The Wolves Eat Well This Year, Chapter 2
Title: The Wolves Eat Well This Year
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~10500
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.
Chapter Two: Accept an Honorable Surrender
Veikko was there again when he woke up, nothing more wolfish about him than before. Trick of the light (or the dark), had to be. Some bread, some water, the blanket stuffed back into the bag, and they started walking again. After three days of luxury, Aleksandr’s stomach had learned again how to complain of the reduction. He learned again how to ignore it.
After nightfall, they reached a house in a tiny clearing. There was a woman there, with a little boy younger even than Veikko; Heikki ran to her and they talked for a while before she called them all in. They looked a lot like Heikki, Aleksandr noticed - maybe they were his mother, his brother. Also, the woman looked at Aleksandr in much the same way. But she fed him, too, more good heavy food, and he said “Thank you” again.
Veikko nudged him. “Kiitos.”
“Kiitos,” he repeated. She laughed at that.
The house was more modern than the ones at the village; it had more than one room and wooden floors and a fireplace and a chimney instead of just a hole in the ceiling. After he ate she let him take a spot by the fire. There he undid the scarf, took off the boots and gloves and socks, and checked for frostbite. The little boy watched him do this as Veikko had watched him do other things. Veikko saw this too, and began the pointing routine - “Aleksandr,” then pointing to the boy, “Paavo” - before the woman noticed and ushered Paavo away. She was still talking to Heikki when Aleksandr lay down in the blanket, the budenovka and gloves a makeshift pillow; he slept nearly immediately.
***
Elias listened attentively and finally heard the howls - Heikki Saarinen and Veikko Smallest-Of-Litter, at the Saarinens’ house to the west right now, and he suppressed his disappointment that Marita hadn’t been the one picked to ferry the cub. A few hours later that night he took some time off on patrol with Kustaa to howl back. In this way, they arranged a rendezvous at a distance from the camp and the mottis. Captain Jokela was notified, as were Kustaa and Tapio. Tapio would be partnering him again tomorrow. Day patrol, this time. Meeting them halfway, best as they could manage. As he saw to his human charges he listened to howls from Ilmari and then Jalmari at their own camp, expressing intrigue and best wishes.
A rough plan: explanations in the relative privacy of the camp sauna, then more explanations during the captain’s “interrogation” with Sergeant Elias Laukkanen, of course, serving as interpreter.
“Anything for me to do?” asked Tapio, cradling his coffee like a newborn.
“I’ll tell you if I think of something,” said Elias, mentally reviewing the pertinent vocabulary: volk - wolf, volchonok - wolf-cub, oboroten - werewolf…
***
The next morning Veikko had gone. Instead a gray wolf (a dog, a dog, but he wasn’t able to convince himself anymore) waited outside the house and trotted at his side. Aside from being a wolf, it was as friendly as Veikko had been. Aleksandr wondered where the wolf had come from and where Veikko had gone, shoving aside the simplest and most insane answer. He wasn’t about to try to ask Heikki, who walked as if trying to pretend he wasn’t there.
The blanket was left in the house - Heikki had taken it from him when he started to pack it again. Would he not need it anymore? Was that good or bad?
For a while they took a small trail from the house, but soon they veered off between the trees again, walking eastward. With so much snow on the ground there was little appreciable difference.
Eastward. Just maybe, they were taking him to the border. Maybe his papers had fallen out along the way, or he’d had them out when the last attack came and didn’t take them with him in the confusion. Maybe they didn’t know that when the Red Army came with tanks and planes it came as friends and liberators - Aleksandr knew there’d been leaflets dropped, by the bushel, but they might not have reached that one little village and he didn’t even know if they could read - and were keeping the rifle because they weren’t sure he wouldn’t shoot them with it. Once they’d proven their good intentions to him, they would give it back. Nice to try to believe that. As long as he could try to believe that…
In his dreams last night, people had bowed to him in the falling snow. Wolves had bowed to him. Massive wolf-men had bowed to him. Insane. Insane.
As far as Aleksandr could tell through the trees, the sun was starting to dip again. His feet hurt. He hadn’t gone on a march like this for a while; the encirclement enforced stillness.
The sun had dipped a little further, not yet in the process of setting, when the howling began again. The wolf that couldn’t be Veikko threw its head back and howled a reply. The howling continued, intermittently, back and forth, until they entered a small clearing. Heikki stopped walking; Aleksandr followed his lead. The wolf howled once more and fell silent.
They stood with breath pluming until Aleksandr, looking east, saw the pair moving between the trees.
They were on skis, fast when he first saw them but soon slowing, leisurely. Their clothes blending with the snow, rifles belted across their backs, knives at their belts. Shouting - “Terve! Terve!” And he knew. Supposing, really, more supposing, but in his gut he knew: White Finns, all right.
“No. Please, no. Please.” Remembered the Finnish Veikko taught him. “Ei, ei -”
The wolf was staring at him, its head tilted like Veikko’s. Heikki was staring at him too, and he saw not reassurance but confirmation, disgust nearly inked across Heikki’s face. That same contempt as on the very first day when he’d spat “Ivan!”
He should’ve known from the start.
He would’ve known from the start if he wasn’t such a coward that he’d rather walk meekly to his death than take a risk, than resist -
Now Heikki turned from him, dismissing him. The wolf ran for the White Finns as they entered the clearing, making noises that sounded happy. Aleksandr thought, a thought that seemed very slow: if he was ever going to resist, now was probably his last remotely viable chance.
At least he was such a coward that Heikki wasn’t expecting the kick. He went over so fast that Aleksandr felt correspondingly guilty for it, but he couldn’t afford to feel guilty. He might be a boy of Fyodor’s age but Fyodor wouldn’t have sold him to the Whites. He kicked again before he reached and pulled the rifle from the sling, so fast that the bayonet ripped at Heikki’s coat and maybe deeper, then knocked him down with the other end when he tried to rise. No time even to try for the knife. He bolted into the trees again. Directly east wasn’t an option. He’d have to circle around and -
He stumbled through the snow and knew he’d never get to that part.
Behind him, a roar, and “Heikki! Heikki!” and more words.
Maybe, he thought, trying to run zigzag, they’d shoot him in the back. At least it would be a quick death.
No bullet, just words. His own name, now, and his own language. Veikko (Veikko?) calling “Aleksandr, Aleksandr!” and someone else, one of the Whites, “Aleksandr, wait! Please wait! Would you please wait?” Why the please?
The words were coming closer. Not fast. Still leisurely. On those skis they could catch up any time, following his footprints.
Aleksandr heard himself pant, half-sobbing. Pain in his side. Exertion, or a bullet he hadn’t heard? His bag banged against his other side. He nearly ran into a tree, and when he turned from it his head nearly collided with a low branch.
Cuckoos, he thought, and reached up. He was still carrying the rifle; he used that arm to brace himself, the other to hoist. He half-somersaulted onto the branch, lay half-draped and half-straddling it for a few precious seconds, then tried for one thicker and higher up. That was trickier. He nearly lost the rifle, nearly stuck himself with the bayonet. But he made it, eventually, sobbing all the way now, torn between clutching the rifle and the branch. He wanted to clutch his side, as well, but settled for looking down best as he could. No red bloom on the fabric of the coat, at least. He looked up; the closest branches were too thin to support him and he didn’t dare try higher.
He was stranded maybe two meters from the ground and one of the White Finns came to a stop beneath him, looking amused. Aleksandr fumbled with the rifle, trying to shoulder it, thinking any second he’d tip and plummet.
“Kindly calm down,” said the White Finn. “Calm down and realize that for you, this war is over.”
Shoulder and aim. His marksmanship scores at least had been good. “Go away,” he gasped, and knew he’d been heard when the White laughed. He could take as many as he could with him, at least, before the end. Could be one, could be none - maybe the recoil of the first shot would knock him from his perch. If it did, he could hope to break his neck when he hit the ground. He braced himself best as he could and pulled the trigger.
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, and the White was laughing again. Aleksandr pulled open his bag and fumbled one-handed for the cartridges.
“It would be very courteous of you if you eased matters for everyone and came down.”
I’m not that stupid, he thought, and felt himself flush remembering how stupid he’d been even an hour ago. He got hold of the cartridges and extracted one from the belt.
“It may not seem so, but I am your ally.”
He tugged off his left glove with his teeth and held it in his mouth while he reloaded. If the White took his own rifle and shot him now… well, then, he would shoot him. That was it.
“You are aware that that will accomplish nothing?”
He was aware. He was lucky if he managed to get this one. He bit down on the glove - no time to juggle putting it back on - and set the rifle to his shoulder again.
Or maybe he had time after all, because the White wasn’t aiming back. If anything he was doing the exact opposite. His rifle was unbelted, laid out in the snow. He’d stepped out of the skis. But no, there was the other White, there was a furious-looking Heikki, there was Veikko again, his eyes big. This White was waving them back.
The tableau gave him brief pause. He might have been tempted to talk to the White some more, but if he let go of his glove now it would probably drop to the ground and he’d lose even the diminishing chance of ever covering his hand. It was already starting to numb.
So much he wanted to ask. About the wolves, even, if he was really going crazy. But he knew what the chances were of getting a truthful answer.
He wondered if the White would draw the knife, stab at his feet as they hung from the branch - the White was fairly short, and couldn’t reach most of him.
“Let me ask you,” said the White, “if I said that I was a Red, would you come down?”
Aleksandr stared at him. That was good as confirming that he wasn’t.
“I thought as much,” said the White. “Well then.” He sighed from deep in his lungs and began to grow.
Aleksandr’s gasp drew the glove deeper into his mouth. He bit down again and fired at the thing with everything from bones to hair to teeth growing and growing and growing. In answer, something clawed hot streaks up his throat. He forced it down more out of habit than anything else because it wasn’t as if not panicking now would make much of a difference, but it still wouldn’t help if he threw himself out of the tree trying to get away.
The monster, the gray-furred wolf-man of his dreams, stood over the branch and snatched at him.
Aleksandr rammed forward with the bayonet, but this fazed it no more than bullets. The massive claws grabbed him, pulled him off the branch, and they were caught briefly in a grotesque half-embrace, his rifle holding them apart, the thing still impaled on the bayonet, but he was close enough to see it salivate. He struggled, lost his grip, fell. The first thing to touch ground was his right ankle, twisting under him. Breath left him when he thumped onto his back. When it came back the first thing he did was scream as the pain came with it, the second thing choke on the glove that muffled his scream.
The thing yanked his rifle from its chest and stood over him. He stared up, coughing, and watched as the flow of blood stopped, as the wounds sealed. He was crazy. He accepted this, and he waited. While he waited he pulled the glove from his mouth and sat up and put the glove back on because he might as well. His ankle burned; his eyes, in comparison, just stung. A bullet dropped into the snow at the thing’s massive feet. He saw the knife, still sheathed, still belted at the approximate area of its waist. The belt was longer, that was all, and the knife larger.
He was still staring at them when they became smaller again, and the thing wearing them along with them. Now the White stood there, a little disheveled but grinning, still with the look of a predator (Marshal Mannerheim the tsarist butcher, he remembered hearing, but this was something far more feral, without the form and mechanism of a slaughterhouse), as he set down Aleksandr’s rifle and moved closer. “Well then, have you had enough?”
No chance, no chance at all, but if he could at least thrash himself into nothing, leave them nothing except maybe a scar to remember him by, a sign that he’d done something with his life -
Aleksandr waited for him to move closer and grabbed at the knife. He got hold of it, actually pulled it from the sheath before the White slammed into him and bore him back to the ground. What breath he’d regained deserted him again. The White’s hands pinned his over his head. He still clutched the knife, useless in this position. His body still tried to struggle, twisting frantically in the range it had under the small but sturdy frame.
“I suppose not,” gasped the White, breath warm on Aleksandr’s face, sounding gleeful. “Now kindly calm down, calm down, I’ll have you know that I can wait on you all day…” The changes began again and once they did Aleksandr lay paralyzed with even fiercer terror.
Up close he had an excruciating view of how that face distorted outward into a muzzle that nearly bumped his nose. He could see, also, part of the transformation of the body around it. He felt the weight on his wrists grow to almost crush them; at least the hind legs moved to either side of his, and now only one great paw was required to hold both his hands. The White had become a massive wolf, maybe twice the size of the one that replaced Veikko (was Veikko?). It didn’t snarl or growl but somehow that made it worse.
