The White Rosebush

Chapter 12: The Not-So-Terrible Ivan

Chapter 12: The Not-So-Terrible Ivan

I was scared. This was so wrong. Ivan didn't get scared; he just didn't. He didn't get sad. Ivan didn't have emotions. If he was upset, nobody knew; he would keep it hidden. But what if that's it? What if that's the reason that he was so distraught? No, distraught didn't even begin to describe him; he was beyond distraught. I had never seen a person in such a state. He hadn't even reacted to my presence since I had climbed my way out of his hug.

"Eti ruki yavlyayut·sya nositelyami smerti..." he muttered, rocking back and forth and staring at his hands with wide, unseeing eyes. I shivered nervously as he repeated the haunting chant over and over and over again.

"Ivan..." I pressed softly. He looked at me for a moment, but there was no recognition in his eyes, no evidence he had even seen me.  "You need to tell me what's wrong."

"Ushli..." he whispered. I shook my head slightly; there was something very wrong. He wouldn't even speak English.

"Ivan!" I snapped a bit more firmly, grabbing his face and forcing him to look at me. He blinked, still shaking, but his gaze seemed less glazed.

"Are you ok?" He suddenly smarted up, as if something had shocked him back into reality.

"Nyet," he snapped, raising to his feet. "Do you see this?!" he roared, sticking his hand into my face so quickly that it hit me full in the nose. I staggered backward a few steps.

"Your hand?"

"Moya ruka?" he laughed crazily. I got goosebumps. "My hand, she says... This is not a hand."

"Of course it is, Ivan," I whispered gently. There was something seriously wrong with him. Where all those displays of emotionless cruelty he had shown around me just ways of hiding it? Or was this young leader truly insane, driven into craziness by too much stress on too young a mind? Perhaps he'd been through a lot in his past? A million questions battered my head, but I didn't dare ask any of them.

"Do not speak to me like I'm some sort of abashed child!" he raged, now angry. How odd. He had  went from scared to sad to emotionless to angry in the course of a few minutes.

"I'm sorry."

"You're not. They never are. I'll tell you who's sorry! My father is sorry. My entire family is sorry. Nobody is ever sorry until they have been punished. Punished by this!" he thrust his hand in my face again.

"It's just a hand." It was getting hard for me to keep my composure. For the first time ever, the Russian was truly scaring me.

"It's not a hand. It's a murder weapon."

"Ivan, you are not making any sense."

"It's just as well..." He backed up against a wall, sunk to the floor, and began staring at his hands again. I walked over him wearily, grabbed one of them, and got on my kness in front of him, and looked at him full in the face.

"Calm down." He buried his face into his knees and began openly weeping. "I should go get a doctor or something," I whispered to myself as I stood.

"Nyet, nyet! No! Don't leave me please! If you leave, they'll all come back. I don't want them to come back! Please... Keep them away!" He looked at me with an expression that broke my heart. He wasn't a teenager. He wasn't a leader. He wasn't the emotionless hardened solider I knew. He was a boy. A scared, lonely, traumatized, little boy. Maybe what he needed wasn't a person who obeyed him. Alfred has said that Ivan's idea of loyalty was agreeing to not kill people who obeyed him. Maybe he needed more than that... Maybe what he needed was a friend.