Get up real early in the morning, don't get up 'til the afternoon; son, I see the day is dawning?

[der_weevilkonig]

Sometime around eight in the morning, Owen Harper is in the Kashtta Tower infirmary with his back to the door, cleaning and re-dressing a set of fairly deep healing clawmarks on his forearms. He's managed to keep them out of sight so far by washing them at odd hours and wearing long-sleeve shirts, because he doesn't particularly want to have a

Comments

[nogettingback]

There is a rather obtrusive car parked in front of the coffee shop. It's obtrusive because it's bright pink and an El Camino, which the narration is convinced no sane person actually drives anymore. At the moment, it is abandoned, however, the owner is now stepping out of The Coffee Shop with some sort of coffee drink that has way too much foam to be considered a manly beverage. There's a carnival flier under his windshield and he tugs it off and examines it.

"Huh. And I thought the traveling carnival thing went out with bellbottoms," he muses, more to himself than anyone, but loud enough that Ivan can probably hear.

[soldatceryi]

Ivan looks over at that, registers the angel, registers that the angel owns (or is planning to steal) that car, and...

"For that it may be much like your automobile," he says, gesturing to the car with his cane. "Maybe it is like this is; a - akh, shto slovo? - 'enthusiast'."

[nogettingback]

Aaron looks at his car like he's never seen it before. "Okay, point."

He does, however, give Janine an affectionate pat. Out of style or not, he loves his... Horrible, horrible car.

"Retro or not, it looks like it could be a laugh," he shrugs nonchalantly. "I got a cousin who could use a few."

Why yes, Aaron does just chat animatedly with perfect strangers about things he'd probably be better off not talking about. Why would you ever think otherwise?

[soldatceryi]

"You should take her," Ivan says. "Him? I loved the carnival when I was a boy. Good foods, and the dancers, and the bears..."

And then there times when he went out with his father to hunt bears, and then there was the festival where they fed vodka to the bear. Russia is big on bears.

[nogettingback]

"Her. Tay Barnam. She's been all over the journals here lately, for one thing and another." Which is why Aaron doesn't feel the need to be on the downlow about it.

He turns the flier around in his hands. "Well, she's on crutches, so she'll have to hobble around a bit, but the girl needs some whimsy in her life, y'know?"

It seems Chicago is suffering from insufficient whimsy.

[soldatceryi]

Well, there's a look of recognition on Ivan's face. "Ah. The infamous. I had meant to come visit her." He shifts the cane to his left hand, extending his right. "Ivan Volkovich. And you would be a Barnam, then?"

Everyone's heard of the Barnams. Even the Russians.

[nogettingback]

"Da!" Aaron grins, which would be about as much Russian as he knows. Unless 'vodka' counts as knowing Russian. "Yeah, I'm Aaron." A beat. "They don't talk about me much."

If that wasn't obvious by the car and the general sparkliness that is Aaron.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume... Archangel?" His wings aren't out, so he couldn't even be sure of angel, but... He knows the Barnams, he has the look of a hardened warrior. If he's not an archangel, Aaron will eat that flier.

[soldatceryi]

Ivan smiles at the attempted Russian. "Да, архангел. Очень приятно."

Hey, if he's going to start it...

"Sadly retired. Old war wound. Of a sort." There were those who said that Stalin went to war against his own people. "And you do seem very unlike the Barnams I've heard about."

[nogettingback]

"And then you lost me." He's pretty amused, despite that, however. Russian is pretty.

"Ouch," Aaron cringes. "Nothing worse for an arch than feelin' put out to pasture, but you don't seem to be doing so bad." He would like to think that he's a good judge of things.

At the last, he chuckles and bows a bit flambouyantly. "I try so very, very hard. I'm glad that comes across."

[soldatceryi]

"I find ways to occupy myself," Ivan says. "Primarily training. Worst was the Great War - the second World War." He grimaces. "I was very recently... 'put out to pasture' then. But the Maquis were more than considerate."

Ivan doesn't actually have all that many archangel-y friends. Sometimes you've just gotta share your war stories.

[nogettingback]

Aaron whistles. "Ought to point you out to my family." He makes a grandoise gesture, like he's pointing Ivan out to an invisible archangel. "This is a standard by which we ought to set ourselves by." This is accompanied by a shake of his head. "I'm all for fighting for a reason and going down fighting, even if it takes me out of the game. I don't like this starting wars bullshit and I don't like thinking that I'm completely useless if I can't put myself out there and tear into everything that bleeds black."

Aaron's enamored with him already... In a hero-worshippy way. He doesn't get to meet many archangels who aren't, well, Barnamesque or as crazy as he is. It's nice to meet an archangel who sort of personifies what he believes an archangel should be- a soldier-type, but one who doesn't just run around screaming BLOOOOD.

[soldatceryi]

And here Ivan is relaxing into this topic already. That's one thing that required a major adjustment, coming here - the war between the species. He's used to an uneasy truce with not-infrequent flareups of violence. The assumption that hotbloods and coldbloods should always be killing each other is.. bizarre.

"In Russia it is not always possible," he explains. "There are, too often, too many political enemies to worry about angels and demons. Too many of us fighting on the same side." He tilts his cup. "And, yes, getting very prickly at one another in the ranks, but even then, killing one another was frowned upon."

[nogettingback]

Aaron moves to perch on the hood of his car, leaning over with his hands resting on his knees. "Jesus, you tell Big Daddy something like that, I think he'd burst a blood vessel." He scratches the back of his neck. "It's true though. You even see it in the military these days. Angels and demons working through uneasy truces because they're on the same side. You'd think people'd get the hint."

And this coming from someone who has never so much as been in a room with a demon he wasn't supposed to kill before he came here and wound up in a whole damn building full of them.

"I just never saw the point of it," he shrugs. "The fighting."

[soldatceryi]

Ivan shrugs. "It is what God made us to do," he says. "Some were made to guard, some to heal, we were made to hunt and kill demons. It is only a little flaw in the world that it is not so good for what we were meant to do.

This, he says with a wry smirk. Oh, yes, the world is broken. He's more than used to this. The life of the Russian archangel is all about learning how to keep your footing and work around the jagged bits.

[nogettingback]

Aaron has no idea if God has anything to do with it- he's pretty sure it was just some evolutionary trick- but he's not going to argue the point. He just smirks back.

"Yeah, but I think we're due for a major shift. When a Barnam becomes a guardian angel to a demon, something is either going very wrong with the world or veering towards very right."

Ask him which he thinks it is and he wouldn't be able to tell you, but something is happening all right.