Title: Sings the Caged Birds
Author:
Fandom: The Bourne Series
Characters: Kirill, OFC, Jason Bourne
Pairings: Kirill/OFC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except Anastasiya.
Summary: A caged bird never trills a jubilant song, only one of despair and longing for what it knows is just byond the metal bars. Anastasiya is one bird among many trying to find her own song, and failing. She's locked in a world where the other birds have turned their tail feathers to her and she's alone.
When she was a little girl, her grandmother used to tell her, God loved the birds and invented trees, Asya. Man loved the birds and invented cages. Growing up, she never knew what her grandmother had meant and after a few years she never gave it another thought. But it occurs to her, on a cold, rainy day in London, so far from her homeland, what her grandmother might have been hinting towards. It comes to her suddenly, as if the knowledge itself is not quite sure whether she is ready or not to understand, and she agrees, maybe. She's not ready, but she remembers, all the same, about the day she began to learn what it meant to free a caged bird.
She remembers the first time she met him. It was dusk, in England, and cold. Not really cold, but enough that it was a bit uncomfortable. She was walking to her dorm, like every other evening, after a four hour rehearsal with her instructor. She was tired and her fingers hurt, more than they had in years. She remembers that she was maybe a bit sleepy, enough to lessen her awareness of her surroundings anyway. She tripped over an uneven cobblestone in the road and she fell onto the rough, wet pathway. Her face lit up in embarrassment when some of the other students heading the same way roared with laughter. They passed by her without a second look and didn't break from their tight-knit group. None of them stopped to help her. She was nineteen at the time, and alone: too old to fit in with the child prodigies at the Royal Academy of Music and too young to fit with the older, more experienced students. She had nowhere to go.
She did not right herself immediately but when she did small rocks that clung to the skin of her arms and the fabric of her jeans had to be brushed away. There was a new tear in her well-worn pants and fresh blood oozing from her palms alongside the dried from the hours of intense abuse to her fingers and wrists. She used the already somewhat stained fabric of her jeans to wipe the blood away and bent to retrieve her bag and case. She remembers the sudden impact of someone larger, stronger, than her colliding with her back, and being afraid of hitting the ground again, but she never did. A solid, though gentle, arm halted her fall. It was fast to slide around her waist and pull her upright against a firm chest and, for a moment, it was as if she was being held like someone's lover, warm and protected. But, as soon as she was righted, the arm disappeared and she was able to turn to face her savior. And she was awestruck. She still has no better words for her feelings that day.
He was taller than she was, she had to tilt her head to look him in the eye, and broad in the shoulders and thin at the waist. His hair was black and short and his eyes, she remembers his eyes the best. They were hazel, nothing special, but the way they looked at her, like some kind of warring knowledge lay behind them. They were stunning. His lips were set into a sullen frown, like he hadn't expected to run into her. Like he hadn't even seen her. She remembers that a broken thanks tumbled out of her mouth, her rough accent a little deeper and a little more slurred. He had blinked, as if he was surprised, but there was no other outward sign that he was anything but stoic. And he had opened his mouth and answered her in her native language; his voice is rough and unused, but is soft at the same time, almost like a whisper. She remembers him walking away, sliding, caressing, his fingers so lightly over her elbow that she maybe had imagined it, and his eyes had met hers and then he was gone.
She doesn't remember much after that, only one minute she was on the street and the next she was in her fourth story dorm room. She shed her jacket and her scarf and set her giant instrument case, bigger than she was and black and alive under her fingers, in the corner behind the door. She shuffled into the almost non-existent kitchen area and had fixed a cup of strong tea and had huddled up in the small window seat with a blanket and relatively new sheet music, though it had been bent and straightened and well-loved before; she had a performance in a few months and she had to make sure she was completely familiar with the piece.
But the longer she sat there, the longer she thought about what he had said.
"Обережно, пташка."
Careful, little bird
A/N: This is diffrent from the teaser. there is a new paragraph and the others have been changed.