Chapter Text
TW: Animal Abuse
The docks were almost as quiet as the people who had been following her for the last half hour, but not quite. Katana groaned. Another confrontation was the last thing she wanted to deal with today, and she was already pissed off because some drunkard had tried to accost her in an alleyway behind the tavern. The only thing that made her feel better was that she only had a stab wound to deal with; he hadn’t been so lucky.
An inhumane shriek grabbed her attention, and she glanced around to find its source. A group of children were huddled around something moving in a nearby corner, laughing. The wind carried traces of their conversation over to her, and Katana slowed down to listen.
“Kick it again!” A voice hollered, a mean chuckle following the comment. The soft thud of a boot hitting flesh reached Katana’s ears.
“I wonder if dragons can burn,” another boy commented. “Anyone got matches?”
Another howl of laughter went up from the group as someone pulled out a packet, but this time they were interrupted by a looming shadow. Katana smiled, a slow, sarcastic sneer, as she took in the sight of the baby dragon mewling quietly as it shrunk away from its tormentors. Its wings had been bound tightly so it couldn’t escape, and its ribs were visible through pale silvery-blue scales.
“Aye, who do you think you are?” One of the boys demanded. “And what do you think you’re doing-” The rest of his comment never got the chance to be heard, for in a second he was flat on his back along with his comrades.
“If I ever hear of any of you so much as looking at a poor animal maliciously again, you will regret it,” Katana murmured, eyes flashing. The boys might have laughed if they were not curled up, clutching their stomachs, and staring at the stars already. But they wisely refrained from saying anything as Katana snatched up the baby dragon and bustled away.
By the time they brushed themselves off and went home to scolding mothers complaining about a raven-haired witch who had ruined their evening, Katana arrived in front of the doors of a rundown inn on the outskirts of town. Try as she might, she had been unable to lose her tail and suspected that the only reason she knew of its existence was because those following her wanted her to know. It wasn’t a very reassuring thought, she decided as she wrinkled her nose in distaste, particularly since she had slacked off on her training. From the footsteps she heard behind her, there were around three (although there could very well be more skulking in the shadows that she had not perceived). It mattered not; what would happen would happen. She merely must finish what she came for before it happened.
The inn door opened with the merry jingle of a bell, and the proprietor glanced up from her desk. When Katana strode in and set the now-sleeping dragon wrapped in a cloak on a couch, the proprietor did a double take.
“Kat! Is it really you?” The proprietor didn’t wait for an answer; she barreled around her desk and engulfed Katana in a stifling hug. “Girl, I have so much to tell you.”
“Oh, Ami, it’s been so long.” Katana felt a lump in her throat she chose to ignore as she hugged the petite girl in front of her. “You’re ginger now!”
Ami chuckled as she twirled a braid on her finger. “I’ve been ginger for six months now, dragonfly. My purple hair is so last year. Where’ve you been?”
Katana grimaced. “Busy dealing with morons and rescuing dragons. Speaking of which, I got a little baby here if you aren’t too busy to take a look.”
Ami’s dark eyes grew wide as saucers as she registered the bundle on the sofa. “What happened? Poor baby’s covered in blood.”
“Some idiots were beating it to a bloody pulp when I happened across them on the docks. Should’ve beaten them all to a bloody pulp.” Ami’s eyes flashed in agreement with Katana’s words as she gently scooped up the dragon, cooing softly to him in a language that crackled like foreign fire. The dragon responded, hissing back, and Ami smiled as she opened a door labeled Staff Only.
“His name is Burns-with-the-heat-of-a-thousand-fires but we can call him Bernie. From what I feel, he has five cracked ribs and a punctured lung. It’s a good thing I recently visited the apothecary; I was almost out of some ingredients to my healing salves.” After hanging a CLOSED sign in the window, Ami gathered some herbs, scooped up Bernie, and headed back into the kitchen.
Katana smiled as Bernie nuzzled under her arm. It felt good to reunite with one of her old friends, and she regretted not doing it sooner. She had forgotten how Ami’s skin glowed like ebony under the dying rays of sunlight when she was happy and missed the beaming brightness of Ami’s smile. Ami had always been the friendly one, the healer of their friend group, always picking up the next stray on the street and gluing their broken pieces back together.
This inn had Ami’s fingerprints all over it, from the peeling wallpaper that originally had been bumblebee yellow to the quaint sky-blue rocking chair behind the neon green concierge. It was an eclectic blend of bright styles complete with cozy throw blankets, blended together in a way that only Ami could accomplish. Katana grinned to herself as she remembered hauling furniture in and painting walls and redecorating the kitchen with their friends. There had been five of them then: Ami and Katana herself and Tamarinda (better known as Tamar) and Priscilla and Gus.