He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to turn his face away. Even when there was nothing to lose he didn’t dare. It was fear, not courage, that kept his eyes fixed on the wolf’s. Snow ground into his hair, the back of his head; he’d lost his budenovka again in one of the falls. He noticed the mottling of the gray fur, slightly darker patches.
Probably there was no fur beyond a scattering of beard. Probably he was hallucinating.
He couldn’t stop believing his hallucinations.
It was clawing up his throat again and he could hardly breathe around it.
The wolf’s head was receding, somehow, it wasn’t as though Aleksandr’s head could move any further away, and the wolf wasn’t moving either, not by itself. Maybe Aleksandr was the one receding, into himself, except he felt like he was moving away, like the paw still heavy on his wrists was lightening, not pressing down and inward, maybe like he was leaving his wrists behind, his body behind. Breaking loose, somehow, though loose was not free. A little more and maybe he would spiral out and up, a bird. With these wolf-men about it wasn’t impossible that he could at least dream it happening.
Wolf. Man. Man. Wolf. You change?
As he left his body behind everything that had tensed began to slacken, from his gut outward. It reached his extremities, pooled at his throbbing ankle. His hands fell open. The knife didn’t fall out but lay inert.
The wolf bent down and nuzzled at his cheek and made noises. The White sat up, knife in hand, smiled at him, and said, “That was a pleasant bout.” The White’s eyes burned. The White’s face in the shape of the faces of the boys who chattered about Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva but older, sharper, harsher. The White put the knife away and said, “Have those clothes been dedicated?” The White turned his head and said a question to someone else. The White turned his head back and said, “Never mind. Allow me to see to it.”
The White put his hands on Aleksandr’s chest.
The White unbuttoned the coat.
The White put his hands on the sweater.
The White put his hands under the sweater.
Aleksandr’s mouth moved. His tongue moved. Aleksandr said, “What…?”
The White put his hands under the shirt and said, “If you would rather go naked, then that is your choice.”
***
Go naked - his own words inspired another jolt. Elias kept his smile on and thanked Fenris (though Fenris probably wouldn’t appreciate the thanks, and nor would the Old Man - thank Gaia, then, thank Raven, thank cunning Cuckoo, thank the ever-decorous Snow Queen) that his layers of winter clothes hid his arousal. Thanked Crinos physiology, wolf physiology, Hispo physiology - Crinos was made for fighting not fucking (snickering slanders of the Children of Gaia aside), so the relevant bits weren’t exactly on display, and wolves (and Hispo dire wolves, with them) didn’t get excited until they’d actually stuck it in. Otherwise his erection would’ve been flopping around out there to horrify everyone. One thing to know in theory this was all body, nothing of intentions, and another to believe it when it was right there. He wasn’t an excitable thirteen anymore, trailing after Kolya Rybalkin like a dog, like a puppy.
And he thanked Gaia, Raven, Cuckoo, the Snow Queen that it was wilting now. This Aleksandr was still good-looking - the physical parts all still in place, except that ankle - but right now it didn’t have nearly the same kick as it did when he was loading the rifle with his fine features grim-set and his mouth full of glove (a mouth full of glove and he still managed to enthrall like that) or making a stubborn try for Elias’s puukko. Now he was all submission, spread out with his arms over his head. His pale blue eyes with what seemed like a layer of glass or ice over them. Snow in the scarf, in his hair - extremely short, but thick and dark brown and Elias could imagine what it would look like given the opportunity to grow out.
The shirt, a flannel undershirt, and that was it for the layers on the upper half. Aili or Sofia or Marita had probably done this ritual already, but there was no point in assuming, especially as Heikki and Veikko had no clue whether or not they had. Assumptions led to ruining perfectly good clothes, and awkward questions when it came to getting new ones. This was what he told himself.
Elias pulled out his hands, readjusted Jalmari’s gray-and-blue patterned sweater (colors Jalmari’s wife liked but Jalmari didn’t), closed Marita’s coat - he could rebutton later, when he wasn’t holding everything for dedication together in his head. He did a pass over Marita’s gloves and Ilmari’s scarf, while he was at it. The scarf was done by Ilmari’s twelve-year-old sister in a garish patchwork of knits; Ilmari’s sister was seventeen now and her taste had improved considerably. These clothes weren’t anyone’s first choice, which was why they were left at the sept in case the dedicated sets were past repair. Not equal contributions by any means - Elias and Ilmari were too short to put in much, as were all the cliath. Though no one but Veikko, he thought, would have been too skinny.
Now he scooted backward and worked downward. The trousers, the belt, and the underpants - up above he’d centered his hand on Aleksandr’s chest, but he took care to avoid the cock, went for the leg instead. When his hand settled against the flannel at the hipbone, warmed by the skin underneath it, Aleksandr flinched and let out a keening noise. A bad bruise? “Everything is perfectly in order,” he said distractedly. “Everything is perfectly all right.” The default state of his Russian was formality - after all he’d learned it on the pretext of communicating with Silver Fang dignitaries.
Speaking of which. Aleksandr had a tribal look after all - not one of the ones he’d judged plausible, but the Silver Fang look. It was this look that convinced Elias he wasn’t looking at some random Red Army kid in the throes of Delirium who’d had the bad luck to stumble into the bawn, that he’d been choking down frenzy along with his fear (and his glove). His look had blazed when he was in the tree. All heroic resolve, go out with glory, no surrender.
The problem was when you had “to the death, no surrender” types who ought to be on the same side instead on the opposite ones. That was why surrendering had been in the Litany before Geneva, let alone the Convention, was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Really, other Fenrir might scoff but it was a lucky thing that Aleksandr’s resolve had buckled to the right side. His fellows - Elias mulled over this while he moved on to the socks and the boots - they had guts, they held out in the surrounded mottis and fought to the last, only handfuls of prisoners taken out of each of their thousands. While Elias could respect their guts, at least, it also meant that he and his fellows ended up killing them.
And, there. The clothes were dedicated to him now, would shift to match him, save on clothing expenses. Elias scrabbled back up to take Aleksandr by the shoulders and draw him to sit up. He stayed where Elias left him, hands splayed in the snow, while Elias took another look at the twisted ankle. “We can repair this.” Aleksandr just stared at him. “Or rather, you can repair this. It is very simple, very fast. You saw me heal. You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same. You are a werewolf. Garou. As I am, and as they are back at the sept.”
Still nothing. “I will adjust this now, if you don’t mind.” Elias took hold of the ankle, put it back in alignment, and was answered by a gasp, slightly parted lips. Stop thinking about the cub’s lips. “Now then,” said Elias, and began. Telling him how to visualize, how to focus.
It wouldn’t take. He’d never had charge of a lost cub before, or even your run-of-the-mill cub. He remembered his own lessons on voluntary shifting after Firsting, but he’d been eager, accommodating - at least responsive. Aleksandr sat in the snow and barely twitched.
“I might not be a Red,” he said, “but that is of no consequence here. Russian, Finnish, Australian - it does not matter. We are all Garou. There are all manner of things to battle aside from one another.”
No result. He looked up and about. Heikki, Veikko, and Tapio had drifted closer, gathered around.
Once Elias looked at him Heikki said, “I’ll pull his guts out through his throat -”
The pursuit had been delayed, not that the delay made much difference in the end, by holding down Heikki in Crinos until he snapped out of frenzy. He might be Ahroun to Elias’s Ragabash, but Elias was fostern to his cliath, more experienced and better skilled, and he’d restrained him with Veikko’s help. Elias wondered if they’d need to do it again.
“- dig out his eyes and feed them to the ravens -”
Maybe a shock would do it where cajoling wouldn’t. The First Change itself often came about through anger, fear, pain. If he could call that up again…
“You let your guard down like that you get what you deserve,” he told Heikki when the latter paused for breath. But he translated for Aleksandr. “Heikki says that he will pull your guts out through your throat.” He straddled his legs again, put a hand beneath his chin, caught himself imagining what it would feel like if his hand were bare and pressed against the dusting of stubble. “He says that he will dig out your eyes and feed them to the ravens -”
Nothing there either, when he finished the list. If anything the cub seemed to retreat deeper into himself, even more glass over his eyes. If Elias went further, if he slapped him, if he punched him, if he started to throttle him, would he snap or would he shatter?
“Look,” said Tapio, “I know, Garou business, but we can’t stand here forever trying to snap him out of it. There’s a war on. Patrol to do.”
He had a point. A lost cub this old was probably especially sunk into being human. Especially-especially since there was no sign of a baptismal mark - meant, likely, no one knew of him to mark him, no one back in Russia to give him a preliminary education. He reached for the boot and began to undo the laces.
When he began to tug it off Aleksandr said “No,” faintly, from a distance.
“If you won’t remedy it in the easiest way,” Elias told him, “I have to do something about it in the human way. Do you understand?” But at least Aleksandr had said something, never mind it made no sense.
He didn’t say anything more, though, didn’t say if he understood. The boot, then the sock. Elias examined the sprain and pressed snow against it, then prevailed on Tapio to scrounge up a rag to bind it with. They’d have to keep him from the medic. The medic was a decent person but neither Kin nor Garou, and would notice if the sprain he’d examined healed up so far ahead of schedule. Elias wasn’t going to put off shifting lessons until then. He’d say there was just a little twist and he’d taken care of it on the way in, nothing serious. Truthful enough.
“So,” he said while wrapping, “he’s got the look - how come he’s not with the Fangs?”
“Hell if I know,” said Heikki.
He looked to Veikko. Veikko looked blank.
“You ask Ilmari-rhya for me, why don’t you.”
Heikki nodded and turned over the rifle sling, a plastic capsule, a sheaf of papers in Russian, then a separate folded piece with a list of moon phases - on closer examination, they turned out to be the phases on the fourth of each month of 1920 along with all the phases of April that year, and a note at the bottom in a familiar hand:
Elias: We got the 4 and the 1920, calculated a bunch - you fill in the blank, unless we fucked up completely. By the by, we’ve dedicated his togs. Plenty of dead time while he was conked out.
Elias swore, not too strongly. A few minutes wasted. Ah well.
You and Ilmari have fun. Marita.
Next he twisted open the capsule and unrolled another slip of paper inside. An identification form. He’d seen little Red Army boxes like this before, but in those cases the papers were blank. This one was filled out in a cramped neat hand: Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, born the fourth of September 1920 (the numerals of 4 and 1920 bookending the Cyrillic that had eluded them at the sept), an address in Leningrad (the Rybalkins called it Petrograd, and it was Saint Petersburg in their books). He checked Marita’s list. Fourth of September was waning Philodox, unless maybe for some reason the cub had been born across the country in Siberia. What a match.
As far as matches, the other papers held some redundant information. He reviewed them in case of unexpected intelligence, found nothing of the sort. He did come across more details - in a little book buried in the middle of the sheaf, an internal passport, the cub’s nationality was listed as Russian and his “social position” listed as “worker.” This last struck him as faintly absurd, though he didn’t suppose they’d put people down as “Grand Duke” or “count” - he recalled the stuff piped across the border, Molotov’s speeches and such, and entertained himself with the image of a passport listing social position as “bloodsucking parasite” (bloodsucking leech, even, bloodsucking corpse, draugr, he wondered how the literal undead fared over there in comparison). That done, he stuffed them down his coat.
He got the rest of the story from Heikki and Veikko, everything he could think to ask that they happened to know. Then came the story to be told in the near future. “So we’ll say he straggled his way to your house,” he said to Heikki. “And you took him over here. Can you get your mom to back that up? Can Paavo handle it?”
Heikki nodded. As time passed he looked more and more abashed.
A few more minutes to get everyone consistent, Veikko giving a primer of the smattering of Finnish he’d taught Aleksandr, and then a goodbye to both the cliath. “Don’t wipe out the Wyrm without me, all right?”
“No,” said Veikko. “If you are not there when we fight the Wyrm I am very sorry but if we can wipe it out then -”
“Fair enough.”
Some more quick goodbyes, hellos to be delivered, and the cliath were off. Elias strapped everything back on, put Aleksandr’s rifle over his shoulder, and retrieved Aleksandr’s hat. They’d have to walk back to camp - it wasn’t as if he or even Tapio could really carry him. “Now I can address you properly, can I not, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?” Did he just flinch? “Are you able to walk? Here - allow me to assist you.”
