A/N: before you collectively ask what the bleep is wrong with me, let me just say that this is weird and strange and I'm not quite sure what happened. Further comments/explanations at the bottom.
1.
Ivan Braginski did not believe in ghosts.
He was an ordinary, if big, man – a ballet teacher - deceptively tall and heavy, with a frown too gentle to be angry and a smile too cold to be happy.
His aunt raised him, along with her daughter. Ivan did not remember why two men and a woman (so key in all of their conjoined lives) were missing. It might have been a war, a sickness, a bottle of whiskey. And it didn't matter to him.
Not much did.
Besides his dancing (his only constant companion), and his cousin and aunt (both loved him very much, and both lived very far away), there was music. Sometimes – he wished he had a talent for it. Sometimes – he'd go into a music store (an abandoned one, where the cashier was miles away with earbuds in and it was only his body keeping him there) and plink away at the keys of a dusty piano, light years away from grand.
He could have bought it.
But he didn't.
There was something special about the situation – the way the dust motes floated around him as his fingers stumbled over keys, maybe, or the curious solitude with another person so near – and Ivan knew - was so utterly sure – that if he pulled it too close to himself, it would disappear.
He saw it in other people, too, this specialness, but saw none of it in himself and took care not to tamper with it unduly.
This might have been why he was so lonely.
This may have been why he started disappearing.
2.
Yao was a ghost. He'd died, oh, what was it? A long time ago, maybe that was it. The styles were different now – the music less joyful, the clothing more subdued. He'd noticed it maybe a decade after his body had been entombed in the earth, and decided he was a watcher. He liked that, in a vague, ghostlike sort of way did he?. He had the most curious feeling he didn't know himself anymore. And that was fine, as long as he didn't think about it too hard.
Indeed, he didn't do much thinking anymore.
His ectoplasm seemed to be fading. His mind registered this as it did the changing of seasons – barely, if at all. He was falling asleep more and more often It was about time he faded into the dirt.
As a person, he hadn't been like that. There were friends, some very good ones, oh yes, younger siblings to look after. He suspected that they were dead, but didn't let it bother him.
He watched and waited with dull, half-lidded eyes.
3.
Ivan rather liked ice skating. Nobody had taught him; one day, when the dusty piano hadn't been enough, he'd left the dead shop to walk through the sparkling downtown (alight for a season that required happiness and money, neither of which he had or cared to spend) and spotted a used pair of skates languishing in a window.
He was a dancer. It wasn't hard to skate, once he'd regained his balance. Dancing was what it was like: the same freedom, but with cold air and mittened fingers and rosy red cheeks.
And yet, for some reason, it was better. Was it that he could skate among a crowd and remain so alone?
He became confident enough to skate outdoors, in a park pond lit by dirty lampposts and the bonfires of happy couples and friends.
One night after the temperature dropped and everyone else had gone home, Ivan kept skating.
4.
Yao's favorite place in winter was the pond. Perhaps it was the season yes the winter the cold but his ectoplasm was stronger, and he would leave footprints behind. And sometimes the people that congregated there would speak to him, unknowing of his fate or circumstance. He was just a young man in a red coat, with a hat that never flew away in a stray gust of wind.
the sleeping don't forget the sleeping
(each time he thought it was his last: when his ectoplasm shifted and fell to the ground, worthless, and his spirit rotted away inside the wood of a tree... and the sleeps came more often and more often, longer and longer ...or was his time awake becoming shorter and shorter?)
He fell asleep midsummer and awoke to view the harvest moon. Was it the same year? Too hard to tell and he was so very tired...
The people at the pond, when he talked to them, helped clear the confusion - his sleeps were becoming longer and longer, and, he noticed, his footprints shallower and shallower in the freshly fallen snow.
One night, as he shivered (though he felt no cold) and curled up in a tree (because he was afraid), he stayed awake and watched the skaters disappear outside the pools of light cast by the ancient lampposts. One lingered though -
He simply kept going around and around and around, hands clasped behind his back and chin in the air, smiling blankly for an invisible audience.
Yao was that invisible audience, he realized with the tiniest of pangs.
and yet he didn't stay that way...
5.
