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It's been kind of a Whole Week, you know? A lot of things Happening and a lot of conversations which have unsettled and disquieted Fox.
At some point they're going to need to talk to Lux, but first? She needs Her Heart. She needs to unpack it all. She needs...
snuggles.
And plot-relevant conversation. That, too.
She's been using Time a lot more recently -- Time and Fate -- and today is no different; as an exercise, she divines the Most Likely Time for Vasha to return home and enter their shared room. This permits her to scrub up -- to turn her body all soft and clean and pink, and Matter out the stubborn dirt under her nails -- and steal one of his undershirts and be sitting in bed, blanket over her lap and waiting at the appointed time.
But who knows, when dealing with an Acanthus, whether that's the right time at all? It might not be.
All manner of shielding practices drop inside the defenses of their shared sanctum. Things begin to notice him again. Text messages arrive, e-mails come in. His voicemail dings. His familiar manifests as a sparkling ball of light beside him, crackling and buzzing. Probably translating the incoming spam into something the time crunched Acanthus can digest without having to bother with his thumbs.
He pauses at the gun closet to fuss with the tri-level security and stowe his extra pieces and day vest. Lyudmila is transferred to a clip holster and secured at his side. He switches out for a jacket tailored without kevlar in mind, straightens his tie, and steps back out again, plucking a breath mint from the tray next to the grenade crate. He pops it, chews it, waits to see what manifests to ambush him serendipitously at this particular moment.
Nothing does. Not even when his hand comes away from the pistol with the safety on. Encouraging. So he buttons his jacket, punches the locks, closes the security panel, and heads to his room.
"Ah ha," he says accusatorily, "I knew something was looking for me." He shuts the door and waggles his phone, "I can leave Oontz Oontz here with my phone so he can get me messages while I'm out, if that would help? I figured you would feel safer knowing he was with me."
(oh no, I a poor acanthus master of time am now defenseless with my liddle tiny gun and so vest on it would be a shame if you were to reveal your clever ambush and allow me to rewind time and just shoot you the second I come in the door)
(No? Okay. Nobody does the classics anymore.)
She is as patient as she can be, which isn't terribly, let's be honest. When she hears Vasha, her ears twitch -- not that visible under her hair, with the human ears, but they do -- and her shoulders shift a little bit back and forth. Nothing as undignified as a humanoid form of the canine dance of happy interaction, also known as tippy tappy feet, no. Fox is a very dignified Double Master.
Promise.
When he enters the room and takes on that tone of accusation, her gold eyes get very big -- almost cartoonishly so -- before she smiles broadly. "Yes, it was me, I am terribly clever." She stretches her arms out toward him. "I do feel safer knowing he is with you," the Thyrsus agrees. "But please, yes, leave the spirit with the teenage boy mentality out there." There's only so often one can put up with aw ye hot girl hot while spending time with one's partners before you start Pulling Spirit Rank for quiet, and then Oontz Oontz pouts for days.
The fact that he hadn't even considered the possibility of sending the spirit away from himself might be a cause for concern. He slowly glances aside at the spirit which can't be really said to glance his way, being as it's just a floating ball of sparkling energy as though from the set of Star Trek: TNG. To make it clear he is actually complying rather than entering into some ruse of technicality, he ticks his head towards the door. The spirit can't go through it as is, and so begins to discorporate enroute to the exit.
"I wasn't aware you found him bothersome to such a degree." Vasha heads over to the bedside to lean down and plant a kiss on her cheek before continuing to the sideboard to get himself a cocktail poured and a cigar clipped. "Then I will keep him with me. And just put a signal in the usual places if you need to meet. I do need to be able to tell if it's us or some other that's playing with my threads, darling." He's clearly not mad. Probably she has a very good reason. But also, he's the one whose role it is to caution about these things.
"Do you need me for something? Or do you ... need me for something?" The questions he has to ask sometimes really suck. Cold vodka. Cold cranberry juice. His favoite regal, clipped. He lights it with a match and carries it over to the edge of the bed, settling himself down on the edge, near to Fox.
"I don't always find him bothersome. Sometimes I find him charming. I am always happy for you to have him around; I suppose you wouldn't notice because it's you, but you know -- having him to look after has been very good for you, and not just in the 'you'll have someone to send for help if something happens that's outside your control." She leaves her arms held out while he fixes his drink, and when he sits down on the edge of the bed, scoots over to curl up against him, wrapping her arms around him.
