That wasn't fair, but I wasn't in a mood to care. My parents had mostly retired to take care of me. They'd had plenty of money to do it and were tired of getting stomped; everyone gets to that point eventually. You ask anyone in any frame of work if they'd retire if they had the cash to do it and most over my age will jump at the chance. No one bothers to tell you this when you're in high school trying to pick a job, but you get tired in your 30s.
It doesn't matter how cool you are, how much you love your work (and don't get me wrong; I do), or how you feel about the impact of that work on the rest of the world. You can be the most successful person in the universe and you're still going to want to have a break by the time you've been doing it for a couple of decades.
Some treacherous part of me hadn't hated being powerless. There were options in it; settling down, maybe getting married, or having kids. You could stop breaking bones and willing them to get healed faster. You could stop worrying about staying in peak shape and have a couple of love handles if you wanted them.
Active superhero work was fulfilling. You literally saved babies from raging fires and helped the general public avoid getting taken out by terrorists. I'd fought aliens, villains, and my own Alliance family from time to time, always ending up on top.
But, in my isolation, I'd come to admit that maybe I needed a real vacation from it all. I needed to sit down and discuss things with a professional so I could work through my feelings. When I'd lost my powers, I'd been frustrated. But I hadn't been broken over it.
And that bothered me.
Maybe the Alliance and I weren't a good match anymore. Again, it didn't matter until I got out of the Dream. Maybe those thoughts were the work of my cousin, Allison alias Dreamweaver, who'd shoved me in this hell. Psychic superheroes were tricky sorts, always knowing too much and most of that being exactly how to manipulate their enemies.
God, how far had my family fallen that those involved were enemies within? Even as kids we'd been encouraged to stick up for each other at school and show ourselves as a unit. That hadn't always happened because kids will be kids, but it had been enough that I'd hadn't always turned up back at home black and blue.
I concentrated on Jarrett and dropped the frisbee. Maybe if I broke the pattern, something else would break within the Dream and I'd be free. Instead, the dog just climbed onto my lap and wiggled so hard he threatened to cause an earthquake. I sighed and wrapped my arms around his ridiculously thick neck, pressed my head into his shoulder, and took a long, deep breath to prevent myself from bursting into tears.
Everything was terrible and I felt like that had become a running trend for me in the past few years. I'd accidentally killed my girlfriend, spent years in prison, and then found out she hadn't been dead at all; my cousin had trapped her in the Dream and had been cruising her body around to do superhero work whenever she'd wanted.
And when we'd gotten her back? Yeah, she'd been offended that I'd moved on romantically.
Hell, did I really want to come back from the Dream? At least things were simple, a blank canvas that I was learning to manipulate to my will. I could do neat tricks, spin things how I wanted them spun, and work to find solutions for problems that I couldn't on the outside. Like, all my feelings? Those didn't matter so long as i was trapped within the Dream.
Yeah, super healthy way to deal with that.
"Cassie?"
I knew that voice. I looked around the endless void, frowning. "Mom?"
"Hi, honey. You just give us a few more minutes and we'll have you out of there. You've gotten yourself all turned around and confused. Don't know how you did it, but it's an impressive little knot."
I blinked and shook the thought away, certain it was some new trick. Allison was close enough with my parents, whom I hadn't spoken to since I'd been put in prison, that she would have been perfectly capable of creating a great impression of my mother. Memories of her came shooting into my mind, which just reinforced the fact that it had to be fake.
Then again, would Allison think to give my mom the condescending tone? Would she consider that my mother would, somehow, blame me for ending up trapped in the Dream in the first place? I frowned and tried to reach toward the voice, both physically and with whatever dim sense of psychic residue I had control of.
But I had no idea what I was doing and it wasn't as if I'd be able to recognize my mother anyway. Psychics always said there was sort of an aura around each person, like a fingerprint. It was individual enough that you'd likely never run into duplicates as long as you lived. That meant that you could sort of tell who it was you were communicating with. I thought of it like an energy signature on all those Japanese cartoons I'd watched as a kid.
No one in my family had been particularly fond of that explanation, but it was pretty normal for that to happen with me regardless.
It took me too long to realize, as I'd said, that I wouldn't know my own mother's aura if it hit me in the face. I just wasn't a part of that world, no matter how much my inner child desperately wanted to be; if for no other reason than to please my parents. When your family marks
