WHAT: Present Katou finds Future El, and there are EMOTIONS WHERE: The Outpost WHEN: March 28th, 2033 WARNINGS: Future Vallo Typical Talks, death and all that STATUS: Complete
Katou didn’t really get why he’d been picked for this mission. He wasn’t the type of person he’d pick on a world-saving time travel adventure, but if they said he was needed then he was happy enough to go along. He was good at fighting, at least, though there was the sinking feeling in his stomach that he was more likely to end the world than save it.
Whatever. Caleb and Essek were smarter than him, and he’d do what they said.
Arriving in the future had been chaotic though. It had been disorienting to land and immediately start fighting, but only a little bit. Katou was always ready for violence.
And here he was, in this Outhouse. Or Outpost. What-the-fuck-ever.
He smiled when he caught sight of El, a little bit of his anxiety and apprehension melting away when he saw her. She was different than when he’d seen her the day before, but he still recognized her immediately. Some memory from long ago was there, of sitting in a corn maze with her arm around him.
“Hey, Waffles,” he said, approaching her with an easy grin. Did he still call her Waffles in the future? Didn’t matter. “Can you believe they brought someone like me along on their little quantum space thing?”
The Outpost had become a flurry of activity. It was always crowded, yes – there was a level of chaos to it considering their circumstances, and she’d been out scouting when the chatter reached her ears. They’re back, and it actually worked.
She came to crowds and people speaking loudly, and she pushed through the throng with annoyance. Her brows pinched together, and El surveyed the group to see if she could catch a glimpse of her dad, or mom, and then –
Hey, Waffles.
Eleven spun around.
She looked – well, yes, she looked older. Her hair was grown out, a frizzy mess tied back into a ponytail. She wasn’t scrawny by any means, having worked for a physique that could handle herself out in the wild when it came to throwing punches, sprinting for an escape. There were a few scars on her, like someone had taken a knife across her cheek and another to her throat.
A wound meant to kill her, but they had failed.
And when her eyes landed on him, and she saw him, she couldn’t believe it.
She didn’t really believe it. She hadn’t seen the list. She didn’t want to see names she recognized and had this hope that she could see them again, and at the same time none of this seemed real.
That’s why she shoved him.
“Are you really you?!”
A flash of hurt crossed Katou’s face, but it was gone almost as soon as it appeared, replaced instead with a nonchalant, devil-may-care grin. “Christ, they told me I didn’t exist no more here, but I didn’t think that meant I didn’t exist.”
It was actually a little unsettling. He was fine about thinking that he died. He’d died before. He’d died a few times before. That was a kind of discomfort that he could ignore. He didn’t think he’d been sent to a future where he didn’t exist at all, but what if he had?
“It’s me, your old pal Yue. You don’t gotta get your panties all in a twist; I thought you’d be happy ta see me.”
Eleven was happy to see him. God, she was. But if this worked, and they were all here, then that meant that hope she was too afraid to rekindle was about to light back up. Hope had died with Mike. With Dustin. With Robin. With Cloud. It was taken when Eddie was turned into a thrall, when Steve disappeared. When Katou killed himself to save her. Except Katou was –
“You’re…” The huff she let out was her attempt to keep the threat of tears at a distance, and she reached for his face to pull at his skin and check his eyes and feel that he was real. “You’re real. You died. You died.”
The face pulling settled more into a face cradle, and she kept staring at him as if he was a ghost.
Katou snorted derisively. “Please. When’s that ever stopped me?” he asked, shooting her a toothy, shit-eating grin. Only for a moment, and then it softened into a more genuine smile. He looked at El with warmth. It was kinda weird to think of her being… well, and adult. He’d met her adult self when he’d been a kid, but those memories had been hazy in the way childhood memories often were.
He leaned his cheek into her hand, laid his right hand over her left. “But yeah, here I am, in the flesh. Stuck saving the world.”
Eleven made a weird sound. It was this strangled sob, struggling to break free from her throat.
Then, she hugged him. The embrace wasn’t gentle. It was bone-crushing and tight, as if she was afraid her friend would slip through her fingers again. This was Katou. It was really Katou, smug and tender all in one vegetable-body mess. For the first time in what felt like forever, hope warmed her chest.
“We keep losing people,” she gasped through these stupid tears. She always cried so easily, and she hated that despite everything, it hadn’t changed. “I lost you, and Robin, Dustin, and they killed Mike too, and Steve’s gone and Eddie’s–”
Alive, technically, but a puppet on a string. It made her think of that song he was always obsessed with.
There was a moment of breathless surprise when El hugged him – breathless, mostly, because she’d knocked the wind out of him – but after the initial surprise passed he wrapped his arms around her too. He hugged her tightly. Maybe not as tightly as she clung to him, but he thought she might need it. She’d given him enough needed hugs that he figured he could reciprocate this time.
