What’s funny about being inches away from unimaginable agony are the brief memories that smack you across the face, like a splash of cold water shattering the world for a moment and pausing everything. Maybe my brain has just gotten pretty used to processing being in pain, so much so that it’s gotten the handle of slowing things down so I had the time to understand what I’d done to fuck up so badly. Or maybe it was just this moment, right here and now, that had time crawling in split second heartbeats. And you know what fraction of a second memory came to mind?

  The Christmas just before dad kicked the bucket, when mom bought me my first costume. She never liked the idea of me being a superhero, and I always figured that my powers showing up late gave her some kind of hope that I wasn’t gonna end up like my old man, and for some reason, she buckled and bought the same exact one I had been staring at in the mall a few weeks earlier. It’s kinda where I got the inspiration for the rest of my costumes now. Its red and white, the fingerless sleeves and the thick boots. No cape, just squared shoulders and flying made easier.

  Dad hadn’t liked seeing me in the costume as much as either of us had, and I can’t remember seeing that thing anywhere after he told me to go to bed early and take it off. I think the only reason the memory came to mind now was because of her, Olympia, and the golden accents on her suit, the white and the thinner strips of red and blue, like someone had smashed my costume together with dads and called it a day, which made something very obvious in the split second she was in front of me, and the even smaller split second that her fist met my temple.

  Olympia, this version of me, wasn’t the real me. She wasn’t calling the shots.

  Because if there was one thing I’d never do, it was look like Zeus.

  But I guess when you’ve been hit as hard as I had, good old memories come flying back just as hard as when dad used to send me skipping, tripping, and shooting through the air with hay makers like Older Me landed.

  By the time I stop grinding my body against the dirt, I’m in a crater I’ve made, staring at the pale blue sky, wondering if this superhero stuff was ever meant for me in the first place, like Suits was saying. Fuck me, I feel like I just got hit by a bus. At least, that’s what a human would probably feel like right now. So out of your mind that your own body feels like it's held together by string and bits of thread. Move your arm and your leg jerks first. Try to roll over and suddenly all you can do is tense and curl into a ball of pulsating agony. My body feels like it’s on fire, not just my head, where she cracked me with a right hook hard enough to leave a few of my teeth tumbling out of my mouth when I spit a goblet of blood onto the hot sand. Slowly, very slowly, I roll onto my chest and face the dirt.

  Then shut my eyes and lie there, gasping like some fish on land, because you know what?

  Fuck her.

  Every single time I go asking people for help, they either punch me in the face or fuck me over, and I’m done with that. Hell, I quit. All I wanted to do was save Bianca. All I ever want to do is help New Olympus dig itself out of the massive fiery hole that it’s managed to bury itself inside ever since dad decided to kick the bucket one day. I’m doing these people a favor, but there’s always an angle to their nonsense. I’m gonna keep it real for a second and tell you what I’ve really been thinking about this whole Fracture nonsense: it sucks, but I probably think there’s more to it than I know, and I’ll only find out once it either tries to kill me, back stab me, or murder me, which I understand is the same thing as the first option, but sometimes killing someone is by accident, like that time the girl with the Mercedes cut Alice in half. Murder, though, is what I used to go and do to clean the streets.

  One of them is targeted, and the other one is sometimes targeted, but not really.

  Or maybe I’ve got a concussion and I’m not thinking straight.

  Point being: fuck this, and I’m going home.

  I spit out one more loose tooth and swallow some more blood, and then shove the Earth off my face. I shake my head and get to one knee, finding nothing around me for miles except howling wind and sand that pelts against my skin like a sandblaster. It stings against my cuts and rashes, scraping against raw, bloody flesh like sandpaper. I swear and hover, because my foot aches like hell when I put pressure on it, then search around myself.

  I’ve got an option now to either look for this reality’s Thirteen to get out of here, or just wait it out.

  Bianca is kind of in trouble right now, though, so I chose option number two.

  I take a deep breath and slowly breathe out, shutting my eyes in the process. I try to let myself relax, dropping my shoulders and rolling them to ease the tension in my neck. Slowly, my skin begins to prickle, then feel strange. It takes about a minute before I can hear garbled voices, but the wind is making it even harder to focus on anything underneath me. Don’t know how far deep the surviving humans are. Could be digging for days, and I also didn’t want to make a tunnel directly for the Empire to follow right to the remaining humans Earth is harboring.

  Searching for entrances was also gonna be a pain to do. Nearly impossible in a sandstorm like this, and on a planet so screwed up, too. Kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, or for Bianca in a city that I supposedly knew like the back of my hand, multiplied by however many million miles of barren land covers Earth now. So, like I said, almost completely impossible.

  Then I hear screaming, torn up by the wind. I look up, then hover a foot backward.

