Agent Washington (completelysane) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2018-08-21 19:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | agent washington, yue katou |
Who: Wash and Katou
What: Conversation and advice
When: Earlier this month
Where: Local pizza place
Rating/Warnings Lowish - some language
Status: Complete!
Katou wasn’t really sure what was wrong with Wash, but it had been pretty obvious, even before he admitted it, that something was eating him. Katou didn’t really know if he could help - he wasn’t exactly known for being a sympathetic ear - but Wash was one of Katou’s oldest friends, at least amongst those who hadn’t up and left the county, and he was getting a free pizza out of it, so he figured the least he could do was to spend some time with him.
He’d been in the area anyway, so he wasn’t too surprised when he showed up first. He’d barely sat down at the booth when he saw Wash walked in, and he waved him over.
Wash had a lot on his mind. To be fair, Wash usually had a lot on his mind. Lately, however, (apart from his Dreams, which had started up again) he’d been focused a lot on the news Carolina had given him. Her father -- theirfather -- was going to be in town for a conference or convention (or something) in the next several weeks and she was pushing for them to meet. It hadn’t been the first time Carolina had made the suggestion, but she seemed more instant about it this time.
Wash wasn’t sure if that was a good idea for a couple of reasons and the more he thought about it, the worse the idea became. He wasn’t sure how to tell Carolina, though. Dr. Church had already told her in no uncertain terms that he expected to see her. And Wash wasn’t sure if he should say anything to York. He trusted York would give him an honest opinion, but he didn’t want to run the risk of anything he said getting back to Carolina and making an awkward situation worse.
The closer the dates came in which Dr. Church would be in town, the more Wash obsessed over what he to do. It made him anxious and finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. He was very grateful Katou agreed to meet him for pizza, because Wash really needed to get out of the house and considering his track record when it came to things that bothered him, he didn’t trust that he’d make the best decisions.
“Hey, Kat,” he said as he slid into the booth across from Katou. “Thanks for meeting me.”
Katou raised an eyebrow. “‘Thanks for meeting me?’” he parroted back. “God, you’re making this sound like work. You don’t gotta be thanking me for showing up, you know. It’s what friends do. ‘Specially when there’s pizza involved.”
To be fair,for all Wash knew Katou could already had plans for the afternoon. But the younger man did have a point. “Yeah, I know,” he said a little sheepishly. “I just...well, you know…want to stay out of trouble. You coulda been busy tonight, so...thanks for agreeing to babysit me for a bit.” It wasn’t as though Wash knew a lot of other recovering addicts. Katou really was the only one who knew what it was like to struggle against temptation, especially when things seemed overwhelming. Plus, Katou wasn’t the type to sugar coat anything. Granted, neither was Carolina. However, Katou’s outlook on the world, life, and everything else was very different and Wash needed that difference of perspective.
Katou shrugged, scowling slightly. “Well, it ain’t like you wouldn’t do the same for me,” he grumbled grudgingly. “So what’s got under your skin, Hyde?”
Wash took a breath and ran a hand through his hair. He hesitated a moment, glancing at the menu in front of him and towards a nearby window. “Carolina’s father -- my father -- is going to be in town for a conference,” he said slowly. He’d known who his father was for over a year now and it still felt strange saying it, even thinking it. “He’s made it clear that he expects to see her at least once during his downtime. She thinks I should meet him too.”
Katou frowned. “You never met him before?” Katou asked, because it didn’t sound like it. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Wash talk about his dad, either. “You wanna?”
Wash shook his head. “I didn’t even know who he was until Carolina told me she was my sister,” he said. “My mother knew, but she never told me. And he apparently knew about me too, but…” Wash shrugged. “Other than my education, I wasn’t really on his radar. To be fair, he only seemed to care about Carolina’s grades too, and she lived with him.”
His hand had come to rest on the back of his neck. “I don’t know if I want to meet him,” he admitted. “I did once. A long time ago. But that was before...” Before he had learned that his mother had stolen literally thousands of dollars Dr. Church had sent for Wash’s education. Before the Dreams had taken Dr. Leonard Church and twisted his memories of his late wife until he had become ruthless and cruel. “...before I found out who he was and before the dreams came along and fucked some shit up. I’m not so sure he’d want to meet me either. From what I know of him -- what Carolina has told me -- “ which wasn’t a whole lot (not that Wash had ever pressed her for more) “ -- Dr. Church has some pretty high standards. I’m not sure I really measure up to any of them.”
Katou frowned, and took a sip through the straw of his pop, not bothering to lift the cup from the table. “He sounds like a dick,” Katou said after a moment. “I wouldn’t bother if I was you,” he said, leaning back into his seat. He gave a casual shrug of his shoulders. “You’ve done fine so far without him getting up in your business. Why ruin a good thing?”
Wash raised a brow at the young man across from him. “I wouldn’t exactly say that a recovering alcoholic is the definition of ‘doing fine’, Kat.” He shook his head. “Carolina wants me to meet him. She thinks it’s important and you know Carolina,” he chuckled softly, “she doesn’t usually take no for an answer.”
He fidgeted slightly with the straw to his water. “But, maybe you’re right. I mean, he knew about me this whole time and never bothered to even send a card. He never answered any of my grandmother’s letters to him.” His eyes narrowed. “Fuck, if he’d called maybe he would have figured out that my mother was robbing him blind.”
Katou shrugged. “Better than a drinking alcoholic,” he said. He snorted a little at his next comment though. “No, I sure as shit wouldn’t wanna stand up against Carolina,” he said. She was a scary woman sometimes. It was easier to just do what she said and not talk back.
