31_days | [Sept 2nd] [Original Short Shory] Kitty

Title: Kitty
Date/Theme: September 2nd: Cat
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: Samuel (Sam) Campman/Kamilla Verkhanovskaya, Katrina (Kitty) Vassilievna Khudoleiva, mentions of Katrina's husband, Misha, her sister, Nika (Natalya Vassilievna Khudoleiva), her brother, Sasha, and Nika's first love, Nikolai (Kolya) Volkov. And some other people you don't really need to know who they are for the purpose of this story.
Rating: PG? I don't think it's PG-13.
Warnings: Angst.

I apologize for the name of the girl being the same name as the recent hurricane. It was completely not intentional.

Kitty

With five days to languish in prison before the inevitable, Sam had a lot of time to think. And, shortly after reflecting on Kamilla and on the children, Vera and Alik, his thoughts turned to Katrina Vassilievna Khudoleiva, his Kitty.

He called her Kitty because the first time they'd met, they'd jested about names. She'd explained that Mlodovska, though it sometimes acted like a little province that had gotten lost from Russia, had derived its culture from many different places, so it wasn't all that strange that her name was Katrina rather than Ekatarina. She'd told him that he could call her Ekatarina if he preferred, or Katya, as did her friends. He'd told her that he would call her Kat.

She'd laughed. "Kat? Cat? Koshka?" Evidently, cat was one of the few words she knew in English. "You are calling me a cat?"

He'd laughed too. He hadn't thought of Kat as a nickname for Katrina and cat as in the animal as one and the same, but he couldn't help using the idea now. "Indeed you are. So I'm going to call you Kitty."

And indeed, he felt the comparison to a cat was suiting. Like a cat, she was beautiful, dainty and fine. She was well-mannered and elegant. And like a cat, (though not all believe this of cats,) she was caring and devoted. Lastly, she had hidden strength, like a cat's claws, which could be brought out to defend those she loved.

He'd met her because Nika, Natalya Vassilievna, had introduced them. As an American operative in Mlodovska, he knew no-one, and his life was lonely. Nika, leader of OBzh, was too busy to entertain him. Katrina, her little sister, was itching for a way to help OBzh. So Nika had introduced Katrina to Sam and it all followed from there.

Katrina was musical. She played piano, and sometimes sang, too, Sam remembered. She was like a girl in one of those history novels, an accomplished young lady. You didn't see that anymore, not in America. There was Rosie the Riveter now, instead, and before that there were the flapper girls. No, Katrina, daughter of a man descended from Mlodovskan nobility and a woman who'd fled Leningrad in '17, was truly a daughter of a bygone era.

No, Sam wasn't in love with Katrina, though the preceeding paragraphs might make one think so. Maybe he would have been, if she didn't have Misha and if he hadn't met Kamilla. For Kamilla was the girl who gave him reason to live, to wake up every morning. Katrina had her own sun in the form of Misha, and she was the light of his life as well. But to say that Sam was not in love with Katrina was not to say that Sam did not love Katrina. Sam loved Katrina like a sister, like a daughter, perhaps, though she was a scant four years younger than himself. He wanted to protect her innocence. He wanted to...

But she was not as naive as he'd imagined.

His love for Kamilla he'd thought of a thousand times, and as such he didn't reflect on the process of that as he now reflected back on Kitty.

Was it only a year after he'd arrived, was it only 1944, that he'd made his choice? Had he really fallen in love with Kamilla so fast? Well, he'd never regretted this love. Here he was, 1954, in a Soviet prison, about to die for that love, and he still regretted nothing. Here's to devotion.

In any event, he'd been told he was being transferred. Was getting too close with OBzh. Was getting too attached to his comrades. He was an operative and a spy, and allies and friends didn't mean the same thing. Allies and lovers certainly didn't mean the same thing. They would pull him out and send him elsewhere. If not...

"If you chose to stay, what can they do to you? I mean, they are an army at war, not a business, they cannot just fire you!" Katrina had demanded. "Why don't you tell them to, you know, forget it all?"

"Ir's not that simple," Sam had told her. "If I refuse, that's, that's practically treason. They drop me. The army drops me. I'm stranded here without a friend. Maybe they would rescind my citizenship. I don't know. They think it's gone too far already."

Katrina's blue eyes had widened and she'd clasped a small, pale hand to her lips. "If that's so, why, you must return! Kamilla can never hope for you to suffer so!"

"But it's not suffering!" Sam had cried, surprising even himself with his vehemence. "I love her, you see, more than life, more than anything ever before, I love her! Life would not be life without her! I don't care if I... look, nobody back home would give a damn were I to die, and..."

"Sam," Katrina had cut in, her voice soft but her tone firm. "Do not say these things."

"They're the truth!" Sam had exclaimed.

"Sam," she'd repeated. "Let me tell you about something."

Sam had nodded slowly, and the girl had begun to speak. "I met Kolya Volkov when I was sixteen, and I liked him very well. He was dating Nika, then, had been for a while, but he came to my house the first time when I was sixteen. He was uncomfortable there, because we were so rich and he was so poor, and you could tell that he had never seen so much mahogany and granite and gold as there was all over our house, and no matter how nice we tried to be to him, there was no way of escaping that our social class was so different.

