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Zoya is in her room, having just got off of a phone call. Her office and her bedroom are separate rooms, even if attached to one another, and if she's in her room rather than the office she's probably not working. The fact she's staring into space, just looking out the window out over the city while sitting on the edge of her bed, is a good indication she's not in the middle of work, too.
If she wanted to be sure she wasn't disturbed she'd probably have closed the door, too.
Sometimes Fox runs around the house as various animals. Sometimes it's a fox, naturally, or birds -- she does love birds -- but today?
Today, kudzu comes stretching and creeping in along the top of the doorway, the green leaves and stems creaking and peeking into Zoya's room. Buds and shoots rustle and crackle, the dark green leaves opening quickly, growing even faster than the ridiculous growth rate of that particular plant.
It takes longer than it probably should for Zoya to notice the kudzu and when she does it makes her jump a little. "This seems like something out a terrible horror movie," she says out loud. Talking to the plants? "I really hope that's Little Fox and not the start to another truly unreal day. I guess it could be both..."
The plants crawl into the room and then -- without the feel of Life magic -- collapse into the shape of a large bat, which hangs from the doorframe before flapping down to the ground and then resolving into a Fox, sitting on the floor. "Yeah, that was a little silly of me, in context. I seem to be bad at remembering context right now." She scratches her cheek absently, tugging on the bottom edge of her t-shirt, a massively-oversized thing which reads OF COURSE I AM IN CHARGE, I'M A UKRANIAN and was undoubtedly stolen from Lyuda's giant collection of algorithmic t-shirts, some of which are so extremely on-point that they could only belong to an Acanthus.
"I just felt like being a plant today. How are you?"
It's no longer possible for Zoya to be surprised by the things Fox turns into. There might be things she turns into Zoya didn't expect, but not things that surprise her. When the fact this is Fox is confirmed she's at least relieved, though. If it wasn't Fox then her day was probably about to get really bad.
But it's Fox! Zoya turns away from the window and toward her friend, lifts her arms up, and makes rapid beckoning gestures that say 'come hug me' as clearly as her words might. "I'm full of feelings," she says. (edited)
Bare feet on the wood floor go pap pap pap and soften some as she crosses the rugs that people scatter about to keep their feet from getting cold if they're not nearly impervious to cold from being Life Masters who will never have Wisdom 8 because they use magic flippantly and constantly. Ahem. Fox scoots in underneath those opened arms and wraps her own around Zoya's midsection, nuzzling in at her cheek and jawline with the instinct of a companion canine. Not that Naika is tame. No. Perish the thought.
"Tell me all of your Feelings, Z." It is, after all, a Hearthmaster's job.
"All of them?"
Zoya starts to think. "I'm still embarrassed by the time I was on a date when I was fourteen and got up from our table at a restaurant to use the bathroom, only to run directly into the waiter and made him dump an entire table's worth of food on the boy I was with. I think if I ever saw that boy again, I guess he'd be a man now, I might just die."
She leans her head into Fox's nuzzling and wraps the Thyrsus up in her arms. "Maybe I should stick to currently relevant feelings, though. I think the biggest one is awe, and I'm not even just overawed by one thing. I'm also afraid that I hurt you, even though I didn't get any choice. Or that someone else hurt you, but did it through me without intending to. I don't know."
"I want all of the feelings you'll give to me, Z. Even the ones from when you were fourteen. That's how you know people," Fox says softly. "But, good news, that boy wasn't me. If it was, you'd remember that it was a girl instead, because the universe remembers me as one. Also, I was living in Philadelphia when we were teenagers." She crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue there. The Thyrsus doesn't talk a lot about how weird it is that the universe changed after her Awakening, or that she felt mildly gaslit by the world when it suddenly remembered her as always a girl instead of trans woman working in Russia.
She squeezes her arms around Zoya's waist and cuddles up close. "Why do you think you hurt me?" (edited)
"It would have been worse if it was a girl, I might have actually been into her. Probably not, though. Another oligarch's kid. It was kind of an arranged date," Zoya says with humor, if not quite a laugh. "It would have been extremely interesting if my dad had arranged a date with you when I was fourteen, though. Crazy weird."
She leans in to kiss Fox's nose in response to the stuck tongue.
"Because the Mother talked to me, personally. Or might have. I saw the look on your face. I'm sorry if you were hurt. I love you too much to ever want to hurt you."
