[GROZNYJ GRAD TOUR CONTINUED] Part II

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

[RECAP:]


Nikanor Liadov:

Nika raised his head slowly, but didn't stop what he was doing.

He remained holding the cadaver bag open for an industrious Rakitin, who was cradling Molokov's severed calf like a newborn, rustling it carefully into the sack.

"Gorgeous," he replied pithily.

It wasn't unpretty. The ash and smoke had billowed, sculpted and plumed. Transforming the greenhouse into something new, a functionless sculpture.

Once it had been utility. Now it was art and form.

He wondered who he was talking to. The gravelly tone was not one he'd heard before, and he had a pretty good forensic ear and memory for voices.

"Actually, we're just removing some dead meat. Don't mind us."


Rakitin:

"Oh, hello," Ippolit said. He waved an arm, realized it was not, strictly speaking, his, and set it in the bag Liadov was holding open while the MENT shot him a look of amused tolerance.

So the shadow shaped like a man in a space suit was, in fact, a man in a space suit. Just went to show that you never could tell.

"Sorry to bother you," he chirped. "We'll be out of here in just a minute."



[[CONTINUATION ->]]


"Who is it?" Liadov asked Rakitin, mildly quiet, shaking the bag lightly to settle the arm down to the bottom, the way you would when selecting new fingerling potatoes in the Petrograd harbor.

After all, they still had two legs and assorted possibly-significant ash and timbers to gather up.

Rakitin was carefully unearthing the left leg from its sooty repose, letting excess ashes fall where they could compile them, and not lose them to the wind.

The greenhouse was now undeniably open-air, and not exactly breaking the unpredictable, occasional gusts of mountain wind.

"Bruising, or charcoal?" he asked, frowning, tilting his head for a better look.

Comments

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Nika smiled.

"No, no. I don't believe you did this. It doesn't suit your modus."

Liadov glanced at Rakitin, who was coming back, looking inordinately pleased with himself, holding the stray finger up and shaking it Nika as if he were scolding.

"Can I close this one up?" he asked motioning at the bag.

Rakitin made a happy affirmative noise and pulled a smaller baggy from his pocket, which he lovingly wrapped around the forlorn digit.

Nika set down the larger bag and began to carefully tie it, then rose, straightening his cap.

He turned his attention back to the cosmonaut, a surreal figure against a surreal backdrop, where Liadov himself actually seemed to be the odd element.

"Funny," he said. "I'm the one who looks out of place here."

Then he refocused on the issue at hand, reassuring the Fury that he was not a suspect. Not that he suppposed the cosmonaut cared overmuch.

"I think- had you wanted to torment the German, you'd have set his lover on fire in front of him."

The idea was terrible, but more in line with what he'd heard of the man.

"And to be utterly honest, you aren't a murderer. You're a nihilist." Nika shrugged. "Death is incidental to you. Only a byproduct, if you will, of your true mission- which is sterilizing the world."

Nika tilted his head, meeting the man's eyes as well as he could through layers of heatproof glass, smoked amber.

"I'm not sure if the same can be said of all your troops."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

So this was The Fury. One of the famous Cobra unit. Rakitin hadn't met any of them yet, excepting their leader, The Boss, a woman who would have been tall and imposing anywhere except beside the Colonel, and who had looked as though she could snap Ippolit's neck by thinking about it.

There were six of them, including her. Five. He kept forgetting that one of them had died a few years ago. Ippolit's tally was thrown off by the way someone with a macabre sense of humor had written in "The Sorrow" at the bottom of the roster in his files, in a neat, Gothic script.

"You don't need a spacesuit here," Ippolit said helpfully, sealing the finger safely in plastic. "The atmosphere's perfectly breathable."

He paused, remembering what they said about assumptions.

"It must be," he concluded. "Otherwise one of us would have fallen down by now."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"That or you're an alien," whispered Liadov, inverting his eyebrows theatrically. "Are you a lizard man, Rakitin? The State demands you disclose."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Ippolit grinned. "Then you'd have to be one too, wouldn't you? You've fallen right into my trap."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Nika smiled wryly.

"I've been called a reptile so many times, my dear Lieutenant...you have no idea," he drawled. "Nice to have company, though."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"I never understood what people have against them," Ippolit said thoughtfully. "Even the poisonous ones really don't bite very often. Unless you poke them with a stick."

