They plunged into the bay, deep and murky, somewhere far above a wrecked kree spaceship.

"Goodbye, Victor," five drones intoned, and powered into the air. Their repulsors shot up spray, blinding Victor, and when he blinked the water clear, the drones were mere specks dwindling over the city.

"Bye, Hacker," Victor whispered. He turned to the chaos in the water. Nobody had noticed the fleeing drones; Dante's flames hissed and sputtered, and Ette shouted Victor's name, splashing widely. Ivy's fog crackled, and someone kept coughing.

"Over here!" Victor called, paddling against rocking waves.

"Victor," Ette shouted, relieved. "I was holding onto your arm and then we were in the water and you weren't there so I--"

"I talked to Hacker," he said. Remnants of ice sprayed into the air and Dante shouted unintelligibly, supporting an unconscious Ivy. "In the void. He's leaving."

Ette stared. The fog and flames behind her slowly dispersed.

"He left already, actually," Victor pointed to the city's skyline.

Ette opened her mouth to speak, catching a wave of water instead. She spluttered.

"E..everybody okay?" Dante asked shakily.

"Maybe," Ms. Marvel muttered around steady splashes. "You look like you're about to sink, want me to take Ivy?"

Victor and Ette paddled over, buoyed by the waves. Pepper laid on her back, unconscious, snatches of red fur visible in the water below her--proof of Squirrel Girl's tail keeping her afloat. Ashen-faced Dante hauled Ivy by her shoulder, transferring her to Ms. Marvel's outstretched, cot-sized hand.

"Where did the drones go?" Dante asked.

"Away," Victor said. His shock wore off, and the water's cold hit him with a violent force, chattering his teeth. Salt stung the cuts in his arms and cheek.

"What happened?" Ette coughed. "In the vo--" a wave smacked her in the face.

"Let's g-g-go home," Dante stuttered.

"Tippy Toe!" Squirrel Girl yelped, splashing in a circle. "Oh my almonds, I left Tippy Toe in the penthouse! Tippy Toe!"

Victor shut his eyes, focusing through the stinging pain and cold. He opened a portal beneath them, dropping buckets of ocean water and the seven of them through. Within the void, the water hung in clear curtains, refracting violet light. He slid a hand through it, fingers cutting a clean wedge, a window to the others' faces. Then he dragged everything with them, frozen figures linked by arms and tails and cold liquid.

He surfaced in the penthouse, ocean water flooding a hallway intersection. "Tippy Toe!" Squirrel Girl called.

***

One, phones took poorly to sea water. Two, jars of rice supposedly worked well for that, but the Greens didn't have any rice. Three, Ivy's skin turned clammy and pale, so Ette bundled her in a quilt and lay beside her in the back lawn, grass growing towers around them. Four, between Dorian and Maureen running back and forth from their bathroom's medicine cabinet to the back lawn, Victor explained what Hacker said in the void, about a tiny memory unscathed from the mind erasure, and about leaving to find himself. Five, Squirrel Girl filled in the rest of the story for her parents, briefly sketching out Pepper's penthouse and the fight with the drones and Ivy's fury at Pepper resetting their friend and Dante saving half of them from impalement by dry ice.

"What about Pepper Potts now?" Maureen asked, plastering a bandage onto Squirrel Girl's nose.

"We left her in the hotel lobby beneath the tower's penthouse," Ms. Marvel, seated in the grass, stared at the grass growing around her legs.

"Little bit expensive to be calling that tower a hotel," Squirrel Girl muttered, swatting her mother away.

"Five-star hotel," Ms. Marvel amended. "Someone will find her unconscious and call an ambulance or something."

"We should've trashed every one of her suits," Ette muttered from the quilts. "And her repulsor gloves."

Victor frowned at her shoes sticking out beneath the bottom of the quilt.

"She did what she thought was best," Dante whispered, basically in Victor's ear, but Ette apparently heard.

"Are you defending her now?"

No!" Dante leaned harder into Victor's arm, making the cuts sting. "Maybe! Not for what she did to Hacker, but those suits helped save Jersey City from a crashing spaceship, remember?"

"Suits probably controlled by Hacker at the time," Ms. Marvel muttered.

"And now Hacker's gone off and disappeared, so Rescue doesn't need them, right?" Ette said.

"Dear," Maureen said, rising to her feet, "forgiveness is a powerful thing."

"Yes indeed," Dorian crouched and patted a bandage to Victor's face. Victor tried not to meet his too-close gaze.

"What's forgiveness got to do with this?" Victor asked. "We're done with Pepper, and Hacker left." He flicked his gaze toward Ette and repeated, "we're done with Pepper." Dorian thankfully retreated, scooting over to Dante.

"No we're not," Ms. Marvel kept staring at the ground. "We'll never be done with her. Our secret base is literally an elevator ride from where she keeps her Rescue-suits."

"Victor," Maureen said, "forgiveness means expelling the poison in your heart towards someone. What Pepper did has poisoned all of you, but if you cling to it, it will only poison you, not her."

"How did you get so wise?" Ms. Marvel grumbled.

Maureen smiled. "Years and years of practice."

"I think someone here should speak in Rescue's behalf," Dorian rose to his feet, crinkling band-aid wrappers in his fist. "She is a superhero. She saves peoples lives, saves burning bridges, she broke away from the Avengers and stuck up for herself after the Captain Marvel and Spider-man fiasco. She's done a lot for this city, and a lot of others like it."

"Yeah," Ms. Marvel sighed. Squirrel Girl reluctantly nodded, Tippy Toe silently appearing on her arm.

"I still don't feel okay with that elevator in our warehouse," Dante said. "She's furious with us."

"I don't think I can sleep there," Ette whispered.

