Chapter Text
The first thing she remembers is a sky so empty and wide it could swallow her whole. Even the moon had fallen in, and only a scant few stars to light the night remained. The second is standing beneath that yawning emptiness and feeling her insides echoing the same, walking on shaking legs, staggering away from… a crash? Had she crashed? What had crashed? What had happened? Who was she?
The third thing is finding that house. Lights like a lifeboat on a sea. Dragging herself, shivering like mad, to the door and desperately pounding her arms against it.
The fourth thing is collapsing into the arms of the woman who opens it.
The fifth is relief.
A hard, confusing month or two later, she is granted personhood by a city and parentage by a slip of paper. She is named Victoria— Victory. (She is not exactly sure how she is one. Wherever she came from, whoever she used to be, that’s all gone. She feels more defined by loss than anything else. She’s tried looking for the wreckage of...a car? Plane? Anything? But all she finds are endless fields of dead grass and more suburban houses. Someone had cleaned it up. Who? Her new parents don’t have an answer.
She thinks that they’re hiding something.)
She— Victoria, she is Victoria Dallon, she has to learn to respond to the name— throws herself into studying. Her life is a blank canvas and she needs to fill it with something. The material comes quickly, fortunately. She enjoys reading, enjoys learning. Even if it isn’t always pleasant to learn. (The human race delights in destruction more so than creation, it seems. For every moment in time she finds warming her heart she finds ten oceans worth of tragedy to drown it in ice.) She learns about the shape of human history. She learns about the curve of the planet. She learns about capes. Those special few living amongst the mortals in disguises, ready to don costumes and fight each other for justice or for just themselves. How silly. How terrifying. How grand. Parahumans. Para, suffix, to mean beyond, apart from, or abnormal. How mad.
She thinks she’d like to be one.
And if she feels a little stronger every day...well, that’s her secret.
The first thing Victoria Dallon learns after becoming a god is that the world around her is fragile. She learns this when she rushes to the door and instead of grasping the handle and swinging it open, she just— takes the door with her. Velocity, impact, boom! The door smacks and cracks against the ceiling, chipping paint and scratching up the floor, hinges snapped like cheap plastic. The outside world rushes in with heat and dust and shrieks from her family. As the destruction settles along with the adrenaline high, the crash comes with the heady realization of how different things are now. She’s a cape— and the world around her hasn’t adjusted accordingly. Her mother begins scolding even as her cousins laugh and her father just sighs and calls a repairman, but Victoria’s only half-listening because she’s still holding onto the doorknob in shock. The metal is lumpy and misshapen in her hands— it’s almost like holding water than anything solid, she just has to put mild pressure around the metal and it just crumples beneath her digits. The door itself hadn’t even taken any real force— she was so used to just wrenching the heavy thing open wide (the Dallons had their house made of strong materials, just in case), and it hadn’t even occurred to her what had happened before it was being dragged all over the living room floor. How strong is she?
Things change quickly. Mom makes rules about using powers inside the house or pretty much anywhere when she isn't in costume. Dad calls a trusted repair guy. Erik and Crystal tease her about being a blundering walrus. Victoria stops bounding down the stairs so her feet do not plunge right through them. She gently pulls on doorknobs and moves her hand slowly, feather-light in her touch. She grasps the shower handle and it only takes a few indents in the metal to remember that she has to be more careful. It only takes one wide arc of her arm, aimed at swatting her friend after a dumb joke to take a chunk out of a building, her fingers marking the proof of her life more dramatically than any flare of paint or ink could ever accomplish. Three thin gouges torn out of brick and a cloud of dust say Victoria Dallon was here. And her friends. Her friends, who she was just walking with, just talking with on their way out of school, they giggle and laugh and run before someone takes a photo and subsequently they get charged with property damage (mom’s least favorite term), and Victoria’s glad that they’re too busy cracking up to remember that a head had been there only a few moments ago and—
Victoria Dallon learns that her life is an object in motion. Newton wrote that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Victoria Dallon stops hugging her family.
Victoria Dallon’s first fight goes something like this: Asphalt ripped up and shattered, broken shards of grey and black hurling into the air beneath reinforced fists and bursts of physics-defying light. Windows burst and screams ring through the air.
They call themselves The Chorus. They’re a bunch of neo-fascist assholes that are also Catholic, so all of the insane eugenist bullshit also has that annoying religious doctrine tone thrown in. Really, she’s just trying to tune them out and focus on keeping people safe.