"I can do my own killing," she answers him quietly. "But that's not why I need you. I mean, I always need you, I just." She takes a slow, deep breath. "I'm going to ask you how you're doing with all of this before the end of this conversation, and you know you can't weasel with me, so here's your warning." While thinking, she absently -- and ever-so-lightly -- gnaws on his shoulder. "The future version of a vampire friend of mine -- Guy, you know, the one who I go flying with him and his girlfriend Petra -- visited him, and I figured out part of the breadcrumbs. I have to talk to Lux. But you see patterns where I don't. And I'm sad and scared and I don't want Balm to go but I have to be a big girl."
It's a lot to process with a high ball in one hand and a cigar in the other. So he carefully trades them off to be held in his left hand, both. His right arm is able to snake around Fox and offer what comfort it can, under the circumstances. Fox's rushes of words are pretty much par for the course. He lets her run where her mind takes her, not trying to bother to keep her pursuing one single thought in any particular direction for too long.
Because what, after all, would be the point of that?
So he waits for the mental zoomies to play themselves out before deciding how best to respond. "You often need some assistance with your finding, however. Killing has never come hard to you, no." Vasily takes a sip of his drink and watches her reflection in the gawdy gilt dressing mirror opposite the bed.
"The further along I travel down the road I've chosen, the less the walking of it troubles me. The closing of choices can come as a relief when you're trying to winnow down potential futures. Which I am. But. There more I consider the things they told me, the things I know, the people they sent-- the more... the more certain I feel that I was likely given some of the critical information knowing I would keep the noncritical information quiet and out of the discourse within this time stream."
"They did their jobs. Their operatives reached me and convinced me to look into matters and I uncovered Seer operations, precisely as they said. Acting on what I learned in the manner it required took a second push. They chose the right person. The right time. The right place. The right way. Because of course they did." Vasha worries at his lip before admitting, "But they still chose me. Not... someone else. My caution, my paranoia, my due diligence-- call it what you will. That seems an odd thing to set aside now I was hand picked to know these things I know."
Likewise, she has to wait out all of the patient things that he has to say; after a decade and a half in each other's company -- or out of it, as the case may be -- there's no one who knows the other better. She has to, as he thinks, mentally zoom all over the place, spitting out all of the things which have accumulated in her brain since the last time that they were able to sit still and really talk about things, and then she has to give him time and space for all of his considered and thoughtful responses. "Foxes hunt as well as scavenge." And that's all that needs saying: of course it isn't difficult for her to do the right kind of killing. Clean deaths, good deaths, necessary ones.
And at the end of all of that, she points out, "but so was I, to know the things I know." She curls herself in even closer to him. "Whoever sent me to see me -- " here her eyes cut up toward him like yeah whoever that was that's an Archmaster of TIme do you have any theories on that babe "-- knew that I'd tell myself that Balm wasn't still around, that I'd be ... me with my information. That I'd bring you your coin, the one that -- " the one that told him what he could have. "But like... they chose your precision and my... me-ness. So we could meet in the middle, I think. The way we always do."
More idle gnawing at his shoulder. "Future Guy told Now Guy that he was supposed to tell the Mages that the sexy pigeon knows where the clearing is. And so Diamond told me about it, because -- " because pigeons. "Lux dressed up like a sexy pigeon when we went out for Halloween. I don't know what the other part of it means, though."
"The only reason I am throwing my entire career on the pyre like this is because, having literally nothing left of my old life but this Cadre, I am still consumed by the need to thwart the Throne. It is pavlovian. I have no... handler to report to." He won't say Epopt in front of her even now. "No government to appease. No party's ethics to uphold. No kommissar debriefing me in a room for six hours. Asking the same questions a dozen different ways. No, it's just me. And an urge they implanted in me. I'm like a fucking wind up toy. Just a ... just a reflex response in a bacterium, flailing its little flagellum. Moving towards the heat, towards the light."
"I can feel how empty everything I am doing presently is. How uttery unfulfilling. But I can't stop myself from doing it. And I will doubtless, without some intercession, continue to do it until it ceases to propogate the impulse to do so. And then, what? Alcohol? 'Retirement'?" He shakes his head a little, draws in a breath, and lets out a large sigh.