Aleksandr stood up like he sat up, and when Elias braced him with an arm he could limp alongside him.
“Since we know who you are, allow me to return the favor. I am Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki, fostern Ragabash of the Get of Fenris. You will not know what most of that means. Do not concern yourself with it yet. My human name is Elias Laukkanen. This is my cousin, Tapio Koskinen.”
Tapio picked up on his own name. “Pleased to meet you,” he tossed off as he trudged ahead.
“Tapio says he is pleased to meet you. We will be returning to camp,” Elias told him. “We have built a sauna - similar to your banya in Russia, but of course ours is first and best.” He laughed. Aleksandr continued the trend and didn’t. “I must complete my patrol, but afterward I believe I can obtain some time in it for us. We can relax and discuss the situation in private - we wouldn’t want ordinary humans to hear this.”
He’d come up with this already. It was only some silent minutes after saying it that he thought of further implications and immediately shoved them away. Perkele, Great Fenris, no. He’d shared the sauna with both Ilmari the Tireless and Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, with Heikki and Kalevi and Olavi and Veikko, with Jalmari Fleet-Of-Foot, with visiting Fenrir, with Tapio and Kustaa and other soldiers of the camp, with Kolya, and he’d been absolutely fine. And in all likelihood Aleksandr had been in a bathhouse before, he’d know how it went. It wasn’t as though men without clothes on would send Elias into orgasmic frenzy. It wasn’t as though this was some surreptitious plan to see Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov naked. He’d decided long before laying eyes on him. What lunatic fucked in a sauna anyway?
Though he was easy on the eyes. The Silver Fangs had that way about them to begin with, their tribal look, their blood shining through plain as Helios to any Garou, and on top of that most of them and their Kin were handsome in a way that humans could also recognize. After all they’d had first pick of Kinfolk for time immemorial and, as the Shadow Lords would readily insinuate, they were as susceptible to a pretty face as anyone else, so given pick between an aristocrat and a good-looking aristocrat…
Was he shuddering against Elias’s arm? Surely he hadn’t read his thoughts. Elias tightened his hold, resisted the urge to blurt denials. Aleksandr probably hadn’t thought of it at all and bringing it up would only put it into his head, put himself into suspicion.
“There is no need to worry. I have you now.”
***
He shouldn’t have filled out the paper. There were all the rest that betrayed him twice over, he knew that, but it was the little one in the capsule they’d handed out to the new conscripts that he kept thinking of. How Kozlov had laughed when he found out. Kozlov had fought in the civil war twenty years ago and said, while still chuckling, Comrade Novikov, if you’re so worried about how they’ll know it’s you, you’re already dead.
Not dead yet. Not like Kozlov. He’d died in the first days, when the White Finns were closing the encirclement.
Not dead yet, but probably when the White (Laukkanen, that was his name) was done with him he’d shoot him in the head, cut his throat, break his neck, or maybe even then it would be something slow. Something that wouldn’t have happened if he’d fought back harder, if he’d made the wolf tear out his throat in the forest.
Laukkanen’s grip tightening about his ribcage. Laukkanen’s hand cupping his face. Laukkanen’s voice, echoing at thankful distance, the slow syllables, obscene formality greasing everything, Now I can address you properly, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (he had no right, some hysterical part of him insisted, he had no right), telling him all those things Heikki wanted to do to him, the amiable threat of making him strip there in the snow if he didn’t let Laukkanen touch him like that, (it couldn’t even have been frisking him, there wasn’t enough touching to be that), I have you now.
And the sauna, like the banya. Together. Discuss the situation in private. And Aleksandr thought: together, in that close space, with no clothes on… he couldn’t pretend that meant nothing. He couldn’t pretend it would be like bathing with comrades, something innocent that men did together.
Laukkanen and his cousin took him into camp and to a dugout with a low ceiling. There they shoved him at another of the Whites and they left for their patrol. This White was called Kustaa Ruotsalainen. Aleksandr thought he looked like the man at the village, though far younger. More relations? The dugout was fairly warm and Ruotsalainen was content to ignore him, while the other two inside it slept near the far end; Aleksandr drifted back to the world here, to the rhythm of the throb in his wrapped ankle, and held still against the wall so as not to disturb this equilibrium.
Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear. May 1934. That day he’d read Izvestiya in the apartment, trying not to look like he was paying Gorky’s article on Proletarian Humanism any more attention than the rest because why would he?
The year before that, the year Aleksandr turned thirteen, was the year of the Isayev siblings. Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva had shared a grade with him for years but it was now, on the brink, that they noticed her. Him, and Mikhail, and he remembered the other boys in their grade whispering about her. How pretty she was, and things they wanted to do to her, things he hadn’t really understood then and he doubted most of them had either. Now he supposed that if she’d ever noticed them in return they would’ve been at a loss. But at any rate Raisa had her brother Lev, two years older than her, who made sure the other boys had no chance to do any of that. Aleksandr didn’t dare get too close but as far as he got Lev found him acceptable - judged him no threat.
Had he judged wrong? Aleksandr hadn’t thought so then, hadn’t let himself think so. He’d watched Raisa from a distance with the other boys, watched Lev next to her. He agreed, in silence, that Raisa was pretty, that she was lively, that she was sweet. He thought about her sometimes, dreamed of what it would be like if she somehow comprehended his longings in a flash of insight even though he’d never actually shown her anything of the kind, and then there were the especially embarrassing dreams about what he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t difficult to see Lev and Raisa were related. They weren’t identical even besides the obvious; for one thing, Lev had red hair and Raisa had brown. But Lev was handsome for a lot of the same reasons Raisa was pretty, and Raisa’s friends adored him though he paid them little attention. Eventually Aleksandr started having some of the same thoughts about Lev, the same dreams - though he knew, too, how silly it was to think that Lev would pay him any more attention than he did Raisa’s friends. They were halting thoughts, confusing ones. No one ever said thoughts like these that he could hear and think, yes, this is what I think and other people think this, other boys think this, in a small way it’s all right. None of that.
He didn’t say these thoughts about Lev, or his thoughts about the other boys he started to look at in the same way after. It wasn’t hard - most of his thoughts, like the ones about Raisa and other girls, he didn’t say to start with. It was just that there was even more reason not to say thoughts about boys because they wouldn’t just be embarrassing. He’d learned, keeping his ears and eyes open, that they were wrong in a deep way, they were perverted, they were corrupted. This confused him too, because he couldn’t figure out what might have corrupted him, but there it was.
And the idea that along with being corrupted, he, too, could corrupt… it threatened the youth, Gorky wrote. Was he still “the youth” now that he could threaten other youth? So he’d said nothing, he’d done nothing, and he’d told himself that would be enough. That that had to be enough. That if he never showed it to anyone he couldn’t hurt anyone by it. That if he hurt no one else, he’d never have to let them know there was something this wrong with him.
And here it was. It was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? That the White fascists who pulled men’s pants to their ankles and cut off their cocks would use him the same way? Would do the things to him that he had to have wanted, hadn’t gone after only because he was a coward about getting caught as he was a coward in all other ways?
He didn’t know it was going to happen. He didn’t know - but he hadn’t known, either, that the villagers would turn him over. He’d had plenty of opportunity to realize that but had refused to. He wouldn’t make that mistake this time. Maybe the hunger in that look was, after all, only a hunger to see him suffer. But he couldn’t assume that. This time he would anticipate the worst, for all the good it would do him. If nothing else it wouldn’t shock him; it wouldn’t crush his last hopes, just put them out of their misery. Just maybe Laukkanen was only dangerous in the same way an ordinary wolf would be dangerous, but there was no point in fooling himself into thinking this would be the case.
Ruotsalainen was shaking one of the other men awake. A brief, whispered, exchange. He muttered something at Aleksandr and climbed out of the dugout. The man he’d woken up took his place. He looked half-asleep and sullen. Aleksandr held still.
You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same.
Not just a fascist, not just a White butcher, but a monster in the truest sense. A wolf-man, no, a werewolf. Laukkanen had said so himself. No wonder the White Finns were holding out if they had those fighting for them. The only mystery was why people didn’t know by now, but this was easily answered if he supposed they left no survivors.
It is very simple, very fast.
The same.
That round scar. He hadn’t looked at it since, had tried to put it out of mind.
“Ivan,” they were calling, outside. “Ivan!”
Where was Ruotsalainen? With them? Now one of them was reaching in, was climbing in, walking bent down as one had to in here. Aleksandr moved back as far as he dared; any further and he’d fall over the last sleeping man, and that would probably make things worse.
This man exchanged words with the one Ruotsalainen had left watching him; the latter shrugged, and the former closed on Aleksandr, grabbing his arm. The other hand yanked his bag from his shoulder and let it fall. Aleksandr was towed and then shoved out of the dugout; he put up no resistance. He glanced back for a moment and saw the erstwhile watcher already lying back down. He got another shove for that.
Three more of them stood close by outside, laughing as he stumbled and blinked in the afternoon light. Surrounded again. He wrapped his arms around himself and huddled as much as he could on his own, weight on his left foot. They were in the open, this time, and nothing he could do.
A push from behind sent him to hands and knees. He saw one of them drawing a booted foot back to kick and recoiled so quickly as to fall over again. The laughing was even louder now, mixed with jeers. They feigned several more kicks at his ribs and head. He curled like a worm, staring into his knees, his arms wrapped over his head, trying to steady his breathing.
“Ivan, Ivan!”
He looked up, in spite of himself, and saw one of them take out their rifle and point it at him. “Please,” Aleksandr said again, “no,” alternating the Russian please with the Finnish no as the barrel came closer until it nearly touched his forehead. At that point he fell silent. At least this way it wouldn’t hurt for long, he told himself, but when it clicked on an empty chamber he nearly pissed himself.
At the periphery someone else came closer. Maybe his rifle would be loaded, but Aleksandr never found out, because the one who’d not-shot him waved back his companion and dragged him up by his throat. He scrabbled to get his feet beneath him before he choked. The White snarled in his face, then jeered, and he stared back, mouth working without sound, hands fluttering open and closed and please, please -
A shout. The White let him fall. He knelt, gradually looking up as Ruotsalainen elbowed his way through the gathered knot of Whites around Aleksandr, still shouting; in the Finnish (no more of the wolves’ language here) Aleksandr heard Laukkanen several times. Eventually the knot dispersed. Ruotsalainen came to a stop in front of him, staring down. He held dishes of something that steamed in the cold air.
That reminded him of the meal last night, of what to say. “Kiitos.” It meant thank you, didn’t it?
Ruotsalainen blinked at him, then ushered him back into the dugout and gave him a dish of soup and a spoon and then, out of a pocket of his white coat like Heikki had, another piece of bread. While he ate, Ruotsalainen shook that man awake again and they began to argue.
It seemed now as though Laukkanen’s claim on him (I have you now) at least afforded him some protection from the rest. Should he be grateful for that?
He was grateful, at least, to be fed. Another half-a-promise that he wouldn’t die yet - could he let himself believe that much? He believed it too easily, because (That was a pleasant bout) it was easy for him to believe that Laukkanen wanted to enjoy himself for a long time.
***
“I stepped out to get lunch,” Kustaa was telling him, “and when I got back they were on him like - like -” Of course he couldn’t say wolves. “Having sport with him. If I hadn’t gotten back when I did there would’ve been a massacre.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Elias. He didn’t bother whispering. Anyone listening would assume he meant that surely his fellow soldiers had more decency than to shoot a prisoner, that the plurality of massacre was Kustaa being dramatic. Aleksandr hadn’t frenzied out in the forest; Elias figured it would take more than a little teasing to set him off now.
“I found out later one of them was pushing a rifle in his face.”
To some Fenrir that might still qualify as teasing. Many people, Elias understood, did not share their opinion. Kustaa, Kin though he was, appeared to be one of them. He thought of pointing this out and decided there was no need to further Kustaa’s Garou-related anxieties. “Oh? Which one?”
“Nieminen. And that shithead Väinö, I ask him just to watch while I’m out, make sure the Russkie doesn’t take it in his head to cut open Mikael with his own puukko, and what does he do, he hands the kid over when the pricks come knocking.” Funny hearing him say kid, considering Kustaa was only older than Aleksandr by a few months. “I shouldn’t have to tell him not to hand over people to mobs when you’re watching them, it should be a given.”