Ivan noticed him as he made to leave the pond. He sat in the branches of a nearby tree, watching Ivan, watching with some sort of reluctance - his eyes were dark and narrowed, hard to read. He had every appearance of a large red bird - everything of his posture suggested perching, and the of tilt of his head was the heedful's mixture of curious and cautious.
They regarded each other in quiet for a few moments, and then Ivan sat down and bent over to begin untying his skates. When he looked up to reach for his right boot, the boy was standing before him, face as unscrutable as before.
"You've been here for a long time," he said, almost accusingly.
"Hmmm, yes," said Ivan, glancing behind the youth and noticing his footprints. They were very light and small, disproportionate to his apparent age. Snow began to tumble through the air and landed on his face - his cheeks still ruddy from the exercise, his translucent eyelashes catching the odd snowflake, but -
"My name is Yao," said Yao, his eyes intensely fixed on Ivan's face. His arms rested by his sides - extended a little, perhaps, as if he could fly away at any moment. He hesitated, and then added, "I don't normally tell people my name."
"That's not very polite," said Ivan with a small chuckle, pulling on the boot with a small grunt.
"Most people don't care."
Ivan appeared to consider that for a moment. Really, he thought, it must be a strange picture - this boy, his coat bright against the ashy light cast by the old lights, like a scarlet bird about to take flight into a blizzard - and the tall pale man (made of snow himself, it seemed), hunched over, eyes glittering with suspicion over a chilly smile.
something was wrong, yes, but he didn't know - couldn't know - what just yet;;
But, he was insane and bored, and yes, why not admit it, lonely. He had nothing to lose.
"Will you come for a walk with me?"
6.
The lampposts sent hazy rays into the air. Whoever had equated light with heat was was proven painfully wrong here - if anything, their presence enervated and chilled the atmosphere, draining the landscape of what little winter color it retained.
They did not stick to the path, freshly powdered as it was; Yao's feet wandered, seemingly of their own accord, and Ivan kept up. Though he was the one who suggested the exercise, Yao led him - a puppeteer with grace too subtle to quantify.
When he brought this thought into the barren air, Yao merely shrugged. He'd retreated into silence, apparently deeply lost in his own thoughts - some seemed to make him angry, drawing his brows together, others caused his eyes to slacken to dullness and grief - and Ivan's attempts to lure him out were met with vague, prickled answers.
They trekked onwards.
7.
All sense of time had long since drifted away from Ivan. His feet ached with every step and the tips of his ears burned with cold. The trees grew more closely together, shutting out the wind and the snow, and they trudged through the pine needles from one ancient lamppost to the next, the only islands of light in a an ocean of woven shadows. The posts were growing farther and farther apart...
"How long until there are no more?" asked Ivan, not even sure that Yao still walked beside him - he had not looked at him for the past two secondsminuteshours and his feet were the only ones disturbing the fallen needles that carpeted the ground.
"Still a while from here," said Yao, appearing at the edges of Ivan's vision - a slight, scarlet phantom, washed out in the filtered darkness.
A vague, irrelevant though intruded upon Ivan's non-thoughts. He'd left the skates at the pond farther and farther behind them.
He hesitated, stopped, turned halfway back to stare into the blackness. Though they'd passed the last lamp only a secondminutehour ago, his eyes were met only with murk and gloom.
"Where are we going?" he asked, looking around to see Yao paused in front of him, facing towards the next light in the nearfar distance.
"I had assumed we were going for a walk," replied Yao, staring around with wary eyes. "I believe it's become more than that, though..."
"You believe? Or you know?"
"Neither. Not anymore." The first flicker of a smile licked at Yao's suddenly mobile features. "Maybe I'll see you off to your grave, you - you didn't tell me your name."
"I did not," acknowledged Ivan, starting to walk again. Yao stopped for a second, shocked by his own behavior, by the woods, by all of it and there was a piece missing too, something strange about the tall pale man. He ran after.
"You should. Tell me. Your name," he said, words oddly punctuated by the sudden intensity of his curiousity.
"I will not."
"I'll tell you about me," suggested Yao, "if you tell me your name."
"Let us hear it then, and consider," said Ivan, drawing his scarf closer to his neck. At this point, it didn't matter entirely what Yao was or was not - the unease in the pit of Ivan's stomach that flourished in the enfolding darkness kindled into a memory of anger: irritation, really. He frowned at Yao's silence.
