The shelterbelt had been poplars once. Now it was a row of black sticks standing in churned mud, each one shredded at the top like a chewed pencil, and Russia lay under the third of them with his cheek in the dirt and his rifle across his forearms and thought about nothing at all, which was the only rest he got anymore. His boot had rubbed a hole in the side of his left heel four days ago. The hole had gone soft and yellow at the edges and it throbbed with his pulse, a small stupid drumbeat that he had stopped being able to ignore around noon. His mouth tasted like a coin. He had drunk the last of his water at dawn and the sun had gone over the top of the sky since then and come down the other side, and he was still here, and the field in front of him was still empty, and the war was still happening somewhere to the west of his own body in a way he could hear but not see.
Behind him Chechnya was talking. Chechnya was always talking. He had his phone out again, propped on the lid of an ammunition crate that he was also sitting on despite being told three separate times not to sit on it, filming the treeline with the lens held at the angle that made his shoulders look enormous.
"Look at him," Chechnya said. "Look at this. The great one, lying in the mud like a dog outside a shop." He turned the phone. "Say something. Go on, say something for them."
"Get off the crate."
"He says get off the crate." Chechnya did not get off the crate. He shifted on it, which was worse, and Dagestan laughed the short obedient laugh he always laughed, the one that cost him nothing. "You know what I think? I think he's sulking. I think he's been sulking since February. Which February, you ask. All of them."
Russia did not turn his head. He counted to eight, which was a thing he did, and by seven he had gotten as far as I made you, and by eight he had gotten as far as you were rock and goats and three roads before me and you will be rock and goats and three roads after, and then he stopped counting because it did not help. It never helped. The problem with Chechnya was that Chechnya belonged to him on every map ever printed and in every ledger ever kept, and Chechnya knew it, and Chechnya had worked out a very long time ago that a thing you own is a thing that cannot easily be rid of you. So he ate the good rations first. So he sat on the crate. So he cuffed the back of Russia's head when he walked past, light, playful, the way an older cousin does it, and Russia let him, because what was the alternative, and the letting had become a habit, and the habit had become a shape in his chest that he carried around with the rest of his kit.
Buryatia said, from where he was crouched over the little stove that did not work, "There's a drone up. There's been a drone up since four."
Nobody answered him. Nobody ever answered him. Buryatia went back to the stove, and Chechnya said something about the quality of men they were sending these days, and Russia got up onto his knees, then his feet, and slung his rifle, and started walking north along the inside of the treeline.
"Where are you going?"
"Looking."
"On your own?"
"Yes."
"That's against your own rules, that. Your rules." Chechnya laughed. "Write him a ticket, Dagestan."
He kept walking. The rule existed. He had written the rule. Two men minimum, always, no exceptions, and he had signed off on it and repeated it and punished men for breaking it, and he broke it now because his heel hurt and his mouth tasted like a coin and because if he had to listen to that voice for one more hour he was going to do something that would take a decade to unpick. That was the honest reason. He did not say the honest reason out loud, not even inside his own skull, where he called it reconnaissance.
The ground went down into a drainage cut and he went down with it, walking in fifteen centimeters of dead brown water, and the mud sucked at him and let him go, sucked and let go, and the sound of the camp behind him thinned out until it was gone. Out here the war got very quiet. That was the thing nobody said about it. There were hours, whole hours, where a field was just a field and the crickets did not know anything had happened and a lark went up singing over a minefield like it was 1913. He walked for twenty minutes in that quiet and let his shoulders come down off his ears and started, almost, to feel like a person with a body instead of a body with a person crammed in it.
Then he heard the hornet.
He was under the edge of a fallen poplar before he had decided to move, which was the only part of himself he still fully trusted. The whine came in from the south, went over him at maybe forty meters, and swung out across the open ground in a long lazy arc. He watched it through the tangle of dead branches with his face pressed into the wood. Small. Cheap. The kind they made by the thousand now, four arms and a battery and a thing strapped underneath that would take his head off if he stood up. It came back. It went out again. It came back, and it was the same arc, and on the third pass he had it, the shape of the search, the pivot point, the place the operator's attention was anchored.
Northeast. Maybe three hundred meters. Down in the folded ground where the old irrigation ditch ran.
