ax_main | Kitty and Shen | Halloween Party

Kitty and Shen discuss what happened to Jeanne-Marie, then Kitty explains who Aloy is and why Hana isn't offending a world full of people. You know, regular girl talk.

WARNING: Horizon Zero Dawn Spoilers! Vague ones, but still.

"You look so kickass," Shen told Kitty as she walked up to her with a huge grin. It had been too long since they'd really chatted, and she missed her friend, for all that she was super happy about her professional success.

Kitty's eyes brightened as she turned to greet her friend, giving a small shake of her head. "It doesn't even hold a candle to your outfit. That's amazing."

"My uncle helped me with it," Shen said with a grin. "He's awesome with a sewing machine."

"My mom did the same thing," Kitty smiled. "I mean, I could have bought something, you know, but it wouldn't have been the same."

"It would've looked way cheaper, and I'm always in favor of not giving Disney any money," Shen stated happily. "I'm so glad you're here tonight! I was so hoping the new job wouldn't keep you away." But hey, her boss was here, so clearly she ought to be, too!

Kitty quirked her lips. "I guess I have been kind of busy lately, huh? It was mostly just because of the new release, you know? Everything was crazy. But it should be letting up now. I mean, I'll still need to go into the city some, but I can do some of it from here."

"I've been watching some of your interviews," Shen told her, eyes glinting happily. "You're making science look amazing." It was just so awesome that Kitty got to have a job like that already. No one deserved it more.

Flushing, Kitty shook her head. "I'm just following in Nolan's footsteps...and his, you know, money. It's...I mean it's not like I really earned it."

Shen held up her hands. "Whoa, stop right there. Of course you earned it. You're brilliant!"

"Okay, I mean," Kitty sighed, then chewed on her lip. "Yeah, I'm smart. And I do a lot of stuff, but I never would have gotten this job if it weren't for Nolan going to this school. He never would have known who I am, because I'm just not the put myself out there kind of person, and that's why I'm having so much trouble with all the attention I'm getting from the media. I never wanted that."

"Yeah, I get not enjoying that bit," Shen confirmed with a nose wrinkle. She still remembered the Vogue photoshoot. Vividly. (Okay, it had been kind of awesome. But that profile though! Ugh.) "But you totally deserve to be where you are. Chance just put that guy on your path who actually saw that, and gave you the job you deserved. That's kind of amazing."

"Yeah, I guess," Kitty agreed, rather than argue with Shen about it. "Just don't tell Nolan I'm having issues dealing with it? I don't want him to worry about anything else."

"Yeah, you're safe on that front," Shen assured her with a shrug. "'No-no' and I don't really talk." She wasn't sure they had anything in common, apart from being mutants and, like, Kitty. "But even if we did. You're my girl." Shen would never betray her confidence.

"Wow, that nickname has really caught on," Kitty started laughing.

Shen laughed, too. "Like I was ever gonna forget it."

"Thanks though," Kitty huffed a sigh. "For you know, always listening to me, and keeping my secrets, and weathering through me moaning on and on about Yana and Bobby."

"Hey, that's what friends are for, right?" Shen stated, smiling at Kitty.

"Yeah but," Kitty motioned Shen over toward the edge of a wall to sit. "That's the thing. I always feel like I'm dumping on you. Never the other way around. How are things going with you?"

For once, sitting could happen without negotiating wings. Shen instinctively tried to anyway, before remembering there was no point tonight. "Really well!" she answered cheerfully. "I mean, the rallies all over have been going well. So have the rescues with Monica." And other things with Monica. And Kiki. "And like. Aurora's around, right now, so, that's good?" Aurora was a lot more like the JM she'd always known than 'Jeanne-Marie'.

Oh yeah. Aurora. Kitty tried not to wince at the mention. She really had no idea how to handle the whole Aurora/Jeanne-Marie split. Intelligently, she understood what was going on there, but emotionally, she just had no clue. "Is that as weird as I think it is, rooming with them?"

"Probably weirder," Shen admitted after a beat. She made a face. "Sorry. I mean, I know it's not her fault. Their fault." She didn't even know what pronoun to use, and not in the usual way. "It's just. I can't really bond, with Jeanne-Marie, so."

