#formvoidseries

He comes to a halt at the edge of a clearing in the woods. His heart seizes up, claws its way toward his throat, wedges itself in the part of his brain that pleads in silent no no no with the sight before him. His hand finds his weapon seconds after. He raises it, more in warning than in any form of retaliation, and hisses out the ache that settles in the burns on his skin.

“Get away from him.”

He knows Manny is dead. There’s a pallor to his skin that’s never been there before – not on Manny, whose tanned skin survives even the toughest winters – and the man is eerily silent. Manny’s loud in the way all his friends are. He’s never quiet for long. He’s not the type to play a prank this fucking cruel, either, not when life is already so uncertain and so many things come to an end.

Manny’s dead. The woman kneeling beside him certainly is not.

“I said,” he repeats, voice stronger and louder now, “get away from him.”

She raises her head and tilts it slowly. Dark, near-black eyes meet his gaze. A smile curves around her bloodied mouth a moment. It creases the dirt and white scars upon her skin fleetingly, so swiftly that he thinks he has imagined it. The set of her mouth hardens into something akin to cruelty the longer he looks at her. Her eyes burn. Her eyes don’t release him.

He gasps out a breath. Coughs as his lungs constrict in warning. His weapon shakes as his hand begins to tremble.

“Don’t make me,” he rasps out between one breath and the next, desperate for air as much as he is for this fight, “put a bullet between your eyes.”

Her laughter rings out in the clearing. He hears the rustle of feathers overhead, though the rest of the forest seems to go utterly silent at the sound of her voice. There’s something of honey and molasses in the sound of her amusement, thick and syrupy in a way that clings to skin and throat, but there’s something darker in the lower notes that makes him shudder.

“Brave, aren’t you?”

He takes a step back at that. There’s too much approval in her voice. Too much warmth, heat, fire in her gaze. He almost thinks to turn away altogether, but Manny’s still at her feet as she rises to face him. Manny’s body lies on the ground between them. He will not leave his friend to a god so cruel. To one so capricious, which this one seems to be.

Her laughter dies abruptly. There’s a chill in the air.

“If you’re going to shoot me, caro,” she says, caressing the Italian pet name in a way that makes him shiver, “you’d better be quick about it. Do you think yourself faster than me?”

The shadows in the forest blur. Her form blurs a moment, too, and the dark wraps around her as the golden light fades from the trees. He snarls out what could be a warning – would be a warning, again, because he was raised to not raise a hand against a woman like that at all – and then finds his back against the tree and her body pressed up against his.

He lowers his weapon. Drops it to the floor. Thinks he sees disappointment in her eyes, those dark cruel hard searing burning eyes, and almost laughs a challenge into her ear to tell her you didn’t get to me just yet.

“Are all gods like you? So quick to show off?”

“Some.”

She smiles a hunter’s smile. Gazes at him as though he’s a mouse she’s going to catch and release half a dozen times before she eats him. He bares his teeth at the thought. He will not comply. He will not be taken, not like this, not by any god and least of all by her, and he doesn’t need a weapon to get that point across.

His hand wraps around her throat. Squeezes. Squeezes tighter than he would if she were human, if she were anything but the destructive god who caused the world to bend to her whims and wants. His nails dig into her skin hard enough to draw blood.

“I’m not faster,” he breathes, “but I’ll rip you apart if you pull that trick on me again.”

“You’ll try.” Her laugh, though rasping, is too delighted by far. Her voice drops into a purr even when his grip turns firmer still. “I like that about you, John.”

This city isn’t hers, but it might as well be. Who else remains here but she, allowing the rats to swarm her feet without screeching about it the way she might’ve done in some other life? (Where the sun was not a traitor and Sasha’s smile was not a photograph.) Who else draws breath in this city between one shelling and the next, between one shot and the other, between the tank that cannot move its turret and the carcasses of good intentions? (She’s not alone. There are others here. Sometimes, the streets ring out with song before the silence comes and chokes the air from her lungs.)

