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The first time they meet, she is Sasha and he is Aleksis, but everyone else would tell you otherwise.
She is seven feet tall, wrapped in a thick black coat and a pair of dark jeans and holding a pint of Baltika dark. He is five ten, shrouded in a fitted leather jacket, and does shots of vodka chased with vodka.
The television in the corner shows a football match between two of the Moscows (CSKA and Spartak and oh, it'll be a bloody one) and the old mercury thermometer in the corner drops down past negative twelve.
She leans over to him and says, "Keeping the cold out?"
He chuckles. "It does a better job than beer."
"Perhaps." Sasha waves her hand at the bartender. "Two more, on…" She nods her head toward Aleksis.
"Sasha," Aleksis says. "I've got a tab."
Sasha's eyes widen a little and she leans against the bar. "Your name's Sasha?"
"Depends on when you ask," Aleksis says. "Not today."
She nods and the bartender slides two tiny glasses in front of them. Sasha takes hers and downs it without blinking. "What's your name really, then?"
"The one they gave me is Aleksandra," says Aleksis. "But Sasha is better."
Sasha nods. She feels the burn of the liquor spread in her stomach and hums in pleasure. "They called me Aleksandr too, once."
Aleksis raises his eyebrow. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"And what do they call you now?"
"Warden Kaidonovsky, or sometimes 'that pussy'."
Aleksis laughs. It's bright, and it warms Sasha the way vodka never does. "You work at Pyatak too?"
"A year in April, yeah. Transportation, mostly. What about you?”
"Night watch. Sometimes day shifts too." Aleksis leans over and grabs Sasha's beer and takes a long, slow sip. "Dark? Really?"
Someone scores on television and a quarter of the bar starts shouting and a quarter goes angrily quiet and somewhere, Sasha thinks she hears some glass breaking. "You should go."
"Why?"
"Getting glassed would make showing up for work tomorrow difficult."
Aleksis grins, and it makes the hair on the back of Sasha's neck prickle. "Good thing I've got tomorrow off, then."
Sasha tilts her head to the side. "What is your name, really? I don't recognize you."
"I go by Aleksis today. Tomorrow? Who knows." Aleksis cracks his neck and rolls his shoulders a little. "They call me Sasha today, and they will call me Sasha tomorrow. Is that good enough?"
Sasha licks her lower lip and sinks down in her chair a little. "Really?"
Aleksis's nostrils flare. "Yes," he says coldly. “Really. Are you going to report me to Tsar Putin?"
"No! No, no," Sasha says quickly. "No, never."
Aleksis arches one eyebrow. "Aleksandr Kaidonovsky," he says slowly. "Always?"
Sasha blinks a few times, then drops her gaze and shakes her head. "Not always."
"No?"
"No."
"Not today?"
"Not today."
Aleksis nods. "What's today?"
Sasha shrugs. "You know."
"I do."
Sasha looks up sharply and then directly into Aleksis's eyes and she doesn't blink and neither does he. And Aleksis knows, just like that. This strange man, with dark hair and dark eyes and breasts and pain and knowledge. He knows.
"I'm going outside to smoke," Aleksis says. "Come."
"Okay." She slides out from her chair and follows him out into the brisk wind outside the bar.
Snow swirls around their feet and Aleksis stamps against the cold and he lights a cigarette. "Want one?"
Sasha starts to shake her head, then shrugs. "Sure."
Aleksis takes a long drag off of the cigarette, then hands it over. Sasha mirrors him, then exhales smoke and steam together in a cloud above their heads.
"Sasha Kaidonovsky," Aleksis murmurs to himself. "It's got a nice ring."
Sasha looks down and Aleksis smirks back up at her. "Doesn't it, though."
~
The first time Sasha is Aleksis, he is she is at a bar, snuck in with a big coat and some heavy eyeliner and a wink at the bouncer, twenty-six days before her eighteenth birthday.
A friend of a friend, that's how she got here, a friend of a friend and word of mouth that hey, Natalya Petrova is a dyke, she knows people, she knows places, and now Sasha is in an underground gay bar, staring down anyone who tries to catch her eye. The men at the regular bars have long since learned to leave her alone after the first few times she shoots them down, but it's nice not to have to do it at all.
Sasha doesn't mind the men here like she doesn't mind the women - she'd let anyone buy her a drink, if they pay and she watches it get made. She's got her rules - they have one pint, one shot, one measure of something to make an impression, and if they do, she buys the next round.
She's three shots into the night on a nearly full wallet when one girl, nearly as tall as her, strides over and says, "Buy me a drink?"
Sasha snorts. "Not likely."
The girl grins. "I'll make it worth your while."
She bats her eyelashes and Sasha rolls her eyes but feels her cheeks flush a little. "You haven't even introduced yourself."
"Neither have you." The girl raises her eyebrows.
Sasha looks her up and down once, and the corner of her mouth twitches up a little and she taps the bar with two fingers.
The girl smirks.
And she makes an impression, somewhere between shots two and three (only one of which Sasha pays for) when she leans into Sasha's side and says, "Wanna get out of here?"
Sasha chokes on half a mouthful of vodka and starts coughing. "Excuse me?"
"I live nearby."
"Oh. Um…" Sasha glances over her shoulder at Natalya and her band of followers. "I mean… I'm here with people– friends."
"Ah."
"If you've got anywhere closer, though…"
The girl laughs. "Do you think your people-friends would notice if you disappeared for a few minutes?"
"I wouldn't," Sasha says with a wicked grin. "Come on."
They weave through the crowd to the bathrooms in the back, and make it all the way into the first stall before the girl is locking the door and pushing her against the tile wall. Sasha grunts in surprise as the girl's lips press against hers. Without really thinking, she spins them around, pressing against the girl and swallowing the quiet gasp it elicits.
"You never told me your name," Sasha breathes.
"Irina. Yours?"
"Sasha."
"Sasha," Irina repeats. "That doesn't look like you." She slides her hands under Sasha's shirt and leans over to bite at her earlobe. "You look more like an Aleksis to me."
"Aleksis?" Sasha asks, biting back a groan.
"Yeah, I like it," Irina says. She rolls her hips a little and slides one knee between Sasha's legs. "Do you?"
"Yeah," Sasha breathes. "Yeah, I like that."
"Aleksis," Irina sighs, and then sighs it again when Sasha kisses her, and keeps breathing it between them as Sasha scratches down her sides and hooks her thumbs in the waist of her skirt. Irina moans quietly and grinds her hips up and then Sasha feels something poking at her thigh.
"What–?" She pulls away and looks down and sure enough, there is a bulge sticking out from Irina's skirt. "You–?"
"Oh…" Irina blushes darkly. "I thought you, um. I thought you knew."
"Knew you had a dick?" Sasha asks. "No, I didn't think–"
"Is this a problem?" Irina asks, and she sounds somewhere between cold and scared as she tugs the front of her skirt down. "Are you afraid of a girl with a cock?"
"No, not really," Sasha says slowly. "Not really at all."
"Okay. Good," Irina says, and she visibly relaxes. "But were you not…?"
"Was I not what?"
"I thought you were a guy," Irina says.
"You thought I had a dick?"
"No, I just thought you were a guy."
Sasha blinks a few times, then leans in and catches Irina in another kiss. Irina sighs into her and her breath catches in her through when Sasha cups her cock through her skirt and grinds down gently with the heel of her hand.
"Are you?" Irina gasps.
"If you want," Sasha replies, then drops down into a crouch and pushes up Irina's skirt and grins as fingers thread through her hair and muffled murmurs of Aleksis! drop above her head.
~
On their first date, he is Aleksis and he is also Aleksis, and no one has any idea.
Aleksis couldn’t say what it is, but the second Sasha opens the door of her apartment, he realizes she’s clearly not Sasha, not right now. Her jeans are dark and tight fitting and her shirt falls a little below her collarbones, clinging to her waist nicely, and even though she’s edging toward six feet on her own, she’s wearing heels, and yet she carries herself differently, shoulders squarer and face more defiant, even as she smiles and grabs her coat. “Good evening, Aleksis.”
Aleksis smiles. “Good evening… Um…?”
She shrugs. “Let’s go with Aleksis tonight, yeah?”
“Aleksis,” he agrees. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah, just a second.” Aleksis leans toward the wall, looking in the mirror near his front door. “Do I look all pretty tonight?”
“Uh…”
Aleksis glances up with the faintest hint of a smirk. “It’s okay, I don’t mind it so much right now.”
“You look good,” Aleksis says uncertainly.
“You charmer.” Aleksis runs a tube of chapstick over his lips, then nods, satisfied. “Alright, let’s go.”
Aleksis drives them out to IL Patiyo near Cherepovets. He drums his hands against the steering wheel and curses Belozersky for being useless when it comes to food. Aleksis just smiles gently as he watches him, leaning against the car door with one leg propped against the dashboard.
“You’re awfully cheerful looking,” Aleksis grumbles.
“I’m not the one in Vologda traffic.”
“Do you want to drive?”
“No, that’s alright,” Aleksis says. “I’d rather sit here being impressed that you managed to fit yourself into this car.”
Aleksis breaks a little harder than he perhaps needs to and Aleksis bumps his other knee against the dashboard, but he just laughs and keeps up the good natured teasing until Aleksis finally finds a parking space two blocks from the restaurant. He pops his collar against the the breeze rolling in off the Sheksna and Aleksis’s smaller hand slips into his. He looks down at him and smiles and Aleksis returns it easily.
There’s a quarter hour wait time, even with a reservation, so he entertains Aleksis with stories about work and the plots of books he’s read. Aleksis responds with his own stories, plots of little eight-page books he wrote Nikita when they were kids and carefully filed away before Nikita could trash them. Aleksis watches him with something close to admiration in his eyes, like he’s hanging on every word, and it makes a nice change of pace.
They get seated in the middle of a story about a girl and a magic tree, and the first thing Aleksis says when the waiter leaves is, “How did you end up working at a prison? Why didn’t you write?”
“I still write.” Aleksis unrolls his fork and knife from his napkin. “I have less time on transport jobs, but I still write.”
“No, no, I mean professionally,” Aleksis clarifies. “Instead of being a guard.”
Aleksis snorts. “Look at me. Do I look like the sort of person who could get away with writing books instead of enlisting in something?”