She laughs brightly, then -- Fox's laughter is the sort of thing that cracks open like an egg and gets everywhere, wild and raucous -- and nuzzles against Zoya's throat again, taking a deep breath in through her nose. "It would have been weird. Can you imagine? Your dad, like 'ah yes, you should date this American Jew?'" She snickers at the thought. "Not gonna lie, the thought that it would piss your dad off so bad to know who you're with these days delights me on occasion." She beams, then, at the kiss to her nose, and snaps her teeth playfully.
Her expression dims a little at the end. "Oh. It's -- " Her shoulders lift and drop in the Obrimos' embrace. "I mean, yes? But that's, like... I mean, I'm jealous, but jealousy isn't bad in this case. Of course I'm jealous if Mother spoke to you. But also I'm -- " A pause. "Scared."
The look on Zoya's face during that laugh is pretty much just dopey and lovestruck. Her dad would hate it. "When you laugh like that I forget to breathe sometimes," she says. "It's such a beautiful sound, among my favorites, and I've heard the choirs of the Aether." She turns her head to kiss Fox's forehead. Then kiss it again.
"Me too. I'm scared, too. What are you scared of? Or is it many things? Do you want to talk to me about any of them? I'm here, and I'm glad to be here, and I'm no hurry not to be. And I have fears of my own to share. Things I didn't mention earlier. Personal ones, not about this Emanation."
Her dad would hate it, but Fox breathes it in like air, soaks in it like a sunflower turning to face the dawn. She blushes, too, a furiously red thing that colors her from her collarbone to the tips of her ears, and it's a good thing that Zoya's kissing her forehead, because Fox hides her face in the Obrimos' shoulder. "Stoooooop," she mock-wails, in a way that doesn't mean it really at all. "You're making my face red." It's a distraction from Big Talks, though, and she welcomes it.
A heavy sigh drops at the end of that sentence, though, when Z goes on. "A lot of things," she answers, finally. "A lot of things." Her head picks up from Z's shoulder, and one of their hands comes to idly fuss with her hair, pet at her cheek with calloused hands. "You first." Like a flash of red against the snow, here and then gone, the Hearthmaster dodges, all under the guise of her job. You first.
For all that she just finished completing Fox's laugh, Zoya's is beautiful too. Full of life, free and clear. It's part of her charm in her videos. It comes out now, for Fox. "I like making your face red."
She's not too easily distracted, though. She sighs, closes her eyes when Fox's hands go into her hair, and organizes words before opening her mouth to reply. "Failing, mostly. That fear isn't new but it sure is a lot bigger all of a sudden. I'm also afraid that I'm changing. Afraid I've been changed. I don't know how to explain it except as maybe the exact opposite of the idea of a dark night of the soul. Not like Awakening, where I was filled up in a sudden rush by the supernal, but also still profound. I'm afraid of everything it will mean for me." She slides a hand under the back of Fox's shirt, just letting her hand rest on the warm skin there.
Now is the time for Fox to clamber into Zoya's lap. It's a common thing, for her, and all the more common these days. It seems to comfort others but shh. Fox finds comfort in it too. Don't give away the secret. "Your laugh is so pretty," she murmurs, a little aside, twined around Zoya's words like a cat around the ankles rather than interrupting.
"Because you feel responsible suddenly for a whole new big thing?" she queries, and then her hand mirrors Z's, sneaking under shirt-tails for skin contact. "We're always changing. It gets scary when we realize it, though. I'm supposed to make a new branch of the Orphans, and ... " It isn't being responsible for a new plane of reality, says her tone, but it's something.
"I'm afraid of that, too. I keep thinking maybe if I just don't look, it won't be there. I can't... " Her gaze slides across the room to an empty place and stays there for a minute. It's not really an empty place if one can perceive spirits in Twilight, mind. Agoston, the Husky-like dog spirit familiar Fox inherited when Balm died, Ascended to Archmastery, or both, lays patiently on the floor there, having his ears groomed by Proper Ratthew, Fox's other familiar. He's been passed from one Child of the Tree to another for hundreds of years, this spirit dog, and this isn't the first time he's had someone in this situation stare at him.
"I'm not ready. You both can't go where I can't follow you. I wouldn't make it. But I can't. Be the reason."
