Thank you to all who reviewed, favorited, and followed!
Asteri0519 - Stef really needs a hug :( warmth and sunshine would be amazing, too.
Robby the Cyber Warrior - Thank you! I hope I do an alright job.
WARNING: This fanfiction mentions child abuse and neglect. Also child-on-child violence and murder. The main character is briefly part of the Red Room, what did you expect?
All my translations are from Google, so if you happen to be fluent in Russian, please don't end me.
In order of appearance:
Россия - Russia.
Сигареты - Cigarette.
For reference:
If a character speaks and it's all in italics, that's (from-now-on), Russian. I'll still refer to certain words in Russian, but this just makes it easier to read.
Also, I Googled how long a boat ride from Russia to Norway would be, and got to answer. Oops,
It was awful to find out you're seasick your first time on a boat. It was even worse when you were surrounded by bad-smelling men with a few missing teeth who spoke a handful of languages you've never heard of before.
This is the situation Stefanya found herself in.
She was alone in a small town in Россия, freezing half-to-death and shaking in her stolen shoes when a man who called himself Viktor found her.
He was a kind man in his early thirties, with white-blonde hair to his neck and soft gray eyes. His skin was dirt-covered, and his hands looked like they'd never been washed before. Viktor walked up to her, holding a bowl in his hands, when he asked:
"Have you run away?"
Stefanya didn't know what run away meant, but she technically did run from the Academy, so she nodded. If she wouldn't have been so tired and cold, she would have been alert. Now, she was thinking she wouldn't mind if they found her. At least she'd be warm.
Viktor, smiling sadly, held out his hands. She looked from his dirty face to the contents inside, which was some kind of soup with chunks of meat and other vegetables floating inside. It smelled amazing.
Her stomach burned with hunger. She was starving, something she hadn't noticed before. However, caution set in her bones. She didn't know this man, or why he was handing her food. She didn't trust him.
Viktor laughed good-heartedly, "Don't worry, it's not poisoned. You're hungry." It wasn't a question, and he was correct. She threw caution out the window and cupped the bowl in her hands, enjoying the warmth in her numb fingers.
"Thank you." Her voice sounded small compare to his, which was deep and spoken as if each word held the secret to world peace. Stefanya took a gulp of soup. She'd trust him for now, especially since the soup was good. "I'm Stefanya."
"And I'm Viktor."
An hour had passed, she drank the soup and thanked him once more. He just smiled, and said he was happy she enjoyed it.
"I live on a boat," Viktor's voice broke the silence, "where do you live?"
"This bench. What's a boat."
Viktor's smile turned into a frown, which seemed alien on his face. He brushed a chunk of black hair behind her ear, Stefanya would have moved away, but it didn't feel wrong. It made a warmth spread in her stomach. It reminded her of Annika. "You don't know what a boat is?"
She shook her head. Sure, she'd heard of them: Emiliya, a girl who slept in the bed beside her's at the Academy, came to Russia on a boat. She was from a faraway place called New Zealand, where her mother had gone to have her in the hopes her father wouldn't find her. It didn't work. He made a deal with Madame B. to give Emiliya away for a sum of money, like Stefanya.
Emiliya had a last name when she got there, though.
"Do you want to see a boat?"
She nodded, and that lead her to present times, two days later. Viktor felt bad, he said, he wanted to keep her safe because it wasn't good for a girl her age to be alone. He offered to have her pose as his daughter, so she could come on the boat with him.
Stefanya jumped at the chance, not thinking it through. All she did think was that he was nice, the boat wasn't as cold as the bench, he let her keep her nail, and wherever Norway was, it wasn't Russia. They wouldn't look for her farther than Russia, she wasn't worth it.
Within an hour of boat travel, Stefanya was throwing up over the side. Viktor, and another man named Marco (he spoke Spanish, another language the Red Room taught her) laughed and said she just needed her sea-legs.
After her second day of on-and-off nausea, he told her to rest in their cabin, which they also shared with Marco. She slept in the same bed as Viktor, but he made sure there was always a pillow between them.
"Don't want anyone getting the wrong idea, girly." He said when she asked why, playfully pulling on her braid, if it still could be considered that.
She didn't know what he meant, but nodded like she did.
When Viktor came back that night, his face was tired and he smelled like seawater. His clothes were drenched with what she assumed to be the same. Stefanya made a face. Was he going to get into bed all wet, too?
"Well," Viktor started, pulling a cигареты out of a small box he kept in underneath Marco's bunk. Marco wasn't aware. He used a match to light the end of it, then used the same match to light the candle on the small dresser the room had to offer, "I've never learned your last name."
"Oh," she sat up, ignoring the weird feeling of the blanket. It wasn't really scratchy, just… odd. "It's Ivanov."
He shook his head, inhaling the smoke from the small stick. (He blew it out away from her, though it was pointless, since they were an enclosed space. She didn't care, so neither mentioned it. He'd already explained the health risks three different times until she agreed not to steal one while he worked. She didn't know what lung cancer meant, but she did know that she didn't care. It seemed cool.) "It should be Ivanova."
