PE class had ended ten minutes ago, and all Taylor could think was, an hour isn't long enough for a free period.
The girl's locker room at Winslow High School was an absolute nightmare of uncleanliness, an affront deep enough to encroach on the back of her mind even through the bathroom stall she had previously been hiding in. Tiled grey flooring covered with the grease of neglect, damp and blue school-issued towels leaching with pale sweat. Once-white walls mildewing with a forlorn sort of dereliction, air dappled with the stink of embarrassment and exposure. There wasn't much worse than being bone-tired, stuck in a room with people who hated you just because it was easy.
Her foot skidded across an abandoned sock on the ground, dragging out a lonely squeak of grime. It wasn't as if the owner would come back for it, or that anyone else was going to wear it. It was a dead sock in the making, soaking in the runoff of the shower stalls.
Nasty. Taylor felt a surge of sudden pity for the garment, which was utterly ridiculous, and she steeled her to peel it off of her foot, keeping an eye on the clock across from the island of lockers which was in the center of the room. The PE teacher, Mr. Rawls, didn't like that she was loitering in the changing room instead of washing up with everyone else. But seeing as she didn't have class right now, it seemed that he was still looking the other way.
Not that he was going to do anything more than give her breathing room. She snorted with faint disgust, trying not to choke on the stench of something that might have been chlorine, once upon a time.
Out of the bathroom, past the lockers, past the sinks and water fountain, past the mirrors, into the showers.
Some people would question the necessity of having to shower alone, but it wasn't as if she didn't get enough crap to deal with, just from her own bitter thoughts. She didn't need her bullies in there with her, picking her apart with cutting barbs and careful taunts, when she could dissect herself just fine.
Flat chest, flabby stomach-? Stupid. Years of hormones and it got her nothing to show for it. It was easy to believe that the hormones just weren't working, but no, they were working just fine. The point of failure was that her genes weren't doing anything for her. And now, if anything had changed, it had changed because she'd been locked into a box with garbage and left to marinate.
One of a dozen shower-heads turned on with the shnckt of a switch and the rush of water through pipes, spraying across the concrete (and only mostly clean) walls. A sound like rain, echoing around a too-large room until it washed itself out. With her clothes already forgotten, left in the corner, Taylor dunked herself into the water.
It was too cold to relax in, but also too warm to jolt her into awareness. She pulled a face, her eyes already screwed shut to avoid being splashed by the shower (to avoid having to look at herself). Really, she just needed to scrub away the sweat left over from class, which clung to her skin and pores just like her heart continued to jackhammer in her empty ribcage. But she lingered under the stream.
PE had ended fifteen minutes ago, and all Taylor could think about was how much she hated this. All of this. It had been a good day, even. Sophia had still backed way off, probably for whatever inscrutable reason drove her to be a bitch. It had been an easy day.
But apparently she was still such a wimp that even easy days were too hard for her. Ugh. She squeezed a bit of water out of her long, dark hair.
She was loitering. She knew it. She couldn't do it forever. So she turned the water back off and turned to towel off, to put her clothes on and hightail it out of the filth-
"Honestly, I can't believe that they let a freak like you in here."
And Emma's face loomed out of the slick mist. Taylor's heart sank down, down, down, past her feet and into the grout of the flooring.
Click!
Emma held her phone in her off-hand, poised to network. She was taking pictures, of course. Documenting Taylor's aberration, sterilizing it down to an artefact for humiliation. Taylor moved to cover herself up, half-loopy from the shock. But it was probably too late anyways.
"But hey, at least you had the common decency to wait until all of the real girls were gone, huh? Maybe you're not a completely lost cause."
Taylor wasn't even listening. She thought she was angry. It was painfully hard to tell. Emma had a way of turning banal evil into fresh pain. Picking at scabs and then pushing hooks into the exposed wounds.
"Delete those pictures," Taylor said. The words fell out of her mouth without her even thinking about it.
"Who am I kidding?" Emma said, as if Taylor had herself said nothing. As if Taylor wasn't even in the room. Or perhaps as if she was less important than cockroaches under her shoes. Not worthy of being considered. "This is probably the first time you've tried to clean up since you went played in the trash. And we both know that it's going to take a lot more than a little bit of water to fix your stench."
Flesh knotting, then spindling, nucleating, insinuating-
There were pinpricks, digging tunnels through muscle. It was spiders, this time, Taylor thought.
"Delete them," Taylor said. Still covering herself. She was on the verge of throwing up.
