[For Will] If I could have my way, I'd check out right now

[girlsolo]

It's not that Kate wants to talk to Will. She just wants to talk to him. It's not the same thing. One's like, Will staring into her soul and pulling out all the crap she's not proud of and making her want to be better. The other's just, spending time with her BFF. Hanging out. Maybe getting a few beers.

Back home, she'd get Hank and try to drag Will out with them to a club or something. Here...here, he's dating Magnus and how does she even hang out with the boss's boyfriend? It's weird. But not talking to him's weirder and with the whole Magnus and Tesla getting powers thing and Coraline and Sam and everything with Declan and Aidan and Tesla and...

Kate just needs to talk to her BFF for a little while. Just hang out. That's all. Which is why she's got the bottle Sam brought her from Rapture tucked in the crook of her arm and her hands in her pockets, even though it's late afternoon and Will's not that much of a drinker.

Not a self-medicater, is what she means to say, her inner Will voice tells her. She tells it to shut the fuck up and knocks on the door to the hut instead. Magnus won't be there now, but maybe Will is. If not...she'll find somewhere else to self-medicate.

*
Title and LJ cut lyrics from Melissa Etheridge's Brave and Crazy.

Comments

[inabmovie]

When Will heard the knock, he was in the middle of feeding Roy. The sloth was still a tiny thing, and needed regular feedings of a goat's milk-based formula that Magnus had come up with. He'd grown enough that they'd appropriated and modified a baby bottle from the compound to use, but it was still kind of a messy business. "Come in," he called, since Magnus wasn't there and he had his hands full.

[girlsolo.livejournal.com]

"Are you naked? Because if you're naked, put some clothes on Z-man. I know the boss thinks you're the cat's meow plus a bag of chips or whatever but I don't need to see that."

It's all banter and bullshit. But it's...she doesn't stay here that much anymore and going into the hut he shares with Magnus, and...well. Kate just wants him to know who it is, in case he needs to work himself up to talk to her or whatever.

[inabmovie]

"Yeah, I lay around naked all day," Will called back, snorting with laughter. "Come in." Roy ignored all this and greedily slurped away at his bottle.

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"Hey, how should I know?" Smirking, Kate pushes open the door and heads in. "I've never had a cabana boy before but I'll get right on that."

She sighs when she sees him feeding the sloth and shakes her head sadly. "You're destroying all of your guy cred. Not to mention you're so lucky I can't snap a picture on my phone and send it out. Tesla would never stop with the jokes about you being the girl in the relationship."

[inabmovie]

"He's just a baby, okay?" Will said, and rolled his eyes. "You think I'm going to like, leave him in the jungle to starve?" Roy hooked a claw in his shirt at that, like he understood what Will was saying, and continued slurping messily at the bottle.

"You know," he added to Roy, "If you would slow down a little, you'd get less on me, and more in you, and I think we'd both be a lot happier about this situation."

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"There's not leaving him in the jungle to starve and there's nursing." Kate smirks and tosses herself onto the nearest cushioned and flat surface. "At least Ralphie eats cheeseburgers."

Kate groans. Cheeseburgers. Okay so she likes most of her food organic and free range these days. But cheeseburgers and pizza are the exception to seriously every rule.

"I think I would murder someone for cheeseburger right now."

[inabmovie]

"He's. A. Baby. This is what he does, for now. Later he can like, chomp on some leaves or something." Will wasn't entirely sure exactly what growup sloths ate other than some kind of plants. He'd been so busy reading about baby sloths that he hadn't gotten to adult ones yet.

"You can get a boar burger at the Winchester," Will added. "They had actual beef for a while but I don't know if they have any left."

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"Not the same thing." It's not. Even if a boar burger tastes good, it's not the same as a cheeseburger with everything from their favorite places in Old City. That's kind of the point.

Will's not the same thing either. And to him, neither is she.

"Whatever. I'm in a decent mood so I won't tell Tesla you're nursing a sloth." She's definitely telling Declan though.

[inabmovie]

"Did you have some reason for this conversation or is it simply to harass and mock me for feeding an orphan animal?" he said, scowling at her a little. "And when did you and the ex-vampire get so buddy-buddy that you feel the need to update him on the details of my life?" Weirdly enough, she was talking about Tesla like he was her long-lost pal, and not breathing a word about Declan, who was... well, Will had no clue what was going on there.

