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A slightly late birthday poste for my dear ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jesshelga. For you! Blazanov!
TITLE: Kopek
FANDOM: Deadwood (Blazanov)
RATING: PG
DISCLAIMER: You may own this, Milch, but you don't deserve 'em.
Kopek
Deadwood-verse, 11th January 2010
---
For Jessie, on her birthday.
---
They say that, at the very end, it'll be the watcher who remains unscathed. The watcher, who'll write down the truths and bundle them up into piles of paper in envelopes, despite the on-coming flood of telecommunications and the obsolete nature of the written word.
Blazanov knows this.
He remembers, as a boy in Russia, a young girl giving him a single kopek to pass on a message to her boyfriend. She had blonde hair that tickled his cheek and she smelt like the snow - an unsure smell, like melting seasons and the ringing of church bells, her cheeks red from the cold and her mouth curved in a smile.
"You'll bring me back word, won't you?" And he'd nodded, and gone, running over the slippery streets in Moscow with the kopek burning in his hand and the message ringing in his ears.
A mission.
He ran, right into the boyfriend's legs; his voice stringing high as he relayed the girl's words - a message of hope, and joy, and Blazanov watched in rapture as as the boyfriend's stoic expression gave way to one of pure happiness.
A reason.
It was enough - to start the fires, to stir the ashes, to open his mind up to larger scales and beautiful scenes, to look towards the shores of another country with a real sense of industry in his heart.
He'd probably have gone on to be a worker, like his father, despite them sacrificing everything to send him to school. A railway worker, most probably, with no real goals or ambitions and the steady ticking of death ringing in his ears.
"You are a stupid boy," sighed his father.
"No. I am not stupid," he'd replied, standing as if to punctuate his point. "I am a free man."
He doesn't remember feeling anything when his parents are murdered in the street. He only remembers buying a ticket for his freedom, for his parents' - a flimsy paper ticket, to escape a land where rules were only just being written and the streets were filled with men living to kill.
He boarded a boat pointed towards America, waving goodbye to his sister as he turned towards a whole new life and promised to write; long letters of foreign sports and mixed company, of a time of an industrial revolution in a country that was bursting at the seams.
He stood at the bow and read chapters of a book he didn't understand, in a language that was as far from the snowed streets of Moscow as he could imagine; his eyes taking in the Statue of Liberty with the feeling of absoluteness stuck right in his chest and the terrifying fear of the unknown at the bottom of his feet.
God will have a path for us all.
The menial jobs, the English lessons - he worked them all, learnt them all, reading and absorbing and observing with the tenacity of a the men before him. With the same honesty, the same spirit; the same understanding that, if you worked hard enough, then only the best of fortune could ever smile upon you.
God will show us the way.
It was a man who he'd never seen before, in a pageboy hat and waistcoat, who opened him up to what was always going to be his destiny.
"Have y'ever heard of Morse Code, possum? The telegraph?"
His mission. A reason.
He doesn't remember the exact details anymore, or the correct tale to tell when asked of the reasons behind his decision to move to Deadwood. He supposes, in retrospect, that there were so many men like him in the telegraph business in New York, that he would have to strike out on his own in order to make a real go of it.
He smiles, laughs even, at the ridiculousness of hindsight. There was never any chance, really, never any destiny - his path, he knew now, was always set. From the streets of Moscow, from the day of his birth, it was set towards Deadwood and the people who called it home, in every loose sense of the word.
Every face he met, every story he told - it lived in him. The Gem Saloon, the muddy main street, the worries and hopes of men desperate for gold and the women who tried to be desperate about anything else.
He would hold their tiny messages - ones of joy, and death; of indifference and of shadowing trouble - he would hold them, and send them, and know them.
Deadwood became his home - in every sense of the word - and he, in turn, became Deadwood.
The tiny, bustling town only leaves his immediate thoughts when he's older. Widowed, set up in Chicago, and he feels the chill of age in his bones. He feels the ghosts of those men and women itching at his collar, as he writes down the final words of their stories.
I was simply an observer. A watcher.
And God Bless every one of them.
God has a plan, Blazanov knows.
And he closes his eyes and sleeps the sleep of a man who's lived more lives than one.
---
Fin.
---
I hope there was cake and margaritas and handsome men/pretty ladies giving the thumbs up in their salmon undadraws. <33333
jesshelga. For you! Blazanov!TITLE: Kopek
FANDOM: Deadwood (Blazanov)
RATING: PG
DISCLAIMER: You may own this, Milch, but you don't deserve 'em.
Kopek
Deadwood-verse, 11th January 2010
---
For Jessie, on her birthday.
---
They say that, at the very end, it'll be the watcher who remains unscathed. The watcher, who'll write down the truths and bundle them up into piles of paper in envelopes, despite the on-coming flood of telecommunications and the obsolete nature of the written word.