"What I need you to know about my visitation, Naika, is that it showed me something that I needed to see so that I could continue to go on after giving everything up as I just did. I am rudderless now. I am not designed to operate without a handler debriefing me routinely. It's how I process, how I monitor-- how I make sure I'm okay. It replaced the certainty that someone would always be there to punch my clock if I lost sight of what truly matters with the hope that possibly maybe one day I could be a man worthy of winning this fight."
"But that hope is slim. Precious beyond all possible explanation. What I saw, just a single possible outcome in a universe of possible outcomes, gave me hope. I don't want to scare anyone, or burden them with guilt should my reasons for doing this come to nothing. I am in this for you, for your people, for what's left of the promise I made as a man I used to be, and can be no longer."
She listens intently, in that way that she has where her whole body seems devoted to the listening: she snuggles up into him, her body turned toward his side, her head on his shoulder. Blanket pulled over them both, gaze fixed on the Acanthus.
"Do you want answers from me on any of this, or are these rhetorical questions, things you have to talk yourself through in order to get to the end? Sometimes you want me to tell you answers, and sometimes you just need to talk to someone who won't judge you." A rarity for a Guardian, to be certain: someone you know won't judge you. She sneaks her hand under the hemline of his shirt, presses her palm flat against his belly, some subtle scar under the gentleness of her touch.
She blinks slowly, thoughtfully. Smiles a little bit at the invocation of her old name, the one only the Zar-Ptista use for her now. "If you need to create a new check-in routine, My Heart, this is a possibility." Fox doesn't say it should be her making assessments of Vasha's mental state; her bias is a Known Thing. But then again, she isn't saying it shouldn't be her, at least part of the time, either.
"Nothing you can tell me is going to scare me away from you. You can tell me or not tell me. Of course I'm wildly curious." Because Fox remains Fox. "But I have seen some of the things that give you hope in the visit we had together, and some of the things that might come to pass when Weaver and I met our potential futures. The founding of a Legacy that sees my kind rise again rather than dwindling into nothingness in the modern world. We all have our own fragile hopes. Yours, mine, ours." (edited)
"I am not saying you don't. I am simply saying that some chances are more remote than others. Take it from someone who knows. You are far more likely to found a legacy to bring your traditions into this modern age-- or perhaps to make this modern age value your traditions? Than I am likely to roll snake eyes a dozen times in a row. And my hope is far more remote than that."
Vasha reaches out a hand to take one of hers and pull it into his lap, as he attempts to explain. "There is an oak tree. There are oak trees. There are forests of oak trees. And there are other trees. If I go back in time? There are oak trees. There are forests of oak trees. And there are other trees. But where is an oak tree? Where is the oak tree? Where is that oak tree? And you go forwards. There are trees. Sturdy oaks. But where is that tree? There are chances within chances within chances. One day I will let you know if it came true or not. I won't know, likely, for ... twenty five years? Thirty? I am too sensible a man to live my life between now and then for that moment at the cost of all the others in between. Just trust me on this and let it go. If they had wanted you to know, you would know. And if they wanted someone to tell you, they would have chosen someone else. And you know it, too."
With that all said, Vasha gives her hand a squeeze with both of his own. "I'm going to leave my order and join the Assembly as a Voter." Wait. Vasha the Free Councilor? He holds up a hand to make his need to continue known, "I know, I know. But if I join the Children straight away I will likely have to go through the process of being a Scion. You won't let me fight with you and for you, because you will be obligated to protect me until my education is over. Laudable, but impractical. As a simple voter, I can fight and assist and join later but still be your ally."
"My darling," Fox reminds him gently. "You taught me well. I have not mastered Time and Fate, only become an Adept of one and a Disciple of the other. I do not need you to explain how remote chances are along these lines." She allows him to steal her hand back from petting his stomach, to hold it, and nuzzles against the side of his neck.
Thirty years of wild curiosity? Yeah that's fine actually and Fox won't be wildly curious all that time. Mmmhm. She squirms a little bit, but doesn't press.
Her head snaps up off of his shoulder and she blinks at him rapidly. "I mean, I fought when I was a Scion, but... " Yeah, that's a mental image that Fox is having a hard time with. Vasha. In the Free Council. Vasily Tomechtko the Voter. Vasha... in... the... what.
