Archive of Our Own

There was a time, not very long ago,
when we lived in an enchanted world of elegant palaces and grand parties.

Snow swirls through the air on this cold night, turned to shimmering glitter by the lights that line the streets and houses.

The only thing more beautiful is the grand palace. It stands tall and proud over the land, lit up from within, living gold, from which pours the sound of music and laughter.

A carriage door is opened, and with the hand of her steward, the Dowager Empress Seklos steps out into the sparkling night. She’s dressed in deep blue, and the cold is no match for the luxurious white fur of her cloak. Her platinum blonde hair, pulled into a crisp bun, appears nearly as white as the snow, and is just as brilliant.

The year was 1917 and my son, Fialkov, was the tsar of imperial Russia.

The servants all bow to her as she walks past them, head held high, spine straight, regal and poised as ever. She is led into the palace, along rich red carpet and through gilded halls, right to the grand ballroom where her son and his wife, Tsarina Coranda, tan-skinned and dark-haired, as beautiful as they come, await him. Fialkov gives a short bow, and Coranda curtsies. Seklos bows her own head and then holds her arms out to give them both a hug, breaking her imperial veneer, if only for a moment. Tonight is a night for celebration and joy, after all.

We were celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of our family’s rule,
and no stars shone brighter that night than those of Aja and Krel,
the twins, and my youngest grandchildren.

Within the ballroom, beneath vaulted ceilings and grand chandeliers, over polished marble and dressed in the finest furs and silks, the twins can be found on the dance floor, spinning each other around as fast as they can in a chaotic rendition of the court dance that currently takes up the majority of the space. Aja, the spitting image of Seklos herself, and Krel, as handsome as their mother is beautiful. Though they couldn’t look more different, no one could possibly mistake them for anything but siblings, attached at the hip, with the same smile and laugh. They giggle as they whirl, and though it’s perhaps not quite the behavior expected from the children of the tsar, no one is able to bring themselves to interrupt their delight.

Over the prior days and weeks,
they had been begging me not to return to Paris after the tricentennial.

They spot her just as she’s taken her seat at the head of the room beside her son’s throne, and dart over with a dual cry of, “Grandmama!”

She hugs them as well, and they hug her back with equal enthusiasm—she loves all of her grandchildren, and they all love her in turn, but she and the twins have always had a special connection.

Behind the thrones, another young boy watches the interaction, an interaction with a strange familiarity despite the glaring differences—the princelings each hold out drawings for the dowager empress, and she takes them with a bright smile and words of praise.

Then, the dowager empress pulls out something—it looks like some sort of box, maybe, gold and blue, and the twins both light up at the sight of it.

So, I had a very special gift made for them to make the separation easier for all of us.

“Hisirdoux, you are supposed to be in the kitchens!”

He flinches at the shrill, grating call of Madame Bagdwella—looks like he snuck out one too many times tonight, the cook resorted to siccing her on him. There’s just something mesmerizing about the royals and their life and the twins. They’re about his age, just a couple of years younger, but their lives are so different from his. It’s fascinating, and, well, it also could be said that he’s a bit of a dreamer. To live a life like this, to dance like they do, and wear those clothes, and get to do all the things he’s seen the twins do from afar…

He barely gets a moment longer before Madame Bagdwella grabs the back of his shirt, the jerk nearly choking him, and drags him out of the ballroom and back towards the kitchen, entirely unnoticed by the royals mere feet away.

“What is it?” Krel asks.

“Is it a jewelry box?” Aja asks.

“Watch,” Seklos says with a smile. She then pulls out a special key from her sleeve and uses it to wind up the music box. The top opens as delicate music begins to play, revealing a pair of dancing figures, their parents, the tsar and tsarina.

“It plays our lullaby,” Aja says with a small gasp.

“That’s right,” Seklos says. “You two can play it at night before you go to bed and pretend that it’s me singing.” Just as inseparable in sleep as they are awake—and entirely at their insistence. Technically, they each do have their own bedroom, but one has stood empty since the day they were old enough to leave the nursery, the pair sticking together, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Honestly, she rather dreads the day they’ll be forced to separate. Best case scenario, they’ll want more space as they get older and reach adolescence, and so willingly split into different rooms. Any other case, and, well, she can’t imagine it going anywhere near well.

Seklos gently hands the music box to the pair, and they take it just as gently, the small box cradled by one hand each, carrying with it a whiff of Seklos’s favorite peppermint hand oil. She then starts to sing along with the waltz, “On the wind, ‘cross the sea, hear this song and remember.”

“Soon you’ll be home with me,” Krel and Aja sing with her, “once upon a December.”

With that, Seklos closes the music box in their hands and then holds out the key she used to wind it. “Read what it says.”

They take it and together read aloud, “Together in Paris.”

“Really, Grandmama?” Aja says, her eyes shining. Krel wears an identical expression.

“Of course,” Seklos says. “Once you’re both a little older. And, here, let me show you.”

She takes back the key to twist it, splitting it into two identically shaped parts, a necklace for each.

“This way, you both will always have a piece, your own keys,” Seklos says. She hands them back, Aja getting the half that says ‘Together’ and Krel getting the half that says ‘in Paris’.

With that, both twins once more fling themselves forward to hug her.

But we would never be together in Paris. Not all of us.
For a darkness had descended upon House Tarron.

The music dies and the lights dim, as if a shadow has pulled itself across the room, across the world. The crowd gasps and parts, scrambling out of the way of the looming, cloaked figure that has made his entrance. He walks with slow, purposeful strides, and though his face is shaded by his hood, his eyes are visible, burning red.

His name was Val Morando. We thought he was a Holy Man.

***

He comes in the night, when all hope has been lost.

The young prince’s fever has raged for days. Nothing they’ve tried has done a thing for him, and they have exhausted all of their avenues. His tiny body can’t hold out against the illness for much longer, of that the Tarrons are sure. Not even a year old, and they are going to lose him.

But then Morando comes. He comes with comforting words and medicines none of them have heard of, as well as a claim of being a healer blessed by God himself. Many are skeptical. But Fialkov and Coranda have nothing to lose—their son is going to die, and this mysterious man is their last hope to save him, a last-ditch attempt.

Within hours of Morando attending to the prince, the fever breaks. In mere days, the infant on death’s door becomes just as full of life as he had been before he fell ill. It’s a miracle.

And it’s all thanks to Morando.

***

But he was a fraud.

***

Morando was at the beck and call of the Tarrons for years. Every bruise, every sneeze, everything from a stuffy nose to the flu, he had a way to fix it; he could banish colds and dispel ailments of every sort. He was everything he claimed to be and more, a healer of truly divine ability, a mind of nigh unparalleled brilliance, a confidante and trusted advisor.

But strange things began to occur, picking up in frequency as time passed.

Items have disappeared suddenly and without a trace.

Some of their most highly respected and revered generals have quit without a word, vanishing into the night with all of their stuff.

Servants have begun to act strangely, twitchy, out of it, as if they are under some sort of spell.

And with every instance, every shortening interval, tensions have been rising, suspicions growing and flying around the palace. Many have been quick to point fingers, the skeptics becoming louder and louder, more and more people doubting Morando.

While Coranda does not want to believe them, she sees it as her duty to investigate.

And so it is she who uncovers his true dealings.

The items—in his personal quarters, some melted down or destroyed for pieces that he’d collected for purposes beyond the tsarina’s understanding.

The generals—dead, bodies hidden in the deepest dungeons where none had tread for years, their stuff sold off or taken by Morando.

The servants—drugged, hypnotized, enchanted, all under Morando’s influence.

And the worst of all—the illness that nearly took her son’s life those years ago, she discovers that it was introduced by Morando himself, a rare disease from a far-off land that he chose special for his purpose. He had it transmitted via a servant, one he’d had enchanted from the very beginning, and he’d had the cure ready for when she and Fialkov were at their lowest. In the following years, to keep up his ruse, he’d used placebos, magical glamours, concoctions of opioids and sedatives and hallucinogens when “necessary”. None of it was real.

And his purpose? Power. Morando wanted to be the one pulling the strings, the voice in the tsar’s and tsarina’s ears, the only man they could trust unconditionally.

It’s worse than anything she could have imagined. Not only is Morando a charlatan, but one who nearly killed her son in order to gain entrance into their lives, whose plan worked flawlessly, and who has since committed countless crimes against the crown, probably more than they’ll ever truly know, right under their noses.

He must be dealt with.

Thus, she and her husband banish Morando, under threat of death should he ever show his face here again.

***

Power-mad and dangerous.

“How dare you return!?” Fialkov says, going up to the dark figure.

“But I am your confidante,” Morando says, pulling down his hood, his deep voice resonating with something…unnatural. Something viscerally wrong that crawls under Seklos’s skin.

“You are a traitor!” Coranda says. “Guards!”

Several soldiers advance from their positions around the border of the room, weapons at the ready. But Morando is unfazed.

“You think you can punish me?” Morando says, the red of his eyes starting to truly glow. He straightens up impossibly taller, and his scowl darkens the room even further, the chandeliers going out. He then pulls out something from his cloak, the likes of which Seklos has never seen. It’s like a vial, glowing blood red, the contents within swirling and curling as if alive, whispering strange words that cannot be comprehended by logic, but that emotion knows all too well. Shivers cascade down her spine, and she understands that whatever this object is, it can only be described as pure evil.

“Mark my words, you and all of your family shall die tonight,” Morando continues. “With the Reliquary, I curse your bloodline, and I will not rest until I see the permanent end of House Tarron!”

Morando then lifts the object, and Seklos stands from her seat, pushing the twins behind her.

And not a moment too soon.

“Fly, my OMENs!” Red light shoots straight for the chandeliers, destroying them, bringing them crashing down to the floor below, cracking the marble on impact, metal and glass exploding outward. All around them, the windows shatter, sending glass shards flying in every direction. People scream in fear and pain, and chaos erupts. The crowd swarms, trying to escape, taking down the soldiers in their frenzy, catching the slower and less fortunate under boots, crushing them. Seklos remains where she is, however, keeping herself between the stampede and the twins. She doesn’t know Morando’s full plan, but she’ll be damned if he lays a finger on them.

But he does nothing.

Morando simply disappears amidst pandemonium, leaving the Tarrons in the wreckage.

Consumed by his hatred for the Tarrons,
Morando sold his soul for the power to destroy them.

***

He was so close! Just a little longer, and everything would have been in place, and he could have sprung his ultimate trap. Their minds would have been his, and so too would all of Russia, if it weren’t for that meddlesome woman. He never liked her—he never liked any of them, but she has always been the strangely perceptive one.

But, unfortunately for the tsar and tsarina, Morando still has several tricks up his sleeve.

He might as well go with his favorite, the one he’s been itching to try ever since he found the tome.

The things he stole—they were far more than artifacts and precious items, far more than just wealth.

No, they were ingredients.

Ingredients he originally planned to use in his final spell, yes, but could be used in a number of other ways. Such potent things hold power, power that can be used for many ends, from control to vengeance.

In his infernal tome, there is a spell that will give him everything he needs to crush the Tarrons and their legacy forever, a spell that will give him all the power of the darkest forces in the world in the palm of his hand!

The price: his soul.

But he’s never had much use for that anyway.

With the Reliquary, none can stand against him!

***

From that moment, his power had fanned the spark of unhappiness in our country into a flame,
one that would destroy our lives forever.

Outside, unbeknownst to them, Morando’s magic had been brewing for a fortnight, and around them, St. Petersburg burns.

Buildings on fire, statues toppled, people screaming and yelling, fear and rage and despair so potent, it chokes anyone who breathes it in. Though the snow remains, the blaze has turned it to glowing hellfire surrounding them, waiting to consume them.

Late into the night, long after the party has cleared out and the family has finally gone to bed, exhausted from the terror, the insurgents, the Taylons, advance, eyes gleaming that same red—the gates fall easily to their hands and weapons, to the demons that Morando unleashed into the world, his OMENs.

Seklos runs through the palace, doing her utmost to clear the tears that threaten to overtake her vision.

Her son, her Fialkov, is dead, his blood cascading down the palace steps, body laid out across them, a hole in his heart and half his face blown out, a point-blank bullet to the cheekbone.

Her daughter-in-law, Coranda, is dead, body prostrate in the grand entrance hall, trampled by the Taylons pushing their way inward, a bullet hole in her forehead, neat, right between the eyes.

And though Seklos doesn’t know for sure, something in her heart tells her that her older granddaughters, Zadra, Izita, and Davaros, are dead as well, whether in their beds or trying to flee, it doesn’t matter. Even then, they are all adults, or nearly—though it hurts her heart to leave any of them behind, she understands that it is the twins who most need her help, and so it is the twins she must prioritize.

It is up to her to get Aja and Krel out, and she has very little time before the Taylons penetrate deeper and reach them. She hauls them from their room, barely giving them enough time to throw on their coats over their night clothes, and takes them by their wrists in an iron grip, running as fast as they can.

But before they can get out, Aja suddenly stops in her tracks. “The music box!”

She somehow slips from Seklos’s hold and darts back into the depths of the palace.

Krel, of course, is on her heels, taking advantage of Seklos’s momentary surprise to slip out of her grip as well.

“Aja! Krel! Come back!”

Seklos chases them all the way back to their room and arrives just in time to see Aja, faster than Krel, snatch the music box from their nightstand.

There’s a great crash and the sound of thundering footsteps.

Seklos closes the door behind her, pressing herself against it, trying to think of what to do now, how she can save them—

The answer comes in the form of a servant not much older than the twins.

A dark-haired boy with shocking gold eyes emerges from a wall—one of the hidden doors to the passages used by the servants, disguised so as to not ruin the aesthetics of the palace.

“Hurry!” Hisirdoux says, rushing over to the royals. “Come this way! Through the servants’ quarters!”

Thankfully, the dowager empress follows his call without a moment’s hesitation, ducking into the small space, dragging the twins behind her.

Something clatters to the ground. Hisirdoux looks to find that box he saw earlier.

“No, our gift!” the princess cries out.

The princess tries to pull herself away from her grandmother. With the empress distracted by trying to keep hold of her granddaughter, the prince makes a grab for the box. But Hisirdoux is just a smidge faster, pushing the prince back through the opening with a desperate, “Go!”

Hisirdoux slams the door, trying his best to wedge it shut, to prevent the invaders from finding it.

That’s when there’s an awful crack, and the door to the room is kicked down, splintered and split in twain. Hisirdoux whips around to find three large men in coats and hats, bearing guns that are all pointed at him.

“Where are they, boy?” one demands.

Hisirdoux looks around, panicking, and his eyes land on the nearest lamp—he might be scared shitless right now, but like hell he’ll tell them anything! He chucks it at them with all his might, but his fear has shot his aim, and it just shatters at their feet. He is powerless against them, one frightened servant child against three grown men, but perhaps that is what spares him—instead of a bullet between the eyes, the butt of a gun meets his temple.

Outside, Seklos keeps running, Aja and Krel desperately trying to keep up with her.

But, from his vantage point atop the bridge, a spot he chose so he could watch as much of the carnage as possible, he sees them, the three figures stark against the snow.

And the next time Krel stumbles, his little legs struggling to keep stride with his grandmother, a searing hand wraps itself around his free wrist. He looks to find a wicked grin and blood red eyes.

Krel cries as he’s yanked backwards, right out of his grandmama’s hold.

Aja lunges for his free hand, fast as a whip, “No! I won’t let you take Krel!”

“Good thing you’re both on my list,” Morando says with a sneer. Small and young as she is, Aja is nowhere near strong enough to resist, and Morando grabs her as well with ease.

What he hadn’t taken into consideration was the dowager empress.

She is a grandmother, far past her youth, and like many before, this fact has made Morando underestimate her. With a strength only very specific circles know her to possess, a strength that has been the inheritance of the women of her bloodline for centuries, Seklos lashes out, walloping him upside the head before kicking him away, and reclaims her grandchildren.

On the ground, too stunned to stand back up quickly enough, Morando snaps out for their ankles. But even still, Seklos does not let go, her grip on their arms painful and unyielding.

Morando uses all of his strength to pull them down with him.

But instead, the ice beneath him cracks.

See, just out from under the bridge, they’re directly atop the frozen river that runs past the palace.

A river that perhaps wasn’t as frozen as had been thought.

With their struggle having weakened the buried surface, that last jolt breaks it completely. He plunges into the icy depths, the Reliquary illuminating the ink-dark water that vivid red, dimming as he sinks ever further.

“Come on!” Seklos says, hauling her grandchildren up and away from the scene.

She doesn’t slow until they reach the train station. Even if Morando has drowned—and she’s not even sure of that—she can’t take a single chance. The insurgents could still find them. She can’t rest, can’t even breathe, not until they’re safe on the train out of Russia.

The train that’s already started to pull away.

Seklos muscles her way through the crowd, dragging Krel and Aja along.

A man standing at the back of the train helps hoist her up, but she loses hold of the twins.

“Aja! Krel!” She reaches back out as far as she can, only the man keeping her on the train as she tries to grab them, yelling out for them. The train is picking up speed, and their window for boarding is coming to a swift close.

Aja, always the more athletic of the two, manages to catch onto Seklos’s outstretched hand first, and with her other hand still in Krel’s, never having let go, Seklos starts to pull them up.

But then, Krel’s foot catches on something, tearing his hand out of Aja’s, sending Aja flying into Seklos from the release of tension, and sending him tumbling. His head smacks against the side of the rails, knocking him out cold.

“KREL!” Aja screams, and she tries to jump off to go back for Krel, but the train is simply moving too fast now—Seklos grabs onto her with all her might, holding back the sobbing girl as Krel is lost to the crowd, and the train station slowly disappears into the distance behind them.

So many lives were destroyed that night.
What had always been was now gone forever.
And my Krel, my beloved grandson, Aja’s twin brother…

We never saw him again.

—Fifteen Years Later—

Thick smog fills the air, the streets already hustling and bustling this early in the morning, people dressed in what dirty rags they can afford off to their jobs, punch cards at the ready.

Ever since the Taylons’ takeover, St. Petersburg has grown gloomy and bleak, the smoke of relentless, unregulated industrialization filling streets and lungs, while stores and stomachs grow ever emptier as food becomes scarcer and scarcer.

Though, of course, you’ll never catch anyone saying that.

No, you’re more likely to hear very different things.

“Hail our brave new land!”

Renaming a place doesn’t make it new—in fact, most everyone hates the new name, ‘Leningrad’. No, it’s St. Petersburg. Always has been, always will be.

“Leningrad is booming, a city on the rise.”

And St. Petersburg withers underneath that shiny veneer sold to the public and the foreigners alike.

“It’s really very friendly.”

What they don’t add is, “if you don’t mind spies.”

“We stand behind our leaders.”

And they stand in line for bread.

“We’re good and loyal comrades, and our favorite color’s red!”

Red, like your skin in the harsh winter winds that cut through your threadbare clothing. Red, like the blood you’ll spill if you step out of line. Red, like that night, all those years ago.

“Now everyone is equal!”

Yes, everyone, from the professors pushing brooms to the two dozen total strangers living in two small rooms.

But despite their circumstances, and the leering Taylon guards ever present, watching their every move, the people of St. Petersburg have found their own little joys in the midst of the gloom.

You could say that it’s the gossip that gets them through the day.

“Have you heard there’s a rumor in St. Petersburg?
“Have you heard what they’re saying on the street?”

That gossip spreads like wildfire, every whisper traveling through the city in a matter of hours. And though some gossip grows old, there is one rumor that has kept the people in a chokehold, one rumor they always come back to, talking excitedly in hushed tones right under the noses of the guards.

“Though the tsar did not survive—”

“—His only son may be still alive!”

“The lost heir, Tsarevitch Krel!”

Though of course, they always tag on, “But please do not repeat.” As if anyone has ever listened to that piece of advice.

“It’s a rumor, a legend, a mystery! Something whispered in an alleyway or through a crack.”

And while most are content to keep themselves to the gossip, others find themselves more…motivated.

“It’s a rumor that’s part of our history!
“They say his sis and grandmother will pay a royal sum to the one who brings the tsarevitch back!”

Through the crowd weaves a man in his mid-thirties, stubble on his face, dressed in muted colors, though the blue of his coat, disguised somewhat by the film of soot that seems to lie over everything since the factories went up, speaks to a different past than you usually find amongst the proletariat. He keeps his eyes peeled for his partner—black hair doesn’t stick out, but the shade of his eyes certainly does.

He’s just ascended the stairs that lead up to the second level of the large courtyard marketplace when there comes a sharp, “Psst! Jim!”

He turns to find exactly the man he was looking for, long and tall, a decade younger than himself, leaning nonchalantly against the corner of the banister. His medium-length black hair is tied back out of his face, putting those golden eyes on full display.

“Ah, Douxie!”

“Come on,” Douxie says, beckoning him onward, and together, the two plunge deeper into the mostly abandoned structure, the remains of the old palace. They pass by seedy setups and seedier shopkeepers, each peddling their own wares, though these wares are far different from the gossip and knick-knacks sold out in the open.

“A ruble for this painting. It was the Tarron’s, I swear!”

“Lord Domzalski’s pajamas! Comrades, buy the pair!”

“I got this from the palace, it’s got real fur trim!”

Douxie stops for a moment, looking the cape over—its authenticity is debatable. But it looks real enough for his purposes. He flips the vendor a coin and shares a conspiratorial smile. “It could be worth a fortune if it belonged to him!”

Douxie and Jim continue until they reach an old, creaky door, through which can be found some of the old servants’ quarters. At least, that’s what it used to be. Now, it’s crammed with contraband and counterfeit artifacts, as well as several layers of dust and plenty of spiderwebs wherever there’s a space that hasn’t been so disturbed.

“Tell me you got good news,” Douxie says.

“I got us a theater,” Jim says, doing his best to hold back his weary sigh. He can’t believe Douxie is really going through with this scheme.

“Then everything is going according to plan. All we need now is the boy,” Douxie says with a grin. The pair step into an old stairway, rough from years of neglect, not that it was ever that nice to begin with, and begin their ascent. “Just think, Jim, no more forging papers, no more stolen goods. We’ll have three tickets out of here! One for you, one for me, and one for Tsarevitch Krel!”

They finally reach their destination, another forgotten corner that once belonged to the servants and has served as their home/base of operations since the fall of the Tarrons.

“It’s the rumor, the legend, the mystery! It’s the Tsarevitch Krel who will save our day! You and I, Jim, will go down in history!”

He rifles through everything they’ve gathered over the years, over all the illegal books they squirreled away and items they’ve managed to either buy or nick for themselves from the palace. They’re going to need every little bit they can get to make this as convincing as possible.

“We’ll find a boy to play the part, and teach him what to say, dress him up, and take him to Paris.” He goes over to where Jim’s packing up some of his own stuff and materials, and throws an arm around his shoulders, high on the fact that it’s all finally, finally coming together. “Imagine the reward his sis and grandmother will pay! Who else could pull it off but you and me?”

Douxie picks up the last and most essential piece to their trick—a gold and blue music box he’s kept tucked away for ten long years. He stuffs it into his briefcase, and together, he and Jim head over to the window, which he throws wide open. “We’ll be rich.”

“We’ll be rich,” Jim repeats, a grin coming to his face—though it’s not so much the money that’s important as what it can do for him and what it can do for Douxie.

“We’ll be out!” Douxie says.

“We’ll be out!” They’ll finally be free of this place, finally be out from under the thumb of the traitorous Taylons.

On the small balcony outside the window, they share one last conspiratorial smile. “And St. Petersburg will have some more to talk about!”

Then, they take the jump, hopping over the rail and onto the roof below, their quickest route to their destination, using the heavy layer of snow to aid in their descent, sliding across and down with an ease that only comes from years of sneaking around.

“Have you heard there’s a rumor in St. Petersburg?
“Have you heard what they’re saying on the street?”

They land in an alleyway and brush off the snow before darting out into the square—Douxie can hear the sound of the trolley ahead, the very trolley they need to catch.

“Have you heard there’s a rumor in St. Petersburg?
“Have you heard, comrades, what do you suppose?”

Douxie takes a leap, his long legs propelling him the last few feet onto the back of the trolley, Jim shortly behind him.

“A fascinating mystery—”

It’s finally time! They’re on their way, and nothing can stop them! “The biggest con in history!”

“The lost heir, Tsarevitch Krel! Alive or Dead? Who knows?”

///

In a far-too-big coat, wrapped in many layers to make up for the sorry state of the layers, scarf secure around his neck, hat firmly on his head, a young man stands in front of the orphanage, the big, old brick house he grew up in, the only place he’s ever known—as far as he can remember.

The younger kids all wave and yell their goodbyes, and he waves back. This will be the last he sees of them—he cares for them, he grew up with them, but there is nothing in this world that could get him to stay here a second longer.

“Now, that job I finally got for you, no thanks to you, is at the fish factory,” the headmistress of the orphanage, a squat and sour woman, says, all but shoving him toward the front gates. “You go straight down the path, and take a left at the fork in the road.”

“Yes, Comrade Gladysgro,” he says with a sigh. The fish factory. Like anyone would want to work at a fish factory. And how is it his fault that nowhere else wants him? He can fix things and build things and run circles around anyone within at least a hundred miles in math and physics, kept this orphanage intact and functional for years, but noooo, apparently that’s not enough to offset his apparently innate weirdness and social awkwardness. So now he’s stuck with the stupid fish factory.

“You know,” she starts, and he does, in fact, know exactly where this is going, “you’ve been a thorn in my side since the moment you were brought here, acting like the tsar himself, instead of the nameless no-account you are! For over a decade, I’ve fed you, I’ve—”

“—clothed me, kept a roof over my head, yeah, yeah,” he says. And that’s all she did. Comrade Gladysgro has never been the nurturing type. She kept him alive, and that’s about it. He had to take care of the rest. He’s spent more time than not underweight and mildly ill.

She whips around to give him the stink eye, and he just smiles.

“How is it you don’t have a clue as to who you were before you came to us, but you can remember all that?” she says with a huff, unlocking the gates.

“Except I do have a clue—”

“Pah! That stupid necklace?” she says. She yanks off his scarf to pull out the necklace in question. “ “In Paris”. So, you want to go to France to find your family, huh?”

“Yes,” he says, pointedly ignoring the note of mockery in her voice.

“Little Kirill, it’s time to take your place in life,” she says, and he knows that tone of voice, far too sweet. She then steps behind him and uses her full body weight to shove him through the open way into the snow. “In life and in line. And be grateful, too!”

Just as he extracts himself from said snow, his scarf hits the back of his head, and the gates slam shut.

“Be grateful,” he says in his best impression of Comrade Gladysgro before letting out a scoff and standing to brush the snow off of himself, gather up his scarf, and collect his singular bag of belongings—all ratty hand-me-downs, but better than nothing. “Oh, I’m grateful, alright. Grateful to get away!”

She goes back inside before he finishes his shouting, not sparing another glance his way.

With that, Kirill sets off down the road. It doesn’t take him long to reach the fork the headmistress mentioned. But, rather than going left, he finds himself at a pause.

Go left. Why should he go left? All that lies to the left is a fish factory and being ‘Kirill the Orphan’ forever.

But to the right…

Well, the sign says St. Petersburg. But it’s so much more than that. He’d be screwing Comrade Gladysgro, which is a plus. And who knows what he’ll find there? Maybe…maybe he could find…

His fingers go to the necklace. He hasn’t taken it off longer than it takes to bathe for as long as he can remember. The gold has become worn over the years from all the times he’s touched it, fiddled with it, found comfort in it. Comrade Gladysgro never understood. But then again, she never knew everything about it.

She never knew that it’s only half of a whole.

He can’t remember anything about the other half, but the way the metal is wrought, it’s obvious it was meant to attach to something, that its shape is incomplete. A half that’s been missing for fifteen years at least, a half he can’t remember but can feel all the same. It wasn’t long after he arrived here that he figured that out, having spent every moment of those days desperately looking over the necklace, looking for anything that might help him remember since he finally had a moment to spare, a moment where he wasn’t either trying desperately to stay warm or obtain food or the likes. And once he figured that out, the strange feeling in his chest made so much sense.

Somewhere out there, the other half of this necklace waits. Whoever gave him this necklace, whoever holds the other half, they must have loved him…

“Gah, this is crazy!” he groans. “Me? Paris?”

It’s ludicrous! He’s a malnourished orphan with nearly nothing to his name. He’s not the kind of person who goes places like Paris.

But at the same time, maybe he was. The necklace, his only worthwhile possession, is real gold—another thing Comrade Gladysgro never knew about, ‘cause if she did, she would’ve pawned it years ago—and it’s expertly made. Someone who owns something like that, now that’s a person who goes places like Paris.

Ugh!

He sets down his bag and slumps down onto it, not caring for the cold of the deep snow—he’s got enough layers to not have to worry about melting snow, and with how poor the insulation at the orphanage was, he’s used to feeling cold.

He’s never been the religious type. He played along at the orphanage to keep Comrade Gladysgro off his back about it, but he just never understood it. Even still, he picked up some habits, and if he’s yelling at nothing, then, well, it’s not like there’s anyone around to call him crazy.

“Can I get a sign?” he calls out. “A hint? Anything?”

It’s at that very moment that his scarf, which he never ended up putting back on, is snatched out of his hand with a playful yip.

What appears to be a corgi of all things has his scarf in its mouth, its tail wagging madly.

“Hey! I need that!”

He reaches for the scarf, and the dog darts just out of reach, stopping in a play bow, eyes locked on Kirill.

Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?

He lunges for the dog, who once more darts, but Kirill is ready for him this time. He pivots at the last moment, catching the dog by surprise.

But he hadn’t accounted for the scarf being long and trip-over-able.

In the midst of his pivot and the dog’s swerve in an attempt to thwart him, the scarf wraps itself around his ankles, and he eats snow for the second time that day, only this time, it’s literal.

He spits out the mouthful of snow and rolls over onto his back with a groan to find the dog now standing over him, its tail still wagging, scarf still in its teeth, looking far too pleased with itself.

“And I suppose you think this is funny?” Kirill says.

It yips again, the sound muffled by the fabric of the scarf, and the dog disappears from his line of sight.

Kleb.

He sits up, fully expecting the dog and his scarf to be long gone.

But they’re not. In fact, the dog sits about ten feet down the right-hand path, still holding his scarf, looking at him expectantly.

The right path…

He supposes it’s as good a sign as any.

He picks up his bag and goes over to the dog, and it actually allows him to take back his scarf—well, one end of it. With a sigh, he threads that end a couple of times through one of the belt loops on his coat. That way, he doesn’t lose it, and the dog still has an end to play with—judging from the state of its coat, he doubts it has an owner for him to return it to, so might as well let it tag along.

This leaves him staring down the snowy path that extends before him between the thick-needled pines and winter-bare trees. He finds his mouth suddenly dry, and has to swallow a couple of times before taking a deep breath and a first tentative step forward.

“Heart, don’t fail me now. Courage, don’t desert me. Don’t turn back now that we’re here.”

