(no subject)

[everyone_takes]

Time doesn't heal all wounds.

Kate's pretty much determined that old cliché to be total bullshit, because here she is, months after Marshall disappeared and she still feels like crap almost every day. Some days are better than others and sometimes she can pretend she's happy long enough to fool some people, but it never sticks. At the end of the day she still goes home and thinks about all her family members who aren't there with her and feels like she's been left behind.

She doesn't tell anyone, but all she wants lately is just to go home.

But she does all the stuff people expect of her, even though she doesn't want to. She trains with Danny and pays attention to what he's saying. She spends time with her friends, with her boyfriend, she acts like herself, but she never feels like herself. No matter what she does, she feels like some kind of imposter who's just floating through her life.

The worst part is that there's nothing she can do that makes it go away. For the past few days, she's been thinking about going off on her own, doing something that's probably sort of stupid, but nothing seems to appeal to her. The dinosaurs still don't hold that much interest for her and she doesn't care about camping or looking for weird animals or bugs. That sort of leaves her with Rapture, even though she isn't sure about going down there. They probably wouldn't let her go down alone, anyway, but she can hardly ask Danny to go along with her.

Standing in front of the caves, she frowns and stares down into the dark. She has a flashlight, but no idea where to do or what she'll do when she gets there.

Comments

[everyone_takes]

"You were executed?" Kate repeated, suddenly turning against the window. The city itself was fascinating, but this was a little more important than whatever she was looking for down here. It shouldn't have been that surprising; she knew that all sorts of really shitty things happened to the people who were on the island now, but she didn't like to think about it all that much.

She especially didn't want to think about someone she liked being killed.

"How's that possible? I mean, what happened?"

[girlsolo]

"Yep. Whole team." Kate's glib now, but it had been ugly and messy and terrifying then. They'd all pretended not to be terrified, but they all thought Will or Magnus would talk their way out of it too.

Beautiful but deadly. Just like this place. Just like Declan used to say about her. No wonder she's confused.

"Next thing I knew, I was waking up with a bitch of a headache and drinking some kind of ion-reversing shake. Turns out, they had the ability to resurrect us. Once we were dead, the law was satisfied, and their leader had us resurrected to help out with a problem."

[everyone_takes]

"Jesus Christ," Kate said, frowning deeply. That was seriously fucked up and for all the shitty things she'd seen in her life, all the things she'd had to deal with, this was definitely near the top of the list. There was something seriously different from dealing with her mother than hearing about something like this.

"That's... really fucking stupid," she decided. "Just, oh, we'll just kill you, because you're breaking some law and now we need your help, so we'll bring you back and put you through all this horrible bullshit." People were pretty much assholes wherever they were from.

[girlsolo]

"In their defense, they were fighting off a coup and environmental collapse at the time," Kate says, but she's not sure why she's defending Ranna. Bitch wouldn't even give them the help they needed to save Will when he started turning into a Psillobar. "We were people they could trust not to have an agenda and Magnus's name goes a long way in our world."

She makes a face, then shoves her hair back, twisting it back into a knot. "But it sucked. The protein shake tasted like shit and I had a headache for days. That's the before part. The after part... I guess the surface world found out about Hollow Earth and Praxis and the Abnormals and it got destroyed. I met a dude, like some kind of leader there, and when Magnus needed a liaison, she sent me down there and I got engaged. Get engaged. Will get engaged. Won't ever get engaged?" She's still making faces because how the fuck do you talk about something you never did, but some other you did and you might but might not ever do? Even in her head it's complicated.

[everyone_takes]

"All of the above?" Kate guessed, because none of that shit really made sense in her brain. It all happened and yet none of it happened and she wasn't sure how that worked. For the most part, she tried not to think about it too much, especially in relation to her own life.

"So did you meeting him happen before you got here?" she asked, wandering down the hall a little further, looking for another door or another room. "The guy you got or didn't get or will get engaged to, I mean. Do you remember that much at least?"

[girlsolo]

"Welcome lounge is at the end of this hall, keep walking all the way through, the hall bends right, keep going through the room there and we'll take the elevators down," Kate says offhandedly, making it obvious the reason Thrace waved her through isn't because she's generally competent. More like a frequent flyer.

She lets Kate go ahead of her, because the ITF keeps this level in good repair and pretty well lit. A lot of people end their tours here. They won't, and Kate will take a lead then, but for now, letting other-Kate have her head is safe and it'll take the edge off the urge to wander later.

