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Entry tags:
Log: Kevin and Maya - Respect
Maya finds Kevin at the local Deli and decides to have a conversation. It goes about as well as can be expected for these two.
“I’ll have a club sandwich,” Maya said, smiling at the server who had asked for her order at the counter. She gave him an extra eye twinkle just in case he happened to be single. “And a coffee, please.”
She’d stopped at Sol’s for a quick sandwich before she had to go back to her next lecture. Something on the role of social services in society. It was basic beginning classes, nothing that was taxing or needed extra attention.
She spotted Kevin almost immediately when she turned to look for a seat.
He was sitting by the window, half of a sandwich on the plate in front of him, engrossed in the newspaper he was reading as he sipped from his coffee. If he had a lit cigarette, it would have been indistinguishable from photos from the deli in the 40s.
“You look like a photo for Chap magazine,” Maya noted as she wandered across the Deli and then nodded to the empty seat. “Mind a bit of company?”
"I have no idea what that is. But feel free to have a seat." He said, pausing to take a sip from his coffee cup.
“Darcy can buy you a subscription, it’s for guys that dress like you,” Maya noted and took the seat. She nodded at the paper he was reading. “Anything interesting or just the usual bad news and fear-mongering?”
He raised one eyebrow. "It's not the New York Post, kid. And the news is the news. Often twisted, compromised, and slanted, but it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines. Besides, this is a significantly more satisfying way to consume it than reading off my phone screen."
“Are we talking physical feel of the paper or the smell of the fresh ink?” Maya asked as she pulled her phone out and tapped out a text to Kyle about swing classes later in the week. “I’ve got friends who have similar feelings about books. Can’t really agree unless we’re talking middle of nowhere without a signal but you do you.”
"Habit. Every day since 1952... save for a near decade of underwater torture, I've read the paper. Actually, most days I read at least a half dozen papers, but walking around with more than a couple is inconvenient." He paused for a moment to take a bite from his sandwich. "I do miss being able to have a cigarette while doing it, but such is the way of progress."
“1952, how old were you then?” Maya asked, curious.
She placed her phone back in her pocket and kept an ear out for her name.
"18. My first year in the Agency." Kevin said, motioning over to the server, who had Maya's club in hand.
“They recruited that young? Eighteen doesn’t scream spy,” Maya noted, and accepted her sandwich with a smile but turned back to Kevin to finish her thought before taking a bite. “Why’d you join up? Must have been better things you could have been doing.”
"They actually recruited me at 17, but by the time I was demobbed from the Army and transferred over to Agency for training, I was 18. And I joined the CIA because it was a hell of a lot better money than the Army and they offered a career." Kevin said after he finished chewing and took a sip from his coffee. "I joined the Army at 16 to get away from my old man."
Maya was quiet as she took another bite of her sandwich and spent the time to actually chew it this time. It wasn’t a long pause, but enough to think.
“No Mom?”
"Died when I was a kid. Never recovered from having me which, of course, he blamed on me." Kevin said, turning a page. "So my childhood was all kinds of wonderful, as you can imagine."
“Your Dad’s an asshat,” Maya noted with the finality and confidence of youth. “So was the army the only way out or just the best fit?”
Forge has joined the army too, leaving the Rez to see the world. Maya had never really gotten the need, she liked being close to home. Not that she wasn’t very far away from the rez now. She supposed the mansion had become sort of home, certainly the people there.
"No, my uncle offered to put him up, apprentice at the auto shop he part-owned. But the uniform is a pretty strong lure when you're a teenager. After all, most of the guys in their 20s in my neighborhood were just back from serving during WW2." Kevin shook out the paper for a second. "Since I was underaged, I needed parental permission and sponsorship from either a state or federal elected figure. My old man was more than happy to sign that paper and his union got our Member of the House to do the same. Like the other underaged kids, after Basic, we were supposed to be assigned roles stateside, like drivers and operators and stuff, to free up an older guy for deployment. And once we hit 18, we could be deployed. In theory, at least."
“I don’t think I’d have made it in the army,” Maya admitted with a shrug. “Least not the stuff you see on TV. Was it actually like all the war movies at basic?”
