The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legends fade to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the First Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long passed, a wind rose in the Himalayas. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings or endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
The man who lives down the block has no children. No one says living in this neighborhood means you have to have children, but there wasn't a household along the street without a kid close to her age until he came. Thalia watches his front door with the wide-eyed stare of a mouse transfixed by a hawk. She waits for the shadow above her to come shrieking down, talons outstretched.
Today, she swings lazily at the playground across from his house and eats a popsicle. Today, she is by herself. Zahir has one of his rare summer camps going on, and even rarer is the fact that he's going without her. In the distant way of a child she worries about him, almost entirely alone, but her worry is a paltry thing in the face of this immediate threat. Grape juice stains her right hand. The door watches her back with a hawk's blank and predatory gaze.
Someone in the house jerks aside a curtain violently to peer down at the street, and then yanks it closed again. Thalia drops her half-eaten popsicle in the dirt and jumps off the swing. It only takes a heartbeat to cross the street if she doesn't bother to check for cars, and then she's behind the sharp green bushes in his front yard, peering up at the window where now no one moves.
when he killed a girl for the first time, he recieved a name. he drowned a balding man and the manacles came off of his wrists. now cyrus dimitrius is dead for the sake of a nation that no longer exists, and stefan is left with the vexing task of convincing himself that he is more human for it.
"i'm your goddammed brother! don't you remember our mother?"
he doesn't know if cyrus was telling the truth. that's the thing about being a soldier. he doesn't sift through the politics of being human. he has a gun and a responsibility and that has to be enough.
"i remember." that wasn't the answer that his comrade-in-arms had been expecting. "i remember that you shot the colonel." if he hadn't, then stefan wouldn't be standing here right now, an instrument of consequence.
stefan sat in his apartment for about three hours before he decided that he can't stand the smell of blood on his carpet anymore. he resists the urge to lick the blood off of his fingers. forgetting cyrus - forgetting the only person whom he addressed by name - that too, is his responsibility.
stefan takes a carton and a lighter out of his pocket. every man had to learn how to count his days somehow. his fingers are stiff. it takes him two tries to light his cigarette. he coughs like a teenager, but there is no one around to laugh. that, and he's even less than that.
he could open a window, but stefan is always paranoid that the smell of blood is as strong to others as it is to him. instead, he walks down to the front steps and sits on the porch. his cigarette burns steadily in his hand. he needs to dispose of the body. maybe the house should go too.
The man who comes out of the house and sits down on the stoop is not the man who lives there. His presence is comforting to Thaliathough. If there's someone else here, it'll be easier to get away if she needs to. She almost steps out of the bushes before the second thought occurs to her: unless they're working together.
She shrinks back into the foliage, but knows it's already too late. The rustle and snap of branches when she moved wasn't loud, but it wasn't quiet either, and unless he's completely out of it, he's got to know someone is watching him from the holly now.
I should run she thinks, the first coherent sentence since that jagged spike of alarm, but her legs are rooted with fear. Thalia might as well be part of the plant herself for all she could escape.
the war is over. stefan imagines himself to be of little value now. is it better to die on american shores so that his superiors will never be implicated, or do his bloody hands have any use still?
well. he isn't any good judge of that.
he sits with his back to the house, along with all of his consequences. he's left his once-beating heart inside of that house, and he doesn't even know. what most would consider amputation, stefan diagnoses as a flesh wound.
he wasn't happy with his comrade-in-arms at his side. nothing so disgustingly hedonistic as that.
(but)
he was human, once.
the cracking sound is an unwelcome distraction. stefan can't imagine an actual agent to be this sloppy, but cyrus no longer had access to trained personnel. he draws his gun. after all, he is standing on private property. america is good about these things. he points the weapon at the foilage.
"identify yourself." he watches for any indication of shape, just in case he's been distracted by a stray rabbit.
Called upon to identify herself, Thalia instead only squeaks and falls out of the holly bush entirely. She recognizes the gun only from half-glimpsed movies on the television and her father's stories but even without that knowledge she would know the shape of her own death before her, the looming shadow of incoming hurt.
She looks up at the man in front of her, eyes fastened to his face instead of the dark emptiness of the gun barrel, searching for some hint of mercy or hesitation, but she doesn't know how to understand adults. With the exception of her father they are all one ragged monolith, inescapable steamrollers that will trample over her again and again with neither notice nor care.
Thalia squeaks again, the sound twisting to a ragged sob halfway through. But she blinks back hard against the tears in her eyes, refusing to let them fall.
"I'm Thalia," she says. "Who are you? You don't live here. Are you the police?" If he's a policeman, he's allowed to have a gun. She hopes, she hopes.
at first, he's not entirely sure what he's looking at. then it registers to him that she's a child. one of the last free beings in this world.
he knows this much, even if he has no personal understanding. at the very least, he does not smell gunpowder on her fingers. that's enough for the moment.
stefan lowers his gun, unwilling to needlessly escalate the situation. now that he knows that she is a low-level threat, he would rather she didn't scream. he has enough headaches for one day.
"of a kind." his english carries a slight phonetic irregularity, but he's too much of a polyglot for his accent to be easily identifiable. he shuffles through thalia's words in the back of his head like an old tape recorder.
"you've been here before." it's not an accusation. stefan doesn't need to accuse her of anything that he already knows.
What does that mean? He's secret police? Like the CIA, the FBI, or like her father's recollections? Either way, he's lowered the gun and Thalia assumes that can only be a good thing, for now. It means he's not going to shoot her. Not yet.
