bakerstreet | Things We Lost in the Fire

Things We Lost in the Fire

Mutual Healing Shipping Meme

Healing doesn't come quickly, whether the need comes from physical or mental wounds. But you're trying regain your strength - and yourself.

People, as a general rule, are kind, or at least not outright inflammatory to you, it seems. Still, you just can't connect with them. No matter how nice, how caring, they don't understand. They've never experienced anything like what you've gone through, or they're not like you in a way that lets them see what you still go through; they have no frame of reference. Sure, they have sympathy, but it's not the same. So there's no real connection, despite any friendliness. It's so easy, then, to feel detached...

...until you meet them, in this place of both death and healing.

They may not have been through the exact same struggles, they may not be exactly the same as you, but they know what darkness is light. How they handle this fact may be better or worse than how you do, yet you can see yourself in their actions. And for once? There's connection; more than that, too. Slowly, you can feel yourself opening up towards them, and then, falling for them.

Is this something your used to? Will you fight your feelings, or will you jump at the opportunity to be with someone who can begin to get you? You may have little choice in the matter, as your instincts may just reach out to be with whatever compatible contact you can get. That's better, in the long run, though. Who else could have wounds like yours?

Essentially, it's what it says: a "romance," in the loose definition, or "shipping" meme for characters who have been through the wringer or have hangups.
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They let her have the letter, although it takes a while, and by the time it comes to her there are more words blacked out; they don't want her knowing where he is. Once she gets past the initial shock, though -- once she's read the letter ten times already -- she uses the candle by her bed and a few other tricks she knows to see the rest. My dearest, she reads, and just when she thought her heart had started to beat again, it stops.

The reply takes a long time to come back to him, too; long enough that it might even seem like there isn't one coming at all. Hers is handwritten in neat copperplate lettering, and oddly enough comes on two sheets of paper, although the contents of the letter at first seem to be limited to one. It is, in fact, very short:

Sgt. Maj. Shelby,

I am glad to hear that you are alive and well. I remain at [previous camp] and am being treated very kindly. I hope this news brings you some comfort. However, I must request that you not write to me again. It is not appropriate in our current situations. I also ask that you burn this letter upon receipt. It is best for you to forget me.

Regards,
Nina Krilova

And she hopes, she prays, that Tommy is smart enough not to just toss the papers into the fire; that he'll see what becomes of the other sheet of paper when it gets close enough to the heat that the other message, written in lemon juice and water, starts to darken.

My dearest, dearest Tommy,

I promise I was not lying: they are treating me as well here as I could reasonably expect. I am earning my keep, though I ask that you not ask me how. They are carefully monitoring our correspondence, and so it is not safe for me to write to you, and it is certainly not safe for me to write you everything that is in my heart. I can only hope that you find this before they do.

You did nothing wrong, Tommy. There was nothing you could have done to prevented any of this. I confess to you, because I do not want to lie to you any more, that there are days I wish I had given them your notes; but there are many, many more days that I wish I had told you the truth from the start, and days that I miss you, and days that I love you.

If you write to me again, do it as my cousin Alexei Vasilovich, as I have permission to get letters from him. Use any code you like. I'll figure it out. I have no chess boards or card games to entertain me here, anyway.

If I do not hear from you again, please stay safe. Trust nobody but the men that came with you. Get home to your family. I wish that for you every day.

Love,
Nina

He wilts in front of the candle's flame when he sees the words appear on paper. He catches words, first, as the color comes out: he picks out dearest, and hope, many more days, I love you.

He almost burns his fingers for the trembling that starts up then. The tense line of his shoulders warn the others off of him, and he is alone at the table while everyone eats in the dining hall they have set up in this place. He reads it twice, three times, before he feels able to even put a fold in the paper.

It takes him days to write back, because he has one goal: acquire something for her to do, even just something small. So he makes friends with a Russian captain, who has books to burn, and he gets one to use. Anna Karenina, a cheap print, but it's in Russian, and he looks at the Cyrillic as if he can somehow pull part of her from the pages, sink into her culture and her language.

Eventually he tears out the pages, neatly along the seam, and he writes her in the margins in the same solution she'd used to write him. Easier than code, and more credible besides: why would Nina Sergeevna Krilova's cousin write her in English?

