Intercession
A Worm / Harry Potter crossover
Author's Note: Chapter 1. Aka, the chapter I most needed to improve. Quite a bit of telling, not showing, and more leaping around assuming readers will accept the premise without much justification. There was a lot to fix here. I would have had this up a lot sooner, but I wanted to show all of the changes together as a whole, not piecemeal. See the end notes for a list of what, exactly, changed and was added.
Taylor had expected death. An end. To be put down, a dangerous attack dog who had finally outlived her usefulness and developed a case of rabies in the process.
She hadn't fought it. Better dead than a crippled, insensate expression of her power in human form.
And yet, when she next woke, decidedly not dead and not an uncomprehending merged monstrosity – she couldn't feel her power at all, not even in its most basic form controlling insects – she found that she very much did not want to die after all, so long as she could stay herself.
It seemed someone else agreed, because she wasn't dead yet and based on her surroundings wasn't likely to be in the near future. She came to in a hospital bed, one that seemed to be situated in a totally normal, if somewhat old-fashioned hospital. She was hooked up to something that looked a bit like a dialysis machine, but with extra parts attached, and Contessa was plugging in another bag of dark-colored blood.
Contessa looked over at her. "Ask," she said neutrally.
"What are you doing?" Taylor rasped. She was too weak to lift her head, let alone to resist whatever was happening. Being so helpless made her skin crawl, but she had no recourse.
"Exchanging your blood for someone else's, and using Tinkertech to change your body accordingly," Contessa answered.
"Why?" Taylor tried to reach for the IV bag, but it was on the side of her missing right arm, so she ended up just twitching the stump that remained of her upper arm. Her power was out of reach, leaving her mostly helpless for the moment. Helpless and sane.
"Part of the Path," Contessa said, as if that was all Taylor needed to know. She plugged another little bag into the machine, and the world fuzzed before Taylor's eyes, fading to black with an alarming speed.
Some time later, still missing an arm but otherwise feeling wonderful and oddly light-headed, Taylor once again found herself in the same old-fashioned hospital room, this time without any obvious Tinkertech hooked up to her.
Contessa was there, but she was missing her usual fedora and instead wearing a nurse's outfit. Also, she was holding a sleeping baby. This made Taylor giggle. Serious, inhumanly precise Contessa, holding a baby like she thought it was going to poop or puke on her at any moment.
"Listen carefully," Contessa told her, her voice and words pleasantly measured and precise. "This is an entirely normal world. No powers, no entities, no knowledge that either ever existed. I am going to leave you here, and no parahuman will ever return to this dimension. No matter what happens here, there is no chance that you will ever merge with your power to the extent you did against Scion. Do you understand?"
So it was to be exile, then. Exile to the horrible wilderness of normalness. Taylor tried to cross her arms and scowled when she was once again reminded that she only had one. Then she laughed, because it was funny, and nodded because Contessa had asked if she understood. Everything was pleasant and blurry around the edges.
"You will find paperwork establishing your existence on the chair behind me," Contessa continued. "Personal identification, a document trail under your real name as a British citizen with deceased parents, tax records, everything necessary to prove you exist. A deed to a small house in a nearby town, and the keys to a car modified so that you can drive it, which is currently parked in the driveway there. There's enough money in the house to last you a year. Legally, you have always existed in this world, and all documentation associated with that is here or in that house."
Taylor spared a moment to contemplate exactly how fucked she would be if she didn't have all of that, but was still stranded in a new world. Perhaps not entirely fucked, but at least halfway there, at minimum. Homeless, illegal immigrant Taylor wasn't funny. "I want that…" she asserted. "The house and money and papers."
"You will have it," Contessa agreed. "You are here in this hospital as the aftermath of being struck by a car. Your arm needed to be amputated. You have a medical history, but that, your current visual prescription, and childbirth are the only things on it."
"Childbirth." She might still be on some sort of medication, because she couldn't will up more than a mild curiosity as to why that made the list when all of her old injuries – concussions, back-alley surgery to remove metal fused inside the shoulder socket, temporary bisection – for some reason didn't make the cut. She hadn't given birth, but she had been cut in half. Why one and not the other?
"Your son according to all governmental records." Contessa held the child out to show her. "Harry."
"You stole a baby to give to me." She was definitely on something strong, because that seemed eminently reasonable. Why not go all the way when forging a fake identity? It would be hard to prove she was an interdimensional refugee when there were records of her giving birth here at least a year before she arrived, and a child to go along with the paperwork.
"The Path specifically directed me to picking this child up from where it was abandoned on a porch in the middle of the night," Contessa explained. "This child is optimal for ensuring you never attempt to leave this dimension, or to you being happy here. Or both. I have asked for a Path to those things, and to ensuring your power never takes control of you again. This is that Path."
"Okay. Fine." Her new identity included an optimized baby. Okay. That made sense. "Anything… else?"
"No. The Path ends with this explanation, which you will remember… less than fondly. I will leave the baby with you, suggest you wait to leave until they wean you off the painkillers so that the Tinkertech drugs I have added are fully flushed from your system, and then I will deconstruct the means by which I reached this dimension and leave."
"I knew it." She was on drugs. That was the only reason suddenly having a new life, in a new country, in a new dimension, with a baby she had never seen before in her life seemed in any way reasonable. "Don't… Don't let the door hit you. On the way out."
"You managed to succeed where Cauldron failed." Contessa walked over to her bedside and gently set the baby boy in Taylor's lap. "You cannot go back. Only forward. Enjoy living."
"Sure." She looked down at the sleeping child.
Black hair. Pale skin. A cute little green onesie. An odd lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.
When she looked up, Contessa was gone.
She was pretty sure she was going to appreciate being drugged for this conversation in retrospect, because at the moment she felt pretty good about how things were turning out, and that was probably going to be a rare feeling when she was lucid.
It was nice to have a moment of peace before everything went to hell again.
In the pale sunlight of morning some time later, painfully, dramatically sober, Taylor felt for one fleeting moment the urge to chuck the sleeping baby in her arms across her hospital room.
Once that uncharitable thought passed, the tears came. Angry, mentally exhausted, terrified tears.
The last time she had been fully right in the head was before demanding Panacea screw with her powers, and even that was debatable given her proximity to the Simurgh some time prior to that moment. Since then, she had lived to regret that choice, lived to sorely regret that choice even as she made the most of it, lived to be unable to comprehend such a choice in addition to many other things, and then been given a brief semi-lucid respite to talk to Contessa. Not someone she loved or even just liked, not her father, Lisa, Brian, Rachel, Theo, Yamada, Glenn or anyone she had even a fleeting personal connection to. Instead it was cold, impersonal Contessa.
