Ivan Kosin

Tom Gaspar was watching him, leaning against the edge of the tiled shower stall. Malcolm didn't care. The water felt too good and he felt too elated, too bright, too filled with new knowledge. He closed his eyes and felt the hot pricking drip-drop silver sluices of water strike his head, neck, back, shoulders. Impulse overcame him and he stuck out his tongue to taste it, then began gulping in short, hot breaths.
"Take it easy, buddy." Tom warned, shifting his weight as if to come forward and Malcolm laughed, his dark hair trembling beneath the weight of the water.
"So this is it?" he asked, sprawling both hands over the tile. Tom Gaspar gave a smile whose meaning was incomprehensible.
"This is it."
Malcolm looked over his shoulder.
"Does it always feel this way?"
Tom laughed a little.
"At first. But that'll fade."
Malcolm turned back to the white wall, slid his index finger down the slit between tiles where grout had cracked and split away. Everything felt important now, and he tried to memorize the texture of things - the dimensions of smell and sound and awareness that made them real.
"What if I hadn't made it?" he asked, speaking aloud the question that had been burning in his belly since they'd first told him why. Tom Gaspar didn't answer. Malcolm coughed and thought about something else.
"I feel…immense."
Tom smiled.
"You should. You are."
Malcolm shook his head under the stream of the water and his bare feet made a wet slapping sound against the cement ground.
"I want Ivan."
Tom nodded.
"I know."
"What's he doing now?"
"He's in good hands with the others."
There was another question that Malcolm wanted to ask, but it stuck in his belly and crawled and curled and was recalcitrant to be regurgitated.

After a few minutes longer, Tom Gaspar spoke again.
"I can't let you go back to him until I'm sure you understand, Malcolm."
Dark eyes flicked over Tom - his dark slacks; his shirt, damp; his bare feet. The new initiate answered eagerly.
"I get it. I do."
Tom looked skeptically - or perhaps it was expectantly? - at the stripped man in front of him and waited. Malcolm stood straight and turned to face Tom. He took a deep, slow breath, then closed his eyes and felt drops of water race warmly, rapidly, urgently from his hairline down to the small of his back.
"I have the power." he explained, voice ghosting, hands spreading to either side of himself.
"What power?" Tom demanded, unmoved.
"The masculine power. I am a man; this world belongs to me. I am the king. I am divine." Malcolm recited, the sound of their chant in his head powerful and intrusive and magnificently present. Tom's posture was relaxed, but his voice demanded more.
"And what is Ivan to you?"
"Ivan is my stone, my source - the completion of my rule in this world. Without him, I my power is nothing. With him, my power is everything."

~:~

George had kept Ivan sane - or as sane as could be expected - during the time that Malcolm was gone. At this point, the men had been gone on a full day longer than any of the carriers had anticipated. There had been occasional contact, of course, for each of them from their husbands, and Miller seemed to have received a confirmation that Malcolm had passed the tests, but there had been no further information regarding Mal's whereabouts and all of them knew better than to ask. This silent ignorance had made for a tense house, and Ivan - ever the perceptive one - was all too aware of it.

"He's not coming back, is he?" he asked George, for what felt like the thousandth time.
"Of course he is, Ivan." George answered distractedly. "Pay attention to what you're doing."
They were canning fruits and summer vegetables to store for the winter, and Ivan had almost burnt himself twice on the pot.
"If he doesn't - "
"Then you'll stay here."
Although the conversation never went further than this point, George was well aware of the plea that remained unspoken. Please don't send me back to my father.
Ivan settled after that, but not for long.
"I'm hot."
"We're all hot." George retorted, his patience wearing thin. Miller looked up from the table a few yards away where he was slicing apples for Lavi and Max.
"George…" he said, softly, and the blonde carrier glanced at him, then sighed.
Long minutes passed with no sound but Lavi and Max's squealing conversation and the clinking of spoons and lids and pots and jars. Miller put the apple slices onto a blue plastic plate and pushed them towards the boys.

