Who: Kenzi & Katou What: Sharing 'What To Do After You Die' advice When: Recently! Where: A not particularly special watering hole Rating/Warnings: Mentions of death, language Status: Complete!
Living it up was the only remedy that worked when shaking off the shackles of death. Kenzi was still trying to make sense out of things - philosophically, mentally, emotionally, all that fun beeswax - but there was therapy in being social, drinking, having a good time and throwing herself back into the motions of life. Without death looming around the corner ready to pop up and go ‘SUUUUUUUPRISE.’
Katou’s return back to the states was worthy of celebration, too. The first pint was on her. It was a bar where the youth frequented; meaning your college crowd so the typical recreational bar shenanigans were strong at this watering hole. Beer pong, darts, pool. It was a Pokemon Gym too, but, y’know - details.
“So what’d you do in the land of tea and crumpets?” she asked, pouring them each a nice, frothy pint of beer. Okay, more like cider but it was alcoholic and delicious and that’s all that mattered. “Gimme all the deets. Did you see the Queen?”
“Oh, you know, ate a ton of tea and crumpets. I got a small shitty apartment that you could barely turn around in and drank a bunch of beer. Travelled around the island going to gigs, had a couple part-time jobs. That kinda thing.” It really had been good to get away from the OC for a while. He still had nightmares about his dreams, but at least he didn’t get repeats. “Got to hang around with my old pals Jack and Wendy which pretty cool. And yeah, me and old Queen Vicky definitely got to hang out. She don’t normally hang with peons like me, but when she saw how damn handsome I was she couldn’t help but take me in to introduce me to princesses and shit.”
Guh, so jelly. Kenzi had been over the pond once and that was to Killian’s homeland, to see here he and Liam grew up. If she had a left nut she’d be sacrificing it to the gods for a chance to travel the European continent in depth more - and she really did need to take a trip out of here after, y’know, dying and some shit. “Sounds amazeballs, my friend, but it was quiet without you. DId you come back because you just had to or because you wanted to?”
If she recalled correctly, Katou had been fucked by the dildo of death a couple times, wasn’t he? From their conversations she guessed his dreams were over, but still.
“Crazy as it sounds, because I wanted to. It’s not so easy to connect with people when they haven't experienced all this craziness.” And he hasn't wanted to manipulate all of Jack and Wendy’s time. They had their own lives and their own loves to occupy them. And, though Katou would rather rewrite his algebra final than admit it, he'd missed his friends back home. “Apparently I came too late though. I missed all the fun with the zombies and demons and eclipse and shit. Did you get to join in the fun?”
“Not really, which is a shame because I have a chainsaw to hack some of the undead folk,” she sighed. What a loss. But she went to collect the darts from the boat - green for her, red for him - and drew lines for the scoreboard. “I died. And then the guy I had asked to resurrect me had a battle of wills over a valkyrie for my soul so I spend my time thinking about what the shit to do for the rest of my life.”
Kenzi never had any plans, but now she was soul-seeking for some kind of direction to take things. A vacation somewhere would be nice. Maybe get credentials for school? Get her PI license, maybe get into cosmetology too.
And her own place. That was important. For the first time in awhile, she was craving her own space.
Katou frowned, and shot Kenzi a look that could almost be considered sympathetic. He’d been on the wrong side of death enough times that it could almost be considered comical, but he knew how much it could fuck a person up. “You too, huh?” he asked, taking up one of his darts and aiming for the dart board. He hit the board, but missed his target by about three inches. “Welcome to the club. In the dreams? Or here?” His next two shots were slightly better, with the third one actually hitting the fat that he’d been aiming for.
“Both,” was Kenzi’s nonchalant answer. Shrug. It could have been worse. It could have been a bloody mess, it could have hurt, it could have led her friends to find her in the realm of Valhalla, or it could have involved the Gate of Hel to open up here unleashing thousands of revenants (and her dying to close it). Dying in her sleep, but having a plan to get someone to bring her back, had been the best case scenario.
