You may not have half of my sandwich (Ev)

[Yulia Sokolov]

Bruises or not, Lia had decided to go into work, and she had been doing so for a few days. However she had been avoiding contact with her coworkers, trying mostly just to stick to the schedule of training sessions she had to teach and then leaving. It was more comfortable to go downtown and talk to those who already knew about how she had gotten her bruises then try to explain them away to a new group. She didn’t want to alarm anyone, which meant that she had to lie regardless. Lia really didn’t like to lie, but she understood that she really didn’t have any other options.

All the same Lia had decided that perhaps it would be alright for her to eat a late lunch in the staff room. That way she would have a table, a chair, and some quiet hopefully. Working was the best thing she could have possibly done in the face of all of this. It made things so much easier. She didn’t even have to think about anything else. Plus she was pleased with her students and how they were progressing. It was amazing how much could still be accomplished without a strict training regiment. She wondered if things were more like this at Odarennyi. She didn’t dare go back and find out, that was for sure.

Yulia got a can of coke from the vending machine and sat down again, unwrapping her sandwich. The bell rang and she could hear the students going from one class to another outside. She bowed her head over her lunch and focused on that. She was oddly hungry today, but she went about eating in a very calculated sense. One bite of sandwich, a sip of coke, and half a carrot stick, and then repeat over and over again. Things like patterns had always been comforting, and this sort of paradigm was no exception to that.

[Evgeny Demidov]

Having lunch by himself in the staff lounge had become a habit to Evgeny by now. It was fun. Being by himself that short two hours. Not like he didn't have enough time for himself, he did live by himself... yes, still in a hotel room in Pilot Ridge. There was just something about being in a school filled with loud running happy kids all over the place hadn't stop making him uncomfortable. Becoming a teacher had been nothing near a great decision, apparently, and as he whistled his way in the staff lounge, a sudden stop made him remember the reason of such decision and, at the same time, reassured him that he was thinking right, perhaps it had been indeed not the greatest decision.

"Yulz?" It was too late to sneakily walk his way back out now. "Long time no see." He walked his way towards the table where she was sitting. "Well, not as long as last time b..." He slowly sat. Was there something wrong with her? "...ut long still. Where have you been?"

Dropping his things in the floor Evgeny scratched that feeling of something unusual going on. What was it? Well besides the fact of seeing Yulia for the first time in what seemed like months. Was it months? Was she still mad at him? Probably. I'm such a bad friend. He not only avoided her when he moved to Pilot Ridge, but lost contact with here even if they both work in the same place. He had no excuse, or at least not a good one, but did she had one? Besides being mad at him and the fact that he is the one that should be chasing her all over town until she forgives him? Maybe it was that what kept him from looking for her. Guilt.

"Wait..." He stared at her. "Where did you get those bruises?" It hasn't been the first time he had seen the woman bruised. Military life is like that and worse, specially in their division, which is why it didn't seem strange at first, but they were no longer soldiers. "What happened to you?"

[Yulia Sokolov]

If Yulia had felt at peace that feeling was soon gone. A voice that she didn’t expect to hear addressed her, Evgeny’s voice. It was strange to hear it, if only because he was still sort of dead to her. He was alive, that was true, but it didn’t mean what it used to. She had always told herself that if he had survived then things would be so different, that they would be so happy, she would be so happy. But the fact of the matter was that nothing had changed. It had truly been the worst kind of wishful thinking. That adoration, that crush, that assuredness that if only he had lived that he would love her as much as she had loved him was flat dead on the floor.

Lia put down her sandwich and looked over at him for a moment. ”Oh, Hello Evgeny.” Really why should she be surprised, they worked at the same place, even now. Still they usually did a good job of not running into each other. Then again, it wasn’t like it was done on purpose, they all ran on different schedules. However she nearly cringed when he chose to go about mentioning how they had last ended up meeting.

