Aradia never felt as if she'd made a decision to become a hero, not really. It wasn't as if she looked at her new powers, looked at the state of the world, and then said to herself, "I should use this power to make a difference."

It just seemed like the obvious thing to do with them, no thinking necessary. She'd tried to save her mother, and she couldn't. Some time later, after she'd really started to process what had happened to her, she tried to save her father and couldn't do that either; she found herself standing beside the road where his accident had happened at the exact same time that the earthquake was happening thousands of miles to the south. If she couldn't bring back the two people she most wanted to save, well, she might as well help others instead.

Besides, she couldn't very well keep hiding in Sollux's bedroom forever the way she did for the first few days. Oh, he probably would have let her if she'd really wanted to, at least for a good long while, and there wasn't much danger of her being found there since his parents were both unnerved by the complex computer systems he'd built up and avoided going into his room, but she'd never been the type of person who could happily roost in one small area for days on end.

Especially not after the news report they watched together two days after she arrived. She wasn't that surprised to see that her mother's death made the local news-respected members of their community who died in unusual circumstances usually got at least a quick mention-but she hadn't expected to see her own school picture show up on screen while the anchor prattled on about how Dr. Megido's daughter had gone missing and how if anyone heard anything from her they should contact the police at once so they could help bring her home.

Of course she realized once it happened that it made sense that they would talk about her, after all she was a missing child from their city even if the place she'd gone missing from was thousands of miles away, but she wished that they hadn't. She'd told Sollux about her mother's death but just let him assume that she'd gotten back some normal way then run off before anyone could try dumping her in foster care. That reasoning wouldn't hold water anymore now that he'd learned that she'd just gone missing from the dig site, especially when he had all the information he needed to realize that she'd somehow gone missing after she'd shown up in his room.

She glanced at Sollux out of the corner of her eye and found that he was already looking back at her. "I'm not gonna ask about it if you don't want-" he started, but she quickly cut him off.

"Good," she said shortly, then immediately regretted her tone when she knew he'd only blame himself for upsetting her and rushed to make up for it. "I'm sorry, Sollux. I promise one day I'll tell you everything that happened, but I... I can't..."

She couldn't do it while the pain of her mother's death was still so fresh that she needed to try her best to avoid thinking about it or she'd start to feel like she needed to throw up everywhere from her body trying to find a way to expel the hurt. She couldn't do it while she still had no idea what had really happened to her, or where the music in her mind had come from or how it could make time dance to its beat. And she definitely couldn't until she found a way to say 'I might be some type of zombie' without sounding completely insane.

Thinking about it must have written her heartache all over her face again, as she knew it had been as often as not in those early days, because instead of getting upset or trying to push the issue further he said, "Shit, AA, don't look at a guy like that. Listen, why don't you try getting a couple winks, empty your head out until tomorrow?"

Aradia didn't really think that she was tired, or rather she knew that she felt bone-weary but she'd been feeling that way ever since the earthquake regardless of whether she actually needed rest or not and thought it was nothing more than that. Still, she recognized an out when she was given one and was glad to take it. "I think I will," she said, crawling up into his bed and snuggling down under the covers. "Thank you, Sollux."

"It's nothing," he said, waving off her appreciation. He flipped off the TV and the lights, leaving nothing that could possibly disturb her but the dim glow of his computer and, a moment later, the comfortingly familiar sound of his fingers moving over his keyboard. "You know I've got your back, AA."

o 0 O 0 o

Surprisingly, the morning after that Sollux was the one who first put the idea of heroism into her mind. The first thing he said when she began to wake up was, "You know how lucky you are people started getting born with weird powers?"

"Uh?" she grunted, still more asleep than not and completely unable to grasp what he could mean by the apparent non sequitur. She rolled onto her side and cracked open her eyes to look at him where he was sitting at the computer. She wasn't sure if he'd ever left it during the night; if he'd joined her in his bed at some point he'd managed to do it and then get up again without disturbing her.

"I've been looking shit up for you," he told her, leaning sideways so she could see his monitor though the text filling it was so small that there was no way she could have made it out from the bed. "I figure if you're crashing here it's because you want to hide out for some reason, right?"

"I guess," she said, dragging herself up so she could lean over his shoulder and see what in the world they were discussing. It wasn't much help; the internet browser he had open was displaying what looked like the verdict from some lawsuit. "I haven't really thought about it. I just don't want to be sent off to live with some family member I've never even heard of, or to be bounced around foster families, or whatever will happen to me if the people looking for me find me."

