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"I don't -- I think I agree with you that I don't want you to fix things with magic. Make her more receptive to me. If I wanted to do that, I could do it with Mind, myself, you know? But I don't want that. I want to fix things with my sister, but if I'm going to fix it, I want to fix it ... myself. By being me." Fox pulls in a deep breath through her nose, face still buried in his chest, taking a draught of Vasha's scent in order to steady herself. There are tiny trembles in her grubby hands. "I think if you could just ... arrange the call, and pick a good time for me to call her, when she'll be alone and has the ability to talk, that is exactly enough of being my hero. That's all the little miracle I'll need."
It might speak volumes about the respect and deference the die hard Guardian has for Fox that he offers a purely magical solution in the first place. Guardians typically favor conventional solutions over magical ones, but he exerts no great pressure either way, beyond seeming pleased that she makes what he clearly sees as the correct decision.
For a brief moment, Vasha smiles and nothing clouds the emotion. He's simply happy to help.
Unsurprisingly, this is not a very startling demonstration of magical prowess. As subtle as subtle can be, divination. He closes his eyes, concentrates, and begins to perceive the threads of time in the process.
The vision comes fast, little lines of concise information, dates, times and time available. There's quite a few options with wide windows of opportunity for the intended goal. A few lines stick out for the best moments, it's easy for Vasily to sort through this kind of information. Some of the result are in the far distant future of Next Week ™️ and some are as early as Later this Evening ™️
It says a lot about the way that Fox and Vasha are together that she doesn't question his support. She tips her face up toward him, green-gold eyes subtly rimed with tears, just in time to catch that smile, because it would be an absolute sin against everything if she missed it. And her genuine smile -- so much easier come by than his -- blossoms across her face, vulpine teeth and all. Fox pushes up onto her toes and kisses his cheek, then rests down on her feet again and just sets her head against his chest.
She waits for the weird stuttering of his nimbus, the feeling of being slightly out of time, of a thousand timelines exploding through Vasha and resolving, and lets out a subtle sigh. Yes, that is her heart, doing the thing that he does.
Vasha's divination seems to take the form of automatic writing. Only he uses his phone, rather than pen and paper.
When he opens his eyes once again, he consults the screen and then purses his lips with a little frown.
"Fucking phone took the dates like here in the US."
He does some rather tart grumbling in mumbled Ukrainian as he corrects the dates and the date display while he's at it. "Day smaller than month smaller than year... Fucking country."
Corrected, he offers it back to Fox with a list of dates and times showing correctly. If you're not American, anyway. "Oh, and the times are all GMT, so you'll want to... correct. That." Vasha fights the urge to reclaim the phone, then slides his hands into his pockets. "Pick a time, I do the thing."
She laughs a little bit at his grumbling, because she knows the difference between Standard Vasha Grumbling and Vasha Is Really Upset after all of these years. "I appreciate you very much, especially with having to deal with my fucking country," she responds in her fluent, properly-accented Ukranian. After all, she learned from the best, didn't she? "I promise to make it worth your while later." She sticks out her tongue: classic Fox deflection from nervousness, that.
"Okay!" Fox has no trouble navigating the backwards dates: she lived in Europe for most of her adult life, after all. Adjusting the date display to EST, she winks at him when he slides his hands into his pockets, smiling that sly smile of hers, and scrolls through the dates. "I think... let's pull the bandaid. This time, here, tonight. It's not too long to wait and get myself all spun up."
"Okay." Vasha shrugs his shoulders in a manner that would read as dismissive to those unused to his general surliness.
It seems Vasha intends to just wait out the clock, which might explain why he gives Fox a quick kiss, then slides out of her arms to go and fetch himself a cigar from his humidor and a glass of vodka and cranberry. Two, in this case.
He passes one to her with a bit of a wink, "In Vodka, truth. Na Zdrovye, Krasnaya."
Fox knows better, after all this time, so the corners of her mouth curl up and she takes the kiss with a relieved sort of smile -- things are moving, something's going to happen, she's not just marinating in her own worry and sadness -- and then slides off to the couch, curling up into a little ball.
The drink she accepts gratefully. "Na Zdrovye, My Heart." Her eyes half-lid, and she takes a quick swallow of the pink concoction. "Fuck, I needed that." And then? She settles in to wait.
At the appointed hour, Vasha snaps out a new burner SIM card, chucks it into an old GSM phone, and mashes the buttons a bit before hitting send and handing Fox the now ringing phone.
For his part, he settles back with his cigar, lights it up, and shamelessly eavesdrops while at Fox's side.
