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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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."

Her answering, slightly-less-frustrated hand gesture suggests that it's a close enough explanation to somewhat approximate the truth. We'll go with that.

"He still has this love affair with Wonderbread. Someone corrupted him badly."

"..but it is good of you to look past this," she says, very solemn.

"They are considering me for sainthood." Who 'they' might be, she couldn't say - the Roman Catholic Church would be more than happy to burn her, if they could find anyone brave enough to make the attempt.

(He wouldn't get to make an attempt twice.)

"I can see that.

The ring of gold on your icon would be very fetching."

"Someone must balance out St. Columba." She sniffs, having had that particular icon thrust in her face more than once.

"Indeed one must, and I see you're taking on the proper attitude for sainthood."

Her lips twitch.

"Always helpful, that's me. She is serious, I have vodka. She has horrible fashion sense, I am always stylish." She suggests cheerfully, wondering if anyone in her current world's Vatican would notice if she snuck her name into the lists.

"You'd be a welcome addition to any pantheon or religious system," she says, still solemn.

Oh so solemn.

Then she shakes her head, and laughs quietly.

"Eh. Wouldn't be the first time." She had a rough time in France, learning from one of the most powerful Watches in the world, but given entirely too much slack in her leash for someone so young. The resulting conference with Gesar had been so much fun. "At least this time I could do it on purpose."

The laughter changes to more of a giggle.

"Do tell, Katya."

She sighs, and pours herself more vodka.

"I was on loan to the Watch in Paris, France - one of the more powerful Watches, though they rarely did anything with it. I had been sent into the surrounding countryside for training with one of their mages, and we ran across a pair of wild vampires. It was a lovely spring evening, so there were plenty of infatuated lovers littering the landscape for them to feed on." It had been a bit of a gory scene, really - she was not at all envious of the human police who got to clean that up. "They split up and ran, so we did the same - mine was a lot older than me and a bit beyond my class, and I couldn't stay in the Twlight as long as him. I came up for rest... and forgot to check where I was. But how was I supposed to know they were going to hold a midnight mass for Joan of Arc's feast day?" She asks plaintively. That'd gone over like a bomb - one dark-haired girl suddenly appearing in the middle of the church, blood-stained and wild? It's the stuff of Catholic legend.

She snorts, and then presses her hand to her mouth, giggling.

"Oh dear. The paperwork for that must have been fun."

"Utter nightmare. I was put on a desk for almost a year, and that was only what Ansalme Boulanger felt necessary. My next check in with Moscow was brutal." She grumbles - Gesar hadn't even waited for the usual face-to-face meeting - she had ended up with the head of the Moscow Nightwatch waiting for her in her dreams.

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