Ivan barely has the time to raise his head from the thawing river when a school bag catapults over his head and sails down, down, down into the depths below. A rattling fills the air as thin adolescent limbs scramble at the wire fencing trying to find a hold and wrest their body over.
The boy gives up half a minute later, just falling back to the footpath and curling up into a little angry ball.
The boy’s hair is in faded blond ringlets that look very soft and well cared after. “Little boy,” calls Ivan. “You should not have thrown your bag away.”
“Shut up!” the boy snarls in a voice that is savage and not at all like what you would expect from one with a face so sweet and pure. “Like you can talk, you jumper! Everyone knows why you’re always here! You’re a coward! You don’t understand anything!”
Ivan sighs, eventually, and steps back over to the other side to join the rest of humanity, for a moment. He takes the boy by the hand and leads him back up the street, and they buy ice-cream as Ivan’s melancholy takes a back seat beneath his skin. And the child tells him haltingly of bullies and burning matches and dressing rooms where he’s naked and humiliated and how much it makes him want to just give up.
“I would like another sundae,” announces Ivan, interrupting.
Slumped in his seat, too adolescent to care, the kid places another three dollars on the table and gives him the shyest of smiles. He buys a caramel, and Ivan remembers that he loves strawberry syrup, then, so he buys them another to make sure.
-
3.
“I’m just tired,” says his psychiatrist. “So tired.”
Ivan nods as they sit together in the grey cityscape. “I know. Waking up-“
“-is hard. Sometimes.” He doesn’t laugh, he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t get angry or start crying. It’s the kind of melancholy that creeps, that settles and eventually is just there like a chill or an old friend. Ivan knows the kind. “But, you know, Mr Braginsky? That doesn’t mean I feel like this every day.”
Ivan considers this, or pretends to. “You only want to kill yourself some of the time?”
He laughs sheepishly and tucks his hair behind his ear. “Everybody… wants to kill themselves sometimes. You told me that story. About your mother and the garden and those sunflowers. And it…it reminded me of this thing that happened when I was younger. Funny, huh?”
“What is it?”
He sighs and the darkness is back again, behind those clear green eyes. “Well, I was in a large family when I was little, like you, and …well, my father wasn’t abusive per say, but-“
He wasn’t abusive, but. But he was.
“But they aren’t all gone,” sings Ivan. “They didn’t leave you to fend for yourself-“
“No,” concedes his psychiatrist. “Your mother died. That’s not leaving you. But you’re not alone. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Because I pay you.”
And he lets out an explosive breath and rubs his face in his hands and just closes his eyes. “Jesus. I care. Are you still taking your medication?”
And he answers to the sunset over the bridge, “Yes. Yes. …No.”
Silnece. Another sigh. "It's nice to have someone to talk to."
But the face bathed in red next to him reminds him of strawberry syrup and of that lady, and when he returns home he opens the pill bottle and counts them again.
-Fuck, he’s not meant to feel guilty.
-
2.
A white and blue flash tears past his eyes on the way to his usual spot. It’s a man, clad in skinny jeans and a torn T-shirt, and he runs hard and runs fast, towards-
-towards his ledge.
And he’s almost over and free and Ivan knows by the madmadmad look in his eyes that this one- he’ll do it, he will-
A passerby tackles him to the ground and pulls him, sobbing, back to safety.
“Let me go!” he screams, “Let me go! He raped me, my cousin raped me and I want to die so let me go! Fuck him, fuck him, just let me go I want to die-“
He descends into some language full of Ilpons and Aigos and sobs that Ivan can’t understand. Eventually, an ambulance and a police car arrive to take him away.
Ivan stands dumb for a good hour before he realises that his heart is thrumming.
He doesn’t stand on the bridge this day. There are too many people on the look out. He spends the day in his empty house looking through dusty photographs of his family and thinking.
-
44.
“You!”
“…yes?”
