"I guess - there's a lot going on in my head. Sometimes the whole day is fine until suddenly it's just not. And this place isn't like the gulag, it's nicer than any place I've ever even seen in Russia, but I keep having... I keep having flashbacks. To something that, that happened but didn't get recorded. Because it was no big deal. It is no big deal. And if anything's going to screw me up it should be the train crash or losing my family, right? So I shouldn't care about little things." Ilya rarely rambles, but he's both trying to talk himself into and out of something. He's nervous, he's scared, he wishes his mother were alive and here so he could curl up with her and cry, and so he just sort of blurts out, "A lot of guys in the gulag turned on each other. No women around so - things, uh, happened. Kind of happened, to me. Once."
Just uttering those words makes him feel like the lowest form of life on planet Earth. A powerful enough mutant to lift mining carts had to be rescued by a guard. And how shallow does it make him to even care about that when his hometown is deserted, everyone he knew is dead, the world as he understands it is gone? And he's flashing back to something as completely insubstantial as this? Worse, he's having flashbacks of it? The only way he can make sense of it is that maybe he's too much of a coward to face the rest of what he went through. Maybe he's just not strong enough.
"...I know it's my fault. For being out of sight of the guards and being stupid. But ever since SHIELD pushed me for details of every little thing I could remember it's all sort of resurfaced. I don't know why. I used to be fine."
If 'fine' meant 'never thinking about it and focusing on anything else he could'. If 'fine' meant being too shocked to do anything but keep going. Honestly, if Dolemeck hadn't pried it out of him, Ilya might've just gone his whole life resigned to flashbacks, nightmares, being afraid of other men in the hall and ignoring his own quiet panic.
no subject
Just uttering those words makes him feel like the lowest form of life on planet Earth. A powerful enough mutant to lift mining carts had to be rescued by a guard. And how shallow does it make him to even care about that when his hometown is deserted, everyone he knew is dead, the world as he understands it is gone? And he's flashing back to something as completely insubstantial as this? Worse, he's having flashbacks of it? The only way he can make sense of it is that maybe he's too much of a coward to face the rest of what he went through. Maybe he's just not strong enough.
"...I know it's my fault. For being out of sight of the guards and being stupid. But ever since SHIELD pushed me for details of every little thing I could remember it's all sort of resurfaced. I don't know why. I used to be fine."
If 'fine' meant 'never thinking about it and focusing on anything else he could'. If 'fine' meant being too shocked to do anything but keep going. Honestly, if Dolemeck hadn't pried it out of him, Ilya might've just gone his whole life resigned to flashbacks, nightmares, being afraid of other men in the hall and ignoring his own quiet panic.