Atermoiements

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[font color=purple] “Yes, yes quite. I don’t think either of us would be the people we are today if anything had actually happened.”[/font color] Kallie closed her eyes for a brief second. On the outside, it might not look like anything was happening, but inside her head, Kallie was going through damage control. She was locking everything down, chaining all of the thoughts back into place. Could have beens, should have beens, would have beens. She repressed it. She repressed it.

[div][attr="style","font-size:15px;"]She repressed it.[/div]

Her head calmed down, and with it her heart also slowed back down. Once everything was in its proper perimeters again, she opened her eyes with a sigh, looking up at Cait. Then she processed the rest of the woman’s statement.[font color=purple] “I’m sorry, what do you mean it explains so much about Pepper?”[/font color]

Her brain was still a little fuzzy after the near panic attack. She pushed the mug away gently so that it was nearly out of reach. She didn’t want it right then.

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"][font color="33ccff"]"The sweaters,"[/font] Cait answered, all innocence once again. Pepper always seemed to have a sweater on, Alvis Holt seemed like he always had a sweater on, bam - explanation.

The comment definitely had nothing to do with Pepper's inability to express herself about a relationship and spend five years working up the nerve to ask Cody out. Definitely.

Cait was not actually sure if Dr. Reed knew about that. Probably? Pepper seemed like the sort of person to tell everyone the news if it was good news, but there was also a lot going on there and maybe she hadn't. Maybe she just hadn't had the chance yet, and that meant it was especially important for Cait not to spoil it. It was one thing to drop hints about a relationship when people were trying to get together and one of them was oblivious, but telling someone's... senior... researcher? Anyway, it wouldn't have been right.
 
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First, there was indignation. The fact that Cait could think of her many years past love for Alvis Holt would influence the way she “dressed” Pepper. Second, there was rage at the same fact. The Indignation built up into a cold fury that made her right hand start to tremble. With a very hard look on her face, one she usually reserved for reprimanding other Class-Ds for being idiots, she looked the young woman in the face and said,[font color=purple] “I do not dress my daughter is sweaters because of Alvis. She chose those all on her own. She’s always been allowed to dress herself. Always.”[/font color]

She probably shouldn’t have called Pepper her daughter, she realized, as she was only her adoptive mother, but it was how she felt about the young woman. She’d had her from the age of five onward, and with no one else stepping up to take care of the girl, Kallie had done so. And subsequently, fell in a different kind of love. She’d never had anyone whom she would willingly throw herself in front of traffic for before, but was she willing to do anything for Pepper.

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Cait blinked. She had not expected that. Sure, she'd gotten the sense from Pepper that she and Dr. Reed were close, but daughter was something that Cait hadn't expected. And Dr. Reed said it like she actually liked her, too. Cared about her.

Fine. Fine. That was... fine. It was all just ex-ple-tive-ing fine. Yeah. Of course it was.

Focus on the problems that are not you, Cait. Right. Just like dealing with unfathomable entities of the depths. Give nothing away, and if you do, make them pay for it. That's probably not a good thing to think about people. Don't think that about people. People got grumpy and then they got annoyed and then they wouldn't talk to you any more.

She'd lost her trains of thought. Where had she been? Sweaters. Right. Defensive knitwear. It would do. Did Dr. Reed react differently when Pepper put a sweater on? Cait sure as hell didn't know, but that was the best part of dealing with psych people. Get them on the right track and they'd ask themselves all the questions. Cait was just going to leave that there for later. [font color="33ccff"]"Right."[/font] It was the sort of 'right' that meant I'm willing to pretend you didn't just say that if you are, because I'm such a nice person like that. [font color="33ccff"]"Anyhow."[/font] A dismissive wave of her hand, as if swatting away invisible anomalous bees. [font color="33ccff"]"What'd Pepper think of him?"[/font]
 
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The flat and humorless smiles that Kallie gave then was definitely indicative of how her mood had changed. Her good day had gone, and with it, the playfulness with which she had answered the first few questions. This always seemed to happen. The moment she let her guard down and started to enjoy a conversation, she either caught feelings or caught a punch to the gut. The only person whom she was safe to really talk to was Pepper anymore. And with everything that had been going on over the last few weeks, she had barely even seen her.

