[Fic] International Relations 7/7

[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

"Is it Alisa?" Which was the first thing on her mind. The Day Watch and the Night Watch, especially in Moscow but she had heard of it happening in other cities as well, were very fond of backstabbing. And plotting. To the point where it was joked that Gesser and Zavulon couldn't follow a straight path if it was a line painted on a road.

But Anton made a thinking noise and then, "No. No, I don't think so. The Day Watch is as interested in stopping these kidnappers as much as we are. But this isn't the only country these kidnappers are working in. Just the first one."

Tiger Cub could feel the headache starting in her forehead and temples. "The first one?"

"Other children are going missing. In the Vancouver area, England, northern Africa. And Moscow."

Her teeth ground together. But it explained why the boss had wanted her to handle this. If he had known that this would eventually cross into their world, into their country, or if he had even guessed he would want someone of theirs at the beginning of it to monitor and observe the situation.

Why her and not Anton or Semyon or someone more suited to observation and working with strangers, she didn't know.

"All right."

"And give the man a chance."

She was glad she hadn't been near the others when he said that. Her swearing would be understood by everyone, not even Alisa, who was bad enough for making fun of her for it. "Which man?"

"That one you've been watching since you met him. He irritates you and intrigues you, you think we can't see it?" There was a murmur in the background. "Svetlana explained it to me," he admitted after a second, and Tiger Cub heard her chuckling. She growled in response, yes, irritably. Right now they were more irritating than Guerrero, even if they weren't entirely wrong.

"I've been watching him because he's a pain and..."

"And he intrigues you."

"And he's an assassin. He is not the sort of person who would survive in our world, and he is an assassin. We'd kill each other inside a week if we didn't have to work together." The first two were good reasons, but the last was a lame protest and she let it lie there in the hopes that he woudn't take that into account.

Anton made a noise, and behind him Svetlana said something else. "I won't tell you to pursue it, only be a little nicer to him."

"A little nicer?"

"Be a little less tense. If I... we could figure it out, so could he."

Tiger Cub even laughed at that. "In my experience the man is always the last to know. All right, I will try to behave better."

"Be careful. If this was the test, they will be mobilizing and getting ready to move. And they will be out in force. I know you are dangerous, but so are they, and you are not with your usual team."

Tiger Cub smiled. It was full of teeth, and it caught the attention of all three of the others as she walked up to the car. "Anton. It's me."



Guerrero kept one eye on the ladies and one eye on his surroundings as they headed up the highway. After that phone call Katya had been more relaxed than he'd come to think of as usual, or maybe that wasn't the right word for it. More accommodating. Calmer. It was a nice change but it made him a little suspicious of her motives or her friends on the other end of the line.

Either that or they had told her to be more cooperative in the interests of solving this little mystery, which wouldn't be the strangest thing that had happened.

The drive up was uneventful to the point of being ominous. Long stretches of road and scenery, highway normalcy which was to say madness, people who didn't know how to merge, bad drivers. Restlessness from the two Russians, surrounded as they were by strangers and a strange language. It reminded him of how used to traveling he'd gotten, being surrounded by other languages and other things that he might or might not know. Spanish was easy. Russian was all right. Japanese left him bewildered and grumpy. Rather the same way, he thought, that Katya was bewildered and grumpy now.

"Did your friend have anything helpful?" he asked her, in Russian, as they drove. It was some effort to put his thoughts into Russian, but less so than it might have been a few days ago. And in the interests of easing the group dynamic, it might help.

She treated him to a startled stare before she answered. "No. Well... nothing immediately helpful." Her gaze turned to the front again, not hostile, just pensive and tired. "It's started up in other cities, now. Vancouver, London. Moscow."

He sat still for a moment. "The kidnappings." Even tone, even voice. The road slid by. One more piece of data to the puzzle. The West Coast of the United States was a test run. Brought on by a vulnerable state, upheaved and broke. Kids put into the system by parents split up by bureaucracy, by their inability to put food on the table, by all kinds of things. He didn't know why it was only now starting to come together in his head, only that it was. He started to explain to Katya.

She snorted. "You don't have to explain to me. I know what starvation looks like."

