Kita MacGruder
From DirtyWiki
Contents |
Out of Character
Rue actually started playing Kita in DL in 2006.
In Character
Specifics
Full Name: Kitessa Frederica Winola MacGruder
Nickname(s): Kita, to the point where that's what she gives as a name. Kay, to family. Spinner at work. Tons of pet names. Also Skippy.
Species: Human
Birthdate: 11 June, 1978
Birthplace: Richmond, Virginia, USA
Hometown: Arlington, Virginia, USA
Currently Resides: 13 Reston Place, Hyde Park, London, England
Family: Father, Andrew. Mother, Renée Montag. Siblings, Orane, Elisabeth, Dagny, Vala, Emory, Torin, Bernard, Clay, Abdiel, Tremaine and Lambourn. Husband, Lindsey O'Gevany. Everyone else, on both sides.
Sexuality: Straight. Mostly.
Relationship Status: Married to Lindsey O'Gevany (as of 7 July, 2007)
Schooling: Armstrong High School, Quantico
Occupation: Interpol Liason to the Metropolitan Police Technical (currently).
Detailed Information
Physical Description
She is 5'2", with bright blue eyes and freckles and long red hair. She's quite slender but not at all too skinny, and doesn't seem at first blush at all to be half of what she really is. She's also a really, really awful clutz.
Being a Marine, one may expect her to have tattoos, which she does, but they're not nearly as extravagant as most. The obligatory anchor-and-wings interpretation most Corpsmen have is there, very small, on her left arm. The more interesting one is the Tyr rune in the small of her back - simple and meaningful, if you ask her.
Personal Information
Military. Military is a very good way to describe her. Also eccentric – she's a coder, first off, and her talents actually are mostly related to a natural inclination toward working with computers that is occasionally referred to as supernatural. It's not. There is nothing supernatural about it. Kita is airily sociable when she chooses, incredibly oddball in others, 99% stringent in most, incredibly clumsy, and a hopeless romantic with a compulsive fear of relationships and betrayal. She's a spectrum.
Due to being a full-time member of Interpol, Kita is fluent in English, Spanish, Arabic and French. Because of her family, she also speaks a wide variety of German, though she's not of the level of her Montag cousins who actually lived in Germany.
Due to being a member of the US Marine Corps and a graduate of Quantico, she's also fully trained in weaponless combat and can speak Esperanto.
Since being basically cornered and tricked into giving up alcohol altogether cold turkey by Lindsey, Kita's been drinking a messy non-alcoholic-but-man-does-it-taste-like-it-has-alcohol in it concoction created by Nancy Armin. Therefore, while it could be said that her choice drink is the Asterix Cocktail, she does have a fondness for the hair of the goat that the dog bit while chasing someone else.
Backstory
By the time Kita Frederica Winola MacGruder was born on June 11, 1978, her parents Andrew MacGruder and Renée Montag already had four children. That didn't, however, in the span of her lifetime, stop them from having quite a few more. However, the birth of any of her twelve siblings doesn't really pertain to Kita, so much.
Early childhood for Kita wasn't anything exceptional – as a military brat with a Quantico-associated mother and quite a few siblings already, days growing up in Arlington were pretty boring. She was put through music lessons and taught to ride a horse, but besides that, all she really did was tool around with Quantico's safe-deemed computers.
It was when it was time for Kita to attend high school that the family relocated to Richmond, Renée taking up a job in the area. Kita, along with three of her siblings, were enrolled in Armstrong High School (Orane was a bit old, and the triplets and Abdiel went to elementary school; Addison was too young to even be in school at all) where she continued her pattern of not really making friends with anyone outside of other barrack brats she knew from Quantico due to a subtle level of social ineptitude. However, she did meet a few people in ROTC – she had known since the age of twelve that following in her father's Marine footsteps was in her future, and her uncanny ability with computing and technology made her a favourite for those attempting to pioneer military computing systems. Unfortunately for her, Kita's prodigious nature in those areas made it difficult for her to excell equally or even fairly in some other areas. Her social life was mostly nonexistent, and she rarely even bothered with the arts.
Therefore, many people were surprised when at 17 and a junior at Armstrong Kita demonstrated a secondary talent in the foreign area of singing, something her parents had attempted to train her in as a young girl but she hadn't seemed too interested in following.
But when she did try, Kita was good. Surprisngly good. Halfway through her junior year Kita started performing at the Boardroom, Quantico's second floor bar for agents and Marines. This she continued to do through her years in Marine training and local service, which began immediately after her graduating of high school. Quantico's Academy served as Kita's university; she has no degree and sees no shame in it.
