girlsolo | [For Kate G.] But don't pick on the girl who's only turning on the lightswitch

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[For Kate G.] But don't pick on the girl who's only turning on the lightswitch

It's been thirteen days since the IPD caught her. She's got six weeks to do her 110 hours. Check this, Dr. Z. she's not even procrastinating. Thirteen days in and she's done forty-eight of them already. Count that. Forty-eight. Four hours a day, every day, plus an extra four hours on Monday.

Today, she's got the ITF laundry detail and she's already two hours into a four hour shift. She might even pull another four, since the laundry room's a great place to look at fashion magazines without getting caught by people who don't need to know she's looking at them. Declan. Tesla. Will. Magnus would be okay. She'd probably get it.

She's sprawled on the floor on her stomach with her feet up, waiting for the dryers to stop or the shit she's soaking (she does not want to know what some of those stains are) to be ready to swap to the wash, when she hears footsteps. "First and second washers are open, first through third dryers," she says without looking up.

She's dutiful about her community service, yeah. But no one said she had to be an overachiever.

[OOC: Assuming Kate's wearing something suitably cute and interesting. There would be combat boots and a jacket, studded bracelets, and at least one flash of color involved. Whether Kate picks up she's the one from the note or not is up to you. I'll have Kate recognize her if not.]

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It wasn't a question she normally gave much thought to and Kate's shoulders lifted slowly. It wasn't like that here. Even if people did know who he was and his history, they pretty much gave Harry all the space he deserved, as far as she knew, and besides Lionel Trane, no one had asked her what it was like. (And no one had asked her if he tasted like butterbeer, but Kate figured if anyone was going to say that, it was going to be Lionel. It was part of his charm.)

"Pretty normal," she answered after a moment. "I'm pretty used to people staring at me because life was like, fucking crazy back home, but no one does that here." It was nice.

"Huh." Kate guesses that makes sense. "I guess with lots of people finding stuff like that out about themselves, no one's really going to make a big deal out of it." Henry would probably still fanboy the crap out of Trip, but after Kate punched him once, at least he'd keep his mouth shut.

Fuck. She really misses him.

She hops up on the washer opposite other-Kate. "Mind my asking what flavor of crazy? Seems like everyone's got a story around here."

Tara's shit wasn't something Kate had ever really been quiet about. It might have been embarrassing or even hurtful, but she'd never hidden it from anyone. It was a part of who she was, whether she liked it or not, and Kate knew her life would've been a lot different if her mom hadn't been sick.

With a shrug, she said, "My mom's sick. She has DID. They used to call it Multiple Personalities." And whether or not the name was changed, that was still what it felt like to Kate most of the time. There were multiple people in her mom's body and sometimes she got Tara, but sometimes she got T. Or Alice.

Kate's never been the sit and chit-chat type. Yeah, she's constantly bugging Hank and Biggie when she's bored, but they're always talking about something. She doesn't know how to do this empathic crap. That's Will's job.

But this girl, there's just something about her. Same as Coraline. Kate can't help getting drawn into that shrug. It's like watching herself in the mirror. "Sounds rough. You have family to help out with that or was it just you?"

There had definitely been periods of rough, times when things had been really, extremely fucked up, but Kate had always been sort of weirdly optimistic about it. They could handle anything, the five of them, so long as Charmaine wasn't being a total bitch or her mom was being honest.

"Nah, there was a bunch of us," she said. "My brother, my dad, my aunt." Her grandparents pretended to help, but they mostly just made shit worse. "I mean, it's not even that big a deal. It just... is."

It's not that big a deal. It just is. It's like a page from her own playbook. And some people - Will - would say it was guarded or overcompensating or something. Maybe it is. It's also how you cope. When things are crazy, like other-Kate's mom or her life when mom went all weird and withdrawn after dad died and Thad was born, you learn fast. Boo-hooing about it does no good.

Kate nods at her, knowing. It just is. "I hear that. It's kinda like living in gangland or something. You get used to it. You do what you have to."

