Who: Katou and Eleven What: Katou takes Eleven out for some fancy waffles as a 'congrats on not screaming at trees anymore' reward When: Sunday, December 5th Where: Nooks & Crannies Warnings: Some talk about violent deaths and not-great parental figures
Katou glared at the menu of Nooks and Crannies wondering what, exactly, he’d been thinking when he agreed to take the girl out for waffles if she showered and changed. Sure, he’d been trying to coax her back into humanity, but chances are she was going to have to do that sooner or later without his help.
And now he was stuck footing the bill for $14 waffles. Fuck his life.
This is what he got from hanging around Setsuna so much, he guessed. Before he’d died and gotten stuck with the bleeding hearted twerp, he probably wouldn’t have cared that much some kid being dumb and freezing to death in the woods when she could have had a nice apartment to herself.
But she was looking better. Less dirty and covered in blood - her own and animal blood, he’d guessed. Her clothes were clean and didn’t look any more out of place than his - he was wearing jeans and a plain white t-shirt, hair tied back, and had been wearing a warm leather jacket that was now draped over the back of his chair. Everyone else in the restaurant looked, to him, like they’d gone out of their way to get dressed up for breakfast which seemed like a waste of effort.
“You only get two waffles,” Katou grumbled. He didn’t know how much she could eat, but given her Network post she could probably inhale fifty of them, if given the choice.
This was an odd place.
Eleven had never really, um. Gotten out much, was the thing. Hopper gave her strict rules of where she could and couldn’t go - and being out and about in urban areas, sprawling with people was a Big Fat No and one of the rules he had bestowed upon her. It wasn’t as if she always listened, anyway. She had gotten out of Hawkins and tracked down her mother, plus Kali a whole state over. Then her venture out to the mall with Max, where she got to try on clothes at different stores and go to an actual ice cream shop.
But those rules weren’t necessary here since her safety wasn’t at risk, and she got to try things out like Korean BBQ (which you cook yourself???) and now, for once, she wasn’t eating waffles that were stored in a freezer. These were restaurant waffles. Fancy restaurant waffles.
It was overwhelming, and while her expression remained stoic and slightly intense (those eyes, dark and big) she was looking forward to it. The stares were easy to ignore. Even she was underdressed in what was a simple David Bowie shirt (she didn’t know who that was) and black pants. Enola’s clothes fit her well; no shopping necessary for her at the moment.
“I will eat how many waffles I eat,” she responded sternly, all while her eyes scanned the menu. “But I want… the ‘Oreo Freakin’ Party.’ It has cookies.”
“If you want more than two waffles, you can pay for them yourself,” Katou growled. “I ain’t made of money, you know.” He had enough money, and was happy enough to take contracts in the forest when he was short of funds, but it wasn’t like he was about to drop $100 on waffles for some weird kid that had introduced herself to him by tossing him across said forest.
He scowled deeper at her choice, because that was the waffle that he’d been eyeing up too. He had a weakness for chocolate, and while the Zennekin also had cookies, they weren’t chocolate cookies.
He debated for a moment to get something else, and then, with an annoyed exhale, realized that no, he wasn’t going to change his order just because this kid also wanted what was clearly the best waffle on the menu.
He closed his menu, leaned back in his chair, and lifted his hand with an “Oi.” He ignored the dark look the server shot him before they made their way over.
“Are you ready to order?” the server asked, any look of annoyance already wiped from their face.
“Yeah, we’re both gonna get the Oreo Freakin’ Party and I’m gonna get one of them double shot Cafe Mochas. What do you want to drink, Waffles?”
Oh. El could choose? Right, she could, they had asked her for a drink order at that other restaurant and she kind of fumbled for a second before she requested a standard coke but there were other options here. Did she even know what a double shot Cafe Mocha was? Absolutely not. Was she going to order the same one?
Yes.
“What he said,” she replied without a change of expression, handing over the menu. The server gave her an odd look and for a second she wondered if she accidentally ordered something alcoholic, except they didn’t say anything about it.
Then she looked at Katou with every bit of seriousness she could muster until she realized there was a glaring step they had missed in this entire process. El blinked, eyes widening. “What is your name again?”
