Chapter 72: Rage Against
To be perfectly honest, this doesn't feel real.
And to think, I'd finally allowed myself to grieve… only to end right back where I'd started. Surrounded by the ghosts of those I failed one year ago.
It feels like a kick in the gut. It's harsh to say I never wanted to see them again. It's not that at all. It's just… I accepted that I never would. I finally stopped pretending.
But here I am, and they don't feel like ghosts. This isn't some dream. I'm really back.
In some sense of the word.
I left them behind without ever saying it. I failed them in that.
Yeah, I'll admit it. I was afraid. Too scared of actually feeling something for someone other than myself. Even after everything we'd gone through, I couldn't let myself open up. Not really. So, I never told them, huh?
Well, I've never been one to pass up an opportunity. Let's enjoy these times while they last.
-<>-<>-<>-
"Long time no see, Visha."
Tanya's eyes pulse, neon teal reflecting faintly against her silver bangs.
"Or, I suppose, no time at all. For me, it's only been about a day… I don't imagine you can tell me the world's at peace now?"
Shivering down her spine, there's a finicky tremble, as if her nerves are protesting. There's a faint, underlying tension in her arms and shoulders, and inside the underside of her forearms, up to the tip of her pinkies, it feels like a muffled TV static. Like she needs to shake them out to get the blood flowing properly.
Visha doesn't respond at first. Her eyes are blown wide open, and in the faint light of the cell, the edges of them glisten with held back tears.
She raises her hand to the grid-patterned bars, and it's shaking and trembling, reaching out desperately for something that she's almost certain won't be there. That she's still half-convinced it's just a trick of the mind, a great collective hallucination, a viral illusion, infecting everyone around.
Making her see ghosts.
…yeah, Tanya can relate to that one.
Slowly, she gets up from her cot, rolling her shoulders. And if her own fingers are shaking a bit as she steps forward, pressing her hands against the bars just next to Visha's, well…
It's been a long, long year. So much has changed. Too much has changed.
"…yeah. Yeah, I'm really here, Visha."
And now, quietly, as the warmth of their hands connects through cold iron bars, Tanya allows herself to grieve once more.
-<>-<>-<>-
Even so, I'm sorry. And I truly mean that.
Six days, huh? One of those is already gone. Wasted in a cell. So really, it's five days. Five days to say what I never said. Five days to find a way back home.
Five days to fix everything.
I've got quite a busy schedule, don't I? That's fine. It's me, after all.
"This will be the most difficult operation you've ever carried out."
Yeah, I believe it. But honestly, the hardest part isn't duping a Deity. I've already done that, and I'll do it again. The hardest part comes in between. I've never been one to apologize, and I'm definitely not the most emotionally inclined.
But hey, didn't you know?
It's better to not leave things unsaid.
Especially now. Because this time, I won't be coming back.
So, I'm sorry everyone. I'll do it. I'll make up for past mistakes.
But I'm afraid I'm going to have to fail you one last time.
-<>-<>-<>-
The Second Day, Winter
Eastern Imperial Territory
Germanian Empire
In the car ride back to civilization, Tanya does not dare fall asleep. The faint tinge of a headache threatens her, but she can't sleep it away. Her body feels like it's squeezing her, but that's a tension she'll have to endure.
The risk is too great.
While once, about a year ago in fact, she may have been able to stay awake and alert for a great number of unnatural hours, it's a different story now. There's more to push through than simply exhaustion.
Falling back into old habits isn't the issue. She'd never ceased rising with the Sun, even far removed from her old military life. Though, occasionally, her beloved could convince her to rest for another hour or so.
Beloved.
The word is a bittersweet taste. It is a foreign sensation, delicious yet far painfully unfamiliar.
At least she'd been able to say it, in the end.
…no. Not the end. That's the entire point of this.
Her head drops, silver strands cascading around her shoulders and face. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Focus.
Tanya strengthens her resolve and hardens her heart.
She scoots forward, making it easier to lean her head back against the space next to her headrest. Teal glowing eyes facing the car's – more accurately, a Jeep-esque vehicle, but who's really keeping track – roof, she lets her eyelids flutter shut.
