Paragon to Pavement 5

Bright and clean. He had to give the place that much. 

Lucius Connor Bright took his first step into the lobby of the building as the doors whispered open, the smell of floor wax and lemon disinfectant just enough to tickle his sensitive nose. 

Whatever other opinion he could pull up about the Torrance branch of the SDN, a simple fact about the place was that it looked almost exactly like a dentist’s waiting room with a bigger budget, as if someone had mashed up a Freedom Corps outpost with a Crey building; no scuffed linoleum, lingering scent of ozone, or scorch marks on the walls. 

As far as he could tell, nobody had ever even fought in here and the idea of some villain using this place as a base to be raided seemed like an impossibility.

A building with this many powered people milling around in it just being a building was almost nice on its own; potted plants that were definitely plastic sitting in the corners, lighting overhead a sterile white buzzing down on his head.

Even still, Sky bit down a frown as the door hissed shut behind him, sealing him in from the humid California morning.

Hands shoved themselves deep into the pockets of his tracksuit, the fabric bunching up over the replica gi hidden underneath his track top and bottom. Electric blue eyes, already exhausted this early in the morning, automatically traced the whole of the space as that same frown nearly forced its way free.

Two exits behind the reception desk. A blind spot near the water cooler.

A reinforced security door to the right corridor.

Okay, fuck it. Sky’s jaw clicked loud as he grit his teeth at the sight of the place. Seems like nobody got shit to do.

Back in Paragon, people were always moving for a reason; hospitals full, sirens blaring, and the sky was choked with heroes launching off rooftops for whatever reason. Even on a light day in Atlas Park, people were training and going somewhere; streets humming with energy because people were still ready to do something. Here, a couple of guys in tailored suits milled around a coffee machine, laughing at something on a tablet.

Breathing in through his nose, Sky forced his shoulders to drop as he walked up to the front reception desk.

“Welcome to the Torrance Superhero D-” The receptionist looked up, the young woman behind the desk in a black headset and blue polo, a customer-service smile on her face for all of a half-second before it lost all strength. A pair of brown eyes snagged on the thick melted wax of the scars wrapping their way around his neck and down his arms, the jagged tracks of discoloration across his face and jawline pulling her attention as well. 

Her gaze didn’t even meet his, her attention far too focused on his skin.

“Phoenix Program.” Sky’s tone flattened instantly, clicking his tongue at the woman to snap her back to normal. “Where’s it at?”

“Uh-uh-uh, I mean…” One manicured finger raised itself high to point out a shaky line towards the left corridor. “D-down…uh, um, hall B, take a right at Accounting, and uhhh, the, um, th-”

“Good looks.” Sky didn’t wait for her brain to kickstart, already turning on his heel as his sneakers squeaked against freshly-waxed tile. Somehow, he couldn’t find it in him to enjoy someone staring down his burns as they tried to manage a whole sentence.

…fuck me. Five minutes later, he was wishing he hadn’t been so quick to give the front-desk girl the mental finger.

Mostly, because he was already completely lost in this place. 

The front-desk girl had pointed him to Accounting. A clerk in Accounting, buried behind a mountain of manila, had barely looked up before she pointed him to Liability. A lady in Liability had sent him all the way down to a dead-end hallway featuring a poster that said SYNERGY SAVES CITIZENS in bold corpo-style font, right above a picture of Blonde Blazer shaking hands with… someone.

“Who thought this was smart?” Sky spat the words to the empty hall, voice bouncing off the drywall as he searched around for a directory. “This place a rat maze for heroes or what?”

He spun around with another click of the tongue, turning the corner as a sigh spilled free, and a-fuck!

Sky blinked, hands almost coming up into fists as he immediately stopped short, soles skidding on the floor to avoid walking face-first into a literal mountain of a man.

Tan skin stretched tall over a body that had never even seen the bottom shelf since it was probably five years old, the guy probably packing enough raw dense muscle in his overbuilt body to bend a steel I-beam over his knee.

And that was assuming the guy didn’t have any powers, either.

