creatures of snow

There were a lot of questions she would probably never find answers to. Questions like why her parents hadn't told her, and why they hadn't told Pasha. Questions about whether or not her inability to die had something to do with her heritage, or if it was genetic.

She supposed she'd found out if she would be able to die of old age before long.

Anastasia was wearing only a light jacket. While other people had started wearing heavier and heavier clothes, she'd found that a windbreaker was good enough for her. Maybe she'd need an actual jacket in the dead of winter, but for now... well, he could go out without any real issue. Her breath still steamed, but not as much as someone else's might.

She found Pasha sitting on a bench not far from the center of the park, and gave him only a small smile in greeting. Even if she wasn't sure what to count him as, he was still a familiar face among a sea of newcomers.

"I was elected to student council." Not the position she wanted, but the one below it - treasurer.

Anastasia took a seat on the cleared bench. Even though the bench was literally freezing cold, she barely felt it. "Treasurer." She clarified. Not president or anything like that, but a significant enough position she felt involved. She would have - if she stayed in school - another four years, and it was important that she find a way to dig her proverbial heels in and find herself a place within the school.

It was good to have someone familiar there, even if she wasn't looking at him. Much like Pasha, she was staring at the tree - and just like Pasha, she was thinking of her father. It hurt a bit to see the tree, knowing how excited he'd have been.

"Were you on the island a while before I came?" She truly had no idea. For all she knew he'd been here for decades, almost waiting for her to show up. Or maybe he'd only just arrived.

Anastasia was not the type to bring a list of questions. What she wanted to know was small, compact, and to the point. If she asked more than a handful of questions, it would be a small miracle.

She had put a lot of thought into exactly what she wanted to ask. Powers didn't interest her - she knew enough to work off of, and Pasha didn't seem to know any more about it than she did. She was the first of her kind, the first half-season. Even if she asked, she was unlikely to get any answers beyond that he didn't know.

Which really only left questions about her family. She already knew that her parentage had only been kept from Pasha himself - both of her parents had known. Her father had never given any sign, and all three of them had worked together, presumably in the military.

It wasn't, reasonably speaking, all that hard to figure it out. She had all the pieces, and she'd just had to put them together until she could take a guess at the picture. She only needed a situation where her father would be happy to raise someone else's child, where her mother being with Pasha would not be seen as an affair at all.

It hadn't been hard to take a guess at the last piece.

"Were you -" She cut herself off, frowning for only a moment. All that time thinking and she'd still almost asked the wrong question. "Was my father in love with you?" That was a better phrasing, because that was the piece of information she needed to complete her little puzzle. That sort of thing would never have been tolerated - not in the Russian military, of all places.

The silence told her that the answer was yes. If the answer was no, Pasha would have just said no, because that sort of insinuation would be terribly insulting back at home. Only he hadn't said no, and she could only sit and wait for him to reply.

There was no 'in a sense'. There was only yes. Yes, her father had been in love with Pasha, and so the whole thing slid together, the final puzzle piece appearing before her. Her father had loved Pasha, and no doubt Pasha had loved him back, in one way or another. Her mother had, one way or another, also loved Pasha, and also her father - well, Anastasia had never really doubted that her father had loved her mother. That had never come into question, not even with the revelation of who her father was. Just because Mikhail had liked someone else (probably first, if she was being honest with herself) didn't mean he hadn't also loved her mother. That had been real - she'd seen it plenty.

"I'm not..." She trailed off once more. Every other question didn't really seem to matter anymore. "I'm not angry at him or anything. Or you. I mean, it's weird, because he was my father." And if she was being honest, maybe a little bit because him and Pasha were both guys. "I just... wanted to know." And now she knew, and felt... well, very strange about it.

Well, she knew. And that was that. She couldn't put it back in the box - no matter what happened, she knew that truth about what her parents had been like. Even if she didn't have the full picture, she had enough. She had a general idea of what her parents had been like, and where Pasha fell into it, and she supposed there was really only one question left - the question of how he felt about it. He'd been dropped into the whole thing as unexpectedly as she had, having been blissfully unaware.

Only now he knew, and what mattered is what he was going to do about it. Did he even want to be 'family'? Or did he just want to stay the family friend? Because either answer was fine, but as much as she'd considered just not asking, it was probably better to just cut to the chase and ask.

"So what happens now?" Which was, as far as Anastasia went, unusually vague.