Time passes relatively quickly, as they drink and smoke, time ticking down slowly toward the hour, minutes and seconds. The spell completed, the phone ringing the seconds ticking down to the perfect timing.
click
Strangely, the sound of a big dog barking is the first noise that's heard in the call. A distant, indistinct voice is heard, talking to the dog, apparently inviting it for a trip to the outside, a door shutting close is heard.
"Hello? Sorry the phone startled the dog before his walk." and possibly a nap from the woman, a sleepy but comfortable and calm feminine voice. "Who is it?" No sound beyond the voice now, not even the background noise of a TV show or podcast.
Delicately, she curls her fingers over the perfect carved-wood necklace hanging on a thong around her neck, carved into a figure that seems to be either a wolf or a fox, depending on the angle from which you look at it, its eye set with a glimmering sapphire. The mudra is likely clear to Vasha, at least that she's using Forces, and if it isn't at first, then it becomes so when Simone's side of the conversation plays nice and clear right next to his ear.
Then? She takes a deep breath. Three seconds of magic, long enough for Simone to talk, and she swallows once. "Simone?"
She left home when she was a young adult: her voice is slightly thickened with the weight of years, but otherwise, it's exactly, exactly the same. A deep, settling breath in, and she continues:
"It's ... It's Avigail."
It isn't exactly, it's Fox, Avigail isn't her name anymore. But there will be time for that, later.
At first, the response is a sort of stunned silence with many little false start to the response. "Yes, it's Simone..." the voice is still calm, then seems to speak as if to herself, away from the phone. "Is this a fucking dream?" a mild impact sound, a short expression of pain follow.
"Avigail? Really?" A hopeful, if skeptical tone. "How did you get my number?" the shuffles of a blanket being thrown off, then feet pattering on the ground, as Simone moves through her residence. Water runs for a short moment, there's a change in sound level, she's clearly being put on speaker. Simone drinks a glass of water in under ten second, pacing as she waits for the answers, if her foot steps are any indication.
"Are you okay?" Fox asks first, and then there's a soft bit of laughter. "It isn't," she adds on.
She sits very still, very quiet, listening carefully to the sounds as they paint a little picture for her. She probably knows what Simone looks like now -- artist's pictures are often up on the sites for galleries they're showing at -- and just sort of... listens. Able, sort of, to picture her sister walking around nervously. "Someone I am very close to is very good at finding things like that." There's time to talk about her fiance, too. Not right now. She'll get there. "And yes, it's... really me."
"Hi."
More pacing sounds, but it slows down as Avigail speaks again and she takes a deep breath. "Uh... Hi." a nervous laugh follows. "Are you really in Philadelphia right now? Are you safe?"
Whichever phone is set to receive a penthouse-related text pings nearby in the apartment, only once.
"And I know a few people like that too." She confesses with another breath taken.
"I am as safe as anyone can be. I am surrounded by very capable and protective people," Fox reassures. "And yes. I am." Well, kind of above it, she thinks to herself.
"... hold on a second." Fox pops up from the couch, setting the phone down so it doesn't remove the phone from its broadcast range, and snags the phone from off its charger, returning to the couch and thumbing into the text menu for it. "Sorry, something was beeping and I needed to stop it."
"Well." A pause. "It's good to know people like that."
The text is from the security team of the building they reside in asking if anyone know why a Thomas Distel came asking questions about the resident of the buidling earlier in the day that they turned away. It seems like a copy/pasted text, official and professional, reassuring that absolutely no information have been given out.
"I'm happy to know you're safe, at least." Relief is evident in Simone's voice "We thought the worst when you went missing in Russia and there wasn't anything we could do except ask people over there and that didn't yield anything..." another pause, apprehension seeping into her voice, but Simone pushes through that and follows up with another question.
"What happened to you?"
Fox stares at that for a minute, and frowns, but what can she really say about it, if it was Simone? It isn't like she didn't ask her fiance to use magic to find Simone. Turnabout, etc.
She sets the house phone down. That is a problem for Future Fox. Future Fox will deal with that. Right-Now Fox is talking to her sister for the first time in a decade. "It's ... a really long, complicated story," Fox replies. "But... something happened to me that made it not safe, I thought, for me to contact you, because if I did, it might put you all in danger. It turns out I was wrong about that, but... I didn't know, at the time, and I defaulted to trying to keep you all safe. I got back to Philly a few months ago, but... I really didn't know how to -- like, how do you just call someone after all these years? And basically I was just being a total weenie, being really afraid."
"But then I saw your show, and the posters -- I think I saw Devorah, it kinda looked like her, there was a boy with her -- and I realized, like. I was being... really emotionally wimpy and by doing that I was being really ... not the person I want to be." The words all come out in a tumbling rush, like a faucet turned on to high all of a sudden. "And I'm sorry."
