After March 9: the broken locks were a warning you got inside my head

[girlsolo]

Ever since she found Finnick screaming for Annie, Kate's been restless. Strung tight like she hasn't been for months now. Not even when she realized B (Buffy, not Bella) was gone so soon after William's Uncle Jack. That'd just been sad, in that slow, aching way that punching bags or bodies doesn't help.

She can't sleep, even with Declan, and since Bonny keeps him up about half the time anyway, it'd be a dick move to take up more of his sack time with trying to tire her out. It probably wouldn't work anyway. Running, swimming, surfing, training, chasing kids, playing hoops, target practice, nothing works, and it's only gotten worse since Bella fell.

If she does sleep, she dreams of Thad getting eaten by the Sorkel instead of Constantine, or seeing dad get blown up but turning into Jimmy at the last second, or Will turning into a Psillobar or not coming back after Kali, or Biggie dead and Magnus batshit and it really doesn't take her shrink best pal to work out the kinks in her psyche (not that kind, but he can probably figure those out too, which is why they're never, ever talking about it). She's freaked out about the roots she's putting down here. Even more freaked out about not having anywhere to run when it hurts too much to stay. And don't even get her started about not being able to protect the people she's let herself care about.

It's late, it's dark, drinking just makes her emotionally sloppy, getting high makes her think too much. She's sick of everything and crawling out of her skin. So what makes a blind run down to the Compound a good idea? The promise of a shower, maybe some tea, and a movie at the end of it. She can watch movies on her laptop, but she left it at Declan's and the last time Bonny licked her in her sleep, she had dreams of being trapped in a cave with a million squirmy worms.

So she's scanning the bookshelf for something decent to watch instead of choosing from everything she loves in her own space. The hot shower and tea have just managed to soothe the sharpest of her edges off when the light catches on reel in a shiny case, fallen on a diagonal in a gap between two others.

Kate freezes.

Sanctuary

Instantly the edges are gone and Kate busts out all over spines. Like a porcupine or pufferfish. But she can't help reaching for the reel. And the next one. And the next and the next and the next and the next. Seven in all. Kali, pts 1, 2 and 3, which she shoves in the hemp bag she brought with her. She knows what that is. Penance, she knows that from the script, and shoves it away too, all the way to the bottom. Metamorphosis, and maybe Kate's not the most educated person but she remembers the Kafka jokes from when Will was turning into that thing and that goes into the bottom of the bag with him dying to save the world from a giant sea spider, while she swallows back the acid and the chill. The Bank Job's pretty self-evident, and even makes her smile a little. If Will knew, if they hadn't agreed not to tell him, she could show him that reel. They'd had fun on that job. But she can't, so she bags it too.

The last one's called Acolyte and she can't think of anything that's happened that might get that title. The smart thing to do is bury them before they can fuck her up more, but it's like Danny with Grace. Kate has to know. She has to know what's happening to Hank and Biggie, to the versions of Will and Magnus, Declan and Tesla and herself that she left back home.

Wishing there were somewhere private to watch these things, Kate edges over to the projector, head low and trying not to catch the attention of any of the other night owls. She fumbles the canister open with shaking fingers and snaps the film onto the arm. It takes a couple of tries to get it fed through, but she does, starts the film, hops the back of the couch and then sinks low into it.

It starts with Will's voice saying "Previously on Sanctuary" and she laughs nervously. That dissolves at Magnus looking gorgeous and talking to Will. It cuts to a guy she doesn't recognize talking about Hollow Earth saying they just signed the Sanctuary's death warrant.

"Typical genre melodramatic bullshit," she mutters to cover the catch in her chest at seeing and hearing Biggie, then Will, Declan and Henry are driving through the jungle talking about Magnus and where is she?

Will shouts, "Magnus, come in. You've got to get out of there now--!" and then a hotel explodes. It crumbles like the Twin Towers to the sound of Declan, master of British understatement saying, "My God."