"Your feet do not leave prints. At least, not always," he said, and awaited an explanation.
None was forthcoming.
"Your breath does not fog the air," he said, his own billowing into the cold and vanishing as he stepped through it.
Silence.
Yao ran ahead of Ivan, stopping in a pool of yellow light. Ivan halted, glared down at him through mistrusting eyes.
"You should know that I am dead," he said, "and that we're not with the living any more. I don't know if I can guide you back."
"Will I be able to go back without you?"
"No."
"So I have no choice."
"Yes."
"Will I come out alive?"
"I do not know."
The irritation swallowed itself, leaving blankness in Ivan's chest. He thought about this for a time, and then, giving up, shrugged. "Lead on."
They proceeded in silence. The darkness absorbed them painlessly, with no guiding light for twenty secondsminuteshours, until Yao ventured a proposition.
"Give me some light," he said to Ivan, startling him out of a reverie. His eyes, though blind and in turn unseeable in the forest, were sharp and even.
"How?"
"Give me your name," said Yao. "I don't even have to hear it." He offered his hand to Ivan, palm facing up. Ivan, after a bemused silence, took the hand and bowed to bring it to his lips. The name had scarcely fallen from his tongue when a lantern flared to life in Yao's hand. "Good," he said, and went on.
The light shed by the lantern was of an indistinguishable color, bright enough to give light, but not enough to cast any true shadow.
They walked on.
8.
Ivan fell, tripped by a tree root. Yao did not pause to help him up - on the contrary, he seemed to be speeding up, the light bobbing in his hands retreating into an anonymous darkness. The immediate fear that flowed into Ivan's chests and ballooned there between his ribs, though, quickly softened and gave way to such sudden serenity that his breath caught in his throat.
"There's a clearing ahead," called Yao from somewhere beyond a bend, only then seeming to realize that Ivan had fallen behind. "The moon is out."
Ivan made no reply except to stand up and move to join him, still with that great stillness, so unfamiliar was it? and welcome, he almost sighed with its coming. It tugged at his limbs and at his lungs for him, and he didn't really mind anymore, and -
a winter wind rushed by, frolicking around his scarf and heralding a sudden return to open air
He emerged into the clearing.
The moon shone down at them, lustrous and waxing waning really filling the frigid air with old things like promisesbroken and onceuponatimes and fulfill them here, fullfilthemnow.
The lantern caught fire in Yao's hands, and disintegrated to dust as Ivan finally stood beside him, overlooking a pond.
"You've left something behind," he told Ivan, nodding back to the forest without looking. He glanced back and could somehow see - a crumpled form, colorless, soundless, motionless, "But, now -
(and then he saw Ivan, saw him really, and they smiled.)
oh"
9.
"Vanya!"
flutter ban rattlerobinrun, winter for all of sleeping, dreaming for all of -
"Vanya! You're here! I've been waiting for you. Come on, we have to go!" He took one of Ivan's hands in both of his (and, though he was a ghost, the hands in question were quite warm) and pulled him towards the shore.
They were right where they had started. Ivan's skates rested, half-buried in snow next to the old log.
"Yao, where are we going?" asked Ivan, at once afraid and excited, clutching back at the small hands.
"We'll know when we reach the other side," said Yao. "I don't have skates, though. I thought you would take me?" It came out as a question, and Ivan almost laughed.
"I could not go without you."
Ivan plunked down, found his feet already stripped to socks, ready to receive the new shoes. Yao hovered in the background, straining to see across the moon-drenched ice.
When the skates were finally on, Ivan called to Yao, and they approached the ice.
"Ready?"
"As I always was." Yao climbed onto his back and gestured towards the pond, which suddenly extended as far as either could dare to look. "Let's go."
10.
and they did.
... so, um, yeah.
I participated in a Secret Santa on dA this year, and the prompts were hard for me (China or Rochu? nothx). I wrestled with this for about a month and I'm still not entirely happy with the end result (probably because I intended for this to be more concrete than abstract, and wtf is with that ending?). Though I'm glad I tried out this freaky-weird style - experimenting is good.
Expect something more real by Thursday. Merry late Christmas, and thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia or any affiliated characters.