When destiny called them to distant lands, only Ami stayed behind. She established a reputation as a healer who always came bearing spiced buns and cheese and set up her own community around her. She was a ray of sunlight shining through epidemics and famines and droughts; although she never had plenty, she always had enough. People recognized this and flocked to her, always willing to protect and help and work with her. She was one of the few people who was brave enough to love without restraint, regardless of where she ended up.
On one of Ami’s trips to visit an ailing grandmother, she had been waylaid by Tamarinda. After noticing the scars on Tamar’s back, Ami promptly dragged her back to the recently-purchased inn to treat them. Boasting a head of copper-coloured curls, suntanned skin, and freckles, Tamar had the determination of a bulldog and the wild beauty of the sea. Shanghaied onto a pirate ship as a powder-monkey at the age of five, her character was shaped by rolling waves and rough words and running wild. Even after she had settled at the hotel, she never quite had mastered her relationship with the water; as much as she hated it, she was also drawn to it until one day she established her own trading fleet and left the flat land forever. Blunt, proud, and bossy, she was born to be a leader wherever she went.
Priscilla and Gus were a bonded pair as enigmatic as night itself; no one knew quite where they came from and no one knew where they were, yet no one doubted that they were together. One day they showed up on the hotel doorstep, and five years later they left forever. Gus, who would tar and feather anyone who called her by her birth name Augustina, was as still and dangerous as a sword. When she talked, everyone listened. More often than not, though, she remained silent and watched quiet as a mouse. Every move of hers was calculated and precise, although Katana knew that Gus would strike quick as an adder the moment someone attacked Priscilla. Priscilla was everything that Gus was not; she was a social butterfly flitting to one person and then to the next. If someone made a caustic remark about her missing arms, they were quickly silenced by Gus’ looming glare. No one besides Ami and Gus knew how Priscilla had lost her arms, but no one had ever dared to ask. Katana supposed that they were probably wandering the trails of the Majestic North somewhere together, free and happy as birds.
“Bernie’s all fixed up. He’s sleeping right now; I just gave him a dose of pain removers to help him relax,” chirped Ami. Katana jumped in surprise.
“Thanks so much! What should I do with him?”
“Well, you can leave him here until he feels better. But sometimes when dragons are in traumatic circumstances, they Imprint on someone who they trust. Because you rescued him, he may have Imprinted on you. I’ll talk to him when he wakes up and see what he says. If he has Imprinted on you, think of it as a bond. It means he can become very attached to you, which would be very useful if he grows up. He’s the goodest boy, too; he didn’t even cry when I gave him castor oil.”
“Sounds good. Well, I really got to go now-” Katana said, heading toward the door. Ami gasped.
“Are you really trying to leave without telling me where you’ve been for the past three years? And don’t tell me you’re too busy; if you have time to rescue a baby dragon, you have time to talk to a friend you haven’t seen in over three years. The last I heard, you were headed to the mountains to try to track down your father.”
Katana winced; she had been trying to avoid this conversation. There was so much she couldn’t say and so much she wanted to say that she had no clue where to start. But Ami did have a right to know; all she had heard was that Katana’s father had been spotted in the mountains.
“What do you want me to tell you?” Katana asked as she sat down in a blood-red armchair and resigned herself to her fate.
“Everything. Pretend I know nothing, and start at the beginning.”
“Fine. I’ll start from the beginning, then, I suppose. About a year after Gus and Priscilla left, I began receiving parcels from mysterious cloaked figures that all said the same thing: you have been found. I never told anyone much about my past, but all you need to know for my story is that I was running from someone.”
“Is this about you being a Fate? I’ve always wondered precisely what your powers are.” Ami murmured, eyes scanning Katana’s face as though the answers were scrawled across it. Katana frowned; she had thought no one had known about it. As though reading her worry, Ami chuckled. “Don’t worry; I’m the only one who realized. The only reason I knew was because I was watching when you made that elderly man’s plants grow for him.” Katana wasn’t reassured; however, Ami beckoned her continue with an impatient gesture. With a sigh, Katana beckoned her close and whispered quietly in her ear:
“Well, it doesn’t involve me being a Fate but it also doesn’t not involve me being a Fate. As Lady Life, I cannot physically die. I can heal others; the only reason I didn’t heal Bernie was because I couldn’t waste too much of my abilities. I had picked up a tail and didn’t want them to see. They’re still here: hence, the secrecy. Anyways, my powers also include growth; although I cannot force growth, I can encourage growth to happen faster.”
Katana hesitated for a moment. “I can also . . . remove life. It’s usually a flash of white light (almost like energy) when I do it, although I’ve only done it a couple times so I’m not quite sure how it works. In fact, I try to avoid using my power-”
“You’re scared of it,” Ami interrupted. “I can see it in your hesitations and your body language. If I had to wager a guess, I would say that you probably have no idea what you can actually do because you’ve been too terrified to try to do anything.”
Katana glared at her, hating her perceptiveness more than ever before. “Are you telling this story or am I?” She grumbled. Ami rolled her eyes, and Katana continued talking rapidly.
