Welcome to Gaia! ::

first part of this is copied over from google drive

Point the first: Kaatje was not out at a bar.

Being out on the town on a weeknight would be horrendously dumb. Tomorrow was her physical training check-in and if she showed up hungover and puked on the pad, she might as well write her own name on the control roster. And if she got on the control roster, her rapidly-budding plan to get the White Moon whipped into shape would go straight down the tubes. So, clearly, she was not out drinking, and when she found the blindingly offensive thing, she knew for ******** sure it was wrong.

Point the second: Kaatje had invested in a motorcycle lock.

It wasn’t because she didn’t trust the guys at the motor pool, because she did. They were SecFo, and awesome, and could probably drag her corpse a mile without tiring. She liked going out drinking with them because she was a very lovely girl and she did not want anyone to have any particular reason to hit on her or try anything untoward. Also, she’d been drinking with those guys since waaaay before she was legal, so she knew they could be trusted. Not that she had been drinking, because she definitely had not been.

Point the third: The only surplus store in DC was in a shady part of town, one where you certainly needed a bike lock.

These three points combined to put Kaatje on the edge. Almost over the edge, in fact. So when Kaatje came out of the store with a bag of second-hand sage-green combat boots--to replace the pair that had gotten ******** up by wax and mud--and saw a guy dressed so outlandishly she just knew he was a Negaverser, her first instinct was not flight, to hide and henshin into Sailor Gunn and then kill his a**.

It was to storm forward and kill his a**.

Her brilliant first move was, therefore, to lean over her motorcycle and do her utmost to punch him in the ******** face.

The first car Jack ever stole was a shitty little Taurus with rusted doors, and he had not done it alone. He was one third of a mischievous trio back then, and their unmistakable leader-- a clever boy hiding behind the smile of a clown. BJ and Ducky did all the dirty work. He played the distraction.

Since becoming Proustite he had upgraded to solo operations. This was partly because BJ'd gone and knocked up some dish who kept him on a short leash. Partly because Jack spent less and less time as himself, and the affection he retained for his childhood friends meant that he tried to keep them as far away from the Negaverse as possible.

It was a big deal for Jack. He wasn't usually so considerate of other people.

Motorcycles weren't his usual go-to prize. Proustite preferred sneaking refurbished classics out of their cradles at night. But he was an opportunist to the core, and loathe to deny his heart anything that it decided it wanted. He reached for Kaatje's motorcycle on a whim, and was too busy attempting to separate machine from lock to notice when she approached him until it was too late.

Her fist connected with his jaw. Hard enough to rock Proustite's head back.

"Ow," he hissed out between his teeth, lifting his arms in self-defense. Jack whirled to face his assailant, but whatever anger he felt towards Kaatje vanished the moment he got a good look at her face. He took a careful step back, and looked like a boy who knew he'd been caught doing something naughty. A smirk started on his lips, despite the pain left behind by Kaatje's hand.

Brave girl.

"Let me guess," Proustite said, rubbing at his jaw with one hand, and gesturing at her motorcycle with the other. "This is yours."

“Yes, you daft son of a b***h!” She couldn’t precisely yell that she was going to transform into a senshi and kill him flatter than dead, although she certainly thought about it. While a civilian, untrained and alone, against a Negaverser was certainly suicide, Kaatje was not untrained and she was more than prepared to use her helmet as a hammer and the sack of boots as a flail. “That is mine, and I’m not exactly keen on giving it up. There a reason you want to take it?”

That was when she processed that the Negaverser was not attacking her. The scowl on her face faded to… confusion, because a Negaverse officer really should be attacking her by now. Like, he was faster than she was at the moment for sure, and he could definitely hit harder. A starseed and a motorcycle was definitely a bigger and better prize than just a motorcycle or just a starseed, and though Kaatje’s motorcycle was definitely an awesome ride, her starseed was honestly the more worthy part of the equation. So why wasn’t he attacking? Her furrowed brow smoothed, and then she arched an eyebrow. “So, what, it’s that easy? You’re just gonna stop because I hit you once? ‘Cause if so, you’re a weak little b***h.”

Why was she provoking him? For real. “I’d appreciate it if you’d get away from my boot camp gift to myself,” she hinted.

It took more than insults from a pretty girl to injure Proustite’s pride. The Negaverse Captain stood back, massaging his jaw, and could not fault Kaatje for her anger. He had been trying to steal her bike, after all. She had a right to her fury. Not that Jack was ashamed of himself. On the contrary, he was pleased, wondering if the fates had conspired to bring him and this particularly… passionate young woman together.

He wasn’t going to make off with her bike tonight. Maybe he’d get to make out with her instead.

“It’s a pretty nice ride,” he said, brown eyes twinkling with a mischievous light. They swept over Kaatje’s face, took in her ginger hair, and then ventured lower-- appreciating the length of her legs without much regard for his own safety. “I couldn’t help myself.”

His gaze drifted back up to look her in the eye. Proustite smiled to see that Kaatje was not afraid of him, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket. He retrieved one from inside, and pressed it between his lips.

“Got a light?”

He did not step away from the bike. Of the pair of them, Proustite knew that he was the stronger. While he was too much of a gentleman to push himself on Kaatje, he did not think he had any reason to be afraid of her, either.

Kaatje was a pretty girl. Had, point of fact, been a pretty girl for most of her life. Being born blonde and blue-eyed (even if her hair had reddened to orange along the way) with her bone structure had bought her a lot of leniency and a lot of leering looks from a very young age. "Yeah," she said sourly, "I bet you couldn't." She took a step forward, keeping the bike between herself and the captain; without breaking eye contact, she set the bag of boots down in the under-seat compartment and shut it again.

