Tommy and Shen - Backdated
Mar. 24th, 2019 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ax_mainTommy and Shen on a random superhero outing.
Cargo port fire. That had been a new one, and not a particularly easy one, given the attitude of some of the cops towards mutants. But the firefighters had welcome their help, as a whole, and they'd managed to avoid any casualties, and help put out the fire.
Now Shen landed on a rooftop a little way from the harbor, where Tommy was waiting for her. She turned off her image inducer as her feet touched the ground, looking once again like a brown-winged teenager with talons for feet, rather than a grey-winged twenty-something in combat boots. Her suit went from sleeveless green and purple to the long-sleeved black one (with green accents courtesy of Gilmore) issued by the school, and there was a faint smatter of soot on her face.
"That was a good one," she said with a smile, pushing a hand back through her recently cut hair.
"Hell yeah," Tommy agreed easily from where he sat on the roof's edge, feet dangling over the empty space below. He'd turned off the image inducer the moment he was well away from the port (stupid thing - no wonder it annoyed Kurt so much). "I gotta start lifting weights more. Hauling unconscious dock workers around is a lot heavier than tossing Billy across the Danger Room. That last guy felt like he ate rocks for breakfast." He grinned, stretching his arms up and then popping both shoulders one after the other. "You good?"
"I'm awesome," Shen confirmed, hopping up on the ledge beside him. "Kinda wired." Between the adrenaline and the elation of doing some good, there was a restless kind of energy buzzing through her, and she had to wonder if it was what life was like for Tommy, only all the freaking time. She used one taloned foot to poke at his shoulder playfully. "You should totally work out with me. Build up some muscle mass."
Tommy laughed, kicking his feet against the building wall in restless rhythm. "You could bench press both me and the bench press itself, we know this." His goggles cast the world in a greenish light, Shen a bright spot in the artificial light of the night vision. He shoved them up on the top of his head, his hair rumpling around the frame, and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. "What's next? Any more calls from dispatch?" Tommy teased. He should be basking in victory, but the night was way too young to slow down now.
"Nothing that seems to require our assistance," Shen announced with a shake of her head. "Wanna do a quick round through the streets, make sure no one needs a little help? I reaaaally don't wanna head back to New York just yet."
"Told you I was going to be a bad influence on you." Tommy bounced to his feet before she was done talking, and spun on one heel to survey the city laid out below them. The port was all lit up, fire trucks and police cars and everything still with all their lights going. Smaller pockets of lights meant warehouses and business parks, while the bright gleam of the downtown core beckoned from a few miles away. "Bright lights, big city -- let's do it. Can I grab a lift down, or do I need to hit the stairs again?"
Shen grinned - she wasn't sure what was bad about his influence so far, and also absolutely an answer to his question. "Sure," she confirmed out loud, as she turned the imager back on. Then she moved behind him, arms wrapping around his waist, and hurtled both of them off of the ledge, freefall for a couple of seconds before she spread her wings and they soared over the nearby warehouses, heading for downtown proper. Her hold on him was strong and sure; he wasn't in any danger of falling. And she couldn't quite stop smiling, between the high of a successful call and just, this moment, Tommy and her up in the air, city sprawling underneath, the rush of the wind and the rush of elation.
Tommy dropped his goggles back into place when Shen grabbed him, and let her carry him up into the air. Yeah, this was the one power he envied. If he could switch up for a day he'd want flight, just to know what it would be like to be the one kicking gravity in the balls. She moved almost fast enough for the motion to feel right, the world slipping by underneath them only a little slower than it should. Sometimes -- more these days than ever before -- he didn't feel so off-sync with the universe. Almost like he'd found somewhere to fit.
As they neared downtown, Shen flew them a little lower for Tommy's benefit, since he didn't have her enhanced eyesight. "You want me to take you down, or patrol from up here?" she asked, pushing her voice over the wind whipping past them, eyes already scanning the streets below for anything that might require their attention.
