Like Kats and Dogs
AN: Alright. I admit it. Kat Manx, an - at best - supporting, fictional character in a TV show for five-eleven year old boys, is currently the dominant voice in my head. (My head being that of a sixteen year old school-girl with ex-hippie parents, a liberal humanst philosophy and an attraction to shiny things). Oh well... I wrote this at about two in the morning last night suffering from insomnia and a sugar over-dose (not quite sure which caused the other). I may well continue it. If I do, it will chart the distinctly dysfunctional yet completely unexplored history of therelationship between Doggie Cruger and Kat Manx, from first meating to the end of SPD (or possiblynext year'scrossover, if I'm still inspired by that point). I'm also interested in doing a little digging into the mind of said feline-esk scientist, and the concept that, surprisingly, no one else has delt with on (that I've seen, anyway): The fact that Kat Manx worked with the SPD ranger's parents. Still, I would greatly be encouraged to write more if I recieved a few reviews denoting interest on the part of my readers. Enjoy! And even if you don't want to read more, leave me a reviw telling me what you think!
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not making any money. Yadda yadda yadda.
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There were no liver spots on her cheeks. He couldn't see them at all. They'd completely faded.
Doggie Cruger shook his head.
"She's too far gone! Find the others. This one wont make it off the planet."
Blood leaking from the eyes. Open soars on her hands, face, ears… radiation poisoning. She'd survived the battle, though the gashes down her sides, burns on her arms, in her clothes, suggested that she'd fought hard through out it, only to be struck down because SPD HQ had been too slow issuing orders to send in the cavalry. She'd maybe been lying here two days, amongst the rubble of a once great city and the bodies of her friends, family, comrades and colleagues, coughing up her own lungs, dying of treatable injuries, while radiation spread steadily through her system, shutting her down from the inside out.
A day, maybe even as little as eight hours sooner in getting here, and she'd have been saveable, along with millions of others who would now perish in this pathetically pointless manner. But the liver spots on her cheeks, a tell-tale sign of health in adult Felinas, were completely invisible; her eyes were glazed; her skin was white as paper and turning blue around the lips and fingers; her wounds were infected and festering; her breathing was raspy; bloody foam was bubbling up around her lips with every outward breath. She was going to die, because a commander somewhere three thousand light years away onEX31 (SPD's tempary basewhile they relocated)hadn't agreed with a term on a piece of paper. One more victim out of millions on yet another planet laid waist to by Grumm and his armies.
Disgusted by the pointlessness of it all, Cruger turned away. He could call for painkillers, place a cyanide pill beneath her tongue, or take off his uniform coat and place it under her head. Anything to ease the pain before an inevitable end came upon that crumpled little body. But it was time wasted that could be spent hauling out those who would live from the wreckage. Two dead bodies are not worth the peace of a third, his commander had once said, and he knew the sense in it, though it rankled in his mind.
Then a hand latched onto his ankle.
Soldier's instinct almost made him shoot it's owner without thinking. He was too much on edge. It wasn't unusual for Grumm to leave goons around to ambush any rescue parties sent to his recently concurred worlds. What he saw almost scared him more.
The Felina he'd taken as beyond saving, who was beyond saving, had latched a surprisingly sturdy hand around his boot. Absolute desperation fuelled that grip. He'd seen it before, and he'd see it again. Knuckles so white the bone might well burst through the skin. Her breathing hitched and gurgled. She spat blood, heaved another breath, stared up at him, and he spotted a spark of cold defiance in those bleeding eyes.
"Help me."
He didn't know the Felina tongue, but the shrieking clicks that escaped her throat were unlikely to be anything else. What else did you say in that situation? She repeated it, then broke off to heave, vomiting blood and what might well be bits of her own semi-liquidised intestines. She screamed, a rasping, ear-splitting sound, almost too high for the human ear to pick up. She was attempting to tell him something, though she probably knew that her last words were wasted on him. Blood dripped off her fangs and down her chin. She spat, heaved, coughed, shrieked again, and was still.
Cruger watched her chest rattle to a stop. Her grip on his ankle slackened. Her eyes glazed completely.
Trying to keep his breath even, Cruger made to step away, when he felt something wedged against his heel. What the… she'd put something into his boot. Grabbing him hadn't been a last ditch attempt at survival, but a desperate attempt to deposit something important onto his person. He fished into his boot, to find a tiny glass vile, filled with a yellowish liquid. He frowned, holding up the container, looking at the dead Felina woman.
"What are you trying to give me?" He asked, softly, turning the container over in his fingers.
Holding it up to the evening sun, he caught a glint of something in the liquid. Tiny silver particles suspended within it's swirling content. It couldn't be… he upended the vile and looked at the figures etched out in universal numeral code on the bottom.
It was.
"Commander!" Cruger spun round, "Commander! We can save these people!"
Flinging himself onto his knees as his squad members came running to his side, he hauled the dead Felina female into a sitting position, letting her head fall back, unscrewed the top of the container, and shook two drops loose through the filter, letting them drop between her teethe. Already he was mentally calculating… an average of two minutes to brain death without oxygen for most bipedal life-forms. Could Felinas last longer? He didn't know. This stuff needed aboutone minuteto start working, but she wouldn't be able to breath by herself for another three. One if not both of her lungs was almost certainly completely liquified by now. She'd definitely need an entire body organ transplant within the next half hour. But there were donors sprawled everywhere over these ruined streets. There would be a few who had simply been shot and avoided the radiation turning them to mush from the inside.