He takes a few more steps, small flurries swirling around his ankles. A bit of cold hits his nose, and he blinks in surprise. Looking up, he spots a few small flakes fluttering down from the silver gray clouds overhead—looks like there’s another layer coming down, though this one in gentle flutters instead of a near blizzard.

“People always say life is full of choices. No one ever mentions fear.”

Another yip brings his attention back down to the ground where the dog is waiting, still holding his scarf, extended as far out as he can get, looking at him with big, expectant eyes.

“Or how the world can seem so vast, moving forward—”

Just then, there’s a call from behind him, and he steps off to the side in time for a horse-pulled sled to glide by, the people in it talking loudly and laughing.

And suddenly, he doesn’t feel so alone out here.

“—to the past!”

Finally, he fully sets off, trudging through the snow with a new sense of determination.

“Somewhere down this road, I know someone’s waiting.” His gloved fingers find the necklace again, and he grips it tight. “Years of dreams just can’t be wrong.”

Another tug of the scarf, and he realizes that he’s now moving faster than the dog can in this deep snow, his long legs much better suited for this than the dog’s little ones.

“Arms will open wide, I’ll be safe and wanted—” he goes and scoops the pup up, bundling it as best he can in his coat, clutched to his chest with his free arm “—finally home where I belong.” Looks like he’s got a new friend.

“Well, starting now, I’m learning fast on this journey to the past!”

The sun ascends into the sky over him as he travels, the shadows around him ever so slowly moving. The snow continues to fall around him in large fluffy flakes, gentle and leisurely, getting caught in the hair that sticks out from under his hat and in the dog’s—he thinks he’s gonna call him Luug—fur whenever he pokes his head out or insists on Krel letting him run around for a bit.

Sometime deep into the day, the afternoon now waning, Kirill reaches a small village, and Luug, out for a romp, zeros in on a pair of kids playing in the snow, a boy and a girl. Luug darts over, yapping loudly, and the kids cheer when they see him, giggling as he joins in their fun.

Kirill can’t help but wonder if he ever had such a moment.

“Home, love, family, there was once a time I must have had them too.”

There’s a call from a nearby house. A woman now stands on the front porch, a smile on her face as she watches the children. She calls out again, and though they look disappointed to have to leave Luug, they go running over to her, where she brushes snow from their hair and coats lovingly.

His heart aches at the sight.

“Home, love, family, I will never be complete until I find you.”

The lady takes notice of him, and the villagers are kind enough to let him stay for the night, even with his lack of money to pay them for the room or food. So, in lieu of money, and despite their insistence that he doesn’t need to do anything, he uses the skills he picked up over the years to fix up some things for them. He and Luug depart the next morning at dawn with plenty of well wishes and a small loaf of bread for the road, courtesy of the lady.

“One step at a time. One hope, then another. Who knows where this road may go?”

The road becomes progressively less pristine as they go. The snow has been trampled by feet and churned up by wheels, darkened with dirt and soot—a sign of civilization if he’s ever seen one.

He must be getting close, at least close to somewhere that can take him to St. Petersburg. And from there, well…that’s part of a journey, right?

“Back to who I was, on to find my future, things my heart still needs to know.”

And when the sun just hits noon, up ahead, he thinks he sees something over the next hill.

“Yes, let this be a sign! Let this road be mine! Let it lead me to my past—”

He scrambles forward, ignoring the ache in his feet, legs, and back from trudging all those miles. He only stops at the crest of the hill, all the breath taken from his lungs.

Before him sprawls what can only be St. Petersburg, huge and full of life, the old palace towering over the city, as grand as all the stories he’s ever heard have described it! Smoke billows from chimneys, and he can hear the whistle of a train, even all the way out here still. Something in his chest blooms at the sight and sound of it, and he almost starts to tear up with the emotions now welling within.

“—and bring me home at last!”

///

At the train station, Kirill fidgets nervously in line. He’s never been anywhere like this, as far as he knows. So many people and sounds all around him, on every side…it’s rather overwhelming.

When he reaches the front, he finds a very grumpy-looking man waiting for him.

“Um, how do I get a ticket to Paris?” he asks, doing his best to make his voice as strong as he can, trying to mask his nerves.

“Do you have an exit visa?” the man asks, eyebrow twitching.

“An exit visa?” Kirill asks.

“No exit visa, no ticket to Paris!” the man then spits out, his temper exploding out of him—must have had a rough day. The man pulls back from his window and slams down the shutters.

Well, kleb.

“Psst!”

He turns to find an old woman waiting behind him. She leans in, her voice kept low. “See Douxie. He can help you.”

“Where can I find him?” Kirill asks, just as quiet.

“At the old palace,” she says. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”

With that, the woman shuffles off to join another line.

“Hmm. Douxie, huh?” He looks down at Luug, situated in his arms. “Think we oughtta give him a visit?”

Luug barks once. Kirill will take that as a yes.

It’s not like he’s got any other recourse available to him right now anyway.

In a small theater not too far away, Douxie is having even less success in his endeavor.

He and Jim have been sitting here for almost two days now, and not a single boy who’s auditioned has been anywhere even close to what they need!

“And I look so much like the tsarevitch, don’t you think?” the guy on stage asks, and Douxie plasters on his best fake smile and nods. The only remote resemblance he bears to the tsarevitch is the dark hair and eyes, and roughly his age. Other than that, not an inch of him looks like Tsarevitch Krel. And he’s also a horrible actor.

“Yes, yes, thank you, we’ll be in touch,” he says as he scribbles the guy’s name off the list.

Once the guy has removed the cape they’ve been using to help set the scene and has fully left the stage, Douxie looks over at Jim, who somehow looks even more exhausted by all of this than Douxie feels.

“How many more?” Jim asks.

“Just one,” Douxie says. Both a godsend and the worst-case scenario.

But by now, his hopes have been shot, so when the final guy walks up onto the stage to very dramatically throw the cape over his shoulders, dressed in a weird, rather revealing knock-off version of how the royals used to dress and speaks in an even weirder husky, sultry tone, he’s at least not too let down.

With that one out of the way, the pair clean up.

“Ugh, I don’t think this is gonna work, Doux,” Jim says. “We spent everything on this theater, and despite your theory it would lend us some credence and attract better possibilities, still no Tsarevitch Krel.”

“We’ll find him,” Douxie says. “We’re so close, Jim. We’ve only been at this for a couple of days, and we’ve got the entire city of St. Petersburg around us, and the rest of Russia, too. There has to be the perfect guy out there, right under our noses, I just know it!”

Jim swears, and Douxie looks over to see him staring at the empty stage.

“The last guy stole the cape!” Jim says with a groan that matches Douxie’s own at the realization.

Of course he did.

One last insult to add to the injury.

With their things packed, they head for the exit, and Douxie resumes his spiel. “And remember, one look at the jewelry box and the dowager empress will think we’ve got the real Tsarevitch Krel. By the time she figures it out, we’ll already have our ten million rubles, and she won’t be able to prove whether or not we knew we were presenting her with a fake—”

As they exit the theater, Douxie accidentally knocks shoulders with another young man who looks like he’s been trudging through the snow nonstop for days. There’s some awkward mumbling and ‘excuse me, sorry’s, but the young man pays little to no mind to it, so Douxie just shrugs and keeps on walking with Jim.

“—so long as you play it cool.”

“I can keep a secret, you know that,” Jim says. “But what about the tickets? They’re for today.” Douxie had been so certain they’d find someone quickly. He feels like he should’ve known better.

“We can forge new ones, it’ll be fine,” Douxie says. “Now, come on—we’re gonna miss the trolley at this rate.”

Kirill only spares a single glance at the two men as they walk away, their speed picking up—whatever’s got them so enraptured that they can’t look where they’re going, he doesn’t care.

He zeros in on another pedestrian and goes over. He looks older, which means he probably knows the city fairly well. “Could I get some directions?”

And that’s how Kirill finds himself at the base of the steps that lead up to the palace, a little while later—surely only one of many such staircases with a building of this size. The man said no one was here, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a look anyway. After all, with the way the woman at the train station spoke, it seems like this Douxie isn’t exactly running a legal operation.

He walks up slowly, Luug zooming ahead of him best he can with his little legs. The place has obviously been abandoned for a while. There are half-rotted boards nailed over the doors and windows that he passes, and what glass remains in the windows is filthy. There’s something just so…sad about it. It hangs in the air all around the place, clinging to every inch of it. Driven by something he doesn’t quite understand, Kirill removes his gloves to brush his fingers along one of the large blocks that make up this section, some stone dust rubbing off onto his skin as he does so. So much sadness…

Luug barks at something, and Kirill looks just in time to see him wiggle through a gap in the planks over one of the archways, what looks to have once been a doorway, the door long gone.

“Luug!”

He looks in through the gaps, but the inside is dark, and he can’t see Luug.

“Dammit, Luug.”

He’s gonna have to go in, isn’t he?

With a little elbow grease, he manages to tear down some of the boards, the wood coming away from the wall with a crack and crashing to the ground, making him flinch at the volume.

Inside, tucked away in their own little world, Douxie bolts up straight. He looks at Jim, who just raises an eyebrow from where he’s lounging on a ratty chaise, a bottle of vodka in his hand. “What?”

“Did you hear something?” Douxie asks him.

“No,” Jim says, looking at him like he’s crazy. Which he might be, but that’s neither here nor there.

“I’m gonna go check it out,” Douxie says.

Outside, Kirill peers around, a tad paranoid, but he’s just as alone as he was before. No one around to hear the sound, let alone catch him. So, he steps inside.

Somehow, the interior is even sadder than the exterior. It’s no more run-down, but the feeling is thicker in here. Deeper. As if the sadness has sunken into the very stone of the palace, into the marble floor and the grand carpet that leads away from the entrance he just came in, into the gilding along the faded walls and the gold of the dark chandeliers over his head. He finds himself removing his hat as if in respect for the sheer grief of this place.

“Luug? Luug, where’d you go?” he calls out as he advances. But he’s not really looking for Luug anymore. The dog comes running up at his heels, and he continues onward, utterly captivated, fascinated, by the scene he finds himself in, a shell full of ghosts.

He walks until he finds a large room. Within is a table, long and lined with empty plates and silverware, set out as if there could be a grand meal at any moment, though the dust says they’ve been waiting for that meal for a very, very long time—he wonders why they’re still here when it looks as if the rest of the palace has been ransacked, picked over of everything remotely valuable.

Kirill stuffs his hat into one of his coat pockets and carefully picks up one of the plates, blowing away the dust. In it, his reflection stares back at him, the gold of the plate so pristine that there’s almost no distortion whatsoever.

A feeling washes over him, so strong and sudden it nearly knocks him off his feet. It’s a sensation he’s never felt before, a voice just out of his range of hearing, an image that flashes on the backs of his eyelids, there and gone too fast for him to comprehend it. It stirs something in his head, something deep, deep down.

This place…it’s like a memory from a dream…

He comes back to reality with a jolt and drops the plate, it clattering against the marble floor.

He shakes his head, trying to rid himself of the strangeness, but it persists, a weird feeling of almost…familiarity, even though that’s preposterous. He replaces the plate before his gaze wanders elsewhere in the room. He realizes it isn’t a banquet hall. No, there’s a vanity and a large, cracked mirror, comfortable pieces of furniture…perhaps a parlor of some sort? He isn’t sure.

But what he is sure of is that what he next finds is a potential reason for the state of this room in comparison to the rest of what he’s seen of the ransacked palace. There’s a fine carpet set beneath a couch, and across both is a large, dark splatter.

His heart stutters and clenches at the realization that this room is where someone died—almost certainly during the uprising, as he knows many died that night. This might even possibly be the spot where one of the Tarrons was killed. Perhaps such an event was enough to create some sort of superstition-powered protection over the items in here.

And yet, despite this morbid discovery, he doesn’t recoil, nor does he leave. No, something keeps him here, advancing further into the room, taking in every detail as if they were water and he was in a desert.

He approaches the vanity, fingers ghosting along the top, finding a word carved into it in what looks like the scratchy scrawl of a child, though the way it’s worn tells him that happened quite a while ago. He traces the letters, З-А-Д-Р-А—Zadra.

He then turns his attention to the vase that sits on said vanity, caressing it gently so as to not disturb it or possibly catch his finger on a jagged, broken edge. Half of it has pictures of bears and a pattern of delicate wings, while the other half is broken with pieces missing. They make something spark in his head, far away, almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Something is there.

“Dancing bears, painted wings, things I almost remember.”

He then goes over to look at the open doors that lead out onto a balcony that overlooks what can only be a ballroom. From here, he can see the art on the walls above the shattered windows across the way. Below, the floor is pristine, save for the debris swept to the sides, glass and metal and crystal chards, what looks like chandeliers—and sure enough, he can see the broken fixtures on the ceiling.

“And a song someone sings, once upon a December.”

The balcony leads to red-carpeted grand stairs that then lead down to the main floor, mirroring the opposite side. He stops on the landing where staircases from each side meet in the middle before descending the rest of the way as one.

“Someone holds me safe and warm. Horses prance through a silver storm.”

He fully sheds his coat, draping it over one of the beautifully carved banisters, and sets down his bag. He feels like…well, it’s utterly ridiculous in every way, but he feels like dancing. Like he can almost hear the waltz resonating around him, the music that once graced this hall.

“Figures dancing gracefully across my memories.”

Down on the floor, his feet fall into a pattern his mind doesn’t recognize, but his muscles certainly do. He can practically see the people dancing around him, can feel the hands of another in his own.

“Far away, long ago, glowing dim as an ember!”

A presence at his side, platinum blonde hair and eyes the same blue-gray as the winter morning.

“Things my heart used to know, things it yearns to remember!”

He stops at the very center, breathless, as the sounds and images suddenly start to fade, growing blurry and indistinct.

“And a song someone sings…once upon a December…”

He tries to grasp at them, to hold on tighter, but it’s no use; they slip through his fingers as ephemeral as mist, leaving him just as lost as he’s always been.

“Hey!”

Kirill whips around at the shout to find a pair of men standing on the balcony that’s at the far end, directly across from the grand staircase.

Kleb.

“What are you doing in here!?”

Not knowing if they’re maybe guards or some kind of authority, Kirill takes off toward the opposite end, the way he came. He can’t find Douxie if he gets arrested.

“Hey!” Douxie shouts again, zipping down the stairs from the far balcony to take off after the boy, Jim not far behind. “Stop!”

Luug barks as the three sprint across the enormous room, though whether from excitement or in some attempt to intimidate the other two, Kirill isn’t sure. He scrambles up the stairs, not even caring to grab his stuff—it’s not like it’s worth anything.

“Hold on a minute!” one of the young men shouts, the same one who’s been shouting.

But Kirill can’t keep this pace up. After walking for two days through the snow, his legs just can’t keep going like this. He comes to a stumbling stop on the landing, panting hard, halting just before an enormous painting he hadn’t noticed earlier—a painting of a family, a mom and dad, four daughters, and a son.

“How did you get in here—” Douxie starts to demand, skidding to his own stop at the base of the stairs, but his words get stuck in his throat as he takes in the scene before him. The boy now looks at him, standing beside the painted visage of Tsarevitch Krel, and the resemblance is uncanny. The hair, the eyes, the face, it’s all perfect, like that image came to life and stepped right out of the painting, just aged about a decade or more—the very picture of what might’ve been, if only…

Just as Jim catches up, Douxie grabs him by the lapel of his coat, pulling him in close. “Jim, do you see what I see?”

“Huh?” Jim looks at Douxie, confused. But Douxie doesn’t look back at him, not for a moment. So, he turns his attention in the same direction as Douxie, and he lets out a gasp at the sight before him. “By Deya…”

Kirill looks between the men who are now both gawking at him. Both have dark hair and wear blue, though the slightly shorter one with the stubble has warmer-toned hair and a long, lighter blue jacket, while the taller one with longer, cooler-toned hair has an unbuttoned dark blue vest over a white shirt. But what really strikes him are the eyes. The bearded one has blue eyes, not terribly uncommon around here, but the taller one has gold. Kirill doesn’t think he’s ever seen a color like it.

After another moment, though, he sighs and crosses his arms. He doesn’t have the patience for whatever this is. “Look, is one of you Douxie?”

“Oh, er, that depends on who’s looking for him,” Douxie says, snapping out of it. He needs to play this perfectly. He cannot afford to mess anything up whatsoever, not when the perfect stand-in for Tsarevitch Krel has presented himself practically on a silver platter!

A snuffling and a nudge at his ankle grabs his attention, and he looks down to find what he thinks is a corgi staring up at him. “Uh, hello there, little guy.”

The corgi seems satisfied by his acknowledgement, giving a yap before going over to Jim to sniff at his pant legs.

“Well, I’m Kirill,” the boy says, “and I’m looking for travel papers.”

Douxie starts moving around him, getting a better look, scanning him over.

“I heard Douxie was the guy to go to for stuff like that,” the boy, Kirill, continues. “Why are you circling me? What are you, some kind of vulture?”

“No, it’s just…it’s just that you look an awful lot like—” He cuts himself off. He needs to sus ‘Kirill’ out a little more before he can really go all in on the plan. “Well, nevermind that. You said travel papers?”

“Yes,” Kirill says. “I’d like to go to Paris.”

“You’d like to go to Paris?” Douxie cannot believe his ears. There is no way he’s just hit a jackpot this big; there’s gotta be some kind of catch. He looks back at Jim to see if he’s hearing what Douxie’s hearing, but his friend is thoroughly enraptured by the puppy, scratching him behind the ears, doing that baby talk people sometimes do with dogs.

Well, Douxie can’t exactly blame him—the dog is pretty cute.

“Let me ask you something, Kirill,” Douxie says. “Travel papers require a bit more information than just a first name. Is there a last name to go with that?”

Kirill wrings his hands, his demeanor shifting. “A last name…well, this is gonna sound crazy, but I don’t know my last name. I was found as a kid, when I was something like eight or nine years old. I don’t know exactly what age.”

He doesn’t like thinking about that time—though his memories are fuzzy around the event itself, he does remember the confusion and terror he felt waking up alone in a strange place, no idea of where he was, or how he got there, or even who he was.

“And before that?” Douxie asks.

“I don’t know,” Kirill says. “I have no memories from before then. I don’t even remember my birth name aside from the fact that it started with a ‘K’—” that’s how he got ‘Kirill’, which was the name he felt the least wrong calling himself, though it’s never been completely right either “—or anything about my family or past…”

What little he remembers of then flashes through his head, an old ache igniting behind his sternum.

“They said I was found at the old train station,” Kirill says. “No tracks in the snow, new precipitation…in the darkness and cold with the wind in the trees, a boy with no name, and no memories but these.”

The images are blurry, that old hospital…

“Rain against a window, sheets upon a bed. Terrifying nurses whispering overhead, “Call the child Kirill, give the child a hat.” I don’t know a thing before that.”

A hat to help hide and somewhat protect the gnarly gash that stretched across his temple—an ugly scar he bears to this day, though now it’s mostly hidden by his hair—that was barely healed by the time he had to leave the hospital. So little space, so little money, his stay was much shorter than it probably should’ve been. He’d ended up with nothing and no one and nowhere to go. He did eventually find himself at the orphanage, but before that, well…the time between the hospital and the orphanage was much too long for a child to have to endure. But endure he did.

“Traveling the back roads, sleeping in the woods. Taking what I needed, working when I could. Keeping up my courage, foolish as it seems. At night, all alone in my dreams.”

Huddled in the darkness, alone as much in his dreams as in the waking world.

Almost.

“In my dreams shadows call.”

Distorted voices from people beyond his field of vision, mixed-up syllables and words that he could make sense of if only he could get closer.

“There’s a light at the end of a hall.”

A grand hall, big and vaulted, the floor a rich carpet, the walls decorated in blurry swirls of gold. There’s someone waiting at the end for him. Is it the one talking?

“Then my dreams fade away…”

But he always walks forever, that hall getting longer and longer, and always wakes up before he can see who it is, before he can make sense of the words.

Somehow, he just knows that if he could reach the end, if he could finally see who stands there, who’s waiting for him, he’d have his answers. He can just feel it.

And because of that, he’s refused to give up.

“But I know it all will come back one day.

“I dream of a city beyond all compare. A faraway place, Paris…”

Comrade Bagdwella always said it was just because of his necklace, just because of how much research he’s done on the city over the years, trying to feel a connection, trying to figure out what his necklace could mean. But he’s certain that’s not it. At least, not all of it.

“A beautiful river, a bridge by a square, and I hear a voice whisper, “We’ll be together there, in Paris,” Paris…”

The only words he’s ever been able to decipher in these dreams, though he couldn’t tell you anything about the voice to save his life. In all his attempts to listen and remember, he can never quite grasp even an inkling of who might be saying it.

The sound of a light cough brings Kirill back to reality, and his eyes zip to Douxie and Jim, who are standing there, watching him. He can’t decipher their expressions.

“You don’t know what it’s like, not to know who you are, to have lived in the shadows and travelled this far,” Kirill says. “I’ve seen flashes of fire, heard the echo of screams—”

These are what haunt his nightmares, the flipside to that hallway. These, and confusion and pain and this strange red light.

“—But I still have this faith in the truth of my dreams.”

He has to. Without that…without that, he’d truly be utterly lost and alone in this world. He’d have less than nothing. He’d be nothing.

“In my dreams, it’s all real, and my heart has so much to reveal. And my dreams seem to say, “Don't be afraid to go on, don’t give up hope, come what may,”…

“I know it all will come back one day.”

And perhaps the key to that is in Paris.

“So, can you help me or not?” he asks Douxie.

“Jim, the tickets,” Douxie hisses. Jim gives the dog one last pat before standing and pulling them from the depths of his coat to hand them over.

“What’s the plan here?” Jim asks, keeping his volume low.

“Just follow my lead,” Douxie says.

He takes the tickets and turns back to Kirill. “You know, we sure would like to help you. In fact, funnily enough, we’re looking to head to Paris ourselves. And I’ve got three tickets—”

“Really?” Kirill says, hopeful.

“Yes, but,” Douxie says, “the third is for him—” he motions toward the painting, toward the small boy sitting down in front next to his twin sister “—Tsarevitch Krel.”

Kirill looks back at the painting, eyes catching on the boy in front. Tsarevitch Krel, huh?

He’s heard the rumors of the tsarevitch’s potential survival—who in Russia hasn’t?—but he’d never given the royal family or the prince much thought. Well, much thought beyond the fact that he quite likes the name, more than ‘Kirill’. He couldn’t exactly go around calling himself the same name as the lost heir to the throne, though.

“See, Jim and I have a plan to reunite Tsarevitch Krel with his twin sister and grandmother once we find him,” Douxie says. He slings an arm around Kirill’s shoulders to start guiding him up the stairs. “And you, Kirill, you resemble him quite a bit.”

“The dark eyes,” Jim says.

“The face shape,” Douxie says.

“The tsar’s smile,” Jim says.

“The tsarina’s complexion,” Douxie says.

“Even the dowager empress’s hands,” Jim says.

“And you’re the same age and the same physical type,” Douxie says.

“Are you saying that you think I am the lost tsarevitch?” Kirill scoffs.

“All I’m saying,” Douxie says as they come to a stop before another painting, this one of only the twins, “is that I have seen thousands of men all over the country and not one of them has looked as much like the tsarevitch as you. Just look at the portrait!”

Kirill scoffs again, shaking his head. “And here I thought I was crazy, but you’ve definitely got me beat.”

He turns to walk away, but Douxie circles around, blocking his path back down the stairs. “Come on, you don’t remember what happened to you.”

“And no one knows what happened to him,” Jim says.

“You’re looking for family in Paris,” Douxie says.

“And his only family is in Paris,” Jim says.

“And you did say that you know your birth name started with a ‘K’,” Douxie says, turning Kirill back around, making sure he really looks at the portrait this time. “Have you ever thought about the possibility?”

“That I could be royalty?” Kirill says. “I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine yourself as the tsarevitch when you’re sleeping blanket-less and hungry on a damp floor…though, I suppose every lonely kid has wished at least once that they were someone so special…”

Douxie makes a show of checking his watch and then says, “Well, really wish we could help, but the third ticket is for Tsarevitch Krel, and we’ve gotta get going. Good luck.”

He then grabs Jim, and they start off back down the stairs, leaving Kirill alone under the painting.

“Ok, what are you up to?” Jim asks as they descend.

“All he wants to do is go to Paris,” Douxie says. “Why give away a third of the reward money?”

“Douxie,” Jim says, his tone disapproving.

“I know it’s a little underhanded, but it’s far from the worst thing we’ve done,” Douxie says. “And it’s not any worse than lying to the empress.”

Jim’s not much a fan of that either. But he made a promise a long time ago to a lost little boy to look out for him no matter what, and he refuses to break it, even for a hairbrained scheme he finds deeply questionable at best.

“Please, Jim. You’ve played along this far, yeah? Just trust me,” Douxie says.

“I don’t like this,” Jim says. “But…I’ll trust you.”

“Thank you,” Douxie says.

“So, why are we walking away so soon then?” Jim asks.

“Patience,” Douxie says. “And walk a little slower.”

Still by the painting, now with Luug in his arms, Kirill can’t help but look a little closer at the boy on the right, Tsarevitch Krel. He must admit, Douxie and Jim do have a point about the similarities.

But it’s the girl on the left that really gets him. She wears a dress to match the suit the boy wears, and though her physical features couldn’t be more different from the boy’s, he can see something there. They’re siblings, he’s sure of it. This has to be the sister, the tsarevitch’s twin.

Potentially, maybe…his twin…

His fingers go to his necklace, lightly running over the words and detailing, over where it’s supposed to attach to—

Its missing half.

Its missing half in Paris.

At the bottom of the stairs, before Jim can ask another question, Douxie holds up three fingers. “Three, two, one…”

“Douxie!”

Douxie shoots Jim a grin.

“Douxie, wait up!”

He turns to see Kirill rushing down the steps.

“You need something?” Douxie asks.

“If I don’t remember who I am, then who’s to say I’m not the tsarevitch or whatever, right?” Kirill says.

“Go on,” Douxie says, nodding along.

“And if I’m not Krel, then no doubt the sister and the empress will be able to tell right away, and it’s all just an honest mistake,” Kirill says.

“Sounds plausible to me,” Douxie says.

“And,” Jim tacks on, “if you really are the tsarevitch, then you’ll finally know who you are and have your family back.”

“He’s right,” Douxie says. “Either way, it gets you to Paris.”

“Right,” Kirill says. He sticks out a hand, which Douxie takes, and gives a far firmer shake than Douxie had expected. It actually kind of hurts. But that doesn’t matter! Because they’ve found their tsarevitch!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces to the empty room with a smile as Kirill puts his coat on and grabs his bag, “may I present his royal highness, Tsarevitch Krel!”

///

Under the ice, at the bottom of the river, in the coldest depths, something stirs. Something…unnatural. Something wrong.

For the first time in fifteen years, the water turns to crimson, and muted whispers emerge from the mud at the bottom, asleep for years, but reawakened.

The blood of the Tarrons has reemerged.

Morando’s dark purpose remains unfulfilled.

And to be fulfilled, it requires the direction of its caster.

With none around to witness, the surface cracks and bursts in a flash of red, sending the ice flying into the surrounding snowbanks, and from the waters emerges a figure caked in mud and sediment and plant detritus, through which can be seen spots of ivory. One of its hands is but bare phalanges clawing through the snow and dirt to haul this form onto land.

The form takes a deep gasp as its head breaches, the air escaping before it can ever reach the lungs, one full of water, the other leaking like an untied water balloon.

A gust of wind picks up some snow that whistles through an empty, exposed eye socket and slips through exposed teeth, each rotted at different times as the current exposed different parts, the cold preserving much, but unable to preserve what the water and fish battered.

On land, splayed out, the form takes another breath, just as ineffectual as the first, though this one triggers a response within its rotted body, sluggish and jilted as it is, and it retches up as much water as it can, what remains of its abdominal muscles spasming and flailing unevenly in their attempts to rid its body of the intrusion.

Then, grabbing onto the stones of the near bridge support, it hauls itself up, stacking its bones until it’s as upright as possible, though most of its dead weight is held by the bridge, legs too worn and weak.

And thus, for the first time in over a decade, Morando once more stands in the world.

It’s disorienting. What happened? Where is he? Images flash through his head, real and imagined, and he shivers at them, unsettled.

Was he asleep?

He thinks he was dreaming…

Though perhaps ‘dream’ isn’t quite the right descriptor for the sensations in his head.

In the dark of the night, I was tossing and turning.
And the nightmare I had was as bad as could be.

He goes to wipe off some of the mud, trying to make sense of those images, piece together everything.

It scared me out of my wits; a corpse falling to bits.

And when he raises one hand to brush off the opposite sleeve, he stops, horror dawning at the realization, everything falling into line like a slip knot pulled.

Then I opened my eyes, and the nightmare was me!

Dead.

He was dead.

His exposed joints crackle as his fingers curl into a fist, rage swelling within him.

He then grabs for the Reliquary.

Did he succeed? What happened between his fall and now? How long has it been?

He opens his mouth to try to speak, and his vocal cords creak like old, rusty pipes, not wanting to cooperate, stiff and frozen from so many years of disuse and bitter temperatures. After a moment, though, he manages to force out sounds.

“Show me,” he hisses, his voice jagged, barely human. He doesn’t need to elaborate further, the Reliquary knowing implicitly.

The light spills out, swirling to coalesce into an image, or rather, a window. And through it, he sees the boy. The tsarevitch. All grown up. Alive.

He grits his teeth, a low growl escaping him.

So that’s why he never passed on, why he was trapped in this rotting shell for all these years.

His curse was never completed.

One of the Tarrons escaped.

And not just any Tarron, but the heir.

I was once the greatest mind in all Russia.
When the royals betrayed me, they made a mistake.
My curse made each of them pay, but one little boy got away.

His snarl then quirks, something curling delightedly in his chest.

After all, he’s back now, brought back by the instrument of his vengeance.

And so his vengeance can once more reign.

Little Krel, beware, Morando’s awake!

He turns his eyes to the palace.

He can’t operate out here in the open. Can’t take the chance of someone stumbling upon him.

But he knows of a place.

And there’s nowhere better for him to work from than the very place he killed the rest of the Tarrons.

In the dark of the night, evil will find him.
In the dark of the night, just before dawn.
Revenge will be sweet when the curse is complete!
In the dark of the night, he’ll be gone!

It takes far longer than he’d like, but Morando manages to drag himself unseen into the palace, going in through a hidden back way long forgotten. Perhaps he should be worried about the trail of mud and plant matter left in his wake, but he’s not. The streets are dirty, and the snow still falls—those will disappear soon enough.

From there, it’s easy; the entire place is utterly deserted. A shell filled with ghosts, the remnants of blood staining the beautiful marble like sweet ambrosia, the image of the Tarrons with their bodies broken and torn open, innards glistening in the warm light of candles and chandeliers…it’s enough to chase away even the worst of his unliving nightmares.

