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Nastya would one day tell people -very few people, and only those closest to her who had not been there to witness such events in person, but people nonetheless- that the first thing she did, when she woke aboard Aurora, was fall in love.
It was not a lie, precisely. She did fall for her love quite quickly, but it was not the truth, either.
The first thing Nastya did upon waking, was freeze. She was not yet used to the unnatural cold that rushed through her body. She would never be used to it, not really, but time would make it something akin to bearable. In her first moments of true consciousness, after so long in a haze of pain and fear and confusion, she felt cold, and she felt heavy.
‘Nastya,’ her daemon’s voice in her mind was a sharp note of clarity, a relief against so much strangeness.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, barely managing to string together even that much coherence.
‘I don’t know.’ Something in his voice sounded wrong, she realised with a sudden thrill of fear. Small and helpless. Grieving. ‘Nastya I can’t fly.’
She sat up abruptly, her limbs moving sluggishly, an unfamiliar weight coursing through her veins. She was in a lab, on a Cyberian ship, she could tell that much from her first glance around the room as she searched for him.
She found him on a table not far from the one she rested on, his beautiful, pale form, once so proud, now a crumpled heap of feathers.
“What do you mean?” she asked, a fearful note leaking into her own voice.
“It’s too heavy. I can’t fly.” He raised his head to look at her, and she felt a piece of herself wrench away, spinning out into the endless void of space. The weight in her own veins seemed to drag her down until all she could do was lay back down on the operating table and cry tears which shone silver under the harsh, white lights of Dr Carmilla’s lab.
Jonny was the one to ask about it. Carmilla likely already knew, and so had no reason to, and it had never been in Jonny’s nature to be tactful. So it was Jonny, seated next to her in the dark, helping her keep silent and still to avoid Carmilla and her moonrat, who asked.
Or observed, really.
“Haven’t seen your daemon fly since you got here,” he said, seated close enough to her that she could leech off his warmth, far enough that he wasn’t actually touching her.
“He’s too heavy,” she said. There was acid in her words, harsh and biting but such things hardly ever affected him. Sitting there, hidden away from searching eyes, Jonny laughed.
“Bit on-the-nose, ain’t it?” he asked.
She felt his nose break under her fist with a satisfying crunch.
“Alright, I walked into that one.” He made a show of wiping up the blood running down his face. “You coulda just shot me.”
“Too loud,” she said. “And too quick, you inconsiderate bastard.”
He grinned at her with bloodied teeth. “Never claimed to be anything else.”
And she wondered, briefly, staring at his half-manic grin with an odd combination of disbelief and growing fondness, if this was what having an older brother was supposed to be like.
The first time her blood became too much took her by surprise. She’d felt herself growing weaker over the day, but had not put much stock into it. Nothing to worry about, she’d told herself. She just hadn’t got enough rest or something. She was in the engine room when it really hit, a slow wave of heavy and cold, rolling over her body, sending her to the floor in a fall that somehow felt sluggish despite how fast it probably was.
On his perch Koschei wobbled dangerously, throwing out his wings to catch himself in a slow glide to the floor.
‘Nastya?’ he stumbled over to her, half-collapsing against her side.
-Nastya?- Aurora’s voice of creaking metal and mechanical clicks filled her from all sides, a soothing balm against the weight that held her pinned to the floor. -Are you alright?-
She tried to get her mouth to respond but found she could not. She tried, with mild fascination more than anything, to activate any of her cybernetics, beyond their base functions and the constant background hum of their existence.
Nothing.
‘Koschei, can you talk?’ she asked.
He let out a weak, musical trill and fell silent.
-Nastya, if you do not give me some indication that you’re alright within the next ten seconds, I will locate Jonny and drag him in here,- Aurora said.
She wanted to protest, but her voice refused to cooperate. The seconds to Aurora’s deadline ticked by one by one, until they were all spent and she had yet to move a muscle. Nastya let the final bit of her strength bleed out and shut her eyes. All that was left now was to wait.
The door to the engine room opened far sooner than she’d been expecting, and with it came Jonny’s voice, loud and angry.
“-rora-! What the fuck’s gotten into y-” his voice cut off abruptly, along with the sound of his pointless struggling. “Shit.”
Running footsteps, hoofbeats not far behind. A shift in the air as he sank to his knees next to her. She couldn’t force her eyes to open, but she imagined how he must look. Hovering, awkwardly forced into a position of caretaker against his nature and his will.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, the air shifted again as he got up to walk to Aurora’s terminal to speak to her in a way he could understand.
“And her Mechanism ain’t fixing it?” he asked, responding to whatever it was Aurora had told him.
Nastya so desperately wanted to laugh at that, but all she managed was a faint wheeze. Still enough to catch his attention, seemingly, because she heard him take a step back towards her, swear, and turn to the terminal.
“Is it safe to move her?”
…
“No, not to her, fuck do you take me for?”
…
“I know! Just-” he cut himself off with a sharp sound of frustration.
