The Value of Me
By Rey
Shout out to: Reesachan (Clymenestra) – thank you very much for notifying me about the confusion between events and feelings in the previous chapter and this one – it's fixed now!
Chapter 5: I Can't Care Less
15.
20th December 1987
Some magical jolts to the chest, as Ma'am's mother instructed the boy in one of his first-aid lessons some time ago, restores his family's breathing and heartbeats. They still do not wake up, though, even after he has poured as much magic into them as he can. And now, he feels so faint from magic loss, with nothing to show for it.
Still, they cannot stay here. Even now, in the total silence, he can hear the stonework above the four of them crieking ominously. He doesn't want himself and his family to be here when the stonework fails.
So, with all the remnants of his physical and magical might, he begins to drag them one by one down the stone-and-dirt tunnel – the only one, thus far, as far as he can see – snaking away from this priorly unknown underground chamber. It… helps, kind of, that there's some sort of conveyer belt made up of stone tubes and railing on the middle of the narrow path that seems to activate when there's something laid on it.
It makes him wonder, though… Has his family thought of – prepared for – this occasion? And if so, why haven't they told him?
The total silence and the repetitive, physically and magically taxing movements give him all too much time and chance to brood. It doesn't help, at all, that he has nearly lost them a scant time ago.
With all that is going on and his level of distraction, it can be forgiven, thus, that he almost forgets to magically and physically check what is round him every few metres or so, as Ma'am's father has always taught him in one of their lessons on tracking and wariness.
In one of those checks, he is thankful – and therefore less mad – with his… well, grandfather. Because here, in an alcove in the left wall hidden by a physical stone slab and a magical doorknob ward, he finds a bunch of Pepper-up potions – invigorating magical drink – in vials in a drawstring leather pouch, as well as another pouch that seems to contain miniaturised trunks.
He can do with some Pepper-up, right about now, like he did after his first karate session.
There are tunnels, branching every which way. Nosha has left his unconscious family wrapped in the rolls of sleeping bags from the last alcove he's found, safe under a portable lattice arrangement of protection wards, the ward stones of which his grandfather always has him carry wherever he goes in a mokeskin-pouch pendant. And since then he has gone adventuring down the tunnels. The magical tracing threads he leaves behind on each and every step are the only guide that he has, aside from the magical and physical senses that he possesses. He maps the tunnels this way, and finds a few facts that intrigue and upset him at equal measure.
Firstly, the ends of the tunnels are not equidistant to each other, judging from the length of each thread compared to the other, cut down to straight lines. There is a trapdoor at each end, so these tunnels are escape routes too, to varying points that make it harder for the enemy to patrol or set up an ambush.
Secondly, he's found identical supplies in identical alcoves set in identical distance from each trapdoor, which means the supplies have indeed been left there deliberately, with much forethought – or maybe even anticipation. He's taken them all, of course, regardless of their initial purpose – or purposes. But still.
It doesn't help his scattered thoughts and emotions that he finds the stone conveyer belt, made to run smoothly and automatically by a mix of magical and mundane scentless and durable oil, running down each and every tunnels that he passes through.
And now, as he's just finished mapping them all, he finds that all these tunnels originate from the just-collapsed trapdoor beneath the living-room he and his family have originally fallen down from.
His family prepared so extensively for this day, it appears, and they didn't tell him. He couldn't have prepared together with them. He couldn't have prepared for this day at all. And now he, a seven-year-old boy, is in charge of the care of three unconscious, magically spent grown-ups.
If he knew this day would come, he would take care to have his most-prized possessions always on his person or nearby, and he would help take care that the tunnels would be stocked up even better.
Well, if he knew this day would come, he would've had a very hard time to sleep each night and to study or play each day, too, but he can't care less about it right now. He just wants to feel angry – at himself, at Ma'am – she's his mother, damn it – at the elder Romanovs, at the unknown assailants, at the house for breaking down over its occupants….
His cheeks are wet, his eyes are burning, but he can't care less about that, too.
And still, he returns to where he stowed his family, unshrink all the trunks that he retrieved from the first alcove, and check over them one by one to find what they contain, to see if he can use any of them to help save his family.
Family is family, after all, and his life would be much more miserable without them, however angry he is with them right now.
16.
22nd December 1987
Yelena wakes up in a soft, magically comfortable bed, greeted by equally soft yellowish white light that doesn't hurt her eyes.
She is in a magically expanded trunk, that much she knows, judging from the wooden feel of her surroundings and the magic of distorted space saturating the air. It smells old and familiar, as well, so it is possibly the trunk her parents brought from Germany, the one that they often used in their longer travels, before Doshka came into their lives.
Doshka….
She sits up and moves away from the bed in one fluid movement, expertly disregarding the bone-deep exhaustion lingering in every particle of her being, like all werewolves do after years of practise every full moon. – Doshka! Where is he? She cannot catch scent of him, although the scents of her parents are so close, and now she can see that they are lying – or have been laid? By Doshka? – on their own beds at either side of hers.
She searches all over the portable-flat trunk, but what she can find are only the amenities and stores of supplies and other items that she has grown accustomed to throughout the years. Nothing has been touched, save for the storeroom at the far corner opposite the trapdoor that leads outside. And again, there, the only missing or disturbed things are bed-making kits.