"Then you're lucky superheroes aren't just a thing in comics anymore," he said, looping back to the confusing subject he'd used to start the whole confusing conversation before finally actually clarifying it, "Look, you know all the crazy shit that's started happening since they showed up? People getting yanked into alternate dimensions, or called off into space, or being brainwashed into thinking they're someone else? There's all this precedent now; long as you stay out of sight nobody'll be touching your stuff until you've been gone long enough to declare you dead. They're not gonna risk the kind of bad press it'd get if it turned out you were some kind of hero off saving the world and you cared more about your ma's house than your secret identity."

She giggled and flexed her arm at him. The muscles in it were perhaps a little more developed than those of most girls her age-the whole summer she'd been the one asked to cart off wheelbarrows once they were full of dirt and rocks since there was nothing else she was trusted to do, and that had had an effect on her-but it was still far from a fighter's body. "Right, Sollux, I'm sure they'll look at my school picture and think I'm off fighting evil."

"Shit, who could tell? You might have all kinds of crazy powers. That witch girl out east is scrawnier than you, and she blew up a gate that opened up to hell a couple weeks back." He paused a moment, then added, "Guess you wouldn't know about that."

"I might have powers..." she repeated slowly, and for the first time since she'd arrived in Sollux's room she heard the music again, just two low sweet notes that felt somehow questioning. Sollux was looking at her again the same way he had the night before and she knew that he had to be wondering again about how she had gotten there so quickly, but this time he didn't try to ask for an explanation.

Which was good, since she still didn't feel like offering one.

Instead she focused on what he'd been saying before that. "You're sure people will really just stay away?"

"Come on, AA, I might be fucking awful at a lot of things but you know I can get whatever I want out of a computer," he said, rolling his eyes at her. "Don't be an idiot and try living at home or you'll get spotted in two seconds, but if you wanna spend five years hiding under my bed you can move right back home when it's over."

"I'm not going to ask you to put up with me that long! But if I really don't need to worry about anyone digging around in our things, there is somewhere else..."

o 0 O 0 o

Almost nobody knew that her family owned forty acres of forest outside of the city. Her great-great-grandfather had loved to hunt and set his heart on having his own private hunting grounds. He'd saved up every spare cent he could get, buying up the land in hunks whenever he had enough for another parcel and never stopping until he was too old to go on working. Everyone who'd been alive to know about the old man's obsession had long since died, and apart from the occasional developer who dug up the information because they wanted to buy it to build a mall or movie theater the fact that it was owned by anyone in particular had been more or less forgotten.

And nobody outside of her family-which now meant nobody besides herself and her grandmother if her ravaged mind still held the information-knew about the hunting lodge hidden in the heart of the forest. Her great-great-grandfather had built it in a time before building permits had been much of a thing, and though there'd been a few improvements since then, mostly adding indoor-plumbing and wiring it for electricity with the help of a private generator, all the work had been kept in the family as much as possible.

Aradia was pretty sure that was just because they saw it as a fun family project and not a sign that her dad had come from a line of crazy antiauthoritarian survivalists, but whatever the case she wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And if any record of it did exist anywhere, well, one of the great things about having an incredible hacker for a best friend was that sometimes records could just mysteriously vanish.

She took Sollux with her when she first went out to the lodge, wanting him to know how to find her if he needed to, and with her permission he brought his girlfriend Feferi too. He said it was because he didn't really trust his brain to remember the way through the forest on its own, but they both knew Feferi had a bad enough sense of direction that the truth must be he just didn't want to keep Aradia's presence a secret from her.

They took a bus out to the suburbs as far as it would go, Aradia disguising herself by binding up her hair, putting on a pair of thick-rimmed drugstore reading glasses Sollux had bought her, and feeling grateful that a summer near the equator had left her skin much darker than it had been in the picture they kept flashing on the news. Apparently it worked, since even though they were making something of a scene the entire way out-Feferi clinging to her arm most of the ride and occasionally whispering to her low enough that nobody else could hear how happy she was to find out Aradia was okay-not a single person even gave her a second look.

Once the bus had taken them as far as it could they had to switch to walking, a trek that lasted miles before they even reached the edge of the forest. Sollux had the most trouble with it; Aradia had been hiking everywhere all summer and Feferi was the champion of their school's swim team with the muscles to prove it, but the only regular exercise he got was walking his family's dog. Even though they kept up a slow pace he was obviously winded and trying to hide it by the time they reached the edge of the forest, so Aradia let him sit down with Feferi to take a break while she looked for the spot where they'd be going in.

"Fuck, AA, you didn't say it would be this far," he said as he watched her looking around for the landmarks she needed to orientate herself by.

