The Restoring of Broken Parts

Cattails and milkweeds. The sun had come up blurry behind the waterlogged, drooping trees. As the mist cleared, the short green sedge crowding around the cattails became visible. Finna used it to mark the shallow parts of the swamp, walking only where the long green blades stuck out of the water itself. Even the shallow edge of the swamp was quite deep, however, and the dark water nearly covered his stomach as he waded onward. His arm was held out to his side, three snakes hanging from it following their unfortunate attempts on his life. In his free hand was a basket, empty.

Dmitrii didn’t like being out here so early in the morning. It reminded him of the first time they met Finna; how they had marched through this very same swamp in the cold, dark pre-dawn so they could avoid the heat. It reminded him of being an adventurer, a phrase he took even more offense to these days than he had back then.

And anyway, going to the swamp was not part of the plan.

When Dmitrii saw Finna picking his way through the water, he had to resist an urge to shout out. He had been trudging through the marshland all morning looking for Finna. Something about seeing him like this—moving through nature, quite calmly, quite methodically—made Dmitrii angry and frustrated and tired all at once.

He didn’t shout, though. Instead, he crossed the bog the long way around, and met Finna on the other side as he came out of the water. If the android was surprised to see him there, he didn’t show it.

“You’ve spent the night out here,” Dmitrii said, his arms crossed.

“Have I?” Finna said, in a strangely disaffected tone. He couldn’t lie—not without his face cringing disturbingly like whatever machinery ran him was malfunctioning—but he could tell half-truths and dodge questions he didn’t like. Have I? was an excellent example of one such dodge.

Dmitrii felt his eyebrows falling. He tried to keep his face from getting too stern. He kept his tone reasonable and level. “I thought you’d be back by morning. I was going to make breakfast, but then I couldn’t find you. It was alarming.”

Their arrangement, if it could even be called that, was not simple and barely made sense. At first, when Finna came back, he spent a lot of time with Miruku, and it had been assumed that this was where he would stay. Dmitrii was welcome to the idea—he was more and more of the opinion that Miruku needed someone to watch over her, not just someone who could visit when she called. He figured Finna could take over that role while Dmitrii saw to preparing a place for his lover.

But not long after, Finna started showing up at Dmitrii’s. Not just the home near Anvil’s, all of them. He seemed to have some knack (probably scrying) for knowing where Dmitrii was on any given night. He would visit suddenly, usually without any warning, and would awkwardly mumble his way through his presence. Most of the time he only stayed for a few hours. But every now and then he would stay for a few days. Eventually, he just stopped leaving.

Well, “stopped” is a strong word. Dmitrii wouldn’t be in the swamp right now if Finna wasn’t constantly disappearing from the house for hours to days on end. The point was, as far as either of them could tell or were willing to discuss, Finna lived with Dmitrii now. And it was driving Dmitrii insane.

“I couldn’t find the frogs,” Finna said.

“What?” Dmitrii said, snapping out of the rueful thoughts.

“The frogs,” Finna said again, looking down at Dmitrii levelly. “This is their mating season. The eggs should be just around here, near the shallows, but every bog I’ve checked so far has turned up empty. I suspected I was on the wrong side of the swamp, so I decided to check the other end in the morning.” His gaze turned to the water, eyes narrowed. “They are not here.”

Dmitrii felt some small light leave him. He realized he had been waiting for an apology and a rational explanation. He was going to get neither. Of course not. This was Finna.

“Look,” Dmitrii muttered, “do you want me to just go home?”

“It seems a waste if you came all this way just to go back,” Finna said. This time the ignorance was genuine. Unfortunately, Dmitrii was already too upset for that to matter.

“Yeah, it does seem a waste, doesn’t it?” he snarled. “But I guess I’m just gonna have to suck it up so I can keep visiting my boyfriend in the wild. It’s not like I can see him at home!”

Finna looked rebuked. He didn’t say anything, standing there holding the snakes stupidly.

“Is this just, like, a comfort thing?” Dmitrii went on. “Are you just more comfortable here? Because you can live in the swamp if you want to, you know. You don’t have to force yourself to stay with me. You’re just leaving all the time anyway, so—I just… Can you just tell me what it is that we’re doing here? Is this a dating thing? Do you want to live with me? We don’t have to live together to be together.”

Finna kept staring at him.

“Answer me, goddamnit,” he said, the anger suddenly spiking through his chest like heartburn. “Do you love me? Are we in love?”