Katou blinked, a little surprised. Names had never been something he’d put much stock into. Maybe it was because of how much he hated his own name, or maybe it was because keeping track of people’s names hadn’t been something he’d been especially good with he’d spent nearly all his days alive high, but he’d much rather just call someone what he wanted to call them. When he first met the kid, his memories had been leaking from his mind like sand through his fingers. He’d assumed he’d just forgotten her name.
Apparently, they hadn’t bothered with the introduction thing at all. Which made sense, really. You didn’t shout out your name when someone was punting you around the forest.
“You don’t remember my name?” Katou asked, aghast. “I’m buying you fancy-ass waffles, and you can’t even be bothered to remember my name? Wow.”
Just because he’d probably never told her his name didn’t mean that he couldn’t still give her a hard time about not knowing it.
El was, admittedly, a little embarrassed because - did she forget his name? Her brows furrowed, thinking. The first time they met was weird. Most of what she remembered was him making her mad and flinging him across the forest so she could scream at existence in peace but even during the times they sat and chatted, she was almost sure they never properly introduced themselves.
Her arms crossed over her chest, eyes tightening again with scrutiny as she leaned back into the booth. “What is my name, then?”
If he hadn't told her his name then she was sure she did tell him hers. And if she did and somehow missed it, he hadn’t referred to her by it recently so maybe it really was safe to assume that they somehow skipped the whole process of exchanging basic information and jumped straight to waffles.
Katou grinned. “Waffles,” he said, with all the confidence he’d have if he actually had the answer. “Or Girlie,” he added after a moment. “Either or, really.”
“It’s Eleven,” she deadpanned. His answer clarified the confusion, then. They hadn’t exchanged names. “Or - El, just call me El.” Mike had given her the nickname and it stuck well. It felt like it somehow drew the line between who she was now and the strange test subject she had been raised to be at Hawkins Laboratory. “You should tell me yours, otherwise I will just call you a mouth breather.
Or something more vulgar and colorful. What would the boys say? Something about - assholes. Dicks. Shit. Shitheads? El didn’t know why so much of it involved body parts and basic human function and she was too afraid to ask.
“What kinda name is Ele-” Katou started, and then stopped, because right. Government experimentation. “I think I’ll just stick with Waffles,” he said instead, waving a hand dismissively. “My name’s Katou.”
“I’ll call you Kat,” she decided, since he was gifting her with a nickname she didn’t care for (though she really did love waffles) and she ought to give him one too. “How… old are you?”
El squinted at him. He didn’t seem that much older than her - nor did he act like it, either. She was guessing around eighteen, if that? Point is, he was young. Too young to be dead, but she wasn’t a stranger to those around her age meeting that face either.
Katou frowned, debating whether or not to protest over Kat and then shrugged. "Call me what you like," he said. And as far as nicknames went, Kat wasn't bad.
He rubbed the side of his head at the question about his age though. "I guess I'm eighteen?" he answered, not sounding entirely certain. Mostly because he wasn't. "My birthday was a couple weeks ago here, and hey, it means I can buy booze without no hassle so I'll take it. But I wound up skipping some months when wound up here."
And there was the whole dead thing. Did corpses keep aging? Or was he just gonna be seventeen until this body finally gave out?
"What about you?" he asked, giving her a once over. He'd have said that she must've been the same age as Kurai, except for the fact that Kurai was an Evil and was probably older than dirt.
“Fourteen,” El replied, and then scrunched her nose because she caught herself second guessing. That was right, wasn’t it? No, yeah. Itt was. She had a new birth certificate drawn up with her actual birthday and it was sometime in June, 1971. Every other year or so a kind and rare laboratory worker would sneak her a cupcake on a day that was supposed to be her birthday, but - age and specific dates hadn’t really been discussed until her escape.
Their mochas were delivered - with whipped cream, she liked that a lot - and she poked it cautiously with a spoon since, for whatever reason, she didn’t expect the drink to be hot. “Why would anyone care if a dead boy drank alcohol though? The worst has already happened to you.”