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Kate crosses her arms under her breasts and scowls at him. "I need a reason to talk to you now? Should've figured." It actually stings when she says it. She needs to toughen the hell up. That was barely a prick.

"Even Nikola--" Yeah, that's intentional this time. Whatever. Magnus knows. Will probably knows anyway. "Doesn't need a reason for us to harass each other."

[inabmovie]

"Kate." That was all he said--just her name, and then just looked at her, ignoring the sloth for a second so he could give her a full-on, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you look.

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"What?" Kate glares back at him, tries to glare, maybe looks wounded. It's Will. Who the fuck knows what he sees? He's the goddamned shrink. Let him figure it out.

[inabmovie]

"Tesla? Seriously?" He didn't know exactly what was going on there, and wasn't sure he wanted to know, but there was something up and he was concerned.

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"He's not that bad when he's defanged." Kate knows she sounds defensive. That much hasn't changed. Will always puts her on the defensive, even when she comes out swinging. At least he knows me, is what she wants to say, but somehow it's easier to say that to Declan or Magnus than Will. Knowing her is Will's job and he's failing at it.

She opens the bottle she brought with her, takes a sip, and then holds it up for him. He probably won't want it, will probably bitch at her for drinking in the middle of the day. She doesn't exactly give a fuck.

[inabmovie]

"No, thanks." Will put down Roy's bottle, now empty, and rubbed at his temples. "You do realize that guy always has some kind of hidden agenda, right? Always."

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"Master of the long con," Kate says and shrugs. Tesla's a lot more transparent to her than the rest of them. Her gaze is dark and hard on his, challenging, when she adds, "Can't con a con."

[inabmovie]

Roy hooked a claw in Will's shirt and pulled up, like he wanted to cling to him for a while, but after giving Roy a little scratch on the head he carefully dislodged his claws and deposited him in his towel-lined box. Then he looked at Kate, resting his elbows on his knees. "What's going on with you?"

[girlsolo.livejournal.com]

Watching Will with the damned sloth, Kate misses Ralphie. Yeah, he's full grown. Hasn't been little enough for head scratching since his first week. But she misses him. She misses walking by his enclosure and seeing him and the other Abnormals every day and that feeling. The one where she knows she's doing the right thing and it's not just about her anymore.

She sets her teeth against the urge to fling herself at Will because he's here or punch him in the face for not being her Will.

"You're the shrink. You tell me," she snaps and stares guiltily at the whiskey. You shouldn't have to ask, Will. You should just know.

[inabmovie]

"I think it's better if you tell me," he said, and though he wanted to snap right back at her, he resisted the impulse. It was good having her here but weird, too, after not seeing anyone from home for so long, and it was taking more adjustment than he thought it would.

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"Because you don't know," Kate says flatly, not looking at him. "You need me to tell you because you don't know." Her voice is rising, she hates it, but she can't control it. It takes everything she's got just to keep her ass where it is. Her fingers are twitching with the urge to fight. "You want to know what's up with me? That's what's up with me. Nikola knows me. But you. You don't."

[inabmovie]

"So you're going to take it out on me, is that it?" he asks. The words were kind of bitchy, but they didn't come out that way--it was more of an honest question than passive-aggressive baiting. "I'm sorry I don't know you as well as the Will you know. But I can't help that. And you know a whole lot of stuff about me, my future, stuff I don't even know how to ask about. It's like it's not really even me that you know, but some other guy."

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"Exactly!" Kate barks and grabs her bottle. She gets halfway up before she realizes there's nowhere to go. Nowhere to go to get away from this Will who isn't Will. Nowhere far enough to run away from any of this. The island's smaller than the city of Chicago, but she could hide there. She could get lost there for years. Long enough for even Will to give up looking for her.

She drops down again, bottle between her knees. Because it's here or Declan. Declan's a different problem.

"If you were you, you wouldn't have to ask. You'd know. You'd tell me why I'm like this. And I would...stop. I would listen. But you don't know. Tesla doesn't care. Magnus needs me too much. Declan cares too much. And you don't know anything." She takes a long swallow off the bottle because the whiskey burn stops the tears. For now.

[inabmovie]

Will got up and crossed the few steps to where she sat, then plunked down beside her. "So now that I'm me and I don't know and I'm not telling you, you're not going to stop?" he asked quietly. "I mean, I hope not, because I don't think that's going to end well, but the way you're talking, that's what it sounds like."