"Bombs away!" he called up cheerfully, giving her a thumbs-up that he assumed she could see. "You take the high road and I'll take the low road, or however that shit goes."
"All right!" Shen shouted back, and nosedived towards the streets below until they were low enough that she could drop him without risking injuring him... but still high enough that he would actually drop a little, and she wouldn't risk catching his head with her feet as she swooped back up.
When he'd first started doing the whole patrol thing it had made sense to stick closer to home territory -- New York, Jersey, all that. He could cover the area easily, got to know some of the usual faces on the street corners, get a better sense of when someone was out of place. But this stuff, Shen's big rescues, those took them out to cities he didn't know well. Or at all.
On the one hand, it was a whole lot less boring. On the other, it meant they were stuck more on the big stuff, the obvious car crashes and break-and-enters, rather than the more subtle problems that ran under the surface. It was probably for the best. He'd never been good at subtle.
Tommy dropped and hit the ground running - literally - not stumbling when his feet hit pavement. He didn't need to slow down for Shen the way he did for Jack, so that was alright; all the people out and about this time of night would notice was a wind that kicked up dust around them after he was already long gone. Party districts were usually safer than people gave them credit for -- all the lights and noise kept the really bad shit at bay. And he wasn't in a mood to wrangle drunks. The dark side streets, quiet industrial parks, away from prying eyes -- that was where stuff went down.
And speaking of which -- the empty parking garage between a pair of condemned buildings caught his attention. Tommy slowed down to figure out what had caught his eye. There: a light up on the second level, red like brake lights where there shouldn't have been anything at all. Hunh.
Shen circled around the building, peering into the darkness, glad that her sight was as good as it was. Clearly a deal of some kind, bags were being exchanged. She tapped her earbud. "Some kind of deal. Want to investigate?"
Shen's voice cut in to the street noise and Tommy slowed down, skidding quietly to a halt in the darkness across the street. The handful of fading yellow streetlights in the distance didn't do much of anything to help him out, but at least he had the goggles. They didn't pick up much more than vague shapes, though. Not at this distance. "Assuming you don't mean dealing like cards, yeah. What can you see from up there?"
"Can't see what's in the bags. Two cars, six - no, seven figures," she answered, making another circle to get another look. "A couple of skinheads. All whites, and some buzzcuts. I hate to stereotype, but..."
"But odds are good it's not a Juggalo meetup. Got it." He should be asking more questions, make like TJ and think strategy, but why bother? The pair of them could out-punch and out-run any jackbooted creep without breaking a sweat. "Round-up time," Tommy muttered cheerfully into the comm and headed across the street toward the big ramp that went in and up.
Shen chuckled and changed trajectory, dropping towards the second story in a swoop, wings tucked in behind her back. The men - all of them were men, ugh - didn't see anything coming, and when she flared her wings on either side of her to slow down, they knocked two of them to the ground. She stopped with a jolt, and landed between their prone figures. "Hey, boys," she greeted the group with a smirk, tiny Chinese mutant chick, so much there they probably hated. Two strikes to the men trying to stand back up, taking them back down, and she was up in the air again as the rest of the group reached inside their jackets for what she fully expected to be firearms.
Tommy'd held back for a sec to watch Shen do her thing in the beams of the car lights, adrenaline and anticipation making everything sharp and bright. When she was moving again and they were going for guns, that was his cue. Tommy sped up and time froze, making it easy -- too easy -- to grab the silenced handguns from their inside pockets. Those and the bag that one of them had dropped the minute Shen descended on them. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, paused half in the air and half already hitting the ground.
He hauled it away, the contents clanking ominously, and heaved the bag away behind Shen. It skidded into the shadows and stopped about ten feet back.
When time restarted, Tommy grinned at the men - them, empty-handed, and him, with a bunch of guns in his arms. "Looking for these?" Their expressions when they started to realize why their holsters were empty was totally the best part.