"Or what? " Emma asked, her voice gleaming with sadistic glee.
Taylor was silent. Or what.
"Yeah, that's about what I thought." Emma clucked her tongue. "I'd like to see you-"
Taylor lunged, grabbing madly, more for any kind of dignity than for the physical phone. She tripped, of course, because she was barefoot in the wet shower. Her face hit the floor, and blood ran down her skin like melting pennies.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Emma laughed, not quite in time with the imitated shutter-clicks that snapped out from her phone. She sounded like a hyena, and it was like a slap in the face. Once upon a time, Taylor wouldn't have thought it possible for a person to dishonor their own memory, but the only person more insulted than Taylor by what Emma did was perhaps the ghost of who Emma used to be.
But like a kiss, the ghost of that younger Emma was something that didn't exist anymore. It was a bit sad and hopelessly to fixate on it. Like anthropomorphizing a sock.
Fucking gross. What was she supposed to do? She could feel chitin frothing, cells walling up and hatching anew.
"Why are you doing this?" Taylor asked.
"Because you deserve it?" Emma giggled, but it was just as fake as both of them. "You know, I'm sure we've gone over this before… I guess you're just too slow on the uptake. A faggot and a retard."
"You didn't use to believe that," Taylor said, drawing things out from her place. Delaying on old notes of pain for a few moments, before Emma invented a fresh melody. "What changed your mind?"
"I grew up."
Taylor laughed. She could taste her own blood. "And look at what you've grown into."
Emma froze. "Excuse me?"
"If growing up is all it takes to leave someone behind, it seems to me that you're going to die all alone, huh?"
Emma hissed, drawn out with the edge of surprise, and then she kicked Taylor in the ribs. That was unusual, actually; it was the kind of thing that Sophia was supposed to do. But escalation could change patterns, apparently.
"You're different from the rest, Taylor," Emma spat. "You're pretty uniquely pathetic. You know it."
"And isn't that convenient for you-!?"
Emma kicked her again. At this point, it didn't even hurt. Too much endoskeleton, although Emma didn't notice.
"Shut up, Taylor."
"What are you going to do?" Taylor asked. "With the pictures?"
"What the fuck do you think?"
Taylor was silent.
"Nothing to say? That's a relief, honestly; no-one wants to hear your insipid falsetto."
Taylor said nothing.
"I figured I could round all this out with a bit of last-minute blackmail, don't you think? I mean, I've been holding the threat of outing you over your head, but wow, nudes really drive the point home, huh?"
The really pathetic part was that for a moment, Taylor actually considered going along with it. She stopped trying to get up, and Emma's smugness was palpable. "What do you want me to do?"
Emma explained, and Taylor considered it. For a moment.
And then she broke, and spiders started breaking through her skin, born from lesions that were teratoma that were eggs.
Emma didn't even notice that, because Taylor swept her arm through Emma's legs. She hit the ground, taking the impact to her ass and her shoulders, and she stared agog at Taylor as if she couldn't dare to imagine that Taylor was doing something, anything at all.
Her phone lay under the rain of the showerhead.
"No," Taylor said. Why even bother rooting her objection in dignity when she had none left?
Emma blinked, collecting herself, and then she visibly snarled. "You're going to get in so much trouble, you realize. Destroying my property and assaulting me, naked in the girl's locker room? Do you even realize what you look like?"
Taylor considered this, too, for a few seconds. Maybe she was just had no more fucks to give. But if she was already going to get in trouble...
"In for a penny," she said. She was so tired. She wished that she didn't feel anything for Emma anymore, but she did feel something. She felt everything. It mixed together like oil and water, a hatelove left to fester in anguish and betrayal and the abstract pity a person could feel for broken glassware.
Both of them knew that Emma couldn't do this forever; school didn't go on ad infinitum. And then Emma would live without tormenting Taylor for kicks, and she might become an adjusted and functional human being. But character development and personal growth was always something to be procrastinated.
Taylor staggered to her feet, shutting the shower off. Emma tried to stand, too; the key word being 'tried'. Taylor shoved her back down.
"You-"
And then Taylor dragged Emma out of the showers, to where it might be drier. And Emma lashed out, before Taylor threw Emma bodily to the ground with a dull thud. She gasped for breath, her chest empty as helium, and she stared up at Taylor, her eyes dilating like apricot flowers in bloom.
(It would be so nice to pretend that it wasn't hatelove.)