That’s Victoria’s role. Unlike the rest of her family, she’s a true brute— they hadn’t found anything that’d been able to hurt her yet (not that they’d tried too hard, of course. Vicky hadn’t been able to convince any of her cousins to shoot her, even after she read parts of Crystal’s fanfic out loud, although it had been a near thing. No, she’d learned how invincible she really was the first time she tried to stop an attempted mugging and the bullets had felt like nerf darts). So, she plays at being a human shield, protecting the others from the lobs of fire that Azrael (angel of vengeance. Hah! What a thirteen-year-old-edge-lord name) tosses around like water balloons of accelerant and sparks. She slams down in front of the still scattering civilians, still marveling at the alien sensation of ravenous fire splashing against her as harmlessly as rain against an umbrella.
She plays defense right up until her dad dips down to avoid a blast, but the shattered concrete of the road betrays him, and then one of the Chorus is right there on top of him, slamming his head into the ground with enough force to make the entire road undulate with the raw power of the blows, over and over and his shield can only take so much—
She doesn’t even have to think about it.
She’s just there, her palm connecting with Uriel and watching the brute sail down the street, skipping like a rock across a pond. She knows she shouldn’t feel it but a jolt of a very visceral form of satisfaction races down her nerves. She doesn’t take her eyes off the fight, she’s been taught better than that, but when she asks: “You okay, dad?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Dad?” She asks again, and she’s ashamed of how her voice quivers at his silence. She’s supposed to be fearless. “Dad?!” She repeats again, fighting the impulse to shout. Nothing. Oh god oh fuck, she risks turning to look at him and his eyes glazed over and staring at nothing, he’s still breathing but he’s not saying anything—
“Andraste!” Mom is there, hand on her shoulder and Crystal and Eric close ranks, “I need to get your father out of here, you’re on offense until I get back! Drive them away from the streets!”
Victoria doesn’t even have time to process any of that before her mother is dipping out of the combat zone, her father still limp and silent. Go on the offense.
Okay.
She can do that.
It doesn’t feel righteous when Victoria beats them down—it doesn’t feel heroic. It doesn’t feel good (except it does feel good, to finally hit something, to stop having to be quite so restrained, quite so careful. Finally being allowed to relax, cut loose, if only a little. She feels more herself in a firefight, drunk on the fumes of gasoline; high on gunpowder and scorched asphalt. The person she has to be at home is exhausting. It’s exhausting, having to be so careful. Having to constantly measure her movements, her breath. She’s scared all the time of breaking something that can’t be fixed, and she hates it. But what does it say about her, that this violence feels good? That she enjoys doing bad things to bad people?)
The fight doesn’t take too long at all when the thing she has to worry about most is not causing more damage than necessary. Eventually, the person you can’t hurt and can’t outrun wins, and Victoria cannot be hurt nor outrun, so the fight ends as soon as she wants it to end. Her dad goes straight to the hospital and checks out with nothing worse than a concussion, and the rest have some scrapes and bruises at worst. Andraste continues with a perfect record.
(Victoria doesn’t tell anyone that she could hear the hairline fractures on Uriel’s chest grinding. She tells herself she hated hearing it.)
Victoria Dallon falls in love with Dean Stansfield on a Thursday. She’s out and about on her own because, despite her parent’s overbearing overprotectiveness, the argument that you’re quite literally invincible goes a long way towards assuring them that you’ll be fine. (Even if there was some still lingering paranoia about Masters, but if they really let that stop them, they’d never leave the house.) So, here is Victoria, drifting through the crowded courts of Brockton Bay, a free spirit. Except, not, because she has to go home eventually. Back to the house (she’s trying more and more not to resent her little room. The windows. The doors. Why must she be surrounded by fragile things), back to the mundanity. It’s not even that she particularly dislikes mundanity— there’s a joy in doing something that does not involve costumes or capes, but… she is ill-suited for it.
At least she can pursue through a crowd and pretend she’s someone else. It’s surprising, how few people recognize her while she’s out of costume. There’s the occasional person who asks for a photograph or just wants to say thank you (she enjoys that the most, the stories of the loved ones of the people she saved last week. It makes all of the stress and fear and fighting feel worth it, for a moment) but aside from that...it’s relatively peaceful.
She finds herself wandering into a part of the mall that leads into a Macy’s, and she decides she might as well look for a nice dress, there’s a fundraiser coming up and it wasn’t a costumed event. She glances at a few, hemming and hawing silently, wishing she could just wear pants— ooh, maybe she could convince mom to let her wear slick dress pants? With some kind of white blouse with that...oh, what was the word, that frilly thing down the middle…
Ugh. Maybe she could just not go. (That would be the better option for everyone, because Victoria’s seen the test results that her mom had tried so hard to hide, but someone who’s got x-ray vision and super-strength isn’t really deterred by walls and especially not locks.
