Apartment Above Luke's, Sunday Afternoon

[spin_kick_snap]

By Sunday morning, Kathy was ready to leave Boston. It was colder in Boston than in Baltimore and her attempts to forget herself in bars and clubs had had sub-optimal results. She was going to chalk it up to residual concern over Ezra's warnings about the Coterie, even if the truth was likely far more complicated.

With far more clothing, makeup, and accessories than she'd left with (look, they called it retail therapy for a reason!), Kathy quietly let herself into the apartment. Trading her shoes for her indoor slippers, she realized just how much she'd missed the place; it had only been theirs for a few days, but she'd already gotten into the mindset of thinking of it as home. And if this were home, she had to start acting like it. No more running away. She might not know what she was doing or anything like that, but at least she had somewhere she could feel safe to not know from.

She put her bags in her room, promising herself she'd put everything away later along with the rest of the unpacking she still had to do, and went looking for her roommate. Everything between them was still up in the air, including Kathy's own feelings, but avoiding Raven wasn't going to do much good for either of them.

[For the roomie if she's around, but open to visitors and phone calls!]

Comments

[spin_kick_snap]

"You were mad at me?" Kathy asked. "Because I left?"

[tigerundercover]

"Yeah, I guess. And because Dante was right, and you were blaming yourself for everything and -- I don't know. It's stupid."

'Funny blue sidekick who kills people' as a phrase that was going to stick to her.

[spin_kick_snap]

She got that. Ten months later and 'Saturday morning cartoon' still lingered.

"Eliot said something similar, I think," Kathy admitted softly. "That when I blamed myself for you being stuck out there, I took away your agency. Made it about me and my choices, not you and yours."

Okay, he hadn't said it quite like that. That was the gist, when put through Kathy's Tumblr filters.

"So you went to talk to Dante and ended up getting mad at me?" she asked, quirking a humorless smile. "Some talent there."

[tigerundercover]

Yeah, but Raven had come up with hers herself.

"I was already pretty mad when I got there. This whole week kinda . . . broke something." She stared down into her spaghetti. "You really freaked me out. The agency thing, like you said, but also. I think I was mad that I let you -- that I was going to let you kick me out. That this whole year has been all about -- you and your family and your world and -- it's not your fault, but --"

Oh hey. Here was more of those tears she'd gotten all over Haridson.

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy froze in her chair. A week ago, she would have gotten up and comforted Raven without hesitation, but now she wasn't sure if that would even be wanted. After a few seconds, she pushed a napkin across the table and then just let her hand sort of...linger. There.

"I--I'm sorry," she said, hesitant. And feeling guilty all over again. Like Raven said, this whole year had been about her. "I wasn't--I wasn't gonna kick you out, though. Even if I couldn't live with what you--what happened, I wasn't going to unilaterally...This is our place, not mine. I don't get to make that decision out of hand..."

She wasn't sure if she was actually helping with this. Or if she was even focusing on the right bit at all.

[tigerundercover]

"I wasn't going to let you, anyway," Raven said, trying to get a lighter tone going. "I mean, not by Friday." She reached over to take the napkin, letting her hand brush against Kathy's. "It really isn't you, though. It's me. I . . . latch onto people and just let them decide everything for me. I did it with Charles too."

[spin_kick_snap]

"You were a kid with Charles," Kathy protested. "And you didn't know anything about the kind of life he led. Of course you let him make all the decisions! And then it just became...habit, probably. At least with him."

Kathy gave her a helpless shrug. "I do that with blame, too, I think. Guilt, I mean. If it's all my fault then when I get in trouble, at least I get in trouble for something I did. It's not unfair or arbitrary, it's just...my fault."

[tigerundercover]

"You're always looking for right and wrong," Raven said. "Charles did that, too. But -- that's what you never got, when we were out there fighting. Survival's not about right or wrong. It's just -- you stay alive, or you don't. It's not unfair, because 'fair' isn't a thing."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I know." she took another bite of spaghetti, not that she'd really tasted any of it. "I know you're right and I know I don't get it. It's more than unfair--it doesn't make sense, mo matter how much I want it to. I just don't know how to go from knowing all that to, like, understanding it. Grokking it."

