To All Those Brave and Lovely

Out of the Rubble

Nora Reynolds was the girl who walked away.

At least, that was what the news called her. They liked to give people names, and now Nora was one of those people, as they replayed the image of her crashing through that picture window with a little girl cradled in her arms, Spider-Man coming to the rescue just before she hits the ground. Its all they seem to want to talk about, even as the speculation keeps coming about what terrorist group sent the killer robots in the first place (like it matters which bully sent the first punch, it doesn't matter in the end who was responsible, it still hurts) and the responses to another Avengers world rescue come pouring in. Nora watches it alone in her house on her grainy television, sees her own face played over the screen and Spider-Man leaving her alone on the pavement.

She's spent a lot of time alone since then. It got easier, especially after the funeral (her father lowered down into the ground beside her mother, everyone staring at her, cameras flashing because even if they couldn't get into the cemetery, it didn't matter, because the paparazzi's cameras could see that far, the realization setting in that she was really alone and there was no where for her to go) to just sit in the living room through the night and watch bad tv, eating microwaveable food that had gotten freezer burn months ago, only going to sleep when the sun starts to climb the walls. Nora lets the phone ring and ring and doesn't answer it, until the time she does and finds a reporter on the other end and gets so angry that she rips the landline right out of the wall.

"You'll have to face it sometime," Eden tells her, when she climbs up the old trellis that shouldn't hold her weight and finds her on the roof. They used to spend a lot of time on the roof together, sneaking out of their respective households to dream and make solutions to their problems that would never come true. They'd talk about heroes, too, after the bad things started coming and the avengers fought them back and heroes became a fact of life rather than something out of a fairy tale. "They won't let you stay here forever."

Nora knows that they won't. She's not sure who they are, but they're men in suits and woman with expensive dresses and cheap shoes carrying clip boards and knocking on doors. She watches them from behind the window curtains, peeking out when they go into the house of her elderly neighbor that comes to check on her and brings her brownies. Her cousin told her they came to his house, too, asked if he was prepared to take on being her legal guardian. For once, she's glad that the county she lived in was a poor one, because it meant that the wheels turned slow everywhere, especially children's services, even when the child question was a topic of national interest. "I just want things to go back to how they were," She says, holding up her hands to trace the constellations, some of them real and some of them ones she and Eden had made up as kids. "Is that too much to ask?"

But it was, because she still has dirt coating her teeth and has dreams of metal monsters and has to check that the ground underneath her feet are still solid. Things couldn't go back to the way they were, because her father was dead, because he had walked up to that first robot and hit it over the back with a chair to give people enough time to run, and that robot had turned and looked at him like a little kid might look at a butterfly before ripping out its wings before sending him flying into the wall. They couldn't ever be normal, because she can't look out window without flinching and her back is still covered in angry red scars from the glass, and because now people that had never even met her are arguing what to do with her, treating her like a stray dog that needs to be passed around until they find someone who really wants it.

Wants her.

Nora isn't used to being wanted, but they come to her anyways, knocking on the door with sad and solemn faces, like there aren't at least twenty other kids in this town more in need of their help than she is. "You don't have a choice," They tell her, when she finally lets them in and they settle at the kitchen table. She knows one of them, the girl with the fake diamond earrings. The girl, Carly, had graduated high school the year Nora went into eighth grade, and now she was here, sliding a file across her desk. "There's no where else for you to go."