His words are careful and easy to follow, even if they are written in the margins of Russian literature.

Nina, my Nina,

Last time, I had such trouble writing that you were dear to me. It felt like a betrayal of my principles, of who I have been raised to be, of being a soldier. But you have fought for your country and your life, just as much as I have. You deserve nothing but respect for that. And yes, you are dear to me.

Two months and half a country away it is much easier to understand what happened between us. Despite everything, all of it, I cannot bring myself to hate you any longer: believe me, there are nights when I wish I could.

I would like to get to know you again. The real you, one who does not have to lie to me in order to keep herself safe. I think we could come to like each other again, not just love each other.

(Please tell me if I can send you anything else. Cousin Alexei Vasilovich is very eager to provide his family with means of amusement.)

All my love,
Tommy

This is all foolish, she knows at heart. It was foolish to have written to him at all -- to have done anything but burnt his letter up on sight. It's foolish to do what she does when she gets the next one, which is to hide it under her mattress so that she can read it again and again when she finally crawls into bed each night. And deciding how best to reply becomes outright dangerous, but eventually, she manages.

This time, it's another Russian officer who slips Tommy the letter: a few paragraphs of what he assures Tommy are mundane, uninteresting details in Cyrillic, and under the candlelight the real letter printed across the back.

Dear Tommy,

I am sorry to keep you waiting so long. I have my wonderfully generous cousin now, but it took me a while to get a message out again. I was inspired by your clever plan. Thank you for the book. Thank you for remembering. It really is my favorite.

Most of what I told you (including that) was the truth, which I hope you can believe. My name is Nina Sergeevna Krilova; I was born in Vladivostok; I joined the war after my father disappeared. I really do not know where my mother is, but when I left, she was in Moscow. I love chess. I managed to hide a few of the pieces you made for me.

The first lie: I have never been a nurse. Every woman in my unit is a spy. The Germans know this, of course; that is why they gave us the work they did. They chose you for me, and for that, I curse them bitterly.

(The second lie: I am not a Bolshevik. In all honesty, I liked Freddie too much to say so. Maybe this will come as a relief to him.)

Ask me anything else you want to know and I promise I will tell you. I don't know what the future holds for either of us -- if I will ever see you again, if we will have enough time for you to come to like me -- but I owe you that much, and I want to give you what relief I can.

If Alexei Vasilovich could send the rest of Anna Karenina in his next letter, I would like that very much. Are you better entertained than I am? I will send you something next time in return, if not.

Love,
Nina

He has kept the previous letter, and the new one joins it immediately. He keeps them over his heart, in an inside pocket. They are more free, here, even if Tommy is often under house arrest, not allowed to participate in the plays and games of sport they put on. An extra dimension of prison- but he's glad to suffer it.

He does send her the rest of Anna Karenina, and he's written along the upper marges of good number of the pages.

My dearest Nina,

It gives me some pleasure to write along these pages, not knowing what's written in them. Perhaps I am making serious declarations next to a scene that is supposed to be funny, or I am talking of love when the story talks of war. I'm not a literary man, but I'm sure it would be some kind of irony.

I am entertained. Your correspondence keeps me entertained most of all: I have read your letter so often that the paper already has creases in it that I can see through. Please, if you can: write my anything you like, poetry, anything. Let me reread those things as often as I can.

Tell me how you came to be a spy? Tell me how you managed to hide that you aren't a Bolshevik? I won't tell Freddie, because I have no way of talking to my men. They're all still in the same camp as you, because I took responsibility for it all.

Tell me what your life was like, before Bolsheviks and war and prison came into it. I'll tell you too, if you want, in return.

Be safe, Nina.

All my love,
Tommy

Tell me, he says, and so she does, words pouring out of her like a deluge, as though finally having someone to confide in -- even if it's only through secret letters, spaced painfully far apart -- has opened a door in her. She tells him about her father, who traveled across the whole of Asia to end up in Vladivostok. She tells him how he took her and her mother on another seemingly endless journey to Moscow, on a railway still only half-finished. She tells him that when she chased him to the Army, she was offered a choice between spying and nursing, and she took the one that seemed more interesting and challenging. She tells him, most truthfully of all, that she hadn't thought enough about what it would do to her soul.

