A Refugee's Face

Going to the forest didn't have the effect he wanted it to. He was still shaky and off-put, this psychic constipation that he almost never had to deal with and certainly hadn't had since the demon had tried to destroy him and Ronan and everything they were. Had that been two years ago or three now? Sometimes it was hard to remember.

Sometimes, Kavinsky thought it didn't really matter.

Today was no better or worse than when he'd woken with the pitch in his blood, that glossy black that he hadn't really had since he'd arrived in Darrow and was still getting used to dreaming here. He wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not. Either way, he wasn't up for dancing.

Skip out with me he texted Alex. They weren't due on a stage for hours, and he was hanging out in Arch. He accompanied it with a selfie, him hanging half backwards off his chair, the picture taken upside down, sticking his tongue out and looking stupid with the sound board behind him. Let's just chill.

There was maybe a part of him that hoped she could do something, but he wasn't about to ask. Joseph Kavinsky did not ask for things. He had always been the knowledgeable outlier, the fount and sage, and anyway this wasn't exactly some ghost bullshit, was it? He'd figure it out.

Kavinsky was at the studio when the idea struck him. He was supposed to go right to the club after this, a long day but a relatively early night all things considered. And he didn't think Newt was planning to come out, in particular. But now the thought had come to him and he couldn't get it out of his head, even as he worked through the promotional materials he needed for next weeks festival.

He set everything aside and sent Newt a text.

come to the club
pretend u dont know me for the night

They hadn't done anything like this in ages. Sure, Newt came to watch him dance, but it was mostly smiling and laughing and a few tips. They didn't do anything more than that very often. And the thought of it was a fun one.

Sometimes he missed the filth they got up to in the first months of their relationship, or even before they'd gotten the kid at home. It was normally pretty easy to kick Charlie out for an evening, but that wasn't the point. Sometimes, you just wanted to get filthy and freaky with your husband, wherever you could get him to dick you down. And at work? That was just an extra bit of fun.

And now, especially, it was exciting because he wasn't sure when Newt might appear to play the game. He just had to wait and let it happen.

Well, time to go to the club, dress down, and start his night. With the music in his ears, he could ignore the time and just dance for tips and the whistling attention of the post-business week crowd.

"I'm pretty sure this place is out to get me."

Kavinsky didn't mean it badly, not this time. It just seemed like these things happened to him slightly more often than they happened to Newt. Which was fine, he supposed. He found he minded but he didn't mind when he inevitably woke up and there were tits in place, no more cock, all the rest of it. Newt certainly always seemed to enjoy it when it happened, so why shouldn't he too?

He yawed and stretched. The sweatpants he'd gone to sleep in were too big, and because he hadn't slept in a shirt he felt curiously exposed. He considered the tattoos on his arms and then let them drop across his chest.

"Gimme a shirt."

Baba had come to New York and liberated him from his little flat, and now he was standing outside of Prokopenko's place, a moving van parked behind the Evo, a couple of strapping Ukrainian men moving his things into the house.

Prokopenko wasn't even there. Kavinsky had called on the way down, and he'd been at work. Kavinsky had laughed it off then, but he hadn't expected baba to have a key to the place, prepared to break them in and start moving the few things that he had into the house while there was no one there to stop them.

"I will make lunch," she proclaimed, walking into the house with great aplomb. Kavinsky could do nothing but follow her.

"Shouldn't we wait for Illya?"

"Pah, he knows we are coming. If he is late for lunch, this his problem."

Kavinsky swore under his breath, scrubbing at his hair. He didn't think Proko was going to have a problem, but he wasn't sure how happy he was going to be about how unceremonious this was.

Poison was running late, but that was fine. Kavinsky had been sitting in the studio for a while anyway. There had been a couple of smaller bills he'd dealt with, studio time that paid for keeping the place open and producing Poison, but most of the day so far had been book keeping and not, specifically, thinking about the letter that was sitting on the front desk.

e had to think about it at some point. He had to open it. He ought to open it around Newt, because that was probably the right thing to do, but he'd grabbed it on his way out the front door, and he'd been glancing at it throughout the morning, letting it stare at him as the day marched onward.

Darrow City Administration
Department of Family Services

Kavinsky felt like he ought to be more manic and less generally anxious. The letter had come sooner than he'd expected; they'd had the home visit only a week or so ago, and the case worker had said it would take quite a while to hear back, and even longer to get a placement. They were, for the moment, slated for fostering over adoption. He wasn't sure if that actually made a difference with placement at all.

He heard the door open and looked up from the letter, which he'd picked up from the desk and was just staring at.

The club was busy, noisy, and Kavinsky was dressed to draw attention. She'd had a bit to drink already, but not enough to be drunk, and she'd done a couple of bumps in the bathroom, but not enough to feel really out of control. Everything felt good, especially when she's dancing, her tight skirt scrunched almost all the way up, her top loose and almost hanging off, even as it clung to her.

She wants to get in trouble. She wants to have a wild night. It seems like a great night to do it.

Kavinsky had been in Darrow long enough now that it was shaping up to be one of the longest places he'd been anywhere, if he was lucky. Even after only three years, he had thoughts that, maybe, hopefully, it was sort of a forever place. He had never really thought of a forever place, after his family had left Bulgaria. New Jersey certainly hadn't been a forever place, and they'd been there for as long as they'd been in Virginia. Now, Kavinsky had been in Darrow half as long as he'd been in any of those three places. If he managed just three more years here, he'd be able to neatly quarter his life--Bulgaria, New Jersey, Virginia, and Darrow--and then after that, everything would be here. That seemed an awful lot like a forever place to him.

He did not forget that people just arrived here. After all, he was an immigrant by nature and by circumstance in Darrow, and he'd had people show up in and around Arch Studio, and he himself had emerged from the forest--the old version of it, the one that hated him still--like a ghost or a dream. Still, it happened irregularly, or without rhyme or reason enough that sometimes Kavinsky could fool or kid himself. Maybe people arrived in Darrow as fully formed as the native folk. Maybe they'd just always been there and didn't know it. It was, perhaps, a more peaceful lie to tell themselves than the truth. That in some other version, they went off the rails, or they died, or they kept on existing without having left at all.

So Kavinsky wasn't thinking of anything in particular, that day. It wasn't a spectacular day. He wasn't doing anything in particular. He was missing the Evo in favor of the Golf, wishing the world hadn't turned inside out and backwards back in autumn. He was thinking of the future--of him and Newt, of Arch Studios, of everything--and listening to the world around him.

He wasn't entirely sure what had drawn him to the train station, but he was there. Sometimes he went, looked at Jack's old graffiti and smiled a little. Today, he was there and sitting on top of the Golf, watching people, smoking a cigarette and looking, he thought, a little less like a twenty year old that owned and ran a music label, and a little more like a gargoyle. With him, it was probably a bit of the same.