Monday, January 3rd 2011.
Brockton Bay
If there was one thing Dean Stansfield did not enjoy about being a Ward, it was the fact that technically it was in almost every way, the exact same as a crappy part-time job.
Work the hours your boss tells you too no matter how unreasonable? Check.
Do things in stupid and often inefficient ways because the person in charge of you said so? Check.
Smile at the customer no matter what they said about you, and keep your opinions to yourself when you disagreed, even when they wrote fanfiction about you have sex with yourself? Absolutely Check.
Honestly, it would probably be easier to list the handful of perks to the job than it would be to go over the frankly staggering list of petty annoyances he did his best not to get to hung up over. He realized that it made him seem like kind of a suck up that he never vocalized any of his misgivings. He understood that he had an image as the pristine one, the one that followed orders without complaint, the one that never toed the line.
But that didn't mean he actually was any of those things. A fact that was never more apparent to him than when his cellphone began ringing while he was on a date with his girlfriend. Not his normal cellphone, because he could ignore that one. No, it was his work phone. The one that the PRT used to contact him when something bad was happening - which was pretty much every day ending in y in Brockton Bay. The Wards, you see, like any overworked part time employees, were always on call. It wouldn't have mattered if Dean had been in San Francisco half asleep in a hotel room, miles away from his home city and his boss, if something in his immediate vicinity was going pear shaped, he would be called to the local PRT headquarters to be briefed on it.
He wasn't sure when the practice had begun, or why, but he hated it all the same.
"Work?" Vicky asked him knowingly from the opposite side of the table at the very expensive restaurant that he had chosen to take her to that afternoon. One of the few perks of being a Ward was a heavily truncated school day. Vicky didn't really have that benefit, but little known fact, she was actually smart enough to skip as much school as she wanted and be just fine - which was probably the only reason she was allowed to get away with it so often.
"Yeah. Gimme a second." He answered, carefully keeping his annoyance out of his voice. He wasn't annoyed because of how expensive the restaurant was so much as how hard it was to get reservations there. Money meant next to nothing to him. His parents had so much of it that they practically had to make up new ways to waste it if they ever wanted to drop down to upper-middle class in his lifetime, something he was perfectly okay helping them with if it made Vicky happy.
With long practiced ease, he withdrew his phone from a pocket, and glanced at it under the table, making sure to shield the screen itself from any prying eyes. As always, he was being recalled to the base because a Parahuman was on a rampage somewhere and the PRT didn't want any of its precious Wards unaccounted for. The irony was that he would be called to the building, told nothing about what was going on, and be expected to find something to do for hours until the crisis had passed. He wasn't actually needed at all.
"What's up?" Vicky asked once he had fully glanced through the message and pocketed his phone again.
"Something tearing up the road near Winslow. Probably another Squealer tank or something." He answered, immediately regretting the decision to open his mouth when he caught the familiar glint in his girlfriend's eye as he denoted the location.
"Vicky, no." He said firmly staring into her eyes.
"Oh come on! I've got nothing else to do since a certain someone has to ditch me during our date." She said accusatorily. There was no heat in the statement though, no actual anger. Despite their on and off again relationship Vicky never took Cape work lightly. She might break up with him because he spent an extra two seconds looking at a passerby, but she would never give him trouble over anything he was forced to do in his capacity as a hero of the city, and he loved her for it.
"Yeah but if you keep showing up places you shouldn't they're eventually going to realize how you're figuring out where to go." He pointed out exasperatedly. He really wasn't supposed to pass the information he got to anyone else. Especially not information on crimes in progress. The only reason he did so with Vicky was because, well... she was very hard to say no to when she wanted to be.
And she usually made it up to him later, but that was nobodies business but his own.
"Aw come on! Everyone knows I fly around looking for trouble around this hour!" She shot back, already packing away her things into her purse while he waved for a waiter to bring him the bill.
"Except literally everyone in the building with us right now," Dean said tiredly, already knowing he wasn't going to win this argument. "And me." He added as an afterthought.