"Yes I did!" she told him, spotting the lightning-struck tree that was the clearest marker for the start of the path they'd be taking. They were a few dozen yards off, but she'd been prepared to need to search a lot further than that. "If anything I over-estimated how far it would be. You can't blame me if you don't know how long a mile takes on foot."

"She's right," Feferi added, "she did say how far we'd be going."

"Why the hell do I spend so much time around unsympathetic women?" he groused.

Feferi laughed and hugged his arm, "Because you like us best, of course!"

"Of course." Sollux pushed himself to his feet and jogged over to where Aradia was poking around some blackberry bushes, their fruit long since dried out. "All right, I got my breath back. Let's get this shit done."

"We need to go around these brambles," she said, carefully lifting one of the thorny limbs. "They've spread out since the last time we came here. The path starts right behind them."

"Great, looks like I'll end up bleeding for you today too," he said, but plowed gamely through the underbrush without hesitation. Aradia and Feferi followed behind a little more slowly, each of them holding branches and vines out of the other's way until they pushed through to where the trees became thick enough to steal the sunlight from anything trying to grow beneath. When they joined Sollux he was frowning at Aradia, though he looked more confused than upset. "You sure you picked the right spot, AA? There's no fucking path here."

She smiled brightly and darted forward with quick dancing steps. "Of course there is. Keep looking."

They followed her without question even though she was sure that neither of them had managed to spot the faint trail she was keeping a careful eye on. After a few minutes Sollux said, "Wait, I think I think I see it."

"Really?" Feferi asked, squinting at the woods in front of them. "I still only sea trees."

"Yeah but, no offense FF, you suck at finding your way around anywhere that isn't the beach." He held up and hand and waved it through the air, describing the curve of the path with its motion. "That it, AA?"

"Mm-hm. Good job! The first time I ever came out here it took me a lot longer to find it... though I was four."

"Hate to be the one to break this to you, but that's not a fucking path. It's barely even a groove. You can't get smug about us not seeing it."

"I wasn't smug! Mom and Dad did the same thing to me when I was little." Just for a moment, on mentioning her parents, Aradia's smile and her steps both faltered, but she swallowed back her sorrow and kept on. "This is the only track to the lodge, my great-great-grandpa made it by riding his horse through and we've all kept from totally disappearing by walking over it ever since; if you went in anywhere but right between that dead tree and the blackberry bushes you'd just need to keep wandering until you either found the house on your own or wandered out of it again." After a moment's thought she added, "But it is a lot more faded than it was the last time I came. We haven't been here since before the car accident, and I guess things must grow over it faster than I would have thought. So you did do good spotting it!"

The steaming hot days of late summer weren't the best time in the world to go tramping through the woods, although at least the trees provided them with shade that they hadn't gotten in the suburbs and Aradia was much better off than the others since she was still accustomed to the temperatures further south. Even worse than the heat were the mosquitos which were out in force; out on regular roads they'd been much scarcer, but under the trees it seemed like they were getting bitten every few minutes.

But the trip to the building was shorter than the walk from the bus stop to the woods had been, and it wasn't that much longer before they reached it. "Um, so I guess this will be my new home," she said, gesturing to it. It wasn't much to look at, not even painted, but she knew that it had a kitchen and a bathroom and a few beds and she didn't need anything else.

Whatever her own thoughts on it, Sollux and Feferi didn't look especially thrilled with it. "AA..." Sollux said, frowning at her, "You know, the spot under my bed's still open if you want it."

"Or you could not try to hide," Feferi added hesitantly. "I know you don't want to be sent to live with someone you don't know, but do you really think you'll be able to live alone for five years? How are you going to get money to eat?"

"I've already thought about that. I can sneak back home and find things to sell online to get grocery money. You could make me an account on eBay or somewhere that couldn't be traced back to me, couldn't you Sollux?" She waited for his nod before going on, "And there's enough of a yard for me to make a vegetable garden for next year, that would help. Then once I've settled in there's something else I think I might do..."

She paused, gathering her courage so she'd be prepared to discuss the things she knew they'd want to know. When she saw herself appear behind them she knew that she was ready, and an instant later she reached into her mind to start the music playing and pushed herself a moment backwards.

"I know you wanted to know how I got to your home so fast, Sollux," she said to their backs, making them both jump and whirl to face her, Sollux yelping and Feferi's eyes wide. "I might be ready to tell you."

It took a minute for them to collect themselves enough to talk, but when Sollux finally did his reaction wasn't what she was expecting.

"You mean we walked all that way when we could have just teleported? Shit, AA, give us a break next time." /html