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When Vasha makes it home, he makes good on his promise. Which was to drink vodka heavily. The nice thing about not being up to speed on life magic is being able to drink liquor, enjoy getting drunk, and not being able to just snap your fingers and get rid of the sensation. It's a commitment. You're in it for the long haul. So he's pretty well and truly drunk after an hour or two. He's not an angry drunk, or even a surly drunk, he's just a quiet and depressed drunk. This involves sitting out on the balcony with his shades on, in boxer shorts and a house robe, smoking cigarettes, drinking, and listening to classical music. No one tell that Vasha has cultural tastes.
It takes some time for Fox to get home with the promised pelmeni, especially because, being Fox, she does not like to take the elevator. It's a good thing that she can also be invisible to machines, because otherwise? People flying drones around might be a little weirded out to see a bald eagle flying around carrying two big greasy brown paper bags in its beak. Especially a bald eagle with a weird feather pattern on its back and around its throat.
Lift to weight ratio is a thing, okay? Being a crow and carrying this shit up 48 flights wasn't going to work either.
The eagle soars down, circling to the painted-on landing pad, and alights gently, melting upward as the spell releases, and then Fox is there in her most usual form, holding two bags of pelmeni like some sort of sacred offering. Which, of course, in some ways, it is.
Vasha sets the bottle down beside his chair when the eagle arrives bearing gifts. He's drunk enough now that pelmeni won't really help him get sober by absorbing alcohol in his stomach. It's just carby and meaty goodness at this point. He makes a grabby hand gesture at one of the bags, the cigarette in his mouth bobbling as he speaks, "Just in time. I'm starving. Well. Not literally starving, but I am impressively hungry."
"There's no Neva, but I think this ought to do just as well, you're drunk enough that you can see the river, I'm sure." Plus, the Delaware isn't that far away, right? Fox sheds her shoes, stepping on the heels of each with her opposite foot and abandoning them, dropping her backpack next to Vasha's chair, and slinging her leg across him, straddling his lap. One bag gets set down next to her backpack, and she pulls the top of the other open, all the better to hold it between them and nosh. But before pelmeni, smooches. Even if he tastes like an ashtray that's lived in the bottom of a pickle barrel for a year, it's still Vasha.
Vasha reaches into the bag for one of the pelmeni and pops it into his mouth after the smooch is had. He's probably not eaten much today, which would account for him going for a second one almost immediately upon the first being swallowed. Drunk food is best food. Especially when the drunk food is greasy. He flicks some cigarette ash away and then flicks the cigarette itself-- what's left of it --off the balcony. "This hits the spot. Thank you."
The Thyrsus waits until Vasha has taken a pelmeni or two, and then reaches to grab one of the pelmeni, and a second one. Shoving them into her sharp-toothed maw, she grins around her food at him. No manners whatsoever, this one. It's sort of a pride point for Orphans, so he's used to it by now. "Of course. I am the luckiest, to have a Vasha and pelmeni, in Philadelphia." She reaches out her less-greasy hand to pet over his curls, absently pushing them away from his forehead and the drunk-sweat. Another pelmeni disappears into her mouth, and she chews through it before turning her head up toward the sky and burping loudly, the gastronomical equivalent of a barbaric yawp.
"Ah, my delicate flower," Vasha says fondly in the wake of the belch, "so decorous and mild." He fishes out a third pelmeni and takes a bite of it, chewing and swallowing it down before finishing it off with a second bite. He doesn't have a beverage out here that isn't Vodka, and with Fox straddling him, he can't very well go get one. So he suffers in salty carby meaty death without any sort of beverage at all. It's awful and tragic and bad. "I need to get out and speak to people about the Proximus. See if we can figure out who he was. Go over his documents. Stuff like that. Tomorrow."
"As if," laughs Fox, as their clowning has the desired response. She leans down and kisses him again, and then the tip of his nose. Snags another pelmeni, stuffs it into their mouth, chewing happily. "I mean, I've been a delicate flower. Roses are so fussy, but not nearly as fucking dramatic as herbs. They put on such a big show if they're even slightly underwatered." And then she quiets down, slowly blinking her wide green-gold eyes as he starts toward the seriousness. "Zoya has his phone -- Leta brought it back and gave it over to Zoya yesterday. I think she's going to go through it for whatever she can find. Zoya, not Leta. That -- should help. If there's anything there to find, Pheme will find it." The invocation of their cadremate's Shadow Name is deliberate. Very little that Fox does isn't deliberate, though.
