Baltimore, Thursday Evening, Right Before Sunset

[spin_kick_snap]

Things that really plucked Kathy's last nerve: 1) turning around and seeing a giant mountain of luggage behind her at the gym when she was perfectly well-adjusted, thank you, and 2) turning around and seeing a trail of mooks trussed like the Thanksgiving turkey behind her on patrol the night before when she was perfectly capable of handling herself, thank you. Never mind that she hadn't noticed at least three of them on her tail--in fact, that just made it even more annoying You know what made someone feel even more resentful? Knowing that she should be feeling grateful instead. Ugh! Not that she had any idea who this 'mysterious benefactor' was--the brief glimpses she'd caught of him showed that he was too tall to be Eliot and too compact to be Mr. Hardison. Which meant that Eliot had farmed this...this...this baby-sitting job off on someone else, because he couldn't be bothered.

So, yeah. She'd gone to sleep fulminating over that and woke up with a duffel bag at the foot of her bed that said Never going to be good enough and you know what? Kathy was just done. The baggage had only gotten worse throughout the day until Kathy had shoved her gi into a backpack and lit out for Baltimore after lunch. Anything to be away from that stupid island for the rest of the day. And, hey, maybe that would make it a lot ha.rder for her obnoxious shadow to find her, too.

Honestly, could today get any worse?

[For them that know who they are, please! NFB]

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[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy was careful to hide her bloody knuckles in her pockets and stepped lightly out of the alleyway. "So what are we saying? Unfortunate mugging victims?" she asked in an undertone. "Assuming we have to say anything at all."

She followed him, half a step behind. "If not that guy, who did you have tailing me?" she asked, trying not to sound bitter.

He had just asked for everyone's help for this, hadn't he? Everyone but hers, of course.

[vdistinctive]

Eliot had years of practice dodging around cops to get out of a crime scene, so he just tucked his chin a little and kept moving.

Sterling could take care of the paperwork. He'd probably even enjoy it, the asshole.

"I'm guessin' Shelley. I didn't have him tailing you, I just said to keep an eye out." Eliot smiled faintly. "He's a damn boy scout. Always goin' a step beyond."

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"Yeah, I kept appreciating how he--" Kathy bit down on the rest of her comment. "You can thank him for me," she said instead. Sounding grudging. "He does good work."

Her work. He'd done her work. But he'd done it well enough.

[vdistinctive]

Eliot looked over at her as they got clear of the cops, no longer as worried about hiding his face. "You do, too, you know." He nodded behind them. "Back there. That was real good. Ain't many people would've had my back any better."

There was nothing grudging or patronizing in his tone. Eliot didn't believe in critiques that weren't honest, especially not about fighting.

[spin_kick_snap]

Eliot "Teaching Moment" Spencer.

For a moment, Kathy just smiled; bright and happy and roughly a million megawatts. His praise meant a lot to her. A whole lot, since she knew how sincere it was. Her mentor was proud of her. "Thanks, I--"

Her smile faltered. Fell. His praise felt good, but it didn't make things right. Admittedly, she had her own fair share of blame to shoulder for that, but... "You still would have had me a million miles from here. Except you would have died, Eliot. You told me over and over how dangerous this guy was, but you were still stalking through all of Baltimore by yourself to take him on."

[vdistinctive]

"Might've died," Eliot admitted. "Mighta landed my hands on something useful and gotten the upper hand back. But I wasn't alone." He tapped his ear -- where his earbud had fallen out at some point, and probably ended up crunched under someone's heel. Hardison would be giving him hell for that. "Just 'cause you can't see it don't mean backup ain't around." He sighed again, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. "You're young, Kathy. I know it's just about the last thing someone your age wants to hear, but it's true. You're idealistic, untested. I couldn't pick you at my back because I knew he could kill me. And then he'd have a straight line to you. You've got too much potential to waste it dyin' at the hands of someone like the Butcher."

[spin_kick_snap]

He was right, she didn't like hearing it. But she knew he wasn't wrong. At least, not about her being young. Everything else, however...