Kevin shrugged. "Basic was fine. You follow orders, do what you're told, speak when spoken to, and learn to eat what is put in front of you without asking. The point is to strip out individuality and replace it with someone who will do what they are ordered to do instantly and without question."
“And that was you?” Maya asked with a disbelieving scoff.
She couldn’t see it, not the man who sat before her who was anything but a person who seemed capable of following orders without question. She certainly wasn’t that person, even if the X-men asked for it, which for the most part they didn’t. The times they did she wasn’t on the team.
"Sure. The Army's had a long history training all kinds of people to the same point. The old ways work a lot better than you think." Kevin said, shaking his head slightly. "I know you don't believe it, but if I shoved you into Basic at 18, in six weeks you'd be 'yes sir, no sir' with all the rest."
“I’d argue but you’d probably give me examples,” Maya noted with a wry smile.
She played with the edge of the placemat under the plate that held her sandwich, and then took a long sip of her coffee.
“So why you and not someone else? You must have had a choice in it.”
"In Basic, it turned out that I had a rare talent for putting little pieces of metal through people from a long way away. So they transferred me to the sniper school at Fort Perry. Along the way, an extremely convenient filing accident changed my birthdate so I was now 18 in the eyes of the Army. Which meant after Perry, they could ship me right to active duty in Korea." Kevin's tone was casual like he was describing an encounter at a post office and not life-changing events.
“How long were you in Korea?” Maya asked.
She pulled the sugar on the table toward her and added several spoonfuls to her cup. She didn’t usually like highly sweet coffee but sometimes the sugar helped keep her awake through the more boring lectures.
"Little over a year before the CIA approached me. Why? You planning to write a history paper on me, kid."
“Kevin, do I look like a high school student?” Maya replied with wry amusement. “It’s my twenty questions way of trying to find common ground. I’ve noticed you don’t really do the same much. “
"They stopped assigning papers in post-secondary? Shame I did all that work for my now vastly out of date MBA." He turned a page. "I ask many questions when I don't know things. There's very little I don't know about you. Or, at least, don't know that isn't related to professional concerns. Personal ones, well, the 65 year age difference makes being... what's the term? BFFs less likely."
“Ouch. If I were the type to see my value as only what friends I had, that might have actually hurt.” Maya noted with a hand against her heart. “You normally decide friendships on age range? Doesn’t matter, I’m not looking to be your BFF. I just like to know the people living around me, so sue me.”
He paused and folded the paper carefully before placing it on the table. "I don't mind answering your questions. I don't mind if you feel that's a way to bond or something. But if you're dearly offended that I don't honestly care about the minutiae I don't know about you, I can't help you. One of the issues of youth that youth can't understand is that you're not that interesting to me. I've seen you come and go with a dozen different faces under a dozen different names in my life."
“Settle down, old timer. Don’t want you to blow a heart valve.” Maya noted, placing her cup beside her plate and giving him a serious look for once. “I’m not offended that you don’t think we’ll be friends or that this ‘youth’ isn’t that interesting to you. I think you’re short-sighted for that but not offended. I like knowing the people I live with, I like at least being on good terms despite what my behavior when I was younger might imply but I don’t care so much that it keeps me awake at night. Why does basic human interaction weird you out so much?”
She’d used air quotes around ‘youth’ to show what little she thought of that reference. She sat back, however, arms crossed, and waited for a response.
"You asked a very simple thing. Why was I less interested in asking you questions than you are apparently about me? I don't want to play twenty questions with you because I don't have twenty questions about you to ask."
“You don't need to ask twenty, you could ask even one,” Maya noted, chin up now. Her shoulders were locked in a stiff perfect posture as she tapped on her cup lid with nails that were cut short and square. “Because I don’t understand how you can possibly have lived so long and yet be unable to see that people are different no matter how much things seem the same.”
