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There are things you do to cope.
You've always known this. When the night was too dark or the bottom bunk too empty or the world too loud you found your ways, your little fidgets and stims to make your brain quiet down, but there were bigger things, too. Things you've learned in a place too impossible to exist but too impactful to have been a dream.
There's no real way to prepare. When a name vanishes, you expect it might come back, given time, or perhaps given a good night's rest in a real bed instead of curled beneath a tree. But when you wake in the morning to the sound of screaming and sirens, when you're taken somewhere strange and told that the poor couple whose house you broke into has no daughter, in fact they have no children at all, and what is your name anyway so we can find you in the system and you open your mouth and your tongue lies heavy and useless with no word except Hero but you're not anymore you're not.
So you do what you were brought up to never do and you steal. You steal a name from a woman with one eye, because you figure she would understand and as your nervous fingers pull threads from a tear in your too-large sweater still brimming with love and good feelings that are useless against the cold metal chair they've sat you on the only thing your mind can come up with is the comfort of a dream long forgotten and a smile and a honey-colored tear that seemed much more elegant than the ones you are blubbering as you force the word "Madras" from your lips.
You cope when you're thrown into a house with far too many children. It is too loud and too crowded and the woman who is too tired looks at you from across the dinner table and says "quiet hands" so you learn to sit on them. You learn the best hiding places for the small things you've kept - two vials, one swirling with a dream and the other fogged with cloudstuff, a cut of gossamer thread that feels wrong (though sometimes you touch it with the tip of your tongue to feel the numbness, to remind yourself that it still works), a red sweater that's wearing out in the elbows and cuffs - so that the other children do not find them, do not break them or steal their magic away for themselves. This worked, for some time, but caution was the downfall of the Dream, kept beneath a pillow each night for easy access in defense from Fears and Griefs, but shattered as one foster sibling leapt across a bed to catch another, leaving shattered glass and vapors that absorbed into the pillow and gave a pleasant dream that lasted one night and then was gone forever.
Money has become foreign, cold; not that you ever had any, anyway. You use things that you have to make things that others will want, use that to trade for what you need. A shiny trinket found on the way back from school becomes a hair bobble for the girl who is better with math than you are, and it gleams from atop her head as she teaches you multiplication tables. Chunks of quartz dug up from the backyard, fashioned with cord, become a bracelet to be traded for a guaranteed quiet space when it's most needed. You teach an older boy to tie knots and he gives you his bug-catching net. You weave crowns of flowers for the other children and get their friendship, along with their tears when they are taken away, one by one, or age out, or just leave.
The last subset is the one that contains you, though it takes years. One of the other children, no longer a child, agrees to drive up in the night to take you somewhere far away. They were adopted a year ago, and their new mom has a car but the mom is out of town and so they have it for the night, and there's a bed and breakfast out in the country who could use a gardener and they won't ask too many questions. The ride is in tense silence, hands fidgeting and stilling, debating on whether or not the need to be 'quiet' extends outside the jurisdiction of the group home. As the car pulls up the driver opens their mouth to say something, but finds no words. You understand, pat their arm, and say thank you.
There are bugs in the garden. You love bugs. You have a room and a bed and a name and none of them are truly yours but you cope, because it's something and you've become adept at making something out of nothing. There are roses in a vase on your nightstand, cut by hand. You replace the water three times and then the flowers, once the petals have passed velvet soft into brittle dust. The dead ones litter the ground outside the window, fertilizing the bush as they decay. They're red, but sometimes you imagine them blue.
They pay you in money you rarely use. They take some out of the pay to account for the food, which you regularly use. You spend the days trimming and mowing and pruning and one day you count your money and find it's enough for the space up the road where you can have a garden of your own. You see no purpose until you think of the faces of the children you left behind and you send the first month's payment and the government applications in the same day.
The children grow up so quickly. They have room to grow and they play in the garden. They watch in awe as you rescue a preying mantis from the birdbath and transfer it to the roses (white) where it will be safer. They cower behind you as you diligently check beneath the bed and within the closet for any hidden monsters each night before bed. They run to you with boo-boo's and heartaches and you have the cure for them all.
They don't stay terribly long, as you go to lengths to find them permanent homes, but while they are with you they are happy, and that is what's important. You buy them hand-me-downs and tell them that well-loved things will serve them the kindest, and you smile when you see their pockets full of small treasures that they trade amongst themselves.
Sleeping comes the hardest. Even with the ache of a full day's work and the knowledge of the children bathed and tucked in, you cannot bring yourself to close your eyes willingly. You turn a vial of more condensation than cloud-stuff over and over in your hands, wishing it were a dream, sitting resolutely on the edge of your bed instead of lying in it.
This is what you're doing when you hear him. A voice, all static and old Hollywood, too British to be genuine, speaking through the darkness as he did so many years before.
