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WHO: Stella Gibson
WHERE: The inn
WHEN: January 10th
OPEN TO: Kate Kelly
WARNINGS: narrative references to sexual assault.
STATUS: Closed

Stella notices things.

It's not just that it's been part of her job for over a decade and a half to pay attention, to see things other people don't, although the investigative mindset is almost impossible to turn off once you've got into it. No, Stella's always been good at noticing, at reading people, being able to tell when someone's trying to hide something.

And what she has noticed is that there is a problem between herself and Kate Kelly — or, more accurately, that Kate Kelly seems to have developed a problem with her. She thinks it must have started some time after Karen's murder, when she'd been doing a bit of her own investigative work on the side, before a group of the others had gone off and come back with the body of that creature and that had been the end of it. It's nothing terribly obvious — or, at least, Stella thinks Kate has been trying not to make a show of it — but when someone is friendly with her one week and giving her the cold shoulder in the next, she tends to suspect that something, somewhere, has gone wrong.

She could just let it lie. Stella has never really been someone to care whether or not other people like her, and as a police officer and a woman she's had every insult in the book thrown at her in the past. She does not exactly need to be friends with Kate. But she's also trapped in a village of less than sixty people, and one of the people central to that community has apparently decided, out of what feels like nowhere, that she doesn't like her. It is... probably in Stella's best interest to at least try to find out what's going on. And she's not going to get that if she waits for Kate to come to her.

Stella dresses in what's been her usual outfit since the day they all got those gifts: boots, scrub trousers, the light blue jumper that came to her courtesy of Finnick Odair, her gloves from Margaery, and her black coat. She heads back to the inn from her house in the late afternoon, after everyone has cleared out after lunch, and finds Kate where she more or less expected to, in the kitchen.

"Miss Kelly? Have you got a moment?"

She is making the best effort she knows how not to act like a police officer. This is not an interrogation. She's just a woman, here to talk to another woman about something that concerns her. Her posture is relaxed, and she doesn't seem worried, nervous, or angry: just calm, and maybe a little expectant.

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She's standing at the kitchen table, singing. None of this is strange. Not the song, not the location, and not even the work. Today is she grinding dried out tubers and rhizomes, rolling them over and over with a rolling pin. It's hard work, monotonous, and it's one reason for why she sings so. Another is to keep her chest muscles, her lungs, strong, keep them used to working even though she's wearing a proper corset of steel and boning now.

Then Miss Gibson - Detective Inspector Gibson speaks, and Kate stills. Her song stops, her arms and hands stop, and she keeps her head down. It's just for a fraction of a heart-beat, but it's there.

Kate looks up, keeping her expression polite.

"I have a moment, Miss Gibson."

And though she's trying not to treat this like an interview, Stella's still watching her, watching her body language like she would a suspect's: another of those behaviors deeply ingrained by now, impossible to avoid. She notices that fractional hesitation, the briefest pause that anyone less astute might have missed. It doesn't, unfortunately, tell her anything she doesn't already know; Kate is uncomfortable with her presence.

She is, however, completely used to talking to people who aren't comfortable with her, and it doesn't put her off. Stella gives Kate some space, shedding her coat and gloves and sitting down on the opposite side of the kitchen table: conversational space, but not personal. She folds her hands on the tabletop and allows herself a moment, no longer than a breath, to decide what she intends to say.

"You've barely spoken a word to me since the feast," she says, steady-voiced. "I was wondering if perhaps we might have had some misunderstanding."

She is careful neither to blame herself nor Kate, partly because Stella is not one to lay blame until she knows where to put it and partly because she simply does not know what's going on and would prefer not to make assumptions. They'd got on well enough that night, at the feast, even though Kate had been more than a little drunk. Something here isn't sitting right.

Defensive, is the posture. Not obviously so, but a tension humming through her, habitual and subtle. She's one used to being questioned, is Kate Kelly. Used, too, to being kicked and lorded over, and that's there a bit as well as it hasn't been since she arrived.

Despite all of that, she's keeping herself in check. There's never ever been any point to lashing out, and Kate can acknowledge that the detective has not wronged her or hers or any others while here.

It's a quandary, and one she's not sure how to deal with, not exactly.
Then again, sometimes Kate is really too much like her mother, like her oldest brother.

"I'm not the fondest of policemen," Kate says, bluntly. Not rude, not exactly, but blunt and with no attempt to soften.

There's a part of Stella that appreciates that: no trying to evade the question, no wasting time trying to conjure up excuses for the sake of avoiding injured feelings. She's always preferred straightforward honesty to beating around the bush.

"I see." It's soft, uninflected; an acknowledgement, nothing more. Stella is by now well used to people who don't like the police, and if she had a penny for every time she'd had her profession insulted she'd be a rich woman. In particular, there are a lot of people who don't like the Met or what they believe it stands for — so in that sense, Kate's words simply roll right off her.

What she is interested in is the reason behind them, because this doesn't seem like the sort of dislike rooted in a general, nebulous discontent with authority. "Personal experience?" she asks, with that same undisturbed calm, aware of Kate's defensiveness and attempting as best she can to appear nonthreatening.

Kate is well within her rights to tell Stella to fuck off; she's not here to push the point. But she does want to see what Kate might tell her on her own initiative.

"Yes." Short, but not clipped. There's a little hiss at the end, a sound of bitterness and distaste. "Never been arrested or charged with anythin', before you ask. But that doesn't seem to matter much in the pursuit of justice."

