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In the years that follow, she’s never entirely sure how to reconcile the events that happened.
Part of her is convinced the whole thing was little more than a fever dream, the way that so many childhood memories fade. The entire situation is wholly unbelievable; it’s far more likely that she dreamed just before morning that a man came into her room and when she woke up hours or years later she’d simply dreamed the whole thing. But dreams will fade and this never does, too vivid, too impossible. There’s no explanation for the white scar on her knee or the coat that she never found or the thin, dark line running along her breastbone where her schism once was, normally almost invisible except on those dark, angry days when her chest feels hollow and when she peels off her shirt to shower, it’s stark against her skin. When she touches it, it feels like it almost begins to give.
Things stick with you: feelings, whispers, not-quite-sounds. Static.
She has a name. She has a gender. There is a history behind her, and it is real and verifiable, from the moment of her birth to her present breath.
None of these things feel as concrete as the way her head still jerks up at the word “hero” or the way she can no longer sleep without white noise, the way her bed feels too soft and too deep. Her mother never understood how she got over her fear of the dark so quickly as long as there is sound, and she doesn’t know how she could possibly explain that one time a deep, static-smooth voice showed her how to map out the darkness with her own heartbeat. She can’t explain how she learned to barter or why she has a strange new reverence for trees or why she gives such importance to dreaming.
Her past feels disconnected and faded, and the feeling never goes away. More and more, she feels like an imposter in the body of a girl who died when she nodded her acceptance of a desperate quest. She did her job. She saved that nightmare world above the clouds, and as a reward, they kicked her out. The hero fulfilled the hero’s mission, and then there is no more need for a hero.
She thought she wanted this, is the thing. So many times she asked and cajoled and coerced RGB into bringing her home, and eventually home is where she ended up, and it was just the same as she remembered it. She got up, got dressed, went to school, came home and watched cartoons. Her mother made curry for dinner and packed her the leftovers for lunch the next day. Her father got home and hugged her before going to shower off the smell of cleaning supplies. They called her by name and held her hand and smiled freely and told her they loved her.
She was happy.
But at the same time, she wasn’t.
She gets older. Experimentally, she grows her hair out, and her mother praises it. She learns how to garden, and loves it immediately, growing flowers and herbs in window boxes and pots. Sometimes she creeps down to the living room, bundles herself in a blanket, and sleeps in front of the telly playing blank static on low volume. She makes friends, but never crushes. One night, a few friends invite her over for a sleepover, and, giggling, pull out a small illicit stash of makeup “borrowed” from mothers and older sisters. They give each other clumsy makeovers and she laughs and smiles and feels more disconnected than ever. When Ashley holds up the hand mirror for her to inspect the garish ‘handiwork’, she stares at the girl wearing blush and messy pink lipstick and teal eyeshadow with hair that falls nearly to her shoulders and does not recognize herself.
She tries to ignore the feeling, but it persists. Two nights later she steals down to the kitchen at midnight and hacks off all the new growth with a pair of dulling scissors, sharp, methodic, pretending tears aren’t welling in her eyes. Her mother is shocked when it comes time to wake her up for school the next day, but she just sighs and plunks her down on a stool and carefully, if inexpertly, evens up the haircut before it’s time to catch the bus.
The other coat that she never liked as much as the red one that squelched into gelatinous pieces somewhere on the Plains of Hesitation is enough for a few years, but she soon outgrows it, and she replaces it with a big olive-green army surplus coat with lots of pockets. It’s much too big for an eleven year old, but she pulls out every trick she knows, and her parents cave quickly enough. She keeps the pockets stocked with candies and trinkets, the kind of things she knows or suspects would work as bargaining chips, because the instinct to hoard barterable objects never entirely left her.
She never speaks of her adventures, if they could be called that, to anyone. She feels comfortable enough in her own skin, sufficient unto herself, but more and more the label of ‘girl’ chafes. It’s not that she’s a boy, and it’s not that the idea of being a girl feels wholly wrong, it’s just...not right. Not enough. The expectations grow and change, and it gets harder and harder to grow and change to meet them. They expect her to be a person, nothing more, nothing less, and she is a person, of course she’s a person, but.
Some part of her personhood was stripped away a long time ago and replaced with an archetype, and the rules are different for her now. No one expects a hero. A hero is all she truly knows how to be anymore.
As much as she hates to admit it, he was right. She should never have gone back. For all that she loves her family and her home and her life, none of it is truly hers. Not anymore.
Nearly four years to the day that whoever she was before died, she jerks awake in the wee hours of the morning, gasping and sweat-streaked from a quickly-fading nightmare, and a low, familiar voice that she hasn’t heard in years says from her window, “Terrible things, dreams. Can’t imagine why anyone would have them.”
She jolts upright, and there he is, legs crossed over the edge of her dresser, inspecting his gloves. In the dimness of her room he is faintly luminescent, brilliant red blazer and tawny slacks and bespatted shoes well-fitted to an invisible form, and the test screen of his mouth is curved into a small but sincere smile as green drips to his bowtie.
Her first thought is that she is still dreaming. Her second thought is that no, now she is finally waking up.
“I say,” he says, echoing those words of so long ago, and his smile is real and familiar, “would you like to be a hero?” and once more, overcome, she nods.
“Although,” he adds, surveying her form as she sits up half-covered in blankets, “I dearly hope you’ve mastered ladders by now, as I suspect you’re far too heavy by now for me to help you down like last time.”
“That’s rude, RGB,” she says, but she is smiling.
Then she says, “Look away, I’m not wearing any trousers,” and as her...friend? yes, friend turns away abruptly, embarrassment in the line of his shoulders, she scrambles down and squirms into yesterday’s jeans, shoves her feet into her wellies and pulls her big army-green coat on over her well-worn t-shirt.
“Are you decent?” RGB inquires, voice strained, as she empties the entire contents of her meager jewelry box into one of her myriad pockets for the inevitable day when something shiny and semiprecious will come in handy.
She makes an affirming noise and shoves a beanie over her close-cropped hair. He hops down from her dresser. With surprise, she notes that she is eye-level with his bowtie now.
“Ready to go?” he asks, and she hesitates. She knows, now, that if she goes with him, if she follows this familiar monster out of her room, she will never set foot here again. She glances around her room, the well-thumbed books, the mirror and drawings on the wall, the potted spider plant that RGB likely narrowly missed knocking off the windowsill when he entered.
She also knows that she hasn’t belonged here in four years.
“Wait one moment,” she says, and like last time, she leans her head into her parents’ room, murmurs “Mum, dad? I love you.”
Like last time, neither of them fully awaken. She is grateful.
“Ready now?” RGB asks when she rejoins him, but this time he sounds more sympathetic than impatient. He knows that she knows that one way or another, she will not die in the world she was born in.
She looks up at him.
“Yes,” Hero says. “Yes, I’m ready.”
He does not offer his hand. She does not expect him to. But together they climb to the roof, and he helps her clamber out of the skylight. Hero breathes the smoggy Manchester air one last time, and looks up at the half-clouded Manchester stars, and then together they climb the chimney-smoke and leave the mortal world behind them.
Hero does not look back.