“Uh huh. Well, thanks for averting massacre.” Here in the camp, among allies if not friends (especially after this debacle), was the wrong place for massacre. “I’ll talk with them.”
Inside the dugout, Aleksandr slept slumped against the wall, one arm wrapped around the battered bag and hat in his lap, the other dropped at his side with the fingers curled upward. His head tilted back and in the fading light, rife with deeper shadow, Elias could make out the stubs - not quite strands - of dark hair poking out from under the scarf, the beginnings of a fringe; Elias again imagined him with a fringe, with an entire thick mane. His mouth had fallen slightly open, and again its shape preoccupied Elias more than it should have. He found himself also unduly preoccupied by the slight twitches of Aleksandr’s eyelids, the corresponding movement of his lashes.
If he hadn’t been a Garou -
Well, if he hadn’t been a Garou, he wouldn’t be here.
Elias crouched beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
Aleksandr jerked upright, out from under his hand. His eyes squeezed further shut before opening. For a moment he regarded Elias with undisguised wariness before ducking his head. Both hands were on his bag now, crowned with the hat.
“I am pleased to inform you it is our turn for the sauna.”
Aleksandr nodded. He looked faintly sick.
“How does your ankle fare?”
A hesitation. “About… about the same.”
“Do you think you might be ill?”
Another hesitation, followed by a minute shake of the head.
It was because of the hesitation that Elias checked, pressing their foreheads together like he remembered his mother and then his aunt doing when Helena and Tapio were sick (even before they Firsted, he and Marita had never required this that he recalled). If there was a fever, this rough measure didn’t pick it up. Even so, Aleksandr looked if possible even more ill when he came away. Nothing to be done about it. “Here we go, then. You can leave the bag.”
Aleksandr came up easily, leaning the bag against the wall with the hat still atop it. Elias guided him out of the dugout and across the camp, waving with his free arm to those he passed. At least Nieminen wasn’t one of them; Elias hadn’t decided yet what to do about him.
The numerous centimeters Aleksandr had on him continued to make it slightly awkward to maneuver, but they were accustomed to one another’s movements by now and reached the field sauna without much difficulty. The main difficulty was that by then Elias’s cock insisted this new period of closeness meant something. He dawdled outside the sauna for a bit, chattering about its construction, but Aleksandr was looking more anxious by the moment so Elias told him to call him if he needed any help and sent him in first. Aleksandr turned his back; once he’d shrugged the coat off his shoulders, Elias looked up at the sky past the trees and thought very hard about the most grotesque fomori he’d ever fought and reviewed the Litany with emphasis on the first bit.
Aleksandr had been alone in there for a while now, and a Soviet plane was churning overhead, oblivious to their camouflaged camp. Hell with it, he thought at last, shedding his coat. If Aleksandr noticed, he’d just wax poetic about the girls in the Lotta Svärd who did such great work for the soldiers, and what they might be hiding under those austere uniforms. He’d mention, very casually, how being cooped up out here could make you feel fourteen again, and as easily excited. It wasn’t as if men getting hard by other men came up very often, did it?
***
He was hard, Aleksandr saw immediately, and once he took this in - taking in, at the same time, the minor detail of the scar higher on Laukkanen’s body, slashed between shoulder and lower collarbone - he turned his head away. Laukkanen might make him look at him later, but Aleksandr saw no reason to preempt him. His own hands folded in his lap, a flimsy shield.
Laukkanen sat down beside him. “You should eat more.”
That struck a brief spark of anger - he’d certainly have liked to have eaten more, if only the White Finns hadn’t cut off their supply lines and attacked the field kitchens. Another one, of righteous indignation: did Laukkanen think he could buy him with soup? These sparks faded quickly. Of course Laukkanen didn’t think that. Laukkanen didn’t need to buy him.
Laukkanen said nothing else for a while, just let out long contented sighs, and Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether this was a mercy or just a torment, delaying the dreaded and the inevitable. He kept staring to the side. No relaxing this time.
Come home. His mother had said this to him the day Aleksandr and Mikhail were to report, last September, not long after their shared birthday. Hugged him and tucked her head into his shoulder and whispered directly into his ear. When she came away she looked embarrassed, maybe to have said it. He wasn’t sure if she’d said the same to Mikhail, when she hugged him in turn. Whatever she’d said, Mikhail had groaned at it.
Come home - and how was he to do that? The ready answer was that he couldn’t. Escape? His limping footprints would be visible in the snow for any White on skis to run him down, and even if more snow happened to fill them up he was sure Laukkanen’s wolf-half would follow his scent.
Was there a cost he could pay for survival? What could he offer?
Anything, was his first thought. Anything, he’d do anything - but Aleksandr knew he couldn’t say so. Laukkanen would be sure to choose the part of anything that he couldn’t make good on, tell him to do the things he couldn’t do if he had the smallest scrap of integrity left. He’d failed, no denying that, but he couldn’t drag others with him.
He had barely anything to bargain with. In nearly all matters where his cooperation might be worth something, he couldn’t cooperate, nonnegotiable. It wasn’t as if he was a trove of military intelligence to start with, but he had to guard even what little he knew. He had to keep in mind that even if he did do anything he could, told everything, betrayed everything, Laukkanen could renege on a whim.
Small sacrifices, for small favors.
It was a small sacrifice, no matter if his gut didn’t seem to think so. After all, Laukkanen could simply force him. And a small favor - something that would barely matter to Laukkanen, since he could hardly be asked to cut short his game. Nothing was certain, but…
Another while, getting his speech in order, waiting for the “discussion” to begin.
“Does your ankle pain you, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
Aleksandr thought that, warmed and unwrapped, the pain there might have grown again. He looked down. Was it swelling? He didn’t look long before Laukkanen was leaning down, drawing his leg over the bench across Laukkanen’s lap. At that point, dangerously close to looking there, he turned away again, concentrated on keeping himself covered and suppressing his winces while Laukkanen prodded his ankle.
“Well,” Laukkanen said at last, taking his hands away, “it shouldn’t matter, in the long run.”
Aleksandr wondered briefly if there would be any repercussions for pulling back his leg. Then Laukkanen took hold of it again, depositing it back on the floor. He shoved his legs together.
A splash and sizzle - the water in the waiting bucket. The enclosure grew humid. Laukkanen said, “Come now. You act as though you have never done this before.”
Not like this.
He had better get it over with, as quick and clean as he could make it. He’d wondered whether to pitch himself in the same key of formality, but decided Laukkanen might not like someone playing the same game as he was. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“You may ask. Naturally, my response would depend on the favor.”
“Yes. Thank you. Am I a prisoner?”
“Is that your favor? You would like me to answer that question?”
“I… no, I…”
“Oh, there’s no need. Technically, yes, you are a prisoner of war, but I would rather that you thought of yourself as a guest.”
“And there’s… registrations? Records?”
“Oh yes, there is some of that. Why wouldn’t there be? I’ll take care of it tomorrow. I will have to excuse you from being sent to the prisoner-of-war camp, but since the captain is a friend to us that shouldn’t be very difficult - though of course,” and Laukkanen laughed, “I will have to be a little creative as to why you should stay.” There were enough like him, at least in this one way, to make a camp? Who knew? After all, Laukkanen had just made clear that if he had his way Aleksandr would never see it. Maybe later he’d start using it as a threat. “I think that if we play things correctly, you could even send a letter home.”
A letter, at least, if he’d never… He wanted to cling to that possibility but no, it would run entirely counter to the goal. He had to concentrate on that. “I see. Thank you. The favor… I’d like to ask you -” Repeating himself, he knew.
“Go on and ask.”
“Could you not make a record?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said I’m technically a prisoner. Without the technicality? If you could just leave it out, if you could leave me out of the records… or if I have to be in them, could it be another name? I could make one for you if you want.” That couldn’t be too hard. Vladimir Nikolayevich Golubev was the first to come to mind, but Golubev deserved better than that. “I know you have my paper, but most of us threw them away anyway. It wouldn’t be strange if I didn’t have one.” He remembered, belatedly, his other papers.
Laukkanen remembered as well. “Oh, your papers. I’d forgotten. I can return them, if you like… but many of us know you’re an Aleksandr by now. At this point, presenting yourself as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov might be complicated.”
He knew that, now that he thought of it. He’d established it all the way back in the village, with Veikko. And then there was Laukkanen, throwing around the Sergeyevich. And he thought he remembered that Laukkanen had used his full name in his “introductions” with Ruotsalainen. But barring that… and who among the Whites would particularly care if the patronymic and surname were different than they remembered? “That’s fine. There are plenty of Aleksandrs.”
“Would you mind, then, explaining why you’d like to be a different Aleksandr, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
His throat locked up on this. To expose himself as surely as if - concentrate, concentrate. Laukkanen might be a degenerate White fascist, might be a monster, but surely there was something human left, or at least not enough of the inhuman that he’d contrive to turn this against Aleksandr out of spite. The worst that could happen was he’d say no.
Of all times to be optimistic. But what else could he do?
“I know I… I haven’t done very well. And my family… I have brothers, a cousin… it’s not their fault. It isn’t their fault I came out this way. Please. Let them think I died when I should have. I don’t want them to be punished for it.” Was Laukkanen actually stifling laughter? He didn’t dare look. So much for optimism. “Please. Would you want your mother to be… to…”
“Hmm. I wonder what you would say if I told you I was an orphan.”
“Please. Please.” He was already facing away from Laukkanen but he shut his eyes anyway, to shut out doubly what he knew was behind him.
“Oh come now, this rigmarole can’t be necessary. Not when you could simply go home with the end of the war. Couldn’t you?”
So he held out the prospect of surviving the war. Aleksandr couldn’t believe it. It was probably just a ploy to get him to cooperate, a superfluous one at that. “I can’t go home. I know I won’t. I know what’s going to happen. What has to happen. You don’t have to pretend you’ll let me live.” And if he did live by some miracle, what then? Desertion, treason. Dead was, in a way, safer. Surely with so many dead and missing in the Finnish forests they couldn’t assume the worst for every one of them.
Laukkanen laughing again, not stifling it as well this time.
“If you do this little thing for me I’ll… I’ll do what I can. I don’t know much of anything, I was just a conscript, but other things… I can do other things for you. And I won’t fight back, whatever you do to me, I promise I won’t.”
“Ha, and what would you say if I told you I liked a bit of a fight?” Aleksandr was spared answering (spared that, at least) when Laukkanen immediately continued, “What sort of things, pray tell? What do you expect me to do to you?”
He was that inhuman. He wanted Aleksandr to say it out loud, to seal what he was reduced to. “Things. I’ll do… things.” He wasn’t articulate to begin with but this was a new low. He remembered the slang, the whispers, but to say any of it still entailed forcing it up through his locked throat. “I could… I could do it the… the French way.”
“The French way?”
“Yes. I could… use my mouth. Or any other way you want. I’ve never done it before but -”
Incredulous now, “You’ve never done what?”
This, on top of everything. No, he’d never done it before. Not even a kiss that was anything but chaste. Even before realizing what he had with the Isayevs, he’d been afraid to do anything that might lead to that. He’d suspected something was wrong with him, in that way, but worse to hear it from him. Worse, still, to think that this would be the first time doing anything like it, to think that Laukkanen and maybe other White Finns would be first and last, so he tried not to think of it as he forged ahead. “Anything like that. Anything. I’m sorry if I’m not very good at it. I’m sorry. But I’ve never. Not with girls, even -”
And now sharp, without a trace of amusement or greasy mockery, “You’ve never done what with girls?”
Aleksandr knew with that question the size of the mistake he’d made. His legs pulled back onto the bench, feet pressed against the edge, blood rushing through his ankle. His arms clamped over his head as they had when the other Whites had kicked at him outside the dugout. Small help, he knew. The air was still steamy; he wasn’t sure how much of his sweat was heat and how much was terror. He wanted to scream, to flail out, to run as fast and far as he could; he kept fighting it down, knowing it wouldn’t help. But what could help? “I’m sorry,” he choked out. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, I’m sorry, please…”
He waited, locked in position, through the long silence, then the rapid footsteps. When he finally peered over his knees, he found himself alone.
Next chapter here.
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~10500
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.
