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The quiet, somber notes of Rochmaninoff's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor-- Op 3, no 2 if you're being really nosy --come jangling out of the music room. (We have a music room? We have a music room.). Three heavy bass notes, resonant and foreboding. Then an answer from the treble end of the keys. And so on, this conversation of winter and spring, of light and dark, of nature and nurture, of choice and destiny.
There is a reason Vasily likes Rochmaninoff.
It's just him in one of his army t-shirts, possibly the one he was wearing when he returned to her in the first place. He's in the hoodie again, though a clean pair of track pants are making an appearance this time around. Still unshaven, still sporting a clear neckbeard, he sits in front of a piano that costs more than three of his cars, a cigarillo in his mouth as his hands work the keys with skill and precision that Soviet elite education can produce in the son of a General who is the son of a General who fought with Lenin.
His eyes are closed, his head tilted as though watching things that are not present. His sunglasses are on, but they're low on his nose and do him no good. Every so often, when the music calls for it, his shoulders tense and his arms strike down as though venting a reserve of violence without outlet. Or something else that manifests as violent movement, anyway.
She's been being Things lately. Sometimes bugs, sometimes animals, sometimes just a plant. Plants have fewer feelings. Plants don't miss their Mage Mom.
The sound of fluttering wings flirts with the waterfall-like tumbling of notes which Vasha's fingers pull out of the piano, and then there's the softest of scrabbling noises. And whenever Vasha finishes playing, whenever he opens his eyes, the question may be:
Was she already a tiny little bat, or did she turn into a tiny little bat to come and listen to him play?
(Because there is a tiny bat hanging from the edge of the piano's open lid.)
When those final notes fade out into a question or possibly an answer, but in any case certainly not anything like satisfaction, his eyes do pop back open and he returns to the here and the now. If indeed he had been at some particular there and then.
"You are being a bat today," he observes having switched to Chopin somewhere in the tinkling of the notes. All that sombre moroseness is gone, and here comes Chopin's sprightly little dancing up and dow the keys. There's even some two fingered tinkling, which Vasily manages with a smile and a little waggle of his wrist.
And then his hands are dancing all over the damn place, because it's Chopin and he's showing off. Somehow the hands miss her of course, but do dart around her every which way. Until he can break one handed, in which case he snatches her up to drape him on his face instead.
He's back at it for the two handed crossover bits, which he does batfolded, because he can.
"Are you not entertained?"
She doesn't answer in words -- no Forces/Mind effects here -- but in a shrill (but adorable) squeak. eeee!
She stays a bat, swaying a little while hanging from the piano's lid as he starts to play the sprightly, spring-like Chopin. It's all sunny afternoons interrupted by the rough-and-tumble of a lively creek and punctuated by the laughter of children getting dirtier than their mothers would prefer, and she's bopping her little big-eared head.
And then he grabs her -- eeeee! -- and hangs her up as a batfold, and the sound that comes from her then is something high and shrill and also guttural. If bats laughed, that's what it would sound like, apparently.
When the last sprawling intervals leap up the keys and then resolve into a few muted chords, the batfold unfolds a little like every cell in her body unfolding at once, and then Fox in boxers and an oversized t-shirt (probably his) straddles his lap, arms looped lazily around his waist, head resting on his shoulder. "Being a bat is nice." There's his answer. "Especially when you play."
"I will admit, if I am going to have you on my face, I do prefer it be in this form," he answers her wryly. He might have been caught having one of those broody Acanthus moments, but he's always fairly quick to get his head out of his own ass when Fox is about. Waste not want not, especially where time with Fox is concerned. "I apologize if the music was too loud for little sensitive bat ears. I hadn't considered that might be an issue." He sets that aside, though.
"I just worked out an imago for co-locating us to a place we're likely to find the most happiness in the long run. As a place for us to settle down, now that I am in out of the cold. And existing." He begins playing Rochmaninoff again, but this time something more bright and chipper. Lilacs.
