The Wolves Eat Well This Year, Chapter 6
Title: The Wolves Eat Well This Year
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~8200
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Six: Heroics
Karelian Isthmus, Finland, February 1940
A silver medal on a red ribbon, “For Courage,” pinned to his coat, bumping his Komsomol badge to second in line. His name in the lists in the newspapers, and an entry in the Combat Pages pamphlets. Accolades from Politruk Tarasov, who naturally expected him to get out there and do it all over again. A new bicycle that they’d deliver home, for when he came home; in the meantime there was a certificate to prove it. “If I die,” Mikhail almost wrote home after he was done with the requisite thank-you-I’m-not-worthy, “Sasha can have it. If he dies too, then Fedya and Yulia can share.” He scratched this out. If he died his folks were smart enough to work out distribution on their own. “If it gets there before we do, go ahead and use it while we’re away,” he wrote instead, after jostling himself into a more optimistic frame of mind. Not so optimistic, though, that he didn’t stop himself from promising “We’ll be finished by May Day,” encouraged by a flight of fancy that this sentence alone might keep them in Finland until Stalin’s birthday came around again. He settled for a more nebulous “We’ll be finished soon. All my love, Misha.”
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. He was holding some back for Aleksandr, wherever he was now. Everything was such a mess, especially in the first months of the war, that for all he knew his twin was already buried under the snow of some other battlefield, or even this battlefield. For all he knew he might run into him in the latest batch sent to this front, or have already passed him by obliviously. For all he knew Aleksandr was this moment convalescing in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, minus a limb.
It was sheerest luck (by a certain definition) that Mikhail himself wasn’t now in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, preferably with all his limbs, being fussed over by nurses. Luck was all there was to it. The brave died from the White Finns, and the cowards died from the NKVD if not from bullets in the back, but at least by being brave you stood a chance of doing something useful with the rest of your life. Mikhail would have liked to think that he’d been deliberately brave out there, actually thought out risking his life even more than it was usually risked to help get the army as a whole a bit further along the Isthmus, but even now, trying to sort it out, he didn’t remember much in specific. It had been like any other day in the renewed assault this month, with the boom of artillery and the rattle of machine guns and the screams of the charging men and then the screams of the wounded men, etc. When he thought very hard about it he thought he might remember, as in a dream, the bleeding bulk of Captain Semyonov atop him (he thought Semyonov’s body might actually have been a shield of sorts, caught some more bullets during the trip back that otherwise would’ve drilled into Mikhail’s own back and legs, but if so the captain lived through them and no one was keen to bring it up). He thought he might remember himself bawling encouragement to those around him. He thought he might remember the attack on the machine-gunner some time later, though the actual moment when the gunner had fallen still eluded him. Before they got to Finland he’d imagined being heroic plenty of times - medals, orders, basking in admiration, cheery letters home, jumping the lines at the shops with a flash of his decorations when he himself reached home. Maybe he’d thought of being heroic sometime that day, too, but if he had it’d been swept clean out of his head by the end of that day. When they were congratulating him, embracing him, chattering on about what he was supposed to have done, at first he’d done nothing but blink back, nonplussed. Even now he wasn’t sure if he really remembered doing those things or if this was how he imagined what had to have happened since everyone else agreed on it.
Tarasov said Mikhail was likely command material and talked about a military academy. Most of the other boys and men probably would piss on Tarasov if he was on fire, for the pleasure of getting away with it in the name of comradely aid, but as to Mikhail they tended to share his opinion, had done so since before Tarasov ever took notice of him, and Tarasov’s notice hadn’t changed that. It was heady stuff, felt almost like real pull, and Mikhail tried not to get drunk on it. Look what happened three years ago with all those big military men like Tukhachevsky who’d gone and lost their heads.
Each day, at least, the constant pounding of their artillery and the sound of aircraft overhead helped keep the headiness in check. Mikhail found it hard to imagine that anything was still standing behind the White Finnish lines, but obviously something was there to shoot back.
Out he went again. Thinking optimistically, if he kept living maybe he could gamble his way into bicycles for the whole family.
***
Michigan, United States of America, 1 February 1940
Dear Cousin Elias,
I read in the newspapers about the things you are doing in Finland now. My father heard about it. He wanted to go back and help. Because of everything that is happening, he couldn’t. He is very sorry. I think that over there you are all very brave and strong. People who are not in the family are also very brave and strong. I am sure you are one of the very bravest.
We send our regards and wish you luck.
Yours truly,
Alex
***
Ladoga-Karelia, Finland, February 1940
Elias turned his head to watch Aleksandr, who lay on his back facing the ceiling. One hand had come up out of the blanket and closed on the crumpling material, almost a fist. Elias liked watching his hands; it was in his watching that he noticed little things like how while he wrote and shot (the one time Elias had seen him shoot) with his right hand, he tended to use his left for everything else. His hands were a feature that Elias appreciated out of more than Litany-inappropriate lust; his eyes might be big and his body nearly unmarked and his attitude incongruously submissive, but out of gloves his hands were graceful without being soft, evidently put to frequent use. He’d asked about it once - army training, Aleksandr had said, and months of factory work after he’d left secondary school, before he’d been called up.
He didn’t rave about Soviet power, and if what he said was right being in this Komsomol thing didn’t mean he was particularly fanatical, but Elias still wasn’t privy to whatever seethed in his head. Now he’d shown a little of that, and Elias pounced. Careful, he told himself now. If he came on too strong Aleksandr would just lock it all up again.
Though even if he locked up, he still had ears, so going on wouldn’t be pointless. Elias could set to coaxing him out again later.
“To start with,” he said, “I know you didn’t decide to be here, but someone did send you here. Someone sent hundreds of thousands of men to get mown down, except they didn’t think that would happen did they? They thought they’d flood us away and be in Helsinki before the week was out. Someone set up that puppet show in Terijoki. What did they tell you they were doing it all for?”
Aleksandr answered, eventually. “We - they said we needed more land between the border and Leningrad, and you wouldn’t give it to us even when we offered twice as much in return. They said… they said in Finland you were oppressed, by the fascists and the Whites, and we’d liberate the people. They said they’d shelled one of the villages on the border. Mainila. People died there.”
Elias slipped into Finnish forms of invective. “Perkele, what fucking horseshit!” Around them, people twitched and muttered in the dark. He lowered his voice and went back to Russian. “I’ll have you know we never knocked a single shingle off a single roof your side of the border. Our big guns were too far back, anyway. No, what we saw was shelling from the other side. Maybe some officer got plastered. Or maybe…”
“How do you know? Did you see them yourself?”
“What, did you?”
“No,” said Aleksandr, sounding defiant, “but if neither of us saw it, why should I believe you first?”
Elias wanted to shout for a moment at that, but no, it would be stupid to shake his head at Aleksandr’s perpetual silence and then strike him back down once he did speak. Fairly reasonable question, when he considered, except that he knew the truth. “And why would we do a thing like that, anyway? A stupid thing like that? It’s like a gnome kicking a giant. We’ve, what, four millions? To how many hundred millions? And however we Garou can fight, it’s not as if our human army’s been indulged in the way of tanks and such. We haven’t even got uniforms for everyone - lot of us in the reserves had to bring our own, though at least we know how to kit out. We’re holding out, yes, but it’s still a stupid thing to have bet on.
“And another thing -”
Aleksandr sat up and starting pulling on his gloves.
“What?”
Aleksandr muttered as he got up, “Latrine.”
It might be a dodge, but if so it was a believable one. “I’ll go with you.”
Aleksandr said nothing to that; Elias scrambled to get his gear on and followed him out of the dugout. “And another thing,” he continued in the open air, “We’re much less oppressed than you think. I hear planes were dropping leaflets telling us we’d get the eight-hour day we’ve had for more than twenty years.”
“Once,” said Aleksandr, “before the encirclement, someone threw leaflets at us from the woods.”
“Did you read them?”
“Some people did. They said there were strange letters in them and Politruk Malinovsky laughed at the grammar and said they must think we were all illiterate children.”
“But if you were all illiterate there wouldn’t be any point in leaflets.”
“It’s what he said.”
“And how’s my grammar?”
“It isn’t bad.”
“Good.” He thought of learning Cyrillic, and Kolya demonstrating the letter yat on the slate set out before them. Yat had been a poser for years and he hadn’t seen much point to it when there was a perfectly good e. “Maybe they were using the old alphabet. The Russians outside of Russia still use it.”
“You think they wrote them?”
“The leaflets? Maybe them, or just people who learned it the old way. Like me. I don’t suppose anyone paid much mind to them, then. Pity, but then we’re even there.”
“They put them in their boots.”
They rapidly approached the latrine, now visible in the morning dark. “There’s worse things you could do with them.”
Elias waited at a distance while Aleksandr answered the call of Gaia; he’d realized on the way over that he wouldn’t mind taking a piss himself, but he hung back until Aleksandr started doing up his buttons before saying, as if he’d only just thought of it, “Wait a minute, would you?” Aleksandr waited.
Once they began back to the dugout, Elias started up again. “About not being oppressed. Yes, I suppose not everyone’s the absolute happiest here - who is anywhere, with the Wyrm in the world and all? - but they’re not so unhappy that they’d rather be invaded. Even Toivo and the other Bone Gnawers think it’s…” Horseshit, he almost said again. “Nonsense. Nonsense like Kuusinen’s charade in Terijoki they’re trying to puppet around to the world. Nonsense like that -” fucking prick “- Molotov saying it’s bread they’re dropping on Viipuri and Helsinki. They give us bread like that, we give them drinks to match.”
***
Aleksandr remembered: back in the woods, the arc of a bottle in the air, ending when it smashed against a tank in a gout of flame. The tank had burned for a long time.
“And I tell you,” said Laukkanen, “they had nothing to worry about from us. There was a treaty and everything. We keep our treaties. They want Leningrad out of danger but it’s perfectly acceptable if Viipuri’s in danger, yes? Because we’re so small, who cares what we think? And you know what I think? I think that Leningrad wasn’t in any danger from us then, but if they give us half a chance now it damn well will be.”
Aleksandr buried his hands in his coat pockets and trudged on.
