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Chapter Text

There is nothing more terrifying to a parent than realizing that their child might die, though the realization was something Pulcheria had banished from her mind as soon as her children were old enough that the worst of the danger had passed. Of course she’d still worried about Dunya’s habit of tree climbing, and then later her love of staying underwater as long as she could when she swam at the lake, but Pulcheria had rarely worried about her Rodya.

He had been a quiet, sensible child, though there had always been something almost eerie in the way he would sit silently and seriously while his sister ran about. For a while she’d entertained the thought that there might’ve been something wrong with him, but every time the thought even so much as crossed her mind, she was struck with guilt. Her Rodya was just mature, that’s all.

And as common sense would decree, Pulcheria’s worries were all for naught — he’d been fine, after all — and she’d sent him off after he graduated high school with such pride. (Later, after everything, she would look back on these moments and blame herself. Maybe if she hadn’t spent so much time worrying over her daughter, and maybe put more thought into her son’s safety this wouldn't have happened. She hadn’t worried much about him though, that was the reality.

Pulcheria would admit that despite her frequent worrying, despite the occasional fear-laced vision of her beloved Dunya getting in some kind of trouble, she had never imagined Rodya sprawled half dead in the dark, it had never occurred to her that Rodya would do something shortsighted or impulsive enough to end like that. Alas, she’d found him exactly like that, sprawled in a feverish stupor within his sparsely furnished apartment.

He hadn’t been to a class in weeks, when the cough had started parents had begun refusing his tutoring, and now it was so obviously advanced- well his friend had found him days before, delirious, smilingly insisting that a saint had stepped out of the wallpaper and kissed him on the head. Dmitri had telephoned immediately, and Pulcheria had gotten on the next train. Now she stood in the doorway, before her the view of her son slumped on the sofa, reaching a sickly pale hand toward the floor.

Striding forward, Pulcheria wrapped her fingers around the hand, alarm beating at her chest.
“Dunya!” She called her flighty little girl, now an adult, (now meant to be safe) “I think I will need your help.”

-

He ached. He knew why he ached. He had no idea why he ached. No, he did. Did he?
Raskolnikov had been poked, prodded, diagnosed, scrutinized, his left lung was medically collapsed for the sake of something he was far too delirious to understand. And then, weary and sore, he was dumped in some room with orders to rest.
He raved until he fell onto the small bed. Or maybe the nurse had held him down as he shook. It wasn’t a bed, it was a coffin. He clawed at the walls, didn’t they know he had been buried alive? The eggs they brought him were too hot. Then they were too cold. Why was the ceiling so far away? Who was that man? Who was he? Where was his pocket watch? He’d gotten it back. Had they seen his pocket watch? Where was it? The walls here were gray, he knew he wasn’t home. Had he not brought the pocketwatch? The walls here were gray, in his apartment the walls were faded yellow paper. Dusty, there was no dust here.

-

Dmitri wasn’t sure exactly what to do.

He was just about a year from graduation, and had the immense luck to have not gone broke during his freshman year, like his mother worried he might, and with how the economy was doing he expected he wouldn’t have any trouble at all finding a job and living out his dream.

He dreamt, as the rather uninspired man he was, of having a nice little house somewhere and a wife with most of her teeth.
He would, of course, have his dear friend Rodya for dinner every week. They would sit in the wallpapered parlor and play cards and laugh. The wallpaper would be spotted with crisp white daisies on a light green background, there would be carpets to keep their feet warm, a family portrait smiling down at them.

Unlike almost everyone else, he’d noticed when Raskolnikov stopped showing up to classes.

It wasn’t long after Razumikhin made a rare visit home. When he’d returned Rodya had been different, what little softness he had cut away from his character, even more irritable than usual.

He’d noticed when he stopped seeing him at all. He had sat there through a lecture, feeling his absence weigh down on him, the pressure crushing. By the end he couldn’t breathe.

He wanted to cry.

So after class that day he gathered up his courage, turning away from the lecturer and towards the door, stuffing books back into a bag, ignoring the tittering about football games and girls, exams and professors.

When he saw him again his friend had been twisted into a caricature. A greasy haired caricature who looked at him like he was his savior.

After that little foray he had called Raskolnikov’s mother, and then hadn’t seen him since.

He rubbed his hands on his knees nervously. The train was warm enough, and the seats were soft enough, and the old woman sitting next to him wasn’t trying to speak with him.

He could have easily fallen asleep.

Despite this comfort, the warm soft wool his coat was cut from, the vibration of the train felt like a cocktail being mixed, like whatever came of this would be as strong and intoxicating as what spilled out from a decanter.

Would Rodya be different? He had seemed a little touched in the head the last time they’d spoken. Well, they’d spoken if one’s definition of a pleasant conversation was to rant and ramble about saints in the wallpaper.

He’d looked up at Razumikhin like he was Lenin and Raskolnikov was a reverent peasant. Like Razumikhin could explain the world and it would all be set right.

Part of him wanted to still be seen like that.

Most of him wanted his old friend back.
He imagined the consumptives from the dramatic novels he’d read, frail Victorian beauties who would cough daintily, red staining their pale cheeks, blond curls hanging lank around their wasted faces.

For a split second he saw a somewhat unflattering picture of Rodya laying under a ruffled bedspread in the bed jacket his grandmother used to wear around the house.
The rooms he lay in belonged to Razumikhin’s grandmother as well, that was her clock on the wall. This made him giggle, and the giggling made the old woman sitting next to him look at him like he’d gone mad, her gray brows knitting into one another and her skin folding neatly like paper as confusion painted itself across her face in broad strokes.

She decided that it would be better to ignore this madman in favor of staring blankly at the world out her window, city receding to increasingly pastoral scenes.

Chapter Text

Last year, around February, Dmitri had been sitting in his apartment with a rather flu-ish Raskolnikov shivering by the vent.

He’d started feeling sick when he and Dmitri were in the library studying. Raskolnikov, at least, had been studying. His books were sprawled open on the desk, his pencil scratching quietly as he wrote.

Dmitri had had to take a moment to appreciate the perfect framing of the scene. Thin pale February light filtering in through the high windows, light pulling gold fingers across hair, sitting on his face like he was the subject of a painting.

He’d be gorgeous, Dmitri thought, if he were a woman. He’d trotted happily over to Rodya’s elbow, silly grin plastered onto his face.

“Hello Rodya! Want to get dinner with me after studying?”

Dinner would be far away. It was 2:30 in the afternoon.

“God Razumikhin. What is your impulse to buy me dinner and call me by a diminutive? One would think you were my mother!”

Dmitri, if he were speaking with anyone else, would take this opportunity to make a slightly crass joke about his mother.

However this was Raskolnikov, and he was in a bad mood.

“I never said that I’d be the one buying dinner Raskolnikov.”

Raskolnikov scoffed, but let Dmitri sit down beside him, even let him borrow a pencil when he ran out of ink. After about an hour he even asked what it was he was translating.
Then, at around 5:30 Dmitri’s efforts were rewarded and he was able to coax Rodya to dinner. Unfortunately however, as they sat there, at some cheap restaurant with sticky tables, the sort that couldn’t pass a health inspection even with a hearty bribe, he’d started to look rather green around the gills.

“Rodya? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.” He looked like he was going to vomit.

“Maybe we should take you home.”

“My apartment is on the other side of town, and I’m fine.”

“My apartment is a block away.”

“I don’t want to-“ he gagged, a blue coated woman sitting near them looked over with disgust.

“Come on now, it’s not a long walk.”

He’d vomited twice on the walk, then fell asleep almost immediately when they made it back to Razumikhin’s apartment, collapsing onto the ratty couch like he had no bones.

Dmitri decided to make him tea for when he woke up. It would take the taste of bile out of his mouth. He would tell Raskolnikov to drink it slowly, just little sips. Maybe he could keep him here for a few days while he recovered. Maybe his friend could stay warm, wrapped in layers of blankets. Safe.

The kettle whistled, nearly splitting his ear open and cracking his thoughts like ice in the heat, and he poured the hot water into a tea cup. The whistle hadn’t woken Raskolnikov, who still slept like the dead on the sofa.

He crouched down next to the sofa, resting a hand on the same armrest that Raskolnikov’s head was uncomfortably balanced on. The brush of Razumikhin’s hand in his hair woke him immediately. One of his bloodshot eyes peeled open and he sank back into the blankets like a disturbed hermit crab.

“Here Rodya, have some tea.”

The hermit crab scoffed. “Don’t call me that, Razumikhin.” His voice was hideous.

“Sorry. Don’t you want tea?”

“I don’t want your bitter kindness Razumikhin.”

Even under such discomfort, even with such unpleasantness, his friend’s eloquence survived.
“I added honey.”

“Disgusting.” He’d muttered.

Then he’d fallen back asleep, and when he woke up he had thanked Dmitri for his hospitality and things had gone mostly back to normal. Everything had been fine, Raskolnikov had been crusty and had his mood swings, but he’d been fine.

Dmitri felt the train screech to a halt. It was his stop.

The town the sanatorium was in was small, quaint, almost stereotypically north eastern.
The houses came in three varieties, antique farm houses that had survived a revolution, most painted creamy yellows, some in less comely dark browns, Victorians in varying sizes and levels of ornate detail, some just simple cottages, some grand affairs with porches, multiple chimneys, and ridiculous lattice work, then, the final breed of house was the more recent, more fittingly suburban.

The town wasn’t very dense, and seemed to have formed gradually and organically over about a century, with farms sprouting up here and there, then with less organically growth centered around a now somewhat defunct looking factory making straw hats or pitchforks or something equally irrelevant.

Then, at some point in the last fifty years someone had gone to the town, taken one look and said “well hot diggity would this place be perfect for some consumptives! Let’s just stuff them over there!” But, as Dmitri thought to himself in amusement, someone probably objected to having dozens of contagious invalids in the middle of town, and so a farm or two had been bought up and the sanatorium had been plopped down at the very edge of town, with a fringe of woods to either side and a large cleared area with walking paths.

It was honestly pretty, even with the crust of old, half melted snow. All of the buildings were brick, with large open windows. There was even a row of what looked like small vacation cottages arranged neatly up by the tree-line.

The inside of the sanatorium had clean tile floors and large windows. It smelled slightly of phenol, and felt as cold and sterile as a morgue.

Razumikhin was still pink cheeked from the cold just outside, inside it was almost oppressively warm. “I’m here to visit someone.”

The woman looked at him a little blankly. She blinked.

She was dressed like a nurse, and given his current location she very likely was a nurse, but she had an expression like the tired nanny of too many children. Which would have made sense if he knew what her job entailed.

Besides he shouldn’t have been quite so judgmental, as his train ride had left him rumpled and worried nights had left him just as tired looking.

“I’m afraid that might not be so easy, depending on who it is you wanted to visit, I’m afraid some of our patients are very ill and quite contagious, but I’m sure that if you came back at a later date-“

“I’d like to visit Rodion Raskolnikov, I’m his brother.”

She scrutinized him, her pale blue eyes picking him apart like he was a piece of bread, and she was using him to sop up the last drops of soup.

“I’m sure your brother would enjoy receiving a letter.”

She turned to leave. Her shift was almost over, after a long day of looking after the sick she wanted to go home, and this man was treating her as a receptionist.
To make matters worse she knew Rodion and thought it was no wonder that not even the man’s own lungs could stand him.

“But I-“

“I’m afraid that your brother is currently highly contagious and far too sick to take visitors.” That was true. He was also a horrible little man who thrashed around constantly, made everything harder, and had kept his roommate up so many nights chattering like a kid at a slumber party that they had had to give him his own room.

Razumikhin, however, did not know this.
So he turned away from her with a certain sadness coiling inside his chest that he had felt far too often recently.

They had told him to stay in bed. In bed! The metal cot. Why had they stabbed him like that? Was it penance? What did he have to repent? He thought it was moral, nay, necessary to crush them like bugs, to crack them like eggs. They had given him eggs for breakfast. They had given him lunch too. More food than he could stomach. He coughed. His chest ached. The needle! The needle! His chest ached because of the needle didn’t it! He hadn’t forgotten that. Why had they collapsed his lung? Why did they give him so much to eat, food wouldn’t heal his lungs. They told him not to leave the bed. The shadow on that wall had moved, hadn’t it? In the morning it had been a slanted slash across the floor, now it was a neat square below the window. Blood. He’d coughed up blood once. Days ago. Maybe it was weeks. But he had seen that blood and known it was retribution. Known it was the hands of fate, of retribution, reaching into his chest and crushing his organs. Or maybe it was just blood. He heard footsteps. He heard the man who shared the room with him groan. they had told him not to get up either, that or he never wanted to move. The shadow had moved again. They brought him another meal. They brought him a letter. He poked at the food with his fork, he had opened the letter, then his eyes had drifted from it. Had his mother brought him here? Why? The shadow moved, then disappeared. He slept, then woke, then slept again.

Chapter Text

Dunya felt the deep tiredness that could only come after a day of being at the beck and call of a man who was entirely average in just about every sense of the word, yet believed himself to be a genius.

She needed the job, it was definitely better than her old one, but still, at the end of the day she found herself sitting on her bed in her childhood bedroom pressing the heel of her hand into her eye until she saw dancing fractal visions of stars.

She needed to do the laundry, she knew she needed to. She was on her last blouse and though her mother had offered to do the washing she didn’t want her mother, who seemed so frail these days, to have to worry about yet another thing. She had to go to work tomorrow, after work she had dinner plans with Jenny, she needed a clean blouse for these occasions.

She dropped her hands from her eyes and she stood, slid off her bed with her skirt hiked up. She crossed the room to the laundry basket and examined her already worn blouses for one clean enough to wear again. Unfortunately she was out of luck. She wanted to cry, she wanted to throw herself on the floor and just lie there until something changed for the better.

Instead she trudged to the kitchen with dirty blouse in hand. She extracted a pot from the cabinet and threw her blouse in with abandon, but flinched when she heard shell buttons clacking against metal.

She filled the pot with cold water, and rubbed now translucent fabric between her soapy fingertips. She squeezed the fabric. It was possibly the laziest washing she had ever done, but it would have to do. She wound it out, then draped the fabric over the radiator to dry.

Finally, she could sleep.

Unfortunately, somehow, even after the trials of the day, even with everything arranged for the next day, despite how weary she felt, she closed her eyes but found no sleep.

Dunya’s job was a necessary evil, like trimming a dog’s claws or making a child take cod liver oil. That being said, there were days she would much rather down an entire bottle of cod liver oil, then trim the nails of an entire pack of wolves than go to work.

She was a stenographer at the office of Peter Luzhin II, a former New York City lawyer who had, after acquiring enough money, moved to the country where he still kept a small firm.

He saw this as an act of charity, he could have easily just retired and sat around in a nice little lake house fishing for the rest of his life, but he had chosen out of the goodness of his heart to provide for the town and its neighboring small communities. He still made clients pay through the nose.

Luzhin came from some money, his father was some successful self made businessman who had died a decade ago, leaving his dear son money and a sense of righteous superiority. Luzhin himself was successful, though he owed a great deal of that success to his family’s money. He was forty something, Dunya had never been good at judging age, with slightly thinning hair, pale eyes, and an array of tasteful but expensive pocket squares. He had a tendency of pacing while he dictated, as well as using his stenographer for writing down personal letters.

He was wearing a dark gray pinstripe suit with a light blue pocket square, hair neatly combed into a somewhat convincing comb over as he paced and dictated a letter to his elderly mother.

“Dear mother.”

Dunya typed out the line.

“No, no, that’s not right at all. Dear mother is so formal.” He clicked his tongue.

“Strike that.” She pulled the paper out of the machine and set it in the pile of scratch paper.

“Dearest mother,”
“I have been considering what you said, about how it is high time I married.”

Dunya imagined for a moment her middle aged boss sitting on some lavish country house’s porch with an ancient old lady, his mother saying something like “it’s high time you settled down young man!” And waggling a finger teasingly.

Before Luzhin could continue his dictation a knock came at the door.

Luzhin’s office was on the second floor of a brick fronted building, and divided into two sections. There was a main room with a door leading to the staircase. This room had a window overlooking the street, green walls, an ornate decade old radiator, and a stenographer’s desk. The stenographer’s desk was on the wall opposite to the window, next to the stairway door, and on a diagonal to Luzhin’s office. Whenever a client showed up they were greeted by the stenographer, as there was no receptionist, then led back into the office. Then the stenographer would run back over to the desk to get the typewriter, which she would then drag into the office.

The entire set up would be far easier with a receptionist, but Luzhin wanted things to be cozy and intimate. Things which generally weren’t looked for in law firms.

It was better than her old job though, which is what she reminded herself as she carried her typewriter into the office following the arrival of this client.
The client was a woman of about fifty years of age, she was wearing a thick coat made of dark green wool, with a soft silvery fur collar.
She quite obviously was not from around here.

The woman turned out to be one of Luzhin’s old clients, whose will needed revision. Unfortunately she was wealthy enough, and had such a large family that her will was threateningly long, and strangely worded. After the woman finished describing the changes that needed to be made she struck up a long conversation with Luzhin, as Dunya felt her mind going numb.

It was hours before she was released out into the crisp, cold night.

Jenny held her fork in between her soft pink fingers like it was some sultry flapper’s cigarette holder.

“Why dahhling” she batted her eyelashes at Dunya “whatever is the matter?”

Dunya had to laugh. Jenny had always been able to squeeze laughter out of her in any circumstance, on any occasion. One of Dunya’s few childhood friends she was still in contact with gave her this special status in Dunya’s mind. Jenny knew her so well she rarely had to tell her things. Unfortunately Jenny also knew Dunya well enough to know when she was acting off.

“Nothing’s the matter, I’m just tired.”

“Are things busy with Mr. Luzhin?”

“He has some important case, I’ve had to copy so many documents recently I think my fingers will fall right off!”

This placated Jenny, she turned her attention back to her plate, spearing a piece of meat with her fork instead of waving it around. She chewed for a minute, with a reflective look settling onto her face.

“Do you remember the game we played when we were younger?”

“Which one?”

“The murder mystery game. We read a few too many Sherlock Holmes stories and started acting out those murders. My mother hated it!”

Dunya remembered the game, the warm summer days with her and Jenny playing detective or witness and Rodya sprawled out, far too still on the floor.

“Right, she said it was too morbid for us to play.”

She had actually threatened to ban Jenny from spending time at the Raskolnikov house, saying that the children were too dark and too miserable to be safe for her impressionable child.

“I think she was just disturbed by how good a corpse your brother was.”

