West Ritner, Philadelphia, 01:02 AM.
September 10th, 2010.
The early morning must have been dark as Aiden touched down, but his eyes had no issue picking out Byrna Brilyant standing on the doorstep. He glanced down at the single luggage bag she had on her-the extended handle of which was resting snug against her hip.
“I was expecting a lot more boxes, to be honest?” Aiden said curiously.
“It’s already been moved to a storage container in Boston,” Byrna said imperiously.
“Huh,” Aiden blinked.
Byrna smiled in the dark, flicking her long thick hair over her shoulder, clearly impressed with herself. Aiden rolled his eyes; why had he needed to pick her up then? Whatever. He strode forward, ducking down to slip his fingers into the handle on the bag before letting it dangle from his palm. Without bothering to wait, he scooped her legs out from under her and lifted off the ground.
“Hey!” Byrna squawked, “A little warning next time-Whoa! The city looks awesome from up here!”
“Doesn’t it?” Aiden grinned.
He was in complete agreement; flying had to be the single greatest ability that he had access to. Everything looked incredible when you were gliding unaided through the air.
“So, what made you change your mind?” Aiden said curiously.
Byrna had wanted time to think about it-which was a good idea, really; making such a life-changing decision at the drop of a hat would have been incredibly impulsive. It spoke well of her faculties that she’d given it two weeks thought before deciding. Not that he’d been expecting it-despite what he would tell anyone that asked-he’d assumed he’d messed the recruitment pitch up and given it up as a bad job.
“I’m a teacher for the early years-usually anyway. Still, there's been a flu going around, so we were all curious about how exactly-” Byrna started excitedly.
Aiden stared at the woman in his hands in horror; why the hell had he asked again? He had no choice but to listen to the twisted tale that, at some point, somehow included the price of Tea in China.
“-Anyway, I had to sub for one of them,” Byrna said, muttered, embarrassedly. “Now-If you have ever had a substitute teacher before, well, those little bastards had me crying in seven minutes-”
“Fantastic,” Aiden interrupted incredulously once he’d finally received his answer. “You need to learn to summarize-and prune off all that extra nonsense that had absolutely nothing to do with the question.”
“It did!” Byrna cried in outrage, “You had to know how they got sick in the first place! Or the rest of the story wouldn’t have made sense!”
Aiden scrunched up his face in agony as she launched into a detailed description of why it was important.
What had he done?
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Empty Warehouse(Waynetech), Boston, 8:02 AM.
September 11th, 2010.
Two steps closer in an instant, and he was already raising his hand to block the obvious right hook.
Once again, he was somehow completely surprised as her left fist slipped between his ineffective guard and crashed into his cheek. The force of the jab sent him into a half spin, and he tried to turn the force into a spinning backhand that completely missed as Diana stopped on a dime.
He watched in slow motion as the back of his hand cut past her face. Diana’s eyes came into view as the momentum carried him into a barely controllable spin, and his left arm only made it halfway up before her right hand slipped behind his head, twisting tightly into his hair.
Diana hopped up into the air at the exact same moment as she ripped his head downwards, and her knee landed with a crack, sending him reeling back to his feet-only she didn’t let go. He took another knee to the face before he managed to get his hands into a position to block the next one. Not that it mattered because she tossed another knee at him and then punched him squared in the face when his hands dropped to stop her thigh cold.
Aiden gritted his teeth as he stumbled backward; goddammit, he’d never been beaten so badly in his life. It was much less painful than he would have expected, but that was undoubtedly a combination of her pulling her punches and his sheer durability.
He had barely settled back into an upright stance when the metal disc that was her shield bounced off his head, sending him rocking back another step. The shield arced high into the air as she came sprinting back towards him.
The momentum of the shield bled away, and it started to drop once more. Aiden took two steps forward, an attempt to have some momentum of his own on his side as Diana reached him. The shield fell directly between them as he sent a punch straight past it towards her face.
Diana palmed it out wide, spun downward before her leg flicked upwards, and sent the shield smashing once more into his face. This time he hadn’t recovered as she plucked the shield out of the air and pressed the offensive once more.
He reacted more on instinct than anything else, sending a burst of invisible Ki behind him to send him rocketing forwards, while drawing as much of it as he could into his right arm, and swung forward as Roshi’s technique took effect, rapidly increasing the muscle mass in his arm.
Diana’s eyes went wide, but even having caught her completely flat-footed, she still managed to get the shield up between them as his enlarged fist crashed into it. She slid backward from the force, digging twin trenches in the concrete floor before she managed to halt herself.
“How did you even block that?!” Aiden complained, adrenaline coursing through him. “I thought I had you that time.”
“I almost didn’t block it in time,” Diana admitted easily, “How did you change direction so quickly?”
“Energy released behind me to propel me in the opposite direction,” Aiden said easily before blinking.
