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Chapter Text

All was formless and void (Before the beginning, Legasov)

Valery stumbled into Piotr's dorm room, laughing as he tripped over his untied shoelace in the doorway. When he tumbled onto the bed, Piotr's eyes crinkled in that familiar-yet-strange way that people's sometimes did. Not usually when they were looking at him, though.

"Valera, you'll stay, won't you?" Piotr was laughing at a joke Valery didn't understand, and it was putting him on edge.

"At least until I sober up a bit," he said. "No point trying to walk home if I can't stand steady. Can I get some water?"

"Oh, but vodka is so much more fun!" Piotr was sitting beside him now, hand resting against Valery's thigh. Oh. It's that, he realised.

"Piotr, let's just sleep it off," he said gently.

"But... you don't want to, with women," he protests. "Katya tried for weeks, and you weren't interested!"

Valery flopped back onto the bed, drunk enough to be more open than usual. "You're half right -- it's not women. I don't 'want to' at all." 

"But aren't you even curious?" Piotr suddenly seemed a lot more sober.

"I mean, yes, but only in the purely academic sense -- it's like knowing what Comrade Khruschev's bedroom looks like. To say I don't want to know would be a lie, but the idea that I'd put in any real effort to find out, let alone break the law, is absurd. It all seems very -- messy, and altogether unpleasant. No, thank you." Valery said, somewhat disgruntled

Piotr looked down at him, astonished. He leaned down and kissed him, then, and Valery disentangled himself somewhat abruptly. Balance be damned, he thought, I'm walking home. He'd not stay to be pawed and gawked at. He'd hoped Piotr would be a friend, but -- well, it happened. He'd commiserate with Tatiana tomorrow, and then take himself to the library and read that book Professor Kikoin had recommended.

Over the decades that followed, Valery did sometimes find himself attracted to people, and even took a few lovers, but it fizzled out quickly and more often than not it was too complicated to be worth pursuing anyway. If he could have seen his KGB files, he would have been surprised to learn that they considered him to be a "probable homosexual" since his crushes were as often on women as men, but since they also didn't think him likely to be arrested or blackmailed, his career didn't suffer for the insinuation.

And darkness covered the face of the deep (Before the beginning, Shcherbina)

Boris was crammed into a troop train, looking out of the window. There were enough men in here with him that he felt warm for the first time in what seemed like months. As he watched the Finnish forests slip away, he breathed deep and began replacing "Soldier Boris" with "Civilian Boris". He remembered the men who couldn't put their wars away, in his youth. He remembered asking his father what had happened to them.

The train was helping. Boris could not help but notice the condition of the rails, the speed they were travelling, that the train was too heavy for its engine. All of these were things that Civilian Boris knew, and that Soldier Boris hadn't had time for. He cast his eyes around the carriage and saw a man using his kit bag as a pillow. 

Perfect, he thought, and began to pack all of his experiences from the last few months into a mental bag. In went the taste of pine needles, the sight of a man's intestines, the grim certainty that he was being watched by somebody who would kill him the moment he stopped moving. In went Yaroslav. It was no longer the 1920s, and those feelings were neither appropriate nor safe in civilian life. Besides which, if he didn't think of Yaroslav then he didn't have to remember what he'd looked like as he -- no. Better that it all went into the bag.

Somewhere around Moscow (it had to be, they were passing over too many sets of points for a regional junction) all of his memories had been put into his mental bag. Boris tied it shut, passing the ropes around it again for extra security. He imagined himself digging a hole, narrow but deep, and dropping the bag into it before replacing the soft earth. He set a Finnish pine to mark the spot. It's a prettier memorial than Yarko will get from the Army, he thought, and turned his mind resolutely to the state of the railway. The signals could use some work, the driver is slowing us down to be sure he spots them.

Over the years, people asked Boris about his military service or what he had done during the War. He would brusquely change the subject, resolute in his unwillingness to disturb his sack of memories. On very cold nights, when he'd worked through dinner or sat up with little Yuri as he cried, he sometimes found himself sitting at the foot of the pine tree again. It's beautiful, Yarko. I wish I could show you. he would think, then turn himself away and go back to his life.

Chapter Text

It all began with a global nuclear catastrophe, although nobody in Moscow on that fateful April night recognised it as such. This was, perhaps, appropriate.

Naturally they've gone and picked a minister at random, then sent him to 'take charge', thought Valery, walking towards the helicopter. His mind was a swirling cocktail of terror, resignation and annoyance. The pattern-card of a Party man: reliable, predictable, sometimes useful and occasionally dangerous. All he wants is to use the situation to further his own career, and reality can go hang. Unbeknownst to him, Shcherbina was thinking something very similar, though the words "scaremongering scientist" stood in for "Party man", and Shcherbina was not yet aware that he'd signed his own death warrant.

But Valery had always taken pride in his scientific integrity, so when he started to find contrary evidence -- like Shcherbina showing that he was listening to what he had to say -- he filed it away in his mind. When he then used that knowledge (correctly) to trip up Bryukhanov and Fomin, he added it to the file. 

