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I was not having a good day, and it had nothing to do with a world ending threat or beef I may or may not have been having with the Avengers. It wasn't even a neighbourhood disrupting issue since my boyfriend, the problem in this scenario, didn't live in the area let alone the country.
'Problem' - although I used such terminology in my own mind or when speaking to my brother about Yuri, I never used it to or about him in his hearing. That would be an inexcusable want of tact, especially considering the particular issue he was dealing with. Besides, I had other things to vent frustration about that risked a good outcome instead of a nose dive into an even worse situation.
"Travelling all the way to Siberia everytime I want to see you is a real bitch. I always forget to apply an anti freeze spell until my feathers begin frosting up." I said, upon coming in to land on a bald patch of earth on the cliffside leading to his home on Lake Baikal. I did remember to heat the soil in order to melt any black ice that might lead me to slip or skid or drop my luggage or otherwise embarrass myself, and I did teleport-jump my way across the immense country, so my bad mood wasn't helped by my own baseless complaints. It was spring anyway, and a bright day, despite the blistering cold. I hate Siberia though, whatever season it is. It's one vast death trap, a terrifying place where problem people are sent to die. Always was, always will be. No one returns from there.
Stones crunched, a shiny black boot coming down on a struggling daisy, the thump sending a flurry of grey and black feathers whirling to the ground. Yuri ignored the loss, if he even noticed it to begin with, his brown eyes dull and half lidded when he fixed them on me. "I'm not often here and it's not always winter." he said, matching my level of grumpiness but failing to add the faux brightness to his voice that I did.
Such was our greeting after a couple weeks without seeing each other. I would be tempted to blame myself, but he was exteriorly as cold as his natal environment, and could be an absolute glacier if he felt like it.
Inside his traditional log cabin mansion - a very beautiful 'laced' building in the Siberian Baroque style - my annoyance only suffered an increase when I was forced to play 'Where's Wally' with the seven pairs of hard, disapproving eyes belonging to the seven so-called sisters who shared the place with him. Seven heinous sisters who were all in their sixties and seventies, and evil. Yuri himself was forty-seven to my twenty-nine, and last time we met in person he'd cryptically told me that he'd be enjoying no more birthdays, an alarming statement to make, if he wasn't a wizard. He then refused to elaborate. Asking his 'sisters' about it helped not at all, as they'd cackle like the witches they were. I'd attempted to use telepathy on them to force the answer to appear, but they had magical means unknown to me that prevented my prying. I did not attempt to use telepathy on my boyfriend. Not yet. It would be pointless, and might ruin my relationship. A relationship I very much enjoyed and wanted to see develop into something permanent.
And because I enjoyed it and wanted stability, his sisters hated me, claiming I was a bad, foreign influence which was corrupting their precious little brother, the head of the household. Reminding them that he was a grown man who could make his own choices didn't help.
"Yet you attempt to mother him, missy."
Is the answer I'd always receive from the youngest sister, the one who hated me most of all. No, I did not attempt to mother him, I was simply concerned, unlike them.
"How was the flight?" he finally asked when we were alone in his room with refreshments. His suite of rooms actually. His wing of the house, which was very large because it was very old. Old and luxurious, with devilishly thick walls, small windows, furs everywhere, and one huge fireplace in the centre. At the end of his question he yawned and stretched. I watched from my spot curled up on my favourite perch, watched the uncoordinated, slow way he moved, watched more feathers detach from his wings to drift to the floor, which already featured fluff drifts floating over the glossy oak. Even more feathers detached when he fluttered up beside me and draped a wing over my back. His warmth was not as great as it was even a fortnight ago.
"More or less the usual. A flock of tourists mobbed me for autographs. I lost an hour."
"Awww, poor little Scarlet Witch. Having to give autographs to the fans, haha. I'm surprised you didn't send them into another dimension."
"I came very close." I did in fact blast a few clouds apart.
"Hah. Please do it in foreign airspace, zaika. Preferably Bulgarian airspace, hehe."