Zoya's hand, the one that isn't resting on Fox's back, searches for Fox's hand and, finding it, twines fingers with the Thyrsus's. With that done, a signal that Zoya isn't pulling away, she scootches herself from where she'd been sitting on the edge of the bed up toward the head of it, and then onto it, pulling Fox with her. "I like it when you sit on my lap and I hold you, but will you hold me, this time? I think I could really use that." It's a brief aside from the conversation, just to relocate and ask for something when she asks for so little, most of the time. Afterward the conversation goes on.
"The responsibility is the reason I'm afraid. It's not directly the reason for the rest. I'm an Obrimos, but I've never really had a religious bone in my body, despite stereotypes about us as a Path. I find wonder and beauty in so much of the world, and a sense of purpose and responsibility toward it, and a need to protect the fragile parts of it, and a willingness to do that even at my own expense. Yet I've never run into anything that gave me a sense of more than... spirituality, I guess? A love of the universe and what it contains, then magic of it all." She sighs. "And now I have, and it feels like I just noticed something that was missing all along."
With a dry laugh she adds, "and I definitely don't feel like I'm ready to go anywhere. Not permanently, anyway."
Fox hangs on to that hand like a drowning man hangs on to a rope, and she makes a tiny and piteous whine instinctively in the back of her throat when Zoya starts to pull away, until she realizes what's going on. She scrambles after when pulled along, slipping reflexively into her foxself so that she can scamper up the bed and over Zoya in circles, back and forth across her stomach. Clowning for her lover, breaking the tension, whatever it is, the shenanigans last for only a moment before she turns so fluidly back into herself, without a hint of anything on peripheral mage sight. It's just her soul, doing what it does.
And then? She curls around Zoya, snuggling the taller woman in at her side. One arm tucked under her neck, the other wrapping around her middle. "What you describe sounds to me like being an Orphan, which, like being a Jew, is religion and philosophy and people and living, all wrapped up together. I love people, you know? And the world itself. And if HaShem is not in the water and the sky and the way that snails move across the earth, then I want no part of Him." A pause. "Responsibility is very scary." She nods her head against the pillow. "Good. I -- so much is changing, I don't know. And I know that -- " A little puff of breath. "I met future me. You know? And. Lesja met one of our children?"
Speaking of responsibility. "It isn't a Realm," she adds.
Zoya laughs -- no, giggles -- a little at Fox's brief antics, and it's good to have a little bit of tension broken. So says her reaction, at least.
Still, when Fox goes human again and curls around her, Zoya blows out a long sigh, releasing even more tension with it, and curls herself in against the Orphan. Even a powerful Obrimos, potentially nearing the crossing to archmastery, a master of Mind who can alter her thoughts and feelings as she wishes, still sometimes just needs to be held and comforted.
"I know it sounds a little bit like being an Orphan," she answers agreeably, smiling with voice right along with her whole face. One of these days the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles is going to give her serious smile lines, and it will probably be a wonderful look on her. "I've been your friend for how long, now? You've rubbed off some, and I don't just mean to mark your territory."
A brief pause to nuzzle against Fox happens then, like she's doing just that. Rubbing her scent on Fox.
"That's pretty heavy," she says. "I don't know that it isn't a Realm, in its own way, you know? The whole idea that every person is an entire universe unto themselves. I've always wanted to have kids, you know. There's just... never been the right person, the right time, the right everything all at once. I keep pushing it out of my mind for later. There are always too many reasons not to, right now."
She hugs tightly now and again, just squeezing the Obrimos so that Zoya is actively aware of the snuggle, perhaps. And she seems terribly pleased with making Zoya giggle, breaking the tension. Every so often, her nose nuzzles in against Zoya's throat thoughtfully. "I've rubbed off on you in a bunch of ways," she teases, and the nuzzling that Zoya does gets answered in kind, her cheek against the Guardian's soft cheek. "You've been lots of things." Her fingers sneak for the tail of Zoya's shirt, clambering underneath for more skin contact.
Human beings wither without that kind of contact, and Fox especially seems to completely thrive on it. "I always knew that we would have kids. Somehow, someday. Maybe it's that I wanted Lesja to be well enough, or I wanted us to be stable enough -- all of us, not just the two of us -- that we felt like we could manage it. And I think -- I think -- that when Lesja came back as ... her future self, which at the time was wearing Vasya's face, which sort of messes my head around a little bit when I think about it, but maybe it was just the face that she understood she needed to see at the time... and when our daughter came back, I think maybe that was part of what we were supposed to understand. Either that it's never going to be stable enough so you might as well just get on with living, or maybe that we are winning enough now."