To her left, Visha shifts, looking at her. Tanya pays her no mind.
It's easier to split her focus without other things adding on top.
Tanya closes her eyes and focuses. Checks in, smooths the flow.
She's mostly gotten the hang of it now. The formula isn't complete, but then again, she doesn't have full access to her powers here anyway. Not like this, at least.
It's not that her Skills are incompatible with this world. It's just…
She's not properly together at the moment. Or something like that.
This formula though; it's enough by itself. Everything else will fall into place.
Tanya focuses one corner of her consciousness on it, keeping it awake and powered almost as easily as breathing. It's a faint, continuous process now.
She can feel it in the gaps in her joints, down to her bone marrow. Between the hasty seams of this physical form, a cold heat that only exists on some other plane.
And then, while she cannot let herself truly sleep, Tanya quietly wanders into a daydream.
In this, she finds herself on a beach.
The world used to be greyscale. Dim, with muted blues and colorless sunlight poking through gaps in the clouds. Now, it glows with color just a step to the right of correct.
The sky is still filled with clouds, a constant cumulonimbus. They dance and spark, ripped apart at some point. Directly in the middle of those clouds, beyond the shore and high above the ocean, there is a massive, roughly hewn circle cut out of them.
Inside it, hovering silently, is a sphere that glitches along the edges. Teal and gold and sometimes, pitch black. The clouds nearest it war with one another, changing shape, blinking between evaporating away and coming closer in a stormy accretion disk.
She stands on the shore, ozone on the back of her tongue. She can feel the breeze, the rumble of thunder in her chest, just the same as she can feel the seat of the car underneath her.
What are you?
She knows what it is.
There's salt in the air, clinging and wet, but there's no real sensation to it. It comes like a memory, a natural visualization. Waves roll back and forth, and in the distance, storm clouds linger where the ocean meets the sky.
Thunder booms. The ocean rises and churns as it did when Leviathan was slain.
No one should be in this place, but she is in this place. Of course she is. Who else?
There is something dreadfully right about it all. The weight of this world presses down in comforting familiarity. There is something dreadfully wrong, too.
No one else should be in this place.
Above her, that great sphere flickers between giving light and taking it in. Yet, without fail, an aura, or a veil, or a coat of teal energy crackles and covers it like a protective blanket.
Far behind her, defying comprehension, a great tower rises past the sky.
Tanya opens her eyes, staring at the roof of the car with that same teal glow.
It's impossible to get comfortable.
-<>-<>-<>-
There's something about staring. It's constant. Every single person she's encountered so far has stared.
Not glanced. Not dismissed. Stared.
Why?
She remembers her arrival.
An explosion of color, her stomach lurching and bloody bile spitting on the back of her tongue. Wind rushing against her body, unfamiliar skin and flesh sensitive to the touch. Everything was too sharp, her bones too perfectly aligned, her nerves on a fine trigger, and it didn't so much hurt as it did feel.
Bouncing across concrete like a skipping stone, slamming into a metal wall hard enough to leave an indent. Scrapes and bruises and maybe a broken bone or two, her senses overloaded, far too loud, yelling and screaming and, muffled as if heard underwater, "Oh my god" "What the fuck is-" "It can't-" "Is that-?!"
She couldn't focus on anything else. Only inward.
Blurry eyes registered the vague shapes of people crowding around her. Someone picked her up, and that was it. Dropping, half-conscious, into that same daydream. Ignoring everything around her just to keep it going, don't pass out, you have to stay awake, Tanya, or else-
When she'd finally, finally felt some semblance of control over herself, Tanya opened her eyes and found herself on a cot, in a cell. Sensation returned to her in a rush. Smell, taste, touch, pain, spatial awareness.
Dirt and mildew drifting on the air, a faint metallic tinge along the roof of her mouth, cool metal underneath her and around her wrists, a faint pulsing over her back, shoulders, neck, cheek.
A faint itch, as her flesh knits itself back together. The scrapes along her skin didn't last more than a couple hours, and the bruises lasted about the same. She'd wince, and shiver at the cold.
