Author's Note: While it only gets passing mention in this chapter and is explored in more depth next chapter, all my Chernobyl references are legit. There really is a substance called chernobylite, and it is so toxic being caught with it counts as being caught with a biological weapon in many countries. Orange lightning is in fact quite common in the area around Chernobyl, and there are pictures of it occurring inside buildings, though with less frequency in the last decade. Ukraine really did get full responsibility over the area containing the most radiation after the fall of the USSR. Whether that counts as getting screwed over by Russia or getting it by virtue of getting all Ukrainian speaking parts of the country is a hotly debated topic in real life. For the purposes of this fanfic I'm not going to take on that debate, mostly because it's too complicated. Some Ukrainians want Chernobyl because This Land Is My Land It Is Not Your Land, some want Russia to fix it since they broke it, some Russians want it so they can salvage scrap materials/research wildlife there, some Russians happily say It's Your Problem Now. Some people on both sides don't care. All of that is beyond the scope of this fanfic since Linka, while Russian, is not a nuclear scientist so neither government would care what she had to say on the matter. That, and I have way too many subplots going as it is, we cannot afford to add any others into the mix.
I decided not to translate a bit of Russian slang and a bit of Korean. Gi gets to use Korean slang because she's Japanese-Korean and context makes it make sense, the one bit of Russian slang I gave up on, I gave up on after realizing 200 words explaining a single word just isn't a good use of my readers' time. Moskva is how Russian speakers spell Moscow, but outside of one specific context I'll be sticking to Moscow for the sake of my overworked spellcheck function.
Viktoriya Daineko is a real Russian pop star. I headcanon that Linka likes her music. Look, everybody has a pop singer they like, even if they're a classical music fan. My mom used to teach classical music and went through a Celine Dion phase. It happens.
Another side note that becomes important next chapter – Chukotka Okrug really does have an active mining industry. In the time since the USSR fell it's developed into more of a lumber and factory territory, but when the USSR first faceplanted, it was mostly mining. I know I'm fiddling with the timeline of things a bit here and there to fit with the show but just assume oblasts, okrugs and krais in Russia are Like Real Life Unless Otherwise Specified.
The truly awful thing was that Wheeler could see exactly where Linka's father was coming from.
Wheeler didn't have kids, but if he asked himself if he'd shoot someone to save his family, to save Linka, to save him? He knew he would. He imagined what it would be like to have his family depending on him for income and knew that as much as the idea of shooting someone up close made him want to be ill, he'd have done it. There was no insurance payout in the Russian system for having been beaten to death by white supremacists, but more than that, there was no replacing someone's father. Linka would never have recovered from that. It was basic self defense, basic logic, to take a shot. Wheeler grew up in a bad enough neighborhood to know that when one guy pulled a gun, whole groups could and would usually scatter. Even if one side had the numbers, the phrase 'God created men, guns made them equal' had weight to it for a reason. One shot, one person down, and Jevrem lived to see another day.
Presumably in an alleyway at night there wasn't much in the way of light or room to aim. Presumably, Jevrem hadn't known until everyone scattered exactly who he shot: a twelve year old wannabe gangster as young as his own son, a confused teenager lost and tangled up with the wrong crowd, but by then there were people calling the cops. By then it was too late to stay or take it back. Linka explained how it had been in on TV that morning, after Jevrem got back and showered and couldn't stop moving. Pacing, biting at the skin around his fingers, he broke down when the news casually discussed the boy not making it. Blood loss from a shoulder wound was highly deadly, particularly when the body was so small, as the bullet's impact was disproportionate. Everyone in the media thought it was deliberate. Actually, as Linka learned from her mother later, her father had only fired his gun twice in his life before, both times to break up fights. He'd never killed anyone else. He had never been in that position, because he was just a thief, a conman, someone who got goods from point A to point B and sold things of various dubiousness for a profit. He wasn't a saint, but he wasn't a murderer. He wasn't shooting to kill. That wasn't who he was. He just wanted to make it out alive. He had kids to provide for. He couldn't end up dead and disgraced in an alley. A warning shot was supposed to be just that, a warning, and then it was supposed to be over.
