girlsolo | [Not-so-merry prankster] Steve: Innocence is overrated based on what you haven't done

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[Not-so-merry prankster] Steve: Innocence is overrated based on what you haven't done

They let her go with less than a slap on the wrist. More of a slap in the face. Community service. Fine, whatever. It's an insult, in a way. It's also exactly what she needs. A slap in the face. Wake up, Freelander. This isn't a dream. It's not going away. A slap in the face. For being a brat and acting out. A slap in the face. Look at your life, look at your choices. Where's a girl's sassy gay friend when she needs him.

Not being sassy, never gay, and sleeping with the boss. That's where her not sassy, not gay best friend is.

Kate sighs, adjusts the ugly ass bag on her shoulder and tucks her hands in her pockets. It's a long walk from IPD to the little house on the beach, not prairie, even if there's a cheerful dog waiting to greet her. The walk will do her good. Maybe her cheek will stop stinging by then. Maybe her heart will.

She doesn't mind Will selling her out. She's kind of glad he did. It's a way to get straight, make good, and keep her pokerface at the same time. It's not that she cares. It's not that it matters to her. She just got caught and now she's got to pay the price and pray that it's enough. Yeah, she's in kind of a Melissa mood and she'd pretty much kill for her iPod.

The tracks in her head have switched from Melissa to Dessa by the time she gets to the hut on the beach. Her little canine pal is there, barking and wagging his tail. She smiles and crouches to pet him, in case they take away visiting privileges. Damn dog is one the only good things about this island. "Hey, pal. At least someone's glad to see me."

*Title and lj-cut lyric from Dessa's Dutch. Internal reference, Melissa Etheridge's Chrome Plated Heart.

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"More or less," Kate answers, forced nonchalant. She's not uncomfortable with him or his questions, and that's got to be obvious by the way she gestures, an easy, graceful flick of a hand. "Mind if we sit?"

Yeah, it's not answering the question that's uncomfortable. It's the answers. And the fact they're pretty personal.

Steve glances over the distance between where they're standing and the front porch steps and leads the way toward them, Zulu lifting his head from his paws as they approach. His tail is wagging audibly, a constant thumping against the wood, and he stands up to wait patiently until they both sit before promptly crawling into Kate's lap and sitting there, leaning back expectantly for a scratch - he knows he can count on that from her, apparently. Steve doesn't have much of an outward response to this, only a slight tension in his mouth that could constitute a smile.

"To be honest, the one you'd have more trouble convincing not to broadcast this is my partner," he points out, resting his forearm on one knee. "It doesn't make a difference either way to me. You could lie your ass off straight to my face and I probably wouldn't be able to tell. Am I getting close?" he asks, peering at her.

Kate grins at the dog and scratches his ears. "Dumb dog. Aren't you supposed to be a good judge of character?" She can't resist bending all the way over her lap to be nose to nose with him. He makes a dog noise of agreement, licks her face and she shrugs, laughing a little, and kisses his head. "What's his name?"

She flips the same smile back up at the hotass, just for a second, completely unguarded and sweet, before it shutters down into a smirk. Softer, but a smirk. "The dog's. But I wouldn't mind knowing yours and your partner's too." She'll answer his other question in a minute. These are the important things. To her.

"Might take him a while to grow into that particular trait," Steve replies, with an audible sigh. It's less about exasperation than it is the fact that he's grown ridiculously attached to the dog in question since Danny first brought him home from the litter. Sometimes it surprises him just how much, and then he remembers the fact that he'd never gotten to have one growing up, and maybe this is all residual yearning cropping up. He's not going to get lost in those thoughts now, though, not as soon as he catches a glimpse of sincerity flickering over her features. He's been trained to recognize the slightest movement. Microexpressions tend to fall under that category.

"Zulu. From the phonetic alphabet," he explains briefly, before turning the box lid over to reveal the CHAMP sticker pasted on its front, its edges worn and scratched.

