Horizon
Beta'ed and/or revised by;
Contradicting-Whispers
Pendragoon
Heather-Shadelight
My most heartfelt thanks.
— O —
TW: (Mention of) Abusive/Alcoholic parents. Bullying, physical and mental trauma. Internalized homophobia.
2009, October, that Saturday. A bus to Boston.
Taylor self consciously picked at the hem of her marine blue hoodie, ruffling and straightening it out constantly in a never-ending cycle of anxiety tinged with anticipation and a small amount of dread.
Fidgeting, she tried to calm her thoughts down, failing to not think about how much she wanted to make a good first impression on her friend, how horribly bad it could go and if maybe Sarah wasn't making a mistake, or if she would ditch her the moment she saw her, or she wouldn't recognize her and simply walked away, or if she had been playing the long game like Emm-
Breathe.
She adjusted the backpack resting on her knees once more, wincing slightly when a bruise in her arm made itself known with a dull flare of pain that had her lips pressing into a thin line in silence, even if her first instinct was to let out a sharp hiss.
Dull aches and minor pains screamed at her from all around her body, and she knew that behind her clothes she was, to put it simply, a mess.
It had started small; just little pushes in the hallways, an elbow in her way that dug into her side, someone passing too quickly and almost bowling her over, a conveniently placed foot just out of sight that almost made her fall if she hadn't arrested her fall with her forearms in time, the edged wood of a desk digging painfully into her flesh. Her arms had ached for days after that.
She couldn't tell any of this to her father, who increasingly refused her help with anything and everything; always distant, always bitter, always coming home bruised and drunk, always angry.
So she didn't.
She couldn't tell any of this to Sarah either, because she had too many issues of her own to care about hers – she knew that something had happened in those two weeks, something awful, but the mere idea of digging too much in what was essentially something she didn't belong and thus push away the only friend she had left completely terrified her to the point of near paralysis, so she didn't. She didn't dig, she didn't push, she didn't ask.
Something had happened to her friend, and she was too scared to reach out and help her. Too scared, too paranoid of fucking up, too shaken up by the experience of being completely alone, of the thought of her only friends turning their back to her at the same time.
The least she could do was be there for her if Sarah needed something, anything at all, because Taylor was completely sure that she needed her.
Too much, too much, too much.
Too much of a fucking cowar-
Breathe.
She tried to push away thoughts of school, put them out of her mind, but it was easier said than done. She still didn't know why her friend turned on her at the start of the year, and it baffled Taylor. Yes, they grew… somewhat more distant after she started talking to Sarah. With someone else to talk to she hadn't leaned so hard on Emma, she hadn't divulged all of her secrets like she had wanted at the moment, and it had seemed to bother her something fierce.
She didn't know why, then, nor did she now. Had she been so vicious, so petty all this time and she simply hadn't seen it? Was that why she almost seemed jealous each time she spoke about Sarah?
It made a certain amount of sense that she had always been this way – there had always been this glint in her eye, this edge to her – but still, there was something missing, and not knowing what, exactly, was positively driving her up the wall. It was more curiosity and need to know than any desire to get back to how things were. She had no wish to be stabbed in the back again, and any and all trust Emma had built over the years may as well be a pile of ash scattered to the winds.
Taylor closed her eyes, pressing her heated forehead to the cool crystal of the bus, the rumbling of the engine soothing and making the budding headache worse at the same time. It was a strange dichotomy, but one she enjoyed nonetheless. It helped calm her thoughts, not think about her impending meetup and possibly irreparable fuck ups or about school and how it was getting harder by the day to put a foot inside that building again.
She knew that Mom wouldn't have been happy about her for even thinking and much less suggesting that she dropped out, but the school year had barely started almost a month ago and she was so very close to completely done with it that it was getting harder and harder to care, as much as that thought hurt. Going to school had been one of the things that reminded her of Mom, one of the last things she could do to have a connection to the woman that she had been – a proud educator, through and through, to the very end.
And now that connection was sullied, too. Sullied and damaged, possibly irreparably.
