Part 1: Foreshocks
"Foreshocks are relatively smaller earthquakes that precede the largest earthquake in a series, which is termed the mainshock. Not all mainshocks have foreshocks."
Kazakov's first warning came on a dreary Thursday in the middle of March when the evening news announced that Maximilian Nero, a man so dangerous he appeared on precisely zero wanted lists, had been arrested after an altercation near the London Eye. The news anchor said he had been taken in by a new global antiterrorism agency calling itself H.O.P.E., of all things, and the name alone (completely apart from the idea of criminals too dangerous to have prices put on their heads) was enough to make Kazakov scoff. The anchor said that HOPE still had a suspect at large, and blurry footage of them from the altercation was displayed with the CrimeWatch number underneath.
Kazakov's first thought was Talya. Though the footage had all the graininess and blurriness he had come to expect from a CCTV camera, the dark-clothed figure was unmistakably her to his eyes. Something about the fluidity of the person's movements, maybe, the steadiness of their stance, or more likely the pair of fire-bright swords in their hands. (An image sprung into his mind, unbidden, of a dark-haired girl standing at attention, two bloody blades in her hands. Of the way she seemed to hunch into herself while standing ramrod straight. Of the emptiness at her sides, the place where two boys should have been. Of the too-small body at her feet, curly-haired and chubby-cheeked - though that's not right. By the time Raven had come out of isolation wild-eyed and red-handed, none of them had looked remotely childish for years.)
Kazakov's second thought, a scant second after the first, was shit. He hadn't thought about the Glasshouse or the Furans or Talya or Tolya almost as long as he'd been Kazakov - had half-convinced himself his teenage years were nothing more than a vivid nightmare, a story from a fairy-tale realm of personal pettiness and cartoonish evil the likes of which normal people hunting normal criminals couldn't possibly touch. There was no point in thinking about it, anyway, when the Glasshouse had been burned back to the stone and abandoned, years-old ash crunching beneath his boots as he aimed his rifle at shadows and ghosts. When he was the only survivor.
But Talya had survived whatever had happened to his childhood prison (which, based on current events, Kazakov would make an educated guess was Talya) , and whatever she'd been doing since had now attracted official attention. The past, it seemed, was like a phoenix, and Kazakov had the sinking feeling he was about to get burned.
A few days later, the morning news had an artist's sketch of the assailant's face: the drawing was of a woman, perhaps thirty at the oldest, with closely cropped black hair and dark eyes and a long, thin scar stretching from her hairline to her jaw. She looked menacing, mean, the perfect accomplice to the ragged man in prison orange H.O.P.E. had actually managed to catch in London. (She looked whole. Healthy. Perhaps even happy, if her mouth had not been drawn in a scowl. Certainly better than the last time Kazakov had seen her, a few months after… well, after, when the scar on her cheek had still been an angry pink held together with coarse black thread and her eyes had still been blank and her hands had still been cracked from scrubbing so hard and so often.)
The news anchor called her Raven - her old code name, Kazakov remembered as he tried not to think of a boy called Cossack, and presumably her current one as well - and listed her crimes. The rap sheet was of the sort Kazakov expected: a wide variety of petty theft (which, if he had his dates right, occurred when she was still a street urchin named Natalya - a fact that made Kazakov faintly impressed with and decidedly nervous about H.O.P.E.'s investigatory skills), breaking and entering, assault with a knife, the death of a teenaged gang leader right around the time the Furans had found her, and the murder of Anatoly Kazakov.