He started moving when it was outbound and stopped when it turned, and he did that four times, and the whole way his mouth was going dry in a way that had nothing to do with the water. Who. That was the game he played with himself when he stalked. Who is holding the stick. Probably Kherson. It was Kherson's kind of country, flat and thirsty, and Kherson hated him the way other places had religion, with rituals and holy days and a private language of contempt, and there was nothing Russia enjoyed more than getting his hands on that skinny sunburnt little bastard and watching the hate leak out through the cracks. He had done it before. He had held Kherson's face in the grit of his own riverbank and felt him shake with fury and not fear, never fear, and he had found it genuinely funny, and he was smiling now, actually smiling, teeth and all, crawling through dead thistle with his heel screaming and a warm stupid glow in his chest at the thought of it. Going to make you cry this time. Going to sit on you and go through your pockets and make you say please.
He came up the last of the rise on his belly, put his eye past a clump of dry grass, and stopped breathing.
Not Kherson.
He was flat on his front under a cam net with the antenna propped on a ration box and the controller in both hands, and his sleeves were shoved up past the elbow, and his hair was stuck to his forehead in short blue spikes with the sweat. Yellow arms. Yellow hands. The freckles came down off his face onto his shoulders where the collar had slipped, a spatter of them, the same ones he had had when he was small enough to sit on a countertop. His face was turned away and it did not matter, Russia would have known the back of that head in a crowd of a million, would have known the shape of those shoulders in the dark by touch alone, because he had grown up two rooms down from them.
Ukraine.
Something went out from under Russia's ribs like a floor giving way. Years. Years of this, and he saw him maybe three times a season, always at a table, always with glass walls and water carafes and a hundred other countries sitting around pretending to read documents while the two of them said things to each other in the flattest voices they owned. Always watched. Always with America clearing his throat and Germany looking at his hands and France being smug in the corner. Never once had he had him like this. Alone. Dirty. Face-down in a ditch with his boots crossed at the ankle and his ribs going in and out and not the slightest idea in the world that anyone was above him.
He was so small. Russia had forgotten that. On the screens he was enormous.
Russia went over the lip of the rise.
He got about two strides of silence and then the grass gave him away and Ukraine started to turn, and Russia hit him from behind with everything he had, all of it, eigthy and something kilos of exhausted furious country coming down flat across his back, and the controller went out of his hands and into the mud with the sticks still twitching, and the air came out of Ukraine in one hard grunt like a door slamming.
Then he came alive. God, he came alive. He bucked, he twisted, he got an elbow back into Russia's mouth so hard that Russia's head snapped sideways and his lip split against his own teeth, and he went for the knife on his own belt and Russia caught the wrist and folded it up behind him and Ukraine screamed into the dirt, not in pain, in pure incandescent rage. He got a knee under himself. Russia knocked it out. He twisted his head around and spat, and it caught Russia on the cheekbone, warm, and Ukraine's eyes were absolutely blazing blue in all that yellow and all that filth.
Russia laughed. He could not help it. It came up out of him in a great wheezing bark and it felt like the first laugh in four years.
"Katsap." Ukraine's voice came out crushed because his own chest was pinned. "Get off me. Get off me, you pig, get off."
"No."
"I said get off." He heaved again. Nothing moved. Russia had a knee in the small of his back and a fistful of his collar and there was nowhere in the world for him to go, and he found that out in about four seconds, and the finding out was written all over his face. "Where's your squad, huh? Where are they? You don't go anywhere alone, you little coward, you never have."
"They're back there. You want me to call them?"
That shut him up for exactly one second. Then: "Idy v sraku."
"Such a mouth." Russia wiped the spit off his cheek with the back of his wrist and looked at it and then looked down at him. "You know I haven't seen you in four months? Properly. Not that room with the flags, I mean you. Four months."
"Good."
"I was hunting you and I thought you were Kherson."
"I'm going to tell him you said that."
"He'd be flattered." Russia shifted his weight and Ukraine grunted and went still, conserving, the way he always did when he was working out the angle. He had done that at eleven, too. He had done it on the kitchen floor with Russia's forearm across his throat while Georgia shrieked at them both to stop. "You know what else. You're filthy. You smell like a ditch."
