undergrounds | wake up

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wake up

(1)

Kyle was new to the area. Hell, he was new to the country. As easy as it was to pick up the basics - public transit, prices, slang - he was having a harder time learning the small and intertwining streets in his neighborhood. He felt almost constantly lost, which made him almost constantly anxious about knowing his exits and whether he would ever find his damn AWOL C.O. he'd come to find in the first place.

It's one such night, disoriented on the way back to his shared flat from a quiet drink at a pub, that he stumbles into something he thought he left behind. Kyle knows what he's looking at the moment he sees it. The vampire feeding on the teenage boy who seems near unconsciousness.

"Hey!" He yells without thinking, waving his arms as if trying to chase a coyote off from a stray stash of food. The vampire, in a stroke of luck for Kyle or perhaps to keep his face hidden, decides to take off rather than engage in a conflict, dropping the now passed out boy into the street. Kyle runs over, ripping off his shirt to apply pressure to the wound on the kid's neck, then looking around for someone - anyone - nearby. "Hey, I could use some help here."

(2)

Post traumatic stress is never an easy thing. Although Kyle never receives full on hallucinations like a couple of his brothers had struggled with, the traumas continue to sneak up on him occasionally, clouding his judgment and ratcheting his anxiety into high gear. This time, it's in the middle of his run. He's not even sure if it was a scent or a sound that set him off. Maybe the combination. Whatever it is, it forces him to stop and focus, to breathe through it.

He takes a seat on the nearby bench, legs shoulder-width apart, forearms on his knees, eyes closed, head down to hide his face. His mandated counselor told him it was the most efficient breathing position. Now he uses it to relax, to try to force the body working against him to calm down and get back to the present with him. And he probably looks troubled, if not a little crazy, to the passersby, but that's rarely been a concern for him.

(3)

Vampires are real. Kyle learned about that some time ago, when Cooper came to his hospital room and gave him a reason to live and fight through the Fever. He'd been trained in that specialty, hunting, and it had been most of his tour in South Africa. What unnerved him was learning that they were everywhere. The problem wasn't contained to an area, as he'd been lead to believe, but the creatures sprawled in various corners of the world, thriving on the suffering and death of humans. So, yeah, he took it upon himself to do something about it.

Kyle has a split lip, a couple seriously bruised ribs, a swollen and bruised cheek, and some bloody scratches on both an arm and his neck from the fight. But you should see the other guy. The vampire lays dead on the ground, a broken pool cue shoved through his heart. All things considered, Kyle feels like he got off pretty well.

To the casual observer, it looks like a bar room brawl gone bad. Which is why, when he hears someone behind him, Kyle tenses and silently curses in his mind. The soldier lifts his hands to either side of him in a gesture of surrender, showing he's unarmed. "It's not what it looks like."

(4)

Hoping to settle in faster than the average, Kyle's out running errands throughout the day. He's picking up some new clothes, having arrived with only his backpack's worth of stuff, and groceries for the apartment. At the same time, he pops in to occasional shops to apply for jobs. Sweeper, clerk. Anything with decent pay at a local joint who will accept an American with a military background in a questionable economy.

[Feel free to bump into him shopping, or be in a shop when he asks for work, or anywhere in between. Fairly open.]

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Kyle flashes her a charming smile, intentionally showing off a little. He knows it's a good smile. When she moves past him, he takes a half step out of her way, not wanting to appear as a threat ever again. When she turns back, he tilts his head questioningly.

He offers the same flash of a smile with her words. "Tomorrow's great. Your place or mine?"

Alex's smile relaxes slightly in response to his. It's almost unfairly dazzling, but it also looks really genuine. It makes her feel more at ease with him.

She's done her best to make her apartment look like normal human apartment, but there's really no way to make a massive steel cage look like anything other than a massive steel cage. She keeps a sheet over it, partially so she doesn't have to look at it every day and partially in case of unexpected company, but that just makes it look like a cage with a sheet over it. No way is she inviting Kyle to her place ever.

"Yours. My apartment's kind of a mess." She makes a face to illustrate just how much of a mess her apartment definitely is.

"Okay," he agrees easily. Although staying with some distant relatives and not having the place to himself at the moment, he's confident they'll allow him to take over the kitchen area for awhile. The estranged aunt and uncle have been surprisingly patient and welcoming of his barely announced decision to visit and showing up on their front step with little money to offer in the way of rent. Kyle's grateful for that every time he thinks of it.

"My aunt and uncle might be around, but they won't bother us or anything. You want to text me so I have your number and I can text you my address? Or do you want me to like, write it down and you can just show up around two?" There's a part of him that worries that she'll take his information, bail, and disappear with no way of him ever seeing her again. It's her right, of course, but he'd be a little disappointed.