"Because they aren't. You want to hear the real terrifying part?" Kevin leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped. "Not only have I seen you a dozen times before, but I already know how to play you. The details are a little different. I'd need to get a few specifics, but I could crack you like an egg if I needed you as an asset. I know, you're a special unicorn who is a unique snowflake. But the one thing age teaches you is none of us are. You, me, everyone else... the right experience and you just know."
There were so many ways this could continue to play out, Maya could think of a dozen without even trying, some of them even had her coming out on top in a burst of self-righteous fury where he admitted to the fact he didn’t know fuck all about her and one where she simply just punched him and walked away.
“You don’t see me at all,” she simply said and picked her coffee up to take a drink. “A snowflake? Really? You see a statistic or a history and you extrapolate that to what you think I am. You don’t even take a moment to acknowledge my individuality in all that. That’s a sucky way to treat anyone, even someone you don’t see any point in knowing.”
"Of course. You're the unique one." Kevin picked back up his newspaper. "You'd be the one who wouldn't come out of Basic with the same attitude as the millions of others who went through it and did. You're the unique individual that is different from every young woman I've met in almost nine decades. Defying all the odds. Well done, kid."
"This is the point where you give me a rage stroke and have to explain to the owners why they’ve got a dead mutant in their store," Maya noted with a small attempt at humor. "I wasn’t talking about basic. I’m not talking about the other young women you’ve known, and whether I meet some universal template you have memorized after years of being a spy. I just want you to acknowledge that I’m a person, not a painting without a soul.”
"Soul discussions I leave to the Padres, which I stopped listening to over 70 years ago."
"I’m trying," Maya noted with a sigh as she packed up the rest of her sandwich and got ready to leave. "I know you don’t care, you’ve told me you don’t care. That’s okay. I promised I’d try to everyone who counts to me to not be an asshole though. So if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to keep trying and maybe one day I’ll be someone new to you and not just a photo of all the people you’ve already seen."
"You weren't listening. I said none of us are particularly special. People by and large mostly fit into a range of categories."
"Ok," Maya noted as she paused in an attempt to leave, unable to help herself at that point. Who doesn't want to know what people saw about or in them after all? “So what category am I?”
"Incredibly privileged young woman who doesn't accept that she is and is still trying to make up for it. Including her new need to 'make right' with everyone as a better person, without ever once thinking about what the other person might want." Kevin said mildly.
"Says the mediocre white guy wearing a suit and pretending he had a hard time because his Daddy never hugged him enough," Maya pushed her chair back forcefully as she grabbed her food. "Miss me with that bullshit, you don’t fucking know the first thing about me."
"I know everything about you. I have your file. I've worked the case." Kevin took another sip from his coffee. "And I am exquisitely mediocre. You're in the presence of banal greatness. I am always playing you. Now, you think this wasn't the reaction I intended from the start?"
#- I think that you’re very quick to play games with someone who was trying to be genuine, you giant asshole. -# Maya signed angrily, supremely unwilling now to provide any ease of communication between them.
#- No you weren't. -# His ASL was crisp and perfect. #-You want absolution. You want to be a good person because you visit old people in a home, show up at a soup kitchen, or worse, go on a missionary mission to interfere. But that's not what makes you a good person and you are so terrified you're the opposite you can't handle someone who doesn't buy into your 'new direction'.-#
#-Don’t you fucking dare tell me what I can handle. You don’t get to tell me anything.-#
Tears of rage threatened and she clenched her hands into fists. Her power had already told her she couldn't win a confrontation, taking note of the table in between them and the myriad obstacles to victory, not least of which were bystanders and simple logistics. She also knew even beyond what she could see, there were years of experience that she just didn't have, and a mutant power that made him supremely dangerous. Even with all that, it was a close call.
How dare he. Missionary work? She would kill before she ever worked for a religion that had tried to destroy her people.
#- Now you're angry I see you. You're mad I don't see you as a special flower but maybe see you for who you are? -# Kevin signed. "I'm not a nice man." He said openly. "I'm not a project for you. You want to talk to me honestly about something, you can."
“Fuck you.”
It was the last thing she said before she turned and walked away, slamming out of the store with a raised finger behind her.
Zane paused, looking at Kevin as Maya left. "My grand-niece. She's got a temper." Kevin said, settling him down before turning back to his paper.