[font color=purple] “She has not had the displeasure of meeting either of the men you could be referring to, nor would I wish that misfortune on her. I worked hard to keep Strings away from her, and– and he was before she was even born. I haven’t seen him since.”[/font color]

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"]Okay, good. The conversation was out of crisis. Well, out of crisis for Cait, anyway. Dr. Reed, not so much - she seemed like she was still definitely still having a bit of a crisis.

Strings would have kept needling at her, Cait knew. It would have been easy, too, like pointing out that it was pretty likely that Pepper was going to meet Strings relatively soon what with everything going on with her. But Strings was... unavailable... and Cait? She just... didn't have the heart. Not here, anyway. She had a few back at L-9, in case she needed them for something. Joshua had a whole bunch, in little jars. All different sorts. That wasn't really relevant. Relevant was... Dr. Reed was having a day and it was at least a little bit Cait's fault, and she was-

-and Pepper liked her, so time to help the researcher put herself back together.

[font color="33ccff"]"You sound like you wish things were different."[/font] About the last part, the not seeing Alvis part. Not about the Pepper hasn't met them part, she'd sounded pretty confident on that one.
 
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Saudade. A noun, meaning a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; “the love that remains”. Kallie knew many words, some of them very strange, but all of them had their moments. This was the moment for saudade. Despite her best efforts to contain the emotions inside of her, their chains were now loose, and some of them slipped out. A deep ache settled in her chest as she stared at Cait with an expression that gradually grew distant and sad.

[font color=purple] “There was a time when I had considered just pretending it had never happened. That I didn’t know what I knew about him. If I could just forget it, then things could go back to the way they were before, with me loving him silently and him letting me.”[/font color] Kallie had no idea why she was telling this to Cait. Maybe it was just because, like Strings had when it had first happened, she had just asked. Maybe it was because the chains were already weak, and so it was just slipping out. Either way, she decided to continue, her voice soft and hushed.[font color=purple] “I even considered amnestics just to erase the day, I had almost requested them under the guise of a traumatic experience with the particular patient, but I felt like it wouldn’t have, uh, been accepted as the reason.”[/font color]

She paused there, hesitating. Then she finally sighed and ruffled her short, barely curling black and grey hair.[font color=purple] “I never wanted it to be like this. I really did love… love him.”[/font color]

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"][font color="33ccff"]"Hm."[/font] It surprised people, sometimes, that Cait was actually capable of not talking for a while. She didn't know why that was, it wasn't like she'd have gotten anywhere as an occultist without being really good at listening, but people didn't think about that. Of course, even in the Foundation, most people didn't understand what Cait did or how it worked. Heck, even at L-9 a lot of people didn't understand what Cait did or how it worked, but that was more due to Cait being a certain kind of special than any lack of understanding about occult Foundations.

You had to know when to listen, with the weird stuff. Sometimes that was what gave you the clues on how to survive without being absorbed into a many-eyed jelly being. Sometimes it was what gave you the clues for when the class-E's were in a bad mood about something and it was best to find something to be busy with elsewhere. And sometimes it was just because listening was a good way to know things, and Cait liked knowing things almost as much as she liked doing things.

So she listened and she didn't say much about the story. She didn't even point out that she thought that the Foundation used way too many amnestics on its people and that they really ought to be more for keeping things secret rather than erasing trauma. Trauma was how you grew! But that was all a her thing and not a Dr. Reed thing, and this whole thing was a Dr. Reed thing, so Cait just listened, and made vague but interested and encouraging sounds at the right moments, and waited until Dr. Kallie finished up with a sigh like someone half her age.

And that was when Cait threaded the needle and prompted, curiously, [font color="33ccff"]"Did? Or do?"[/font]

Because she was pretty sure that people did not get this sappy about someone they'd once had a thing with, probably before Cait had even existed.
 
