Disclaimer-This fanfic is based off on the setting "Worm," which belongs to the impressively talented wildbow, and which may be found at the site parahumans. wordpress. com. All intellectual rights to this setting and characters belong to wildbow.
Author's Note: This fanfiction is the culmination of several different factors. The first is the sudden appearance, quite recently, of several well-written (and several not-as-well-written) fanworks centering in the Worm setting. The second is my reading of several of these fanworks, and coming to the same conclusion-almost to a fault, they center upon Taylor Hebert, the protagonist of Worm, and in the majority they give her (previously an underdog) access to powers which are outside of the context of the setting. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it isn't really my scene, and the fact that I could find hardly any fanfiction set in my favorite universe which was not an Exalted crossover attracted my ire. I therefore declared my intent to combat the growing tide of Exalted fanfiction-singlehandedly if necessary-by writing fanfiction of a type more interesting to me, that of character studies and romance fanfiction. I am preceded in this attempt by the most excellent Exeon130, who has written a pair of slashfics posted in the general thread on spacebattles.
December 3rd, 1986.
Detroit, Michigan
It was altogether too cold for this, Harbinger decided, shifting his shoulders to dislodge some of the snow. He had been perched on a rooftop in the snow for the past two hours, not permitted to leave, forced to observe the building across the street, a large, brick apartment building since abandoned by the city. Nobody had entered or left for two hours, and he predicted that this would hold true for the rest of the night, given that the city was in the midst of a snowstorm, the power lines were intact, and that he had glimpsed both a working heater and a refrigerator within. Meanwhile, Harbinger's costume, though insulated, wasn't enough to protect him from the cold.
Placing him on a stakeout was a waste of his powers. Certainly, he could do it; the broad scope of Harbinger's power let him easily model what each of the inhabitants was doing, even though he could only catch brief glimpses to the window. But there were others that were just as suited. Screamer could have recorded every bit of sound in the building from the comfort of a well-heated room. Breed could have sent his spawn and then had them return to report regularly. Crimson was immune to the effects of cold, where Harbinger calculated that there was a small but worrying chance that this could permanently damage his physical capabilities through frostbite.
The only conclusion was that King was playing another mindgame. He'd ceased his more physical efforts after the first few months, concluding, apparently, that Harbinger wouldn't be broken that way. Now he was trying psychological warfare, wearing Harbinger down until the leader of the Nine could reshape him as he wanted. Harbinger wasn't sure why, but he also wasn't about to let King have his way. He could endure a little cold.
There was a crunching sound behind him, the sound of shoes on snow. Harbinger heard the sound, and without his consent his power took it, compared it to the thickness of the snow and previous experiences with similar sounds, and returned a result. Harbinger didn't turn around as another teenager flopped down beside him in the snow, his loose-fitting, ragged shirt falling around him, the snow getting in his unkempt, dark hair.
"King says that Breed wants to make a few more of his freaks for this one, so it'll be a while," the other teenager told Harbinger, his voice muffled from his face being buried in the snow. "Says you can't come back in."
Harbinger turned to the other, taking him in. He barely reacted to the statement-it was what he'd expected of King.
"Did he order you to accompany me?" Harbinger asked.
"Nah. But I hate you less than I hate everyone else." He turned his head on its side, looking at Harbinger with one eye.
"Thank you for the company, then." Harbinger frowned behind his mask as his gaze went to the other's hands, the left one covered in bandages and recent blood, which was seeping through and dotting the snow. "You're injured."
"Power drill, this time. He went through three of the hostages before he realized I switched with one of 'em yesterday." A smirk curled the visible half of the boy's face.
"That was foolish," Harbinger noted, not judging or condemning.
"Yeah, but I'm not like you. Can't bide my time or give in." He spat the last two words, then made a face. "Ew, dirty snow in my mouth." He spat out a few times, rising to his knees.
"At least it isn't your dominant hand," Harbinger offered. He wasn't the best at sympathy, but he could imitate it.
"Yeah, I guess." The other boy planted his uninjured hand behind him and leaned back. "We're doing it soon, right?"
Harbinger frowned a moment, calculating. Yes, Screamer would be asleep now, or too occupied with the novel she'd picked out at their last stop. "Two more cities, I think." King had let Harbinger plan their itinerary, confident, it seemed, that he had been sufficiently broken. That was one of many foolish mistakes. "Once we've left Jackson. It's the best time."
"It's when he'll be expecting it."