"That will help, yes. I will wait for Pheme before going to the Silver Ladder, then. I imagine the Sentinels will want to take a bite out of all of this. Which suits me fine, since they're both Guardians. It's just that bringing in a Seer is a good bid for a position within the Consilium. And it would certainly be a feather in the cap of the Cadre, as far as that goes." Vasha fishes out another pelmeni, popping it into his mouth and chewing it quite hungrily. "What did the briefcase contain, do you know? I'm interested to know what ministry this asshole works under. You can generally learn a lot about a seer by knowing who is stepping on its neck."
"I didn't go through the paperwork," Fox admits, shaking her head slightly, reaching for another of the greasy little dumplings and shoving it into her mouth. "At the point where Leta was going through his briefcase, I was concerned with the little spirit who had been twisted into rather a nasty large spirit, because it had started fucking with us, and I was still high. Leta says he wasn't the nicest of men." A pause, and they glance off toward the city. "Not the nicest of ended universes," she sighs, and then focuses back on Vasha. "It would be rather a feather in our cap, and a good bid for a position. If one wanted to lead, in some fashion." Fox has never tried to do that, save in the most immediate, apprentice-having of ways, and it does make for kind of an okay segue.
If not a subtle one.
Fox has never, ever been subtle.
"I have no intention of doing that again. There are more senior Sentinels, and in general, I operate better on my own than in a large team setting. Sniper fire, that sort of thing. I don't see myself leading anyone, not that I even want to." Vasha has been put off his food with the very not subtle invocation of his recent issues. Not drinking around Fox is a choice, not a rule, but he's holding to it. For all that he's clearly not much caring for where the conversation is going. "You sound surprised. I don't know why you would be. You know what went on over there, even if you didn't hear it from me."
She frowns slightly, and sets aside the paper bag, her small sharp teeth tugging on her lower lip as the first bag of pelmeni is set by the second, next to them. "I'm not surprised," Fox replies, quietly. "But I didn't know. We've come back together like nothing changed, and nothing essential did. Not between us. You and I will always be you and I. We will always be Fox and Vasha. I will always love you with every mitochondria and every molecule and every tendon, muscle and joint, and know that in a way that only a Life Master can. But you've been through a lot without me, and I've been through a lot without you." A pause, and she looks for words, casting about for them with a soft puff of breath let out. "I'm not surprised. I just -- didn't know," she repeats. "I can't guess at things like this. It's too much. I'll make mistakes. And you're too important to make mistakes with, My Heart."
"I could show you, but then it would be in you, too. And you don't want that. I could tell you but I don't think I could do it justice. Stuck fighting a losing war, underfunded, under armed, under equipped. A war NATO largely ignored. That killed 10,000 of us. What would America, a country so much larger than Ukraine do if another nation's paramilitaries murdered 10,000 of its people? There'd be glass where the country once stood. They would burn the enemy to the ground. Ours holds our fleet. Our eastern frontier. The Crimea. And I did it all while hunting a Pylon. Hell, the Pylon was using the conflict, if not responsible for it to some degree. No small amount of my missions were more about countering them than on containing the Russians. We lost so many. To artillery, to mines, to airstrikes. To armor. It's a miracle I survived. Even when I can cause miracles at will. Most of my company didn't. Out of 140 men in four platoons, we were under 70 by the end of it all. Of the original 140, in any case. And, yes yes. I know. War is hell. War you were complicit in orchestrating against your own people, moreso. I'm angry. And I'm bitter. And I'm hateful. And the world just keeps on moving forward. Europe moves forward, America moves forward. They don't care. Not enough to do anything about it. Not enough to stop it. Not enough to help us win. Help us to survive? Oh, yes. They'll prolong our suffering indefinitely if it inconveniences Putin. But they will never. Ever. Let us win."
"I would rather you showed me than carried it alone," Fox answers quietly, and she reaches her fingers out to pet through his hair. "You're right, I don't want that. But I'd rather carry it with you than that it festers in you and makes you want to pickle your heart." She goes silent, listening to him talk. Solemn, quiet, and fixed upon him. There's a sad, small smile that slides across her face, and she looks down and away, then back up at him. "How can I help you carry your dead so they don't kill you, too?"
