Chapter Text
Love On The Run!
Ivan Braginski sat on a chair in the Relatives Room of the hospital with Matthew Williams by his side and Matthew's soulmate, Gilbert Beilschmidt, next to him as they waited for someone to come and tell them that the operation was over and how it went. Across the room sat a young Chinese man with choppy brown hair and golden-brown eyes with large eyebrows, trying to look emotionless but, every now and then, a glimpse of fearful concern flashed in his eyes. A large plaster graced his cheek and his arm was in a sling but he had gotten off lightly compared to his older brother.
Ivan slumped down in his chair, his face sinking into the scarf that his older sister had given him when he left Russia for Alaska and then on to Canada and he wished she was here now. How could he have let this happen! He should have gotten Yao out when Natalya turned up in Canada as part of Ivan's helicopter crew but he thought he could hide Yao's existence from her but, in the end, it was futile and now an innocent man was dead, Li Xiao had been hurt and Yao was in the operating theatre, fighting for his life.
Everyone looked up as the door opened and a man in doctor's scrubs with light-brown hair and hazel eyes, came in and looked round.
"Are you with Yao Wang?" he asked and both Ivan and Li Xiao stood up.
"I'm his brother!" Li Xiao replied.
"I'm his soulmate!" Ivan revealed. "And his fiancé!"
"I'm Doctor Bell!" the doctor said. "The operation went as well as could be expected! If he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, he has a chance. The rest is up to him now!"
"Can we see him, Doctor?" Ivan asked. The doctor nodded.
"He's being moved to a private room in ICU, right now," he replied. "Give us time to get him settled and I'll have a nurse take you to him!"
"Thank you, Doctor!" Li Xiao said and the doctor left the room. Ivan sat back down and rested his head on the back of his chair, his usual smile, absent. After all, other than the fact that Yao had survived the operation, Ivan had very little to smile about. His violet eyes just stared at the ceiling above his head while Matthew came to sit beside him and put a reassuring hand on Ivan's arm. Ivan turned to look at his workmate.
"This is my fault, Matvey!" he condemned himself. "I knew what Natalya was like, how unstable she was. I should have done more to protect my sunflower!"
"Ivan," Matthew said, softly. "You hadn't seen her in years! You had no idea what she was capable of, how truly unstable she was!"
"I knew how obsessive she could become," Ivan replied. "She's the reason why I went to Alaska when I met Yao! I knew if she knew about Yao, she would become …... difficult!"
"You could not have known that she would do what she did!" Matthew insisted. "No one would expect somebody to do something like that! This was all her, Ivan! All you did was find your soulmate, the most natural and desired thing in the world!"
"She wanted to be my soulmate!" Ivan replied. "She obsessed about it!"
"But she wasn't!" Matthew stated. "And never would be! Siblings are never soulmates and she should have accepted that! Instead, she went against nature and let it destroy her sanity!"
"Is it bad that I'm glad she's been sectioned?" Ivan asked. "Does that make me a bad brother?"
"No!" Gilbert spoke up now. "It's hard but she showed how dangerous she was and now she's where she can get help! She was a threat to you and everyone around her! It's not awesome but true!"
"He's right, Ivan!" Matthew said. The door opened again and a nurse with black hair in a ponytail and blue eyes, came in.
"Hello," she greeted. "I'm here to take you to Yao Wang's room." Everyone stood up and left the room. The nurse led them through corridors and finally opened the door to a private room.
"Gil and I will wait out here," Matthew said, when the nurse said that only two people could be in the room. "You're his family!" Ivan smiled at his colleague and then followed Li Xiao into the room.
Ivan had already caught the antiseptic smell of the hospital outside the room and the next thing he detected was the beep of the heart monitor and the hiss of the respirator. Then the hospital bed came into view with its occupant. The Chinese man that lay there looked small, his hair out of its usual ponytail, trailing out of the bandages that covered most of his head. Wires snaked out from under his hospital gown and trailed out to the heart monitor while the breathing tube was attached to the respirator as it hissed, pushing air into Yao's lungs. His skin looked pale and waxy with dark shadows under his closed eyes and Ivan could not believe that his soulmate had come to this!
Li Xiao sat in a chair on the right side of the bed, taking his older brother's hand and holding it tight. Li Xiao had spent years, teasing Yao and irritating him like every other bratty younger brother that had ever existed and Yao had always pretending it made him angry but Li Xiao knew he had secretly liked it! Li Xiao, for all his help, never let Yao feel like he was different because of his impediment. Younger brothers irritated older brothers, that was the way it was but now Li Xiao wished he had been less of a pain.