"Yeah but they don't care, and you love me too much to snitch." She said with a smirk, before zipping around the table to plant a firm kiss on his lips. He accepted it without thought, basking in the warmth of her presence. Then she was off, shooting out of the restaurant at speeds that left tiny zephyrs in her wake, pausing only to pull the front door of the establishment open.
It took him several seconds to process what had happened, and by the time he realized that his girlfriend had more or less just distracted him with a kiss and won the argument, he was halfway to his car.
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011.
PRT Headquarters, Brockton Bay
It wasn't very often that Dean was unhappy about being right. He was self-aware enough to know that he had lived a fairly charmed life to this point, and as such, had a much more positive outlook on life than basically every other Parahuman he could list off the top of his head besides Vicky.
Unfortunately, this only made it more important to him to take the few setbacks he did receive, with grace. It was a resolution he stood by, because it was one he had come to of his own accord, that could neither be bought nor faked. It was something he could stand up as an achievement of his own that had nothing at all to do with his elevated status in life.
But right now it was so, so very tempting to scowl and swear.
"Carol Dalon just called to ask me some very pointed questions about why her daughter was directed towards Line Drive in the midst of his rampage Gallant." The Director said blandly, not bother to mask her obvious irritation with the topic of conversation. She usually chose not to be alone in the same room as him if she had a choice, primarily because she was perfectly aware of one of his less discussed powers - that being, the ability to see what everyone around him was feeling at any given moment in time.
If she had asked him he would have kindly explained that knowing someone was annoyed or disgusted didn't mean he knew why, or who it was directed at. If she had asked he would have politely pointed out that the Director - even when praising him was typically annoyed or disgusted by something, such that he rarely saw anything else from her.
But she didn't ask, and he supposed that was for the best. He couldn't imagine she would believe him anyway.
"Well? Nothing to say, Gallant?" She continued on when he didn't immediately respond.
"No M'am. It was my mistake M'am." He answered dutifully. As much as he didn't like the situation, what he liked much less was that the callous woman had opened the conversation with an almost clinical list of the injuries Vicky had sustained during that brief altercation.
Most of her bones were shattered, one of her lungs had been punctured by a stray rib, and if Assault hadn't brought her to the hospital when he had, she probably would have died long before Amy could have gotten to her. Apparently the new cape - dubbed Line Drive by Armsmaster - was capable of striking with such force that his initial blow caused Glory Girl's forcefield to shatter, leaving the resulting shockwave of such an impact to pass through Vicky unimpeded. The Director had noted - again in the same clinical tone - that the damage was not dissimilar to being hit by the blast from a grenade.
Dean made a mental note to send Assault a gift basket of some kind. Or buy him a car or something. He'd finagle a way to get the man an all expenses paid vacation to the Bahamas if he thought Battery would allow it - which she wouldn't.
"...You're to be on the Base immediately following school for the next two weeks. You're on console duty until I say otherwise, and I don't even want to hear that you were in contact with Glory Girl during that time. Do I make myself clear?" the harsh woman finally said with a sigh. One of the perks of being 'the model Ward' was that when he did occasionally screw up, no one felt the need to lecture him on it, assuming he had already gotten the point.
He had to admit that usually, he had, but never so much as right now.
'Like getting hit by a grenade.' He thought to himself, making a conscious effort not to clench his fists where they sat in his lap.
Friday, January 7th, 2011
PRT Headquarters, Brockton Bay
The intervening days had been... strange. It was rare that he held a grudge longer than Vicky, but to his surprise, he found that when his girlfriend had told him - in confidence - that she had spoken to the Cape that had nearly killed her, he was the one who was becoming enraged.
Vicky had assured him that whomever the Cape was, 'she' wasn't guilty of anything except giving an open-ended order to a projection. For the most part, he understood why Vicky might say that. Again, despite the public opinion of her relative intelligence, she was already taking college level courses in Cape psychology. There was no way she wouldn't understand the mitigating circumstances behind a Trigger Event.
But for the first time in a long time, Dean was finding it very, very difficult to well... care. At the end of the day, if a dog had rabies, you could understand it all you wanted, but you still had to deal with a dog that had rabies. Not that he said that out loud. No, to Vicky he had merely expressed his utmost concern that she had apparently decided to spend her free time tracking down and talking to someone who could literally hit her so hard she might explode.