As he goes, he feels a semblance of warmth returning to his limbs, sinking through frozen solid skin and into partially rotted muscles. His drags become steps, and he stops needing to rely on walls and railings for his balance, which in turn allows the fire within to spike higher, glee combining with the rage into a potent blaze.

I can feel that my powers are slowly returning.
Raised from the grave and stoked in the fires of hell.
As the pieces fall into place, I’ll see him crawl into place!
Do svidaniya, Krel, Your Grace, farewell!

In the deepest depths of the palace, deeper than most ever knew existed, a place not even the best schematics will include, Morando finds his lair exactly as he left it—not the one Coranda ransacked when she discovered him, no, but his true lair, the one he hid in when they banished him, the one where he kept his darkest secrets, where he committed his gravest sins. The walls are lined with books and artefacts on the dark arts, everything and anything a person could need to make their wildest dreams come true, to force the world to bend to their will, to bring reality to its knees, for those powerful enough. Things he aspired to, things he dreamed of becoming powerful enough to do, especially once the tsar and tsarina were under his thrall, completely and utterly. Then he had to go and get caught and then die.

Perhaps he should have done everything here. It would’ve been smarter. But he got too comfortable as his plan neared fruition, too cocky. And at the time, he had rather his lair proper not be filled with the stench of rotting bodies.

He grimaces at the thought.

Oh, the irony.

But such trivial things don’t matter anymore.

Not when he still has one more wretched Tarron to wipe from the face of the Earth.

In the dark of the night, terror will strike him.
In the dark of the night, devilry brews.
Soon, he will feel that his nightmares are real!
In the dark of the night, he’ll be through!

He takes the Reliquary from his neck and sets it upon the table at the center of the room, sturdy and made of stone, cold and coated in dust, cobwebs woven between the legs. All it takes is a bit of brushing to uncover the runes carefully carved, the incantations set into stone, and still stained with the blood he used to enchant them. Once more, the Reliquary’s light swirls to open that window, showing Morando the prince with two strangers in what appears to be a vehicle, the images outside the window flashing by faster than Morando can make sense of them, the three men sitting in padded booths.

A train.

He can work with that.

Oh, how he can work with that.

In the dark of the night, evil will find him.
In the dark of the night, out of the blue.
Tsarevitch, here’s a sign, it’s the end of the line!

He takes another deep breath, just as physiologically useless as his first, with his lungs empty and still, though he cannot deny how it steadies his mind, and extends his hands over the Reliquary. The magic tingles in his fingers, both those of flesh and those of bone, before shooting up his arms, streaks of pure, fiery-hot energy racing through him.

He can’t help but grin—well, he gets as close as he can to a grin, what with him missing chunks out of his face.

“Come, my OMENs, rise for your master, let your evil shine!”

Shapes emerge from the light this time, all spilling out as if they had been compressed within, now springing for the first freedom they’ve had in years. They funnel upward, whirling around each other, screeching and cawing in malicious delight.

“Find him now, yes, fly ever faster!”

They then phase through the stone ceiling, one after another, an endless stream scrambling to do his bidding, almost begging to do his bidding. He can feel their excitement within him, vibrating, almost too much for them to contain, that sheer glee at fulfilling their purpose once and for all.

“In the dark of the night, he’ll be mine!”

///

As Douxie gets their luggage taken care of, Jim goes straight to adjusting their documents. His and Douxie’s are mostly filled out, so it’s really just Kirill’s that needs doing, but he doesn’t want to dawdle. Doing so is a great way to invite a passport check to happen then and there.

He writes down ‘Kirill’, careful to make the letters as smooth and official-looking as possible, but not too perfect, and then pulls off the top of his head ‘Ivanov’—throw a dart anywhere in Russia and you’ll more than likely either hit an Ivanov or someone who knows an Ivanov.

As he’s doing this, Kirill’s dog, Luug, as Jim has learned he’s called, curls up next to Jim and across from Kirill, basking in the afternoon light that’s spilling in across the seat.

Jim then glances at Douxie, who’s standing in the doorway. The younger man is looking at Luug with an expression on his face that tells Jim that Douxie had wanted to sit by the window. But he says nothing, appearing to accept that the dog’s got dibs, and takes his seat across from Jim and next to Kirill.

There’s a moment of silence, all of them settling in for the long ride.

And of course, Jim can only shake his head when Douxie has to fill it.

“So…you know, you should probably try to sit up straight,” Douxie says, looking at Kirill. “Bad posture doesn’t exactly scream ‘prince’.”

Oh boy.

Kirill slumps further into his seat, crossing his arms. “And how do you know what princes do or don’t do?”

“I’ve made it my business to know,” Douxie says.

“Right, right,” Kirill says, unconvinced.

“I’m just trying to help,” Douxie says.

“Is that so?” Kirill says. “Well, do you really think I’m royalty?”

“You know I do,” Douxie says, and Jim has to physically restrain himself from rolling his eyes. Douxie’s just walked right into this one.

“Then stop bossing me around,” Kirill says. “You’re acting above your station.”

Douxie wumps back against his seat with a groan.

Jim adds another tick to his mental tally. Kirill: 12. Douxie: 0. And they only just met the man.

Though he expected nothing less. Douxie’s great; he’s clever, hardworking, caring, and loyal to a fault. But Jim has known the kid for fifteen years, and so he knows that Douxie can be…not the brightest at times. Certain things can make that better or worse. An example of the latter, the presence of an attractive young man with a tongue as sharp as his intellect.

As, if there’s one thing Jim’s learned about Kirill thus far, it’s that while he’s not the greatest with people, he’s smart. Like, genius-level smart. For every ounce of social awkwardness Jim’s witnessed, Kirill’s got tenfold the brains. And he’s also utterly unafraid to voice exactly what he thinks. Which has been amusing to watch around Douxie, to say the least.

The time passes. Afternoon shifts towards evening. Jim finishes up their papers with no sign of a check and so decides to go inspect the dining car, Luug on his heels. And during this, Douxie decides to try talking to Kirill again.

“So, I think we got off on the wrong foot earlier,” Douxie says.

“Really? Never would’ve guessed,” Kirill says, not looking up from his book.

“Are you like this all the time?” Douxie asks.

“You are looking at a professional at sarcasm, snark, and the occasional sardonicism,” Kirill says, and he can’t help but take pleasure in the groan from Douxie at that.

“Sardonicism,” Douxie says, “now that’s a hundred-ruble word.”

“ ‘Tis but a mere glimpse into my voluminous menagerie of sumptuous vocabulary,” Kirill says, which earns him a snort from Douxie. There’s a beat of silence after that, and Kirill figures he should probably make an effort to be friendlier than he has been—they’re gonna be stuck on this train together for a while, after all. “So…you gonna miss it?”

“Miss what?” Douxie asks.

“Russia,” Kirill says, finally putting down his book and gesturing out the window.

“No,” Douxie says with a scoff.

“But it was your home,” Kirill says.

“It was a place I lived,” Douxie says. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

The last time it felt remotely like a home was before the revolution, before that night, and even then, he was a serving boy. He had friends amongst the other children and got somewhat of an education that he enjoyed, reading, writing, some literature and history, stuff like that—a servant to literal royalty couldn’t be anything but of the highest caliber—but he was still just a servant. He didn’t even have family—his parents both died from typhoid fever before he was old enough to remember them. The same illness that took Jim’s mother as well, according to his friend.

“Then Paris is going to be your home?” Kirill asks.

“Why’s that even matter?” Douxie asks with a shrug. His tone is apathetic, teetering on dismissive, and something flares hot inside Kirill.

“Well, unlike you, apparently, some people would do just about anything to find a home, a place to be genuinely loved and to actually belong in,” Kirill snaps, taking Douxie aback, his reaction far more volatile than Douxie had expected.

Kirill stands with a huff and all but storms out of the compartment, just as Jim returns.

“Sheesh, what’d you do?” Jim asks.

“Why do you automatically assume I did something?” Douxie asks.

“Have you met yourself?” Jim says. “Especially when you’re around someone you find attractive.”

“Excuse me?” Douxie splutters.

“Come on,” Jim says. “I’ve known you for fifteen years, Doux, including every minute of your frankly exhausting adolescence. I know your type when I see it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Douxie says.

“Right, and I’m the king of England,” Jim says.

“Nothing of the sort is going on—this is a job, and I am a professional, thank you very much,” Douxie says.

“Just like you were a professional with your little Lad o’ Fortune schtick when you were fifteen?” Jim teases.

“Shut up,” Douxie says, and Jim just laughs.

///

It’s deep into the night when the passport check finally comes.

Hearing people talking further along in their car, Jim takes out their papers and opens the door to be ready. Finally. He has no idea why it’s taken so long; he’s exhausted from having stayed up waiting, but it’s finally here, so sleep is in sight.

Only, while doing so, he hears a couple up ahead talking, already waiting, and what they say sends a shiver down his spine, banishing the exhaustion.

“Red? I thought our passports were done in blue?” the woman asks.

“They changed it last month,” the man says. “It’s why I had to—”

Jim pulls back into the compartment and does his best to shut the door as nonchalantly as possible to avoid attention.

“We have a problem,” he then says, turning around to look at Douxie.

“What’s wrong?” Douxie asks, sitting up from where he’d slumped down in a half-slumber. He was trying to stay up with Jim, just so he wouldn’t be alone, but he’d finally started to succumb.

“Well, it’s what’s wrong with our government,” Jim says with a grimace, flipping open one of their passports to show Douxie the blue ink. “Everything’s in red.”

“Red?” Douxie says, now fully alert. “Shit.”

“I propose we move to the baggage car quickly before the Taylons come,” Jim says.

“I propose we get off this train,” Douxie says.

“If you want to make that jump, be my guest,” Jim says, quickly shoving the papers and the odds and ends that had made their way out back into his suitcase.

As they frantically try to get everything in order to move, Luug is looking out the window. There’s an eerie red cast that’s descended over the nearby landscape, making the snow they travel by look closer to a murder scene. In the crimson glow, shapes move, strange and unsettling. These ghostly forms fly and climb as they swarm, snarling and cackling in unearthly tones that his ears can just barely pick up, and around them, Luug can feel the fast-box shudder oddly. He barks, his hackles raising, but the humans pay no attention to his alert, seeming not to notice anything.

Once their stuff is all good to go, Douxie turns his attention to Kirill, who’s fast asleep on the seat, his coat draped over him as a blanket. He reaches out to shake Kirill awake, but mere moments after his hand makes contact with Kirill’s shoulder, Kirill’s arm flies out, whacking him hard in the face with an audible slap. He reels back with a shout, hands going to his face as a reflex, hot pain radiating through his nose. The backs of his knees make contact with the other seat, and he falls into it as Kirill shoots up, looking around.

“What’s going on, what happened?” Kirill asks.

“I think you broke my nose!” Douxie groans, the words nasal through his hands.

“Whoops,” Kirill says, not sounding sorry whatsoever.

“Just—come on,” Douxie says with a frustrated sigh. He gets back up and grabs Kirill by the wrist with one hand, the luggage with his other, and so follows Jim. “We gotta go.”

Kirill staggers after him, barely able to get a hand on his coat before he’s dragged out of the compartment, Luug on his heels, yipping and whining.

They don’t slow for a moment, Kirill doing his best to rewrap himself as they go so as to not lose any of his stuff, until they’ve closed the door behind them to the baggage car. Good thing about the baggage car, their papers won’t be checked, as no one will come here until it’s nearly time to disembark. Bad thing about the baggage car, it’s not heated since there’s not meant to be anyone riding in it.

“Yes, this should do nicely,” Douxie says, trying to play down their situation as he sets his stuff down to pull his coat tighter around himself.

“The baggage car?” Kirill says, giving Douxie a look that says he’s not buying his shit for a moment. “There wouldn't be anything wrong with our papers now, would there, maestro?”

“Of course not, Your Grace,” Douxie says. “I just—I hate to see you forced to mingle with all those commoners, is all.”

Kirill rolls his eyes at the same time Jim does, and Douxie feels rather ganged up on.

During all of this, Luug’s barking never stops. If anything, it only grows higher and higher-pitched and more and more incessant. Finally, Kirill looks down at his dog to try to figure out what’s wrong.

But there’s a sudden lurch, the car jerking and jolting, throwing them down along with all of the luggage around them.

“What was that!?” Douxie says, now half buried.

“Whatever it was, there goes the dining car!” Jim says. Having been spared the worst of the spill, he finds himself staring through where the door just was, now ripped from its hinges and lost somewhere on the tracks, at the swiftly vanishing form of the dining car, and the rest of the train behind it, the connection between the cars utterly shattered by…

Well, Jim has no idea.

No idea, just a very, very bad feeling.

“Get off of me!” Kirill says, and it’s only then that Douxie realizes he’s on top of Kirill, both of them a tangle of limbs, pinned down by various suitcases and boxes.

“I’m trying!” It takes some less-than-graceful flailing from both of them to free themselves, the growing bumping and rattling of the car not helping them.

While those two sort themselves out, Jim goes over to the opposite door as well as he can, almost unable to keep his balance with how destabilized the car has suddenly become. Luug now stands at this door, too spared from getting squished, still barking his head off, though the barks have grown to full-blown distress.

He looks out the small window in the door.

And it feels as though the bottom of his stomach has fallen out completely.

“Uh, Doux?”

“What?” comes an annoyed huff behind him.

“I think someone has flambéed our engine.”

Kirill and Douxie, finally free, both rush over as Jim pulls the door open, a wave of heat washing in, hitting them like a physical wall.

Outside, there are pops and bursts of sparks coming from the engine that ping off the metal of the baggage car, the coal visibly and audibly sizzling. The scene glows an orange that ignites a primal fear deep within, the scent of burning only compounding it.

“Holy fuzzbuckets,” Douxie says.

“Outta my way,” Kirill says, stripping off his coat and scarf—he doesn’t need loose clothing catching on fire right now—and shoving past the pair to jump across the gap and scale up the back of the engine.

“What are you doing!?!” Douxie shouts out.

“Takes an engineer to figure out an engine!” Kirill calls back, not bothering to wait for a reply.

He takes off over the coals, keeping his footsteps quick to prevent the soles of his shoes from totally melting. Once on top of solid metal, he swings down through the open side door to find what he can only describe as a nightmare.

There’s no one here, not a single other person, and no sign of anyone having been here at all. All of the mechanisms within are glowing red hot, steam hissing and more sparks popping and pinging all around him. One of the gauges cracks and then bursts, sending out a blast of hot flames that nearly singe the ends of his hair and glass that catches in his clothes, nicking him in a few places along his arms and a long scrape over his cheek, adding the scent of wet iron to the scents of burning coal and melting gears.

“Dammit, Douxie!” Jim shouts over the roar of the engine, restraining the other from going after Kirill.

“We can’t just let him go alone!” Douxie says. “He’s our Prince Krel, and he could be killed!”

Kirill’s not even the real prince, but Douxie can feel that old panic bubbling up from deep down where he’d shoved it.

“He said he’s an engineer, and you are not!” Jim says. “I don’t need both of you dying!”

Douxie can’t let this happen.

“We’re probably gonna die anyway!” Douxie says.

Not again.

“Nobody’s driving this train!” The sudden third voice makes both men jump, and they look to see Kirill quickly descending back down the engine. He leaps back across, cutting between them, now with a bunch of small, crispy rips along his sleeves and a gash across one cheek that’s slowly weeping crimson. “We’re gonna have to jump!”

Kirill rushes over to the side to throw up the loading door.

Unfortunately, though, all three look out to find that their speed has dramatically increased. To the point that they’d be splatters on the ground if they tried to jump out.

“Maybe we uncouple the car instead,” Douxie says.

Luug’s bark turns into a full-blown howl. More of that snarling and cackling from earlier assaults his ears, this time with hissing and screeching, now so close that it hurts. He howls and howls and howls as those red forms from earlier reappear, swarming the connection between the cold fast-box and the hot fast-box, an acrid, acidic scent overwhelming his nose as they melt the two boxes together. They then flee as fast as they came, diving below the hot fast-box, gone before the humans can register their presence.

Douxie shoves past Kirill this time, hopping out to find the metal of the connection all mangled.

“I need a wrench, an axe, something!”

“Just let me do it!” Kirill yells.

“I can handle this!” Douxie yells back.

Kirill knows he’s a man, too, but men, he swears.

“Here!” Jim says. He pulls open a crate and hands Douxie the first tool he finds within, a hammer.

Douxie starts going at the welded metal while Kirill searches for something better. His eyes land on a box marked with DANGER – EXPLOSIVES.

Perfect.

Douxie grunts in frustration when the hammer in his hands breaks, the tool too flimsy to make any headway against whatever the fuck’s been done to the connectors.

“Come on, there’s gotta be something better in there!” he calls back, trying to analyze the mess for somewhere better to strike, but finding nothing.

“Here,” Kirill says, sounding all too smug as he places something in Douxie’s hand.

A new hiss hits Douxie’s ears, and he looks up to find a lit stick of dynamite in his hands.

“…That’ll work.” He jams it into the muddle of metal as best as he can and then dives back into the baggage car, Jim slamming the door shut behind him. “Go, go, go!”

They all run to the very back of the baggage car, crouching down behind all the crates that got scattered when the car first detached from the rest of the train, Kirill scooping Luug up in his arms to try and help shield him.

“What do they teach you in those orphanages?” Douxie asks.

“That wasn’t the orphanage—that was all me,” Kirill says with a devious grin that does not make something in Douxie’s chest flutter weirdly. Not at all.

The explosion rocks the car, and cold winds cut in through the large chunk of the front half of the car that’s now gone.

Jim springs into action, going for the emergency brake that is—

That was near the front of the car. The handle’s still mostly there, but the mechanism itself has been completely blown out. “Uh, bad news, no brakes!”

“Well, uh, we’ve got plenty of track, yeah? We’ll coast to a stop, easy,” Douxie says.

There’s a sound of a screech, something animalistic but not like any animal Douxie’s ever heard, and then the car gives another mighty lurch, throwing them all to the floor once more. Close as he is to the ground, Luug gets his bearings the fastest and so is the only one to witness what happens next.

He barks as loud and hard as he can, trying to alert the humans. Living red light cascades through the night sky, zipping far ahead of them, to coalesce at the bridge they can see up ahead, spanning the gap between two cliffs over a river. The red light gathers into one monstrous, hulking form, some sort of misshapen animal. It lets loose a howling roar that seems to shake the mountains themselves as the glow bursts through the bridge, taking it out from surface to base, the wood and metal splintering and exploding, some of it even just flat out disintegrating within the light. The creature then fades from existence, leaving only spots in Luug’s vision and a gaping hole in the bridge.

Kirill’s the first back on his feet, scooping Luug back up into his arms, and so is the first to see it.

“Oh, kleb.”

Douxie and Jim follow his gaze to find their predicament, horror lancing through them both.

Douxie looks around frantically. New idea. They need a new idea, and fast.

There’s a coiled chain near the back—an anchor!

“Jim, help me out,” he says. He runs to the back and hops out the blown-out door, hanging on with one hand, bracing his feet against the back, which takes nearly all his strength. “Hand me the chain!”

He reaches up, but the hand that places the chain in his own is not Jim’s.

“Jim’s a little busy,” Kirill says, having just shoved Luug into Jim’s arms. “At what point are you going to listen to the fact that I am the engineer here!?”

“I got this!” Douxie says, taking the chain. He dips down, throwing it around one of the supports on the underside of the car, doing his best to hang on while wrapping it as securely as possible.

A crack sounds out, and Douxie’s heart jams in his heart when he sees a broken section of the front catch momentarily on the track before getting completely ripped from the train.

A hand suddenly grabs his wrist and hauls up and out of the way just in time, the broken piece missing his head by a hair’s breadth.

He finds himself suddenly face-to-face with Kirill, a mere couple of inches between their noses. Another crack catches their attention, though, and both look back in time to see that broken piece take out a tree, the trunk snapping like a twig.

“And to think that could’ve been you,” Kirill says, pulling him the rest of the way in.

After a stunned moment, Douxie clears his throat awkwardly and brushes off his shirt and vest. “If we live through this, remind me to thank you.”

Together, the pair of them shove the anchor out of the car and watch with bated breath.

For a moment, hope flickers as it catches onto one of the crossties, the chain unspooling behind it.

The flicker is just as quickly extinguished, though, as the speed and force prove to be too much, the chain yanking taut and the anchor instead ripping up the track.

With the track destroyed behind them, the rail beneath them loses all support, and the wheels of the car jump, the car swerving to skid longways, all of them flung against the far side wall, the last side of the car not open to the elements.

Kirill does a couple of quick calculations—with the drag, they’re now going slow enough that they probably won’t die on impact.

“Well,” he says, fighting the unsteady motion of the car to reach for their luggage, thrusting various pieces into various arms, grabbing his coat and scarf from where he’d abandoned them, and making sure Jim’s still got Luug, “looks like this is our stop!”

Kirill then grabs hold of an arm of each man and takes a leap of faith through the still-open side door.

They tumble through the snow, luggage flying, until they come to a rolling stop.

The three then can only watch as the engine and, shortly thereafter, the baggage car go flying over the edge of the broken bridge, all loud rumbles and sparks and squeals of metal until an explosion rocks the land, the engine having hit the cliffside, a fireball and subsequent mushroom cloud flying up into the sky.

///

“Kleb!”

How could the OMENs have missed!? How could the pathetic little prince have escaped all that!?

Morando can only snarl, practically foaming at what’s left of his mouth in his fury, as he watches through the magical window. The prince and his two idiots look bruised and confused, the prince himself bearing a few scrapes, contusions, and light burns, but ultimately no worse for wear.

“So…what the hell just happened?” the prince asks as they pick themselves up, brushing off snow.

“I don’t know if I actually want to know,” Beard Idiot says.

“Well,” Tall Idiot says, “whatever it was, what I know is that I am never getting on a train again—”

With a growl, Morando lashes out, slashing a hand through the window and closing it, cutting off the sound of Tall Idiot’s voice.

With the magic thread broken, though, he finds himself unable to stand a moment longer, crumpling to the floor, not a muscle responding to a single command, not even his eyes capable of opening. It’s as though he’s suddenly become paralyzed, though he can still feel the stone floor against his skin and exposed flesh and bones. But he hasn’t the energy to even panic. He hasn’t any energy at all—

Ahh. He understands.

It appears that he must be more careful with his energy allocation. The Reliquary is what brought him back and sustains his lifeforce, so the more energy from it he uses for his spells and OMENs, the less energy he has for himself.

He’ll need to recharge for a while after all it took to destroy the train and the bridge.

On the bright side, this gives him time to rethink his approach. The prince is smarter and more capable than he bargained for; sure, he’d heard all about just how brilliant the tsarevitch was back when he was a child, back before Morando was cast out, but he’d honestly believed that to be the typical boot-licking, as he made it his mission to avoid as much interaction with the children as possible outside of his healings—he’s always found children disgusting. But it appears it wasn’t just boot-licking. And the prince’s years as a poor orphan have only thickened his skin to add to his natural intelligence.

But it’s fine, it’ll be fine. The brat might be sharp and have a trick or two, but he’s still beneath Morando, a soft, pathetic Tarron. He doesn’t have access to a fraction of the power Morando does. Morando just needs to concoct a more tailored plan of action.

The prince can think on his feet, and his idiots aren’t useless either. Morando needs a way to avoid these obstacles, a way to catch the prince unawares and alone, vulnerable…

///

“So, what, are we walking all the way to Paris?” Kirill asks.

“No, we’ll take a boat in Germany,” Douxie says.

“Then we’re walking to Germany?” Kirill says.

“No, Your Grace,” Douxie says. “We’ll take a bus.”

“A bus,” Kirill says. “Where’s the bus?”

“Wherever the nearest civilization is,” Jim says, cutting in. Their back and forth can be amusing, but he just nearly died and has a headache, and is even more exhausted. “So, we might as well just get used to walking.”

Luckily for them, where they crashed wasn’t actually too far out in the wilderness. They’re still fairly in the middle of nowhere, but it doesn’t take more than an hour or two to find a trail that they can follow, and once on the trail, near dawn, they find a farmhouse. The owner graciously allows them to rest within after getting a look at their sorry state, and the three catch some much-needed sleep.

Kirill also gets the scrape across his cheek looked at during their short stay, Douxie dabbing at it surprisingly gently, brows furrowed slightly as he does so. It’s far from the worst injury Kirill’s ever gotten, and frankly, he thinks it would’ve been just fine, but Douxie insists on fretting (though he emphatically denies his fretting when Kirill calls it out).

The owner also lets them know that they’re in Poland. Which isn’t Germany, but it’s next to Germany, so they all consider it a win—or at least, not a loss.

When they set back off, the journey is much more pleasant. Unlike in St. Petersburg, spring has begun to encroach here. Walking goes faster without the snow to drag at their feet, and there’s an invigorating relief at the respite from the bitter cold, now replaced by the edges of warmth. They all feel lighter than before, even with having to carry their own stuff, lighter without the weather or the guards breathing down their necks.

As the time goes by, Douxie interrogates Kirill, because he has just learned some things about Kirill with zero context, and he thinks he deserves some. Apparently, Kirill taught himself everything he knows about engineering and mechanics—it was a special interest of his growing up on the streets and then in the orphanage, something he thinks he carried over from his life before, as he already had some tinkering knowledge that he had no idea where he got. Over the years, he made himself into quite the prodigy at it, along with math and physics, which always just came naturally to him. He fixed up a good amount of the orphanage during his time there (which was especially critical in the few adult years he spent there when he couldn’t afford to fully move out—and was the only reason ‘Comrade Gladysgro’ allowed him to stay) and had even built some machines of his own when he had the time and space to do so (though all were taken apart eventually for spare parts for repairs and whatnot). Douxie doesn’t know what he expected to learn about Kirill, but he can’t say him being an expert engineer and mechanic was on the list.

It takes five days to reach the next major landmark—the Oder River. They spend their nights in the small villages they come across, in one of which they also got their hands on a map, allowing them to really make a plan instead of wandering aimlessly:

1. Continue west to cross the Oder River
2. From there, get to Strasburg, Germany
3. Strasburg to Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg-Strelitz
4. Neubrandenburg to Waren in Mecklenburg-Schwerin
5. Waren to Güstrow
6. Güstrow to Schwerin
7. Schwerin, through Schleswig-Holstein, to Hamburg
8. In Hamburg, catch a boat to Le Havre, France
9. Le Havre to Rouen
10. Rouen to Paris

They’ll be in the city by about this time next month, give or take a few days, depending on how long it takes them to walk places and what transportation they find.

And Douxie and Kirill actually talk through most of the five days. There are, of course, natural lulls and stretches of companionable silence, but there’s just as much boisterous conversation; it turns out they actually get along really well when Douxie isn’t being dumb, and Kirill isn’t being preemptively antagonistic.

On day five, they spend most of the time in a relaxed quiet, taking in the lovely weather and scenery around them as the hours pass. The only one not doing so is Jim, who has been drifting further and further off into Jim-Land since they left the farmhouse. After all, Jim can feel it—true hope, true anticipation. This is the closest he’s gotten in so long, he can taste it, feel it, hear it.

Her.

“And what’s got you so cheery?” Kirill asks him at a stop along a dirt road in the shade of blooming deciduous trees. They find themselves by a river, over which an enclosed, wooden bridge can be found—according to their map, the Oder River. Thank kleb. Kirill sits perched on his bag as Douxie shakes rocks out of a shoe and Jim stares off into the distance with a dopey smile on his face.

“Claire,” Jim says with a smitten sigh.

“Who’s Claire?” Kirill asks.

“Who’s Claire?” Jim says. “Only the most exquisite—”                                                       

“Jim,” Douxie says, stuffing his shoe back on and scrambling over to the other before he can get too deep in his mooning. He puts a hand on Jim’s chest and hisses through his teeth, “Ixnay on the aire-Clay.”

“—smartest and most wonderful—” Jim continues, completely ignoring Douxie, moving around him to instead scoop up Luug and hug him with all his joy. He’s the closest to his beloved Claire that he’s been in fifteen years, and he’s not letting Douxie ruin it!

“Jim.”

“—and most beautiful woman, perhaps even more beautiful than her cousin, the empress herself—”

“She’s cousin to the empress?” Kirill asks, cutting off Jim’s gushing.

“Technically in law,” Jim says.

“I thought we were going to see the empress and her granddaughter,” Kirill says, only half listening to Jim. “Why are we going to see her cousin?”

Douxie groans.

“Douxie?” Kirill says, crossing his arms and arching an eyebrow.

“What? We can make two stops,” Douxie says with a nervous laugh. “Look at Jim! We couldn’t just not, you know?”

“Douxie,” Kirill says, pressing harder.

“Well…ok, so, no one gets near the dowager empress or the grand duchess without convincing Claire first,” Douxie says. According to his research when first putting this scheme together, at least, which was, in his opinion, quite thorough.

Kirill gives him a look that’s a rather impressive perfect mixture of unimpressed and incredulous. “Are you serious?”

Douxie gives him a smile.

“No,” Kirill says. “No, no, no. Nobody ever told me I’d have to prove myself the tsarevitch!”

“Look—” Douxie tries to cut in, but Kirill is not having it.

“Show up? Yes. Look nice? Fine. But lie to them?”

He’s had to lie before plenty, especially when he was on the streets, but…he doesn’t think he has it in him to break the hearts of the empress and princess, or possibly offend them.

“You don’t know it’s a lie,” Douxie says. “What if it’s true?”

Kirill levels him with a glare.

“Okay, so it’s one more stop on the road to finding out who you are,” Douxie says, trying desperately to salvage this. “I just thought this was something you had to see through to the end, no matter what.”

“Look at me!” Kirill says, gesturing to his ratty old clothing of browns and beiges. “I’m not exactly tsarevitch material!”

Kirill storms off over to the bridge.

And knowing Douxie is only going to fuck this up further, Jim goes after him.

He places a hand on Kirill’s shoulder and gently motions him to the rail of the bridge. Together, they look over into the water, running pure and clean, displaying their reflections peering back up at them.

“What do you see?” Jim asks.

“I see an awkward nobody with no past and no future,” Kirill says with a huff, trying and failing to conceal the ache in his heart.

“Well, I see an intelligent and fiery young man who has shown a regal command equal to any royal in the world,” Jim says. “And I have known my share of royalty.”

“You have?” Kirill asks, now looking at the older man. Jim isn’t that much older than him or Douxie, a decade or so, maybe, but in this moment, Kirill can see something in his eyes, a weight that ages him to the point Kirill feels as though he’s speaking with someone many, many years his senior.

“Oh, yes,” Jim says. “You see, I was a member of the imperial court.”

“You were?” Kirill asks, almost disbelieving. But it also makes some sort of sense.