A snicker sneaks out of her at that: Fox was expecting that line, and doesn't complain one bit. Indeed, she picks her head up off of his shoulder and looks up at him with those wide golden eyes which so oddly catch the light these days. "That can be arranged," she answers wryly, then boops her nose against his gently before putting her head back on his shoulder. Her arms squeeze around his waist, and she shakes her head a little. "No, it was nice, actually. I mean, it was a lot, but it was a lot in a good way, mostly? I don't think I could have flown for a few minutes after that, my equilibrium was all janky, but... "
She wiggles her feet in the air, lazily, behind the piano bench. "Our own place?" Fox asks, thoughtfully. "In addition to this place?" She has already rubbed her muzzle all over every corner in this place on her cat days, after all. Her arms squeeze again. "I would like to see the place it chooses for me and my existing husband."
"Yes. Away from this," he says, and while it's not disdain, it's something like it. And not really with his surroundings per se. Perhaps just the situation he finds himself in. But even if he wanted to hide his bristling, she's right up against his body and there's no poker face that can beat the tightening of the chest like that.
"I don't know who I am any longer. Or why I do the things that I do. And I don't want to just find another program to execute. I don't just want to start fighting your war," even though that's precisely what here's here to do. Seemingly without sense of personal sacrifice in the doing of it, either. "Not unless I'm figuring out what to do with myself afterwards. I plan to break my masques. Possibly even reforge my soul. And while I will need everyone's help to do that-- I can't do that under everyone's gaze."
His case made, even though she'd already said she was down with it, he looks to her waiting for her to change her mind now that she knows this wasn't just a whim but one of his Long Term Machinations that manifest like sudden whims to people without Time and Fate and Mind and lots of experience with him.
In a move that might concern people the people that lack the aforementioned experience, he reaches between their bodies and pulls out a long, silver pistol. While holding eye contact with her, he operates the magazine release and drops it onto the ground. He has to reach behind her to pop the round that was in the chamber. No longer a weapon per se, he brandishes it rather more like a wand, conjuring the idea of Space and Fate and Time and Mind. A little dash and spice from this Aracanum and that. Like sipping the wine of his Gnosis.
And then he produces one of His coins. The silver coins that plague his persistent nimbus. He spins it atop the piano, and she can probably feel the world reeling around her, even though she's still.
And it's only her own nosy, intrusive, prying eyes that spot the madness in the genius. Or the genius in the madness, perhaps. As the coin linked to his nimbus spins, and the world spins along with it, and where it all falls? Well, apparently that's where they belong so says Fate and Time and probably a bit of narrative intervention if we're being honest.
But the way Vasily's eyes stare at that coin, it's like this is the first truly free thing he's ever done.
She sits back a little bit to look up at him while he speaks, leaning against her arms around his waist, a tethering point. She really listens, when she gives all of her attention to someone, and he has every scrap of hers. In its own way, this is as much her magical soul as his long-term machinations are a part of his. She is Here, Now, With Him, every thought, every nerve fiber, every blood cell. Here, entirely.
"Okay," Fox agrees quietly, solemnly, and sincerely. One of her hands slips out from behind his back and reaches up to cradle his cheek gently. "Sometimes you need a quiet den."
It's been a long time since Fox lived all by herself in a hole in the ground in a park in St. Petersburg, but it's not like she doesn't understand. Who could possibly understand more?
Her gaze flicks to look at the coin, but then she turns her attention back to him, her gaze fixed on his face while her peripheral vision catches the sparks of his magic.
There are an infinite number of possible realities. In this one, the coin spins, and spins, and hisses, and hisses. The world reels and reels and even though the roll was always fixed, and even though he could have looked ahead and told himself what was going to happen, the real chance is in whether or not he has the courage to let the coin actually stop in the end.
He can find seven forevers in the time left to him. And he is probably one of the few people on the planet with sufficient perspective to appreciate just how many times he could stop this all from happening. All the different ways he just walks away from all of it. All the hundreds of millions of ways he becomes a traitor to one part of himself to be loyal to the other rather than vice versa.
