Natasha R. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
latrodectus) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
logsville2021-02-07 05:34 pm
latrodectus) wrote in logsville2021-02-07 05:34 pm
OPEN
Who: Natasha and You.
When: First week after arrival, before the event.
Where: Around town!
What: Natasha meets the neighbors, goes to the library.
Warnings: N/A, will update if necessary.
A. Guns or Butter
[ Natasha did not grow up with a kindly babuskha watching over her shoulder, telling her how to beat the eggs. Instead, she had dormitory kitchens and field rations, careful portions of second grade wheat flour. What she knew how to make, she'd taught herself.
It is how they explain it in American textbooks: you can have guns or butter. She'd always chosen guns. And takeout. And a glass of wine before bed.
But if there was one lesson her upbringing did teacher, it was that you work with what you have. So one trip to the grocery store, and a stop at the library, and she was making what the recipe assured her were cakes, to bring to her new neighbors.
She delivers them by hand, of course, ringing the doorbell and waiting outside with a smile. That was the point. To meet them, maybe get a look inside their houses, make a perimeter. ]
Hi, I'm Natalie. [ She says, holding the unnaturally colored cake up in her white-gloved hands. It isn't poison. At least, not on purpose. ]
I just moved in.
B. Odyssey
[ She does love books, especially long and sad stories where everything ends neatly, with nothing frayed. But that isn't why she goes to the library. She wants to see the town records for herself. Natasha expects them to be lies, but even the lies people tell reveal the truth they want to be believed.
But there's nothing, nothing from the past ten years, at least. Her eyes scan the shelves, sometimes taking out a book and looking at the publishing date, then hurriedly putting it back. If someone catches her looking, though, she turns to them and whispers: ]
Do you know where the romances are?
C. Lovely Dark and Deep
[ She tries the forest, too, as the sun is just beginning to sink into the depths of the sky. The woods are thick enough that it's easy not to notice, and the light that does shine through is warmer, with the dusk.
It feels like the most lonely spot in this town, and that's almost freeing, in a way. Natasha stops for a moment, leaning on the fence. She takes her hair down.
And then there's a horrible, horrible laugh.
There's another hiker approaching, and she meets their gaze, her own eyes asking the unspoken question: did you hear that? ]
D. Wildcard
[ Natasha is going to be wandering all around town after arrival, trying to case the place out. Feel free to run into her, or have her catch your character doing something unusual. ]
When: First week after arrival, before the event.
Where: Around town!
What: Natasha meets the neighbors, goes to the library.
Warnings: N/A, will update if necessary.
A. Guns or Butter
[ Natasha did not grow up with a kindly babuskha watching over her shoulder, telling her how to beat the eggs. Instead, she had dormitory kitchens and field rations, careful portions of second grade wheat flour. What she knew how to make, she'd taught herself.
It is how they explain it in American textbooks: you can have guns or butter. She'd always chosen guns. And takeout. And a glass of wine before bed.
But if there was one lesson her upbringing did teacher, it was that you work with what you have. So one trip to the grocery store, and a stop at the library, and she was making what the recipe assured her were cakes, to bring to her new neighbors.
She delivers them by hand, of course, ringing the doorbell and waiting outside with a smile. That was the point. To meet them, maybe get a look inside their houses, make a perimeter. ]
Hi, I'm Natalie. [ She says, holding the unnaturally colored cake up in her white-gloved hands. It isn't poison. At least, not on purpose. ]
I just moved in.
B. Odyssey
[ She does love books, especially long and sad stories where everything ends neatly, with nothing frayed. But that isn't why she goes to the library. She wants to see the town records for herself. Natasha expects them to be lies, but even the lies people tell reveal the truth they want to be believed.
But there's nothing, nothing from the past ten years, at least. Her eyes scan the shelves, sometimes taking out a book and looking at the publishing date, then hurriedly putting it back. If someone catches her looking, though, she turns to them and whispers: ]
Do you know where the romances are?
C. Lovely Dark and Deep
[ She tries the forest, too, as the sun is just beginning to sink into the depths of the sky. The woods are thick enough that it's easy not to notice, and the light that does shine through is warmer, with the dusk.
It feels like the most lonely spot in this town, and that's almost freeing, in a way. Natasha stops for a moment, leaning on the fence. She takes her hair down.
And then there's a horrible, horrible laugh.
