We are more than our scars (Ko, Dasha)
Ko hadn’t seen much of Dasha in the last fortnight. Not out of any effort on his part to avoid her, as one might be expected to avoid a person who kept punching you in the face. In fact it seemed like she was avoiding him. Perhaps she thought his vicious face kept attacking her poor fist.
He did seek her out once a few days after they’d last spoken, in order to walk past her in the corridor wearing her iPod. Yeah, he knew Lucine had asked him to look out for Dasha and he was, he would… there was just something irresistible about igniting that anger in her.
Childish, maybe. Unhelpful, definitely. But irresistible.
Maybe he just liked girls who looked at him like they wanted to kill him. There weren’t many others his own age around the convent, even fewer deathless, but the lack of choice wasn’t what drew him in, not at all. Maybe he could see patterns of his own hurt reflected in her, shadows under her skin.
A few more days passed in their usual way; preparation for London England, lessons. Lucine was making him work on his English, which grated. He didn’t like the language, even the profanities sounded weak as piss, but Lucine was right. It was useful.
Julya laughed at him as he twisted his mouth around the structure of the language while they made pelmeni for dinner, folding the thin dough around little parcels of meat. Julya’s English was awful, and she hated speaking it even more than Ko did because she hated being bad at anything, which motivated Ko to speak it around her – see the aforementioned annoy-the-girl routine.
He discovered that insulting her in English made her almost as angry as Dasha, though instead of punching him in the face she’d stormed off, and he thought he’d won till he woke up in the middle of the night from one of the worst nightmares he’d had in a long time – and Ko’s nightmares could be harrowing enough under their own steam. The dreams raked in, leaving trails of horror across his mind, vivid memories of the cold press of metal against his head and the efficient cruelty of humans.
Ko woke on his hands and knees on the floor of his bedroom, the sweep of wings nearly touching the low ceiling. Instantly he was out the window, flying hard and high. Flight was the best way to bleed out adrenaline, though not the most effective (the most effective was hitting things). Cold wind bit into his wings, iced the sweat on his face and he pushed himself harder, higher, till the strain resembled relief and he could breathe again.
There were a few lights still on in Izmaylov, though the soft glow was almost swallowed by the thick dark of the night. Sixty eight, thought Ko. Sixty eight of us.
Dasha’s right, he thought. We should strike first. This he felt like a whip at his back, the need to destroy the militia that had him and Julya when they were younger – although every member of the militia was dead, now. Lucine had destroyed them. That didn’t stop the urge to kill them again, though, or find someone in their place and destroy them. Destroy everyone.
He could fly down to the village tonight, drain them all, kill them. He could wipe them all out by himself.
The image of his younger hands around a child’s neck hit him suddenly, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Okay, maybe not the kids.
Ko didn’t go back to sleep that night, but he didn’t massacre a village either. He did wonder how far he’d have to go to destroy a village that Lucine wouldn’t find out about – very far, he imagined. He wouldn’t do it – it was only a thought. The idea of letting Lucine down like that was a bad one, he needed her to rely on him too much. Lucine and her plans for him were too deeply integrated into his view of himself and his future, he couldn’t honestly comprehend jeopardising her trust. Without Lucine, he was nothing.
As the weak winter sunlight began to bleed over the landscape, Ko strung up a reindeer. The rush of its guts as he slid his hunting knife down its body bought more relief. There was destruction, and then there was productive destruction.
Julya found him as he was skinning it, and placed a clean brown hand on his shoulder. “Did you sleep well, little brother?” she asked in their native Ukrainian.
“How could I not, knowing my sister is guarding my dreams?" he said, in pleasant English, meeting her gaze with a low and steady look of his own. He'd been practising a number of various things to say to her in his head for a while and couldn't hide the spark of pride that he'd pulled one of them off. Her eyes darkened into sharp slits of confusion as she tried to translate what he’d said, and he smiled widely at her. "Never change, Julya."
