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A single light was hung by a wire in the jail cell, swinging violently enough that it could have fallen when the guard threw the unconscious boy to the concrete floor and slammed the ironed door close. The floor was still covered in the acid that was used to blind his eye and the blood from a wound in his shoulder.
Nikolai’s good eye fluttered open after hours of his heart trying to decide whether it wished to continue beating or finally give out like the rest of his body had. He pulled himself by the iron bars (ignoring the pain it shot through to his ribs) to sit up, taking the tray of water and stale bread that had appeared earlier into his lap. One day, the bread would be laced with cyanide and the guard would find his corpse the next morning—the scent of vomit and blood thick in the air. But he could not care less. He shoved the bread into his mouth and chugged the water down too fast to savour the only nutrients he would have for the rest of the week.
The thought of escape was fleeting in his mind. With every beating, every breakdown, every time he lurched over the toilet and vomited blood (it was the only thing left in his system), Nikolai lost more and more of his will to pick himself up, bite at the hands that touch him, and reclaim what was his and finally leave that damp and decrepit underground facility. He only ever got out of the metal bed when the guards drag him out by his arms that were too weak to move on their own anymore.
At some point, he started thinking killing himself would be a happier ending than the one where he escapes from captivity. (That would never happen, though. As long as the men saw him useful, they were going to keep him alive no matter how close to death they kept him.)
“Get up.” the guard snapped at him one day, hitting a metal baton to his stomach that made his brittle bones grind and tear against each other. “You have an appointment today with the doctor to get rid of that disgusting thing.” They sneered at the sight of the boy’s eye.
Nikolai did not fight back when he was forced—dragged—out of the cell, ankles scathing against the concrete floors. His vision came in and out until he was strapped by the arms and legs to an examination table, a surgical light burning into his brain.
“Look at you, poor thing,” a disembodied voice spoke to him, “We’ll have to remove that thing. A shame it would be if the infection reaches your bloodstream before our experiments are complete.”
“Can–Can...I,” Nikolai coughed, “Have...anaesthesia?”
“You know the answer to that, boy.” the voice said, a hand caressing his cheek before fabric was pushed through his mouth and past his molars.
Pieces of metal pressed in on Nikolai’s right eyelid to keep it open. The air of the room stung his eye, and something cold pushed through the back of it and an ungloved hand tugged at the eyeball. Echoes of his own muffled screams filled the room as scissors cut through the nerve holding the eye in the socket. Blood ran down his cheek and on to his clavicle before he lost all consciousness.
For the next several days that followed, Nikolai was stuck in paralysis; a guard having to lift his head and press the glass of water against his lips every morning and a piece of bread every other day. He could not think—even when hands that were too hot to handle touched the sensitive parts of his body and teeth that bit into the shoulder that was more bone than skin.
Strength returned to him little by little. Bandages covered over where his eye once was and—oh, was it always so hard to breathe?
After several doctor’s visits and serum injections, a plan finally came to him. A foolish one that would almost certainly end in his death, but a plan that would allow him to have an ending he chose for himself.
It was winter when it happened (not that Nikolai knew, the facility was underground and the lack of fresh air made it insufferably hot). Screams filled the torture chamber; melodies of crying people begging for mercy singing through his ears; the scent of death thick in the air.
None of the guards had a body close to his, but, in need of clothes that were not stained in others’ blood, he stripped a corpse for their clothes, taking along with him their wallet. In a locked safe, he found the coat that was stolen from him the night he came there. It was collecting dust and had lost the extravagant beauty it once had during the years of the circus.
When Nikolai reached the surface, the cold winter breeze had him nearly falling backwards. Regaining his balance with the help of the rusting rail overlooking a dark river, he darted his eyes back and forth to figure out where he was; snow covering roofs of dilapidating buildings from across the river; the foggy outline of a city; a faded sign with the words Saint Petersburg.
He stumbled his way to a supermarket that was dimly lit in the winter weather—legs nearly giving out after months (years?) of not receiving proper use. Wary eyes stared at him as he grabbed handfuls of painkillers and any food under three hundred roubles. The cashier offered him a quivering smile when he approached her, “Will that be all for today, sir?”
