Paragon to Pavement 19

Open.

Close.

Five fingers spread themselves out wide, before curling slow into a fist; knuckles popping against callouses as his hand kept on doing what it did. Sky stared down at it, watching the hand like it wasn’t his — thumptip pressing hard into the meat of his palm where the blue had sat just this morning.

The blue had held too.

Actually held. Not like the usual sad little match flicker that died the second he stopped focusing on it, either. Blue. A whole two times and longer than it had in forever, it had held for him.

For her.

The second one hurt like a bitch, tank scraped clean all the way to the bottom. He knew what was coming next after that, even as he did his best to keep his hands from shaking. No matter how much self-control he brought to bear, it didn’t do a thing to keep his body from betraying  him anyway as his gut rumbled loud enough that Prism almost swerved off the road.

With a loud-ass “Damn, nigga”, it didn’t take much to convince the woman to stop for a Gigaburger — after she threw some jokes his way of course — but three sandwiches and six sugar cookies later, Sky couldn’t even care about any of that.

It stayed lit.

A whole month of stressing his ass out on that balcony, gutted washer strapped to his back with rope as he chased that pilot light like some King’s Row junkie fiending for a fix. Thirty-odd days of the same nothing, and some kid lights up and he does the same on demand.

Makes no damn sense.

Unless…

Unless the whole time the problem wa— “Sorry, sweetheart, just gonna—”

Sky’s whole body went rigid as a forearm came down past his ear, shoulders already dropping before he caught the clipboard tucked under one arm and the headset around the radio tech’s neck. The woman leaned across him, two fingers adjusting the microphone arm firmly in front of his face.

“Gotta bring this a little higher for you. Taller than our last guest.” She twisted the boom, moving the whole of the thing until it was level with his mouth. “Now, you just talk right into this thing, okay? Not over, too many are always doing that.”

Sky blinked at her. “Got you.”

“And don’t touch the board.” The woman waved a finger his way as she backed herself out of the booth. “Don’t let him get you to touch the board.”

Sky nodded back before the door finally sealed behind her and he was left with the hum of dead air, walls foamed up under all those gray wedges, equipment droning low in the booth soundproofed to all hell. Blue eyes flicked up to the glass leading to the control room where clipboard lady vanished to, thick glass right behind a particleboard table.

The ‘ON AIR’ sign blared red, bright and big, the ugly scarlet wash thrown over half the booth as it buzzed its own neon undertone different from the rest of the room.

“We’re back, Torrance!”

And, across the table, sat the whole reason he was here. “It’s your boy with the beats, Danny ‘The Bone Zone’ Diaz, coming at you live today with another special on your favorite station, KBRZ 105.5 — The Breeze!” 

The client himself sat there with his snapback on backwards, a little bit of black hair poking out through the hole. Gold sat on six out of ten fingers, even more of the stuff around the skinny man’s neck, and somehow none of it managed to be as distracting as the shirt he wore — the material loud enough to probably get him a noise ordinance if he wasn’t locked in a soundproof box most of the day.

“Today… okay, okay, listen, I got a treat for the good little listeners at work and at home because today we’re getting into the grit and the grift of things.” Eyebrows waggled up and down, both of the bushy things nearly vanishing under the cap. “The controversy behind the capes. Yeah, you know what I’m about, people. The absolute insanity in our local hero gig economy, broseph.”

Sky blinked at the man across from him.

“Because—” Diaz leaned in, one hand gripping his mic like he’d been separated from it for years at war. “And I’m telling you this because you already know…”

Then… Sky’s mouth turned down into a frown. Then why are you telling them?

“I’m telling you because people are already saying it so it’s not just me, right?” The shock jock let out a little laugh, the sound venturing off into high-pitched by the second breath. “I’m not the mean one here when I say the SDN, right? That Superhero Dispatch Network, the wackos out the Windy City, gave us all a good deal, you know? You pay a premium and they’ll always have a hero ready for you, right? Keep your streets nice and beautiful, all of it a dream.”

The man clicked his tongue a few times, head shaking in time with the sound. “Until you go over the fine print with a comb, ‘mano. Till you find out that they’re putting criminals out there, to protect us. All the good people supposedly being protected by the not-so-good people, make it make sense, right?”

Prove him wrong. Robert had said as much this afternoon, not too long after he got back from the fire job with Prism. Just speak like a hero.