"So," he began, slowly, "You understand that Malcolm won't be the same when he comes back, right, Ivan?"
Ivan shrugged and adjusted the flame under the pot.
"Don't know. Sort of. Maybe." he straightened back up and turned half-sideways to Miller, but didn't meet his eyes. "The same like how?"
Miller cast a cautious glance at George, but the elder blonde carrier gave no protest to this line of conversation.
"Well," he continued, "They are...training him now."
Ivan just blinked. Training. That word took him back to a forbidding place in his mind. He had been there himself - in training. He had learned to hate, to be cold. To hear a man begging for his life and think nothing of it. To administer the lethal dose -

"Ivan."
Two hands on his shoulders brought him out of it. George was here, in front of him, his eyes looking worriedly into Ivan's. "It's over now." he told him, firmly - the same solid, calming voice he used when Ivan woke, sweaty, with night terrors. Ivan blinked and swallowed.
"What are they - what are they training him to do?"
Miller looked guiltily down at the table, then back up.
"Teaching." he said. "I should have said teaching." he glanced away, then back. "They'll want him to be a Man of the Manor now. A man like them. So they'll teach him all their rules. About how to live, how to behave. About who is one of us and who is not. Where to go, who to see. How to live like us."
Ivan continued to stare at Miller, feeling that he was learning nothing he hadn't been told before.
"OK…"
Miller glanced again at George before going on.
"They will have taken him to the temple, shown him the symbols, and opened his eyes to the Inspiration." Miller looked meaningfully at Ivan. "If he survived this, then they will have taken him to meet Fascinus."
Ivan ran in his head through all of the briefing documents he'd ever read about sectarian beliefs, minor religions, even mythology, but the origin of that name remained frustratingly elusive. Miller furrowed his brow and leaned forward, as if divulging to Ivan something of immense importance.
"Fascinus decides which men are worthy, and which are not."
Ivan didn't ask the obvious question.
"Is Malcolm going to be worthy?" he asked, instead
Miller leaned back in his chair, and his face took on a distant expression.
"Unfortunately, that's not for me to decide."
Miller glanced behind Ivan to George; Ivan looked briefly at George and was surprised to find censure in his expression. Miller must have seen this, too, and known it was for him, but he looked defiantly back at George, then demurely away. Ivan did not understand or care about this exchange; the tension thrummed in the room, but he had only one concern: Malcolm. He felt his heart begin to race.
"But what if he isn't worthy?" he asked, anxiously, personal regrets tainting his rationality and making his fears seem inescapable. "What if he doesn't make it?" George looked kindly at him.
"I wish I could tell you. But I've been a carrier as long as I've been here. I've never seen the ritual - only men, promised to secrecy, are allowed."
Here, his gaze slid over to Miller, and Ivan understood a bit better what was passing between them.

"Miller?" he asked, and although he had begun with the intention to demand answers of this man who already owed him deeply, Ivan found his voice took a turn towards the beseeching. "Tell me what they do to him."
Miller looked panicked, then hesitant, but eventually answered.
"I don't - I don't know everything. Just the chant, and the wine - the Inspiration…there's something in it that gives you visions. I don't know what it is, but it's awful. If you live beyond it, then they give you something to make you sleep. I slept 2 days, but it felt like an hour. I woke and could barely remember my own name. I threw up four times, saw my long-gone mother. My tongue felt like a wet towel in my mouth and my skin felt like it was itching off."
Miller looked up at him, and his face was naked with remembering.
"It was awful." he said, plainly.

Ivan felt the tiniest pang of something that might be called sympathy/appreciation, but it died a swift death in the face of Miller's past cruelties.
"Will they hurt him?" Ivan asked, and was surprised to hear the urgency in his own voice.
Miller hesitated.
"They didn't hurt me. But the ritual is different for everyone. And Malcolm had broken the rules when they took him…" he trailed off, and Ivan looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. Miller saw this, too, and reached out recklessly to touch him; Ivan snatched his hand away. Miller looked up at him with wide eyes.
"Ivan - "
"Leave it, Miller." George's voice was firm, and a little bit angry. "Leave him be."

~:~