“That’s right,” Jim says. “A member, and also quite the soldier, if you can believe that. I had a cordial relationship with the tsar and tsarina, and had a few brushes with the older princesses. In some morbid cosmic coincidence, the ones I never actually interacted with were the dowager empress or the twins—I saw them plenty, but the dowager empress always had her own guards and the twins were a bit young for the tsar and tsarina to trust with fresh-faced me yet.”

Which he fully understood. He was young and still in the beginning stages of training when the twins were born, bouncing all around Europe, though mostly between England, where he was born, and Russia, where much of his House lived at the time. And while he’d risen quickly through the ranks, he still had barely hit proper adulthood by the revolution. The only reason he had any interactions at all with the elder princesses was that they were all closer to his age—the age gap between the siblings wasn’t insignificant. There was a full decade between the twins and Davaros, twelve years between them and Izita, and nearly fifteen years between them and Zadra.

“And as a member of the imperial court, that’s how I know Claire—we were engaged to be married. It was an arrangement set up by our parents when we were young, but from the moment we met, I knew she was the one.”

It was like a fairytale. They met when they were only fifteen, but it was love at first sight, and it only grew stronger from there. They’d even had a wedding date set, picked out for years, both of them counting down until the day finally came. They’d gotten to the stage where they were making the arrangements and preparing things for the big day. They were so close. But the date ended up being on the wrong side of that fateful night.

“But, when the revolution happened, she was with her parents at their main estate in Madrid, while I was in St. Petersburg, though not at the tricentennial. I was with some soldiers elsewhere in the city checking out rumors. I often wonder what might’ve been if I had been at the palace that night like I should have…”

One of Jim’s greatest regrets in life. He was one of their best soldiers; he’s even a knight in his homeland of England (even though that’s not a fighting rank anymore—he’d like to think he made the original tradition of knighthood proud, back before the revolution in Russia). He should’ve been at the palace that night, he had been assigned to the palace that night. But he’d convinced the tsar to allow him to go and investigate the rumors of an uprising. Rumors that led him to the opposite end of the city, far from the royals, right where the Taylons wanted him.

He doesn’t know how much help he actually would have been, especially if the rumors of sorcery were true. But he could’ve tried. And maybe that would’ve made all the difference. Maybe he could have saved the royals. Maybe he could have prevented the loss of the prince. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

“…Anyway, I was trapped in Russia after that, as I discovered that amongst the myriad of stuff that was burned or stolen from the palace were basically all of my belongings. I had nothing. And I could hardly use my status as a member of the court to get out—it never felt safe enough, and even if it had, my status wouldn’t have extended to Douxie, and I wasn’t about to leave him behind.”

He was all Douxie had in the world. The moment he found him, half-concussed and clutching that jewelry box like his life depended on it, alone and afraid in that big, nearly empty palace, Jim swore to protect him and take care of him.

“I began sending Claire letters once word made it to Russia that the empress had reached France, and that la Dama Claire de la Casa de Nuñez had made her family’s Paris manor her permanent residence so she could help with Princess Aja, since the princess was still so young. But I have been unable to receive any letters in return due to a variety of factors. So, I don’t even know if she ever got them. I’ve been dreaming of reuniting with her for fifteen years, wondering if she got my letters, wondering if she was ok, if she was happy. And now, thanks to you, it’s finally happening.”

Kirill averts his gaze at this.

“You’re out of Russia,” Kirill says. “You can still see her without me.”

“What kind of person would I be if I didn’t return the favor?” Jim says. “Because of you, I get to see the love of my life again, the closest thing I still have to family in this world, aside from Douxie. It might take some effort to prove yourself and see the empress—but won’t that be worth it if you really are the prince? You’d be with your family again.”

“I don’t know how to be a tsarevitch,” Kirill says. “I can’t prove myself.”

“Ah, but remember what I just told you?” Jim says. “I was part of the imperial court. And Douxie, when he was a child, he used to work as a servant to the noble and royal houses. We can help you.”

“He’s right—you won’t have to do this alone,” Douxie says, joining them on the bridge on Kirill’s other side.

Kirill bites his lip and turns away from the two, hands going to his necklace.

“There is nothing left for us, for you, back in Russia,” Jim says. “All of our hopes and dreams have one destination—and that is Paris. And we’ll be with you every step of the way.”

Kirill looks at his necklace, at those words that have permanently imprinted themselves in his mind.

In Paris.

He turns back around to face them, a new determination in his face. “Well then, gentlemen…start your teaching.”

Jim and Douxie exchange a grin.

“Let’s begin, then, Tsarevitch Krel,” Jim then says, going over to pick up Kirill’s bag and handing it to him. He figures they ought to begin calling him ‘Krel’, at least aloud—get them all used to it. “You were born in a palace by the sea.”

“A palace by the sea?” Kirill says as he takes the bag. Then, the three once more set off. “Really?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Jim says. “You rode horseback when you were only three.”

“Horseback riding? Me?” Kirill can’t imagine that going well.

Jim can’t help but let out a little huff of laughter at the incredulous expression on Kirill’s face. “And the horse—”

“He was white,” Douxie says. He remembers that, at least. He saw them a few times, the twins on their horses, out riding together. Both had pure white steeds. Douxie always thought they were just so beautiful.

“You and your twin, Aja, used to terrorize the cook,” Jim says.

“Threw him in the brook!” Douxie says. He almost forgot about that! He and the rest of the servant kids had the afternoon off that day, and they got outside just in time to see the twins trip the head chef—who Douxie had always hated—and he fell face-first into the brook that was on the grounds! His yelling and spluttering as he wiped mud off himself, his clothes and hair soaked through, making him look like a wet rat, it was hilarious.

“Were we wild?” Kirill asks. He can’t see himself doing something like that. Unless the cook was an asshole. Or he was that bored. Or both. Ok, maybe he would’ve done something like that. Especially if it was something his twin Aja would’ve done too.

“Wrote the book!” Douxie says with a laugh. Truly, their shenanigans were prime entertainment for the servant children.

“But you’d behave when your parents gave that look,” Jim says. To an extent. He may not have had personal contact with the twins, but he heard plenty of stories, and yeah, their parents could wrangle them in, but even then, that was temporary. Sometimes very temporary.

“Imagine how it was,” Douxie says, “your long forgotten past.”

“We’ve lots and lots to teach you,” Jim says, “and the time is going fast.”

It doesn’t feel like it, but Kirill also knows Jim has a point. It might feel like they have forever, they have a month of travel ahead of them, but before they know it, they’ll be in Paris, and it’ll have felt like little to no time has passed at all. They can’t waste a moment.

“Whelp…” Kirill says, turning his eyes forward to the forest they’re now on the edge of, and beyond…well, the rest of Germany. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

As soon as they’re off the open road, a little further into the forest, it feels like the other two all but jump him with the flurry of their ‘teachings’.

“Now, shoulders back and stand up tall,” Jim says as Douxie takes Kirill’s bag. Jim then uses his hands to straighten up Kirill’s upper back and pull his shoulders into the ‘correct’ position. It’s not painful, but it certainly feels odd—if this is how he used to stand and walk, then he’s fifteen years out of practice, so it makes sense.

“And do not walk, but try to float,” Douxie says. He then ushers Kirill over to a fallen log, and Jim helps him up before he can even say or do anything, and then Douxie places a stick he finds on the ground atop Kirill’s head.

Kirill does his best to do what they’re telling him, maintaining the posture, trying to take light, even steps while keeping his balance on the log and balancing the stick on his head. “I feel a little foolish. Am I floating?”

“Like a little boat,” Jim says. And Jim is honestly impressed—Kirill picked the walk up quite fast, especially with how they put him in hard mode on the log (which Luug has elected to join, trotting along behind Kirill with his own head held high, as if in mimicry of Kirill’s posture). The ‘throw them into the deep end’ method isn’t for everybody, but it seems to suit Kirill, which is good, since they don’t have multiple months for full-blown, from-the-ground-up etiquette lessons.

When Kirill hops down off the other end, where Jim waits, Douxie comes around to his side once more to remove the stick from his head. “You give a bow.”

Kirill looks between the two men before giving a rather stiff bow to Jim.

“What happens now?” he asks.

Jim pulls him back upright. “Your ring receives a kiss.”

Douxie suddenly grabs his wrist to hold his hand up and leaves a light peck on his currently ringless finger, done so quickly that Kirill can barely register it before it’s over and Douxie and Jim are continuing onward, sweeping right past it.

“Most of all, remember this,” Jim says, “if I can learn to do it, you can learn to do it.” He wasn’t the worst at this sort of stuff by any means, but neither did he take to it like a fish to water. He was always better at the chivalry and gentlemanly stuff and worse at the propriety and decorum stuff. If he could learn the right way to hold himself and when to stuff his mouth, no matter how much the other person deserved it—something he still isn’t amazing at, but he’s also out of practice—Kirill can learn too.

“Something in you knows it,” Douxie says. Kirill can’t be Krel, but he thinks Kirill’s starting to believe he actually might be, so might as well tap into that, potentially inspire some confidence that way. “There’s nothing to it.”

“Just follow in my footsteps, shoe by shoe,” Jim says. “You can learn to do it too.”

The trek through the forest and the plains on the other side takes another two days, during which Kirill practices his posture and just overall physicality, how to walk like a royal, how to sit like a royal, how to stand like a royal, because apparently, royals stand differently from peasants.

When they finally reach Strasburg, they’re all exhausted. They crash long and hard at the first place they find. The next day brings dread of more walking. But they’re in luck—they find a man who’s heading out to Neubrandenburg with a cart of wares who lets them ride along for a small bit of pay. It’s not comfortable, but it is worlds better than walking.

Of course, this gives them the opportunity to introduce some new stuff to Kirill: table manners. They don’t have a table, but they did bring food with them, which is good enough for the general stuff.

“So, elbows in and sit up straight,” Jim says, once more maneuvering Kirill, pressing his elbows closer to his body and once more pushing at Kirill’s upper back to get him to straighten his spine. He’s still working on the posture thing—it’s hard to break fifteen years of habit, sitting hunched over what food he had in an instinctual effort to prevent the heat from escaping in the dead of winter.

“And never slurp the stroganoff,” Douxie says.

Stroganoff. Kirill’s always hated the stuff. So, he puts on his haughtiest voice, sticking his nose high in the air, and says as snootily as he can, “I never cared for stroganoff.” He also throws a scrap Luug’s way, as if tossing aside the offensive food.

“You said that like a royal tsar,” Jim says with a laugh and a playful push at his shoulder.

“The hot lapsha,” Douxie says, mind drifting off to the feasts of old. The servants got to eat what the royals and nobles didn’t—sometimes, depending on a few factors. He misses those days. The cook might have been an asshole, but damn did he know how to whip up a meal.

“The vatrushka,” Jim says, too pulled into the fantasy. When he was young, he actually got the cook—the one before the guy the twins pushed into a brook—to teach him a few things, and he really enjoyed it. That cook helped him bake his first vatrushka, and he remembers how it tasted to this day.

“A blin and then good night?” Kirill teases the two practically drooling men.

They both jolt out of their yearning reverie, and Douxie awkwardly flushes, but hits back, “Not until you get this right.”

Kirill flips him off.

They reach Neubrandenburg late into the evening, and it’s the largest place they’ve come across since they left St. Petersburg. It’s actually kind of nice. The quiet of nature was enjoyable, but Jim and Douxie can’t deny there’s something comforting about being back in the busier environment—though, of course, it’s not St. Petersburg-busy.

The next day, they manage to find a carriage to take them to Waren, which is far more comfortable than the cart, though also more expensive. They spend more time on eating etiquette, and about halfway through the day, Kirill’s about ready to dump his food over both their heads and let Luug at them.

“Tell me to sit up straight one more time,” Kirill says before Jim can make another move, and the murder in his eyes is enough for Jim to back off for a second and enough to make Douxie happy he hadn’t pushed when he made that comment back on the train.

“Alright, let’s calm down, take a moment,” Jim says. “Just remember, if I can learn to do it, you can learn to do it.”

In an attempt to compound on the message and hopefully provide some encouragement, Douxie echoes the message, “Seriously, if he can learn to do it, you can learn to do it.”

“Just pull yourself together, and you’ll pull through it,” Jim says, giving Douxie an eyeroll for his little jab, but electing to otherwise ignore it.

“Tell yourself it’s easy, and it’s true,” Douxie says. A manifest mindset!

Then, he finds himself reaching out, placing a hand on Kirill’s knee with a reassuring smile. “You can learn to do it too.”

And good gods, how is Kirill supposed to grumble at that?

So, with a sigh, Kirill does his best to straighten up a little further.

It’s from Waren to Güstrow where things get a little tricky travel-wise. They end up having to split the journey into three parts—they hitch a ride out to the nearest small village, where they then must walk until they find another mode of transportation.

Which comes in perhaps the last form Kirill would ever expect.

On the second day of this length of the trek, Douxie disappears for a little while in one of the villages, and when he returns, he has with him three horses, one brown, one black, and one a grayish white. Kirill tries to ask where and how, but Douxie is tight-lipped, which only makes Kirill feel more nervous about it—he’s genuinely worried Douxie might have stolen them. But in the end, with Douxie’s insistence, and with Jim on his side, Kirill sets aside his apprehension, and they find themselves riding horseback the rest of the way, Jim taking the chestnut horse with Luug makeshiftedly strapped in (since the chestnut is the largest), Douxie taking the black, and Kirill taking the silver dapple.

And it’s one of the strangest sensations. Kirill is not an outdoorsy guy—at least, not an outdoorsy-activities guy. If it weren’t for Jim and Douxie telling him otherwise, he would’ve thought he’d never been so close to a horse as this a day in his life. But in the saddle—which he really thinks Douxie might have actually stolen, even if he didn’t steal the horses—it’s like his body remembers what his mind doesn’t. He can just tell what to do, how to keep his balance, how best to sit for his comfort and the horse’s, how to steer with the reins, all of it.

Douxie watches Kirill on the horse, rather awed by how naturally he takes to it. If you told him that this guy had had horseback riding lessons all his childhood, he’d honestly believe you. And there’s just something to Kirill that…well, he doesn’t know how to describe it. But whatever it is, it has Douxie’s eyes glued to the other man, watching him closely, enraptured by him.

Kirill can’t help but wonder about his rides as a child as they go. He probably went on them with Aja, right? He’d imagine so. Did he like horse riding, or was it more of a thing he had to do? What was Aja like with the horses? Was she better at riding? Worse? How often would they ride together? Was it anything like this, or was it totally different?

Hmm…

Aja was better than he was at horseback riding.

It hits him out of nowhere, and he is filled with total certainty. Her face and voice still elude him, but with a little thought, he is sure that she was better. More athletic in general. And that makes sense because he’s pretty average in most physical arenas, and below average in a few, so he can’t imagine he was this prodigy at horseback riding before. Yes, she was the better rider.

“Kir—Krel?”

Douxie’s voice pulls him out of his head, and he looks over to see Douxie’s sidled up next to him. Something about the image of dark-haired Douxie on a horse dark as midnight is just absolutely striking. But to offset this, Douxie is appearing to have a much…eh, rougher time with riding his horse.

“You’ve never been on a horse, have you?” Kirill asks. No wonder Jim insisted on taking Luug and the larger horse.

“Not a day in my life,” Douxie says. His legs are stiff and all but clinging to the horse’s ribcage for dear life, and he’s got the reins gripped so tightly in his hands that his fingers are turning white.

“The horse can tell if you’re nervous, you know,” Kirill says.

“And how do you know that?” Douxie asks. “You don’t remember anything.”

“No, but I have eyes that can see,” Kirill says.

At that moment, Douxie’s horse does a little hop over something in the road—a branch or something like that, he didn’t get a good look—and nearly scares the bejeebus out of Douxie in the process. He clings harder to the horse, entire body tensing up, waiting for the moment he’s flung off.

That moment never comes. But what does come is loud laughter.

He finally manages to open his eyes again to see Kirill laughing.

“Rude,” he says, but it lacks any bite. And when Kirill shoots him a smile, surprisingly warm, skin and hair turned caramel in the morning sunlight, perched perfectly atop his pale steed, a couple of words finally come to Douxie.

Stunning. Regal.

The only thing that breaks the vision is the clothes Kirill is wearing—ragged, patchy, not something a tsarevitch would wear. But there’s not much to be done about that right now.

Once in Güstrow, Kirill leaves it to Douxie to figure out what to do with the horses while he procures the transportation. It takes a little looking, but since their next destination is Schwerin, the capital of this region, he ends up finding someone not only willing to take them, but someone with their own automobile that’s just big enough for the three of them and Luug to squeeze in the back.

“Next, let’s memorize the names of the royalty,” Jim says once they’ve gotten on the road. In his hand, he has a book that he took out of his luggage before they stuffed all that around their legs and feet, and some in the front passenger seat. He flips it open and stops on a page with a basic diagram of some of the royalty of Europe. Jim then points to one, an older man who, despite his frail form, looks like he could beat you into next year and has a slightly unhinged look in his eyes. “Now, here we have Varvatos—”

“He shot a Zeron!” Douxie says. It was the talk of St. Petersburg in the immediate aftermath—a member of a royal family shooting and killing one of the more notorious members of one of their country’s political parties, now that is gossip.

“Allegedly,” Jim says. Then he points to a different man, this one square-faced and serious-looking. “And your dear Uncle Uhl loves his lager.”

“Got it, Kirill?” Douxie asks.

“Varvatos shot a guy, and Uhl likes to drink,” Kirill says, like Douxie’s an idiot for even asking.

“Allegedly shot a guy,” Jim once more corrects. “Very important distinction there.”

Douxie opens his mouth.

“Legally speaking,” Jim says.

Douxie shuts his mouth.

Then, Jim points to another, a squat, round-shaped man. “Lord Tobias—”

“—he is short,” Douxie says.

Jim then points out another man, heavier set in the face, his hair rather messy for a royal or noble. “And Baron Stuart—”

“—has a snort,” Douxie says.

“Countess Nancy—”

“—she wore that feathered hat,” Douxie says with a laugh, spotting her before Jim’s actually pointed to her. He remembers that well—she wore it to dinners quite a lot.

“You know, I’ve heard she’s gone mad as a bat,” Jim says, slightly lowering his voice. Not even chivalrous Jim can escape the urge to gossip.

A detail suddenly pops into Kirill’s head, random and small—he guesses Jim or Douxie must’ve mentioned it at some point. “And she had that Russian Blue cat!”

Jim exchanges a look with Douxie, both saying the exact same thing without words: ‘I don’t think we told him that.’

With the car ride, they arrive in Schwerin fairly early the same day that they left Güstrow, and they elect to take the rest of that day to rest, having been traveling near constantly since the train, only having stopped to sleep before setting off again.

They use the time to continue going through the royals with Kirill. Kirill’s picking it up quickly—not unexpected with how smart he is. If anything, Kirill’s now in his element, absorbing the knowledge from the books at speeds Jim and Douxie can barely comprehend.

“If you can learn to do it, I can learn to do it,” Kirill says with a smirk at their expressions.

But Jim is still rather distracted by that moment earlier. The cat. Because last time he saw her, Countess Nancy Domzalski did in fact have a Russian Blue, the eldest of her cats at the time, and it was the one he saw most. Was it known to the general public that the countess had these cats, that she had perhaps the prettiest Russian Blue that Jim has ever seen? He honestly has no idea. It’s possible.

This stay also allows them to drill Kirill more directly on table manners, putting together a makeshift mimicry of a royal table setting. Kirill finds it utterly annoying, as he doesn’t get to just eat—no, they tell him what it is that they’re setting in front of him (in reality, bland soup, but in imagination land, whatever highbrow dish they can think of) and he has to indicate the right utensil to use to eat it before he can—but he figures it best to just do it, if for no other reason than to prove he’s got this so they can stop going over it.

And honestly, Kirill doesn’t get what’s supposed to be so hard about this. Yeah, it’s unnecessary and a pain in the ass, but it’s fairly obvious to him which utensil (a.k.a. which stand-in for the utensils) to use when. After the first few tests, he actually starts feeling a little proud of it, as Douxie is gobsmacked that he just seems to know (as, apparently, although Douxie tried to learn, he never quite got it).

“I just don’t get how you knew that,” Douxie says in sheer disbelief.

“I simply knew it,” Kirill says with a shrug and a little bit of smugness.

And Jim didn’t have to remind him even once to sit up straight.

He also shows off his walk and his posture, balancing one of Jim’s books in lieu of a stick. It comes a lot easier than it did when they began. But then again, he began practicing the walk what feels like forever ago, and it’s not like it’s especially complicated.

Honestly, thinking about it, he feels really different from then. He feels surer in his step and in his self. Steadier. More comfortable. Not the Kirill that he was when he first left Russia. Not ‘Kirill the Orphan’.

Jim gives him a questioning look, and all Kirill can say is, “Suddenly…I feel like someone new.”

Douxie can believe it. Kirill doesn’t look any different outwardly, but it’s like there’s been some sort of transformation beyond the naked eye. He stands taller, presents himself prouder. Right before their very eyes, Kirill is transforming into a prince, and the plan is going better than Douxie could have ever imagined it would before they met Kirill.

“Kirill, you’re a dream come true,” he says, and he means it. Kirill is literally everything they were looking for and more.

Much more.

Then Kirill flushes, and then Douxie flushes when he realizes how that sounded, and then neither can look each other in the eye for the rest of the night (though that’s not to say they don’t steal glances—and that’s not to say that Douxie doesn’t think about the implications of those words, doesn’t think about the way they make him feel, the way they seem to have made Kirill feel).

In the morning, they catch a bus that’s Hamburg-bound—Hamburg, where their sea passage to France awaits them. When the city enters their view, all three can’t help but buzz with excitement. They’re almost there! One boat ride between them and France, and then it’s smooth sailing to Paris!

Once in the city, they head straight for the port, all three separating with an agreement to meet back up at a specific spot in an hour—they’re all excited, but they’ve also been in constant contact with each other for nearly two weeks now, and they’re going to be in a boat in the middle of the sea with each other for another two weeks, and Kirill needs at least one single moment where he is alone.

Well, Luug’s with him, but he doesn’t count, he’s a dog.

Jim doesn’t mind—he can more quickly book their passage and arrange things on his own, as well as look around at the vendors that are set up in the area.

Douxie doesn’t mind either—well, he does (and he got Kirill to agree to stay at the meeting spot to help assuage that), but…he saw something, and got an idea, and he doesn’t want Kirill hovering around him while he looks into it. It’ll only take him a minute.

Jim’s the first to return to the spot after about half an hour, three tickets in hand, passage booked on a one-way trip to Le Havre, France. He finds Kirill with one of his books out, Luug snuggled up beside him on the bench he’s found.

“Douxie’s not back yet?” he asks. He expected to be the last back.

Luug perks up at the sound of his voice and jumps down to come over, placing his paws on Jim’s legs for a head scritch.

“Not yet,” Kirill says. “Any idea what he’s up to?”

“Nope,” Jim says. “So, there’s an equal chance it’s nothing special, or we might need to bail him out of the local jail.”

“Hmm, comforting,” Kirill says.

“Yeah, he’s…spirited,” Jim says. “He dreams big and tends to not think before jumping in headfirst.”

“Hey, keeps you on your toes,” Kirill says, replacing his bookmark and closing the book. “Can’t imagine things get boring.”

“That they do not,” Jim says with a chuckle. He then picks up his cases—he figures he should be ready, the boat will start boarding soon.

Kirill looks at him for a moment, seeming to contemplate something, before standing and placing the book on top of Jim’s head.

“Um, what’s happening?” Jim asks.

“If I can learn to do it, you can learn to do it,” Kirill says. “I’ve been parading like a monkey for you, and you’ve talked some big game, so let’s see you actually take a crack at it.”

“Can I at least put the bags down?” he says.

“Just pull yourself together,” Kirill says, a smile cracking his face. “You’ll pull through it.”

“Come on—”

“Tell yourself it’s easy, and it’s true.”

“Ok, I don’t need both of you ganging up on me,” Jim groans at the sound of Douxie’s voice behind him.

“Walk for us, Jim,” Kirill says. “Make sure to keep your back straight. After all, there’s nothing to it. You can learn to do it too.”

Just then, there’s the loud sound of a boat horn.

“Whelp, that’s us,” Jim says, tilting his head so the book hits the ground before heading off toward the boat.

“Oh, come on, that’s not playing fair!” Douxie says as he and a laughing Kirill go after him, Kirill scooping up the book, Luug on their heels.

///

Aboard the ship, Jim shows them the room he managed to book. It’s not big and only has two beds that are a lumpy bunk, but it works, and all three of them are comfortable in it. It’s certainly better than Kirill’s room back at the orphanage, at least. And they’ve got a porthole window, which is nice.

They all set their stuff down, and Jim heads back above deck to talk to the captain or something—something to do with the trip, Kirill wasn’t paying that much attention if he’s being honest.

Kirill is the next to go to leave, wanting to check out more of the boat.

But he’s stopped out in the hallway.

“Here.”

Kirill finds Douxie suddenly in front of him, holding up some sort of clothing, a shirt that’s a muted blue and black slacks, as well as a pair of black shoes, none of which Kirill’s seen before, and he would’ve thought he’d seen all the clothing they packed by now with how long they’ve been traveling. They also look a lot nicer than anything any of them owns.

“I bought you a more, uh, suitable outfit for when we get to Paris.”

“Oh…”

That must be what Douxie was up to. Douxie was getting this outfit. For him.

Kirill takes the clothing from Douxie, finding himself at a loss for words. “They’re, uh…”

“Just put them on,” Douxie says, looking very awkward. “And meet us on deck. Uh, so we can see how they fit in good lighting, of course.”

Another awkward second passes before Douxie turns on his heel and walks up the stairs that lead to the deck, leaving Kirill standing outside their room with the clothes and Luug at his ankles, panting happily.

Kirill holds out the ensemble, looking it over thoughtfully. He looks down at Luug, who gives an approving yip.

Up on deck, Douxie finds Jim, and to pass the time, they settle down at a chessboard that’s been set up.

Which turns out to not be a great idea.

After about half an hour, with the shoreline vanished behind them, Douxie stares at the chessboard before him with all of his focus, analyzing where each piece stands, how Jim stares at his own pieces in contemplation. He’s not losing another game to Jim.

Jim picks up one of his knights. Douxie’s stomach drops, realizing it’s too late—Jim’s got him in checkmate.

Fuzzbuckets.

But they’re interrupted before Jim can finish the move.

“So? How do I look?”

Both men look over, and Douxie suddenly finds breathing a lot harder.

Kirill stands there in the ensemble he bought, the polished lace-up ankle boots and high-waisted black slacks making his legs look miles long and hugging his hips just right, adorned with a thick black leather belt and black suspenders. The tucked-in shirt is a button-up in a darker, muted blue with swirling patterns sewn along the edges in the same color but different, shinier material, and black buttons. Kirill has the sleeves rolled up, exposing his tan forearms, and the top two buttons are undone, giving just the barest peek at his collarbone, where that necklace still sits. He also has his hair cleaned and combed, a little longer now than it was when they first left Russia, grown just enough to now brush the tops of his shoulders in thick, decadent waves, fluffy as a cloud, rich as chocolate. In the fading light of the evening, his eyes are even darker, even deeper than usual.

Now this is a tsarevitch.

And Douxie is spellbound.

“Wow, you clean up nicely,” Jim says, setting his piece back down—though, setting it down in the checkmate position, sending a quick smirk Douxie’s way before getting up and going over to Kirill.

“You think so?” Kirill says.

“I know so,” Jim says. “And now, onto our next lesson—dancing. Douxie?”

The call snaps him out of his staring, and he stands and goes over, trying not to seem too giddy. What can he say, he doesn’t often get the chance to show off his dancing skills.

“Now, Krel should probably take the lead position, since he is the tsarevitch here,” Jim says, and the two of them slide into position surprisingly easily, Kirill’s hand and his finding each other without a hitch, his other hand going to Kirill’s shoulder and Kirill’s hand going to his waist in one fluid movement. The only snag is that Douxie is taller than Kirill, making the position feel a little stilted, but that’s easy to ignore.

“Ready?” Jim asks, and they both nod.

Jim begins counting, a steady waltz, and Douxie and Kirill fall into step.

Kirill can’t help but think back to that moment in the palace just before he met Douxie, how his feet moved in ways he hadn’t known—but he did. Somewhere deep inside, his body knew the movements, and here, they rise more readily to the surface, as natural as breathing.

“Doux, you’re leading,” Jim suddenly chides, and Douxie winces.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” Douxie says to Kirill. “I’ve just always enjoyed dancing, so I guess I just…”

“Well, let Krel lead, he’s in the leading position,” Jim says with a knowing smile.

With that, Jim restarts the count, and Douxie does his best to relax and allow Kirill to dictate the movement. He’s never followed before, actually, so it feels a little odd, though not unpleasant.

Unbeknownst to him, Kirill feels just as odd. For some reason, he has this feeling that he’s not a lead, that he’s never been a lead.

“So, you like dancing?” Kirill asks, trying to take his mind off the strangeness by latching onto that little tidbit about Douxie.

“I’ve always had a knack for music and music-adjacent stuff,” Douxie says.

“How has this not come up before?” Kirill says, something new sparkling in his eyes. “Play any instruments?”

“Several, actually,” Douxie says.

“I’ve always wanted to play an instrument,” Kirill says with a longing sigh. Though a tsarevitch probably learns one or more instruments in his youth. Maybe that’ll come back to him. He hopes so.

“Well, perhaps you’ll get the chance in Paris,” Douxie says. “I could even show you a thing or two if we get the opportunity.”

“Really?” Kirill says, a smile growing on his face.

“It would be my honor,” Douxie says, his own smile growing in turn.

And then, he forges onward before his nerves can get the best of him. “A-and, uh…well, uh, I just wanna say, I think the outfit looks really nice on you.”

“You do?” Kirill asks. A light blush dusts Kirill’s cheeks, joining that smile, and Douxie can’t help but internally crow and puff out his metaphorical feathers.

“Yes,” Douxie says. “I mean, the pieces were all nice when I picked them out, but they look even better on you. You should wear them.”

“I am wearing them,” Kirill says with a huff of laughter as he leads Douxie through a spin.

“Oh, right,” Douxie says, now probably flushed as well, though with embarrassment. “I-I’m just trying to give you a—”

“A compliment?” Kirill says, now with a teasing grin.

“Yeah,” Douxie says, breathless. But then, his eyes catch on something; he hadn’t noticed it before, but with how Kirill’s cleaned himself up, he can see it now—the edge of a scar that disappears beneath his hair. “What’s that on your temple?”

“Oh, uh…” Kirill says, faltering a bit. He’s always been a bit self-conscious about the scar. “It’s a scar from where I hit my head when I was little. The injury that wiped out my memories. At least, that’s what I’ve always assumed.”

A well-founded assumption, in his opinion, since it was fresh when he woke up in the hospital with no memories.

