Aberrant. Chapter II
Title: Aberrant (2/2)
Author: Stef (ignitedangel@aol.com)
Rating: R
Summary: Sands muses on the cocky bastard that entered the CIA so many years before.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue
Dedication: Thanks to circe_tigana for motivating me to write this.
Author's Note: A sequel of sorts to 'Productivity'. You really don't have to had read that in order to read this. Just going with a guess on Sands' age being 33 for dates here. Also, the drug is of my own invention, unless it exists and there's something we don't know about it. Ooh. Scary.
Previous chapter is located here.
--
Aberrant. Chapter II of II
"That's some shiner you got there."
Three more shots. Sands lowers his gun, hearing the click and whirr of the sheet come towards him. He'd been practicing his shooting - the sheet silhouette marked in the head, chest, and crotch - when this ignorant fuck has to distract him. Bad enough he started pumping him for information the day before during the meeting. They had left the office and Rush called Sands to stay behind. What did Rush say to Sands, Gregory wondered.
Sands knew that if he mentioned the 'excellent work' bullshit Rush had gone on about, he'd never hear the end of Gregory's complaining. Sure, Sands had an 'attitude' - a label they stuck on him - but he was doing good work. Not entirely by the book, but just enough of an edge to show he wouldn't falter. Wouldn't break.
They liked that.
Sands wasn't sure if he liked that they liked that.
Taking off his protective visor, Sands turns to face Gregory. He absentmindedly runs a hand through his hair, brushing past the bruise on his temple. Val, cheeky girl that she was, had a wonderful throwing arm.
"Thanks for the interest. Well, no, not really," Sands says, an eyebrow rising. "We're being rebellious today, aren't we? Speaking to an agent while said agent is practicing their shooting skills. Distracting, Gregory. You could be reprimanded. You rebel, you."
Gregory rolls his eyes, folding his arms across his chest. "Fuck you, Sheldon. I'm only here to give you a message."
"If it involves any of your body parts, I'll have to say 'no'."
"Rush wants to see you. In his office." The last words are said with a smirk. You're dead, Gregory's eyes read.
"That's swell. Good work." He pats Gregory on the shoulder, heading for the adjoining room to change out of his gear. "You free tonight? Broke up with Val. Sloppy seconds and all, but she thinks you're an accountant. That's steady, buddy."
--
Sands isn't sure if this is a joke or that Rush has been watching Star Wars one too many times.
He gets the appeal of it. Hell, had the action figures. Of course that was post-Bond, pre-deterioration into rebellion. Sands marks his life with phases. They aren't 'childhood', 'teen', 'adult'. They run by years of films, comics, and the line of girlfriends. Well, less on the latter. There's a difference between 'fucking' and 'making love'. Sands only knows of the first one, and will probably continue to adhere to it.
So he pushes all the smoke and mirrors aside, and realizes he's in a plain room, sitting on a chair, with a bandana tied around his head. His wrists and ankles are bound.
For a moment he wonders if Rush is actually some sort of kinky fuck, and then that dissolves.
"You're used to seeing what's in front of you, Sheldon."
"Sir?"
"Think of this as an exercise."
"I'm not sure where you're heading with this, sir." Sands turns his head this way and that, trying to see. But there is nothing other than black. There is no light filtering through the material, or up the hollows of his cheeks. There is only darkness, and Sands curses inwardly because he thinks he may or may not have to take a piss-
"You're CIA. This isn't college anymore, son. You know that. You've done it for the past few months. Done a heck of a job. But you've got to learn some things. Not everything is manipulation. Not everything is solid and easy to touch. You're not untouchable, although you may think you are. So that's where the bandana comes in."
"I'm going undercover as a S & M punk, now?"
"Not yet. Though if you're looking for a nice night of paper work, I might be able to set that one up for you."
Sands figures he'd be looking towards a nice night of fucking on the job instead of paperwork. However, apparently this sort of punk get-up isn't what he had in mind. Too bad with the punk thing. It'd be just like high school all over again.
"You remember we put that on you in my office, don't you."
"Yes, sir."
"And then we drove off to an undisclosed location."
"Yes, sir."
"Stop that."
"All right."
"Back to the point. You have to find your way back to the office with the blindfold."
"--What?"