"I say, it isn't good for children to stay up so late."
The vial freezes in your fingers but doesn't drop. A flood of something fills your lungs and you're surprised your voice is so even when you reply "'Then it's a good thing I'm not a child anymore."
The television gives a slight nod, light from his screen bouncing from wall to floor and back. "Fair enough."
He steps from the shadows, and familiarity shows you the hesitation in his would-be bravado. He is being too stiff, too formal, and there's the yellow dripping among blue and green and magenta as he looks you over and you do the same to him. He looks the same as ever, his suit a muted forest number with red lapels, making him look very Christmas-y. He observes your sweater, your boots, your cargo shorts. Though he has no eyes (not this part of him, at least) you feel his gaze linger on the bead on a cord around your neck; an evil eye, for protection, traded for a handful of beach glass from the jewelry maker at the local flea market.
You break the silence first.
"If you're looking for a Hero, you've picked the wrong house," you say, protective instinct and a still aching tear right through your heart giving fire to your words. Down the hall, there were three children who would never know the feeling of being sliced open by Fears or consumed by Doubts, on your life you'd be sure of that.
"Rather," he says, toying delicately with the hook of the bamboo cane between his gloved fingers. "I'm looking to enquire about the well-being of an old one. You might know her - quiet little thing, messy hair, about yay high?" He waves a flattened palm about the height of his hip, his color-bar curving into a crooked smile.
You can't help a snort of a laugh which you attempt to bury in a palm. You see him perk up even from behind your fingers, the laugh allowing boldness to creep into his routine.
"You see I seem to have lost her somewhere along the way. She always was a slippery little thing, mind, always running off-"
"RGB," you say, stopping him.
His smile becomes less for show and more nostalgic, green and pink together. "Look at you. I will have to ask that you not stand up, if you'd be so kind. I don't think I could bear to know if you've outgrown me."
"You are shorter than I remember," you say, earning a small bristle from the monster.
"Yes, well," he sputters, "I suppose there may be one benefit to working with children after all."
This wipes the smile off of your face and he notices. He moves to the window, thumbing the petals of a wilting white rose in an attempt to pretend he hadn't seen.
"Your garden is beautiful," he says, not bothering to look through the window. "You tend to it yourself?"
"Mm," you affirm.
"Did I ever show you the gardens?" he asks, knowing the answer before the words have left his speakers. "We were so busy back then, I don't believe I ever got the chance. We don't grow your average flowers, not like these. I've seen seeds of happiness, of hope and joy. Granted, only those with green thumbs can make them blossom, but you always were fond of green, were you not?"
"RGB," you say, warningly.
"-And truly they could use all the help they can get. With the sun back in the sky nobody knows anything about plants anymore. All our good gardeners gave up when the trees started to wither, but now that the world is saved and things have begun to grow again there's somewhat of an agricultural vacuum, you see, and honestly it's quite a mess and you'd laugh if you could see it, ha! It's as if linear time is a foreign concept to them, they expect to water a seed once and have it sprout, fully formed, from the dirt! Just like that, I tell you!"
"RGB."
"-But anyway, what I'm really trying to say is, well, there is a space, certainly. A vacancy, if you will, for perhaps an ex-Hero-"
"RGB!"
He flinches but does not turn. There is static, but he is silent. You take advantage of the lapse in his planned speech.
"I'm not going back."
A petal comes off in his fingers and he holds it, his body still. "Why not?"
A red hot something rushes in your throat, in your head, and you know the words are biting but you cannot help it as they tumble from your lips. "Why did you bring me back?"
The petal is squeezed between a thumb and forefinger. "You asked me to return you home."
"I thought there'd be a home to come back to."
"I told you-"
"Told me what? You didn't tell me anything-"
"-The you that returned was not the you that left-"
"The me that you took-"
"I asked you. You consented to-"
"Consented- RGB, I was a kid!" you cry, and for a moment he has no response so you push onward. "I was a child who didn't know what I was getting into, and you thought when it was all said and done you could drop me back into this world like a puzzle piece in the wrong box. My parents, RGB, my own mum and dad didn't recognize me. Did you tell me that would happen? Did you tell me that even when I wasn't Hero anymore that my old name wouldn't come back? That I couldn't ever get back to the me that I was before I was your tool?"
"You were never a tool," he says softly, the only thing he can refute.
"No, I was a Hero," the word tastes bitter in your mouth. "There's a difference, yeah?"
There is pulp between his fingers. He wipes it quickly on the seam of his trousers, leaving a dark stain. "You're saying you wish you had told me 'no'?"
"Yes," you say before you can think. Then, softer, "No." Finally, you finish with "I don't know."
"Then what are you saying?" he asks, the edge beneath his voice a reminder of the cutting cruelty he is capable of. You remember too well how he has wielded it against you before.
