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Vasha hasn't seen Fox in a day or so. This isn't terribly unusual, but when it stretches to closer to two days, that's a little more unusual. Then again, the last time she went missing for a few days without notice, she came back with two rings made out of multiple Perfected metals, so, you know, maybe it isn't all bad?
In any case, whenever it is that Vasha arrives home from wherever he was last, Fox is sitting cross-legged in the middle of their bed. She's fresh-washed and naked, too, and normally when those three things go together, she looks much more cheerful than she does at the moment. Not that she looks sad, really, but thoughtful. She's turning a silver coin over and over in her little hands, staring at what looks like a Tarot card in front of her.
When Vasha returns to their shared domicile high above the streets of Philadelphia, he's wearing his old Ukrainian army uniform, festooned with weapons, with a tactical radio in his ear and a knit cap on his head. He heads directly for his weapon closet to begin peeling off his gear and checking it in. He smells like blood, sweat, and the outside world, though as per the usual he is without blemish. Another scrape without a bruise to show for it, as is typical for him and his particular scrapes. Once the weapons are put up and their magazines topped off and filed away, he peels out of his bullet vest and lets out the profound groan of a man who didn't used to make that sound when he did that ten years ago. When he's finally stripped down to his olive green undershirt and his baggy uniform trousers, he shuffles into their room and throws himself at the bed, face down, one leg and one arm draping over the edge and dangling to the floor.
"Nnnngh," he greets Fox vaguely.
Another scrape without a bruise, indeed. Fox has the look -- as tired as he might be, and as much as he might not notice at this point -- of the same sort of impact. Something happened that left her at the very best unsettled and at the very worst with the sort of wounds that don't show. She stops playing with the coin -- the extremely familiar silver coin -- and moves both it and the card over to the nightstand, placing the card neatly lined up with the corner of the table and the coin precisely in the card's center, heads up.
Vasha's coins always land heads, after all.
She slides down so she can drape herself along him, resting her chin on his shoulder and sharing his pillow; one arm flops over his back. "You can go first," she offers mildly, leaning in to smooch the tip of his nose in greeting.
Vasha's head lifts suddenly when he spots that particular coin. "I gave that to A Man at the Gaol. Where did you get that?" Vasha pushes himself reluctantly up from the bed and leans over to peer at the coin, probably in a manner more than just a casual stare. He winds up sitting cross legged, facing the bedside table, staring at the coin like it's suddenly the most curious object in the world. And, frankly, it is. "I literally-- I just gave this to-- It's the same coin. I gave this to A Man. I keyed the temporal cage I put the Seer I captured to it. He's going to pick her up with it--" Vasha pulls his phone from his pocket and puts it to his ear after hitting speed dial. He waits. He waits. His eyes roll up a bit, waiting. Finally: "I know. Did everything work out?" A pause. "You still have my coin?" He lifts the coin up from the bedside table and stares at it for a long moment. The answer comes to his ear and his face gets a little paler. "No. No. You hold onto it for now. Just wanted to make sure you were good, Man." A bit of a drawn out pause as he's likely being verbally dressed down. He endures it with the grace of someone sacrificing a bit of his reputation for an answer and figuring it was worth the trade. "I'll remember that, sir. I'll leave you be then." He ends the call, then turns slowly to face Fox with a bit of a squint, holding his coin.
"How?" Apparently he was going to go first, but. Yanno.
When Vasha sees, and reacts, to the coin, Fox's face first pales, and then the wobbly smile that works its way across her face is sort of... satisfied, somehow. As if of course it's some sort of significant item. He doesn't give her a moment to answer, he's sort of working through something on his own, and so Fox just sits back up, absently rubbing at the Pavlichenko tattoo over her heart, fingers pressing into the tattooed sniper in WW2 women's army uniform, the Ukranian flag which flies behind her. Which is, in its own way, the most answer that she can give him while he's making phone calls.
He finally asks a question and gives her a chance to answer, and Fox chews on her lower lip. Then she leans toward the nightstand, pulls open its drawer, and takes out an envelope, holding it out to him. He knows his own utilitarian Cyrillic handwriting and that he's the only person in the world who would address an envelope to Krasnaya.
"You gave it to me," Fox answers quietly. "I mean obviously not you you but -- you. Future you. I mean technically it was future me that gave me it, and Future Weaver, too, but."
"You gave it to me."
"Did it have the words on the edge when you gave it to A Man?"