Footsteps approached her, and the air shifted as he knelt down beside her again.
“Don’t know if you can hear me,” he muttered, hooking one hand around her shoulders, the other under her knees, “but I’m taking you to that nest you call a bed.”
He lifted her slowly, his arms shaking with the effort. “Fuck you’re heavy,” he muttered.
‘She filled my veins with mercury, what the fuck did you expect?’ she asked, within the confines of her head. She received the impression of a chuckle from Koschei before he slipped from her side as Jonny succeeded in heaving her up into his arms.
“Y’all at the part where you can touch her daemon yet?” Jonny asked.
-I am almost always touching him, but I know what you mean and yes we are,- Aurora answered, her voice bright and overlayed with the small chirp-like tones that meant she was happy. None of which Jonny would understand, but it warmed Nastya to hear it. Aurora’s wires slunk down to gently lift Koschei off the ground, her touch sending a quiet thrill through Nastya. She breathed a little easier as Jonny settled her in among her many blankets and pillows. Seconds later, Aurora placed Koschei back on her chest.
“I’ll just-” Jonny began, then grunted as if something had struck him. “Alright, I get it! I’ll stay.” She felt him settle down next to her, Marraco no more than a hair’s breadth from her leg. Distantly she realised she probably should have been panicking this entire time, but even with that realisation there she could not find it within herself to do so.
‘Are we stuck like this, do you think?’ she asked Koschei, in the same tone one might ask about how long the rain would last.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I’m tired.’
‘Then we should sleep.’
But sleep did not come. Her mind remained alert within the darkness behind her eyelids, the strange heavy calm sitting right alongside it. There was nothing to do but lay there and stew in her own thoughts. So she anchored herself to the feeling of Aurora’s wires around her wrist, and Jonny’s presence at her side, and she waited.
The minutes ticked on at a torturous speed until, finally, around half an hour later, her finger twitched. At her side, Jonny jerked back to reality as her eyelids fluttered open and she flexed her fingers, almost experimentally. Koschei shook himself off with a relieved sigh and stood up to set about preening his ruffled feathers.
“Took you long enough,” Jonny said, his irreverent tone an excellent cover for the real concern she could see hiding in the creases of his frown.
She hummed non-committally, her voice not fully returned yet as she pushed herself up onto shaking arms. Behind her, Aurora rearranged her pillows so she could sit back against them.
“Got a voice yet?” Jonny asked.
She didn’t answer, reaching instead to press a hand against the warm metal of Aurora’s walls, taking comfort in the steady beat of life that hummed through her at all times.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Jonny said. Nastya bumped her shoulder against his, even that movement a massive strain against muscles that still felt over-burdened. Hesitantly he raised a hand to tangle it into her hair. “Got any idea what that was?” he asked.
“Heavy,” Nastya muttered. Jonny frowned.
“What’s that supposed to-” he stopped. “Oh.”
“You’re not-.” She drew a deep breath, struggling against the sluggishness that still coated her tongue and crawled down her throat to try and steal her voice from her. “You’re not going to- to tell her, are you?”
“’Course not,” Jonny answered, almost before she’d gotten the question out. Immediate and dismissive in a way that eased the very last of the worry from her chest and let her relax fully against him. “Can’t promise she won’t find out some other way, but not from me.”
“Good,” Nastya sighed, turning her face into his shoulder.
It was a beautiful planet they’d landed on. Large swathes of untouched nature stretching as far as the eye could see. From where Nastya sat, perched atop Aurora’s outer hull, the expanse seemed far more majestic than it would even from the tallest of the buildings in the nearby city. A vast evergreen forest sprung up practically at the city limits, growing only denser and darker as the miles rolled by. Vast snow-capped mountains rose from the trees in the distance, sparkling in the light of the September sun.
Nastya hated it.
From his perch on her shoulder, Koschei gazed unblinking out over the landscape. He twitched and fidgeted, shifting his wings restlessly. His talons clenched and unclenched, though he was as always careful not to tear her coat or pierce her skin despite his obvious agitation.
She stared out over the vast expanse, up into the clear blue sky, and she ached. She could get lost in that endless blue if she let herself. Here, away from Aurora’s constant, comforting hum, outside of where she could hear her lover’s voice in every shift and groan of metal, she could fall for eternity into an unreachable ocean of clear, cold sky.
“Nastya.” Jonny’s voice, clipped and serious in a way she wasn’t used to, shocked her out of her thoughts. “Come with me.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Didn’t realise you hated me that much,” he said, his voice held the cadence of a joke, but his eyes searched hers, a worry behind them that she’d become familiar with over the millennia.
“You never miss an opportunity to see Fun Brian in action,” she offered up as an explanation. Especially not when Tim was tagging along with him. The three of them together were hell on earth for whichever poor soul crossed between them and the righteous goal Brian had his sites set on.
“Right.” Jonny’s leg twitched restlessly. The tension in his shoulders and the way his eyes flickered back towards the city told her plain enough he wished he’d gone with everyone else. “Hate to miss the fun, but I’ve got an idea, and I need you to tell me if it’s completely off base.”