But in this reality, the coin falls like iron curtains and empires and the hopes of children for the approval of their fathers and the hopes of fathers that they will repay what was done to their own. And perhaps that is the stury of the Rus. Fathers, all the way down.
Which is why when they find the piano in a wheat field in a chilly afternoon, Vasily isn't precisely surprised. Relieved, maybe. The daughter he's yet to have is still alive in theory. To the east, the haze of a city and the swirl of sea birds. The scent of salt water is present. Vasily pushes the piano back into Philadelphia, and does a bit of glancing about to make sure of his bearings.
Fox will no doubt recognize the location. It's less pregnant with grain than she will have recalled seeing it. And the home on the land is ... remarkably run down, and hidden behind a good deal of wild growth off one of the plough turn trails. Right where she will have remembered it. A shitty shack in rural Odessa Oblast.
It's the scent of the sea air which catches her first -- she stays entirely focused on him through the moment. That's what's always been important to her -- the people. This person, in particular. Her nose brushes against his again, and when she smells the sea air, she brushes her lips against his, then disentangles herself from his lap. The t-shirt she's wearing is black, and way too big on her, emblazoned with the words: "I'm a UKRANIAN VETERAN who EATS BEEF and SINGS KAREOKE but I love THE NORTHERN LIGHTS more than GUNS."
Like you do.
She turns around slowly, taking in the sky she has never seen but somehow knows, the mown-down wheat field not yet planted for the year, the shack with its rotten shingles and cracked front window. Turning back, she tips her head to one side, a soft smile slipping across her face. "It's a hell of a commute," she offers, "at least, for other people."
He at least looks the part of the people that call this place home. Not that anyone in particular is out at this end of a farm field at this hour in the day. He gives her some side-eye when she seems to recognize this location as readily as he does. And of course she will note that he's watching her to see if she's aware of all the possible implications, too.
And now he knows and she knows he knows and he knows she knows he knows. So they can stop pretending not to know. Which is clearly not something Vasily is going to do. Because if he never talks about it, the universe can't take it from him. Right? Right. The cigarillo is snubbed out in an ash tray on the other side of the world, and the cigarillo tin left behind as well, traded instead for a pack of cigarettes.
He knows where he is.
He watches the shack, then her, then looks to the bright blue sky overhead. The sunglasses, Chekov would note, have become useful. "I could hit a golf ball and break a window in Moldova," he remarks of their location. That is a tremendous exaggeration unless he uses scrying windows. But it isn't far, really.
"We're outside Odessa. It's just wheat and farmers and pigs and corn here." And then he says, perhaps grasping at straws, "You know, Kalashnikov just wanted to build tractors." And then. "Maybe I was supposed to be a farmer, Naika."
Her gaze has always been the one that he can't escape. (Well. Pheme and Mei have champion stares, too, but that's not the point.) She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the earth beneath her feet, the stubbly wheat stalks between her toes, and she stares at him. Both physically and metaphorically, he'll have to blink first, because she's not going to deny knowing this place. He knows her tells after all these years, can see the little squint at the corners of her eyes, the flicker in their gold irises, the set of her shoulders and splay of her fingers. She knows. She knows the implications. Would it even surprise him if she told him she could geolocate herself like a homing pigeon, using the magnetic fields of the earth complemented by the sun?
After a long moment just listening to him, her shoulders rise and fall. "Sounds like Lancaster County," she answers him. And indeed, the center of Pennsylvania is the Bread Basket of the East the same way that Ukraine is the Bread Basket of Europe. Rolling fields of grain sprawling out on either side of railway tracks stretched toward the horizon. "But the golf courses there are more literal than metaphorical." Her nose wrinkles up a little, and she crosses back to him.
"Maybe you were. Maybe you were meant to be this. Maybe you were meant to be something else." She pauses. "But you're here now. And you're you." Her shoulders rise and fall again. "I would never have met a farmer from Odessa. I've never been to Odessa until now." She never set foot in the entire country for fear she'd cross paths with him on his mission. Whether she was more afraid she'd distract him from his work or more afraid that she wouldn't? Well. Who can say?
