Chapter Text
Fall 1996
Kit Campbell fidgeted in the hard, cheap wooden seating the government had deigned to provide, tugging at the collar of her blouse. She hated blouses: hated how the word sounded, hated how they felt, hated how they looked. Too feminine looking. Like, what was the point of this bow on the front? It wasn’t doing anything but getting in the way. She had dug it out of Sandra’s closet and worn it only as a compromise to prevent Codwick from having the fish equivalent of a heart attack (which, she thought, could very well be just a heart attack). He had insisted on a dress, asserting in his panic kiwi accent that they needed to take every advantage to portray her as an innocent young girl and not the, in his words, “rapscallion” she was. She had insisted he sit in his bowl and shut the fuck up. All this was HIS fault anyway! In her research, she had found a number of records indicating animal guardians to the Zodiac Scouts were able to assume humanoid form. All he had to do was turn into a human, pretend to be her guardian, pay the fine or whatever, and everything would be fine. Instead she was now sitting outside the office of Child Protective Services, trying to figure out a way to avoid getting suckered into the foster system.
After her parents died, it had just been her and Scott. When Scott met Sandra, it was all three of them. As perfect a family as a Scout, a Knight, and a 10-year-old orphan could be. And then, after Scott and Sandra went off to fight the Butcher of Hubris and never came back, it had just been her and Codwick. It was funny. Before all that, her and Codwick had only interacted in the way one does when meeting someone else’s pet. She greeted him, offered him a snack, but at the end of the day they weren’t bonded, weren’t family. Then, in a moment, he became the only family she had left. She was still a little fuzzy on how everything went down, lost in a haze of grief. She remembered feeling drawn to the warzone, like a siren’s call. She remembered finding Codwick barely hanging on in his toppled travel tube, taking Scott’s cracked wristwatch from his cold (so very cold, you always know the dead are cold but you never realize just how much) 10 years old and robbing corpses, no wonder she wound up a delinquent. How long she stayed, how she got away, where she went...those were facts that had slipped from her fingers. Her memory picks up days (weeks?) later, squatting in Scott and Sandra’s old apartment, living off takeout Codwick called in, draining what little savings Scott had left. She had to grow up fast, these past four years. She never graduated to full on criminal, wasn’t her style, but a few lifted wallets here, a few pocketed essentials there. What could it hurt?
Apparently exactly as much as this bench. She had been sloppy, no other way to say it. Let herself get comfortable that things would be okay, that she could let herself let her vice grip slip on controlling her world. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Got caught tinkering with an alarm system, got nicked by the police, and despite Codwick’s harried attempts on the phone to defuse the situation as her “uncle”, the police smelled a rat and kicked her over to CPS. And so, here she was, running options through her head. The uncle story couldn’t really hold much water, pun intended, since even if she could convince them she had a random uncle from New Zealand who just so happens to have no records anywhere attesting to his existence, the moment they tried to meet him in person the charade would fall apart, not only because they would arrive to find a talking fish but they would arrive to find the address they were given was a bookstore.
After the money ran out from Scott’s bank account about a year or two in, they decided it better to abandon than risk eviction (and attention) and departed the premises covertly. They did the homeless thing for a while, getting hotel rooms when the wallets were fat, breaking and entering the homes of the out of town rich when they weren’t. Life as a burglar let Kit get, in her opinion, proficient enough with electronics, buoyed by her apparent natural intelligence (Who knew? Certainly not the public school system!). She had thought she was so fucking clever the first time she thought to “hack” the school records, hacking being a very loose description of her actual act of just walking in, editing files, and clicking save. The public school system don’t really notice the quiet, poor little girl enough to realize her manipulation. She made herself over in the eyes of the school as a perfectly average student: attends MOST of her classes, gets mostly B’s, not bad or good enough for anyone to care. And she was free to focus on bigger and better things: staying alive and stopping what a robot from the future had described as a worldwide apocalypse-level event.
Staying alive had gotten a lot easier once they found the Felix Mansion. It had been abandoned for a number of years, the eccentric owner disappearing in the early 80’s. Nobody could quite make heads or tails of it and life on the street was a game of instincts and every instinct told most people to stay away. Most people didn’t have a talking fish who could sense Scout energy though. They had only passed by it on happenstance, tending to avoid the richer areas where a little girl dressed in dirty men’s clothes tended to draw out both invasive philanthropists and stuck-up tattlers, when Codwick cried out in joy, stopping Kit in her tracks since he was usually the better of the two at not exposing the prestige in public. They never did find the actual source of Codwick’s ping, just a few knick-knacks that seemed to relate to the former Scout residents, but they did find something almost as good: a home. It didn’t have water or power or heat, but it was safe, clean, and dry. And soon to be taken from her, no doubt.
“Katharine Campbell?” the woman said, peeking her head out from behind the door. “Come inside, sweetie, let’s talk.”