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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"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."

"I hear that, sister," Kate echoes from over at a mound of ITF laundry she's getting ready for wash. She winces mildly at the sister, but then it settles all right with her. For someone she stole crap from a half a month ago, Kate's pretty cool. "It's hard to lose a killer pair of boots if they're in plain sight."

She grins back over her shoulder. "And the trash schedule wasn't Will's. It's the boss's. We live on-site, at the Sanctuary, so that was his way of saying 'if you're staying, clean up your shit.'"

"Or easier to lose them in the mess," Kate admitted, but she was grinning as she said it. Even that couldn't make her stop keeping her room the way it was. Even back home, she'd been sort of ordered, but it was a bit chaotic anyway. There were places for all her things, but some of those places had overflowed into others.

"So what kind of job was that?" she asked. "I mean, between Big Foot and a trash schedule, it sounds like... nothing I've ever heard of."

With her piles sorted and ready to go into the wash, Kate goes back to the dryers and starts unloading them, one at a time, folding as she goes. "I know this sounds dumb, but it's actually classified." Right, who would believe that she's got clearance for something sensitive, with being a thief and stuff.

"Basically, I'm a retrieval specialist for exotic creatures." She quirks a softly wry grin at Kate. "Or as my gamer-geek pal would say, I'm using my powers for good."

"So you... find creatures that other people think aren't real and bring them back with you?" Kate asked, even though she'd said it was classified. A word like classified had never stopped Kate before.

That sounded like it wasn't real either, but the world was different now. She'd accepted that. It would never be the same as it had been in Kansas.

"We're actually a lot more like, um, maybe Greenpeace or the UN for exotic species than ghosthunters. We protect them from humans and humans from them. So we do a lot of stuff like endangered species, disturbed habitats, stopping trafficking. We really only relocate anyone if they're in danger or they're hurting people."

It's hard to explain without saying Abnormal, Kate realizes and hard to explain without giving Kate a sense of how much Abnormal life there really is. "We do a lot more work with things like a drug trade in hallucinogenic beetles than tracking Nessie."

"Hallucinogenic beetles," Kate repeated, knowing full well someone on the island would find a use for them if they happened to be here. The raves were great once in awhile, even if the last one ended sort of badly, but she knew someone out there would want something like that.

"Still, it's crazy and sounds really cool," she admitted. "How does someone get a job like that? 'Cause when I looked online, all I found was postings for the local restaurants."

Kate sobers at the question, smile fading into a soft frown. "Kind of depends. For most people it starts with seeing something you can't explain and can't let go of. The more you look, the more you find, and if you look long enough, our people find you."

She tosses another load into the dryer, shuts the door and turns the dial. Leaning against it, she glances at other-Kate and rolls her shoulders. "Sometimes you get in over your head and find yourself doing things you wish you weren't. If you're really lucky, Magnus sees something in you worth saving and invites you to stay."

She's never told it that way to anyone before. It feels kind of like honoring Jimmy to pay that forward.

"Huh," Kate said, pursing her lips thoughtfully. She never would have done something like that back home, she knew that. In general, she was pretty rooted in making money and getting her own place or getting out to see the world. Looking for things she couldn't explain had never been something she'd been good at. For the most part, she'd just rationalize even the craziest things.

"I guess you miss it, huh?" she asked. "I mean, it sounds like the sort of thing that you do because you like it."

"Yeah," Kate says softly. Nothing so far has really clammed her up, which is kind of amazing. Usually she'd have shut up before she started talking. She tries to be casual on the island. For Magnus and Will's sake mostly. But Feelings? Kate likes them about as much as Abby or anyone likes the boss du jour when the old one leaves on just about any procedural with a lot less chance of 'warming up'.

She kind of shrugs, tries to hide it in a wry, "That's the official shrink diagnosis for why I took your crap anyway."

"Oh, my god, shrinks," Kate said, rolling her eyes. There was only so many doctors someone could see before they sort of realized most of them didn't have the slightest clue. Her mother had seen every doctor Kansas had to offer and no one had been able to help her.

"I know they're supposed to help and all, but I don't know if a single one ever helped my mom," she said. "Maybe that last one helped a bit, but not much."

"Normally I'd be right there with you," Kate says with a quiet laugh. There's nothing she hates more, usually, than being picked apart for every tiny detail and explanation for why she is the person she is. Nature and nature. Done.

"But Will, the guy with the trash pickup time? He's a shrink. Don't tell him I said so, but he's pretty much the best guy I know."

"Well, I never said they couldn't be good people," Kate answered with a small smile. For all she knew, they were all super awesome. But she also knew none of them had ever helped her mom.

"I mean, I don't know a ton personally, but I bet they're all pretty nice," she continued. "You'd have to be, right? To do something like that. Even if they don't actually help anyone, that's what they wanted to do when they started doing it."

Kate's not sure that's why Will decided to become a shrink. Actually, she's pretty sure it's not at all, but they've never talked about it. It makes her kind of curious. Maybe she'll ask him.

It's not really Kate's business though, since she doesn't know Will. And once she's done shifting this set of loads around, she hops back up on the washers. "Is that why you want to be a cop? To help people?"

Kate honestly sure what it was. "I don't know," she admitted. "I mean... it's something to do. Something that I can do here. Back home I wanted to travel. I wanted to go to Japan so bad and like, teach English to little Japanese kids, but you can't do something like that on the island. Everyone already knows English. And there's no where to go."

Kids still need to learn to speak and read English on the island, but Kate knows what other-Kate means. She rubs her hands over her thighs and nods her agreement. "Yeah. Nowhere to go is a big problem. So is figuring out what to do. Not much use for someone whose best skills are combat and demolition."

"Or anything," Kate said. "Unless you're good at building shit or cooking. Or hunting, I guess, that's probably pretty important here, too." And the doctors, now that she was thinking about it. The island would be a lot worse off without all the doctors. But she was thinking of herself, with nothing do, of Marshall, whose best talent was making movies, of Jeff, who couldn't exactly be a lawyer.

"I guess no one really needs to have a job here," she said, shrugging. "But it gets kinda boring."

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girlsolo.livejournal.com - 2011-11-06 19:13 (UTC) - Expand

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