He was a lot more forthright than usual, probably due to the excitement he felt washing through him at the combat. He’d have to watch out for that in the future; he didn’t want to start monologuing in the middle of a fight.
“You should use it more often,” Diana said thoughtfully, “Can you expel it from behind your elbows or legs?”
Aiden tilted his head in thought; he hadn’t thought to try and use it like that. It had been a flash of brilliance in the middle of the fight that had even caused him to do it in the first place-not something he had trained himself to do. He was being pressured, and the solution had come to him-almost by instinct.
“I’ll attempt to figure it out; I don’t see why I couldn’t,” Aiden said curiously. “Hey, Diana; how’d you get so good at this anyway?”
Diana blinked before lowering her shield to reply. The second she opened her mouth, he used another Ki Burst to dash forward across the room, trying to sneak attack her. He saw the edge of her mouth twist up into a smirk before she spun out of the way, apparently expecting his underhanded tactics by now.
Dammit.
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Apartment, Boston, 7:02 AM.
September 13th, 2010.
“Home, sweet home,” Aiden said easily, stepping inside for the first time.
It much much the same as the last apartment and fully furnished to boot, although the location of the building wasn’t as central. That did have the benefit of lowering the price quite a bit, though, so he could deal with a little extra travel time.
There was one of those three-seaters lounges with the extra bit hanging off that he’d seen around. Byrna rolled her luggage bag over to it and flopped over on it with an indecipherable groan.
“You’ve still got some money, don’t you?” Aiden said curiously, “Buy a single bed or something to put against the wall if you don’t want to sleep on the couch.”
“It’s not bad,” Byrna mumbled into the cushions, “I can survive this.”
Aiden rolled his eyes at the dramatics, taking a seat on one of the two high stools at the floating bench in the kitchen. According to Tracy, the Design for the Gravity room was going well; Emil had apparently come through on a warehouse, although he hadn’t seen it yet.
He hadn’t managed to speak to the man since his apartment had exploded either, but it was only a week until his next appointment was supposed to be scheduled. He’d have to locate where the Star labs were in Boston proper.
He’d learn from Diana that Chesire had been placed in ‘Belle Reve Penitentiary’ whose name rung a bell; he was pretty sure that was one of the things that tended to crop up in DC. He’d also learned they were learning a wealth of information about his ‘Ships’ construction.
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Apparently, they had set off some kind of defense protocol during the process because it refused to output anything on the monitors any more. He was a little annoyed at that, but there was a general consensus that it might start working again if Aiden were to make an attempt to turn it on.
He’d told them to set up a day for it, but nobody contacted him about that yet.
“Alright,” Aiden said thoughtfully, “I’ve got a warehouse in the works, should be enough space for your equipment if you want to set up there; have you given any thought to rebranding?”
Byrna rolled over enough to free her face from the curtain of thick black hair.
“A little?” Byrna admitted. “I still want to be ice-themed-its what I’m most comfortable with.”
“Cool,” Aiden said wryly, earning a snort of indignation. “Think you can come up with some defensive tech?”
Byrna propped her cheek up on her palm.
“Ice walls,” Byrna said cheekily.
“Incredible,” Aiden said deadpanned. "Nobody will ever see that coming; how about some kind of simple defensive suit a client can wear? It doesn’t need to be able to attack or anything, just armor.”
Byrna blinked at the idea.
“Make a suit for someone else?” Byrna mumbled, “I never thought of doing that- if the suit doesn’t need cryo-I could dump most of the power modules and use the remaining ones to power the movement of the suit.”
Aiden probably wouldn’t have been able to hear her if his ears weren’t what they were.
Her circumstance had been pretty adverse to any kind of altruistic design goals. A villain hiding her identity wouldn’t be thinking about making anything for anyone else, really.
“Slim down the armor, still needs to block a certain level of kinetic force- but enough to reduce the power cost of moving the-” Byrna was sitting up now, staring off into space.
Aiden watched her curiously; it was like watching two different people-her normal scatterbrained self and this hyper-focused intensity. Byrna nodded firmly to herself some minutes later before popping up off the lounge.
“Let's go!” Byrna said excitedly, “I have so many ideas! This is great-”
“Can’t,” Aiden said immediately, “We haven’t got access to the warehouse yet, and we're not setting anything up in my apartment.”
Byrna opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again.
“When the hell do we get the warehouse? Can’t you hurry it up? I want to work!” Byrna whined, “Aiden!”
Aiden could feel the little muscle in his eyelid tensing, goddammit she was so annoying!
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Apartment, Boston, 4:53 PM.
September 14th, 2010.
“The terror twins have been rampaging cross country; this will be the third state where they’ve staged an assault,” Cat Grant said excitedly, “We just so happen to have a front-row seat to the action this time!”
