One day, I will grow real wings. Heavy, lifting wings...

Saburov minds his tea and keeps it black. Children preferred sweeter things, and needed sweeter things, so he was happy to go without.

He does glance up on occasion, to observe both girls. Grace, as usual seemed to be in her own little world, ponderous and doe-eyed gaze staring into her tea. Capella, in contrast, was vexed. Troublesome thoughts after a troublesome night.

“Mn,” he grunts, setting down the tea, “So… eventful day, girls?”

It’s… an attempt to break up the dwelling thoughts and steer away dread.

“How are your lessons coming along, Grace?” he asks, “Has Peter been teaching you your letters and numbers? You’ve already demonstrated the artistic.”

Alexander looks to Capella next, addressing her, “Your battle-trophy doesn’t seem to be swelling more- that’s good. But we’ll still pack ice on it after tea. Have you… figured out anything else about your particular condition?”

He leans forward, attentive.

“Or if there are any questions you have, I’m willing to discuss. I know my experiences are limited.”

“You could say so.” Capella says, taking a sip of her drink. Grace leads into an explanation of her progress - she’s learning to write bit by bit. She really enjoys drawing. Peter is teaching her to read as she learns her lets and words, and what she can’t read yet he reads to her. Stories from far-away places and times. He writes down things he can’t write for her yet too. 

She loves him, and Capella is relieved at that, that she’s settled very happily into her new home. 

“You likely have some of the best perspective in town actually about what a true Mistress is, save for Aspity, who knows all the Kin’s history.” Capella comments when Grace lapses back into thoughtful silence. 

“ He’s not mad. He’s just fucking sad. ”

He mutters it quietly. Grief’s angry, of course, but he knew the look in Grief’s face on the walk over. It’s sadness, not anger. It’s helplessness.

He flips the knife over his hands before it’s shoved into the pocket of his coat. Fine, he’ll take it if she insists. His hand fucking hurts and he sinks down to lay on his side, throwing Whetstone at an odd angle across the room from him.

She’s thinking too hard. He should say something comforting. He really should.

“ This ain’t about you, Whetstone. This is something I have to take care of. ”

He sighed, tucking his legs close as he rested his cheek against the roughspun sheets.

“ I’ll come back if I can. If I fuck this up, I die or I have to leave. These dogs have plague, y’know. They were rotting with the Pest. ”

He cracks one eye open at her, exhausted in the moment. He’s not going to get much sleep, but he needs to.

He lays down, and she can tell how much pain he’s in. 

About how much pain Grief was in when they dragged his ass to his friend’s place. He’s still not supposed to be moving. She doesn’t think Pennyweight should be either. 

“You don’t get to fuck up. You don’t get to leave. You don’t- you don’t get to make me care about you and then go and fucking die.” 

She’s not even looking at him anymore. She’s looking at the floorboards, eyes angry and wet and she’s refusing to let anything fall. They’re angry tears. They’re angry tears, and she’s got to be professional - she’s got to put back on the mask. Too involved, too involved.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Stupid little criminal family, disfunction and all. They’re all she’s got and she wouldn’t have it any other way. 

“ Vic – Capella. ”

He shouldn’t call her Victoria right now. He shouldn’t. It wouldn’t help the situation.

She’s clinging to the coffin inside, unwilling to be parted from their mother, and he breathes in deep and holds it for a five count before he exhales and bends down to where she curls away from him.

“ Capella, we can’t do this. If you stay here, then… ”

He has to consider what to say, his hand folded out to her.

“ If you stay here, then there won’t be a Mistress above ground. You can’t rule from under. Come on. ”

He’s tired. His hair is swept into his face, clinging to his brow with sweat from the warm day outside.

Her mother lays silent. But she's not silent. She's still here, she can still feel her. Why won't anyone understand that? She feels her here still, she's still here!

"I can't rule with out Mama," she sniffs. She's sobbed on and off since yesterday. "I can't leave her here. She's still here. I can feel her, brother, I can feel her still with me!" 

She rubs her face angrily. She's not a crybaby - but no one understands. 