“Oh,” said Laukkanen at last. “Sorry. It’s not anything personal. It’s just…” He muttered something in Finnish. “What do you say to getting breakfast?”
They changed course to the field kitchen, which he’d noticed gave off an astonishingly thin trail of smoke, where the cook ladled them oatmeal and Laukkanen went on to acquire mugs of coffee. In the front room of the house they spooned up the oatmeal and drank the coffee and Aleksandr thought, as he tried not to, about where Laukkanen would be going after this. Why did he try not to? For his own peace of mind? What had he done to deserve that peace?
“About the Silver Fangs,” said Laukkanen, who’d finished quickly. Aleksandr scraped the bottom of his bowl to build up a last spoonful. “Now, in Finland we’re not much for kings and queens either. I’m told there was some talk about getting one in after independence, some German Gleaming Eyer I think, but that fell through after Germany folded. But that’s the human side, and we’re only half human. These days when a human says God says they ought to be king, people laugh at them, but the thing is, for the Silver Fangs that’s true. God hasn’t said so, if he even exists, but Helios and Luna and Falcon and such have, and we ought to pay attention to that.”
Helios and Luna and Falcon - powerful spirits, according to Laukkanen, of a sort Aleksandr had yet to see. So far on their visits to the Umbra he’d only seen the ones lower in the hierarchy, the ones called Jagglings and Gafflings. Above them, according to Laukkanen, stood the Incarna and the Celestines, but so far he had no actual proof of their existence. “Have you ever…?”
Laukkanen tipped his head sideways. “Ever what?”
“Ever seen them?”
“Helios and Falcon and Luna themselves? No, but I don’t need to to know. This was centuries ago, millennia ago, and it’s been passed on ever since. It’s not as though they’ve revised things.”
“Oh.” Aleksandr finished the last of the oatmeal. “Have you ever seen a… an Incarna, or a…?”
“Oh, yes. An avatar of Great Fenris in my Rite of Passage, and of the Snow Queen when our pack was looking for a totem. Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering,” said Aleksandr. It was essentially a lie, and he was sure it showed.
Laukkanen looked as if he was about to say something else, but then someone approached and he stood up, throwing up an arm in salute. Aleksandr stood as well, seeing a Finnish officer in front of them. He thought he’d seen the face somewhere in the camp before, but if so he hadn’t seen it for a while now.
Laukkanen spoke to the officer in Finnish. Aleksandr understood him when he said, “Lieutenant Lind.” Then he said something else.
Lieutenant Lind said something back and looked over at Aleksandr. His face was set, appraising.
Laukkanen turned to him and said, “Would you go back to the dugout?”
Aleksandr walked back by himself; they were still talking as he closed the door behind him.
***
“You’re fond of the prisoner.”
The lieutenant headed Elias’s platoon and took their captain’s borrowing him for translation with fair humor, insofar as he had humor. He had made a quick recovery from his injuries during the raid, and Elias supposed Jokela’s covert attentions had something to do with it.
Elias shrugged. “A lot of the men have taken to him, sir.”
“With you in the lead.” Lind’s face still held no hint as to his opinion on this state of affairs.
Was this something like how Nieminen had felt? “Naturally, sir. Generally easier to take to someone when you know what they’re saying.”
“Hm. How long has he been here, now?” Elias thought back, counted back, but before he could answer Lind continued. “I should think it’s long overdue for him to be sent west.”
This was true enough, and the real reason it hadn’t happened was something to be kept behind the Veil. “Captain Jokela gave permission for him to stay.”
“Then I’ll speak with him about it. Keeping a prisoner on the front lines is risky, especially this unrestrained. He could run.”
“All due respect, sir, I don’t think he’d want to run. Not to a motti. Not when here he has hot food and a good sauna and people aren’t trying to shoot him. And if he tried to go past the mottis, he’d freeze to death if someone didn’t catch him first. And he knows it. Sir.”
“We may not be trying to shoot him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. If the Soviets find us or the motti tries to break out, he could be caught in the crossfire. Especially since he’s lost most of his uniform.”
True enough, too, and Elias couldn’t tell him that Aleksandr was a good bit more resilient than the human average.
“Sergeant Laukkanen,” said Lind, and now he sighed, “I know you’ve taken a liking to the boy, but in that case you have to think about what’s best for him.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
Lind evidently doubted that. But still, he turned and walked across the room to rap sharply on the office door. “Come in,” Jokela called, and he did. Elias wondered what Jokela could say that might satisfy him.
***
While Laukkanen left for the day, Aleksandr reread Tolstoy; he remembered those of the stories he’d read in school, and this helped him figure out and then skim the old-fashioned letters. Eventually, he went to the field kitchen with Salo for lunch. After that he switched to Chekhov for a stretch. Laukkanen came back in the afternoon, mumbled a greeting, and promptly fell asleep.
After sunset, Aleksandr watched as a group of Finns assembled in camp, all of them draped in white and on skis. He saw the lieutenant, Laukkanen (who’d just had so much coffee in lieu of his interrupted sleep that Aleksandr had to wonder how far he could get before he had to stop and piss), Ruotsalainen, Koskinen, and several others he was acquainted with among them. They glided into the woods and vanished between the trees.
Aleksandr spent some crowded time in the little sauna with two other soldiers named Ranta and Kyander. By this point it felt very nearly like being in the banya with comrades. Some exercises, and then dinner, and then sleep.
He woke up when he heard them coming back in. Some shouts, some whoops, soldiers filtering into the dugout. “It won’t be very long now,” Laukkanen muttered when he finally came in, and once again collapsed beside him. Aleksandr lay down again and followed his lead.
***
The next night, after another of the gradually lengthening days of waiting in the snow for someone in the motti to get careless, Elias found the time for another lesson in the Penumbra. As Aleksandr latched the office door, Elias turned to Jokela. “Lieutenant Lind talked to you about him.” Lind had only spoken to him as absolutely necessary during the night’s raid, so the exact content of his time with the captain remained a mystery.
“He did,” said Jokela. “From his point of view, his concerns are entirely justified.”
“But -”
“I know. I said that if he was amenable to staying, then it wouldn’t be a very big risk to let him.” Elias didn’t suppose Lind was satisfied with that.
The first thing he noticed after stepping sideways was that the top of his makeshift flagpole had been snapped off and the flag was nowhere to be seen. Well, spirits did fiddle about. The second thing, immediately afterward, was the howling at a distance, voices he recognized. Ilmari - Jalmari - Marita? And the howls themselves -
He turned to Aleksandr, beside him. Aleksandr heard it, too. Even as his mouth opened to ask, Elias shouted quickly, “Fight over there. Wyrm!” Next moment he’d thought himself into lupus form and started sprinting toward the sound, dodging between the trees, howling a reply. Seconds later, he heard Aleksandr behind him, joining in.
It seemed to take so long to reach the pertinent part of the Penumbra that Elias was almost surprised when they finally arrived, bursting through the trees to an old, beaten trail which made a narrow battlefield. The battle was well underway; one Crinos form lay bleeding heavily a ways down the path next to what looked like a massive pile of shattered white porcelain dripping with black bile (Jalmari had a Gift like that), out of it for now. Ilmari, Elias saw when he got closer. Marita and Jalmari, also in Crinos and wounded, continued to dart around the massive Bane’s strikes. Marita wielded a warhammer - Ilmari had left his at the sept, was it his? The Bane itself was indistinct in the Penumbral gloom. Best as he could make out it seemed to stand on two legs, which weren’t moving, but its “head” was a writhing, featureless grotesquery and its “arms” kept retracting and extending at various points around the top of its nebulous torso, wielding a nasty-looking blade of the same translucent stuff in each. Elias watched Jalmari parry one blade and then land a hit with his klaive; as malleable as that stuff looked, the noise it made was as though Jalmari had tried to drive it into stone.
Elias let out another howl, bulked up to Hispo, and leaped forward.
***
It happened so fast that there almost wasn’t time for Aleksandr to decide otherwise. For a few minutes, still in the form of a wolf, he ran about underfoot; then, with a quick glance at Laukkanen as he worried at the thing’s leg, he took the same form - the dire wolf - and, not understanding the frantic shouts in High Tongue flying back and forth between the other combatants, settled for worrying at the other leg once he caught sight of it and hoping he wasn’t missing something crucial. Even in Hispo, the thing seemed to tower over him, seemed as tall as a pine tree; the legs themselves could be a thinner sort of trunk.
Left! Laukkanen barked in the language of wolves, and Aleksandr barely dodged a swinging blade that scuffed the Penumbral ground. Once back in range, Aleksandr bit down about where the ankle would be and felt like his teeth would break. Then the thing drew its other leg back and kicked Laukkanen back toward the trees; Aleksandr, warned, let go and drew back fast enough that “all” the next kick did was tumble him over once and wind him for a few seconds; he got his breath back in time to dodge the blade. Laukkanen staggered forward, then ran the remaining distance back into the fray.
One of the others in Crinos let out a howl that was partly shriek, and the next moment, before his teeth returned to somewhere like the thing’s ankle, Aleksandr heard the crack as that one shoved a large silver dagger into the thing’s torso; though the thing’s body looked like it might be made of glass, it engulfed the blade and concealed it until it was yanked out again. The thing lurched; Aleksandr dodged, abandoning his just-established grip. The one with the dagger (a klaive?) knocked aside an emerging arm and kept stabbing at that one spot, howling all the while. He had hardly been sedate before but now he was all fire; there was an incredible strength behind the movement of his arms. Aleksandr thought he might even glimpse cracks webbing outward on the glass of the thing’s body.
He barely had time to observe this power before it was gone; the Garou faltered, and in the next instant the thing’s swinging arm knocked him to the ground, landing like a rag doll, the dagger’s hilt torn from his grasp. The Garou twitched where he fell, his movements now as feeble as a leveret’s. The thing’s blade swept high, caught the thin light without flashing, and shot downward; it tore into the Garou’s back as he rolled away, and got another, agonized shriek in return. The Garou with the hammer let out a howl at that and tried to step in the way, but was blocked by a swift repositioning of the other arm. The first arm went up, started down.
