[FIC] Little Talks - Chapter 2
Title: Little Talks
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Character(s) or Pairing(s): (eventual) Russia/China
Rating: PG-13
Warnings for chapter: some discussion of alcoholism, mild violence
Summary: Ghosts aren't real. Ivan keeps telling himself that. Ghosts aren't real.
2.
In America, alcoholism was a disease.
Ivan never really knew how to respond to that when one of the therapists he was made to go to said that to him. “Alcoholism is a disease.”
He always thought about making some kind of snide remark about why was he fired if it was a disease, but he doesn’t. They would probably just say something along the lines of “Now Mr. Braginsky, you weren’t fired. You were asked to take a sabbatical to work through some of your... issues.”
An unpaid sabbatical. An indefinite, unpaid sabbatical. Right.
Ivan really hated his therapists. They were so sickeningly American, with their fake plastered on smiles. Ivan really hated that about America. In America everyone had a fake smile.
Still, he always faked a smile right back at them when he talked to them. It’s the only way to deal with them really.
***
Ivan was crawling out of his skin, and he really couldn’t believe he missed throwing luggage onto a plane.
Ivan had taken the baggage handling position because it was really as close to planes as he could get, considering he hadn’t gone to college.
He sort of hated it. Seeing the planes was nice, big and majestic and metal and so much nicer than the models he had made as a kid, but the rest of the job, the lifting, the sorting, the stupid reflective vest...
He hated it.
He used to think a lot about applying for a position in airport security, just so he could work indoors and not be subjected tot he whims of the weather, but he didn’t really know what kind of qualifications you needed for that job.
It probably involved a background check.
He definitely hated background checks because he was almost always sure that they were going to see that his father had been in the Russian army as a youth, and that always made them look at Ivan funny. Ivan didn’t know how to explain to them that his father wasn’t some sort of Russian spy, that behind his thick grey mustache and hard eyes was nothing more than a cold, bitter single father who smoked too much and cursed too much and died when Ivan was a teenager.
It didn’t matter though, because it turned out even if you were just a baggage handler airlines weren’t too pleased about an employee coming to work drunk as many times as he did.
He didn’t want to go to the stupid anonymous meetings they sent him to, so he didn’t. He only sometimes went to the therapists. He was probably never going to get his job back. He mostly just stayed inside his small apartment, bored out of his mind and savoring the burn of alcohol in the back of his throat.
Alcoholism is a disease.
Yeah right.
***
His sisters called him sometimes. His big sister, who had raised him his whole life, though only legally for about four years, had found a husband a while back. They were talking about having a family, though Ivan couldn’t understand why she would want to subject herself to that again after raising her siblings.
Little Natalia, who was not so little anymore, changed jobs a lot due to her temper, but had been working for about a year as a waitress and talked about a boy sometimes who Ivan thought she may be dating, and he sort of hoped it was true because she had gone through a phase of wanting to marry Ivan that sort of bothered him even though their big sister said it was normal kid stuff.
They told him these things.
He had not told them anything.
He figured they’d all be happier that way.
***
Maybe Ivan was lonely.
Maybe he felt displaced, like he had no home anymore.
Maybe he just really liked the taste of vodka.
***
He remembered the big house with a lot of stairs.
He never felt lonely there.
***
There were a lot of words one would use to describe Ivan.
Impulsive was not one of them. Large, intimidating, creepy, quiet, those were all words that had been used to describe Ivan in the past.
Not impulsive.
Not that he was particularly cautious either. If Ivan were to describe himself, he would have used the word average.
(The people who described him with all those other words would have doubtlessly laughed at this description, but no one ever said Ivan was self-aware.)
So why, if Ivan was in fact not impulsive, did he buy that bus ticket? It was not a particularly good idea, to take a trip to his hometown shortly after essentially losing his job. Sure he had a little money saved up, but he didn’t really know what he hoped to accomplish in going to see his old house.
Boredom and nostalgia effected everyone at some point, he supposed as he boarded the bus. Also he had been drunk while scheduling the trip.
So there was that.
