(fic) The Good Machine
Title: The Good Machine
Pairing: Anna Kournikova / Sergei Fedorov
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, it is untrue
The Good Machine
Liz did a "My Sergei" so I want to as well.
My Sergei promises that he will never marry again. He promises he will never love again and breaks that promise monthly and weekly and daily.
My Sergei is scared he will never have children.
but I wrote that and then I wrote Anna/ Sergei
The good machine
Anna slipped out of his life almost silently. He paid her nothing, they didn't say goodbye. Anna left him scattered like loose change from a hundred dollar bill. A hangover and a heartache and a pocket full of small coins and no idea where all the dollars went.
//
They have painted a mural inside the surgery to look like a stone wall with vines twisting up it. For the life of him, the life of his, Sergei can’t understand what they are trying to say. He’s been to Italy, the southern parts that look exactly like the travel pages of glossy magazines. They went together. It looked nothing like this wall, smelled nothing like this place.
Sergei spent a sleepless night watching Anna, the way the groove between her eyebrows never entirely thinned out. By the next morning, Anna spending almost an hour in the shower, emerging shaking with cold even though opening the door filled the bedroom with steam, the mark almost seemed to be a part of her. Something that had always been there and Sergei had never noticed before. The steam from the bathroom fogged the mirror in front of Sergei, until Anna was just a blur of white and yellow, like looking at a field of tulips in the heat of the sun.
//
Or Anna left him like a house the day the owners move out of it, and before the new owners have moved in. Like he was the last room of an empty house, with sunshine falling into nothing in rooms laid fallow. The hallway outside the room, decorated with dust and nails on the walls.
//
He always did his best to not look too excited. Not to be too pleased or happy like those expressions could be used against him at some later date.
He always tried to be calm, to pass on translations between players, to censor the words that came from the bottom of his stomach from his heart, from his soul. The games they could have played, Building train sets or remote controlled toys.
Words that he would have passed on, father to son. He can feel sometimes the future hands of children in his. Words and hands that slip out of his and spill on the floor like pulling something out his pockets when they are full of coins.
//
Sergei wonders what they would have called the baby if it had ever become a baby. If it would have looked like him, or like Anna or like his father. If the baby had been a boy maybe it would have by-passed all of Sergei’s features, been exactly like his father, or his mother. Sergei just a facial footnote on the child, in the child.
If it had become a child.
//
Anna gave few words to Sergei. To few to hold onto, or to turn over in his mind. And she left him in the end utterly silently.
There were no late night last phone calls, not even a message passed through the lawyers and Sergei had felt humiliated asking.
It felt in the end like they had amputated Anna from his side. Where she had been pressed against him in Italy in the sun by the field that was filled with Dutch tulips.
That they had cut her flesh from his flesh whisked it from his sight like it was something to be ashamed of. It felt like unpacking a box in a new house and realizing to late that something had been left behind and lost. Missing pieces of a puzzle, missing parts from a coffee machine that had worked so well. A wind up toy that was missing its key.
//
Anna turned then and took Sergei’s hand. Held it in both of hers. ‘Tell me I am doing the right thing.’ She said. “Tell me we are doing the right thing.’ Sergei can feel the weight of imagined bundles falling from his arms, the sun of smiles fading from his mind. Can only see her eyes, can only feel her hands, one on his palm one near his knuckles.
‘We are doing the right thing.’ He tells her. Turns when she turns, faces the wall of the vine of the sun. He walks out of the doctor’s office and stares at the fountain in the courtyard. Nothing like the ones he remembers in Italy, he had taken her there, she had been with him, plastered to his side hotter than the sun on his neck.
Stopping to see the view by the field filled with tulips.
Sergei pours the coins from one hand to the other, feeling them bounce off his palm and slide through the gaps in his fingers to the water below.
//
Sergei thinks of Anna sometimes like the plot of a movie. Where everything is telegraphed from the first act. How it was going to act, the eventual happy ending she would have. All that is left to play out is their inevitable final meeting. The bittersweet feelings it will evoke in both of them.
Sergei thinks of them only sometimes. Sometimes he thinks of just the two, him and Anna, sometimes of the possibility of a third or a forth or more. He sees them sometimes, when the heat of the sun is right, standing by a field of Dutch tulips in the sun in Italy. The feel of wine and meat in his belly. The burden in his arms. He thinks of the children that had played there with their remote controlled planes and helicopters. Perfectly fitted together machines. How they flew so briefly, how they almost seemed to touch the clouds.