"Oblast," he is quick to remind her. As if to say she hasn't really been to Odessa yet, because she hasn't been to Odessa yet. "I think you are right. Maybe I am not supposed to be this thing or that thing. But I need to be something. And farmers have animals about. And farmers have a reason to be out in the field alone away from people all the time. And they have a reason to come home at night and to not go out to the bar too much. Or spend too much time at church, too. Because there is good work and a better woman to keep him honest, or at least too tired to be of much harm sober."
He makes the land of his youth sound so appealing. Of course, it was an SSR back that. "I can't be an American tech head. I can be at the head of a regiment, but I can't be at the head of an office. But I think I can drive a combine and talk the wheat into growing. This, I think I can do until I figure out who I am now." He shifts his weight and inquires, "Is Ivan Medvedev making a final purchase before he disappears for good, then?"
"I've never been to Ukraine, My Heart," Fox answers him, reaching to smooth her thumb along his cheekbone. "I was afraid to distract you, become a liability. So I avoided the whole country." Her head tips to one side and then the other, her smile wry.
A glance over toward the house. "Did you know," she begins, "that in Scotland, and some other places as well, but I know for sure in Scotland, that when they bury a shepherd, they pin a tuft of wool to the shroud?" Sliding her hand down his arm, she turns her head to look at the shack, made of more hole than house as it is. Fox doesn't finish that thought, but it seems to be relevant? Somehow? She doesn't connect the dots for him, though. Sometimes she gets distracted.
A pause follows, and she turns her head back toward him, wrinkling up her forehead, and then her face splits into a broad, sharp grin. She would move to the moon for his Masques to go away for good. One final thread cut clean. "Yes." (edited)
"Just to be like, 'ha ha, you worked your whole life for this shit, here's some more of it, Boris you asshole'?" He knows this is not the case, but he's back home in Ukraine, and bleak humor is as natural as breathing. He even looks happy about it. He takes a deep breath. That is definitely sea air, moldering wheat husks, and distant pig shit. Yep. He's home alright.
In any event, he looks to her and gets the answer he'd been hoping for. Not that there was much of a chance of it going any other way, still the pretense must be observed. He lets out a breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding and then sweeps his hand through the air, tossing the world away and returning them to the music room, a few steps away from the piano.
The air still smells like the ocean for a short while more, until the spell is dropped entirely, and they're solidly back in Philadelphia. In a relativistic sense.
"I'll go tell him the news, then."
She laughs, then. "No. It's to tell God or Saint Peter or whoever is doing the accounting in the afterlife, whatever afterlife shepherds go to, that the person in question was busy with guarding and herding and lambing and may have been too busy to spend too much time in church. And if that nice Jewish boy is a shepherd, too, perhaps he'll be a little gentler with one of his own." Fox is just full of these sorts of random stories, trivia about pigeons or the fact that gingko biloba is one of two remaining Jurassic plants, and somehow it always matters. Life Masters, man.
"Okay," Fox agrees. "But don't take long. I want to talk about this some more. Make plans." Beat. "Oh, and I made Tucker Carlson shit his pants during a rant on pronouns today." Look, we all celebrate the great changes in our lives in our own way.
It only takes him a few hours. But those hours involve a period of him going dark. The way he goes dark when he simply stops being for a while, so far as the world and time and the perceptions of the mind are concerned. He hasn't done that in weeks, and to do it so suddenly after all of this might be concerning.
But when he returns-- and he does return, abruptly, and likely through the use of Space rather than mind this time --he looks the way Bilbo Baggins described himself as being. Too little butter scraped over too much bread. There's a hollowness behind his eyes, and shadows beneath them that imply he is somehow physically exhausted rather than mentally so. How? Don't ask.
