Milliways

[redintheledger]

Natasha is eighty-three. Old enough to be a grandmother. Old enough to be a great-grandmother, had the mother part had happened at all. Old enough, apparently, to acquire a certain degree of wisdom.

What she is doing at the moment isn't very wise.

She's sitting at the bar in Milliways, studying the bottles stacked up on the shelves. There is some logic: Milliways appeared in her apartment just when she was thinking that she'd really, really love to stop thinking, and it's a bar.

A bar at the end of the universe, where people from all times (like Nataliya Shostakova from 1952, whispers the annoyingly persistent part of her mind that won't let her forget it), so maybe they'd have something that'd get her drunk more easily than vodka.

Unfortunately for Natasha's drive for experimentation, another part of her is pointing out that getting drunk in a strange bar when she is freaked out over her memory is stupid.

But Natasha is eighty-three, and she's very, very tired of being careful when all she wants to do is not think for a few hours.

Comments

[katyafeline]

"Da? Spellwork has never been a strength of mine." She sighs - there's a couple of witches in Moscow that she owes a beatdown that will now never be paid.

[redintheledger]

"You've never noticed how it's changed? Words get...drift-y. They lose their strength in one aspect, and others take their place, or the whole meaning is just lost. Same with powerful ideas. Like angels. Now they are fluffy, and on cards."

[katyafeline]

"Like vampires. Since when are they sexy?" Katya asks plaintively - she just doesn't get fangirls.

[redintheledger]

"Dracula.




And Anne Rice."

1976 had found her living with a horror-fan. She got bored one day.

"It's zombies I don't get."

[katyafeline]

"We don't have many of those - it takes a ridiculous amount of power to reanimate the dead."

She pauses, thinks about that, and knocks back more wine.

"But the movie ones never seemed so difficult to best."

[redintheledger]

"In the movies it's more...death by swarm than anything else."

Throw bodies at obstacle until the obstacle is overrun. Her mouth twists a little, and there is a drink.

At least there hadn't been zombies during the war.

[katyafeline]

"I did not fight in the Great Patriotic War." Katya muses, following that train of thought to its logical end. "The Dark would have gained permission to use a mage of equal strength, and it was not considered good tactics."

No one wanted a Dark brawler loose in the world.

[redintheledger]

"I did," she says, simply. "I was fourteen when they reached my city. Stalingrad."

The city by the Volga, where the Nazis were finally stopped.





Wait.





"The Dark was on the side of the Nazis? The Russian Dark?"

[katyafeline]

"..." Katya pauses, and looks pained. "The lines of the fight between Others did not fall exactly along the lines of the human war."

When two ideals that your side helped create evolve into two nations at war, agents end up scattered between both armies.

[redintheledger]

She contemplates this.








"I'm not asking," she decides.

[katyafeline]

"I spent most of the war tracking down Dark Others who used the fighting as a shield for their own treaty breaking." Katya at that point hadn't really cared where her targets came from - if they overstepped their bounds, they were hers.

She had been a very busy Watchman those years.

"The best one was the Czech Dark Other who came up as a soldier for Russia - he tried to stiff a Russian Dark Other who was working as a prostitute. Their fight took out power for an entire city block, including the Day Watch headquarters. We weren't sure if we should arrest them or give them medals."

[redintheledger]

"Hah," she says. "It even sounds like the war."

Despite the horror, it could be absurd. Surrealist, and dark, and ridiculous.

[katyafeline]

"It certainly was a... different time." Katya agrees, pouring herself more wine and gesturing with the bottle to see if Nat needs a top-off.

"Lots of newly minted Others. Lots of chaos."

[redintheledger]

Natasha huffs a laugh.

"I was a fourteen year old little girl in a uniform. You don't have to tell me about the chaos."

Down another drink goes, and she braces her head in her hand.

"Fourteen, and the war ended when I was seventeen. But look at me. Who would believe that now. Natasha hasn't marched anywhere. Natasha's never fought. Natasha only knows the songs because of her grandparents.

Bah."

[katyafeline]

"No one sings the good songs anymore, just the fluffy crap on the radio. The last good music died with Freddie Mercury." Katya agrees firmly.

She only includes Freddie because... Well. It's him. She still has more than a little bit of a crush on him.

[redintheledger]

Oh, Freddie Mercury.

"I saw him perform live."

[katyafeline]

Katya gasps, and no, it wasn't a little crush. Freddie Mercury was sex on a stick, let's not be vague about it, dayum.

"Really?" There is so much jealousy and longing here. So much.

[redintheledger]

"Really. That man is the most charismatic person I've seen in my life."

Pause.

"Charismatic from the original Ancient Greek, which was sexual grace. And awe-inspiring. And a little terrible. But, he was just..."

She gestures. It's a flaily. But then again, it was Freddie.

[katyafeline]

"He was very, very just." Katya agrees, her accompanying hand gesture expansive and expressive. "You could spend all day just listening to that voice..."

[redintheledger]

"Caaaaaaan anybodyyyyy find meeeee somebody tooooo looooove?" she sings. Her singing voice is much like her speaking - low, throaty - and nothing like Freddie Mercury's at all.

But she's been able to sing along since the song was released, and it shows.

[katyafeline]

Katya needs no further encouragement, she really doesn't. Her pitch is higher than Natasha's, built more for cheerfully happy pop than soulful crooning, but she's never really let that stop her.

"Ooooooh, each morning I get up, I die a little -
Can barely stand on my feet..." She croons, impassioned, to the the neck of the mostly-empty bottle of Atlantean. "Take a look in the mirror and cry - Lord what you're doing to me!"