groznyj_grad | Antivenom [February 20, 1964, 1:17 pm]

The sight of the Colonel sank into Ippolit's heart like shark's teeth, row on row. The piercing eyes were clouded and unfocused, the statuesque body frozen in unwilling repose.

Ippolit had not thought his admiration for this man could grow.

Such was the measure of his assurance and dignity that even such a blow had no power to diminish it. He fell near death without ever being brought to his knees.

Rakitin would have wondered who in the world Alyosha was, were the look on Lynx's face not answer.

So he shared a name with the youngest son of the Karamazovs, the benefactor whose love transformed all it fell upon.

At any other time, Rakitin would rather have slit his own throat than intrude on the intimacy the single word and low, abraded voice established. There were, however, things that must be done before he could drop back and observe, a lucky wanderer happening upon two magnificent stags nuzzling in a forest glade.

"Colonel," Ippolit said gently, setting to work without delay. "We've brought an antivenom."

"Lieutenant Rakitin brought an antivenom," corrected Lynx, impelling the pathogist forward toward the bed with a casual hand at the small of his back. "Worked on it like a slave."

He paused.

"There was a little more than we bargained for in the mix," he said, evenly, looking at Volgin, and taking a seat in the corner to let the pathologist do his work unimpede. "A little arsenic, a little bitter almond," he smirked bloodlessly, "and a little...unusual venom. That's what's making you hurt, Zhenya, even though the poison is neutalized. But this should reverse any damage."

It was beginning to dawn on him that Rakitin's expression as he knelt by the Colonel's arm was anything but fear. More along the lines of rapturous.

Alexei frowned, mildly bemused, then smiled.

Well, why not. Surely he wasn't the only man who found the Colonel's unorthodox person compelling and inspiring-

Not unlike the Gila Monster, he thought. Some people shied away from bright red and yellow- some were attracted, as if to flowers.

And then they were ensnared.

Alexei was glad to be captive. He imagined Rakitin was too.

Volgin closed his eyes, and let out a deep sigh.

"That's good," he murmured.

Such was his trust of Alexei, he knew if Alexei said that everything would be all right, then it would be. He could relax now.

"Good work...Lieutenant Rakitin," he added.

Volgin barely had the strength for anything else, but he opened his eyes again, and looked that the blur he knew was Alexei, and his mouth curved into a faint smile. "Do you remember what we talked about last time, Alyosha? As soon as I'm better, we'll start. It'll be like before, only better."

And it would, he thought. Because now he didn't just have Alexei, he had Ocelot, and Ivan, and the Shagohod. His power was stronger now, more consolidated. Once they took care of whoever thought he could simply be eliminated, then everything would be perfect. That reminded him of the conversation he'd had with Ocelot.

"Tell Ocelot. I want you to work with him...he has some ideas, Alyosha. See what you can do."

Talking left him weak, but there was so much to say. He rested briefly, closing his eyes, aware of the pathologist working at something, diligently, at his side.

He murmured in the lieutenant's direction. "Mm. Thank you, Lieutenant. You'll be well-rewarded for this."

Rakitin had resisted, before, but this time he would accept Volgin's gratitude.

"I'll make sure of it."

Rakitin wanted to protest that Lynx had done the difficult part, but he remembered the large man's reticence to discuss the lizard's origin. Apparently he didn't want it known that he happened to have a large, venomous reptile on hand. People could be funny that way.

"Thank you, sir," Ippolit demurred, smiling softly, flushed with pleasure. "That's really not necessary."

He was at a loss for what more he could possibly want.

Lynx's encouragement helped him approach, drawn forward like a wooden duck on a string.

With infinite care, Rakitin knelt and took the Colonel's arm. The veins were proud and easy to locate, running alongside scars that flowed like India ink across rich parchment. Ippolit thought of what it would be like to run reverent fingers along their course, tracing the shape of the sinuous curves.

"This will only hurt for a moment," Ippolit said, positioning the needle with a steady hand. "Then you should begin recovering strength very quickly, though you should still take it easy for a while."

He smiled down at the depressed plunger.

