Disclaimer: I do not own Anastasia. Tragically, I don't even own a copy of Anastasia, as I swear I had one during childhood but it magically disappeared the last time I cleaned my basement. I had to watch the entire thing on YouTube this summer. That was awkward and annoying. Especially since Part Seven was missing...
A/N: This is a slightly pointless rambling about Dmitri and Vlad that I did a few months ago for no real apparent reason. There's not much of a plot. There's not much of a point. Really, not much happens except I was able to fulfill my secret wish of spending a few hours with Dmitri. Seriously, I love that man more than I should love any animated character. I have the biggest animated crush on Dmitri of any animated character I have ever seen. Even more than Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, whom I loved from a character standpoint because he was tormented and tragic. Dmitri is tormented and tragic, yes, but he is also extremely sexy. Therefore, he wins.
Anyway! Onward we go! And please don't say in your reviews that there is no plot to this story. I am extremely well-aware of the fact. If you have any suggestions for a plot, on the other hand (even though I fully intend this to be a one-shot), feel free to tell me. I'm always curious.
Choices
The man groaned and sat down heavily on the sturdy marble steps leading up to St. Peter's Cathedral. As the noise escaped from him it seemed to take all his will along with it to drift with the cloud of his breath off into the street, deflating the man to an empty, exhausted shell of his genuine self. Snow swirled around him like a miniature lethargic tornado, dotting his scarlet overcoat, dark hair and beard with white and, added to his demeanor, giving the impression that he had aged thirty years in three minutes. Despair has an aura to it, something that can be sensed without having to ask any questions, and everyone on the St. Petersburg streets could feel it radiating from the man. He didn't truly know where he was, he had nowhere to go, and there was no reason to think that any of that was going to change very quickly.
He sat this way for some minutes, gazing at the crowds of people rushing through the streets (though if asked, he could have remembered not a single face that he had seen). All of a sudden, a joltingly familiar voice came drifting out of the masses.
"Hey! Vlad!"
With considerable difficulty, a young man in a long gray overcoat and carelessly angled cap characteristic of the working-class disentangled himself from the throng in the street and took the stairs three at a time with the enthusiasm and energy of youth. The man on the steps, Vlad, gaped at him in amazement. He knew that face, that dark hair unmasterfully parted, that voice though he'd heard only two words of it so far; the recognition in his eyes was obvious.
"Dmitri?" he breathed, standing up in surprise.
"No, Vlad, it's Czar Ivan the Terrible," the youth Dmitri deadpanned, then grinned and embraced Vlad like a brother. "My God, it's been too long! I missed you! Can't say I've missed much else from back in the day, but I did miss you."
"You look good," Vlad said honestly, holding Dmitri's shoulders yet so as to get a better look at him. The overall effect was that of a father taking stock of a son come home after months of study away at university, trying to decide how many of the changes were the result of where the boy had been and how many the twisted betrayals of unreliable and nostalgic memory. "Self-employment is treating you well, I see." If that was what the youth was doing now, it certainly seemed that way. His deep brown eyes sparkled with a barely suppressed vitality, and though he was notably thin beneath the overcoat it was a healthy slimness of athleticism, not of poverty. His grin came easily, but as he looked over Vlad it was abandoned in favor of deep concern.
"Wish I could say the same for you," he said with concern. "What happened? Vlad, you look like someone's died. You're shivering, you've lost weight…"
"Glad somebody noticed," Vlad said ruefully, eyeing his still-sizeable stomach.
"I'm serious," Dmitri insisted. "What happened?"
Vlad sighed. "Boy, we're bankrupt."
Dmitri gaped at him, his mouth half-open without his even noticing it. "Bankrupt? You? Vlad, you're not making sense. Your family was swimming in rubles, I think I would know that personally. How did… Never mind," he said, suddenly businesslike. "You can tell me all about it when we get there."
He blinked, perplexed. "Get where, exactly?"
"Well, you're coming to stay with me, aren't you?" Dmitri asked, seemingly stunned at the daftness of the question. "Unless you have somewhere else you were planning on going, I mean…"
"N-not exactly," Vlad stammered, "but you don't need to…"
Dmitri rolled his eyes dramatically and took Vlad by the arm. "Vlad," he said pointedly, "shut up and just follow me, all right?" His friend grinned appreciatively and allowed himself to be helplessly led into the shifting crowd of the St. Petersburg streets. It was clear that Dmitri knew these streets well; he wove in and out of alleys and passersby with the grace of a dancer of the Russian ballet, hitting every mark, brushing off haggling salesmen and beggars with a practiced air, gliding through the snow like an ice dancer. Several weeks ago, Vlad would have resented giving up all control of the situation, especially to someone as young and familiar as Dmitri; after all, who knew better how to run Vladimir Prokofiev's life better than Vladimir Prokofiev? Circumstances being as they were, however, he was more than willing to allow Dmitri to lead him to whatever destination he had in mind. He knew what he was doing. Vlad was going to have to trust him on that, and it was not nearly as difficult as he'd thought it was going to be. Of course, that didn't mean that he didn't still have a few questions.