Credits roll, Kate can't decide if she loves the music or hates it, but she knows how this stuff works, so she's not panicked about Magnus blowing up. Not yet. But exploding buildings and people she cares about…yeah.

Half an hour later, she's seen herself come up from Hollow Earth - she's living down there? - to deliver a message to Magnus, interrogate some dude from species she doesn't know with Will (who says Hollow Earth is treating her well), find a bunch of dead humans and Abnormals and uncover a key piece of evidence in a terrorist plot. Biggie's brainwashed. "Fuck this fucking show! Goddamn it! It better not be real!" because she's crying and she doesn't cry and that's before she and Magnus get through the gate guards "the old-fashioned way," "Krav-Maga them" according to this Addison asshole, and she smashes Biggie in the head with a fire extinguisher -

To keep him from blowing himself and her and Magnus up with his suicide bomb vest.

They get him out, but the hotel explodes anyway, their van rolls, and Kate sees herself unconscious, battered, bleeding ,and Magnus sounding terrified when she calls her name. Cut to Will sitting by a bed reading, her bed, she realizes, and they do the wake up dance. She's been out for a week, Magnus did two surgeries, Sally's been helping remap Biggie's brain and Kate's…

Running her fingers over a bracelet. The bracelet. The goddamned bracelet that was in her jewelry box. What the hell?

"Did the doc say when I'll be well enough to travel?"

"Calm down, okay? You just woke up."

"I just really should be getting back to Hollow Earth. People will be worried."

"Is that a… Herusan promise band? From Garris? I looked it up."

"Yes."

Yes?!

"Congratulations."

"Thanks."

"Oh, fuck me sideways." Kate pauses, her stomach flips over in a tight, hot knot and her voice is raw from crying. "Seriously?" She doesn't even know this Garris guy.

[[ooc: There's a youtube full episode here and a transcript here. Feel free to find Kate at any point of the episode. If you come before she starts the reel, she may not or may choose a different one, depending. Caveat: Cerie and Callie do not want Magnus and Will canon-punctured, so if yours are going to need to tell them, please don't tag. ]]

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[chasedthestars]

"Kate?"

He's been present for a while now. Walked into the room with a smile that only brightened for the sight of Kate, but she didn't see him, her eyes fixed on the projection with an intensity that makes Jim look, too. He doesn't understand what's happening, but he can feel that it's important. It's in the line of Kate's shoulders, the deep shadows between her brows, the white press of her lips. He spends more time watching her than the projection, but at a new voice he looks up again, recognizing that craggy face at once.

Biggie, she'd called him.

Jim detaches himself at last from the door and doesn't stop until he's crouched between Kate and the images on the wall. "Katie bug, c'mon." He doesn't know what the hell is happening, but he knows enough to have made a decision. "Maybe we take a break, huh?"

[girlsolo]

Kate knows there's someone there, she always knows what's in her environment, but she can't look away. For once on the island, she trusts that it's safe long enough to do what she needs to do. So she's surprised when it's Jim. Pissed, too, because he reminds her so much of Jimmy. I'm Jimmy, by the way. Hi Jimmy, I'm...? Who's about the only person besides Biggie and Will who's ever seen her cry.

She dashes at her face with her wrist, scrubbing at the telltale streaks and spits out, "No. I have to see what happens." And then a beat later, because he is who he is, she dredges up the attitude and the snark to say, "And did you seriously just call me Katie-bug?"

[chasedthestars]

"Too cutesy?" Jim asks, but he knows she's well past smiling right now, and sits down next to her. "Okay. But I'm staying, too," he says, eyes flicking back to what's happening on the wall. It's hard to get a handle on what it is. That's Kate, and those are others he's seen on the island, but the scenes move more like entertainment than documentary. Reenactment? If so, why? "What are we looking at here?"