”I’ve been alright, really busy honestly. How have you been?” She was not sure how to go about this conversation in a normal fashion. She guessed that she should just let go of what had happened. She also knew that he didn’t really know the half of it, he had always been oblivious to her most private thoughts on the matter. Still when she had told him to keep the tag it was for a reason. She had a new life here, not the sort of life that they had back in Russia, not the kind of life that had put her through hell. So what was putting her through hell now? Oh yeah, she was. Then came the question that she had learned to hate answering. She always had to scramble a little to figure out what to say. ”I was just in a little accident. It isn’t a big deal, they’ll heal up.”

She decided that redirection now would be the best remedy to all of this. ”So how are your students. It is so different here compared to Odarennyi isn’t it? That struck me at first too. It is nice though, nice knowing that these kids have options. Imagine…” Lia shook herself then. ”I like it here, I do.”

[Evgeny Demidov]

Just a little accident... There was something about the way she was putting it that made Ev think Yulia was holding something back. Then again, he had seen her in much, much worse states, and that even if you're not counting how her last ever Black Ops mission left her, which was a whole different kind of deal. He didn't worry, he knew how strong Yulia was and whatever this had been, it, for sure, had been nothing, plus he knew just how much of a bad idea was trying to argue with her, and how much he sucked at it.

"Well, I'm glad you're fine." Evgeny said with a honest smile as he went through his backpack, taking out his two bowls of cold pasta, one of which he carefully placed in front of his comrade. "I always bring two bowls. It's really good, mushrooms and cheese sauce." As he placed a plastic fork in front of her, his smile kept shining in his face. "Eat up!" It looked like he was putting up some puppy eyes, but they were contextual, in reality, he always had puppy eyes. "It has to be better than a simple sandwich, right?"

Ha. Ev couldn't help but laugh a little in the inside. If there was something Odarennyi, was the opposite of Hammel. The way Yulia said it, though, made look Odarennyi bad or evil, and beyond the judgement if it was those things or not, Evgeny had to admit he enjoyed his time there. It was hell, yes, but he honestly liked it. It was not masochism, not at all, he just... liked it. He liked the military style it had, as hard, rough and uncaring as it was, it made them strong, and he appreciated it. He wouldn't say that the Odarennyi years were the best of his life, neither were the military years afterwards, while probably Hammel graduates could say that about their school, but everyone had different tastes. If he had been raised in a school like Hammel, he would have ended up a completely different person, and he liked the person he currently was.

"It is nice." He finally said while opening the hermetically closed bowl of food. "It's... fresh." Different was a better word, but also an understatement. "I can't imagine me studying studying here, though." The plastic fork in Evgeny's hand swiftly took the white pasta and carried it to his mouth. The first bites were always the better ones. "Measures were extreme back in motherland, but the freedom here is scary. I mean, there were a couple of kids fighting with their abilities in the gym the other day. That would have never happened in Odarennyi."

[Yulia Sokolov]

Lia was glad that Ev didn’t ask any more questions. She was not sure if this was because he was satisfied with the answer or he just knew her well enough not to push it any further. Part of her knew that the latter was very true, just not as true as she would like. And in regard to the former? Well, he wasn’t an idiot. She had seen him work, she had worked with him. They could not do what they had done for years if either of them were idiots. Maybe they were blind? Well no, that was foolish, after all wasn’t he the very opposite of blind? She was the one lacking in some sort of function here then. She needed to stop thinking.

Lia looked at the bowl he put in front of her and then at her sandwich. He was right, though she was really fond of peanut butter, oddly. Still she switched her attention to the pasta. It was good after all, and she had already turned down one gift from him when last she saw him. She had the snow globe though. It was sitting on a shelf in her room, a little dusty now since she didn’t know what to do with it besides leave it there. It felt strange to touch it. Lia took a few bites of the pasta. “Yes, thank you, this is very good Evgeny.” It was good, and the bowl was warm against her fingers, which was nice.