Aleksis gives him a hard look, and it makes him want to avert his eyes. “Why does it matter what you look like?” he asks. “Are you worried about the dust jacket or something?”
Aleksis snorts. “No, no. Literature just has a type, you know? A type of person you should be, or at least one you should look like you are.”
Aleksis scoffs. “Bullshit. Think of Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Chekhov, or Gogol. What do you know about them?”
“Well, Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina–”
Aleksis cuts him off. “But what do you actually know about him?”
Aleksis considers it. “He spoke French?” he volunteers. “And he was a pacifist, or an anarchist…”
“True enough,” Aleksis says. “But did you know what his favorite animal was? Or what position he slept in at night? Or what his last words were of what got his dick hard or how he took his tea?”
“I don’t,” Aleksis admits. “But I could probably look through his memoirs and find out some of it.”
Aleksis throws his hands in the air. “So don’t write a memoir. Write stories. I bet you could recite whole pages of Anna Karenina from school, right?”
“I suppose.”
“The book’s all anyone is going to remember at the end of it all,” Aleksis says. “If all there is is the story, people will read the story.”
“And if they love it enough, then should I publish my memoir?” Aleksis jokes.
Aleksis rolls his eyes. “‘The Tale of a Smartass, by A. Kaidonovsky’.”
“Or S. Kaidonovsky,” Aleksis says quietly.
Aleksis glances up. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“It’s not really the type, is it?” Aleksis says. “Tolstoy, Chekhov, all of them, they were all men who stood for something.”
“And what are you?”
“Neither, some days.”
Aleksis stares at him for a long moment, then says, “Wanna hear about the fight my friend Lena got into yesterday?”
“Please,” Aleksis says gratefully.
Aleksis launches into a story about his friend Elena and her disaster wedding plans and how she almost stabbed the groom with a plastic knife – Saer or Semir or something, Aleksis doesn’t catch it. He laughs in the right places and smiles when Aleksis laughs too hard at his own jokes and nearly spills wine into his borscht. He thinks about telling Aleksis that he is beautiful, but he doesn’t think it sounds right. He knows dozens of ways to entrance girls with his words and they all fail him as Aleksis pretends to commit domestic murder on his beef cut.
“Tell me a story,” Aleksis says, most of the way through dinner.
Aleksis swallows his bite and leans back in his chair. “Once there was a man named Aleksandr Kaidonovsky who ate too much and probably died.”
“Not on my watch,” Aleksis teases. “Are all your stories so morbid?”
Aleksis opens his mouth to reply, but his words get caught in his throat. “No,” he says eventually. “Sometimes, but no. I like writing adventures, mostly, and poetry.”
“Poetry?” Aleksis repeats, torn between interest and amusement. “Do a poem.”
“Once his plate was no longer loaded, Aleksis Kaidonovsky’s stomach exploded.”
“They buried him deep at his request,” Aleksis adds. “And then his boyfriend took all the rest.” He leans over and spears a piece of meat on his fork and pops it into his mouth.
“Boyfriend?”
“Like you think I’m letting you go,” Aleksis snorts. “This is delicious.”
“You can eat it off my corpse,” Aleksis says tiredly.
Aleksis laughs and steals another bite. “I intend to.”
They forgo dessert on Aleksis’s behalf and Aleksis waves away protests when he tucks a handful of rubles into the bill.
“Are you sure?”
“We have the same job,” Aleksis says. “Don’t give me that ‘man pays for the date’ bullshit, it’s two thousand and eleven, I can pay for my own dinner.”
Aleksis gives him a small smile. “I thought the man was paying for the date.”
Aleksis wrinkles his nose and smacks at him with the bill fold. “You charming ass.”
He ends up paying for the bill, and Aleksis makes it up by kissing him long and hard in the front seat of his car outside of Aleksis’s apartment.
“Is this your first time kissing a man?” Aleksis breathes against his mouth, thin fingers scratching through his hair.
“I don’t know anymore. Probably.”
“Welcome to the wonderful world,” Aleksis grins and pulls him back in.
~
The first time Aleksis is Sasha, she is he is four years old, in the middle of a crisis, reading books to his little brother in their room while his parents argue in the kitchen.
He may have been Sasha before that, or after that. He's not entirely sure.
Aleksis's parents love books, classics and science fiction and journals and histories in tandem, and in him they have instilled the same love. By age three, Aleksis could read the basic books his mother's friends bought for him on his own – it's important for a Russian boy to be intelligent, they crow, intelligent and strong and unafraid – and Aleksis is intelligent, but he is not unafraid, so he tries to make up for it with extra books, extra lessons, extra everything, just in case it could add up.
So he sits with his brother in his lap – two years old, he can't possibly be absorbing these fairy tales but Aleksis reads them out anyway, sounding his way through ж's and я's of Vasilii the Unlucky with his chin resting on the top of Nikita's head and his thin voice almost drowning out the low grumbles of his parents in the kitchen.
Aleksis hears the slap of newspaper against the counter and a noise of frustration from his father's chest and he pulls Nikita just a little bit closer.
"…no idea why he thinks he's going to get away with this."
"Because he's the president, Dasha, and he’s not wrong, you know.”
“I don’t know what he thinks dissolving Parliament is going to do. You know the court won’t uphold it.”
“What about the April referendum, though?”
“No way that holds up. No way.”
“Daria…”
“He can’t do that, Pyotr! He’s going to destroy the government!”
Aleksis hears a thump of something hitting the counter and goes very still.
Then his father says, in quiet words that Aleksis has to strain to hear, “It won’t be pretty, Dasha, and it won’t be nice, but Yeltsin is going to come out of this still in power.”
His mother is quiet for a moment. “This doesn’t feel safe, though. If Yeltsin takes full executive power, the Americans will take it personally and rush in to yell at us.”
“Then we defend. We clean up our sons and we ship them out against the Americans.”
“Don’t bring Nikita and Sasha into this–“
“We need to stop calling him Sasha, Daria.”
“For God’s sake, Pyotr, he’s a child!”
“And he always will be if we don’t raise him right.” Aleksis hears pacing on the linoleum. “‘Sasha’, that’s hardly respectable.”
“Pyotr, he’s four.”
“Not forever. And I don’t want him to grow up soft, not like all those singers and poets and actresses. He needs to be a fighter.”
“For Christ’s sake–“
“Sasha means ‘helper’,” Aleksis’s father interrupts. “Aleksis means ‘defender’. What do you think we need more right now?”
His mother mutters something indistinct and his father sighs.
“Do not let him be soft in Russia. Russia has never been a soft place, not even now.”
She sighs in frustration, but can’t really argue with that. “They’re just boys.”
“No one is ‘just a boy’ for long here,” his father says. He sounds almost sad. “We cannot afford to be ‘just boys’, or ‘just girls’ for that matter. Where will we be next time Parliament dissolves? Next time we are at war? Next time there is war in Georgia? Next time we disagree with America?”
Aleksis strains for any hint of sound from his mother, but she is quiet.
“I don’t want them to be soldiers, but they have to know how to be if we need them.” His father’s voice has an air of finality to it.
His mother doesn’t argue.
“We should go to Victor’s house, he has a safe room,” his father says. “Just in case Yeltsin makes the wrong decisions. We should stay there.”
“Alright.”
“Get the boys, I’ll pack some clothes.”
“Yes, Pasha.”
Footsteps move away from the kitchen, and then toward the door. Aleksis flips the book open again, back to the page he was on, and pretends like he wasn’t listening the whole time.
His mother leans down and scoops Nikita up in her arms, bouncing him a little on her hip. “Hi baby. How is the book?”
“Good,” Aleksis says automatically.
“Good.” She brushes a wisp of hair from Nikita’s forehead. “Your papa wants to go visit Uncle Victor tonight, can you pack a backpack?”
“Why?”
She sighs again. “We want to go away from Moscow for a little while.”
“Why?”
“Because the President did something bad, darling. Don’t tell your papa, but he did.”
“Oh.” Aleksis closes his book. “Okay.”
He stands up and pulls a backpack off of the hook in his closet and starts pushing clothes into it.
His mother sighs again, more to herself than anything. “Thank you, Aleksis.”
Aleksis frowns to himself. “Yes, mama.”
They are still at Uncle Victor’s house two weeks later when Yeltsin’s soldiers shell the White House. His mother has no trouble calling him Aleksis after that.
~
The first time they fuck, she is Sasha and she is also Sasha, and no one can ever know that.
They were close to being Aleksis and Sasha, close to having a nice night in and watching a film, and then Aleksis turned around in his room as he pulled on a sweater and was Sasha, and Sasha stared at her phone for long minutes, wondering whether or not she should cancel.
(Sasha was never one to mess around, and when Aleksis had left her by her door during their last date, she had told him to buy condoms for their next one.)
So Sasha paces around her bed, picking her phone up and then dropping it again, until she shakes her head and shoves it in her pocket and swings a coat around her shoulders and leaves before she can think otherwise.
She knocks on the door and it swings open and Sasha looks her up and down for one long moment, then smiles and says, "Come in, Sasha."
Sasha feels a huge tension release in her shoulders and ducks down to kiss Sasha once before going into the sitting room and plunking herself down on the couch.
"I'm making popcorn," Sasha calls as she goes to the kitchen. "Do you want anything?"
"I'm alright." Sasha sits up and sheds her coat, then falls back against the arm of the couch. "What are we watching?"
"Machete, with subtitles. I couldn't find a dub."
Sasha laughs. "Machete? Really? You don't get enough of that at work?"
"I broke up a fight between four inmates last night after one of them tried to shank the other and missed," Sasha says, carrying a big bowl full of popcorn out into the sitting room. "Mindless violence can be nice after all the desperation. It's sort of cathartic."
"If you say so," Sasha chuckles. "If I'd just broken up a prison fight, I would probably watch something stupid and funny."
"I'm sure this will be both of those things. And besides…" Sasha sits down and tucks her head under Sasha's bearded chin and presses play on her DVD remote. "If I got anything interesting, then I'd be too distracted by the movie."
Sasha opens her mouth, then closes it and feels her cheeks flush a little as she grins to herself.
Around the time that Danny Trejo escapes from Jeff Fahey, Sasha feels slim fingers resting on her thigh. She glances down and Sasha’s thumb rubs little circles over her jeans. Sasha smiles a little and rests her chin in dark hair and snakes her arm around Sasha’ waist.