[girlsolo]

Kate nods once, sharply. He has to stay now, because he's seen the pictures on her phone and he's seen Biggie. He has to know that this is wrong, that Biggie would never hurt humans, that he wouldn't betray her or the Sanctuary like this. If she can't be there to help her friend, at least she can make sure anyone who knows about him knows the truth.

It matters.

Besides, she really really doesn't want to be alone for this and she can't tell Will and she won't tell Declan until she knows. If Biggie went wrong, that's a secret she'll carry by herself. Alone. The others don't need to know and Jim will help her keep the secret if she needs him to.

It's a thing. She just knows. So instead of jumping up to turn it off or shoving him away, she pulls her knees up onto the couch and leans into him. It's okay to not be okay with it, she told Will once after he told her a million times and right now she's not okay and it's too much work to pretend.

"Fiction or my future. Don't know," she says, rough, soft and quiet, the words from the screen more important than hers.

[chasedthestars]

Fiction. The idea grates in ways Jim's too preoccupied to deal with now, but he files it away for later for when Kate's not a warm, tense weight tucked against his side. Jim puts his arm around her, hand curled around her shoulder.

Before them, that Magnus lady is kicking bureaucratic ass, and then Kate's there, and the ass they're kicking is less than figurative. "Nice elbow hook," Jim murmurs.

[girlsolo]

"Should see it now," Kate manages between tense breaths. It's hard to watch this. Doing it's easy. In the moment, she always knows how it's going to roll. Always knows she'll do whatever she has to and the adrenaline flows, anger flows, need makes her hot and ready for anything that comes at them.

Her fingers curl and clench tight and Jim's hand on her shoulder's the only thing keeping her from getting up to pace while they search for Biggie. "Watching sucks." She barely gets it out before Biggie opens the vest and then she's gone from anger to fear again.

She stops him. She and Magnus stop him. They have to. They just do.

[chasedthestars]

Her already staccato breaths come even sharper, and Jim tightens his hand around her shoulder, holding on like he can keep whatever's coming at bay, but he knows he can't.

Biggie is opening his vest, and Jim doesn't believe in a single damn deity in all the universe, but he finds he feels like praying all the same. This isn't like home. There's nothing he can do here, nothing he can be except for comfort, and that won't be enough. He doesn't know how to be enough, and god, he hates no win scenarios to the depths of his bones.

"Kate..." he murmurs, because he's not sure if Magnus is going to talk Biggie out of it. "You don't have to watch."

[girlsolo]

Her shoulder's numb under Jim's hand. She feels the weight of it but not the grip.

"He'd watch for me," she answers, in a tone as thin and sharp as razorwire, a tone to flay skin from bone before you even feel the pain. He would. She knows. One or the other, they'll be there for each other's last breath. All the team, but especially Biggie.

Her mind chases down the details, the logistics, and it's not enough to know how this is going to play out. Except that she'd be circling back by--

Now. Kate sucks in a short breath and lets it out as smile that's even shorter. They're not out of trouble yet, but if anyone can rewire or unwire a bomb in the time they've got it's her, and if not --
if not, they'll do what they did and get him out of the vest.

Fuck. Now she knows what Will and Declan were seeing at the beginning of the reel. She tenses again. Drive faster, Magnus.

[chasedthestars]

Jim breathes a sigh of relief as well, but it's shortlived. Kate knows this world better than he ever could, and she's still a ball of tension beneath his arm.

"Hurry up," he murmurs despite his better efforts. It's all he can do not to rocket right off the couch and shout at the screen. "Hurry up, hu-" But on the wall, the city in the valley is exploding, and Jim's lungs are too tight for breath.

[girlsolo]

When Will starts shouting - Magnus! Kate! Anybody, come in! Magnus, come in. Kate, anyone, come in. Magnus, if you can read me, please respond. Magnus! - Kate tears in two. Her breathing's harsh and raspy, and her hand's somehow made it onto Jim's other arm, fingernails digging into it. Hearing Will panicking like that over them is worse than seeing them in the van on its side and in pieces on the ground. Way worse.

