Ana Karenina/Leo Tostly for August and Nana 👀💕
i’ve had like three different goes at this prompt, but i’m still going arounf post apocalyptic nanaugust, so airport meet cute and their lovely marriage will have to wait.
quote: “Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget” (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)* * *
Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, it hadn’t fallen in one either. Or rather it did, but the true implications of it weren’t felt on a day. They expanded, in waves slow, sure, unknown. This is about the same. The news hit them when they’re on their respective works, and it takes them an hour for their phones to connect — the lines already collapsing.
“Are you safe?” Is the first thing August asked through the static. He didn’t need to ask him if he’s heard, he already knew Anatole had. He already knew Anatole saw it happen, tangentially, in some other office where political decisions were being taken.
“I always thought it’d come with a war, you know, but no, apparently not, I was finally wrong,” he replies. Not what you were asked, a voice inside his head says but sometimes, when he’s afraid or unsure, he’s still a 5 year old boy in Zagreb. “Yes, I’m safe. The office is a bit in commotion, Johan is fathering Jacob as we speak, it’s a nice sight to witness. Small miracles, I suppose.”
There’s a moment of silence, then a plead: “Anatole please don’t stay at work trying to fix this, please come home.”
He mulls over his request, not knowing what to reply as there’s too many things he could reply — always the sarcastic smartarse with a reply for everything. It’s not as if he wouldn’t eventually go home to him. He can’t not go home to him. However Anatole worked in politics, Anatole hasdspent a life trying to understand society and its shifts to create effective solutions, and he knows what happened now.
“Anatole?” August insists, he’d been quiet for too long.
He finally replied, with the only thing that will ever suffice: the truth, the inevitable truth that is staring him right in the eye, mocking his entire career, as if saying ‘How many years of advocacy, how many PhDs you needed to see this coming, pretty boy?’
“August? I don’t think there is a fixing this.” He replied just when his office went quiet, his voice echoing, strong and clear. He feels all eyes on him, specially that set of grey eyes belonging to Johan. This is the third time in his life he’d seen him on the verge of tears. Anatole shook his head, and surprisingly Johannes nodded.
It’s in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep when he voiced what he’s really thinking. “Part of me wishes there had been a war, at least it would’ve felt like there was something to be won, or something to fight against — yes, I know I have said plenty of times war is nothing but destruction.”
August is unperturbed, he always slept like a sack of potatoes.
“But at least it would feel like there’s something to hope for,” he whispered, afraid of his own thoughts for the first time in a long time. Afraid of what bitterness and insecurities he might find there.
This time his husband stirs, mumbling in his sleep: “What if there is?”
It makes Anatole’s head turn violently, checking if he’s really talking in his sleep or if he’s actually awake. It’s the former and he just laughs, covering his mouth with his hand before spooning August, finally caving in and trying to sleep.
“Of course there is,” he says as he drifts away, “of course you’re right.”
August was surprising like that.***
During the first weeks Ari made a bet about it, about how long would it take for the cities to start emptying and collapsing, like Johan, trying to make something fun out of it, trying to give them all a space to laugh and be normal people for the first time in weeks. Normal people with normal lives even if she knows it’s all gone now and they’ll have to find a way to adapt, normal people who don’t ask Anatole what do you do with children growing up in a collapsing world — this is the first he thinks growing up in a war zone has been useful to him.
What comes around goes around, or however the saying goes.
Johannes says two years, Ari says five. Rom says three weeks, and Dee snorts making some remark about his utter lack of positive thinking and says a year. Anatole also says a year, Yessica says six months, Leonore says eight, and the bet ends when August finally says ‘five months’ after having been staring at nothing for two straight minutes.
“I just know it’s five months.”
They’ve known each other for too long to question August’s small predictions.
Leonore is the first to go, when the airports are still working. He promises all of them to call as often as he can, tells them they have to meet each other again — but his family is all the way back in London, and he has to be there with them, he has to be with Althea now, whatever happens. He was born with his sister, so whatever happens now he’ll go through it with his sister. Everybody understands, and Anatole makes him promise he’ll keep an eye on Medea.