Vasha turns the coin to inspect its edge with a furrowed brow and a frown of clear annoyance. Someone etched his lucky coin what the fuck. "No! I would never! This is the first coin that manifested after I awoke! It's... it's a product of my Nimbus!" Vasha speaks of this particular coin as though it's a family friend, or a pet. "What do you mean Future Me gave this to you? If I jumped forward in time to give you this coin, I'd know, because I'd have done so already and closed the loop. And that's impossible, since I have no memory of having done this! The only way what you're suggesting would be even possible is with Imperial Mastery of Time. Either that or someone went in and rewrote my entire psyche when I wasn't looking, and it perfectly matches my memory cache that I keep at the Safehouse. Or did at my last debriefing, in any case." He sets the coin down, then looks back to Fox. He's too hidebound in his many, many ethical rules to even consider the obvious answer as the true one. He just looks confused and tired.(edited)
The fact that there's never a thought in his mind that she's lying to him seems to soothe Fox at least a little. She knows what she's saying is -- not great. "Yes. And I haven't reported it, which makes me a Time Criminal. You are correct. Once we talk, I'll go talk to Balm, but I am sure as fuck not going to talk to Penance about it, because I'm not even part of the Pentacle anymore." Her hands rest on her knees, and she pulls in a long breath.
"I wasn't lying to myself. Weaver basically can't lie, his pedipalps twitch too much. He's worse at it than I am. So, yes, this is what happened. I know it was me, because they knew about something that I am planning that I ... hadn't told anyone at that point. That I was planning on talking to Weaver about literally like... I was just bringing it up to Weaver when they appeared, and -- "
The room fills with a strange pressure, like coming up too quickly from being underwater, and then being plunged back down to the depths. A sort of metaphysical bends followed by pressure again and then suddenly a release. A feeling like an army of ghosts just walked over your grave, a crawling sensation like an entire mound of ants fleeing a predator and running right up your spine.
Fox doesn't look scared per se, but the tips of her fingers do turn into claws and her skin does suddenly look like granite.
Just in case.
Two things happen simultaneously. Lyudmila is in Vasha's hand and his free hand is resting on Fox's shoulder. The fact that Vasha's vision seems to lose track of where Fox's face is suggests that he just put her under Incognito Presence. Life gave him time to do one thing, and he made her safe. That figures. He craws off the bed to his feet and begins retreating towards the closed bedroom door, moving his hand as though he intends to open it. Fox can't get out easily and unnoticed with the door and windows shut. His pistol keeps checking the corners and lanes of fire, searching for a target, and trusting Fox not to linger in any of the obvious places he might drop a bullet.
What he doesn't seem is scared.
He can't see that she smiles. He can't see that she slips to stand behind him. It would be very difficult, thought not impossible, for him to shoot her when she's right behind him.
The pressure resolves with Vasha facing...
... himself.
Older? Yes. More worn at the edges? Yes. Softer? Also yes. But that sense of softness comes as much from the fact that this Vasha looks... relaxed? Somehow? No, relaxed is the wrong word. There's a tension that runs through his expression and his carriage, even though he's leaning casually against the doorframe with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of the strange uniform/armor he wears, this skintight, smooth, charcoal-covered thing. (Roddenberry was wrong and uniforms do need pockets.) But he somehow looks... content, on some level. Spiritually fulfilled.
And that may be as disconcerting as literally anything else about the fact that he's facing his literal self leaning against the bathroom doorjamb.
Fox (unseen) pops her head out from behind Vasha, and (unheard) says "oh," quite softly. A half-second later, she gets the most shifty-eyed look, and her puckish little smile, possibly because she's sure no one can see her.
"You really need better wards," Future!Vasha leads, in his comfortable Ukranian. "But that aside -- you should listen to her."(edited)
The room is filled with the sudden, impossibly loud sound of a semi automatic .44 caliber pistol firing off three rounds in quick succession. He lands those rounds clean along the door jamb, splintering the wood work, and probably perforating some of his suits stored just behind it. The pistol's aim then corrects to his ostensible future self's face. Keep smiling, future asshole, it only gets funnier the closer they get.
"Now I know why I was asked about warding against alien timelines," he mutters to himself without giving up the name of who raised the topic. (Spoiler alert: It was Hearth.) "Hands on your fucking head. Turn around." He makes a small twitch with the muzzle of his pistol, sort of gesturing an about face with it. "Reach for your weapon. Magazine goes one way. Slide another. Receiver in a third. Deviate, and I'm calling a Redactor." Which is to say, there will be a mess.
His future self looks not at all perturbed by all of this. He doesn't even have the decency to blink or look shocked or worried. All of this has happened before, and all of that. He turns around, folding his hands behind his head, but he looks a bit more like he's folding his hands behind his head to lean back in his favorite chair rather than that he's got his own favorite pistol trained on him. "I don't have a lot of time, unless you'd like this to be followed by fighting an Acamoth. You've had a very long day already, what with saving the wife of one of the second-in-commands of the Summer Court, talking with a woman who frequently grows berries on her skin, and now me. So let's get through the part where you threaten me as quickly as possible."
Somehow, he's managed to store Lyudmila in that skin-tight uniform. Or maybe in a pocket timeline. The latter seems more likely since the pistol appears in his hand, rather than that he reaches for it. He follows the instructions, casually tossing the receiver one way and the magazine into the bathroom, where it clatters loudly on the tile. "There. Now, we're wasting time." Only there does a edge of Vasha's terminal frustration show, a little bit of 'I knew you wouldn't believe it, and I know this because I'm you, so can we get on with this please.'