She's not scared of dying. Never has been. Not scared of watching herself die. If this is her swan song, at least she went out doing the best thing she's ever done: saving Biggie.

...she hopes.

[chasedthestars]

Jim's no stranger to suffering. He's seen good people hurt many times, himself among them, and the sour feeling churning in his gut isn't a surprise. What is is that for all he's been through, it never gets any easier, and when he sees Kate lying bloody on a bed of asphalt and broken glass, he can't even breathe.

His arm tightens around her again, and this time, it's not to give comfort but to take it.

[girlsolo]

Kate's hand slips from Jim's arm to his chest right below his ribs, his solar plexus, before she has time to realize she's doing it. It's instinctive, but whether she's protecting him from the van flipping on them or reassuring him here and now she's okay, Kate doesn't know or think about. What she does know is that when the wall shows Will sitting by a bed waiting for her to wake up, Jim's doing the same thing. He's acting like team.

"Hey." It's soft, more a sound than a word. Just I'm okay, before she's fussing with the damned bracelet up on the screen. Herusan promise band, and she's less freaked out than pissed off. "You have got to be shitting me." Engaged? To some guy she doesn't even know? While her family's getting ripped apart? No fucking way.

[chasedthestars]

Alive. She's still alive, and Jim's swallows around a lump that feels like he's been screaming for hours. "What?" he rasps, sounding every bit as wrecked as the Kate onscreen. He'd be embarrassed, but frankly he thinks he's doing pretty good speaking around the heart lodged in his throat.

"What is that?"

[girlsolo]

"A giant mindfuck." It's acid and bitter, and she hurts like she just got blown apart and put back together twice.

She's not okay with this. With Will's congratulations or with Biggie going off undercover alone (he is, obviously, because no way he'd get past Magnus a second time) or the fact somehow it's more important to get back to this Garris than stick around and see Biggie through.

Her fingers clench against the emotional sandblasting and she'd be a lot more awkward about that being his shirt they're curled in if she couldn't feel his heart pounding as hard as hers. She lets go and pulls back in on herself, making herself okay, and lifting her gaze to meet his. "That bracelet showed up here last month. I thought..." She shrugs like so what but it's a lie so big even she can't make herself belief it. "I thought it was from Declan. But no. So I turned it in to the IPD. Guess it's mine. Guess..."

Kate guesses a lot of things, and she's not sure how to feel about any of them, so she offers up a sheepish little smile, deflecting. "Guess it's kind of weird that I'm more worked up about that than getting blown up, huh?"

[chasedthestars]

"Maybe," says Jim, and though he doesn't understand all that the bracelet must mean, he can make some guesses. A sweet girl with blond ringlets had tried to give him a promise ring in the fourth grade, but he thinks it's safe to say Kate's running from more here than just cooties.

"Is that - " he says, "I mean, do you know the guy? Garris?"

[girlsolo]

She shakes her head and glances down at her hands where they're picking at the frayed seams of her jeans. "Never heard of him."

Not like that's any big surprise. She wouldn't expect to know anyone she was seeing at home unless it was Declan, Will, or Henry. The last guy she hooked up with before here lasted like two weeks?

Her shoulders shift and she just feels...too many fucking things to try to sort them when she won't even spend an entire weekend with the guy she supposedly loves. Maybe he's not, if she can leave everything that matters to her for this Garris guy, even Biggie. "Never wanted that, you know?"

[chasedthestars]

"Yeah." His gaze drops from her shifting shoulders and to his own hands. Jim can face down danger with nothing more than an excited swoop in his gut, but things like this...it takes regrouping.

He does know what she means, though it's less that he's never wanted it, and more that Jim accepted long ago that he couldn't have it. Loving someone like that had ruined his mother's life, ruined Jim's when his father's death extinguished all hope of an ever after. Jim's been through enough. He's not eager to invite more, especially when he knows how it all too frequently ends.