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[font color=purple] “I-I– I mean I–”[/font color]

Did she still love him? No, that would be impossible. She couldn’t still love Alvis. Her emotions at the time had been completely fabricated by him. They had been real to her, and she had suffered the fallout afterward normally associated with heartbreak, but all of it was… not real. It had never been real. Because Alvis was a monster whom she had trusted, and he had gotten into her head and made her feel things that she didn’t actually feel.

But that didn’t explain the deep ache in her chest right then, the pain she felt in talking about him. It didn’t explain the fact that she still thought about him rather often for someone who had promised themselves they would never think of him again. And it really didn’t explain the fact that Cait’s question made kallie want to cry. Just as she was registering that fact, a silent stream of tears fell from her eyes down her face, dripping onto her turtleneck. She gasped in a small breath.

Knowing that he had been a monster, she could have eventually gotten past that. There were plenty of monsters in the Foundation, plenty of horrible people too, and many of them were loved by someone. It had been something she needed to know, eventually, but that hadn’t been the thing that made her “break up” with him. It had been the fact that she had realized if he could break a mind so thoroughly as he had broken Vincent’s, then he could have put feelings and thoughts into hers without any issue. She couldn’t trust her own emotions. What she had perceived as a breach of trust was what had broken what they had.

But now she was forced to come to the realization– either the feelings were permanent, and he had broken her brain the same way he had Vincent’s… or she was just truly in love with him. He was still all of the things that she thought he was. Calm, collected, soft and gentle. Thoughtful and highly sympathetic. And as much as Kallie wished she could deny it, knowing there was a part underneath the surface that he suppressed, a dangerous part of him he had carefully concealed… that was far more intriguing to her than she wanted to admit. Kallie had always been attracted to monsters, after all. For the first time in years, in nearly two decades, she thought of Carter. He had been the same way, although his monstrous habits hadn’t been revealed to her until after his death.

So did she still love Alvis? It seemed to be that way. Her hand rose to dig into her shit just above her heart like she was trying to claw the emotion out. Or maybe grasp it in her hand. She gasped as she realized that that meant he probably hadn’t fucked with her brain. Or maybe he had? God she had no way of knowing except to trust his word. That shook something inside her. The idea of trusting someone had died with her hopes that they would ever be anything more than what they had been.

[font color=purple] “Yes. Yes, I– No, we’re done talking about this. Talk about something else, anything else.”[/font color] There was no denying the girl was one of Strings’ people. Only Strings had ever pinned her down like this and made her admit to her feelings before. That damnable man, teaching others had to be damnable people. She would have to talk about that the next time he visited.

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"]Oh-kay, she'd made someone cry.

That had not actually been on Cait's to-do list for today. She did not actually like making people cry, despite it apparently happening a lot. Pepper had been crying too, last time they'd met, but Cait had at least had some sort of plausible deniability on that one not being her fault. This one was definitely her fault, and she wasn't really sure what to do with it. She almost wanted to give Dr. Reed a hug, but she'd been at L-9 long enough to know not to touch things unless you were prepared for the consequences. Also, like, she'd just met the woman, and that was probably weird.

She'd also only just met Pepper, but that was different. Pepper had a vibe. Dr. Reed also had a vibe, but it was definitely not that vibe. Cait wondered if anything good would come of it. Realizing you loved someone seemed like a good thing, right? At least, until you started thinking about all the consequences. Love was messy. And relationships always went wrong. She knew it was what you did with the wrong that counted, but it was still a doozy for a while.

Talk about something else, anything else. Anything else? Really? Because Cait had a whole lot of anything that definitely wasn't stuff that most people would have wanted to talk about. In fact, she had a whole lot of things she could say that would actively scramble the brains of anyone she was talking to. She'd been working on an amnestic spell but right now the side effects were not great, especially since they consisted of seizures, speaking in gibberish, and attempts to swim down as deep as possible, which Cait suspected was an attempt to get down to the Deep Ones on account of the Eldritch component. She was pretty sure if she tried it as an AOE she'd end up spawning a cult.