Of course she would. And bureaucracy's toll on the human population. "Well, I guess we know how they've been doing this for so long, if not why they started here."

Katya bit her tongue for a second before shrugging, sighing. "Perhaps all the changing laws in your country, especially here, about who can be a household and who cannot."

Guerrero snorted. That was a delicate way of putting it, something he hadn't expected from her. "Maybe no reason at all. Just a random point on a map."

"It might be so. There might be..."

He didn't catch the rest of what she said, on account of the sports car of some bright yellow color T-boning them at the one-light intersection going eighty-per.

There weren't supposed to be cars at this intersection. They were taking this route around Mount Shasta specifically because it offered them the greatest advantage for the girls to get the lay of the land (so they said) without getting them into populated areas where they might be spotted. And he was expected to believe that a sports car just came out of nowhere?

His ears were ringing. They were skidding along the pavement and they were upside-down. Sensory input was coming in fast enough that he was having trouble processing it all at once. Chance was bracing himself, he saw, Alisa was screaming, and Katya...

... Tiger Cub was changing.

It was like the afternoon with the car, but in reverse. There had been a woman there and now there wasn't, there was an angry roaring beast that was tearing itself out of the car and into the road. Claws scraped and tore the pavement into gravel. He saw her tail twitch.

By the time his vision was graying she was in shoes and feet again, white slacks curling around her ankles. He opened his mouth to tell her something, maybe just to snark that wasn't that overkill, but the only thing that came out was a gurgling breath before he collapsed onto his shoulders and the back of his head. The car was upside-down.



Maggie dug the palms of her hands into her temples and tried to concentrate. She had read a book once, a book with dragons in it, where a whole kingdom had fallen because of turning leaves into sugar. Or something like that. She didn't remember all of it, hadn't understood all of it even, but she remembered the part about leaves into sugar. How something so small had made such a very big difference.

Well, they were small. Their powers were small, but they could make a big difference now. They had to make a big difference now. Or they were going to make no difference at all later, and later would be too late.

Okay, that didn't make sense in her head but she was tired. And she was hungry, and scared, and Duncan still hadn't come back. She had made other friends in the last couple of days, other allies, but Duncan still hadn't come back.

Maggie wrapped her hands around the sides of her pillow and dug her fingers into the fabric until it wore at the seams, faded and fell apart. Like her fingers had punched through the pillow case, only they hadn't. It was something that happened a lot these days. Since she had learned to change things it slowly got easier to do it on command, but what she had discovered was that her mood could affect the things around her in other ways. And as her stay here got longer and longer, her mood got darker and darker. And things around her began to rot.

She tried to keep it from their watchers. If they knew what she was doing they would want to do things to her, or make her do things to other things, or people. Maggie didn't need anyone to tell her that, it was just the way things worked. And she didn't want to be that girl. She didn't even want to be what she was right now, she just wanted to go home where things were safe and normal. The pillow case rotted further. She curled forward and buried her face in a pile of threads and feathers and tried not to cry.

"Maggie!"

Hissed whispering made a wreck of her name but she heard it anyway. It was Ignat, under their -- her -- bed.

"What are you doing down there?" she hissed back, not lifting her head. The guard could appear in the doorway at any moment.

"Come down here. Leave pillows in your bed and come down here."

It took a moment for the argument to sink in and convince her, but she did. There wasn't much left of her pillows but she could manage to make what looked like a body under her sheet. Then she climbed down. The wood softened and crumbled a little more where her hands had been, where she'd climbed down every day since the one after Duncan disappeared.

She curled up in the bed and pretended to be asleep. The guards weren't so familiar with the room from day to day that they would notice another body in the bed where it shouldn't be. They only noticed children hunched over in the aisles, whispered conversations and other things more obviously out of place. She curled up in Duncan's place and listened.

"We're leaving." His English had improved by being steeped in it. "Tonight. We're leaving tonight."

He sounded so excited. Maggie thought it was hard to be excited when she was so scared. "How? We can't just walk through the doors, they'll see us, they'll find us, and we can't..."

"We can. You can get us through the doors. Jason and Eddie and me, we can protect us. Kumi will keep us safe, she will make us invisible. She will make the guards blind so that..."

