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If one wants to be pushed into both flying and falling, the person to go to is definitely Fox. When Myrne brought this up to her, being a lady spirit, she gently nudged and prodded at her with questions and such until Myrne came to the realization that half-steps weren't going to cut it this time.
Myrne comes back into the body she knew before, and - at Fox's suggestion - the pair work the Life magic together, ritually. Either could have easily snapped their fingers and made the chance instantly, but casting it together, she suggested, would help, as would tying in Fate to design the body according to what Myrne needs at this moment.
With their rings literally to hand as tools, she pushes back the furniture in the living room, laying out a space for them to work. The feeling of the Supernal flowing through the Brontium, the Lunargent, through them...
Vasya -- Myrne -- Pavlichenko -- has apologized for not being the husband she needed. But when it watches her hands move through the mudras, her dirty feet beating on the floor, the rise and fall of her bared breast, the way those stomping steps shake through her body, and the way her golden eyes glow when their Nimbuses flare and overlap like that?
This is all she's ever wanted, really. Just it. Just her. Just them.
And when the Supernal snaps into place, she comes laughing across the floor, wrapping her arms around Myrne's naked waist (Life magic is best naked, it's a fact) to lift her off the ground and spin her around.
In the end there was ever really going to be one archetypal woman someone named Lyudmila Pavlichenko is going to assume right out of the gates. A girl next door pretty sort with the long dark blond hair of the Tartar part of Ukraine. She has that nose, a soft slavic jaw, and eyes that shouldn't have to look like that at her age. She's probably a healthy size fourteen, too. Thick thighs, sturdy calves. You know. A Ukrainian woman.
She's not quite sure what to do about it all at first but make an oof at the hug that is of higher pitch than she would have been expecting. Because it's not buzzing. So she tries it again. "Ahh. Ahhhhh. Huh." She spends a moment inspecting one hand while dissociatively holding Fox with her other arm. Watching it with those special eyes of hers. Her fingers wiggle. And with a flick of her hand the gauntlet rises like a steel wall and drops just as quickly again.
Yep. She's still me. I'm still her. We're still us. This. There are tits now.
Oontz-Oontz picks this moment to materialize holding a laptop. He leans over it to primly press play. It is a YouTube video of a cartoon character saying the word 'gay' for roughly forty seven seconds. He then disappears before Vasya can bind him to something.
You're still you, we're still us. Fox picks her up and spins her happily, then tucks herself in against her side.
And absently bites the side of Myrne's boob gently, like a puppy lightly gnawing on the ear of a littermate. "Do you want me to call you Myrne when you look like this?" Fox prompts cheerfully but gently. Anything she wants right now, she could have from Fox.
When that brat spirit materializes, Fox snaps her teeth at it. "You're damn right!"
"That's Oontz-Oontz for 'took you long enough'," she assures Fox easily with a pat to her heart. She's never had a boob per se to have its side bitten, so she rubs at it guardedly under her arm. Not out of any defensiveness or pain, but out of a 'what am I feeling when I am feeling this thing I'm feeling'. Fox will have seen it a few times from those rare people who do not instantly sexualize this experience. The jaw is the next funny thing, both its proportion and its lack of an unkempt farm beard. First fingertips, then flats of hands run over the planes of her face.
"Huh," once again. Still holding her with one arm, but clearly doing so as an 'I'm including you in a conversation with myself right now' accessory. "I... Uh. I. Maybe there's a reason she wasn't named Lyudmila?" She gives a sitcom shrug, which is not an answer but also an answer. That's the only not Myrne name that doesn't itch like a bad sweater, and of course it's a riff on her Shadowname.
"Oh, I know what it was, he's still a pain in the ass," Fox laughs brightly. She strokes a hand down her side, rests it at her hip, pets up her arm to the soft curve of that Slavic jaw. Her touches are very clearly meant not to sexualize this (yet) but to bring Lyuda into familiarity with her new body. "A reason who wasn't?" she asks, and then follows the train of thought to its station.
"Mm. Never after a living person, no," she agrees. And then up to her toes, kissing her cheek. "Lyuda. I love you." Always have. Always will.
