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thejusticelounge2014-10-29 09:07 am
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-10-29 09:07 am
Entry tags:
visitation
K TXT: doing better now, the cough stuff helped. Just a bullshit cold, I'm mostly okay, I
K TXT: look, is it okay if I come see you?
Ollie reads the text, standing at the kitchen counter with a rag and cleaning spray in one hand and his phone in the other, and even though he’s in direct, buttery-warm sunlight the words send a shiver up his back. It’s a good shiver and he makes a little involuntary sound as he answers, quick as can be.
O TXT: Come see me. Please.
Kate can almost hear Ollie say it, and how he’d say it, and her lips quirk as she flicks the reply button with her thumb.
O TXT: There in a minute. Swear I’m not contagious.
Adebayo had said as much, anyway. Besides, the reprocessed air of the Watchtower is getting old, drying her skin, and California sun before she gets back to Gotham—okay, more than just that sun—is what she really needs, rather than more decongestants.
"Hey, güero, whatever happened to day of rest?" she asks, stepping from the patio zeta platform over to the open doors to the kitchen, blinking the dizziness of the transit off of her and clearing her throat. "And on the seventh day, God cleaned the house, the counters and the sinks, the dish drain and the stovetop, and it was good?"
It’s still her place, just enough, and she’s glad for it.
"You know me," Ollie says, abandoning the spray bottle (a concoction of diluted dish soap and vinegar that he mixes up himself, naturally, eco-friendly cleaning and all that) and rag in the double sink. He goes over to Kate, taking in the way she looks in his city’s sunshine: russet-reddish all over, the brown of her skin and the deep dark of her hair, sharper still from having been sick. Taking a deep breath, Ollie finishes, “I’m not the world’s greatest when it comes to days of rest.”
The last few words are spoken into Kate’s hair, against her cheek, her mouth.
Kate’s surprised, a little, that Ollie’s so close, so soon, but it’s not a bad thing, damn it—and so she melts into him a little, pressing her cheek against his. He smells of Ecover and sharp limes and mint, and it makes her smile. “I know you aren’t,” she says. “And neither am I, in the interests of full disclosure and not being a hypocrite.”
Her breathing’s still a little too heavy when she moves for her liking, but she likes the salt of the sea in her throat, the lightness of the air.
"Ollie," she murmurs, after a moment of them just standing there, close. "I’m so fucking sorry, cielo."
Backing up a little, Ollie blinks at Kate, half-sitting against the kitchen table and reaching behind him to put the heels of his hands against the wood. “You are?” he asks. “I’m not … I mean, what for?”
He gives a snort at himself and says, “Not that I don’t think you have stuff to apologize for. I guess I just …” Ollie rubs his face and sighs. “Okay. I’m gonna get wound up in my own words if I keep going this way, so maybe the best thing to do is ask you. What it is you’re apologizing for. Last thing I want is for us to be working at cross-purposes.”
"For being a pain in the ass," says Kate, moving around him so she can lean her elbow against the table and look up at Ollie, still close. "And adversarial, and just…generally unhelpful. And running away."
She owes Bruce an apology as well, she knows, though with him she’s not sure of the best way to say it. With Ollie, it ends up being just blurty and that ends up somehow being okay in the end, usually.
"It seemed like everything was rubbing against raw nerves, and I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that way, and from turning everything into more pain and anger in my head, rolling up into a ball. It was like that game Lian likes, where all the stuff gets stuck to the ball, and you roll it all over and it gets bigger and bigger…"
Kate apparently has forgotten the name of Katamari Damacy, but to be fair, she has a lot on her plate.
As Kate goes on, Ollie’s chin sinks down against his chest, a brooding expression settling over his face. He waits until she’s done, though, before he crosses his arms, legs scooting out further in front of him to brace his feet against the floor.
