Who: Ezio Auditore and Kitty Pryde What: First appointment When: 10/2 Where: Ezio's office Rating/Warning: PG13 for Kitty's life. It needs its own warning. Status: Complete
Ezio had been very curious for this one for quite some time. The girl Kitty had seemed polite and kind, if ... rattled, might be the best word. He got the impression that all was not well with her in the least. He was awaiting her arrival at his office now, not entirely sure what to expect.
Kitty didn’t know how to approach things, though from the net it was obvious that Ezio was a dreamer. That was a bit of a relief - the things she’d say, both in and out of the dreams would be a little less crazy.
She knocked on the door, and then entered. She’d worn her hair down, combed back, and had on jeans and a comfy sweater.
She came in before he had a chance to go get her, and he rose, smiling as he saw her. She was pretty, but looked very small. He decided that he would try to be as charming and warm as possible - call it a hunch, but she might need it. “Signorina Pryde. Kitty, yes? Gattina in my language. I am Ezio Auditore.”
“A pleasure.” She held out her hand, smiling nervously and trying to not look or act crazy. No phasing, no boasting, no...well being herself, really.
It didn’t take an idiot to see she was very nervous. “Am I so frightening in appearance?” Ezio teased gently. “You look as though a ghost will jump out at you, signorina. I promise you, I am not here to judge, only to listen.” As any good psychologist ought to do.
“Oh, you’re easy on the eyes,” she said, her expression relaxing. “And that’s good, because the last time I tried this with someone I freaked her out.”
“Ma davvero? This is so?” Interesting. Ezio raised an eyebrow. “That is not a very good doctor, in truth; even if your tales frighten us, we are taught not to react in a personal manner.” Either her previous therapist had been very bad, or her story was harrowing indeed.
"Oh, I think her freak out was justified," Kitty said, rubbing the back of her neck and taking a seat. She looked rather sheepish. "Between the dreams and the messed up crap in my waking life, I probably got a little too...informative."
“I fail to see how it could be too much, but I shall not press. You should start at the beginning, I think.” Ezio sat back, crossing a leg.
"Uhm." Kitty pulled her legs up into a crosslegged position, and wondering where to start. "There are a lot of beginnings. Do I start with meeting Xi'an, with Logan? Do I start with the dreams, Xavier, and all the trauma of living under a roof with a figurative target on it?"
Ezio raised an eyebrow. “Tell me the three things which are bothering you most right now, out of all of them.” Some people tended to benefit from breaking down what seemed like an insurmountable wall of problems.
"Not easy either. But I'll try. I think the biggest thing right now is Xi'an...and all that fall out." She played with something in her pocket. "I met her early last year. I was instantly attracted to her, which was generally confusing as fuck at the time for me."
“Ah. You were unaware of your interest in ladies at the time?” That was difficult to begin with, plus whatever had happened to her since.
“Yes and no. I hit on my roommate when I was drunk once. But it was one of those things that was a little bit on the...buried side.” She chuckled lightly. “But I fell for her, I fell hard. She has these twin siblings. They were just ten at the time. It was like I was given this...ready made family.” Her voice started to waver part-way through that.
Oh, dear. “So all at once, you went from having no family, to having family, to what I assume is ... no longer being in that state.” She spoke mostly in the past tense. “How much time was this within? Rapid changes will confuse and upset even the strongest will.”
"It's complicated. But we got married in February." She waved a hand, trying to find the words. "There was a lot of things that happened between then and February. I helped a ship full of women being smuggled out of the country, fought some bad guys, gained super powers, dealt with trauma from dreams and things of that nature." Oh god this all sounded crazy. She flailed her hands.
"Okay setting that crazy aside, the wedding was beautiful. We had a late flight after..." She swallowed, closing her eyes. "Did you hear about that Japan Air flight that blew up? I was... I was the only survivor."
“Aspetta, aspetta, wait.” Ezio held up a hand. “Signorina Kitty. What appears to be happening right now is that you cannot get a handle on anything. Things feel enormous and terrifying, I would guess. When things feel enormous, they cannot be reckoned with.” He looked over at her. “One can reckon with a thread. One cannot reckon with an enormous tangle. Perhaps we can work to identify the big problems. Macro level issues. For example, if it were me, I would say ... father issues and borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder.” Hopefully airing his own issues would help her feel less frightened. “Would yours be, perhaps, sexual preference questions, loss and the dreams?”
“Last year, I’d agree on the former,” Kitty replied. “But I’m pretty settled into understanding where on the scale I am, and that the scale can be a little fluid at times. I like girls, I like boys, and I’d probably love someone in between or neither too, if it happened that way.” What he said made a lot of sense. There was too big a tangle to unravel with just any one thread.