There's another hiker approaching, and she meets their gaze, her own eyes asking the unspoken question: did you hear that? ]
D. Wildcard
[ Natasha is going to be wandering all around town after arrival, trying to case the place out. Feel free to run into her, or have her catch your character doing something unusual. ]
no subject
But one of Stalyenko's goons wouldn't take her to California. And wouldn't entertain the lie of Natalie Rushman. Maybe he's just toying with her.
She decides to push. Pawns can only move in one direction. ]
Are you going to shoot me?
[ Her voice is not much louder than her breath. She seems small, underneath the bedclothes. Hardly a threat. She wonders if he'll believe that. ]
no subject
So the sentiment is expressed simply and clumsily, filtered through the bottleneck of his proficiency in this shitty language.
He considers for a moment, then slowly walks to the dresser on what was presumably intended to be his 'side' of the room, gun still leveled at the center of her body, and pulls out the first bulky sweater he can find. He tosses it at her feet—it's an ugly brick red and probably slightly too big for her, but it should accomplish its purpose (that is, to add another layer). What she's wearing is nothing compared to the assorted lacy... things the women of the 2000s sleep in, but somewhere behind the stress of a stranger in his home, it still feels decidedly inappropriate to be standing in the same room as an unfamiliar woman in nothing but her pajamas. He can't imagine she's thrilled about it either.
He gestures minutely with the gun, a small movement of the wrist. ]
You can put it on.
no subject
When Yegorovich moves to the drawer, that becomes harder. He definitely has training, she decides; He isn't bluffing, when he says he might shoot her. But the sweater appears at her feet nonetheless— like a pool on the ground, of warm red. She picks it up very carefully. Pulling it over her head, she has to break her gaze. The sweater becomes a tunnel, for a moment, darkness on all sides. But she comes out through the end of it. ]
Thanks. [ A breath. She presses a hand to the bed, now, to stop her palms from shaking. ] Did you— I mean. [ She stops and starts over. ] Did you bring me here? I don't have any money.
[ Natasha tastes her words, but she doesn't feel the tingle of saline, like she would if she'd been drugged. ]
no subject
[ A beat. ]
It is 1961 here.
[ Vasiliy leaves out the fact that it was also 1961 in October. He'll introduce that eventually, once she's gotten her bearings, he decides; all the while, his eyes remain on this "Natalie", assessing her movements, watching for the first sign of a threat. For all he knows, he interrogated this woman, and his own return to the living—and subsequent arrival here—wasn't an isolated incident. The faces are all a blur in his memory with few exceptions, single frames on a long flickering reel projected against the walls of his mind, passing by too quickly to be identified. ]
no subject
Natasha hates time travel.
For a moment she thinks about pretending 1961 is normal. But no, that idea disappears with a blink. He wouldn't tell her this if he didn't think she'd find it strange.
She turns to look at him— he's about her own height, she realizes— and fumbles her next syllables. ]
No. That— It was 2020. I was in New York.
[ God, she hates time travel. ]
cw discussion of ethnic discrimination
[ Mostly. His face doesn't move with the lie; his voice doesn't let a single trace of uncertainty slip through the cracks. He's had a lot of practice with this, with being Vasiliy Yegorovich Ardankin, born January 1985, in a city known as St. Petersburg, not Petrograd. ]
The people here, they do not know that. There are others and they think we have always been here. [ A beat. Not exactly true. He revises that statement. ] Well. They are thinking the Americans have always been here.
[ He knows he doesn't need to finish that sentence. It's 1961 and their idioms fall flat and he doesn't laugh when they expect him to or force smiles when they do or fumble through their language with the same patterns of inflection, and of the acronym WASP, only one descriptor applies to him.
Even that, in the eyes of men like the Americans' Patton and the Britons' Kipling, is disputable. ]
no subject
Instead, she just stares, no longer at him, but on some fixed point behind. There is nothing sharp in her gaze, only shock, or a facsimile thereof. When she speaks, there's a tremor in her voice. ]
How long have you been here?
[ Months? A year? ]
no subject
[ Judging by the look on her face, the horror of the situation is seeping in. But presumably—presumably, she has some familiar place to find her way back to, even if it's on the other side of the country, and she won't be killed shortly after setting foot there. There's an escape for her.
The thought brings about a familiar ache in his chest, a hollowness in his ribcage he's been feeling more and more with every passing day here. Vasiliy stifles the feeling; it's important to remain focused, especially now, as muscular fatigue finally starts to set into the muscles that have been supporting his right arm and keeping the gun level.
He bends his elbow and returns his upper arm to his side with an immediate feeling of relief, wrist and elbow bending as a pair to ensure the potential trajectory of its bullets never diverges from the reddish brown sweater. ]