agoodyarn | @doomed

@doomed_copper

The one nice thing about having more than a few friends in more than a few places was that he could get a flight just about any time or anywhere for anyone to anywhere. The fact that he'd been able to give Zinda a decent amount of warning ahead of time and that nothing had popped up in the mean time meant that he was slipping out of the stone in the at the top of the brownstone just as the small plane settled onto the roof. That he's wearing business casual instead of his usual uniform is because of who's in the plane, namely the guest of honor for at least one meal over the next few days and the visitor that Sand's been excited about for...

Well, pretty much since they'd brought up the idea.

As the ramp descends, he peers into the darkness of the craft, looking for Louise. Or Zinda, at least. He knew Zinda had to be on there.

"How was the flight?"

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She'd given the buxom blonde the once-over when she'd boarded earlier...perhaps a neatly-arched eyebrow was tossed in her direction as well. Can't be too complacent...that's how girls lose their 'investments', she thought to herself while buckling in for the ride. But Zinda turned out to be neither a worry, nor a floozy; she'd proved herself to be a more than deft pilot and was both courteous and the utmost in professional.

When they landed, the redhead disembarked the ship, her face alight with the wonder of just having tried something VERY new. "Why do I feel like I was aboard the Millennium Falcon just now," she grinned. "Flight was fabulous. And landing atop your brownstone like an MI-5 agent? Priceless."

Zinda could be a floozy, enjoyed it as a matter of fact, but Sand had made it clear what and who the transportation was for and she knew how to keep her head on. And when it came to skilled pilots, there weren't many better.

Sand throws off a salute to the cockpit, gets one back, then focuses on Louise with a warm smile.

"I figured you might like the experience," he admits as he reaches out to get an arm around her. "And it saves us both time fighting traffic. Besides, this is just working my way up to asking Alan to teleport you."

...is he kidding? No, not really, but he sort of makes it sound like he is because he is working up to that.

Instinctively, Louise turned to fold herself into the half-embrace, her head resting upon his chest for a few seconds...but when he mentioned the 'T' word, she blanched.

"I suppose I should be asking who 'Alan' is," she started. "But understandably, I am rather wary of my atoms and cells dividing in a not-so-natural way," she put it delicately, yet cheekily.

"Alan is the guy people used to think of when they said Green Lantern, the first one," he says with some pride, "and it's not so much atoms and cells dividing as a flash of green fire and suddenly, you're there. But, you know, we'll get there..."

He offers Zinda another wave before starting to lead Louise towards the roof access door.

"You'll probably get to meet him. He's around today, I think."

"'Green Lantern'," she repeated. "So he wasn't the stuff of legends after all, was he." Being based outside London, and never having been to the States apart from a few symposiums at Quantico, not much was known in the small, green island nation about the American hero. Well--except for those in MI-6, and, well, Louise didn't exactly qualify for clearance at that level.

Once they'd reached the roof access door, the redhead pulled it open and stepped aside. "After you," she quipped cavalierly.

"Well," he offers in reply with a lopsided smile, "I'd still say he is. He's just also flesh and blood."

He nods to her offer before stepping forward and heading down the short stairs, bringing them to a hallway that looks like nothing so much as an apartment complex.

"This is where most of the residents live, up here. Not everyone sticks around, but there's a few people who do."

Well, so was Captain America...the stuff of legends? STILL LEGENDS. Even human ones.

Peering round one of the corners and seeing what looked like a row of council flats like she'd see within the confines of London's various boroughs, she hummed to herself.

"Erm, this doesn't really look like an 'HQ'," she remarked as they made their way down the nondescript hallway. "But I'll bite. Which one's yours?" She had to admit she was eager for a look inside Sand's domicile...if only to see his taste in décor.

"That's cause we're still in the part that's mostly the mansion," he says as he leads her over to an elevator. He presses the down button, as one might expect.