She explains, because he asked, that poor Freddie Thorne has been misled about how much control the Bolsheviks have -- that the Tsar is still in power, or was when she left. She admits that she's been hearing things lately from the other girls, changes in the wind, and she does think they have some good ideas. But--

I am starting to realize that I may be an opportunist, she writes. I know this is not redeeming. You called me brave, once, but I do not know if you would still say so now. I do not fight the way you and your men do, for principles, for country. I tell you this, Tommy, because there is no one else I can tell: I fight because I am too afraid of the alternative.

Why do you? You said you would tell me about the parts I don't know, and this is what I want to know. What made you fight your war?

At the end of this last letter, she draws a little figure: eight squares by eight squares, two rows on each side marked with X's and O's, respectively. Underneath, she adds: Another moment of selfishness: I tell myself that if I keep you entertained, it will soften your judgment against me. With that in mind... your move?

He writes her back and is full of questions: this is secret correspondence, and he can ask her about her missions, where she'd traveled, who she'd met. Not for intel, but out of interest. His own addition to the letter only comes at the end, when he's spent time putting his thoughts on the matter into the right order.

I fight because it is my duty- because the men around me all enlisted, and we thought this war would be short. I fight because no one had faith my brothers and I would, because of who we are. I fight because it is the right thing to do.

I was foolish, a few years ago. I cannot deny it. But I am here, and doubting my actions now would hurt me more than keeping at least some faith.

He's drawn a new version, identical to hers apart from one O placed in the center, and a little scribble below it: You think that your letters are not enough to entertain me? I have moved beyond the need for judgment, Nina. But all the same: your move.

On this reply, she hesitates. Secret correspondence or not, if she gets caught sending him messages about love and family, she can probably still spare her own life. If she gets caught sending military secrets, then it's not just the Germans she'll be in trouble with. Even her own people might kill her for that.

This time, she starts with her move in the chess game, one little X moved one space up, before going on.

I want to tell you everything, she demurs, but some things should not be written down, even this way. I told you: I am not brave. This is as reckless as I can afford to be.

Do you still dream about what will happen when the war finally ends? Am I ever still in them? If so, imagine me giving you every answer you seek then. I was telling the truth about that before, too: I do not know what my future in Russia holds, and I do not expect a happy reunion there. I always knew that England would never be real -- not once you knew about me -- but now there are days I let myself think about it.

Please don't correct me if I'm wrong about that yet. ~~I need~~ ~~Things are~~ It helps when things are difficult here.

Instead, I will tell you this, not a lie, but something I never got around to telling you: I was going to be a dancer once. Maybe I should really run away and join the USO?

He puts an O to the right side of her X, smiling, leaning against the edge of his bed. He's spending so much time isolated that her letters have become a true comfort, that he can close his eyes and imagine her sitting next to him, whispering the words into his ear.

This is not an illusion I will take from you: I do dream of that, every day. No one would have to know what had happened, and you could be happy in England even if you were not happy with me. I meant what I said, and even now I wish I could help you attain that goal, so that you can work hard towards a happy life.

You could do that. You are strong enough, even if you say you are not brave.

Is it true, then, what they say about all the Russian girls? You are all ballet dancers, graceful on a stage. The USO would be happy to have you, but it would take you quite far away from everything you have ever known.

Did I ever tell you how difficult it was to enlist? I have no birth record, and it made it quite the challenge to do so. It seems very silly now.

The other letters have made her feel so much, so strongly, that it's been hard to even put a name to the emotions they've wrung out of her. She'd read each one almost in a daze, her eyes glued to the words, lips moving along silently despite the fact that she can read the English perfectly well, as if to channel Tommy's singular voice through her own. Replying to them, she'd alternated between floods of furious writing and long spans of hesitation, choosing every word carefully before setting it down.

This last letter is easier: it outright makes her smile, both the first time she reads it and every time after. She thinks of the life he dreams for her, of the tender generosity he still treats her with in his own mind, of starting to be able to share silly jokes and stories again, and even at the end of a very dark day, it comforts her to no end to curl up with it in her bed.

