strangetrip | [GP] All we can do is learn to swim

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[GP] All we can do is learn to swim

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim. - Vicki Harrison

"You're sure?" Regina already knew the answer but demanding that Sam tell her what she already knew satisfied something petty in her. Or maybe just something hurt that hoped he'd have a different answer than her locator spell had already provided.

"Yeah." Sam half-rolled his eyes at her as he leaned across the pink bar counter to grab bottles of beer from the Silver Bar ice bin -- probably the results of Rebekah's last work-effort at the Inn -- for himself and his newly arrived companion.

Briefly, Regina considered burning a hole in the seat of his jeans, but it wouldn't bring Rebekah or any of the absent ones back. Instead, she took refuge in straightening her A-line and walking around the stylish counter Sam lay across like he was surfing the waves of grief. She took down a bottle of pointlessly pricey champagne, and then found the precise cut-crystal glasses Rebekah and Miss Fisher had preferred for their afternoon indulgences. She poured herself a glass and one for the person who dared her openly bitter expression.

"So who all are we missing?" they both said at once, glared at each other and sighed. They both knew the answers, in their own way and for their own reasons. And neither of them wanted to say.

Rebekah Mikaelson. Henry Winchester. Jack Robinson. Phryne Fisher. Dorothy Williams. Angua von Uberwald. Jaime Vegas. Harry Dresden. Lydia Martin. Raleigh Becket. Yasmeen. Joanna Beauchamp. Constance Bonacieux D'Artagnan. Lindsey McDonald.

"Grief is like the ocean," Sam clearly quoted from some fucking where, and Regina tuned him out until he added, "All we can do is learn to swim. Rebekah told me that."

Now Regina rolled her eyes; they weren't friends. "Shut up, Sam."

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"I mean, yeah," Peter says, nodding his head vigorously in agreement. He'd be happy to be home, too. Aunt May was probably worried sick about him. And all his friends were probably worried too. Especially Ned, who knew he was Spider-Man and had the imagination to contrive some pretty bizarre scenarios to explain his sudden disappearance.

Sure, this place wasn't home, but he'd still miss the friends that he made here, too. It wasn't as if anyone had developed the technology to communicate across time and space and alternate universes, so it wasn't as if they'd just be a phone call away when he went home, even if they somehow wound up at their respective homes, too.

Peter curls his hand around the glass, his palm slick with the condensation from the glass. "But that doesn't really change the way you feel, right? I mean, it's possible to be happy for someone else and sad for yourself at the same time."

Peter takes a long sip from the straw, then looks over at Kitty appreciatively. "Thanks for the drink, Miss Kitty," he says. Maybe it was weird for him to be calling her Miss, especially when she didn't look that much older than him, but he didn't want to assume familiarity or seem disrespectful. It was probably better for him to err on the side of caution.

"Just Kitty's fine," she assured him. It hadn't been that long ago that she'd been the youngest one in a group she needed to live and work with. She'd never liked being treated like a kid, so she wouldn't treat him like one either. Much.

"And, no, it doesn't change my feelings that much. I guess it's just that I'm used to it." People always left. It was what happened when you were an X-man. People died or got captured or turned to the dark and they left.

"Kitty," Peter repeats, as if testing the flow of the name without the prefix. But then Kitty starts talking about losing people, and it's kind of sad, really. Peter has lost people before, but it wasn't something he'd ever want to actually get used to, even if it meant that the sting hurt a lot less.

He's not entirely sure if Kitty actually wants to talk about it, or if she'd just prefer a distraction, so he rolls the backpack straps off of his shoulders and sets his bag on the barstool next to him. He unzips one of the front compartments, and as he does so, asks:

"Did they have LEGOs where you come from?" Peter figures he should probably ask. He's always surprised by what people did and didn't have in their respective realities. "Before I wound up here, my best friend Ned and I were collecting all the kits from this one particular movie, and we were going to put them all together once we managed to find them all."

Peter pulls out a relatively small LEGO kit (well, smaller than the last kit Ned and he had put together) on the bartable.

"There's six of them total, and we found four of them before they went out of print. I found this one at Urban Jungle over on Knickerbocker, completely unopened."

He almost can't believe his luck himself. But then, later that afternoon, his luck seemed turned upside down when he was transported here. "I'm sure Ned won't mind it if we open it up early, though."

"Wait. Urban Jungle? Knickerbocker?" Kitty perked up. "Those sound like places in my world. Where are you from?"

Of course, that didn't stop her from pouring a carafe of Coke and grabbing a bottle of beer to bring along to the table. "I mean, LEGOs are from my world too, but it's usually the littler details that distinguish one version of a world from another."

Peter looks up from opening the package. These boxes are thick and sturdy, but they're also a pain to open for the first time. "Oh, uh, I'm from Brooklyn." He used to tell people where he was from all the time, but then he started realizing that a lot of people weren't from Earth. Or they were from a different version of Earth than he was. And then it seemed like it didn't matter as much.