Dunya looks away from Jenny, as if she’s just looking at her friend’s new home. Jenny moved out of her parent’s house just a few weeks ago, now she has an apartment in the middle of town.

It was right above the shop she worked at, she rented it from the store’s owner. Her parents helped her move in, she had a picture of her family on the sideboard, a cabinet full of dishes and cookware, a table, chairs, a rug. She was living out her own childhood fantasy.

She’d always talked about how one day she would live on her own, in a place she could see the whole town from, in those fantasies she’d always been an artist or an author, or in their most outlandish iteration, an heiress who could just sit around in silks and furs all day. In her fantasies Dunya lived in the house across the street and they had dinner together every day. Their other friend, Marie, had been included in these dreams too, but she had left them, gotten married just days after graduation and moved to the town her husband got a job in. Dunya spent the wedding picking at the hem of her dress and promising herself the two of them would stay in touch. They hadn’t heard a thing from her in ages.

“Dunya?”

Jenny knew better. She had rarely poked her nose where she knew it wasn’t wanted before. Not taking non answers was different from intentionally prying. She knew better than to ask Dunya what was really bothering her.

“Yes?”

“Would you like more of the vegetables?”

Good. She would leave the dead things buried in their hasty graves.

Chapter Text

Dmitri had a problem.

That problem being he had nothing to do, and having so little to do made him feel like he was being pulled apart. He had spent the last week antsy and claustrophobic, pacing around his apartment whenever he wasn’t in class, and ceaselessly fidgeting when he was.

He should visit his family, but visiting his family was something he had avoided for most of his time in college. It was uncomfortable, and he’d found that his parents worried more when they knew about things than when they didn’t.

If he went home for a visit now it would inevitably come out that Rodya had gotten sick, then they would worry. They might be concerned that he might have caught the disease from Raskolnikov, or maybe they would insist on visiting Pulcheria, and then eventually everyone would be lost in a hailstorm of weepy emigres discussing the homeland, probably with immense sugarcoating, copious amounts of “the mother tongue” which Razumikhin could barely understand, and, as was common when multiple Russians of a certain age and generation were in a room together, they would find some genetic connection, however distant, between the two families. He was fairly sure that in Russia in the old days things had operated entirely on a basis of who was who’s fifth cousin thrice removed.

Part of why he had avoided visiting his parents recently was to prevent this. If they knew that Raskolnikov’s mother was a lonely widow (Rodya had never gone into specifics about his father, he had just managed to extrapolate that the old bastard was as dead as dickens’ doornails) and from the motherland, they would insist on meeting his family.

He wasn’t sure why he wanted to keep Raskolnikov to himself, but something in him recoiled from the thought of his mother cheerfully setting Raskolnikov up with every young female relative or family friend she could pull out of thin air.

So every weekend he sat completely alone in his tiny, crummy apartment. He hadn’t done this always, before he had had Raskolnikov to keep him company. On weekends they’d studied together, and gone out together, trying to hunt down speakeasies and the parties of more “in the know” students who might possibly have some booze smuggled in across the border or brewed in some farmers backyard.

Now he was alone. His tiny apartment was smothering him. The faded wallpaper was tricking his eyes. The air was too thick, too still. He desperately wanted to leave, but then he’d be wandering the streets alone with no one to keep him company. Sure, he had other friends, he’d made other bonds over the years, but Rodya had always been his favorite. He’d been different.

Razumikhin could tell him everything, he would take it in stride. He was special in other ways too. He was by far his smartest friend, so dazzlingly bright most people seemed like fools when held up for comparison. He thought of his poor friend wasting away in the consumptive ward. He suddenly was struck with the urge to visit someone else’s mother, anyone other than his mother.

There was an idea, he’d go next weekend.

Unfortunately that meant he had to get through yet another week first.
Every morning when he opened his eyes he felt some sort of strange excitement fill his chest; not strange in unfamiliarity, but strange in that he knew full well that he would not see Raskolnikov, but instead his mother. He had only felt excitement like that when he had been going to see Rodion. There really was something about him that made him more precious, more dear to him, then any of his other friends. Then, the excitement would ebb and his chest would fill with icy water as he remembered that it was not yet Saturday morning.

One such morning, the Wednesday before his visit, he woke up earlier than usual, feeling joy wash over him as he thought about the trip. Then, his mind wandered. Rodion’s pale face, eyes wide, looking at him like Dmitri was just as precious and dear a friend to him as he was to Dmitri.

After a moment of debate on whether or not he should go back to sleep, after noticing how early it still was, (on the one hand he was still very tired, and it was cold outside the covers of his bed, on the other, if he fell back asleep now he would awaken too late) he slipped out from between the sheets and dressed.

Because it was still so early in the morning he decided to sit and possibly get some work done. He had an article to translate, and he needed to finish his translation quickly if he wanted pay.

He sat by the window, the street still shrouded in the stifling darkness, what little light there was growing milky as it passed through the veil of water droplets in the light drizzle. The whole world had this sleepy, still dreamlike quality, and he found himself growing distracted from his work and instead staring quietly out the window. Whenever this happened he would draw himself back into his work, talking to himself to try and keep himself in the here and now.

“Should I translate komisch as funny or strange?”

It really wasn’t a question that warranted asking out loud, and he ought to have just written down the first one that came to mind, it was just that unimportant. Yet he was in a bit of an odd mood, so he let even the most pointless questions float happily.

“Should I use the anglicized version of the place names? Or leave them in German.”

He paused for a moment, as if he truly needed to think it over.

“I’ll leave in the German. München is far more fun to say than Munich.”

Rodya would think he was being stupid. Rodya would sigh and shake his head and criticize him for being so ridiculous. Rodya have kept him company, he never used to have to talk to himself.

There was something so hideous about how lonely he felt then, he had never felt so lonely before.

Eventually the sun rose and slowly cut through the mist, and the unseasonably warm day warmed further, the sad, crusty snow leftover from February. He scraped together breakfast, as melancholy could not keep him from a meal, the only thing that had ever succeeded had been when he was a bit low on cash, and left his apartment for class with uncharacteristic resignation and something bordering on misery.

Last year, in the fall, they’d been at a party, when of the rare ones Razumikhin had managed to drag Rodion to and they had been standing there near the door. Dmitri was on his second glass of moonshine he was sure could make him go blind and was rotating between three entirely separate conversations. Rodion was silent, a bit pale and peaky looking. Dmitri hadn’t thought much of it, because when was Rodion not a bit peaky looking? One of their (more accurately Dmitri’s) friends had slipped out of the crowd and walked up to them.

“Hey Raskolnikov.” Generally at parties Raskolnikov was left alone, treated more as an eccentric accessory belonging to Dmitri than some separate being you could talk to.

“Yes” Dmitri, so used to his friend’s rants, was surprised at the reminder of his mastery at the monosyllable.

“I read that article you wrote.” Dmitri shifted most of his attention back to his own affairs.

“Which one.”

“You know which one buddy!” He clapped Rodion on the shoulder with his free hand.

“It’s a bit… different. Certainly thought provoking in the least. Though anyone who starts declaring that napoleons are above the law will inevitably declare themself a napoleon.”

Despite his eloquence Dmitri disregarded him completely, due to the loud burp that issued forth as soon as he finished his sentence. He was obviously drunk and had no idea what he was talking about.

Maybe Dmitri should have paid more attention though. It really wasn’t long after this that Rodya had stopped going to classes or doing his tutoring or just about anything that wasn’t pacing about his apartment.

Dmitri had seen less and less of him, and he had been distracted by the follies of life as a very agreeable young man. He should have paid more attention, he thought to himself. Everything would be different if only he’d paid attention.

Thinking about all this almost made him weep in the middle of a lecture.

Chapter Text

Luzhin had been acting a bit strange as of late. That entire week he had been taking every opportunity to perch at the edge of Dunya’s desk, and would spend an unnecessarily long time explaining simple things.

It was better than her old job. So much better. She repeated this like a mantra. “Better than it could be, better than it could be” again and again and somehow it carried her through another week.

On Friday night Dunya went back to visit Jenny again. She found herself turned away. Jenny opened the door just enough to poke her head through, her face flushed with excitement.

“I’m very sorry Dunya, but I’ve adopted a very skittish stray cat! Isn’t it wonderful! Her name is Delilah, and she’s currently trying to scratch a hole through the wall, but she’s a delight! I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel our dinner, sorry I didn’t tell you in advance!”

The door swung shut and Dunya could hear the sound of Jenny clinking a spoon against something and a low meow.

It was dark out already, the street empty. Dunya being alone was rare. She had spent her few years of adult life by her mother’s side, or at work, or with one of her friends. Generally she enjoyed those rare drops of solitude she was so infrequently blessed with.

But tonight the silence made her feel uneasy. The only sound was the sound of her own heels clicking against the sidewalk, her own heartbeat. Her mind struggled to hold onto a single strand of thoughts on her walk home, shifting between topics like her mind was a radio with the dial being twisted.

Eventually, her mind settled on her brother, as it often did these days. Despite how little she had seen him over the last few years he took up a disproportionate amount of storage in her head. If her mind was an attic the old boxes of clothes had been tossed out the window to make more room for him.

Her thoughts were tinged with guilt and colored in by worry, and whenever she tried to think about something else they grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her right back down. She walked past the park, and the office she worked in, and then, when she was about to turn onto the street she lived on with her mother she tripped, twisting her ankle painfully. She limped back home, her thoughts transplanted from Rodya to what she could say to soothe her mother.

She had come up with a good idea by the time she made it to her home, good enough at least. She would smile at her mother, explain to her the situation with jenny’s new cat, then go to her bedroom early, saying she was tired. She wouldn't mention the ankle. In the past Dunya’s minor injuries had elicited a disproportionate response from her mother, who would nearly faint at the sight of her child’s blood, and she had been even more stressed than usual lately. She practiced her “i'm tired mama” smile as she opened the door.

“Mother?” she called into the darkened kitchen. Shuffling a bit painfully into the kitchen she turned on the light. Warm yellow light fell onto worn counters and a bowl of apples.

There was a note left on the counter, written on the back of an envelope. It spelled in script familiar to Dunya “went to bed early, going to visit Rodya first thing in the morning. -mother.”
In the past, Pulcheria had always waited for her daughter’s arrival, growing anxious if she was even minutes late.

Dunya woke the next morning in an already empty house, she had been so tired the night before she had forgotten to draw the blinds, so light fell through and clawed at her eyelids. Bleary, she lay in bed for what could have been ten minutes or half an hour, fighting the pull of sleep.

She did get up eventually, made herself tea and breakfast. She sat by a window after breakfast with a book, she had always enjoyed reading on Saturday morning, saving any chores for later.

Today though, despite the book being one she had been enjoying, she couldn’t quite focus. Somehow, Rodion was taking up even more of her mind. Should she have gone to the sanatorium with her mother? What if today was the day they’d allow visitors? Her brother was alone in some unknown place and she wasn’t even a good enough sister to care. Was she even a very good person? Was the bitterness she felt the day before as she was turned away by Jenny a mark of what a terrible, self centered being she really was?

People had always said her brother was as full of himself as a parrot with a mirror, what if she was just the same?

Pulcheria Raskolnikova, or “the widow Mrs Raskolnikov” as her American neighbors put it, had a house like a museum that had lost all its provenance. It was obvious that everything had a history. The layout of the rooms, and where objects were placed seemed more an act of divine providence than any act of carefully measured out convenience or aestheticism.

The moment you walked in the door you were greeted by a large portrait of a woman. No one knew who she was, or where the portrait had come from, but Dunya and Rodya had been told at some point that a woman had given the painting to Pulcheria sometime not long after she’d come to America. The woman was pale, with thin, faint eyebrows and a dark hat tilted forward over her brow, her expression was quite dour, which made her seem positively ancient. The portrait lay against a backdrop of blue and cream striped wallpaper, and was probably at least forty years old.

When they were children, Dunya had made up stories about how the strange woman was their grandmother. She didn’t look like she could be, but she might very well have been. In the little dining room there was an antique table, which wasn’t really antique in the “beautiful and precious” sense, but more in the “ancient junk no one in their right mind would buy.” It was cracked, scarred, far too low for the family to eat at comfortably, but it had been a fixture in the house. Again no one had any idea how it came to be there, it just was.

The shelf in the sitting room had exactly twelve books on the top shelf. They ranged in width, one so short it could have only been a play or some sort of novella, another must have been about nine hundred pages. Each book was in Russian, and since neither of the Raskolnikov children had learned to read in that language, they could have been filled with anything. It was all still exactly the same as it had been for years.

Pulcheria felt, truly, deeply, that something should have changed intrinsically, the way it had felt when her Rodya had gone to college, but this changed absence was still just an absence. She was still just as alone. The only thing that had changed was her hopes. Her dreams had been soaring hot air balloons, or airplanes that crossed the Atlantic without stopping once. They would carry her towards the future, give her something to hold onto, but now the air balloons had deflated, bright colored sides slumping down, and the planes had run out of fuel in midair. All those lofty things had come crashing down by her feet in a pile of charred canvas. Now her hopes were paper gliders, timid and shoddy and plain. She hoped that her son would recover. That her daughter could hold onto that job. That everyone would be back home soon. She’d given up on the image of her son wearing the cap and gown. Her son opening his own law firm.

Now she counted out drops of hope like they were spoonfuls of sugar and she couldn’t buy anymore, like rationing during a war. She needed a spoonful so she could get on the train every weekend and ride it to the hospital. She needed another to get home after being turned away or told by a doctor that he hadn’t improved.

Sunday morning she had been in her kitchen, readying herself for a trip out into the world to buy food when someone knocked at her door. She adjusted her collar and ran fingers over her graying hair, making sure everything was as it should be, or as close to right as it could be. Then she turned towards the door.

Illogically, she knew very well how illogical it was, her heart beat a little faster as she walked towards that door, this had happened to her every phone call or knock at the door for months. Every time she was interrupted like this her first thoughts went to her son, to the fact that this person might be here to say that he was dead. She knew it was illogical, because why would the hospital send someone all the way out just to inform her, and because on her last visit they had said he was improving. Before she opened the door, she straightened out a rug that had shifted on the tile.

“Good morning” the voice from outside called as she opened the door. Razumikhin’s pleasant face greeted her, lips pleating into a smile.

She smiled back earnestly. “Oh! Oh it’s you! Please, come in.”

She beckoned him inside, smiling warmly at him. He looked cold, she thought. It was still March, early March. In rural New York early March might well have been January on some days. He was only wearing a sweater, not a proper coat, and it was a damp day, the poor man must have been freezing.

“Would you like any tea, Dmitri?” She was already taking the tin of tea leaves and her old teapot out of the cupboard. The cupboard was against the wall of the kitchen furthest from the door. It had been in place so long that the wallpaper in the cracks near it had darkened with unreachable dust. Yet another story-less museum piece.

“If it’s not too much trouble, I’d love some.” He knew better than to refuse her kindness. She smiled at him again, he really was a good friend to her boy.

“Dmitri, though you are more than welcome in our home, I do think I should ask what brings you here?” She was pouring water into the kettle now, the teapot and the little green tin of tea leaves already set down on the tray.

“Well, I wanted to stop by, see how everyone was doing, ask after Rodya.”

“Oh well, he’s in good hands.”

“That’s good.”

Dmitri looked around the room like he wasn’t sure what he was looking for, just that he was looking for something. Pulcheria could see the moment his eyes caught on the little framed family portrait. Roman Raskolnikov seated, with a seven year old Dunya sitting on his knee and a ten year old Rodya standing next to his mother. Dunya was smiling in the picture, Rodion’s expression was decidedly neutral.

“Is that their father?”

“Yes.” She didn’t seem to have anything else to say.

“Rodya takes after him.”

“He does, doesn’t he.” Silence rested heavily between them, stretching out its legs and lying down on the table, deciding it would set a while. Pulcheria poured the hot water and tea into the teapot, and carried the tray over, setting it down with a gentle clink.

Chapter Text

Dmitri wasn’t sure why he had come to the Raskolnikov house. Some strange urge to see the place his dearest friend grew up, maybe concern for his mother, but in any case he had spent what little pocket money he had on a train ticket. This time he had ridden next to a commuter on the train, some man in a suit on his way home to his family. The man’s briefcase had tipped over onto the floor during the ride.

He stood outside the house for a few minutes after he left Pulcheria.

Her house was like a museum that only held artifacts from some lost kingdom he had never heard a thing about and being there talking to her was like wandering through the museum trying to piece together the kingdom's story. They had teapots, that must mean they drink tea! There had been some things that were easier to piece together, the cigarette case sitting dusty on a set of drawers in the corner, the face in the picture. Raskolnikov’s mother drank her tea with raspberry jam, just like his grandmother. He had guessed at these things before, he had assumed that Raskolnikov’s parents were immigrants and that his father was dead and that he had grown up in a small town, but he didn’t know the details. He wasn’t sure what he had been trying to glean from this excursion, but he almost knew less than when he had arrived.

He was damp now, from the fog. He was cold, he wasn’t sure why he was here, he knew that he should leave.
He walked down the lawn, still dormant from the long miserable winter, the only nod to any possible coming verdancy was the faint brown stubble of clipped back lilies and irises and a few tentative green things clawing out from the crusty remains of winter.

A shape emerged from the fog, the columnar form of a tall, rather slender woman in a long coat. As the shape drifted closer, becoming less a two dimensional shadow puppet, its detail filled in until it became Avdotya Raskolnikov.

“Hello Dunya!” His spirits lift noticeably. He hasn’t gotten to speak much to Dunya in the past, but he likes her. When she smiles it seems so honest, so pretty, she’s gentle, and patient, everything her brother is not, while still being sharp and having the same good looks. They really are a pretty family, he thinks.

“Hello yourself.” Her smile doesn’t seem quite as genuine, it falters slightly. It’s understandable, she must be surprised to see him.

“What brings you so far from home?” Though he’d hate to admit it, he is confused for a moment. She doesn’t know where his family lives, and when he realizes she’s probably referring to his apartment his stomach churns slightly.

“I wanted to check on your family.” He wonders at how someone so warm and polite could have been raised in the same home by the same parents as Rodion - angry-muttering-in-lieu-of-greeting- Raskolnikov.

“Mother frets, but we’re doing well enough. How are you?” She looks up at him with those charming dark eyes. Rodya’s eyes had been just like that, so clear and intelligent, before they’d started to lose focus. How good of her to think of him.

“Your brother is a fine man and I miss him terribly. Now I have no one to glare daggers at me when I call him by his given name.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t like it much when I call him Rodya.”

