Chapter Text
“Predecessors of mine,” Rose Lalonde says. “–Though my exact title is of recent vintage, there have been a thousand Western politicians who stood before a Russian autocrat and wondered if they were one of us, or some unknowable them, or worse yet a combination–predecessors of mine may have underestimated how vast your land is, how many live there, and how little you care if they die, Comrade Peixes. I shall not.”
“I completely lost track of that sentence,” the misapplied attache and translator Comrade Vriska Serket informs you. “But it was boring and totally xenophobic, so look mad.”
“I speak English!” you say, not in that language. “And she speaks Russian, everyone knows that.” You show Miss Rose Lalonde your teeth. You have quite a lot of them, and you are disappointed when she doesn’t stare. Vriska drifts towards the lone troll in Lalonde’s small party, a tall female with mismatched horns. “She should also know that of course I care how many of my people die. I am not the one talking of war.”
“It is my job to ensure that remains the case,” Lalonde says. “For all your valiantly drab clothing, you still say your people, and your caste has something of a reputation.”
“Ah,” you say. “Whaaaaaale, your country does struggle with judging people based on old caste systems, Comrade, so I will not be offended by you comparing me to–that troll.” You grin wider.
“A very palpable hit,” she murmurs. “Let’s smile for the cameras, shall we?”
You do so. You do the smile, the handshake, and then back inside for the serious heads bent towards each other very serious politicians discussing important matters shot, where you can talk again so long as your mouths don’t make any shapes a reporter can read curses into.
“No victory nor armistice,” Lalonde is going on about.
“You are not making it very easy to like you,” you say.
Rose nods thoughtfully in a coruscation of flashbulbs. “I’m told my reporters are struggling–they want to call it the Peixes Thaw, but apparently you’re all called that, and ‘Feferi’ doesn’t come too easily to our tongues.”
“When our reporters struggle, I cut them down,” you say. “Joke! Joke, Roes. Anywave,” you add. “I was talking about a fight between me and you.”
“Oh,” she says, and her eyebrows jerk up. She surveys you, a tiny human woman in half a dozen coats. “Well. That depends. With your height, I’m quite close to where your gillflaps ought to be, are they as sensitive as is reported?”
You laugh, and that’s the picture that will make the newspapers. “You’ll do,” you tell Rose Lalonde. “Your assistant has disappeared with my translator, though, should I be worried?”