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Vasily Vasilievich Arketov has died. Nyssa Rasovna Raatko is still alive. This is a very unfortunate scenario.
The window of the bedchamber is open, and it’s icy cold outside. It’s late and there is no light on the Balkan lake’s black water that the window overlooks. It is pure, pitch-dark outside.
Inside it is slightly warmer, but Nyssa does not feel it. There is a candle on the table. It casts a faint glow on the cup of tea Misha had wordlessly left there some time ago. Nyssa stares out the window into the abyss. She’s lounging in an upholstery chair, legs swung over one arm. The tea, being completely ignored, has long since grown cold.
Does she wish she were dead too? She wonders this half-seriously, and then she lets herself consider it. Just to indulge the thought.
No, she decides. Not exactly. Not anymore. When you’ve been alive for long enough, it’s not that easy to just grow tired of living. You grow addicted to the adrenaline of seeing whatever will happen next. She has been addicted to many things in her long, long life. When she’d walked from Crimea to Algiers to find her father in 1794, she’d stayed warm with absinthe and the heat of opium dens.
Now, she favored modern morphine. Morphine for the pain that hadn’t gone away since she was vivisected awake and screaming and acid was poured inside her. Morphine made everything stiller. It had been more than half a century. She’d been hooked since the first time the needle pierced her skin and the opiates entered her veins in the Soviet hospital, in which she’d spent a year recovering after the liberation of Ravensbrück.
Phenibut, too. A Soviet cosmonaut drug for her nerves. It wasn’t a narcotic, exactly, she told herself. It made her warm, and dizzy, and flushed. Sometimes it made her sick. But it was there. And she was Russian, so a shot of vodka in the morning and three more at night took the edge off.
So, yes, Nyssa Rasovna is no stranger to addiction. She could therefore confidently say that life itself is the greatest one.
The kicker is that you will be addicted to eternal life, but you will hate every minute of it. Life will fucking beat you over the head with one thing after another, and you just have to keep taking it, because some cosmic fear of missing out prevents you from opting out into eternal peace and blissful blackness.
You’ve stuck around this long, cast your lot this far. You’ve made it through unspeakable horrors. The worst things that can be done - to a woman, a mother, a human - have already been done to you. What is one more thing to add to the pile? What is the final straw?
To have there be a point in history after which you will never perceive anything again is unfathomable.
Besides, suicide would be a logistical nightmare.
Nyssa Rasovna is not a coward, but she can’t kill herself. She wouldn’t dare. She will not go gently into this good night. The Nazis had tried to kill her. She’d considered it seriously postwar; the germans had failed to do it, but they’d never put a loaded gun directly to her temple either. But again, the unfathomable urge to keep living at all costs won out. It was almost Freudian. The death drive, but perversely inverted.
No. She doesn’t want to die. Vasily Vasilievich has died, and it doesn't matter. He will be an irrelevant footnote in history. That was it for him.
She was not close to Arketov. She’d kept up with his life, obviously, taking an interest in his affairs. She even met him once, posing as some distant cousin - had she informed him of the truth of their relation, it would have been unbelievable to him. (We look like we’re the same age. I am your great-grandmother. That would have gone over really well.)
Beyond the periodic surveillance, she would never have allowed herself to get close.
Watching him grow up, quietly and from afar as she had watched his grandfather and father, had been one of her few sources of entertainment over the past decades. If she were still capable of feeling anything beyond this persistent fog of numbness, there would have been numerous points at which her heart would have swelled with something akin to maternal pride.
Vasily Vasilievich is not a little boy. Not anymore. He was blown to pieces in some Balkan shithole and now he is not even a corpse in one piece that can have the dignity of burial.
“What a way to go out,” Nyssa murmurs. She’s been sitting in the same position for so long that her legs are starting to go numb. With some discomfort, she stretches and shifts.
“It is very sad,” comes the reply, making Nyssa jump a bit. Misha - when did he get here? - is sympathetically nodding in concurrence. He looks more pained than she does. The fact that the henchman is showing more grief than Nyssa herself is so horrible that it almost strikes her as ridiculous.
“Do you want more tea?” Misha asks stupidly. The cup of tea is full. It’s been untouched since he put it there an hour ago, to replace the last cup of tea which had also grown cold without being acknowledged.
It takes Nyssa a second to process that this is a question. She blinks, shakes her head. “No. Thank you.”
He takes the cup away. Five minutes later, he’s back with a new steaming cup anyway.
Yesterday she’d cried on his shoulder. The news had just broken and she’d been uncharacteristically sentimental. She has not acknowledged this since and she expects him to do the same. It is not to be spoken of again.
What also will not be spoken of again was the fit of rage that came shortly before the tears (moment of weakness.) It’s fine, though. The vintage porcelain cups can be replaced, and the deep scratches are already beginning to scab over. There’s only a little blood crusted under her fingernails. Nyssa will heal rapidly; she always does.
❦
She’s lightheaded, dizzy. Her olive skin is struggling against the pallor of bloodlessness; she’s too pale. She feels sick, and when she tries to push herself out of the bathtub, a wave of nausea and vertigo washes over her and she gets too dizzy and overwhelmed and just falls limply back into the water with a pathetic little splash.
Water seeps over the side of the too-full bathtub onto the cold tile floor. Nyssa groans.
Eleven grams. Phenibut.
She’d tossed and washed the powder over the course of several hours and was feeling pretty good - buzzed, a bit lightheaded but in a pleasant and drunken way. A warm flush in her cheeks. Until the wave of wrongness had crashed upon her all at once.