Aleksandr jumped and clamped down his jaws on the forearm so hard he was sure he’d heard something snap inside them. It didn’t hurt until a split second later when the thing’s arm jerked to a stop, all momentum ended. Then it began to swing that arm like a shaken pendulum, Aleksandr continuing to bite down and scrabbling with his front paws for a further hold. Another swift movement at the edge of his sight and his side flared up, another burst of pain that seemed to expand all the way to the opposite side of his body, followed by a tremendous chill following the same path. He couldn’t breathe to cry out and if he cried out he’d fall. The thing swung its arm about; his tail clipped a tree branch. He thought he saw his own blood falling, almost flying in the wake of the movement of his body. He could feel himself bleed, and marveled that the blood hadn’t frozen as it left the vein.
Child! Hold the creature as Falcon would, child!
Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, he thought, he believed, he knew, and felt a little more strength in the grip of his jaws.
The thing didn’t stab at him anymore. Instead it tried to swing him against a tree, but it couldn’t get quite far enough. The cries around him now took on a triumphant cast. He glimpsed the other Garou swinging the hammer against the thing’s chest or back, and the very bloody one who had dragged himself away from the fight staggered back up to slam the silver dagger deeper in. The thing’s arm didn’t shift around in its body anymore. It hadn’t done, he thought, since he got hold of it.
So he held on as it began to list, then to topple. A crack, and now he wasn’t sure if it was his teeth breaking or his teeth breaking through. The thing lashed out again as it neared the ground, jarring his hind legs, more flares, but it wasn’t nearly as bad this time. And then it no longer moved; even after the blows coming down from above stopped he held on, thinking still that maybe it was somehow faking.
“Aleksandr?” he heard Laukkanen saying some time later. “Aleksandr, you can let go.”
***
Elias got the story from Jalmari, who propped himself on his elbows and told it with Galliard’s aplomb as Marita called on Gaia to heal him and Ilmari. There had been a pair of Banes, he learned. They’d beaten the first one by simultaneous attack, but Ilmari had taken the brunt and they were in less than ideal shape when the second one found them. The warhammer was indeed Ilmari’s; Marita had taken it with her when she’d started out from the sept, suspecting where she’d end up going (“It’s good work you’re doing out here,” Marita interjected without turning around, “but it’s not as though it leads to a lot of good feeling for the Russians, does it?”). She’d encountered Ilmari and Jalmari on one of the Umbral scouting trips they’d taken to sneaking in while Elias confined himself largely to the Penumbra around camp, and they’d taken the opportunity to track down one of the Banes together.
“You do realize,” said Elias with mock pique, “that I am very disappointed in you, leaving me out.”
“Thought you had your hands full,” said Jalmari. He sounded wrung-out - calling on the Gift of Thor’s strength did that. For an hour or two he’d have a hard time even smashing a glass. It was balance of sorts. “Teaching the cub.”
“I was teaching the cub. He’s not that unruly. Not unruly at all, actually. Didn’t tell him to come along.”
“Don’t suppose you told him not to?”
“Saving my breath. No, really. And if we hadn’t been there to pin it then what would’ve you done?”
“Collected some battle scars, most like,” said Marita, glancing over her shoulder this time. “And Jalmari-rhya might’ve been bisected and we could hardly hope for it to be the right way.”
“Dare I ask the right way?”
“Simple. Crossways instead of down the middle. Plenty of folk can live with no legs and he’s already managed a trueborn with little Liisa. Yet to hear of anyone hobbling along with half a head.”
“I’m here, you know,” said Jalmari.
Marita turned from Ilmari to him. “So what d’you think would’ve happened then, Jalmari-rhya?”
Elias went and fetched Aleksandr, who let go of the Bane’s arm and stumbled over, staying in Hispo. When Elias looked closely his side looked like it was still bleeding sluggishly, but all in all it wasn’t too bad now - his regeneration was working. Elias’s tongue prodded at his own teeth - he’d waited in Hispo, too, for his teeth to unchip after his ride on the Bane’s other arm. Ilmari stuck with Crinos.
Marita took her hands off his chest, got up and pointed. “Stream over there.”
As they walked, Jalmari said, “So that’s the cub.”
“Yeah.”
Jalmari staggered, put his hands out to brace himself against trees, but Elias knew he’d rebuff any offer of help. “You didn’t say he was a Fang.”
“Wasn’t told.”
“Marita? Didn’t you know?”
“No point, Ilmari-rhya said,” said Marita, taking point, bag over her shoulder. “Said they wouldn’t take him, anyhow. He’d grown up clueless under the Reds, probably someone’s bastard, and Ilmari-rhya thought he was a weakling.”
“Huh,” said Elias, “knowing that would’ve saved us all some trouble.”
“Knowing what?”
“The bastard thing,” said Jalmari. “Got to be, ‘cause anyone say the kid’s a weakling after what he did back there and I’ll -”
“Thought the boys knew.”
“Heikki and Veikko? If they ever knew they forgot.”
“Fuck, ‘course a Ragabash would ask. What a fuck-up. I’ll check around again back at the sept.”
Jalmari glanced over at Aleksandr. “You want I should do the Rite of Wounding?”
“Your choice,” said Elias. “You’re the rhya. He hasn’t even done his Rite of Passage yet, unless this counts. Be tough pulling together all the pomp and circumstance out here.”
“I’ve got us drinks,” said Marita. “Meant it for chiminage, but I didn’t promise it. And I can burn down something.”
At this point they reached the stream; Ilmari plunged in through the thin ice. “Go on,” Elias told Aleksandr. “Get off the blood before it gets in your clothes.” Aleksandr waded in; Elias knelt on the bank, stuffed his gloves in his pocket, plunged his hands in through the fractured ice and lapped up the silver-lit water from the makeshift cup, rinsed and spat, wiped his hands on his coat before putting his gloves back on. Further from the bank, Marita coaxed spirits into supporting her fire.
“Aleksandr,” he called, “for your first battle wound, it’s tradition to rub ashes in it. For a proper scar. All right?”
In response, Aleksandr climbed out of the water; Elias stood clear as he shook himself off, and as Marita watched the fire Aleksandr finally returned to homid, sitting on the bank.
“Everything come together right?”
It was surprising how different Aleksandr didn’t look. He’d probably had that fierce look while it was happening, but at this point it was gone. Instead he had much of the same amazed look as he’d had after he first shifted of his own will. “I think so.”
“Get over here,” Marita called.
They got over there and reseated themselves by the fire. “Let’s have a look,” said Jalmari, miming pulling up his shirt. Aleksandr took off the coat first, and once he did Jalmari blurted, “You gave him that awful thing?”
“Didn’t think you’d be too broken up about it,” said Marita.
“I don’t know,” said Elias, “I think it suits him.” He bit his tongue before it could continue with Brings out his eyes. That would really be going too far. Instead, he added laughingly, “Perkele, I’ll be happy to appreciate Hilja and her knits if you won’t,” before explaining the exchange to Aleksandr, and the origin of the sweater.
“Oh,” said Aleksandr, and in halting Finnish, “Thank you and your wife, Jalmari-rhya.”
Jalmari looked at Aleksandr, then at Elias. “Didn’t know he spoke Finnish.”
“He’s picked up a bit.”
He turned back to Aleksandr. “Aw, cub, it’s nothing.”
“Jalmari-rhya says it’s nothing.”
While they spoke, Ilmari splashed out of the stream and Aleksandr hooked his fingers under the hem of the sweater and pulled, taking shirt and undershirt with it. They all looked intact, at least - dedicated clothes could have strange interactions with injuries. As for the injury, it was a ragged line along his right side which had regenerated all the way to closing. Jalmari clicked his tongue at it. “Have to reopen it to do properly.”
Elias translated. “Happens a lot,” he added, “us being as we are. It’s usually not practical to keep it unhealed all the way to the sept unless it’s from silver or something. I had to have mine redone, too. Guaranteed it hurts less than the first time.”
Aleksandr nodded.
“Might as well take it all off,” said Jalmari. “Awkward doing a rite holding your shirt up. This thing’s improvised enough already.”
Elias translated again; Aleksandr nodded and shed the layers while Jalmari unsheathed his puukko and tested the edge. Marita glanced over from where she was carefully extracting ash. “He’s skinnier than you.”
“So he is. Now hold still - shit.” Jalmari returned his puukko to his sheath. “Still tuckered out. ‘ll probably fumble. Can you do it?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Aleksandr held still, his eyes open and staring ahead, as Elias meticulously followed the line of the original wound with the tip of his own puukko. His skin was like milk and Elias thought he saw gooseflesh rise on his arms and torso - the Penumbra here was hardly Helios-kissed as the Mediterranean. That wasn’t the only thing rising- the darker nubs on his chest were stiff, too, as they got with cold, perfectly natural, but even so why was he noticing this?
He knew damn well why.
Jalmari looked now to Aleksandr’s left side, probably to the scar already there. “He get shot?”
“Yeah,” said Elias, wiping off the blade. “That’s how he Firsted. One of our men at his motti. Don’t think it counts, does it?”
“Don’t think so either. Marita?”
“Got it.”
Jalmari took up a handful of ash. He smeared this in turn into the wound, and as he did he began to intone with an abrupt if appropriate solemnity. Even with only the five of them, he pronounced the words of the High Tongue with all due ceremony. Elias translated it equally formally. Jalmari paused when it came to his name. “Aleksandr Novikov,” Elias filled in. That was fitting. A lot of Silver Fangs thought so highly of their families’ noble names that they didn’t see the need for a deed-name as well. Aleksandr was proud of his family if he wasn’t of himself.
Aleksandr sat listening. He’d winced several times during the recutting and when the ash went in, but his face soon stilled into something like his usual expression, though Elias was positive something had changed in it. Marita and Ilmari continued to feed the fire as they listened. Of course they’d all been there when it happened, had at least the general idea, but Jalmari’s rendition was no less impressive.
Finished, he clapped his hands once and turned to Marita, who reached into her bag and produced a bundle wrapped in what looked like an extra sweater. A large bottle emerged from this nest; Marita yanked out the cork with her teeth and passed it to him, followed by a wooden cup. He hefted the bottle high, viewing it critically. “Strong stuff?”
