A/N: So this alternate ending is meant to (somewhat) represent my original idea for this fic's end in 2014 when I began writing it. This is why there is no mention of Gleb. Because he was based partially on the musical character, he did not exist in this story in 2014 as the musical wasn't a thing back then.

In this version, Bartok is never taken from Alexei and Dimitri is not separated from the Romanovs when he arrives in Yekaterinburg.

Dimitri awoke to a hand grasping his elbow and shaking his arm. The grip on his elbow was light, but the shake was no less urgent for it.

Opening his eyes and seeing Botkin hovering over him, his brow furrowed, forehead creased with concern, he assumed something was the matter with Alexei, and – leaping up from his cot – attempted to hurry to the door in what was – save for the dressing-grown he'd thrown over himself for modesty's sake – still a state of undress.

"Nyet." Botkin cleared his throat pointedly, and Dimitri stopped, his hand hovering over the doorknob for another second before dropping to his side when, glancing back, he perceived the smallest shake of the doctor's head.

Ah. Not Alexei, then.

Still, the question, in a lower, half-sleep, half-breathless voice: "What's wrong?"

Pushing his spectacles more firmly into place, up the bridge of his nose from where they'd slid – just a little ways – down it, Botkin said, "One of us has to wake the girls – Yurovsky is moving us."

Dimitri couldn't help it – he gawked. "Now?"

"So it would seem." There was a dry, tense edge to Botkin's voice.

That was when Dimitri noticed a letter – partially completed, left off in the middle of a sentence – on the small desk beside the narrow bed in which Botkin slept when the pain from his kidneys (bad again, as of late) subsided enough to let him rest, and when worries over the health of the former tsarevich and empress did not keep his eyes from shutting.

"Who were you writing?" he asked.

"My son," he said, rather quietly. "Did I ever tell you that you share a name?"

"He's called Dimitri, too?" It wasn't an uncommon name, not in Russia, but this still surprised him for whatever reason. "No. You never told me that."

"I also have a daughter called Tatiana," Botkin murmured. "Just like the grand duchess."

Bending over to quickly lace up his boots (best not keep the Bolshie guards waiting, lest they inspire their anger and unwittingly encourage them to inflict further petty cruelties on the Romanovs), Dimitri asked, "How could you leave them?" It was different for himself, staying on with the family – he had no one else. The Romanovs were his family. Anastasia was his family.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders – an audible pop springing from his slightly cramped, achy joints as he did so. "A man finds the strength when he must." Glancing down at his young charge, he took in Dimitri's puzzlement. "Ah. You still don't understand. Well, do you remember that time at Spala, when Alexei was about eight years old?"

Dimitri shuddered involuntarily. He did remember. Unlike Anastasia, he didn't remember each time Alexei was sick – there were simply too many for his mind to keep straight – but he remembered that incident.

It was the worst, the most unforgettable.

"Of course." His tone, though remaining low, was almost indignant at being asked the question at all. It was akin, nearly, to being asked if he remembered how to breathe.

"The other servants put cotton in their ears," Botkin went on. "To block out his screams – they couldn't work and listen to Alexei's pain." He raised his eyebrows. "Even Alexandra Feodorovna gave you her blessing, if you needed to block it out – yet, you choose not to. Do you remember what you said to me when I delivered the Tsarina's message?"

He'd said he needed to keep his senses, no matter the strain, in case there was anything – at any point, however small – he could do for Alexei. It was his job, and he would not dull his senses and shrink from it.

"How did you find the strength to endure it? Those screams?"

"I found it because I had to."

"So it goes with me." Then, "After all, you could have chosen to leave the Romanovs, too – you had a choice. You could have gone home when the revolution started."

"Wherever they are," he whispered, more to himself than Botkin, "is my home."

"I feel the same – even though, in my case, it meant great sacrifice." He grimaced. There was the sound of distant gunfire. "Now, will you be so kind as to rouse the girls before the guards grow upset?"

The good doctor had said 'upset' not 'dangerous', but somehow the words seemed genuinely interchangeable in this context.