“…I can understand,” Douxie says after a moment. “What it was like for you.”

“How can you understand?” Kirill asks. He can appreciate some level of sympathy, but he finds it hard to imagine Douxie could possibly understand the true extent of what he went through.

“I mean, I didn’t lose my memory, but I got a head injury too, when I was little, during the Taylon Uprising,” Douxie says. “I woke up dazed and confused and alone in the dark, the entire place empty, a graveyard devoid of all life aside from myself, as if I were the last person in the world…Jim was the one who found me. I was too scared to leave on my own. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know what would have become of me.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence, Kirill staring at Douxie in a state of shock, their eyes locked together as their bodies continue to mindlessly move. And for the first time, Kirill feels truly seen.

Despite the tragedy of what Douxie’s just shared with him, Kirill feels a small smile pull at his lips.

And Douxie could swear it’s brilliant as the sun.

Jim watches them as they waltz, having long stopped his counting. They haven’t noticed at all, too wrapped up in the dance, in each other.

“It’s one, two, three, and suddenly, I see it at a glance. Kirill’s radiant and confident and born to take this chance.”

There’s a pawing at his leg, and Jim scoops up Luug without taking his eyes off the duo.

“I tried to think of everything, I just forgot romance.”

He had teased Douxie a few times, sure, but…he honestly hadn’t expected this. But now it’s clear as day in front of him, in how their eyes shine as they twirl, and he knows he was a fool for not anticipating it. How did he not see this growing? He was with them the entire time, all the signs were there!

“Jim, how could you do this? How will they get through this?”

God, he feels like he’s doomed them. In Paris…well, Kirill will go off with the empress and princess and Douxie…oh, Douxie…

“I never should have let them dance.”

Kirill feels hypnotized by the gold of Douxie’s eyes, molten in the twilight. “I…I’m feeling a little dizzy.”

“Kind of light-headed?” Douxie asks.

Kirill nods, mouth suddenly too dry to speak.

“Me too,” Douxie says, eyes never leaving Kirill’s. “Probably from all the spinning. Maybe we should stop.”

“We have stopped,” Kirill says, and Douxie blinks at him for a moment, the words taking a second to register. Kirill’s right—they’re not spinning, or even really dancing anymore. Just sort of standing there, their holds on each other loose, but their faces mere inches apart, closer than when they’d started. Neither knows when this happened.

“Kirill, I…”

“Yes?” Kirill says.

It’s like a magnet pulling him forward, Kirill leaning in as well, his eyes slipping closed. They’re so close, Douxie can feel Kirill’s soft breath across his face, warm and gentle. His own eyes start to close as well.

But Luug barks, and the sound jolts Douxie out of it.

He pulls back, and Kirill’s eyes open at the sudden loss of proximity.

“You’re doing fine,” Douxie says, turning back to the dancing, at a loss for what else to say.

With all the emotions now churning within, Douxie makes a swift exit, leaving Kirill, Jim, and Luug on the deck.

Kirill can’t help the disappointment that sits in his chest like a stone as he watches Douxie retreat.

///

Later in the night, the ship rocks on the waves, the North Sea roiled by the incoming storm.

Douxie lied down to sleep before either Jim or Kirill, so neither could argue with him about who was taking the floor, leaving the two of them to prepare for bed.

As Kirill runs the brush through his hair one more time, not wanting to give the tangles a head start, he glances up at Jim, who’s already claimed the top bunk and has been trying and failing to doze off, and he raises an eyebrow at the older man’s expression, his brows furrowed with a grimace.

“Are you all right?” Kirill asks.

“Fine,” he says before throwing a half-hearted glare at the fast-asleep form of Douxie, who is utterly undisturbed by the rocking and bumping. “Just envious. Look at him! He can sleep through anything.”

Kirill lets out a huff of laughter at this.

Around them, Luug snuffles, somehow finding ever more to sniff of their belongings even though he’s already run this inspection countless times. This time, though, Douxie left one of his bags open, presumably the one that held whatever sleep clothes he’s got on under his blanket. Luug stuffs his head in, his snuffles audible in their strength. Luug, however, didn’t think this fully through. When he tries to withdraw his head, his ears catch on the bag’s handles, and he quickly finds himself stuck. It’s only with a fierce flail and a less-than-dignified fall that he’s freed, along with most of the bag’s contents.

One item in particular catches Kirill’s attention, standing out quite starkly amongst the bits and bobs.

He takes it with careful fingers, an ellipsoid box of blue and gold with a squat, four-legged stand, about the size of his palm, delicate in its beauty.

“What is this?” Kirill asks, something tickling in the back of his mind, out of reach, but so close…

“A jewelry box, I believe,” Jim says. “It’s an artifact from the palace.” He still doesn’t like that Douxie’s not been completely truthful, but he said he would trust Douxie. He doesn’t know what Douxie’s plan is for the box in this circumstance aside from presenting it to the empress, so he figures it best to play this as vaguely as possible.

“Huh…” Kirill says, his brow furrowing as he tries to dig for that thing in his head, reaching for that tickle, but it still remains just out of his grasp. “I don’t think that’s right…”

“The jewelry box part or the artifact from the palace part?” Jim asks.

“The jewelry box part…I don’t think that’s what it is,” Kirill says.

“What else would it be?” Jim asks, eyeing Kirill, doing his best to hide the suspicion that’s been building since they began their trek from the crash.

“I’m not sure,” Kirill says. “But it’s something…special. Something to do with a secret…”

But just as in the palace, that feeling slips away, leaving a void.

Kirill sighs. “I probably sound crazy, right?”

“Anything’s possible,” Jim says with a shrug. He’s not gonna pretend to know a whole lot about the Tarrons’ personal effects. “Now, I’m very tired, so I am going to try harder to get some sleep. Fingers crossed. You should probably do the same.”

“Right, yeah,” Kirill says. He stuffs the jewelry box and the other things Luug dumped on the floor back into Douxie’s bag, turns off the light, then crawls into bed.

He claps his hands, and Luug jumps up. Kirill pulls the blanket over both of them, settling in for a good (as good as can be in a storm like this, at least) night’s sleep.

///

Finally, his energy has replenished, and just in time, too. He’s come up with a new plan.

A perfect plan.

And one made even more so by the prince’s newest circumstance.

The prince won’t see it coming, can do nothing to stop it, and his sleeping idiots won’t know until it’s far too late.

Yes, this time, there will be nothing that can save the prince!

“Go, my OMENs,” Morando hisses over the Reliquary, sending his minions through the window he’s opened. “I’ve even set the scene for you this time. Go, and lead our prince home.”

///

Under the door, red smoke billows, three plumes reaching through like seeking hands. They creep along the floorboards, low and quiet, until they reach limp fingertips, an arm dangling from the bed of a young man. The blood in his veins, it calls to them, reeking of the Tarrons. This is their prey.

The OMENs three slither up the arm and along the man’s chest, over his neck, and around his jaw to dive inward through his ears.

And behind Kirill’s eyelids, in his unconscious mind, a scene unfolds.

He finds himself sitting in a blooming meadow dressed in white clothes he doesn’t recognize, but can feel are made of the finest fabrics.

“Hey!”

He looks up at the call, and at the top of the nearby hill, a little girl stands. She’s a little bit under ten or so, pale with braided platinum hair that sparkles in the sunlight. She’s dressed in light blue, and her feet are bare—he realizes what she’s wearing is a bathing suit.

And he’s seen her before, skipping and running, laughing and abounding with energy and life. He’s never been able to catch up to her, though. He’s never been able to follow her to the end of that hallway.

“Come on,” she says, holding out her hands, and from them come three red butterflies. They fly over to him and flutter around his head, beckoning to him. With his heart thundering in his chest, Kirill stands and follows the butterflies over to the little girl, who leads him onward.

It’s the sound of the door thudding closed that wakes Luug. He looks around the room, still groggy, but the faint whispers of the red creatures reach his ears, fully springing him into consciousness. He looks back and finds his human is gone from the bed, the blanket thrown aside, no sign of him. The only clue is the faint red glow coming from under the door, which is fast fading. He leaps into action, rushing over to the door, whining and scratching. But unfortunately, he lacks the thumbs of the humans, as well as the height to reach the door handle.

So, Luug turns and bounds over the human sleeping on the floor. He jumps on him, whimpering and barking, but the human just grunts and turns over. But he refuses to give up!

In his dreamworld, Kirill continues following the girl as she skips along, the butterflies still fluttering around them as they go. She doesn’t get ahead of him, she doesn’t disappear. No, she stays tangible before him, her face slightly fuzzy, as if his eyes were unfocused but only on her, but her eyes and smile are clear as day. The girl scampers up a steep section of rocks to reach the top of the next hill and stops to wait, calling down, “You can do it! Come on!”

And so Kirill follows, though for some reason, it’s hard to get his feet under him. His shoes slip as though the rocks were wet despite it being a beautiful day, and his balance is rather wobbly. But with her beaming face waiting for him, he pushes through and reaches the top to continue on their way.

But while the rocks weren’t wet, the stairs up to the deck are, they and their sleeping climber bombarded by the raging storm.

Kirill and the girl forge onward, carefully crossing a log, which Kirill nearly loses his balance on a couple of times, as if the world were tilting around him. He makes it safe, though, and on the other side, up ahead, there are three older girls, closer to him in age, waiting. They call out and wave at them from their position at the edge of a cliff, a picnic set up next to them, all three wearing bathing suits as well, different shades of blue. Their faces, too, are just slightly out of focus, a tad more so than the girl. Even still, he can tell they look rather like the little girl, all of them pale, though not quite to the girl’s extent, and possessing similar features, though they each have hair of a different shade of brunette. The one he assumes is the eldest, dressed in dark navy, stands out the most; she’s exceedingly tall, built lean and strong, and her hair is long and wild with gravity-defying roots. The other two, in teal and electric blue respectively, are closer to average height and have more delicate frames and similar bobs, though the one he thinks is the youngest also has straight cut bangs that are just long enough to start encroaching on her vision. The three wave them over with wide smiles before jumping over the edge and out of sight, the sound of splashing and drops of water flying into the air following.

In the room, Luug continues his efforts, barking louder and pawing at the human’s face, undeterred by the sleepy attempts to bat him away.

Eventually, Douxie loses his patience and sits up to grab the dog with a tired, grumpy, “Luug! Luug, what is it?”

Luug squirms in his grip, barking in a way that Douxie only recalls him barking once. On the train.

There’s a flash of lightning outside, briefly illuminating their room through the porthole, and Douxie’s world comes to a screeching stop at the sight of the empty bed. Jim is in the top bunk, Douxie can hear his breathing and see his bedhead, so that means—

“Kirill!”

Luug wriggles from his grasp and darts over to the door. Douxie springs to his feet and rushes over, throwing it open and darting through. Luug goes to follow, but the door swings back closed too fast, leaving him behind as Douxie sprints for the deck.

Kirill approaches the edge of the cliff, having to step up onto a ridge to see properly, holding onto the skinny trunk of a young tree to help keep his balance. Below are the three girls, as well as a man and a woman. The bearded man is tall and regal looking with pale skin and dirty blonde hair, while the beautiful woman is closer to his own coloring, tan skin and dark hair. All five smile up at him, and he knows he’s seen them too, somewhere, somewhen, even further out of reach than the little girl, always standing at the end of the hallway, or hovering at the edges of his vision.

The man calls, “Hello there, you two!”

Kirill’s never heard his voice so clear before.

“Hello!” the little girl calls back.

“Jump in, children!” the woman then says. “Jump! Join us!”

Her voice, too, is the clearest it’s ever been, and his heart aches in his chest at the sound of it.

The little girl takes his hand in hers and looks up at him with her big blue-gray eyes and an even bigger smile. “Together.”

“Together,” Kirill echoes, and something in his chest squeezes.

Douxie races across the deck, looking every which way, but is unable to see much through the rain and the darkness. “Kirill!”

A rumble is his only warning before a massive wave crashes over the ship, bowling him over. He slams to the deck and is barely able to catch onto something to haul himself back up, fighting against the wind and the rocking of the boat for every inch. He needs to get up somewhere higher, out of reach of the waves, and where he might be able to see better.

He goes over to one of the small overlooks, struggling up the short stairs, his only saving grace the railing for him to grab onto. He looks around, squinting through the wind and water, and he gasps when he finally spots a figure. A figure dressed in pajamas he recognizes, standing on the edge of the boat with a hand on the rigging to keep his balance, leaning over the dark sea below, one foot already raised as if to step off.

Douxie throws himself over the side of the overlook, back to the main deck with a cry, “Kirill, NO!”

Kirill falters, something sounding out somewhere behind him. A voice, he thinks. He goes to check, to see if there’s anyone else there, but the man below calls out again. “Jump! JUMP!”

A new resonance, deep and gravelly, fills the now booming voice, the call an order that echoes around him, the light of day fading to an eerie darkness tinged red. The little girl lets go of his hand, and panic seizes him, a primal sort of panic from somewhere deep within him. He calls out and desperately reaches for her, but she’s just out of reach as she jumps. But, she vanishes before she can hit the water, dissolving into smoke. The landscape around him warps until he’s standing on a solitary column, surrounded by spectral creatures that cackle and a sea of pungent blood.

“THE CURSE OF THE TARRONS!”

Instead of the man and the others, he now finds a different figure below, single, alone. This figure grows and grows before him, dark and demonic, with wicked fangs and blazing red eyes. Kirill tries to step back as the figure lashes out, but there’s nowhere for him to go. It grabs onto his arm with a snarling grin and gives another thundering command in that deep, distorted voice, “JUMP!”

Kirill yells and thrashes against the hold, struggling as something else wraps around his waist from behind. All around him, those specters swarm and hiss, and faces swim before his vision, disjointed and crying out, accompanied by snippets of unintelligible words and shouts and screams. He doesn’t know what they want, or who they are, but something in him screams that he should know, that he should be able to help them, to even just recognize them. How could he? How could he have forgotten them? How could he have abandoned them?

Douxie holds onto Kirill with all his might as he pulls him down, the other man fighting against him, arms and legs flailing, calling out in weak distress.

“Kirill! Kirill, wake up!” Douxie shouts over the storm. He manages to get Kirill down onto the deck, both on their knees, and shakes him as hard as he dares until finally, Kirill’s eyes snap open with a gasp.

It takes Kirill a moment to orient himself, gasping for air as he’s pelted by rain. He realizes he’s in Douxie’s arms, on board the ship to France. Still, the panic won’t fully leave him. He grabs onto Douxie’s sodden night shirt with all his strength and chokes out, “The—the Curse of the Tarrons!”

“What? What are you talking about?” Douxie asks.

“Faces,” Kirill says, his voice now closer to a whimper between choking sobs, as he buries his own face in Douxie’s chest. “So many faces, a-and voices—”

“It was a nightmare,” Douxie says, wrapping his arms fully around Kirill and pressing his cheek to the top of Kirill’s head. “It’s alright. You’re safe now. I’ve got you.”

Together, they sit on the deck in the rain, wrapped in each other’s arms, Kirill slowly calming and their breathing falling into time as the waves settle. The storm dissipates, leaving them feeling as if they are alone in their own little world as the clouds part and the moonlight bursts through, a shining halo in the night.

///

It takes all of Morando’s self-control not to hurl the Reliquary across the room.

It was perfect!

But apparently, he underestimated that damned dog!

He was thwarted by a dog!

He spits a command, and the OMENs return through the window, regathering within the Reliquary, and once more he is brought to his knees, the energy within him vanished. But not as much as before. He’s getting stronger. Good. He’ll need all the strength and energy he can get for this next part.

He cannot rely on his minions to do this. He sees that now.

No, he must go and kill the prince himself.

///

In one of the grandest manors of all Paris, three women sit and watch a young man rattle off facts. He’s well-rehearsed, but nearly all of them have been, and he looks the part, though not quite right. To the unfamiliar eye, he’d pass with flying colors, the skin tone, the physical frame, the hair texture. But to eyes that have been searching resolutely through the years, that know and remember as though it were yesterday, the flaws are glaringly obvious: the eye and brow shape, the jawline, the shade of the irises, how he carries himself, and the cadence of his speech.

“Uncle Varvatos is from Kyiv. Uncle Uhl is from Vienna. And every spring—”

“We’d have picnics by the shore on Sundays.” The eldest of the three women—dressed in white and gray, her hair the same color as snow, blue eyes no less piercing than they were in her youth, despite the lines around them—gives the young man an unimpressed look that could take down even the proudest individuals. “Haven’t you anything better to do?”

“I-I’m afraid I don’t understand—” he starts to say, but he’s swiftly cut off.

“I would know my brother anywhere,” says the second woman, dressed in red and black, platinum-haired and blue-gray-eyed, every bit as beautiful as the older woman was in her younger years (and still is, of course). “And you are not him.”

“But, it has been so long, how could you—”

“Get out,” the second woman says, voice now cold as ice and sharp as a knife.

“You must leave now, sorry,” the third woman says, getting up from her seat to usher the young man out. Unlike the other two, her hair is dark as night, though a portion has gone white over the years, more of it turning year after year, flummoxing doctors but causing no harm. She’s dressed in violet, her outfit more modern than those of her companions, and she’s a few years older than the younger of the other two, not many but enough that it’s visible.

“No more,” the elder says, her words filled with a sadness that goes deeper than most could possibly comprehend.

“Grandmama?” the younger asks.

“I am sorry about him, Seklos,” the third says, returning with a tray of tea for all of them. “He answered all the questions correctly, so—”

“No more, Claire,” the elder, Seklos, says.

“Grandmama, what do you mean by that?” the younger asks.

“What I mean, Aja, is that my heart can’t take it anymore,” Seklos says. “I will see no more boys claiming to be Krel.”

“What!?” Aja says. “We can’t just give up!”

“Aja, I simply can’t do this any longer,” Seklos says. “I understand that—”

“No!” Aja says, standing with a huff, shaking the table and nearly spilling the tea. Claire manages to save it in the nick of time—and she fully intends on keeping herself to the tea; she has long learned that it is unwise to step into an argument between these two. “No, you don’t understand if you can give up so easily!”

“Easily?” Seklos says. “You think this is easy for me!? To give up on seeing my own grandson ever again? It is not easy. I am just…too old and—and too broken to keep going like this. It isn’t healthy for you, either. No, this must end.”

It must end.

Seklos’s gaze goes to the closed door, something bitter and dead in her eyes.

“These strangers come calling. Soon enough, they’re gone.”

Then, she looks to the window, to the fading light outside.

“The twilight is falling, lamps will soon go on.”

The last of the sun’s light slipping, slipping, slipping away. Just like the seasons. Just like the years.

“And where does summer go? I will never know. Summer used to last endlessly, children all in white running down the sand to me…”

It’s nearly enough to bring a tear to her eye if that something within her hadn’t withered and died long ago. Perhaps it would still be alive, perhaps there would be a reason, if it weren’t for all the selfish fools of this world. Though perhaps she never should have expected anything more.

“These strangers sent packing. What do they expect? So grasping, so lacking, why not be direct?

“The beating of my heart after they depart, lying wide awake in the chill…”

Night after night, year after year, always the same, it always ends the same. She reaches for the portrait on the table, one that she’s had up on this table for years—the last picture she ever got of her grandson, when he was young and carefree. “Will you ever come running home to me?”

“He will,” Aja says, but Seklos just shakes her head and turns her attention to her granddaughter. She needs her to understand.

“I’ve believed so long, I have dared to hope that the door might open and that he might enter. He’d give us a smile, all would be worthwhile…”

That’s all it ever was, though—belief. Hope. Fruitless, pointless, reasonless hope. And nothing more.

“The lamps begin to glow, in my heart I know he’s a lie that we’ve waited for!”

Aja jolts back at that, as if burned, and Seklos then addresses Claire, her voice thick with emotion. “Tell them all to go! Tell them all no more! Tell them I close the door!”

“But Grandmama—!” Aja tries once more. But it’s futile.

“My decision is final,” Seklos says in that voice of hers that leaves no room for questions. “It is time we let your brother rest in peace. He’s gone. He’s been gone for a long, long time. And deep down, I think we both know it.”

Those words knock all the wind out of Aja’s sails, and she whumps back down into her seat, eyes hazy, chest aching.

Seklos then flips the portrait face down.

It’s over.

I am sorry, my wonderful Krel. I just can’t do it anymore, I can’t keep hoping anymore. I’m not strong enough.

///

The two weeks on the boat pass without another incident, to both Kirill’s and Douxie’s great relief. But something is different after that night. There had been a shift occurring before, but after…well, neither can ignore its existence, no matter how hard they try. They find themselves closer together, physically gravitating toward each other without conscious knowledge of it. Touches become heavier, no different in the physical feeling, but something fundamental has changed in everything underneath. Moments become charged in ways neither quite understands. Everything is heightened, every emotion, every sensation, but in different ways. Higher energy. Cozier silences. New equilibrium. A sense of newfound comfort for Kirill. A sense of intensified anxiety for Douxie. But while they cannot ignore it, neither can they bring themselves to address any of it.

When they arrive in Le Havre, they set off straight for Rouen, taking a bus to get them there by nightfall, where they spend the night, strange but relieving to be sleeping on steady land once again.

They get up bright and early the next morning, hiring a carriage to take them the rest of the way.

And that is where they find themselves now.

“Where is Uncle Varvatos from?”

They’ve been doing this since they set off—Jim and Douxie have been quizzing Kirill over everything, but the closer they get to Claire’s place, the more and more nervous Kirill becomes and the less and less able he is to focus on anything.

“What if Claire doesn’t recognize me?” Kirill asks, giving up on even trying to answer Douxie. Instead, he looks around Douxie to his right and out the window of the carriage.

“She will,” Douxie says. He bumps his shoulder against Kirill’s to get him to look at him. “You’re the prince!”

“Everything will be fine,” Jim says from his seat on Kirill’s left. “And if nothing else, I can promise you that she’s kind and wonderful and amazing—”

“Jim,” Douxie says, cutting him off. He can understand Jim’s excitement, but there’s only so much gushing he can stand within a twenty-four-hour interval, and Jim started the minute port was in sight.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” Jim says with a blush.

Kirill sighs. “It’s just that..”

“Just what?” Douxie asks.

“Well, not that long ago, I didn’t have any past at all, and now I’m trying to remember an entire lifetime,” Kirill says.

“That’s why you got me,” Douxie says.

“Us,” Jim says.

“Right, us,” Douxie says with an awkward clearing of his throat. “Now, where is Uncle Varvatos from?”

“I think…Kyiv,” Kirill says.

They go through all the questions again, Douxie and Jim helping to keep Kirill on track while also doing their best to distract him from the nerves. And by the time they’re done, they’re pulling up in front of a grand Parisian estate.

They pile out after paying their driver, and then Jim slowly, tentatively approaches the door.

“You alright?” Douxie asks.

“Y-yeah, I just…” Jim trails off. How can he begin to describe his own nerves? He’s been dreaming of this moment for fifteen years, and yet now that he’s here, suddenly he finds himself unsteady.

“You got this,” Douxie says, pushing him forward. “She’s waiting for you.”

He certainly hopes so. He wrote her letters, but he cannot be sure she ever received them. And though he knows she loved him just as much as he loved her, he couldn’t blame her if she tried her hand at love again in the past fifteen years. Especially since she’s an heiress, her parents no doubt would have wanted her to marry still. He thinks he would’ve heard about that, in the paper or through the grapevine or something, but he cannot say for certain.

With a last deep breath, he covers the final distance and knocks on the door.

“Oui, monsieur?” a maid asks, answering after a few seconds. “Comment je peux vous aider?”

“Um…is Claire home?” Jim asks.

“Oui. What is your business with her?” the maid asks, thankfully switching languages, though her words are all quite heavily accented.

“Could you—could you tell her that Jim is here to see her?” Jim says.

“Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” the maid says. She disappears back into the house, the door closing behind her.

It’s but moments later that the door is thrown back open.

And there she is.

Wide-eyed, longing and anxiety etched equally into her expression, she’s grown fully into womanhood in the past fifteen years, and this has given her such a graceful air. Her eyes are the same warm brown he remembers, and she has the same dark hair, though over the years, that streak of white, present since they were fifteen, has grown, now taking up about a third of her head. Her hair is also shorter now, cut in a sharp bob that frames her face, which has become more defined, the last of the baby fat having disappeared in those years apart. She wears a very modern casual flapper of a pale violet, sleeveless and low-waisted, the fabric ending just below her knees, paired with strappy heels.

She’s even more beautiful than the last time Jim saw her.

“Claire,” Jim manages to choke out, nearly overcome with emotion.

“Oh, Jim!”

She all but throws herself at him, the force making him stumble back a little as he catches her in his arms, the two of them wrapping around each other, closing the very last of the space that had separated them for so long. Unable to stand it a moment longer, Jim readjusts his head so as to kiss her, her lips soft yet searing, loving yet desperate.

From behind, both Kirill and Douxie watch the reunion with a smile, though Kirill is also really taking in her visage, scanning her head to toe, along every line and curve—after all, she’s supposedly related to him. Which is a truly bizarre thought. Like, he’d thought about it, but now being here in front of her…it’s just so strange, finally being presented with a potential family member after having been an orphan for fifteen years.

And though Kirill was only half listening when Jim said this, the words come to full clarity the longer he watches. Jim said that she’s technically the empress’s cousin-in-law. Though there are undoubtedly several different places in the family tree for someone to become the empress’s cousin-in-law, based on Claire’s general appearance and coloring, Kirill is willing to bet she’s located somewhere on his mother’s side.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” Claire says once she and Jim part, tears now glistening in her eyes.

“I know,” Jim says. “But I spent every minute doing all I could to come back to you.”

“I thought you were dead,” Claire says. “At least, until I got your letters.”

“You did get them?” Jim says.

“And I kept every single one,” she says. Then she gives a light, wet laugh. “They’re the only thing that got my parents off my back about marriage.”

“So, you still want…?”

“Of course!” Claire says. That is when she finally catches sight of Kirill and Douxie behind Jim. “Oh! Where are my manners? Come in, all of you.”

Claire leads them to a parlor bigger than the room Kirill shared with all the other boys at the orphanage.

“Now, I have something that must be addressed before anything else,” Jim says. “May I present his imperial highness, Tsarevitch Krel of House Tarron.”

Claire stops in her tracks at that and turns around to fully take in Kirill.

Kirill feels very exposed under Claire’s sharp eyes. She walks up to him, scrutinizing, curious, and he does his best not to fidget as she moves around him, not unlike how Douxie did when they first met in the palace.

“He certainly does look like Krel,” she says. “But so did many of the others. Take a seat.”

Kirill does as she says, sitting in one of the plush chairs, Luug coming to sit on his feet. Claire also takes a seat in the chair across from him while Jim and Douxie sit on one of the couches.

“To begin, where were you born?” Claire asks.

“At the Peterhof palace,” Kirill says.

“Correct,” Claire says. “And how does Krel like his tea?”

“I don’t,” Kirill says flatly. That’s at least one he knew from the very start of this—can’t stand the stuff.

“Well, you certainly sound like Krel, too,” Claire says with an amused huff.

The interview goes on for about an hour, Claire asking question after question, and Kirill answering them perfectly. Apparently, his natural snark and attitude also fit ‘Krel’ to a T, according to Claire, which Douxie couldn’t be more thankful for.

But Douxie’s stomach plummets at the final question.

“Finally…well, you’ll probably find this an impertinent question, but with how many impostors we’ve had come through, please, indulge me,” Claire says. “How did you escape during the siege of the palace?”

They never taught Kirill that. Jim doesn’t even know that full story; Douxie never told him. Bleeding balroths, they’re screwed.

“There was a boy,” Kirill says after a moment, and Douxie’s heart stops, “a boy who worked in the palace. He opened a wall…”

Mordrax’s miracles…

“So, what do you think?” Jim asks, unknowing of what just happened, of what the words Kirill just said really mean.

Claire’s mouth hangs slightly open as she stares at Kirill in a mixture of shock and wonder, the same that Douxie feels as well.

“He answered every question,” Claire says, almost breathless. “Even the last. I…well, I’ve never asked it before. And he got it right.”

“You hear that?” Jim says to Kirill. “You did it!”

Jim springs up to give Kirill a hug, and Douxie stands as well, but he doesn’t go over. There’s so much going on in his head, in his chest…slowly and quietly, he backs away from the scene.

Kirill is Krel. The prince is alive, and Douxie found him.

Which means he didn’t fail back then. He wasn’t responsible for the prince’s death. It never happened, so it wasn’t his fault, couldn’t have been his fault. And now Krel is here, and he’s Kirill—

And oh gods, he’s fallen in love with the long-lost heir to the Russin throne.

“ ‘Did it’?” Claire asks.

“Er, he’s just been so nervous, understandably,” Jim says. “So, when do we meet the empress?”

“I’m afraid you don’t,” Claire says with a sigh. “Admittedly, Jim, I only gave him the interview because it was you who brought him. The empress…she simply won’t allow any more meetings. Not after so long and so many disappointments. If he’s not…”

“But he is,” Douxie says, his voice faint but full of conviction.

“Well…do you like the Russian ballet?” Claire suddenly asks, taking Kirill off guard. “They are performing in Paris tonight. And the empress, princess, and I never miss a show.”

Ohhh, Kirill gets it now.

“I’d like that,” Kirill says. Even besides the meeting part, it’s something he’s never done before. And he knows ballet involves music and dancing, which he likes.

“Yes, we would love to see the Russian ballet,” Jim says. “Especially if I get to go with you.”

Claire giggles at that. “Wonderful. I can get you guys tickets, so no need to worry about that. And we will have to procure appropriate outfits for you. I can also help with that. Then, perhaps while we’re out, I could show you a bit of Paris, as well.”

Kirill’s heart leaps at that. Paris…he’s only been dreaming about this place for as long as he can remember. To see the city—

Wait.

“What about Luug?” Kirill asks. He doubts he can drag a dog all over Paris.

“I promise, he will be perfectly fine here,” Claire says. “There’s plenty of space and my maids will gladly look after him—it’s not often we host adorable puppies. Now, come. We’ll get you each situated with a room and then be on our way.”

///

With the servants taking care of Kirill and Douxie, Jim finds himself alone with Claire.

For the first time in over a decade.

And they sit in awkward silence, neither quite knowing what to say now. Feelings remain, but it’s been so long, they’ve fallen out of sync.

Jim aches to say something, anything, but nothing comes to him.

It’s Claire who finally breaks the silence, a gleam in her eye, the spark of an idea.

After all, she figures, what better way to bring them back together than how they came together before?

“Do you remember the night we met?” she asks.

“Are you kidding?” Jim says. “It’s been on my mind every day since we parted…”

It was a party. He hadn’t really wanted to attend. But his mother had insisted—he was to meet his fiancée, so there could be no lenience, not this time.

It was hot from all the bodies in that space, and stuffy as well. His clothes chafed, new and not yet broken in, and he’d kept pulling and fiddling with the stiff collar of his formal jacket.