"It does make a certain sort of sense. I've made a failure of being a man so often and so well that I could never see my way around to forgiving myself for it never really being my choice at the start. I keep saying 'I deserve to be dead for the things I've done' and maybe what I am meaning by that deep down is that I do indeed deserve to put that name to rest. It has never loved me. It has only brought me shelter from deeper pain. Even now, it chains me to my agonies."
She steps back a bit after the hands over her sides, looking down at her arms and legs, and at herself in her entirety. With a flare of Space Magic, it's pretty obvious that's what she's doing literally. She stops turning this way and that, as a result, and simply stands there. Lifting an arm or leg now and again, then pawing through her pubic hair to check out down there, too.
"I don't know if this feels like home, but it does feel like progress? It feels like I could start over here. I don't know... how. That would work. With our lives as we live them? But I'm sure we can sort it out somehow."
She takes a step back when Lyuda does, her hands planted on her hips in almost a superhero pose, listening as she talks. "Well, I've been running around for fifteen years with a name that my parents didn't give me because after I woke up, the world decided to gaslight me a little bit," she laughs, "so maybe I'm not the best person to ask about that."
"You might not be wrong, though. I mean, there's a lot of logic to it." Fox scratches at her cheek. "It does kind of... solve some of the problem I've been having in my head, if that's the case. Or maybe not. I don't know. Who can say? It's not important right now." And that does seem to be her actual feelings on the matter. Whatever little ball bearing of an idea was just rattling around inside of her head has been put aside for later.
When Lyudmila is done pawing at herself, Fox takes a cautious step towards her again. Maybe she wants to paw, too, or just wants to be in contact at this particular moment. Or maybe she's trying to read her partner. "What do you mean, with our lives as we live them?"
"Myrne is in my soul. Myrne is what I am, even if I don't wish it to be. And if I wish it not to be, I must tear it out of me. Which I can do, but then I am nothing. Just an empty thing. And so I am Myrne, and I revel in it. This, however?" Lyuda gestures to her bodacious farm bod indicatively, giving a little turn, "Is the work of the Wise. It can be unwoven. It will become undone. It's another vulnerability in a war without indulgences."
She thinks about that for a moment, and rolls her shoulders. "That's true of an awful lot of who and what we are, My Heart." She's always called Lyuda a gender-neutral term of affection, which seems to strike her just now, even as the words leave her mouth, and it makes her smile all the more broadly. "Someone could unmake these rings, made as they are. The spells are relinquished, yes, but could still be torn apart. Someone could tear out of me so many things that I am. Rip my tattoos out of my skin, pull my teeth from my mouth, sever my Awakened soul from what remains. In all this universe, there is no single solid place to stand. Nothing that isn't moving at thousands of miles per second, nothing that isn't always changing."
"So you have to choose the things that are worth the danger, that's all." That bodacious farm bod invites hands, and Fox can't help herself. She takes a handful of butt. "You weave strong spells. You do good work. If this makes you happy? I'll help you make it as steady a spot to stand as anyplace we've ever called home."
"I suppose that is true. This just. It's a selfish one. I don't think I have ever cast a spell in my life that was simply for me. Simply because I want it. I don't." She is generally picking at her mind. The meteor was definitely pushing it, but even then it gave them rings made from his mastery and hers. It wasn't purely for pronoun here.
If you've never seen someone who hated themself their entire adult life walk headfirst into something they believe they genuinely did that was good and right and hard, and did so for that entire adult life? Then you probably won't be expecting the sudden faint that follows. Just. Gone. Night night. And not in a bad way.
"Ooookay, okay, okay!" Fox was just listening, there, and when Lyuda passes out? The Orphan dashes forward, grabbing on to the Acanthus' crumpling form. Her Life Sight switches over to active, looking her beloved over with a gaze any doctor would envy, simply verifying that nothing more drastic than a faint has happened. Lyuda's limp body gets carefully laid down into her lap as Fox sits down on the floor. "Hey, sweetheart. Hello, my love. My Heart, when you're ready to wake up, I'm right here."
She's fine. It's a trick she could have pulled with a blip of life. But now that she's out, something is clearly going on in there. Limbs twitch at points, eyes behind lids. Was that a smile? A snarl? There is a sudden flare of Mind magic as Lyuda's eyes rocket open with a sudden inhale of breath. The exhale sends an idea out of her. A thought. It's a goetia, very obviously. It is a perhaps hamfisted naked little boy trying to hide his shame in the flag of the Soviet Union. Of course, now that it's out of her, Lyuda is still as calm water resting in Fox's arms.
