Author's Note: Here's the second part. Please R&R. I love comments. I'm sorry if it seems a little rushed at the end here, but I didn't think what I was rushing through all that important. Please tell me what you think.

Disclaimer: Still don't own 'em.

"Beginnings"

"Paula!" I called, running down the hallway, throwing my bag over my left shoulder and pulling my leather jacket over my right. The bell had just rung so the hall was filled with a stampede of teenagers. I dodged through the crowd towards the front doors just as my target placed her hand on the handle and began to push them open. "Paula, wait up!"

I reached the door just as she was stepping out, putting my hand out over her shoulder to hold the door open for her. I leaned heavily against it, panting slightly to catch my breath. "At least... let me carry... your books..." I said between gasps.

She didn't even acknowledge me, but simply walked through the door I held open and down the steps, the edges of her burgundy dress swishing slightly as she walked down the steps. I sighed and bounded after her, letting the door close on the noses of several freshmen.

"Paula, c'mon, just talk to me?" I said pleadingly as I slowed to a walk beside her, leaning forward slightly to look her in the face. She gave me an indignant squeak, "hmpf!" and looked the other way. I really screwed up this one, I thought.

"Paula, what do you want? You want me to say 'I'm sorry'? OK, OK, I'm sorry. I'm really, truly sorry, alright? Denise said she needed some help with her mad science project so I offered to help her out a bit," I said. She took a step forward and stopped suddenly in front of me, so suddenly that I almost fell over her.

"And I suppose the carrying her books and letting her lean on your shoulder were just part of that too?" she said accusingly.

"What? No! No, no, she sprained her ankle the other day in Save the Citizen so I offered to carry her books," I stammered, scratching the back of my head with one of my hands. Paula looked at me, her dark eyes incredulous. "The shoulder... well, she just did that by herself."

She looked me over with her dark eyes, scrutinizing every aspect of my body, looking for any clue in the way I stood, the way my face was arranged, or anything that would tell her what to believe. After a long silence, she finally spoke. "Truth?"

"Truth, Paula," I said.

"John Peace, you are... You are..." she screwed up her face in exasperation, but decided to simply shake her head and sigh heavily. "Unbelievable, that's what you are," she said, thrusting her books forward into my chest, almost knocking the wind out of my lungs.

The first time I saw Paula Gold was the first day of our freshman year at Sky High, during Power Placement. She was an illusionist and I remember watching, completely amazed, as she spun a breathtaking scene of a country meadow in summer, the grass green, the sky blue, and the sun bright and warm, around the gym, and how she blushed ever so slightly as the entire class, and Coach Boomer, drew a collective gasp at the beauty she'd created.

Steve had seen me looking at her, slack-jawed and a blank stare on my face. "You should ask her out," he told me, later that day over lunch.

"Are you kidding?" I said. "We're total opposites! She'd never go for it."

"Y'know what my dad always says to me when I tell him something like that, John?" Steve replied, settling into inspirational-speech-mode as he bit into a cookie. "He says, 'You'll never get anywhere if you don't try.'"

"But what if she says no?"

"Well," he said, munching contentedly, "what if she says yes?" I looked at him incredulously. "Think of it this way: If you do ask her, you've got about a 50 chance that she'll say yes. But if you don't ask her, then you're chance that she'll say yes approaches absolute zero." He swallowed hard and downed his half-pint of milk. "Y'know?"

I chuckled and smiled, shaking my head. Steve was inspirational like that, he had it in his genes. He just didn't have the gene that made you take him seriously. "That would've been a whole lot more inspirational without the cookie and the milk."

I glanced around the lunch room as I bit into my sandwich. As my eyes traveled the tables, I saw her, Paula Gold, sitting off by a window with a few of her friends, talking and laughing and having a generally good time. The way the sun played across her cheeks and made her dark eyes sparkle brilliantly, the way her long, dark hair fell gracefully around her shoulders and danced as she moved, the way her voice rolled off her tongue like liquid silk and her laugh chimed like the harmony of a thousand silver bells – I was captivated.

Steve snapped me out of my trance, waving his hand in front of my face. "You really are hopeless, John," he said, laughing.

When I finally worked up the nerve to ask her to our junior prom, I'd been a nervous wreck. People tell me I'm a pretty confident guy, normally, and I believe them; but that day, I was scared to death of what she'd say. I wasn't the right kind of guy for her. I was too brutal, too shallow, too completely different from her that she'd never see anything likable, let alone lovable, in me. But when I finally stopped her on the steps to the school and asked her, she'd shattered every one of my concerns.

She couldn't get her mind off me, she'd told me. Every night, all she thought about was me and she couldn't get her mind to concentrate on anything else. I was so completely different from her, she'd said, that she couldn't believe how attracted to me she was. She couldn't wait to let me take her to prom. And, she couldn't believe I hadn't made a move sooner.

