Skyborn The Divine

6: Found

Alice had no idea how long it took her to get home. It felt like an eternity. She didn't even remember anything about the landscape, really, except that she eventually found the interstate and followed it all the way home.

It was late when she finally crawled in through her bedroom window. The apartment was dark and quiet, and she supposed her mother would have gone to bed by now. She wanted nothing more than to do the same. She didn't even bother showering. She peeled off her clothes and left them in a big, sopping pile on the floor and crawled under the comforter on her bed.

When she awoke the next morning, there were leaves and drying mud on her pillow from her hair. Her floor was in a similar state, and she realized she would have to clean the mess if she didn't want her mom to ask questions.

Alice looked up to see her mom standing in her doorway. "Where were you last night?"

Alice thought to make an excuse, or maybe to lie to spare her mom the worry. What could she say? That she'd been out late on her date? She looked around her room and remembered her wet, muddy clothes were still in a heap at the foot of her bed, and a streak of brown marks speckled with grit and leaves adorned her windowsill where she squeezed in. Alice realized with a sigh that lying about all this would have been pointless.

"I'm sorry," she said as she sat up and pulled away the hair plastered to her face. "It was late, but I didn't check the time."

Her mother stared at her, eyes narrowed. "I know it was late, I waited up for you," she grumbled. "I slept really badly."

And without another word on the matter, she left Alice alone in her room with her muddy mess and her troubled conscience. Alice groaned and tried rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She was terrible at keeping secrets from her mom, and she knew she would have to come to an understanding with her if she was going to keep adventuring out into the world the way she had been. That is, if she kept adventuring out into the world. The whole point of sneaking out to chase disasters had been to find more metahumans, and she had instead found normal people using machines. She realized she didn't know what to do with herself now. The only certainty left her was her desire for breakfast and a shower.

After scouring her apartment for food—heavens, she was hungry—she grabbed a spray bottle and a rag and went to work. As she scrubbed at the crusted mud on her floor, she listened to Freddy Mercury's voice as he sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" and reflected on just how well some of the lyrics seemed to sum up her feeling that everything that had just happened felt just as much like a dream.

It makes me wonder if this is the real life, or if it is just fantasy?

Her rescue of the woman in the trailer park and the people on the boardwalk seemed like something out of a movie, and yet there she was, scrubbing the evidence of her adventure from the floor with a rag. The whole experience still had her head spinning. She'd done things she'd never dared before that day. She'd shown her powers in public. She'd exposed herself to other heroes, though they hadn't turned out to be exactly what she thought they were. She'd put herself in harm's way. She had grown up her whole life without ever having been truly injured, but getting out of bed that morning, she'd discovered her very first bruise. In fact, there were several spotting on her shoulder and arms where she'd hit the falling pieces of the Skywheel.

She'd also saved people's lives. It felt ridiculous to believe she had ever done such a thing, like a child believing she'd performed a feat of real magic, and yet she had done it. She saved that woman from the flooded trailer park, and she'd saved those people on the boardwalk. It made her feel...what? Proud of herself? Hardly. She knew she'd fumbled her way through each "heroic" deed. She could very easily have failed or made the situation worse, but somehow, she hadn't. Somehow, everything had turned out all right.