“Fourteen, huh?” That was about the age Katou’d been when he’d left home. It seemed young to have as much power as she did, but when he thought about it, maybe not so much. Setsuna was only sixteen, and he was the freaking messiah.
He laughed at the question though. “Listen, if there’s one thing you gotta know, it’s that adults care about the stupidest things imaginable and their rules make absolutely zero sense half the time.” He took a spoon to stir the whipped cream into the mocha. “And there’s worse things than dying out there,” he added, watching as it melted. “It actually mighta been the best thing that could’ve happened.”
Everything important about Katou had been dead long before he’d been murdered. He hadn’t remembered what it meant to be alive until Setsuna had come waltzing into Hades and reminded him.
Oh, she was familiar with adults making rules that made little sense to her - and the whole speech of you’re too young to understand. It had all been sold around the topic of her safety and in regards to Hopper, she could believe that. Even if he went over the top with some things.
El really, really missed him. Richie and Max were nice but Hopper was… Hopper. He was the father she chose.
“How did you die?” she asked, rather bluntly without a tentative pause or shame. The mocha was lifted to her lips and instead of letting the whipped cream completely goop into it, she took a sip and let it coat her upper-lip like a white mustache. It was a good look on her. “Did it hurt?”
“The first time that stuck, you mean?” he asked. He imagined that she probably did. He wasn’t sure if the first time really counted, since he hadn’t remembered it until after he was already in the underworld, and he’d already been dead for the next two or three times. “Yeah, it hurt like a motherfucker.”
He lifted his shirt up without a second thought for anyone else in the restaurant. “The short version is that some kid opened me up with a sword from here,” he stuck his thumb at his right shoulder, and dragged it down his torso so that it nearly reached his left hip, an angry, red scar appearing where his thumb had been dragged, “to here. It probably didn’t actually take that long for me to die afterward I got gutted like a pig, maybe a minute or two, but it felt like an hour.”
He rubbed his hand over the scar like he was rubbing out a stain and it disappeared again. Once it was gone, he dropped his shirt.
Her eyes widened briefly at the sight of that scar, that story - it seemed intense, and she decided that whatever world Katou came from was very brutal. And unfair, but she guessed that was probably true for every world.
“That kid sounds like a dick,” El replied plainly, hands hugging the mug of mocha. Sorry you died sounded cheap so she didn’t voice that, and he did say the whole thing was maybe the best thing that could have happened to him. That was sad. She was also tempted to ask about his family but that seemed like a worse question than how did you die? From experience, the topic was always a mixed bag.
Instead, she went with this; “I hope you stay here for a long time then. I've heard some people do for years. Your home world sucks.”
This was her trying to be nice to him, you’re welcome.
“It was mostly my fault,” Katou admitted, frowning. “Setsuna’s alright. An obnoxious dumbass, but he means well. He saved me in the end. My soul, I mean.” It sounded corny as all hell and Katou fidgeted in his seat, hand rubbing the back of his neck. “The slightly longer version of the story was that I got possessed by this psychopath who goaded Set into killing me.”
He cleared his throat, and was more than grateful when their waffles were put in front of them. He hoped the golden waffles, covered with chocolate and cookies and everything else would distract her from any follow-up questions.
“But yeah, my home world fucking blows. Ain’t gonna miss it, that’s for sure. What about you? You still trying to get home?” He didn’t think she’d given up just because she’d found a warm place to sleep and a set of clean clothes.
The waffles did their trick. El’s attention was captured for a few solid seconds there, observing - because these waffles were a lot thicker than the eggos that came frozen in a box. Looked fluffier, too. Her first instinct was to use her hands to pick it up and eat it like she was chowing down on a burger but then she remembered table etiquette and that utensils existed.
A fork was picked up so she could start working on that mountain of whipped cream. “I’m not trying anymore,” she admitted solemnly, not pleased by that admission but she knew better now. She was stuck. There wasn’t any other way around it besides waiting it out. It was a bitter pill to swallow but - what could she do that she hadn’t already tried? “But everything that is happening there is… my fault. It’s hard not to think about.”
