005: Nudity
Mar. 11th, 2011 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katyafelineThe first time was fairly early in their partnership.
The second day, actually. She was thirteen. He... very much wasn't. She was just out of training. He... wasn't. She was vivacious and loud and talkative and a live wire. He... was not. But Bear was a talented shape-shifter, and Katya was slated to become the Moscow Night Watch's next great battle mage. There was, literally, no one better in Moscow for her to learn practical skills from... possibly no one better in Russia. The first day (or rather, night) of their partnership was spent driving around Moscow, with her talking, and him not. The longer the silence from him, the more desperate and babbling her chatter got.
He tried to get Boris Ivanovich to give the girl to some other watch member, any other watch member, as soon as they had gotten back to headquarters. The request was denied categorically. Katya had heard every word of the conversation. The second patrol started with five hours of complete silence, the discomfort between the two Light Others a nearly palpable thing. If things had continued as they started, most likely there would have been many awkward conversations with the boss, and the eventual dissolution of the ill-fated pair.
But, at a loss for anything else to do, he had pulled over to get them both some food, telling her gruffly to stay put and stay out of trouble. She managed neither. Almost as soon as he was gone, she heard a scream. She was good, she didn't immediately go chasing after it... but then she heard people talking about a beast, saw the Dark flare in the Twilight, watching from the shadow of her own eyelids. She'd darted out of the car, and paused, undecided on the pavement. Go get Bear, or go see if she could help?
The second scream, this one more gurgled, decided her. She'd never find him and convince him in time. So off she hared, tracing the patterns of causality through the Twilight, desperately trying to remember anything she could about fighting she'd picked up from various teachers. The apartments near the river were probably swanky at one point, but age and overcrowding had reduced them to just another mediocre place to live, and tonight they were a deathtrap. Werewolves, an entire pack of them, all shifted, looked up at her when she barreled through the doorway, all long coltish limbs and awkwardness.
"...um. This is the Night Watch! Step out of the Twilight!" She called, rallying, after a long moment of her staring a them (the blood dripping off their jaws, the crazed eyes, the Darkness oozing through them) and them staring at her (wild stance, panicked eyes, no cohesive power to speak of). It was only after she said it that she realized not a one of the werewolves were in the Twilight at the moment, and now they knew that she didn't know what she was doing. It was then decided, through pack mentality or some latent telepathy or just plain group dynamics that she made a much more interesting dinner than the humans they had been terrorizing. Four shadowy, shaggy creatures advanced on her, and she gulped, realizing she was an awful long ways away from headquarters, and she had no idea where Bear (or anyone else) was.
She ran.
She ran up the stairs, panic and her half-learned shifting skills letting her take flights half at a time, gaining precious seconds as she fled from the howling, slavering pack. If they had been thinking clearer they could have simply slipped into the Twilight and gotten to the top of the stairwell ahead of her, blocked her every exit, but where she was nearly mindless with fear, they were too far gone with bloodlust. All that existed was the hunt, the kill. She burst onto the rooftop, gulping the air made rank by the garbage floating in that once-beautiful river, and sprinted towards the edge, expecting a nearby rooftop.
There was none. The building to one side was much taller than the one she was on, the walls worn nearly sheer as they climbed up and away from her. The building to the other side was a wreak, the roof long-since having caved in. The third side went straight down to the street below, and the last... into the river.
A growl sounded behind her. A low, dangerous sound that crawled up her spine and set a knot of horror in her brain. Slowly she turned around, and knew she was lost. Four healthy, angry, hungry werewolves were stalking towards her, slowly decreasing the space she had to run. She backed away towards the river side of the building, but she had no ideas, no plan. She wasn't supposed to be fighting, not yet. Her job was to observe, to learn.
Or, it seemed, to die. Oh why hadn't she learned to shift into an eagle?
Out of options, she went on the offensive, scooping up a rusting metal pipe and swinging it at the werewolves with an accuracy born of desperation. She actually connected solidly a couple of times, driving back the wolves, changing some of those growls to cries of pain. Then one of the larger wolves caught the bar in his teeth, and yanked it away.
The next wolf was on her and had its teeth sunk into her shoulder before she could blink, and after that...