Stepping into the room to wake the girls, all deeply asleep in their cots, Dimitri debated for a moment which cot to approach first. He almost went to Olga, since she was the eldest, thinking perhaps that she would want to take charge of getting the others organized, but that was more Tatiana – the Governess – and there was no way he was going to wake her first. She would be scandalized, even now, he thought, to be roused by a lone manservant of Dimitri's age. If it had been Botkin, who being their doctor had seen them all before in their nighties, she wouldn't have made much fuss, but Dimitri was another matter entirely. Just like Alexandra – ever the prim Victorian Mama – she would be too overcome by the impropriety of the whole thing to ready herself as quickly as necessary. Better let one of her sisters deal with passing on the message.

So he went to Anastasia's cot and shook her arm the way Botkin had shaken his earlier.

Startled out of a feverish dream, she stretched her arm up and unintentionally clocked him in the face.

"Ow!" He had to cover his mouth with his hand to muffle the cry as the blow sent him staggering backwards into Maria's cot, which he bumped the back of his thigh against.

Maria sat up, rubbing her eyes and murmuring, "Is it time to get up already?"

Anastasia meanwhile grimaced at Dimitri. "Sorry. What's happened?"

"You all have to get up now," he told her. "Yurovsky's moving us."

"It's so dark still," Maria mumbled, blinking at him. "Are we allowed to take anything?"

Dimitri told her he didn't think so, and Anastasia declared she wasn't leaving Pooka.

While Maria got up and started looking around for her shoes, insisting she had left them somewhere near her cot, Dimitri tried to make his exit, saying he'd let them get dressed.

Unfortunately, that was the exact moment Tatiana woke up from the sounds of the conversation (Maria was being a little louder than she meant to) and exclaimed, "What's he doing in here?" She pulled her blankets more securely around herself.

"Dimitri was just leaving," Anastasia said quickly. "Botkin sent him to wake us – Yurovsky's moving us all tonight."

Tatiana's pretty brow furrowed, but she got up and woke Olga anyway, just as Dimitri nodded and tried for the second time to leave the room.

"Where's Alexei?" she asked next, before his toe was even over the threshold. "Why aren't you with him?"

He explained, hastily, that Nicholas was getting the boy ready and that he was under orders from Botkin to wait for them all in the hallway.

Tatiana accepted this, her demeanor gone from scandalized to dutiful as she started helping her sisters. Maria had popped a button on the blouse she was trying to put on; the seam on Olga's coat sleeve was torn; and Anastasia's hair, according to Tatiana's assessment, was frightful.

Twice, the guards came through the hallway and demanded to know what was taking the girls so long. Dimitri could only shrug and station himself as securely in front of the door as he dared until they left in an impatient huff.

The girls finally emerged, fully dressed, and all except for Anastasia – who was holding Pooka, of course – carried little handbags and pillows.

Botkin joined them on the landing, followed by Alexandra escorted by a maid named Demidova who Dimitri didn't know very well, and then Nicholas with a groggy Alexei in his arms.

As they all made their way down the stairs, Dimitri noticed a little white head poke itself out of Alexei's breast pocket. So he had smuggled Bartok out with him, it seemed. He hoped the guards wouldn't notice and get upset. Or simply decide to take the bat away from him as a slight.

Though, perhaps, with the sound of gunfire so near, they had other worries more pressing than how to inflict further misery on the Romanovs.

There were twenty-three steps down into the basement, where the guards led them.

"Stand here," Yurovsky started demanding, pointing in whichever direction he wanted each of them positioned. "Nicholas Romanov, over here, in front."

Alexandra wanted to know why there were no chairs.

Chairs were consequently brought out – only two, but chairs nonetheless. Still, Dimitri didn't like the look on the guards' faces as they did so, as if they were sharing some kind of nasty, unpleasant private joke between them.

Nicholas placed Alexei onto one of the chairs; Alexandra sank into the other. Botkin double-checked that Alexei was comfortable, gently straightening the position of his legs, and Dimitri took off his greatcoat and tucked it around the former tsarevich's lap as if for warmth, though it wasn't really very cold, being July. He just felt he ought to do something for him – the boy was looking so pale.