His eyes went involuntarily to the neat sets of small, old, round scars on his forearm.

"Several times."

[vostok-n2o4.livejournal.com]

“You know of my mission?” He asked, incredulous. The cosmonaut took a step toward Nikanor, but stopped just short. “How is that possible? I’m impressed.”

The Fury’s limited perspective of the world prevented him from realizing that perhaps criminal investigators half a world away in Moscow studied his file for whatever reason; the case of a wartime hero pilot gone absolutely fuck-raving loony by all accounts. Naturally, the files always left out the part about the covert space mission, heat shield failure, or suspected sabotage.

The casualty with which Liadov proceeded in picking apart his brain should have said enough, but the comment about the flame patrol made him bristle again.

“It’s a good thing you’re here to investigate a murder, and not the ethics and morals of my flame soldiers.”

Ippolit’s comment at least eased the tension, and made the Fury smirk to himself behind his respirator.

“That isn’t quite the point. The atmosphere is quite nice I’m sure, but I don’t want whatever diseases you two might be carrying.” He pointed at Rakitin to emphasize his point. “And you shouldn’t joke about extra terrestrials. Alien abduction is very serious business.”

For a moment, he was thankful that Phobos had wandered off into the woods, singsonging to himself about pursuing his favorite glowing fungus. Deimos had already convinced the poor boy that the investigators were aliens that would kill him, eat his organs, and wear his skin as a suit.

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"He's right," Rakitin said to Nika, nodding gravely. "Alien abduction is terrible problem. Back home, they used to abduct sheep by the dozens." He frowned, pensive. "For some reason, it usually centered around enlistment time. Must have been the alignment of the planets."

"But," he said, turning back to The Fury., "I don't have any...That is, I didn't." He looked down at his bandaged hand. "Now, I might have some kind of new strain of hyper-rabies."

That would be interesting. He would have to check it in the lab later, if he remembered.

First, there were more important things to take care of.

"I should get these to the lab," Rakitin said. "There's not much chance they belonged to anyone but Molokov, but you play with the hand you're dealt, as they say. Care to help, Major?"

Ippolit smiled over his shoulder, briefly and tightly, almost shy.

"We lizard-men should stick together."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"Agreed," said Nika. "Isn't it nice to be in a place where lizard men are the most average of citizens?"

Indeed, had there actually been lizard men at Groznyj Grad, they would have been largely unimpressive.

He returned the Lieutenant's gesture with his own restless, wry slice of a smile.

"And of course I'll help. Wouldn't want these beauties wilting."

He gave the bag in his hand a baleful glance.

"Sorry to have intruded on your handiwork. But the MVD believes in always leaving a place cleaner than it was when we came. That goes for campgrounds and incinerated greenhouses alike."

[vostok-n2o4.livejournal.com]

The Fury nodded to the investigators. Either they were mocking him, or they were out of their minds, or both. The cosmonaut was nearly certain it was the former, but he didn’t mind as much as he though he should have.

They were both so refreshingly friendly that it was almost cliché. No harm in humoring them.

“Lizard men. Of course. From Planet X, isn’t it?”

Beyond the remains of the burned greenhouse, a lone flame soldier picked his way along the edge of the woods, an obvious khaki spot against the spring green. It was perfect.

“Phobos!” The cosmonaut called, “over here.”

The flame soldier gave the investigators a very wide berth as he returned to his captain, stumbling over a half-burned board and never taking his eyes off of the men. He regarded them with a truly deranged glare; he didn’t walk, he scurried, keeping his prize clutched close -- his gasmask, turned upside down and half-filled with glow cap mushrooms.

“No need to worry.” The Fury offered, as the soldier scuttled behind him to hide, peering between the pipes of the cosmonaut’s jetpack. “They’re only lizard men. They won’t hurt you.”

“Planet X?” Phobos asked, his green eyes going wide. He stood up, looking over the rocket booster that he had previously been trying to hide behind.

“Indeed, comrade.”

“To be stealing my mushrooms?”

The Fury shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re just here for Molokov’s limbs.”

“Oh.” The flame soldier blinked, as if considering the captain’s words. He ran a hand through his red hair, brushing it back out of his eyes, and laughed nervously. “Why?”