She shouldn't say that. Not to police. She shouldn't be too bitter, except no, fuck it, they aren't home in Victoria, they aren't in the Australian colonies, they aren't in England where Miss Gibson would have her collogues and pet judges. If she's a sharp one, Miss Gibson could probably pick out all the implications about Kate's family.

Nothing for it, Kate supposes.

There it is: the crack in the polite facade, the sharp upwelling of bitterness through it, the twist on the word justice as if to make mockery of it, as if the syllables taste badly in her mouth. Stella can't help but hear it, trained as she is.

"I believe you," she says — not quickly as if to reassure Kate or defend herself, but soft and measured, matter-of-fact. Of course, not having been arrested or charged doesn't mean she's done nothing wrong, and there are certain implications that Stella does note, because she's listening not only to what Kate says but what she doesn't say.

She stifles the instinct to probe further from this angle, to sift through those implications until they grow clearer. This is a conversation, not an interrogation. Stella takes a different tack.

"Justice," and the word sounds lighter in her voice, falls off her tongue easier, not a curse like Kate uses it. "For me, that means protecting others from harm, and ensuring those who would harm others don't have that opportunity." A pause, and then, "I think there are some out there who might confuse justice and revenge."

She says it without knowing anything about Kate at all, no more than what she's told her verbally and otherwise in these past few minutes — but it's a common enough story that she thinks she won't be too far off. Stella will know in a moment if she's wrong.

What a nice world you must live in, lady, Kate doesn't say. There's a clenching of her jaw though, the faint twisting of her mouth. But then Miss Gibson keeps on talking, doesn't she.

(And that's what they do, sometimes. Keep talking to see how you react. If they care about such things, the veneer of respectability.)

But revenge isn't where she'd been expecting the sentence to end, and her hazel eyes flick back to Miss Gibson's face. Mixed in with the scorn now is guilt. She can't help it. She started it, when she punched Fitzpatrick in the face instead of playing sweet and getting away all discreet. And he didn't take it like a man, but went crying to salvage his pride and she has nothing but hatred and contempt for him, but...

But.

But maybe, maybe, maybe she could have thought of something, done something, and it's that maybe which twists her up as much as the hatred. The guilt, that she brought all the ruin down on her family.

"Justice doesn't exist for the likes of us," Kate says, finally. Unless we take it ourselves.

(But that's why she's never, ever told her big brother Ned what happened.)

She's touched a nerve, Stella thinks — or touched something, certainly, the way the guilt rises up there behind the younger woman's gaze. It's an odd emotion for the situation, she thinks, wondering why Kate ought to feel guilty, or thinks she ought.

Her brow furrows slightly at the words; they're ones she's heard before, in different contexts. The likes of us back home could be young people in council housing, stuck there because they've nowhere else to go and unable to call on the police for help because so many see estate flats and still think drug dealers and welfare scroungers. It could be women forced to turn to selling their bodies because it's either that or starve, who can't report men who've assaulted them for fear of being arrested, mocked, told it's their fault. It could be wives, girlfriends, daughters of men who've committed crimes being harassed and threatened by the police even though they've done nothing wrong themselves.

She's not sure if any of those cases apply to Kate, but Stella hears the likes of us and something changes in her expression, a slight softening around the corners of her eyes and mouth: maybe not quite sympathy, but something like it. An involuntary reaction, difficult to falsify even if she were trained at faking emotions.

There's a silence, allowed more for Kate's sake than Stella's. "I'm not here to try to convince you of anything," she says eventually. She doesn't think she can. If Kate is set on not trusting her, then nothing Stella says will change her mind, no matter how she words it. "If you'd like me to leave, I will."

And if you'd like me to listen, then I'll stay is what's implied under that without, Stella thinks, needing to be stated — but the offer of a way out of the conversation does need to be made plain, otherwise this will start to feel exactly like being questioned in custody and that is not what Stella's aiming for.

She catches the faint softening and she's not sure what it means, if anything. It doesn't change things from her perspective, not on its own. Some of the bobbies had given her sympathetic looks, but none had offered to help pick up the mess their colleagues had made of Kate's ma's house or done much to stop anything.

"Why'd I ask you to leave?" Kate asks then, tone cross and a frown creasing her face. "This ain't my kitchen or my inn. You haven't disturbed the peace any. I don't like your kind, sure, but this place is open to everyone and I mean it."

It's the one thing she's worked at, consistently, alongside making sure everyone gets a meal: everyone can come to the inn.

"And I'll be polite to you 'til you give me reason otherwise."

"I appreciate that," Stella says, honestly. She does. Kate could, despite what she says about this not being her inn, ask her to go elsewhere. There's a certain strength of character in being able to be polite to someone you don't like.

It's just that's not really Stella's point. "But I'd also prefer not to make you uncomfortable," she adds, very simply. A pause, and a small, dry smile, the very slightest break in her cool demeanor. "Especially as I suspect I've done that already."

Stella certainly doesn't need to push herself into Kate's personal space to make herself feel better.

The frown deepens but any sharp retort Kate might have said is caught in her mouth, somewhere behind the clenching of her jaw. She's had to learn how to keep her tongue, keep her temper... Well, not sweet, not exactly biddable, but leashed. More leashed than she might have otherwise let it.

This woman in front of her, all poised composure and upper-class English vowels, is confusing her. It's an irritating form of confusion, like a burr stuck between stocking and boot.

"Why would you care?" she asks then. There's still a trace of defensiveness in her posture, but mostly Kate's curious now. Confused.

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