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Mia woke up in a cold sweat. She was shivering- more than that, really, more like trembling. Convulsing. Like an earthquake in her bones.
The sheets were wet against her back. It was…sweat, her sweat, she could feel it plastering her pajamas to her skin, dripping through her hair down to the nape of her neck. Shit, was her first thought, as if through a haze. These are Ollie’s. A too-big t-shirt and sweatpants, pilfered from his closet when he wasn’t looking. She had been pretty sure he wouldn’t mind. They were comfy, anyway, and Mia had a habit of snatching things first and thinking later. They were all rumpled with sweat now, though…would he get mad? Would he be angry at her, for ruining his clothes?
Hmm. How would Ollie’s sweatpants fit her? Actually, maybe they were Connor’s. Dinah’s?
She couldn’t remember. Mia had a lot of stolen clothes scattered around her room. She considered it an endearing trait and not a sign that she was a budding kleptomaniac.
“What,” Mia croaked to herself, out loud. Her eyes were still closed. She couldn’t remember…She knew she was in her bed. She knew she was wet, and sticky (gross.) She knew her muscles were sore. Why were her muscles sore? Oh, right, from the shivering.
Earthquakes. Mia didn’t know a lot about earthquakes, but she’d watched a documentary about them once upon a time. When she was really little…elementary school, probably. Though she poked fun at Connor for watching them now, Mia had quite liked documentaries when she was a little kid. Mostly just because she’d liked learning things, even back then. They didn’t really have many books in the house, so she’d turn on the Discovery channel and listen to one gentle old man or another teach her about nature or animals or history. It was nice.
Mia hadn’t actually been supposed to mess with the TV when she was that age, but when he had been out of the house she’d always told herself she didn’t give a shit and made sure to put the remote right back in the exact place she’d found it when she was finished. She remembered the earthquake documentary being a little too scientific for her young brain. It talked about fault lines and plate tectonics and seismometers, and all she could think of was how maybe that would happen to her one day. She would just vibrate out of her cells, and no one would know she had ever existed.
“Fault lines in my skin,” she whispered to herself, and then thought that was really funny. She giggled to herself for a minute, curling up into a tighter ball.
Mia gulped in breaths of air, all of them shallow. Her teeth were chattering. She was cold. She was aware of the fact, all of a sudden, that she was miserable. She wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted her limbs to stop shaking. She wanted to get out of these awful fucking sweaty sheets. Mia pushed them off of her, except it was more like she was halfheartedly kicking and flailing at them, because actually reaching out and untangling them when she was so exhausted sounded impossible. The sheets got batted to the other side of the bed, except…no, it wasn’t the sheets that were moving, it was her, and then she couldn’t feel the mattress anymore and then she was tumbling down to the floor.
“Fuuuuuck,” Mia groaned, rolling over onto her back. The floor was cold under her. She stared at the ceiling, which seemed really far away. She blinked a few times, her vision coming in and out of focus. Mia shivered and rubbed sweat from her face. She felt strange. It was like there was a fog in her brain, so thick she couldn’t think through it. If she looked hard enough, she thought she could see birds dancing on the ceiling, but that was dumb. Wasn’t it? She was too tired for this.
“I need…” she whispered groggily to herself, “I need…” she needed something. What was it? A washcloth, maybe, to wipe off all the sweat. To get one of those she’d need to make it all the way down the hall to the closet, and then to the bathroom, to get the washcloth wet, and Mia didn’t even think she’d be able to sit upright. Just the thought made her want to puke. And-
There was a noise from the hallway outside her door. A creaking floorboard. It was strange, because suddenly she couldn’t remember who else lived in the house that could be making that noise, and she couldn’t remember whose house she was in, and she couldn’t remember where she was. It was all a hazy blur, and her vision was tunneling, and she didn’t want anyone else to know she was here. She clamped a sweaty hand over her mouth to stop her teeth from chattering. She couldn’t make too much noise. Mia was great at making noise, but that had gotten her in trouble over the years, and she knew better now than to make noise when she was scared. Anyone could be outside her door. Anyone could find her in here, shivering and huddled on the floor, and that made her stomach turn.
She rolled over onto her elbows and started to crawl. Walking was out of the question, but dragging herself along the hardwood floor only made her feel a little bit nauseous. It felt like it took her forever to make it to the bedroom door, because the floor kept warping on her every few feet, rolling sideways and backwards and turning uphill like a mountain. She kept blinking and it would look different. But mama hadn’t raised a fucking quitter, and Mia eventually slumped against the doorframe, letting out an exhausted breath. She reached one arm up and clicked the latch that made the door lock from the inside. Okay. Okay, it was okay, she was safe now. No one could get in if she didn’t want them to.