Chapter Two: Accept an Honorable Surrender
Veikko was there again when he woke up, nothing more wolfish about him than before. Trick of the light (or the dark), had to be. Some bread, some water, the blanket stuffed back into the bag, and they started walking again. After three days of luxury, Aleksandr’s stomach had learned again how to complain of the reduction. He learned again how to ignore it.
After nightfall, they reached a house in a tiny clearing. There was a woman there, with a little boy younger even than Veikko; Heikki ran to her and they talked for a while before she called them all in. They looked a lot like Heikki, Aleksandr noticed - maybe they were his mother, his brother. Also, the woman looked at Aleksandr in much the same way. But she fed him, too, more good heavy food, and he said “Thank you” again.
Veikko nudged him. “Kiitos.”
“Kiitos,” he repeated. She laughed at that.
The house was more modern than the ones at the village; it had more than one room and wooden floors and a fireplace and a chimney instead of just a hole in the ceiling. After he ate she let him take a spot by the fire. There he undid the scarf, took off the boots and gloves and socks, and checked for frostbite. The little boy watched him do this as Veikko had watched him do other things. Veikko saw this too, and began the pointing routine - “Aleksandr,” then pointing to the boy, “Paavo” - before the woman noticed and ushered Paavo away. She was still talking to Heikki when Aleksandr lay down in the blanket, the budenovka and gloves a makeshift pillow; he slept nearly immediately.
***
Elias listened attentively and finally heard the howls - Heikki Saarinen and Veikko Smallest-Of-Litter, at the Saarinens’ house to the west right now, and he suppressed his disappointment that Marita hadn’t been the one picked to ferry the cub. A few hours later that night he took some time off on patrol with Kustaa to howl back. In this way, they arranged a rendezvous at a distance from the camp and the mottis. Captain Jokela was notified, as were Kustaa and Tapio. Tapio would be partnering him again tomorrow. Day patrol, this time. Meeting them halfway, best as they could manage. As he saw to his human charges he listened to howls from Ilmari and then Jalmari at their own camp, expressing intrigue and best wishes.
A rough plan: explanations in the relative privacy of the camp sauna, then more explanations during the captain’s “interrogation” with Sergeant Elias Laukkanen, of course, serving as interpreter.
“Anything for me to do?” asked Tapio, cradling his coffee like a newborn.
“I’ll tell you if I think of something,” said Elias, mentally reviewing the pertinent vocabulary: volk - wolf, volchonok - wolf-cub, oboroten - werewolf…
***
The next morning Veikko had gone. Instead a gray wolf (a dog, a dog, but he wasn’t able to convince himself anymore) waited outside the house and trotted at his side. Aside from being a wolf, it was as friendly as Veikko had been. Aleksandr wondered where the wolf had come from and where Veikko had gone, shoving aside the simplest and most insane answer. He wasn’t about to try to ask Heikki, who walked as if trying to pretend he wasn’t there.
The blanket was left in the house - Heikki had taken it from him when he started to pack it again. Would he not need it anymore? Was that good or bad?
For a while they took a small trail from the house, but soon they veered off between the trees again, walking eastward. With so much snow on the ground there was little appreciable difference.
Eastward. Just maybe, they were taking him to the border. Maybe his papers had fallen out along the way, or he’d had them out when the last attack came and didn’t take them with him in the confusion. Maybe they didn’t know that when the Red Army came with tanks and planes it came as friends and liberators - Aleksandr knew there’d been leaflets dropped, by the bushel, but they might not have reached that one little village and he didn’t even know if they could read - and were keeping the rifle because they weren’t sure he wouldn’t shoot them with it. Once they’d proven their good intentions to him, they would give it back. Nice to try to believe that. As long as he could try to believe that…
In his dreams last night, people had bowed to him in the falling snow. Wolves had bowed to him. Massive wolf-men had bowed to him. Insane. Insane.
As far as Aleksandr could tell through the trees, the sun was starting to dip again. His feet hurt. He hadn’t gone on a march like this for a while; the encirclement enforced stillness.
The sun had dipped a little further, not yet in the process of setting, when the howling began again. The wolf that couldn’t be Veikko threw its head back and howled a reply. The howling continued, intermittently, back and forth, until they entered a small clearing. Heikki stopped walking; Aleksandr followed his lead. The wolf howled once more and fell silent.
They stood with breath pluming until Aleksandr, looking east, saw the pair moving between the trees.
They were on skis, fast when he first saw them but soon slowing, leisurely. Their clothes blending with the snow, rifles belted across their backs, knives at their belts. Shouting - “Terve! Terve!” And he knew. Supposing, really, more supposing, but in his gut he knew: White Finns, all right.
“No. Please, no. Please.” Remembered the Finnish Veikko taught him. “Ei, ei -”
The wolf was staring at him, its head tilted like Veikko’s. Heikki was staring at him too, and he saw not reassurance but confirmation, disgust nearly inked across Heikki’s face. That same contempt as on the very first day when he’d spat “Ivan!”
He should’ve known from the start.
He would’ve known from the start if he wasn’t such a coward that he’d rather walk meekly to his death than take a risk, than resist -
Now Heikki turned from him, dismissing him. The wolf ran for the White Finns as they entered the clearing, making noises that sounded happy. Aleksandr thought, a thought that seemed very slow: if he was ever going to resist, now was probably his last remotely viable chance.
At least he was such a coward that Heikki wasn’t expecting the kick. He went over so fast that Aleksandr felt correspondingly guilty for it, but he couldn’t afford to feel guilty. He might be a boy of Fyodor’s age but Fyodor wouldn’t have sold him to the Whites. He kicked again before he reached and pulled the rifle from the sling, so fast that the bayonet ripped at Heikki’s coat and maybe deeper, then knocked him down with the other end when he tried to rise. No time even to try for the knife. He bolted into the trees again. Directly east wasn’t an option. He’d have to circle around and -
He stumbled through the snow and knew he’d never get to that part.
Behind him, a roar, and “Heikki! Heikki!” and more words.
Maybe, he thought, trying to run zigzag, they’d shoot him in the back. At least it would be a quick death.
No bullet, just words. His own name, now, and his own language. Veikko (Veikko?) calling “Aleksandr, Aleksandr!” and someone else, one of the Whites, “Aleksandr, wait! Please wait! Would you please wait?” Why the please?
The words were coming closer. Not fast. Still leisurely. On those skis they could catch up any time, following his footprints.
Aleksandr heard himself pant, half-sobbing. Pain in his side. Exertion, or a bullet he hadn’t heard? His bag banged against his other side. He nearly ran into a tree, and when he turned from it his head nearly collided with a low branch.
Cuckoos, he thought, and reached up. He was still carrying the rifle; he used that arm to brace himself, the other to hoist. He half-somersaulted onto the branch, lay half-draped and half-straddling it for a few precious seconds, then tried for one thicker and higher up. That was trickier. He nearly lost the rifle, nearly stuck himself with the bayonet. But he made it, eventually, sobbing all the way now, torn between clutching the rifle and the branch. He wanted to clutch his side, as well, but settled for looking down best as he could. No red bloom on the fabric of the coat, at least. He looked up; the closest branches were too thin to support him and he didn’t dare try higher.
He was stranded maybe two meters from the ground and one of the White Finns came to a stop beneath him, looking amused. Aleksandr fumbled with the rifle, trying to shoulder it, thinking any second he’d tip and plummet.
“Kindly calm down,” said the White Finn. “Calm down and realize that for you, this war is over.”
Shoulder and aim. His marksmanship scores at least had been good. “Go away,” he gasped, and knew he’d been heard when the White laughed. He could take as many as he could with him, at least, before the end. Could be one, could be none - maybe the recoil of the first shot would knock him from his perch. If it did, he could hope to break his neck when he hit the ground. He braced himself best as he could and pulled the trigger.
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, and the White was laughing again. Aleksandr pulled open his bag and fumbled one-handed for the cartridges.
“It would be very courteous of you if you eased matters for everyone and came down.”
I’m not that stupid, he thought, and felt himself flush remembering how stupid he’d been even an hour ago. He got hold of the cartridges and extracted one from the belt.
“It may not seem so, but I am your ally.”
He tugged off his left glove with his teeth and held it in his mouth while he reloaded. If the White took his own rifle and shot him now… well, then, he would shoot him. That was it.
“You are aware that that will accomplish nothing?”
He was aware. He was lucky if he managed to get this one. He bit down on the glove - no time to juggle putting it back on - and set the rifle to his shoulder again.
Or maybe he had time after all, because the White wasn’t aiming back. If anything he was doing the exact opposite. His rifle was unbelted, laid out in the snow. He’d stepped out of the skis. But no, there was the other White, there was a furious-looking Heikki, there was Veikko again, his eyes big. This White was waving them back.
The tableau gave him brief pause. He might have been tempted to talk to the White some more, but if he let go of his glove now it would probably drop to the ground and he’d lose even the diminishing chance of ever covering his hand. It was already starting to numb.
So much he wanted to ask. About the wolves, even, if he was really going crazy. But he knew what the chances were of getting a truthful answer.
He wondered if the White would draw the knife, stab at his feet as they hung from the branch - the White was fairly short, and couldn’t reach most of him.
“Let me ask you,” said the White, “if I said that I was a Red, would you come down?”
Aleksandr stared at him. That was good as confirming that he wasn’t.
“I thought as much,” said the White. “Well then.” He sighed from deep in his lungs and began to grow.
Aleksandr’s gasp drew the glove deeper into his mouth. He bit down again and fired at the thing with everything from bones to hair to teeth growing and growing and growing. In answer, something clawed hot streaks up his throat. He forced it down more out of habit than anything else because it wasn’t as if not panicking now would make much of a difference, but it still wouldn’t help if he threw himself out of the tree trying to get away.
The monster, the gray-furred wolf-man of his dreams, stood over the branch and snatched at him.
Aleksandr rammed forward with the bayonet, but this fazed it no more than bullets. The massive claws grabbed him, pulled him off the branch, and they were caught briefly in a grotesque half-embrace, his rifle holding them apart, the thing still impaled on the bayonet, but he was close enough to see it salivate. He struggled, lost his grip, fell. The first thing to touch ground was his right ankle, twisting under him. Breath left him when he thumped onto his back. When it came back the first thing he did was scream as the pain came with it, the second thing choke on the glove that muffled his scream.
The thing yanked his rifle from its chest and stood over him. He stared up, coughing, and watched as the flow of blood stopped, as the wounds sealed. He was crazy. He accepted this, and he waited. While he waited he pulled the glove from his mouth and sat up and put the glove back on because he might as well. His ankle burned; his eyes, in comparison, just stung. A bullet dropped into the snow at the thing’s massive feet. He saw the knife, still sheathed, still belted at the approximate area of its waist. The belt was longer, that was all, and the knife larger.
He was still staring at them when they became smaller again, and the thing wearing them along with them. Now the White stood there, a little disheveled but grinning, still with the look of a predator (Marshal Mannerheim the tsarist butcher, he remembered hearing, but this was something far more feral, without the form and mechanism of a slaughterhouse), as he set down Aleksandr’s rifle and moved closer. “Well then, have you had enough?”
No chance, no chance at all, but if he could at least thrash himself into nothing, leave them nothing except maybe a scar to remember him by, a sign that he’d done something with his life -
Aleksandr waited for him to move closer and grabbed at the knife. He got hold of it, actually pulled it from the sheath before the White slammed into him and bore him back to the ground. What breath he’d regained deserted him again. The White’s hands pinned his over his head. He still clutched the knife, useless in this position. His body still tried to struggle, twisting frantically in the range it had under the small but sturdy frame.
“I suppose not,” gasped the White, breath warm on Aleksandr’s face, sounding gleeful. “Now kindly calm down, calm down, I’ll have you know that I can wait on you all day…” The changes began again and once they did Aleksandr lay paralyzed with even fiercer terror.
Up close he had an excruciating view of how that face distorted outward into a muzzle that nearly bumped his nose. He could see, also, part of the transformation of the body around it. He felt the weight on his wrists grow to almost crush them; at least the hind legs moved to either side of his, and now only one great paw was required to hold both his hands. The White had become a massive wolf, maybe twice the size of the one that replaced Veikko (was Veikko?). It didn’t snarl or growl but somehow that made it worse.