“Anger issues. Definite anger issues but those stem from the dreams and the loss. Dream me is a very bitter woman, a lot of the time. She lost out on a huge chunk of her childhood. And then there are other dream-mes.” She squinted at the thought, and changed the subject. “I keep trying to move on, from Xi’an. Maybe it’s too fast. I don’t know, but I have a hard time with the thought of being alone.”
Other dream-Kittys? Ezio blinked at that, but figured it was best to focus on one dream world at a time. “It seems to me - though please do correct me if I am wrong - that the biggest problem is your emotions surrounding your wife’s passing. You appear to be stuck in the second stage.” Denial, for this woman, would have been brief. They needed to get her to bargaining, or even to depression. It was all important, even if it would be difficult.
"Anger? I'm always angry." She pounded her fist on the armrest of the chair. She could get where he was going with this. "And I always go back to angry. I went right through bargaining and depression and then back to angry. I can't punch a bomb, I had no power over any of that!"
Ezio didn’t react to her emotion; this was always to be a safe place to let it all out. “I understand,” he said, “but that isn’t the question I had intended to ask.” He smiled at her. “You are angry, obviously. You have a right to be. But the question we must find the answer to is not ‘are you angry’, but ‘who or what are you angry with’?” Breaking things down was always the answer, always - once problems were dissected into their tiniest parts, they could be pieced back together correctly.
“There are many people you could be angry with.” He looked over at her. “Yourself. Your Xi’an. The person who laid this bomb - which, incidentally, is a terrible tragedy that no one should ever have to go through.” His tone had softened - could it be that very few people had ever simply told her this? - but he pressed on. “The other people on board. For all we know right now, your anger could be placed upon the head of the ticket agent who booked you on this flight you mentioned.”
Kitty smiled a little softly, and a little bitterly. "I almost had her. All I need to to would be to have grabbed her arm, and she would have been safe. If I hadn't gone to pee... I could have saved someone..anyone. A kid. But it was all so fast. My instincts kicked in. I went right through the plane."
She stuck her hand through the desk between them. "I floated down like a feather. I’m not angry at them. I’m angry at myself."
Ezio blinked. “What do you mean, please, that you went ‘right through’ the plane?”
"And this is where I lost Jean. I can alter the polarity of my molecules to pass through other objects, or even float." Kitty sank through the chair, then rose up behind Ezio and floated over his head, before landing daintily in the seat in front of him.
Hearing about and experiencing his own dreams had gone a long way toward his tolerance for crazy. Ezio was shocked, even slightly afraid, but it was no longer out of the realm of possibility. He stared at her for a moment before laughing. “Dio mio! Signorina, what you have there is what we call un arma a doppio taglio - in English, I think it is a ‘dual edged sword’.” What a fabulous, wonderful gift - and what a burden.
"I can dance on air," she said, her voice breaking. But she'd give that up, if she could. She'd begged and pleaded to be able to do that, but obviously, it hadn't worked.
His heart broke for her. “Piccola Gattina.” Ezio said gently, looking right at her. “Despite your awesome power, there are greater, crueler forces. Whether or not you had this ability, the world had seen fit to take your Xi’an at that moment. It had nothing to do with you.” He touched her hand, just resting his on top of it. “And I cannot imagine that she would want you to suffer so much.”
“I couldn’t even make those bastards pay. And believe me, I tried. I’m a fighter. A warrior. In my dreams I’m an honest to god ninja, trained by some of the best fighters you’ve ever seen.” She threw up her hands. “I tried not to.. suffer. You know? But fucked all that up too. Her name was Alicia, and I thought it was just...lose myself in a pair of awesome tits but I apparently can’t do that without feels.”
“You have never been powerless before, have you? Or at least, it is a very foreign idea.” Ezio shook his head. “Sometimes, as much as we hate it, there is nothing we can do.”
She looked up at him again, and smiled tightly. “Not in a long time, really. It sucks to have power and then have it be completely useless when you need it most. And then...well there’s a lot you can do to a person with a power like this, and I fantasized a lot, which probably wasn’t healthy. I haven’t done a lot of unhealthy things…”
“It is horrible.” Ezio nodded hard. “To feel powerless, I mean. And it takes a very mature person to accept the fact of powerlessness.” And he didn’t quite think this girl was mature enough yet. It wasn’t any kind of insult to her - the simple fact was that she looked very, very young. “Tell me, Signorina Kitty. In general terms. You talk about hurting people with your power. Have you done this? Or only fantasized? I cannot tell police,” he added, lest she worry. “I can only tell police if you inform me of a crime you intend to commit in the future, or harm yourself.”
