AU: Operation: Mountain Dew and Doritos

[Marnie Sullivan]

When Marnie first learned that she and Sean would be attending a rally on a mission, she was downright giddy. Protesting! Civil disobedience! Exercising their freedom of speech to achieve a common goal with their fellow citizens! Why wouldn't she be excited?

...Because they were not actually attending to participate, Sean had told her. They would be observing, possibly serving as crowd control if it came to it. Besides, he'd explained, these weren't the sort of people she wanted to align herself with anyway. Still, it was a mission, and Marnie was determined to be excited about it.

Arriving upon the scene, however, her conviction in that regard began to waver. It wasn't that the crowd was particularly large - there were maybe a few dozen at a glance, mostly or entirely men - but given their numbers, they seemed to disproportionately radiate outrage. And body odor, Marnie realized after they were hit with a gust of wind.

"...Hey, Sean? If these people are here to protest the new Ghostbusters movie, why does that guy's sign have Hillary Clinton's face with devil horns on it?" Marnie asked her mentor, pointing discretely to a man with a scraggly ponytail and a t-shirt emblazoned with the silhouette of a pole dancer and the words I SUPPORT SINGLE MOMS. "And why are they protesting at City Hall and not, I don't know, at the studios actually making the movie?"

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean’s immediate reaction to their assignment had consisted of far less giddiness and far more frowning. This had been followed by an argument with his partner, when Josh had demanded that he come along to put the protestors in their place, with the telepath reminding him that it was both inappropriate and a waste of time, and, besides, as per their parenting agreement, Josh needed to stay home with the baby while Sean was out being Sage rather than tending to his vegetable garden.

However, he had dutifully donned his costume and then picked up Marnie for their assignment. He hadn’t had the heart to assure her that she was in for a world of disappointment for this particular mission.

Unfortunately, the protestors didn’t disappointment; they met his expectations when they arrived to find only a handful of men outside of City Hall. None of them dressed well – not in terms of class or formal dressing but rather that half of them had ill-fitting clothing, with another third wearing either unwashed or torn garments, and several with tee shirts that Sean was sure his daughter would be embarrassed to know existed, if she became aware of this twenty-years from now as a functional adult. The level of rhetoric was exactly what he expected, down to the conspiracy theorists and slut shaming.

And they would be here for the next several hours.

Being a superhero wasn’t always glamorous.

At the question, the telepath shook his head to himself. He couldn’t fault Marnie’s curiosity, but how to even explain this?

Finding no reason to hold his tongue, he said, “They’re bitter that women have rights, and took the first flimsy excuse to cover for that in a way that looks slightly more palatable.”

To make that point further, a man walked by with a poster that proclaimed “Don’t mess with hisstory.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Now, Marnie wasn't totally naive. She knew that sexism still existed, even though she didn't recall ever experiencing any particularly egregious offenses. But this was the twenty-first century; how could there still be people who thought women shouldn't have rights? It made even less sense than just protesting the movie. Or the spelling on the one dude's sign, which Marnie read with raised eyebrows. Maybe Sean was oversimplifying things a bit.

"You don't think they'll actually, like, riot, do you? she asked nervously. The crowd didn't look like much, but the hostility was palpable.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

“Rioting takes effort, so we should be safe.” Contempt dripped from his voice. One might consider the quip sarcasm, but Sean was quite serious with that assessment.

He had interacted with the MRAs before, and he always managed to come away with a headache and deep shame on behalf of his gender. Since his daughter’s birth, his occasional interactions with them also caused worry for her future.

Paradoxically, his daughter was the reason he had cut back on his heroic duties to focus on his family life as well as why he hadn’t hung up his cape. There remained so much work to be done.

He crossed his arms over his chest, taking advantage of his position to scope out the men in attendance. The one who could (charitably) be called their leader held up a sign that made vague reference to no taxation without representation, which would seem utterly out of place in the situation, but for the fact that Sean knew from past experience that this was a thinly-veiled reference to child support.

Working groups like these always made him want to go home to bathe and then to pay his taxes.

“Keep an eye on the entrances and the stairs just to make sure that they don’t cross their permit lines.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie hoped he was right; against a crowd of any size, her camouflage would be no help. But, she reminded herself, humans had been handling this sort of thing without powers for a long time, and she'd never heard of a protest about a movie of all things turning violent. Yeah, they could do this, probably.