A wrinkle formed between her eyebrows.
“That doesn’t sound much like him, he’s a bit prickly, but he isn’t the sort of person who obsesses that much with ceremony, especially not with someone he knows well.”

“Well, it’s just more recently that he’s taken issue with it.”

That was true, wasn’t it? When the two of them had first met, though Rodya had been a bit pessimistic and not exactly a jovial sort, he hadn’t been quite so cold. He’d let Dmitri call him Rodya, and he’d called him Dmitri, though never Mitya no matter how many times he told him to. For most of the first year they’d known each other Raskolnikov had laughed and smiled and acted human enough. It had changed at some point though, when the slight morbidity had swelled up in his mind, the intensity had grown into obsession, the slight formality turned into an arctic coldness. He’d started scribbling away at some strange articles and he’d never tell Dmitri what they were about. It was the sickness, it must be. He’d started succumbing to illness more frequently, his face grew strangely like a villain in a German silent film, and with the weakness came that shift in personality. When he healed he’d be Rodya again.

“And yet you put up with that dear man. You are a true friend to him, Dmitri.”

“Thank you Dunya, I’d like to be a friend to you as well, if there’s anything your family needs-“

“Don’t worry about us, you have enough on your plate.” She smiled a genuine smile this time, the humidity pulling at her soft blond hair.

On the train home he was able to fall asleep, but not until after he thought about Raskolnikov’s pretty sister, turning her face over and over in his mind till the features blurred and shifted and stopped being Dunya at all.

For Raskolnikov days passed like cherry pits spat onto the ground. They passed like cold molasses. They passed like a final exam. Lucidity, lucidity was a brush that rarely dabbed colour into his existence. He had books, his mother had brought them. He had had a roommate, but then the man had been moved. Raskolnikov asked to be allowed out of his room, but the nurse closed the door. He had enough energy now to pace, and he rarely coughed. He was fine, wouldn’t they let him leave?
He was very sick. He was going to die before he could even prove himself to the world. Time spun around him and so did the heavens and so did the room.
He fell back upon his bed and slept.
When he woke, lucidity visited him once more.

“Good morning” he said to the nurse, smiling. She looked at him and said it was near midnight. She pointed towards the dark window.

“Good night then.”

She looked at him suspiciously.
“I’d like to speak with you.” He motioned for her to sit on the vacated cot on the other side of the room. “Please, it’s been so long since I spoke to anyone. Anyone of education at least, that man was nothing but a dung beetle, a cockroach.”

She very carefully, slowly, like someone inching away from a bear, sits on the edge of the cot.
“The average trained circus bear has more education and wit than that witless fellow. All he ever did was shriek and moan.”
She opens her mouth. She closes it. She smiles.

“Whatever happened to him, anyway.”

She opens her mouth again, but this time she speaks. “In your delirium, from the fever, you threatened to smash him over the head with your dinner plate, but since you were still so weak, you dropped the plate. We decided you should be allowed to recuperate in more peaceful conditions.” She has a bit of a stutter. Words tumble out of her mouth. Must not talk much, poor lady. She had a countenance like damp leaves torn from the tree in a storm. She looked rumpled.

“Who did you accidentally off to get on the graveyard shift?”

“I beg your pardon sir.” She stammers some more and stands, brushing off her skirt, watch rapping against her like a door knocker for her rib cage.

“Nothing wrong with a few mistakes. We’ve all made them.”

She looks at him with wide eyes and tells him to get some more rest, that he’ll surely feel better soon. She backs out the door.

Chapter Text

Dunya hadn’t seen her brother since they’d found him in his stupor, and while the guilt inspired by that fact occasionally nipped at the back of her mind when she was unoccupied, she had been incredibly busy as of late.

Her mother, however, had been dropping by the sanitarium every week for several months hoping that that would be the time he’d be allowed visitors. It was obvious from her stories that the staff hated having her there. The risk of infection was high, and here she was dropping by to pester them every weekend. Dunya was almost embarrassed at the thought, her old mother, with that thick, occasionally hard to understand accent, asking anyone in earshot about her son.

Dunya had come close to begging her to stop, her pension drained by weekly train rides, Dunya’s income already sapped by hospital bills and their household expenses.One morning at the beginning of April Dunya had noticed a pink indent where there should be a ring on her mother’s hand. She said nothing. A week later her mother stopped wearing earrings.

To make matters worse she wasn’t sure how long she could hold onto her job. She couldn’t lose this job, it was the best she’d ever had, but she was sure Luzhin had noticed the quality of her work slipping.

She crossed her legs under the desk, then uncrossed them. She typed up a copy of a document, but made a mistake on one page and had to start again. The collar of her blouse caught a drip of sweat. It was stuffy in the office, and the heat had not yet been turned off, despite the warmth of the spring day.

She looked at the closed window, should she open it? Would that be worth it? What if Luzhin wanted it to stay closed? She set her feet on the floor, heels clicking as they landed on new linoleum tiles. She walked over to the window, wrapping her fingers around the bottom edge, forcing it open. Apparently she was the first one in years to think of opening that window, as it had been painted shut. She heard the crackle of dried paint breaking as she forced it upward.

A soft spring breeze rewarded her efforts as she breathed in the good, clear air. The world outside the window was gentle, not quite still. Wind ruffled leaves, soft, clean looking clouds moved quickly, there was a woman holding a child's hand walking down the street. Sitting back at her desk she could her the ringing of the church bell. It was just an hour till noon, just an hour till she could have a break.

“Can I speak to you for a moment, Dunya?”

Dunya experienced a rare moment of intense piety as she prayed to anything that would listen. This was the moment that she had been terrified of for months. He was going to fire her, how would she tell her mother?

“Ive been thinking, about the dilemma your family finds itself in, and how I could help you”

He sits down on the corner of her desk as he says this, looking not at her but at the wall just above her head. Was he going to give her a raise? Or maybe some more backhanded “help” like offering her more hours at some terrible time, like three in the morning on christmas day, or a delightful work opportunity to clean his house.

“I have always believed in the importance of” he paused for a moment, as though searching desperately for the right word, but his face remained just as smug. “ the importance of a man’s position as benefactor.”

He wasn't her benefactor, he was her employer. She had a job, she wasn't some destitute victorian maiden in a workhouse. But she needed this job, so she nodded.

“I'd like to propose something to you, something that might seem rather unconventional. But I believe it to be the proper way of doing things.”

The sun was warm that day, so Dunya hadn’t worn a coat. The sky was a lovely clear blue, high and far away. As a child she had imagined that on days like this the sky would taste sweet if she could lick it. She tried to keep her hand tucked slightly behind her as she walked, but had no coat pocket or plausible excuse like the cold.
Eventually of course Jenny saw it.

“Gosh Dunya! That’s not a stone that’s a boulder!”

She should’ve taken off the ring, she should have left that burden in her pocket, buried it in her purse. Jenny doesn’t need to know about this just yet. She should’ve hidden this to give herself more time to figure things out. Instead she has her hand in Jenny’s fingers as she admires the way the stone catches the light. She’s known Jenny for years, they were children together, she could tell her the truth, but her mouth is full of marbles.

“Are you going to tell me who the lucky gentleman is? Or maybe you’re the lucky one, just look at the size of this thing!” Dunya hopes she doesn’t catch her wince. Jenny is sweet, she's fun, she’s always been there for Dunya. Her pretty brown eyes sparkle as she smiles at her warmly, everything about her is warm, her freckles and dark curled hair and her pink dress. She was lovely, but Dunya had been hiding things from her.

“You haven’t told me anything about this guy! Is he someone you know from work? Was it an office romance!” Dunya tried not to wince again. “You know my boss, Luzhin? He just sprung this on me about a week ago. How’s your cat been?” Dunya is comforted as Jenny drops the subject in favor of telling her about her cat, Delilah, who is apparently a creature of infinite amusement and charm. Jenny and Dunya walk through the park together underneath the pretty flowering trees and the nice blue tablecloth of sky, subject of the ring fortunately dropped entirely.

“She tried to chase a bird through the window yesterday, it was so funny! I wish you’d have seen it! Anyway, have you heard that song! It’s charming! It goes like this”

she whistled a few bars of music, it was some jazzy dance tune, Dunya imagined Jenny listening to it as she made dinner, chopping vegetables to the beat.

“Oh Dunya! We should go to the city together soon! Just the two of us, to celebrate your engagement! We’d have so much fun!”

In that moment Dunya realized that she had to make a choice. Tell the truth, and possibly lose her oldest and most dear friend, or tell a lie and probably still lose her friend. She could wait until most of the plans were secure, then have something “come up” and have to cancel, or she could flat out tell her that she can’t afford to, but it was still a choice she’d have to make eventually.

Her mother approved heartily of the match. The Luzhin’s were a respectable family, the marriage would bring her only daughter the sort of affluence she never could have dreamed of for herself. Luzhin had a car, shiny beetle black and not bought on credit, a sprawling family home, the kind so grand it came with its own ghost stories and so many chimneys and pointless architectural features it looked like a porcupine.

Dunya tried to focus on the money when she spoke with Luzhin. She had always had to pick something specific to focus on when speaking with her employers, otherwise she would have broken through her persona as the perfect servile employee.

When she’d first started working for him she had focused on the broken veins in his nose, then she’d latched onto a small scratch on the lenses of his spectacles. But then he’d got new spectacles so now she just pictured the heaps of money he went home to everyday. She imagined massive snow drifts of bills keeping doors closed, a veritable blizzard of wealth.

Luzhin was speaking to her as the sun sank steadily lower in the sky, his voice slow and confident in the way she’d grown used to, he’d caught her after work, gently wrapping his fingers around her elbow.

“My dear fiancé can’t wait to get away from me! Whatever is a man to do.”

“Sorry sir, my mother is waiting for me at home and-“

“Dunya, dear, speaking of mothers, I think it’s time I brought you to meet mine.”

The way he said it, it sounded like an order.

“This weekend, I’ll drive you to meet my mother, I think she’ll just adore you.”

Though Dunya hoped the weekend would never come, it did anyway. It dawned just as bright and lovely as every other day that week had been, and Luzhin had picked her up in his sleek black dung beetle and told her all about his grandfather’s service in the civil war while Dunya nodded and replied politely.

The house did look like a strangely geometric porcupine, chimneys and spires and tacked on additions. The roof was even decorated with ornamental wrought iron spikes. A matching set of spikes formed an expensive looking fence cradling the outer edges of the property.

Further down the path, through the gates, the driveway pinched off into a loop in the midst of a manicured garden. In the distance Dunya could see the glimmer of water and the steep roof of a garden folly. Inside, the house was no less grand, but slightly mustier. Dunya was led into a sitting room and left to wait for Luzhin’s mother.

The rich took so many pictures. This was the main difference that Dunya had been able to grasp while she sat primly at the edge of an armchair. Hung on the walls, perched on tables, tucked away in an album that lay on the low coffee table, and not just the number of photos.

A family like the Raskolnikovs had a family picture of two, very posed, meant to be the sole representation and immortalization of the family, perhaps, to future generations, Dunya would be frozen as a long haired little girl. Families like Luzhin’s, however, seemed to not take the grand tradition of portraiture nearly as seriously. The photos showed Luzhin’s mother and siblings and children who must be nieces and nephews ambling along the shore of a lake, nestled behind the steering wheel of a car, smiling, almost silly, almost in jest. One picture was of a little girl in a pleated silk dress covered with little flowers holding out the skirts in a mock curtsy.
That, not the rich velvet upholstery, or the vibrancy of the wallpaper, or how a maid brought them tea, was the true difference between the families.

Luzhin’s mother was a woman both older and richer than god. She had outlived two husbands, one of her children, and probably a dozen maids. She looked Dunya over with the cold gaze of someone out buying meat and finding that the best cuts were already sold and there was just gristle left.

“I told my son he should marry some nice young widow, one of my friend’s daughters, she’s a lovely woman, already has two children. But he said that a wife ought to feel indebted to her husband, that a man should be a benefactor as well as a husband.”

On the drive back home Luzhin had not mentioned anything about his mother, and instead had told the story of his other grandfather’s successful factory.

Chapter Text

Dunya visited her soon to be mother in law almost every weekend after that. She sat in the sitting room, judged by the faces of people she didn’t know and likely never would, by the maids, by Mrs. Luzhin herself. The judgement sticks to her skin, she tries to remove it but it never comes off clean.

Once, when Dunya was a child, she had snuck into the kitchen after her mother had prepared cookies. They were meant for a housewarming gift for a neighbor, and when Dunya had asked for one, still warm from the oven, her mother had refused her. So she crept into the kitchen and took a cookie from the plate and had eaten it in only a few bites. She wiped the crumbs off her shirt and walked away. She had played, nearly guiltless, in the garden until her mother saw a smear of raspberry jam on her cheek and reprimanded her. Sometimes Dunya stared at the silver dessert fork on her plate at the Luzhin’s house and rolled that memory around on her tongue.

On the first weekend of may Dunya went with her mother to the sanatorium. Luzhin drove them there, smiling as Pulcheria nestled down happily on the seat of the car. Dunya watched her mother rub her thumb against her ring finger, as though the skin wasn’t used to absence yet. She had worn that ring for nearly three decades, so Dunya supposed the feeling wouldn’t go away easily.

Luzhin brought them up the drive, but stayed within the car to Dunya’s immense relief.

“I’m rather peckish. I thought I would go get lunch in town.” He smiled at Pulcheria and tacked on “when Rodion is better situated I will interview him for that job.”

Then he drove off and Pulcheria rushed inside. Dunya remained on the steps, squinting into a bright spring sky.
There was a woman strolling along outside the hospital. It was a warm afternoon for May, the sun cutting through the occasional cloud in the silky expanse of sky, soft new leaves pressing against it, except for where the gray hospital roof cut into it like teeth. The path the woman was walking on was brick, soft dark green grass growing on either side of it. The woman herself fit oddly into this tableau, with her blond hair twisted up in a slightly lopsided chignon and her clothes rather far out of style, ill fitting, but rather neat.

She smiled at Dunya, as she stood outside waiting for her mother.
Dunya had been standing there for a seemingly endless span of time. At first it had been nice, peaceful, the sun warm and all things pleasant, but then things had gotten boring. So she struck up conversation with this unknown woman.

“Hello there, how are you?”

“I'm doing quite well thank you.” the woman smiled warmly. She was young, maybe a year younger than Dunya, and rather pretty, she was, like her hair and clothes, simple and a bit old fashioned, just as her hair was still long, her face was bare of any makeup. She looked like she had been frozen in time a decade ago. She turned to leave, but Dunya spoke again.

“Are you here to visit someone?”

“Oh no, i'm a patient.”

“Really? I thought they were serious about keeping people under lock and key?”

She laughed, just a little, softly and quietly. The way a child whose parent suffers from headaches will learn to laugh.
“I'm one of the ambulatory patients, almost ready to leave. They say my lungs have had plenty of time to heal, so I get to take long walks, and live in one of the cottages.”

“Ah, so i suppose you havent met my brother.”

“Maybe, what's his name?” She seemed genuinely intrigued. She had large, pretty eyes that held an enviable amount of emotion. She was probably, Dunya thought, the sort of person who felt things irrepressibly and deeply. The sort of person who wept happy tears at the sound of spring peepers and the taste of fresh strawberries. She told herself to stop assuming things like this about someone she’d only just met. Someone she’d likely never see again.

“Rodion, and I’m Dunya, but tell me more about yourself.” she was beyond trying to not sound pushy, she really wanted to know more about her. Her immediate need for amusement had tempered into a genuine desire for connection. She tried to comfort her hapless victim though, with what she sincerely hoped was a reassuring smile.

“Well, my name is Sofia, and I think your dress is very pretty.” Though the response was almost childish, or perhaps how an adult would speak to a child, her tone was warmly genuine. Though Dunya noted the way she shifted attention back onto her own shoulders. Ah so she was good at avoiding questions wasn't she. Well, two could play at this game.

“Thank you Sofia, I did the embroidery myself.” It had been a pain. “Did you do the embroidery on that kerchief?” There were little marigolds embroidered onto the edges of her kerchief, which had been tucked around her neck with a careful knot.

“I didn’t,” All that lovely, pure, open emotion in her eyes slammed shut.

“But it’s so detailed! You rarely can find this sort of thing off the rack!”

“Well, I didn’t get it off the rack.” She smiled in the sort of genuine manner that reassured Dunya she hadn’t greatly offended her.

“It was nice meeting you Dunya.”

She said this a little shyly, just a little. Then she walked off and Dunya was alone again.

While Dunya waited outside in the warmth of the sun, Pulcheria hurried through the doors into the tiled, brightly lit belly of the austere beast of a building.
The pure elation that had gripped Pulcheria’s chest when she was told she could visit her son was enough, she thought, to make up for months of fear and disappointment.

They led her through the sanitized gray halls, bright with wide windows, down to the room where he had apparently spent the past five months. She waited as the tired looking nurse in a white dress and a whiter apron opened the door for her. The nurse did not open the door. Instead, she turned to face Pulcheria. “I should warn you, Mrs. Raskolnikov, that he is still rather unwell.” Pulcheria did not care. She knew he was sick, why would she not just open the door? The nurse looked her in the eyes for a moment, then the realization that nothing would change Pulcheria’s mind seemed to flicker to life in her eyes. She opened the door.

If Pulcheria had thought her happiness before made up for everything, now she was so happy she felt like she might drop dead. Something swelled in her chest as she laid eyes on her son.

“Rodya!” She cried out, reaching towards him. He looked so much better now, it made sense to her that he would improve after five months, what with the constant care he had been offered, but it still soothed her so greatly. Someone had cut his hair, so it only barely brushed his collar, and it was clean. His face looked softer, the dark circles fainter, she expected that he would reach towards her and embrace her and everything would be right with the world once more.

She hardly even noticed the bitten down nails on his hands. His eyes froze the moment they met hers. His mouth pulled downward into a sneer.

“Are you here to torment me in my premature grave?” His voice was a croak like a raven’s.

“Have you come here simply to haunt me, mother?”

“Are you even really here?” He pulled himself to his feet, knuckles white, wrapped around the bed frame, eyes wild.
Pulcheria could feel her face fall.

“Rodya? What’s wrong?”

“You know very well! They lock me up! They put me into the box! Mother! She watches her son through the glass. Am I in a terrarium that you built? Are you with the police? Are you a scientist in a mask?”

“Rodya I-“

“Death! Death happens you know! We have no power to exert over fate! It was fate's fingers!”

“Please darling! Tell me what is wrong!”