"Where are we going, lad?" Vlad panted, struggling to catch up as he rounded another corner. Dmitri merely grinned and procured a battered piece of wire from the inner pocket of his overcoat. He approached the ornately painted but slightly charred door of the manor house looming on their left. "What in God's name is that?" Vlad demanded, hoping for an answer this time.
"My house key," Dmitri said vaguely, presently setting to work picking the lock.
Vlad groaned. "I should have known this would be illegal, shouldn't I?" he mused aloud.
Dmitri smiled ironically. "I'm shocked, Vlad! Hurt and shocked. It's fine, would you calm down for five minutes? What kind of criminal do you think I am? Don't answer that," he added on further reflection. "No one lives here but me and the rats, anyway," he finished, just as the door swung open silently. He stepped into the room, followed by a slightly dubious Vlad.
"How on Earth can you be so sure of that?" he challenged.
The youth grinned and closed the door behind him, leading Vlad through the halls to a room with a warm but faint golden light flickering through the open door. "Vlad, do you even know where we are?"
Looking around the room at the Louis XVI furnishings, the oil paintings of stern old men on the elegantly papered walls, at the thick royal blue carpet, Vlad gasped. "The Romanov mansion? Dmitri, I don't believe you," he chuckled.
"Yeah, didn't know it had a secret entrance from the street, did you? It's amazing what trade secrets you can pick up over the years. And it has a certain amount of beautiful irony to it, doesn't it?" Dmitri grinned, sitting back in an armchair and kicking his feet up over the side lazily. "I serve them as a child, they serve me as an adult. I watched their death, they give me life. So many fond memories, you know?" he added sarcastically. "I found it hard to leave." Cracking his back ostentatiously, he slipped out of his coat and hat, letting them fall to the floor where the crackling heat of the fire in the grate would dry the residual snow from them. "So I think you owe me a story, my old friend. Now how exactly does it happen that someone rich enough to have thirty-eight servants and four separate carriages ends up alone on the steps of St. Peter's without half a ruble to his name?"
Vlad sighed and took an armchair for himself, though he arranged himself in it in a far more traditional manner. "I think you owe me a story too," he said wryly, indicating with a sweep of his hand the whole of the abandoned Romanov mansion, "but I suppose I should go first."
"Fair enough," Dmitri consented.
"You remember, I am sure," Vlad said vaguely, "how the Prokofiev family operates."
Dmitri shared a look with him, trying to make connections out of vague hints, but he asked no questions yet. Pressuring Vlad to speak more quickly in such an apparently touchy subject would do no good. They were inside, they were warm, and he was now in the position to help his old friend who appeared to be in desperate need of it. He could afford to wait and be patient.
"You know, the traditional pastimes of my father. Drink or gambling or drinking and gambling at the same time for a change of pace. It is not hard in hindsight to see where this road was going to end. It only got to that end before I had a chance to distance myself from it."
Dmitri winced, remembering Vlad's father, a bitter and angry man with the constant smell of vodka about his person and a tragic tendency to return from the opium houses and gambling dens with only a tiny fraction of the money he set out with. "He lost it all?"
"All the money, all our investments… He gambled the deed to our house when he ran out of physical possessions. I should have left years ago, and now look where my longing for a comfortable lifestyle got me," Vlad muttered. "But that is not important now. What matters now is that I am free of my family and am now able to move on. If this is not the way I would have chosen to make the separation, well, what am I going to do about that? Nothing. I only have to deal with what I have been given, and that is exactly what I am going to do. So what about you, Dmitri?" he continued in a tone that made it very clear that the subject was closed. "How did you end up…"
"Running a business of fake travel visas and forged paperwork in the remains of the deserted Romanov mansion?" he prompted knowingly, then laughing at the look on Vlad's face.
"Er…if… if that's what you're doing here, then yes."
"It's a roaring trade, if not exactly the fast track to riches," Dmitri shrugged. "You wouldn't believe how many people are dying to get out of this hellhole."
