Vodka. It was a distinct smell, one that Külliki was less than thrilled now covered her skirt. She should have left when she said she was going to, but did anyone ever do that? It had been ages since she’d had anything to drink, especially going out, but she was beginning to regret the decision anyway. She pursed her lips, eyes scanning the bar for a rag at the very least. It didn’t help that the place was so bloody crowded.
Külli loathed large crowds. She had always loathed them. They almost always spelled trouble, and tonight it spelled some drunken idiot crashing into her and then trying to get her number. She still wasn’t fond of cellphones, let alone handing her contact information out to drunk blokes like the one trying to chat her up despite numerous attempts at shutting him down and ignoring him. “If you’re going to keep talking, at least make yourself useful and find a--” She began, turning to find he’d finally left in favor of another.
hello, i’m bea & this is my little bird of flight, külliki ozolinš. below the cut is a very awful introduction but if you would like to plot pls go ahead and give this a heart. külli is quickly becoming one of my favorite babies, so i’d love to write her more.
( GABRIELLA WILDE / CISFEMALE / SHE/HER ). KÜLLIKI OZOLIŅŠ WASN’T EXPECTING TO BE GIVEN A SECOND CHANCE AT LIFE. THE TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD LAST REMEMBERS LIVING IN THE 1950S IN TALLINN, ESTONIA. ONE THING THEY REMEMBER FROM THEIR PAST IS A MODEL AIRPLANE. THEY’VE BEEN DESCRIBED AS BEING RESOURCEFUL AND IMPULSIVE, BUT THAT IS TO BE EXPECTED SINCE THEY ARE A LEO.
trigger warnings: war, plane crash, death, talks of occupations. | pls let me know if I miss anything & I’ll add to the trigger warnings. I apologize in advance if I do miss anything!!
Also sorry it’s stupidly long, pls love me.
okay so bullet points bc I’m a lazy lad/i’m student teaching and took a nap for like four hours.
Külli was born in late July of 1932 in Tallinn, Estonia but she spent the first few years of her life in her mother’s hometown of Český Krumlov, Czechoslovakia. She held papers for both Estonia and Czechoslovakia. Her father was a proud Estonian pilot and her mother was a Czech musician and educator.
The family had a habit of moving between Tallinn and Český Krumlov, primarily in time with her father’s flight schedules. Regardless of which country they stayed in, Külli was well loved and educated. She spent many hours at the airfield, learning the ins and outs of every airplane that came across her path. She had a natural curiosity and affinity for the intricacies of flight. It was an art, and planes themselves were masterpieces.
In 1938, despite growing tensions in the world, Külli and her family made the trek back to Tallinn to visit her grandparents on her father’s side. Their health had been declining, and it had been several years since the family had made the journey to visit them. Unfortunately, they did not return to Czechoslovakia before the Nazis invaded and found themselves stuck in Estonia.
The family considered moving out of the capital city but that was where her father held work and her mother was able to find work tutoring. Soon they would find themselves under Soviet rule, while their second home in Czechoslovakia remained under German rule. Trapped between two aggressors, the family tried to build their life in Estonia under the USSR.
In the summer of 1941, the Nazis launched their invasion of the Soviet Union. Northern Estonia was the last to fall to the Germans, but with the joint Estonian-German army surrounding the capital, the Soviet rule ended and the Nazis took control.
Külli was 9 when the Germans successfully took control of Estonia, and she and her family were among those who did not welcome them with open arms, as they still held to their Czech heritage and grieved for the way their country had been overlooked by supposed allies.
The German occupation was also more personal and something Külli remember more than Soviet rule, because she was older. Losses of friends, unfair treatment, and cruelties were felt more deeply and with a larger understanding. She loathed the Germans and dreamed of the day they would be chased from both of her beautiful countries.
She and her family found themselves in a difficult spot politically, as they did not trust the West for their treatment of Czechoslovakia during the Munich agreement, they loathed the Nazis, but had faced hardship under unfair Soviet rule as well. They longed for a return to autonomy and independence, but would never see it in their lifetimes.
The Soviet Union returned to Estonia in the autumn of 1944, and it was all Külli would know until her death in 1956.
Külli found herself mixed up with intelligence forces when, in 1951 she tried to make the (illegal) trip back to Czechoslovakia. It was during this attempt that she was introduced to the Czech VZ as she had been nearly successful in her attempts.
Her position in the VZ quickly paired her with Aleksandr Láska. She made her abilities as a pilot known, and with the multitude of languages she could speak and an ability to fit in, she was trained for infiltration and flight missions.
