tripwires of fate

The preserves in the tea wasn’t something he expected when she’d offered. He’d expected a plain biscuit as a vessel for the sweet. But the tea is good, and the strawberry added a pleasant spot of sweet and tart to the drink, so he doesn’t complain, and instead notes the combination for later use.

Yulia quickly deduces the other offers he meant to give after her acceptance. Being able to choose her own staff and direct (or wrangle) the Stamatins, being able to improve upon the infrastructure and add where things were needed.

There’s a dry smile that creeps onto his face, “Honestly, I feel more like Atlas and less like Hercules, though I understand the sentiment and the Twelve Labors…”

Saburov lowers his tea, briefly, “It never seemed fair to me that Hercules was punished both by gods and man for something out of his control. He didn’t ask for divine lineage, nor was the will that turned him against his family his own- yet, he still labored to atone for those. I suppose if it isn’t fair, it’s still admirable.”

“Regardless,” he pauses to sip, “You’re right. It would be easier to leave. Death too, is simpler than the manner of dying.”

“Where would we go, Yulia?” he asks, “I think you could go anywhere and survive. What little remains of the Imperial legacy is fleeing. I could join them. I would be miserable in Paris, but I could join them.”

No, he couldn’t. That would be betraying Katerina’s wishes of him.

He shakes his head, “And the people left in town? They are used to being treated as slaves, but still enjoy freedoms no one else on the globe will. Perhaps never.”

He glances at Aysa as he says it.

“Crossing the steppe by any means is suicide. It will be the unpleasant death if we leave. At least trying to fix things may give us a chance to make life worthwhile before the inevitable.”

“Pardon the tangent.”

Aysa takes tea as well, welcoming the break from cleaning dirt and already dead plant matter from the floor. She has the eye of someone listening to the conversation at hand and processing it without further interjection. Analyst’s eyes. Yulia nods.

“You would be miserable in Paris. France is not the most ideal place to be, I do imagine. I do not particularly see you as Atlas. Atlas was condemned, and you took your burdens on easily. Hence, more a herculean effort, and less fruitless labors when the evidence was clear that the sky was held up long before Atlas.”

She sips her tea and meanders over to her gramophone, to readjust the needle and wind the device herself. It hummed to life and played a lively tune off of some foreign record. It was strange for the area, and stranger still in it’s speed.

“If we leave, we also leave the cultures here to be at the mercy of the mining industry without enough experience in how to contend with the machines and structures of the age. It’s evident that we’ve been planted here and must now be responsible curators of our own environments. It’s a pleasure to see what we shall come to, and how far behind the rest of the world shall be for quite some time.”

She lets the record play, and the children find the energy to scoop dirt with the beat.

He unfurls his hand from his face and lowers it to his side, nodding at her offer.

“Yes, that would be much appreciated, thank you.”

Glancing down at the carnage of shattered pots, dirt, and desiccated plant matter, Saburov merely quirks his eyebrow. The plant seemed to have been long gone before now, but somehow, just recently, the vessel had fallen. Perhaps it was the odd children that were now in her custody. Perhaps it was the spirit of the dead plant finally begging to be laid to rest in a display of drama.

More than likely, the children.

As Yulia ducks in for tea and strawberry preserves, he says, “I had an open position on the council, if you were interested.”

Waving his hand, he tries to clear the stinging fog from his eyes and from his mind. It was easy to feel lightheaded with the insane amount of smoke that wafted.

He steps past a desk with an overfull ashtray, clearing space for the family to continue cleaning.

“I need someone in charge of Town planning- infrastructure. I think you are the only one rational enough to meet the needs of the current populace- the actual needs.”

Aysa hands him a filled teacup and Yulia takes the jar of preserves and slides a dollop into it without asking. He’ll enjoy it, or at the least, he’ll need a sip of sugar, so she doesn’t ask. She does watch the children as Aysa hands her, her own cup and reminds her that she is yet, in the material world with material things. Her plant had met a terrible, terrible end.

The children, sweet as they were, were also not the most coordinated cleaning crew, and tracked roots and dirt through her home. 

“Well, of course. My wife will be working beside me, and I will have command of the engineering team Gemini. It is a pleasant arrangement. We already had aspirations for infrastructure improvement and re-paved roads.”