Now, almost a year later, I was feeling just as nervous and run down as I had that day. I couldn't bear to lose Paula so soon. I couldn't imagine how anything could ever go on if she were to leave me. I loved her too damn much. I hurried after her to the edge of the school, shuffling her books around in my arms, and followed her up into the bus. Maybe she didn't know just how dedicated to her I was. I promised myself right then and there that, after graduation, I'd find a way to show her.

---

Senior came and went, and we were at graduation in what seemed like a blink of the eye. Paula had forgiven me for the incident with Denise, forgiven me entirely. At graduation, I was titled "Barron Battle." My color scheme was declared to be black and red. That was a relief for me, as pretty much everything I already owned was either black, white, or red. Paula was named Duplicita, her colors a sky blue and white. After the last of the heroes received their names and colors, and the last of the sidekicks had been paired off, Principal Powers gave us a speech, marking that day as a most momentous occasion, the day when we'd all go on to begin our careers as the new protectors of the planet. I'm sure the day was momentous for the whole class, but it was even more so for me.

After the cheers had died down and the rain of caps subsided, I looked around the field for Paula. I spotted her leaning against a tree off to the side of the field. As I got closer, I saw the she was looking up into the branches at something, apparently quite amusing as she was laughing.

"Hey, Paula," I greeted, waving to her as I approached. "What're you doing?"

"Oh, hi John," she said. She pointed up to a branch where I saw a bluebird chirping. "Watch this," she said, raising her hand and swirling her fingers, creating in a small flash of light a perfect replica of the bluebird that fluttered down onto the branch and began singing harmony with the other. She laughed her musical laugh again, and I smiled.

"So, Paula," I said as lightly as I could, leaning back against the tree next to her, "you and me, we've been going out for what is it now? A year? A year and a half?"

"A year and a half about, I'd say," she said, a little distractedly. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, I was just thinking that, well, a year and a half's a long time, y'know? Long enough for you to see how you really feel about someone."

"Hmm," she said.

"Long enough to know if you really love someone," I said, almost forcing the words from my quaking mouth.

"I do love you, John," she said, turning her head slightly now to look at me from the side of eye. "You know that."

"I do," I said. "And I love you too, very much, Paula. You know that, don't you?"

"Of course I do, John."

"So, I figured that it's like Principal Powers said. Today's the day our lives really begin, today's the day we all make our new starts." I turned my head to look at her and saw that she'd done the same, her dark eyes studying me intently. "So, I figured, if I'm going to be making a new start, I want to make it really special."

"Hmm," Paula said, turning her body a bit more so she was leaning on her side rather than on her back.

"And, so, I couldn't think of anything more special than starting out with someone I love," I said, my voice shaking like a leaf in a gale and my heart beating in my ears, and only vaguely aware that Paula had shifted over a few inches closer to me on the tree.

"So, I guess what I'm trying to say is," I continued, "I want to m—"

But I didn't get to finish. Paula wrapped her hand around the back of my neck and pulled me into her, pressing her lips softly against mine. Saying that I was anything but completely and utterly astonished would be a complete and utter lie. We pulled apart, I entirely out of breath from the shock, and she simply smiling lightly.

"Of course I'll marry you, John Peace," she said, laughing. I laughed lightly. This wasn't any laughing matter, I thought to myself. "How long have you been building up to this."

"Since that day I told you about what happened with Denise," I said, cringing at the mention of that girl's name. "I wanted to find a way to show you that I really love you." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a little velvet lined box. "This was the best thing I could think of."

She took the box in her hands and opened it slowly. Her eyes sparkled when she saw the thin band of gold, set with three rubies inside. "John, this is beautiful," she gasped.

"I'll buy you a proper one later," I said hastily. "With diamonds and all. But I knew you liked rubies, so I was hoping this would be fine until then?"

She smiled and shook her head lightly, clicking her tongue "ts, ts, ts." She fitted the ring onto her finger. "John Peace, you are unbelievable."

---

There's not much else I could say about that. Paula and I talked it over with our parents and they were all thrilled to hear that we'd be getting together. We chose a date in August and chose an open spot out in the country. Paula didn't want a big wedding, and I was just as happy to keep it small. Her parents helped us find an apartment and agreed to help us pay the rent for as long as we needed to get settled. I found a part-time job working as a clerk for a sales firm to get us some income while we both looked around for something more sustainable for the future.

A year or so passed and our lives stabilized. Paula and I both wanted to build a family; but we agreed, to the relief of our parents, that we weren't nearly stable enough, financially or otherwise, to take a shot at raising children. So, we decided to wait a few years and let things settle down. I went back to school to get a degree in architecture and Paula began studying interior design, both jobs that we knew would give us enough leeway to take off if ever we needed too.

Back in those days, the hero front was pretty slow. I don't know if it was because we were new recruits or if crime and villainy just wasn't a big thing yet, but, compared to today, we rarely had any action at all. One of us would get an assignment every now and again, but for the most part we were living out normal lives. Even so, out of the two of us, I was always the busiest. I had an assignment at least once or twice a month while Paula only very rarely got assignments of her own. As time went on and our careers picked up, I only got busier, with assignments being called in all the time. Looking back, I think it must have been all that activity I had that led me to where I am now.