I'm not a hardship. I'm awesome.

It had been a very tense, hectic few hours in the Gregson household. There had been a few fights, though those had been had mostly away from Bod's immediate vicinity, even if sound carried well in this house.

First, there'd been a brief row between Tara and Max once she'd finally made it back. Thankfully, that hadn't lasted long, and then Tara had already been off to go get Kate.

Next, there'd been a slightly heated discussion between Max and Charmaine, who'd finally dragged herself out of bed and out into the house, though she wasn't helping much.

Then, once Marshall had gotten home, Courtney had turned up some time after, and they'd had... a discussion, outside. It was about as close to an argument Marshall tended to get, really.

And then finally, once they'd managed to break the vacuum cleaner and had had to call Max's friend Neil to bring his one over, Neil and Charmaine had ended having a major fight in the front yard.

So, it was no wonder that even though the house was starting to look like it could be lived in (the broken windows had been taped over with plastic, the garbage bags had been taken out, the yard had been mostly cleared) the people inside were extremely tense, right about now. It didn't help that Tara and Kate were still nowhere to be seen. It was less than an hour until the social worker was supposed to show up.

Max was vacuuming the floor, while Marshall and Bod had been tasked with putting the finishing touches to everything. Mostly, it meant making sure family pictures were upright and sofa cushions in order.

And Charmaine? She was in the kitchen, and she needed the wall socket for the appliances.

"Stop unplugging the vac!" Max yelled for what felt like the nth time.

( Click for endless drama. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, TBC in the comments! Part three of three. Again, preplayed with the amazing there_was_life, and taken and modified from United States of Tara S02E07 'Dept. of Fucked Up Family Services'.]

Last night, Kate had brought Bod to Kansas with her again. Considering the way things had gone the last time (both the last time he'd been here, and the last time she'd been here), it may have been considered a bold move, but Kate was convinced that if she came back this time alone, things would have been much worse.

And it wasn't like they'd be spending much time with her family, anyway. Kate was going to be leaving for her comic book store thing soon, and Bod was getting to do whatever the hell he wanted while that was going on.

There had been some mentions of a tornado watch, but those didn't bother Kate as she sat by the kitchen island, eating cereal, wearing a sheet over her princess costume. No point in dressing in regular clothes when she'd be leaving soon. And she and Bod were alone in the kitchen: Kate didn't even know where the rest of her family was, and she didn't particularly care. Although, she was pretty sure she'd seen her brother's faghag/girlfriend hanging around. Still. And that was weird.

But whatever. She adjusted her helmet and turned a little more towards Bod. "So, what do you think you're gonna do while I'm out earning money?"

( And so the very, very, very long day begins. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC-okay! Part one of two, preplayed with the fantabulous there_was_life, taken and modified from United States of Tara S02E06 'Torando!'. I love this episode.]

Yesterday? Had been a fucking catastrophe of epic proportions, and Kate really didn't want to even think about it, but of course thinking about it was unavoidable. Everything was completely fucked up, again.

And now there were ants in their fucking kitchen, again.

So, Kate wasn't exactly pleased when she was having to have breakfast with a deep-seated hatred of everything in her heart, and a flyswatter in her hand. Stupid ants. Stupid life.

Tara could've maybe picked a better time to walk into the kitchen.

( Hey Kate. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC-okay! Taken and tweaked from USoT S02E04 'You Becoming You'.

In other news, I'm taking off to go to Helsinki for the weekend to marathon Firefly. I'll probably ping in to the HMD horror thingie tomorrow, but other than that, have a great weekend and I'll see you Sunday evening!]

Kate thought there were better things to wake up to than Aunt Charmaine calling to squeal "I got engaged, Katie, I'm engaged!" and to ask whether she could have Kate's room because she had to move out of Nick's place to revirginize herself before the wedding. Which was months and months away.

Charmaine was not getting the room, but her delirious glee was something Kate could exploit since a whim had struck her. She'd kind of been thinking of an excuse to go to Kansas since yesterday, and it didn't take much more than saying that she would've loved to come celebrate if only flying wasn't so expensive. Charmaine immediately promised to pay for her flights. It would probably come out of Nick's money, anyway.

So, Kate packed some stuff, handwavily notified people she wasn't just disappearing (a note for Bobby and a voicemail for Bod), and left on an unplanned trip home.

And because the plane took her to Kansas City, it was only natural to take a little detour for work matters, right?

( Right. )

[ooc: NFI and NFB, OOC-okay. Taken and tweaked from USoT S02E02. Lynda! ♥]

Kate was nervous. And she thought she had every damn right to be. This was actually the first time ever she'd brought a boyfriend home to be introduced to her parents. (As always, Leto didn't count. They hadn't even kissed before he came home with her.) And that was just... Weird. It felt weird.

And anyway, in her mind, they were here more to get a break from Fandom. Not to make official introductions. But it was still a little terrifying, even if she wasn't really showing it.