The picture the station showed, bearing the overly bright hues of a poorly colorized photograph, was of a chubby-cheeked, curly-haired boy, a few scant years out of toddlerhood. (Distantly, Kazakov recognized that this was meant to imply Tolya was still a child when killed - like he and Talya weren't of a similar age, like she hadn't come out of that match, red-handed and wild-eyed, by the skin of her teeth, like Talya had been a child-murderer as well as a child murderer.) It had been cropped heavily - there was no trace of the puppy in the boy's arms, let alone of his two brothers standing on either side of him or the man and woman behind them - but Kazakov knew it well; it was one taken shortly before their parents died, several years before… well, before, and he'd carried it in the bottom of his right boot for years until he'd lost it, along with everything else, somewhere in Afghanistan. He wondered where and when and how it ended up delivered to H.O.P.E. or the news station. He wondered who knew to look for it and why; to the best of his knowledge, the Glasshouse hadn't kept death records, and any that they had would've burned along with it.
(He wondered when he'd started forgetting his baby brother's face. He could still see Olek's in his mind clear as day, covered in sand and grit and sweat and blood, but his youngest brother's features had grown fuzzy with decades of grief, had been overwritten by his son's and his nightmares.)
The news anchor continued down the lengthy rap sheet, covering a variety of mostly violent crimes and a truly impressive kill list, but Kazakov had stopped paying attention. Later, he would ask James to show him how to take a screenshot. This news channel offered its newscasts on its website indefinitely; he would have ample opportunity to go through today's and find the photo and screenshot it and save it under an innocuous name, maybe that of his son. It was hard to believe he and his brothers had ever been that young, chubby-cheeked and smiling and intensely vulnerable. Like a barely weaned, particularly kickable puppy, or a redshirt in their first martial arts class.
(That was his second warning. Kazakov had not been the surname Tolya had been known by, though their patronym had long since slipped from Kazakov's memory; the surname had been something he and Olek had chosen at the recruiting station perhaps six months after… well, after, when they had decided war was more palatable than whatever mission they'd been sent on, which Kazakov had also forgotten the details of other than the unsupervised afternoon in Ekaterinburg they had used to full effect. They'd needed something the Furans wouldn't think to check to ship out under, something innocuous but also petty, in a rebelling teenager sort of way - you tried to take my name, you called me Cossack, and I'm taking them both back for myself.
But Kazakov was the surname Kazakov was now known by - the one he had used since that day - and finding someone had become a lot easier since he and Olek had made their escape those many years before.)
What probably should have been Kazakov's third warning came at a staff meeting six months later. The reports about Raven had faded from the news fairly quickly - any questions on campus about a boy she had murdered and his possible relation to their head training instructor had been eclipsed by rumors about which pairs of agents had coupled or decoupled and who had gotten up to what on their last mission even faster - and even H.O.P.E. itself had stopped gaining much attention, being supplanted by some business with rogue missiles in America. If it weren't for the picture on his computer and the print of it in his left boot, Kazakov would have forgotten about the whole messy business entirely.
(That, and that he'd started having the nightmares again. The ones with a far-off explosion and grief not yet confirmed but still sitting heavy in his gut as the sky and sand turned bloody red. The ones about the corpse of a little curly-haired boy - sometimes the other ones, the ones he himself killed, and not infrequently either his brother Olek or the son named in his memory, but most often Tolya, and always too young - bleeding out onto his boots as he stood at attention. Except that boy was wearing a red shirt now nine times out of ten, and he stared into the eyes of the Chairwoman as often as he did one of the Furans. Once, Piotr was replaced with an extremely surreal Pike, and the body was that of the redshirt girl who'd broken her leg on the assault course - a push from a fifteen-year-old who, to the best of Kazakov's knowledge, was still running punishment laps three months later, followed by an awkward landing - and who Pike had carried to the medical office on his back.
Twice, the body was James'. Kazakov tried not to think too hard about what that was supposed to indicate.
And, of course, the one where he came to CHERUB campus - actually looking like the real thing, now, and not a demented combination of the Glasshouse and a quaint English village - to find the Furans standing at the gates, ready to greet him, that he'd had every night from the first time he'd heard of CHERUB until he'd actually seen it.