So, content as he may be wherever he's from, it's still him.
(Fox is still here, but even if she was screaming at the top of her lungs to listen to himself, or lasciviously looking between the two Vashas, no one would know.)
And Vasha without even a zip cuff. This entire incident is going to lead to him going to sleep in tactical gear, I hope everyone realizes. Once his future self is disarmed, he grabs himself by the hair and pulls himself away from the closet to shove himself against the wall and kick his feet wide apart for the pat down that everyone knew was coming. "Start talking. What do you want." Vasha begins tossing what he finds during the pat down aside, tossing the collection of weapons and personal effects into a pile on top of the dresser. The future Vasha can speak as this Vasha turns out his pockets and checks every place he knows he's hidden a weapon on himself in the past. Only once he's reasonably confident that he's disarmed the other man does he pull open the dresser drawer, sweep it all into it, and shut it again. Then he's stepping away clean, breaking distance in a sudden backwards stutter step that moves him free of a sudden cinch attack and keeps his muzzle centered on his erstwhile prisoner.
Then he sits down, pulls over his cigarette tin, and plucks two out. Lights one, and offers it out to himself at the end of two fingers with a little chin up. "Pertinent details. Tactical overview. Facts. Now."
He suffers all of this from himself with only the occasional sigh. Either this has already happened for him once, or he just knows himself well enough to expect this sort of treatment. When all is said and done, he sits down next to himself but still a short distance away. The cigarette is accepted with a grateful grunt.
"You can let her out now. She's probably either yelling at you or giving both of us Looks," he begins, and then pulls in a long, slow drag, letting the smoke curl out of his nose like some sort of erstwhile dragon.
"You know I can't give you much." That's how he begins. "And most of what I can give, I already gave to her, via herself. And Weaver." He pauses, scratching his chin with the thumb of the hand which holds his cigarette. There's a thin scar along the line of his jaw that this Vasha doesn't have. The other thumb absently turns the ring on his left hand. "You already know that the Mysteries of the Tree are leading you toward something important. You find yourself locked in a battle with the Seers which feels a lot like it's becoming Odessa." Another drag, the smoke curling slowly out after he pulls the breath in. "When I come from, we're winning. Not ... another battle in a lifelong war of attrition which you fear will eventually destroy everything and everyone that you love while you watch."
"Really winning." Here he pauses, undoubtedly looking through his own mind for the things he planned to say. "The Exarchs are failing at fighting us then, so we believe -- " A pause. "I believe that they are attempting to destabilize now, so it can never become then."
"The Third Degree Master agent I neutralized. There's a lobster in the mountains for every one of those I've come across in the field." Vasha takes his own cigarette and lights it, then flicks his zippo shut with an agitated flick of the wrist. "I have no idea where Fox is. One thing that you can plainly see is that she's not here at the moment." Technically true. The best kind of true. "And it's irrelevant. You are now the one wasting time." He taps some ash into the ashtray and takes another drag as he stares at himself.
"In any case, are you suggesting all of this? The Acamoths, the heightened risk of Paradoxes, the increased Seer activity-- that's all actually aimed at disrupting your present, and not ours per se?" Vasha takes a few moments to look over his future self's uniform. It is not, after all, one with which he's familiar. "What in Bukharin's balls are you wearing, anyway?"
Thwack. That's the sound of a Gibbs smack landing on the back of Vasha's head. Ignore that, buddy. Hmph.
Future!Vasha kindly ignores that assault to his dignity. "No, because she's already talked to herself and could keep me from having to spend time re-explaining things. I could just say 'ask her this part later' and we could move on to relevant other things." At this point, Future!Vasha doesn't so much look pained as mildly weary, as if to say: self, sometimes you are a fucking pain in the ass. I understand why, but you're a fucking pain in the ass. Another drag from his cigarette, and he gestures for the ashtray.
"That is what I am suggesting. It's our best theory at the moment. My best theory, and Weaver's. They had long suspected that one of the ways the Exarchs maintained control in our reality was through temporal control here in the Fallen world and Ur-control of the root symbolism within the Realms Supernal. Both can be effected without literally anyone ever being aware it was done, since the events being opposed simple never happened in the first place. Win the war by ensuring it never took place to begin with." There, he's almost certainly reciting something he heard Weaver say many, many times, in many long discussions and debates, from the way he recites it. Of course, this Vasha doesn't spend that much time with the spider.
"If they can't beat us then -- and they can't -- they'll attack us when we're more vulnerable. And given what you're saying now, it seems like that theory's proven correct."
He circles back to the first bit. "There will be an awful lot more lobsters in the mountains before you become me." A vague shrug. "Armor. Fox made it. It's terribly comfortable, actually."
"You look like you belong in a Marvel movie. It's ridiculous," Vasha indicts his future self gravely. Apparently he doesn't even spare himself from the acid that passes as his personal opinion. The smack on the back of his head causes him to scowl slightly. More in that she didn't make good an escape he'd prepared for her than anything else. He rolls his tongue about in his mouth for a moment, sighs, then releases the attainment keeping her out of their mutual perceptions.
