Start Post Log 001 (9 Lives 10 Deaths | Guardian Beast Yuri)
"Guardians are born out of an unconditional love," Nikolai had explained many times when the cold nights settled over the house where Yuri had first opened his eyes to the world. "Your father's for my daughter was a deep affection, so intense with passion for our family as to manifest a magnificent protector. A lion's pride, little fierce one, is its family." Yuri knew what little of his father Nikolai would recall when sleep was difficult to come by- Lev had also been a Guardian of the Plisetsky family, a maned beast whose service began more than seven generations before Nikolai's birth, and whose intervention alone had kept Nikolai's wife (now a blessed memory) safe from the cursing eye during her difficult pregnancy. Lev willed with all the power of his last life that the child, Nikolai's only daughter, have a pride guardian of her own. Such was Yuri's origin. When Yuri had been a cub across his grandfather's lap, he fell asleep before the story's final warning, but Nikolai always spoke it. "I am an old man, and have only one life to spend with you. Humans are brief, but our loves are monstrous things that span lifetimes." Having heard it enough since early adolescence to feel Nikolai's voice in his bones, Yuri sometimes wished his was not so new and fresh a soul in this world. Yuri expected to outlive them all, but he sure as hell didn't want to think about it and had stopped pretending otherwise. He clung to the family's history of longevity-- a testament, Nikolai had boasted, to the strength of Lev's resolve to protect the family ages ago. Yuri tried to seem unbothered by mortality, even though he prowled his grandfather's apartment as often as his mother's penthouse, strutting and rolling shoulders and jamming fists deep into his coat pockets. He lingered in doorways, scowling, breathing in the smell of frying potato cakes and stewed beets. The sense that some fucking thing was going to happen made Yuri's scalp itch. Nikolai's big bakers' hands still formed the most delicious pirozk and most beautifully crimped hand-pies, but Yuri had seen them trembling at the wrists with the effort of fine-dicing cabbage. The encroaching cold made Nikolai's arthritic joints creak, which soured Yuri's mood just as reliably as the lemon Nikolai was squeezing over the simmering borscht upstairs. Kicking a stone from the orange fluorescent light of the doorless stairwell into the alley street darkness, Yuri cursed his nerves. "Ugh, Fuck off." From the alley, an irritable meow. "Not you, Tomcat," Yuri said as he crouched and extended a hand to the big stray tabby that emerged from its shadowy hangout near the fire escape. It was a young guardian's mistake to divide his attention.