"And then what? When we get out, what do we do? Do you think they'd keep us in a city where we could just run outside and scream for help and maybe someone would do something?"

Ignat was silent under the bed for so long that she thought about pulling up the mattress to make sure he was still under there. Or rolling over and looking around the edge. She could do that, she thought, without making too much noise or looking like she was peering under the edge of the bed. And she was about to when he spoke again, causing her to stuff her face into Duncan's pillow.

"Maggie, we have to go. It's time. I can't tell you how we know, we don't know how we know, but it is."

The restlessness was infectious. She did want to go, she wanted to leave with him, maybe find help and bring it back. Her mother would know what to do. But she didn't know where she was anymore, and she knew even less how to find her Mama.

Ignat was her best hope, wasn't he. Ignat and the small crew they had gathered. Even if they got out... Maggie sighed. "All right. What do you want me to do?"

They still had to make their way to help or safety on their own. This was not going to be easy, and it was way, way more scary than anything they had thrown at her in that room.



"Ignat!" she hissed. They were still talking in whispers.

But it seemed like it was going to be just that easy. She didn't know how they'd done it, but they had. The halls were gray and everything seemed tired and sluggish, and it hurt. It pricked at her skin like she was running through poison ivy, but she was still taking it better than the others. Some of them were falling down, having to be supported by others.

And it was still just that easy. No one had seen them. No one had even noticed they were there, and she had been looking. So had Ignat's friend Kumi. They had both been looking and seen the guard who walked right past them as though they weren't there. She had no idea how they were doing that, but it went in the same box as Ignat's shape-changing and her whatever it was that rotted things.

"Ignat, come on!" He was falling behind. She ran back and tried to pick him up, scowling. "Why are you so heavy?"

"Why are you so small?" he grumbled back at her, but he did try to pick himself up and keep moving with only a little bit of help from her.

Kumi had reached the big heavy doors first, and looked back at them. Painted a shade of white so hideous it looked green in this dim light, they were metal doors, institutional, like the doors of a particularly ugly school or a very old hospital. "Come on! They'll notice we're missing soon..."

Half of everyone stopped and listened for the alarm. In the movies, that was always when the alarm rang. But there was no alarm.

Maggie let Ignat stumble his own way down the hall and ran up to put her hand on the lock, exchanging a look with Kumi as she did so. "Do you think you can do it?" her friend asked, dubious.

She shrugged. "I don't know?" It would be the first time she had tried this rotting trick on purpose. This much on purpose. She pressed her hand to the lock and tried to think about how much she hated this place. How it made her feel. Scared and alone, a little dirty, a little small. Helpless, like she wasn't in control of any part of herself. Cut off from everything. The lock began to rust and chip. They were in the hallway, they were vulnerable, and if they were caught they would be disappeared and unknown things would be done to the. Probably terrible things.

Her fingers pushed forward as the lock gave way in its housing and clattered to the floor on the opposite side.

"Help..." Eddie came up next to her, grabbing the edge of the door as she pried it open and pulling it with her. One by one, they stumbled through. The next hallway had a door to the outside; she could see the grass beyond. And maybe the shadow of a building. Something like that, anyway, corners that square didn't come in nature.

She went back and started to drag Ignat by his arms, scooting him along the floor. His face was gray and he lookd as though he was going to pass out. "It's not that far," she told him. Tried to tell him, but his eyes were closed again. "Ignat! You stupid..." No, that wasn't fair, and her mother said never to use those words unless she really, really meant it. She didn't mean it now. She was just upset. "Come on, we're almost there..."

Next to her, Kumi was having a similar problem with Jason. Eddie was starting to turn pale.

Maggie left Ignat near the door and turned and banged her fists on the outer doors. They were so close, and no one had even come after them yet, and the doors weren't opening fast enough. Not to get them out of the building, and she was convinced that was what was killing them. "Open already!"

Something did open it. Something big, and loud, and furious.



She didn't have time to explain it to him, though she did take the time to get them out of the car. And into the other car, despite the blood sticking to Guerrero's face and the half-dazed look in Chance's eyes. Apparently concussions and potentially severe injuries weren't going to stop them.

