riverviewlogs | [open And we keep waiting to be seen, right?

Entry tags:

[open And we keep waiting to be seen, right?

who: Illya Kuryakin & you
what: just a general catch-all
when: End of April and beginning of May
where: around the city shopping, gym
warnings: will add if needed

1; around

Illya doesn’t get out much.

It’s not being in a strange place, in a strange world full of strange people with futuristic technology. Or… rather, even though he has to admit that’s kind of getting under the skin, it’s not just that. He’s just used to keeping to himself, to doing things on his own and only relying on his boss to give him his orders and trust Illya will know what to do.

In here it’s different. In here he doesn’t have to hide, doesn’t have to keep in the shadows and become a shadow himself. In here he can get out and try to be a normal person. Or at least do his best to look like one, since the most people know about him is a fake name and his claims that he was a rowboat champion before he ended up in this place.

So there’s probably something… calming, in just doing normal things. Grocery shopping, checking out nearby libraries, just stopping at a park and watching the animals go by. It may seem boring to most people, but to Illya is kind of refreshing to be able to do all of this without a weight on his shoulders. He figures it will get boring eventually, but for now he enjoys his newfound freedom.

Enjoying it so much he doesn’t even notice the orange firefly circling him.

2; gym

It does get boring eventually, even with all the shenanigans going around.

Illya is used to physical exertion, to being active and working out as much as he can, as much as he’s healthy. Back home he needed his body to be in peak condition, to be able to fulfill every mission as fast as efficiently as possible. Most of them ended up with him running away or towards something, after all. But in here his job, while more interesting than what he had assumed when it had been assigned to him, doesn’t require much more than a inquisitive mind and knowing where to look, what questions to ask.

He really misses the exertion. So after asking around and getting some advice he’s finally decided to join a nearby gym.

He can be seen running himself ragged on the treadmill, doing weights or basically using every single machine he can find his hands on. Yay technology. Obviously not all on the same day, he’s stubborn but not suicidal… but someone should probably tell him to slow down.

3: OPEN option! Go wild. Poke me on DM or over at

crotalus if you want a specific thread!

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[Illya is scratching the bite of the firefly on his arm, glaring at it like it’s personally guilty of all the problems in Illya’s life. Which, technically that’s not all that far from the truth. He would have stayed away from them if he had been warned of what they were able to, he’d have worn longer sleeves and made sure to stay inside unless absolutely necessary. The fireflies glow, so it’s not like he couldn’t have seen them coming if he had wanted to.

But instead, he let one of them bite him- the orange one, probably (in Illya’s opinion) the worst one he could have been bitten by. He already feels the compulsion, the… need to open up. It’s not a familiar feeling. It’s definitely not a feeling he wants to feel again in the future.

Which is why he’s all but running to the lift, ready to get into his floor and hole up in his room- when someone else rushes in right as the doors were going to start to close.]

Natasha ducks into the elevator right before the doors slip closed. She's just come off shift, she's tired, she's hungry, and she desperately wants a shower. "Thanks," she says with a nod. The man in the elevator with her looks anxious. She's clearly had this job for too long, because even though she doesn't want to care, she still asks: "Are you all right? Do you need--" Her sentence cuts off with a sharp his, and she smacks the side of her neck, bringing her hand down to stare at the squashed bug on her palm. "Shit. Did you see what colour it was?"

“No.”

He’s quick to reply because it’s the truth, and right now telling her the truth and being honest feels like the most important thing in the world. Like he’s overflowing with information that needs to be shared, like letting everyone know everything about himself has become his number one priority. Like his usual paranoia has is fighting for control of his own brain.

“But it was probably orange.” She shows her his arm. “I was just bitten.”

Orange. Shit. Orange is bad. Orange is, from Natasha's point of view, perhaps the worst possible bug to be bitten by. Mostly because there is so much she wants to say, so much she wants to share with a found family that she no longer has, and she's not sure how to deal with any of it. She'd much rather the bug that makes you want to beat the living hell out of everyone who crosses your path.

The elevator jerks into motion, but her eyes don't leave Illya. She takes a deep breath, opens her mouth, and feels entirely incapable of stopping the flood of words that spew forth in place of her intended introduction. "I'm pretty certain that I'm beating my head against the wall here fighting to get back to a world that is never going to have a place for me again."

Orange.

Shit.