"Never met him, unless he was just one of the thousands of guys I met in passing. Kinda think he was part of some resistance though. More my type than a government honcho, you know?"

[everyone_takes]

"Yeah, I get that," she answered as she walked in the direction Kate had indicated, grinning to herself. Although she was totally convinced that her parents would have approved of Harry, there was still the fact that he wasn't much of one for rules, which was something Kate had always liked. Harry was a lot more balanced than the guys she'd dated in the past, though, which made everything a little easier.

"Apparently I date some total right wing douchebag for a little while back home," she said. "Lionel told me while he was here. I don't know why. I bet he was rich."

[girlsolo]

"Or he was hot and great in bed. Good sex covers a multitude of sins." Kate grins at her back and keeps walking. She's kind of curious about Harry, because, you know, Harry Potter and all. Either he's like a champion fuck or he's got a stick so far up his ass it stabs when they're kissing.

"So." Because it's about time they get to the point and neither of them's really the talk to me type, but if she's taking Kate somewhere dangerous, she needs to know what's on her mind. "You just decide you needed some excitement or looking for something specific down here?"

[everyone_takes]

It was totally possible he was awesome in bed, but it still bugged Kate that she'd actually date some asshole who was a jerk to her brother. She didn't have a lot of lines, but that was one of them. As far as she was concerned, she was the only person allowed to be a jerk to Marshall. Not that she even had the opportunity anymore.

She shrugged at Kate's question, lifting her hand to trail her fingers over the wall. "Nothing really specific. I just... I needed to do something. Effy and I went over to the other island, but that was before everything pretty much exploded for the both of us."

[girlsolo]

Effy. Kate knows the name and face but not the girl. Lost a bunch of people, went a little or a lot crazed, Finnick and Kate and some others have been looking out for her since. Stuff exploding, that's probably mostly Marshall but a lot of people went missing around the same time as Declan.

"Yeah, I know that feeling." Rapture's a good place to 'do something'. It's just what sort of 'something' Kate has in mind. "Sightseeing, window-shopping, treasure-hunting or adventure climbing? Rapture's got a little bit of everything, even if it's mostly defanged." Kinda like Tesla, really. More a memory of danger than actual danger, but sometimes it jumped up and bit you anyway.

[everyone_takes]

"Treasure hunting," Kate answered almost immediately. The other things appealed to her, too, but she had never been very good at window shopping, always wanting to take something home, keep it and have it for her own. Treasure hunting could give her that and maybe she'd find something cool to take back to Effy.

Maybe get her talking a little bit again.

"Is there actually treasure down here or will we just run around forever and find nothing?" she asked, smiling.

[girlsolo]

"Fort Frolic it is," Kate decides. A little bit of everything there and farther down so it's a little less trafficked. It means more time in the bathyspheres, but she can deal for a little bit of fun.

"There's still some stuff. Food, wine, weapons, crap from the shops. They don't mind if you bring the little stuff back but if it's bigger than a breadbox or fires projectiles, you've gotta talk to someone about it."

[everyone_takes]

"Fort Frolic," she repeated, amused by the name. There was a lot she didn't know about this place, but that was part of the fun, part of the distraction. It meant she wouldn't have to be thinking of other things, which was pretty much exactly what she was looking for.

"Who named it that?" she asked. "Any idea? Because it sounds like something straight out of a seventies porno or something."

[girlsolo]

Kate shrugs and leads them to the bathysphere station again. "Not sure. Probably the big kahuna, Ryan, or maybe Cohen." Their names are all over the place. Kate hasn't bothered to learn the history. That's usually Will's department. Maybe she'll come down here with Daniel sometime. He'll probably be able to figure out all that geeky crap just by twitching an eyebrow.

"This place was supposed to be for artists and scientists to have freedom of expression all the time, before it went bad." That much she knows. "All the names are kind of...you know. Thematic."

[everyone_takes]

"Not to be a total downer on the original idea, but isn't total freedom in science kind of... I don't know, really fucking bad?" Kate asked, thinking about that as she stepped back into the weird elevator thing. "I mean, scientific advancement is great and all, but there has to be some kind of rules. Guidelines so that everyone doesn't go completely insane and create something really dangerous?"

Maybe that was what had happened down here. She'd said everything had gone bad, so maybe someone had done exactly what she was thinking. Created something that had turned on everyone and caused a whole lot of bad shit to happen.

[girlsolo]

"Bet you'd never guess that I'm not exactly your philosophy type." Kate smirks a bit as she calls the bathysphere back to get them. "Also not really a rules type."