"And you can help them do that without getting caught?"
"Call me an escape artist. It's something of a gift. Honestly, I stumbled into it on accident," he admitted ruefully. "After I ran away, I didn't really have much of a place to go. I asked for and was denied help from more random strangers than my pride really wants to remember. Eventually I ran into this old woman who told me she would give me twenty rubles if I made her a fake visa to Vienna. Apparently there was business there for her, probably not legal, and I decided it was probably safer not to ask any questions. I was hungry, Vlad, so I did what I had to do. It turned out flawless. The Secret Police couldn't have told the difference if I held it up to a real one side-by-side. Word travels fast in a city that loves rumors as much as this one, and before you know it I've got a reputation and I'm set up as a con artist in the one room available in this city that doesn't charge rent. Not a bad job, really."
"Sounds easy enough, and right up your alley," Vlad grinned.
"Oh, it is, once you get used to it," he said casually. "I'll teach you, and then we'll get twice as much business covered. I can't tell you how many people I've had to turn down just because I only have two hands and twenty-four hours in a day." Neither man commented on the offhand exchange that had just netted the second one in a life of crime; it seemed more natural than breathing. Dmitri had that air about him, that carelessly confident feeling, that made it disturbingly easy to trust him, and for lack of any better way to earn a living for himself Vlad found it impossible to even argue with him, let alone refuse. "It's a little cruel, isn't it, Vlad?" Dmitri added as an afterthought, standing up to stoke the fire which had begun to languish during his absence from beneath the cream-colored mantle.
"I thought so from the start," Vlad said thoughtfully, rising with some effort to examine the portraits on the walls more clearly. "To share the wealth with the people, you can't argue with that in principle, but what had they truly done wrong? To depose the Czar, all right, but to kill them? It seemed…"
"Not the Romanovs, Vlad," Dmitri said dismissively with a wave of his hand, still bent intently over the fire. "I dare you to find someone who gives less of a damn about them than I do. They were someone I worked for because I didn't have anywhere better to go, nothing more than that. I did what I could to help them, then I left. No, I was talking about me."
"You?" Vlad repeated, still distracted by the piercing eyes looking out at him from the portrait of Czar Nicolas. "How so?"
Dmitri straightened to his full height and leaned with a put-on ease against the wall. "I spend all my time helping other people escape, but damn if I can get out myself. I'm more trapped than any of them, and there's no one to help me."
The youth's words were so bitter that Vlad turned to face him seriously. "Get out of where, exactly?" he inquired.
"Here!" Dmitri said with almost dangerous passion, straightening and beginning to pace. "St. Petersburg! Russia! This life that's got me trapped like a rat in a cage!" It was clear he'd been drafting this sentiment in his head for some time, running the meaning over and over again through his thoughts until it had somehow formed a mantra, a permanent soundtrack of the world's wrongs against him that he could not stop playing in his ears even as he knew it was consuming him. "All my life I've been a servant, Vlad. First for the Romanovs, then for your family after they fell, then for complete strangers after I left you. Never getting anything for my work, just working because I'll die if I stop! I don't want this forever!"
"What do you want, then?" Vlad asked calmly. "We all work until we die. That's how it is, my boy."
Dmitri flung himself back on the chair with desperate propulsion, slinging his legs across the arm of it and letting his arm dangle absently down the back. "All I want is a choice," he said with difficulty. "Just once, to do what I want to and not what I've been forced into. Is that such a crazy thing to ask for?"
Vlad laughed. "In this government? Yes, more or less."
Dmitri grinned in spite of himself. "Well, all the more reason to get out, isn't it? One big scam, that's all we need. Something large-scale, something huge, something that makes enough money to start over somewhere else. Maybe Poland, maybe Germany, London, Paris!"
"You think that you, Dmitri Kabalevsky, a servant boy from St. Petersburg, could fit in in Paris?" Vlad asked him, skeptically raising one eyebrow.
"En fait, je travaillais depuis quelques ans en apprennant a parler francais, tu vois. Ca serait bien utile, j'ai pense," Dmitri commented in fluent French, a wry smile on his handsome face.
"Now why would a con man know how to speak like a Parisian?" Vlad chuckled, impressed but on a fundamental level not surprised.
"I make it my business to know things," he half-explained. "You get in trouble for not knowing things far more often than you do for knowing them, in my experience."
"Again, you clearly do not understand this government," he snorted. "You've given this quite a lot of thought, haven't you?"
"No one else's been around to do the thinking for me, are they? So if I want to get anything done, I have to do it myself," he shrugged. "Paris is the goal, the con's the means. Cause and effect, and all that."