“To clone him, of course!” The Fury laughed, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world.

The flame soldier smiled as well, stepping out from behind the cosmonaut. “Cloning Molotov? Like the cocktail! Welcome to Earth, lizard men. Want a glowy fungus?”

The cosmonaut only laughed, amused by his newest recruit. “Do pardon him. Comrade Phobos is just a little…different.”

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Liadov stared at the soldier's gasmask, bewildered by the calm luminescent glow of the mushrooms.

"What...what in the world are you holding in your respirator? Those aren't...from a meltdown site, are they?"

He looked at Rakitin uneasily.

"Have you ever seen anything like this? Radioactive truffles?"

The Fury seemed to have an unusually tolerant affection for his little fledgling flamesuits, even this one, who was clearly not rowing with both oars.

He wondered if the sanity deficit impeded the commission of his flame-throwing duties or enhanced them.

"It's nice to meet you...Phobos?" Nika said, keeping his voice very open and unloaded. "Do you have a rank, or just a codename?"

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Don't worry," Ippolit said to Nika. "They're perfectly natural. Bioluminescent. Like the fish."

He smiled reassuringly at the nervous flame soldier, the helmet in his hands indeed resembling a bucket full of anglerfish bouquet. With a word of thanks, Ippolit reached out and plucked a small, gently glowing fungus.

"There's no such thing as cloning," he confided to Phobos, who was staring at him as though he were going to sprout scales and claws any minute. "Anytime anybody tries it, they're left with a pile of goo, looking sheepish. And we're not from Planet X.

"It's a moon, actually."

Ippolit studied the mushroom, its pale, friendly luminescence dimly apparent, though crassly drowned out by the sunlight.

"Funny, isn't it?" he mused. "Nature creates such strange things, without any radiation at all, probably. It seems like glowing in the dark wouldn't be anything but a good way to get yourself eaten. But it must serve some purpose, or else it wouldn't have evolved that way."

Rakitin popped the mushroom in his mouth. After the certain things they'd discussed with Major Krauss, he would never see mushrooms in quite the same way again, but this one wasn't bad.

Polya looked down at his watch.

"Huh," he said. "It really does recharge batteries."

He glanced up.

"You should try one, Nika."

[krasnogorje.livejournal.com]

“Name?” The flame soldier tilted his head, giving Liadov the look of a dog that had just heard a high pitched whistle. “Don’t remember.” He shrugged, dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.”

“You see…” The Fury trailed, “a name means nothing on the battlefield.” The cosmonaut narrowed his eyes at them behind the smoked glass. “Not that either of you would know anything about that.”

It wasn’t an insult, only an observation about the constitution of their character.

“Don’t worry about those mushrooms. He hasn’t sprouted a second head yet.”

Phobos laughed, grinning widely at his commander, and held the fungus toward Liadov in offering.

But the cosmonaut was suddenly serious again, and sighed. The investigators, they were good men, sent to do good work. Molokov was a good man too, measured against the Fury’s peculiar set of morals.

Molokov didn’t even deserve purification. He was one of the most genuinely kind people the Fury had ever happened across, bright, intelligent, and curious. Always full of questions; they never bothered him, and they were never condescending. He was always so curious about what all of the steel drums of rocket fuel were being used for.

The question that lingered in the cosmonaut’s memory most vividly was a simple request: an autograph. Molokov explained that his young son at home in Moscow was enamored with all manner of mechanical things that flew through the air, the boy would be delighted to have a simple greeting from such a famous pilot, and Cobra soldier as well.

“I’ve decided you should live.” He said finally. The Fury wouldn’t go so far as to admit he rather liked them, and the way they humored him, all nods and smiles and outlandish stories. It was the sort of reaction he had come to expect. It was the reason he collected his flame soldiers from the outside world in a simple navy blue VVS standard issue tunic and jodhpurs. People reacted better to horrific burns and disfigurement than to a ashen black space suit.

At least the investigators were nice about it.

The Fury lifted his helmet off to address them properly, wincing momentarily at the brightness of the midday sun. “Liadov. Ippolit. You have my word that I will issue an immediate cease and desist to the soldiers under my command that would like to kill you.” He pointed at Nikanor. “Especially you.”