Her reply this time is careful, not out of fear, but because she wants to bring him the same comfort if she can. She starts by taking his pawn, though -- putting her piece in place of his and drawing in his O on the side of the board -- but she knows he'll like that, too, that he likes it when she's clever. She follows:

Only you could be noble even when you are being silly, my darling. No, you never told me this story. Missing you the way I do now, I wonder how anyone could ever turn you away, with or without your papers.

As for me, yes, you have me: we are all dancers, we all play chess, we all read Anna Karenina. Yes: I am very, very Russian.

Yet, leaving Russia was easier than I thought it would be, and I think going back after this will be harder than I hope. Maybe the USO would be very far, but so would England; and yet, if you will let me dream of that, I will continue to. Know that when I do, it is always Birmingham, even though all I know of it is what you have told me. I try to think of other places I know -- London, mostly -- but I always come back to Birmingham, and to you.

Tell me more, then, please? Tell me about the life you imagine when this is all over.

He has to work very hard not to erupt into laughter when he sees what she's done to his little O- and he catches himself stroking his thumb over it, fondly, as if it were a physical object or her hand.

God, that's embarrassing, but he's still grinning so much a Captain asks him whether he received some good news from back home. He says yes, to make it easy- it's good news, either way.

Oh, but I was a nobody. A strange, insistent gypsy with no papers, standing in front of them with two more of the same. We didn't have to intimidate them very long, and I can promise you now that I learned how eager the military is to create papers out of nowhere once you have proven yourself.

You know I have never been to Russia, have never seen photographs of Vladivostok. Comparisons will be difficult to make, but let me try, for you. I am from a part of Birmingham called Small Heath. It is filled with hard men and harder women; most men work in the arms factory, and they drink too much. You have to be strong, as a woman, to survive there.

But there is a community. The people there know my family, they come together for problems. The women- my aunt, Polly, you would like her very much. My sister, too. They would teach you how to throw the men out on their arses if they misbehaved, and they would listen to you. There's laughter in the bars, around the kitchen table; there is warmth in the business my family runs, there is growth, there is so much to be had in the future.

It must all sound very bleak, but to me, this is home, and this is what I know. But I also know this: that I want to take you into the beautiful green hills west of Birmingham and show you what it is like to feel the wind through your hair as you ride a horse along the edge of the forest. The sound of a creek as we have lunch in the grass. Laughter from the fair the next town over. The thrill of standing in the audience at a horse race, or the dances after.

The other girls know that there's a suitor, of course, even if they don't know who or how; nobody reacts the way she does to letters from a cousin, even a much-loved one, even someone as lonely as Nina. When she gets this letter, when they see the way she clings to the little bundle of pages, one of them laughingly, whimsically suggests putting them under her pillow instead of the mattress. To let him into your dreams, she says. It's a joke, and Nina laughs, too -- but that night, she does slip the half-formed Anna Karenina into her pillowcase, ignoring the girls' continued amusement. When she closes her eyes, she wills herself to dream of Small Heath, Birmingham.

The next morning, she doesn't remember if it worked or not, but she feels the papers against her fingers and feels better, anyway. It's riskier to keep the pages there than under the mattress, but she does all the same.

I don't know why you say Birmingham sounds bleak. Is it? You make it sound like it should: like your home. If the people are strong there, if they have learned to be hard, is that any different from where we are now? And besides, you have been more gentle with me than I have ever deserved. I once feared the world had not made you hard enough.

Vladivostok was very beautiful, but I have not lived there in a long time. Some parts of Petrograd are as well, but when I left, it was a city in deterioration. If I could find my family in the chaos I feel will be coming there, I would go back, but I do not know that I dream of returning for the sake of going home. I still don't know that I believe I will ever leave here, but if I do... If I do, and you will have me, why not dance at the races?

Or do you want to come to Petrograd with me and turn Bolshevik after all? I think this is what is coming next for my country. Bring Freddie and we will all become glorious Communists and toast our fellow workers in the Tsar's palace. I do think you would look charming in red. I don't think I could convince my mother, who is immune to me, but maybe you could. If my father lives, he would have you drink vodka with him. What do you think?

It's still your move, my love.