Saburov tries to wave the smoke away and sets himself apart from the rest of the household.

“It will be a challenge. The town was not built to be a town. Transforming it into one is a feat of engineering, architecture, and social structures. Your selections, likewise, will be able to set the foundational work to advance in that direction. It is a herculean task. It would be simpler to leave.”

But, she enjoys this place. It rejuvenates her.

Fumes of musky cigarettes linger in the air even before entering the Trammel. It was no secret that Yulia was a heavy smoker, but for for the scent to linger far outside of her domain, that meant one of two things.

She was either quite stressed, or quite focused- and the difference between the two was probably indistinguishable to most, save for her “housemate”, Aysa.

Focused seemed to be her default state, however, the hyper-rational genius that she was.

Saburov enters through, and waves a hand to waft the motley smoke out of his face as he breaches the door. The Trammel being a library first and foremost, he felt that knocking was uncalled for, and more likely to disturb whatever calculations she was doing at any given moment.

Coughing as quietly as he could into a gloved hand, he pushes forward, easing his way toward where he remembered the drafting room being.

“Yulia?“ he calls, finding his breath again.

Being a former soldier, he understood the calming effects of a cigarette or two on occasion (along with the temporary reprieve from hunger), but Yulia was a verified combustible steam engine by this point.

“I wanted to discuss something with you, are you available?”

"Just a moment,” she calls back, a cigarette between her fingers and an entire potted plant massacred on the floor. The children were gently scooping handfuls off the floor, and Aysa was sweeping some of it out her back door. The chill from the steadily opening and closing door was making her teeth chatter between drags. Cigarettes are not good for body heat retention.

“I apologize for the mess, Governor. It won’t be a problem though. What do you need from me?”

The haze of smoke hung at eye level, the drawing on her table demonstrating at exactly what point the ceramic pot had fallen to the floor. There were incredibly even lines and schematics of roadways, and then midway on one of the sketches, there was the single word, ‘Resume” upon a half shaded brick.

Aysa placed a hand on the broom and offered her fingers for the cigarette to toss outside. Enough was enough.

“ I am trying very hard not to throw your teacup, Yulia. ”

She scoops preserves into his tea and that distracts him once again into swirling the tea to melt the jam inside. It’s…good. It tastes good. He’ll have to show that to Daniil next time he sees him, even if Daniil already knows about it.

She gives a pointed sigh that signals him to not get into the specifics of Utopian idealism, even if he still has a lot to say about it. He still holds his place as one of the last Utopians in this godforsaken place, but he’ll not argue with her about it.

She’s right, as well. She’s absolutely right that the world will use it to harm people again and again, even if that’s not what it’s about – or what is has ever been about.

A sigh from him, as he sips at the tea and lets it make his problems slightly more manageable. Slightly. It doesn’t help the ghost-who-wants-to-melt-his-brain situation, but it does help the so-angry-he-could-puke situation, which…baby steps, Stamatin, baby steps.

“ You have such wonderful confidence in me, Yulia, even after watching me get my ass handed to me several times already. ”

He still won, of course, but there were always consequences. The handprints on his ribcage were one such thing.

“ The good thing is, she hasn’t been bothering Peter. She isn’t likely too either, if he’s living with our mother right now. She frightens Nina. ”

"Your mother in town was surprising. I know that you had lost contact with much of your nuclear family. Regardless.”

She refills his cup to distract him, and pops another spoonful of preserves into it to sate the things that need to be sated. She can’t quite doctor all of the things that he needs to be healed, but she could redirect and stabilze.

“Yes. You win all of your fights, no matter how long winded they seem. You would be a fair one to bet on in any match. Much like how you handled the one night at the Heart where three disputes turned into one large dispute. It was quite impressive.”

She nods at him with affirmation. It’s easy to see he’ll keep winning.

There’s a muted thump when he sets the chair back on all four legs, and she pours a refresher on his tea so it stays warm. At that, he does take the cup and warm his hands around it at least.

It had been a fun argument at the time, because they were four intellectuals trapped on a passenger train with no one else in their car, because no one dared cross the geniuses brought in by the Kains. The plum brandy had been sweet and sharp, and Peter had concluded (once everyone else but the twins had returned to their sleeping quarters) that he should paint Farkhad with the ears of an ass to prove his point, which had just made Andrey laugh and laugh and laugh.