“I’ll have a club sandwich,” Maya said, smiling at the server who had asked for her order at the counter. She gave him an extra eye twinkle just in case he happened to be single. “And a coffee, please.”
She’d stopped at Sol’s for a quick sandwich before she had to go back to her next lecture. Something on the role of social services in society. It was basic beginning classes, nothing that was taxing or needed extra attention.
She spotted Kevin almost immediately when she turned to look for a seat.
He was sitting by the window, half of a sandwich on the plate in front of him, engrossed in the newspaper he was reading as he sipped from his coffee. If he had a lit cigarette, it would have been indistinguishable from photos from the deli in the 40s.
“You look like a photo for Chap magazine,” Maya noted as she wandered across the Deli and then nodded to the empty seat. “Mind a bit of company?”
"I have no idea what that is. But feel free to have a seat." He said, pausing to take a sip from his coffee cup.
“Darcy can buy you a subscription, it’s for guys that dress like you,” Maya noted and took the seat. She nodded at the paper he was reading. “Anything interesting or just the usual bad news and fear-mongering?”
He raised one eyebrow. "It's not the New York Post, kid. And the news is the news. Often twisted, compromised, and slanted, but it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines. Besides, this is a significantly more satisfying way to consume it than reading off my phone screen."
“Are we talking physical feel of the paper or the smell of the fresh ink?” Maya asked as she pulled her phone out and tapped out a text to Kyle about swing classes later in the week. “I’ve got friends who have similar feelings about books. Can’t really agree unless we’re talking middle of nowhere without a signal but you do you.”
"Habit. Every day since 1952... save for a near decade of underwater torture, I've read the paper. Actually, most days I read at least a half dozen papers, but walking around with more than a couple is inconvenient." He paused for a moment to take a bite from his sandwich. "I do miss being able to have a cigarette while doing it, but such is the way of progress."
“1952, how old were you then?” Maya asked, curious.
She placed her phone back in her pocket and kept an ear out for her name.
"18. My first year in the Agency." Kevin said, motioning over to the server, who had Maya's club in hand.
“They recruited that young? Eighteen doesn’t scream spy,” Maya noted, and accepted her sandwich with a smile but turned back to Kevin to finish her thought before taking a bite. “Why’d you join up? Must have been better things you could have been doing.”
"They actually recruited me at 17, but by the time I was demobbed from the Army and transferred over to Agency for training, I was 18. And I joined the CIA because it was a hell of a lot better money than the Army and they offered a career." Kevin said after he finished chewing and took a sip from his coffee. "I joined the Army at 16 to get away from my old man."
Maya was quiet as she took another bite of her sandwich and spent the time to actually chew it this time. It wasn’t a long pause, but enough to think.
“No Mom?”
"Died when I was a kid. Never recovered from having me which, of course, he blamed on me." Kevin said, turning a page. "So my childhood was all kinds of wonderful, as you can imagine."
“Your Dad’s an asshat,” Maya noted with the finality and confidence of youth. “So was the army the only way out or just the best fit?”
Forge has joined the army too, leaving the Rez to see the world. Maya had never really gotten the need, she liked being close to home. Not that she wasn’t very far away from the rez now. She supposed the mansion had become sort of home, certainly the people there.
"No, my uncle offered to put him up, apprentice at the auto shop he part-owned. But the uniform is a pretty strong lure when you're a teenager. After all, most of the guys in their 20s in my neighborhood were just back from serving during WW2." Kevin shook out the paper for a second. "Since I was underaged, I needed parental permission and sponsorship from either a state or federal elected figure. My old man was more than happy to sign that paper and his union got our Member of the House to do the same. Like the other underaged kids, after Basic, we were supposed to be assigned roles stateside, like drivers and operators and stuff, to free up an older guy for deployment. And once we hit 18, we could be deployed. In theory, at least."
“I don’t think I’d have made it in the army,” Maya admitted with a shrug. “Least not the stuff you see on TV. Was it actually like all the war movies at basic?”