"I think it might be the first bit." Her nose wrinkles up. "I'm terrified of being pregnant, but I guess it doesn't have to be me, does it? I always assumed it would be. Maybe it isn't." And then she absently gnaws at Zoya's shoulder for a minute, very delicately and gently. "Well, you could. And anyway, if we have a baby, it's yours too, kind of."
Zoya quietly soaks up the contact while Fox is speaking. Her skin is warm under the touch, and the connection seems to relax her with even just the one hand under her shirt .
"I think," she says, "that of you're always waiting for the perfect moment you can miss the right one." She smiles. "If there's something you want, or need, and it's not clearly the wrong time, then maybe it is the right one."
She shifts herself closer against Fox. "Recent events have made me think about all the things that I've needed or wanted but put off. There's so much time, I thought. No need to rush anything. I still think I'm likely to have some time ahead of me, but this all made me realize how quickly things can change, too. I need to stop putting off things I want."
She turns so she can kiss Fox tenderly, barely more than touching their lips together at first and slowly more firm. Just a few seconds.
"I could. And I love you, and I love her, in different ways, and I would love to be part of the life of any kids you have. I think I'll feel more like a proud aunt, though."
She hugs tightly now and again, just squeezing the Obrimos so that Zoya is actively aware of the snuggle, perhaps. And she seems terribly pleased with making Zoya giggle, breaking the tension. Every so often, her nose nuzzles in against Zoya's throat thoughtfully. "I've rubbed off on you in a bunch of ways," she teases, and the nuzzling that Zoya does gets answered in kind, her cheek against the Guardian's soft cheek. "You've been lots of things." Her fingers sneak for the tail of Zoya's shirt, clambering underneath for more skin contact.
Human beings wither without that kind of contact, and Fox especially seems to completely thrive on it. "I always knew that we would have kids. Somehow, someday. Maybe it's that I wanted Lesja to be well enough, or I wanted us to be stable enough -- all of us, not just the two of us -- that we felt like we could manage it. And I think -- I think -- that when Lesja came back as ... her future self, which at the time was wearing Vasya's face, which sort of messes my head around a little bit when I think about it, but maybe it was just the face that she understood she needed to see at the time... and when our daughter came back, I think maybe that was part of what we were supposed to understand. Either that it's never going to be stable enough so you might as well just get on with living, or maybe that we are winning enough now."
"I think it might be the first bit." Her nose wrinkles up. "I'm terrified of being pregnant, but I guess it doesn't have to be me, does it? I always assumed it would be. Maybe it isn't." And then she absently gnaws at Zoya's shoulder for a minute, very delicately and gently. "Well, you could. And anyway, if we have a baby, it's yours too, kind of."
Zoya quietly soaks up the contact while Fox is speaking. Her skin is warm under the touch, and the connection seems to relax her with even just the one hand under her shirt .
"I think," she says, "that of you're always waiting for the perfect moment you can miss the right one." She smiles. "If there's something you want, or need, and it's not clearly the wrong time, then maybe it is the right one."
She shifts herself closer against Fox. "Recent events have made me think about all the things that I've needed or wanted but put off. There's so much time, I thought. No need to rush anything. I still think I'm likely to have some time ahead of me, but this all made me realize how quickly things can change, too. I need to stop putting off things I want."
She turns so she can kiss Fox tenderly, barely more than touching their lips together at first and slowly more firm. Just a few seconds.
"I could. And I love you, and I love her, in different ways, and I would love to be part of the life of any kids you have. I think I'll feel more like a proud aunt, though."
When Zoya snuggles in closer, Fox tugs her in, tossing a leg over the Obrimos' hip comfortably and weaseling her hand up to the space beneath her ribcage, all soft and comfy. "I think that's the thing that it took well after I became an Adept in Time for me to learn," she admits. Fox lets out a little breath, and then snuffles at Zoya's neck. It tickles, and she knows it tickles, and this is just the way that Fox is when there's too much Serious, sometimes she has to clown for a little bit before she can continue having a Big Serious Talk.
The tender kiss catches the breath in the back of her throat, and her big gold eyes slowly flutter closed, that blush returning. "What are the things you want that you've been putting off?" Fox replies breathlessly.
"However you want to be part of their life, I think -- you'll be good for the twins. How... could you not be?" Twins? Oh dear.