"I'm saying..." you falter, unsure. "I'm saying I wish I'd known. I wish someone would have told me. I wish I could go back and tell myself."
"Hm," he muses, looking out the window to avoid looking at you. "I suppose you hate me, then."
Your laugh catches him off guard. To be fair, it catches you off your guard as well, tumbling out before you can stop it. He makes a quick shift from startled to indignant, stomping his foot in a way that is much more childish than you're sure he would like to think of himself.
"And what exactly is so funny?" he demands.
"Hate you!" you laugh, dabbing at an eye with a bit of your sleeve. "God, I wish I hated you. Things would be so much easier if I hated you."
This catches him off guard in an entirely different way, and he stares at you, dripping pink, waiting for some sort of clarification.
"I waited for you to come and get me. I kept thinking you'd realize you made a mistake. Years and years I'd wake up in the night and hope to roll over and see that dumb screen of yours lighting up the room, hoping you might come and ask me to be Hero again. And all these years later and here you are and by all rights I should be furious with you and to be fair I still am but despite it all I'm... I'm just so happy to see you."
His expression ripples. "Hero, I-"
"I'm not done!"
He snaps to attention obediently.
"And part of me is mad at myself about it because for all intents and purposes you have essentially ruined my life but at the same time there's just so much magic that I never saw before, and now I have my own kids to look after and-"
"You have children?" RGB sputters.
"Don't you dare!" you warn.
He holds up his hands in a wave of innocence. "No, no not- It's simply, I am surprised is all- is there a lucky fellow or lady I should know about?"
"They're foster children, RGB." You hesitate. "Like I was."
"Oh. Oh yes of course," he palms the back of his casing sheepishly. "Of course." On its way back, his hand grabs his hat, and he holds it in front of his chest.
"I can take care of them, at least. Give them a good childhood. They have nowhere else to go."
"And I suppose that's why-?" his voice trails off. You answer with a nod. "Right. I should have figured. A few years too late, as it were."
There is a moment of hesitation that manifests itself in silence. A question burns on your tongue until you speak it aloud. "Why did you wait so long?"
His sigh hisses through his vents, a fan overworked. "I wanted you to be able to grow up. Not everyone is given that chance."
You nod, understanding. Perhaps not agreeing, but understanding. "So now what?"
"Now?" he considers. "Well, I suppose I head back."
"So soon?"
"Monsters aren't as accustomed to the daylight, as it were," he says with a small smile. "Oh, though there is one thing-" He points with a gloved finger to you, and it takes a moment to narrow the motion down to the bead around your neck. "That charm of yours. I figure that must be what's causing it."
"Causing what?" you ask, reaching up to fiddle with it unconsciously. The bead spins beneath your thumb, whirling around and around, blue white and black.
"Well, I did try to keep... updated. I have a friend who's very good at keeping an eye on things, you might know her," a pause for a chuckle. "Anyway, when our attempt didn't quite work I thought either something had happened or... well, it's good to know that it's just a warding charm. If you take it off I should have no trouble."
"You tried to spy on me?" you ask.
He bristles immediately. "I do not spy! I was merely trying to see how you were coping! Is it a crime to want to know if you're still alive or not?"
"Well," you say, tightening your grip on the Evil Eye, "If you want to know so badly you'll just have to come check on me in person in the future."
He grimaces, throwing his hands up as he turns towards the door. "Oh, you're as impossible as ever. I don't know why I even bother-" he stops mid-stride as something catches his eye.
There's a battered old telly on a stand by the door. It isn't much, the tubes were long since burned out when you got it, but the screen isn't cracked and the dials on the side are arranged just so, and one antenna has a kink in it from where you always twang it when you pass. It's currently being used as a hat stand for one of your straw sun hats, the brim falling over the corner in a cartoonish manner.
His fingers ghost over the top of the old electronic, then curl away and tuck themselves safely in one of his belt loops.
"I'll see you later, then, I suppose," he says eventually, his voice impossible to read.
"Don't be a stranger" you say in return.
He scoffs. "Us? Strangers?" He looks over his shoulder at you with one last smile, dripping with blue-green. "Never."
And then he slips out the door and you're left with an empty room. You wait a full minute before tiptoeing down the hall, silently opening the door and counting the heads on pillows, satisfied that there were and are still three there. You make your way out to the garden with still bare feet, walking backwards along the stone path until you can see the roof. The dawn shows the remnants of a cloudy staircase that you figure must have started at your chimney, though the bottom steps have long since blown away in the breeze. You can't quite make out a figure going up, but the clouds hang low overhead and it couldn't have been a long climb.
Still, you wait until the last of the stairs have vanished before you let yourself back inside and start breakfast. There are three children who need to catch the bus and a garden full of chores that require your attention. You spin the bead around your neck and do your best not to think.
These are the things you do to cope.