"... Why... does it 'got' to be done. Tonight?"

"Welll," Vicky responded grimacing. "Bucky said he'd start sending stuff come Thursday, and today's...."

"I can't just go on some harebrained scheme to snatch a hard-drive from someone's house! With hours notice!"

"Hey! I wanted to meet yesterday!"

"That's not much better! I need to — do things. I need to prep! I need to..." 'mentally prep...' "I need to plan...."

"And hey! Hey, Guy!" Vicky was waving her hand in his face. "We can plan now. I've been at his house tons of times. I know where everything is."

Jimmy glared hotly at her and the fact that she didn't burst into flames, said more about the dark shade of his sunglasses than any natural resistance to such things.

"And — and you want to do it tonight anyway!"

"... Why... Do I want to do it tonight... anyway?"

----------------------------------------

"—Tonights game day." Jimmy mimicked under his breath. He took care to make his voice especially winey and annoying. "No way is he gonna be home. Bucky doesn't miss a game. Even when he's injur— Well someone's sure as heck home now!"

Jimmy zipped passed the house again on his bike and went several blocks farther until he turned back in a slow, grudging circle and cycled back. Slowly.

He dismounted several houses away under a deep patch of shadows cast by an over hanging tree and a distant streetlight.

The street was littered with such shadows. It was fully night time by anyone's estimation and the sky was just overcast enough to damp out the light of the moon. And streetlights? They cast as many shadows as they did luminance.

He dismissed the bike back into a card with a touch and It flickered into his hand where he glared moodily at it before tucking it back into his pocket.

Jimmy wasn't worried about someone noticing. Approximately three months of paranoia and anxiety had taught Jimmy the valuable lesson that people were notoriously bad at noticing... anything.

And Jimmy... Jimmy also had a... sense for that kind of thing.

What he'd told Vicky in the park was true. No one had noticed them — at least, not initially. It wasn't anywhere near as accurate as the sense he usually used to find peoples things. He couldn't pick out, or point to the noticer or anything, but frequently, he'd found that he had a sort of instinct — a prickle down his spine, when he was being actively watched.

And... he wasn't.

It wasn't infallible, or anything — in fact it failed all the time when there were a lot of people doing a lot of fast noticing or when he called attention to himself. But in the dead of night with only a couple pedestrians and a man distracted by his dog across the street?

Jimmy stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned into their driveway pausing only briefly to slip some blue-tinted swimming goggles over his eyes, a hat over his head, and raise a hospital mask — black for the occasion — over his nose.

'Oh yeah. No ones gonna be home. They're all gonna be at the ga — Well someone's definitely home now, Vicky!'

Jimmy eyed the car still in the driveway and then the lights he could see in several of the windows.

Mental Vicky, flicked her braid at him. 'Well, you know, maybe someone's home, but they're just downstairs. And you know, whatever right? It wasn't like you were planning on walking in through the front door, were you?' The image of Vicky in his brain grinned brightly. 'You can totally do this! You're The Guy! Yo —'

Jimmy blushed and shook his head until Mental Vicky got dizzy and shut up.

Real Vicky had of course said none of those things.

'And probably no one's gonna be home.' Is what she'd really said. 'They're all like die hard football nuts. I was once trapped in a convo for like three days 'cause I said I liked the Pat....'

"Great," Jimmy muttered to himself as he trudged up to the back gate.

"So what if someone is home. It wasn't like I was really going to walk in through front door. I can totally do this. This isn't even my hardest job!"

That was certainly true. His hardest was that time when someone had paid him to retrieve their stolen debit card of all things.

He was certain that they'd only asked him to do that on the novelty alone of some dude claiming that they could retrieve anything, so they had been gratifyingly surprised when he'd turned up five day's later with their missing card.

It had been difficult. The boy in possession had been walking around with it stuffed into his wallet, so Jimmy had been forced to contrive a scenario where he'd been crushed up against the guy long enough to stick a finger into his pocket and 'en-card' the entire wallet, with no mask or duster jacket, and only the crush of bodies, and shear human blindness to conceal what he was doing.

Still, Jimmy remembered gleefully. The dumbstruck expression on the kid's face when he'd turned up with the card had been more than satisfying. And, he'd completed the contract, so Arbitrage delivered the two hundred dollars straight into his bank account five business day's later and no amount of the boy's screaming, complaining or text yelling could do anything about that.

Debit cards were, what? Fifty cents to replace? If they weren't free? The sheer profit from that job alone had left the Itch making happy cat noises for a month.

The gate disappeared at a touch and then reappeared a moment later behind Jimmy — carefully — so that it didn't make any noise when it reappeared, and he stole past the side-door — windowless, thankfully — and then all the way to the tree that Vicky claimed was right below Buck's window.