  Actress slammed into the ground in front of me, throwing dirt into the air. I waited for it to settle before checking if she was alive. She had a giant purple welt on the side of her jaw. Blood mouth and split lower lip. Her eyes were fuzzy and her words were garbled as they spilled out of her mouth. She moaned and let out a soft cry as she turned onto her side, staying there to cradle her face. Couldn’t blame her. Olympia was shooting for the stands.

  If this happened to me a few months ago, she would have probably put her fist through my face.

  “What the hell is her problem?” she moaned, squeezing her eyes shut. “She could have killed me!”

  “Took it like a champ, superstar,” I muttered, offering her a hand. She looked up at me, then reached out so I could help her up. Almost immediately, she collapsed onto her knees, legs completely out from underneath her.

  “I wanna go home,” she whispered, cradling her face and the growing bruise. She could barely speak, not with lips starting to swell that large. Has she never gotten hit before? “This sucks. They’re supposed to yell ‘cut.’”

  “Cut?” I asked her. “What the hell do you mean ‘cut?’”

  She looked at me weirdly, as if she’d just noticed I was standing there. “Yeah,” she said, as she found her broken sunglasses and picked them off the ground. “They’re not meant to actually hit you. It’s all pre-recorded.”

  I stared at her for a long time, then it clicked. Oh, hell. Oh, hell! “Don’t tell me you’re a fake.”

  “There’s nothing fake about what I do!” she snapped, then calmed when her jaw clicked. She winced and dusted her sunglasses before putting them on her forehead again. “Being a superhero means inspiring people, and you don’t inspire anyone if you go around bleeding all over the place looking like shit. Villains lose. I win. Easy.”

  I laughed, hard, because this was just news to me, tell you what. “Easy? Nothing about us is easy.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Winning is easy,” she said, glaring at me. “But with a face like yours, you should try it some time instead of getting punched around all the freaking time. Gods, I knew I should’ve gone to bed early. That damn intern…”

  “Well, poser,” I said, earning myself a hatred-filled glare. “I’m gonna head out, so if you still wanna play a game of deadly capture the flag, then be my guest, but I’m out of here. Come with me if you like, your call.”

  “You’re leaving?” she asked, standing up, wobbling as she did. “But Olympia said—”

  “Fuck what she said! You might not get it now, because your life’s been tailor made to be the perfect golden standard of being a superhero or whatever, but this kind of shit never ends. I’m gonna make sure I get out of here whether she likes it or not. I don’t even know how long it’s been back in my reality! But she’ll probably just say that training here is more important, which is bullshit, by the way, because if someone actually wanted to help me out for once, they wouldn’t try to flatline me!” I didn’t realize I was panting until I started tasting dirt on my tongue. I spat and used the back of my hand to wipe my mouth, then pointed at her. “I’m going, and if you tell her that I left, I will find you, and I will hurt you, because between me and you, I’m probably the better fighter, okay?”

  Actress put her hands up defensively. “Never said anything about being a snitch, loser. But if you’re gonna coward your way out of this, remember that she also said that we need this training to save our worlds and stuff.”

  I snorted. “We’re Olympia. You think the universe will ever give us a shot of doing that? We can’t even get the girl we like to go on a date with us before she gets kidnapped by some assassin guild. We’re not lucky enough for the world to end and for us to be the ones to save it. Word of advice: focus on the smaller things that matter.”

  “But…doesn’t everything matter, small and big?”

  “Sure, I guess. But I don’t really care anymore.”

  “And here I thought I got through to you.”

  Fuck me.

  Olympia hovered several feet away from us, arms by her sides and knuckles bruised. One of her arms was splattered with blood that got violently sprayed across her suit by the winds. She looked at the two of us, pale blue eyes flicking from one face to the other, then she smiled thinly. “Looks like you two are the lucky ones, right?”

  “Please don’t hit me!” Actress quickly said.

  “I’ve decided I don’t want anything to do with this anymore,” I said, hovering a little closer to her, and doing Actress a favor and getting in front of her, saving at least some of her credibility. “I’m leaving soon, and—”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. I paused and raised an eyebrow. “By all means, tap out.”

  “…that’s it?”

  “You want me to roll out a red carpet and tell you that the exit is stage left, too?” she asked, tilting her head. “Or should I put your head in the dirt to knock you out flat so you can dream of walking away so easily?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Ah, alright. I see what you’re doing. Fight you to get what I want, which is a way out of this place, since you probably figured one of us wouldn’t want to play ball. Smart. Shame I don’t care.”

  Olympia’s smile faded. She stared at me, empty-eyed and distant, like she was seeing miles and miles through my chest and even beyond that toward the horizon across the sea of dead cities and rotting skyscrapers. She drew her mouth into a thin line and waited, patiently, for the wind to die and our hair to stop whipping around us.