"My place is a couple of floors down. But this is actually where I grew up. Before I donated it, this was the Dodds mansion, one of the oldest buildings on the island."

As the lift descended, Louise eyed him thoughfully. "What was your childhood like in a place like this? Did you have your powers then?"

The lift doors opened, and Louise and Sand stepped out into another hallway. As they walked down the corridor, she peered into a few of the flats whose doors were open...some people were reading, others watching the telly. It was definitely more like a university dorm than it was a domicile for enhanced humans.

That gets a soft laugh and a shake of his head.

"Not so much, no. And to be fair, most of my 'childhood' took place in an orphanage."

He makes a point to wave to one of the girls in one of the rooms, a teenage blond who waved back cheerfully before blinking over at Louise. Then there was a wobble of a hand that said he'd do introductions later before he moved on. The red head in the next room didn't acknowledge them but her... yes, that's a monkey dressed up like flying monkey from the Wizard of Oz.

But the elevator.

"I got adopted when I was a little older. And the powers came up when I was about 14."

She was sure he'd mentioned as much during their blind date, but the redhead's mind was a whirlwind of activity--not even including her regular workload--and now she was processing what seemed to be Sandy's 'base', by all comparisons. An ORPHANAGE. Louise had both parents for only a decade and some change--her father having been killed whilst on the beat, her mum going straight back to work in a reception job--that she could relate to his upbringing was no small feat.

"Something went wrong in a lab, if I recall correctly?" she queried.

"My mentor, Wesley, was working on a silicoid gun to compliment his other gadgets," he says as he holds the door open to the elevator. "He was showing it to me when it exploded."

"Right," she said. "But you never went into much detail as to what happened--the...'process', I guess."

The redhead wondered what he went through--if he was in pain, how he'd coped in the aftermath and became comfortable with his 'new' self. Louise had gone through something similar, though hers was more of a radical mental shift than a physical one like Sand's.

He actually pauses before looking over at her for a moment, considering.

"It's not pleasant." He holds up a finger before- "I'll tell you, but it wasn't- it's all a little- I try not to think about it. I can talk about it, I'm not- I survived and I'm here and I'm fine. But you're not- it's not an idle question, is what I want you to know."

She could understand his moment of reticence, along with fumbling for the precise way to articulate what he'd gone through. Indeed, Louise herself found herself at odds with how to describe the various timelines she'd lived in, particularly how she'd arrived in each one. To be fair, Sand had never asked her much about it, but she'd encountered plenty of people who had. And, like him, it wasn't that she wasn't an open book; rather, she was afraid of, at the least, spooking the person, much less depressing them.

She nodded in response. "Believe me, I completely understand. Everything."

He lets out a slow breath before running a hand through his hair and shaking his head a few times.

"It hurt. A lot. In a way I can't even think of describing. But one minute, I was a normal 14 year old kid, and then I'm twice that size and rock and my nerve endings are screaming."

One minute, I was a 30 year-old, green Detective Constable, and then I was dead in a pool of grey water in a warehouse car park, nerves shutting down, she thought. One minute, I was a 30 year-old, green Detective Constable, and then I was dead in my barricaded flat on the eve of the millennium, empty bottles of lorazepam and Cabernet next to me, nerves quieting at last, the endless sleep on its way.

Her reverie broke for a moment as she gazed at him, blinking. Louise never remembered feeling pain, only numbness; the one cavernous difference between them.

"When did it STOP?" she queried softly, referring to the debilitating, crippling torture.

"After a few minutes," he admits quietly as they make their way down, "but by then, Wes had dosed me with sleep gas to try and contain me. He thought he was putting me to sleep but really, it just made it so I couldn't move."

The doors open on a different floor and he braces one to make sure she can get out without hassle.

"Put me in a nice containment cell, he thought to keep me from 'rampaging' though... it wasn't really like that. And he tried to work to fix me."

He's not looking at her.

"That was about for forty, fifty years or so."

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@doomed_copper

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