Dim though the memories have already grown, Illya remembers stories of magic. Wondrous, fantastical, terrible things that happen to people who wander out into the snow. Those who were taken by spirits of ice and the trees, never to return. Those who were blessed or cursed by the creatures they met out among those trees, a place so far from the Moscow he knows that it might as well have been a separate world (and so a world where magic could possibly thrive where his own seemed starved of it).
Travel through time had factored in none he remembered. Pictures of faces then worn, grown so much older? They seemed like they should have belonged, as he had to think in peering at that identification card and seeing the undeniable truth that the young man in it was the older boy before him now.
"Has a witch done this?" he asks, before closing his mouth quick. The stories his mother had told him once were ones he knew his father (and by extension, the great leader Stalin) would disapprove of in a sensible, responsible boy.
Magic cannot exist, and yet as he holds Martin's card in his hands and stares down at it, he cannot help but wonder.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-10-14 06:54 am (UTC)Travel through time had factored in none he remembered. Pictures of faces then worn, grown so much older? They seemed like they should have belonged, as he had to think in peering at that identification card and seeing the undeniable truth that the young man in it was the older boy before him now.
"Has a witch done this?" he asks, before closing his mouth quick. The stories his mother had told him once were ones he knew his father (and by extension, the great leader Stalin) would disapprove of in a sensible, responsible boy.
Magic cannot exist, and yet as he holds Martin's card in his hands and stares down at it, he cannot help but wonder.