It was hard to fire in an alley not eight feet wide and not hit someone when there were seven people in front of you. It was a horrible mistake, an accident, a disaster, and what was a guy supposed to do after that kind of thing? He'd been afraid for weeks afterwards of people identifying him, pressing charges, then when no one showed up to do so it ate away at him. The guilt was unimaginable. He barely slept, barely ate, woke up thinking he'd heard Mihaljo screaming only to find the apartment eerily quiet.
"Mrz," he'd muttered, sobbing into his wife's should and curling up on the couch late at night as Linka carefully eavesdropped. "Mrzim samog sebe!" Hate, I hate myself!
Her mother had taken his hands to keep him from digging his nails into his palms until they bled and sat with him as he stared at the TV, eyes distant. Her Serbian was rusty, yet she made valiant efforts to keep up with his breakdown, his lapse into his mother tongue, carefully speaking sense to the madness, but it was a failing fight. Some people were not capable of living with acts of evil like that, even accidental ones. Wheeler didn't know if he could have lived with it, either, with killing a kid, with hurting someone who was just lost and confused and probably not evil in the slightest, someone who had their whole life ahead of them to change.
He did know now that Serbians comprised over sixty percent of suicides in Yugoslavia despite being about fourteen percent of the population.
At some point he'd latched onto Linka's hands and found himself running his thumbs in circles over her knuckles, looking at her face, a portrait of determination in the face of pain, awful ugly truths on full display for her friends to see. She had lived with this for years, with only a few people knowing, keeping all the emotional fallout locked up inside. Her shoulders were squared like she expected to have to defend her father to the entire room. She didn't. Wheeker glanced over to see Ma-Ti was silently crying into Ovdotya's jacket; she had an arm around his shoulders like he was her kid brother, and met his gaze evenly. I've got this, she said with her eyes, apparently prioritizing protecting him over her own reaction. Gi was uncharacteristically quiet. Japan's suicide rate was high enough it never left the top twenty countries in world rankings. In recent years it had climbed into the top ten. He couldn't read her expression, although her eyes were sad and she kept biting her lip, chewing at it in a nervous habit she rarely engaged in these days. Kwame's hand was on hers; the lack of reaction was telling about how much this topic was hitting too close to home for her. Kwame himself just looked tired, exhausted with how this simple in and out mission had unearthed all the pain his friend had buried inside. Belatedly, as an afterthought, Wheeler looked over at Anatoly, whose own mother had committed suicide – and he'd been there to see the body. The Russian's entire body language was rigid, forcibly professional, like he could retreat into the shell of Administrative Director Yurasov and not have to be Tolya, the little boy who'd come home one day to find his mother lifeless in the bathtub. The shield was up in full force, the same way the fake smile had been up at the ballet. It was the only armor he had.
"So we're going to be looking at some political fallout," Anatoly began, and the strain to Keep It Together was obvious in his voice. Wheeler wondered if they shouldn't just take a ten minute break and reconvene for the sake of his sanity. "Yugoslavia is a mess Linka cannot keep ignoring with her extended family there, and someone will bring it up in that coded 'are Serbs violent' way the media adores the more exposure her father's actions get. Self-defense is not going to be believed because of who shot and who was shot. The only way we might be able to get this swept under the rug is to divert media attention somewhere else."
Ovdotya exhaled, frustrated with her own idea before she voiced it. "We're going to Sverdlovsk."
"Didn't you just explain why we can't?" Kwame asked, raising an eyebrow.
She gestured to the room. "We need to split the team. We need to get to Sverdlovsk to get answers on the nuclear initiative and its' safety issues. We need to talk to officials here to keep them assured the world aka the Planeteers are taking Russia's environmental issues seriously so no international incidents happen. We need to locate Gi's Ring. We need to get the media back on the side of the Planeteers. We can't do all that and huddle together."
Anatoly massaged what was already becoming a visible migraine. "Alright. Alright, we can do this. Gi will need to stay here for damage control. Japan is big on nuclear energy, her talking to officials would get press and possibly improve Japanese-Russian relations, not to mention people from the Koryo-saram community want to meet her. Chukotka's representative has been gunning for some kind of meeting with Kwame to discuss comparative mining ethics and get more of a spotlight on his area's economic and environmental struggles. Kwame?"