"Okay," he says. "But we can’t keep doing this. It’s not like I expect us to never fight, Kate, but." Ollie stops there, looking over at her. "You have to stop seeing everything I do as a fuckup waiting to happen. I want us to be /partners/ again, Kate, like we used to be. And it’s not that we can’t be now that there’s three of us, that’s not what I’m saying."
He pulls out a chair and sits down properly, fiddling with one of the hot sauce bottles that sits out on their table all the time. “I understand that things are shitty for you right now, you and Bruce,” Ollie says carefully. “That’s no reason to shut me out, when being supportive for each other is the best thing we can have right now.”
Kate tilts her head a little, waits for a second to hear him out. She’s a little more tense, wonders if she maybe shouldn’t have said anything at all for a while, but that would get them nowhere. And Ollie’s right (though she still worries about what he might do if he’s hurting)—she needs to start from a place of trust and judge only if something does occur.
"I know," she says. "And I know it’s not what I should have done. I was just worrying about getting hurt…that video, Walter…it’s sent my brain some places, some ways of coping, that I thought I’d closed off for good. Not so much, I guess."
She winces, making a funny little face as she tries to suppress a cough, then fails and coughs into her elbow.
Getting up, Ollie goes over to the fridge and pours a glass of lemonade, stirring some extra honey into it before setting it down in front of Kate and taking his seat again. “It’s not hot, but it’s better than nothing,” he says. “And you can tell me what it is you’re worrying about. Whether it has to do with me or Bruce or Walt or Ramsey or anything else. Your brain has entirely too many cul-de-sacs and diversions to be able to navigate alone if you’re in a bad place.”
He still can’t bring himself to act like everything’s normal between them, but jesus, it’s good to be able to talk to her. To see her and sit together, at least. “Have you and Bruce had a chance to discuss what might be happening? With Walt?”
Picking up the glass, Kate takes a sip, sucking on her teeth a little at the sweetness of the honey before it warms her throat. “Thanks,” she murmurs, and sips some more of the drink before she responds. She’s not quite ready to say everything that she fears, everything that scares her—not even in this warm safe bright place. She hopes the words will come soon, though, no longer stuck in her mind in nooks and crannies, and she wants to tell Ollie that but doesn’t know how, tries to say it with her eyes.
"I haven’t seen him in a few days," she replies, after a minute. "I’ve gotten further with my tracking than he has, and then Mar’i, and all that shit that happened that Zee and Jason and Jaime dealt with—he takes everything onto his plate, even more than I do. And I’m not quite there. I’m close, I can tell, but I can’t pin him down to one place yet."
"He takes things onto his plate he’s got no business messing with," Ollie grumps, but then leaves it aside, because there’s no need to bring that up right now. "If you need help with Walt, I’m available. I know you were gonna try and get Mar’i’s help on this, but with the shooting and all, that’s clearly not gonna happen." He reaches for her lemonade glass, but then says just as she’s about to, "—oh yeah, you have a cold—" and gets up to get his own.
Taking a sip, Ollie continues, “Bruce says she’s stable now, but god knows whether or not she’ll take a turn for the worse.” He chases the tang of the lemon around his mouth, licking his teeth. “Makes me glad Jason’s staying here and not anywhere he’d be expected to hang around.” Ollie slants a look at Kate and asks, a bit tartly, “…unless you share Bruce’s suspicions about what I want with Jason Todd?”
There’s a long moment where Kate seems to be drawn in on herself a little, considering, before she says, “Yeah. I’m going to need your help. If anything else, to cover my back—he’s fucking ridiculously strong, Ollie, I don’t know what I’m gonna do—”
The other comment of Ollie’s takes her visibly aback, and it takes a second for her to get past the reaction of ‘why the hell would I think that’, and into something more conversational. “No. I knew the situation wasn’t ever going to be that, O.” Even if she’s not sure she could ever have Bruce understand why she was of that mindset. That was something he and Ollie would have to fight out, in time.