These were a lot of the things that Cait probably shouldn't be saying, too. Level two locations got all up in arms about the weird stuff. Not at all like Level one locations, who got more up in tentacles or wings or weird things pulled out of pockets. Or computers. But that one was boring.

Council locations were full of weirdos.

[font color="33ccff"]"You guys are under SV-3, yeah? Do you think he'd let someone put a tattoo on his buttcheek?"[/font]
 
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Once her brain started going, it wouldn’t stop. There had been so many times over the years when she had almost caved and gone to see Alvis, just to say she missed him. Just to try and repair things. And now, as she sat there with her mind going a mile a minute, she began to realize something. Something that truly crushed her. Her heart felt like it was being squeezed by a vice.

If he hadn’t manipulated her, then she had ruined everything.

If he hadn’t manipulated her, then she had ruined everything.

If he hadn’t manipulated her, then she had ruined everything.

There had been no reason for her to break everything. All she would have needed was a few days to process him being a monster and to decide whether or not that meant that things should end. She hadn’t needed to jump to such a conclusion, but then, he had tried to tell her that, hadn’t he? He had tried to tell her that he hadn’t done that to her. And she had been so freaked out that she hadn’t listened to him. A deep sorrow rose up and left her chest aching, left her throat swollen and more tears began to fall from her eyes as she silently cried.

[div][attr="style","font-size:15px;"]If he hadn’t manipulated her, then she ruined everyth–[/div]

Cait shook her from her thoughts with the strangest question she had ever heard. She sat stunned for a moment before laughter bubbled up out of her. It wasn’t exactly the laughter of someone who thought something was funny as much as it was someone taken by surprise. It was such an abrupt thought changer, in fact, that she went from laughing to sobbing in seconds, holding her face in her hands. She took in shaky breaths.

[font color=purple] “I-I’m so sorry. I-I– I don’t think so, no.”[/font color] The tears turned back into laughter then, but it wasn’t happy laughter. It was almost hysterical. Almost, but not quite. Then as quickly as it had started, it stopped.

She

[div][attr="style","font-size:15px;"]Repressed[/div]

[div][attr="style","font-size:20px;"]It[/div]

And just like that, she was back to normal, carefully wiping tears from her face. Kallie had a rare talent of being able to repress anything at the drop of a dime. It wasn’t a healthy talent, but it was a talent. Until that point, she thought that only two people in the whole world had ever seen her do it, because there had rarely been occasion for her to need to repress something so quickly. She looked up with a neutral expression on her face.

[font color=purple] “No, I don’t think that SV-3 would allow someone to tattoo his butt cheek. That seems entirely unreasonable to expect from any of the Councilmen. I can’t even say that I think Strings would allow it. But then, maybe he’s changed in the last six years.”[/font color]

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"]Dr. Reed wasn't done falling apart yet. That was fine. Cait was used to breakdowns. She observed, and took notes - mentally, not physically. That would have been rude. But when someone was having a breakdown, you took notes, because that was the sort of thing that people needed to know about. Or, at least, wanted to know about.

Dr. Reed was a whole hot mess for a minute there, really. She pulled herself back together, with the sort of air of shoving the mess under the bed and pulling the blanket down a little bit. It didn't solve the problem and it didn't even hide it particularly well - all it would take was a little yank in the right spot and the blanket would be gone and the mess would be visible again. But Cait wasn't a psychologist and she didn't solve problems except in very specific ways, and this was not one of those problems that Cait's skillset was particularly good for, except maybe in the sense of this is obviously a multifaceted issue so if we just make Dr. Reed spherical that would fix it, right? It would not be particularly healthy for Dr. Reed, as people were not meant to be spherical. Also, dimensional alteration of Foundation personnel was one of the things that Cait had strictly been forbidden from doing while she was here at L-14.

Oh, well. Dr. Reed was doing a good impression of everything is fine, so Cait supposed she might as well play along. She actually answered the question, too, which was kind of a surprise. Cait had expected the usual what is wrong with you stare. Sometimes it was good to be wrong!