He kept speaking. Rambling nonsense like bad school project poetry stumbling out of his lips. The yellow tint of the light bulbs reflected off of his dark pupils. He began to pace about the small room, touching the wall as he passed it. When he turned back around the figure in a blue dress and his mother’s skin was gone.

Chapter Text

Night was a time that Dmitri dreaded these days. He was quite sociable, as he always had been, and he spent the day talking to just about anyone. As a direct result of his pleasant personality and sociable demeanor he had many friends, and many invitations to a variety of social events from the highbrow to the possibly contraband.

He had slowly moved away from his usual fluttering from person to person, spending every free moment he had in someone else’s apartment laughing with them in recent months.

It didn’t feel right anymore, like he was a clock, and his mechanism, generally in perfect order, had fallen slightly out of place. Maybe a singular notch on a singular gear had worn down, and now didn’t mesh properly. In any case he now spent most evenings in his apartment. He used the excuse of having to pick up more work as a translator, and there was indeed a pile of German texts on his desk, but in truth most evenings he just sat staring off into space, thinking. He spent far too much time thinking these days, he was starting to take after Rodya wasn’t he?

Oh god, Rodya.

He really was the key piece of Dmitri’s life, wasn’t he? That was a bit depressing. That his whole life might fall apart if a single one of his friends were no longer present. Then again, Rodya wasn’t like most of his friends. Something about him was different, more crucial somehow. Dmitri shifted on the threadbare couch, trying to make himself comfortable. He couldn’t seem to get comfortable though, as though there were some spring poking out of the fabric. He checked for a possible loose spring. There wasn’t one.

After a few moments of discomfort, in which Dmitri almost gave up and lay down on the floor, there was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s the police. We need you to answer a few questions.”

Dmitri was worried this might have something to do with the booze. Though it wouldn’t make much sense to come after him in particular, given that not only was he not distributing anything, he was only marginally involved.

“Okay.” He tried to keep the tone of his voice as level as he could. Flatten out any inflection in it at all.

He opens the door, and lets the man into his home.
He’s not quite what Dmitri expected, given that he’s a single man, yet spoke in the plural. He was middle aged, a bit portly, and wearing a rather nice tie. When he spoke to dmitri his tone was remarkably amiable. It’s jarring, especially with the things he said.

“Tell me a bit about your friend, Rodion Raskolnikov.”

Dmitri had to take a moment to process that, and quite nearly asked the man to repeat himself. Does everything truly revolve around Rodya these days?

“He was studying law, he has a mother and a sister who live somewhere upstate, I’ve only ever met them once. He’s a very intelligent man, very strong moral convictions to go with that. He had to take some time off recently. Is that sufficient sir?”

Dmitri was shaken even more when the man smiled at him pleasantly.

“Please, no need for sir. My name is Porfiry Petrovitch.”

The man smiled, revealing slightly yellowed, slightly crooked teeth. The teeth of a man who drank quite a bit of coffee or tea, but if he were a smoker they’d be grayed. Razumikhin, despite himself, felt his nerves easing when the man smiled. He was, to his very bones, a good natured man who truly did believe in the good nature of others.

“Right, sorry Mr petrovitch. Anyway he isn’t in the city currently. Please don’t be offended when I ask you what interest this holds?”

“There has been a murder recently. I’m sure you are aware.”

“No I wasn’t. What happened?”

Murders are something Dmitri would associate with some pulp novel, something to be read once then left at a second hand shop, something where the names of the characters would be entirely forgotten within a week of finishing the book.

“Several months ago two women were found dead in their apartment. Very bloody, one was a pawnbroker and in any case we discovered that a certain Rodion Raskolnikov had done business with them in the past. Very interesting. Unfortunately we had trouble tracking him down, apparently he’s been at a sanitarium upstate for months now.”

Rodya had been in a bit of a financial pickle, and had to pawn some things. Not that he’d told Dmitri, but Dmitri had figured it out anyway.

“Well yes, he’s been very sick. It’s all very upsetting, especially to his mother. He hasn’t been allowed visitors, for fear of contagion.” He knew his speech was growing less intelligent sounding. He began to stammer too. The polish was flaking right off of him.

“How unfortunate.”

“Yes.” He hoped that Porfiry could not tell how much he was sweating.

He felt his shirt begin to stick to flesh, despite the evening chill. When the man finally left he nearly collapsed back onto the sofa and fell asleep.

Even by morning though, the uneasiness hadn’t left him.
He decided that the best course of action was to go out into the heavy sheets of rain for a warm breakfast that he wouldn't have to make himself, perhaps a walk and a plate of warm eggs will make the swirling unease making a home of his stomach and the itching in the back of his mind go away.

Yet Dmitri found that not even the cheapest eggs and coffee could not fix him. He slumped over the sticky table staring into his coffee like it was a crystal ball and he was a fortune teller, and he could use the swirling dark liquid to reveal to himself the truth.

The steam lifted off the surface, warming his face. It feels rather nice, and his fingers are warm from wrapping around the cup. Unfortunately his clothes had gotten wet, so now he smells like a herd of soggy sheep.

The first time he had met Raskolnikov had been right after they left class on the very first day of their very first year of college. It had been over three years ago now, and Raskolnikov had been a bit twitchy around all the noise and all the people, in the way that said quite obviously that he was a bit of a bumpkin.

Something had been charming about him. Maybe the way he had smiled at Razumikhin, maybe it was the brilliant mind he had very quickly revealed. It was a warm day, and sweat had glistened lightly on his pale forehead. His hair was cut in a rather unfortunate style, if it could even be called that, and some of it was stuck to the dampness of his face. His clothes were well made, barely worn, but had obviously not been made for him. A man more critical would have seen that as frumpy and unprofessional, a more observant man would have noticed just how poorly they suited him, Dmitri, however, had found something charming in the way the sleeves hung a touch too long and the way the jacket was cut too broad.

The warmth tied to the memory, the way that the shadows of leaves had flickered across his face as they walked through the park and towards Razumikhin’s new housing, the taste of the illicit overpriced liquor at the first party they’d gone to together just a few days later, it warmed him. The nostalgia of it all, all while comforting him, attempted to crush him.

He wondered if this was how men back from the war felt, the men who would sit in bars all day long, lost somewhere deep and hopeless in the past. He chastised himself for that thought.

He looked out through the window of the coffee shop. It was raining, heavy lashing waves of rain swept over the street, painting it all gray. The waitress behind the counter smiled at him, asked if he wanted another cup, if his coffee had gone cold. She added a darling to the coffee question, he shook his head.

His coffee was fine.

She smoothed a hand over her bobbed hair and went back to her work.

They had been in the library one day, maybe about a year ago, studying, but Raskolnikov had fallen asleep. He hadn’t been sleeping much, and he’d been so tired recently, that Dmitri couldn’t bring himself to wake him. He was slumped forward, face resting on his arms, hair falling around him. His shirt had come untucked a while ago, and now had ridden up. Dmitri could see the thumb sized divot next to his hip bone. He wanted to put his thumb there. He wanted to touch his friend's bare skin. He wanted so desperately to touch him. Would his flesh give like the skin of an overripe peach? Would sweet juice drip from where his thumb had punctured pale flesh? He would pull pieces away and eat them one by one. His face was hot just thinking about it. He was shameful, he shifted uncomfortably in his chair and wrapped his hand around the mug of coffee, as if the firm ceramic curve would make him forget.

Dmitri took a sip of coffee, it was cold now.
He was cold. It was May, and he felt cold, and it was raining.
He left the cafe, his mug cold on the counter.

Chapter Text

The sky was spinning closer to dusk when Dunya saw a car roll to a stop outside the office window. It was lacquered black and glossy like a beetle's shell, and she knew it was the police even before a uniformed man emerged from it. She watched as he walked inside, hearing footsteps up the stairs, growing closer, as she stared down at some paperwork. There was a knock at the door, which she answered.

“Excuse me, Ms. Raskolnikov, we need to talk with you about something.”

There was a police officer. There was a police officer waiting outside Luzhin’s office. Had something happened? Was everyone all right? Her mind, as it often did, went to the worst of extremes.

The police officer was middle aged, lines clustering near his mouth and eyes, he looked rather displeased, not making much of an attempt to put her at ease.
“Is something wrong?” She couldn’t help the panic creeping into her voice.

“Don’t worry, miss, we just need to have a word with you down at the station.”

She followed after, cowed into silence.

The police station had a room with a varnished wooden door with a frosted glass window. She was led behind the door and into a room with a wooden table and two chairs. There were no windows.

“Well miss Raskolnikov, in light of your brother’s current illness, we thought we might ask you a few questions.”
He smiled in a way that was probably meant to be reassuring, but Dunya was still crumpling her skirt in her fists. She can’t think of a single reason she might be of interest.

“What about?”

“Well, there was an incident near where your brother lived, I’m correct that Rodion is your brother?” He waits for Dunya to answer, eyes boring into her.

“Yes, he is.” She wanted to tell him, rather snappishly, that obviously Rodya was her brother, how many Raskolnikovs could there even be living in a town of middling size in upstate New York. How many Raskolnikovs were there in the entire damn country?
“Well,” this man was getting on her nerves. He had coffee strong on his breath, it was almost unbearable at this point. He couldn't seem to choose a word other than well to start sentences. He had dragged her here and she wasn’t even entirely sure what for.

“Two elderly women were murdered sometime late last year and our counterparts in the city connected him back to it. We found out he was sick, so interviewing him was probably not a good option, for the sake of justice and our men’s safety.” They thought her quiet, idealistic brother was a killer. The skirt in her fist crumpled more, she ground her teeth.

“When did the murders take place?” Her brother had been in a sanitarium, mostly delirious for months, he couldn’t have killed anyone. This man, sergeant Dowd would see that and let her leave, shift suspicion off her brother.

“Late November, the estimated time of death was about noon on November twenty eighth.”

“Rodion couldn’t have been involved, on December second we received a call informing us of his illness, according to his landlady and a friend of his he had been delirious and weak with illness for over a week by then, and in deteriorating health for even longer.” She didn’t attempt to imagine her sickly brother with a pistol aimed at an old lady’s head.

His face hardly changed with this information. “Is that so?”

“How were the victims connected to him?” They wouldn’t just try to pin two random murders onto her brother, right?

“As you may know, your brother struggled a bit financially according to a statement that the department in the city received from his friend. He went to a pawnbroker with some valuables, took a bit of money, little while later, bam!” He whacked the table with both hands, making Dunya jump.

“Dead.”

He turned his scrutiny back to Dunya.
“Well, Ms Raskolnikov, do you happen to know if your brother said anything,” he paused, licking his lower lip. “suspicious, the last time the two of you spoke?”

“I don’t remember anything in particular about the last time we spoke, it was a long time ago. He was visiting and he told me a bit about the city, his friends, an idea for an article he had, just run of the mill things.”

“Do you happen to remember what the article was about?”

She thought for a moment, trying to remember what that article had been about. Her mother had been euphoric, had thought the article a stroke of genius, but Dunya had thought it a bit bland.
“Not really, napoleon, I think?”

“Napoleon. The French guy?” He sounded almost disappointed, maybe he had expected some multiple chapter murder manifesto.

“Yes, the emperor. I think it was some analysis of the Napoleonic code. I don’t think he ever wrote it, and if he did it didn’t get published by anyone.”

She was told she may leave, but before she walked out the door she turned back around to Sergeant Dowd.
“Please don’t go to my mother. She’s an old woman, and going through a rough time. She knows as much as I do, and in any case I think we all know Rodya is innocent. Please leave her alone at least.”

Raskolnikov didn’t remember if he was innocent. Innocent of what?
He had seen the light leave her eyes, hadn’t he! He had. He knew. Then why was she here? Why was she right here, right in front of him? Was he going mad? He couldn’t be. A Napoleon didn’t go mad from killing, a Napoleon was born to exert control over the souls around him. A Napoleon was a god on earth, a mortal no more. He transcended all laws, all moral codes, he was god. Gods didn’t bow to authority.

Then he woke from an uncomfortable shadow filled sleep. He was alone, and he wanted to speak.
He imagined his vocal cords rusting and collecting dust from disuse.

He sat up in his bed, and swung his legs over the edge, as if he was going to get up.
He didn’t, and sat there. He itched to talk to just about anyone.
It was actually an itch, something small and sharp-ended caught somewhere in the folds and creases of his mind.

He brushed the wrinkles out of his clothes. He was wearing pajamas. He didn’t think he owned any. As he carefully sorted through the delirium of what he knew was several months he just came up with a few images of nurses with his breakfast splashed across their aprons and orderlies backing away from him. There was a faint image of his mother wearing a blue dress and weeping, but he wasn’t sure if that was actually recent, because his mother weeping in that same blue dress was an unfortunately common occurrence.

He waited for a while, reading a book that had been left under the bed. It was one of his own, but not one he’d read in a long time. It served as a confirmation that Pulcheria had actually visited, as he had left the book at home when he left for university, his name scrawled into the cover in an undeniably childish hand. He found the book rather boring, he had left books like this far behind by the time he was fifteen. It was read for the first time in the midst of a distraction caused by the sound of far off canons and for the second time in a distraction caused by the close sound of footsteps as he waited eagerly for someone to speak to. It was a ridiculous novel, obviously meant for little boys, about some young mechanical genius and adventurer. Someone had given him the book for his eighth birthday. After about thirty minutes of reading it began to irk him so much he chucked it under the bed once more.

He heard someone walk up to the door. Quiet little hoof beats as another devil tapped their way towards his personal hell. Door knob turned and hinges creaked.
Raskolnikov felt oddly like a man awaiting his own execution.
The nurse who walked in with his lunch was one of the older, more experienced nurses. She had strong arms and a thick, solid waist, like an old elm. In her hands was a tray, which she held in whitening knuckles.
She placed the tray on the small table, and turned towards the door, moving as if she was being magnetically repulsed by the room.

“Please, stay a minute.”

Her eyes widened and her features flew away from each other before she quickly and skillfully smoothed the expression from her face.

“I haven’t had much conversation in a while. It would be nice to talk for just a moment.” He had never craved human interaction. In general he was the sort who could go without. But now, his only company was some mediocre book from his childhood and a crack on the ceiling he wanted desperately to speak.

“It’s okay, I don’t bite!” He tried on his best approximation of a Razumikhin-esque smile.
The nurse sat carefully on the edge of the other cot. Raskolnikov wondered for a moment why she seemed so afraid of him. He had barely moved in months, if he didn’t spend so much time pacing he probably wouldn’t be able to stand at all anymore. He wondered why they would keep him locked up like this, when really, wasn't part of the treatment for consumptives plenty of fresh air? He wondered if perhaps this woman knew what he had done. It would justify her fear, at least slightly.
She smiled back, though tentatively.

“How are you feeling Mr-“ she trailed off, obviously not knowing his name. He found that amusing for a moment, then infuriating in the next. It curdled in the deep pits of his belly.

“Call me Rodion.” He said pleasantly, “I don’t stand on ceremony.”

“Right, Rodion.”

“I’m feeling quite well as of late. Practically cured! All things considered you lot are miracle workers!” He smiled again, and he must have done it wrong because she winced. That wince played over in his mind, her not knowing his name, her fearing him, her cringing away from him, it all dripped into that pit of curdling fury deep within him.

“I’m glad you're feeling better, Rodion.”

“Has my mother been to visit recently?”

“She came just a week ago.”

“How was her visit?”

“I don’t think I can tell you.”

Raskolnikov wasn't exactly sure what happened next. They either had a pleasant conversation, or he chucked himself at her with all his force and began ripping out her hairpins and hurling them at the wall.

He woke up hours later with a touch of headache.

Chapter Text

Raskolnikov awoke the next morning, the aforementioned headache nibbling gently in his temples, hunger gnawing away at his stomach. Eventually that same nurse from the day before returned with a tray. She smiled at him brightly, her hair pins very much still in her hair, he was soothed. Less so because he knew he didn’t hurt the woman, though he supposed that was part of it, but more specifically that he knew exactly what happened. It was, after all, ignorance which seemed to him far worse than death.

In the moment he was sated on knowledge and spoke to her once more. She had a family, he learned, two sisters and a plethora of nieces and nephews. He was soothed, but soon grew annoyed by her. The days passed horribly slow now that he’d regained lucidity. He sat and he read, then tired of reading so he paced.

Dunya’s first brush with infatuation had been at the age of eleven when she’d taken a shine to an older girl named Mary. Mary was the sort of person who wore their own fragility as a sort of armor, exposing glasslike limbs to the air and letting out soft sighs at the sound of birdsong. Dunya was deeply in love with Mary, but also harbored the burning desire to be Mary. She was so grown up and lovely, had so many friends.

Dunya had spent a full year trailing after her and blushing whenever Mary said her name. One day she had overheard Mary telling her friends about the weird little girl who kept following her around like a lost puppy. Dunya had gone home and cried into her pillow until eventually her mother had petted her hair and soothed her enough.

Her next infatuation had been another older girl, when Dunya was about fourteen.
The girl was almost seventeen, and had dark hair, burnished a lovely metallic copper by the summer, and had been given a generous serving of strawberry seed freckles by the same sweet summer sun.
She had befriended Dunya of her own volition, and they had spent long lovely days together wandering through the forest, skirts of their oldest, least presentable outdoor clothes halfheartedly hiked up to prevent them getting further torn and muddied.

They had stopped one day in a little glen, perched on tufts of China packing grass, their shoes and stockings forsaken as they dipped feet in a brook.
The girl, whose name was Elodie, had leaned back comfortably and let more of that generous provider warm her face.
Dunya had felt so delighted in that moment, had played it again and again in her mind for weeks, it was written down in her diary, but more importantly in her very soul.

A week later they had been back in the glen on a less bright day. Perhaps Dunya should have seen the gathering clouds as an omen, as all Elodie wanted to talk about was her brother. How smart and polite and handsome and BLOND he was and when had she said he’d be free. Dunya had wanted to say that she too was all of those things, and quite possibly more so, as people had always said her brother’s hair was more of a dark honey while hers was a true blond, and she was certainly more polite than him, but she hadn’t.
Instead she had snipped the thread connecting them and spent a few nights crying as she killed her fantasies of running fingers through the hair of that daughter of the sun while kissing every freckle.

In actuality her first kiss had been with a girl she’d met on a brief trip to the seaside, whose name was Anne, and had pretty dark eyes. All the kisses after that had been when her first employer had caught her alone and grabbed her blouse, or when her current employer kissed her cheek in greeting. Then she would go home and scrub her skin, still feeling like she had oily stains.

