notrosecolored

Scott made a point of meeting Sandy's eyes, even if he couldn't see it. It tended to make conversation better, and it was a base level of respect that was simply not-optional for him in any situation that wasn't far more dire than sitting around a hotel room and waiting for sunset.

"Most of the school sees me as their teacher, their field commander, or both. Even those few who have been around since I was a kid were led by me from the start." It demanded he be separated from them a bit, and that was something he was more than used to, but until recently he'd had Jean to counterbalance that. " And no one knows what the hell to do with me now."

Another reason they were here, now, he thought.

"Other than send you out on milkrun missions with potential allies?" he added with a wry little twist of his lips. Then he tipped his chin to the cards.

"Come on, get the slaughter over with."

His two pair wasn't exactly stellar.

"The last milk run I went out on ended with the jet in pieces. Maybe we're here to babysit each other."

He glanced at his hand, then pulled out two pair just slightly higher than Sandy's, so it was much of a slaughter. He left his cards on the table, though, and leaned back in his chair. He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling, just for a moment, before turning back to Sandy.

"Why do the younger one's think you're creepy?"

"Well, it starts with wearing this all the time," he said as his mask solidified on his face for just long enough to make the point. Then it sunk back in, leaving his wry expression for Scott to see.

"I tend to haunt around the place at odd hours because of my work and my sleep schedule. And of course, the moaning and shouting and screaming that happens when I do finally get to sleep, well... add it together and I'm not exactly the happy go lucky mentor that Jesse and Rick are."

He took a moment to finish off his coffee and took another chicken finger.

"Some of them are all right with me. Courtney's got brass balls to go along with that staff of hers. Stargirl. Takes after Jack that way." And he missed Jack sorely. Jack had been one of the few who'd appreciated not just Wes but his aunt Dian, both her brilliance and her contributions to their work. And Jack had understood the mixed bag that was being a second generation hero. The weight of it and the pain of it and the pride of it. The struggle. Michael had some of that as well, but he'd chosen it. It wasn't quite the same. And he was almost as serious as Sand himself was. Jack's irreverence was probably one of the main reasons he hadn't become so dour to start with.

"And Maxine's not really afraid of anything but someone telling her to go away. But a man can only listen to the Wicked soundtrack so many times."

He took a few bites of chicken finger before continuing.

"Kara thinks it's also the fact that I only appear when something dire is going on. I guess she's not wrong but... it is what it is."

Edited 2015-10-11 14:40 (UTC)

"They sound like a pretty good group, overall." He said, as an outsider. Then again, that was basically how he judged his own group, just from not quite so far outside. "They'll get used to it if they've got enough time." Probably, though some things never stopped pushing buttons for people.

"I was going to ask you earlier: What's with the mask? What function does it serve?"

Seemed slightly odd to him, since it was all coming from Sandy, but he clearly didn't know anything close to everything.

He reached down to his holsters and pulled out the gas gun with a practiced flourish.

"I'm the Sandman. We're old fashioned, firmly in the no-kill camp," and he turned the gun to the side to show off the slot where he could insert his canisters. "This produces a sleeping gas, a similar formula to the one my mentor used for years. The problem with gas, however, is that it's not exactly selective as to who it works on."

Hence the mask.

"Though... I'm actually immune to it, that's not something I want people knowing. And the mask is-- the mask is--" it was clearly hard for him to find the exact words. There were plenty of words, of course. But the right ones... "the mask is part of the legacy. Not the same as Wesley's, but the visual is similar. And it helps that it's intimidating to the kind of criminal I usually deal with."

Scott listened to the explanation, including the bit about being immune to the sleeping gas, and then all the rest. He stayed silent for a bit after Sandy was finished, too, debating whether he was going to say anything at all and poking things from a few different angles.

"I'm not sure how that translates to you wearing it all the time around your friends. You're not wearing it now." Not that it really mattered, but dammit there was some confusing logic in play and Scott hated when he couldn't get that kind of thing. It was like a sore tooth.

"I don't wear it in my downtime," he agreed with a nod, "but I don't exactly have much downtime."

New York was a big enough city and even then, his nightmares didn't always restrict themselves to familiar streets. He could travel almost instantly, but it was still a lot of traveling. Not to mention investigation; his dreams weren't exactly easy to parse, and when it could be anywhere, any time...

He'd mentioned he was a workaholic, hadn't he?

"Like I said, most of the new folks only see me for work, if that. Which is when I wear my mask."

"Sounds like your presence here really isn't much of a mystery." Not that it had been for a bit. "If you want to head back, to the Mansion or your team, I can probably handle this from here."

If he didn't feel like putting up with the mechanizations, that was.

Sandy stiffened, just a little, and the effect was almost as if he'd been slapped. He sat up a straighter and picked up his cards to neaten them before placing them closer to Scott on the table.

He was a realist, no doubts about that. Practical, when it came to most things. But the JSA wasn't most things. And his honor and his duty, to his legacy and to the organization, was one of the few things that could actually throw him out of his perpetual fatigue and depression into something else.