Alex has only had a smartphone for six months or so, and she's still amazed by how many smiley faces there are. As soon as he suggests texting him, she picks one out and sends it to him. "There. Two sounds great."

After giving him one more small smile, she turns to leave, but once again quickly turns back. "You might want to invest in a fire extinguisher. I don't want to burn down the building." With that, she heads for the registers again.

Edited 2016-02-01 12:18 (UTC)

Kyle drops his eyes to his phone, smiling at the emoticon and a little surprised a girl like that would use the smiley rather than words. He pockets his phone, deciding to wait until they have officially parted ways before sending his address for tomorrow.

"Already have two," he replies lightly. Kyle follows her towards the registers a little longer. As a casual goodbye, expecting she won't really wait around for him, he adds, "I'll see you tomorrow."

Then he wanders back off into the store to grab the couple items he'd forgotten. Normally the soldier would skip out on them to spend more time with her, but now that they have plans tomorrow, he feels no sense of urgency.

After checking out and eventually returning home, an hour or two later, he'll send the text with his address to her, along with the time and a quick note about starting with the basics.

Alex watches him wander away while she pays for the few things she's buying. Part of her can't help but wonder if he's got some ulterior motive, but she's still unexpectedly excited about seeing him again tomorrow.

The next day, she arrives at the address he sent her promptly at two o'clock. She feels obligated to bring something - he's providing the kitchen, the cookware, and the actual cooking skills, the least she can do is provide something to cook - but she wasn't entirely sure what to get. So she has some vegetables, some pasta, and some cheese. Hopefully that's enough to make a meal.

Kyle feels oddly anxious about Alex coming over. Back in high school, the attention and a constant stream of friends was the norm for him. After his family's deaths and the military though, it all feels somehow foreign. He still has friends and what not, but, being in another country, he doesn't hang out with them much. And this girl is different, someone he doesn't know everything about already. It intrigues him and makes for a nice distraction.

He opens the door not long after she arrives, flashing her a smile. There's a part of him that's surprised she actually showed up while simultaneously not surprised at all.

"Hey, come on in. My aunt and uncle are upstairs. The kitchen is through the hall here, to the right." Kyle holds the door open for her and then closes it behind, consciously leaving it unlocked. He offers to takes the bag of stuff she brought, if she'll let him, as he slips past her to lead the way to the kitchen.

The fact that there's an upstairs impresses her. Her apartment back in New York was big, but only one story. And of course it, like her apartment here, was more part of her cover than a real home, carefully designed to make her look as normal as possible. This place is a real home. She can't help staring around until he tries to take the bag from her.

"Oh, that's okay, you don't have to," she says quickly. She's not holding on to it too tightly, so if he insists, she'll let go of it. She follows him into the kitchen, still staring. "Your aunt and uncle have a really nice place."

Kyle insists, taking the bag out of her hands as she admires the house. He has to admit, he lucked out. His relatives aren't too wealthy, but they've owned the home for generations and do well enough to keep up with all the necessities. The place looks an odd mix of homey and modern, full of accouterments without seeming stuffed to the brim.

"Thanks, I'll tell them you said that." He points with his free hand as they move down the hall, indicating the various doorways. "Living room, closet, bathroom, kitchen slash dining room."

That's the doorway he slips through to reveal a modest kitchen and small table that seats four on the other side of the counter. Kyle watches her as he sets the bag on the counter and begins unloading what she's brought before returning his attention to the task before them.

"This is great. I have some sausage that could be good, if you're okay with sausage? Spinach, mushrooms. I think we could use the squash thing or the asparagus, but probably not both," he remarks as he holds one in each hand, looking between them and then turning back to face her.

"Yeah," she says in answer to his question, still distractedly looking around the place. She forces herself to turn her attention back to him and continue, "Yes. Sausage is good."

She smiles a little awkwardly when he turns towards her. "I didn't know what to bring. You can just keep whatever we don't use, it's fine. I wouldn't know what to do with asparagus anyway."

"Steam it, grill it, stir fry it. It's great. I'm going to give it back to you. Trust me, you want it." Kyle turns around to return the asparagus and the excess of the usable ingredients back in the bag. He places it aside and then pulls out a pot for the pasta and a couple pans for the other ingredients, setting them on the stove without yet turning anything on.

"Alright. You need an apron?" First thing's first, he supposed. Being in a t-shirt and jeans himself, he's not too worried about spills. As he's looking to her for an answer, he grabs a cutting board and a couple knives out for them to start. "Okay. First rule: I won't stab you, you don't stab me. Deal?"

"I don't know how to do any of that."

She shakes her head in response to his first question. She's not wearing anything that's fancy enough for her to worry about. In response to his second question, her lips curl slightly upward. "Yeah, if we kill each other, who'll eat the pasta?"