The more that Lia thought about Odarennyi the more she drew that very conclusion. It was bad, it was evil, and it had harmed her. In all fairness without it she might have gone insane or some nasty result like that, but still. There were some things that she could forgive that they had done to her and some things that she could not. The things that she could not were slowly becoming of much more importance to her. As such she was holding tightly to the idea of finding some way of severing herself further from it. She was now self aware in a way that she had never been allowed to be before. ”I think fresh might be an understatement. I think it is something much more than that. It just doesn’t seem like enough to call it new.”

”Oh imagine if we had been able to.” The thought nearly made Lia glow. What would that have been like? How different things could have been!”[/b] She found what he said next to be curious, that the freedom was scary. Then the bit about those students, the thought of what would have happened to them at Odarennyi for such actions made her cringe. ”Evgeny, think about what they forced us to do.” Her voice pitched a little towards hysterical and distressed. She did her best to pull it back down and maintain her calm. ”Imagine if we didn’t have to, imagine if that wasn’t the only option. I know that I can’t think of anything else except that. I mean, for the love of god, think about what they made us do!”

[Evgeny Demidov]

Evgeny and Yulia had definitely very different ways of thinking and up until now, he hadn't notice it before. It was rather awkward.

"Well I was never forced..." Ev, very slowly, continued his pasta, wondering if he should continue talking. "I liked Odarennyi. And I loved my job."

Heck, he even chose to stay after that big disastrous mission that ended up breaking the group apart. Saying that, though, was probably not a good idea, specially since part of staying in his job was letting others tell Yulia that he was dead,and he didn't think she was finally over it. What they made us do? Evgeny gave a rather confused look while kept digging in his pasta. To him, all the things he'd done was for the good of Mother Russia. He was, after all, the biggest patriot ever, having been a soldier was something he was proud of.

"I think it would have been my option even if it wasn't the only option." He said firmly, although not completely sure of his words. He just couldn't imagine anything else for his life. "Like... What, an architect? A doctor? A teach... Well... I am a teacher now aren't I..." He looked around the table, he had forgotten to bring something to drink... again. "Yeah, I mean, no. It would have always been my first option."

[Yulia Sokolov]

Lia was not sure what to say to him at this moment. He said that he was never forced, well, technically she had not been either. She had no choice, and no real safe home, not after what had happened. Still it was not a find memory.

”Really Evgeny? Then how did they take you? How did they take you away from everything you knew? Even if it was nothing, and even if it was horrible the choice was not yours, it never was. It wasn’t mine either. Do you ever think about what might have happened if we resisted or our families resisted? Do you remember those pits?” Yulia said this in a surprisingly even way given how sick to her stomach it made her feel. As such she put down the fork in the bowl and couldn’t bring herself to touch another bite. She could not pretend that all of this was fine anymore. That she was happy with what had happened to her back in Russia.

She felt like everything was just burned into her head. She could not forget any of it and she could not let it go, though she was close to the latter. Lia was severing the last of those mental chains.

Still what Evgeny was saying to her was making her near furious. She wasn’t sure what to tell him, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that he was right, as nothing would make her feel that. For the second time in her life she was mad at him, except this time she was in less of a whirlwind of confusion. ”Like what? Like what, Evgeny? How about not killers! How about just that? Would that be too much to ask? You know what I could do Evgeny, you know what I can still do now. You know that they had to train that ability up to kill, train us all to kill. And what questions did we really ask? How much did we really know? They wanted to use us as weapons and we let them. So no, I don’t care about being an architect or a doctor, but I do care about not being a monster.” Lia’s lips pressed down into a firm line and she looked down at the table. ”If I had a chance to go back I would have refused, even if it made no difference in the long run.”

[Evgeny Demidov]

What's up with her? But the real question was what have been up with her her whole life. Evgeny felt nothing but shunned and attacked by his old friend and couldn't manage to gather enough courage to do anything but keep slowly eating, without daring to look at her, as she practically yelled at him. At least to Ev, he felt as if being yelled. And it wasn't like he wasn't used to be yelled, yelling is the normal means of communications from superior to soldier in the military, after all, it just was that it seemed so... strange from Yulia. It wasn't the first time he heard her like this either, then what was it? Why he suddenly felt so... bad?

