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UPA’s skin is tanned. The red and black that usually hides it is has melted off him, dripped like Ukraine’s blood.
Her body is limp in his arms, and he can feel where her blood makes his grip slick. Each squelching re-adjustment of his grip makes the acid in his stomach sour and boil. Each step he takes sends an ache up his bad leg, up his back and it feels like there is a hot metal rod in his spine instead of marrow.
The pain is a shallow, comforting brush on his nerves compared to the twisting claws in his brain, the aching in his heart.
He runs faster.
He knows where the camp is. He knows who Ukraine’s human friends are. He knows that right now they should be in that camp.
He also knows that with every pulse of blood that leaves Ukraine, the claws in his mind tighten and twist and shred his brain into ribbons. It is the love, the adoration that aches in his chest. In his head, however, is the tie between Militant and Motherland.
Ukraine dies, and UPA will spend eternity as a ruined soul, torn into haunted fragments of battles and landmarks.
He cannot let that happen. They have so much, so much to fight for.
Ukraine. It’s people. Reliable bread on a table with a patterned tablecloth and a mutt for a dog and three children who are all covered in mud. A grandfather who reads the paper and shouts at the neighbour’s kids but is the first to give up his rations. A dance. A dress flying out. Candles burning low. Mother Mary in stained glass. Ribbons in hair.
A shitty communist bloc apartment with a cat, a dog and a collection of classic literature. Slow, sleepy sunlit mornings.
He can feel each beat of Ukraine’s heart in his own. His heart beats frantic, shallow, in sync with Ukraine’s. It’s not a metaphor this time. It’s literal. Ukraine’s heart speeds up in the heat of a chase, in the stillness of the hunt, and his echoes.
He is her shadow. A reflection and a distortion.
He has melted away the black and red from his skin. The last of it drips off of his elbows as he stumbles into the camp, shouting, “MEDIC!” in the loudest, least accented Russian he can manage. The language rips at his tongue and pulls at the tears in his mind but it’s fine because there are five people surrounding him and Ukraine and at least two off them have red crosses stitched into their uniforms.
When he lets her go, lying on a gurney, uncomfortably pale, he feels pins stabling into his fingers. A pull at the base of his neck.
Each metre they are separated is a chasm between the chambers of his heart.
He sits outside the operating room, tan fingers pressed to the dirty, cracked, tiled floors. He sits there for what feels like eternity before someone kicks his boot, making him look up.
“What are you doing here?” The woman looks supremely unimpressed with him. Underneath it is deep suspicion. (a military aged male in Sevastopol outside of uniform. impossible.) UPA recognises her face, after a second. It is Ukraine’s sniper shadow. Iryna.
“Ukraine,” It’s the only word that makes its way out of his mouth, and he chokes on his own breath before he speaks the next sentence. “I brought her here.”
Iryna stares down at him. Disapproval. Disapproval and Disapproval. Eventually, she offers him her hand and yanks him to his feet with surprising strength. It knocks UPA out of the stupid, dangerously stupid state he has ended up in. Comatose. Morphine seeping into the back of his mind.
“Cigarette,” Iryna presses one into his hand as they lean on the ruined door of a floor-leave balcony. Straggly roses dig their thorns into the marble pillars, clinging stubbornly. “You know Ukraine.” Iryna doesn’t phrase it as a question. It’s an accusation.
“I do. We are friends.” UPA says firmly. Lying is more than second nature to him. It’s in his very flesh. In the tanned skin and black hair he shows.
“Ukraine doesn’t make friends with draft dodgers,” Iryna accuses him. “She doesn’t make “ friends ” either.” The air quotes she places around that word make her meaning clear.
“You care about Ukraine,” UPA states in return. “ Ukraine .”
Iryna scoffs at him. “I should report you to the NKVD. Draft dodgers get shot in the head, just around the corner there. The blood matter has been melded into the walls.” Iryna’s words are hard. Steel and sinew. UPA has no doubt that she could mean them. That threats of violence are not threats when they pass her teeth.
He can see why Ukraine likes her.
“You won’t,” UPA says. “You care about Ukraine. The NKVD certainly doesn’t.”
Iryna side eyes him now. “I care about my comrades as much as the next soldier here.”
“Listen. I need your help.” UPA takes a risk. A very calculated one, when he drops the Russian from his tongue and speaks Ukrainian.
Iryna snaps her head towards him, eyes glinting. “I knew it.”
“You can gloat as much as you want when we get Ukraine out of Sevastopol. She cannot die now. Do you understand me? They will get her in Moscow. She will be made to forget us.” UPA whispers quick behind the cloud of cigarette smoke that he breathes out. A long, slow breath. His heart is slow and even now. ( Ukraine. Ukraine’s heart. )
“Tell me.” Iryna says. The determination in her gaze is final. “Tell me how we can get her out.”
UPA never thought he would ever find someone quite like him. Ukraine is the sun to his moon. The fire to his haw-frost.
Iryna is a twin moon. She knows what it is to be a shadow of Ukraine—following devoted like the Israelites of Moses. Like the lamb to the sacrifice altar, knowing the knife which awaits.
UPA is satisfied that Ukraine is in safe hands, that she is protected if her own fangs and claws someday prove not enough.
UPA holds Iryna’s hazel gaze with his own deep carmine. They are the same.
They will do whatever, whatever must be done to keep Ukraine safe. Even if it means their own demise.