"You have a lot more strength than average to recover, if you don't mind my saying so, sir."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

Volgin closed his eyes, but didn't feel the pain, which was slightly disappointing. His body was simply too numb to register much that was happening to it.

He lay quietly for a while, resting, and then began to feel a tingle in his arm.

His scarred brow knitted, slowly. "I think I feel something," he said. "It...might be working."

"Good," Ippolit said with a tinge of relief. "I wasn't sure how it would affect your unique physiology-"

He cut off before his mind could go too far down that road.

"In the meantime," Polya detoured, "just don't get bitten by any gila monsters. I mean, if you can. Sometimes it's unavoidable."

As the story went, it was dislodging the creature that was the difficult part. Polya thought of the legend that their jaws would only release at the sound of thunder and smiled.

"Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

Volgin opened his eyes again, turning his head to look at the pathologist. It almost seemed to him that his vision had cleared somewhat; Rakitin looked less blur-like, and more like a proper human being.

He nodded, still weak, though the tingling in his arm had intensified. It was a peculiar sensation, not exactly like pain. More like electricity, slowly burning through his body, purifying the taint.

"Yes...actually, there is, Lieutenant. Please mention to Major Liadov that I'd like to speak to him, at some point, when I'm feeling a little better. I'll let you know."

Volgin's eyes were a mild blue, like the clearing sky after a storm, but now they tracked the lieutenant with growing accuracy.

"I'd appreciate it. Also, have I missed anything? Do you have any new information regarding the murders?"

"...Murders?" echoed Alexei softly, leaning forward.

He frowned.

"It wasn't a murder, Yevgen- they didn't get you."

Alexei thought maybe Volgin's equilibrium hadn't fully returned after the shock to his system. Was he confused, and referring to the attempts on his own life, or was he referring to-

Lynx's lips slackened briefly.

"We spoke about the boy, Zhenya," he said, quietly, inclining his head and meeting the monolith's eyes. "Don't you remember?"

"No...no. Not that."

Volgin looked at Alexei, meeting his gaze, which was heavy, and shadowed by the weight of his furrowed brow.

He remembered Alexei's whispered confession that night with a terrible clarity. Hearing the anguish in his lover's voice, and realizing how much the necessary, but unfortunate, death had cost Alyosha chilled Volgin to his core.

Alexei was like that, a man with a conscience, though Volgin had always appreciated that he never let it get in the way of his duty. Still, every life Alexei took with his broad hands affected him personally in a way that Volgin had never really understood, but simply accepted.

"There were murders on base. Two. Corpses dismembered and posed, or somesuch. That's why Lieutenant Rakitin is here, to investigate them."

He shifted his gaze slightly, to indicate the pathologist.

"The work of someone very disturbed," he added, more quietly, thinking of Ivan.

Already the Colonel seemed to be recovering. He was truly incredible. His wandering eyes met Polya's level, earnest gaze directly for the first time. An odd karmic reversal of their first meeting.

Much had changed, since then. At first Polya had been overwhelmed, a speck carried away by the tidal wave of the Colonel's magnificence. Now without receding it had steadied, and Polya could float. That he existed made the world a more vital, vibrant place, and loneliness in it more bearable. It seemed a very long time ago that Polya had arrived, never imagining that events would place him kneeling at the Colonel's side.

Still holding his arm.

"Yes, sir," Polya said, scrambling to his feet. "I'll let N- Major Liadov know."

Come to think of it, he couldn't remember seeing Nika lately. Which didn't mean much in itself. Over the past two days, he could have been standing at Polya's shoulder and eluded his attention.

"No, er, new evidence has come to light, to my knowledge."

No mutilated bodies lately, if you didn't count the poor sniped one. A streak of luck, Polya thought sardonically.

Well. There was that one piece of 'evidence.'

"I examined the...object as you requested," Rakitin said. "Unfortunately, any fingerprints left were too smudged to identify."

They certainly were now.

Lynx's words confused him, until he remember that the big man was a recent arrival. Of course he wouldn't have known.

The Colonel's words confused him more lastingly.

"Two?" Ippolit said, his brow furrowing.

Volgin grunted, frowning. "There's been more?"

