The Undoing Of Villains | ✓

eighteen

(a/n: i promised an update when we reached the goal and we did - even surpassing it! yay for my readers still stanning this piece of waste - me! - you're all too kind! dedication goes to kara-zxrel for stanning black canary w me. an icon, truly.)

eighteen

STEALING A CAR was totally worth it. OK, it was far from something I would actively endorse as a superhero, but it got me home, at least. And in one piece. Well, the last bit was relative - I didn't feel entirely like one piece when I got back to my apartment.

The car had worked surprisingly well, and had just enough gas to get me where I needed. Close enough for me to walk slash limp the rest of the way home, but just far enough for Vector to have problems locating my home should he have felt the need to tail the car. I was good enough at behaving like a criminal that the thought to change professions crossed my mind, briefly. Only once though. Promise.

Even though my apartment was cold and dark and empty when I got back, it felt like I had been welcomed into paradise, or the Elysian fields. No time had been wasted in washing off and jumping into bed. The superhero life was slowly but surely eroding every piece of my conscious mind, and the lack of sleep was getting to me severely.

This was something I discovered when I woke the next day. The shutters had been closed so firmly that even the dust particles couldn't get through - I had effectively sealed myself into my bedroom like a mummy in a dark sarcophagus. Not that I complained. The only issue with this was that I awoke at 2 o'clock - in the afternoon.

To be fair, I probably needed the sleep. I had been going out every night as Synapse for a while longer than physically possible, and I hadn't yet mastered the arts of surviving on negative 2 hours' worth of sleep per night. I supposed that would change when fall term started and I became an official undergrad.

Starting university was not something I'd had on my mind, as I'd been more than little swept up with my new occupation. Something as trivial as going to university - which the mere thought of once had me hyperventilating - seemed so .. abnormal. It was nothing like the severe challenges I'd faced so far, but without my mask I felt not one lick of the empowerment I experienced as my alter ego. Charlotte O'Hare would probably have a heart-attack on her first day either way, which in the end I supposed was a good thing.

No one would possibly link the shy, withdrawn country girl to the more cocky, outspoken new super, unless they were completely out of their minds. Or recognized me. If Vector was enrolled at DCU ... the probability of that ought to be relatively low. He'd revealed he had a doctoral degree, which meant he must've already graduated. Probably. Hopefully.

Rolling out of bed, I reached for my phone, which usually rested atop its circular charging pad. When I found nothing but air, my eyes flew wide open.

"Shit." I exclaimed, feeling a rising panic. I'd had it with me when I'd had lunch with Sawyer, then listened to music while I walked around Dynamo-

You left it in the backpack, stuffed into a nook a rooftop in uptown. I knew the exact place, could even see it in my mind. I hadn't a boatload of acquaintances or friends I was worried about missing texts from, but if my brothers - one in particular - happened to look up my phone's current location and find it to be on a rooftop, stuffed in a backpack with a change of clothes ... I would be more than six feet under.

Going back for it in broad daylight would be a little suspicious. Dusk would be the appropriate time, as I would be manually getting to the rooftop (sans flying, that is) and didn't wish for a million pedestrians to notice me spidering my way up a high-rise.