All By Design: A Nikolai Lantsov Series

Just a Short Time Chapter Five: the system's breaking down

this time: Nikolai doesn't like thinking about the time he ran away to be a nobody in a ghost town by the sea. That doesn't stop it from being real, though, nor does it keep him from wanting to become Sturmhond again more than ever.

this chapter's song: glitch

Nikolai Lantsov almost doesn't believe he's going to get away with it until he's already gone. Running away has been a fever dream of his for some time now. The idea that life in the rest of the city could continue on as normal— just as hollow, as saccharine, as worthless— without him feels impossible.

Improbable, he should say instead, it feels improbable. Improbable, because today Nikolai has done the impossible and he got out. His fluorescent city is a smudge of light in his rearview mirror, already much too far away to ever have a hold on him again.

Technically, he already departed the city. Ravka left his sights a while ago under the guise of Nikolai pursuing a university education. That much was true, Nikolai did go to college, but he also managed to get through it much faster than expected due to a masterminded application of previous course credit and placement exams.

Time spent at the university is still the alibi cloaking him from the sights of the general public, though, and it's the excuse Nikolai uses now. He was still monitored at college, photographed through the doors of lecture halls and videotaped on his walks throughout campus.

Nikolai didn't like that very much. Sometimes, when his irritation got the better of him, he imagined running up to the paparazzi and smashing their cameras or ruining their film or doing something, anything, to erase any trace that he'd been there at all.

He never did. Nikolai knows the expectations for his mother's son and his father's heir, he knows how the rumors would run rampant if he were to give the snapping cameras so much as a single sour look. Not only would he be ruined, called callous and cruel and some sick selfish kid who only got where he was because of his father's money and his mother's beauty, his parents would be punished as well. The apple doesn't fall from the tree, and you can take that either way. If his parents were terrible, he surely is as well. If Nikolai's damned, so are they.

No, fighting isn't an option. Running, though, now that's certainly something. Nikolai first experienced the barest trace of it back in uni, and already it was enough to keep him going. This is altogether different. This is Nikolai sprinting for his life. He swaps cars three times, selling and renting with abandon, and then he's gone for good.

Nikolai ends up settling in a small town. Nobody knows where it is, not even the occupants. The borough is so obscure it doesn't even deserve a dot on a map, Nikolai looks at the place and calls it home without a second thought. There is not a single soul in this town that knows who he is, and it is marvelous.

Still, Nikolai has a few close calls his first week. He's still a newcomer by time of arrival to these particular streets, and he walks and talks like he's used to money. Nikolai has always been a damned good actor, though, so he decides upon his next role without a second's hesitation.

They need someone who doesn't breathe like an outsider, so that's exactly what he becomes. Nikolai gets a job in town to pay off rent on a small shack near the sea that he thinks has less surface area than his mother's closet. The walls are patched thrice over, the windows cracked. Nikolai can stand on his threshold and smell the salt on the air, ferried over to him by the waves breaking down the hill. He loves it like a paramour.

Nikolai gets drunk one night and hates the way he looks. He stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, knuckles white as bone around a chipped ceramic sink, and all he can see looking back at himself is his father. There are a thousand and one different rumors that Nikolai isn't actually Alexander Lantsov's real son, but at this moment, unlike any other, Nikolai doesn't believe a word of it.