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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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.

Kitty took a moment to consider where they might best go for this demonstration and decided that the usually empty chapel would do nicely. She led Peter there without saying much of anything.

Once there, she shut the door to the chapel space so that it would deter anyone from entering casually. As tempting as it was to simply lean against that door and pass through it, Kitty didn't, since it would defeat the purpose of privacy.

Instead, she walked down the center aisle, with each step rising a few feet, so that by the time she arrived at the lectern, her head brushed the ceiling.

Peter's mouth is hanging open.

He's not actually aware that it's hanging open until Kitty's head is brushing the top of the ceiling. Sure, he expected this from her description, but it's an entirely different thing to actually see it in action.

"Did you," he finally manages to sputter out before he adjusts course. "Were you always able to do that?"

While he was speaking, Kitty phased, disappearing from view. He'd probably be able to sense her presence as she moved around the room, back to where he stood, but maybe not.

She rematerialized beside him and grinned. "Oh hell no. That took years of training. At first, all I could do was fall through the bed in my sleep."

"Years of training?" Peter looks uneasy. He's only been doing the whole spidey thing for, like, a year and he apparently had a lot of learning ahead of him.

But... he knew that already. That was part of why he wanted to keep on being the neighborhood friendly Spider-Man for a little longer.

"What'd you do for training, exactly? Just..." He presses his lips together, thinking. "...keep trying to move your hand through something?"

"What didn't we do?" Kitty answered with a laugh. "Sparring, a computerized training room that simulates danger scenarios, weight training, strategy, tactics, history, politics, languages, investigative skills..."

She lifted up and twirled a pirouette on one toe. "Me personally, I've got ballet and modern dance training, and black belts in about a dozen martial arts."

"That sounds... a lot more sophisticated than what I do. Did," he corrects. It wasn't like he had a lot of opportunity to do much more than push-ups and sit-ups here at the Madonna Inn, which was in fact, part of his unofficial training regimen. But there was a lot of patroling and low-level rescuing involved, too -- which wasn't really high in demand at a place as peaceful as the inn, especially with as many powered people around as there were.

"I-I don't want to impose, but... basically everything I know about fighting is completely self-taught. I mean, I watched a few Youtube videos before I actually got on the field, but I don't think that really makes up for a lack of practical training."

He pauses there, an uncomfortable silence filling the space between them.

"Do you think you could maybe teach me? I mean, you don't have to if you don't want to," he quickly scrambles in to clarify. "I just figure that you already know what I'm capable of, if the other Peter got his powers the same way. And you know martial arts."

All Peter really knew was martial arts films.

"Sure," Kitty answered without even thinking about it. "I'd love to." After she said it, she wondered why that had been so simple, but it was. Maybe she'd talk to Laynia about it, since they'd been doing some practicing too.

"I don't have a lot of experience with training someone else, but I've had a lot of different teachers. And you're not a lot bigger than I am right now, so a lot of the move should be similar."

She smiled with a little bit more confidence than she actually felt and said, "It'll be fun. Besides, it's always good to have something worth doing in this place."

"Yeah," Peter agrees. "There's not a lot to do here. I tried finding some stuff for making more webslinger fluid, but I can't find any of the ingredients and I'm not exactly sure how the staff's going to take to me using one of their pans to make it in instead of a beaker."

That much is true. Even though the kitchen was a free-for-all, it didn't really feel like the place was his. He always felt like he was an intruder. Or a guest. But mostly just an intruder.

"There hasn't really been a lot of opportunity to use it, anyway. I made a hammock from the chandelier to the wall a few times, but I can't really swing from building to building like I used to." Sure, there were a couple of buildings on the hotel grounds, but this place wasn't anything like Brooklyn.

"I've got paint buckets and stuff in my workshop we can use if you run out," Kitty offered because she was curious what went into it as much as anything else. But maybe he could help with some of her projects, too.

"I kind of took over one of the old maintenance rooms so I didn't turn the cafe into a tech lab. Abby's more of a chemist than I am, so she might be able to pinch hit, if there's stuff you need that I don't have."

"Really?" Peter looks over at Kitty, wide-eyed and excited. "You sure you don't mind?"

He pauses there, but not for very long. "Do you share it with Abby? Will she be okay with it? I promise, I won't make a mess." A beat, before he quickly adds: "Or I'll try not to, and when I do make a mess, I'll be sure to clean it up."

Edited (I'm an idiot) 2017-11-01 00:09 (UTC)

"I'm sure." He really was cute. Too young by at least five years, but cute. "Abby's got her own space. But if you introduce yourself and tell her you're a friend of mine, she'll show you around it."

He'd be nervous about that, she thought, and so she decided, "I'll tell her I'm sending you when I see her at shift change. That way it won't be a surprise. You'll like her. She's smart and funny and easy to be around. And don't worry if she figures out something's up with you. She won't tell anyone."

For a moment, a brief flicker of apprehension draws itself across Peter Parker's face, but it disappears the moment that Kitty says she'll make sure Abby knows he's coming.

"Thanks," he says appreciatively. "And, uh, it's good to know your friend. If she's a really good chemist, I could probably use her help. I'm still trying to perfect the formula."

Peter nods a head towards the door. "You wanna go back to the bar now? I mean, we don't have to, but I'd love to it back to my room in one piece tonight. Or three pieces," he quickly corrects. It was a three-piece set. "I think it's about time I start decorating the place a little."

"She definitely can help. She worked in a major forensics lab back home. I've never met anyone who knows so much about so many completely unexpected things." And that was saying something, coming from Kitty.

"Yeah, we probably should." Kitty gestured ahead of her. "I hate leaving the bar untended on a day when a bunch of people have disappeared. It's not like people won't go get their own drinks, but..."

She shrugged and smiled sheepishly. "X-Men save people. This is about as close as I get."

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[GP] All we can do is learn to swim

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