But he keeps to her request in somehow doing all that he needed to do so he could not take too terribly long. But it comes with him pouring himself one big glass of his favored drink, lighting up one of his full and proper cigars, and dropping down onto the couch. He takes a drink, has a few puffs, then plops the cigar in his mouth and draws the paperwork for the farm from his jacket and slaps it down, hastily folded in half, onto the table.
Along with identity paperwork. A work history. Credit report. A passport with travel on it.
Of course Fox got nervous when he left and was gone and went dark. It's a thing that Foxes do. He went dark when he went to talk to some important 'him' (don't think Fox didn't make a note of that mentally) who is going to determine the path forward for them. And what does Fox do when she's anxious?
Well, shapeshifting, mostly. Changing her form helps her not think, because she's using up her thoughts on experiencing other things.
When he returns, a very weary-looking Gus sits on the floor.
There is a scrub jay sitting on his head, slowly blinking its black eyes. She flies up to the table, hop hop hop across it, and pecks at the papers. (edited)
"Yes," he remarks of the pecking bird, "those are new." He rubs at his eyes briefly to clear them, clears his throat, and then promptly covers it with more liquor and smoke. That'll take care of that old throat rattle, surely. "I literally don't remember the deal that I made to get them. But I'm out. Officially. It's done." It's pretty clear he's hoping nobody looks under that particular rock too awful much by way of becoming indignant on his behalf. It's not like he knows why it would be worth bothering any longer.
"I'm persona non grata, of course. That's to be expected. But they'll leave me be. Keep my prior activities, whatever they may have been, from coming back to haunt me." There's a fatalistic shrug that follows that statement, as though he always knew this would be where it ended if it didn't end the other way.
Fluttering up, she unfolds in a shower of blue and white, landing next to him. "I don't like that you can't remember the deal you made," Fox says simply, leaning to kiss the top of his head, "and I can't promise that I won't Have A Problem if it turns out that you not remembering is problematic." Her fingers trail through the curls on the back of his head, and she reaches her other hand to sort through the paperwork that he bought back. Reading it all. Absently, she taps her ring finger against the papers and the wood beneath them, clicking the siderite of it against the surface lightly. Any more than that and she risks breaking the table. Freaking siderite.
"But for now, I can leave it." If the Guardians don't make her sink her teeth into it, she won't. Leaning, she kisses the top of his head. "They won't make life difficult for Zoya or Leta, either, I hope."
She pauses, presses her lips together. "I have always hated the way they have treated you." The words come out thin. He's probably known that, but she has never said that out loud before. Far be it from her to say a word about the Order he was in when he was in it. That doesn't mean he doesn't know, but she's never, ever said it. "If this means they stop, then I will be happy."
"Well. My terms are understood. Just not what all I gave up." Vasya taps the side of his head indicatively. "It doesn't do much good to remove secrets if you remember what secrets you've quote unquote given up. My point is that if you catch me staring at you blankly when you mention something over the course of the next bit, please be more patient with me than usual. It's likely it was collateral damage, whatever you're discussing." His eyebrows twitch in a 'whatever' manner. This is fine, and not at all disorienting.
He lets the indictment of his former order wash over him, not seeing fit to defend it, but not really joining her in the condemnation either. His head tilts to the side and her watches her in silent for several moments, then looks back at the empty television screen across the room. Another drink from his vodka is taken.
"There has never been a place for me in this world. I have always been nothing more than a proof of concept for a dead ideology. Just a figment of someone else's imagination. There wasn't even a 'me' to mistreat. I was just an apparatus of the merging of the state and the Labyrinth. I played out. I had my time. I served my purpose. I am just a broken toy. This wasn't a victory. I haven't won anything. They haven't learned anything. Nothing will change." (edited)
She takes in a deep breath, lets it out. "What were your terms?" Fox asks, leaning in against him the way that she does when she's croissanting as a canine. She keeps petting at his hair, listening to him as he talks. "Okay. I'll fill in what you need to know, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, I ... won't necessarily first assume that Seers have attacked your brain or that they've messed with your timeline." Beat. "But I may want to check, if you're worrying me."
After all, the Seers did infiltrate the Guardians and all that. It's right of a Fox to be concerned.