Since the girl on the beach she hadn’t felt the pull of any sort of infatuation, but somehow her interest in Sofie had grown to something else, a massive beast of a thing that Dunya didn’t know quite what to do with. She went about her daily life, went on walks with Jenny, but no matter what her mind turned again and again to Sofia.

The next time Pulcheria visited the sanitarium Dunya went with her.
She had a singular, selfish goal. She wanted to pester Sofia some more. She’d started visiting whenever she could, even sometimes during the week, when she would say to her mother she was going to Jenny’s apartment for dinner or to the city to buy something. It was the most selfish thing she’d ever done in her life. It made her feel like she had a dirty secret, something to set her constantly on edge. Every time she visited, as if in an attempt to alleviate some of her guilt, she would bring Sofia a gift. A new handkerchief, a pretty bookmark made with pressed flowers, some chocolates. Sofia would smile demurely and blush, say Dunya was far too kind, dodge some questions, on Dunya’s part she would always hide her ring in her pocket before she came, it was a comfortable rhythm. The last time she’d gone there she and Sofia had sat on the porch of one of the outpatient cottages to escape the drizzle.

“If you were Russian you’d be Sonia.” She was thinking about that, how different but the same she would be. Her mother, if she ever met Sofia, would probably call her Sonia.

“Why is that?”

“Soniechka sounds better than sofiechka.” Dunya wished to call Sofia both. Wished to soften that lovely name between her lips, roll it about her palate like a sommelier with wine.

“What explanation do you have for Dunya from Avdotya? And why is it that your diminutives make a name three times as long?” Sofie’s tone was light and joking, Dunya felt a swell of pleasure at managing to get Sofie to be so comfortable with her.
“No clue” as they spoke, Dunya leaned closer to Sofie.

“If your parents were American you’d be Dottie.” That thought amused Dunya, she thought that even if Sofie would be the same as a Sonia she would be entirely different as a Dottie.

“Are your parents Americans?” God forgive her, Dunya desperately wanted to know more about her, even if it made her seem blunt. She’d managed to shake Sofie down for details on her little siblings. It was ridiculously hard to get Sofie to talk about herself, she was almost tragically devoid of ego.

“They were as much as any of us.” Sofie turned away as she said it, looking out towards the smooth curtain of rain.

“That tells me nothing.”

Sofie scoffs, and though it pleased her that the joke landed, the tragic reminder of her mother’s absence bit Dunya. That was an unfortunate side effect of shaking her down for stories on her siblings, learning of her mother’s death. She didnt know when, or how, questioning Sofie on that seemed beyond the pale. A quiet moment passes, emptiness filled by the sound of rain against the roof.

“What were they like?”

“They were nice people, mother used to call me Sofie, which is a more sensible nickname for a Sofia then “Soniechka” I think.”

“ Can I call you Sophie?”

“Okay.” She smiled. “I’d like that actually.”

God help her, Dunya felt her heart beat like a rabbit’s.

While she had been able to shake some information out of her, her very existence was still a mystery to Dunya.
Dunya prided herself at the amount of information she could usually get simply by looking at someone’s clothes. It made her feel, though she never would have admitted it, a bit like Sherlock Holmes. While she could tell by a glance that that blouse had belonged to someone else before, that much was obvious, she couldn’t figure out all that much else. The sleeves were just a touch too short, but not in the way off the rack clothing was sometimes ill fitting, the blouse was obviously not off the rack. The delicate floral embroidery, the tiny pink shell buttons, all of it was too careful, too hard to mass produce. Besides, the style was pretty out of date, it definitely could not have been Sofia’s initially. That ring she wore on a ribbon around her neck had to belong to a mother! Sofie had never mentioned an engagement.

Dunya was overcome with the unquenchable thirst to unwind the secrets from this Girl like she was a spool of thread. Wouldn't Sofie’s father have kept the ring? Or perhaps it would have been slipped back onto the hand of its owner before she was given to the earth.

The conversation had ended, Dunya had gone back home, and thought about Sofia constantly until she walked back into view on Sunday, just before noon.
She smiled when she saw Dunya, eyes traveling down to Dunya’s hands, then laughing. When she got closer Dunya said “it’s such a beautiful day, I made us both flower crowns on the way here.” She let Dunya place the daisies onto her brow, let her lead her to a bench.

Dunya looked gently upon Sofia, pretty in her crown of flowers, her clean white blouse. The sun hit the side of her face, where she wasn’t protected by the tree.“You look lovely Sofie, but I’m not surprised.”

“Dunya, I have to tell you something.” Her tone is all wrong for the moment. The perfect light, the warmth, the prettiness of everything. She sounded worse than solemn.

“What is it?”

“I’m going to be discharged soon.”

“You’ll have to give me your address! I can write you, and maybe visit.” Dunya imagined stopping by Sofia’s house, hands filled with more little presents, writing long letters and receiving long letters back. Like bosom buddies in a children’s novel.
Sofia looked like she might cry. Dunya really hoped she wouldn’t.

“I don’t know what my address will be.”

“Oh” that did throw a wrench into her plans, didn’t it.

“I didn’t want you to know before, because I thought if you knew you might stop talking to me.” She took a deep, shaky breath before continuing, her voice thick.

“You have been so nice to me, and told me so much about yourself, but I’ve hidden everything because I wanted you to still grant me that niceness.”

“I won’t stop talking to you.” she wanted to say that she can't ever stop talking to Sofie, that she spent every spare moment recalling their past conversations and planning for the next. Would she bring sweet sofie a candy? Strawberries?

“When I got sick my mother caught it from me, and we came here at the same time, but she died from a hemorrhage and I lived. I’ve cost my family so much. My stepmother is sick too now and they don’t have the money for treatment, and my father won’t stop drinking, and I don’t know where to go!” the words were abraded by having been kept in for too long. Dunya had felt like that before She’d felt the words bounce back and forth in her own mind, amplified with every passing until finally they grew into a scream.

“Don’t worry Sofia, I can help you.” She would do anything for Sophie now, and she grew less and less certain if that was solely because she was desperately in love with her. She had reached the stage of infatuation where an imperfection or indignity could not shake her adoration of Sofie, and would in fact endear her further.

“Bless you Dunya.”

“We'll figure something out.”

They sat for another moment, side by side in the warmth, Sofie still a touch shaky from the emotion. Then her voice issues again, this time slippery but lighter.

“Thank you again for the flowers.” She coaxes the conversation back to life after that, letting the warm day ease the ache.

Chapter Text

Dunya had an idea.
Her idea was simple, it was simple and yet it made her thoroughly sick. She sat at the vanity mirror that morning, everything laid out just so, six hairpins lined up on the counter, a small bottle of cologne, a hairbrush, neat, tidy. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror. No, that looked too unnatural. She tried again. Better, but not perfect. She couldn’t find a way to smile that didn’t warp her face unnaturally.

She swallowed back her fear and pinned a flower to her dress. She looked at her reflection again, with the flower she’d tried to make herself look comely, like an offshoot of spring itself, but instead she felt she could see a vision of the future, her pale face with its eyes closed, muscles slackened into habitual frown, hands folded over a spray of gladiolas or some other funeral flower.

She walked into her job that bright Monday morning neatly dressed, a flower pinned to her bust with a little brooch, ring displayed prominently. She could feel its weight on her hand, she still hadn‘t gotten used to it. Possibly her own fault, for how little she wore it.

When Mr. Luzhin walked in she didn’t let him just breeze past with his usual brisk, toneless “good morning,” though he made a valiant effort at it.

“Excuse me, Mr Luzhin. I need to ask you something.” she made sure to smile up at him through her lashes, just so. This morning he was wearing a stiff wool suit, despite the warming weather, and a red silk waistcoat with a gaudy pattern. His pocket square was a more muted red to match.

“Of course dear, as I’ve said before, a wife should be beholden to her husband, be able to rely on him.” God, could he please stop saying that? It had long since begun wearing on her nerves. She knew she owed him. He didn’t have to remind her. She kept her smile pinned on.

“A friend of mine needs a job.” She looked him in the eyes and tried to steady her heartbeat. “I was thinking that you could probably use a secretary.”

“Does he have experience?”

“She can type.” Dunya did not, in fact, know if Sofia could type. She might be able to.

“I suppose I will need a new stenographer after we marry, wouldn’t be right for my wife to still work.” He crossed over to the window as he said this, speaking to her with his back turned to her, staring out the window.

Dunya wondered how long she could hold onto this in between time.”Of course not.”

“Is she a decent sort?”

“Yes, a nice, polite, decent young woman.” That, at least, was true.

Next in her plan came Jenny. Jenny wouldnt be quite as hard, she thought. She would have to come up with some deception there, but she could. She wasn't entirely sure why she didnt want Jenny to know her family’s hardship, but somehow she couldnt bear the thought of Jenny looking on in pity.

Pity was a strange beast, serpentine and slick and amphibious. It wore the face of kindness then bit you when you couldn't possibly bear any more pain. Dunya had been bitten by the beast in the past, when she’d still had two blond braids to her waist and her father had decayed in front of the eyes of the town. Then, after he was in his coffin in the sitting room for the wake the town had surged through the door with the same teary eyed platitudes that they brought to every family in the county in that ugly bloodstained year, when plague had swept through and taken the people that war had not. Dunya’s father hadn't been a victim of either of those scourges, and he hadn't been that well liked before his death, but after his death he was preyed upon by pity. Dunya, then eleven, her eyelashes crusted together with dried salt, would have sworn that they were only here to take the desserts. Her brother, tall and dour beyond his years at fourteen, was not in the sitting room.

Jenny was overjoyed to see Dunya at her door. Her round cheeks pinched with elation.
“Come in! You can meet Delilah!”

Dunya was ushered through the door. The apartment looked like it did months ago, but now a sleek cat is perched on the couch. Delilah must have only been a kitten when Jenny acquired her, because now she still looked quite small, and surprisingly docile. Didn’t Dunya hear somewhere that adult strays can’t be tamed?

While the cat did keep Dunya from dinner once, she didn’t hold grudges against a creature so dear to Jenny, so she held her hand up to the cat's nose to sniff, then when she was accepted gave the beast a scratch behind the ear.

Jenny’s family had been one of the few who visited after the funeral. Dunya used to wonder if more people would have visited if her father had been better liked, but he had been a man much like his son, solitary and often stern, withdrawing more as the illness wore on him. Jenny’s mother had brought the family a death casserole the day after, along with some unsolicited advice.

“I need to ask you for something Jenny.” Jenny looked over from the counter, where she had been pouring hot water into a teapot.

She let out a startled little “Mm” before telling Dunya “oh of course, what do you need?”

Jenny’s mother had been wary of the Raskolnikov family. She had thought that Rodion was strange and that Dunya was crass and common and that the parents hadn’t done enough to Americanize. She watched Roman Raskolnikov start to crumple in on himself, the whole town did, with the distance given to sickly foreigners. After his death, however, she had swooped in with that aforementioned death casserole and some honey-soaked, barbed platitudes. Dunya hadn’t cared all that much, as she’d brought Jenny with her. Jenny had loved her and cared for her and been with her for years. She was the sort of friend who agreed to help before she knew what it was you needed.

“A friend of mine I met at my old job is getting released from the T.B ward soon, she needs somewhere to stay for a bit before she can get her own place. She’s a dear and you’ll absolutely adore her, but I understand if you don’t want to let her stay here for a bit.”

Dunya couldn’t help but notice how Jenny’s face chilled when she said that. It may have been the immense demand, perhaps the mention of Dunya’s previous employment. She agreed to let Sofie stay, but Dunya still saw how cold she looked.

She hated imposing on her friends good nature and kindness. She hated asking Luzhin for anything, she hated that she would have done it all over again.

Dunya spent the rest of the week horribly on edge, simply waiting for calamity that never came.

That Saturday Pulcheria made her weekly visit to the sanatorium.
The doctor herded Pulcheria down the long sterile corridor, deeper and deeper into the gray heart of the beast. She had come for her weekly visit. Last week Rodion hadn’t been anywhere near as belligerent, perhaps today he would act like her son.

“Mrs Raskolnikov, your son is technically ready to be released from the sanitarium.”

She reels back in shock. She could have him home, safe and warm and well, by a week from now. They could eat Sunday dinner together, introduce him to Dunya’s fiancé, let him burrow back into his old room and his old books.
“So we can bring him back home?”

Her voice sounded almost girlish to her own ears. She can’t remember the last time she was so excited. The doctor slowed his pace almost to a halt and turned to face her. He looked slightly gray, but perhaps it was the walls reflecting onto him.
“We would suggest that you didn’t.”

“Then why did you say he was cured?”

“His lungs, Mrs Raskolnikov are healed, he is no longer contagious, he would have been ambulatory months ago, he would have been an outpatient months ago, but unfortunately..” he trailed off for a moment, scratched at his arm through his sleeve.

“We don’t think.. we think your son needs to go to a different sort of institution for a bit, his body is recovered, but his mind needs expertise we do not possess here, as well as time to heal.”

There was something about saying that her son needed even more time to heal was funny to her. They’d already given him plenty of time, what he needed now was to come home.

“But he is discharged from this hospital?” Hot air is pushed back into the floundering, deflated hot air balloon in her chest. It rises until it presses against the back of her throat.

“Yes. He is no longer tubercular. He can leave without fear of contagion.” The doctor was not making a move toward the door.

“My daughter and I will be bringing him to live with us at home then. He just needs some time at home.”

The last time they’d had him at home for long was three years ago. He had spent an extra two years with them, studying and tutoring, working at the grocers. Though those two years were born of hardship she looked back on them fondly. She’d had her daughter and her son, right there in front of her, safe and sound and accounted for.

The doctor took on a slightly condescending air. “I think that is unwise.”

“Why.”

“He is mentally deranged, Ms. Raskolnikov. I was saying that you ought to have him committed. He is unstable, unpredictable, and needs constant surveillance to ensure he is not a danger to himself and others.”

Her son was not mentally deranged. Her son did not need to spend even longer looked up in some sterile, expensive prison. He needed to be home. This doctor was an idiot and her desire to slap him was growing by the second.

She stopped grinding her teeth so she could open her mouth. “Mentally deranged! And whose fault is that?”

“What do you mean, fault?”

“You left my son cooped up in a miserable room for months and expected him not to lose himself? I ought to sue you for malpractice!”

“Sue, ma’am.”

He did it think she could, did he,

“Yes sue! My son in law is a lawyer! We’ll sue you for all you’re worth!”

Doctors generally got nervous at the mention of legal action. “No need to resort to that ma’am, I was just trying to be helpful.”

Pulcheria smoothed the front of her dress. “You ought to stop helping then

Chapter Text

Dmitri walked to the restaurant where he had once dragged Raskolnikov. The street was loud and unpleasantly busy and inside the tables were sticky. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this; he didn’t really know why he did anything anymore. After years of optimism and good natured gaiety, as well as genuine ambition, he had lapsed into a bizarre weeks-long existential crisis that kept him pinned like a butterfly.
Why should he study for that midterm, if he did well he would become a lawyer, get married and die, and if he failed he would fail, then fail some more, drop out of school, not become a lawyer, then die. In the end the outcome was the same, wasn’t it?

If he didn’t get breakfast and coffee and stare blankly out the window he might be a little light headed, but it wouldn’t change things that much.

His crisis, he supposed, thinking about it a little clearer with a cup of coffee in his gullet (coffee had changed more than he’d given it credit to) and with his nerves calmed from a long walk, was possibly based in the fact that he’d been trapped in the same day for over a year.

They’d been sitting across from each other in Dmitri‘s apartment, a bottle of scotch sitting between them half drunk and papers strewn in front of them half finished.

Actual study had fizzled out as they passed the bottle back and forth, minds and conversation turning to things with more meat on the bone. Politics, philosophy, whether or not archduke Franz Ferdinand had been referred to as “Franzl” by his wife, and Dmitri had noticed that Rodion was in a far more jovial mood than normal.

Dmitri had stood, still feeling fairly clear headed, to get them something to eat while they talked and drank.

He had heard soft footfalls behind him, and turned around. Rodion was right behind him. He stared Razumikhin down, then grabbed his face and pulled it to his own.

Dmitri hadn’t believed it for a moment, stood stiff, but Raskolnikov did not disappear or stop kissing him. Then his hand had drifted up to a bony hip and stayed there.
The long awaited succulent peach dripped juices sweetly down his chin, staining his clothes and marking him. His mouth tasted of scotch.

The next day, at waking, he would spend a long moment contemplating the events of the night, before spending some time and scratch paper trying to determine how much drunker Rodion had been. He had been pretty much fine, though a bit gigglier than normal, and he wouldn’t have trusted himself to drive anything, but Rodion was half a foot shorter and fairly light, he also tended to not hold liquor well. He’d labored over his arithmetic, finally determining that Raskolnikov would have been a good bit tipsier than him, but still possessing of most of his wits. He would almost certainly have acted of his own accord and would certainly remember.

He’d been almost giddy with nerves until the next time he saw Raskolnikov, unusually twitchy and unable to sit still for long. Then, finally they were reunited. Raskolnikov nodded from across the room, then turned back to the book he was reading.

The kiss, though it spent weeks playing in Dmitri’s head, was never mentioned.

Sophie moved into Jenny’s apartment on a Saturday. She brought with her a single suitcase containing all her worldly possessions. Clothes made for a deceased mother, a toothbrush, a Bible, a box of matches, and a small card with a picture of the Virgin Mary, which she nestled in the frame of a mirror. Dunya briefly saw the back of it, and it seemed to be one of the prayer cards distributed at catholic funerals.

Sofie saw her looking at it, and smiled. “I used to mark my place in a book with it, but I don’t have any books now.”

“That’s too bad. Why not?”

“I gave them to the patients on bedrest. As selfish as it sounds, I almost wish I hadn’t. I miss them.”

“What books did you have?”

“I loved little women. My mother thought it was beyond the pale, what with one of the sisters dying, but I loved it anyway. And I had a copy of Anne of Green Gables.”

The mention of Anne of Green Gables stirred a long forgotten excitement in Dunya, and she lapsed into an uncharacteristic fit of joy.

“I loved Anne of Green Gables! What if I get us a copy, we could read it together!”

Sofie smiled, but she looked hesitant. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Nonsense! I think I might still have a copy.”

Sofie smiled at her, and the two of them went back to unpacking Sofie’s scanty possessions. The Bible went on the vanity, the clothes tucked into the drawers, the box of matches found in the bottom of the suitcase with some confusion, and stashed in the vanity as well.

“In case you need to burn some heretical spiders at the stake.”
Sophie shook her head and laughed a little, Dunya glowed with pride.