"I watch the house," she says with a disturbingly clear honesty. She may be scared and unsure, but she's still a child. Duplicity does not yet come naturally to her. "The man who lives here, he moved in just a little while ago and I don't trust him. So I watch to make sure he doesn't do anything."
he pauses. then he smiles, as if he's listening to a very funny joke. stefan doesn't even realize that he's doing it.
cyrus is -- was at least three feet taller than thalia and twice as heavy. he was also crass and prone to public intoxication. stefan is surprised that the girl hadn't been driven away by common sense or self-preservation instinct. the same might have been said for himself, but he doubts that a child born in this country had these things washed out of them. not in the land of the free.
"did it not occur to you that you are trespassing on private property?" stefan doesn't even remember that big words and small children are mutually incompatible. she was right not to trust cyrus, but that isn't the point. "you have far fewer rights here than in a public space. what did you hope to accomplish?"
Thalia doesn't know what half the words in that sentence the man says even means but she picks up most of what he's trying to say from his tone. She wrinkles her nose.
"It doesn't matter if I was here or somewhere else," she answers. "Adults can do whatever they want to you and it doesn't matter where you are."
As if that statement reminds her that she is actually talking to a bona fide adult, Thalia clamps her mouth shut and glares sullenly at Stefan as if he's wrested something important from her without even knowing it.
her words refract within him. some of it catches on some old bitterness that had never become soluable with his usual complacency. "they surrendered. why did you shoot? the taste of blood in his mouth reinforced the memory. now he knows why. because some men have guns and some men do not.
some of her words are directed elsewhere. equally arresting was the coldness of the officer's hand. it was better for the world that men like cyrus died with the collar around his neck still.
his bloody rosary weighs heavily in his left pocket.
"that is true." his answer is polished, like a glass that's been wiped with a cloth too many times. "but that's also one of the things that makes life livable. peaceful." he speaks as if he has a world to return to after all of this. maybe he did. maybe he didn't. universal truths still hold, through doubt and absurdity.
children always believe that they want to be alone until they actually are.
stefan puts out his cigarette and tosses it aside. secondhand smoke aside, he's done pretending that the cigarette wasn't doing a number on his sense of smell.
"you shouldn't worry about the man anymore." that's something for the local police to worry about, now that he's stripped the body of evidence and personal effects. he would also prefer not to shoot a child that he doesn't have to shoot. "i'll walk you home." better than letting her wander into the house. THALIA
there's someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you
"I can't go home yet," Thalia chides with an air of long-suffering patience, as if this were somehow a fact that Stefan could have known. "Papa is at work, so the house is empty and I'll be by myself."
She eyes him, a cornered animal making sure the predator isn't coming in for a swipe, ready to run at the first sign of him pressing the matter, but continues on without wavering: "You may walk me to the store, though. Thank you." Her manners have kicked in a little late, but at least they kicked in.
she has a father at work, and stefan isn’t sure what to even do with this new information.
“so?” the door to a residence home shouldn’t be difficult to pick, if keys were the concern. “you can sit on the porch at your own house or you can sit on the porch of a deluded alcoholic.” one of the choices seemed better than the other.
he’s silent for a moment before his mind diverges from what seemed like the most obvious path. “your father works at the store.” THALIA
there's someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you
There are so many things about those sentences that Thalia doesn't understand. She doesn't know where to begin. She's also starting to suspect that even if she did know where to begin, it would be useless. So she responds to the only part she really got.
"He handles the money," Thalia answers, which is not wrong but also not right. Her father works the cash register, closes and opens, re-stocks and generally does the work of five employees for the pay of one. The time sink of his job is something she and Zahir rarely notice during school--it's normal, right?--but becomes unavoidable, even to children's eyes, during summer. Thalia is still young enough to be proud of him and not embarrassed, though. "He's the best. The owner trusts him the most and he's been there the longest."
She walks down the sidewalk with that same air of patient expectancy as when she graciously allowed Stefan the option of walking her to the store. "What do you do? Are you good with money?"
he wrinkles his nose at the mention of money, like the way that some of the senior officers did whenever someone mentioned the capitalist nations. as if they didn’t have a dozen of their own investments on the side. as if they hadn’t been prepared for the roof to cave in for at least a few years.
as if not a single person saw these separatist wars coming.
“i stop the country from splitting apart.”
obviously, he’s not very good at that. atlas was always one man.
just as she barely comprehends his english, he has no space in his mind to accommodate for her innocence. stefan kills people, but he’s always been trained not to say that. he’s not even sure that the child would even believe him. maybe this is america’s strength. a strength that allows only a few to sleep with a knife beside their pillow instead of the many. he is one of the few, but stefan feels no pride in it. it’s only rational. it’s only optimal for a few to have their humanity stretched as far as possible without becoming animals.
stefan feels the metal crucifix against the cloth of his pocket. his ex-squadmate had a hard limit. drugs were acceptable. alcohol was acceptable. every manner of poison was acceptable, all but the most deadly: money, wives, and god. he doesn’t want to think about which one of the three was the reason that cyrus had renounced everything that he was. nobody likes to think about the frailty of machines when a roof is caving in.
(“you weren’t optimal last week. go to bucharest for a few days and find a pretty woman. just don’t bring her back afterward.”)
he didn’t understand. now, he never wants to.
stefan realizes that he hasn’t said anything in a long time.
“money is bad for the soul.” he tells thalia with complete seriousness. as if he knew what a soul was outside of the political rhetoric that was passed around the barracks. “don’t let it become your life.”
that's not to say that he wouldn't be one hell of an accountant. THALIA
there's someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you
