Post by Pyro on Nov 10, 2006 2:33:34 GMT -5
Petrelli's Bistro, NYC, NY
He'd positioned himself moderately strategically once he'd got inside Petrelli's. A table far enough away from the door and in a little alcove where very few people could actually see him - except for his new comrades, who were sitting together at a table in the middle of the busy restaurant.
He could see the door though - and every time it opened, he looked up with a sort of anxious excitement.
He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes. He'd said he'd wait for a little while, but it was looking increasingly like - the embarrassment - he'd been stood up.
Kitty was never late; this was a rule of the universe. However, Kitty also usually wasn't dealing with a best friend behind bars, her parents' divorce, a little kid (whom was supposed to be protecting!) too mad at her to speak, and seeing an ex-boyfriend who happened to have become number one on the FBI's Most Wanted.
Under the circumstances, lateness was pretty well justified, she thought. She still felt guilty about it.
"Hi," she said breathlessly to the host at Petrelli's as she blew in the door with a gust of wind at her back, sending dust motes scuttling in after her and blowing her white skirt up in a way that made her clutch at the edges for dear life. Why had she worn a skirt? Oh, that's right. Because she was crazy.
"I'm looking for a blond guy," she said, "he'll be alone - can I look around?"
The host nodded bored consent and Kitty ducked into the restaurant, pulling her top out straight so that the wide doubled collar fell straight across her blue front rather than strangling her around one side of her neck, as was its wont. She gazed through the restaurant, still very aware that she was late and he might already be gone, but convinced, somehow, that he wouldn't be.
Indeed, he wasn't. Dimly, within a little alcove, she spotted a man sitting alone; and though he didn't look much like the Pyro she'd known - far older, for one thing - but pervaded by the same anxiousness, the same particular way of holding himself, even if he didn't look completely the same. Or the same at all, in some ways. Her heart skittered wildly and blood rushed to her face as she weaved through a few tables over to The Table, the Table of Imminent Doom, and smiled.
She stood in silence next to the booth for a moment.
"So," she said, "um... hi."
He'd actually missed her coming in. How the hell had he done that? He'd been watching the door like a hawk the whole time - and the one moment that he'd looked away, she'd probably phased in through the door or something.
Still. Here she was. The same Kitty he remembered.
For days - no, for months he'd envisioned this reunion. He'd considered a number of potential possibilities for the initial moment and none of them had consisted of her simply standing there and saying 'hi' to him.
He ran a hand through his hair. Up this close, she could see that there was a lot less blond in it than there had been the last time she'd seen him and than had been in the news reports that flashed up periodically. The news reports that generally contained the words 'John Allerdyce' and 'still not located' in the same paragraph.
For the briefest of moments, he actually panicked. What the hell had he done, coming out in public like this - and with one of the X-Men to boot? She'd throw him to the dogs, that's what would happen...it was a trap...everyone from the mansion was outside waiting to bust his chops...
It's Kitty, his inner self reassured him. She wouldn't have done that.
He gave her the shy, anxious smile she remembered oh so well. "Hi. You gonna sit?"
Kitty deliberated for a moment, not because she wasn't sure if she wanted to sit, but more because she'd forgotten the English language.
(Didn't work too well under emotional pressure.)
She nodded, pulling her purse off her arm and sitting it next to her in the seat across from John - John, who looked so different but had the same smile, the same eyes. Somehow, though she knew he must look different, he'd stayed the same age and state in her mind, preserved the day before Stryker's attack on the mansion for over a year now. Even though she'd seen him at Alcatraz, he'd still stuck in her head the way she'd known him.
It was very clear he wasn't the same person. Just similar. Like an estranged twin.
"Thanks," she said, remembering her manners and realigning the silverware on the table so that it was perfectly parallel and all the bits were in the right places. "So. Um. What's been going on?"
"Ah, y'know," he said, with a nonchalant shrug. "Training, sleeping. Occasionally remembering to eat." He gestured vaguely at his always-skinny but now thin frame. "Uh...stuff. Not been anywhere for quite a while."
Since Baltimore.
An awkward silence came down between them and he stared at the tablecloth. "Should we order, do you think? Do you want to stay that long?"
