The Wolves Eat Well This Year, Chapter 7
Title: The Wolves Eat Well This Year
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~8100
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Seven: If Only
It was a machine-gunner, this time. His head snapped back, his hands up as if in belated surrender. Before he finished falling Elias was skiing away at speed.
He wondered if he might be slipping. He hadn’t expected any difficulties when he was called up - he’d already spent years in the war against the Wyrm, he wasn’t some raw kid who puked after his first kill, no, he’d left his first kill long behind and he hadn’t puked then either, he’d learned the ropes long before his compulsory year in the army, and what was a tank to someone who’d slain a Pattern Spider? But over time he’d started noticing and paying more attention to details like the way their hands flew up, and the way they pressed close for warmth while caught between the deep cold and the vulnerability of the campfires, and the way they cried out with pain and screamed, and the way they didn’t scream but stared, dull-eyed…
Back at camp, Aleksandr wasn’t at their dugout. He was directed to another one, where Kyander had organized a sing-song. He arrived to the accompaniment of Aleksandr’s singing voice, halting and tremulous, nothing that would win prizes, but with an authentically mournful inflection - “The heroes ride over the field, hey, the heroes of the Red Army…”
When he slipped into the dugout, Aleksandr stopped on the verge of a word and looked like he wanted to drop dead. This brought protests from among his audience; others, like Salo, lounged against the walls doing their best to give the impression that they were present by sheer coincidence. “Go on, Santeri,” said Kyander, giving him an encouraging smile.
“Yah, go on,” put in Ranta.
Elias nodded at him, smiling at well, and he resumed, continuing to stare anxiously over at Elias. “… the girls are crying, the girls are sorrowful today, their sweethearts went away for a long time, hey, their sweethearts went away to the army…” When he finished he looked grateful to step down for someone else who, in the wake of that apparent novelty act, won the audience over with some renditions of the familiar. The climax was an impromptu chorus of “Our Land,” in which Elias whispered the lyrics to Aleksandr and Aleksandr applauded politely at its end.
“What, did you think I’d bust you for spreading propaganda?” Elias asked him after the minor festivities wound down and everyone dispersed, including them. “Doesn’t matter much if they don’t even know what it says, does it?”
“They were all asking me to sing something,” Aleksandr whispered. He carried something fabric over his shoulder, light blue that matched his eyes. “At first all I could think of was ‘The Internationale.’”
Elias stifled a laugh at the image of Aleksandr embarrassedly exhorting the oblivious gathering to world revolution. “I get it. No problems there?”
“No, no problems. Then later they wanted another one. I’d been trying to think of something cheerful, like from a film, but I couldn’t remember all the words to any of them.”
Probably for the best, thought Elias. He knew now that Aleksandr’s face wouldn’t crack like porcelain if he laughed, but he still found it hard to imagine him pulling off something cheerful.
“So I thought of two, and the other one was a lot worse.”
“How much worse?”
“It’s called ‘Suomi the Beautiful.’”
One word stuck out in the midst of the Russian. “Better than ‘the Hideous.’ ‘Suomi’?”
“It’s a marching song.”
“What’s it like?”
“You won’t be angry?”
“If I would, would I ask you?”
“All right. It goes like this…”
He whispered the lyrics, without melody, in their dugout, as he set down the blue thing - which proved to be a shirt - dug a sewing kit out of a coat pocket, and threaded a needle. “… We are used to victories, and again we are at war. Under the red star, we go by the roads of our grandfathers. Many lies were told these years, to fool the Finnish people…
“… We are coming to help you punish, to return your disgrace manifold.” He was looking up at the ceiling. “Meet us, Suomi the beautiful, decorated with transparent lakes. And that’s it.”
Elias nodded. “Good thinking.” If nothing else, the appearance of the name of their own country might have made the others curious for a translation, and if his own appalled hilarity was any indicator he didn’t suppose Aleksandr would have taken the massed reaction very well.
***
After that last close call, the captain had restricted their office visits. Elias (he was getting used to thinking of him as Elias) had said that it was fine, he’d had enough of the Penumbra to last him a while. What he needed, said Elias, was to return there periodically - to find a private place, preferably in land as untouched by the Weaver as possible, and go sideways for a minute or so, and hopefully keep a mirror on hand. Aleksandr suspected it wouldn’t be so simple in Leningrad. Though there were parks - maybe those would work.
The pace of his lessons had slowed. Elias spent more time in digressions, trying now to be both a teacher and something like a friend. Aleksandr tried not to think too hard about Golubev, or to think too hard (Mikhail had said this of him once, that he thought too hard) about all the reasons why he was probably dead, all the reasons Elias had told him.
For the moment, Aleksandr concentrated on the shirt. It wasn’t a uniform shirt; it was what they called “model Cajander” in jest, as this man Cajander’s lack of money for the army meant many of the soldiers brought clothes from home. This particular piece was Kyander’s, and it had given out at the seam where sleeve joined shoulder. Since he was sitting at camp all day doing next to nothing and he was not bad at detail work, he seemed a natural choice for Kyander to ask about repairing it, and Aleksandr had agreed accordingly.
It wasn’t a very large thing, was it? Nothing of great strategic importance. Could one stitched seam eventually lead to someone’s life or death? Was it a minor Finnish victory that he sat here sewing up one of their soldier’s shirts? He wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer from himself, he knew. He knew very well that if he was committing some treason, he wouldn’t want to judge it as such.
When Elias called his name, he finished his stitch and looked up; Elias was only around at certain times, and he had plenty of other time for sewing. Elias looked to the book he’d left closed atop his bag, the Tolstoy. “Which one are you on now?”
He would ask that today. “‘A Prisoner in the Caucasus.’”
“Oh, I remember that one.” And now Elias was looking at him, appraisingly. Aleksandr tried to guess what he wanted. Another performance? “Would you rather be in the Caucasus, do you think?”
Aleksandr tried, then, to guess why he’d asked that. “They don’t do things like that in the Caucasus anymore.” Though from the Caucasus, he couldn’t help thinking, he could take a train. Elias had given back his internal passport and his other papers once he’d reviewed them for intelligence. The main problem would be explaining how he’d ended up there, if it was something inexplicable. The explicable - suppose he’d been assigned there, in a garrison, far away from Finland? When would he have known about being a werewolf, if he’d ever have known? Would his life ever have been as threatened in the Caucasus?
Was Elias trying to draw a parallel or break one?
“It was one of the first ones I read,” said Elias. “The style, you see, the language. It’s very simple…”
And wound in with that, he started to tell Aleksandr about the Rybalkin family.
Lyudmila Rybalkina had been the wife of a tsarist officer who also happened to be a Theurge of the Get of Fenris. Colonel Rybalkin had been in the White Guard and died at some point; Elias didn’t know which war he’d been a casualty of, especially as the suffering of one war was supposed to have fed the Wyrm in the other. Lyudmila and her children had fled to Finland and made contact with the Fenrir community there. When as a child Elias expressed an interest in learning Russian, he’d been sent to Lyudmila, who’d taught herself Finnish in the intervening years and tutored him with the help of her library and her three children. Elias counted them off - Marya, Nikolay, Valentina.
“Kolya especially,” said Elias. “He was older enough that I particularly looked up to him - yes, I know, I’m always looking up to people, I look up to you for crying out loud - but not so old that he couldn’t be bothered with me at all.”
***
Elias had been twelve when the lessons started and took to Kolya immediately, then admired him a long time before starting to think that along with someone he wanted to be he was someone Elias just wanted. He remembered Kolya’s broad shoulders and chest, his oft-ruffled mane of dark hair, the muscle visible when he rolled up his sleeves at the writing table and when he undid the top buttons of his shirt in summer. He remembered how when Elias asked “Are you named after that tsar Nikolay?” the exact way Kolya had said “Yes.” He remembered how Kolya was so solemn at first that it was particularly satisfying the first time he got him to laugh. He remembered Kolya’s interest in the fowl and rabbits Elias brought in by way of payment (Viktor Fire-Eye had loved to hunt, Lyudmila told him once, but Kolya had been too young to join him), the time spent preparing the carcasses together. He’d had crushes for long before, and he’d hankered after a particular sort of attention from a series of other boys interspersed with the succession of girls, but it wasn’t until Kolya that he put the same name to it that he already knew for what he wanted with girls.
Though once, when he was maybe five or six, not long before his mother died, he’d told her he wanted to marry Yrjö, who was a boy he often played with then. At the time it sounded fun, something to look forward to. His mother had laughed and told him it didn’t work that way, and he’d asked her how it did work, but he hadn’t thought whatever her answer had been was important enough to remember, and he definitely hadn’t thought she’d die before the year was out.
Kolya’s Russian wasn’t perfect, by any means. By then he’d lived in Finland longer than he’d lived in Russia, and it was thanks to Lyudmila’s tooth-and-nail persistence that he retained as much as he did. He interpreted for his mother when complex conversation was required at the bank and such, and he sat in so often on Elias’s first lessons for this purpose that it seemed only natural that he should take it up himself. In preparing to tutor Elias, he brushed up on his own command of his language, and this suited Lyudmila perfectly.
He remembered one summer a year after the lessons began, he’d invited Kolya to the village, to go swimming in the nearby lake, in silent hopes of seeing more of him in a literal sense. He’d seen plenty of that, but he’d also seen Kolya looking at him in particular ways, puzzled and then vaguely uncomfortable, culminating in their first sharing of the Koskinens’ sauna during which for once neither of them said a word. He knew something, Elias thought, and with that he began to know. Here it was suggested that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and he had been, and he hadn’t invited Kolya again for a long time though he still saw him at the Rybalkins’ house, feeling as though he ought to be furtive about it.