By the time Robert De Niro gets killed by the Border Patrol, they’ve abandoned the movie completely. Sasha’s shirt is on the floor and her bra is unclasped, but still hanging off of her shoulders. She rolls her hips down into Sasha’s, and Sasha gasps quietly into her mouth as Sasha’s tongue flicks at her lower lip. She grins and runs one rough hand over Sasha’s bare back and cups her breast with the other and Sasha bucks her hips hard.
“Mm, yes,” she breathes into her mouth.
Sasha grins up at her and rolls her hips up again. Sasha groans and laughs breathlessly, letting her forehead rest against Sasha’s. “Do you want to take this elsewhere?”
Sasha gestures vaguely at the TV. “Aren’t you worried about Machete and Jessica Alba?”
Sasha laughs again and smacks her shoulder. “I told you, I didn’t rent it to watch.”
She stands up and shrugs out of her bra, letting it fall on top if her shirt on the floor, then turns and walks down the hall. “Come on.”
Sasha’s on her feet and following in a second and they’re crashing through Sasha’s bedroom door together, tripping over jeans that never make it into the laundry hamper. Sasha reaches up and and grips the neckline of Sasha’s shirt, then spins her around and pushes her down onto the bed. Sasha falls easily, bouncing once and holding her arms out and Sasha’s already crawling back on top of her, kissing at her mouth, her ear, her neck.
“Mm, your beard tickles,” Sasha says.
“I’ll shave it later.”
“Only if you want. I like it.” Sasha runs her hand through the thickest part of it, then nips at a spot on Sasha’s neck that rips a low, rumbling groan out of her. “Shirt.”
Sasha pushes herself up and lets smaller hands divest her of her shirt. It’s not the first time Sasha’s seen her without her shirt on, but Sasha looks hungrier this time. Her eyes are dark as one hand runs up over barely visible abs, up to her collarbone and back down again. Sasha hums and closes her eyes at the ministrations, and hisses out a breath between her teeth as she feels a scrape of nails over her nipple.
“You’re so sensitive,” Sasha breathes, and then she pushes Sasha back on the bed with one hand in the center of her chest. “I love it.”
Her head ducks down, mapping out the newly exposed skin with her mouth, fingertips running back and forth over Sasha’s ribs. Sasha bites her lip and closes her eyes, lets one hand settle in short, dark hair and grip just a little. It seems to urge Sasha on and her lips find her collarbones, her nipples, the barely-there line of her ribs.
“You’re fucking hot,” Sasha says, and the bluntness of it makes Sasha laugh, even if it’s just a rush of air.
“What would your mother say?”
“She’d be jealous,” Sasha says, “That I am fucking a hot girl and she isn’t.”
Sasha feels a warmth spread in her chest.
“Why are you talking about my mother in bed?” Sasha teases. “I don’t want to think about her when I have you.”
“I’m sure your– sure your mother is lovely,” Sasha gasps out, but there are hands on her hips and the soft warmth of breasts against her stomach and the stinging heat of Sasha biting at her neck and sucking - just above regulation uniform, she realizes, and almost swats her away. “The boys will love this tomorrow.”
“Stop thinking about work,” Sasha breathes against her throat. “I’m offended.”
Sasha holds up her hands. “My apologies.”
She does her best to look apologetic, but Sasha just laughs again and wraps her fingers around Sasha’s wrists and pins them loosely above her head. “Behave.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sasha looks pleased enough, and she starts working down Sasha’s chest again, kissing and licking and somehow finding all of the points that make Sasha shudder and jerk under her. Sasha’s hands disappear from her hips and snake to the front of her jeans, scrabbling against the button.
Sasha blinks and opens her eyes.
“Черт побери!” Sasha mutters and breaks her staring match with Sasha’s ribs to look down. She pops the button and tugs down the zipper. “Hips.”
Sasha dutifully lifts her hips up and denim slides out from under her. Her cock is pressing against the front of her underwear, and it makes her throat hurt a little.
Sasha tosses the jeans onto the floor and looks down appreciatively. “Very nice.”
“It’s not all the way,” Sasha says. She gestures vaguely. “You know. Hard.”
Sasha smirks and makes a show of licking her lips. “Let’s see if we can fix that.”
Sasha opens her mouth to protest, but then Sasha’s mouth is back on hers again and that feels nice. It dulls the shame a little. It’s distracting. She wraps both arms around Sasha, pulling her tight to her chest, and Sasha moans quietly in support. Sasha lets her eyes flicker open for just a second in the kiss. Sasha’s eyes are closed and her hair is falling into her face, and Sasha resists the urge to push it away or fist her hand in it or something.
“You’re thinking too much,” Sasha mutters against her lips.
“Sorry.”
“Not a problem,” Sasha says. “But I’d like to get your underwear off. I want to see what I’m going to be riding tonight.”
Sasha flushes and her cock twitches, but her stomach feels like ice. “Uh…”
Sasha sits back, straddling her stomach, and reaches one hand between her own legs. “Is that alright?”
“Um…” Sasha swallows hard and lets her head fall to the side, staring at the wall.
“Hey, no.” Sasha reaches over with her free hand and turns Sasha’s face back to her. “Is that not alright tonight?”
“It’s, you know…” Sasha covers her face in one hand.
“Too wrong?” Sasha guesses. It sounds like she knows what it’s like.
Sasha nods miserably. “Sometimes, you know, it just… Doesn’t work?”
She waits for the inevitable crack of ‘it sure seems like it’s working’, but Sasha just nods. “I get it.”
“Yeah.” Sasha closes her eyes pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry, I know you wanted to tonight.”
Sasha waves a hand. “No problem, Саша.”
Sasha smiles a little, but her stomach still twists a little. “I bought condoms and everything…”
Sasha snorts out a laugh. “Really, it’s okay. I don’t care.”
“Oh. You… don’t?”
“I mean, I don’t mind,” Sasha says. “Obviously I care, but if you don’t want to tonight, then that’s not bad or anything.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, I just… Can’t,” Sasha says unhappily. “It feels good, it does, it’s just…” She frowns as the words hover just out of her grasp.
“It feels too wrong,” Sasha finishes for her. “Like a betrayal.”
“Yeah,” Sasha says, surprised, although she supposes she shouldn’t be. Sasha must have had her fair share of feeling wrong in her body. Suddenly, she feels stupid for feeling embarrassed, but the shame is still there, buried low in her gut.
Sasha licks her lips, considering, then shifts to the side so she’s sitting on the bed too.
Sasha groans. “I fucking hate my dick.”
“I’m sorry,” Sasha says honestly. “Is it… Worse that it’s hard?”
Sasha shrugs. “Harder to ignore.”
Sasha nods. After a few moments, she asks, “You ever fucked like this?”
“You mean as…” Sasha nods at her dick. “With that?”
“No, идиот,” Sasha says, although she sounds affectionate. “Like Sasha?”
“Oh. Er…” Sasha feels herself blushing again. “Not with anyone else.”
“By yourself, then?”
Sasha nods.
“Did you like it?”
Sasha doesn’t say anything.
Sasha nudges her with her ankle. “Hey, you can tell me.”
“It’s kind of awkward,” Sasha admits. “The angle is hard.”
“But you liked it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Sasha admits reluctantly. “It doesn’t finish me off, but it’s nice.”
“You wanna do that then?”
Sasha blinks in surprised. “What?”
“We can still have sex, you know,” Sasha says. “Without your… Um… Can I still call it a dick?”
“It doesn’t stop being a dick just because I don’t want it,” Sasha says.
Sasha shrugs. “I disagree, but okay. We don’t need your dick to have sex.”
Sasha laughs humorlessly. “You want to put your fingers in my ass?”
“Sure,” Sasha says, shrugging. “Sounds fun.”
“Wait, really?”
“God, you’re stupid sometimes,” Sasha says, smiling. “Yes, I want to put my fingers in your ass. Hang on a sec.”
She pushes herself up off the bed and Sasha allows herself a long moment admire the curve of her ass and the length of her legs before she turns her attention to the drawer that Sasha is rummaging through. Something black comes flying out at her face and she ducks. “What–?”
“Gonna need help with that,” Sasha says absently, still pushing clothing aside.
Sasha reaches behind her and grabs the object and holds it up. It seems to be made of leather, with buckles in loops on the sides and a flat panel in the front. “What is this?”
“Oh my God.” Sasha buries her face in her hands. “Are you serious?”
“Should I know this?”
“Sasha Kaidonovksy, you are one of the most clueless beings I have ever met,” Sasha says.
She pulls out something bright red and– oh. Sasha looks between the straps and Sasha’s hand and back and says, “Oh.”
“Yes, oh,” Sasha mocks, but she sounds amused.
“Okay but,” Sasha holds up the straps. “Why would I ever have to know that?”
“Because it’s the twenty-first century? Because internet exists?” Sasha suggests. “Because you are, some of the time, a red-blooded male who probably watched a lot of terrible lesbian porn in your teenage years?”
“Well, I mean–“ Sasha starts, but then Sasha starts laughing and she can’t help but join in. “I’ve never seen one in person, okay?”
Sasha holds up her hands. “No judgment. Well, a little, but not really.” Sasha throws the straps at her but she catches them in her free hand. “I do need help, though, these are a little complicated and it has been a while since I’ve put it on.”
“Why do you have this?” Sasha asks, getting up to help.
Sasha positions the top strap around her hips and pulls the base between her legs. “Do you really think you’re the first girl I’ve fucked?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Sasha says. She buckles one buckle next to Sasha’s right thigh. “But I guess not.”
“Damn straight.” Sasha sounds pleased with herself. “Do this one tighter.”
Sasha pulls the second buckle tighter, until it pulls taut. “So how do you…?”
“Well I don’t do yet,” Sasha says. “It would hurt.” She shifts her hips from side to side a little, then leans across Sasha to the bedside table and pulls out a small bottle of lube. “Lay back?”
Sasha does as she’s told, but nerves are starting to make her body tense. “Sasha…”
“It’s okay,” Sasha says. She starts rolling the little bottle between her hand. “I’ve done this before. You’ve done this before. It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah… Yeah. Okay.” Sasha grabs a pillow and tucks it under her head so she can watch as Sasha pops the cap on the little bottle and lets some of the lube drip onto her fingers.