"Yeah," he says in agreement, finally cracking the box open with a dull pop. "Some of the other Earths are pretty different, though." Peter pulls out a few plastic bags of clinking LEGO pieces and sets them on the table. He pulls out the instructions last. "I haven't met anyone who's from the same Earth as me." Though maybe Kitty is the exception to that particular rule. "Do the Avengers exist on your Earth?"

The Avengers seemed to be one of those things that was Big Enough to distinguish his Earth from any other. So it's usually what he asks whenever he encounters someone else from Earth.

"Yeah," Kitty answered and her eyes lit up just a little. Everyone knew the Avengers back home, but it was sort of a random thing to suggest unless Peter... why was it always Peter with her? and...

Oh hell. Kitty almost laughed as she set the box she'd been examining. "Just out of curiosity, Peter, what's your last name?"

Peter's not exactly sure what to think of the question, but he answers it anyway.

"Parker," he responds, opening the first package of Legos. These should be all the pieces for the helicopter.

Abruptly, Kitty bust out laughing. "Of course it is." It took her a minute to calm herself to ask, "Do you have X-Men in your world?"

He might not, and that was fine. Probably better, considering how well the Avengers and X-Teams tended not to get along in her world. But it was fine either way.

Peter looks at her, puzzled. His mind is so preoccupied with Kitty's reaction that he can't even begin to sort through the LEGOs piled up on the table.

"No," he says tentatively in response to her query, not quite sure what to make of the question. He attempts to shift his attention back to the LEGOs so he doesn't look so clearly uneasy with this strange line of questioning.

"Uh," he begins, once he has the all the blue pieces piled up together. "Should I?"

"Nah." It was a little weird, but no weirder than Yana being from a different world or Piotr or Laynia not even knowing a Kitty. "But let's just say I knew of a you in a different world. We had mutual friends."

More like 'friends' but she and Tony got along reasonably well. And she'd had the odd meeting with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four.

Wow.

It seemed reasonable enough, especially after he and Butters talked about the Many-Worlds Interpretation and all. But that doesn't stop it from being a little weird. Or stop Peter from being a little curious. But even more importantly...

"Did you, uh," he brushes a hand over the sheet of instructions, hoping to press the paper down enough so it's not folding in a little on itself from where it had been folded. "Did you know anything about me?" A beat. "Other than my name, I mean," he quickly adds, looking up from the two LEGO pieces he neatly clicks together.

Peter's trying to sound less nervous than he actually feels, but he's plenty nervous. He knows that it shouldn't be a big deal to anyone here that he has powers, because plenty of people did. And maybe it was just the need for secrecy that Tony impressed upon him, but it just felt weird, letting other people know. Ned and his Aunt May were the only two people who knew outside of certain members of the Avengers.

This Peter was a lot younger than the one she'd known and for a few moments, Kitty regretted bringing it up. She didn't want him to freak out or be afraid of her.

She took it down a notch, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. It made her look younger, and hopefully less nervous-making. "The X-Men are a team of mutant superheroes. I've been one since I was thirteen. Codename Shadowcat," she told him quietly without looking around in a way that might call attention. People knowing she had powers was starting to be the norm, but most of them didn't know she was also a superhero.

"I've worked with the Avengers, the Four, and Tony Stark. So, yeah, I knew about the thing you're asking about."

"What?"

It comes out louder than Peter intended, and after looking around, he shrinks down a little. It was obvious from the Kitty's soft-spoken tones that she was trying to keep this on the DL, and his exclamation had drawn a few eyes in their direction.

"You and Mr. Stark worked together? And you worked with the Avengers?"

It's obvious that this particular confession didn't put Peter on-edge; if anything, it just excited him. All the Avengers were so much older than him, and they treated him like it. Kitty, on the other hand, wasn't much older than he was, and so far, she hadn't treated him like a kid. And she apparently had powers, too.

He leans forward, almost conspiratorially, his hand curled around the outside of his sweating glass. His next question was probably obvious:

"Did you -- did you work with me?"

"Not you. But I've crossed paths with a version of you," Kitty said and then clarified, "In a good way. We weren't on opposite sides or anything."

People slowly went back to what they were doing. One of the good things about the Inn was that everyone had their own stories and secrets and people tended not to stick their noses in where they weren't invited. And since most people knew Kitty, they knew if she was having a quiet-voices conversation, she actually cared if they listened in.

Still, she couldn't help smiling at the way he leaned in, trying to be stealthy about it. It reminded her a little of Bobby, back in the old days. "For the most part, you stuck to your home territory. We were sort of...international." And occasionally interplanetary but that got complicated fast.

"I mean, that version of me is me, but just a different version of me, right?" He's sure somewhere out there, there's a Peter who wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider, but given that Kitty says that she worked with other-Peter before, it's probably safe to assume that he still had powers. Maybe not exactly the same, but some sort of powers.

When Kitty says that he tends to stay local, it makes total sense to Peter. He'd told Mr. Stark he wanted to stick around to Brooklyn for the time being not too long before showing up here. Maybe he'd be ready to be international like Kitty sometime, but that time wasn't now.

