houseofcards_rp | [ota] sleeping under strange skies

He's ready for this. Of course he's ready for this.

He wouldn't be here if he weren't ready. Holló wouldn't have sent him through without being prepared. This isn't, after all, the sort of place a person gets sent without it being purposeful. Even the people who wander here 'by chance' are the people who need to be here, he's been told.

So it's the right time for Aleksei Volkov to be stepping out into the cold sunlight barely warming the walls of the Castle Spades, newly minted and processed and told he'll have to start working his way up from Two now.

The few things he'd brought with him have been settled into the cramped quarters he'll be sharing with a few other recent arrivals. What's stuck from his grandmother means he'll be starting off under the apparently quite severe Spade kitchen staff.

Hopefully it isn't the end of the world that he needs to pause when he's sent out to Town to pick up a few extra bottles of truffle oil and vanilla extract. Hopefully being 'ready for this' doesn't mean he can't take a moment--take a deep breath--as he lets settle into his bones the fact that he's here.

{ooc; He can be bumped into at the castle or being lost in Town. Also tag plz?}

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"Just Jordan." There are some Spades, of course, who still frown on that kind of thing. Those with the last name of Chives are particularly prone to it; even Ethan's adopted that particular old Spade attitude, especially since becoming Ace. Jordan thinks of it as unnecessary. It's the kind of thing that's part and parcel of making the Spades automatically suspicious to everyone else.

That and the stabbing, at least.

""You can save the Misters," he adds as he goes back to filling the basket, "for the people who look like they might have the vapors if you don't."

Filling his basket with a newly-acquired shadow, clearly. He's going to have to take a bit to shake the new Spade.

"How can you tell?"

Hadyn used to be a shadow. But then Jordan grew into a particularly heinous brand of teenage boy - it's probably fortunate, really, that he's not Aleksei's age anymore - and that pretty much nipped that one in the bud.

"Mr. Chives the elder is one of them," he says as he frowns down at the canned tomatoes - as if he's supposed to know the difference between San Marzano and...whatever the rest are. "His son, too. The butler. The ones with the sterner expressions like to see all the proprieties observed."

He gives Aleksei a sidelong look with a slight smile. "I suppose the safe route would be to call everyone Mister and Miss and let them correct you. Either way, they'll let you know."

Maybe it will be like a second chance. Certainly it will be a lot like having a new, attentive human being who doesn't mind sitting with piles upon piles of work to be set in files and spirited into cabinets and outboxes and other people's lives.

Probably somewhere between 'puppy' and 'incredibly useful receptacle for unwanted work.'

"Less risk of an unpleasant version of that if you err on the side of-- overly polite, yes?"

Hadyn was never anything like a puppy, Jordan will say that much. More like an irritant, who was usually most obedient and attentive towards Julien. Or their mother, but neither Novak boy had ever really been rebellious towards Laureline.

Until the end, at least.

He laughs a little bit and nods. "It's a definite way to err on the side of caution," he says. "I usually prefer to avoid physical altercations when I'm not on the training field."

Which brings, alas, another question. And another moment of shuffling and shifting in the fashion of someone who obviously wants not to impose but dearly wants to ask.

"But-- on the training field, then?"

Were things really as brutal here as they'd been made out to be?

"It can be rough on the training field," Jordan admits. "But it's not like you're in the Coliseum." If nothing else, you couldn't say the Deck didn't fill their heads with classical history. "No one's going to try to kill you. It's more like playground brawls turned up a notch."

And for what it was worth, the old Spade ways were dying out. There weren't that many people in Spade Castle who still believed the best way for someone to learn was to nearly die in the process.

Up a notch. So broken noses to broken larger bones, it would seem. Bleeding that got you in trouble to bleeding that got someone into a hospital. Not so bad at all.

Except.

"And-- Challenges?"

"Challenges." Well. "Challenges have the potential to be fatal." He knows that as well as anyone; it was strange, he thinks. He's killed since Maddox, but nothing's been like that punch in the gut.

"But the royals do tend to frown on that. The Queen especially. And there's nothing that says you have to challenge in your fighting skills. I challenged to Nine with a horse race."

There's still that bit of an assumptive pronoun. That means there's still a need to let his nose wrinkle slightly, his head duck to one side.

"But you still must... have them, yes?"

Because 'fighting skills' were still going to be used here in a more real way than boys brawling in a schoolyard, presumably.

"Of course," Jordan agrees. "Especially in the Spades. There are Spades who think of it as the only way to challenge." And certainly, he thinks, you didn't really prove yourself in the Spades until you'd used knives or swords to advance yourself.

He'd done it for Seven.

And he wants to ask if his father is one of those Spades. He wants to know if it's changed since the fall from Ace.

He'll think of a way to frame the question someday. For now, he'll start slower.

"What do you think?"

Julien is the kind of Spade who doesn't challenge in a way that isn't clearly a battle. He can't imagine Julien doing what his uncle Davin did - challenging a Nine in Scrabble, for instance.

But Aleksei hasn't asked that question. He's asked one that's a bit harder.

"I think...that knowing how to defend you and yours is still integral to what Spades are," he says, looking over at the younger boy. "But if you limit yourself to just that, you miss out on what all you could be."

It's something to ponder. It's something he'll be mulling over likely all the way up the ladder he's intending to work up. It's the sort of thing he'll look back on, years from now, as one of the moments that helped bridge between boy and man.

"...I see." And he doesn't, not fully, but he sees as much as he can without mulling over it. "How did you?"

"How did I challenge?" He's only done it twice in this Suit, actually, which made him a little bit of an unusual Nine. "I challenged once in...knife-fighting, and once in a kind of race."

Part of the reason of choosing the second was to appease the then-King, who'd also been his favorite cousin. But the other part had been to show that challenging without killing or maiming was something they could do. Somehow that had been important.

It's a line he's fairly certain everyone has to walk alone. Time will tell, of course, which side of the line to be walking on.

Little bits and pieces for now, clearly.

"A... kind of race?"

"A race on horseback, over obstacles instead of on a flat track." Steeplechase, it was called, but Jordan doubted that terminology had be drummed into Aleksei's head yet.

"Do you know how to ride?"

There would have been some good questions on what steeples were being chased and if they were actually some variant of fox. Another time, perhaps.

"No." He'll learn not to admit things this readily with time. "But I will learn. From the Hearts."

[ota] sleeping under strange skies

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