“Spread your legs a bit,” Sasha says, so she does, and tries not to feel too self-conscious as Sasha gives her a once-over and smiles. “God, you’re pretty.”
Sasha blushes, the heat in her face in direct contrast with the chill of the lube as Sasha rubs two fingers over the cleft of her ass. “Fuck!”
“Sorry. I tried to warm it up.” Sasha rubs over the tight muscle until the lube acclimates to her body temperature, then slowly presses the tip of one finger in. “Alright?”
“Yeah. Good.”
“Breathe out.” Sasha complies, inhaling deeply and then pushing all the air out of her chest, and she feels Sasha push her finger in, past the resistance, centimeter by centimeter until her knuckle bumps against the rim. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Sasha breathes out. It doesn’t hurt, not particularly, but it does stretch and it’s not completely comfortable. “Give me a second.”
She lies there, breathing through her nose, until she can feel her heartbeat thudding around Sasha’s finger, and that feels too weird to stay still, and the discomfort is fading a lot, so she nods and says, “Go ahead.”
Sasha draws her finger back, then works in the tip of a second around the second knuckle. Sasha breathes in again and bears down on the exhale and Sasha works her two fingers in together. She rubs one hand over Sasha’s hip and flexes her fingers.
“Oh, Christ, that feels weird from that angle,” Sasha says, squirming. “What are you doing?”
“Looking,” Sasha replies. “I know it’s… around here…”
Sasha feels her fingers flexing and curling and pressing, and it’s still a little uncomfortable and completely weird. “Try back a little,” she says, a little hoarsely.
“Back? Alright.” Sasha extends her fingers and presses upward toward the ceiling and then a rush of pleasure shoots up through Sasha’s body.
“Fuck!” One of Sasha’s hands fists in the blanket and the other flies up to cover the hand on her hip. “There, there, there…”
Sasha grins between her legs and presses up again, rubbing her fingers back and forth, and Sasha swears loudly. Her cock twitches against her stomach, fully hard, but Sasha’s hand is grounding on her hip and it’s okay.
Sasha fingers her lazily for a little while, murmuring quiet encouragements while Sasha groans and bucks underneath her. The discomfort has faded, to the point where Sasha is able to get three fingers in without Sasha even noticing. She’s sweating now, shaking a little, and she stills Sasha’s hand with her own and whispers, “Fuck, please, fuck me.”
Sasha breaks out into a grin and carefully slips her fingers free. Sasha’s body clenches down around the absence of anything. “Alright. Give me a second.”
Sasha props herself up on her elbow again and watches as Sasha looks around the room, then shrugs and wipes her fingers off on her sheet. She undoes one of the buckles and fits the red dildo into the harness, then buckles it back up and juts her hips out. “What do you think?”
Sasha opens her mouth to say one of the hundreds of ways she could think of to tell Sasha how beautiful she is, but all that comes out is, “Your dick is a communist,” before she breaks down into giggles.
Sasha just stares at her, mouth slightly open, and that makes Sasha laugh harder. “What the fuck,” she finally asks.
Sasha holds up one hand in confused defeat, wiping away a tear with the other. “Just put it inside me.”
Sasha stares for a moment longer, then shakes her head. “I don’t even know what to say.” She flips the cap of the lube open and squirts some into her hand, slicking the dildo up and - Sasha thinks privately - putting on just a bit of a show.
“Come toward the end of the bed,” she orders, so Sasha scoots down until her legs are hanging off the end of bed. Sasha kneels down between them and carefully guides the tip of the dildo to Sasha’s entrance. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Sasha nods and braces her hands on Sasha’s hips and slowly rocks in, burying herself a little farther each time until the straps are flush with Sasha’s ass. She rests for a few seconds to give Sasha time to adjust, then pulls back about halfway and snaps her hips forward again. Sasha bites her lip and pulls Sasha’s hands to her hips and Sasha grins like the sun.
She is so in love and it is disgusting.
Once she’s sure Sasha’s adjusted, she starts up a rhythm of short, shallow thrusts, driving up as close to the spot she found before as possible. It’s hit and miss - Sasha’s fucked some girls who didn’t even need their prostates touched to get off from this, but she doesn’t think Sasha’s one of those girls - but one hand is digging into Sasha’s hip and the other hand is dragging over her chest, fingertips pressing into the two bite marks on Sasha’s neck, curling around her shoulder to fuck into her deep, and soon enough, Sasha is gasping, one leg wrapped around Sasha’s waist, trying to draw her in deeper.
“Fuck, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she chants. “God, please, fuck…”
“Come how you want, baby,” Sasha grunts. “I got you.”
Sasha groans and looks almost angry as she wraps one hand around her dick, but it only takes a few strokes before she’s coming apart under Sasha, moaning louder than Sasha would have given her credit for.
Sasha keeps up her pace to help her through the aftershocks, then slowly pulls out, grimacing at the wet pop the dildo makes when it comes free. She flips open the buckles and lets the straps fall to the ground, then crawls on top of Sasha, splaying her limbs out like a blanket.
“‘m sticky,” Sasha says, sounding mildly disgusted.
“Don’t care. It was good.”
“You didn’t come.”
“Don’t care,” Sasha repeats. “Was really good. Fun.”
Sasha frowns, but shrugs. Sasha is never one to lie about these sort of things, so she just wraps one arm around her waist and hums. “Get me a tissue?”
“Just use the sheet.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“You aren’t the first girl who’s gotten come on my sheets,” Sasha says, burying her face in Sasha’s neck. “So shut up.”
Sasha wipes her stomach off with the corner of the sheet, then rolls over so she can pull the blanket over Sasha and herself.
She can feel herself just drifting off to sleep when Sasha whispers, “Danny Trejo totally got his green card.”
~
The first time Aleksis feels like Sasha, she has he has just passed six feet tall at the age of fifteen and suddenly finds himself face down in his pillow, screaming with rage.
He is almost taller than his father, and his father is twenty-three years older than he is and six feet plus a little bit, and Aleksis is almost there with six more years to add.
Nikita is only five five, projected to hit five ten or eleven and then stop, but he is only thirteen. Who knows what will happen in two years.
Aleksis buries his face in his blanket and clamps the pillow down over it. He fists his hands in the sheets and squeezes for dear life, like he can force the last few inches back inside him. Six feet is ridiculous. His father didn’t reach six feet until he turned nineteen and stopped pretty quickly after that. Aleksis can tell by the strain in his shins and the ache in his back that his body isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
He looks awkward like this, too tall and too skinny because he’s stretched a normal man over his huge frame. Nikita says he should work out more, so that he looks less like a badly drawn stick figure. (Aleksis responds by picking him up and throwing him over his shoulder until Nikita wiggles out of his grip and runs away.)
Aleksis rolls over onto his back, dragging the pillow with him so it still covers his face. His feet hang off of the end of the bed and he wonders if his parents will have to get him another new bed frame. The last one cracked under the strain of him and Nikita jumping onto it; they counted themselves lucky that their father hadn’t smacked them with the pieces. That one was too short too, back then, but it could have become Nikita’s bed if it hadn’t snapped in half.
He rests one hand on his stomach, the other pushing the pillow aside, tucking it under his head so he can look down. His ribs are too sharp, even under his shirt. His body caves in. His chest is too flat. His hips are too narrow and his legs are too long.
He raises one hand up above his face and frowns at it. His fingers are thicker than they used to be. His father has them doing house repairs during the summer and his skin is rough and calloused from climbing ladders and holding hammers. He’s not sure he likes it. They should be a bit shorter, a bit slimmer, he thinks more suited to a pen.
(Nikita laughs at him when he says this and calls him a bourgeois cunt.)
Aleksis never feels like he can write the way he wants like this, when he lies on his bed and hates his own flesh. His fingers don’t move correctly around his pen. He means to write stories of adventures, poems to women, love stories to read to Olya and maybe his history essay for school, if he’s optimistic. Instead, sad girls haunt the pages of his notebooks. Lost girls, sometimes women, sometimes in pain, wandering their way through layers of ink, wondering who betrayed them in their lives that they ended up here. Aleksis too wonders who they are, because he can never think of anything good enough to justify them feeling this out of place.
He reaches over and grabs his notebook by his bedside and flips through his recent stories. There’s one he wrote for Olya after she failed her maths test, and one for Nikita that he then turned in for an assignment. A couple of pages of notes about a possible novel idea - brave adventuring siblings, or maybe soldiers - and a little doodle of Putin with a Hitler moustache in the corner.
Twenty or thirty pages back, he finds the last lost girl story he wrote. It was a little sad, really, about a girl who dressed as her brother as she traveled from village to ancient village. This girl was called Ana, but said her name was Andrei. She bound her chest with cotton rags and wore loose, stolen clothing and heavy boots and worked in fields during the day in exchange for shelter at night.
Nikita teases him for reading the Bible too much. Aleksis counters that he takes inspiration from history and dares him to disagree in front of the Orthodox Church, even though neither of them care very much for religion.
Aleksis digs his wallet out of his back pocket and rifles through it. He’s good for cash right now, about five hundred rubles in his wallet, but he could probably slip a couple of these stories under the table for some of his classmates later. Everyone at school knows that Aleksis is one of the best writers in class, but the assignments he turns in are always fantastical stories and overly romantic poetry. His teacher never suspects that he sells his work off because he never hands in these. They’re too dark for his style, too gritty and serious and ambiguous at the end. Aleksis likes to keep it that way. But after a while, the stories start to burn a hole in his notebook and his conscience and he feels weird throwing them away. At least this way, he gets a few more rubles in his pocket.
He turns to a new page and taps his pen against the paper a few times. He sketches out the face of a girl he calls Sasha, with hair cut short, falling around her ears. Her dress is dirty and it hangs wrong - clearly made for someone older than her, because her chest is too flat and her hips are too narrow and her body caves in. The dress droops in unfortunate places, emphasizing what a poor fit it is.
Her parents never buy her a new one. They are poor and can’t afford the fabric, so their clothes run threadbare and hers hang too big. Maybe next year, they will have clothes that fit. Maybe next year they will make them fit.
She looks at herself in a pane of glass - cracked, until Aleksis rolls his eyes at himself and crosses it out - turning side to side, examining how the dress emaciates her. Her mother turns her away from the mirror and her father urges her to eat some dinner. Any thinner, he jokes, and they will have to start calling her Aleksis–
Aleksis’s eyes grow wide and he drops his pen on the bed. He stares at the paper for a long moment, then tears the page out of his notebook and crumples it up and throws it in his trash bin.
