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Zoya's flat is ridonculously huge. Vasha has only managed to scout about a third of it so far. He probably needs to solve a riddle or find an old man in a cupboard with a secret magic key to unlock the rest of it, or something.
This is only a mild exaggeration. In any case, he's once more out on the balcony, this time in a pair of swim trunks and one of his ridiculous smoking jackets, drinking a vodka and cranberry and smoking the most expensive cigar he could find within walking distance of the flat. He has a box of them, of course, but he's only smoking the one. His deck chair allows him to stretch out and sun himself. A thing his pale, pale meatsuit sorely needs. He's presently vibing to the dulcet dance stylings of KAZKA. Because of course he is.
Buzz buzz buzz. Today is the day of being bees. What looks like a dark cloud buzzes its way across the sky, appearing to shimmer and shift. Clouds of insects and flocks of birds have a wonderfully hypnotic appearance when they move like that, and so it is just now.
That buzzing circles its way out of the sky down onto the porch, which would probably be disturbing if one wasn't used to clouds of insects coalescing into tiny Thyrsii and then said Thyrsus flinging herself at you in enthusiastic greeting. "That was fun!" Because of course it was.
"Ah, my queen arrives! Hello, honey! Been busy? You've come to bug me? I hope I don't break out in hives." People encouraged him to master the english language. And now he has. And puns are what they get for it. They get rapid fire bee puns. He catches her up and deposits her into his lap, then reaches up to brush his fingers back through her unruly hair. "Look, Naika. I'm a honey comb." Cos he's combing his honey, see. "When it comes to bee puns, you could say I'm poll-in." He's here all week, folx. "Before you buzz off, give me a kiss." He taps one cheek, then the other, then his lips.
She's leaning in to kiss him when he starts with the rapid-fire bee puns, and then Fox sits back on his lap a little, tilts her head to the side, and gives him a long, confused look. That confusion resolves itself into laughter when he starts combing his fingers through her hair, and she leans in to give him the desired kisses: one for each cheek, and then his nose, and then his lips. "This is what I get for teaching you English," Fox laughs aloud, leaning in comfortably and straddling his lap. "That smells like a good cigar. Are you having a good day today?"
"It's pretty good. I felt like splurging. Now that we're settled and I've got my ID and everything, I can come in from the cold a little more purposefully. So I'm relaxing with some good cigars, some excellent vodka and a whole lot of sun. It's quite refreshing, you should try it sometime." That last bit was a joke, no doubt. He settles his palms atop her thighs and gives them a firm squeeze, then smacks her hips with both hands. "That Mearcstapa is a gentleman. I enjoyed his company. Seems like a good asset to know. Where did you find him?"
"Oh, good, you met with Mearcstapa?" Fox leans in on Vasha's chest, treating the Ukranian like a giant, sun-warmed rock on which she can lizard herself happily. Her eyes half-lid, and she giggles a little bit at the joke. Ah, yes, relaxing, the thing that Fox should try out sometime. Absolutely. She lays her hands on his chest and then rests her chin on them. Life is good. "He's Lux's partner. One of them. Lux and Jack Martingale and Mearcstapa, they're the trio. So I met Lux because I found them when they were spray-painting things and I was a fox, and then through them I met Mearcstapa and ... um... lots of people, actually. He's nice. I like him. They brought me back presents from when they went to Hawaii. I have some flower seeds that I need to get proper settled once we're all settled here, and grow them."
"I did, yes. We met in a safehouse. He was quite charming. I'm helping him learn Russian, as it happens. As a return for the favor of making Ivan Medvedev a real boy." Vasha sing songs the last bit, Disney style. "It's a bit of a relief to have that issue behind me. And unexpected. I don't think I would have taken this step, myself. But I am enormously relieved that it was taken on my behalf. I am actually relaxing for the first time in..." He doesn't complete the thought. Too long, is the point. "I think maybe we should go away for a little bit. Together. You and me. We have a lot to catch up on, I think. And we've both been wrapped up in everyone else since we reunited."