He hadn't been out that long, had he? Only a day, he'd thought Ocelot had told him. Or perhaps it had been one of the nurses who had said that. He wasn't sure now, but hoped he hadn't misremembered. If he'd missed much more, that would be highly unfortunate. Some things required his continual supervision.

It made him wonder, again, where Ivan was.

"There have been two of these...ritual...murders, correct, Lieutenant? Captain Molokov and the mechanic."

Volgin didn't recall the mechanic's name. Unlike Molokov, he would not be missed by anyone important.

"Or is there something I need to know?"

"The other one," Ippolit said slowly. "The Ocelot in the showers. Sergei Gurlukovich."

If the poison had affected the Colonel's memory, it was worse than he had thought. He could just not be counting it, since it hadn't been done according to the habits of dismemberment.

Or if he knew something else that put it in a different class.

The pieces of the puzzle shifted on the crowded coffee table of Rakitin's mind. He tried to make them form a shape other than the one they seemed determined to.

"Ritual murders..." murmured Alexei, taken aback. "You mean, a nonmilitary individualized incidence of homicide?"

He paused, searching for another way to describe it. Killing was not adequate.

They were all killers.

State-sanctioned did not qualify. Not all of them were sponsored by the prevailing government.

Brutality had no bearing. Nor did torture. Brutality was a swift and merciful component of Alexei's own tradecraft, and he knew that Volgin himself had tortured a few men until they expired. Volgin liked a little torture himself, which Lynx had readily obliged him.

But somehow, this was something else, able to make even hardened killers wince and seek distinctions.

What did you call that kind of murder?

Murder, was the answer. Murder, not killing.

"Here at the Grad? You have a murderer loose?"

Volgin looked between Alexei and Rakitin, but then nodded.

"Yes...a murderer," he told Alexei. "The first murder was around three weeks ago. Lieutenant Rakitin and his partner, Major Liadov, have been conducting interviews and analyzing the evidence."

Volgin rested for a moment, closing his eyes.

His throat was raw and rough, and it hurt to talk for any longer than a few sentences at a time.

He still felt drained, his body exhausted from the fight he'd had with the poison. Battling the insidious, invisible enemy had consumed a lot of his strength.

This antidote of Lieutenant Rakitin's was working now, he could tell, but only in increments. Every tiny measure of strength and vigor that returned only made him want to push himself harder, but he knew he couldn't.

Shouldn't.

Volgin opened his eyes again, gaze flicked to Rakitin. "Ah yes. The Ocelot. Actually, new information had recently come to my attention regarding that death, and I'm satisfied it's unrelated to the murders."

Volgin paused.

"I hadn't had a chance to inform you and Major Liadov yet, before...this...happened."

"I...see," Rakitin said, carefully.

The boy, Lynx had said. But he hadn't known.

That and his near ludicrously specific terminology was all the impetus needed to jump to conclusions.

Something Lieutenant-- Isav? Issef? The blond Ocelot, as if that narrowed it down - had said completed its laborious swim up from the depths of memory and made it less of a jump than a leisurely stroll.

Rakitin was hardly going to deplete the Colonel's strength by demanding an explanation. He kept his mouth shut and resolved to ask Lynx later, if he got the chance.

Lynx turned to the pathologist.

"Is that why you're here," he acknowledged, frowning.

Alexei sighed.

"Then in order not to complicate matters, you may as well know. The death was my responsibility. I took the kid's life, regrettably- I'm under classified orders that could not be compromised."

He looked at Volgin, briefly.

"I trust this admission won't threaten to compromise my effectiveness, either."

He paused, his words firm but rational.

"I'm authorized to take an unlimited amount of action, Lieutenant. And I have no qualms about doing it."

Rakitin nodded thoughtfully.

"That makes sense. It was strange. Quick and clean with a minimum of trauma and no postmortem indecency. Not our murderer's mode of operation at all. The theory was that he'd gone to wash off blood and had to get rid of an unexpected witness quickly."

Lynx looked at the floor.

"I made it quick," he said, quietly.

He rubbed his hand absently with the other.

Innocent blood never came off. Alexei knew that. All you could do was take responsibility for spilling it, and wear the scarlet letter.

