Marvel New York was familiar, like Christmas ornaments dug out of plastic and cardboard, dusty from the attic but still memorable. Ella remembered fear and she remembered unhappiness like they were bad dreams but Elizabeth didn't remember anything from before. Elizabeth didn't understand time, space or anything except there were comic-book heroes and that had taken a couple hours and ground-rules and bargaining a cookie for the hat and the scarf knotted around her neck.
It was New York cold outside, not and the sunshine was long gone and if she missed the base and the coffee made in the morning by someone other than a Mr. Coffee plastic coffee-maker that had come with the apartment, then Ella wasn't saying. Elizabeth towed her, with a running commentary on every passer-by the way over that Ella wasn't sure went entirely unnoticed. But they made it to Luke and Wren's place without incident, and the knock at the door was a cheerfully impatient knock-knock and then a pause and a knock-knock-knock again.
When the door opened, the woman on the step of it was a half-second behind the straggly height of a six-year-old with a fuzzy green hat with a silver bobble on the top and a shirt that proclaimed loudly her intent to 'make peas, not war'. She grinned, dimples and a missing tooth to one side, and she looked past Luke's hip into the recesses of the house. "You have a dog," Elizabeth told him, seriously, "We're supposed to get a dog, or we were before the superheroes." A look upward.
Ella knew she was different when she looked in the mirror. Cheekbones, and she was thinner but the same wheat-colored hair spilled over her shoulders beneath a grey knit cap that had been crammed on without ceremony. "We were maybe," she said, like the conversation had happened a thousand times before. "Hi."