you're just another set of bones to lay to rest

          they’ll  never  know  just  how  much  blood  his  hands  are  covered  in,  kavinsky  certainly  makes  sure  to  keep  them  painted  red  —  a  warning.  but  he’s  as  much  a  visionary  as  he  is  a  killer,  a  provider  and  a  protector  first.  his  reputation  is  as  much  shield  and  advertisement  as  he  needs,  the  true  statistics  nobody  needs  to  know.  not  even  the  feds  will  ever  be  able  to  prove  him  anything  —  he  is  a  fortress  dressed  in  white.  prokopenko  is  being  let  in  slowly,  door  by  door,  fortified  wall  by  fortified  wall.  he’s  not  afraid  of  the  things  that  he  sees  and  kavinsky  doesn’t  care.  he  is  just  waiting  to  lock  the  doors  behind  him.

          his  serpent  eyes  linger  on  prokopenko  though,  his  inquisitiveness  left  unmasked  but  unexplained.  there’s  a  keenness  about  the  other  that  goes  unnoticed,  the  way  that  his  observation  seems  unsuspecting,  almost  innocent,  certainly  incapable  of  deducing  the  cruelty  and  threat  lazily  hidden  in  the  shadows  surrounding  him.  in  the  way  he  talks,  though,  shines,  through  oblivious  questions  and  out  of  the  blue  observations,  his  quick  reasoning  and  sharp  intuition.  this  is  one  thing  that  kavinsky  likes  about  him,  and  he  likes  that  he  noticed,  and  that  prokopenko  can  hang  unspoken  words  in  the  air  and  kavinsky  will  still  catch  them.  you’re  so  young.  you’re  so  strong,  you’re  so  callous.  but  i  know  you  better.  i  know  there’s  more.  yes,  kavinsky  truly  likes  him.

          “ there  are  worse  fates, ”  a  knowing  look  finishes  the  sentence  ambiguously  —  is  he  talking  about  the  killing  or  the  dying?  he  ends  this  line  of  conversation  with  a  shrug,  it  rolls  like  a  wave  through  his  shoulders  as  if  he  lets  them  rather  than  leads  them,  a  motion  expressive  enough.  “ if  there’s  one  piece  of  advice  i  can  give  you:  get  rid  of  what  holds  you  back.  no  point  if  there’s  no  use.  of  course, ”  kavinsky  leans  forward  again,  in  closer  to  prokopenko,  seemingly  grinning  at  the  thought  sharing  with  him  this  priceless  advice  “ you  have  to  know  what  it  is  that  you  want.  you  know,  don’t  you? ”

in  one  respect,  at  least,  kavinsky  is  like  most  things  in  life:  the  more  prokopenko  learns,  the  less  he  understands.  he’s  hit  another  dead  end  in  this  maze,  and  there’s  only  so  many  times  he  can  turn  around  and  choose  another  path  before  it  becomes  too  obvious  that  he  is  trying  to  find  what’s  at  its  center.  coaxing  out  secrets,  desires,  fears,  needs,  subtly  enough  to  make  his  target  feel  like  they’re  sharing  on  their  own  terms  has  long  been  prokopenko’s  great  skill,  used  as  means  for  kindness  and  cruelty  as  if  the  distinction  doesn’t  matter,  but  kavinsky  is  light  on  his  feet  when  he  dances  around  the  truth,  and  prokopenko  has  to  work  to  keep  up.  

the  unprompted  advice  is  an  explanation,  kind  of,  though  it  reveals  no  more  than  kavinsky  has  already  told  him,  just  rearranges  the  pieces  and  offers  them  for  a  different  purpose.  when  he  leans  forward  —  seemingly  for  dramatic  effect  —  prokopenko  mirrors  the  movement  even  though  his  instinct  is  to  back  away.    

what  does  he  want?  the  question  catches  him  off  guard  and  he’s  sure  it  shows;  he’s  never  had  a  real  answer.  his  life  divides  neatly  into  chapters  defined  by  whichever  headstrong  friend  or  self-assured  fling  he’d  chosen  to  cling  to  to  give  it  meaning,  a  magnet  to  keep  him  turned  away  from  the  emptiness  in  his  own  psyche.  but  these  things  are  always  finite,  and  ultimately  he  is  directionless,  stranded  in  an  unmoving  ocean,  always  looking  for  the  next  lighthouse  to  move  towards  or  the  next  anchor  to  keep  him  grounded.  doesn’t  matter  where  it  takes  him;  sinking  down  to  the  sea  floor  is  better  by  far  than  stillness.  