Contessa, who gave her a respite so that she could answer questions. So she could know she was going to die. So she could accept it.
And then she was modified against her will, healed and stripped of her power – good riddance – and given someone else's blood – why? – and put in a hospital and told she was on a new world, not even in America, with a baby!
It was too much. She didn't remember the last time she had cried – that moment in the field didn't count – but anyone in her situation would have. It was either cry or self-destruct.
The baby in her arms – someone's baby that she shouldn't have – woke up. Instead of joining her in her misery, it snuggled against her chest.
She cried silently, her only concession to the unwanted child. Only because if it started wailing she wouldn't even be able to fall apart in peace.
If it started wailing, maybe a nurse would come and take it away from her.
She couldn't, wouldn't, care for a child. She couldn't even care for herself right now.
When the baby made its hunger known some time later, a nurse did bustle in to take it. "Only for a quick meal, then he'll be right back with you," she assured Taylor, as if Taylor wouldn't be able to stand being separated from the child for long.
From the nurse's understanding of the situation, that was probably right, though…
Taylor wondered, for what was probably an unusually long time, whether the baby was at the age where it was supposed to still be breast-feeding, and if so what the nurse had been told was the excuse for her not doing so. Or would she suddenly start lactating?
She hoped not, though it was entirely within the realm of possibility. Contessa had already violated her body and life in enough ways. She would fall apart again if something so drastically intrusive had really been done to her without her knowledge.
She hated feeling so fragile. So helpless. So confused. Maybe it was warranted. Maybe she had every excuse in the universe, in the multiverse, to feel this way. But she still hated it.
The nurse came back, a bright-eyed baby in her arms, and deposited him on Taylor's stomach irregardless of her wishes, not that she said anything. "Freshly fed and freshly changed after!"
Taylor was left alone with a baby once again.
A baby that was not hers.
A baby that was, for all intents and purposes, hers. Tied to her fake backstory. Part and parcel of the deal that got her a house, a car, a life she could hide behind while she figured out how to go five minutes without bawling or staring numbly at the ceiling.
She could give it up for adoption. It would be reasonable. A single mother, missing an arm, fresh off an accident, no family or support structure in sight? Nobody would find it odd. Doing so wouldn't bring any increased scrutiny to her cover story. Contessa wasn't here to stop her; Contessa's part in the path ended with that infuriatingly matter-of-fact dumping of circumstances while her victim was too drugged to object. She had to believe that, or she wouldn't be able to function for fear of further interruption.
In this one thing, she still had control. A choice. Maybe one predicted and expected by Contessa's power, but still a choice from her perspective.
It was oddly comforting, even amidst the detritus of her confidence and her life. She was not insane, she was not at risk of going insane, her power was gone, and she had a choice. Those were things she could work with.
Starting with this baby. She craned her neck to look at it.
It had green eyes. Tiny little eyes that looked up at her with innocent curiosity.
She could speak to a nurse right now. Muster up a sob story – it wouldn't be hard – and ask how she could give the baby up for adoption.
Or, she could keep the baby. Attempt to raise it while also trying to pull her life back together. On the surface a laughable decision, but Contessa had specifically said this baby was meant to make her happy. Somehow.
Giving it up was the obvious right choice in the moment. But…
Taylor didn't understand her reluctance at first. It certainly had nothing to do with newly-awakened motherly instincts or anything like that; the strongest feeling she had for the child on her lap was that it had to be extremely unlucky to be in a position to have Contessa interfering in its life at such a young age.
But still, something was stopping her. Something important.
Contessa said this child was important to her happiness. She didn't have to believe that. But Contessa had also said that she had set up events so that Taylor would never leave this dimension, never again be reduced to the state that Panacea and her own desperate choice had brought her to…
And that she would be happy.
If she tossed the child away at the first opportunity, that was saying she didn't believe Contessa's path could actually deliver. Even though one of the goals of this path was her own happiness, something she wanted quite badly, especially right now when she was one errant thought away from shattering again.
Unless it was only by giving the child away that the Rube Goldberg machine of a powerful precog's plan would come to fruition… Wouldn't the child then be 'necessary' for her eventual happiness? But what could giving a child up possibly do for her that not having a child to give up in the first place would not?
More importantly, did she want to try and cooperate with the plan laid out for her, or did she want to fight it? Could she fight it if she tried? How would she know she was succeeding, beyond just… ensuring that she was never happy?
She was too tired, mentally and physically, to figure any of that out now. Now was a bad time to make any decisions she wouldn't be able to take back, meaning that she wasn't going to give the baby up for adoption right this moment. It wasn't like that was a one-time deal, so there was no harm in waiting.
She looked down again. The baby was still looking at her. Still curious.
"You're going to be a huge pain in the ass, aren't you?" she whispered.
He grinned at her. "Ahhs," he burbled. Was it a coincidence that it sounded like he was saying… It wasn't, was it?
"Oh god." She let her head fall back on the pillow. "This is such a bad idea."
But it was her idea, her reasoning, so she did it anyway.
Contessa had not baby-proofed the furniture.
Taylor worked with packing tape and extra diapers, blunting every sharp edge she could find. Awkwardly, with only one hand available, and all the while keeping one eye on the baby crawling around on the carpet in the living room.
She had come from the hospital to the house Contessa provided, driven back by a taxi – the nurse had called it a 'minicab' – and dropped off in the driveway just as the sun set behind it. Harry was hungry, she had to figure out what he was able to eat, she had to set up the crib, and she still had to go find a grocery store to stock the bare cupboards. All before it got too late for any stores to be open.
Harry shrieked, and she dropped the diapers and tape as she spun around, but he was just shrieking to himself, for no particular reason.
Baby-proofing came first, because she didn't know if Harry could walk yet and the last thing she needed was the baby bashing his brains out on the corner of a coffee table because the perfect precognitive parahuman somehow forgot to foresee baby-proofing the furniture as essential. Even if she gave him up for adoption tomorrow, she wasn't willing to risk him hurting himself between now and then. Giving up a seriously injured baby would bring scrutiny.
Also, she wasn't a monster. The things she had done, Aster in particular… They were done in extremis, not evidence of how she normally treated children. She didn't want an innocent child to be in danger, regardless of the complications around how and why that was currently her responsibility.