"So. Despite the fact that you're breaking the Gold Accord, that you're tampering in a time travel, that you're using Imperial Magic to meddle in the past-- four enormous breaches of the Lex Magica --I am supposed to look the other way, become complicit in your criminal activities, and burn every bridge I have left in the world? We can't go back to CENTRAL. If I spend the safe landing I found here, precisely where will we go? I won't do Latin America. I hate the bugs, and Argentina is full of shitty Nazi grandkids. You get your future, and I get prison. Or the knife. You're drastically underselling your position, here."
"What is so important about you and your future that I am supposed to destroy my present?"
He shrugs at that. Looking ridiculous is really the least of his worries, apparently, or maybe he's secure enough in himself that he thinks he looks just fine, or doesn't really give a shit. Fox melts back into perception, and curls up alongside Vasha, resting her head on his shoulder. He should have known better than to think she'd leave him behind, really. He may try to protect her and let her escape, but she won't go.
"If I could show you everything that is at stake, they would never happen." A pause, and he corrects himself. "It would never happen." Future!Vasha takes a long drag of his cigarette, and Fox chuffs softly. "You have spent your entire life protecting others, fighting for the better good, trying to save the world one bullet, one dram of shifting sand at a time. And if -- when someone comes to you and says 'I have seen how we can win, really win, for good, and better the reality of every person on the planet,' -- if those same people who have abused you for most of your life at this point say 'we can't do it, and here's the knife for you and your accomplice wife,' do you want to go back to CENTRAL?"
What he doesn't say is leaving is always a choice. Maybe he doesn't need to. "She said best, to her future self. Pikuach nefesh. Looking after the world, as a whole, and all the souls on it." A pause. "But there will be more. Not just you, not just her. Diamond has spoken to herself. Hearth and Laura. Weaver. If it is necessary to convince you, I will make accomplices of every Awakened in Philadelphia. Your stand is here, and you know it, whatever comes of it."
And that's where he ends it, apparently, pushing himself up to his feet. "You know me. You know what I will and will not do, and why I will and will not do things. But our time is up. Last questions, and then I go."(edited)
Vasha has a whole lot of scowls. Scowls that mean different things at different times. This scowl that he wears is deep and ugly, his bushy slavic brows heavy and crowded at the edge of his forehead. His widow's peak and mussed hair and two day stubble really sell the nearly feral ugliness of the stare he's given his future self. No one can skin your traumas quite as handily as your own damn self, can they. Fox, draped against him as she is, can feel the tension in his body at that. His frustrated, impotent fury. He fixes his beady, bloodshot eyes on himself and asks through gritted teeth, "Was it worth it? Was it all worth it?" He ceases boring a hole through his future self's chest with his eyes and meets his own eyes.
He wouldn't believe anyone else if they said those things, would he? Sometimes only you can talk sense into you. Future!Vasha rolls his shoulders, smooths his hands over the uniform/armor that he told himself looked ridiculous, and slaps his hands on his stomach. He moves to the bathroom and the spot on the floor where the parts of Lyudmila fell, and doesn't bother reassembling them. Then to the drawer to collect all of his items, the odd little things he carried in his pockets. Mostly just oddments, but as he stands, he rolls a small charm between his fingers, then sets it on the table, on the other side of the lamp, where Vasha can't quite see what it is just now.
Fox stays silent for now, but she's an active presence at his side. Her fingers curl at the back of his head, petting the divot at the back of the skull where it joins the neck.
"Back to the fight, then." A pause, and he looks at Fox. "It's harder on you than you ever let on. I know. Thank you." That makes her hide her face in his shoulder, and she just huffs.
"I wouldn't trade it," she replies, and his head bobs in recognition.
"I know that, too."
At the question, though, Future!Vasha, with one half of Lyudmila in one hand and the other half of the silver pistol in the other, looks himself solidly in the eyes, and then he smiles. Not his usual acerbic smile, equal parts sarcasm and disdain, but a real smile, one that takes up his whole face, makes his eyes twinkle with realized delight and contentment.
"Oh, yes," he answers himself, holding his own gaze. Look upon your possible future, Vasha, and all the potential fulfillment and joy it holds.
"Without a doubt."
Then Future!Vasha slaps the magazine back into place in Lyudmila, that practised gesture, and the minute that it clicks into place, he's gone.
