One might call Lucy a hypocrite for telling her friends not to worry about the Urban Pirates for the time being, only to double down on her own personal investigation. 

Lucy's room had a desk that took up one corner that she used for studying or reading, and above it, hanging from the wall was a large bulletin board. The board was almost entirely taken up by pictures. Pictures of her friends, family, former classes, everyone. 

Lately however, Lucy had dedicated a portion of the board to her detective work. There wasn't any sort of red string or anything, but there was a whole lot of notes and even some pictures she's printed out from news articles. 

Lucy was doing what had become routine for her in the past few months: pacing up and down, when she heard the front door open. She threw her bedroom door open and raced down the narrow townhouse stairs, nearly tripping multiple times one her way down. 

She arrived to see a tall, dark skinned man standing in the doorway taking off his coat. He looked up, past Lucy's mother, and smiled at her. 

"Lucy!" He exclaimed in a deep, accented voice. "Anak ko!" Lucy allowed a rare smile to spread across her face as she crossed to room to give her dad a hug. He embraced her for all of maybe two seconds before pulling away almost hastily, and turning to her mom. They started speaking in Tagalog, which Lucy barely understood, so she just tuned it out, took and hung up her dad's coat, and slipped back upstairs again. 

She'd barely made it up the last step when her parents called her down again. 

"Lucy Jane! You're father just arrived back home for the first time in over a month, are you that ungrateful?!" Her mom called up. Lucy flinched. Getting called ungrateful wasn't anything new, but what did her parents expect when they didn't even speak a language she understood?

"Well you guys are speaking Tagalog, so I can't even speak if I wanted to." Lucy explained as she came back downstairs, which earned a glare from her mother and a sigh from her father. "Hasn't she been taking lessons?" He asked her mother, who muttered something about it being too expensive. 

"Even if I did know it better, I wouldn't really have a lot of uses for it!" Lucy protested. "I already know Japanese pretty well from that time when you decided to move the the slightly better set of islands up north and then kept us stuck there for the next eight years!"

"I thought you liked Japan!" Her mother hissed at her. 

"I did! But then you kept moving us around the country before we came to Canada, and then you expected me to speak three separate languages at thirteen years old!"

"Well I'm sorry for letting you see the world at an early age!" Lucy frowned, her parents had been able to move them and her out of the Philippines when she was only three, and Lucy was glad they'd gone to a place with better support for them, but to her parents it meant that any minor disobedience was a show of how "ungrateful" she was.

"You know that Japanese won't allow you to connect with your relatives, if you're supposedly that overwhelmed, you don't have to keep practicing it." Her father observed coldly.

"But Japanese is basically my first language, and you guys got me out of the Philippines before I'd actually picked up any Tagalog!" She insisted.

"LUCY JANE GO TO YOUR ROOM." Her mother boomed, and Lucy scuttled upstairs as fast as she could and bolted to her room. 

Lucy plopped onto her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her parents were beyond difficult most of the time. She supposed she still loved them, but it was moments like these which justified her holding them at arms distance.

With nothing else to do, Lucy grabbed her phone and texted Florence.

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ThatGayFromSchool is online

ThatGayFromSchool: Just got in a fight w/ my parents :/ Wyd

Floret: That's rough buddy. 

Floret: U ok?

ThatGayFromSchool: Yeah. Just rlly mad I guess. My dad just got home too, literally five minutes ago </3

Floret: Yikes

Floret: Y r they mad @ you?

ThatGayFromSchool: Something about being ungrateful about stuff again

ThatGayFromSchool: Also the fact that I know nothing abt Tagalog even tho I haven't rlly been taught that well. They even said "forget Japanese" even tho it was pretty much the first language I learned

Floret: U should leave

ThatGayFromSchool: ???

Floret: Leave home

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Lucy set her phone down and started at the last message that Florence had sent. She couldn't just leave, could she? And if she could before, she certainly couldn't now. Not with a band of criminals on her tail. 

 Not to mention her parents had always made her feel like she wouldn't survive in the real world without them, providing even more stress about her senior year of high school. 

Lucy kept looking at the text, trying to think. Eventually she came up with a response, but it didn't feel like enough. 

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ThatGayFromSchol: I can't

Floret: Sry I guess not. Sorry about bringing it up, your parents are just messed up sometimes.