Her stomach growled at her. Her head hurt. Harry was going to start crying soon, if she didn't get him something edible. She didn't even know what he had eaten for lunch; a nurse handled that while the doctors were giving her the last dose of unnecessary painkillers. She didn't know if a real mother would have let a nurse take her year-old son away to feed him out of sight.
She didn't know how to do any of this, and another thing Contessa had not provided was a how-to manual. Did Contessa really expect her to be able to handle this and grieving and everything else that had happened?
It wasn't permanent. Harry, that was. She only had to keep him alive and healthy until she determined what she was going to do. Whether she was going to keep him, whether she was going to stay in Britain, what she was going to do with her life…
She was so tired. If it was just her, she probably would have given up on eating and gone to bed. Thanks to Harry, she had a good reason to not give up, but she wasn't feeling thankful.
There was a small car seat installed in the back of the little four-doored white car Contessa had provided. She awkwardly hoisted Harry up with her one arm, after opening the front door and car door in preparation, and hauled his babbling little body out of the house, up the driveway, and into the seat. Buckling him in was a chore, though he was looking around so curiously that he didn't fight her securing all of the straps that would hold him in place. He had a fascination for the interior of automobiles, apparently; the taxi had enthralled him, too.
She went back into the house. Just to close the door and make sure she had everything she needed. Money, keys… there was something else. License, that was it. All on the kitchen table.
Her picture on the license was recent. As in, recent to within the last few days. She looked… worn. Haggard. It was backdated to a few months ago. Was it legal for her to be driving after losing an arm? Did Britain require some sort of recertification? Contessa had mentioned a modification to the car to make it possible for her to drive. Was that street-legal? She didn't know.
She didn't know so much. Not even whether the people she cared about were still alive.
There was a baby sitting in a car seat outside, though, and she couldn't afford to wallow. Not here. Not now.
Everything was a struggle. Driving on the wrong side of the road, with a setup that compensated for her missing arm in counterintuitive ways. Shopping, with money in currency she only vaguely understood the relative values of. Wrangling a child into eating and then cleaning him afterward. Changing a diaper with one hand and kicking feet in the way.
It wasn't insurmountable, though. None of it. She did manage to drive to the store and back without getting pulled over or crashing. She did manage to stock her kitchen. She did change that stupid diaper, after finding several helpful instructional pamphlets in a drawer of the brand-new changing table set up in one of the unused bedrooms. She put Harry into the new crib, and wonder of wonders, he fell asleep right away.
She was too tired to plot that night, but the next morning, bright and early, safe in the knowledge that Harry was still asleep in his crib? Contessa's forged existence was strewn across the dining room table and examined at length. This was her life and she would pick and choose how she lived it. That meant understanding exactly what she had been given, so she could decide whether or not to throw it away.
One stack of paperwork was her medical history. A record of her birth – in Britain – to Annette and Danny Hebert, both nonexistent British citizens at the time, presumably with the forged records to prove it. There were records of an initial checkup and a few years of regular examinations for the fake baby version of herself, with no major problems. Then a blank gap of fourteen years after that, with a handwritten note saying simply 'American medical records lost in unfortunate fire; wiggle room'. Her records in Britain started up again when she was eighteen, with a few preliminary checkups and then a full set of pregnancy examinations over the course of nine months.
She felt violated, looking at those documents. Measurements, ultrasounds, development that couldn't possibly be hers laid out and assigned to her. They were undoubtedly essential to have if she intended to keep Harry, and truthfully she would have to hold onto them even if she gave him up in case someone ever investigated her past, but she didn't like them.
Beyond that? An evaluation of her physical state after the 'car crash', another spike of frustrated dismay. Did it have to be that excuse? Apparently so, though at least the official story was that she was a pedestrian struck by flying debris from the crash, not that she was one of the drivers. Her medical records ended there.
In another, much smaller pile, she had Harry's medical records, such that they were. A single checkup dated to only two days ago. A birth certificate. He was named 'Harry Hebert' there, with no middle name provided.
She pushed the medical records away, unsettled and slightly nauseous. It was practical, but that all of it had been assigned to her without any input from her…
The financial side of things was much more palatable. She owned this house outright, a potent financial asset that put her solidly in the lower middle-class. Same for the car; there would be no mortgage or loan payments for her to drown under. She also had a large amount of money in physical form, in her bedroom. There was also a bank account under her name, but it only had a few hundred pounds in it.
She did not have a passport, but she could probably get one. As a British citizen, from what she remembered of foreign countries as taught in high school, she could go anywhere in the EU with minimal trouble. She wasn't chained to Britain by anything more than the house being too valuable to just abandon without any setup.
The house could be sold. The car could be sold. Harry could be put up for adoption. A passport could be obtained. If she wanted, she could apply to immigrate to the United States, get back to somewhere close to her home. Brockton Bay, a non-parahuman Brockton Bay.
The thought did not fill her with joy. Or anticipation. Or even satisfaction.
She set it aside and delved into the last, small stack of paperwork.
Her family history.
There was a marriage license, dated more than a decade early, and evidence that her parents had moved to America on a long-term visa, never becoming citizens but staying there for more than a decade with her. Then they came back to Britain, purchased this house and car… And died. Not, thankfully, in the same fictitious car accident that was the excuse given for her missing arm.
The real Annette and Danny, on the other hand… She thought about it long enough to realize that if they did exist in this world, they were at least a decade younger than her and had never met. Then she stopped thinking about it, because that was another thing she had no idea how to deal with. She didn't even know if her actual father was alive.
It wasn't something she could deal with right now, so she forced herself to put it aside for the moment. First, sort out her own life. Then everything else.
She could go anywhere, within reason. She could do whatever she wanted. Contessa had provided her a ready-made life, but she was not locked into pursuing it. Only a lack of more appealing alternatives kept her here. Dimensional travel was out, this world was normal, but anywhere within the confines of this planet was theoretically available.
Brockton Bay? There was nothing for her there, and she had as many bad memories of the city as she did good ones. Maybe it wasn't so shit in this world, or maybe it was. She had no desire to find out.
Chicago? When she lived there, she lived for preventing the end of the world. The people she knew best wouldn't be there, not as the people she knew.
Anywhere else in America? She knew the country… But what good was that, really? It would still be a huge adjustment, thirty years in the past and in a world that never knew parahumans. This world's America might as well be a foreign country to her, with the added discomfort of the chance she might walk into someone she knew from her past and do something stupid.