Vasha sits slouched on the edge of the bed, a smoldering cigarette dangling from the corner of his scowl. A scowl that has not lessened on fraction for all of that. If anything, it deepens. The fact that he's not blinking is causing his eyes to water. Or, you know. He's tearing up. One or the other. He's deathly still, despite the shivering tension in his muscles. And that doesn't really stop once the other Vasha has left this reality, not for a painful span of time that only an Acanthus could possibly find tolerable. "Near Odessa I come to a place where the end is beginning. Where the light is absolute. Where the light is absolute. Where the l..." He chokes on the word and looks down at his hands, cradling his weapon. He sucks in a shaky breath and manages, "Where the light is absolute. We rise." It all becomes way, way too much, and he slowly bends forward, wraps his arms around his middle, and starts silently sobbing. He sets his pistol aside to cover his face with both hands, instead.(edited)
Fox just waits. She's gotten really, really good at that over the years. Her fingers continue to pet the base of his skull, and she waits. Her other hand comes to rest on his knee: she's totally turned in toward him now, chin on his shoulder. Just waiting. It's not like she didn't have a similar reaction, after all. Different reasons, similar reaction. She waits. And when he starts sobbing, she just wraps her little arms around him tightly, kisses his temple, and gently rocks him, her hand smoothing down his side now instead. "I know, My Heart," she murmurs. She doesn't, not factually, because he's never actually talked about what happened in Odessa. But emotionally, at least, she does know.
Given that Vasha almost never cries, he's making the most of the experience now that he's doing it. Apparently getting it out is a priority at this point, and rather than getting it all out in a violent fit of elaborate sobbing, he just remains doubled over, shoulders shaking, tears leaking, all while more or less perfectly silence except for the snuffling and the shaky breaths he has to take from time to time. Eventually he rubs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets to stem the tide of tears and attempts to regather his composure. He looks first to Fox, because of course he does, his face a blotchy mess of snot and tears which he tries to clean with the back of his bare arm. "Why can't I just love you?" He lifts a hand to gesture out at reality, "They took my country. My Party. They took my Councilorship. They took my status. They took our Sanctum, or home. Years. I gave years to them. The things I have done, Krasnaya. With these hands." He slumps forward again, resting on his knees with his elbows. "I never asked for gratitude. I never needed gratitude. I only ever wanted one thing, and that was you. A safe place to keep you. Separate from all of ... all the things I have done."
But, goes the unsaid statement, that's never been in the cards. That's always been denied him. "They will use me until I am too old and too slow. And then I will be dead. And they will teach my final encounter to new recruits as though the failing was in me for being spent like a short round." He's just saying things that have been stewing inside him for months now. Possibly years. "When I die, they'll just cross off a name on a list of all the loose ends the Donetsk Operation left unresolved. And so long as I continue to toe the party line, they're content to leave me in the field and wait for the day time catches up with the Acanthus." He then snaps his fingers. Pop. Gone.
He then reaches over for his forgotten future-favorite coin and slides it off the bedside table onto his palm again. 'For when you need to decide,' says the etching on the side. He's weighing that coin now, flat on his palm, as he looks up to the trinket left on the dresser by his future self, attempting to identify it.
It isn't the first time he's cried like this in the many years they've known each other (even if there was that horrible gap in the middle), though this is a particularly large moment of letting go, even for someone who almost never cries and so, when they can, gets everything out. She holds on to him, pets him, and makes comforting noises toward him. Whatever else is going on, she's here, and will never not be here again. Just watch him try to go on a big mission without her ever again. Not gonna happen.
She doesn't give him reasons, she doesn't answer him. She just lets him talk. There's a look that passes across her face that's both understanding and frustrated at the same time when he talks about the things he has done. As if to say I knew what I was getting and I never asked you to keep me out of any part of you. But she doesn't say these things out loud. He needs to talk and she needs to listen and that's all just fine.
At the end, though, the former Mystagogue offers back, with all the simple clarity that being a creature like Fox permits: "Then don't." She leans in to kiss his cheeks, the corners of his eyes, and then insinuates herself across his lap, straddling his thighs so she can look him direct in the eyes and wrap her arms around his shoulders. "Stop letting them fucking hurt you." A kiss between those bushy eyebrows follows. "You can always leave. And if that's what's coming for you, then seriously, fuck them. Fuck them and their stupid masks and their stupid depersonalization bullshit. Your Order is a fucking cult, and if all they're going to do is use you up and throw you away, then leave. There has to be a way. There has to be a way for them to stop taking you away from me, over and over. I shouldn't have come to the conclusion that we should get married because I wanted the right to be your widow, but that's what they did to you. To me. To us."
Partially out of view, the little silver charm looks like familiar work. Vasha knows Fox's art, the careful way she shapes metal, and he can see the ears and the head of an alert and watchful fox poking up over the base of the lamp.
For all that Fox may be correct, she's arguing against over 30 years of focused conditioning and indoctrination. Before he ever awoke, he was in the Labyrinth. Hell. He was in the Labyrinth before he was in puberty, for fuck's sake. He's been groomed for this life before he ever knew this live was an option. And at first all she succeeds in doing is making him instantly defensive. He pulls himself and his arm free of her and recoils away from the bed, backpedaling until he hits the dresser and leans back against it as though she'd just struck him. He looks that genuinely wounded, or perhaps just confused.