"I swear he never knew what hit him."

Volgin was unsurprised that Alexei had confessed, though had nearly held his breath for a few moments, waiting for Lieutenant Rakitin's reaction.

He genuinely liked the lieutenant.

It would be have been a shame to have to kill him.

Fortunately the pathologist seemed to accept Alexei's explanation, and with no persuasion necessary. Volgin appreciated that. It made him even more certain of his decision to bring Rakitin into the fold. He would fit in nicely, here. He wondered if Major Liadov would prove to be as agreeable. He hoped so.

Alexei would be fine here, he knew, even with the changes that had gone on in his absence. All the time that had passed would be like nothing. Volgin's gaze sought out Alexei's eyes, which were clear, even in his private sorrow.

"Alyosha..."

Volgin reached for Alexei's hand but missed. Still not enough strength in his arm to raise it even ten centimeters off the bed.

He grimaced, then resigned himself to not being able to touch Alyosha by his own power, though he would soon, he told himself. Soon.

"It was a sacrifice you had to make," he told Alexei. There was little else to say that would give some sort of comfort, so Volgin did not try, but merely looked at Alexei with quiet acceptance.

Alexei wasn't actually sure that was true.

Had he been able to reason with-

But no. He knew the guards had orders to shoot on sight.

Hell, if he hadn't had Volgin in his arms he would never have risked walking out into the open hall unarmed.

"He didn't suffer," he repeated.

It was enough, and it was important to him.

"I would apologize to Ocelot...but something tells me that might not be a good idea," he said wryly. "He seems to care about his men almost as much as I do."

Lynx paused.

"Did," he corrected, with a sheepish smile.

Volgin nodded.

"It would be best that Ocelot...not be informed of this. I don't want there to be any unnecessary friction."

His eyes flicked to Rakitin, significantly.

Volgin paused long enough to make sure the lieutenant understood, but then looked back at Alexei.

"Alyosha...you'll have men again," he promised.

Volgin's eyelids drooped, but in his mind's eye, he saw it.

Groznyj Grad, training academy for new recruits. The best Russia had to offer. He pictured Alexei, overseeing rows of trainees, molding and nurturing them each of them, shaping them into fine officers. Fine men.

And just as Alexei cared for his men, they cared for him in turn, Volgin knew. Men strove to excel when they had a leader they had a leader that they trusted. A leader that inspired them. Alexei's guidance would help them grow into the finest elite fighting force, not just in all of Russia, but in the world.

Volgin's scarred lips curved upward, bloomed into a wide, slow smile.

"I can see it, Alexei. The future. Your place here, with me. And the others, all that I've chosen. This will be our place. Our time."

He could not say more, not in front of Rakitin. It was too early for that. But Alexei knew what he meant.

Volgin's arm still tingled, but exhaustion had caught up with him. His eyes closed, though when he opened them, Alexei was still there.

Ippolit met Lynx's eyes without hesitance.

"You respect the dead," he said, quietly, but with a foundation of firmness he was unused to hearing in his own voice, like bedrock glimpsed beneath drifting snow.

Lynx made no excuses, no attempt to lessen or dodge the deed. It was a death.

"I won't tell anyone," Ippolit promised both of them. "It's not my secret to reveal."

Fortunately, he was much better at keeping other people's secrets than his own.

Something about the cadence of the Colonel's voice, low and hypnotic, suggested that he was not speaking of a momentary whim. He smiled in the way that people did when speaking of their heart's fondest wish, lips tracing a warm, honeyed curve that made Ippolit ache to kiss him.

He wanted to make his people a home.

Though Ippolit lacked the words or voice to say it, he knew he would do anything he could to help make the Colonel's dream a reality.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," Volgin murmured.

He was pleased again by his choice. Rakitin would fit in perfectly here, not to mention his particular skillset would be invaluable for several things that would be critical to their success, later.

Volgin favored Rakitin with a drowsy smile, but then his attention drifted back to Alexei, as had seemed happen often since he'd taken ill from the poison. Alexei's was first face he saw when he woke, the last voice he heard when he succumbed to sleep.

He had little need to say anything that he had not already said.