"Well, what about you?" she demanded. "Have you used up all your potential or something? Have you gotten to the point where it's okay to throw yourself away on the Butcher? Where's this vaunted backup of yours? Where's your army buddy? Why isn't he here backing you up? Where are Parker and Hardison? What did you think you were going to do, fight him and his jerks off?"

Ugh, now she was tearing up. But she'd seen how close it had been--the idea of Eliot dying alone in an alleyway because he was being stupid--!

[vdistinctive]

"I've done it before." That probably wasn't as reassuring as he'd thought it would be. "And honestly, if I hadn't been trying to make sure you didn't catch a wild swing, he might not've come as close to takin' me out as he did." Again, this was matter of fact. He was still annoyed, but he kept it out of his voice as best he could. "I shouldn't've blown you off the way I did. I'm sorry about that. But if I'm gonna be teaching you, darlin', you gotta start listenin' to me all the time. Not just when you like what I've got to say."

[spin_kick_snap]

"You didn't just blow me off, Eliot, you dismissed me. Everything I do, everything I thought I was capable of--suddenly it didn't matter. It became some...some dumb kid's game or something!" That was the problem about pushing people away for their own good. Sometimes they didn't go far enough and you were left trying to repair the damage. "You want me to listen to you? Maybe try talking first. Without telling me that I'm good enough only when the stakes don't matter."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot bit back a sharp retort, reminding himself that he was more than twice her age. And how much of an idiot he'd been at seventeen, too.

"I ain't -- always great with the explaining things." Hardison would be laughing uproariously at that understatement. And then glaring. "I promise to try when it ain't life or death. Frankly --" He ran a hand through his hair, wincing as he ended up pulling a few strands that had gotten caught in the blood on his cheek. "You scare the shit out of me."

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"Me?" Kathy looked honestly baffled. "I don't scare anyone!"

[vdistinctive]

Eliot chuckled ruefully. "If that were true you wouldn't have had the Butcher called in to take you out. That -- that ain't what I mean, though." Did Kathy have any idea how hard it was for him to come out and say things like this? "I ain't -- I've never done this before. Hell, I only recently got used to workin' with a team. I screw it up. . . ."

If he screwed it up, he got to see what happened on the alien ship happen all over again. Only this time without it being a simulation.

[spin_kick_snap]

Even if she did, she wasn't going to make it easy on him. She'd been miserable for over a week over this, dammit.

"I was pissing them off and making it expensive," Kathy corrected. "That's not fear, that's concern over the bottom line." She shrugged like it didn't bother her than no one took her seriously without her first jumping through hoop after hoop. "I know you don't want to see me dead, Eliot. I don't want to die, either. But...but making me feel small isn't going to stop me from doing something I think is important. It just undermines everything else."

[vdistinctive]

"You don't want to get treated like a child, darlin', you gotta learn not to act like one. I been doin' this job longer than you've been alive. That expertise either means somethin' to you, or it doesn't."

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"It's--it's not that I don't respect your expertise," Kathy said, twisting her hands, grip tight enough to even look painful. "But you started off by barking orders at me. Not trying to talk, not trying to explain. Just--just snapping. Expecting me to obey without question. And when I protested, you devalued everything I've been doing for two years now. Or--or at least that's how it felt. Worse that that? It felt familiar. I'm used to that. Just not from you."

[vdistinctive]

Great, and now Eliot wanted to punch her father again. He swallowed that down, reminding himself that he'd just told her not to act like a kid; he shouldn't start doing it, either.

"You told me about the Butcher and all I knew was that you'd somehow gotten involved with a professional killer. You were dancin' after me, demanding answers when I was still tryin' to do my own recon. It didn't matter how many times I told you I didn't have time for it, the only thing you could think of was getting your answers on your time. Instantaneously. That ain't how the world works. That ain't how the job you're choosing works. When I tell you I don't have time to give you answers, that doesn't mean you're never going to get them. It means I don't have time to give them to you right now."

