a heart, closing
koschei & maryathe past, russia
cw: death, murder,
butchering, child abuse
the hut and the surrounding woods are utterly silent.
that is not a good thing.
koschei looks at the hut, feeling something deep in his bones that something is wrong. that whatever he is looking at — the hut, it's claws deeply cloven into the earth with no smoke from it's chimney with the windows hard to see — is not right. the magic he uses isn't like baba yaga's, and even he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end at the way this looks, at the fact that it seems as if the air is holding it's very breath.
he dismounts from his horse, patting his neck almost reassuringly. the horse paws at the ground, backs away. he'll never run; his home is with koschei alone, so he doesn't do anything to tie it near the hut.
koschei approaches the hut slowly, quietly. every bit of training he'd had at leraje's feet, he uses to make sure his footsteps are silent. even the cloak he wears doesn't make a noise as he gets closer and closer to the hut.
he expects baba yaga to cry out. he expects there to be jeers. he expects to see a human running away. he expects the animals to make a noise.
there is none of that.
there is only him, touching the door with a gloved hand and the door swinging open, shuddering.
the hut isn't just a hut. it is alive. it has a will of its own, he thinks. and the door is opening.
the first thing that his nostrils is the smell of blood, a dead body. that isn't unusual in and of itself; he's argued with baba yaga as she's stripped the flesh from humans. what's unusual is that he can tell this isn't human. that this is... worse.
covering his nose isn't an option as koschei ducks inside, fully steps into the hut. for all the ways that the hut has been before, something about this is more barren than before, and the stench is worse.
he keeps his feet quiet as he moves through the house, searching for baba yaga, or perhaps her daughter. the last time they'd seen each other had been months ago, koschei still not entirely at ease with her sudden growth. his fingers run over the walls, and he almost enters the last room when he freezes.
how can he not freeze, given that baba yaga and her daughter were there — and one seemed to be dead?
marya is young, actually young, the first time baba yaga put a knife in her hand. the rabbit had panicked, it’s heart so fast it was less a beat and more hum, while she worked to pull it loose from the snare but when she held it — stroking it’s soft fur and staring into it’s dark wet eyes, whispering safe, safe, safe like a promise — it had calmed, trusting. she wanted to keep it. wanted something she could hold, something that would love her back. she didn’t even care that it would only love her for not hurting it.
mostly, she didn’t know love was supposed to be anything else.
it stayed in her arms as she went back to the hut, half asleep where it was tucked into her dushegreia, and she thought of how she could ask to keep it. she’d been practicing. watching the visitors who came to baba yaga wanting things, saw which ones did not make her smile. smiling was dangerous.
the rabbit struggled when it saw baba yaga. that’s why she had sent marya to the woods to check their snares. everything that wasn’t human and greedy knew to stay away. marya held it closer, her own heartbeat rabbit-fast. shaking.
baba yaga smiled.
“put it there.” she said, gesturing at the stained table. when marya lingered too long, when dacha’s door trembled as if to open to some unsaid wish, baba yaga stopped smiling, abrupt, lips pursing in a familiar expression. “now, kuritsa.”
marya never said no. she put the rabbit on the table and held it between her hands when baba yaga got the knife. then it started to scream.
“please,” she had begged. it wasn’t a word baba yaga used. marya had learned it from the people who came to the hut instead. they said it often. “it’s scared.”
baba yaga put her hand on her head, long claws catching in her dark hair. “then be kind,” she said, leaning over her and putting the knife in her hand. “and cut straight.”
the cut in her chest is straight. practiced. she wonders if it would have taken baba yaga hours to take her apart, the way it had taken marya. it bleeds, even days later, but not enough to kill her — not anymore. a day ago, maybe more, she had moved her hand with it’s new long claws, familiar in a way that made her breath catch and choke, and pressed where it healed; tender skin, rent muscle, damaged meat. more blood spilled to pool on her lap and brought a sort of cold indifference with it as her body slowed, drained out, numb. bled, the way she would an animal she pulled from her snares.
marya wanted to live. she remembered the days before, knowing. feeling the change in the air around them, a tension to everything. a sudden politeness. a week before a man had come and asked for her. he called her mарена, чародейка. baba yaga had smiled, and he said nothing again.
marya was born wanting. hungry and selfish. when baba yaga felt she was particularly ungrateful she would tell her how she dragged the body of her mother (the first one) from the river, cut her open and pulled out a dead baby and gave it breath. how marya was always greedy, always wanting more when the very air she breathed each day was a debt she owed her. but she did. radishes, dumplings, and blackberries, the comb the skeleton man gave her, to suck honey off her fingers, to be called mashenka, marukha, любимая, to see the cities the men who bargained spoke of going to, to wear velvet and silk and her hair loose, new stories and new songs.
that night, marya hid the knife.
she wanted her mother to love her. she wanted everything else more.
it takes a lot to kill a hag. koschei knows that. he doesn't know what it takes to create a hag; baba yaga had never said, and why would she? he doesn't know what he's looking at here, except the corpse of a woman he had known for years now, and her daughter who's hair spills on the floorboards like dark ink.
for a moment, he's not sure who he wants to, needs to tend to first: the seemingly living girl on the floor or the corpse of her mother.
he decides to take it one at a time: to unclasp his cloak, fingers practiced at this over the years. it doesn't take much to free it, and koschei does his best to make some noise on the floorboards, to let her know that he was here, that he wasn't there to frighten her. even if she hadn't ever seemed truly frightened of much, even if he thought she was just a simple little girl at first, she wasn't anymore. not after this, for certain.