“You!” he says again, leaning unsteadily on the bars next to him. He’s a tourist, definitely, with that accent. The street lights from the city across the river make his skin glow like bronze- blue lights, red lights, green lights-GO. “Some of us are pissed and need to be all depressed, got it? You gonna jump or what?”
The man’s grinning at him. The man’s grinning in his face, stone drunk. And suddenly it all just annoys him to that point and he wishes they’d stop questioning him.
Fine.
Ivan turns and steps-
-he doesn’t step, because the man’s caught his shoulder in a vicegrip and he’s pulled him back. They bang against the fence with a crash- and the world wheels around them and the lights from the city are like stars as they wheel into heaven and back- back through the dreaming-
-and they land.
Beat.
“Fuckin’ shit!” the man swears in a rush of breath. “Bloody hell! Holy shit, mate. What the fuck you doin’? We could have died!”
Ivan just looks at him.
And eventually the man just laughs and laughs and laughs, and Ivan finds himself laughing too, adrenaline in his veins reminding his cells of one very, very important thing.
He’s alive. For now.
“It’s the cold,” he says later when the grinning man has heaved him into a gimmicky bar made for the tourist trade. “Fuckin’ gets into your head, eh?”
Ivan knocks back another vodka and thinks about his empty house with his family all fled from him. “Yes. Loneliness,” he says to himself.
“Yer not the only one, you drongo,” the tourist drawls over his beer. “Everyone’s alone.”
“’Course,” he adds with a wince, “ain’t no different where it’s warm, either.”
-
1.
On a spring day, the sun rises strong and bright, and Ivan makes his trek back to his spot.
There’s a girl- no, a woman- already standing there. As he draws nearer, she glances at her watch as if she’s waiting for something. He climbs over the railing and stands next to her; she looks up and down again.
“Hello,” says Ivan.
“Hello,” she replies. Then, eyes as sharp as kitchen knives, she jabs without preamble. “Why do you try to kill yourself day after day?”
Why? An empty house, a memory of blood and siblings and I’m sorry Ivan I won’t see you this year and uncles who don’t want anything to do with him because he’s a failure and he can’t even write a history PhD- but suddenly, Ivan can’t really remember. His mind’s too full of numbers and proverbs and a prosecutor’s cufflinks.
It starts to snow. “Because I’m alone.”
She has platinum hair, as flat and smooth as a board, framing her pretty face like it was made for mounting in memory. She’s beautiful, and cold.
“Liar,” she says. “I’ve been watching you. And you’re not alone at all. You’ve touched more people than others do in a lifetime. Liar.”
Oh. “I…I can’t help what I think. No one needs me. They all hate me.”
She clenches her little jaw and looks up into his face, and only now does Ivan see the tears, or see the emotion down there, hidden away. Always just out of view, behind the mask of a stranger.
“Think this,” she demands, taking a precarious step closer along the edge. “I’ve been here, on this bridge, watching you, for a year. If you’d thought to just look around you and notice, you would have seen that it’s not just me. And if you jump of this bridge, I’ll jump after you so we can be together for those last few seconds, because without you I have nothing. I love you. I’m in love with a man who wants to kill himself, and it’s driving me to suicide.”
Ivan trembles under that gaze, and it tells him in a biting voice that you’re an idiot, and I love you, and I need you, and you are not alone.
Anon? That was just beautiful. I like the anachronistic pattern in which Russia meets (and saves) everyone else, I like the backstories, and I love the ending. Yes, it's a bit out of the blue, but when is real life that predictable?
Five stars, A+, I don't know. This is one of the best fills I've ever read. Lovely fill, anon, please keep up the great work!
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Do Better (3/4)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-05 12:32 pm (UTC)(link)Ivan barely has the time to raise his head from the thawing river when a school bag catapults over his head and sails down, down, down into the depths below. A rattling fills the air as thin adolescent limbs scramble at the wire fencing trying to find a hold and wrest their body over.
The boy gives up half a minute later, just falling back to the footpath and curling up into a little angry ball.