"I'm in a ditch, you absolute clown."
"Papa would have made you wash."
The whole body under him went hard as a plank. That was interesting. That always worked and it always worked instantly and Russia had never fully understood why, only that it did, the way you know which floorboard creaks without knowing anything about carpentry.
"Don't." Ukraine's voice came out very low. "Don't you say a word about him."
"Why not? He raised us both."
"He raised you." He laughed, and the laugh was horrible, it had nothing in it at all. "He raised you and he kept me. There's a difference, and you've had ninety-three years to learn it and you still haven't, because you're thick, because you've always been thick, because everything went into that head and nothing ever came out."
"He loved you."
"He starved me." Ukraine's hands flexed in the mud. "Say it. Go on. You can't, can you. Ninety-three years and you still can't get the word out of your mouth."
"You always complained about the food," Russia said.
He honestly did not know why that one landed the way it did. He had meant it lightly, he had meant it as the kind of thing you say to a brother, and Ukraine made a sound that was not a word and threw himself backwards with such violence that Russia nearly lost him, nearly, and had to grab a handful of blue hair and put his face back down into the earth to hold him, and Ukraine was swearing now in a steady scalding stream, moskal, svynya, tvaryuka, the same three or four words over and over like he was hammering nails.
And it was somewhere in there, with his brother writhing under his hips and the dirt coming up in clods around his knees and that filthy breathless stream of hate going into the ground, that Russia realized he was hard.
He stopped. He actually stopped, and blinked, and took stock, because it had been so long since it had happened outside of the thick unreachable middle of a night that his first reaction was something close to relief, a stupid grateful animal surprise, like putting weight on a leg that had been asleep and finding it still there. Years. He had not touched himself since the first winter. There had not been time and then there had not been the want and then there had not even been the noticing of the absence of the want, and he had assumed, in an offhand way he never examined, that something had simply shut off in him, that this was one more thing the war had taken out of the house and sold.
Ukraine felt it. Of course he felt it. He was flat under Russia's hips with his back pressed into Russia's groin and there was no possible way to miss it, and Russia felt the exact moment that the information arrived, because everything in him locked up, all at once, from the shoulders down.
"No," Ukraine said.
"Huh."
"No. No." He started fighting again and it was different now, it was not the cold calculating twisting from before, it was frantic, it was scrabbling, he was clawing forward through the mud trying to get his belly off the ground and his hips away, and his face when he wrenched it around was going a dull flushed orange along the yellow, right up over the freckles and into his ears. "You sick. You absolutely sick piece of. Get off, get off me, ne chipay mene, I swear to God."
"Stop wriggling."
"Get off."
"Stop wriggling, you're making it worse." Russia put his forearm across the back of Ukraine's neck and leaned, and the fight went out of the top half of him whether he liked it or not, cheek into the dirt, mouth open, one eye rolling back trying to see. His back was heaving. Russia put his free hand flat on the yellow strip of lower back where the shirt had ridden up and just left it there, feeling the heat of him, feeling the whole frame of him shaking with effort, and something in his chest turned over so completely that it made him dizzy. Four months. Four years. Thirty-five. He could not remember the last time he had touched anyone who wasn't trying to kill him, and this one was trying to kill him, and it turned out that was fine. It turned out that was better.
"Don't." Ukraine's voice cracked in the middle of the word and he hated it, Russia could hear him hating it. "Don't you dare. I'll kill you. I'll find you and I'll kill you."
"You've been saying that since you were eight."
He went for the belt.
Ukraine screamed then, properly screamed, and there was nobody in five kilometers to hear it except the drone, which was still up, which was still going around and around its patient little circle with nobody flying it, and the sound of it came and went overhead like a fly at a window. Russia got the buckle open one-handed while the whole body under him thrashed. It took a while. It was not smooth and it was not elegant, he had to give up twice and put his weight back down and start again, and at one point Ukraine got his boot up and heeled him in the thigh hard enough to bruise. But there were two of them and one of them was twice the size of the other and the mathematics of it did not change no matter how much the small one hated the large one, and eventually the belt came loose, and Russia dragged the trousers down off his hips to the middle of his thighs and the underwear with them.
He stopped for a second just to look.