Even if she was assured that it wasn’t as if she was really gone. It didn’t change the fact that people were dying, and that their carnage was being made into a living super-weapon in order to kill her. Meanwhile she was here, and she was eating an overpriced waffle.
“We all make mistakes,” Katou said, shrugging and shoving the first bite of waffle in his mouth. It was… pretty freaking delicious, but he was trying to decide if it was ridiculously expensive delicious. He wasn’t about to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. Either her having some sort of heroic guilt complex, like Setsuna, or it actually being her fault, like Katou, seemed equally plausible and he wasn’t going to argue with her about something he knew nothing about
“There ain’t nothing you can do about it now either way, so not thinking about it’ll stop you from losing your damn mind. What is it you think you did, anyway? Cause if you didn’t end the world, then you’re probably okay.”
Eleven blinked from her waffle to look at Katou, then back to her waffle and then pushed the whipped cream back off her fork and just - prodded at her food with the prongs. “I accidentally opened a gate,” she started with a light shrug. “To another world, the Upside Down. Monsters came through and killed people. There was a bigger monster trying to get through, and I closed it before he could.”
That should have been the end of it but nothing ended simply. It was a lesson she was learning.
“But there was a piece of him that stayed, and he… controlled people. In the town. He - melted them together?” she winced. It wasn’t the most appetizing topic to talk about while eating. “He doesn’t want to leave our world. He wants to stay. So he made a monster out of people to kill me.”
Hence it being her fault. Those people that died - he did it for her. That’s what he told her through Billy, and she couldn’t shake off the guilt.
Katou frowned, and under the table, he gave her a quick, sharp kick in the shin. “Eat your damn waffles before they get cold. I ain’t wasting my money here,” he snapped at her. He waited until she started eating before he continued. “Anyway, sounds like a load of crap to me. Accidents happen, ain’t nothing you can do about that. And it sounds to me like you did an alright job of fixing it anyway. You closed the gate, and if some little piece of it got through,it ain’t like you dragged it through yourself. It’d’ve turned those people into ghoulies whether it was after you or not. It’s just going after you first because it knows you’ll kick its ass if it don’t.”
That kick was so startling she let out this high-pitched yelp, and looked at him for the audacity of kicking her but she also didn’t react negatively. Like, Katou remained seated in his seat since she had enough self-control not to telekinetically ‘yeet’ him across the restaurant.
Instead, she complied and took a bite of her waffle finally. Eleven was glaring at him for a few seconds but she was eating. His words also sunk in, kind of. “Yes - but he threatened my friends too,” she sighed. “It’s… hard from going to that to this. Even if I have been here for weeks now. I wish I could go back to see how it ends, and who… wins, I guess.”
Katou supposed that was one good part about dying. He didn’t know how things were going to end in his world either, had no way of finding out, but at least he knew that that wasn’t going to change even if he did go back. He was dead, and even if he wasn’t, he was on the wrong side of Heaven’s Gate. He’d been nothing but dead weight at the end anyway.
So he could wonder, but going back wasn’t an option, even if it was an option.
Katou shrugged. “Well, either you’re gonna win or you’re gonna die, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it either way,” Katou said, shrugging nonchalantly. He was trying to be comforting, at least. “But you seem like the typea person where if someone starts fucking with your friends, you fuck ‘em up even harder.” He shoved a mouthful of chocolatey waffle in his mouth. “So I like your odds.”
You’re gonna win or you’re gonna die. Well. That was rude. But also - he was very right, and she kind of hated it.
El sucked in a breath. “I’m trying not to worry,” she then said, breathing the words out in one swoop of a sigh, like she could exhale those worries out into the air and be better for it. There were a lot of things to do that would keep her busy here. Richie talked about enrolling her into school (ew), and she had acquaintances in the forest that said she could help out with their livestock.
Then there was the city, bright and bustling and diverse in a way that almost didn’t seem real. “I have a lot to learn because, as my boyfriend put it, the people who raised me were a ‘bag of dicks,’' she even went on and even used air quotes for that, “so I can do that here. Not in hiding for once. And I have never been to a restaurant just for waffles and I like it a lot.”
