Mess, cont

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin stared at Liadov, his stomach clenched into a ball of ice.

Slowly, as he studied Nika's expression, he realized something.

Someone was striking derision and a wall of cold rejection, someone was where they weren't wanted, and it wasn't Polya.

How strange.

In the wash of relief and something else (acceptance? No, that was absurd), he felt an undercurrent of sympathy for the supply captain.

For the first time, it occured to him that he could play along.

Polya looked met Utrov's eyes and smiled a little, shyly.

The secret was shared, after all.

"You know, I think he does."

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[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

The ashes of anger stirred and gave forth nothing.

A few days ago, Rakitin would have given a bloody chunk of his heart to have the murderer alone in the night at point blank range.

As he looked at the man who had once been called Dmitri, Ippolit could only see a twisted child.

Revenge against such a stunted soul was worse than empty.

"Report me if you want," Rakitin said tiredly. "I won't stop you."

He released a listless laugh.

"Wouldn't it be funny, if we switched places. Me at Magadan, and you here."

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

Rakitin’s laughter caught him by surprise, left him off-balance, unguarded, and a bit unhinged.

He was laughing, not condemning Dima's life as useless.

“Whatever you want. I’ll have a five-page formal report on Colonel Volgin’s desk tomorrow morning, then.”

Deimos smirked at the sheer irrationality of his promise. There was no reason he shouldn’t spare the usual insults and cursing, and Polya’s brief fish-eyed look of horror more than made up for the inconvenience.

“Shit. You wouldn’t last ten minutes at Magadan. Maybe a half hour, tops, if you were someone else’s bitch.” Dmitry shrugged a bit, looked Rakitin up and down. “Well. Maybe an hour. You’re kind of pretty.”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Why, I think that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

It was as if the world was flat, and had turned to be viewed edge-on. Polya couldn't see any reason why he shouldn't be having a friendly conversation with the scum of the earth.

The threat to reveal him to the very man he longed for deepened the surreality.

Polya found himself wondering about this wretched being. Like a compound that had, through some fatal flaw or grand mistake, devolved into less than its components.

"Is that how you survived?" he asked, curiosity floating across his features.

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“No.”

His tone turned bitter again, his dark eyes narrowed enough to drill holes in Ippolit soul. Dmitry hesitated, unsure if it was genuine foolish curiosity, or an insult disguised as the former.

He recalled the tall, graceful blonde on that very first day. Too pretty, too frightened. His fear was palpable and delicious.

There were few words in the beginning, only brief impersonal exchanges, fumbling, mumbled orders and secrecy.

And then one day, he thought to ask the man for his name. Iosef Obruchnikov. Also born in Moscow, but from a very different world than Dmitry.

He looked down for a moment, then back up at Polya, pushing away from the metal crate. “No, it’s not. If you --”

The flame soldier stopped suddenly, and became aware of something he had forgotten entirely, up until that moment. Thoughtfully, he pulled something from the pocket of his jumpsuit and turned it over in his hands. He held his breath as he opened the lid of the brass compass.

The black needle wobbled, and settled across the middle of the N. It was pointing due north.

“Listen. You’ll probably take this the wrong way, but I’ve got to say it now. If I were the murderer you’re hunting, you’d be my next victim. You fit the profile. You’re vulnerable. And you fucking wander off from your bodyguards and meet strange men in strange places.”

Deimos traced his fingers over the engraved phoenix on the top of the compass, but did not look up.

“And if I were the murderer… eliminating you would eliminate any risk of getting caught. But I’m not the murderer. Just a murderer.”

Finally, his gaze flickered back to Polya. "You should be more careful."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Polya furrowed his brow, confused.

"You sound like you want him to get caught. I would have thought you'd be kindred spirits."

It was blunt, but without malice, like a bat swung idly from hand to hand.

"I'd think you wouldn't mind seeing me dead, either."

The villain's sudden concern surprised him almost as much as getting an answer. Unease laid its hand at the small of Polya's back.

Rakitin looked up at the stars, watching them watch him.

"You know," he mentioned, "for a while, I would have killed you, if I got the chance. I wouldn't have given it an instant's hesitation."

As he returned his eyes to Deimos, something caught the light. Metallic, circular. A shape like a bird in bas-relief. An eagle, maybe.

"What's that?" Polya said, forgetting himself. "It's pretty."

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“Maybe you thought wrong.” Dmitry shrugged, turning the compass over and over in his hands as though it were a worry stone. “Or maybe you thought right, and I’m the one who was wrong. I don’t know.”

He was startled to think that such a delicate flower as Ippolit Rakitin could harbor such malicious thoughts. It was macabre and wrong.

“Strange, isn’t it? I never took the time to look at the stars until I came here.”

Maybe Rakitin wasn’t quite as delicate or innocent as he looked.

An awful thought skittered across the surface of his consciousness, like a rock across a still pond.

He pressed the compass into Ippolit’s palm, and his hands lingered.

The pathologist’s skin felt warm and soft, and slightly clammy.

“What was her name? You want to kill me… because I killed someone very close to you. Don’t you? Was she a lover? A sister?”