Yellow. All of it yellow, the backs of his thighs, the curve of his ass, that same soft dusting of freckles running down over the small of his back and scattering out across the top of it like something spilled, and a farmer's line at the top of the legs where the sun had never got. He was thin. Everyone was thin now. The dip at the sides of his hips was deeper than it should have been and Russia noticed that and felt an odd pang about it and then felt his cock throb against the inside of his own trousers, and the two feelings sat next to each other perfectly comfortably, which told him something about himself that he decided not to look at.
"I'm going to be sick," Ukraine said into the mud. He had gone very still. "I'm going to be sick. Russia. Russia, listen to me. Listen. Don't do this."
"Shhh."
"We're brothers."
"I know," Russia said. He said it almost tenderly, and got his own belt open, and shoved his trousers down enough to get himself out, and his cock came up out of the fabric thick and red and heavy against his own belly, the foreskin drawn back halfway off the head, already wet at the tip from nothing at all. He put his hand around himself and the contact was so sharp after so long that his eyes actually watered. "I know we are. Tikho. Be quiet now."
He spat into his palm. It was all he had. He spat again, twice more, worked it over himself and then pushed his slick hand down between the yellow cheeks and found him, and Ukraine's whole body seized at the first touch of a fingertip, clenched up hard and tight and furious, and made a noise he clearly did not mean to make.
"Nnh. No. No, no, no."
"You're so tight it's stupid." Russia pressed and the muscle fought him and he pressed harder and felt it give, grudging, a centimeter, and Ukraine's breath went out in a long shuddering hiss. "Has nobody had you? Ever? All these years with the whole of Europe standing in your kitchen and none of them took a turn?"
"Pishov ty nakhuy."
"Nobody wanted you." He worked the finger in to the second knuckle and Ukraine made a high sound into his own forearm. "Not really. They send you things. You ever notice that? They send you things instead of coming."
"Shut up. Shut up."
He got two fingers in eventually, and it was not nearly enough and he knew it was not nearly enough and he ran out of patience anyway, because his heart was slamming and his thighs were shaking and he had waited four years for his body to remember what it was for and now it had remembered all at once and would not be told anything. He spat on himself one more time. He got a fistful of blue hair in his left hand and hauled Ukraine's head up out of the dirt so that his back arched and his throat was exposed and his boots scrabbled uselessly in the mud, and he lined himself up with his right hand, and he pushed.
The first five centimeters were the worst and the best. Ukraine howled. It came out of him raw and it was not a word in any language, just a long torn-open sound, and his hands scrabbled at the ground in front of him, fingers digging in, ripping up grass by the roots. He was hot inside, unbelievably hot, and tight to the point of pain, gripping down so hard on the head of Russia's cock that for a second Russia genuinely thought he would not get any further. He leaned. He put his weight into it and sank in another five centimeters on the back of his own spit and whatever the body gives up when it has no choice, and Ukraine's voice climbed and then broke and went ragged.
"Aahh, ah, ahh, it hurts, it hurts, bolyt, stop, stop, vidpusty mene, please, I can't."
"You can." Russia's voice did not sound like his own. It came out of somewhere low in his chest, wrecked, almost gentle. "Malysh. You can. Look at you taking it."
"I hate you. I hate you I hate you I hate you."
"I know."
He went the rest of the way in one long push and sat there fully seated with his hips flush against that yellow ass and his fingers still knotted in blue hair, and for a moment neither of them moved at all. Russia's whole body was ringing. He had forgotten. He had genuinely forgotten what it was like, the grip, the heat, the mindless white pressure of it climbing up the backs of his legs, and he had to stop and breathe through his teeth like a man carrying something up a flight of stairs or he would have finished right there like a boy. Under him Ukraine was making small broken sounds on every breath, hn, hn, hn, his back lifting and dropping, his fists clenched full of torn grass.
Then Russia drew back and drove in again and the dirt gave a wet slap and the sounds stopped being small.
