Urbs omnia

[intheheart]

Title: Urbs omnia
Rating: PG-13.
Summary: New York City should be Urbs omnia, city of everything.
AU: Urban Fantasy
Warnings: sexual harassment, depiction of a panic attack.
Notes: justice_turtle's AU request from my Celebratory Memes.



1. city that never sleeps

Olivia doesn't sleep, her first night in the city. She sits instead on the fire escape outside her window, and stares down at the ground, watches the lights go back and forth, stirs the air with her bare dangling feet.

Aura, wind-nymph; she has a name for herself now. Her father-- it's so strange to think the word, and not mean Hugh Marhenke-- did he ever know he had another daughter? She doubts it, doubts too that he'd care if he did know.

She feels so disconnected, high above the living city.

She doesn't think she'll ever feel connected again.



2. taxi!

Zack's nose is bothering him.

It's the damn wolf, it's always the wolf, trying to claw its way to freedom. He hasn't changed uncontrolled since he was a spotty, hormonal teenager, and he isn't about to break that streak, but fuck, he needs to get out of here. Anger is sour on the back of his tongue, fear sweet like an overripe plum, and there's the wolf, clawing, scratching...

He throws a hand up and he must look awfully damn urgent because a taxi stops right away.

At least in the sticky backseat it only smells like gas and sweat.



3. don't call it the big apple

New York City is nothing like an apple, and yet people call it that all the time. Summer does not understand this.

She prefers the proper names for things. Homo sanguinus for vampires, Homo lupus for werewolves... well, technically it means shifters, but lupus means wolf so she uses it literally. Everything has a real name: New York is not "the big apple."

New York should be Urbs omnia, city of everything. Homo sapiens and all their mutated cousins, sanguinus and lupus and all the rest. So many lives in such a small place.

It is nothing like an apple.



4. tourists everywhere

Aaron's favorite coffee shop must have made it into some kind of supernatural guidebook, because it's crawling with tourists. An elf and a pixie jostle for a seat, a little trolllike being with no teeth and octopus suckers for fingers orders a latte, a wendigo bounces impatiently, and a kitsune argues amiably with a harpy over the last black and white cookie. There's even a manticore, though how he got in here without attracting attention...

He'll just have to lurk until a seat opens up.

Well, maybe he'll wait for a second seat. He doesn't want to fight that rakshasa.



5. commuting

Gail wears her hair up at the office, clipped back with a gold barrette, with a tailored charcoal pantsuit and low heels. It looks professional, even a little intimidating, precisely as it's supposed to; precisely as it's supposed to, it shows no more than half of what it is.

Low thick heels, with excellent balance. Hair pulled back severely so no tendril can escape to block her field of vision. A pantsuit, because fighting in a skirt is not advisable, tailored to hide the three daggers and two stakes she wears at all times.

Once a slayer, always a slayer.



6. the Bronx

One second Jake's pretty sure he's about to die; the next the vampire is dust, and his new boss is holding the stake.

"Mr. Foster?" she asks, sounding just as confused as him. "What are you doing in the Bronx?"

"I live here," he says. "What are you doing here?"

Her mouth twists up. "My second job." She considers him. "You're not collapsing in terror."

He shrugs. "Just sudden death. Nothing to get worked up about."

"Hmm." She considers him again. "Interesting. My office, nine o'clock sharp tomorrow morning."

That's a nonsequitor, to say the least. But she's already gone.



7. Brooklyn

Summer takes the train to Brooklyn sometimes, and walks down to Admiral's Row, the grand old rows of houses now falling apart. The only things here now are ghosts, and they don't frighten her. Not like the living.

She comes here to turn her truesight on the buildings and the dead that haunt them, to touch hands with the ghosts and tell them they are remembered. She knows, she tells them, what it's like to be alone, to be forgotten; she tells them that while she's here, they'll never be alone.

She hopes, in some distant way, that it helps.



8. Manhattan

For once, Ivy is having a peaceful evening. Then Lars barrels through her window, followed immediately by some blonde chick with a stake.

So much for that.

Ivy drops and rolls and pops up between them, demands "Who the fuck are you?" as Lars locks himself in the bathroom.

"Working." The woman sounds on edge. Noob.

"The fuck you are, Manhattan's my turf." Ivy crosses her arms. "Lars's troll-blood, anyway. Not our division."

The woman stops, looks at her. "You're a slayer too?" She sounds weirdly hopeful.

"Genetic," Ivy says. "Name's Ivy."

"Danny," the woman says.

Ivy forgets about Lars.



9. Staten Island

He works in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn, but sometimes, Nathan takes the Staten Island Ferry for no reason. Or, well, not no reason, but not a reason that anyone on this boat would understand.

He is a selkie's son, the not-quite-human child of a mother who never really left the sea. He was nineteen when she judged him old enough to fend for himself and went back to the water where she was born. He still misses her.

It's been decades, but sometimes he takes the Staten Island Ferry and looks for her in the water.

Just in case.



10. Queens

Most swan maidens keep to themselves, hiding their feather cloaks in cupboards or safe-deposit boxes. Joy flaunts hers, uses it in her act, wears it around the club when she’s off or trolling for lap dances. It’s so much a part of her act that everyone thinks it is an act.

There's safety in danger, invisibility in open publicity. Reality in pretense. The idea appeals to her, who spends so much of her life pretending.