Dunya found a small worn copy of Anne of Green Gables tucked away at the back of her bookshelf, which was otherwise laden with novels about country estates and thick histories about Ancient Greece, and biographies on Catherine the great. She flipped the cover open, revealing the name of the previous owner.

As a child Dunya had loved going to the library. She would pick a book from the shelf and flip through the paper, read the summary on the first page, smell the perfume or smoke still lodged in the porous volume. She would see the forgotten scraps of paper once used as bookmarks and now left behind. Other people’s lives felt enticing sometimes, especially when her father sickened and her brother stopped talking to her.

She could sink two layers deep in another person's life, both through the traces in the book and the story itself. It made her wonder, rather wistfully, what it would be like to flip through Sofie’s lost volumes.

At the very least now Sofie would get to read her book, see the other girl's name in the cover, smell the traces of rose water soap. Dunya knew, the sort of tactile memory that re-emerges with a smell or object, that there was a four leaf clover somewhere in the middle. Maybe it would bring them luck.

Dunya was twitchy with excitement the next day, she sat at her desk with the book in her purse tucked to the side of her chair. It felt like a secret. She knew it wasn’t, that it was a worn children’s book with creased pages, but it felt like perhaps she was carrying secret documents or an ancient artifact. Something precious and delicate.

Luzhin was bearable. He began the day with a monologue, and Dunya knew he would end the day with another monologue- just that she would need to find a way to cut that one short. Otherwise she would be late to meet Sofie in the park.

Fortunately Luzhin was not in the most verbose mood, but he did still sidle his way over at one point.
“When will that friend of yours start work?”

“She’s still settling in, but I’m sure she’ll be ready for her interview in a week.”

“Delightful. You’ll have to come to brunch this weekend dear, my mother has been asking after you.”

Dunya would rather gargle soapy water than spend one more hour with her future mother in law. She knew that Luzhin’s mother would never actually miss her at visits, except as someone to mock. Perhaps hatred kept the rich young and healthy.

She smiled toothily. “Tell her to have a place set for me then.”

At five ten she strolled across the street to the park. The sun was creeping closer towards the treeline, but it was still quite bright and warm, the air filled with the soft rustle of leaves in the wind.

Sofie was waiting for her, and smiled cheerily at her, then called to her.
“I’m over here Dunya!”

She was wearing a long white summer dress, airy but slightly grass stained at the hem, the oblique rays of the setting sun made the freckles lightly dotting her face visible.

They linked arms and walked into the center of the little park.
At the center, the gravel path looped around a tree and twisted back around, though giving the large maple enough berth that there was a little grassy mound under the tree, which was the ideal spot, as Dunya had discovered years ago, for reading.
It was especially nice, as the teenaged Dunya had discovered, good when one didn’t want anybody to know what one was reading, as anyone sitting on the far side of the tree was invisible until a walker was right in front of them, and gravel crunched loudly enough to alert a reader.

Dunya plopped herself down with her back to the tree and her legs sprawled in front of her, and Sofie eased herself down, then sat with her legs folded primly.
A hand dipped into her purse and drew out the book.

“Mrs Rachel Lynde lived just where the avonlea main road dipped..”
Dunya continued reading for some time. Her voice grew slightly rough as she spoke. Eventually she felt a hand on the back of hers. “I’ll read for a bit.”

Dunya shifted her hand and the book, bringing Sofie’s with it, so she could study the pink nail beds and slender fingers. “You have such lovely hands Sofie.”

She took the hand in her free one. Sophie relinquished the book and allowed her hand to be held. In a moment of reckless abandon Dunya brought those fingers to her lips and kissed them.

Sophie was hard to read for a moment. Then she reached own free hand towards Dunya’s face. Then, gently, slowly, she kissed her.

It was chaste and sweet and Dunya felt her heart go like a rabbit. Then Sophie pulled away and smiled. “Thank you Dunya.”

Chapter Text

Dunya and Pulcheria had only rarely gone on vacation.
The sea had been a just visible lapping, glittering, living moat of glass, far off in the distance. They’d borrowed a neighbor's car and rented a seaside cottage for a few days. Desperately irresponsible, reckless, and therefore exhilarating.
Pulcheria gasped with pleasure at the sight of the water, once it came into view through the trees. The vacation was to celebrate Dunya’s graduation and her encroaching employment, she would have the enviable position tutoring the children of the wealthy Svidrigailov family. Her trunk was already packed with everything she’d need living away from home for the first time, and she’d already decided that with the money she saved up from her paychecks she would buy cologne and new books.

That night she sat on the edge of a wall smelling the night as the air cooled and the wind swept over someone’s cookout, bringing the succulence up to her nose. She heard a slight crunching nearby and looked up to see a shape in the night. A girl, probably about her age. The shape approached her.
“Hello.” Her voice was young and cheerful.

“Nice night isn’t it?”

“It is lovely. My name is Anne, by the way.”

“I’m Dunya”

“Are you here on vacation?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“No, I’m a townie.”

“Maybe you can show me around.”

“I’d love to. Tell me which cottage you’re in and I’ll show up tomorrow, give you the grand tour. Don’t be too disappointed though, mostly just old ships, fresh fish, and men even older than the ships talking about the days past.”
“You make it sound so glamorous.”

In the light of morning everything was cast in new full colour splendor. The hydrangeas by the cottages were crowned with cloudy blue flowers, some so heavily laden that the tall stalks tipped and rested practically on the ground. Anne too was beautiful by daylight. She showed up that morning with a smile turning up the corners of her mouth. She had little brown freckles and her eyelashes were quite dark. Whether they were dark with their own pigment or if they would rub off on a pillow, Dunya didn’t care and knew she’d never find out.

The day was spent in a final feasting open childhood, enjoying the youthful pursuits that made her feel a bit ridiculous. Here one can see the employed woman, nearly grown and with her hair cut short, climbing a cannon in the town center in peals of laughter. Then the day ended with a kiss.

Dunya went home with a feeling of vindication. She had felt something then she’d proven it. She’d found another young woman like herself and then they’d acted upon those feelings together.

It hadn’t been love though, not like now.

It only took a month before Dunya’s infatuation developed wholly into love. It coincided beautifully with the heady warmth and perfumed air of early summer. Trips to the picture show and to get ice cream where they spent the entire excursion standing as close as possible and brushing hands against each other, talking and laughing until they rushed home to Jenny’s guest room where they could be alone together.

Unfortunately, as Dunya had come to believe, the universe seemed determined that the happiest time she’d ever experienced was just as full of hardship as any other time in her life. It tucked an older brother in the attic like Mrs Rochester and a ring onto Dunya’s finger that was not from her beloved.

The worst part was, of course, work. She and Sofie sat in silence in the same office room with the window wide open, fanning themselves with paperwork. Occasionally they’d exchange a glance or nudge the other's foot, but it wasn’t enough.

On one such day, with Sophie and Dunya both nestled on the same side of the desk, typing. Though Sophie was a bit slow with a typewriter, at least compared to Dunya, the two of them working at once made the work much quicker and easier to do.
Luzhin seemed even more puffed up with pride as of late, perhaps just because He now had twice as many secretaries as his brother.

“Ladies.” He bobbed his head at them after emerging from his office. “I just need to borrow my fiancé for a moment.”

Sofie glanced over at Dunya as she stood, her brow slightly creased.

Luzhin closed the door of his office. “My mother is greatly distressed at how little she’s been seeing you.” He smiled at her before continuing. “Now, she understands you are young, and that young girls often spend long hours frivolously frolicking with friends, but she worries you might not take marriage seriously enough.”

He set himself into a chair with a slight grunt.
“She’s having a garden party to celebrate the start of summer, she’d like you to come.” He paused. “I’d like you to come.”

She smiled and said “All right, sounds lovely.”

The garden party was, in fact, lovely. The Luzhin family had a sprawling garden, which was currently heaped in peonies and clematis and ornamental strawberry.
There were refreshments too, served by Mrs. Luzhin’s harried maid. Dunya wrapped some cookies in a handkerchief and stuffed it in her purse, to share with Sofie later.

She’d tell her about the party, the lavishness, the people who’d stood around lovely clothes, then brush the cookie crumbs off of her lip.

In time Dunya knew that these people would become caricatures. On the first telling they’d just be characters, she’d tell Sofie about the woman with the hawk nose and the short man in the poorly tailored jacket, but after a retelling or two the woman wouldn’t just have a long nose, it would be so long it entered the room a full minute before she did, and the man would be a rich man at a garden party wearing pajamas.

She was standing alone, which she found more tolerable than making conversation, but it still made her feel desperately lonesome.

“Excuse me ms.” The man in the ugly jacket had walked up to her side while she’d been distracted. “Are you Peter’s fiancé?”

Dunya put down her lemonade. “Why, yes. I am.”

The man stared at her with a look of blatant disgust.

“Oh god you’re young.”

Epiphanies were bizarre things.
Understanding of some beautiful, convoluted thing might arise while one is washing dishes or chewing on a piece of gum that has long since lost its flavor. For Dmitri,
It happened while he was spreading butter on toast.
Dmitri experienced the sort of intense world altering epiphany first as a deep ache, then as a yawning open of everything bright. The sun fell upon him, shed light into his world. He realized that he had been treading water for years. He set the butter knife back on the scarred wood of the table and laughed. He felt the tightening grip of the past year relax, free him. He needed to tell Rodion how he felt. It was simple, he thought. If he had spent years of his life stuck in the same place, infatuated and trapped, the only way to continue onward would be to tell him how he felt. He laughed again. He would do it, he thought. Of course he could.

He spent the rest of the week antsy and restless waiting, utterly thrilled, for when he could loosen the trap. Nested down on the seat of the train he considered that this might bring him more than just freedom from his old cycle, perhaps Rodion reciprocated. Maybe he would end all this not only freer but with a hand to hold in his own, a soul to mirror his own, a second body in his bed to keep warm.

Despite his deeply romantic tendencies he did tell himself that that wasn’t quite so likely to happen, tried to prepare his heart for possible letdown or emotional tragedy. He told himself to keep his expectations low in a still hopeful voice though.

Pulcheria had sent him to his bedroom with a smile, pointing out which door it was before returning to her cup of tea. Dmitri hadn’t been prepared for how his chest filled with warmth at seeing his friend again. He opened the door for Dmitri and beckoned him inside, before sitting down at the desk, leaving Dmitri to sit at the edge of the bed. He looked so much better. His hair was clean, his clothes were too. He looked like a functioning human. Dmitri doubted he’d seen him so well in years, if ever.
With how calm he was acting at the moment Dmitri could reconcile him with the person who apparently deferred college to stay with his family after his fathers death. He could picture this man as the same one who had paid for a distressed woman’s lunch on a bitter day last year. Dmitri surveyed the room before he spoke, two small windows, a bed heaped with an ungodly number of blankets, a dresser in the corner that he guessed was mostly empty. And books. There were books heaped on nearly every surface a book could dwell.

“Rodya” He braced himself to be corrected, but Rodion didn't speak. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

He still didn’t respond, so Dmitri continued. “I haven’t seen you in nearly ten months, and I just kept thinking about how much you mean to me. It was like you were with me the entire time.”

He stood, as he spoke his voice began to tremble with emotion. It had all become far too much to bear, he was a man with a load so heavy his knees had given out. “I realized that everything means so much more when I’m with you, that everything is brighter, and better, and far more interesting. Without you I feel decades older than I am, like every time you leave me you take my youth with you. You are brilliant, you are so good; your heart is purer and better than anyone else I’ve ever met, and you are unspeakably beautiful. Like a saint, like the coast, so austere and so lovely.” The tears that had been threatening earlier broke through and drenched his cheeks, his hands shook with seismic trembles as he raised them halfway to Rodions face.

“I love you.”

“Get out! Leave!” Raskolnikov spit the words out. They fall to the ground like dropped thumbtacks too covered in rust to merit reclaiming. “You are a fool! You are a fool and you are bringing more illness into my house! Out! Out!”
He was on his feet by then too, and his orders were punctuated with a shake of his arm. He slapped Dmitri’s hands away and retreated towards the back wall of the room. Dmitri shuffled out the door, defeated, hopes dashed against the northeast’s rocky coastline.

Pulcheria could hear Rodion yelling upstairs. Dmitri clumsily tumbled through the living room, breathily thanked her and said goodbye, then he was gone. She was happy that Dunya hadn’t been at home, she’d have been so worried.

Chapter Text

The summer gained strength until it became a ruthless creature.
Punishing young women working in offices, the stiffness going out of collars and hair fuzzing out of waves from the dampness of sweat. Dunya melted into her desk now, and when ladies sat on the chair in Luzhin’s office, Dunya and Sofie could hear them peel any exposed skin off the leather.

The window stayed open nearly constantly, hoping to catch a breeze coming in off the street, anything to clear up the stale hot air in the office, which was nearly always hotter than it was outside.

Dunya had been to see Mother Luzhin once more, having to cancel her plans with Sofie and Jenny to sit in her sitting room and drink weak tea out of a cup the color of ash. (Isn’t the pattern on this one lovely? A finger tapped the grey lattice work design. Of course it isn’t the nicest we own, but it suits the occasion.)

Days were hot and bright until the violent drumbeat of thunder broke up the silence. Seated in Luzhin’s office, Dunya and Sofie fanned each other and typed. At some point Luzhin decided that Sofie’s job also included office maintenance, so she would occasionally be dispatched to tidy up his office or scrape mildew off of the window frame. Perhaps it was because Luzhin was used to his employees being multi-purpose, Dunya herself was a secretary, a stenographer, and a fiancé, three for the price of one.

“Dunya, can you come into my office for a moment darling?”
Luzhin has finally transitioned into summer linen, this suit is paired with a crimson pocket square.

She bobbed her head. “Of course.”

“I'd like to speak to you, Dunya.”

“Of course.”

“I know you have been enjoying having your friend as a colleague, though i worry that being friends with her is not seemly.”

“Maybe I sound a touch old fashioned, but humor me. She’s barely a penny to her name, and her father is a drunk. I did a little research, apparently there were rumours that she sold her body to pay for his liquor.”

“I simply wouldn't want you to be associated with that sort of behavior.”

“Of course not”

“Its not that i dislike her, shes a good worker, industrious, though i suppose the irish have to be, and shes certainly a sweet girl.”

“I simply want you to be above any such rumours and base matters.”
Dunya could not care any less about being associated with base matters. She smiled at Luzhin rather stiffly, feeling sweat pool in the collar of her blouse and the small of her back.

She patted her hair trying to smooth it, finding it damp along her hairline.

It was 5:30, but the sun was glaring down ruthlessly, at such an angle that it seemed to slap Dunya in the face as they left the office doors.

“Out from the frying pan into into the fire”

“Its ruthlessly hot, and i'm sure its only gotten cooler. I just hope my brother wasn't holed up all day. Sometimes he forgets to drink anything, and he gets these dreadful headaches because of it. At least he did when we were children.”
She could have gone without saying the last bit, because it was a given these days. Sometimes she felt like a complete stranger was just walking around under her brothers face.

“I'm sure your mother brought him something.”

“Would you like to go to the park tonight? It should cool off after dark.”

“Sounds lovely.”

They did, in fact, go to the park.

“Why do you think that they called it New York instead of something else, like new wales or new Perth. New York seems a bit arbitrary.”

“New Amsterdam was too Dutch, and new wales was too welsh. Only York was a British enough name for the most British place on earth.”

“Of course. The most British place on earth. Famous for such British things as bagels, pizza, and my favorite, Sofia.”

Sofie giggled a bit, but then sighed heavily.
“Sorry to be so maudlin, but i'm so glad to see summer again. Every year I think I’ll die before June rolls around.”

Bless her, Dunya has no idea what to say.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it.”

“Everything being so green almost makes up for having to peel myself off my desk. And that I’ll have to peel my hair off my neck before I can take it down.”

Sofie made daisy chains out of dandelions and Dunya laughed at how yellow her fingertips turned from the pollen.

Dunya wasn’t sure what their relationship was. It was entirely platonic, but she felt that they had something between them that most platonic relationships did not have. Sofie confided in her, Sofie sometimes fell asleep on her shoulder, Dunya found Sofie to be one of the most beautiful people she’d ever known.
They spent hours together, just the two of them, but they only ever talked. Sometimes in the park they would sit together in complete silence, like a spell had been cast over them.
Occasionally they would kiss the other’s hand, or even mouth, but at the same time it was like a threshold had not yet been crossed. Indecision wasn’t making Dunya restless quite yet. So she found things comfortable.

Raskolnikov was still slowly decomposing in his room on the second floor, right under the gables. He had woken up that morning feeling the stuffy warmth that preceded the molten heat of midday in the attic, but could not bring himself to leave his room or even just crack a window. His skin itches because of the heat, it felt like it might all fall off in one long, luxurious lemon peel.

His bed was eating him. Every night he went to sleep one way, then woke up the same way but inches deeper. He went to sleep too hot, but woke in the middle of the night shivering. He heaped more blankets at the foot of his bed every night, he knew his mother probably noticed the diminished supply in the linen closet. He ground his teeth while he slept, sometimes he woke and felt his teeth gnash against each other.

His mother brought him food, which he refused. His mother brought him tea, it was too hot for tea. He read, but his fingers made the pages warp from moisture. Possibly the worst aspect of his new life, which really wasn’t all that different from the past, was that he was constantly, mercilessly lucid. Sometimes his thoughts did not make sense, even to himself, but still, they were distinct and he remembered them.

This was hell, and he had built it with his own two hands.

Once he had woken into that sauna, he paced a bit. Walking the length of his room (which was the length of the house) several times, stretching. He didn’t get dressed, he’d slept in his clothes. Then, satisfied that his legs were sufficiently stretched, he took a book from the floor and read. Then he grew restless, paced more, and took a different book.

The knock on the door was muffled through layers of plaster and the book he was reading. Then the knock sounded again. Then, faintly, as Raskolnikov fell out of his book, eyes still on the page but listening now, the sound of Pulcheria’s shoes against the floor. The door creaked, then heavy footsteps, entirely unlike Pulcheria’s mincing clatter, reached him in his upstairs spiderweb.

The man at the door was a large gentleman in a summer waistcoat. He looked well bred and well educated, like a neatly groomed terrier.

He cleared his throat.
“Hello? Are you Mrs Raskolnikov?”

She smiled at him. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m Porfiry Petrovitch, I’d like to speak with your son.”

“Are you another of his friends?” She gave him no time to answer, she was to happy to see another person who might be able to lift Rodion out of his mood. “I’ll send you right up to speak to him.”