He’d made his investigations once he felt confident enough, or at least not terrified enough not to. One path these investigations led him down, one of many that eventually converged on his sixteenth name day, was to a slim novel tucked away behind a dictionary in Lyudmila’s rescued library. It was called simply Wings. It had been published when she was only sixteen, and Kolya hadn’t heard of it. When he asked Lyudmila about it she said, flushing slightly, that it had been such a scandal when it came out that she’d inveigled a wild friend of the family into procuring her a copy to see what all the horror was about. Of course, she understood, now Elias had to see what all the horror was about. This curiosity carried him through to when he started thinking that amidst all the fuss about art and such he was brushing up against something familiar in its scandal. When he set down the book, closing it on Vanya preparing to fly off to Italy with Stroop, he set down another path that led him, between here and that name day, to looking up the Roman emperors referenced and to poring over a map of Denmark. And some weeks after that name day, Lyudmila would present him with Wings wrapped in brown paper, by which he understood that now she knew too though she said nothing about it.
Meanwhile, after he finally realized about Kolya, it was as though something had unleashed the flood. He didn’t much care for Yrjö anymore, he’d gotten tedious and self-important with age, but there were others he started realizing he noticed that way. For one there was Jalmari Tikkanen, who was nearly ten years older than him, loose-limbed and wiry and affable. He hadn’t known quite what Jalmari was yet, didn’t yet know him as Fleet-Of-Foot, but he did know that for a long time he loved watching Jalmari go running, half-flying across the ground, changing direction on the head of a pin. Jalmari nearly always had a word for a cub.
For another there was Dima, fair-haired and high-cheekboned, one of Kolya’s entirely human friends among the other children of runaway White Russians. Dima was the son of a baron whose lands were stuck back in Russia, and while tagging along on visits to Dima’s withering parents Elias put his etiquette lessons into practice. He well remembered Dima’s gratifying surprise when Elias first spoke up during their discussion of the Russian literature their parents pressed on them (Kolya hadn’t been surprised; he’d walked Elias through the translation of the relevant piece the week before). He remembered trying not to stare at the movement of Dima’s swanlike neck and throat as he drank - or, for that matter, at the movement of Kolya’s throat.
At these gatherings there was also eventually Kirill Belyev, courting Dima’s sister Vera; after the losses the Silver Fangs had taken in Russia they were gathering to them what noble families remained. Vera had no idea about this part, but she took well to Kirill, as a lot of women did; Elias was relieved to note that while Vera herself was nice enough to look at as well as be around and he certainly acknowledged the imposing figure the young Theurge cut, he didn’t see his appeal. He’d known by then what he was, what Kirill was, and he’d guessed it was a natural thing, some part of him recognizing the spiritual incest of it (even then he had no explanation for why this part of him didn’t work when it came to Jalmari, and he hadn’t yet considered why there was a need for a rule in the first place if there was such a safeguard). When talking to Kirill, there was finally some justification for his initial arguments for learning Russian. Kirill was flattered by the effort.
Kolya had always been the first for him, in those years. Dima wasn’t his friend, and Jalmari was so much older he seemed entirely out of reach, and etcetera, etcetera. Kolya might have suspected him at the lake, but none of that showed when he helped Elias with the aggravating yat and set him exercises. Elias wished sometimes he was again new enough to Cyrillic that he could make his hand wobble, spill out misshapen letters, so that Kolya would put a large hand on his to guide him. But to earn Kolya’s smile, he’d long ago improved his penmanship so that reverting now would be unbelievable.
***
He didn’t say anything in that way, not straight out, but Aleksandr was reminded of when his father talked about meeting his mother in the factory before the revolution. He and Mikhail and Fyodor all had the story by heart: how his father wasn’t at war because his leg was bad, broken as a child and never healed right (knowing this, maybe, taking this so-close example to heart, was part of why he was so much more cautious in that way, got into so much fewer scrapes than his brothers, because even if the hospitals were better now the thought of all that trouble on his account…). How his mother helped him get around at the end of especially long working days (and they were especially long in those days) when the leg pained him. How they’d joined the crowds in the March demonstrations, his mother helping his father again whenever he tired. How they’d first kissed in the days after the tsar fell, how they’d finally married at the civil registry some months after Kerensky fell that November.
With all the stories twisting around like ribbons in the wind, loyalty on one side and treason on the other, all the paper pasted over pictures in their textbooks and all the pages torn out (he was an expert, at this point, at their neat extraction, and sometimes the neat replacement with provided pages), this story stayed fairly constant. Only the flavor changed, mention of names like Trotsky and Bukharin discreetly omitted. It had a unique texture to it, in his experience. It wasn’t the same as the way his grandmother talked about his grandfather, because he’d died of typhus before Aleksandr and Mikhail were born. It wasn’t the same as the way aunt Taisiya talked about Yulia’s father, because he’d run away from his wife and child and left nothing but his name, not even bothering with a postcard to mark their divorce - aunt Taisiya never actually said his name, not when she had so many salty substitutes to spare, but Yulia’s full name was Yulia Vasilyevna Vinogradova so it was easy to guess. It wasn’t the way Mikhail and Fyodor talked about the girls they liked, because it never had time to really grow old and steady for them.
Maybe if Elias hadn’t called him handsome all those nights ago Aleksandr wouldn’t be seeing this in the same way, but as it was he saw it the way he saw it, and heard it the way he heard it. He heard the fond way Elias’s words curled around his descriptions, the way he spoke with wistful sighs about long evenings spent bent over books with this Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin who he spoke of in the familiar form. He saw the way Elias’s gaze unfocused and then refocused on something years behind him. And after Elias finished, his gaze lingering, he dared whisper, “You said you liked men like you liked women?”
“Hmm? Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?”
“What’s it… what’s it like?”
“What’s it like?” Elias stretched, arms up, hands interlaced. “What’s that supposed to mean? It’s like liking women. It’s just that a lot more people don’t care for it and you might get arrested and such. Here, anyway. I suppose there’s a law over there, too?”
“There is.”
“Some places haven’t got them, though. I looked them up. There was a time…” Elias let out another sigh before chuckling, stretching his laced hands out in front of him. “… there was a time I thought I might go off to Denmark and find myself a place at a caern there. I figured I knew enough Swedish, which I hear isn’t so different, I could muddle through all right. There was even a time I would’ve settled for Germany, after all I heard about it, except they started paying attention to their law again. So. Remember the last time you saw a pretty girl and started getting an itch? It’s like that, but with men. Simple enough.”
That particular detail, he already knew, was true for him, but he couldn’t think of it as simple. “Oh. Is it… hard for you?”
“Hard? Not particularly.” Elias shrugged. “I might be distracted by more people than the average, there’s more of a range to choose from after all, but it’s not as if it’s a big distraction. Usually. Like I said - did I say it? - sorry about that.”
Aleksandr nodded.
Judging from his frown, this didn’t seem to satisfy Elias. “And I’m sorry, too, that your first impression was so rotten. Yes, I was a gigantic…” He seemed to cast about for an expletive of suitable strength; finding none, he flung up his hands, uttered something Finnish, and went on. “… but I want to let you know, I wouldn’t have done it.” He had told this to Aleksandr already, but this time he didn’t ask if he had. “And I want to let you know, too, that kind of thing isn’t anything the same as just liking men. People don’t understand that, sometimes. Like with Sodom… no, you wouldn’t know about that, would you? Over there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, it’s nonsense anyway. Anyway, when I was trying to figure myself out I found a Christian story about this place called Sodom, where the men came out in a mob to rape some travelers. The travelers were also men. And because of that the place got burned down. That’s the very short version that has everything that matters to what I’m saying right now. It’s a good thing I knew better than to believe that kind of thing. But people believed it for hundreds of years, they still believe it, and they get the raping mixed up with the having sex with men. So that’s why here, at least, they call sex with men ‘sodomy’ - sodomiasta, in our language, in Finnish - even when there’s no raping involved. Understand me so far?”
Aleksandr nodded. At home, of course, they were busy shaking off religion, keeping only things like New Year’s trees (they’d been Christmas trees once), but he understood. At home they sometimes called it pederasty, which he’d looked up as discreetly as possible - there was another word on the same page of the dictionary which he had ready as an excuse, though he supposed if he were questioned he’d have blushed and stammered enough to give himself away anyway - and it turned out to mean, strictly speaking, only men having sex with boys. At the time he’d certainly wanted, even as he didn’t want the wanting, to have something with Lev Isayev, but they were both boys then so he’d thought surely it didn’t quite count. Not under this particular reckoning.
“It’s not as though men who like women that way all go about raping women all the time, so why would men like me all go about raping men? When you think about it, it makes no sense.”
Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether Elias was still trying to apologize for all that had happened on the first day or if he was chiding him for misconceptions about men who liked men that way or both.
“What I did was stupid, but I never meant to do anything of the kind, is the thing.”
And in answer, Aleksandr wasn’t sure if it was commiseration - over this lingering guilt - or exasperation - about being condescended to about this one thing in this new world that he already understood - that finished opening his mouth and shaping the words, “I never wanted to hurt anyone either.”
Elias’s hands unwove and fell to his sides. He looked down at them where they had landed, slack. He looked back up at Aleksandr. “You’re saying…?”
“Yes.”