ThatGayFromSchool: Ik. But I can't leave now more than ever

Floret: Ik, sorry

Floret: Just be careful around them ok?

ThatGayFromSchool: Thanks Flo 

ThatGayFromSchool: C u tmrw, goodnight.

Floret: Goodnight <3

-----------------------

Lucy stared at the heart she sent for a moment before turning her phone off and just staring at the ceiling for a bit until her mom called her for dinner.

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After a week of tense dinners with her parents, Lucy needed a break, and a distraction. So when the weekend finally rolled around, the first thing she did was hop on her bike and ride the length of the neighbourhood. 

The very edge of the area ended in the relatively steep hill going down to the bridge across the river. Across the river lay the skyline, and with it the entire downtown area of Sun Oak. Lucy technically wasn't supposed to leave the neighbourhood, but it was a cool, breezy late afternoon, and the sun was dipping below the skyline. Now or never. 

Lucy chose now.

She raced down the side of the road, intense wind causing her eyes to water. Lucy felt her bun loosen and eventually completely fall apart. It was okay though, she had another hair tie. Besides, the feeling of the wind whipping her hair was amazing. 

The ground levelled out as Lucy zoomed onto the bridge. She looked down at the water flowing below her as she sped across the gap. She looked up and saw the skyline towering above her, the sun shining in her eyes. The bridge ended and Lucy raced onto the street as cars zoomed past her. She sped onto the sidewalk, the momentum from the hill had carried all the way to this point, but now she had to pedal for herself. 

Downtown was much louder than the suburbs, but not only was Lucy used to loud noises because of high school, she had also grown up in Tokyo.

The Main Street was loud and chaotic, but there were multiple streets that branched off of it that were much less hectic. It was one of these streets that Lucy turned onto. It was lined with little shops that sold all sorts of things. From toys to crystals to tea. Lucy didn't have any money on her, but she still peered into the shop windows to see what they had to offer. Most of the shops were either open of just beginning to close up, it was almost 5:00pm after all. There was only one shop that actually looked closed, and it caught Lucy's eye.

The lights were turned off, and everything inside looked dusty. The shelves were filled with random little trinkets and pictures, almost like someone took some random stuff from a basement and put it on their shelves. The only set of shelves that were consistent with what was on them was a large bookshelf taking up part of the back wall. Lucy stared into the window before turning away to see some one she didn't expect.

"Jade!" Lucy exclaimed, nearly falling off her bike. "What are you um, doing here?"

The blue and green eyed girl blinked. "Oh, I was just uh, shopping! Yeah..." She trailed off, looking at the ground. 

"Uh, thanks for covering for Sue and Grace the other day." Lucy added awkwardly. 

"No problem. Mr. Foyer is the worst."

The two just stood there for a few moments before Jade just kanda waved and walked away, leaving Lucy alone. She looked back in the direction of her neighbourhood, and knew that she wasn't ready to go back yet. That was when she spotted the tall apartment complexes nearby, and got an idea.

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The good thing about knowing aerial silks was that one could climb. And that's was Lucy did. There was an old apartment complex that Trinity had supposedly lived in before she'd met Lucy. She'd showed it to her before, and had even brought her up to the roof. 

Lucy just hoped she would remember the way without her friend.

There were some old crates filled with random junk piled against the side of the building. Lucy wasn't the strongest, but she managed to pile up enough of them to be able to barely reach the fire escape ladder. She climb all the way to the top of the building, losing count of how many stories there were. 

When Lucy got to the top, who knows how many stories later, her legs were exhausted, but she was greeted with a beautiful view of the skyline, and the city it shadowed. When she turned around there was a spectacular view of the upper side of the valley where Sun Oak was built. 

There was a steep drop into the river on the other bank, as opposed to the side that Lucy was on, where it was just a gentle drop to the river. Lucy even knew some people who's houses were incredibly close to what most citizens of the city called "The Drop Zone".

On all sides the view was picturesque, and Lucy realized it was one of the few moments she'd had to truly breathe all year.

A/N:Yeah, Lucy's parents don't exactly have a very healthy relationship with their kid :/. Also I kept having to double check w/ my Filipino mother about the spelling of the passage at the beginning  (Btw, Anak ko is "my child" in Tagalog). Also incase you haven't figured it out I have zero schedule/plan for which character gets the narrative. Anyways, have a nice day/evening/night!

-Brooke