Just like Mom's little knick knacks, or her clothes, or her books that were gathering dust in the basement, or the photo album that she still didn't know where it was because Dad had gotten angry when she saw her with it and took it away and gave her this look-
Breathe.
A distant rumbling took her out of the spiral of memories she had been descending faster and faster, and made her look up and through the window. They were in the city proper already, they only needed to get down to the bus station and they would be all set.
In the distance and a couple of blocks away she could see small flashes of fire and hear the unmistakable pop-pop-pop of gunfire. She scanned the scene for a moment, then deemed it sufficiently far away to not be a cause of concern – after all, there was a truce about not hitting buses or hospitals – and tried to close her eyes and relax before getting out of the bus.
An exercise in futility, as the rest of the passengers – and the pilot, if the jolt of acceleration was anything to go by – were not at all as nonchalant about having a possible cape fight near the vehicle. Taylor didn't pay much attention to that, too preoccupied with her own thoughts and the feeling of impending doom she felt about meeting Sarah face to face for the first time.
Finally, finally, the bus stopped and the doors opened. Most of the people inside got out at quite the quick pace, looking above their shoulders and talking to each other in muffled, worried whispers.
She scanned the handful of people that were waiting in the platform, almost everyone already reunited with friends or family and making a hasty retreat from the area. Taylor lagged behind, still confused about all the agitation. If they were so preoccupied about getting caught in a cape fight they just had to stay in the bus, it was what most people did back at home.
Her eyes roamed the people left, and if she was guessing right, the only girl around her age that was here had to be Sarah.
She was… pretty. Pretty in a way that she was not that sent a twinge of something to her chest.
She was biting a nail while looking at the people that had left the bus, focusing more intently on the people around her age, until a pair of bright green eyes focused on hers. She pulled out a phone, read something quickly, and looked at her again.
She approached with quick steps and a worried look in her eyes. She seemed hesitant, and Taylor squirmed slightly under her gaze. She pushed away the nascent instinct of looking down or hunching her shoulders, presenting a smaller target for stray elbows or cruel gazes.
Too quickly, she was standing close to her, not quite at arms reach but not far enough to mistake if she was speaking to her or not.
"Taylor?"
She examined her once more, noticing the similarities that Sarah had used when describing herself and the person in front of her. Taylor hadn't wanted to use photos, afraid of coming out horribly wrong and scaring away her friend, as ridiculous as the thought was, the only one that looked good in photos was Emm-
"Sarah?"
She beamed, but a shadow of worry still lingered in her eyes and features. Sarah moved to close the distance and she fought the urge to step away, inevitably flinching when a hand closed gently around her forearm and started pulling her in a direction away from where the sound of gunfire and fighting was a couple of minutes ago, eliciting a slight hiss from her when her thumb brushed against a particularly nasty bruise.
Sarah looked at her in concern, but she shook her head and tried her hand at a smile. If her expression was anything to go by, it wasn't a very convincing attempt. She tried to open a conversation with something simple.
"Did you notice the fight a couple of blocks away?"
Her head snapped in her direction, the concern now blooming into something deeper. "What fight? I heard about something going on, but…"
Taylor smiled, this was more in her territory. "Well, there was some gunfire a block and some change away from where the bus took us, and I think I saw a member of the Ambassador's in the distance. Think they were fighting the Teeth?"
Taylor looked at Sarah, noticing how she had grown pale with each uttered word, and the small smile pulling at her lips died in its cradle.
"...did I say something wrong?"
She noticed that they had stopped on a sidewalk near a park, and Sarah was giving Taylor a look of complete incredulity tinted with mounting concern.
"Taylor," she began slowly. "You were close to a cape fight. In a bus, an enclosed space. If some of those maniacs had gotten the idea of using you as meatshields you could have died."
Sarah was definitely freaking out, and the grip on her arm was passing the 'ow' grade and straight jumping into 'that hurts'.
"But," she intervened, her voice tinier than Taylor would've liked. "The truce?"
Sarah looked at her incomprehensibly and in a way that made her eyes sparkle and pull at another strange something inside Taylor's chest.
