strangetrip | [GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

Fifteen days into this particular strange trip, Kitty had redistributed alcohol supplies between the cafe, restaurant, and night club to make it possible to easily tend bar wherever people decided to gather. Today, as most days, she settled into the lobby cafe after chivvying the cook into chicken tenders and french fries (after convincing him it was a single plate meal). It was the closest she could get to "bar food" from him and someone would probably arrive sooner rather than later to make something else.

A few people trickled in after awhile, but none of them demanding. Like her, they drank coffee from the samovar she'd put out. And also like her, most of them had something else to keep them occupied. At the moment, Kitty had a notebook open (from the gift shop; she kept her school notebooks separate in case she made it home during the term) and was sketching plans to upgrade the hotel's computer technology. She needed more raw computing power to work out the energy requirements to do what Illyana did with a thought.

She lifted her head periodically to check for new customers, and had just seated herself at the end of the bar after refilling the samovar when the first new new customer arrived. Immediately, she flipped to a fresh page in the notebook and headed it "Day 15" and made a hash mark for one new arrival. Then she looked up from her notebook and offered one and all her best bartending smile.

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Like she had with Lara, Kitty felt a sudden, deep compulsion to be truthful with Wyatt. To push him away before she gave a damn, in case he ended up being a hateful jerk, probably.

Kitty sighed and refilled his coffee. "Part of me would like for you to ask for something stronger, so I could join you. It's not buried particularly deep at all, since I'm telling you about it." Her anger had subsided again, down to simmer below the surface from where it might erupt again at any moment. "Because I'm pretty sure you think I'm talking about World War Two, but I'm not."

It wouldn't surprise Wyatt that what had happened in World War Two happened again. There were too many incidents with bigots in charge throughout history and the present. He straightened his shoulders almost subconsciously to ward against what she was about to say.

"If not World War Two then when?" It was said with curiosity as well as a bit of dread.

Kitty took a quick look around to see who might be listening, then topped off his coffee and poured a cup for herself. She nodded to a table at the back of the cafe where she can see everyone and modulate her voice accordingly. "Not a conversation for the bar counter. Care to take this somewhere less exposed?"

That was an interesting turn of phrase for an area with not that many people, which in turn led him to wonder what she must have dealt with. Wyatt gave her a quick nod and picked up his coffee cup to head in the direction that she'd indicated.

Once at the table, he paused, allowing her to sit with her back to the wall and vantage point to see all of the activity in the room. While he took the seat that allowed him to see to her side and any activity toward the kitchen.

Quick on the uptake, it seemed, and Kitty appreciated it. She didn't have Pete's paranoia, but her time with him and Logan besides, had given her a healthy appreciation for being able to see what was going. Less for her own sake than for defending others, since a wall or a floor posed an equal obstacle to her.

She sat and sipped her coffee, watching him for the moment over the rim of the cup. "Do you have superheroes in your world?" It seemed like the easiest place to start.

He immediately thought was of Ian Fleming. The memories were a lot fresher than his time reading comics as a kid so his mind drifted there. "We have some that people would call superheros, but if you mean people that have extraordinary abilities, no." He paused thoughtfully before adding, "at least not that I know of. I didn't know about time travel in my world until I was drawn into it."

Kitty nodded. She hated this part. Always. When someone figured out she wasn't like them, and suddenly everything cool about them vanished into the mist of prejudice or well-intentioned paternalism.

"In my world, we do. We're called mutants." We. Not 'they'. Even here. Maybe especially here, Kitty wouldn't deny who she was. No matter what happened. If she lied, all those voices were lost forever.

Wyatt wondered about the term mutant. It sounded too derogatory but he kept his opinion to himself. He didn't think that she needed to hear something that she already knew. "And the mutants were the ones rounded up and sent to 'ghettos' like in World War Two?"

He would have liked to have heard that one place at least didn't go down that road.

"An island of our choosing," Kitty appended. It had been a ghetto, even if it was one Magneto had chosen, and even if recruitment wasn't exactly voluntary. Not that it ever was, with a ghetto.

"We painted a target on the broad side of the barn." We did. Not they did. Would he hear it, or would she have to spell it out? It was almost better that he hadn't said yet. At least he wasn't so much of a hater he saw mutants everywhere, or a groupie, which was almost worse.

Wyatt wondered st the significance of the target on a barn beyond the ironic of hitting the broad side of a barn. "It sounds like you got sent to a prison that happened to be an island. And the target on the barn? That was symbolic enough to get the regime upset at you and the others?" It wasn't anything that he understood.

As a soldier you followed orders and didn't question, he got that, except some orders demanded questions.

His confusion provoked a small smile. It was kind of cute, which wasn't something she should be thinking, especially right now. "Where there are superheroes there will be super-villains. Even if there weren't, millions of people with special abilities forming a nation..." She shrugged, sure she didn't have to explain that.

"It wasn't straightforward or any one group of people's fault. Genosha got caught in a battle between humans and mutants, and mutants and mutants. It couldn't have happened without anti-mutant hatred, but I don't even really know who to blame."

That...was possibly the first time she'd said that out loud. Or even "in-loud," because the way it all sounded inside her head was still screams and crumbling buildings.

Edited 2017-01-30 17:50 (UTC)

Wyatt sat silent for a moment, thinking through what she said and hadn't said, before he commented. "When I was young and growing up in Texas, my heroes were John Wayne and Gary Cooper. I loved the old westerns where there were good guys and bad guys. The world was black and white. I went to war in Afghanistan and the first thing I learned in combat was that those movies were wrong. There isn't black and white in the world, there are all kinds of grey and the lines between who you thought was wrong and what you thought was right, gets blurred. Don't get me wrong, there are some lines and area that are sharply defined and always will be, but most of the lines are blurry. Sometimes it's harder to cope when there isn't just one area to focus the anger on."