[font color="33ccff"]"No, he won't."[/font] There hadn't really been a question, but Cait had answered it anyway. Of course, this answer was likely prompting the thought that Cait knew this for a fact, which would probably lead right into that what is wrong with you stare and then they'd all be back on familiar ground. Yay!
 
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A small grin cracked on Kallie’s face as she finished drying it off. This girl was definitely one of Strings’ students, that was for sure. Maybe some people would have had a different reaction to that kind of “you definitely asked him” information, but nothing would ever be as weird as working side by side with Strings had been. Cait could try, though.

Thinking of Strings helped her to calm down all the way. It wasn’t that it was calming to think of him, no. It was that it was difficult to think of anything else when you’re thinking of the batshit crazy things that Strings did. The way every office he had ever had seemed to be located somewhere in the bayou by the time he walked inside it had been one of her favorite tricks. Kallie herself wasn’t very good with the occult stuff, though that might have been because she had only ever done anything at Strings’ prompting, and those attempts had all… half-worked. So a lack of trying, maybe? Or maybe it was the fact that Kallie’s chaos was too tightly contained, too packed away in its box for her to freely access it. At least, that had been their joking theory for a while, but she wasn’t sure how much Strings was joking and how much he meant.

She focused in again on Cait and replied with a simple,[font color=purple] “Did you ask him on a good day? That might have been the problem. You really have to catch him when he’s off balance. Good luck with that, though.”[/font color]

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[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"][font color="33ccff"]"Oh, I didn't ask him. No. No way. I am not crazy. Weird, yes. Crazy, no. I was an innocent bystander. Gail asked him. She's crazy."[/font] Emphatically and especially. Cait respected Strings way too much for that sort of impertinent question. Or maybe it was less about the respect and more about... well, Cait didn't know. Not being crazy. Maybe it was just that. But, like, yikes.

Funny, but also yikes.

Cait sighed, tangentially, releasing the last little bit of the exhalation with an [font color="33ccff"]"Ugh."[/font] She sat back in her chair, or leaned back, or slouched back - something in the boneless sort of manner that only worked under thirty unless you wanted to regret it. [font color="33ccff"]"I've been thinking I should have Pepper talk to her about, y'know, Pepper's little friend on the inside."[/font] Dr. Reed knew about that, Cait was pretty sure - she'd been on the paperwork Pepper had plopped out at that meeting, anyway. If anyone knew a whole lot about sharing their soul space with a weird entity thing, it was definitely Gail. On the other hand, though...

Cait sighed again, this time just for dramatic effect. [font color="33ccff"]"But Pepper's so nice."[/font]
 
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Pepper’s little friend on the inside. Kallie had no idea what that meant, but she didn’t let her face show it. She knew about Gail Weber, of course. She’d have to be stupid to not know about her. Their team was one of those things about L-9 you just sort of picked up. They were pretty well known for being crazy, even by L-9’s standards. Pepper and Gail in the same room was… certainly a thing that could happen, though Kallie wasn’t sure how well it’d go.

But the comment about Pepper’s friend caught her attention. So Kallie decided to bluff. It had worked on crazier than Cait before, though it had never worked on Strings. Hopefully, Cait hadn’t fully picked up the “I see right through Kallie Reed” perk just yet.[font color=purple] “I know you know about that whole situation, but I need to know exactly how much you know before I start talking about it. Security reasons and all of that.”[/font color]

Kallie’s face betrayed nothing, as it remained in a neutral sort of look, her eyes partially closed and her mouth a straight line. She had her hands clasped under the desk, and the only sign she was nervous was a slight tremor in her left hand. If something was going on with Pepper, then Kallie would find out. That was just how she was. Even though Pepper was now 25, Kallie couldn’t help the desire to protect and help her adopted daughter.

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Was this the response Dr. Reed had expected? Possibly not. Was it the one she had wanted? Probably not. It was, however, the one she'd gotten.