Shen might be fast when she'd picked up speed up in the air, but she couldn't process things at the speed Tommy did, and it was the sound of a slide behind her that had her glance back and notice the bag. She smirked, especially when Tommy went all attitude on the guys, and two strong beats of her wings flew her back closer to the bag. "And this, probably," she called out conversationally. They'd come for it, and she'd be waiting - if Tommy let them reach her, but she trusted him to let her have some fun, too, for all that he could have taken them all out in a couple of seconds.
"Goddamn muties," one of the bozos snarled, and the hand that had been going for his gun balled up into a fist. "Get your asses over here and I'll show you who's the dominant species."
Tommy fiddled with the guns until they ejected the clips, and he chucked the pieces in the general direction of the bag. "If you're so superior, why can I smell you from over here?" he asked with flippant ease. The big dude and his skinny buzz-cut buddy tried to rush Tommy but it was too easy; he slowed time down and charged them with his arms out. He got them around the waists and knocked the wind out of them before they realized he was moving.
In those moments, Shen always sort of wished she could just be watching Tommy in action. Never mind that she'd see a blur more often than not. But she was busy with her own stuff, namely, two of the assholes running for her while a third tried to get to the bag. She touched down just long enough to jump up again, twirling through the air, talons curled in on themselves so they would only cause blunt trauma when her feet made contact. The idea wasn't to kill anyone, after all. A well-timed beat of her wings prevented her from landing and carried her over to the guy who'd just grabbed the bag. "I love haters," she commented, and decked him with one well-placed punch, keeping tight control of her strength. "Thinking so hard they're superior, having no clue we're actually holding back."
The first two dudes dropped, Tommy spun around and took on the next one - this time a beefy guy who had the distinct look of roid-rage in the eyes. That and the swastika carved into his arm made Tommy really glad for the chance to take him down. "They say it takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. I guess that's why you never will." And he wiggled his pinkie finger at roid-dude in the universal gesture for 'microdick.'
Roid-rage tried to go for a knife but Tommy got out of the way, standing behind him and knocking him to the ground before the guy even noticed he'd moved. "Amazing."
That was two, four, five, six... where'd the last guy go?
"Speed!" Shen shouted as she looked up from dropping that asshole to the ground. "Behind you!"
For a guy whose whole thing was reaction time, getting caught off-guard was stupidly embarrassing. Tommy's head whipped around when Shen yelled his name, only hauling on time's strings when he saw the movement of the board out of the corner of his eye. The last of the neo-nazi shitheads had come up behind him while he'd been whaling on the other guys, a nail-ridden two-by-four in his hands.
Time stopped around him just before the moment of impact, iron spikes headed right for Tommy's temple. He dropped to the ground, rolled and took the shithead out at the knees, grabbing his board and breaking it into splinters on the concrete pillar. Splinters flew, one of the nails catching against the heel of his hand.
The sting startled him, time spinning back up to meet him as he let go of his hold on his powers. (Or was he slowing down? It was impossible to tell from the inside, always had been.)
One second, Shen thought the bastard was going to manage to get Tommy, but then, the asshole was on the ground, his improvised weapon was shattered into pieces, and the blur of movement Tommy had become resolved back into him. Shen, who'd launched towards them, landed right by the neonazi and punched him out before he could try anything else. "You okay?" she asked, her breath short, looking Tommy up and down, and instinctively reaching for his hand when she noticed the blood there.
At first he had no idea why she was trying to hold his hand, his brain jumping around faster than usual through about a hundred different things. "yeah, no, I'm-" the adrenaline was wearing off, that was what was happening, burning away from his bloodstream as his body slowed back down to normal. His hand stung and he actually looked down rather than frowning at her face through his night-vision goggles. Bleeding. He'd actually been hit by something. Dumbass. "I'm good," he said automatically. "It's fine."
"Just a scratch," Shen confirmed after having a look at it. She let his hand go, and gave him a smile. Adrenaline, doing good, and someone she could trust to have her back, and vice versa; things were good.