Avoiding all eye contact (they are all looking at it), Nikolai said his thanks and hurried out of the store. He counted what little money he had left: enough to give him a place to sleep for two, maybe three, nights at the first motel he came across; a dingy parking lot with weeds taking control of the pavement; broken windows to rooms sealed off by wooden planks; a neon green sign that flickered too much to be intentional reading vacancy.
The inside of his room looked even sadder than outside—a single bed with a cracked bed frame, paint on the walls chipping off; pictures displaying a happy scenery that only made the feeling he felt worse. It was a surprise to him that when he opened the door to the bathroom there wasn't a corpse hanging from the ceiling. But, looking into the mirror, there was still something with the resemblance to one.
Nikolai could not recognise himself. Only months prior, he had been apart of a group that took care of him, that kept his body from looking like something from a campfire’s tale—a boney, one-eyed creature covered in blood. It took all of his control to not to break the glass to prove that wasn't him looking back at him. Instead, he threw himself in the bath where his wounds bled and dried.
Get clothes, he mused to himself when he got out, slipping the coat over his small frame. The screws that had been drilled in and out of his head assured that he would not be able to remember how to use his ability; otherwise, he would have teleported himself to his neighbour’s room and stolen all their valuables as he used to do habitually.
With even a softer bed than he had felt in years, Nikolai was not able to sleep that night. He tossed and turned with every thought of needles and rough hands, cold air forcing itself in from the cracks in the window and it was so cold. His bones ached with every shiver and parts of him thought that with their brittleness they were broken.
Air, he thought and pulled himself out of the bed, trembling legs steading on to the creaky floor. Ignoring the cracks and aching of his bones, he threw on clothes before meeting the harsh winter weather.
It was snowing now. Heavy clouds rolled in from the east and it would not be long before the weather worsened to the point of unbearability even to Russian standards.
With heavy arms crossed over each other, Nikolai walked through the parking lot to an abandoned lot nearby. A playground, it appeared to be, that was stripped of its slides and swingsets to leave nothing but withered concrete with drilled holes that now had minuscule forests trying to fight away the snow. A sign laid on the ground with only speckles of snow that read Please keep in sight of your children at all times.
There was a warehouse across the street. Abandoned, like most things of that neighbourhood seemed to be; the windows were busted out, but iron bars covered over them; the faint moving of a light reflecting off of one wall to another in a window. Someone is still in there, Nikolai thought passingly. It did not cause any sort of concern to him. He had been homeless once, and abandoned buildings were often his substitute.
The wind picked up, costing him to almost fall to his knees again and serving as the signal for him to make his return to the motel. But as he turned on his heels to leave, he and his heart stopped at the sound of a blood-curdling scream coming from within the warehouse. His fingers thumbed the buttons of the coat as his mind raced with what he should do. Was he willing to risk his own wellbeing in the name of curiosity?
Another scream, this time belonging to someone else, someone younger—a child, he presumed.
Curiosity wins. However sceptical of his ability, Nikolai raised the edge of his coat and pulled his body through with the intention of landing in the room of the screaming. But instead, he ended up in the hallway outside the room—a damp, poorly lit hallway that did not have the security he had expected. In fact, it appeared that everyone that was in the building was in that room.
Find a knife, he thought as his hand reached through the coat, Or do I get a gun? He ultimately left it up to fate—his hand brushing against wood and glass before finally sneaking a pistol off of one of the men. A poor choice considering he did not know how to use such a weapon.
His hand was unsteady when he opened the door, carelessly closing the only eye he had left as he shot around the room like a madman hoping to at least hit something. And when he opened his eye after all the bullets were gone, Nikolai was surprised to see that he actually hit his targets—two men in ragged clothes.
In the centre of the room chained by the hands and neck to a pole was a boy, hair sticking to his forehead with blood and sweat—like the centrepiece to a Christmas dinner, he snickered.