"What are you doing?" Emma asked.
"What the fuck do you think?" Taylor replied. Emma paled, and Taylor didn't care much. "No worse than you wanted me to do for you, or have ever accused me of."
"Let go of me, you fucking pervert-!" Emma yelled. Not even particularly loudly, of course. Plausible deniability all of the way down.
Taylor's hands began to drool with silk, and she resisted the urge to 'let go' of Emma by gluing her to the wall, no matter how much she probably deserved it. Better to tie Emma up instead. Taylor had been a boy scout, once. Gross. But she knew how to tie a good knot, even without using her powers to cheat.
"You keep running your mouth," Taylor hissed, her voice fractured by the dragonfly wings in her lungs. "You're too irresponsible, you need someone to put it to a better use."
Emma stared in surprise. "You…" she trailed off. And then she started laughing. Not like a hyena, but like a woman possessed. "Oh, of course! Of course, and what are you going to do next?"
And that was about as far as Emma got before Taylor shoved her fingers into her mouth. "Maybe you didn't get the message. Stop talking."
Taylor could already feel her fine control slipping away, bone turning to carapace. Her stupid, treacherous cock was getting hard, but she didn't have to think about how wrong it was if it wasn't even human. A stinger, an ovipositor, anything at all. Fuck being human. What did that get her? She could live comfortably as a fly on the wall if she needed to.
But there was no reason to abandon everything. You couldn't kiss without human lips. Compound eyes couldn't capture the swell of Emma's breasts, not the way that Taylor wanted to see them. There was no reason to touch at all, isolated by exoskeleton.
Emma didn't taste like honey. She tasted like terror and shock, arousal and desire fired in a bitter kiln to a point of crazing. Taylor breathed from the curve of Emma's neck, pulling the other girl's hands behind her back and binding them together with the cords that spun from her palms. Tying each knot with a kiss, a touch.
"H-hey! Untie me!"
Taylor unzipped Emma's jacket. Gathered up the curve of her waist into a palm. "You don't deserve that."
"What?"
"What, what? Do you think you need to use your hands, you prissy bitch?"
She unbuttoned Emma's flannel and undid her bra with hands like spiders; she met Emma's chest with her lips, leaving hickeys on her breastbone; the other girl gasped and shuddered, shaking underneath Taylor's weight.
"Please," Emma said. "I'll be good," she said, her cheeks flushing to the color of apple-skin as soon as she said it. As if to match her eyes the size of dinner plates.
"Would you?" Taylor asked, perhaps a bit too cruelly. "I doubt it."
"I-"
She grabbed one of Emma's nipples and twisted, hard, drawing out a yelp that petered into a long moan. Emma blushed even harder, beside herself.
"Could you?" Taylor asked. "I doubt that, too."
"Because I'm bad?" Emma asked, panting a bit. Taylor watched the rise and fall of her chest.
"Because you'll be busy," Taylor replied. Emma seemed to melt, running into the cracks between the tiles of the floor and the gaps between Taylor's searching fingers. Pliable clay. Maybe she could be bent into something that wasn't unbearable. "But yes, you are bad. You're a bad girl."
Emma trembled. She shook the fog of arousal out of her head, filling up with the fizz and slosh of sass. "Are you going to punish me, then?"
Taylor slapped Emma straight across the face, hard, and Emma squeaked, the impact knocking another five miles of heat-haze into her mind and body. Her lips remained parted, an image of vulnerability.
"If you keep asking questions, you know I'm going to make it worse," Taylor said. She felt… strong. Whatever would happen, she was in control in this moment. It was intoxicating. She was drunk on it.
It felt glorious. It felt like a spell had been cast over the two of them.
"And how bad are you going to make it-?"
That was as far as Emma got before Taylor took her chin in her hand, and kissed her like they were younger again. The insides of her lips were chewed bloody, exposing the taste of sea salt.
Emma warred with something, breathing in sharply. And then she kissed back, wilted from neglect, but willing. Taylor pushed her hand down into Emma's pants, where she was damp from the floor of the showers and slippery with lust. She stroked the inside of Emma's thighs. Touching. Teasing. Emma shook, her legs splaying like they did when Taylor used to tickle her.
She broke away. "Taylor…"
"What?"
Emma was visibly struggling to string her sentences together. "Please."
"Please what? You want me to let you go?"
"No! I…"
Taylor raised an eyebrow.