'You could probably climb it!' She'd said.

Jimmy... was not going to climb it.

He breathed tight, even breaths and produced a card. "You're gonna be fine." Jimmy said to himself. "You'll break into Bucks room. Steal the hard-drive and get out. Easy peezy, lemon squeezy. No where near your hardest job. Just get the hard-drive. Then you'll get paid, the Itch will leave you the F alone, and then. Five. Dates. With Vicky M....."

'Oh, I hate Vicky M...' He thought. But he knew he was blushing.

----------------------------------------

The ladder flashed into existence with a woosh and a scrape as the rubber pads struggled at first to find purchase on the exterior.

Jimmy flinched, steadying it desperately. And then he froze, listening —

No change. No noise of alarm from the house. Just the dullest of all murmurs which could have even been coming from the neighbors.

He breathed again and made doubly sure that the base was steady again before scrambling up the ladder. 'Please don't fall. Please don't fall. Please please pleeeeaaaaaaase'.

He didn't fall and a moment later he was standing just below Bucks bedroom window and peering between the blinds into the messiest room he had ever seen.

There were clothes littering the floor, and the bed was unmade with the sheets all bunched up on one side of the bed where they'd been flung.

He could see what looked like granola bar wrappers scattered on the desk against the far wall, along with several old plates and plastic-ware, and some of it had even overflown onto the floor underneath, along with a jumbled stack of books and binders, some loose papers and one and half pairs of shoes. The missing half, Jimmy located a second later by the door leaving the room.

'But, no Buck.'

The window screen, the window and all the blinds went the same way the gate had — into his pocket.

Really, Jimmy thought. Everything's all the same answer with this power. Have a door you can't go through? Card it. Need to climb up to a window? Card a ladder for later! Can't get in through the window cause glass is non-permeable to humans? Card that too. Cardcardcardcardcard. I've got a hammer, and everywhere I look are nails.

Jimmy grinned stupidly as he swung himself in — like a shadow, he imagined — and rubbed his hands together.

Sometimes, your pretty cool, Jimmy thought to the Itch.

'Now, where's that hard-drive....'

----------------------------------------

The room was a mess.

Jimmy took a moment to appreciate this fact as he professionally appraised the room in his capacity as a thief. Messy rooms were good for business, he thought. Messy rooms meant that everything that would normally be secreted away into neat little cubbies and boxes and shelves and dressers, were all instead left out in the open for all eyes to see. Wonderful.

Five minutes later Jimmy was forced to reevaluate his professional opinion.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

'It also means that nothing is where it's supposed to be!' Like a hard-drive which Vicky had been certain would be either on his desk, or in one of the drawers underneath his desk.

It wasn't in either of those places.

What's more, if he hadn't been certain that the house had been occupied before — people left lights on all the time — he most certainly was now.

He could hear them talking downstairs. Just a muffled murmur that he couldn't understand, and it was raising hackles all the way up and down his spine. It was one thing to suspect that people might be home and decide to break in anyway, just really quietly. It was quite another to actually be in the house, and be one loud thump away from those family members storming up the stairs to kick his lights out.

Or worse. Call the Police.

Jimmy... was hyperventilating a lot.

The hard-drive was supposed to be in the desk. It wasn't.

The family were all probably going to be at the football game. They were not.

What else was Vicky wrong about? Was there even a game? Was Buck here right now? Was there even a hard-drive to begin with?

Jimmy could feel his breath speed up as he sifted frantically through the mess with his flashlight set on its lowest setting. Then he checked all of the drawers again and then....

"Aarrggghhhh!" Quietly.

"I have to go," he muttered. 'It's really, time to go.'

And... he didn't move.

'I... I can't go.' The contract. He'd given his word to retrieve the hard-drive. Tonight.

'Oh. I really really hate Vicky M' he thought, in what he was starting to think of as the theme of this whole operation. 'Damn her and her stupid, glowy, beautiful face, and long dumb hair and...stupid smile and.... What if this is a setup?'

He froze in the middle of checking between the matress and the bedsprings.

"What if this is a setup, Itch? Then I can go!"

The Itch, of course, said nothing so helpful as 'Yes, Jimmy'. Only... Itched dully... at the lack of any actual stealing going on.

'If I'm going to get hurt or injured or caught, there is no reason why I can't go!'

He took two steps towards the window before the Itch woke up.

----------------------------------------

It wasn't an Itch-y pain that stopped him. It was deeper than that. A dull ache which started small but stretched quickly until it balooned into a burning tear. As if he was pulling at something deep inside, and that if he didn't stop, it would snap and he'd....

He stopped, breathing raggedly mere feet from the window sill.

Once, in ninth grade, his mother had had the fantastic idea that he, Jimmy, should join the cross-country team. She had her reasons, Jimmy was certain.

But after four days of having to run three miles as the warm up, Jimmy came to the realization that they couldn't make him run if he twisted his ankle.

So he tried.... And then he ran the three miles because the sheer existential horror of trying to break yourself on purpose was just, somehow, More than team sports.

"Ok. You win." He breathed. And the pain vanished like it had never been.

"B-but I'm putting a new clause in the contract! 'I can walk out on any job if in danger of bodily harm or identification!' And — and..."

Jimmy looked around and belatedly wondered why he was whisper-yelling in the middle of this dark, messy room, instead of, you know, yell-thinking.

New plan. 'I am a Super Human! With Super — uh — theft — skills! I am not grubbing around this dumb, pigstie of a room on my hands and knees with a flashlight until Buck gets home!'

He reached out and a card flickered into existence.

Pants — lint in pockets

Again. More pants.

Shorts — pockets empty

He started sweeping his hand around the room in quick broad strokes.

flicker.

flicker.

flicker.

...

Flicker. Flickerflicker. Flickerflickerflicker.

Sweaty Socks. Low quality essay — English. Low quality assignment — math. Low quality — Jimmy shook his head, all of Bucks homework was low quality apparently, though how his power determined that was beyond him.

The entire desk disappeared into a card and Jimmy eyes fluttered as he integrated all of what had still been inside it. Seven Pens. Two Pencils. Calculator — low quality. Calculator with graphing capability — moderate quality. Half Empty box of Tissue Paper. Used tissue pape... Jimmy sped past that one.

Where?! If I were a hard drive that... maybe I don't want anyone to find... where would I be?

His eyes zipped around room. It was far cleaner now. And far emptier. 'I'll put it all back.' He thought. 'I will! I'm a thief, but I'm not an evil thief!'

The mattress went next. He'd already checked underneath it, but maybe Buck had cut a hole... Nope. Just a mattress. Then the bedspring. Then the frame... nope all kosher. "Fudge!"

There was a box of condoms, he noticed now, that had been beneath the bed... but no hard-drive!

'Where else?!' he looked around and his eyes landed on... the closet! He rushed over barely pausing to en-card the dresser on the way — ironically, it was mostly empty — and then he was there.

The sliding mirror doors each disappeared into a card and then he was running his hands through all the jackets and coats and jerseys and hockey sticks and shoes and cleats and... and cards flew every which way in a cloud of multi colored ethereal paper with tribal markings.

He was so feverish that he almost didn't even notice it when the words Hard-drive — medium capacity popped up and it was only after his fingers picked up Thumb-drive. Thumb-drive and then for some reason Flash-stick that his mind skittered to a halt.

"Hard-drive!" He croaked, and then his hand slipped and instead of en-carding the shoe box at the top right corner of the shelf, the shelf itself flickered into his hand.

There was a crash.

It was loud.

----------------------------------------

Time slowwwwed for Jimmy as the clamour of... lots of falling things thudded and clanged against each other in the closet.

The dull murmur stopped... and then there were footsteps.

Jimmy leapt and he was one leg fully out the window before he realized that he'd vanished the ladder behind him after entering — for very good reasons that he couldn't remember now — and that he was currently about to step out into thin air —

His hand dove into his pocket. Low quality assignment — math. Calculator — low quality. Ladder!

He stopped short of rematerializing it as the thought came unbidden that the only possibly more unappetizing thing than being caught right at the window of Buck's room might be to be caught just below the window of Buck's room on an unstable ladder!

'I should jump,' he thought dully. 'I should—' He looked down as footsteps thudded up the stairs... and he jumped....

Back! Into the closet. The bed, the desk, the dresser... they were all cards now. There was nowhere left to hi —

And Buck strode into the room.

----------------------------------------

In reflection, some part of Jimmy had always known that Buck would be home tonight. The same way he just knew that if he went sky-diving, the drag force of air molecules would stutter. Or, if he went scuba-diving the valve might stick... or a — a shark might come.

So he'd known. He had! Even though it was game day! Even though Vicky said Buck never missed a game and Jimmy couldn't see why he would, star quarterback and all. So he'd known.

He'd just disregarded it. Because that's what you do to those fears....

But now faced with Buck's figure filling the room, Jimmy also knew... 'That... that was a really dumb idea.'

"What the—" Buck's exclamation was startled as he stomped in to his now desolate room and Jimmy tried to make himself as small as possible in the closet. "What the fuck?! Dad! Mo —" then his eyes panning the room found Jimmy and he roared.

Jimmy made a break for the open door, and Buck charged after him.