MUSIC. you are a breath of fresh air. you are soft and free. you disappear as quickly as you appear, and everyone wishes you had stayed around longer than you did. your voice is what makes people fall in love. everything you say is in harmonies and codes, and only the most experienced listeners can fully understand you. your presence is always enjoyed but you aren’t always given the praise you deserve; people will let you stay in the background. all you want is for someone to really listen to you.

tagged by: stole but i don’t remember from who

sienna’s  not  trying  to  eat  air,  is  she?  that’s  the  point  —  you  can’t  survive  on  air  or  love  or  anything  alone.  she’s  making  that  point  because  it  feels  like  kolya  is  trying  to  survive  on  love.  it  was  sweet,  at  first.  sweet  and  sad  and  tragic,  and  sienna  felt  terribly  sorry  for  him.  now  she  just  feels  irritated.  okay,  grow  up,  get  over  it.  stop  being  an  insufferable  simp.  she’s  about  to  say  that  when  he  knocks  the  words  out  of  her  mouth.  her  jaw  drops  —  actually  drops  —  and  she  stares  at  him.  

          ❛  that…  doesn’t  sound  right.  ❜  bertrand  isn’t  that  much  older.  he’s  fifteen  years  older  than  sienna,  which  is  basically  ten,  which  can  be  rounded  down  to  seven,  which  is  like  saying  he’s  five  years  older  than  her.  and  sienna  is  much  older  than  nikolai.  she’s  four  years  older,  which  is  like  saying  six,  which  is  like  saying  eight,  which  is  like  saying  she’s  ten  years  older  than  him.  his  mother  can’t  possibly  be  younger  than  bertrand.  no,  she  isn’t.  nikolai  must’ve  done  his  math  wrong,  or  maybe  he’s  fucking  with  her  on  purpose.  yes,  that  must  be  it.  he’s  fucking  with  her  to  distract  her  from  his  drawing.  something  about  kolya  and  fingers  in  people’s  mouths!  why  are  teenagers  so  horny  these  days!

          ❛  and  stop  drawing  shit  like  that!  ❜  she  snaps,  which  is  unfair  because  his  drawings  aren’t  shit  and  he  shouldn’t  stop,  but  she’s  tense  today.  tenser  than  usual.  ❛  this  is  exactly  what  i  want  to  talk  about.  delphi’s  been  stealing  and  selling  my  shit  again.  you  need  to  be  careful.  ❜  

“ well it is, ” nikolai’s eyebrows quirk for half a second, but he catches himself before his surprise shows on his face. he hadn’t expected that sienna wouldn’t actually know this exquisitely fun fact — he really just pointed it out because he thought it would get on her nerves. “ you’re four years older than me. my mom was seventeen when i was born. that means she’s thirteen years older than you, and two years younger than your boyfriend, ” he knows he is opening himself up to his mother being called a slut, but he also knows that the problem is actually that sienna’s boyfriend is just a weird old pervert, so he doesn’t care. meeting sienna’s eyes pointedly, nikolai shifts the position of his drawing pad and resumes exactly what he was doing.

a chuckle; no comment. yes, it’s sienna and her silly little half-truths and pills. across from her, it’s nikolai and his silly little half-truths and empty copies. what’s a half-truth? wasn’t for him to answer, but here he is, channeling bruce in response. it’s the effect of growing up under bruce’s wing; it’s the way nikolai and delphini were silly little science experiments molded directly to serve the wayne family’s purpose. and who is the wayne family? it’s bruce. it’s all bruce. he’s about as wayne as you can get. it’s a pity he dragged nikolai and delphini into the pain with him.

nikolai hasn’t got bruce whispering (or yelling) into his ear now, though. sienna wants to hear what nikolai is thinking. actually, she doesn’t, but given the choice between hearing bruce’s thoughts and nikolai’s, she’ll take nikolai’s. the bar’s underground, of course, but this life is about surviving, not living.

“is it bad to make you reach your own conclusions?” it’s a serious question. sienna wants to know why nikolai frames it so negatively in his mind. “has bruce brainwashed you so much that you don’t ever think for yourself? picture this: you wake up in the morning and you’ve got bruce telling you what to do and what to think. you go through the day as bruce’s puppet—half of a dream team—and you’ve saved the day. except the day’s not over, and you’re not saved. you’ve still got to go home and put yourself together every night and hear yourself and—”

—and that’s why sienna can’t ever have a normal fucking conversation.

