|
Vasily is a child of a high ranking Soviet party member, and an officer of the Soviet military. He doesn't really have Christmas traditions, beyond the Orthodox church's rote observations. Certainly no childhood associations. No joy to look forward to. And the new year, well that's just a night for lifting a glass. And to an Acanthus, not at all notworthy for remarking another time around the sun. His subconscious runs a more accurate clock of his local time. Every moment is as the other moments in these collections of moments that is his life. This fuzzy, imprecise series of choices-- each choice leaving his fingerprint on the surface of time itself. Each choice that opens a new choice closes an infinite series of possibilities, propelling him forever forward from the past to the future with all the conscious awareness of a bacterium under glass working its flagellum to move it towards the light, away from entropy.
Seeing life and reality as a fuzzy ball of possibilities interacting forever in a membrane of forever humming and vibrating threads makes things like Christmas and The New Year and, indeed, life and death seem unspecial and unremarkable. Moments in a chain of moments from start to finish, captured under glass. Like the flailing cell under the microscope. And he with an assassin's efficiency and dispassion for violence. It's a recipe for sociopathy. Anyone who really experienced reality the way someone like him does would know to keep an eye on him. A close eye. That the barrier between rational demigodhood and madness is tenuous. Fuzzy. Like time and space and the barrier between being and not being. Porous. The two sides trade heat. And he runs very hot, indeed.
It's why he does unremarkable things with such focus and intention. Like making waffles with Oontz-Oontz while watching The Voice reruns on the kitchen telly. The spirit enjoys the call and answer and sing-along nature of it all.
He's felt this strange pressure before, the way that it suddenly feels like the world is standing on his chest. A supernatural sort of bends that comes with the desire to pop his ears and a feeling like someone standing over his shoulder.
The voice that follows right on the tail end of that sensation, somehow like being plunged into freezing and boiling water at once and rimed around the edges with the very distinct taste of incredibly powerful magic, is not one he recognizes. Much like the sensation comes edged with that feeling of magic, the voice has a slim edge of Ukranian on it. Familiar, but not. Philly, but not. A voice he's heard before and yet never -- he can't place it but somehow he knows it, this young woman's voice.
"You could shoot me; probably only you could do that. But please do not. It would upset people very much."
"It's just a matter of finding the right moment," Vasily answers, miming a toss of cards as though playing dealer to a table of black jack. Over a steaming waffle iron. But, hey. The idea is communicated. "As the IRA said of Mrs. Thatcher. She has to be lucky every time. They only have to be lucky once. And once you realize that's as true of you as it is of everyone you might like to see dead, it makes it less a threat and more of a warning. When we play chess with lives, the pawns are people. So I am going to assume you have a very good reason for putting my whole timeline at risk. Again." Vasha pokes a quad of waffles from the iron with a fork and breaks it in half, tossing two on one plate and two on the other.
"I'm guessing you'll have met Oontz-Oontz before now," he observes, gesturing to the spirit with one plate. He sets one before the spirit and the other at an empty seat opposite him. For the girl, no doubt. "Say your piece and then leave, please."
"You can ask the person who sent me when you get there, if you do. I was told to come, and I come." She stands in the doorway, hands propped loosely on her hips; he recognizes the sort of loose ready posture.
Somewhere around five and a half feet tall, wearing that skin-tight charcoal suit he saw himself wearing all those months ago. Likely, there are weapons hidden in it, but the way she moves when she comes to sit down in the chair across from him -- casual as you like -- marks her just as much a weapon as anything her clothing might conceal. Blonde hair pulled back into a practical ponytail, a soft oval face, bright blue eyes.
"Anyway, I come because sending the same people back gets -- riskier. And she would get distracted." She wrinkles up her nose in mild, affectionate distaste. "It will be necessary to expand the circle of who you talk to frankly. And to find the connections between the events everyone has treated as discrete. And you will say, probably, 'of course, this is what I do,' and I will say 'yes, this is why I am talking to you, because so many things are in so many places.'" Butter, then syrup. Her fork crunches through the waffle as she cuts it into bite-sized pieces.
As if to prove some sort of point, there is now a bottle of whipped cream on the table that very much wasn't there in the reality that had existed prior to him deciding he preferred this one better. But in this reality, the whipped cream was brought to the table. And in this reality, she's still seated across from him, cutting up her waffles.
