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

[tigerundercover]

"Campaign manager means I get to do nothing at all and just cling to your coattails, right?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"I'm going to say yes for now," Kathy said with a laugh, "just so you'll agree. I'll spring the real responsibilities on you later, when you least expect them!"

[tigerundercover]

"I don't know, that sets a dangerous precedent for how you might behave in office."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Hey, that's why you get aides and assistants and interns," Kathy said. "We can just keep passing the responsibilities down."

[tigerundercover]

"While you get all the glory?" Raven pointed out. "Look at that, you haven't even started running yet and already the power's corrupting you."

[spin_kick_snap]

"While I get all the kicking," Kathy corrected. "That's what I'm bringing to this administration. Kicking."

[tigerundercover]

"Maybe you should shoot for a new cabinet position instead of the presidency. You could be the Secretary of Kicking."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Not under this administration," Kathy said with a curl of her lip. "Has anyone told you about the current political bullshit?"

Kathy had been alive a week and already has SERIOUS political opinions.

[tigerundercover]

"Does it have anything to do with why Hardison starts his mornings by cursing at news websites?"

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy's ferocious scowl was a very eloquent yes.

"I would be very surprised if he wasn't trying to convince Parker and Eliot to pull some kind of giant con on the president right this minute."

[tigerundercover]

"Which version, though?" Raven asked. "I mean, that seems like rather a lot of the same con over and over if they don't focus on just one world's version."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Maybe they could experiment," Kathy said, thinking about it. "Play around with a couple of different ones. Streamline and refine them until they got the perfect presidential con."

[tigerundercover]

". . . Okay, but then those worlds they experimented in might still be screwed."

[spin_kick_snap]

"C'mon, they'd never run a half-assed con that didn't work," Kathy said. "Some of them just might go off less elegantly than others!"

[tigerundercover]

"Isn't Eliot teaching this semester?" Raven asked. "When is he going to find time to run the diner, teach class, and run a billion political cons at the same time?"

She was getting her own ideas of how to . . . simplify the political situation in modern America. Kathy probably wouldn't like them at all.

[spin_kick_snap]

...Give Kathy a few months. She might come around.

"Clearly, that's where we come in," Kathy decided. "It's not like we have--oh wait. No, you do have a job. Hmm. Do you think Jono will mind if you sometimes miss a shift because we're working against the current American regime?"

[tigerundercover]

"He might worry a little about my sanity," Raven mused. "But no, I think he'd be okay otherwise."

[spin_kick_snap]

Jono would probably throw her a bloody parade and offer to pay her for the shifts she missed anyway.

"Raven, I hate to break it to you, but..." Kathy dropped her voice, like she was about to impart some great secret she didn't want the squirrels to hear.

"...I'm pretty sure everyone is worried about our sanity right now."

[tigerundercover]

"Noooooooooooooooooooo," Raven said, with greatly exaggerated shock. "Why?"

[spin_kick_snap]

"Internalized fear of teenage femininity," Kathy said with a Very Serious Nod. "We have the power of creation inside of us and they fear our natural womynhood."

...Second-wave feminist texts were weird, by the way.

[tigerundercover]

". . . Did you just mispronounce 'womanhood'?"

Raven had managed to skip secondwave feminism entirely.

[spin_kick_snap]

She wouldn't have been included in it anyway.

"There's a 'y' in it," Kathy explained. "So that it's not a form of 'man'."

[tigerundercover]

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy shrugged, with that particular twist to her lips that Raven had long-since come to translate as 'white people.'