Elle Eats Something She Shouldn't

 Elle made her bed. Now it's time to lie in it.

That's just the way it is, though. Sometimes, you team up with the foremost bureaucratic organization for superheroes in the country and everything goes swimmingly. Sometimes, your little wonder league goes against their rules and you have to deal with the fallout. She can worry about it in the morning, though. For now, she's going to get herself some dinner and a shower while she still has the house to herself.

Elle has been okay with this kind of arrangement for a while, ever since she decided to do the whole vigilante thing. Vigilante justice will always put you on the outskirts. It will always make you despised by police and people who want to keep everything the same. Things staying the same never helped people hurt by the norm. The same never fixed anything. Why shouldn't she have some fun?

It's fine that her roommates aren't here. They won't see her walking in through the back door in her favorite old military-inspired, glaringly-pink costume. It's based on the one she wore when she was younger, back when the media still remotely liked her. Now her support tends to come from weird leftists online who love a good callout. It's just them and the people she helps.

That's fine by her. She doesn't like being a public figure. She never really did. She likes being adored, sure, but she doesn't like the ownership people think they have over her. She's a person, not a statue. She's no hero. She's just some guy.

Elle stands in the kitchen, peeling her sweaty mask from her face. A domino mask shouldn't do so much to obscure her features but, somehow, it does. It helps that she doesn't dress like this at all in her day-to-day life. By day, she's Elle Duffy, former child actress and current aspiring chemistry teacher. By night, she's Heartbreak, another shitty vigilante the city doesn't really want, but definitely needs. She definitely fills a niche. Elle knows that. She goes where the normal superheroes can't. She does the morally dubious work that needs doing. She's fine with it.

She unzips the back of the costume to let in some air, then opens the fridge to take a peek inside. Her roommates didn't buy groceries. She doesn't know why she expected them to.

There's a cheap lunch meat tupperware full of lasagna that's probably not good to eat, but Elle takes it out of the fridge anyway. A girl's gotta eat, right? While she waits for it to warm up in the microwave (and tries not to smell it), she ducks into her room to change out of her costume and tries to keep her mind from wandering to the thought of her dinner and whether or not it's really a good idea to eat it.

There's a text waiting for her on her personal phone. It's two words, from someone she hasn't spoken to in forever. It's from Julie Myers, another chemistry major, another superhero, one who used to do all the vigilante shit with her but decided to go a different route when Omega offered her a position. Groaning, Elle reads the text.

Two words. "Call me."

Elle knows what that means. She gets the uniform off of the floor. She'll have to eat on her way out.

*****

The lasagna was bad. She can feel it in her guts, threatening to revolt. It's fine, though. She takes another sip of her water out of the heart-shaped flask on her hip. It's unbearably warm. The flesh inside her mouth is sour and hot.

The house she's standing next to is more of a collection of planks and dirty windows than anything else. The only things left intact are the cracked concrete foundation, the back sliding glass door, and the chain link fence Elle is steading herself on. The other house on this street is in much better shape.

She hears gravel crunching under boots. Elle knows it's Julie. Julie won't care that Elle is half-out of her costume, with her jacket draped over the fence, her mask off, and her belt-slash-bandolier undone and hanging loose. Except for her bug-themed mask (which she has with her), Julie's in uniform. Her gold jacket, green clothes, gold boots-- clothes provided by and taken from the corrupt superhero organization she used to work with-- are all on, dirty from a hard day's work of moving cows out of roads or whatever it is she does now. Elle isn't sure. She's not even sure what she's doing anymore.