The White Panther

Ordinary, On Purpose

The trash bag split exactly halfway down the stairwell.
Y/N stood there for a full three seconds — long enough for the coffee grounds, the wilted cilantro, and something unidentifiable that had definitely been in the fridge since last Tuesday to arrange themselves artfully across the hallway floor — and simply breathed. In. Out. She had read somewhere that three deep breaths could prevent a mental breakdown. She had now taken four and could confirm the research was flawed.

"Okay," she said to no one. "Okay."

She went back upstairs, got the other trash bag, came back down, and collected the catastrophe piece by piece. Her neighbor Mr. Oussama opened his door, looked at her, looked at the floor, and quietly closed his door again. Smart man. She didn't blame him.
This was, objectively, not the worst thing that had happened today. The worst thing had been her manager, Siham, leaning over her desk at eleven in the morning with that particular expression — the one that said I am about to ask you something unreasonable and I have already decided you will say yes — and asking if Y/N could cover the afternoon shift. Y/N had said yes. She always said yes. She had covered the afternoon shift and also, as it turned out, forty minutes of Siham's closing duties, because Siham had a thing. What thing? Unspecified. Important. Goodbye.

Between those two events had been three hours of babysitting her cousin's children, who were four and six and appeared to be training for some kind of extreme sport that involved shrieking and running directly into furniture. She loved them. She did. She had fed them, wiped a face, retrieved a toy from under the couch, and then sat very still on the kitchen floor for approximately eight minutes while they watched cartoons, not because she was resting but because the linoleum was cold and she had simply stopped having the will to move.

This was her life. Monday through Monday, more or less the same shape.
Wake up. Work. Eat something. Sleep. Repeat until death or retirement, whichever arrived first.
She tied the new trash bag with more force than necessary and hauled it the rest of the way down. Outside, the evening air was already cool — late October doing its best impression of actual winter, the sky pressed flat and purple over the rooftops. She stood at the bin for a moment longer than she needed to, tilting her face up at the purpling dark.

Beautiful, she thought. And then: I am so tired.

By nine-thirty she was horizontal, phone propped on a pillow, the blue-white glow of the screen the only light in her room. She had changed into the old oversized shirt she'd had since university, made herself a bowl of noodles she'd eaten cross-legged on the bed, and she was, finally, watching the Miraculous compilation she'd saved three days ago and hadn't had time to open until now.

This was the best part of the day. This was always the best part of the day.

She had watched Miraculous Ladybug for years — longer than she'd watched almost anything else. She'd started as a joke, a low-commitment background show, something to have on while she folded laundry, and then somewhere around season two she'd looked up from the laundry and realized she hadn't blinked in forty minutes. There was something about it. The Paris rooftops, the way the suits caught the light, the whole impossible gorgeous mythology of it — kwamis and miraculouses and ancient guardians. The sense that an ordinary person could be handed something extraordinary and become, briefly, luminous.
She watched Marinette fling herself off a building with absolutely no hesitation and felt a warm, uncomplicated affection.

"She's insane," Y/N told her phone, approvingly.
She was not Marinette. She knew this about herself without distress. Marinette was brave and relentless and constitutionally incapable of giving up. Y/N, by contrast, had once turned around halfway to the grocery store because she realized she'd forgotten her tote bag and the plastic bags cost money now, and she had gone home and eaten crackers for dinner instead of going back. Different kinds of people existed in the world. Both were valid.