The Winter Scarf

by lirance

The eagle screams into his throat, but the vodka burns its blood away." Ivan and wounds and the nature of slow insanity, across half a century. China and Finland cameos.

1. St Petersburg, 1904: Faultlines

Fault-lines (St Petersburg, 1904)

Ivan can feel the fault-lines rising and splitting through the blood in his mouth.

He's not sure how long he will last. How long Russia will last. Inside, he feels the horrible, sickly tremor of anticipation. It's not a tame, safe, singular human emotion with a clear little white label and a dictionary heading. It is something that screams from the black earth, that wails from the tundra and whispers through the cornfield, something that only a Nation could sense.

This kingdom is waiting. Something's going to happen. Something's going to happen. Don't know when or what or how. It's coming. It rumbles in the streets, the houses, the skies, the bare and empty places, the glorious cities.

This change, this revolution, it will take his soul, his being, his essence, his words, his wants, into hands as cold as winter, and, though Ivan desperately wants to believe in the ideals, in the hopes of these rebels, he has a terrible feeling that he won't be able to save anyone after this.