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[ blog is very WIP !! ]
✇ indie // mutuals only // very selective // VERY low activity roleplay [side]blog for KATE WALKER from U.S. AGENT comics. ✇
❱ 21+ only, triggering themes & topics will be present !
❱ essentially just an OC lol . goes by katie and uses she/they
❱ estranged sibling of @antipersonal [my main blog]
The lake is misted over, phthalocyanine green and shuddering with the last ripples of displacement. Todd stumbles in the shallows-- human again, blinking at the white beam from Katie's phone, waking up from something halfway between a coma and a hangover.
"See ya later, alligator," they mutter humorlessly as they wade in after him. The water bites cold. It seeps through their jeans, stings their raw knuckles.
Todd doesn't answer. There's mud on his arms, lakeweed tangled in his hair. When they haul him up by the arm, he's heavy in a loose, unstrung way, and his skin is fever-hot.
Katie wraps him in an old terrycloth robe, one that smells faintly like detergent and smoke, presses cheap flip-flops into his hands. It's become a habit to keep them in her bag for months.
He doesn't talk much, not that he ever does. Just sits cross-legged in front of the radiator in her trailer, steam curling from his skin as the water dries. Katie crouches behind him with a towel, combing through his hair in slow, clumsy strokes.
"You're a bad swimmer," they say, not unkindly. "Woulda thought you got enough practice by now."
He hums-- a low, sleepy sound.
Katie studies the pulse at his throat, the curve of his shoulders under their borrowed shirt, how perfectly, painfully normal he looks. Every time he comes back, she expects to see something left over -- a scaled ridge, a milky white film across his eyes-- but there's nothing. Todd is whole again. Intact.
When Katie stretches their hands, the webbing between their fingers catches the light, faint and translucent. Not quite skin anymore. The serum has been kind to them, so far.
He sneezes suddenly, sharp and human. Katie startles, but their nose crinkles in amusement when they toss the towel around his neck. "You're a mess, dude," they tell him.
Todd blinks up at them, bleary and still far from the surface of himself. There's something childlike about it, something disarming, and Katie feels a strange, irrational guilt bloom in their chest.
"I know," he murmurs.
They sit together a while, saying nothing. Fog presses against the window, and somewhere beyond it, the lake stirs.
He's sitting on the edge of the counter when he says it.
"Can you check?"
Katie looks up from their phone.
"That I'm still--" He gestures vaguely, eyes skittering away from theirs. "You know. Me."
Katie doesn't sigh. Just closes the screen and crosses the short distance between them, tucks a greasy pink strand behind one ear. The radiator hums, turning the damp air thick and metallic.
"All right," they say. "Hold still, big guy."
She starts with his hands. Five fingers. Nails bitten to the quick. She turns them over, presses the tendons in his wrist with her thumbnail until he flinches. His skin is clammy, but still human. Still fragile.
Then his face. They tilt it toward the light, study the tiredness in his doe eyes, the split in his eyebrow that never healed right. He blinks at them, uneasy but trusting.
(He isn't unattractive, Katie thinks, not for the first time. If he were a girl, and she was a boy, and everything about their lives wasn't so deeply, irreparably wrong, maybe she'd do more than think. But it's late, and neither of them have enough energy left to play pretend.)
"Teeth?" he asks.
Katie tilts her head, tired voice like wet gravel. "Weirdo. Open up."
He obeys. They catch his chin, pull his mouth open, run their thumb over the blunt edges of his teeth with clinical precision. The contact feels strangely grounding, the way a pulse beneath your finger reminds both parties they're still alive. Todd's breath is warm where it ghosts across their wrist. He exhales when they let go, unspooling just a little.
Still, the paranoia lingers in his eyes.
Katie reaches into their pocket.
The tiny folding blade clicks open. They take his hand again, turn it palm-up. A warning would only make him flinch, so they don't give him one. It's a careful, practiced motion, just a little nick.
A bead of unremarkable red wells up. Todd stares at it like he's afraid when he blinks it'll disappear.