But then…he saw her.

“Ever since that first day I saw you at court, I knew I was beneath you,” he says. She was like an angel, and he was a mere mortal in comparison.

Claire scoffs. “Come now, no you weren’t.”

“I noticed you across a room, the most exquisite rose,” Jim says, enraptured by the memory. “A sparkling tiara and that haughty little nose. I tried to flirt, rather badly—”

An understatement. He still cringes at his attempts at Spanish. He’s gotten better, but those early days with the language haunt him.

“Or so the record goes,” Claire says with a laugh. It truly was awful—but at the same time, so endearing. Jim fumbled through his introduction, flustered and red as a beet, and his Spanish was clumsy and half-baked. It was adorable. “The Countess—”

“And her common man,” Jim says.

“You’ve never been common,” Claire says.

“I am compared to you, mi vida,” Jim says, taking the chance to show off his improved Spanish and his improved accent. “Then we tiptoed off to Peterhof, it was such a teenage thing.”

“My parents weren’t too happy then,” Claire continues. Also an understatement—they were always very protective of her. “I was grounded ‘til next spring.”

“And I still tried to see you, but—”

Claire can’t help the guffaw that escapes her then.

“All the guards caught your fling!”

At the time, it felt like the worst thing in the world, but now, looking back, it’s nothing but hilarious. Neither can keep themselves from laughing.

Jim was young and stupid, and this was even before he was promoted to being a proper guard himself. He’d done his best to sneak off to see her, but he was caught halfway up one of the walls, covered in sweat and scratches and bush leaves from how many attempts he’d already made at climbing this wall and failing. He’d wanted it to be romantic, like a fairytale. Instead, he failed over and over, to the point he was noticed, and once he was, guards shouting from below, he stupidly tried to make a mad dash for the top, only to be unceremoniously shoved back down by a guard at one of the upper windows. They had to extract him from a particularly gnarly bush, gnarly enough to leave small tears in his clothes, and the exasperated look and scolding he got from her parents was truly something else. He’s pretty sure the only reason he didn’t get in more trouble was that her father had done something similar with her mother in their younger days—a fact he didn’t learn until years later.

“The Countess—” Jim starts.

“—and her handsome man,” Claire finishes. She leans into him with her lips close to his ear, making a blush erupt across Jim’s face.

“The days horseback riding, the dates and wine,” Jim then says. After that whole thing, he and Claire did things more by-the-books, so to speak. Even still, every moment was amazing, every minute spent with her a wonder.

“And under the table, your foot touching mine,” Claire says, which only makes Jim blush harder.

But he knows how to get her back.

“And how my heart beat when you sent me our sign,” Jim says. It was a fun little thing they came up with, mostly for occasions where they couldn’t do things together, like official court stuff and boring ceremonies. Just a small way to connect. Over time, though, as they matured, it came to mean something a little different. A little deeper.

He does it, two taps with his pointer and middle finger against the large muscle of his jaw, and red dusts her cheeks as well, coming with a light, playful smack against his shoulder.

“I loved you,” Jim says.

“You loved me,” Claire says—because he did. He really did. From the get-go, his love for her shone like the sun. “And oh, it was simply divine.”

She sinks further into his side, a hand going to rest on his strong chest, their faces now mere inches apart, eyes half lidded.

“Who would have known, my lovely rose, we’re back where we began,” Jim says softly.

“And I suppose that you’ll propose another sneaky plan,” Claire says teasingly. “Which I’ll resist.”

“Until you’re kissed,” Jim says. “For nothing’s better than the Countess—”

“And her perfect man,” Claire says.

They both then lean in, crossing the little space still between them, to kiss. It’s fiery and warm and passionate.

And it feels like home.

The high-pitched barking of Luug above them breaks the spell they’d fallen under, and they part, though both still blush profusely.

“Well, I should show you to your room now, especially if we want time for more than just shopping,” Claire says, slowly pulling herself away from Jim. “You’ll be sharing, but I promise, you’re going to love your company.”

Jim chuckles at this. “I’m sure I will.”

///

Kirill steps out of the car into the warm mid-spring afternoon-approaching-evening, eyes wide, trying to take it all in. The cobblestone street, the high-end stores, people walking up and down the way in groups and pairs, smiling, laughing.

A presence appears at his side, and he looks to see Douxie’s gotten out of the car as well. He latches onto Douxie’s arm, practically vibrating with excitement—he’s finally here, he finally gets to see it and live it!

Douxie finds Kirill’s smile infectious, his enthusiasm so intense that it radiates off him.

On Kirill’s other side, Claire and Jim join them, and the car drives off to park nearby.

“So, what now?” Kirill asks.

Claire looks around, and her eyes alight on a vendor—she knows just where to start.

Because these two are not slick. She hasn’t been around them long, but even a blind man could see what’s brewing between Jim’s friend and the potential tsarevitch.

“Bienvenu à Paris,” she says, guiding them over to a woman who holds a large basket of roses. Claire flips her some change, and the woman smiles and hands her four roses. Claire then turns back to the others, handing them out to each. “Here, prenez une fleur, on me.”

Kirill takes his flower, and then, he turns to Douxie to tuck it into the breast pocket of his vest.

Douxie’s face goes up in flames. For a moment, all he can do is stand there, brain ceasing to function. But then, he manages to move, intending to do the same for Kirill—Krel. Except Krel doesn’t have a pocket, so instead, Douxie tucks it behind his ear, fingers brushing gently against Krel’s hair, caressing the side of his face for a moment that tingles in his fingers even after it’s passed.

“Forget where you’re from,” Claire continues, first taking one of Jim’s elbows, and then taking Kirill’s free one, “vous êtes en France, my friends, come. I’ll show you that French joie de vivre!”

She then takes off, her stride purposeful and head held high, dragging them all along with her. “Paris holds the key to your heart. Et tout Paris plays a part.”

Then she breaks her hold on ‘Krel’, firmly attaching herself to Jim and shooting ‘Krel’ a knowing grin. “We’ll stroll two by two down what we call ‘la rue’.

“And soon all Paris will be singing to you!”

The first place Claire leads them is a clothing store called ‘Chanel’. Within are clothes so expensive, it makes Kirill feel rather light-headed—he might have spent his childhood in the upper echelons, supposedly, but he spent his adolescence in the lowest ones, so he’s still gotta wrap his head around the sheer concept of this much money, of enough money to purchase clothes like this as if it were nothing. Now, he’s not sure of the conversion rate, but considering just how mind-boggling the numbers of francs they’re talking about are, he imagines they’re probably also boggling in rubles.

When they leave the store, Claire has spent more money on clothing for Kirill than he’d believed possible—and this was only the first place! He’s now in a new suit, as are Jim and Douxie. His is a powder blue made of soft inner materials, but with accents and a vest that have a light shimmer to them that remind him of clear water on a sunny day—perhaps that brook Douxie and Jim told him about. Douxie’s is sleek, black with royal blue and gold accents that form these accentuating animal-pelt patterns along the hems and cuffs, as well as the inner lapels—if Kirill had to take a guess, some sort of spotted cat. Jim has silver-gray with sky blue accents, a more traditional look than he or Douxie, but it still has its own flair, the insides of the jacket lined with that sky blue satin, as well as a very fitted cream button-up that Claire definitely picked out for her benefit. All three suits are cut fit and chic, top-of-the-line fashion with wide pant legs and tailored jackets. Claire got herself a new dress as well, this one a black flapper with a lower skirt that drapes in ways even Kirill’s mind struggles to comprehend, iridescent when the light catches it right.

“Paris holds the key to l’amour.”

The French rolls off Claire’s tongue like a purr as she cozies back up to Jim, giving him a seductive smile that turns Jim’s face red as a tomato, which makes Douxie snicker.

“And no one can deny its allure.”

Then she turns her gaze on Douxie, sharp and shrewd, and he freezes. She gives him a teasing smirk, and he knows she sees right through him, straight to the squishy, emotionally-compromised core.

“La passion est dans l’air,” Claire says, returning her attention to the tour.

“Et les Folies Bergères!” She leads them past a grand-looking building, all lit up in the deepening early evening, playbills depicting dancers in flashy and outrageous outfits plastered along the outside, lively and abuzz with energy, music heard coming from within as they pass.

“Les français have it down to an art.”

That’s putting it lightly, in Douxie’s opinion. The atmosphere seems to be infused with something heady and decadent that stirs something within him, creating a low simmer of giddiness. He can really only describe it as butterflies fluttering around inside his stomach. He knows all of Paris can’t be like this, but right here, right now, he could truly believe it to be a city made of pure romance, one that suffuses all in its borders, that inspires passions and affections to the point they become too big to contain and spill out into the world to wrap around yourself and your beloved.

Having Krel smiling bright as the sun on his arm certainly doesn’t help the butterflies or mushy feelings either.

“Paris holds the key to your heart!”

Claire leads them onward, past bougie stores and classic restaurants, the artistry of the old and the glamor of the new melding together all around them to create a stunning scene, every inch an experience, every minuscule detail adding up to this breathtaking mixture, something everywhere you look for the eye and heart to feast upon.

Claire only stops once they’ve reached a new, very unique-looking building. Douxie’s never seen the like—it has this windmill-like piece atop the main building. It’s just as lit up as the other place, the Folies Bergère, that Claire showed them, only here, the light is mostly red, blazing in the evening.

“When you’re feeling blue, venez au Moulin,” Claire says, guiding them toward the doors. “When your heart says ‘don’t’, les français disent ‘do’!”

Within, Douxie finds a lavish cabaret in the style of a theater, tables filled with patrons lining the equivalents of the mezzanine and orchestra. Front and center is a dancefloor where a dozen beautiful young women dance to live music in tight-bodiced, frilly-skirted dresses of red, white, and blue, feathers adorning their hair, all of them sparkling under the lights, covered in hundreds of rhinestones. Servers weave expertly through the crowd, and one comes up to them, greeting Claire in rapid French and with a respectful head-bow, and then leading them to a front row table.

“When you think you can’t, you’ll find you can-can!” Claire says as they take their seats with a smile, a wink, and a nudge of Jim’s arm as the dancers get into line to start kicking, all too pleased with her pun.

Kirill can only watch the dancers in sheer fascination, the pun flying right by him. Their legs fly higher than Kirill had honestly believed the human body capable of, their movements creating whirls of color with their skirts, their angles and timing all perfect. It’s as if they were all pieces of a well-oiled machine.

“And if you think you won’t,” Claire continues, now leaning in close to Kirill almost conspiratorially, bringing his attention back to her, a sly spark in her eyes, “just maybe you will.”

Kirill blushes deeply at this—he isn’t quite sure what she’s insinuating, he’s never been great at reading between the lines with people, but it’s enough to unsettle him and make him feel far too exposed.

So, he resolutely turns his attention back to the dancers just as they let out a collective cheer, their kicking stopped, and in two lines, they cartwheel through each other, a flurry of color and sparkles and ruffles. They land in a V-formation, and then ripple from one end to the other, each jumping into a full split one right after another with another cheer that’s echoed back by the audience.

At that moment is when a server comes by, presenting them with the finest of liquid courage and taking their orders—apparently, they’re having dinner here, and Claire orders for all of them, assuring them that the food is delicious and they’ll love it.

Douxie takes a taste of the red wine, trying to balance propriety and today’s revelations in the size of his sip, and a subtle warmth blooms inside, the alcohol hitting his empty stomach and slipping nicely into his bloodstream. He’s better versed in vodka than wine, but he can tell that this is the expensive stuff, aged and fragrant and other adjectives he’s heard people use for wine.

Since he’s very much on Claire’s bill, he wonders just how much she’ll let him get away with drinking. Is it proper to get drunk off wine in public? Probably not. Is he still going to do his best? Yep. If he starts now, he should be adequately sobered up by the time the ballet starts.

The music shifts as the dancers take their bow, their number concluded. The lively tune is replaced by a smoother, calmer sound, the sort of music you’d play between numbers, nice but not too much, light and palatable.

Claire then stands and motions for Krel to join her.

“Not your boytoy?” Douxie asks her.

“Boytoy?” Jim splutters.

“Oh, he’s up next,” Claire says, shooting Jim a grin and another wink. “I just want to get a feel for the potential tsarevitch’s dancing skills before I become too lost in the night.”

Good thing they danced on the boat, then.

Douxie’s heart spasms weirdly at the memory.

The boat…

She leads Krel away from the table, leaving Douxie and Jim to watch.

“Well, I shall take this opportunity to find a bathroom. Be right back,” Jim says, leaving Douxie alone to watch.

And watch he does.

Krel assumes the position, and the two begin to slowly dance, movements even and confident, as if they both had been doing this since birth.

But then again, they both have.

“Paris holds the key to his past.”

For a moment, Douxie can see the tricentennial in his mind’s eye, how the twins danced for one song earlier in the night, during his first escape from the kitchens. It was one of those rare moments when they’d listen and do things properly, Krel leading Aja in a waltz, so much smaller then, but really, it looks so much the same now. How careful and precise each motion is, the focused yet soft expression on his face—

Good gods, did he have a crush on the prince even then?

Yeah. Yeah, he did.

In spite of being a parentless serving boy and Tsarevitch Krel more than likely having no active knowledge of his existence whatsoever prior to the escape, he’d always found himself captivated by the prince.

It’s why his loss hurt so much. Douxie would’ve still felt awful if it had been the princess or the empress, but it was Krel, and it felt like his heart had been torn out of his chest.

He was just too young to understand the feelings back then, and after, he’d done everything in his power to push it all away, to distance himself emotionally from the heartbreak of failing and losing the prince.

But in actuality, he hadn’t.

“Yes, my prince, I’ve found you at last.”

Somehow, impossibly, miraculously, the prince really did survive. And Douxie of all people found him.

He wonders, did a piece of him know? When he first saw Krel in the middle of the ballroom, and then in front of the Tarron family portrait, did something deep inside him know that the young man was the real thing? Is that why he was so drawn to Krel immediately (though it took some time to admit it)? Is that why it was so easy to fall for him, because they weren’t just new feelings, but also old ones reignited?

…Well, that doesn’t matter anymore. Not that it ever did, but especially now.

After all, their time is nearly up.

“No more pretend, you’ll be gone, that’s the end…”

Douxie looks away from the dancing to stare at his wine for a second, looking into the deep liquid, and decides fuck it. He knocks back the rest of the glass in one gulp and reaches for the bottle the server left for them.

Bottoms up.

When Kirill finally returns to the table, he finds Douxie already halfway through the bottle the server brought for them. They couldn’t have been dancing for that long, could they? The food isn’t here yet, so probably not.

“Douxie?” he asks.

“ ‘M fine,” Douxie says, a slight slur to his words already.

“I mean, it’s not every day you get to taste wine quite like this,” Claire says with a light laugh as she retakes her seat. “I can’t necessarily knock him for being unable to resist.”

“It’s irresistible,” Douxie says, and Kirill is unconvinced, but Claire doesn’t seem concerned. She’s looking around for Jim, also sipping her own wine now, and so he too grabs his glass to take a taste. She’s right, it’s good. Not that Kirill has much knowledge about wine or alcohol quality.

Jim reappears at about the same time as their food, and once they’ve all got their dishes, Claire goes back to the dance floor with Jim, leaving Kirill and Douxie at the table.

“…Are you sure you’re feeling ok?” Kirill asks. He just can’t brush off the nagging that something’s not right.

“Everything’s fine, I promise,” Douxie says, seeming to surface from his growing inebriation for a moment. “I mean, what could be wrong? We’re in Paris. Everything we’ve been working toward is finally happening.”

“Well…if you’re certain,” Kirill says.

Douxie reaches over to place a hand atop one of Kirill’s, brushing a thumb along the back of his hand as he gives Kirill a warm smile, gold eyes turned honey in the mood lighting. “Of course I am.”

Kirill’s heart flutters in his chest, and he can’t help his own smile in return.

Douxie spends the rest of dinner pinging between watching the various performances, definitely not staring at Krel, who glows like a star under the stage lights, and refilling his glass over and over, sinking into the nice, warm buzz that steadily grows, starting in his stomach and head and spreading throughout the rest of his body. At some point, Jim takes the wine away from him. Unfortunate, but eh, he doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to protest. He turns his attention to his food then, finally, and through his haze, he vaguely finds that Claire was right, whatever this is is pretty good.

Once they’ve finished their food, Claire whisks them all away once more.

“Paris holds the key to your heart!”

This time, she takes them to a barbershop, and with only one word from Claire, the barber zeroes in on Krel, snatching him up and taking him away. Though not without some protesting from Krel.

“Wait, what? What’s happening, what’re we doing?” Krel asks when the barber moves around to try to steer him by his shoulders, resisting the movement.

“Just a little hair trim and zhuzh is all,” Claire says.

The barber then speaks, his words heavily accented but not lacking in conviction, “Do not worry—I take good care of you. You will be vraiment beau, like a star!”

“He’s right,” Claire says, giving Krel a reassuring smile. “Go on! And if you want, I can add a bit of my own personal touch when we’re getting ready for the ballet.”

With that, Krel finally allows himself to be led away, leaving the three of them.

“So…do we just wait?” Douxie asks.

“If you want a cut too, go ahead,” Claire says.

“This seems like a place where haircuts are really expensive,” Douxie says, looking around at the shining surfaces, the gleaming detailing and extravagant lights, how chic everything is from the tiled floor under his feet to the chairs the clients sit in to the wall art hung up. It’s all very Art Deco. Some of the fakes he peddled back in St. Petersburg would fit right in here.

“You do remember who you’re with, right?” Claire says, and yeah, that’s a fair point. He’s just accustomed to being poor. “Come on, I think a trim would do you two some good. You’re both looking a little scruffy.”

Douxie huffs at that—he thinks he looks perfectly acceptable for someone who escaped a train wreck, trekked across western Poland and northern Germany in roughly a fortnight, and then spent the following fortnight couped up on a boat.

Jim accepts Claire’s offer. Douxie declines. They can cut his hair over his dead body—he spent years growing it out to its current length, and like hell is Douxie letting some high-end Parsian barber fuck it up with whatever he considers ‘fashionable’.

And when the barber brings Krel back, Douxie finds himself deeply regretting his inebriation.

Because he is not mentally equipped in such a state to handle this.

It’s not even like there’s this immense difference. A wash, a trim, and a bit of shaping, nothing major. Just cleaned up.

But with that trim and shape, Krel’s hair can now wave and curl properly, turning the dark, thick hair into a veritable cloud, rich and full-bodied. He wants to run his fingers through the locks, to feel if it’s as soft as it looks, to hold Krel close enough to do so, close enough to smell the scent of the shampoo…

And he can say absolutely none of this out loud—especially that last bit—and he doesn’t know if he can trust himself not to just blurt out any of this in a moment of lapsed focus.

He’s just gotta speak as little as possible until it wears off. If he says nothing, he can’t incriminate himself.

Once Jim rejoins them, beard trimmed and tamed, refreshed, Claire once more takes the lead.

Down the street, the nightlife continues, vibrant and incandescent in the darkness, music still weaving through the air, fading in and out, twisting between tunes as they pass buildings.

“Dansez toute la soirée, and forget all your woes!”

People of all sorts twist along with the music, from giggling groups to swaying couples, all their own microcosms that have happened to bump and collide tonight. As far as Douxie can tell, there’s not one unhappy face amongst them all, a sensation that sparkles like the stars enveloping each and every one of them, even if only for this one singular moment. It’s as though right now is all that matters—everything else in the world can wait.

“Une ville allumée, where life blooms like a rose!” At the end of this street, however, Claire stops and calls for their car. “And one never knows what will start!”

Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like she’s calling the car to return to the manor, which confuses Jim, as it’s getting late, and he can’t imagine they have time for much else before the ballet.

“Wait, where are we going now?” Jim asks.

Claire gives him a look and then lets out a small laugh with a shake of her head. “I don’t know, Jim, where could we possibly be going to close out our mini tour of Paris, France?” Then, she gets in the car, waving for them to hurry up and get in as well.

And Kirill knows exactly where they’re going.

After all, just about every book he’s ever managed to get his hands on about France has had a picture big and bold, either amongst the pages or right smack dab on the front cover.

“And don’t worry—we’ll have all the time in the world to come back for a longer visit,” Claire says. “I just figured there’s really no other way we could end this.”

Kirill is inclined to agree, already practically vibrating with excitement, though doing his best to keep it from escaping and embarrassing himself.

With that, they take off. Kirill can’t help but watch every little thing as they go, doing his utmost to take in all the details he can. He’s barely been here a day, and it’s already everything he dreamed and more—the only piece that’s missing is whoever gave him his necklace. A piece that hopefully shall be found soon enough.

They’re eventually let out a short walk away from their destination, and even from here, though it’s obscured by the buildings, Kirill could swear he can feel its aura in the air.

Once they enter the square, all of the breath is stolen from his body.

Before them stands the Eiffel Tower, or la tour Eiffel, he thinks, in all of its magnificence and splendor, a glowing beacon in the night, warm and bright and just truly incredible.

He’s imagined such a moment as this countless times over the years, envisioned standing in Paris, seeing the Eiffel Tower, basking in its brilliance, but not a single second of that prepared him for the true, overwhelming feeling of actually being here, of this finally happening. No more dreams and wishes—it’s all real, and it’s all happening right now.

He then all but suction-cups himself to Douxie’s arm to drag him, and by extension, the group, toward the tower.

It’s easy to get in quickly. All it takes is one look at Claire, and the employees grant them access. Having rich and influential friends pays off.

They step onto the elevator, and the whole way up, Douxie can’t tear his eyes from Krel for a single moment. His excitement practically glows, a light shining from within the boy to illuminate the entire space, bathing them all. It’s downright infectious, all of their energy lifted and buzzing in time with Krel’s.

At the top, the sight is utterly breathtaking, Paris sprawled out below and around Kirill for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see in every direction, glowing warm and alive in the dark. He feels as though he’s on top of the world, as though he were lighter than air. He runs over to the edge, hands going to the railing, the brisk breeze all the way up here rippling through his freshly washed and cut hair, making him feel more alive than he’s felt in…well, in as long as he can remember.

There’s only one thing missing.

Kirill looks back and extends a hand, an invitation to join him.

And Douxie couldn’t deny it if he tried, couldn’t possibly resist the gravity that pulls him toward Kirill, the city’s luminescence dancing across Krel’s rich skin, the way the light wind ruffles his hair and leaves a redness high on his cheeks and the tip of his nose.

Douxie takes hold of the offered hand to stand next to Krel, Krel’s arm snaking to link with his own, pulling him in close so that they’re pressed together side-by-side. Heat rising in Douxie’s cheeks at the action, and he hopes the dim lighting, the chill in the air, and the faster-fading-than-he’d-like remnants of his inebriation are enough to disguise the true source of the blush now undoubtedly brushed across his face.

“Paris holds the key to your heart!”

Jim and Claire join them as well, too linked at the arms, but Douxie pays them little mind. He should be looking out at the city, it would be safer for him to be looking out at the city, but he just can’t tear his eyes from Krel, the joy on his face, the way all the lights glitter in his dark eyes as if they were twin cosmoses of their own, his smile…

It’s not their hearts that Paris holds the key to.

It’s Krel’s.

And Douxie’s heart swells, even as the cracks shoot deeper through it.

///

“So, you nervous?” Jim asks Douxie as they sit on the steps outside the theater, suited up in their tuxes, awaiting Claire and Kirill and whatever she’s subjecting him to. After their brief stop at the Eiffel Tower, they all returned to Claire’s manor to drop their new stuff off and get dressed, but then Claire sent the two of them ahead, saying she wanted to put some finishing touches on Kirill.

“No,” Douxie says, dearly missing his fading buzz, the chilled night air now bringing things into far too sharp a relief for his taste. “He’s the prince. No reason to be nervous.”

Jim contemplates him for a second before saying, “You’re not telling me something.”

“…I was that boy in the palace,” Douxie says after a moment, his voice soft, but something in it is so profound that it makes Jim sit up straighter. “The one who opened the wall, just like Kirill said, like Krel said. He’s the real thing, Jim.”

Douxie expects some sort of shock from Jim, but instead, after a moment for Jim to really absorb the information, he gets a nod. “I suspected as much.”

“Wait, what?” Douxie asks. “You knew?”

“No, I didn’t know, I’ve just had an inkling for a while now,” Jim says.

“An inkling?” Douxie says.

“Come on, Doux,” Jim says. “Even disregarding the fact that how I found you in the palace fits with his memory almost too perfectly—”

Douxie hadn’t even thought of that. Of course Jim would make the connection—he found Douxie still in the twins’ bedroom for Mordrax’s sake, still clutching the box. And he certainly showed Jim enough of the servants’ passages for him to instantly understand what Krel wasn’t quite remembering.

“—with how much he seemed to know without us telling him, how quickly he picked up on all the skills, the fact that he shares every opinion it was known that Tsarevitch Krel had even over the smallest of things, the fact that his birth name started with a ‘K’…there can only be so many coincidences.”

“I guess you’re right,” Douxie says with a sigh.

“Which means ‘Kirill’ has found his family, and we have found the heir to the Russian throne!” Jim says. “And you—”

“Will walk out of his life forever,” Douxie says.

“Douxie,” Jim says with that annoying disapproving tone of his that he always weaponizes against Douxie!

“Princes don’t marry servants,” Douxie says. “We’re going to go through with this as if nothing has changed. Because nothing has.”

“Ok, I’ve had it with this whole charade,” Jim says. He knows what he thought at first on the boat, but after watching Douxie and Krel for all this time, how they were on the boat, hell, even just how they were tonight…well, he just can’t stay silent. He’s allowed Douxie to just do a whole lot of stuff in their time together, but he’s not going to just let him walk away, not without at least saying something. “I followed along because I trust you, but I’m putting my foot down. Everything has changed. And you have to tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

There at the curb stands Krel. He is definitely Krel. Before, it was a correction, an attempt to shift his own thinking, but now, it’s so much more. Because the man before Douxie is the one and only Tsarevitch Krel, fully bloomed. He wears a fur-lined cloak dark as night, and his hair has been brushed and styled. He has a silver bracelet on one wrist and silver rings on the opposite hand. But he still wears that necklace he’s had since the moment they met—or rather, reunited.

“How…how handsome you look,” Douxie says as he gets to his feet, eyes never leaving Krel.

Krel blushes. “Well, thank you.”

“Just you wait,” Claire says, coming up beside Krel with a cheeky grin. She herself is now in a black fur cloak, which is open enough to show her deep plum floor-length gown, her hands covered by black silk gloves, her makeup dark but her silver jewelry bright. “Now, let’s go.”

Within, they go through coat, bag, and hat check, the foyer filled with people milling around and mingling before they must be seated for the show. Kirill heads up the main flight of stairs that lead to the balcony and box seats. He stops on the first landing to take a look around. A look around at his new world.

Below, Douxie realizes he’s lost sight of Krel. At least until he looks up to find the man at the top of the stairs now without his cloak, taking his breath away.

Krel is in a tuxedo like them, but his could only ever be worn by a true royal. The fabric is of the highest quality and dyed midnight blue that seems to sparkle with stars. If he didn’t know better, Douxie might think Krel were clad in the constellations themselves. The shirt beneath is black silk, as is the bow tie, lending an unobtrusive depth that only makes it feel even more like the night sky, and the cut of the ensemble, the lines sharp and with long coattails, defines his shape in a way that can only be described as regal.

Krel catches his eye and gives a look that says, ‘What’re you doing, come on.’

Douxie does his best to fumble up the stairs—even his equilibrium is thrown by the magnificent sight before him. At the top, he offers his arm, and Krel takes it with the smallest of smiles, his eyes soft, and Douxie feels as though he could melt.

They head to their box seats, Jim splitting from Claire to sit with them for the first half. After everything, though, after they’ve introduced Krel to the empress, there will be nothing in this world that could separate him from her for a moment longer.

Douxie looks through the binoculars, provided courtesy of Claire, and spots Claire and the empress sitting across the way.

Claire, the empress, and…

“Look,” he says, handing the binoculars over to Krel and pointing them out.

Kirill takes them and looks, and for a moment, it feels as though he’s been hit by a bus.

He sees Claire, whose dress he now realizes has short, sheer sleeves that drape elegantly over her shoulders and whose gloves go all the way up over her elbows, sitting next to an older woman. Head held high, white hair contained in a high bun that’s decorated with a diamond-encrusted crown, dressed in flowing ice blue, this woman can only be the empress herself. But though she does make him feel a confused sort of way, she’s not what’s making him feel like he’s been run over.

No, it’s the third person in the box.

A young woman, the spitting image of the empress, with beautiful spooling platinum blonde hair and clear blue-gray eyes, dressed in a sleeveless, dazzling white gown, like freshly fallen snow sparkling in the sunlight. She talks with the other two and smiles, and Kirill feels as though his heart could burst from the sight of her. He doesn’t even need to ask who she is—he never actually managed to fully remember her face, not really, but he knows who she is. It’s like every cell in his body calls out for her.

The Grand Duchess Aja.

His twin sister.

All those fuzzy images shift into sharp clarity, every dream he’s ever had where she appeared, his brain lighting up with the last puzzle piece to the concept of Aja. She is his sister. His twin sister. They goofed around and pushed that cook into the brook and rode horses together…

It’s her.

He feels like he could cry. But he won’t. He refuses.

The lights go down, and Kirill redirects his attention to the stage, where the curtains open to reveal the dancers.

As the show unfolds before him, he finds himself only half watching, the other half too busy worrying. He wrings the paper program for Swan Lake in his hands, and over time, begins ripping it and picking at it, reducing it to smaller and smaller pieces in his lap.

Can this be the evening? Can this be the place? Am I only dreaming, looking at her face?
Everything I wanted suddenly so clear. My past and my future so near…

Douxie notices the ripping and picking, and he reaches over and links his hand with Krel’s, weaving their fingers together. He then leans over to Krel, who’s now looking at him, to say quietly, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

His mind, though, is much less sure. Not of whether or not this will work. But of himself.

Next to me, this frightened boy, holding tight despite dancers’ joy.

Doubt creeps up the back of his throat. He swallows it down as much as he can.

Keep your nerve and see this through, it’s what you’ve come to do.

Over in their own box, the dowager empress can’t help but be distracted by the constant flicking of Claire’s eyes and head, looking over every so often. Often enough for her to notice and for it to get annoying.

Seklos looks in that direction, trying to spot what’s got Claire so preoccupied.

And her heart jams in her throat.

See that boy, could it be?

He looks…he looks…

No.

She resolutely turns her attention back to the ballet, back to the dancers as they seem to float and fly across the stage, graceful and beautiful.

Don’t be ridiculous. I refuse to dream. I refuse to hope. I must stop believing I will ever find him.

Claire’s thoughts are very different.

She’s looking over at Jim, of course. But the potential tsarevitch just keeps drawing her eye as well (the tsarevitch and the young man, Douxie, sitting next to him, their hands intertwined).