Blazanov knows this.
He remembers, as a boy in Russia, a young girl giving him a single kopek to pass on a message to her boyfriend. She had blonde hair that tickled his cheek and she smelt like the snow - an unsure smell, like melting seasons and the ringing of church bells, her cheeks red from the cold and her mouth curved in a smile.
"You'll bring me back word, won't you?" And he'd nodded, and gone, running over the slippery streets in Moscow with the kopek burning in his hand and the message ringing in his ears.
A mission.
He ran, right into the boyfriend's legs; his voice stringing high as he relayed the girl's words - a message of hope, and joy, and Blazanov watched in rapture as as the boyfriend's stoic expression gave way to one of pure happiness.
A reason.
It was enough - to start the fires, to stir the ashes, to open his mind up to larger scales and beautiful scenes, to look towards the shores of another country with a real sense of industry in his heart.
He'd probably have gone on to be a worker, like his father, despite them sacrificing everything to send him to school. A railway worker, most probably, with no real goals or ambitions and the steady ticking of death ringing in his ears.
"You are a stupid boy," sighed his father.
"No. I am not stupid," he'd replied, standing as if to punctuate his point. "I am a free man."
He doesn't remember feeling anything when his parents are murdered in the street. He only remembers buying a ticket for his freedom, for his parents' - a flimsy paper ticket, to escape a land where rules were only just being written and the streets were filled with men living to kill.
He boarded a boat pointed towards America, waving goodbye to his sister as he turned towards a whole new life and promised to write; long letters of foreign sports and mixed company, of a time of an industrial revolution in a country that was bursting at the seams.
He stood at the bow and read chapters of a book he didn't understand, in a language that was as far from the snowed streets of Moscow as he could imagine; his eyes taking in the Statue of Liberty with the feeling of absoluteness stuck right in his chest and the terrifying fear of the unknown at the bottom of his feet.
God will have a path for us all.
The menial jobs, the English lessons - he worked them all, learnt them all, reading and absorbing and observing with the tenacity of a the men before him. With the same honesty, the same spirit; the same understanding that, if you worked hard enough, then only the best of fortune could ever smile upon you.
God will show us the way.
It was a man who he'd never seen before, in a pageboy hat and waistcoat, who opened him up to what was always going to be his destiny.
"Have y'ever heard of Morse Code, possum? The telegraph?"
His mission. A reason.
He doesn't remember the exact details anymore, or the correct tale to tell when asked of the reasons behind his decision to move to Deadwood. He supposes, in retrospect, that there were so many men like him in the telegraph business in New York, that he would have to strike out on his own in order to make a real go of it.
He smiles, laughs even, at the ridiculousness of hindsight. There was never any chance, really, never any destiny - his path, he knew now, was always set. From the streets of Moscow, from the day of his birth, it was set towards Deadwood and the people who called it home, in every loose sense of the word.
Every face he met, every story he told - it lived in him. The Gem Saloon, the muddy main street, the worries and hopes of men desperate for gold and the women who tried to be desperate about anything else.
He would hold their tiny messages - ones of joy, and death; of indifference and of shadowing trouble - he would hold them, and send them, and know them.
Deadwood became his home - in every sense of the word - and he, in turn, became Deadwood.
The tiny, bustling town only leaves his immediate thoughts when he's older. Widowed, set up in Chicago, and he feels the chill of age in his bones. He feels the ghosts of those men and women itching at his collar, as he writes down the final words of their stories.
I was simply an observer. A watcher.
And God Bless every one of them.
God has a plan, Blazanov knows.
And he closes his eyes and sleeps the sleep of a man who's lived more lives than one.
---
Fin.
---
I hope there was cake and margaritas and handsome men/pretty ladies giving the thumbs up in their salmon undadraws. <33333
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From:
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Deadwood became his home - in every sense of the word - and he, in turn, became Deadwood.
The tiny, bustling town only leaves his immediate thoughts when he's older. Widowed, set up in Chicago, and he feels the chill of age in his bones. He feels the ghosts of those men and women itching at his collar, as he writes down the final words of their stories.
The idea that he returned to Chicago to marry that girl is awesome. And he helped all the people of Deadwood live again through writing. Wonderful, wonderful.
(Oh, Pasha giving the thumbs up! So glorious and hilarious yet still totally adorable!)
From:
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I'm glad you liked it - I always feel vastly inferior when writing Deadwood, and as much as Blazanov was (sort of) a blank canvas, it was hard. And I just though, "dude would totally write a book about this shit", and voila! Birthday fic! <3
Ridiculousness: there's about two mentions and no pictures of Blazanov in the Stories of the Black Hills book. ONE MORE FAIL NOTCH, MILCH. :|
(Kim in Treme on 11th April, yay? And, uh...Steve Zahn?)
From:
no subject
(I really, really need to go and find the Blazanov icon I used to use.)