Long black hair fell over standard-issue SDN blues, the cut looking tailored for a grizzly that learned to walk upright. Oversized orange wristbands hugged forearms thicker than Sky’s thighs, a massive tribal tattoo curling up one arm the last thing he spotted before he finally saw the guy’s face.

Tank. Definitely a tank. Sky’s eyes traced the guy’s mass one more time, instinct firing before he even did anything. Heavy hitter. Watch the grapple. 

“Brah… what da fak…” 

A chesty baritone rolled through the hallway like a fog learned how to be warm as the giant blinked down at him from a good two feet up. It took another blink entirely before recognition even entered the big man’s eyes as he saw Sky standing there, his breaking into an easy grin that fit perfectly on his face. “Oh, brah. I no see you there.”

“...yeah, no sh-” Sky’s teeth clicked shut almost immediately, the young hero forcing the look into a grin as he stared back up at the Hawaiian giant. “I mean, yeah, not surprised, man.”

“I no see you here before either.” Something about the guy’s words had them come out sounding halfway to a chuckle. “You lost, lil brah?”

Sky looked him up and down. 

Mostly up. 

He’s real. Sky hadn’t talked to a lot of people since he was let out of the SuperMax, the apartment and the grocery store really his two main hubs in the last month of freedom. The only person from the SDN he’d had the chance to even meet was the blondest of Blazers and the woman was so… two-faced.

Not that he’d seen her other face, but he could tell that she was hiding it.

Maybe all that time managing heroes had done something to her soul or maybe she was just a bitch underneath that perfect smile and hair that was literally always in place. It could have just been that celebrity life and all that time spent posing for billboards and doing ads had rotted something inside her.

Who knew?

He definitely didn’t but he could still tell that her fakeness level was off the charts.

This guy wasn’t like that, though.

No posturing, no tension, no nothing.

Just cool bro energy packed into what looked like the human version of a bulldozer.

“Yeah, man.” Sky let his fake grin fall and smiled up at him with a nod. “Lookin’ for Z-Team. Phoenix Program.”

“Phoenix? Ah, da new guy!” A pair of wire-cutters looked like plastic toys in his ham of a hand as he pointed them down the hallway to his left. “Just go down da hall ova dere, take a left by da tech bay. I’m Royd, by da way. If your comms bust, you bring ‘em my way. No worry, we make um work.”

“Sky.” He nodded again. “Good looks, Royd.”

“Ain’t a thing, bruddah.” The man turned back and hunched over to face the wall, a sparked out junction box on the wall right in front of him. “You be good.”

“Got you.”

“Oh, and watch out for da bat,” Royd laughed out Sky’s way as he started heading the way the big man sent him. “He stay talking too much. Try to get your money that way.”

Money? Blue eyes blinked black before narrowing to a squint, Sky glancing back over his shoulder with nothing but confusion written all over his face. What you mean by… 

A second later, he shook his head and just kept moving. Whatever.

With clean instructions, it took him barely a half-minute before he found the door he was looking for this whole time, the one marked Z-TEAM COMMON AREA.

He stopped.

Air hitched in his lungs again as a cold phantom weight clamped down tight around his throat again. He didn’t need to know the exact dimensions of the shock-collar to know the feel of it, the leash he wore almost nonstop for half a year in the SuperMax was a constant visitor to his nightmares and daydreams after all.

Even now, the veins in his neck twitched with nothing around them, memories of the thing being activated when he spoke up to a guard on a bad day or even complained about the food they’d given him. 

Six months. 

Locked in a concrete box, barely able to even feel his powers with the suppression cuffs on, and treated like a rabid dog with that collar because of what happened at that gas station.

Six months. And now he was standing outside a door, ready to be grouped up to play nice with some C-list felons. Fuck me.

He swallowed hard, nothing in his mouth but phantom pressure to force down. He rolled his neck slow, this morning’s exercise still pulling a bit tight at his scar tissue, and plastered the best grin he could manage across his face. Showtime, Blue Sky.

Letting the breath free, his fist bumped the door release.

And was met with a circus.