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It’s almost always the same dream. That’s the funny thing.
Not funny funny, but funny strange. Strange that no matter how old she gets, or how far she goes, that the dream never really changes.
It’s all in her head of course. Every therapist she’s ever seen has told her that. Trauma from childhood events, fear over the constant attacks by supervillains, and whatever else they say it is. The dream isn’t real.
But somedays, Rani could swear that it was. People say that they can’t read clocks or see their hands in dreams. But she can, she can see the clock as clear as day.
She dreams of running through someplace. Maybe a house or a workplace, she can never nail it down. But she’s running, and giggling. She’s young, she’s always small in the dream. She can hear voices as she runs. But they’re distant and familiar.
She’s supposed to be doing something else, but she knows how to get out of her room easily. Then the world cracks apart, and everything ends.
The same dream every night. Sometimes it’s different days, and hours, and times. But she’s always herself and she’s always young.
Trauma response. From things that happened when she was likely too young to recall. Maybe from when her parents died, or when she was getting shoved from foster home to foster home.
She’s always been the believer that it’s from that one vacation where her first foster parents died and the stranger who helped keep her alive jumped off the roof. It would explain why she’s so young in the dream. But it wouldn’t explain why Rani expected someone to take her away from looking at the body and comfort her.
There was nobody else on that roof. Nobody stopped her from looking at the body.
Strange how sometimes you trick yourself into thinking somebody will stop you from doing something that they couldn’t have. She looked at the body because there was nobody to tell her not to.
She sat on the roof and waited until sunset, and then got her way down. The cops managed to get her back home. To another state and another foster home.
She’d half expected the assignment to be in Arizona, but it wasn’t. It was in Washington. She’d never been to Arizona.
For the next 7 years she hit every foster home in the country and then some. That day was when the dreams started and they never stopped.
By 13, she’d realized her place in the world and expected it. Superheroes didn’t save kids like her, so she worked a way to save herself. She’d landed in a good home for the last year, but was ‘too old’ to be prime adoption age anymore.
Keep your head down. Stay out of trouble and trouble will stay out of you. That’s how it was supposed to work.
It never seemed to work the way she wanted it too.
She’s running down the streets of Metropolis when it happens. She’d taken a bus here with her classmates on a field trip but had slipped away the second she could. Unfortunately some older boys had had the same idea.
“C’mon kid!” one of the boys shout, “Stop running.”
She had swiped an apple from one of their lunch bags when they weren’t looking but they had noticed quicker than she expected, she cursed herself at being caught so easily. She wasn’t usually that messy. Not that she stole things a lot, she just didn’t have a lunch and they were a bunch of assholes.
“I’m gonna beat your ass, Rani!”
She trips, over her stupid shoelaces. She goes tumbling headfirst into the concrete, and feels the blood run down her face as it collides hard with the ground. She sits up unsteadily, her head spinning at the fall.
The boys catch up with her. One of the yanks her to her feet and pushes her up against the wall.
“Not so tough now, huh?” he taunts, his pale face shining with sweat. “Think you can steal from us?”
“It was an apple, you asshole. Not like you or any of your rich boy friends were even going to eat it!”
He just slams her back to the wall and her head feels like its going to shatter and she feels like she’s going to vomit. Rani’s pretty sure she has some type of concussion. The blood from her nose drips into her mouth, coppery and iron filled.
She’s terrified. She’s too far to call for help but then she remembers where she is. She’s in Metropolis. If anyone can hear her, Superman can.
“Help!” she screams her voice broken, “Help me!”
The boy in front of her pulls back a fist and hits her square in the stomach and she gasps as the air is pushed out of her lungs. She gasps and gasps, unable to get a proper breath in. She feels like she’s dying.
“Help!” she whispers, the word barely escaping her mouth.
He reels back his fist again, this time at her face but something stops him. Rani looks around as a light blue forcefield stands between the two of them. It’s blocking the boy from hitting her and he’s pissed.
“That’s not very nice is it?” a cocky voice asks in front of her, “Hitting somebody younger than you is one thing but someone who can’t fight back is another.”
“What are you going to do?” the boy spits at the forcefield, “Call Superman?”
“Superman?” he chuckles, his blond hair falling down over his cowl-like headpiece, “Buddy, I don’t need Superman.”
The forcefield stretches out until it covers the others like a bubble and the blond man shoots into the sky with the boys inside the field. She can surprisingly still hear his voice.
“Now say you’ll never do it again, and apologize.”
The boys are shaking so hard that she can see it even from down here with her double vision. That’s strange, her vision isn’t supposed to do that.
