[Fic] International Relations

[kittydesade]

Title:International Relations
Fandom: Night Watch/Human Target
Characters: Tiger Cub, Guerrero
Word Count: ~28,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When children who have yet to make their Choice go missing up and down the West Coast of the United States, the head of the Moscow Night Watch sends Tiger Cub to help the Americans investigate. Her encounter with the assassin Guerrero seems to be a coincidence, but the deeper she goes into the investigation the fewer coincidences there seem to be.
A/N: Written for scifibigbang and beta'd by the ever-tolerant kikibug13


Tiger Cub's eyes flared open for just a second when she woke up, before she made herself relax and feign sleep again. Still, no one was there, or at least she didn't see anyone in the quick glimpse she had of the room. It was cluttered, with dust motes in the air, but many of the surfaces looked clean and often used. She was on some sort of couch, tucked in with a ragged old blanket that smelled like dog.

The dog in question came up and started licking her face a few moments later. It was hard to keep up the ruse of sleep under that assault.

"All right, all right, dog," she laughed, pushing it away and sitting up. Him, she noted, upon more glimpsed inspection. Pushed him away till he jumped up onto the couch with her and looked up expectantly. "All right, you can be petted."

"His name's Carmine," came a voice from over her shoulder, in accented but comprehensible Russian. Tiger Cub spun, disgorging the dog from the couch.

The blond man from earlier was standing with his hands down by his sides and his posture and expression open, unguarded. At least as unguarded as his kind ever got. She saw that he had a kind spirit, and also that he was a man who could kill under the right circumstances. And had.

But he was showing himself to be, if not unarmed, then at least in no way intending to make any sudden or threatening movements. Which meant that he perceived her as a threat or someone capable of being as deadly as he himself was. Interesting. Paranoid, and interesting, and not untrue.

"Hi." He shrugged, smiled.

Tiger Cub mustered a smile from somewhere that did not have so many teeth in it as she wanted to show. "Hello. My name is..."

"Katya, I heard."

That's right, she'd introduced herself before passing second time. "Where is..." She wasn't sure if the two men were friends or not.

"Guerrero," he nodded. "Went out for a little while. How are you feeling?"

She wrinkled her nose. "My head hurts. I feel fine," she shrugged, brushing off the injuries she'd somewhat sustained. If she was in need she could always go find a healer of the Night Watch. Or possibly even one of the Day Watch, though she was extremely reluctant to owe anyone in her opposite number any favors.

"You took quite a spill, there. Landed pretty hard, are you sure you don't want to see a doctor or something?" He held up his hands before she could do more than give him a look. "Doesn't have to be in a hospital or anything. Trust me, I know how annoying hospitals can be."

In other words, he knew that sometimes hospitals asked questions one couldn't have answered. She shook her head. "I'll be fine," she repeated, rather than tell him anything about the Watches. Or that she had people. Or anything. She didn't trust her English at the moment, let alone anything about this strange person or this strange place.

"Water, anyway?" he gestured to one side of him. "There's a kitchen over this way. You're probably thirsty."

It was interesting, she thought, as he led the way to the kitchen. Interesting that he would show her to the kitchen rather than bring her a glass of water, although she appreciated it. It meant that she could be assured it wasn't drugged or poisoned. A courtesy that only someone who had been long steeped in the underworld would offer.

She poured herself a glass of water from the sink, drank it down, and poured another. "What is your name?" It barely registered to her that they were still speaking Russian, although a part of her mind noted that he spoke it fluently even if he did have a strong accent.

"Christopher Chance."

Now that smelled like a lie. But not necessarily a bad lie. The kind of lie that someone said when they wanted to be someone other than who they were. She ignored it politely, didn't press.

"Thank you, Christopher Chance," she told him, smiling. "And thank your friend for me." She set down the glass and headed for what seemed to be the door, or at least the door out of this part of the building.

"You sure you don't want to stay, rest up a little at least? I make a good barbecue..."

Tiger Cub wasn't sure what was behind the need to have her stick around, nor yet why he didn't pursue it as forcefully as she knew he could have. Either way, she was rather glad he wasn't. She waved at him over her shoulder as she headed out the door.

Just in time, too, as she saw his friend Guerrero pulling up in his somewhat repaired truck, the dent obviously recently popped out. She slipped into the Gloom to avoid him as she left.



Her Day Watch counterpart was waiting for her at the pre-arranged rendezvous. It was standard procedure when entering strange territory to create a meeting point in case of emergencies like the one that had just happened, although Tiger Cub wasn't certain that their emergency hideout hadn't been compromised, either.

