TW: situations approaching but not resulting in rape
Backdated to July 26th

Boston looms large around her. Once Astrophyllite clears the neighborhood, she shrugs her coat off and sends her glamour with it. Gemma is wearing too-big second-hand jeans with holes ripped in the knees - her own doing - and an oversized t-shirt she got from the lost-and-found at school. She has four crumpled dollars in her pocket, no cell phone and no keys to the house, and she knows she can’t go back. Her father and Beatrice will want to know how she got out of the house in the first place. Panic rises in her throat, and is then quelled, because at least… At least the house is under the Negaverse’s protection. At least her family is safe.

An hour later, the four dollars are gone, traded for a donut and an iced coffee drink at the Dunkin on the corner. But the store is closing, and Gemma can’t stay here. The cashier gives her a sympathetic look and says “You have to leave once I finish sweeping, okay?” She is very good at her job. The sweeping goes fast.

Back out on the street, she kicks around Coolidge Corner, circling the intersection to the rhythm of the stopwalks. She counts the streetcar come and go ten times and then at one AM it stops running so she walks down Harvard Street and looks into the windows of the bookstore and the ice cream parlor and the shoe store and reads the sign board out front of the movie theater and imagines what the films are about.

She doesn’t hear the man coming until he grabs her, and when he does, her Saint Magdalena’s training kicks in: go still and do nothing, because you deserve this. Only bad girls get grabbed. And he has her in the alley with her pants halfway down her legs before she comes back from the weird disassociation of this is happening for a reason and realizes that no, she is not a bad girl. She is Lieutenant Astrophyllite and an officer of the Negaverse and that means she is the Best Girl. Avalon told her so.
So in spite of Trixilite’s threats, Gemma pulls her coat around her once more. The man stumbles back from her in surprise, surely having not expecting her to turn into a superhero before his very eyes.

“You’re the bad one,” she says, and she sinks her hand into his chest like she has seen Bischofite do, like she has seen Avalon do, and her fingers close around something small and hard.

The man’s eyes go very wide indeed.

“You’re the bad one,” she says again, “And bad people get punished. Bad people get all their stuff taken away. Bad people get killed.”

She rips his starseed from his chest and she does not feel any remorse at all, because she is Astrophyllite, and as he goes still and crumples to the ground, she knows that she is Good. Then, she puts the starseed in her mouth, like she has seen generals do. She thinks it must be dirty, to have come from such a dirty place, but it is sweet on her tongue and when it crunches beneath her teeth it releases something, like one of those hard candies with the juice center.

Power flows through her. She decides she is strong enough that she does not need to be Astrophyllite right now, so she shrugs the coat off and pulls up her pants.

Back out on the street, a pair of police officers pick her up and ask her where she lives. Gemma gives them her father and Beatrice’s address and agrees with the men that it is awfully late for a young girl like her to be wandering the streets alone.