"Can we stay that long?" Kitty said. "I thought you had to leave pretty quickly..."
That and she was pretty sure she'd barf up anything she ordered. "I'm not hungry anyway," she said. "I - um. Big breakfast." (Yogurt. And nerves.)
"Oh, wait a sec." Kitty turned briefly to dig through her purse, the purse which was the end of the universe. Everything in the world somehow ended up in Kitty's purse. It was always immaculately organized, but there was always, somehow, inexplicable flatware, at least three kinds of headache pills, Ace bandages and Icy Hot, and a TI-83 Scientific Graphing calculator.
Also, there was Catch-22, with the pictures of John's mother tucked carefully inside.
"I picked it up," she said, pushing it across the table as she felt her face heat. "In Baltimore. I thought you'd want the pictures back, at least."
He'd been hoping she might stay long enough to have a drink or something, but she seemed just as awkward as he did - which didn't really surprise him.
When she produced the copy of Catch-22 and he realised it still had the pictures of his mother inside his heart skipped several beats. He stared down at it, then back up at her.
"Thank you," he said, simply. "You have no idea." He opened the book at the back page and there was the strip of photographs, of a twenty-year old Rachel Collins holding a dark-haired, huge-eyed four-year old in her arms. "Thank you," he said again. "Have a coffee at least. The waiter's gonna start getting suspicious if I don't order something soon."
"What, is he going to think we're dealing illicitly in used books?" Kitty asked, but she held up a hand briefly to the waiter before he got the hint and came over. As politely as possible, because Kitty knew, just knew, what went on in kitchens if you were rude to the waitstaff, she ordered a hot chocolate with skim milk. (Coffee was gross.)
John, whose diet these days was heavily caffeine-based, ordered a double espresso.
He stared down at the photographs for a little longer, then very carefully slid the book into the pocket of the jacket that he wore. "I'm sorry," he said, in the softest of soft voices. "I can't be sorry for everything, but I am sorry for the way I left. Without saying goodbye or anything. Everything just...happened."
She was so pretty. He'd always thought so. And this was for the best. They were from different worlds now. Well, they had always been from different backgrounds, but now he was very much a Montague to her Capulet.
The Shakespearean analogy amused him briefly.
"For stony limits cannot hold love out..." he murmured, barely audibly.
Kitty blinked in slight confusion, silent for a moment. "Everything just... happened," she repeated, ignoring his Shakespearean moment. "I'm sorry, John, but how does joining a terrorist organization and leaving behind everything that's been your home just happen?"
So he was sorry. He was sorry. He was sorry for leaving her, for leaving Bobby, for killing hundreds of people - maybe thousands by now - and what? He was just sorry?
The waiter returned, setting down a mug with a dollop of whipped cream down in front of her. Uncharacteristically, Kitty didn't turn to thank him; her eyes were focused too keenly on John's face to give any quarter to an extraneous subject.
He shook his head mutely. The question was too big, too hard to answer. He couldn't find the right words. He sipped at his espresso and used that as a reason to get his head together before he spoke again.
"I didn't plan it to happen the way it did, Kitty. I didn't. You have to at least believe that. I'm not even going to start to explain myself - I don't have to, and I don't want to. I just wanted to see you. I wanted to see you and tell you I was sorry for leaving you the way I did. I've done that now. And the fact that you hate me now is right and I understand it totally."
He sipped at the coffee again.
"Why did you come here today?"
Her cocoa untouched, Kitty leaned on the table, her open palm supporting her chin. "How is it better that you didn't plan it?" she asked. "Am I supposed to be reassured that when someone asked you to take off, you didn't even have to think about it for a few weeks before you said okay?"
She shook her head, picking up her spoon to give her hands something to do.
"I came because I wanted to see an old friend," she said. "I miss John. Somehow I thought he'd still be down there somewhere, but he's not. It's just you now."
She stuck her spoon in the cocoa, mixing in the whipped cream and concentrating intently on getting it all smoothed in. "You didn't come to apologize to me," she said. "You came to get it off your own chest. I could've been anyone, couldn't I? I could've been Bobby, or Rogue if she was still here. If they were still here. Bobby's in jail, did you know that?"