He nodded, as if confirming his decision with himself. Then, he turned to the flame soldier at his side.

“Phoebe?”

“Hnn?”

“Shall we go see how those heat seeking napalm rockets are coming?”

The soldier nodded his affirmative, and happily followed the captain.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Liadov blinked.

"I didn't ask his name," he said, bemused, after they had left. "I asked his rank."

He shook his head and shouldered the bag, shaking his hair out of his eyes.

"Apparently part of the requirement for Flame Patrol service is utter deafness."

He glanced at Rakitin, raising his eyebrows.

"I'm your burden beast, Lieutenant. Were do you want it?"

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Huh," said Ippolit, watching the Flame Patrol trail down the hillside like a line of lop-sided ants. "Looks like you're popular. Did you spit in someone's propellant tank already?"

It was too bad the flamethrower soldiers had departed so abruptly. The red-haired one had seemed nice.

"Down to the lab," Rakitin said. "I should run those blood tests."

A formality, really. There could hardly be two brutalized, dismembered corpses lying around.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"I sentenced two of them to serve life in Magadan," Nikanor said calmly, as they made their way toward the laboratory.

He was following the Lieutenant's lead; Liadov had no idea where the Groznyj Graddites had sequestered his witch doctor during the early evening hours he preferred to work.

"Obviously, they didn't stay there."

He grimaced slightly.

"Unremarkable murderers of the sick but common kind. Whores, shopgirls. Wrecked, discarded. All over Leningrad."

He paused.

"Krauss personally signed for their release. Undid two years of hard work on my part. Blood, sweat, tears and eventual vindication."

His eyes narrowed slightly.

"I don't take kindly to that."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"No," Ippolit murmured, eyes down on the uneven ground, "I can't imagine you would."

Girls. Why was it always girls? Young ones, usually. Pretty. The ones that would go unnoticed. Mourned, by someone.

"I'm familiar with the type," Rakitin said quietly. "From the...effect side of the equation."

He sealed the implications away in the place in his mind meant for dealing with such things, the compartment with metal edges.

"Two convicted murderers here already..." he muttered. "Does that change anything?"

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"I don't think so," said Liadov, truthfully.

The Flame Patrol girl-killer lunatics were a red herring, a diversion. They didn't kill Molokov. They wouldn't have had the stones to take down a full grown man.

Predators like that were sad, slavering misogynists; impossible to romanticize, and only able to regain control of their own limp cocks and flaccid sanity by slaughtering other people's daughters in the most inhuman, snivelling, loathesome way.

There was nothing about it that conveyed any credibility in toughness or mettle- it was rot, it was the weak being preyed upon by the weakest, who couldn't even bear their own lot in life without taking it out on someone else.

His fist clenched slightly.

He should have pilled them both with cyanide when he had the chance.

Rakitin's words gradually coalesced into sense for him.

"...You lost someone. I'm very sorry." He frowned slightly, squaring his shoulders beneath the sack of Molokovian remnant. "It isn't the same, of course, but after so long staring at the photos and names...I feel as if I lost them all."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

The anger radiating from Nika was palpable. It surprised Ippolit. He wouldn't have guessed there to be much the MENT allowed to crack his composure.

"My sister," he said.

A girl, they had said. Another one. Sad. Sad. Pulling the sheet back and feeling the glue that held reality together soften. Thinking, She would have looked... The endless second in the shelter of not understanding.

No. Here, and now, as real as it got.

"Thank you," Ippolit said, with an honesty that surprised him. "...I think you understand."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"When you live next to the cemetery, you can't weep for everyone," Nika said, tonelessly, thinking he'd probably said that to Rakitin before, in another context. It was a mantra of his, something he turned and returned to.

No, you couldn't, but sometimes he did.

He almost cringed, at the casual way of it, the detachment with which survivors were forced to speak of their murdered loved ones. It was necessary, for life to progress.

"Younger?" Liadov asked, hesitantly. "You seem like the kind of guy who'd have had a little sister."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

He had said that before, Ippolit remembered. People repeated things they were convincing themselves of.

Or not. Rakitin had no way to know. He had to remember that.

"Yes," he said, nodding vaguely. "She was fourteen."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Nika's lips twisted.

"Nice," he said, in a way that invoked the inverse.

He shook his head.

