Log: David Kostyk and Nikolai Lantsov - King of Scars spoilers WHO: David Kostyk and Nikolai Lantsov WHAT: David and Nikolai talk shop (specifically Nikolai's Lighthouse Project) and Their Dark Past WHEN: Last week sometime WHERE: David's office at the DOA science department WARNINGS: Spoilers for King of Scars
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Nikolai swept into David’s office and dropped a heavy, secured ring of blueprints onto the table with the air of someone used to being a worthy interruption. It’d been quite the month. Between remembering what had happened back home the last few months, losing a friend, getting him back, and having control of his inner shadow monster, Nikolai had been… well, not quite like himself. He’d been quieter, a little more withdrawn. On him, that still looked outgoing. But he’d sought distraction in projects, and one such project was a way to make the forest less awful, changeable, and difficult to navigate. He’d been on the open seas for years; Nikolai disliked places easy to get lost in. He’d hated the Fold for similar reasons (besides the obvious). Now that he was no longer someone terribly important, well, he could spend his time thinking about such things rather than on how irreparably broke his country was.
“If you hate it, I’ll cry,” he said, as David opened the plans to his idea for some sort of light to make the city easily visible from the darkness of the woods.
“If I hate it, we’ll change it,” David replied without looking up from the plans Nikolai had handed him. He’d never really mastered the art of jokes, despite the fact that this royal jester was more or less his best friend. They just didn’t click for him, for the most part, especially when he was focused on a project rather than actively attempting to decipher human behavior.
“I still think one at either end of the city to allow for actually establishing position would be useful. Maybe not for people who are newly arrived, but I expect the defense teams on patrol could make use of it when the forest shifts unexpectedly. They could skip the math if we also developed something along the lines of an astrolabe to work alongside the points of reference.”
“The defense teams patrol the forest what, multiple times a day?” Nikolai said, taking a seat across from David gamely and tapping his fingers against the desk as he thought. David had always been one of his best friends and confidantes - it had been genuinely nice to have people who didn’t care about his title, who worked with him not solely out of loyalty to the Lantsovs but because they believed that he was good for Ravka. It helped that he enjoyed David’s refusal to ever kiss his ass. “I’d originally thought light - and I’m still partial to it, mind you, with how dark that forest gets in the evening - but we’ll need to consider something for when the sun’s up, too. Or even for the visually impaired - you stated it yourself: not everyone sees the same color spectrum, do they.”
“They don’t, but other senses are traditionally harder to reach than sight.”
David was thinking aloud, as he often did when he was with Nikolai. He didn’t with everyone; usually, he knew he was awkward, so he just stayed quiet. Once a project came into it, though, he was absolutely confident–and David and Nikolai had always had a project. If they didn’t, they’d come up with one.
“They’re also harder to reach constantly,” David went on. “If we propose a perpetual sound that would be audible for miles, I expect we’d be up for execution by the next morning. I think light is the best option. It’s just a question of what kind of light, and what sort of amplification, and how we can get the best visibility.”
“I’d rather not be executed,” Nikolai agreed, shrugging off the notion of a sound. “What we’re essentially trying to reinvent is a compass, right? But a compass that people don’t have to carry around, that would be helpful to new arrivals.” Genya hadn’t been wrong when she’d noted the likeness in notion to Alina Starkov; the beams of amplified light David had created for her had a tendency to stick in Nikolai’s mind.
Thinking of Genya had him pivot ever-so-slightly. “Speaking of new arrivals… how are you and Genya doing?” There really wasn’t a good way to ask how no longer being dead was going. “I don’t suppose you’ll need a third wedding considering the fate of your last one? I’m always down for a party.”
David had spent the first two days or so ruminating on the fact that he was, depending on how one measured such things, dead. Genya had filled him in on the basics: a few minutes after he’d slipped out to his lab in the Little Palace during the wedding, they’d been attacked, and he’d been crushed in the rubble. He had died. Genya and Nikolai both remembered it happening. And yet…here he was. He could easily have used up months considering the ramifications, but 48 hours had seemed all that was really reasonable. Beyond that it would just be circular, so it was best to simply set the existential dread aside and get along with things.
So when Nikolai sort of sideways brought it up, David was prepared to let it roll off without any fretting.