The confusion gives way to a sort of trembling anger, since the thought that came to him and the words he's about to speak run entirely contrary to the conditioning that made him respond this way to begin with, "When the Guardians apply leverage to a selfless person, we do not target the selfless individual." How he can speak what is an indictment defensively and still maintain his sanity is anyone's guess. The cognitive dissonance he's probably experiencing at the moment is intense. "You don't just leave. No one ever just leaves." This is, of course, an outright lie. Guardians leave quite regularly. Pathetic, sad, social pariahs. Not trusted by the rest of the Orders, shunned by the Visus Draconis. Ghosts.
"And where would I go? Who would welcome a... a... fucking cultist so depersonalized he forgets his own fucking name sometimes." He beats a fist against his chest twice and protests, "All things for the good of all. All things for the good of all!" As though that's all the rebuttal she should require.
She expected some version of this, but still she tumbles back onto the floor, flat on her naked ass. "Ow," Fox chuffs, and sits still on the floor, leaning back on her hands, knees bent and feet flat on the floor, looking up at him. And then it's time to wait out the things that Vasha says until he's done. Then she pushes herself up to her feet. She's both calm and her hands are shaking. Her jaw sets and her gold eyes glisten. No, it's not easy to see him like this. It never is.
He can almost see the words on her lips, the idea that you can always just leave. Of course the fox would think that. Leaving is always an option. Flight is the opposite of fight, but that's always, always an option. She places a hand on her stomach, calming herself, and then reaches her hand out to the side to pick up that silver charm, though she doesn't look at it. It's close at hand, and she needs to hold on to something physical right now. The shape feels familiar and comforting, without her really looking at it or knowing why.
And when he yells at her -- toward her -- near her at the end, Fox flinches, reflexively. He doesn't yell her. That is, if not new, then at least so vanishingly rare as to be non-existenct. She flinches, ever-so-slightly, and then rights herself. Calms herself. Meets his eyes.
"Nuture the Soul in All Things," she answers, her voice deliberately gentle, but strong as stone underneath. The Orphans of Proteus are living beings with bones of granite and steel. "Humanity is the Family of All."
"Humanity is the Family of All."
"That isn't an answer, Krasnaya! People like me do not get to leave. People like me aren't welcome, even when they do." Vasha shakes his head and slowly slides down to the floor, curling his arms around his legs and resting his back against the dresser, still. He pets his hands back through his hair compulsively, tugging back the haphazard mess of his blonde curls. The gesture probably doesn't help the state of his hairline any. "You say it like it's the simplest thing, but so is killing. It's the simplest thing there is. It's living with it that's hard. It's the surviving. It's the stacking of the meat when the shooting is done. That's the hard part, Fox. No one wants to stick around and see what a world like this asks of people like me. They hate us because of who we are and what we do, but they wouldn't exist without us. I am a necessary and unfortunate evil, and everyone knows it. Most of all me. And you don't invite the paschal lamb to sit with you at dinner do you. Do you?" He fixes her with a hard stare for a moment, then goes back to tugging at his hair and hiding his face. "So you tell me where I belong anymore."(edited)
"It is an answer!" And there her patience cracks, for only a moment, but it does. Fox's eyes blur briefly with tears, and she knuckles them away with the hand holding the charm, which she still hasn't looked at. Probably she meant to bring it back to him, but he's set his boundaries and his distance, and she's not pushing into his personal space right now, even though the tension in her slender, naked form and the way she leans toward him just a little mean that's a deliberate choice that contravenes her active desires. "The Cortical Precepts of the Scions which I have burned into my bones and written on my heart are absolutely a fucking answer!" Her hand squeezes tight enough around that silver that the little ears and snout undoubtedly bite into her palm.
"Do you know what they ask you to do when you join the Mysterium? Do you know what I fucking did? No, you don't, because I've never told you, because they forbid us from telling people. They bring out a bull -- a living thing -- " And they don't do this in Philadelphia, but they sure did in St. Petersburg, "and they give you a dagger. And it is not enough to kill the thing, to feel its hot blood on your feet, staining the white robe they give you. No, the stain goes deeper than that. They tell you that just this once it is okay, and you can deal with it, to scour the Potentia out of this animal you have killed, this life you have ended. You can't tell anyone that you committed an unforgivable sin. They make you fucking complicit. And in all my time, I have never seen anything within the Diamond that leads me to believe that it isn't all just a fucking mess of 'follow these rules, except you are the special one that must break them, you are the special one that must put yourself in a position of being judged, you must carry this burden. We shall make you complicit in our crimes so you can never break free!'"
She stops, gasping for air at the end of that long diatribe against her former Order, and gulps once, twice, rubbing at her eyes again. Tears come unbidden from those mostly-gold eyes, the green in them less and less every time she wills her soul into some other shape. "You aren't the only one who has been asked to sin for the sake of your Order, and to lie, and to conceal, and to kill. That is not the only time I ever killed for the Mysterium." Fox takes another steadying breath.
