The Gideon Factor
Part Three
"Okay, Mick," Sara started, "how do we do this? We need a plan. Or at least most of a plan." The Legends were sprawled in plush leather chairs around the Library, most with a drink of some sort. While the relaxed nature of the group would concern most leaders, Sara knew this was the best way for her team to sync into a strategy. She herself was splayed sideways across an overstuffed, light brown leather chair, with her legs over the arm of the chair, socked feet lightly swinging. She swirled a glass of Macallan scotch and thought it may be her favorite. For some reason, she found that she really liked the way the name sounded, and the smooth taste of the golden drink as she rolled it in her mouth. Besides, while Mick tended to avoid participation in the planning phases, when it came to prison breaks, heists, or arson, he was dynamite, bordering on genius, after about four beers.
She laid her head back on the opposite arm of the chair, her long hair almost to the floor, so she could look over her shoulder in the man's direction. Mick leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and took a swig from the glass bottle. He glanced at the Captain and she could see something click in the man's hazel eyes. She raised an eyebrow. Mick nodded. Sara relaxed back into her chair and sipped her scotch. He had a plan.
Mick lifted his bulky form out of the seat with surprising smoothness. He killed the beer and moved to lean on the circular table in the center of the room. "Okay, first, we need the time dweeb."
"Gary," Ray pitched in.
"Right, the time dweeb, that's what I said," Mick replied. "He's going to get us a badge and pass codes to wherever they're keeping the black widow lady."
"I like where your head's at, Big Guy, but why would Gary help us?" Nate asked.
Mick made eye contact with Zari, who laughed softly to herself, shrugged, and nodded. "I think I can come up with a couple things to… encourage him to lend a hand," she replied helpfully. "I should also be able to hack into the Time Bureau system and grab guard schedules and blueprints." Mick quirked his lips, mind already coming up with helpful ways to blackmail the nerd, and he knew for certain the hacker would be on board. Zari was perhaps the only Legend that shared his twisted sense of humor, though the Captain had a way about her that the large man appreciated.
Mick growled in approval and cast his attention back to the Captain. "I'll check out the blueprints, Boss, but it should be a piece of cake to get your lady friend out." Sara tossed her empty glass towards the gruff man, which he deftly caught. "It's not like that," she said. "She saved me on Lian Yu. We have… history." With that, Sara swung her legs around and stood. Her crew glanced at each other with hesitant looks, hoping to get more on this phase of their Captain's past that she had always refused to talk about.
"Okay, Z, you do your thing. Please try to avoid hurting Gary too much. Oh, and try to stay in the Time Bureau system in case we need a diversion once we're in there. Mick, check out the blueprints and see what you think. Let's keep the plan simple and flexible. I have an errand to run first thing in the morning, we'll go get Nyssa tomorrow afternoon." Sara turned and headed toward the hallway that would lead to the Captain's quarters.
"Where are you going in the morning, Captain?" Ray asked after her.
"I'm going to get us a ship," she replied. And fix things with my girlfriend, she thought to herself.
Sara made her way down the predominantly steel hallway toward her room, a little surprised by how the vessel somehow felt colder without Gideon's presence. She examined the protective steel pipes that ran along the ceiling and thought about the vulnerable fibers that spread throughout the ship. It was interesting how many similarities the ship had with it's human crew. She thought of her own structure, a muscular, strong, compact form created to protect her own vulnerable fibers and sense of consciousness. A consciousness that often took a morose and reflective turn after the third glass of scotch. "Fuck, snap out of it," she muttered to herself as she reached her Captain's quarters.
It had taken Sara awhile to settle in to the Captain's quarters once she finally accepted her placement in the position. A moderate sized room with a queen-size bed, a loveseat, and an overstuffed chair made of soft, light gray leather. While the library and study were furnished with shades of brown in an attempt to soften the metal ship, Sara had decided to embrace it. She liked the edge it gave her environment, and instead used blue accents to compliment the steel.
The room was decorated with a few family photos on the shelving unit next to the loveseat, as well as on the nightstands on either side of the bed. On the walls, she had a couple of woven reed mats that she'd had Gideon fabricate, but she herself had painted in hues of blue, copper, and white. One night, after a particularly difficult day facing her demons, she remembered how much she had loved to paint when she was younger. When she was normal. It effectively helped her keep the demons at bay, for the moment anyway, and as she looked at the woven mats, she found they were still able to soothe her.
