Author's Note: I cannot apologize enough for the continual delays and schedule slips that compose my life. I am a terrible writer and I am sorry.


Jevrem took the hairbrush from his wife's tired hands and told her to go to bed already; she frowned at him, but kissed him as Linka watched the tiny TV in their tinier apartment.

The TV was a gift from a friend, sort of. Where it came from wasn't as important as the fact that it was making his children happy and helped them fit in at their school. Moscow was a huge step up from the mining town they'd lived in; even their poorest of neighbors was wealthier than their richest ones back there. He knew he could help Ilinka and Mihailjo study any time, but he could not bring them up to speed on Russian pop culture or be there when their playmates asked them if they were keeping up with the latest cartoons and shows. He worked the hairbrush into the sturdy knots in his daughter's hair as they both watched a rerun of Go There, Don't Know Where! Jevrem had to smile at both the movie and his child. Distantly, he remembered seeing that movie when he was young, wide-eyed and idealistic, a new immigrant to Russia, seeking out a better life.

"Next time," he told his daughter, "Put your hair up when you beat up a boy."

She giggled, bringing sunshine into the dark evening. Her face was much like his, with a small nose and bright green eyes, but her hair was her mother's, and he marveled sometimes he'd had a part in creating someone so beautiful. "You're supposed to tell me not to beat up boys, Otac."

On instinct, he glanced around them. He sighed silently when he realized his wife wasn't listening. They'd been trying to get the children to stop calling him that here. A proper Russian said Papa, not Otac. A proper Russian did a lot of things his children didn't do, and he hated pushing them to be people they weren't. Jevrem knew it was confusing to them that the world couldn't accept even the small Serbian things like that when their teachers, the news and all of Russia drilled into them that prejudice was the problem of lesser countries like the United States. Mihaljo was doing better than his sister at adapting to Moscow. He had eagerly abandoned his name for Mikhail, bleached the dark ink-brown out of his hair when one classmate of his had said they'd seen a Serb who looked like him at the grocery store. His son listened to Russian music, poked his head into a Russian Orthodox church, swore in Russian, talked up how Azeri people coming over the border were ruining Russia, so long as he didn't know his father was in earshot.

Jevrem hadn't said anything to him the day he heard his son talking like that on the phone. He and his son had just stared at each other for a long moment before Jevrem felt something between them break and he turned away, telling himself it was best this way. Really, it was – they'd have better futures, both of them, if they could learn to be like that. He hadn't called his son Mijo or lepotane moj in months. They'd lived here for nearly four years. This was inevitable. He told himself that often, when he couldn't sleep despite being dead tired and overworked, as he stared up at the ceiling. It shouldn't hurt; words were only words, after all. But Linka filled his heart up by insisting on Linka as a nickname, refusing to change her name, calling him sreco moja and curling up with him most evenings when she wasn't out with friends. Of course she called him Otac. No one made his daughter do a damn thing she didn't want to.

"Vihora moja, you know how your mother feels about you saying that. So I'll make you a deal," he said quickly as she opened her mouth to object, "I'll cover for you the next time you get into a fight, so long as it was for a good reason, if you can be good for your mother, alright?"

She exhaled the most dramatic sigh he'd ever heard outside of a sitcom. Jevrem chuckled, working the knots out of her hair as she pondered laboriously over this. He would never get tired of his dramatic child and her expressiveness. She got a lot of that from his mother, who he wished she could have met. They would have gotten along like a lit match and gasoline. "Fine," she relented. "But I still think Ilinka is a prettier name than Malinka."

He thought about pointing out they weren't radically different names, then decided Linka probably would say he was missing the point. Instead, he tried to keep the mood light. "You know, I almost named you Vesna."

"Otac!" she half-shrieked, turning to look at him with horror. "Like the girl on that American cartoon?!"

"Scooby-Doo hadn't had a Russian release back then," he defended himself, savoring the wide eyes and total shock on her perfect features. "Besides, I think her name was something different in the American original anyway. What's wrong with Vesna?"

Linka shook her head helplessly, giving up her father as a lost cause. He was nice, but he would never be cool. It just came with being a parent, probably. As he braided her hair for the evening, she mulled over a different question: "What would you have named me if I was a boy?"

"Neven, maybe. Or Nikola, though you would've changed it to Nikolai once we moved," he replied, and she frowned, shaking her head. "What?"