Everything is too up in the air for them to pretend to hate each other for clout so when they hug each other for minutes everyone gives them space.
Anatole said he wouldn’t cry and he doesn’t.
The rest of them travel here and there, Yessi being the next to embark herself for longer, with her family in Mexico. It’s still close enough, somewhat more reachable. Doesn’t mean they don’t tell her to be safe, to check in as often as possible, to be safe when crossing the borders even if, technically, there’s no longer a border when she goes see her family.
No one mentions how delightfully ironic it is, but Anatole does laugh about it when him and August are going home. August doesn’t need him to explain to know what he’s laughing for. He smiles, watching Anatole bundled in his coat and scarf, happy that in the middle of the chaos his husband’s acerbic and somewhat morbid sense of humour is still there.
Everything dislocates quietly. After the chaos it’s silent, almost too tranquil for comfort, deserted. As the years pass they stock up, and watch how things which used to be institutionalised begin depending on people who organise, in the collective effort of humanity to hold on. Supplies work differently now, everything does, and as always he observes how cities are destroyed, buildings set on fire, but people, society carries on. Both August and Anatole stay and help around as much as they can, until there’s nothing left to do.
After consulting with August’s mothers, having their group of friends meet once more to agree to meet in one place at least once a year, calling often and staying in touch, no one has to tell them it’s time to finally prepare everything — from water purifiers to their bags — and leave. They don’t need to be told twice the time to look for tenderer shores has come.
August is setting up the last things checking item by item with meticulous care, something he’s never been particularly known for, but this has changed everyone in tiny ways. Or almost everyone, August thinks, because when he looks at Anatole speak to his parents over a videocall he thinks he hasn’t changed that much: he thinks him, like light and water, adapted rather beautifully. Prepared as ever, hopeful as ever, still with a solution for everything, even if he sometimes looks more tired, or sleeps worse if there were helicopters in the air.
Most of the things they have there has been put in boxes and secured in the storage room they had assigned in their building, just in case. Leaving was less of a necessity and more of a deep realisation they had nothing left for them in the city. Yes, humanity was trying to adjust, sometimes seeming tired of the fight and the stillness until, from somewhere, some renewal of energy came, but the city had little to offer them any more. They could always come back, even if it would never be the same.
When Anatole is done talking to his parents he gives their flat one more look and for the first time in months he starts crying. They left a note on the door saying the place can be used to stay if people are passing through the city, but to please take care of it, so others could use it after. It felt empty without its mismatched knick-knacks and the personal pictures. Yet none of that had made him cry: what made him start crying was seeing his piano and his harp left behind. It felt as if someone was ripping out a chunk of himself, and while he told himself he was taking his violin with him — reassuring himself he would finally have a chance to get better at it — it still hurt.
August startles when the first loud sob comes out of Anatole. As ever he’s quick to hold him and rub his back, not stopping even when he insists its nothing.
“It’s just... can you imagine all the lives that ended and were lost to history every time the world collapsed? Lives like ours? I know this happens every day, but — god, that piano is from the XIX century, August. It’s my piano.”
They had turned an old Volkswagen van into a home on wheels, fully aware of how perfectly cliché it was. Or rather August and Johannes had with the help of one of August’s mothers, Anatole’s help with the process extended to correct Johannes on the pronunciation of German. August thought it was cool and Anatole that common places were good in times of crisis: they were a comfort, perhaps it would take them to a safe place, even if they knew no place will ever be as safe as each other. There’s no universal safe places now that everything has fallen, but there are places of comfort, of community.
It was like a draught, all of it. One of humanity on itself, as if it had forgotten who it was before, as has to remember before it is ready to be reborn so it can keep on its course, like very stubborn roaches or perennials shaking the snow from winter. It depended how one wanted to see it. One way or another it was something which took time.