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"Shut up, asshole," Kate says, and it's a tangled up mess of emotions, including deeply fond. She dashes the tears from her eyes with the back of one gloved wrist (yeah, she cut a pair up that she found in an empty hut). "You can ask anything you want, you know. I'll tell you."

It's not an answer, except in all the ways that it is. She needs him too much for him not to be Will. He has to be. And she really fucking hates that.

[inabmovie]

"So I'm asking," Will said. "Again. Tell me what's going on with you." What he really wanted to do was to slide his arm around her and give her a casual kind of hug, but he figured she'd be more likely to bite him than to let him give her any kind of feelings.

It was stupid, but he felt he ought to know her better than this. Not just because she was supposed to be his friend but because in that one crazy universe where the world was ending, they were a thing. And here he sat in this one without knowing a damn thing to do.

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"That." One small word, so soft, loaded down with everything that's between them, including some fucked up world Magnus saw where they had a kid. Together. Her and Will. It has to hold the weight of everything, because she doesn't know how else to say that what's wrong is that he has to ask.

She sits quiet for a long time. Longer than this Will's probably ever seen before she says, "I stayed. I never stayed anywhere. But I stayed." He should know. Will should understand. He does know. What a home means to kids like him, runaways like her. "Now it's gone."

It's gone. But there's nowhere to run except crazy.

[inabmovie]

Will draped his arm over the back of the couch, turned in a little towards her. "The Sanctuary was the only family I ever really had," he said. "The only place I felt like anyone ever got me." Not always, but most of the time, and really, that was good enough. "And a year ago I ended up here and that was gone. Just Magnus, and I'm glad for that, but it was just us. It was like I'd just found this big family with all of you and then you're all gone." He wasn't saying this to turn the conversation on himself; he was saying it so Kate would get that he got it. Maybe not the part where she's pissed that he had to ask, because he couldn't help that. But he did get the part where she had something she never had and then it was gone, because he had that, too.

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Kate tucks herself under his arm, moving close enough for their thighs to touch. "Yeah." She rests her head against his shoulder for a minute, glad he gets that part of it. But...

"You're a good guy, Will. You're a white hat. You've always been a white hat. I'm not. It's not..." Fuck. She hates this. "It's not just my family. It's..." Her voice drops to a whisper, like if she says it too loud she's going to make it true. "My one shot at making things right."

[inabmovie]

"Or maybe it's another shot at making things right," he offered, after thinking about it a second. He dropped his arm down around her shouders for a brief squeeze, then draped his arm over the couch again.

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"It's not." Kate shakes her head. She knows it's not. "The Abnormals I hurt, they're not here. It's not a shot at redemption. It's a fresh start." And she doesn't deserve one. "I made myself a lot of those. It never took."

[inabmovie]

Will wanted to beat his head against the wall a little out of the frustration of not getting through to her, but he kept that to himself. "You have to do the best you can with what you have," Will said finally. "I know that sucks. I do." It was part of the whole package of being stuck here, learning how to do what you could with what you had so it was more like living and less like just existing. "It doesn't mean you're giving up on home or anything, or that you don't care about anything before this, it just means you're trying to live. I know you can't see that right now."

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"I can see just fine," Kate snaps and pulls away. She can see that Will thinks like someone who never sold Abnormals or killed anyone and that he still doesn't get her at all.

Just as fast, she sees she's not being fair. She cares. She does, but...

Kate plants her elbows on her knees and leans over them, head in her hands. "This was a bad idea. I can't... I'm not ready to do this." Not with you.

[inabmovie]

Well, shit. Will had thought trying to empathize with her was the right thing to do, but apparently not. Damn. "It's okay," he said, and though he wanted to pat her on the shoulder or hug her or something, he didn't.

[girlsolo.livejournal.com]

It's not okay. It's the farthest thing from okay. It's never going to be okay, Kate screams inside her head, fingers curling so tight in her hair it pulls.

"It's not your fault," she says instead. "I'll be fine. I always am."

[inabmovie]

"Well, you know where I am, if you ever want to try this again," he said. He was aiming for casual, which wasn't really what he felt then, and mostly succeeded. It wasn't like talking to a patient. It was more personal, and Will couldn't help feeling a little stung.

[girlsolo.livejournal.com]

"I'm not breaking up with you," Kate says and her tone strongly implies both the moron and the asshole she doesn't add. But she rakes her hands through her hair and grabs the bottle she brought with her. "I just...can't talk about this. Not now."

I didn't want to talk, Will. I just wanted to talk. But maybe they can't talk until they've talked.