What a different time that was.

“ A Utopian transcends their mortal limits – though the Kains thought that meant their bodies, and not the ideal that they’d be known forever for what they did. Ah, they misunderstood. ”

She’s still right, though. He wouldn’t be so angry if it was stupid. He’d just laugh.

“ Mn. You’re right about that. Legal due process has only ever ended with me in jail or trying to institutionalize both my brother and me – or sentencing us to death by gallows, firing squad, or some other insane practice. I’d like to wring her fucking neck myself, but alas, here we are. ”

He drinks the tea too quickly, which burns his mouth, which is fine by him. It distracts him from the sudden, mind-numbing urge to sling the cup through a window.

The urge is still there. Definitely still there. He’ll ignore it for now, though. He nudges one of the jars he brought closer to her.

“ Try the preserves. They’re good. I’ve gotta thank Ravel for ‘em at some point. ”

"Do not throw my teacup, Andrey.”

She scoops some of the preserves from his jar up with a tiny tea spoon into his tea when he takes a small break from sipping it, to let the jell melt and stain the cup with sugar. IT is very good, it’s sweet. Ravel made exceptional sweets that made problems much more manageable once they were consumed. It was a particular talent of hers. Andrey talks about Utopia and Yulia heaves a gentle, but pointed sign at the philosophical righteousness of it all.

“Utopia has always been a rally word, my friend, for desperate people and despicable people. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. Utopia has always ever been a blinding ideal. It will be again, much more readily, I think. The patterns of scarcity and war, economy line up for a perfect storm of particularly unrepentant leaders with utopic ideals. Each leader will have a utopian ideal of what “perfect” will be, ascribed to the nation. And as our microcosm has, will use Utopia to commit atrocities against humanity. Rise and falls and ebbs and flows.”

She tucks one of her shoes behind her wooden leg, knocking her heel against it.

“I personally find is more compelling to simply exist within the space of fellow persons. It is much more simple to work towards more pleasant times this way.”

But, he didn’t come here for that lecture.

Correction: he didn’t like recounting under the influence if it was something negative towards him. His best stories are told when he’s high on something or other, but all the bad things? They get put in a box labeled OPEN LATER and put into a dusty corner.

Unfortunately for him, someone has come along and kicked that box over, so everything he’s been ignoring is now everywhere for him to no longer ignore. It means he groans when Yulia mentions that he’s helpless, putting both hands over his face.

“ Farkhad was all about that shit. Spirits inhabiting enclosed spaces, souls in tiny boxes. He and Peter would talk for hours about living houses, except they always disagreed. Peter said the soul came from the house, while Farkhad said it came from a person inhabiting it. ”

That had been an argument of the ages on the train to the Town. Both of them fussing animatedly while he and Yulia shared a bottle of something strong and watched. It had been the reason the two of them became friends to start.

She makes a half mention of silver and his mind flits to the jewelry box in his room. If Grief hasn’t fleeced it empty by now, there should be…six rings inside with various levels of silver.

“ Maybe. Maybe…I’ll think about that if it comes down to it. No, no, I’m just angry that she was in my damn head. I hate it. I can’t even be in my own head peacefully. ”

He mutters it quietly, chancing a moment to lean back in the seat to see if it creaked dangerously at all – or if Yulia would notice and scold him.

“ I couldn’t file charges on her when she was alive anyways. She was paying for our house – and keeping us from a firing squad in the Capitol. It’s…stupid. ”

"Stop,” she says when he tests her chair to see if it’s going to break. Andrey’s all sorts of energetic and angry and she pours more tea for him while he doesn’t even touch the tea she initially poured. She does remember that almost incomprehensible argument with no winner, loser, or ground covered. She had kept the exact midpoint of that conversation entirely to herself. Souls could come from within, or without a space, of course. 

If anything, their experiences here proved them both quite correct. It also proved both Andrey and Yulia favoring plum brandy that was popular in the area. She does have a bottle of it somewhere in storage.

“It isn’t stupid. If it was, you would not be so upset,” she says, matter-of-factly, “You also have never been an individual interested in resolving disputes through the legal process. Unsurprising considering the legal process has been quite defunct and terribly corrupt for ages. The Kains were quite resourceful in their manipulations, but lacked the long term understanding that they would ultimately die and fail in their projects when they refused to accept sustainability as their central thesis.”