She entered her quarters, reached into a storage space under the shelving unit, and pulled out a small box. Sara curled up in the corner of the loveseat and closed her eyes for a moment before she opened it. Inside, under a folded silk sash, was another photograph. On this one, the only of its kind, were two smiling faces looking back. "Holy shit, she's beautiful." Sara was always a little shocked at how the deep-set brown eyes were always able to affect her.
The eyes were framed by an exotic and angular face, slightly wider than standard measurements of beauty, and long, dark brown hair with loose curls throughout. In the photo, Nyssa's usually stoic face was caught in a full, heartfelt smile, with copper highlights exposed by sunlight in her dark hair. On her black denim clad lap sat Sara, laughing, with her arms wrapped around the broad shoulders of her then partner. Nyssa was clad in a fitted white t-shirt that contrasted nicely with her darker, tanned skin. Sara was in a thin, long-sleeved red shirt and her eyes were crystal blue in the sunlight.
She recalled the photo had been taken during one of their first missions together, one of the first appearances of Ta-er al-Sahfer, the Canary. Sara was unable to decide if she couldn't remember the target, or if she chose not to, but either way, her recollection of the time was perfectly summed up by their happy, loving faces in the photograph. It was interesting in hindsight, how the end of a person's life at her hand was far overshadowed by the passion she had felt for the dark-haired woman. "And now I'm forcing myself back into her life. How many times is she going to let me hurt her?" Sara wondered aloud.
Of course the Captain's feelings for Nyssa were complex. She was her first love and it was built during a time when every moment of every day was life or death. That kind of love, like the love between soldiers returning from war, transcended normal relationships. Not that she would consider the relationship she was building with Ava to be normal by any stretch of the imagination, but there would always be a connection there. Sara accepted long ago that she would always try to protect Nyssa al Ghul. From anything but myself, apparently. She was nervous and unsure how the woman would react when she showed up to break Nyssa out. But, the blonde woman's willingness to put the greater good before her own personal status was slowly becoming second-nature.
Sara tucked the picture back under the silk sash and returned the box to its original place. As she stood, she met the smirking dark-blue eyes of her current lover and smiled in response. Even though the relationship was fairly new, Sara knew there was something serious developing. "Hell, I even made it through that Roman-era party without fucking someone… that's gotta mean something," the blonde woman laughed at herself, acknowledging her uninhibited self-confidence that sometimes encouraged her to explore sexuality throughout time. But, sexuality aside, Sara's relationship with the older woman had developed from a bone-deep animosity that morphed into absolute respect, and then became something undeniably emotional and real.
"If we can get through this fiasco without killing each other, I think we'll be solid," she commented aloud, fully aware that she was going to have to do a bit of lying to the Time Bureau Director, and really hoped that Ava could delineate the two roles she played in the Captain of the Waverider's life. We'll see what happens tomorrow, I suppose, she thought as she slid into her large bed and surrounded herself with an inordinate number of pillows.
As the Captain found herself ruminating as she mentally prepared for the emotional rollercoaster she was to experience for the foreseeable future, Zari was bathed in the fluorescent glow of her laptop screen, still curled up in the Library. Behind her, Nate and Mick directed a game of 'Never-Have-I-Ever'. Based on the completely different backgrounds Rip found the two men in, there was quite a bit of drinking. Since Zari was occupied with actual work, the two men would guess whether Zari had done the task at hand and were sure to keep her glass filled with red wine.
Most hackers had a ritual when performing their trade, and Zari was no exception. She insisted on wearing a tight, black tank top that exposed a well-defined collar bone and feminine shoulders, with baggy grey sweats that she had stolen from Mick's room her second day on the ship. Plus, she drank red wine, and typically quite a bit of it. This facet of her ritual was much easier to accomplish on the Waverider than it had been in the 2042 police-state the Legends found her in. Her apocalyptic era also explained the simplistic nature of her ritual. She used to listen to a cassette tape of an underground Saudi Arabian black metal band called Al-Namrood, but her Walkman was confiscated the last time she was picked up by ARGUS in 2042.
