firewatcher | [psl] 2015: Crawl 'til dawn, on our hands and knees

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[psl] 2015: Crawl 'til dawn, on our hands and knees

The end of the first night of the rest of her terrible garbage life saw Palmer in a situation she never imagined possible: in the first all-night diner she could find, sitting across the table from Vera Volkov, back from the dead.

Or—Liv Lazzari, now, wasn't it.

That was going to take some getting used to. That, and the fact that despite the drastic changes to her appearance, Vera—Liv—still didn't look a day older than when Palmer had seen her last, over twenty years ago. Not worth the price of admission, in Palmer's mind, but it felt a little unfair. Palmers tended to start showing age early, and she herself was no exception.

Palmer leaned on the slightly sticky table with one elbow, absentmindedly stirring her coffee with the other hand and biting back a yawn. "Is every night in hell this eventful?"

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Hell was apt enough; Vera hadn't actually considered the possibility that this shit life could get shittier. Served her right for underestimating Maria.

She sunk deep into the plastic-y fake leather of the booth cushion, her hand pressed over her eyes. Hard to say whether that was more about not looking at Maria or just hiding her face (too little too late). Maybe both. Both was good.

"Well, the execution is standard enough." Her voice came out a little hoarse, a little raw. Shame it'd been so close to sun-up; she felt like she had a lot more screaming left in her, and Buckley was just the tip of that iceberg. "The Psu'ho-wurv exploding himself into some kind of fucking demon ...and you... not so much."

She shifted her hand to peer at Maria through parted fingers, her expression somewhere between venomous and exhausted.

"So yeah. Welcome to the god-damned party." Her lip quirked very slightly at her own joke.

"Ha ha." Palmer didn't smile, and picked up her mug to take a large gulp of her coffee. "What an exciting time for this all to happen. I should have expected to be so unlucky. Пришла беда — отворяй ворота."

She ran a hand backwards through her hair. "What a fucking nightmare. Only my nightmares don't even get this creative." Mostly they were just a replay of the past, over and over and fucking over. "Believe me, I'm not expecting things to go up from here."

"Honestly, Lieutenant Palmer" —and there was no small amount of bitterness in that inflection— "it's really not clear to me what direction you thought things would be going from here, showing your face and spooking them with that stunt with the ashes."

Vera shoved herself forward out of her slouch to lean her forearms against the table, still sporting the glare.

She switched to Russian. "Your accent is shit, by the way—you're out of practice." There was a pause, almost awkward, and she broke eye contact, jerking her head sideways to study her fingernails. "...I guess I can't really blame you for that one."

"Yeah. Hard to keep the accent right when I've run out of native speakers to practice with, you know. Can't exactly hit up the Abramoviches for a little friendly conversation."

Palmer shrugged, and switched back to English. "Honestly, that could have gone a lot worse. I was expecting to have to do some haggling." That she hadn't needed to offer anything in return for Amity's acknowledgment was way better than she'd hoped, even if that represented one hell of a low bar in her expectations. "And for God's sake, just call me Palmer. I'm not on duty."

"Not Maria, then? —Or, you used to love it when I called you Masha."

She had two decades of bitterness to tap into; really, she was just getting started.

Palmer raised an eyebrow. "Sorry, should I stop calling you Liv, then? Verochka?" The pet name, at least, still rolls off her tongue with ease after all these years. Then again, maybe it would have been better if it didn't.

She sighed, though, and shook her head. "No one calls me Maria anymore. Not for a long time."

Vera had looked about ready to spit; ready, maybe, to throw a punch, all tensed up like a dog gone feral. Then she sighed and leaned back in her seat again, staring out the window towards the orange glow on the horizon.

"...Not since Andy, I'd guess." She looked back at Maria. "And honestly...Palmer...I almost think I'd prefer it if you called me Vera. Not in front of them, just..."

And then she lost her nerve once more, her eyes back at her hands, nails digging into her arms. "This whole thing is enough of a sick joke without having to listen to you fake it too."

"Yeah. Not since Andy." She looked away, too, to stare out the window at the brightening sky, chewing slightly on her lower lip. "But... sure, if you want me to. Comes more naturally, anyway. Though at least the alliteration makes the new name easier to remember."

She looked back at Vera, her face mildly skeptical. "Liv, though? Really? Was that your choice? Kind of on the nose, isn't it."