He wanted to shut his eyes. He wanted to turn his face away. Even when there was nothing to lose he didn’t dare. It was fear, not courage, that kept his eyes fixed on the wolf’s. Snow ground into his hair, the back of his head; he’d lost his budenovka again in one of the falls. He noticed the mottling of the gray fur, slightly darker patches.
Probably there was no fur beyond a scattering of beard. Probably he was hallucinating.
He couldn’t stop believing his hallucinations.
It was clawing up his throat again and he could hardly breathe around it.
The wolf’s head was receding, somehow, it wasn’t as though Aleksandr’s head could move any further away, and the wolf wasn’t moving either, not by itself. Maybe Aleksandr was the one receding, into himself, except he felt like he was moving away, like the paw still heavy on his wrists was lightening, not pressing down and inward, maybe like he was leaving his wrists behind, his body behind. Breaking loose, somehow, though loose was not free. A little more and maybe he would spiral out and up, a bird. With these wolf-men about it wasn’t impossible that he could at least dream it happening.
Wolf. Man. Man. Wolf. You change?
As he left his body behind everything that had tensed began to slacken, from his gut outward. It reached his extremities, pooled at his throbbing ankle. His hands fell open. The knife didn’t fall out but lay inert.
The wolf bent down and nuzzled at his cheek and made noises. The White sat up, knife in hand, smiled at him, and said, “That was a pleasant bout.” The White’s eyes burned. The White’s face in the shape of the faces of the boys who chattered about Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva but older, sharper, harsher. The White put the knife away and said, “Have those clothes been dedicated?” The White turned his head and said a question to someone else. The White turned his head back and said, “Never mind. Allow me to see to it.”
The White put his hands on Aleksandr’s chest.
The White unbuttoned the coat.
The White put his hands on the sweater.
The White put his hands under the sweater.
Aleksandr’s mouth moved. His tongue moved. Aleksandr said, “What…?”
The White put his hands under the shirt and said, “If you would rather go naked, then that is your choice.”
***
Go naked - his own words inspired another jolt. Elias kept his smile on and thanked Fenris (though Fenris probably wouldn’t appreciate the thanks, and nor would the Old Man - thank Gaia, then, thank Raven, thank cunning Cuckoo, thank the ever-decorous Snow Queen) that his layers of winter clothes hid his arousal. Thanked Crinos physiology, wolf physiology, Hispo physiology - Crinos was made for fighting not fucking (snickering slanders of the Children of Gaia aside), so the relevant bits weren’t exactly on display, and wolves (and Hispo dire wolves, with them) didn’t get excited until they’d actually stuck it in. Otherwise his erection would’ve been flopping around out there to horrify everyone. One thing to know in theory this was all body, nothing of intentions, and another to believe it when it was right there. He wasn’t an excitable thirteen anymore, trailing after Kolya Rybalkin like a dog, like a puppy.
And he thanked Gaia, Raven, Cuckoo, the Snow Queen that it was wilting now. This Aleksandr was still good-looking - the physical parts all still in place, except that ankle - but right now it didn’t have nearly the same kick as it did when he was loading the rifle with his fine features grim-set and his mouth full of glove (a mouth full of glove and he still managed to enthrall like that) or making a stubborn try for Elias’s puukko. Now he was all submission, spread out with his arms over his head. His pale blue eyes with what seemed like a layer of glass or ice over them. Snow in the scarf, in his hair - extremely short, but thick and dark brown and Elias could imagine what it would look like given the opportunity to grow out.
The shirt, a flannel undershirt, and that was it for the layers on the upper half. Aili or Sofia or Marita had probably done this ritual already, but there was no point in assuming, especially as Heikki and Veikko had no clue whether or not they had. Assumptions led to ruining perfectly good clothes, and awkward questions when it came to getting new ones. This was what he told himself.
Elias pulled out his hands, readjusted Jalmari’s gray-and-blue patterned sweater (colors Jalmari’s wife liked but Jalmari didn’t), closed Marita’s coat - he could rebutton later, when he wasn’t holding everything for dedication together in his head. He did a pass over Marita’s gloves and Ilmari’s scarf, while he was at it. The scarf was done by Ilmari’s twelve-year-old sister in a garish patchwork of knits; Ilmari’s sister was seventeen now and her taste had improved considerably. These clothes weren’t anyone’s first choice, which was why they were left at the sept in case the dedicated sets were past repair. Not equal contributions by any means - Elias and Ilmari were too short to put in much, as were all the cliath. Though no one but Veikko, he thought, would have been too skinny.
Now he scooted backward and worked downward. The trousers, the belt, and the underpants - up above he’d centered his hand on Aleksandr’s chest, but he took care to avoid the cock, went for the leg instead. When his hand settled against the flannel at the hipbone, warmed by the skin underneath it, Aleksandr flinched and let out a keening noise. A bad bruise? “Everything is perfectly in order,” he said distractedly. “Everything is perfectly all right.” The default state of his Russian was formality - after all he’d learned it on the pretext of communicating with Silver Fang dignitaries.
Speaking of which. Aleksandr had a tribal look after all - not one of the ones he’d judged plausible, but the Silver Fang look. It was this look that convinced Elias he wasn’t looking at some random Red Army kid in the throes of Delirium who’d had the bad luck to stumble into the bawn, that he’d been choking down frenzy along with his fear (and his glove). His look had blazed when he was in the tree. All heroic resolve, go out with glory, no surrender.
The problem was when you had “to the death, no surrender” types who ought to be on the same side instead on the opposite ones. That was why surrendering had been in the Litany before Geneva, let alone the Convention, was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Really, other Fenrir might scoff but it was a lucky thing that Aleksandr’s resolve had buckled to the right side. His fellows - Elias mulled over this while he moved on to the socks and the boots - they had guts, they held out in the surrounded mottis and fought to the last, only handfuls of prisoners taken out of each of their thousands. While Elias could respect their guts, at least, it also meant that he and his fellows ended up killing them.
And, there. The clothes were dedicated to him now, would shift to match him, save on clothing expenses. Elias scrabbled back up to take Aleksandr by the shoulders and draw him to sit up. He stayed where Elias left him, hands splayed in the snow, while Elias took another look at the twisted ankle. “We can repair this.” Aleksandr just stared at him. “Or rather, you can repair this. It is very simple, very fast. You saw me heal. You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same. You are a werewolf. Garou. As I am, and as they are back at the sept.”
Still nothing. “I will adjust this now, if you don’t mind.” Elias took hold of the ankle, put it back in alignment, and was answered by a gasp, slightly parted lips. Stop thinking about the cub’s lips. “Now then,” said Elias, and began. Telling him how to visualize, how to focus.
It wouldn’t take. He’d never had charge of a lost cub before, or even your run-of-the-mill cub. He remembered his own lessons on voluntary shifting after Firsting, but he’d been eager, accommodating - at least responsive. Aleksandr sat in the snow and barely twitched.
“I might not be a Red,” he said, “but that is of no consequence here. Russian, Finnish, Australian - it does not matter. We are all Garou. There are all manner of things to battle aside from one another.”
No result. He looked up and about. Heikki, Veikko, and Tapio had drifted closer, gathered around.
Once Elias looked at him Heikki said, “I’ll pull his guts out through his throat -”
The pursuit had been delayed, not that the delay made much difference in the end, by holding down Heikki in Crinos until he snapped out of frenzy. He might be Ahroun to Elias’s Ragabash, but Elias was fostern to his cliath, more experienced and better skilled, and he’d restrained him with Veikko’s help. Elias wondered if they’d need to do it again.
“- dig out his eyes and feed them to the ravens -”
Maybe a shock would do it where cajoling wouldn’t. The First Change itself often came about through anger, fear, pain. If he could call that up again…
“You let your guard down like that you get what you deserve,” he told Heikki when the latter paused for breath. But he translated for Aleksandr. “Heikki says that he will pull your guts out through your throat.” He straddled his legs again, put a hand beneath his chin, caught himself imagining what it would feel like if his hand were bare and pressed against the dusting of stubble. “He says that he will dig out your eyes and feed them to the ravens -”
Nothing there either, when he finished the list. If anything the cub seemed to retreat deeper into himself, even more glass over his eyes. If Elias went further, if he slapped him, if he punched him, if he started to throttle him, would he snap or would he shatter?
“Look,” said Tapio, “I know, Garou business, but we can’t stand here forever trying to snap him out of it. There’s a war on. Patrol to do.”
He had a point. A lost cub this old was probably especially sunk into being human. Especially-especially since there was no sign of a baptismal mark - meant, likely, no one knew of him to mark him, no one back in Russia to give him a preliminary education. He reached for the boot and began to undo the laces.
When he began to tug it off Aleksandr said “No,” faintly, from a distance.
“If you won’t remedy it in the easiest way,” Elias told him, “I have to do something about it in the human way. Do you understand?” But at least Aleksandr had said something, never mind it made no sense.
He didn’t say anything more, though, didn’t say if he understood. The boot, then the sock. Elias examined the sprain and pressed snow against it, then prevailed on Tapio to scrounge up a rag to bind it with. They’d have to keep him from the medic. The medic was a decent person but neither Kin nor Garou, and would notice if the sprain he’d examined healed up so far ahead of schedule. Elias wasn’t going to put off shifting lessons until then. He’d say there was just a little twist and he’d taken care of it on the way in, nothing serious. Truthful enough.
“So,” he said while wrapping, “he’s got the look - how come he’s not with the Fangs?”
“Hell if I know,” said Heikki.
He looked to Veikko. Veikko looked blank.
“You ask Ilmari-rhya for me, why don’t you.”
Heikki nodded and turned over the rifle sling, a plastic capsule, a sheaf of papers in Russian, then a separate folded piece with a list of moon phases - on closer examination, they turned out to be the phases on the fourth of each month of 1920 along with all the phases of April that year, and a note at the bottom in a familiar hand:
Elias: We got the 4 and the 1920, calculated a bunch - you fill in the blank, unless we fucked up completely. By the by, we’ve dedicated his togs. Plenty of dead time while he was conked out.
Elias swore, not too strongly. A few minutes wasted. Ah well.
You and Ilmari have fun. Marita.
Next he twisted open the capsule and unrolled another slip of paper inside. An identification form. He’d seen little Red Army boxes like this before, but in those cases the papers were blank. This one was filled out in a cramped neat hand: Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov, born the fourth of September 1920 (the numerals of 4 and 1920 bookending the Cyrillic that had eluded them at the sept), an address in Leningrad (the Rybalkins called it Petrograd, and it was Saint Petersburg in their books). He checked Marita’s list. Fourth of September was waning Philodox, unless maybe for some reason the cub had been born across the country in Siberia. What a match.
As far as matches, the other papers held some redundant information. He reviewed them in case of unexpected intelligence, found nothing of the sort. He did come across more details - in a little book buried in the middle of the sheaf, an internal passport, the cub’s nationality was listed as Russian and his “social position” listed as “worker.” This last struck him as faintly absurd, though he didn’t suppose they’d put people down as “Grand Duke” or “count” - he recalled the stuff piped across the border, Molotov’s speeches and such, and entertained himself with the image of a passport listing social position as “bloodsucking parasite” (bloodsucking leech, even, bloodsucking corpse, draugr, he wondered how the literal undead fared over there in comparison). That done, he stuffed them down his coat.
He got the rest of the story from Heikki and Veikko, everything he could think to ask that they happened to know. Then came the story to be told in the near future. “So we’ll say he straggled his way to your house,” he said to Heikki. “And you took him over here. Can you get your mom to back that up? Can Paavo handle it?”
Heikki nodded. As time passed he looked more and more abashed.
A few more minutes to get everyone consistent, Veikko giving a primer of the smattering of Finnish he’d taught Aleksandr, and then a goodbye to both the cliath. “Don’t wipe out the Wyrm without me, all right?”
“No,” said Veikko. “If you are not there when we fight the Wyrm I am very sorry but if we can wipe it out then -”
“Fair enough.”
Some more quick goodbyes, hellos to be delivered, and the cliath were off. Elias strapped everything back on, put Aleksandr’s rifle over his shoulder, and retrieved Aleksandr’s hat. They’d have to walk back to camp - it wasn’t as if he or even Tapio could really carry him. “Now I can address you properly, can I not, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?” Did he just flinch? “Are you able to walk? Here - allow me to assist you.”
Aleksandr stood up like he sat up, and when Elias braced him with an arm he could limp alongside him.