But sensation was, and still is now… duller, for lack of a better word. Magic, similarly odd.
Her hands were cuffed in cold iron, too. It took her a moment to even notice.
If she were an ordinary mage, it would have been worrisome. Especially with the necessities of her current situation. But needless to say, ordinary does not describe her at all.
Honestly, the manacles and chains back from her brief prison stint in Xerxes were far more troublesome. The handcuffs here don't even have runes. How embarrassing.
So, all that being said, Tanya supposes her abrupt reappearance might have something to do with the staring. Or maybe it's her clothes, or her hair, or her eyes.
The white button up without a jacket probably gives off a bit of an underdressed impression, considering it is winter and they are currently walking through a military base. And silver hair – still kept down, because unfortunately there weren't any hair ties in her cell – is far from natural, at least on younger people.
The glowing eyes? Well, that's not going away until she's gone.
Not like she can do much about any of those. It's what she had on in her cell, and presumably while arriving too, since there's a rip across the shirt's right shoulder. Her pants and slip-on shoes are fine. There's blood on them, sure. Nothing crazy though. Standard military issue, not counting the shoes.
It's… not an insignificant amount of blood. Her shirt is also stained fairly badly.
Given her lack of injuries, she probably looks like she murdered someone.
Yeah, never mind. Let's address the elephant in the room.
It's probably just that fact that it's her.
Tanya von Degurechaff. KIA, apparently MIA, now apparently Returned to Action?
Hey everyone. Remember that time I died? Well, I got better.
Visha walks at her side, close enough to nearly touch shoulders. She's leading her… somewhere. To meet with a higher-up or something, maybe. Tanya's not thinking about that, to be honest.
She's just thankful the car ride from the mage prison to here was fairly short. It narrows down where exactly she might be, which is honestly way more important right now than hearing some schmuck member of the Brass give her a sitrep.
She can imagine how that conversation is going to go.
"It is very good to see you again, Colonel."
"I died. That means my employment with the military was terminated."
"Details, details. We'll get you reinstated ASAP."
Or something like that.
Huh. It really only took her a year to stop pretending to give a shit about some things. It's remarkably freeing to not have to worry about being court martialed.
Arene still leaves a bad taste in her mouth this many years later, for several reasons including that one. As does the assault on Moskov. The first one, that is.
Tanya suppresses a grimace.
"How could you come up with something so horrible?" It was a thought exercise about circumventing international wartime law they gave us at the War College, the essay on which should have ended up forgotten in the professor's desk drawer. You weren't supposed to take inspiration from it, you decrepit bastards.
An officer walks through the same hallway as them, heading in the opposite direction.
He glances at Visha, then her, then does a double take. And then, because apparently no one has any fucking tact, he stares at her. He's still staring when they walk past; she can feel his eyes on the back of her neck.
Sigh.
Does he recognize her? Maybe. Does he recognize Visha? Most likely.
Has he heard rumors floating around the base about a young woman with silver hair, who greatly resembles an older version of the greatest mage the Empire's ever known? That Tanya von Degurechaff herself may well be back from the-
Yeah, Tanya has heard those rumors, and she's been on base for all of ten minutes.
So, yeah. Definitely.
Tanya sighs out loud this time, only for it to shift into a yawn. Visha shifts, glancing at her.
Then, "Are they bothering you?"
Tanya's irritation melts a little bit. It really is good to see her adjutant again.
No, that's underselling it. It's… heartwarming to see her closest friend one more time, and to see she's still so caring.
It's heartwarming enough for Tanya to not point out that Visha has also been staring whenever she thinks Tanya isn't looking.
No one seems to think she's real. That she's here.
And to be fair, they're half right. It doesn't even feel real to her.
"It's fine." Tanya waves it off. Then, after a moment of indecision, bumps their shoulders together. "I'm practically a ghost, aren't I?"
She hears Visha's breath catch, like she's about to cry.
Yeah, that's a can of worms they don't need to open up in a random hallway. So, she doesn't say anything else, and they keep walking to… wherever they're going.