“Very.”
“Big bottle.”
“Spirits can have massive heads for liquor.”
Satisfied with this windfall, Jalmari then turned to Aleksandr, who had just picked up his undershirt. “Hey,” he called, and brought out a piece of his smattering of Russian - a lot of people in the east picked up a smattering, if usually not enough to carry on a complex discussion, and Jalmari was a Galliard. “Have a drink!”
Aleksandr looked at him like a transfixed rabbit before dropping the undershirt, extending his hands and taking up the bottle and cup smeared with Jalmari’s fingerprints marked in a paste of blood and ashes. He poured a short stream into the cup which seemed barely enough to cover its bottom, sipped, and handed it on to Elias. Elias poured himself a good bit more, tossed it back, and shortly after regretted it. “What’s in this? Fire Gafflings? You make off with a Fianna recipe?”
“Spirits can be particular.”
Ilmari next, then Marita, then Jalmari, and another round ensued. It proceeded more slowly, as Jalmari brought out various simple tales while Elias continued to translate. This time, Aleksandr quickly passed the bottle and cup to Elias without taking his share. Then a final round interspersed with more of the same, Aleksandr abstaining again, and then Jalmari recorked the bottle and finished up his last story, a spooker about a pack who’d gone bear-hunting with their Kin and found themselves in pursuit of a specimen with uncanny ties to the Gurahl. Once Elias had repeated the last sentence in Russian, Jalmari dropped into lupus. Elias followed suit, then Ilmari and Marita, rushing about and howling to Luna while Jalmari retired to renew his strength. Aleksandr was last, shifting only when Elias ran up to him and yipped encouragement.
It didn’t approach the nightlong collective mayhem of Elias and his packmates’ celebrations (a joke: to see your way to your first scar, go to a Rite of Wounding and they’ll gladly share the wealth), but with just the five of them they still made a decent job of it. Mad dashing about turned to roughhousing; Jalmari, the adren, ruled the field once he’d recovered, and bravery notwithstanding Aleksandr was still at the bottom, especially given his hesitation to put his all into it, but Elias and his packmates were a decent match for one another. They wrestled and nipped and when their regenerating bodies burnt off their intoxication they switched to homid for more. In homid, too, they continued their sparring, and carried on constantly shifting between forms. Clothes and boots were flung aside on the bank, so as not to be torn by wolf claws; their constant movement interspersed with periodic growth of fur, and for four of them their constant drinking, kept them warm.
At one point, experimenting with tickling with the brush of his tail, Elias’s ears - sharpened as a wolf - were hit by a burst of unfamiliar laughter from above. He looked up; his partner was Aleksandr, in homid, still laughing, and to further idealize the scene Luna’s light gave him an excellent view of Aleksandr’s face while this was happening - eyes shut, mouth open, head flung back, the lines of his neck and bare shoulders. And the sound of it. That sound alone…
Elias rose up, panting, and thrust his tongue out to lap at throat and collarbone. Aleksandr laughed harder, not stopping when Elias took the opportunity to tumble him to the ground.
***
Some time had passed. Tired from exertion in both the fight and the celebration, now they lolled about. Ilmari had retrieved his clothes and pulled them over himself if not on. Marita and Aleksandr were being thorough about it. Jalmari lay sprawled still in lupus, the empty bottle beside him. Elias, in similar disarray in homid, wondered what spirit might accept the bottle itself as chiminage.
“Marita-rhya?” Aleksandr called.
“Yes?”
In Finnish, “How is Veikko?”
“Veikko? Veikko’s doing fine.”
“Thank you.” A silence. “Laukkanen-rhya?”
He looked up to Aleksandr. “There’s no need for that. Call me Elias if you like.”
“Elias-rhya…” Aleksandr looked, now, back to form, though he had obliged. He looked so much the same as usual that Elias might wonder if he had misheard the laughter, pinned it to the wrong person. He put on the sweater; when his head emerged he said, “Hasn’t the captain been waiting for -”
“Perkele!”
Elias leaped to his feet and scurried about gathering his clothes. The others were roused by this, and he explained in a jumble as he tried to distinguish between his and Jalmari’s undershirt, which he eventually determined by holding them up side-by-side. “Lupus,” he called to Aleksandr, who was already fully dressed. “It covers ground faster.”
However fast they covered ground, there was still the need to constantly pause; they were far astray from Elias’s usual pathways, and had to search for their own scent - or rather, for Aleksandr’s scent; one of the gifts Elias had learned gave him no scent unless he willed it, which he hadn’t thought to will at the time - and for their pawprints. They also looked through the Gauntlet from time to time; when they caught something besides expanses of trees echoing those in the Penumbra, they might reckon their direction from there. By the time they reached the severed flagpole and returned to homid Elias was sobered ten times over, with any lingered mists cleared out of the way by his attempts to figure out how to lie about this. They ranged from saying that Aleksandr had finally agreed to help him with what little a teenage conscript could to saying that they’d been having a tryst out in the woods, freezing to each other in amorous poses, and hoping the sheer absurdity of the claim would carry them through on force of laughter.
Jokela was on them immediately when they reappeared in his office; never before had Elias received such a tongue-lashing from someone with their voice so mild and low. The Russian dictionary still stood in “warning” position on the table. Someone had come in eventually, Jokela confirmed. Multiple people at various times, actually. No, he said he’d been catching some sleep, and nobody seemed to have noticed their absence, but they couldn’t always be so lucky, could they -
“Sorry,” Elias whispered back, “we were fighting a Bane.”
Aleksandr glanced over, looking guilty; he’d learned enough Finnish to understand that, and he knew - as did Elias - that they could’ve been back hours before if they hadn’t stayed for the ritual and the miniature revel.
Jokela, too, seemed to pick up on this, and he proceeded to bludgeon Elias with massive amounts of concern and disappointment, which he was less inured to than simple fury. He was reminded of Lieutenant Lind.
But after all, they had helped kill a Bane, so eventually he escaped. As Jokela pointed out, even if the men hadn’t noticed that they’d unaccountably vanished from the room, they might still notice when they unaccountably appeared from it. Hence, another jaunt to the Penumbra followed; Elias looked through at intervals until they found a secluded spot from which they could emerge and merge discreetly with the rhythm of the camp.
That done, they returned to the dugout. Boots and gloves off, and then on their backs under the blankets, Elias’s left side against Aleksandr’s right, Elias’s feet perhaps in the area of Aleksandr’s shins.
“Have a good time?” Elias whispered against his ear, starting to drowse.
A small silence. “Yes. After the…”
“Yes, after that. Is your wound all right?”
“It’s fine.”
“Good. You did very well, you know.”
“Thank you.”
Elias was drowsing ever deeper, soon to slip entirely asleep, when Aleksandr spoke again, in his hesitant way. “Did you think I was crying in the morning because the Silver Fangs wouldn’t have me?”
He had thought that, first thing to come to mind - it wasn’t as if Aleksandr cried like that on other nights before the Silver Fangs came, so it was easy to take it as cause and effect. Who knew what they’d been saying to him while Elias was keeping watch? He figured it could be humiliating, being told you weren’t up to snuff, and at the same time getting a second and third opinion that someone in your family line had most likely been fucking around with a prince, that they weren’t quite as straight-spined and virtuous as previously assumed. “That’s what I guessed. It wasn’t that, I take it?”
“It didn’t… it didn’t make me sad or anything like that.”
He remembered Aleksandr’s fists hanging at his sides. Remembered what Aleksandr had said the morning after, his sharp rejection which could very well not be sour grapes, which had made Elias decide that confrontation was in order. “Would you mind if I asked what made you sad?”
Elias listened to the mingled breathing in the dugout until Aleksandr murmured, flat and regularly paced, “I want to go home.”
The words were so blunt it gave Elias pause in turn. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” he said at last. “The war’s got to end someday. There’s got to be some Garou there that can see to you.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“What, for telling you that? I have nothing to do with it. It’s nothing but facts.”
“For telling me that. If I’d been a Silver Fang, do you think I could still go?”
Elias batted around the possibility that somehow they shared the new moon. “I don’t know. If they’d had you, they might’ve thought it was too risky for you to stay there. Worried about growing up with the right attitude and that kind of thing. I mean, they’re living here now, not there. But there were others who stayed.”
“They said Prince Volkovsky stayed.”
“Well, I suppose they’d know. The Prince Volkovsky they think was your…?”
“Konstantin Anatolyevich Volkovsky. That one.”
“Right. That one. Well, I guess if anyone he might have a better idea how it happened, if he’s still around.”
“He might,” he said in that same flat voice, and Elias doubted Aleksandr actually wanted to know the dirty details of just how the “Ragabash Prince” might have insinuated himself unseen.
“Mind if I ask what home’s like?”
Aleksandr hesitated. He spoke like he wasn’t sure what Elias wanted to hear. “It’s an apartment. Communal. We have a very large room, five square meters each.”
“One room?”
He sounded bemused, and only now a little embarrassed. “Yes. But it’s a large one and we put up curtains. I think the whole apartment belonged to someone rich once, but it was broken up after the revolution. My father says there used to be a chandelier on the ceiling, but they took it out. You can see the hole there.”
Elias made a suitably impressed sound.
“And… and, we share the kitchen, so there’s a schedule for who cooks dinner first. It’s very organized. Mostly grandmother cooks for us, because mother and aunt Taisiya have to work. And… what’s yours like?”
Elias whispered then, for some time, about his village - disproportionately Fenrir Kinfolk - and his aunt and uncle Koskinen, and the time before Helena got married, and the days before his First Change when he’d laid traps and gone hunting with just puukko and rifle, and how he’d economized on bullets afterward. Aleksandr whispered back about streetcars and parades and the lines at the stores. Back and forth until Elias at last whispered, “Sleep well,” and followed his own advice.
Next chapter here.
Fandom: Old World of Darkness (Werewolf: the Apocalypse)
Genre: Drama/Angst/Friendship
Rating: R
Word Count: ~8200
Summary: The year is 1940, and the death toll of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union continues to mount. In the midst of this, a lost cub in the Red Army undergoes his First Change and finds himself at the mercy of Finnish Garou, contending with a destiny he doesn’t want.