Hours later, when the threadbare dress is still sharp in his mind, he steals his father’s lighter and burns the paper to ash.
~
The first time they fight, he is Aleksis and she is Sasha, questionably, and it's like a scene from a perfectly choreographed movie, the way the shouting falls to silence.
It's over work, probably, or leaving clothes on the floor, maybe, or making dinner, perhaps, but it escalates, the way all proper fights do. It's over long hours and short hours and rent and underwear and pent up rage because someone made a disgusting joke at work and someone else laughed. It's weeks of burning, smoldering coals of fury over that one time someone called him 'Sasha' as a joke when it was true, when she called her 'Aleksis' when it wasn't, when men catcalled her as she walked home from the store on a day when she was he was wearing his thickest, loosest jacket and heaviest boots and carried a switchblade in his back pocket.
It plays out like the slow motion scenes in films they can't afford to go see right now, from the first door slam to the pulsing veins in Aleksis's temple to the way Sasha's eyes seem to flash dark every time she prepares her retorts. And they build up and they build up, until the gap closes between then and there's half a meter of space between them, maybe, and most of that half meter is upwards and they can feel the rage rolling off of each other over one stupid pair of jeans and the word whore.
And in the midst of the anger, someone says Aleksis and someone says Sasha and maybe they're not the right someones, not this time, and everything freezes. Words hang in the air, terrible words, and they each look so stricken that they could reach out and grab their own sentences and take them back and it goes on and on and on, just looking at each other, half panic and half slow-burning rage and a little bit of distilled fear, right at the back of their minds.
Saying:
"You assumed."
"I knew."
"But what if you were wrong?"
Or:
"You were wrong."
"I didn't know."
"You didn't ask."
Or:
"You were wrong."
"And so were you."
"And so are we."
"And so are we."
"And so are we…"
And then. And then.
And then the world unfreezes itself and words fall like shattered glass around them, echoing in the wordless space that feels like heavy cotton wrapping around their heads.
"Aleksis?" Sasha tries first. A timid offering, thin and substanceless, but an offering none the less.
Aleksis nods. "Sasha?"
"More or less."
"More or less," he echoes.
"More or less."
"Are you okay?"
She shrugs one shoulder. "You?"
"My chest is shaking."
Sasha nods. "Mine as well."
"Where do we go now?"
"Now we go to dinner."
Aleksis begrudges her a small chuckle and they go into the kitchen to quietly make dinner and quietly eat together and quietly brush their teeth and quietly go to bed.
In the morning, they pick up the discussion, but the rage is tempered, the anger is softer, and the quiet doesn't feel so forced when Sasha goes off to work.
~
The first time Sasha feels like Aleksis, he is she is swinging her fists like fire in the yard after school and shouting insults at the boys trying to spill her blood.
Or rather, the morning before that.
The morning before that, she stands in front of the mirror, turning from side to side, trying to make her undershirt lie flat against her torso and failing miserably. The morning before that, she thanks her God for her tall father and curses her devil for her shorter mother and tries to make the best of her five foot seven stance. The morning before that, she digs through her parents' first aid kit and finds an elastic bandage, faded from time and stretched a little from when her father injured his knee, but it looks like gold in her hands as she wraps it tightly around her chest until she sacrifices the deepest of her breaths for a mostly flat plane and it's acceptable.
That morning, she wraps up in a loose sweatshirt with the hood pulled up against the light snow and she gets called a boy three times by three different people on the way to class and can't quite hide her small smile as she starts writing down the day's assignments.
But now is not that morning, now is now, and now is when there are three boys in front of her and two backing her up and everyone is infuriated over something someone else said and Sasha will defend her honor against anyone who calls her a манда, no matter why. She dodges kicks and outstretched arms and pushes away the bodies that try to use brute force to barrel down at her and never take momentum into account. It's almost terrifying, and the adrenaline make it almost fun, and she's breathless, humorlessly laughing and trying to stand her own and–
And crack.
It resonates through her body, all around her torso and into her hips and it's not like in the movies, when people crash slowly into the ground and skid slower along the pavement. It's simple, one crack and then her face is in the ground, scraping her cheek, and then she can't breathe because the shallowest of breaths feels like a stab wound, hot and sharp. She gasps out a curse and someone must hear her, because a space clears out in her eye line and then a pair of feet is running toward her. "Sasha! Sasha?"
"Shit!" Sasha presses one hand to her side and her vision whites out for a split second. "Shit shit shit–"
"Get help!" the pair of feet shout, and then everyone scatters, like the headmaster won't know what happened. The feet crouch down into legs but Sasha's vision is swimming too much to see who it is. She doesn't recognize the voice, but that doesn't mean much.
It seems like only a few seconds later when cold hands are gripping her arm and turning her sideways onto her back. She keens quietly and feels something grind inside her chest, and her eyes fly open as indistinct figures say indistinct things over her head.
"Aleksandra?" one of the figures says eventually.
"Yes."
"Sit up."
"Can't."
The figures look down, down to where she's still clutching her chest, and one gently moves her hand away. Pain flares up again and claws at the inside of her throat, threatening to burst when someone presses gently against it.
"Broken rib,” the figure declares. "Call her parents."
Two figures descend upon her and pick her up, one arm under each of hers, and the stretching is almost unbearable but the pain cycles around to be a sort of anesthesia, because when the fog finally clears and she is able to blink and look around, she's lying on her back on a cot in the health center at school with her mother looking down at her as she talks to the headmaster. Sasha groans quietly and puts one hand over her face, until cold fingers gently move it away.
"Sasha, the nurse says we need to go to the hospital," her mother says, more gently than Sasha would have given her credit for. "Can you walk to the car?"
"I– no, I can't."
Her mother sighs. "Alright. Come on."
Arms lace under hers again and she's pulled up, off the cot, and back on her feet. The stretch of her muscles ignites the pain again, and Sasha hisses as she stumbles along, out of the building and into the back seat of her father's car.
The hospital is quick and efficient, almost to the point of neglect, and Sasha's eyes pop open the second before the doctor takes her shirt off to reveal the elastic bandage.
"No, wait–"
But the fabric is over her head, over her eyes, and Sasha can almost see the confusion blooming on her mother's face.
"Sasha, why are you wearing your father's knee bandage?"
The shirt pulls away and Sasha's hair falls into her face and spares her meeting her mother's eyes and she tries to stammer out a convincing lie that hasn't yet formed.
"Were you jumping off the fence again?" her mother asks. "I told you not to do that anymore."
"Yeah," Sasha breathes. "Yeah, I was. Me and Ivan. I, uh. I landed badly."
"And then you broke your rib," her mother says, shaking her head. "Stupid child."
"Sorry," Sasha mumbles. A doctor pushes her back down on the hospital bed and starts cutting the bandage off with a pair of scissors. The second in falls away, Sasha feels her chest start to expand, and then the pain is so severe that she would scream if she had any air left in her lungs.
"Ah, damn," the doctor says quietly. Sasha looks down at her bare skin and it's dark purple now along the right side of her rib cage, with a patch of red right where the pain is worse. "Definitely a fracture."
"What do you do about that?"
The doctor's voice fades in and out with her mother's, and Sasha closes her eyes, resists the urge to cover her chest again, and tries to breathe as slowly as she can. If she focuses hard enough, she feels the grind of bone against bone, just a little bit. It's almost cathartic, to focus on it, to imagine the slight grind of marrow with every breath, and she pulls her focus to that and feels the pain slowly start to drain out of her focus, turning into a dull, muted, throbbing red in the back of her mind.
The doctor pulls her out of her reverie sometime later to examine her, to make sure her organs are working fine – fit for the black market, he joked, and Sasha would have punched him if her arm could extend that far – and then she swallows some pills that slowly make the red fade into grey.
"Ice and rest," the doctor says as her mother leads her out. "Ice and rest and take something for the pain."
"Don't spend anymore time with Ivan," her mother says as she drives back to their house. "He's a bad influence on you." She shakes her head. "Fighting and climbing fences. When I was your age, the KGB would have smacked you for trying to escape Russia."
"Wasn't trying to escape Russia," Sasha murmurs. Her mouth doesn't feel like it's working properly.
"I know," her mother replies. "I never said they would be right."
Sasha snorts and instantly regrets it, and as she lies in bed, ice taped to her chest, she almost regrets ever trying at all.
~
When they get married, he is Aleksis and he was almost Sasha and he punches a wall in the tiny waiting room as one of his bridesmaids adjusts his dress and murmurs, "Hold still, Sasha."
Aleksis grits his teeth and holds his arms back above his head. Alla grabs another pinch of fabric and runs a safety pin through the inside, pushing it closed. "Did you even get this sized?"
"It fit three months ago," Aleksis says. "It's been a stressful three months."
Alla hums in sympathy. "At least Aleksis was helpful. You remember when Lena got married, Samir made her do everything."
"Samir didn't want to get married," Aleksis shoots back. "He was an idiot for agreeing."
Alla laughs. "Don't be too happy about love, then."
Aleksis rubs his face with one hand before returning it over his head. "Is it stupid that I'm nervous?"
"No, of course not." Alla sets the pins down and rests her hands on Aleksis's shoulders. "Sasha, I know marriage is big and scary, but you love Aleksis, don't you?"
"Of course," Aleksis says immediately.
"So you'll be fine," Alla says with a faint smile. She pats Aleksis's cheek, then turns and starts digging through a makeup bag. "What do you want?"
Aleksis makes a face behind her back. "Something simple. Not a lot."
"Alright. Sit."
Aleksis carefully sits down on the stool next to the mirror and frowns at the way his breasts tug the dress up. Alla bends down a little with a container of foundation and starts brushing it on. "You don't think I'm making a bad decision, do you?"
"Of course not," Alla says. "You've been together for what, two and a half years?"
"Two years, eight months."
"Exactly. And you've never been able to be around anyone for that long," Alla says. "Not even Vanya."
Aleksis sighs. "Yeah, I suppose."
"You made a good choice, Sasha. You'll be fine." Alla sets the brush down and picks up an eyeliner pencil.
"I'm kind of worried what sort of speech Vanya's worked up," Aleksis muses, closing his eyes.
