Author's Note: Hi kids! If the writing style of the fic seems familiar, it's because I used to write Red/Healy stories here under the name FrozenPhantasm. I got locked out of that account and I can't get back in, but I'm still writing about our favorite Russian, so I made a new account. Anyway, fair warning, this story is dark-there are mentions of suicidal thoughts, feelings, and mentions of attempted and actual suicides. It takes place after S6E13, when Red is still in SHU and not feeling super optimistic about her life/choices/prospects. So if that's triggering for you, don't read. The rest of the fic (I have at least two more chapters planned) will be in the same vein.
These Walls
Chapter One
For days, she had been unable to think of anything but beef stroganoff. It was the first dish that she had ever learned how to cook. That was almost fifty years ago now, but Red still remembered that winter well. It was the winter that she had gotten a little sister, an especially momentous occasion for young Galina, who had spent nine years of her life in a house full of boys. Brothers were good for wrestling and for playing ball and for beating up Boris Lobanov, the neighbor boy who was always pulling Galina's pigtails, but she had spent most of her life wishing for someone to play dolls and dress-up with.
And then Nastya came, and it would be a few years before she was big enough to do any kind of sister things, but little Galina didn't care. It was nice just to have another girl around, and she happily assisted her mother with feedings and nappy changes and singing the baby to sleep. But none of that lasted, because Nastya was dead in her crib after barely five months of life, and Mamushka didn't leave her bed after that, except to go down the long tenement hallway to the WC. Papa was always at work; he worked as much as he could because Mamushka couldn't anymore; she couldn't do anything, not even cook for her surviving children. Galina could still remember how her stomach felt like it had been hollowed out, and the way that Alyosha, six years old and Galina's responsibility now, had cried for bread.
Nikolai, the oldest at thirteen, had been the first to try and make something edible out of the family's meager rations, but he was no cook and everyone choked on the tasteless, half-boiled potatoes he made, and when Galina complained, he threw a still-steaming spud at her and yelled, "Well why don't you cook, then?" And she had, standing on a kitchen chair so that she could reach the stove, balancing her babushka's recipe book in one small hand and a wooden spoon in the other. She learned to make stroganoff first, then borscht, and then gradually more complicated meals, and she fed everyone, including Mamushka, because that was how Galina had always dealt with adversity. Roll your sleeves up and get to work, and don't stop until the problems have been pounded into nothingness.
Some problems, though, you can't just chop and boil and sauté away, Red thought. Especially when you were locked in closet-sized cell with no immediate hope of being let out, and even if you did get out, you had no access to any kind of kitchen. Because your cooking days were over, your days of feeding everyone, of being useful and taking care of everyone, were over.
Red doubted that she'd see another kitchen again in her life, not that it mattered, as she had no one to feed, anyway. She was nobody's mother; nobody needed her. Her children were gone, all of them, and it was, as she was forced to admit to herself, all her fault. Vassily's words came back to her, drowning out even the manic screams of the woman across the way, echoing in Red's head.
"You put this glass between us, Ma! You!"
He was right. She could sulk and plot all she wanted, play the victim, tell herself that her sons lacked loyalty and honor and had willingly, cruelly abandoned her—and she did, for the first week or so that she'd spent trapped in between these walls. But buying into her own bullshit, stewing in it on high heat, didn't change the truth.
And now she wouldn't be able to apologize. Vassily would never come to see her again, she knew that, nor would his brothers forgive what she had done to him. Vasya, the middle child, the peace-keeper, was always the most soft-hearted of her sons, the most forgiving, the most devoted to her. If he hated her now, as well he should, then Red could only imagine what Yuri and Maxim thought of her.
In truth, though, she had lost them, all of them, long before the incident in the visitation room. Cooing at her grandchildren through three inches of glass and a staticky telephone was nothing compared to holding them, kissing them, smelling their sweet baby skin, and she would never be able to do that, because she was going to die in here, possibly in this very cell.
Ten years, she thought. Dwight had told her that at least it wasn't longer, and her lawyer spewed his crap about how easy it would be for her to bring that down with good behavior, but it didn't matter, not for her. When had any of the good things that Red had done, tried to do, ever mattered? Everything she had ever striven for, everyone she had tried to help, the evils that she had thrown herself in front of to protect others, it all amounted to nichego.
Less than nothing, she reminded herself, running a hand through her hair. She still had scars there, was still half-bald underneath her wig. There were others scars, too, wounds that went deeper, but she refused to acknowledge those, because she'd go insane if she did, and she couldn't afford that, not if she had to spend ten more years trying to survive here.
