In the middle of battle, Leanne runs and lives to fight another day. A strategic retreat, she’ll explain to her team, though no doubt they’ll hold it against her. Just one more failing in a long list of them.
Coward, Thunderbolt is fond of spitting in her direction.
Amateur, Starling will note in a far more objective tone.
Weak and distant and always falling behind.
Even Zenith, who doesn’t view her presence as a total eyesore, will say, “Not everyone is cut out for this. Civilians,” he’ll finish with a shrug, as if that explains it.
And maybe it does.
Because Leanne is a civilian. Or she was one up until a few months ago. She wasn’t born into this like Caleb, wasn’t trained for it like Henry, doesn’t have an endless well of power sparking at her fingertips like Tetsuki.
She’s just a girl who inherited a pocket watch that doesn’t tell time.
—
For the first eight years of her life, Leanne lived with her grandparents. Not too unusual, she supposes, except that she has siblings. Two of them, in fact, one on either side of her in age. But both of them lived with her mother during that span of time. And while Leanne did join them eventually–both of her grandparents passing away–it’s something that marks her as… different.
Eight years is not so much, in comparison to a person’s total lifespan, but that first bit is enough. Victor and Faye are much closer to each other than they ever were with her, their mother falls silent when it comes to the matter of Leanne’s baby stories.
Even in her own family she is an outsider.
Perhaps she gets that from her father–forever a wanderer; a fleeting, intangible presence in her life, even when she lived with his parents. He’s the one who gave her the watch, even though Victor is the oldest.
He’s the one that doomed her to this fate.
—
Leanne is nearly seventeen when she gets a visitor. A strange visitor.
Doctor Ellen Kaiza is not so much a celebrity as she is an urban myth, name so ingrained with the meta-human movement that it might as well be synonymous.
What the hell is she doing here?
Leanne isn’t a meta-human, not as the doctors classify it, anyway. Green, photosynthesizing hair might have counted fifty years ago, but not anymore. If that counted, Kaiza wouldn’t be here for Leanne. Not when Victor can actually boost plant growth, or Faye can occasionally harden her skin into tree bark, and both of them with the same hair as her. But even then, technically, neither of them count as meta-human either.
Leanne’s maternal grandmother did–a combination of powers that were stronger in a time when the requirements were lower–but that’s not what Kaiza is here for. Who Kaiza is here for.
No, this is about Leanne’s paternal grandmother–more specifically, Leanne’s broken pocket watch that she inherited from her father, who inherited it from her paternal grandmother.
The broken pocket watch made for Leanne decades ago, before she or her father were even born.
—
In the middle of battle, Leanne runs and lives to fight another day.
Except when Leanne runs, she goes farther than just one day. She runs into another year, another decade, another century. She runs backwards and forwards, jumps back and forth, unable to control when or where she lands.
Her pocket watch isn’t supposed to be able to do that. She figured it out, slowly but surely, but there are rules to it. One hour–that’s it–she can change one hour per day. Undo it, rewind it, relive it, tweak it. It’s not supposed to do this.
Or at least, she thought, it wasn’t supposed to do this. It’s been broken for a long time. What does time mean to someone like her?
In the middle of a battle, Leanne runs.
She never stops running.
~
A/N: Laalalalala, does not contain the woooooord again, but I don’t caaaaare… Just trying to kick start my writing because I have so many things I want to write but none of them are working! *cough* The Many Faces of Rudiger Smoot *cough* Light It Up (Burn It Down) *cough* political Dreaming of S(omething) *cough*
D:
JackSGreyson Says 