Katie sweeps a thumb over the cut and licks it, shrugging idly.
The relief that washes over him is quiet but total-- his shoulders droop, and he looks oddly young, like the fear that had aged him had been peeled back.
They wipe their hand on their shirt, fish a crumpled bandage from their pocket, presses the cheap adhesive into place. Todd's hand lingers and she's struck by how small it looks, curled into her palm.
Katie hasn't touched another person in weeks-- nothing that wasn't transactional, brief, forgettable, violent-- but here they are. You can’t see a wild thing until it decides to trust you.
Then, with an exhale that could either be patience or fatigue, they ruffle his hair roughly-- it's getting long nowadays, sticking to his forehead as it dries. A gesture that tries to say: You're okay. You're still you. I'm still me.
The radiator hums. The run-down trailer holds a little while longer.
You choose to love. Love does not come to you easily, but every day you wake up and choose it. It would be so easy, wouldn't it, to grow cold and callous and grim.
But you rise to greet the world, making the conscious effort to find something, anything to love. When you fall for someone, you do not kid yourself of their flaws. Instead, you resolve to see them for who they are, mistakes and all and you love them all the same.
Your love is work, and it does not come easy. Your love sweats and toils. It is calloused and sunburned; it bears scars and comes with stories. Your love is worn, but it is no less valuable for it. Being loved by you is like being loved by a gardener, a mother, a teacher.
Your love may not always be the simplest, but it is worth the effort.
Her body kicked in before her brain. One shot and their shoulder split, muscle and bone splattering onto the surface of the water. Another, clean through the ribs. Another after another, body tearing and rupturing, bone glinting wetly through ragged flesh - they kept lurching forward, vivid blue bleeding across the water like an oil slick.
Yelena's gun clicked hollowly.
And then she collided with the shore, so hard the air punched out of her lungs. A hand shoved her head down, mud sluicing into her mouth and nose. They thrashed, boots scrabbling uselessly in the sludge, but it wasn't enough - terror ratcheted through Yelena's skull, hot and primal, as her diaphragm spasmed.
The table was still wet as she leaned back onto it. One of the overhead lights flickered. Bad bulb. The last girl on the table had gurgled, thrashing and choking until all of a sudden, she stopped. They carried the body out, called up the next. If Yelena focused hard enough, she could hear the bulb buzzing, just out of harmony with the rest. She stared at the lamp, its coil flaring in an irregular pulse, as they pressed the cloth over her face. Stared at the aftereffect burned on the inside of her eyes, breath shallow in her throat, and waited.
Something registered. Words - drawled out by amusement, familiar in some far-off way Yelena couldn't isolate with the edges of her mind feathering into murky blackness. A wet squelch, the pop of cartilage.
Her knife - fuck, she could feel it pressing into her thigh, blocked by Katie's leg and just out of reach. Pressure swelled in her chest, tugging a flood of panic with it. Yelena wriggled, cold mud sucking at her sleeves as she fumbled for something to grab onto - her hand hit something damp and solid, a stretch of skin, and she latched on, nails biting in.
For one split second, Yelena felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Then it hit - the bites arced through her, hot and sharp like the slice of a razor, her muscles tensing at the voltage. The body on top of her jolted, the lolled, and the pressure on her neck eased long enough for Yelena to force her head up and scrabble out from under Katie.
Relief collapsed over her - then ebbed as fast as the tide. No gun. They were bigger. She had to move fast.
Yelena crawled on top of Katie, knees bracketing their waist, still gasping and spitting mud. She slammed Katie's shoulder's back into the silt, blue-tinged water crackling with residual static as it splashed around them. Her knife was slippery with mud and blood, but Yelena drove it into Katie’s shoulder, wrenching through neoprene and still-fusing tendons.
In the faint wash of moonlight and the eerie, blue haze, Yelena finally got a good look at them. The skin was peeling off the side of their face like old paint, but the gunshot wound was half gone - muscles fibers aligning, phosphorescent blue splattered on their skin and running in bright rivulets into their pink hair.