Contented, laying here in the sun, Fox's eyes stay half-lidded as she listens to Vasha talk about meeting up with Mearcstapa. She scoots around a little bit so that she's sort of lounging, sort of straddling, totally comfortable. Laying on him like her own personal sunning rock. It's perfect. So perfect that she even harmonizes with him wordlessly when he sings real boy. Her eyes open slowly so she can look up at him, all contentment and adoration. "I knew that you needed to have an anchor to here so that you could be here," Fox explains. "Otherwise you'd just be floating, you know? Not really here, and not there anymore." When he doesn't complete the thought, she pushes up a little bit to press her mouth against his. Too long, and she understands that.
The last bit surprises her, and her eyes open, blinking rapidly in delight. "Yes." That isn't a request that she expected Vasha to make -- he's always working, and that's a part of him that even if she doesn't understand it, it's part of the person that she loves. But a blush and a smile spread across her face as the idea takes root, and she nods, laying her head down on his chest. "I would like that, very much. I don't have identification, but we can figure out where we go and how to get me there. Where do you want to go?"
"The carribean, I think. On a boat. So we can be at sea whenever we want away from people, and can come to port whenever we want them again. Languages we don't speak, cultures we don't know, wildlife you've never seen, food I've never tasted. Just for a while. I'm sure Zoya wouldn't mind portaling us somewhere. No need for ID. Ivan can buy us a boat down there, and we can portal in to meet it. Sail it back, perhaps. I've been wondering what to spend my money on, and a yacht seems like a sound investment for someone whose cover is a Russian Oligarch."
The smile on her face grows, and Fox burrows her face down against his chest as if she's hiding her nose underneath her tail. "That sounds... " she pauses. "Like a honeymoon, really." There's a sort of wistfulness to her voice, and she takes in a breath, lets it out. "And then we would have a boat!" A yacht is not a boat, Fox. (Fox does not care.)
"Which I guess reminds me of your silly shirts. You keep wearing things saying you have a wife, people will believe you."
"Well. Maybe I've just not met the right person yet," Vasha rejoins mildly, petting his fingers through her hair soothingly, letting his head rest back on the cushion of his deck chair and staring up at the sky through his ever present sunglasses. "You are a free spirit, you know. You do your own thing, love who you want to love, do what you want to do. And I love that about you. But it doesn't really suggest you're interested in the confines of a Ukrainian Orthodox wedding." He grins a little crookedly at that. "If I thought this arrangement wasn't to your liking, I might be willing to entertain a change to it. I just somehow never imagined you as a Mrs. Vasily Tometchko." His tone implies he is teasing, at least partly. While also not teasing, also.(edited)
She scratches her cheek thoughtfully. "I am. And I can't imagine that I would ever want to not be who I am. Or constrain you, given that you've had your own other partners in the past, and we've had partners we've shared, and so on." Fox rests her chin on his chest, and stares up at him. "I'm not interested in the confines of a Ukranian Orthodox wedding, partially because I'm not that thing, and could never be that thing. I'm a pantheistic Supernal Jew who recognizes that God is one and also everything, my love, and they don't let people like that get married in Ukranian Orthodox churches. Whatever we are, it would always be a thing we made ourselves." She slides a hand down his side and sneaks it under his shirt, resting her fingers against his skin.
"But you are my home, and everything I am and will ever be leads back to you. And... " Fox's voice trails off, and her forehead wrinkles up, like she's trying to find words.
"Pantheistic Supernal Jew sounds like a very excellent entry into Eurovision," Vasha observes with a grin, his focus still on the sky above. "But now you see my point. I'm not a mensch. You're not a doting submissive wife. There's nothing set out for us to follow as an easy road towards union. No social conventions or customs apply. As you point out, we'd have to invent it for ourselves. Which we can do, I suppose, but also explains why we haven't up to now." He curls one arm back behind his head to prop it up a bit, still petting through her hair with the other. "My youthful charm and rakish good looks have diminished over the years. I'm afraid I'm no longer quite the casanova I might have been once. Not that the word ever really applied." His shoulders shrug just a touch. "What do you want for us?"
Laughter curls out of Fox's throat as she peers up at Vasha from her fox-sunning position laying on his chest. "It does, doesn't it? Maybe that'll be next year's Israel entry." She turns her head and presses her lips against his chest in an exaggerated mmmmmmwah! "Oh, I'm not questioning why we haven't up until now," she agrees. "I'm just realizing that we keep walking up to the wall and peeking over it, and making jokes and gestures toward the thing, and so maybe rather than just keeping on making those jokes and gestures, we should ... talk about it. And decide whether we're happier as we are or whether we might want to make some new thing. Grow in some new way."