Disclaimer: The Old World of Darkness and associated thingamabobbers aren’t mine.
Author’s Notes and Warnings: Contains violence and language, references to rape and torture, internalized homophobia and other values dissonance. On a lighter note, some bizarre but hopefully discreet shout-outs. Please note that the views of these characters certainly don’t always match my own.
Previous chapter here. First chapter here.
Chapter Six: Heroics
Karelian Isthmus, Finland, February 1940
A silver medal on a red ribbon, “For Courage,” pinned to his coat, bumping his Komsomol badge to second in line. His name in the lists in the newspapers, and an entry in the Combat Pages pamphlets. Accolades from Politruk Tarasov, who naturally expected him to get out there and do it all over again. A new bicycle that they’d deliver home, for when he came home; in the meantime there was a certificate to prove it. “If I die,” Mikhail almost wrote home after he was done with the requisite thank-you-I’m-not-worthy, “Sasha can have it. If he dies too, then Fedya and Yulia can share.” He scratched this out. If he died his folks were smart enough to work out distribution on their own. “If it gets there before we do, go ahead and use it while we’re away,” he wrote instead, after jostling himself into a more optimistic frame of mind. Not so optimistic, though, that he didn’t stop himself from promising “We’ll be finished by May Day,” encouraged by a flight of fancy that this sentence alone might keep them in Finland until Stalin’s birthday came around again. He settled for a more nebulous “We’ll be finished soon. All my love, Misha.”
Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. He was holding some back for Aleksandr, wherever he was now. Everything was such a mess, especially in the first months of the war, that for all he knew his twin was already buried under the snow of some other battlefield, or even this battlefield. For all he knew he might run into him in the latest batch sent to this front, or have already passed him by obliviously. For all he knew Aleksandr was this moment convalescing in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, minus a limb.
It was sheerest luck (by a certain definition) that Mikhail himself wasn’t now in some Leningrad or Moscow hospital, preferably with all his limbs, being fussed over by nurses. Luck was all there was to it. The brave died from the White Finns, and the cowards died from the NKVD if not from bullets in the back, but at least by being brave you stood a chance of doing something useful with the rest of your life. Mikhail would have liked to think that he’d been deliberately brave out there, actually thought out risking his life even more than it was usually risked to help get the army as a whole a bit further along the Isthmus, but even now, trying to sort it out, he didn’t remember much in specific. It had been like any other day in the renewed assault this month, with the boom of artillery and the rattle of machine guns and the screams of the charging men and then the screams of the wounded men, etc. When he thought very hard about it he thought he might remember, as in a dream, the bleeding bulk of Captain Semyonov atop him (he thought Semyonov’s body might actually have been a shield of sorts, caught some more bullets during the trip back that otherwise would’ve drilled into Mikhail’s own back and legs, but if so the captain lived through them and no one was keen to bring it up). He thought he might remember himself bawling encouragement to those around him. He thought he might remember the attack on the machine-gunner some time later, though the actual moment when the gunner had fallen still eluded him. Before they got to Finland he’d imagined being heroic plenty of times - medals, orders, basking in admiration, cheery letters home, jumping the lines at the shops with a flash of his decorations when he himself reached home. Maybe he’d thought of being heroic sometime that day, too, but if he had it’d been swept clean out of his head by the end of that day. When they were congratulating him, embracing him, chattering on about what he was supposed to have done, at first he’d done nothing but blink back, nonplussed. Even now he wasn’t sure if he really remembered doing those things or if this was how he imagined what had to have happened since everyone else agreed on it.
Tarasov said Mikhail was likely command material and talked about a military academy. Most of the other boys and men probably would piss on Tarasov if he was on fire, for the pleasure of getting away with it in the name of comradely aid, but as to Mikhail they tended to share his opinion, had done so since before Tarasov ever took notice of him, and Tarasov’s notice hadn’t changed that. It was heady stuff, felt almost like real pull, and Mikhail tried not to get drunk on it. Look what happened three years ago with all those big military men like Tukhachevsky who’d gone and lost their heads.
Each day, at least, the constant pounding of their artillery and the sound of aircraft overhead helped keep the headiness in check. Mikhail found it hard to imagine that anything was still standing behind the White Finnish lines, but obviously something was there to shoot back.
Out he went again. Thinking optimistically, if he kept living maybe he could gamble his way into bicycles for the whole family.
***
Michigan, United States of America, 1 February 1940
Dear Cousin Elias,
I read in the newspapers about the things you are doing in Finland now. My father heard about it. He wanted to go back and help. Because of everything that is happening, he couldn’t. He is very sorry. I think that over there you are all very brave and strong. People who are not in the family are also very brave and strong. I am sure you are one of the very bravest.
We send our regards and wish you luck.
Yours truly,
Alex
***
Ladoga-Karelia, Finland, February 1940
Elias turned his head to watch Aleksandr, who lay on his back facing the ceiling. One hand had come up out of the blanket and closed on the crumpling material, almost a fist. Elias liked watching his hands; it was in his watching that he noticed little things like how while he wrote and shot (the one time Elias had seen him shoot) with his right hand, he tended to use his left for everything else. His hands were a feature that Elias appreciated out of more than Litany-inappropriate lust; his eyes might be big and his body nearly unmarked and his attitude incongruously submissive, but out of gloves his hands were graceful without being soft, evidently put to frequent use. He’d asked about it once - army training, Aleksandr had said, and months of factory work after he’d left secondary school, before he’d been called up.
He didn’t rave about Soviet power, and if what he said was right being in this Komsomol thing didn’t mean he was particularly fanatical, but Elias still wasn’t privy to whatever seethed in his head. Now he’d shown a little of that, and Elias pounced. Careful, he told himself now. If he came on too strong Aleksandr would just lock it all up again.
Though even if he locked up, he still had ears, so going on wouldn’t be pointless. Elias could set to coaxing him out again later.
“To start with,” he said, “I know you didn’t decide to be here, but someone did send you here. Someone sent hundreds of thousands of men to get mown down, except they didn’t think that would happen did they? They thought they’d flood us away and be in Helsinki before the week was out. Someone set up that puppet show in Terijoki. What did they tell you they were doing it all for?”
Aleksandr answered, eventually. “We - they said we needed more land between the border and Leningrad, and you wouldn’t give it to us even when we offered twice as much in return. They said… they said in Finland you were oppressed, by the fascists and the Whites, and we’d liberate the people. They said they’d shelled one of the villages on the border. Mainila. People died there.”
Elias slipped into Finnish forms of invective. “Perkele, what fucking horseshit!” Around them, people twitched and muttered in the dark. He lowered his voice and went back to Russian. “I’ll have you know we never knocked a single shingle off a single roof your side of the border. Our big guns were too far back, anyway. No, what we saw was shelling from the other side. Maybe some officer got plastered. Or maybe…”
“How do you know? Did you see them yourself?”
“What, did you?”
“No,” said Aleksandr, sounding defiant, “but if neither of us saw it, why should I believe you first?”
Elias wanted to shout for a moment at that, but no, it would be stupid to shake his head at Aleksandr’s perpetual silence and then strike him back down once he did speak. Fairly reasonable question, when he considered, except that he knew the truth. “And why would we do a thing like that, anyway? A stupid thing like that? It’s like a gnome kicking a giant. We’ve, what, four millions? To how many hundred millions? And however we Garou can fight, it’s not as if our human army’s been indulged in the way of tanks and such. We haven’t even got uniforms for everyone - lot of us in the reserves had to bring our own, though at least we know how to kit out. We’re holding out, yes, but it’s still a stupid thing to have bet on.
“And another thing -”
Aleksandr sat up and starting pulling on his gloves.
“What?”
Aleksandr muttered as he got up, “Latrine.”
It might be a dodge, but if so it was a believable one. “I’ll go with you.”
Aleksandr said nothing to that; Elias scrambled to get his gear on and followed him out of the dugout. “And another thing,” he continued in the open air, “We’re much less oppressed than you think. I hear planes were dropping leaflets telling us we’d get the eight-hour day we’ve had for more than twenty years.”
“Once,” said Aleksandr, “before the encirclement, someone threw leaflets at us from the woods.”
“Did you read them?”
“Some people did. They said there were strange letters in them and Politruk Malinovsky laughed at the grammar and said they must think we were all illiterate children.”
“But if you were all illiterate there wouldn’t be any point in leaflets.”
“It’s what he said.”
“And how’s my grammar?”
“It isn’t bad.”
“Good.” He thought of learning Cyrillic, and Kolya demonstrating the letter yat on the slate set out before them. Yat had been a poser for years and he hadn’t seen much point to it when there was a perfectly good e. “Maybe they were using the old alphabet. The Russians outside of Russia still use it.”
“You think they wrote them?”
“The leaflets? Maybe them, or just people who learned it the old way. Like me. I don’t suppose anyone paid much mind to them, then. Pity, but then we’re even there.”
“They put them in their boots.”
They rapidly approached the latrine, now visible in the morning dark. “There’s worse things you could do with them.”
Elias waited at a distance while Aleksandr answered the call of Gaia; he’d realized on the way over that he wouldn’t mind taking a piss himself, but he hung back until Aleksandr started doing up his buttons before saying, as if he’d only just thought of it, “Wait a minute, would you?” Aleksandr waited.
Once they began back to the dugout, Elias started up again. “About not being oppressed. Yes, I suppose not everyone’s the absolute happiest here - who is anywhere, with the Wyrm in the world and all? - but they’re not so unhappy that they’d rather be invaded. Even Toivo and the other Bone Gnawers think it’s…” Horseshit, he almost said again. “Nonsense. Nonsense like Kuusinen’s charade in Terijoki they’re trying to puppet around to the world. Nonsense like that -” fucking prick “- Molotov saying it’s bread they’re dropping on Viipuri and Helsinki. They give us bread like that, we give them drinks to match.”
***
Aleksandr remembered: back in the woods, the arc of a bottle in the air, ending when it smashed against a tank in a gout of flame. The tank had burned for a long time.