"You're not my target." Yelena blurted, panting, water and blood dribbling down her skin. Her hand slipped on her knife, then steadied, twisting in the muscle.
The slope of their nose or the shape of their jaw, something - it was familiar, but wrong. Like looking at an old photo, or seeing someone through the distorted field of memory. But it couldn’t be them.
Katie was supposed to have eyes like hers - greenish-hazel. Not a blue so bright that white phosphenes stained the edges of Yelena's vision. And Katie wasn't supposed to get her jaw blown off and have it fuse back together.
Katie wasn’t supposed to be that much like her brother.
Katie locked up when the shock ran through her soaked body. Her eyes flared, teeth flashing in the moonlight, and she realized a little too late-- god damn it, those stupid fucking gimmicky taser cuffs. She ground her jaw as she was shoved, irritation flaring hotter than the serum in her veins. How had she forgotten?
For one awful instant, the sensation yanked her backward. Worse than the cattle fence she'd grabbed as a kid, the one Lemar kept insisting he'd fix. Improperly installed, the wiring had sent out a far worse shock than it should have, coiling up her arm and sending her sprawling to the ground. The two boys hadn't yelled, hadn't scolded, just looked more scared than she'd ever seen them. (That had hurt worse.)
She shook her head violently, furious at herself for remembering. That was a different Katie. Katie wasn't that girl anymore. Katie was something else. Bigger. Faster. Predatory. Better.
Her shoulder flared where the knife was burrowed-- in a adrenaline haze she wrapped her hand around Yelena's fingers and twisted it harder, deeper, until it snagged in the tendon and muscle in a way that made it impossible to pull it free cleanly. Her body hummed with the rush, the fury, pain dissolving into something deliriously alive.
A spray of glowing blue blood splattered across Yelena's cheek, thick and phosphorescent. Another fragmented tooth blossomed through the gap, and she caught it in her mouth for a second before letting it tumble into the mud with a soft, squelching plop. Her grin split her still-healing face-- wild and shark-like, an uncanny mirror of her brother.
"Yeah? You're mine," they spat, words crawling low and wet over Yelena's skin. Something mean glinted in their eyes as they squeezed harder, threatening to break her fingers around the handle of the knife as they leaned up, the tip slicing through the other side of their wetsuit with a sickening rasp.
Her eyes flicked up to meet Yelena's, glowing and smug, almost salacious. "Guess I'm not the first Walker you've been on top of," she slurred, testing the words as her jaw finished knitting itself together. "Don't worry. I'm not jealous."
Then she moved, the movement sinuous and unnatural, something that had no right to exist in a human body. She crushed Yelena to her chest and rolled them both into the lake in one fluid, terrifying motion, an alligator twisting chunks of muscle out of its prey. Bubbles of laughter escaped her mouth as she bore down, down, every vein beneath her skin glowing in the darkness as the struggle churned the dark water around them.
[ He wakes up on the couch, hair damp, tongue sour. The blinds are drawn. Katie is hunched in the armchair like she's been waiting for a verdict, arms muddy to the elbow. He asks what time it is, what day, what month, and she shrugs like it's nothing. He doesn't understand why his throat tastes like metal. ]
The water is warm. KATIE tosses scraps of fish to him and makes bright little noises he doesn't understand. He swims in circles, basking in the sun. Her voice is a good sound, even if the words mean nothing.
[ Next time he wakes up, her hair brushes her shoulders. He knows it used to be shorter --much shorter-- but she insists it's only been a few days. Todd knows better. They can't live in the city, can't live anywhere, not when he's legally dead and can't risk showing his face. He wonders if that's the reason she looks so sick. ]
He keeps time by visits. One each day. Sometimes the moon crosses overhead three, four times before he sees her-- he thrashes in the water angrily when she returns, tail cracking against the dock, only settling when she fearfully raises her voice.