By this time in their relationship, Fox's hand being up her shirt is the kind of thing that gives Zoya pause, but that doesn't mean it isn't a little bit distracting. Distracting in the best way is still distracting. Fair is fair, though. Her own hand finds its way up the back of Fox's too, as she wriggles in close and holds Fox against her. She ends up wriggling again when her neck is tickled by breath.
Shaking off the distraction and figuring out what she wants to say take her a minute, where she gets a distant look while her fingers idly curl and uncurl, tracing patterns on Fox's skin.
"Me?" she finally says. "It feels like I'm always putting myself and the things I want or need behind other people. I'm not unhappy, so don't get me wrong. I love you, I love our cadre, and I don't want to change this, and I don't want to break up the family we built out of the Firebirds. There's a part of me that's really lonely, too? If that makes sense? I know you love me, and you're here for me, but we don't have the same depth of a connection you and Sashenka have. That's okay, too. I'm just feeling a way about not being number one for anybody. Including myself. I feel that way, but I also feel silly and selfish for feeling that way."
A low, happy sound in the back of her throat at the skin contact. Sometimes it's very distracting, and sometimes it's very calming, and sometimes it's both. She noses in at the side of Zoya's neck, taking in a deep breath through her nose. Skin contact and smell: having an Orphan around means being extremely aware of how animal people can be, because she doesn't try to disguise the animal part of being human.
The patterns traced on her skin pull her attention, and she squirms a little, not displeased in the least. Just, you know. Trying to focus. When Zoya finds words, Fox gently noses at her neck again. "That's not silly or selfish," Fox answers quietly. "Not too long ago, I realized that like... " she tries to find words. "We stand on the earth, and we think, 'oh, this is solid, this is sturdy.' But it's really just a tiny inconsequential speck in the middle of a vast, unknowable nothingness, hurtling through the universe at, what, millions of miles an hour? Literally everything in the world is in motion all the time and that's... that's terrifying."
"It's okay to want a metaphorical solid place to stand, because you'll never have a literal one." Her shoulders shift slightly, a sideways sort of shrug. "I'm not going anywhere, not again. Not ever again, without all of you. I can't bear to be apart from you. But if you need somewhere -- someone -- where you feel like... you are steady? Standing still?" A soft puff of breath. "I'm the last person who could say 'no, pay attention to me.' I'm the one who ran away when I couldn't stand being in Russia anymore when Lesja was undercover."
"'Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.'" Zoya quotes, a little amusement in her voice. "The more I've studied Space the more interesting I've found it how well it accommodates for all that motion in a lot of ways. I think me being a Master of Forces contributes to that being an oddity. If I teleport myself from here to Moscow, on the other side of the planet, my inertia from the Earth's rotation and its rotation around the Sun and the Sun's movement through the galaxy change dramatically, especially the rotational inertia of the planet under my feet. Basically the opposite direction. Somehow, I come out on the other side not flying off at high speed. Magic."
But that's off topic, and as her exploring hands slide higher they pull Fox's shirt up a little, and Zoya goes on.
"To be fair to you, I probably should have run away from Russia a long time ago, and I think that your doing so was one of the things that finally gave me the courage. There's so much I miss about home, but it's truly not the right place for me as it is now. I don't know if it will be in my lifetime, so I need to truly build a life, and do it where I am. Which is here, with you and the Firebirds." She sighs gently. "Thank you for understanding what I was saying. I still can't shake the feeling that my need to feel like I'm the most important thing in someone's world is... childish, I guess? But I still want it, and to have someone who is also that to me, unless I decide not to, and then I'm just denying truths about myself. I don't want to go down the path of just changing my own mind with magic just to avoid inconvenient feelings."
She sighs contentedly. "Carl Sagan. I love the fact that his wife put the sound of her brain when she was falling in love with him on the record that they sent out into the stars," Fox murmurs. "Do you know that story? I love that story." The Thyrsus sort of mentally drifts, nosing in against Zoya and listening to her talk about teleportation and Forces Mastery and magical theories. Her hands mirror the Obrimos', mostly. For a second they dart around to her sides and tickle, because it's Fox.
"It's not childish. It's real. I love you, and I don't want to lose any part of what you are to me, but I can't promise you something like that, not right now, anyway. You know?" There's a sort of tipping of her head back and forth against the bed and her golden eyes look upward for a moment. "I know that Lesja is -- in a place where... she needs me to be her solid place to stand. And I can't imagine ever denying you that."