He looked down, he looked up, and he began to laugh, not trying to hide it at all, howling and whooping and tossing his head about. His hands came up again, clutching himself as he rocked against the wall. He laughed until other men in the dugout, awakened, began to curse him. Then it faded into helpless chuckles interspersed with Finnish mutterings, constant shaking of his head as his rocking slowed, stopped. And then he looked back, abashed. “Sorry.”
Aleksandr looked back at him.
“I mean, who would have thought… both of us…” He kept chuckling, visibly restraining himself from letting it grow again. “If this were some novel we’d fall straight into love now, I suppose, except if this were a novel who’d write us how we are?”
Aleksandr had never read such a novel either; he said nothing.
Elias shook his head a few more times. “But you know that doesn’t change anything, right, in that way?”
“I know. The Litany.” If it weren’t for the Litany, would Elias think it would change things in that way?
“Right. The Litany. Now what?”
“Now what?”
“Is that all you wanted to say?” Elias might have said this in a sharp way, but he didn’t. “Just, you know, establishing things?”
“I don’t know. I… what else could you tell me about it? I’d like to know that.”
“Then I’ll tell you, best as I can. So… men. Women, too?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I know for some poor bastards of our persuasion women don’t do it for them at all. This way you’ve got some chance of a family with who you’d like.”
***
9 April 1934
Elias was decided: as long as he had such a crazy scheme swirling around in his head giving him no rest, he might as well see if it worked. Kolya would look at him differently after this no matter what, but he would let it out, he’d finally let it out before the pressure of keeping it secret blasted him to Luna. Maybe Kolya wouldn’t like it, would call him a pervert or a sodomite or such, and he hated the thought of that, but would it really be better if the only thing stopping Kolya from calling him that was that he didn’t know to call him that?
He wasn’t worried about getting arrested, either - he was sure Kolya wouldn’t tell. Kolya was his friend long enough and deep enough not to. Even if he was wrong about that, Kolya knew better than to take a Garou out of the fight over a stupid thing like wanting to fuck men. Was that thinking like a Shadow Lord? Maybe, but there were the facts, and the Shadow Lords did get shit done in their own way.
It was Elias’s name day, nearly the opposite side of the year from his sixteenth birthday last October, and Kolya had paid a visit for the occasion, making excuses for his mother and sisters. Elias couldn’t think of a better time, so he girded himself for battle in the Fianna style with a few mugs of celebratory beer; this left him more inclined to tip, but certainly wasn’t enough to tipsy himself head over heels in the dirt and puke on Kolya. As the celebration started to wind down he steered Kolya away from the other revelers. In the Koskinen barn he checked all the corners for any courting couples who’d gotten the same idea, and then he started laying out something he doubted any of the courting couples had ever thought of, not quite this way. Elias carried in a lantern, setting it down far from what hay was left over from that winter; little light filtered through from the crescent moon beyond the walls.
“Kolya?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to tell you something important. A secret. All right?”
“All right?”
In his head, Elias had put himself through the paces several times. Now, well-rehearsed, he pushed himself up onto his toes and threw his arms around Kolya’s chest and said…
Actually, later he wouldn’t remember exactly what he’d said. He remembered that this part wasn’t so well rehearsed and came tumbling out, words somersaulting over each other. He talked about the Fenrir of Denmark, he talked about mutual intelligibility with Swedish and how the way he picked up languages he was sure he’d get hold of Danish itself in no time. He talked about the law of humans and the law of Garou. He talked about how the Litany prohibited two Garou mating, probably also doing things in the area of mating, but definitely didn’t prohibit a Garou and Kin doing the same. On and on. At least once, probably more than that, he’d said, “I love you.” It was the done thing to say, in a time like this.
He didn’t remember the order it had come out, how many times he’d had to go back and rearrange things into coherence. He didn’t remember how long it had taken. What he did remember was how, when he wound down, Kolya looked like he’d caught a Jarlhammer to the gut.
***
February 1940
“I told you, didn’t I, how few of us are born?”
“You told me.”
“Remember what I said about it?”
“You said we should have children with Kinfolk, to have as many Garou as possible.”
“Unless I’m starting up a new line of them, yes. Kinfolk. And of course I can’t very well do anything for any line with another man, not without the proper equipment. We Garou,” said Elias, “we have a job to do, and that’s the most important thing. Things are different for us. We don’t much care for this thing the humans have in their heads now about squeezing out as many babies as they can. It makes good cover for us having all our kids, but that’s about it.”
Aleksandr remembered 1936. The new constitution. His mother and aunt Taisiya, fresh from factory meetings, further discussing the new law on abortion. The idea that with socialism built, what woman would want to get rid of a baby? Aunt Taisiya muttering about Vasily Vinogradov. His grandmother, occasionally clucking and sighing. His father, awkwardly trying to keep to the periphery, out of the way of the women’s talk, but five square meters each didn’t leave much room for periphery.
“A lot of us wouldn’t mind at all if more humans were homosexual and didn’t worry about pretending not to be, or having to have kids. Less humans born means less humans to muck about with Gaia, you see. But less Garou to protect Gaia - that’s not good, and once we let the numbers go down with us, it’s especially hard getting them back up again.” Elias sighed, now with exasperation. “Some types think that because of that, a man just wanting a man’s wrong for us. Which just goes to show that not all Garou are as enlightened about this sort of thing as I am, ha.”
***
9 April 1934
After he started to look less bludgeoned in the gut, Kolya reached up and gently pried Elias off of him. He held on to Elias’s hands. He said, “We should talk.”
“I thought we were.”
“You were, yes. Now, may I?”
“Of course.”
“It’s not any problem with you,” said Kolya, and from then on Elias knew the important part of his answer.
***
February 1940
“So, do you want my advice?”
“Yes, please.” He could decide whether or not to take it.
“Right, then. What I do is this: I concentrate on the girls. At least we can do that much. If a man catches my eye, well, that’s all right, I just tell myself not to expect anything in the long run. And that’s not too hard to take and swallow, because I can’t expect anything with a lot of the women that catch my eye either. Now, about love.”
“Yes?”
“All that moaning about ‘one true love,’ ‘without you I’ll die,’ that sort of thing, ever feel that way?”
“Not exactly?”
“Good. Now hope it doesn’t ever clobber you over the head in future. I know people can feel that way, but I’ll tell you now, we can’t afford to truck with that sort of thing. Fighting the Wyrm’s a precarious occupation. We have the gifts we do - the healing, the shapeshifting, the Gift-gifts and so on - because we need them for what we do, and sometimes even that’s not enough. We’ve got more than our share of widows and widowers and orphans.”
Aleksandr nodded, remembering again what Elias had said that first night. “Did you say your mother…?”
“I might have. Yes. Now, Kinfolk aren’t in as much danger, day-to-day, but sometimes when the Wyrm can’t get at us it gets at them instead. And then there’s the normal things that we don’t die of so much, but humans do all the time. Say if you’d been just Kin, being Kin wouldn’t have done anything about a shot to the heart. So it’s not always the Garou that dies first, these situations.” He paused. “My father, for instance. He got mixed up in the civil war, our civil war. My mother lasted a few more years - she was very good at what she did.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“For what? But my point is, if you believe that rot about how only one person in all the world will do, then you’ve got a lot of people left miserable forever and ever, or until they die too. Which, thank Gaia, is not what happens. One of the things you learn very much, being Garou, is that things don’t last as long as you want. People die. It happens, and then the people left go on with their lives.”
People died, he already knew. People went away. There was Mandowska, who’d kept to herself, for which everyone else was relieved when she’d been ushered out of her tiny room early one morning with a suitcase in hand. Yulia whispered this to them afterward; she’d happened to be up that early for a reason she wouldn’t tell the boys. Her door was sealed until a newly married couple - Galkin and Galkina - took her place.
There was Nikanorov the self-important factory manager, who his mother sometimes used to grumble about. One day she’d come home, barely any blood in her face, and mentioned that someone had taken the complaints about him very seriously.
There was Demyan Ivanovych Andriyenko, who’d been a grade above him, who’d been one of the boys Aleksandr caught himself watching after first starting to look at Isayev that way. Andriyenko was a broad-shouldered Ukrainian, considerably shorter than Aleksandr but far sturdier, with tanned skin and sun-bleached hair and high cheekbones and a voice that perpetually demanded attention and a laugh that pealed like the bells of the torn-down churches. He’d been denounced at a meeting, expelled from the Komsomol and then the school as a kulak’s son. Just the month before Aleksandr had exchanged his Young Pioneer badge and red kerchief for the badge and card of the Komsomol. He sat at the back at the meeting and couldn’t stand to look at Andriyenko - his memory of that time was mainly of the people constantly interrupting Andriyenko’s mumbles of denial in a voice no longer nearly so strident and fierce. Andriyenko had a lot more friends than Mandowska and he took most of them with him - either they hadn’t picked up that he was hiding something or they were hiding things themselves. One of the ones who wasn’t taken was Lev Isayev; Andriyenko, too, had admired him from afar and then from not-quite-as-far. Aleksandr remembered his voice among the denouncers, no longer nearly so upbeat and encouraging, declaring why he had never been as friendly as Andriyenko wanted.
