Room 508, Friday Morning

[spin_kick_snap]

After her discussion of gymnastics, Kathy found herself in the mood to go through a routine or two. She hadn't really done much since coming back after break and she was starting to feel it. She had a bunch of excess energy lately and without either gymnastics or her studies to pour it into, she was getting restless.

The weather made her decide to skip the gym, so she headed back up to her dorm. There wasn't a lot of room in there to maneuver, but that just meant she had less room for error, right?

A bit of shifting to push her desk over to Flick's side gave her enough space to work out and she quickly changed into her usual workout gear: sports bra for what little chest she had, comfortable yoga pants, legwarmers and socks. Then she put her iPod into the speaker dock and started blasting workout music. Most of the girls she'd gone to lessons with had liked soothing, classical music to work out to. Kathy? Really liked dubstep. It just seemed better to move to!

Okay, warm-up time. Her muscles were stiff and needed to be stretched before she could hit the floor properly, but before her playlist was even halfway over, she was bringing her feet over her head and in front of her face like normal.

...Well, a gymnast's version of normal, anyway.

[Door ajar and post open! Up early because new canon makes me want to plaaaaay her and I should post before I get distracted again. I'll pick up pings in the morning. If you want to know what her warmup looks like, the link goes to a gymnast video. SFW, but it plays music so you might want to mute it. Also, just watching her hurts my everything.]

Comments

[spin_kick_snap]

"Were?" Kathy picked up on that past tense. "I'm sorry. That's rough, with or without powers. But they were okay with everything? I mean, you said you got powers and then you left home..."

She didn't want to pry here, especially not with him having dead parents, but he'd also said that she could ask him about things.

[genesishero]

"They were proud of me," Evan agreed softly. "It was too good to be true."

Literally.

[spin_kick_snap]

That whole thing just sounded like a landmine, one Kathy wasn't sure if she wanted to tread on. She was going to back away quickly and pounce on another topic.

"So, you developed powers and came here?" she asked. "Or did you stop somewhere else first? Because this whole island seems like a pretty open and accepting place."

[genesishero]

Evan exhaled a breath he hadn't been aware he was holding, and then gave her a tiny smile, thankful that she'd changed the topic a little.

"I went to a different school before coming here. One for just mutant students. It was great for learning about mutant history and for developing my powers, but I didn't get along very well with some of the students, which is why I came here."

That was... kind of what had happened, yes!

[spin_kick_snap]

"So, like, have you been personally harassed by regu--err, non-mutant humans?" Kathy asked. "What is the right word for that? Or, at least, the least cumbersome?"

[genesishero]

"Where we're from... humans." Evan shrugged his shoulders a little. "We refer to ourselves at mutants. It's a hard label to shake. And yeah, I... have had some bad run-ins with humans, actually."

He sort of sounded a little surprised when he said that.

"Like I said, I grew up sheltered. I didn't get any of this until a couple of years ago. But once I did? Giant robots made to kill us, a crazy man in the woods with guns, a pack of kids who have been trying to just outright kill us. Someone shot a good friend of mine in the head." He swallowed. "The teachers of our last school try to shelter us from it as much as they can, but it's them against the whole world. They can't catch everything."

She probably hadn't been thinking of extermination attempts, so much, when she asked about harassment. Oops.

[spin_kick_snap]

Yeah, Kathy had been thinking more along the lines of nasty words, maybe some fistfights, catcalls. Not something straight up out of the most heartbreaking pages of Y-People.

"How do you manage?" she asked quietly. "How do you keep going on without just, I don't know, snapping? I mean, yeah, obviously you don't want to let them turn you into something you're not--" she's heard that often enough growing up "--but it's got to be so hard to resist pushing back."

[genesishero]

"A lot of people do push back," Evan replied softly. "They go beyond defending themselves and they make humanity the enemy, innocent or not, because that's how humanity treated us. And they take it to extremes... 'If you're not with us, you're against us,' and anyone could be a casualty along the way and if a person has strong enough powers and a weak enough will, they can be broken and twisted and made to do anything."

He hadn't been. He hadn't been pushed that far. He'd come close. He'd come so, so close. He'd had Sabretooth in his hands and was ready to rip him to shreds. The Skinless Man. Mystique. He'd wanted to hurt them all.

But he hadn't.

"But that's not how I was raised."

Real or not. That wasn't the sort of person he ever wanted to be.

[spin_kick_snap]

"...I don't know if I'd ever be that good," Kathy admitted in a small voice. "I was chased by some guys on my last trip home. I ran, but part of me wished I could do more than just run. Part of me wanted to stop them. I just--can't."

[genesishero]

"If they were chasing you, they're the kind of people that need to be stopped," Evan pointed out softly. "They're not innocents, not children or people who haven't raised a hand to wrongfully hurt someone. Wanting to do more... that's okay. And the fact that not everyone can..."

He shrugged his shoulders a tiny bit.

"That's not your fault. Not everyone has to be a hero, just because they've been made a victim. It took me a while to sort out the difference between wanting to hurt people back, and wanting to keep people from causing harm in the first place."

[spin_kick_snap]

"They were Seventeens," Kathy said, then clarified, "a gang in LA. They've been harassing a lot of people in Koreatown."

Which wasn't doing any favors for her father's rants about how the neighborhood had really gone downhill after all the non-Koreans moved in. Sigh, Dad.

"I'm not sure if what I wanted to do came from wanting to stop them, or from wanting to hurt them for scaring me so bad. But, either way, all I did was run." She gulped. "Really fast."

"Really fast."

[genesishero]

Evan hesitated before coming up with his reply to that. Really fast?

Really fast. And then he chewed his lip, and he nodded.

"I've run away from people who chased me before too," he offered softly. "People who wanted to hurt me. People who did. And all I could think at the time was how disappointed my parents would have been, me turning and running from the bad guy. I... I have these powers, I'm strong, and I was taught never to run. But I was scared. So I ran as fast as I could."

He scuffed his toe against the floor, not quite looking up.

"Sometimes, running is all you can do. No matter how strong you are or what else you might be capable of doing. People who are strong enough to level city blocks, who have been in control of that ability for years, still run away, sometimes."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Like Blockbuster," Kathy said with a nod. "A hero from my world who can just slam through wall after wall after wall, no matter what it's made of. The Mighty Dragon says we're lucky he wanted to become a hero, rather than a bank robber or something."

She tucked her knees up under her and held them, feeling unaccountably vulnerable. "I'm so confused," she admitted. "I just keep thinking that it can't be real, that things like that don't happen to people like me. I'm too afraid to believe it, you know? Because what if I do believe it and then I turn out to be wrong? I don't want to believe I'm special for a few days or weeks and then go back to being a nobody."