After a second, she says, biting her lip, eyes a little wider, “You said about Jason staying here—do you think they’re going after all of the kids?”
Ollie watches Kate for a while after she tells him she didn’t agree with Bruce’s suspicions, green eyes scanning her face over and over to figure out if she’s telling the truth, if she’s keeping anything from him, if there’s any doubt. Only after he’s satisfied himself that Kate means it does he nod and sit back in his chair. “I think they’re going after what we hold dearest,” he says, “whether that’s places like Bruce’s home in Wayne Manor, or the people we love.”
Despite the slight stiffness in his manner towards Kate, the faint reserved tone of his voice, Ollie reaches out to take her hand then, thumb running over the too-prominent bones on the back of it. “He might be strong, but you took him down once, Kate,” he says. “This time you’ll put him down for good.”
Kate lets Ollie judge her, determine she’s genuine; if that’s what he needs, she’ll allow it without a question, and it’s not like she’s in the mood to do crossexamination right now. It’s what he has to say that bothers her, and makes her brow furrow as she settles more firmly into the chair. When looking at what all could be targeted as things the members of the League held dear, considering it too closely made her stomach churn.
"I couldn’t have done it without Cam," she says, focusing on Walter and getting what she could manage done. She wonders, a little, at what caused Ollie to change his mind about this being The Real Walt, or if he’s just going along with her, but it doesn’t really matter.
She squeezes Ollie’s hand, her brow furrowing even deeper as she considers her plan—such as it is, it’s not really much of one. “And I may investigate on my own, but it’s going to take more than me to stop him. Especially seeing as he’s…uh, no longer dead. God knows what’s involved there.”
"You could have done it without Cameron Chase." Ollie sits back in his chair, removing his hand again, back to the more clipped manner of speech. "If you’d had to, you could have." He shoves his palm against the top of the table as if he’s trying to scrunch it up like fabric, or paper. "I’m tired of hearing you doubt yourself, Kate. You could have gotten it done if it needed doing, with Ramsey’s life on the line. Keep repeating that you don’t know if you can take him and you would’ve failed without somebody else’s help, and you’ve halfway defeated yourself before you even face him."
Ollie moves his lemonade glass to the side of the table, careful not to knock it over and off the way he’d done last time he’d talked to Kate, especially after the way she’d gone tharn. “Look, we still don’t know what it is you’re facing. You wanted me to admit that it’s Walt, and in the absence of any other evidence, yeah, okay, it might be Dear Old back from the grave and looking for your blood. But we don’t know for /sure/, Kate. All we know is what this spectre can do to you psychologically, so that’s what I’m here for. Is trying to keep it from fucking with your head.”
"I appreciate that, and I get your point," Kate retorts, but her voice is quiet. "But in this case I’m asking for help rather than going it alone. I tried to do it on my own with him last time and that’s what got me into trouble. I’m saying this now so I’m accountable, Ollie, so I don’t go off again thinking that only I can clean up my family’s mess, and that I don’t deserve help.”
She pauses, snorts a soft laugh almost to herself, about herself. “…and yeah, that’d be it fucking with my head, I guess.”
"And you’ve got my help, however you want it. You just need to tell me what it is you want me to do, because so far you haven’t responded well to anything that I suggest." Ollie holds up his hands in front of him, palms out, to forestall any possible protests. "Which isn’t the point, and it’s your prerogative to not take my advice. I’m just saying that you’re the one running the show and you’re the one who’s put him down once before, so I’ll run backup on this."
He doesn’t touch Kate’s statement about not deserving help. It’s on the tip of his tongue, to assure her that she’s more than deserving of not just help but a million more things besides, but Ollie stifles the impulse and leaves his contribution to the conversation as it is: stark, plain, unembellished. It’s disconcerting, but with how their talks have been going lately, it’s the best and possibly only option.
"So tell me: what d’you want me to do."