"We can safely assume the location of my whipped cream is not especially relavant to the outcome of your future war," he observes, having done his little trick with time. With dealing out moments. With making it clear that, yes, he could kill her. Could go back and have already killed her. Go back and kill her before she even opens up her mouth. But so could she. To him. Ad nauseum. Still.
There is a semaphore. He is observing it.
"The fact that you have chosen to revisit me gives me a unique opportunity to observe this reality and that reality-- hold up those moments side by side --and eliminate what's changed as relavant. So much noise will fall away. So much noise will remain. But it's noise we can sift. Especially with having encountered the Seer Pylon behind the local attacks prior to now. Cross reference that static reality against their ambitions in the future, and fate will glow brightly enough. To indicate the kernel of what is here and now that is so fucking important to all of you."
"And once we know, I will thank you to let us handle it from there. The more you meddle the more noise you leave in the data. And I have to figure out what's sympathetic to our time and what's symapthetic to your time. And parse them apart. Which gets fucking impossible at quantum levels. And since you're standing here in my kitchen eating my waffles, I'm guessing you know that already."
Oontz-Oontz "speaks up" by playing the line, "Don't cross the streams, Ray," from some unseen speaker in his hoodie.
Vasha points at the spirit, "I think you're damaging the fabric of reality by doing this. It needs to stop."
She stops with her fork partway to her mouth, her gaze sliding sidelong to the whipped cream, and one eyebrow rises just so before she puts the syrup-and-buttered bite into her mouth, crunching slowly as her gaze returns to him. "That is a lot of words for 'fuck off,'" she observes mildly.
"Time is not what I am good at, no. I do not know that. I know that I am given an assignment, which is to come say to you the thing I mostly already said, and the person doing the sending, I trust with my life and yours. And theirs. And the reason I am given is because I am outside this time, on account of I don't exist yet. So I am safer to send." Another slow, crunching bite. "You know already there is someone inside the Guardians who is not on your side, so, you know, trusting people with information, harder. But also, you cannot succeed without the information that the Lost, the Vampires, all of them, have too."
"So I have come, and I have said." She pushes the waffle away from herself, staring at him still with that calm, implacable face. He knows that sort of expression well; he's schooled it in himself. "And you have said."
She gets up from her chair, pushing up the cuff of her left sleeve slightly.
"Not 'fuck off'. I wouldn't be talking about how to use your second visitation to solve your problem for you if I wanted you to 'fuck off'. What I want is to communicate to you that your incursions make it increasingly more difficult for me to do this my way. Is my way so special?" Vasha apes the 'maybe so maybe no' slavic face and elicits an exaggerated shrug, the sort of gesture men like him learn in prison. Not that he's been in prison. Well. Not that he's been sentenced to prison. "But it's the way I have. And I do not trust but a tenth of these people here to remember my coffee order, nevermind keep a secret." Oh, the naked contempt of the Guardian Acanthus. The know it all. The see it all. The do it all. The keep it all for myself.
"So I give you warnings. I tell you what I have observed. The complications you've aroused for me. And the opportunities I see arising from the complications you have aroused. I am going to use this visit to learn a great deal about what is special about the here and now. And I know changelings that I trust to be competent. Vampires... less so. Probably Fox knows Vampires. Fox likes disgusting things." Vasily makes a face. Eugh. Vampires.
"As time has progressed, I've grown less enamored of my old life. And what I was clinging to. I suppose this is now all becoming a part of my exit strategy. One last assassination for the cause, and then I step out. To do my murders in the open from now on." He flashes a wan, tired smile.
"I am curious about one thing, though." He pauses and lifts a finger, tapping at his cheek thoughtfully, "Do I win? Is your name Lyudmila?"
She stands next to her chair for a moment, and she tips her head to the side just a little bit as she watches him. In some moments she looks precisely like a younger version of him, though -- perhaps reassuringly -- in this moment, her mannerisms look exactly like someone else entirely.
"Good." That's all she says to the first bit about his way. It seems to comfort her somehow; the tiny motion of her shoulders and the way she relaxes them just a little bit. "Mmm. True, she does." And the face she makes? An exact mirror of his. Unfuckingcanny.
She nods along with all of this, as if she's hearing an old story. Perhaps that says something. Perhaps it tells him nothing. After all, if he's right, he trained her.
Her hand hovers over the watch, and she pauses for just a moment. Watching him.
"Lyudmila is my twin sister."
She winks.
She disappears.
|