That was a risk she would have to take. It could be mitigated, but there was no way to truly know. She wasn't a seer.

"Alisa..." Tiger Cub would have been lying if she said she wasn't relieved to see the Dark Other alive and whole, but she didn't want to give any sort of impression that she'd been desperately worried. "Are you all right?"

The other woman pinned her dark hair up, businesslike and calm. "I'm fine. I'm not happy about what happened, but how are you?"

"I've been in better shape," Tiger Cub wrinkled her nose, rummaging around in the refrigerator for something decent to eat. "When I ran, they chased me off a roof and onto a man's truck. An assassin," she added, because that was probably important to know. "A human assassin. He wasn't happy about it, I think I interrupted something."

"Business or pleasure?" Alisa's eyebrows arched in mild curiosity.

"Business. He was alone until I arrived, and then he called a friend, I think in case I died on him from falling into his engine."

Alisa's lips twitched. Others, Light or Dark, were sturdier than that. Even falling from a rooftop into a car wouldn't kill them, although it would likely hurt quite a bit. And as if she had just thought of it, she stepped towards Tiger Cub. "Do you need medical attention? A healer?"

"Are you a healer?" Tiger Cub replied, then shook her head. "I'll be all right." A cat, after all, always landed on her feet. And she still was, if only a kitten yet. "He and his friend took me back to their home, I think, to keep an eye on me. But they didn't try to keep me there. Or, his friend didn't. The man who had the truck, Guerrero, he wasn't there when I woke up."

But he was there now. She didn't flicker or twitch when he appeared in the shadow of the alley opposite their building, but he did. Tiger Cub had to appreciate at least the stealth he had employed when following her. She hadn't noticed a thing.

In fact, at the moment she wasn't sure if she would have noticed him had he not been somewhat conspicuous in leaning against the brick wall of one of the buildings. He meant for her to see him, she thought.

"What was he doing?"

Tiger Cub dragged her attention back to Alisa, not that it was that difficult. "I think, getting his car fixed."

"From the tiger-shaped dent in his hood," Alisa laughed, shaking her head. "You are a bad cat. Did he or his friend say anything else? You said they were human..."

She waved a hand, dismissing the man who stood outside the building and his friend. "They are a pair of human mercenaries, but they're not connected to what we are investigating. They were in the wrong place at the right time, or the shorter one was. They didn't say anything that gave them away, and I didn't say anything that gave us away."

Just in case Alisa intended to report her to Gesser or Zavulon for revealing their existence to humans. Which, as it went, was not an egregious offense given the circumstances, but Alisa could still make trouble for her.

"They are not an issue. Do we know what happened in the attack? Where are the others?"

"As far as I know they're back at their own headquarters, trying to learn what happened and why we were attacked. Is this the same short one who is watching the building from across the street?"

Damn. Tiger Cub rolled her eyes, not so much at Alisa but at the man, Guerrero, for following her and for making himself obvious while he was watching her. This was a complication she didn't need right now. "I think so, I don't know what he wants," she added, before Alisa asked. "I suppose we could go ask him."

She snorted. "In this heat? We should let him stew. Do you even think he would understand us?"

"He and his friend speak Russian fluently," Tiger Cub pointed out.

"How did you let him follow you here, anyway?" Alisa asked, just now, it seemed, realizing that if Guerrero had followed her to their supposed safe house, others might have as well.

She shook her head. "I didn't let him follow me. But if anyone was following me they would have had to make a stop at that warehouse building first, and I doubt they would have had the patience..."

"You doubt that? On what grounds? You don't even know who it was who attacked us, and for all you know it could have been someone in league with that man..."

Tiger Cub slapped her hand on the table and roared, ending the argument. "He is in league with no one but himself. I had a good look at him while he scooped me off his car, and he isn't the sort to conspire with anyone unless there is money involved. And if he had been paid to attack us, he wouldn't have taken me to his safe place."

Not, she suspected, that it was his safest place. But it was a place where he felt comfortable with taking possibly injured young women, and not people he intended to torture and murder. A mercenary he might be, but he had the air of an honest mercenary, as much as there were those.

"Forget the man," Tiger Cub snorted, shaking her head. "He's probably only curious to know why I came here instead of going to a hospital, and what I am doing here. If I have any relation to whatever his business is. He is not important."

Alisa looked at her as though she might argue, but shook her head after a minute instead. "All right. Then what do you want to do now, wait for them, the San Francisco division to find out how someone found our meeting place and attacked it, who they were and what they wanted?"

