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When you looked back at your life, you were supposed to remember the details with...some sort of feeling, weren’t you? You were meant to feel connected to the people you had met, the things you had done, the orders you had followed, and yet…
And yet a year in this city and Illya felt as if his former life had been exactly that. A former life. If it had even been lived by him. He remembered the agony and the exhaustion that had gone into his training. Every broken bone. Every scraped knuckle and dislocation. He could not forget the physical sensations that had come with being half-drowned in a trough of ice water or the ache of his cracked ribs when he’d taken a baton to the side, too slow in his sleep-deprived state to respond quick enough to deflect the blow.
Even Rome had begun to fade in his memories. Not entirely, no, but the memories seemed distant. As if he had dreamt that he had been assigned an American as a partner on a mission. That he had gone undercover as the fiance of a beautiful East German mechanic in order to flush out a collection of Nazis and disrupt their organization.
If he-
A bark disrupts him, mid-thought, and the question of where his loyalties stand is lost to remembering his purpose there in the park.
Marina Raskova (the dog, not the Nachthexen). He bends briefly to pat her head before continuing on toward the dog park.
And yet a year in this city and Illya felt as if his former life had been exactly that. A former life. If it had even been lived by him. He remembered the agony and the exhaustion that had gone into his training. Every broken bone. Every scraped knuckle and dislocation. He could not forget the physical sensations that had come with being half-drowned in a trough of ice water or the ache of his cracked ribs when he’d taken a baton to the side, too slow in his sleep-deprived state to respond quick enough to deflect the blow.
Even Rome had begun to fade in his memories. Not entirely, no, but the memories seemed distant. As if he had dreamt that he had been assigned an American as a partner on a mission. That he had gone undercover as the fiance of a beautiful East German mechanic in order to flush out a collection of Nazis and disrupt their organization.
If he-
A bark disrupts him, mid-thought, and the question of where his loyalties stand is lost to remembering his purpose there in the park.
Marina Raskova (the dog, not the Nachthexen). He bends briefly to pat her head before continuing on toward the dog park.
There was an idleness he was unused to in this place. Without lessons, without the barking commands and razor-sharp insinuations of his teachers...Illya felt as lost as he had on that street corner. Even with a belly full of simple, but filling food, warm and able to sleep without fear of interruption, this world was too strange to let him settle. However awful the things said and done to him in the cold walls of his school, it had become familiar. Discomfort and unhappiness the new normal.
He was less nervous in approaching Martin, less afraid the older boy would rebuff his company or turn on him for a foot placed wrong. For every time he had flinched in the expectation of the back of the boy's hand, there had been nothing but a sad twist of a smile. For every discovery of some need Illya had tried to hide until his stomach had growled audibly or his teeth clacked with cold, a hot meal or a push toward bed or an invitation to go put on his coat.
"Could we go out?" he asks, still choosing his words carefully although he hides his hopefulness less well than before.
He was less nervous in approaching Martin, less afraid the older boy would rebuff his company or turn on him for a foot placed wrong. For every time he had flinched in the expectation of the back of the boy's hand, there had been nothing but a sad twist of a smile. For every discovery of some need Illya had tried to hide until his stomach had growled audibly or his teeth clacked with cold, a hot meal or a push toward bed or an invitation to go put on his coat.
"Could we go out?" he asks, still choosing his words carefully although he hides his hopefulness less well than before.
With a watch strung loosely on his wrist
Sep. 22nd, 2017 07:29 pmPanic was a living thing.
It clawed through his belly, leaving him to hiccup and curl his fingers tight around the watch he held in his hand. Held against his chest, but so tightly that its edges bit into his small palm and left an impression behind that was sure to last for weeks.
He had found himself standing on a street corner, on the edge of a street, a world he did not recognize. No sign he had seen made sense. The letters were at once angular and too rounded, and the longer he stared at them the less they made sense. Those were letters that belonged to strange letters he had not understood. Belonged to a place that was not his home and did not exist in any lesson he had been taught save that of the amorphous threat that lived outside of his city's borders.
His uniform was sweltering. His coat and hat far too heavy for the temperate weather.
A nine year old Illya Kuryakin.
Lost and alone.
It clawed through his belly, leaving him to hiccup and curl his fingers tight around the watch he held in his hand. Held against his chest, but so tightly that its edges bit into his small palm and left an impression behind that was sure to last for weeks.
He had found himself standing on a street corner, on the edge of a street, a world he did not recognize. No sign he had seen made sense. The letters were at once angular and too rounded, and the longer he stared at them the less they made sense. Those were letters that belonged to strange letters he had not understood. Belonged to a place that was not his home and did not exist in any lesson he had been taught save that of the amorphous threat that lived outside of his city's borders.
His uniform was sweltering. His coat and hat far too heavy for the temperate weather.
A nine year old Illya Kuryakin.
Lost and alone.
