COGS
Yuri cannot charm the words from him for any price. They come at random intervals, sometimes in public, sometimes in private. For all his emotional aloofness there are times when he spills over, and a life's story constructs itself from the flood. Sometimes they are tinted with the sad desperation of a child, other times the quiet detachment of an adult, as though he cannot decide whether he wants no part of himself or if he is trying to embrace what he is and has been.
"I got here on the train," he says, standing by the window and looking down onto the lit streets below. The city is brilliant at night, enough to make any true countryman's heart swell with pride at the sight of so much red banner flying from the windows. "I stole the money for the ticket. It wasn't hard."
It's a strange way to begin a conversation but it's typical for him, by now. Just that tiny seed, a glimpse into a journey rarely shared. Yuri waits.
"People assume I'm soft," the boy says, hand against the frozen windowpane. His shoulders are bare and his pale hair short against the nape of his neck. His reflection in the glass is faint and hard to make out. "I get by on that when I have to."
What that means, at the time, is unclear.
In training he is silent and sullen against the taunts heaped on him by men stronger, larger, more capable, men who intend to make the cut to the more elite levels of the organization. They have no love or patience for a slight grey-eyed teenager who can't aim a gun without shaking hands, who never smiles and who makes no effort to start friendships or conversations outside of the few connections he already has. Yuri, old enough to find the mood-swings of the young beyond him, is not privileged to know him beyond the physical, and for the most part he remains a mystery.
"Don't bother with the Makarov anymore," says the Serzhant, half laughing and half infuriated by the boy's complete inadequacy. "Stick with a combat knife. The most an idiot like you can do with that is cut yourself up."
The world around them grows more hostile, and none feel it more strongly than the budding young soldiers in Moscow. Promises of transfers into hidden organizations surface, moving like ripples across a pond. Spetsnaz is the name, whispered like a secret through the ranks, and though the men rarely speak of it together the unifying feeling of reaching for it surrounds them. It steals the focus from the soft-voiced boy, who makes efforts to appear as though he does not care one way or the other, and has taken to carrying his weak weapon wherever he goes.
"It's going to rain," he comments to Yuri, as they stand at attention in the courtyard, side by side and unmoving as stone statues. There are eyes on them, but not ears. Yuri speaks from the corner of his mouth, without turning.
"How do you know?"
The boy glances at him in forbidden movement, and at that moment there's a distant rumble of thunder, like a weapon going off far away. Yuri watches him, expecting some kind of mystic reply about sensing the storm, or some claim to a psychic weather connection.
Instead he recieves a shrug so small it's nearly undetectable, a tone so logical it borders on condescending.
"Well you can smell it, can't you?"
There is no love lost or gained between them, the boy makes this abundantly clear. Nothing of him belongs to Yuri, or to anyone else, for that matter. Attempts to offer anything beyond what he is already recieving are rebuffed, coldly, in short terms and harsh looks. Yuri is cut off at the emotional level by a wall of ice. Eventually, he no longer makes the effort.
The GRU comes to focus on the Moscow base in the winter, the eager soldiers are made frantic by the possibility of promotions and transfers. Colonel Volgin, the udarmolnii, has arrived like the proverbial storm, as terrifying in person as in reputation, giant and scarred and vicious. The men assemble for him without question, for the price of resistance here is too expensive even to consider.
"I'm in," the boy tells him afterwards. "Spetsnaz GRU." He has a slip of paper bearing a large and nearly illegible signature. His face, as always, gives away nothing as to how he feels about this, save for something around the eyes that Yuri, despite the distance, has come to recognize.
"Scared?" he asks, quietly, and the boy's whole body goes stiff with sudden rage.
"Go to hell." Tone clipped and steely. "What do you know about me? Just because-..." He stops himself, and lowers his head again, shoulders hunched faintly. "What you got from me doesn't mean anything beyond what it was. Don't fool yourself."
There's a silence, and then Yuri rises to his feet, moving to approach, but the boy turns and fixes him with a look that stops him in his tracks. Don't touch, it says, because you've already been allowed all the closeness you're going to get.
They stand like that, in uneasy standoff, until at last Yuri forces himself to speak again.
"I thought you couldn't handle a gun up to standard."
"I can't," says the boy, through his teeth, with perfect fury. "But I don't need to." He draws the combat knife, given to him in a moment of shame, and holds it up with an expert fighter's grasp. "I can throw this from a standstill at any target within sight. I'm faster with it than any other man in this unit. Nobody else here can match me."
He breathes out, slowly, gathering himself, and holds out the paper to Yuri, in a gesture that is most uncharacteristic in its openness. Yuri takes it, reads.
Ivan Raidenovich Raikov has been formally accepted... He looks up again. "They misspelled your name."
The boy takes the paper back again, folding it carelessly. "No they didn't," he says, tucking it away. "That's the way I wrote it."
And with anybody else that wouldn't make sense, the skewing of the patronymic as such, but Ivan adds, with a vicious sort of self-satisfaction that explains everything: "I refuse to be Radan's son any longer."
When the GRU leave Moscow in the morning he is with them, marching silent and upright beneath the watchful eyes of Colonel Volgin, heightened to the elite but still one small cog in a large and complicated machine, a piece vital but unseen.