The boy’s hair is in faded blond ringlets that look very soft and well cared after. “Little boy,” calls Ivan. “You should not have thrown your bag away.”
“Shut up!” the boy snarls in a voice that is savage and not at all like what you would expect from one with a face so sweet and pure. “Like you can talk, you jumper! Everyone knows why you’re always here! You’re a coward! You don’t understand anything!”
Ivan sighs, eventually, and steps back over to the other side to join the rest of humanity, for a moment. He takes the boy by the hand and leads him back up the street, and they buy ice-cream as Ivan’s melancholy takes a back seat beneath his skin. And the child tells him haltingly of bullies and burning matches and dressing rooms where he’s naked and humiliated and how much it makes him want to just give up.
“I would like another sundae,” announces Ivan, interrupting.
Slumped in his seat, too adolescent to care, the kid places another three dollars on the table and gives him the shyest of smiles. He buys a caramel, and Ivan remembers that he loves strawberry syrup, then, so he buys them another to make sure.
-
3.
“I’m just tired,” says his psychiatrist. “So tired.”
Ivan nods as they sit together in the grey cityscape. “I know. Waking up-“
“-is hard. Sometimes.” He doesn’t laugh, he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t get angry or start crying. It’s the kind of melancholy that creeps, that settles and eventually is just there like a chill or an old friend. Ivan knows the kind. “But, you know, Mr Braginsky? That doesn’t mean I feel like this every day.”
Ivan considers this, or pretends to. “You only want to kill yourself some of the time?”
He laughs sheepishly and tucks his hair behind his ear. “Everybody… wants to kill themselves sometimes. You told me that story. About your mother and the garden and those sunflowers. And it…it reminded me of this thing that happened when I was younger. Funny, huh?”
“What is it?”
He sighs and the darkness is back again, behind those clear green eyes. “Well, I was in a large family when I was little, like you, and …well, my father wasn’t abusive per say, but-“
He wasn’t abusive, but. But he was.
“But they aren’t all gone,” sings Ivan. “They didn’t leave you to fend for yourself-“
“No,” concedes his psychiatrist. “Your mother died. That’s not leaving you. But you’re not alone. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Because I pay you.”
And he lets out an explosive breath and rubs his face in his hands and just closes his eyes. “Jesus. I care. Are you still taking your medication?”
And he answers to the sunset over the bridge, “Yes. Yes. …No.”
Silnece. Another sigh. "It's nice to have someone to talk to."
But the face bathed in red next to him reminds him of strawberry syrup and of that lady, and when he returns home he opens the pill bottle and counts them again.
-Fuck, he’s not meant to feel guilty.
-
2.
A white and blue flash tears past his eyes on the way to his usual spot. It’s a man, clad in skinny jeans and a torn T-shirt, and he runs hard and runs fast, towards-
-towards his ledge.
And he’s almost over and free and Ivan knows by the madmadmad look in his eyes that this one- he’ll do it, he will-
A passerby tackles him to the ground and pulls him, sobbing, back to safety.
“Let me go!” he screams, “Let me go! He raped me, my cousin raped me and I want to die so let me go! Fuck him, fuck him, just let me go I want to die-“
He descends into some language full of Ilpons and Aigos and sobs that Ivan can’t understand. Eventually, an ambulance and a police car arrive to take him away.
Do Better (4/4+)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-05 12:39 pm (UTC)(link)He doesn’t stand on the bridge this day. There are too many people on the look out. He spends the day in his empty house looking through dusty photographs of his family and thinking.
-
44.
“You!”
“…yes?”
“You!” he says again, leaning unsteadily on the bars next to him. He’s a tourist, definitely, with that accent. The street lights from the city across the river make his skin glow like bronze- blue lights, red lights, green lights-GO. “Some of us are pissed and need to be all depressed, got it? You gonna jump or what?”
The man’s grinning at him. The man’s grinning in his face, stone drunk. And suddenly it all just annoys him to that point and he wishes they’d stop questioning him.
Fine.