The vodka gets reached for and taken from him, and Fox takes a swallow. He talks, and she pets. "Mmm. Do you want me to listen to you and agree, or do you want me to tell you what I think?"
"I've consented to periodic monitoring off my mind to verify that whatever was removed is staying that way. You know how Lasting effects can be less than Lasting. Especially these days, what with the universe rewriting itself willy-nilly. Assuming I just walk away and stop messing in Guardian affairs, they'll assign agents to assume the duties I was undertaking. Whatever those might have been. They'll work to keep my past life from interrupting my new one, so long as I work to keep my new life free from my old. It's not as one-sided as it seems, depending on what I used to do for them on a regular basis and didn't tell you about."
"i don't think it matters much if you agree or not, Fox," he finally admits, leaning forward to set his drink down on a coaster so he can slouch down into the couch and smoke properly. "Some things just are the way they are. But I'm always interested in hearing what you think, especially if it's about my affairs."
She takes his drink again and swallows more vodka and cranberry. (What else would it be?) The drink goes back on its coaster, and she settles down next to him. For a while, there's nothing to say.
"Sometimes you want to marinate in your nihilism, My Heart, and sometimes you want to hear what I have to say at that moment. It's okay when you don't want to necessarily hear what I have to say, that's why I asked." Her dark head leans on his shoulder and she pets the inside of his forearm. Big sigh, and she wiggles her bare toes. "I think that everything you just said is what you were taught, and it's as untrue as any of the other Soviet propaganda that was part of your upbringing. You have inherent worth, and there is a you that they mistreated. They told you that there wasn't, because it made it possible for them to keep mistreating you." There's a sort of rattle in the back of her throat, something like a growl, a rasp on her words.
"I really don't give a fuck if nothing changes for the Guardians of the fucking Veil," Fox says. "At least beyond what might affect our family. I'll care about that again later someday, maybe. What I'm concerned about is taking care of my husband."
She pushes herself up to her knees, then, and turns to look him in the eyes, placing one hand on each of his stubbly cheeks. "I have loved you since the first bag of pelmeni by the Neva, and before you say it, I did not love your artifice or the lies you told me. They lied to you, they gaslit you, they told you that you were nothing, so they could treat you like a function and a tool rather than a person. They lied for their own convenience." A deep breath. "I am not so shallow or so silly to love a person who is nothing, and if you can't believe it for yourself, then believe that I would never love someone who is just the things you describe."
Vasya, stuck as he is in the existential equivalent of a bottle of vodka, does not argue the finer details of her counter-argument. His lower lip sticks out and his shoulders come up in a shrug, one hand holding his cigar. A very slavic form of the sit com shrug.
"So who is he, this man you love? What does he do for a living? What does he do for fun? I know I am a husband, I know I want to be a father, and I know I care more about a stupid fucking helpless spirit having been--" Self-awareness comes leaping from the wings and delivers a drop kick right across the Acanthus's chin in real time. When you remove some programming, some mental blocks go right out with it. "--forced against its will to do violence on the innocent."
All the wind has gone out of his sails. "Is it that simple, in the end? I'm still just a flinching boy? Sad."
She waits it all out, patiently. This isn't the first time she's had a conversation like this, nor even the first time she's had a conversation like this with him. It's just the first time she's had a conversation like this with him when he's been able to see past the at least some of the blocks and stops they worked to put in him from his childhood in a Labyrinth.
And then at the end, when the wind has gone out of his sails and he asks that last question, she starts there, first. "To a certain extent, My Heart? Yes. Because I am, too. Still just the flinching boy being shamed for being who he is and loving who he loves. Whether the universe fixed things for me or decided to gaslight me, I am still -- " She pauses. "Yes. Somewhere inside every adult is a scared child. They told you he wasn't still in there, but he is. And being kind to the scared kid is kinda how you ... stop constantly reliving the same things."