Vera grimaced slightly, and shrugged.

"Hey, the alliteration is traditional. I had to keep—" But she'd miscalculated that particular emotional direction; her voice caught. "—something, didn't I."

When she looked back at Maria, her eyes were already narrowed, back on the defensive. "Anyway, Kitty picked it out for me. I like it." It maybe came out a touch too insistent.

Palmer managed to only wince a little at the mention of Kitty, and bit back the crack that sprang to mind (Don't you mean Katya? Or do you only call her that in private?). She could understand wanting to hold onto something of the past, maybe, since in the end wanting Vera to stay won out over taking highly personal potshots.

"Yeah, Kitty Hawk, real peach. Of course she picked it out. A woman of many talents." Keeping the venom out of her voice just made her sound exhausted. Good enough. "Got a lot going for her, aside from being a huge bitch who needs to keep her nose out of my business." Okay, maybe that defeated the point, but.

The shift in body language was immediate: from an exhausted slouch to leaning as far forward as she could, her right hand gripping the edge of the table, her left making an accusatory jab.

"Fuck off, Masha." She had switched back to Russian, her voice elevating as she did so. "You know nothing about it. Of course Katya would look into you."

And there it was, all on its own; Maria hadn't even needed to reference the pet name directly. "You've got a lot of fucking nerve, saying that. Maybe it's just what she had to do to keep us safe, хорошо? Don't be so smug."

"Maybe, maybe not, how the fuck do I know, Vera? Safe from what? From me? You could have just told me you found someone else, you know."

Palmer slammed her arm down on the table, rattling the cutlery and startling a passing waitress, and leaned in to match Vera's posture, looking her right in the eye. "And maybe I'd be a little less pissed off about the bloodsuckers if I didn't think for two decades that they'd killed you."

She placed her other hand on the table, as if to push herself up to leave, but didn't yet, not breaking eye contact.

"Oh, no you don't." It was a deliberate echo of Palmer's words to her earlier in this too-long night, when she'd made her own last-ditch attempt to pretend all this wasn't happening.

The waitress recovered, then studiously ignored them.

"You don't say that to me like you know what the fuck this has been like. You don't lump her in with the rest of them."

She made a grab for Maria's left wrist—the hand with her wedding band. "And you don't try to play this like I'm the one who moved on. Twenty goddamn years of hell—"

Edited 2015-10-13 15:40 (UTC)

"Make up your goddamn mind," Palmer snarled, slapping Vera's hand away. "You never want to see me again, but I'm the one not allowed to move on? If you'd come back, I would have—"

She stopped, looked away, switched back to English. "I don't know. You act like I've been having the time of my life, which isn't something I'd caption 'getting widowed at thirty with two small kids' with. For someone who's literally been stalking me, you really don't seem to get what my life's been like."

After a moment, she settled back down into her seat, but didn't lean back. "What the hell's so great about Kitty Hawk that it makes twenty years of hell worth it?"

She'd seemed ready for that, moving her hand back from the slap with speed that just exceeded natural. Or maybe she really had simply expected the reaction—already prepared to snarl back.

And then Palmer went on, and the tension broke. Vera's shoulders dropped, and she dragged a hand across her face; Palmer wasn't the only one running on too little sleep.

She neither met her eyes nor switched back to English, but her voice was quieter now. "You know, you really don't realize how good you've got it, Palmer. People were always going to die doing this. That was it—that was the life. It's just that you're the only one good enough to be left standing. Katya kept me...safe. But it wasn't about her. I just thought...the least I could do for you was keep you out of it."

Vera let herself collapse back into the booth then, too. "You're welcome for that."

Palmer rubbed her temples, switching back to Russian. Might as well get practice in. "Not sure it's a question of 'good enough.' I'm not that old, I still have a chance to go out the old-fashioned Palmer way." Returning on her shield, so to speak. She gave a brief, mirthless chuckle. "The problem with being the last one left standing is that, well—what's the point when you run out of people to protect, you know?"

She did finally relax a little, sitting back in the booth in a slouch. "And, of course, everyone's good work undone by a total idiot that none of us ever saw coming. Good job, all of us."

"Well, you can rest assured that you're never going to run out of monsters.
"So. There's that."