"If I truly want to join your people, krasnaya, had I not best begin by demonstrating that I understand something of their ways and wish to respect their way of handling matters? I can't ask them to respect my mystical prowess, my knowledge, my experise, and all of that and just stand as a peer to your emissaries at word go. I would lack the right. The humility. The socialization. The ability to speak for your people well rather than simply according to my personal knowledge. You can't afford to be without my input. And it would be a special priviledge to have my input valued at an emissariate meeting as an emissary. Better my place be as a valued and trusted outsider, a sympathizer to the cause, and a petitioner for entry. If you stop thinking like a Mystagogue for half a moment the way I have been forced to stop thinking like a Guardian, you'll see this is a very elegant solution."
Vasha pats her hand consolingly. "Besides. Information wants to be free."
The fact that he's right doesn't make her spine prickle any less at the idea, the strangeness of it all. And when he invokes her former Pentacle status, and the Order she called home for a decade, she makes a face at him. Her nose wrinkles up, and she ends up sticking her tongue out at him. The fact that he's right just means she makes faces rather than arguing with him.
That last sentence, though. Fox just flings herself dramatically onto her back, away from him and flopping onto the bed, one arm flung across her eyes. "Noooo!" she wails, kicking her feet like a toddler throwing a tantrum. "No, anything but that!"
"Stop it, Zero Cool, I need your help hecking the Gib-sone." Vasha really leans into his accent there on that hacking the Gibson line, attempting to spill her playful complaining over into proper geckering. "Grab your skateboard, we are going to hack the planet now." He says this while leaning over further to tickle at her sides.
"I believe in radical democracy and metropolitain libertarianism. Let's go gentrify something with four over ones." He gestures with a hand as though picturing the scenery presented as grand rather than a blight on society.
And gekkering he gets -- that mixture of laughter and complaining that's so very vulpine and indeed so very Fox -- peals of it bouncing off the walls and ceiling, filling the room. "Noooooo!" she whines. "No, no hack the planet, leave planet in one piece, nice planet!" She flails once he starts tickling her, batting at his head ineffectually as though entirely incapable of wriggling her way free or stopping all of it.
She wails at the word 'gentrify' and laughs herself utterly breathless. "Okay, that I cannot believe," she snorts, trying to catch her breath. "You, a libertarian. No." She picks her head up from the bed, scoops a hand behind his head, and kisses him firmly.
That achieved, he plucks his drink and cigar back up and resumes sipping the one and puffing on the other while the fox recovers. And probably bites him. But that's how these things go. He scoots back on the bed until he's resting against the headboard, kicks off his shoes, and groans a bit as he rolls out his shoulders. Another puff of his cigar is taken.
"So. All we have to do is save the multiverse from the Exarchs and then we can relax. Simple. I'm not sure why we didn't think of doing this sooner, if I'm being honest." He finishes off his drink so he can set it aside. And actually enjoy a buzz for a moment or two.
She lets him slip away for the moment and flops back onto her back once more, staring up at the ceiling like she can see through it and up to the faint stars above, dimmed by light pollution here in the center of the city. A big, heavy sigh. "All we have to do is save the multiverse from the Exarchs and then we can have a vision of a house in the middle of a field and one kit with green eyes and one kit with yellow." She scratches her belly absently, letting out a big sigh. "And a renewed Legacy that will either make me a genius or a heretic. Or both."
She stretches her legs, flexes her toes, and then rolls up onto hands and knees to clamber across the bed and straddle his lap, flop her head on his shoulder. "Just a few little things on the checklist first." But she doesn't seem in any hurry to go anywhere.
His turn to chuckle at that. It's dry as a Santa Ana wind, but it's at least amusement. And that's been hard to come by from him for any extended period since Reagan left office. He taps a little ash into the tray and takes a final puff or two before setting the cigar aside again. He's been trying not to waste it, but she's intent on cuddling and he's too kind to smoke right in her face. He doesn't seem cross.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you missed me." His hands now free, he pulls the covers up and around them again, then settles his hands on her hips, regarding her patiently with necessarily crossed eyes.