After Pikalov came back with his  dosimeter reading, offering proof even the Communist Party wouldn't ignore, Shcherbina moved instantly into action, fully exposing the contradictory character Valery had begun to glimpse. He showed himself to be decisive, as certain of people as he was of facts. Valery's stubborn insistence on the truth seemed to have marked him as "reliable", at least as far as the plant and the fire were concerned. Neither monetary expense nor logistical complexity seemed to be barriers to him. Yet he deferred to his Party superiors (few as they were) without question, and he was willing to leave a city full of people in harm's way in exchange for a veneer of respectable calm to put over the disaster. Frustrating as Shcherbina was, Valery couldn't help but respect him.

Seeing the man fully dressed and working when Valery dragged himself to breakfast at seven thirty the next morning was undeniably impressive, but the real change in his opinion came in the afternoon. When the phone call about the international responses to their accident came right on the heels of his outburst -- really, Valery, there were kinder ways to deliver that particular information  -- Shcherbina visibly shelved his own feelings and reconsidered his whole approach. Valery's respect was cemented into admiration.

The next day, over their mid-morning tea, he offered to properly teach Boris the fundamentals of RBMK reactor operation. "Believe it or not, there's more to it than I can explain during a helicopter ride under threat of defenestration," he said wryly, his posture making it clear that he was letting Shcherbina in on the joke.

Boris smirked, clearly enjoying having unsettled him, and took him up on it. When Boris "suggested" in turn that they take nightly walks "for their health", Valery didn't put up more than a token protest. They set off after dinner, and once they had walked far enough that their audience had given up on trying to stay within earshot, Boris said,

"I know the dust isn't good for us. But if we've no more than five years anyway, then I need privacy more than I need my lungs."

Valery nodded, "It's nice, to be able to think without an audience," he mused. Boris left him to his thoughts, that first day, and he did feel lighter once they got back to the hotel.

The next night, he asked him "Why did they send you here, anyway?"

"What do you mean?" Boris replied, bristling slightly.

"Well, why the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers? Why not Mayorets in Energy, or Listov at Chemical Industries, or why not just put Pikalov in charge?"

"Ah," Boris answered, mollified. "I think it was a combination of my history and my personality."

Valery cocked his head, silently asking him to elaborate.

"You know I used to head up the department for Fuel and Energy?" Valery shook his head. "Well, in practice that meant I spent a lot of time in Siberia establishing new towns near the oil fields." 

"Of course -- you're an expert in logistics and you're used to working without Moscow breathing down your neck, so you'd be willing to actually make urgent decisions by yourself."

Boris hummed his agreement. "And as to the rest, well. At sixty-four I finally made Deputy Chairman, and the General Secretary... let us say that he prefers the vigour of younger men. It was decided that my own deputies can handle the work in my absence." 

"Which is to say that you're not such a raging primadonna that you won't allow your subordinates to gain experience, and you are, unlike half the Central Committee, able to cope in a civilised fashion with other ministers taking some of the top-level tasks for a while." Valery found himself unwilling to let Boris' unflattering self-assessment stand.

He looked at the ground ahead of them for a moment, not sure what to make of the urge to defend Boris even from himself and a little embarrassed at his vehemence. Had he been paying attention, he would have seen the surprised warmth on Boris' face at this unexpected defence, and he might have made the connection between being asked for his favourite food and the bird's milk cake in their next shipment.

*****

Over the next few weeks, in snatches of mornings and evenings and waiting-on-a-telephone-call, Valery built on Boris' existing understanding to explain how a nuclear reactor worked in general, and then an RBMK reactor in particular. His chemistry was remarkably solid, if a little over-specialised into petrochemicals and building materials, and his physics was very scattershot but showed an active curiosity and a strong grasp of logic. 

One afternoon, Boris said "You keep telling me there's no such thing as a stupid question."

"There are facetious questions, but not stupid ones." Valery answered mildly. He had no desire to encourage Boris' insecurities around his education.

"What exactly is the difference between radioactive and non-radioactive atoms?" At Valery's silence, he said "You see? Stupid."

"No, no, Boris! It's exactly the opposite of stupid -- it means that you're understanding what I'm saying, then thinking about it and trying to build a bigger picture. It's an incredible question."

Boris looked up, startled. Valery looked happier than he'd ever seen him, sincerity in every line of his body. He suddenly remembered the time, decades before, when he'd been standing at their local metro station talking about railways with Yuri. The boy had pointed to two different lines and asked "How do trains get from over here to over there?" and he'd felt ten feet tall as he explained points. Valery looked like that now. He blushed and ducked his head again. "Well?" he asked, gruffly.

"The answer is somewhat complicated, so I'm going to start a little bit further back. To know why some atoms are radioactive, we need to start with atomic nuclei. Every nucleus that is physically present can be considered to be balanced between the forces that hold it together -- the strong nuclear force, mostly -- and the electrostatic repulsion trying to drive it apart..."

Chapter Text

Boris wasn't sure when his assessment of Legasov had shifted from "overgrown brat who thinks he can use an accident in the provinces to further his own career" to "one of the best men I know". It had been a gradual thing, and were he to be asked he'd say it was the man's unfailing honesty that had won him over. 

