@pittmash asked: 🫂 for Kate
Maybe it is messed up that she likes that people assume she's here because she's Hawkeye. A roof top is where the sniper would be. This is the place they would expect to find a hawk. It raises no alarm bells…and she likes that.
The city is pretty from up here, at least Kate thinks so. She would rather be watching the city lights than dealing with the phone that won't stop chiming. Elbows on the railing, she leans against it as she watches the string of messages flick up on the screen.
[Eleanor: You couldn’t call? Couldn’t send a card? Nothing?]
[Eleanor: It's his birthday, and I know he acts like he is not a big deal but fuck you]
[Eleanor: You are actually the worst Katherine]
[Eleanor: You don’t care about this family]
She just wants some peace.
Some time where there are no demands on her, where people don’t want things, where they don’t ask for her to solve their problems or find things and people. A few moments where she doesn’t have to be anything for anyone. Kate thinks that is selfish in some ways, but she wants to be selfish for a moment, and while she would rather be on her own, Jack's silence is one of the few things she would tolerate right now.
Kate even tolerates the quiet side hug, then welcomes it as she leans into it. Swallows the lump in her throat and swipes the messages to the left, ridding her lock screen of them and then letting go of the phone, letting it dangle off the wrist strap.
As usual, it takes what feels like an eternity for her to say something. Words are picked carefully, her feelings picked out and then tempered, for she feels she must make them palatable for others. Like the edge must be sanded off and the feelings dampened so they do no unintended damage.
“You know what it is like, to wake up one day and realise this isn’t how a family is meant to be…” she wonders if he does. Most people don’t. It’s come to her attention that most people have quite average families, and then it occurred to her of course they do, that is why it's average. “Everyone thinks they know…everything about it.” Hell, her family had been on the cover of too many newspapers for people to think otherwise. “So when you leave and never come back, they ask what is wrong with you….rather than why you did it.”
