A/N: I would like to give major props to spam-in-a-can for helping me with this chapter, and this fic in general. She knows what she's done. Same with Raptor and Kai, though I don't think they have FFN accounts. Anyway. Here's my latest offering, an alternate universe fic set post-series. Specifically AU because I don't want to destroy what Things Change established. Yes, this will be a multi-chapter fic. So. Please to be sitting back and enjoying Revolution 9.
Ring.
Ring.
Brooke sighed, flopping against her bed.
Ring.
Her alarm clock kept wanting to keep her up, even though it was 6AM and officially too damn early to be awake. By now, with a couple months of high school under her belt, she should have been used to it, but waking up before the sun rose still didn't settle well with her – probably because she had only fallen asleep six hours prior.
Ring.
Sigh. She lunged out from her bed to put the alarm on snooze and lay there for a minute, wondering if she could get away with another nine minutes.
…
…
Ring.
The alarm woke her up again, and she reached her arm out again to turn it off, this time hopefully ready to get up and face the day. Her head lazily rolled to catch the digital readout; she gasped. Nine minutes had turned into 63; it was now 7:03AM and the bus to Murakami High would be there in just about twelve minutes.
She swore to herself, kicking the red sheets off her body and nearly tripping on the bed in her mad clamber to get into uniform with enough time for some kind of breakfast. Never having to get dressed this quickly, she didn't care that her tie was crooked or her collar was still popped, or her skirt wasn't pleated perfectly. She'd fix all that later, when she was on the bus. Grabbing her backpack off the railing to save time while she could, she rushed to the bathroom to brush her teeth, then barreled down the stairs, again almost falling down head over heels in her rush. Snatching a Pop-Tart from an already-open sleeve, she crammed half of it into her mouth and yelled something unintelligible into the house as she pulled the door open and ran outside.
Greeting her outside was the tail end of the bus pulling away from the stop at the corner of her street. Which also happened to be the last stop before the school, so she couldn't even chase the bus and catch it further down. "Wonderful," she muttered quickly, slinging her bag over her shoulder and sprinting after the bus, hoping she wouldn't get sweat all over her clothes and wind up smelling like crap all day.
Her mad dash had taken her through parts of Jump City she never even remembered going through on foot, and yet somehow she could still find her way to school without a hitch. She knew exactly why that was, but the reason was constantly being pushed to the back of her mind, and she wasn't in the mood to start analyzing it, either. By the time she'd finally arrived on the grounds of the school, a bell had just stopped ringing; she had no idea which one, though, until she caught sight of two of her better friends running inside the building.
"Alison!" Brooke called out. "Sarah!" The girls, a redhead and a brunette, stopped running briefly and turned around, which gave Brooke the chance to catch up.
"Brooke!" the red-haired girl said, giving her a once-over with her eyes. "Jeez, you look like hell."
"Yeah, don't remind me, Sarah. I had a rough morning."
"We saw you running after the bus," added the brown-haired girl, "and we tried getting the driver to stop, but he didn't do anything."
"Wonderful." Brooke sighed. "Look, can we just get inside? We're gonna be late if—"
Another ringing bell cut her off, and this time she knew which one it was. She'd made all three of them late now. Not even waiting to finish her sentence, she bolted towards the doors of the school with Alison and Sarah quickly following suit.
-RN-
The rest of the day continued without incident, for once, which Brooke was thankful for. Homeroom, where she had gotten chewed out for being late and looking sloppy. But after that, algebra, English, American history, earth sciences, all that fun stuff. The only class she had really been looking forward to was earth sciences; she'd always been inexplicably amazing at geology, and Ms. Cisewski always seemed to favor her for her aptitude.
And yet, all day, she'd been focusing on one thing in particular: That early-morning rush. The thrill of wondering whether or not she would make it in time. The stress pumping adrenaline into her body – which she didn't know about, because biology was never her thing, but something had been giving her a rush, and the important part of it all was that she'd liked it.
But no. She couldn't be thinking like that. She didn't want to like that rush. She was just a normal teenage girl. Stuff like that couldn't excite her. It shouldn't. Because if she were to focus on that for too long, she knew it would send her into a rush of a completely different kind, one spanning back two years and even further. And she couldn't have that. The time had long since come for her to leave her past behind her.