Oh, if she were Gunn right then, she would give him a light. Burn his face right off. "No, babe, I don't," she said. She started to out her helmet down, reconsidered, and made a valiant attempt to clock him in the face with it. "Maybe when you leer at a girl, you should skip the part where you try to steal her bike! a*****e!"

Proustite barely managed to step back in time to avoid having his nose broken. His breath left him in a surprised whoosh of air, cigarette falling from his lips onto the pavement at their feet. He let it stay there, lifting his hands, palms facing outwards, to signal surrender.

s**t. Jack didn’t know when he’d started having such bad luck with women. True, Kaatje had caught him in the act of trying to steal her motorbike-- but he was no fighter. Not really. Jack had always been much better with his lips than his fists. And he had personal rules about hitting women. Rules that he’d been forced to break, on occasion. But it wasn’t his fault most of the senshi wanted his blood instead of his phone number.

“Chill out for a sec, okay!”

Proustite looked every bit the repentant criminal, and properly afraid for his safety in the wake of Kaatje’s helmet-wielding fury, dark eyes shining on the strength in her hands. It was clear to him that this girl knew how to defend herself.

“Would you quit trying to kill me…”

His lips quirked into a smirk. And then he moved, swift in his powered form in ways that Jack could never be as a civilian. One moment Proustite was standing in front of Kaatje with his hands in the air. The next moment he was darting forward, pecking her pretty mouth with his for a whip-quick kiss.

“... if I bought you dinner first?”

Was he… scared of her? Oh holy ********, he was scared of her. Kaatje’s cheeks flushed dark but it wasn’t with worry or anxiety, it was because there was a man who could probably crush her throat right now who was genuinely scared of her. Which was a little bit of a turn-on, and probably why she didn’t immediately knee him when he kissed her. But she did make a valiant attempt to slam her helmet into his gut, so that was at least keeping up her plausible deniability.

“If you bought dinner for me before I killed you, I’d be a little worried for your health,” she said, but--he sort of had a point. Killing him now was just a good recipe to get caught. She put her helmet down on the back of her motorcycle. “And you must have a very very big ego to think I’d want you to buy me dinner after you tried to steal my bike. Not very trustworthy.”

She frowned. If he was scared of her, oh, well. “You stay over there, I’ll stay over here, and I promise I won’t try to kill you again.”


Kaatje proved valiant, her helmet connecting with Proustite’s gut hard enough to wipe the smirk off his face and make him groan. He bent over at the waist in order to regain his breath, lifting a hand to hold her at bay again.

“I’ll stay over here.” He wheezed, crossing the fingers of his other hand behind his back where she hopefully couldn’t see. His intentions, if he had any at all, were not to harm Kaatje. Truly, Jack liked leaving as much of the murdering business to his colleagues as possible. All of them cared more than he did. While Proustite was far too attached to his power to really misbehave, he cared less for the Negaverse agenda than he did for himself. There was nothing heroic or moral about his apathy towards their cause. Jack abused the power Proustite gave him every goddamned day. He was grateful for it.

But he took orders about as well as a spoiled dog.

“If you worried about my health before killing me,” he said once he’d recovered his voice, reaching to pick up his fallen cigarette and putting it back in his mouth, “I’d wonder if you hadn’t started to like me.”

He straightened, twinkling at Kaatje again with a smile on his face, “just a little bit.”

“In the way one likes an intestinal worm,” said Kaatje with a roll of her eyes. With one eye on the Negaverser, she pulled her keys out of her pocket and knelt down to unlock the chain from her motorcycle. This she lifted up and dropped into the compartment with her new boots and laces, before meeting Proustite’s gaze again.

In a life where he wasn’t an awful Negaverse a*****e who was dead-set on murdering civilians (as they all were, of course) she would almost like him. He was handsome enough, with a devil-may-care attitude, the sort of thing that generally caught her attention in civilian boys. Granted, he was also a thief, but everyone had personality flaws and she was sure she could fix it if she just had the chance. Kaatje had the dogged determination to get what she wanted, and when determination wasn’t enough, she also knew four ways to kill a man with just her left hand. So that was also helpful.

She considered this. She considered getting on her bike and riding the ******** away, which would certainly be the smart thing to do. Instead of being smart, though, she reached into her pocket and sent a text message to Tallulah mentioning where she was. Just on the off chance that she should get starseed jacked after this, yeah? That done, she reached across her bike, grabbed handfuls of his hair, and pulled him down to kiss him. Not a gentle, or romantic kiss, but a painful one--with teeth, and she was pretty sure she tasted his blood.

It didn’t actually taste different from anyone else’s. Not even her own. Odd!

When she had been very small, her mother had told her a story about a pair of toxic lovers, people who had given and given and given and never been enough for each other. Kaatje thought of that story now as Proustite caught her lower lip between his teeth. She hissed at his bite, and pulled harder on his hair, tipping his face up for a better angle. As if she would let him win everything--even kissing.

She drew back and wiped a hand over her mouth, eyeing the streak of red on the sleeve of her jacket. "You're getting ahead of yourself, a*****e," she said, spitting out just a little more blood on the asphalt. "I don't know about you, but I have to be up at five in the morning to get my a** kicked by a technical sergeant twice your size. Unless you have a really persuasive argument, I am going to go home."