"Yeah, exactly," Kate said, a little relieved. Some people just got it, they just understood that you couldn't change shit like that, so you dealt with it as best you could. Sometimes that meant getting mad and sometimes it meant just doing what needed to be done and sometimes it meant nothing at all.

"People would think it was the weirdest thing ever. For me it's just like... I don't know, my mom's sometimes a dude. And she's been sometimes a dude since I was a kid."

"What's weird to someone else can start to look normal, real fast." Like living in what's basically a castle with a mermaid, a two-faced guy, and dozens of Abnormals. Not to mention, "Back home, Bigfoot's one of my best friends." And when she'd met him, she'd been thinking about selling him.

Kate frowns a little, not sure of herself in a conversation like this. "I'm not trying to say it's not rough or anything. I'm sure it is. I just get that life's about working with what you've got." Shut up, Will. He's only been trying to remind her of that since she got here.

"Wait, Bigfoot?" Kate asked, because nothing else that was said even mattered the slightest bit after that. "Like, actual Bigfoot?" If someone had said that to her in Kansas, she would have called them crazy in a second. But here on the island... well, she'd seen a lot of weird shit. Bigfoot wouldn't even be in the top five.

"For real?" she asked, just to be clear. "Really for real Bigfoot?"

Kate's mouth quirks with a sharp wry smile that barely covers the pain of that loss. "Yeah. He's actually been working for my boss for like fifty years or something. He's great. Seriously." There's no hiding either the longing or the fondness in her voice. Clean laundry's always going to remind her of Biggie. "We watch 'Operation: Paranormal' together every week."

She's been trying not to think about him. Or Henry, but especially not Biggie. Fuck, she really misses them.

"Mind literally blown," Kate said. It wasn't every week someone told her that not only did Bigfoot exist, but that he had a job and they were friends. "So is the Loch Ness Monster real, too? I mean, they're sort of in the same vein, as far as I know..."

Maybe that was a stupid question, but it was one she had to ask anyway.

"Yup." Actually, Kate's not completely sure on that one. She'll ask Declan. "At least, probably. Pretty much everything you've ever heard about is real in some way. Except aliens. We haven't run into any of those yet."

It's funny, Kate thinks as she hops down from the washer to check on the clothes. She doesn't tell most people what they actually do. But there's something about other-Kate that says she's not going to go telling tales and pointing fingers, and Kate likes that's she's smiling. It feels like she's making up for messing with her.

"There's a mermaid we call 'Sally' living with us, the goddess Kali's actually a telepathic projection of a giant sea spider..." Her eyes flash with mischief as she glances back over her shoulder. "Had enough yet?"

"Ew," she said, nose wrinkling at the thought of a giant sea spider. "Seriously, that's pretty gross. I mean, spiders in general aren't my favourite things in the world, but now you're telling me there's a giant one. In the ocean?"

Which meant she was never going to go swimming there again if she could help it. Even if the spider hadn't been near the island before, weird shit happened here all the time.

Kate laughs just a little. "Bertha's huge. Like half an island fights with Godzilla big. And sedated last time we saw her. She actually looks a lot more like a robot crab than a spider. Seriously, don't worry about her interrupting your beach funtimes."

If Bertha shows up, she's more likely to interrupt the beach than the funtimes. Man, now Kate's even more pissed off at the state of the island than ever. Yeah, there were superpowers when the movie monsters showed up, but what if there aren't, next time? There's not enough firepower on this island to deal with Bertha. She keeps that off her face, though, smiling while she sorts and folds.

"All that sounds pretty unreal," she said, her heels banging lightly against the washer as she considered it. There was always a chance Kate was bullshitting her. She had gone into her hut and stolen her shit, leaving behind a Harry Potter book, of all things, so it wasn't impossible that she would be lying.

"But I guess everyone comes from pretty different worlds," she added. "I mean, there sure aren't any wizards in mine."