There was Alisa Yefimovna Tkachenko, who’d pounded at the door early on another morning, calling for Vitya between her sobs. Aleksandr, who’d come to the door with some apprehension, had stayed with her while Mikhail ran to wake up Vitaly Yefimovich Tkachenko, the father of the family. Alisa was his sister. Her husband had been arrested, he gathered, in some horrible mistake. He was a Party member in good standing and commended for his work, he’d done nothing wrong, she was his wife and ought to know. He listened to this and felt relieved that the knock hadn’t been for them and felt awful for that relief. When Tkachenko got there he gaped at her and shooed Aleksandr and Mikhail away - “Haven’t you got school in the morning?” As they made their way back to bed they could still hear them talking, and then they could hear the door slam. When Mikhail asked Tkachenko about it the following evening, Tkachenko rebuffed him in an unusually sharp voice.
Months later, Aleksandr brought it up with Mikhail while they were studying together. “It’s probably straightened out by now,” said Mikhail. Aleksandr agreed. Knowing nothing else, it was a nice thing to assume had happened.
“So if some man does catch your eye,” said Elias, “and you love him, and you don’t think you can live without him… well, let me tell you now, you probably can.”
***
9 April 1934
Kolya had been eminently reasonable, if embarrassed about it. He’d explained, very reasonably, why he didn’t think a thing like that could last, and why pretending it could last would make ending it worse. And it would have to end. They needed to find mates, they needed to have children. Elias should know this already, he didn’t say outright, but Elias could think it for himself.
“It’s nothing wrong with you.”
And he had guessed at it, he told him, for some years. He’d made the comparison jokingly at first - imagined only that eager little Elias was acting like a boy in love (Elias was relieved, a little, that he hadn’t said like a girl in love, though he couldn’t have said why). Maybe a year ago, he said, he’d started to seriously consider that it was more than acting like one. Maybe half a year ago, he’d started to think if, maybe…
“Maybe if something about this was different,” said Kolya.
If one of them were a woman. If they were both entirely human, nothing to do with Garou and their duties, if it was just the human world they had to worry about. If, if…
***
February 1940
“No matter how much you might love him right then,” said Elias, “he won’t be the only one. Keep that in mind. If you can’t be with him as you want, it won’t be the Apocalypse. There’s nothing wrong just with feeling that way, but he won’t be the only one in the world you could possibly be that way about. And I expect that somewhere out there there’s at least one woman who could do the same thing to you.” He hesitated, looked tentative, and then swept it out of his face with an impish grin. Aleksandr had thought of Golubev before; now he thought of Mikhail. “With your looks, I don’t imagine you’ll have any problems finding girls who’d like to.”
***
9 April 1934
“All right,” said Elias. “It can’t last. All right. I understand. But…”
Kolya watched him, waiting. Outside, someone whooped once, short and sharp, before silence pressed back in.
“But,” said Elias. “Couldn’t it last… just for a little bit? It’s not as if it’s charach. What it is is, it’s my name day.” Though maybe it was past midnight by then. “Can’t we pretend it’s different? Just once?”
***
February 1940
“Well,” said Elias, his grin fading, “that’s about all I can tell you. I can’t think of much else. Except that if anyone says you’re some kind of a pervert, that something’s wrong with you just because of that… I’m not saying you’ve got to go right up and kick their skulls in, because that’s not always practical and some folk just don’t know any better, but just remember that’s complete nonsense. Promise me?”
“I promise.” Here, now, it was easy to promise.
“Sergeant Laukkanen?” someone called, and Elias nodded at him and went off to whatever the soldiers required of him. Aleksandr returned his attention to the stitching.
Their father had taught them how to sew, back when you could get needles and thread in the regular stores. He was maybe eight then. Fyodor was enthusiastic but kept sticking himself with the needle until father took it away. He cried a while before wandering off to play with Masha Tkachenko. Mikhail was bored and kept saying, “Why? I’ll just get married.”
“Don’t be so sure it’ll work that way by the time you’re of age,” their father told him. “I wouldn’t be so sure about getting married if you have that kind of attitude.” It still mostly worked that way by the time they were of age, as it happened, but for a while it had seemed something might change in that way.
For practice, their father gave him his mother’s coat with a tear in the lining. Aleksandr worked very slowly, very carefully, and when he was done his mother had made a great show of looking for where it had torn. He’d practiced a few more times, and then the shortages started and the sewing things they had left they put away for when it was really needed. He hadn’t handled a needle and thread for years after that, until he was called up and found some in one of the special stores open to the military.
Everyone needed to make sacrifices. Once they’d overtaken the capitalists, it would be paid back ten times over. That part hadn’t happened yet.
He remembered the surprised noises Elias made, how he kept asking about the shortages, the size of the lines, as if perpetually unsure he’d heard right. “I’ve been to Tampere and Viipuri,” Elias had said. “I’ve never seen a line that long. Not every day.”
To get anywhere, one had to make sacrifices. This was maybe part of why, though their lines weren’t as long, so many of the Finns remained simple farmers (downtrodden ones, really?) while the Five-Year Plans brought forth massive constructions, the biggest of their kind, across the broad stretch of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was why the Finnish army was so small and backward. But their little army was still dressed for the winter, dressed for the snow, and prepared for the forests.
Aleksandr remembered the olive and brown of their summer uniforms. He remembered the commanders in their sheepskin coats, warm and white. The shortage of these coats meant that when the White Finns could pick out such a man against the snow, they would know he was someone important and aim for him.
He thought about how many weeks it had been since Stalin’s birthday.
He remembered again about Mandowska and Andriyenko and the rest. The cars going by in the night. Aunt Taisiya packing and unpacking her half-broken suitcase, leaving it propped by the door. “In case there’s a fire,” she said when Mikhail asked, not looking at him, looking over his shoulder. The trials, so many people, the showy ones for Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin, the after-the-fact notice for Tukhachevsky, and that was just ones they had in the papers.
He remembered again about the pages pasted over, torn out.
He felt he was on the edge of something, a mountain or a precipice.
He had to pause for a minute when he was done, to figure out how to knot off the end. Once he’d worked something out, he turned Kyander’s shirt right side out, examined it from that side - it seemed puckered compared to the seam around it, hopefully Kyander wouldn’t mind - and folded it up. He’d return it tomorrow. Back to the books; by the time Elias returned, he’d finished “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” was part of the way into the story following. He thought of the speculation, still unanswered, that had led him to his first question tonight.
“Elias?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something? Something personal?”
“You can always ask me whatever you’d like.”
“I was wondering. Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin…”
“Yes?”
“Did you love him?”
***
9 April 1934
They moved into a far corner of the barn, leaving the lantern behind. Elias, graceless tonight, fumbled at the buttons of Kolya’s trousers, fumbled for the knotted string of his drawers, pressed his mouth to Kolya’s neck.
The Rybalkins were great kissers. It was the Russian way of doing things, he thought. Masha and Valya and Lyudmila kissed each other and their Russian girl friends; Kolya kissed friends like Dima. In Elias’s village no one else kissed as readily, as openly; Fenrir in particular weren’t given to it. The sight of these kisses often gave him a small guilty frisson, especially since he knew they didn’t mean them the way he saw them and especially not with family. In memory of this, he pushed himself up and moved his mouth to Kolya’s cheek.
Kolya was all variations of shadows; the touch was the important thing. It was Kolya’s hand cupping his cheek that guided their mouths together. It wasn’t like Elias had expected. Drier, maybe, the feeling of Kolya’s lips against his. When he went further his tongue bumped into Kolya’s teeth. Completely graceless. But Elias still wanted, wanted so much to pretend that it would last.
***
February 1940
“Kolya? Oh, yes. Yes. I did love him. Was I that obvious?”
Aleksandr said nothing.
“He was always more sensible than I was,” said Elias. “Especially about this sort of thing.” He fell back against the wall again. “We did it once. On my name day. Just to know what it would’ve been like. We agreed that would be it.”
“… was it?”
“It was. Yes, I know, I was surprised too.” This laugh was soft, rueful. “I thought maybe I could persuade him into more once he knew what it felt like. Well, I didn’t. One thing he was too sensible about was, after that, he said that maybe I could marry Valya or Masha instead. They’re all right but I didn’t like them the same way, didn’t love them the same way,” which Aleksandr had already guessed at from the way his tone shifted between them, “and it would’ve been too close to see anything but him. They ought to have better than that. And they did get better than that.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes, it is. So, that was it for Kolya. We write, back and forth. I’ll have to tell him about this sometime.”
“About what?”
“Oh, well,” another of those soft laughs, “not everything. Just that I met a man at the front that put me in mind of him.”
“Do you think so?”
“I think so. In some ways, at least. Tall and dark and Russian and gutsy and handsome enough to make the Snow Queen long to carry him off.”
And unattainable. Aleksandr shifted about, uncomfortable under the sharp light of these words. “You’re very… direct.”
“After what happened when I hoped for it to slide by…”
“I don’t think anyone’s called me handsome before.”
“You’re at your best when you’re gutsy. It’s not just the shapes of your face, it’s an attitude that shows it to best advantage. And the Silver Fangs bred for handsomeness, I think, as a sideline.” A silence. “Like I said, nothing like that’s going to happen. I swear on the jaws of Great Fenris. Don’t fret about it.”
“I won’t.” For quite some time it hadn’t occurred to him to fret about it.
“I’d say to think of me as an older brother, but I don’t know if that quite goes together the right way.”
Aleksandr nodded. To imagine his brothers harboring incestuous fantasies, let alone stating them so bluntly, was a far more disturbing thought.
“But if something about this was different,” said Elias, and stopped.
So many things would have to be different, then. One of them would have to be a woman, at least one of them wouldn’t be Garou, it would help very much to be born on the same side of a border, and he supposed being a prisoner, in name or in fact, would always put another cast to things whether or not they noticed outright… “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~8100
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Seven: If Only
It was a machine-gunner, this time. His head snapped back, his hands up as if in belated surrender. Before he finished falling Elias was skiing away at speed.