"There are bad people out there," Kitty said, picking at the nail on her thumb. "Terrorists, killers, rapists, muggers. I have the power, the training, and enough of a moral compass to only hurt them a little bit. Kinda like the Batman only with a less crazy suit."
Her lips turned up into a smirk. "There are also those underground fight club like places. They're fun on occasion. But the only times I've ever used my powers to intentionally hurt a human being were in self defense or defense of another."
Mostly the truth. There was that one guy's rib but she hadn't been able to do any more than that.
“The reason that I ask,” Ezio said, doing his best to sound non-committal, “is because someone who feels powerless in a given situation often seeks to exert power over others, in other situations. Getting into fights is common. If a person is prone to substance abuse or sex addiction, that may also become worse. Their lives often become about control.”
"Sex addiction?" Kitty darted her eyes. "I'm into that. Getting tied up and ... stuff." She picked at her nail again. "But I don't want to...control people. And the kids...well they kept me from going too far down the path of Jack Daniels."
She couldn't deny that he was right though. She wanted to feel control over her life.
Ezio had to laugh. “Addiction does not mean ‘kink’, it means frequency, bella ragazza. And I do not think you want to control people necessarily. Just ... something. Because it all feels as though you are merely a passenger.” In truth, he worried about any children of hers right now. She didn’t seem stable enough to look after children, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud; at least not yet.
"Oh. So you're saying you think I'm a horndog, right?" She wasn't denying it. She had a huge libido, just ask Rikku, but that had always been the case.
"I've always been a passenger, I guess. In the dreams, I join this school...and it's one adventure or danger after another."
Ezio laughed. “I think your sex life is your business, unless it is endangering you or your loved ones. But your life should be yours to drive, so to speak. We must find a way to get you into the driver’s seat. But to do that, you may have to confront some truths that you wish to remain hidden.”
“Like what?” She wasn’t sure where he was going with this, and she couldn’t think of very many things she wasn’t willing to blurt out about. She always feared she would be alone, but that was pretty obvious.
“Like the fact that you do not appear to be comfortable with who you are,” Ezio said, watching her reaction. “In the sense that every time you speak about yourself, you speak about yourself in relation to someone else. You and Xi’an. You and this Alicia. You and your children. You must find yourself, without anyone there to lean on. You must realize that you will sometimes be powerless, despite your gifts, and that is an extremely human characteristic. In short, piccola gattina, you must learn that you are still human.”
She blinked at him, sitting up straighter. Her and Xi’an, her and Rachel, her and Alicia, her and Piotr, her and Wisdom, Illyana, her and Excalibur, the X-men, Logan….Hell, one of the few times she’d been on her own, Lockheed had been there.
“How do I do that without pushing everyone away?”
“I think there is a medium. A middle way.” Ezio saw the change in her posture. “Can you tell me something? When was the last time you can recall in which you cared for yourself? Took the mental health day, or did something hedonistic for the sole reason that it would please you, with no one else’s input?”
She thought about it, which wasn’t the best sign. “It’s been awhile since I indulged in any of my hobbies. Usually I’m doing things I already enjoy as a favor or because it’s with someone else. Like computer stuff, or building things.”
“It may sound facile, but I would suggest that you take time for yourself every day.” Ezio nodded. “I am serious - the more time you spend with yourself, the more you will see that you are a whole person, because you have no choice but to be. It does not mean you will never want the company or help of others, but you seem to need it. Part of the reason I believe you are so angry at yourself is because you feel less than whole without Xi’an.”
“You know, you’re the first person who’s ever given me advice that was...that is kind of useful,” she said. She wondered what he’d say about embracing one’s dream self. “There are only a few people in this world or the other that ever made me feel that whole…”
“I am?” Ezio was curious. “Interesting. You must be very good at hiding your feelings when you choose.” He smiled a little. “I think that everyone has the right to feel like a whole person. You should enjoy your own company sometimes, instead of fearing it.”
“The best advice I got was to just grieve at my own pace, and not… let anyone else tell me how fast or slow to do it. But usually everyone is telling me to cut out the pieces of myself from the dreams.” She shook her head. “As if they’re that easily separated. I knew XI’an in the dreams too. We never hooked up because I was too afraid, so it was like...this second chance…”
“I am very new to the dreams,” Ezio replied. “But my own dreams, for example, take place in the Renaissance. My dream self is young, cocky, arrogant and absolutely blindsided when my family were taken from their home and hanged to death in public.” His tone was quiet. “There are parts of me which are him, but I am not all him. I believe in free will.”