"I hope they caught the bastard. Hope they sent him up North, or better yet, shot him up against a flat."

He looked up as they approached a door.

"You get this whole underutilized lab building to yourself? Generous."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"He was convicted and sent to Siberia," Rakitin said, allowing a degree of cold satisfaction to slip into his voice. It was different from the visceral revenge he had heard described. What was the word? Seigi.

His mouth twisted.

"But it seems that's not as permanent as it appears, if your old friends here are anything to judge by."

He opened the door and blinked in the unaccustomed gloom.

"If anyone else uses it, I haven't seen them. I'm not sure why. It's a perfectly good set of laboratories, and not that many rats. I figure that, between the Fury's men and Khostov's technicians, anyone else prone to playing with chemistry sets is kept on a short leash. Or..." Ippolit considered. "Maybe it's haunted."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"Ghosts," Nika said, almost pensively. "I believe in them."

It was dark when they stepped inside.

Rakitin flipped a switch and he waited for the hum of the overhead lights warming up.

It was going to be a long night, but Nika had no intention of leaving now that they had found a lead. He would have tea and sit up with Rakitin while he worked.

Lab work was lonely. Better with a comrade.

Especially a creepy place like this outbuilding.

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Believe in them," Rakitin murmured, half to himself. "Right."

He often forgot that there were people who saw acknowledging spirits as more than simple politeness.

Nika set the evidence down on a low steel table, but made no move to leave. Ippolit was surprised. It was rare that someone was willing to stay with him while he worked, though he didn't know why. He'd only done the old "your name up in lights" joke once.

"This shouldn't take long," Ippolit said, getting to work.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"Didn't the Major say something about finding you a better lab space?"

Nika glanced around. Yeah, circa 1955.

"This equipment has to be from fifteen years ago." He picked up a very clinical but vaguely art-deco clamp light that lay on the desk. "Khui. This is probably 1940s vintage."

He wondered where the Majors were. They were supposed to get back to them, weren't they?

"...I hope they didn't kill each other," he added.

There had seemed to be a little Animosity in Majortown, if Nika wasn't mistaken- and he rarely was, at least in terms of human nature.

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Ippolit shrugged. "You work with what you have."

At least, he always had.

His brow dipped pensively at the mention of the Majors.

"There's definitely something odd between them, and they're not making much effort to hide it." He smiled wryly. "Even I can tell."

Ippolit wasn't in the habit of making assumptions about what influenced other people's actions. There was no way of gathering empiracal evidence, and no way of knowing for certain whether or not you were wrong. No way of knowing how one's personal feelings might color observations.

That pretty Major. Dynamic, self-assured. How could anyone ever understand someone like that?

"In any case," Ippolit said, shaking himself out of wistful reverie, "it's nothing so simple as violence."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Nika snorted.

"I ask for administrative support, and I get a couple of prancing uniformed blonds in a catfight."

He inclined his eyes toward Rakitin, who was weighing each of the fingers carefully, using minute motions to calibrate the scales, as if they were priceless caviar.

"What did you get?" he asked, idly, half-joking, toying with a badly rolled cigarette someone had left unsmoked on the workbench.

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"Careful what you wish for, and all that," said Ippolit.

He picked up the sad, cat-gnawed finger in his bandaged hand.

"I'm afraid to find out. Might get a hunchback with a lisp and stitches all over him for an assistant."

He adjusted a gauge with thoughtful precision.

"Actually, I've always kind of wanted one of those."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"One thing is concerning me," said Nika, eventually, pulling out his flask and taking a small nip. "Would you like to know what it is?"

Rakitin's expression, like it always did, said "Why not"?

This was as Nika had expected, so he plunged in.

"The thing is," he said. "It troubles me...that we have...too many fingers."

He paused, sighing.

"Is that wrong?"

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

"No...." Ippolit said, staring down at the results. The syllable extended for a deal longer than it had a right to. "That is-- as I would expect."

He should have noticed before.

A jingling, lonely understatement tripped back and forth in his head.

This is bad.

"I'm going to run these tests again to be sure," Rakitin said, his hands moving with practiced swiftness. As if they didn't belong to him after all. "You should contact the Majors and tell them to organize a search. But..."

He kept his eyes down, steady on his work. He felt a breath of cold settle on the nape of his neck.