Ivan turns and steps-
-he doesn’t step, because the man’s caught his shoulder in a vicegrip and he’s pulled him back. They bang against the fence with a crash- and the world wheels around them and the lights from the city are like stars as they wheel into heaven and back- back through the dreaming-
-and they land.
Beat.
“Fuckin’ shit!” the man swears in a rush of breath. “Bloody hell! Holy shit, mate. What the fuck you doin’? We could have died!”
Ivan just looks at him.
And eventually the man just laughs and laughs and laughs, and Ivan finds himself laughing too, adrenaline in his veins reminding his cells of one very, very important thing.
He’s alive. For now.
“It’s the cold,” he says later when the grinning man has heaved him into a gimmicky bar made for the tourist trade. “Fuckin’ gets into your head, eh?”
Ivan knocks back another vodka and thinks about his empty house with his family all fled from him. “Yes. Loneliness,” he says to himself.
“Yer not the only one, you drongo,” the tourist drawls over his beer. “Everyone’s alone.”
“’Course,” he adds with a wince, “ain’t no different where it’s warm, either.”
-
1.
On a spring day, the sun rises strong and bright, and Ivan makes his trek back to his spot.
There’s a girl- no, a woman- already standing there. As he draws nearer, she glances at her watch as if she’s waiting for something. He climbs over the railing and stands next to her; she looks up and down again.
“Hello,” says Ivan.
“Hello,” she replies. Then, eyes as sharp as kitchen knives, she jabs without preamble. “Why do you try to kill yourself day after day?”
Why? An empty house, a memory of blood and siblings and I’m sorry Ivan I won’t see you this year and uncles who don’t want anything to do with him because he’s a failure and he can’t even write a history PhD- but suddenly, Ivan can’t really remember. His mind’s too full of numbers and proverbs and a prosecutor’s cufflinks.
It starts to snow. “Because I’m alone.”
She has platinum hair, as flat and smooth as a board, framing her pretty face like it was made for mounting in memory. She’s beautiful, and cold.
“Liar,” she says. “I’ve been watching you. And you’re not alone at all. You’ve touched more people than others do in a lifetime. Liar.”
Oh. “I…I can’t help what I think. No one needs me. They all hate me.”
She clenches her little jaw and looks up into his face, and only now does Ivan see the tears, or see the emotion down there, hidden away. Always just out of view, behind the mask of a stranger.
“Think this,” she demands, taking a precarious step closer along the edge. “I’ve been here, on this bridge, watching you, for a year. If you’d thought to just look around you and notice, you would have seen that it’s not just me. And if you jump of this bridge, I’ll jump after you so we can be together for those last few seconds, because without you I have nothing. I love you. I’m in love with a man who wants to kill himself, and it’s driving me to suicide.”
Ivan trembles under that gaze, and it tells him in a biting voice that you’re an idiot, and I love you, and I need you, and you are not alone.
Do Better (4+/4+)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-05 12:44 pm (UTC)(link)“What’s your name?” he asks after, as they walk hand in hand to a nearby bakery with sunflowers arranges in the window.
“Natalya. Yours?”
Good enough isn’t a fine ending, but as a beginning, well, it’s a start.
-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
Did you know?
Lithuania is no longer the top country for suicide. This dubious honor now belongs to the lovely Belarus.
The countries above were chosen for their contrast, the ability to link into something cohesive, and personal bias. Sorry. :D
Russia is very hard to characterise, realised an anon who has never actually had to write a Russia beyond two dimensions.
My one regret- not putting in America.
But hey, he's paired FAR TOO OFTEN with Russia OH GOD I'm going to be killed
Re: Do Better (4+/4+)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-05 03:43 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Do Better (4+/4+)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-05 04:07 pm (UTC)(link)Five stars, A+, I don't know. This is one of the best fills I've ever read. Lovely fill, anon, please keep up the great work!
Re: Do Better (4+/4+)
(Anonymous) 2010-10-24 10:39 pm (UTC)(link)