"I need you to literally have my back when I go in to get the bastard," says Kate, her brow furrowing a little in frustration that Ollie’s not really hearing her—giving her no purchase. It’s perhaps fair, but that doesn’t mean she has to enjoy it either.
"Seriously, at this stage of the game, I have no other plan, no elaborate trap or scheme or method. I want to find him and put him down again, quick and dirty and end of story. So yeah, maybe that’s where I need your help as well, because if you have any ideas for the best way to draw him out…"
It’s sinking in, though, that despite her hate for Walter, she’s talking about her father like he’s a rabid dog; and something about the whole situation makes Kate feel filthy, like she’ll never be able to get clean. Like she’s the one who’s wrong, twisted. A muscle in her cheek twitches and she’s unable to bite it back.
Ollie swallows, meeting her gaze openly. “I don’t know if you’re up to that right now. This is taking a helluva toll on you already, and you haven’t even begun to confront him. To confront Walt. Maybe I was wrong to encourage you to make hunting Walter your primary focus. Maybe you should reconsider, for your own safety.”
Kate rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, tension creasing between her eyebrows as she looks back at Ollie. For once in this conversation, it’s not tension at him, because on a certain level she agrees with him and he’s right.
"I probably should, but Ollie…what else am I going to do? If he’s out there, if he’s still killing women, trying to get to me, I don’t know how I can set that aside, even for my own wellbeing, when there’s not anyone as equipped to handle the situation." And, frankly, she’s not sure who else would pick this up, or has the workload capacity to do so.
"How equipped can you be when you’re working from such a compromised position?" Ollie shakes his head, scrubbing his hand through his hair. "Mar’i would’ve been best, but with her down too … well."
He shrugs there, not wanting to elaborate on that thought. “Why don’t you think on it a while,” Ollie suggests. “See if there’s any angle you can come at it that’s more indirect, or somebody who has talents particular to this kind of thing. Tracking and putting down. A hunter.”
Ollie stands up from the kitchen table with his glass, and before he reaches out to take hers, he puts his hand on Kate’s to add one more thing for her to consider. “And don’t forget — your husband’s one.”
K TXT: look, is it okay if I come see you?
Ollie reads the text, standing at the kitchen counter with a rag and cleaning spray in one hand and his phone in the other, and even though he’s in direct, buttery-warm sunlight the words send a shiver up his back. It’s a good shiver and he makes a little involuntary sound as he answers, quick as can be.
O TXT: Come see me. Please.
Kate can almost hear Ollie say it, and how he’d say it, and her lips quirk as she flicks the reply button with her thumb.
O TXT: There in a minute. Swear I’m not contagious.
Adebayo had said as much, anyway. Besides, the reprocessed air of the Watchtower is getting old, drying her skin, and California sun before she gets back to Gotham—okay, more than just that sun—is what she really needs, rather than more decongestants.
"Hey, güero, whatever happened to day of rest?" she asks, stepping from the patio zeta platform over to the open doors to the kitchen, blinking the dizziness of the transit off of her and clearing her throat. "And on the seventh day, God cleaned the house, the counters and the sinks, the dish drain and the stovetop, and it was good?"
It’s still her place, just enough, and she’s glad for it.
"You know me," Ollie says, abandoning the spray bottle (a concoction of diluted dish soap and vinegar that he mixes up himself, naturally, eco-friendly cleaning and all that) and rag in the double sink. He goes over to Kate, taking in the way she looks in his city’s sunshine: russet-reddish all over, the brown of her skin and the deep dark of her hair, sharper still from having been sick. Taking a deep breath, Ollie finishes, “I’m not the world’s greatest when it comes to days of rest.”
The last few words are spoken into Kate’s hair, against her cheek, her mouth.
Kate’s surprised, a little, that Ollie’s so close, so soon, but it’s not a bad thing, damn it—and so she melts into him a little, pressing her cheek against his. He smells of Ecover and sharp limes and mint, and it makes her smile. “I know you aren’t,” she says. “And neither am I, in the interests of full disclosure and not being a hypocrite.”