"I do know that story, and I feel like that's a kind of magic that many of us never manage to accomplish," Zoya says with a dreamy sigh. She squirms just a little under Fox's tickling touch. "I love you, too. No matter how much I want my solid place to stand, I don't think one that didn't allow room for you, too, would work for me. I have no plans to go anywhere, and I understand, fully understand, get it one hundred percent, that you can't be that place for me. It would make me happy beyond reason if you could be, yes, but the fact that you and Lesja are that for each other has never once hurt me, it just makes me so happy."
For the span of what would be a couple of breaths she kisses Fox.
"Me bringing this up wasn't asking you for more, or anything different, or a prelude to a breakup. I promise. I just feel like the ground under me is more unsteady than it has ever been. I... I think I might need to retire from the Guardians. I'm not sure yet."
Another little wistful sigh. "Yeah. The idea that you could record the sound of falling in love was one of the best things I'd ever heard at that point in my life. I think I was like... twelve. And the thought that a girl would fall in love with me and her brain would do that -- or a boy, but, you know, that was a whole thing at the time because I thought I was a boy, and I didn't know there were more options -- just... blew me away." Fox wiggles a little bit, and offers, "I think that... just... right now... I can't be, because she needs so much of me. With her gender things, and her ... Myrne-ness... that's all. That's the why. Not you. Just."
Oh, there were going to be more words, but then she's being kissed, and the Thyrsus melts, sighing breathlessly. "... oh. That. Is the best news." It's no secret that she hates the Guardians by now.
There are distinct advantages to being a Master of Forces and Mind. It takes only a few seconds for Zoya to reach back into her memories for certain ones, sort through the emotions of the time, and put sound to them. The room around them fills with music, low and soft, suited to the background of a conversation. The music of Zoya's emotions the first time that she realized that she loved Fox. She doesn't explain the sounds, probably not feeling like she has to, unless asked. Instead, she gently kisses Fox again.
"I know. I know," she says gently, with smiling lips and smiling eyes, the words tender and accepting. "I'm not asking anything different of you."
Then she sighs and her expression changes. "Please don't do that," she says. There's some pain in her voice when she says it. "The Guardians have been the right place for me for a long time, and not all our experiences with them have been the same. I'm not looking at the idea of leaving because they were wrong to me, or wronged me. That's where my heart has been, and it hurts to hear that part of me rejected. I'm not rejecting it. I'm just growing and changing."
She'll come back to the music in a moment, because curiosity flickers across her face, and nothing is more interesting to Fox than a Mystery, but then there's kissing, and then she's accidentally hurt Zoya.
"It's not... you." Fox pulls back, then, and sits up. "Look, I... "
She scrubs her hands over her face. "I know things I shouldn't know. A lot of them. Not just about Lesja, but ... " Fox stops, and shakes her head hard. "The things I know about what happened to Lesja. What her father did. The things she was put through, for that Order. How much... not a person she was... by the time she left. All of this ... Myrne and Lesja stuff, all of that is the healthy shit that's starting to happen now, but we had to cut in and let out a lot of ... pus, essentially, and... flush it all out. And I wasn't sure if there would be much of anyone left once all of the poison and pain and death and cranberry-and-vodka got washed out."
Her voice goes thin and reedy as her throat closes around her words. "I went in to the sanctum of the Major Arcana when... things went wrong, about a year ago. We... they had been replaced. You know that part. That you all were reporting to Seer decoys, and they tortured A Man and Cypher and Gardener. And I... the things I saw. Cypher and Gardener are still people, Zee, but A Man is hollowed. Out. He's not... he's not real anymore. He's a... a walking collection of masks. A pile of faces. There's nobody in there anymore, and the Guardians were doing that to Lesja, too."
One of her hands reaches back out, so tentatively, as her jaw works and she blinks rapidly. "You are, as far as I can tell, probably the only healthy Guardian I've ever known. Leta is just -- I owe her everything, she saved the fucking Tree -- but she's never sober anymore, and even I know you can't do that all the time, and ... " She swallows hard, her words kind of breaking at the edges, the consonants cracking between her sharp teeth. "I'm glad they didn't hurt you, I'm glad it's different for you, but I want you all to be safe and you're the only one I know that they haven't broken. Of course I want you out of it. Of course I never asked you to, because you're grown and you make your decisions, but that Order did such terrible things to so many people that I'm holding my breath and praying it won't hurt you before you leave it. It's not rejecting you, not a tiny bit, even the parts of Lesja that the Guardians burned to pieces, I love those parts of her, because she lived them and it's who she is but I don't have to want anyone else to get hurt that way. I love you and I love that you tell me not to and I love that you are the only one and I love how very you that you are but I'm always going to want to protect you and when something hurts people over and over isn't it fair to not want it to hurt more people?"