"Oh," comes that unfamiliar familiar voice. (edited)
Perhaps it is hamfisted, but sometimes we must see things written in big plain block lettering that seem obvious once we've seen them, but before we saw them, there's no way we could have known. Sometimes that's just how it is. Fox cradles Lyuda so gently, laying her head against those blonde locks, a thumb gently petting along her upper arm. Her stalwart composure keeps her from overreacting at that sharp inhale of breath, and she kisses the top of the Acanthus' head.
"Oh?" she prompts, her voice soft and quiet.
"Shame and fear," Lyuda answers calmly, her eyes on the things she pulled out of herself. The one, wrapped in the other. She's walked her inner roads too many times to leap out at this creation. It wasn't willful, after all. Not in the sense one might typically think. This is an answer to the question what are you afraid of.
She pushes up a little higher in Fox's arms and rests in against her. For safety and comfort, yes. But also just because she wants to. And there's no rush. She hasn't felt this good ... that she can remember. And an Acanthus knows not to rush.
"Do you mind if we talk to him? I can put him away again."
When spoken of the child hunches his shoulders and turns his back, peering out through a hole in the flag and shuddering.
She kisses the top of Pavlichenko's head once more, and her hands soothe down the other woman's, gentle and easy as you please. She shifts position, putting one leg on either side of Lyuda so that the taller woman can lean back against her more comfortably, and she reaches up behind herself, stretching to pull cushions off of the couch and drag them behind herself so she's got something to lean on, too. Thus situated, she settles in. "Of course," she agrees, but that's to what they are. Of course that's her shame and fear. Of course. Once it's said aloud, it's perfectly obvious.
"I not only don't mind, I insist," Fox answers. "You clearly need to talk to him, My Heart."
She reaches out a hand towards the kid, the other on Lyuda's arm. "Hey. You don't have to run."
"We're not going to hurt you."
All this ensures is that the goetia flees into the furthest remote corner of the living room. Away from them both, into the darkness. It wails piteously, clawing at the wall, trying to do just that. He fixes one terrified eye on Fox, trying desperately to reach out to her somehow, and the flag coils tighter in. A shield and a noose.
Lyuda's eyes play over first one then the other of the two pieces of this whole. Trying to ferret out if what his brain disgorged is a gestalt which may be further broken down. Rather like crab claw Carl Jung. (Who isn't real, and can't hurt you.)
Her hand reaches out, makes a grasping fist, and with a mimed pull wrenches the flag and the child apart. The shame is now exposed, naked and bruised and bloody. And the fear, oh the fear flutters in its tatters. The fear is hanging on by the last of its grommets. She has beaten the fuck out of that fear over the years. She knows it well.
"Try now," she suggests, holding her fear in the grip of her mind. (edited)
The Thyrsus waits through that tormented process, letting Lyuda do what she must, and simply holding on to her. Right now she may not feel that shame and fear, but eventually, it will come back, and when it does, Lyuda will remember that Fox never moved and never left. She has always been here. Lyuda was the one who had to leave, the one who had duties and responsibilities and wars to fight.
Fox has always been waiting, even when she went home to lick her wounds, she was waiting. She won't leave. She never has.
And so it is with her arms around Lyuda, the hand which had been outstretched curling around the Acanthus whose head rests against the Ukranian flag, the symbol of Pavlichenko tattooed over Fox's heart, that she murmurs quietly, "No, My Heart. You try now." And a kiss to the top of her head. "He needs you to love him."
She stands there, rather regal seeming with her hand outstretched and choking off her very fear. She's utterly dispassionate now, even the fish dead cold is out of those eyes. They're not precisely healthy in their present state, but they are largely at peace. And when has that even happened around her?
She's not ready yet. That much is clear. She looks to the child, wailing at her for help and then to the flag snapping and cracking in the harbor winds of Odessa. There is no going to that child without going through that fear. And her physical body boils away into a glowing hammer fist. Just that. That and nothing else. It looms out of the ground and slams the flag down and out of the sky. The ferocious force of the impact leaves its corpus flickering, looking like the dazed face of the Creator. And again comes the hand, and its A Man. Again, and again, and again. The kid he shot. Simon's exploded head. Again. Murder victims of the Scelesti. Again and again. Face after face. Somewhere in the middle of all the flailing and hammering, a howl tears out across twilight. And with each blow the child wails with uncertainty, but it must be said diminishing terror.