When Kazakov was nineteen, he had run from the Glasshouse with nothing but the clothes on his back and his brother by his side. When he was twenty-nine and brotherless, he had returned with his rifle in his hands and a bandolier of grenades on his belt to find it already destroyed, burned back to the crumbling stone and utterly empty.
When he was thirty-nine, he had taken out and cleaned his old rifle, fully prepared to do the same to this CHERUB or die trying. Fully expecting the need to do the same or die trying. And then he'd seen the campus and met the agents and unloaded the rifle he still cleaned every Sunday he was on campus, just in case.)
The meeting had begun normally - a review of past missions gone awry, discussions of proposed changes to campus, a few of the more interesting requests from other agencies for CHERUB agents.
"No," Kazakov said when Chloe Blake mentioned H.O.P.E. was looking for help infiltrating some kind of recruitment point for the ghost they were chasing (M.I.T.T.E.N., or H.A.T., or some other ridiculous thing). After a moment trying to think up a justification why, he added, "too risky."
"That's why I turned them down," Chloe agreed. "Limited ability for contact with handlers, and they didn't even bother to plan an emergency exit strategy. Their security director is pushy, though." Chloe's face scrunched in an expression of distaste. "Says he used to run a school, too, and that his kids would've leapt at the chance for a couple weeks' easy work."
(Somewhere in the back of Kazakov's mind, alarms were sounding, and he almost asked Chloe the name of this director - but the klaxons were coming from a far-off corner far removed from his current life, and dubiously ethical training programs, as his current position would indicate, were a dime a dozen, and he could just look up the man's name later.
He would forget to do so. If he had, it almost certainly wouldn't have changed anything, but perhaps he would've been slightly more prepared for the fallout.)
"With that attitude, I don't think we should send agents on this mission even if the plan passed basic safety procedures," Zara said.
"It's not just him, either," Pike said. "I met a couple of HOPE agents a few months back, and they rubbed me the wrong way, too. Can't put my finger on why, but I don't trust any of them."
"Same," Kazakov said, and the conversation moved on to safer topics: planned missions (including, a corner of Kazakov's mind noted somewhat smugly, a distinct lack of an invitation back to Camp Reagan for this years' exercise) and how the creation of the soon-to-be-graduates' new identities was going, plans for training exercises, and a thousand other minutiae of CHERUB's operation.
After the meeting, Pike came up to him.
"Thanks for backing me up there," Pike said. "Didn't know you'd met any of the HOPE people." Kazakov grunted noncommittally.
"I've worked with a couple of their consultants before," he said. "I know their type."
"Ah." Pike nodded. "I've worked with a few of those types myself. Your successes are theirs and theirs only, but their failures are always everyone else's fault, right?"
"Exactly," Kazakov said.
"Ugh, the worst people to work with. My Dad always says-"
"-you have a father ?"
"Yeah?" Pike blinked. "Most people do."
"I had always assumed you had been a CHERUB agent." Not all of the adults on campus were former agents - as Kazakov himself was not - but most were.
"Nah," Pike said. "Two parents, three dogs, the works. Stumbled on an op my first year of teaching, got recruited from there. You? I mean, I know you had brothers, but other than them?"
"A son," Kazakov said. He did not miss Pike's use of the plural, but he did not acknowledge it, either. "We don't talk much."
"That's a shame. Do you want to take this round of basic training or the one after?" Pike asked, which Kazakov was pretty sure was code for I don't want to go to Siberia.
"The next," Kazakov said, and Pike grinned, said goodbye, and left.
Kazakov's actual third warning came in an airport several months later, when he came face to face with someone he had long believed dead and hoped would have stayed so.
So. First time posting here in a while. Crossposting some stuff from AO3 (same username; also has my exchange fic) I've already written. I have some ideas for where ENVF and Rewind are going, but they're still on indefinite hiatus.
Liked it? Hated it? Review and let me know, and follow me on tumblr at brachylagus-fandom for very erratic writing updates, general thoughts, and an outtake from this fic featuring an accidental field trip to a grave.