"He'll probably start off with a five minute tirade about being asked to be your maid of honor," Alla replies. Aleksis laughs. "Watch it! I don't want to mess up."
"Right, sorry." Aleksis schools his face into passivity again.
Alla wipes a stray mark away with her thumb. "Really, though, he'll do good. He's been working on it for weeks."
"I can still guarantee that he'll say something about having to walk in with Nikita."
"He's a big boy, he can handle it." Alla wipes away a couple more smudges, then steps back. "Simple. Go look."
Aleksis eases himself up and crosses the room to the mirror. He reaches up with one hand and runs a finger over the reflection of line of his face, along his jaw, and down the slope of his shoulders to the line of his dress.
"Well?" Alla's head appears by his shoulder in the mirror. "What do you think?"
"I look…" Aleksis bites his lip. "I look like a woman about to get married."
Alla chuckles. "I should hope so. Anything else I need to do?"
"No," Aleksis says faintly. "No, this is good."
He feels a hand rub between his shoulder blades and has to work hard not to pull away. "You'll be fine, Sasha."
"I know."
"Okay, good." Alla pulls away and he lets his shoulders slump, just a bit. "It's nearly time."
Aleksis takes a deep breath, then nods and turns around. "I'm set."
They duck out of the tiny room and into the hall where the rest of the party waits. Aleksis approaches them all cautiously, brushes off the gasps and excited compliments and shuffles to the back of the line. Ivan leans over with a murmured compliment and Aleksis smiles and slips his hand into his, just for a second, and squeezes before letting go.
"Thank you for picking a small church," he whispers.
"Thank you for letting me call you maid of honor," Aleksis whispers back.
Ivan grins. "You could have gone with man of honor."
"Not on your life, Vanya." Aleksis smirks back.
And then someone is rushing around, pushing them all into line, and the doors are opening and Aleksis feels light headed as he follows Ivan following Alla following Katja following the path they've walked four times today in practice, only about fifteen meters but each one feels like a mile. Aleksis squares his shoulders and breathes and steps out onto the carpet and feels the breath leave his chest when he looks up and sees Aleksis standing by the priest. He he catches Aleksis's gaze and watches his eyes grow wide and his face break out into a grin and he feels the panic in his chest subside, little by little, as he approaches.
They didn't write vows - the Orthodox Church supplied them, and they were fine - and Aleksis is grateful for the fact that he doesn't have to try to say anything except "I do" when the priest prompts him. He can feel eyes on him, watching his every move, watching Sasha become Mrs. Aleksandra Kaidonovskaya and yet Aleksandr Kaidonovsky is standing at the head of the church twice over today. Aleksis reaches forward and grabs Aleksis's hand, and he smiles down at him, eyes twinkling.
When the priest pronounces them husband and wife - laughably, so laughably - Aleksis reaches up and tugs him down and presses their lips together and there might be applause in the background. There might be crying. Aleksis might be crying. But Aleksis doesn't care.
They pull away, foreheads pressed together, and Aleksis grins, settling his hands on silk-clad hips and murmurs, "My beautiful husband."
Aleksis feels his eyes stinging and laughter bubbles its way out of his mouth, absolutely content laughter that he feels like his body can't contain. "My beautiful husband."
If there are flashes, they don't see them. If there is talking, they don't hear it. If Ivan's voice cracks in the middle of his speech and he has to pause for just a second, then Aleksis doesn't care, because his hand is linked with Aleksis's and his best friend is raising a glass and he's Mr. Aleksandr Kaidonovsky and that feels good.
~
The first time Sasha sees Aleksis cry, she is Sasha and she is also Sasha and it's an abrupt switch, one morning before work, when Aleksis goes into the bedroom to put on a different coat and two minutes later, Sasha comes in too to see Aleksis - no, Sasha now - sitting on the floor, barely moving, fists clenched by her sides and one tear track burning on the right side of her face. Maybe on the left too, Sasha can't see from the doorway.
"Sweetheart?"
Sasha looks up, startled, then quickly bows her head and rubs at her face where the tear edges into her beard. "Get out."
Sasha licks her lips. "Don't be a bastard, come on–"
"Sasha, please, just leave."
"Are you embarrassed?" Sasha crosses her arms and leans in the doorway. "To cry in front of me?"
A muscle in Sasha's jaw twitches, visible under her beard, just over the collar of her jacket.
"What's going on?"
"The shift."
Sasha sighs and pushes off of the door frame to go sit on the bed. She leans down and rubs Sasha's shoulder with one hand. "I'm sorry."
"Me too."
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know."
Sasha hums. "Maybe your long coat today? It's not so cold out."
"Maybe." Her voice is barely above a whisper, and rougher than normal.
Sasha sighs. "Come on, love, let's get up. You need to leave soon."
"They will call me Aleksandr all day. Or Aleksis."
"I know."
"I don't want them to call me Aleksis."
"I know."
"I don't want to talk to them."
"It's only today," Sasha says. "When you come home tonight, you can stop being Aleksis. Just pretend for me today, okay?"
"Okay." Sasha pushes herself up off the floor and stretches, fingers brushing the top of the ceiling, then pulls her long coat out of the closet and swings it around over her shoulders. "Tonight?"
"Tonight. Promise."
"Good." Sasha rolls her shoulders and then slumps a little into herself, and then she's out the front door, letting in a gust of cold wind behind her.
Sasha lies back on the bed and drapes one arm over her eyes and lets herself feel frustration for a minute, for herself and her partner and for their job, and then she rolls back off and goes to finish eating breakfast.
Later, she makes sure to send Sasha a text at work.
Я люблю тебя, Саша.
I love you, Sasha.
~
The first morning they spend together in their new place, in a tiny apartment on the edge of the Belozersky District, he is Aleksis and he is also Aleksis and–
"Good morning, Sasha."
“Nope."
Aleksis looks up, still rubbing sleep from one eye, and sees Sasha leaning against the breakfast bar in a sweater and underwear, drinking one cup of coffee with another by her elbow and scanning the front page of the paper and then it dawns on him.
"…Good morning, Aleksis."
"Morning."
He pushes a cup of coffee toward Aleksis and turns the page of the paper and Aleksis smiles as he sits down and accepts the warm mug on the counter.
~
The first time they drift, she is he is Aleksis is Sasha is her is him is Sasha is Aleksis and it hurts a little bit.
First drifts are rough, they always say, imperfect and scary and unlike anything you know. A few of the Jaeger Academy students before them had panic attacks, or ran out of the room to vomit, or simply walked out dazed with their partner trailing behind them, ready to catch them if they fell. Aleksis watches them go as they wait outside the lab and Sasha squeezes his hand. "We will be fine, love."
Aleksis nods. "I know."
The lab uses the basic Pons systems for initial drift testing, with the pulsing lights from the ends of the clamps still visible through the thin layer of padding. The drift instructor fits Sasha first, then Aleksis, and they sit stiffly as the helmets are secured on their heads. The instructor bustles off to - adjust settings, take vital signs, they don't know anymore. Their training is gone from their minds and it almost feels like they're already synced, the way their nervousness rolls off of their shoulders like waves.
"Aleksandra, ready?"
"Yes," Sasha says, more steadily than she feels.
"Aleksandr, ready?"
"Ready."
"Very good. Initiating drift in five… Four… Three… Two… One."
He flips a switch, or presses a button, or something happens, because suddenly it feels like an electric shock, straight through their heads and down their spines. Sasha gasps quietly and grips the edges of the chair's arms, breathing hard through her nose, and she can see Aleksis doing the same thing next to her. It prickles and it invades and their bodies are buzzing with energy.
And then the drift starts.
She is nine years old and chasing Ivan around the Kaidonovsky house is five rooms and Nikita has to share with loud club music, thudding in her chest as Irina laughs at bullet points in hastily written shorthand for a homework assignment with story notes in the margins of first time she aced a math exam and her father was so pleased anger and shouting through the door who's it from who's it from layering sweaters over sweaters six-one six-two it isn't going to stop five-eight five-nine it's slowing down two inches from being stabbed dodge dodge Sasha Sasha Sasha Sasha Aleksandr Aleksandr stop dressing like a boy Sasha is too feminine we need to raise a fighter thudding pain in each rib how do you say this letter bleeding this shouldn't be happening these sharp planes hurt to look at wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrongwrongwrongwrong–
Sasha's eyes fly open and her breath is ragged in her own ears.
–wrongwrongwrongdodgeright flicked the knife closed on his right knuckle four stitches long coat kicks up behind her two shots too many Nikita you'll be killed welcome to the Sochi Olympics first girlfriend Olya second boyfriend Dmitry wrongwrongwrong whywhywhy can't sleep can't sleep what a girl what a bitch are you afraid of a girl with a cock? not really not really at all are you sure you want to work Moscow State wants you whywhywhywhywhy–
Aleksis grits his teeth and feels tears threatening to bead in the corners of his eyes.
–nonononono these clothes don't fit anymore Aleksandr Kaidonovsky always? no not always day watch promotion block D be careful say nothing say nothing Aleksis Sasha wrongwrongWRONG promotion to Pyatak good luck son breathe through the pain don't pass out in the car your chin is so weak you should stop shaving third time this month you've punched that boy pussy bitch fucking dyke your turn to set the table how did you mess up stroganoff? soaked through the skin but Nikita is laughing so brightly the sun sets so pretty on Sofia's shoulders what's the word is there a word? going to tear every inch of skin away–
"And we should be stable." The drift instructor's voice sounds distant and foggy, but there, cutting through the blue haze. "Are you still with me?"
With a bit of difficulty, Aleksis nods and Sasha murmurs something indistinct.
"Your neural handshake appears to be holding strong. In a few moments, we'll begin testing."
–why work in a prison of all places? do you like Aleksis or Sasha today? what would your father think what would Ivan think duck faster next time ten stitches in your forehead I don't care what's wrong with you what's wrong with me why why why whywhywhy–
Aleksis?
Aleksis jumps a little in his seat.
Aleksis? Sasha?
I don't know.
Sasha nods microscopically, but Aleksis catches the motion in the corner of his vision.
Sasha?
Maybe.
Aleksis?
Maybe.
Breathe in, breathe out.
It hurts.
You hurt.
It's true. They do.
Hold my hand.
I can't see your hand.
Find me.
I'm here.
Their fingers lace together, and someone squeezes gently.
Thud thud thud thud thud loud in their ears, slightly out of time.