She writes my love and he has to force his heart down his throat again, has to close his eyes to calm himself. He realizes it feels natural that she's calling him by that name, something she never even said before everything went sour.

He makes another drawing, makes a move.

You are the only person who has ever thought that, my dear Nina. Only when I wish the world and the war had not made me as hard, I remember that I would not have met you. The thought seems impossible and wrong, nowadays.

(Sometimes I fantasise about this, a very small thing to you, but big to me: I kiss your lips before I walk out into the kitchen, leaving you just behind the wall. I tell my family that from now one, the family meetings will include one more, and when I open the door my family accepts you with open arms, smiles, and a glass of good whiskey.)

Or we could become traveling people. It should be in my blood, after all, and that way we can wear red and think of Revolution one month, and ride horses as anonymous lovers the next. I will turn my charms on your mother, but I have to warn you that it has not worked very often. I will bring your father bottles of whiskey, and I will bring my brothers bottles of vodka.

You will leave that place, just like I will. Have faith in that, if you have faith on nothing else in the world.

Yet this time, there's no reply at all. Of course, even with their system in place, it's taken a while for even their quickest correspondence to pass over land and through the watchful eyes of the censors -- but this time a fortnight passes, and then another, and another. The stand-in Alexei Vasilovich knows nothing; he's heard not a word. No one has. For all intents and purposes, Nina Sergeevna Krilova has disappeared off the face of the Earth.

It's over two months before Alexei returns with the next letter, and when he does, he reports that the Cyrillic version mentions only an illness. Tommy's letter is similarly brief, if not so terse:

Something else I never told you: before this war, I was an optimist. It is this place that has turned me hard, too, that has made me so bitter and pessimistic. It is only when I think of you that I remember how to hope. It is only when I think of you that I remember there are reasons to.

I wish you were here to hold me. I do believe, now, that you will again someday, but I don't know what to do but count the days until then. I am counting. I promise that I am. I don't care where we go after that.

Yours always,
Nina

She isn't ill. He's sure of it, so sure it feels like a cold vice has gripped his heart, so sure that his breath comes in short gasps while he reads her letter over and over for another clue of what's happened to her. He holds every last scrap of paper over a flame, against the light, tries other tricks- a cipher, perhaps, some kind of a code he's yet to figure out.

Nothing. There's nothing. He goes to the Russian officer and asks him for each detail, but nothing comes.

Yours always. He's never heard words more ominous.

He asks his superior officers to ask around, but their intel is slow in arriving; and so he tries to find his own sources, men who pass through this camp to go through others. One time, he finds a woman who came from their old camp, but she keeps quiet and turns away from him, refusing to speak.

He's desperate. It feels like he's fallen into a hole- he hasn't felt like this since that moment in the cell together. He writes her several letters, as if to make up for the time she didn't send him any.

Nina, Nina, you worried me in your last letter. I am tempted to put any kind of code in this, to make sure no one but us can read it. But in the end, it's still a normal letter.

I will be the optimist for the both of us. I have so many thoughts and ideas- sometimes I feel so restless to just go out and do something, make something of myself, of us. You are one of the reasons, always know that.

It won't be long now, my Nina. There are rumours, have you heard them? They filter through. The Germans are losing their war, and we will be free. Soon, soon, Nina.

Write me. Please. I miss you.

Edited 2015-11-28 21:23 (UTC)

This time, the reply is blessedly quick, at least by the measure of the camps -- it comes in just under two weeks, and the writing is a little messier than usual, as if she had penned it hastily, too.

I'm sorry to have frightened you, my dearest, my darling. I was ill for a while, but I am getting stronger again every day. I must, if the war is really coming to an end. I had not heard much while I was sick, but as soon as I saw your letter, I asked one of the girls in my unit. She said the same thing: your people on one front and mine on the other, and soon they will meet in the middle and we will be rid of this country, you and I.

I do have faith now, Tommy. I know you will come for me when you can -- or if I am the first to leave, I will come to you. I may never let you go again, but I know you'll forgive me for that.

Tell me of your ideas. Tell me what we will do next. I know I owe you a game of chess, for a start.