  “Rylee,” she said slowly. “Your world is in danger of being brought to its knees. Bailing on this—”

  “Will end it, yeah, you said it the first time,” I muttered. I folded my arms, even though it hurt like all hell to rub my arms together with how tender their skin was. “But if there’s anything I’ve learnt at all in the past year of my life ever since I graduated, is that being a superhero is totally different from what it used to mean for dad way back in his day. People like him got up early in the morning, stopped a bank robbery, and fucked off for the rest of the day to their normal jobs. I don’t get that luxury, and that’s only because they’re also the same generation that made damn sure to shake every single dirty paw in that city just to make sure everything looked spectacular on the outside, and stupid six-year-old me for thinking that dear old dad had all the answers, because all he was doing was making my life that little bit harder in the future. Just train harder Rylee. Just fly faster. Just hit harder.” I scoffed and waved my hand through the air. “The real me wouldn’t turn out like him, because one thing I’d never do is beat myself into the ground trying to train to be better, because I can do that on my own without killing myself in the goddamned process, too. So blow me and take your bullshit ‘training’ someplace else, bitch. I’m going home.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

  “That if everything I’m struggling through ends with me turning out like dad, then I might as well die.” I got closer to her, so close that we could look each other level in the eyes. “You’re no hero. You’re not even Rylee.”

  “You’re right,” she said quietly. “I’m not, and the other put that idea in your head first, didn’t she?”

  “Not surprised that you heard us talking.”

  “So you knew I was listening?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re like an irritation on my skin, hard not to notice you.”

  Olympia smiled flatly. “I always figured that you were the most physically developed. Even from where I come from, you—the previous you, at least—was so much further along than the government would have liked to believe, because sooner or later, they’re gonna start taking action from the many talks they’ve had about you.”

  “Yeah, and what’s that?”

  “How much do you really care?” she asked me, floating a little higher, making me look upward. “How much, when the time comes, are you willing to put your life on the line, not just for America, but for the world?”

  “What decision did the real me end up making?” I asked.

  “The simple, easier, more selfish and arrogant option,” Olympia said. “Herself.”

  “Shocker,” I said quietly. “The world’s been pretty shit to me so far. One thing after the other. I can look at all the pretty trees and sun-lit hills all day long from the atmosphere, but the people are making it hell to deal with.”

  “That sounds like a true-blooded Arkathian answer,” she said quietly, fists tightening.

  “What, I sound like a threat?” I asked her. “Or do I just want Earth to be better?”

  “And what does that actually look like in your mind?”

  “It looks like the kind of place where I’m not forced to go on bullshit side quests for you people, just so you can get something out of me every other day of my life. But I think I’ve decided to ditch that for the old school approach. The kind of approach where I do my thing, don’t care about the conspiracy part, and kill the bad guys.”

  “So,” she said, “what’re you going to do when the bad guys are the government that deems you a threat?”

  I shrugged. “Send in the nukes and the fighter jets. I bet that’s a better idea than fixing their country.”

  “You know just as much as I do that using that approach doesn’t work,” she said. “You’ve tried it.”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “I was stupid enough to listen to a supervillain who thought she knew what she was doing, when she clearly fucking knew she didn’t actually know anything. But I can’t blame her. We both thought that the world was ours and that making it a better place was our birthright, but dad couldn’t even do that without bending over backwards for a crime lord and getting himself iced in the process. Mark my fuckin’ words, you gods forsaken clone, that I’m gonna be better than him by tenfold. Not because I’m buckling to anyone, but because I’m wasting time with idiots like you and Thirteen every other week, pretending that any of this is actually helpful!”

  “You really think all of what I’m trying to teach you is useless?” she asked me.

  “Well, isn’t it?” I asked. “I mean, the real version of me died in your reality, right? Even with all that knowledge they put in that head of yours, they still couldn’t get the fact down that wasting my time like this won’t put me on your side, but push me away from it. My own mentor fucked me over. The same guy who would sit and watch cartoons with me on Saturday mornings, just because he had the time to entertain me, also turned out to be the same guy poisoning my half to death. I am done. Finished. No more bullshit. No more lies. I know I’ve said this all before, and you probably know that better than anyone, but goddamn, am I tired of trying to be a modern hero.”

  Hell, let’s take this all back to the Golden Age of Capes. Let’s snap a neck or two and put the rest of ‘em in prison. Bianca is coming back to me whether that guild liked that idea or not. Why she was taken isn’t my problem anymore. They crossed a line, they were going to face me, and they were going to fear me, and they were going to give her up and leave us alone, or they were going to find out the hard way how easily humans can come apart.

  I hated to sound like my old self. The angry, bitter, time-bomb frothing at the mouth for blood.

  But I eventually wanted time to sit down and just…be. Just exist without any of this.

  I wanted the powers, and I was getting used to the responsibility.

  What I don’t want anymore is people using me.

  Lucas is gonna have to die then, Ry.

  And…that was something I was just going to have to do.

  Which also meant leaving and starting this superhero thing from scratch, and doing it the right way.

  If Olympia had an issue with that, then I’d never know, because the fist that erupts right through her head cuts her sentence short.