They'd taken a bus from the airport and walked the rest of the way since it wasn't far from the bus stop, and Kate thought she could use the extra time to remind Bod of what he wasn't supposed to talk about. And to prepare herself for everything.

The first thing she noticed after they got to her house was that her dad's pick-up truck wasn't parked outside. Neither was The Green Hornet, her mom's car. But she was too nervous to think about what that might mean.

"So. That's my house," she said, nodding at the house and flashing a smile at Bod as she stopped to stand by the green mailbox, which had a few painted flowers on it and said 'The Gregsons' in Tara's handwriting. "Welcome to Oak Avenue."

[ooc: For that guy I modded a bit just now. NFB due to distance.]

"So, you think there's any point to this?"

Kate's question threw Marshall for a loop for a moment. She was sitting on her bed, while he sat on the floor, leaning his back against the bed; they'd just been going over the latest lamenesses of Butterworth Senior High when Kate had decided to change the subject.

"Huh?" he asked, intelligently, turning his head to look at her.

"The new meds?" Kate clarified, shifting. She ended up on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows, her cellphone in her hands. "Like, I thought we were over this already."

( Their parents had meant to tell them on Friday... )

[ooc: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay. God, my heart is breaking for not being able to join the weetiny fun.]

"...Maybe yeah, but I’m not sure yet. I don't know if they have stuff here that I wanna be here for, but I'll get back to you as soon as I know, okay? ...What? Um, no, we haven't talked about that, I don't think Christmas is a- ...Okay, maybe. We'll see. You wouldn't mind? ... Okay. I might ask him. ... Yeah. Tell Dad I said hi. Okay, love you too, bye."

And that was Kate's Thanksgiving phonecall to her Mom over and done with. Sure, Thanksgiving was actually on Thursday, but she'd tried calling then and that... hadn't worked out. After two unanswered calls to her mother's cellphone, she'd called her brother instead, and confirmed her suspicions: it had been Alice-time. It hadn’t been much better on Friday, either, but today things were back to as normal as the Gregsons could manage, and Kate actually really enjoyed talking to her mother on the phone. Despite all the crazy, she missed her family.

Still, what was Kate thankful for? Not being in Overland Park.

After the call she flopped down on her bed. This weekend wasn’t as busy as the two before it, and she was completely fine with that. If she was going to be involved in any kind of action today, that action was going to have to come find her first, because she was just going to lay here and be lazy.

[ooc: Open door, open post.]

Kate was just getting around to emailing photos of Fandom to her brother when her phone buzzed, signaling the arrival of a message.

haven’t seen you at school, where r u?

Kate blinked a few times after she read the message. Oh-kay. Not entirely unexpected, but still pretty surprising. She wasn’t going to reply to it, though. He didn’t deserve it. She couldn’t really bring herself to delete the message right away, but went back to picking sendable pictures on the computer.

About five minutes later the phone buzzed again.

i miss you katie-chan

...He was making it really hard not to reply. Kate sat on her bed, looking at her phone.


[Open door, open post!]

So, this was actually happening. Kate had brought Leto home with her.

Sure, her family could have picked them up at the airport, but Kate had insisted on a cab instead. It was kind of expensive, but at least it gave her some more time to prep Leto on What Not To Talk About. As if she hadn't kind of been lecturing him through the whole flight over.

The only downside to this arrangement was that thanks to some stuff that had come up during the cab ride, the cab driver now probably thought Kate and Leto were pretty nice and coherent for obvious drug users.

And now they were out of the cab and standing on the sidewalk in front of Kate's home. "So, this is my neighborhood," Kate told Leto, gesturing around at the identical houses and cute frontyards. "Pretty unspectacular."

( Leto Atreides from Arrakis meets the Gregsons from Kansas. )



( And then late Saturday morning... )

[OOC: NFI & NFB due to distance, OOC welcome. Preplayed with the wonderful future_sandworm and the equally wonderful thegregsons aka joan_notjane. Both bits posted now because of my (un)availability, about which there’ll be a separate post in just a moment.]

”I love you guys too. ...Okay, bye.”

Kate sighed as she ended the call. She had lied to her mom a lot more than she would have wanted to, even though she had tried to stay as vague as possible. Yes, she had been talking to people. Yes, everyone seemed friendly enough. Yes, the island was nice – or at least the little she had seen of it.

All of the above statements were, of course, true. The big lie had been this: ”Yes Mom, everything’s okay.” Because no, no it wasn’t. But it was easier to pretend that it was. Kate definitely didn’t want her mom stressing out over anything. Especially since everyone kept assuring her that despite its total weirdness, Fandom High was a good place to be, and she had decided not to talk to her family about any of the odd stuff, not at least while she was still coming to terms with it herself.

Kate shook her head in an effort to get the whole thing out of her head and started rummaging through her clothes. If she hadn’t been so damn tired on Saturday morning, she would not have unpacked all her stuff the day before the move to the cabins.


[For the roomie.]