Alisa complained under her breath the whole way to the other car, which was now a convertible. Or simply an open-topped car, since there was now no way to convert it to anything but. She'd sheared the top open in a fit of, well, pique. It hadn't been attentive enough to be called true rage. Luck had left her the only one in the car in a position to do much of anything. Shock had kept the other driver off his balance long enough for her to decapitate him.

No one batted a lash at the body. No one even looked over.

"It's this way," she pointed down the skid marks as she shifted the car into gear, listening to the grinding of belts and metal against metal. Guerrero swiped his palm along his forehead, smearing the blood into his hair.

She expected him or Chance to say something, but none of them did. They were heading along the roads and she was following the dark red streaks that the car had left to her vision if not to the humans' sight. It was taking them into a more populated area, not what she wanted in terms of a free reign to deal with the children but at least now they had a sign. A more concrete sign. She muttered something to that effect under her breath.

"Really?" Alisa muttered back. "Because I thought being rammed in the side panels was only a mild hint."

Tiger Cub grumbled. "We must have been getting close. It might have been an outrider, or someone who was on their way to..."

"Courier, maybe, but not someone we were going to follow to their base of operations," Chance pointed out from the back seat, shaking his head. "This car wouldn't hold a kid, not even close, let alone two or three of them. Are you sure you know where you're going?"

She knew where she was going, and opened her mouth to say so. "Give her a chance, dude." Tiger Cub shut her mouth again and stared at him through the rearview mirror, or what was left of it.

They kept driving. Beside her, Alisa was readying her gun. Something was nagging at the back of her mind about this and she couldn't think what it was, not and drive at the same time. She wasn't the kind of driver Ilya or Semyon was.

"Do you think they meant to ram us?" Alisa asked after a moment. Metal clacked against metal, this time from the inside of the car. Distracting. Tiger Cub's nose wrinkled at the smell of gun oil. "They were going fast, but not fast enough to do enough damage if they meant..."

"They were trying to get away," Chance mused out loud. "They weren't trying to get us, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Or the right place at the right time," his friend muttered.

"They were trying to get away from something. Or get to something."

Tiger Cub swore in just about every combination she could think of, shifted the car as far as it would go, and stomped the gas pedal into the floor.



The outside world had turned into monsters.

Maggie didn't know what was going on. They had been in the compound and now they were out of it, and they should have been safe, but now monsters were tearing them apart. At least, they looked like monsters. Monsters made out of string and blood.

"Ignat!" She tugged at his arm, and he wasn't moving. She moved over to Eddie, who was bent over on his hands and knees and struggling to breathe. Jason was already slumped over, Kumi was trying to get him up, and the last few stragglers weren't doing any better. "Come on, we have to go! We have to get out of here..."

Because the alarm had been raised. Or maybe it had been raised a long time ago and they had only been waiting because they hadn't thought the bunch of them would make it this far. Out to the grass and the trees and what looked like a highway, even. In the distance, but far enough that they could run to it. If any of them could run. Right now they couldn't even walk, and the monsters were catching up. And the spider-veins, and...

She was hit with an attack of not caring. Whatever they did, it wasn't going to work. She was cold, and she was tired, and they were all falling down while the monsters lumbered up to get them. Maybe the monsters had been guarding them all along, or maybe it was this gray sludge that they were trying to push their way through that made them look like this, she didn't know. But she was tired, and she wasn't supposed to have to do things like this! Mama did things like this. She just went to school. She wasn't the princess, she wasn't the super hero, she was the girl. She was the one that got picked up and rescued and dusted off and...

"Ow!"

A woman was tugging her arm. She hadn't seen her before, but now the woman was there, looking like that lady from the movie Mama liked, sometimes. All dressed in white, with dark yellow sunglasses and spiky blonde hair. And her nails were digging into Maggie's arm, hard enough to draw blood.

"What are you doing? Let me go..." She kicked the woman's leg, as hard as she could. Aiming for the knee like Mama had told her to, punching for the soft spot, and grabbing her hand and digging her fingers and thumb into the part between her thumb and forefinger. "Let me go!"

"Ow!" The woman yelped, and they both fell to the ground.

But when she looked up again the sky was blue, bright blue. And the grass was green and there was no gray sludge anywhere, and no monsters. There was blood still, though. A lot of blood.