Even with the cacophony he caused, the boy looked to be unconscious, dead even. Nikolai made silent steps towards him, not missing the corpse of a man who looked to have had his entire head blown to pieces by a cannon (he knew what that looked like, it happened at a performance once). The boy’s head shot up with the hastiness that seemed uncanny for someone who just appeared to be dead, violet eyes darting around the room at the scene of the murders, and asked with a hoarse voice, “Who are you?”
Nikolai hummed, pausing to look at the boy. Immaturity was in every bone and bruise that he could see, putting him no older than thirteen. He smiled and gave a small bow, “I am your guardian angel.”
“Angel?” the boy asked with a tilt of the head, his eyes wide and sparkling with an emotion unknown to Nikolai, “Do...Do all angels look like you?”
A smile spread across Nikolai’s face and sang, “Maaaybe!” His boots clicked against the floor as he approached the boy and reached his hand out to touch his cheek, “Now let's get rid of those chains!”
The boy’s face paled even more than they naturally were, his body entirely flinching away before he could be touched and his voice trembling as he spoke, “D-Don’t...touch me...,” he pointed his bony finger towards the door, “Keys...there are keys in the room just left of here. I can get myself out if you find the keys.”
Violet eyes stared up at him in horror when Nikolai attempted to touch him—something that should not have come as a surprise to him, but a frown still replaced his smile at the boy’s reaction. “Hmm, yes, I could do that, but,” Nikolai chimed, “An angel like myself can easily cut you free of those chains.”
“Don’t get close to me.”
“Do you not trust your own angel?”
“No, I just—” The boy tried to start, interrupted by the crashing sounds of metal chains hitting the floor when Nikolai cut him free with one swift swipe. He struggled to remove the metal around his wrists and neck that were bloodied from it digging into his skin every time men pulled at the chains.
“Take my hand,” Nikolai said, kneeling down in front of him to hold out his hand, “Here, I’ll bring you to safety.”
“You can’t touch me.”
“Sure I can! See?” Nikolai grabbed the bruised and scratched up hand of the boy and pulled him against his chest. A small whine escaped from the boy, his expression a painful mixture of fear and shock. His body felt like a skeleton pulled out from its coffin after centuries underground, like if he pressed down on him he would turn to dust and wither away in the wind. “Well, now, my human, what's your name?”
“Name...?” the boy stuttered out from shock, teeth biting down on brittle nails, “F...Fyodor Dostoevsky.”
“Fedya,” Nikolai sang, taking Fyodor’s hand to kiss his bruised knuckles, “And I am Nikolai Gogol. Pleased to meet you,” he lifted the side of his coat and added, “And just as a fair warning, your body might be ripped to shreds by this!”
He pulled the coat over them, and they ended up in the river outside the warehouse. Snow meeting the dark and freezing water that left Fyodor coughing and gripping on to Nikolai’s shoulder with the intensity of as if he would die if he loosened his grip. “W-Warn me...next time you throw us...into freezing water!”
“Oops!” Nikolai laughed, patting the younger boy’s head as he brought them to shore, “I meant for us to land on top of the bridge. I’ll get it right next time!”
Fyodor collapsed to his knees when Nikolai released him on the rocky shore, fingernails gripping and bleeding on the stones as he wheezed and struggled to reply, “I...I can't breathe.”
“There, there, Fedya.” The sight of the boy lurching over the rocks and coughing up water and specks of blood made Nikolai’s ribs twist and tear apart. He ran his thumb in circles against Fyodor’s vertebrae that were too prominent and waited patiently for him to calm down before lifting him up into his arms with ease.
“I can walk...on my own.” Fyodor said in protest, but by the time he had finished speaking, his head was laying on his shoulder and his eyes fluttered close, heavy breathing turning into slow, quiet breaths—a scenery that had Nikolai struggling to hold back a fit of laughter.
He carried the now unconscious boy back to the motel room that felt like a safe haven after the hell of a snowstorm they walked through, bones awkwardly rubbing against each other with every shiver as he laid Fyodor on the bed.
“Gogol...,” somnolence etched in Fyodor’s voice as he slowly returned to consciousness, eyes unfocused and fingers wrapping around a string from the duvet, “Where...am I?”
“Now, now, Fedya,” Nikolai hushed Fyodor and closed his eyes with his hand—mentally making note of how hot his skin was at his touch, “Sleep now. We’ll discuss in the morning.”