[tigerundercover]

Raven shook her head. "I don't know." She bit her lip. "This is going to sound so mean, but -- you didn't actually survive it. You died. Maybe that's -- why you don't get it. What I was doing, getting back here . . . I wasn't actually human anymore. Like, literally sometimes, I spent this huge part of the fall actually living as someone's pet dog, but that's not -- animals get it. It's people that complicate things."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Believe me, I'm well aware of how much I failed at surviving," Kathy said with a bitter smile. "I'm not a survivor. There are things I won't do. Lines I won't cross. At least, I did. I don't know how true that is anymore."

She wasn't so sure anymore. Now that she knew what death was like--even if death itself was like nothing at all--she might fight harder to survive next time.

And then, because she couldn't not ask, "...A dog?"

[tigerundercover]

"People were a lot less likely to shoot a strange dog on sight than a strange person."

[spin_kick_snap]

"And they adopted you?" Kathy asked. "Was it hard, living as someone's pet? Or easy, because you didn't have to be a person?"

[tigerundercover]

Raven was pretty sure she hadn't been a person for months before the dog thing. "They fed me. The little girl sometimes curled up next to me on the floor and used me as a pillow. I helped chase away rabbits and things that were going to get at their garden, and -- it was simple. Tiring. A little dull. But simple."

Right up until it wasn't.

[spin_kick_snap]

"So what changed?"

Something had to, or Kathy would still be chattering away in LA while Raven chased rabbits.

[tigerundercover]

"The mom died."

To a certain extent, that kind of said it all.

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy was not not going to ask if Raven killed her. Even if it was on the tip of her tongue to do so. More of that bread dipped in sauce helped keep her mouth busy until the impulse passed.

"What happened to the little girl?"

[tigerundercover]

"I'm . . . not sure," Raven admitted. "I got her out of the house, but when the other townspeople saw me -- the real me --" Raven reached up and rubbed at her shoulder, over the scar. "I stopped trying to talk to people after that."

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy nodded, pursing her lips. There were a lot of blanks that she could fill in--she, too, sometimes rubbed at her shoulder in lieu of words, though her scar was purely internal now.

"But I thought you met someone," she said, instead of asking more questions about what happened. "Was that before then?"

[tigerundercover]

"No. That was in Virginia. The town was in Texas. Misfit was -- extraordinary." Raven finally smiled then. "They broke all the rules."

All of them. Quite literally.

[spin_kick_snap]

"The rules?" Kathy asked, propping her chin on her hand. This, at least, seemed less fraught. A nice change. "What rules?"

[tigerundercover]

"Just -- all of them. They didn't shave to look more like a girl or wear pants to look more like a boy. They didn't try to please people at all. And they didn't get scared and run away, even when I turned into a bear."

[spin_kick_snap]

"How did you meet?" Honestly, she could hear Raven talk about Misfit all day. It made her smile, which was in short supply around here recently.

[tigerundercover]

"We were in the mountains. Exes are attracted to sound, but it keeps wildlife away, so I'd sing or talk to myself while I walked and just -- kill whatever came at me." She said that too casually. Much too casually. "I stopped for the night at one of these little lean-to shelters along the trail, and I heard someone whistling and I was all set to -- but the sound had bounced around and I misjudged the direction, and suddenly they were just there. I freaked out, went bear, and they smiled. For the first time in months, someone was there who wasn't dead or terrified. It was like a miracle."

[spin_kick_snap]

Yeah, that casual 'I'd just kill' followed by the 'all set to' definitely had Kathy drawing some unfortunate conclusions.

"Did they say why they weren't terrified?" Kathy asked. "Did they know someone with powers before, or was it just not in their nature?"