SILENCE BETWEEN SONGS . . . oneshots

🎶 17.

one last time deleted scene ; in which i had too many plans for kat and was too lazy to put them in the actual fic.
— warnings : mentions of drinking & alcoholism. the waystation stuff is so inaccurate because i'm too lazy to actually read back the dark prophecy LMAO. also the timeline might be lowkey wrong?? or quick at least. oops.

❝ seventeen, i can't recall a thing
a cry for help, but no one's ever listening ❞

KATERINA'S LIFE MOVED quicker than the speed of sound when she was seventeen.

She'd barely had a moment to herself, caught up in the training and the missions and the avoidance. So much avoidance. She brought this on herself, because the moment she let herself stop, she thought about that day when her life was ruined.

But now she's happier. Or, at least, she was distracted. But being distracted is better than being sad.

Was it too late to slow down? Absolutely. Did she want to? Absolutely not.

Maybe she never got to stop and smell the flowers, like every other seventeen year old did. Maybe she never got to sit and dream away the hours because every time she slept, she had nightmares: nightmares of Leo dying, nightmares of Jason and Piper leaving her, nightmares of her mama, playing in black and white like old TVs.

Everyone told Katerina that she'd be okay. That she would move on, that she'd get over her trauma. Like life is just a game.

But she didn't want to play. So she avoided it.

She threw herself in her missions, in drinking, and in traveling. In surfing the waves whenever she had time. In playing her guitar and humming along. But mostly in the former three.

But no matter how much she tried to avoid the past sixteen years of her life, it always found a way to snake back into her life.

It started with Leo, because of course it did. Katerina's life started with him, and it ended with him. Nothing else mattered.

It was around June, almost a year after their quest had started. She spent the last ten or so months traveling, and stealing, and fighting, and trying to outrun her depression before it consumed her. Oh, who was she kidding? It probably already consumed her.

She was on a mission in Indianapolis, stealing some jewel or artifact from a rich businessman in the area or something. She had no idea, but she needed to cement a position as a really good spy so she could keep going out, keep avoiding the past.

Naturally, the past didn't want to avoid her.

The last few days she and another group member had been scouting out the building, and miraculously she hadn't noticed that something was stuck to her bag. Not until there was a knock on the door that made everyone gathered around the dining room table flinch.

"Everyone's here, right?" one of her team members asked as another went to look at the monitors that displayed all of the live footage from the security cameras.

"Who the hell is this kid?" he asked.

Katerina got up to look and . . . what the fuck?

"No fucking way," she said, storming back to her chair and grabbing her bag. "I'll be right back."

"Did you get us compromised, Mikhailova?" another team member snapped.

"He won't say anything, don't worry," Katerina reassured her as she walked over to the door, leaving the warehouse that they were situated in.