“And I tell you,” said Laukkanen, “they had nothing to worry about from us. There was a treaty and everything. We keep our treaties. They want Leningrad out of danger but it’s perfectly acceptable if Viipuri’s in danger, yes? Because we’re so small, who cares what we think? And you know what I think? I think that Leningrad wasn’t in any danger from us then, but if they give us half a chance now it damn well will be.”
Aleksandr buried his hands in his coat pockets and trudged on.
“Oh,” said Laukkanen at last. “Sorry. It’s not anything personal. It’s just…” He muttered something in Finnish. “What do you say to getting breakfast?”
They changed course to the field kitchen, which he’d noticed gave off an astonishingly thin trail of smoke, where the cook ladled them oatmeal and Laukkanen went on to acquire mugs of coffee. In the front room of the house they spooned up the oatmeal and drank the coffee and Aleksandr thought, as he tried not to, about where Laukkanen would be going after this. Why did he try not to? For his own peace of mind? What had he done to deserve that peace?
“About the Silver Fangs,” said Laukkanen, who’d finished quickly. Aleksandr scraped the bottom of his bowl to build up a last spoonful. “Now, in Finland we’re not much for kings and queens either. I’m told there was some talk about getting one in after independence, some German Gleaming Eyer I think, but that fell through after Germany folded. But that’s the human side, and we’re only half human. These days when a human says God says they ought to be king, people laugh at them, but the thing is, for the Silver Fangs that’s true. God hasn’t said so, if he even exists, but Helios and Luna and Falcon and such have, and we ought to pay attention to that.”
Helios and Luna and Falcon - powerful spirits, according to Laukkanen, of a sort Aleksandr had yet to see. So far on their visits to the Umbra he’d only seen the ones lower in the hierarchy, the ones called Jagglings and Gafflings. Above them, according to Laukkanen, stood the Incarna and the Celestines, but so far he had no actual proof of their existence. “Have you ever…?”
Laukkanen tipped his head sideways. “Ever what?”
“Ever seen them?”
“Helios and Falcon and Luna themselves? No, but I don’t need to to know. This was centuries ago, millennia ago, and it’s been passed on ever since. It’s not as though they’ve revised things.”
“Oh.” Aleksandr finished the last of the oatmeal. “Have you ever seen a… an Incarna, or a…?”
“Oh, yes. An avatar of Great Fenris in my Rite of Passage, and of the Snow Queen when our pack was looking for a totem. Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering,” said Aleksandr. It was essentially a lie, and he was sure it showed.
Laukkanen looked as if he was about to say something else, but then someone approached and he stood up, throwing up an arm in salute. Aleksandr stood as well, seeing a Finnish officer in front of them. He thought he’d seen the face somewhere in the camp before, but if so he hadn’t seen it for a while now.
Laukkanen spoke to the officer in Finnish. Aleksandr understood him when he said, “Lieutenant Lind.” Then he said something else.
Lieutenant Lind said something back and looked over at Aleksandr. His face was set, appraising.
Laukkanen turned to him and said, “Would you go back to the dugout?”
Aleksandr walked back by himself; they were still talking as he closed the door behind him.
***
“You’re fond of the prisoner.”
The lieutenant headed Elias’s platoon and took their captain’s borrowing him for translation with fair humor, insofar as he had humor. He had made a quick recovery from his injuries during the raid, and Elias supposed Jokela’s covert attentions had something to do with it.
Elias shrugged. “A lot of the men have taken to him, sir.”
“With you in the lead.” Lind’s face still held no hint as to his opinion on this state of affairs.
Was this something like how Nieminen had felt? “Naturally, sir. Generally easier to take to someone when you know what they’re saying.”
“Hm. How long has he been here, now?” Elias thought back, counted back, but before he could answer Lind continued. “I should think it’s long overdue for him to be sent west.”
This was true enough, and the real reason it hadn’t happened was something to be kept behind the Veil. “Captain Jokela gave permission for him to stay.”
“Then I’ll speak with him about it. Keeping a prisoner on the front lines is risky, especially this unrestrained. He could run.”
“All due respect, sir, I don’t think he’d want to run. Not to a motti. Not when here he has hot food and a good sauna and people aren’t trying to shoot him. And if he tried to go past the mottis, he’d freeze to death if someone didn’t catch him first. And he knows it. Sir.”
“We may not be trying to shoot him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. If the Soviets find us or the motti tries to break out, he could be caught in the crossfire. Especially since he’s lost most of his uniform.”
True enough, too, and Elias couldn’t tell him that Aleksandr was a good bit more resilient than the human average.
“Sergeant Laukkanen,” said Lind, and now he sighed, “I know you’ve taken a liking to the boy, but in that case you have to think about what’s best for him.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
Lind evidently doubted that. But still, he turned and walked across the room to rap sharply on the office door. “Come in,” Jokela called, and he did. Elias wondered what Jokela could say that might satisfy him.
***
While Laukkanen left for the day, Aleksandr reread Tolstoy; he remembered those of the stories he’d read in school, and this helped him figure out and then skim the old-fashioned letters. Eventually, he went to the field kitchen with Salo for lunch. After that he switched to Chekhov for a stretch. Laukkanen came back in the afternoon, mumbled a greeting, and promptly fell asleep.
After sunset, Aleksandr watched as a group of Finns assembled in camp, all of them draped in white and on skis. He saw the lieutenant, Laukkanen (who’d just had so much coffee in lieu of his interrupted sleep that Aleksandr had to wonder how far he could get before he had to stop and piss), Ruotsalainen, Koskinen, and several others he was acquainted with among them. They glided into the woods and vanished between the trees.
Aleksandr spent some crowded time in the little sauna with two other soldiers named Ranta and Kyander. By this point it felt very nearly like being in the banya with comrades. Some exercises, and then dinner, and then sleep.
He woke up when he heard them coming back in. Some shouts, some whoops, soldiers filtering into the dugout. “It won’t be very long now,” Laukkanen muttered when he finally came in, and once again collapsed beside him. Aleksandr lay down again and followed his lead.
***
The next night, after another of the gradually lengthening days of waiting in the snow for someone in the motti to get careless, Elias found the time for another lesson in the Penumbra. As Aleksandr latched the office door, Elias turned to Jokela. “Lieutenant Lind talked to you about him.” Lind had only spoken to him as absolutely necessary during the night’s raid, so the exact content of his time with the captain remained a mystery.
“He did,” said Jokela. “From his point of view, his concerns are entirely justified.”
“But -”
“I know. I said that if he was amenable to staying, then it wouldn’t be a very big risk to let him.” Elias didn’t suppose Lind was satisfied with that.
The first thing he noticed after stepping sideways was that the top of his makeshift flagpole had been snapped off and the flag was nowhere to be seen. Well, spirits did fiddle about. The second thing, immediately afterward, was the howling at a distance, voices he recognized. Ilmari - Jalmari - Marita? And the howls themselves -
He turned to Aleksandr, beside him. Aleksandr heard it, too. Even as his mouth opened to ask, Elias shouted quickly, “Fight over there. Wyrm!” Next moment he’d thought himself into lupus form and started sprinting toward the sound, dodging between the trees, howling a reply. Seconds later, he heard Aleksandr behind him, joining in.
It seemed to take so long to reach the pertinent part of the Penumbra that Elias was almost surprised when they finally arrived, bursting through the trees to an old, beaten trail which made a narrow battlefield. The battle was well underway; one Crinos form lay bleeding heavily a ways down the path next to what looked like a massive pile of shattered white porcelain dripping with black bile (Jalmari had a Gift like that), out of it for now. Ilmari, Elias saw when he got closer. Marita and Jalmari, also in Crinos and wounded, continued to dart around the massive Bane’s strikes. Marita wielded a warhammer - Ilmari had left his at the sept, was it his? The Bane itself was indistinct in the Penumbral gloom. Best as he could make out it seemed to stand on two legs, which weren’t moving, but its “head” was a writhing, featureless grotesquery and its “arms” kept retracting and extending at various points around the top of its nebulous torso, wielding a nasty-looking blade of the same translucent stuff in each. Elias watched Jalmari parry one blade and then land a hit with his klaive; as malleable as that stuff looked, the noise it made was as though Jalmari had tried to drive it into stone.
Elias let out another howl, bulked up to Hispo, and leaped forward.
***
It happened so fast that there almost wasn’t time for Aleksandr to decide otherwise. For a few minutes, still in the form of a wolf, he ran about underfoot; then, with a quick glance at Laukkanen as he worried at the thing’s leg, he took the same form - the dire wolf - and, not understanding the frantic shouts in High Tongue flying back and forth between the other combatants, settled for worrying at the other leg once he caught sight of it and hoping he wasn’t missing something crucial. Even in Hispo, the thing seemed to tower over him, seemed as tall as a pine tree; the legs themselves could be a thinner sort of trunk.
Left! Laukkanen barked in the language of wolves, and Aleksandr barely dodged a swinging blade that scuffed the Penumbral ground. Once back in range, Aleksandr bit down about where the ankle would be and felt like his teeth would break. Then the thing drew its other leg back and kicked Laukkanen back toward the trees; Aleksandr, warned, let go and drew back fast enough that “all” the next kick did was tumble him over once and wind him for a few seconds; he got his breath back in time to dodge the blade. Laukkanen staggered forward, then ran the remaining distance back into the fray.
One of the others in Crinos let out a howl that was partly shriek, and the next moment, before his teeth returned to somewhere like the thing’s ankle, Aleksandr heard the crack as that one shoved a large silver dagger into the thing’s torso; though the thing’s body looked like it might be made of glass, it engulfed the blade and concealed it until it was yanked out again. The thing lurched; Aleksandr dodged, abandoning his just-established grip. The one with the dagger (a klaive?) knocked aside an emerging arm and kept stabbing at that one spot, howling all the while. He had hardly been sedate before but now he was all fire; there was an incredible strength behind the movement of his arms. Aleksandr thought he might even glimpse cracks webbing outward on the glass of the thing’s body.
He barely had time to observe this power before it was gone; the Garou faltered, and in the next instant the thing’s swinging arm knocked him to the ground, landing like a rag doll, the dagger’s hilt torn from his grasp. The Garou twitched where he fell, his movements now as feeble as a leveret’s. The thing’s blade swept high, caught the thin light without flashing, and shot downward; it tore into the Garou’s back as he rolled away, and got another, agonized shriek in return. The Garou with the hammer let out a howl at that and tried to step in the way, but was blocked by a swift repositioning of the other arm. The first arm went up, started down.