"The truce?" She continued. "The one that protects hospitals… and… buses…"
Her confusion only became more apparent, until something clicked in her head and Taylor very suddenly needed something to sit down and-
Breathe.
"There-There's no Truce here, is there?"
She nodded numbly, and Taylor felt her hands go clammy with cold sweat.
"I, I think I need somewhere to sit down."
Her friend nodded, and took her to a bench in the nearby park with gentle tugs and a nervous smile.
— X —
Sarah held back a sigh as she took in the form of her friend.
Her friend that was currently breathing into a paper bag and trying very pointedly to not pass out.
Her worries and concerns hounded her mind with newfound vigor each time she thought back and reviewed their first interaction and Taylor's reactions.
When she had looked at her at the bus station Taylor started to hunch her shoulders and avoid her gaze, presenting a smaller, less noticeable target. It didn't look natural, or at least it didn't look like a knee-jerk reaction, not yet. It appeared more like something she taught herself, and something she had to focus on to do constantly. Not an ingrained reaction, then, which meant that whoever had done this to Taylor did so recently.
Sarah was flitting through a mental list of where she could dump a body. Blasto's territory, maybe?
Taylor's breathing seemed to come down to a more sedate level, but she was still shaking slightly, and her face was a shade or two paler than the rest of her body, not that she could see much else with that hoodie on he-
Her left sleeve slipped slightly downwards, and for a moment Sarah's eyes caught skin that wasn't that pale tone of hers, but an ugly yellow with promises and hints of something darker further downwards, where pale flesh was still covered by cloth.
She scooted closer, an arm touching Taylor's shoulder in warning and correctly anticipating the subsequent flinch. Taylor looked at her for a moment, panic flashing for a instant in her eyes, green, but not like Sarah's brilliant and clear ones. They were a deeper color, more mature. Curiously, the first thing that came to mind was 'arsenic green'.
Taylor calmed down once she recognized her, and Sarah took the opportunity to softly pull her in a one armed hug, partly to help her with the panic, partly to scout the damage as subtly as possible.
The thought of touching her made Sarah feel something strange in her chest, but she crushed it after a moment.
With one hand she started subtly applying the softest kind of pressure she could to her right arm and side, pausing when just a soft grace near one of her ribs was enough to elicit a pained hiss from her.
Taylor looked at Sarah, almost entirely out of her bout of panic, with a bewildered expression. Sarah pursed her lips and Taylor looked away with a flinch.
That reaction sent a stab of something she had come to recognize as guilt scraping against her ribs, but she brushed it off as best as she could.
"Tay, hey."
Taylor looked at her once more, the bag finally at her side. Her breathing was still somewhat labored, but that was to be expected. "Y-Yeah?"
"You're hurt. You know that, right?"
Her gaze went downwards, not meeting Sarah's. That was all the answer she needed. With a sigh, she reached out with one hand towards her face, hesitated, then went all the way despite the small voice at the back of her head whispering that you don't deserv-
Helping her friend was more important than her own feelings. She took her chin, and softly moved her face so she was facing Sarah. Taylor didn't resist.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I-" something eerily similar to the guilt weighing Sarah's shoulders flashed through her face. "I didn't want to be a bother, I just…" She seemed frustrated, as if she herself didn't know what she wanted to say or what she felt.
"Alright, but you're coming with me. I'm not letting you walk around town when you're in pain." Her hand left Taylor's face, and she felt an odd sense of loss at the absence of contact that she made her best to shove down because she's your friend you frea-
Before Taylor could speak, she intervened. "And yes, we're going to my house to look for something you can take for that pain. My parents aren't home until Monday, so you don't have to worry about anything." Her tone didn't leave room for argument, but her smile was soft.
"I don't want to impose," at another of Sarah's looks, she caved, "but, well… okay." There was still that flash of emotion across her features, but she still got up when Sarah did, falling into step with her.
"I hope you're not afraid of big, empty houses with more pieces of abstract art than the owners have common sense."
Taylor smiled at her stupid joke, and suddenly the day didn't seem that grey anymore.