1964-10-16 - Paths Found
Summary: It sounds like someone has a trip to Siberia ahead.
Related: If there are no related logs, put 'None', — please don't leave blank!
Theme Song: None
lucian bucky 


Russian myths from a man as much the myth himself. Lucian rests his back against the wall, the faint slant to his torso and hip. Casual exists in his lexicon, the casual of a naked sword kept in arm's reach or a sniper rifle in the sunshine. He drags his finger to his mouth and tastes the blotted remnants on it, acute senses calculating what might be the flavour beneath. "Wise. We can't trust in just anyone to hold the peace, all things considered. This is a house of luxury and refuge, not petty quarrels."


"I've met them before. Rusalki, I mean," he explains, quietly. "When I was in Siberia." Then he pauses a beat. "There are a lot of things that are supposedly mythical still living out there." Just ask Winter about the time he fought her White Knight to a standstill.


"Rusalki have a way about them. Though the ones coming through may have a particular type. Maze's job is discovering what. Naturally they won't go near Ana." And would they want to, considering she's the ruler over the waters hereabout? Lucian is at ease in his own skin. The thumping tempo of experimental rock overhead barely seeps into here, the fine acoustics at odds with sublime soundproofing technology. Privacy and entertainment have the odd couple relationship, of course. "Siberia represents one of the last great stretches of the unknown. It, the Amazon, the Outback, and the far Canadian north represent the marginalized areas where they can hide. The Tibetan plateau is too much wreathed by the bodhisattvas to really present much danger directly in creatures, though those which survive are old, powerful, and crossed halfway into dimensions."


He's still looking at Lucian calmly, though one corner of his lip refuses to uncurl, good tempered more than sardonic. Those little wisps of adoration come off him like steam off a sweated horse on a cold day, for all his attempts at cool. It takes a moment for him to mull that over, the grin unspooling itself all the while, into one of those puckish smiles. "Just when I think I've seen it all," he says, in a near whisper, musing. "I sure saw plenty when I was out there. I learned to mostly keep my mouth shut on it, though. If I came back with a crazy story, they'd assume it was programming flaw hallucinations, and I'd get an extra dose of treatment." He's matter of fact about it.


Sedate will never really apply to the father of lies, the master of hell come and gone. He clicks his heels and wiggles his nose, trouble erupts. Ideas constantly churn in that mind. He raises an eyebrow. Lucian's golden smirk has all a lion's bitter-dark ease. "The world doesn't believe what it can leave behind. Convenience for assuming they are safe in their concrete high-rises and behind their paved roads. Humanity's but a skin on a great jest. No one likes to think the planet may have its own cycles and processes under the surface, much less a volition not in accordance with mankind's own. What are in those dreadful forests? I should take a flyby before they get too snowy and dark. Any recommendations?"


"Yeah, that was the Soviets. They couldn't really handle much outside that worldview," Buck's voice is musing. "Tigers. Huge bastards and some of 'em were wearing human skins part of the time. Bears, the same. Leshiye. Snow ghosts." Then he blinks at Lucian, as if parsing that. "….d'you mean now? I mean, today?"


"Soviets wouldn't let creativity or fortune stand in the way of a five-year plan." Lucifer Morningstar, condemning the hammer and sickle? Watch him complain about Mao. The little red book is his idea of a crock. Nothing really eases recognition at how foolish and stupid humanity can be. "The bears prove respectably dangerous in their own right. Snow demons, animated spirits of the sucking bogs. Many remarkable creatures come out of shamanic traditions or the very permafrost itself. Are you asking me if they exist now?" He smirks slightly. "Do you really want the answer?"


"No, they sure didn't," Buck agrees, on a sigh. "No, I figured they still dead. I met my share, and even the Russians haven't conquered those forests and steppes. I meant - are you going now? Today?" He sounds almost hopeful. What charms can those frozen wastes have for him, that makes him sound in the least bit wistful. The blinding white cold, the monsters within and without, the knowledge that in none of it is succor or rest? Though it has its own pure beauty.


"To the frozen north? Why not. The ice for the whiskey lacks a certain quality and permafrost is ideal when it comes to peaty drinks." Lucian eases into a smirk. "Won't take terribly long to get there. Handful of ice scooped up and that ought to do the trick. I should find Ana and ask her to find a covered bucket, something suitable. We could sell it as the Bite of the Winter Hag or something equally bad. The rusalki would be at home about it too. Thoughts?"


Lucian gets an utterly blank stare for a long moment. And then Bucky bursts into laughter, hastily stifled behind his gloved hand…..but he's still grinning conspiratorially at Lucian, when he stops. "Sure, like you said, why not," Lucian might be baiting him, but he'll rise to it like an obliging trout anyhow. And if he isn't, well….wonders never cease at this job.