He wondered if he might be slipping. He hadn’t expected any difficulties when he was called up - he’d already spent years in the war against the Wyrm, he wasn’t some raw kid who puked after his first kill, no, he’d left his first kill long behind and he hadn’t puked then either, he’d learned the ropes long before his compulsory year in the army, and what was a tank to someone who’d slain a Pattern Spider? But over time he’d started noticing and paying more attention to details like the way their hands flew up, and the way they pressed close for warmth while caught between the deep cold and the vulnerability of the campfires, and the way they cried out with pain and screamed, and the way they didn’t scream but stared, dull-eyed…
Back at camp, Aleksandr wasn’t at their dugout. He was directed to another one, where Kyander had organized a sing-song. He arrived to the accompaniment of Aleksandr’s singing voice, halting and tremulous, nothing that would win prizes, but with an authentically mournful inflection - “The heroes ride over the field, hey, the heroes of the Red Army…”
When he slipped into the dugout, Aleksandr stopped on the verge of a word and looked like he wanted to drop dead. This brought protests from among his audience; others, like Salo, lounged against the walls doing their best to give the impression that they were present by sheer coincidence. “Go on, Santeri,” said Kyander, giving him an encouraging smile.
“Yah, go on,” put in Ranta.
Elias nodded at him, smiling at well, and he resumed, continuing to stare anxiously over at Elias. “… the girls are crying, the girls are sorrowful today, their sweethearts went away for a long time, hey, their sweethearts went away to the army…” When he finished he looked grateful to step down for someone else who, in the wake of that apparent novelty act, won the audience over with some renditions of the familiar. The climax was an impromptu chorus of “Our Land,” in which Elias whispered the lyrics to Aleksandr and Aleksandr applauded politely at its end.
“What, did you think I’d bust you for spreading propaganda?” Elias asked him after the minor festivities wound down and everyone dispersed, including them. “Doesn’t matter much if they don’t even know what it says, does it?”
“They were all asking me to sing something,” Aleksandr whispered. He carried something fabric over his shoulder, light blue that matched his eyes. “At first all I could think of was ‘The Internationale.’”
Elias stifled a laugh at the image of Aleksandr embarrassedly exhorting the oblivious gathering to world revolution. “I get it. No problems there?”
“No, no problems. Then later they wanted another one. I’d been trying to think of something cheerful, like from a film, but I couldn’t remember all the words to any of them.”
Probably for the best, thought Elias. He knew now that Aleksandr’s face wouldn’t crack like porcelain if he laughed, but he still found it hard to imagine him pulling off something cheerful.
“So I thought of two, and the other one was a lot worse.”
“How much worse?”
“It’s called ‘Suomi the Beautiful.’”
One word stuck out in the midst of the Russian. “Better than ‘the Hideous.’ ‘Suomi’?”
“It’s a marching song.”
“What’s it like?”
“You won’t be angry?”
“If I would, would I ask you?”
“All right. It goes like this…”
He whispered the lyrics, without melody, in their dugout, as he set down the blue thing - which proved to be a shirt - dug a sewing kit out of a coat pocket, and threaded a needle. “… We are used to victories, and again we are at war. Under the red star, we go by the roads of our grandfathers. Many lies were told these years, to fool the Finnish people…
“… We are coming to help you punish, to return your disgrace manifold.” He was looking up at the ceiling. “Meet us, Suomi the beautiful, decorated with transparent lakes. And that’s it.”
Elias nodded. “Good thinking.” If nothing else, the appearance of the name of their own country might have made the others curious for a translation, and if his own appalled hilarity was any indicator he didn’t suppose Aleksandr would have taken the massed reaction very well.
***
After that last close call, the captain had restricted their office visits. Elias (he was getting used to thinking of him as Elias) had said that it was fine, he’d had enough of the Penumbra to last him a while. What he needed, said Elias, was to return there periodically - to find a private place, preferably in land as untouched by the Weaver as possible, and go sideways for a minute or so, and hopefully keep a mirror on hand. Aleksandr suspected it wouldn’t be so simple in Leningrad. Though there were parks - maybe those would work.
The pace of his lessons had slowed. Elias spent more time in digressions, trying now to be both a teacher and something like a friend. Aleksandr tried not to think too hard about Golubev, or to think too hard (Mikhail had said this of him once, that he thought too hard) about all the reasons why he was probably dead, all the reasons Elias had told him.
For the moment, Aleksandr concentrated on the shirt. It wasn’t a uniform shirt; it was what they called “model Cajander” in jest, as this man Cajander’s lack of money for the army meant many of the soldiers brought clothes from home. This particular piece was Kyander’s, and it had given out at the seam where sleeve joined shoulder. Since he was sitting at camp all day doing next to nothing and he was not bad at detail work, he seemed a natural choice for Kyander to ask about repairing it, and Aleksandr had agreed accordingly.
It wasn’t a very large thing, was it? Nothing of great strategic importance. Could one stitched seam eventually lead to someone’s life or death? Was it a minor Finnish victory that he sat here sewing up one of their soldier’s shirts? He wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer from himself, he knew. He knew very well that if he was committing some treason, he wouldn’t want to judge it as such.
When Elias called his name, he finished his stitch and looked up; Elias was only around at certain times, and he had plenty of other time for sewing. Elias looked to the book he’d left closed atop his bag, the Tolstoy. “Which one are you on now?”
He would ask that today. “‘A Prisoner in the Caucasus.’”
“Oh, I remember that one.” And now Elias was looking at him, appraisingly. Aleksandr tried to guess what he wanted. Another performance? “Would you rather be in the Caucasus, do you think?”
Aleksandr tried, then, to guess why he’d asked that. “They don’t do things like that in the Caucasus anymore.” Though from the Caucasus, he couldn’t help thinking, he could take a train. Elias had given back his internal passport and his other papers once he’d reviewed them for intelligence. The main problem would be explaining how he’d ended up there, if it was something inexplicable. The explicable - suppose he’d been assigned there, in a garrison, far away from Finland? When would he have known about being a werewolf, if he’d ever have known? Would his life ever have been as threatened in the Caucasus?
Was Elias trying to draw a parallel or break one?
“It was one of the first ones I read,” said Elias. “The style, you see, the language. It’s very simple…”
And wound in with that, he started to tell Aleksandr about the Rybalkin family.
Lyudmila Rybalkina had been the wife of a tsarist officer who also happened to be a Theurge of the Get of Fenris. Colonel Rybalkin had been in the White Guard and died at some point; Elias didn’t know which war he’d been a casualty of, especially as the suffering of one war was supposed to have fed the Wyrm in the other. Lyudmila and her children had fled to Finland and made contact with the Fenrir community there. When as a child Elias expressed an interest in learning Russian, he’d been sent to Lyudmila, who’d taught herself Finnish in the intervening years and tutored him with the help of her library and her three children. Elias counted them off - Marya, Nikolay, Valentina.
“Kolya especially,” said Elias. “He was older enough that I particularly looked up to him - yes, I know, I’m always looking up to people, I look up to you for crying out loud - but not so old that he couldn’t be bothered with me at all.”
***
Elias had been twelve when the lessons started and took to Kolya immediately, then admired him a long time before starting to think that along with someone he wanted to be he was someone Elias just wanted. He remembered Kolya’s broad shoulders and chest, his oft-ruffled mane of dark hair, the muscle visible when he rolled up his sleeves at the writing table and when he undid the top buttons of his shirt in summer. He remembered how when Elias asked “Are you named after that tsar Nikolay?” the exact way Kolya had said “Yes.” He remembered how Kolya was so solemn at first that it was particularly satisfying the first time he got him to laugh. He remembered Kolya’s interest in the fowl and rabbits Elias brought in by way of payment (Viktor Fire-Eye had loved to hunt, Lyudmila told him once, but Kolya had been too young to join him), the time spent preparing the carcasses together. He’d had crushes for long before, and he’d hankered after a particular sort of attention from a series of other boys interspersed with the succession of girls, but it wasn’t until Kolya that he put the same name to it that he already knew for what he wanted with girls.
Though once, when he was maybe five or six, not long before his mother died, he’d told her he wanted to marry Yrjö, who was a boy he often played with then. At the time it sounded fun, something to look forward to. His mother had laughed and told him it didn’t work that way, and he’d asked her how it did work, but he hadn’t thought whatever her answer had been was important enough to remember, and he definitely hadn’t thought she’d die before the year was out.
Kolya’s Russian wasn’t perfect, by any means. By then he’d lived in Finland longer than he’d lived in Russia, and it was thanks to Lyudmila’s tooth-and-nail persistence that he retained as much as he did. He interpreted for his mother when complex conversation was required at the bank and such, and he sat in so often on Elias’s first lessons for this purpose that it seemed only natural that he should take it up himself. In preparing to tutor Elias, he brushed up on his own command of his language, and this suited Lyudmila perfectly.
He remembered one summer a year after the lessons began, he’d invited Kolya to the village, to go swimming in the nearby lake, in silent hopes of seeing more of him in a literal sense. He’d seen plenty of that, but he’d also seen Kolya looking at him in particular ways, puzzled and then vaguely uncomfortable, culminating in their first sharing of the Koskinens’ sauna during which for once neither of them said a word. He knew something, Elias thought, and with that he began to know. Here it was suggested that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and he had been, and he hadn’t invited Kolya again for a long time though he still saw him at the Rybalkins’ house, feeling as though he ought to be furtive about it.