"What, you couldn't tell that from this?" He puts the lid down and offers a hand. "Steve McGarrett." He doesn't offer his military designation any more these days. And something tells him she wouldn't care one way or the other. "Danny Williams is my partner, but you'll probably hear him before you see him, if you haven't met him already. Frankly, I'm surprised you hadn't heard anything about me prior to coming. He tends to over-exaggerate my past handling of certain cases."

"Listen up, Zulu." Kate bypasses most of what Steve says in favor of giving a dog lecture. It probably says something about her if you're Will. She's not going to think about it. Thinking always gets her in trouble. "The next time some chick tries to come in your house, don't be fooled by promises of water and pets. Don't let her in until the dads get home and check her out. Got me?"

There's something wry and soft in her eyes when she looks up again. "You asked before about me lying. The answer's yeah. I'm good at it. But it's less lying than magician's sleight of hand. Grifting and conning are about making you see what you want to see instead of what's there." Like she could be showing him sincerity while stealing his wallet out of his ass pocket. She's not, but she could be.

"Why did I take that?" She flips her hand at the toolbox lid. "Because you'd notice it, but I didn't need it. No chance of my being Valjean." Yeah, she knew all the classic con and thieves tales. "Why take something at all? Because..." This is harder and she's not really sure she knows. Kate shrugs. "Because I was there. Zulu needed water, so did I, and I wanted you to know I'd been there. Good and bad. I'd already done it 8 times and 10's a complete number. I kind of liked you guys too, because Zulu seemed happy. Kind of third grade, I guess. Pulling pigtails."

Thing is, what he really wants to know is why she did it at all, and that's a lot more complicated. Maybe she'll wait to see what he says first.

Steve observes the one-sided conversation with a small grin, one that almost instantly disappears when Kate looks his way again. Her words pretty much confirm everything he's already deduced about her - the faces she prefers to show the world, the sides she favors over others. He's caught a glimpse of at least two or more just within this one conversation, and he gets the feeling that there are likely more. Her admissions only confess so much, and he knows she's still keeping him at a distance despite the closer proximity they've achieved during their talk. Close, but leagues apart.

"Why take items that don't count as anything of value to you?" he asks, peering over at her, a deep frown settling in on his face. "You had to have known that some of them had sentimental value to their owners, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered leaving much more than the note. You saw the box under the bed, and you knew that it meant something because of where it was hidden." More accurately, he'd placed the box under the bed as a reminder that it'd always be there, that his father's investigation was still ongoing in one way or another, even if there was another version of himself still pursuing the endgame.

"A simple thief would have taken items worth more than just the memories," Steve finishes, propping his foot up a step higher, his forearm rising as it continues to rest on his knee. "This wasn't just about what you could do. This was about what? What you didn't do? What are you trying to prove, Kate?"

Edited 2011-10-15 18:06 (UTC)

Her eyes widen a little at that, and there's a sudden lump in her throat. She ducks her head and lets her hair screen the emotion that's too fast to be faked. How come he gets it, when Will doesn't?

It takes her a minute of petting Zulu, a full minute, which is a lifetime (and certain death) for a con like Kate. When she answers, it's quieter.

"A thief takes things they want or things they can sell. It's always about you have, I want." She chews at the corner of her lip and then blows out a breath. "On the island, no one needs anything tangible they can't get. But it's still about you have, I want. The things I took... It's not some big theoretical proof or anything, even though I guess it could look that way. I took from you what the island took from me. My past, my history, my home, my family. But I didn't want any of you to lose those things. So I gave them to someone else." Always to someone who had their own memories and dreams who would know to value them, even if they didn't know what they meant. "I knew you'd get them back and if you didn't, I'd steal them back and give them to you."

When she says it like that, it sounds...kind of weird. Hopeful almost. And like she was trying to control something uncontrollable.

"You can't count on a person to be the guardian of someone else's memories," Steve tells her, his own voice low and quiet. Zulu's settled down to drowse lazily in Kate's lap, soothed by the constant petting and the soft tones between them.