Instead, he regarded Alexei warmly, his gaze lingering on the broad, handsome features - fierce wolfhound jaw and high Russian cheekbones, and that beautiful, sensuous mouth that even now arced upward into a smile.

Yes. Volgin could sleep now, knowing that Alexei was here, Lieutenant Rakitin had devised a cure, and that everything would be just as he dreamed, soon.

His eyes closed again, and this time, he didn't struggle to open them once more.

"I guess we should go," Alexei said, quietly. "I appreciate you saving him."

Lynx paused.

"He'll reward you well, you know, for your loyalty."

His eyes traveled over Volgin's stilled form. He looked less like a sleeping man than a tranquilized bear, and his chest heaved with rapid respiration.

It may have been residual asphyxiation from the poison, making his body work harder to breathe.

Alexei frowned and shifted his gaze to the pathologist.

"He has his flaws as a human, but as commander, as a man...I would never serve any other master."

He rose, reluctant to leave, but knowing he had to attend to his colleagues sooner or later, and keep them satistfied.

And there was Viktor.

His urge to see Leshovik was troubling and strong.

"Are you going to stay? Or did you have more work to do?"

"I suppose I should go back to the lab," Ippolit said, quietly, though he doubted that much could now override the Colonel's physical need for sleep. He was unrestrained and easeful in repose. Ippolit felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his face, restrained only by an ironclad sense of propriety and a swift application of will.

"He is generous." A fond smile tugged at the corners of Polya's mouth. "Too kind to me. You're the one who saved his life. Twice. If you hadn't been there-"

Well. No need to think of that now, thank every kami in every mountain and stream this side of the equator.

Polya could return now to his safe, shrouded islet, the Colonel's safety shining like a lantern on a distant shore. It was enough to be in sight, clutching to his chest the memory of a smile that had been meant for him alone.

"Who wouldn't be loyal, to him?" Rakitin said, half dreaming, half aware, half intoxicated with relief and half forgetting how fractions added up. "It's impossible not to admire someone willing and able to lift the sky on his shoulders. To want to protect him from anyone jealous or cruel enough to want to bring him down."

Polya looked up at Lynx, who was watching the rise and fall of the Colonel's broad chest as though a string tied it to his heartbeat. Ippolit was not of especially small stature, but here he was dwarfed.

They left the Colonel to rest.

The door shut and left them in a hall free from nurses in an act of providence no doubt temporary.

Polya felt a pang of regret that his presence had prevented the two of them from speaking freely. In the spaces between breaths had been the weight of words unsaid.

Intuition became speech without passing through the sieve of the conscious mind.

"You love him, don't you," Polya said softly.

"Yes," said Lynx, surprised, but unhesitant.

"More than most men love him...and as much as some others. That's never been the point of it, to be the only one."

He had a feeling that Rakitin wasn't speaking of the love of a soldier for his commander, so he didn't pretend to respond in that way.

"I know he has a...steady arrangement. I would never want to interfere in that."

He paused.

"I used to be the only one. You would think it would make me jealous, to know that I'm not, anymore."

Lynx smiled.

"And yet, it doesn't. It makes me glad. Glad that he has people watching his back. Because he thinks he's invincible, and I don't ever want him to lose that illusion."

"Good." Polya smiled. "It's good to have people like that."

He toed idly at the tiled floor.

"I never understood jealousy, really," Rakitin admitted. "Doesn't loving somebody mean wishing him happiness wherever he finds it?"

It occurred to Polya that he hadn't glimpsed Major Raikov about for some time. Perhaps he had simply faded into the background of fortress life, as he tended to when there wasn't a tank or a few hundred half-naked men to focus the attention.

"There is someone else who should be here." Polya frowned, glancing down the empty halls. The prettily nondescript major had slipped his mind entirely. "I wonder if anyone told him what happened."

Ah, well. Someone probably had.

"You say 'invicible' as though he isn't." Ippolit laughed, slightly, as if dislodging a grain of sand from his throat. "He could burn away his own mortality, without even needing to be held by the heel."