"I have the feeling that, whoever these belong to, he's already long past wanting them back."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"I don't want to deal with those two," muttered Nika.

But of course he would have to. It was either that or go directly to Volgin, and while the Colonel had seemed cooperative and pleasant enough, there was a streak of paranoia in the man that Liadov was absolutely not going to activate.

He'd heard too many stories.

"I'll flag down a soldier," he said wearily. "See if he can find one, or both of them."

He looked down at the fingers in question.

"He might not be dead," he said, skeptically. "One swallow doesn't make a whole summer, as they say..."

Rakitin nodded, and he shrugged and they both wholly didn't believe a word of it.

"False analogy," he sighed. "To compare fingers and swallows. Let it be said I tried, however fallaciously, to make this not the fiasco it seems destined to become."

[hajimenoippolit.livejournal.com]

Rakitin ran the tests quickly, without the encumberance of much hope.

He was not disappointed.

"No mistake," he said dully. "They're not Molokov's."

Swallows or sparrows. He had no doubt this one had fallen. Had no one seen it?

He let out a breath he hadn't been holding.

"Why can gut feelings never be about good things?"

[capt-kasya.livejournal.com]

Kassian lingered near the outbuilding.

He didn't have a nest here, which he found discomforting. Instinctively, he always sought high ground. Better to see his target, harder for his target to see him. He'd made a career of hiding on rooftops, along ledges, and in trees.

Imanov had nixed the idea of heading inside to keep watch on the investigators. The building was small and isolated, and given they could actually hear Liadov and Rakitin's voices echoing from inside and they weren't screaming in agony, it was a safe bet Flame Patrol wasn't in there with them.

Imanov had preferred to maintain cover, rather than have to give explanations. Kassian doubted they could keep it up forever, but he wasn't going to fight Imanov over a point that could become moot at any moment.

He watched the door from his position just around a corner, crouched low behind an old crate. The position was the next best thing he had to a nest overhead, and it actually gave him good line-of-sight to the nearby buildings, and the outbuilding door itself. Imanov had taken up a position on the other side, to cover the rear approach.

It was good enough for now. They'd make their re-adjustments when Liadov and Rakitin came out.

Kassian shifted slightly, to get into a more comfortable position, then settled down to wait. His mind entered the watchful, restful state of maximum awareness of his surroundings and willful ignorance of the passage of time.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

"Because good feelings always center in the groin," he deadpanned to Rakitin, as he unhooked his boots and quit the lab stool he was perching idly on.

"I'm going to step outside and see if I can find an Ocelot," he said, but his instinct told him that the Majors had made themselves scarce for the evening.

Bored with the whole ordeal already, no doubt, he thought cynically. Fucking mindless mercenaries.

He sighed and went to push open the heavy metal door to the yard, stepping outside into the bright winter night.

Shadows struck stark geometric hatches along the sides of the corrugated walls. All around the mountains loomed jaggedly, but the sky was soft as velvet and muted blue like a Ver Meer.

Liadov glanced around.

The yard seemed deserted, no soldiers, no murderers, no mammals. No wait. There was a mammal.

A bat flickered erratically under the high flooding sodium light.

Liadov smirked, watching it, vaguely annoyed at the paucity of major action he was getting.

The bat dipped, and it was then that he noticed the shadow that didn't belong.

It was a long, cylindrical shape, protruding from a triangular corner, the shadow cast by a metal crate to his right.

He turned quickly, and moved toward the crate on soundless boots, drawing his Makarov and extending his arm.

Nika was looking down at a balaclaved Ocelot sniper, poised in a settled crouch, finger resting on the trigger of his trained rifle.

"Looking for someone?" he asked, with narrowed eyes, training the gun on the man.

[capt-kasya.livejournal.com]

"Not you," Kassian replied, calmly. He looked up at Liadov with a solemn, steady gaze.

"I had the perfect shot three seconds ago, if I'd been here for you."

He'd thought about this possibilty, that Liadov would find out about his shadows on his own. Personally, Kassian thought the MVD investigator should have known from the beginning. Less chance of inadvertently spooking him that way, like Kassian had just done.

"We're here to protect you," Kassian told Liadov.

He paused, hands still on his rifle, then tilted his head slightly.

