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Surviving was only half the battle. The other half was surviving the surviving, a much more difficult task. With your body collapsed amongst the remains of your fiancee’s coffee table, it was strikingly obvious to your new family that you'd been attacked. The sort of attack remained obscure for another moment or two, until they began attempting to get a hold of you so they could apparate you to a hospital. In the process Parvati noticed that your trousers were undone, belt hanging open, a dead leather snake. Viktor had pulled them up, but that was it. There was no point trying to put you back together properly, not when he meant for Baikal to consume you utterly.
“...Just…please.” Poor girl, she knew immediately what had happened, and ran for the loo, where she threw up into the sink the tea and cake she'd been enjoying before you dropped your carcass into her lounge.
“Parvati! We must take him to St Mungo's right now!”
“I'm, urgh, coming!” She threw up again, wiped her mouth, and ran out of there, taking hold of her mother's shoulder, her father clasping you to his chest like you were his own wounded son, her twin sister holding your hands between her own, tears hydrating mud which had already dried. With a crack, the entire tragic tableau vanished into thin air.
But once at the hospital, Parvati had to face her fears and suspicions, taking a healer aside. Fortunately, you were unconscious, and didn't have to feel the sting and burn of judgement. You can't understand how people who work with victims regularly, can fail to learn.
“I think he was, you know, a-assaulted.”
The man stared at her, not coldly, but not warmly either. “What do you mean? Beaten up?”
“No. Uh-”
“Raped then. You think he was raped. Why?”
The word, like a cannonball to the face, made your fiancee lift and hold a trembling hand to her eyes. “Because his clothes are undone. Because he's covered in mud. Because he was alone with someone who'd…done that to him before.”
“What? Why would he be alone with his rapist?”
“They're friends.”
The healer gave her a half disbelieving, half contemptuous look. Yes, it is very easy to be both when one is standing on the Mountain of the Unraped, so far away from the underworld of life, where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil grows. At least you never had the liberty to be so dismissive, because you'd never stood on that high peak. Still, the man took what she said into consideration, and lo and behold, she was correct.
Ejected to wait with others in the holding cell called a waiting room, the family almost missed your priest as he strode through the hospital, let past all the ordinary barriers as if they didn't exist.
“I had a premonition as I was praying.” He said, vanishing into the ward where you lay, your bodily trauma being repaired by skillful hands and strong potions. Ural mud splattered a healer's face when you coughed up the last of it, but he just wiped it out of his eyes and kept working.
💀🌹💀
The warm blanket of unconsciousness had to lift so you could have the happy ending Viktor attempted to steal from you, but its lifting felt like a tearing away of your skin. Before you opened your eyes, you felt a warm hand in yours, and heard voices.
“You're sure it was him, sweetheart?”
“I know it was him, dad. It couldn't have been anyone else. Not unless they were jumped by some random maniac.”
“Well, we'll have to hear what Yuri says, but if so…I'm going to get him. He can't get away with it, celebrity or not. To think, you invited him to your wedding.”
“Dad, we never thought he was capable of this.”
“But you said-”
“Yes, but Yuri thought Viktor didn't understand he was doing wrong when he took advantage of him.”
“He’s a grown man, Parvati. He understood. Understood that it's easy to prey on the weak. I'm sorry, dear, but you don't listen to what a victim thinks of the intentions of their abuser. Not so soon after the event. What they think is always advantageous to the bastard who made them think that way in the first place. It is so so difficult for them to break free from the enmeshment, we've seen that firsthand.”
“...You live and learn, dad.”
“I know. I'm sorry, honey. I don't mean to sound accusatory. Come here.”
The hand in yours left it briefly as a hug took place, complete with sniffling. People crying over you? Phenomenal. Unprecedented.
“....Is he going to be okay?”
“He's an extraordinary young man. He's come through horrors before.”
“They weren't as bad as this. This is betrayal. The friendship is dead, irretrievably.”
“With your and Father's help, he'll get back on track. And he has other friends.”
“None of them can replace Viktor.”
You decided to wait a while before revealing that you were awake, so long that you fell asleep, and woke up having forgotten entirely about that conversation.
“Parvati.”
The rasp of your voice startled the twins where they sat on either side of your bed, their eyes either listlessly travelling over the pages of a magazine, or else floating around your private room, looking for somewhere to land.
“Yuri!” Your fiancee almost leapt on you, just managing to stop herself. Instead she bent over your face, showering it with kisses and tears.
“I’m alive.” You said, trying to lighten the mood, trying, pointlessly, to distract them and yourself from the reason why you were lying in hospital. The memories were crowding at the edge of your mental vision, massing as an army, waiting to leap before your inner eye, more horrifying than any outside fright could be.
“He's not stuttering.” Said Padma, beaming a hopeful grin at her sister.