Tanya looks like a ghost right now. All silver and bloody.
Maybe that was insensitive to say. Maybe it's the truth.
Maybe, well, they might as well be ghosts to her.
But none of them know about that.
She wonders if they can really see her after all. Maybe they're all just staring into a blank space and wishing it were something, someone else. Maybe the grief separating them will always be a wall between sorrow and acceptance. An opaque glass wall forcing us to see things we can't.
Tanya is trapped between missing her subordinates, her friends, and accepting that they're here. They never died; she did. But leaving and being left behind are equally painful, it seems.
And with such an abrupt return – in whatever sense that word that means right now – such a time later, well, it makes sense they'd look at her.
They should look at her. Look for her. Think of her always.
But that's selfish. At some point there must be closure. Here she is, in spite of this.
It must have reopened an old wound, ripping open rough and forcibly healed seams on the heart, to no small amount of pain and bloodshed.
Tanya doesn't know if the blood on her clothing is dried or not. It feels like she's still bleeding.
You know, it makes sense that they'd lock her up for a bit. Or maybe they should have called an exorcist instead of guards.
Physically, she doesn't look even remotely the same beyond facial features. Taller, healthier, stronger, she's a far cry from the malnourished orphan the General Staff had no qualms about sending to the frontlines time and again.
She's different, now. A ghost or lingering spirit in every sense of the word, having come back but also having come back wrong.
And they stare, and Tanya knows. She feels it every time, every second, and she doesn't blame them in the slightest.
She knows.
She yawns again, wondering about the tears in her eyes.
Well… that's too much, isn't it?
As if she doesn't have enough to deal with right now. And it doesn't help that she's operating off of… zero hours of actual, in-depth sleep over the past like, 30 hours or so.
The next, say, 114 or so hours won't be very fun, will they?
"Here we are, Colonel." Her former adjutant opens the door, gesturing for her to go in.
"Just Tanya." Tanya corrects, before stepping inside.
It's a rather compact room, not in floorplan exactly but in how the space is used. The room is a rectangle, with ten tall wooden lockers on the longer left and right walls. Four more lockers are on the far wall, with the door on the wall behind her.
Visha follows, closing the door. "But…"
"If years and death aren't enough to revoke me of that status, then at the very least do it because I asked." A set of wooden benches runs down the middle. Tanya drifts around them, until she pauses about halfway into the room. "Where…?"
"Locker 13, ma'am- uh, I mean-"
Of-fucking-course it's locker 13. Tanya sighs, waving her off. That's not even subtle.
She walks the rest of the way to the far wall and opens the locker. She blinks.
They must have rushed to get these here.
"…Visha."
"Yes? What is it?"
"I'm going to go out on a limb and say these clothes are based on my old measurements?"
Tanya glances over her shoulder and leans to the side, revealing a button-up shirt, pants, and overshirt uniform that wouldn't look out of place in a Halloween costume aisle marketed at smaller-than-average teenagers with a preference for historical authenticity.
That is to say, they're comically too small. Tanya is roughly Visha's height right now, and that's with her wearing flat shoes in comparison to Visha's military boots.
While Tanya's okay with her current clothing, people might start asking uncomfortable questions if she goes out in the snow and isn't bothered. It'd be better to just accept a uniform and the coat that comes with it, honestly.
Also, clothes without blood on them would be nice.
"Ah." Visha blinks, then looks over her from head to toe. It's like she's really seeing her for the first time, which, fair enough. There's a lot going on right now.
Her gaze flickers up and down. "I… guess you can borrow one of mine?"
Tanya turns, placing a hand on the inside of the locker's door. Discretely, she traces something on the inside of her locker's surface. "That's a possibility."
Similar heights now, and their physical builds aren't too different. Aside from the obvious.
"Do you have a spare here?"
Warmth trickles through her fingertip, into the wood. Her eyes would normally give her away, glowing in response to the use of magicules… but her eyes have been glowing since she arrived, so Visha won't be any the wiser.
Place one… there, and there. Good. He's not looking right now.
"A spare button-up, that is."