"Please… f-fuck me…" Emma trailed off at the incredulous expression on Taylor's face. "It's what you want to do to me… isn't it?"
"I'm trying to hurt you," Taylor said lowly. "I should have known you were a masochist. Of course you are. You can't even let me get revenge on you, can you?"
The other girl visibly flinched, at that. Presumptuous bitch. Who was also Taylor's sister in all but blood.
...presumptuous mega-bitch.
"Fuck you. I wouldn't even use you as a cum dumpster."
Hah! As if Taylor could still ejaculate without leaning on her power to turn her spunk into insect eggs.
"Please," Emma begged.
Actually, that wasn't a completely terrible idea.
(We'd make good mothers.)
Maybe another time.
"Do you want me to use you like that? You want that? You're fucking low, Emma. You're a bully-"
Taylor pinched the inside of Emma's thigh, leaving a reddened mark behind.
"-a traitor-"
Her hands kneaded Emma's rounded breasts, squeezing hard enough to make her squeal.
"-and a whore, apparently, too. It fits. You've always been selling your looks, the perfect career model, I shouldn't be surprised you're such an absolute slut."
"I'm not a slut!" Emma cried.
"Aren't you? You're willing to take a fucking from a retarded faggot, that alone shows how low your standards are. Slut."
She took Emma's right nipple into her mouth, nibbling on it softly. From her proximity, she could hear and feel Emma's pounding heartbeat, lively and hot.
Then she bit down, hard. Not hard enough to draw blood, but Emma still screamed.
"-Jesus! You, you're the one fucking the person who made your life miserable!"
"Self-awareness doesn't change the fact that you're just a worthless slut."
Her teeth had left marks. She unbuttoned Emma's pants, leaving her directly exposed; her fingers went looking for Emma's clit and found it, rubbing circles in with firm touches.
"Wha-? Taylor- oh, oh fuck-"
"You like that?" Taylor asked. Rhetorically, of course. "Of course you do."
Emma writhed, jerking against Taylor's hands, straining against the ties around her arms. There was a surge of wetness, and Emma arched her back.
Did she just-?
"You really are a whore," Taylor said, as if she were simply remarking on the weather and not simultaneously turned on, thrilled, and disgusted. Emma's face burned with black shame.
Taylor brought her hand to her tongue. Emma's juices didn't taste like honey or apricot. They actually tasted better, because of course they did. Fucking Emma.
"I am," Emma admitted, her voice almost without inflection. She stared blankly down at the floor, periodically glancing at Taylor's exposed cock.
"Did you say something, Emma?"
Emma flinched and swallowed her pride, looking back up to Taylor's face with nervousness. "I'm just a worthless whore."
"And why are you so worthless, Emma?"
"Taylor," Emma said. "You can't mean to make me - you know why."
"I want to hear you say it," Taylor hissed. "Why not apologize while you're at it?"
Emma closed her eyes, and a tear trickled out. "I'm sorry for turning my back on you-"
Taylor could have been a bit gentler about what she did next, but she wasn't really in the mood for being gentle. With her eyes closed, Emma didn't see it coming until it was too late, as Taylor lifted her up and speared her on her hardened dick.
Emma let out a scream of shock like an animal gutted alive, slumping against Taylor and choking.
"...I'm sorry," she said, gasping for breath.
She was sopping wet, clenching madly around Taylor's cock with every twitch. An inviting heat.
"I'm sorry I stole your flute."
Taylor lifted Emma up and pushed her down again, as if Emma was just a sex toy in her lap. "Mine? It was my mother's! "
"I'm! Oh, oh fuck, I'm sorry for stealing your mother's flute!"
"And?"
"I'm sorry for making Sophia, a-and Madison, and, oh, everyyyone else bully you-"
She squirmed from head to toe, and inside, too, stroking Taylor as she thrust in and out.
"-and for the locker, and for, and for those tests I ruined, and-"
Like she was dying of thirst, she tried to bend down to suckle at Taylor's petite tits. An icon of desperation, an epitome of deprivation. Babbling in tongues.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I tried to break you, I'm sorry," she groaned. "I'm sorry that I'm sorry, I'm, fuck!"
The feeling of power was sublime. Taylor felt like she could fall out of her own skin through the feeling of butterflies in the small of her back and the tingling in her core. She felt like she was on top of the world, which was irrational and stupid, but both of them knew that she was on top of their world.
"And, nngh, what would you do to make up for it?" Taylor asked, drawing her thrusts and strokes out.