"I'm sorry." He muttered.

What else was he to say? He probably touched some wound on the woman. Maybe he shouldn't have said anything at all? But why? Aren't I entitled to an opinion now? He realized it was unfair. Even if she had a bad time, didn't mean they were evil and didn't mean they all had a bad time, he knew for a fact that at least a couple of his comrades were as happy as him with their lives back there. It's so unfair, Yulz... He swallowed saliva. He just couldn't go and voice his opinion to her could he? And keep being yelled at?

"Don't you remember the look in those kids' eyes as you hurried them out of the desert building in Spain?" He said in between pasta mouthfuls. "Or the way that mother thanked you for saving her and her kid near the Tatarstan/Udmurtia border?" He dropped his fork in the bowl. There was no way she thought her job was that of Satan's spawn when he could clearly remember a very high number of occasions when it was proven to them that even if they weren't God's angels, they were doing good. "Because I do remember them. All of them. Always has. Everyday from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep."

[Yulia Sokolov]

Lia felt rather sick to her stomach now, which was a shame because lunch had indeed been good. She almost regretted bringing it all up but another part of her felt like she was doing the right thing. She needed to say this stuff of she was going to go crazy, and she needed to say it to someone who she thought knew her, who she thought cared about her. That was Evgeny, even if it was only platonic and even if it was something they had both pulled away from, by choice or not. On top of that thinking about where she had been as compared to where she was now got harder every day, and it just made her feel tired to think about it. It was a mountain that she just could not climb.

She heard him say he was sorry, and did know what to tell him. Part of her wanted to tell him that it wasn’t like she was blaming him, and part of her knew how much he had loved the military, and that this was the closest he would get to understanding her. Then again it wasn’t like she was stopping him from speaking his peace, she knew his, and now she was the dissenter. And all the same she wanted to tell him that he did not understand, that he could not possibly understand what she meant. And why was that? Because he had special awareness, he did not have the same training, he did not have the same mentality, not deep down.

”I remember them, of course I remember them. And do you remember all the other things we had to do? We were hardly saving children all the time, but Evgeny, I don’t know how to explain this.” Her fingertips pressed down on the top of the table until they were white. ”They made me into something awful Evgeny, I really think they did. They taught me control but they also trained me up, trained up what I could do until I could kill, and how do I explain that? How do I cope with that? I don’t know how to reconcile with this monstrous part of me because it is a part of me. I can look at a man and kill him, and that will never go away.” It all felt like a curse to her.

”I don’t know how to reconcile that with who I wish I was.”

[Evgeny Demidov]

"You're not... awful." He immediately said in the midst of her speech.

Was she scolding him? At least for Ev, it seemed like that. He felt bad. Why did he do wrong? Can he not say his opinion out loud now? It just wasn't fair, but he couldn't quite tell her, could he? It would just heat the discussion even more and there was no point in it. Also, in all honesty, Ev did agree with most of what Yulia was saying, he just didn't agree with the way she was saying it nor with her thoughts about it. Why are you negative? It saddened him.

"You believe you're such a dark person, but you're not." He finally said, feeling that several minutes had passed since she had finished talking. "I don't see this so-called cold-blooded killer. I see..." He stopped for a moment, hesitating on continuing the phrase. "You know, whatever I say won't change what you think." He closed his food bowl and quickly placed it back in his backpack. "Because you're just like that. You always have to..." Be the center of attention? Be the victim? "You've almost died how many times counting the car accident? You're luckier than you think." He readied with bag and wore it in his back before standing up. "A better person too."

He let silence slip in, swallowed saliva, and then gave a rather empty look at Yulia. Was she aware that she had pretty much damaged their lunch? Luckily for both of them, it was near impossible to make Evgeny's mood go down for too long.

"I hope you liked the pasta." He softly grinned. "You can keep the bowl."