mashtater (mashtater) wrote in valloic, @ 2021-02-14 14:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, ₴ inactive: alexei mashkov, ₴ inactive: solaire |
"I'm a bit surprised that you didn't have a sweetheart here with you tonight."WARNINGS Heavy thinking about homophobia and specifically the violent nature of homophobia in Russia
He’d made an effort to look presentable, ditching his sun armor and instead donning a light sweater the color of a spring sky. Solaire had pulled his hair into a low ponytail but it was only just long enough; wisps kept escaping throughout the evening no matter what he did to secure them. It was several hours in when he laughed and gave Tater’s waist a tug, declaring: “Let’s get some air; it’s hotter than a salamander’s belly in here” in his typically loud voice (for Solaire had never possessed an indoor voice when a loud one would do).
Having spent his whole life playing hockey and being Russian, Tater didn't object to a little good-natured yelling. Loud was his default, too - and so was a desire for nice cold air. His approach to dancing was all enthusiasm, with technique learned more or less exclusively from St. Petersburg nightclubs and Boz Luhrmann movies, which meant he'd warmed up considerably over the course of this silly high school dance. At least he hadn't gone so far as to sweat through his shirt - a nice shirt, pink, with actual buttons on it, because this was a nice event. He also wore jeans, though, and eschewed a tie, because he was not wearing a tie unless Georgia was there to tell him he had to.
"Yes, please!" he called back, and led the way through the nearest exit to the much quieter gardens. Steam lifted from his skin as he stepped out into the cold air, which brought a bright laugh out of him. "Hah! Like going to snow from sauna!"
It’d been a long time since Solaire had thought about saunas or bath houses - at least a few hundred years - and he grinned reflexively, delighted in the remembering. Vallo was like that, for him - a step-by-step reacquaintance with a world that he’d very nearly forgotten could exist.
And people, too, he’d forgotten could exist. At least in terms of personalities. Everyone back home did what they could, but they were exhausted, losing hope fast. Few had that spark of life that nearly everyone here at Vallo possessed, that he could see in the way that Tater (badly) danced. Solaire took a breath, enjoying the rush of cold, knowing his face was probably turning pink from the chill and not caring. “I love dancing!” he declared, and stretched, popping a stream of things in his back. “Talk about a good time! That music’s like nothing I’ve ever heard!”
Tater simultaneously winced in sympathy and laughed as Solaire’s back crackled like bubble-wrap. He’d been playing a contact sport all his life, he was no stranger to those sorts of noises. That look of pure joy on Solaire’s face was something far more rare; Tater didn’t come from a land of undead and eternal darkness, but even so finding someone so determinedly optimistic and not self-conscious about it was unusual. More often than not, Tater was that person himself, the one going around finding the best in things. There wasn’t much of anyone to be that for him when his optimism faltered, or to go dancing with him just for the fun of it.
“Dancing is wonderful!” Tater agreed, grinning broadly. He leaned on the wall adjacent to the door, unbothered by the cold of the stones against his back. “And I am glad you like music, music is fun. I didn’t know if you would, thought maybe you would come here and say what is terrible noise in speakers? because you are old.”
Solaire laughed, not offended by the insinuation. “I admit, a lot of it I don’t really know how they make half the noises,” he said, taking a side beside Tater against the wall easily. “And sometimes the singers sound almost as if they’ve been… enchanted to stay on tune? It’s most odd. But I like the beats very much.” He was easy to please, really, at least in terms of music. “A lot of the choral songs I know from home are lovely but you can’t really dance to them.”
Honestly though, give him an ale and someone plugging away at a drum and you had yourself the start of a good time. “Did you dance like this in Russia or is this just a Vallo thing?” Solaire wasn’t clear on Earth geography and mostly didn’t give a crap that he wasn’t clear.
Tater appreciated that Solaire could roll with the usual hockey player habit of forming connections through teasing. Tater was better than most of them at expressing actual emotions, but chirping was still an integral part of the culture.
“I did, when I could find time,” Tater replied. “Dancing is usually starting late, and hockey is usually starting early, and I am not eighteen now to be playing good game on four hours of sleep, yeah?”