***
The landlord of what used to be Ivan’s home was an older man with a scruffy, patchy beard and an inability to pronounce Ivan’s last name correctly.
“Well Mr Brayjinsky,” said the man, scratching his beard. “I’m surprised you want to look at this property. I can’t seem to rent it for the life of me. Tenants are always moving out as fast as they move in. Won’t ever say why though.”
Ivan did not care about the people who lived there after him. “So it’s empty?”
***
Ivan did not have enough money to buy a house. He did have enough money to rent one for a bit.
Especially a house that no one else wanted.
So he wrote the landlord a sizable check, including a fee to keep the sparse furniture that was in the house and another for the last-minute nature of the transaction, and by that evening he was unlocking his house.
It was dark in the house, and cold, cold like he remembered it to be. A real smile almost flickered across his face as he tightened his scarf and turned a light on.
He felt less lonely already.
***
That night Ivan dreamed that a man was sitting on his chest, gripping his neck.
Take me home! shouted the man, tightening his grip. Take me home, take me home!
***
Ivan’s eyes flew open as he woke up with a start, catching his breath, hand going to his throat.
There was no one there.
It had been a nightmare, that was all.
He sighed heavily and laid back down. How odd. He almost never had nightmares. His dreams were always unremarkable, average. Maybe it was being in this new (well, old) place, in a bed that wasn’t his, that was throwing him off.
Yeah, yeah that was probably all.
Sighing again he stood. He was thirsty. He walked into the bathroom, flicking a light on and walking to the sink, palming water directly from the faucet into his mouth. (Get cups, he reminded himself. And plates and bowls and... You didn’t think this through did you Ivan?)
Satisfied, he splashed a little water on his face then glanced in the mirror.
Large, purpling bruises were forming on his neck.
Bruises shaped like hands.
***
That couldn’t be right though.
It must have been something else. Maybe while sleeping on the bus up here he had hit his neck and the bruises were slow in forming. Maybe he had tightened his scarf too tight. Maybe he had grabbed himself while he was sleeping.
(Maybe he was going insane.)
***
The Braginsky way of dealing with bad situations was quite simple: You pretended they weren’t happening, you didn’t talk about them, and you tried not to think about them.
The next day Ivan wrapped his scarf around his bruised neck and went to the local Wal-Mart to buy some cheap dishes. He got home and sat in the dining room, and checked his cellphone, which he had turned off while on the bus and had neglected to turn back on.
There was one message, from his older sister. “Ivan? It’s me. I tried calling your home phone but you weren’t there... Call me back when you get this I guess.”
Ivan did not call her back. He didn’t know what he would say to her.
So he tugged his scarf just a little bit tighter and ordered some takeout, which he ate in the living room alone before going to bed and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He didn’t think about the bruises.
***
He did think about the creaks of the house though.
He had forgotten how noisy these old houses really were.
***
Within the next few days he went to a cafe to boot up his old, clunky laptop and take advantage of the free wifi, and order a cup of black coffee.
He googled “bruises appearing for no reason.”
There were too many answers to really figure anything out. None of them really explained why they were shaped like hands.
He took a gulp of his coffee in frustration and burned his tongue rather badly.
***
After a little over a week, when his bruises had all but faded, his sister left a panicked message on his cell phone. “Ivan! Ivan are you there? I tried calling your w-work since you hadn’t been answering... They said you were on sabbatical and were supposed to be going to a therapist but you haven’t been? Ivan, where are you? Has something happened? Please call me back!”
It sounded like she was going to cry. He didn’t want her to worry, but he didn’t really want to talk to her either, so he waited until very late at night and left a message on her cell phone.
“It’s me. I’m alright. I’m just taking a vacation, don’t worry about me. Traveling the country, looking at landmarks. I just need some time to clear my head.”
After leaving the message he sat up in bed, listening to the creaks and groans of the house.
***
“Why did everyone move away from here so fast?” Ivan asked the open air one day.
As if in answer one of his plastic cups suddenly fell forcefully from it’s place on the counter.
Ivan remembered shattering glass and drew in a breath.
***
Ghosts aren’t real. Ivan kept telling himself that. “Ghosts aren’t real.”