But Finna just kept staring. His face had gone blank—totally illegible, gormless. The expression was so dull that it made Dmitrii even angrier despite himself. It made him want to slap Finna, call him names, call him stupid and brainless. His fists clenched at his sides and his hand went back like he was going to reach for his rapier. He didn’t, though. He clenched his teeth and breathed out through his nose. As the air left him, tears rose to his eyes unbidden.

“I’m going home,” he said, turning away. “I suggest you do the same.”

By the time he was hanging his wet clothes in front of the fireplace, Dmitrii had convinced himself he was a bad person again. I suggest you do the same. Like Finna hadn’t been trying to go home since day one—like that hadn’t been the primary subject of torment and shame for years of their lives. I suggest you do the same. What a terrible thing to say. How many other “smart” comments had he made like that since Finna returned? Maybe that’s the real reason Dmitrii couldn’t keep him.

By the time he’d finished dinner, he’d made a mental list of every person he’d ever kissed before, alongside a tally of every ugly thing he’d ever said to them. There was not a single person on the list who had never received one of Dmitrii’s snide comments about a personal piece of information. He could recall at least a memory for each.

By the time he was getting into bed, he decided he would never love anyone again.

He woke up around two in the morning and concluded almost immediately that everything was still Finna’s fault because, goddamnit, he didn’t say anything. That’s not a fair fight, is it? It’s only a fair fight if both people make a fool of themselves. It was actually Finna who was cheating and being extremely unfair by not saying anything at all. Dmitrii decided he’d go into Anvil’s Plunge in the morning and find a beautiful Dwarven girl and sleep with her and that’ll show Finna.

And he almost did. He was nearly through with his morning routine—boots cleaned, numerous layers of finery on and in place—when an odd smell started drifting through the house. It was sharp and savory, gamey and peppery, the smell of something foreign being cooked hot and fast. He wandered into the kitchen, still rolling his collar over in his hands.

Finna was standing there, over a cast-iron pot on the flame. He was frying something that cracked and hopped inside the pot, muttering magic over it as he added a steady series of seasonings and reagents. Dmitrii realized the cooking smell had married with the magic smell, contributing to the strangeness of it. It smelled like oven-roasted incense or bonemeal-coated chicken. Not a bad smell, just an odd one. It was similar to the smell that had been in Finna’s log, all those years ago.

Before Dmitrii could decide whether or not he was still angry, Finna turned around and saw him. “You’re up,” he said curtly. “Glad to see my timing is still decent, time travel artefacts aside. You’re angry with me. Please wait a moment.”

Well, if Finna said he was angry, Dmitrii might as well go with it and be angry. He sat at the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and worked very hard at looking cross.

The more Dmitrii worked at it, the more he realized he ought to stop working at it because his anger actually was quite genuine. He was workshopping the beginning lines for several superb opening rants, but something about Finna’s demeanor made him hesitate. He had never seen the android behave in quite this way before. He was moving about the kitchen with a frantic, clipped efficiency, muttering under his breath little self-directions like “Where is—?” and “Add some here…” and “Then this spell…” The focus he had for the task at hand had filled him with a kind of strange agitation.

It took Dmitrii an embarrassingly long time to realize that it was excitement. Finna was excited.

Finally, and with some showmanship, Finna brought a bowl over to the counter. It was heaped with frogs’ legs, pan-fried and covered in all manner of accoutrements. Dmitrii couldn’t claim to recognize most of the ingredients. But it was decorated beautifully, with dried leaves folded over the edges of the bowl in a pattern.

“There,” Finna said, sounding uncharacteristically triumphant. He gestured for Dmitrii to try.

“What is this, Finna?”

“Eat it, eat it.”

Dmitrii sighed and picked up one of the frog legs. It was just barely cooled enough to touch; he blew on it and took a small bite, a conciliatory bite. It wasn’t his kind of food, but it was good: complex and hot, full of vibrant flavor. And he could feel the magic working its way through his system, feel as it relaxed his muscles and brought strength and focus into his eyes.

“Frogs’ legs with hunter’s enchantment,” Finna said, bringing his hands together. “Exactly how they made it on Petalis. Exactly. Getting all the right ingredients… took some doing. All the same, though. What do you think?”

“It’s good,” he said, in a gentle voice. “Thanks.”

Bafflingly, this response caused Finna’s shoulders to drop. His head lowered and the twinkle that Dmitrii hadn’t noticed until now left his eyes. He muttered something in Sylvan, and Dmitrii felt confident assuming it was a curse.

“Then forgive me,” he said, head turned away. “I’ll go now.”

Dmitrii was on his feet in an instant. “No, it’s good, Finna, I like it. Did you not want me to like it?” He grabbed the android’s arm. “Just… just tell me what you’re thinking, for Gods’ sake.”