Like if she ran into this world's potentially non-murderous Jack Slash on the street. He could be smiling, unthreatening, and eating a bagel, and she might still reflexively try to kill him. It was unlikely, but it was still possible. At least she knew for a fact that she had no history in the Britain of her own world. She had never set foot on the island, never exchanged more than a few words with anyone from Britain, except perhaps at Endbringer fights. There would be no chance encounters with familiar faces, no moments of deja vu. Not here.
Really, the only places in the world she could be more certain of having a totally fresh start were Japan and Newfoundland, both of which were due to be destroyed in the next few years by Endbringers, which of course wouldn't happen here.
A low, searching cry pierced her eardrums despite coming from upstairs behind a closed door. She jumped out of her chair before realizing it was just Harry. She waited for more wailing, but it seemed the cry was a one-off thing, so she stiffly sat back down.
Britain was as good a place as any if she wanted to avoid possible encounters with people she had known on Earth Bet. Better than most. She could blame her initial disorientation on being American, but Britain wasn't so different that she would be genuinely disadvantaged. No new language to learn, no outlandishly different customs, and no struggle to immigrate, because she was already here.
Somewhere over the course of looking everything over, she had decided she was going to stay. It only made sense. Contessa made it the path of least resistance, and now Taylor had verified for herself that not only was it the path of least resistance, it was similar to the path she probably would have chosen anyway.
The same went for the house and car, easy practical decisions now that she had resolved to remain in Britain for the time being. She had them, they were hers, and there was no reason to go to the effort of exchanging them.
Beyond that, what she was going to do with her life, bereft of power and purpose…
Not so easy. Not something she was going to figure out in a single morning sitting with piles of paperwork.
She stood, willing herself to feel better. She was taking control. She had thought through her options and made an intelligent, reasoned decision. Things were getting better.
Harry cried out again, and this time he didn't stop at a single cry.
As for him? That decision could wait, too. Today she was quitting while she was ahead. Though in this case, quitting meant feeding the baby, not ignoring him.
Taylor had a daily routine.
The key word there: had. As in, before the complete reshuffling of her existence. That routine was now worthless. Not only was she not fighting the end of the world, she wasn't training for it. It wasn't a looming motivation in the distance. She wasn't on probation or in the public eye. She wasn't a superhero or even a supervillain. She didn't have a superpower. Nobody expected her to fight. Nobody expected her to do anything. Nobody knew she existed. Not as a person; presumably there were government workers who now had files with the name 'Taylor Hebert' in their filing cabinets. She didn't even have a normal job to take up time.
As for what she did have now? A lot of unpleasant things to brood over. Grief. A television with a bunch of old shows. A lawn and old-fashioned lawnmower, which she did tackle just because it seemed doable, but which could only fill her time once every few weeks. Nightmares. Lethargy. Pains in her stump and her nonexistent arm.
None of which made for a good, productive schedule, or any kind of schedule at all.
That was one thing the baby was undeniably good for. Filling the abundance of empty hours she otherwise struggled to put to any sort of productive use. She hadn't given him up to be adopted yet; all else aside, she didn't know where to go to do such a thing – she was not going to abandon the baby on a porch or something, not even if that was how Contessa found him in the first place – and she didn't feel motivated to find out.
She still intended to get around to it, because she neither wanted nor believed herself capable of actually raising a child, long-term. Just… not yet. He was a good motivation. Dealing with him forced her to adapt to only having one arm. Caring for him forced her to go out and use her car more. Figuring out how to care for him drove her to find the local library, which was good for a number of things she hadn't thought to research until she was there.
If it was just her, alone in a house, she might have done something rash.
Instead…
She sat down on the living room floor, to better keep an eye on the baby while she read. Harry, who was free to crawl around wherever he wished in the living room, inexplicably came right to her and the pile of miscellaneous books she needed to read. Books on British citizenship intended for immigrants, books on childcare, books on coping with loss. The librarian might have given her a knowing, pitying look while checking them out for her, but the internet wasn't a thing yet in this dimension and she needed to do her research. That was always her first reaction to being dropped into a new, unfamiliar situation. It had been when she first got her powers, and it was now, as she got her feet under her enough to think beyond the moment.
Harry pulled the book on coping with loss out from the bottom of the pile, chubby hands grasping the muted brown cover. She used her hand to stop the entire pile from collapsing on top of him. "That's not for you–" she began, annoyed.
He pulled the book into his lap, planted his butt on the floor, and opened it to the middle, two pages of dense, no-nonsense text. This provoked a little frown as he stared at the meaningless words, probably having assumed there would be fun pictures.
She laughed, though she didn't mean to, and he looked up, still frowning.
Her amusement curdled and died in her chest as she contemplated him. Here he was, temporarily in her care, and she didn't have a single toy or picture book or anything for him to play with. She hadn't so much as opened the childcare book yet, but everyone knew kids needed to be stimulated, not left to sit around like lumps all day.
She dissembled her book pile so that he couldn't topple it on himself again, then stood. "Come on," she told him, picking him up by looping her arm around her waist, "we're going back to the library." Both of them, this time. And then somewhere for a few basic baby toys. She wouldn't need them for long, but it was something else to do, something obviously correct.
Later that afternoon, back from an extended trip, she set Harry down on the carpet and began unloading their haul. Toy blocks, two stuffed animals, a few miscellaneous toy cars, and a red couch pillow that Harry had latched onto at the store all went on the floor. A dozen board books were included in the pile, cheap enough that she had bought them without a second thought, and a few more library books for babies went on the couch, where she could avoid him accidentally or intentionally damaging them.
She felt much better about herself, watching Harry pushing his stuffed dog around on top of a small toy car. Neglect through inattention was not something she wanted to think herself capable of.
Also, Harry was cute when he was wrapped up in playing. Maybe now she could get back to her research…
She settled down with her back to the couch and chose the book on Britain's citizenship test, to start. Barely three pages in, she felt a tugging at her sleeve. She looked up to see Harry, a board book in one hand, steadying himself against the couch. Without her insects keeping her abreast of everything around her, she hadn't even noticed him abandoning the toy car and coming over to her.
What he wanted was clear, and he couldn't read for himself yet, so she felt obligated to give it to him. "Okay," she conceded. "Let's read."
Her research could wait until Harry was in his crib that evening. She had nothing but time.