She was skeptical, but after the questions, after everything tonight…she really thinks this might be Krel.

And after all the years of wondering, all the years of catastrophizing, he’s…well, he’s…

Someone holds him safe and warm. Someone rescued him from the storm.
It’s a miracle, and one thing’s clear: it’s love that brought him here.

The music swells. Despite his efforts, Kirill begins to tear up as he watches, desperately trying to take his mind off his anxiety, but the despair of the poor swan aching to be freed from her curse is getting to him. She’s trapped. She can’t go home, she can’t return to her family…

Doubts and dreams, hopes and woe, whirling like a ballet.
Things my heart used to know, swirling below the surface.

And as a tear finally escapes, slipping down Krel’s cheek, something within Douxie solidifies, and he squeezes Krel’s hand a little harder.

Home, love, family. He will have all of it. And I will help him.

This he swears.

///

It’s not until intermission that Douxie and Krel let go of each other, and even then, it’s just a moment to rearrange so it’s more comfortable as they walk, Douxie partially pulling the ever more nervous Krel along, Jim having already gone ahead to see Claire.

“Relax, you’re gonna be great,” Douxie says.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Kirill groans, digging his heels in, bringing them to a momentary halt.

It’s been so long, do they remember me all that well, besides me being their brother and grandson? What if they don’t want this version of me? What if I’m still not good enough to be a tsarevitch, to be a part of their family? What if they reject me? What if—

“Just take deep breaths,” Douxie says. “You got this.”

Kirill tries to do as Douxie says and allows himself to be led onward.

When they finally reach the empress’s box, Douxie releases his hold. “Wait out here for just a moment. I’ll go in and announce you properly.”

He turns to enter.

“Douxie—”

Krel’s hand on his wrist stops him short.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Look, we’ve been through a lot together,” Krel starts, and Douxie’s heart lifts. “And I just wanted to…”

“Yes?”

“Well…” And Kirill falters—he just doesn’t have that much courage in one night. “Thank you, I guess. Thank you for everything.”

Douxie smiles at him softly. “Of course. I’ll go in and announce you now.”

Douxie makes a swift retreat through the door. He thought…well, it was a foolish thought. Even if Krel had said what he thought for a moment he was going to, it would’ve amounted to the same thing. Douxie does not get a happy ending here.

But he can do his damnedest to ensure Krel gets his.

Kirill watches as Douxie goes. But the door doesn’t completely close behind him. Kirill glances around, making sure no one’s staring, and goes over to stand at the crack. What can he say, he’s always been a tad ‘nosy’, though he prefers ‘curious’.

Within, Douxie finds Claire and Jim speaking in hushed tones. When she sees him, Claire gives an encouraging smile.

“Please inform Her Majesty, Dowager Empress Seklos, that I have found her grandson, Tsarevitch Krel of House Tarron,” he says, voice as official as he can make it. “He’s waiting for her just outside the door.”

“I’m very sorry, young man,” Claire says. “But the dowager empress will see no one.”

Claire then steps aside with a wink.

In the box, Seklos sighs and calls back, “Claire, you may tell that young man that I have seen enough ‘Tsarevitch Krel’s to last me a lifetime.”

“You’d better go,” she hears Claire say.

“Please, let me just—”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Seklos says, cutting off the young man’s protest, her voice cold as ice, “I wish to live out the remainder of my life in peace.” Aja will not be happy to find out that she’s turned another one away once she returns from the bathroom, but Seklos doesn’t care. Maybe she won’t even have to tell her at all if the young man is gone by the time Aja returns.

“I’ll see you to the door,” Claire says, closing the curtains that cut off the front portion of the box from the back—she knows the empress, and so she knows that tone is not one that can, nor should, be argued with. Then she says more quietly, “I’m sorry, Douxie.”

Claire goes to lead him out.

While she’s facing away from him, and despite the warning look Jim gives him, Douxie slips through the curtains.

When the sound of the curtains whipping closed hits her ears, Claire can only sigh. This is not going to end well.

There’s only one way she can think of to salvage this.

“Jim, I need you to go find Aja,” she says.

“Huh?” Jim says. “I’m not leaving Douxie—”

“The only chance you have of the empress listening to anything Douxie has to say now lies with the princess,” Claire says. “She went off with her security, down the hall—I’m sure you remember what the security guards look like.”

“Don’t think I’ll ever forget,” Jim says, unable to keep the amusement from his voice despite the increasing severity of the situation.

“Neither have they,” Claire says with a cheeky half-grin. Then she pushes him quite forcefully toward the door. “Now, go, vite, vite, vite.”

He exits the box to find Krel right outside.

“Princess?” Krel says.

He must’ve overheard.

“You stay here, I’ll be right back,” Jim says. Then, he takes off to hopefully find some salvation before the empress bites off Douxie’s head.

On the other side of the box’s curtains, Douxie finds the empress all alone—the princess must be elsewhere right now. He doesn’t know if that’s good or bad for him. Oh well. No going back now.

“Your Majesty, I intend you no harm.”

Seklos whips back around at the voice of the young man.

“And just what do you think you’re doing?” she asks.

“My name is Douxie,” he says, coming to sit in the seat next to her. “Or perhaps you might remember ‘Hisirdoux’. I used to work at the palace.”

“Well, that’s one I haven’t heard, I must say,” Seklos says. “Points for originality.”

Then, she stands to leave, not willing to waste another second on this.

“Wait, don’t go, please!” Douxie says, moving quickly to cut off her exit. “If you’ll just hear me out.”

“Do you think me a fool?” Seklos asks. “I know what you’re after. I’ve seen it a thousand times before.”

The empress brushes past Douxie into the back, where Claire still is, watching with nervous eyes and bated breath—but no Jim. She must have sent him off for something, or some other reason. Or perhaps so that he’d be out of the growing mess.

“People who train boys in the royal ways—” the empress continues.

“But if Your Highness will just listen—”

“Haven’t you been listening!?” the empress finally snaps, her voice full of rage and grief. “I’ve had enough! I don’t care how much you have fashioned this boy to look like Krel, sound like Krel, or act like Krel. In the end, it never is Krel.”

“But this time it is Krel!” Douxie protests.

“Wait—Douxie,” the empress suddenly says. “I’ve heard of you.”

Ah, fuzzbuckets.

This can’t be good.

“You’re that conman from St. Petersburg who was holding auditions to find a Krel look-alike.”

How the hell did she hear about that!?

“Your Grace, we’ve come all the way from Russia—”

“And you can go all the way back to Russia,” she says, her voice now bitter.

“It’s not what you think—”

“How much pain must you inflict on an old woman for money!?” she says. “Claire, remove him at once!”

Claire, looking grim, approaches him and then grabs his arms in a vice grip the likes of which Douxie has never encountered before. He gasps at the strength of it and tries to break it, but her grip is pure iron.

“But he is Krel, I’m telling you!” Douxie says as Claire pulls him away. “He’s the tsarevitch, if you’ll only speak to him, you’ll see!”

But his begging and struggling are for naught. Claire, with a last quiet apology, shoves him out the door, where he falls, unable to catch himself from the sheer force of the shove. She closes the door behind him, not quite a slam, but decisive even still.

And even worse, as he picks himself up off the floor, he finds Krel standing there with tears in his eyes, staring down at him as if he were a stranger. Douxie thinks this might be what getting stabbed feels like.

“It was all a lie, wasn’t it?” Krel says, his voice trembling.

“No! No, it wasn’t,” Douxie says. He tries to reach for Krel, but Krel jerks back.

“You used me,” Krel accuses. “I was just part of your con to get her money.”

“No!” he says more emphatically. “Look, i-it may have started that way—”

Kirill starts to storm off. He can’t believe that he believed Douxie, that for a single moment he could have thought he was anything other than a nameless orphan.

“—but everything’s different now, because you are Krel!” Douxie continues, following him. “You are!”

“Stop it!” Krel says, whirling on him. If circumstances were different, Douxie might have laughed at how similar Krel looks and sounds to the dowager empress right now. “From the very beginning, you lied! And I not only believed you, I actually thought—ugh!”

“Please,” Douxie says, moving around to try to block him, just as he did the empress. “When you spoke of the hidden door in the wall opening and the little boy—” he grabs Krel’s arm, desperate for him to hear what he’s saying “—Listen to me, that was—”

“No!” Kirill says, ripping his arm from Douxie’s grip. “I don’t want to hear about anything I said or “remembered”!” All of that was just suggestion—it had to have been. The idea conjured things in his head. Brains are fickle and very suggestible things in the right circumstances, after all. He so desperately wanted to believe he had a family out there that his brain took the initiative to create what was never really there. Made-up memories. False fantasies. Well, he refuses to be so gullible for a second longer. “You just leave me alone!”

Krel pushes past Douxie.

Douxie grabs his arm again to try to stop him from leaving.

Big mistake.

Krel lashes out, hand flying to slap Douxie right across the face with enough force to not only dislodge him, but send him back to the floor. Krel then fully storms away, pushing through and past people, disappearing into the crowd.

“Kirill, Krel, please, you have to know the truth!” Douxie tries one last time, ignoring the stinging of his cheek and springing back to his feet. But a couple of onlookers stop him, giving him dirty looks.

Krel is gone.

And by the time Jim returns with the princess and her security in tow, Douxie is too.

Jim approaches Claire, and she shakes her head sadly. It’s too late.

///

Douxie didn’t bother watching the second half of the ballet. He just…couldn’t.

Instead, he collected his stuff from the check and has since lingered outside, trying to think of what to do now, how he could possibly fix this.

It’s when he looks back to see the dowager empress getting into her car that an idea comes to him.

It’s perhaps the worst idea he’s had in years. Maybe even ever.

But it’s the only one he’s got.

As the rather short, awkward-looking chauffeur is focused on the dowager empress, Douxie sneaks around to the driver’s side of the car.

The chauffeur closes the door for her.

And so Douxie hops into the driver’s seat, the keys thankfully ready and waiting in the ignition. He starts the car, and the chauffeur cries out, but he pays no attention, putting the pedal to the metal and tearing off.

“Oh! Loth, ralentissez,” the empress says.

“I’m not Loth,” Douxie says.

“You!” the empress gasps. “How dare—!?”

“What is going on!?”

It’s only then that Douxie realizes Grand Duchess Aja is also in the car, sitting behind him. He’d totally forgotten about her. He can see her in the rearview mirror—she stares at him with wide eyes, but not quite as hostile as her grandmother’s, which give him a death glare of such ferocity, he could believe it might actually be able to kill him. And in those wide eyes of Aja’s, despite the color discrepancy, all he can see is Kirill, which only reaffirms what he already knew to be true.

“Rien!” the empress says. “You, young man, pull over this instant!”

“Grandmama, do you know him? Who is he?” the princess asks. Again, her words are startled, but not angry.

Not angry, she doesn’t know who he is or what could be going on…

The incongruency between their reactions hits him.

“The princess doesn’t know, does she?” Douxie asks.

“Know what?” the princess asks. In the rearview mirror, he sees her turn to the empress. “Grandmama?”

“…This man came to me during intermission about yet another false Krel,” the empress says.

“He’s the real thing!” Douxie says.

“Grandmama!” the princess says. “How could you not tell me!?”

“Because I knew this is how you would react,” the empress says.

“Because, unlike you, I refuse to give up!” the princess says. “That’s my brother!”

The empress and the princess continue their bickering, thankfully taking some of the heat off of Douxie, until Douxie finally pulls up in front of Claire’s mansion—he saw Krel leave with Jim and Claire, so he is definitely here. And even if he hadn’t seen him, there’s no way Krel would leave behind his stuff or Luug.

Douxie parks the car and scurries around to open the empress’s door, kneeling down so she can’t just step out and storm away, but also as a form of deference—he may be committing a crime here of a caliber higher than any crime he’s committed before, but he still wants to show the dowager empress respect, show her that he’s not someone to be feared.

“You have to talk to him,” he says. “Just look at him, please!”

“I won’t be badgered by you a moment longer!” the empress says.

“Do you recognize this?” Douxie asks, reaching into his coat. He pulls out the jewelry box, and the princess gasps, which convinces the empress to look, and her eyes widen to match her granddaughter’s.

“Where did you get this?” the empress asks, taking the box from him with trembling fingers.

“It’s him!” the princess suddenly says.

“What?” the empress asks.

“Grandmama, don’t you remember?” the princess says, eyes desperate but filled with a fierce hope. “He’s the boy who showed us the servants’ passages!”

“I know you’ve been hurt,” Douxie says, plowing onward, “but he’s been as lost as you have, as you both have, and now he’s finally here and ready to be found.”

“You’ll stop at nothing, will you?” the empress asks, though it lacks the bite from before.

“I’m probably about as stubborn as you are,” Douxie says, which the princess snorts at.

“…Very well.”

With that, he stands and steps back from the door, and the princess is already moving before the empress so much as shifts her weight, throwing her door open and running up the walkway, surprisingly agile in her floor-length gown.

///

Kirill packs away his stuff, doing his best to make fit all the new clothes Claire bought for him and refused to take back, Luug’s snores his only companion. He’s still in his suit from the show, but he’ll take care of that once he’s finished taking out some of his anger and devastation by forcefully shoving things into bags.

He comes to a halt, though, when, amongst those clothes, he finds the rose from earlier. From when he thought he’d actually found a home and a family and a…well, that doesn’t matter now. None of it was real.

He swipes at his burning eyes for the new tears that have welled and throws the rose in the trash.

And at that moment, there’s emphatic banging at his door. He can only think of one person who would be banging on his door like this right now.

“Go away, Douxie,” he calls out. He’s not interested in anything he has to say.

Even still, the door opens, and he turns around with a barb on his tongue ready to launch, only to find the rug pulled out from under him.

There stand the Dowager Empress Seklos and the Grand Duchess Aja, the empress looking less than impressed, and the princess looking about ready to pounce on him, eyes a storm of conflicting emotions, hair slightly mussed, making her desperation all the more palpable.

“Oh…sorry, I-I thought you were—”

“I know who you thought I was,” the empress says, cutting in front of the grand duchess and giving her a stern look before turning her attention back to him. “How about you tell me who you are?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he says, averting his eyes.

“My dear, I am old,” she says, unmoved, “and I’m tired of being conned and tricked.”

“I don’t want to trick you,” Kirill says.

“And I suppose the money doesn’t interest you either?” the empress asks.

“I didn’t even know about the reward until I overheard you and Douxie talking,” Kirill says. “You weren’t the only one lied to. I just want to know who I am. Whether or not I belong to a family. Your family.”

“You’re a very good actor—best yet, in fact—but I’ve had enough.” She brushes past him, heading for the door. “Aja, viens, allons-y.”

“No!” the princess says, almost panicked, her eyes flicking wildly back and forth from her grandmother to Kirill, as if it pains her not to look at him for even a single moment. “Not yet—”

A scent hits his nose, and it’s like a key unlocking doors in his mind he didn’t even know were there, digging up thoughts and feelings he’d lost so long ago, brilliant sunlight flooding the darkest corners of his mind, banishing the shadows. Images flash before him, so fast and intense that it makes him dizzy, some of the blurry scenes he’d already uncovered sharpening to crystal clarity, so many more reemerging for the first time since he forgot.

“Peppermint,” he says, having to place a hand against a wall to steady himself from the force of the flood within.

“An oil for my hands,” the empress says, rather confused by the sudden shift.

“I…I spilled a bottle,” Kirill says. The princess’s head whips back over at that, her gaze finally freezing on him totally. “The carpet was soaked, and we could never get the scent out. It forever smelled of peppermint.”

He finds his hand once more playing with his necklace, and when he looks again, he finds the princess’s eyes have zeroed in on this action, more afraid than ever, more hopeful than ever. As for the empress, she takes a seat on the vanity stool, her face full of wary wishes.

“I used to lie there on that rug…” Kirill continues, following the swiftly unspooling threads in his head, letting go of the wall to rub at his temple, an ache starting to form from the speed and force of the onslaught. “No, we used to lie there. And we missed you so much when you went away…to Paris.”

The empress pats the empty part of the bench next to her, hand shaking. Kirill heeds her invitation, going over to sit next to her, with the princess moving around to stand on his other side.

“What is that?” the empress asks, now looking at the necklace as well.

“I’ve had it for as long as I can remember,” Kirill says. “I was found wandering around fifteen years ago with a pretty nasty head injury and no memory of, well, anything. All I had was this necklace.”

“May I?” the princess says, hands reaching for his necklace, but hesitating at the last moment.

He carefully removes it and hands it over.

It only takes a second before tears well up in her eyes. She reaches for her own neck and, out of her dress, draws a necklace as well. She takes it off and holds it out for him to see. It’s the same make and color as his exactly, the same shape and quality, and even the same amount of worn from years of wearing it and fiddling with it.

And it says something as well—something different, but not really. Not different in so much as it is the rest of a phrase.

“Together,” he whispers.

“In Paris,” she finishes, and she clicks the necklaces together, the two halves reuniting.

“It was our secret,” the empress says, now tearing up as well, as the princess hands it to her for the empress to see, too choked up to say anything herself. “My Krel’s and Aja’s and mine.”

She reaches into her purse to pull out an item he recognizes—Douxie had it in his bag.

And Kirill knows now that it is certainly not and has never been a jewelry box.

“The music box,” he says. She offers it to him, and he takes it, a lump forming in his throat. “To…to sing us to sleep when you were in Paris.”

He also takes the necklaces and slides the key into its slot to wind up the music box. Gentle music begins to play, a waltz, as the top opens to reveal a pair of figures in a dancing embrace, figures he recognizes with a clench of his heart.

Mama and Papa.

“On the wind, ‘cross the sea,” he starts to sing along, “hear this song and remember.”

“Soon you’ll be home with me,” Aja joins, a smile splitting her teary face, wide enough to hurt.

“Once upon a December,” all three sing together, not one eye dry anymore.

“Oh, mon chéri,” Grandmama says, barely able to get the words out, at the same time that Aja sobs more than says, “Krel!”

Both wrap their arms around him as tight as can be, and he hugs them back, one arm around his grandmother, one arm around his sister. Finally, disconnected pieces become one, in his head and his heart and his life, making Krel whole once again.

Outside, Douxie can hear the weeping pouring out of the open window of Krel’s room, all three voices crying together.

He takes a moment longer to listen, the joy in his heart matching the deep-set ache. He blows a kiss and a hope up to the window, to all three within the room, but especially to Krel.

Then, Douxie walks away.

He walks away, wanting to give them their moment and time enough to get Krel moved out before he returns to his room.

He walks away, leaving Krel to his life, new, old, and right.

///

If he weren’t already technically dead, Morando’s sheer rage might have killed him.

Ever since he reached France, a long and exhausting process even with magic, he has lurked below the streets in the darkness, watching, waiting for the perfect opportunity.

And while watching and waiting, he has learned something.

The girl escaped, too.

That bitch managed to get the girl out of the country!

No, calm. You are rash when you are angry. You cannot afford to be rash, not now. Not when you’re so close.

He must look on the bright side—if the boy hadn’t thwarted him before, he would never have discovered the girl alive and well in Paris. He would’ve still believed his OMENs had finished her for him. But because the prince proved more difficult to kill than anticipated, Morando not only knows, he now has the opportunity to kill both at once!

And in such a delicious way, too.

He might be out of sight, but that does not mean he is cut off. It doesn’t take long for the newspapers to wash down here via one mechanism or another, delivered straight to his hands, and the newest one holds much promise:

L’HÉRITIER RUSSE PERDU KREL DE LA MAISON TARRON A ÉTÉ RETROUVÉ
L’Impératrice Douairière et la Grande-Duchesse Russes Organiseront un Bal Royal Pour Célébrer

A quick translation spell, and:

LOST TSAREVITCH KREL OF HOUSE TARRON FOUND
Dowager Empress and Grand Duchess of Russia To Hold Royal Ball In Celebration

Yes, the prince will have his moment in the spotlight, a moment of joy and gaiety for all.

And then Morando will snatch it away in a pristine recreation, a perfect continuation, an immaculate conclusion of what he began fifteen years ago. He’ll rip them from their happy little bubble and kill them both together, just as it was supposed to happen. Only appropriate since they came into this world together.

In but a few days, the Tarron line will finally be eradicated!

///

Together, Krel and Aja sit in matching blue pajamas on a plush, blush pink carpet before a grand fireplace. Luug is there as well, belly up and practically dead to the world. They’re in their grandmama’s private parlor in her palace, and she herself sits in a comfy chaise longue, dressed in a luxurious cream dressing gown. There’s a box on the table beside her full of memories, and between the twins is an old photograph in a gilded frame.

Krel brushes over it with trembling fingers, taking in each face: Mama, Papa, Zadra, Izita, and Davaros, and of course, him and Aja.

“I remember now,” he says, sadness and nostalgia and love in equal measure coloring his words. He’s remembered a lot, actually. There are still pieces missing, but with what he dredged up on the way to France, plus everything he’s remembered since he smelled that peppermint, he’s gotten a fair chunk back. “I remember how much I loved them.”

“And they loved us too,” Aja says, her head falling onto his shoulder as she looks. It’s been many years since she last set eyes on this photograph, since she could last bring herself to set eyes on it. Their parents, their older sisters, all lost that night…but now she has Krel back, and it’s more than enough.

“They would not want us to live in the past,” Seklos says, first petting Krel’s head, and then Aja’s. “Not now that we are all finally together again.”

They both continue their sad gazing, though, so she reaches for the box for something else to relocate their attention.

“Oh, regardez ça,” she says, pulling out an old pair of pictures. “The drawings you two gave me.”

Krel sets the photograph aside and takes his drawing as Aja takes hers as well, his eyes lighting up.

“Remember?” she asks.

“Yes,” Krel says with a laugh. “We drew renditions of each other for you to take to Paris once you had to leave. Izita made so much fun of them. And us.”

“I remember Davaros said our drawings looked like misshapen pigs,” Aja says. “And I mean…mine kinda does. Sorry, Krel.”

Krel. It feels so much better than ‘Kirill’ ever did. It feels like him. ‘Kirill’ was fine, it served its purpose, but it was never quite right, always felt like a shirt that wasn’t the correct size. And that was because he’s Krel. And he doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough of hearing his sister call him such. He may not have remembered her before, but something within still ached for her, still mourned the loss of her by his side, still missed his missing half.

Krel laughs more when Aja shows him her drawing, and he shows her his as well, saying, “Mine isn’t much better.”

“Oh, Krel,” Seklos says, taking the pictures to set them aside before standing, beckoning them each to stand as well. She leads them over to the floor-to-ceiling mirror, taking in the sight of them as a family once more. “You know, in your laughter, I can hear my dear Fialkov—”

“Our papa,” Aja says, once more cuddling up to him as she had been on the floor. “I can hear it too.”

Seklos then goes over to a pair of boxes set on a decorative table, exactly where they’ve been for fifteen years, Aja refusing to even touch hers without Krel. Aja gasps when she realizes what Seklos’s doing, and Krel watches in interest as she opens the beautifully carved wooden boxes to reveal a pair of crowns made from the purest of silver.

She first places Aja’s on her head, and then places Krel’s upon his, saying, “But you have the beauty of your mother, Coranda, Empress of all Russia.”

Beauty. He never would’ve used ‘beautiful’ to describe himself, but, well, if he looks like his mother, who is he to dispute that? After all, her face has become progressively sharper in his mind’s eye, and he remembers now that she really was, she was beautiful. And he knows now that just as the laughter that leaves his throat is Papa’s, the face that looks back at him in the mirror is Mama’s.

Something swells in Krel’s chest, something huge and impactful, something he can’t quite name but which overcomes him with such power, filling him from head to toe.

Meeting Aja’s gaze in the mirror, though, he understands.

Home.

Love.

Family.

///

Douxie finds himself in the dowager empress’s office a few days later, where he gives an awkward bow before saying, “You sent for me, Your Grace?”

“Ten million rubles, as promised,” she says, motioning toward a large case on her desk. “As well as my eternal gratitude.”

Oh, thank Mordrax, she’s not still angry at him.

“I accept your gratitude, Your Grace,” he says. “But I don’t want your money.”

Not something he ever thought he’d say before everything, something he could never have imagined even thinking after all those years of grifting and conning to keep his belly full. But just as Jim said outside the theater, everything has changed.

“What do you want then?” the empress asks.

“Nothing you can give,” he says, wincing at the slight voice crack at the end, praying she doesn’t comment on it. He bows once more and turns to leave.

“Young man,” the empress then says, stopping him in his tracks, “where did you get that music box?”

“I—”

“My granddaughter was right, wasn’t she?” she says, moving around to look him in the face. “You were the boy, the servant boy who got us out. You saved all our lives that night. And now, you have restored Krel to us. Yet, you want no reward.”

“Not anymore,” he says, breaking the eye contact.

“Why the change of mind?” she asks, and Douxie feels naked, like she can see right through him and to the gooey center that mourns what might have been but now can never be, what truthfully could never have been.

“It was more a change of heart,” he says. “I must go now.”

The boy bows once more and takes his leave. This time, Seklos lets him, too busy ruminating over all that she’s just learned. For such a notorious conman, he wears his heart awful obviously on his sleeve. And it’s all too clear how it now bleeds.

Douxie makes his way down the stairs, intending to just leave and never turn back, only to find himself stopped halfway down, face to face with Krel.

Krel is now dressed in a new outfit of a variety of shades of blue, an ensemble fit for a ball, sitting at a surprisingly fashionable midpoint between modern and traditionally Russian, along with a crown on his head, breathtakingly handsome. He looks as though this is exactly where he has always belonged. Douxie supposes that’s because that’s true—Krel belongs here, and always has, a royal by blood and by destiny.

“Hello, Douxie,” Krel says, feeling like a fish out of water all of a sudden. He’s still so angry at him, but at the same time, such anger and betrayal could not kill those deeper feelings so easily. With the time that’s passed, though it’s only been a few days, his anger and hurt have faded just enough to allow those other feelings to creep back in, leaving him confused and unsteady. Not that he’ll ever show that to Douxie, of course. Not after everything.

“Hello,” Douxie says, wary of what might happen.

“Did you collect your reward?” Krel asks, a stinging question if there ever was one.

“My business here is complete,” Douxie says. He doesn’t want to lie anymore, can’t bring himself to. But he figures it best not to say the full truth either. It’s better this way.

“Not yet, it’s not.”

At the bottom of the stairs stands Aja, dressed in her own modern-traditional gown that matches Krel’s regalia, also wearing a matching crown. She’s gazing up at Douxie with such intense vulnerability and appreciation, he almost can’t stand it.

“Aja—” Krel starts to protest, but she ignores this completely, climbing without a care to pull Douxie into a hug.

“Merci,” Aja says, squeezing Douxie as tight as she can. “For everything.”

“Of course,” Douxie wheezes out, the hug so tight he can barely breathe.

When Aja finally lets go of him to link arms with her brother, she then adds, “Vraiment, I cannot possibly thank you enough. There is nothing in this world that I—”

“It was my pleasure,” Douxie says, cutting her off. He just can’t take this—he’s happy to have been able to reunite them all, but at the same time, this venture began for such incredibly selfish reasons. He doesn’t deserve all the praise.

Krel rolls his eyes at this, and for a fraction of a second, it feels as though they’re back to the beginning, back to the train.

“Young man,” a servant who stands at the bottom says, putting a definitive end to that moment, “you will bow and address the princelings as ‘Your Highnesses’.”

“No, that’s not necessary,” Krel says. It feels so utterly wrong, it makes everything in him recoil.

“Please,” Douxie says, holding up a hand to stop his protest before bowing to the pair. “Your Highnesses.” He then focuses once more on Krel. “I am glad you found what you were looking for.”

“I am glad you did too,” Krel responds stiffly, and Aja’s eyes flick between the two men, the gears in her head turning.

“Well then, goodbye, Your Highnesses,” Douxie says and bows again.

Before Krel can say anything, Douxie makes a swift retreat, leaving him gazing after, a soft, “Goodbye,” on his lips.

“Krel?” Aja says. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Krel says. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Yeah, that’s a crock of shit if Aja’s ever seen one.

But she won’t push.

For now.

///

Jim adjusts his sash in the mirror, checking over his outfit one last time before he must meet Claire and head down to the ball, which he’s attending this time, mostly as a guest, but also because he is never missing a ball again after what happened at the last one, after all that he might’ve prevented, might’ve saved. He smooths his freshly trimmed hair and close-cut beard. He hasn’t worn anything so fine as his current outfit in years, but he must admit, it feels right to be back in such an ensemble: blue coat, black dress pants, a gold sash. There are medals pinned over his heart, accolades of old that Claire had first as a promise from him to always return to her, then additionally as her last connection to him when the world turned upside down, telling of his experience as a lord and a knight. Claire also saved one of his swords from back then, which now sits on a nearby table in a decorative scabbard waiting to be strapped to his belt, and he hadn’t realized how much he missed the feel of a hilt in his hands.

The door behind him opens, and in his mirror, he realizes that it’s Douxie, whom he hasn’t seen in days, despite the man still having been in Claire’s manor.

“Douxie?” He turns to meet the other halfway. “I am so sorry about how things went at the theater. Claire sent me to find the princess to help you, but by the time I got to her and back, everything had already happened. I didn’t even have the time to explain to the princess—”

“Jim,” he says, and the way he says this is so finalistic, Jim’s heart drops. “It’s alright. Everything has worked out.”

“Where’s the money, then?” Jim asks. “You gonna invest in your music like you always talked about?”

“I didn’t take the money,” Douxie says.

“You what?” Jim says, unsure whether he heard that right or not. That money has been Douxie’s ticket out of living in that empty, condemned palace and running scams, his ticket to finally being able to get the life he wanted, the life Jim has wanted for him. “But then…what’s your plan?”

“Well…if you’re ever in St. Petersburg again, look me up,” Douxie says with a shrug of his shoulders.

“What?” Jim says, everything in his head coming to a halt at the unexpected statement. “But you wanted to leave St. Petersburg as much as I did!”

“Perhaps,” Douxie says. “But…there’s nothing for me here—”

“I’m here,” Jim says. “I’ll always be here.”

Douxie just shakes his head and ignores Jim’s interjection. “—and nowhere for me to go.”

“Douxie…”

“So long, Jim,” Douxie says, extending a hand for Jim to take.

Instead, Jim pulls the younger man, his brother in all but blood, into a hug. He only pulls back so he can look Douxie in the face as he says, “You’re making a mistake.”

“Trust me,” Douxie says, breaking the hug. “This is the one thing I’m doing right.”

No matter how much a broken heart hurts.

At that moment, there’s the click of nails on marble, and he looks down to see Luug has come up to him, wearing his own tiny sash and crown. Luug whimpers with big, sad eyes, as though he understands what’s happening. Douxie bends down to pet him one last time.

“You know, I trusted your judgment before, and look how that ended,” Jim says.

“Hey, that judgment got us to Paris,” Douxie says defensively.