"People value their memories, and they want to be able to preserve them in whatever way they can, however small or insignificant they might appear from the outside. If holding on to something tangible helps with that, it's their right to have it. The island took all of those things from the rest of us too, Kate - some more drastically than others," he admits. He knows some people have family here, others have friends from home, and yet others have no one at all they can identify from their world, their past before the island took them without warning. And yet these items keep appearing, things from their worlds that either serve as fond or painful reminders. Steve's toolbox was more of the latter at first, but he keeps it for a different reason now.

"I know you probably feel helpless, but you're not alone in that feeling. Look around. We're all trying to build a life here, and some of us have a harder time of it, but you're stronger when you rely on others. You don't have to struggle through it alone."

"You all say that." Kate's voice is low, too, rough with emotion, and accusatory. "You all say 'you're not alone'. But you don't mean it. What you mean is, 'stop kicking, stop resisting, here, have a cookie, little girl, it's not so bad.' I don't want to build a life here. I want the life I had."

She stops, tongue running the underside of her teeth, the sharp edges keeping back tears that are none of his business. "I want the life where my boss and my best friend aren't living together. Where they've known me for years instead of months. Where I'm making up for my past and doing good and people respect that instead of giving me some blank slate pardon I don't deserve."

Probably the most telling thing about all of it is that her hand never once tenses on the puppy. She's gentle with him, because none of this is his fault. Like Ralphie, he just had the stupid bad judgment to like her and now she has to repay that with kindness. "I don't feel helpless. I just...don't want to be the hot Indian chick with the great taste in trashy chic who's great with guns and demolitions. I want to be me. All of me."

"You've got to make the most of what you've been given," Steve says, his own voice low and even-tempered, casual and quiet. Even if he is experiencing a myriad of emotions, they never once bubble to the surface. It means he's the one who stays level-headed on most occasions while Danny is busy shouting at him for something, and it means he's not going to raise his voice above a normal speaking level even now.

"And what's to stop you from any of that?" he asks, his question directed to the last part of what she's saying. "What's to stop you from being you here, where you've got nothing holding you back from that? You can be you, or not, more or less, whatever you want. None of the normal rules apply, none of what defined you back there is going to matter here, because you've been given that blank slate. We all have. We can either choose to let the past represent us or we can move on, move forward. And from what I've seen, it'd be a shame if you allowed yourself to define your future based on what you think you deserve. You want to make up for your past, Kate? Then do good, starting right now. Looks to me like no one's holding you back from that but yourself."

"That's thinking like a good guy who's always been good," Kate says quickly, but there's a slip of a smile at the corners of her mouth. He sort of gets it. Almost. If he does, maybe Will will get it. If she talks to him. No, when she does. She can't get right with the island if she's not right with Will. And Magnus.

"Maybe the island won't define me by that, but I have to. If I forget, even for one minute, the people I hurt, I don't deserve the second chance I already got, or the new start I get here." She shrugs, shoulders shifting and weight shifting back. Opening her body posture is deliberate. It's an invitation to see her as she is. "I'm sorry, for whatever that's worth. Hurting you or any of the others was never part of it. And doing good starting now, well...that's pretty much why I'm here."

"Trust me, we've all done things we're not proud of," Steve replies, his expression momentarily hardening. He's not going to go into specifics, partly because he doesn't care to if it's in the past and partly because some of those things weren't entirely government-sanctioned. It's safer for everyone he knows if he just lets those sleeping dogs lie.

"I'm not saying you have to forget," he adds, a quiet promise. "It's never good to forget. It keeps you from slipping into complacency. But you have that second chance, whether you think you deserve it or not. Start in on the good you think you owe whoever - yourself, others, all of it - but there are ways to channel your energies here. Ways to feel like you're doing something, so you can feel a part of this place." His expression softens slightly at her apology. "I know that was never your intention, and, well - if you wanted to make a fresh start for yourself, this is as good a chance as any for you to do that."

Kate doesn't want to feel like a part of this place. She's not going to say that, though. Not again. "There's probably a lot of reasons I did what I did. All of them true." It takes a con to know how malleable, how gray the truth is. Motivations are the most complicated truths there are and there's never just one reason. "Five stages of grief, that's what Will would say," she suggests with a wry quirk of her mouth and lift of her eyebrow.