Where maliciousness typically lay coiled like a venomous snake, there was only curiosity, and a frantic desire to know.

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin would have expected the murderer's hands to feel lifeless as stone, as if the blood staining it were an agent to corrode the flesh into a physical reflection of inner inhumanity. Instead, it felt perfectly ordinary. His skin was too numb to crawl.

"Not you," Polya said softly to the bronze object in his hand, "except for the sense that every strain is the same sickness."

A compass. Rather beautiful. What he had taken for part of the bird design was in fact stylized flames. A firebird. One of the four beasts in the stars. Polya had always liked the turtle best.

"Her name was Kira." He turned the compass in his hands. "She was young, and she was lost. My sister. Someone like you found her."

The metal gleamed.

"I found the evidence that convicted him. I never saw his face. It was over quickly."

The light made its edges glow as if there were fire hidden behind them.

"He's probably dead. I don't know."

Rakitin clicked the lid shut with a sound like a cricket's cry.

He set it back in Deimos's hand, the unneccesary gun at his side like a friend. The bird nested amid the thematically appropriate scars.

"It doesn't really matter, does it?"

Polya met Deimos's eyes without anger.

"It is an insult to suggest that simple death could atone for your crimes."

Less than an empty gesture.

"Tell me," Rakitin said suddenly. "I always wondered. While they're bleeding, do you imagine that someone is going to measure the wounds to find the width of the knife? Or that someone's going to bag and label the bits you scatter?"

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

Dmitry made a small noise of understanding. Sympathy and compassion were still beyond him and his fractured psyche, but he understood in his own way, and nodded.

“Kira. That’s a very pretty name.” A very unusual name too, and he wanted to ask just how young she was, what she looked like, how she wore her hair, but something about it struck him as wrong, in some way.

He shook his head. “No, you should care.”

Dmitry met the pathologist’s gaze, and the man’s curiosity gave him chills, quickened his pulse, set his nerves on edge.

“You ask so many questions.” Deimos smiled, reached out and brushed his fingers over Polya’s cheek, gently, almost lovingly. “Do you really want me to tell you what I imagined as they lay bleeding?”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

How strange, this smiling murderer.

His fingers were dry and coarse. Polya wondered distantly if he might glance into a mirror later and see his face flayed open to the bone, or some other mark.

Wounds surrounded by stippled powder burns were characteristic of shots from this distance.

It was part of his job to recreate the moment of death from what was left behind. To make from scavenged parts a working model of a murderer's mind.

"Tell me," Rakitin said.

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

Deimos pocketed the compass and his vicious smile lingered.

“Come a little closer, and I’ll tell you everything.”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin stepped forward. He drew his gun from the holster and rested the muzzle at the murderer's heart.

Contact shots left stars of powder congruent with the weapon's rifling.

"Tell me," Polya said softly. "What do you think of while a girl, defenseless, unarmed, is losing her life for the crime of letting you within a meter?"

Sorrow flowed in him like a river.

"Do you even understand what you've done?"

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

The rigid steel pressed to his heart drew a ragged gasp from his lips, and he shivered as fire raced along his skin in pinpricks and blossomed at his groin.

“You’ll kill me lovingly, just like this?” His fervid gaze flickered to the gleaming metal against his chest, then back to Polya’s dark eyes. “With a gentle squeeze of the trigger?”

Dmitry pressed closer, his hands seeking out the buttons of Rakitin’s coat.

“Something beautiful is exchanged between murderer and victim. Something spiritual. A dance. Like sex. Better, still. Words do not exist, because words cannot describe the feeling of taking another life…”

He was whispering, low and soft into the pathologist’s ear like the sweet nothings of a dear lover.

“Words like carnal, and erotic… but there are no words for it! The struggling, the screaming, the red blood that flows so easily…and my own rage. The is nothing that could ever extinguish it, and when they are silent, finally, and cold and pale… oh, they’re so beautiful in death.”

Dmitry trembled, rested his head on Polya’s shoulder, pulled the lithe, pale man against him by the coarse wool of his coat. Wool, yes, he smelled sweet like old wool and soap, and the murder shivered again. “You have no idea what you do to me. How you destroy me, only with questions.”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin looked down at where Deimos clung to him like a blind leech seeking unprotected flesh. It was something like the cool dispassion of lifting the liver from a corpse.

"So that's what it is to you," he said, through dawning understanding. "A...fetish?"

The gun was pressed between them, steady against Deimos's chest.

"You're like the men who sniff women's shoes."

He looked down at Deimos with pity.

"You don't understand at all," he said, "that someone is anything but your doll to break in a fit of pique."

Sorrow weighed his shoulders.

"You're nothing but a spoiled child."

Rakitin's eyes closed in sadness, and he said, "You truly are pathetic."

Eveything had a reason.

"There would be no pleasure in killing you, Deimos."

How tawdry, sad, and stained those reasons often were.

"I would put you down like a rabid dog, because that is what you've chosen to be."

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“Why do you insult me, when I give nothing but kindness to you?” The charged smile evaporated from his features, and he relaxed his grip on Rakitin’s coat. “To compare what I do to a fetish… you disgust me.”

Dmitry shook his head, and laughter caught in his throat.