But since they've got some time to kill waiting for it to come back from whereever it went, Kate leans against the wall with one shoulder and gives it a thought. "Magnus and Will argue about this kind of stuff all the time. And Tesla. The problem's not really the science." She shrugs, mildly uncomfortably with the following thought, but it's true. If anyone, Kate would know. "It's the people. Sure, it's harder to kill lots of people without an ICBM, but if that's your goal, not having one isn't going to stop you."

[everyone_takes]

"People are pretty much the problem with everything," Kate agreed, rolling her eyes a little. "But I mean, something happened down here, right? There's a reason no one was allowed down here until everything was cleared and I heard some stories. There was some weird fucking shit going on down here. All the rules got taken away and a whole bunch of bad shit went down."

She wasn't one for rules normally, but it sort of seemed to be the way it was. They were given ultimate freedom and it all went to shit.

[girlsolo]

"Yeah. It all happened before I got her, but some of the main guys were kind of batshit. Experimentation went badwrong, killing ensued." It's not that Kate's nonchalant about it, except in a way, she is. "It's pretty much what you'd expect whenever you give a bunch of megalomaniacs some power. They want all of it. Just be glad Tesla thinks the tech down here's kind of backwards, or he'd be trying to take over the island from here."

She's not sure he isn't. Some days. But most of the time, he's just Nikola to her now. And if he tries to take over the world, she'll beg his boyfriend's pardon and kick Nikola's ass.

[everyone_takes]

"Yeah, that's what I heard," Kate said, although she really didn't know the whole story and most of the time she wasn't sure that she wanted to. Normally, she only paid attention to things in as much as they affected her, but given that she was down in Rapture now, it was becoming sort of important.

"I'm not sure the island's really worth taking over," she added thoughtfully. "I mean, the world, sure. But the island? There's like... two hundred people and a whole bunch of trees. Would that even be fun? I guess the dinosaurs add something to the mix."

[girlsolo]

The bathysphere takes that minute show and Kate makes a face at it when it opens. She gestures for other-Kate to step inside ahead of her. "Hate rides," she mutters under her breath, but goes ahead and gets in too.

"Oh, he'd use it as a platform to take over the universe. Or at least he'd say he was. Thing with him is, you can never actually be sure. You think he's just monologuing but it turns out to be something like the truth."

[everyone_takes]

"I don't get it," Kate said, stepping into the elevator easily as she thought about it. "Taking over the universe, I mean. I just don't get it. I don't get the motivation behind something like that. You're going to take over and then do what? Kill everyone off? No one will care anymore that you own the universe or whatever, not if we're all dead. Turn everyone into slaves? I just... yeah, I don't get it."

Maybe she'd never be an evil genius because of that, but she could deal with it. That wasn't something she'd ever really aspired to.

[girlsolo]

The bathysphere plunges down and Kate's fingers tighten around the rail, back presses against the side. She looks straight ahead, in control, but fuck she hates these things.

When it stops again, she lets out a sigh. "Remake the world in their own image. Play god. Most of them think they're making a better world." Nikola does. He might not even be wrong, most of the time. "The whole slavery thing is kind of a downer. I dunno. Mostly it seems like too much work to me. If you're busy dictating everything, when do you do the stuff you want to do?"

[everyone_takes]

"Sounds boring. Why would you want to remake everything in your own image? I mean, shit, I'm awesome and everything, but I wouldn't want everyone else to be like me, too. Then how would anyone know how awesome I am?" she asked, glancing over at Kate. "And, yeah, like you said. Way too much work."

Without taking a breath, she plunged on and asked, "Are you okay? You don't seem to like this... thing that much." It wasn't like it was fun, she had to admit.

[girlsolo]

"Yeah, fine." Kate upchins at her, directing her out of the now open bathsyphere into the corridor that led out into Fort Frolic's Atrium. The Hub of Fort Frolic.

"I just don't like rides. Like, anything not under my control. Give me a bike, I'm great. Tilt-a-Whirl, I'll toss every time." Why, well, some of it's just the control thing. But there's other things. About Thad and the things that happened at carnivals.

[everyone_takes]

"Gross. Please don't barf on me," she said, but she was smiling, teasing. But a second later, she had no idea what she'd even been talking about, her eyes widening as she took in the area that surrounded them. It was really like nothing she'd ever seen before and if she thought the entrance was spectacular, this is something else entirely.

"Holy shit," she murmured, staring at the signs, the advertisements. "I don't know what I thought we'd find down here, but this is... so weird."