While serving, Kita met a Department of Defense agent named Haldean Harper, and was reuinited with lone high school friend Spencer Carlin, who had joined the Navy. Kita and Carlin have remained eternally best friends since then, and Kita and Harper's history has been ... interesting.
They started out as co-workers and slightly as rivals, and this involved into a friendship as he, frequently referred to as Dean but called 'Ha' by Kita (who he in turn called Kay), began dating Kita's sister Elisabeth. It was also early in Kita's 21st year that she fell into drinking as an escape from stress. In November of 1999, during one of her drunken episodes, Kita and Dean ended up sleeping together. He claimed he had always been rather infatuated with her, and she doubted this, feeling that she'd done nothing but betray Lis. Dean, however, told Elisabeth about it all himself, and attempted to keep Kita, who couldn't deny a strong attraction to the strange foreign man, as his own.
This effort became more difficult when Kita discovered, to her horror, that she was pregnant. Only 21, a Marine lieutenant and a frequent drinker, Kita informed Haldean that she was definitely having an abortion. He was saddened and disheartened by this, but he was also absolutely devoted to his Kay, who he knew was also a physical force to reckon with, and he didn't attempt to change her mind. She changed her mind, though, two or three times, but in the end, it didn't actually matter. This, however, strained the relationship that the two were attempting to develop, and feeling uncomfortable and trapped, Kita left him.
Shortly after that, she was deployed to East Timor with the USS Panache, whose naval crew included none other than Spencer Carlin. Upon her return to Virginia, though, Kita almost immediately ran into Haldean again. The eight months without even speaking to him made her forget a lot of the pain and made him even more devoted than he had been. Haldean had fallen hard, he said, and hadn't even thought of another woman throughout their time apart.
Moved by his romanticism and devotion, Kita agreed to try again. She didn't, however, cease the only escalating drinking – if anything, alcohol continued to be Kita's only escape from the harsh realities of her stressful position. Neither Spencer nor Haldean or anyone else very close to her realized she was drinking herself into a hole.
The drinking didn't manage to get much worse, though, until shortly after asking Kita to marry him, Haldean had a one-night stand with another woman. He claimed when confronted that his reasoning was that he had suddenly become "uncertain in his future with her." Spencer found out and immediately informed Kita. She was so heartbroken that night, all her ideals shattered, that she almost drank herself to death. If her sisters hadn't phoned that evening after hearing about it, Elisabeth seeming unsurprised but not wanting to really say anything due to Kita's present emotional state, she may not have pulled through. But Kita wasn't suicidal – she was just sad, and the drinking was just her protection, her safe haven. No one contested this, either. She was just upset. Isolated incident.
Two days later, Kita told Haldean point blank that that was that, and they were over. Again. No wedding. No second – third – chance. He had hurt her too deeply, more deeply than most people would be affected by something like this; she'd put all of the trust she had in him and he'd broken it. Someone used to the camraderie of the barracks just couldn't take that. And yet, they ran into one another every now and then. They worked in close proximity. The physical attraction was difficult to cope with, and yet that wasn't the primary reason that when in 2002 and both Kita and Spencer were invited to join a central team on computing at Interpol headquarters, they both went. The primary reason really was the work: she loved what they wanted her to be doing, and Spencer was equally as intrigued by what the world's highest policing department had enlisted him to do. It turned out, too, that they would end up as teammates and sometimes even partners. The distance from Haldean was, for Kita, an extended bonus.
While the drinking problem didn't go away, it certainly didn't worsen and even ebbed a little once Kita moved to Lyons. Upon her arrival she began to intensely study the two official Interpol languages she didn't already know (Arabic and more importantly due to location, French). Quick learners, both Kita and Spencer picked them up fairly quickly.
About six months after the move, Kita tried again with a serious romantic relationship – with a neighbor in her building. As with all previous ties to other people, it was difficult for Kita to interpret many romantic moves and social signals, and yet this man's impatience with her occasional social ineptitude didn't result in dumping, frustration, difficulty or physical abuse; this particular relationship became one of total emotional manipulation on his part. When her teammates Brady, Adam, Marcus and of course Spencer figured this out, they pooled funds to get Kita a new flat and distanced her from the man. Once she moved yet again, the drinking worsened slightly after the impact of change, and Kita began to wear sunglasses almost constantly, even inside. Relationships and connections, she'd determined, weren't for her, and if eyes were the gateway to the soul, after all, she didn't want anyone being able to look into hers.