“And nearly got you jailed if the empress had been even a smidge more disagreeable—” Douxie winces at that, realizing word must have gotten to Claire and thus to Jim “—on top of the debacle with Krel at the opera,” Jim says. “Who says I should trust your judgment now?”

“Come on, Jim,” Douxie groans, straightening up. “I can’t stay. I don’t belong here.”

“You are always welcome, at least with me and Claire,” Jim says.

“Welcome and belonging are two very different things, my friend,” Douxie says.

And with that, Douxie leaves.

Douxie leaves, with all of his stuff, out of the palace and into the streets of Paris, alone.

Douxie leaves, for the last time.

///

Music fills the grand ballroom of the Dowager Empress Seklos’s estate, the ballroom bursting with people and merriment, all gathered to celebrate the miraculous return of the prince.

Krel watches the scene from behind the curtains that close off a private area from the main dais where the royal thrones are located, beside one of which Luug sits, tail wagging a mile a minute as he too watches his subjects. Krel’s eyes scan the crowd, finding all the people he learned about during the journey, from Uncle Varvatos to the Countess Domzalski and her grandson, who has spent much of the time all but glued to Jim, to the Baron Stuart of Durio to Uncle Uhl—he hasn’t actually spoken to any of them yet, hasn’t been reintroduced yet, but finds his anxiety growing with each face he recognizes. Beyond them, he continues cataloguing every detail, a tight ball sitting in his chest as he does so, made from that anxiety, but not entirely. No, something else makes up a good portion of it, something he doesn’t dare name.

Beside him, Aja’s talking, trying to keep his mind on more cheerful things, and failing. “You know, we could go out there and dance like when we were kids. Remember how I used to lead you? Uncle Varvatos always got on us about how it was improper for a princess to lead a prince. But then Zadra would come and redirect him with talks of her most recent fencing or horse-riding lesson, and I’d drag you back out all across the floor. Remember that?”

But, as has been the case since he took this position, Krel gives her no response.

Aja sighs—looks like she needs a different approach. However, she has no idea what. She used to know him like the back of her hand, but she can’t deny that time has changed both of them. They are not who they once were, and if she’s honest, she’s a little unmoored knowing that she doesn’t know her brother as well as she used to. Some things are thankfully still the same—he still likes to build and invent, like he used to with their toys, and he’s still smart and snarky and wry, still awkward but determined. But there’s so much still to learn and relearn. And they’ve only had a few days back together, a few days of bridging that gap. What worked when they were little may very well not work now.

But, fortunately for her, her salvation arrives just in time.

“He’s not there.”

Krel turns to see that Grandmama has finally come to join them, dressed in a silver ballgown.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Krel says. “Who’s not there?”

Seklos and Aja exchange a look, and both are relieved to find that they are on the same page, and that yes, Krel is still just as obvious as he’s ever been.

“A remarkable young man,” Seklos says, “who found a music box.”

“No, he’s probably too busy spending his reward money as fast as he can,” Krel says bitterly.

At that moment, Seklos reaches a decision.

She joins Krel at the curtain and gestures out at the party. “Look at them dance. You were born into this world of glittering jewels and fine titles. But…I wonder if this is what you really want.”

Krel looks at his grandmother and lets the curtain drop closed, hardly believing his ears. “Of course it is. I found what I was looking for. I found out who I am. I found you and Aja.”

“Yes, you did find us,” Seklos says. “And you’ll always have us.”

Seklos pulls her grandson in to hold him close. “But is it enough?”

She takes his face in her hands, taking in the handsome young man he’s become over the years. The years that she missed. The years that shaped him into who he is today.

Then, she says, “Ma petite étoile, your Hisirdoux didn’t take the money. He didn’t want it. ”

“He didn’t?” Krel asks, confused. He’d thought…

“Knowing you are alive and safe and home with your family, that was his reward,” Grandmama says.

She then places a gentle kiss on his brow.

“And knowing that you are alive and safe and having you home with us, seeing the man you have become, it brings me a joy I never thought I could feel again.”

She moves back to the curtains. Before she goes, however, she has one last thing to add.

“Whatever you choose, know that we will always have each other, and you will always have a home here with me and Aja.”

With that, she heads out into the party, leaving the twins alone.

“You should probably go too,” Krel says to Aja after a moment, his thoughts awhirl, his heart torn.

“There is no way in hell,” Aja says. She failed him once, left him behind, and she refuses to do so again. “You’re never getting rid of me ever again. And certainly not leaving my sight as much and for as long as I can help it.”

Well, he can’t exactly knock her for feeling like that.

“And whatever you want, I’ll support you too,” she adds, her tone knowing. “Unconditionally.”

He is equal parts eternally grateful for Aja and a tad embarrassed that she’s managed to clock him with having seen only one interaction between him and Douxie.

Luug’s sharp bark cuts through their moment, and both look over to see the corgi bounding toward the open door to the gardens, through which fresh spring night air flows in, helping to diffuse the heat of all the people here.

“Luug?” Krel calls out. Luug doesn’t even look back, though, continuing on his way, barking up a storm.

Krel and Aja exchange a look—he’s got a bad feeling, and it looks like she does too.

So, they go after Luug.

Luug leads them through the gardens, utterly fixated on something, but neither can figure out what. All they can do is continue after him, even as he leaves the regular gardens to dive into the hedge maze.

And neither notices how the foliage around the entrance to the maze grows over behind them, sealing them off from the palace.

///

At the train station, his only viable mode of transportation back to Russia, Douxie digs through his coat pockets for what money he has as he waits in line.

But what he extracts from his pocket is not money.

No, it’s the rose he got when Claire was showing them around Paris, the match to Krel’s. He remembers now—he’d put it in this jacket pocket when changing into his tuxedo, to make sure he wouldn’t lose it.

His mind goes back to that night, and every night before, Krel flooding his head with a vengeance. Douxie had tried to push him down, to shut thoughts of him out. But with the rose in hand, fragrant as it was when he first got it, even after days in his pocket, he’s powerless against them. The scent fills him, floral and sweet, cutting through every barrier he’d tried to erect, overturning every stone he’d tried to bury things under.

He smiles at the memories, and his heart aches in his chest.

“La personne suivante,” the clerk servicing the line he’s in says. “Ahem, la personne suivante, monsieur.”

Douxie jolts at the direct and pointed address to find there’s no one ahead of him anymore. He’s next.

There’s discontented muttering behind him; he’s holding up the line. But…he can’t seem to make himself move. He can only stand there, frozen, staring dumbly at the clerk, who becomes quickly annoyed by his lack of response.

“Si vous n’avez besoin de rien, monsieur, je dois vous demander de partir de la file, s’il vous plaît,” the clerk says. “Il y a d’autres personnes qui attendent.”

Though Douxie does know some French—he had lessons on it while he was a servant, as well as a few other languages, so as to better serve the foreign dignitaries when they came to visit—his brain comprehends absolutely none of that.

He finds his gaze returning to the rose.

He’s here at the station. It’s his turn. He needs to leave, to return to St. Petersburg. He knows this, he came here specifically for this.

But…

He raises the flower to take another whiff.

Visions of Krel flash through his head once again. Everything they’ve been through this past month. And everything before…

It was June, I was ten. It’s been a while since I last thought of then.
A parade and a boy, and a crowd of thousands.

He sat straight as a king. Only eight, but so proud and striking.
How they cheered, how I stared. In that crowd of thousands.

Then, I started to run and to call out his name as the crowd on the road went wild.
I reached out with my hand and looked up. And then he smiled.

The parade travelled on. With the sun in my eyes, he was gone.

But if I were still ten in that crowd of thousands, I’d find him again…

And he knows that…he just can’t do this.

In an almost daze, he steps aside, allowing the person behind him to go up to the clerk.

He looks wistfully to the sky in the direction of the palace.

And his heart nearly stops at the strange red tinge to the dark night in that direction, wisps of crimson gathering like clouds of the deepest blood, blotting out the stars as they bleed.

If he were anyone else, he’d say it was an optical illusion, or perhaps some kind of astronomical event, and call it a night. It’s not even that noticeable, all things considered.

But he’s not anyone else.

No, he’s him, and something in his gut sinks like a stone, a shot of adrenaline racing through him, the dueling urges to fight or flee sparking along his every nerve, along with this overwhelming déjà vu.

Whatever that is, those clouds, that color…it has everything within him screaming DANGER.

It hits him, a strike to his heart, a swell of memory and emotion in his head.

The Curse of the Tarrons.

His memories from that night have never been the greatest. He’s sure that’s thanks in no small part to the head injury he got that same night, but even more than that are the years of suppression.

He’d done his utmost to not think about that fateful night over the years, to bury it as deep as he could. After he learned that the tsarevitch was lost, his heart just couldn’t bear it.

But now it’s coming back in a rush, the terror of hearing the screams in the ballroom even from the kitchens, the dread at the sight outside the palace as though hell had come to Earth, the soul-rending guilt at his failure…

And a red gleam in the malicious glares of soldiers, something eerie and unnatural in their irises, the same red that seemed to imbue everything that night, swirling amongst the chaos. Other servants who were stationed in the ballroom said Morando, that healer the tsar and tsarina had banished, had returned and cast a curse. He hadn’t believed them. Why hadn’t he believed them?

And with that same eerie red returned tonight of all nights…

Krel!

///

It seems as though no matter which way they turn or how far they go, Krel and Aja can’t seem to find Luug, the dog’s barks remaining near but still out of reach. It doesn’t help that it’s fully dark out now, and while there are lights placed at intervals throughout the hedge maze, they’re not doing all that much to help them outside of keeping them from tripping over things or running into hedges.

“I don’t like this,” Aja eventually says.

“Me neither,” Krel says. “But I’m not leaving Luug out here.”

“Of course not,” she says. And he knows it’s genuine. Honestly, Luug might be even more her dog than his after the way they’ve bonded these past few days. “I just—”

“I’m with you, Aja, so I’ll be fine,” Krel reassures her. “And might I remind you, I was on the streets and spent years in a shitty orphanage—I can take care of myself.”

“Krel—”

“Well, well, well, look what we have here.”

They both stop in their tracks at the sound of the voice echoing all around them. It’s masculine, but the echo distorts it too much for Krel to really get a read of it. Even still, there’s something about it that freezes his core solid, pangs off something deep, deep down, something that’s terrified.

His hand shoots out at the same time as Aja’s, the two meeting in the middle to grab onto each other for dear life. Looks like he’s not the only one who feels like this.

“A lost pair of princelings all alone.”

Another bark rings out, this time closer than at any point before, and both of their heads whip in that direction. No need for discussion—they take off for it. They have to get to Luug before whoever is speaking does.

“You know, it’s not safe for princelings to be alone.”

Skidding around a corner, they finally find Luug, who’s now sitting crouched in a corner, tail tucked and shaking, looking absolutely petrified. But he perks up when he sees them and runs right over to them and into their waiting arms.

And now that they have him, they can worry more about getting out of here.

“There could be people out here who want to hurt you.”

They both scream as the hedge to their left suddenly erupts, thorny vines flying out to wrap around one of Krel’s ankles and one of Aja’s wrists. But that’s all they get before they rip themselves away and start running, Aja fully taking Luug and Krel taking the lead.

See, Krel remembers their exact route—he can guide them out of here easily.

But to their dismay, when they round a corner further back, they find a wall instead of a corridor, a living wall with lifted vines waiting to grab them.

They skid to a stop, Aja using her strength to yank them away and out of reach before the vines can make their move.

“What now?” she asks as they back away.

And for once— “I-I don’t know.”

“Here, let me help.”

They’re snatched from behind, vines braided into thick ropes of foliage grabbing onto their arms and legs to drag them back and through the wall behind them.

But, to Krel’s surprise, they’re thrown out into the open, and the vines retreat.

He and Aja look around to find that they’re somehow on a bridge, and once they pick themselves up, looking back, they find that the palace is on the complete other side of the maze, much further out than either had thought the maze went.

That’s when Luug starts to bark and growl, squirming so fiercely in Aja’s arms that she can’t keep hold of him. He leaps to the ground, teeth bared and hackles raised, eyes glued to something behind them.

“Krel and Aja, the beloved twins, youngest of the Tarrons, Tsarevitch and Grand Duchess of all Russia.”

At the very center of the bridge stands a cloaked man, hood up to hide his face. But the red glow of one eye cannot be hidden, and more memories assault Krel, memories of a cold night and a river, of a harsh grasp on his ankle and a determined one on his arm.

“Your Imperial Highnesses,” he continues. “Look what fifteen years have done to us. You, two blossoming flowers, me, a rotting corpse. Did you like my little trick, attracting the dog? I certainly did—used your little personal alarm against you.”

He laughs, a deep, crazed sound that sends chills down Krel’s spine.

“Vous!” Aja says, reverting to the French she’s become accustomed to in her sheer shock. “Mais…ce n’est pas possible!”

“Oh, it’s far more possible than you might expect, Princess,” the man says. “And I must take a moment to commend you—taking your grandmother’s maiden name, a stroke of genius. That and your flight to Paris, it was enough to fool the Reliquary into believing you dealt with. Your brother simply got lucky, though I suppose he would’ve done the same as you, had he gotten that far.”

“Lucky?” Krel says with an insulted splutter.

“Amnesia, such a convenient thing,” the man says. “Prince Krel vanished into little orphan Kirill, who ended up in an orphanage outside of St. Petersburg, and the Reliquary could not find you—you were as good as dead. But the moment you set foot into the palace once more, the moment you began to really remember, that was when your fate was sealed, and I lived again.”

The man pulls his hood down to reveal severe features and a threatening snarl, made all the more so by the fact that there are a couple of patches of flesh missing from his face, exposing sections of bone, the socket and brow of one eye, and the opposite half of his teeth. Krel lurches back, Aja beside him the only thing keeping him on his feet. “That face…”

“Last seen at a party like this one, followed by a tragic night on the ice,” he says. “Remember!?”

He raises something, a large vial of a red that Krel recognizes all too well, and out from it speeds a wave of cold air that freezes everything, icing over the entire bridge and river below, and yanking the memory into full relief.

“Morando,” Krel says.

“Destroyed by your wretched, despicable family!” he says, once more raising the vial, his Reliquary, and now Krel can see that the hand he holds the vial in is completely skeletal, the last few vestiges of flesh and muscle half hanging on, half loose, rotted. “But what goes around comes around.”

It’s not hard to figure it out—the magic must’ve somehow brought Morando back, and everything that happened, the train crash, him almost jumping to his death, it all came from Morando. And Krel remembers it now, too, how Morando unleashed it, how it destroyed the ballroom all around them.

The creatures from the Reliquary, the OMENs, swarm, flying in circles around them as they cackle, grabbing at their clothes and hair and faces, ripping and pulling.

“Get away from him!” Aja says, and Krel has half a mind to once again remind her that he can handle himself, and that he’s lived a more rough-and-tumble life than her, so he has a trick or two, but there are more important things to worry about right now. They both try to bat at the OMENs, but their efforts are futile. Though the OMENs can touch them, the same can’t be said in the opposite direction; all of their attempts to ward them off end up with their hands just flying through their incorporeal bodies. The onslaught forces them back in their attempts to duck away from it, and they quickly find themselves cornered, pressed against each other, and up against the rail of the bridge. It’s only then that the OMENs stop and back off, leaving them covered in long, thin scratches and gouges, as well as missing chunks of their outfits, allowing the cold to fully sink into their bodies. They’ve also lost sight of Luug.

Even still, there’s a fire lit within Krel, that fear and grief from so long ago converting to anger, and he yells out at Morando, “We’re not afraid of you!”

“I can fix that,” Morando says. “Care for a little swim?”

Another flash of that red light erupts all around them from below, blasting out from between the stones, rocking the ground under them. It’s only when they register the cracking and quaking that they understand what Morando’s doing. It’s Aja’s fast reflexes that save them as everything under them collapses in a burst of debris, sending them falling. One of her hands shoots out, catching onto the broken edge, and the other grabs his wrist and keeps him from plummeting.

It’s almost too familiar for Aja to bear.

But this time, she won’t let go. She’s stronger now, stronger than when they were those kids at the train station. And no matter what happens, no matter if it means they both fall, she refuses to let him go ever again.

“No one can save you now!” Moranda crows above them.

“Wanna bet?”

A fist collides with Morando’s face from seemingly nowhere, and taken off guard, Morando is thrown to the ground.

And though Krel can hardly believe his eyes, there is no doubt—it’s Douxie who stands where Morando just was, his black hair free-flowing, ripped from its usual tie by the conjured wind, and breathing as if he’d just run a marathon. The way his shoulder-length hair ripples around his face, how his golden eyes burn, the hateful scowl he wears, the striking figure he cuts, Krel’s blood would curdle if he didn’t already know Douxie. But he does, and so all he feels is this full-body relief.

With the momentary reprieve, Aja displays strength she could only have inherited from Grandmama, pulling him up with one hand while maintaining her hold with the other. He aids her as best he can by finding what little purchase there is on the broken section of the bridge still under them, not yet having fully broken clean off, and she lifts him until he manages to grab ahold of the edge as well.

“Oh, how sweet,” Morando says, picking himself back up. “The prince’s idiot in shining armor, returned to save the day.”

Another motion with the Reliquary, and the OMENs round on Douxie, enveloping him to snatch him away. He shouts as they pull him from the ground to launch him into the air. He flies until he hits the statue of a pegasus, the sound of his body flat-backed hitting stone sending a shockwave of fear through Krel. Douxie then crumples to the ground, curling in on himself with a groan.

“And you know, I think such a hero requires a noble steed, don’t you agree?”

Douxie doesn’t get much time to recover, for just as quickly as the OMENs snatched him, at Morando’s words, one sinks into the very pegasus statue Douxie hit, illuminating its eyes red and bringing it to some semblance of life. It rears up with a whinny that echoes across the frozen water and flies down to where Douxie lies. He can barely roll out of the way in time, its two massive front hooves coming down with enough force to crack the bridge where he was just moments before. Douxie scrambles to his feet and grabs the nearest thing to him that can serve as a weapon, a long piece of broken rebar. With it, he fends off the statue best he can, but the sheer size difference prevents him from doing any lasting damage or creating any openings—it’s all he can do to keep from getting squished, let alone getting back over to the twins.

With Tall Idiot occupied, Morando turns back to Krel and Aja.

“Do svidanya,” he says, baring his teeth in a facsimile of a smile as the piece of the bridge below them finally fully crumbles into the water, leaving them hanging on by their fingertips. He walks over to stop right at the edge, looming tall over them, a silhouette even darker than the night. Then, he squats down, the already unstable edge cracking and groaning under his weight, drawing closer to them, closer to better see their expressions as they fall to their deaths, to better smell their fear. “Finally, the last of the Tarrons shall die, and my work shall be complete!”

Krel’s barely paying any attention to Morando, though, so the gloating falls on mostly deaf ears. He’s too busy looking around, calculating as fast as he can, racing against his quickly tiring grip. Aja’s always been practically able to read his mind, so if he can just think of something—

That’s when Luug makes his sudden reappearance. In the flurry of the red-creepers, he got separated and turned around, shoved back through the leaf-wall into the dark twisty-garden. But his nose has never failed him before, and it did not fail him this time, leading him right back here. He comes flying out of seemingly nowhere with a snarl, and he chomps down on one of Morando’s ankles, teeth sinking into what flesh is still there, and locks his jaws. He won’t let the bad-gross-smell-man hurt his humans!

Morando reels back with a pained cry, and this is the last straw for the loose section of the bridge, the stone all crumbling into the water below them, and the edge they’re hanging onto crumbling as well.

Luckily, though, Aja’s as athletic as ever, and Krel’s excellent at thinking on his feet. His eyes lock onto their saving grace, and it only takes one jerk of his head in the relevant direction for Aja to understand and move. She uses the last of her quickly disintegrating handhold to propel herself all the way over to a long piece of exposed rebar, bent but still firmly embedded. Once her hold is secure, she takes advantage of the freer movement granted by how torn-up her skirt is to flip and lock her legs around the bend in the rebar. She looks back over and holds out her arms—his turn. He follows, swinging his legs to build some momentum before letting go with a prayer. But this prayer is unneeded, as, like it has always been, Aja catches him, hands clamping around Krel’s forearms, and his around hers.

Above, Morando blasts an OMEN at the damned dog to remove it from his leg—and scowls at the sight of the head of his tibia and part of his achilles tendon still in its teeth—and keep it occupied and out of his way. And maybe, hopefully, kill it, too. Then he looks over and can’t help the laugh that bubbles out of him at the sight of the ripples in the water, no sign of the Tarron children.

“Yes!” he cries.

“NO, KREL!” Douxie finally dodges around one of the statue’s hooves to dart over to where Krel and Aja had just been, but are no longer.

Dread and fear and not again churning in his gut, Douxie dives.

Only for that statue to have somehow flown around fast enough to headbutt him back onto the bridge.

“Long live the Tarrons!” Morando crows, triumphant voice echoing into the night

“Right!” a feminine voice that’s supposed to have been silenced says.

Morando’s head whips over to see both twins a few feet over, freeing the hems of their clothes from the jagged stone edge, breathing heavily, covered in dust and with bloody scrapes all over their hands, but alive.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Krel says.

With that, the twins charge Morando, tackling him to the ground.

Krel rolls off to the side, giving Aja the room she needs to wrestle Morando into submission and pin him, which in turn gives Krel his opening to scramble to his feet and turn his eyes to the Reliquary. He grabs it, Morando unable to pull it away or even move that arm at all thanks to Aja, and rips it from Morando’s grip—quite literally, as Morando refused to release it, but bare bones connected by only the meagerest of rotted sinews aren’t exactly the strongest things.

If this is what brought him back, then this is what can send him back.

Krel raises the Reliquary to the sky, and with a snarl on his face, says, “This is for our family!”

For everything that Morando took from them. For every moment he stole. For every life he extinguished, living and potential, for every second Krel lost with his grandmother and sister, for everything that could have been but was destroyed by him.

He knows logically that there is no use in dwelling on what-ifs. But right now, all there is is rage that’s reaching a fever point within, pure and potent, begging to be released, to detonate.

Thanks to this man, Krel lost everything: his family, his home, his own self. And he might have never recovered any of it if it weren’t for the stroke of unbelievable, inconceivable fortune that led him and Douxie to meet that day.

So, while there is no use dwelling, retribution does feel pretty damn good.

“Do svidanya, Morando!”

With all his might, Krel throws the Reliquary to the ground, the glass shattering on impact into a million pieces, razor glitter spilling across the remains of the bridge.

“NO!”

But the protest does nothing. It’s too late for Morando—with the Reliquary broken, so too is his deal broken.

From the shattered remains, a column of fiery light explodes, shaking the bridge from the sheer force of the eruption, unleashing a great boom. The winds whip up into a howling maelstrom all around them, thick clouds gathering overhead of that deep red, tinting the world all around them bloody crimson.

All the OMENs come flying, whirling around the column as if caught in the wind, shrieking and cackling as they go. And with all the OMENs congregating at the epicenter, this frees Luug from his combatant, but it also frees the statue from its possessor and its source of life. Crossed with cracks from all the OMEN put it through, the statue instantly crumbles, stone raining down. Douxie tries to escape, dodging a few larger stones, managing to handle a few hits from others well enough as he goes, but he isn’t quite fast enough. Despite his efforts, a large chunk of that stone clocks him straight on the top of his skull, laying him out amongst the growing debris.

“Douxie!” Krel cries out. He runs over, pushing against the wind, and falls to his knees next to Douxie, not caring about the bruises that’ll form in no time, nor for the already-ruined outfit he probably just tore more holes in. The stone from the statue has all fallen, but looking back at the chaos, Krel maneuvers himself so that he’s helping to shield Douxie from any other potential projectiles. Luug joins him, scrambling to press himself into Krel’s side.

With Krel out of the way, Aja finally lets Morando up, and he tries to get to his feet, tries to flee the scene, his desperate rambling incoherent with the fear that radiates off of him.

Aja then joins Krel as well, wrapping herself around him, the two clutching onto each other for dear life whilst shielding Douxie and Luug amidst the growing storm.

Morando doesn’t get very far. The OMENs lash back out, only this time, their prey is Morando. They swarm him, the man completely disappearing beneath them, and in one last flurry of screeches, they vanish, leaving only a pile of picked-clean bones that then turn to dust, picked up by the winter wind still blowing. The dust is funneled into the column of light, which grows brighter and brighter until, in one sudden flash that leaves imprints in Krel’s vision, it disappears completely.

Only then does the wind finally stop, and with it goes the arctic temperature and the ice, leaving them on the ruins of the bridge on a normal, temperate, Parisian spring night.

“Holy kleb,” is all Krel can say after a moment of just sitting there in the quiet, the sudden difference a shock to the system.

And then, his mind goes back to their timely savior.

He and Aja untangle themselves, allowing Krel to fully roll Douxie onto his back. He then places two fingers to his throat, feeling for a heartbeat—that kind of blow to the head can easily kill a person. But his hands are just too shaky for him to tell, the adrenaline from everything starting to crash, making him unsteady.

Luckily, though, he doesn’t have to search for long.

After a few frantic moments of trying and failing to feel Douxie’s pulse, Douxie twitches under his fingers, a low groan making its way out of him as his brow scrunches.

Krel watches with bated breath, barely containing himself, as Douxie slowly blinks his eyes open.

“What…”

Douxie can’t get more than that out, though, before Krel finally throws himself at him, wrapping his arms as tightly as he can around Douxie.

“Ah! Easy, easy, please,” Douxie says with pained gasp, and Krel releases him like he were burned. “Think a rock got me in the ribs…”

“Douxie,” Krel says, hands going to gently cup Douxie’s face. “I…I thought…where…” The words stick in his throat. Honestly, he’s not even sure what all he’s trying to say. There’s so much, it’s all jammed up in his head, his thoughts frazzled and disordered. He ends up only being able to manage two words. “What happened?”

“I was leaving Paris,” Douxie says before slowly moving to sit up, wincing and hissing as every wrong tweak and tinge. But eventually, he does make it upright. “Made it all the way to the train station, nearly had my ticket to St. Petersburg bought.”

“But, then, why’re you here?” Krel asks.

“I saw the red in the sky, like from…back then,” Douxie says. “But…even if I hadn’t seen that, well…I just couldn’t go. I couldn’t do it.”

“Why?” Krel asks.

Douxie’s hand moves, and Krel watches as Douxie reaches into his vest. He gasps, hands flying to his mouth in a swell of emotion as Douxie withdraws a single rose, now squished and missing a few petals, but a rose Krel would recognize anywhere.

“Because, I-I…Krel, I—”

“Oh, pour l’amour de—just kiss already!” Aja says, sounding a manic mixture of exasperated and fond.

“Aja!” Krel says, though it’s embarrassingly close to a whine.

“Am I wrong?” Aja asks, and Krel can feel as his face heats up, a blush no doubt erupted across his cheeks.

But he finds Douxie with a similar blush, the new rosy hue to his skin bright even beneath all the dust and dirt that Douxie’s covered in—that they’re all covered in, no doubt.

A smile starts to break out across Krel’s face, and a matching one begins to appear on Douxie’s, only for it to suddenly falter and fade.

“But…they’re all waiting for you, for both of you,” Douxie says, tearing his eyes from Krel, the hand with the rose lowering. “At the palace.”

For a moment, Krel hesitates, unsure.

And in that moment, another memory assaults him, coming on fast and strong.

A parade…passing by…It was hot, not a cloud in the sky.
Then, a boy caught my eye in a crowd of thousands.

He was thin. Not too clean. There were guards, but he dodged in between.
Yes, he made himself seen in that crowd of thousands.

Then, he called out my name, and he started to run through the sun, and the heat, and the crowd.
And I really tried not to, but I smiled.

And then, he bowed.

The parade travelled on. With the sun in my eyes, he was gone.
But I knew even then, in a crowd of thousands, I’d find him again.

It was Douxie. It’s always been Douxie, even before everything.

And it’ll always be Douxie.

He looks at Aja.

Eyes now growing glassy, understanding what he’s saying without him needing to say a word, just as it’s always been, she gives him a smile and a nod.

///

Seklos returns to her personal parlor late into the evening to find a very unexpected sight awaiting her.

There on her chaise sits Aja. Her dress is torn and dirtied, her hair is a mess, there are half-scabbed, half-still-slowly-bleeding scratches covering her, her makeup is smeared from her quiet sniffling, and she just overall looks like hell. Then, she’s got Luug hugged to her chest and a note in one of her hands.

“Aja? What’s wrong? What’s happened?” Seklos says, rushing over. Jim and Claire step into the room after her, both wearing looks of great concern. Neither dares to approach yet, though, not until they know more of the situation.

Seklos stops short when she sees that while Aja’s got her crown still on her head—which is probably going to take several maids to remove with how tangled her hair is—Krel’s crown is back on its satin pillow.

Aja pulls on her sleeve to get her attention back. Then, she gives Seklos a watery smile before handing over the note.

Chère Grandmama,
Wish me luck! We’ll be back soon, I promise.
(And Aja—don’t worry about me, please.)
(If that’s even possible.)
À bientôt!
~ Krel (& Douxie)

“Krel and Douxie, they’ve eloped,” Aja says, voice as watery as her smile, the words accompanied by almost identical gasps from Claire and Jim. “It’s a perfect ending…”

“No,” Seklos says, taking a seat next to her granddaughter and wrapping an arm around her. “It’s a perfect beginning.”

“Oh, and, uh, funny story, we maybe sort of have to pay for a bridge to be rebuilt.”

“We what?”

Not too far away, on a boat slowly cruising along the Seine, two figures stand together at the prow beneath the stars, basking in their perfect beginning. As they go, music floats down the river from who knows which glowing building that lines their way. As it would happen, it’s a waltz.

“Shall we dance?” Douxie asks. His various scratches and contusions have been treated—he got very lucky, his head still rather aches, but they found no sign of a concussion—and his clothes have been brushed clean from the chaos earlier, leaving him looking as dapper as always, though he’s left his hair loose by special request.

“Hmm…only if you lead this time,” Krel says. He, too, has been patched and cleaned up, though his outfit was unsalvageable; he’s now dressed in the ensemble Douxie purchased for him before they got on the boat from Germany to France, and if anything, it feels right.

“I think that can be arranged,” Douxie says. He holds out a hand, which Krel readily takes, allowing Douxie to pull him in close, chest to chest.

And so close together, how could Krel not bridge those last few inches, surging up to press his lips to Douxie’s, arms draping over Douxie’s shoulders. Douxie presses back with equal fervor, arms snaking around Krel’s waist.

When they pull apart, Douxie simply can’t help himself, picking up Krel to swing him around, eliciting laughter from the younger man that’s more beautiful than any music.

With steady hands holding him secure, Krel feels like he’s flying. And even once his feet touch the deck once more, their foreheads coming to touch lightly, that feeling doesn’t leave him.

After all these years, Krel is finally right where he belongs.

They both are.