She shrugs at the whole mess of it.

“If it is any consolation, I can assure you that there is a distinct lack of spectral presence in this house. And I do happen to have a flask of powdered silver I meant to paint onto some of my more involved sketches sans filigrees. I personally would like to see Nina Kaina being beaten to death again. She was quite a waste of human life while she walked the Earth. Which, ultimately, is a pity, considering she was indeed attuned to the far reaching things in the world.”

Another shrug. She spoke with very little detachment it hardly sounds like a secret (it wasn’t).

“ I hate when you’re right about stuff like that. Yeah, she’s been a bitch to me for a long time – but I thought I’d get some peace once she was gone. ”

Limited perceptions of time as a defense mechanism. It sounds like something in a book he might have read once. Then again, Yulia just sounded like that – like a walking library of stuff he’s read once.

He knows she’s been hurting him for ages. There was a period of two years where he was at her beck and call for everything, because they had to impress the Kains to get their contracts.

It’s a personal sting that she says his burden is that there are just some things he can’t solve with his bare hands – because she’s right. He can’t do anything about this. He can’t fight her with his bare hands, so there’s nothing he can do.

“ Yes. There’s a ghost of Nina fucking Kaina running around. Peter saw her too, so he can back me up on that one. And I don’t know where she’s gone. ”

"You never have enjoyed recounting under the influence of something. It’s simple factual information, I do promise you that.”

She dries the chilly water off her hands and returns to her desk with a slow gait. Her soft shoes slide over the floor, and she slides into her chair with a quiet laugh in doing it. Back to the tea and soft, lumpy bread. 

“Well, considering the Kains commissioned two personal structures, the Tower and the Crucible, it would make perfect sense to find a ghost in the remaining piece. Ghosts, according to literature, often inhabit constructed spaces. I imagine it is much more clinical and understandable to a portion of a consciousness to define ones’ self within limited spaces. I did not consider dead consciousnesses prior to the Sand Pest, actually. It was never part of my infrastructure.”

She pours herself more tea, dabbing a bit of the preserves into the liquid to melt. 

“It would not be unreasonable to say, also, that you were completely helpless in this. Perhaps you simply need to be interacting with the manifestation in a way significant to it. There have been plenty of pieces  written on the subjugation of spirits, again, within the realm of spirituality and belief more often than not. The key, I suppose, is intention. Perhaps old tales of lacing your fists with silver... Well, actually, I do know that there are silvered knuckles somewhere about this town. Otherwise, perhaps another with more ergonomic ability to the situation could help you personally find restitution.”

Unfortunately, cigarettes had been rationed along with everything else, otherwise, she imagined offering one to him.

There’s more people in the Trammel than there have been in his entire time living here, he thinks. The two children, Aysa and Yulia have taken up careful residence here, on the edge of the Gorkhon, comfortably away from the Kains but not in the Earth Quarter proper.

He knocks the snow off his boots when he comes in, carrying a satchel with the remains of his cherry preserves (most of it eaten between him and Peter over the last few days) and the rhubarb ones he’s managed to keep out of his brother’s grasp.

The offer of warm bread is tempting, and he grabs some on his way by to bring to Yulia’s desk and split it with her, setting the preserves between them.

The children trot upstairs, which is good, because he doesn’t have anything really nice to say around them right now. They were still strange anomalies to him that made him question…a lot of things, actually.

“ I’m oh-so-curious as to what you think my issue is this time. Please, enlighten me as to what your brain has conjured up as the Stamatin Situation of the week. ”

He does pull a chair up and refrains from putting his feet on any of her tables. It’s warm in here and he’s…quite tired. He’d like a nap, actually, but later. When he got home and he could curl up and maybe listen to Gray tell more Steppe stories she knew.

"Hmm...”

He shares his food, and it is good food. Yulia scoots her chair back to dig through the bottom drawers of her desk and collect the rest of the two person tea set out. She offers him a teacup and a spoon for leaves, splitting some of the bread he offers with him and spreading preserves out on the slice with the back of her spoon.

