Bam! Bam! Bam!

Fins ripple outward, gills tighten and eyes harden next to her. He's about to roar. Elisa can feel it; he's going to roar and wake up Mr. Arzoumanian and then the bulging man will pound up the stairs yelling about putting a stop to the whole thing and lose his fucking mind when he sees she hasn't gotten a dog after all-

Around the corner and in the alcove that passes for a kitchen in this year of 1962, Zelda manages a quick look with Giles once she takes her eyes off the curls of meat sizzling before her, and the older man cocks his head, acquiescing. Elisa's practically having to brace herself against the creature's shoulders and digging her red heels into the striated wood to keep him from knocking down her door in overprotective zeal. She feels the rapid tap of a finger on her shoulder, and sees her artist neighbor smiling toothily at her. "Don't worry about it, honey," he says. "Just keep our boy from getting too excited. I have the door."

"Your eggs are doing fine too!" Zelda hollers from across the apartment. "You're welcome!" Elisa smirks to herself and looks back up at the amphibian man imploringly.

You don't need to worry! We're just having a guest over. You don't mind it when G-I-L-E-S or Z-E-L-D-A are guests, do you?

His eyes dart around the abnormally crowded apartment, looking for an excuse between the floorboards or hiding in a shoerack cubby.

Door closed. Cannot see. Who? No idea. Can be bad men. Many tools. Not hard to hurt.

You can't be serious. He just called us on the phone before starting the drive here! Trust me. He'll take kindly to you.

One wet grumble, and he's hers. She leans forward on the tips of her scarlet shoes and kisses him gently. Elisa looks deep into his eyes. Thank you. I love you.

Trust E-L-I-S-A. Love E-L-I-S-A back.

"Ahem . . ." a slightly effeminate voice with the barest nuance of a foreign accent coughs.

Fully aware of who exactly it was, standing there next to Giles in the doorway, Elisa flushes blood red at the snap of a finger. Taking the amphibian man's hand and squeezing it like a squid, she turns on her heels. Guiltily, she bites her lip, and with her free hand fracturedly signs welcome! Although in broken sign language it probably looked like Well .

"'Well', as in what do I think?" Dmitri asks as he steps heavily through the doorway, hanging his crisp black coat on the rack behind him and hefting a large, vague, creamy-looking dish in a plastic container. "I mean, stranger things have happened. I know he is self-aware. I hope the two of you are happy. I simply never imagined he had that kind of emotional epoch within him yet . . ."

Immediately she glares blushing daggers at Giles. The old man shrugs from behind the Russian, signing back to her wasn't just going leave him out in the rain!

"Regardless, I have already met your man Giles," Dmitri continues. He sets his contribution to tonight's dinner down on Elisa's dining table and strides back over to her, calmly grinning. "You must be Elisa Esposito. Pleased to make your acquaintance again. It is good to see you as well, Mrs. Fuller!" He raises his voice on the last sentence. Zelda's wide face dips around the corner, smiles once, and then she resumes unleashing culinary fury that rivals God's zeal when he made the world.

"And you!" Dmitri exclaims as his eyes land on the creature. "You have been keeping him healthy, Ms. Esposito? His coloration is fuller and darker, his gills are saturated . . ." The amphibian man turns to Elisa and the many inches of his long, lurid tongue stick out in disgust.

No. Color always same. Gills always wet! Talk about nothing!

Before anyone can respond to the creature and before Elisa can tell him off for being rude, Dmitri smiles. "Maybe not to your eyes, but perhaps we'll go over the finer points of it at dinner, mmm?"