“ I didn’t tell you to come out. I said I was coming in. ”

He waits another moment, hears his father’s grumbling complaint, and manages to nudge the heavy door open to slip inside. Capella might sit against it, but he’s older and stronger than she is.

The door slides back closed behind him with some insistence, plunging them both into quiet darkness.

“ Capella, you’ve worried everyone sick. Come here. ”

She’s pushed across the cold stone floor, and light spills in briefly, blinding her in her enclosed darkness, as Vlad slips in and then lets it close behind him. 

“They don’t understand. You don’t understand.” She says into her shoulder, curled away from him, and the door. 

Yelena would kill her if she slammed the door and Whetstone knows it, so the door closes with a click and leans back against it. The glare is something he feels rather than seeing, because he’s still pulling the stitches tight to knot the end of them with a grunt.

The pouch gets tossed onto his lap and he glances back to her, plucking the strings open one-handed before the bottle, the bandage, and the blade dump into his lap.

“ Boss is gonna get mad at you for helping me. ”

He mutters it softly, though he takes the bandage and twines it around his hand to pull it tight and cover his hard work.

“ I don’t need your knife, Whetstone. Keep it. ”

He flips it into his grip to look at it, thoughtful for a moment, before he sighs.

“ Unless you’re going to insist. Which I know you are. ”

It gets set back beside him as he pushes back onto the bed, setting his shoulders against the wall to prop himself up. He’s tired. He’s very tired and coming off of the poison on Brin’s blade and the fact that he’s not welcome.

“ I’m leaving tomorrow. If you want to say your piece, do it now. ”

“He’s already mad.” She counters. “You don’t have to use it. But you’re going to bring it back to me when you’re done. You hear that? You don’t... you don’t get to leave, even if you fucked up.” 

It sounds immature, childish, even to her own ears. A child crying about not getting their way, about things they don’t understand. Stupid, stupid. 

She’s 5. The Kin caravan travels across the Steppe, fields away. She is young, but not young enough to miss the sorrow and wistfulness in her mother’s eyes, or the bruise on her face in the shape of her father’s hand. 

She’s 7. Slipstrop, then by another name now buried in the river, attends the burial of her mother with her. 

She’s 10. Slipstrop stays with her when her father marries a new woman, and tells her she isn’t welcome in his new household. 

She’s 15. Slipstrop is a menace to the other teens, but no one touches Whetstone because of it. 

She’s 19. Slipstrop keeps running with Barley, leaves her at Grief’s, moves out of their shared room, moves on, moves away, moves beyond. She leaves without remorse, she leaves all the promises they made in the wayside as she sends child after child to the Capitol. 

“You’re going to come back.” 

He nods to her, and shields his hands with towels before assisting her upstairs to set the table for tea with Grace.

“No, no stove you missed- but I have something that doesn’t need a stove to heat water.“

The kettle safely on a tray for the table, cups and saucers distributed, Saburov brings out a small tray of sugar, and cream for their young palates.

Then, when everyone is settled, he opens the cabinet and withdraws an urn with red floral enamel patterns, and sets it on the table.

“It’s called a ‘samovar’- I know it’s supposed to be used outside but… I made an exception to formalities of use when my wife’s illness took a turn for the worse. See, it was simply easier to have certain things on the same level.”

“I haven’t employed servants, but neither have I had the time to install dumbwaiters. So… being able to make tea without worrying about her falling downstairs or scalding herself when racked with seizures… brought at least a little peace of mind when I couldn’t be home to care for her.”

The device is interesting, certainly to Grace, who’s immediately craning her neck this way and that to look at the patterned enamel. Capella nods to his comments - a wise investment. It’s said with a sensitivity - she’s sure Grace has passed on Katerina’s message. It’s also a haunting thought, of Katerina’s health before her death. Yet, hadn’t that happened as well to Nina Kaina and her mother? Though, from her understanding, their weakness was sudden and the deaths quick. Katerina struggled and suffered for years...

It’s not until the tea is passed around that she flinches out of her thoughts. Ah, she meant to pour that for everyone. Oh well. 

Saburov carefully makes his way downstairs, where his kitchen had seen a lot more activity in the last month than it had in years. A kettle begins to shudder and whistle as steam pours from the spout.