“Well... You’ve been substantially hurt in symbolic fashion. You’ve brought food with you because you want to stay for an extended period of time. You seem to still have significant injuries that don’t coordinate with simple bar fights. Yet, this isn’t about the fights. Can you tell me what is bothering you?”

She bites into the bread while crunched over, fishing for her remaining first aid supplies in their loose medic’s bag. That wound on his neck is quite something. She has theories, but they’re personal ones and not for initially polite conversation. Better to let someone explain themselves a few bites into a meal.

It’s snowing outside when he trudges through the Tanners and into the Chine, where the Trammel sits on the corner of the river. He hasn’t been here for a while. He hasn’t been avoiding her, to be fair, but things have been hectic.

More than anything, really, he needed someone who could look at him and tell him he’s being completely insane. He’s still feeling hands on his throat, and the angry red marks on either side (covered by a wrap of gauze around his throat now) tell him exactly that it happened and it definitely happened.

He knocks once, just as a courtesy, before he’s shoving the door open and sighing a little bit at the warmth of the Trammel.

“ Yulia? Hey, I brought food. Can we talk? ”

She’s midway through a sketch at her drafting table, the woodstove pleasantly full of well-burning logs and the thick smell of rich tea and bread a backdrop of pleasant sensation for her and the two tykes that without problem had taken to following simple instructions on misshapen loaves of bread, biscuits, and various treats to eat. They became less mythic around her, and more like children whose trust she’d readily earned. 

And they had a lot of questions with answers that they found morbid and unfortunately cried at.  Aysa had to reassure them that the finality of things was not so scary at the beginning. No they could not go back to Simon’s sandbox because they were hungry, which she appropriately explained was an illusion of physics and they would get hungry regularly. That was simply normal.

So, it had been a learning experience in what not to say to children about hunger. It applied to many things, but the outcomes were more favorable to be truthful to two small quite demihuman beings.

They were eating apple jelly basted biscuits happily tonight though, and skimming through a book of birds to point at and consider where to find them. Aysa was sensibly asleep in the comfort of her own home.

And then the door opens, midway through her sketch, and the cold air teases the stove’s heat off her back.

“Hello Andrey,” she calls around the nooks and crannies, “This could only be about a few select things. Come in.”

And to the children, “Please take your book to your room. This is a conversation for myself and a friend.”

To which, they toddles with their plate and their book, in deep discussion about a bird that they continued into their two level bedroom.

Yulia is quick as always. Capella sometimes wonders why she’s here - she could be solving the mathematical conundrums of the world, and yet… she’s here, in the Town on Ghorkin. But then again, she could wonder the same about the Stamatins, building their impossible structures, or Doctor Dankovsky, who, if his butterfly experiment is to be believed, has already traversed a boundary most people thought impossible to break. Incredible people seem drawn to this town like bees to honey… or flies to a carcass. She’s not sure which it is nowadays. 

“They are nice trees,” she comments offhandedly. “Something besides cobble would be nice… Perhaps once spring comes he might enjoy the dirt roads around the outside of town?”

Does she require anything else of her? Nothing mathematical she thinks as she takes the transcription. She can read note music, and she can play. She can test this when she gets home. She should test this when she gets home. She doens’t want to, because she knows Yulia will be right, and it will be her mother’s song, and that will be another coffin nail in a growing pile. 

Yulia is waiting for an answer.

“…no, nothing else.” Nothing that Yulia can give her, anyway, she thinks. Still…

“What did you think of my father?” she asks, turning back around to face her. “What did you really think of him? Truly?”

“He was a template businessman much like his contemporaries in similar fields. An economist and proponent of the North Line. I don’t have much of an opinion, which is to say, he never surprised me and always played his roles very dutifully.”

She does have a point. Yulia glances to her reconstructed roads. She should indeed begin gathering her crew for it. Many of the Khatangher were kind and in need of good work, and the roads were being repurposed according to the commissioner- a late and dead menkhu and the Stamatins who intended to populate the construction. She should visit them soon. They seemed to be doing much, much better.

“I do think you were asking me for an opinion, positive or negative, but I believe your own perceptions to be as correct as they will be. If you are looking for validation in them, then, I will tell you that his actions were that of a person that does not see others as valuable or necessary. Ultimately flawed logic, as it leaves a person empty.”

She takes the teacup off the desk and sips cold tea.