Aleksandr jumped and clamped down his jaws on the forearm so hard he was sure he’d heard something snap inside them. It didn’t hurt until a split second later when the thing’s arm jerked to a stop, all momentum ended. Then it began to swing that arm like a shaken pendulum, Aleksandr continuing to bite down and scrabbling with his front paws for a further hold. Another swift movement at the edge of his sight and his side flared up, another burst of pain that seemed to expand all the way to the opposite side of his body, followed by a tremendous chill following the same path. He couldn’t breathe to cry out and if he cried out he’d fall. The thing swung its arm about; his tail clipped a tree branch. He thought he saw his own blood falling, almost flying in the wake of the movement of his body. He could feel himself bleed, and marveled that the blood hadn’t frozen as it left the vein.
Child! Hold the creature as Falcon would, child!
Yelizaveta Yuriyevna Kanyukova, he thought, he believed, he knew, and felt a little more strength in the grip of his jaws.
The thing didn’t stab at him anymore. Instead it tried to swing him against a tree, but it couldn’t get quite far enough. The cries around him now took on a triumphant cast. He glimpsed the other Garou swinging the hammer against the thing’s chest or back, and the very bloody one who had dragged himself away from the fight staggered back up to slam the silver dagger deeper in. The thing’s arm didn’t shift around in its body anymore. It hadn’t done, he thought, since he got hold of it.
So he held on as it began to list, then to topple. A crack, and now he wasn’t sure if it was his teeth breaking or his teeth breaking through. The thing lashed out again as it neared the ground, jarring his hind legs, more flares, but it wasn’t nearly as bad this time. And then it no longer moved; even after the blows coming down from above stopped he held on, thinking still that maybe it was somehow faking.
“Aleksandr?” he heard Laukkanen saying some time later. “Aleksandr, you can let go.”
***
Elias got the story from Jalmari, who propped himself on his elbows and told it with Galliard’s aplomb as Marita called on Gaia to heal him and Ilmari. There had been a pair of Banes, he learned. They’d beaten the first one by simultaneous attack, but Ilmari had taken the brunt and they were in less than ideal shape when the second one found them. The warhammer was indeed Ilmari’s; Marita had taken it with her when she’d started out from the sept, suspecting where she’d end up going (“It’s good work you’re doing out here,” Marita interjected without turning around, “but it’s not as though it leads to a lot of good feeling for the Russians, does it?”). She’d encountered Ilmari and Jalmari on one of the Umbral scouting trips they’d taken to sneaking in while Elias confined himself largely to the Penumbra around camp, and they’d taken the opportunity to track down one of the Banes together.
“You do realize,” said Elias with mock pique, “that I am very disappointed in you, leaving me out.”
“Thought you had your hands full,” said Jalmari. He sounded wrung-out - calling on the Gift of Thor’s strength did that. For an hour or two he’d have a hard time even smashing a glass. It was balance of sorts. “Teaching the cub.”
“I was teaching the cub. He’s not that unruly. Not unruly at all, actually. Didn’t tell him to come along.”
“Don’t suppose you told him not to?”
“Saving my breath. No, really. And if we hadn’t been there to pin it then what would’ve you done?”
“Collected some battle scars, most like,” said Marita, glancing over her shoulder this time. “And Jalmari-rhya might’ve been bisected and we could hardly hope for it to be the right way.”
“Dare I ask the right way?”
“Simple. Crossways instead of down the middle. Plenty of folk can live with no legs and he’s already managed a trueborn with little Liisa. Yet to hear of anyone hobbling along with half a head.”
“I’m here, you know,” said Jalmari.
Marita turned from Ilmari to him. “So what d’you think would’ve happened then, Jalmari-rhya?”
Elias went and fetched Aleksandr, who let go of the Bane’s arm and stumbled over, staying in Hispo. When Elias looked closely his side looked like it was still bleeding sluggishly, but all in all it wasn’t too bad now - his regeneration was working. Elias’s tongue prodded at his own teeth - he’d waited in Hispo, too, for his teeth to unchip after his ride on the Bane’s other arm. Ilmari stuck with Crinos.
Marita took her hands off his chest, got up and pointed. “Stream over there.”
As they walked, Jalmari said, “So that’s the cub.”
“Yeah.”
Jalmari staggered, put his hands out to brace himself against trees, but Elias knew he’d rebuff any offer of help. “You didn’t say he was a Fang.”
“Wasn’t told.”
“Marita? Didn’t you know?”
“No point, Ilmari-rhya said,” said Marita, taking point, bag over her shoulder. “Said they wouldn’t take him, anyhow. He’d grown up clueless under the Reds, probably someone’s bastard, and Ilmari-rhya thought he was a weakling.”
“Huh,” said Elias, “knowing that would’ve saved us all some trouble.”
“Knowing what?”
“The bastard thing,” said Jalmari. “Got to be, ‘cause anyone say the kid’s a weakling after what he did back there and I’ll -”
“Thought the boys knew.”
“Heikki and Veikko? If they ever knew they forgot.”
“Fuck, ‘course a Ragabash would ask. What a fuck-up. I’ll check around again back at the sept.”
Jalmari glanced over at Aleksandr. “You want I should do the Rite of Wounding?”
“Your choice,” said Elias. “You’re the rhya. He hasn’t even done his Rite of Passage yet, unless this counts. Be tough pulling together all the pomp and circumstance out here.”
“I’ve got us drinks,” said Marita. “Meant it for chiminage, but I didn’t promise it. And I can burn down something.”
At this point they reached the stream; Ilmari plunged in through the thin ice. “Go on,” Elias told Aleksandr. “Get off the blood before it gets in your clothes.” Aleksandr waded in; Elias knelt on the bank, stuffed his gloves in his pocket, plunged his hands in through the fractured ice and lapped up the silver-lit water from the makeshift cup, rinsed and spat, wiped his hands on his coat before putting his gloves back on. Further from the bank, Marita coaxed spirits into supporting her fire.
“Aleksandr,” he called, “for your first battle wound, it’s tradition to rub ashes in it. For a proper scar. All right?”
In response, Aleksandr climbed out of the water; Elias stood clear as he shook himself off, and as Marita watched the fire Aleksandr finally returned to homid, sitting on the bank.
“Everything come together right?”
It was surprising how different Aleksandr didn’t look. He’d probably had that fierce look while it was happening, but at this point it was gone. Instead he had much of the same amazed look as he’d had after he first shifted of his own will. “I think so.”
“Get over here,” Marita called.
They got over there and reseated themselves by the fire. “Let’s have a look,” said Jalmari, miming pulling up his shirt. Aleksandr took off the coat first, and once he did Jalmari blurted, “You gave him that awful thing?”
“Didn’t think you’d be too broken up about it,” said Marita.
“I don’t know,” said Elias, “I think it suits him.” He bit his tongue before it could continue with Brings out his eyes. That would really be going too far. Instead, he added laughingly, “Perkele, I’ll be happy to appreciate Hilja and her knits if you won’t,” before explaining the exchange to Aleksandr, and the origin of the sweater.
“Oh,” said Aleksandr, and in halting Finnish, “Thank you and your wife, Jalmari-rhya.”
Jalmari looked at Aleksandr, then at Elias. “Didn’t know he spoke Finnish.”
“He’s picked up a bit.”
He turned back to Aleksandr. “Aw, cub, it’s nothing.”
“Jalmari-rhya says it’s nothing.”
While they spoke, Ilmari splashed out of the stream and Aleksandr hooked his fingers under the hem of the sweater and pulled, taking shirt and undershirt with it. They all looked intact, at least - dedicated clothes could have strange interactions with injuries. As for the injury, it was a ragged line along his right side which had regenerated all the way to closing. Jalmari clicked his tongue at it. “Have to reopen it to do properly.”
Elias translated. “Happens a lot,” he added, “us being as we are. It’s usually not practical to keep it unhealed all the way to the sept unless it’s from silver or something. I had to have mine redone, too. Guaranteed it hurts less than the first time.”
Aleksandr nodded.
“Might as well take it all off,” said Jalmari. “Awkward doing a rite holding your shirt up. This thing’s improvised enough already.”
Elias translated again; Aleksandr nodded and shed the layers while Jalmari unsheathed his puukko and tested the edge. Marita glanced over from where she was carefully extracting ash. “He’s skinnier than you.”
“So he is. Now hold still - shit.” Jalmari returned his puukko to his sheath. “Still tuckered out. ‘ll probably fumble. Can you do it?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Aleksandr held still, his eyes open and staring ahead, as Elias meticulously followed the line of the original wound with the tip of his own puukko. His skin was like milk and Elias thought he saw gooseflesh rise on his arms and torso - the Penumbra here was hardly Helios-kissed as the Mediterranean. That wasn’t the only thing rising- the darker nubs on his chest were stiff, too, as they got with cold, perfectly natural, but even so why was he noticing this?
He knew damn well why.
Jalmari looked now to Aleksandr’s left side, probably to the scar already there. “He get shot?”
“Yeah,” said Elias, wiping off the blade. “That’s how he Firsted. One of our men at his motti. Don’t think it counts, does it?”
“Don’t think so either. Marita?”
“Got it.”
Jalmari took up a handful of ash. He smeared this in turn into the wound, and as he did he began to intone with an abrupt if appropriate solemnity. Even with only the five of them, he pronounced the words of the High Tongue with all due ceremony. Elias translated it equally formally. Jalmari paused when it came to his name. “Aleksandr Novikov,” Elias filled in. That was fitting. A lot of Silver Fangs thought so highly of their families’ noble names that they didn’t see the need for a deed-name as well. Aleksandr was proud of his family if he wasn’t of himself.
Aleksandr sat listening. He’d winced several times during the recutting and when the ash went in, but his face soon stilled into something like his usual expression, though Elias was positive something had changed in it. Marita and Ilmari continued to feed the fire as they listened. Of course they’d all been there when it happened, had at least the general idea, but Jalmari’s rendition was no less impressive.
