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Twelve months after Ajax joins the Fatui, Pulcinella pulls him from routine combat training with an order to pack an overnight bag.
So he does, with all the speed and efficiency of a boy whose worldly possessions consist of little more than three standard-issue uniforms and the necessary toiletries. Part of him is disappointed. He likes it — the training. He’s good at it. The other recruits are older than him, bigger, but that hardly matters when everything down there had been older and bigger and a hundred times more terrifying than any human being.
Still, orders are orders, and Ajax is a soldier.
(He knows better than to talk back, had learned that lesson the hard way.)
Pulcinella greets him with a kind smile when he boards the carriage. It’s just the two of them, and Ajax allows himself to sink into the plush upholstery.
“Where are we going?”
“East,” Pulcinella says.
It’s an answer, but a nonspecific one. Ajax doesn’t ask any more questions.
By and large the journey is uneventful. He spends half of it gazing out at the Snezhnayan countryside and the other half dozing in his seat while Pulcinella busies himself with some sort of report. He’s not used to it. The silence, broken only by the sound of wheels on dirt and flipped pages.
Even before the Fatui, Ajax was the middle child of a large family. Constant noise and little to no privacy were a given. There was always someone around. Someone to play with, someone to laugh with. And at the end of the day, he and his siblings would snuggle up, all of them in one big pile to keep warm.
(These days, Ajax sleeps by himself on a hard cot with a knife beneath his pillow.)
Sometime later, Pulcinella wakes him with a gentle shake of his shoulder. The carriage is stopped, and the sky through the window is painted in hues of yellow and orange and purple. Half a day has passed since they set out from the Fatui camp.
“Big Brother!”
For a moment, Ajax writes off the voice as a figment of his imagination. One of several voices in his head. Then his senses register the crashing waves, the distinct scent of salt and sulfur he’d spent the first fifteen years of his life marinating in. He clambers over Pulcinella, scrambling to wrench open the carriage door and — yes, there! Two figures, rapidly approaching with their arms in the air screaming and waving and Ajax doesn’t hesitate to leap out to meet them halfway.
They barrel into him and his back meets the ground with a thud. The air is knocked from his lungs, and their combined weight on his chest makes it hard to breathe, but that small detail hardly matters when he can finally wrap his arms around them and feel their warmth seeping through his cloak.
“Anthon, Tonia… What are you two doing here?” Ajax asks. “I mean, why—“
“The young lady wrote to me,” a voice from above replies. Pulcinella shoulders both their bags.
“Tonia?”
His sister pouts. “Because Big Brother wouldn’t answer my letters!”
Well, no getting around that one. It wasn’t intentional — not entirely, anyway. He’d been angry. Hurt and betrayed. Not by his younger siblings, never them, but for a time anything related to his past life was hastily shoved aside. The home he was no longer welcome in, the celebrations he would miss, the childhood that was cut so painfully short… He didn’t want to think about all the things he’d lost.
(Weeks and months pass, and Ajax’s anger morphs into something closer to shame. The letters stay hidden beneath his cot, dozens of them in a secure box Ajax buys with the first payment he receives for his service to Her Majesty the Tsaritsa.)
“Sorry,” he says, because what else is there to say? “I’ll write back next time. Promise.”
Tonia looks at him for a long moment. Then, satisfied with what she sees, she extends her pinky.
“You break a pinky promise…”
-
The house hasn’t changed much. Ajax is greeted by the same old yard, the same old chipped front door. His family has lived here for generations, many of his ancestors having never ventured outside their small village.
The inside is much the same too. It makes it easy to pretend the past year has been nothing but a bad dream, that he is simply returning home after a day of play. His mother has dinner on the stove, and his father sits in his leather armchair with a toddler on his lap.
“Ajax,” he says, setting Teucer down.
Teucer approaches him with none of the wariness Ajax possessed at his age. Rather, he offers a wide grin to the brother he was too young to remember, and extends his chubby arms with a simple request:
“Up!”
