Room 508, Thursday Afternoon

[spin_kick_snap]

If anyone asked Kathy how she was dealing with the events of Monday's little destination adventure, she'd tell them she was doing just fine, thank you. She'd had her crying, she'd had a good talk, she'd drowned her brain out with purely physical pleasure for a bit, and now she was much better. The only lasting consequence of Monday was her new inability to walk past a certain empty room on the fifth floor without blushing a little bit. Everything was fine.

Granted, she hadn't gone out and patrolled as Banzai even once yet this week. And she was spending hours at the gym and in the salle, weight-training and working on the moves Eliot had been drilling into her for several months now. Oh, and she wasn't sleeping well at all, even with how exhausted she was. But those weren't related, either to one another or to Monday. They just...were. She was just adjusting after a week away. Or the change in seasons and the darkening days were messing with her natural rhythms. Or it was stress over college applications. Kathy had a hundred different excuses she could apply to the situation--or would if there were a situation.

Which there wasn't.

Because she was fine.

Take today for instance. She had dubstep blaring wile she did set after set after set of pushups. Beneath her on the floor was her Italian textbook; she was memorizing verb conjugation with every rep. On her bed were several dresses so she could figure out what to wear for the dance this weekend in between sets. In all, a completely normal day with nothing at all amiss.

See? Kathy was fine.

Comments

[spin_kick_snap]

"Fair," Kathy said quietly, popping up to snag some spoons and bringing them back. Bowls were for the weak, dammit. "I'm sorry, I haven't meant to be be weird and stressed out, but that's a pretty fair assessment of the situation, I guess."

She gave Raven a crooked smile. "Any chance you'll buy that I'm really invested in becoming Homecoming Queen?"

[tigerundercover]

"I might've, if you didn't start with asking if I'd buy it. Plus, radio made it sound like something much more dire happened."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I wouldn't actually want you to believe it," Kathy admitted, shoving her hair back from her face. "Because then I'd be lying to you and you're my best friend. I'm not going to do that. Things got...things got bad, yeah. I, umm..."

She took a big bite her her ice cream. "Someone--a cop--died in my arms on Monday. Shot by another cop. To frame me and Anders. For reasons we're still not sure about."

[tigerundercover]

"Oh my god!" Raven pressed her hand over her mouth and shook her head. "Kathy! That's -- in Baltimore? Were you crime fighting?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"No. Thank goodness. I haven't done a lot in Baltimore since the fire." Which you know, she also hadn't really mentioned to her roommate. Damn, she needed to talk to Raven more. "This was in Dante's world. I guess he gets kidnapped every so often to go fight demons or something. Unfortunately, when he's snatched, the people next to him can get grabbed, too."

[tigerundercover]

"I get the feeling we're going to have to make this a regular ice cream fest appointment," Raven said. "What fire, and oh my god that's so creepy."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Can't argue with more ice cream and time with you," Kathy admitted. "And--yeah. Yeah it was. Dante disappeared, buildings around us started falling apart and injuring people, and we were attacked, and by the time Dante reappeared, two of the cops were dead and the demon he killed looked like a little old lady. It was...rough."

[tigerundercover]

"How do you end up in these situations?" Asked the girl who went to the ocean floor to fight off drugged up mutants and impersonate a cult leader to rescue a blues singer.

[spin_kick_snap]

Lucky for Raven, Kathy didn't know about all that and couldn't offer it up as a counterpoint.

"This one? I didn't go when Dante told us to. He said to get to a bus station. I said I wasn't going to leave him behind. Then he vanished and Anders and I tried to help the civilians, and..." She shrugged. "Then we got attacked by, like, rogue cops or something."

[tigerundercover]

"Of course you didn't, you all got sucked into a timewarp or something! Why would you leave someone behind after that?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"Exactly!" Kathy declared, happy that someone else saw it the way she had. "What was I supposed to do? Just abandon him? I didn't know he was going to be sucked away into an extra-Limbo dimension or whatever!"