Harbinger looked at the other boy's eyes, trying to discern if that had been resignation or something else. "Jacob…"
"We'll do it before. When we're still in the city," Jacob decided. "Won't see that coming."
"It will be harder. His power will be stronger."
"Don't care. We just need to hit him enough and he'll run out, right? Everyone but us is expendable anyway."
Harbinger nodded after a brief moment of hesitation. He would need Jacob to make this work, after all, and he didn't want the other boy to die. And he could adjust the plan to work almost as well at that time. As he nodded, Jacob leaned forward, reached out and seized his mask by the fangs that sprouted from its mouth. Harbinger could have avoided it, but chose not to.
Jacob tugged Harbinger's mask up, getting it caught in the hood of his costume and exposing the lower half of his face to the cold, then pressed a kiss to Harbinger's lips.
Harbinger let it happen. He wasn't one to enjoy physical pleasures normally, finding meaning primarily in using his power, but this was…enjoyable.
If pressed, Harbinger would blame chemistry for that. His power gave him the ability to calculate and understand. King's teachings had given him the ability to step back emotionally, to use his power to the fullest extent in combat. But some part of his brain that wasn't under his direct control thought that this seemed right, and flooded his mind with pleasure-producing chemistry. It was annoying.
On occasion, he regretted that his power worked even at moments like these, modeling and analyzing the actions of others. He knew that Jacob was doing this primarily to re-establish some semblance of control over him, to assert to himself that he could still manipulate Harbinger into helping him kill King by maintaining an emotional tie. It was the reason that he had made the advances he had, using any means that he could to compensate for his weaker, less versatile power. Whether Jacob possessed any true affection for him, Harbinger was uncertain. His model of Jacob was still very incomplete.
After a moment, Jacob broke the kiss. Harbinger pulled his mask down, and they stared at one another for a moment, Harbinger silent save for elevated breathing caused by the additional endorphins, Jacob shivering slightly from the cold.
Jacob broke the silence first. "Want to get out of here?"
Harbinger shook his head. "I can't abandon my post. One of us needs to avoid being disciplined, if we're going to do it this soon."
"That's not what I meant. Let's get this done, then head back. Finish the job for them. He'll like that, right? And it'll be some fun."
Harbinger frowned, mentally consulting his model of King. If they appealed to his sense of superiority, framing it as loyal servants exceeding orders instead of insubordination… "He never specifically ordered me not to, no."
Jacob smirked. Harbinger drew a pair of throwing knives from his belt, then tossed them at the apartment building almost lazily, the vectors, angles, and analysis unfolding in his mind in an instant, built up after two hours of observation. Jacob turned to look, watching as the first knife struck just the right point on the window to shatter it, paving the way for the second to float through the falling glass and catch one of the occupants in the throat before she could react.
"The power lines," Harbinger murmured to him, and Jacob drew his own knife in his uninjured hand, grinning, before making a few slashes in the direction of the thick black cables. His power extended the cutting edge of the knife, severing cables and leaving them unanchored, flapping in the breeze. The lights in the apartment building went out.
Harbinger went from a standing start next to Jacob to a leap, three stories above the ground onto the recently plowed street. He adjusted his position as he fell, landing uninjured and rolling to his feet.
In the apartment building, their targets would be reacting, recovering, or, in the case of one, attacking.
Harbinger drew another knife and made a slashing motion at the broken window. Jacob saw him and used his power on the knife halfway through, and the cut sliced into the side of the burly man in plainclothes that appeared in it, jumping outwards. The man faltered in mid-air as a hole opened up in his gut, falling and landing heavily two feet from the approaching Harbinger instead of on his feet as he had intended. Harbinger planted his knife in the man's throat and continued on without stopping, reaching the side of the building and digging his hands into the brick wall, finding his grip before he reached out with his power.
He scaled the building in moments, leaping through the window into the darkened apartment building. There were three capes inside, two in brightly-colored costumes that had been pieced together from bits and pieces of normal clothing, one in plainclothes. That would be all of them, then.
Harbinger stepped to the left as the first of the costumed capes appeared to flicker, briefly in two places at once as her second self materialized beside Harbinger before throwing an undirected punch that missed by a narrow margin. Harbinger tossed another knife at her other form, letting her see it coming. The cape's flickering lips spread in a grin. She thought that so long as she was in two places at once she was invulnerable.