Five chairs are held tight by gravity and the weight of five humanoid beings sitting upon them. Elisa and the creature sit side by side, and the latter of the pair glistens under the halfhearted light with renewed vigor. A wad of chemical supplement from his minutes-ago dunking in the bathtub still clings to his shoulder, and Elisa picks it off him and flicks it onto the floor. She sits meek and content in her chair. Her previous blouse, stained with eggshell fluid and fish oil and bathwater, has been swapped out for the cheapest, longest dress she could find in red, one she's kept wrapped in a bulwark of plastic for the three weeks since her last moment of weakness in a department store. The creature says he likes red, and his will is done. He sits as upright as he can, with his hips angled behind him and his back arched. Elisa suspects he's tired of the chair's back smushing his golden spines, or maybe he wants to look as prestigious as possible in some one-sided battle of ethos with Dmitri, who he's eyed somewhat predatorily ever since the scientist came in. He and Giles are across from Elisa and the amphibian man, and Dmitri seems like a different man than the defeated, fragile-hearted one she saw each night at OCCAM. Frequently his V-shaped smile presented itself, and he's been the picture of gentlemanly to her and Zelda both. Napkin tucked into his suitvest, his eyes dart to his cup of glassy vodka once or twice a minute. Giles opted for a glass as well. Once upon a time, Elisa might have slapped the cup out of his hand as his lifts it to take a drink in the silence. But she's seen Giles at his best and worst. At the rate he used to drink in the first few months after his rejection from Klein & Saunders, one drink that small wouldn't even phase him. At the head of the table is Zelda, clad in all blue, holding both Giles and Elisa's hands in each of hers as grace begins. Elisa thinks it significant that the older lady's clothes are so similar to those she wears while slaving away in OCCAM's shoved-elsewhere bathrooms and supply closets. She's always at work, but she doesn't seem tired with the way she glows contentedly at the table.

"Everyone ready?" Zelda asks. Elisa and Giles nod. Dmitri shakes his head.

"I am from the U.S.S.R., Mrs. Fuller," he says. "I wouldn't want to pollute your prayers with my lack of faith."

"Just 'cause you're wrong don't make you evil." She smiles warmly at him. "C'mon."

He nods and takes Giles' hand, and with a much slower extension of his arm, the creature's. Four sets of small, white eyes close, and one luminous duo of gold ones scans the others, perplexed.

"Heavenly Father," Zelda begins, with a relaxing breath. "Thank you for givin' me and my friend Giles here the skill to make this here feast we have. Thank you for giving the five of us some peace in the world, for helpin' us find each other. Thank you for giving Elisa the biggest, most stubborn heart anyone's had since David. Thank ya for this meal, that we take into ourselves, that we might better do your bidding. In Jesus' name, Amen."

"Amen."

Amen .

"Amin'."

It's truly fortuitous that God is thanked for the food currently testing the weight limits of what Elisa's dining room table can hold, because it might just have come from the highest, most holy and most blissful dining hall behind the Pearly Gates.

From Giles : quiche after quiche, five in all. Each one had the most creamy, golden-brown egg filling, and within were all manner of spices and meats. As he and Zelda and Elisa had all labored for the last few hours preparing everything, Elisa had seen cuts from all sorts of different creatures; slices of salmon and a bit of herring, skinned flanks of cow or pig, chicken and turkey and duck all intermingled with egg and butter and crust. Like flecks of acid in the pies were peppers and onions, cilantro and herb. Elisa's not sure where he got the money to buy everything, but she'd heard tell of a mighty final paycheck from the ad firm after his firing. How he hadn't blown it all on drink, she couldn't fathom. To complete his contribution, he'd bought at least seven, stout salt containers should anybody wish to pour a bit over the ropes of pork belly that Zelda had brought.

Striated amongst said pieces of meat were what looked like the juiciest, fattest pieces of . . . well, fat that Elisa had ever seen. They were curly and glistening, pockets of Nirvana amongst the hardy, protein-filled portions of muscles. Each strip was thicker than Elisa's dainty fingers, and longer than her entire hand. From the way she had listened during their cooking, the meat had sang a crackling, oily song as the tender juices within were summoned to the surface of their vessel. Even now, over the rest of the Valhallan feast laid out before the five of them, the aroma of them fills her nose and she sighs, pleasured. Rounding out Zelda's efforts is a thick, mushy meatloaf, ashy brown for its ground-beef template. Worcestershire sauce and ketchup are warped together into a layer of viscous red atop the meat.

A mouthful equal to either one of Zelda's girthy dishes is the title of Dmitri's. Elisa had had to press her hand to her mouth and start up a conversation with the creature (who was entirely perplexed by the nuances behind saying grace) to hide her unending grin as Dmitri attempted to teach Zelda the name.

"Once more, Mrs. Fuller," he pleaded. "I can feel it, right on the tip of your tongue. You've just about got it!"

"And I thought I'd jump for joy when a man would talk my head off. Fine."

" Baklaz ."

" Baklaz ," Zelda repeats.

" Hano ."

" Hano ."

" Vaya . . . " Dmitri smiles, his eyes only telling the older woman to go forward.

" Vaya ."

" Baklazhanovaya ."