it’s because she wants to talk. she wants to say what she has to say, but she’s always interrupted. and the worst part is that she can’t even tell people to shut the fuck up because they can’t control their thoughts. the quietest people are the absolute worst because they think so much. sienna drops her pillow and puts her hands over her ears, squeezing tight, but it doesn’t do shit, because nikolai’s words aren’t in her ears. they’re inside her head. and now that she’s lost her own train of thought, her thoughts are mixing with nikolai’s and she doesn’t know which are hers and which are his.

she grabs her pillow and pulls it over her face. whenever a room is too bright, that always helps. except now her eyes are closed and she can see only out of nikolai’s eyes. she feels two sets of hearts beating. and he’s thinking, he’s thinking and all sienna can feel is what he’s seeing. she sees adam and bruce. they’re fighting. adam’s words are twisted with venom, yet there’s truth in every biting word. sienna glances over in the memory. delphi is beside her, eyes welling up with tears at adam’s words that they’re not supposed to be hearing.

and then she’s hanging out with her friends—except she doesn’t have any, so these must be nikolai’s memories—and bruce is fucking calling again. she sends thirty-three copies of herself, but they’re disposable. they were disposable, she finds out at the end of the day, and they were all disposed. all thirty-three. and delphi barely made it out alive. a part of her doesn’t want to split herself anymore. she wants to do normal shit. she’s eighteen, and she wants to live.

she thinks back to prom…

sienna forces her eyes open and pulls the pillow away from her face. the room is still too bright, but she’s just going to have to deal with it. she blinks her eyes twice and looks at nikolai. he’s sitting across from her and she is sitting across from him. her name is f. sienna wayne and she is a real person. that is nikolai wayne and he is also a real person. he is her “brother” and he can tear himself apart at bruce’s will. sienna hugs herself and looks away, taking deep, deep breaths and trying to separate nikolai’s thoughts from her own.

she barely remembers what she’d been saying.

something rolls off her cheek and sienna realizes she is crying. she is crying for nikolai and for every single memory. imagine ripping yourself to pieces and seeing them die. she doesn’t need to imagine it, though, because she remembers it. sienna’s hands shake as she reaches for the pill bottle and they’re still shaking as she swallows thee more.

“don’t remember what i was saying,” she manages, and her voice is trembling, but it’s not like she can hide it. it doesn’t matter; she’s seen much more of him than he’s seen of her. “all i know is—it doesn’t matter what you were made for. i mean, it does, nikolai, it does, but it matters on an emotional level. y-you don’t have to—you should take delphi and run. adam and i ran.”

and adam’s powers are frightening. sienna had no idea. she tries to remember them, but it’s difficult over nikolai’s incessant thoughts. she’ll have to think about it later. the entire dynamic is different now that adam’s got powers. this could be an issue for her, but it could also be an issue for bruce.

but that comes later. she’s in the present now.

“and we were right to run.” that’s for herself, too. she looks at nikolai again. she can still feel his heart beating. in fact, she can feel his heart more than she can feel her own. “you can always run away from prescribed meaning and give meaning to yourself. whatever those two monsters envisioned when they made you is—forgive me, but i’d set their graves on fire if i could. fuck whatever they wanted. fuck whatever bruce wants. what do you want? do you remember prom? graduation?” she bites her lip, hard, to remind herself that she is sienna and he is nikolai and all of those memories were his. “go do that. this world needs saving, but you can’t save it if you’re just acting as an extension of bruce. it isn’t sustainable; you’re already tearing yourself apart in so many ways. so go do what you want and let bruce kill himself trying to do whatever it is he’s trying to do.”

harsh words, maybe, but sienna doesn’t have it in her to speak nicely. she takes another breath and wipes at her eyes. enough is enough. she needs to check on the tea, anyway.

when he was little, bruce and adam both used to sharpie a big ‘x’ onto the inside of his wrist to at least somewhat keep track of him and stay a step ahead of his mischief — the first nikolai would wear the mark his copies would remain bareskinned. when he was sixteen, nikolai went through a phase where he did the same. he wanted to be certain at the end of each mission that the bodies on the ground were copies. if that were true and one of the alive nikolais were the original — the real one — he retained his humanity. ( he stopped when the original was almost crushed under a building and six copies were left searching for the corpse in a blind panic. he turned out to be alive, just about, and after months of healing broken bones and damaged internal organs, he decided he was better off being uncertain. 

but that’s the full extent of the pain his powers cause him. he is a walking identity crisis, but only because he is caught up in life-threating situations multiple times per week. nikolai and delphi’s powers aren’t the double edged sword that most people’s are: they can’t be consumed by monsters of their own creation while they sleep or accidentally set their home on fire or drown their entire family when they lose control. their pain is extrinsic; if the world was a better place, their lives would be simple and happy. the same can’t be said for truly useful powers, and maybe that alone is enough to explain why they were chosen over other infants with more lucrative powers. 