Cait worked with Strings. Cait worked with Gail. When someone started spouting the sort of sentence that told you absolutely nothing and was meant to sound like it meant a whole lot more than it did, it meant bad things. Sometimes it meant lawyer things. Sometimes it meant those fae [expletive]s things. Sometimes it meant both of those things and sometimes it meant other things, but the things were never good things. It was the sort of phrase that meant you should sit up and pay attention, but you should only do one of those things actually and the sitting up was more of a metaphysical thing, because you never wanted to let them know how deep you thought you were in it.

So, how was Cait going to handle this? What would Strings do? Strings would... probably see if he could needle her back into a crisis and then ask questions; not particularly helpful for Pepper if that was the goal. What would Gail do? Gail would draw up a contract that meant that the first one to reveal something the other didn't know got yeeted into a psionic maelstrom for a week and then play silly buggers. Also, probably not particularly helpful. Funny, though. But Cait didn't have that much of a flair for contracts, which left other questions like: What would Joshua do? Probably offer to dissect Pepper to see what really was on the inside, which was also not really all that helpful, even if he would put her back together afterwards. What would Nic do? Nic was an idiot, forget Nic. And Brian would probably say something about security and protocol.

Blech. Cait hated protocol. L-14 was the worst.

[font color="33ccff"]"I'm sure if you called Isaac down here he could certify my credentials, yeah?"[/font] Sure, Cody could too, but if Cait was really trying to help Pepper out, then that meant helping her boyfriend not have to touch this one with a thirty-foot tentacle. [font color="33ccff"]"I dunno. What part did you want to talk about?"[/font]
 
[div style="background-color:purple;border-top:purple 4px outset;border-left:purple 4px inset;border-right:purple 4px outset;border-bottom:purple 4px inset;"][div style="border-top:purple 4px inset;border-left:purple 4px outset;border-right:purple 4px inset;border-bottom:purple 4px outset;"][div style="background-color:white;color:black;padding:15px;font-family:courier new;"]
A sharp grin crossed Kallie’s face, and she very slowly pulled her hands up from under the table and folded them under her chin before looking straight into Cait’s eyes. There was a small fire behind them, one that was built on the kindling of fury and concern. Kallie had come to the unfortunate realization that not only had something happened with Pepper but she had been excluded from whatever it was. It was important enough that Cait felt it important enough to bring up Isaac as her defense.

[font color=purple] “I want to know what you know about the voice in my daughter’s head, Cait. Because that’s what I want to talk about now. I have some thoughts on it, but I don’t know how much you know.”[/font color]

Kallie wasn’t even trying now. Her voice was laced with thinly veiled concern and anger, a strange combination that let her voice rise in a shaky crescendo. She wasn’t exactly yelling, but she wasn’t being quiet anymore. Anyone passing by her open door would easily hear her now, whereas before she’d been speaking just softly enough that only Cait could hear her. The fierce look on her face, still adorned with that sharp grin, said she didn’t care who heard her.

A voice in Pepper’s head couldn’t mean anything good, and if Pepper hadn’t already told her about it, it was either above her paygrade or the girl had been instructed not to tell anyone. She had seen Pepper every day the last week since Cait had shown up– they lived together after all. They had spoken at work several times as well. So the only answer was one of the two she had already decided upon. And either way, Kallie was going to find out what they didn’t want her to know.

[/div][/div][/div]
 
[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"][font color="33ccff"]"Voice?"[/font]

Cait sat up. [font color="33ccff"]"If there's a voice, that's new. Or, new to me, anyway."[/font] At least, if it was a voice in Pepper's head. Cait had heard the voice outside Pepper's head, which had been delightfully weird, but Pepper hadn't said anything about voices in her head. It seemed like the sort of thing that would have come up. Pepper hadn't really wanted to talk about all of it at first, but once it had come up, she hadn't really been hiding anything either, since they'd been trying to piece everything together.