It is usual for Fox to crawl into his lap in these moments, and so she does, still turned to face him, one hand still resting on his cheek. "Currently, for a living, the man that I love is helping to save a future in which his wife gave him a cheesy little statue, and a vision he saw that he really wanted. He's planning to fix up a house, and learn to fix farm equipment, and I think he hopes to be pleasantly surprised at how applicable all of the skills he uses to fix his collection of firearms will be at fixing up a house or fixing up farm equipment. He plays with his spirit friend for fun, too -- and Oontz Oontz is your friend. The two of you practically have a secret language. He spends time with his cadre, and complains about it, but he loves the company of the people who have stuck around no matter how hard he tries to push them away. He's devoted enough to smuggle himself onto a different continent to come and find his wife, and patient enough to put in the time peeling back the... "
She pauses, then. "I think that you think I don't have my own defensive layers, just because mine are more... publicly palatable. But the man that I love saw past the chattering laughter of the public pest from the minute he saw me. You took me seriously, because you knew there was something serious about me. And you never called me on it. Not really. And I love you for that, too, which isn't what you asked. But you see people in a way you don't give yourself credit for. And you love people, and you love who they really are."
"You just pretend you don't, because it's easier that way. Because love is a lever they used to control you."
There is a long silence that follows all of that, perhaps still a holdover from him processing his big pathetic middle-aged manbaby revelation. The universe just keeps on kicking the man while he's down, it seems. Which is perhaps his recompense for telling it what to do the rest of the time.
Are there any acanthus who aren't disasters? He doesn't argue, but he does explain. Just a little more. "Part of my training, you know. Is to learn just a little it. Just a little bit about everything. If you know how to operate a tool, that's enough. You don't need to know how to apply it-- the mission will provide that. You don't need to know the complexities of a security system per se, so long as you know how to use the implements employed in disarming it. The mission will provide the rest. Over and over again we were told not to be too much of anything, save for three things. How to kill, how to hide, and how to know who to trust."
He looks her way, then down at his drink on the table. "It makes being normal difficult. I know a hundred ways to murder everyone around me and can accurately predict who is mad at how I dress. It's not a great combination, I tell you." This is probably a joke, but he's not laughing at the moment. "Some of the things you like about me were drilled into me. Seeing through people's bullshit is a valuable skill in my old profession, Naika." A small shrug of the shoulders.
"But the rest, okay. So that is who I am. Husband, father, friend. Tugger of foxtails." He reaches up to gently honk her nose between his thumb and forefinger. "It's a beginning."
"They trained you how to see through people, but they didn't tell you to take me seriously," Fox rebuts quietly. "You think you're the only person who wonders who they really are, and I ask myself if there's anything here except for the ridiculousness." The latter half of that sentence has her gesturing a hand toward herself, but then she lets all of it go when he honks her nose.
"It is," she agrees, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, as if his honk of her nose made her face malfunction. Nothing here but the ridiculousness, right?
She rests her head on his shoulder. "All you need is somewhere to start, Vasyl." Her nose nuzzles in to the side of his throat. "Where do you want to start on the house?"
"I don't," he admits with a glance back to her, then once again down at his drink. He has a strong gulp of it, then sets it down a little further away. Having Time means never having to drink too much if you don't care to.
"Starting on the house seems too big. I will start with the land instead. I think you will know best what I need to find when I step inside, and I know you have the means to ensure it's done. Here, after all, it's all about technology and glamour and money and so on. Not that the eyrie is unpleasant, only that it is not you. So. Go build us a den. And I can figure out some place inside of it to hang up my hat." Vasya seems wholly sincere, here. "For reasons I can't explain to you at the moment, decorating the interior of a home is an impossible task and befriending the spirits of wheat on the land sounds positively pleasant."
Her brow furrows at first, confused by the idea that he doesn't know where he wants to start on the house. This is the thing he wants, right? The thing that he needs? So why is it that he doesn't -- but then he goes on, and her eyebrows rise a little, her face blooms into a smile.
