Old Friends|katherinekris
There were a handful of things that Dex hadn’t expected in her life. One might have been gaining the ability to light herself on fire, free of harm, at the age of 13. Another was probably getting a job as a mechanic so quickly out of vocational school, or even getting her GED without completing her Junior year, let alone Senior. Other than that, for the past three years, things had been running pretty smoothly, only with the occasional foray into vigilante justice. Occasional. She’d started developing a ‘spidy sense’ for danger, which drew her into different dark alleys on different nights, to mostly intimidate petty thieves into running, and then bolting herself.
So the night previous didn’t seem terribly out of the ordinary. A young woman was cornered, a large man had a knife, and Dex waltzed in, told him to back off. Of course, he didn’t because she was 5’5’’ built like a couple of sticks, and not a particularly imposing figure. So, she skipped any more formalities and skipped straight to setting her arms on fire up to about her elbows. That cleared things up. What was strange was the woman he was threatening- she was about her own age, and her features were familiar- terribly familiar, in a way that made her heart feel like something was breaking a little inside, but not really in a bad way. The way that stretching in the morning after a long run feels good- hurts, but good.
And of course, she ran. She had an apartment (dark, one room, basement apartment), with a bed (a mattress on the floor), and tomorrow, she had to go to work. She didn’t have time to meet old friends, and sure, maybe some part of her was scared of what that might mean for her.
Then came the really surprising part. Towards the end of the day, when she was gritty from work, black grease smudged on her arms, and a bit on her face that no one had told her about, she was getting coffee. The work coffee was for work, when she was tired and hated everything. Coffee shop coffee was for when she actually felt like loving herself a little. That was when she saw her again- four years had changed them both, sure, they didn’t really look like high schoolers anymore, did they? But it was still Katherine. She was gaping a little, though she didn’t mean to, trying to remember if she had her hood pulled up when she’d helped out the night before, she usually did, the shadows usually hid her face, but what if she was recognized? She hadn’t even taken into account the usual things that happened when you ran into a high school girlfriend. Conversations, and the like.