It went on. It went on and on. He found the rhythm and he lost it and he found it again, hips hammering down, the sound of it obscene in all that quiet, skin on skin and the squelch of the mud under Ukraine's belly and the creak of gear and the drone going around and around overhead like it was keeping time. Russia let go of the hair at some point and put both hands on the yellow hips instead and hauled him back onto every stroke, using him, watching his own red cock disappear into him and drag back out shiny, watching the freckled small of that back flex, watching Ukraine's shoulders bunch as he tried and kept trying, even now, to crawl forward out from under it and got nowhere at all.
"You feel that?" He was babbling. He did not care. His voice kept cracking. "You feel me? Say it. Say you feel me."
"Schob ty zdokh."
"Ah, ah, God, you're. You were always mine. You were always mine, all of you, every field, every road, all this dirt, it's mine." He leaned down over him and got his mouth against Ukraine's ear and Ukraine flinched away from the closeness of it harder than he had flinched from anything yet. "You ran to the back door and slammed it and what, huh? What did you think, that I wouldn't come round the front? Little idiot. Little idiot. You never once got away from me in your life."
Underneath him Ukraine's cock was hard. It had been hard for a while. Russia had felt it dragging against his knuckles when he adjusted his grip and he had kept it to himself out of some obscure instinct to save it, and now he reached down under and closed his hand around it, yellow and stiff and foreskin half back and sticky at the end, and Ukraine made the single most wretched sound of the whole afternoon.
"No. No, don't, don't touch it, don't, that's not, I'm not, ne treba."
"It's the body." Russia stroked him, clumsy, off-rhythm with his own hips, and felt it jump in his fist. "It's just the body. It doesn't know who you are."
"Stop it. Stop it. I'm not, I don't want."
"I know you don't." He kept going. "Doesn't matter."
That was when he started crying. Russia felt it before he heard it, felt the hitching change in the ribs under him, and then Ukraine shoved his own face down into the crook of his own elbow and made a sound like something tearing, muffled, choked off, fighting it the whole way, and the fighting was somehow so much worse than the crying itself. His shoulders jerked. He kept trying to stop and could not stop. He said something into his sleeve that might have been a name and might have been a curse, and his hole clenched down in these helpless fluttering spasms that nearly finished Russia on the spot.
"There it is." Russia's own eyes were stinging and he did not know why and did not examine it. "There he is. Khoroshiy mal'chik. That's good. That's good, that's good, let it out."
"I hate you." It came out in pieces, soaked, barely a voice at all. "I hate you. I hate you so much. Nenavydzhu."
"I've got you."
He went faster. He could not have slowed down if the whole Ukrainian line had come over the rise at that moment. It was building at the base of his spine and up through his gut and his thighs were going and he was making noises himself now, ugly grunting animal noises on every stroke, and he got his arm right under Ukraine's chest and hauled him up off the ground, hauled him back against his own body so that the smaller frame was folded up against him with his heels off the earth and his back to Russia's chest and nothing anywhere to brace against. He held him there. He held him like that, tight, both arms wrapped around him, fucking up into him in short brutal jolts, his face buried in the sweat-soaked blue hair at the nape of his neck, and he smelled him, and it was the smell of the house. Thirty-five years and it was still the smell of the house.
"Malysh," he said into his neck, ruined, "my little one, my little, blyat, I'm going to, I'm, ah, ah, take it, take it, take it, take it."
He came so hard that his vision went white at the corners. It went out of him in long wrenching pulses, deep, and he shoved himself in as far as he would go and held there shaking with his arms locked around his brother's chest and his teeth in his shoulder, filling him, and he felt his own cock kick and kick and kick and felt the wet slickness of it spreading in the tight heat around him, and he made a sound into that yellow shoulder that he would have been ashamed of if he had been in any condition to hear it.
For a while he did not let go. He could not have said how long. He knelt there with Ukraine hauled back against his chest and his cock still buried in him and his heart going like a hammer on a rail, and the field was quiet again, and the drone was still going around, and a lark was singing somewhere over toward the road as though nothing whatsoever had occurred in the world it was flying over. Ukraine had stopped fighting. That was the thing. He had gone entirely limp in Russia's arms with his head tipped forward and his hands hanging and his breath coming in these small wet uneven pulls, and he was still crying, but quietly now, in a way that had given up on hiding, and every few seconds a shiver went through him from the neck down.
