The Stars and the Cookie Jar

So. Hm.  Finished what has been dubbed 'Cain and Abel Among the Romanovs',and it is unmitigatedly weird. If the Russian revolution had been started by the tsesarevich ikilling his brother instead of the Three Princes killing Rasputin, and if it had all happened sometime last year.... this might be what shook out.

Don't look at me, I just write it.

            Sirens, again.
            Even if they weren't for him, they startled his sleep from him. When he sat up, he could not lie down again, and he was sweating. He put his hand out into the dark, found his shirt and his crumpled jacket. He found his shoes. He steadied the pack onto one aching shoulder. The blisters on his feet all reopened, as he flung himself up from the bed, but he ran.
           
            He stepped up from the alley's gutter into the humid main street. The imperial city had been built – a few times, by now – on a fetid piece of swampland down from the great river, and even in this modern world, mosquitoes brought fevers into the city, chills and rashes and death.
            He still had the knife, because going in the streets with no weapon was just stupid, and he had a clean spare shirt and a sense of direction. He was going to see Stas, to hear his name spoken again, and because he hadn't eaten in three days. He'd given the last of his money for a bath, and that had been three days ago, too.
            The beds, he never had to pay for. He had good teeth, good length of bone, gray eyes and sable hair, all things rare enough in this city to be striking; he was past caring, now, about anything but whether the sheets were clean.
            Man or woman, they quite often said he was beautiful.
            Anastasia would tell him he was insane for coming back here, and utterly fucked in the head, but she would give him his name.
           
            He could smell meat, and onions frying in too much oil. The sky was beginning to lighten toward dawn, with a strange blue-green streak along the river. He limped faster, with the last of his will; his strength had spilled away hours before, but he had to get out of sight. Someone here might know him. He was too close to home.
            It had been one of the loveliest quarters of the city, once, with water-lapped pink granite steps down the embankment, statues of griffins and dragons done in beaten bronze. The kin strife had burned a path through all that.
            What did you want? He had nearly broken the habit of talking in his own head, like a crazy man, because once outside a bun shop three days east of here, with nothing to chew but his own foul fingers in his mouth, he had spoken aloud. You don’t murder the heir of the blood and not bring down a civil war.
            Stas still lived in the same apartment block, not far from the Winter Palace, in a rotted once-elegant building that oozed green down the walls when it rained. She had been there since before all of it, and admitted in her wry way that it probably saved her life to sit up here, miles from the court and the Summer Palace, forgotten. His father had had her moved here, very quietly, after the sad accident that claimed her sight.
            His sister-in-law's sad accident had concerned two bottles of claret, his younger brother's fist, and a marble double staircase. He'd heard they'd put out some story of a horse.
            The building's lobby was gutted, but two of the lights overhead still worked. The guard's booth at the doors was deserted, and black-and-orange fungus had begun to take over the furniture. At the far end of the lobby near the elevators was a perfectly ordinary, unscathed row of postboxes, though it had been a year since anyone delivered the mail. The left-hand elevator's door sagged off its bearings, and the right-hand one, bullet-pocked, looked as if it had come off the worst in a firefight. Which was probably exactly what had happened, he thought; he unsheathed his knife and started up the unlit stair.
           