As she walked on to the bus at the end of the day, for a change, she didn't sit with Alison or Sarah. She fed them some excuse about how she had a lot of homework to do and how she wanted to get an even earlier start than usual. So as to keep up the charade, when she moved to the middle of the bus (since the back was always filled with the wrong kinds of kids, or at least as wrong as Murakami High would permit), she pulled a notebook and pencil, as well as her earth sciences book, from her backpack and started writing something, but not homework. In the clearest handwriting the shaking and bouncing bus could allow, she started writing down the lyrics to a song that had been running through her head for the past couple days.
You decided this
Mm, what'd you say?
Mm, what did she say?
Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth
Midsweet talk, newspaper word cutouts
Speak no feeling
No, I don't believe you...
Speak no feeling
Speak no feeling
She had written those three words several times more, each time underlining them more and more emphatically. It was something she had to keep to herself. And even then, she couldn't even let herself think those feelings. She was a high school girl now, living in her foster house with foster parents and foster friends. Just trying to keep her head above water was enough of a chore. The last thing she needed was something like this coming in and screwing everything up.
Though... the allure was...
No. No allure. It had no allure. She was interested in her schoolwork. In studying about rocks. Alison and Sarah were her friends, and it was them she'd turn to if she had any boy problems.
She wasn't sure whether it was reassurance or convincing that she was trying to do. But fortunately, she wasn't left to think about it for much longer, because if she didn't get off the bus soon, it would blow right past her stop, and that would have been the last thing she needed today.
-RN-
Another week had passed. This Monday morning, however, she had woken up on time and had a very relaxed day, with everything going as it normally should have. Being bombarded with an essay on The Once and Future King, an assignment on imaginary numbers, and a field-based lab for earth sciences, all over the course of three days, had left her mind too occupied to focus on that nagging feeling left over from a week ago.
At the end of her school day today, though, waiting on her stoop was a very familiar box that almost made her drop everything when she saw it. The silver container, normally empty and dull, had been polished to an almost brilliant shine even in the fading November sunlight, and a small slip of yellow paper was sticking out of it. She briefly considered kicking it into the bushes and forgetting about it – and in fact, she did, and that would have been well enough, but after she had kicked it, it opened, the small piece of paper fluttering out in the breeze.
She caught the paper in midair and looked at it quickly. Two words, written in such a way that, if she cared, she would almost be able to feel the desperateness coming from them. "Please remember."
Brooke grumbled and crumpled the paper in one hand, throwing it to the side to join the box. "Why doesn't he just give up already?" she muttered, pushing the door of her house open and finally going inside. She made a beeline for her room without even greeting her father, who she knew would be sitting on the couch watching television, like he always was when she got home from school. Her mother wouldn't be home for a couple hours.
She dumped her backpack out over her bed, watching her earth sciences book fall out last and disturb everything else. The assignment for that class would be especially easy, she knew. Go out into an open, natural area and take some samples of the earth, then bring them into class so they could run some kind of test on them. The scientific words, she wasn't really all that savvy to. It was more the earth part that drew her in, but she was learning what it felt like to be an egghead. She giggled at that thought, that she, Brooke Reynolds, could ever be a scientist. She sucked at math, and as far as she knew, science was just another type of math.
About the only thing she was good at, where science came to mind, was knowing the earth. She really did always have an interest in rocks and dirt, but nobody would be able to tell by looking at her. It had even taken Alison and Sarah a while to figure it out – they'd had her slated for a cross-country runner. Of course, she couldn't tell them how right they were, or at least would have been, but now that she was focusing on all the events from the beginning of her freshman year, she couldn't help but draw all the wrong connections to her past.
In an effort to drown those thoughts out, she left her earth sciences book on her bed and instead picked up her algebra text, putting it on her desk and opening it to the chapter she had to review before she could even think of starting all that stuff about imaginary numbers.
-RN-
"Square root of negative one, my ass," she mumbled, her eyes already glazed over from boredom. She couldn't keep this up much longer, but she had to; she had a quiz tomorrow and was not at all closer to comprehending the subject. Her eyes scanning the page, she found herself reading the same sentence over and over again, and not even that information was getting through.