"I can't promise I'm done spitting in the wind, laughing at death, yanking the tiger's tail, whatever your favorite metaphor is." There's a new set to her shoulders. Or actually an old one. Jaunty and self-confident. Strong and aggressively sensual. "That's part of me and not part I want to lose. I'm never giving up on going home. But I'm ready to take back the other part, too. The part that joined the revolution." Private joke, her and Hank, but it makes her smile to say it now.

"You offering to show me the way?"

"There always are," Steve responds, mouth twisted into a wry smile. The truth is always less simple than black and white, reasons and motivations always muddled in a grey area - at least that's what he's come to believe, no matter how often he and Danny disagree on the issue. He has to believe it. It's what his father had been investigating prior to his death, and Steve's almost positive that he'd had to break more than a few rules in order to look into what was really going on beneath the surface of HPD. Turned out it was something even more serious, something that spiraled up into the very structure of the islands' government, if Danny's stories about Jameson being in on it had been true - and Danny has no reason to lie to him, which makes the truth all the more unnerving.

"You don't have to change everything. No one's asking for a personality makeover," he adds, his expression still one of faint amusement as he studies the blatant shift in her posture, her carriage. She's got a confidence that you don't learn - you're either born with it or you spend your entire life trying to have it. "And home is on a lot of minds here." Her question takes him slightly aback, but when it comes down to it, there's really only one answer he winds up having.

"I guess I am," he declares, steadily meeting her gaze.

"There's nothing wrong with my personality." That's bright and almost playfully sharp, but softens with a glance down at the puppy still sprawled over her lap. "Right, Zulu?"

That's all sleight of hand though, see this, not that, while she works out how she feels about this. She'd been kidding, more or less. Needling. But it reminds her of another conversation, one that changed her life. Another time when it was up to her.

Trash gets picked up at four. Funny how the stupidest things start to symbolize an entire life.

"Okay. One condition, no exceptions. Magnus comes first. She will always come first." Which is weird, since it was about Will, but this is different. This about where her loyalty flows and it will always go first to her.

"He doesn't seem to think so, but then again, he's always been fairly trusting," Steve replies, shaking his head slightly as he scoffs at the sight of the puppy completely relaxed, his paws occasionally twitching in his sleep.

There's something in her that reminds him of Mary, maybe that equal parts of confidence and occasional vulnerability, and so maybe that means he feels somewhat inclined to look out for her now, if only to keep the inhabitants of this island as safe as he had back home. There's no Five-O here, only him and Danny now, but that doesn't mean the work they do should end.

"Oh, you mean - " She can only mean one Magnus, and Steve's gaze sparks with recognition as he nods thoughtfully. "Far be it from me to encroach on any of that."

Kate hooks a paw on her finger when it twitches but the little guy never wakes up. "Yeah, her."

For the first time in weeks, Kate doesn't feel a heavy weight when she names herself part of the Sanctuary staff. She smiles, and even though a lot of this is going to suck, it's not so bad. "A couple of years ago, I ran into Magnus working the opposite side of a job. I ended up helping her save her network and now I'm part of her team."

There's pride in her face when she lifts her hand to push her hair back from it. "What I did, don't let that reflect on her. She and Will and Declan are the best people I know. I screwed up, but that's not because of them. It's on me. Just me."

"To be honest, I'm not too familiar with any of the work Dr. Magnus used to do," Steve admits. It's not out of a lack of desire to know, but their last encounter had been entirely medically-related, not to mention that he's always considered her as more of Danny's friend than his. He imagines Danny might know a little more about this team Kate's talking about, at least.

"Had a team kind of like that back home," he adds. "Special task force I assembled from a couple people - one of which society had written off as a traitor. Point is, whatever it was you did doesn't have to reflect on you, either, not if the work you're doing now is good."

"Actually, at home, it was kind of important that it did reflect on me." Kate's not sure how much to tell him, mostly because she doesn't know how much they say about the Sanctuary and Abnormals. She runs her finger along the tendon of one floppy paw again while she thinks. "I had a reputation for being someone not to screw with. That was useful."

