Roxanne goes to ground as thoroughly as she can, sleeps for a few hours huddled in a corner of an abandoned building.
A nightmare (the lab her collar pain no) wakes her up, sometime near dawn. She curls into a tighter ball, shivering, and tries to come up with a plan.
Options. She has to have some options. (think Roxanne, think)
She could go public. She could tell people what they did to her, in that lab.
(the people in the store, edging away from her, looking at her out of the corners of their eyes like she was a criminal, just because a smiling man in a white suit said she was)
God, and she didn't do herself any favors, going crazy on him like that, panicking in the prison, escaping custody so dramatically. Shit shit shit.
No one's going to believe her. No one's going to listen.
(the people in the store just stood there and let Metro Man take her. they just watched while she screamed.)
She's on her own. The only way anyone is going to help her is if she makes them, if she uses her powers and twists their will and forces them to help her.
No one is going to save her.
(the blood, all the blood, too much blood on the ground outside of her old house, after she'd finished with the team that the lab sent to collect her and she doesn't deserve to be saved, does she)
Roxanne presses a hand to her mouth and tries to cry quietly.
She could run. Go somewhere else, anywhere else. A different city, or—god, somewhere without people? The idea of no people is appealing but—but if they find her again, she'll have to have people around, people she can use her powers on, because without her powers to protect her, she's entirely helpless.
And where is she going to go? She's never lived anywhere but Wisconsin and Metro City; she doesn't know anywhere else, doesn't know anything about any other places. At least here, she has a sense of the geography, places to hide, places to escape to.
She can't stay in Metro City though, surely she can't—she's already classified as a superpowered threat to society.
A thought—dances at the edges of her mind. Something about—
Roxanne takes a sharp breath.
Before her father left, he worked as a public defender in the city; he mostly dealt with ordinary criminals, but she remembers that once he got called in to defend a guy who'd had—some kind of superpowers—superspeed, maybe?
Whatever it had been, though, the guy had used his powers to commit crimes in several different cities before finally coming to live in Metro City. He'd committed crimes here, too, and he'd been caught and arrested.
What had been so interesting about that case, though, was the fact that the man hadn't been trying to plead innocent—Roxanne's father had been trying to get him classified as a Level One Superpowered Threat to Society.
Level One Superpowered Threats to Society who lived in a city with an official Defender cannot legally be extradited to another location.
(The logic, Roxanne remembers her father saying, is that the Defender who fights them regularly will be best suited to handle them, if they should escape.)
If someone is a Level One Superpowered Threat to Society, and they attach themselves to a place like Metro City—
—Metro City was the only place they can legally be held or serve time. Because Metro City will have jurisdiction.
The people at the lab had shot themselves in the foot when they'd gotten her classified as a superpowered threat to society, Roxanne realizes, hope dawning. They'd meant to keep her from escaping them, but if she manages to get her threat level raised to One—
Then they won't be able to touch her.
She goes to the library.
She doesn't really know where else to go.
Roxanne goes there when the library is open, stays until after it closes. She hides in a cabinet in the staff room, curled up into a tiny ball.
And when everyone else has gone, she climbs out of the cabinet and researches supervillains.
Halfway through the night, she gets up to take a break from reading and wanders around the library, exploring. She remembers it, of course, from when she lived in Metro City before, but mostly what she remembers is the children's section.
Roxanne ends up there, at last, wandering through the maze of shelves, trailing her fingertips over brightly colored books of the children's section.
There's a door back there, behind the shelves, a door marked 'Authorized Personnel Only'; Roxanne opens it curiously, climbs over the grate that's set across the bottom of the doorway, and walks down the short hall to a stairwell.
For the first time since—since before the lab—Roxanne feels something like—
—it's not happiness, exactly, more like—
—excitement.
An excitement that doesn't have anything to do with fear.
She thinks of the books she read when she was younger, books about children who stepped through a hidden doorway and into another world to be heroes, and her heart flutters with excited wonder, as if she might be one of those children.
(as if she's not too old and too damaged to be anything like a hero.)
She climbs the stairs and her sense of wonder only increases when the staircase ends with a landing—and a turquoise-painted door.