"I wouldn't change it," she muttered angrily. "Mijo made you sad, when he did so. I would rather be made fun of by strangers than make you or Mama feel bad."

Jevrem swallowed back a lump in his throat, not wanting to get emotional when he knew he had to go work his so-called 'second job' tonight. "If… if when you're older, that changes, that's alright, Linka. You'll always be my malo vihora, no matter what you do, or say, or call yourself. Your brother is still my knez, too. Okay?"

"Okay. But I won't change my name."

With a smile, he finished fixing her hair, planted a kiss to the top of his indomitable-spirited daughter's head and shooed her off to bed. As he put his winter clothes on in the dark and carefully slipped his handgun into the inside pocket he'd sewed into the coat, he heard her sneak back into the living room to turn the TV on the lowest volume possible, a volume that necessitated she sit all of four inches away from the screen just to hear it. He stood in the doorway for a moment watching her small form silhouetted against the bright screen, saw her fists clench through a particularly scary moment in the movie as she refused to look away even though she clearly wanted to. She was so kind, so good, he marveled that he had anything to do with her upbringing. Sometimes, he thought about leaving the work he did, for the sake of his conscience, for the sake of his own sanity. Then he thought of his children and steeled himself for another round. Seeing his daughter like this, safe and sound, enjoying her childhood and all its' little luxuries he'd never had growing up, he knew he could no more quit crime than quit breathing. Everything was worth it for moments like this, and everything always would be.

He slipped out of the apartment silent as a shadow, the orchestral swell of the TV's music still in his head as he entered the dangerous quiet of the Moscow night.


For several moments, Linka was silent, watching the TV blather on in a language she really had only ever gotten mediocre grades in. The words barely registered with her other than the one that counted.

Murderer, the TV said. Murderer, as if it were that simple, that cut and dry, as if no further explanation need be given. As if these people turning her father into a ratings' surge could ever comprehend what his life had been like, all the time he had spent working, all the insults he'd had to take in stride, the threats he had to force himself not to respond to, the constant marathon of off-color jokes he'd pretended not to find offensive for years just to get by. They had no idea what it was like to have every action interpreted as dangerous or angry, to have to watch everything said and done in order to make it through the day. Linka's father had been in a lot of fights in his life. She knew that from the scars he bore than he kept concealed under layers of clothing, all of them frightening, some of them still an angry red, others pale and faded. She had only walked in on him changing once. After that he kept the bedroom door locked to a paranoid degree. Linka knew he wanted her to think the world was a good place and that he had wanted her to fit in and live a happy life unburdened by the weight of her heritage.

She was tired of trying to fit in and tired of the good life and that was half of why she'd left Anatoly, but to be honest with herself, if she'd really been through with lying she would have told Wheeler she wasn't really Russian the second they met and he told her he loved her accent. After years of trying to hush up her family history, she had thought she could start anew with the Planeteers, just leave her entire prior life behind and remake herself.

The past was not a thing that could be outrun. She saw that now. Getting to her feet, she accepted Wheeler's hand when he reached for hers and tugged him towards the table, dimly aware of Anatoly turning off the TV with the remote, the word murderer still repeating in her head like a drumbeat; she thought it was a better word in English because it was harsher sounding in English, hard and solid like the condemnation that came with it. The English murder reminded her of the Serbian mrz. Her father had rarely sworn, but he'd used mrzim more than any other verb in either Russian or Serbian when pushed to his limits, repeatedly, sometimes. As she sat down at the table, she pictured the time a month before her father's death when she'd woken up late at night to find him at the table, fists clenched in his hair, muttering ja me mrze again and again and again as her mother tried to comfort him.

Ovdotya and Ma-Ti came in the front door and Linka gestured them over, not even noticing the way Ma-Ti's Ring pulsed as he tried to get a read on her. "What happened?" he asked, prompting Linka to look over at him with an unreadable expression.

No more lies. No more omissions, she thought, stubbornly pushing down her own anxiety and pain. If Wheeler and I have a daughter, she will never see me break down and say I hate myself. I will never lie to Wheeler about anything ever again. No more hiding, even from the ugliest truths, the coldest things. I am too old to keep playing make-believe with myself. It won't get better until everyone knows the truth.

"The press-" Anatoly began, and she cut him off. She loved him, distantly, as she might a brother or a friend. She always would. But Anatoly was like his father, like her own father – he would do what it took to survive even if that meant lying to everyone around him.