Chapter Text

The man at the door was a large gentleman in a summer waistcoat. He looked well bred and well educated, like a neatly groomed terrier. He smiled at her after smoothing down his waistcoat.

He cleared his throat.
“Hello? Are you Mrs Raskolnikov?”

She smiled at him. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m Porfiry Petrovitch, I’d like to speak with your son.”

“Are you another of his friends?” She gave him no time to answer, she was to happy to see another person who might be able to lift Rodion out of his mood. “I’ll send you right up to speak to him.”

She pointed out the door to him, and put the pot on the stove to boil water for tea.

After the park they walked to Jenny’s apartment in a comfortable silence, close enough that their hands could have brushed. They didn’t, though Dunya did brush a hand against her shoulder to get her attention. She pointed out a duck in the marsh, with its head dipped under, searching for food.

The sky was quickly darkening, the lovely sunset going from a glowing gold into a deep rich purple as the sun left them, traveling further and further away. As night fell the air grew heavy with the sound of crickets and the occasional rustle of leaves as wind brought them increasing relief from the heat of the dying day.

It was the sort of night when things felt like they’d been made anew with the setting of the sun, like the old day had been bound off, and the new one was being cast on in a much nicer yarn than the old day had been made from.

Jenny was away for the week, off visiting her sister, so the two of them had the couch to themselves, and after Delilah was fed and stopped meowling at them it was peaceful.

The couch was noticeably rattier than Dunya remembered, like Delilah had been constantly clawing it since she’d seen it last.

Sofie darted off towards her bedroom after Delilah was happily snarfing down the fishy smelling paste in her bowl. “I’ll get the book.” She called behind her.

Dunya settled down further into the couch, letting the tension leave her body and her agitation soak out into the cool air. She was still sweaty, and she could still hear Luzhin’s words echoing in the back of her skull.

What did he mean by “baseness?”

Sofie returned holding the slightly battered copy of Anne of Green Gables in a small tapering hand.

She nestled herself down next to Dunya. “Shall I read today?”

“Of course Sofie, your voice is the berries!”

Sofie giggled.

“What are you? A Sheba? Or a sheik? Maybe a darb?” Her eyes glittered with an unusual mischief, In return Dunya was consumed with a lightness that buoyed her up into a similar mischievous realm.

She smiled, then said, bemused, “You’ve used “the berries” before.”

“You want me to read?”

“Of course.”

Anne was telling Marila about the peddler who had sold her the disastrous hair dye, and Dunya forgot what Luzhin had said to her. Sofie’s voice grew slightly hoarse as she read, as though while reading she tried to pitch her voice a little too low. As she read Sofie leaned closer to Dunya’s shoulder, allowing her to feel the heat of her skin through her blouse.

This was bliss. She thought. This was utter bliss and she would never be as happy as she was in this moment ever again. Her throat felt thick when she thought about it.

The crisis in Anne’s world was averted and Sofie yawned.

“Don’t yawn! I’ll yawn!”

“I’m sorry, I’m too tired to keep reading.”

“That’s okay, I should probably get home.”

She leaned in and kissed her on her cheek. “I’ll be off then.”

Sofie had told Dunya once, on a rainy afternoon, of her childhood in a tenement.
Her father drank, and despite many teary eyed promises to her mother to stop he never could shake the habit. One january night, he had staggered back over the threshold long after dark, smelling of alcohol and cold night air, and sank to the ground in front of her and began sobbing. Genuflecting in front of his eldest child like she was some shining golden idol he’d begged for her forgiveness, to be absolved by her. “Please, the Bible says to forgive the sinner. If Jesus forgave the sinners then you can forgive me dear one!”
His forehead had dropped to the faded carpet which hadn’t had the dust beaten out of it in ages. “Dear sweet precious girl, you should have been a better man’s daughter, such a good thing you are.”

Then she had kissed his forehead and told him she forgave him, and tried to coax him to lie down on the couch.
“No! I must find your mother! I must receive her forgiveness as well!”
He stood from the couch and staggered towards the door to the other tiny room in their apartment. “Please my love! My one! My only! Where are you!”

He was sobbing by that point, a young Sofie clinging to his sleeve, trying to lead him back to the couch. “Please father, you should lie down, you’re still cold, you aren’t steady on your feet and you can speak with ma in the morning.“
She’d lost her grip on his coat at about that point, as he stumbled closer and closer towards the door. She had made a promise at that moment that if she ever had a chance to help her family she would take it. She had promised herself that she would get a proper job as soon as possible, never think of buying anything for herself again, sell the few books she owned, if it would help her parents.

Then, mere months later she had started coughing and never stopped, and then her mother had started coughing, and everything else fell apart.

Everything that had been in stasis for ages could fall apart in a day.

Dunya opened the door and let herself into the kitchen. She made herself comfortable in one of the chairs at the slightly too low dining room table. There was something strange about the house, like something had happened that set the house off center.

Something had, but she wouldn’t know till morning.

Dmitri stared into the thin amber liquid in the bottom of his glass mug.

Something about the coast, and lovely eyes like sky during a new moon, and hair silky and fine enough to weave velvet out of.

Long slender fingers like the branches of a leafless young apple tree, before it gets gnarled and twisted.

The slight give of a narrow waist under his fingers as he-

The performer onstage sang coyly from behind a bejeweled, feather laden fan.

The fan being dropped away, then held out away from her body, revealed a heavily made up face that bobbed slightly above a tall, slender form draped in a beaded dress she was holding up slightly to reveal more leg.

Dmitri stared at her as she continued singing in her husky voice.

She had silky blond hair and dark eyes, like the night during a new moon.

An hour later he was standing outside the door of the dressing room with a tip for the performer. The man who walked out of the dressing room was the rare sort who was better looking up close. He had very dark eyes and blond hair that was now slicked back into a shiny beetles shell, but it looked long enough to form a Bob if left soft and around his face. It looked silky and fine.

“Hello!” He gasped out. “I enjoyed the performance!”

The man turned around startled. “I wasn’t expecting to get an admirer on my first night at the job.”
He smiled, wide and toothy.

Chapter Text

When Pulcheria’s children had been small and her husband had been living the family had sat for a portrait. She had diligently smoothed her little girl’s hair into two silky braids, and then brushed imagined dust off of her son’s shoulder, then fussed over her husband’s collar.

Her husband was, at the time, a somewhat sickly man, though still good looking according to her own judgement and that of most people she’d met, who remarked upon his pale blue eyes and proud nose just as often as they’d remarked upon her shining dark beetle shell eyes and warmth. Her children were beautiful and she did not need anyone else’s word to back that up.

Her children had been in agreement over the photograph, believing it to be the most uniquely horrifying thing that had ever befallen anyone. Rodion hadn’t had time to finish that ridiculous book he was reading, the one with the detective or adventurer or whatever, and Dunya had been forced to abandon her plans with Jenny and Marie. They’d apparently planned to bake cookies or play pretend in the yard or perhaps play pretend at baking cookies. Pulcheria was foggy on the details these days.

The photographer arranged the family after Pulcheria had once again straightened up the family, smoothed the soft wisps that had escaped Dunya’s braids. With Roman seated and Rodion by his side and his daughter on his knee, the center of the family. Yet though Roman was the center, Pulcheria was a looming presence behind the chair, her best red dress appearing black in the photograph, a hand on the back of the chair. Her dark eyes watchful and piercing while Roman’s disappeared in the way pales eyes do in photographs.

Nothing could happen under her dutiful gaze.

But of course things did happen, her husband took sick and her son sank into melancholy and her daughter retreated into a novel and the world spun out of control, the cannons had roared in her distant homeland and then the gunshots sounded and an age that had lasted hundreds of years was killed in the matter of months.
Then her children had left her and gotten hurt, and then they had come back to her in terrible pain and so she clung to the hope she could keep the bad things from happening this time around.

Pulcheria heard a voice, raised far above polite conversation. It was a voice she knew very well.

She winced, regretful that her son’s friends only seemed to visit on his bad days. Just yesterday had been a good day, she had coaxed him downstairs for tea, and he had quietly eaten his toast and drank his tea, smiled at her, then gone back to his room. The day before that he had spoken with his sister the way they had in the old days.
A crash followed the shouting. Then, the well dressed well bred man came down the stairs, still as calm and coolheaded as he had been before.

He smiled at her as he started towards the door. “Mrs Raskolnikov, I do apologize, thank you for your hospitality.”

She stepped towards him, cutting him off before the door. “Wait a moment, I’ve made tea.”

”I’m afraid I must be leaving.”

“Please, stay a moment longer. It’s a hot day and I’m sure you’d prefer to not bear that heat for a little longer.”

He glanced at his, while not lavishly expensive, still enviable, watch. “Oh, I guess I could.”

He made his way to one of the chairs at the too low table and wrapped a ring-less left hand around the back.

Then, before he could sit, someone else came crashing down the stairs.

“I told you to get out! Why haven’t you left! I’ve told you I’m innocent, must you interrogate my poor mother too!”

He lunged at him, but was miles off, instead bringing down the portrait nestled on the sideboard with a crash, sending glass flying.

Pulcheria was immobilized with horror, her stomach beginning to churn uncomfortably.

He glared from his place on the floor in the middle of a halo of glass shards. “May you suffer a terrible death for disturbing us in this way! You rat!”

Pulcheria finally, finally, unglued herself from the tar pit.
“Darling! Are you hurt?”

He seemed to not see her at all, his gaze still firmly trained on Porfiry Petrovitch.
“You rat!” He spat out as Petrovitch left.

The air felt thick and hot and unbreathable.

Pulcheria reached toward her son. “Take my hand dear.”

He looked at the offered hand Distrustfully, like it was there to slap him.
“Please, let me help you.”

Uncharacteristically, he kept mum as he took it in one of his own and allowed his mother to carefully raise him from the floor. He kept mum while she took the small, almost beautiful glass splinters from his hand, then walked up the stairs silently while Pulcheria took out a broom and swept the glimmering shards from their patch of sunlight on the floor.

Once the wreckage of the frame was collected she set to work straightening out the picture, flattening the crease that had formed in it and preparing a new frame.
When she was finished with this she was tired and the sun had smashed Itself to pieces on the tree line, sending glorious gold and deep burgundy flying across the dome of sky.

There was blood on his hands. There was literal glimmering blood, thick and crimson red and fresh, sticky, on his hands. His mother with her tweezer, pulling at sparkling pieces, slipping in the evidence of sin. Mary. Mary by the cross, Mary by the cross with the other Mary, the one who grew her hair and wore it like a robe in the desert, tangled and knotted with nothing underneath. Was nothing less sinful than finery? She was forgiven. Mary forgave the other Mary for her sins, then wept and took her son off the cross and then there were yet more Marys who dripped with more divine blood and plenty of farm girls and harlots and queens, all named Mary, not a drop of divinity in their ruddy faces and their missing teeth and their death sentences and pyres. A pyre was building under him as his mother’s tweezer slipped in his blood and lost its traction in the lovely mess. His mother had made cookies with raspberry jam when they were young, and his sister had eaten one of them and been in trouble. Had he eaten one of them too? He had. He had taken a moment to see how the raspberry jam caught the light, then he’d scarfed it down and gone back to his reading. He had been older than her, he should have known better. He left his sister alone in front of judge, jury, and executioner. She couldn’t get any traction on the piece. It had lodged well in his flesh and now her tweezers were slick and she smiled apologetic and brought out her sewing kit with its delicate bird beaked embroidery scissors. He smelled the fetid tides of shame lapping at him. He was drowning in the sludgy mess by the streets of New York City. Manure and sitting water and god only knows and it was an endless tide lapping and lapping and carrying him away.

The Marys watched as he was pulled away by the tide. The weeping Mary at the cross and the queen of England with the smell of other peoples ashes in her hair and the Mary he’d known in school who’d called him vile for a reason he no longer remembered. A row of robes and long skirts and a few little girls’ knock knees and he was pulled under deeper and deeper.

Faces Saintly and degenerate and divine and lowly rippled in the filth and his mothers face faded above the surface as he sank deeper.

He didn’t faint and his mother got the sharp edged things away from him and washed and bandaged his eviscerated hands and smiled and made sure he made it up the stairs and didn’t faint right down them and all the Marys the martyred and un martyred and the un saintly cruel ones frowned and he slept.

Chapter Text

Dmitri returned to the bar about a week after his first visit, Watched the singer again, all pearly earlobes and glossy blond hair and beetle black eyes.

He wanted a drink, he told himself. He’d would drain his glass then leave.

He did not leave. He fell into the fairy circle then stayed trapped in another world for a hundred years.

He wanted. He wanted the singer and he wanted to forget and he wanted nothing so he drank deeply and let himself fall into the warm and waiting arms of cowardice.
The rest of the evening was blurred, sharp pen lines falling into soft watercolor and fuzzy oil lilies as Monet went blind.

He’d never felt like this before. He’d never gotten drunk on something nonalcoholic. Maybe he ought to have himself erased, then redrawn along new specifications. The artist would hold the brush, and decide not to Give him such obsession. He would be transformed into a better creature.

Verkaufen. He was handed a check for his time which he sold to people he would never know. He traded in their words for words of his own then sold it back to them but he’d never written his own sentence. Maybe he had never had his own thought and he was just regurgitating what others told him. Maybe he wasn’t even…

Verlieben. Words rose lazily through his mind as he rapped his finger nails on an empty glass. He attempted to make it into a sentence but grammar drowned in the hazy lilies. Ich… war…

Verloren. He wasn’t sure where he was in the city. Just that he was still in the city and that he felt terribly sick and his head was pounding and he wanted nothing…

Nothing more than to…

To…

Warm and hazy sunshine glowing in the algae green waters and a face with dark eyes and a strong nose.

His hand on a waist, his mouth on someone’s lips, he’d never been drunk on something nonalcoholic before then.

Sofie and Dunya tended to cling together once they let their guard down slightly. All day at work it was as if they were being pulled slowly together, growing increasingly touchy as the day wore on. A poke with the tip of a shoe under the desk, then A hand on a shoulder, then finally they would cleave together and be curled next to each other reading from the same book.

They were reading a mystery now. They’d just finished Anne of Green Gables, and almost immediately after Dunya had gone to the library, and poked her nose back into the familiar musty shelves of her youth.

Time hadn’t stayed still, not even in the library, and everything had shifted on the shelves as new books were added and older ones weeded from the shelves.

The plot of their new novel was a touch sleazy perhaps, but they were together and warm and certainly enjoying themselves.

Jenny was moving about quietly in the kitchen, her white dress following her in a slight cloud.
She stopped moving for a moment, the sprigged cotton voile skirt falling still around her legs.

“The two of you are practically joined at the hip.” She turned back to the counter. As Dunya read she could hear Jenny’s knife make contact with the wood of the cutting board, a soft thump muffled by distance and the very carrots she was chopping into.

“Anyway, I’m done with the chopping, so Dunya, you’d better make quick work of the soup, I’m as hungry as a horse.”

“Okay.”

After she slid to her feet, Jenny plumped the cushions, then fell onto them with an audible plop. She was, however, a slightly wider distance from Sofie than Dunya had been.

Dunya stood on one foot while she stirred the soup, staring into the bottom and wiping the steam and perspiration from her forehead.

The pot is no oracle, and tells her nothing.

The opaque liquid just churns in the bottom, a reddish orange with pieces of mushroom dancing to the surface occasionally, bits of onion that grow softer and more golden yellow every time they turn up again.

Her mother told her nothing of what happened when she finally noticed the reframed photograph, the crease down the middle, almost directly through their parents, separating the siblings.

They ate the soup, laughing at how silly it was to eat soup on such a hot day. It was one of those moments that Dunya knew would become rubbed smooth in her mind from the number of times she’d turn it over in her mind like a worry stone.

It was on the walk home that some grain of sand in Sofie’s mind finally smoothed enough to become a pearl.

She presented it to Dunya in the tender warm night with a hundred crickets whirring under her voice.

Her voice was soft, but not so soft that Dunya had to search for it.“What are we, to each other?”

Dunya blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“You and I, we aren’t exactly the same as friends.” Sofie bit her soft lower lip. “Not even like Anne and her bosom buddies or kindred spirits.”

Something clicked into place. Dunya’s heart leapt.
“Do you mean, are we in love?”
It was a struggle to keep her voice steady.

“I do.”

“I think we are, but I’ve never really been in love before.”

Voicing it, giving voice to something that had bothered Dunya for so long, made everything seem less powerful, maybe all this was a dream and Dunya would wake up hungry and cold and still loveless.

Sofie rested a hand smoothly against her cheek “May I kiss you again?”

“Yes.”

They waited for a secluded spot not in view of anyone’s window, which happened to be in the Raskolnikov’s side garden, tucked between an overgrown rhododendron and a rosebush with too many dead branches.

Sofie took Dunya’s face between her hands again, laid her fingers over Dunya’s temples, threaded them through her hair.

Then Dunya kissed her.

Some of the crushing tension of the last few weeks melted away on their lips.

Two girls kissed by a diseased rose bush and yet the next morning came with another ruthless dawn.

The pouch of lips and the hand laid over her cheek. The world faded away along with the sun, which had fallen to its beautiful, gruesome death hours before.

Dunya woke up half stuck to her sheets and with what might grow up into a big strong headache if it drank enough milk. She laughed at the image. Headache parents telling their baby headaches to drink milk and eat vegetables or else they would get rickets like those poor children in Alaska. She rubbed her temples and slid from her bed. She had fallen into bed the previous night with her makeup still on, and there was a smudge of pink on her pillow case, along with a few ants made of mascara.
So it had happened. So she hadn’t dreamed it.

She smiled.

Rodion had been worse lately, Dunya wasn’t sure why, but he’d been camped out in his room even as the temperatures climbed behind the dark wooden door.

Apparently he’d started refusing food and getting so worked up at the sight of their mother that he would nearly have a fit.

It was as though the attic room was draining him, but had whispered into his ear that if he ever left it he would die.

In any case Pulcheria had decided that as Dunya didn’t have work today, she ought to try bringing up his food instead. Like some sacrificial maiden sent to appease a god in an ancient tangled forest somewhere.

Dunya wrapped her fingers tighter around the tray and tried to keep its contents from jostling too much. If she was a sacrifice, they’d probably give her a flower crown and a flowing white dress. Instead her mother had just handed her a kitchen towel so she wouldn’t burn her knuckles on the teapot.

When she opened the door she was surprised to see her brother sitting at the edge of his bed with his legs crossed and a book in his hands.
he looked up at her, and to her even greater surprise, smiled. “Oh you took long enough Dunya.”

She set down the tray on the end table by the bed, and he shifted over slightly.

