every_blossom_blooming | (no subject)

The past week or so has felt more than a little strange, and Gleb still doesn't know what to do about the recent arrival from home, a man whom he barely knows but who has some connection with Anya beyond just that of a conman and his hired actress. He hasn't asked about it; he doesn't think he wants to know, though it's probably inevitable. Sitting around just waiting for the other shoe to drop isn't going to do him any good, though. It's with that in mind that he tells Anya he'll watch Pushkin for a while, taking the little dog to the park where they first ran into each other. The weather has started to grow warm, at least, a welcome relief no matter how accustomed he may be to winters that refuse to let go.

If he's relieved, though, then Pushkin is downright elated. Having a pet in any capacity is still something that's fairly new to him, but the dog's eagerness isn't difficult to pick up on, especially once he darts straight away and down the path. There are enough people around, at least, that Gleb isn't particularly worried, but there's still a fond exasperation in his expression as he sighs and follows after the dog.

He's about to call out, but he's close enough by then to just make out what the young woman Pushkin has run up to is saying, surprised at the familiarity of the words. With Anya, he only ever speaks Russian, but he can count on one hand the number of other people he's encountered in his time in Darrow who can do so as well. Fortunate as he may be to be here, he'll never stop missing home, not really, and that touch of familiarity goes a long way.

"Not quite lost, no," he says with a small smile and a shake of his head. "He just got away from me for a moment."

Nina smiled brightly when the man that approached responded in an entirely familiar language. It felt wonderful to hear someone else speaking it. Inej did, sometimes, but hearing it in yet another voice just-- it made her happy. And it made her homesick. She stood up again, bringing the little dog with her.

"Well, he's terribly friendly," she answered. "Do you speak English, too?"

She would have called it Kerch, or something like it, but most everyone else around here called the language English, and she had finally started to do the same.

Edited 2018-04-26 20:26 (UTC)

"I do," Gleb says, nodding, still nothing short of pleased to have heard his own language for a change. It's a rarity around here, an odd change of pace when, until not very long before he found himself here, he'd never left Russia before. Sometimes he wishes he hadn't, but that isn't a path worth considering, with too many hypotheticals coming into play. He went to Paris, he made the only choice he could, and then he blinked and was in another world entirely. There doesn't have to be any more to it than that.

"It helps, I think, in this place, but I haven't found many people who sound like they could be from home."

"I haven't, either. It feels nice - it sounds nice." Inej would speak Ravkan with her sometimes, but for the most part they kept to their other common language.

Nina rose and offered her hand to the strange. She flashed her most effusive smile. Charm had always been her forte, even if Zoya complained that she was too much.

"I'm Nina Zenik. And your darling here is very charming, even if he is a bit naughty. Which makes him just my type, I suppose."

"It does," Gleb agrees of the sound of their shared language, nodding before he reaches out to shake Nina's offered hand. "Gleb Vaganov. It's a pleasure, Nina." In this instance, it's not just a formality, either. It's almost strange, when simply speaking the same language once was just to be expected, nothing half so consequential. Here, though, he's felt even more out of place than he did for the brief spell he was in Paris, which is saying a great deal.

"And he's definitely that. He was a stray before he found me."

"The pleasure is mine, truly." Nina smiled down at the dog but soon turned the expression back on Gleb. "I'm a bit of a stray too, I suppose, terribly far from home even before I ended up in Darrow."

It pained her a little to think of how far away Ravka was now. There was nothing she could do about it; she would just have to make the best of Darrow, the same way she had to make the best of Ketterdam.

"I'm on my way to a cafe I just love, if you two would like to join me. The pastries there remind me of home. There's something about the way they make the coffee, too."

"I was far from home as well," Gleb says, almost grateful to be able to say as much without the weight of the circumstances hanging overhead. It's too strange to talk about it with Anya, given what could have happened when he was in Paris, and he hasn't yet mentioned as much to their new arrival from home, her conman. Perhaps she will, but that's her prerogative. He has no real acquaintance with the man, only a passing recognition and a shared connection. If he hasn't figured out what any of this means yet, though, then it's unlikely he will now. Just for the moment, it doesn't seem worth dwelling on. "It was meant to be temporary, but, well."