"Which con?" Vlad asked vaguely.
"The greatest con in history!" Dmitri said with a grandiose wave of his hand.
"…which is…?" Vlad prompted. Embarassed, Dmitri averted his eyes. "You have no idea what it is, do you?"
"None at all," Dmitri agreed flippantly. "But I know what I want, and isn't that usually the hardest part?"
"It may be in my best interest to stop arguing with you," Vlad muttered to Dmitri's amusement. "Cleary even when you're wrong you can prove yourself right."
"It's a gift," he consented. "The envy of my peers."
Whatever Vlad had been about to say was caught off abruptly by a quick hard knock on the door, sounding three times with a sharp arrogance that seemed to scream, "Open for me immediately, because I am far more important than you can ever aspire to be." Dmitri stood up and disappeared into the hallway again towards the street-side door, as calm as if this happened twenty times a day, whereas Vlad jumped about six feet in the air and whirled to look after his disappearing friend with the expression of a rabbit chased out of its hole by a team of hounds. He looked around the empty room for a moment, trying to decide which was more frightening: venturing off into the street to strike up some kind of business deal with a criminal or risk getting arrested by the police, or to stay here in this drawing room with the piercing blue eyes of the Czar Nicolas staring through him like a spear through his heart. After a split second's deliberation, he tore off down the halls on the heels of his friend. Dmitri shot him a silent "oh, would you relax" look as he caught up and indicated with a jerk of his head that in order to get this reaction, Vlad was to open the door. As if he had just been sentenced to death by firing squad, he did. A short little man with a highly impressive mustache that he no doubt trimmed and curled on a daily basis stood on the threshold with his arms crossed impatiently over his chest.
"Let me in, idiot, it's cold," the man said in a clipped voice that had the permanent undertones of a sneer to it. Restraining himself from pointing out that saying "it's cold" regarding St. Petersburg was something similar to saying "it's Catholic" regarding the Pope, Vlad stepped aside and permitted the man to enter, closing the door behind him.
"So you're Dmitri the Con Master, hmm?" he asked Vlad curtly. "And your hired help, I presume," he added with an unconcerned gesture at Dmitri.
The young man's color rose noticeably in his face. There was something in the bearing of that noncommittal flick of the wrist, something in that semi-permanent sneer, that was all too familiar to Dmitri, something that standing in the halls of the Romanov mansion was helping to spark an unwelcome wave of déjà vu. Years crashed over him like frozen waves, years of voices and orders and beatings and other assorted memories he had tried to block out with denial and work over the past months. He was tired of being talked about as an inanimate object, as somebody who was not even present or far too stupid to understand what was going on. He was through caring what people thought and wished and ordered simply because their pockets were too weighted down with rubles to allow them any freedom of movement to perform the actions themselves. Simply put, Dmitri was tired. Tired of everything.
"You certainly do," he said, his voice coldly professional yet somehow devastatingly scathing. "If you're looking for Dmitri to do you a favor, you might want to ask him in person."
"You?" the man spluttered, surprised.
"Mmm." Never before has more disdain been packed into a simple consonant noise.
The man squinted at him slightly through the dimness of the manor as the three of them traversed the halls back to the comfort of the Louis XVI sitting room. "From your description I expected someone more… well, more," he finally said, after casting about for words.
"If you want me to help you, watch how you talk to me," Dmitri said shortly. "Remember who's asking the favors of whom, hmm?"
A business deal began to slowly take shape, but Dmitri's posture did not relax, nor did his words lose their edge of coldness or did his hands unclench themselves from silent fists. A cloud hung over the young man's head as plans for a travel visa to Amsterdam (for business or pleasure, depending on the definition of either of those terms) were hammered out, a cloud of history and misconceptions and still-forming identities. As a con man, the job in and of itself was built on fabricating deceptions and making over the truth into something more attractive, but there might be one truth that was more difficult to hide than the others.
When you hide who you have always been, what does that then make you? The truth that no one sees or the lie you put out every day? Stay yourself in certain hell or abandon yourself completely in favor of uncertain hell, that was the long-awaited choice Dmitri had managed to discover after years of searching.
Is it still a choice if the choice is impossible?
Yep, I jacked all of my last names from classical piano composers, in case you were wondering. I don't have much of a source for Russian surnames, as my ancestors lost theirs at Ellis Island. So I have to raid Romantic and Twentieth Century Piano Compositions, Volume 10 instead. Whatever works, I guess...
Hope you enjoyed! I know I had some fun...