Kevin shrugged. "Basic was fine. You follow orders, do what you're told, speak when spoken to, and learn to eat what is put in front of you without asking. The point is to strip out individuality and replace it with someone who will do what they are ordered to do instantly and without question."
“And that was you?” Maya asked with a disbelieving scoff.
She couldn’t see it, not the man who sat before her who was anything but a person who seemed capable of following orders without question. She certainly wasn’t that person, even if the X-men asked for it, which for the most part they didn’t. The times they did she wasn’t on the team.
"Sure. The Army's had a long history training all kinds of people to the same point. The old ways work a lot better than you think." Kevin said, shaking his head slightly. "I know you don't believe it, but if I shoved you into Basic at 18, in six weeks you'd be 'yes sir, no sir' with all the rest."
“I’d argue but you’d probably give me examples,” Maya noted with a wry smile.
She played with the edge of the placemat under the plate that held her sandwich, and then took a long sip of her coffee.
“So why you and not someone else? You must have had a choice in it.”
"In Basic, it turned out that I had a rare talent for putting little pieces of metal through people from a long way away. So they transferred me to the sniper school at Fort Perry. Along the way, an extremely convenient filing accident changed my birthdate so I was now 18 in the eyes of the Army. Which meant after Perry, they could ship me right to active duty in Korea." Kevin's tone was casual like he was describing an encounter at a post office and not life-changing events.
“How long were you in Korea?” Maya asked.
She pulled the sugar on the table toward her and added several spoonfuls to her cup. She didn’t usually like highly sweet coffee but sometimes the sugar helped keep her awake through the more boring lectures.
"Little over a year before the CIA approached me. Why? You planning to write a history paper on me, kid."
“Kevin, do I look like a high school student?” Maya replied with wry amusement. “It’s my twenty questions way of trying to find common ground. I’ve noticed you don’t really do the same much. “
"They stopped assigning papers in post-secondary? Shame I did all that work for my now vastly out of date MBA." He turned a page. "I ask many questions when I don't know things. There's very little I don't know about you. Or, at least, don't know that isn't related to professional concerns. Personal ones, well, the 65 year age difference makes being... what's the term? BFFs less likely."
“Ouch. If I were the type to see my value as only what friends I had, that might have actually hurt.” Maya noted with a hand against her heart. “You normally decide friendships on age range? Doesn’t matter, I’m not looking to be your BFF. I just like to know the people living around me, so sue me.”
He paused and folded the paper carefully before placing it on the table. "I don't mind answering your questions. I don't mind if you feel that's a way to bond or something. But if you're dearly offended that I don't honestly care about the minutiae I don't know about you, I can't help you. One of the issues of youth that youth can't understand is that you're not that interesting to me. I've seen you come and go with a dozen different faces under a dozen different names in my life."
“Settle down, old timer. Don’t want you to blow a heart valve.” Maya noted, placing her cup beside her plate and giving him a serious look for once. “I’m not offended that you don’t think we’ll be friends or that this ‘youth’ isn’t that interesting to you. I think you’re short-sighted for that but not offended. I like knowing the people I live with, I like at least being on good terms despite what my behavior when I was younger might imply but I don’t care so much that it keeps me awake at night. Why does basic human interaction weird you out so much?”
She’d used air quotes around ‘youth’ to show what little she thought of that reference. She sat back, however, arms crossed, and waited for a response.
"You asked a very simple thing. Why was I less interested in asking you questions than you are apparently about me? I don't want to play twenty questions with you because I don't have twenty questions about you to ask."
“You don't need to ask twenty, you could ask even one,” Maya noted, chin up now. Her shoulders were locked in a stiff perfect posture as she tapped on her cup lid with nails that were cut short and square. “Because I don’t understand how you can possibly have lived so long and yet be unable to see that people are different no matter how much things seem the same.”
"Because they aren't. You want to hear the real terrifying part?" Kevin leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped. "Not only have I seen you a dozen times before, but I already know how to play you. The details are a little different. I'd need to get a few specifics, but I could crack you like an egg if I needed you as an asset. I know, you're a special unicorn who is a unique snowflake. But the one thing age teaches you is none of us are. You, me, everyone else... the right experience and you just know."