"It's pedestrian, I'll admit. But you'll learn from it. I know I sure as hell did. Though we didn't have the same kind of drugs we do now."
Sands feels a tug on the back of his head, wisps of hair catching on the knot before slipping. The blindfold is loosened, able to fall off any minute. There are no lights. He feels himself still bound to the chair, wrists, ankles, and all. No light comes into the room, so he cannot estimate how big it is. How far the chair is from the door.
"Find my way underground? What's with the blindfold? I thought you said-"
"The lights are on, Sheldon. Don't worry. It'll come back to you. It only lasts for give or take six hours. You'll have plenty of time to come back by then."
Now Sands is agitated. His fingers flex, and he digs inside of his suit jacket sleeve to pull the tip of a small knife strapped to his arm. Not exactly a convenient spot - he'd much prefer his leg, or that new fake arm he saw in the equipment room - but it'd do. Ten more seconds and he'd have the rope cut in a jiffy-
"Failure to succeed in this mission will only earn your participation in washing my Mercedes come Monday morning."
Sands lifted his head in grim realization, hearing footsteps diminish. Bonds cut from his wrists, he bends forward, quickly cutting the ropes from his ankles. Sands gets up, and then stops.
The soft silk of the bandana falls past his shoulders and to the ground.
Sands can't see anything. And the door closes.
Drugs. Rush has blinded him.
I'm blind. Okay...
Sands isn't exactly sure whether he should laugh at the sheer comic book absurdity of it, or start cursing.
He does both, simultaneously. He puts the knife in his pocket carefully. Then he takes three steps forward and feels his face come in contact with something very solid and cold.
A column. He's walked into a column.
"If I'd have known this was going on, I would've vouched for the Skywalker treatment. At least he had a helmet."
Running a hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes - damn fucking drug, whatever the fucking fuck - Sands gropes the air blindly, clawing. He feels the column, smiles a little, then takes careful steps around it. Five more, and there was a wall. Left or right. Decisions, decisions.
He feels a cool little breeze come up from the right, and chooses that direction. Quicker than he expected, his hand is on the doorknob, and fresh air blasts against his face. It ruffles his hair, and he waits.
Cars. People. Teenagers laughing. Bicycles. The jingle and jangle of bicycles. Someone bumps walking past him, and he feels shopping bags brush past his leg. He waits longer, and he hears a car slow and the ignition turn off merely ten feet away.
Not the inside of a mall. Outside. Door, small room, outside - strip mall. He was in an abandoned store or office. Where was the nearest strip mall located from the CIA building? Right. Four miles.
If this was the same county, state, much less country.
Sands waits, then hears the giggle and constant chatter - English, though that doesn't help much- of kids passing by. He sticks an arm out, catching one kid by the shirt.
"Hey, man! Watch it!"
"Where am I?"
"Dude, get the--"
"Cop. Tell me. Where are we?"
"I ain't never seen a blind cop before."
"Little fucker--"
Sands feels a pain in his shin, then the scampering of sneakers. He grunts, snarls and touches his leg. Exnay on that plan. A hand snakes up past his jacket pocket, fumbles, then snatches the sunglasses. They are brand new as the last ones had broke, and so he slips these on. Much better than the unsettling blank eyes he imagines. Could be worse, the eye thing.
Could be permanent.
Could be in his apartment watching PBS and their musical specials. Oh, but no. No, no, shoot a couple of guards and get an Aesop slash metaphorical exercise courtesy of a certain sarcastic old bastard. Fucking A. He'd have taken the fucking lecture over this. Still, Sands knew this had to mean something. Idiotic, but something.
He knew there would be a downside to the good feeling of having Gregory jealous.
Rolling his eyes, Sands carefully starts walking down the block, past open store doors. He gropes along the wall, sometimes brushing past customers or outside displays. Displays - there! Something hard and long and - he has to smirk to himself - wooden. A stick. More fumbling and feeling. A cane. Just what he needed. He plucks it from its moorings, a cardboard display box, before rushing off. Glad to bump into the shoppers nearby, for he wouldn't get yelled at for stealing if they were in the way.
Sands stops short, foot hovering over the edge of the sidewalk. He estimates this by sticking the cane out lower, down. Yes, the curb. It was the curb, and he nearly walked across and gotten smeared over some idiot's windshield.