She screws her mouth up into a displeased frown, shifts her attention to the panel of buttons on the elevator, and pulls on the emergency stop. The elevator car jerks to an immediate standstill, and Natasha continues to glare at the panel of buttons rather than look at the man she's just trapped herself with. No way in hell is she putting herself in direct line of god knows who in these communal floors while she's feeling the intense urge to word vomit at random. If she's going to make an emotional mess of herself, at least she can try to contain it.

If she hadn’t done it herself, then Illya would have pressed the button. The bites work so fast, so quickly, the venom (or whatever it is) in those damn butterflies spreading quickly that running to his room was no longer an option. Not with the risk that he would meet with someone- anyone- and reveal… well. Anything.

Even his name is something to be protected, as far as he’s concerned.

“I’m… not convinced I will know who to trust anymore if I go back home. I have been lied to for too long. And yet I want to believe.” He licks his lips.

“My name is Illya. Illya Kuryakin.”

Illya Kuryakin, and this is who she's got and there really isn't another option for her. Unless she wants to go up on top of the elevator and take her luck with the air vents and... she glances up at the access hatch. That is too nuts. No matter how much she hates what's happening now, she is not going to be that person. She's seen Agents go completely off the rails, and she knows she's in danger of that here more than ever. So she huffs and lets her head thunk back against the wall of the elevator, resignation in every defeated line of her body.

"Trusting anyone is only going to hurt you in the end. It never works out. You will let them down, they will let you down, everything you build for yourself that relies on other people will fail. It's just a question of when." This is her life now. Natasha sighs, and then slides down the elevator wall until she's sitting on the floor, setting her groceries down next to her so she can wrap her arms around her knees. "Natasha Romanoff."

“And waiting for the when is sometimes agonizing.” Illya nods in agreement, because he finds no fault in what she’s shared. He already feels the… need, the convulsion to tell her more. To tell her about Gabby, about Solo. About how he thought she had betrayed him but she was only protecting him in the end, and how he thought Solo was only in it for his own gain and the man had surprised him by giving him a way out for both of them.

But while he has the need to share and be honest, he thinks… he still can control what he shares, at least a little bit.

“I am Russian.” He finally says. “I come from what you will know as the cold war.”

She chuckles, and there is no mirth in it. "So do I, and I should probably apologize for the part I play in it. We really messed everything up, trying to do the right thing." Of course, she was younger than him when it ended, which means that no matter what, he had to deal with it longer, and was dealing with it before she ever became a pawn in that game. Still, doesn't mean she has no blame to shoulder here.

The hope is fleeting and probably based on very unstable logic, but Natasha wonders if having her mouth full will keep her from wanting to talk. She hasn't tried that before. Never had the situation allow for it. So she pulls a protein bar out of her bag and rips the packaging open with her teeth, taking a big bite. Fingers crossed for this one.

The way his lips twitch will probably tell Natasha he isn’t happy with that first answer before he even says anything. But honestly, even if he hadn’t been under the influence of the firefly’s bites he’d have still been honest about his displeasure. He’s not good at just letting things go.

“We were not the only ones messing everything up. We just happened to be…” On the losing side. But no, he can’t even say that. “We just happened to not be the ones who got to write history.” Okay, that’s probably fair enough.

He motions at the bar she’s eating.

“You probably have things you don’t want to tell me if you’re trying to keep your mouth otherwise occupied.”

"It's not you," she says right after swallowing the bite in her mouth. "I don't--" She grits her teeth. "I might just be hungry. You don't know." She's not, though, and so that can only hang in the air for a moment before she's compelled to correct it. "Opening up to people doesn't work out for me. It only ever makes things worse. Why would it be any different here?" Damnit. She sighs, then digs another bar out of the bag and holds it up in his direction. "Hungry?"

“No.”

He says quickly, because that was a direct question and he definitely can’t avoid answering those and a lie is apparently unthinkable right now. But he reaches for the bar anyway, keeping his mouth occupied doesn’t sound like a bad idea right now.

“What you just said sounds a bit like a negative generalization. Those are usually untrue- you have no way of knowing opening up will cause either of us any harm. Me, I must keep a lot to myself because of my job. I would be punished if I didn’t.” It’s… becoming harder to just give vague statements and no specifics but as long as she doesn’t ask specifics, he seems to be managing.