They will have to tear us apart once we have found each other. His hand had been shaking while writing this, it's clear, and he feels desperate to get it to her immediately. There's an energy in the camp that makes it hard to sit still, as if they're all eager to get back to the war to make it end sooner. Instead they sit around and wait, and Tommy writes letters.

John writes to him, saying that it's really true, it's really happening- he's sure the war will be over soon, and Tommy will go free. No one will keep him after what he's been through, and he hopes to God his brother is right.

How were you sick? What happened? Are you getting the care you need? I'm glad to hear you're better, Nina, I only wish I were there to help. It is agony, not being able to, I promise.

The camps will clear, soon. We will meet somewhere, in a city, or a port, or a train station. We will wait there for each other, because communications will be difficult once the war is over. Things will be chaotic. But we will wait for each other in that place, and when we finally see each other we are going wherever our boots are taking us, Nina.

Please, please. Be safe. I beg you, and I do not beg easily.

I am being safe. I am being careful. I am being strong. Don't worry, dear Tommy -- I am a little better every day, every minute, and by the time I see you again I will be well enough to jump on one of your horses and race it myself.

It's not true, not yet, but she is trying. In the early days -- and he doesn't need to know what it was, she doesn't need to talk about that -- she hadn't had his letters to hand, only memories, and she had healed mostly by virtue of the faint threads of hope those had left her with and her own grit-toothed stubbornness. The more she'd been able to remember, the more possible it had become. Now that she has the letters again, it feels almost easy, and each one buoys her spirits that much more.

What she doesn't tell him, for fear of scaring him further, is this: that she's come to believe in their shared dream so strongly because there has to be something at the end of all of this. That, too, gets easier to believe every day; the more the mood in the camp changes, the less it becomes a desperate wish and the closer it comes to being reality.

I think, ironically, your intel is better than mine now. Where shall I go? Give me a city and I will be at the station every day until I find you. I promise -- I swear it. If you have truly come to trust me again, please believe that.

Come to Strassbourg. Even if we can't return to England or Russia, it is a border town, and one way or another a should be able to reach it. I will wait too, I promise, I promise. I won't return home before I have seen you again.

The letter barely has time to arrive before it happens: suddenly the camps are thrown over, the liberators liberating, the captors becoming prisoners. For a week after they have no papers, no place to go- and Tommy, with his house arrest, takes the longest by far. He knows correspondence will be useless, now, and so he tries his best to make it to Strassbourg before too much time passes. Every night he spends dreaming of her, happily sometimes, but more often anxiously.

Strassbourg is in chaos, but one thing he can do: sit in the train station hallway and wait, and wait.

It turns out that chaos is what waits for Nina, too: when the gates of her camp are flung open, she discovers that her country is in the midst of its own revolution, the government still in disarray, everything in a state of confusion. Petrograd isn't even the capital anymore, and no one really knows quite what to do with the Russians for a while. It at least gives Nina time to think, to finish healing, but she worries about Tommy in Strasbourg. Tommy waiting for her. What if he loses faith while she's still sitting here like a piece of mislabeled cargo? She begs everyone who leaves before her to pass messages on if any of them are going to France, but she has no way of knowing if they get to him or not.

She no longer considers that he didn't go at all. She meant what she'd written: the war has ripped the faith right out of her, but what little remains, it all rests with him. Whenever she finds herself wavering, she remembers that day in the cell: the day he could have easily killed her himself, when still, he tried to think of ways he could save her.

She hasn't been saved, but by the time her papers finally come in, she's well enough to trade the ticket back to Russia for a ticket to France and make for Strasbourg as fast as she possibly can. After all the enforced isolation, the station is an overwhelming blur of activity, but she clutches her little bag close to her chest and dives into the crowd, searching, endlessly searching--

--until she spots a flash of blue eyes and the glint of dim station lighting off the curve of a familiar cheek. It's been months since she last saw him, but after all those nights spent mapping his face with her eyes and hands and lips, it doesn't take more than a glance, and then it doesn't even matter when her vision blurs. All she has to do is cut through the crowd, sit down next to him, and reach out with one trembling hand to slip something into his: a little wooden horse, rubbed smooth and shiny from months of being held, and stroked, and loved.