Instead, in her boredom, her thoughts were slipping to other events. Last Monday, specifically, and the experience she'd all but forced herself to forget.
She needed to get out of the house. Before she got completely lost in what she used to be. She needed to distract herself somehow. With… with homework. Homework would work.
But she hadn't even finished the book for English yet, and she knew she couldn't keep doing math anymore. That left one thing. Leaving the house to go to some place in the city… that would help. And it was just a couple samples, anyway. She wouldn't be alone at night in the city for long. Besides, the Teen Titans kept the streets safe for people like her.
Or at least, one of them still did.
"No, damn it, I can't keep… ugh," she started thinking out loud. "I gotta get outta here." She picked up her empty backpack, threw her cell phone in, and left her room, going downstairs to the kitchen to grab some Ziploc bags. "Mom, Dad, I'm heading out to do one of my projects. I'll be back. Got my cell if you need me." Her dad was probably already asleep – something about that couch had to be magic or something; everyone always fell asleep on it – but she knew her mom had heard her, and felt no qualms when she shut the door behind her and left the house for a while.
-RN-
Fortunately, she lived on the right end of the city, so her trip to the desert just outside Jump was a short one. She wasted no time in getting there, keeping her eyes straight ahead and not taking the time to look up at the sky to admire the night. She was out at night for homework and couldn't afford distractions.
The actual project part, she had finished rather quickly. The problem was that being in the desert for any length of time reminded her of… back then. She was torn between being anxious to get out of there and wanting to sit around and soak it all in, so maybe she could sort through her thoughts better. The logic made sense to her, at least. But she couldn't come to a decision at all, and wound up just standing there for a while, divided.
One thought crept its way back into her mind – of that morning last week. With the thrill running through her body, she didn't have any other thoughts. It had distracted her from everything for a while.
She needed that rush to come again to clear her head. But out here, there were no buses not to catch, and really nothing at all to get her heart pumping. Her eyes passed across a rocky outcropping, and she actually vocalized her objection to that. "No." Her voice wasn't firm or shocked; more surprised that the thought had ever crossed her mind.
But it was the only thing around.
And she really, really needed to just not think for a while.
She sighed deeply. "One time. One time, and then it'll never happen again," she told herself, bargaining. "Just this once."
As if trying to remember some obscure fact from far too long ago, her eyes closed and her mouth twisted into a determined frown. Nothing happened for a while, but eventually, after not even she knew how long, one of the rocks from the outcropping dislodged itself and slowly made its way over to her.
She gasped in surprise when she opened her eyes and realized that she could still do something like that, then shakily climbed on. Taking things much more slowly at first, she rose into the air only about a foot, then turned the rock and her body with it so that she was facing a large, clear expanse of desert, hopefully out of sight from the rest of the city.
Moving forward at around her standard walking speed, she gradually picked up a little speed, making sure her footing would hold. She wasn't exactly wearing heels, but she wasn't wearing boots either, and that made staying in place a major concern. Once she was sure she wasn't going to fly off, she kept pressing onward, increasing her speed until she was moving faster than she'd ever gone on foot.
Faster and faster she rocketed across the desert, losing herself to the adrenaline and the rush of the wind past her face, and her mind was free. She didn't notice that she wasn't thinking about things going on in her life, but then again, that was the point. She didn't notice anything except what was going on directly in front of her; heard nothing but the wind; saw nothing but desert and sky.
Unfortunately, she had overlooked what was hiding behind one of the dunes, and another cluster of rocks came out of seemingly nowhere as she turned a shallow corner. Her platform collided with those rocks, sending her flying forward, landing face-first in the sand.
Her knees and the heels of her palms were skinned almost to the point of bleeding, and she had a pounding headache, but as she carefully climbed to her feet, she realized she was smiling. Her mind had been a clean slate for just that one moment. And she loved that. But there had to be other ways to get that same sensation, she knew. Because this was the only time she would do this. Ever.
She was still a damn far walk away from her house, though. Farther now than it had been. Fortunately, she'd at least kept her backpack with her.
"Maybe just one more time," she conceded. Just to get her closer to home. It was getting later by the minute, and even the Titans had to sleep. It wouldn't be safe.
Another rock made its way under her feet.
Just one more time. And then never again.
Just one more time, to get back to living her foster life.