Her breathing’s still a little too heavy when she moves for her liking, but she likes the salt of the sea in her throat, the lightness of the air.
"Ollie," she murmurs, after a moment of them just standing there, close. "I’m so fucking sorry, cielo."
Backing up a little, Ollie blinks at Kate, half-sitting against the kitchen table and reaching behind him to put the heels of his hands against the wood. “You are?” he asks. “I’m not … I mean, what for?”
He gives a snort at himself and says, “Not that I don’t think you have stuff to apologize for. I guess I just …” Ollie rubs his face and sighs. “Okay. I’m gonna get wound up in my own words if I keep going this way, so maybe the best thing to do is ask you. What it is you’re apologizing for. Last thing I want is for us to be working at cross-purposes.”
"For being a pain in the ass," says Kate, moving around him so she can lean her elbow against the table and look up at Ollie, still close. "And adversarial, and just…generally unhelpful. And running away."
She owes Bruce an apology as well, she knows, though with him she’s not sure of the best way to say it. With Ollie, it ends up being just blurty and that ends up somehow being okay in the end, usually.
"It seemed like everything was rubbing against raw nerves, and I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that way, and from turning everything into more pain and anger in my head, rolling up into a ball. It was like that game Lian likes, where all the stuff gets stuck to the ball, and you roll it all over and it gets bigger and bigger…"
Kate apparently has forgotten the name of Katamari Damacy, but to be fair, she has a lot on her plate.
As Kate goes on, Ollie’s chin sinks down against his chest, a brooding expression settling over his face. He waits until she’s done, though, before he crosses his arms, legs scooting out further in front of him to brace his feet against the floor.
"Okay," he says. "But we can’t keep doing this. It’s not like I expect us to never fight, Kate, but." Ollie stops there, looking over at her. "You have to stop seeing everything I do as a fuckup waiting to happen. I want us to be /partners/ again, Kate, like we used to be. And it’s not that we can’t be now that there’s three of us, that’s not what I’m saying."
He pulls out a chair and sits down properly, fiddling with one of the hot sauce bottles that sits out on their table all the time. “I understand that things are shitty for you right now, you and Bruce,” Ollie says carefully. “That’s no reason to shut me out, when being supportive for each other is the best thing we can have right now.”
Kate tilts her head a little, waits for a second to hear him out. She’s a little more tense, wonders if she maybe shouldn’t have said anything at all for a while, but that would get them nowhere. And Ollie’s right (though she still worries about what he might do if he’s hurting)—she needs to start from a place of trust and judge only if something does occur.
"I know," she says. "And I know it’s not what I should have done. I was just worrying about getting hurt…that video, Walter…it’s sent my brain some places, some ways of coping, that I thought I’d closed off for good. Not so much, I guess."
She winces, making a funny little face as she tries to suppress a cough, then fails and coughs into her elbow.
Getting up, Ollie goes over to the fridge and pours a glass of lemonade, stirring some extra honey into it before setting it down in front of Kate and taking his seat again. “It’s not hot, but it’s better than nothing,” he says. “And you can tell me what it is you’re worrying about. Whether it has to do with me or Bruce or Walt or Ramsey or anything else. Your brain has entirely too many cul-de-sacs and diversions to be able to navigate alone if you’re in a bad place.”
He still can’t bring himself to act like everything’s normal between them, but jesus, it’s good to be able to talk to her. To see her and sit together, at least. “Have you and Bruce had a chance to discuss what might be happening? With Walt?”
Picking up the glass, Kate takes a sip, sucking on her teeth a little at the sweetness of the honey before it warms her throat. “Thanks,” she murmurs, and sips some more of the drink before she responds. She’s not quite ready to say everything that she fears, everything that scares her—not even in this warm safe bright place. She hopes the words will come soon, though, no longer stuck in her mind in nooks and crannies, and she wants to tell Ollie that but doesn’t know how, tries to say it with her eyes.