A brief moment of silence. "I understand, I don't know for our parents, or Devorah, or anyone really, but I promise you I'm not angry, I just... I'm just glad to know you're alive." a beat "I know it's you."
Simone has stopped pacing around now, just focusing on the phone. "One of Dad's people said they saw you hanging around a Rabbi he knows, or used to know, I'm not sure exactly." Simone explains when the show gets brought up. "I dug up every picture of you and tried to make a composite portrait, we didn't want to go through the cops for that. We got lucky with the Gallery letting us make the show and then the media got ahold of the story from there." she rambles a little too, not unlike Fox just did.
"Devorah helped put out the wanted poster too, I don't know if she asked her kids to help or not, but she wanted to help too." A pause, another hesitation, another step forward "Could we see you again?"
It's possible to hear, from the way her voice tightens in her throat, both Fox's relief squeezing her heart into her throat and the tears that start falling free just tightening her vocal cords. "Yeah. It's me."
"Mmm, yeah. Rabbi Aaron Cohen. Yes, the one who got arrested for punching a cop who was beating an imam at a protest. I was there, too, and I followed the ambulance to the hospital to make sure he was OK, and I met him and Mei Lee. We've become pretty close because that was a really stressful time. Forged in fire and all that. Aaron used to be the rabbi at Mom and Dad's synagogue but ... I don't know if they asked him to resign, or he just did, but... yeah. He's at Kol Tzedek now." And now is the time on Sprockets when we babble at each other, sometimes overtalking and taking at the same time, a common speech trait among Ashkenazi Jews!
All the time making affirming noises and saying unh huh while her sister is talking is part of that too - so Fox just lets herself do that. It's nice to use your natural speech patterns! "I don't know. It really looked like her."
"Yes," she affirms. "In fact... " and here her voice trails off for a moment. "You should probably meet my fiancé too." Fox bites her lower lip gently, nervously waiting for a response.
The replies comes flying so fast, it almost seems like Simone might have missed the statement about Fox's fiancé. Joy makes her voice vibrate in a slightly higher pitch and it seems as if she might be bouncing into place, the moment that Avigail even mention them possibly meeting again. "When can we meet? Where? Could you get me a picture of yourself? I'd like to have something to complete my piece at the gallery, see how right I was with how you look now, I have a timelapse of the work on that if you want to see it I can send it to you if you have an email or a drop box..."
She continues to ramble a little until Fox tries to speak up again a few times, letting her answer to the verbosity
"Whenever you want, and maybe somewhere where we can talk? But not my house yet, my partners and roommates don't like people they don't know in the apartment. " Sure, Fox, 'the apartment'. Like it's not a ridiculous penthouse with a pool and a hot tub and a pigeon loft. Fox answers her sister, finally cutting in. "I don't have to bring Vasha the first time." She pauses, then. Fox doesn't usually let people take pictures of her, for many reasons, but if she's being hyperparanoid, she can have Zoya server her sympathies to the image. "Yeah, I can do that," she agrees. There's no way she can lie her way out of that. Soft laughter as Simone's voice spills out of the phone; the sound makes her tears dry, and she wipes off her face with one hand.
"Yeah, I have an email." One of several random emails she keeps on hand, because Guardian habits do rub off on you after nearly 13 years. "It's ajoyyoucantkeepin@burstmail.com. I would love to see your process. I've always loved watching you make stuff."
"I'll send a link to it when I sit back down at my laptop..." the sound of a pen scratching on paper several time to let the ink out after not being used for a bit, a more rhythmical sound the moment after, when it finally works. "You can send me the picture with the email I'll use or just a selfie with the phone you're on, since you have my number now."
A few foot steps, away from the phone, the sound of a patio door open, winds rushing in for a short moment, the patio door closes. "Sorry about that, thought I saw something in the backyard." A pause, maybe a shiver. "Do you want me to tell everyone yet, or is that too fast? I'm honestly not sure how dad's going to react to this." though she laugh as she mentions this. "Or mom for that matter, I don't think she'd believe you were real if you were right in front of her." another laugh, maybe a bit more nervous.
"No worries!" she chirps brightly. "I'll take time to take a picture later and email it to you, or text it, or whatever."
"... are you OK?" That comes with a tone of voice that clearly reads 'I will show up there RIGHT NOW if you need me.' Being 5+ years older than a sibling means you remember when they were a baby and acted as their bodyguard as long as you lived at home.
It takes him a moment to refocus, given the brief Something that's possibly there. I'LL GO KICK ITS ASS, WHATEVER IT IS. Fox has always been impetuous when it comes to the people they love. "Uhm. Let's... let's wait a bit. I want to talk to them, but... like... this is a lot. And each of you only has to have this conversation once. I have to have it like... five times, if you count Beth. I need to take it in bites."