Jimmy remembered hearing once that quarterbacks tended to be on the smaller side of football teams. They were meant to be quick and speedy.

And that checked out, he thought. The football team was quite prominent at school, walking around in team sweatshirts and letterman jackets, and bar none they all looked like rinoceri in human skin.

Buck did not. He was smaller. But that did not mean... small.

His shoulders and waist filled the room and his hands looked like they could crush soda cans into pancakes. And when he moved....

Jimmy noted dazedly, that it mattered very little to the guy getting hit if the one doing the hitting was the size of a rinocerous or merely as big as a refrigerator.

He tried to dodge and sprint at the same time and only managed one of those.

He hit the open door, then the wall hard enough to see stars, and Bucks hand closed on his wrist.

Jimmy struggled, almost sobbing in desperation.

"What the fuck! What the — where the hell are my things!" Buck was screaming into his face.

Somehow he managed to squirm his arm out and then he was crashing down the stairs back first while Buck, enraged, bore down on him.

'I'm gonna die.' Jimmy thought blearily as he crashed down the stairs. 'This is it. This is how —' And some latent survival instinct that Jimmy didn't know he had kicked in, and his hand... flicked.

The card he was still clutching flew and then a ladder long enough reach a second story window burst into being with a crunch of shattered dry wall.

Jimmy saw Buck's eyes widen a split second before he struck the ladder, tearing furrows in both walls before the ladder met the first stud, and Buck clotheslined beneath it.

Jimmy lay on the ground, stunned. Then he dragged himself up. His body burned and ached and that swelling sensation of forming bruises was everywhere. 'Please don't be broken. please nothing be broken.' He swayed, and caught himself against a wall. 'Door? That way. Doo —'

A hand grabbed his shoulder and slammed him back against the wall.

The stars came back, and through those stars, Jimmy saw Buck close his other hand into a fist just before it impacted his stomach. Twice.

He threw up into his mask. Jimmy had never encountered this kind of pain before. He'd never even been in any sort of brawl before.

"You and I." Buck was hissing in his ear. "We are going to be great friends. Now lets see who the fuck you are. Huh?"

"No! No!" Jimmy desperately babbled. He struggled futilely, trying to escape.

He grabbed at Bucks arm — it had about as much an affect as it would have against a Silverback Gorilla.

He strained! and his other hand —

Sock — soiled, Low Quality Assignment — math, Mirrored Door, Three Sticks of Bludgeoning...

His other hand closed on a card. It flickered and Jimmy pressed it in the rough area where Bucks neck was and pushed the switch.

Vicky's Pen-taser made a sound like a concentrated swarm of cicadas as Jimmy held it there, and Buck spasmed.

He probably held it there for a little bit longer than he should have before a noise dragged him back to the present and his thumb slipped off the switch.

Buck crumpled and Jimmy was left standing over him staring at an older woman, her hands over her mouth looking horrified, and a short, similarly aged man with a pointed beard.

'Buck's parents. They must be.' Jimmy thought dazedly.

Only now did he realize how quickly everything occurred. The noise from upstairs. Buck bursting into the room. Them crashing down the stairs. Buck hitting him. Him tasing Buck... 'They must have just made it in and now I'm....'

"I'm sorry." He managed. "I —"

The man bellowed. He grabbed at a vase and flung it.

Jimmy tried to dodge — it didn't work very well — but the man's aim was askew anyway and the vase shattered against the wall next to Jimmy's head, sending painful pinpricks against his cheek.

Buck's father picked up a chair next while Jimmy backpedaled. 'Door... Door? There. Door!'

"I'm sorry." Jimmy kept mumbling. "I'm s-sorry." as Buck's father advanced on him. He swiped at the chair as the man got close, disappearing it into his hand — Violent Chair — and the man let out another bellow, this time horrified.

"A Super!"

"I'm sorry." Jimmy begged again. Then he turned tail and dashed for the door. He didn't even bother with opening it, just flickered it out of existence with a touch and only remembered to flicker it back in to existence when he was half way out of the drive way.

Then he ran... or limped quickly. What he hoped was quickly, anyway.

'I need to break line of sight. If they follow me.... Who in their right mind would chase a Super?' Jimmy's thoughts were a jumble. He chanced a glance behind him — no one — and turned a corner already fishing in his pocket for his bike.

It appeared in front of him, and Jimmy jumped on it and he rode. And rode and rode.

----------------------------------------

It was nearly midnight when Jimmy made it back to his bedroom window — he did actually have to scale a tree this time. He zapped it out of existence with a sigh, hopped in and —

His desk chair swiveled smoothly around as he flickered it back in.

"Bro..." His sister said after a very, very long pause. "Your homework is hardcore."