Moving had another benefit, though – during the move itself, a badly-angled couch nearly crushed her foot, and Kita foot and all was rescued by JD Monet, who since that day has been a very very close friend to her indeed.
Life got a lot easier after she decided against dating; after all, Haldean had made years of her life difficult, and it took all of her team as well as in her eyes the alcohol to save her from a serious flaw in decisionmaking when it came to people. Obviously, it was outside human connections that were spoiling things for her, and she was a tough and dangerous person anyway. (The latter was genuinely true as well as being a mental conception.)
She became involved in case after case, and while she still ran into Haldean a few times due to work, the only intensity between them was the physical attraction and the fact that he still had strong feelings for her. Mostly, Kita managed to avoid it, to avoid thinking about it or feeling unsettled by it, but just when she would become fully comfortable with the way life was, Haldean would pop up again. For the most part, though, she wasn't entirely comfortable, and didn't run into him all that often. The caseload continued to be the same intrigue of fugitive-apprehending and crime tracking using computerized connections, and she and the team developed strong ties and firm patterns as they continued to settle into a life of travel-and-stay that worked perfectly for them.
Things got stirred up again, though, when in late 2006 Kita had to travel to London due to the fact that a bombing suspect she'd been involved with previously had acted again, detonating a cellular phone bomb in the Greater London mortuary. While in London, Kita stayed with her cousin Lydia, who she was fond of calling 'Spot' (it was Lydia who started the nickname of Spinner, as well), and avoiding a horse and carriage crash incident in a park that may have been either Regents or St James, she met Lindsey O'Gevany. The two of them ended up meeting more than once; the second time at a ballet that Kita and newfound friend Ezra Thacker went to – and they ended up talking, kissing and then it culminated in Kita's spending that evening sleeping on Lindsey's couch and sneaking out in the morning.
A day after that, she and the rest of the boys met him again at a diner. They all made fun of her, for the most part. And a week later, Kita ended up in Berlin where, unsurprisingly, she met Haldean again. They were staying in hotel rooms next door to each other, and spent hours and hours together, getting drinks and talking and even kissing, quite a few times. Kita wasn't surprised; she'd just started to develop feelings for Lindsey when there he was again. But the decision was made to distance themselves again, as the two of them always would despite the fact he loved her dearly and she'd always have lingering feelings for him. It was important to Kita. And Kita told Haldean a bit about Lindsey – shockingly, he gave her encouragement, something that neither she nor Spencer were expecting.
A week later, dispatched to Grand Cayman, Kita and Spencer and Adam were attempting to apprehend an old-time fugitive, tax-hopper Thomas Nolan, when an errant gunshot led to a social riot and Kita got a bullet lodged in her shoulder and admitted to the hospital. The doctors didn't really enjoy having Kita and Spencer on the premises, as they had developed an annoying habit of making long phone calls and noise and generally horrifying other patients, but life was life. They left the Caymans on January 29th and were barely back in Lyon a week before another return to London was neccessitated.
Being related to a murder at an international convention, no one really minded, but by the time Kita and Adam got to the scene, she realized that she was more connected to this little group than she'd expected, because it was Ezra who was running the show. Or had been, until he'd become either overwhelmed or hypnotically suggested or perhaps both, and Dorothea Jordan took over the show.
Kita went to talk to Lindsey again, in the middle of the investigation, and met his sister, which was fairly awkward indeed. She also ended up asking him to the policeman's ball, an affair she certainly hadn't wanted to go to, but went to all the same.
And at a meeting at the townhouse with local associates on the investigation, the group of them - that is to say, Adam, Kita, Spencer, Bertrand, Vaughn, Warner and eventually also Ezra, Antonia Lindale, Carlton Lindale, JD and Lindsey (the last of whom was invited by Spencer) traveled to America to track down a suspect. They caught the metaphorical scent of Timothy Nolan as well, which precipitated an awkward call to Haldean.
Thankfully, the trip went off without too many hitches, and one of the only troubles was getting the truck from her uncles (she had to introduce everyone else to them) as well as the fact that one night while driving, Kita had a petit mal seizure. Lindsey noticed. Oops.
She didn't explain the seizures until after they were all back in London, and after having a second in a restaurant, Lindsey cornered her into telling him what had happened. In return for that secret, he proposed to her, and then after her nervous waffling in Esperanto, told her his other secret. The one about occasionally turning into a jaguar.