"Hello!" A large woman in overalls just a little too tight for her peaked over the back fence, badly startling Taylor, who had been walking Harry around their backyard. Thankfully, he was currently toddling along beside her, not in her arms, so when she jumped in surprise she only pulled on his arm, not threw him bodily at the offending intruder. This never would have been a problem back when she had her power.
"Hello," she said warily.
The woman disappeared behind the fence.
"Hello?" she repeated, but her presumed neighbor was gone.
She looked down at Harry. He stared up at the fence, waiting for the big woman to pop back up again. Admittedly, Taylor was tempted to do the same.
Something thumped on the other side of the fence. Several somethings. "One second!" the woman grunted.
Taylor stepped up to the fence and leaned over. She almost took a trowel to the face for her trouble as the woman straightened up, gardening implements pointed to the sky. She had a whole set of stringy clumps of dirt clutched in the same hand, paler shapes among them dangling like the severed heads of her enemies, spinal cord and everything trailing from the bottom of a bulbous top–
Taylor winced at her own mental imagery when she realized the woman was only holding up misshapen carrots.
"For you!" the woman asserted, holding out the dirt-carrot handful. "Welcoming gift! Much better than a fruit basket, right?"
"Thank you?" she said, letting go of Harry's hand to take the offering. She had a peeler somewhere in the kitchen… Not that she knew what to make with homegrown carrots. "Do you garden?"
"It's a hobby," the woman said brightly. "The husband's a stock trader, but why buy good produce when you can grow it? You should teach the little one to garden, it keeps them active!"
Taylor had let her arm drop to her side, and just as the woman said that she felt a tug on the vaguely carrot-based mass. Harry was pulling the strings of dirt off, one by one.
"Maybe." She forced a smile for the odd but apparently friendly woman. "Thank you for the welcoming gift. Should I expect…" She looked to the other two sides of her fenced-in yard.
"Oh, no, they're busybodies without an ounce of green thumb between them," her neighbor said, leaning in conspiratorily. "Want my advice? When they come to say hello, which they will, insult them. You don't want a part in their neighborhood association or gossip circle, not with… well, there's already been talk about how you're new, with a baby and without a husband. Not good for the constitution, all that jabber. If you brass them off right away they'll leave you alone and you won't have to deal with the constant rumor mongering."
"Sound advice," she said, amused despite herself. She probably would have ended up doing exactly that anyway, albeit unintentionally, but now she was definitely going to do it on purpose. Being left alone by the majority of her neighbors sounded good.
"Meanwhile, that little cutie can help you garden!" the woman said. "Hello, little one! What's his name?"
"Harry," she answered for him. "And I'm Taylor. Taylor Hebert. I don't think I got your name?"
"He's a cute one, no mistake," she said. "I'm Wilma. Anyhow, if you ever need any help with gardening or just somebody to watch the tyke, feel free to ask me!" She disappeared behind the fence again, and this time when Taylor listened closely she could hear earth being moved around.
Taylor had no intention of taking her up on either offer… unless perhaps there was an emergency and she had no other options… but she appreciated that it had been made.
Harry poked her leg. She looked and saw that he had completely removed the dirt clumps from the four carrots she still held in her hand.
"Carrots," she told him, holding out the vegetables for him to take.
He happily gathered them in. "Carro'," he said.
"Yes."
Later, well after meeting Wllma, she realized that the existence of a busy-body neighborhood gossip group was going to present additional problems if she put Harry up for adoption anytime soon. Problems she could deal with or ignore with little trouble, but problems nonetheless. That wasn't Wilma's fault, though; better to be forewarned than oblivious, even if she had no intention of getting involved in neighborhood politics.
"The dog jumped over the river," she read aloud. Harry sat in her lap, his chubby fingers gripping the sides of the board book to hold it open for her. An old-fashioned – to her, it was the style of the time here – illustration of a cartoon dog leaping ten feet into the air to cross what amounted to a tiny stream popped out of the page in bright primary colors. The dog looked jaundiced to her, all yellow around the eyes. And everywhere else.
"Da," Harry said.
"Yellow dog," she elaborated.
"Da," he repeated.
"Ugly cartoon character designed to entertain small children," she said brightly.
He twisted around to look at her. "Da?" he said.
She laughed. "Yes. Dog."
She flipped the page, to see on the next that the dog had landed itself in the tiny stream with an exaggerated splash. Harry's little gasp was as amusing as it was the first time they went through this book. "The dog doesn't know how to swim," she told him. "Always swim with a lifeguard. Avoid riptides."
Harry scowled. Those weren't the words, she could imagine him complaining. He didn't have the vocabulary for that yet, but the intent behind his scowl was crystal clear. She was not to go off-script.
"Also, the dog fell with a big splash," she narrated.
He smiled.
She continued reading, obligated to walk through the adventures of the jaundiced cartoon dog from river, to jungle, to mountain. Harry turned the pages, and she read.
Inevitably, nature called, for once for her instead of him. She lifted him off her lap, set him on the floor by the couch, and put the book in his hands. "I'll be right back," she told him, hurrying off to the bathroom.
She didn't take long. Two minutes, at most. But when she came back, he was gone, the board book abandoned at the foot of the couch. He was probably just somewhere else in the house, but she didn't see him.
Her head twinged, even through the momentary, probably unfounded panic. It felt like something was buzzing in her skull, an insistent push. Temptation.
If she had her bugs, she would be able to keep track of him from anywhere in the house.
But she didn't have her bugs, her headache failed to reopen any old wounds or old connections, and Harry's burbling laughter led her to the kitchen, where he was trying and failing to walk more than a few steps before falling on the – thankfully – thick safety carpet she had put over the tile floor.
She snatched him up with her good arm, feeling protective despite him being in no danger at all, and took him back to the living room.
"Mama," he said, pushing at her arm. "Down!"
She set him down, her momentary panic if not forgotten then at least buried. Next time, she was going to put a mirror in the hallway so she could keep an eye on the living room from the bathroom. Or just put him in his crib.
Her headache remained for most of the day, but it didn't come to anything. She neither expected nor wanted it to. It could stay gone.
Toast popped up in the toaster. Scrambled eggs sizzled in the pan. Taylor took a plate from a stack in the cabinet under the counter, set it down, and quickly seized the spatula to dish up some eggs.
