Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Michelle’s fingers repeatedly tapped her thigh, the stim bringing some sense of control. Her life had been thrown upside down and she was trying to hold it together.
Two week ago Michelle had been nobody, just an average adopted teenager living her life back in Munich, oh sure she had Olympic aspirations as a weight lifter in a few years… But now… Now she was on a bus to Ravenhold Academy, having learned her birth mother was the great Valkyra, and she was the inheritor to her powers… Which unfortunately had drawn the ire of a crazy transphobic witch…
This was too much. Way too much for poor Michelle to handle at once.
“Stop it,” Freyja said, “Your wings keep fidgeting.”
Wings, right… When Valkyra had died Michelle had inherited her powers, growing large swan wings, and now the damned things wouldn’t do what she wanted!
“I’m sorry!” Michelle said, “They do what they want.”
Michelle tried to keep them still, it was hard keeping them comfortable in such a confined space already…
Freyja sighed, “You have so much to catch up on…”
Michelle nodded, she hadn’t asked for this… She looked back at Freyja, the two of them were fraternal twins but one could mistake them for identical; both had medium brown skin, wavy hair, deep brown eyes, they were both built solidly over six feet in height… There was one thing that separated them; Freyja’s belly was swollen from pregnancy, already in the third trimester…
Of course the two were twins only in blood. They had met for the first time less than two weeks ago and this was the first time they truly had a moment to sit and talk alone.
“You’re staring,” Freyja said.
“Sorry, it’s just… I never thought I’d have a sister.”
“We’re just strangers, we just happen to have the same parents,” Freyja sighed. She looked so tired, with heavy bags under her eyes, she smelled faintly of alcohol.
She wasn’t handling her mother’s death well, and she’d been passed over for Michelle when the powers had chosen its next host. Everyone knew the powers of the Valkyra passed from mother to daughter, but Michelle was trans, it was why she’d been adopted out.
“What are you going to do?” Michelle asked.
“Do?”
“If you aren’t the Valkyra…”
Freya shrugged, “Look after mom’s legacy is all I can do,” she said, her voice distant and bitter. She’d trained all her life for this eventuality, now it was gone, had passed her by…
“Do you… do you hate me?”
Freyja looked at her surprised, “No, Mom cared for you, even if she kept her distance for your safety, I can’t bring myself to hate you.”
Michelle fidgeted. “I just feel like I stole this from you…”
“You didn’t, if I was bitter I could’ve helped Wycked.”
Wycked was the leader of a Radical Feminist “Hero” group, and when she’d found out Michelle, a transgender girl, had inherited the powers she’d flipped out, tried to force Michelle to give them up, tried to kill her even…
“But you didn’t.”
“Mom cared for you, and I don’t agree with Wycked’s dumbass bigoted ideology.” Freyja shrugged, “That’s all there was to it.”
Michelle looked away and out the window, Freyja went back to her phone. It would be a difficult journey, Freyja might claim not to hate her, but she definitely didn’t like her either…
Maybe things would get better, she sighed, breath fogging up the window. Maybe one day they could be sisters…
Ravenhold Academy 
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