She barely heard the roar from Bear when he caught up with her, only distantly realized that someone was flinging werewolves around like rag dolls. She just remembered dazedly trying to stand, and looking up only to see a crazed wolf racing towards her before it's weight slammed into her chest, and they both tumbled off of the roof, towards the river far below.
"Number twelve, Bank street!" There was a fire nearby, she thought, groggily. She could hear it crackling, see the crazy flickering light it painted on the wall, feel its reassuring warmth. There was also someone growling very crankily. She thought about these things for what seemed for a long while, and then added another fact to her list - she was alive. Definitely alive - for if she were dead, it shouldn't hurt to breathe, and it did, in a way she'd never felt before, like her lungs were heavy as lead inside the cage of her ribs. This new fact occupied her for a while. Then she realized that she was lying down, on something soft, and while she was mostly dry, she could feel small rivulets of water snaking past her ears and pooling against her neck from her hair. She explored that idea for a while, but couldn't make much of it. Various places began to throb in a distracting fashion, with a sense that while they hurt now, it was only a small preview of what was awaiting her when she was a bit more awake.
Then she realized something very, very important. She was lying on something soft, there was something soft on top of her... but not a one of those things were clothing. There was, in fact, no clothing. At all. There were what felt like tight bandages (almost tourniquets) in some places, but... no, nothing registered as clothes. There were drafts where there shouldn't be any. Squeaking, she tried to sit up, was summarily confronted with the whole of her injuries at once, and passed out cold. Bear, who had been trying to give more coherent directions to the rescue teams who were coming after them, managed just barely to catch her before she smacked her head into the ground.
She learned, quite a while later, that after she'd been bitten she'd actually fallen back on some of her training, pulling off a few defensive spells (the flare of which had guided Bear to where she'd been cornered). But after she'd hit the river, she'd stopped fighting, and nearly drowned. Bear had fished her out again, pumped the river out of her, and then stripped her down to get her out of the frigidly cold clothing and bind the worst of the damage before she could bleed out, which would have been a bit anticlimactic after the daring river rescue. The first day she had been released from the healers, he had appeared, lead her to the one of the vast training halls, and hadn't let her leave until she could, at least half of the time, shield herself from a full frontal assault from a fully trained mage... at least for a little while. Long enough to get away.
They never spoke of the incident again.
The second day, actually. She was thirteen. He... very much wasn't. She was just out of training. He... wasn't. She was vivacious and loud and talkative and a live wire. He... was not. But Bear was a talented shape-shifter, and Katya was slated to become the Moscow Night Watch's next great battle mage. There was, literally, no one better in Moscow for her to learn practical skills from... possibly no one better in Russia. The first day (or rather, night) of their partnership was spent driving around Moscow, with her talking, and him not. The longer the silence from him, the more desperate and babbling her chatter got.
He tried to get Boris Ivanovich to give the girl to some other watch member, any other watch member, as soon as they had gotten back to headquarters. The request was denied categorically. Katya had heard every word of the conversation. The second patrol started with five hours of complete silence, the discomfort between the two Light Others a nearly palpable thing. If things had continued as they started, most likely there would have been many awkward conversations with the boss, and the eventual dissolution of the ill-fated pair.
But, at a loss for anything else to do, he had pulled over to get them both some food, telling her gruffly to stay put and stay out of trouble. She managed neither. Almost as soon as he was gone, she heard a scream. She was good, she didn't immediately go chasing after it... but then she heard people talking about a beast, saw the Dark flare in the Twilight, watching from the shadow of her own eyelids. She'd darted out of the car, and paused, undecided on the pavement. Go get Bear, or go see if she could help?
The second scream, this one more gurgled, decided her. She'd never find him and convince him in time. So off she hared, tracing the patterns of causality through the Twilight, desperately trying to remember anything she could about fighting she'd picked up from various teachers. The apartments near the river were probably swanky at one point, but age and overcrowding had reduced them to just another mediocre place to live, and tonight they were a deathtrap. Werewolves, an entire pack of them, all shifted, looked up at her when she barreled through the doorway, all long coltish limbs and awkwardness.