It doesn’t feel like it’s hers to keep. They fight for every room in every house. They fight for every street corner. For every alleyway. For every access point below the city, for every vantage point above it, for every route to the water that does not end with blood. They’re losing, they must be, because she’s in new rooms every time she blinks and she’s forgotten the taste of crystal clear water by now. (And they’re not losing, they’re not, because Katya’s exhale is sharp in the morning air and not a single bullet goes to waste. They’re not losing, they can’t, because Sergey moves rock and root to clear their path and then obstructs the way for those who’re following them. They are not losing this city, not while they are here, not while they share whatever food they find and rig the remains to be a trap for the hungry that come after they’ve gone.)

Lately, she’s been functioning on a breath and a prayer.

She’s tried to curb the latter. Tried to stomp it out, to quench its finicky flame, because there’s not a whole lot that gets done with prayer at all. Whatever she’s doing to it – protect us, she snarls, let us live – probably would be classified as demand instead of prayer. She bares her teeth the way wolves do, snap and lock around the panic of inhale-exhale, and offers her throat to the unseen and unheard. May you take me if you think me coward, she seethes, opening her enemy from sternum to throat just like the rabbits Kolya used to skin, but you owe me this fucking city and its fucking peace at this point.

She does not believe in bargaining chips. Does not buy into a truce, or a standoff, or any of the other things they call when they’re all too exhausted and night comes with too swift a foot. She doesn’t think she can cut a deal with a god at all, but there’s only so many breaths she’s got before the panic hits. (She knows it’s that. Can feel the fear of it tremble in her fingertips as she wrenches her knife free. Can feel the huff and puff of it in her lungs, too quick, too constricting. She doesn’t look at the glazed-over eyes of the dead and dying. Can’t meet them, not with the wellspring in the back of her mind that dares her to look and see come and see hear the squalling babe’s cry thunk boom splash –)

She’s alone now, or as alone as someone can be when they know exactly where their allies are and the crudely-drawn map before her tells her more of the story than she’d cared to know. There’s just her in this room, in this fucking cavern the enemy created for itself from the rubble of her houses in her city, and her throat’s parched with a scream that renders her belly full to bursting. (There have been rats here, too, and they’ve eaten and eaten and feasted long before her boots crushed the bones underfoot.)

She’s alone and her breath won’t leave her lungs.

Her hand bleeds around the rock she used to break through the glass casings. (Who puts glass casings in a war? Who makes the glass survive the shatter-bang of bullets?) There’s red drip-dropping onto the parchment, onto the paper and vellum and all the other things they used to tell stories on. Some of her strength is bleeding out of her as she stares at lines she does not understand, as a language she only knows to speak in garbled wartongue glares up at her from note after note.

There’s her tongue here, too, older than their scraps of paper. And thus it came to pass, she squints in the dim light, that the ancients revealed themselves from sea and mountain, hungering in the passageways…

“Fuck that,” she rasps out, recognizing the myth for what it is. Tucks the offending parchment in the same pouch where she keeps her gunpowder. If it survives, it will pass to Kolya who alone knows the chaos that resides within such matter. “Ghost stories. Fairytales. Sad lies to tell our children.”

There’s anger in her belly, coarse and seething, which twists in her lap like a viper’s pit and gleams darkly whenever she allows it to meet a semblance of light. Where will they reveal themselves now that this city is about to fall?

She blinks at the dark that sweeps into her space. Stares at the night that unfolds from the corners of the room, where the dead have met the living earth, and scatters all the light away from itself. There’s dirt in its scent, heavy with muck and grime and something utterly deathless that makes her drop her stone onto the floor. There are shards of dust in her wound that begin to bite and snap at her skin like the embers of a wildfire. Like termites eating their own. There’s ash on her tongue.

She blinks at the dark. The dark blinks back.

“Here,” it says. They say, for they are many. He says, for he is just one man. “Here will I reveal myself.”

