The Bubbly Sensation

by LucyCrewe11

Before being banished by the Romanovs and swearing his revenge, Rasputin is called upon to heal a sickly child. Bartok accompanies him and tells the boy a story about bears and witches and other wonders. Alexei finds it impossible to believe.

The Bubbly Sensation

An Anastasia fanfiction

While Rasputin heals the young tsarevich – a child of barely five years – his reliquary glowing a sickly emerald colour as a thin river of blood extending from the nostrils to the tiny, puckered-with-pain upper lip, magically dries up, Bartok perches upon the frame of a picture of one of Empress Alexandra's favourite saints and – trying not to hiccup – peers down curiously.

The convalescing figure arouses pity in the bat, who flaps his wings unsteadily to fly down, landing noisily upon a sadly twisted little arm that won't bend all the way at the elbow.

Tired blue eyes crack open a slit and dizzily regard the creature, not with an expression like he has when watching his dog or his pet donkey in the imperial stable, the stinky one Papa lifts him onto and lets him ride for a few paces as long as his sailor-nannies flank either side of him and another servant holds the lead rope, but rather with the look he gives Mama's yearly enamelled eggs when they are delivered to the palace by Fabergé.

There is such pain behind this little child's stare, Bartok begins to tell a story, hoping to distract him.

In this story he is a travelling performer, accompanied in the back of a wagon by a bear named Zozi, and one day he is called upon to venture into the forest to meet Baba Yaga to rescue a young tsar.

"This was Ivan, you know, little fellow," says the bat. "That's your ancestor's uncle. Not the terrible one. I've got a signed picture of his."

Alexei listens, still and stiff as a board, his eyes the only things that move, when they widen or roll or lighten or darken, while Bartok recounts a vile advisor, Ludmillia, turning into a dragon and how he vanquished her.

When the story ends with the bat proudly watching Baba Yaga fly off in her mortar and it is safe to turn his head without fear of the bleeding starting up again, he looks suspiciously to Rasputin, who has been sitting with a dark scowl beside his reliquary, waiting impatiently.

"You've been letting your bat drink champagne at Cousin Felix's house again, haven't you?"

Caressing Alexei's sweat-beaded brow with his long, bony fingers, Rasputin grants him a too-wide, too-fawning smile. "He likes the bubbly sensation, your imperial highness."

"Hmph," says Bartok.