"...um. This is the Night Watch! Step out of the Twilight!" She called, rallying, after a long moment of her staring a them (the blood dripping off their jaws, the crazed eyes, the Darkness oozing through them) and them staring at her (wild stance, panicked eyes, no cohesive power to speak of). It was only after she said it that she realized not a one of the werewolves were in the Twilight at the moment, and now they knew that she didn't know what she was doing. It was then decided, through pack mentality or some latent telepathy or just plain group dynamics that she made a much more interesting dinner than the humans they had been terrorizing. Four shadowy, shaggy creatures advanced on her, and she gulped, realizing she was an awful long ways away from headquarters, and she had no idea where Bear (or anyone else) was.
She ran.
She ran up the stairs, panic and her half-learned shifting skills letting her take flights half at a time, gaining precious seconds as she fled from the howling, slavering pack. If they had been thinking clearer they could have simply slipped into the Twilight and gotten to the top of the stairwell ahead of her, blocked her every exit, but where she was nearly mindless with fear, they were too far gone with bloodlust. All that existed was the hunt, the kill. She burst onto the rooftop, gulping the air made rank by the garbage floating in that once-beautiful river, and sprinted towards the edge, expecting a nearby rooftop.
There was none. The building to one side was much taller than the one she was on, the walls worn nearly sheer as they climbed up and away from her. The building to the other side was a wreak, the roof long-since having caved in. The third side went straight down to the street below, and the last... into the river.
A growl sounded behind her. A low, dangerous sound that crawled up her spine and set a knot of horror in her brain. Slowly she turned around, and knew she was lost. Four healthy, angry, hungry werewolves were stalking towards her, slowly decreasing the space she had to run. She backed away towards the river side of the building, but she had no ideas, no plan. She wasn't supposed to be fighting, not yet. Her job was to observe, to learn.
Or, it seemed, to die. Oh why hadn't she learned to shift into an eagle?
Out of options, she went on the offensive, scooping up a rusting metal pipe and swinging it at the werewolves with an accuracy born of desperation. She actually connected solidly a couple of times, driving back the wolves, changing some of those growls to cries of pain. Then one of the larger wolves caught the bar in his teeth, and yanked it away.
The next wolf was on her and had its teeth sunk into her shoulder before she could blink, and after that...
She barely heard the roar from Bear when he caught up with her, only distantly realized that someone was flinging werewolves around like rag dolls. She just remembered dazedly trying to stand, and looking up only to see a crazed wolf racing towards her before it's weight slammed into her chest, and they both tumbled off of the roof, towards the river far below.
"Number twelve, Bank street!" There was a fire nearby, she thought, groggily. She could hear it crackling, see the crazy flickering light it painted on the wall, feel its reassuring warmth. There was also someone growling very crankily. She thought about these things for what seemed for a long while, and then added another fact to her list - she was alive. Definitely alive - for if she were dead, it shouldn't hurt to breathe, and it did, in a way she'd never felt before, like her lungs were heavy as lead inside the cage of her ribs. This new fact occupied her for a while. Then she realized that she was lying down, on something soft, and while she was mostly dry, she could feel small rivulets of water snaking past her ears and pooling against her neck from her hair. She explored that idea for a while, but couldn't make much of it. Various places began to throb in a distracting fashion, with a sense that while they hurt now, it was only a small preview of what was awaiting her when she was a bit more awake.
Then she realized something very, very important. She was lying on something soft, there was something soft on top of her... but not a one of those things were clothing. There was, in fact, no clothing. At all. There were what felt like tight bandages (almost tourniquets) in some places, but... no, nothing registered as clothes. There were drafts where there shouldn't be any. Squeaking, she tried to sit up, was summarily confronted with the whole of her injuries at once, and passed out cold. Bear, who had been trying to give more coherent directions to the rescue teams who were coming after them, managed just barely to catch her before she smacked her head into the ground.
She learned, quite a while later, that after she'd been bitten she'd actually fallen back on some of her training, pulling off a few defensive spells (the flare of which had guided Bear to where she'd been cornered). But after she'd hit the river, she'd stopped fighting, and nearly drowned. Bear had fished her out again, pumped the river out of her, and then stripped her down to get her out of the frigidly cold clothing and bind the worst of the damage before she could bleed out, which would have been a bit anticlimactic after the daring river rescue. The first day she had been released from the healers, he had appeared, lead her to the one of the vast training halls, and hadn't let her leave until she could, at least half of the time, shield herself from a full frontal assault from a fully trained mage... at least for a little while. Long enough to get away.
They never spoke of the incident again.