Katou had two very good points. “You’re probably right,” Wash said. “My mother was in town last July and I thought things would be different. I thought – or hoped, at least – that she wanted to reconcile and make up for all the shit she put me through when I was a kid. But she didn’t. She just wanted to use me to fund her vacation. Which I did because I’m a fucking idiot. I don’t want to make that same mistake. And I don’t want Carolina to either. Though,” he smirked a little, “she’s smarter than me in that regard.”
“He probably deserved it,” he said after a moment, though he didn’t really know much about what Wash’s mom was like either, now that he thought about it. “You think he wants to meet you?”
“I don’t know,” Wash answered. He let go of his straw and it continued to swirl around in the glass another moment. “Carolina didn’t say that he wanted to. She didn’t say that he didn’t either. I don’t even know if he knows that she found me.” He paused a moment, his eyes narrowing. “No, he probably does. We were at his storage unit last year to grab some of Carolina’s stuff. He’s got the whole unit organized, complete with a manifest. I took a couple of boxes that had the letters my grandmother had written him and I signed the sheet. If he’s been back to the unit he would have seen my name.”
If he’d been back. There was no guarantee that he had been. From what Wash understood, Dr. Church didn’t visit his home town of Austin very much, and when he did he probably wasn’t going to want to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Not that anything in the storage unit could be classified as “nostalgia.”
Wash sighed and sat back. “I don’t know what he wants,” he said. “Carolina didn’t know she had a brother until he told her, but at the same time he hasn’t done anything to reach out to me. Not that I’ve made much of an effort, either. Even if he doesn’t turn out to be the same asshole from our dreams, I can’t promise that I won’t be one.”
Katou frowned to himself, elbow on the table and propping his head up with a hand. “I dunno, if it was me, I’d say fuck it and not bother with him. People are like their dreams more often than not, and it just sounds like a whole lot of headache for no reward.” He shrugged. “He’s barely in Carolina’s life, right? Doubt he’d finally decide to become fatherly just ‘cause he suddenly met the long lost son he always knew about.”
Katou had two very good points. “You’re probably right,” Wash said. “My mother was in town last July and I thought things would be different. I thought – or hoped, at least – that she wanted to reconcile and make up for all the shit she put me through when I was a kid. But she didn’t. She just wanted to use me to fund her vacation. Which I did because I’m a fucking idiot. I don’t want to make that same mistake. And I don’t want Carolina to either. Though,” he smirked a little, “she’s smarter than me in that regard.”
“Parents man, they’re the fucking worst,” Katou grumbled. He and his own mom had come about as close to reconciling as he thought they were going to. He made sure to spend time with her around the holidays, or when Sae would invite him over for a family dinner, and he didn’t talk to her much outside of that. She’d always cared for him, in her own, nervous, not-around-his-father way, he knew, just not enough to take him out of the house.
“Yeah, I don’t think you gotta worry too much about Carolina. I don’t think there’s no one on earth who could take advantage of her. At least, not without coming to seriously regret it.”
If the dreams were as true-to-life as some people thought, than there was one person who might have been able to take advantage of Carolina. Wash still believed that Carolina had more sense than he did, especially when it came to their respective parents. Still, she was the one who thought meeting would be beneficial. Not for Dr. Church so much as for Wash himself. Wash couldn’t deny that there had been a time in his life (a time not all that far back, either), in which he had wished that he knew who is father was and had longed for at least one parental figure who gave a damn about him. However, it had become painfully clear to him in the past year that was something he wasn’t ever going to get.
Wash sighed and rested his chin in his palm. With his other hand, he started fidgeting with his straw again. “I think you’re probably right,” he said. “He’s never shown any interest in being involved in my life -- much less Carolina’s -- and that probably won’t change if I show up to one lunch while he’s here. But…” he pinched the end of the straw between his fingers hard. “There are some things I’d like to say to him. I don’t know if I’d get another chance.”
Katou frowned, leaning back in his seat, chewing on the end of the straw that he had pulled from his drink. He wanted to tell Wash to just forget about it, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. When his father had been on his deathbed, Katou had vehemently refused to go, and instead got high. Aside from giving Sae a black eye on the night before her wedding, it was his greatest regret.
He realized that a big part of it was some naive desire for his father to acknowledge him as his son, despite the fact that they had no blood connection, and to tell Katou that he loved him, and he also realized that that was pretty unlikely to happen even on his deathbed, despite the fact that Sae said he’d been asking for Katou. But there was a lot that had gone unsaid that Katou wished he could have said. And there had always been the chance… It was something that nagged at Katou even now, these three years later.
“Maybe you should,” he muttered, barely audible, out of the side of his mouth.
Wash glanced up from the straw – which at this point he’d rendered nearly unusable with his fidgeting. He looked at Katou carefully as if trying to decide if he’d heard him correctly. A frown tugged slightly at the corners of his mouth. “Maybe I should,” he agreed.
“Just don’t get your hopes up or forget what a fucking creep he is,” Katou added as an afterthought. The last thing he wanted was Wash to get hurt, especially if it was because of Katou’s advice.
Wash had an idea of how he should handle this now. He knew Carolina wasn’t likely to let him weasel out of this meeting, but now at least he had an idea of what he wanted the meeting to be. “I won’t,” he promised. “I know this has probably dredge up some shit for you. Thanks for listening to me.”
Katou waved his hand dismissively. “Nah,” he said. “Don’t worry ‘bout it. I hope you give him a real piece of your mind.”
Wash smiled wanly. “Yeah,” he said. “I will.”