Peter idly drums his fingers on the table in what might have looked like an attempt to pantomime the quick movements of a spider with a little more effort.

"So," he says, letting the word hang in the air for a moment. "I guess you probably know about the suit and my powers."

Then the realization sets in:

"You're the third person to know," he says, as if just realizing it for the first time himself. "I mean, minus Mr. Stark and the rest of the Avengers, but they don't really count." Not really, though he can't say what makes them knowing different from Kitty knowing. "Ned knows, but he's my best friend. And my Aunt May found out shortly before I wound up here."

"The suit, the powers, the quips."

Kitty had never felt so old in her life as when he said she was the third person to know. She could hardly remember the beginning of it all these days.

She felt even older when she patted his drumming hand to still it, and soothe the inevitable nervousness of someone new knowing. It was as though in five minutes, she'd aged into an entirely different generation of superheroes.

"I get it. It's weird. Kind of exciting, terrifying, and a relief all at once, right?"

Peter averts his eyes in an attempt to hide his own embarrassment when Kitty pats his hand. He knows he's incredibly readable, and the last thing he wants is for this girl he just met to think that he still gets embarrassed when a pretty girl touches him.

Even if he does.

"Yeah, I mean... well, kinda. You're the first person who didn't just freak out about it." Both Ned and Aunt May had pretty extreme reactions. But this made sense; Kitty had powers too, so it wasn't so weird or spectacular now.

"There's lots of people with powers here. It feels weird keeping it a secret when everyone's so open about the things they can do, but it feels weird just telling people, too."

Kitty nodded her understanding and drew her hand back. She picked up a couple of the blue LEGOs to consider how they might fit together.

"I tell people when it starts to feel like a lie not to." Some people she'd told sooner than that, like Lara and Wyatt. "But the longer I'm here, the less I care who knows I'm a mutant. Since Piotr can't hide it, it feels wrong to make him stand alone."

She set one of the blocks down and chose another. "The thing I keep to myself most of the time is being a superhero."

Peter, as if taking a cue, goes back to fiddling with the LEGO pieces in front of him. He usually spent a good chunk of the time hunched over the instructions for the bigger sets, but this one's not nearly as complicated as some of the other ones he's done before. And besides, sometimes, the best part of putting something like this together was getting to see if you could figure it out without help at first.

Peter nods at Kitty's explanation with a sound of affirmation, but it's her last few words that get him to look up from his LEGOs.

"Why keep the superhero part secret?" he asks.

"It's different. Lots of people have powers, magic, that kind of thing. So there's no reason to keep that secret. It's pretty hard to keep a lot of it secret in such close quarters."

The pieces she held clicked together and she flashed Peter a brief smile of triumph, set them down, and then starting pawing through the pile.

"But just because they have powers doesn't mean they're on our side or that they use them to fight. It seems good to hold something in reserve."

"Yeah," Peter agrees, rubbing the back of his neck. "I guess so." It's a possibility that he'd never considered before: that people might have powers and not use them to fight, or not use them to do good or evil at all.

He returns to working with his LEGOs. One piece joins another, and he quickly references the instructions, just to make sure he's headed in the right track. He is, so he keeps at it.

"So, you already know what I can do," he says, directing a long piece of LEGO in Kitty's direction. "What can you do?"

For mutants and superhero friendlies, 'what can you do?' was like 'where do you come from?' The familiarity brought a smile to Kitty's eyes more than to her lips.

"Atomic level control of my physical structure, more or less," she told him, not concerned that the science would be too much for him. Not for any Peter Parker she could imagine. "I can't shapeshift, but I can phase through matter, become intangible, make anything I'm wearing or touching including other people intangible, disrupt physical and electronic structure...there are a few other ramifications, but that's the gist."

There's about a million things Peter wants to say to that, but his thoughts are racing so furiously at that explanation that all he can manage is one single word:

"Wow!"

But when Kitty delivers her explanation, she doesn't just identify her abilities; she also identifies herself as a fellow science nerd. And that excites Peter almost as much as knowing she's a superhero too.

Almost.

"Can I see you do it?" he asks, looking around to ensure no one's looking their way. He clicks two LEGO pieces together, and looks up at Kitty expectantly with his best puppy-dog eyes.

At that look, Kitty just laughed. Even missing Henry and Miss Fisher and Dot, she laughed hard and bright-eyed.

When she caught her breath, she pushed up from the table. "These'll be safe here for a few minutes. Come on."

Because he wasn't going to be satisfied with her passing a hand through the table. He was going to want to see Shadowcat in action.

Peter looks uncertainly from the LEGOs over at Kitty. It's not really the LEGOs getting stolen that he's worried about (everyone he's met here thusfar seems to be pretty good people) -- it's what exactly Kitty plans to show him.

He briefly presses his lips together, and then pushes himself off the barstool, and follows Kitty to wherever she might lead them.

[GP] All we can do is learn to swim

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