Ippolit was distantly aware that he was babbling. There was an honesty, if not quite openess, to this man that made him easy to talk to, with the sense that one would be heard and perhaps even taken seriously. It made Ippolit slightly nervous, as being looked at directly always did, but it was refreshing all the same.

Ippolit glanced up at him out of the corner of his eye, like a raccoon caught in a flashlight beam.

"Why did you leave?" he asked, and was immediately appalled at the forwardness of the question. "That is, if, er, you don't mind me asking."

"No," said Lynx, blinking, suddenly keenly aware that he had been sucked, wholecloth, back into a military life.

That people asked normative questions of senior officers, on a need to know basis, and that to not answer those questions was far more suspicious than to spin some glib reply.

"No, I don't mind at all."

He cracked a slow smile while he gathered his thoughts, rubbing his jaw, then his head.

"...I didn't leave," he said, finally. "I was badly injured, rehabilitated and...eventually reassigned."

He paused.

"But they say lightning only strikes once, Lieutenant. So I think this time around, my tenure will hold."

Without his awareness or permission, a shy smile annexed Ippolit's features. "I hope so."

Lynx didn't seem put off at all by his presumption, even to expect it.

"It must have been formidable, to put you out of commission." It was difficult to imagine the solidly-built man being injured by much of anything.

"Actually," Rakitin said brightly, "that's a popular misconception. Lightning tends to strike the highest point, whether or not it's been struck previously. Some tall buildings in areas with frequent storms have been struck hundreds of times...."

His head caught up with his mouth.

"That's not what you were talking about," he concluded glumly.

"Do you know, Lieutenant...it's actually not far off."

Alexei raised his eyebrows, and laughed, although it was with a wry, black humor.

"I would be the highest point, wouldn't I?"

He paused.

"Excepting the Colonel, of course."

Volgin was not immune to the force of nature he channeled. Alexei remembered that well enough. On rare occasions when Yevgeny would lose his grip on the power that coursed through him, he would bleed.

Actually bleed.

Little rivers of wounding.

Lynx shivered inwardly at the memory of Volgin lying back on his bed, dazed and dull-eyed, with crimson crowning his scalp in trickling, rich rolls like candle wax-looking like a martyr on an internal cross.

He had hurled Alexei away at the last moment during a session in his quarters when he sensed himself spiralling out of control. He had said it was an anomaly that time would cure, the uncertainty. The suit could be refined, his conduits and quarters insulated. His own understanding was growing- but so was his power.

Lynx believed him, then. Trusted him, trusted his power.

Nothing had changed.

"What's that phrase he always says?" said Alexei after a moment, smiling unprovoked. "You know the one. You must know it. About...bushes."

Try as he might, he couldn't recall the phrase. It eluded his memory, like staring at a blank page where the outline, the shape of once-held knowledge remained, taunting. Even when he seemed utterly whole and unblighted, there were lapses. Lacuna.

It was always something like this, always something small, that reminded him he would never be truly the same again. Some things were irretrievable to him, no matter how he tried- there were residual effects of the massive shock to his system.

His smile faded, and he looked helpless, bemused for a moment.

"I don't...I can't remember it," he said, quietly.

His voice was pained.

"Do you? Can you tell me what it is, Lieutenant?"

Lynx's eyes clouded the way someone's did when they were seeing something projected on the backs by the tireless slideman of memory. The unmistakable Keep Out sign of the heart.

Abruptly, Ippolit felt again the keen sense of being an intruder on the connection between the two men, as though he were eavesdropping at a confessional being put to a far more tender and primal use.

As if in an effort to back away, he felt his mind drop back into thoughts of lightning, tripping from the ways of mechanics to aesthetics. The sublimity of the torrent striking his face unimpeded as he stared and his young untried heart went wild at each distant bright bolt, wishing with a child's flawless intensity that one would fall near him so that he could gather that searing, flowing light into his hand like a firefly gone supernova. Being dragged in out of the rain, pressing his face to cold glass as water struck the other side and listening to the muttering chant of an old voice yet to lose its last resonance.

Lynx's question took Rakitin by surprise, phonetics echoing and mixing with memory's stored storms.

"Kuwabara?" Polya guessed absurdly.