"Oh! You - pervert!"
Another thump, different than the column. No, he knew this pain, had felt it before. Some woman was smacking him on his shoulder with her handbag. Again and again. Sands curses, screaming shouts of "fuck!" and "I'm blind, damn it!" However, the woman isn't concerned with this as she keeps smacking the crap out of him.
So this would be another really, really bad day.
--
The Present
Sands looks on the whole incident fondly. He remembers getting back to the CIA building in three hours flat. Rush's office in four, given the run around they gave him. He was lucky. He would have had to wash Rush's car if he had bumped into Gregory. Fortunately, the little ass kisser was nowhere in sight when he got back, and Sands was grateful. Gregory might've shoved and locked him into a closet.
Hey, it's what Sands did the next morning once the drug wore off and his vision came back.
Sure, you couldn't kill CIA officers in the building. So he had to amuse himself with G rated fun. In the building.
Though he knew if he'd see that fucker laughing at him again outside of it-
Sands straightens in his chair, licking his lips. He turns his head left and right, knowing he won't see anything. There are sockets there, and they are far worse than merely being drugged. Rush thought it was amusing. It wasn't at the time. Days, months after, it was. Minutely. The irony sprung from there, twisted with a hint of tequila and lime.
He had walked by a pranks and parties supply store, picking up one of those prank canes that had an upturned mirror. And that woman appeared to be standing nearby, wearing a dress.
He'd been made a fool that day-also pervert, but that he already knew - and Sands didn't like it. He was a cocky bastard, then and now, but still didn't like it. Much prefer to study for the test and not walk in with a broken pencil. But in the end, the lesson had been to sometimes rely on others, not walk in blind, yadda yadda, after school special, call your senator, don't do drugs and hug your parents. Well, don't hug your parents, or do. Yell at them. Whatever.
Sands feels his temples throb in a headache from the moralistic garbage.
He likes Rush in that respect. Rush didn't want to commend him fully. No, there was a breach of protocol. Although he liked Sands for the excitement he displayed, he needed to know that wasn't how one went about these sort of things. One needed boundaries and rules. One needed to learn to rely on others for certain things, other times not. And do it by the book.
Once again: whatever.
Falling from his seat, his body slips down to the floor. Shirt twisted, and he finally pulls it off, feeling the scratchy touch of rug beneath bare skin. His fingers grope about blindly for the sunglasses, but they are gone. Instead he turns to lie on his back, kicking the shirt away. The window remains open, and curtains flutter in the breeze. He knows this for they brush the skin of his chest, back and forth, constant movement.
He runs a hand along his forehead and pushes his hair away from his eyes. Fingers are careful not to brush past his eyebrows, and the sockets there. Sheldon Sands can be a kinky S & M punk. Or a perverted, comic book reading fuck. But deep down, he doesn't want to feel. His sockets, or anywhere. Never his eyes. He's not ready for it, nor does he think he will be. Ever. Because right now, he can try to muse about the past. He can try to imagine how Gregory looked like hours ago, the colors of lights outside his window. Yet the mental images don't fully focus.
He can only picture Gregory at twenty three, and not older. The scene smokes to an office around them. And he is there, sitting with Gregory, wearing a plain black suit, white shirt and black tie. He has his eyes still, and stray bangs bother them, ones that he has to constantly push back. Sands is young and rebellious, sarcastic, dark, mellow. Gregory would complain, and Sands would slip his hand into his pants. Then it'd go in two directions: the lewd one, and the near shitting of the other officer, since Sands liked to keep his gun in his pants. Damn weak nerves Gregory had. Whiny fuck.
But he's dead now, and Sands is blind, older, hair longer, and tanned.
So after he thinks about all this, he stumbles to his feet and bends low. A sweep of his hand and his sunglasses find a way back. Then they go on his face, his shirt and jacket on his person, and he is off.
It is late, but Sands figures he can try to check out a bar, and see how good the pork is. And then tomorrow, perhaps the museum of sex on Fifth Avenue, after picking up the latest Catwoman.
Because even if he was a cocky young bastard out of college, an older psychotic, pork craving fuck now, he still has his priorities.
After all, he has to live up to the pervert mantel that woman bestowed upon him so many years ago.