"I can do that," the African teen immediately agreed. That it would let him stay relatively close to Gi was a welcome bonus, but he knew what it was like to be from nowhere anyone cared about and have a lot of environmental worries. "I would like to help them regardless of circumstances. Mining rarely gets the attention it deserves from the press."
"Great. Now, we absolutely cannot send an American to Sverdlovsk, they're still bitter about the Cold War. I know, it's petty; it's politics, things always are. But this is not a good time to send Linka anywhere without backup-"
Ovdotya cut him off. "Ma-Ti and I will go. I work the politics, he works the people, we play it as some concern for the emotional stability of places jilted by that conflict, we get in and out in a week, tops." She cut Ma-Ti's protest off with, "You're cute, cute sells. It'll work." He turned bright red and sputtered, but didn't object. "Tolya, you've got to go suck up to Gospozha Lysenko, we're going to need to look at Pripyat – that's Chernobyl, for the American in the room – and she's in control of the whole Chernobyl Exclusion Zone now that the Ukraine has succeeded. So you might have to hunker down here for a while."
Linka folded her arms. "I know what you're both thinking and I am not going to do it."
"Lenoshka," her ex-boyfriend said in a not very official at all voice, sounding one argument away from raiding his father's liquor cabinet just to make this day stop being a very long nightmare, "At this point, I give up on that front. I gave up a long time ago. If you really want to drag this out, fine, we'll scrap my old plan on what to do if the media broke this story. But you're going to need to do something in some official capacity or you're going to come under immediate fire, and I have no idea what that'd be."
"I have a plan," she informed him, making him wince. "No, it's not that. Or any part of the old plan we used to have for this. Wheeler and I are going to go on SKM."
"…the talk show," Anatoly said flatly, massaging his temples with his fingers. "You want to distract everyone with gossip about your new boyfriend. By announcing to the world that you're dating via the most watched talk show in Russia. Damn, if this is what you do to the men you love, I'm a little glad you hate me."
"I don't hate you." She looked directly into his eyes, and he sighed, eyes softening, conceding the point. "RTV airs on a delay in the United States, on cable. It will be a good way to show people our countries can come together."
Wheeler held up a hand like he was in class. "Do I get a say in this? What's SKM anyway?"
The Russians in the room gave him three highly pitying looks.
"Bashushka?"
Dr. Blight fought to keep from turning red at the ridiculously affectionate diminutive of her first name. Ilya blinked innocently at her, frowning at a book in his hands. He was stabilizing from their excursion into Moscow before still, so she'd given him books to read so he could feel productive. A lack of productivity was something he'd seen people killed over before, something he might've reported people for himself, thus signing their death warrants. His anxiety was too great to let him really rest; even with her assurances that she wouldn't report anything to his superiors, to him, that abandoned underground city was his entire world. Their values were the only values that really existed. To not work was to volunteer to die. She had to come up with low-effort alternatives that tricked him into thinking he was doing valuable work just to keep his anxiety down to manageable levels.
But oh, the questions he had. "It says here that cloning from adults results in cellular degeneration. I don't understand. I was cloned from an adult human, and I'm fine. Everyone back home is."
She thought about debating their definitions of fine. Instead, she let out a huff of air, leaning against the wall. "Radiation changes cellular structure. Maybe that makes you and the rest of the urban legends in that ghost town the exceptions."
"Oh." He glanced between her body and his, as if trying to discern some difference worth remarking upon. The only one that she thought was instantly visible was in their eye colors, his inhuman orange. Orange like chernobylite, she'd learned, like the lightning scientists had snapped pictures of within the ruins of the nuclear reactor. Not that there was much chernobylite on the market to compare his eyes to, admittedly; it was as illegal as he was. "You're staring at me."
"Sorry, Ilya." Blight forced her gaze off him – one day she'd get used to his eyes' dull glow, it just wasn't today. "You're not as pale as you were earlier. How're you feeling, handsome?"
"Better- wait, what?" he blushed, shrinking back slightly as if trying to make himself smaller. She was oddly fascinated by how even at his most red, he was still like a porcelain doll.
