bipolyjack

"Yours?"

"Not all of it," says Shrike, shucking off her rain-sodden jacket at the door of the Haunt. She knows the rain hasn't washed away all of the blood on her face and hands (and chest, and trousers) because she can still feel it congealing in hot sticky patches on her skin, and at least one of the cuts above her eye is still bleeding, judging by how often she has to blink the blood and rainwater out of her vision. She supposes Roach, cleaning the bar with a rag, is showing concern, in her own curt way.

"Dinner's in the icebox for you," says Roach on her way upstairs, instead of asking who the rest of the blood belongs to, or where Shrike has been for the past two days (then again, this is Roach; she probably already knows). Shrike tosses her sopping jacket over the coat-rack and goes obediently to the icebox, and has just retrieved a bowl of oily soup and a pot to heat it in when Roach returns with the medical kit she keeps under her desk and a knobbly threadbare towel, which she tosses at Shrike with a critical look at her once-white shirt, now translucent with water in some places and opaque with bloodstains in others, sticking to her everywhere, showing the dark color-blotches of the heavy tattoo work on her arms and torso. "Dry. Then sit."

The Haunt is closed for the night. Shrike strips off her shirt and towels herself down while the soup warms, squeezing water and blood out of her plaits onto the puddling floorboards. She sits in her trousers on the bartop and burns her mouth on soup while Roach gets to work on her various abrasions, holding a bowl of water in her prosthetic hand and dabbing clinically at Shrike with a damp cloth in the other.

"This one needs sewn," says Roach, pressing a little harder at the wide-edged gash across Shrike's brow, which, for the record, was from the windowsill her mark smashed her head into moments before she killed him. The cloth soaks through with fresh blood; Shrike doesn't flinch. Roach sets the cloth aside, lifts the bowl out of Shrike's hands, and gets out her needle and a candle to sterilize it with.

"Want me to do it?" says Shrike, watching Roach carefully pinch the thread in the pincer-claw of her prosthetic hand, her little mouth pressed together in concentration, but Roach shakes her head.

"I'm not great with my left, but still better than you."

Shrike prepares to make a retort, but then decides to keep her mouth shut as Roach's needle pierces the skin above her eyebrow.

In all honesty, Roach isn't half bad with her left, just slow. Shrike has plenty of time to watch her as she sews, to study her face up close in a way she rarely has occasion to do. Her eyes are as smooth and dark and shiny as beach pebbles, and the candlelight glints off of them just like that, like wet stone. Shrike can only see one of them well; the other appears and disappears behind the thick curly hanging mass of hair Roach likes to wear over the ridged chitinous plating that lines the left contour of her face. 

She's always wondered about the texture of those plates - whether they would be crunchy-hard to the touch like a crab shell, or a little pliable, like a fingernail. She wonders if the left side of Roach's body is plated all the way down.

(She won't follow that thought, of course. Roach is her employer, and Shrike is on the clock, even now. That's contract work.)

Roach ties off the thread one-handed, with a brisk tug, and wipes away the last of the blood to examine her work. The faint trace of a self-satisfied tilt comes to her lips. "Ugly, but serviceable. Need a drink?"

You buying me a drink, boss, Shrike might say, if she wasn't such a professional. There's no harm in thinking the joke, privately, to herself. And while Shrike does not, as a rule, drink on the job, her whole body hurts, so she says, "Not gonna turn it down."

Roach cleans her hands and pours her one, strong but sweet, the way she knows Shrike secretly likes it. (Shrike never told her she prefers her liquor sweetened. Like most things, Roach just found out somehow.) They've got a full time bartender now, a former Foghound by the name of Whippet, but before him it was just Roach and Shrike and whoever the Foghounds could spare, so they all had to learn. The kid's not half bad at it, when she's of a mind. 

She pours herself a half-glass as well (weaker than Shrike's) and leans against the counter, dangling the glass from her fingers. "You know, Irina's gonna be pissed when she finds out."

"Maybe she won't. Find out." Shrike tosses back her drink, swallows against the burn. Doesn't ask Roach how she knew. The alcohol fades, leaving behind the lingering sticky-sweetness of syrup. 

"Irina always finds out."

She does. It's her journalist's nose. "Too late to do anything about it," says Shrike, feeling vaguely like she's being reprimanded. "Since when do you care about a pissy Irina?"

"I don't," says Roach breezily, and hoists herself up to sit on the countertop. "Just making an observation." She lets her bony heels tap against the cupboard doors down below. Her bare feet are brown and sinewy, long-toed and high-arched - another part of Roach that Shrike has had few opportunities to study. She used to go barefoot more often as a girl, Shrike remembers, around the clocktower. She'd sidle up behind you on those silent feet and stand there listening to everything you said until you happened to turn and catch her at it, and she wouldn't show the slightest lick of remorse, just fold her arms and tilt her sharp little chin up at you as if you were the one who had been caught out, somehow.

Roach is not a girl anymore, and Shrike hasn't seen her without shoes in many years. Shrike, with some dismay, finds herself strangely entranced. Can't tell whether it's the blood loss or the exhaustion getting to her - or maybe, right, the vigorous meeting of her skull with the windowsill. She closes her eyes for a moment, presses the glass to her forehead. The newly stitched wound stings.

"Stop that," says Roach, brusque, but quiet. Shrike, eyes still closed, feels the glass removed from her hand, feels the cool damp cloth on her brow again. "You need sleep. Real sleep, in a bed, not a thirty-minute upright eyes-open nap in a storm drain."

Shrike doesn't point out that those details are too specific to be made up and how the fuck does she do that, anyways. "Watch?"

"Bear until four, then Weasel until nine. You're not on rotation until tomorrow night. Sleep. Real bed. Go. That's a direct order. And get out of those trousers first, they're a wreck."

"Yeah, boss," says Shrike, and goes.

In the little room she sleeps in, adjacent to Roach's office, she tosses the wet and bloodied trousers over the back of her one chair (does Roach ever think about her without trousers) and climbs heavy-limbed into bed and lies there for a time, though she is very tired, both hands clenched atop her thighs, thinking of the wry arch of Roach's instep, her long and bony toes, and concentrating with furious intention on willing her body to stop having such banal things as involuntary reactions to such untouchable things as her employer's feet.