It was better than anything Blazer would probably have said, that too-bright smile still burning in his mind’s eye. Just be yourself, Sky.

Ughhh, prove him wrong… With what, though?

He was two days into this whole Z-Team thing and all he’d done was lose a fight and get dips called on him like the last slice of pizza. The whole program was filled with people he would have drop-kicked into traction just two years ago with a smile on his face; from superpowered arsonist to a drug-addict were-bat and — of course — the unrepentant assassin.

That’s the roster. The rehabilitated crop that was Torrance’s Phoenix Program that he was supposed to sell to a guy who loved the sound of his own voice.

Danny chose that moment to slam the board and Sky sat up straight as sound went right through his headset like someone drove a spike into his ear. His hips almost came right off the seat, hands clasping tight at his thighs as all the muscles in his spine locked from the tailbone up.

Air horns. It was just air horns.

Not a dropship, nothing Rikti— just air horns.

Apart from the sound of his own voice, Diaz also loved air horns.

“Yeah, that’s right. We’re talkin’ bout Phoenix Program again. No drama, just facts — straight up and pipin’ hot, people! The SDN taking certified villains — I’m talking bank robbin’, civilian killin’, tax evadin’ villains — and putting an SDN patch on their asses before slappin’ them out the door to get back out in the world with the rest of us. These parolees even got a name too, if you can believe it. Z-Team, which is…” Diaz snorted, eyes closed. “On point as I’ve ever heard. You know somebody got paid to come up with that.”

The man laughed out loud, hips twisting in his chair before he bothered to finally look up and over at Sky. “And, wouldn’t you know it, I managed to round up one of the local losers themselves, because sitting across from me right now, live in studio, is Dispatch’s newest addition to our local psychos. And he goes by…”

The chains swung as he leaned forward, clearly waiting for something.

Half-lidded eyes, blue as his hero name, closed shut fully for a full second and enjoyed the dead air with all the spite he had in him. “...Sky.”

“Sky!” The pen in his hand spun as he parroted the name back, Danny propping his chin up on two fingers as he smirked over the name. “Talk about a name. What, not a fan of Dirt? Or Water? Or Flame? Well, I mean, I guess your teammate already got that last one on lock. How is Flambae anyway? He melt any parking meters outside a Trader Joe’s recently?”

“...I don’t know what a Trader Joe’s is.”

Diaz’s smile almost fell fully off his face for a second, before the man caught himself and laughed it off enough to fight even another instant of dead air. “Talk about a jokester, man. So, Skyboy, before we start, you got any questions for the Baron of Boners himself?”

Baron of…

Those eyes dropped back to half-mast again, a sigh held back as Sky spoke. “One.”

“Ooooh, you hear that, folks?” Diaz leaned into the mic again. “He’s got one question for the main man. I bet this’ll be good. What’s your question, kid?”

Sky stared back at him. “...is this supposed to make you likeable?”

Unlike his second answer, this one didn’t even trip the man as he snorted again. “Well, it pays my mortgage, so that’s as far as I gotta care.”

…huh. Sky could only nod to that. “Fair.”

“Speaking of fair, talk to me, Skyguy, straight up, mano a mano, hombre to hombre, how does your company justify putting my safety — my personal, physical safety, my moms lives in this city by the way — in the hands of felonious freaks like yourself?”

Sky looked at the mic.

Then back at the host. “Mom. What? No wife, no kids?” An eyebrow went high. “At your big age? You a lone wolf or something?”

“More of a sigma male myself.” The shock jock winked his way, a single button-press supplying the twinkling sound effect for that. “I got a girlfriend, though. Great tits. This job paid for those too, if you can believe it.”

Sky blinked slow. “Definitely can.”

“Good, good stuff.” That pen spun again, Diaz’s skinny fingers making it dance. “So how bout you answer mine now that I answered yours. How we supposed to live with SDN doing this Phoenix BS? Just ‘cause they got a nice pitch — fix the freaks — we gotta just bend over and take it? Title of my memoir, by the way.”

Jesus… “I mean…” Sky didn’t bother holding back the sigh this time. “I mean, I’ve only been at it a couple days. Nah, for real, only been in town a month. But honestly…” His tongue passed over his front teeth, a soft noise amplified in the mic. “Do you want powered people spending their time, effort, and abilities doing good or…”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Look, you take any one of these guys.” Sky leaned in, just a bit closer to the mic; the chair complaining under him. “You got… I dunno, ice claws? Say, you got ice claws your whole life and… that ice does one thing always. It scares people. And one day, you scare somebody at a register, or to take a bag of money out a truck, or to get somebody off you. That’s all those hands know how to do, because nobody showed you better…”

“Uh-huh?”