Within the privacy of his own mind, though, Boris knew better. His opinion had begun to shift on the helicopter ride to Pripyat, when Valery had responded to Boris' attempt to trip him up with surprised pleasure. The man had been sincerely happy that Boris had understood something, and had responded to the "trap" by beginning to give him a real explanation. Over the following weeks, his patience with Boris' patchy self-education in the sciences had won him respect, and his sincere love of teaching earned him more affection than Boris was comfortable admitting even to himself. It also didn't hurt that while he wasn't quite conventionally handsome, the way Legasov's powerful mind animated his face and body was undeniably... compelling.

Boris was not looking forward to their upcoming trip back to Moscow. Valery would be talking to Khomyuk (about things which could only upset him) and they would lose their nightly walks. His department would have a hundred messes for him to clean up, and he was likely to get even less sleep than he did out here.

If he was really honest with himself -- to a level he tried not to be most of the time -- this whole situation was reminding Boris uncomfortably of a lot of things that he wanted to stay buried. It had been years since he'd had to do so, but he knew he needed to take the evening and settle himself before he started to crack.

After dinner, he took himself off to the empty freezers at the back of the Polissya kitchens. He took a bottle of vodka and a packet of cigarettes, and his glare made it clear to the young soldier who'd followed him that Boris didn't want to be disturbed. He sat in the small, dark, cold space and opened the vodka, setting it beside him. He lit a cigarette and laid it across the neck of the bottle. He shut his eyes and inhaled the scent-memory. There it is.

He was standing at the foot of his tree, over his buried memories. War, pain, cold, so much death. Love.

He used to think that everything was still buried, but now he could tell that the love wasn't down there any more. Trees feed on the soil they stand in, and this one had slowly brought up what he'd felt for Yaroslav, so long ago, and stripped it of its poison. They'd been two boys in a terrible situation, of course they'd taken what comfort they could in each other. He walked through the branches and sat down with his back to the trunk. It had been beautiful, what he and Yarko had shared, while it lasted.

How do I cope with this? he asked the tree, Our boys are dying, all around us, and I cannot stop it. I have to send them to their deaths, because I know that the alternative is worse.

How did you cope before? the winter wind asked him, whistling through the branches.

The answer came to him, in the steady pressure of bark on his back. By having something else to think about, when it got to be too much. By knowing when to look and when to look away. By having a piece of something good to hold in my heart.

Fine. If that's what it took. It never hurt anybody, the wind seemed to whisper. He'd spend long phone calls looking at Legasov's broad, masculine hands, remembering how square his shoulders looked in shirtsleeves and suspenders, how sweet his face was once he fell asleep. When he couldn't stop thinking about our boys, he'd dwell instead on how Valera's voice roughened as he smoked. And when the source of his stress and worry was the man himself, perhaps he'd imagine how he could persuade him to unwind. 

And in the exceptionally unlikely event that his interest was returned, well, he'd take his happiness where he could find it and fuck the law.

I need to talk to Pikalov. he thought, as he packed up and left. The KGB are all over this place, he needs to make sure nobody is facing consequences for the kind of harmless stress relief that nobody would find out about during regular service.

Chapter Text

As he left the Lubyanka, Valery knew that his calm facade was strained. When he sat in the back of the car, safely out of sight, it shattered. Whatever annoyance had been lingering in Boris' posture from his earlier recklessness evaporated. "Was she --" 

"She wasn't -- nobody -- the KGB didn't hurt her. They just left her in a cell overnight." He felt sick. "But she was -- and I told her --"

Boris put a hand on his arm and pressed the intercom. "Professor Legasov needs fresh air. Please take us to the nearest park." when the Chaika pulled up, he opened the door and spoke quietly to the driver. When he returned to help Valery out of the car, he was carrying a brown paper bag. "We'll head for those trees. If you need to be sick, try to avoid my shoes." It was clear that both he and the driver thought this was a serious possibility. Valery didn't have the energy to tell them his stomach was too empty to bring anything up.

When they reached the copse, Boris's voice was rough but his tone was kind as he asked "What happened?"

Valery leaned back against a tree, letting his head thump against the bark as he mirrored his own pose of half an hour ago. "She told me she was tired. She'd seen too much. She wanted to stop." He inhaled a deep breath and sighed. "I told her -- I said, so was I. That I thought there was a fifty percent chance I'd sent Glukhov and his men to pointless deaths. That I'd seen too much, and done too much, but I kept going anyway, and that I thought her -- that she was too much of a scientist to let the unanswered questions lie. God, Boris. I took her most vulnerable moment and I told her she didn't have a choice, then tried to make her think it was her own idea."

"You did nothing that didn't have to be done. Men in our position don't have the luxury of a clean conscience. Besides, when you laid out her options -- you weren't wrong about which choice she could live with, afterwards. As to Glukhov," Boris grimaced. "How many deaths, if the melting core got into the groundwater?"

"Between three and ten million." The answer was immediate. Valery had checked these calculations too often for anything else.

"And what are the chances that it will happen, if we do nothing?"

"Fifty-fifty. Khomyuk thinks forty percent, and since her ability to sleep at night doesn't depend on her answer I'm inclined to think she has the right of it."

"So. Forty percent of three million people is one point two million. Against a hundred miners."