Maybe she was being a little harsh. But it felt like her world was crumbling from under her. Everything to which she'd held was dissolving, or worse, turning out to barely have existed in the first place.
He was stung by her accusation. He hadn't come here to 'get it off his own chest' as she'd put it. He'd come to see her. But she was making it blatantly clear that she didn't see it that way. "Yeah - I know about Bobby," he retorted. "I told him to get the hell out, to get away when he still could - did YOU know THAT?" John laughed, humourlessly.
"No, I'll bet a penny to a pound that he didn't mention that little fact. It'll be all 'evil John this' and 'wicked John that' and 'asshole the other'...yeah, whatever, Kitty. Whatever." He pulled out a twenty dollar bill and threw it down on the table. "I'm glad I got to see you again and thanks for the book. I should probably just get the hell out of here now, right?"
Later she was probably going to feel awful.
Now, though, she felt great. Like she'd done something by herself for once. Even if all she'd done was piss off one of the most important people in her life.
"You blew up a warehouse," she said flatly. "You killed people. Do you expect everyone to treat you like a saint because you gave Bobby a friendly warning?"
Evil wicked asshole was right.
"And yeah," she said, "you probably should."
Without further ado she picked up her purse and went to follow her own advice, but paused briefly at the edge of the table, licked her thumb and forefinger, and delicately pinched out the little flame on the candle in the middle of the table.
And then she left.
If she'd slapped him in the face it would have been better. He sat back down again and stared at the now extinguished candle.
He left it for five minutes after she had gone, seething anger replacing the terrible sense of loss he had felt for her all these months, then he stood again and nodded to Dominic. It was time to get out of here.
Whatever she had felt for him - if she ever really had - was gone. She'd made that clear.
The injustice of it all irritated him. Yes - he'd blown up that warehouse - but he'd never intended to. He'd never planned that. It had been because of the tear gas, the loss of control...but no. The X-Men were too damn pure to think that things might have been accidental.
That, more than anything, stung John to the core, and it subtly altered something inside him. That link with his past, the link to the John who had lain with his head in Kitty's lap whilst she stroked his hair and gave him hope to the future withered and died.
And damn, but it hurt.
He'd positioned himself moderately strategically once he'd got inside Petrelli's. A table far enough away from the door and in a little alcove where very few people could actually see him - except for his new comrades, who were sitting together at a table in the middle of the busy restaurant.
He could see the door though - and every time it opened, he looked up with a sort of anxious excitement.
He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes. He'd said he'd wait for a little while, but it was looking increasingly like - the embarrassment - he'd been stood up.
Kitty was never late; this was a rule of the universe. However, Kitty also usually wasn't dealing with a best friend behind bars, her parents' divorce, a little kid (whom was supposed to be protecting!) too mad at her to speak, and seeing an ex-boyfriend who happened to have become number one on the FBI's Most Wanted.
Under the circumstances, lateness was pretty well justified, she thought. She still felt guilty about it.
"Hi," she said breathlessly to the host at Petrelli's as she blew in the door with a gust of wind at her back, sending dust motes scuttling in after her and blowing her white skirt up in a way that made her clutch at the edges for dear life. Why had she worn a skirt? Oh, that's right. Because she was crazy.
"I'm looking for a blond guy," she said, "he'll be alone - can I look around?"
The host nodded bored consent and Kitty ducked into the restaurant, pulling her top out straight so that the wide doubled collar fell straight across her blue front rather than strangling her around one side of her neck, as was its wont. She gazed through the restaurant, still very aware that she was late and he might already be gone, but convinced, somehow, that he wouldn't be.
Indeed, he wasn't. Dimly, within a little alcove, she spotted a man sitting alone; and though he didn't look much like the Pyro she'd known - far older, for one thing - but pervaded by the same anxiousness, the same particular way of holding himself, even if he didn't look completely the same. Or the same at all, in some ways. Her heart skittered wildly and blood rushed to her face as she weaved through a few tables over to The Table, the Table of Imminent Doom, and smiled.
She stood in silence next to the booth for a moment.
"So," she said, "um... hi."
He'd actually missed her coming in. How the hell had he done that? He'd been watching the door like a hawk the whole time - and the one moment that he'd looked away, she'd probably phased in through the door or something.