“Since when do you need my input on anything?” Nastya asked, a touch incredulous.
“Look, will you just come with me!?” He was growing tenser by the second, practically vibrating by this point, a pipe bomb seconds from going off and taking half the forest with him.
Nastya sighed and rose to her feet. “Lead the way.”
The tension bled out of him in an instant, and he spun on his heel, not even checking to see if she really was following as he slid in a controlled fall down Aurora’s side to the ground, Marraco climbing after him with the uncanny, gravity-defying ability natural to every goat. Nastya set off after them at an only slightly more subdued pace.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Nastya asked as she landed next to Jonny, the boot prints from her impact with the soft, mossy ground considerably deeper than his.
“Nah, think I’ll let that mystery stew for a bit.” Jonny grinned at her. She sighed but followed him regardless as he led them deeper into the forest. “You’ve just gotta tell me if it’s a bad idea.”
Nastya rolled her eyes.
“I always tell you when you have a bad idea, you never listen to me.”
He ignored her, and she fell into step beside him. All around them the forest was teeming with life. Birdsong and the rustling of small critters through the underbrush filled the air around them, their footfalls muffled by soft moss. Gradually the land began to rise, the trees thinning out a little as she followed Jonny up along a long, winding forest path, half-overgrown and long forgotten by all save what few forest creatures might still use it.
The sun had risen to its zenith by the time they reached their destination. Jonny came to a sudden halt and spun around, throwing his arms out wide to gesture around them. Nastya frowned, blinking out over the forest rolling on bellow the cliff they found themselves on.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asked.
“This,” Jonny said -with all the drama and showmanship of any of their shows-, “is how Koschei can fly again. Or near as, anyway.”
Nastya stared at him.
“You want me to toss my daemon off a cliff,” she said flatly.
“I can glide,” Koschei said, nipping her ear in mild annoyance at the same moment as Jonny waved his hand dismissively and said;
“He can glide, can’t he?”
Nastya snorted.
“Well…” she extended her arm so Koschei could walk to her hand. “What do you think?”
“I’d like to try,” he said, casting an unmistakably longing glance out over the distance between the cliff’s edge and the ground. Nastya peered over it, a thoughtful frown on her face.
“I would prefer if I were down there to catch you…”
Koschei nodded and leapt from her arm, gliding carefully down to the ground as she took a couple of steps away from the cliff’s edge. Jonny frowned at them before something seemed to click in his brain, and he jerked towards her.
“You’re not gonna-”
She didn’t hear the rest as she took a running start and launched herself off the cliff. The rush of air swallowed her laughter at the explosion of very loud, probably expletive-filled yelling that followed her decent.
She fell much faster than any of the rest of the crew, with the possible exception of Brian. They’d never actually bothered to check, but thinking about it as she fell she could probably rope Raphaella into that if she ever wanted to know for sure.
Brian would probably fall faster than her, was the hypothesis she came to shortly before she hit the ground with a muffled thump, sending a flock of birds scattering in alarm.
She came to a while later, a dull ache radiating through her entire body. Her back crackled as she stood up with a slight wince, moving her head from side to side to work the stiffness out of her neck.
Her communicator was beeping in her pocket.
“Did I die?” she asked, not even bothering to check who it was.
“You-! Fuck you!” She couldn’t gage, not without seeing his face, if he was more upset over the actual jump or that she’d inadvertently tricked him into showing he cared.
“Jonny, did I die?”
“No,” he said, though he sounded reluctant to admit it. “Koschei flickered for a sec, but I think you just knocked yourself out.”
“Thought so,” she said, nodding to herself. “Well, I’m good now.”
She didn’t need Jonny’s words to know the moment Koschei launched himself off the cliff and spread his wings to catch the air. She felt lighter than she had in years. A renewed energy rushed through her chest, reminding her almost painfully of when cold could be refreshing rather than the endless baseline of her existence. She watched him, a small shape against the vast blue sky, and felt the rightness of his movement through the air as he caught the wind and let it carry him as far as it would. It was how he should be, always.
Winging his way around Aurora’s corridors, finding small hidden nooks high in the corners of the engine room to sleep in, soaring through life at her side rather than stuck permanently to her shoulder.
But he could not rise on his own, only descend.
She raised her arm in preparation as he neared, coming in for an elegant landing, head held high and proud as he shook out his feathers. Her breath felt freer in her chest as she ran a finger of his head.
“How was it?” Jonny’s voice over the comms broke her out of her moment of reverie.
“Refreshing,” she answered.
His short bark of startled laughter brought a smile to her face.
“Good. I’m gonna head into town, see if the others left anything standing. Care to join me?”
“No, I need to get back to Aurora,” Nastya said.
“Figured.” He made a noise like he was stretching. “Well, see ya.”
“Jonny?” Her hand tightened briefly around the communicator as she steadied her breathing.
“Hm?”
“Thank you.”