"Major, if you're going to stand out in the open like this, could you at least step behind me? You're blocking my line of sight."

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Nika smirked again and holstered his Makarov.

He thought he recognized that voice, though he couldn't be sure. Low and rich like black coffee, with a slight gravel of grounds.

"I'm touched," he said, archly, sweeping his gaze over the surrounding terrain. "You said 'we'. Who else is in my fashionable entourage?"

Liadov moved back as spoke, toward the door, so the sniper could cover him at a distance while they spoke. He was used to MVD snipers. They were taciturn businesslike men with hard mouths and steady muscles. The man's complaint didn't irk him. It seemed wholly germane to a Longshot.

"Is this what Volgin meant by protection? A silent counterattack team?" Liadov smiled, shaking his head. "It's nice to be loved- of course, I probably should have gotten a memo or something."

[capt-kasya.livejournal.com]

"I agree." Kassian nodded once, shortly, but kept his gaze ahead, scanning the surrounding area. Nothing had changed since he'd laid eyes on it last. Good.

He found the fact that Liadov had spotted him so quickly to be comforting. It meant that Liadov had a mind for self-preservation and situational awareness.

Generally, it was easier to protect someone who knew how to protect themselves. But it was a good thing Liadov hadn't turned out to be the twitchy sort, the kind of man who shot at shadows.

"Sorry, Major. Just following orders."

Regardless, Kassian could have done a better job at hiding. Had he really wanted to.

"Lieutenant Imanov is nearby," he explained, eyes still on their surroundings. He did not so much as glance at Liadov when he spoke, keeping his attention focused on where it should be, which was everywhere else.

Kassian had rarely done protection duty during his tour in Spetsnaz. Most of his assignments were offensive in nature, for no particular reason he could discern save for the fact he'd been through the war.

It took a certain kind of man to shoot someone in cold blood. A man willing to protect others was, perhaps, more common.

"Were you going somewhere?" he asked Liadov, after another few moments.

Now that was something he and Imanov hadn't discussed: what would happen if their pair of investigators decided to split up.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Liadov frowned.

"Not if I can help it. I don't want to leave the Lieutenant alone in the lab. But we've run into a situation requiring greater notification. We'll require a search of the premises and surrounding areas, ASAP."

He paused, unsure how much to disclose without knowing who he was addressing.

"Is there only one sniper in OMON Ocelot?" he said, trying to gauge the face behind the balaclava. The eyes seemed to speak the identity he sought, but Nika knew better than to go with assumptions on the occasions when facts could be easily verified.

[capt-kasya.livejournal.com]

"Why?" Kassian asked, suddenly intent, but he still didn't break form and take his eyes off his surroundings.

He realized, after a moment, that it had sounded like he'd addressed Liadov's last statement, though in truth, his mind still lingered on the previous.

"One sniper. Irinarhov," he supplied, hurriedly.

Under the balaclava, in the dark, he might as well be another twenty year-old blond lieutenant for all Liadov knew. Only the Mosin-Nagant marked him, and Liadov had never seen him with it.

But Kassian had caught an underlying tension in the MENT's tone, read something under the euphemism.

It hadn't been an idle question.

"It's me, Major Liadov. What's the situation? I have CODEC, if you want me to notify someone."

[imre-nico.livejournal.com]

Liadov nodded.

"Captain. I thought so," he said, almost to himself. "Yes. We have a problem. A real problem. I'm not going to waste your time or mine yanking dicks over who's privy on a need-to-know-basis."

He paused.

"There's another body out there somewhere. Another victim. The limbs we found don't belong to Molokov."

A sigh.

"CODEC me someone. If you can't get me one of the Majors, get me Volgin. If you can't get anyone, call out a search yourself.

[nikanor-liadov.livejournal.com]

Liadov nodded.

"Captain. I thought so," he said, almost to himself. "Yes. We have a problem. A real problem. I'm not going to waste your time or mine yanking dicks over who's privy on a need-to-know-basis."

He paused.

"There's another body out there somewhere. Another victim. The limbs we found don't belong to Molokov."

A sigh.

"CODEC me someone. If you can't get me one of the Majors, get me Volgin. If you can't get anyone, call out a search yourself. My authority."

He pulled off his MVD badge and tossed it at Kassian.