( how come i always try to cross even though i know the bridge is burning )
It's funny what a person can get used to.
(It's not.)
Lucas North always lands on his feet - eventually - but Alyosha Tarasov can't tell if this is falling or landing he's doing right now, nearly a year after his arrival. In the back of his head, he's marking time like he's back in prison and he doesn't have another eight fucking years to go AWOL in. There won't be any prisoner trading this time; Harry can't get him out of this. He knows that most people come and go, that the odds for once were stacked up in his favour and still somehow he's getting screwed here.
He can get out, is the thing. He can get out, he just can't get home.
For the past ten months, he's built a whole world around a cover story he made up on the spot; his tattoos offer an explanation for where he came from that he doesn't dispute, just quietly establishes himself as legitimate now, on the straight and narrow. His last girlfriend was from Boston, died of brain cancer while being treated at Dana-Farber; he hasn't dated since, but he's mending, getting back on track with work and running a branch of his private security company out of Xanadu itself. It turns a profit, disconnected from the mothership for obvious reasons that sidestep the fact there is no mothership and there is no Alyosha bloody Tarasov. He's got all the requisite IDs, though, and maybe he's just the right kind of paranoid to not want people casually knowing which Moscow he belongs to; it fits the person he supposedly is.
(It fits the person he really is, too, 'paranoia as a lifestyle choice'. Professionally sound philosophy.)
In Xanadu, there's a small, retro cinema - red velvet, balcony seating that features a bar and restaurant upstairs if you pay extra for the gold tickets - that's currently featuring film festival shorts from around the multiverse, and he catches a late showing of Skindeep after sighting a poster of the familiar leading lady on his way out of a business lunch earlier in the day. No pomegranates, he remembers, rolling the silver coin she gave him over his knuckles; he's just superstitious enough to have kept it, not quite enough to think it means anything. It's just time watching itself go by, and he has plenty of that as he heads back out into the cooler late evening air, dropping his ticket stub in the trash and tucking his hands in his coat pockets.
He makes a beeline for a nocturnally-inclined coffee shop and lifts his hand in silent greeting to the young man behind the register; they know his face and his order here, which as knowing him goes is good enough for government work.