For anyone else, a ten-year sentence may have simply been a heartbreak, but for her, it may as well have been a death knell. Red was no longer young; after a week of sleeping on the hard, narrow SHU bunk and living with the pain of her wrecked back twisting into pretzel shapes, she felt her age more than ever. When she got out of here—if she got out—she would be well into her seventies, and even more ruined by her endless years of incarceration. She would, in essence, be useless, a burden on her sons and an object of mixed pity and scorn for her grandchildren, who wouldn't know her and would have no room for her in their lives by then.
But, she knew, it was more likely that even that bleak future was just a pipe dream. She was old now, she would only get older, and old people didn't do well in gen pop. Red had seen enough at camp to know that much, and she could only imagine it was a hundred times worse in Max. If she managed not to get shanked or beaten to death or to lose her mind, then she would undoubtedly catch one of the diseases that ran rampant in prison; she'd get sick and die, the way that old people did at alarming rates when they also had no access to medical care. She would leave this place bagged, tagged, and stiff; she was delusional if she thought there was any other way out for her. And then she'd be buried in the prison yard, and if the Litchfield idiots couldn't even spell Tricia's name right, then what the hell would they do to the foreign syllables of hers?
And the worst part was that nobody would care that they'd misspelled it; probably no one would know, because no one would miss her. Her sons had lived without her for almost twenty years; she'd been in prison for longer than she'd been with them. Besides, they hated her now anyway. Even Vasya, even her little boy who had cried and clung to her hand on the first day of kindergarten, who'd rushed the police officers when they came to arrest her, kicking and punching ineffectually at them to keep them from taking Mama. But Vassily wasn't that little boy anymore, and Red had betrayed him too many times.
Her death wouldn't matter to Dmitri, either; he could just bury any grief he might feel in his brand new girlfriend's pussy. Maybe Nicky, Red thought, briefly wondering what would happen to Nicky if she died. But Nicky was young and strong and she actually did have hope of getting out, someday. That day would come soon, much sooner than Nicky herself realized, and then she would be gone and she'd forget all about the woman who had only been her prison mother. Out there in the big wide world, Nicky would have no need for Red, and history had taught Red that as soon as she was no longer needed, she was tossed out like week-old borscht.
Another face flashed in Red's mind, another person who might miss her, but she quickly shrugged that off. Too late in the night, their ships had passed. And he was gone, too; no word from him in the months since the riot, and she hadn't expected any, either.
Red rolled over on her cot, coming to rest on her stomach and picking at a loose thread on her blanket. Dmitri…Nicky…Vassily…Her stomach rumbled, and she thought about stroganoff again, returning to the memory of Mamushka's kitchen, the heat from the stove reddening her cheeks and little Alyosha asking when the food would be ready. "Galya, I'm soooooo hungry." Alyosha, the first person who had depended on her, the first person she had ultimately failed. He was gone, too, and Papa and Mamushka. No one left, no one left to care what happened to her. Nothing for her anymore, except long, long years is a stinking concrete-and-metal cage, an eventual slow death from pneumonia or the flu or something else that would eat her body before it finally kill her.
She stretched her hands out in front of her, looking at the roughness of them, the redness and the age spots and the scars from years and years of being splattered with hot grease or boiling water. There were similar scars on her thin, freckled arms, too, where she had accidentally gotten too close to a lit burner or the scorching top lip of the oven. Scars that she didn't mind as much as some others she'd accumulated, because she'd gotten these feeding people, being useful in a way that she never would be again.
Red turned her arms over, looking at the white underside of them, the criss-cross of blue veins beneath the surface, and feeling her heart skip as she got a wicked idea. She chastised herself at first, because that was for weaklings. Isn't that what she had told Frieda? But Frieda was the reason she was here, the reason that she would die here and never see her children again, and if she had known then what she knew now, she would have opened that bottle of bleach and gladly shoved it down the old cunt's throat. Let her fucking choke on it…
Red didn't have any bleach. She didn't have anything sharp, either, nor did she think that she could make a weapon from anything in the room. The people who ran this place really did think of everything, everything to keep the prisoners from taking matters into their own hands and speeding up what disease and desperation and neglect were doing to them anyway. But there were ways. Frieda found a way…Tricia found a way…Red knew others who had found a way, too. You just had to be smart enough, crafty enough, and for all her faults, no one could accuse Red of being an idiot…
She rolled over again, considered the watermarks on the ceiling, wondered if she would feel any different tomorrow, a week from now, a year from now. She didn't see how, though. Nothing would change; nothing ever changed, unless it was for the worst, and Red was so very tired, and betrayed, and broken, and she wanted so many things she could never have. Mamushka's kitchen and her own beef stroganoff, her babies, her life back…and freedom, freedom that would never come unless she found a way to get it herself…