"I would like to get some rest," she pushed a hand through her hair, wincing as it aggravated the headache. And backache. "I would like to recover from falling off a building into a truck. And then, yes. I suppose we may as well talk to them, find out what they know and what they think happened back there."

The Dark Other nodded, looking sympathetic and as tired as Tiger Cub felt, or almost, at least. "I'll drive."

The other woman hadn't been there, didn't know what manner of truck to look out for except possibly one with a big dent in the front. Tiger Cub did, and the truck didn't have the dent in it anymore. The dent had been popped out, but she still got a good eyeful of the truck as it came down their street a respectable two cars behind. Being followed wasn't on her list of favorite things to do. It felt too much like being hunted, and she was the hunter, here. But then if she pointed him out to Alisa, who knew what the Dark woman would do?

Instead, Tiger Cub sank further into her seat and pretended the headache was the reason for her crankiness. Waiting and seeing what developed wasn't on her list of favorite activities either, and yet it seemed all she was able to do at the moment.

She wanted, a bit, to curse Boris Ignatievich for sending her here in the first place. But even an ocean and half a continent away, she didn't dare.



Guerrero left shortly after the meeting. He managed not to crash on the way home through years and years of reflexes and quiet roads, but his mind was not on the drive. It wasn't even on the danger that the women he'd just left might represent, although that was a part of it. He did, at least, manage not to crash the truck into the wall of Chance's warehouse.

Taking the stairs two at a time, he made enough of a racket coming up to the office that Chance came out of the room very slightly crouched, ready for an assault. When he saw it was only Guerrero, he stopped.

"What's up?"

The smaller man shook his head. "You're gonna want to sit down for this, dude."

He caught Chance's nod out of the corner of his eye as he changed course in mid-stream, going for the kitchen instead. What with everything going on, he hadn't eaten since morning. Winston always had something in the fridge. Chance even waited while he heated up last night's Chinese.

"Something wrong?"

Guerrero leaned up against the counter, palms pressing against the edge. Behind him and to his right, the microwave hummed merrily along. "Not exactly. It's complicated." He didn't know how else to describe it. "It's unbelievable, literally."

Chance's eyebrows shot up. "I don't know, I could believe quite a bit."

"Not this you couldn't," Guerrero started, then stopped when the microwave beeped. For a second the only sounds he made were scarfing down food, and Chance was patient enough to let him. He even sat down opposite the other man after the first couple of bites. "Okay. Remember the chick who crashed into the hood of my truck?"

"It was yesterday, and that's not exactly something I'm likely to forget."

"Okay." He scooted a little closer, using his fork to gesticulate as he talked. "Well, I didn't like the way she looked, so I decided to keep an eye on her."

Chance blinked. "How was she supposed to look? She'd just fallen off a roof." Guerrero gave him a look. He knew what he meant.

"Turns out, she's with some kind of international organization called the Night Watch. They go around, not sanctioned by any government, not officially. They're do-gooders. Kinda like you and Winston." And himself, most of the time, these days. But he wasn't putting himself under Winston's umbrella like that.

His friend nodded. "Okay, I'm following."

"Thing is, and here's where it gets really weird, dude. Thing is, they do it with magic." He stuffed a forkful of food into his mouth to give Chance some time to think that over.

Chance took all of two seconds to think it over. "That's impossible."

"That's what I said, but ..." And he didn't know how to explain it at first. He knew Chance would know what he meant if he just said she sounded like she was telling the truth, but that only applied to the truth as far as she knew or believed it. And there were a lot of whack jobs out there who believed they could talk to crystals or commune with their pets.

Another couple of bites and he stopped gesturing with his fork, poking it down into the stir fry and holding it there. "There's something about her, dude. It's like she doesn't need to try to convince me it exists, it just does without me having to believe in it. She talks about magic and Others and the Night Watch the way we talk about the CIA. Fact of life, complete with bureaucracy."

"Magic has bureaucracy."

Guerrero snorted. "How many new age hippies do you know who'd complain about the bureaucracy of wizards like a pencil pusher with an office."

"I don't actually know that many new age hippies," Chance pondered. "So, she's part of some magic law enforcement group? Like, um... Wardens?"

"Who?"

"... Never mind."

Fingertips to the temples did little to rub away the headache that was coming back for a second round, but he tried. "That's what she says, man, I don't know if she's out of her gourd or if she's telling the truth. And I'm not sure I want to get involved enough to ask."

Chance grunted. "So why is this a problem that affects us?"

"They're looking for a gang that's kidnapping kids, reasons unknown."

"Ah." He leaned back in his chair and gave that a few moment's thought. "Shit."

"Pretty much, dude."