The flashes of humanity were enough to keep on going: how the internet or a number of other ex-commodities were now free (something Anatole greatly delighted on, often mentioning Tesla would be delighted), allowing people to actually use it to connect. They still saw their friends, regularly — they called too, or shared photos, even travelled together sometimes, moving and settle in different places depending on what was needed, and if Johannes’ and Ariadne’s twins and Dee’s and Romulus’ daughter were or not in school.
They still functioned, schools, just not how they used to. Nothing did any more, as if they lived in a perpetually skewed picture, or a machine that worked, only not how it was designed to work, but in some DIY arrangement after you didn’t have time or money to have it fixed. Transitional.
Humanity was present in the people they talked to, from different corners of the world, from different backgrounds, all of them willing to help each other, all of them finally having enough of those selfish people who wanted everything for themselves. Humanity was present in the moments they had together, still in love with each other, still happy to kiss and explore each other. It was in Anatole’s car ride playlists.
(August drove, the window made Anatole’s blonde hair a mess and he was laughing. He had no idea how he kept managing to find a way to dye it the colour of his choice but he did. He’s singing Kate Bush and it’s almost how it was before. Almost.)
Yet when they were alone and there was no one around to help each other, or there was a particular commotion some place they went, it felt like a cruel reminder that even if things are hard and people gather together, even if there was community or an attempt at it, it was all a wasteland all the same, and none of them had properly learnt to make the best of it yet.
The night is clear, perfect for stargazing. August said he would set up a fire just in case, Anatole volunteering to do so, but August insisted he should rest — a while before they had settled in some city which still majorly worked and Anatole, being fully and characteristically himself, had thrown his entire existence into working: organising supplies, creating solutions, if he was needed, he jumped it into, while August exhausted his days trying to find someone who could take them on a transatlantic journey.
He did the fire on automatic pilot, his mind somewhere else entire, namely Anatole who was sitting on their bed in the back of the van, the backdoors opened as he scribbled away some notes about whatever book he had decided to tackle down this time. He was older, in his late thirties, and still looked some good years younger. Sometimes August looked at his husband (of seven years per next week) and wondered how was he.
Communication between them has never been a problem, not even after everything collapsed, but he knows Anatole is nitpicky and not very prone to concessions; that he overthinks and doesn’t know when to quit, specially when he said he’d do something, and he’s more than aware he married a man who had settled on being nothing less than great.
He knew he was tired, and while he accepted this was it, that the world had changed, he knew that as some level rested a wound in him, a wound that if poked could make him snap into drinking seven cups of coffee and sword fight whomever had decided, whomever had let the world collapse like this. Fence and fist fight with whomever took him away from his flat with it’s eclectic decor and his old piano, which even if still surviving he saw less and less, the more and more they travelled. Whomever had taken his dream job from him, and pushed all his friends in different corners of the world, so they turned into those people who saw them once in a while, when they all used to live within a 30 minutes radium of each other. When he used to work with one of them.
He could sword fight that person, if he wanted to. He had fenced most of his life and he still has the antique rapier somewhere in the car. He always travelled with it, just in case.
“Nana?” He asks, finally breaking the silence, Anatole not putting down his pen when he acknowledges him.
“Do you remember our wedding vows?”
“Yes, of course I do, why wouldn’t I?”
Anatole raises an eyebrow at him, inquisitive as always. This time, he does put his pen down, closing both the notebook and the book.
“Well,” he says elongating the e, “I wanted to ask you if I could make you new ones.”
“Why? What’s wrong with the original ones? You don’t like them?” A sudden panic settles in Anatole. “Do you... do you regret them?” He doesn’t know why he fears that, he doesn’t know why he asks: he’s never doubted August, but the fear is there anyway.
“What? No! I just thought, no, Nana, I swear I don’t and I swear I still mean every word of our vows... I just thought that it has been years and well, everything has changed now, hasn’t it?” He pauses. “So I was thinking about some additional ones? You don’t have to say anything, but I know how important everything was for you, how important your job was, and leaving a mark in the world and how now that world is sort of... gone. I never thought I’d be very important, perhaps contribute with an important discovery to astronomy if I was lucky, but not important, or great, or well known — no, let me finish. You made me important because loving you is important, but...”