Kitty leaned in, pleading, "Is it her or they? Please tell me so I don't screw up."

Shen grimaced. "Sorry. I don't really know. It's way easier when you can just ask people." But this was way more complicated than that, and Shen had no idea how to negotiate it. "I tend to stick with her? I mean, she's always still... one person? Just, two personalities? But I don't know."

"I guess so," Kitty frowned. "I think if I had another... me, that I couldn't talk to or remember stuff from, I'd hate thinking I wasn't my own person, you know?"

"But at the same time, all of it is her?" Shen pointed out with a wince. "I've been having this argument with myself for a while."

"I can tell," Kitty sympathized. "So you and Jeanne-Marie didn't talk much? Is Aurora better?"

"We talked a bunch, she was around for a while," Shen admitted. "But it just didn't... click. She's like... intensely Catholic. And like, dark. Aurora... she's a lot more like JM used to be. Only a little wilder? Way more my speed." Shen paused, worrying her bottom lip, then admitted, "I feel terrible, not being able to really bond with Jeanne-Marie."

Pulling one leg up beneath her, Kitty shook her head. "I don't think you should feel terrible. There are other personalities at the school that you don't bond with, right? It's not like you're failing her. It's just that you two don't have a lot in common. And, well, she's super opposite from you in a lot of ways."

"Sure, but... she's part of my friend," Shen stated, frowning, and clearly taking all this very seriously. "You don't get to pick and choose what part of your friends you like, right? You just love them. Wholly."

"Except Jeanne-Marie is the part that she probably shared with other people, like Kurt, rather than with you," Kitty pointed out.

"I don't know," Shen shook her head. "She was open about her faith, like I am about mine. Jeanne-Marie feels a lot like... I don't know," she stopped herself before she might betray some of what JM had told her about her past, over their months of friendship. "Like the darker parts of her? I don't know, it just sucks."

"Oh," Kitty replied numbly. Maybe she had been spending too much time at NolCorp lately. "That's...I'm sorry. I mean, at least Aurora's around now, but that doesn't mean that Jeanne-Marie can't come back."

"She will," Shen confirmed with a quick, brief smile. "It's fine. I mean, we just need time, right? She's still part of JM, so it'll be fine."

Nodding, Kitty leaned in to gently side-hug her friend, which was a heck of a lot easier without the wings. "We'll help her get through this. I can help. You don't have to do it alone."

"It's not something she'll likely get through, Kitty," Shen said, releasing her friend with a shake of her head. "It's something she's going to have to learn to live with." And so would they.

"That's...that's what I mean. I know...I know there's no cure or...you know," Kitty stuttered out, wringing her hands. "But we can help her find a balance, right? A new normal?"

"Yeah," Shen confirmed, looking back at the crowd to spot her friend and roommate. "That's the idea."

Kitty followed Shen's gaze and sighed heavily. "Why is it that every time things seem like they're starting to go good, something terrible happens?"

"Hey," Shen said, looking back at her friend with a small smile. "It's not so bad. We didn't lose anyone, right?"

"Didn't we?" Kitty asked quietly.

"No," Shen replied immediately, and very firmly, "we didn't." She couldn't think of it that way.

Shame flushed through Kitty's cheeks, but she just nodded. "Okay." She took a deep breath, centering herself. Shen was always good for that. "Okay," she repeated.

"Sorry," Shen said almost immediately, looking away from Kitty, and down at the floor. Barely managing not to tear up. "I can't - she's still - she's our friend, okay?"

"Yeah," Kitty answered, then took a deep breath and agreed more emphatically, "Yes. She's our friend. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. It's just...I've been losing so many friends lately, I've gotten kind of dark about the whole thing and I...I didn't mean that."

"Losing friends is really different from losing people," Shen replied, after a beat.

"That's... wow, I'm really failing here," Kitty crumpled in a little.

Shen grimaced, swallowed, then reached out to wrap both arms around Kitty. "I'm sorry. Now I'm making it all super dark. You're not failing anything, I'm just... I've been thrown for a loop, that's all." More than she wanted to admit.

Kitty squeezed Shen into a warm hug. "Is there anything I can do?"

"This," Shen admitted, after a brief pause, not loosening the hug. "This is nice."

