[center][img]https://cdn.marvel.com/content/2x/clean_238.jpg[/img][/center] [color=#ffe599][h3] Beverly High, Beverly Massachusetts [/h3][/color] [hr] She had forgotten what a normal morning felt like. Or at least, she had forgotten what passed for her, Carol had been awake before her alarm, which was nothing new. Usually it was the low pull of anxiety, the rehearsal of what the day required of her, the performance of it. This morning it was something more like the feeling after a very long run, the pleasant hollow of a body that has pushed itself entirely and come out the other side. She'd lain there in the blue-grey before-light of her room, staring up at the ceiling, and let herself have it for exactly as long as she could afford before she had to get up and be Carol Danvers, senior, Beverly High, the usual. She'd dressed quickly. Nothing overthought. Dark jeans, a cream ribbed top, her leather jacket over the top. A pair of boots she knew from experience were comfortable enough to stand in all day. Just enough effort to count as being her on a low day. The walk to school was quiet and grey, the kind of mid-morning overcast that couldn't decide if it was going to rain or simply threaten to for the entire day. It became apparent the moment the doors opened that Beverly High had its own opinion on recent events. "—did you actually [i]watch[/i] it, the whole clip is like forty seconds and she—" "—my dad says it's completely CGI, the government does this stuff all the—" "—no way is that CGI, you can see the light, like actually [i]reflecting[/i] off the water—" "—she just [i]flew straight through it,[/i] though. The whole thing. How—" Carol pulled the left earbud out and tucked it into her pocket, very calmly, and continued down the main corridor. She had known it would be like this. She had known it on an intellectual, practical level,but that was different than understanding what it would [i]feel[/i] like to walk through a school hallway while the people around her argued about whether she existed. [i]Fascinating.[/i] She grabbed her locker combination from muscle memory, not quite listening to the fragments of conversation around her. Two junior girls at the next bank of lockers had what was very clearly a paused-on phone screen between them; she didn't look directly at it but her peripheral vision was, through no fault of her own, considerably better than it used to be. The frozen image was gold and blurred and moving very fast over a dark ocean, and the caption underneath it had accumulated enough exclamation marks to constitute a safety hazard. She got her locker open. Retrieved her books. Closed it again. [color=#ff9900]"Morning."[/color] Michael appeared at her elbow in the way that he always did, as if he had simply manifested there at the precise moment most likely to be useful to someone. He was holding two cups of coffee from the place on Cabot Street that no one should have had time to get to before school but which Michael apparently considered a personal challenge, and he extended one towards her in a gesture that brooked no argument. [color=#ff9900]"You,"[/color] Carol said, taking it, [color=#ff9900]"are an actual saint."[/color] "I know." He turned to survey the corridor with the expression of a man watching a very entertaining documentary. "You've seen the video, I assume." [color=#ff9900]"I've been trying not to look directly at it. Like an eclipse."[/color] "Smart." He took a sip of his own coffee. "Kelly thinks it's a government actor. She's very passionate about it." [color=#ff9900]"Sounds like Kelly."[/color] "She's made a PowerPoint." Carol turned to look at him for the first time since he'd appeared. He looked back at her, entirely without irony. [color=#ff9900]"She's made a [i]PowerPoint.[/i]"[/color] "Eight slides. There's a section on 'suspicious hair volume.'" For one extremely dangerous moment, Carol felt something shift in her face that she had to work very hard to neutralise back into simple, polite amusement. [color=#ff9900]"Well,"[/color] she said, after a beat, [color=#ff9900]"she's not wrong that the hair is a lot."[/color] Michael gave her a sideways look that lasted approximately half a second longer than she would have liked, then moved smoothly on. "Half the football team has decided she's actually military. The other half think she's an alien. Kyle Briggs apparently spent twenty minutes this morning explaining to anyone who would listen why the G-forces alone would—" [color=#ff9900]"Kyle Briggs failed physics."[/color] "He did," Michael confirmed, "and yet. The confidence." She laughed then, properly, which helped. The first period bell rang. Around them the hallway began its usual self-reorganisation. [color=#ff9900]"If Kelly shows me that PowerPoint,"[/color] Carol said, shouldering her bag, [color=#ff9900]"I'm dropping cheer."[/color] "You won't." [color=#ff9900]"I won't,"[/color] she agreed. [color=#ff9900]"But I'll [i]think[/i] about it very seriously for at least six seconds."[/color] She headed towards her first class, coffee in hand, past two more sets of students with phones out and voices low, before any member of staff could impress on them the importance to be elsewhere. It was a very strange thing, she reflected, to be the secret at the centre of a rumour. To hear your own name spoken in tones of speculation and not be able to say [i]yes, that's me, I was there, I was cold coming back through the atmosphere and the hair helmet thing is genuinely a lot of engineering for something that aesthetic.[/i] She sat down in AP English. Opened her notebook. Wrote the date at the top of a fresh page. Across the aisle, one of the girls from the cheer team was leaning over to whisper something to the girl beside her, phone face-up between them. Carol caught the image without meaning to. The angle was different from the one the junior girls had been looking at, this one was taken from the ground somewhere in Boston, the quality shakier, more human. A streak of gold against a flat grey sky, impossibly fast, impossibly bright. She recognised the exact moment it had been taken. She remembered the whip of air, the specific pitch of its shriek, the way the city had looked impossibly small and impossibly dear from up there. She looked back down at her notebook. Outside, somewhere past the grey overcast, the sky was very wide and very quiet.