"I haven’t seen him in a few days," she replies, after a minute. "I’ve gotten further with my tracking than he has, and then Mar’i, and all that shit that happened that Zee and Jason and Jaime dealt with—he takes everything onto his plate, even more than I do. And I’m not quite there. I’m close, I can tell, but I can’t pin him down to one place yet."
"He takes things onto his plate he’s got no business messing with," Ollie grumps, but then leaves it aside, because there’s no need to bring that up right now. "If you need help with Walt, I’m available. I know you were gonna try and get Mar’i’s help on this, but with the shooting and all, that’s clearly not gonna happen." He reaches for her lemonade glass, but then says just as she’s about to, "—oh yeah, you have a cold—" and gets up to get his own.
Taking a sip, Ollie continues, “Bruce says she’s stable now, but god knows whether or not she’ll take a turn for the worse.” He chases the tang of the lemon around his mouth, licking his teeth. “Makes me glad Jason’s staying here and not anywhere he’d be expected to hang around.” Ollie slants a look at Kate and asks, a bit tartly, “…unless you share Bruce’s suspicions about what I want with Jason Todd?”
There’s a long moment where Kate seems to be drawn in on herself a little, considering, before she says, “Yeah. I’m going to need your help. If anything else, to cover my back—he’s fucking ridiculously strong, Ollie, I don’t know what I’m gonna do—”
The other comment of Ollie’s takes her visibly aback, and it takes a second for her to get past the reaction of ‘why the hell would I think that’, and into something more conversational. “No. I knew the situation wasn’t ever going to be that, O.” Even if she’s not sure she could ever have Bruce understand why she was of that mindset. That was something he and Ollie would have to fight out, in time.
After a second, she says, biting her lip, eyes a little wider, “You said about Jason staying here—do you think they’re going after all of the kids?”
Ollie watches Kate for a while after she tells him she didn’t agree with Bruce’s suspicions, green eyes scanning her face over and over to figure out if she’s telling the truth, if she’s keeping anything from him, if there’s any doubt. Only after he’s satisfied himself that Kate means it does he nod and sit back in his chair. “I think they’re going after what we hold dearest,” he says, “whether that’s places like Bruce’s home in Wayne Manor, or the people we love.”
Despite the slight stiffness in his manner towards Kate, the faint reserved tone of his voice, Ollie reaches out to take her hand then, thumb running over the too-prominent bones on the back of it. “He might be strong, but you took him down once, Kate,” he says. “This time you’ll put him down for good.”
Kate lets Ollie judge her, determine she’s genuine; if that’s what he needs, she’ll allow it without a question, and it’s not like she’s in the mood to do crossexamination right now. It’s what he has to say that bothers her, and makes her brow furrow as she settles more firmly into the chair. When looking at what all could be targeted as things the members of the League held dear, considering it too closely made her stomach churn.
"I couldn’t have done it without Cam," she says, focusing on Walter and getting what she could manage done. She wonders, a little, at what caused Ollie to change his mind about this being The Real Walt, or if he’s just going along with her, but it doesn’t really matter.
She squeezes Ollie’s hand, her brow furrowing even deeper as she considers her plan—such as it is, it’s not really much of one. “And I may investigate on my own, but it’s going to take more than me to stop him. Especially seeing as he’s…uh, no longer dead. God knows what’s involved there.”
"You could have done it without Cameron Chase." Ollie sits back in his chair, removing his hand again, back to the more clipped manner of speech. "If you’d had to, you could have." He shoves his palm against the top of the table as if he’s trying to scrunch it up like fabric, or paper. "I’m tired of hearing you doubt yourself, Kate. You could have gotten it done if it needed doing, with Ramsey’s life on the line. Keep repeating that you don’t know if you can take him and you would’ve failed without somebody else’s help, and you’ve halfway defeated yourself before you even face him."