The camera swerved to the left, and both Superman and Martian Manhunter floating serenely in the air above the bridge. A car was suddenly launched from the bridge towards them, followed barely a moment later by a second. Martian Manhunter simply faded through the projectile aimed at him, not bothering to move an inch. Superman just swatted his own out of the air without effort, sending it into the water below.
Aiden took in their complete lack of tension; they clearly had it under control, give they were more or less at ease. He wondered why people even bothered trying to duke it out with the guy; he was clearly just using the minimum amount of force to accomplish the task.
Then again, with the sheer strength that he must have had at his disposal, Aiden could feel that itch in the back of his mind once more. Fighting Diana had been an absolute pleasure, despite the fact that he’d gotten his ass painfully kicked all over the warehouse.
He wondered what it would be like to fight the Man of Steel himself.
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Apartment, Boston, 4:01 PM.
September 17th, 2010.
Aiden took a bite out of his fifth snack of the day and once more glanced at his phone.
Apart from a handful of times in the past, Dinah was usually pretty prompt when it came to keeping their appointment times. He wondered-three knocks, calm, and confident rang out; he’d tracked the Ki-signature all the way up the apartment buildings stairs. Still, he’d assumed that it was one of the tenants that had lived above or a ninja coming to kill him.
Maybe he was a little paranoid.
“I’ll get it!” Byrna gasped.
“Do whatever you want,” Aiden mumbled.
She been moping around everywhere since they’d arrived here; apparently, not having the warehouse ready and waiting for her to start working was grounds for sulking. Having someone to talk to that was more aware of him was nice, and it had given him someone to bounce ideas off of. The downside was that Byrna had to be the single most chattiest person he had ever met in his life, and once she started, it was almost impossible to keep her on track.
On several occasions, he’d found himself dragged into conversations-arguments even, that he had absolutely no stake in but routinely found himself trying to defend before he managed to realize she’d baited him once more. He’d died on more hills in the last week than he had in his entire life up until this point! It was keeping him on his toes-not exactly a bad thing; he had been getting rusty after all.
“Hi!” Byrna said excitedly, “Who are you?”
A familiar voice that could only be Dinah spoke up from the door.
“I’m looking for Aiden Neve?” Dinah said calmly. “We have an appointment.”
They were coming to his house now?
“Really?” Byrna said, surprised, “Are you the real estate-”
“Dinah is my Justice League appointed therapist,” Aiden said quickly, loading the phrase to make sure she understood not to say anything incriminating. “I wasn’t aware we were doing in-person interviews now?”
Byrna stepped back to allow her inside, watching the woman curiously. Dinah strode in with confidence looking completely at ease.
“I had business in Boston today, so I thought we could do the interview in person,” Dinah said easily, “Unless you have a problem? I’d be willing to stand out in the hallway and call you-if you prefer.”
Aiden considered asking her to do just that, it would be hilarious, but it would likely tip over the house of cards that was their carefully balanced communications. He didn’t want to completely alienate her or the Justice League, and it would likely get back to Diana at that point as well.
He enjoyed that spar way too much for it to be the only one he ever got.
“In-person is fine,” Aiden said finally, “I’d like to receive notice beforehand in the future though-I might not have been home at all.”
“Perfect,” Dinah nodded before glancing at Byrna. “Are you happy to hold the discussion in the presence of your friend?”
Byrna was giving him the pouty eyes, and he knew she would start badgering him about it as soon as Dinah was gone if he kicked her out for half an hour.
Aiden sighed.
“Yeah, she can stay, have a seat,” Aiden sighed, gesturing to the stools. “Byrna, Dinah, Dinah, Byrna.”
“Hi!” Byrna chirped.
“Hello again,” Dinah said bemused, before turning back to him. “How have you been, Aiden?”
Byrna snorted, and he realized immediately that he had made a grievous mistake.
“I’m fine,” Aiden said wryly, “Same as always, wounds are all healed-seems pretty fast given I had metal rods sticking out of me. At least this experimental body is good for something, you know?”
There he’d covered most of the new information in a single sentence, but her expression didn’t really change. Aiden studied her face; she had obviously come in person this time because she wanted to get a better read on him than she could get on the phone. Which probably meant she was looking for something in particular.
“That’s good; not all wounds can be healed quite so quickly, however,” Dinah said calmly, “You’ve been through a very traumatic incident; how are you dealing with what happened?”
“You mean when ninjas blew up my apartment building in an attempt to assassinate me?” Aiden said dryly, “I’m watching every single person I pass in the street as if they might be waiting to pull a katana out of their trousers and shank me.”
Aiden paused for a beat and then spoke up before she could ask anything deeper.
“Or perhaps you meant when the ninjas blew up STAR Labs and stole my medical history?” Aiden said, archly, side-eyeing her.
Dinah almost sighed.