"Politics." 

"Statistics. If four times in ten the coal wagon catches fire, and you're sending a hundred coal trains, that's forty fires. And if one in five of those trains is also carrying mining material, you're going to have eight explosions. One of those explosions is in a populated area? A thousand dead. So if three men a month are maimed, to drop the chance of a fire from four in ten to one in fifty, you don't have a choice -- you sign the order. At least you have the guts to look the men in the eyes while you're doing it. What Khomyuk is doing... is necessary. Better that the compulsion comes from within."

Valery sagged. He was exhausted, but no longer felt like he was going to throw up. "Thank you." he struggled, looking for words. "For comforting me, in my scruples and spasms. For holding me together when I cannot afford to fall apart. It's too much to ask, and you have never... thank you."

Boris looked as though he was going to speak, but shook his head at Valery's eyebrow. After a moment, he said "It's not too much to ask. I know what it's... you're welcome, to ask me."

"And who do you talk to? When it's all too much?"

Boris huffed a bitter laugh. "Myself, I suppose." He turned to walk back towards the car, knowing he wasn't equal to whatever he'd see on Valery's face.

*****

Valery had to meet Khomyuk that evening to discuss their plans for the next few weeks, and since he and Boris were planning to share transport back to the disaster site the three of them decided it would be simplest to discuss it all over dinner. As they ate, Ulana told them that she would be babysitting her cousin's children that evening, and suggested they finish their discussion after the children were in bed.

Boris and Valery took the metro from their respective apartments and arrived at Svibolo station on consecutive trains. They walked in silence to the address Ulana gave them, and knocked as instructed at 9:45. When Ulana opened the door, Boris offered her a bottle from his coat pocket. 

"Cognac! Armenian?" she asked appreciatively as she showed them to the living room before going to the kitchen and fetching glasses.

When she returned and invited them to sit, there was a moment of awkwardness before Valery perched almost defiantly on the arm of the sofa. Boris took a cushion and stretched out on the floor, leaning his back against the wooden front panel. Ulana's eyes flicked between the two men almost imperceptibly, before she sat in the armchair next to the piano and put her arms around her knees.

"My cousin and his wife are borrowing my hotel room for the night. I don't have to sleep surrounded by strangers, they get a little privacy. We do it for at least one night whenever I come to Moscow," she explained.

"And you don't want that hotel room for your own assignations?" Boris teased. He took a glass of cognac, and sipped it as the others began to drink.

"No, I wouldn't do that to my husband. I suppose I don't really want to," she mused. "It's like seeing a stranger with a particularly tasty looking lunch. I might wonder what it tastes like, but that's a far cry from walking up to them and asking for a bite. But as a Party man, of course you know all about secret assignations."

"Sadly only from my colleagues. I had lovers before I met my wife, but my view of marriage was much like yours I'm afraid. It's always a useful thing to know about one's superiors, though."

"Was?" Valery's tone was kind.

"She passed this last November. A heart attack." 

"I'm sorry." Valery said, very softly.

Seeing Boris looking a little lost, Ulana said "Valery, you're our last hope! Tell us all about your scandalous love life."

Briefly remembering a long-ago conversation, Valery drained his glass and flopped down across the sofa. I can trust them with this, he thought. They've seen worse from me. "I'm afraid I will have to disappoint you. I've had," he paused, calculating, "Three and a half lovers. Depending on what qualifies. I've... never been interested enough to pursue anything, in the end. I like your lunch metaphor, I may steal it."

"And what qualifies one to have been Professor Legasov's lover?"

"I think that's rather subjective, don't you?" offered Ulana. "Kissing doesn't. Does oral sex? Mutual manual relief?"

Boris laughed softly, tipping his head back. He could not have failed to notice that he was touching Valery's thigh, but he gave no sign of it. Valery, who would normally have been uncomfortable, felt both calmed and warmed by the casual intimacy of the gesture.

"Look at us, gossiping and passing a bottle around. This feels like when my wife had her friends over and kicked me out of the house for the evening. All we need is the stack of blinis." 

"Oh! I have some in my coat pocket!" Valery felt loose-limbed, almost giddy with relief that they hadn't reacted poorly.

"Don't get up, I'll fetch them." said Ulana. As she returned with a bakery box and three plates, she said "I've been thinking. We can't possibly have a girls' night with Boris and Valery! How do you feel about Natasha and Elena?"

"Please. Do I look like a Natasha?" Boris' tone dripped with exaggerated offence.

"No, you're more of an Olga," Valery laughed. "Like the saint. Anybody trying to make you do something you don't want to is going to regret it. I'll be the Natasha."

The others laughed with him and the evening wound on, light and silly and easy in the way socialising almost never was, even after the slight buzz of the cognac wore off. When Ulana jerked awake in the armchair for the second time, she excused herself to the bedroom and told the others she'd wake them in the morning. Valery waved goodnight, tucked his legs up more comfortably, and went to sleep.

He woke up at around five, when the sunlight filtering in through the curtains reached his eyes. Valery was surprised to realise that Boris' head was still resting on his thigh. Quietly, gently, not stopping to consider the source of the impulse, he reached down and took a moment to stroke the other man's hair before sitting up to start the day.

