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]

The thing about great adventures is that they are meant to be unexpected. Martin is as sure of that fact as he is of gravity or the principles of the worldwide workers' revolution. Waking up in a strange city of the future isn't the same as being kidnapped, or having dwarves show up unannounced to tea, or finding a treasure map, but it is wonderful all the same. Especially once he pieced together what his older self must be doing there.

The knowledge gives him a near constant thrill of excitement. (Even if it is more of a theory than an indisputable fact. A hypothesis that still needs testing.) Adult Martin would surely be pleased with how nicely he's caught on. Now he just has to continue playing along.

It's fun at first, nodding in mute reply when a few people address him as Moritz, pretending that he's meant to be there, marveling at the cars, marveling at the people, marveling at the shops, marveling at everything really. He couldn't have imagined anything more new and exciting and sinister if he tried for a whole year and he wants to explore as much of it as possible.

It all comes crashing down as soon as he sees a smaller boy -so Soviet and incongruously homelike that it almost physically hurts, intruding on the wonder like a slap interrupting a dream- standing alone on the sidewalk. The boy might as well be a marble statue, absolutely white and still beneath his miniature military overcoat and hat. Before he can think, Martin is already on his way over, calling out in German in an effort to break the spell.

"Hey! Are you okay? Are you lost?"

[fight_them_all]

The weight of his coat across his shoulders seems to be growing with every breath, every second ticked off by the watch he held so tightly in his hand. It was old, his coat, a carryover from the winter before and even where he knows he is still among the smallest of the boys his age, there are signs already it is nearly outgrown.

He is not used to the feeling of the sleeves creeping up his wrists as if with a movement too much of him would be exposed and be lost to the cold. Even as the heat swamps him and he returns to the panicked certainty of suffocating there in a strange land he does not recognize.

Illya is not certain he can keep himself from crying. For all that he tightens his jaw and lifts his chin, he can feel the tears prickle of the back of his eyes and that- that is so much worse than being lost or scared.

Movement more than the sound of German in a stranger's voice draws his attention away from the impending crisis. Sees that he turns to look for its source, although finding a boy some years older than himself does nothing to keep his stomach from lurching. "I cannot- I do not speak German," he tells the stranger, eyes wide and wary.

[codenamekolibri]

"That is all right. I can speak Russian." Martin smiles as he speaks, bright and optimistic. He wasn't expecting to run into a Russian at all, but it's far better than any of the city's Americans. It may even be better than a fellow German. After all, they could just as easily turn out to be Western rather than Eastern. With a Soviet though he knew where he stood. They were comrades.

It also helps that his Russian is far, far better than his English. He's won prizes for it.

"We study it in school. Teacher says I am so good I could maybe even go and study in Moscow one day." Moscow. His expression loses a bit of its earlier cheerfulness, replaced by something more wistful and even patriotic. It lasts a moment or so, then he returns his attention to the other boy, his head tilting slightly in curiosity. "It is a little warm for that coat, I think. And the hat. Why don't you take them off?"

[fight_them_all]

In the face of such exuberance and friendliness, Illya shrinks back. Seems to grow smaller, if such a thing were possible. In his heavy coat that hangs past his knees and with his hat only his face is left exposed.

The pull of the newly closed cut beside his eye is too sharp to allow him to forget what a bigger boy might do. Where there is some comfort in seeing that there is only one before him at the moment, he knows he is neither particularly fast nor good enough to escape if the teenager with his clipped German accent and the formality that lives in his words were to call for reinforcement.

"I am from Moscow," he offers, although cautiously. It seems to him sensible indeed to learn Russian in school, as it is the most important of languages. The Germans are a subject much discussed around and over him, but he remembers little of the content of those conversations carried out over his head save that there was a new truce signed between their countries.

But the suggestion that he take off his heavy, too hot layers is one met with immediate alarm. He shakes his head "I must not lose them. There will be-" he breaks off and shakes his head again "Such a lapse will be severely punished." The words come in the rhythm of those oft-repeated by those with far more authority and power than his small voice.

[codenamekolibri]

"That is silly. Taking off is not the same thing as losing." He reaches out to give one of the woolen sleeves a quick, playful tug. The younger boy is so serious, nothing at all like the Russian children Martin has seen on television or in books and youth magazines. They always look so happy and proud; saluting at Pioneer camp or visiting with soldiers or helping on collective farms. If it wasn't for the uniform it would be difficult to tell that this boy is one of them.

