Page 79 of Katya and the Young God

Katya stays standing, despite a burning need to run, to get away, to go anywhere else. Her entire body telling her danger, telling her to get out, telling her she doesn’t want to hear this.

But still, she stays. Half a room away. But still there.

“My entire life, everything I ever tried to do, was dead then. I don’t remember teleporting here, but when I tried to leave, I couldn’t. All I had was the clothes on my back and Vanya’s body.”

“You buried him, right?” Katya interrupts, dread pooling at the bottom of her stomach.

He nods, careful, like he’s more scared of her now than he was when she had a gun pointed at him. “I can show you his grave.”

“Better not,” Katya says, quick.

“I vowed revenge, I vowed harm, I vowed to put all my wealth and my power into taking down Iakov, to take down whatever he held dear, but...” Stepan stands, before hauling himself up on the couch and plopping against Pieter. It’s the most obvious soothing motion she’s ever seen. “But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t do a fraction of what I did before. I barely survived the winter, and I wouldn’t have at all if this dog,” he pats Stepan’s head, “hadn’t shown up at the cabin in a snowstorm and refused to leave.”

She doesn’t know why he’s telling her this, but something inside her, the part that’s always running calculations, always comparing information, tells her it’ll be important. She doesn’t know when it’ll be important, but sometime, somehow, it’ll come back and be useful.

He looks at her, his slate gray eyes steady, if wide. Like he’s as scared of saying this as she is of hearing it. “You do a lot of thinking when the one thing you’ve ever lived for is gone.”

It’s Katya’s turn to look away out of discomfort. “Do you mean your twin or the whole world domination thing?”

He doesn’t answer for a long time, just softly petting Stepan. “Both,” he says, his voice soft, so soft she can barely hear. His throat works. “I don’t like myself, who I was back then.”

“Good,” Katya says, hugging herself. “I didn’t like you then either.”

A smile, quick, a break in the tension, before that disappears. “It’s not easy, coming to terms with the idea that everything you did was wrong. That all you lived for was evil, that all you did was cause pain.”

And there it is, cracked open, raw, and he hangs his head, like it’s the first time he’s said it, actually said it, aloud. Like this has been brewing inside of him for the past year, and he’s been too alone to let it out.

“So when Beatriz kept trying to get me back, I just refused. And then she sent you here, like a gift, like I’m just a child sulking who could be tempted back with something to kill.” He gestures at her, widely, before wincing again at the movement.

“Don’t reopen the wound,” Katya says, soft. “It still needs stitches.”

“I think the noise, the buzzing from the mountain, pulled me here,” he says, as if papering over his previous statement, papering over what it must have cost for him to say that. Changing the subject. “Makes sense, like calls to like.”

“Yeah,” Katya says. “Makes sense.”

There’s silence, then, and she doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to unbend her legs and go over to him.

“Have you asked her if she can resurrect the dead?” Katya hears herself say, like she’s an outside observer in this whole mess of a scenario, and if she could have, she would snatch those words back.

At least, he looks in control of himself at her words. “I haven’t.”

“Are you going to?”

“They tried to make her, in the cage,” he says, slow. “They would bring her people, make her touch them, and then try to get her to bring them back. She always cried that they ran away, that she tried but they wouldn’t come back to her.” His face is still, like his heart is breaking. “I don’t know if...if Vanya would just run away as well.”

Katya nods, turning away, at least sure he’s telling the truth in that bit as well. “If you try to end the world again I’m gonna stop you.”

“I would expect nothing else.”

13

The next day she makes him sit still to do proper stitches, and he’s way more uncomfortable with it than she is.

“If it’s been fine so far, does it have to get actual stitches?” He asks, hitching up his shirt anyways and flinching as she peels away the butterfly bandages.

“I once sedated Iakov to give him stitches, don’t think I won’t do it to you,” she says, quickly swabbing a local anesthetic over the wound. The skin around it is healthy. “I know it leaves a scar, but it’s healthier this way.”

He’s holding so still she can’t tell if he’s angry or not. “You actually sedated him?” She’s not looking at his face, but his voice is carefully curious. “I thought you were an ally to him, why would you sedate him?”

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