Let's just say Kita didn't take it well.
But after a few days of being drunk, insane, overdosed on Nembutal and spending time with two brothers, a sister-in-law and her cousins, Kita went back to see Lindsey and Mina, and ran into family friends who scared the hell out of her as well. She did, however, manage to accept the idea that she was going to marry Lindsey. Slowly. Jack, JD and Spencer could be thanked for the encouragement.
They were stuck in London until the end of March, cleaning things up on that case, and just as soon as the group were ready to get going again, a couple of things happened. The first was that they were all given a week's vacation. The second was that Kita, who had put herself back on the list, not ever thinking she'd end up attached to someone like Lindsey, found out that the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing's Light Helicopters were deploying 200 troops, and they'd really appreciate that if one of those troops was her. And it's hard to say no to the commandant.
Wait, let's make that three things.
Lindsey's cousin disappeared, and – no, hang on, let's make that four things. Lindsey's cousin disappeared, and Kita found herself flying two O'Gevanys back to Mexico City for a few days. They took a detour at 102 Geiger, also known as the "House of Flying Daggers," where Mina and Lindsey got to meet quite a bit of Kita's family. Tremaine thought Lindsey was just about the greatest thing ever – but then again, he had since he played a piece by the man in music school about a year previously.
The fourth thing, though, is how he managed to corner her into giving up alcohol cold turkey a few days before they departed. She owes part of her sanity still to Ezra, who thought of giving her spiked tea at 4am when she hadn't slept in a week. Very kind man.
But even though Clay ended up with a terrible crush on Mina while in Quantico, and some interesting revelations were made about Vala's husband, things really only got weirder for Kita when they actually got to Mexico. Running in to an old adversary or two made things a little bit sticky.
She managed, though, and the whole lot of them managed for some time. Clay's coming back to visit Kita in France later in the year to help her with a transfer to the London office as Interpol-SCD liason led to a car crash and a stickier situation that landed Clay with a girlfriend in Lindsey's sister, despite the fact he already had one. However they sorted that out, though, didn't concern Kita any. She knows only the vaguest of details, and that something her brother did changed something in the Mecatl family business. (His clinic also got a new front door.)
The transfer was mostly, if not entirely seamless; the only difficulty was the settle in to SCD and having do deal with the fact that just after getting married she'd have to go off to a base in the Middle East.
A big surprise came on Kita's 29th birthday. Well, no, that's not true – more than one big surprise. The first came in a phone call to the SCD office from Vala, who calmly reported that she and Clay were at the airport, and if Kita would please stop by and pick them up and then swing by the train for Bernard, that would be lovely. The second surprise, which the triplets and Emory and his girlfriend Rita Sayles were all in on, was that Lindsey, Mina, Jess and Marisa had put an Olympic-pool-sized lake in the basement. (Sub-basement four, specifically.)
Life proceeded to relax again, after that, and Kita got to spend her evenings in a mockup aircraft carrier the size of a sailboat, and possibly also in a sailboat, which sometimes came downstairs. It was a good way to relax, reading or typing or coding something and floating around in water and sometimes watching Lindseycat or his sister fish koi with their teeth. She'd started to get used to the jaguars, helped along by Lindsey's deciding to be "helpful" and growl in her ear on occasion.
Kita left for her family's home again on June 28th. By July 2nd, it had been made clear to her that Lindsey was miserable without her, and her parents extended the invitation to attend the family's 4th of July party to him as well as Mina, Marisa and Jess, as the three of them had essentially become family anyway. They showed up on the third with a kitten, who eventually, after some trouble with the airport and Orane and Simon, went to Tremaine. An exchange between Lindsey and Haldean at the party led to an uncomfortable fight; this was remedied by going to blow things up. Clay's MRE bombs (aptly nicknamed Multiplicatively Reflective Explosions by Lindsey and upping the list of "alternative meanings of MRE" yet again) were a big hit.
July 5th had Kita in a panic. Two days before her first attempt to get married – well, nobody talks about that, which is why it hasn't actually shown up in her backstory, but let's just say it didn't go well. Two days before her second attempt, Haldean slept with her best female friend (the very same Lauren Meyer who dated Lindsey while undercover and was presently staying with the family) and they split. This was two days before the third try, the one that was supposed to be a charm, and she suffered a minor breakdown of sense. Jack Armin is the right person to have around when you're suffering a breakdown of sense, and Kita's matron of honor fixed things fairly well indeed, partially by convincing Kita she was right and then setting off with her and Ezra in tow to somewhere for a bachelorette party of a sort, meeting JD and Ezra there.
