Katina Choovanski

Painting in the room wasn't quite as preferable to painting on the roof some days, but it was cool and damp enough too often lately for Katchoo to care to risk the canvas. There was music playing, but -- gasp -- she was in more of a Björk mood than a Griffin Silver one, and so it was Homogenic on the stereo as she worked.

Quiet weekend, pretty good mood -- she really couldn't complain.

[OOC: For the roomie and them what knows who they are.]

With so few classes to take up much of her week, and no work until tomorrow, Katchoo had turned to her favorite pastime. You know, the one that wasn't pining after Francine. Her easel was set up by the bed, the windows wide open to sort of do something about the paint fumes and cigarette smoke (Clocky was totally equipped to chase off the fire marshal or something, really), and the stereo was cranking one of her very well-worn Griffin Silver CDs.

You could say she had some residual frustrations to work out and was doing that through painting.

. . . and then you could look at the stack of canvases that was threatening to eat her closet, and strike the word 'residual.'

[OOC: For that guy with the ears, and the roomie if she wants, but open too. This post, which was supposed to go up hours ago, is yet another victim of my Swiss-cheese brain today. Sigh.]

Hey, look at that, Katchoo had finally made it home, after a whole lot of procrastination. (A whoooooooooooole lot of procrastination.) And dinner at Mooby Land, because it was cheap, dammit.

She could open a door quietly when she a) wanted to and b) was sober enough to; both of those criteria currently being filled, watch Katchoo trying to sneak back unobtrusively into her own room and hope she wasn't waking Francine.

The suitcase had a squeaky wheel. Assuming Francine was in the room? Good luck with that, Chewie.

[OOC: For ze roomie and SP due to zzz. I seriously just fell asleep dreaming about marshmallows in fedoras for a second.]

Because there hadn't been enough frustration in her week, today was the first day Katchoo had actually gotten to see Emma; first there'd been the fact that the only flight she could wrangle had a connection in Tampa (Baltimore to Tampa to Toronto, what the hell) and then getting booted from the overbooked connection and waiting a day and a half in a terminal without a damn open outlet to charge her dead phone, to fly standby the rest of the way. She'd finally shown up here at the hospice, where the sisters had been expecting her, but they'd taken one look at her and escorted her straight to a room where she'd collapsed into a long unconscious sleep and only just now woken up.

Under most circumstances Katchoo wasn't much for religion at all, and she had especially little patience for the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism, but this place -- just outside the Toronto city limits -- really was peaceful. It was a good place to go, if you could choose where to die.

( 'She took a turn for the worse right after you left three months ago,' said Sister Jordan as she led Katchoo down the hall to Emma's room. 'Slowly at first, but lately much more pronounced, and I'm afraid there's just nothing more we can do for her.' (Character death and lots of images behind the cut.) )

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC and Kleenex welcome. Dialogue taken and adapted (with some additions by me) from Strangers in Paradise Volume 2, Issue 3, "Echoes of Home," as are the comic panels. Sorry for the image-heavy but narrative text just doesn't do the artwork in this scene justice.]

When the phone rang, Katchoo nearly smashed it for having the audacity to wake her. Clocky sympathized with the phone, which was saved by virtue of Katchoo's fist missing and sending it skidding off the nightstand and onto the bed instead, where it bounced off her forehead.

"Ow! Sonofa --" she started to growl when she saw the caller ID and snapped the slider open, all thoughts of being relieved about being herself again on hold. "Hello?"

The woman on the other end of the line spoke in a soft French-Canadian accent. "This is Sister Jordan at Saint Mary's Hospice in Toronto. I'm looking for Katina Choovanski."

Shit. "Yeah, this is she," Katchoo answered with none of her usual gruffness, and fell silent, listening to what the woman had to say. The details of it weren't important the way the strangled sob Katchoo let out in response was. "Okay. I understand," she said, her fist half jammed into her mouth to keep from crying. "Okay. Please tell her I'm on my way. I'll be there as soon as I can."