Chapter Text

Valery only realised how much he had come to rely on his daily walks when he had to skip one. July brought an abrupt torrent of rain, and by the second evening when nobody dared venture more than a meter out of doors, he was getting rather irritable. Mid-afternoon on day three, he had a word with one of the soldiers and that evening he spent an hour and a half walking laps around the little park next to the hotel, fully dressed in chemical warfare gear.

When he came back inside, sweaty but finally somewhat calm, he found Boris looking at him in astonishment.

"The rain's washing radioactive soot out of the air," he said mildly. 

"I know that," Boris answered, "That's why I stayed inside."

Valery could hear the raised eyebrow, though his glasses had yet to un-fog enough for him to see much. "I needed to get outside, clear my head." 

Boris looked at him, shook his head, and said nothing. The next evening, the rain had stopped but the streets were still soaked. Both men wore army-issue rubber overgarments and dust masks. They didn't speak much -- between the wind and the masks, it would have been hard to make themselves heard -- but Valery savoured the quiet companionship and unspoken intimacy their walk offered.

It was a few evenings later when Boris, who had become increasingly subdued, said "You know they've stopped following us."

Valery looked around, surprised not to see the usual figures lurking at a "polite" distance. "They have?"

"After your little stunt Sunday evening," said Boris. "Ulana overheard them talking about it. They basically stationed four people on the top floor of the hotel, and when all you did was walk in circles they decided that you were a crazy person who needed exercise and they had better things to do with their evenings than chase us while I babysat you."

Valery snorted. "For once they're actually correct."

Boris smirked. For the rest of their walk, he kept shooting Valery little glances and there was something off in his tone. It looked almost like excitement, or anticipation. Like a cat enjoying the moments before it pounced, savouring the adrenaline of standing poised between triumph and disaster. Valery hadn't often been the object of these sorts of looks, but he was surprised to find himself hoping that he wasn't imagining it. 

That night, Valery dreamed. He was walking along a vast lake shore when, out of the jungle beside him, he noticed a great cat. Tall and shaggy, thick-boned, with its long grey fur beginning to shade white and arresting blue-grey eyes. Boris, Valery realised, with the sudden certainty of a dream. Valery found that he was a mouse, small and reddish-brown. Boris-the-cat was adjusting his back paws, as if preparing to pounce but unsure whether he would get the mouse or land in the water.

Valery knew that he should run, but it felt like something he'd been taught rather than his own belief. He didn't want to. He looked up and met Boris-the-cat's piercing gaze. He's waiting for my permission. He nodded, fractionally. The cat leaped -- and his alarm clock went off. Valery sat up and slapped it silent, as the blankets pooled around his waist and pulled his attention to his physical reaction to the dream.

Well. This hadn't happened to him in years. He'd overheard some of the others talking, despite his best efforts. Apparently the men either couldn't get it up at all or were stricken with incurable priapism. Valery hadn't taken it seriously -- it wasn't his first time in a small, isolated place under significant stress. Crude discussions of dubious authenticity were rather more common than not, though this particular group had seemed somewhat preoccupied by their penises in particular. Valery had assumed it was a peculiarity of Army culture. 

Why now? he wondered. Despite the rumours in the Army trucks, this wasn't a side-effect of radiation. The answer came after a moment, Because you won't get another chance. It's the most basic biological imperative. But why Boris? Because I like him. I respect him. I trust him. And... I think he might actually return my interest. Valery got dressed and walked to breakfast, trying to work out quite what he was supposed to do with this information.

That evening, Boris was still quiet. He kept sneaking long looks at him. Valery smiled whenever he caught them. I am truly terrible at flirting, he thought. But I don't think he'll act, if I don't do something. Once they had reached the denser streets in the centre of the abandoned city, Valery met his eyes and said softly, "Boris, you're trying to ask me for something. Anything you want from me, tell me. I want to do it."

Boris looked away, "You don't mean that." His voice was rough.

Valery laid a hand on his arm and said, very gently, "I do."

Boris looked up at him then, that strange excitement filling his expression again. The cat in the moment before it pounces. Valery met his eyes and gave a small, sharp nod. Boris surged forwards, pushing him into the doorway of an abandoned shop and giving Valery a kiss that was all pressure, a shove from his lips rather than his hands. Valery felt almost dizzy with joy. Boris pulled back a few centimetres, still pressing Valery's shoulders into the door, hesitancy creeping back into his expression. 

Stop overthinking this, Boris, Valery thought with wry affection. He reached forward and recaptured his lips. Their second kiss was sweeter, gentler, an exploration of mutual enjoyment rather than an defiant statement of intent. Boris sighed against his mouth and ran his hands from Valery's shoulders down his arms to caress his waist. Valery reached up and stroked the soft hairs at the nape of his neck.

When they paused for for breath, Boris said, "Why professor, when did you get so bold?"

Valery matched his arch, teasing tone. "Didn't you know? What Deputy Chairman Shcherbina wants, he gets. What Professor Legasov wants, Deputy Chairman Shcherbina gets for him. So when Professor Legasov wants to take what Deputy Chairman Shcherbina very much wants to give..." He nipped Boris' earlobe.