for someone who thinks so much, thirty times over if he’s got thirty bodies on the go, he is notably bad at thinking for himself. the amount of thinking for himself he’s had to do since uncovering lab is exhausting in a way he had never experienced before. the muscles are undeveloped, and just like anything else, picking up the momentum to get good at it is not very fun. 

bruce could more than likely find the record of the flight he took, if he knew to look for it, but at least he wouldn’t get a fucking notification saying exactly where he was going and when. nikolai is known to keep spontaneous company, anyway; it’s not too far-fetched that he’d take take a quiet weekend off to go to the beach on the west coast and redirect to inland europe, though he’d usually ask first, or at the very least, text delphi an update as plans change. perhaps he could have left half of himself at home to keep questions and suspicion at bay — each time the number of copies he can make increases, he keeps some secret, for himself, just in case — but there are limits to his power, it weakens the further away he gets from himself. while the difference is unnoticeable within the confines of new jersey, and even as far as d.c. and massachusetts as he’s gotten stronger, spreading himself halfway across the world is simply too thin. the dip in performance would definitely catch more attention than a brief absence. besides, this conversation may be going surprisingly well, but there’s no telling how many of himself he’ll actually need. 

in the space of a moment, sienna goes from explaining his own life to him to crying, and he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do besides sit there and wait for her to stop. “ is that safe? ” but she’s already taken more pills before he finishes the sentence, and he’s left blinking dumbly in their wake. nikolai didn’t think his thoughts were that upsetting. he has to keep them under control, except he thought he was already doing that. apparently they’re not under control enough. adam learning to meditate a few years before sienna left, he used to say it was to shut her out. it always seemed kind of stupid, because showing her nothing was not the same as stopping her from entering; nikolai never learned to turn of his thoughts, he can’t just not think, but he draws a box around the things he wants to keep out of his head for the time being, and pushes it as far away as possible. 

“ but wouldn’t it be — ” what, wrong? lazy? selfish? at least half a dozen times that he and delphi have made a bad situation worse by getting involved come to mind. if anyone can save the world, it isn’t them. 

adam has already told him something similar, though it was framed around what he was missing instead. there’s more to the world than that city, you know, he’d said, the summer before nikolai’s last year of high school. that’s easy for him to say. he was somewhere in brazil at the time, turning barren, overworked farmland into back into the oasis it used to be. the world bends around him, he can make a difference. sienna could too, if she wanted to. if she were a more reliable witness, she could solve just about any mystery the world has to offer, or at least contribute to its solution. realistically, nikolai’s powers are best suited to getting his homework done, going for a run, and cobbling together something for dinner without missing out on whatever his friends are doing. his brain is structured in a way that allows him to retain exponentially more memories than the average person, and that’s really the most exceptional thing about him. 

prom and graduation were a fluke. nikolai hadn’t applied to any universities. not that he needed to — him and delphi have received hundreds of still-standing offers between the two of them, from schools all over the world, and it’s not like money would have been an issue for the handful that didn’t waive their tuition. now, most people his age are nearing their first round of finals, and most of those people would probably tell him that he’s lucky not to have to suffer through it — success in every sense of the word is a given for him — but he still feels like he’s missing something fundamental. there was no giddily waiting for acceptance letters on results day, no freshman orientation or moving into dorms or trying to make friends on the first day of class. there was no feeling of leaving the nest whatsoever, and he’s never quite sure if that makes him more of a child because nothing has changed or more of an adult because the nest was blown away years ago.

truthfully, nikolai doesn’t know what else he’d do if not this. it feels like it’s too late to do anything else.

“ thanks for the advice, ” he says carefully, when sienna gets up to return to the tea. even though he knows she can hear, see, feel everything that crosses his mind, it’s somehow easier to breathe freely when he isn’t under the direct scrutiny of her gaze. there is no one else he can talk to ( even if he trusted delphi to keep secrets from bruce, she probably wouldn’t grasp the depth of the issue, both logistically and emotionally ), so he continues, just to get it out, before it starts swirling around in his head and ends up making sienna cry again, “ i have a mom, you know. i mean, i always wondered about her, but all i knew was that she was super young. younger than us, ” her file is in the car. it’s kind of weird, but he takes it everywhere with him. sienna would be rightfully horrified if she read it. “ she went to prison when she was pregnant. just some minor fraud charge, nothing extreme like delphi’s parents. she lives in brooklyn still. do you think it would be weird to try and contact her? last time she saw me i couldn’t even hold my head up. ”