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So she wasn't looking for a relationship. She was just looking for a hook up. AJ sighed and gently grabbed the hand that had bee drifting up toward his neck.

Was he in any state to judge here? He could probably have this woman and throw her aside and she'd be happy about it. He just... had never really considered such a thing before.

"Ma'am--" AJ's phone buzzed against the glass table and that totally derailed his train of thinking.

"Oh-hoh. Ma'am is my mother. You're supposed to call me Sonja." She pulled back a bit to pout when AJ reached for his phone, but did not let him go. He'd been holding her hand a few moments ago. She could sense his resolve wavering.

To free himself, AJ pressed his glass into the woman's hands.

"Looks like you're empty. Take mine."

She protested about ordering more and even started to flag down a waitress, but AJ was more concerned about his phone. Was this interruption enough to get him out?

...

"Pfft." He couldn't believe what he'd just read. The stoic no-nonesense woman who'd been through the blackout with Pippa was probably the last person on the plant he expected to hear from, let alone be given such a golden opportunity from.

Honestly, they were untangled now, he could just leave.

Or...



He glanced around, but didn't see her, but the waitress was on her way.

AJ watched the idea trickle down the unknown woman's face and then Pippa's.

Yep. It was happening.

"Excellent. I've always wanted to try driving a rig this big."

AJ would have rubbed his hands together if he weren't applying pressure. He was more than fine with asking for forgiveness on this one, also this job was already 90% lost. He'd have to find another one regardless of if he took the truck or not.

Once they'd made it through the exit stiles, the truck awaited with virtually no one on deck to stop them. The remainder of the response team had their hands full guiding and sorting the people who'd made it out, and they'd led the blind until they were no longer in the darkness. Something pinged off the concrete tunnel behind them and AJ cringed as a wave of panic echoed behind them. They weren't out of the woods just yet.

"Hop into a 5-point harness if you can with that shoulder. I'll unhook the hoses so we don't start a second catastrophe." The woman with the gun... AJ didn't both trying to tell her what to do. She seemed to be the ranking decision maker.

AJ had to scoot through a scuffle of people who could see as he passed and then devolved back into panic once he was out of the way again before he hefted himself up to the release latches. They'd been using the hoses to lead the blind out. If AJ drove off without unhooking them, they'd maybe start dragging some poor people who really just wanted out of the situation.

Another, closer rapport had AJ dropping down to the far side of the truck and yanking a bystander out of the way of the driver-side door so he could slide into place.

"Everyone in? 'Cause here we go." He strapped his own seatbelt and released the air brakes with a sudden hiss.

The crowd nearest to them all jumped and scrambled back from the sound as much as the feeling of the hiss of air as the rig started to roll forward.

It wasn't enough, though. The crowds were thick and half blind. Those that could see were shouting: at him, at others, at what was coming for them from inside the tunnels.

AJ reached for the horn strap.

HONK, HOOOOONK

Everyone jumped and turned to look, regardless of if they could see or not. He had experience driving emergency vehicles, but of a smaller variety. The firefighters left nearby shouted and started to book it back toward the truck, but they'd parked in the shroud where they couldn't see.

I hope there's no jail time for this. Was AJ's last thought before the passenger-side window erupted inward. AJ ducked and eased forward inch by inch so he would be sure no one was going to get mowed down.

This was not the heroic whisking away he'd imagined when he suggested it.

AJ saw the ninja take the gun and nod toward himself and Pippa as well as taking up a sort of guard stance. She was probably saying to go ahead and move. Best guess. Pippa also said something, with his hands on her trunk, he could make out a bit more just by watching her lips and feeling the cadence of the words from her body.

"Not letting go, sorry-not-sorry." She seemed real woozy which likely meant shock since, despite all the drama and blood of the wound, it didn't appear that serious. Then again, he hadn't given the rest of her more than a cursory look. Maybe she was bleeding out from her leg and couldn't feel it yet. AJ tamped down on the unlikely scenarios buzzing around in his head.

They would do more a thorough examination once they were in a safe place. That was his marching mantra.

And yeah, it was awkward walking through the stadium seating. It was awkward scooting through as just as one person, but as a three-headed-one-gunned-two-armed monster with 6 legs it was slow going. He kept checking behind him, since he couldn't hear, to be sure that the ninja was there. She was either hella stealthy or AJ really had ruined his hearing for the day.

"Doing great. Just a little further to the main stairway and this one looks clear of people." He kept up a steady stream of talking, trying not to shout it all and keep his voice low. Little encouragements to keep Pippa focused and to ground the ninja behind them. Hell, they were just as encouraging to him as well. "Not a lot of people this way. No one is repelling. Just gotta keep moving one foot after the other."

AJ was not a fighter. He had taken an oath to do no harm and given the kind of person he was, he figured he should be able to talk his way out of any fights before they happened for real. He had never in his wildest daydreams thought he would actually take swing at another human. Sure, maybe he'd thought about it, but the doing was very different than he expected.

For starters, when he punched the masked face, his hand hurt. The movies made it look pretty easy and certainly nobody pulled their hand back with an "ow" that was echoed in a woman's voice over the seats.

AJ's head whipped to the side as he took a blow to the chin. He'd already been trying to look that way since the voice... that was Pippa. And if he heard Pippa, that meant Pippa had not, in fact, run away. And had, in fact, gotten hurt.

He swung harder, sending the guy beneath him rocking back and his... no, actually her face mask askew. He'd been scrabbling with a lady and really did not know how to feel about that.