–screaming into this pillow you'll never make it you'll never make it you'll never be right your writing grades are excellent have you considered a career why are we moving? Good morning, Sasha. Nope. Good morning Aleksis. Morning. you didn't know neither did you you were wrong I was wrong I am wrong hangover feels like a spike in your brain never smoking again this is disgusting you're fired the growth plate is broken you'll need a cast–
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
I'm here.
Don't get lost.
I won't.
Their hands shake together.
I miss Irina.
You never met Irina.
You never met Andrei.
I love Andrei.
Sasha bites her lip and frowns a little.
Irina knew.
Who's Irina?
Your father never suspected.
Aleksis closes his eyes again.
I was at Pyatak before you.
No you weren't.
We are there together.
We aren't going back.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
It's okay.
You're okay.
We're okay.
Thud.
Thud.
~
The first time anyone else finds out - anyone at all - he is actually Aleksis and she is actually Sasha and it's almost laughable that they feel at peace in their bodies the one time someone asks about it.
It's their drift instructor, the German scientist, the one who watched them fall out of the drift the very first time. Luka Reiniger, neurowissenschaftenarzt aus Bayern, and he watched them tug the Pons systems off of their heads, gasping and panting, and wrote down notes on his clipboard as they took shaky sips of water. He complimented them on their strong neural handshake, made recommendations in the margins of his notes, and always made sure they had stopped shaking before he kicked them out and invited the next group in. He was kind and forgiving and stable and that's what keeps the two of them from snapping when he finds them after a day of training.
"I just wanted to clarify," he says, sounding far more unsure of himself than inside the academy. "You're Aleksis and you're Sasha, right? Because sometimes I see you called Aleksis and you called Sasha and I only want to be sure."
Aleksis opens his mouth and Sasha tilts her head, eyes widening slightly, but neither of them say anything.
Luka raises his eyebrows. "Did I get that backwards?"
"No, you, er. You got that right," Sasha says finally. "Both bits."
"What?"
"She is Sasha, but Aleksis sometimes," Aleksis volunteers quietly. "And I am Aleksis, but Sasha sometimes."
"Are those naming traditions in Russia?" Luka asks.
"Um…"
Sasha looks up at Aleksis, and Aleksis can see the panic creeping into her eyes. He reaches down and grabs her hand and and she squeezes his fingers tightly.
Luka looks back and forth between them. "Do you prefer those some days?" he asks cautiously.
Aleksis falters, then nods shortly, just once.
Luka looks around behind him, quickly, then nods toward the hallway. "Let's go out."
Aleksis feels a rush of cold panic in his chest, but he turns and follows the man through the double doors, Sasha following one step behind.
Luka leads them down the hallway a little ways, into an empty lecture room, and closes the door behind him. Aleksis sidles closer to Sasha and Sasha squeezes his hand and they can head each other's pulses ring loud and fast in their heads.
Luka locks the door, then turns around, hands behind his back. "What names would you prefer right now?"
"Sasha," Sasha says quietly.
"Aleksis."
"Sasha, Aleksis," Luka says, nodding between them. "Right. But sometimes…?"
The silence hangs between them for a long moment, before Sasha speaks. "Sometimes I like Aleksis, and sometimes Aleksis likes Sasha."
Luka nods. "Depending on how you feel that day, yes?"
Sasha's hand twitches a little in surprise, but she nods, jerkily. "Yes."
"Do you, um…" Luka waves his hands back and forth a little. "You switch, yes? Switch, ah, what's the word? Geschlecht?"
Sasha and Aleksis exchange confused glances. "What?"
"I don't know the English word," Luka says. "But where you feel more as a man, or more as a woman, or sometimes both, or not at all? Do you have a word for that in Russian?"
"I think he means 'пол'," Aleksis says.
"Or 'гендер'," Sasha replies.
Luka glances back and forth between them, looking more nervous than either of them had ever seen him. "Yes?"
Sasha takes a deep breath, then lets it out. "Tell no one, okay?" she says harshly.
"No one," Aleksis repeats.
Luka holds up his hands. "Of course not, of course not. I only wish to understand."
Sasha glances at Aleksis out of the corner of her eye. "Do you think he's trustworthy?" she murmurs in Russian.
Aleksis considers for a moment, then nods. "I think so, yes."
"Good." Sasha nods at Luka. "We… We change sometimes. We call it the смена, it's just when we… change."
"Sasha sometimes feels more… Мужской, more masculine, sometimes she is not she, sometimes he is he."
"And Aleksis is the same," Sasha says. "Sometimes he is he and sometimes she is she, more... женский."
"Feminine," Aleksis supplies.
"Yes, like that. Sometimes we change. Sometimes we feel…" Sasha gestures vaguely at the ceiling. "Wrong."
Luka nods. "I understand."
"Do you?" Aleksis asks.
"Sort of," Luka says. "I don't feel that, but I understand what you mean."
"Right. Good." Sasha shifts uncomfortably. "Are you… What are you going to do?"
Luka looks confused. "What?"
"Are you doing to report us?" Aleksis cuts in. "Remove us from the program?"
"No, of course not. Why would we do that?" Luka asks, eyebrows drawn together. "You two have an extremely strong neural handshake, you're on track to be excellent Jaeger pilots. Why would we remove you?"
Sasha blinks and Aleksis looks at the ground. "You are not from Russia, Herr Reiniger. You do not feel as we feel when in Russia."
"Are there not others in Russia?" Luka asks. "Others who feel wrong and feel as you do?"
"Yes, but you do not speak of it," Aleksis says. "Not if you wish to survive."
Luka swallows and nods. "I see. In my country, it's easier. Passports and things, you can change them if you wish to."
"If only we grew up in Germany," Sasha says, only a little bitterly.
"My apologies," Luka says, holding up his hands. "Perhaps when you come in for drift testing, you will tell me what name you like that day?"
"Oh. Yes, okay," Sasha says. "But do not–"
"I won't tell anyone," Luka says. "I promise. It's not my place or my job to expose you if you don't wish to be."
Aleksis nods. "Good." He glances down at his watch. "Sasha, we should go, it's late."
Luka nods. "Go, you have morning workout at oh five hundred. "
Sasha nods. "Thank you, Herr Reiniger." She unlocks the door and walks out, and Aleksis follows with a nod of his own. Luka watches them leave, then quietly closes the door behind them.
The next time they drift, he is Aleksis and he is also Aleksis and Luka doesn't call him Sasha once.
~
The first time they fight a kaiju, see it properly, huge and towering in front of them in the icy Pacific waters, she was supposed to be Sasha and he was supposed to be Aleksis and they were supposed to be celebrating their fifth anniversary, but things never really work out like that.
They call it Raythe, diminutive of Raytheon, ironically named because Raytheon means tolerant and helpful to humanity, and this monster tears through the Okhotsk Sea on a quest for destruction, as far as they can tell.
Tolerant and helpful indeed.
It's not like the tests, not even the late late ones where they're awakened by screaming sirens and ordered into that Jaeger within five minutes of scrambling out of bed. They learn to force adrenaline through their veins at a moment’s notice, but those are only tests. They can do tests and simulation drops and have synced dreams about Trespasser and Hundun and Kaiceph and Scissure like they’ve trained for years, but it’s not the same. It’s hurriedly putting clothes back on and the low roll in their stomachs battling the ice of adrenaline and boots tossed across the room being laced back on in record time and being in each other’s heads so much that they barely notice when the neural handshake initiates.
One of them gasps as they touch down in the Okhotsk Sea and the water ripples out around them in huge, foaming waves. In the distance, they can see something rolling back toward them, pushing water toward their own waves and creating breaks. The kaiju’s head rises slowly out of the water, mouth open, and roars loudly. Aleksis is absurdly reminded for a spilt second of watching Godzilla when he was a child.
He feels Sasha tensing to his right, rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck. He feels the pop along his own spine.
“Just like in the simulators?” she says, grinning.
Aleksis nods. “Just like the simulators.”
Sasha hauls her right foot forward, and Aleksis follows with his left, and soon they’re charging toward Raythe, which screams at them and rears back onto its hind legs. Sasha laughs, with just an edge of hysteria, and Cherno Alpha pounds its fists together in a taunt.
Raythe lunges at them and Aleksis feels like he’s about to fall out of his armor when Cherno ducks to the side. Sasha throws her arm out to the side, slamming into the back of Raythe’s head, and the kaiju crashes hard into the ocean. Water rushes up around the tops of Cherno’s legs, then runs back down again.
Raythe shoots back up on the other side, throwing them off balance. “Grab it!” Sasha screams. Aleksis reaches out and manages to grab– the shoulder, maybe, or some sort of neck muscle, he’s not sure. “Hold it!” He squeezes tighter and hears the creak of metal and the bellowing of the kaiju.
“Engaging Z14!” Sasha presses a couple of buttons on her control panel and the Conn-Pod fills with the crackle of electricity. The kaiju shrieks as four hundred thousand volts shoot through its neck. Aleksis jerks it forward and Sasha drives Cherno’s right fist into its face. Raythe’s resulting scream shakes the Conn-Pod.
“Again!” Aleksis shouts over the noise. “Engage hydraulics!”
“You do it!” Aleksis reaches over and selects the correct option on Sasha’s panel, and then Cherno lurches backwards as the right arm’s hydraulics kick in and drive forward. Raythe screams again, and Cherno’s fist comes away spattered in blue.
“Well done, Cherno, keep it up,” LOCCENT says in their ear.
Aleksis activates the hydraulics again and Sasha punches straight into the kaiju’s throat, cutting off Raythe’s bellowing with a strangled crack. “Activate ‘Roll of Nickels’!”
Sasha laughs again, loud and breathless. “Oh, Aleksis, don’t you want a turn?”
Aleksis grins at her through his helmet and approves the activation. Raythe falls back into the water; Cherno shakes as the cylinders slide into place and armored metal fingers curl around them.
“Give it hell, my love,” Sasha says.
Aleksis nods and slams Cherno’s left fist into the kaiju’s exposed head once, twice, three and four times as the hydraulics hiss and groan into the water. Blue leaks into the ocean, spreading and glowing over the surface of the water.
“Signal is wavering, Cherno,” LOCCENT says in their earpieces. “Finish this bastard off.”