END
Author: Stef (ignitedangel@aol.com)
Rating: R
Summary: Sands muses on the cocky bastard that entered the CIA so many years before.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue
Dedication: Thanks to circe_tigana for motivating me to write this.
Author's Note: A sequel of sorts to 'Productivity'. You really don't have to had read that in order to read this. Just going with a guess on Sands' age being 33 for dates here. Also, the drug is of my own invention, unless it exists and there's something we don't know about it. Ooh. Scary.
Previous chapter is located here.
--
Aberrant. Chapter II of II
"That's some shiner you got there."
Three more shots. Sands lowers his gun, hearing the click and whirr of the sheet come towards him. He'd been practicing his shooting - the sheet silhouette marked in the head, chest, and crotch - when this ignorant fuck has to distract him. Bad enough he started pumping him for information the day before during the meeting. They had left the office and Rush called Sands to stay behind. What did Rush say to Sands, Gregory wondered.
Sands knew that if he mentioned the 'excellent work' bullshit Rush had gone on about, he'd never hear the end of Gregory's complaining. Sure, Sands had an 'attitude' - a label they stuck on him - but he was doing good work. Not entirely by the book, but just enough of an edge to show he wouldn't falter. Wouldn't break.
They liked that.
Sands wasn't sure if he liked that they liked that.
Taking off his protective visor, Sands turns to face Gregory. He absentmindedly runs a hand through his hair, brushing past the bruise on his temple. Val, cheeky girl that she was, had a wonderful throwing arm.
"Thanks for the interest. Well, no, not really," Sands says, an eyebrow rising. "We're being rebellious today, aren't we? Speaking to an agent while said agent is practicing their shooting skills. Distracting, Gregory. You could be reprimanded. You rebel, you."
Gregory rolls his eyes, folding his arms across his chest. "Fuck you, Sheldon. I'm only here to give you a message."
"If it involves any of your body parts, I'll have to say 'no'."
"Rush wants to see you. In his office." The last words are said with a smirk. You're dead, Gregory's eyes read.
"That's swell. Good work." He pats Gregory on the shoulder, heading for the adjoining room to change out of his gear. "You free tonight? Broke up with Val. Sloppy seconds and all, but she thinks you're an accountant. That's steady, buddy."
--
Sands isn't sure if this is a joke or that Rush has been watching Star Wars one too many times.
He gets the appeal of it. Hell, had the action figures. Of course that was post-Bond, pre-deterioration into rebellion. Sands marks his life with phases. They aren't 'childhood', 'teen', 'adult'. They run by years of films, comics, and the line of girlfriends. Well, less on the latter. There's a difference between 'fucking' and 'making love'. Sands only knows of the first one, and will probably continue to adhere to it.
So he pushes all the smoke and mirrors aside, and realizes he's in a plain room, sitting on a chair, with a bandana tied around his head. His wrists and ankles are bound.
For a moment he wonders if Rush is actually some sort of kinky fuck, and then that dissolves.
"You're used to seeing what's in front of you, Sheldon."
"Sir?"
"Think of this as an exercise."
"I'm not sure where you're heading with this, sir." Sands turns his head this way and that, trying to see. But there is nothing other than black. There is no light filtering through the material, or up the hollows of his cheeks. There is only darkness, and Sands curses inwardly because he thinks he may or may not have to take a piss-
"You're CIA. This isn't college anymore, son. You know that. You've done it for the past few months. Done a heck of a job. But you've got to learn some things. Not everything is manipulation. Not everything is solid and easy to touch. You're not untouchable, although you may think you are. So that's where the bandana comes in."
"I'm going undercover as a S & M punk, now?"
"Not yet. Though if you're looking for a nice night of paper work, I might be able to set that one up for you."
Sands figures he'd be looking towards a nice night of fucking on the job instead of paperwork. However, apparently this sort of punk get-up isn't what he had in mind. Too bad with the punk thing. It'd be just like high school all over again.
"You remember we put that on you in my office, don't you."
"Yes, sir."
"And then we drove off to an undisclosed location."
"Yes, sir."
"Stop that."
"All right."
"Back to the point. You have to find your way back to the office with the blindfold."
"--What?"