Still. Here she was. The same Kitty he remembered.
For days - no, for months he'd envisioned this reunion. He'd considered a number of potential possibilities for the initial moment and none of them had consisted of her simply standing there and saying 'hi' to him.
He ran a hand through his hair. Up this close, she could see that there was a lot less blond in it than there had been the last time she'd seen him and than had been in the news reports that flashed up periodically. The news reports that generally contained the words 'John Allerdyce' and 'still not located' in the same paragraph.
For the briefest of moments, he actually panicked. What the hell had he done, coming out in public like this - and with one of the X-Men to boot? She'd throw him to the dogs, that's what would happen...it was a trap...everyone from the mansion was outside waiting to bust his chops...
It's Kitty, his inner self reassured him. She wouldn't have done that.
He gave her the shy, anxious smile she remembered oh so well. "Hi. You gonna sit?"
Kitty deliberated for a moment, not because she wasn't sure if she wanted to sit, but more because she'd forgotten the English language.
(Didn't work too well under emotional pressure.)
She nodded, pulling her purse off her arm and sitting it next to her in the seat across from John - John, who looked so different but had the same smile, the same eyes. Somehow, though she knew he must look different, he'd stayed the same age and state in her mind, preserved the day before Stryker's attack on the mansion for over a year now. Even though she'd seen him at Alcatraz, he'd still stuck in her head the way she'd known him.
It was very clear he wasn't the same person. Just similar. Like an estranged twin.
"Thanks," she said, remembering her manners and realigning the silverware on the table so that it was perfectly parallel and all the bits were in the right places. "So. Um. What's been going on?"
"Ah, y'know," he said, with a nonchalant shrug. "Training, sleeping. Occasionally remembering to eat." He gestured vaguely at his always-skinny but now thin frame. "Uh...stuff. Not been anywhere for quite a while."
Since Baltimore.
An awkward silence came down between them and he stared at the tablecloth. "Should we order, do you think? Do you want to stay that long?"
"Can we stay that long?" Kitty said. "I thought you had to leave pretty quickly..."
That and she was pretty sure she'd barf up anything she ordered. "I'm not hungry anyway," she said. "I - um. Big breakfast." (Yogurt. And nerves.)
"Oh, wait a sec." Kitty turned briefly to dig through her purse, the purse which was the end of the universe. Everything in the world somehow ended up in Kitty's purse. It was always immaculately organized, but there was always, somehow, inexplicable flatware, at least three kinds of headache pills, Ace bandages and Icy Hot, and a TI-83 Scientific Graphing calculator.
Also, there was Catch-22, with the pictures of John's mother tucked carefully inside.
"I picked it up," she said, pushing it across the table as she felt her face heat. "In Baltimore. I thought you'd want the pictures back, at least."
He'd been hoping she might stay long enough to have a drink or something, but she seemed just as awkward as he did - which didn't really surprise him.
When she produced the copy of Catch-22 and he realised it still had the pictures of his mother inside his heart skipped several beats. He stared down at it, then back up at her.
"Thank you," he said, simply. "You have no idea." He opened the book at the back page and there was the strip of photographs, of a twenty-year old Rachel Collins holding a dark-haired, huge-eyed four-year old in her arms. "Thank you," he said again. "Have a coffee at least. The waiter's gonna start getting suspicious if I don't order something soon."
"What, is he going to think we're dealing illicitly in used books?" Kitty asked, but she held up a hand briefly to the waiter before he got the hint and came over. As politely as possible, because Kitty knew, just knew, what went on in kitchens if you were rude to the waitstaff, she ordered a hot chocolate with skim milk. (Coffee was gross.)
John, whose diet these days was heavily caffeine-based, ordered a double espresso.
He stared down at the photographs for a little longer, then very carefully slid the book into the pocket of the jacket that he wore. "I'm sorry," he said, in the softest of soft voices. "I can't be sorry for everything, but I am sorry for the way I left. Without saying goodbye or anything. Everything just...happened."
She was so pretty. He'd always thought so. And this was for the best. They were from different worlds now. Well, they had always been from different backgrounds, but now he was very much a Montague to her Capulet.