She took another small bite (because he was paying for it and she’d never let it go to waste anyway), and then smirked at him. “Thank you.”
Katou’s eyes clouded a little at the mention of being raised by a bag of dicks, because boy, could he commiserate on that. Sometimes he rolled his eyes at people who complained about their parents – Youji, for instance, had complained about his parents, and as far as Katou could tell, their biggest crime was giving him everything he’d ever wanted – but he didn’t doubt that El’s boyfriend’s assessment was probably right. Her name was Eleven, for fuck’s sake.
His expression shifted into a blush when she thanked him though, and he shoved a too-large chunk of waffle in his mouth instead of responding right away.
“Whatever,” he said, once he’d swallowed enough of it that he could talk again. “Anyway, I can teach you a thing or two if you wanted. Take you out for some fun.” Not the kind of fun he’d been having at her age though. He felt a weirdly stupid urge to be absolutely positive that she didn’t get mixed up in that kind of fun at all. “What about those guys you’re living with now? They alright?”
“Oh - yeah!” El blinked owlishly, eyes brightening up at the mention about those guys. “I like them, they’re nice. Max uses magic and Richie has visions of the future. The castle is pretty.”
Previously the places she had considered home were a white room without any windows, Mike’s basement - then Hopper’s cabin which was small, and needed a lot of repairs but she was fond of it. It was cozy. Skyhold was completely different than any of that, and she liked to wander the halls out of awe.
It was very cool. “My room is really big - it used to be someone else’s before me. Her name was Enola and we had the same face.” Her shoulders shrugged. That was a thing sometimes, according to what she heard from others. Look-alikes. No wonder why Richie was eager to take her in. “I have clothes that actually fit. I can’t complain.”
Katou frowned. Setsuna and Rociel had had the same face, and Lucifer and Kira, and his stomach lurched at the thought. And, of course, there was Katou, who could have the same face as just about anyone. He pushed the thought down. He doubted that Enola had been some homicidal maniac who only wanted to see everyone else suffer. Hell, El was probably the evil twin in that particular duo, anyway. She was a big enough pain in the ass to count, at least. He felt his lip twitching at the thought, the wave of nausea subsiding.
“Well, if they end up being a bag of dicks too, you let me know. What’s it like living in a castle anyway? Lotsa ghosts?”
Eleven snorted out a laugh. “No ghosts,” she said. Well - not that she knew of. Ghosts weren’t anything she had encountered before but Vallo was bound to bring a whole slew of experiences, unwanted or not. “There is a lot of walking. Lots of weird rooms. You should come over and see sometime.”
Yes, she was inviting her friend over. Katou was weirdly one of her first ones here, even if she only found his name out literally today. “Max and Richie are funny - you would like them.”
“We’ll see,” Katou said, not sounding entirely convinced. Katou didn’t especially like or trust adults, certainly not human ones. The ones he’d met that he actually liked were Uriel - an angel - and Hades and Persephone - whatever the hell they were. Not human, at least. There were ones he met that maybe weren’t so bad, like Alex, but he wasn’t about to get chummy with them any time soon.
“But yeah, I’ll come check out your castle sometime. I ain’t never actually seen an honest-to-goodness castle, so it’d be worth it even if it does mean I’d have to spend some time with you.”
“You like spending time with me,” she shot back and rolled her eyes. Katou had often found her throughout the forest when she was being stubborn about being here - and the whole waffle excursion was his idea. Deep down he seemed lonely, and maybe a little lost.
Another chunk of waffle was speared with her fork and this one was a hearty bite, too. It meant her appetite for it was back in full-force and not lulled by the anxiety of what she felt like she left behind at home. “I sometimes help the farmers with pests and they pay me,” Eleven added. “Next time I will pay. Okay?”
Katou snorted dismissively, though he didn’t actually outright deny that he liked spending time with her. She was annoying and kind of bratty, but she was alright, and he felt kind of protective over her even if she could toss him to the other side of the island like a ragdoll.
“If you think I’m gonna try to say ‘no’ to you buying next time, you got another thing coming,” Katou said, grinning at her. “I’ll be holding you to that.”