He sat quietly for a minute before he added, "sometimes when it's hard to focus that anger, you turn it on yourself. It's easier to see your faults and what you think you should have done differently to change the outcome that actually happened."

Or that was just him.

Once Kitty figured out what he was going to say, she mostly tipped her head to listen to how he said it. When your brain moved fifteen times as fast as most peoples', you had to teach yourself to slow down and hear. So she noted that he didn't sound judgmental, or preachy, or condescending, that he did sound like he knew from experience, that it didn't sound like he was trying to solve her problems or tell her something she already knew, but that he wanted her to get that he understood.

When he'd finished, though, it left her fiddling with her coffee cup, turning it between her hands. "Don't take this wrong, but--" She tried to put a smile in her eyes at least. "You sound like my shrink. I'm gonna guess that's because you've been there, or maybe you are there. What sucks is that it's just gonna get worse while we're stuck here. Like the car ride to forever."

Wyatt didn't take offense, or take what she'd said wrong. It was the truth. He probably did sound like a shrink. He'd heard them enough after he'd returned home. Not that he'd listened much but some it must have stuck.

"Been there, still there." He acknowledged, his eyes met hers. "Literally, right before arriving here, I was at the Battle of the Alamo with Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett. I think I'm grateful that it's a never ending car ride though and not Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill." Though it might turn out to be the latter before all is said and done.

"Wow." Kitty paused for a moment to try to imagine that, what it would be like to have to blend in and fight. "I have like a thousand questions, but at least that explains the outfit. Lucky for you, they have some men's clothes in the boutique and cowboy boots are the rage in California." She did smile then, trying to lighten the moment for his sake. After all, it was pretty not cool to be stuck out of time with no one you knew.

"While I'm at it, bonus points for not asking if I'm a mutant and what I can do."

Wyatt ducked his head with a small smile at the mention of cowboy boots. "I'd just tell everyone I'm from Texas if they weren't the rage in California." He had to admit he was glad to hear there was at least someplace that he could get different clothes.

"And I thought you'd share what you can do when or if you ever wanted. It wasn't my place to ask." Wyatt hadn't had to ask if she was one. The use of pronouns as she'd related what had happened, told him that she was a mutant. Though he had to admit, that he wasn't a fan of the word.

Even though he wasn't the first person not to ask (although Lara had, but not until she'd given her permission by confessing), Wyatt's choice and his phrasing brought a sudden lump to her throat. "Thanks for that. A lot of people want to make our powers into public knowledge and public property. Register us like weapons."

She shrugged and then tipped her head to look at him (beyond the cute factor which she'd already noticed and was ignoring, because celibacy was being good to her). "A lot of people, even the good ones, get pretty freaked out when they know. I don't mind telling you, but..." I like you and I want to trust you, because I need people I can trust if I'm going to get us out of here.

"You will when you feel comfortable enough. Trust has to be earned. I get that and it should be." Wyatt finished what he thought she was going to say. "Especially after going through a war, trust is easily crushed and hard to give out again."

He thought of Rufus and while he trusted him with his life and understood why he'd done what he had to protect his family, there was still a kernel of doubt for Wyatt.

"It's not that," Kitty protested. A little feebly, but it really wasn't that she didn't trust him...exactly. "It's more... I do trust you, but someone I trusted just hacked the network of my particle physics lab and rigged it to blow, all because he suspected someone in class of being a mutant."

To be fair, it had been his bitch girlfriend, not him who had instigated it, but Kitty didn't feel like being fair. Honest, yes. Fair...screw fair. "I managed to save everyone in the lab, but it outed me. I went from anonymous and safe back to Kitty Pryde, mutant, X-man, inside a day. That would've been bad enough, but me and two of my friends were being targeted by mutant-hunting artificial intelligences at the same time."

It had been three months ago, now, but she still remembered it like yesterday. "I trust you, but I'm really freaking tired of being wrong." Tired, terrified. Tomato, tomahto.

Wyatt had no idea what an X-man was but it assumed it had something to do with being a mutant. "I get that, I do. You aren't sure that you trust your instincts and you're second guessing yourself." He smiled a little, "I've been feeling the same way with my friend Rufus. He was forced to betray me by a powerful group that threatened to harm his family. It's not the same as what happened to you, not even close, but I wanted you to know that I do truly understand about trust both in someone else and with your own instincts. What is that saying about fool me once shame on you, fool me twice... or that old President Reagan thing about trusting but verify?"

"I've had to work with people after they betrayed me. It's never easy." As she had with Lara, Kitty allowed herself to trust her feelings about Wyatt, allow herself to care just enough to stretch her hand across the table to curl her fingers around his hand. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry you didn't get that resolved before you ended up here."

She offered a small reassuring smile as she squeezed his hand. "Thanks for being decent about me being a mutant. It goes a long way."

Wyatt found himself squeezing back on her hand. "Not a problem and thanks for being decent about the whole time traveling thing. You took it a lot better than I did when I found out about it." Not that he'd let anyone at Mason Industries or Homeland Security know just how rattled he had been.

"Not my first rodeo." After she said it, she took in his clothes again and quickly covered her mouth to try to stifle a laugh. It didn't work, and after a few moments, Kitty stopped trying. "Sorry... I just... sorry," she said again, buried her face in her arms on the table, and gave in to the laughter.

Wyatt watched her laugh with a smile of his own. After the day's events, it was really nice to hear that kind of joy, especially after the dark tinge of the conversation that they'd had earlier.

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