AN: First historically based story that I am taking a great deal of artistic license with. Like...a great deal, but the point is more to entertain. Anyway, this chapter is written in thoughtflow and may...be a little difficult to read, but please bear with me, as I promise it gets more lucid as time goes on. Enjoy.
Ah, it hurt...
Well, it always hurt. But this sharp ache where his shoulder became his neck agonized his whole body, shooting tendrils of pain into the back of his skull, making his senses dull and useless.
So he sat in the red slush in the No-Man's land between Narva and...wherever they were going to-
But they had lost.
Over 30,000 Russian soldiers versus 10,500 Swedish men, yet somehow...
They'd lost.
He'd lost.
And he was feeling it in every bone. He knew logically that this body did not really exist in the same manner as his soldiers', but still he burned down to marrow as they died in the snow, too tired and too beaten down to save themselves. And he felt each of them go out as if someone pressed a coal to the bare skin of his narrow back. And the afterglow of pain was almost bad as the burn.
But yes, they'd lost...they'd pick up and start again. And maybe this time would be better.
But it wasn't likely. Not when someone had the entire country running backwards. He felt that too. The vast sense of inferiority as Sweden towered over him, face expressionless yet somehow still menacing, aiming a gun straight into his face-
Ah.
That explained the hole in the side of his head. It was getting and feeling better, though—
…Well, it was healing. It didn't feel better. And his left eye hadn't quite grown back in—
And he cursed himself for being so small and yet so big, so old and still so young, so wise and yet still so damnably naive about the nature of war-
Some of the shallow blood puddles in the snow were deep enough to form some kind of morbid mirror so he could see his own face reflected in it with his one good eye.
And he cursed that young face, the face of a fresh teenager, the face of a boy who couldn't grow up-
And every time he'd shove his foot into that macabre pool, scattering it so it shone ruby on the few patches of still-pristine snow.
But that was an endless age ago (fifteen seconds was an eternity on the battlefield, before, during, or after) and now was Now.
And Now had a pair of polished black boots entering his hazy field of vision and standing there in an almost cocksure manner.
"You're not supposed to be here," he told the boots numbly, slowly raising his hand to hide the hole in his face where his eye still hadn't grown in yet(Couldn't it hurry? They wouldn't let him shoot the guns at this rate), ashamed to look so...repulsive in the face of those pristine boots.
"He told you that you couldn't help. He said you couldn't be here. W-why are you here?" And he cursed that still-high child's voice, praying each day to a God he wasn't sure he still believed in that one day it would disappear and he'd have the voice of a man, one that could make everyone listen to him-
"Ahaha, well. Anything to piss that bastard off. Can't help too much, but I can at least get your stupid brat ass out of the snow. Get up," the owner of the boots said.
Slowly he shook his head, hand still pressed firmly over the left side of his face.
"He said you weren't allowed to help. He said you couldn't be here," he repeated dully, eye still locked on those boots. They were perfect, really. He could stare at those boots for the rest of eternity. It felt wonderful to look at something as it was, just being what it was and being so gloriously. Just a pair of boots and yet they were soflawless and beautiful-
"Oy-! Are you crying? Niko, give me a hand here —" the boots' owner cried helplessly.
"You can't do anything right, can you?" A cool, high voice broke in, a pair of brown boots moving forward from some point behind the black boots, out of his field of sight.
And he hated those boots on sight. They were an ill shade of reddish brown, taking on the colour of the sullied snow, making it as if that ocean of blood was slowly encroaching on his borders, taking back the land, didn't they once say such a thing would happen one day and what was life like underwater, being the fatherland for endless schools of fish, the largest country in the known world-
"Russland. Look at me, please." The horrifying boots became hidden as a pair of legs clothed in green knelt and disguised them from view.
His eye drifted up to stare into a face that contained a frigid sort of beauty, pale and expressionless. And he blinked once, a slow and uncertain smile spreading on his face.
"...You know my name?"
At this point, he wasn't sure if he'd spoken aloud or if all his words stayed in his mind instead of escaping out into the air and they all were just stuck in his head, crowding together and confusing him and-
"...fuck, Nikolai. Look at them. Can't we do something? Shit, that's just...pathetic."
The frigid beauty whipped his head around and up to stare blankly at the other man's face.
"You know we can't. We're only here for him. This is pushing the rules of the treaty as it is," the small blonde said sharply.
"Yes, I know. But-"
"Søren. We aren'tsupposed to be here. If it wasn't for the fact that he'll be—we'll discuss this later."
The boots shifted impatiently and he felt a stab of uncertainty in his gut. Don't move, don't move, you'll get blood on you-
"Ja, I know. We talked about it before."
The pale boy looked satisfied and turned around again to face him, eyes roving over his face critically, making him feel a bit like some kind of strange specimen.
"Give me my bag, Søren. I need to bandage this at the very least."
Small leather-clad hands tugged gently but firmly at his hand over his not-there-yet-eye, forcing it away to hang uselessly by his side. Fingers grasped his chin in a firm hold, tilting his head up and to the side and forcing everything out of his vision except the pale yellow sky.
"Well?"
The beautiful one hummed once in a strange mixture of pity and exasperation, reaching for the bag that now lay at his feet.
"There's nothing in it, but it isn't closing like it should. Berwald went too far this time."
"That bastard always goes too far."
"Shut up."
"Whatever you say!"
And it was said, this easy way of giving in, in a tone so full of adoration and so empty of rancour that it made the bottom of his stomach drop and he wasn't sure why. There was nobody new here, no one he hadn't seen before and in fact there were less than ever, look at all the dead soldiers, look at them dying, dropping like the fireflies during the first winter freeze and if you found them in the morning you felt enough pity to bury them, because a solitary dead firefly means more than a field full of many dead soldiers, because you always value something more rare, don't you?
Of course you do.
And that's why these black boots were more priceless than any precious metal on this battlefield. Gold? There was an abundance of gold, just ask the Swede soldiers if they minded sharing because it wasn't as if they had any use for it anymore. Blue and gold and green and red, forever endlessly red. And the black was beautiful, an absence of colour or was it the mix of all colour? He couldn't quite remember. That scientific symposium explaining light and sound had been so long ago and was black the absence of light or the mix of all colours and what did it even MATTER and why did we waste So Much Money on this nonsense?
Regardless of who lived and who died and whether black was everything or nothing, the world still turned and there was still money to be made and wasted and gold to be stained on a battlefield full of periwinkle with silver fastenings.
"-he can't go through the checkpoint like that, idiot."
"Eh? Why not? What's wrong with him?"
-oh, what wasn't wrong with him? To see so much and learn so little, to have grown so much and be on the cusp of reaching for something more but still just too damnably short to grasp it with his own hands and how could he survive the fall when God, coming down from the clouds, couldn't? How did he keep this pitiful body of child together when all it was...was flesh and blood and tendon and bone and soft and hard and smooth and rough and infinitely infinitely breakable by human reckoning.
But God was made of glass?
By that logic, why wasn't the whole world made of jade?
"I can't bandage it with all this hair in the way; it'll get infected. I don't understand why they let him keep it so long in the first place...it isn't appropriate for a soldier."
"Boyar."
"...how ridiculous. Give me your knife."
"Ahaha, my what? ...oh, you're serious. Um..."
"...idiot."
He was slightly confused as the two of them leaned him back to lie in the snow, staring up at a canary yellow sunset-ridden sky. Metal flashed in the peripheral of his intact eye and he began to scream because everything was going to hell again.