Disclaimer: All characters and the immediate backstory belong to Kenner and a bunch of animation studios. Character backstory belongs to me.

Author Note: This is just a little something inspired directly by the episode The Oz Effect, and is set a few days after the end of the episode.

Author Note 2: This fits into my version of the MASK universe (as set up in The Coming Storm et al), but is not directly related to any of those stories; it's purely stand-alone.

With many thanks to freespirit127 for editing, feedback and patient hand holding - to say nothing of pointing me in the right direction!

Masquerade

Sarah Johnson was nervous.

It wasn't a feeling she was all that used to dealing with: She'd mostly gone through life with the utmost confidence. In High School, she'd been voted "Most Likely To Succeed"; in college she'd graduated Magna Cum Laude and had successfully led a fight against the college administrators over the closure of the college fine arts building. Her daily life saw her speak to hundreds of people, from lowly tribespeople in the Amazon basin to top presidential aids and diplomats. At no time was she ever nervous.

So what the hell was she nervous about now?

He was just a mechanic. Just the guy who fixed her oil leaks and helped her out when she got a flat. Just the guy who'd somehow been there to rescue her when those masked goons had kidnapped her.

That was what made her nervous. In one crazy week, he'd gone from being no-one to being someone and it didn't make any sense to Sarah. What had he been doing there? Why had he been dressed to blend in with the natives?

She reached up to knock on the apartment door.

Why couldn't he have stayed in his neatly labelled pigeonhole?

The door opened and she half expected him to be dressed in the coveralls she more normally saw him in. But he wasn't. He was wearing jeans and a faded green button down shirt. His feet were bare and his hair looked even more untidy than normal.

"Uh, hi?" Sarah ventured.

One corner of his mouth turned up in a half-smile. "Sarah. Figured you'd be by sometime."

Sarah blinked. "You did?"

The other corner of his mouth quirked upwards and he grinned. "Sure. Guess you've probably got a few questions." He opened the door wider. "You want to come in?"

This wasn't at all how she'd imagined it to be. She'd imagined he'd fob her off, or flat out lie and say it hadn't been him. But he'd all but admitted it. Admitted it – and invited her in as well. Was he actually going to explain? Sarah blinked again. He'd just jumped pigeonholes again and done it so seamlessly.

What was he?

"Or, y'know, we could just stand here, staring at each other," he joked, and belatedly Sarah realised they were still standing on his doorstep.

She blushed. "Uh, sorry. I--- I guess I'm---"

"Figure it ain't every day you get up close and personal with a bunch of rattlesnakes." He smiled. "You've got every right to be kinda shaken up." He gestured for her to come in. "I got coffee on the hot plate, if you want some."

Mustering her self-possession, Sarah nodded. "Sure; thank you."

The apartment wasn't how she imagined, either. There was one main room, split into two chunks by the front door. To her left was a small but scrupulously clean kitchen area. A stove, a few cupboards and a sink, with a small circular table and a couple of chairs comprised its sum. To her right was a lounge area. A big couch took up one side; a small entertainment centre, with an armchair either side, occupied the other. There was a homespun Indian rug spread over the floor and the couch was almost entirely hidden under a welter of papers and books. The walls were bare, save for a charcoal drawing of two kids, hanging just above the entertainment centre. She didn't recognise the girl in the picture, but the boy was unmistakable.

"How do you take your coffee?" he asked, dragging her attention away from the details of his life and back to the here and now.

"Oh, uh, with cream – if you have it."

He chuckled. "Sure do."

Sarah watched as he poured to cups of coffee from the jug on the hot plate. Then she glanced back at the couch. "I wasn't interrupting anything, was I?"

"Just trying to catch up on my filing," he answered. "Nothing that won't keep a while longer." He waved a hand to one of the kitchen chairs. "Have a seat."

She sat and he placed one of the coffees in front of her. "Thank you."

He just smiled and took up a seat of his own. "How are you doing?"

Sarah looked down at her coffee. "OK, I guess. Mostly."

"You are allowed not to be, you know?"

"Dr Clay keeps looking at me like I might break," Sarah retorted, suddenly and irrationally angry. "So no, I'm not allowed to be 'not OK'. I'm supposed to be fine. I'm supposed to just carry on like nothing goddamn happened."

"But something did happen and you're not fine," he answered softly. "You were kidnapped and held prisoner by some class A goons and---"

"Hate snakes," Sarah muttered. "Can't stand them." She shivered, slopping coffee from her cup onto the table. "Been seeing them every single time I close my eyes." She studied the spilt coffee. "Am I ever gonna stop seeing them?"

"Give it time," he answered.

"How much time?"

"I don't have all the answers, Sarah." He sounded like he was smiling. "But I can recommend someone you can talk to, if you need it."

Sarah's head snapped up and she now stared at him. He'd jumped pigeonholes again. Why couldn't he just stay put? "You've seen a shrink?"

He grinned, although there was something very plastic about it – as if he were grinning for her benefit rather than out of real amusement. "Everyone needs help sometimes, Sarah."

"What was it for you?" she asked before she could censor the question.

For a second, she thought he wouldn't answer. But then he leapt pigeonholes once more. "There was an accident, about six months ago. Someone got hurt and I knew it wasn't my fault, but as the guy who fixes the vehicles…" He trailed off and shrugged.

"You blamed yourself," Sarah realised.

"It was about nine kinds of wrong," he said. "I wasn't even involved in it; I just got to see it happen right in front of me, and kept seeing it right in front of me."

"And did the shrink help?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "Yeah, she did."