"Will always says it's like we live in a B movie," Kate agrees. It totally is and completely unbelievable, especially coming from her. She pats her pocket to see if she has her phone. She still carries it, and still charges it, even though she can't do anything with it. "I've probably got a picture of Biggie if you want to see." She does, she knows, she tries not to look at it too often.

It's weird making the offer. Especially to a stranger. But, fuck her sideways, somehow it matters whether other-Kate believes her. Man. The fuck happened to you, Freelander?

"Holy shit, yes," Kate answered, jumping down from the washer to wander over to her. That was the sort of thing that Marshall would never believe, but seeing a picture would make it perfectly real for Kate. Even though she knew stuff like that could be faked, it didn't matter. She knew somehow that it would be real.

Grinning, Kate pulls out her phone. It's not a standard model and just looking at it you can tell it's pretty souped up. She pushes the on button, pops the folders up, and finds a folder called 'Fam'. A doubletap and two flicks of her middle finger across the screen get her to a picture she took one morning when she ambushed him for a hug at a campsite. It's her favorite. If it were on paper, it'd be worn from how many times she's touched his face.

"Here. That's him and me in Wyoming." They'd been hunting a giant shapeshifting moose. It was a hoax, and a pretty good one. Magnus had been ticked.

"Wow," Kate said, looking at the picture. She hadn't needed the picture to believe it -- she believed all sorts of crazy things now -- but it sort of cemented the idea in her mind. All that shit people thought was fake was actually real. And someone she knew was friends with one of them.

"That must've been... crazy," she said, but she was smiling. Crazy in the good way. Crazy in a way she never thought she'd know.

"It was." Kate flips around to a picture of the boys screwing around and points to them. "That's Henry. Hank. He's our tech geek. He built this phone and the superfast wall-charger I've got. It charges the phone to 50% in like 5 minutes. And that's Will, he's here on the island. He's a profiler. Like freaky observant. He sees everything." Her voice softens, which she fucking hates, when she points out Declan. "That's Declan. He's head of our UK House and sort of our tactical leader. He's here too."

"You've got a lot of people from home," she said, then pushed off the washing machine when it stopped. "My brother's here."

But only Marshall. She was gland he was on the island, that much was certain. If he hadn't been, Kate was pretty sure she would've gone crazy by now, but it would have been nice to see her mom or dad. She would've even taken Charmaine at that point.

"Our boss is here too, and one of her best friends," Kate agrees both with the statement and what she's pretty sure other-Kate means by it. "Is your brother who you live with?" That would explain why one room was so different than the other but there didn't seem to be any real overlap zone of tension. You saw that sometimes in houses where marriages had become the War of the Roses.

She moves away to check on the stuff in one of the dryers that's stopped. It's not dry, so she starts it up again.

"Yeah, we got the hut not too long ago," Kate answered, grinning a little. "Now there's a wall to keep my shit contained. I think Marshall likes that."

And having actual walls was pretty nice, not to mention the windows and door. The Compound had been okay at first, when she hadn't been sure of anything, but eventually she'd needed her own space.

"Marshall sounds like he should meet Will." Kate grins at the thought of matchmaking friends for Will based off her stealing spree. It would drive him batshit, which is actually reason enough to do it. Especially since they're all patched up now. "One of the first nice things he ever said to me was 'trash gets picked up at four'."

She's thought it before, but saying it out loud like that really drives it home. Sometimes it's the smallest stuff that sticks with you and means the most.

"He had a schedule for the garbage?" Kate asked, but then she laughed, because she loved her brother, but that was totally something he might do. There were good reasons behind it, she wasn't totally oblivious to why Marshall had become the caretaker or why she'd started to rebel at fourteen, but she didn't think either of them would ever change completely.

Marshall would always be Marshall and she'd always be Kate. They'd grow up and they'd do some things different, but her mess would probably always drive him crazy.

"I just like knowing where my stuff is," she said, grinning. "If it's on the floor, I can see it."

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