“I think Genya would consider it tempting fate,” he said, because while he didn’t worry much about himself, he did worry about Genya. “And I was already happy with one shipboard wedding. The only thing that ever mattered to me was coming home with Genya as my wife at the end of it.”
“This could be a happy ending for you two,” Nikolai admitted, casting a glance toward the other man. “A quieter place that doesn’t take advantage of your loyalty.” Ravka might have been their homeland, but it wasn’t the nicest place to live. Nikolai wouldn’t forget that. As much as he missed aspects of home, he had to admit that actually managing seven hours of restful sleep a night uninterrupted by monsters, death, and the Fjerda’s military advancements was doing wonders for his complexion.
There were advantages to being here. Nikolai supposed it wasn’t shirking his responsibilities if he hadn’t had a say in the matter. Still. He knew that David’s old line of work had preyed on the man’s mind and morals. This notion of a lighthouse - of bringing people to aid - he knew would appeal to the man. David had never craved excitement or flash: he’d wanted to be useful, to solve the riddle.
So much of the work David had done had hurt people, killed people, destroyed homes. It weighed on him in a way that didn’t show externally until he was flatly telling the king that he absolutely would not build or design a city-killing bomb. David had learned his lessons from the Darkling, and he wouldn’t repeat the old mistakes, not even for Ravka.
Here in Vallo, he didn’t have to. No one even asked him to. He wondered, looking at Nikolai’s latest designs, what they might have done for Ravka if they hadn’t been clawing at the cliff face of survival and constantly fighting off Fjerda’s wolves. If all their work had been for improving lives instead of ending them, what wonders could they have wrought on the world?
“I want that for Genya, more than anything,” David admitted. “I’ll be fine anywhere with a lab, but she deserves better than Ravka gave her.”
Nikolai nodded, his expression hardening. “That she does.”
He’d done what he could to avenge Genya, to make what had happened to her right. It might have been argued by Nikolai’s detractors that exhiling the previous king had been a minor response to the crimes Genya had accused him of, and sometimes Nikolai wondered: had it been enough? Had forcing his father to write a confession, exiling him to nothingness been the right move? Clearly the man had been attracting followers in his time spent in exile. But Nikolai had not wanted to start his reign with more blood. He had opted for making an example rather than execution.
He hoped that had been the correct call.
Glancing back at David, he continued: “There’s a lot here. Good people who haven’t had their notion to hope stamped out of them. It’s novel approaching things from this side of it - the side where no one’s watching us.”
“I like it.” One of David’s rare smiles popped up, a little spot of sunshine in the overcast sameness of his usual expression. “The work without the baggage. Building things instead of desperately trying to protect them.”
He didn’t blame Nikolai for what Genya had been through at the hands of his father or the Darkling. If anything, he was thankful to Nikolai for making sure Genya got some justice for what happened to her. Any other ruler, David knew, would have been more likely to have Genya executed for treason than exiling the old king. So long as Genya didn’t hold the past against Nikolai, neither would David.
“It does sound rather nice, doesn’t it?” Nikolai replied brightly, sharing the grin David has given him. He wasn’t certain how to function when he wasn’t under crushing pressure. It was going to be exciting to find out just how.
“I can’t wait to get you and Edwin in a room together to sort something out,” he added, his eyes scanning the blueprints in front of them. “He does magic - different from yours or Genya’s - but his favorite approach is invention. He’s invented whole spells before.” Such a thing was unheard of in Ravka, at least, it had been up until jurda began transforming grisha powers. “You’re both so detail oriented I imagine listening to the two of you go would be a bit like enjoying a sporting match.” He delivered the pronouncement with great fondness; if left to his own devices David would never meet anyone. Nikolai was already making plans to change that.
It wasn’t that David didn’t like people. It was more that he didn’t understand most of them, nor did they understand him, and thus he struggled to connect with him. Somewhere around age nine or ten he stopped trying, and didn’t really make any friends until more outgoing people adopted him. Nikolai was the sort who didn’t stop with that, but would then go out and make friends on David’s behalf–which David was fine with. Saints knew he was no good at it himself, but he did like having other people to talk to on occasion.
“Mm. Let me know when you have a problem for us, then,” he said. “There are a lot more people here like me, I’ve noticed. Oddballs.”
