There are occasions when Illya has to remind himself that he is human, too. He is more than steady hands and desperate teeth and wild eyes. He scares himself with his inhumanity. There was a time before, of course, before his Special Forces education, when he was so keenly aware of his humanity that it haunted his every step. It was a freedom and a burden, and it was hunted out of him, the awareness of himself as someone other than a murderer. The awareness of his body as something more than a tool. It is a terrible thing to forget. When he remembers, when he shakes off the haze of inhumanity, he is met with shame. He is not proud of the weapon he has become.
But he must remember. He must.
***
The evening has settled heavily across the hotel room. Across the room, Gaby cradles the phone to her ear, talking soft and sharp in the golden light. At the table, Illya sets up his chessboard. He keeps his movements slow, gentle, setting each piece down so that it won’t click against the board. He watches Gaby out of the corner of his eye. She has set down the phone and is pouring two glasses of something alcoholic.
He doesn’t understand her. Since they met he has felt her eyes flickering over him, little stolen glances, not in appraisal but in calculation, not like she wants him but like she can see through him, see past his careful exterior to the frightened animal he is underneath. He has secrets — they all do. It is not something that can be escaped in their line of work. But Illya’s secrets are different, dangerous. He sometimes wonders just how much she has figured out. If he is still safe with her. If he ever was.
He feels her eyes on him again as she saunters over to the couch. She knocks back one glass, cuts her eyes over to him like a challenge. “Drink?” she offers.
“No, thank you,” mutters Illya, dropping his eyes back to the chessboard. In his periphery, Gaby knocks back the other glass. She sprawls on the ouch adjacent to him. The pose, the empty glasses, remind Illya of someone else, long ago, and he feels the cold hands of memory trail down his spine.
“Would you like bigger glass?” He keeps his tone even and dry.
“I will finish this bottle,” says Gaby. “The only question is, are you going to help me or not?” Her eyes catch on his and he forces himself to look down again. He is afraid of what she will see.
“No. Thank you.”
She finishes another glass. This is beginning to feel dangerous. Illya does not like alcohol, nor does he like the way she has draped herself across the couch, just looking at him.
“Is this fun?” she asks, jutting her chin towards the chessboard.
No, but it keeps me sane. Illya blinks once, harder than he needs to, and does not answer.
Gaby huffs and pushes herself off of the couch. Her footsteps are light as she disappears into the bedroom, but their impact sounds to Illya as harsh as breaking glass. His hands shake. He curses himself as he knocks over a piece.
And into the silence, there is music. Gaby has put a record on. It is slow, smoky, rock n’ roll. Illya stiffens. It is not the song, their song, his and Alyosha’s from so long ago, but the rhythm is close enough. And Illya is too raw, every inch of him covered in exposed nerves, too human. And the sound of the music overwhelms him, and for one devastating second his body betrays him, calling out with every cell to get up and move.
He wants to dance again.
“Illya!” calls Gaby. She is swaying to the beat, effortless in the lamplight and at least slightly drunk. “Come and dance with me!”
He sighs. “No. Thank. You.”
“Come on!”
He watches over his shoulder as she dances, her hair tossed all about her face. Oh, how he wants. But everything is different, now. He doesn’t know if he could dance again, even if he tried. “I cannot.”
“I will teach you!”
“I know how,” he huffs. “I do not want to.”
“Come on,” she says, her voice drawn out into what is almost a whine. She leans over the back of his chair, her arms braced on his shoulders, her mouth close to his ear. The music is still playing. “Dance with me.”
He wants to dance, but. He cannot. He breathes in once, too shallow, and his shaking fingers knock over a white pawn.
“Illya?” she says. “What’s wrong?”
And in this moment, he is painfully human. It is all too close. What is wrong? I want to dance, and I want to love, and I want to stop hurting people. I want to go back in time. I want it all to stop. I want, I want, I want.
And she is looking at him like she sees him, and it has been so long since last he cried, he has forgotten how long, but there are tears pricking at his lash line now, and he wants, oh he wants to be vulnerable. Just this once. And even though she is swaying drunk, a time bomb, an enigma, he trusts her. He trusts her.
He exhales, slowly, listening to his breath shake in the air. And he tells her everything.
***
Alexey Piotrevitch Moroshkin lived in the apartment that would have been across the hall from Illya’s had it not been one floor up. The neighborhood knew him as Alexey Piotrevitch, because he was not Alexey Sergeyevitch who lived on the ground floor. Illya, an awkward creature in those days and far too affectionate with his classmates, knew him as Alyosha. He was sixteen at the same time that Illya was sixteen, and he was rebellious and cool. He was one of the few people who ever wanted to listen to Illya. That was what mattered most.
