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Unremarkable, sunbleached asphalt, fringed by bushes. Overnight, pockmarks and hallmarks of battle, blackened craters and gouges. A few days later, a ramshackle scattering of office trailers and tents, neat geometries contrasting with the irregularities of rubble. Weeks after that, a patchwork of razings and fresh pourings, sufficiently complete for the final migration of workers from their satellites, their destination an unfamiliar silhouette with a familiar footprint. The lot beneath their feet would, in years to come, return to its unremarkable, sunbleached continuity, but who could say when exactly it became whole again?
The sun had already slipped behind the horizon by the time Mandy emerged from her office trailer with a cardboard box of miscellanea. Afternoon had smeared into evening as each meeting lapsed into the next, until she realized she had spent half the day at the Downtown branch. This obligation was becoming more common; Mandy's assurance to herself that this was the result of Torrance rising in prominence did little to ameliorate her annoyance, especially when she missed events like her branch's soft re-opening.
The building's exterior was the most obvious change, outdated tiling replaced by a sleek facade of steel and glass. An L-shaped partial third floor was under construction along the north and west corners of the building, located so as to not immerse the courtyard in shadow. But apart from those modifications, the new building's aesthetic was similar, adhering to established corporate guidelines on interior design: drop ceilings, beiges and grays with occasional wood paneling, warm accent colors (though Mandy personally intervened to dilute anything that was too red). Her new office was in the same location as its previous incarnation. She took slow steps towards her desk as she appraised the room. Though the layout was identical, the contents were just unfamiliar enough to seem acquaintances rather than friends: the cabinets and bookshelves sported different handles and wood grain patterns, the usual array of greenery was missing from the windowed side of the room, and the couch was fresher and paler, not yet yellowed by the constant scrutiny of the sun.
Mandy set the box on the desk, turned on a lamp, and sat down. She leaned forward and pressed the lever under the chair, and the pneumatic piston rose. It was close to the correct height before, just about an inch low. Affording herself a moment to take in the view, she noticed the abstract paintings on the opposing walls were new as well, though stylistically similar to the artworks that had adorned her office previously. Mandy's eyes traced the angled whorls and convolutions, her mind wandering as she repeated a vaguely star-shaped circuit near the bottom of the painting.
She remembered that debrief with Robert and Chase after Robert's first day as a dispatcher: two involuntarily retired heroes, one jaded and infirm, the other resolutely optimistic while stanching a bloody nose. It was tragicomic, how much more deserving they were of plaudits and admiration than she was, even when she was Blonde Blazer, holding more power in both the arcane sense and the corporate. Maybe that was why she ceded so much control of the Z-Team to Robert instead of maintaining her usual level of oversight. Or maybe it was the creeping feeling of inadequacy, that she was the common factor in each previous dispatchers' failures to extract the Z-Team's full potential. To reconstruct that tableau now, Mecha Man and an upgraded Track Star seated across from Mandy, their grandeur juxtaposed with her shabbiness...that was more correct, more honest, to the point she felt she didn't belong in that image at all.
Chase was going by Track Star again, at least while he was on the clock. It was customary for dispatchers to keep their retired identities private to minimize the potential for those histories entering office politics. Of course, the Z-Team existed to flout tradition, and in hindsight, the entwining of Chase's life with Robert's made it almost a guarantee his past heroics would become public knowledge. For Chase, though, was that disclosure really that bad? He had barely made a grudging peace with the early twilight of his career as a hero, and he leapt at the offer to again take up the mantle of Track Star, now for SDN. Mandy would never accuse him of selfishness, but she couldn't help feeling herself submerged in frigid jealousy seeing Chase use her powers—no, the amulet's powers—in tandem with his own. Even worse was when she allowed herself to be hopeful, looking forward to when she could be Blonde Blazer again, inevitably spiraling into reckoning with the possibility that it was an "if" rather than a "when" she could take back the amulet without risking Chase's life. Every time that uncertainty roused itself, Mandy was gripped by despair stronger than any envy.
Letting herself be consumed by work, yielding no bandwidth to any stray reflection that tried to linger, only went so far; there were others' reactions, her reactions to their reactions, theirs to hers to theirs. Most coworkers had adjusted to calling her Mandy immediately, though a few adopted an unearned unfamiliarity, as if she actually was a new hire and not the same branch manager they had all known and...tolerated. The Z-Team was less consistent in their adjustments. After a couple days of using the wrong name, Prism had pivoted to calling her Miss Mandy, which she admittedly quite liked. Visi still called her Blondie, which she hated, though Mandy wasn't sure whether that nickname's persistence was out of force of habit or mischievous impulse. Phenomaman had no difficulty calling her Mandy, but he at first seemed to think she was "that friend of Blonde Blazer's I was never able to meet during our failed relationship." It took multiple explanations for him to understand she was, as he put it, "the former Blonde Blazer." Everyone had their own unique failures in recognizing her, and it was exasperating. Mandy hoped her frustration didn't bleed into her interactions at work; her corporate persona wasn't in any way false, but it was easier to embody before the identity of Blonde Blazer had been wrested from her. Now, there was Mandy, just Mandy, no longer secret and silent as she had always been.
She had slumped in her chair, but she stood up, embarrassed, when the office door opened. "Figured you'd still be here. Only you would get a swanky new office and be too busy to use it during business hours." Robert looked around the room with wonder befitting a child in a planetarium. "Oh shit, did they save your old chair?"
Mandy blinked. "Huh? I thought they replaced everything."
"Looks like the same one to me. Nice of them to salvage something from the old building."
She knelt down and examined the underside of the chair. Four eyes stared blankly back at her, the initials "BB" in permanent marker, a claim in her own handwriting from years ago.
The seat had been too low. Even her chair didn't know her anymore.
A void opened up within Mandy and she fell into it.
"Mandy?"
She stumbled to her feet and ran out of the office, burning tears already running down her cheeks. This place was no longer hers.
"Wait a second! Mandy!"
Unthinking, she turned the corner and drove her fist against the wall. Pain rippled from her knuckles up her forearm. The wall was still intact. A sob broke through with the realization her rage possessed none of the potency it had before. She was wretched, diminished. She crumpled, but Robert was there to catch her. She clung to him and wept. He said nothing but held her firmly, securely.
"Isn't this what I wanted?" she asked. He cradled her head against his chest. They both knew the unspoken answer.
He waited for her sobs to subside before he spoke. "I am so, so lucky I got to know you as Mandy and as Blonde Blazer at the same time, because it gave me a clearer look at you than anyone else here has ever gotten. They're both you, they've always both been you, completely. The woman I adore has never been just the sum of a bunch of pieces put together." He paused. "You know, you did make a choice that night. You saved Chase, you saved me, all of Torrance, with the smartest and bravest thing you could've done. You just don't think that counts as a choice because you're too noble to have considered anything less."
Robert knew it wasn't enough. But he knew this loss intimately himself, or at least a version of it, and there were no words that were sufficiently true and soothing. She sniffled, empty.
"Let me take you home," he said. And so they walked, loosely folded in on each other, out of the building and into the dark, together.
It would take longer than one night or a few days. The weeks would pass indifferently as they must, but the day would come when this time was remembered only as something dreary and distant, a continuum made darker by comparison to the brighter days that followed.
They weren't done saving each other yet. But they would.