Another little pause. She reaches for her second cranberry and vodka, which Vasha refilled for her, and takes a little swallow. The ice clicks against the glass. "So... are you ignoring me telling you I have a fiancé, or... ?"
"Yeah I'm okay, just saw it from the side of my eye, maybe it was just snow falling from a tree or something, or a bird or something" Simone said with just a casual tone. "Sometimes we get animals wandering into the backyard and I have to make sure they're not trapped in, I don't want my dog to have to fight anything when we let him out."
"Of course, I'll wait, but like, just to let you know, dad got a PI to work on this, so you might notice someone sticking their nose in your business." Simone says, another sound of the patio opening, but this time the phone is carried outside, a bit of wind is heard, though Simone seems to mind the microphone well.
"And I'm not ignoring it, I just got lost in the moment and I just dropped it from my mind?" A soft laugh, snow cracking under steps. "Did you meet them in Russia? Or here?"
"Hmm. Okay," Fox ostensibly agrees but not really agrees. "If you stop feeling safe, please tell me." Her brain is already spinning off in a million directions: what if it was a ghost spy? What if it was a ghost spy SENT BY THE SEERS because they know her face because she didn't think to shapeshift during the defense of the Tree? Is something else putting her sister in danger just to get to her? Does SIMONE have enemies? Thank G-d for One Mind, Two Thoughts.
"Mmmhm. I heard about it," she answers. "Thomas Distel. One of my partners is also a PI. People talk." All of these things are true! She's not lying! Just putting three unconnected truths in a line!
Her shoulders hunch defensively, and Fox rises to pad back and forth a few times. Worried. Slinking around the living room like a... Fox. But staying close enough to Vasha that the phone doesn't go out of range.
"Oh, it's okay." The reassurance carries clear in her voice. "I met him in Russia, yeah. He helped me through all of the things that I went through. We've been together for... oh. Twelve years." Not much less time than Fox has been out of touch. "He used to be KGB, but then when Ukraine broke off, he felt... disloyal. So he joined the Ukrainian Army. We were out of contact for a while because of his deployments," by the Guardians, but it's not technically a lie, "and when I came to the US, I hadn't heard from him in a while. But he found me again, and we got engaged a few months ago. I asked him."
"He's not my only partner, but he is the core of ... like the center of my life. The sun around which everything spins. My heart." A deep breath in. "So yeah."
"So. How about you?"
"Twelve years!?" Of course that's the detail she hangs up on, but it comes with a mirthful voice. "Do you have kids?! Well with a job like that, I don't know if..." a pause, as if her own verbiage brings another random thought to mind. "What do you do for work now? Do you have everything you need?"
More snow crunching underfoot. "Okay, this is not a bunny." Simone says more for herself. "I'm tracking some paw prints across my yard and I'm going in circles, I think its hiding in the bushes and think I'm an idiot."
"Your partner who's a PI, wouldn't that be the woman who got in trouble at the same time as Rabbi Cohen?" Ah, there it is, the little shit sibling voice. Simone probably feels very clever right now, if her tone is any indication.
"Yeah. Twelve years. I met him shortly after Stuff Happened."
"Not exactly. We've temporarily taken in a lot of young people over the years. who didn't have resources, or really, I have, and he's supported me in that, though he grumbles." A soft laugh. "It's never been the right time, and that's okay. We're very happy with the way we are together."
"I'm an artist." A pause. "Oh, I do. One of my partners is actually very ... okay I can't even say 'very well off.' Mom and Dad are very well off. She's rich. And she really really loves spoiling our polycule." Because it is that, it's just also a cadre.
"... can you send me a picture of the pawprint, please, Simone? I'll probably be able to identify it." All of this - being an artist, being able to identify animal tracks, the casualness with which she talks about having multiple partners in a big queer polycule - is rather odd for someone who used to be an ambitious, highly-driven, buttoned-up individual in the stressful environment of the advertising industry.
Another curl of her bright, fox-sharp laughter at that little-shit sibling voice. "Yes," she agrees. "Mei Lee. She took me out for a really good meal at Bao Wow! a couple of days ago. We just started dating not too long ago."
A picture is quick in coming, almost as if that was already in process. ping the image moves a bit, it's a very short video. Little Fox is very familiar with the print in the snow, Fox's paw print. How completely, mind-blowingly coincidental.
A blink of an eye later, a brief glimpse of the supernal, gone now from the video. Paw prints are still there though.
"Maybe we can cooperate on something! I'm sure the owner of the gallery would love to have something like that on display, they might get more donors or something." Simone seems excited at the prospect of it.
"Hey, take your time, parenting can be done in many ways. Dog mom, cat mom and the like. Taking care of something is always fun." The steps in the snow stops. "Where the fuck is it hiding?"
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