Boris made a small sound of pleased surprise. Valery took the earlobe into his teeth again and pressed a little harder, a careful suggestion of a bite, then curled his tongue around it. Boris let out a noise which might, coming from a less dignified man, have been called a whine before sliding his thigh between Valery's legs.

The pressure was delightful, though the layers of clothing between them meant that he couldn't feel anything more than the diffuse weight of the other man's thigh. When Boris began nibbling along his jaw and pressing open-mouthed kisses to his neck, it was Valery's turn to sigh and press up against Boris' delightful bulk.

When Valery's watch beeped the hour, he startled a little before saying "We have to get back or we'll be missed," his tone heavy with reluctance. 

Boris made a grumble of assent, then said "I need a minute before I'm presentable."

Valery rested their foreheads together, banking the embers of their passion and savouring the sweetness of their newfound affection. After a few moments, they turned together and walked towards the Polissya. Their strides matched as they had for months, and while they were not precisely holding hands, they were standing so close to one another that every few strides their fingertips brushed together. Both men were very much aware that there was plenty they could do back at the hotel, if they were quiet.

Chapter Text

One morning, Boris heard a knock at his door. Even half-awake, he recognised it as Valery's. "Come," he said, and sure enough his favourite scientist entered with two mugs and a bundle of paper. He set one of them and what looked like the overnight reports down on the bedside table and handed a hot mug to Boris.

Boris took it, looked down and broke into tears, lost in a sudden wave of grief. Nobody had done this for him since Raisa. Before her illness had started to get the better of her, she would wake early and make tea for them both. If he was still in bed when it was finished, she'd bring him a cup. Valery had noticed, too, that he took his tea with cream first thing in the morning though he drank it black the rest of the day. He hadn't known until that moment how much he'd ached at the loss of this sort of simple gesture of lo-- consideration.

Valery took the mug from him and set it down, then sat beside him on the mattress and gently tugged Boris' head down to his shoulder. He said nothing as his shirt grew wet, stroking along Boris' spine. After a few minutes, sheltered in the circle of the other man's neck, Boris explained. "The last person who brought me tea in bed was my wife."

Valery hummed understanding and continued to hold him, murmuring softly and rubbing soothing circles on his back. Boris slowly realised that the murmurs were poetry, though he didn't recognise any of it. Once he was still, Valery handed him a handkerchief. Boris took it, wiped roughly at his eyes and walked to the small ensuite bathroom. In a fit of sentiment, he tucked the handkerchief into his pocket instead of blowing his nose with it, using toilet roll and washing his face instead. When he emerged, he found Valery writing a short summary of one of the morning's reports. He suggested gently that they head down to breakfast together. Boris had to hold back another wave of emotion at this further kindness. In the Army truck, on the way to their trailer at the disaster site, Boris found an absent-minded scribble in the margin of the report, "The life that I have is all that I have, and the life that I have is yours."

That evening, on their walk, he asked Valery about it.

"Well --" the other man ducked his head, embarrassed, "You know I write poetry, as a hobby," at Boris' nod, he continued "That came to me this morning. These sorts of... fragments of an idea tend to come when I'm working on something else, so I'm in the habit of writing them down on the nearest piece of paper. I don't know where that one is going, maybe it's nowhere. I left it there because whatever it is, it's yours."

"This morning, those were your poems?" Boris' voice was rough with emotions he wasn't prepared to examine.

"Most of it, yes." Valery was still embarrassed.

"That explains why I didn't recognise them." Boris twined their fingers together. "It sounded nice. I've never had my own poem before. Thank you."

Valery squeezed his hand. "If I get any more, you'll be the first to know."

Chapter Text

When Valery found a note from Boris at breakfast in place of the man himself, saying that he was heading over to the work site early that morning, he chose to follow up on a few queries he'd had about their recent reports instead of going straight to their "office" tent. When he finally did enter, fifteen minutes later than was his habit, Boris and Tarakanov had obviously cut short whatever discussion they'd been having.

Both men were too experienced to do anything so suspicious as springing apart, but Tarakanov was leafing through a report and Boris was talking about the weather forecast and neither man looked annoyed that the other wasn't paying attention. Valery allowed himself a small smirk, which vanished when the general's eyes flicked up to him and then to Boris. What were you two discussing? he wondered

But Valery had not wasted his morning detour. "I think the men are massaging the reports again -- the radiation reports in Sectors 15 and 37 are certainly too low and there are a few other discrepancies. We're going to have to redo the surveys, again." Boris pinched the bridge of his nose, Tarakanov swore and the moment was gone.

At the survey site, Valery and Boris wandered away from the others, Boris holding the various detectors and sampling kits Valery wasn't using. "Thanks for coming along," Valery said.

"Somebody has to remind these idiots that we need accurate information -- somebody they're scared of," he added to Valery's indrawn breath. "More to the point, coming out and checking things myself means they're more likely to believe me when I tell them I want the real numbers."

Valery snorted. "Good luck. What was that with Tarakanov, this morning?"

Boris' voice dropped. "He wanted to follow up on something I said to Pikalov -- usually, the Army is used to a certain level of... privacy, shall we say, and there are behaviours which are tolerated in Afghanistan which wouldn't be acceptable in Leningrad."