"It's pedestrian, I'll admit. But you'll learn from it. I know I sure as hell did. Though we didn't have the same kind of drugs we do now."
Sands feels a tug on the back of his head, wisps of hair catching on the knot before slipping. The blindfold is loosened, able to fall off any minute. There are no lights. He feels himself still bound to the chair, wrists, ankles, and all. No light comes into the room, so he cannot estimate how big it is. How far the chair is from the door.
"Find my way underground? What's with the blindfold? I thought you said-"
"The lights are on, Sheldon. Don't worry. It'll come back to you. It only lasts for give or take six hours. You'll have plenty of time to come back by then."
Now Sands is agitated. His fingers flex, and he digs inside of his suit jacket sleeve to pull the tip of a small knife strapped to his arm. Not exactly a convenient spot - he'd much prefer his leg, or that new fake arm he saw in the equipment room - but it'd do. Ten more seconds and he'd have the rope cut in a jiffy-
"Failure to succeed in this mission will only earn your participation in washing my Mercedes come Monday morning."
Sands lifted his head in grim realization, hearing footsteps diminish. Bonds cut from his wrists, he bends forward, quickly cutting the ropes from his ankles. Sands gets up, and then stops.
The soft silk of the bandana falls past his shoulders and to the ground.
Sands can't see anything. And the door closes.
Drugs. Rush has blinded him.
I'm blind. Okay...
Sands isn't exactly sure whether he should laugh at the sheer comic book absurdity of it, or start cursing.
He does both, simultaneously. He puts the knife in his pocket carefully. Then he takes three steps forward and feels his face come in contact with something very solid and cold.
A column. He's walked into a column.
"If I'd have known this was going on, I would've vouched for the Skywalker treatment. At least he had a helmet."
Running a hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes - damn fucking drug, whatever the fucking fuck - Sands gropes the air blindly, clawing. He feels the column, smiles a little, then takes careful steps around it. Five more, and there was a wall. Left or right. Decisions, decisions.
He feels a cool little breeze come up from the right, and chooses that direction. Quicker than he expected, his hand is on the doorknob, and fresh air blasts against his face. It ruffles his hair, and he waits.
Cars. People. Teenagers laughing. Bicycles. The jingle and jangle of bicycles. Someone bumps walking past him, and he feels shopping bags brush past his leg. He waits longer, and he hears a car slow and the ignition turn off merely ten feet away.
Not the inside of a mall. Outside. Door, small room, outside - strip mall. He was in an abandoned store or office. Where was the nearest strip mall located from the CIA building? Right. Four miles.
If this was the same county, state, much less country.
Sands waits, then hears the giggle and constant chatter - English, though that doesn't help much- of kids passing by. He sticks an arm out, catching one kid by the shirt.
"Hey, man! Watch it!"
"Where am I?"
"Dude, get the--"
"Cop. Tell me. Where are we?"
"I ain't never seen a blind cop before."
"Little fucker--"
Sands feels a pain in his shin, then the scampering of sneakers. He grunts, snarls and touches his leg. Exnay on that plan. A hand snakes up past his jacket pocket, fumbles, then snatches the sunglasses. They are brand new as the last ones had broke, and so he slips these on. Much better than the unsettling blank eyes he imagines. Could be worse, the eye thing.
Could be permanent.
Could be in his apartment watching PBS and their musical specials. Oh, but no. No, no, shoot a couple of guards and get an Aesop slash metaphorical exercise courtesy of a certain sarcastic old bastard. Fucking A. He'd have taken the fucking lecture over this. Still, Sands knew this had to mean something. Idiotic, but something.
He knew there would be a downside to the good feeling of having Gregory jealous.
Rolling his eyes, Sands carefully starts walking down the block, past open store doors. He gropes along the wall, sometimes brushing past customers or outside displays. Displays - there! Something hard and long and - he has to smirk to himself - wooden. A stick. More fumbling and feeling. A cane. Just what he needed. He plucks it from its moorings, a cardboard display box, before rushing off. Glad to bump into the shoppers nearby, for he wouldn't get yelled at for stealing if they were in the way.
Sands stops short, foot hovering over the edge of the sidewalk. He estimates this by sticking the cane out lower, down. Yes, the curb. It was the curb, and he nearly walked across and gotten smeared over some idiot's windshield.
