Apotheosis 1.1

I looked up. My eyes were wet.

So many stars. The universe so vast.

Then, everything was gone. No stars, no field. I tried to move, to prepare for conflict, but I couldn't. Everything was dark. My breath quickened in the darkness, my mind searching for something to latch on to.

I am standing on a crystal that glows dimly in the endless black. I am alone. Then I am not.

There is another woman, standing across from me. She has long flowing black hair, a missing arm, a mouth too wide for her face, and she's the same height as me. The same height as I was. She is… me, but not me. I don't know what to do. Is fighting correct? Is conflict correct? It's familiar, it feels good, feels safe. Not-me opens her mouth.

I wait.

She makes no noise.

She tries again, "H… Hel…" she struggles and yet somehow I understand. She is greeting me. I don't know what to do.

"Ta... Tayl…" Not-me tries again. She is… saying my name?

I try and speak, but I can't. I still can't. Only garbled noises come out of my mouth. Not-me tries again, "Hel... Hello Tay… Taylor." The corners of her lips turn up. Does that mean she's going to attack me? I tense up, preparing to fight back.

"Hello Taylor," she says triumphantly

Everything becomes agonizingly clear. All my identities, Skitter, Weaver, Khepri. All the atrocities I'd committed. My friends. I can remember them now, remember their names. I'd… I'd cut Aisha when she came near me. I hadn't recognized my best friend as I walked through the portal that Glastig Uaine had made for me. Fighting Behemoth, Killing Alexandria, Killing Purity's child. I had made so many mistakes. Even before I became Khepri, I was no longer the person I wanted to be. Still, I couldn't tell where things went so wrong. When it no longer became worth it.

I screamed.

"Why? Why are you showing me all this? Who are you?" I cried out, head in my hands.

Not-me walked slowly over to me. I didn't attack her, I understood, she wasn't a danger, didn't intend to harm me. How did I know? She put her finger on my forehead.

"Puh… Partner," she manages, but I understand. She's similar enough to me that I understand what she means. She's my passenger. Queen Administrator, as Glastig Uaine had called her. She's standing before me. "Why?"

My Passenger points to herself then point to the crystalline floor "Us," she says simply. I don't understand, something about the floor. Something about us. I don't have enough context.

"Why did you bring me here?" I ask her.

The crystalline floor underneath me fractures. It is utterly silent as a smooth fissure divides me and my passenger. She looks down sadly, "End." she says, her voice sounding more muted as if I was listening to it from far away, or through a tube.

I see. This is goodbye. "Goodbye Passenger," I say, if this is my end, I should at least thank her for helping me against Scion. Instead of turning away, looking for another host like I expected her to, she steps out, right by the edge and holds out her hand. It's just close enough for me to reach. Her voice, though, sounds like it's coming from so much further away, to the point where it's getting harder to make out what she's saying. "Bu- Oppo- -unity," she says.

I can't make out her words, but I can understand her sentiment well enough. She wants to try and give me a second chance. Contessa said I could recover from this, go back to who I was. Is that who I want to be? The Taylor who lived solely to fight Zion? I don't think I can go further back than that. The Taylor who wanted so badly to be a hero is dead, and the Taylor who just wanted her friend back is even more dead. Do I deserve this second chance?

No. No, I didn't. There were many people out there who deserved this second chance more than I did. They weren't the ones who had it offered to them, though. Only I was offered this, at least as far as I knew. I guess it kept coming back to practicality. I shouldn't let myself slip, fall back into old habits. I can't be the Taylor who I was before. I resolve myself. If I'm going to have a second chance, I'm going to do things better. Pay less attention to some people. Pay attention to the people important to me. Lisa, Dad. I'll find you. I promise.

I reach out to my passenger and take her hand. She gives me her brightest smile yet.

Light.

There is so much light, all around me. I try and raise my hands to shield my eyes, but my passenger has a death grip on my right hand. When I can see again, the floor has mended itself, and the void is no longer empty. There are so many blinking lights surrounding us, like stars in the night sky. I feel our connection to them. Instinctively, I recognize them, the powers, no, the passengers of some of the people I'd controlled along with other passengers I didn't recognize, didn't remember.

Was this my second chance? Was I doomed to control anyone who came near me? I tried to pull back from my passenger's grip. I didn't want this. I wanted anything but this. Her grip on me remained firm, inviolable. "Let me go! Stop!" I screamed at her. She gave me a smile that looked like it should have been reassuring, but it just made me more worried. Then, she hugged me. I was so surprised by the physical intimacy that I forgot to resist her. I felt as the connection between us and so many other passengers grew stronger. The lights in the void growing brighter as I felt them. Instinctively I knew some of them. Gavel's power, in the grasp of another, Glastig Uaine. String Theory's power, adrift, searching for another host after its last one. Then, the one that made me the saddest of all. I'd hoped he had survived somehow, that it would only be a matter of finding him in the ruins. Brian's passenger pulsed softly in the void as if to mourn him with me.