“But I’ve always been the one who seemed to constantly be willing to fistfight his temporary existence?”
“Well, yes. Yes, but the thing is I know our existences are temporary, I know that even stars don’t last forever, but I think... I think it isn’t so bad to be temporary if we’re temporary together. Anatole, not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget, and know if I could I would paint a hundred more stars in the sky if it meant you never burnt out, and I know I’m not important in the big picture, which it’s okay by me, because you love me, and you’re here, loving me. I am loved by the greatest man I will ever know.”
Almost seven years ago he remembers being dressed in green, under that big tree he never remembered the name of in his mothers-in-law’s backyard. He remembers August talking to him, his vows about their so very many tomorrows and tearing up by them. He doesn’t feel exactly the same now, but the burn of his throat as he tries to fight the tears is the same, and for a moment, that wound he never speaks about is soothed and healed when he kisses him.
For a moment he’s made new and young again when his fingers dig into August’s skin and he tells him and shows him how much he loves him. He’s reminded everything is going to be okay, and whatever happens they’ll be great at it with every trace of August touch left on his skin.
The fire is glowing embers when they wake up in the morning, a bundle of sheets, warmth, love and each other — their love is great and sweet and everlasting. When he kisses him good morning he feels at peace.
The last time they saw everyone was a couple of months ago, before they decided to take their car and actually cross the Atlantic. Anatole missed Europe, and complicated as they were, he missed his family, more than he let on, so they packed their things, took each other’s hand and embarked themselves on a new adventure. When they finally made it through the Mediterranean coast the Balkans were surprisingly not deserted, and his family was exactly where Anatole was told they would be.
Anatole laughed, saying he wasn’t surprised, that that’s how the Balkans worked.
After that, they kept travelling. One morning they decided to sit on the back of their car, August’s peregrine falcon, Froyo, flying around surveying the area, and Anatole’s raccoon, Antu, curled in a blanket, sleeping the morning off. He was getting old and Anatole still took care of him diligently. They watch as the sun rises over a ghost of a town.
Anatole thinks he knows the name of it, but he isn’t sure, he’d have to check a map but he has no intention of moving, too comfortable sitting by August, sharing each other’s warmth.
It’s August whom, once again, breaks the silence: “Are you ever afraid?”
Anatole looks at him half curiosity, half amusement, and can’t help but to snort. “I see this whole collapse of civilisation deal has definitely make you one for existential questions... I should’ve seen this coming.”
“Well, you like those, don’t you? So, indulge me... sometimes I am, you know. It’s odd, and I don’t think I can put it into words in any way that makes sense, but I am. You?”
“I suppose, but no, not really. Overwhelmed sometimes... impotent... not afraid.”
“No, I don’t think I am either. Why would I be? The future has never been secure, it was never been a certainty. You know I’ve never been afraid of the future, I write my own future, still do, I think,” a smile peeks through his lips and he looks at August from the corner of his eye. “It can get hard, it has been hard, but no, I think I’m still confident on the promise of dawn, so to speak... Are you?”
He isn’t as sure as Anatole of his reply, even if he sometimes still sees glimpses of things, those images of the future he’s never quite understood how or why he sees, but sees all the same. Yet, even if he’s not as sure as Anatole he believes in him, he believes in them. “Things could be worse, I suppose,” he runs his fingers over the inside of Anatole’s elbow, through his forearm and into his hand, until their fingers are laced together. “So no, I’m not afraid of the future either.”
They pass the rest of the morning having breakfast and making up stories of what kind of people lived in the town they’re looking at, what kind of lives they lead, what kind of things they did, or what kind of interactions they would’ve had — like writers, plotting a new novel, or perhaps two old Gods pondering about the possibilities within the creation of humanity, even if in reality they only have the power to recreate it as it was in their heads.
“We should go to Salzburg,” Anatole said, “I bet I could get away with playing in the Mozart’s piano.”