“Since we know who you are, allow me to return the favor. I am Elias Hunts-With-Mielikki, fostern Ragabash of the Get of Fenris. You will not know what most of that means. Do not concern yourself with it yet. My human name is Elias Laukkanen. This is my cousin, Tapio Koskinen.”
Tapio picked up on his own name. “Pleased to meet you,” he tossed off as he trudged ahead.
“Tapio says he is pleased to meet you. We will be returning to camp,” Elias told him. “We have built a sauna - similar to your banya in Russia, but of course ours is first and best.” He laughed. Aleksandr continued the trend and didn’t. “I must complete my patrol, but afterward I believe I can obtain some time in it for us. We can relax and discuss the situation in private - we wouldn’t want ordinary humans to hear this.”
He’d come up with this already. It was only some silent minutes after saying it that he thought of further implications and immediately shoved them away. Perkele, Great Fenris, no. He’d shared the sauna with both Ilmari the Tireless and Ilmari Cuts-Down-The-Wyrm, with Heikki and Kalevi and Olavi and Veikko, with Jalmari Fleet-Of-Foot, with visiting Fenrir, with Tapio and Kustaa and other soldiers of the camp, with Kolya, and he’d been absolutely fine. And in all likelihood Aleksandr had been in a bathhouse before, he’d know how it went. It wasn’t as though men without clothes on would send Elias into orgasmic frenzy. It wasn’t as though this was some surreptitious plan to see Aleksandr Sergeyevich Novikov naked. He’d decided long before laying eyes on him. What lunatic fucked in a sauna anyway?
Though he was easy on the eyes. The Silver Fangs had that way about them to begin with, their tribal look, their blood shining through plain as Helios to any Garou, and on top of that most of them and their Kin were handsome in a way that humans could also recognize. After all they’d had first pick of Kinfolk for time immemorial and, as the Shadow Lords would readily insinuate, they were as susceptible to a pretty face as anyone else, so given pick between an aristocrat and a good-looking aristocrat…
Was he shuddering against Elias’s arm? Surely he hadn’t read his thoughts. Elias tightened his hold, resisted the urge to blurt denials. Aleksandr probably hadn’t thought of it at all and bringing it up would only put it into his head, put himself into suspicion.
“There is no need to worry. I have you now.”
***
He shouldn’t have filled out the paper. There were all the rest that betrayed him twice over, he knew that, but it was the little one in the capsule they’d handed out to the new conscripts that he kept thinking of. How Kozlov had laughed when he found out. Kozlov had fought in the civil war twenty years ago and said, while still chuckling, Comrade Novikov, if you’re so worried about how they’ll know it’s you, you’re already dead.
Not dead yet. Not like Kozlov. He’d died in the first days, when the White Finns were closing the encirclement.
Not dead yet, but probably when the White (Laukkanen, that was his name) was done with him he’d shoot him in the head, cut his throat, break his neck, or maybe even then it would be something slow. Something that wouldn’t have happened if he’d fought back harder, if he’d made the wolf tear out his throat in the forest.
Laukkanen’s grip tightening about his ribcage. Laukkanen’s hand cupping his face. Laukkanen’s voice, echoing at thankful distance, the slow syllables, obscene formality greasing everything, Now I can address you properly, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (he had no right, some hysterical part of him insisted, he had no right), telling him all those things Heikki wanted to do to him, the amiable threat of making him strip there in the snow if he didn’t let Laukkanen touch him like that, (it couldn’t even have been frisking him, there wasn’t enough touching to be that), I have you now.
And the sauna, like the banya. Together. Discuss the situation in private. And Aleksandr thought: together, in that close space, with no clothes on… he couldn’t pretend that meant nothing. He couldn’t pretend it would be like bathing with comrades, something innocent that men did together.
Laukkanen and his cousin took him into camp and to a dugout with a low ceiling. There they shoved him at another of the Whites and they left for their patrol. This White was called Kustaa Ruotsalainen. Aleksandr thought he looked like the man at the village, though far younger. More relations? The dugout was fairly warm and Ruotsalainen was content to ignore him, while the other two inside it slept near the far end; Aleksandr drifted back to the world here, to the rhythm of the throb in his wrapped ankle, and held still against the wall so as not to disturb this equilibrium.
Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear. May 1934. That day he’d read Izvestiya in the apartment, trying not to look like he was paying Gorky’s article on Proletarian Humanism any more attention than the rest because why would he?
The year before that, the year Aleksandr turned thirteen, was the year of the Isayev siblings. Raisa Pavlovna Isayeva had shared a grade with him for years but it was now, on the brink, that they noticed her. Him, and Mikhail, and he remembered the other boys in their grade whispering about her. How pretty she was, and things they wanted to do to her, things he hadn’t really understood then and he doubted most of them had either. Now he supposed that if she’d ever noticed them in return they would’ve been at a loss. But at any rate Raisa had her brother Lev, two years older than her, who made sure the other boys had no chance to do any of that. Aleksandr didn’t dare get too close but as far as he got Lev found him acceptable - judged him no threat.
Had he judged wrong? Aleksandr hadn’t thought so then, hadn’t let himself think so. He’d watched Raisa from a distance with the other boys, watched Lev next to her. He agreed, in silence, that Raisa was pretty, that she was lively, that she was sweet. He thought about her sometimes, dreamed of what it would be like if she somehow comprehended his longings in a flash of insight even though he’d never actually shown her anything of the kind, and then there were the especially embarrassing dreams about what he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t difficult to see Lev and Raisa were related. They weren’t identical even besides the obvious; for one thing, Lev had red hair and Raisa had brown. But Lev was handsome for a lot of the same reasons Raisa was pretty, and Raisa’s friends adored him though he paid them little attention. Eventually Aleksandr started having some of the same thoughts about Lev, the same dreams - though he knew, too, how silly it was to think that Lev would pay him any more attention than he did Raisa’s friends. They were halting thoughts, confusing ones. No one ever said thoughts like these that he could hear and think, yes, this is what I think and other people think this, other boys think this, in a small way it’s all right. None of that.
He didn’t say these thoughts about Lev, or his thoughts about the other boys he started to look at in the same way after. It wasn’t hard - most of his thoughts, like the ones about Raisa and other girls, he didn’t say to start with. It was just that there was even more reason not to say thoughts about boys because they wouldn’t just be embarrassing. He’d learned, keeping his ears and eyes open, that they were wrong in a deep way, they were perverted, they were corrupted. This confused him too, because he couldn’t figure out what might have corrupted him, but there it was.
And the idea that along with being corrupted, he, too, could corrupt… it threatened the youth, Gorky wrote. Was he still “the youth” now that he could threaten other youth? So he’d said nothing, he’d done nothing, and he’d told himself that would be enough. That that had to be enough. That if he never showed it to anyone he couldn’t hurt anyone by it. That if he hurt no one else, he’d never have to let them know there was something this wrong with him.
And here it was. It was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? That the White fascists who pulled men’s pants to their ankles and cut off their cocks would use him the same way? Would do the things to him that he had to have wanted, hadn’t gone after only because he was a coward about getting caught as he was a coward in all other ways?
He didn’t know it was going to happen. He didn’t know - but he hadn’t known, either, that the villagers would turn him over. He’d had plenty of opportunity to realize that but had refused to. He wouldn’t make that mistake this time. Maybe the hunger in that look was, after all, only a hunger to see him suffer. But he couldn’t assume that. This time he would anticipate the worst, for all the good it would do him. If nothing else it wouldn’t shock him; it wouldn’t crush his last hopes, just put them out of their misery. Just maybe Laukkanen was only dangerous in the same way an ordinary wolf would be dangerous, but there was no point in fooling himself into thinking this would be the case.
Ruotsalainen was shaking one of the other men awake. A brief, whispered, exchange. He muttered something at Aleksandr and climbed out of the dugout. The man he’d woken up took his place. He looked half-asleep and sullen. Aleksandr held still.
You can do the same, because you are, in fact, the same.
Not just a fascist, not just a White butcher, but a monster in the truest sense. A wolf-man, no, a werewolf. Laukkanen had said so himself. No wonder the White Finns were holding out if they had those fighting for them. The only mystery was why people didn’t know by now, but this was easily answered if he supposed they left no survivors.
It is very simple, very fast.
The same.
That round scar. He hadn’t looked at it since, had tried to put it out of mind.
“Ivan,” they were calling, outside. “Ivan!”
Where was Ruotsalainen? With them? Now one of them was reaching in, was climbing in, walking bent down as one had to in here. Aleksandr moved back as far as he dared; any further and he’d fall over the last sleeping man, and that would probably make things worse.
This man exchanged words with the one Ruotsalainen had left watching him; the latter shrugged, and the former closed on Aleksandr, grabbing his arm. The other hand yanked his bag from his shoulder and let it fall. Aleksandr was towed and then shoved out of the dugout; he put up no resistance. He glanced back for a moment and saw the erstwhile watcher already lying back down. He got another shove for that.
Three more of them stood close by outside, laughing as he stumbled and blinked in the afternoon light. Surrounded again. He wrapped his arms around himself and huddled as much as he could on his own, weight on his left foot. They were in the open, this time, and nothing he could do.
A push from behind sent him to hands and knees. He saw one of them drawing a booted foot back to kick and recoiled so quickly as to fall over again. The laughing was even louder now, mixed with jeers. They feigned several more kicks at his ribs and head. He curled like a worm, staring into his knees, his arms wrapped over his head, trying to steady his breathing.
“Ivan, Ivan!”
He looked up, in spite of himself, and saw one of them take out their rifle and point it at him. “Please,” Aleksandr said again, “no,” alternating the Russian please with the Finnish no as the barrel came closer until it nearly touched his forehead. At that point he fell silent. At least this way it wouldn’t hurt for long, he told himself, but when it clicked on an empty chamber he nearly pissed himself.
At the periphery someone else came closer. Maybe his rifle would be loaded, but Aleksandr never found out, because the one who’d not-shot him waved back his companion and dragged him up by his throat. He scrabbled to get his feet beneath him before he choked. The White snarled in his face, then jeered, and he stared back, mouth working without sound, hands fluttering open and closed and please, please -
A shout. The White let him fall. He knelt, gradually looking up as Ruotsalainen elbowed his way through the gathered knot of Whites around Aleksandr, still shouting; in the Finnish (no more of the wolves’ language here) Aleksandr heard Laukkanen several times. Eventually the knot dispersed. Ruotsalainen came to a stop in front of him, staring down. He held dishes of something that steamed in the cold air.
That reminded him of the meal last night, of what to say. “Kiitos.” It meant thank you, didn’t it?
Ruotsalainen blinked at him, then ushered him back into the dugout and gave him a dish of soup and a spoon and then, out of a pocket of his white coat like Heikki had, another piece of bread. While he ate, Ruotsalainen shook that man awake again and they began to argue.
It seemed now as though Laukkanen’s claim on him (I have you now) at least afforded him some protection from the rest. Should he be grateful for that?
He was grateful, at least, to be fed. Another half-a-promise that he wouldn’t die yet - could he let himself believe that much? He believed it too easily, because (That was a pleasant bout) it was easy for him to believe that Laukkanen wanted to enjoy himself for a long time.
***
“I stepped out to get lunch,” Kustaa was telling him, “and when I got back they were on him like - like -” Of course he couldn’t say wolves. “Having sport with him. If I hadn’t gotten back when I did there would’ve been a massacre.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Elias. He didn’t bother whispering. Anyone listening would assume he meant that surely his fellow soldiers had more decency than to shoot a prisoner, that the plurality of massacre was Kustaa being dramatic. Aleksandr hadn’t frenzied out in the forest; Elias figured it would take more than a little teasing to set him off now.
“I found out later one of them was pushing a rifle in his face.”
To some Fenrir that might still qualify as teasing. Many people, Elias understood, did not share their opinion. Kustaa, Kin though he was, appeared to be one of them. He thought of pointing this out and decided there was no need to further Kustaa’s Garou-related anxieties. “Oh? Which one?”
“Nieminen. And that shithead Väinö, I ask him just to watch while I’m out, make sure the Russkie doesn’t take it in his head to cut open Mikael with his own puukko, and what does he do, he hands the kid over when the pricks come knocking.” Funny hearing him say kid, considering Kustaa was only older than Aleksandr by a few months. “I shouldn’t have to tell him not to hand over people to mobs when you’re watching them, it should be a given.”