" Baklazhanovaya ," she says, eyeing the Russian dubiously, sure that his analytical mind will sink into the cracks and find an error in her mimicry she wouldn't have discovered in a lifetime.

" Da , that was perfect."

Triumph shines in Zelda's eyes as Elisa catches her glance. Elisa hears her, unable to read until she was sixteen, repeating the word over and over; " Baklazhanovaya, Baklazhanovaya, Baklazhanovaya," in time with the word's engraving onto a napkin with a pen. Said Baklazhanovaya didn't look very appealing to Elisa. Once, she and Zelda had been called into a laboratory at OCCAM that they rarely visited to dispose of vomit, loosed from a weak-stomach scientist upon his viewing of some experiment they had kept there. To this day she still didn't know what the man had seen, but his picture in the newspaper obituary had confirmed that it had been horrific.

This Russian dish was the spitting image of the half-digested food and viscera they'd been called in to clean up. Chops of green, spinach or lettuce, and the shiny surface of eggplant and onion poked through the dominant, rust-colored mush. A few brave, graceful leaves of decorative herb had been placed atop the dish, and though they gave her little incentive to eat the caviar, Elisa would never forget their sacrifice.

And finally, from her own pocket and sweat, ten plastic plates of eggs. Only three of them could fit on the table, so the other seven had been relegated to the fridge. This was not the same assortment of eggs she had every morning before work. The entire family from every hidden, frozen or fiery corner of planet earth had come to visit. There were deviled eggs and scrambled eggs; boiled eggs and poached eggs, fried, over easy, over medium, sparkling with light-catching salt like snow. They had taken her the last day and a half to make, mostly from trying to piece together the fractured recipes out of a cookbook Giles' mother had given him on a long-lost birthday of his. Judging by the 1925 copyright on the inside cover, Elisa supposes that long-lost is an accurate term indeed. Against all odds, here they were, salted and spiced and sprinkled and topped with cheese in some cases, in defiance of all obstacles. Earlier that afternoon, Elisa had been unable to hide every egg she was watching over before the wet plods of the creature exiting the bathroom found her, and his (unhingeable) jaw dropped.

She'd thought she'd been looking into a belching forge straight from one of Tolkien's novels as the creature's eyes swirled and sparkled. His hands had risen to chest level in an attempt to sign his euphoria, but he'd lost his voice. The odd twitches of his webbed fingers were unintelligible to her. Elisa turns and sees the eggs glitter under the light, just like the million-shield phalanx of the creature's scales. When she faces him again, blue phosphorescence is pulsing behind his skin in time with her heartbeat. Cords of it arc through his veins like strands of sunfire.

Elisa had felt her cheeks heat and a blooming, tentacled warmth in her chest.

Now, they aren't all for you-

E-L-I-S-A kind. Make happy. Happy you make happy. Which word?

Appreciate?

His eyes, for all their brightness, seem to glow.

Appreciate! Appreciate!

And here they were back in the present, food bulging from the table, overflowing it, and those same eyes drill twin holes into the bowl of eggs in front of him. They take a spilt second to land on Elisa and see that she's watching him. Time? The amphibian man asks. Time, she signs back. He's got three eggshells crunching between his teeth before her hands even hit the table.

"I'd just like to get out of the way," Dmitri begins. " my gratitude for helping me that night." His greyish eyes lock on some unknown object behind Elisa, maybe the doorknob, as if he can't get his emotions out and look his allies in the eye at the same time. "I've had self-loathing and guilt eat at me for many years. So many times I refused to listen to my heart and stood by while bourgeoisie and comrade alike did things that I still wake up at night sweating over. But thanks to you all-" he takes a long, gurgly sip of his vodka, and his eyelids flutter. "That's . . . praklyatye , that is smooth." When he starts again, his eyes are focused like needles or scalpels, piercing into the others and making sure they knew he was there. "Thanks to you all, I shook off my . . . my inaction and I listened to my conscience for the first time in years. I will never forget it. Edmund Burke once said-"

"'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing'." Giles finishes, helping himself to a slice of quiche and washing it down with the silver ichor in his cup. "1770, right? God knows what a difference that thinking would have made these last sixty years."