I don't know how long I spent like that submerging myself in all the powers that surrounded me, surrounded my passenger and me. Everything must come to an end though, and this ending was punctuated with gunshots. Two of them, to be precise. Time seemed to slow, no time did slow, or perhaps I sped up. I turned to see Contessa her face neutral as she fired at me, the bullets floating still in the air. I felt a spike of rage flow through me at how nonchalant she was about ending me. It faded quickly when I remembered that I'd asked for this, that I'd begged her to make it all end, even as my own body prevented me from pleading in any coherent way.

Time unfroze, and I flinched. The bullets made a pinging noise as they bounced off of a golden shield that sprung forth in front of me. I floated up into the air. Some of my hair passed in front of my face, it was highlighted in a bright golden halo. I held my hand up to my face. They were the same. I didn't understand.

'Is this you, passenger?' I questioned inside my head.

Nothing. Not unsurprising, even when we had been almost the same person, we hadn't communicated through words. It seemed that my time to talk to my passenger had ended. Contessa looked at me with a mix of shock and horror on her face. I didn't understand what was happening. I needed to see.

There was a faint pressure in the back of my head, and so many viewpoints opened up around me. I saw myself from every perspective, in so many different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared, Ultraviolet, only in red and violet hues, heat vision, magnetic fields, vibrations. Perhaps to some, the sudden influx of perspectives would be confusing, but I was used to it, sorting them out into what I needed and what I didn't. I saw myself from a third person perspective, just behind Contessa's shoulder. I was floating slightly in the air, my broken form lit up with a familiar glowing golden light as my hair flowed around me. I was holding my one good hand in front of my face, looking at it curiously.

The light that surrounded me. I couldn't forget it, no one who had been there could. It was that same light Zion had used as he obliterated billions of lives, destroyed thousands of worlds, and now it was mine.

'Passenger, what have you done?'

Contessa is frozen in front of me, making no move to escape. For just a moment, I contemplate killing her. I had seen her working with Teacher, doing things I suspected weren't heroic or moral in the slightest. The consideration lasted only for a moment as our most recent conversation came to mind. She wanted to spend more time as herself, be a person outside of her power. If I got a second chance, who was I to deny Contessa hers?

No, that wasn't what I wanted. What did I want?

"Lisa, Dad. I'll find you. I promise."

I recall my own words, I wanted to find them, to know where they were. Were they doing alright?

There was a slight pain in the back of my head as I felt a hundred powers bubble up, offering me a hundred different ways to find them, to know what they were up to. Dad was with some others, picking through rubble somewhere, looking for survivors, it had been so long since I'd seen him. Lisa was with the rest of the Undersiders, planning a strike against Teacher. I was relieved to see that Aisha seemed unfazed by what had happened, although she always was good at bottling up her uncertainties. I want to go to them, but who should I go to? What should I do next?

Thousands of passengers answer, each one presenting a different solution, a different answer, a different path forward. My head feels like it's splitting open, I feel a warm trickle flow over my lip. My body can't handle all this power. I reach for a power to heal me, preserve me.

The answers are all wrong. Regeneration that would adapt to the damage, slowly turning me into some kind of monster, a power to create an independent clone of myself for each of my powers, something to re-create my body exactly five seconds after each time it died. I needed something better... and there it was. The option to offload my own mind onto the million powers I was now connected to, to give up my humanity, become like Zion. I stood, paralyzed even as I could feel my body breaking down under the stress. Is this what I wanted?

No.

I had already been the monster once and I didn't want to do it again. I wanted to do better, to be worthy of this chance I had been offered. I rejected that option. I wouldn't be the second coming of Zion. I would be… something else.

Contessa is attempting to speak to me, but I can't hear her. I don't want to hear her, I need to be somewhere else. I reach for a power very familiar to me, even if it fills me with disgust, even if someone else is currently trying to hold onto it. The Faerie Queen can keep her Doormaker, I just need to borrow him for a little bit. For just a moment, I consider going to Lisa, to the Undersiders. They might be able to protect me as I recover, but I've already troubled them enough with my burdens. I can't put my own evil on them, force them to fight off the hordes that want me dead. I open a door to an uninhabited Earth and collapse there. I tug on the regeneration power, Crawler's, I realize, just now recognizing it and use it along with another, the one that Zion used to make his human form, the counterpart to Oliver's passenger, one of the few that survived his death. I can feel myself starting to regenerate, but the going is slow, too slow to keep up with the growing demands of my passenger. I feel consciousness slowly slip away, recognizing that I've been through something like this before, back when I first triggered all those years ago.

'You never learn, do you passenger?'

On a whim, I check for one power, in particular, Zion's unrestricted version of the Contessa's power.

It's dead, I can feel the space where it used to be.

Fitting.

AN:

Hey, this is MonkPenguin, you might know me from some of my quests over on SV, and this is my try at writing a fic. Yes, the first part is a direct quote from Speck 30.7. This fic is loosely inspired by Zenith by Ryuugi. If the title of the fic doesn't make it clear what the premise is, it should be by the end of this chapter.

Anyway, I'm writing this because I looked around and couldn't find anything similar other than Zenith, which seems like it's not going to be continued, at least probably not while Arana is still going, thus I decided to do it myself.

I really wanted the first scene to be a really trippy sequence, and I think I did a decent job of it.