Ivan took a seat of the left side of Yao's bed and held his left hand, which seemed small in his large grip, gazing at the gold engagement ring with the jade stone that he himself had placed there only a year ago. He should have done it sooner! He should have done it when they left Alaska for Canada and married quickly but he thought they had time! He had managed to leave Russia before Natalya had found out about Yao and he never thought she would find out where he had gone to until she turned up as his new co-pilot on the Mountain Rescue team that he worked on. She pretended that it was all just a co-incidence and never gave any indication that she knew about Yao. Ivan had made arrangements to get Yao out of Canada to the safety of his native China but Natalya had managed to get to him any way!
Ivan looked down at the ring again, remembering the day he had met Yao, the day he had proposed, everything!
Four years ago ……
Ivan Arlovsky had finally achieved his pilot's licence and finished his training in piloting helicopters. He called his older half-sister, Katyusha to tell her and she was ecstatic for him but no sooner had he finished his call than his phone rang and he groaned as he saw on Caller Id who it was. He should ignore it but Natalya would just keep calling and turning his phone off would just mean a harder time when they met in person. Natalya was becoming increasingly harder to deal with as her affection for him went beyond brother and sister and he was no longer comfortable in her presence. Natalya took after their father, General Dmitri Arlovsky, sometimes called General Winter because of his cold demeanour but even he found his daughter's obsession with his son disturbing and had arranged for her to see a psychiatrist but she was not very co-operative and her obsession persisted. It accumulated with Ivan leaving the family home when Natalya demanded he marry her. Since then, she had gone into stalker mode!
"Hello, brother!" her sweet but creepy voice seeped down the phone when he answered. "I've heard you've got your licence! Now you can get a pilot's job and we can marry! Marry me, brother! Marry me!" Ivan wondered how she had found out so fast.
"Nyet!" he said with determination. "We are not soulmates and, more importantly, we are brother and sister, that is not natural! Give up your obsession of me, Natalya! Find your soulmate and I'll find mine!" The voice on the phone turned to an angry hiss.
"I know my heart," Natalya growled. "It will beat if you love me! Do not let someone else make your heart beat, brother! You'll both regret it if you do!" Ivan switched his phone off on the disturbing call. Natalya had made threats against Ivan's future soulmate before and it made him dread finding his life partner and he had long since made a plan for that eventuality. Ivan was born in Alaska, giving him dual citizenship with the US and he would use that to his advantage when he finally found his soulmate because they would not be safe in Russia. They would go to Alaska, his soulmate would be guaranteed citizenship through Ivan and Ivan would change his name, to Braginski, which was his mother's name before marrying his father and it was Katyusha's name before marrying her soulmate, Eduard Von Bock. From there, they would find away to disappear where Natalya could never find them.
Then, one day, the inevitable happened.
It was just an ordinary day with Ivan doing an every day thing, shopping for groceries and wandering the aisles for his required items. As he searched the shelves for ingredients for Borscht, he could hear two male voices, chatting in the next aisle in a language he did not understand but it sounded like Chinese. Over the aisle, he could see the back of their heads, one with choppy dark brown, almost black hair and the other's was a similar colour but it was longer and was in a ponytail, draped over his left shoulder. They chatted back and forth, maybe discussing what to buy and so forth, so Ivan went back to his own shopping and moved down the aisle, looking for the other items on his list.
He did not realise that the two Chinese men were also moving down the aisle on the opposite side and, as he turned at the end of the aisle to go into the next one, he found himself crashing into the older man who, being smaller than Ivan, was knocked to the ground, almost taking the younger, who was holding his arm, down with him.
"Yao!" the younger man cried.
"Prosti! ( I'm sorry! )" Ivan exclaimed, reaching his hand down for the Chinese man to take so he could help him up but the younger …... Ivan had thought the other was older but he was little more than a young teenager with gold-brown eyes and substantial eyebrows ….. knelt down to help the other man to his feet and Ivan's hand was ignored. Ivan thought that was rude, after all he had not meant to knock the man down, and he took a good look at the man who had paid no attention to his attempt to help. The older Chinese man had eyes that were darker than the younger and they resembled each other enough for Ivan to guess that they were brothers but he was not prepared for what happened next.
Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump!
Ivan immediately put his hand over his heart, as if to confirm that it was beating and realised that the day he had both longed for and dreaded was finally here! His soulmate was standing before him but the man's face gave no indication that he realised that and then Ivan noticed something about the man. His eyes seemed to look right through him, as if he was not there and that's when he realised. His new sunflower was blind! Ivan knew that this meeting had put his new soulmate in extreme danger but his blindness would make him even more vulnerable.
“ Do you speak Russian? " he asked in his own language. His soul mate cocked his head and his brother just stared at the tall Russian in their way.
" I'm sorry! I can't speak Russian , " the older man replied in Chinese. " Do you, perhaps, speak Chinese? Or maybe English, aru?" He had switched to the English language.
"Da!" Ivan replied, happy that he could actually converse with his sunflower, even if it was not in either of their native tongue. "I can speak English! I am happy but also sad at finally meeting you! I am Ivan Arlovsky!" The Chinese man looked confused.