Harry crawled by as she worked. He saw her legs and latched on, using her to pull himself up. She took his surprisingly dense weight in stride, pulled the pan off the burner, dropped her spatula in the sink for later, and flicked the knob to turn the burner off, all in rapid, practiced succession.
Then she reached over, grabbed a banana from a bunch she had left out on the counter overnight, and snapped it off to hand to Harry. "Here," she said.
He smiled and took it, letting go of her leg to sit down right behind her and pull at the peel. He probably wouldn't get it open, or if he did the insides would be shapeless mush, but he could eat that just as well and she had other food for him.
Momentarily freed of his encumbrance, she stepped over him to open the refrigerator, took out the milk, and then stepped back to take the toast and drop it on her plate.
All without a single dropped item, burned hand, or startled baby. Breakfast was served.
She was getting the hang of all of this.
Taylor would like to think that she understood herself far better than she had at fifteen. She was still very much a work in progress, and she still didn't quite know what to do with herself in this world, but relatively speaking, she was more self-aware.
Not by much, though, because it took her four months to realize that she had fallen right into an old pattern, just as ludicrous now as it was back when it happened for the first time.
"Where have I heard this one before," she said to herself as she supervised Harry toddling around the living room, standing in the center of the carpet to act as a human stabilizing pole for him to grab onto. "I meet someone. I say I'm going to betray them later, and that I just need to play along for now, so I can get what I need in the short term. I have good reasons to want to stick around them for a little while, and it's all very reasonable."
Harry painstakingly walked himself along the wall, both hands out to keep himself up.
"But I don't have anyone else, and it's easy to be around them. I keep telling myself it's temporary, but eventually… it's not. Even if I really did intend it to be. Even if it would have been smarter to do anything else."
He pushed off the wall, ponderously toddled forward, and grabbed onto her knees with both arms.
"Now here I am," she told him. He looked up at her, smiling triumphantly. "This was supposed to be temporary. Just until I was sure there wasn't some hidden 'screw you' clause from Contessa set to go off if I tried to get rid of you. Once I knew how I was supposed to give you up." She had found no evidence of any such backup plan… unless she counted the existence of the busybody association in her neighborhood, which she didn't. That was too petty for an alien supercomputer to arrange.
In the meantime, with no reason to keep the child, she had… not given him up. Not even for any concrete reason, or not for one that stayed the same from week to week. At first it was that she didn't know how it was supposed to be done. Then that he was a good unavoidable motivation to keep herself moving when she would rather just lay in bed all day and brood. Then because she was just… used to having him around. And the neighborhood would gossip. Which was about where the excuses stopped being legitimate reasons and started becoming halfhearted rationalizations, because she couldn't give a single flying fuck for what a bunch of housewives thought about her.
"Mama," Harry babbled.
"It's like you're trying to get a repeat performance out of me," she said fondly. "I realized it before someone forced my hand this time, at least." Was raising a child while still picking herself up from an interdimensional kick to the stomach more or less ridiculous than joining a team of supervillains while intending to be a superhero? She wasn't sure. She still had no idea how she was going to fare as a long-term caregiver, but Harry was growing on her. Like a weed. Like her friends had, back then. It was different, very different, but it was also the same.
She could just see Lisa laughing at her for this. Not cruelly, but with that sly tone that meant she had seen it coming all along and was only waiting for everyone else to catch up. Rachel would have taken it in stride with nary a pause, unconcerned with the things Taylor did beyond what they meant, practically speaking. Regent would have mocked her incessantly, Imp would follow suit, and Brian would probably be the only one to raise any real objections…
She missed them. Dead or just unreachably far away, she missed them all, and her father too.
Harry's weight left her legs as he pushed off again. He stumbled, and she reached down to catch him just before he hit the ground with both hands, instead lowering him gently down the rest of the way.
If she was going to make a new life here, to really make a new life instead of moping until the money ran out, she might as well leap in with both feet. Harry was growing on her? She didn't want to give him up? Then she wouldn't, or at least not until she proved incapable of raising him. It was her choice. Her life.
Contessa might have given that choice to her, but she was the one making it.
Once she decided she was keeping Harry, certain things started to look a lot more important. Such as her dwindling supply of money. She still had half a year left of her free ride before that became a real issue, but she now had to factor in what she was going to do with a one-and-a-half-year-old child once she had to start going to work, which might take time to arrange. Also, she had to figure out where she was going to work, and by extension what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
She had to think back a depressingly long time to remember what she wanted to do for a job, before the possibility of being a superhero and the resulting trainwreck of events beyond that. She wasn't sure now whether she had ever really considered what she wanted to be beyond the age where all children wanted to be all sorts of things.
There were obviously things she didn't want to do or be, which was a good place to start. Politics was right out the metaphorical window with a bullet in the chest; she'd had enough of dealing with that sort of thing to last a lifetime, and that was only on the outskirts as a criminal and then a problem child of the Protectorate. Government work of any kind was out for much the same reason. Nothing with fighting or violence; she might be good at it, but she was taking a step back from that life and so far that suited her just fine. Nothing with long, irregular hours for Harry's sake.
Ruling things out didn't leave her with an obvious epiphany, so she settled for finding something temporary to ease back into the flow of things.
"You'll only be shelving books to start," the old woman in charge of the library staff told her. "Irwin will teach you the system, it couldn't be simpler. I expect full productivity from you, one arm or not, you understand?"
"I'll do my best." She wasn't certain she liked her new boss, but nothing was holding her to this job except the need to fund the rest of her life. Shelving books didn't pay highly enough that she would be devastated to see it go if she couldn't deal with the people involved.
Irwin was a young man who broke all of the 'old lady librarian' stereotypes their boss fulfilled, though he was wearing a very ugly sweater that made Taylor wonder whether there was a dress code she was exceeding with her normal, serviceable pants and blouse. "Don't mind Eileen, she's retiring in a few months," he told her as he led her into the back room. "Here," he indicated a slot in the wall with a big bin under it, "is the book return. Your job is to get the books from here to the shelves after checking them in and examining them for damage." He took a paperback from the bin and tossed it onto a table, presumably to demonstrate. "I've heard word of fancy sorting systems, but here we still do it the old-fashioned way."
Having grown up three decades in the future of a timeline that had Tinkers, Taylor had expected their process would seem old-fashioned to her even if it was cutting-edge. "Works for me."