The wedding itself did not, in fact, go off without a hitch. There were several hitches, in fact. The first incident was Tonqui's becoming sick. The second incident was the loss of Kita's father. The third incident was the fact that Lindsey's mother ended up shoved aside by a few nervous MPs when the President came by and they didn't want him to actually see a cartel queen, despite the fact he probably wouldn't recongize her. The fourth was that when Mina went to look for Andrew and Tonqui, Tonqui returned and they couldn't find her – and then she got in an argument with Teyacapan and could barely get her to come back outside without yelling. (Tonqui tried to hide again. Jesus and Kita stopped him.) The fifth involved the fact that neither Kita nor Lindsey had actually written vows. Following that, there was a loss of a cake, boldly rescued by Connor Griffen in cat form and hunted down by Kita, Lindsey and Claire Camden trailing behind him. (Spencer, Lauren and Skeet Corrigan confessed to having stolen it.)
Kita and Lindsey left that Monday for their honeymoon at a middle-of-nowhere house in Baja California owned by Lindsey's uncle, and she's enjoying the last of her days there before having to go back to sort things out at the SCD, take a week and then go to war (again).
She went, in the end of July - and came back on September 29, a week after something went wrong at the base. Having gotten hit on the head with fallen debris, Kita is trapped at home convalescing until she's got the use of her right eye back. She's not allowed to do much, which upsets her, and probably secretly amuses her family.
Backstory: Simplified
Kita was born in 1978, the fifth child of what would eventually become fourteen. She spent the majority of her life in Virginia, knowing she'd have a military career almost as soon as she knew what a career was – and hadn't expected the few years spent singing, but welcomed them. Her best friends in high school, Spencer Carlin and Lauren Meyer both entered Quantico service also – Kita became a Marine, Spencer joined the Navy and Lauren entered the FBI under HIDTA.
She met Haldean Harper in 1998 for the first time, and by 1999, he was her sister's boyfriend. By the end of 1999, he was Kita's boyfriend, instead, and the two of them were expecting a child. Abortion was reccomended when Kita's epilepsy came into play; she told Haldean at first she would, then vacillated, thought about refusing and by the fifth month of her pregnancy it was decided for her. This split the two of them apart, and Kita took off on missions, then to Interpol (along with Spencer). She and Haldean actually got back together two or three times, and almost married once or twice, but never did.
Another difficult relationship happened when Kita first lived in Lyon, and a year later her partner and some other co-workers conspired to move her out and into a new building, where she met the third of her closest friends, JD Monet, who saved her from a couch. An incident with a bomb and a cellular phone took Kita to London in 2006, where she met a delightful cast of characters including the Belgravia Station group (admittedly she'd known Alexander Fierch for years and had worked with Ryan Bertrand and Cary Vaughn-Blair once before), Ezra Thacker, Sidney Remy, Nancy Armin, Jack Armin (who also turned out to become a Very Very Dear Friend, as well as a close-to-lookalike) and most notably Lindsey O'Gevany (and later his sister Mina).
Lindsey, like JD, saved Kita from a flying object. Unlike JD, Kita was decidedly attracted to him almost instantly. A comedy of errors proceeded, ending the two of them in a relationship that culminated when Lindsey proposed on February 28, 2007. Kita at first was gobsmacked, then almost answered, and then Lindsey showed her the fact he turned into a jaguar, sometimes. Which scared her, and it took them another three days to finalize their engagement.
Amongst work-related chaos, dreams about the Marlborough Diamond, her cousin Lydia's boyfriend's stalker, and their siblings also ending up together, though, the two of them managed not to break up and were actually married on July 7, 2007. (The date was chosen due to the fact that it was a string of numbers that Lindsey could remember, and Rue and Beth knew nothing about Eva Longoria's plan to marry the same day.)
She went to war again at the end of the month, got "slightly mangled" (Clay's words) in an unexpected explosion when she wasn't even supposed to be seeing combat that week, won another Purple Heart and got sent home, plus a promotion to Major that she doesn't know about yet.
External Links
Kita's LJ
Currently 153! Things About Kita, being updated off and on
Interpol, where Kita worked first as an FBI liason and now as one for the SCD
Charge of This Post, Kita's journal from October 1999 to February 2001