Suddenly she became aware she was staring at his pale pink lips and shut her eyes, trying to come up with a joke that could downplay what she'd as a joke. She flirted with every eco-villain she teamed up with, even temporarily, just out of habit. Controlling men was easy. With him, there was a complete lack of experience, of fight or resistance or pretending he wasn't affected, and it tripped her up. People this honest threw a wrench into how she understood the world's workings. Illarion was the sort of easy mark she would normally break and discard like trash when she was done with him. More than once, the thought popped into her head as she watched him read, that she could make him do anything, that he was just a puppet on a string for her. She was the source of his access to the world outside his city, she had a tight grip on his reigns from the day she'd made contact with him, from the moment he was assigned to her to be her dramatic stage-presenter villainous sidekick. And he did dramatics well, he liked playing games with the Planeteers, he was just devious enough that sometimes she could imagine throwing him back to the den of wolves he came from without remorse. Then he would glance up, the light filling his citrine colored eyes, pure trust etched into every inch of his face, and she tried to remember his people weren't technically people. That never really worked for long. As much as knowing she could manipulate him made her feel safe, she found herself oddly reluctant to actually do it.
He set the book aside and got to his feet, cautiously approaching her. He was taller than her, yet thinner, leaner, born of a society that had never quite enough to go around. Re-education was more common than the nightmarish executions he'd been threatened with his whole life just because they needed a certain number of people to sustain the group. She studied his face as he stepped closer, wondering how many times they'd scrubbed his mind clean, implanted correct doctrine to make him a better worker into his head. Illarion stared back at her, seeming so much younger in these close quarters than he had the day they met. She unfolded her arms and he very gingerly reached out to brush her hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. Blight braced herself for the usual questions – how did it happen, did it hurt, wasn't there anything that doctors could do to make it better – only to be surprised when he leaned in and ghosted his lips over each of her cheeks, just barely, before leaning back, holding his breath.
No one as knowledgeable regarding nuclear physics, radiation and biology had the right to be this naïve to how the world worked. Even though just being around him was taking time off her lifespan, she reached out and forcibly tugged him into a tight embrace. He exhaled a half-gasp, half-relieved sound, a 'oh good I didn't cross a line' mixed with confusion on what came next. After a few moments where she rested her head against the place his neck and shoulder neck, Illarion wrapped his arms around her in return. He felt warm, soft. Like home, she thought, shutting her eyes and burying her nose into him to try to memorize how he smelled. He stiffened, shifting a little, uncomfortable but not resistant, compliant yet new.
"You're beautiful, you know," he ventured quietly, timidly, as if sharing some great secret of the universe with her. Blight hated and loved that he made her feel like the center of his life when he talked like that. "And I – I really care about you, Basha. I know maybe I shouldn't," he babbled as she dug her fingers into his shirt, gripping the fabric tightly to brace herself against the incoming emotions she desperately did not want to feel, knowing her resolve would break if he uttered the right sequence of words, "I hope it's okay, that I…" Deep breath, then, quickly: "I love you, even though I'm not really human."
She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his head down, crushing her lips against his. It took him several stunned seconds to remember to breathe at all. She had to coach him into movement, his every motion experimental and unsure, until something deep within his brain clicked and he kissed her back properly, albeit gracelessly, smiling and serene as the eye of a hurricane.
"It's okay," Barbara told him, gruffly. "Just be you, Ilya, baby. That's what I love."
The Ring thrummed on her hand and she barely even noticed.
SKM stood for Sveta, Kamera, Moskva! and was sort of like if a talk show had a baby with the news.
When dinner time rolled around, Linka hauled Wheeler to her guest room in Anatoly's house to at least let him watch an episode in private. The host of the show was young, charming and obscenely good looking, and cheerfully played some clips of various officials on both sides of the nuclear initiative debate before mocking both sides and their total lack of understanding of what nuclear science was. At one point, he pulled out a children's book on the subject and read aloud from it to drive the point home. There was a musical guest (given Linka's grin and the peals of applause from the audience Viktoriya Daineko was a very big deal as a singer in Russia) who got to give a fairly decent interview about the music industry post-Soviet Union. Ultimately, she seemed hopeful that the arts would survive in Russia regardless of whatever might come. There was a director on to discuss his upcoming film, The Chekist, which was about war crimes during the Russian Civil War. Discussion of the line between horror and historical film came up, with added discussion of whether or not it was intended to be a statement on current wars. Wheeler had not been expecting it to take a turn for the deep and compare the Russian Civil War to current events and the uncertainty faced by the world, but the host, Yulian Dyomin, was clearly more than just a ridiculously pretty face. He could pierce people with questions like an interrogator. Wheeler was both impressed and, if he was going to be honest, kind of intimidated.