"Shooting people, for one."

"As you say. Not long after we arrived, I warned Pikalov that the place was crawling with Moscow Checkists. It's not fair to the men to stop them, and it's not wise either. Illegal sex acts are absolutely preferable to, say, looting our own civilians, but it does nobody any good if they're thrown in prison for it." 

"What did he do?" Valery was fascinated both by Boris' unflappable pragmatism and by the army's seeming indifference to the law.

"Per Tarakanov, he just called in a particularly territorial political officer from Afghanistan and told him that the KGB were a bunch of soft-handed pencil pushers who had no business in an Army camp."

Valery snorted. "He's still here?"

"And merrily reporting on all sorts of 'suspicious individuals' who turn out to be regular Checkists snooping around the camp. I don't think he's even noticed the Article 121 violations."

"Efficient."

"I thought so." They shared a smirk.

*****

One evening, Boris was very quiet. He was walking too quickly for it to be depression, so Valery decided to wait him out. After several false starts, he said "What are your expectations, once we are both back in Moscow?"

Ah. "I'm not sure I have any," Valery answered mildly. "Certainly I'd like it if we were to remain friends, but neither of us has the kind of freedom that would allow us to continue as we are now."

Boris looked somewhat nonplussed, and Valery realised that he'd been expecting resistance.

"Dorogoy, I know I'm not always the most... practical person, but I've always known the boundaries of what's between us. It's illegal, of course, and I daresay you have no more desire than I do tospend what time we have left in a forced labour camp. Even if it weren't, given the nature of our professional relationship it would be career suicide for either one of us to be publicly entangled with the other. And even if it weren't, somehow -- if we had a grant handwritten by Lenin himself, declaring that for the good of the Union we must be acknowledged spouses from the Bering Strait to the South China Sea, we would still only have a maximum of four and a half years before one or the other of us would be crying in a hospital room. Probably you, and probably about three years, by the way -- my doctor isn't as optimistic as I am."

Valery met Boris' eyes as he spoke, and watched the other man's face move from a vague affront to understanding and finally to sadness. "So that's it, then."

"Not if we don't want it to be. Just because I don't have any expectations of our future doesn't mean I don't value what we have. I do, very much, and I'd like to continue it as long as we feasibly can. You've made me happier than anybody has in a very long time. When we're back in Moscow, we'll see. I won't hold you to anything -- if you should meet somebody else who makes you happy then... we have so little time. I want you happy, love."

Boris took his hand, then, and held it to his chest. Eventually, he spoke, his voice rougher than usual. "I'm not sure I want there to be anybody else."

Valery nodded, and stepped forward to embrace him. They finished their walk in silence.

*****

One crisp autumn morning, Valery walked into the breakfast room and saw from the set of Boris' shoulders that (for once) nothing had gone wrong overnight. Valery walked up to him, put a hand on his shoulder and asked for the morning's reports. As Boris handed them over, just loud enough to be heard, he whispered "Tag. You're it," before walking over to get a mug of tea. Boris shot him a look which promised retribution, and he had to smother his grin. 

They traded tags all day, finding opportunities to touch one another in innocuous-seeming ways. They had immediately reached a silent agreement on the rules: nothing that would draw suspicion, no hiding from each other, and nothing that would interfere with their actual work. Valery had started it as a minor diversion, but had dramatically underestimated how competitive they both were, as well as how much Boris' intensity would add to his own enjoyment. He also hadn't expected the way a day of paying careful attention to every moment of potential contact would leave him feeling.

It was not a surprise when, in an alley behind what had once been a hairdresser's, Boris had pushed Valery against the wall and kissed him until he was dizzy. He pulled back, met Valery's burning gaze and with an absolutely wicked smirk he said "Tag," and sauntered back towards the hotel.

Valery let his head thump back against the wall and laughed until he couldn't breathe.

*****

As autumn turned to winter, Valery saw an opportunity. One morning, he said "You look cold -- here," and tucked his scarf around Boris' neck. Boris smoothed it carefully under the lapels of his greatcoat and said nothing, but every time their eyes met he softened.

That evening, when Valery went upstairs after dinner to gather his own coat and hat, he saw a scarf on his pillow. As he picked it up, he realised he recognised it from an older photograph of Boris they had reused in a recent newspaper article. Pinned to it was a note which read "from each according to what he has, to each according to what he needs". He folded the note and tucked it into his pocket. Wrapping the scarf around himself, he put his coat on and went downstairs.

The next day, a note appeared on Boris' desk: "The love that I have for the life that I have is yours and yours and yours." It was unsigned, and disappeared before anyone could comment on it.

*****

As they had predicted, their opportunities to see one another once they had returned to Moscow were few and unsatisfactory. It was Boris, in the end, who had insisted that they needed weekly meetings to ensure they were adequately prepared to testify in Vienna. One gloomy Thursday evening, Valery had had a truly awful week. His colleagues had tried to deflect their share of responsibility for the dire state of industrial safety in the USSR by accusing him of anything and everything (except, ironically, the only "crime" he was actually guilty of), and the near-total lack of either support of visible progress was wearing on him. 

