milliways_bar | (no subject)

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The woman walking into the bar today still has the remains of eyeliner and glitter around her eyes, but the clothes themselves are a perfectly ordinary set of shorts and fitted t-shirt.

If anyone asks, Nadine was at a party last night. And, because she can, Natasha is going to make sure that party was way, way more fun than 'Tanya's' waitressing shift.

Mostly, though, she's going to claim a couch, slip off her tennis shoes, and curl her feet up, just because she can.

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"...I'd be in the palace. And it wouldn't be fun."

Not with her luck.

"Treaty? So you have to have equal representatives?"

"A balance of influence, rather. Whether that influence is used where the opposite side thinks it will be used is an entirely different matter." She smirks faintly.

"Ohhh, sphere of influences crap. I know that."

Just as wry, "Good luck with it."

"Eh. No longer my problem, unless Dark Others from my world decide to come here. Then I'll have to obey the Treaty again." She still does... mostly. She doesn't worry quite so much about minor remoralizations, or about trouncing the dark creatures she finds while scouting with Skellig.

Quietly,

"You left?"

"Picked a fight above my weight class." She can still be very angry about that if she thinks about it too hard - it was a trap from the word go, but with her temper it was one that was impossible to avoid. "My door no longer opens to Moscow."

"Ah."

She chose to leave, but still; an exile is an exile.

"I am sorry, Katya."

She shrugs, slightly - what is she going to do? There's nothing she can do to change it now.

"It is well. I have a partner again, and a new world to explore, and there are Russians in the bar."

"There are," she concedes.

"Still outnumbered by the Americans."

"A tragedy I bemoan daily." She drawls, with a smirk. A tragedy that calls for more vodka, evidently. "But at least I can hear my own language with a native accent."

Russian, spoken by Russians?

Without it being in anyway related to a mission?

"Now there's the truth."

"Though, I could do without the Puritan approach to alcohol." She snorts, as she pours herself another glass. "That is more of a tragedy."

She huffs a laugh, and swirls the vodka still left in her glass.

"You referring to me, or the Americans?"

"Mostly the Americans, though others get in on the act. It is ridiculous." She grumbles with an annoyed sort of gesture. As if she hasn't been drinking for longer than most of them have existed.

She was partnered with Bear. Between the two of them, they were largely responsible for keeping black market vodka producers in business.

"Well, Americans are good at cultural influence," she says, as if her homeland never did any such thing.

Then she glances at Katya, amused.

"Not that I'm inclined to get drunk, it takes far too much effort most of the time."

That earns some raised eyebrows, and a considering look.

"That sounded like a challenge." Her parties in the summer were the best parties (if one does not take into account the dogs).

"Mmm, was it? I didn't mean for it to be one." Her tone is mild, but she's not exactly adverse to a challenge.

"Not tonight. I'm working."

She nods, agreeably - this has always been a perfectly valid excuse for not joining in with whatever victory celebration or post-fight licking-of-wounds was going on within the Watch. It is, after all, impossibly hard to focus on trouncing witches and vampires when your head is threatening to roll off your shoulders and into the gutter (and it hurts enough that you're tempted to let it).

"Mmph, making me feel positively lazy. Travelling with Skellig isn't quite like patrolling."

"Isn't it a cat thing? Being lazy when you're not hunting down prey and miscreants?"

She's teasing.

"Skellig."

She pulls a face, the face of the teenager she once was who was cruelly denied her chance of becoming a wolf.
"Tiger was not my first choice." She dearly, dearly wanted to be a wolf. And then a unicorn. The unicorn choice died hard.

"Skellig."

"Tigers are impressive," she says, still with that deceptively mild voice.

Then she grins at the other woman

"Skellig's your partner in fighting things?"

"He's.... yes? Sort of." She frowns, because Skellig isn't a partner like Bear was - they were a matched set, deployed as strategically as any chess piece, and ever so brutal when let off the leash.

With Skellig... they keep each other sane, which in some cases is a more difficult task.

"...it's complicated, I take it?"

She can handle complicated.

Her whole career has been built on one form of 'complicated' or another.

"... Not terribly, but..." She makes a vaguely frustrated hand gesture that somehow encompasses the idea that the exact version of the explanation goes something like 'it's like doing the Viennese waltz while skydiving, except that's entirely wrong and it's a stupid illustration anyway'. "We are not the same sort of creature, him and I, but alike enough that we can support each other anyway."

...

She frankly believes that's a stupid explanation as well, but it's the best she's got at the moment.

...this is not, particularly, helping with Natasha's missing Clint.

(Or indeed, in a dull, mostly healed way, Alex)

"Friends, then. Who are a team, even if not an official one." She shrugs, a little. "It's good to find something."