Like anger.

"My chairman gave me an assignment," was his answer, curt and 'professional' for a given value of professional.

Scott's eyebrows both appeared over the rim of his glasses at that response, but he didn't comment on it at all, actually. "That's your business, too," he said, with an amount of blandness that would have made dry toast seem exciting.

Would he walk away from an assignment Charles gave him? Not easily. He was determined to get the kid out. Not so much because he'd been given an order these days, but because that kid needed to be helped and helping mutants was what he did.

He'd do it, though. There were days he'd walk away from the whole fucking thing, and days - more of them as he got older, as he buried more of his kids and teammates - that he questioned Charles. He believed in what they were doing, still but he wasn't quite so sure how they were doing it.

None of it would stop him helping a kid, though.

Sand wasn't a good little soldier, hadn't been for a long time, at least not in his own head. How he acted and how he felt, how he restrained himself and hid his pain, hid his wounds, hid the strain... Sand, frankly, was a mess in a lot of ways. A mess in a mask and there might be the answer Scott was looking for.

But arguing or making arrangements was one thing; flat walking out on an assignment was another, at least in his books. Especially something like this.

He reached over, tried to sip at his coffee again, found it was empty, breathed out a low sigh and put a hand through his hair.

"No one works me to the bone but myself," he said after a moment. "And I take my responsibilities... seriously."

And he wouldn't actually say so, but it was almost abundantly clear that a good portion of that was because he literally had nothing else.

Scott paused again for another moment or two before asking: "Is there something about me saying it's none of my business that makes you decide to give me an explanation?"

It was dry, and it was wry, but it had happened often enough now to call a pattern and while it was interesting it struck him as a little bit strange. Not bad strange, but strange strange. Truth of the matter was, he was enough of a mess himself that there was a limit to how entangled in somebody else he'd get.

Wait, no there wasn't. There was a limit to how hard he'd push to get entangled.

He actually considered the question for a moment before actually let out a chuckle. Whatever he'd set off a moment before was entirely defused.

"I think it's for the same reason you're in the running for 'best friend'," he admitted with a little shrug. "You don't push. Give me enough time to think. In this case, you gave me enough time to realize I was jumping down your throat for no reason."

He let his own gaze hit the ceiling before refocusing.

"This is probably the longest I've been in a room with someone I wasn't interrogating or have known for ages for... Years. You can blame that too."

He'd forgotten how to small talk.

"My wife is-"

Scott stopped there, backed up and tried again.

"My wife and I were together from the time we were just kids. I wasn't even social then, but she was a telepath. That made things easier. Now, I guess I'm just out of practice when it's not a mission or a debriefing."

Why was he sharing even that, he didn't know. Maybe because Sandy was sharing and reaching out and deciding he was safe with the lack of pushing. Maybe because he was lonely and could. Maybe it was just as simple as it being what seemed fair in the moment.

He didn't say anything at the obvious change in tense, but he did incline his head for a moment in silence. The man had probably heard enough on the subject, but he could be respectful.

He couldn't imagine how something like that could be. Wes and Dian had been... well, it made complete sense to him that they'd gone within days of each other. That was just how the universe was made. That was just right. Separating them was wrong on every level.

His own romantic adventures had consisted of exactly one person, who'd ambushed him with a kiss that had gotten him removed from his leadership position in the JSA and lost him one of his oldest friends. Looking back on it, there hadn't been much to the whole thing besides desperation: Kendra had been looking to escape the idea of being with Carter because of 'destiny' and he'd been looking for anything and anyone to hold onto. Anything or anyone to see him as worthy.

And of course, the one who'd kissed him had been destined for someone else. He'd saved the world, spent a year spread out throughout the Earth to hold it together and let it heal after Gog's attack, another prison, and he'd come back from that with hope. Hope that had, of course, eventually been dashed. Because some people were meant to be.

And he was meant to be...

Who knew.

"I never had friends my age. I was an orphan, and then I was with Wes and my aunt, and then I figured out what Wes was doing at night and joined him in his work. Then I was..." he spread his hands, "Sandy the Golden Boy, kid sidekick. The one whose hair got ruffled."

He ruffled his own hair and his eyes were anywhere but Scott's.

"Then I was the object lesson in the velvet cage."

Scott was at that stage of grief where sympathy was more likely to break him than not. He'd never wanted it, but now he absolutely needed to not have it. He was still learning to function without her, to be able to talk about her without breaking down, but he didn't want more sympathy.

He couldn't stand more sympathy.

So silent respect and moving on in this slightly odd exchange of information felt about right.

"I don't remember much before Charles found me." Jack of Diamonds. He remembered that, but that wasn't something that was worth revisiting. "Being in the hospital, one foster home out of what must have been several." Those foster parents had died. "I was the first of us. Jean was the third. Bobby was between us and a couple of years younger . The kid sidekick and golden boy sounds a lot like him."

