A Blackhawk walks into a bar...

[zerocharliexray]

Zinda's good cheer is never fully diminished, but there are a few clouds graying up her sunny sky today. Still, she's whistling as she strolls into the bar, kitted out in full uniform: every pleat on her skirt ironed to a precise knife-sharp edge, her gloves spotless white, her hat and boots polished until they shine. The poppy on her breast is as red as fresh blood. If she looks like she was lifted straight from a Memorial Day parade, it's because...

Well, she was.

She parks her shapely behind on a barstool and lays a white-gloved hand gently on the glossy wooden bartop.

"Champers, if you please, missy," she says, and smiles when the glass and bottle materialize. "You're aces, hon."

A few photos get laid out carefully next to the glass: black-and-white shots of a bunch of flyboys, mostly. She sets them all out and fills her glass, then lifts it.

"You're on the wing, fellas," she tells them. "At ease."




[Tiny tag: Zinda Blake]

Comments

It Needed To Happen Finally!!!

[thebesteverseen]

"Be my honor."

The words are out without much thought, and maybe that'll make this longer than ten minutes, but no time'll be passing out that Door. He can still hear Danny snapping up a fuss last night (all plaintive fire and flying hands) about his being as dense as a door for not wanting to do anything with the day but fix the roof and maybe the attic, after the morning service at Hickam.

Steve held out a hand, still polite as Hawaii was sunny. Starting with the obvious, that gets out of the way he's not a civvy. "Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett."

[zerocharliexray]

"... Huh."

She's looking at him a little more closely now, as she shakes his hand. Her own are still in her gleaming white gloves, but she pulls them off as Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett sits down. "That's funny. I knew a Steve McGarrett once –

"Long time ago."

[thebesteverseen]

Steve takes that with an easy enough grace. The woman doesn't look familiar, and while his surname isn't common, it's not as unique as some come either. Plus, that whole multiple-whatever that this place was connected to. He lets it roll, settling all six-plus feet of him onto the stool, with an easy breezy,

"Is that good for me, or bad for me?"

[zerocharliexray]

"Neither, probably," she grins, pouring a coupe glass full of champagne and passing it over to him. "Unless somehow you were in Hawaii in the summer of 1941."

She says it with a laugh. He doesn't look that much like her old pal.

[thebesteverseen]

Steve's face doesn't turn shocked. It's a tighter thing than that. A narrow that hazes the line of a look that's suspicion more than shock, private territory touched, even when he hasn't hazarded into either area at all. It keeps the coupe in his hand and nowhere near his mouth. Knocks Memorial Day full to the side briefly for looking at her.

"I'm in Hawaii now. Grew up there."

With an uninvited blade-sharp claw ascending his spine.
"My grandfather was an ensign who went down with the Arizona in '41."

[zerocharliexray]

Zinda's mouth makes an almost perfect "o" of surprise. "No foolin'?"

She blinks at him, and sure – that face is familiar. After a second her own breaks into a grin like sunshine flooding across the ocean. "You could knock me over with a feather! Hey, how about that? Your gramps was an old war buddy of mine. He'd be tickled pink about this; I can hear him laughin' now."

She beams at him. "I'm Zinda Blake. And it sure is fine to meet you, Steve McGarrett."

[thebesteverseen]

It's jarring. She brightens, but Steve doesn't. Can't.
It doesn't line up. Even with the pictures.

"An old war buddy of yours?" Parrots back from her words, trying to combine all these things but coming up at smoke and shards, and the only trained response he has to both. "How's that possible? You don't look much older than my kid sister."

Then the question flies out, last in the flood, one he didn't even know was coming until it sucker-punched the back of his teeth, momentarily a too young and stumped need all caught up in those hazel eyes of his, right in the middle of that serious face: "Are you coming in from then?"

[zerocharliexray]

"Don't look a day over a hundred'n three, do I?"

There's something sympathetic in the look she's giving him as she sips her champagne. "It's a long story, sugar, and it involves a fella named Guy Gardner, a bar in another universe, and a whole bunch of time travel nonsense. The upshot of it is I landed back in the world about seventy years after I left. That's how."

[thebesteverseen]

It sounds crazy. Back home, he'd tell her off for daring to besmirch any of it. Daring to use his family to get whatever she might need. But he's sitting in the center of crazy, isn't he? This place. Weird shit happens in this place like it was made here first. On a level, Steve would rather not even consider most days and was glad to put away entirely for as long as he'd been gone from it.

He hates it, but his eyes land on the photo not far from her.
Old. His eyebrows are a little furrowed, but he asks anyway.

"That how you lost them?"

It's assumptive, maybe even invasive at this point, but he needs somewhere to moor all of it. And there she is, young, not all that incredibly younger than she looks now, at shoulders with all of the men she's drinking to, in that same outdated sepia film of theirs.

[zerocharliexray]

"Most of them."

Her smile's a little wistful as she looks at the photo. "By the time I got back, all but one were gone."

[thebesteverseen]

They lost her first. Even if she'd been alive. Out of reach. They lost her first, and only one of them got her back. While she'd lost all of them, save the one. Even one is too many, but you signed up to carry however many the signing up meant you'd carry, and you signed up knowing someone else might have to carry you. That both were worth it.


"Sorry. That must have been hard."

In a completely different way from coming home without your whole team.
It's hard to wrap his head around it, but he's at least going to try.

[zerocharliexray]

"Name of the game," she says. It's wistful but not depressed; she misses them and she'll always miss them, but they'd hate to have her mope over them. "There's always gonna be someone left standing, right?"

She didn't think it would be her, but sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

[thebesteverseen]

There's noise that's half-affirmative, mostly undeniable truth for a brief burst at the bottom of his throat. Maybe. Maybe he just thinks it in agreeing and thinks it happens. Beyond that though, is one of the things he does best: he pulls it back together, because he always does pull it back together. He finally raises that glass she'd given him back at the beginning.

"To the ones who stood as long as they could."

[zerocharliexray]

"Couldn't've said it better myself."

She lifts her glass and clinks it against his with a smile. The champagne is crisp and cold and the bubbles effervesce in her mouth and she thinks the boys woulda just loved this place.