"If you take them off and put them somewhere safe they will not get lost." Martin pauses suddenly, struck by a new thought. "Do you have somewhere safe?"

They are both in enemy territory after all, like Indian scouts trapped behind American lines in a film, and it never hit him until that moment that his younger comrade might not have the luxury of a base like adult Martin's apartment. If he did why would he be standing on the street close to tears?

[fight_them_all]

The memories tumble in on and over each other. His mother delicate and beautiful and as touchable as the sky. The fading of her upon his father's arrest and those first chaotic weeks where he had had more nightmares than restful sleep. The shadow she had become even before he understood that the world had turned on them and the idyllic luxury of their lives became the desperate, clawing attempts to survive. The suggestions on and on by those around that perhaps it would have been better he did not.

His breathing is already shallow and quick when the other boy reaches for him and Illya flinches back in fear.

No safety lies in the adults who walk the streets of the city, he knows. It is expected he will take his blows and should he weep, be punished more severely for it. Fear is a block in his throat, but the threat of worse should he fail to answer has him struggling for words despite his raising agitation. There is nothing of the control (however fragile) of adulthood. Not now. "No. I do not know where I am."

[codenamekolibri]

When the flinch comes Martin pulls away as if he is the one who has been hurt. Did he say something wrong? Did he somehow insult him? Has some unknown line of Russian politeness been breached without his knowing it? He backs up half a step, shoving his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels, thinking.

Russian or not, no child that he has ever met has reacted like this. The closest thing to it that he can think of is a stray dog that he would see sometimes in Berlin on shopping trips with his mother when he was small. It lived in one of the empty lots in between buildings, another scar left by a war before he was born. It would snarl and shiver if he got too close, but on each trip he would make an excuse to break from mama and leave a small bit of bread or a candy or once a sliver of sausage near where he was certain its lair must have been. Then he would crouch down in the dirt and watch it eat and tell it that his name was Martin. On the third trip, when he brought the sausage, it had actually come close enough to sniff his hand. On the fourth trip there was no dog. Just a pile of lumber and an announcement that more workers' housing would be arriving soon.

The younger boy might not be tempted out of his shell by offering him tidbits, but Martin is still prepared to wait as long as he must to earn something like trust.

"My name is Martin. I do not know where I am either, but I have a house. You can put your coat there and no one will take it. I promise."

[fight_them_all]

Dangerous as it was to close his eyes, Illya finds that he had all the same. Had attempted to pull so far back into his jacket and away from the strange boy he stands now with his back against the wall behind him.

But there is no pain, and in the seconds that tick onward he steels himself and peeks to see when, or from what direction it might strike instead. What he remembers is not schoolyard taunts that can be shrugged off or even the pushing and shoving that belongs to juvenile attempts to sort out the hierarchy among the boys in his year. In the school. No, he remembers blood tacky on his face and one eye swollen closed after one particularly brutal beating. The snort of breath of his teacher's upon his inspection after. The knowledge they were disappointed he could scrape himself up again and return to the classroom.

He is no less cautious in watching the boy, but the lack of venom in that voice, as well as the distance he'd placed between them, allows Illya to breathe a little easier.

Russian children were not subterfuge in their hate, and so Illya finds no certainty in what to expect. But the world is too frightening and strange around them, and if he has learned nothing else in his life, he has learned to answer those who speak his language. "I can?" he asks, tentative and unsure. "It is safer there?"

[codenamekolibri]

"It is. I promise," he repeats. Still keeping his distance. Still keeping his hands firmly in his pockets.

The fact that he's answering at all is likely progress of a sort, but it doesn't do much to make him feel any better. The way he had backed up, the way he had squeezed his eyes shut and waited, they make Martin's stomach clench uncomfortably. He's seen people like that before and he's even been one of them once. Only very briefly thankfully. He was too easygoing, too normal, too popular to attract much of the wrong sort of attention at school. He ended fights between people, not started them. It seemed though that there were always some people who were simply cruel. They didn't need a reason, they just were. There was no other explanation.

"I can show you where it is. And I also promise not to hit you." Martin does his best to look as trustworthy and respectable as possible, feeling very mature. "I am not a bully."

[fight_them_all]

The State had done well in its teaching of young Illya. Still too young to understand the ramifications of the truce just signed with Germany, the friendship that would turn out to be fleeting and almost immediately bitter with Hitler and his government, he had learned much at the State's knee.