It's not difficult to put the pieces together. The Cold War, personal responsibility, the lies, being unable to trust, and a job where talking means pain. Natasha clenches her teeth to try and keep it from happening, but it doesn't make a difference. The laugh bubbles up, and she tips her head back with an almost pained expression on her face. "Two spies, trapped in an elevator, compelled to honesty. What the fuck?"

This is going to be awful. "Some negative generalizations are true because the one common factor causes the failure. I am the one common factor. My life, and sharing it, does not end well." Like right now. Right now, she hates her fucking life, and she hates how it feels a little bit better to just be able to talk.

The corner of Illya’s lips twitch downwards and his entire body becomes tense. Natasha may find it humorous but Illya really doesn’t feel like laughing at being found out like this. He’s also utterly unsurprised at her being a spy, she’s not the only one who can draw conclusions but that doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

At least he’s pretty sure he can trust her, of all people to keep a secret. He’s got her number as well, ater all.

“I have a hard time believing you sharing something specific about your life is enough to cause people any problems. But you seem like a smart woman, guess you had your reasons to reach that conclusion even if I may not agree.” He shrugs one shoulder.

“I don’t share about my life because I’d be betraying my country. It could be used against me. And also because I’d probably have to get rid of them later on.”

Natasha finds is unbearable. She has inappropriate emotional reactions a lot of the time, though. They set people on edge. They're a slightly vindictive coping mechanism.

"Maybe. I'm. Just. Rotten." It's difficult to bite the words out, and she does it around a smile gleaming white, predatory. Rotten all the way through, all the way down, try to hide it with a veneer or virtue and justice, but it won't take. You can't paint over rot and have it hold.

Fuck this. She looks down at the protein bar in her hand, frowns, thumps her head back against the elevator wall. "Do you still love it? Russia?"

Illya wants to take it seriously. She seems to mean it, the words coming out of her like every single syllable hurts deep in her soul to pronounce. And he knows, better than some, that it’s hard to convince your logical brain when your very emotional heart has already made a decision. But still the idea of her being rotten seems just impossible, to him. To say the least.

“I am resilient. You can share with me, I will survive.” He tilts his head. “Though it looks like you do not have much of an option.

And… part of me does. Part of me will always love Russia. It is who I am, it is how I was raised.”

"Turns out it is just a machine. It will grind us down and discard us. We don't matter." It's easier to talk about. Not that she thinks it's going to offer her much of a reprieve, but she doesn't feel as compelled to talk when he's also talking. She just needs to wait for him to give in. She can do that.

She hopes she can, anyway. It's not easy. "If you stay standing up for much longer, I'm pretty sure i'm going to try and hook your feet out from under you."

Illya’s hand tightens, but that’s the only outward sign of his displeasure. It’s been… an intense couple of weeks, reading about Russia’s past and future. What he knew, what he’d suspected but never dared to look into, and things he just could never have imagined were going on in Russia. So to say he’s feeling a little conflicted right now is putting it lightly.

“We shouldn’t be what matters. We are only individual people.” In the end that feels like the safest way to answer that now that he cannot lie. Because he isn’t sure what Nat’s future looks like in her world, but he still has to go back to Russia.

“And you’re welcome to try.”

Illya's hand, and Nat's jaw. First her jaw, then her shoulders, until she looks ready to attack him. "Individual people matter. We matter. They have no right-- to just-- take us, and--" She takes a shaky breath to try and calm down, but it doesn't work. It's far easier to ignore things when she doesn't have to think about them, when she doesn't have to admit them out loud. "I matter."

It has taken her a long time to come to that, to accept it. It's taken a lot of people many years to convince her that she counts for something, that she is more than just a tool, a moving part in a heartless machine. Thing is, those people aren't here, those relationships are gone. She's ruined them, or maybe just been unable to save them, but the point is they're gone. Her support network, it's gone, and it hurts.

Here’s where he would usually try to… calm things down. He may be a jerk sometimes, and he will never deny that he’s got anger issues in spades but he’s still a human with some level of empathy. But that would be when he’s not being bitten by a damn firefly that forces him to just blurt out the truth, no matter how painful, instead of trying to soften the blow.

“It’s about the good of many, not the individual.” He says, parroting what he’s been taught. Just telling her what has been repeated to him all his life until he firmly believed it.

“But working for a bigger goal doesn’t make our lives any less important.” He can agree to that.