"But Rescue's heroics hardly excuse her from wiping Hacker's mind," Dorian said. "Hacker was a fine speaking water bottle."

Maureen handed a band-aid box to Dorian. "He was much more than that, dear. Defending the Stark network from cyber attacks with...what was it, twenty percent of his capacity?"

"Ten," Ette said.

"He would be a monster to play against in Scrabble," Dorian sighed, wiping his eyes.

Squirrel Girl bounced to her feet. "Thanks Mom and Dad," she dragged them both into a fierce hug. "For the band-aids, and the towels for our phones, really."

"No problem, Doreen," they said, muffled in Squirrel Girl's arms.

She released them. "But could the five of us chat in private for a bit? You know, secret superhero stuff."

Maureen squeezed Squirrel Girl back. "Of course."

Dorian pushed his glasses up. "But maybe inform us before you break in somewhere else, please?"

"Yeah, sure thing," Squirrel Girl nodded, fixing a smile to her face. The Greens slowly retreated to the door.

"And let us know if you need anything else," Dorian said.

"Besides rice," Maureen chimed in, "that's already on the list."

"And thanks for the garden work, Ette!" Dorian added.

"Okay," Ette grumbled, and the door squeaked shut.

Squirrel Girl sighed, slumping to the ground.

"So..." Ms. Marvel raised an eyebrow.

Squirrel Girl quirked an eyebrow back. "What?"

"So what did we need to talk in private about?"

She shrugged. "I was just trying to get rid of them. I don't know. I kind of want to sleep until this is all over, you know?"

"I have a question," Dante shifted against Victor, and he responded by wrapping an arm around Dante's shoulder. "What are we doing about the elevator into our warehouse? Or the whole, Pepper's mad at us for breaking in, and there's water damage in the hall, not to mention how Ivy knocked her out--"

"--Actually I punched her out," Ms. Marvel said. Squirrel Girl raised an eyebrow. "...But Ivy gets all the points for distracting her."

"--and the damage the drones caused up there..." Dante trailed off. "She's going to try and make us pay for that."

"We're not paying for anything," Squirrel Girl glared. "If she had been honest with us in the first place, we wouldn't have gone snooping."

Victor curled his hands into fists. "If she'd been honest about wiping Hacker's memories, we would've done worse than sneak in."

Dante snorted.

"Either way. We're not paying for that," Squirrel Girl said.

"Maybe I could weld the elevator door shut," Dante murmured. "Then we could barricade it."

"Sounds like a temporary solution," Victor said. "It's not much of a secret base if all that's really keeping it secret is a welded elevator door and some boxes."

"I never said boxes."

"Then--"

"What if we shared our warehouse with everyone first?" Ms. Marvel sat up straight. "That way Pepper can't hold it over us."

"Uh," Victor said.

"That totally defeats the purpose of a secret base too," Squirrel Girl said.

Ms. Marvel's face hardened. "So we find a new secret base. Somewhere. Somewhere that's more safe where we don't have to answer to Pepper Potts."

"Uh," Ette said. Trees rustled, and the back fence creaked.

"Ms. Marvel, you're not the one who'd be without somewhere to sleep if we just left," Victor said softly.

She winced.

"Hey, what if..." Squirrel Girl glanced over toward the door. "Kamala, we've still only filmed two scenes for our horror movie. What if we made a different movie instead?"

She frowned. "About--"

"Hacker. And superheroes. And us and our secret base."

"Again," Dante said, "you wouldn't be without a place to sleep if we exposed the base."

"So," Ms. Marvel said, then paused. "Okay, what if, theoretically, I brought you all over to my place? I mean, my brother moved out not that long ago, and...we have a spare bedroom? So you could crash there for a while?"

"Bowling club?" Squirrel Girl plucked at the grass. "Or..."

"Or as superhero friends?" Ette finished, muffled by the quilt.

"Superhero friends," Ms. Marvel said, folding her arms. "I mean, I can't make promises my parents will react well, but...you shouldn't have to sleep with an elevator to Rescue's penthouse right there."

Victor blinked.

"You'd be willing to do that?" Squirrel Girl tossed grass stems at the ground.

Ms. Marvel nodded. "Like you guys said...I'm half the people here with any family around. So it's not fair to ditch you all in the warehouse just because I'm scared of what my parents will say."

"We could always visit my fam," Ette said softly. "Except I have no clue where to find them."

"Ette?" Dante asked. "Did your...family move?"

"Yeah, I think so." The grass curled up the quilt's patchwork patterns. "We were supposed to, about a week after Victor..."

Victor grimaced. Then furrowed his eyebrows. Technically, if he'd never abducted her, they never would have met like this.

"I'm pretty sure my mom thinks I ran away, because I adamantly opposed moving away from Ivy, and now she's probably disowned me because of how much we argued about it."

"Oh," Dante said.

"But I guess I sorta did run away with Ivy?"

"Sort of," Victor muttered.

"So yeah," Ms. Marvel bit her lip. "Maybe we'll just show up at my apartment since our phones are all fried."

Squirrel Girl crawled across the grass and high-fived Ms. Marvel, patting Ette's side with her tail. "Kree Annihilators, look at us being amazing," she whispered.

"We'll see about that," Ms. Marvel wrinkled her nose.

"Nope, we're already amazing," Squirrel Girl said. "Super amazing."

"Should I portal us right now?" Victor asked.

"Nah," Squirrel Girl shook her head. "We can eat at my place first, right?"

"Okay," Ms. Marvel sighed, shoulders loosening. "Nothing like delaying the inevitable, right?"

***

Author note: vote to help things go well with Ms. Marvel telling her parents about the superhero gang she's a part of ;)