“Vyyti, uyti,” she snarls back, voice cracking on the demand of get out, leave. Her eyes widen in a refusal to close for the encroaching dark. “You are not welcome.”

His head tilts. His eyes carry pinpricks of light that should not be warm, except they are and he must think her stupid if he thinks she will follow that. (There is no safety in the light. The light gets you killed. Fire murders, hope dies, the flicker of a flame is only good when attached to something that can raze the enemy to the ground. These things she knows. These things she has learned. She will not follow.)

“You called for me.”

He makes it sound simple. She doesn’t think it is. She huffs. Rolls her eyes for good measure. Tastes the iron twang of blood on her tongue when her head meets the stone wall behind her and she bites down on her lip to stop the dark from changing the colors around her to endless black.

“Any god, any relief,” she spits out, aiming the blood at him despite the gap between them. “Anything that lets me live.” Her laughter is sharp, biting, barking like that of the rabid dogs that have overtaken the river’s second bank. “You must be something desperate, nyet?”

“Not quite.”

Her eyebrow raises. “Everyone here is.”

“I am not everyone.”

“You are here, also,” she points out, rising to her feet soon after. The bones snap and crunch beneath her heel. “Desperate,” she hisses, viper’s venom coating her tongue in earnest now, “tricky, false. Preying on dead and dying, look at you, shadow to hopelessness. What kind of god is that, hm? What are you?”

“I thought you do not believe in gods, Tatiana Ilyinichna.”

“So did I.”

(And she doesn’t, still, though she’s seen the shining ones amid the enemy. She doesn’t, still, though this creature before her speaks her name like a caress and she has not given him such privilege. She doesn’t, still, because to believe is to know the war is lost.)

“I am here,” he says again.

“Congratulations. Now leave.”

“Not…”

“Not…?”

She stares him down, this man with darkness flitting around him, this creature with eyes like midnight, this abomination dressed in a soldier’s garb. Her blood drips from her hand. She’s certain at least one other wound reopened. The burns she sustained from that ill-fated run-in with that tank itch and scrape against her uniform. The hair on the back of her neck stands upright the longer she looks at him. Raises against her as though she were a cat being stroked wrong, as though it means to warn her.

Her sense of danger fled this city long ago. There is just fear now, stark in this room, stark everywhere she walks, and there’s the act of doing.

She walks up to this one, whom all the vellums around her call a god, and aims for its throat.

“There you are,” he says, from beside her this time, because her fist meets air and he moves the way shadows do before the midday sun eats them whole. “There is your fight.”

There’s hunger there, ravenous in the familiar syllables that flood his tongue and coat her language with something utterly foreign, and something that she thinks would’ve sounded like pride if Kolya or Sasha had spoken it. (Kolya never speaks these days. Sasha cannot speak, though she thinks she used to hear his voice in the trees before they burned too.)

“Fuck you,” she replies conversationally, turning and balling her fist anew. “I am not yours to judge.”

“No, you are not. You are mine to want.”

She steps back. Snaps like an animal that knows it is about to be wounded. “Gods don’t want. They take.”

“So let me,” he responds, smile gleaming like hers did in the mirror before she watched herself kill five grown men and a sniveling boy. “Let me take.”

“I do not even know what you are.”

“Don’t you? You, who sung me to life the moment you could speak? You, who took three pills every day to be rid of me?”

“I will eat them as soon as I find them,” she promises. Her voice does not waver, though of course she knows. She knows him. Knows this dark as well as she knows the sound of her own pulse. “You will fall back into shadow. You will not be in me.”

“I expect no less from you, Tatusha.”

“Do not speak that name!”

“Tatiana,” he corrects, so smoothly it is as though he has never uttered Sasha’s name for her at all. “I know your choices. It will only be for this time. For this battle, such as it is.”

“We are losing. I am losing my city.”

He inclines his head. “For now.”

“And you can change it?”