the cloak is placed on her shoulders first, no move made to clean her, to take away the blood from her face. it's just security, a way to remind her that he's there.
then he steps further into the room, into the real carnage before him. baba yaga was never exactly a beautiful looking woman; that was generally the point of her. when she did look like one, it was always a warning, a signal to back away that humans never could see.
so to see her corpse in death — no magic left to glamor her, no need to send a warning signal, to look pretty for the reaper — is a different thing as he stands over her.
he hasn't been or felt human in a long time. his humanity certainly doesn't return to him now as he looks at her corpse, at the way that her ribs have been pulled apart from her body. it's a little like the rabbits, the fowls he used to find as a child, having to cut into them for his family. it's not quite like a battlefield corpse, either, and koschei can only come to a single culprit, still sitting in the hut, still surrounded by blood, still alive.
there's an urge to peek inside further, past the viscera, past the blood, past the bone. to actually put his hand in there, root around it for organs the way he'd done as a boy, looking for a liver or the intestines.
instead, he looks away from the corpse, and goes back to marya, feet still falling deliberately, until he's on his knees beside her, searching for some kind of reaction in her face, some other signal that some part of marya has survived this horror.
if some part could.
he reaches out with his finger, to touch her cheek.
marya was distantly aware of dacha shuddering around her, like someone crying silently, a shifting of wood that felt like heaving breaths or stifled sobs coming out as a hiccup, familiar, then careful footfalls. oh, she thought, unconcerned. there was a calmness to her now. a distance. what could be worse than her, in these woods, this house? she has her mother’s blood on her chin. what was there left to be scared of?
she tracked the muffled steps, stirring up the dust that never fully settled while baba yaga lived, never would have dared, thick across the floors. slow, checking each room. eventually, they stop, lingering in the half open door. marya carefully does not picture the scene as it appears from the door. the blood in pools and hand prints and stains, turning centuries old sheets crisp and brown at the edges like an autumn leaf. two knives. the body, ribs cracked, muscles ripped. marya, on the floor.
dacha had let them in, she thinks, unbothered, hearing the creak of shifting weight. and then a thought so terrible, her first true one in days, enough to make the air stick in her chest (still open): what if she had killed dacha with baba yaga? what if those fitful movements, the groans of the wood, the rattles of glass in the window panes, were the final gasps. it’s nearly enough to wake her up, drag her back to the world she had wanted so much. nearly.
please, she thinks, pathetically, please, thumb twitching to pet the floor though she barely feel it. she wants to say she’s sorry but it sticks in her teeth, throat too raw. marya had been quiet when her mother started cutting, quiet when she reached for the knife, but her throat ached as if she had been screaming.
the man — of course it’s a man, of course, not even knocking; it was a convulsive half-formed hysterical sort of thought — steps into the room. he’s noisy but otherwise she doesn’t register much about him, even as he throws a cloak about her, as if she were cold, as if she was something that needed protecting; it’s only when he kneels, touching her cheek does she register his familiarity. baba yaga, voice raised, like a crow koschei, koschei. bessmertny. skeleton man.
marya opens her mouth to say something, anything, and chokes on her breath overwhelmed. baba yaga dragged her from the river, dead before she had been born, pushed air into her lungs and called her hers; it feels like she’s drowning, like she has been drowning for years. slowly, then all at once. but she has to say it. forces it through airless gasps and numb lips. “i killed her. i killed her.” lifts her arms as much as she is able to show her hands, the blood, the claws.
normally, he doesn't like to think of the wife and children he'd lost centuries before. there's no point anymore when they wasted away without him, when their names hardly occupy his mind, much less their faces.
yet when marya opens her mouth, when she gasps he thinks of them. of his wife gasping after the death of a child, of his daughters upset when the rabbit they've liked died. he thinks of them as marya struggles for breath, as he watches her mouth move.
i killed her.
she says it in a way no child should ever have to say, she says it in a way that isn't brimming with pride or joy or triumph.
it's just hurt. it's just pain.
no matter what the motivation was, no matter what the intended outcome was, koschei is very sure she didn't anticipate this.
koschei's eyes flick from her her face to the new claws she has, to the blood that coats her hands and arms. the whole room is so full of it, she's so drenched in it. if he hadn't been a seasoned killer himself, it would have been overwhelmingly sickening to see the carnage.
but he is a seasoned killer. and she is not. she is feeling something different than when koschei first killed a rabbit or when he first killed an invader to his home. the violence here is so painfully intimate.
and it makes him upset for her. makes him feel for her as he nods, voice gentle. "i know, i know." koschei doesn't ask how or when or why. not now. instead he asks, "are you hurt?"
physically, it should be an easy enough answer.
she doesn’t know what she expected him to do. what her sad little confession was meant to inspire. anger. fear. incredulity. i killed her, as if it had been easy, simple. baba yaga was dead. baba yaga was dead. but maybe that was unfair. marya didn’t even know what she thought about it, and it had been her, her hands, her knife. (a straight line across the throat, quick and neat, so fast baba yaga hadn’t seemed to register it for a moment before her neck opened like a yawning mouth. the skin had started to mend, later, a faint noise starting in her chest while marya tore at ribs with her bare hands, fingers slipping. she grabbed the knife and slit her throat again. she didn’t know if it was for her mother, be kind, be kind, or her.)
if marya had expected anything, it wasn’t this. this softness. a hand against her cheek. the question confuses her, that it is a question confuses her. eyebrows drawing together minutely, and even that feels exhausting for the effort it takes. she thinks of wax drips from candles landing on her hand, and imagines her skin like that. thick, smooth, like it could peel off whole.
marya wasn’t hurt. she was an open wound.
she shakes her head no.