There was an awkward silence. Sarah sipped what was left of her coffee. She'd come expecting to be fed bullshit, but instead he was answering her questions and jumping from label to label like some sort of demented Tarzan. Every time she thought she'd got who he was nailed down, he moved. It was almost like trying to look at a holograph: Tilt it one way and see a flat image, tilt it another and see it take on colour and depth.

"So what do you want to know?" he asked, shifting yet again.

And suddenly, Sarah knew the question she had to ask: "Who are you?"

He smiled, then huffed in laughter and ducked his head. "Some days, I'm not sure I even know any more. There's the mechanic, up at the gas station; there's the sometime thief; there's the spy; there's the agent working for MASK to defeat VENOM; there's the guy who wishes, more than anything else, that he'd done things differently. They're all me."

She blinked. Confused. "But which one of them's the real Buddy Hawks?"

He shrugged. "All of them. None of them. I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

There was another awkward silence.

"Imagine you're cold," he said suddenly.

Sarah frowned. "What? But---"

He held up a hand. "Humour me."

She gave him a dubious look. "All right."

"You're cold, so you pull on a sweater. The sweater's not enough, so you pull on a coat. The coat's not enough, so you find something else and something else, and something else. Being the mechanic wasn't enough. Being the spy wasn't enough. Being the MASK agent wasn't enough. The thief wasn't enough and regretting some of the shit I've done sure as hell ain't enough. So I'll keep finding new layers to wear until I figure out exactly what is enough."

Sarah shivered. There was something unsettling about that concept.

He smiled. "Don't over analyse it, Sarah. You have to understand something: I've been doing this a long time. When I started out, I was a naïve kid with a talent for getting myself into trouble. I've had to grow up while hiding behind a mask and sometimes it gets difficult to remember where the mask ends and I start."

"I guess." No; he wasn't a demented Tarzan, he was a chameleon. Changing colour to fit in and hide and not be hurt by predators passing by. Sarah suddenly wondered what he meant by 'a long time', but this time, the question didn't voice itself. She didn't need to know that. "What was last week to you?"

He ticked points off on his fingers. "An experience I don't particularly care to repeat. A complete clusterfuck. Yet another attempt by karma to catch up to me. A chance to help a friend find her way home."

Sarah blinked. "You see me as a friend?"

He grinned and this time there was humour in the expression. It lit up his face and suddenly made him look very boyish. "The amount of times you get up to the gas station with something wrong with your car, I'd say we'd gone way beyond just a working relationship."

"I guess we have." She smiled in return. "Did you really know the snakes weren't real?"

"I have a friend who keeps snakes. After a while, you get to know the way they move, and VENOM's little toys just weren't lifelike."

She tested the words, trying to detect any hint of bravado in them, but there wasn't any. He really had known. "Why do you do it? I mean, why do you put yourself at risk for people who probably don't even know you're there and don't ever realise what you've done for them?"

"Because there are more ways of being rewarded than hearing someone say thanks," he answered. "Because it's my way of making the world a little better, a little safer. Because maybe, if I do this, someone else who I'll probably never know won't ever have to understand what it's like to have VENOM rip their family to shreds." He smiled tightly. "And maybe, someday, if I do this long enough, I'll be able to find my sister."

The girl in the picture, Sarah realised. "VENOM took her?"

"Yeah."

There was something that he wasn't saying about it, but the suppressed pain and barely concealed hurt in his voice and expression made her back away. An awkward silence fell. Sarah didn't quite know what else to say and, to judge by his expression, nor did he.

It was finally broken by the sudden scrape of his chair as he stood up. "Do you want another cup of coffee?"

"No; thanks."

He helped himself to another cup. "So now you know; what are you going to do?"

Sarah looked up at him. He'd shifted yet again; this change, though, was far less subtle. This was the MASK agent who was probably concerned with having his cover blown. "I'm not going to 'do' anything." He lifted an eyebrow. "Yes, I'm a reporter and yes, there's a story that I'd love to tell. No, I'm not in the business of getting people killed." The other eyebrow joined the first. "I'm not stupid. You said it yourself: You hide behind a mask; maybe that's literal sometimes, mostly I figure it's metaphorical. Either way, that mask wouldn't be too much good to you if VENOM knew who was behind it."

He inclined his head. "Some members of VENOM would just kill me. The rest of them would probably want to stop a while first and have some fun."

"Then I'm not gonna be writing that story."

"Thank you."

Sarah frowned. "What would you have done if I'd said anything else?"

He smiled faintly. "Found a new mask." His smile strengthened. "Guess I don't have to now."

Sarah smiled in return. "Good." His eyebrow quirked again. "Well, I was sorta wondering. Are you doing anything for dinner tonight?"

He blinked, clearly taken by surprise. "Are you--- Are you asking me out on a date?"

"Uh-huh. I figure most folks don't say thanks, but since I know you, I don't have any excuse, and it's the least I can do."

He looked amused. "You don't have to."

"Maybe not; but I want to."

"You do realise that I could have to leave, suddenly? I'm on call twenty-four/seven."

"I figured that. Besides," she added, "something tells me you have a lot of interesting stories to tell."

He grinned that boyish grin again. "Well, all right, then, Ms Johnson. If you wanna take the risk of me running out before the entrees, I'm all yours."

It occurred to Sarah later, as she headed back to her own apartment in the complex, that she was curious to know which mask he would be wearing that evening. But no sooner had she thought that than she realised she actually didn't care. It was just going to be fun. And who knew; maybe she would be able to figure out just where the masquerade ended and the real Buddy Hawks began. She smiled. At least she'd have fun trying to figure it out.