Ignat and Jason and Kumi and everyone were either lying or kneeling on the grass. Jason was dead. She could see that without having to ask and she looked away as quickly as she could because she didn't want to see it, she didn't want to see any of this and make it real. Looking away, though, meant she got to see the two men standing on what used to be a bright yellow car, and a pretty one, pointing guns at her and the other woman. Maggie yelped and tried to duck, but the blonde held her upright.

"Don't do that," she said, in English that sounded like Ignat's. "They're friends."

"Friends?" Maggie gaped. Friends with guns? Big guns. Rifles. There was another crack, two cracks, and without thinking she buried her face in the blonde woman's hip so she didn't have to see whatever was happening. It was too much happening, for one thing. Too much happening in the last however many days, and she had learned far too much and she didn't want to know any more. She wanted to go home. "I don't want any friends. I want to go home."

The blonde woman sighed, running her fingers through Maggie's hair. "Don't worry, little one. We're going to take you home."



Tiger Cub left the body of the one child they hadn't been able to bring back out of the Gloom where he lay. If there was something left to come back to, they would come back to him later and bring him home to his parents. As it was, getting all of the escaped children to the car and getting the car started again, and moving back to where they had left the wreck of Guerrero's battle wagon was quite a task.

"They've come this far," he shrugged, when Chance suggested that maybe they should call in backup. "Besides, where are we going to get backup from?"

"I thought you knew a guy."

"Nah, that was a couple years ago." Tiger Cub hid her smile by looking away. From the tone of voice, a couple years ago meant a falling out at least of some kind, and perhaps the kind that involved guns pointed and worse things. She shouldn't laugh, really.

Leaving the men to their quibbling, she looked down at the girl who had led the group out of the compound. The seven year old girl, and already strong enough to crawl into and out of the Gloom by herself. Still swirling with choices yet unmade, and it was at least in part that swirl of her aura that made Tiger Cub look to the bright blue of her eyes, and then over her shoulder.

Surely not. That was stretching coincidence, even for her own beliefs.

When she looked back at the girl, Maggie, she'd said her name was, Maggie had her arms folded over her chest and a petulant, arched eyebrow expression with which Tiger Cub was uncomfortably familiar.

She crouched down in front of Maggie, falling onto her butt in the grass and then pretending she'd meant to sit down all along. "So," she started, brisk and graceful. "You're the one who led these children out of the compound? That... teaching... place." One hand sort of waved in the general direction from which they'd come.

"Sort of," Maggie said. "Why?"

"Did your Daddy teach you that?" Tiger Cub couldn't resist, but she was a little surprised at the child's answer.

"My Mama did. I don't have a Daddy."

She winced, and very carefully did not look over her shoulder. "Well, then, you have a very brave and very smart Mama," Tiger Cub told her. And somehow, that made sense. At least, she couldn't picture the man taking up with anyone less than that.

"Of course," Maggie said. Tiger Cub waited for the tag end of that and smiled again, a little, when it didn't come. The absence of it was almost funnier.

She didn't know what else to say, but by now they'd loaded nearly all the children into the car, at least two to a seat, some on laps. Chance was in the driver's seat, and they'd have to go slow, but it was better than staying here and waiting for a fresh contingent of guards. Especially with this many children, and this many bodies. She looked down at Maggie and held out her hand, and the girl took it, both of them eager to be away from this place. There was still so much work to do, and Tiger Cub could see herself now staying here for a considerable while longer.

Guerrero introduced himself with solemnity to Maggie, then lifted her up and somehow managed to swing himself over the door of the car and flop down into a seat with her in his lap in a display of agility that had to be showing off. Had to. Tiger Cub blinked, watching him. He was asking her about her escape, treating the girl with more respect and care than he had given to most adults she'd seen him speak with. Because she was a little girl, no doubt. And yet.

"You coming?" Chance looked over at her. He didn't even look around at his friend.

Tiger Cub shook her head and climbed into the car, wedging herself between the green-faced Russian boy and the door. "We've got a lot of cleaning up to do," she told him.

Guerrero didn't sound as though he'd even looked up from his conversation. "Hey, we've got time."

She hoped, at least, that that was true.