Ko (koshchiy) wrote in darker_london, @ 2015-01-15 07:34:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | koshchiy doroshenko, lucine nazarian, nancy kane |
Homecoming (Ko, Nancy, Lucine, Londonites)
Ko had never been on a boat before, and he didn’t like it. The ground was not behaving like ground and no matter how accustomed his stomach was to the drops and turns of flight, he was not used to this. He gripped the railing and looked out over the sea, out toward England as they pulled out of Calais. He could have flown this distance; he and Lucine both, and it would have been better, but for Ailbhe’s vision. (He ignored the question of luggage because it ruined the fantasy of flying over a sea he'd never seen before. He'd never seen any sea before, never been totally surrounded by water.)
Despite the hypnotising constant swell of the water stretching on forever, didn’t linger on the railing long, but began to move through the ferry, searching. Lucine had taken the lower decks, either sympathetic to his stomach or (Ko suspected, but not till later) because she wanted him to find the other deathless first.
Nancy saw him first, sensed him first. She was watching from a higher deck, enjoying the salt bite against her skin, so different from the bite of the heat and the grit. Her warmest clothes were bundled in layers around her, her thickest scarf wrapped around her neck and over her hair. The young man on the deck below, in contrast, was barely wearing anything, just a heavy jacket, no scarf, bare hands. But he hadn’t spent the last two years in Somalia, Nancy presumed.
It felt… typical, that she wasn’t even back in London and already she was coming across a demon. There hadn’t been any, in two years, though she’d met a pack of desert werewolves, long of limb and brown of face, their fur a rusty red closer to the rare Ethiopian wolf than Scarlett’s, their bodies smaller in transformation than their European cousins, too. But demons? No, she’d been lucky.
Nancy did not hesitate. She waited a little while, to watch him, but it was not nervous hesitation. Nancy had lost a lot of her nerves over the past two years and, though still cautious, she was not afraid. Perhaps he knew her friends in London, after all.
She waited for him to sense her, approaching from one side, and she was starting to wonder if he could – or perhaps he’d never met anyone like her before and didn’t know what it was he was feeling – till she was perhaps a hundred feet away, and he turned sharply. He stood tall, and he held himself like a lot of the men she’d met in Somalia, a definite look of the soldier about him.
His eyes found her, and the change in his expression was subtle, but Nancy saw no threat in it. No, she rather thought her appearance was a welcome one.
She was pretty, buried under all those layers. Pretty and tall, but Ko could not tell much more about her. Deathless, an alkonost, like Lucine, but no... not quite. Lucine had a weightier kind of power about her, where this woman had a bit of a shimmer, a little disjointed. “Hello,” she said “Chilly, isn’t it? Though you don’t look very cold.” Her smile was very pretty too. He could not tell how old she was. Perhaps the shimmer of power hinted at youth, as opposed to Lucine's deep, slow river, but there was something about the way she carried herself that did not look young.
“I am used to colder,” Ko said, smiling back at her. “Though the wind off the ocean, she bites.”
“It does,” Nancy agreed, with a little shiver. “It’s blowing straight off the Arctic Circle. My name is Nancy.” It had been a while since she’d gone by Nancy, though. Even Bear had taken to calling her Naciimo, which was close enough to Nancy and meant, pleasingly, comfort. The thought of Bear, and his voice around her name – either name – was a soft ache in her. She missed him already, but it was not the kind of ache that made her unhappy.
“Nancy,” Ko said, copying the way her mouth formed around her name. He could not place her accent; all of her words had a strangers music to them. “I am Koschiy.”
“Pleased to meet you, Koshchiy.” She was very good at pronouncing his name right. The ocean gave a sudden lurch and he grabbed onto the railing to right himself. “No sea legs?” she asked, gently teasing, but sympathetic. Ko didn’t know what sea legs were, but she caught the blank look on his face within seconds. “It means, you’re not used to boats, are you?”
“No,” he agreed. “I am not used to boats.” Nancy listened as he spoke, to his voice and the words he used. She wondered if she sounded similar when she spoke Somali. After two years, her vocabulary was quite good, and the way the language rose and fell on her tongue mimicked the others, but her friend Suleekho told her she still sounded a little alien, a little too polite. (“I sound like that in English too,” Nancy told her, but Suleekho just shook her head.)
“Well, I spent most of the last twenty four hours dealing with some very rough flights,” Nancy said, joining him in holding the railing, both of them facing England. “I was glad the last leg of my journey was the ferry and the train. A little fresh air,” she said, tilting her head back to look at the sky, grey and low, though the cloud was breaking up in the south.
Nancy knew she was heading back to grim London. And yes, she longed to be there faster but there was no point in stressing about it; the ship could only go as fast as a ship could go. She would be there soon enough. She would do everything she could to find Astrid, soon enough.
For now, all she could do was wait, lips parted, tasting the spray of the sea as her face went numb from the cold.
Ko watched her in frustration. With her eyes closed she looked like a child. How old was she?
She turned toward him and opened her eyes, clear eyes, and suddenly looked as far from a child as a person could get. "Are you going all the way to London?"
He wondered if his eyes would ever look at anyone as clearly as hers did. He very much doubted it. "Yes," he said, and she smiled to herself. It was a private joke, he could tell, but at no point did she make him feel like the joke was on him. "Me too," she told him, but that he already knew.
"I'm travelling together with someone," he said, because it was time to find Lucine. Any other questions she had about his travel to London should be answered with Lucine. "Do you want to meet me with her?"
She looked at him for another moment then smiled again. "I'd love to," she said. She thought he was polite, if a little wooden, but a quaint variety of wooden. He smiled stiffly back at her and it was fairly obvious the expression was not one that came naturally - Ko was unsure what to do with important strangers when they didn't need rescuing or subduing - but Nancy gave him points for effort, and was glad when he started heading indoors. The frozen fresh air was nice for a change, but she was starting to lose feeling in her cheeks.