“No.” A beat. An offered hand. “You can. If you are, ah, something desperate.”

He sings in her blood. The dark swallows her, drapes itself around her shoulders like a second coat, turns and enters her wounds until she gasps and her hand jerks upward of its own volition. There’s nothing else to be in this world but desperate. There’s nothing else that remains of her, such as the fear is, such as her heart is also.

Something desperate.

Her hand closes around his. Around theirs. Around hers.

“Good,” says the dark-eyed woman with a voice that sounds like the rush of wings. “Let us begin.”

(Two years and some time to this day, she finally meets the man. He is tall like most of these Americans are, though far more unsmiling than those he is surrounded by, and he fills the room before she turns to greet him. His too-dark eyes barely linger on the patches of blood that still coat her uniform, nor does he seem surprised by the state of her boots or the absence of most of her hair. There’s something of her in the grace of his movements.

“He still has that thing?”

“Yeah. Hester keeps crossing names off it,” smiles Dick. “Says it’s a liability if the enemy gets its hands on a full roster of god-chosen, even when we know half of theirs already.”

“Propaganda, thy name is convenience.” Nix reaches down to his belt. Unscrews his canteen thoughtfully, then sniffs at its contents. The small and rather measured sip he takes from it tells Dick he needs to shake his head when it’s offered to him, which he does moments later. “Someone ought to tell Speirs that Strayer keeps a roster of all god-chosen. See how fast that thing disappears.”

“Or how fast Strayer does.”

Nix’s laugh contains a hint of surprise at Dick’s wry words. He quirks a smile in turn, confident as he is by now that Nix will take anything said between them to the grave. The dark-haired and even darker-eyed man may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but Dick doesn’t quite think he’ll ever get over the fact that Nix refused to jump through any society-made hoops unless Dick got to jump through the same ones too. It’s always ever been about one look passing between them. One glance to know they are on the same page and destined to stay there.

“Shame we don’t have a Storm-chosen. You’d think” – says Nix, undeterred by Dick’s discontented groan at the conversation not moving on from this point – “that they would have wanted one on board. All thunder and lightning. Could blow the Germans straight back to Berlin.”

“Rumor has it that’s what those Soviet pilots are.”

“What, Storm-chosen? Huh.” Light flickers in Nix’s eyes as he turns to face Dick. He’s frowning outright, now, and his hand plays with one of his uniform straps before he balls it into a fist. “I thought the Soviets didn’t like our kind? They suppress us, chain us, and now they use us at their convenience?”

“Historically–”

“We’ve had worse.” Nix finishes his sentence. Shrugs. “Doesn’t mean I am used to it. Don’t think you can get used to it. No matter how many stories you hear about suppression. About our people dying at the hands of non-chosen.”

“Nix..”

“I know, I know. Us versus them is bad, even coming from me.”

“Especially coming from you,” hums a new voice, crystalline and soothing, as the haze of darkness around them flickers with bright iridescence. With its presence, as always, comes that age-old feeling of having been caught stuffing one’s hand into the cookie jar. It’s only a small mercy that the admonishment, when it comes, is not directed at Dick at all. “I taught you better, Lewis.”

Nix’s smile is that of a fox’s mischief. “You also taught me to not go looking for trouble.”

“And?” comes the swift demand.

“It’s not my fault trouble usually finds me.”

She flutters into being between them. Takes up residence in the small space between them as though she is the glue that binds them together. Dick has often wondered at it, in those early days of knowing Lewis Nixon, because men like Nix don’t play nice with men like him. All they do is take, or so his father would say, and Dick hadn’t known how to disagree prior to meeting her.

Wisdom.

He’d asked for it. Asked for her, specifically, down in the Shepherd’s Church where one asked for such impossibilities on one’s bare knees and expected no answer. I’m off to war, he’d whispered to a golden-hued effigy, thinking it ridiculous that only a quarter of all gods even had a thing such as that to pray to. I don’t ask this for myself, but for the men I will serve with. Help us. Help me help them.