"I would kill for the Children if I needed to. And I have. But they wouldn't ask me to carry all the sin on my shoulders, and they would not make a sacrifice of me. And if you say that isn't an answer, what you're saying is that the values I live by, the reason I made myself a pariah in the halls of the supposed most-learned of the Pentacle Orders is a lie."
"You are not a sacrifice. You are a fucking abuse victim. They victimize you over and over, and they have for most of your goddamned life. And if the Children won't take you, then they can't have me, either. If the Cortical Precepts of the Mother's Children do not apply to someone who is what you think of yourself, then they don't mean anything."
Her head drops forward for a moment, and her voice goes quiet again. "And if you are everything you say of yourself, why would I love you? Why would I try to save you? If you cannot think more of yourself, would you think so little of me that I could love someone as broken as you say you are?" That, now, sounds like a plea, and here, finally, she stutters half a step forward.
"Fox," Vasha temporizes, a note of frustration leaking into his voice. But he doesn't get mad at her. He's yet to get properly mad at her, for all the raising of his voice and pulling away. His head ends up shaking in dismay and sadness, a mirthless chuckle bubbling up out of his chest. "In all my years of living, and in all the time we have spent together? I have never once understood why you persist in loving me. I am a miserable creature. And I was miserable then. I deaden my pain in alcohol and hedonism. When I am still, all I do is look for another mission. And it's only then that I feel any sense of purpose."
"Do you think there is another person in the Consilium that could have done what I did? That could have gotten there quick enough to rewind time? That would have thought to enlist the help of the Changelings on scene in the fight? That could have counterspelled three third degree mastery effects in a row to buy them all time to act? To subdue her? That they would have known to warn about the shared fate? That they would have had the good sense to advise them to target her equipment, rather than herself?" It's possible, but unlikely. He was definitely the right person in the right place at the right time, which is of course the entirety of his job description.
He combs one hand back through his hair and looks despondently at the coin in his other hand, rubbing at it with his thumb. "And then I left you alone for seven years, not knowing if I was alive or dead at times. To fight in someone else's war. To do what needed doing. And I came back, and you..." His head shakes, because he can't fathom it. "You still loved me. So long as I live, I don't think I will ever understand why, when I gave you every reason to leave, every reason to give up, every reason to write me off for dead? That you didn't."
"I am grateful, as all fools are grateful, for their undeserved good fortune. You are the only treasure I can never replace."
"And yet you ask me why they can't let you just love me," Fox answers him, another small step forward, and another, until the edge of their bed hits just above her knees. "You ask why they can't leave you alone, so you can live your life." Here, her eyebrows rise just so, and she cants her head to the side, one of the many little vulpine tics of hers.
"I love you because you are not what they made of you. I love you because what they made of you has never been everything that you are. I love you because you pull me back when I go too far. I love you because you are the other side of the coin. I love you because when I was broken and afraid, you put on your bravest face for me. I love you because when I am hurt and bleeding, your arms are there for me. I love you because I have always been able to see the brilliant, sweet, soft-hearted man behind the green eyes that you turn into opaque shields, and try to hide your heart from the world. If you were anything else, if you were as dead of heart as you claim to be, none of this would hurt you. The fact that it still hurts you, that you can scream about it and cry and protest about it and call yourself broken rather than just moving forward with resignation and a deadened sensibility? That means you're not what you fear you are, or think you have become. And I have always seen that."
"You stand on the edge of a precipice every day, screaming 'I don't care at all,' while you care so deeply that your heart screams in the cage they made you put it in. And no one is fooled, My Heart. No one in this penthouse, at the very least. They all know that you're essentially a good man forced to make choices as though you're a bad man."
She sits down on the bed's edge, one knee pulled up on the bed so she can stay turned to face him, and comes no closer. "I couldn't do anything else but wait. You're the love of my life, Vasha. Whether you understand why or not, I couldn't live without you. Not really. But I could hold on and wait. So I did." Her hand relaxes and her thumb rubs over the shape of the charm in her hand, but she still hasn't looked at it.
"I don't know. Maybe there was someone else who could have done it. And I'm grateful that you could do it, but none of that requires you to be in hoc forever to an Order that treats you like an expendable cog, and grinds you down until you're useless. Whether or not you can believe that you deserve my love, I will never leave you. But I'm done with watching them hurt you over and over, and letting you go without protest to do their work unsupported, without being taken care of. You don't belong to them. If you don't belong to yourself, you belong to me. And if that's how it has to be so they stop fucking using you up like a pile of bullets, then fine."
"I belong to you," Vasha says the words a bit haltingly, as though mulling them over rather than spitting them back. That's certainly one way of looking at it. He doesn't protest as hard this time around, though his head shakes again at some of the things she says, and his eyes squint shut against the implications. It's a very terrifying thing, what he's contemplating doing. And he is, quite justifiably, scared. And obviously so. It's a miracle he hasn't just gone incognito and slunk off somewhere to force the world to forget he ever existed for a while.