"Babe? Are you mad at me?" he asked, taking in the rapt and laughing audience as Dyomin shot off one liners. "He's a little intense, don't you think?"
"Da. I had such a crush on him when I was younger," she admitted openly, grinning at him. "It seems I have a type. I like opinionated men."
He couldn't help smiling back. "But I'm more handsome than he is, right?"
She tilted her head, pretending to think about it intensely. "He dresses better than you do."
"Gee, thanks. You're not gonna take me shopping before we go on, are you?"
"Nyet." Linka waited until he exhaled a sigh of relief to explain, "Tolya will. I am hopeless with men's clothes."
Wheeler tried to envision an experience more soul-sucking than going clothes shopping with his girlfriend's ex and shuddered. "Well, that answers my question about you being mad at me."
She leaned against him, rolling her eyes. It was after dinner, and everyone was either trying to sleep or watching TV – only the Yurasov family would be so bad at communicating with each other they needed multiple TVs in the house to watch the same show – and they could hear, distantly, Ma-Ti on the phone with Ovdotya. Linka was willing to bet there was a crush forming there, although she knew Ovdotya well enough to know it was one-sided on Ma-Ti's part. Kwame, Gi and Anatoly had spent more time trying to puzzle out the journal, but the nuclear secrets and inventions in it had to take a backseat to doing damage control in the media in the coming days. Linka pulled her hair out of its' usual ponytail to help with the growing headache and readjusted her spot on Wheeler's shoulder, watching her boyfriend desperately try to keep up with the closed captioning in Russian. Back as he was at the spoken – and oh, Wheeler was a disaster sometimes – he was remarkably good at reading. He waited until a commercial for kvass to talk again.
"Babe? Are you okay?" He shifted, picking his words carefully. "I mean, all this, it's really heavy stuff, but you seem… I don't know. Calm, maybe?"
Linka shut her eyes and listened to the pleasant background noise of Russian commercials on the TV and her boyfriend's heartbeat. "You are right. It is heavy. All of these things I try to live with, they are weighing me down, and it gets hard sometimes. But I am not carrying all of it alone anymore." She squeezed his hand with hers, letting herself smile a sad smile. "My Otac would have liked you so much. He could never afford to be opinionated the way he wanted to. Someone as loud as you would have been welcomed in with open arms."
Wheeler watched her choke back tears, feeling an absence where his girlfriend's family should have been in their lives. "And your ma?"
"Ugh, she would have hated you. But only for a bit," she laughed, tears tumbling down her cheeks lightly. "You are like an addiction, you grow on people eventually."
"…when this mess is settled, you wanna go to New York with me? Hang out with my old man, y'know, make sure we actually know what he'd think of you."
She wiped at her eyes, but her smile was bright and genuine. "Da, I would. I would love to."
Nazar took a very deep breath and knocked on Gi's door. He was painfully sober.
"I know," he said in response to her expression. "There isn't a soul in this household that wants to talk to me. But I need you to. I need you to do a little censorship regarding that journal of my father's – hear me out," he intoned appealingly, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Nothing relevant to your research or his, just to my family's honor. You're Japanese, more or less. You understand what a tarnished family name can mean in some circles."
After a pause in which she counted to ten in two languages, she opened the door to usher him in. It shut with a click that seemed deafening solely based on who she was standing near. "Alright, I'm listening."
He sat down on the ottoman by the bed. Fair enough; it was his house. Rubbing at his temple, he looked at the teen with an obvious discomfort painted all over his every movement. "I assume you're deep enough in to have heard my father mention a Gospozha Rosaline Davis."