The man at the bottom of the pile managed to wriggle out from the scrum. AJ didn't have a braincell to spare on that at the moment.

He was trying to put his body between the user and the gun that had already gone off once—the likely, but hopefully not too serious reason for Pippa's shouting of "ow." The gun was on a strap, so he couldn't get it totally out of the bad guy's hands, so AJ had rolled into the woman beneath him to put his back against her and get his body between her and the gun. She wasn't letting him have it though and in the struggle that followed, the gun went off again.

AJ saw it. The woman beneath him was so close that she saw it as well.

The last masked man had been reaching down to pull AJ off the woman and he took the shot right in the gut.

AJ's hearing was entirely gone, ears ringing from two too close shots. The woman beneath him was frozen rigid in shock over what had just happened. The shot man collapsed across their legs. There really wasn't time to process. His first instinct was to go to the victim, but as AJ lurched forward, he realized that would leave the woman with the gun at his back. And that while the fallen man was a human who deserved dignity in death, he also still had a gun on his person and an unknown agenda.

"No. Nononono." The woman moved toward the fallen man and her hands darted around like confused butterflies. "I can't see. I can't- Kurt."

AJ moved carefully to unhook the strap that kept the gunwoman's semi-automatic attached, feeling any fast movements would be enough to snap her back to her senses. He sneaked the weapon away from the unmasked woman, tempted to yeet it into outer space but... there were kids here. He couldn't just leave it and he definitely didn't want to leave it with her.

"I'm here." AJ moved away from the tragedy unfolding behind him and slid into the seat next to Pippa so that the woman he knew was between him and the one he didn't know. If it hadn't been the gut... if he had seen the man move even once after he took that shot...

"Hold this, please. Where are you hurt?" He thought he said it, but it may have come out as a shout. AJ shoved the gun toward Pippa and tried to trace the blood trail up her back. He could assess her, decide if she could be moved or not, and then they could all fuck right off into the sunset for all he cared. But there was no skipping step 1.

AJ had thought it was a power trip to drive in an Emergency Medical Services truck. He was no stranger to weaving through traffic and jumping curbs. What he wasn't used to was doing it with 50,000 pounds of force and threat. People pulled over for EMS sometimes. People absolutely got out of the way for the fire truck he was riding with toward the scene of a potential medical emergency.

He was moonlighting with a fancy new license after passing the firefighter’s fitness test. Carrying 300lb over his shoulders was just another Tuesday. If he’d known that was all that was standing between him and a pay raise, he would have started Fire EMS training way sooner.

The driver honked as they neared the baseball stadium, the scene they’d been called to for generic emergency reasons. The place had gone dark, according to the radio, and they were supposed to help get the lights back on and help any of the panic stampede victims.

Only, it was daylight, still. And nothing really seemed amiss in AJ’s eyes as he leaned forward toward the driver to see out the front window.

People were stumbling around. Cars had been fleeing as they drove in, but the closer they got to the stadium entryway, the more AJ noted chaos: people stumbling and bumping blindly. There was a definite difference in how a sighted person behaved when they lost their most relied-upon sense. These people weren’t just in a blind panic. They were acting totally blind: running into poles, walls, and other obvious obstructions.

“What a f***ing sh*t-show.”

The fire truck nudged through a tight opening between vehicles and rolled to a stop as near to the stadium as they could manage without running over any of the people blindly stumbling around. The team lead had been talking scenarios and how it might be a large-scale gas leak, but the debate in the back died off as soon as the engine cut.

“Dude. Not funny. Whatever you did to make it dark, cut it out.”

AJ sat back in his jump seat to grab the kit beneath his chair and as he moved, the fireman next to him claimed that things got better while the driver started complaining…

Eventually, they came up with the dumbest plan.

They walked as a team, each member keeping one hand on AJ while AJ held the fire hose. They hadn’t hooked it up to a hydrant, the hose was functionally a rope for people to follow back to the truck and from the truck, they knew it was only a few more feet to the point where they could see again: the edge of the anomaly.

They steered toward any obvious injuries first and captured as many able bodied people, explaining the hose thing to any who would listen which imposed some small amount of order, at least in the section of stadium that they had entered.

AJ for his part felt rather silly. He could see a lot of crazy, a lot of panic, and a lot of… were those swat team members? They were dressed in black and repelling from the upper nosebleed section, right toward a woman who was seated and hugging her knees and… familiar?

”Pippa?” He wasn’t supposed to. He was absolutely stranding his team. But he couldn’t just watch whatever was about to happen. They had guns and she was just sitting there totally unaware.

AJ stuffed the hose into the hands of the firefighters he’d come in with and vaulted over an empty section of seating.

”Pippa get down!” He roared, afraid he wouldn’t be heard over the din.

It did cost an arm and a leg. "And a partial liver." He joked about the drinking problems he observed in his classmates and himself, and tried not to sound too glum about it. This really wasn't Pippa's problem and AJ wasn't one to unburden himself by burdening others. "Luckily the liver is one of the few body parts we can self-regenerate without special powers."

Blue sky, blue sky. It had been such a nice day earlier, he just had to keep that fixed in his heart.

"So the people you worked for suck, but they at least acknowledge that and admitting you suck is the first step to recovery." His mind spun a few fancys of what kind of people she might work for that had both massage therapists and racists. Those two didn't entirely jive in his head, though.

"Wait. Stockholm? Are you really stuck there, or is it the metaphorical 'stuck' of a good pay check and health insurance?"