Chapter Text
Grisha is a doctor but Dina insists that she be the one to clean all of Zeke’s cuts and bruises, so there’s one way to bond taken off the table. Grisha doesn’t know how to cook, so Dina makes the boy breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Another bonding experience, taken off the table. Grisha has low emotional intelligence and so Zeke automatically cries to his mother whenever there is an obstacle or issue in life. Zeke cries to his mother about the monsters in his closet and under his bed, he hides behind her skirts and wraps his arms around her legs and the boy, Grisha is sure of this, avoids him.
Grisha has tried. Really. He says, ‘how was your day, Zeke?’
Zeke cowers, Zeke shivers, Zeke fidgets and mutters something about how all his grades are good and he was on his best behavior.
To be clear, Grisha has never laid a hand on the boy and yet his own son flinches like he’s expecting Grisha to bludgeon him with the typewriter he keeps on his desk. The only bonding experience he could think of once was asking Zeke about his grades, because he’s always been a bright boy and Grisha is a bright man, but now Zeke has taken it to mean if his grades are poor there will be some sort of deeply illegal punishment involving and not limited to maiming.
Zeke is so quiet around him, it’s hard to believe the boy has long, drawn out conversations with literally everyone else. He apparently has a sense of humor. He apparently adores animals. He apparently talks about Grisha constantly. Grisha is so far out of the loop he used to think his son was an actual mute.
Dina says, ‘Zeke is a very gentle soul. You have to talk sweetly to him.’
Grisha has tried that too.
He once waited in the kitchen for his son to get home, and when he did, Grisha practically whispered (rasped): “How was school?” He hadn’t whispered in years, not since his wedding night. On account of all of the cigarettes since then, his tone struck closer to that of a deranged gravedigger lurking in the shadows, and Zeke sobbed, “My grades are still perfect! I promise father!”
So what was the man to do? Zeke did not come for comfort, for medicine, for advice, for love. Grisha was feeling more and more like his own father. He could recall trying to hug the man once, in his childhood, and getting nothing but an upturned nose. Mummified and bitter, his father had muttered, “You aren’t your sister, Grisha, and I’m not your mother.”
That was to say: men don’t embrace.
Grisha feels less than human sometimes. Alabaster in motion, with mechanical lungs and a mechanical heart. He envies Dina. She is warm and soft and smiles even when it seems like the world is ending. She would hold his hand through Armageddon and oh, he loves her he loves her he loves her. She tells him she loves him too- Grisha can’t imagine why, but won’t dare interrogate the woman; he’d rather her not realize she could do so much better. She’s as blind as she is beautiful and that’s perfectly alright with him.
But back to Zeke. The boy fears him. Always has.
Grisha is having a cigarette on the porch, newsboy cap tugged low and eyes on his scuffed shoes. The sun is low in the sky and Dina should be at the market and Zeke should be getting home. Today, he’s going to hug the boy. Yes. Even if they’re both men (well, Zeke’s really more like half of a man being as small as he is). Grisha will wrap his arms around him and say, “Welcome home!”
Just like Dina.
He feels like he’s gone a bit mad from the frustration of his son thinking he’s the god damn devil.
There Zeke is, running on those thin legs. He’s perfectly healthy but Grisha drags him to his private practice every Saturday morning to do a check up. Just to… Make sure. Zeke has always looked ill. It could be all the syringes and tongue depressors and stethoscopes and Grisha’s violently serious expressions that terrify the boy, actually. To explain, ‘I do this because I love you, honey’, is much harder than demanding Zeke stay still and stop crying over every little test.
Grisha has such heavy hands.
He waves stiffly as Zeke deliberately slows in his running- the boy has seen him on the porch, and is dragging his feet. The inevitable lurks and Zeke maybe would’ve taken a different route home if he knew Grisha was going to be waiting for him.
The old cobblestone stretches like a vast wasteland between them, and Zeke crosses it like an amorphous, boneless blob. There are other Eldians. Walking, dashing, jogging. But it feels like it’s just them and Grisha’s cigarette smoke. He exhales. He stabs the end on the concrete step then flicks the butt off into a patch of dead weeds growing between the cobblestone. He stands and forces a smile, but he is almost certain it comes across as a grimace. Zeke is grimacing too. He has the same bad habit.
He looks like his mother and smiles like his father. Which is like an angel parading around in circus paint.
Grisha is sorry about that and wonders how the hell he managed to pick that habit up when he barely spends time with the man anyway.
“H-Hello, father. My grades are-!”
“They’re probably perfect. Yes, yes... Very good job, Zeke."