"Oh! You - pervert!"
Another thump, different than the column. No, he knew this pain, had felt it before. Some woman was smacking him on his shoulder with her handbag. Again and again. Sands curses, screaming shouts of "fuck!" and "I'm blind, damn it!" However, the woman isn't concerned with this as she keeps smacking the crap out of him.
So this would be another really, really bad day.
--
The Present
Sands looks on the whole incident fondly. He remembers getting back to the CIA building in three hours flat. Rush's office in four, given the run around they gave him. He was lucky. He would have had to wash Rush's car if he had bumped into Gregory. Fortunately, the little ass kisser was nowhere in sight when he got back, and Sands was grateful. Gregory might've shoved and locked him into a closet.
Hey, it's what Sands did the next morning once the drug wore off and his vision came back.
Sure, you couldn't kill CIA officers in the building. So he had to amuse himself with G rated fun. In the building.
Though he knew if he'd see that fucker laughing at him again outside of it-
Sands straightens in his chair, licking his lips. He turns his head left and right, knowing he won't see anything. There are sockets there, and they are far worse than merely being drugged. Rush thought it was amusing. It wasn't at the time. Days, months after, it was. Minutely. The irony sprung from there, twisted with a hint of tequila and lime.
He had walked by a pranks and parties supply store, picking up one of those prank canes that had an upturned mirror. And that woman appeared to be standing nearby, wearing a dress.
He'd been made a fool that day-also pervert, but that he already knew - and Sands didn't like it. He was a cocky bastard, then and now, but still didn't like it. Much prefer to study for the test and not walk in with a broken pencil. But in the end, the lesson had been to sometimes rely on others, not walk in blind, yadda yadda, after school special, call your senator, don't do drugs and hug your parents. Well, don't hug your parents, or do. Yell at them. Whatever.
Sands feels his temples throb in a headache from the moralistic garbage.
He likes Rush in that respect. Rush didn't want to commend him fully. No, there was a breach of protocol. Although he liked Sands for the excitement he displayed, he needed to know that wasn't how one went about these sort of things. One needed boundaries and rules. One needed to learn to rely on others for certain things, other times not. And do it by the book.
Once again: whatever.
Falling from his seat, his body slips down to the floor. Shirt twisted, and he finally pulls it off, feeling the scratchy touch of rug beneath bare skin. His fingers grope about blindly for the sunglasses, but they are gone. Instead he turns to lie on his back, kicking the shirt away. The window remains open, and curtains flutter in the breeze. He knows this for they brush the skin of his chest, back and forth, constant movement.
He runs a hand along his forehead and pushes his hair away from his eyes. Fingers are careful not to brush past his eyebrows, and the sockets there. Sheldon Sands can be a kinky S & M punk. Or a perverted, comic book reading fuck. But deep down, he doesn't want to feel. His sockets, or anywhere. Never his eyes. He's not ready for it, nor does he think he will be. Ever. Because right now, he can try to muse about the past. He can try to imagine how Gregory looked like hours ago, the colors of lights outside his window. Yet the mental images don't fully focus.
He can only picture Gregory at twenty three, and not older. The scene smokes to an office around them. And he is there, sitting with Gregory, wearing a plain black suit, white shirt and black tie. He has his eyes still, and stray bangs bother them, ones that he has to constantly push back. Sands is young and rebellious, sarcastic, dark, mellow. Gregory would complain, and Sands would slip his hand into his pants. Then it'd go in two directions: the lewd one, and the near shitting of the other officer, since Sands liked to keep his gun in his pants. Damn weak nerves Gregory had. Whiny fuck.
But he's dead now, and Sands is blind, older, hair longer, and tanned.
So after he thinks about all this, he stumbles to his feet and bends low. A sweep of his hand and his sunglasses find a way back. Then they go on his face, his shirt and jacket on his person, and he is off.
It is late, but Sands figures he can try to check out a bar, and see how good the pork is. And then tomorrow, perhaps the museum of sex on Fifth Avenue, after picking up the latest Catwoman.
Because even if he was a cocky young bastard out of college, an older psychotic, pork craving fuck now, he still has his priorities.
After all, he has to live up to the pervert mantel that woman bestowed upon him so many years ago.
END