By most measures, Tater was a young guy with way more than half his life ahead of him, but in hockey terms, he was an old man. Forwards didn’t tend to last long after 30 - there was always someone faster and sharper coming up. Players like Chára, hanging in there past 40, were outliers. If Tater wanted to keep going even close to that long, he had to take care of himself, which included sleeping.
“Oh, I’ll never denigrate sleeping,” Solaire pledged with full feeling in his heart. “Some of my fondest memories were resting by the bonfire with friends.” Knowing they’d have a busy day ahead of them, but there was no reason not to rest at the time, being safe and warm and protected from creeping things and things which wore faces of once-loved ones. “Seems a shame there aren’t more wild dance opportunities during the day. We used to do festivals, and those had day-dancing, but they don’t seem culturally common here.” He brightened. “I should champion one of those festivals, maybe! I bet people would be interested in it. Provided there’s food and alcohol.”
“Everyone loves food and alcohol!” Most everyone, anyway. There were probably some people out there hating food, but Tater was sure there couldn’t be many. He grinned, thinking of the possibilities a festival in Vallo had to offer. “Festivals are fun! My neighborhood in Providence is having festival every year - many people dance when musicians are performing, and people are selling food and crafts and things. Is very nice, I buy pretty colored glass for my house when I am there last year, and fried Oreo.”
Had he tipped a bit to the side? Yes, his shoulder was touching Solaire’s now, not through any real intention. It had just sort of happened, out here in the cold, still a little high on fun and dancing like an idiot.
Solaire had no notion of what an Oreo was, but he had learned enough to know he liked all things fried, so that was enough for him to produce a vigorous head nod. Unlike Tater, he didn’t notice that they were closer - Solaire naturally had a fairly tight personal bubble and though he tried to mind those that didn’t, it was often something he realized after the fact. Close combat often made for close friends, literally speaking.
“I’m a bit surprised,” he said, his voice curious, “to find you didn’t have a sweetheart with you tonight!” It was a holiday of love, after all. Solaire had more than a few people he’d flirted with, and one he’d even went home with once, but he hadn’t gotten the impression that that was the sort of thing Valentines Day was supposed to be about. It seemed a more-- specific, soft kind of love.
Tater had been hearing variations of that question for most of his adult life. When he had to appear at the NHL Awards, he’d bring a friend or his sister. When the Falconers held Family Skate, he came alone and did silly things like teaching Jack’s boyfriend how to lift someone twice his weight on the ice. Plenty of people had noticed the pattern and asked; probably more had noticed the pattern and rightly ruled it none of their business to ask. As such, he had a host of well-practiced answers to the question - it had just been a long time since he’d had to give one of them to someone he liked more than he ought to.
“Ah, you know, I am here only little time,” he said with a chuckle, glancing down at his feet. “Not time enough to have someone looking past my bad English and getting chased up tree like cat by murder-birds and see charming Alyosha underneath.”
Solaire was just polite enough beneath his nosiness not to pry - although he often came off as slightly dense, he wasn’t socially incompentent, at least. And the notion that relationships between people of the same gender could be frowned upon or even illegal in places would never have occurred to him.
“It’s no matter!” he said with cheer that wasn’t forced. “I was just ensuring I wouldn’t have a jealous and weapons-wielding lover to deal with for taking up your time. And besides,” he gave a wink, “some of us rather like saving people as a start to a touching romance!”
It was only at that moment that Tater realized he was being flirted with. Or at least, probably he was? Maybe? It could also be chirping - chirping and flirting could sound a lot alike. And some people were just like that; flirting was their default state of conversation. Tater could be like that himself sometimes, and particularly came off that way in America; Americans were much more reserved with their emotions than Russians were. And this time he really did genuinely want to return the flirtation.
It wouldn’t matter to anyone here if he did. All his friends here were American and Canadian or from totally different worlds nothing like the one he came from. Half of them were gay or bi or pansexual themselves, it seemed like. There was no Russia in Vallo for him to never go home to again. His father wasn’t here; Tater wouldn’t have to brace himself for the broadcast where national hockey hero Misha Mashkov said that Alexei Mashkov was no longer his son.