“We’re sorry! We’re sorry just let us down!”
“Not to me, to her.”
“We’re sorry, Rani!”
“Now promise you won’t bother her again.”
One of the boys shakes his head, “We promise!”
The gold covered man smiles and lowers them to the ground. The second they hit solid ground, they run off as fast as they can. Not even looking behind them at her as they do.
Rani shakes her head as the nausea increases and the street begins to tilt. The man settles in front of her and she recognizes him. Booster Gold, the guy from all those cereal commercials. But he seems more familiar to her than some distant celebratory esque figure. He reminds her of home, which is odd because Rani’s never had one.
“Hey, kid. You okay? That was rough.”
She smiles at him and opens her mouth to respond and promptly vomits on his shoes and then faints into pitch black nothingness.
She wakes up to arguing.
“You can’t just kidnap random teenagers, Booster!”
“But she passed out! She needed help”
“So take her to a hospital like a normal person, not to me!”
She blinks her eyes open and realizes the pain is gone and so is the blood. She turns her head to see Booster and another man arguing back and forth. The other man is gruff looking, with grown out blonde roots that leads into dyed red hair and stubble covering his face. He has a green and red jumpsuit on that makes him look like he’s straight out of the 27th century. The 70s, she meant the 70s. Why did she think the 27th century?
They continue arguing as she swings herself up, adjusting her overalls and staring at them. The blood had dripped down onto her shirt, she noticed. They don’t notice her until she clears he throat.
They both flip around with wide eyes and stare at her like they’d never seen a teenage girl before in their lives.
“Hi” she offers, “Sorry for vomiting on your shoes.”
Booster grins at her, which makes her head rush with deja vu, “It’s no problem, kiddo. Not the first time someone I’ve saved has vomited on me. Sorry for taking you away from there. I bet your parents are worried sick!”
“I don’t have any,” she responded with a shrug, “Besides I was on a field trip and Mrs. Montague never notices whose there and whose not. I was planning on sneaking off anyway.”
She pauses, “How am I fine? I thought I definitely had a concussion.”
The man next to Booster sighs, “I healed you with some advanced technology from the future since somebody brought you to me instead of the hospital.”
He picks up an object and she recognizes it. How the hell does she know what that is?
“What got those boys all worked up anyways?” Booster asked and Rani smirks.
“I stole a stupid apple from one of them because my foster parents forgot to give me money for lunch. So they decided to chase me down the street and beat the living hell out of me.”
“What’s your name, kid?” the other man asks.
“Rani, Rani Carter.”
Booster does a double take, “That’s my last name. Small world!”
“I thought your last name was Gold?”
“Nah, that’s just my hero name.”
“Well we better be getting you back to your school trip before Rip here blows a gasket.”
Rip shoots an irritated look at Booster and turns to leave without another word.
Something about the pair of them feel startlingly familiar, like an old memory she just can’t quite reach. But she brushes it aside. Has to be nothing.
Just like her dreams are nothing.
“C’mon!” Booster calls leading her out the door and to a round ball like machine. The word comes to her mind, a Time Sphere.
How does she know this?
“This baby is a Time Sphere. It can take you anywhere in time and space. I’m going to take you back to your trip with it.”
He opens the door and steps inside the translucent sphere then looks back, “Well are you coming?”
She smiles big and follows him. Some part of her knows she’s safe which is strange because this man is a stranger. But she feels like she knows him. Maybe its because she grew up with his face on the TV?
They settled down into it and she buckles up and they shoot off into a multicolored vortex and Rani gasps. She knows this place, she visits this place in her dreams every night. This is home. This is home.
The memories come flooding back to her. Daxom. Boppy’s time lab. Michelle. Mikey.
Oh god, where was Aunt Shel? Mikey was here and so was Boppy but where was she? She looks around wildly like Shel will suddenly appear in the sphere. But she doesn’t.
Mikey keeps driving like nothing has changed and she realizes all at once. He doesn’t remember her. He doesn’t know who she is. Her dad doesn’t know her at all.
She feels like sobbing and screaming. Like shaking him until he snaps back to normal. Rani doesn’t want to go back to school and to her foster parents she wants to go home with him.
But there’s no use in it. She has to bide her time and wait. She has to see if she can work this the long way around.
If theres one thing Rani Carter can do, it’s wait.
Mikey drops her off and saunters off with a wave before she can even get the words out. What words? “You’re my father!” “We’re family in a different timeline?” No that sounds ridiculous. She’ll just has to wait like she always has.
She’ll wait for her family. She’ll find Aunt Shel. She’ll come home.
She will go home.