dim as an ember

Chapter Three: learn to do it

The train trip to Hrodna took two days, and Anastasia seemed so in love with the places outside her window, it made hard for Yelena not to smile. The places she saw - Anastasia insisted on pointing out every city and village, every cow and pasture and war-torn field. Yelena so wanted to stop on every train station to explore the towns, but Dimitri wouldn't let her.

Well, the fact her stomach was queasy didn't help matters, too. But if she could...

Leaving Leningrad had been... Easier than Yelena had thought. She had just packed her clothes - the few she had, actually - inside the bags she had used so many years before, to leave Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk, Yelena corrected herself, forcing herself to use the unfamiliar name to her hometown. It would always be Yekaterinburg to her, though), and her clothes seemed even less than before, to the point they had free space in their bags, now.

And, well, Yelena had also brought something she should have left behind. The little pearl and diamond she had never sold, out of the five or six she had found, feeling it was important somehow, and the little Anastasia card she had gotten so many years ago, and given to Dimitri to carry with him, during the war, as a good luck charm.

He had given it back to her, but she had never looked at it, not until Yelena broke the lock and got herself the little card, old, faded by time and sweat, but still recognizable, its colours somehow brilliant, even if the card was almost two decades old and had been through hell and back with Yelena and Dimitri. Yelena, however, was too sick to keep a good eye on the card, so she stuck it in the bottom of her pile of clothes, and Dimitri...

Dimitri, meanwhile, had disappeared through the thin hallways of the train, and sometimes - when the train stopped in cities she had never heard about, Anastasia taking small walks to soothe Yelena's stomach -, she was almost sure she could hear him speak or laugh. It was like a ghost of a friend, a shadow of a cloud in the ground, and Yelena couldn't help but wonder if he'd be like that in Berlin as well, just a background noise in the radiation of their lives.

But then, after each stop would come and go, Dimitri - clothes messy, a stupid laugh in his eyes, hair untamed and wild like the night - would appear, books under his arm. Yelena didn't know where he found those, especially since their content would have been... Well, forbidden.

"Where did you get those? I feel like it's been years since I've seen a book!" Anastasia had said, the first time he had come with them, and picked them up. Yelena couldn't recognize many letters, but she sure could recognize Romanov. Anastasia, unaware of what Yelena was thinking, picked up the book, rifling through it. "Oh wow, I'd love to say this brings memories, but it brings up nothing at all!"

"Well, I figured that since you will talk with some old royalty, you'd have to know something about it, right? So I betted some things, lost another, but got this set of books for you." He smiled, and Yelena felt useless. She could never get these for Anastasia, because it wasn't like she knew what they'd say.

She should really pick up reading and writing any of these days.

"Was your dignity part of it?" Yelena asked, faking cheerfulness, and Dimitri smiled. She knew that smile - it was the same he sported for a week after he disappeared for an hour with Sergei in the forest. Sergei had died in the war, but Dimitri had tried - and failed - to save him, if memory served her right. "You know what, Dimitri? I don't want to know. I really don't."

"Anyway, as I was saying... Me and Lena here will teach you how to be a Russian girl, since you don't. Let's start with something simple, yes?" Dimitri said, but Anastasia was busy going through the book. Yelena cleared her throat, and Anastasia's blue-grey eyes rose, seemingly embarrassed. "Something simple, yes?"