"Those can be your future lessons," he replies idly, not willing to take no for an answer in this. With her response to the knives, he smiles, then jerks his head back to the side as a way to call her over closer to him. "Come on. You can start cutting vegetables."

He moves the board over to give her some space to work without him being directly beside her, setting a knife atop and grabbing the pack of mushrooms for her to start on. "Do you know how to slice mushrooms?"

An honest question as he then grabs the large pot to begin filling it with water. No reason not to multitask a little.

She knows - in theory, at least - how to cut up people. Cutting up mushrooms should be pretty simple by comparison. At least the mushrooms won't fight back. "Yeah, I got it."

She grabs the knife and starts cutting, maybe a little too enthusiastically. Once she decides she can do something, she's not gonna do it halfway. Chopping has the added benefit of distracting her from the daunting prospect of small talk. At least it's just him. The possibility of meeting his aunt and uncle is even more daunting. She frowns down at the mushrooms as she tries to think of something, anything, to say. She could just pretend she's undercover, that she's playing a character who's great at small talk, but she doesn't want the only friendship she has right now to be fake.

Finally, she decides to just tell him the truth. "I don't do this a lot," she says, her tone somewhere between rueful and annoyed at her own social limitations. "I don't have a lot of friends."

"I couldn't tell," he replies with a sincerity that can only be teasing.

Kyle finishes filling the pot, turning off the sink and moving it back to the stove. He turns the burner beneath it on and then turns his attention to Alex and the mushrooms. She's doing well. Not exactly how he might do it, probably better. It's good. To avoid staring, he busies himself by grabbing the package of sausage from the fridge and dumping it into one of the two pans he pulled out.

"I used to. Have a lot of friends," he says after a beat, more serious than before. "It's hard when your priorities aren't the same. When what's important to you and what's important to them is different."

He thinks about his family dying. While his friends were picking out colleges, he was sliding a noose around his neck and wondering if he should step off the chair. Then the military, the vampires. Kyle half forgot what it was like to be normal before moving to London. Luckily he falls back into it without too much trouble.

"Or maybe you're just really bad at small talk."

Alex shoots him an unamused glance. It is a little funny, but she doesn't plan on letting him know that. Then she switches her focus back to the mushrooms until he speaks again.

"Or when it turns out they've been lying to you for years." That's real, the kind of thing she wouldn't normally share, but right now, at least for the moment, she feels comfortable with him, like he might get it.

She's never had a lot of friends - even when she was a kid it was mostly just her and Yuri. She wonders, not for the first time, if Yuri's still alive, or if he was killed that night along with his parents.

She stops chopping for a moment, and brushes a loose lock of hair behind her ear before glancing at Kyle again, her eyes narrowed. She's not really offended, but she narrows her eyes and tries to frown, even though the frown is on the verge of becoming a smile. "Aren't you supposed to be telling me how to make a sauce or something?"

"Or that," he agrees. Kyle recognizes the sincere insight for what it is, again surprised by her choice. He thought she barely liked him at all and yet here she is, in his kitchen, admitting to vulnerabilities. He mixes the sausage around a bit, then flashes a grin at her faux accusation. "Or something."

He moves over next to her to look at her work. "Cool. I'm going to borrow this." Very deliberately not touching her, Kyle slides the knife out of her hand and uses it to quickly cut up the garlic, which he tosses into the third pan. Then he holds the knife out, handle first, towards her again. "First thing, throw a bunch of shit in a pan. Olive oil, garlic, mushrooms, squash, maybe some little tomatoes. Cook that for awhile, add some spinach. Mix in the meat once it's cooked. Add to the pasta. Easy."

He picks up the squash and offers it to her to cut. "The hard part is timing. Squash takes a long time to cook, spinach is fast. Water takes for-fucking-ever to boil."

Alex just stands there, perfectly still, as he takes the knife from her. It's kind of sweet, how careful he's being, but it's also a little annoying.

"I'm not made of glass, you know." It's a simple observation, not meant to be snippy or accusatory. "I promise I won't attack you again." She definitely won't lash out at him over nothing, and she's sure she has enough self-control that, unless he does something stupid like her without warning again, it won't come to blows.

She takes the knife back from him when it's offered, and starts cutting up the squash, half-listening to his instructions. "How do you cook the meat?" That she definitely has to figure out. It'd be great to be able to cook her own meat.

"I told you I wouldn't touch you and I keep my word," he retorts with a light smile. It's encouraging that she's becoming more comfortable around him, but he means what he said. Besides, he understands automated responses and trauma. Not everything is a conscious choice. "Unless you're giving me permission to break it."