Julya may have been a perfect weapon, an asset to the cause and a true believer in Lucine’s ideals, but she could be a really shitty sister. The look in her eyes was just as dangerous as before. Ko decided it would be wise if he gave her a wide berth for a bit. Pregnancy was making her vicious.
He spent a few days up in the mountains with two of the kids at his heels, all of them pushing themselves to their limits with little food, little warmth, hiking and flying mile after mile after mile, just to see how far they could go. Ko bought guns with him and spent long hours helping them hone their techniques.
“You are strong,” he told them. “You are unshakeable. Breathe, aim. Be steady. Fire.” He taught them to relish the bruises the guns made as they kicked back, and they would run around later on, comparing them with each other, showing off to the others back at the convent who had been too young or too flightless to come.
Artur was constantly covered in bruises. He was tough, fourteen years old and new to his wings, white as the snow. He was nearly as tall as Ko already, though not nearly so large, and was pretty damn dedicated to being as tough as Ko. He was a clumsy flier, though; most of his bruises came from his terrible landing. Luba, though younger, was a better flier, steady and strong with a good eye, and would have been almost perfect if her anxiety about guns wasn’t so strong.
There was part of Ko that hated guns as well. He had been shot more times that he could remember, seen them used in horrific ways he didn’t want to remember, but it had never occurred to him to avoid using them. It would have been like being afraid of food or your own wings– weapons were integral, constant, necessary.
“Take it into the air, Artur,” Ko said, handing the younger boy the gun. “See how different your aim is compared to the ground.”
Artur grinned, pushed his earmuffs back over his ears and kicking off the ground with a gust of wind. “How high?” he called down.
“Keep level with the canopy,” Ko called up, his voice strong but accompanied by a gesture, since if the earmuffs were doing their job Artur shouldn’t be able to hear him. They had a target set up at the other end of the clearing, a red sheet strung between two trees. So far, only Koshchiy had put a hole through the fabric, though Artur had hit one of the trees.
Artur aimed. “You can almost see him poking out his tongue,” he saw Luba’s mouth moving out of the corner of his eye. Ko had been able to lip read since he was young and he was very annoyed that he couldn’t do it in English, but hoped the knack would come.
The shot cracked through the still mountain air, safely muffled, but Artur jerked backwards, surprised by how different the kickback was when he didn’t have the ground to brace his feet against. He dropped the gun, which spun, hit the ground and fired into the trees, harmlessly, but Luba screamed and took off in the opposite direction anyway.
“Get back on the ground!” Ko growled at Artur. “Do not touch that gun.” He waited long enough to see Artur’s unpolished landing before taking off after Luba.
“Luba stop,” Ko caught up with her and cut her off, his sudden appearance in front of her making her shriek and swerve toward a tree, bending a branch back as she ran into it, causing a branchfull of snow to be flung into the air.
Goddamn kids.
Ko flicked snow out of his hair and grabbed her midair by her wrists. He wanted to toss her out of the air, to pin her down with his boot against her neck and his own gun at her head and show her what happens when you panic in a battle situation. Impress upon her – and Artur – just how dire things would get if she bolted from a fight or refused a weapon at a crucial moment, but Ko couldn’t work out how to do that without pointing a gun at her and firing if she refused to fire first, and that was the kind of technique Lucine frowned upon.
What he wanted to do was pass her off to Lucine, who was good at that sort of thing, but she’d just tell him he was perfectly capable of handling it.
Goddamn Lucine.
Instead: “You’re alright,” he told her, both his hands still clamped over her wrists as she flapped, trying to break free. “Luba, you’re alright. Calm yourself. Calm yourself down.”
Luba hiccupped in breath after breath, interspersed with a rapid-fire retelling of how Artur had dropped the gun and how it had fired at her and how it had nearly killed her, and Ko had to keep reminding her it didn’t, it wouldn’t. “You’re deathless, Lyubochka,” he repeated, more than once. “He can’t kill you. No one can.”