When the goetia is finally tossed aside, she has nothing more to say to it. That's a conversation for another night. Pounded through and subjugated, she takes it back into herself with a breath. The guttering sobs of the boy quiet, and his sniffles peek out of the corner now. Along with his eyes.
She's still afraid now. But she's looked it dead in the eye and she knows its name. "Hello, Vasyl. I am Lyuda." She does not speak his father's name as custom would have it. No, that she does not do. (edited)
This is not something to participate in, but something to be witnessed, something to endure. This is something she will remember -- as Fox now remembers everything -- for the rest of her life. She gets to her feet, skittering back, leaving her spouse all the room that she needs to handle this. That lasts just a moment, however, because once the kid screams?
Fox is still Fox.
Maybe there's no going to the kid except through the fear for Lyuda, but a fox always has a way to get to where it needs, and a fox always has a way to bring what must be brought. A fox can bring a lobster to the mountain, after all.
And so she skitters past and around the weight of her beloved's fear and the anger that she carries for having had to harbor that fear, and she places herself physically -- as much as one can place oneself physically anywhere when it comes to goetia -- between fear and shame. This naked crouching creature with golden eyes and sharp teeth puts herself between the fear and the terrified child that lives inside Lyuda's breast. She doesn't try to approach the kid again, but she stretches her arms out. She creates a boundary between fear and the individual that Lyuda addresses as Vasyl. "I'm here," she whispers over and over to the kid in the middle of the storm and the fury. "It's going to be okay."
And when it all comes to quiet again, she's still there. (edited)
"Vasily," the child protests. But he's a city kid from Odessya. And he pronounces it Vasilya. And when he hears himself say it, he flinches from the sound. "Menya zavyoot Vasilya." The child protests it to Fox as if to say, 'aren't I good?'. Hugry for praise. For any genuine kindness, really.
Lyuda moves to Fox's side when what needs doing is done, seating herself criss cross applesauce as she's seen the thyrsus do a million times. And now she can do it without crushing her balls. Yay. "Your name is Vasyl Tometchko. Glory to the Country." Slava Ukraini.
The child looks to Fox as arbiter, of all things.
This isn't, in the end, about her, even though it is kind of about her, the way that everything about her is, in the end, about Lyuda, and everything about Lyuda is, in the end, about her.
She spins her wedding ring around her finger with her thumb. "That is what they told you, yes," she agrees with the child. "And you have tried so hard to make everyone proud." Fox is absolute shit at lying, you know. Just absolutely shit. But she's really good at connecting with people. She turns her hands palms up towards the kid, and takes a half-step to her side, so that her leg is touching Lyuda's shoulder. Reaching out to one and touching the other. "They told you that your name is Vasilya, and you told people that, too. Your dad wanted you to be a good Soviet, and you tried real hard, even when it hurt. Especially when it hurt."
"It really sucks, kiddo. But that's not who you are. It really hurts when someone takes away the things you thought were real about yourself. But you're Vasyl Tometchko, and I'm really proud of you."
At some point it will be time for Lyuda to take over. But she does not interfere at all between her wife and her life's shame having a heart to heart for her benefit. She can watch her shame be accepted and embraced with her own two eyes. From outside herself, where it is impossible to push the experience of it away without literally walking away from it. Her eyes barely blink as this, too, is good. And right. And fine.
But her shame was always more than one simple thing. The child's back is striped with murder. It is bruised with lies. Bones are fractured by torture. They're healed again rough and ridged by time away from her. There are cuts that are the screams of dying kids wailing for their captain. Every person he remembers hurting, letting down, every failure. Every disappointment. His knee has a booboo that is leaving the toilet seat up. For she's about to get it now.
And these are not things she can forgive on that child. Not as she is. Not yet, anyway. Someone else has to say it first.
The child hesitantly reaches for her hand. With fingers blistered by thievery. They settle into her fingers without registering what should be the pain of it. He crawls a little closer on palms skinned by pushing away love. Favoring a shoulder sprained from the repetitive motion of trying resuscitate dead ideologies. A wretched child of war and deprivation and sinister motives. Another little victim, crawling now into her lap as the tears keep coming.