Alyosha was tall, but not as tall as Illya. He was strong and lean and all his proportions made sense, as though he was a figure from a propaganda poster, the ideal of the male form. He reminded Illya of an oak tree. He was solid and he was comforting, with his dark hair, dark eyes.
***
It was a warm day in late spring, and Illya’s heart was racing. His teacher had given his class the afternoon off because of the lovely weather. Illya was still unused to rebellion, to breaking the rules in any way. He never wanted to feel the rotting terror of discipline again. His father — no. This was a day to enjoy. He rolled his uniform sleeves to the elbow and closed his eyes into the sun on his walk home.
Ahead of him, the road shimmered into haze. He could just barely see the indistinct forms of a group of boys from his class, Alyosha among them. They never walked home together. Illya wasn’t yet sure why. Still, he knew that it was important they never be seen together outside of class. If they were seen together, these reasons for their strangeness around each other would become abundantly clear. It wasn’t because of Alyosha. It was never because of Alyosha. It was because of Illya, and the way he stood out, because of his size, and his reputation, and because of his fear of himself. Because Alyosha wasn’t like his other classmates. He was different, to Illya at least, and so around him, Illya never knew how to act.
The sun slid off his bare forearms as he stepped into the building. It was always cool and dark in the foyer of their apartment building — a blessing on hot days like this one and a curse in the depths of winter. It was because of the height, Illya supposed. The foyer was twice the height of the other halls in the building, with bare patches along the walls where the gilt had been ripped off. Every inch of the hall was infused with gloom.
It was mostly war widows who lived here, with their mothers and daughters, generations of women left to stagnate in their grief and wither down their pensions. Illya’s mother hated it. But no one noticed her string of gentlemen callers and no one reported her black-market Italian wine under the sink. So they stayed in the silence and the shadows, and Illya thought of the day at the end of that summer when he would leave for his training with the Special Forces. And he stole little moments of beauty whenever he could, to brighten the hall a little. And they were okay.
He was surprised to find the interior of his apartment as dark as the foyer, and then not surprised at all. The drapes were shut tight. In the kitchen, his mother lay sprawled on the floor, a dark, ribbon-like shape in the quiet of the kitchen. Her hair was left down, and it spread across the tile like an imitation of a sunray. She was breathing, and that was all.
So he shut the bottles in the cabinet, not looking at them, staring at his hands or the floor. It was nearly automatic. His eyes burned. He gathered his mother up into his arms and even though he was only sixteen he was tall and strong and his shoulders were broad and she weighed nothing, nothing at all. He poured her into their worn-out armchair and put his schoolbooks down next to her and then he rushed out of the apartment and into the communal bathroom on their floor and retched until he could see again.
And then he fled upstairs to the boy he knew would be there.
***
Alyosha’s kitchen was just the same as Illya’s. Of course. He greeted Illya with a little smile and said, “Illyusha! Come in, I have something for you.” Illya did not blush at this. It was the same affection as it had always been.
“What do you have?” he asked, stepping into the kitchen. It was as warm as the street outside, the window white with brilliant sun.
Alyosha stepped past him in the small space, reaching into a cabinet. From the very back he extracted a large cardstock folder. He grinned at Illya over his shoulder. “A surprise. Sit down, I’ll show you.”
Illya did not sit down. He leaned against the counter and waited for Alyosha to show him.
Alyosha set the folder on the counter. He knelt, reaching under the pantry. Illya watched the curve of his back extend as he reached into the small space. He wriggled out, his hair dusty, with his arms full of something dark and heavy. Illya caught a glimpse of metal, and his throat filled with anticipation as Alyosha placed the object on the counter beside the folder.
A record player.
“Alyosha,” said Illya. “Where did you get that?” All he got in response was a grin.
From the folder, Alyosha produced a record. Burned white into it was the ghostly image of a skeletal hand.
“Ребра,” said Alyosha. Ribs.
Illya understood. He had heard of black-market records before, made from abandoned X-rays that the hospitals threw out. It didn’t surprise him that Alyosha had one. He was mysterious, well-connected, intense. Sometimes he spoke only with his eyes. These were the times that Illya did not understand him, the times that Illya feared to understand him. Alyosha was a rebel, through and through, and this record fit right into his air of mystery. Illya wondered what he had had to do to get it.
“Here,” said Alyosha. “Sit. I’ll put the record on.” He gestured to a small chair tucked between the pantry and the window. Illya did not move. His heart was racing for reasons he didn’t yet understand. Alyosha stepped closer. He put a careful hand on Illya’s hip and pushed. And the air left Illya’s lungs, all in one painful rush, like how a drift of snow will collapse a brittle roof, sudden and silent. He blushed and scrambled into the chair behind him.
