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]

Comments

[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."

[spin_kick_snap]

"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."

[vdistinctive]

"That many?" Shelley said, stepping aside to let them into the large, mostly empty loft space, lined on three sides with windows. "I must be slipping."

"Or she's that good," Eliot said. "She took out, what, four of the Butcher's lackeys?" He looked over at Kathy for confirmation. "And came out without a scratch."

Some bruises, probably. Especially in the neck area. But she'd at least managed not to end up bleeding.

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy tried not to grin with pride, but it was hard enough for her to dim her smiles on a day that she hadn't just fought off a bunch of the mafia shoulder to shoulder with her mentor and no one had died.

Not even the bad guy!

"I think only three," she said, hand coming up to rub at the bruises on her throat. "It was hard to keep track. But I think you threw the fourth one in the dumpster. That was before I jumped the last guy, remember? Right before you got the upper hand with the Butcher."

And, yeah, now she was sneaking another sidelong glance at Shelley from under her lashes. Yeah. Totally hot. "And yeah. I spotted you four times. Would have been five, but I'm not counting the time you ducked into the coffee shop before I could register what you were wearing."

[vdistinctive]

Shelley nodded, impressed. "Hey, been wanting to ask: how do you do that leaping around thing?"

"That's classified." Eliot pulled a couple ice packs out of a cooler and tossed one to Kathy, resting the other on his knuckles. "Now, you gonna give me a hand over here, or do I have to stitch up my own face again?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"I could do it," Kathy offered, catching the ice pack with ease. "It's way easier than stitching up a bullet in a shoulder."

Cause she'd done that, Shelley. She had. Just saying. She was pretty awesome like that.

Though she was tilting her head at Eliot and furrowing her brows. Shelley couldn't know that she was...whatever she was? On the other hand, being classified seemed kinda cool. Right? Feminine mystique and all that?

"So...army buddies? That's what Sterling implied anyway."

[vdistinctive]

Less 'couldn't', more 'had no frame of reference for believing it'. Eliot figured Kathy might like the classified line. "Sorry, darlin'. I'm gonna have the guy who didn't just beat his fingers on a bunch of people stitching my face." He held up his hands. "Which ain't me sayin' I don't trust you to be able to do it."

Just to be clear.

"We went through basic together," Shelley said. "I'm one of the few, the proud, the stayed on Spencer's radar after he went AWOL."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I understand," Kathy said, bringing her hands out of her pockets to examine them. Her knuckles were red and bloody, the skin split from where she'd cut it on the last guy's teeth. "I should probably wrap my hands anyway. They're going to swell and bruise if I don't."

What? She was just a totally normal teenage girl doing totally normal teenage girl things. Like beating down bad guys in back alleys.

[vdistinctive]

"Wrap them and ice them," Shelley suggested. "Got plenty of cold packs on hand. Always do when it's a Spencer job."

"Shaddup." Eliot found a stool and grabbed a seat under one of the brighter lights. "Can we get on with this, please?"

He didn't think things were perfectly fine between him and Kathy just yet. He did, for the first time since last Monday, have the feeling that they could be.