Cargo port fire. That had been a new one, and not a particularly easy one, given the attitude of some of the cops towards mutants. But the firefighters had welcome their help, as a whole, and they'd managed to avoid any casualties, and help put out the fire.
Now Shen landed on a rooftop a little way from the harbor, where Tommy was waiting for her. She turned off her image inducer as her feet touched the ground, looking once again like a brown-winged teenager with talons for feet, rather than a grey-winged twenty-something in combat boots. Her suit went from sleeveless green and purple to the long-sleeved black one (with green accents courtesy of Gilmore) issued by the school, and there was a faint smatter of soot on her face.
"That was a good one," she said with a smile, pushing a hand back through her recently cut hair.
"Hell yeah," Tommy agreed easily from where he sat on the roof's edge, feet dangling over the empty space below. He'd turned off the image inducer the moment he was well away from the port (stupid thing - no wonder it annoyed Kurt so much). "I gotta start lifting weights more. Hauling unconscious dock workers around is a lot heavier than tossing Billy across the Danger Room. That last guy felt like he ate rocks for breakfast." He grinned, stretching his arms up and then popping both shoulders one after the other. "You good?"
"I'm awesome," Shen confirmed, hopping up on the ledge beside him. "Kinda wired." Between the adrenaline and the elation of doing some good, there was a restless kind of energy buzzing through her, and she had to wonder if it was what life was like for Tommy, only all the freaking time. She used one taloned foot to poke at his shoulder playfully. "You should totally work out with me. Build up some muscle mass."
Tommy laughed, kicking his feet against the building wall in restless rhythm. "You could bench press both me and the bench press itself, we know this." His goggles cast the world in a greenish light, Shen a bright spot in the artificial light of the night vision. He shoved them up on the top of his head, his hair rumpling around the frame, and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. "What's next? Any more calls from dispatch?" Tommy teased. He should be basking in victory, but the night was way too young to slow down now.
"Nothing that seems to require our assistance," Shen announced with a shake of her head. "Wanna do a quick round through the streets, make sure no one needs a little help? I reaaaally don't wanna head back to New York just yet."
"Told you I was going to be a bad influence on you." Tommy bounced to his feet before she was done talking, and spun on one heel to survey the city laid out below them. The port was all lit up, fire trucks and police cars and everything still with all their lights going. Smaller pockets of lights meant warehouses and business parks, while the bright gleam of the downtown core beckoned from a few miles away. "Bright lights, big city -- let's do it. Can I grab a lift down, or do I need to hit the stairs again?"
Shen grinned - she wasn't sure what was bad about his influence so far, and also absolutely an answer to his question. "Sure," she confirmed out loud, as she turned the imager back on. Then she moved behind him, arms wrapping around his waist, and hurtled both of them off of the ledge, freefall for a couple of seconds before she spread her wings and they soared over the nearby warehouses, heading for downtown proper. Her hold on him was strong and sure; he wasn't in any danger of falling. And she couldn't quite stop smiling, between the high of a successful call and just, this moment, Tommy and her up in the air, city sprawling underneath, the rush of the wind and the rush of elation.
Tommy dropped his goggles back into place when Shen grabbed him, and let her carry him up into the air. Yeah, this was the one power he envied. If he could switch up for a day he'd want flight, just to know what it would be like to be the one kicking gravity in the balls. She moved almost fast enough for the motion to feel right, the world slipping by underneath them only a little slower than it should. Sometimes -- more these days than ever before -- he didn't feel so off-sync with the universe. Almost like he'd found somewhere to fit.
As they neared downtown, Shen flew them a little lower for Tommy's benefit, since he didn't have her enhanced eyesight. "You want me to take you down, or patrol from up here?" she asked, pushing her voice over the wind whipping past them, eyes already scanning the streets below for anything that might require their attention.