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"You scared me!" Kathy finally stopped wringing her hands to gesticulate with them. "I mean, yes, you're right. I wanted answers. I was demanding answers. But the kind of recon you were going to do involved you grabbing a knife and stalking out of your own restaurant. I'm me--I'm no one and suddenly there's a hit man after me and the one guy who knows anything about him--the guy I look up to looks like he's about to cross over the Causeway to start yanking fingernails out of people!"

[vdistinctive]

"Right. So we're even, then." Both terrified. Great. "Don't give me that 'I'm nobody' crap, sweetheart. You don't dress up in a superhero costume to defend the downtrodden when you think you don't matter."

He made no denial to the rest of it. He hadn't gone after people's fingernails in a long time, but there was a short list of people he'd be willing to do it for, and Kathy was on it.

He turned off the sidewalk, heading for the door of what looked like an empty building on the corner. "Sterling was right about one thing: I gotta get this cut cleaned out and stitched up. C'mon, you can meet Shelley proper."

[spin_kick_snap]

"No, you do that to matter," she told him. "And why it hurts when people tells you that it doesn't."

And why it was hard to stop, even when that was what was best.

"Are you going to the clinic?" she asked, taking the half step up to join him at his side, rather than falling behind. "Or are you going to manfully grit your teeth while this Shelley guy does it?"

[vdistinctive]

"I was planning on asking for an anesthetic," Eliot said, raising an eyebrow at her. "Gritting my teeth would just make Shelley more likely to screw something up. When did I ever tell you what you do doesn't matter?"

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Kathy's head dropped and her shoulders hunched up, doing an excellent impression of a turtle trying to slide into its shell. "When you told me that my job was to stay the fuck out of the way and let the grownups handle it. When you said that if I behaved myself, maybe I could be allowed to tag along. I've been doing this for two years--I'm the reason he was even here--but suddenly I was being sent to my room and banned from going into Baltimore." Her eyes were firmly on the ground, but she sounded flat. The kind of tone that had no emotion because otherwise it would hold too much. "I know that I'm not an adult. And that I don't have the training to take on a professional killer. But the way you said it--it felt like you were telling a four-year-old that playtime was over and it was time to hang up her dressup clothes and get ready for bed. That's not what you say to someone if you respect what they're doing."

She shrugged with exaggerated casualness. "I mean, hey. It's not like you're the only one who thinks I'm playing out here. Maybe it is me."

[vdistinctive]

Eliot groaned softly. "What you were doin' right at that moment was pesterin' me and refusin' to listen to me. So yeah, I wasn't respecting that much." He'd led the way into the abandoned building and started heading up a set of stairs. He stopped at the first door on the second floor and knocked what was clearly a prearranged rhythm on it. "And besides that, the Butcher's nearly taken me out a time or two. You understand that I was a little freaked out about you maybe havin' to face him."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I didn't want to face him." Well. Much. "But I wanted to be kept in the loop. I mean, this guy was after me. Is it really too much to want to know what the heck is going on? Imagine how you'd feel if someone told you there was someone gunning for you but then didn't want to tell you anything more than that."

She gulped. "Not that I gave you much of a reason to trust that I could handle what you told me. I was freaking out over your reaction and then I--I acted like the kid you were saying I was. I'm sorry."

[vdistinctive]

"I wasn't not going to tell you." He was probably not going to tell her. "I just wasn't tellin' you right then."

The door opened and a thin, good looking man with short dark hair looked out. "Spencer. The hell did you do to your face?"

"Shelley. Charming as ever. This here's, uh." Eliot paused, not sure which identity Kathy would prefer he use.

"The teenage vigilante," Shelley said, folding his arms over his chest and giving Kathy a once over. "She's a little less bright and colorful than usual."

[spin_kick_snap]

Whoa. Babysitter was hot. Kathy hadn't been expecting that. "Hi," she said, unconsciously straightening up. It was all she could do not to pat her hair down. "Kathy." She traded him look for look, eyebrow arched slightly. "I must admit you have the better of me. I only caught sight of you a few times."