That terror still remained in the back of his mind, though: the one that said two could keep a secret if one of them was dead, that his friends would never out him on purpose but that it was so easy to slip, that if he was found out he might never be spoken to in his native language ever again, that if people knew he could never go home again without being placed on a list to be hunted. The terror screamed at him to stop. Laugh it off. Treat it like a friendly joke. There was another part of him, though, equally loud, insisting that if it was ever going to be safe for him to be himself, this was the place. This world could be his only chance to take a risk on maybe having the kind of beautiful love he saw every day between so many of his friends. He wanted that so much that it ached all the way down to his bones sometimes, and this world might be his one shot at it.
And, well, just look at the man next to him. Look at that pure sunshine smile that matched his pure sunshine hair! Look at this bright light of a person who had somehow stayed that way through darkness Tater couldn’t even fully imagine! Look at his shoulders, bozhe moi, like something out of a Renaissance sculpture! With everything that would stop him removed by at least one whole dimension of reality, why should he ignore this?
“I never saw myself being--blyad, how to say? Dame in distress?” Tater laughed, relaxing as he fell into his usual struggle with English idioms. It was comforting for how utterly typical of a problem it was for him, making it easier to go on and try flirting with a man and meaning it and even admit to meaning it. “But knight in shining armor, that is fantasy for everyone, yes? Very romantic! Being big, strong man myself, I am thinking I never get hero rescue.”
Solaire, unaware of the emotional journey Tater was going on, had been trying to attack snowflakes with his tongue as they gently fell from the sky in unassuming gusts. It wasn’t quite snowing - there just weren’t that many - but the few snowflakes that fell were great fun to try to catch if you were Solaire and easily amused. “Where I’m from, knights in shining armor are a dime a dozen,” he laughed, turning his focus back to Tater, “even my friends who were from noble families put on the gear to try to prove themselves worthy of the Chosen Undead title. That said, there is something fun about being rescued. It’s happened to me a few times.”
He wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about it, either. “After all, it isn’t really enough that you’re the best, is it? It’s how you react to needing help that cements your character. It’s just that,” he added lightly, “some of us look better needing help than others.” With a gentle knock his shoulders against Tater’s, he settled back in against the wall as the snow continued to think about coming down for real, and not quite making it there. He still wasn’t certain what to make of Tater - the man ran hot and cold and he wasn’t sure if it was a language disconnect or something else that made him difficult to read despite his effusiveness, but if someone wasn’t actually attacking Solaire with pointy-ass weapons, he assumed he still had a chance to shoot a shot.
“If you want ample opportunity to save me from a terrible demise,” Solaire suggested after a beat, his voice teasing, “may I ask for you to spare a few hours out of your busy week and teach me how to-- oh, what do you lot call it. Ice skate? I’ve never done it, and I’d like to learn, and it’s practically guaranteed that I’m going to fall hilariously despite your making it look easy.”
“I would love that!” Tater readily replied, full cheer and enthusiasm back in place. “And do not worry about fall. Everybody fall! Falling is how to know you are taking risk, learning new things, yeah? And I am very good knight in hockey armor,” he added, letting himself adopt the same teasing tone Solaire did. It wasn’t dangerous here, he reminded himself. He even winked at Solaire. “Ask Zimmboni sometime, I am Gordie Howe Hat Trick King of Falconers. Nothing real bad will happen to you when I am on ice.”
“I’ve no idea who Gordie Howe Hat Trick King of Falconers is,” Solaire answered zippily, “and I didn’t even know hats were involved in ice skating, but I must admit he sounds very impressive.” He wasn’t worried about falling, not in the least. He’d fallen off cliffs for crying out loud. He’d be fine, probably. What was a bruise when you got to experience something new?
He rubbed his hands over his arms and glanced back to the party where reverb was leaking out from the cracks in the door. “What do you say we have another pass at the food table and get back to dancing?” he suggested.
"Hah, yes, I think I am cooled off enough now!" Tater laughed. He turned to open the door as he explained, letting Solaire come through past him as they made for the food table. "So Hat Trick, that is what we call when player gets three goals in one game. Is very impressive! Crowd gets very excited, throws hats onto ice. Gordie Howe Hat Trick is different. That is when player gets one goal, one assist - that's passing to other player so he gets goal - and gets into one fight on ice, all in one game. I am good player, but maybe throw gloves little bit fast, and…”