She doesn't really know what to make of it, this whole superhero … thing. Atlas doesn't leap from building to building. Atlas doesn't come back home with his hand split open and a proud smile on his face. Atlas doesn't promise to come back in time and save her. Atlas doesn't do much at all, really, save buy her a chocolate bar from the vending machine every day he walks by it.
But Alisha doesn't want to do the whole vigilante thing again.
Instead of remaining in their apartment, she crawls her life into a box. One of those that he'd helped her with so long ago — it's been kicked in, by her, and drawn on, by him, but it's still there, as if waiting for this moment. And so she packs it with herself, tossing her items into the boxes like she can fit her entire life in them. "I can't do this," she says, and she folds her sweaters into neat little squares before tossing them into her box. "I'm not fucking doing this again."
She knows the moment he grabs one of the boxes to help her carry them to wherever the fuck she's chosen to go that he won't really fight her on it. There'll be no Alisha, please, no we're meant to be together — there's no pictures depicting he was ever a rest stop in her life on her way to her destination. There's nothing in this little flat that tells her anything about their future.
Save for him and that fucking cardboard box.
He looks down at it, fingers reaching inside to pick at one of her dresses. "It's going to get wrinkly," he says.
She shrugs.
"You hate the iron," he says, peering down at it.
She looks down at the box, at his fingers, then back up at him. He still doesn't look at her.
Digging inside her box, he pulls out a piece of paper. On it, he's drawn him ironing her dress, her carrying a soda can. It's not really anything artistic, really. Alisha imagines he's been predicting this day would come after he'd seen her memory of Superhoodie taking that fucking bullet.
"It's not a polaroid of the future," he says. He looks at her then, when she's not peering at him. "But it's what you make of it, isn't it? You're not meant to live in a cardboard box forever, Alisha."
She closes her eyes for a long, long time, but she thinks that's how she's been in Eudio since the day she arrived. Swarmed in nothing but blackness. Unable to see. She opens them now and finds herself staring at him, seeing her life for the very first time in that cardboard box.
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drop a ship ‣ donny + alisha
for bella; donny + alisha & this