Her head comes up again, gaze meeting his. "We're the good guys, our team. But the people we're fighting, the work we do, it's dangerous and we can't always afford to play nice. I hear what you're saying, though, chief, and I'm on it."

She gives him another solid once over, taking in the body beneath the clothes. The way he moves. The things he's said. What she suggests isn't sexual, it's just plain smart. "If I get any say in where we start, my hand to hand could use some work. CQB or Krav Maga?" With Declan's shoulder, she hasn't been able to spar full out.

"Well, that does have its advantages," Steve admits, with something of a sideways look. His gaze flicks out toward the beach, toward the water a few hundred feet away from the hut, and the volleyball net in the distance, to the west. "As does not necessarily playing by the rules, but when the governor gives you full immunity and means to take down criminals, you don't really question her choice."

He finally shrugs, reaching back to absently scratch at his opposite shoulder. "I'm more experienced with the former, at least as far as training goes. ITF's helped me fill in the gaps, but I can only spar with a few of its members lately, at least in terms of matching someone both in size and in physical condition."

"I can see that. You're peak-conditioned." She stretches her legs which are starting to fall asleep under Zulu's weight. "We do a lot of work with tactical weaponry, so I'm not. I've got some Krav Maga and my regular spar partner on the island is CQB trained, British Special Forces. Pretty sure you'll kick my ass regularly, but I can make you work for it while I learn and I've got no problem with getting hurt."

If it makes her better, faster, stronger, if it makes her more valuable to Magnus when she gets home, if it channels her fury at being stuck here without leaving bite marks on her skin, she'll volunteer for the beating.

"Can't afford to be less than," Steve admits, with a small shrug. Zulu wakes up from the shifting underneath him, stretching lazily and yawning with a soft sound at being disturbed.

"Well, it wouldn't be training if you didn't wind up struggling with it every now and then. Only way you learn. Though I'd prefer it if the learning happened without serious injury," he adds, frowning at the thought.

"I've been training with guys your size for the last few years. I'm used to the disadvantage and I want to learn. That and anything else your --" Now she lifts an eyebrow, smirks lightly and scratches puppy belly. "SEAL ass wants to show me."

Yeah. She's almost sure. It's mostly the body that gives it away, but also the attitude. Very commando. Plus there's the CQB. Besides, she's had sex with a few of them. There's just a way of looking at the world that no one else who's served has.

A lot like the Sanctuary.

Steve's reaction is a small raise of the eyebrows, but he has to expect that she's going to peg him as easily as he had earlier, especially the longer the conversation goes on. "Former SEAL," he corrects, but it's a small relief that she knows what she's getting into. "It's been a long time since I was in it, but some things you just don't completely forget how to do."

Like spar, for example, and he can still hold his breath for a fairly decent amount of time. It's helped, lately, with the diving he's been doing. He smirks slightly, shaking his head at the expression on the puppy's face as he gets his belly rubbed. "That one's a hopeless case, I'm thinking."

"Thought so." Kate smiles and it's a pretty guileless expression. She's tired now, it's been a long day of talking, and this isn't where she wants to be. "Mossad, SAS, SEALs, for someone who knows what they're looking at, you guys are as obvious as an Indian girl in Kansas."

She glances down at the warm, wiggly mass of puppy in her lap and then her smile amps up a notch. "Or a puppy who wants a tummy rub." Bending over him, she gives him another talking to. "Don't listen to that. You're not hopeless. You might even turn out to be right about me."

The cocky confidence of the old Kate Freelander slides into the relaxed ease of the new one. Her chin comes up, gaze meets Steve's, solid. "He is right about me, for the record. No one needs to lock their shit up because of me. But--" Kate shrugs, casual and loose. "But if they do, I might call it a good deed. They trust too much. They're careless. I could have done much worse, if I wanted to, and there's a lot worse out there than me."

It's not an excuse, no attempt at an excuse. She actually feels like herself, Kate Freelander, Sanctuary Network, for the first time in weeks.

Edited 2011-10-16 21:11 (UTC)

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[Not-so-merry prankster] Steve: Innocence is overrated based on what you haven't done

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