I loved that he wasn't awed by me or the people I associated with. That he couldn't care less about Avengers or X-Men or anything outside his own ambit. I'd learnt that most wizards and witches who counted themselves as part of a wizarding society were the same. For once I felt like a normal young woman sitting literally under the wing of a more experienced, older and more powerful man. I no longer needed to be the tough one, the one others looked to. The burden of chaos was alleviated whenever he scoffed at the 'nouveau riche' superhero world I'd become used to.
"And how are you, sweetie?" I asked, hating that his bitch sisters were getting into my head and making 'sweetie' sound like a mom word. I sounded concerned too, pointedly concerned, but he was a man of the old school, and seemingly didn't notice.
"Fine. Looking forward to summer and the holidays. Brrgh." He shook himself, puffing up his feathers, despite the heat in the room.
A feather drifted past, seesawing through the air. Snatching it with my telekinesis, I tapped his nose with it, setting off a play fight and a bit of canoodling, postponing the moment when I'd have to ask him how his eating was going.
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"Whore thinks she's something special just because her feathers are red and she can create interdimensional portals. Hmpf!"
Yuri's sisters thought I couldn't understand them because they spoke Russian. Actually no, that's desperately incorrect. Wishful thinking, Wanda. They knew I could understand most of what they said, especially the truly pertinent parts. Under the influence of vodka they would sometimes slip up and talk shit when their brother was in ear shot, and then a whole thing would erupt, screaming and shouting, feathers flying everywhere and holes ending up in the roof. My boyfriend would typically drive six of the seven off to nearby relatives, leaving only the youngest behind since she was his favourite. And also his mother, the situation being the traditional 'hide the bastard child' trick that people used to pull not too long ago. He wouldn't tell me why he'd be having no more birthdays, or why he was depressed, but he told me that at least.
Aside from that minor detail, being talked about behind my back was almost worth it. That evening though, he wasn't in the room but instead was chopping wood outside, the sound of an axe hitting logs irregularly audible. I decided to trot out into the bleak twilight to observe him, leaving a pair of hags cooking in the kitchen, where I'd gone to offer assistance. Cooking a huge, man-sized meal he would not eat.
"There she goes. Off to try mother poor Yurochka into an American simpleton. No wonder he's moulting."
"And she wonders why he hasn't asked her to marry him, blaming us. Huh!"
The old women shook their ragged forms. No feathers fell from their drab, faded, barely usable wings.
I found 'Yurochka' resting on his axe, breathing heavily, his wings drooping down to the permafrost ridden ground, with very few pieces of wood cut. Forgoing his heavy fur coat and robes to work in muggle jeans and a black tank top meant he couldn't hide the way his rib cage and clavicles projected. More damn feathers lay trapped in the vegetation and caught in bushes.
But while I was studying him, he was studying me, his eyes glittering in the increasing dark, the shadows in their sockets black as pitch. "You're beautiful, Wanda." he whispered, breathing still compromised, still ragged.
Devastated emotionally, I floated over to him on a burst of chaos energy, which we both found gorgeous, taking him in my arms.
"Why don't you magic the job done, baby?"
"Picking the easy option every time is a quick way to become fatally soft, zaika."
"But…" I couldn't push him away a little to make my meaning plain via a look. Talking to him about what was ailing him only caused him to clam up entirely. "You're right. Want to go for an evening flight?"
I didn't think he had the energy for it, or the feathers, but if he fell out of the sky straight into the atrociously deep lake below, he'd be unable to either avoid a conversation or eat. Whenever he was laid up in bed, his sisters aunts and mother would swarm him, the one thing they were good for, making for tough nurses.
"Alright." He said, lifting his wings out of the mud already refreezing come nighttime.
A couple shots of vodka before the labour of flight would warm us up and provide some much needed calories to my boyfriend. Like some females with eating disorders, certain things were immune to his ban on consumption, things like vodka, grilled chicken, and hardboiled sweets. Not things like vegetables, strangely.
"Ready?" I asked, when his glass hit the kitchen counter. With him in the room, his women said nothing, only huffed and muttered amongst themselves. A loose window frame rattled in a sudden gust, but only Yuri jumped and looked, his mud splattered feathers fluffing. I'd have to clean them for him later, because I could tell he hadn't been keeping on top of preening, feathers dirty and barbs separated. No one loves harder than me, because his wings were certainly infested with parasites.