Her arms loop lazily around his neck, and she grabs the blanket she'd nestled herself inside, draping it around her shoulders like a cape. And then she pulls it up over her head like a cape with a hood. Her big gold-green eyes blink at him once, twice, and the corner of her mouth turns up in wry amusement. "Every time I'm not like, immediately not missing you," she says, like this is some sort of secret code that others might overhear and not just the two of them alone, "I miss you." Blink blink.
"I had a lot of missing, I have to parcel out the recovery time and all the excess missing."
Vasha falls quiet for an extended span of moments, his eyes growing unfocused as he glances over her shoulder and back up at the ceiling, brow furrowing just a bit. "I suppose I don't understand why you have to miss me any longer. Since I've been back, I just... I focus on the times when we're together. Live there. Having perfect recall and total sensory recovery means you're always just a thought away. The good times. The best times."
His attention refocuses on her, his smile agreeable, "You're obsessed with body transformation and personal evolution. Time to evolve your thinking too. There's no such thing as alone anymore. No such place as away. And while you can be alone if you wish, you need never be truly lonely again. It's one of the reasons I've become so dull and serene lately. I'm content. Men like me were never intended to feel content for long. It suppose it makes me seem rather dull. I'll need to come up with some hobbies apart from studying people."
She lets him talk, listening to him; a soft, warm smile slides across her face as she does, and Fox tips her head to her side. "My beautiful, perfect love," Fox murmurs gently, and she curls her hands around the sides of his throat, traces his cheeks with her fingers. Rubs her fingertips over his scruff, leans forward to brush the tip of her nose against his. "My darling, cerebral other half," she continues, slowly squishing his cheeks in with her hands until it makes his mouth into fish lips. "I, too, have perfect recall now. I taught myself so I could not forget the things I wanted to not forget."
"But," she continues, squishing his face between her palms so his mouth squished all fish-lips makes a 'blup blup' kind of shape, "and this is very important," she continues, "oh heart of my heart and North Star around which Revontulet is set to dance... "
"... I was flirting with you."
His cheeks squidge up and his lips flap about, but his face remains calm and impassive. When it comes to rest, he's grinning a little once again. "Yes, but what's the point of that if you have to resort to insincere claims that originate in you not simply using the good sense you've been given?" There are certain aspects of modern courtship that make absolutely no sense to him and never will. Among them: the white lie.
"You know how I flirt, don't you? I take off my gun belt. I look you deeply in the eye. And I say 'it's naked thirty' and then? We have sex." He taps her nose with a fingertip, then lifts his head to kiss her lips quickly in the aftermath. "You always make things so needlessly complicated." Says he of the infinite complexities. He's got to be teasing her.
A little pat pat of her palms against his cheeks, and she smiles back at him, a lopsided grin with all those sharp teeth. "It's not insincere! I think about you naked a lot. Why would I think about you naked with me when you are naked with me?" Fox huffs dramatically, rolling her eyes up toward the ceiling. How is she so plagued? Truly, it is a torture.
She steals a second kiss in the wake of the first, laughing brightly. "Ah yes. It is me who makes things needlessly complicated. If you ask all our friends, which one, is it Fox or is it Vasha, who makes things needlessly complicated, they will say, it is Fox who is so subtle and complicated."
And then she looks him deeply in the eye, steals another kiss and tugs on his lower lip, and solemnly says: "It is naked thirty."
"No. They will say, 'Who the fuck is Vasha?' because I have no friends. I am a gun hand with an ego at the moment. But perhaps that will change with time." Absentmindedly, while she's snuggled into him and he has one arm looped around her back, he uses his free hand to gesture up some potentia, feeding it into twilight where a passing spirit pauses in gratitude to soak up the free meal. The way Weaver might feed a spider, or Fox her pigeons. He watches the creature scurry off up the idea of the wall, though to her he might just be daydreaming but for the tickle of magic in her all-too keen periphery.
"You had better stop all that, or I will have to pretend I did not see you feed a spirit because you are fond of Oontz Oontz and he has made you care about spirits. Plus, I will tell Mei and Zoya and Leta and it will hurt all their feelings. Both of Leta's, even: stoned and horny." Fox casually pets a hand down his cheek, then, and adds, "But I said. It is naked thirty." And then she sticks her tongue out at him.
"Yes, but you haven't taken off your gun belt," Vasha points out. That this is because she never had one to begin with is, apparently, a technicality upon which he is willing to hang his hat nonetheless.
For about three seconds.
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