She doesn’t have a corona pontella in her brain, or anywhere else in her body. Her status as a parahuman is— questionable. And with that revelation came the answer to so many ugly questions, aside jokes about how lucky Victoria was to get so many powers taking on a whole new light in the face that they knew she hadn’t had a Trigger Event, hadn’t suffered like they had— and they’re right. She is lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky to be so strong and getting stronger all the time. Lucky to not have to deal with the aftermath of becoming a parahuman. Yes. The girl who’s terrified to touch her family for fear of breaking them like fine china is lucky. The girl who doesn’t know how much longer she can keep this up is lucky. The girl who doesn’t even knon what she is anymore is so fucking lucky.
Really, she should just—)
She turns and she sees a boy staring at her with eyes wide, and mentally prepares herself for the tide of awkward questions about her dating life and requests for pictures that always come with fanboys—
“Are you okay?” The boy asks.
“...what?” Victoria says, so flat footed she thinks for a moment she can hear her brain screech to a halt and attempt to reboot itself.
“Are you okay?” He asks again, his voice soft to the point of being almost musical.
“Um. I—” She’s never felt so flustered. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I don’t remember the last time someone asked me that. Uh. Who are you?”
“My name’s Dean. Stansfield.” He chuckles awkwardly and runs a hand through his caramel-colored hair. “And, well…I just thought that you looked kinda sad.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, that came out way worse than it did in my head.” Dean admits, flushing a little. It’s a pretty cute expression, honestly. The way he smiles is honestly a little…distracting. “Still getting used to this whole, uh. Helping people thing.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Victoria finds herself saying, even as she puzzles over what the hell that meant. “Trying to know how to fix something when the world’s just taught you how to break instead.”
“Hardest thing in the world.” He echoes solemnly. “ But you have to try, right?”
“...yeah.” Victoria swallows. “Yeah, you do. I’m Victoria, by the way. Victoria Dallon.”
“Nice to meet you, Victoria Dallon. How can I help you?”
“Oh, you’re not just trying to get my number?”
“Nah.”
“Huh. Well, if you’re determined…” Things move. He does end up with her number after he proves to be every inch the gentlemen he appeared, despite his protests at it. They meet up for coffee a few more times, much to her mother’s consternation. When the news breaks that he’s Gallant of the Brockton Bay Wards, well. It’s not really a surprise (because she’d looked straight through his shirt to see scars and hairline fractures racing up and down his body like a demented spiderweb, a similar pattern she’d seen on fellow capes that lacked the same…gifts as she.) But the fact that he trusts her so soon is…sweet.
They begin to talk more. Late into the night, she sneaks out and flies in through his window sill, and he trusts her with the nightmares that coiled beneath his pillow. He sees the suffering of everyone in the world, and despite how hard he tries, there’s little he can do to make everyone happy. There’s little he can do to make himself happy. He’s afraid that one day, he’ll look at the darkness of the world and turn away because he’s seen too much to care anymore.
She holds this precious boy in her arms and lets him cry. She cries with him.
I don’t know what I am. She wants to tell him. I’m getting stronger all the time. I don’t know if it’s ever going to stop. I’m scared I’m going to lose control one day and hurt someone I care about. I’m scared that one day I’m going to hurt someone and I’m going to enjoy it.
But she doesn’t.
Because he’s so good.
And she isn’t.
And she can’t let him know.
So she just holds him.
And pretends that she’s crying for him.
Lying to someone she loves shouldn’t be this easy.
She’s eighteen. It’s birthday.
She is not eighteen. It is not her birthday.
The atmosphere is happy.
The atmosphere is solemn.
Her parents invite all of her friend and they laugh and drink and play games and she and dean dance on the rooftop and drift of into the air, because he trusts her, he loves her, and so they waltz among the stars.
Her parents invite no one.
Crystal tells Victoria that she’s so proud of her, both in the costume and out of it. Erik gives her a brand new costume, blues and reds bright as the ocean and the blood in her veins. Her parents beam, the city looks like it’s glowing, each window gleaming with possibilities, and she laughs, and her laughter makes the windows shake.
Her parents bring her into the basement.
Victoria falls asleep feeling at home for the first time in her life.
Victoria sees the ship.
Victoria dreams of saving everyone, and a dawn of a new age, a heroic silver age, herself at the forefront and her family by her side.
Kryptonian. War. Last of her kind. Kara Zor-El.
Victoria wakes up to a new day.
Kara Zor-El screams loud enough that the mountains shake.
Victoria is happy.
Kara Zor-El flies a long ways away.
She doesn’t know which to choose.
The universe is silent.
She is alone.