She smiles, strokes her hand along a drift of cloud-white feathers. No one will take her cloak away.

And she will never have to hide.



11. Central Park

If Gina follows the stream in Central Park, she comes to a waterfall into a small pond that is so much like home her breath catches. Even in summer, surrounded by greenery, it is familiar; in the winter, layered in snow, it is perfect.

She goes there some winter nights when she is unbearably homesick, slips naked into the water and lets her gold hair float loose among silver shards of ice. She's never cold in the water; though her nipples may tighten and her skin pebble, she is always warm.

In the water, she knows her name again.

Rusalka.



12. Upper East Side

Jake didn't know this before he started working for Ms. Hirschfeld, but a slayer no longer slays vampires. Or not solely. According to her, that wasn't even their primary function, originally. One does not need truesight just to slay vampires, after all.

He strolls down 74th, counting buildings. Somewhere in here is a nondescript building that houses New York's other diplomatic center, the one that the United Nations will not acknowledge. Somewhere in here is Ms. Hirschfeld's second job and the slayer's original function: diplomat and policewoman for the supernatural community.

Couldn't have picked a better woman for the job.



13. Lower East Side

Aaron calls them preta, but Ivy knows a vampire when she sees one.

Okay, so they're not vampires in the mutated-human sense; they're really more like spirits. They look like starving mummies, distended bellies swollen in skeletal frames, limbs like twigs under grey, dead skin. They eat things, usually something harmless, if disgusting; corpses, crap.

This one eats blood.

She chases it through the Lower East Side, but the damn thing is quicker than lightning; she never quite catches up.

She stands at the edge of the river, panting, and vows that next time, she won't let it get away.



14. there's more to New York than Manhattan

When Aaron was seven years old, his dad sat him down and explained that he wasn't fully human.

It was a weird talk. He'd learned of the supernatural world and that he was a part of it all in ten dizzying minutes. It was his first real experience with not knowing, the first real sense that ignorance was danger.

He's not ignorant anymore. He got a degree in anthropology and applied it to the supernatural world, learning anything and everything that people would tell him. He's got a reputation even: That Guy Who Probably Knows.

He still doesn't feel safe.



15. traffic jam

Olivia isn't proud of the fact that she had a panic attack in a taxi.

But what exactly was she supposed to do? She was already having a nervous day, then the taxi got stuck in traffic, and on top of that the driver wouldn't let her open the windows. The smell, he'd said, but she'd needed the air.

She'd shoved money at him and stumbled home, crying the whole way-- now she sits on her fire escape and rests her forehead against the railing, trying to calm down.

She'd've thought not being human would overwrite mental illness.

Apparently not.



16. jaywalking: a way of life

Lars is a troll. In more ways than one.

Though strictly speaking he's only troll-blood. Somewhere in the distant past his ancestors had long limbs and graying skin and tangled, wild hair; in appearances he's inherited only the hair. But they passed down something else, those ancestors from the ragged Scandinavian mountains, a gift in the blood left for more urban children.

He steps out onto the street with blithe unconcern, gives the finger to a swerving taxi, dents the bumper of a sedan that doesn't quite manage to miss him.

That's gonna bruise, he thinks, and walks on, grinning.



17. take the subway

Gina is not a traditional rusalka. No one really is, these days, but her sisters deny it, insist that they all act as they have always done and lure unfaithful men to a watery grave. Gina refuses that; it seems a lot of effort for little payoff and a possible murder conviction. But scaring them, now...

There's a man staring at her. She can feel his eyes on her back. The subway sways around a corner and his hand is suddenly on her ass, groping and squeezing before retreating into the crowd.

She smiles.

This one will be a pleasure.



18. on Broadway and off

Infected blood in the IV and boom, the joys of vampirism are Felipe's. Zack says this is what he deserves for blowing himself up. Summer just shakes her head.

It could be worse. Life goes on for him more or less as normal. He grows more and more nocturnal and gets real friendly with the blood bank, but he still does his job, still loves his partners.

Plus, of course, he buys a suitably dramatic cape and wears it everywhere.

He didn’t ask to be vampirized, but it happened. He's damn well going to play it for all it’s worth.



19. egotism, n, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen

There's nothing at all supernatural about Jake, beyond an excellent memory and reasonably phenomenal patience. He's fairly sure that's why Ms. Hirschfeld hired him, for his stubborn ordinariness in the face of otherwise utterly bizarre events, and his refusal to let them faze him. But really, this is one step too far.

Emma's looking at him like he's grown a second head. "What's wrong with it? The answers are all right."

He knows they're all right, that's the problem. "Maybe someone else wanted to do it," he grumbles.

"Then someone else should buy their own paper," she says, calmly.

Sphinxes.



20. I love New York City; I've got a gun.

Danny loads up the guns with silver and salt and slots them into her shoulder holsters. The holy water pistol gets stuck in the back of her pants. Guns loaded with ordinary bullets go in the holsters on her belts, next to the bone and cold iron knives. Plain throwing knives have their own snap-release holsters around her forearms, under her jacket. Clutch piece in the ankle holster, switchblade down her cleavage, steel-boned vest under the jacket, sturdy boots laced tight around her ankles.

She rakes a hand through her short hair, glances once in the mirror, and heads out.