His father was a traitor. The worst of the worst, for having been so close to Stalin and betrayed him for...what? Money? He did not yet know how unlikely it was his father would survive more than a winter in the gulag, although they reminded him often enough of the fact that he had been, and the shame he felt with every reminder overwhelmed nearly all else. So too did he not know how unlikely it was the elder Kuryakin had survived his interrogation room at all, as intimate a betrayal as his actions were deemed.

He had no secrets from those around him, had not from the moment his father had been taken away and his mother had become the delicate, infinitely fragile thing she was. "It is expected," he tells the other boy, not with derision but with the resigned acceptance that shouldn't have belonged to such a small thing.

There is little he has learned of trust, already, but within the sweltering confines of his coat, Illya is worried he might faint and make himself more of a target. "Please," he says, once he has made up his mind to take the offer, no matter how likely to come with future threat or demand. "I do not want to stay out here."

[codenamekolibri]

It is expected.

Martin frowns, though the scar that permanently twists one brow higher than the other takes some of the intent from the expression, making him look more quizzical than anything else. Whether his companion meant bullies or punches doesn't matter. Neither of them have any right to exist in the world as Martin knows it. The aggressors, the bullies... they were the ones responsible for society's pain and suffering and one day, with his help, they would be stopped. It was the future they were all working towards.

He may be miles away from a classroom or a Young Pioneer meeting, but memories of films and lectures about Western imperialism in Vietnam flash through his mind regardless. The way that the younger boy speaks and acts makes that same fire -equal parts determination and disgust- rise up in him that usually only appears when confronted with pictures and stories of far off wars. It makes him want to do something, even if he doesn't know all the reasons behind it. It makes him want to fix things. It makes him want to do whatever he can to make a difference, no matter how slight.

"Come on. It is not far away." He extends a hand as he starts for the apartment, still hopeful, even if he knows the chances of it being taken are slight. "What is your name?"

[fight_them_all]

Perhaps had anyone, anyone at all ever said to him that the words of the others were false, he might have stood a chance. Believed even for a second that no, his father's shame would not hang over him until the day he died. No, there was no obligation to repay Mother Russia for having chosen to spare him. To take pity.

But he and a thousand, ten thousand other children like him had not been born to live in such kindness. Such softness would not come to children who numbered in the millions within Russia's borders and lived and died under its command.

Violence inside its State schools served a purpose. Thinned out the weakest of their numbers. Ensured those who did survive would remember what came of those who betrayed their glorious leader. Failed the whole of their society.

He stares down at the boy's hand but does not take it. Lifts his eyes in question over what has become an alien gesture (at least when offered to him), only for his stomach to twist as he moves to follow. Hoping the name he carries will be unknown to the German boy. "My name is Illya Kuryakin."

[codenamekolibri]

"I am very pleased to meet you, Comrade Kuryakin." Despite the anxious, angry way Illya's behavior makes him feel, there's an undeniable pleasure in being able to say that. There they are now. Comrades. Equals. Brothers. Soldiers on the same side in the same glorious fight.

"My name is Martin Rauch. Martin Ingridovitch Rauch."

Another small victory comes with being able to say that. Genosse Hauptmann isn't there to correct him, to make him use his long-dead grandfather's name instead or -worse- make a name up. If he doesn't have a father, he shouldn't have to have a patronymic. Mama is enough for him and ought to be enough for everyone else.

He keeps walking straight ahead, glancing behind every now and then to make sure Illya is still following him. The apartment complex really is quite close and before too long it comes into view, not looming like blocks he's seen in Berlin, but appearing gradually from among the other buildings, as if embarrassed to be there and trying to hide. "There it is. I think I have my own apartment in here."

[fight_them_all]

At the honorific of 'Comrade' Illya does not flinch. But it is a near enough thing, as often as he had been reminded that he does not deserve such a title. He cannot be the equal of others at his school if they too were not refuse. Detritus. The waste of their society, and marked so by the actions of their parents. Their fathers.

His father with his greedy hands in the Party's funds.

Friendships do not come without strings, with obligations. They are not made on the basis of shared interests but in camaraderie built on their ideals. On the ideology, they were built upon. Like monuments. And still, he cannot help but fall into the hope of the older boy offering his hand (the literal having passed unmet). Dangerous, but far too tempting.

"Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin," he tells him. Even as he swallows heavy at the possibility of being remembered. Of being forgotten. "Does everyone here?" he asks, wondering how a boy would have an apartment of his own. Wondering why he follows a stranger through a strange city and does not wonder how he might find his mother (or his teachers) instead.

[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.”

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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.”