Pairing: Anna Kournikova / Sergei Fedorov
Rating: R
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, it is untrue
The Good Machine
Liz did a "My Sergei" so I want to as well.
My Sergei promises that he will never marry again. He promises he will never love again and breaks that promise monthly and weekly and daily.
My Sergei is scared he will never have children.
but I wrote that and then I wrote Anna/ Sergei
The good machine
Anna slipped out of his life almost silently. He paid her nothing, they didn't say goodbye. Anna left him scattered like loose change from a hundred dollar bill. A hangover and a heartache and a pocket full of small coins and no idea where all the dollars went.
//
They have painted a mural inside the surgery to look like a stone wall with vines twisting up it. For the life of him, the life of his, Sergei can’t understand what they are trying to say. He’s been to Italy, the southern parts that look exactly like the travel pages of glossy magazines. They went together. It looked nothing like this wall, smelled nothing like this place.
Sergei spent a sleepless night watching Anna, the way the groove between her eyebrows never entirely thinned out. By the next morning, Anna spending almost an hour in the shower, emerging shaking with cold even though opening the door filled the bedroom with steam, the mark almost seemed to be a part of her. Something that had always been there and Sergei had never noticed before. The steam from the bathroom fogged the mirror in front of Sergei, until Anna was just a blur of white and yellow, like looking at a field of tulips in the heat of the sun.
//
Or Anna left him like a house the day the owners move out of it, and before the new owners have moved in. Like he was the last room of an empty house, with sunshine falling into nothing in rooms laid fallow. The hallway outside the room, decorated with dust and nails on the walls.
//
He always did his best to not look too excited. Not to be too pleased or happy like those expressions could be used against him at some later date.
He always tried to be calm, to pass on translations between players, to censor the words that came from the bottom of his stomach from his heart, from his soul. The games they could have played, Building train sets or remote controlled toys.
Words that he would have passed on, father to son. He can feel sometimes the future hands of children in his. Words and hands that slip out of his and spill on the floor like pulling something out his pockets when they are full of coins.
//
Sergei wonders what they would have called the baby if it had ever become a baby. If it would have looked like him, or like Anna or like his father. If the baby had been a boy maybe it would have by-passed all of Sergei’s features, been exactly like his father, or his mother. Sergei just a facial footnote on the child, in the child.
If it had become a child.
//
Anna gave few words to Sergei. To few to hold onto, or to turn over in his mind. And she left him in the end utterly silently.
There were no late night last phone calls, not even a message passed through the lawyers and Sergei had felt humiliated asking.
It felt in the end like they had amputated Anna from his side. Where she had been pressed against him in Italy in the sun by the field that was filled with Dutch tulips.
That they had cut her flesh from his flesh whisked it from his sight like it was something to be ashamed of. It felt like unpacking a box in a new house and realizing to late that something had been left behind and lost. Missing pieces of a puzzle, missing parts from a coffee machine that had worked so well. A wind up toy that was missing its key.
//
Anna turned then and took Sergei’s hand. Held it in both of hers. ‘Tell me I am doing the right thing.’ She said. “Tell me we are doing the right thing.’ Sergei can feel the weight of imagined bundles falling from his arms, the sun of smiles fading from his mind. Can only see her eyes, can only feel her hands, one on his palm one near his knuckles.
‘We are doing the right thing.’ He tells her. Turns when she turns, faces the wall of the vine of the sun. He walks out of the doctor’s office and stares at the fountain in the courtyard. Nothing like the ones he remembers in Italy, he had taken her there, she had been with him, plastered to his side hotter than the sun on his neck.
Stopping to see the view by the field filled with tulips.
Sergei pours the coins from one hand to the other, feeling them bounce off his palm and slide through the gaps in his fingers to the water below.
//
Sergei thinks of Anna sometimes like the plot of a movie. Where everything is telegraphed from the first act. How it was going to act, the eventual happy ending she would have. All that is left to play out is their inevitable final meeting. The bittersweet feelings it will evoke in both of them.
Sergei thinks of them only sometimes. Sometimes he thinks of just the two, him and Anna, sometimes of the possibility of a third or a forth or more. He sees them sometimes, when the heat of the sun is right, standing by a field of Dutch tulips in the sun in Italy. The feel of wine and meat in his belly. The burden in his arms. He thinks of the children that had played there with their remote controlled planes and helicopters. Perfectly fitted together machines. How they flew so briefly, how they almost seemed to touch the clouds.