He’d made his investigations once he felt confident enough, or at least not terrified enough not to. One path these investigations led him down, one of many that eventually converged on his sixteenth name day, was to a slim novel tucked away behind a dictionary in Lyudmila’s rescued library. It was called simply Wings. It had been published when she was only sixteen, and Kolya hadn’t heard of it. When he asked Lyudmila about it she said, flushing slightly, that it had been such a scandal when it came out that she’d inveigled a wild friend of the family into procuring her a copy to see what all the horror was about. Of course, she understood, now Elias had to see what all the horror was about. This curiosity carried him through to when he started thinking that amidst all the fuss about art and such he was brushing up against something familiar in its scandal. When he set down the book, closing it on Vanya preparing to fly off to Italy with Stroop, he set down another path that led him, between here and that name day, to looking up the Roman emperors referenced and to poring over a map of Denmark. And some weeks after that name day, Lyudmila would present him with Wings wrapped in brown paper, by which he understood that now she knew too though she said nothing about it.
Meanwhile, after he finally realized about Kolya, it was as though something had unleashed the flood. He didn’t much care for Yrjö anymore, he’d gotten tedious and self-important with age, but there were others he started realizing he noticed that way. For one there was Jalmari Tikkanen, who was nearly ten years older than him, loose-limbed and wiry and affable. He hadn’t known quite what Jalmari was yet, didn’t yet know him as Fleet-Of-Foot, but he did know that for a long time he loved watching Jalmari go running, half-flying across the ground, changing direction on the head of a pin. Jalmari nearly always had a word for a cub.
For another there was Dima, fair-haired and high-cheekboned, one of Kolya’s entirely human friends among the other children of runaway White Russians. Dima was the son of a baron whose lands were stuck back in Russia, and while tagging along on visits to Dima’s withering parents Elias put his etiquette lessons into practice. He well remembered Dima’s gratifying surprise when Elias first spoke up during their discussion of the Russian literature their parents pressed on them (Kolya hadn’t been surprised; he’d walked Elias through the translation of the relevant piece the week before). He remembered trying not to stare at the movement of Dima’s swanlike neck and throat as he drank - or, for that matter, at the movement of Kolya’s throat.
At these gatherings there was also eventually Kirill Belyev, courting Dima’s sister Vera; after the losses the Silver Fangs had taken in Russia they were gathering to them what noble families remained. Vera had no idea about this part, but she took well to Kirill, as a lot of women did; Elias was relieved to note that while Vera herself was nice enough to look at as well as be around and he certainly acknowledged the imposing figure the young Theurge cut, he didn’t see his appeal. He’d known by then what he was, what Kirill was, and he’d guessed it was a natural thing, some part of him recognizing the spiritual incest of it (even then he had no explanation for why this part of him didn’t work when it came to Jalmari, and he hadn’t yet considered why there was a need for a rule in the first place if there was such a safeguard). When talking to Kirill, there was finally some justification for his initial arguments for learning Russian. Kirill was flattered by the effort.
Kolya had always been the first for him, in those years. Dima wasn’t his friend, and Jalmari was so much older he seemed entirely out of reach, and etcetera, etcetera. Kolya might have suspected him at the lake, but none of that showed when he helped Elias with the aggravating yat and set him exercises. Elias wished sometimes he was again new enough to Cyrillic that he could make his hand wobble, spill out misshapen letters, so that Kolya would put a large hand on his to guide him. But to earn Kolya’s smile, he’d long ago improved his penmanship so that reverting now would be unbelievable.
***
He didn’t say anything in that way, not straight out, but Aleksandr was reminded of when his father talked about meeting his mother in the factory before the revolution. He and Mikhail and Fyodor all had the story by heart: how his father wasn’t at war because his leg was bad, broken as a child and never healed right (knowing this, maybe, taking this so-close example to heart, was part of why he was so much more cautious in that way, got into so much fewer scrapes than his brothers, because even if the hospitals were better now the thought of all that trouble on his account…). How his mother helped him get around at the end of especially long working days (and they were especially long in those days) when the leg pained him. How they’d joined the crowds in the March demonstrations, his mother helping his father again whenever he tired. How they’d first kissed in the days after the tsar fell, how they’d finally married at the civil registry some months after Kerensky fell that November.
With all the stories twisting around like ribbons in the wind, loyalty on one side and treason on the other, all the paper pasted over pictures in their textbooks and all the pages torn out (he was an expert, at this point, at their neat extraction, and sometimes the neat replacement with provided pages), this story stayed fairly constant. Only the flavor changed, mention of names like Trotsky and Bukharin discreetly omitted. It had a unique texture to it, in his experience. It wasn’t the same as the way his grandmother talked about his grandfather, because he’d died of typhus before Aleksandr and Mikhail were born. It wasn’t the same as the way aunt Taisiya talked about Yulia’s father, because he’d run away from his wife and child and left nothing but his name, not even bothering with a postcard to mark their divorce - aunt Taisiya never actually said his name, not when she had so many salty substitutes to spare, but Yulia’s full name was Yulia Vasilyevna Vinogradova so it was easy to guess. It wasn’t the way Mikhail and Fyodor talked about the girls they liked, because it never had time to really grow old and steady for them.
Maybe if Elias hadn’t called him handsome all those nights ago Aleksandr wouldn’t be seeing this in the same way, but as it was he saw it the way he saw it, and heard it the way he heard it. He heard the fond way Elias’s words curled around his descriptions, the way he spoke with wistful sighs about long evenings spent bent over books with this Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin who he spoke of in the familiar form. He saw the way Elias’s gaze unfocused and then refocused on something years behind him. And after Elias finished, his gaze lingering, he dared whisper, “You said you liked men like you liked women?”
“Hmm? Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?”
“What’s it… what’s it like?”
“What’s it like?” Elias stretched, arms up, hands interlaced. “What’s that supposed to mean? It’s like liking women. It’s just that a lot more people don’t care for it and you might get arrested and such. Here, anyway. I suppose there’s a law over there, too?”
“There is.”
“Some places haven’t got them, though. I looked them up. There was a time…” Elias let out another sigh before chuckling, stretching his laced hands out in front of him. “… there was a time I thought I might go off to Denmark and find myself a place at a caern there. I figured I knew enough Swedish, which I hear isn’t so different, I could muddle through all right. There was even a time I would’ve settled for Germany, after all I heard about it, except they started paying attention to their law again. So. Remember the last time you saw a pretty girl and started getting an itch? It’s like that, but with men. Simple enough.”
That particular detail, he already knew, was true for him, but he couldn’t think of it as simple. “Oh. Is it… hard for you?”
“Hard? Not particularly.” Elias shrugged. “I might be distracted by more people than the average, there’s more of a range to choose from after all, but it’s not as if it’s a big distraction. Usually. Like I said - did I say it? - sorry about that.”
Aleksandr nodded.
Judging from his frown, this didn’t seem to satisfy Elias. “And I’m sorry, too, that your first impression was so rotten. Yes, I was a gigantic…” He seemed to cast about for an expletive of suitable strength; finding none, he flung up his hands, uttered something Finnish, and went on. “… but I want to let you know, I wouldn’t have done it.” He had told this to Aleksandr already, but this time he didn’t ask if he had. “And I want to let you know, too, that kind of thing isn’t anything the same as just liking men. People don’t understand that, sometimes. Like with Sodom… no, you wouldn’t know about that, would you? Over there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, it’s nonsense anyway. Anyway, when I was trying to figure myself out I found a Christian story about this place called Sodom, where the men came out in a mob to rape some travelers. The travelers were also men. And because of that the place got burned down. That’s the very short version that has everything that matters to what I’m saying right now. It’s a good thing I knew better than to believe that kind of thing. But people believed it for hundreds of years, they still believe it, and they get the raping mixed up with the having sex with men. So that’s why here, at least, they call sex with men ‘sodomy’ - sodomiasta, in our language, in Finnish - even when there’s no raping involved. Understand me so far?”
Aleksandr nodded. At home, of course, they were busy shaking off religion, keeping only things like New Year’s trees (they’d been Christmas trees once), but he understood. At home they sometimes called it pederasty, which he’d looked up as discreetly as possible - there was another word on the same page of the dictionary which he had ready as an excuse, though he supposed if he were questioned he’d have blushed and stammered enough to give himself away anyway - and it turned out to mean, strictly speaking, only men having sex with boys. At the time he’d certainly wanted, even as he didn’t want the wanting, to have something with Lev Isayev, but they were both boys then so he’d thought surely it didn’t quite count. Not under this particular reckoning.
“It’s not as though men who like women that way all go about raping women all the time, so why would men like me all go about raping men? When you think about it, it makes no sense.”
Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether Elias was still trying to apologize for all that had happened on the first day or if he was chiding him for misconceptions about men who liked men that way or both.
“What I did was stupid, but I never meant to do anything of the kind, is the thing.”
And in answer, Aleksandr wasn’t sure if it was commiseration - over this lingering guilt - or exasperation - about being condescended to about this one thing in this new world that he already understood - that finished opening his mouth and shaping the words, “I never wanted to hurt anyone either.”
Elias’s hands unwove and fell to his sides. He looked down at them where they had landed, slack. He looked back up at Aleksandr. “You’re saying…?”
“Yes.”