Once the two men were sat and the tea poured, Boris gave Valery a long look and said "To hell with it. I know what I'm supposed to say. It's late, I've had enough of work today. Teach me something. Anything you like, so long as it's beautiful. I want to know more about beautiful things."

Valery had to take a moment to hold back his tears. Silently, Boris held out an arm and Valery moved from the armchair he'd been sat in to the sofa, tucking himself into his side. He thought for a while, and said "How about Khokhloma?"

"What about it?"

"The crockery, rather than the place -- they take a local softwood, oil it and add layered lacquers, then fire it in a kiln. It makes a sort of pottery effect. I could tell you about the chemistry of it, how the heat causes the dull layers to react and get that deep shine, and why they use reds, blacks and golds. It's a very old technique, though they've modernised it somewhat of late."

"Yes, that's perfect. How do you make a red paint?"

"For anything that will be near food, usually you would use iron..."

He talked until he was hoarse, drawing some of the compounds before and after they reacted and explaining how the heated tin produced its characteristic golden shade. By the time he finally had no choice but to go home, Valery felt centred again. He saw Boris carefully gathering the papers he'd scribbled on, and had to swallow around another lump in his throat. They shared a long, tight hug before Boris reluctantly opened the door. As he left, Valery carefully did not think about the future, after their excuses for regular meetings might have run out. He thought instead of how Boris had looked as he'd answered his questions about heat and timings.

Chapter Text

Valery spent the week after the trial in bed. He'd taken a wrecking ball to his own life and he'd be dead in something like two years, he was allowed to wallow a little. He felt better, in a hollow sort of way, after he realised that Charkov truly hadn't known about his relationship with Boris. It would have been so very easy to have one or other of them up on a sodomy charge, and even if he'd chosen not to do that (it would be difficult to prosecute one of them without implicating the other, and he wanted Deputy Chairman Shcherbina to be his new Hero of Chrenobyl) he hadn't chosen to twist the knife as he surely would have.

All his life, Valery hadn't been quite sure he could love as other people did. He'd never, even in his deepest passions, felt anything close to the jealousy he saw in plays and books and those around him. But losing Boris hurt. The lack of a clean ending (he hadn't been able to say goodbye), the dashing of his hopes for something once they were both permanently back in Moscow, they increased the sting but even as his emotions settled over following month the ache hadn't faded. It was written into his cells as surely as the radiation.

Loving Boris hadn't changed him. But losing him -- well, he'd probably have survived it, if not unscathed, but he wasn't going to get the chance. He thought of the blood on Boris' handkerchief. He thought of his own thinning hair, his greying skin, his waning appetite. At least it won't be a long widowhood, he thought.

He held on to his habits, as best he could. The evening walk was extremely well established in his KGB records at this point, and he never went anywhere suspicious or attempted anything untoward. The longest he ever stopped was to feed the ducks in the park. So if, in the privacy of his own mind, he hoped that somewhere else in the city Boris was walking too? That was his own business. What the government didn't know couldn't hurt them. If he listened to the news every evening, and read Pravda, there was no need to mention that he was paying extra attention to any mention of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. And if he noticed that Boris was giving more interviews, despite his health, that was only to be expected in the wake of so serious a disaster. If it was a comfort to Valery, that was surely incidental. (His lungs seemed to be stable, and he could talk for five minutes at a time without coughing.)

As the months wore on in the same interminable round, Valery found himself thinking. Still -- always -- he was thinking about dangerous topics. He couldn't escape he idea that that if he attempted to harm himself, he wouldn't be stopped. That was what Charkov was hoping for, after all. He kept returning to what he privately called his Solsenytsyn problem -- he had a great deal of information, and he needed to get it from the inside of his own head to the people who could use it to make a difference. Slowly, carefully, he began to prepare.

*****

The world carried on, as it always does. Stories are always beginning in chaos and hope, and always ending in a thousand sharp fragments. There's nothing so tidy as a singular, final title card.

That the end of Professor Legasov's life would not be the end of his story was quite deliberate. Still, not every act he took in his final days was aimed at posterity, and very little made it into his posthumous legend which he had not intended to set there. History does not remember that, a few days before the fateful April night, he had put a note through his neighbours' letterbox asking at they send a farewell letter to his only friend. 

They did so -- after all, he was already dead, so what harm could it do? They dropped it into the post and forgot all about it. (It was safer that way). Boris Shcherbina came home one day to find an envelope containing a sheet of heavy paper, written in Valery's best hand. He recognised it from the occasional personal note to Khomyuk's superiors and the rather more frequent passive-aggressive notes on Boris' own desk. Valery's personal notes had been written in chicken-scratch, as had most of his casual missives to Boris. "No need to make it easy on anybody looking over my shoulder, after all" he'd said.

The page read

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours. 

Two years later, when Boris knew his own time was near, he opened his closet and showed his son a suit. It was dark grey, a little worn. I want to be buried in this, he told him. There are a few mementos, in the pockets. Yuri saw no reason to deny his father so simple a request. And so it was that when Boris Shcherbina was laid to rest, just a few meters away from Valery Legasov, his final poem was resting above his heart.