No, but you weren't particularly stressed just then. It could return at any moment. Could return the instant the first memory assaulted you. Or it might never come back. It was impossible to say. It didn't bother you. Very little bothered you. What is a stutter to murder and rape, the ultimate and penultimate crimes against another human being. What is a queue, or a bill, or a bad hair day, or any of the silly things people bother themselves about. Still, that's not to say it was a good idea to make fun of you for the speech impediment, because there was a volcano of rage locked away in your heart, and it might erupt the instant some fool accidentally dragged one of your many bad memories into the light. Before the second assassination attempt on Viktor, you could direct that rage into your magic, but times had gotten worse since then, and you felt constantly on the edge of erupting.
“How do you feel?” Parvati asked, her hands ceaselessly caressing your face.
Sitting up was difficult, but you managed it without help, finding your lungs unobtrusive once again. No pain there, or within your pelvis. In some ways that was disappointing, because you always felt guilty for not forgetting an injury once the pain it caused had passed away. “I want to go home.”
Going home was difficult, since you had yet to say ‘I do’, and while you didn't need looking after, the Patils wanted to look after you, and they were, naturally, terrified that the would-be murderer would return to finish the job if you went off to your own solitary nest. You couldn't yet produce the words needed to set their minds at ease.
“You're staying with us, my boy, and never leaving our sight ever again.” Mr Patil told you, putting an end to any argument, as well as deciding your future living situation. Fine by you. Your most intense desire had always been for a father.
💀🌹💀
“They found our invitation.”
It had been a fortnight, and the well meaning people around you had been attempting to get justice. Had sent private investigators to sniff around the scene of the crime since you would not consent to going to law enforcement.
“Here.” Your fiancee rested the wedding invitation you had offered your best friend, on the garden table where you were sitting having tea. Caught in a bush after he dropped it, it had only been a little rained on.
You glanced at it, and flicked your eyes away, back at the garden. “I didn't get the chance to ask him to be my best man.”
“Meri jaan…” Parvati's expression twisted into deep anguish. You knew she was recalling her father's words about not trusting the thoughts and feelings of victims. How could you have wanted him to be your best man after you'd told her how he used you when you couldn't say no? ‘Vitya, Vitya’ - that's as far as you could get. ‘Vitya, Vitya, don't do this to me. You know I don't feel that way about you. Don't force me, please' - is what you wanted to say. And now you had to ask someone else to fill his shoes. Someone who would wonder why your other half was not doing the honours. Someone who would ask you where he was, because by then he was known to be missing. So far you had not had to speak to his family, because your family made excuses, claiming you were ill, but that horror was coming. And then they might blame you. Then you might have to expose their son's secrets, if only to save yourself.
“He must face justice, my love. We have evidence of the state you were in, and of the scene.”
Deep in your bones you knew he already had faced justice, but you couldn't speak those words yet, so you spoke others. “I can't stand in court and repeat in detail all the things that have happened to me, zaika. From beginning to end they will make me turn out my guts for inspection. I can't hear them pick holes in the truth, and in me. Not over something like this. Something almost worse than murder. You may as well kill me now.”
Parvati knelt beside you, resting her head on your thigh, which always softened your will considerably. “What about the others? The other victims, I mean? He's still out there. He could be doing the same thing to someone else.”
“He's not, zaika. Trust me.”
Her beautiful brown eyes flickered with apprehension. "How do you know that?”
“It's always been about me. He wasn't possessive like that about other people. I don't think he really saw me as an individual person separate from himself. He was trying to…possess me, because he'd lost himself. Had it taken from him. If he could merge with me, he would find himself and be whole again. Return to the days before he became a thing for others to profit from. You don't need to worry, sweetheart. By the end he'd lost interest in other relationships.”
But Parvati was sharp, and moved from leaning on your thigh to sitting on your lap, the better to look into your eyes, her arms wound around your neck. “You’re keeping something back from me. What is it? Is it too painful to tell?”
Everything was too painful to tell, and the Patils did not pry, but you couldn't hide from her, not when she never shamed you for all the things that sounded so questionable. Not when she never questioned your motives, most of which were obscure even to yourself. Often your actions made it seem like you wanted all the dreadful things which happened to you, you know they did, and people in the past had declared that to be the case. Bad boy, fundamentally broken and wrong. Slutty boy, who leads men and women on. Evil boy, who attracts evil. Eventually you threw yourself at whoever wanted you, just so you could prove to yourself that they were wrong, and right.
“Yes.” You answered, unable to say more because tears had closed your throat and blinded your eyes. A soft bosom turned into a pillow for you, when your fiancee hugged you close, her heartbeat anxious beneath your ear.
“...You know why they can't find him, don't you, my darling?”
“Y-yes…I didn't appar-rate from the Urals.”