"My father killed someone in self-defense. He was jumped by anti-Serbian Russian nationalists, and then he panicked, because he was outnumbered. He became very depressed afterwards. He drank. One day, he got into the car with my mother while he'd had several drinks too many, and they crashed. Most papers only ever cared that my parents were dead. No one outside the family should know what he did except the other men who jumped him. Now that I am famous, one of them has come forward to the police with evidence, whatever that is, however little there is, to tell their version of events, which is skewed, and wrong, and does not tell you that he spent a month in mourning or that he may have crashed deliberately according to the coroner."

After that, there was nothing more to say. She let the silence fall over the room, unrelenting and harsh as everything else seemed to be in her life.

Wheeler collapsed into the chair beside her, mouth open, making a choking sound. Kwame was frozen. Gi had tears filling her startled eyes; she came from a country full of discrimination, but it rarely resulted in lethal crime. Ovdotya swore quietly and put an arm around Ma-Ti's shoulders protectively, as if shielding him from whatever his reaction was; he leaned against her, shrinking back. Linka didn't look at Anatoly because they'd had this talk before and it never got easier with him trying to rationalize things, make sense of the impossibly awful.

No more hiding, not now. And if I could take these words back, I wouldn't.

It'd be like changing my name.


The Water Ring obeyed Blight's every command now.

She was practicing with it because it needed to be broken in. It was stubborn, resistant, it fought her every step of the way as she tried to get more control and more precision, but she had to come through. She was going to make Russia burn for what they'd done to Illarion and his people, they were going to be the laughingstock of the entire world for how foolish they'd been and despised everywhere for how they'd let their own people mutate and die en masse rather than make reparations, and then they'd fork over all the resources that they owed their victims, she hated them they were monsters how could they do this to someone she loved-

All around her, the water she'd been working with froze into a protective dome as if to shield her from her own thought. Staring up at the foggy ice, she swallowed thickly. Alright, so she'd gotten a bit chummy with the creepy mutant who trailed radiation in his wake like a naïve, juvenile death spirit. That didn't mean she loved him. She didn't want to love anyone. It would eat into too much of her time, chip away at her selfish agenda. The only thing that stayed in life was wealth. There was money to made in hurting the world, and if that sounded merciless, then maybe the world should have shown her mercy at some point, should have proved her wrong. People left. Sometimes, people left by degrees, withdrawing by degrees until they had slipped away without her noticing. Sometimes people up and left for their own selfish reasons and didn't bother explaining why to her. Both were better than the people who decided that rather than just burning bridges, they needed to scorch her personally. Her heart was a bitter, blackened, charred thing she was proud to say rarely bothered her. She was the sort of person who entertained end of the world scenarios and fantasies of perfect power when she laid in bed trying to get to sleep at night.

But damn if Ilya didn't trust her despite everything, if he didn't look at her like she set the sun in the sky and made the moon shine. Every tiny thing she gave to him, from a sandwich to a day of bedrest, he treated as if she'd handed him the Holy Grail. He loved things as mundane as the blankets she'd gotten for him to the vastness of the open sky – he could stare out the window endlessly, fascinated, enthralled by nature's beauty. In some way that was kind of pathetic, that he loved nature while being so toxic to it that he couldn't even touch the Ring without tainting it for hours afterwards. What would Gaia think of him, of the thousands of people living underground in the ruins of two cities that had once been thriving with humans? They were radically altered by the manmade abomination of intense radiation, not by some cosmic design. In the whole world, they were the one thing Gaia had never had a hand in creating.

Figured someone would have to be almost literally not of this Earth to be a decent person. Blight focused and the ice dropped into water again. It pooled at her feet, the most innocuous looking of weapons, the most basic of natural resources, and she wondered if Gi had ever entertained the fact that human beings were mostly composed of water. Rip that out, and life went out like a red-doused candle. Water in the lungs would be a quicker way to drown someone than holding them down in it. Here in Russia, in the winter just dousing someone with water and stranding them might kill them from exposure. All of it was awful. Awful was routine. Awful was normal. She remembered waking up as a child at the slightest sound and rolling under the bed, hiding beside her sister, trying to stave off the inevitable abuse. Barbara had wanted to kill their father. She'd entertained the thought for years until finally, in high school, she got into a Chemistry class. Back then she'd loved her sister dearly, enough to decide they'd be better off in the foster care system than in their father's hands, and had arranged a chemical concoction that mimicked the effects of food poisoning.