“Geniuses,” Nikolai corrected. “Or, if you’re attached to ‘oddball’, let’s go with oddball geniuses.” Absolutely David saw the world in ways Nikolai had never imagined, but he didn’t think it was a bad thing. “He looked into helping with my little monster problem,” he said, smoothing out the blueprints in front of him. “But the memories I received a few weeks ago did the trick there nicely.” He’d always seen getting cured as a longshot anyhow. Besides. He’d made peace with his monster at this point.
It was, admittedly, easier to do that here when you hadn’t had to abdicate a throne, but eh, Nikolai wasn’t going to get saucy about it.
“And I missed all of it,” David idly remarked. He took a pencil from the cup on his desk, beginning to make notes in the margins of Nikolai’s drafts even as they talked. “I told myself I wasn’t going to mull over being dead any further, but it’s still strange to think that so much happened to you and Genya and Zoya that I never got to see and never will. That you have lives to return to in Ravka, while I don’t.”
“I think you’re allowed some conflicted reflection,” Nikolai said, and though his voice remained light, his shoulders had tensed. “Considering what happened, and what you lost. What we all lost during that attack.”
It had been so senseless. So sudden. Nikolai was used to losing people on the battlefield; he was less practiced at losing them during a celebration (although now with both David and his brother being murdered during parties, well, he was going to have to change that mindset). He leaned forward then, watching David closely. “Some people go back. There’s no use sugarcoating it. Some people return to their homes, and we don’t know why. But some… some have been here for ages. Or have traveled with their loved ones to other realms.” Genya had been one of those travelers, a fact that he always had had a strange time bending his mind around. “I know you’re not one for talking in groups, but there is a-- club? Gathering? A collection of folk who have died, and are here that meets up. They don’t require participation. Hearing other stories may give you perspective.” Nikolai shrugged. “Or it may just royally piss you off. But it is available, should you wish to seek it.”
“I’d prefer that to talking to Genya about it, at least.” David didn’t quite grimace, but the corner of his mouth twitched. He didn’t like reminding Genya of what had happened, and he certainly didn’t want to drop whatever feelings he had about it on her. It could seem odd to say, but he thought she’d been more hurt by his death than he had been. He simply ceased to be, or rejoined the Making at the Center of the World, or whatever one wanted to call it. She was the one who’d had to carry on with the sense of loss haunting her. Genya deserved nothing but happiness, and that happiness was the only thing David had ever been as dedicated to as he was to his studies. She didn’t need to hear any of the wandering thoughts about being dead that periodically still popped into his head.
Nikolai gave a slow nod, reading between the lines. He couldn’t blame David for not using Genya as a sounding board, not when Genya had gone through so much. “Consider it, anyhow,” he said, “but you can always talk to me about anything.” He’d mourned David - both here in Vallo, and at home - but Nikolai had learned to compartmentalize with the best of them. He wouldn’t mind being a shoulder, not when he still felt guilt for being caught so unawares when the bombs had fallen.
“And if it’s distraction, instead, that you seek…” He tapped the blueprints, offered a wide smile.
“Distraction seems more productive, under the circumstances.” David’s return smile was considerably less bright, but that was just David. All his expressions tended to be understated, unless he was in the lab.
And as per usual, he was already getting drawn out of the conversation and back into the drawings. Staring at this piece, eyes narrowing at that one, and then he was standing up with a glint of determination in his eye.
“Come on, I want to see what our points of visibility might look like and how much of a tree canopy we’re working against.”
“We could do a field trip sometime,” Nikolai suggested, as ever one to prefer reality to theory. “Get hopelessly lost in the woods. Real method acting. And I could send the monster up into the trees, get an idea thereabouts.”
Oh yes, this was absolutely going to be a plan that Genya would love signing off on.
“Perfect. We’ll need to do two runs, though: one day and one night,” David said, because while there were many people who served to curb Nikolai’s impulsive “let’s get out there and test it” nature, David was not one of them. He was more the “experiment now, apologize for accidentally almost shooting down the king later” sort.
And David had almost accidentally shot down the king. It was a fond memory of Nikolai’s, for he cherished people that didn’t treat him with concerned, coddling kid gloves (and because he had remarkably little self-preservation, once he had a Project).
“Let me check my schedule - now that I can work nights without the fear of eating a customer, I sometimes do - and let’s work out the optimum night - maybe a new moon? Less light that way… might as well do this in hard mode…”