Work Text:
Valery’s adding his signature to the Boron shipment’s slip when he realises it’s Shcherbina’s pen he’s using, the one loaned so he might hurriedly scribble a reactor in exchange for not being aerially defenestrated. It’s been in his breast pocket since they landed in Chernobyl, retrieved three perhaps four times, and somehow he’s not thought to return it until now.
A few hours ago, he’d have suspected it was a test. Valery Alekseyevich Legasov, are you the kind of man who regularly goes above his station? Answering back, interrupting your superiors, pocketing their property without permission? Shcherbina hasn’t the time for such pettiness now. Perhaps he hasn’t the time to notice minor infractions either; he’s seen Valery retrieve and use his pen those three perhaps four times and never shown any inclination toward irritation.
“Keep it,” Shcherbina says to the proffered pen that’s halted his pacing, then again to Valery holding it out more persistently. “Keep it.”
Valery blinks.
Twisting it in a dusk tinged with ionizing radiation’s troubling glow, the initials engraved down the pen’s shaft catch that blue light — B. Y. S.
Shcherbina adds, “Keep in mind whose power you’re wielding when you use it, eh?” He smiles; a condescending kind of smile that demands one in return.
Valery doesn’t smile back. He hesitates, nods, then returns the pen to his pocket.
*
The relocation of Pripyat would be less orderly if its residents knew the truth. Yes, it’s dangerous to be here, and no, the evacuation isn’t temporary. Some don’t even carry suitcases, only a bag slung over a shoulder. A few children cry, but their parents subdue them with reassurances that won’t hold up to time.
Valery watches from the roof. He’d followed Shcherbina up the switchback staircase one step to the other man’s two, Shcherbina’s feet angled to fit on narrow steps with the familiarity of someone for whom everything is too small or fits a little too tight. They were breathless upon reaching the top.
They didn’t discuss coming up here, merely drifted as one. The distance feels appropriate. Overhearing strangers leaving their homes the other side of a door felt like trespassing on hallowed ground, hundreds in hallways, some pleading to go back for a forgotten something, babes crying in arms, dogs barking. This will be the last time these souls exist here.
The same will happen in every town and village for hundreds of square miles . . .
Valery wishes he could find relief in overseeing the exodus, in the cooling breeze after the exertion on the stairs, but both sting, ache. All these people will die, most likely, and the breeze itself is radioactive.
Everything from their vantage point, from well-kept grass to painted concrete, will be sealed forever by man’s folly. Once the last coach leaves, only he and Shcherbina will remain in this graveyard.
“Cold?” Shcherbina asks. Dust whips up in the wind like grey snow, catching on the shoulder of his coat.
Valery hadn’t realised he was trembling. He shakes his head and clenches his fists, fingernails digging into palms. Yet, Shcherbina’s stare lingers. (Ironically, since discovering his life expectancy had a much shorter countdown, the man has become more patient.)
Lines of bodies continue moving steadily below. A coach pulls away, its every window filled.
Valery can’t breathe.
It’s not like he’s breathed deep since he arrived. His brain knows what he’s inhaling, what his flesh absorbs every second here. His heart knows what fresh weight it bears each time he tells someone everything will be fine. Being in Chernobyl’s shadow is like sinking in black water. Up here, it’s like coming up for air.
“Easy,” Shcherbina says, fingers curled around Valery’s wrist.
Valery’s gulping like a landed fish, breaths scraping a narrowing throat. Is he dying? Had he miscalculated how long his exposure might take to finish him off?
His ribs feel like they’re bending the wrong way. His vision blurs while his glasses remain on his face. His knees hit the roof as he grabs for something to hold, anything—he’s not far from the edge. Heights don’t scare him, but losing control does.
Did someone poison his breakfast? Is he the victim of sabotage?
Shcherbina sits him against an extractor duct, the metal’s chill seeping into his shoulder blades through his suit. He angles Valery forward until his brow rests on bent knees.
“That’s it,” he says, low voice whisked away by a breeze it usually bores through. “It’ll pass.”
Valery gasps in, in, in, IN, never enough to exhale again.
Something warm and weighted drapes him: Shcherbina’s coat. Valery laughs. The man still thinks he’s cold. He’s no idea Valery is dying beside him.
“Valera, listen to me.” Shcherbina’s voice has its own gravity. It pulls Valery’s frantic thoughts to a point. “We’re doing the best we can. Everything in our power to make things right.”
Nonsense, Valery fails to say. His lips prickle. His tongue is dry yet sticky. So, he listens instead. The weight of Shcherbina’s hand on his shoulder pushes him back down into that black water. He’s wading now, knee-deep, only Shcherbina’s wading with him this time.