Strangely, Alexandra, from her place, was giving Dimitri a withering look – almost of annoyance – when he parted with his greatcoat. Even the fact that it was given to Alexei, her precious Sunbeam, didn't seem to mollify her much.

Anastasia visibly grimaced at him as she bent over and placed the pillow Maria had carried behind their Mama's back to make her more comfortable.

He was never to learn the reason behind this. Never would Dimitri know that his greatcoat lining concealed a king's random of jewels, as did the corsets all four Romanov girls wore.

Alexei stifled a yawn and slipped a small black-bread crumb (heaven only knew where he'd saved it from) into his breast pocket for Bartok.

"Closer together, if you please," said Yurovsky, still motioning – emanating an eerie patience as he did so – with his hands.

Pooka growled; Anastasia tightened her grip on the agitated gray mutt. "What for?"

"We're going to take your picture."

Tatiana, lips pursed, asked why.

Yurovsky offhandedly replied that there were rumors the entire family had escaped. "We want to put an end to it," he finished, his tone flat.

Such ominous words, too. An end to it. Just like that.

For a good while, despite just getting them into place and instructing them all not to move, Yurovsky then left with the other guards and left them alone.

Speculation flew back and forth between the girls.

"They're checking to see it's safe."

"They're getting the trucks ready."

Alexei agreed, insisting he heard a motor.

"I'm going to see what's taking them so long," Anastasia decided, marching toward the doors Yurovsky had exited by.

Alexandra was nonplussed. "You'll do no such thing – you will stay right here with the rest of us."

"It's locked anyway, Yurovsky's sure to have made certain," Maria reminded them, a little timidly, her tired cheeks reddening.

Anastasia complied, of course, but she did not return to the place where Yurovsky had stationed her and bade her to wait. In the only act of defiance she could manage right then, she instead went over to where Dimitri was standing and leaned next to him.

In all the anxiety, her parents either did not notice or much care.

Neither did they see that, when the guards and Yurovsky returned – with grim looks on their brutal, perhaps unintentionally telling faces – Anastasia and Dimitri actually linked hands (she had shifted Pooka's weight onto only one arm, to make this possible) for a fraction of a second, their trembling fingers interlocking.

With a single, fluid movement, Yurovsky took a slip of paper from his greatcoat pocket. "I have been given new orders."

Nicholas nodded uncertainly. Alexandra asked, frowning, if they were not being moved after all.

Boktin's face clouded over with anxiety as he reiterated the former tsarina's question. "You're not taking us anywhere?"

"In view of the fact that your relatives in Europe continue their assault on Soviet Russia, the presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet has sentenced you to be shot." Yurovsky dropped the paper, letting it flutter to the floor. "An execution that will be carried out immediately."

"What? What?" cried Nicholas.

Fire was opened on him immediately.

Seeing their father murdered before their eyes, Olga and Tatiana clutched at each other, weeping.

Within moments, though, the former tsar and tsarina were dead and the rest of them were targets now, too.

Presumably, there was meant to be an order of things, but the frenzy had caused all the guards to aim at Nicholas until he was no more. Now they shot anywhere, any which way, to kill anyone but themselves in the smokey basement room.

Dimitri knew he ought to be protecting Alexei, only the boy was too far away. It was Bartok, instead, who became – without a chance to be asked – the pitiful line of defense between the bullets and the former tsarevich. The shots aimed at his heart, got Bartok in his pocket first. There was a squealing sound to signal his end – and that was more noise than Pooka made as he died and Anastasia was forced to drop him.

So Dimitri flung himself in front of Anastasia, for all the good it could do against the endless attack.

He did not know he was even less protected than she, poor man. That the jewels the bullets might have glanced off and the bayonets mightn't have pierced through straight away were tucked around Alexei's lap, protecting only his bad leg and little else as he fell from his chair, gasping in pain.

The last thing Dimitri ever knew was that he was injured and falling backwards, and Anastasia, whom he knocked down behind himself, was crying on the floor and Maria – somewhere not too far off, closer to the back – was pounding on the double doors, screaming to be let out.

And that was all. There was no more.