***
Listen to me! shouted the man in his dream. Hear me! I want to go home! I just want to go home!
***
He smelled smoke when he woke up one morning, maybe two weeks after moving in, and for a minute he thought maybe the house had caught on fire. He panicked and shot up in bed, then realized what the smoke smelled like.
Cigars.
It was cigar smoke, just like...
Ivan’s stomach lurched.
No. No it can’t be it-
He staggered out of bed, legs not quite caught up to his brain, and stumbled to the door, flinging it open, looking for the source of the smell because it couldn’t, it couldn’t-
There it was, in the hallway, a few feet away from his door. It was like the look of heat in the air, glimmering and distorted and hard to look at, but still Ivan knew what it was the instant he laid eyes on it. He felt the truth of it in the pit of his stomach, and he stood frozen, staring at it.
This thing... It was a person.
It had no face or hair or any defining features at all really, and it’s form is only barely defined, but it doesn’t matter. Ivan knows. He can feel it.
I should run, was the first thing he thought, but he did not know where to, and in the time it took him to think it the figure started to walk, away from him in the direction of the stairs, and the next thing he thought was I should call out to it, but it had already disappeared into thin air, taking the smell of cigar smoke with it.
Ivan felt his knees weaken and he slumped against the wall, trembling violently, fully aware that a man of his size rendered shaky from fear probably would have looked comical to an outside viewer, and not particularly caring.
He wanted to think it wasn’t real
He wanted to think he had been dreaming, imagining it, drunk, going insane, anything that would make sense of the apparition he had seen.
Nothing seemed to fit.
Ivan sort of wanted to throw up. He wanted a drink more though. As if in a daze he went downstairs and into the kitchen and pulled out a bottle of vodka he had purchased a few days earlier.
It was barely to his lips though when he felt it, a cold, clammy wave washing over him, and before he could react a plate sitting on the table from the night before’s dinner was flying at his head.
Instinct took over, instinct steeled from years of being the large kid people picked fights with when they wanted to look tough in front of their friends, and at the last second he dodged, the plate hitting the wall behind him with enough force that it cracked slightly before bouncing off the plaster and hitting the floor.
The instant it hit the ground though, Ivan knew he was perhaps in a worse situation than a second ago.
The bottle of vodka fell as Ivan abandoned it in favor of shielding his face, shattering glass joining the sudden barrage of noise that started as the furniture began to shake violently and the cabinets flew open, plastic dishes flying at Ivan, hitting him with surprisingly painful force, bouncing off his arms and clattering to the ground.
“Wait!” shouted Ivan, his panic and confusion shutting down his mind. “Wait! Stop!” He didn’t know what was happening, what to do, what to say, what was happening, but he did know that he was in danger, that whatever, whoever was in this house was angry, and as he sunk to his knees and a chair flew up in the air and began to move toward him, his eyes clenched shut and the words fell out of his mouth before he had even thought them.
“You saved my life when I was eight!”
Everything stopped.
Silence hung heavy in the air, and, after a long moment, Ivan let out the breath he had not realized he had been holding and slowly, slowly, opened his eyes and peeked out from the shield of his arms.
The heavy, wooden chair that the landlord had provided him was suspended in the air, less than a foot from his face.
“You saved my life,” whispered Ivan, though he didn’t really know why. “I was going to fall down the stairs. You saved me.”
Slowly the chair started to move again, slowly this time, until with a dull thud it was placed back where it had started on the floor.
Then Ivan saw it again, the glimmer, except this time it didn’t stay a glimmer. It swirled, darkened, until it looked to be made of smoke, and it was decidedly human shaped now, and it kept pulsing, molding, changing, twisting and twisting until from the smoke a man started to emerge, and soon it wasn’t smoke at all, but a man standing before Ivan, looking down at him.
He was small, slender, with Asian features and long, ink black hair. Slowly the man crouched, looking Ivan in the eyes, and opened his mouth, syllables falling slowly and unevenly out of his mouth as if a voice was something he had forgotten he had.
“I... Ivan?”
Ivan had never seen this man before, but he knew him.
This was the man from his dreams.