"And I believe that if you claim part of the dreams, you have to accept all of it, good and bad. You just have to realize that not everyone is going to be the same. If you ever meet someone from yours, anyway. I'm friends with someone I absolutely hated there."
“You have to accept it, but you do not have to be that person, is my point. Acceptance implies that you are willing to own up to what you were and what you did. It does not mean you must relive it.” Ezio shook his head. “Signorina Pryde, you seem to feel powerless at the wrong times. You could not save your Xi’an, but you can save yourself.”
“You’re good,” She quipped, folding her arms. “ Really good. You should do this for a living.”
“And sarcasm is a wonderful tool for when you do not want to hear what someone is trying to tell you.” Ezio’s tone was gentle, but firm.
“Who said I was being sarcastic?” She smiled at him. “But you’re right. I don’t want to hear it, but I need to. I can admit that.” And she was too stubborn to let him win.
“We do not even have to discuss that right now, if you do not wish it. But I do genuinely believe that you deserve to be kinder to yourself.” Ezio chuckled. “Some women love massage. Others love running marathons, while others love shopping or video games or whatever you wish to conjure up. But even if all you do for yourself to begin with is to buy your favorite lunch a few days a week, it is a start. You have treated yourself as second or even last for too long.” And as she valued herself more, she would likely start to need others less.
She pursed her lips, staring hard at him, like she was staring down a horde of ninjas. He’d gotten so into her head that she couldn’t deny that what he said was filled with a great deal of truth. “It’s a hard habit to break. I’ve always put others first…”
“Of course. It is a trait built in to us from a young age. And I would never tell you to lose that generous heart. But neither can you be so generous that you grow to think that is all there is to your identity.” Ezio smiled. “When one’s identity is so tied up in working to please others, we forget what pleases us.”
"I don't know where to start." She rubbed at her chin, shifting in her seat and pulling her legs up into it and hugging them. "Maybe reclaim myself from everyone..."
“It would be wrong to shut yourself off from everyone forever. But I do believe it necessary to set boundaries. Perhaps, as a suggestion, try setting aside time to just do nothing. Watch television, or take a nap, or a bath. Even just one half hour a day, where you do what you wish, and speak to no one. Even a small stretch of time where you are mistress of your own fate would be new to you.”
“What about… And this has been on my mind for awhile now. What if I need to reclaim my name. Everyone calls me Kitty, and...well it’s been that way as long as I can remember.” She rubbed her hand through her hair. “There was one person who called me Kate, and I always kinda liked it.”
"If you wish, I am happy to call you this. You should certainly have the authority over what people address you as." Ezio nodded. "I may still say things like bella ragazza at times as I am Italian, but I shall do my best."
“Oh, that kind of thing I don’t mind. I never minded Kitty either but..” She smiled. “It’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes.”
“This I understand. In truth, I must admit that piccola means ‘small.’ You arrived here looking very tiny. Your sweater is larger than it needs to be - I do not suggest wearing revealing, tight things, but that sweater appears at least one size too big.” Ezio hoped she understood what he was trying to say. “Just, what I suggest is to put yourself first. Allow yourself to be visible. Ecco - think of Kate. Put Kate first, even for a small period of time every day. Kitty may eventually follow.”
"It's a comfy sweater," She replied, tugging at the sleeves. She looked down at the fabric and sighed. Think of Kate. She could do that. “It’s gonna be hard to get people to call me that.”
“Start small. Get a sweater in that style, in one size smaller. Do not ask others to call you Kate, only refer to yourself as Kate to begin with.” Ezio smiled a bit more gently than he had before. “I know it is hard. But I promise you that as you take more power back for yourself, then you will get more closure upon your losses. You cannot succeed in strengthening yourself if you have no idea who that self is.”
“Thanks…” She was still reluctant about all of this, but for the first time in a long while she felt like she had some control over her own destiny.
“For what it is worth, I have faith in your abilities.” Ezio said. “And I hope that you will find faith in yourself.” He looked at the clock. “I fear we are at the end of our time. If you would like to come again, I would be delighted to have you, but if not, I also understand.”
“No. I want to come back,” Kate said, holding out her hand to him. “Because I really, really need this. I can’t keep ...doing the things I’ve been doing.”
“I personally agree with you.” Ezio took it, shaking it firmly. “But I cannot make anyone do anything. They have to be willing. You are within your rights to say, Ezio, you are wrong, go away.” He shrugged extravagantly. “Though I am glad you have not.”
“You’re right, so I’ll see you next week,” she said, waving at him, then turning to head out the door. She paused, then added. “You know, in the dreams I had a therapist, mostly she managed my anger issues, and the...well actually I’ll bring that up next week. Mostly I just wanted to hit her. I like you better.”