"You take the book by the spine," Irwin demonstrated, picking the book up again. "One hand on top and bottom of the spine, hold it up, then fan the pages out with your other hand…" He glanced at her, mid-inspection of the book. "Or, if you've got something in your other hand, just flip it over and shake it out, we're only looking for gunk, stuck pages, or ripped pages, nothing fancy," he concluded.
"I can do that." She demonstrated for him, taking a book from the bin to flick open. It was awkward, but everything was awkward at first with one hand. This wouldn't be any different.
"Next we check it in, take it to the log book," he continued.
His enthusiasm wasn't at all infectious, but they were the only ones in this back room and the library itself was mostly empty. As far as jobs went, this would be a good one for easing back into a society she had in truth never been part of in the first place.
Wilma might have proclaimed herself above the petty nosiness exhibited by Taylor's other neighbors, but she obviously wasn't above a bit of prying when she felt like it.
"You have a job now?" she asked, leaning over the fence dividing their properties, dirt smudging her arms.
At least she was blatant about it.
"Yes," Taylor confirmed. "Working at the library. Assistant stuff right now, but I think I'm going to be offered a promotion soon." Eileen's retirement party was coming up, and her replacement had come in a week ago to observe the operation she would soon be running. Taylor wasn't going to count her chickens before they hatched, but being told outright that 'having you on returns and menial labor is a waste of potential' seemed like a reliable indicator of her future.
If she liked the work, she might even keep the job long-term. It was relaxing, and it made her feel close to her mother. She wasn't a teacher, but she was still working with and surrounded by knowledge.
"How's the pay?" Wilma asked, shamelessly enough that Taylor wondered if she was just making conversation.
"Good enough." Aside from Harry the incredible human money pit, she didn't have much to spend on. And thinking of Harry… She glanced over at the corner of the yard. Harry was still digging in a patch of bare dirt with his bare hands, and not making much progress at that. She could afford to let him continue for a while longer.
"Oh, honey, never settle for 'good enough'," Wilma tutted. "You should talk to my Rob. He's an investment broker, I don't know if I told you? Very good. If you put a little aside he can invest it for you. Very stable returns."
Investments… Taylor had considered doing some investing, and not in simple, stable stocks like Wilma was suggesting, but she was hesitant. This world was already very different from the one she knew, even if it was in the past. It was the past of an alternate reality where parahumans didn't exist, and crucially it was only the recent past, well after parahumans started to affect the world. Some things – the development of mobile phones, for instance, or the internet – seemed sure enough bets, but with the influence of Tinkertech confounding everything she knew, she wasn't sure. She had let it slip to the back of her mind, a possible way of making a lot of money when she already had enough money to meet her needs.
There was no harm in trying, though. "I might set something up with him," she conceded. "Do you have a business card, or–"
Wilma produced a stained white card from the front pocket of her overalls. "Always keep one on me!"
Taylor took the grubby contact information and thanked her odd neighbor.
"Uh oh." Harry's voice was apologetic. Taylor heard the hiss and splash of high-pressure water.
"Wha–" Harry was holding his hands over a small fountain pouring out of his two-inch-deep scrape in the dirt. "Harry!"
Wilma's incredulous laughter, loud and braying, followed Taylor across the yard as she hurried to the site of the immensely implausible fountain. "How?" she demanded as she pulled Harry away from the dirty flow of water. His hole was ridiculously shallow, but some moron had decided two inches below the surface of the ground was deep enough for a pipe. There was even a little valve on the end, which she reached down and tightened on a whim. The water cut off, explaining exactly how her two-year-old son had managed to strike water through solid metal. It was a tap, like the one jutting out of the back of the house.
It looked, upon further inspection, like something scrapped together by an amateur. "Not your fault, Harry," she assured him, dragging her shoe in the grass as she traced the likely direction of the pipe. Sure enough, it ran right to her house.
"Old man Jonah loved his wading pool and working with his hands," Wilma informed her. "Did Harry find his solution to his hose not running far enough?"
"Yes, he did," Taylor said grimly. Harry was soaked through… No worse for wear, but surprised and wet.
It was kind of funny. Stupid and improbable, and Harry was so dismayed about being wet… "Let's get you a towel," she said, putting a hand on his back to guide him inside. A towel and then probably a bath, but a towel to start because he was so bothered by the sudden soaking.
She left him alone for thirty seconds while she ran upstairs for the aforementioned towel, to avoid him dripping all over the place. When she returned, he was still standing by the back door, but with the most tremendous smile on his face–
In clothing that was only slightly damp.
She looked around for whatever Harry had used to dry himself, but nothing was anomalously soaked. Even his little shoes were mostly dry. "How did you manage that?" she asked.
Harry smiled guilelessly at her, and she suspected that whatever he had used to dry himself, she would find it later, hidden in some improbable place. "Oh, well…" She rubbed him with the towel anyway. "You know where you're going next?" she asked rhetorically. "The bath." Dry did not mean clean.
"Uh oh," was his answer.
She got the promotion at the library, and the life of a fully-fledged librarian was a lot more interesting than that of an assistant while still being pleasantly laid-back, so she took it and stopped looking for other jobs. Sorting and reshelving books was still part of her day, but now she could run the checkout desk, help visitors look for books, work on the backend sorting and filing systems, and generally do useful things that didn't involve a lot of drudgework nobody else wanted to do.
One such thing was modernizing the returns system. Eileen was out, her replacement was three decades younger, and such a modernization was inevitable. Taylor offered to help with the new equipment, comfortable in the knowledge that as a young adult in her twenties, from the future, she was almost guaranteed to be better with 'new' technology than anyone else at her job.
This threw her firmly into the world of, to her, archaic equipment, programs, and conventions, but it was actually interesting. She had been good at computer class in high school, and while nobody was asking her to program anything, getting everything to work properly was a puzzle she was well-equipped to solve.
Were anyone from her old world to see her now, fiddling with scanners and a rudimentary conveyor belt system in a dusty back room, they would probably scoff or assume she was only working such a job to cover for her vastly more exciting secret life or some such rot. But the truth was her ambition in life right now was to have a job she enjoyed, doing something interesting but not stressful, and this suited her desires well enough that she was happy with it.
Maybe in time she would grow bored of her low-stress job and move on to something more important and high-stakes, but for now that was exactly the opposite of what she wanted. She had saved the world; this was the equivalent of a pleasant retirement… Most of the time.
Which made the few instances in which it was not all the more jarring.
She walked into work one day, bright and early, to find the lights off. It was two hours before opening time, but that was still strange. She knew she wasn't the only one here; there were other cars parked outside. Maybe the power had gone out.