"Anything, fucking, no, I don't, I don't, I don't, I shouldn't, oh, oh god."
"Nothing? You're just going to be my stupid, worthless whore forever?"
"Isn't that-" Emma bit her lip to hold back a cry "-enough?"
"Bitch," Taylor said, but there was no heat in it. It was only lukewarm.
"I'm sorry!" she screamed. Then she screamed a bit louder, as Taylor thumbed Emma's right nipple, feeling the indentations and raw red where she'd bitten at them.
"Too sensitive?" Taylor asked, slowing down.
"Y-yeah," Emma muttered.
So Taylor yanked on Emma's other nipple instead, and made it hurt even more, because, let's face it, she still had a fair bit more bitterness to fuck out.
"Sorry, I forgot, you don't get to register complaints," Taylor said, falsely blithe. "You just have to live with what I do to you. Just like I had to live with what you did to me, you understand? I'm not quite sure that you comprehend the metaphor yet, because even if I'm a retarded faggot, you're the worthless whore."
"F-fuck you, Taylor, just, fucking, fucking fuck me!"
Tempting…
Fuck it, who was she kidding, she was going to fuck Emma's brains out anyways. She sped up her hips again, feeling Emma's thighs against her skin.
Emma finally came with a sigh and a stifled scream, clamping down around Taylor's prick hard enough to coax out Taylor's own orgasm, an anticlimax with no ejaculation and barely any euphoria. Fucking estrogen-riddled cock, you couldn't get normal sex to work right and it wasn't like there was a tech support line to ring up for troubleshooting. At least the buildup to orgasm felt great.
While Taylor was still lost in the split-second after cumming that felt like it meandered on for half an hour, Emma collapsed onto Taylor's body like plywood in a sack. Then Taylor arrived back in the real world, and she collapsed too, slowly slumping the both of them down to the ground. She probably should have dropped Emma like she really was plywood. Stupid sentimentality.
Shit. What the fuck did she do now? Uh. Uh. Cover her ass.
"If you try to tell anyone what I did, or even that I'm a parahuman, then the larvae I implanted in your womb will inject neurotoxin and start burrowing out of your body."
This was probably a lie, but Taylor wasn't actually sure. Her power had done stranger things when she wasn't paying attention to it, so was just believable enough for her to pull a serious face.
"You're fucking bluffing, Taylor, I know you don't have a freaking wasp cock."
"Do you want to bet?"
Emma looked at Taylor's shrinking penis - which maybe looked a little queer from the wrong direction - and shied away. "Fuck. It's not like I was going to tell anyone anyways."
"And I'm supposed to take you at your word?"
"Fuck you, Taylor."
"You did that already."
Emma gave Taylor a dirty look. Then she just looked guilty.
The clock kept ticking. Free period was almost over.
"If you keep your word, then why did you betray me?"
"None of your business, H- Taylor. Fuck off, I should get to class."
It was the cursory sort of 'fuck off', though, the kind you deliver when you want to be confronted but are also terrified of what a confrontation digs up.
"Seriously, Emma?"
"I'm not talking about this."
"We just fucked, and you feel like you can't talk about this-? Wait. Right, I basically just raped you. This is a bad argument."
Emma choked out a scoff even as she tried to put her clothes back on.
"Seriously, Ems, what the fuck is wrong with you?"
"Wrong with me!?" Emma's voice rose to a broken shriek. "Wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you! You should be fucking broken! You fucking said it, we fucking knew it, but you somehow had this fucking wholeness like you weren't born broken at all!"
Taylor stepped back, shocked.
"And then - fuck you! Nothing even happened to me, but I was broken, and everything had happened to you, you were born broken but you were fucking whole, you were rubbing emptiness in my face every day!"
"Emma…" Taylor cut herself off. What the fuck was she supposed to say?
Tears welled up in Emma's eyes. She raised a wrist to brush them away. "I'm a terrible person, aren't I?"
"I won't tell anyone," Taylor said thoughtlessly. Then reality caught back up to her.
Emma sniffed, zipping up her jacket. "I think you've got things mixed up there."
Did she?
"Don't worry." Emma said. "I won't tell anyone either."
Then she went to leave.
"Your phone-!?" Taylor called out.
Emma turned back, and she lingered like she was being dragged back to Taylor by a magnet. And then she shook her head.
"Dad will buy me a new one. He wouldn't care."
And then she was gone.
Taylor still wanted to hate her.