When the boy returned to sleep with ease, Nikolai took to the liberty of gathering more materials and clothing, using the money he pickpocketed off of strangers on Mainstreet—a strategy he had developed at a young age that often ended with adults yelling and hitting at him (which had only sparked his enjoyment from it).
A painful fever gripped Fyodor and held him hostage in what Nikolai could only imagine being a nightmare—cries passing through his lips and knuckles turning white as he held on to the feathered blanket. It took two days for him to finally wake up, confused eyes looking up at the older boy who held an ice pack against his forehead and said, “Welcome back.”
“How...,” Fyodor coughed and brought himself up by his elbows, “How long was I asleep?”
“Two days.”
“Two days,” Fyodor’s eyebrows furrowed, “I’ve been gone for too long,” he tried to lift his body out of bed, “I need to leave.”
“Tsk, tsk. Not yet,” Nikolai hummed, pressing his hands on to Fyodor’s shoulders to push him back down, “As your guardian angel, I get to make all the decisions for you. And I order you to stay here until you are healed.”
“But my priest—”
“—Is a creep who has been using you until you mature,” Nikolai winked, unable to hold in his laughter any longer at Fyodor’s scrunched up expression, “With me, I can promise that you will be safe. That’s my job, isn't it?”
Fyodor was silent, calculating in his head and allowing himself to relax back into the bed. A hand reached up to touch the bandages covering half of Nikolai’s face and commented, “You’re bleeding.”
“Hmm, oh this?” Nikolai took him by the wrist, blood smeared over where Fyodor had touched him, “Demons attacked me. This was the result.”
The younger boy only nodded to that, the childish gullibleness he had towards Nikolai was captivating, making the memory of the mangled corpse with only an iota of a face left seem distant and irrelevant to here and now. Fyodor said not another word as he turned over—blankets clutched against his chest—and fell back to sleep.
Leaving him to rest, Nikolai went into the bathroom, switching on the light that caused pain to soar through his wound. Indeed, he was bleeding. A lot. Blood trickled down from his cheek, the loose bandages hardly holding back any of it. Unwrapping, it revealed the bleeding hole in his face—something yellow sticking to the top of the eyelid, keeping more blood from spilling out.
Not knowing how to properly care for it, he took a washcloth from the hanger and held it under hot water until it made his skin go numb. Blood stained the cloth as he chafed the infected eye, his free hand moving in between his teeth to keep himself from crying out. The bleeding ceased and the eye looked clean; he threw the cloth into the wastebasket and wrapped fresh bandages back around his eye, careful of making it tighter without causing more pain.
By the time Nikolai was finished, his hands were trembling and legs uncooperative. It took his stomach coiling and growling for him to realise he needed to eat. The only things that he had consumed in the last seventy-two hours were peppermint candies and black tea—the food of the gods in his eye.
There was a small microwave in the room—one that any person with common sense would disinfect before ever daring to use it (but Nikolai was either unaware of this or simply could not be bothered to clean it). Taking the box of frozen pierogi he had bought during his last supermarket visit, he put all the food he could stuff on a single plate and waited for it to heat up.
Fyodor awakened not too long after the microwave began beeping obtrusively, eyes more alert and aware of his surroundings than the last two times. His eyes darted from one side of the room to another, analysing everything from the painting of birds being fed to the chipped paint. When he seemed to realise where he was, he only sat up and brought the blanket up to his chest and mumbled while rubbing his eyes, “Hello, Gogol.”
“Good evening, Fedya,” Nikolai beamed as he brought the overstuffed plate to the bed, “I made us some pierogi. Fresh and entirely homemade!”
Fyodor did not react to the obvious lie, taking a dumpling between his trembling fingers and nibbled at the edges before finally biting into it. Seeing the practically emanciated boy eat, Nikolai could not help but feel a sense of accomplishment. Within a few weeks, he was sure he would be able to see his cheeks filled in that would make them worthy of being pinched and adored.
“You’re staring,” Fyodor stated between bites, eyebrows furrowing in apparent disgust, “I don't like it.”
