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]

". . . 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.'