#softlyrcse

Me, spraying Gleb with a water bottle: STOP THAT! NO! GLEB GET BACK HERE!

Alexa: do EEET! GO FOR IT GLEB! JUST DO IT BABY!

            Tell me your secrets - Accepting!

                     Most of Lily’s things had been left behind during her and Avgust’s escape. As fond as she was of finery, her life took slight precedence over her life. They’d crammed their most valuable things in a knapsack before making the long, exhausting trip out of Russia. Value, however, was subjective - not everything the countess had smuggled could be sold in Paris.

                      Underneath last season’s scraps and hosiery she’ll never wear again, buried so deep that even Anne-Claire will never find it, a small, plain box lays in wait, stuffed to the gills with almost-lost memories too precious to get rid of and too poignant to look at. Love letters scented with the cologne of a man she was sure had been shot. Love trinkets from the same - pressed flowers, hair ribbons, tiny things that a pair of young people might have exchanged even if they hadn’t been titled. 

                      If one dissected the box to the very depths, one would have found a single photograph. Being hidden for so long, it hadn’t faded. Save for the cracked glass of a locket, it was entirely unmarred. A pair of young lovers, each sporting knowing smiles in spite of themselves. A pair which decidedly did not include Avgust. It was nearly a candid for the time, taken on the banks of a country stream beneath a tree in Summer. Both were dressed well, but informally. The man had an arm around his lady friend’s waist, a pair of round spectacles dangerously close from falling off his nose. For her part, the lady looked ready to burst. A stray curl had fallen from her bun and was hanging daringly around her shoulder.

“We’re supposed to wear these?”  Aurora was in the ladies locket room to change and her displeasure was evident to everyone in the room.  Who could blame her?  They expected her to wear these horrid khaki jumpsuits before being locked away.  Sure, it was practical, but what if Aurora’s future husband so her for the first time in something so ghastly?  She didn’t want her first impression on him to be something that she didn’t look pretty in.

it hadn't taken him long to find her. once tavis and gan had confirmed that the storms outside weren't naturally caused, the titans had split. after maybe a half hour of searching, his sixth sense locked onto a weird, tingly sort of buzz. it'd lead him here, simply put. lead him to her. ...and for better or worse, she was a familiar sight.

with the wind rattling what glass remained in the dilapidated windows, he remembers those minutes with her. a massive, twisting dust devil of rocks, dirt and debris; she was floating in the center, tears streaming down her face. the fear of her own power... he'd seen it. felt it. just as he does in the girl huddling in the corner.

gar rolls his lips together, shifting his jacket off his arms and approaching her slowly. he doesn't want to scare her.

         ❛ if... by "do something" y'mean give you this jacket.         ...seriously, it's cold and wet out there. i-i don't need it.         i can always turn into a duck or a hippo or something,         and i'll be fine. ❜

he stops, leaving some distance between them, before he slowly kneels to rest on his knees and haunches. then, he extends his arm and jacket forward in offering.

Gleb did not question orders often. He never rejected them. However, sitting in Gorlinsky’s office today, he realized that he hadn’t followed one mandate. One of the latest laws that had been passed was one requiring all adults capable of producing and raising children were to get married and begin trying to conceive after the age of twenty-two. Gleb had forgotten - ignored  - such a rule. At twenty-seven, he had little interest in marrying. He lacked the debonair charm women preferred in a lover and his demands for a partner were high. He understood the principle of the law - as Russia rebuilt itself, it would need a generation of children who had only ever known Bolshevik rule and who shared their parents’ loyalty to Russia, to communism, and to anti-imperialism. It was innovative. 

And mandatory.

“Commissioner,” Gorlinsky said, steepling his fingers, “because of your work in the government, it is imperative that you set a model for our fellow comrades. You will have one week to find a suitable wife before the government assigns you one. It would be wise to comply.”

The way Golinsky said “wise” made Gleb’s stomach clench. How often had he used that word as a euphemism when warning law-breakers what happened to people like them. 

“Understood, Commander.” 

Where was he supposed to find a woman willing to marry him?