"I am Wang Yao," he replied. "This is my younger brother, Wang Li Xiao. Why are you happy but sad to meet me. aru?" Ivan was careful to take Yao's hand and gently pull it forward to put it on his chest so Yao could feel his heart beating. Yao's sightless eyes widened with surprise at the thumping under his hand.
"You are my soulmate!" Yao breathed. Then his face fell. "Now I'm sad! My heart can't beat for you because I cannot see your eyes. I am blind, aru!" Ivan put his other hand over the hand that Yao still had against Ivan's chest.
"That's not important to me, Podsolnukh! ( Sunflower! )," Ivan replied. "But my finding of you places you in great danger!"
"What do you mean?" Li Xiao demanded. Ivan sighed.
"I'm thinking that we should go somewhere and talk!" he said and they went to a nearby coffee shop for a deep discussion.
As they walked to Ivan's favourite coffee shop, Ivan learnt about his new soulmate. He and his brother were having a holiday, to take in the cultural ambience of other countries and Russia had been their next stop. Although Yao could not see the sights that his brother could, he like to learn about the different places they visited. Yao told Ivan that he was a teaching assistant in the blind school that he himself had attended and he was the legal guardian for his fourteen year old brother who had been a help on this trip, guiding him around unfamiliar places so Ivan accepted that Li Xiao would be part of the plan. He also told Ivan about how he lost his sight in a car accident. The sad thing was the damage was repairable with an operation but it was in a dangerous part of the brain and, just one slip, Yao could be permanently brain-damaged or could even die so no doctor would touch it!
They sat in the coffee shop, sipping their beverages as Ivan told him about himself. That his parents were not soulmates as his father's soulmate had died and he had married a widow with a young daughter, his half-sister, Katyusha. He mentioned being a qualified pilot and he also said about the fact that he was born in Alaska so he could bring that up when he outlined his plan for their protection. Then he touched on the problem subject. His insane little sister!
"Natalya has inappropriate feelings toward me," Ivan explained. "I have quite often felt stalked by her and she has made clear the danger she presents to anyone who causes my heart to beat! Even my father cannot bring her under control and I fear for your safety once she finds out about you! I am sorry, Podsolnukh! This will change your life forever!"
"She's that dangerous?" Li Xiao asked. Ivan nodded.
"I made a plan for when I found my soulmate," Ivan told them. "But it will mean you must give up your life as you know it! The plan will be to go to Alaska where I am a citizen and I will change my name and then we go somewhere else!"
"Why not stay in Alaska, aru?" Yao asked.
"Natalya will know to look there," Ivan replied. "It would not be a safe place to hide! You will not be safe!"
"And you expect us to just, like, leave everyone and everything behind!" Li Xiao exclaimed. "We have other brothers and sisters and you expect us to just go to Alaska and leave them! Why don't we just go home and forget this happened?" Li Xiao turned to his brother.
"Do you wish to deny your brother his soulmate?" Ivan replied, desperate not to lose Yao now that he had found him. "And if Natalya finds out my heart is beating, she will not stop until she finds out who Yao is and she will come after him! I'm sorry, Li Xiao! For this reason, I almost did not want to find Yao but I have now and I must do everything I can to protect him. Remember, I, too must give up the life I know. I have a father and a half sister but I will have to leave them behind to protect Yao!"
"You don't sound like someone who scares easily," Yao commented. "She really is that much of a threat, aru!"
"Da!" Yao went silent as he lapsed into thought. When he felt someone crash into him, he never expected it to be his soulmate and he certainly never expected it to overturn his life in this way. On the run from his soulmate's insane, incestuous-minded sister! But Ivan seriously feared for Yao's life! An over-reaction! Yao did not think so!
"If you believe the danger is that great!" Yao said, slowly. "Then we have no choice! I will go with you, Ivan! Li Xiao, the choice is yours! You can come with me or I can send you to Im Yong Soo, although I would rather you came with me, aru!"
"I'm not letting you go to a strange country without me, anyway!" Li Xiao said, adamantly. "You wouldn't last five minutes until you, like, got used to the place. If you're going to do this, I'm going too!"
Ivan smiled. He had his soulmate and Yao was going to agree to the plan and now he would put it into action.
Flights to Alaska were ordered but Yao and Li Xiao went on a different flight to Ivan, who's older sister had met him at the airport in secret to see her brother one last time with a gift of a scarf, that she had made just for him, and they met up in Anchorage where they stayed for a while, changing Ivan's name from Arlovsky to Braginski and organising Yao's citizenship as his soulmate and, as his younger brother's guardian, Li Xiao's but they did not stay too long. Ivan managed to find a job in Canada as the pilot of a mountain rescue helicopter pilot and managed to acquire a work visa for himself and a six-month visa for Yao and Li Xiao and they began a new life in Canada. In the six months, Ivan applied for permanent citizenship and it was granted to him and, by extension, to his soulmate and his little brother as well. They were finally free! For the next three years, at least!