“So, you got that person stuck, sitting in a cell for… six, seven years?” Sky tilted his head to the side, lip twitching against his scars. “Then they walk out? What happens then? Those hands forgot how to be claws? Nobody taught ‘em different, Diaz. You just parked ‘em.”

The shock jock opened his mouth.

“Nah, hold on, man, you asked, like…” Two fingers on the table, Sky shook his head slow. “Now you take the same person and make ‘em spend all their free time pulling a kid out a collapsing building. Or saving a single mom from a car wreck. Or pushing a sinking boat all the way out to shore…”

It’s how you pull ‘em out of red side. “You do it enough times and that hand learns something new.” Sky leaned back in his seat, the chair creaking. “That’s all it does. That’s the whole program right there, the Phoenix.”

That pen spun again, slower. “Beautiful speech there, kid. You should write that down or something.”

“Not doing that.”

“That’s a speech though, man. Tell it to the meter that got melted.”

…Fucking Flambae. Sky only needed to know the flamehead with the missing fingers a whole two days to know that he didn’t like him anywhere near enough to be running defense.

“Better a meter than a person, right?” But here he was doing it anyway. Shit.

Diaz’s smile slid off his face. “...that really your argument?”

“My argument is that he’s doing better, okay?” He licked his lips, unsure of where his actual argument was now. “My argument is that the city gets a new meter and his pay gets docked to pay for it, you know?”

“Oh, great, that’s a— that’s actually a shit deal for the rest of us—” Danny cut himself off, the man flapping a hand at his own board. “If I get you, and let me repeat what you just said to me like it was a real point—”

Fucking Flambae. Blue eyes slid shut.

“—we gotta be at the mercy of some pyro’s temper tantrums because he’s going through rehab at a temp agency for retired supervillains and don’t know no better.”

“Nah.”

“That’s what it sounded like, hombre.”

“You took a whole lot out there, D.”

“I ain’t take nothing out, Skyboy. I’m quoting you.”

“More like a third of me, man. Quoted less than half, like c’mon.” Another click of his tongue echoed into the mic, the hero in the gi turning his head away. “Be fu- I mean, be for real.”

“Hey! Hey! I am the realest motherf-” A press on the soundboard interrupted him with a — “shut yo mouf!” — and Diaz’s smile came back in full force. “In this building. But you can’t tell me you actually believe that. ‘Cause it sounds like you do. None of that sounds like it came off the SDN brochure, man.”

His thumb pressed into his palm, blue still quiet and the dregs still sitting there. Just a few hours ago, a girl lit up like a bonfire had put her hand flat on his and it had held because she needed it to.

Needed him.

“...I believe people need a chance to be better.”

“...and SDN, what about the rest of them?”

Sky frowned at that, the image of that logo on so much of the stuff in his apartment. The same logo on top of the SDN intake dossier he was given a copy of when his probation officer — the Blondest and Blaziest of them all — pulled him out of MegaMax. “...Name one person in the world who likes their boss, man.”

Dead air filled the booth for a long second, neon buzzing over the window still.

“...wooooooow.” Diaz let the word out slow, absolutely dragging the syllable as he ran a hand down the patchy stuff on his jaw. “Dind’t see that one coming, folks. And I had a whole bit ready too. Bits, even.”

Sky blinked slow.

“Even had some airhorns cued up, airhorns I’m not gonna blast out of respect for that last comment.”

“...’ppreciate it.”

“So, for those at home who might be curious, what’d you do to get saddled in with SDN’s loser club?” The gold-wearing shock jock leaned in again. “Tell your new fans listening at home some juicy info. What’s the big crime, Skyguy?”

“...I punched a tank.”

“A tank?”

Sky nodded.

“Alright, sure…” Diaz tilted his head, gold on his hand knocking against the boom as he tilted it closer. “How bout we do something light for the people at home? Hero-in-the-making in the studio, let’s give you a layup. What’s your drink of choice? What's Sky pouring out after a long day of, you know… pulling cats out of trees?”

"…apple juice."

Danny looked at him.

Sky looked back.

"...god, you’re a buzzkill."