TITLE: Glastnost
AUTHOR: Angel
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
valarltdFANDOM: K19 the Widowmaker
PAIRING: Alexei/Misha
RATING: PG
SUMMARY: Wintery musings on a train trip.
NOTES: Written for the contrelamontre public transportation challenge.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own history or Harrison Ford or Liam Neeson. But I wish I did.
The train chuffed through the snowy city. Winter had settled deep in his old bones and every year
seemed colder than the last.
Alexei stared out the window, ignoring the other passengers, thinking. A message from Mikhail Polenin.
That was odd in itself. He had not seen the other captain since their hearings, more than twenty years before.
But asking for a meeting in a graveyard…Alexei was no superstitious peasant like his grandfather, but he
did not like to be reminded of his own mortality, especially now that it was creeping ever closer.
It was a long trip from his little flat. His very empty flat, now that his wife was gone. With her, any hope of
ever overcoming the Widowmaker scandal was gone as well.
So many changes. The Union was collapsing around him. Just today he had watched the ungrateful Germans
destroy the wall in Berlin. He remembered starving on the lines during the War, so they could be free of their
madman leader. Now they repaid the Motherland, which had ended starvation and privation, by leaving.
Germany was reunited and Alexei watched with trepidation, the remembered cold of the winter of 41 gnawing
at him even as the winter of 89 now chewed his bones.
Too many winters. Too much cold. The depths of the sea, the frozen ice where they took their respite, the snow
outside his train window now. Even the snow in his beard and hair. Would Polenin even know him? Would
Mikhail be as white?
Now everything was young. Now it was all glastnost and perestroika. He’d seen enough of perestroika, been
quite restructured enough. Reduced to a pension that kept a roof over his head and black bread on his table,
with few other luxuries. With the prices skyrocketing, there was no telling how long that would last. There was
no space for an old man any more.
Was Polenin the same? Had the big man changed in the intervening years? Was he still as venerated
by their crew as Alexei had been despised? Or had time stolen that from him? Was his wife alive?
Were there little Polenins grown to manhood?
All the questions he had never asked crowded up, demanding answers. Darker things, too, swam in the
depths, like the monstrous fish of the big deep. He found himself remembering Polenin, not as a captain,
but as Misha, for whom the crew had mutinied.
Misha, who was too tall for a submarine, and hurt himself often on the pipes. Misha, of the big hands
and big feet, offered Alexei his oversized bunk, knowing how miserable he would be in one of the crew
bunks. Alexei had refused, being tall himself, and knowing how uncomfortable his exec would be.
He refused to pay any heed to the small voice that whispered “I will take the bunk. If you come with it,
Misha.” That was a decadent Western thought. The desire for men was a perversion from the Greeks.
The Americans practiced it freely and were dying from it now.
He would not think of Misha’s big hands. Or image what it would be like to lie next to that long body,
feeling as small as a woman next to a man his own size. No. Those were unworthy of him. He was a
greybeard, now, and far past such things anyway.
Polenin had been his comrade, his exec and his rival. There could be nothing more between them.
Alexei stared out the window as the train pulled into the station. It would be a short walk from here.
He savored the warmth, feeling it skim the cold surface of his skin like the memories of a lost summer.
The wind bit into him with winter’s reality as he stepped out of the station.
Misha—Polenin—was sitting on a bench, waiting for him. Older, yes, but still handsome. He stood when