The fact that she had apparently unmasked said Cape accidentally, again, meant nearly nothing to Dean. It was the horrifying chance that today might have been the day he woke up and never got to see her again that kept him on edge. Brockton Bay had it's fair share of criminals and villains, but nothing was quite so dangerous as someone so knew that they didn't know the rules or bother to hold back. An idiot without any grasp of the political situation in the bay was much more of a threat than Hookwolf could ever be.
They had gotten into a mild argument over it. Not because he had expressed any of his complaints to Vicky, but rather the opposite. He had been trying to hard to maintain neutrality and be fair to this mystery cape that he had apparently failed to notice Vicky getting mad at his apparent disinterest. She hadn't quite broken up with him again, but as he sat in the Wards common room he knew the fact that she was obviously unhappy with him presently had somehow gotten around.
Mostly because Missy was hovering nearby like a shark that had scented blood in the water. A preteen girl with a crush was already quite a force to be reckoned with before she obtained paramilitary training and the ability to focus so hard she more or less broke reality thank you very much. He just wished he could find a way to let the girl down without hurting her too much. The fact that Vicky both knew about, and didn't really care about the situation beyond finding it hilarious was definitely a mark against him.
He was broken out of his musings by the warning signal blaring throughout the room, and the subsequent struggle for everyone to find a mask. They were supposed to keep them nearby at all times but well... they were watching television. Literally just cartoons presently. There was no earthly reason to bother keeping your mask around for that.
Unless you were Shadow Stalker he supposed, because that woman would use literally any opportunity to run off and beat someone up.
When the door finally opened, Dean was treated to the sight of Armsmaster leading another teen into the room. Armsmaster's emotional aura was the faint yellowish gold of curiosity, and the teens - a girl he noted idly - was a sickly mix of browns and greens. She was either extremely stressed out and anxious, or about to have a stroke with how bright the colours were.
Possibly both.
"Dibs!" Dennis called from off to the side, and Dean would have immediately said something to counter the negative impression such a statement would naturally bring from a normal teenage girl, but then the space behind her changed colours.
It was like one minute the person behind her was no more alive than the wall next to him, and the next, his emotional aura was a solid brick red, denoting mild anger. The change was neither swift nor natural, bringing to mind for some reason the clunky selection of a new song in an old jukebox. The aura was an unnatural blocky shape. It didn't radiate, fluctuate or shift the way a person would. It was a single solid colour that perfectly mirrored the man it surrounded, like a graphical glitch in reality that Dean couldn't make go away no matter how hard he focused.
It took him several seconds after that to center himself enough to tear his eyes away from whatever the thing was that was trailing behind the girl. It took him several more to fully realize that what he was looking at was, in fact, Line Drive. When that was done, he put his most pleasant face on, and did his best to greet the girl who very obviously was afraid of being here, doing his best not to look at the... thing... she brought with her whenever it shifted its head to look him.
Every time he caught it in his peripheral vision, it was like seeing a Terminator, ready and waiting to end him the moment he fouled up. It exuded such an obvious aura of menace and violence that he really couldn't understand how Vicky could find anything about this thing forgivable.
Fortunately, the girl it was attached to, Nexus, proved much more reasonable to deal with, even if she did seem confused every time someone tried to insinuate that having her projection standing perfectly behind her at all times was... sort of creepy.
He was just about convinced that maybe, just maybe he could get over how unnerving he found her projection, when a message on his Wards phone forced him to divert from his drive home and head back to base.
There was an altercation at the docks involving Nexus.
Honestly, sometimes he hated being right.
A/N: I tried to get the right tone with this one. Dean always struck me as a guy who tried almost too hard to be the good guy, even to the point that it was occasionally detrimental to him. He's willing to force himself to forgive or let pretty much anything go, and I tried to make sure that showed here without making him seem like an all forgiving saint. He's not Gandhi, just a very understanding teenager. His views and mental commentary on rabid dogs come from the fact that he never actually had a Trigger event canonically, so as much as he understands trigger trauma, it still bothers him that he has to just forgive anything that happens during one for a bit