She snorts, then. "No, darling. Casanova had little in the way of genuine affection for his conquests, and whatever else ever you were, you have always been genuine." Fox rests her pointy chin on his breastbone. "I think that -- " And then she pauses. "I think that I don't want anything to really change, exactly? You will come and go, you will put on your masks and take them off, and you will do what you need to do when you wear them. I will come and go, I will be a bird or a fox and I like to kiss Zoya and Leta sometimes." A little shrug. "But one of the things I realized when you were undercover is that if you had died, what would I be? 'Ah, she was Vasha's partner for many years.' I wouldn't be your widow, and if I never came back someday from ... raiding a rat warren, or whatever... you'd be ... surviving. And I know that's dark, but I feel like."
"We're Awakened. We know that naming things gives them power. And maybe after all this time, we deserve some sort of ... permanent name for the fact that my heart beats in your chest in all but the most literal of ways. Whatever else that means."
"My point is that I have either lost my touch or my appeal. Probably the telltale signs of battle stress don't help, I imagine. And being a bristly jerk. And insulting people. And rewarding people who pay attention to me with scorn and derision. These things may somewhat inhibit my appeal sexually." He doesn't spare himself from his own sense of humor and never has. Why start now?
"I am all for growing. I'm not sure a legal wedding is in the cards for my clangy and jammy identity. Or your lack of one. But there's nothing that says we can't oath before Arcadia, or the like. Once I have the necessary skill with Prime to shield effects, that is something we can do. It will be a while before that can take place, but it's been a goal of mine for a while. The ability to cloak my magic." Vasha swings his other arm behind his head so that he can look down at her more easily without straining his neck.
"So I suppose what I'm saying, Fox. Is will you nebulously defined long term personal, financial, romantic, and sexual commitment whose name and definition will be workshopped later me?" He fishes in his pocket for one of his ever-present piles of loose change and fishes out a coin. Then he reaches over for his silver handled pistol, flips the coin into the air, and fires off a round at the coin seemingly entirely at random. The coin sings and stops spinning before falling to the deck with a clang, pierced through the center, and smoking.
He leans over to the side after setting his pistol back down and plucks up the coin, blowing on it a bit and bouncing it in his hand until it's safe, then holds up the most Acanthus of rings imaginable.
"You'd be surprised, Vasha My Heart," Fox answers drily. "I think treating her with scorn and derision actually turns Leta on." Her green-gold eyes glitter amusement as he continues to point out all of the reasons why he's not attractive to the partner who has followed him around for the last ten years with big wide googly eyes.
She listens as he speaks, and at first, there's a sort of wobbly expression on her face as 'I'm not sure' tends to lead to a soft no, but as he continues talking? Her eyes widen subtly, and it's almost like he can see her ears starting to perk up. She pushes herself up onto her elbows, still leaning on his chest. Poking him with her pointy little elbows, because she's not really paying attention to not doing that right now.
"..." Her face turns a brilliant red as 'will you' turns into a very long question, and the coin goes spinning, clattering to the ground. He holds it up to her, and she reaches a hand out to take it, murmuring the unknowable, fractional language which is High Speech as the coin in her fingers smooths and shrinks, turning from 'a coin with a hole shot through it' to 'a ring made of a coin with a hole shot through it.' Made partially by him and partially by her.
She doesn't take it from him entirely, though, just closes her hand over the metal as her Nimbus flares all bright green scents and petrichor, the brilliance of life wrapping around them both, even as it's Matter she works. And at the end of it, she lays her hand on his chest, and answers: "Yes."
Vasha reaches out to take the coin-ring from his palm and holds it up with a crooked grin, "It's fitting, I figure. That it took destroying a coin for us to make this decision." An allusion to her old tattoo, no doubt. And his old shadowname, too, come to that. He carefully takes her hand and slides the ring onto her ring finger, denoting their nebulous status of whatever it is they are on an official basis.
He follows up the ring by drawing her further up his chest so that he can more easily kiss her. Manhandling the tiny Thyrsus has never been a particularly difficult task, of course, and once she's situated he lays one on her with every bit of subsumed emotion common to men of his ilk. Beneath the quiet pond, and all that. He breaks the kiss after several seconds to press one to her forehead and wrap his arms about her covetously, nuzzling his cheek into her hair.
"Good."
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