He looked down, he looked up, and he began to laugh, not trying to hide it at all, howling and whooping and tossing his head about. His hands came up again, clutching himself as he rocked against the wall. He laughed until other men in the dugout, awakened, began to curse him. Then it faded into helpless chuckles interspersed with Finnish mutterings, constant shaking of his head as his rocking slowed, stopped. And then he looked back, abashed. “Sorry.”
Aleksandr looked back at him.
“I mean, who would have thought… both of us…” He kept chuckling, visibly restraining himself from letting it grow again. “If this were some novel we’d fall straight into love now, I suppose, except if this were a novel who’d write us how we are?”
Aleksandr had never read such a novel either; he said nothing.
Elias shook his head a few more times. “But you know that doesn’t change anything, right, in that way?”
“I know. The Litany.” If it weren’t for the Litany, would Elias think it would change things in that way?
“Right. The Litany. Now what?”
“Now what?”
“Is that all you wanted to say?” Elias might have said this in a sharp way, but he didn’t. “Just, you know, establishing things?”
“I don’t know. I… what else could you tell me about it? I’d like to know that.”
“Then I’ll tell you, best as I can. So… men. Women, too?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I know for some poor bastards of our persuasion women don’t do it for them at all. This way you’ve got some chance of a family with who you’d like.”
***
9 April 1934
Elias was decided: as long as he had such a crazy scheme swirling around in his head giving him no rest, he might as well see if it worked. Kolya would look at him differently after this no matter what, but he would let it out, he’d finally let it out before the pressure of keeping it secret blasted him to Luna. Maybe Kolya wouldn’t like it, would call him a pervert or a sodomite or such, and he hated the thought of that, but would it really be better if the only thing stopping Kolya from calling him that was that he didn’t know to call him that?
He wasn’t worried about getting arrested, either - he was sure Kolya wouldn’t tell. Kolya was his friend long enough and deep enough not to. Even if he was wrong about that, Kolya knew better than to take a Garou out of the fight over a stupid thing like wanting to fuck men. Was that thinking like a Shadow Lord? Maybe, but there were the facts, and the Shadow Lords did get shit done in their own way.
It was Elias’s name day, nearly the opposite side of the year from his sixteenth birthday last October, and Kolya had paid a visit for the occasion, making excuses for his mother and sisters. Elias couldn’t think of a better time, so he girded himself for battle in the Fianna style with a few mugs of celebratory beer; this left him more inclined to tip, but certainly wasn’t enough to tipsy himself head over heels in the dirt and puke on Kolya. As the celebration started to wind down he steered Kolya away from the other revelers. In the Koskinen barn he checked all the corners for any courting couples who’d gotten the same idea, and then he started laying out something he doubted any of the courting couples had ever thought of, not quite this way. Elias carried in a lantern, setting it down far from what hay was left over from that winter; little light filtered through from the crescent moon beyond the walls.
“Kolya?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to tell you something important. A secret. All right?”
“All right?”
In his head, Elias had put himself through the paces several times. Now, well-rehearsed, he pushed himself up onto his toes and threw his arms around Kolya’s chest and said…
Actually, later he wouldn’t remember exactly what he’d said. He remembered that this part wasn’t so well rehearsed and came tumbling out, words somersaulting over each other. He talked about the Fenrir of Denmark, he talked about mutual intelligibility with Swedish and how the way he picked up languages he was sure he’d get hold of Danish itself in no time. He talked about the law of humans and the law of Garou. He talked about how the Litany prohibited two Garou mating, probably also doing things in the area of mating, but definitely didn’t prohibit a Garou and Kin doing the same. On and on. At least once, probably more than that, he’d said, “I love you.” It was the done thing to say, in a time like this.
He didn’t remember the order it had come out, how many times he’d had to go back and rearrange things into coherence. He didn’t remember how long it had taken. What he did remember was how, when he wound down, Kolya looked like he’d caught a Jarlhammer to the gut.
***
February 1940
“I told you, didn’t I, how few of us are born?”
“You told me.”
“Remember what I said about it?”
“You said we should have children with Kinfolk, to have as many Garou as possible.”
“Unless I’m starting up a new line of them, yes. Kinfolk. And of course I can’t very well do anything for any line with another man, not without the proper equipment. We Garou,” said Elias, “we have a job to do, and that’s the most important thing. Things are different for us. We don’t much care for this thing the humans have in their heads now about squeezing out as many babies as they can. It makes good cover for us having all our kids, but that’s about it.”
Aleksandr remembered 1936. The new constitution. His mother and aunt Taisiya, fresh from factory meetings, further discussing the new law on abortion. The idea that with socialism built, what woman would want to get rid of a baby? Aunt Taisiya muttering about Vasily Vinogradov. His grandmother, occasionally clucking and sighing. His father, awkwardly trying to keep to the periphery, out of the way of the women’s talk, but five square meters each didn’t leave much room for periphery.
“A lot of us wouldn’t mind at all if more humans were homosexual and didn’t worry about pretending not to be, or having to have kids. Less humans born means less humans to muck about with Gaia, you see. But less Garou to protect Gaia - that’s not good, and once we let the numbers go down with us, it’s especially hard getting them back up again.” Elias sighed, now with exasperation. “Some types think that because of that, a man just wanting a man’s wrong for us. Which just goes to show that not all Garou are as enlightened about this sort of thing as I am, ha.”
***
9 April 1934
After he started to look less bludgeoned in the gut, Kolya reached up and gently pried Elias off of him. He held on to Elias’s hands. He said, “We should talk.”
“I thought we were.”
“You were, yes. Now, may I?”
“Of course.”
“It’s not any problem with you,” said Kolya, and from then on Elias knew the important part of his answer.
***
February 1940
“So, do you want my advice?”
“Yes, please.” He could decide whether or not to take it.
“Right, then. What I do is this: I concentrate on the girls. At least we can do that much. If a man catches my eye, well, that’s all right, I just tell myself not to expect anything in the long run. And that’s not too hard to take and swallow, because I can’t expect anything with a lot of the women that catch my eye either. Now, about love.”
“Yes?”
“All that moaning about ‘one true love,’ ‘without you I’ll die,’ that sort of thing, ever feel that way?”
“Not exactly?”
“Good. Now hope it doesn’t ever clobber you over the head in future. I know people can feel that way, but I’ll tell you now, we can’t afford to truck with that sort of thing. Fighting the Wyrm’s a precarious occupation. We have the gifts we do - the healing, the shapeshifting, the Gift-gifts and so on - because we need them for what we do, and sometimes even that’s not enough. We’ve got more than our share of widows and widowers and orphans.”
Aleksandr nodded, remembering again what Elias had said that first night. “Did you say your mother…?”
“I might have. Yes. Now, Kinfolk aren’t in as much danger, day-to-day, but sometimes when the Wyrm can’t get at us it gets at them instead. And then there’s the normal things that we don’t die of so much, but humans do all the time. Say if you’d been just Kin, being Kin wouldn’t have done anything about a shot to the heart. So it’s not always the Garou that dies first, these situations.” He paused. “My father, for instance. He got mixed up in the civil war, our civil war. My mother lasted a few more years - she was very good at what she did.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“For what? But my point is, if you believe that rot about how only one person in all the world will do, then you’ve got a lot of people left miserable forever and ever, or until they die too. Which, thank Gaia, is not what happens. One of the things you learn very much, being Garou, is that things don’t last as long as you want. People die. It happens, and then the people left go on with their lives.”
People died, he already knew. People went away. There was Mandowska, who’d kept to herself, for which everyone else was relieved when she’d been ushered out of her tiny room early one morning with a suitcase in hand. Yulia whispered this to them afterward; she’d happened to be up that early for a reason she wouldn’t tell the boys. Her door was sealed until a newly married couple - Galkin and Galkina - took her place.
There was Nikanorov the self-important factory manager, who his mother sometimes used to grumble about. One day she’d come home, barely any blood in her face, and mentioned that someone had taken the complaints about him very seriously.
There was Demyan Ivanovych Andriyenko, who’d been a grade above him, who’d been one of the boys Aleksandr caught himself watching after first starting to look at Isayev that way. Andriyenko was a broad-shouldered Ukrainian, considerably shorter than Aleksandr but far sturdier, with tanned skin and sun-bleached hair and high cheekbones and a voice that perpetually demanded attention and a laugh that pealed like the bells of the torn-down churches. He’d been denounced at a meeting, expelled from the Komsomol and then the school as a kulak’s son. Just the month before Aleksandr had exchanged his Young Pioneer badge and red kerchief for the badge and card of the Komsomol. He sat at the back at the meeting and couldn’t stand to look at Andriyenko - his memory of that time was mainly of the people constantly interrupting Andriyenko’s mumbles of denial in a voice no longer nearly so strident and fierce. Andriyenko had a lot more friends than Mandowska and he took most of them with him - either they hadn’t picked up that he was hiding something or they were hiding things themselves. One of the ones who wasn’t taken was Lev Isayev; Andriyenko, too, had admired him from afar and then from not-quite-as-far. Aleksandr remembered his voice among the denouncers, no longer nearly so upbeat and encouraging, declaring why he had never been as friendly as Andriyenko wanted.
There was Alisa Yefimovna Tkachenko, who’d pounded at the door early on another morning, calling for Vitya between her sobs. Aleksandr, who’d come to the door with some apprehension, had stayed with her while Mikhail ran to wake up Vitaly Yefimovich Tkachenko, the father of the family. Alisa was his sister. Her husband had been arrested, he gathered, in some horrible mistake. He was a Party member in good standing and commended for his work, he’d done nothing wrong, she was his wife and ought to know. He listened to this and felt relieved that the knock hadn’t been for them and felt awful for that relief. When Tkachenko got there he gaped at her and shooed Aleksandr and Mikhail away - “Haven’t you got school in the morning?” As they made their way back to bed they could still hear them talking, and then they could hear the door slam. When Mikhail asked Tkachenko about it the following evening, Tkachenko rebuffed him in an unusually sharp voice.