“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I try to avoid using my power unnecessarily. My healing only transfers the injuries over to me, so it’s not even that great. Although I could technically remove any type of injury on anyone, it would potentially torture me to do so. Being unable to physically die also gives a lot of room for creativity when someone is torturing you; I wouldn’t call it a benefit necessarily. Long story short, though, I left because someone who couldn’t find me had found me. And so I headed back up to the mountains to hide and found things I only imagined in my worst nightmares. What I found drove me back home, where I’ve been hiding out ever since. And although I’ve been (mostly) successful in hiding my abilities in the past, I decided that it is no longer necessary to do so. That’s why there are people on my trail. . . quite possibly assassins. Now, listen, I really got to go and get rid of these stupid bloodhounds that are driving me crazy. But please, if you see Gus and Priscilla, tell them to find me as soon as possible.”
Katana extracted herself as gracefully as possible from Ami’s demands to stay the night and headed towards the door. Sometime while she talked to Ami, the sun had sunk to sleep beneath the horizon. The streets were dark save for the faint glow of streetlights on the cobblestones.
She had only walked three blocks when five shadowed figures clubbed her in the head and dragged her into a nearby alley.
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When Katana awoke, a blindfold covered her eyes, and the faint sway of a carriage beneath her was the only indication of her surroundings. There was rustles of movement from one corner but no speech; in fact, there was no noise at all except for her rumbling stomach. She tried to speak, but gagged on the cotton stuffed in her mouth. Someone whispered something, too quiet for her to decipher, and, with a whiff of chloroform, she slipped into a dreamless sleep.
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Where was she? She had no idea. It seemed as though she had stopped moving; she no longer felt the jolting of the carriage and was now lying on a hard surface. The grumbling of her stomach had become sharp pangs, indicating that it had been hours since her last meal. Her legs and arms were bound, but the gag had been removed from her mouth by some unknown being while she slept.
“Hello?” She whispered, voice hoarse and throat dry. There was no response, and she tentatively rolled onto her stomach. Still, no reaction came. Was there anyone around her? She rolled again, trying to determine whether she was on the floor or a carriage bench. Presumably she was on the floor, as there seemed to be no precipice she was in danger of tumbling from.
From a distance came the clanging of a door and the squeaking of bars. Katana sighed; she had thought her prison days were over. Carefully, she felt for the knife she had hidden in the seam of her shirt for situations like this. Her fingers crawled up and down the fabric, and she swallowed a curse. They must have inspected her clothing thoroughly and removed any weapons they found. She couldn’t reach any others while her hands were bound, and she had no idea if there even were any others left.
Footsteps pausing nearby made Katana freeze in place, and she waited with baited breath while her cell door creaked open. She knew who it was by the carefully muted feeling of smug satisfaction radiating from her spleen—a feeling that was most definitely not hers.
“Well, well, well. Look at what the cat dragged in,” Chaos murmured, a dark chuckle filling the room. “Who would’ve known I’d see you again so soon?”
Katana had never hated cotton cloth and chains more. She had, incidentally, also never hated a vampire more. The traitorous thump of her heart in relief when she had realized who her captor disgusted her; for one second, she panicked with the thought that she could be back within the dungeons of the mountains ready for another round of experimentation. She wondered, if she had been undressed, what Chaos’ people had thought about the network of angry scars that ran across her body. His actions were carefully calculated, but seemed unpredictable; she did not know what he was plotting which made him dangerous. How would he try to use her? Katana’s only comfort was that the experimenters had already killed everyone she loved except for the Five; he could not hurt her any more than she had already been hurt.
“No response, Lady Life?”
Katana didn’t have to see Chaos’ eyes to hear the smirk in his voice. She growled deep in her throat, but the muffling of the cloth made it sound more like a whimper. She hated it. She hated that he could feel the panic in the cell. Why had she decided the potion was a good idea?
“Turn towards me.” His brusque command betrayed no indication that he had felt her emotion, and Katana was grateful. When she turned over, he removed the cotton from her mouth and untied the blindfold.
“Now, if I untie you, you better not fight back,” Chaos warned. Katana didn’t respond, fighting her exhaustion. After he removed the straps from her arms and legs, he shoved a bowl of food in front of her.
Katana dared to glance up at him, eyes blinking rapidly as she adjusted to the faint light of the corridor outside. She had been partially right; she was in a cage, dangling above the ground. The sight made her feel slightly queasy, but she had other concerns to focus on.
“Is this poisoned?” Katana rasped, clearing her throat and gesturing to the food. Chaos looked amused.
“Why would we poison you if we could’ve killed you quite easily while you were unconscious?”
“Poisoning can be enjoyable to watch.”
Chaos paused.
“No, we didn’t poison the food. Eat up before I change my mind.”
Katana needed no further encouragement; she gobbled up the food, paused, and promptly puked all over the floor.