NEXT CHAPTER: Coming Soon
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Character(s) or Pairing(s): (eventual) Russia/China
Rating: PG-13
Warnings for chapter: some discussion of alcoholism, mild violence
Summary: Ghosts aren't real. Ivan keeps telling himself that. Ghosts aren't real.
2.
In America, alcoholism was a disease.
Ivan never really knew how to respond to that when one of the therapists he was made to go to said that to him. “Alcoholism is a disease.”
He always thought about making some kind of snide remark about why was he fired if it was a disease, but he doesn’t. They would probably just say something along the lines of “Now Mr. Braginsky, you weren’t fired. You were asked to take a sabbatical to work through some of your... issues.”
An unpaid sabbatical. An indefinite, unpaid sabbatical. Right.
Ivan really hated his therapists. They were so sickeningly American, with their fake plastered on smiles. Ivan really hated that about America. In America everyone had a fake smile.
Still, he always faked a smile right back at them when he talked to them. It’s the only way to deal with them really.
***
Ivan was crawling out of his skin, and he really couldn’t believe he missed throwing luggage onto a plane.
Ivan had taken the baggage handling position because it was really as close to planes as he could get, considering he hadn’t gone to college.
He sort of hated it. Seeing the planes was nice, big and majestic and metal and so much nicer than the models he had made as a kid, but the rest of the job, the lifting, the sorting, the stupid reflective vest...
He hated it.
He used to think a lot about applying for a position in airport security, just so he could work indoors and not be subjected tot he whims of the weather, but he didn’t really know what kind of qualifications you needed for that job.
It probably involved a background check.
He definitely hated background checks because he was almost always sure that they were going to see that his father had been in the Russian army as a youth, and that always made them look at Ivan funny. Ivan didn’t know how to explain to them that his father wasn’t some sort of Russian spy, that behind his thick grey mustache and hard eyes was nothing more than a cold, bitter single father who smoked too much and cursed too much and died when Ivan was a teenager.
It didn’t matter though, because it turned out even if you were just a baggage handler airlines weren’t too pleased about an employee coming to work drunk as many times as he did.
He didn’t want to go to the stupid anonymous meetings they sent him to, so he didn’t. He only sometimes went to the therapists. He was probably never going to get his job back. He mostly just stayed inside his small apartment, bored out of his mind and savoring the burn of alcohol in the back of his throat.
Alcoholism is a disease.
Yeah right.
***
His sisters called him sometimes. His big sister, who had raised him his whole life, though only legally for about four years, had found a husband a while back. They were talking about having a family, though Ivan couldn’t understand why she would want to subject herself to that again after raising her siblings.
Little Natalia, who was not so little anymore, changed jobs a lot due to her temper, but had been working for about a year as a waitress and talked about a boy sometimes who Ivan thought she may be dating, and he sort of hoped it was true because she had gone through a phase of wanting to marry Ivan that sort of bothered him even though their big sister said it was normal kid stuff.
They told him these things.
He had not told them anything.
He figured they’d all be happier that way.
***
Maybe Ivan was lonely.
Maybe he felt displaced, like he had no home anymore.
Maybe he just really liked the taste of vodka.
***
He remembered the big house with a lot of stairs.
He never felt lonely there.
***
There were a lot of words one would use to describe Ivan.
Impulsive was not one of them. Large, intimidating, creepy, quiet, those were all words that had been used to describe Ivan in the past.
Not impulsive.
Not that he was particularly cautious either. If Ivan were to describe himself, he would have used the word average.
(The people who described him with all those other words would have doubtlessly laughed at this description, but no one ever said Ivan was self-aware.)
So why, if Ivan was in fact not impulsive, did he buy that bus ticket? It was not a particularly good idea, to take a trip to his hometown shortly after essentially losing his job. Sure he had a little money saved up, but he didn’t really know what he hoped to accomplish in going to see his old house.
Boredom and nostalgia effected everyone at some point, he supposed as he boarded the bus. Also he had been drunk while scheduling the trip.
So there was that.
***
The landlord of what used to be Ivan’s home was an older man with a scruffy, patchy beard and an inability to pronounce Ivan’s last name correctly.