"What?" Her eyebrows shot up, and now she had perked up to attention. "How do you know?"
"Girls got an A added to their last name," another exhale of smoke, he used his free hand to wave it away.
"I'm Stefanya Ivanova?"
"You sure are." He grinned at her, and she smiled back. He tapped her nose, causing it to scrunch up, and laughed. "I'm not real sure what my last name is, anymore."
Stefanya frowned, getting out of the bed and wrapping her arms around her frame. The bruises from training in the Academy had begun to fade. When Viktor first saw them, his face fell and he mumbled something about worthless people. She was afraid he meant her, so she didn't ask about it.
"Why?" She now regretted leaving the bed. She was cold.
"Well, it's been a long time since anyone's asked. I'm thirty-six, y'know." He put the cигареты out on his thumb, which neither of them reacted to. "An old man with no family."
"I've got no family too," She wasn't sure if Mama counted. Mama never called her family, it was Annika who taught her the word. "Maybe you can be an Ivanova, like me?"
He was silent for a long moment, placing the used cигареты back into its box and under the mattress. He'd use the same one for several days, he once said. He couldn't afford them often. "Ivanov."
"What?" She liked that word, it summed up all her questions to a simple one-syllable word.
"I'm Viktor Ivanov, because I'm a male."
It was a week and six days later when they made it to Norway. At that time, a lot had happened. Including her sneaking a cигареты and coughing so badly she feared she would throw up her lungs. Viktor wasn't happy when he found out, and threw his cигареты's overboard. She felt so bad, she offered to throw herself overboard as well. He wasn't happy about that, either. More horrified.
They left the boat hand-in-hand, Viktor having thrown his single bag of possessions over his shoulder. Marco stood on her other side. He'd find something called a hotel and would wait for another boat to ask for work help again. Viktor said he wanted to wait in Norway for a while, now that he had Stefanya.
It turned out that Viktor was fluent in English, like Stefanya and Marco. So they spoke in that, as Marco didn't understand Russian and Viktor didn't understand Spanish. On the boat, they made her be a translator.
Now the two just felt stupid.
"We'll find a hotel too, right?" Stefanya asked, looking up at Viktor. He seemed even dirtier surrounded by the clean people of Norway, who spoke Norwegian. She liked the sound of Norwegian, but none of them knew how to speak that, so she hoped they wouldn't stay long.
He nodded, ruffling her hair, which caused her to huff. Marco could braid hair, he said he had four sisters, and redone her that morning. She didn't need him already messing it up. "That we will, Little Thief."
Stefanya rolled her eyes, something she learned from Marco, and crossed her arms over her chest. She earned that title after stealing the cигареты, and hated it. She wasn't a thief! Maybe she stole a pair of boots, a pair of pants (that Viktor called jeans) back in Russia, and now a cигареты, but that didn't set it in stone!
He laughed, "Don't get an attitude now, little lady. You're the one who stole the cigarette."
She frowned, "Cigarette?"
"Oh, right. The English word for cигареты."
"That sounds stupid."
They got a hotel room, with Marco across the hallway. He said he 'wanted to bring home some nice ladies,' which caused Viktor to scoff. Stefanya wondered who the ladies were, and why he was bringing them to the hotel room. Neither answered her.
Viktor was out, saying he needed to go buy something. She didn't know how, considering all of his money was Russian rubles.
Currently, Stefanya was going through his bag, looking for her nail. She wanted to keep it close in case, even though Viktor had a small pistole on him. In case of robbers, he said.
"Hey, kid."
She must have jump out of her skin, clutching her fingers around her nail and automatically forming her fighting position. What she saw was a man with graying black hair, familiar blue eyes, and dressed in clothes a jogger would wear.
"Whoa, okay." He lifted his hands, and looked almost smug. She didn't let herself falter. He could be a robber not expecting her to fight back. Or someone looking to drag her back to the Red Room.
No, she wasn't worth it.
She threw herself at him, not bothering to let him explain why he was there. She didn't like that a man older than Viktor in their hotel room. It was theirs! Stefanya was tired of sharing, and Viktor said that no one but them could live in the room. She went to stab him with the nail, but was meant with nothing but air.
"Once again, whoa." She spun around, now seeing the man sitting on the edge of her bed (this time not shared with Viktor). Did he manage to escape her? How did he move so quickly?
He gave her a grin, "I can hear your questions, and let me offer no answer." He snapped his fingers, and produced a dark green bag in his hands. "A gift, from me to you. Don't tell my dad, this isn't allowed."
And he was gone.
Stefanya would like to claim she kept her cool. That she accepted that this man just did all of that and took a peek at whatever was in the bag. Well, instead she screamed so loudly that poor Marco thought she was being murdered.
She said she saw a spider and hid the bag. He didn't ask any more questions.