And there she had perched, atop the window seat opposite his on a train, with her golden curls all in disarray and her eyes piercingly steady, and he’d felt the air rush out of him the same way it’d rushed out of him when he laid eyes on Nix after. The same way he’d felt when he..

“Dick.” Wisdom’s head tilts as he swallows the thought. He refuses to meet her too-knowing eyes. “Are you ready for what follows?”

Which part?

He almost asks the question, though he halts himself when Nix murmurs the same on her other side. Her mouth quirks into a smile at the challenge.

“Much do I know, and more can see,” she says, lilting into the cadence of poetry he’s never learned at her feet, “of the fate of the gods.”

“Is that what hangs in the balance here?” He shakes his head. Tries to recall how many god-chosen litter their army’s ranks, how many more are on suppressants so strong that it would take a miracle for their god to connect with them, how many more will be chosen once the thrum of the earth rolls underfoot. “Some divine battle, like..”

Like Joan had claimed with too-bright eyes, once, before she could school her features. Like she’d whispered, steady beside him as he watched Easy slip and fall but not break under Sobel. Like they had agreed, earlier, standing beneath a darkening sky with no jump tonight. Divine hands, divine eyes, and no one he’d rather tumble into war alongside.

Wisdom’s laughter turns challenging. “All battles are sacred things. Would you yet know more?”

“The evil that men do lives after them,” refutes Nix, with a wry smile piercing his citation. “The good is oft interred with their bones.”

“Doesn’t mean we should not try and live well,” responds Dick evenly. Joan had thought so. Had hummed it once, low and knowing, before she’d turned to Gordon and Shapiro and broken the spell. “We’re jumping tomorrow night. There’s no room for death.”

I won’t allow it. The thought had been so stark in her mind. So clear that he’d caught it, long before she’d ever speak it aloud. I won’t allow death to come.

“You cannot stave it off,” his god warns with furrowed brow.

“I know. But who am I if I don’t try?”

“Knight, shining armor,” quips Nix, with raised canteen and a spark in his eyes Dick knows is mirrored in his own. “I do not fear men-at-arms; my way has been made plain before me.”

“Sun Tzu?”

Nix’s grin is almost feral in the haze. “A saint, actually. Jeanne d’Arc.”

“Jehanne.”

Katya is one of the Soviet soldiers in my big project and the role she fulfills in that one is very similar to the one she takes on here. She is the bridge-builder, the mediator, the open and curious one who talks a mile a minute and is genuinely interested in what other people have to say. Katya loves life and almost everyone in it, no matter which story I place her in, and she’s not scared to say how she feels. There’s a disarming sort of bluntness to her that can often be hilarious, and she gets to the point very fast in conversation because of that quality. Katya says how she feels at the moment she feels it, even when it renders her vulnerable, and that’s something on display here.. especially when you realize she only just met Tab.

These two, in any universe, are the love-at-first-sight ship. In their canon version, Katya jumps out of a tree right in front of him and brightly introduces herself.. after which she proceeds to ask Tab a gazillion questions about himself, his friends, his family, his home, etc. Tab is a little taken aback mostly because normally he is the one talking and asking questions, and he’s doggedly pushing back at her before long with questions of his own about her. There’s an instant-vibe of them being a little similar in their people-person ways and their flirtations, which in canon serves as a contrast to the very frosty meeting going on between their respective captains.

“You Americans are very strange, yes?” is a bit of a running gag in the canon version that gets used primarily by Katya’s captain, Petrova, in horrified-surprised-dismayed-resigned-amused fashion against captain Speirs. Tab’s response, here, is close to Speirs’s own “you Soviets are very odd”-observation that inevitably pops up from time to time as well. Petrova and Speirs have a very complex relationship to navigate in comparison to the one Tab and Katya jump into, and the relationship between Tab and Katya serves as a narrative foil to that main relationship in that respect.