"I'm not dying. Well. We're all dying. In a sort of existential sense. I just mean that I am not actively attempting to die, or I'd have been dead long before now. I wouldn't have bothered fleeing, I wouldn't have bothered with all the precautions I have taken. No, I would just be dead. What this has robbed me of is a sense of purpose in my life. It has robbed me of my life's work. It has robbed me of my idealism, at least within the fallen world. It has made me into a nationalist with no nation. A refugee, and a fugitive. It has destroyed my faith in humanity, and it has destroyed my desire to lead. I am tried of watching people die for no good reason. I am tired of killing for no good reason. I am ... I am just so fucking tired." Vasha rubs at his face with a hand and shakes himself out another cigarette. He doesn't so much enjoy them as self-medicate with them, as well she knows. He lights one up and hisses out the smoke with a sigh.
"I know." Fox goes quiet for a while as he lights up his cigarette. Her green-gold eyes examine his face, as if memorizing all of its planes and angles, the new wrinkles and the fine lines around his eyes. One hand rises to carefully trace those lines, with all of the quiet adoration and bone-deep knowledge -- literally -- that it takes a practitioner of Life to understand. "I can tell you how I fished myself out of despair when you were gone, if it would help you." The concept of Fox having been lost to despair probably surprises a lot of people, but not Vasha. "Or if it would, at least, make you feel less alone."
"If you think it will help," Vasha allows between tokes of his cigarette. "Maybe it will, I don't know." Largely because she hasn't said it yet. "I used to be someone somewhere. And now I am very much no one nowhere. It will help once we're more established here, perhaps. Zoya seems to be settling in well, happy to be here. And in truth I am relieved that we're all here, mostly. That is a weight off my shoulders."
Leaning forward, she presses a kiss between his eyebrows. "Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But it's been a long time and we have not known what the other has -- endured." Looking for an English word for it for a moment before settling on 'endured.' "Lived with," Fox adds, after a moment.
"I have been no one nowhere for a long time. Since my Awakening, really. Yes, I was someone to you, to Zoya, to the Firebirds, and you were my anchors, but... I have been no one nowhere. That part does not bother me." She licks her lips absently, then bites on her lower lip with her sharp little teeth. "Not anymore, not really. To be an Orphan, and more to the point to be transgender, is to be a person with no nation. My body is not fully human anymore, and even if it were, look around us. In Poland and Russia they kill us openly, set up 'zones' where we may not even go. In Chechnya we are placed in camps. In the more 'enlightened' countries they yank away from us protections, so that the people who say 'ah, first do no harm,' may go 'oh no, a penis,' and mock us while we bleed out from a car crash, leave us to die on a guerney, like Tyra Hunt, may her memory be a blessing." A deep breath in. "Yesterday, the United Kingdom turned back the clock on legal recognition for transgender people, mandating that you must live as your 'chosen gender' for two years before you can even apply to have your legal gender changed. How can we work in those years? How can we eat? By the sufferance of cisgender people, or not at all, they tell us. And so we are people of no nation, and me, I'm white, and I'm a magical creature who could fool a doctor into thinking I'm cisgender, maybe. So what do I even have to complain about?"
"But every one of us that dies, that ends suffering by their own hand or is killed by neglect and legislation, is killed as surely as if a bullet came from a gun and struck us in the heart. And sometimes that happens, too. And I can't be there for every one of them. I can't knit together every heart, purge every poison, make every pancreas function properly." Raising a hand, she wipes at one of her eyes, resting her other on his chest to balance herself.
"And so I choose to live outside the nations that kill us, and so I choose joy as an act of defiance. My joy has become my weapon. Every day is an act of resistance. I choose to not be defeated, because continuing to live, and to thrive, defies everything that the nations of man have decreed for an individual like me."
"I am more in the 'righteous hand of God avenging injustice with swift and merciless reprisal' school of thought," Vasha observes as he takes a puff of his cigarette and blows the smoke away from Naika. "In a world of gray, I tried to find the black and white. I never lost any sleep murdering Seers of the Throne, Mad Ones, Scelesti. I never flinched away from an assignment from Central, or from the Central Committee of the Red Guards. I always felt I was doing the right thing, against bad people, for righteous purposes. I see Fate and I see Time, and so necrotic culture stands out to me like a tumor on an x-ray. I can see it festering. I can see its sickness growing. I don't find joy in defiance, I find satisfaction through action. Lancing the boil. Burning out the tumor. Excising the rot."
