Title from 'Where The Story Ends' by The Fray. Written for Yuletide.
One evening he kissed her, and pulling away, took a handful of her hair with him.
When he looked down the colour was like smear of ink across his palm. When he looked up, Marya still looked the same.
You will always be amazed, the Gamuyun had said to him a lifetime ago. Who could not be, for whom a married Tsaritsa had given up her status to starve?
But then of course, it had not been a proper marriage. The Tsar of Life had nothing to lose from bad luck, nor would any dare tell him that his vodka was too bitter.
She looked up at him, her eyes hollow. She did not speak, but extended a thin hand towards him, in the way of the queens of old. Ivan had the absurd urge to bend his head and brush his lips over it, to see if it might please her. Instead, he reached out and took it in his, curling her fingers into the palm of his hand for warmth.
The bones of her wrist stuck out like blades. She was hard enough to cut him.
Ivan had been right about that, at least, though he had been wrong about so much. Be fat, be alive. Soon she would not be even the latter, and he dead sooner for having loved her. He had told her once that she had holes in her like bullets, and had believed they could be fixed if he only tried hard enough. And then the war came, and they only grew instead, until sometimes he looked at Marya and felt he could not see her at all.
Her husband remained in the gap between them, the man with the hardest face he had ever seen, and eyes like pits. The memory of those eyes still made Ivan shudder, for feeling Koschei's gaze on him had been like being pricked by a thousand knives, all at once.
She had never responded to Ivan the way he had seen her do to her husband, with frenzied abandon so near madness, love and anger and hate.
Across the dining table, he had looked at her and not known her at all, and yet in that mad instant when he had thought he knew everything, it had all come down to this: that she could never be his.
But then Ivan had never reached out for her arm and tugged her down to him, and claimed her for his own in the way Koschei had done.
He wanted to sometimes, if only to feel like she could see him, that he was real to her. But when Marya let him touch her, there was a carefulness to her that seemed alien, that she would give Ivan this much of her but no more. It felt like she was very far away, her mind back in the hell she had called home.
And sometimes when Ivan touched her, it felt like there was another in the room; caught in the space between them; touching Marya, yet fucking Ivan too. Perhaps there would always be some sort of barrier between him and another man's wife, though it blurred more everyday.
He should have hated her for it, this woman who was not his wife, responding to another man's phantom touches, but he only hated himself instead.
His brothers used to call him a fool. Sometimes he suspected they may have been right, and yet most of the time he considered himself as happy as he could be, in such circumstances.
Outside the lovers sang to distract themselves from the cold, their bold quick words running into each other, but none of them would ever see Lvov again.
"Ivanushka," Marya said, startling him. She had been so quiet he had almost thought her asleep, except that Marya never seemed to sleep nowadays. "Would you perform tasks for me, if I asked?"
"What do you mean?" He had already gotten her endlessly disappearing shoes and dresses she never wore. There was a limit to what a man could spare for a woman whose very existence threatened his own.
"Would you," she paused, and the fingers of her free hand over their joined hands. Her skin was very dry. "Get me a firebird's feather, or fetch a ring from the bottom of the sea, or steal gold from a dragon?"
Ivan considered it, remembering the stories his mother had told him when she had stopped reading the Bible, sitting by the stove. The memory warmed him, but his loyalty belonged elsewhere now, for he had seen too much not to be aware of the consequences.
"These things are so old-fashioned, Masha. They are part of your old life, and the old life of Russia too. You must try to forget."
But how could she, this woman who had married Koschei the Deathless, who had fought a war he could not even understand and had seen things he couldn't even imagine? Living with him seemed to be killing her more surely than him, the shortage of food and heat affected them all, but Marya's very blood seemed to have cooled, and she herself seemed almost hollow, as if there was no more heart in her.
She pulled her hands away from him, moving away from him on the bed as if the loss of heat meant nothing to her. Her shoulder blades stuck out like clipped wings.
The hair remained in his palm, and he closed his fingers over it to keep a little of her with him.
Ivan moved towards her, slowly, cautiously, to see if she would move away from him again. When she did not, he reached out with a trembling hand to run his fingers over her back, tracing the sharp protruding bones.
Marya Morevna shivered under his touch.
Ivan Nikolayevich pressed his dry lips to each shoulder blade, careful as if he were kissing a knife. She was almost as cold, and responded not at all.
The Gamuyun had not said, you will wonder why she chose you, if it were for any reason other than that it would happen. She had not said, you will wish she hadn't.
"I will be late home tomorrow," he said, for lack of anything else, and closed his eyes.