            She sat in the dark. There was a fire, in spite of the season, and by her chair was the silver wolfhound whose collar might still bear the eagles. She spoke without turning to him. Thick chestnut hair in tangles hid her face.
            "Nicolas."
            He bowed to her, a full bow though she could not see it, and shut and locked the door. "Stas."
            "Come to see the blind prophetess, have you? Oh, that's big bad magic, far too much for a prince." She laughed, terrible and rich, and shifted in her chair.
            Her eyes were the family blue. They were cousins, not far from each other on the gilt-painted tree, but he had forgotten who her mother was. In the dancing darkness of firelight, Stas' eyes looked like anyone else's, clear and not without expression. She was fairly good at tracking him, when he moved through the room to her side; her gaze was strange, not vacant.
            "You look well," he said, "but what the hell are you on about?"
            "My neighbors think it’s a powerful thing, a woman gone blind. They come to see me because they think I was given sight for sight." She shrugged. "It's a good living, being a witch. The neighbors aren't quite the crowd they used to be," she added, as if she could see his face. "And I doubt that many of them put down their kopeks for picture postcards of the Heir's beautiful wife."
            "You're still beautiful," said Nicolas, thirsty, starving and still held by her eyes.
            "If you'd cared for any of that years ago," she started.
            "Bitch."
            "Prat."
            "Hag."
            "Idiot princeling!"
            "Blithering trophy!"
            "Faggot."
            He shut up, because it was true.
            She touched his sleeve, in something like comfort, and rubbed her fingers together when she drew back her hand. Sweat and grit and marsh-damp, off his shirt, and he wished he had changed to the clean one.
            "Look at us," she said without irony. "Born in the purple, and now favoring something in unlaundered muslin." Stas smiled, dark, empty. "Take as much food as you can carry. Take the cash. Take a bath."
            Stas was younger than Nicolas, but in her presence he felt like a boy. "I…I thought I could stay, maybe, for a few days."
            "Regicide, fratricide and idiot," she pronounced, but she did not refuse him. She went quiet, and Nicolas would have said she stared into the fire; he remained within reach, but she did not give him her arm to rise from the chair.
            "Fortis," Stas said, after a moment. Nicolas thought she blessed him, or encouraged him; but the great silver bulk of the wolfhound stirred, and he realized she had only been calling the dog.
 
            He sat at her table in the same darkness, when he had bathed and fastened back his hair; heavy woolen curtains were pulled across the kitchen windows. She cut bread and stirred soup as if she had never had servants in her life. She moved with ten times Nicolas' grace through the cramped room, and her only concession to blindness was that she kept her fingers well back from the bread knife.
            "One good thing about this place," Nicolas said, around a gulp of milk. "I always know where the furniture's going to be."     
            "Don't speak," she replied, a little sharp, a little mocking. "Lack of food has obviously stunted your wit. Or maybe you were always that way. Soup?"
            "Please."
            "Why do you stay here?" She sat down, across from him, with the dog under the table. Nicolas pulled his bare feet out of the way of the wolfhound's tongue before he answered.
            "You're my sister."
            "I am not your sister. I am the bride hastily fobbed off on your dissolute, handsome younger brother after it became so appallingly clear that the crown prince was an invert."
            Nicolas flinched.
            "What happened to Michael, in the end?"
            "I don't know," lied Nicolas. "You've asked me this, Stas."
            "And if you ever answered me, I'd stop." She tucked back a rough strand of hair, before it could trail in her vegetable soup. "I thought you ought to have shocked them all, you know, and had him declared Prince Consort. Not," she added, after a moment's careful slurping round the edge of her spoon, "that that would have saved his life."
            He burned his mouth. "You knew."
            "But then, it might have been different for all of us if you had , and nobody's life would need saving." She closed her eyes, and smiled her bitter smile.  "You could go somewhere. There are other, saner countries. Get out of here; cross the border and go."
            "I can't," he told her. "Too much is here."
            "Oh, yes." She dipped a crust into her broth, and held it down to the dog. "Everything but peace."
 
            That night, in Stas' bed, he dreamed of the knife. Scraps and flashes of everything that came before, the Summer Palace, the balls, the betrothals, Michael in the blue and gold of his regiment, Stas with the scarlet Order of Catherine across her breast. Gabriel too with a line of scarlet across his breast, not silk. Around him the lemon-peel scent of Stas' sheets sharpened to aging blood. Nothing was in Nicolas' arms but the pillow, but he wrestled with his fair-haired brother, sweat slippery in his eyes as they twisted and neither could throw the other. Near the end of it Gabriel's hand had closed on the knife hilt, slipped, slid down the blade and his palm must have been laid open, but he never spared breath to cry out. Nicolas only knew that blood was everywhere, hot down his arm, before he had even struck. He remembered the shock of it, Gabriel bleeding, his brother bleeding, and then each had toppled the other, Nicolas smashing shoulder-first on the carpet with Gabriel above. He remembered nothing more of the knife, until Gabriel lay gasping, then white-eyed, then still.
            He had run past Michael, in the garden, Michael reading at the fountain's edge in the sunlight, hydrangea blossoms blue and slick as water under Nicolas' feet. Canals, parks, cars and railroad tracks, he ran, and blood dried and stuck his clothes to him. He ran to Stas, in her exile by the embankment, because she could not see into his eyes. Searching, her fingertips found a cut Gabriel must have given him; deep and long into the muscle of his forearm.  She held the edges together, and frowned, and said the scar would be for life. She stitched the cut, because any girl of the court could do a running stitch with her eyes shut, and swimming in pain while he laughed at the joke, he screamed.         
            "Nicolas! Nicolas!"
            Anastasia's hand was on his chest, and the dog was barking.
            "For God's sake, Nicolas."
            He sat up, into the thicket of her hair. "Dream," he got out. "Sorry."
            "To hell with dreams, a nightmare." Stas had been balanced on the bed's edge; she crossed to the window, and for his sake hitched back the curtain and let in the night-city light. "You dream of him, don't you?"
            "My brother? Or Michael?"
            "Either, both." Stas wrapped herself in the coverlet and sat cross-legged. "Dead men."
            "I never dream of Michael anymore. I wish I could."
            "Michael loved you," she replied. "But you see Gabi when you close your eyes?"
            "He would have killed me."
            "But Michael loved you." Stas' voice was small, and sad.
 