"I do, but everything else might not…" Visha frowns. "…well, maybe…"
She drifts to the right side of the room, pausing in front of a seemingly random locker and opening it.
"Here we go." Visha reaches inside, pulling out a pair of standard-issue dark, almost black cargo pants. Throwing them over her arm, she reaches in again and grabs a white button-up, a grey-blue overcoat, and tosses them over her arm as well. Last, she hesitates, then pulls out a pair of boots.
Tanya presses her palm against the inside of her locker's door, watching as Visha wanders closer and sets the various clothing items on the wooden bench nearest her.
"Are we stealing someone else's clothing for this?" She asks, the glow in her eyes dimming slightly as she steps closer, leaving her locker behind.
"These were Lotte's, actually."
Oh.
"…were?"
Visha blinks, looking back at her. "Oh! Lotte's alive, don't worry. But she was injured and sent home for an extended break rather recently, so I don't think she'd mind…"
"Oh. That's good."
Tanya coughs, half to dispel the awkward feeling in her chest and half to clear the supernatural taste in the back of her throat. It makes sense, actually, that Lotte's clothes would fit her now. As Tanya recalls, the other girl stopped growing back then with about the same build that Tanya has now.
"It makes more sense that she's alive, anyway." Tamya nods to herself, "Right, anyone we trained wouldn't die so easily just because… well, nevermind. I suppose I myself died fairly easily-"
"Don't say that."
"Huh?" Tanya starts in surprise, just a bit, as Visha grabs her by the shoulders.
"You didn't die easily." Visha stares into her soul, those brilliant blue eyes sparking against Tanya's glowing teal. "You fought, and fought, and- and I won't listen to anyone disrespecting the bravest woman I ever knew. Not even herself."
"…huh. Okay." That's about the best Tanya can come up with right now.
Visha's grip on her shoulders tightens.
"You wouldn't die easily. You'd never. I- I've always known that, you know? That you wouldn't just… give up. Everyone else might have given up, but not me. Never."
Tanya finds her words, as Visha's nag at something in her subconscious. "Give up?"
"You'd never just give in. I know that. If anyone could do it, could defy even that, I knew it'd be you. Even if I never thought I'd see you again, I always hoped you'd at least-"
The presence washes over Tanya's senses. He's looking again.
To her surprise, however… Visha seems to bite her tongue, some sort of faint blue light sparking around her irises.
Tanya's eyes widen minutely.
"-I hoped you'd at least live long enough to recover from… everything." Visha's sentence changes. That's not what she'd been about to say at all. "But, you're here. I can feel you. It's like… it's like a dream come true. To see you like this."
She stumbles through the words, as if making them up on the spot.
Tanya breathes in and holds it. Alright then.
"Having grown up?" She says, exhaling. "I'll admit, it's nice being taller. And I'm pretty sure my blood pressure is normal now. Hell of a thing to wake up with, a healthier body."
"Yes…" Visha looks at her, really looks at her, with oddly misty-eyed. "You really did grow… you look so different now, Colonel."
"Like I said. Just Tanya, please." Tanya reminds her, gently brushing Visha's hands off her shoulders. "…I have to wonder, though. This is just a guess, but maybe this is how my body would be at this point, without… well, everything, I suppose. Malnutrition, stress, too much coffee."
Visha could not deny that. Tanya always did have a way with uncannily accurate speculations. Still, there's one other thing. "Even then, your hair is..."
"Oh." Tanya pauses. She actually has a reasonably good guess as to why it's changed color, but voicing that reason out loud is unacceptable right now. "I don't have an answer for that one. Though… pure speculation of course… but, perhaps death could not let me return without leaving a mark."
She pauses.
"Awfully poetic of me, now that I think about it."
It's as good an answer as any. Now's not the time to delve into theories of the soul and the reflection of one's inner self. No doubt, though, someone somewhere is laughing at the irony of her hair turning silver.
Well, silver-grey. Though under certain lighting, it's like the outline and shadows of her hair are white? Odd, that.
"An awful joke, more like." Visha shakes her head, hiding a smile behind her hand.
-<>-<>-<>-
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone