Flex Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

“And that’s a wrap! Cool, thanks y’all for coming, that was a great jam session,” Gwen waved off the others as she starts packing up her bass guitar. Playing music with the Flex Girls was one of the few regular things in her life and it gave her a sense of belonging. She didn’t really want to leave the storage unit they practiced in and go back to Shady Glen Manor, but after band practice was over there wasn’t much else to do. She glanced over at Ellen, who seemed to be dawdling as well. “Hey Drummond,” she called out, “great vocals today.”

“Thanks. I feel like I had a lot to work through today, so shouting really helped. Nice, uh, bass… ing. Too.” Ellen stares at the ground for a moment, in mild disbelief at her lack of ability to string together a sentence. “Damn, I must be more tired than I thought.”

She blinks heavily before letting her guitar case slide off her back and sitting next to it on the floor. She looks up to Gwen to ask, “You mind if I take a minute? Probably shouldn’t drive when I’m so out of it, y’know?”

“Sure,” Gwen responded. “I’m not in a hurry, I can wait with locking up.”

She zipped up the bag for her bass and put it against the wall, before sitting back down on one of the stools they had in the storage unit. “You doing okay, Drummond? You usually don’t space out easily.” She holds out a water bottle to offer it to her bandmate.

“I’m alright, s’probably just ‘cause we were up late last night. Mel was helping me study for a history test. She seems to be doing fine though… huh.” Ellen squints in the direction of the storage unit door where the rest of the band, Melody included, had just left from.

“I didn’t really think I’d be going to school when I got to the future, y’know? I’ve kinda got bigger problems to deal with!” She gestures to her own face and tries to laugh through her frustration, but isn’t very convincing. Hoping to steer the conversation away from herself, she pivots subjects.

“So what do you do with all your free time? That’s gotta be pretty sweet.”

Gwen laughs along with Ellen nervously and twirls a lock of her hair as she turns away her gaze, not making eye contact. “I didn’t think I’d go to public school either after getting out of GREY, big problems always were just around the corner, it’s a miracle I graduated! Haha… I sure do have a lot of free time now… that I love having… with not much to do… and friends that are busy with school most days… and a house that’s mostly empty…”

Ellen raises an eyebrow quizzically at Gwen. “Ok, hinting much? So you’re bored, lonely, don’t know what to do. I guess the question is: what do you wanna do? World’s kinda your oyster, isn’t it?”

Gwen grimaces. “Sorry. I don’t mean to go off, but it’s been bugging me for a while.” She sighs. “I guess the world’s my oyster, or it could be. It used to be I was fighting to get access to my father’s property while he was in prison, but now he’s been released, that’s almost done with. I’m in danger of becoming the bored, rich girl stereotype everyone hates, and yet here I am making punk rock music with y’all.”

She gently kicks against an empty soda can on the floor and it topples over. “Fuck,” she whispers, “I’m turning into Bella.” She shakes her head. “What I want to do is punch bad guys in the face and rock out. I want justice and I want art. I want to feel free, not to be constrained by adults trying to push me into a mould. Like… you ride around on your motorcycle all the time, that must feel pretty freeing, right?”

“I mean, when I’m not at school or trying to convince people I’m not evil or whatever,” Ellen shrugs, “but that eats up a lot of my time. Honestly, it’s less like riding around free and easy, and more like chasing after something I can’t see and with no directions. Half the time I feel like I’m only riding the stupid thing just so I feel like I’m doing something, because I have no idea how to do the thing I came here for.”

She takes a moment to catch her breath, the sound of the blood rushing through her ears is the loudest thing she can hear. Ellen calms and sighs, long and deep. “It’s not easy doing whatever you want when you don’t know what that is, huh?” She smiles weakly at Gwen, sort of glad to have someone in the same boat as her. Even if it is a shitty boat.

“Pfah, yeah…” Gwen scoffs, but smiles back. “I really want to be able to work towards something, but first I’ll have to figure out what that something is.” She sighs. “I almost miss Freedo. At least that little gremlin and I had a goal together, even if it was as small as tagging all the community centers with art sprays. Friends leaving has been rough this past year, even if they often accidentally shut down your powers.”

She shrugs. “But hey, at least the next album is a good goal to work towards, right?” She sounded uncertain. The Flex Girls hadn’t really talked about doing something like that yet, and Gwen and Mini also didn’t want to give up on their other band, Rescue; The Girls. Now that the electoral race for mayor was over, they’d hoped Parrot would be available again.

Ellen grimaces at the mention of friends leaving people behind, pushing down the guilt of having done that herself. “Yeah, that sounds rough, ‘cept for the shutting down your powers part.” She looks down at her hands, flexing them open and closed, working through how to ask her next question.

“Who does that, by the way? Or did that, I guess? They still around?” Her eye contact with Gwen is direct and unusually worried.

“Who? Freedo?” Gwen shakes her head. “No, his family moved to Seattle after Zodiac City fell. He came back for a bit over the summer, but he didn’t stay long.”

She thinks for a moment. “Lavender used to be able to shut down people’s powers too. Had a real problem with it. She’d just look at someone and it would happen, she couldn’t even control it. I kind of learned how to from watching her, but it doesn’t come easily. I…” She sucks in a breath. “I guess I only know how to because I know what it’s like to lose your powers.”

She crosses her arms and looks away, at a distant point outside of the storage unit, feigning interest in a flock of seagulls flying by.

“You do?” Ellen almost shouts, caught totally by surprise. She bolts up to her feet, taking a step toward Gwen before realizing she didn’t really have a plan for what to do once she was up. “What happened? Like, what took your powers away? And how’d you get them back?”

She tries to reel in her curiosity, but the frantic pace of her questions gives away her excitement; finally, there might be an answer for this stupid problem that had been plaguing her since she arrived in 2019.

Gwen is taken aback by the sudden vehemence of Ellen’s tone. She frowns at her. “Uhhh… I mean, other than when Freedo or Lav shut me down?” She shifts uncomfortable on her stool. “Well, back in April, I was on a mission with Herald, Rescue and Manaline. We fought a dragon in Russia and I contracted a deadly disease. I had to stay overnight at the Watchtower and let them run some tests.” She shudders at the memory. “Thank God there were no needles involved…”

She is silent for a moment as she composes herself. “Anyway, that night… I had a very… vivid nightmare. I sought comfort from Nimue, my… a spirit who lived in my sword. She wasn’t there anymore. She’d… left. And with it, the powers that she bestowed upon me. No more armor, no more summoning my sword, no more flight or fancy transformations. I didn’t even have superhuman strength for a while, just my retrocognition.”

Gwen’s lips are a thin line as she presses them tightly together and makes an uncomfortable expression. Explaining the full extent of her relationship with Nimue was easier to leave out, despite that having been a huge factor in how shitty that whole situation had made her feel.

Instead, she sighs, and mumbles, more to herself than to Ellen. “And it was my retrocognition that gave me those nightmares in the first place.”

Ellen is visibly disappointed. Her hopeful expression crumples into a frown followed by a furrowed brow. “Shit, sorry for asking.”

She turns slowly on her heels, plods back over to her previous spot on the floor and drops to a squat by her guitar. “Didn’t mean to bring all… *that* up. I just- it used to be that I wouldn’t even have had to ask you about this. I coulda just, like, poked you, and I’d have seen that. Okay, maybe not *all* of it. Not the nightmares, I don’t think it’s exactly like your retrocognition, but you wouldn’t have had to say it. And you wouldn’t have known I saw it either.”

She ruffles her hair, pushing it out of her face, “I’m just tired of having to ask these stupid questions and making people upset.” Ellen is quiet for a while, picking at the stickers on her guitar case, before she continues. “Did you always have those abilities? What… what did you do when you didn’t have them anymore?” She keeps her eyes down, afraid of the answer.

Gwen picks up the empty soda can by her foot and throws it at Ellen. “How dare you apologize,” she says, and laughs. She shakes her head. “I know it’s not fun to hear, but it’s not like you’re asking fun questions. I wouldn’t be talking about this with you if I wasn’t okay talking about it.”

She hops off the stool and starts to put other equipment away, just to have something useful to do. “You… didn’t make me feel worse,” she continues. “Heck, if I found out you poked me to find out about all that instead of just asking me, I would beat your ass even on Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

She puts the stool away in a corner and straightens up, looking at Ellen’s sticker-covered guitar case. “Hm. Well, I didn’t have Nimue until she came to me while I was in captivity by GREY--I know, more tragic backstory, but if you can’t deal with that you joined the wrong team--but I’ve always had a measure of my father’s strength,” she flexes and arm and then gestures at her face, “and his cheekbones. My mom’s a witch, but I’m not really magical, despite what Olivia might say. I don’t know when I got my retrocognition, but I have odd memories of it going back a long time.”

She stares blankly at the guitar case again, then walks over to her satchel and rummages through it. “I think the first hint came when I tried to lift Thor’s hammer at a dinner party when I was eight. I never lost those powers when Nimue left, so I tried to just… focus on them instead of my flight and my armour and my weapon. I tried to see what I could do that I maybe wasn’t aware of yet. I found that I could draw on the magic of other objects too, not just the sword Nimue used to be in. That helped bridge the gap a bit, like with Mini making me a temporary magic laser sword when we went to the planet Tarin.” She briefly stopped rummaging and looks up. “I’m rambling. Sorry.”

Ellen scoffs at the initial threat of a holiday beating, but listens to Gwen’s explanation earnestly. Nodding along with all the bizarre twists and turns of the story — Thor, a witch, laser sword in space. Cool. — she can’t help but be relieved.

“Don’t be. Honestly, it’s kind of a relief hearing that you’ve been able to do so much without… that part of you, or whatever. Makes me hopeful, y’know?”

She grabs the soda can and chucks it back at Gwen, aiming too wide and sending it clattering into the wall of the storage unit with an alarming \*clang\*. With a mischievous smile she adds, “And if you want a fight, challenge accepted. The band’s called the Flex Girls for a reason,” flexing her bicep slightly as she lowers her arm and raising an eyebrow at Gwen.

Gwen laughs, and it is a relaxing laugh. She notices that a tension in her neck and shoulders that she hadn’t noticed before now dissipates. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that. I could use a workout partner.” She smiled, remembering morning runs with Challenge and Elle, and working out with Parrot. “Maybe we can do some sparring sometime? Shady Glen Manor has a workout space fit for supers, if you don’t want to do it at the base, with Godspeed there.”

“Ugh, yeah, any chance to avoid that guy I will totally take. Whole place kinda creeps me out.” Reassured and reinvigorated, Ellen stands again, stretching her arms up and out. She yawns wide and feels like a bit of weight is gone from her shoulders. “Hey Gwen? Thanks. For the chat. Maybe we should just complain about stuff more often, huh?”

Gwen nods. “We should. It’s nice. Cathartic.” She softly punches Ellen’s shoulder with a smile, then goes to pick up her bass case. “Hey, are you up for some takeout? I’m starving and I could really go for some taquitos.”

“Sounds great. Need a lift, or you got your own way there?” Ellen shrugs on her jacket and picks up her guitar, heading for the storage unit door. The night air is sharp and cold, uncomfortable if it weren’t for the prospects of delicious taquitos soon. She looks out at the streetlights dotting the darkness, clouds of breath disappearing into the night, and for the first time in a while feels like things are looking up.