"The black nuclear physicist, yes," she confirmed, picking the journal up. Her notes on it were nearly as thick as the actual thing and she wasn't even a fourth of the way through. "She sounds like she could have turned the tide of the Cold War if she had ever been taken seriously."
"Undoubtedly, but that's not what I'm here to discuss with you. You're going over that with your boyfriend and my son. Both of them are level-headed enough – well, no, actually, I disapprove of both of them, but that's beside the point. My son absolutely cannot read that book in its' entirety. He will never get over it." At her blank expression, he held out his hand. "Here, I'll show you. I don't know that I trust you to keep this secret, but circumstances have forced my hand."
She waited until he found the page in question with frightening speed, as if he'd read this particular part again and again. For a moment she struggled to read the Russian cursive so common to the 50's. Then it hit her, abrupt as a punch to the chest: For all that I am not a religious man, I pray this sin will be forgiven. God help me, but when I go to push her away, I find myself only entwined further. This love is insidious, it grew so naturally out of what was but a simple friendship, so gradually I had no inkling it was happening until I was already in far too deep to turn away. Each touch of her lips to mine is as a warm coat upon the shoulders of a frozen beggar, and I am alight with her heat, I am burning, we are both hopelessly burning before we even set foot in Hell.
"I know," Nazar muttered, grin not matching the acid in his voice. "Oh, what a very unique motivation he had to campaign for a peace between the States and Russia. I dare say you've never encountered this in any spy flick your American friend ever showed you."
Gi continued staring at the journal. "Did your mother know that…?"
He shuddered, for once not out of dramatics. "And have her think herself adstoi? No, of course not. I obtained the journal late enough in life she was fighting a losing war with Alzheimer's and all my siblings had managed to get themselves killed, I didn't need to add to that load. There is more. Plenty more, unfortunately. Apparently this was written with the intent to be burned, given when I bought it off a scavenger, it had been found in a stove."
"Why didn't you burn it?" she asked, hesitantly. He was being frighteningly non-monstrous. She wasn't sure she liked thinking of someone as happily ethnocentric and racist as him as a worn out person with a legacy to protect.
"It's the only thing of my father's I have," he replied in a very small voice. Instantly, against her will, her heart went out to him. Nazar shut his eyes, drawing himself up into a rigid sitting position, trying to compose himself. "I know you won't believe me when I say that, or that I intended – intend, perhaps, still – to sit Anatoly down one day and explain this. And I was. But I was going to do it after the dust from the Cold War completely settled. It may be over, but a man of my father's stature, from that era, having been intimate with an American? The press would eat my son alive with comparisons between himself and Linka, probably imply he had some secret girl on the side, just to generate gossip. I can't – I can't let that happen to him. I'm a monster because it's kept me alive, not because it's fun. I drink until it's fun, but there isn't enough vodka in all the Urals to make this bearable. Please, just don't tell my Tolya, I know I argue with him every day, I know I have no right to ask you to do anything, but I am not a man without a heart or a man without means. Anything you want, I can-"
She set the journal down loudly. He quit talking. "Stop. Just – stop. I don't need to be paid to do the right thing."
The older Yurasov smiled joylessly at her. "Yet. You don't need that yet. But when you do, my offer is good for as long as I draw breath."
"Do you really have that little faith in humanity?" Gi found herself asking, not wanting to have any sadness regarding this man's disaster of a life. She was good at being righteously angry. That was going to be a lot harder the longer he sat here and conducted himself like an actual human being as opposed to his normal ice king and consummate opportunist persona. "Alright, if you really think I need to ask something from you, how about you cut back on the drinking? Let yourself live long enough to try to repair things with your son."
"That ship has sailed," he groaned, shaking his head sadly and getting to his feet. "Sailed across the sea, circumvented the globe, and returned to port laden with exotic spices. If you come up with something a bit more plausible I can do for you or pay unto you, you know where to find me. Tell Kwame my offer extends to him as well, to the fullest extent." He smiled another soulless smile at her, eyes as distant as the horizon as he left, closing the door silently behind him.
Only after he left did she realize she hadn't corrected him when he'd called Kwame her boyfriend.
And now she had to explain this to him.
"Mwong mi."