He is wetly stuttering his way through the soviet anthem in the process, petrified. This always ends poorly. This always goes away. Or worse.
She is warm and she is soft, for all that she is brutal and animalistic. She contains multitudes, and she knows it. Fox reaches out her arms to the child, gathers him up, and sits down with him in her lap, right next to Lyuda. At any point, she can take over. But for now, Fox curls her arms around the child and rocks him slowly. Her touch is gentle, her touch is soothing. She cannot heal him the way she'd heal him if he were really a child, cannot knit together his body and mend his scars.
"I have never left you," she whispers into that song. "I will never leave you of my own will." Kisses for the top of the child's head, warm arms embrace the shame. "I have always been proud of you."
Slowly, she rocks the child, kissing the top of his head one more time. "I forgive you for leaving me. I forgive you for failing me. I forgive you for not being who you thought you needed to be to me. I forgive you all of it, Vasyl."
"I forgive you."
Every song needs a counter, and she presses her nose into his hair, against a scab that is forgetting to fold his bedspread down properly, and counters it in her soft, farm-girl alto.
Stefania mama, mama Stefania... (edited)
She can't feel how good this feels yet. This catharsis. That's perhaps the one awful part of handling things this way. That instant understanding wave of relief that comes of it is a hit the junkie is denied. She stares at it all fixedly, however. At how this blemish and that scar and this wound and that bruise begin to fade from pink, young skin. By the time Fox is half way through her words and her ministrations, Lyuda is once more kneeling beside them both.
The flag can try to wrap around her wrist. And it can try to keep her hand from reaching out. But he already won this fight a moment ago. And so when her hand finds his own cheek, there is no sharing of tears or embrace of one by the other. Not out here, anyway. That was all it took to resolve the goetia, and it lunges back into her nose and mouth with a sudden convulsation of spasmodic, unexpected, unprepared for catharsis.
And she wails, suddenly, a wail that turns into a single, long agonized scream until the air runs out and the crying starts. (edited)
Before it happens, the Thyrsus sees what's going to happen. This isn't her first goetia rodeo. It's not even her first goetia rodeo with Vasya. She's ready -- as ready as you can ever be to have the love of your life start screaming like that right next to you -- and her arms simply transfer from the child whose scars she saw mending to the woman who bears their fingerprints and cuts and bruises much less visibly if no less literally.
She holds on to Lyuda when Vasyl has become part of her again, when shame and fear return to her body, pulls the shrieking Acanthus into her arms. "I know," she murmurs, because maybe she's the only person who does. "I know."
Over and over again until the crying starts, she murmurs, "I know, I know." Rocking her love like a distraught child, and when the sobs wrack Lyuda's body, she tightens her arms. "I forgive you. I forgive you."
"I forgive you."
She cries. She cries as only an Acanthus can cry. For every stolen moment. For every drop of the sand through the wasted throat of her father's hour glass. For every wasted ambition, every spent ideal, every short round of her beliefs. For the thudding dud of career. His cause. His country. She cries for Donetsk and Luhansk. She cries for Crimea. She cries for Russia, too. For she loved it once. She cries for every corner of her grief, every last breath spoken in service to hierarchies and thrones and lies.
She cries until there's nothing left, absolutely nothing left in her to cry. The work not of minutes, but of literal hours. This she can give herself. This indulgence. With a few tears as a treat. Tomorrow, the monsters will come and the futures will fall away one by one like his company's kids under raking fire. But tonight? Tonight is for her. And she's going to start to enjoy it now.
"Enough."
As Lyuda sobs, Fox quietly works the warp and weft of her own body, increasing her stamina to literally inhuman levels. There's the flare of green, of fitting in, of rain falling on hard ground, and then Fox is strong enough, is tough enough, to hold Lyuda through all of it. Her hands pet gently while she rocks her sob-twisted body. "I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you." And somewhere in there it becomes "I love you, I love you, I love you."
It is the same thing. It has always been the same thing.
When Pavlichenko's tears trail away into nothing, it is just the two of them in the middle of the living room floor. It is just the two of them.
"Okay," she agrees, and kisses between Lyuda's eyebrows. "Okay."
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