Glancing between the wide eyes of his youngest brother and his father, Ajax waits for a nod of approval before scooping Teucer into his arms. “Hey there, buddy! Wow, look at how big you’ve gotten!”
The delighted squeal Teucer lets loose is infectious, and soon Ajax is laughing too as he spins them around. A whole year… He’s missed a whole year of this. Of Teucer’s first words, his first steps. And he won’t be around for his birthday, or his first day of school, or any of the days in between.
A large hand clasps his shoulder, and Ajax stops to meet his father’s gaze. There’s an unreadable look on his face, similar to the day he—
“Ajax,” he says, gruff but not unkind. “Son, how have you been?”
Son.
(The stench of alcohol, a stinging handprint on his cheek—
“Who are you? What have you done to my son?”)
Ajax coughs. “Good,” he says. Hates how his voice wobbles. “I… I’ve been good. Lord Pulcinella has been watching over me.”
“It’s been my pleasure.” Pulcinella stands to the side. He’s out of place here in this humble house, but his smile is kind, betraying none of the ruthlessness that comes with being a Fatuus, with being one of Her Majesty’s finest.
His father bows his head. “Thank you, Lord Harbinger.”
-
Growing up, Ajax is something of a crybaby. A mama’s boy, they called him, always clinging to his mother’s skirts and hiding behind her leg. She indulged him, taught him how to cook a proper meal, how to make a home.
She cried the day Ajax emerged from the Abyss.
(It’s the first time he sees her cry. It is not the last.)
Now, as she crushes him to her chest, Ajax feels the tension melting from his body because no matter how tainted he’s become, part of him will always be the little boy who craves the comfort only his mother can provide.
(She doesn’t fight the day Pulcinella takes him away, but Ajax sees the way her hands tremble, sees the wetness of her bright blue eyes.)
“I’m sorry.” The words are murmured close to his ear, and he notices the way he towers above her now. “I’m so sorry, Ajax, I—“
Ajax returns her embrace. “What are you going on about? I’m fine, Ma. See?”
(He’s not. He’ll never be fine again, but it isn’t her fault.)
“Ajax—“
“Dinner smells good. Do you need help with anything? I can set the table.”
With a shake of her head, his mother ushers him out of the kitchen. “No, no, none of that. You must be exhausted. Go wash up first and show our guest around. He’s more than welcome to sleep in Simon’s old room tonight.”
She lets him go with kiss to his cheek, right above the scabbed over cut he received during training earlier that week.
“And put some medicine on that, dear.”
“I will, I will.”
(The cut is minor and well on its way to healing, but he’ll do it for her sake.)
“I love you,” she says, just like she used to.
“Love you too, Ma.”
-
Pulcinella bribes his siblings.
They call him Uncle Boris, too young to fully understand how dangerous the man truly is, but Ajax doesn’t miss the way Anthon hastily wipes the crumbs from his face as Ajax approaches. They grumble when he steals Uncle Boris away.
The tour of the house doesn’t take long. There isn’t much to show after all, but Pulcinella seems charmed anyway. Vaguely, Ajax wonders if Pulcinella has a family of his own, if he misses them, if—
—if any of the harbingers have a family to return home to.
(Maybe that’s why Pulcinella treats him the way he does.)
-
The carriage arrives first thing in the morning.
Ajax yawns, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as his mother stuffs his once pitifully empty bag with food, clothes, medicine, and Celestia knows what else. She fusses with his hair, and straightens his uniform, and pulls him in for one final hug before he turns to leave.
“This will always be your home, dear. You and Uncle Boris come visit any time and I’ll have a hot meal ready.”
Ajax smiles. His bag is heavier, but his heart feels lighter. “I know, Ma.”
Next to her, his father calls out just as Ajax gets one boot on the footplate.
“Be safe, Ajax.”
-
“Thank you,” Ajax says, a little ways into their return journey.
Pulcinella glances up from his report — different from the one he’d been reading yesterday —and Ajax notes the dark circles beneath his eyes. “Of course,” he says.
“Happy birthday, my boy.”