“Well Mr Brayjinsky,” said the man, scratching his beard. “I’m surprised you want to look at this property. I can’t seem to rent it for the life of me. Tenants are always moving out as fast as they move in. Won’t ever say why though.”
Ivan did not care about the people who lived there after him. “So it’s empty?”
***
Ivan did not have enough money to buy a house. He did have enough money to rent one for a bit.
Especially a house that no one else wanted.
So he wrote the landlord a sizable check, including a fee to keep the sparse furniture that was in the house and another for the last-minute nature of the transaction, and by that evening he was unlocking his house.
It was dark in the house, and cold, cold like he remembered it to be. A real smile almost flickered across his face as he tightened his scarf and turned a light on.
He felt less lonely already.
***
That night Ivan dreamed that a man was sitting on his chest, gripping his neck.
Take me home! shouted the man, tightening his grip. Take me home, take me home!
***
Ivan’s eyes flew open as he woke up with a start, catching his breath, hand going to his throat.
There was no one there.
It had been a nightmare, that was all.
He sighed heavily and laid back down. How odd. He almost never had nightmares. His dreams were always unremarkable, average. Maybe it was being in this new (well, old) place, in a bed that wasn’t his, that was throwing him off.
Yeah, yeah that was probably all.
Sighing again he stood. He was thirsty. He walked into the bathroom, flicking a light on and walking to the sink, palming water directly from the faucet into his mouth. (Get cups, he reminded himself. And plates and bowls and... You didn’t think this through did you Ivan?)
Satisfied, he splashed a little water on his face then glanced in the mirror.
Large, purpling bruises were forming on his neck.
Bruises shaped like hands.
***
That couldn’t be right though.
It must have been something else. Maybe while sleeping on the bus up here he had hit his neck and the bruises were slow in forming. Maybe he had tightened his scarf too tight. Maybe he had grabbed himself while he was sleeping.
(Maybe he was going insane.)
***
The Braginsky way of dealing with bad situations was quite simple: You pretended they weren’t happening, you didn’t talk about them, and you tried not to think about them.
The next day Ivan wrapped his scarf around his bruised neck and went to the local Wal-Mart to buy some cheap dishes. He got home and sat in the dining room, and checked his cellphone, which he had turned off while on the bus and had neglected to turn back on.
There was one message, from his older sister. “Ivan? It’s me. I tried calling your home phone but you weren’t there... Call me back when you get this I guess.”
Ivan did not call her back. He didn’t know what he would say to her.
So he tugged his scarf just a little bit tighter and ordered some takeout, which he ate in the living room alone before going to bed and falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He didn’t think about the bruises.
***
He did think about the creaks of the house though.
He had forgotten how noisy these old houses really were.
***
Within the next few days he went to a cafe to boot up his old, clunky laptop and take advantage of the free wifi, and order a cup of black coffee.
He googled “bruises appearing for no reason.”
There were too many answers to really figure anything out. None of them really explained why they were shaped like hands.
He took a gulp of his coffee in frustration and burned his tongue rather badly.
***
After a little over a week, when his bruises had all but faded, his sister left a panicked message on his cell phone. “Ivan! Ivan are you there? I tried calling your w-work since you hadn’t been answering... They said you were on sabbatical and were supposed to be going to a therapist but you haven’t been? Ivan, where are you? Has something happened? Please call me back!”
It sounded like she was going to cry. He didn’t want her to worry, but he didn’t really want to talk to her either, so he waited until very late at night and left a message on her cell phone.
“It’s me. I’m alright. I’m just taking a vacation, don’t worry about me. Traveling the country, looking at landmarks. I just need some time to clear my head.”
After leaving the message he sat up in bed, listening to the creaks and groans of the house.
***
“Why did everyone move away from here so fast?” Ivan asked the open air one day.
As if in answer one of his plastic cups suddenly fell forcefully from it’s place on the counter.
Ivan remembered shattering glass and drew in a breath.
***
Ghosts aren’t real. Ivan kept telling himself that. “Ghosts aren’t real.”