Gleb supposed there would be plenty of women willing. Marriage to an officer ensured a roof over head, food on the table, a little money. Officers wives led good lives. He thought of the whores who scattered like roaches over the Nevsky Prospekt at night. If any one of them caught wind of Gleb’s marital status, he doubted he could keep them at bay. One particularly brazen woman had unbuttoneded one of his uniform buttons once. He remembered her hands sliding across his pectorals and how it was the first time in a number of years a woman had touched him like that. He’d seized her wrist and arrested her then. He didn’t know what became of her, but there were plenty others just as grasping.  His mind turned to the secretaries at the office. There were plenty. Some were even pretty, but Gleb saw the way they looked at him. There was no lust, no love in their eyes. He had their respect - or perhaps their fear. Gleb had not thought much about romance, even with the new marriage laws, but he had to find a way to do his duty to his country, even if it meant sacrificing the childish, childish hope of marrying for love. He’d once done the math to calculate how long his parents had been married before he’d been born. At the time, he was fourteen - an age ripe for infatuation and clumsy desire. He’d hoped, though he wouldn’t admit it, to realize that his parents had once loved each other, before his father had lost his job at court, before his mother had taken up with Gleb’s tutor, before the metallic scent of revolution was in the air.

Six months. That was how long they’d been married before Gleb was born. The cool civility and bitter arguments suddenly fell into place. His father’s indifference towards his mother; his mother’s need for affection not contingent upon conditions. He’d resolved never to tell either of them that he longed for something better for himself. Still, when he was sixteen and felt first love’s sharp sting and laid in his bed, staring out the window as muddy water rand down the window. He traced a single droplet until it collided with another and grew fat; seeing but not noticing anything except the mundane and only tasting blood in his mouth from suppressing an unmanly sob. His father would never cry over a girl, why should he? So oblivious in that moment, he did not hear his mother enter and only noticed her when she carded her fingers through his hair.

“Glebushka,” she murmured. “I pra- I know you will find love again. Do not let this heartbreak break you.”

It wasn’t that heartbreak, Gleb thought now, that had broken him. 

He was not a man fit for things like love. Somehow, he blamed them, his parents, for making him what he was. He was his father’s son: methodical, ruthless, devoted to Russia. He was not the son his mother wished for: hard lines and sharp angles, not her Glebushka now. Maybe if they’d loved each other a little, he would have held out for a love that was not fallen into, but grown over time. Maybe if they hated each other more, he would not have an inkling of that word “love”. Indifference made him cold, desperate for fire and warmth wherever he could get that.

What hope had he for it now? Too proud to exchange a mouthful of bread or a handful of rubles for a woman’s touch and too out of reach to be loved, the best Gleb could hope for now was that whoever the government assigned him when he failed to secure a wife was tolerable. Tolerable! He sounded more and more like his father with each passing day. He wanted to be proud of it, but he could hear his mother’s voice dimly in the back of his mind, telling him lies that he was lovable, that he would find a better life than she had known. 

Foolish, sentimental man! He walked towards his office as if someone had poured molten lead into his chest. His rote movements lead him to his door, only to find a woman waiting outside it, who was not his secretary. She surprised him. Here he was, wishing for a woman to all but fall into his lap-

Foolish, sentimental man!

She was clearly here for business. Either she had a report of gossip to give or a plea for exit papers. Those were the only reasons women sought him out. He could indulge her in neither. 

“Good morning, comrade,” he said. 

She turned her head and recognition shot through him. She was the daughter of one of the ambassadors. Definitely exit papers, in that case. He remembered her from the fringes of a party, celebrating the renaming of Leningrad. They had talked for a long time without exchanging names. He, arrested by her eyes, could do little more than stare into them and try to impress. For her, he hadn’t given his title, but his best jokes. Just as he was going to offer her his hand for a dance, the ambassador’s deputy officer offered her his arm and whisked her onto the dance floor. Gleb had watched them for a solid minute before resolving that he had no need for waltzes and no skill in them. He never thought he’d see her again, least of all at his office. He wondered if she recognized him, as he recognized her; if she’d always known he was Deputy Commissioner General Gleb Vaganov and had just been too kind to show fear or disinterest all those months ago. 

“Amin, isn’t it?” he asked. “I never forget a face. The renaming of Leningrad... in January...? Deputy Commissioner Gleb Vaganov. Gleb. Just Gleb. Please, allow me.”

He unlocked the door and held it for her. 

“Let me warm you up - a cup of tea - while you tell me your business. I never thought I’d see you again, comrade Amin.. I thought you and your family had...”

Left the country. 

Valentine’s Grinches | Accepting!

[Text] Autocorrect is the worst.