[ He remembers the other Walker sometimes. West Point, same room, same cheap mattress smell. They weren't friends, not really, just two weird and quiet boys shoved together in the same space. He knows better than to bring it up-- Katie's jaw goes tight at the name, and besides, Todd's memory is already swiss-cheesed to shit. Most things before the procedure are missing anyway. ]
The dock creaks. Her shadow falls over the water as she tosses a hefty slab of frozen salmon into the water, bigger than usual. His tail stirs the weeds when he circles up, and KATIE laughs when he snaps up the fish in one bite. Laughing is a good noise. When she swims he rolls beside her, big and clumsy, careful not to break her with the sweep of his tail.
[ One day, there's a syringe on the counter. He doesn't ask-- he's been around needles enough to mind his own business. Katie's hands shake when she hurriedly knocks it into a drawer, not enough coffee in the world to steady them. She tells him it's nothing. He nods and pretends not to notice the glow in her red-rimmed eyes. ]
KATIE kneels at the edge of the dock, straps the tourniquet around his forelimb. The needle slides in. She smells nervous, though there's no reason to be-- he'd only snapped at her the first time, when the fear had made him foolish. Now he just grumbles under the water as she speaks to him softly, lets her rest her cool hand on the smooth scales of his neck.
[ Todd doesn't like mirrors. He doesn't like the cold. He doesn't like the fact that he can't walk into the pharmacy and ask for the little orange bottles that once kept the worst days from tearing him apart. He used to stockpile everything: cans, batteries, extra ammo. Now he has nothing but a damp couch and Katie's patience, starting to thin just like the color in their face. ]
Today she's folded in on herself, shoulders jerking like she can't get air. (Fish do that sometimes-- gasp in the mud, open and close their mouths until they stop moving. Todd doesn't want her to stop moving.)
He rises, pushes his snout against her knees. No change. He nips at her leg, sulks beneath the weeds when she kicks at him.
When KATIE finally lifts her head the noise is louder, ragged and painful. Her face is already wet-- he tests it with a clumsy swipe of his forked tongue as she scolds him. (Salt. Strange. The pond doesn't taste like that, does it?)
He does the only thing he knows. Takes the edge of her shirt gently in his teeth, slides backward off the dock. She follows without resistance, arms limp around his neck, folding into the pull.
The water closes over them both. Here, at least, she won't run out of air.
[ The choice is simple in the end. As a man he is hungry, paranoid, unmedicated, a burden.
As a monster, well-- Seattle Times said fish prices were going down this year, didya hear? ]
The pond is warm this time of year. He circles KATIE when she visits, nips at her ankles to make her laugh. Listens to the smooth lilt of her good sounds, the ones that mean nothing.
This world is smaller, and kinder. He stays. He doesn't wake again.
This far north, the cold never fully released its grip - dampness clung to the back of her neck, slicked the straggly ends of her hair. Yelena skimmed a hand back over it - like that would do anything - and flicked her fingers to clear the water. The rain had petered off a few minutes ago, but residual droplets still pattered down from the redwoods onto the marshy ground, a muffled, asynchronous rhythm.
Any other night, she would be inside. Back at the Motel 6, curled up in one of the shitty, creaky beds. Down the street at a dive bar, betting darts for drinks. Sitting with her back against the foot of the bed, watching trash TV with the team. Anywhere but here - miles off-trail in Olympic National Park, olive green coat zipped up to the throat and still not warm enough.
Her phone buzzed against her hip. Lena fished it out of her coat pocket. It took two tries to unlock it, fingers stiff in the chilly air.
WALKER: Where'd you go, Lena?
She tapped in to respond, then stared at the three little dots blankly. An excuse should be easy. On a run. Needed some air. Need a smoke. Just out, be back soon.
would you tell him you did it
Yelena clicked off her phone. They pushed their knuckles into their masseter, wincing, but the tightness didn't ease.
No sense in thinking about it now. Maybe this was nothing, all just a weird coincidence. Maybe they'd stomp back to the motel, muddy and exhausted, block their number and tell John everything. Maybe Katie was bluffing.
