The Accident (BT)

"The Accident" refers to the event that separated Boz and Kolya from their parents, resulting in their becoming feral, and eventually moving into a life of crime.

Promises
In the late 80s, the Shcherbarkov family took a trip to the Ukrainian mountains. The trip was intended to be a vacation, aimed at getting Pavel away from the stress of his job. Unfortunately, there is no true method of dragging a cop away from his work. While promised as an escape from their daily lives, the twins and their mother spent most of the trip in their hotel room, eagerly trying and failing to extract him from his case-load. It was an effort that consistently failed.

Towards the end of the trip, a seven-year-old Boz decided he had had enough, and confronted his busy father. The trip had been taken with the promise that he would spend time with them, and he had failed to keep his side of the bargain. What resulted was an argument that quickly spiraled out of control, with Pavel dismissing his young son on the grounds that he was just too busy for the conversation. Infuriated, Boz stormed out of the room. Kolya quickly gave chase.

Pavel reluctantly went back to his work, having no idea that the words he had spoken in anger were the last he would ever speak to his son. It was an exchange that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

A Fire
The twins made record time getting off the properly, Kolya following a furious Boz in an effort to reason with him. Their exit could not have been better timed or worse: as they disappeared into the mountains, a fire broke out at the resort they were staying at, quickly consuming more than half of the building--including the rooms they were meant to be housed in. By the time the smoke had darkened the sky, they were so far afield that they could not even see it.

A panic broke out across the resort as people hurried to reclaim their things and take stock of their family members. Along with the staff and security, Pavel assisted in the evacuation, crippled by the mounting sense that his children were in grave danger, and his time was running out. When the smoke cleared, he managed to find Danii, who shared his horror in discovering that neither of them had the twins. Rescue teams searched the rubble of what had been their rooms and the surrounding event areas, only to return empty-handed. The twins were among a handful of people unaccounted for, assumed by the teams to have been trapped in the fire. By then, a blizzard had rolled in, hampering attempts to locate those who had been lost to the chaos.

It was the first of many sleepless nights for the Shcherbarkovs. As the storm cut the burnt-out resort off from all other forms of help, burying the survivors in what remained of the wreckage, the twins found themselves inescapably lost in the woods. By the time the sun came up the next day, all signs of their flight were lost.

Their parents never saw them again.

Three Days
Clad in only their winter coats and gloves, the twins wandered the mountainside in search of a way back to the resort that no longer existed. Attempts at navigation were hampered by their young age and the lingering blizzard. With the roads reduced to endless fields of snow, the rescue teams trapped on the other side of the mountain, they were left to wander the woods in search of some sign that would take them back.

By the time the roads were cleared, they were miles away, all proof of their passing erased by the storm.

Days passed as the boys tried and failed to navigate the mountainside, working their way down until at last they reached the bottom. By this point, they were facing starvation and exposure, acutely aware that they had strayed too far to be easily found. They kept walking, for as long as they could, hoping to stumble across the town they had passed in their way to the resort.

As the sun peeked out on the third day, Kolya finally succumbed to exhaustion, forcing Boz to carry him until he too collapsed. Clutching his twin brother's slowly-fading body, Boz lay in the snow and waited to die.

Little Shadows
Out on errands for the local children's home, a seventeen-year-old Dakmar Polek spotted a pair of unseemly splashes of color in the snowbanks that afternoon, and reluctantly went to investigate. What he found were the frozen twins, caked in filth and wind-ash from the fire, one of them seemingly dead from exposure. He quickly convinced his caretaker to transport them back to the orphanage, keeping them warm until they could be fully treated.

Though almost starved and deathly ill from the cold, the twins survived. It was a mixed blessing, however; prolonged exposure and near-death had caused irreparable memory loss, reducing their knowledge of their lives to a patchwork mosaic of shadows and fragments. The staff's attempts to communicate with them failed when the twins ultimately chose not to identify themselves, having forgotten all but the nicknames their parents had given them: Boz and Kolya.

Consequences
Boris and Nikolai Shcherbarkov disappeared into the mountains that day, and were never seen again. The damage caused by exposure was irreversible. By the time the twins were rescued, they were so deep in shock from the suffering that they had forgotten everything about themselves, beyond their family nicknames. Those were the names they would use all the rest of their lives.

One Person
Growing up in a late-Soviet-era orphanage had further consequences for the twins. Abuse by the staff and multiple attempts to separate them caused the two to develop a near-symbiotic attachment to one another. The result was almost complete loss of their respective identities, the two becoming fixated on the one point that seemed to protect them: the staff could not tell them apart.

Protecting what remained of their names from those who sought to hurt them, the twins became known as "Odyn" and "Dva" (One and Two), and sought to be utterly indistinguishable from each other. Every scar earned by one of them, the other inflicted on himself, to prevent easy identification. This habit lasted well into their adult years, extending later to prison tattoos and even serious injuries as they aged.

By the time they were fourteen, the twins had learned to pick locks and to steal, skills taught to them by Dakmar, then their only friend. Armed with these survival skills, they escaped the orphanage, vanishing again into the countryside to seek out lives for themselves the only way they could: by stealing one.

The twins ended up in prison more than a few times. They were never caught together; when Boz was in prison, Kolya was free, and vise-versa. Between a practice of ritual mutilation to make their bodies match and their skill in escaping, they were never legally identified as two separate people. When arrested, the name they gave was Pavl Sherov--the only fragments they could recall of their father's name.

Obsession
While official reports listed them as casualties of the fire, their father never truly believed that they were dead. He became obsessed with finding them, gathering what little evidence remained and embarking on a quest to find them. It was a process that took him years of research, phone calls and door-knocking, combing the seventy square kilometers around the destroyed resort in an effort of finding them.

He got close several times, eventually reaching the children's home they were staying at, only to be stonewalled by its owner, Ilsa Kovalenko. The twins last-minute escape from the orphanage was bad for her image, and so she denied any knowledge of them, turning him away without so much as confirmation that they had been there. Recognizing Pavel as the twins' father, Dakmar went against the headmistress' wishes and assured him that they had been there, and that he should keep looking.

It was enough to keep him searching for the next 15 years.

Outcome
By the time they were twenty-five, the twins were so co-dependent that they hardly spoke to others at all, resorting to grifting and theft to survive between rotating stints in various prisons.

One particular scam they had luck with was a street-corner show: one of them, posing as a magician, would perform street-magic, while the other picked the audiences' pockets. This was a turning point in their lives, as the two so easily mastered sleight-of-hand that their busking quickly became popular enough that "he" (as they were known to be one person) was being offered chances to perform in front of real crowds, for pay. This character they played would evolve into Angel Phoenix, the twins' stage persona, who would go on to become a Las Vegas strip magician. It was in this way that the twins made their way to the UK, and later, the States.

The scam worked out, offering them a way out of poverty and destitution, but at a semi-permanent price: no one knew there were two of them, and so it had to remain.