Work Text:
He takes the money.
Swallowing hard an irrational “No,” that forms in his throat, he takes the money. He bows once more to the Dowager Empress, and backs out of the room and out of the house and out of the Princess Anastasia’s life, forever.
(He sees her on the stairs, and yes, it hurts, but it hurts the most when she tries to say he doesn’t need to call her Princess and for a moment he sees Anya, shooing away formalities with a graceless hand. It’s better once he bows, because then when he looks up into her face again she is the princess. She is the princess, and that makes it easier to walk away. Makes it necessary to walk away.)
He goes back to Petrograd and spends the money on wine and vodka and clean sheets in fancy hotels and on gifts to impress one night stands. (Or, when that gets too complicated, he spends the money on sex itself.) And on the bribes that make such a life under the Soviet government possible.
But such a life draws attention, and soon it draws the wrong attention, and soon Dmitri is fleeing the Soviet Union with only a single suitcase. (It’s the still the same case the Duchess gave him, which is stupid, because one of the clasps is broken and in the end he has to carry the money out in the lining of his suit anyway. But he keeps the case.)
The clean sheets in the fancy hotels in East Berlin are even softer and cleaner, but somehow Dmitri isn’t sleeping any easier. Every time he opens the case and takes out a stack of bills he sees her face now, sees her clenched jaw as she asks “Did you get what you came for?” (I did. But it wasn’t what I should have come for.) So he stops opening it. The money’s half gone, anyway, it makes more sense to save it as a cushion and support himself with work for a while.
But his heart isn’t in the old cons and he needs Vlad to pull off most of them, so he stops that too. He still needs money and he feels sick every time he opens that damn case, so he finds work in a factory outside Berlin. The pay is bad, and he fucking hates factory work, he always has. But he’s not a good person, and in a way he deserves to have a miserable job and drink miserable low-grade vodka and pass out in a hard bed in his miserable new apartment.
One night he has so much he really is sick, and in the morning he throws out the miserable low-grade vodka along with his bedsheets and resolves to stop drinking such piss. He can’t afford anything better, though, so instead of buying liquor he starts putting his savings in the suitcase along with the rest of the money. For safekeeping.
He doesn’t stay long after that, starts moving from one factory town to another, because he’s Dmitri and he never stays still. For a laugh, one time he takes what he’s saved to a moneylender and tries to change it to rubles. The moneylender hasn’t got any rubles, but when Dmitri pushes he tells him how much it would have gotten him in rubles a year ago. (It’s been almost a year since he took the suitcase and bowed to the Dowager Empress; or maybe it’s been more, how would he know, he hasn’t been counting. But it was summer then and it’s summer again now.)
The number is higher than Dmitri expected, and he starts thinking about how long it would take him to earn back what he spent. It’s a funny idea, and he toys with it the next few weeks: paying back the Dowager Empress.
It’s crazy. The old woman’s not hurting for money, she doesn’t need any gifts from ex-con-men factory workers. But he likes the thought of it, likes the idea of getting the suitcase and it’s stupid fucking broken clasp out from under his bed. Sending it back to Paris, full again.
(In his stupidest moments, right before sleep, Dmitri thinks about handing it directly to Anya. He imagines doing it wordlessly, avoiding her eyes. He imagines saying “This is for your grandmother, with my compliments,” and bowing properly. He imagines cupping her cheek and saying “Anya I was wrong I was an idiot I was blind” and pressing the suitcase into her hands. He imagines her smiling at him, and then he punches himself in the head and forces himself to fall asleep.)
He puts what he earns in the case, and starts eating less to save a little more. He puts it all in the case, and at night when he can’t sleep he counts it and works out the math to convert it to rubles. Whenever he changes countries he visits a new moneylender to find out the new equivalency. He’s getting pretty good at this math.
He saves what he can and he keeps it safe. It’s Anya’s money, it’s the money that bought the Princess Anastasia from Vlad and him.
And he is going to pay it back.