|
"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?"
|