neutral_omens | (no subject)

Date: January 9, 2001
Setting: Tadfield Manor, chapel
Status: Private - John and Kit (complete)
Summary: We need to talk...

It'd had been one of the last stops on their tour, and perhaps it had been a coincidence, but she suspected John had realized just how much the place would appeal to her.

It'd been a while since she'd been in a church, but the solemn faces of saints and angels etched in bright stained glass took her right back to mass when she was young: crowded into a pew, she and her sisters in dresses with far too much lace for her taste, while her mother reprimanded Peter for tugging at his tie. Maybe it was the rarity of such occasions - the stark memories of not knowing when to sit or stand, of not understanding the sermons delivered with such certainty - that made them stand out, but Kit couldn't deny the unique sense of peace she'd always found within these walls, looking up at these faces.

It helped that, to an artist's eye, every shade, every angle of this place was laid out perfectly, with such startling stillness that entering the chapel felt like walking into a photograph. She'd had every intention of trying to capture some of the surreal feeling of the place, and had even brought her sketch pad. But instead, she found herself simply sitting there, near the front, contemplating the elaborate adornments of the altar in this gorgeous place.

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"Something like that," he said, frowning a little confusedly, because that was it exactly if you looked at it one way, but completely the opposite if you looked from the other direction. "Like, I could be John the Bastard out there with everybody else, but not show them the--hell, I don't know, whatever it is you liked, John the Not-So-Much-A-Bastard, I guess...because they'd use that against me, see? ...Well, sure you do. They did, and that was the whole problem." He sighed. "And then with you I could be that, but not the other. And it just didn't work, splitting myself in two like that. Playing Jekyll and Hyde."

He bowed his head, feeling defeated. He really didn't know how he could make Kit understand this. She likely saw it as an addiction, like Brendan's drinking, and in a way it was that, but there was more to it. Addicts could learn to control their own behavior, but how was he supposed to control all the things that the world threw at him whether he went looking for them or not? "They're both real, and I need them both, but there wasn't any place I could be both."

And that, it occurred to him suddenly, might explain more than anything why he'd wound up here. Tadfield Manor was chock full of other people who understood that kind of dilemma, because they shared it. Here, he could let the lines blur a little. Cold comfort that was at the moment.

"It's not like a nine to five job, you know?" he added disconsolately. "Can't just punch out and call it a day. I don't always go looking for the bad shit. Sometimes it's not looking for me either, it just finds me. I'm lucky it doesn't follow me home more often."

"Oh," she said quietly, and for a moment, there seemed nothing else Kit could say. All of her arguments felt shallow and petty in light of what John was telling her; and she'd known they were, but she wasn't ready to admit that at some point - somewhere around their last fight - she'd realized that he'd needed her to be something for him that she wasn't ready to be.

"So what you're sayin' is..." And she stopped, rubbing her eyes wearily. When she began again, her voice was melancholy in a way that sounded strange to her. "What you're saying is, we each let the other down, somewhere along the way."

"Maybe," John said softly. "I dunno. I don't mean to make you feel bad. That was the last thing I ever wanted."

"I know," Kit returned in kind. And she sighed heavily, feeling inexplicably defeated.

After a moment, she drew herself to her feet, and paced down the bench to John's end, seating herself at his side. "But we were friends once, as I recall. Before all this," she said with a faint smile, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Maybe we could work on that bit for a while?"

John looked around at her in surprise, squelching his predictable reaction to the sudden contact. The way the conversation had been going, he had fully expected her to grab the first plausible excuse and leave. The mean-spirited part of him that he'd been talking about just a few minutes earlier remarked caustically that cutting and running was very much Kit's modus operandi.

He ignored it. "Yeah. We could do that," he said after a moment, summoning up a subdued smile. He wanted to be hopeful, but he didn't think he was quite ready to take that leap of faith yet. Still, wait-and-see beat silent enstrangement and the uncomfortable formality of the past few days, he thought. "What d'you reckon we do next, then?" It wasn't meant as a loaded question. He was in unfamiliar territory, and not not quite sure how these things were supposed to work.

Kit was no more familiar with the way things now stood between them, but she was pleased that John had agreed, and smiled. "I reckon," she said carefully, "that you could start with buying me a drink at the bar."

John chuckled. "Isn't that how we got into this mess?" He reached up to take and squeeze her hand, fumbling the unaccustomed gesture a little. They'd never held hands much when they were together, but that was what made it feel like a relatively safe way to bridge the distance between them now. "I hope you're not thinking you can still drink me under the table. I've had loads of practice since I got here."

"Oh, aye?" she asked, a teasing slant to her smile saying that she'd plainly need proof before she'd believe that John could out-drink her.

The hand holding was something she could never really remember having done before; perhaps something to be attributed to John the Not-So-Much-A-Bastard. But she couldn't help but wonder what it meant for them when the fights came back so easily, while the simpler, platonic moments took some adjustment.

She stood then, crossing the bench once more to retrieve her sketch pad. "You coming?" she asked, shooting John another grin and nodding toward the door. "Or are these new found drinkin' skills more the hypothetical sort?"

"I don't do hypothetical, woman," John mock-growled, rising and following her out the door. He paused to close it quietly behind him rather than letting it fall shut, so they weren't cut off abruptly from the solemn tranquility of the place as they departed.