defection au timeskip longpost

A couple weeks pass, maybe more, since Artyom's arrival in the Red Line. He'd traveled with Pavel to Revolution Station, met the man's fellow officers and friends, snagged a job as Pavel's secretary, moved in with Pavel, and became an official citizen. Pavel's apartment almost immediately became Their apartment, 'ours' and 'home' and whatnot. Artyom tried to sleep on his bedroll a few more times, but each time he awoke in Pavel's bed, in Pavel's arms, moved there *mysteriously* in the night. And after the third time, when he tried to take the bedroll once more, his friend had hooked an arm around his middle, yanked him to bed with him, telling him that clearly his request for a second bed was forgotten, but he's not going to let Artyom try to suffer on the floor any longer. And so Pavel's bed, like Pavel's apartment, also became theirs, 'our bed'.

Enough time passed that Artyom finally started to get comfortable, started to memorize a mental map of the station and where things were, and routine settled in. Times to get up, times to work, times to eat, times to relax and spend time with Pavel and friends, times to sleep... And things slowly lost their strangeness and newness, and things became less exciting and more normal. Enough that Artyom had little to distract him from his pervasive melancholy, his depression latching on steadily in full force. He smiled less, he always had a morose demeanor. Pavel's friends, who hadn't known Artyom before, likely think he's just like this, that Artyom Alexovich is just a melancholy fellow.

Pavel probably knows better. That something has been eating at his old friend, something Artyom still won't talk about, but just enough is easy to guess. That he never really wanted to join the Red Line itself, but that there is little left for him to live for outside of it, that Pavel is his final harbor, his lifeboat, one that he clings to as he struggles not to drown in his own depression and self hatred, while guilt and shame nibble at his legs.


He feels like he's slipping under one evening, that he's close to drowning. It happens so suddenly- he was dozing a little in bed, dressed down in socks and trackpants and an undershirt- pajamas, basically, what he wears to sleep now that he's used to sleeping beside his furnace of a friend. Pavel is doing his own thing off to the side, leaving Artyom to lounge in bed. And though Artyom's self hatred is ever present, he can usually be numb to his sins, like an aching tooth you just put up with until you almost don't notice the pain until you actually think about it. And then he thought about it. And now he's laying here, staring up at the ceiling while the seawater rises up around his ears and he can't breathe, the rushing water in his nose and mouth and ears whispering all he's done wrong, everything and everyone he's abandoned all for his selfishness, all for his obsession with a man who hurt him more than anything else in the world, a man whose betrayal he couldn't help but forgive if he'd ever have hope of forgiving himself, a man whose friendship, despite how badly it was sullied, he could never forget. A man who he now revolves around, living with, working with, sleeping with (okay, that's platonic, though).

He's choking on it, on all his shame and guilt and self-hatred, on his own betrayal of his friends, his family, his comrades, his morals, all in the name of a man whose smiling face he just couldn't get out of his head. An abandoned wife and child as he ran away like a coward. They must think he's dead, but wouldn't it be so much worse if they knew the truth? How disappointed in him his father must be, Anna and Miller too, and they would be furious to know the truth. A boy who will grow up without his father, all for what? For this? How disappointed they would all be- how disappointed would Hunter be? Is this the man he thought he saw in Artyom, two years ago, when he handed over the dogtag Artyom still wears under his shirts some days?

He's suffocating, he's drowning, frozen in bed as the rising waters submerge him, but in some stroke of luck- perhaps some hail Mary mental flailing- he glances to the side... And Pavel is right there. He's right there, isn't he? The man he abandoned everything for. The man he can't get out of his head, who is always in his mind's eye whenever he's not in view. Artyom takes a silent, sharp breath- and realizes he can just barely breathe, just enough to take a breath before the water fills his lungs, enough to speak one word, one desperate word, one single cry for help before the sea takes him and he drowns-


The apartment has been so quiet this evening, quiet and calm. But that comfortable silence is suddenly broken by a soft voice, low and quiet and just a little hoarse, softly speaking only a single word: "Pavel?"

And when Pavel looks, because how could he not, hearing his name on that tongue, in that voice, it must sound almost like a stranger calling his name- when he looks, there's Artyom, laying on his back on the bed, hands folded on his belly, looking like his dozing had been interrupted, but his face... His eyes look so lost, and so longing. A hopeful desperation in bottle-green, deeply miserable and aching both.