He sat with his legs tucked under him, almost painfully cramped. He had been too big for secrecy since he was twelve; his limbs too long, for he had not yet grown into them, and his golden hair always mussed and straggling a little too far past the proper length. He looked the part of an awkward creature and he felt like one, too, but he wasn’t. He made sure of it. He placed his limbs with the care and grace of a panther, of a dancer, of the dangerous man he would become. He hid himself well in the hollow of adolescence. Those who looked saw only his awkwardness, his lanky almost-handsomeness, and forgot about the sins of his father. It was the lesser evil by far. It was the lesser shame.
Shame. Oh, Illya understood shame, intimately and viciously. It was like the pollen from the oaks that, in spring, covered his childhood home. So beautiful, though it shouldn’t be, the streets dyed yellow as uranium. It got in everything.
Illya told himself, Stop thinking.
On the counter lay the dilapidated record player. Illya watched as Alyosha laid the X-ray carefully onto it and lowered the needle. “It’s American,” said Alyosha. “Rock n’ roll. We can listen and then we can dance.” His hands were steady and his eyes, holding Illya’s, were deep and serious.
In the first few seconds of static, Alyosha stepped forward, his knees brushing Illya’s, his hands ghosting over Illya’s too-broad shoulders. Illya tilted his head back to stare into Alyosha’s eyes. This was strange. He was not used to looking up. Not like this.
Alyosha reached over Illya, to the window. He twitched the drapes closed and the room fell into darkness as the record began to play.
Someone singing, a sweet low voice, and a soulful guitar. Alyosha stood in front of Illya with his eyes just barely closed. His hips moved in little jumps and his mouth formed around the sound, like he wanted to sing, wanted to dance, but he didn’t know the words. He should have looked stupid. He didn’t. He looked like a revelation, like a man in love. Illya, wrapped in sound, carefully folded himself off the chair and stood. He was so close to Alyosha that he could see the faint shadows that Alyosha’s eyelashes cast on his cheek.
He put his hands on Alyosha’s waist and watched as his eyes flew open. His hands tensed. Please, let this be what Alyosha had wanted. Let there be no more shame. He waited to be pushed away, but Alyosha just smiled — smiled up at him, and leaned up, too, and —
And then they were kissing, kissing, kissing, swaying together in the dark kitchen while the bones spun around and around. Illya felt as though he had grown into himself. Here is what his body was for! To dance, unsure and yet steady, to hold this boy close to him, to draw him in as Alyosha was drawing Illya in, closer, closer. To share with each other this first joy, this self-discovery.
And there was nothing but Alyosha, his Alyosha, and the music.
***
Gaby is crying. Illya does not look at her.
“What happened?” she asks. “What happened to him? Illya?”
It sickens him, how she knows that something happened, that this story could not have ended in happiness. He shakes his head, touches his first finger to the black queen on his chessboard. “Nothing.”
“Illya,” she says, and he has never seen her cry this much. “I didn’t know you were —“
It hits him suddenly, his carelessness with this story. She will condemn him and then what? His assignment will end and if he is lucky he shall just be sent home, home to the emptiness, to another building with a vacant foyer and the miasma of grief clinging to the walls. And the shame he thought he left behind will lay down beside him every night, turning away like a lover afraid of his own want. Like a lover. And there will be no one waiting in the apartment across the hall and one floor up.
And should he be unlucky, he shall be sent to the grave of his father, and there is nothing more to say about that.
He does not want to go back. He does not want to leave.
“I am not anything,” he says, and turns back to his chessboard.
“No,” says Gaby. “No, Illya, don’t be afraid —“ and he flinches, hard, the tremor slowly settling into his hands, the black queen toppled onto the board. How could he have let her know?
“Don’t worry,” says Gaby. “You don’t have to fear consequence from me.”
Don’t worry. And it is something about the way she says it that resonates with Illya, within him. They are speaking English, not a mother tongue to either of them, yet somehow Illya feels more understood than he ever has in Russian. Since Alyosha, that is. He looks up. Gaby is looking back at him.
“I find it beautiful,” she says, “that we can always find each other. People like us.” She is choosing her words carefully and breathing so, so evenly and Illya understands.
“What was her name?” he asks, his voice quiet. He watches a hesitant smile spread across Gaby’s face.
“Sabine,” she says. “And she was heavenly.”
And she puts out her hands to him again, and this time he goes willingly. Her hands are comfortable, friendly, in his own. It has been so long. He wants to dance, but he is afraid. He is afraid of the rush of memory. Of learning again the joy of movement, of his body. He does not want to be anything but the killing machine he has become.
But there is Gaby, grinning wildly, those stupid sunglasses askew on her face, and he smiles, too, just a little. He has nothing to worry about. So he shuts his eyes and leans into the music, and they dance.
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