Capturing exactly what you want is rather difficult.
0o0o0o
Keep him distracted. Easier said than done, Yao thought, chewing on the inside of his mouth again. He tasted copper more often than not now. His mind shuffled through and discarded ideas of meetings, calls, and false files. It kept his mind off Leon for once.
Leon. Yao pushed his face away, but their video call came back to mind. Yao wondered if he'd ever be able to forget Leon's voice with the way his words echoed endlessly in the gray. Of course he would. One day, he wake up and realize he couldn't remember the way Leon winked at his cousins when they were planning or the way he explained the new devices. He would fade, and Yao would then think of the time when Leon's memory had consumed him and curse how he hadn't preserved it better.
Yao felt a sharp pain and raised a hand to his lip. It came away red. Bitten again. His skin felt too tight.
He couldn't think of Leon right now. Leon was beyond saving, and all Yao could do now was to try to save someone else. Try desperately, try with everything left behind from where his younger brother used to be. Try. Try so he wouldn't-fail-again!
Yao pressed the buttons through muscle memory now.
'Kiku, I need your help,' he demanded, ending the line without waiting for an answer and throwing himself back into ideas and sketches as soon as he could. Anything to keep off the horrible gaping loneliness. He didn't know how long it was until Kiku knocked on the door. Without looking up, he shouted 'Let yourself in!'
'Yao, you-'
'Don't start.' Yao stood, the prickling unrest underneath his skin suddenly rising to the surface, snapping along his skin like sparks. 'I know what I look like. I know how much I've been working. Save the lecture. Braginsky got to it first.'
'I was just going to say you have ink here.' The young man tapped his cheekbone quietly. Yao rubbed at it angrily with his sleeve, and Kiku shook his head. 'Hold on.'
The black-haired man crossed to the sink and wet a small towel. Yao watched him, the anger draining as suddenly as it had come for weariness. Kiku turned to him, waiting for permission.
'May I?' he asked. Yao just closed his eyes in response, and the soft cloth rubbed the ink away. It withdrew. Yao still didn't open his eyes.
'I'm sorry.'
'He was your little brother,' Kiku said. The sink ran again.
'I feel guilty, Kiku. So horribly guilty that it feels like it'll rip me up, take me apart, crush me.'
The sink turned off. Kiku moved behind him, such a tiny movement Yao was sure nobody else would have noticed. The kind of almost sigh that meant sorrows and frustration and anger, all unspoken. Yao thought he would snap at him, but his words were surprisingly pained. 'Like a black hole has replaced your heart?'
'Not exactly. Like the entire fleet is falling into a gravity well, a nebula, inevitably but slowly.' Yao twisted the pen in his hands. 'It's not the whole fleet, though. It's just me.'
'It's not just you.' Kiku moved by his side, and Yao opened his eyes again. Kiku looked broken. Kiku looked like he had a black hole replacing his heart. His eyes were raw with emotion. Yao reached out to hold him, but Kiku turned away. 'What did you need me for?'
Yao stared at his back for a long time, begging for him to turn back around and share himself again, but Kiku never did.
'We need to draw the Russian leader's attention away from Ivan.'
'For how long?' Kiku neatly slid his paperwork to the side, returning a thick book buried at the very bottom to the shelf. Yao sat down and motioned for Kiku to follow suit, almost impressed at how he didn't ask questions.
'Three, four hours? Long enough for Ivan to get to the files, but not too long or else it looks suspicious.'
Kiku frowned at his hands before picking up his device and dialing a number. He spoke haltingly into the mouthpiece in a musical language Yao didn't understand, and received a burst of enthusiastic fast-paced chatter in return.
'Who is-'
'Please wait,' Kiku whispered, listening to the young man on the other end for a few minutes more before thanking the person and ending the call. 'That was a friend of mine from the Axis. Particularly, the Italian part. I never know for sure if he will have any information, but the chance did pay off this time.' He glanced questioningly at the note paper. Yao nodded impatiently.
Kiku peeled off a piece and set about writing times.
'He is friends with one of the co-leaders of the Union of Two Nations fleet, and he heard that the Russian leader is having a meeting with the other leader at twelve.' Kiku wrote a twelve at the top of the page, then a one, two, three, and four below it. 'We can almost guarantee that the meeting will run for at least an hour but no more than two, because there was no command to clear the entire day's schedule.' Kiku crossed out the first three numbers and circled the remaining two. 'What will Ivan be doing during the last two hours?'
'Returning the information to me or going back to his usual duties to not seem suspicious?' Yao guessed, slightly euphoric at this strike of good luck.
Kiku wrote it down. 'And the leader?'
Yao shuffled in his seat, coming to the painful realization that he had no inside man other than Ivan to tell him what he needed. Except perhaps…
Yao groaned, dropping his head into his hands. Kiku looked up, startled.
'Did something happen?'
'Kiku,' Yao said, twisting his pen in his fingers again. 'I may either make the biggest mistake or bring this all together.'
It was meant to be lighthearted. But the split second of memory in Kiku's eyes was too much, and Yao's hands cracked the plastic of the pen. Suddenly not caring for an answer, he took up his device with shaking hands and dialed a number he barely remembered seeing flash up on Ivan's display. This was to right the wrongs in some convoluted, ironic way, wasn't it? A game of corruption to avenge innocence?
'Hello, Natalya. This is Yao.'
Kiku flinched, nearly reaching out to take the device away. The other end of the line was silent for so long that Yao thought he'd dialed the wrong number and was about to end the call.