"Yes," exclaimed Lynx, at once, absurdly gratified and relieved. "That's it. Kuwabara, kuwabara."

He hadn't expected the pathologist to come up with it, in all honesty- after all he'd only been here for a few weeks at the most- what were the odds he would have heard Volgin say it?

And yet, Volgin had said it often enough when Lynx knew him. Why should that have changed?

When nothing else had...

"Thank you," he murmured. "You're a good soratnik."

"Huh." Ippolit was nonplussed. "Really?"

He hadn't expected the trinket left by his odd and rather embarrassing heritage to have any significance. It was a feeling of distant nostalgia, like finding something you thought you had left a thousand miles away at the bottom of a drawer.

"Strange soil things grow in," he remarked obscurely, glancing into the middle distance.

Something about the subject had made a change come over Lynx, accentuated by his brightening at the word. His eyes had saddened, and for a moment the big, powerful man had seemed almost fragile. Almost lonely. It had vanished, impermanent as purged poison, leaving only traces behind.

"It's funny how easy it is to forget the little things," Polya prattled. "I used to leave things on the burner all the time, and just forget all about them. Well, until it exploded the second time."

He looked upward in thought.

"Or was that the third....?"

If anyone else had tried Rakitin's absent-minded scientist routine, Lynx would have known it for a subtle and well-intended attempt to make him feel better about his own lack of specific recall, but somehow Alexei knew that wasn't the case with the Lieutenant.

No, there was no irony or wry jesting in Rakitin's expression, only a certain wistful glumness in the wake of his little chirped soliloquoy.

The pathologist's words were not a mindful attempt at sympathy, but a straightforward admission, leaving Alexei with no doubt in his mind that Rakitin's lab did witness its fair share of boil-overs.

Alexei's lip curved at the corner.

"That's all right. I'll tell you what they used to say in my specialist training. They would say: 'You've got to break a few eggs.' "

Rakitin watched him politely, as if waiting for him to go on.

"What?" said Lynx, after a moment.

Rakitin felt a tautening of the universal web, a weight like expectation on his slender strand. He sensed the falling into place of forces as natural and preordained as the effect of the moon on the ocean's tides.

Little good came of struggling against destiny without reason. Rakitin went along with the current.

"You...cook?" he said, looking up at Lynx quizzically.

Alexei smiled.

"Actually, I can. But no, that was a little joke. Something they said to us. It's probably only funny to barehand specialists."

The whole phrase as originally intended was "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette". The covert Spetsnaz version was apocopated, wryly, truncated to exclude the latter positive clause.

There were a lot of injokes like that one, now that he thought about it.

He decided against telling the pathologist the one his own mentor had favored.

The pithy, unvarnished: "Do unto others."

He scratched his arm absently and gave a quiet laugh.

"Sorry. That was a myopic reference to make."

"Barehand specialists," Rakitin echoed thoughtfully. "Lots of those around here."

He cracked a smile.

"Actually, it is kind of funny."

As was the thought of the composed, formidable soldier wielding a whisk and a mixing bowl.

"It's sort of hard to imagine you beating eggs."

"All the same," Alexei said, solemnly. "I've done it. And I'll do it again."

His eyebrows lowered slightly, studiously.

"I need to see to my comrades, Lieutenant. Can't leave those snipers alone. You never know what might happen."

Nothing, he thought, silently. For now, anyway. He'd put the fear of god in everyone, hadn't he.

That was what he was really worried about.

Leshovik had looked at him like a boy who had suddenly realized the great new toy he'd been playing with was an unexploded land mine.

His gaze leveled, as he regarded the pathologist with quiet acknowledgment.

"Again...I appreciate your expertise and your...candor in the situation. I owe you one."

Lynx nodded, shortly.

"Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you. And take care," he added, cryptically, turning away. "It was nice meeting you, Lieutenant. I'm sure I'll be seeing you around."

Polya remembered the man, Leshovik, with Lynx in the laboratory, and the silent volumes that had passed between them.

"Give your comrades my best," he said, smiling brightly.

As he watched Lynx depart, he hoped they would meet again.

Antivenom [February 20, 1964, 1:17 pm]

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