Burning heliotrope eyes crackle. Crooked smile gives credence to the threat of a danger. "What, you've never spent a day going north to south, east to west? Never set your sights on the distant horizon and gunned it?" The premise is easy, concept sketched in a black smear of a gesture in the shadow. "Rather tricky for you to make the trip, you realize. Miserable without some kind of exoskeleton." He shrugs. The wings flicker out of being, a flash of roseate dawn dipped in the deepest coffee dregs of night's cauldron.


"I can fly planes," he says, with a dismissive note in his voice. "But yeah, you're right." A shrug - there was that expedition to the island of very small ponies, after all. Gone from looking at the wings to looking at his face again. My eyes are up here.


"Planes can't keep up." Smug fucking bastard, righto. No explanation further tendered. Too many truths arise of late, too many things that sketch out honest intentions without a smear of concealment. There are veils to be upheld. Shetland adventures, eh? "Ever miss it? The upper atmosphere, the speed?"


"Not like I bet you do," Buck retorts. "But yeah. I don't remember enjoying much from when I was Winter, but I do remember that." And his eyes have gone wistful. "I actually tried to enlist in the Air Force, in the war," he adds, as an odd little aside.


"What turned you away?" Lucian's question is a simple thing. He listens. Happening to talk is good and all, but the strength of the moment lies in those times when a person strips back the mask, cracks open the flesh, and exposes the soul within. Something of a master at those, him. He isn't prone to movement, otherwise.


There's the rueful little grin. "The office I went to had more than reached its quota - too many guys to deal with. They shunted me down the hall to the Army, and that was that. I figured the earlier I got in and the better trained I was, the better chance I'd come out alive."


Lucian gives that smart measure of a smirk and a nod. "We look up to the skies for freedom. Not so much the ocean, but the water has its truth too." One day, perhaps, he'll find the proof of that unlimited speed in the hiss of air under his wings and buoying him rapidly to reaches beyond the earth's stifling, heavy mantle of clouds. So close to divinity and so, so far by choice. "At least you didn't go out a submariner. Nothing really so terrible as being stuck in a stinking tin can. You got the better of it. I should go fetch that ice before the idea eludes me. It might be worthwhile to upset a shaman and the apparatchik of some backwater town. Maybe I'll free the bastards in a gulag."


"I'd beg you go to free my brothers, but….I don't know what we'd do with 'em," Buck says, with a little sour laugh. "I don't even know how many there are, ultimately. But….if you do, tell 'em the Winter Soldier sent you?"


"They won't know what I am. Who. Hasn't the story been squashed out with the fall of the Romanovs and the patriarchy? I doubt highly some man in a khaki shirt and polished boots under his greatcoat will know. He'll hold his breath and stare me down, armoured in his convictions of the party line poured in his ear so he's not like the right bastards they interred there under his watch," remarks the Morningstar. He's the Devil, after all. Their hearts are a comparatively open book. Some semblance of recognition starts from those base sins, those dark looks. "Half your brothers are probably more threat to themselves than anyone out there. I've got half a mind to go walking around and seeing what sort of trashed concepts they made of our work."


A resigned nod at that. "No, they won't. Hell, most people here don't. Not like you can't shine a little light, though. That'd freak 'em out," He grins at the mental image. "I met a few Christians there, though. I used to….used to go to this monastery I found at the end of a training range. They saved my life once, in a blizzard. I never told my trainers about 'em. I was afraid they'd come and wipe the monks off the map just for knowin' about me." Then he cocks an eye at Lucifer and teases, "Isn't that what you're known for? Walking the earth?"


"Monks don't have any better or worse track records. Everyone can show a dismal quality that warrants the need for punishment. Those who suck up the hardest get themselves the stories in the hagiographies, and how many of them end up on the rack or praying for the lash and blade? Of course, it's a business taken terribly seriously." He rolls his shoulder beneath the shirt, adjusting his collar to remain crisp and cool, matching the slight starched quality of the cuffs. Lucian, always presentable.


There's a little flicker behind his eyes at that, the glint of fishscale in murky water. "Yeah," he says, after a beat too long silent. "They were real serious." Not really thinking about it, he brushes nonexistent dust from that sleeve with a motion of leather-covered fingers, as if he were the Morningstar's valet, and not another employee.


"If I see them, I'll say hello. No doubt someone's shouting loud enough to make a good landing spot for ne now, at least." He smirks to nothing and no one in particular. Lucian is good if not perfect at shutting out the calls. Turn his attention in a given quarter, and all those who want arise from the stygian deeps. "Try not to get into too much trouble." Truer words never spoken.


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