Who: Viktor Viktorovich & Generic Russian Mob friends Where: The Boardwalk, Brighton Beach, Brooklyn When: 1 Mar 2018, afternoon What: Viktor gets an unpaid internship! Warnings: Fine I think.
The boardwalk of Brighton Beach was as picturesque as a postcard and the air as sterile, chilled by a wind that whipped over the dark waters of Lower New York Bay. It did not approximate the even throught the thin tracksuit Viktor had picked to blend into the New York neighborhood that in some ways almost felt like the USSR. Almost.
The winters of Viktor's youth had been cruel and frozen and they had molded Viktor Viktorovich Sudoplatov into a soldier of similar. He had melted more than he liked, in the San Francisco rain and the summer sun of Tumbleweed Texas more than he would have liked such that while New York got close though quite cut as deep as a Moscow Winter, the cold steel of the GSh-18 tucked in his waistband was no longer something he ignored.
Viktor turned his back to the sea and slipped instead the phone out of his pocket. He was here standing lookout for what seemed mostly to be two old men playing games on the boardwalk but also veered into discussion of trade between Miami and Brooklyn, but on a day where the temperature barely broke freezing, not even those in Little Odessa were going to the beach. He was interested in the business, feeling more useful at that than he had had in months. But as a shestyorka at best, he couldn't be too interested. He checked his notifications, his stomach souring to see that Tina, his guardian whom Viktor had felt he guarded as much the opposite had left.
Viktor stared at his phone for a while, he couldn't have said how long. It didn't seem long, until his attention was broken. "Прекрати играть с этой штукой, Ви́тя" One of the older Russian men who had been previously engrossed in a game of backgammon on the boardwalk was standing, looking at him.
Viktor nearly blushed, wondering how long he had had been lost in the feed of empty news. He muttered an apology and shoved the phone back into his pocket and followed the man down the pier. They walked in silence back to the shop Vasily owned, every step along the way, Viktor trying to reacquire the icy, Stalinist armor that had gotten him this far to begin with and not entirely succeeding.
After some time, Vasily asked him if he needed to get home. Viktor, for his part, wasn't even sure he had one.
He weighed his options before responding. He could go back to Tumbleweed. Hide out below ground in the skeleton of Kings' Academy. Go back to the school that taught him what he would not need and those who would impose guardianship on him only to disappear. What gave him momentary pause was the group he ate lunch with and the cast of the play he had attached himself to. But Viktor was not raised to be the sort of man who had friends. "Закрыто для вируса" It was an easy enough lie.
"Viktor was wondering if you might not need assistance in Miami."