"Bombs away!" he called up cheerfully, giving her a thumbs-up that he assumed she could see. "You take the high road and I'll take the low road, or however that shit goes."
"All right!" Shen shouted back, and nosedived towards the streets below until they were low enough that she could drop him without risking injuring him... but still high enough that he would actually drop a little, and she wouldn't risk catching his head with her feet as she swooped back up.
When he'd first started doing the whole patrol thing it had made sense to stick closer to home territory -- New York, Jersey, all that. He could cover the area easily, got to know some of the usual faces on the street corners, get a better sense of when someone was out of place. But this stuff, Shen's big rescues, those took them out to cities he didn't know well. Or at all.
On the one hand, it was a whole lot less boring. On the other, it meant they were stuck more on the big stuff, the obvious car crashes and break-and-enters, rather than the more subtle problems that ran under the surface. It was probably for the best. He'd never been good at subtle.
Tommy dropped and hit the ground running - literally - not stumbling when his feet hit pavement. He didn't need to slow down for Shen the way he did for Jack, so that was alright; all the people out and about this time of night would notice was a wind that kicked up dust around them after he was already long gone. Party districts were usually safer than people gave them credit for -- all the lights and noise kept the really bad shit at bay. And he wasn't in a mood to wrangle drunks. The dark side streets, quiet industrial parks, away from prying eyes -- that was where stuff went down.
And speaking of which -- the empty parking garage between a pair of condemned buildings caught his attention. Tommy slowed down to figure out what had caught his eye. There: a light up on the second level, red like brake lights where there shouldn't have been anything at all. Hunh.
Shen circled around the building, peering into the darkness, glad that her sight was as good as it was. Clearly a deal of some kind, bags were being exchanged. She tapped her earbud. "Some kind of deal. Want to investigate?"
Shen's voice cut in to the street noise and Tommy slowed down, skidding quietly to a halt in the darkness across the street. The handful of fading yellow streetlights in the distance didn't do much of anything to help him out, but at least he had the goggles. They didn't pick up much more than vague shapes, though. Not at this distance. "Assuming you don't mean dealing like cards, yeah. What can you see from up there?"
"Can't see what's in the bags. Two cars, six - no, seven figures," she answered, making another circle to get another look. "A couple of skinheads. All whites, and some buzzcuts. I hate to stereotype, but..."
"But odds are good it's not a Juggalo meetup. Got it." He should be asking more questions, make like TJ and think strategy, but why bother? The pair of them could out-punch and out-run any jackbooted creep without breaking a sweat. "Round-up time," Tommy muttered cheerfully into the comm and headed across the street toward the big ramp that went in and up.
Shen chuckled and changed trajectory, dropping towards the second story in a swoop, wings tucked in behind her back. The men - all of them were men, ugh - didn't see anything coming, and when she flared her wings on either side of her to slow down, they knocked two of them to the ground. She stopped with a jolt, and landed between their prone figures. "Hey, boys," she greeted the group with a smirk, tiny Chinese mutant chick, so much there they probably hated. Two strikes to the men trying to stand back up, taking them back down, and she was up in the air again as the rest of the group reached inside their jackets for what she fully expected to be firearms.
Tommy'd held back for a sec to watch Shen do her thing in the beams of the car lights, adrenaline and anticipation making everything sharp and bright. When she was moving again and they were going for guns, that was his cue. Tommy sped up and time froze, making it easy -- too easy -- to grab the silenced handguns from their inside pockets. Those and the bag that one of them had dropped the minute Shen descended on them. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be, paused half in the air and half already hitting the ground.
He hauled it away, the contents clanking ominously, and heaved the bag away behind Shen. It skidded into the shadows and stopped about ten feet back.
When time restarted, Tommy grinned at the men - them, empty-handed, and him, with a bunch of guns in his arms. "Looking for these?" Their expressions when they started to realize why their holsters were empty was totally the best part.