“This will be the worst day of these people’s lives. But at least they’ll have lives.”
He goes on in a steady stream: plans they’ve left to enact, things to try, corners to turn. He says something about the Winter War, about men overcome one moment, raring to go the next, even in the face of death.
Valery feels himself settling back into some semblance of himself.
He exhales, lets it go, and his senses focus like a radio tuned back in.
“I’m . . . sorry,” he rasps.
Boris doesn’t react more than a tap, tap, tap of a finger against Valery’s shoulder. After a moment, he says, “Take all the time you need,” before making his way to the roof’s edge once more.
*
The darkness in Valery’s room feels physically heavy. Shadows collect in ceiling corners, seep into the space surrounding his lamp’s glow until there’s nothing but a void beyond. He flattens the creased edge of reactor four’s blueprint as he reaches for his glass, hopeful that the remaining vodka will extinguish the troubling metallic tang on his tongue. The taste may be imagined. It doesn’t matter either way.
The documentation beneath his elbows is all that’s left now: finding a solution to an impossible problem that’s blazing with bright severity. Beyond that, darkness.
As he lights a cigarette, the flame’s brief glow spills between his fingers sending bars of light across the wall.
Boris raps his knuckles against the unlocked door as it opens: an improvement on letting himself in. (Valery requested he knock after finding him sat across from him with no memory of his arrival. He’d been so lost in his thoughts he hadn’t heard Boris say his name until his third attempt at catching his attention. Being unaware around a man like him wasn’t entirely comfortable.)
“You’re awake,” Boris says plainly, pulling back a chair at the table. He sits on the periphery of the lamplight’s circle, leaving him half eaten by darkness, his features thrown into relief.
Valery isn’t sure why he asks him for the time. A glance at his watch would have his answer faster, but perhaps he desires the satisfaction of simplicity: a question with an easy answer.
“Nearly three,” Boris says. “Is there a reason you’re still awake?”
Valery takes a long drag on his cigarette. “No,” he says on an outward breath, tone questioning. Why is he still checking up on him? What happened on the roof won’t happen again.
“Sleep deprivation. It’s detrimental to—”
“Please don’t say ‘your health’,” Valery interrupts. He flicks ash into the mounting tray and huffs a disbelieving laugh.
Valery’s vodka bottle stands on one corner of the blueprints, holding down the paper’s curl. Boris takes it. There’s only one glass on the table, Valery’s, but he takes that too and fills it almost to capacity.
“I’ve seen men lose it,” he says as he pours. Valery doesn’t appreciate being patronised. “They can do as they’re asked, but it’s the pressure of doing it well that prevents them.” He knocks back the glass in one, grits his teeth as it goes down.
Valery rubs his temple. Best to avoid mentioning that he doesn’t care what the Party thinks of his performance. He cares about saving lives, that’s all. Everything else is . . . well. Nothing besides Chernobyl will ever matter again, will it? Nothing Valery does in his remaining time on this earth will ever come close to what’s spread beneath his elbows on the table, now curling up at that one corner.
No longer enjoying his cigarette, he stubs it out.
Boris refills the glass and slides it towards Valery in offering. “Try to get some sleep,” he says. He’s using that same gentle voice from the rooftop.
When he shrinks into the shadow, Valery questions if he visited at all.
*
He almost misses it.
Boris plucks Valery’s spectacles from the coffee table, the gesture as natural as straightening his tie, almost done without thought. Unfolding the arms, he breathes onto the lenses and rubs the resulting condensation against his shirt, just above where its tucked into his trousers.
They’re on hold, waiting to hear if another evacuation can be approved, and quickly. After fifteen minutes of a telephone receiver pressed to his ear, Valery had removed his glasses to avoid a headache. It’s left most of his immediate vicinity soft at the edges, the room a nebulous assortment of shapes and colours, but he doesn’t need to see to listen, if he’ll get the opportunity.
Boris’s hand comes into sharper focus as he returns Valery’s glasses to the table. The arms are folded beneath, lenses up. Most of the time, people who don’t wear glasses don’t think to do that; they lay them facing down or leave the arms open and lenses susceptible to tipping under their weight.
Such a small gesture shouldn’t stun Valery. They’ve nothing to do but sit and wait. It was only something to occupy Boris’s hands, take the edge off the boredom or distract from the mounting concern that their request might yet be declined. It shouldn’t feel monumental.