Weird thoughts kept sloughing through the fog. How come she could lock the door from the inside? She never could before. And the floor looked different, too…wasn’t it supposed to be some ugly-ass linoleum? She couldn’t…she couldn’t remember. Mia idly scrubbed a hand over the hardwood, feeling the polish and the cracks between panels. Weird.
She had thought the floors were nice, when she first came here. She remembered that. Ollie had taken her around and let her pick out which room she wanted and shown her the doorknobs. They only lock from the inside, see, he had said, tapping the latch with one finger. So you can lock it if you want. Nobody can keep ya in. I want you to feel safe here, kiddo.
Mia remembered feeling a bit sheepish at that, for months afterwards. It wasn’t like Connor needed special locks in his bedroom to feel safe. But it made her feel better anyway. She’d twisted the latch the first couple nights, when Stanley had still been there, and…she didn’t anymore. When had she stopped locking it?
Mia wrapped shaking arms around herself, leaning her cheek down on one shoulder. She didn’t remember. She didn’t…nothing made sense. She couldn’t think straight. She needed to lie back down. She needed to get away from this door. Swallowing her exhaustion, Mia slowly crawled back across the floor before collapsing on top of the rug in the center of her room.
It was soft. She curled up in more-or-less the fetal position, burrowing her cheek into its threads. It was dark in her room, but she could just barely see the little pink flowers sewn into the yellow rug.
“Stupid,” Mia said, a goofy smile on her face. It was stupid. It was bright and silly and childish and probably belonged in a kindergartner’s room. That was sort of why she’d picked it out, though.
Ollie had taken her shopping, a few weeks after she’d moved in. After he got his memories back, after Connor was settling in, after the Stanley Dover mess had finished. They had wandered through a Star City department store, just the two of them. “You can get anything you want for your room,” Ollie had told her, walking down the lamp aisle. “And I mean anything.”
“I want the Mona Lisa,” Mia had said with a grin, just to be an asshole.
Ollie had raised one bushy eyebrow. “Well, that one might be a bit of a tall order, kid,” he had grunted. “But, you know. I’ve had my run-ins with those under the radar types over the years. I could probably-”
“I was kidding, Ollie, god. I don’t actually want the Mona Lisa to decorate my bedroom. What would I do with it, anyway?”
“Look at it, I s’pose.”
“Can I get that one,” Mia had asked abruptly. She had stopped in front of the kid’s section, staring with big eyes at the rolled-up area rugs.
“Hm?” He’d looked over to where she was pointing. “Oh, the rug? Of course. I said anything, didn’t I?”
Mia had turned to him, then, almost defiant. “You don’t think it would look stupid?” she had asked.
“Shit, Mia. I don’t know anything about interior design, or whatever. Or much care. If you want the rug then get the rug.”
She had pursed her lips and nodded. “Okay,” she had said. “I want this one.”
“Yellow,” Mia said now, smiling into the rug. Bright yellow, like Speedy. She liked yellow. It was a happy color, bright, the same as her hair. For some reason that kid’s rug had pulled at her the moment she’d seen it. Her room, when she was a little kid…it hadn’t had anything in it that was really hers. In a way she’d picked out that rug for a Mia who wasn’t around anymore. A little tiny Mia who never got to have a silly yellow rug with pink flowers on it.
Yellow meant safe. Yellow meant Speedy. Yellow meant…
Mia coughed suddenly, hacking into one fist. Her lungs felt too small for her body. She still hadn’t stopped shaking. God, her muscles were sore. She was so cold. She was so fucking tired. All she wanted was to go back to sleep. She was crying, all of a sudden, fat tears trailing from the corners of her eyelids onto the rug. Shit. She was just miserable.
She was tired of being cold. She was tired of being sweaty. She was tired of being alone in this room.
She needed…she needed…
( It was what he’d said, after showing her the doorknob . “Listen to me for a minute, kiddo. I won’t pretend to know everything about your past, and I won’t ask either. But I can tell you’ve been through hell. And I want you to know, right now, here, that nothing is gonna harm you while you’re in this house.” He had looked at her with those hard eyes of his. “I won’t let anything happen to you. Not a thing, sweetheart. Not one single thing.”)
Mia let out a sob. She needed her fucking dad.
“OLLIE!” Mia shouted at the top of her lungs. It took all her energy just to get it out. Her throat hurt but she didn’t care. “ OLLIE!”
