Hear It From Me First

Rory had sat Jude down once they were both home and had wound down for the day. She'd only gotten the nullifier yesterday and had been trying it for size the night before and this morning. She knew he was going to see it sooner or later and she'd much rather be the one to break the news to him. Jude never had liked being kept out of the loop.

So, Rory sat him down and rolled up her sleeve to flash it off. She grinned a little.

"You get three questions."

Rory laughed at the look on his face. "I'm kidding, ask anything you want. But of course, you go for the most obvious one." She scratched at her arm where the bracelet met skin. "A lot of reasons, actually, and the more I think about it the more important it feels. But I don't think you'd get any of those, so I'll tell you the one you'd understand: I'm proving Broen wrong."

"See, it's the only part you'd get and the part you'd disagree with. I know what his problem is, Jude. I've talked about it enough with him. I'm not going to fight with you about whether or not you like my idea, because I'm doing it anyway, and if I'm being honest, I don't think you'd believe me if I tried to explain that it was important to me too."

"Jude why do you always assume that I don't recognize these things when I've always been good at reading and getting people? I know that. I spoke to him. A lot."

Rory sighed, mimicking Jude's gesture. "Words don't work most of the time and when they don't work you have to prove to people that they're not alone, because at the end of the day everyone thinks they are. They're lost in their own pain and people don't listen unless you make them. That's what this is."

She stopped rubbing her nose to look at the bracelet on her hand. "And... because. Because I get sick of people telling me I could never have felt powerless or low or hopeless because of this shit. I became a hero to inspire people to rise up for themselves and my powers stopped allowing for that. When people see me it's all they see and it bothers me. I was never defined by them before but now I have to be."

Rory blinked. "No, Jude. I'm never going to stop being a hero. A hero is what I do, no matter what job I take, where I go, or how I live my life. I'm always going to help people and love them, I don't need my powers to do that. I just want to get away from them for a bit, because sometimes I don't feel like fighting."

She reclined in the chair until its front legs stood in the air and Rory closed her eyes to find the words. When it had come to talking about her own thought process, she'd never been very good at it.

"See, I want to prove you can stand up from anything. I never do anything for one reason, and I'd be hardpressed to think of someone who did. Some of those reasons are conflicting, but not if you don't simplify them.

"It never bothered me when I thought about it before. I never hated my powers, but I know I'm limited by them anyway. When you reach a certain level of strength, people start to assume and sometimes the only way to get out of a box is to utterly break it. I want to make sure I don't end up relying on the abilities, but I also want to prove to the world that you don't need that raw power to keep standing back up and to fight the impossible and no one is willing to believe me when I said I did it before when I was just some bitch who could talk to rodents."