Finished, he clapped his hands once and turned to Marita, who reached into her bag and produced a bundle wrapped in what looked like an extra sweater. A large bottle emerged from this nest; Marita yanked out the cork with her teeth and passed it to him, followed by a wooden cup. He hefted the bottle high, viewing it critically. “Strong stuff?”
“Very.”
“Big bottle.”
“Spirits can have massive heads for liquor.”
Satisfied with this windfall, Jalmari then turned to Aleksandr, who had just picked up his undershirt. “Hey,” he called, and brought out a piece of his smattering of Russian - a lot of people in the east picked up a smattering, if usually not enough to carry on a complex discussion, and Jalmari was a Galliard. “Have a drink!”
Aleksandr looked at him like a transfixed rabbit before dropping the undershirt, extending his hands and taking up the bottle and cup smeared with Jalmari’s fingerprints marked in a paste of blood and ashes. He poured a short stream into the cup which seemed barely enough to cover its bottom, sipped, and handed it on to Elias. Elias poured himself a good bit more, tossed it back, and shortly after regretted it. “What’s in this? Fire Gafflings? You make off with a Fianna recipe?”
“Spirits can be particular.”
Ilmari next, then Marita, then Jalmari, and another round ensued. It proceeded more slowly, as Jalmari brought out various simple tales while Elias continued to translate. This time, Aleksandr quickly passed the bottle and cup to Elias without taking his share. Then a final round interspersed with more of the same, Aleksandr abstaining again, and then Jalmari recorked the bottle and finished up his last story, a spooker about a pack who’d gone bear-hunting with their Kin and found themselves in pursuit of a specimen with uncanny ties to the Gurahl. Once Elias had repeated the last sentence in Russian, Jalmari dropped into lupus. Elias followed suit, then Ilmari and Marita, rushing about and howling to Luna while Jalmari retired to renew his strength. Aleksandr was last, shifting only when Elias ran up to him and yipped encouragement.
It didn’t approach the nightlong collective mayhem of Elias and his packmates’ celebrations (a joke: to see your way to your first scar, go to a Rite of Wounding and they’ll gladly share the wealth), but with just the five of them they still made a decent job of it. Mad dashing about turned to roughhousing; Jalmari, the adren, ruled the field once he’d recovered, and bravery notwithstanding Aleksandr was still at the bottom, especially given his hesitation to put his all into it, but Elias and his packmates were a decent match for one another. They wrestled and nipped and when their regenerating bodies burnt off their intoxication they switched to homid for more. In homid, too, they continued their sparring, and carried on constantly shifting between forms. Clothes and boots were flung aside on the bank, so as not to be torn by wolf claws; their constant movement interspersed with periodic growth of fur, and for four of them their constant drinking, kept them warm.
At one point, experimenting with tickling with the brush of his tail, Elias’s ears - sharpened as a wolf - were hit by a burst of unfamiliar laughter from above. He looked up; his partner was Aleksandr, in homid, still laughing, and to further idealize the scene Luna’s light gave him an excellent view of Aleksandr’s face while this was happening - eyes shut, mouth open, head flung back, the lines of his neck and bare shoulders. And the sound of it. That sound alone…
Elias rose up, panting, and thrust his tongue out to lap at throat and collarbone. Aleksandr laughed harder, not stopping when Elias took the opportunity to tumble him to the ground.
***
Some time had passed. Tired from exertion in both the fight and the celebration, now they lolled about. Ilmari had retrieved his clothes and pulled them over himself if not on. Marita and Aleksandr were being thorough about it. Jalmari lay sprawled still in lupus, the empty bottle beside him. Elias, in similar disarray in homid, wondered what spirit might accept the bottle itself as chiminage.
“Marita-rhya?” Aleksandr called.
“Yes?”
In Finnish, “How is Veikko?”
“Veikko? Veikko’s doing fine.”
“Thank you.” A silence. “Laukkanen-rhya?”
He looked up to Aleksandr. “There’s no need for that. Call me Elias if you like.”
“Elias-rhya…” Aleksandr looked, now, back to form, though he had obliged. He looked so much the same as usual that Elias might wonder if he had misheard the laughter, pinned it to the wrong person. He put on the sweater; when his head emerged he said, “Hasn’t the captain been waiting for -”
“Perkele!”
Elias leaped to his feet and scurried about gathering his clothes. The others were roused by this, and he explained in a jumble as he tried to distinguish between his and Jalmari’s undershirt, which he eventually determined by holding them up side-by-side. “Lupus,” he called to Aleksandr, who was already fully dressed. “It covers ground faster.”
However fast they covered ground, there was still the need to constantly pause; they were far astray from Elias’s usual pathways, and had to search for their own scent - or rather, for Aleksandr’s scent; one of the gifts Elias had learned gave him no scent unless he willed it, which he hadn’t thought to will at the time - and for their pawprints. They also looked through the Gauntlet from time to time; when they caught something besides expanses of trees echoing those in the Penumbra, they might reckon their direction from there. By the time they reached the severed flagpole and returned to homid Elias was sobered ten times over, with any lingered mists cleared out of the way by his attempts to figure out how to lie about this. They ranged from saying that Aleksandr had finally agreed to help him with what little a teenage conscript could to saying that they’d been having a tryst out in the woods, freezing to each other in amorous poses, and hoping the sheer absurdity of the claim would carry them through on force of laughter.
Jokela was on them immediately when they reappeared in his office; never before had Elias received such a tongue-lashing from someone with their voice so mild and low. The Russian dictionary still stood in “warning” position on the table. Someone had come in eventually, Jokela confirmed. Multiple people at various times, actually. No, he said he’d been catching some sleep, and nobody seemed to have noticed their absence, but they couldn’t always be so lucky, could they -
“Sorry,” Elias whispered back, “we were fighting a Bane.”
Aleksandr glanced over, looking guilty; he’d learned enough Finnish to understand that, and he knew - as did Elias - that they could’ve been back hours before if they hadn’t stayed for the ritual and the miniature revel.
Jokela, too, seemed to pick up on this, and he proceeded to bludgeon Elias with massive amounts of concern and disappointment, which he was less inured to than simple fury. He was reminded of Lieutenant Lind.
But after all, they had helped kill a Bane, so eventually he escaped. As Jokela pointed out, even if the men hadn’t noticed that they’d unaccountably vanished from the room, they might still notice when they unaccountably appeared from it. Hence, another jaunt to the Penumbra followed; Elias looked through at intervals until they found a secluded spot from which they could emerge and merge discreetly with the rhythm of the camp.
That done, they returned to the dugout. Boots and gloves off, and then on their backs under the blankets, Elias’s left side against Aleksandr’s right, Elias’s feet perhaps in the area of Aleksandr’s shins.
“Have a good time?” Elias whispered against his ear, starting to drowse.
A small silence. “Yes. After the…”
“Yes, after that. Is your wound all right?”
“It’s fine.”
“Good. You did very well, you know.”
“Thank you.”
Elias was drowsing ever deeper, soon to slip entirely asleep, when Aleksandr spoke again, in his hesitant way. “Did you think I was crying in the morning because the Silver Fangs wouldn’t have me?”
He had thought that, first thing to come to mind - it wasn’t as if Aleksandr cried like that on other nights before the Silver Fangs came, so it was easy to take it as cause and effect. Who knew what they’d been saying to him while Elias was keeping watch? He figured it could be humiliating, being told you weren’t up to snuff, and at the same time getting a second and third opinion that someone in your family line had most likely been fucking around with a prince, that they weren’t quite as straight-spined and virtuous as previously assumed. “That’s what I guessed. It wasn’t that, I take it?”
“It didn’t… it didn’t make me sad or anything like that.”
He remembered Aleksandr’s fists hanging at his sides. Remembered what Aleksandr had said the morning after, his sharp rejection which could very well not be sour grapes, which had made Elias decide that confrontation was in order. “Would you mind if I asked what made you sad?”
Elias listened to the mingled breathing in the dugout until Aleksandr murmured, flat and regularly paced, “I want to go home.”
The words were so blunt it gave Elias pause in turn. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” he said at last. “The war’s got to end someday. There’s got to be some Garou there that can see to you.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“What, for telling you that? I have nothing to do with it. It’s nothing but facts.”
“For telling me that. If I’d been a Silver Fang, do you think I could still go?”
Elias batted around the possibility that somehow they shared the new moon. “I don’t know. If they’d had you, they might’ve thought it was too risky for you to stay there. Worried about growing up with the right attitude and that kind of thing. I mean, they’re living here now, not there. But there were others who stayed.”
“They said Prince Volkovsky stayed.”
“Well, I suppose they’d know. The Prince Volkovsky they think was your…?”
“Konstantin Anatolyevich Volkovsky. That one.”
“Right. That one. Well, I guess if anyone he might have a better idea how it happened, if he’s still around.”
“He might,” he said in that same flat voice, and Elias doubted Aleksandr actually wanted to know the dirty details of just how the “Ragabash Prince” might have insinuated himself unseen.
“Mind if I ask what home’s like?”
Aleksandr hesitated. He spoke like he wasn’t sure what Elias wanted to hear. “It’s an apartment. Communal. We have a very large room, five square meters each.”
“One room?”
He sounded bemused, and only now a little embarrassed. “Yes. But it’s a large one and we put up curtains. I think the whole apartment belonged to someone rich once, but it was broken up after the revolution. My father says there used to be a chandelier on the ceiling, but they took it out. You can see the hole there.”
Elias made a suitably impressed sound.
“And… and, we share the kitchen, so there’s a schedule for who cooks dinner first. It’s very organized. Mostly grandmother cooks for us, because mother and aunt Taisiya have to work. And… what’s yours like?”
Elias whispered then, for some time, about his village - disproportionately Fenrir Kinfolk - and his aunt and uncle Koskinen, and the time before Helena got married, and the days before his First Change when he’d laid traps and gone hunting with just puukko and rifle, and how he’d economized on bullets afterward. Aleksandr whispered back about streetcars and parades and the lines at the stores. Back and forth until Elias at last whispered, “Sleep well,” and followed his own advice.
Next chapter here.