"The first and the last for the longest time, at least amongst the JSA," Sandy admitted. "What happened to me almost got Wes kicked out of the group. I'm not sure he ever really lived it down in some of their eyes. After all, I might have been his sidekick but they were all like uncles and aunts to me."

He started working on the fries then.

"Bobby is the iceman you have, isn't he?"

You bring somebody in, you take responsibility for them. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Something happens to them, it was on you. Scott knew better than to say that out loud.

"Bobby's Iceman. The other couple who were there in the early days were Beast and Angel." Codenames. That was more useful, he realized. More public, more known.

Sandy carefully avoided talking about his feelings on the whole thing, because he couldn't. He couldn't because he couldn't be honest and he hated being dishonest.

"I remember reading about them. Tight work. I missed that whole... period."

He cracked something like a smile.

"Threw Captain America for a bit of a loop. I never got to work with him during the war, but he'd assumed we were all long dead. Ted..." wait, codenames were better, "Wildcat, he still likes to greet him with a 'boo'."

Codenames were working to keep identities put together. Should have started there, but they were moving along now.

Scott gave a soft snort, and a minute shake of his head. "I'd love to tell you amusing stories about Captain America, but most of our encounters have ended with one or both of us flying through the air and occasionally through a wall or two." How could anyone not like Steve? It was a mystery, but Scott was that guy.

It wasn't the aggressive kind of hate he reserved for real bad guys, at least.

"I'm sure finding out there were some people from his past still around in his presence was startling, but I'm sure it wasn't a bad thing. I know he and Wolverine go back to the war, too."

Most of the people he was talking about didn't have much of a secret identity. That was the thing about being trapped outside of reality or, in his case, in a cage for years. It kind of destroyed the need for things like that. But--

"I can understand that." And really, he could. "The guy's not exactly the bending type. Thankfully, most of our interactions have been about neighborly issues. Anything else, we leave to the League."

There was also a card game that no one but those invited ever mentioned, but that was private.

"Much easier to have Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman deal with it. Diana especially. We're a little short on diplomats around the brownstone."

Jay and Alan could, of course. They could be friendly. But when push came to shove, it usually involved Alan flashing them out and the JSA doing what they felt they had to do anyway. Not the most diplomatic.

Secret identities weren't a big thing amongst Scott's team members. It was a thing for some of the students, but that was more a matter of confidentiality than an alternate life. The kids who could pass would have the option of going back out into the world for as long as it could be given to them. Not many of them seemed to make that call. Scott didn't blame them.

"I don't much care about what the other teams out there are doing," he admitted. It was an understatement. He couldn't have cared less if he tried. He had absolutely zero fucks to give, over all. "We're pretty narrow focus. We're not even considered a hero team, super human or otherwise. The people who make those kinds of classifications consider us a terrorist organization about as often as they don't. Those are the same people who dispatch the Avengers to deal with threats above and beyond their capacity to handle themselves, and Stark seems to be a big fan of registering people with special abilities. Meanwhile there's legislation proposed every other year to register mutants like we're a bunch of dangerous dogs and the lucky kids with an extra gene are being locked up in prison cells. I've got just about all I can handle without worrying about the Justice League and Superman."

He had some, um, issues with the Avengers, the government, and Stark.

"JSA doesn't classify you that way," Sandy admitted quietly. "And if you look back, you'll see the government doesn't much like us either."

The JSA had been practically destroyed at one point, false charges brought against the founding members. Some of them even locked up. Carter still held a grudge, and it was one of the very few that Sandy agreed with. What it'd done to Kent, to Wes, to Terry...

"We practically had to start the whole thing up again when I got--" and there it was, almost a slip. He really wasn't used to talking so much. "When I woke up. Because they wouldn't fall in line." Because while the All-Stars had fought for their country, they'd refused to help with the witchhunts afterwards. "We're not mutant specific, or even metahuman specific, but we're firmly skeptical. Especially of any kind of registration."

Because the JSA kept their own records. And didn't trust those records to anyone BUT them. Family took care of their own. And they'd seen what had happened when other people got their hands on that kind of information.

Mr. America. His family.

The Haywoods.

They'd almost lost Tomcat and Ted hadn't even known he had a son the week before.

"I'm not making false equivalences." It wasn't the same. It couldn't be. The issue of mutants was so much bigger. "I'm just saying I wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be doing this, if Kara and Mr. Terrific and your professor didn't feel we were aligned in some sense."

"I know."

He thought about and nearly was a much bigger smart ass about his agreement, but in the end went with the direct and simple, and hopefully the unmistakable.

"I don't have any trouble believing that or objections to working with you. There aren't many scenarios I can see putting us in direct conflict." Very, very few, actually. That was a good thing, because he could think of lots of reasons he'd conflict with lots of groups. He was good at anticipating trouble.

The near miss didn't go unnoticed, but it got the same response as his mention of Jean. Respect, but without pushing.

"I'm just..." Bitter. Disillusioned. Angry. Sick of putting kids in the ground. "Frustrated," he finally settled on.

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