            Because there would be no more sleep, Stas made tea. It was black, thick stuff, well-smoked, smokier still from being kept in a tin on the mantelpiece, and she poured it from a red earthenware pot on a silver tray. There was a withered lemon but no sugar; the drink burned down his throat bitter and sour.
            "Nicolas," she said. From the very first day, before anyone knew anything about anybody, when her accent was still fear-touched and foreign, she had called him by name; not Nicolas Alexeivich, my lord, your grace. "Nicolas, tell me…"
            He kept his head in his hands. He ached as though every ghost in the city had thrown a stone at him, and he was weary. But he would not give her the discourtesy of silence. "Tell you what?"
            "Tell me you didn't strike first." 
            "He had everything that was supposed to be mine. He had you. He hurt you. He had what should have been mine! Of course I went for him first!"
            She stood, guiding herself to him by chair-backs and table edges. She stopped when the toe of her shoe met his, and Nicolas knew he would not move away.
            "You didn't kill him for my honor, or Michael's. You killed him for the life you wanted – the life you couldn't even ask for," she went on, when all he wanted was for her to shut up. Stas went on, and her hands were on his shoulders, bracing them both.
            "Michael would have stood with you, if you asked him. Fuck Parliament, he'd have kept to your side if you wanted to dance naked in front of the Dowager Empress!"
            "Stas," he begged, but she would not shut up.
            "I would have stood for you both!"
            He almost imagined it, saw her standing before the parliament and the throne in a dress like stars, giving his own hand back to him, or setting it in Michael's. He closed his eyes, and felt her fingers on his face, empty, callused, cold.
            "You never asked us," she said.
            "I'm sorry." Nicolas fumbled, to catch at her other hand, to get away. "God knows I'm sorry!"
            Stas nodded. Her gaze was near level with his, and only a little off the mark. "Nicolas Paul Alexander Alexeivich, third of that name by the grace of God, in the line of Michael of the house of the eagle for one thousand years, is sorry he killed his little brother in a knife fight."
            "Stas!"
            "He was a stupid boy, and a violent boy, and a drunk. I wish you had killed him for any of that. I wish you had done him in because he was a tyrant and a fool." She paused "I want you gone by morning."
            "What?"
            "If you come back here, I will make sure that nowhere between here and the sea will you have peace. My father, after all, is still a king."
            "He thinks you're dead, Stas. Everyone thinks we're all dead," he babbled, because he felt himself sinking.         
            "Go tell them we're not, then. Go to the Queen of Greece and tell her you're sorry about her son. Tell her he was loyal to the death. Go to my father and give him my love. But never come back here."
 
*
 
Story notes: Prince Michael of Greece was very hot and Grand Duke Michael Romanov was very gay, so I borrowed that. Princess Anastasia of Montenegro was a witch and a spiritualist, so I sort of borrowed that, though Stas looks like Anastasia Romanov might if she had made it to twenty-two, blind and underfed. Also, been dying to write a character named Anastasia because of the name-symbolism. As for this Russia-gone-sideways, it came from a nightmare of mine. All apologies.
And I'd swear there were only six names in all of Hapsburg Europe.