Maybe not.
The treeline thinned. Yelena fumbled with their phone again, just long enough to check the coordinates they'd bagged off a couple of the weird calling cards. The little red marker on her screen blinked - yeah. This was it.
Mist hung low over the glossy surface of the lake. It was the still, dark gray of the sky, murky at the edges where the lolling waves lapped up against the mud. Quiet. Humid. The roof of her mouth needled - a faint, metallic smell lingered in the air, ozone and gasoline, something else they couldn't quite place.
Yelena eased out her gun.
"Alright, Katie," they called, voice low, boots crunching over the pebbly ground. "Little cold for a swim." Yelena crept down the slope towards the shore, eyes flicking between the treeline and the coast.
Silence. The back of their neck prickled. Down the shore, half hidden in the haze, a flicker of blue. Yelena whirled towards it - then froze. It was gone. They squinted into the mist. Edged closer to the water, mud squelching under their boots.
The lake didn't ripple when she ducked into it, just parted black and slick without ceremony. Katie peered just beneath it, through the curtains of weed and fog-diffused moonlight. The double dose of serum might have been overkill, what with the way her skin was already spiderwebbed with veins, enough radiation that her gums ached. She ran her tongue over them, idly, feeling one snaggletooth catch on the blue-stained flesh.
Above, Yelena moved. Katie studied them, not out of strategy but curiosity. If they'd met somewhere else-- some piss-stinking dive bar bathroom, tacky neon humming overhead-- Katie might've chosen a different kind of hunting. Oh well.
Katie wondered if they looked this small to Todd, from the shore, if they were still human enough to count as prey. Perhaps by now, swapping this much blood, the two of them belonged to the same nameless category. Outside the food chain entirely.
The water parted again.
Slow. Unhurried. Something dredged from the Innsmouth mud, pried loose from the silt. Plant matter clung to her hair in ribbons, the water impossibly dark where it dripped down the material of her wetsuit-- brackish and iron-rich, faintly sweet with decay. The smell of it rolled off her in waves, mixing with the strange ozone sting. She noted, with a sour amusement, that Yelena had worn white beneath their jacket.
The gun cracked.
Katie's shoulder came apart first, hot and wet and wrong. The shock made her lurch, but she didn't stumble, just took another lazy, shambling step forward. The next cored her ribs, then the meat of her side, then her arm. Over and over. She took each one, didn't bother dodging.
Her body did what it was asked. Gristle squelched, sinews snapping and stretching and coiling back into place, veins threading through the mess as the bioluminescent blood hissed into the water. It splattered over the surface like an algae bloom disturbed, spreading light and viscera across the black mirror. Beautiful in a sick way.
A shot tore along her jaw, shattering teeth. She spat them out, jagged splinters that glittered once in the moonlight before sinking-- new ones pressed forward already, serrating through the bloody gums. Katie smiled, wet hair plastered across the good half of her face.
"Pretty good shot," they said, voice raspy and wet, listening for the click of an empty magazine.
And then they were on Yelena.
With both hands fisted in the olive fabric they wrenched her off her feet, knocking the gun into the water with a splash, and hurled her face down into the shoreline. It seeped up, mud and brine pressing into Yelena's nose, her mouth, cold water lapping at them both. Katie bore down like a tide dragging her under, straddling her into the muck.
She could feel Yelena fighting, fingers clawing uselessly at the earth, at roots slick with water. Mud bubbled where their mouth should be. Katie leaned close, listening to it, her own wounds dripping warm viscous trails into her blonde hair, down her neck.
Their cheek mended audibly beside Yelena's ear-- tendons drawing tight, breath whistling through the gap as they sighed in satisfaction. "Hope you brought a knife too, babe. It'll be boring if this is all you got."
Katie let herself muse, as she listened to the struggle. If Yelena could see in the dark, they might have noticed the resemblance. Same nose, same sleepy eyes.