She laughs wearily, tearfully. "I'm sorry, but I'll be happy when you move on, if you do. I can't lie about that. I love all of you. I'm just... " Her voice trails away, and somehow the way that she waves her arms in the air expresses far more eloquently than words ever could that there's just too much for her to reconcile, and she's only one small fox.
"I'm not saying that there aren't people in the Guardians of the Veil who do terrible things, who aren't terrible people, and who shouldn't be scorned," Zoya says with a resigned sigh. "I know that some of the Guardians in your life have been wronged by the Order. Please don't get me wrong, I understand that these things have happened, but please also consider that not every case of a Guardian with a broken psyche is something inflicted upon those people by the Order itself."
She strokes Fox's face as she talks, fingertips brushing lightly across cheeks, along her jawline. Tender, affectionate, loving. Despite any disagreement she still loves Fox, and she tries to say it with that contact.
"Almost nobody becomes a Guardian in the first place if they aren't prone to self sacrifice. Many of us break eventually because of the choices we made for ideals we believe in, not because of things we're forced to do. We become Guardians understanding that part of what that means is doing things that will ravage our own souls because they're things that need to be done, and we want to free others from having to shoulder those burdens if we can. So many of us are people who would probably make the same sacrifices and cause ourselves the same damage no matter where we were, and the Guardians have some support structures in place for us. The rest of the Order understand what we put ourselves through, and that eventually the time comes where many of us will need to leave. It's why we're allowed to leave, and not shamed for it."
She stops for a few breaths before she goes on. "I don't think that Lesja broke herself this way, I'm not saying that, and I wouldn't say that. But did A Man? Is Leta's lack of sobriety because of the Order, or because of the choices she made, with her propensity for making them what lead her to the Guardians? I don't know. But I'm not sure you do either. I just think that in some cases you may have cause and effect backwards."
Sometimes Fox can argue a point for hours and hours on end. She's a former Mystagogue, and a Jew, it comes with the territory -- defending one's ideas in the academia-like atmosphere of the Mysterium and in Torah Study both require the willingness and the ability to do so. And sometimes...
Sometimes, rather than engage with a topic, the Thyrsus -- so terrible at deception -- employs different techniques for dealing with difficult topics. Instead of talking, Fox just turns her face towards Zoya for a moment, clearly listening to her, watching her with those solemn golden eyes. (They used to be dark green, once upon a time. They didn't always catch the light from the window like a canine's eyes catching headlights, reflecting back eyeshine.) And once Zoya stops talking? Her jaw works back and forth for a moment or two, as if she's trying to find words to respond...
And then rather than saying anything, Fox pulls her huge, purloined shirt up over her head and flings it off to the corner of the room before curling back down towards Zoya. She wraps herself up against the Guardian and slings her arms around Zoya's neck for a long, slow kiss.
Zoya makes the very deliberate choice not to try to continue the debate, and to enjoy the view instead. The view and the kiss. It's clearly a diversion, and she diverts happily.
Odds are that the Guardians are going to be behind her soon, and then they can defend themselves if they do choose.
She has kissing to do, and she pulls herself in closer to Fox while she does it, letting her hand roam down Fox's back to her ass as she makes a little quiet sound to demonstrate her delight with the situation.
She's little, and it makes it easy for her to fit herself in along the taller Obrimos. Fox delights in doing so, a low curl of sound in the back of her throat answering Zoya, something mostly human and a little bit not. There's no getting away from that with her, the animal edge to everything. The kiss, too, ends with their little sharp teeth briefly (and with a precise sort of gentleness) tugging on Z's lower lip. The Thyrsus' short fingers twine themselves lazily in the back of her blonde hair, and she brushes the tip of her nose against Z's.
The grin that follows is puckish - she knows what she's about, and delights in it, as if she'd gotten away with something, rather than moving on in a way they'd both prefer - and she snaps her teeth playfully in answer to the hand on her ass, gold eyes glittering delight.
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