Yet, it does. In Chernobyl, a fleeting kindness is felt a magnitude more keenly than anywhere else.
And no one has cleaned Valery’s glasses for him before.
It’s intimate in a way he doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to either. Remarkable for him, for he’d pick apart anything to discover its moving parts, its how and what and why. He’s content to accept this thoughtful act as it is though, to bask in the warmth of being cared for, even if Boris hadn’t meant it that way.
The line clicks. Instinctively, Valery reaches for his glasses.
*
Three men went into the water under the reactor today. Volunteers, each of them.
Valery wipes his mouth with a square of toilet tissue, staring through his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Its bottom third is cracked unevenly from edge to edge, a jagged line of rust eating into the finish and slicing across Valery’s throat. Despite its condition, the mirror functions. Valery must also. He must go on, even if he’s breaking, cracking, retching into the sink’s porcelain hoping Boris doesn’t overhear.
Would he have volunteered to do what he’s doing now, if he’d known the truth? He hasn’t the luxury of answering that. There’s a shortage of truth in Chernobyl.
Could he have refused if he’d known? Probably not.
He runs the tap to flush away the evidence of his fragility, then joins Boris in the other room.
Since their return from the plant, they’ve sat in silence, picked at their food in silence. It feels disrespectful to speak, eat, to think of anything besides the brave men who sacrificed their lives today. They’ve toasted their courage, twice, raising glasses with tired arms while Boris recites their names.
Valery can’t get those names to stick in his head. If he commits them to memory, they’re dead already, a further three added to the list he mentally cycles through every time he attempts (and inevitably fails) to get some sleep.
Boris remembers. He mumbles the men’s names again as Valery retakes his seat on the sofa beside him. Boris is nodding, rocking his broad shoulders in unconscious self-soothing.
Back,
forth.
Back,
forth.
Valery’s cigarettes are in his hand and he’s no clue what to do with them, no recollection of reaching into his pocket to retrieve them. He’s not even sure how long he’s held them. On impulse, he slides one beige end out. He’s self-soothing too.
He’s . . . disintegrating. That black water engulfs him as it did those men today. It spills into the cracks and pits within his shattered soul like slicked oil, spreading poison, suffocating him. His cigarettes spill across the carpet and he sobs, the sound distant, like it’s someone else. His frayed tether to the surface snaps.
There’s an arm around him, then another, a weight on the sofa that sends him tipping into it. Boris holds him together while he breaks apart, whispering something Valery can’t hear because the man’s big hand is flat over his ear, thumb stroking his cheek, gently, soothing.
Back,
forth.
Back,
forth.
This is the first time Valery’s cried since his assignment here. He’s shed a few tears. Of course he has. They’ve never snowballed into wailing, spluttered sobs.
If a man could die from sorrow, he’d have died the moment they landed in Chernobyl.
Boris turns him by the back of his head, firm and guiding, leading his face into his chest. Somewhere along the way, Valery’s spectacles vanish—perhaps knocked aside then off, perhaps removed. They sink together into the cushions, Valery’s eyes screwed tight and stinging, tears soaking Boris’s shirt. He is the only comfort here, the only face to find solace in, because he is the only soul who’s seen what Valery has seen, that knows what Valery knows.
If Boris even weakens his hold a little, he’ll crumble to dust.
“I’ve got you,” Boris is saying, the words coming into focus. “You’re all right.”
He’s so warm. Pressed this close, his scent is richer, caught in the starch-firm fibres of his shirt and suit. Those whispered nothings resonate through his chest, their physical presence more reassuring than the words themselves.
Valery can’t recall the last time he was this close to someone, or indeed the last time he reached to clutch and cling and found the solid weight of someone there. He curls into that feeling, of wanting and getting, this single pearl of happiness gleaming deep in the dark water.
He could just . . . let go. Sink. Trust Boris to be his lifeline when he runs out of oxygen.
The pull of sleep itself jerks Valery to vigilance. It’s almost foreign to feel himself drifting, his mind fogging over with the onset of a dream. Boris is snoring, softly. The spaces between his breaths are slow, the inhales without effort, exhales rustling the hairs at Valery’s temple. Valery has never known him to snore. Perhaps he’s never known him to find enough peace to sleep either.
The man must require comfort too. Valery feels a sharp pang in his chest for not having noticed, for rarely if ever thinking to ask, ‘How are you coping?’ or ‘What might help?’ Selfish.
With his head tucked into the crook of Boris’s shoulder, Valery listens to Boris sleep. He’ll wait for the sun to rise, as it inevitably will, then they’ll face whatever tomorrow brings, together.