[tigerundercover]

"You'd already been sucked through one thingy. What were the chances he'd get sucked through another?" Raven shook her head. "At least you and Anders had each other. It must've been extra creepy for Dante."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I think he's used to it," Kathy said glumly. "Which doesn't mean you're wrong." Just made it sad and creepy for him. "But I don't know what I would have done without Anders. I'd be toast, if it hadn't been for his magic. He stopped a cop from shooting at me by sending a fireball through him."

[tigerundercover]

"He's extremely useful," Raven agreed, remembering him in action down in Rapture. "So then what happened? After you guys stopped the evil cops?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"Nothing all that brave or heroic," Kathy admitted softly. "Two cops were dead and two were down. Dante phased back into the world and we ran for it. Stopped at a gas station bathroom so we could wash the worst of the blood off, Anders helped Dante heal a bit, and then we caught a bus and came back to Baltimore." She spread her hands. "And lo, the impressive saga was at an end with a ten minute scrub and a bus ride."

[tigerundercover]

"Well sure. It'd be nice if a pirtal zapped you home, but a bus sounds luke a perfectly dignified route."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Sure, assuming you're not spending a few hours trying not to cry and feeling blood drying in your hair," Kathy snarked. Then she scrubbed at her face. "I'm sorry, Raven. I shouldn't be snide. I'm just--" There really wasn't a word for what she was. So she just shrugged and had more ice cream.

[tigerundercover]

"Okay, I missed a step. Why were you trying not to cry? Because the cops died?" That didn'tsound right to Raven. She knew she maybe didn't react quite normally to people dying -- she definitely should have freaked out more over killing people in Rapture, right? -- but surely Kathy had seen people die before. And she said they were trying ro frame her and Anders, right?

[spin_kick_snap]

Yeah, see, that was the thing...

"Because a guy just died, right in my arms!" Kathy said, sounding surprised and confused. Wasn't it obvious? "It doesn't matter that he was a cop trying to...arrest us for no reason or whatever. There was a man and he'd been alive and then suddenly he wasn't and it was because I'd tried to use him as a bluff. I've never..." She looked down at her ice cream. "No one's ever...I've never seen someone die before. I saw a dead guy who'd burned to death in the apartment, but even then it was barely a glimpse. The cop--he just died. Right in my arms."

[tigerundercover]

"Oh." That made much more sense. "I'm sorry," Raven said, feeling a little bit useless and stupid. "I didn't realize."

[spin_kick_snap]

Raven might feel useless and stupid, but Kathy was still burrowing into her side, looking for comfort. She wrapped her arms around Raven's waist and buried her face in her shoulder. "It's okay," she mumbled, voice muffled. "It was just so--there. And sudden. One minute, he was struggling to get away and the next, I had blood all over me."

[tigerundercover]

Raven probably wouldn't have been thrown that hard by that, but she could at least see that Kathy clearly was, and she wasn't about to tell her she shouldn't be. She made her shoulder a little bit extra squishy and wrapped her arms around Kathy in return. "That must've been terrible."

[spin_kick_snap]

Yeah. Kathy's life had had a lot of peripheral violence, but she'd been fairly well-insulated from it. Add to that a feeling of personal responsibility and you had one broken teen superhero.

"It was so warm," Kathy said. "And salty. It landed in my mouth and in my eyes and for a quick second, I honestly thought that there'd been a wave from the Pacific or something. I know that makes no sense, but it was the first thing I could think of."

[tigerundercover]

"If you were close enough to Baltimore to take a bus, it definitely wasn't a Pacific wave," Raven noted a little wryly. "But minds like to play tricks like that. Especially if they don't want to admit what's really happening. At least, that's what Charles tells me."

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy nodded. "That was it exactly, I think. I very much did not want to think about what it really was, so I had like three seconds of hoping really hard it was something else entirely. But the delusion didn't really last."