"What is it, Cruger?" His commander had arrived, looking irritated.
"This," Cruger held up the vile, "take it, duplicate it, give it to every living victim no matter how far gone they are. It's Menthes serum." Seeing the blank looks he was being given he groaned, "anti-radiation medicine! I've seen it once before and it wasn't working properly. The Felinas have been developing this stuff for centuries. That's why Grumm targeted them. Because he knew they'd finished their research! For Life's sake, what have we got to loose!"
The commander looked about, at his cadets, at the young Canine he knew had recently lost his home, family and wife in a devastating attack on the planet Sirius not two months previously. TheKanine took everything Grumm did to heart.
The felines were a very secretive race. They kept to themselves, and, while it was common knowledge that their entire (not insubstantial) scientific empire had been based around developing a vaccine against and cure for the kind of radiation poisoning that Grumm's weapons left any live victims with, how far that research was along was, understandable, kept very quiet. There was no guarantee that this was the finished product…
Still… if this really was Menthes Serum, it was worth a shot.
"Alright," he nodded, "Birdie, take this stuff back to the ship and have the tech crew replicate it on the double. Now, boy, move!"
"Yes, sir!" The avian squad-man took the serum and ran.
"Everyone, back to your places, start lining up the wounded, sickest first, go by how faded their spots are. Do it!" The other squad-members scattered back across the rubble.
The commander looked down at Cruger, who was still hunched over the body of the Felina who had presumably managed to give him the serum. "Cruger."
"She's going to live, sir."
"Cruger, you know as well as I do that she's long past any need of our help."
"I'll make her live, sir. She's not been dead a minute. I gave it to her quick enough. I know she'll live."
"Let it go, Cruger."
"She'll live, Commander!"
"Doggie, walk away."
"She's going to live!"
And she did.
Kat Manx lay curled up on his couch, in the rooms he occupied in SPD headquarters, purring contentedly over a piece of soy-milk chocolate cake (like most felines, she was lactose intolerant; almost all dairy products made her sick;) her feet propped up on Boom's stomach. The technician was snoring peacefully, having fallen asleep on top of his own paper work half an hour previously. She turned over a lab report with her free hand, made a few corrections then flicked it aside to lazily peel another from a file resting on the floor by the sofa. She felt his stare before he realised what he was doing, and glanced over at him curiously.
"What?"
Cruger shrugged and managed a slight smile, "I was… thinking about the first time we met."
Kat raised her eyebrows, "you mean, the first time we were introduced, or the first time we… met."
"The very first time."
"You mean the time I died?" She raised the matter airily, "right. Why?"
"It's been twenty five years to the day."
Her eyebrows shot up, and she swiftly began calculating something on her fingers, "you're right," she realised, somewhat incredulously, "wow. Doesn't seem that long."
"I suppose for a being with an average life span of seven hundred years, twenty five doesn't mean much," Cruger shook his head.
"Not at all," Kat corrected, firmly, "a person can do a lot in twenty five years. You can have and raise five kits in twenty five years. You can develop accidental gene therapy in twenty five years. You can build morphers, and a career, in twenty five years. You can even learn to love chocolate cake in twenty five years."
Cruger felt his smile grow. "Is that all."
"Mmm," Kat sucked her spoon, "and more, I suppose. Haven't got round to those though, yet."
"Do you remember what I told you when I was trying to keep you awake?" Cruger asked.
"When you were carrying me out of there?" Kat frowned, "something about human customs. Why?"
"I told you that, on Earth, near where I'd been living since my wife died, they have a saying about cats," Cruger told her, "they say they have nine lives. How many have you used up in twenty five years, Kat?"
Kat frowned slightly, considering. "A few, I'll bet. We should tell the rangers. They'll throw us a party."
"That's precisely why I didn't mention it to them," Cruger replied, grimly.
Kat laughed, sounding as he remembered her nearly twenty five years ago, younger and more naive, despite the loss of her home and family. "You're no fun, Doggie Cruger."
"No, I'm not," he agreed, sinking into a chair with a heavy sigh. "As the rangers themselves would say, 'sue me'."
Kat stuck out her tongue at him, and finished off her chocolate cake.
"Do you feel like taking a walk?" Cruger asked her, presently, as he stood and went to the door of his quarters.
Kat delicately lifted her feet from Boom's stomach, "certainly. Where to?"
"Anywhere you want," Cruger offered, then yelped as the feline scientist took a flying leap onto his back.
"For old time's sake," she grinned and wrapped her arms around his neck.
Cruger sighed, "you may recall that those 'old times' were not exactly the most pleasant we've ever experienced together."
"What, you mean when I slept on your couch, crawled around on top of your cupboards, swung on your lampshades, refused to learn English, ate you out of tuna and made you carry me everywhere?" Kat asked, innocently. "Could you blame me? I'd just had almost every internal organ in my body replaced. I needed to keep my strength up and I couldn't walk. And I wasn't staying in that hospital. People kept staring at me."
"Those were doctors, Kat."
She giggled as they headed out of the door, "it's not as if you have much trouble carrying me anywhere anyway, Doggie."
"Tell that to my spine. I swear it hasn't been the same since you first jumped me."
Kat leant her chin on his shoulder, and let him do the walking.