There were so many ways this could continue to play out, Maya could think of a dozen without even trying, some of them even had her coming out on top in a burst of self-righteous fury where he admitted to the fact he didn’t know fuck all about her and one where she simply just punched him and walked away.
“You don’t see me at all,” she simply said and picked her coffee up to take a drink. “A snowflake? Really? You see a statistic or a history and you extrapolate that to what you think I am. You don’t even take a moment to acknowledge my individuality in all that. That’s a sucky way to treat anyone, even someone you don’t see any point in knowing.”
"Of course. You're the unique one." Kevin picked back up his newspaper. "You'd be the one who wouldn't come out of Basic with the same attitude as the millions of others who went through it and did. You're the unique individual that is different from every young woman I've met in almost nine decades. Defying all the odds. Well done, kid."
"This is the point where you give me a rage stroke and have to explain to the owners why they’ve got a dead mutant in their store," Maya noted with a small attempt at humor. "I wasn’t talking about basic. I’m not talking about the other young women you’ve known, and whether I meet some universal template you have memorized after years of being a spy. I just want you to acknowledge that I’m a person, not a painting without a soul.”
"Soul discussions I leave to the Padres, which I stopped listening to over 70 years ago."
"I’m trying," Maya noted with a sigh as she packed up the rest of her sandwich and got ready to leave. "I know you don’t care, you’ve told me you don’t care. That’s okay. I promised I’d try to everyone who counts to me to not be an asshole though. So if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to keep trying and maybe one day I’ll be someone new to you and not just a photo of all the people you’ve already seen."
"You weren't listening. I said none of us are particularly special. People by and large mostly fit into a range of categories."
"Ok," Maya noted as she paused in an attempt to leave, unable to help herself at that point. Who doesn't want to know what people saw about or in them after all? “So what category am I?”
"Incredibly privileged young woman who doesn't accept that she is and is still trying to make up for it. Including her new need to 'make right' with everyone as a better person, without ever once thinking about what the other person might want." Kevin said mildly.
"Says the mediocre white guy wearing a suit and pretending he had a hard time because his Daddy never hugged him enough," Maya pushed her chair back forcefully as she grabbed her food. "Miss me with that bullshit, you don’t fucking know the first thing about me."
"I know everything about you. I have your file. I've worked the case." Kevin took another sip from his coffee. "And I am exquisitely mediocre. You're in the presence of banal greatness. I am always playing you. Now, you think this wasn't the reaction I intended from the start?"
#- I think that you’re very quick to play games with someone who was trying to be genuine, you giant asshole. -# Maya signed angrily, supremely unwilling now to provide any ease of communication between them.
#- No you weren't. -# His ASL was crisp and perfect. #-You want absolution. You want to be a good person because you visit old people in a home, show up at a soup kitchen, or worse, go on a missionary mission to interfere. But that's not what makes you a good person and you are so terrified you're the opposite you can't handle someone who doesn't buy into your 'new direction'.-#
#-Don’t you fucking dare tell me what I can handle. You don’t get to tell me anything.-#
Tears of rage threatened and she clenched her hands into fists. Her power had already told her she couldn't win a confrontation, taking note of the table in between them and the myriad obstacles to victory, not least of which were bystanders and simple logistics. She also knew even beyond what she could see, there were years of experience that she just didn't have, and a mutant power that made him supremely dangerous. Even with all that, it was a close call.
How dare he. Missionary work? She would kill before she ever worked for a religion that had tried to destroy her people.
#- Now you're angry I see you. You're mad I don't see you as a special flower but maybe see you for who you are? -# Kevin signed. "I'm not a nice man." He said openly. "I'm not a project for you. You want to talk to me honestly about something, you can."
“Fuck you.”
It was the last thing she said before she turned and walked away, slamming out of the store with a raised finger behind her.
Zane paused, looking at Kevin as Maya left. "My grand-niece. She's got a temper." Kevin said, settling him down before turning back to his paper.
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This was a really nice log to read. Well done.
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