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand, and you never will. You, with your fancy words and lifeless insults. You go around picking up broken pieces but you’ll never understand what pleasure there is in destruction. Not even if I showed you…”

At that moment, he wanted to strangle the life from the pathologist, but his hands remained still, one limp at his side, one resting against Rakitin’s raised arm.

“And you’ll never understand what I am, what I do, or what I am becoming. You never should have asked.” Dmitry's tone was even and calm, and it surprised him.

He looked down at the gun between them, but lingered close through an uneasy silence.

Somewhere, a dog barked. An engine rumbled to life in the distance.

He was aware that a peculiar sadness was leaching into him, like the blue shadows that remained in the wake of an extinguished fire. Only little embers remained, dancing just beyond his periphery vision.

Finally, his attention flicked back to Polya and he smiled, very slightly. “You know… you’re warm, and you smell nice.”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"You're not the first person here to say that," Polya muttered.

He raised his eyes.

"Of course. You imagine yourself some kind of artist. Never imagining that someone could be more than your canvas."

Pale faces beneath the sheet.

"I understand too well. I've been shown. I've seen the aftermath of the work of your kind."

A listless smile cracked his lips.

"Maybe you yourself. Moscow is large but the world is small."

His arm was entangled with the murderer's as if they had paused in the middle of a mad dance.

"Tell me that, then. What are you becoming?"

He jerked the gun at the killer's heart, just enough to admonish.

"Is there any reason not to end your life here and now, besides not giving you the satisfaction?"

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

The world itself was a great, blank canvas though, at least according to Iosef.

And Red Square had seemed both perfect canvas to one, and perfect hunting grounds to the other, and ruination to both.

Dmitry shrugged because it was reflexive, and seemed like the logical thing to do. “I don’t know,” he murmured, averting his eyes. “I don’t know anything any more, and I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t know why I want to make you understand me, or why I want to understand you.”

He flinched away when Polya moved suddenly, wincing, thinking his life was over at last. The was only silence and the pounding of his own heart. No gunshots, no searing pain.

“You don’t want to kill me.” He breathed in the cold night air and held it, letting the rush of adrenaline go with it. “And I don’t want to kill you, really. I don’t think I want to hurt anyone anymore, and I don’t know why. Maybe you can tell me, if you understand men like me so well.”

There was no malice in his tone, only a suggestion, an offer that came out half-hearted at best.

Finally he smirked, in spite of himself. “Maybe there’s really somethin' to the Fury’s theory of purification by fire.”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

It surprised Rakitin that Deimos winced. The touch of the gun had seemed to excite him before.

"It's the result I know, not the cause," he said. "That's why I asked you."

Wanting to understand was the state of the universe at rest. It didn't need a why.

"And...no. I don't want to kill you."

His eyes, customarily warm and curious, hardened.

"But if you hurt anyone here, I will."

He said it in the voice of fact that he used for reporting findings.

"I promise you that."

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“Maybe if we go around in circles for long enough, we’ll start making sense to one another.” He laughed dryly and shook his head.

Ippolit Rakitin would have to wait in a very long line for his chance, should Dmitry ever slip. There wouldn’t be a lot left to kill by the time Polya’s number came up.

Dmitry finally let go of Rakitin’s coat, but didn’t drift too far. “It’s cold.” He offered, both of the dark night and the pathologist’s unusual disposition. “Where will you go?”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin released a husk of a laugh, holstering his gun.

"I would have to be a fool to tell you that."

He shrugged, resettling his coat on his shoulders.

"There's no reason you shouldn't change your mind about wanting to kill me, and no reason I should make it easy for you."

Rakitin cocked an eyebrow.

"Will you return to your brothers?"

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“There’s no reason I should tell you that either. What if you change your mind?”

It was still possible that he could catch Io and Phobos before they went out on night patrol. If he hurried, he could join them on the mountain with a cup of bitter coffee, huddled around a bonfire. Pulling a double was better than laying in an empty bed tossing and turning all night long, alone with his thoughts.

“Just… be careful. Out there.” Deimos gestured, vaguely. “In the dark. All alone.” He picked up the handle of his flamethrower where it dangled at his side by a fuel line, frowned at it, and waved to the lieutenant.

Something made him want to ask if Rakitin wanted an escort to wherever it was he wasn't going, even though it would be pointless to even offer.

“Oh, one other thing. Could you please tell Nika I said hello?”

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Da," Polya said. "I'm sure he'll be overjoyed to hear from you."

He paused, brows lifting in mild affront.

"There's no need to fear me shooting you in the back. I would shoot you in the front, like a gentleman."

Rakitin turned to the route that would take him through the shadows to the shooting range. Creatures that lurked in the darkness were nothing to those that emerged smiling into the light. By day, the murderer they hunted walked among them, the same as any other but for the sickness beneath the skin. That frightened Polya more than the stalker in the night.

Probably he should take more precautions. If he was killed by the person he was sent here to help look for, he would feel very silly, and probably anything he found out in the process would go to waste. Hardly anyone listened to dead people these days.

"I should say the same thing," he said, giving Deimos a long, not entirely antagonistic stare. "Be careful."