Ollie moves his lemonade glass to the side of the table, careful not to knock it over and off the way he’d done last time he’d talked to Kate, especially after the way she’d gone tharn. “Look, we still don’t know what it is you’re facing. You wanted me to admit that it’s Walt, and in the absence of any other evidence, yeah, okay, it might be Dear Old back from the grave and looking for your blood. But we don’t know for /sure/, Kate. All we know is what this spectre can do to you psychologically, so that’s what I’m here for. Is trying to keep it from fucking with your head.”
"I appreciate that, and I get your point," Kate retorts, but her voice is quiet. "But in this case I’m asking for help rather than going it alone. I tried to do it on my own with him last time and that’s what got me into trouble. I’m saying this now so I’m accountable, Ollie, so I don’t go off again thinking that only I can clean up my family’s mess, and that I don’t deserve help.”
She pauses, snorts a soft laugh almost to herself, about herself. “…and yeah, that’d be it fucking with my head, I guess.”
"And you’ve got my help, however you want it. You just need to tell me what it is you want me to do, because so far you haven’t responded well to anything that I suggest." Ollie holds up his hands in front of him, palms out, to forestall any possible protests. "Which isn’t the point, and it’s your prerogative to not take my advice. I’m just saying that you’re the one running the show and you’re the one who’s put him down once before, so I’ll run backup on this."
He doesn’t touch Kate’s statement about not deserving help. It’s on the tip of his tongue, to assure her that she’s more than deserving of not just help but a million more things besides, but Ollie stifles the impulse and leaves his contribution to the conversation as it is: stark, plain, unembellished. It’s disconcerting, but with how their talks have been going lately, it’s the best and possibly only option.
"So tell me: what d’you want me to do."
"I need you to literally have my back when I go in to get the bastard," says Kate, her brow furrowing a little in frustration that Ollie’s not really hearing her—giving her no purchase. It’s perhaps fair, but that doesn’t mean she has to enjoy it either.
"Seriously, at this stage of the game, I have no other plan, no elaborate trap or scheme or method. I want to find him and put him down again, quick and dirty and end of story. So yeah, maybe that’s where I need your help as well, because if you have any ideas for the best way to draw him out…"
It’s sinking in, though, that despite her hate for Walter, she’s talking about her father like he’s a rabid dog; and something about the whole situation makes Kate feel filthy, like she’ll never be able to get clean. Like she’s the one who’s wrong, twisted. A muscle in her cheek twitches and she’s unable to bite it back.
Ollie swallows, meeting her gaze openly. “I don’t know if you’re up to that right now. This is taking a helluva toll on you already, and you haven’t even begun to confront him. To confront Walt. Maybe I was wrong to encourage you to make hunting Walter your primary focus. Maybe you should reconsider, for your own safety.”
Kate rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, tension creasing between her eyebrows as she looks back at Ollie. For once in this conversation, it’s not tension at him, because on a certain level she agrees with him and he’s right.
"I probably should, but Ollie…what else am I going to do? If he’s out there, if he’s still killing women, trying to get to me, I don’t know how I can set that aside, even for my own wellbeing, when there’s not anyone as equipped to handle the situation." And, frankly, she’s not sure who else would pick this up, or has the workload capacity to do so.
"How equipped can you be when you’re working from such a compromised position?" Ollie shakes his head, scrubbing his hand through his hair. "Mar’i would’ve been best, but with her down too … well."
He shrugs there, not wanting to elaborate on that thought. “Why don’t you think on it a while,” Ollie suggests. “See if there’s any angle you can come at it that’s more indirect, or somebody who has talents particular to this kind of thing. Tracking and putting down. A hunter.”
Ollie stands up from the kitchen table with his glass, and before he reaches out to take hers, he puts his hand on Kate’s to add one more thing for her to consider. “And don’t forget — your husband’s one.”