A/N: This chapter was beta-ed by the wonderful Serria :) If you haven't already, go check out her stories!


Mihael Keehl spent the first five years of his life in Siberia.

It was a good place, his mother had reminded him: a nice home, nice food, and such pretty trees and look at the mountains! - so please, Misha darling, don't cry, sweetheart, please, you'd break your mother's heart if you do. Please, Misha.

And Mihael hadn't, even if he was bright enough to see how in winter his father's tears stuck to his cheeks and the only sign of Christmas were the evergreens shading their small cottage. But he had been a good child, and he had not wanted his mother to cry. Besides, the cottage had books, Tolstoy and Pushkin, testaments old and new next to samizdat in a dozen different languages that Mello eagerly devoured, even if his mother had to explain the English and French to him at first and refused to tell him what "adultery" meant. In their thatched home that no one visited, Mello read, and learned, and waited.

Sometimes, his father would come home, snow on his boots and a bundle of paper in his hands. And it was when Mihael was three that he began to notice that whenever his father came home with a newspaper in his arms, his mother's smile would slip and come back tight and wrong, and that she would always hush him and give him a big glass of milk that would make him irresistibly sleepy.

Thereafter Mihael would always spit the milk out the window. When his mother wasn't looking, of course.

So it was that at age three, pretending to be asleep as he secretly eavesdropped on his parents, Mihael Keehl learned his first lessons in espionage.

At first, Mihael didn't understand much. There were words like "Chechnya," "rebels," "Yeltsin," words even Dickens didn't use in his thousands of pages. Any ordinary three-year-old would have soon lost interest, but Mihael was a curious child. Inquisitive. Bright.

And so, one night when his parents had long dozed off to sleep, Mihael crept outside, and in dappled moonlight, picked up a faded sheet of newspaper.

He read, and soon his eyes grew as round as the moon above him.

There were rebels, the newspapers said, dangerous (dangerous!), people from Chechnya, the place he had heard of only in whispers. Mihael didn't know what a rebel was, but it sounded exciting.

And this man, this Yeltsin, he was the president (Mihael knew what "president" meant; his mother had said it meant "leader," which meant a bad person), and he didn't like the rebels, oh no no no. He was a bad person, and they were the good people, and they were fighting, really fighting, as in real life fighting with guns and probably swords, too! Like in a duel!

It was just like a novel.

So slowly, with a child's sense of morality, Mihael became convinced that he - and mother and father, of course - were the good ones, the rebels the newspaper had talked about. He didn't tell his parents this, of course; it might have upset them that he had known so much and been sneaking outside at night, anyway.

Two years passed like this.

And then, one rare sunny day, two men in boots and black came through the moss and mushrooms.

The day fractured into light and sound.

His mother, screaming as she pushed him into the house; his father, something steely in his kindly grey eyes; the men, in their sturdy black boots as they walked towards the house as his father raised his old hunting rifle; Mihael, as he watched with nose pressed to kitchen window because this was exciting, it was exciting, the first exciting thing that had happened to him in years -

And then cracks, cracks of sound that split the night and red, red, red everywhere.

Far away, men in gold-gilted office clinked glasses, congratulated themselves on a well done job, on moving a little forward in destroying the last remnants of the Chechnya separatists.

And in Siberia, a boy stared with clear blue eyes as blood blossomed in his mother's chest, and remembered not to cry.

That was Mihael.

And this is Mello.


Chechnya - a part of Russia that wants independence. Kind of like the Quebec of Russia. Currently, it's kind of independent, except it's also a Russian federal subject. It's complicated.

Misha: pet name for Mikhail in Russian (technically, Mihael is Slovene, but the Soviet Union was pretty big in its heyday and it's close enough.)

Samizdat: forbidden literature under the Soviet Union