Before she could stop them, the words fell out of her mouth. “Why’ve you been snapping so much at mother?”

The signs of Rodion’s previous agitation became visible once more as he turned to her. It wasn’t so much that he was angry with her, more that he had something itching at him.

And then he grasped her hands and started weeping.

Like most sisters, Dunya had seen her brother cry plenty of times.
Often in crocodile tears as he tried to sway their mother in something. Immediately after their father’s death, though not since.

People had commented on his lack of emotion at the funeral service. He’d stood stiffly behind his freshly widowed mother and his much younger sister and had not wept in his grief or tried to comfort them.
That tableau, the distance between the boy and his family, became a gulf in the eyes of an onlooker. An inch became a foot which bloomed into a thousand miles of emotional distance. If Pulcheria and Dunya had been in New York, well, Rodion was in Florida.
One neighbor had mentioned, In the quiet of his own home, the safety of his living room, that there was something wrong with a person who could not summon tears at his own fathers funeral and did not try to comfort those poor women.
He was emotionally sterile, that boy.

He sobbed and choked on his own tears and the words he forced out of his throat seemed to not want to come out at all.

“Dunya. Please. What do I do?”

He was unsettling her. “About what?”

“Oh Dunya! I’ve killed.”

All the saintly marys shook their heads, all the degenerate marys glared. The Mary with bloodier hands than he did, nodded proudly.
A sister's hands were gripped so tightly he left tiny crescent moons across the meat of her palms.

“You’re hurting me, Rodya.”

She didn’t specify how.

Chapter Text

A blade splits through the fog and lodges in Dmitri’s skull. “You shouldn’t over indulge Dmitri.”

He opened his eyes and found himself in that dressing room with the blond singer.

“Who are you?”

“Sorry, I suppose you were fairly far gone when I introduced myself to you.”

He was perched on the edge of a vanity, a comb and tube of lipstick pushed off to the side. Dmitri was strewn over the small sofa covered in ratty pink velvet, able to feel knobs of bone in his back he had been previously unaware of until the wooden sofa arm introduced them.

“I’m Sam.” He extended a hand to Dmitri, presumably expecting it to be shaken.

“You were pretty out of it last night, I saw you stumbling around and didn’t want you to hurt yourself. Sorry about the kidnapping.”

Dmitri’s head throbbed. “Kidnapping?”

“Well I guess it’s not a kidnapping, because I will let you leave.”

The man paused for a moment, then continued. “Before I let you leave though, I do want to ask who Rodiechka is, and how much his parents hate him, giving him a name like that.”

Dmitri buried his face and his aching head in his hands. The world was spinning too slowly and his misery would last forever.
“I’m in love. And it’s terrible.”

Sam smiled at him with more warmth than he thought he deserved. “Tell me about it, I won’t judge.”

Dunya kept her mouth shut.
She’d kept her mouth shut before, she’d been raised to lie after all. Everyone was raised to lie to a certain extent, to tell half truths and soften the blow, and she would have cut her own tongue out rather than tell her brother’s secret.

If Sofie noticed her unease, then she said nothing about it. Her lips pinching when Dunya withdrew slightly from a conversation was really the only sign she noticed.

Her brother, on the other hand, seemed much improved by admitting guilt. He ignored Dunya’s wary glances and emerged from his bedroom like Lazarus from the grave.

The first night he’d emerged for dinner voluntarily and hadn’t snapped at Pulcheria, she had been shocked, completely unable to hide her surprise or giddiness from her children.

Her son had ignored her giddiness, and taken his seat at the table.

In the middle of dinner Dunya saw him glance over the serving bowl in the center and smiled. Then in an act even more shocking than him smiling he had made disparaging remarks on the table.

He shuffled uncomfortably, a single deliberate shoe poking Dunya in what would have been a sharp kick a decade ago. “Who was this table made for? There’s nowhere to put one’s legs.”

It was as if the last eight years had not happened, as if their father was in his sickbed in the next room over waiting for a tray to be brought in, and their mother would sigh in a long suffering way at the squabbling that would ensue when Dunya and Rodion both wanted seconds and Rodion was to hungry and not nearly gracious enough to let his poor baby sister have them.

Dunya gaped at him, which he artfully ignored.

He scraped the last serving onto his plate without any protest from Dunya, who’s appetite was stolen by a certain confession days before.

It was as if his entire memory of the murder had been handed over to Dunya, like she was now the killer and he was the one oblivious to the crime.

Dunya felt the sweat on her blouse cool as heat left the air and she shivered.

The last dinner like this that her family had happened three years before. Late summer, the rose of sharons nearing the end of their floral assault. Pulcheria had fussed over Rodion relentlessly, scurrying around to refill his glass and bring out more food.
For once he and Dunya hadn’t fought over seconds, there was enough that they simply didn’t have to. Pulcheria seemed to be stuck in between miserable, mournful little crying jags and joy. It had been a long year of scraping money together, all of them pitching in. Rodion had a job that he’d hated, every cent that did not go to taxes or food had gone into the promise of an education.

And now, it was the last night they had before he left.
Between bites Rodion said “Make sure mother doesn’t do anything rash while I’m gone.”

“Mama wouldn’t do anything reckless.” Dunya dug her knife angrily into the beef on her plate. “Besides, you’ll be back for Christmas, won’t you?”

He said nothing, just continued eating.

After that she’d managed to visit three times and he’d visited once, that last visit they had made he’d grown agitated and snapped at their mother, so Dunya had held her on the train home as she cried over her son’s cruelty in part, but more so over how tired he’d looked. Then they hadn’t seen him for years.
They sent letters but he sent only the most perfunctory replies, they invited him home for holidays and birthdays and the summer, he insisted there was far too much to do and he couldn’t come home.

Yet here he was, as though no time had passed.
He would never again be innocent, he would never again be the same, he had blood on his hands and he got winded going up the stairs, and for some ugly, ungodly reason he seemed to be content.

The next morning Dunya awoke to the same churning in her stomach she woke up to every morning since the confession, but had regained the mental fortitude to steel herself against herself and go to work at Luzhin’s desk.

It was another ruthlessly hot day, and she fanned Sofie with a pamphlet in between the many meetings that Luzhin had scheduled.
“Do you think someone in town has invoked the wrath of god or perhaps incited some ancient mummy curse? It’s truly the only explanation for this heat.”

Sofie replied with very little conviction. “Don’t blaspheme Dear”

Dunya paused fanning to peel the fabric of her skirt away from her calves, where it clung to the skin above her stockings.

“Summer always feels like it lasts forever, then it’s over and you miss it dearly during all that gray and snow.”
Dunya remembered how tenderly Sofie had spoken of June.

And as she often tried to do, she attempted to avoid a turn to the morose. “I could use some snow right now, stick it right down the back of my dress.”

Sofie giggled and winced as though someone had dropped a snowball down her dress.

Sofie turned back to the keys of her typewriter, the clicking almost disguising the sound of someone coming up the back steps, moving in towards them.

Then the door swung open and like a figure emerging straight from the past, in came Mr Svidrigailov, star of Dunya’s most terrible dreams for the last two years.

Sam frowned, a crease forming between his faint eyebrows.
“I’m not sure what to say.”

Dmitri wasn’t sure what he expected or perhaps, wanted to hear after telling his story, but whatever it is it’s not this.

“Honestly I’m not. The signals seem very mixed, genuinely they couldn’t get any more confused than that. He hates you and kisses you and he’s your dearest friend. Honestly a nightmare.”

Rodya was no nightmare. He was perfection in its most unagreeable package. He was simultaneously altruistic and selfish, cruel but loving, he was the most delightful set of paradoxes and Dmitri found that he went slightly insane when rodya wasn’t nearby.

“If I’m allowed to offer it, my most sincere advice would be to cut this man out like a tumor, but I suppose I don’t know him, so I can’t say.”

Sam truly did not know Rodya, that much was certain, but his dressing room was warm, and comfortable despite the wooden couch arm digging into his side, though he supposed he could forgive the couch for being uncomfortable to lie on, very few couches were particularly comfortable for someone Dmitri sized. And despite his ignorance, Sam was pleasant.

So Dmitri thanked him, and before he left said he would visit again, to which Sam smiled magnanimously.

Chapter Text

She clutched Sofie’s shoulder, tense as she stood, trying to steady herself, trying to stay cool and professional despite the heat and despite the growing desire to run.

Despite her best efforts, her voice was still shaky. It was a dog in a thunderstorm, trembling, helpless against nature. “Hello sir, do you have an appointment?”

“Avdotya, do you not remember me?” Before she could say anything he continued. “It would likely be better if you didn’t.” He chuckled a self deprecating little laugh.

“I do, in fact, have an appointment with Mr Luzhin, if you’d bring me to him.”

Dunya did not move. Her hand remained on Sofie’s shoulder as she stood ever so slightly before her. She barely breathed, her chest rising in tiny, sharp movements.

She was a rabbit. One of the homely little brown furred white tailed creatures who hid in clumps of grass and flowers in gardens and fields, the sort that made eye contact with her on her walks in the park, then suddenly went perfectly still, the only sign of life the twitching nose between their glittering black eyes and the coiled spring tension in them and the static of the air around them. She was frozen now but in a minute she would run, white tail flashing, little round body stretched long.
Her tiny heart beating rapidly.

She felt more sweat roll down her back and her arms, a bead dropped off of her chin.

She was like a greased pig, maybe.

Or maybe she was a girl who looked like she might faint while her fingers clutched at her beloved in an attempt to keep her from disappearing.

Sofie carefully eased Dunya’s fingers off of her blouse, smiled at Svidrigailov and brought him into Luzhin’s office.
“He’s right in here sir.”

Dunya ran.

Later, Sofie found her in the bright heat of midday, huddled under a tree in the park, her breathing only just returned to something manageable, something normal for a stationary person. Her mind was still churning, however.

She could make sense of nothing. Her brother was a murderer and the man she’d thought was far from her had shown up unannounced at the office. Luzhin kept trying to set a date for the wedding, and her family needed money.

The heat pressed down on her, smothered her and made her feel like she was slowly being boiled alive in her sensible office clothes and her t strap heels of a reasonable, mad dash-able height.

She heard a person coming and had nearly flown back into a panic, but had seen Sofie’s worn, sensible shoes and followed them up to a soft frown and melting blond curls and had relaxed slightly.

“Are you okay Dunya?”

“I think so.” She reflected on how the last hour (or perhaps ten minutes, she wasn’t sure how time was meant to pass at the moment) probably looked from the perspective of an outsider. “No. I’m not.”

Sofie eased herself down next to Dunya, careful not to catch her shirt on the tree bark.

“Would you like to talk about it.”

Dunya considered not saying anything. Then she considered how sick the idea of Sofie sitting in a room with that man for hours, oblivious to the fangs hidden behind his innocuous lips.

“Yes. I would.” She tilted her head back and looked into the ever shifting dark green canopy of the tree. It was an oppressively hot, still, day, but there must have been a breeze high above them, as the leaves breathed, gentle and soft, above them.

“I had just finished school, and I heard about a family that needed a nanny. Somehow I got the job and I was thrilled. It seemed perfect. I wouldn’t have to pay rent, and I would get money to send home to my mother and to help pay for Rodya’s education. I would have rather been on a seaside vacation or going to school myself, sure, but it seemed okay.”

She could see herself, just turned 18, her eyes bright, excited at being away from home for the first time. She’d packed her trunk in a crackling cloud of excitement. It felt just like the stories she had read, where the protagonists, who were always girls wealthier and prettier and who led lives far more charmed than her, went off to a ladies school or a summer retreat or someone’s country home. She folded her delicate new blouses and her sturdy skirts and a new wool coat to replace the old one she’d been wearing for years despite the sleeves being much too short, and, best of all, a pretty light blue evening dress that Marie had passed on to her.

“I was excited. If I’m honest. It felt like an adventure.”

It really had. The Svidrigailovs went on extravagant outings and brought her along, she spent that summer on the lake in boats that cost more than her house, and wearing Marie’s dress to dinners, all the while keeping the children on good behavior.
She’d slept on silk sheets for the first time, marveling at how the slick pillowcases left her hair untouched, she’d eaten the Svidrigailov’s food with a distinctly adolescent hunger and gawked at the splendor of upholstery and the neatness of the hedges in the garden.

Then she’d realized the reality of her new job. She spent all day chasing around the three Svidrigailov children and trying to avoid their parents' dramatic, gin-fueled fights.

Then, to make it all worse Svidrigailov wouldn’t leave her alone, started propositioning her and cornering her, until one day Mrs. Svidrigailov saw the two of them in the garden behind a hedge, and assumed that her husband was cheating and that the girl they’d hired was the one at fault.

She unwittingly ended Dunya’s nightmare, but even once she’d woken up she’d been jittery. Even when she was finally home, tucked into warm, worn, familiar smelling sheets she kept a kitchen knife on the nightstand. And once she’d explained it all to Pulcheria, her mother had seemed to understand. She’d let her keep the knife, she’d let her creep around and hadn’t said anything when she startled when anyone touched her.

“He never got the better of me, I suppose I shouldn’t be so shaken up about it,” she nestled her face in her hands. “I kept a knife in my drawer for months after, and never dared to try and get my final paycheck.”

Sofie rested a gentle hand on hers. “He is not a good man.”

That smug smile that never left his lips. “He isn’t. And yet he thinks he’s perfect.”

“His wife died, that’s why he was in, for the will.”

Dunya struggled to imagine that flaming inferno of a woman anywhere but alive and seething. A coffin would incinerate once she touched it.

She couldn’t find any sorrow over the death. It troubled her, once she would have cried for even such a cruel woman, but she’d lost that ability in the last few years.

“The world is slowly but surely being purged of the poison I suppose.”

“She left you money. To make up for what happened. That’s what the will says.”

Dunya startled. “What?”

“It confused me. That’s how it’s written into the will. It says to make up for what happened.”

Dunya refused to acknowledge that the woman who blamed her for leading her husband’s eye astray would ever do anything for Dunya.
“Is he gone?”

“No, he and Luzhin are talking about their college days. I think they might be at it for a while.”

Dunya smiled. She knew that she must look a fright, her eyes puffy and her face shining with sweat, but she hardly cared.

“Maybe we could just leave. Go get ice cream.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea Dunya.”

“Please Sofie, just the two of us and something cold to keep Mr mummy’s curse from killing us? You can have as many licks of my ice cream as you want, I know you always seem to want whatever I’ve ordered more than yours.”

Sofie scowled. “That’s not true.”

But they left anyway.

Dmitri brushed the soft part of his hand, the meaty section of palm that joined to thumb, against the door. A soft padded tap. Then he curled his fingers into a fist and rapped his knuckles against the door.

“Are you home?”
He didn’t think he’d spoken to Tom since before Raskolnikov’s illness, but at Sam’s urging he was trying to reconnect with the friends he’d started neglecting when Raskolnikov crossed the street to avoid speaking to him. He’d tucked himself deep into a shell of worry and regret and blinded himself to the good people who were still in his life. People who were kinder and more constant than Raskolnikov, more deserving of Dmitri’s devotion.

He heard a soft padding sound behind the door, then the bolt clicking as the knob turned.

“Dmitri? I haven’t seen you or heard a thing about you for ages, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth. Or maybe that Raskie sold you to the circus for ink money.”

Dmitri tried to hide the way he cringed at Tom’s joke, he’d forgotten how much Tom hated Raskolnikov.

“No, I’m here and not in a striped tent. I’ve just been busy with my translating.”

The night before he’d stared at the same line for half an hour, reading it over again and again, uncomprehending, not determining anything new about it.

He smiled wooden, and attempted to continue Tom’s joke.

“Why would a circus even want me? I don’t have a second head and I’m nowhere near flexible enough to be a contortionist.”

“Oh I never said you’d be an act. You’d probably be the ladder for the lion tamer.”

“But lion tamers don’t use a ladder, they use a stool.”

“The lion tamer is very short. Come in Dmitri, before we bother the neighbors.”

As if in response, one of the neighbors started loudly shouting at her husband.

“Alright then.”

Inside, they made themselves comfortable on the ratty couch. Or, they tried to make themselves comfortable. Tom was the unusually petite, waifish sort with the misfortune of legs short enough that when he sat on a couch he was unable to bend his knees, and Dmitri had the self imposed misfortune of never looking before he sat.
So Tom sat with his legs straight out in front of him, and Dmitri sat on a spring.

“How have you been, Dmitri?”

“Okay, busy, but okay.”

“Really? I haven’t seen you or your lapdog in ages. Did the two of you make a pact to never touch a drop again and devote yourselves to your work?”
There was a slight tremor in Tom’s voice, he carried emotion hidden in a basket and a little dripped through the cracks.

Dmitri can’t bring himself to coddle Tom.
“No, Rodya got sick December of last year and I’ve been too busy to go anywhere.”

He left Tom a while later, wondering why they’d been friends to begin with.

Dmitri tended to look at Rodion and see a prey animal, a deer with an injured leg, his eyes stopped on the large glossy dark eyes and the soft hands that had no callouses, and didn’t see through to what his friends eyes sought out, which was the hard slant of his mouth and the eyes that were set close enough he could only be a predator.

Porfiry Petrovitch stood before his open notebook, all he had observed, all the evidence he had collected since the murders.

Here and there was a stapled in article, or photograph. A copy of the testimony of the only witness on the night of the crime.

He pushed in his high backed wooden chair, which had a brutally uncomfortable splintering wicker seat and a back that attached with a perfect ninety degree angle.

On the night of the murders, a man who lived in the apartment building they occurred in reported hearing a single shrill scream, some thudding, and finally, once he’d flown from his apartment in search of the screams source, had seen a young man in a long coat stumbling anxiously away from the building. He’d described the man as very pale, and though he couldn’t make out much of his face in the dark he said he’d looked youngish, maybe in his mid twenties, though he could have been wrong, and he’d said that the man’s ratty coat hung unevenly, like it was weighted on one side.
He’d apparently seen a whisper of blond hair and the curve of a narrow face in a flash, briefly illuminated before the man scurried away.

Porfiry had thought he’d had him. Rodion Raskolnikov fit perfectly.
He had been in the city at the right time, despite his sister’s confusion about dates. He lived in the same borough.
He was apparently short on cash when the murders occurred.
He was in his mid twenties, blond, and just a touch erratic.
Then there was that strange article he wrote, to top it all off. Published three months before the killing.

But despite Raskolnikov’s violent reaction to his prodding he didn’t have nearly enough evidence to get anywhere.

He closed his notebook with a firm, affectionate pat, and promised himself he’d sort through this mess before the weather turned to winter gray.