Roxanne touches the door, fingertips brushing across the wood. She takes hold of the doorknob, and twists.
It turns in her hand.
She opens the door and steps forward.
Roxanne gasps, one hand flying to her mouth, eyes wide.
It's a house. She's in a house.
There's a house in the library.
Well, an apartment, anyway—Roxanne walks into the apartment and looks around.
It's been abandoned a long time, she can tell; there's dust on the floor, and the rooms are almost completely devoid of furniture—no beds in the bedrooms, no sofa in the living room. There's a table in the kitchen, but nothing in the cabinet over the bathroom sink.
She sees her own reflection in the tarnished bathroom mirror, her face pale and thin and faintly green-tinged by the antique glass. Her hair has grown out, now; it reaches nearly to her chin, greasy and limp and tangled.
Roxanne runs her fingers through it, trying to work out some of the knots. She glances down at the sink, tilts her head, wondering—
Roxanne turns on the tap and laughs when it works. The water comes out in rusty-looking spurts at first, but after a few minutes it flows in a clear, steady stream. She ducks her head beneath it, lets the water wash through her hair, and then straightens up again, grinning. Her reflection grins back at her.
There's a bathtub in here.
"I am going to live here," she says to her reflection, her wet hair clinging to her cheeks, water dripping down her collar.
Leaving the apartment is difficult; she's half afraid it'll disappear as soon as her back is turned. But she does it, going downstairs and grabbing as many of her supervillainy research books as she can carry.
She has to make two trips to get them all, but the apartment is there both times.
Once she's got all of the books upstairs, she takes a minute to think things through.
The apartment door wasn't locked when she came up here the first time—there is a lock on the door, but if she turns it, will that cause suspicion? Do people come up here?
She chews on her lip.
Well, if people come up here, then they'll probably think that they were the ones who locked it, or that—someone else working here locked it. Would they have a key? Someone will have a key, surely.
How can she stay here if people can get in?
For a moment, despair threatens, but she shakes it off. No. She'll figure this out; she will; this is her home now; she won't give it up.
Cabinets. Like she hid in earlier! The kitchen cabinets?
Roxanne goes to inspect the kitchen more closely, looks up at the cabinets speculatively. Sleeping in them all day sounds extremely uncomfortable, but she'll do it if she has to. She—
There's a trapdoor in the ceiling.
Roxanne climbs up onto the formica-topped counter, stands on tiptoe, and opens the trapdoor. Then she pulls herself up through it.
An attic.
There's a kind of window set into the far wall—not a normal window, an octagonal hole with slanting wooden slats on the outside, layered overtop of each other so that light from the streetlamp comes through only in thin, indirect beams. Nobody on the outside will be able to see in; the wooden slats would have blocked their view even if the attic hadn't been so high above the street level. Roxanne has seen the octagonal window thing before, from the outside. She's always assumed it was just ornamental.
The attic is bigger than her cell at the lab, although the ceiling slants so that she's only able to stand up straight when she's in the middle of the room.
The room is empty, which is promising; if nothing is stored up here, there's no reason for anyone to come up here.
Someone has drawn on the walls—no, Roxanne realizes, squinting closely, not just drawn, written, too. The walls are covered in what looks like—blueprints, formulas, equations…
She reaches out to touch one of the drawings—a sketch of something that looks like a kind of flying robot fish with long mechanical tendrils—arms?
Is someone else living up here?
Roxanne looks around the attic again. No, the dust is thick on the floor, undisturbed by footprints. Whoever drew on the walls hasn't been here for a long time.
She looks at another of the drawings, fascinated. Some sort of—gun. A laser gun, all of the parts drawn in painstaking detail. There are diagrams.
Who on earth drew all this?
Roxanne shakes her head and steps away from the wall. She can look at the diagrams later.
She's definitely going to sleep up here; it's much safer than the apartment downstairs.
She should get something heavy to put over the trapdoor, to keep it closed, make it difficult for anyone to come through…tomorrow night, she decides. It's getting late, now—or—early. Close to dawn.
Roxanne sleeps in the corner of the attic, curled up with the books, and for the first time since the lab, there are no nightmares.
...to be continued.