"No, that makes perfect sense to me. You should start with where you need to start." A pause, and she looks at him thoughtfully. "You might find it helpful -- and relaxing -- to try being some wheat for an hour or two, sometime. I always find being grasses so... peaceful. And so helpful in understanding the depth and interconnectedness of things. The roots of grasses and trees, the way that they interconnect with mycelial networks, the fact that an individual tree isn't just a tree on its own but part of a big network... " she trails off, then. "It helps you, when you talk to them, to know what they are."
"I think that-- useful as that practice is, I know --maybe I should stay me while I'm figuring out what I am. I've never had much of an issue relating to things by how they think. What they believe. Putting yourself in another's shoes is fairly simple when you can be inside their head. So. I think I can probably do this the hard way. And probably should do things the hard way right now. And maybe if I get overhwelmed sometime we can try that. When the change will be welcome. And a step towards equilibrium."
Being wheat. Definitely not what he considered being in his future at any point. "At some point, I'd like to take you to the Potemkin stairs. And walk the waterfront. I remember as a boy visiting them with my father. It was summer. He was back from Afghanistan. I wanted to take a boat out, but father wouldn't allow for it. But I remembered thinking how much bigger the world must be than I'd been told, if all I knew was a few blocks in Odessa and they led to something like that. To see the stairs. As a child? And the sea! I'd never imagined anything could be so big."
He's wistful for a bit, then wistful slowly draws out to withdrawn again. His father, in the end, was not particularly good at the job.
"Besides. Your job is to be wheat for me and then tell me what I need to know, isn't it?" He slides her a glance. Deflecting, but accurately.
A soft sound of assent answers him. "That makes sense," she agrees, gently petting her hand down his cheek. His deferral on the subject doesn't seem to bother her at all -- rather, it seems to reassure her. "I'm glad you have enough sense of what it is that you need to say no to my suggestions. That's a reassuring thing, really." Her head stays on his shoulder, nose against the side of his throat. She's always loved the way he smells. Not surprising, considering how important a sense smell is to canids.
"I will go with you wherever you ask," Fox says softly, "and especially to beautiful things that mean a lot to you that you want to show me." The soft curling of her fingertips against the side of his throat continues. The slid glance? She answers that in kind.
"Sometimes," she agrees. "Most of the time." Another pause. "But sometimes I lead people to the experiences they need, and that's one of the things I've learned being here. Sometimes it means I take Lux to be foxes so they don't spend their whole life chasing symbols through their dreams. Sometimes it means that someday we'll be wheat together and talking through the water we pass between our roots."
NEW
"There is a synagogue in town. It's new, they were talking about establishing it after I was already in Russia. And in the Labyrinth. I don't remember too much about it any longer, obviously. But I suppose the only memories I have as a child or, really, as someone not caught up in all of this? Are here. There. Ehm. In Odessa." Vasya tosses his hand as though throwing something over his shoulder. "In my past, long ago. I may go revisit some of those times. So of those memories. Start there and build up."
Finally, he slides his drink away, plucks his cigar from his mouth, and sets it into the tray so he can slide a little closer to Fox and lean his head atop her head. One arm about her shoulders, one hand holding hers in her lap. He turns his head and kisses her temple, then gives her a gentle squeeze.
"But now I need to rest, Naika. That took a bit longer than I may have let you realize."
She listens. She's very good at that. Follows him through all of his thoughts and plans, and into the silence where his arms wrap around her and his fingers knit with hers. It always comes back to this, for her. For both of them. From one bag of greasy pelmeni from a street vendor by the Neva, through all the vagaries of St Petersburg and the silence of those years apart, it always comes back to this, to his head resting on top of hers and the two of them in companionable silence.
Naika sits there for a moment longer, then nods her head beneath his, and slowly disentangles herself from his lap. A step back, and she stretches her hands out toward him. "Then I'll put you to bed," she agrees, and if there's a teasing glitter in her eyes, well, that's just the woman he's always known. Once he stands, she pushes herself up to her toes and lays a delicate kiss on the tip of his nose, then a second on his lips.
"I love you, Vasyl."
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