Flying using my wings was a fairly uncommon event for me, as for most of those with the capacity for teleportation. As per usual, my boyfriend preferred to take the more difficult path, and was, usually, an excellent flyer. Usually.
"Let's go." he said, unfurling his wings and stepping onto the wood chip and gravel path that formed a run up, pointing himself towards the edge of the cliff that stood beyond a sparse stand of trees.
I began to suspect I may have suggested suicide to a man too proud to admit he was in trouble because even his preliminary wing beats gave supreme cause for worry, being slow, uncoordinated, and responsible for yet more feathers shed. Bald spots were beginning to appear in the few hours I'd been over to visit. I consoled myself with the awareness that we were both magical and had means at our disposal to avoid a fatal fall.
"Sweetie-"
But it was too late, he took a running leap and disappeared off the edge with a flurry of whipping cloth, forcing me to follow. I thought I'd hear the dreaded sound of a body hitting rock, but no, he was rising towards me when I cleared the edge of the cliff, labouring to fly as he'd laboured to chop wood, breathing ragged and movements shaky. Feathers vibrated through the darkening air towards me with every heavy beat of his wings.
"What a nice evening." he said, completely ignoring the whirlwind of black feathers dancing between us, before turning and diving towards the silver foiled lake below.
A terrible choice was offered me. A choice between enforcing safety and letting an adult, who was almost twenty years older than me, actually be an adult, and a man at that. But while I debated, time moved on and the man I was considering embarrassing with my concern pulled out of his dive, wings snapping to their full extent to arrest his speed and set him gliding over the deep, icy water. From far down I caught him glancing up at me with a quizzical look that contained more than a hint of knowing irritation. I dived, watching the last of the daylight turn the vast lake into a gigantic silver knife.
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"My father visited last week..." Yuri said, when I was seconds away from falling sleep, the both of us perched side by side near the fire always kept lit in his room by his sisters. That was one thing I couldn't fault them on.
. "…It had been a while." He continued, eyes half open and glittering in the red-dark. He didn't do much sleeping then, or he slept far too much.
I wanted him to talk, but not about his father, the bane of his existence, and a man who had more than once tried to get me alone. "You didn't eat anything for dinner, Yuri. I will make you something." I said, waking fully and stretching in preparation to tip-toe as silently as possible into the kitchen. It can be frighteningly quiet in especially remote parts of Siberia, so quiet you can feel the malice of the environment, especially of the cold and the vastness, staring down at you through the roof, plotting your doom.
"…My father, and his brother. They had a ritual they needed me for..." he continued, making me want to leap out of my skin. Out of my skin and over the edge of the cliff. His father, Igor, was bad. His uncle Grigori was ten times worse. Neither of them looked a day older than Yuri himself, and together they ran through many hundreds of warm bodies a year. I say bodies because they weren't discerning or particularly particular about who or what they took to their beds. They only ever appeared when they wanted something, and usually that something would be dangerous, morally reprehensible, or just plain annoying.
"Come, I'll make you, uh…" I'd never cooked for him before, and that was maybe a failing on my part, but we rarely hung out at home the rare times he visited me, so I didn't have much of an opportunity. "Something with chicken."
"Chickenhawk. One of the local drunks called me that the other day. I had to explain that I've killed hundreds of dark wizards…"
I realised he was talking in his sleep. I was glad to go see if there was something I could do in the kitchen, now that no hag was awake to harass me. If Yuri ever broke up with me, I thought I might put him out of his misery by blowing up a sister or five.
When I returned with the most exquisite chicken salad I've ever concocted wholly without magic, I found him awake, and shivering violently, a carpet of feathers covering the floor below the perch.
"Go away." he grumbled, when I said screw it and told him he was sick and I wasn't going to pretend like he wasn't anymore. When I said that he had to eat or I'd use my superior magical abilities to force him to.
"No. Don't be childish. You're a grown man."
But he was and he wasn't. He was a grown man, but out of his eyes stared a boy confronted once again by the same thing that had first bewildered him almost forty years before, something he couldn't get over, even with wings.