Months later, Aleksandr brought it up with Mikhail while they were studying together. “It’s probably straightened out by now,” said Mikhail. Aleksandr agreed. Knowing nothing else, it was a nice thing to assume had happened.
“So if some man does catch your eye,” said Elias, “and you love him, and you don’t think you can live without him… well, let me tell you now, you probably can.”
***
9 April 1934
Kolya had been eminently reasonable, if embarrassed about it. He’d explained, very reasonably, why he didn’t think a thing like that could last, and why pretending it could last would make ending it worse. And it would have to end. They needed to find mates, they needed to have children. Elias should know this already, he didn’t say outright, but Elias could think it for himself.
“It’s nothing wrong with you.”
And he had guessed at it, he told him, for some years. He’d made the comparison jokingly at first - imagined only that eager little Elias was acting like a boy in love (Elias was relieved, a little, that he hadn’t said like a girl in love, though he couldn’t have said why). Maybe a year ago, he said, he’d started to seriously consider that it was more than acting like one. Maybe half a year ago, he’d started to think if, maybe…
“Maybe if something about this was different,” said Kolya.
If one of them were a woman. If they were both entirely human, nothing to do with Garou and their duties, if it was just the human world they had to worry about. If, if…
***
February 1940
“No matter how much you might love him right then,” said Elias, “he won’t be the only one. Keep that in mind. If you can’t be with him as you want, it won’t be the Apocalypse. There’s nothing wrong just with feeling that way, but he won’t be the only one in the world you could possibly be that way about. And I expect that somewhere out there there’s at least one woman who could do the same thing to you.” He hesitated, looked tentative, and then swept it out of his face with an impish grin. Aleksandr had thought of Golubev before; now he thought of Mikhail. “With your looks, I don’t imagine you’ll have any problems finding girls who’d like to.”
***
9 April 1934
“All right,” said Elias. “It can’t last. All right. I understand. But…”
Kolya watched him, waiting. Outside, someone whooped once, short and sharp, before silence pressed back in.
“But,” said Elias. “Couldn’t it last… just for a little bit? It’s not as if it’s charach. What it is is, it’s my name day.” Though maybe it was past midnight by then. “Can’t we pretend it’s different? Just once?”
***
February 1940
“Well,” said Elias, his grin fading, “that’s about all I can tell you. I can’t think of much else. Except that if anyone says you’re some kind of a pervert, that something’s wrong with you just because of that… I’m not saying you’ve got to go right up and kick their skulls in, because that’s not always practical and some folk just don’t know any better, but just remember that’s complete nonsense. Promise me?”
“I promise.” Here, now, it was easy to promise.
“Sergeant Laukkanen?” someone called, and Elias nodded at him and went off to whatever the soldiers required of him. Aleksandr returned his attention to the stitching.
Their father had taught them how to sew, back when you could get needles and thread in the regular stores. He was maybe eight then. Fyodor was enthusiastic but kept sticking himself with the needle until father took it away. He cried a while before wandering off to play with Masha Tkachenko. Mikhail was bored and kept saying, “Why? I’ll just get married.”
“Don’t be so sure it’ll work that way by the time you’re of age,” their father told him. “I wouldn’t be so sure about getting married if you have that kind of attitude.” It still mostly worked that way by the time they were of age, as it happened, but for a while it had seemed something might change in that way.
For practice, their father gave him his mother’s coat with a tear in the lining. Aleksandr worked very slowly, very carefully, and when he was done his mother had made a great show of looking for where it had torn. He’d practiced a few more times, and then the shortages started and the sewing things they had left they put away for when it was really needed. He hadn’t handled a needle and thread for years after that, until he was called up and found some in one of the special stores open to the military.
Everyone needed to make sacrifices. Once they’d overtaken the capitalists, it would be paid back ten times over. That part hadn’t happened yet.
He remembered the surprised noises Elias made, how he kept asking about the shortages, the size of the lines, as if perpetually unsure he’d heard right. “I’ve been to Tampere and Viipuri,” Elias had said. “I’ve never seen a line that long. Not every day.”
To get anywhere, one had to make sacrifices. This was maybe part of why, though their lines weren’t as long, so many of the Finns remained simple farmers (downtrodden ones, really?) while the Five-Year Plans brought forth massive constructions, the biggest of their kind, across the broad stretch of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was why the Finnish army was so small and backward. But their little army was still dressed for the winter, dressed for the snow, and prepared for the forests.
Aleksandr remembered the olive and brown of their summer uniforms. He remembered the commanders in their sheepskin coats, warm and white. The shortage of these coats meant that when the White Finns could pick out such a man against the snow, they would know he was someone important and aim for him.
He thought about how many weeks it had been since Stalin’s birthday.
He remembered again about Mandowska and Andriyenko and the rest. The cars going by in the night. Aunt Taisiya packing and unpacking her half-broken suitcase, leaving it propped by the door. “In case there’s a fire,” she said when Mikhail asked, not looking at him, looking over his shoulder. The trials, so many people, the showy ones for Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin, the after-the-fact notice for Tukhachevsky, and that was just ones they had in the papers.
He remembered again about the pages pasted over, torn out.
He felt he was on the edge of something, a mountain or a precipice.
He had to pause for a minute when he was done, to figure out how to knot off the end. Once he’d worked something out, he turned Kyander’s shirt right side out, examined it from that side - it seemed puckered compared to the seam around it, hopefully Kyander wouldn’t mind - and folded it up. He’d return it tomorrow. Back to the books; by the time Elias returned, he’d finished “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” was part of the way into the story following. He thought of the speculation, still unanswered, that had led him to his first question tonight.
“Elias?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something? Something personal?”
“You can always ask me whatever you’d like.”
“I was wondering. Nikolay Viktorovich Rybalkin…”
“Yes?”
“Did you love him?”
***
9 April 1934
They moved into a far corner of the barn, leaving the lantern behind. Elias, graceless tonight, fumbled at the buttons of Kolya’s trousers, fumbled for the knotted string of his drawers, pressed his mouth to Kolya’s neck.
The Rybalkins were great kissers. It was the Russian way of doing things, he thought. Masha and Valya and Lyudmila kissed each other and their Russian girl friends; Kolya kissed friends like Dima. In Elias’s village no one else kissed as readily, as openly; Fenrir in particular weren’t given to it. The sight of these kisses often gave him a small guilty frisson, especially since he knew they didn’t mean them the way he saw them and especially not with family. In memory of this, he pushed himself up and moved his mouth to Kolya’s cheek.
Kolya was all variations of shadows; the touch was the important thing. It was Kolya’s hand cupping his cheek that guided their mouths together. It wasn’t like Elias had expected. Drier, maybe, the feeling of Kolya’s lips against his. When he went further his tongue bumped into Kolya’s teeth. Completely graceless. But Elias still wanted, wanted so much to pretend that it would last.
***
February 1940
“Kolya? Oh, yes. Yes. I did love him. Was I that obvious?”
Aleksandr said nothing.
“He was always more sensible than I was,” said Elias. “Especially about this sort of thing.” He fell back against the wall again. “We did it once. On my name day. Just to know what it would’ve been like. We agreed that would be it.”
“… was it?”
“It was. Yes, I know, I was surprised too.” This laugh was soft, rueful. “I thought maybe I could persuade him into more once he knew what it felt like. Well, I didn’t. One thing he was too sensible about was, after that, he said that maybe I could marry Valya or Masha instead. They’re all right but I didn’t like them the same way, didn’t love them the same way,” which Aleksandr had already guessed at from the way his tone shifted between them, “and it would’ve been too close to see anything but him. They ought to have better than that. And they did get better than that.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes, it is. So, that was it for Kolya. We write, back and forth. I’ll have to tell him about this sometime.”
“About what?”
“Oh, well,” another of those soft laughs, “not everything. Just that I met a man at the front that put me in mind of him.”
“Do you think so?”
“I think so. In some ways, at least. Tall and dark and Russian and gutsy and handsome enough to make the Snow Queen long to carry him off.”
And unattainable. Aleksandr shifted about, uncomfortable under the sharp light of these words. “You’re very… direct.”
“After what happened when I hoped for it to slide by…”
“I don’t think anyone’s called me handsome before.”
“You’re at your best when you’re gutsy. It’s not just the shapes of your face, it’s an attitude that shows it to best advantage. And the Silver Fangs bred for handsomeness, I think, as a sideline.” A silence. “Like I said, nothing like that’s going to happen. I swear on the jaws of Great Fenris. Don’t fret about it.”
“I won’t.” For quite some time it hadn’t occurred to him to fret about it.
“I’d say to think of me as an older brother, but I don’t know if that quite goes together the right way.”
Aleksandr nodded. To imagine his brothers harboring incestuous fantasies, let alone stating them so bluntly, was a far more disturbing thought.
“But if something about this was different,” said Elias, and stopped.
So many things would have to be different, then. One of them would have to be a woman, at least one of them wouldn’t be Garou, it would help very much to be born on the same side of a border, and he supposed being a prisoner, in name or in fact, would always put another cast to things whether or not they noticed outright… “I don’t know. Maybe.”