She doesn’t think anything, at first, about the bloody mess outside the bar. Just some ex-POW burnout, losing fistfights in Red drinking holes, relitigating the war ad nauseam at intimate scale. Not that different from herself, and all the more exhausting for it. Katya, formerly Lt. Col. Ekaterina Bellák, now nothing in particular, shifts her eyes front and pulls at her cheapshit cigarette.
Then - and she couldn’t really say why - she looks again. Catches the hollow beneath the loose tank top, the shadow between the half-grown tits, the softness to the sharp of her jaw, like someone’s rounded off the corners with their thumb.
And it's been a while, and she's a little drunk, and... fuck it, why not.
Katya grinds her cigarette out and steps closer. The woman glances up, the tics still, her shoulders gather into a foxhole hunch; Katya holds out a propitiating hand. Hey, hey, easy. The hard lines of the body beneath the surplus jacket ease a notch, but only a notch. Black eyes behind a mess of black hair, dull and watchful.
“You alright down there, girl?” Katya says, conscious of the husk in her voice, how deep it sounds - stupid, as if a transsexual is going to give two shits about that. “Looks like you got a real working over.”
The woman in the gutter licks her split lip. There’s a lot of blood on her face, what might or might not be a freshly broken nose, and as she turns her head the streetlights catch it just right.
“Looks like it,” she says. Her voice is dry and cracked, as if she barely uses it. There’s something familiar in the way her fingers drum on her leg - real up to the middle digit, the rest black civ-issue prosthesis - but Katya can’t place it, a little drunk, has other things on her mind besides placing it.
“How about I help get you down to a hospital?” Katya says, wishing she still had a car. It’d make a better line. “It’s not that far to–”
The woman lurches up, tall, maybe six feet, and Katya takes an involuntary step back. “No,” the stranger says, and then quieter, her voice crushing in on itself, “No hospitals.”
“Alright - alright. No hospitals.” Katya lowers her voice, soothing or close to it. Something’s wrong with this girl, kicked-dog wrong. In the back of her mind, Katya digs the ex-POW burnout thing back out, turns it around this way and that. Holds up.
Hot, she thinks, and only feels a little sick at herself.
“Listen, how about I take you back to my place, patch you up a little,” she says, coaxing now, another step closer, a hand laid on the woman’s arm. She kind of expects her to shake her off, tell her to find someone else to chase. She doesn’t. Just looks at her, eyes flat and glassy, breath coming kind of fast. “I can’t just leave you out here like this, you know?"
“Like…?” The stranger touches her hand to her face. She looks a little surprised by how much red comes back on it. “Oh.” Her eyes refocus, as if she’s actually seeing Katya for the first time. A small nod, not for her, something inside her head clicking into place. “You live close?” she says.
Katya smiles. “Real close, doll.”