"I guess," he says, piecing through all he's just seen, "Future you changes her mind?"

[girlsolo]

"I guess," she says, but she's having trouble believing it, and that's in the annoying, telltale catch in her voice. She used to be so fucking good at this, telling lies and believing in them. What the hell happened to her?

"I heard about this, I guess you'd call it an alternate universe, where me and Will had a son." Kate's not sure why she's telling Jim, for real telling, not just bullshit off the cuff. But the words want out and that doesn't happen much with her, and Will would tell her to respect that. "It really screwed me up for awhile, not the me and him part, but the kid part. Because it was the end of the world, and we had this kid anyway, and I died and left him. And I would never do that." Her eyes glitter when she looks up at Jim, like maybe somehow he's going to understand what she doesn't. "I wouldn't do that to a kid. And I wouldn't do that--" She tosses her chin at the screen and drags her hand against her eyes again. "Leave the Sanctuary like that. I just wouldn't."

[chasedthestars]

"You - " says Jim, and on the heels of what he'd been thinking, what she's saying now, for a long moment his throat is too tight for speech. Growing up, he'd hated his father with as many breaths as he'd spent loving him. George Kirk died a hero, but with Winona gone so often, he'd left little more than an orphan behind. The true fault had lain with Jim's mother's neglect, but forced to choose between hating a father who wasn't around and hating a mother who might change her mind and love him again someday...young Jim had taken the simple approach and run with it. Even now he feels a stir of instinctual anger in his gut, but he swallows it down.

"People do crazy things when the world is ending," he says, recalling Spock's face on the transport pad, the wild determination to beam onto a dying planet to save his mother. "You wouldn't leave people now. I know you wouldn't."

[girlsolo]

How? she wants to ask him, demand, how do you know? when he hasn't known her even that long when she's still scared she will, that she'll screw up, even though she doesn't want to.

Instead, she lays her hand on her thigh, palm up and fingers out, like she wants to take his hand but she can't. "I used to leave. It was all did. Leave. Run. I was all about me, and ties are dangerous. But they convinced me, Will and Magnus and Henry and Biggie. They made it worth the risk." She glances at him, trying to read what's behind that tightness in his voice, the pause, that don't have to do with her. Trying to understand if he's going to get, "It's home. They are. And I fought too hard for that just to let it go for some guy," or it's going to hurt him somehow. To be fair, it does sound like Magnus sent her down there to be the Sanctuary liaison, but it still feels wrong, and...

Quietly, "I was going to do that...for as long as they would let me. As long as I survived it." A few more years, at best. What they'd seen on the screen wasn't that uncommon. "I don't want to leave them." Her voice catches, snags on a rising edge of something like panic, but she tries to swallow it down. "I just don't."

[chasedthestars]

"You don't," Jim agrees, because he can see it in her face, the wide, desperate set of her eyes. She wouldn't leave them anymore than Jim would willingly leave his ship, he knows that.

"And you don't have to. Whatever made that Kate up there decide to put that bracelet on, she's not you. Not yet, not if you don't want her to be."

[girlsolo]

Her breath catches again but there's something in Jim that makes the panic stop, stops the freefall, and she needs to trust it. Needs to believe it and him, so she does - she's always been good at taking what she needs where she can get it.

Kate nods once and exhales slowly, calming herself off his steadiness and certainty. He's right. She knows he is. It's what she's said since she got here. She can't control whether they leave her, but she's not that girl anymore, the one who runs. She doesn't have to be. Doesn't answer a lot of other questions, maybe important ones, but it's enough for now.

"Damn straight," Kate says, and if it's not as convincing as her usual snark, it's a lot closer than just minutes ago. Her gaze is still searching, not cocky, when she finds his again. "And this Kate needs a drink or ten. Coming with?"