She snapped the phone shut and rolled over long enough to let out a muffled, frustrated yell into her pillow, then got up to throw on some clothes and pull the suitcase, already packed, from its place under the bed behind the pile of empty liquor bottles. She'd told Arthur she'd try to tell Francine the truth, just yesterday. Hard to do that now, wherever the hell Francine had gone after their fight (over not telling the truth, funny, that) last night, and now this. Thanks, universe, best timing ever.

Katchoo ripped a page out of her sketchbook and started to scribble a ( quick note: )

Tossing the note onto Francine's bed, she headed out the door, already on the phone and mentally cursing out hold music.

[OOC: Establishy. NFI unless the roomie wants to react to the note.]

So Katchoo wasn't in the mood to go to Fight Club tonight.

Funny, that; apparently she'd gotten a good chunk of her Need To Hit Things out of her system this week. Okay, maybe not, but somehow it just didn't have its usual appeal tonight.

She was sprawled on her bed instead, a sketchbook open in front of her to a page that was blank and had been blank for the past several hours, Ani DiFranco on the tape player stereo and a bottle of Jack Daniels on the nightstand. Pretty comfortable setup for a good, sullen brood.

Good times -- she didn't even notice when Clocky wheeled over to the slightly ajar door and nudged it open a few inches further.

[OOC: Door and post open, should you wish to poke the Happy Fun Chewieball. May be patches of SP because my headache won't go away.]

It was sort of like hunting, if you squinted at it the right way. Actually, Katchoo would be perfectly prepared to argue that any given bar was a sort of hunting ground.

The general concept was pretty much the same, anyhow, at least insofar as one of the two certain bitchy blond Fandom students had in mind tonight; it was something you did when everything was too goddamn &*^@!ing complicated and you had to let off some steam. Beating up on a lump of clay lost its charm pretty quickly, there were too many people who liked the punching bags in the gym, and nobody wanted Katchoo in possession of anything pointy or ballistic when she was in a mood like this anyway.

. . . a bar would be so much better, obviously.

Nonetheless. Bar. Booze. Well away from the island and any stupid squirrels. It was just to let off a little steam, anyway. ( What could possibly go wrong there? (Bit o'violence back here.) )

[OOC: NFB and NFI for mainlandiness, OOC okay. Preplayed with the always fantastic bitch_prince! To be continued in a couple of hours . . .]

Francine hadn't come home yesterday. Katchoo had assumed she'd spent the night with Merlin, and that was a line of thought not worth dwelling on for too long.

Which meant she'd spent all night up in front of an easel, slapping haphazard brushfuls of paint onto canvas with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth 99% of the time, stewing. She hadn't bothered listening to the radio, or she'd have been more worried to hear that they'd been spotted in the preserve.

She hadn't slept, either, although now she was sprawled out on her bed with a cigarette dangling from her fingers, staring at the phone on her bedside table. Francine wasn't around; the newbie picnic could go screw itself.

"Ring, dammit," she muttered, and it hit her that when she'd taken off for Toronto Francine must've freaked just as bad. "Where the hell are you, Francie?"

Karma, she'd just decided, was an utter and complete bitch.

[OOC: Establishy, but open if you want to drop in on an edgy and even more snappish than usual Chewie. If you dare.]

It had been several hours since she'd left Francine that voicemail about being on her way home, but Katchoo hadn't been counting on getting stuck in portal transit for several hours. As luck would have it, she made it back to Fandom and back to her room . . . oh, just in time to make it down to Mythbusting if she dumped her bag on the floor and hurried.

Which she wasn't really feeling much like doing at the moment, go figure. She rifled through the pile of clothes on her bed to find a clean-ish, if ripped all to hell, pair of jeans, a t-shirt, underwear, yadda yadda, then headed for the bathroom. She'd be late to class, or whatever, but the longer she went without washing off the travel grime the worse her mood was going to be.

And she was going to be in enough trouble with Francine for taking off as it was.

[OOC: Estaaaaaaaaaaablishy.]