She might as well have punched him, for all that he's stopped being able to breath. Imagining this moment, day after day, sitting on the same bench in clear view of most of the entries, all possible scenarios had passed through his mind: that he would see her clear across the hall, and he would run towards her and wrap her in a tight embrace; that she would come up behind him, tears in her eyes, and he would kiss her until they both couldn't kiss any longer; that he would see her, first, and he would wrap his arms around her from behind and whisper guess who.

(Sometimes, at night, he would imagine himself sitting here, still, a year from now. Just an Englishman whose mind had been lost to the war, people would say, and he would cradle her letters to his chest as he tried not to lose her.)

Instead she's there, suddenly, and his hand wraps around an object that ought to be familiar, but that's been shaped by her hands as much as his, now. He looks at it, breathing fast, before he lifts his eyes to hers.

"You came," he rasps, eyes wide and almost disbelieving. They did it- they actually did it.

She's been shaped by the months apart, too, though neither smoothed nor softened: she looks thinner, sharper, harder, as if the camp had honed her at every edge. Her skin is no longer so smooth and clear as it once was, her cheeks now dusted with the spidery red of broken blood vessels; though her face is still otherwise mostly undamaged, there's a hint of a scar on her lip where a cut, maybe the same one he remembers, never healed quite properly.

What's most important right now, though, is her eyes, and his happy disbelief mirrored in them. Hers are already full of tears, and this time she doesn't try to hide them or stop them from spilling, doesn't so much as try to wipe them away when it would mean letting go of his hand.

"I'm here," she whispers, her voice breaking -- and on second thought, she does let go, but only to throw her arms around him and bury herself in the warm, solid comfort she's been without for much, much too long.

He hitches in one sharp breath, and then it's like the world around him stops existing. The hustle and bustle of a train station, the voices around them, all stop mattering. He draws her against him so close she could climb into his lap, so hard he might be in danger of hurting her. He doesn't like the way she looks but they're details, now: what matters is that she's here at all, with him, warm and alive and happy to see him.

For all his faults, for all that he is from where he is, Tommy isn't embarrassed, now, to cry. The years have been long and dark, and she's emerged as a bright point, the only thing keeping him sane. He's quiet about it, his tears soaking into the collar of her dress as he keeps her close against him.

"Welcome back, Nina," he whispers eventually, breath hitching, still not pulling away.

She wouldn't care if he did hurt her right now -- she wouldn't care if he outright cracked her ribs with the force of his embrace. It feels like a lifetime since she was held by somebody she wanted to be held by, and it's even different now than it was before. Now he knows her, the truth of her, and he's still here; now she no longer has to keep a part of herself separate, struggling and striving not to love him. She feels his arms around her waist and the damp of his tears through her clothes, the sheer depths of his feeling for her, and she does, in fact, crack under the weight of it. She clutches to him and sobs, softly but openly, her shoulders shaking against him.

Eventually, she hears him speak and tries to quiet herself with a shuddering breath of her own, though she doesn't yet move a muscle, either. "Were you waiting long?" she manages to get out, her voice coming out small and soft.

"Not too long." He raises a hand to her cheek and rubs a thumb over her cheekbone, gently wiping the trail of tears off of her skin.

"I have lodgings- are you hungry? Thirsty? I-"

He doesn't want to talk about this in public. He wants to get to relearn the shape of her, the way she fits into his arms, the way she looks when he makes her laugh. But they're still in the middle of a train station, and it feels like he has more right to see her than the rest of the world right now.

She shakes her head, then leans it into the touch of his hand, seeking the warmth of his palm against her cheek. It's actually not true, she realizes a moment later -- she is hungry, and if she keeps weeping like this, which feels likely, she'll be thirsty before long, too. She just wants him, though, first and foremost, just to enjoy the sheer reality of his presence. She doesn't want to stop touching him long enough to deal with all those other things.

She sniffles a little and swipes at her other cheek, then actually smiles when she pulls back and sees the identical glimmer on his. She cups her hands around his face to brush his tears away, too, then and draws him in to rest her head briefly against his. "Can we take care of that there?" Food, drink, she means.

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whoops pretend I wrote Petrograd instead of Moscow up there, stupid history

moscow what's moscow

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