"Uh, for this? You put it in a pan over like, medium, medium-high maybe. Flip it over and mix it around, try not to burn it. If it wasn't ground up, you could use a lid to help cook it all the way through." He's half making this up as he goes. Kyle has a decent idea of how to cook some basics, but he's no chef and trying to be precise about things like when meat is done or what temperature to use is not his forte.

"I mean..." She stops cutting for a second and looks at him. She almost can't believe he's not making fun of her, but he seems sincere. "Don't treat me like that. Like I'm gonna snap if our hands happen to touch."

She quickly finishes chopping up the squash, and moves to dump it in the same pan as the garlic. "So put the water on first, then vegetables in one pan and meat in another, then the spinach. She reaches for a tomato to chop it up and toss it in with the squash and the garlic, trying to take charge even though she has no clue what she's doing.

Kyle stops and turns to look at her, even as she continues cutting. His free hand pulls into a fist at his side as he turns back to the pan. Then it unravels and he continues on, dismissing his frustration. She doesn't want him to touch her, she gets mad at him for not touching her. It's a frustrating thing to navigate, but he tries to let it go.

"Yeah," he agrees distractedly, turning the heat down under the sausage and turning it up under the vegetables. After she finishes with the tomato, he stops with a small sigh and turns to face her again. He's too frustrated to drop the subject.

"Tell me how to treat you." It's not angry or accusing, said with a degree of expectation but not one of judgment. "I'm not the brightest guy and I'd appreciate it if you could give me a road map. What was it about me boosting you up at the store? That it was unexpected? The intimacy? Your waist? Being in the bread aisle? You don't want me to treat you like a special snowflake, I don't want to treat you like a special snowflake. So help me understand."

Alex really doesn't want to have a serious conversation, or to talk about her feelings or her damage or whatever. She'd much rather just have a normal afternoon with a nice, normal guy who'll make dumb jokes about tater tots and pretend she's normal too. The major flaw in that plan is, of course, that she's not normal, and neither is Kyle.

She sets the knife down and turns towards him. "You came up behind me and grabbed me when I wasn't expecting you to. What did you think I was gonna do, give you a medal?" She reaches for his wrist, hoping to pull his hand towards her, palm up. At the same time, she snatches up the knife and tries to put it in his hand. "We can pass each other stuff, okay? This doesn't have to be weird. Just don't, you know, grab me. And don't treat me like a special snowflake." She reaches for the pasta, hoping the water's started to boil by now. Otherwise she'll just have to keep staring at him, which would make the whole situation a lot more awkward than it already is. She wants to just move on and get back to cooking. "Just... cut up some spinach and I'll figure out how much pasta to cook."

Kyle watches and listens, letting her take his hand and holding the knife when she gives it to him. When she moves away from him to check the boiling water and pour the pasta in, he shifts behind her to set the knife on the counter just on the other side of her. It's close proximity without touching, testing the waters to some extent without really being a conscious thought.

"You don't cut spinach," he says finally, returning to his lighthearted and teasing ways. He has a better sense of what it is that sets her off now and can, hopefully, avoid those things. At least he knows she can handle herself if he oversteps. That helps. Kyle moves back around to the other side of her as before. "I think you're making enough to feed an army, but that's okay. Leftovers are good."

Alex is so engrossed in pouring pasta into the water, trying to keep her mind on that instead of on the conversation she doesn't want to have with him, that she's not really thinking about how much she's pouring. As soon as he speaks, she realizes that she's dumped almost the entire box into the pot - way too much for just the two of them. Probably too much even if his aunt and uncle join them.

A little self-consciously, she sets the box down and clears her throat. "Hey, too much is better than too little, right?" Almost immediately, the pot starts boiling over, water spitting out onto the stovetop and some of it even splashing into the vegetable pan. Alex grabs a dishcloth before realizing that she doesn't have any clue how a dishcloth is supposed to help.

Kyle tilts his head and is halfway into agreeing with her when the pot water spills over, jumping into the pan and almost immediately spitting hot oil in all directions. He turns down the heat on the boiling water, cursing under his breath and flicking his hand as a spot of oil lands on it. His expression tightens with the pain, not from the actual injury but from intruding memories that accompany it.

"Back up," he tells Alex, turning around to dig in a drawer for the lid to the pan. Kyle's great at delegating in a crisis, but only to people he knows and can trust to understand him. Otherwise, it's a hell of a lot easier for him to tackle the emergency himself when he can. In an effort to hide his brief trouble, he adds, "Hot oil bad."

Kyle manages to get the lid on the pan, the boiling water now simmering thanks to the lower heat. Then he turns to offer her a smile. "First, save yourself. Then save the food. Then the stove, I guess."

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let me know if you'd like me to edit

nah you're good! let me know if you want changes

s'all good

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