He tips his head to the side to indicate their surroundings. Darrow changed everything. For a little while there, he thought it might have largely been in positive ways, no matter how homesick he might have been, but he's beginning to reconsider. Of course, he's alive, which makes quite a substantial difference, but that holds true even so.

"And I would like that very much," he says to her offer. "I'm sure Pushkin here wouldn't mind, either."

"Of course it was," she said with a wry smile. "I've given up trying to find ways out. I was told, many times, that it was impossible, but... Sometimes you just have to see things for yourself."

Nina shrugged and then gestured for Gleb to follow her. "Pushkin is always invited. Are you from Russia, then?"

"I am," Gleb replies with a nod, easily falling into step with her. He has to remind himself, sometimes, that he isn't a soldier anymore, that he doesn't need to carry himself like that here. At least having Pushkin with him makes it a little easier not to instinctively keep that stance. "And yourself?"

Anywhere else and that would seem obvious, but he's already met one person here who spoke Russian but came from a place where Russia didn't exist. Strange as it is, he shouldn't start jumping to conclusions about it now.

"I'm from a place called Ravka, which apparently has a very similar language to your Russian," she said. "At least the language that's spoken at court. There's far-flung dialects across the country. I've been reading about Russian history, though. Some things remind me so much of home."

Nina sighed, because she hadn't been home in far too long, and now she was trapped in Darrow. She may never see Ravka again at this rate.

"I've heard of it," Gleb says, a bit relieved not to have assumed. Not so very long ago, he'd have seen no reason not to, but if showing up in a strange world well into his own future is possible, then so, apparently, is the existence of some other country that is like Russia but not, with a language that is nearly Russian. "I met someone else who said they were from there, just a few months back. It's nothing I would ever have considered possible before."

At least there's still that level of familiarity, the similarities seeming more noteworthy than the differences, if only because here, there are so many more of the latter. He's had to learn to take what he can get.

Nina couldn't help the smile that bloomed across her face. "You have? From who? Do you remember what they looked like?" There were only a handful of people in all of Darrow that were even remotely familiar with Ravka, and she knew all of them, and she did so like making these connections.

"I know what you mean," she confessed. "When I started hearing about the places other people had come from, I could barely wrap my head around it all. I've spent a lot of time in the library, just trying to learn."

"She was walking on a wire in the park," Gleb says, that having been easily the most memorable part of the encounter, no matter how distracted he had been at the time. "Her name was... Inej, I believe?" One corner of his mouth lifts slightly, and he nods towards the dog. "That was the day Pushkin here found me, actually. He was a stray, came right up to me on the path almost out of nowhere."

He hadn't expected, then, that he would take the dog in in any capacity. It really is probably for the best that Anya is Pushkin's primary caretaker, having more experience with such things, but he really has grown quite fond of the dog.

"I keep meaning to learn more," he confesses. "But there's so much of it, it's hard to know where to start."

Nina flashed her brightest smile. "You meet Inej! She's my dearest friend, like a sister. Pushkin, you have terribly good taste in people if you managed to find a man that the Wraith approved of," she said to the dog.

"Inej and I knew each other in Ketterdam. We were both very far from home." She tucked her hair back and breathed a sigh that wasn't quite sad, but it wasn't quite a sound of relief, either. She missed Ravka, still, always.

"It's a bit like throwing darts, isn't it? Trying to pick where to start."

Gleb smiles a little in turn at the recognition. They hadn't spoken for long, but he'd liked Inej, and more than that, been glad for something at least resembling familiarity. It's strange in a pleasant sort of way, anyway, finding connections even in a city of this size. He has, at least, noticed that people from other places seem to gravitate towards each other, but mostly, the same hasn't entirely applied to him; he's out of place among most of them, too. A coincidence like this, therefore, is a welcome one.

"It helps, I think, having someone when you're that far from home," he says. Certainly it's been the case here, Anya's presence a relief no matter what the two of them are to each other. "And it is. Deciding what you even want to know to begin with."

"Of course it does. Her life would have been very different from mine, if we both stayed in Ravka. As it is, the universe seemed to insist that our paths cross at one of the lowest points in our lives. She's like a sister to me."