Russia pressed his face into his hair and breathed him in. Warm. God, he was so warm. That was the thought that came, and it arrived with a sweetness that filled him right up to the brim: how warm he was, how solid, how good it was to have his arms all the way around him, and how long it had been. Since the house. Since the kitchen with the bad linoleum and the radio that only got two stations and their father's coat on the hook by the door, huge, smelling of smoke and machine oil. Ukraine used to fall asleep against his shoulder on the long train journeys and drool on his shirt and deny it in the morning. Thirty-five years of tables and glass walls and interpreters and this was the closest they had been since then, right here, in a drainage ditch in the middle of a beet field, and Russia felt a great slow rolling contentment settle over him like a blanket, and he thought, with total sincerity, that he had missed him.
"There," he said. "That's better. Isn't that better."
Ukraine did not answer. His head just hung there.
Russia let him down. He tipped him forward out of his arms and Ukraine went face-first back into the churned mud without putting his hands out at all, and lay there where he landed with his trousers around his thighs and his back rising and falling. Russia pulled out. It came away with a sound and a mess, and he watched it, he could not help watching it, the way the yellow was smeared red-brown with dirt and the way his own cum came out of him thick and started to run down the inside of one thigh in a slow crawling line toward the knee. Something proprietary turned over in his gut at the sight and he had to look away from it and then looked back anyway.
His hands were shaking as he tucked himself in. The belt took three tries. His heel had started up again now that everything else had quieted down, throbbing away in his boot, and his thigh had a hot ache in it from where he had been kicked, and he was aware, distantly, of being more tired than he had been an hour ago and also of feeling better than he had in four years, and both of these facts were simply true and neither of them argued with the other.
"Get up," he said.
Nothing.
"You'll want to get up. They'll come looking when the feed doesn't move. Whoever's on the other end." He nudged Ukraine's boot with his own. "Do you hear me?"
"Hivno," Ukraine said into the mud. It was barely audible. His mouth was not working properly. "You're. You're nothing. You're hivno."
"There he is." Russia almost smiled.
He went and picked up the controller. The sticks were stiff with grit and one antenna had snapped off at the base and the screen had a crack across it in the shape of a river, and the little image on it was still live, still showing a swatch of the world from above, brown and green and the long pale scar of a road, all of it turning very slowly around and around because nobody was telling it otherwise. He looked at that for a moment. He thought about taking it. It was worth taking, somebody at the back would want it, there would be things on it. Then he looked down at Ukraine lying in the mud with his shirt rucked up under his armpits and the freckles going across his shoulders and he found he did not want to carry anything, and he set it down on the ration box where it had been before, more or less straight, the way you put a thing back in a house where you are a guest.
He crouched. He took the hem of Ukraine's shirt and pulled it down over the small of his back, smoothing it flat with two fingers, and he brushed a clod of dirt off his brother's cheekbone with the side of his thumb, careful, the way you would with a child who had fallen over in a yard. Ukraine's eye was open and it was looking at him and there was absolutely nothing in the world behind it except hatred, pure and bottomless and entirely unmixed with any other thing, and Russia looked back into it for a long moment and felt only a mild wistfulness, the sort you feel about weather.
"Eat something," he said. "You've gone thin."
He stood up, and put his rifle back on his shoulder, and walked south.
The light was going orange over the shelterbelt by the time he came back up the drainage cut, and his boots were full of water, and the poplars threw their broken shadows out across the field in long black bars. He could smell the stove before he saw the camp, which meant Buryatia had finally got it going. Chechnya was exactly where he had been, on the crate, phone away now, chewing something. He looked up as Russia came through the gap in the treeline and his eyes went over him once, top to bottom, the mud all down his front and the split lip and the state of his knees, and something moved behind that look, some quick calculation, and he opened his mouth.
"Long walk," he said.
"Mm."
"Find anything?"
Russia unslung his rifle and set it against the tree and lowered himself down onto the crate beside him, taking up most of it, and Chechnya had to shift over. He did shift over. Russia noticed that and put it in his pocket for later. Then he leaned across, took the mess tin out of Buryatia's hands before it had reached Buryatia's mouth, and started eating out of it with his fingers, and it was hot, and it was salty, and it was the best thing he had tasted in a year.
"A drone," he said, with his mouth full. "It's gone now."