He stroked her hair, and grit his teeth. “Well, I think Steve came along for the ride,” Katou said. “Maybe a few years younger than you remember, but you’ll get a chance to suffocate him, too, don’t worry.”
Steve was – here?
Eleven might have cried a little harder. It wasn’t some loud, wailing sort of noise. It was subdued, muffled into his shoulder, and the violence of it all was felt in the trembles of her body. She didn’t care who saw this. She didn’t care how pathetic she must look right now, holding her living best friend like this.
That hope was beginning to feel dangerous.
“We can’t tell him about Dustin,” she rasped out, eyes screwed shut. “Not how he – Dustin, he was eaten.”
That was terrible to remember and terrible to say, but if Katou needed an idea of how fucked everything was right now, there it is.
Katou looked around in embarrassment, half sure that everyone was going to be staring at them, except almost instantly he was aware that El wasn't the only one crying. One of them bookworm types was looking over the crowd with growing anxiety until, abruptly, his expression shuttered and he turned to leave the room, and Lan Xichen's fiance – husband, he assumed by now – was looking at him with an expression that was somehow more embarassing than El's weeping.
He hugged her tightly. Things has obviously been rough.
"Eaten?" he asked, confused. "Like, by a lion?"
“One of the Outlanders,” El blurted, her sentence interspersed with another sob before continuing. “Taken by Interitus, he became – a thrall, and turned into this monster, I can’t remember the name.”
She sniffed and pulled back, scrubbing a hand over her face to wipe away the tears. So much had happened, and her brain felt a little fogged by the fact that Katou was here. “Eddie is a thrall too, and sometimes we see him, and he and Steve were–”
God, she was all over the place. Her nose was red and her eyes were blotchy, and she was trying to wrap her mind around how any of this was supposed to work.
“And you – you’re gone, Katou.”
“Oh, shit, that sucks,” Katou said, grimacing. He was tempted to ask for more details, but didn’t. He didn’t know if El even knew more details, but he did know she probably didn’t want to talk about it. Either way, that seemed an especially gruesome way to die. He hoped Dustin had died before it started.
“And yeah, they told me I didn’t exist here, which is why I was able to come back,” Katou said. He didn’t really get all that. Who cared about time paradoxes when they were trying to change the future anyway? It wasn’t his job to understand this sort of thing though, so he wouldn’t waste too much thought about it.
“I hope my death was at least badass though. I’m gonna be pissed if I like, tripped or something and hit my head real hard.”
“You’re so stupid,” Eleven blurted with a choked laugh, the sniffling neverending at this point – and she was sure there was snot on her face, too. She lifted up her sweatshirt to wipe it clean. Not very hygienic but that was the state of the world, anyway. “I hated – I was there, and you –”
Killed yourself for me.
She didn’t know if she should tell him. Could she tell him?
Inhaling a deep, shaky breath, she willed herself to calm down. There was a hiccup or two, like she was fifteen again and mourning Max’s disappearance, but she couldn’t control those. “You’re going to help us fight,” she deduced, the gears of her brain trying to catch up on the situation. “Right?”
Katou’s grin faded a little. He’d seen his best friend die. He’d killed Kira once, the first time he’d been possessed, and that had been what had caused Setsuna to kill him. That hadn’t been Kira’s true death though – Kira had knitted himself back together and had come back to life like being sliced in half wasn’t anything worse than a paper cut. But he’d seen him die for real, too. Had seen him torn to shreds before his eyes, just before Hell had collapsed, and it wasn’t something Katou was ever likely to talk about.
So he wouldn’t press it with El. He laid a hand on top of her head and messed up her hair instead, not caring at all that El was definitely older than him now.
“Yeah, can’t imagine why else they’d have brought me here if it wasn’t to kick some ass. I doubt they’d add me to the diplomatic team, at least. Not unless they wanted to make diplomacy way more interesting.” He winked.
El smiled fondly at him. It was brief. Katou being here was a reason to smile, but everything was still in the air – uncertain. The hope in her chest was fragile. She was too scared to let herself believe in it after everything.
What if she lost him a second time? Sometimes it felt like it was only a matter of time before she lost all the ones she had left.
“I would like to hear you try to be diplomatic. But there is… nothing to talk through about what is going on. You being here, and everyone –” Eleven glanced around, drinking in more of what was happening around them. The people were rejoicing. There were tears. There was that damn hope. “Maybe something will change. We’re tired.”
“I’m always diplomatic. People just don’t appreciate it,” Katou snorted.
His gaze softened, affectionate and what someone who didn’t know Katou better might have called compassionate. “Well, we’re here now. You can rest for a bit.”
“I will rest when this fucker is dead,” El replied sharply. Then she’d feel like a rest was finally earned – but until then, they’d keep fighting, and hopefully this plan would help. “Sydney is going to be so happy to see you, come on.”
She took Katou by the hand - he had people to see! Hopper would even be happy to see him.