Jacob cut the throat of the cape's second self from across the street at the same instant that Harbinger's knife pierced the eye of the first. The two bodies flickered even more for a moment before resolving into one corpse to Harbinger's left, its throat cut and a knife jabbed into its skull. The entire altercation had taken less than a second.
Harbinger paused for effect, staring silently the two remaining capes. They stared at his fanged mask with its glowing, demonic eyes, shrouded in the darkness of the powerless lights, and each backed up a step. Yes, they knew who he was.
The remaining costumed cape used his power, and every piece of metal within seventeen feet was abruptly pulled towards a singular point above his head. Harbinger released his belt moments before it happened, and it, along with his remaining knives, flew into the small ball of metal. Without pausing, Harbinger reached out and gripped a nearby chair, planting his foot against a leg, holding it with his other hand, and pulling. The leg came loose with a cracking sound, and Harbinger spun it idly in one hand as he turned to face the other two capes.
A moment of wordless communication passed between them, and the one with the magnetic powers seized the ball of metal in both hands before it shot upwards, carrying him through the roof in a shower of plaster. Harbinger didn't bother pursuing. Jacob would take care of him.
The other, her body glowing in the darkness with an aura of green fire that extended three centimeters from her skin, charged Harbinger. He evaded the effect by four centimeters, striking at her legs with the chair leg and causing her to stumble in front of the shattered window. Jacob opened her throat before she could do anything else.
Pausing for a moment to scan the room and confirm that all of the heroes were dead, Harbinger departed through the window. Outside, he could see from the trail of blood sprinkled on the snow where the last hero had crash-landed, on the same rooftop that they had been observing the building from. He scaled the building rapidly, and as he did so, he heard Jacob's voice.
"…Abandoning them? Not the most heroic act. She didn't stand a chance against Harbinger alone, and it was all for nothing in the end, wasn't it?"
Harbinger made his way up the roof. Jacob caught his eye and nodded, grinning. He was kneeling over the body of the last cape, who was bleeding badly from a pair of cuts on his wrists, his blood staining the snow. Metal objects were strewn across the rooftop.
"See, there he is now," Jacob continued without missing a beat. "That's it. Your life-their lives-undone in less than a minute. And we're not even breathing hard. How does that feel?"
The cape gasped something indistinct. Harbinger ignored it as he approached Jacob, bending to pick up his belt from the wreckage. "We should leave. The body in the street will be noticed eventually."
Jacob looked up at him, looking like a child that had just had a favorite toy taken away, and Harbinger briefly found himself calculating the vectors and angles of attack that he could use before the hostility was suppressed. "Fine." He stood, slicing at the dying cape without looking. His slash missed, or perhaps he had missed on purpose, carving a line of blood across the cape's face instead of cutting his throat.
Harbinger approached the body, regarding the dying hero, and stabbed him in the throat, finishing Jacob's job for him. The hero twitched a moment before stilling, and the pungent scent of a newly-made corpse filled Harbinger's nostrils.
Wasteful, Harbinger thought absently. It was an odd thought, but he'd had many of them lately. When he was in battle, using his power to analyze and control the flow of combat, he felt alive, like he was doing what he was meant to do, but afterwards there was always that strange feeling. Not regret, an emotion that he was all too familiar with, but something else, something like exhaustion. Weariness. A feeling of loss, almost.
Jacob tapped him on the shoulder, and Harbinger started.
"Hey, you're the one that said we should leave soon." Jacob was grinning wildly. He had the same reaction to combat as Harbinger did, but none of the conflict at the aftermath.
"Yes, of course," Harbinger murmured. He brought his hand up to his face and loosened his mask, still staring at the corpse. Then he turned to Jacob, placed his palm on the back of the other's head, and brought his lips to his.
It was the same feeling, Harbinger realized, analyzing it with his power, as how he felt in combat. An uncontrolled sort of pleasure, something that came from him but was not under his control. Being with Jacob was much the same as living in battle, and even more dangerous.
It wasn't sustainable, Harbinger realized. Neither of his vices were. Without control over his love of battle, he would one day be killed in combat. Without control in his relationship with Jacob, the end would be much the same.
When he broke the kiss, Jacob was grinning even wider than before. "We can kill him together," he said, breathlessly, "and then it'll be just us. You and me and whoever else tags along, and the rest of the world. Every waking moment."
"Yes," Harbinger agreed, and when Jacob set off for their temporary headquarters at a trot, he followed, stepping over the corpse of the murdered hero and burying his doubts for another time.