"Don't even get me started," Zelda says. She rolls her eyes and motions for Elisa to hand her an egg. There's an uncomfortable silence that hangs for more than a few seconds as she chews it. Elisa hadn't known Zelda nearly as long as Giles, but she's a black woman in America in the present day. There is no way she hadn't felt the sting of evil and stood in the ranks of marching good men, doing something about it. Her days of activism were long over, but they hadn't been over for so long that Elisa hadn't noticed odd bruises at work and been perplexed because, as ape-like as he was, Brewster never hit her. Zelda swallows. "You think 'bout those Nazis, back during the war. If those cats'd picked up guns and started shootin' at Hitler before he came to power? Whole different story. Whole different war!" She catches Dmitri's eyes, and her hardened face melts down when she sees the reminiscent look in them.

"My bad, Doctor. I didn't consider-"

"No no," he waves his hand. "Do not fret over me. I was in reconstruction during the war. I rarely saw my comrades die, and my sister and her baby boy never suffered the lash of the SS. That is more than I can say for millions of my countrymen."

Sister? Elisa sets down her fork to sign, for once thankful she doesn't need her mouth to speak. It is so stuffed with savory meat, no words could escape.

Any ghosts left over from the Great Patriotic War are snuffed out immediately at the mention of his sister, and all Elisa sees there is gold. He grins to himself.

" Nadia, " he sighs. "My older sister. She must be in her fifties by now. Could never get enough of automechanics. Not as delicate as biology, but she was never as delicate as me. Much more attuned to work in the Komsomol than me."

"And what was that? Girl Scouts?" Zelda and Elisa smile to each other between mouthfuls of food.

"Of a fashion, Mrs. Fuller," Dmitri chuckles. "It is a political youth organization. The "helper and the reserve of the Communist Party, they called it. I recall many things; they told us how to live and dress and not to smoke or drink or have intercourse, and the minute we were home and out of our uniforms we would go drink and smoke and have intercourse anyway."

"And that was something, what, she fell into? The rigorous lifestyle?" Giles asks.

"Oh, yes," Dmitri replies. "Of the two of us I was always the one strangled in vices. When I say we would drink and smoke and have intercourse anyway, that was mostly me." He smirks. " Nyet , Nadia is the one who you could confide secrets in and trust to fix your car. Always with her hands covered in oil."

Zelda sipped at her glass of ice water and motioned to herself with her free hand. "Got a picture of her?"

The question seems to have surprised the Russian, and his eyes widen as if giving a face to his dear sibling should've been his first order of business. "Oh, yes, of course. Are you the only one who wants to see?"

The hands of Giles, Elisa, and the creature all rise into the air a few centimeters. Dmitri's forkful of Baklazhanovaya clinks against his concisely-portioned plate as he fishes a thick, amber leather wallet from his pant pocket. From it, he draws a 2.5 by 2.5 inch square of printed picture. Elisa can't quite see it as her older friends view the image of the woman, not until it passes into her hands. She wipes both hands thoroughly clean of grease or grime and then takes a good, inquisitive look at Nadia Papov.

The photo looks old; the edges are torn a little and the grit as well as the lack of color, makes it look like it was taken sometime around the end of World War Two. The woman in question had dark eyes and lips, and a wide and generous grin. Ringlet upon ringlet of frizzy hair cascaded down her shoulders and face, almost in sheets. Nadia's jawline was broad and powerful, yet still attractive in a feminine sort of way. Her cheekbones were high, marbled, and the creases around her mouth remind Elisa of her own face.

As soon as Elisa's brain processes the woman's face in its entirety, she blushes and she bites her lip in a smirk. What a dame . Those eyes and that wild hair -

A trail of cold water, left by a single emerald digit, runs down the middle of her forearm and jerks her back to her apartment. Three pairs of human eyes look her up and down, and confusedly-arching eyebrows abound from all sides of the table. Elisa blushes more deeply and slowly passes on the picture to the amphibian man.

She is beautiful, sing the signs. Very beautiful.

"Oh," Dmitri sighs. "I did not catch on to your being bisexual. You do mean beautiful in a romantic sense, yes?"

Yes. Elisa smiles at him.

"With the kind of company you keep," Giles laughs through a mouthful of quiche. "That is the biggest goddamn shock I've ever received in my life, honey. Really ." She blushes and giggles silently into her hand at him.

The creature nudges Elisa after he returns the photo to Dmitri. Scraps of eggshell still cling to his lips, and he gestures for her to lean in closer as the other three diners chat amongst themselves.

What is it?

Think N-A-D-I-A is beautiful too.

They eat in silence for a while after that, four co-conspirators undermining a hierarchy born centuries before them, and one gleaming idol they refuse to let this brash new world forget.