Zeke stops a short distance away. Zeke fidgets. Grisha fidgets. They fidget together. Without the boy’s mother here to referee the whole thing Grisha is at a loss for words. Usually she translates. She will say, “Zeke, your dad is very happy to see you.” And to Grisha she will say, “Your son is trying his best to make you proud.”
Without her here it’s nothing but the fidgeting and the silence.
Grisha steps forward. Zeke steps back.
So again Grisha steps forward… And Zeke steps back.
“Am I in trouble? Is this b-because of the rations? I’m sorry I took the last sugar cube! I k-know we have to be careful about how much we use, but I thought it'd be okay if I... I'm sorry!”
Zeke stutters, but only around Grisha, which is just another thing to make the man wonder what he’s managed to fumble here in this nonexistent relationship of theirs.
“I don’t care about the sugar, Zeke. Stay still.”
Zeke’s pupils have narrowed down to pinholes and he looks like he’s going to cry. Well he always looks like he’s going to cry, but more so now. He gives a single nod and grips onto the straps of his heavy backpack. School books. Grisha takes a step forward and Zeke doesn’t take a step back. Grisha leans down and Zeke stops breathing, perhaps wondering if his father is capable of eating his own son alive and assuring himself that the man is perfectly capable of it.
Grisha gets his arms around him and Zeke is panicking.
Grisha hugs him.
Sets his chin on the top of the boy’s head and awkwardly slaps at his back like one might smack their hand around to crush a particularly aggravating mosquito.
“Welcome home, Zeke.”
He can see the sun burning itself out, can see Dina coming down the street. Wicker basket full of fruit and grain. She’s streaked pink and she’s lovely and she’s calling in that laughing voice, “What are you boys doing?”
Grisha releases his son, who looks like he might’ve pissed himself if Grisha had held him just a second longer. His bottom lip quivers. The lower lid to his eyes is lined with tears that have yet to fall. He shoves by his father and scurries into the house without a word.
Grisha sighs.
Okay. Perhaps the boy just hates him? Perhaps he knows Grisha refused to hold him as a baby, fearing he’d drop him (and break something so fragile)? Perhaps he knows Grisha is hollow and he has no desire to be held by a hollow man?
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
There’s the fireplace in the sitting room and Grisha is staring into the flames, having a spiked cup of tea. His liver isn’t fond of alcohol and his wife isn’t fond of him ignoring that fact. But a man deserves a drink every now and then. They have no furniture in this room, only thick pillows to sit on. Grisha is a doctor but a soft hearted one and his family is often paid in favors or pies or ‘bless you, Doctor Grisha’s. So he sits on the recently swept clean floor and listens to the news report on the radio and sips his tea.
There are the soft footsteps of either his wife or his son. It’s confirmed to be his son when the boy sits beside him and stares into the fire with him. He is in his pajamas. The blue ones with the clouds. He’s getting too big for them but Grisha isn’t allowed to say that or else his wife flies off the handle about how Zeke is never, ever growing up, and how he is her sweet little monkey.
Grisha does not know why his wife compares his son to a monkey.
Personally, it strikes him as demeaning. It’ll undoubtedly lead to the boy growing up with a complex over the ears his mother tugged on all throughout his childhood. But what does Grisha know about anything? His son probably already has a complex over being hugged if the event by the porch is anything to go by.
Zeke is still as stone through the entirety of the news report. That means that for a whole hour, the two sat together saying nothing. Staring into the fire. The radio in the background, the Marleyan newscaster breaking through the wall of static to report on the war efforts.
It is… Deeply uncomfortable. For both of them.
Grisha wonders if this is some sort of inherited mental illness. His father was loveless, and Grisha is loveless, and Zeke is-
He flinches as his son tosses his arms around him in a quick but tight hug. He buries his face into Grisha’s neck. Breathes him in. The boy releases him and pushes himself to stand with such an abruptness that it’s hard to confirm if that all just happened or not. Zeke doesn’t look at him. Small and nervous and fidgeting. The boy frowns. “You smell funny. I’m telling mom you’re drinking.”
“It’s tea.”
“Mom,” And Zeke is off to the kitchen where the smell of stew is strongest, “Father’s having whiskey again. I can smell it!”
'Again' suggests that Zeke has pulled this stunt before, though Grisha has never seen him do it firsthand. He's touched. He's thrilled. He's terrified that his wife will believe the accusation and chase him around with a wooden spoon.
“It’s- It’s tea! Zeke! Come back here!"
He wonders if he’s opened a can of worms he would’ve preferred to keep shut, then reasons as he sees Dina rounding the corner to the kitchen (furious, hair and eyes and mouth on fire), no. He’s happy he and Zeke hugged for the first time. It feels like a step in the right direction and maybe they can build on this moment. Finally, father and son.
Even if the boy’s first attempt at closeness had been quickly followed by snitching.
The betrayal.