“Jana...” Jeremy began.

“Yes?” she said.

The atmosphere was tense, particularly for a picnic.

“You...were here?”

She slowly nodded.

Jeremy realized, now, what he was part of.

Jana was living history. He could say for sure that she was, indeed, a hero.

“So this is what you’re afraid of...” he said.

He regretted the words as they came from his mouth, but when he glanced at Jana, she was hugging herself with a pained expression.

He had heard Jana mention earlier that she had been the first psychic to oppose the Living Catastrophe. It hadn’t clicked with him before now just what that meant. Jana was someone whose power outmatched his perception of scale.

Psychi was apparently stronger, but he had never felt such pressure from his sister. Now, looking at the scared girl to his right, Jeremy felt reverence. This was the catastrophe Jana had fought to prevent.

The ruins of what used to be a city full of people was spread out before him. Tens of thousands of people had lived here. Now, much of it was ruins; history. He had heard about what Azad had done, but his title, ‘The Living Catastrophe’ always felt a bit overbearing

Now he realized what a catastrophe was.

Destruction, wreaked on countless individuals; thousands of homes, of lives ended and altered.

An unknowable, malign, and wholly unpredictable force of change that would only be stopped through countless sacrifices. A ‘city’ was just a statistic until one looked at the sheer scale of what it was, overseeing the remains of lost lives.

Lives, full and happy, ended without warning, without reprieve, without a memory to hold close. Others had begun living new ones in the wreckage, what remained of the less fortunate.

A ‘catastrophe’ wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a name. It wasn’t a statistic. It wasn’t a word. It wasn’t an earthquake, a person, or even a monster. It was history.

“I...” he began. “I didn’t really understand why you brought me here.”

“I...regret it,” Jana said back. “This place is...probably not my favorite place, h-heh. Why do you think I brought you here, then?”

Jeremy motioned to...everything. “I didn’t understand what you had been through. Why you never wanted to talk about...any of it. I...I can’t blame you for it. This is...I couldn’t have imagined feeling this way when I arrived here.”

Jana slowly nodded. “This is where it all went down. Where I fought Azad for a day straight. Where he toyed with me. Where...” Tears trickled down Jana’s face, and she held her head in her arms. She began to sob. “This is where...the things I did...what-what happened. I-I shouldn’t have come here.”

Jeremy did what he always did with his sister. He put an arm over Jana’s shoulder and pulled her close, sympathetic tears welling in his eyes.

She felt a lot different from his sister, though. Jana wasn’t just some teen with power. She was stronger than Psychi, both physically and mentally. His sister would often end up on his lap, but Jana cried into his chest, holding herself up rather than letting herself fall into the position she found most comfortable. Her arms also held on to him tightly, rather than how Psychi’s own arms were frail and devoid of strength.

Jana didn’t say anything else, at least not for a while. That wasn’t a problem, though. He didn’t need to know details to understand what Jana was feeling.

Eventually, the girl wiped her tears and returned to sitting and staring down at the floor with a furrowed brow and a strange twist of her lips.

Jana felt embarrassed. She hadn’t ever shared this part of herself with someone.

She had never felt as if someone understood what she had gone through, even if a few people had. Other super psychics were greedy, stupid, or just infuriating, so far as she was concerned, and they were the people most similar to her by a large margin.

Azad had killed her father, personally. Yet none of them understood just how that made her conflict against The Catastrophe more than a fight to save the world or whatever. It went beyond the existential dread the others felt when they remembered it. This fight was personal, and the journey to finish it was a fundamental part of who Jana was, and what she stood for.

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It was ironic, because as much as she regretted not accompanying her father into that laboratory, she felt like she wouldn’t change a thing, even if she, of course, would. The horrors she experienced, the pain she endured; it was what made her strong. What made her determined. What made her focused.

The other super psychics didn’t seem to think that way.

But what made Jeremy different?