“Uh huh. Well, thanks for averting massacre.” Here in the camp, among allies if not friends (especially after this debacle), was the wrong place for massacre. “I’ll talk with them.”
Inside the dugout, Aleksandr slept slumped against the wall, one arm wrapped around the battered bag and hat in his lap, the other dropped at his side with the fingers curled upward. His head tilted back and in the fading light, rife with deeper shadow, Elias could make out the stubs - not quite strands - of dark hair poking out from under the scarf, the beginnings of a fringe; Elias again imagined him with a fringe, with an entire thick mane. His mouth had fallen slightly open, and again its shape preoccupied Elias more than it should have. He found himself also unduly preoccupied by the slight twitches of Aleksandr’s eyelids, the corresponding movement of his lashes.
If he hadn’t been a Garou -
Well, if he hadn’t been a Garou, he wouldn’t be here.
Elias crouched beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
Aleksandr jerked upright, out from under his hand. His eyes squeezed further shut before opening. For a moment he regarded Elias with undisguised wariness before ducking his head. Both hands were on his bag now, crowned with the hat.
“I am pleased to inform you it is our turn for the sauna.”
Aleksandr nodded. He looked faintly sick.
“How does your ankle fare?”
A hesitation. “About… about the same.”
“Do you think you might be ill?”
Another hesitation, followed by a minute shake of the head.
It was because of the hesitation that Elias checked, pressing their foreheads together like he remembered his mother and then his aunt doing when Helena and Tapio were sick (even before they Firsted, he and Marita had never required this that he recalled). If there was a fever, this rough measure didn’t pick it up. Even so, Aleksandr looked if possible even more ill when he came away. Nothing to be done about it. “Here we go, then. You can leave the bag.”
Aleksandr came up easily, leaning the bag against the wall with the hat still atop it. Elias guided him out of the dugout and across the camp, waving with his free arm to those he passed. At least Nieminen wasn’t one of them; Elias hadn’t decided yet what to do about him.
The numerous centimeters Aleksandr had on him continued to make it slightly awkward to maneuver, but they were accustomed to one another’s movements by now and reached the field sauna without much difficulty. The main difficulty was that by then Elias’s cock insisted this new period of closeness meant something. He dawdled outside the sauna for a bit, chattering about its construction, but Aleksandr was looking more anxious by the moment so Elias told him to call him if he needed any help and sent him in first. Aleksandr turned his back; once he’d shrugged the coat off his shoulders, Elias looked up at the sky past the trees and thought very hard about the most grotesque fomori he’d ever fought and reviewed the Litany with emphasis on the first bit.
Aleksandr had been alone in there for a while now, and a Soviet plane was churning overhead, oblivious to their camouflaged camp. Hell with it, he thought at last, shedding his coat. If Aleksandr noticed, he’d just wax poetic about the girls in the Lotta Svärd who did such great work for the soldiers, and what they might be hiding under those austere uniforms. He’d mention, very casually, how being cooped up out here could make you feel fourteen again, and as easily excited. It wasn’t as if men getting hard by other men came up very often, did it?
***
He was hard, Aleksandr saw immediately, and once he took this in - taking in, at the same time, the minor detail of the scar higher on Laukkanen’s body, slashed between shoulder and lower collarbone - he turned his head away. Laukkanen might make him look at him later, but Aleksandr saw no reason to preempt him. His own hands folded in his lap, a flimsy shield.
Laukkanen sat down beside him. “You should eat more.”
That struck a brief spark of anger - he’d certainly have liked to have eaten more, if only the White Finns hadn’t cut off their supply lines and attacked the field kitchens. Another one, of righteous indignation: did Laukkanen think he could buy him with soup? These sparks faded quickly. Of course Laukkanen didn’t think that. Laukkanen didn’t need to buy him.
Laukkanen said nothing else for a while, just let out long contented sighs, and Aleksandr wasn’t sure whether this was a mercy or just a torment, delaying the dreaded and the inevitable. He kept staring to the side. No relaxing this time.
Come home. His mother had said this to him the day Aleksandr and Mikhail were to report, last September, not long after their shared birthday. Hugged him and tucked her head into his shoulder and whispered directly into his ear. When she came away she looked embarrassed, maybe to have said it. He wasn’t sure if she’d said the same to Mikhail, when she hugged him in turn. Whatever she’d said, Mikhail had groaned at it.
Come home - and how was he to do that? The ready answer was that he couldn’t. Escape? His limping footprints would be visible in the snow for any White on skis to run him down, and even if more snow happened to fill them up he was sure Laukkanen’s wolf-half would follow his scent.
Was there a cost he could pay for survival? What could he offer?
Anything, was his first thought. Anything, he’d do anything - but Aleksandr knew he couldn’t say so. Laukkanen would be sure to choose the part of anything that he couldn’t make good on, tell him to do the things he couldn’t do if he had the smallest scrap of integrity left. He’d failed, no denying that, but he couldn’t drag others with him.
He had barely anything to bargain with. In nearly all matters where his cooperation might be worth something, he couldn’t cooperate, nonnegotiable. It wasn’t as if he was a trove of military intelligence to start with, but he had to guard even what little he knew. He had to keep in mind that even if he did do anything he could, told everything, betrayed everything, Laukkanen could renege on a whim.
Small sacrifices, for small favors.
It was a small sacrifice, no matter if his gut didn’t seem to think so. After all, Laukkanen could simply force him. And a small favor - something that would barely matter to Laukkanen, since he could hardly be asked to cut short his game. Nothing was certain, but…
Another while, getting his speech in order, waiting for the “discussion” to begin.
“Does your ankle pain you, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
Aleksandr thought that, warmed and unwrapped, the pain there might have grown again. He looked down. Was it swelling? He didn’t look long before Laukkanen was leaning down, drawing his leg over the bench across Laukkanen’s lap. At that point, dangerously close to looking there, he turned away again, concentrated on keeping himself covered and suppressing his winces while Laukkanen prodded his ankle.
“Well,” Laukkanen said at last, taking his hands away, “it shouldn’t matter, in the long run.”
Aleksandr wondered briefly if there would be any repercussions for pulling back his leg. Then Laukkanen took hold of it again, depositing it back on the floor. He shoved his legs together.
A splash and sizzle - the water in the waiting bucket. The enclosure grew humid. Laukkanen said, “Come now. You act as though you have never done this before.”
Not like this.
He had better get it over with, as quick and clean as he could make it. He’d wondered whether to pitch himself in the same key of formality, but decided Laukkanen might not like someone playing the same game as he was. “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“You may ask. Naturally, my response would depend on the favor.”
“Yes. Thank you. Am I a prisoner?”
“Is that your favor? You would like me to answer that question?”
“I… no, I…”
“Oh, there’s no need. Technically, yes, you are a prisoner of war, but I would rather that you thought of yourself as a guest.”
“And there’s… registrations? Records?”
“Oh yes, there is some of that. Why wouldn’t there be? I’ll take care of it tomorrow. I will have to excuse you from being sent to the prisoner-of-war camp, but since the captain is a friend to us that shouldn’t be very difficult - though of course,” and Laukkanen laughed, “I will have to be a little creative as to why you should stay.” There were enough like him, at least in this one way, to make a camp? Who knew? After all, Laukkanen had just made clear that if he had his way Aleksandr would never see it. Maybe later he’d start using it as a threat. “I think that if we play things correctly, you could even send a letter home.”
A letter, at least, if he’d never… He wanted to cling to that possibility but no, it would run entirely counter to the goal. He had to concentrate on that. “I see. Thank you. The favor… I’d like to ask you -” Repeating himself, he knew.
“Go on and ask.”
“Could you not make a record?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said I’m technically a prisoner. Without the technicality? If you could just leave it out, if you could leave me out of the records… or if I have to be in them, could it be another name? I could make one for you if you want.” That couldn’t be too hard. Vladimir Nikolayevich Golubev was the first to come to mind, but Golubev deserved better than that. “I know you have my paper, but most of us threw them away anyway. It wouldn’t be strange if I didn’t have one.” He remembered, belatedly, his other papers.
Laukkanen remembered as well. “Oh, your papers. I’d forgotten. I can return them, if you like… but many of us know you’re an Aleksandr by now. At this point, presenting yourself as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov might be complicated.”
He knew that, now that he thought of it. He’d established it all the way back in the village, with Veikko. And then there was Laukkanen, throwing around the Sergeyevich. And he thought he remembered that Laukkanen had used his full name in his “introductions” with Ruotsalainen. But barring that… and who among the Whites would particularly care if the patronymic and surname were different than they remembered? “That’s fine. There are plenty of Aleksandrs.”
“Would you mind, then, explaining why you’d like to be a different Aleksandr, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?”
His throat locked up on this. To expose himself as surely as if - concentrate, concentrate. Laukkanen might be a degenerate White fascist, might be a monster, but surely there was something human left, or at least not enough of the inhuman that he’d contrive to turn this against Aleksandr out of spite. The worst that could happen was he’d say no.
Of all times to be optimistic. But what else could he do?
“I know I… I haven’t done very well. And my family… I have brothers, a cousin… it’s not their fault. It isn’t their fault I came out this way. Please. Let them think I died when I should have. I don’t want them to be punished for it.” Was Laukkanen actually stifling laughter? He didn’t dare look. So much for optimism. “Please. Would you want your mother to be… to…”
“Hmm. I wonder what you would say if I told you I was an orphan.”
“Please. Please.” He was already facing away from Laukkanen but he shut his eyes anyway, to shut out doubly what he knew was behind him.
“Oh come now, this rigmarole can’t be necessary. Not when you could simply go home with the end of the war. Couldn’t you?”
So he held out the prospect of surviving the war. Aleksandr couldn’t believe it. It was probably just a ploy to get him to cooperate, a superfluous one at that. “I can’t go home. I know I won’t. I know what’s going to happen. What has to happen. You don’t have to pretend you’ll let me live.” And if he did live by some miracle, what then? Desertion, treason. Dead was, in a way, safer. Surely with so many dead and missing in the Finnish forests they couldn’t assume the worst for every one of them.
Laukkanen laughing again, not stifling it as well this time.
“If you do this little thing for me I’ll… I’ll do what I can. I don’t know much of anything, I was just a conscript, but other things… I can do other things for you. And I won’t fight back, whatever you do to me, I promise I won’t.”
“Ha, and what would you say if I told you I liked a bit of a fight?” Aleksandr was spared answering (spared that, at least) when Laukkanen immediately continued, “What sort of things, pray tell? What do you expect me to do to you?”
He was that inhuman. He wanted Aleksandr to say it out loud, to seal what he was reduced to. “Things. I’ll do… things.” He wasn’t articulate to begin with but this was a new low. He remembered the slang, the whispers, but to say any of it still entailed forcing it up through his locked throat. “I could… I could do it the… the French way.”
“The French way?”
“Yes. I could… use my mouth. Or any other way you want. I’ve never done it before but -”
Incredulous now, “You’ve never done what?”
This, on top of everything. No, he’d never done it before. Not even a kiss that was anything but chaste. Even before realizing what he had with the Isayevs, he’d been afraid to do anything that might lead to that. He’d suspected something was wrong with him, in that way, but worse to hear it from him. Worse, still, to think that this would be the first time doing anything like it, to think that Laukkanen and maybe other White Finns would be first and last, so he tried not to think of it as he forged ahead. “Anything like that. Anything. I’m sorry if I’m not very good at it. I’m sorry. But I’ve never. Not with girls, even -”
And now sharp, without a trace of amusement or greasy mockery, “You’ve never done what with girls?”
Aleksandr knew with that question the size of the mistake he’d made. His legs pulled back onto the bench, feet pressed against the edge, blood rushing through his ankle. His arms clamped over his head as they had when the other Whites had kicked at him outside the dugout. Small help, he knew. The air was still steamy; he wasn’t sure how much of his sweat was heat and how much was terror. He wanted to scream, to flail out, to run as fast and far as he could; he kept fighting it down, knowing it wouldn’t help. But what could help? “I’m sorry,” he choked out. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, I’m sorry, please…”
He waited, locked in position, through the long silence, then the rapid footsteps. When he finally peered over his knees, he found himself alone.
Next chapter here.