The Shakespearean analogy amused him briefly.
"For stony limits cannot hold love out..." he murmured, barely audibly.
Kitty blinked in slight confusion, silent for a moment. "Everything just... happened," she repeated, ignoring his Shakespearean moment. "I'm sorry, John, but how does joining a terrorist organization and leaving behind everything that's been your home just happen?"
So he was sorry. He was sorry. He was sorry for leaving her, for leaving Bobby, for killing hundreds of people - maybe thousands by now - and what? He was just sorry?
The waiter returned, setting down a mug with a dollop of whipped cream down in front of her. Uncharacteristically, Kitty didn't turn to thank him; her eyes were focused too keenly on John's face to give any quarter to an extraneous subject.
He shook his head mutely. The question was too big, too hard to answer. He couldn't find the right words. He sipped at his espresso and used that as a reason to get his head together before he spoke again.
"I didn't plan it to happen the way it did, Kitty. I didn't. You have to at least believe that. I'm not even going to start to explain myself - I don't have to, and I don't want to. I just wanted to see you. I wanted to see you and tell you I was sorry for leaving you the way I did. I've done that now. And the fact that you hate me now is right and I understand it totally."
He sipped at the coffee again.
"Why did you come here today?"
Her cocoa untouched, Kitty leaned on the table, her open palm supporting her chin. "How is it better that you didn't plan it?" she asked. "Am I supposed to be reassured that when someone asked you to take off, you didn't even have to think about it for a few weeks before you said okay?"
She shook her head, picking up her spoon to give her hands something to do.
"I came because I wanted to see an old friend," she said. "I miss John. Somehow I thought he'd still be down there somewhere, but he's not. It's just you now."
She stuck her spoon in the cocoa, mixing in the whipped cream and concentrating intently on getting it all smoothed in. "You didn't come to apologize to me," she said. "You came to get it off your own chest. I could've been anyone, couldn't I? I could've been Bobby, or Rogue if she was still here. If they were still here. Bobby's in jail, did you know that?"
Maybe she was being a little harsh. But it felt like her world was crumbling from under her. Everything to which she'd held was dissolving, or worse, turning out to barely have existed in the first place.
He was stung by her accusation. He hadn't come here to 'get it off his own chest' as she'd put it. He'd come to see her. But she was making it blatantly clear that she didn't see it that way. "Yeah - I know about Bobby," he retorted. "I told him to get the hell out, to get away when he still could - did YOU know THAT?" John laughed, humourlessly.
"No, I'll bet a penny to a pound that he didn't mention that little fact. It'll be all 'evil John this' and 'wicked John that' and 'asshole the other'...yeah, whatever, Kitty. Whatever." He pulled out a twenty dollar bill and threw it down on the table. "I'm glad I got to see you again and thanks for the book. I should probably just get the hell out of here now, right?"
Later she was probably going to feel awful.
Now, though, she felt great. Like she'd done something by herself for once. Even if all she'd done was piss off one of the most important people in her life.
"You blew up a warehouse," she said flatly. "You killed people. Do you expect everyone to treat you like a saint because you gave Bobby a friendly warning?"
Evil wicked asshole was right.
"And yeah," she said, "you probably should."
Without further ado she picked up her purse and went to follow her own advice, but paused briefly at the edge of the table, licked her thumb and forefinger, and delicately pinched out the little flame on the candle in the middle of the table.
And then she left.
If she'd slapped him in the face it would have been better. He sat back down again and stared at the now extinguished candle.
He left it for five minutes after she had gone, seething anger replacing the terrible sense of loss he had felt for her all these months, then he stood again and nodded to Dominic. It was time to get out of here.
Whatever she had felt for him - if she ever really had - was gone. She'd made that clear.
The injustice of it all irritated him. Yes - he'd blown up that warehouse - but he'd never intended to. He'd never planned that. It had been because of the tear gas, the loss of control...but no. The X-Men were too damn pure to think that things might have been accidental.
That, more than anything, stung John to the core, and it subtly altered something inside him. That link with his past, the link to the John who had lain with his head in Kitty's lap whilst she stroked his hair and gave him hope to the future withered and died.
And damn, but it hurt.