The deepest fingernail indentation on her arm has come open again. It’s bleeding into the bathwater. She leans over the side of the tub and vomits. Red blooms out in the water around her. Blood from her skin, acid from her gut. It’s all just effluent. Another mess for Misha to find and clean up later.He’ll do it, of course. He always does. He’ll mop the floor, he’ll bandage the cut. He’ll hold back her hair and tell her she means something to him and she will pretend that she has space in her heart for anyone else after all she has lost.
And she will let him. Because this is the brutally paradoxical maintenance of her primary addiction: life.
The morphine quiets the legacy of the acid. The phenibut and the vodka blur the edges of a consciousness too sharp for her own good.
But the base compulsion is the one all other substances merely serve. It is the raw, stupid, biological will. The stubborn refusal of the machine to power down. Even as it corrodes from within, her will persists.
She harbors no love of life, but a terror of its alternative. Misha had taught her the young people’s term “FOMO,” and she’d thought faintly humorously that it applied to her feelings on life and death. Her fear of ceasing to be is so profound it overrides all reason, all pain, all dignity. To opt out would be to miss the next terrible, fascinating thing; Nyssa Rasovna has never been able to look away.
She slumps back against the porcelain. It is cool and comforting against her feverish neck. The world’s tilting on its axis. And the bathwater is growing cold, but overdose-caused heat burns in her cheeks. This is the high, and the crash, and the withdrawal, all at once.
Addicted to the spectacle of her own endurance. She makes a sound that would be a laugh if it weren’t more of a dry cough. Pathetic.
❦
Misha Kravchenko was born in Odessa to a minor-league crime boss father who promptly and stupidly got himself indebted to the Ukrainian mafia, turned to the League for help, and then got knocked off by Ra’s al Ghul when he proved to not be useful anymore. Nyssa had encountered him by chance via mutual criminal underworld connections. As it turned out, it was surprisingly easy to win over a lost, rageful and hurt young man and gain his undying loyalty. All it takes is getting fucked over by the same guy. The enemy of your enemy, and all that.
Misha is a sweet kid. Thirty-five, maybe. Earnest and fresh-faced enough to still have zest for the world. He’s fueled by spite and anger too, obviously, but he has a desire for life still. When he gets his revenge, he might have something else to live for. Maybe he could get married and have a future or something. He won’t be ready to just roll over and die following the death of everyone who has ever wronged him. Were Nyssa not a bitter war widow whose libido had been chemically and traumatically obliterated, she thinks with some amusement, she would give him ten children. In another life.
Misha moves to close the window. “Aren’t you cold, mistress?”
Now he’s sitting beside her, and he’s put a hand on her shoulder. He’s trying to be comforting. How distraught does she look? She’s still staring off into space; now at the closed window and the curtains.
“I’m thinking,” she says. It’s a nonsequitur.
He presses it. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“I’m not cold.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about, really, mistress.” His wide blue eyes have a look of sincerity in them. That is a weird thing about Misha. His eyes are too earnest and unguarded for him to fully come across as intimidating. Or maybe not; the well-built, gopnik look goes a long way as far as intimidation goes. Nyssa can read him too well, maybe.
“I have a sister,” she says, voice measured. “A half-sister, and she’s still very young. My father will crush her.”
“Half-sister on the father’s side? How old is she? How old is he now, anyway?” Misha’s nose wrinkles in disgust. Nyssa scoffs, and despite herself nearly smirks.
“She’s… oh, thirty or so? A child. Her name is Talia. She seems to be highly favored by Ra’s at the moment.” Nyssa absentmindedly touches her wrist. Runs her thumb over the indented scar where she cut out her tattoo. “She ranks highly in the league, and is being groomed to eventually produce him an heir.”
Talia, too, had been on Nyssa’s radar from the moment of her birth. Like Arketov, Talia had never been interacted with.
Nyssa, obviously, had been keeping tabs on her from afar, but she would not dare to get close to someone so entrenched in the league. It would be like playing with fire. It would be willingly pouring gasoline on the flames after already being burned.
Talia was too close to Ra’s. She would want nothing to do with that world.
“Right now, she probably feels like she is of great value to him. It’s such a privilege to be in his service, an honor to be held highly in his esteem,” she muses.
She knows how Ra’s thinks. She knows how he operates.
Nyssa has never spoken to Talia, but she knows exactly what she is thinking. She knows it, because they are her own thoughts from centuries ago. They are the thoughts the girl will enjoy blissfully, living comfortably in the assured knowledge that she is loved and wanted and protected, until she proves to be no longer of use, or until she cannot give Ra’s the one thing he wants. Then her world will inevitably shatter. The sense of security will be ripped away. If she escapes with her life, she will have nothing to live for. She will be broken and purposeless save for revenge.
All of this, and more so, because Talia has been raised by him alone. She has never known another world.
Talia, Nyssa thinks, is already in grave danger. The closer she is to the league, to those disgusting pits, to the temptation of eternal life, and to her father- the more she is at risk.
❦
Nyssa Rasovna’s last living descendant has died, and it’s filled her with the inexplicable urge to talk to her sister. She needs to look at her face. She needs to get to know her, to protect her.
She needs to know that she has some family left. Talia is family.
At one point, Nyssa’s life paralleled Talia’s; her role was hers. If Nyssa has any purpose, it is to save this girl from her own fate. She is a stranger, but they are sisters.
And, extracting revenge is a nice part of it as well.
What can hurt someone more than taking their family away from them, after all?
If she can take away Ra’s beloved daughter from him, turn her against him, before he has tired of her, when he still purports to care for her? What better way to twist the knife?
Revenge is best served cold, anyway. And it’s been a very, very long time.