She streaks towards the trapdoor, biting her lip so as not to yell for her parents to help her find Doshka, then begins to frantically weave her magic for her most potant array of detection and diagnostic spells. The harsh thumping of her heartbeats matches the throbbing, merciless draw on her innate power, which is barely recovered from the harsh draw of the wards of her home – former home, by now, she suspects – which must have fallen anyway under the onslaught of those sick "Fiendfyre Terrorists" that at last visited it, as she saw before she spirited Doshka away, but she can't care less about it.
The last events in her memory have begun to trickle back into her consciousness, that is why, and now she rightfully fears that Doshka is too upset with her and her parents to care about leaving them behind.
Still, if she could repeat this time all over again, the decision that she and her parents has taken would most likely never change. Doshka is skittish enough already; adding the Fiendfyre Terrorist attacks that have been happening all over the country this fortnight to his concerns would have just made him either catatonic in fear or frantic with useless worry, and that wouldn't do, at all.
Happiness is a large part of being safe, and she wants her child to be both happy and safe.
Doshka is apparently not too mad with her and her parents, anyway, if he did take the time and energy and consideration to lay them in beds in the flat-trunk before going away, right?
And indeed, the magical array that returns to her as some sort of "ping" in her mind tells her that he is outside, if farther from the trunk than she feels comfortable with, let alone desires.
And he is getting farther away, in a mix of ill health and upset-curious-defiant.
The detection and diagnostic spells drop away even as a switching spell replaces them, exchanging her pyjamas for her warmest winter attire; the fastest and neatest yet that she can do, with her in a panicked state like this at that, but she can't care less about it, as well.
Long legs and determined speed carry her far, eating the ground faster than Doshka's little, stumbling legs. Winter's chill bites at the few slivers of skin unprotected by her winter attire, but now she can see that Doshka is wholely unprotected from the merciless weather, and a far icier sting eats away at her heart.
Before she can call out to him or stop his determined path, though, a building made entirely of metal appears briefly from amidst some morning fog, and Doshka is running there as if he has been doing this numerous times already. Not wanting to waste her breath and magic, she speeds up quietly instead, with her heart beating in her throat, hoping to be able to physically prevent him from reaching whatever it is.
Because she doesn't want Doshka to come into that building, whatever it is, ever, even if he had done it before.
She can smell the pain and fear and desperation and hopelessness and helplessness from here, tens of metres away in the winter fog. Her wolf howls for her cub.
Doshka is an unstoppable force when he truly wishes for something, Yelena finds out only now, after two years. With all his current all-round fragility and exhaustion and ill health, he has managed to dodge both her wolf-strengthened, wolf-sped hands and the tendrals of magic uncontrollably lashing out from her. And with it, he has managed to enter the building.
What could she have done, then, but to enter after him?
And the things she found inside, just now; the things that are still surrounding her even now, choking her up and drowning her in misery not of her own, so thick and palpable that she wonders why Doshka seems not to notice it.
There are running generators on the four corners of the one-room building, which is really a big metal cage. There is a large recliner-type chair – with restrains and suspicious stains – to the far right adjacent to the door. What looks like a shower area – but with a set of jet hoses instead of a normal shower hose – lies opposite the ominous chair. And right opposite the door, where she and Doshka are standing before now, lies an aquarium-like thing, somewhat curved with glass sheeting and metal frame.
But the sole occupant there is not any kind of fish or other water-bound creature, nor is the content of the thing water.
"Doshka," she whispers, tremulously, past the lump in her throat, past the weakness that seems to be claiming her fast.
Because Doshka – her boy, her son – is standing out here as if he really had been doing it for the past however long she has spent insensate; alone, staring at the naked human trapped before them in the ice.
Alone, because she and her parents never thought of a contingency plan that would leave one of them conscious to take care of him, should trying to maintain the wards round their home prove too much for their magical stores combined. Alone, because she and her parents trusted him too much to be mature, while he is still seven years old, however mature he is for someone of his age.
"Doshka, I'm sorry." – The damage has been done, the time cannot be wound back, and now she stands swaying here with him, staring at the silent tableau of deliberate cruelty. But she needs to say it, to tell him she would take it all back if she could.
She can no longer stand on her feet when, instead of acknowledging her apology by any way, his response – deadened and broken and oh so wrenchingly lost – is, "It's been two days, Mama. I found him here. I found papers about him, too, somewhere round here. I don't understand most of what they talked about in those papers. But I know they have been cruel to him, Mama. Make it better, Mama, please? Just… please…."
He calls her Mama.
In front of a most-likely-dead somebody, whom she knows – even before Doshka's little chilling spiel – has been tortured beyond belief.
After she has woken up from a very close brush with death and a loss of the only home she has known all her life.
"God makes straight with crooked lines," the Christian Bible says, and she has been wanting to understand that bit of seemingly nonsensical thing she found there.
Now she doesn't, but she has, oh she has understood.
As she hugs Doshka tight, as she cries into her little boy's hair, unable to utter her apologies to him in any shape or form, unable to tell him that it may have been too late for his silent friend in the ice these two days to be rescued, she wonders what he will make of having such a weakling for a mother.
Well, right now, she cannot care less about this one, either.