And best case scenarios didn’t happen here often.
She made a fact at the board and tallied his score before shoving him aside with her hips - move, biatch, it was her turn. “It wasn’t the worst. How many times has it happened to you again?”
Katou got out of her way and hopped up so he could sit his ass down on one of the nearby tables. He crossed his leg over his knee and then leaned back on the table, his arms holding up him. “Shit, that blows,” he said, frowning. He’d come close to dying a few times in real life, but he didn’t think it had ever happened. Then again, he was also a soul inserted inside a constructed doll that Uriel had made from a bunch of plant material or something. His body probably had to die at some point for that to happen. “Like, five times in the dreams. You almost get used to it after the first couplea times. You doing okay though? It kinda fucked me up the first time. Really made me think about what exactly I was doing with my life.”
Which wasn’t much, other than getting high and getting into fights.
Lucky her she was good at darts - and throwing knife, actually, which was a strange skill to have but she picked up a couple of good hacks while living on the streets. It was the second dart that nailed her a bull’s eye, boom. “I’m fine,” she said, convincingly. Kenzi wasn’t, but she had her own way of internalizing things. “But that’s the crossroads I’m at now. Figuring out what the hell to do with my life and all that shazz. I’ve never been one to slip into the mold of full-blown adulthood, but -”
Some things had to change. She went to the scoreboard to tally her points. “It made me realize I gotta figure out some stuff. Out with the old, in with the new. How’d that go for you?”
“Great,” Katou said truthfully. “It’s going to sound weird, but dying was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Before… well, it was like I was dead years before I actually died. A guy in my dreams used to tell me that if I kept living the way I was, my soul would rot. It was the same here, I guess. Running away from everything, never fighting for anything. It was like a slap in the face when I realized if I died, there wasn’t a single person who’d give a fuck. So now it’s like, ‘what can I do now that will make someone remember me when I do finally croak.’” He rubbed the side of his head. “I guess it’s probably not the same for you. But if you have any dreams you’ve been putting off, now’s probably the time to go after them.”
He hopped down from the perch on his table and gathered his darts, and scowled at Kenzi’s score. “You know, I almost feel like it ain’t fair playing against you. How’d you get so good at this anyway?” he asked, throwing his next set of darts. He did a little better than the last time, but there was still no bullseye for him. “I can throw a sword at a chick and hit her right between the breasts, but heaven forbid I can throw a couple of fucking darts straight.”
Kenzi always thought grown up careers and stuff like that was for the birds. There was a larger cash flow doing things unconventionally - and not so legally. But now she had a niece, and people holding her accountable for certain things and she didn’t want to be a total disappointment to them, either.
But damn, it was sad how coming back from death had to be the thing to give people epiphanies.
“I knew a dude back during my street days,” she answered his question with grin. “He taught me a lot of survival skills and some flashy ones - I think he was part of a circus at some point.” The variety of people you meet while you’re homeless was freakin’ astounding. Not everyone was a creepy drunk or a panhandler; they had lives, jobs, dreams before they ended up sleeping under a bridge. “And I’m gonna not wanna be around you and swords in the same room if we ever get the chance, but anyway, so after dying so much - how do you feel? Have you actually done all the things you’ve wanted to? You’re still pretty young.”
Katou frowned, thinking over Kenzi’s question. Honesty wasn’t his strong suit, though he’d been trying to aim for a little more honesty about his feelings among his friends. “I don’t think I ever had anything I wanted to do,” he said after a moment. “Growing up, the only thing I wanted was,” for his father to love and care for him, “to be a rock star I guess, but that’s never gonna happen. I’m really more of a go-with-the-flow, what’ll-happen’ll-happen kind of guy. So all I really want to right now is keep the people I care about safe, and try to cram as much living as I can into however long I’ve got left.” Not that he’d done a very good job at protecting the people he cared about. Kanan’s dreams had left him blind and Caleb’s past had left him in prison.