"Entrances and stairs, okay, got it," she repeated. Marnie dutifully trained her eyes on each point before moving on to the next, the notebook and pen she'd brought along gripped tightly in her hands (for documenting history! had been her initial reason, although now it appeared they would come more in handy jotting down descriptions of troublemakers). For now, at least, the crowd seemed content to just cluster together and brandish their signs.

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean felt confident in his own assessment, which went beyond the typical certainty of an individual used to being right (although he did what he could to prevent that from turning into arrogance). In this particular situation, he felt confident because of the contempt he held for the men protesting, and for everything he knew about their beliefs and their behavior.

They were lazy.

Intellectually lazy, because they had long-ago closed their minds off to new experiences and new information that might undermine their narrow, hate-filled worldview.

Physically lazy, since they never wanted to expend effort. Fully half of their rage came from the fact that they expected other people to do their work for them, and so they felt fury and frustration at the impotence of their own movement. They couldn’t even get a real crowd for this protest at City Hall. Given the same amount of planning time that these men had taken, motivated people with non-terrible ideas and motivations could put together fifty or one hundred thousand.

The inequality and police brutality protests had done exactly that.

Sean walked halfway up the steps , to where he could keep an eye on the crowd, on Marnie, and on the entrances without being too far from any of the three. Then he crossed his arms over his chest, not to look imposing per se but to show that he was taking this seriously. More seriously than their opinions warranted.

[Marnie Sullivan]

As she scoped out the points of interest she'd been assigned, Marnie periodically snuck glances back at Sage. His agitation, though much more lowkey than anyone in the crowd's, made her nervous. Very rarely had she ever heard him speak with such venom in his tone. Unlike the men here, from whom she apparently could expect nothing else, in Sage it was troubling.

Better get used to it, Marnie figured. She was bound to see worse in the heroing program, after all.

A pair of voices grew more distinct over the hullabaloo as the men they belonged to drew nearer, heading towards one of the sets of stairs Marnie had been instructed to watch.

"...told me the other day he was coming, but this morning he wouldn't answer his phone. I had to find another ride!" complained the one sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with an energy drink logo.

"Yeah, he got arrested Thursday," explained the other, with a "you hadn't heard?" sort of air. This one held a sign at his side, but its message was obscured by his legs. "His mom called the cops, I guess they got in a fight about his Xbox and he smacked her. Man, who calls the cops on her own son?"

"I've met his mom, she's a real bitch."

The more she heard, the more Marnie's skin crawled, but at the same time the two were drawing nearer to the stairwell and she had a job to do. Throwing her shoulders back importantly, she sidestepped in front of the stairwell, blocking their path - sort of. They were both significantly larger than she was.

"Excuse me!" Marnie interjected with forced cheeriness. "I'm very sorry but this area is off limits to everyone but employees." Her smile faltered as they fixed her with glares.

"The bathroom's that way," said the one with the sign.

"There's another one that -" Marnie began, arm raised to point them in another direction, but the signholder raised his voice right over hers.

"Why can't we use this one?" he objected indignantly. "What're we supposed to do, pee on the floor?"

[Dr. Sean Neville]

Sean preferred the occasional meta-human gone amok with delusions of grandeur to babysitting the MRAs. He preferred most situations to engaging with hate groups, entirely because, at the end of the day, for all of his powers and his notoriety and his experience, he preferred to reason with other people rather than fight them or outwit them. However, it was impossible to reason someone out of a position into which they hadn’t reasoned themselves in the first place, and the MRAs – like all hate groups – were wholly unreasonable.

Moreover, as a white, cisgendered man, the fact that they purportedly spoke for him or his interests disgusted him. That, as a bisexual man in a committed relationship with a gay man and with a child together, as well as a proud feminist ally and anti-racist ally, he didn’t fit into their definition of “man” bothered him on a different level. Sometimes, he wanted to sit all of these other men down and lecture them about everything, but they were deliberately obtuse and it wasn’t worthwhile. Worse yet, telepath, being around them meant he had to hear their thoughts which were consistently more vile than their speech, because, although it might appear otherwise, they did have some manner of filters.

More importantly, he had to worry about Marnie. She was a young woman, which put her in their line of sight for their appalling thoughts, and thus he had to be hyper-vigilant.

When one of them began pushing past her, Sage swooped in with his long stride, moving to stand behind her, and towering over the other man. “That would be illegal – public urination and indecent exposure – and then we’d have to deal with that. So I’d advise you to use the other public accommodations that are right over there.” He pointed in the direction to which Marnie had tried to send the man a moment earlier.