Work Text:
There's a nail hammered in the wall.
It's been here forever, or at least since the first day Pavel started living at Maria’s; in order to support a huge picture, maybe. A portrait of a glorious ancestor – as if people who live in this kind of house could have glorious ancestors. Unless they're bastards of course, but then why in the devil’s name would they care?
No, maybe it's planned for a landscape. A few stupid, pious peasants in a field of snow. The Russian soul, some would say. Who doesn't want to see the Russian soul hanging from a nail?
Or maybe it was just planned for a ham that you can cut slices of. Who needs art when you have ham? It seems a very solid nail for just this, but trust people to take their ham seriously. Pavel could agree with this.
He thinks about nails. He remembers teaching the kids how to put needles inside treats to kill dogs. Oh, he would cook such delicious small cakes, with nails inside them, and give them to the whole Karamazov family, to everyone involved in this. Would Ivan eat them? No, he knows Pavel is a murderer now.
Now.
Pavel feels sick. He has been sick for a very long time, but it's gotten worse.
Or maybe he's healed, now that he sees Ivan Karamazov as he is, an idiot who understood nothing.
They didn't have a secret arrangement. Pavel almost nurtures the hope that Ivan was playing with him this time too, that he's still brilliant and lawless and he's just rejecting him again, pretending, because he doesn't want to be indebted to him... He couldn't fool himself even if he really wanted to.
One time, a few months ago, an eternity ago now, Pavel had asked Ivan: if God created the sun and the moon on the fourth day, where was the light coming from before? And Ivan had answered, without any hesitation, from God himself, but after the creation he left us alone, with only the lesser light of the sun and the moon.
This had been said like a joke, and it made it even better. Ivan didn't believe in God, and he could explain more about him than the most faithful believers.
Ivan could explain so many things, his brilliant mind jumping from subject to subject, never short of an answer. And Pavel was fascinated, listening to him, not sure if Ivan was giving him all the answers of the world, or if Pavel always had them in him, not willing to accept them yet.
Everything is lawful, Ivan was saying – as a joke, again – but his jokes had more weight than anyone else's most sincere beliefs. And Pavel no longer felt guilt for how he had allowed himself to think and dream about Ivan – he'd never feel guilt again.
Even now, his regrets are probably not guilt. So this didn't go up in flames with Pavel's hopes and the rest.
If Ivan could understand a non-existent God and all the old fossils that had written about him, wouldn't understanding Pavel have been even more simple?
Ivan is clever, there's no doubt about it - he just didn't try, he just didn't want to know anything of Pavel, to own anything of his, even his half-secret thoughts.
Then, to hell with Ivan Karamazov! He's nothing he pretended to be! He's nothing Pavel pretended him to be! He only deserves contempt and hatred.
Pavel looks at the nail in the wall and wonders if he could have fought Ivan, if he had enough strength to push him against the wall, to pretend it was only an accident. Ivan is tall, but he's slender, he shouldn't be heavy. And he's not used to fighting, and he's less used to being hit than Pavel is.
Ivan talked about beating him up, assuming that Pavel wouldn't fight back. And of course, if they had been the accomplices Pavel hoped they were, Pavel would have let him, his skin hardened by experience, barely heated by blows, if they were for show, if their minds had been in harmony.
But they weren't. Pavel imagines for an instant a fight turning to his advantage, Ivan falling backwards, the nail entering his head, this brilliant brain spilling on the wall... his eyes widening as he understands that he hasn't won.
And then, in order not to let Ivan go alone to see if there's a hell, Pavel would probably have died too. Better than dealing with the unpleasantness of the police, and more people not understanding a thing about him and what he had wanted.
Pavel hates Ivan, and he wants him dead, but no one has the right to know this, if they don't know why. And no one has the right to know why either, except Ivan himself. And he doesn't want to, Pavel’s feelings not important enough even to play with.
Pavel looks at the nail and knows that, even without Ivan's eyes empty of life in front of him, he is going to kill himself anyway.
That's what he's been turning around in his head since Ivan left him, leaving no light behind.
Pavel is short enough so it would be easy – he would only need a length of string that he already has.
It's the nail that makes him do it, he thinks.
"I destroy my life of my own will and desire, so as to throw no blame on anyone," he writes, lying one more time before death. He blames Ivan with his whole heart. He blames him for every kindness that captured Pavel's devotion, he blames him for every meanness that was not a way to pretend not to work together, like Pavel had hoped.
He blames him for making speeches about the wrongness of common morality, and for acting like a bigoted grandma once it's all out.
And that's why Pavel needs to die, because he hates Ivan, because never again he will submit to Ivan’s will. He won't save Dmitri. He will let Ivan drown in his regrets, it will be a meager consolation, even if he regrets all the wrong things. He won’t go to the tribunal and tell the truth.
All the truth that he didn't even say to Ivan: I did it all for you. I don't care if you didn't actually ask me, it was still for you, and even this you didn't want to understand. Take these 3000 roubles so you don't think I did it for money. I did it all for your love and I didn't get it.
I did it all for nothing.
Another hesitation – briefly Pavel wonders about God. He might exist after all. Suicide is worse than murder, Old Grigori said sometimes, because you can't repent. Pavel knows it isn’t true.
It’s one of these things Ivan told him, that he can’t let go of, because as frustrating as it is, he was right: if repenting is feeling sorry for the victim, you have the time to do it before you die, when it starts to hurt.
Pavel never repented for the murder anyway. Even after learning Ivan never liked him, even a little, he didn't.
He can't even repent for wanting Ivan, no matter how much he should. So if there's a God, there's no way left of winning him over by not dying tonight.
Pavel no longer cares. He got rid, in his heart, of Ivan Karamazov and his wishes; he can throw away God too.
He can imagine that if there's something like a soul living beyond death he can at least leave a gruesome ghost to secretly watch Ivan's face when he's found dead, his eyes widening in horror at the terrible picture, as he understands what he's lost.
So then, the afterlife problem is taken care of; and all that's left is a nail, and a chair, and some string that in some other life could be used to hang a ham, but that seems sturdy enough.