Unlike Aleksandr, she did not covet the Soviet Union. She prayed for Czech independence, and did not believe in everything she was tasked with. Still, she became a skilled operative and worked well alongside her partner. Aleksandr quickly became her greatest love, and she trusted him even if she did not trust the USSR or the VZ.
In 1956, she was tasked with a late night pick up. She was to fill in for another pilot who had taken ill, even though the original plan had been to leave with Aleksandr. It was a routine pick up, one that should have had her back before dawn but instead there were system malfunctions and she lost control of the plane.
She tried to land it in a field, but it was a losing battle as she crashed into the ground, dying in the impact.
Now that she’s been given a second chance, and with the knowledge of Aleksandr’s death being work related and shortly after her own, she has become suspicious that the routine checks and the set up of the situation were not coincidence but purposeful. The only question on her mind is why. Was it the VZ that wanted one of their own dead, or the infiltration of another group? It’s unlikely that she’ll ever find out, but it’s something she wants to find out about anyway.
Now she’s living on her own in a little flat and in the process of looking for a new job. She needs something to keep herself busy, but is finding it difficult to put the past behind her, and even more difficult to live in a world where she’s afraid of the one thing that made her happier than anything else. She is not a flightless bird, and yet, her wings are squarely on the ground these days.
Possible connection ideas:
Honestly, I’d love for her to have a flatmate or neighbor.
Give me an Estonian and I would love you forever. Especially if it’s someone from her childhood who maybe found themselves moving somewhere elsewhere.
Are there any other flight fanatics around here? Give me someone trying to get her back on an airfield.
Coworkers are fun I just have to figure out her job still.
I’m 110% open to anything, please just come love my bab.
Alec holds her up quite easily, not particularly surprised that she’d refused his attempt to put her down. Her questions give him pause, though– he’s more than just shaken by what had happened on that rooftop by the river in Prague. He doesn’t sleep, haunted by the image of the man who’d stood above him and shot him again and again while he was already bleeding out. He’s not well, but–
“I’m doin’ alright.” Not that his gaze meets her eyes while he said it. “Work got me too, maybe a little less than two months after you.” He’s wondered if his grief had made him careless– but he hadn’t gone down without a hell of a fight.
“I’ve got a place, and I work in an auto shop fixin’ cars. They’re different now but.. if I could get some of those trash heap Škoda’s from back then working, American cars aren’t that bad.” Learning curve, yeah, but he was getting there. “What about you? Where are you staying?”
He’s a dirty liar, and a bad one too. Külliki didn’t so much as pause before abruptly smack him upside the head. “What’s gotten into you? We don’t lie to one another.” She chided as she lifted her head to look down at him. Concern etched across her face as her nose scrunched. Her chest felt tight. Work got him too. It wasn’t even two months after her own death, and a part of her, the part that was trained to notice curiosities in situations wondered if perhaps the routine checks on her flight had been purposefully lax.
“An auto shop?” The job is well suited for him. He’d always been good with his hands. A soft smile formed as she leaned forward, gently pressing her forehead against his. “The Škoda’s were something special weren’t they? You’re still lying to me, though. You loved those metal deathtraps.”
She shifted, moving to carefully set her feet back on the ground. “I’ve my own place too. It’s still odd, the American architecture, but it’s nice enough. Come back with me?” She could feel the eyes on them, curious glances tossed in their direction from behind coffee cups. “Then we might talk more.”
Alec holds her close, picking her slightly up off her feet. He hadn’t cried at her funeral– too much in shock to be anything other than expressionless and silent in the back row, then later focusing on putting one foot after another as he’d helped to carry the flag-draped coffin out of the church. His tears had always been private, late at night in one safe house or the other with a bottle of vodka that was always more empty than he’d meant it to be.
But here he can’t stop the tears from falling, damn whatever his commanding officer had said about targeting weaknesses or whatever bullshit. The world had changed but now he wasn’t alone in it.
“I told you those damn things were deathtraps!” And he had, a thousand times before as turbulence shook the small crafts or after rough landings. He laughs though, putting her back down on her feet. “Солнышко, don’t you dare do that again.”
She had thought of him last. She had thought of what he would say as the lights alerted her to system malfunctions. She had thought of him as she tried to land the plane, knowing full well he’d berate her until their next mission for being so reckless. She had done all the proper checks, but she’d also trusted that those above her had done their jobs first. That had been her fatal mistake.