Luba looked at him with firey eyes. He knew her story, how her mother, a mortal woman, had been murdered in front of her (shot, Ko guessed, but didn’t know for sure) and she’d ended up with distant, human, abusive relatives for two months before Lucine found her, only a few weeks before her wings came in for the first time. She’d been lucky she was at Izmaylov when it happened – or rather, the humans were lucky. She’d flipped, to put it mildly.
“I’m deathless,” she panted, as she stopped struggling. “I’m deathless.”
“That’s right,” Ko said, loosening his grip so his hands were now only gently wrapped around her wrists. “Come down, and we’ll show that Artur how it should be done.”
A reluctant look flashed across her face, but Ko was pleased to see she pressed it down. They landed on the frozen ground together, and when Ko handed her the gun, she took it, her eyes on him. When he smiled at her, when he said “Good girl, Lyubochka,” the wave of relief that rolled over her was unmistakable.
Artur had remained where he’d landed, and looked terrified as Ko walked toward him. He didn’t feel almost as tall as Ko anymore, he felt about three feet tall. Ko’s eyes were black and dangerous as he glared down at him. “Do you know what you did wrong?” he demanded.
Artur swallowed hard. “Dropped the gun?” he hazarded.
“Next time, what will you do?”
“Not drop the gun?” Artur smiled nervously. “Also hit the target.”
“Good,” said Ko. “Try it again.”
He didn’t know how Lucine wasn’t fighting a constant battle not to smack them, honestly. But they were good, really. If you gave them a little time, they would be good.
He had to keep reminding himself that pistol-whipping wasn’t the only way to deal with kids, just because that was the first discipline he remembered. They were better than that, here. They rose above instincts, habit and their own rearing. They had to. But it was still a battle he had to fight with himself, every day. Not lashing back at Julya was one of the hardest things he had to do.
But they had time. They must have time. People like Luba were part of the reason they couldn’t be rash and strike first. Artur as well – he was a little too happy with a gun and a little too likely to get excited and fly into a tree.
At the end of the week, Ko led them back to Izmaylov, arriving in time for a steaming hot shower before a hot lunch. Not one finger, not one wingtip, was lost to the cold, and Arthur and Luba regaled the rest of the sixty five who hadn’t gone with how great they were, how many miles they’d covered, how strong they were. Ko caught Lucine watching them from her table, talking gently with a few of the other, older members of the group. She’d smiled at him, and nodded, and with that nod Ko felt himself slot back into place. That feeling was the closest to ‘home’ he’d ever found.
Though it had been some time – was it seven years now? – since he’d been with Lucine, he still did not feel totally comfortable in the four stone walls that had been designated as his for as long as Lucine had owned the convent. It was his, yes, but it was also Lucine’s. Ko didn’t resent the fact that Lucine owned the building, owned the land, and he didn’t own anything.
The feeling sat deep within him, unspoken and unrealised. It struck him as a brief swell of displacement when he walked into his room, or an occasional faint twang whenever one of the younger kids referred to the convent as home.
He barely ever thought about what the concept of home meant to him. Home was a place to be comfortable and Izmaylov was not comfortable. Home was something that would happen after the war. Home was a long way off.
For now, he sat with the kids at the long table, his body aching and relieved to be filling up on food, listening to their stories. This might not be home, whatever home even meant, but it was right. Those kids would follow him – and Lucine – into hell, should anything threaten the place they were building, the family they were building. They were good kids – wild and rough but they relied on each other absolutely.
It wouldn’t be so easy with Dasha, though.
Ko folded a piece of thick, grainy bread into his mouth and watched Dasha across the dining room as he chewed. She looked snarlier than usual as she tore up her food, glowering any conversation away.
Lucine caught his eye again. There were some people who could transmit thoughts from their mind into another, Ko knew, and although Lucine wasn’t one of them her message was clear enough. No rest for the wicked, or no time to waste.
The muscle in Ko’s jaw tightened, fractionally, and he left his place at the table and joined Dasha opposite hers.
“Here,” he said, sliding her iPod across the table. "That's yours."