She leaned her elbows against the table and let herself look Palmer in the eyes again, her eyebrows raised. "I wish I had been there to help you slice off his cock and watch him choke on its ashes, and to feed the rest of him a piece at a time to the sun."

There was no particular venom in that description—only a matter-of-fact blend of brutal practicality and simple exhaustion.

"This, this I missed." Palmer smiled wanly. "Appreciate the sentiment. If only I hadn't been pressed for time, it would have been a lot more satisfying."

The smile turned to a toothy grin. "You know, I told him I might let him live if he knew who killed the Volkovs? Of course, he tried to feed me an obvious lie. Not that he was getting out of there anyway, but you'd think he'd have tried just a little harder."

Vera's smile was slow, crooked, a little vicious. (Or maybe this had always been her smile, and the passage of time had only distilled those qualities in it.)

She was midway to what might have even been a full grin of her own when Palmer mentioned Volkovs. And then her face froze in something less like a smile than it was a wince.

"—Oh?" Relaxing a bit (likely some inner self-reassuring dialogue, there), she went on. "What was it? Had to have been really something for you to be joking about it."

"Well, for one thing, it included Danielle Remington," Palmer said, rolling her eyes—although she paused for a second at Vera's wince. Well, it wasn't as if she herself liked talking about the way her own parents went out. "Which automatically rendered the entire thing bullshit, honestly. For one thing, I still have a copy of her patrol log from that night."

She shrugged. "Didn't expect to be getting some surprise answers to some of my outstanding questions within the next twenty-four hours. Like why I was never able to find the medallion, for one thing." Palmer jerked a thumb at the necklace in question, still around Vera's neck.

Vera scoffed. "I still can't fucking believe that—" She paused; switched again to Russian. "—That you trust a leech like her to follow orders. Much less follow them enough to keep a trustworthy patrol log. As if anyone's fucking report of that night would have had anything about it, anyway." There was a hardness to the words—a mix of bitterness and certainty.

Her fingers went to the medallion when Palmer gestured to it, a motion that had the convenient double effect of holding close and concealing, and she dropped her gaze to the table.

"And the necklace... yeah, it'd have been smarter to leave it behind. I don't know, maybe I just wanted her to see me wear it..."

She looked up. "But this is shit to talk about, so let's fucking not."

"Well, I wouldn't say trustworthy so much as predictable. They're really different things." For one thing, one had a lot more sentimentality to it—the kind Palmer really didn't let herself budget for these days. "But—"

She looked like she wanted to press on that a bit more, but, after giving Vera one long, curious look, instead took another sip of coffee. "Sure. I'm sure it is. Let's change the subject. What's a good topic? People we mutually hate? There must be a lot of overlap. How do you feel about Augustus Cole? The priesty one."

She met Palmer's gaze evenly, eyes slightly narrowed, daring her to pick a fight. (Sure, Maria, give the woman who survived her family's massacre a hard time. It's a real good look.)

"What, the king's—" (she provided air quotes) "—brother's spawn? The whole lineage is revolting, except maybe Mercy, who's instead got the mistaken impression that acting like a mouse makes them any less a monster than the rest. What about him? Did he try to impress you with the leech take on witch shit?"

[ link for STs: here; note image title/description below for explanation ]

"Nah, never actually had the misfortune of meeting the guy," Palmer said. "I think the rest of them I've at least seen; color me unimpressed, though you could probably guess that. My official position on Mercy Cole is that anyone trying that hard to appear that harmless and above-board is seriously overcompensating for something terrible. But—I digress."

She gestured with her coffee cup. "Anyway, one hears things. And what I'm hearing—" She switched into Russian: "Is that Augustus Cole has a long trail of bodies behind him."

Vera's brows lifted skeptically.

"Don't they all? There's a reason we always said they were the ones that mattered most to kill."

She paused, then recrossed her legs and leaned in on an elbow, but kept her focus out the window at the sunrise, deliberately casual. The volume of her voice dropped very slightly. "So what makes him special--how many bodies does it take to shock even you? ...And what kind of source do you have on this? Not your... family... or they'd have told us by now." At this last, she glanced back over her shoulder at Palmer. Little need to guess who she meant by "us."

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sorry, we are trying to advance a scene and here I am picking a fight

it's what these characters do best tbh

"I'm the best at what I do..."

"...and what I do is think about my mistakes."

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