Zari worked her way through the code of the Time Bureau network, sophisticated, but manageable for someone both as skilled as she was, and from a future time period. "Hey, Z, have you ever been to one of those human buffets?" Nate asked. "You know, where they serve sushi or something on sexy, naked people?"
Zari stopped typing and glanced at the historian. "What about the place you found me in, where our food was rationed, and I was constantly on the run from authoritarian crazy people, makes you think I'd have had the opportunity to go to a party that had a human buffet?" She scoffed and returned to her work.
The fit man shrugged and took a drink. "Damn. I thought you went to that Roman thing we did awhile back. To be perfectly honest, I may have ended up way more drunk then I intended by the end of that mission. Roman wine is legit," he said.
"Lightweight," Mick offered. "You missed the boss trying not to give in to that gladiator couple that kept trying to take her for a 'Roman experience'," he added. "I thought she was going to lose it. She must be down for that pant-suit lady. She's hot for a government type, I get it." Mick shrugged and headed off to grab another beer.
Zari set her laptop on a side table and stretched her lean, well-defined arms overhead. "Okay, we're in the system. I've already downloaded the blueprints and schedules, we just need to decide what to do about Gary. Want to go grab Sara?" the woman asked as she unfolded herself from the chair, stood and stretched her legs. Zari killed her glass of wine and tipped the empty glass in Nate's direction, eyebrow raised. The well-groomed time detective hopped out of his chair to follow the woman to the galley for another drink.
Nate had a boyish charm about him and was above average height, but not necessarily tall. He had broad, built shoulders, and it was obvious that his routine sparring sessions were supplemented with some extra time in the gym "getting jacked" as he was known to say. The crew regularly made fun of the man for the length of his morning routine, particularly the amount of time he spent grooming his relatively short brown hair. In conjunction with being able to turn to steel, the time detective had a photographic memory and an analytical mind that were invaluable to the Legends crew.
As they traveled down the opposite hallway from the Captain and crew quarters toward the Galley, Nate snapped his fingers and turned toward the lithe woman. "Let's get Gary tonight!" he suggested excitedly and received a skeptical look from the hacker. "How stoked would the Captain be if everything was set up for us to make the jailbreak when she got back tomorrow?" The two Legends entered the galley and found Mick leaned back with his booted feet kicked up on the round, steel-topped table in the center of the room.
Zari abruptly knocked the big man's feet off as she went to the fabrication station and pressed a series of buttons in an attempt to order more wine from the machine. "This stuff is so much easier when Gideon is here," she grumbled as the system was typically voice-activated through Gideon's interface.
"Mick, you'll be on my side," Nate began his argument. "Let's get Gary tonight. Z, you can plant the blackmail stuff that I'm sure you and Mick have a million dastardly ideas for, and then we can call him with the comms unit that the Captain had Ray clone last week."
Mick grunted in response, hit the beer bottle, and shrugged. "Then we could rough him up a little if we need to," the fighter suggested. Nate and Zari made eye contact and Nate replied, "Uhm, big guy, I don't think that's a great idea. I think we'll be able to get him to agree without beating him up."
"But its an option," the man gruffly replied.
"Uh, sure, yeah, its an option I suppose," Nate finished as he snagged a grape Faygo from the fridge. "What do you say? This is an easy one, come on! It's Gary we're talking about, we can handle it."
Zari sighed as she clearly recalled several times she had been roped into one of Nate's quests to make the Captain proud. The majority of which went horribly wrong and ended in being scolded by Sara, something it took the independent hacker a few tries to get used to, and not just storm off. After her brother was killed and she was separated from her family, Zari only had herself to deal with. Coming to live on a ship with a horde of people was an adjustment, to say the least, and her independent nature had routinely clashed with Sara's sometimes abrasive leadership style. Now, she appreciated that she always knew where she stood with the crew's leader and genuinely enjoyed the blonde woman's company. Plus, a former assassin without super powers who was strong enough to lead the Legends, that's just badass.
"Okay, fuck it, I'm in. Let me grab my laptop. We better do this shit in the Cargo Bay so we don't wake the Captain. Meet you guys there." Zari sighed, sometimes it was trying to follow the Captain's example that got her in trouble to begin with, she mused. Nate pumped his fist in the air and Mick grabbed the rest of the six-pack to bring on the adventure.