delga | fic: hard liquor. [4/14] (spooks)

hard liquor. (spooks)
Fiona, Adam, Tja; het./fem.
iv. (not) a fairytale

Another morning, another early start at Thames House. The world is spinning (Adam checked with Malcolm) but the balance, he thinks, has changed somewhere along the way. He’s tired having spent half the night in Wes’ doorway, watching the sweet child sleep. He oftentimes wonders how two angry spooks managed to bring such a benevolent boy into the world.

When he finally slept, it was four AM and when he woke, Fiona had gone, as though she hadn’t been there at all.

Living with Tja was like everything and nothing. For a year and a half, they toured Europe, living off one another (Anouska more off Tja than the other way around). It was Tja who taught her how to smoke (shit, Nousk! Drape it between the fingers, don’t pinch it. No, look, like this) and Tja who taught her how to cry.

Tja thieves when she wants to, fights when she is bored and spends most of her time haunting bars. On occasion, she somehow manages to receive postcards. These she reads and ties together with tattered ribbon, hiding them at the bottom of her ever-present satchel. When they arrive, Anouska learns how to let Tja be; amidst the silence, she sits in windowsills and weeps before finding any paper she can on which to write. The letters are often pages long, taking days to write and always Tja cries.

(Anouska does not ask. This is not, she feels, her place).

Wherever they appear, Tja seems to know the local tongue and oftentimes, Anouska finds herself questioning from where exactly this banshee materialised.

She dreams of those days, sometimes.

Normally she’s supposed to be doing something important like, I don’t know, surviving, but she can’t help it. Danger is her aphrodisiac and nothing screamed danger like Tja.

But when she’s most afraid (adrenaline streaming, tears forming, muscles burning holes in her flesh) it’s the sweeter things that she remembers most clearly: Tja dancing in the rain, Tja singing under the stars, Tja laughing and playing like a little child brought new into the world. These are the images that sustain her and when she’s begging for redemption, it isn’t Adam she looks to but her old lover, separated from her by time.

Danny comes up to him at lunchtime and asks him (in kinder words) where the fuck his wife is. It only then occurs to Adam that he hasn’t seen Fiona since he fell asleep in the early hours of the morning.

The first time Tja left her was after Berlin. The wall had just come down and Anouska was nervous. There was chaos everywhere and for once, Tja wasn’t the cause of most of it. Nousk wanted to leave – and quickly. Tja wanted to stay, wanted to see what would happen next.

So Anouska went west and Tja went east and the world moved out of focus all over again.

Moscow, she remembers, was always cold. It smelt of sex and liquor; reminded Fiona of Austria (or what she could remember of it, which wasn’t much considering she was five). It was an instinctive reaction, then, to associate vodka with hate because Russia was all about extremes and (in her mind) pain.

This was the land of her blood, the motherland, her terra firma. It was the land of her forefathers and (rather more importantly) her actual father. She had spent her childhood under his drunken eye, spent her early teens beneath his heavy hand. The smell of vodka churned her stomach and yet the taste, the taste could set her alight.

She never drinks vodka lightly; this isn’t child’s play. Vodka is meant to be devoured, not consumed. Fiona has little patience for those who pussyfoot around hard liquor. Slam it down your throat or get the fuck out of the bar. (Adam’s eyes always seem to follow her when she drinks the way her father did. Idiot. This is how men drink: don’t fear the bloody glass, grip it – hard).

Fiona figures it probably says something that her life is polarised between tequila and vodka – then dismisses the idea, pouring herself another shot.

(But this is not all sugar). For all the love, there is terror too but Anouska cannot decide where one ends and the other begins. Tja, it seems, is as capable of brutality as any of the men Anouska has ever known.

It builds in her like a heavy stream of white noise, rising to fill her head. If she reaches out, she could touch her again; if she could just stretch out that much further…

The shot falls to the floor; glass shatters.

This is how Adam Carter finds his wife: sprawled out over a table, screaming into the wood in some harsh Slavic dialect. Split over the floor is glass and ice, swimming around in Smirnoff. He looks at her, really looks at her.

Adam is married to a woman he knows nothing of. (The wonder is that he is learning this only now).

“You’re lying.”

There are arms pinning her back, that deadly blade against her throat and Anouska dares not think lest the cool metal dip too far.

Breathe; I dare you.

“Myshka¹, myshka, myshka… you do not lie to me. You do not lie.”

Anouska can smell her rage; it causes panic to rise in her chest. The blade rises to just below her left eye.

(Quietly, so very, very quietly). “Anouska?” She thinks that maybe Tja is crying; there is that much pain in her voice.

“I didn—” She screams.

Tja draws blood.

end. [4/14]

[1] Means ‘mouse’ in Russian