[font color="33ccff"]"How long has the voice been there?"[/font] Cait was genuinely worried about that. Voices were usually not a good sign, because they could mean there was some sort of attempt at convincing going on, or some sort of ascendancy. Really, with anything going on in the soulspace, new things were not usually good things. And Cait knew that Pepper didn't have a proper contract. It wasn't really her fault, she'd been a little kid - probably why the dead god had picked her, what kid knew how to write a binding legal contract?

Could she get out of it as not legally binding because she'd been a minor? Cait had no idea. Gail would have known, but she wasn't here. Strings would have... Strings would have...

[font color="33ccff"]"What did it say?"[/font]
 
[div style="background-color:purple;border-top:purple 4px outset;border-left:purple 4px inset;border-right:purple 4px outset;border-bottom:purple 4px inset;"][div style="border-top:purple 4px inset;border-left:purple 4px outset;border-right:purple 4px inset;border-bottom:purple 4px outset;"][div style="background-color:white;color:black;padding:15px;font-family:courier new;"]
Although it had been a slip of the tongue, it had worked in her favor. The thing inside Pepper wasn’t speaking to her. But she still had a little friend in her somewhere. That likely meant her head, unless it was some kind of parasite. She probably would have shown signs of a parasite, if that were the case. Kallie could only think of a few things that would hitch a ride in the head, and if Cait had been consulted about it, that narrowed the options down to about one. And that one made Kallie’s skin burst with goosebumps.

[font color=purple] “I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew it, knew I needed to verify how much you knew.”[/font color] Kallie shook her head, letting the grin fall away. She made an unpleasant face, one that was very close to the face she would have actually made had she actually fucked up.[font color=purple] “I can’t tell you anymore, Cait, not until I know how much you actually know. I’ve already said too much.”[/font color]

An Eldritch being. That was the most likely thing. If there was something in Pepper’s head and they were worried about it talking to her, it was likely something Eldritch, especially with Cait involved. She sighed like she was frustrated and ran a hand roughly through her already mused hair. She was frustrated, but not for the reason she was trying to convince Cait of. If she actually managed to deceive the girl into talking to her, she’d have to apologize afterwards.

Her frustration was directly due to the fact that she would have preferred for Pepper to break protocol and tell her anyway. It was a very unKallie thing to say, but she could care less. Pepper’s wellbeing became her number one priority that day in 2009 when she signed the documents and became Pepper’s mother. No amount of protocol would keep her from fulfilling that promise.

[/div][/div][/div]
 
[div style="border-top: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #000000 solid; border-right: 4px #000000 solid;"][div style="border-right: 4px #33ccff solid; border-left: 4px #33ccff solid; border-bottom: 4px #000000 solid; border-top: 4px #000000 solid;padding:8px; background-color:white;color:black;font-family:'courier new';"][font color="33ccff"]"Ughhhh."[/font] Cait had a dilemma.

The dilemma was that on one hand, she was genuinely worried about Pepper, especially if Pepper had voices in her head now, because that was never a good sign. On the other hand, though? On the other hand, Pepper was her friend. And that was one of those things that weighed a lot, in terms of the metaphysical scales.

Cait was quiet for a minute, frowning, then shook her head, apologetically. [font color="33ccff"]"I can't. I'm sorry. I just... like... I can't. Pepper's my friend. And I'm not, like, her researcher or anything, yeah?"[/font] This was true, because Cait was not a researcher. She was at least tangentially roped into Pepper's case as a liason, given the whole godbait situation, but also that was still hella classified. And also, Pepper was her friend. This wasn't an official conversation, and that meant Cait didn't have to do official things.

[font color="33ccff"]"Sorry, Dr. Reed. I know how you must feel, but it just... feels too much like talking about her behind her back. And I'm not gonna do that to a friend. I mean, you can totes call her down and we can, like, all talk about it if she wants to, but if I started talking about her every time someone was curious, I wouldn't be a very good friend."[/font] Maybe Cait wasn't anyway, but the friendship was new, and it still had a lot of potential. Cait didn't want to screw that up. Not over some silly little thing like voices in someone's head.
 
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