Probably nothing, Jana figured. He didn’t particularly understand her feelings. He didn’t even know where Azad had come from or what he had done to her. The memories were haunting, even if she had blotted most of them out, and Jeremy would probably never know what it was like to accidentally kill dozens of people because he lost focus for a split second, to see what happened when stones fell on their wide, fearful eyes.

Her hand twitched has her gut wrenched.

What made him different was that Jana had decided to sit and cry beside him in particular. It was just that simple.

But holy fuck did she feel bad about doing it. Jana knew that crying into other people’s arms was a normal thing to do, but it went so against her image that it was embarrassing as hell. And, between that and the dread and catharsis and fear and possibly a pinch of gender dynamics, Jana’s heartbeat was pounding like a damn earthquake, circulating blood through her body like she was about to fight for her life, causing her to sweat like a dog.

“S-so...” Jana began. N-nice day, right?”

“Umm...yes?” Jeremy said, contradicting himself in confusion.

Hooooly hell, this was so awkward! Jana hadn’t felt so close to someone for a while, and she didn’t want things to be fucked up somehow. “D-did you like the picnic?” she asked.

“I guess so. Not like we actually got to eat much. Speaking of which...” Jeremy ate another date.

Why the fuck are you so calm, you piece of shit!? “Oh, yeah, sorry about that. Ha. Ha.”

“D-did you turn into a robot suddenly?” Jeremy asked, jabbing at Jana’s suddenly awkward laughs.

“Y-yup. I’m a robot now. Ha. Ha,” Jana said, trying to mask how damn awkward she felt.

...Jeremy looked at her with a confused expression.

Fuuuuuck, I’m starting to sound like my father when he gets flustered! “Erm...” Jana cleared her throat. “B-but yeah, sorry about that.”

Jana’s thoughts kept rambling on for a few more moments while she failed to notice Jeremy looking at her rapidly changing expressions like they were the funniest shit he had seen, and eventually, she just cried out, holding her head as if in mental pain. “You know what? I’m done with this shit, we’re going now, now, now, now, and also, right this fucking instant!”

Jana lounged into her pillows, then began slapping her fist into one over and over. “AAAAAAAGH, what the heck did I just do?!” She yelled to herself.

The room was much the same to Jeremy’s, though the security camera in the corner was disassembled. More than likely that wouldn’t have been seen as very guestly behavior, but nobody was going to scold Jana for it.

That was so damn unlike me! she thought. Jana suddenly rubber-banded the pillow across the room into a punching bag of condensed air. Once she made it, Jana promptly beat the shit out of it in blinding, supersonic punches. In just a second, the solid air shattered into wind, Jana’s fist overpowering her hypercondensation kinesis.

Jana maintained a strict self-image of herself, which had finally deteriorated when she had...ugh, cried into Jeremy's chest. Jana made another punching bag, only to reduce it to gas in an instant. Jana was meant to be the person in control, who could punch her way through anything, and yet she’d broken down...again.

It wasn’t a new thing for her. Jana hadn’t had a difficult life up until the catastrophe, but that had all changed. Her mind was still plagued by memories of it, as well as feelings. Jana would sometimes break down crying, wishing things could be the way they used to be. She wished that she could see her father again, have him handle all the nuances for her, have him provide the support she needed in life. She wished she had more time to spend with her mother before she saw her laying in a pool of blood.

Worse, she would sometimes be paralyzed in fear, forced to grapple with her own mind to avoid threatening others with her abilities while her body and psyche wasted away. She wished she’d known what it was when she’d first experienced it.

Afterward, Jana usually felt like a failure. She wasn’t meant to be some crybaby, like (certain)other people, she was meant to be a super psychic, an icon of power. Being anything else was...extra.

However, this time, Jana didn’t feel that way. Embarrassed: yes. A failure: no.

Jana didn’t realize this, anyhow. Instead, she kept forming phantasmal punching bags before promptly obliterating them.

Eventually, she stopped and didn’t waste time tucking herself in, not worrying about the potential dangers of falling asleep as she was expected to.

Though she really didn’t fall asleep for a while, her brain remaining hyperactive for hours after she got under the covers.