Smiling, Kitty gave her friend another squeeze. "Anytime."

Shen squeezed Kitty tighter for a second (making sure not to overdo it with her superstrength), then released her with a smile, and quickly looked away to wipe at her eyes. "Let's talk about happier things. You don't like the media attention, but you're kicking ass at your job already, right?"

Kitty huffed softly. "I hope so. It's not exactly easy bossing people around that are twice my age."

"Bossing them around, or exerting the regular amount of authority expected from any CTO?" Shen asked, with raised eyebrows. Hey, perception mattered, including self-perception.

"Both?" Kitty sighed. "I know that it's expected, but it's still not something I'm used to."

"For sure," Shen nodded. "And we're taught to think of women in positions of authority as bossy and ambitious, in a bad way. And you're bound to have it worse for being so young. But you wouldn't be doing your job if you weren't bossy and ambitious." She smiled at her friend. "In a good way. I'm sure you're doing awesomely. He'd tell you otherwise, right? Nolan, I mean." He'd better, or Shen would add him to her shit list. You didn't give someone inexperienced a job like that without being willing to support them afterwards.

"Absolutely," Kitty agreed, her shoulders relaxing as she thought about him. "I mean, I totally thought he was a complete jerk when he first got here, but I was wrong. He's supported me all the way."

"Good," Shen said with a small, innocent, slight worrying smile. "I don't have to kick him in the metaphorical nuts."

Despite joining X-Force, and the way she had felt after seeing the state Tommy was in, she usually didn't resort to violence to solve problems. That wouldn't be very Buddhist of her.

Kitty laughed softly. "No, I'd beat you to it if I needed to."

Shen grinned. "Because you're the best."

"We both are. Well, us and Hana, because warrior women are awesome," Kitty winked. "Have you seen Hana? I can't believe how good her Aloy costume turned out."

"OK, what is that costume?" Shen asked, leaning closer to Kitty. "Because it just looks like 'sci-fi Native American'."

"What? That's Aloy." Kitty blinked, then her eyes widened. "Omygosh you don't know Horizon Zero Dawn! It's a video game. I mean, it's an awesome video game with an amazing story and okay, she kind of looks Native American, but it all makes sense, I promise."

Shen still looked a little dubious, but she trusted Kitty, so she just nodded, in the end. "Okay."

"No seriously." Kitty turned toward her friend and motioned with her hands as she told the story. "See, at some point in the future, this company develops military robots that are supposed to be peacekeepers. They're totally automated, and can self-replicate, but they run on biomass as fuel. Which means, basically, that they start killing everything on earth and replicating over and over. It means the end of the world, but this one woman does the only thing she can think of and develops her own AI to wait until the destruction is over and the peacekeepers are dead and reseed and populate the world with DNA she's collected.

"So," Kitty continued - and she was totally summarizing because it was so much more complicated, "The world is reseeded and populated with beast-like machines, and the human race is re-introduced into the world...except things go wrong with the AI program, and the humans aren't taught everything they were supposed to, so they end up out in the world with no knowledge of everything that happened 1,000 years ago. They end up settling into tribes, much like the Native Americans, living off of the land, but all looking like different ethnicities because of the way the DNA had been released into the world."

"That does sound pretty cool," Shen had to admit. "Is Aloy one of the people you play in the game?"

Kitty nodded. "She's the main character. It turns out that she has cloned DNA of the woman who created the re-population program, so she has access to all the old bunkers and stuff. She ends up uncovering everything that happened because she's able to access all the old files."

"You know, if I was into gaming, I would so wanna play this, I think," Shen said with a small smile. "Thanks for explaining."

Kitty grinned. "If you ever want me to show you, let me know. But yeah, you're welcome. Hana's cool. She wouldn't appropriate a culture or anything. She's actually really aware of all of that."

"That's what I thought!" Shen confirmed. "I was really confused."

"I guess maybe we should have explained ahead of time," Kitty grinned.

"Or, you know, I could've asked," Shen replied with a grimace. After idiot remarks like Bobby's, she was way too on edge.

"Next time," KItty promised her friend, then looked toward the dance floor. "You wanna go be awesome to some music?"

"A world of yes," Shen confirmed with a grin, and held her hand out to Kitty. "Come on."