Capella is there, managing the dark space and measuring out the tea.

She still bore the bruising on her face from the children’s encounter with the steppe legend, the turnskin.

“Capella?” he calls, “Do you need any help bringing that upstairs? This house was never retroactively fit with dumbwaiters, I’d rather you not have to carry that all by yourself.”

If anyone had to be doused in boiling water, Saburov would rather it be him. But he’d prefer it not to happen at all, regardless.

“I have something to show you for the future as well, so you won’t have to walk up and down for tea.”

@mistresscapella​

It’s the evening after all the fanfare and the adrenaline of the affair has worn off, leaving stinging soreness in its wake. Her face is swollen and bruised, and there’s the possibility her cheekbone is fractured, apparently. She’s been holding packed ice to it intermittently, while Grace had went home to check in with Peter before returning. She’s assigned herself as Capella’s nurse, taking her medic role very seriously as she wears her matching armband with Sticky. 

“If you’d like to carry the teapot, I can hand the cups.” She says when Saburov starts down the stairs. She’d preemptively started the tea - she deserved a cup after that conversation, and she knew this was around the time he returned every day. The man, when there wasn’t pressing catastrophe, was very punctual and ritualistic in his habits. 

It’s a sunny day when they lay Victoria to rest. It makes Vlad the Younger hate every moment of the Steppe summer as he feels his shirt stick to the back of his neck. It’s been an all day affair, which he thinks is nonsense. Steppe funerals were conducted at dawn, not the height of the heat of the day, and on the other side of the Town. Here on the Cape, he can hear the splash of the river against the rocks below, which is far more distracting than the murmur of the people around him.

There’s been a hiccup in the days proceedings – Capella is gone. It should be a cause for alarm – his younger sister had been inconsolable the day before and the day before that – and now not even Makarova knew where she was.

They’re talking about where she could have gone while Vlad checks his watch, until his father scolds him and tells him to help them look. He’s sure Capella simply wants to be alone a while, but…well, perhaps he should help them scour the town for her.

It takes close to two hours before word comes back that she is, indeed, at the Cape – she’d closed herself into Victoria’s tomb and refused to come out, even at the demand of her father. It’s during the conversation of what to do now that he murmurs that he’ll see what he can do, pushing past the people in a half-circle around the construction before he raps his knuckles on the tomb.

“ Capella. It’s your brother. I’m coming in. ”

@mistresscapella

There’s no real answer from within, only silence and the incessant babbling of the Ghorkon and the mixture of frustrated and sympathetic murmurs of the funeral goers some ways away. Big Vlad looks at his pocket watch in an angry fashion. 

“ Th’ door’s open. ”

He sounds muffled when he says it, because he has something in his teeth currently. The door swings open easily if she wants to open it, revealing the room beyond: the picture of tidiness, with a shelf displaying his favorite trophies from his old haunts. To anyone else, they’re a collection of useless junk – a tea cup without the rest of the set, a small silver statuette of a bird, a dozen and a half other valuable knick knacks – but to Pennyweight, they were won fair and square with his skills.

He’s sitting on the bed, thread caught between his teeth as he pulls the last of the stitches for his hand tight, grumbling softly as he ties it off and bites the end of the thread off. Dressed down like he is, there’s a handful of scars all over his torso, with the freshest ones still angry and red.

“ What is it, Whetstone. ”

She opens the door with a huff and closes it. She wants to slam it, but she won’t slam the Madam’s doors. Instead she closes it politely, and leans back against it with her arms crossed. Whetstone glares at Pennyweight for several moments, silent. 

When she’d started this way, she’d aimed to give him something. Maybe talk, if either of them were in the mood (unlikely). Somewhere halfway, she got in the mood to fight. She’s floating somewhere between the two now. 

“...here.”

The scrappy little pouch she’d been carrying is tossed onto the bed. There’s a tightly corked bottle of antiseptic (a hot commodity right now), a pile of sterilized bandages, and a knife.

“I want it back,” she says, knowing he’ll know what she’s referring to. “You’re gonna need it more than me right now. But you’re bringing it back.”