"If I do this," he begins hesitantly, "I can't do it alone. I won't know where to start or what to do. What to say. I don't know how to be seen. I don't know how to simply persist. I have spent so much time being nothing. No one. Or at least not myself. I tried a social visit with the Soul Wardens, and it was... terribly awkward. I felt like a fish in a disco. Just. Flopping about. It was embarrassing." He offers up a gusty, emotionally exhausted sigh. And, forgetting himself entirely, does what comes most naturally to him in times of tension and mental strain. He flips his lucky coin.
The familiar clear note of singing metal follows the casual gesture, as the heavy round coin goes spinning up into the air all gleaming and bright. But the spinning seems to slow down for several moments, replaced by a sudden clear hallucination hovering in the air for the both of them to see. It comes with Vasha's familiar sensory overlays, even his subtitles which come in Ukrainian but adapt to the language of preference of the viewer in rapid order. Almost like looking at a video taken from just behind his eyes, though the color is washed out and white given the method of its delivery. Silver-white light and motion.
A view of rolling wheat fields, as yellow as the stripe of the Ukrainian flag, pregnant under the blanket of a sky just as Ukrainian blue. He's walking through it casually, rustling the grain between his fingers. The familiarity of the sensation in the memory is not something he has now. He is not, nor has he ever been anything like a farmer. The perspective turns about rapidly as what must be Fox's voice calls out cheerfully from behind, and so the viewer looks in that direction. To a humble farm house, built low to the ground, sagging in the middle. A warm yellow light pours from within, something that is instantly understood as the portents of Fate. Threads of relevance and sympathy, all tied back to that place he's never been.
Then the coin falls to the floor with a clatter, hisses about in ever quickening wobbles, and finally deposits itself on the carpet showing tails. The hammer and sickle, laurel and star.
Vasha commences to simply stare at the air in rapt, numb, perhaps catatonic silence.
"Yes." If that's how it has to be for him to stop letting the Guardians hurt him (hurt them both) then that's how it has to be. He belongs to her. Her voice is gentler now, the waves of hard emotion passing, washing over her heart and leaving her somehow clean. She watches him, her head still gently tipped to one side.
"When have I ever let you face something alone unless you made me?" Fox asks quietly. "You should speak to Balm, first. Then Peacekeeper, as she is our Warmaker -- a deceptively-named job. She is a mediator, a negotiator, first of all. Peacekeeper is a better name for her than her title. And with both of them, you should tell them the unvarnished truth. It is what I will do. For that matter, I need to go confess to Grandmother Balm. To tell her what has happened. Though I suppose I should not tell her that my future self told me to tell her that she loves her. Which means either she was successful in walking the Golden Path... or she has died." Her sharp little teeth worry her lower lip as Fox worries her way through all of those things. "The Children are here to heal, My Heart. To make right. Tikkun olam. You do not need to perform correctly the way that you think you do. I guarantee you, you aren't the first person to come in out of the cold to them." A soft laugh. "How right that you arrived in Philadelphia and landed on our doorstep. If I wrote it in a script, people would call it heavy-handed foreshadowing." But then again, he is an Acanthus.
When that coin sings into the air, flipping the words for when you can't decide over and over again, Fox goes very still indeed. Watching that little scene play out, her gold eyes widening. And at the end of it, she quietly scoots up the bed, insinuating herself between his thighs, and curls up against his chest, resting her head on his shoulder. The little figurine lays cradled in her hands, but she closes her eyes. It wasn't left for her, and in any case, she's just snuggling him. They both need it.
Vasha doesn't pull away as she comes nearer to him, though his nerves remain fraught. He watches her carefully, holds very still as she curls in against him, and doesn't really start to relax until she becomes still against him and rests her head against his shoulder. His eyes search about the room, breaking out of his slack jawed staring, and slap down on the coin to drag it over. He places it into his pocket, trading it for Lyudmila. She's a familiar friend, and a calming presence, for all that he's now holding a pistol as well as Fox. But his arms wrap around her tightly, and his nose buries itself into her unruly head of hair. And then, while it is blessedly difficult to know that it has been done, Vasha pulls the curtain down over the both of them and the bedroom forgets they're in it for a while. The phone doesn't ring. The occupation sensors let the lights and air circulation die out.
And for a little while at least, he makes a world for just the two of them. Safe as imaginary houses.
When his arms close around her, all is forgiven and - at least for the moment - forgotten. She leans just a little bit to set it on the table, on top of the tarot card so long left out of mind.
Her face buries into his shoulder, her eyes stay closed. That isn't for her to see first, she knows, even if she knows by touch that work to be her own. And as they sink into their safe little world for just a little while, the silver charm that Future!Fox made for Future!Vasha stands sentinel over them.
One silver fox, alert and watchful, seated upright, keeping guard. One silver fox, alert and watchful, keeping guard upon a small circular base engraved with the words COME HOME SAFE. One silver fox, alert and watchful, keeping guard upon a small circular base engraved with the words COME HOME SAFE, her tail wrapped protectively around two kits, alert and watchful, one with tiny glittering emerald eyes, one with beryl a shimmering yellow.
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