'What do you need, Yao?'
Yao's heart was pounding so hard he could feel it, taste it, hear it. He took a deep breath. 'I need you to tell me what your leader will do after he ends the meeting with the Lithuanian leader.'
More silence. Beside him, Kiku stared at the ground. Finally, she spoke. 'I could tell my leader everything you are saying.'
'But you won't.'
Yao could imagine Natalya with her long spill of pale hair, twirling strands between her fingers as she weighed the consequences. 'Not for nothing.'
'Never for nothing,' he breathed. The woman laughed, then, a terrifying sound, and Yao felt panic spike like fire through him. The sound carried on until she quieted, and Yao waited with bated breath.
'He will be at the observatory,' she whispered, soft as a feather, and the call went dead.
Yao lowered the device from his ear and only then allowed himself to acknowledge how badly his hands were shaking. Kiku gazed at him impassively, but Yao caught a flicker of relief and respect. They shared a silent second of agreement.
'I will meet him there.'
Kiku nodded. It looked as if there was more he wanted to say, but he left before he gave the words voice.
0o0o0o
Ivan considered what he was doing as he walked towards the command rooms. Seeing if he was on death row as a whim for a man who believed his sister's lies. It was ridiculous, Ivan thought, and yet he couldn't imagine doing anything else right now. His and Yao's alliance was built from trust, he supposed. Trust with information and lies and trust that Yao would cover for him.
He pulled his scarf over his mouth as a precaution and uncapped a vial he pulled from his pocket. It wouldn't be fatal for the guards so long as he capped it soon enough. And he did. He held no malice towards them, these crumpled bodies breathing shallowly through the sleeping pain, slumped around the door.
Ivan pushed a tool into the lock and eased open the door to the rooms, and all other thoughts disappeared from his mind. He walked confidently, slowly, not looking around at the people sleeping where they had sat or stood. Nobody appeared to question him, and he made his way into the files department. The files under B were easy to break into and he shuffled through the names, wondering who else he could find ready to be terminated in these folders.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
0o0o0o
Toris may as well have been back with Ivan.
Every time he fielded questions about interests or aims disguised as small talk, he was dragged back to Ivan's childish voice and violet eyes. He tried to drive the memories away by thinking of Feliks, Feliks' sunshine and warmth, but all that appeared in his mind's eye were the sunflowers he now hated so much.
Most of all, that Feliks has been turned away at the door, that his gentle warmth had been stripped away and now Toris was cold and alone.
Toris felt as if he was going to be sick every time the man asked about his governing, knowing where the conversation was slowly sliding to. His machinery.
What if, Toris wished suddenly, foolishly, he had grown up among books and words instead of iron and gears.
'Toris?'
Toris jerked back to the present. 'Sorry?'
'I have heard you design things. Make machines.'
Toris' heart sank, and he wished more than ever for Feliks, but no Feliks arrived. 'I do it rarely. I am not very good.'
'Evidently,' the leader said, tapping his fingers on the table separating them. 'Toris, If someone else was to create the machinery you irresponsibly and unethically used on Leon Wang, do you think he'd still be alive?'
The casual question cut Toris to his core. 'I-I don't…'
'If someone else had done it, if the operation was done better, faster, sooner. Do you think he'd be alive, Toris?'
'I...I don't know,' Toris stammered. 'How did you know I was-'
'Braginsky's device is tapped,' the man said. 'You could be charged, Toris. But I think the worst part for you would be releasing the information publicly.'
Toris stared across the table in horror. The man looked gravely back at him.
'Do we have a deal, Toris?' he asked, and all Toris could do was nod.
0o0o0o
'Ivan?' his sister asked shakily. Ivan carefully shut the drawer and stood. Her voice was a mess of warning and fear.
'Hello,' he said softly. 'What are you doing here?'
She mutely shook her head. 'I came to tell you you need to leave.'
'I know,' Ivan said soothingly. His mind was scrambling for ideas. All he could do was play off his sister's kindness. 'Katyusha, I don't want you to tell anyone I was here. Please?'
She flinched at the familiar name. 'Ivan, you know I would have to. Please, don't.'
'I'm your brother,' Ivan coaxed. 'I'm doing this for a good cause.' He dropped his voice, wondering if he could convince her. 'I am here to see if I am in trouble.'
She flinched. 'Ivan…'
'All it would take is for you to step out of this room and pretend you never saw me. Then I will leave.'
'You have to leave now. Please,' she breathed, one last time. Ivan held their gaze, and finally her eyes dropped.
'Thank you.'
'Don't thank me,' she said quietly. She looked back when she closed the door, but Ivan didn't look up. He opened the drawer again, thumbed back to the Bs, and withdrew his name.
His folder was conspicuously thin. The hard copies were to record histories of information that could not be tampered with, and he had history. Much of it. So why was his barely a few sheets of paper?
He scanned them, taking in information about his Earthly origins and life up to very recently, looking for that red mark that would mean he was on death row. Nothing. But he could have missed it, and panic was insisting he had to run, so foolishly, foolishly, he slid the folder inside his coat, shut the drawer, and left.
The guards and few people in the department were still asleep. Nobody to appear and apprehend him. A question tickled the corners of his mind, but he pushed it away, pushed the door open, and the hallway stretched out before him. He walked along it, then faster and faster.
His breath came hard and fast. He could hear his machinery whir in his chest, and something demanded he return to Yao.
0o0o0o
But we can try, at least.
:: Birds with wings outspread, alighting in almost slow motion