People thought Doctor Barbara Blight was a monster as it was. They had no idea what she was like when she had someone she cared about to think of. Whatever restraints existed in her head, they quit existing when someone else's wellbeing was on the line. She remembered reading some tearfully boring book in her high school years for a class, some literature assignment, that had a main character refer to himself as 'the demon that comes when you say its' name'. Blight was one better than that. She came when people said the name of someone else, someone who was hers. And with the massive power imbalance in their situations, she could more or less own Illarion if she wanted to. If she could work around the radiation, they could live together permanently, he could work alongside MAL and help her with things, inbetween staring at the world and gushing over the joy that was life. He'd been filled with joy at the sight of a seagull earlier. This man was clearly putty in her hands ready to be sculpted, handled, manipulated into something more than just a business partner. He was only intimidating at first, and because he came from a culture that killed people who were a drain on resources. Blight took whatever resources she needed. Including people – what better definition of human resources was there?

Her smirk faded as she fiddled with the Ring on her finger. Truthfully, even with MAL, things got lonely, sometimes. Illarion was so new to everything and so removed from normal human cultures that he could not comprehend murder or abuse. In a world of monsters, he was safe. He was the one person she would never have to worry about betraying her. And it was rough, being on guard all the damn time. Maybe she did really love him, a little, as much as somebody like her could, anyway.

"Now," an all-too-familiar voice said behind her, "You're finally getting it."

Dr. Blight whipped around to face Gaia, instantly seething at the astral projection, see-through as it was, in front of her. Her mind raced. Were the Planeteers en route? The answer was almost definitely yes, so even though she'd opened her mouth to insult the spirit of the Earth, her eyes instead darted to the safehouse. How was she going to get Illarion out of here in time? He might be able to muck up the Ring enough to keep Captain Planet from being summoned, but maybe four Rings was enough – and then what, what were they supposed to do to get out in one piece? Illarion would get strapped down to a table somewhere and cut open by the government, she knew that. That was the way of the world regardless of what country it was.

She squared her shoulders and crossed her arms. "I'll kill at least one of your precious planet-huggers if you send them here, and I'll use your own weapon to do it."

Gaia smiled almost maternally at her. "I know. They aren't on their way. You know, in a way, it seems fated that you're the one who might bring those people out of the dark." The spirit turned her gaze towards where Illarion lay sleeping. "He and his kind are so distant to me. Their hearts are hard and their minds are like machines. I knew it would take something extraordinary to pull them out of their stupor. All that radiation – it changes people, you know, and their descendents. I had feared they were lost to me."

"And what, you think I'm going to hand them over to you so you can end them? I know you. You act like there's no radioactive material in the Earth, like oil is some human invention and you're just oh so sick of us normally. People who leak radiation are your hitlist. You can't fool me."

A long-suffering sigh. "If I didn't know any better, I'd swear I knew one of your ancestors. I know the world has never been kind to you. That doesn't mean I hate the way others have hated. Being immortal changes a person's perspective. I don't hate his people. I think being willing to blow up another nuclear facility to get the government's attention is heinous, but I don't hate them. I don't blame them. The world has done nothing to show them they should have any reason to believe there's any other recourse."

"Because there isn't," Blight insisted firmly. "Where were you when they needed you, anyway? If you weren't involved enough to stop things, you really don't have any right to barge in now."

"I was asleep."

It took a lot to render her speechless, but the doctor stared at her, clearly confused at how three words possibly explained everything. Gaia continued after the pause stretched on into confused silence.

"One day, the world might be ready to hear the whole story. For now, only the Planeteers and Zarm know. I made a deal with the spirit of War that I thought was the right thing to do at the time. A hundred years of sleep, in exchange for him not lifting a hand to stir humans to conflict of any kind for a hundred years. You can imagine my surprise when I woke up and found out you had all managed two World Wars in that span of time."

Blight huffed, crossing her arms. "I'm not remotely surprised. This world's rotten. It always has been. That's why you've gotta take what you can and look out for yourself. Looks like you learned that the hard way. But it doesn't mean I trust you."

"You don't have to. If you can use the Ring, you aren't as far gone as I thought. You may be able to change. In fact, I'm counting on it."

"And you were such a great judge of humanity's character before." She rolled her eyes, and Gaia simply shut her eyes, looking more resigned than someone who was technically an embodiment of metaphysics should be able to.

"I'm telling you now what I told War then: I believe people, in spite of everything, will prove you wrong."