Nina didn't mean to wax poetic, but she loved the Suli girl, and Ketterdam would have been a much more bleak place without her. She felt like it had been too long since she saw Inej; she'd have to arrange a tea date soon.

"I want to know everything, but languages are dear to me. So I started there. What languages sound like ones I already know? Who do they belong to? Where are those people from? It turns into a little bit of a rabbit hole after that, but... worth exploring."

"You could keep going further and further and probably never reach the end, around here," Gleb says, smiling faintly. It's easy to see how something like that might be fascinating, even if it is, to him, more intimidating than anything else. All the different times, different cultures, different worlds — there might never be a chance to come up for air. He could spend the rest of his life here, he thinks, and a much longer one than he'd have been guaranteed at home, and still have an endless supply of things to learn. "I take it you've found out some interesting things, then?"

"I have. It's strange to think that there are so many different worlds out there. My lover talks about them like they are all layered on top of each other, and sometimes align strangely. I've heard other people talk about different planets, different realities."

Nina shook her head and made a vaguely dismissive gesture.

"Honestly, I try not to think too hard about all of that. But it is terribly interesting that I come from a place called Ravka, and the dialects I know are so similar to languages that, somewhere else, are called Russian and Ukrainian." She shrugged and smiled at Gleb.

"What have you been doing since you arrived in Darrow? Some people seem to have such an easy time finding their feet."

"I can't claim to be one of them," Gleb admits, shaking his head. He's tried, of course, but it isn't exactly a small adjustment. There's too much time he's missed out on for that, and there are things to which he wouldn't really want to adjust, anyway. He can get by well enough, but this place is too fundamentally different from all he believes in and all he's fought for. While, granted, it could be worse, that's an incredibly low bar to meet after what Russia before the revolution. "It was a hundred years before this, when I come from, so I've been catching up, mostly. Looking for work, of late. Something in security, perhaps."

"I've given in and started doing a few things I did back in Ketterdam," she sighed. "There's not much need for a soldier here, so I get by making people feel better, even if it's only temporary."

Even if she didn't need the money, she needed the occupation. Sometimes Geralt needed her help, and she eagerly joined him in the field. But that wasn't a steady gig, and at least with tailoring and aura cleansing, as she was calling it, she could use her Grisha skills regularly. Otherwise she might go mad, literally.

"I could see you securing things," she teased him. "Making things terribly difficult for flirtatious girls trying to get by."

"No, there really isn't much need for a soldier, is there?" Gleb asks with the slightest hint of amusement in his voice. Truthfully, he wouldn't have looked at her and assumed she'd ever done anything of the sort, but people are surprising, and he has no reason not to believe her. If anything, though he doesn't know what her war might have had to do with, it makes him feel again like there's a commonality between them. War defined so much of his life; so many people here have never experienced one. It's an odd thing to have realized.

Smiling at her comment, he adds, "How do you make them feel better? Are you a healer of some sort?"

Nina knew what she looked like, and she most certainly didn't look like a soldier as most people probably thought of them. Matthias had reminded her of that many times. She was too indulgent, too soft to be a soldier. He'd probably still the same, but at least now he knew better.

Gleb asked about healing, and Nina realized she had a choice: she could tell him she was a Grisha, or she could wave it off as something else. She tried not to tell many people, still worried that something bad might come of it. This was not Ravka, she was not necessarily safe here.

She shrugged her shoulder. "It's a talent I have," she said. "Healing is one way of putting it."

It sounds a bit cryptic, but it doesn't seem like his place to press, so Gleb doesn't. Back home, he knows, he very well might have, but that's an old instinct, one that he's begun to bury and that has no place here. He has no authority in Darrow. A part of him, loath though he would be to admit it, is a little grateful for that. While, on one hand, he's felt directionless, unsure of what to do, he also knows that he was never quite the person he was supposed to be. His promotion was, he's sure, because of his father's history, and he was always more inclined to look the other way than maybe he ought to have been.

Nothing is the same here. There isn't the inherent suspicion, the distrust, the people turning each other in for the slightest misstep. There's something almost relieving in that.

"It sounds like a good talent to have," he says. "Especially for a soldier."