With a watch strung loosely on his wrist

[fight_them_all]

Panic 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.

Comments

[codenamekolibri]

“I do not know. I woke up in it though and there is more...”

Martin pauses for a moment, looking around suspiciously. There’s no one around though besides himself and Illya. No one out there is going to care, but a part of him can’t help wanting to play it up somewhat. He’s showing off in front of the younger boy, there’s no other word for it.

“Look.” He digs in his pocket, removing keys and a small laminated card, passing it over to Illya. “I found this in the apartment.”

The uniformed man staring up from the identity card photograph can be no one but Martin. The same slim face, the same mismatched eyebrows, even a hint of the same smile lurking in the corner of his mouth. But he must be ten years older at least. “Do you want to know what I think this is? It is time travel. This must be my home in the future.”

There’s more too, more that Martin wants to tell so badly, but he’ll wait. One impossible thing is probably enough for now.

[fight_them_all]

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.

[codenamekolibri]

“Of course not. There is no such thing as witches.”

Abstractly Martin knows that he ought to be acting mature and responsible. That he ought to be both setting a good example and being polite to his guest. (Which is what Illya clearly is. Never mind that the both of them are technically strangers in this place. He found the smaller boy and he is inviting him to his apartment. If that doesn’t make him a guest what does?) So the skeptical scoffing noise he makes isn’t truly meant to be mocking or cruel, though it may sound that way without his meaning it. It’s only that he is so much older after all.

“Magic is dumb. Not like science. That makes sense. Science can put people on the moon, so maybe it can put people somewhere else in time too.”

[fight_them_all]

Embarrassed by the proof of his own childishness, Illya looks down and away. To imagine witches. Even in so strange a place, with so strange a thought as having been brought through time to some other era...only a child would have thought of witches.

His heart sinks further at the sound the older boy makes. His shoulders round again and his hands still clutching the ID card drop before him, resting against the stiff wool of his coat.

But then there's- "The moon?" And he is looking up and over with wide eyes. "They have put people on the moon?"

[codenamekolibri]

“The Americans have,” Martin says, tone and expression a mix of unimpressed and envious. He still remembers where he was when he found out about the moon landing. He’d cried. He must have been the same age as Illya, but he had still broken down and cried, convinced that it must have been some terrible, terrible trick. How dare they get there first? A few years may have passed, but there’s still a hint of outrage about him even now.

“The Soviet space program is better though. The first man in space was a Russian, not an American. Even the name sounds better. Cosmonaut.”

[fight_them_all]

He remembers a world verging on war. On one where war is already at their doorstep, and where he remembers nothing of those who starve where Mother Russia has left them to the cold, the thought of his country coming in second to the Americans left his stomach feeling all kinds of wobbly.

"We have made it to moon?" he asks, eyes wide in the consideration of what seems to him more wonderful and awe-inspiring than the idea of witches. Of the world he knows, one in which a man could walk in space seems too much to imagine. He repeats 'Cosmonaut' aloud in awe and fascination, walking as close to the other boy as he thinks he can manage (without risking being close enough to earn a fist in the teeth or between his ribs, as he is already too familiar). We have cosmonauts? Men who walk among the stars?"

[codenamekolibri]

“We do. I want to be the first German one,” Martin adds with no small amount of pride. It isn’t a stupid idea, no matter what Otto might say, and he’s determined to see it through. If he isn’t an Olympic medalist or a soldier first. And even then, what’s to stop him from one day being all three? He’s obviously already a spy.

At the door to the apartment he pulls out the key, fumbling a bit with the unfamiliar lock, but overall still (hopefully) maintaining an air of maturity. This is his future home after all and he ushers Illya in grandly, eager to show it off. There isn’t much to see really -a few small rooms, basic furniture, framed and faded art prints on the walls that look like they likely came from a secondhand shop, and a battered stereo that looks like it was abandoned on a curb- but there’s a refrigerator and a telephone and it’s all his.

“There is a closet there where you can put your things. Are you hungry? There is food too.”

[fight_them_all]

In the face of such optimism, such a self-assured declaration, Illya falls and stays silent. He is unsure how to operate when the older boy curls his confidence in the vowels and consonants on his tongue, his peculiar accent in the language making the certainty of his words seem all the more alien. To imagine at all of touching the stars...to be able to imagine one's self not just capable of such a thing, but seemingly more certain than stone that it will happen (even tempered by the 'want to be' in place of the 'will be' that seems to resonate within one small, skinny body)...

He is saved from a reply with the opening of a door, and when he follows the other boy in with the same quiet obedience he is expected to show to all those older than himself (however it galls in so many of his hours but this one), he attempts to look everywhere at once. It is worn and plain compared to the apartment he had known until the last year, but after the austerity of the dormitories and the chill that crept like a living, breathing thing into his bones every night within those dim walls, it is a relief.

Or, at least, neutral enough. Only the grumbling of his stomach, as if it needed no more than the sound of the reminder to begin, brought him back from his attempt to memorize everything of his surroundings at once. He holds out the ID he still has in his hand with a jerky nod, cheeks flushing in embarrassment (surely Martin can hear his stomach, it sounds like a bear at the end of winter). "Yes. Thank you."

Despite himself, and with mouth dry, he cannot help but ask "Do you think- Do you think there is a place like this for me here?"

[codenamekolibri]

“I do not know. This is my future, but is it yours too?” He has moved on to the kitchen by the time he answers Illya, but his his voice still manages to convey concern even if his facial expression can’t be seen. When he returns, an orange in one hand and a glass of water in the other, he has switched to frowning as he thinks over the problem of the other boy. He exchanges the fruit for the identification card, feeling incredibly magnanimous and even a little powerful. It isn’t every day that you can give someone a gift like that.

“You can stay here if you want to. There is room and it is safe, I know that. And there is lots of food. Even if it is only just until you know what to do next. I promise I will not tell anyone.”