In less than ten seconds she could hear the sound of pounding footsteps. “YEAH?” he called back. Mia could have died of relief. She wished she had the mental capacity to answer him.
The footsteps got closer until he was right outside. He knocked on the door a few times, then rattled the doorknob.
“Mia? Mia, are you in there, what’s wrong- Why’s the fucking door- ROY! WHY’S THE DOOR LOCKED? I-”
“Ollie,” she choked out, through the sobs that wouldn’t stop wracking her fragile chest. “Help…”
“MIA! Are you okay? I…Shit! The door’s locked! Can you open it for me, kiddo?”
She was too tired. She couldn’t even find the energy to say anything, much less make it all the way to the door. All she could do was lay there and cry.
“Shit, I…Shit. Goddamn door. One sec, Mi, watch out.”
There was a horrible crunching noise, and the door swung open with the force of a typhoon. There he was, in all his blond mustachioed glory.
Ollie ran the few steps into her room and knelt beside her on the rug. Mia closed her eyes and felt herself being scooped up into his arms.
“Mia?” he asked, in a quieter voice. “Are you-
“Sorry,” she managed to hiccup. “Couldn’t move. Think I’m…sick.”
Ollie grunted. “I’ll say. Jesus, kid. You’re shaking more than a goddamn maraca.”
“Earthquake,” Mia corrected quietly.
“An earthquake, sure. I gotta- fuck, you’re burning up. Boiling, really. When did…doesn’t matter, I guess. I better get you to a damn hospital.”
“‘Kay,” was all Mia could reply.
She shivered as Ollie gathered her up in his strong arms and stood, cradling her like a baby. He started out of the room and down the hallway, careful to hold her steady. She nuzzled into his chest.
“What was Roy doing anyway,” Ollie muttered to himself, stopping in the kitchen to grab his wallet and car keys. “Wasn’t it his job to watch you, make sure you didn’t get sick?”
This comment caused some of the fog in Mia’s head to fade. Right. She’d had a cough and low fever yesterday, and Ollie and Connor had joined forces to insist she stay home from school. They both had stupid superhero stuff to do, and Roy had planned on visiting this weekend anyway, so he had brought Lian down a day early to watch Mia. She had been fine all day, really. They had mostly been playing stupid board games and watching soap operas.
“It’s not Roy’s fault, Ollie,” she huffed. “I was fine until now.”
“Hmmph. Guess not. Oh, look, the man of the hour.”
“Dad?” Roy’s voice came from behind Ollie. Mia peeked over his shoulder to see Roy leaning into the kitchen, clad in his pajamas, blinking sleepily. “You were shouting?”
“Mia’s pretty sick,” Ollie explained, laying a kiss on her forehead. “She’s hot as my chili. I’m gonna run her over to the hospital, make sure everything’s okay.”
Roy’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit. I can ride with you if you want-”
“Nah, I got her. Just let Connor and Lian know when they wake up. We’ll probably be back soon. Just- shove my wallet and keys into my pocket there, would ya.”
“Sorry, Speedy the Second,” Roy said sheepishly, tweaking her nose as he grabbed both items from the kitchen counter and slid them into Ollie’s back pocket. “Guess I’m not a very good babysitter.”
“The worst,” Mia said fondly, just to be an asshole. He stuck his tongue out at her. “Bye, Roy,” she said sleepily as Ollie carried her out of the kitchen.
“Feel better, sis.” Roy waved from behind Ollie’s back. Mia would have waved in return if she had literally any energy left.
They made their way through the house. Mia glimpsed the front door, and for some reason the sight of it made her start giggling madly. Maybe she was delirious, but she couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny down there, blondie?”
“You broke down a door for me,” she said, laughing into his neck. “Stupid old man.”
“Hey! Nothing stupid about it!” Ollie shifted her in his arms. “You needed me. Was I about to let some dumb door come between me and my daughter?”
“Guess not,” she whispered. “Thanks, Ollie.”
“Anytime, kiddo.” Ollie twisted the front doorknob with one hand and they stepped out into the cool night.
“Cold,” Mia whispered.
“Mia,” Ollie grunted, stepping through the grass of the front lawn. “Why’d you lock the door?”
“Dunno.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Was scared.”
“Mm.”
“I called for help,” she said, very faintly. “Help. You came. Knew you’d come. You said…not one single thing.”
Ollie was quiet, for a moment. “That’s my girl,” he said, in a voice so soft it should have been illegal. Then, “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you in this car.”
On their way to the hospital, so quiet she thought she had imagined it: “I’ll always come, Mia. You can bet your fucking boots.”