Kenzi had been the same. Or, well, her primary focus was to survive in her younger years - and everything that came after, she didn’t really care as long as she lived comfortably. Views changing was just a sign of growing up, she guessed. “I could totes see you as a rock star, though,” she grinned, pouring a cup of beer for her to drink from. “I guess it’s all swell as long as you fight for what makes you happy.”
That’s advice she’d given to Bo once upon a dream. She needed to abide by it too, otherwise she was a hypocrite. “There’s this, um -” How to word it. “Deed for a property in Spain that crossed over. Left to me in the will of my dead almost-fiance, and it’s legit. I think I might take a vacation across the pond for a while to figure things out.”
“Never stop fighting,” Katou agreed. That was something he’d learned from the dreams. Katou blinked in surprised, his eyes wide. So many of his friends left the OC that it was hard not to take it personally sometimes. She called it a vacation, but any normal person would see their chance and get the hell out of dodge for good. But it was her life, and if she wanted to go he wouldn’t stop her. It wasn’t like they were best buddies anyway. “You do you,” he said after mulling it over for a moment. “I mean, if it’s something you think you needta do, then you needta do it. Grab life’s balls every time they’re dangling in front of you, or whatever. Though, as someone who just came from across the pond, it ain’t no where near as interesting as this place.”
Kenzi thought it over after a couple sips of beer. “Oh, yeah, I know - I don’t think I could ever really leave this place completely,” she admitted. It was the truth. This was where she felt like she was home, where she found family and was reunited with her best friend of another life. It was a wondrous shithole of all things supernatural and Star Wars-y but midst it all, she still felt like she belonged - and wasn’t stressed about being a human.
“But I think I just need to breathe different air for a little while. Two weeks, a month tops. I can’t just leave the live I have here, and I don’t really want to. This place would be less fabulous without me for starters.” There was a hysterically dramatic flip of her hair over her shoulder, and legs that crossed as she motioned over to her knee-high leather kicks that also belonged dancing on a pole.
Katou grinned. “Well in that case, yeah. Go check out your dream villa,” or… whatever. He wished his dreams gave him things like villas in foreign countries instead of fake arms and apocalypse starting stones. “Fight some bulls and uh… eat tacos?” Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t think of anything Spanish people did except for fight bulls. “And then come back and I’ll let you know where we rated on the fabulous scale.”
Bull fights and tacos. Actually, Kenzi knew shit about Spain itself so she might need to wiki that shit before she went - and what about the language barrier? Her other linguistic fluency was Russian. “I’m going to need to prepare more for this trip than I thought,” she mumbled, scratching the tip of her nose. “Well, fine. I will send you like, a zillion selfies and maybe get you a souvenir depending what’s cool out there. I’m going to Instagram my entire experience through filters to make my life feel extra awesome.”
Awwwww yeah. She was going to put the ‘basic’ in ‘bitch.’
“While I’m gone, you could totes practice on your throwing skills because, um - hi, winning here.”
“So long as I don't get nothing with that creepy bunny filter. You know, the one where it makes your eyes all big and turns your nose into a triangle?” Was that Instagram? Or was it Snapchat? He’d just bought his first smartphone and still hadn’t managed to figure out the difference between all those picture apps.
“Yeah, yeah, shove it,” Katou grumbled. “I’d totally kick your ass if we was throwing katanas.” He could still make a comeback, but the gap between their scores was getting bigger and it was looking less likely. “When you get back from your little vacation I'll whoop your ass.”
“That’s Snapchat,” Kenzi laughed, because of course she knew that - most of her selfies with her niece involved some of those filters, ahem. But she offered her pinky, and wiggled it. “Pinky promise, though. I’ll come back and we’ll do this again, but try not to die for the millionth time when I’m gone, tootsie pop.”
Katou grinned. He hadn’t made a pinky promise since he was a kid, but he grapsed Kenzi’s with his own. “Stick a needle in my eye. You gotta promise not to die again before I can whoop your ass too though.”
“Rude,” Kenzi stuck her tongue out. “But deal.” Nope, no more dying on her part - and hopefully not on his, either.