***
Listen to me! shouted the man in his dream. Hear me! I want to go home! I just want to go home!
***
He smelled smoke when he woke up one morning, maybe two weeks after moving in, and for a minute he thought maybe the house had caught on fire. He panicked and shot up in bed, then realized what the smoke smelled like.
Cigars.
It was cigar smoke, just like...
Ivan’s stomach lurched.
No. No it can’t be it-
He staggered out of bed, legs not quite caught up to his brain, and stumbled to the door, flinging it open, looking for the source of the smell because it couldn’t, it couldn’t-
There it was, in the hallway, a few feet away from his door. It was like the look of heat in the air, glimmering and distorted and hard to look at, but still Ivan knew what it was the instant he laid eyes on it. He felt the truth of it in the pit of his stomach, and he stood frozen, staring at it.
This thing... It was a person.
It had no face or hair or any defining features at all really, and it’s form is only barely defined, but it doesn’t matter. Ivan knows. He can feel it.
I should run, was the first thing he thought, but he did not know where to, and in the time it took him to think it the figure started to walk, away from him in the direction of the stairs, and the next thing he thought was I should call out to it, but it had already disappeared into thin air, taking the smell of cigar smoke with it.
Ivan felt his knees weaken and he slumped against the wall, trembling violently, fully aware that a man of his size rendered shaky from fear probably would have looked comical to an outside viewer, and not particularly caring.
He wanted to think it wasn’t real
He wanted to think he had been dreaming, imagining it, drunk, going insane, anything that would make sense of the apparition he had seen.
Nothing seemed to fit.
Ivan sort of wanted to throw up. He wanted a drink more though. As if in a daze he went downstairs and into the kitchen and pulled out a bottle of vodka he had purchased a few days earlier.
It was barely to his lips though when he felt it, a cold, clammy wave washing over him, and before he could react a plate sitting on the table from the night before’s dinner was flying at his head.
Instinct took over, instinct steeled from years of being the large kid people picked fights with when they wanted to look tough in front of their friends, and at the last second he dodged, the plate hitting the wall behind him with enough force that it cracked slightly before bouncing off the plaster and hitting the floor.
The instant it hit the ground though, Ivan knew he was perhaps in a worse situation than a second ago.
The bottle of vodka fell as Ivan abandoned it in favor of shielding his face, shattering glass joining the sudden barrage of noise that started as the furniture began to shake violently and the cabinets flew open, plastic dishes flying at Ivan, hitting him with surprisingly painful force, bouncing off his arms and clattering to the ground.
“Wait!” shouted Ivan, his panic and confusion shutting down his mind. “Wait! Stop!” He didn’t know what was happening, what to do, what to say, what was happening, but he did know that he was in danger, that whatever, whoever was in this house was angry, and as he sunk to his knees and a chair flew up in the air and began to move toward him, his eyes clenched shut and the words fell out of his mouth before he had even thought them.
“You saved my life when I was eight!”
Everything stopped.
Silence hung heavy in the air, and, after a long moment, Ivan let out the breath he had not realized he had been holding and slowly, slowly, opened his eyes and peeked out from the shield of his arms.
The heavy, wooden chair that the landlord had provided him was suspended in the air, less than a foot from his face.
“You saved my life,” whispered Ivan, though he didn’t really know why. “I was going to fall down the stairs. You saved me.”
Slowly the chair started to move again, slowly this time, until with a dull thud it was placed back where it had started on the floor.
Then Ivan saw it again, the glimmer, except this time it didn’t stay a glimmer. It swirled, darkened, until it looked to be made of smoke, and it was decidedly human shaped now, and it kept pulsing, molding, changing, twisting and twisting until from the smoke a man started to emerge, and soon it wasn’t smoke at all, but a man standing before Ivan, looking down at him.
He was small, slender, with Asian features and long, ink black hair. Slowly the man crouched, looking Ivan in the eyes, and opened his mouth, syllables falling slowly and unevenly out of his mouth as if a voice was something he had forgotten he had.
“I... Ivan?”
Ivan had never seen this man before, but he knew him.
This was the man from his dreams.
NEXT CHAPTER: Coming Soon