But when Finna turned around to face him, Dmitrii immediately let his arm go. Because a shocking look of despair had crumpled Finna’s face.

“This was supposed to prove our love,” he said in a small voice, tone almost angry. “You were supposed to have the food of my people and see in it what I see. It would have been proof of our union. But you eat it and it’s just food for you.” He shook his head. “It was my intention to prepare something special that would bring us together, but instead my actions have driven you away. I have failed you. I am not meant for you.”

Dmitrii let out a small sigh. He wondered if maybe he should have called Finna stupid yesterday, because he was going to do it now. “Finna, you’re an idiot.”

Finna adopted an expression like a wounded animal—an expression of cornered fear. Dmitrii recognized it from when they first met, and thought about how that same look had made him hesitate in attacking a cannibal android, had made him think maybe there’s more to this than I realize. It was, in a roundabout way, the look that caused him to fall in love.

“I said I was going,” he murmured, and now Dmitrii grabbed his arm again.

“You don’t really know what love is, do you?” Dmitrii said.

“No,” he admitted. Guilty, ashamed.

“Finna, I need to let you in on a secret,” Dmitrii said. “It’s very important. No one does.”

He blinked at him.

“That’s the whole point. Well, not really, but sort of. What I mean is, when you’re falling in love with someone… the process of doing that… it’s supposed to be messy. The discovering new things, the figuring it out… that’s part of what brings you closer to the other person. We both…” He gestured pointedly at his leg. “We’ve both been through a lot. There is no way for this courtship to go smoothly. I knew that going in. Hell, I put up with you disappearing for years. There’s no way for this to go smoothly.”

“But we have done nothing but fight,” Finna said. He gestured at the food on the table. “We are so different. This is futile.”

“Finna, you can’t just give me your life experiences in a meal,” he muttered. “Well, maybe you could with magic, but you know what I mean.” He returned to the counter and pulled at one of the leaves on the bowl. “This was sweet of you. I see that now. But I’m not from Petalis, and I never will be. I can’t understand that anymore than you can understand Moscow.” He realized that he had never told this Finna about his first life—he’d have to have that conversation later. “Where I’m from,” he clumsily added. “We don’t need that, though. We need to understand each other.”

“How?” Finna said, like a child asking how death works.

Dmitrii gestured emphatically. “That’s it! That’s what love is. Answering that question.”

Finna was quiet. At length, Dmitrii returned to him and ventured to take his hand. “Why didn’t you just say all this in the swamp yesterday?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” he said.

Dmitrii stared at him. He could imagine Finna’s subdued shock at Dmitrii’s appearance—so subdued that Dmitrii didn’t even notice it at all. He could imagine him waffling from said shock, attempting to stumble his way through a conversation in which he couldn’t lie until finally, cowed by Dmitrii’s rage, he opted to fall completely silent. He could almost laugh at how clearly he could see Finna’s behavior now. Maybe a meal could impart someone’s life experiences after all.

“Algebra,” Dmitrii said.

Finna’s expression cleared. “What?”

“You’re good at math,” he continued. “I assume you’re good at algebra, too. Love is like algebra. It’s… it’s solving for x. It’s identifying a missing element and then filling in known elements around it until you have an answer. It’s…” He hesitated, and then told himself to hang it and say what he actually wanted to say. “Where I come from—Moscow. Where I come from, the word algebra comes from the root al-jabr. It means ‘the restoring of broken parts’.” He stopped, heard the way his words rang in the kitchen like a bell. He looked at Finna imploringly. “Do you understand?”

Finna was looking down at his hands, avoiding Dmitrii’s gaze. He was quiet for a moment longer. “In the future… before I came to this time, there was a lashunta in Casio who fell in love with me. She did my tattoos. Most of them, at least.” He raised his arms to look at them. “I told her no. Because I was focused on my revenge. But really, I… didn’t understand what she was saying. I didn’t know how to respond to it, or if I could.” He looked at Dmitrii. “I had spent my whole life surrounded by plant people. Suddenly, this bag of meat was asking for my hand. And I wasn’t entirely against it. I didn’t know what to do with such a feeling. I still don’t know what to do with it.”

“I want to help you find out,” Dmitrii said.

“How do I express love to you?” he said, with that flat intensity so characteristic of androids. He gestured at the meal again. “In a way you’ll understand.”

There were magic words, and then there were magic words, and those were magic words. Dmitrii smiled and lifted his head. “Like this.” And they kissed, and from Dmitrii’s lips equations fell into Finna’s mouth, and that was how he began to solve them.