"He'd brought us gifts, though. Flowers for Mama and Papa, and also flowers for Nika because he gave her pretty things often and didn't have to now. But he gave Sasha a book, I think it was a political book, but I don't think it was a communist book. But Sasha would have gladly taken a communist book, you know? And he gave me a book of piano music. And I thought that was so very nice of him.

"I know what you're thinking, but the communists, they're not all like Stalin or what they tell you in the USA. Half of OBzh is communist. Kolya organized followers from among the people he knew at party meetings. But anyhow, maybe it was sort-of a rebellion, that Nika, who was raised to be the proper daughter of proper people of old family and old money, whom they sent to go to school and study something pointless like literature, not that literature is pointless, granted, and I like it well, but Nika should have been studying history or political science or maybe chemistry, to be honest, to make bombs, since that's what Kolya studied. So maybe it was rebellion that made her choose a boy who was a self-described member of the proletariet. But she loved him. She loved him maybe like you love Kamilla and Kamilla loves you.

"I maybe loved him too. I mean, no I would never have tried to steal him from her. She was the one with the real relationship and I was simply the little sister, the hanger-on, and I was perhaps infatuated with Kolya Volkov. I really wanted him to marry Nika and to be my brother. Then, when he and Nika stopped going out and he was with Erinah Satz instead, I wanted to adopt Erinah like a sister and Kolya could still be my brother, though I hardly knew Erinah. It wasn't like I ever desired him for myself. But I cared for him a great deal.

"You've been told how he died, of course, and I daresay you know more than I do. The Germans caught him and Erinah on a mission. I don't know what kind of mission it was. It was probably, 'routine,' since he wouldn't have taken her on something he deemed dangerous. But it was right after occupation had begun; before then OBzh was just aiding the national army. It wasn't even called OBzh yet. But he'd taken bullets meant for her, and he'd died in her arms. Somehow she escaped, I don't know how. Sasha knows but he won't tell me and I suppose you won't either. In any event, Erinah was left with no one, her family had all died years ago, and soon she had Kolya's baby which was just barely concieved before he died. He left my sister, who still loved him, and he left me. I don't expect he would care about me because I was only Nika's little sister and assuredly he'd written off Nika as bourgeois and all of that, but... his death hurt me deeply. Because before he died, I always believed that no matter what happens, no matter how many... petty evils there are, good will always win, and the righteous will always be triumphant. But Kolya Volkov was one of the best people I've ever known and here he was felled just a month after the war began. And here we are five years later, and is the end in sight? Maybe it is. Will we live to see it? Who knows.

"I like you a lot, too, Sam. I mean I can't compare you to Kolya because you're different people, and I know you in a way Nika does not, but in some ways it is the same because once again I'm looking in on the love of two people who are dear to me and thus I am involved. Kamilka is my dearest girlhood friend, of course you know. But I ... I don't want you to get hurt! I know how risky it is and I don't want you to die! Kamilka would never fault you if you went back! You have your duty and she has hers! It's just, how do I say, I don't want to mourn you! I've cried enough tears already! I want you to be safe! Kamilka is my best friend and she loves you as much as you love her, I know! And it is hard, almost impossible, to walk away! And I know Nika will never fault you on anything you do because of love, knowing Nika and her own issues with love, but... Sam, please, please escape, please survive!"

She was in tears now, rocking back and forth with the force of her sobs on her little blue chair. Sam had stood and awkwardly hugged her, not sure what to say, other than, "There there, Kitty," and "I'm smart, you know. This isn't suicide. I'll stay and I'll live, and Kamilla will live, and we'll all live. It'll be fine. You won't have to mourn any of us. And someday you'll be there when we name our children."

Liberation by the Soviets had come not long after, and soon after V.E. Day, and soon enough the end of the war. OBzh, Osvobozhdenie, 'Liberation,' was honored in all of the parades and plaques put up. Sam remembered thinking that this was the end of their troubles. But no, soon enough the era that would be remembered as the Cold War began, and all found that life in a Soviet sattelite nation was not... well, to make a gross understatement, as expected. Perhaps it was ironic that most of the OBzh heroes, the so-called patriots of Mlodovska fled. Nika went to France, to marry Damien, and Katrina and her Misha were not far behind. Erinah Satz and her daughter Sofiya went to the States, to live with her brother, Pyotr Benyaminovich, in New York state.

Sam had stayed. Betrayed by the US, trained as a spy, he'd switched loyalties and spied for the Russians. Now, as life became unbearable, he'd tried to switch back. His children, eight-year-old Vera and six-year-old Alik, had American blood and as thus American citizenship. Kamilla must be able to get asylum there too, as a refugee, if nothing else, as the mother of citizens. Sam, well, was he still a citizen or not? And forget about his defection back in the war! They'd won after all, and OBzh and Mlodovskan Resistance had helped! So he should be a hero! At the very least, he should be forgiven his trangressions!

Instead, he'd been caught. And that was why, here he was, 1954, in a Soviet prison, condemned to die.

Forgive me, Kitty, for I have failed you.