Sasha activates the foot spikes in her side, then lifts her leg up and slams it into Raythe’s body. “Rip its head off, darling.”
Aleksis disables ‘Roll of Nickels’ and they reach down together, fingers curling around Raythe’s struggling head. Sasha smirks and activates the Z14 again, and the resulting shock stuns Raythe just long enough that they can twist its head to the side and yank it from its body. Raythe’s scream is cut off and turns into a wet gurgling as blue gushes from the head, drenching Cherno’s front and coloring the ocean.
Aleksis turns to Sasha and nods at their control screen. “Do you want to take it home?”
“What, and use it as living room decorations?” Sasha replies, grinning. “You get Vladivostok to approve it, it’s alright with me.”
“Kaiju signal is gone,” LOCCENT declares. “Cherno Alpha, return to base.”
“Yes, sir,” Sasha says. “With or without kaiju bastard?”
There’s a rush of static that might be a sigh or a laugh, and then, “With, I suppose. Give K-Sciences something to do. As long as it won’t get back up again.”
“I don’t think it will, sir,” Aleksis says brightly.
“Very well. Return to base with kaiju bastard.”
They start laughing and they can’t stop for a very long time, not even after Aleksis mutes their comms so that LOCCENT doesn’t yell at them, not even when Sasha has to push up her visor to wipe her tears away, not even when the pure energy running through them deserts them and they feel like they’re carrying Cherno on their backs.
“Holy shit,” Aleksis says.
Sasha shakes her head. “I know.”
“Holy shit, Sasha.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“That motherfucker is big.”
“I know.” Sasha’s grin is teasing. “I was there.”
Aleksis smacks at her, but his armor doesn’t allow him that far. “Come on, let’s get this bastard back to base. I believe we were busy when they sounded the alarm.”
They bend down and Aleksis grabs onto Raythe’s tail. Sasha tucks the head under her arm and they send out waves of watered-down blue all the way back to Vladivostok. There are crowds of people cheering their return, a small group of scientists who immediately take off toward the kaiju corpse as soon as they set it down on the shore, and Sasha and Aleksis let themselves be congratulated while the high is still tingling in their heads.
~
They drift for eighteen hours, once, and in the hangover the next day, he can’t even say Aleksis, let alone be it, and she’s only Sasha because her PPDC tags say so.
They were on patrol for an expected attack, and the expected attack came twelve hours into their drift, in Seoul of all places. Helicopters came and picked them up by the edge of the Okhotsk Sea and set them down on the coast of a ravaged city and it took an hour to get the bastard out of South Korea and into the ocean, and another few hours to beat it down - their Tesla coils burned out after one of Atticon’s claws severed the wires, and its body was armored five or six inches down, so even with ‘Roll of Nickels’, even with the spikes in their feet, even with Aleksis screaming and Sasha straining muscles trying to beat it down, it took ages for the shell to crack and longer still before the water turned blue and half-dried blood got in the cracks of Cherno’s hands. They were exhausted as they stood in the Yellow Sea with shallow waves licking at Cherno’s ankle joints and they radio in for pickup. Tokyo’s LOCCENT picked them up and dragged them back to the Tokyo Shatterdome, because it had been eighteen hours and it was five in the morning and Aleksis vomited into the Pacific Ocean and Sasha barely made it five steps before one of Echo Sabre’s techs had to rush over to catch her. They were led down to the barracks and offered single rooms but Sasha just waved them off and they collapsed onto the bed together without even stripping out of their underarmor.
Sasha wakes up in the morning, bleary, and immediately runs to the barracks’ bathroom and throws up. She hears Aleksis groaning from the bed and her head hurts against the white plastic of the toilet seat.
“Get me some water?” Sasha calls weakly.
Aleksis grunts and waves his hand at the door.
Yeah, fuck you too.
Aleksis chuckles in the other room.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say a word.” Aleksis groans again, louder this time, as he rolls out of bed. The second his feet touch the floor, Sasha reels another wave of nausea rolling through her belly.
“Fuck…”
“Alright?”
“Would be, if you could get me some water.”
“Gonna pour it on your fucking head,” Aleksis says, leaning heavily in the door frame.
“That’s okay, some of it will end up in my mouth.” Sasha flushes the toilet and pushes herself away from it.
Aleksis steps over her legs and leans over the sink. He fills up the small metal cup on the counter and passes it down. Sasha drains it gratefully and Aleksis’s stomach twists.
He refills it, then sits down hard next to her and tucks himself under her arm. “How are you feeling today?”
“Sore,” Sasha replies. “Everywhere. My head hurts, and my back.”
“I can tell.” He nudges her to the side with his shoulder and starts working at the tense muscles under her shoulder blades. She groans in appreciation and lets her head fall forward.
“God, yes.”
Aleksis smiles and hums and works the heels of his hands down her spine, rolling the tension outward until Sasha looks like she’s not about to shatter at any touch. He feels looser after he finishes, and rolls his shoulders forward. Sasha winces at the popping noises.
“Do you think they’ll make us go back to Vladivostok today?” Sasha asks.
“Perhaps. Probably not,” Aleksis says. “Cherno was badly hurt, I think Echo’s mechanics will want to look at her first.”
“That could take days.”
“I don’t want to leave with out Cherno,” Aleksis says, glancing up at the side of Sasha’s face. “Do you?”
Sasha frowns. “Not really.”
“Then we stay,” Aleksis says, with an air of finality. “Until Cherno is ready.”
“Alright.”
They sit on the floor of the bathroom for a while, until Aleksis knocks his knee against Sasha’s and says, “Hey, get out, I need to piss.”
Sasha scowls, but rolls up onto her knees and all but crawls out to the barracks side of the doorway.
Aleksis sticks his tongue out. “You’re too kind.” He pushes himself up and draws up the toilet seat and undoes the zipper of his underarmor pants and–
“Ah, son of a bitch.”
“What’s wrong?” Sasha asks from the other room.
“It seems like you’ve got the dick right now.”
“…What?”
Aleksis feels like his stomach has dropped out. “Check your pants.”
He hears a zipper and a rustle of cloth, and then Sasha gasps, very very quietly. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” Aleksis pushes his underarmor pants down and flips down the seat and sits on the toilet. “I’m going back to bed.”
By the time he washes his hands and comes back into the barracks, Sasha’s full seven foot frame is curled into half its size in the bed, but Aleksis can tell she’s not asleep yet. He slides in behind her and wraps one arm around her, thumb brushing over her stomach. Sasha shivers, but she allows Aleksis to tuck his head on her shoulder, next to her beard, and falls asleep much more easily.
The next time they wake up, Sasha falls out of bed because she thinks she’s still seven feet tall.
Three hours after that, Aleksis ends up lying on his back in bed, running one hand over his chest and feeling like he’s fifteen again.
A few hours after that, Sasha nearly breaks down crying when Aleksis calls her ‘Sasha’, even though neither of them speak out loud. Both of them agree to pretend it never happened.
Aleksis goes and gets them food - lunch, or dinner, or something, they have no idea what time it is anymore - and neither of them manage to keep it down.
One of them screams into the pillow and the other rubs their back because they get caught mid-transition and can’t call it anything that doesn’t taste like poison and feel like sandpaper in their throats or molten metal in their mouths and sound like learning to be Sasha and Aleksis all over again.
Aleksis’s nose drips blood down onto his breasts and Aleksis gently cleans him up with strip after strip of toilet paper.
Sasha punches a wall because she can feel the veins pulsing in Aleksis’s temples and it hurts in the very back of her throat, even though he’s three floors away.
Aleksis feels eyes on the back of his neck when Sasha visits Cherno and Echo’s mechanical team. Cherno is healing nicely. Aleksis knows that Sasha’s heart feels warm.
Three days later and they’re on a plane back to Vladivostok, Cherno in tow, and Sasha brushes bleach blonde bangs off of her forehead and says, “Eighteen hours. Never again.”
“Never again,” Sasha agrees, and squeezes her hand.
~
The first time they lose… Well. The first time they lose is the last time they lose, and she is Sasha and he is Aleksis and neither of them know who is in whose body anymore. That's gone now.
The first time any Ranger loses is the last time, more often than not. Not Stacker Pentecost and not Raleigh Becket, maybe, but the rest of them are only mortal, flesh wrapped in wire and metal and sparks, surrounded by water. But they're not so different, really, from So-Yi and Yuna, or the pilots of Eden Assassin that they never even met. Their records mean nothing; those eighteen hours spent locked in each others' heads, the coastline preserved and the government slipping handouts under the table back in Vladivostok and one and two and three and four and five and six, and sheets of metal are only sheets of metal when they're corroding from the outside in and crushed past repair.
The Conn-Pod is loud as Sasha bellows out orders, as metal creaks and screams and Crimson goes down, Hu and Jin and Cheung go down and fury crackles through the drift, tinged with sadness that they have no time for. Their armor is sizzling and degrading and there is a kaiju on their front and a kaiju on their back and it's all they can do to shake them off.
Until it isn't anything they can do.
The walls are shattered around then and water is rushing around them and it's fire and ice, hot wires burning against their skin, into their bodies not for the first time but now for the last. Sasha screams and screams and tears against the sensors and Aleksis thrashes in the water the way her brain orders him to, and then the water rises, the water rises, and the sound in the Conn-Pod is replaced with the drift.
Aleksis can still hear Sasha screaming, faintly, muffled by the ocean, but her voice is still loud, ringing in his ears, chanting, "No, no, no!" as her armor keeps her stuck, reaching out, and the sensors are useless by now. Cherno's gone, disconnected and shattered and torn apart and Aleksis feels the ache heavy in his chest.
"No! Fuck!"
"Sasha."
"Shut up!"
"Sasha."
"Aleksis! Come on!"
"I love you, Sasha."
In his mind, he sees her face go slack, feels her arms lower fractionally, just for a second, and in that second, in the drift, there is silence.
One and two and three and four and five and six and eighteen hours and fourteen years and then–
"No!"
Something smashes down over the front of the Conn-Pod, and then there's no more silence. There's just fire.
They don't have time to register the heat and they don't have time to register the pain because everything is melted ice and liquid fire, fighting over who will take them first and somewhere in the back of Sasha's mind, she hums a song that she once heard.
"It's a long way down, my love."
"I know."
And it is.
It's a long way down as the drift crackles and fades out and the shell hits the bottom with no more thoughts thrumming through it.