"That's why I want this Seer so badly. It's something I can control. A change I can make that will make the stink a little less pronounced."
Her hand pets his cheek again, and a small smile plays across her lips. She isn't very good at manipulation, but she's very good at laying out how she feels in such a way as to get Vasha to actually start talking rather than grumping pointlessly. "That's why you are you, and I am me. I live brilliantly in an act of defiance, and drag other people into living brilliantly with me. Every time I scream some new delight into the world, I am preventing a new tumor from forming. You clean the wound, and I fight hard to keep another one from forming." Fox smiles a little, there, that sharp little thing of theirs. "Then we will get this Seer. Me, you, Zoya. And Leta." Her eyebrows rise. "You don't have to love her for her to be a good choice for us. And maybe she is not your friend. But she can be a Firebird, because she -- is one of us. And if you can't trust your heart because it is too wounded, then trust mine."
"I met this woman with her tits out over a corpse," Vasha observes dryly as he takes another drag off his cigarette. He speaks around his exhale. "Now, mind you, tits out over a corpse isn't a bad look for her. But as first impressions go, it leaves a lot to be desired. Could I possibly get to know this woman? Speak to her without a dead man and a giant spirit beetween us? Because I'm not saying no, I've only ever said can I please meet this woman first? The constant needling on this point is starting to annoy me. It's not a matter of trust or not trust, it's a matter of I've met her once and was rewiring a Spirit's destiny at the time." He both looks and sounds a little annoyed at the end of it all. "I realize you always dive in head first. It is an admirable quality of yours that I genuinely enjoy about you. I know you do things fully or not at all. That is not my way."
"I'm not constantly needling you," Fox answers, somewhat confusedly. "This is the first time I've actually brought up this idea, Vasha, and ... it was like... twenty minutes ago that you told me that you didn't even want to be her friend because your heart was irreparably damaged from having lost too many people, and you told me to come home and bring pelmeni, and I brought pelmeni, and here we are." She sits back, then, dropping her hands into her lap. "That's literally what I'm asking. Don't -- say I'm doing things I'm not."
"Yes. Twenty minutes ago I said I didn't want more friends and here we are twenty minutes later telling me to trust you about having her added to our cadre," Vasha points out with a grumble. "I will give her a chance for your sake, because I do trust you and I do want you to be happy. But let's not discuss this more tonight. Please." Vasha flicks some ash away, finishes off his cigarette, and snubs it out in his ash tray. "Has she even met Zoya?"
Fox clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Yes. I think we ate waffles together at Maddy's, but I may be wrong, and she came here the other day with me as a crow. I flew her and Mei here, because I had never been part of a murder and they had never been crows before. Mei liked it and thought it was awesome, and it made Leta almost throw up. She didn't like flying forty-eight stories up into the sky." She pushes her grimy hair back out of her face with both hands and lets out a long, slow breath, then hops up from his lap, padding off to the kitchen. "I am getting a drink that isn't vodka." For herself? For him? Probably yes.
"Water would be good, as well as something sugary. Even if you decide to cleanse my system, it will still linger in its effects." Vasha doesn't argue with the 'not vodka' suggestion. He hasn't touched the bottle since she turned up, after all. Once she's off his lap, he takes the last pelmeni from the first bag and polishes it off, crumpling up the bag and tossing it into the waste basket on the balcony. The bottle of vodka is capped and set aside again. He releases a rather disgustingly gassy belch, and then pats his stomach.
"Only if I don't fix that too," Fox calls from the kitchen. But she isn't doing that, at least not right away. There's the sounds of the fridge opening and closing, and her soft bare footsteps going pap pap pap around the kitchen. The sound of water running and ice clinking. She returns not long after with a pitcher full of ice water, a glass, and a container of orange juice, all of which she sets down on the table next to him. The first flare of her nimbus does nothing save, well, flare her nimbus, but the second rushes through his veins in a rather familiarly-cleansing sensation, warm and clean. Rather like a shower for the insides.
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