A tear filled laugh left her lips as she held to him. She didn’t want her feet back on the ground. She wanted to feel secure and weightless in his arms so she pushed up, legs wrapping around his waist as she hid her face in the crook of his shoulder. “медведь, I have no intention of ever leaving you again.” She didn’t have any desire to fly either, not then, not yet. “Are you well? Where are you living? Tell me everything.”
Alec nearly drops his cup of coffee in his haste to search for the source of the voice– it wasn’t one he was ever going to forget, even though it’d been months since he’d heard it. He was always gonna look, even though he’d spent months swearing he’d heard her voice or seen a flash of her blonde hair in the crowds in Prague.
“Külliki!” Because it’s really her this time, not some trick of his mind. Standing in a coffee shop in the middle of this strange town, and he walks away from the person he was speaking to without another word. “You were dead!”
Her heart raced as forbidden tears welled in her eyes. She had never been a huge crier. She had to grow up too fast for that, and she’d had to harden herself to the cruelties of the world, but rules be damned. Aleksandr was approaching her, saying her name, right there in front of her. She did nothing to stop her impulsive response as she launched herself into his arms.
She clung tightly to him, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades as she pulled herself into his embrace. He was there. Physically. She was holding on to him, and she’d be damned if she let him go again. It had been stupid to ever do it.
A short flight, they said. A night flight. A pick up and back before dawn. She should have bloody known better.
“Aleksandr,” Her voice caught in her throat. “I should have never agreed to it. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh my, have you seen this thing you can do to your face? I’m a puppy!” Adrian cooed at the snapchat video and showed it to the stranger he’d found himself stood next to by the bus station and apparently had decided to bother. One thing he had learned pretty fast after waking up was that if you were going to live in this decade, you needed a cell phone with a lot of apps on it. Snapchat was the most amusing to Adrian even if he had nobody to send anything to. The cell phone had actually been pretty fun to learn about even if most of the time he had no idea how to work the damn thing. Adrian turned to look at the stranger next to him and grinned,”Let’s be puppies together! Oh my goodness you’re a dalmation!” He gasped as he held the phone out to capture both of their faces.
Külli turned to look at the stranger crooning about the cellphone and the application he was using. She hadn’t really taken to mobile devices yet. They seemed like a potentially awful idea. She looked at the filter as it added a nose and ears to his profile. It was cute she supposed but she trusted it about as much as she fancied waiting at the station for the bus. Could nothing be punctual in life? Wasn’t this meant to be a more advanced world? Why could the advanced society still not manage to be on time?
“No I--” She started when he captured the photo of the pair of them with dog ears and noses. She sighed, “I’d actually prefer not to be in photographs, thank you.” She had taken very few photographs in her life, having been taught to avoid them for the majority of her formative years and her career. “Have you read the privacy settings on those applications? Or read any of the newspapers about data breaches? Aren’t you concerned?”
confusion was an understatement. fear was probably the world minho would be using right now as his eyes went wide at the new area around him. where the fuck was he? this didn’t look like south korea nor did the people talk in korean. english. english was something he wasn’t quite good at but new a decent amount of. his head began to hurt. minho looked for someone who looked a bit kind, but everyone was looking down at these weird…screen things, so he hoped for the best after tapping someone on the shoulder. “h-hello, where…where am i?” he questioned, stammering in the process because he didn’t want to mess up.
Külliki did not like being tapped on the shoulder. Her muscles went taught as she turned, eyes narrowing as she immediately took in the boy stammering before her. It took a moment for her to register that there was no immediate threat. Slowly, her features softened. He was simply trying to gather her attention. It wasn’t his fault that she was behaving so skittishly.
“The corner of Ashbury and Sals, almost. The corner is just up that way.” Külli gestured to the right direction, though she had a feeling that wasn’t what he meant. “You look concerned. There’s a bistro just there, would you like to sit? I could order you a glass of water?”
“I taught my sister to carve her and the dude’s initials into a tree on a first date because it’s the most romantic way to prove she’s got a knife.” Alec shrugs, taking another drink of his coffee. He’d thought that had been pretty brilliant at the time– and still did. Knives were rad.
Coffee. What a beautiful, beautiful luxury. Of all the things to get used to, the ease of access and abundance of her favored caffeine fix were the ones Külliki cherished the most. She brought the steaming cup to her lips the moment the barista passed the cup to her, a quiet thank you offered as further compensation for the quick service.
She turned at the sound of a voice, however. She recognized that voice. She would recognize it anywhere. Her eyes widened in shock as she interrupted the conversation Alec was having with the poor stranger who regarded Alec like he’d grown a second head.