"You deserve to make your choices for yourself. You deserve to choose to sacrifice for the greater good, and you deserve to know what you're signing up for, what you're giving your life for. They can't just-- take children-- like they don't matter, like they're stripping a car for parts." She can feel it building, hot and prickly in her chest, and she can't stop it.

He can't believe that it doesn't matter. Or that it's not worth-- Unless he's not in the dark, unless he doesn't just blindly follow orders. The greater good, duty and honour, sacrificing for what matters, she'd had that shoved down her throat for years by people who had decided that she did not matter, that she wasn't a person. They believed it. Does he?

She takes one more deep breath which does nothing to calm her. "And I said sit down."

Illya’s body goes from a sort of quiet understanding to a blunt yet quiet anger as she keeps on talking. Mostly born out of denial. Because you cannot uproot your entire life, your core beliefs in such a short amount of time. He’s working to get there, even before he came here Solo and Gabby had taught him Russia wasn’t perfect. But having an inkling doesn’t mean he’s going to just accept all of it.

“If they can’t, then my entire life has been a useless lie.” He hisses out. Luckily for him she’s given her the perfect change of subject for him to latch onto.

“And I said, you’re welcome to try to make me.”

What Natasha hears is that he believes that children are the disposable tools she and her fellow test subjects were treated as, that his whole llfe has depended on this assumption, perhaps that he has been the one stripping them for parts. There are other ways to interpret it, of course, and a calmer mind might cycle through them. She does not have a calm mind. Not right now.

Fuck it. Natasha braces her shoulders against the wall, lashes out quickly to catch his ankle with her foot. If she hooks him and pulls him down or if he dodges out of the way, she's still going to use the force of the burst of movement to shove herself away from the wall and to her feet.

To be fair, if Nat had been a little more specific he’d have agreed with her to a point. He was trained since he was very young and he came out just fine (or so he thinks), but there’s definitely a difference between training and… what Natasha went through. Plus he’d only starting seeing the difference between following orders because it’s the right thing to do and following orders blindly, it will take him a while to get there.

He was ready for Nat’s attack, he had basically been asking her to go for it, so he’s quick to dodge her. But he wasn’t expecting her to be so quick to pull herself up to her feet so quickly. He reacts as fast as he can, trying to slam his full body weight against her shoulder to pin her against the elevator’s wall.

He's enormous, and men his size tend to count on the fact that they hit hard in a fight. She anticipates his next move as soon as he jumps out of the way of her foot, and she's quick to launch herself to the side, rebound off of the perpendicular wall, and come back with a punch aimed squarely at his jaw.

She has a few people she can train with, who are willing to spar, but even those who will come to blows with her aren't really willing to hurt her. He doesn't know her. He has no reason to not want to draw blood. She's gotten a certain amount of satisfaction fighting against the monsters beyond the perimeter, but she was trained for this, and it's been a while.

Funnily enough, in a way, she was trained for exactly this. Not just the face to face violence with another human being, but being in an incredibly tight space with an attacker far larger than her, turning everything in the space, including the confines of the space itself, into an advantage.

Always four steps ahead. That's the only way to keep from getting flattened, and fighting monsters hardly requires so much forethought. This is better. If her punch connects, she'll follow with an uppercut. If he blocks her, he'll give her additional momentum, and she'll use it to duck around him. If he's actually quick enough to grab her, well, that's a whole new approach, isn't it?

Illya’s size puts him at a little bit of disadvantage in this place, and he’s aware of it. He has a harder time moving, and his brute force isn’t going to matter much if he can’t even get his hands on her. For being in a closed space she seems to be everywhere at once, avoiding most of his direct blows and making the ones that manage to hit hurt less than they could by aiming them as best as she can.

But she’s not the only one that has been trained for this, so while this isn’t the ideal place for him to fight he still manages to put up a good one. He’s strong and big, but he can also be fairly nimble when he needs to. So while she manages to avoid all the blows, he’s getting fairly good at cornering her.

This… this is a thrill. This is intense. This is the kind of fight he’s been craving for since he ended up here. He’s been against monsters fairly often, he’s gotten a chance to use his gone a few times and his job does allow him to chance a guy or two every now and then. But nothing compares to this, and even though he’s aiming to hit her as strongly as he can he has to admit this is the most fun he’s had in a long while.

Until, somehow, he ends up with her legs around his neck and her somehow managing to send him all the way to the floor. He’s not down for the count, not by a long shot but the movement does take him by surprise for a moment.

[Closed] to Natasha

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