Shen might be fast when she'd picked up speed up in the air, but she couldn't process things at the speed Tommy did, and it was the sound of a slide behind her that had her glance back and notice the bag. She smirked, especially when Tommy went all attitude on the guys, and two strong beats of her wings flew her back closer to the bag. "And this, probably," she called out conversationally. They'd come for it, and she'd be waiting - if Tommy let them reach her, but she trusted him to let her have some fun, too, for all that he could have taken them all out in a couple of seconds.
"Goddamn muties," one of the bozos snarled, and the hand that had been going for his gun balled up into a fist. "Get your asses over here and I'll show you who's the dominant species."
Tommy fiddled with the guns until they ejected the clips, and he chucked the pieces in the general direction of the bag. "If you're so superior, why can I smell you from over here?" he asked with flippant ease. The big dude and his skinny buzz-cut buddy tried to rush Tommy but it was too easy; he slowed time down and charged them with his arms out. He got them around the waists and knocked the wind out of them before they realized he was moving.
In those moments, Shen always sort of wished she could just be watching Tommy in action. Never mind that she'd see a blur more often than not. But she was busy with her own stuff, namely, two of the assholes running for her while a third tried to get to the bag. She touched down just long enough to jump up again, twirling through the air, talons curled in on themselves so they would only cause blunt trauma when her feet made contact. The idea wasn't to kill anyone, after all. A well-timed beat of her wings prevented her from landing and carried her over to the guy who'd just grabbed the bag. "I love haters," she commented, and decked him with one well-placed punch, keeping tight control of her strength. "Thinking so hard they're superior, having no clue we're actually holding back."
The first two dudes dropped, Tommy spun around and took on the next one - this time a beefy guy who had the distinct look of roid-rage in the eyes. That and the swastika carved into his arm made Tommy really glad for the chance to take him down. "They say it takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. I guess that's why you never will." And he wiggled his pinkie finger at roid-dude in the universal gesture for 'microdick.'
Roid-rage tried to go for a knife but Tommy got out of the way, standing behind him and knocking him to the ground before the guy even noticed he'd moved. "Amazing."
That was two, four, five, six... where'd the last guy go?
"Speed!" Shen shouted as she looked up from dropping that asshole to the ground. "Behind you!"
For a guy whose whole thing was reaction time, getting caught off-guard was stupidly embarrassing. Tommy's head whipped around when Shen yelled his name, only hauling on time's strings when he saw the movement of the board out of the corner of his eye. The last of the neo-nazi shitheads had come up behind him while he'd been whaling on the other guys, a nail-ridden two-by-four in his hands.
Time stopped around him just before the moment of impact, iron spikes headed right for Tommy's temple. He dropped to the ground, rolled and took the shithead out at the knees, grabbing his board and breaking it into splinters on the concrete pillar. Splinters flew, one of the nails catching against the heel of his hand.
The sting startled him, time spinning back up to meet him as he let go of his hold on his powers. (Or was he slowing down? It was impossible to tell from the inside, always had been.)
One second, Shen thought the bastard was going to manage to get Tommy, but then, the asshole was on the ground, his improvised weapon was shattered into pieces, and the blur of movement Tommy had become resolved back into him. Shen, who'd launched towards them, landed right by the neonazi and punched him out before he could try anything else. "You okay?" she asked, her breath short, looking Tommy up and down, and instinctively reaching for his hand when she noticed the blood there.
At first he had no idea why she was trying to hold his hand, his brain jumping around faster than usual through about a hundred different things. "yeah, no, I'm-" the adrenaline was wearing off, that was what was happening, burning away from his bloodstream as his body slowed back down to normal. His hand stung and he actually looked down rather than frowning at her face through his night-vision goggles. Bleeding. He'd actually been hit by something. Dumbass. "I'm good," he said automatically. "It's fine."
"Just a scratch," Shen confirmed after having a look at it. She let his hand go, and gave him a smile. Adrenaline, doing good, and someone she could trust to have her back, and vice versa; things were good.
