idk im obsessed with beyblades in the year 2024

He heard the knocks on the door he wasn’t supposed to close. Loud and precise, three times with a timed two second pause between them. Yuriy. 

Ivan pushed himself away from his tiny desk in the corner of the dimly lit room, the seized wheels of the shitty office chair they’d found on the side of the road dragged against the derelict hardwood. He stared at the door, anticipating the violation of a privacy he wasn’t trusted to have. Uncharacteristically, it never came, not even the threat of it from the doorknob slowly turning.

“What?” Ivan rasped in audible annoyance, dragging the chair further along the blackening floorboards.

“Are you… decent?” Yuriy’s disembodied voice replied from the other side of the threshold. It carried an unusual awkwardness that made Ivan roll his eyes and click his tongue. How often had the four of them been overly exposed to one another as children? How many times had their dignity been stripped away as they were left undressed surrounded by a flock of vultures they couldn’t trust? They’d become far too familiar with one another during those years. Healthy boundaries would be blurred, and then inevitably eradicated. 

When they’d finally escaped that place they’d independently come to the terrifying revelation that they couldn’t live without each other.  

He thought it was kind of fucked up when realistically they couldn’t live with each other either.

Volkov had run the abbey in a perpetual state of trial by ordeal, and every child within its walls was fighting and scheming to stay alive. Ivan remembered how the men dressed as priests proclaimed that Judicium Dei would prevail. That their omnipotent God would always intervene to protect those who proved themselves loyal. He had to admit; they hadn’t really lied, because those who held favour always seemed to evade an undesirable outcome in the final hour.

But what that meant for the four of them well—they were as much enemies as they were allies. And Ivan carried vivid memories of both the suffering inflicted on him, and comfort provided to him, by the men he considered brothers. Two experiences completely at odds with one other, whilst completely interwoven.

Ivan sighed before pushing himself out of the worn chair, ignoring the hot fiery pain that radiated down his left leg from a nerve that would never fully recover. He glanced briefly into the dingy, cracked mirror affixed to the back of the door that was never closed. A hoodie five sizes too big he’d stolen from Sergei and threadbare jeans he’d nicked from some holiday donation bin years ago. He was decent, only if decent meant covered. 

He grabbed onto the fabric bunched up at his elbows and pulled the sleeves of the sweater down until it covered his hands. The bags under his eyes were so pronounced it looked like he had two black eyes and his hair was so slicked with oil it fell around his face in lifeless stringy strands. Ivan shuffled towards the bedroom door, remembering a time when Boris had said that he made a lot of corpses look beautiful. He was probably right, because all you’d find underneath his clothing were jagged scars and pronounced bones. Macabre, grotesque, reminiscent of those left to die when there was no bread left to buy.

When he reached the doorway he grabbed onto its handle, twisting it and allowing the hinges to creak as it slowly swung inwards.

“God damn, can’t a guy have a wank in private?” Ivan asked flatly, staring Yuriy down with an empty expression. It was a lie, they both knew it was; the only question was if Yuriy felt like pressing the matter or not. Which version of Yuriy was Ivan face to face with today?

“Boris texted you asking what you wanted to eat tonight and you didn’t reply,” Yuriy answered, his eyes narrowed and lips downturned. It was the frigid, disinterested Yuriy, the one who kept them all at arms reach, much to Ivan’s satisfaction. 

“I don’t care, noodles or something… without meat,” Ivan stressed, swinging the door back and forth on its hinge so it made an intermittent cracking sound. He hadn’t been able to eat the stuff since they abbey, the taste of rotten flesh forever etched in his memory.

“Right.” Yuriy’s eyes wandered from Ivan towards the dark room behind him, eventually seeming to stop on something. Ivan didn’t move, however his eyes darted to the side, scanning his periphery to see if he could locate what Yuriy saw. His face remained disinterested as always but he could hear the distinct thump of his heartbeat in his ear as his blood pressure rose. Because there were things obscured by the poor lighting that Yuriy absolutely couldn’t see.

“That all bro? Or do you wanna join me?” Ivan eventually asked, flashing Yuriy his best shit eating grin. Making sure to show off the broken incisor; caused when he’d once annoyed Yuriy enough that he’d instructed his attack dog to assault him with a fucking brick.

“Keep the door unlatched,” Yuriy barked, his nose wrinkling in disgust as he turned around and stalked back into the apartment's living area, probably to bleach the table for the twenty seventh time this week. 

But Ivan heard the word unlatched and not open and considered that a hard earned victory—so he purposely closed the door slowly, allowing it to squeak as much as possible. Giving Yuriy ample opportunity to correct himself. Eventually it came to rest with the metal latch touching the frame, only a sliver of light from the corridor illuminated the bedroom.

He limped back to his abandoned chair and dropped into it, pushing himself back towards the desk. Ivan exhaled and his head fell back against the headrest.  All he did for a while was count time, until he was satisfied Yuriy wasn’t about to barge back in trying to catch him in the act.

Slowly he pushed the sleeves of the oversized sweater back to his elbows. A smirk appeared on his face as his right hand slid up his left forearm, pausing about halfway to his wrist. He began to scrape his nail against the uneven surface, causing the rough scab to tear away from the wound, leaving a deep lesion oozing a mix of serosanguinous and foul smelling purulent fluid down his arm and onto the wooden desktop. 

You see the three of them had long taken away all his knives and needles…