Apartment Above Luke's, Sunday Afternoon

[spin_kick_snap]

The quiet was nice.

Kathy looked around the empty apartment, wandering from room to room. If asked, she'd say she was picturing where all their stuff would go when she and Raven left Eliot's place (okay, Eliot's and Parker's and Hardison's, but it had been Eliot's place in her mind for years and it would take some adjusting to) and moved in here, but really, she was just appreciating the quiet. It was nice, being somewhere that no one else was for a little while. She didn't have to worry about whether her smile was convincing or she appeared happy--and grateful! One mustn't forget grateful!--to be alive again. Not that she wanted to be dead again or anything. But sometimes it was hard to be happy about anything. But around people, she felt like she owed it to them to try. Or at least to put up a decent enough facade that they could convince themselves she was.

Alone, though, she didn't have to pretend. She could just do her own thing, try to distance herself from her recent spate of nightmares and just wander for a bit. She would have thought she'd gotten enough walking in as an ex, but maybe her body'd just gotten used to the repetitive motion. Maybe idly poking around the place really would give her some ideas for what to do with the place. Or maybe it was all just bullshit and she should focus on thinking less altogether.

Yeah, it was probably the latter. But until she found a decent substitute for her previous activities that shut her brain down (besides zombieism, ha ha, she was hilarious), walking and appreciating the lack of people would have to do.

[Post open! Link to Anders' thread]

Comments

[spin_kick_snap]

"Some," Kathy said. "Hardison got the bank to reissue me a debit card so I'd have access to my accounts again. I should see how much has built up while I was gone. Barry's got some kind of autopay thing that just keeps shoving money into my account, even though I haven't heard from him in ages."

Not that she'd have to dip into it if she didn't want to because of the aforementioned limitless super-platinum cards. Hardison was probably just itching for an excuse to hand them over anyway.

[tigerundercover]

"Hmmm." Raven made a show of carefully thinking things over, then grinned again. "I think this definitely calls for a shopping spree."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Just so happens there's an Ikea the next island over," Kathy noted. "Isn't that convenient?"

Especially with how it meant neither of them had to venture onto the mainland, where they'd be surrounded by thousands of people!

[tigerundercover]

"I have only one more question," Raven said. "Do they deliver?"

She was not trucking whatever shopping therapy induced them to purchase up all those stairs. Even if she could turn into an elephant.

[spin_kick_snap]

"...That's a damn good question," Kathy said, frowning. She pulled out her phone to check. "With the amount of stuff we're going to need to buy, they'd better," she muttered.

[tigerundercover]

"If not, maybe we can bribe people with pizza?"

Or guilt Eliot and Hardison into being pack mules, maybe.

[spin_kick_snap]

"Time honored practice," Kathy said, still navigating the website. "Though we're gonna need a lot of pizza for that. May be cheaper to just higher movers to do it instead."

[tigerundercover]

"But then we don't get to see who really loves us," Raven said, not meaning it at all. "Pro movers it is. Someone should start a company on the island. 'Fandom Stair Masters, we haul your stuff so you don't have to'."

[spin_kick_snap]

"They'd make a bundle," Kathy said, definitely not ready to see who really loved her enough for manual labor. "Why haven't we just replaced them all with ski lifts yet? That's the real question."

[tigerundercover]

"Please," Raven said. "Fandom's way to sadistic for that. The ski lifts would go wrong every third Tuesday of the month and try to kill anyone trying to get across town."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Yeah, but you can't beat the real estate prices," Kathy said with a wry snort. "Probably because the it sometimes rains soda, but there we are."

[tigerundercover]

"The cost of living does seem remarkably low," Raven agreed. "I'm pretty sure there's nowhere in my world that you can live comfortably working just one day a week. Not unless you're already stinking rich, anyway."

[spin_kick_snap]

"And definitely not in mine," Kathy said, then winced. "Or, well, back when it was a world, anyway. This place is enough to give an economist fits."

[tigerundercover]

"I kind of love that about it, though. Like . . . it's just capitalist enough that it won't set off a red scare, but not so capitalist that we have homeless people living in the streets."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Do we have red scares anymore?" Kathy asked. "I thought we got over this in the 60s."

[tigerundercover]

"It's probably not called that, anymore. But don't people freak out if you try to say the government should pay for everyone's health care?"

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy rolled her eyes. "Yeah, but that's less because we're scared of socialism and more because too many people think that so long as they have theirs, everyone else can fuck off."

[tigerundercover]

"They're scared of socialism because it's one step closer to communism," Raven pointed out. "Because some people never got over the red scare."

[spin_kick_snap]

"And I don't think they're scared at all," Kathy countered. "They're selfish. Socialism means they have to pay more for things that don't immediately benefit them. They're not worried the government is going to come in and take their lands away or their businesses or their summer homes. They're worried they'll lose four percent of their profit margin helping some woman they don't know beat cancer or something. It's not ideological. It's greed."

[tigerundercover]

"You know it can be both, right?" Raven pointed out. "I mean, it's not like the fear of communism was ideologically pure or anything."

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy gasped. "May the ghost of blessed St. McCarthy hush your lying mouth," she said. "I mean, you're right. I just--I don't get the fear of communism. I understand fearing the dictators that use Communism to rise to power, sure, but I don't understand why everyone gets so hysterical about it."

Greed, she could understand, sure. It was repugnant, but explicable. The fear of communism, though? What gave?

[tigerundercover]

"It goes against Truth, Justice, and the American Way!" Raven declared, eyes rolling all the while. "Plus, you know. We'd just finished the second giant multi-country war in less than forty years, the British Empire was collapsing, and the US had just unleashed a weapon that we were pretty sure could destroy the entire world if not used carefully. Everyone wanted a scapegoat. Russia was the other great big superpower. Communism was . . . convenient."

[spin_kick_snap]

"But you had, like, literal Nazis," Kathy protested. "Perfect scapegoat right there! Nazis!"

[tigerundercover]

Raven shrugged. "The Nazis were defeated. The ones who weren't dead were being tried for their crimes." Or let into the US to help them build weapons. Yeah. "The Communists were still out there, running countries. More and more of them all the time."

[spin_kick_snap]

"So, basically, we worried about getting nuked off the planet for thirty years because people hadn't figured out this wasn't all just a giant game of Risk?" Kathy asked, appalled. "My god, I just want to go back in time and shake every person I find."