“Oh, how rude of you, Fedya,” Nikolai dramatically wept, “I am supposed to look after you, am I not?” He leaned in to touch his hand and add on but quickly froze when he saw how Fyodor reacted—hands retreating to under the blankets where they could not be touched and eyes widened with petrification. Right, there was still that.
It did not take asking to know why the boy repeatedly recoiled when Nikolai tried to touch him. The corpse he witnessed was far enough to come to the conclusion of an ability—one that he did not appear to know how to control. One wrong move would surely end in the dirtied walls of the motel room becoming stained with his own blood, whether it be intentional or unintentional.
Neither of them spoke after that. The food, despite being enough for six people, was quickly eaten (mainly by the eldest of the two) and left not even remnants on the plate. Sickness was sure to follow not too long after the meal, but Nikolai gave it not a single thought as he jumped up and turned to Fyodor, “I got you some clothes so you can get out of those bloody rags.”
“Thank you, but,” Fyodor bit on to the nail of his thumb as he spoke without making eye contact, “I still...haven’t recovered any strength. I wouldn't be able to wash the blood off, let alone change into clothing.”
The quiet embarrassment in his voice only endeared Nikolai more to him. Laughing and not hesitating to take him by the hand, he said, “Then let me do the work for you. It's either that or let you get sicker in those things.”
After only a bit more coaxing, Fyodor finally accepted. Not a minute into the bath, the water already began to take a faint red colour. With the boy’s eyes dulling to the point he didn't seem there, Nikolai ran the washcloth gently down his abdomen, making way for faded scars to show—some small and others large and hard to miss. Other scars were far more recent, discoloured and made Fyodor flinch every time he touched them.
There were also bruises—ones that he could not pretend he did not see if he tried. From the inner thighs up to his throat, bruises presented themselves as a painter’s palette after being used—yellow smudges that dotted the palette and dark purples and blacks taking up the remainder of the space. Too deep in thought at the sight of them, Nikolai did not realise how hard he was pressing down until Fyodor arched away from him and whispered for him to be gentler.
When all the blood was gone and the injuries that needed bandages were bandaged, Nikolai helped Fyodor into warm clothing that were several sizes too large for his body that could potentially fit comfortably into clothing made for an eight-year-old.
“Feel better?” Nikolai asked, taking a comb and running into through his thin black hair. Looking at him through the mirror, the almost lifeless violet eyes staring into the void resembled that of his own one-eyed gaze. But instead of the despair, there was something else. Something that seemed far too calculative and distant to belong to a child younger than himself.
Fyodor hummed his response, fingers playing at the collar of his shirt. If he was considerate, Nikolai would have left him be as it was clear he was deep in a trance of thought—hard at work at something he was just too eager to figure out.
“Fedya,” Nikolai chimed, taking a strand of his hair to twirl around his finger, “Mind sharing with the class what has gotten you so preoccupied?”
The silence that followed was long and Nikolai had just but given up and declare that as a no, but Fyodor finally spoke before he could do anything else, “There are more men,” he continued when Nikolai only tilted his head with confusion, “The people who kept me hostage. There are more of them. A hundred, at least. And they will not let me go that easily.”
“We can't kill them,” Nikolai replied, “Two malnourished kids wouldn't be enough to take them down. Especially with you.”
“I can kill them,” Fyodor said, looking down at his shaking hands and added on in a quieter voice, “I think.”
Nikolai could only laugh, dishevelling the hair he had just worked on to make tidy and spoke, “You’re not as strong as you think you are, Fedya. You wouldn't last three seconds against them.”
“What else can we do?” Fyodor asked, “You have already made yourself a target by helping me. Both of us are more than likely to die if we stay here.”
“Hmm,” Nikolai tapped his foot before saying, “I could get us to Moscow. It’s far enough that we would be safe at least a little longer, yes? In this weather, we can easily sneak out of the city before anyone realises we’re missing.”
“Are you positive you can pull something like that off?”
Nikolai smiled, taking Fyodor by the shoulders to spin him around and press a kiss at the top of his head, “As your guardian angel, I assure you I can do it.”