The circuit breakers were in the break room, so she headed there, noticing as she went that nobody was behind the front desk. She hadn't seen anyone yet.
A creeping feeling of unease plagued her, growing stronger with every step. She felt blind and deaf, relegated to only her own senses in a time of possible peril. Something was wrong.
She pushed open the door to the break room. It was dark in there, too. She stepped in.
Something moved to her left – she struck out with her arm – the lights flicked on – things moved all around her–
"Surprise!"
Their welcoming cry faltered and died as Irwin doubled over, gasping for air. She shuddered, rapidly pulling in her arm and putting it behind her back for emphasis, backing away from him and the rest of the room. She had only punched him in the gut. Only attacked a coworker. Who was waiting with the rest of her coworkers, under a banner that read 'Happy Birthday'. With a cake on the break table.
"I'm sorry–" she blurted out. "I don't. Like surprises." What could she say? How to explain it? She couldn't. This wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't even her birthday.
"Noted," Irwin grunted.
Somehow, things didn't escalate from there. The 'party', mostly an excuse to eat cake in the morning, was a subdued affair, and she didn't like the pitying looks she got from some of her coworkers, but that was it. Irwin didn't even hold a grudge. She got the feeling they all felt they had done something wrong, not her.
She definitely didn't want a high-stakes, high-pressure job. Retreating to work on the sorting system was the only thing that made her job bearable that day.
'Hello,' she imagined herself saying, 'I'd like to sign up for therapy.'
'For what?' she imagined her therapist asking, or asking something that amounted to the same thing.
And then what?
She lay in bed late at night, contemplating the thorny little problem her circumstances forced on her.
Nothing was wrong, per se. Her life was on track, Harry was a mostly happy toddler who was only just starting to demonstrate what 'the terrible twos' referred to. Her job was tolerable, good even. She wasn't a bundle of lethal nerves and paranoia.
Most of the time. The incident with the mis-timed birthday party notwithstanding.
But she wasn't okay. Couldn't be, not after everything that had happened. Now that she had a steady source of income and some time when Harry was at day care every day, she could theoretically go get professional help.
If only her problems were things she didn't have to lie about.
'I was in a gang war,' she imagined saying instead of telling the truth. Or 'I'm in witness protection after fighting organized crime.' Or just 'I hurt people, and I was hurt, and I want to make sure I'm not going to hurt anyone else by accident.'
The more vague her excuse, the more likely her therapist was to pry and poke. That was their job, or at least part of it. To understand her problems so they could help her cope. The more specific she made it, the more likely they would catch her in inconsistencies.
At its core, her problem was that she didn't think she could lie and properly benefit from therapy founded on a lie, and she knew she couldn't tell the truth.
She supposed she would just have to do without. She was mostly okay.
Time rushed by whenever her back was turned. Harry grew in fits and spurts, talking and walking and turning into a little person with greater and greater speed every day. Before she knew it, she was signing him up for preschool and dropping him off on his first day.
The classroom was filled with bright toys and tables and other children, and Taylor barely had time to say goodbye before Harry rushed off to join them, not shy in the slightest.
"You've got an enthusiastic one," the woman behind her commented. Her son was still clinging to her side, silently refusing to let go. "What's your secret?"
Being so overly careful out of worry that she had turned out to be a halfway decent mother through overcorrection, maybe. Also, getting out all of the 'I don't want to go' bawling the night before. Taylor smiled as she watched her son claim a half-dozen crayons and paper. "I don't think there is one."
"Thomas, you've got to let go," the woman pleaded. "It'll be fun! You can make new friends."
"Don't wanna," her son said into her shirt hem.
There were other parents behind them and Harry was already engrossed in his art, so Taylor took her leave to make room in the doorway. Nobody gave her a second look, aside from the few who stared at her stump.
This was not the case the next day, when she came to drop her son off once more. The same woman from before gave her a truly confused look as they lined up to get at the crowded doorway.
"Can I help you?" she asked, Harry toddling along behind her, his hand held firmly in hers.
"No, it's nothing…" The woman grimaced. "Did you really lose your arm fighting a bear?"
"Uh… No." The line moved as a frazzled bald man retreated from the doorway. "Who told you that?" Were the anonymous housewives of her neighborhood spreading rumors or something?
They reached the front of the line, but this time Harry held back. "Mum," he whispered, "bears are cooler than cars!"
This was the first Taylor was hearing about that. "Yes, they are, but the truth is cooler still," she said, hiding a smile. Really, she would have a lot more of a leg to stand on if either story was true. Harry thought the car accident was, and for all intents and purposes it was the truth in this world… but still. She couldn't muster up the indignance to be annoyed.
"You could fight a bear," Harry asserted, peeling away from her. "I'm going to draw that!"
She was looking forward to that drawing, truth be told. Harry veered towards the art supplies again today, and unlike yesterday Thomas followed along behind him.
"If it's not impolite of me to ask…" Thomas' mother began.
"Hit by a car," Taylor supplied as they left the room. "But I suppose that's not cool."
They shared an awkward smile that melted into something more genuine as the other woman realized Taylor wasn't bothered by the misunderstanding. It was just kids being kids.
Perhaps, one day, she would tell Harry the truth of how she had lost her arm. When he was old enough to understand, keep it a secret, and not be traumatized by all of the necessary context. Given she was currently dealing with a six-year-old, that wouldn't be for a long time.
Taylor had her prosthetic arm out on the table, along with a screwdriver and a hot glue gun. The arm was a two piece system, with a bicep of leather and aluminum that strapped to her stump, and a forearm of all-aluminum capped in a facsimile of a hand, all covered in flesh-colored plastic. With Harry quietly coloring at the other end of the table, she had time to figure out what was wrong with it.
There was a reason she rarely wore her prosthetic around the house, or out and about. Prosthetics back on Earth Bet were never something she had paid much attention to, but she knew they were rather good, even when one was a normal civilian. Times of war drove innovation of prosthetic technology, and ever since the end of the golden age of parahumans, everywhere was at war of one kind or another.
Here, in 1980s Britain, prosthetics were not great. The elbow of hers could be adjusted manually with her good hand. So could the wrist, and all of the fingers but only at the big knuckle. There was a little metal hook coming out of the palm of the prosthetic so she could pick some things up without needing to use her other hand to adjust herself, but it was all awkward and ungainly. Mostly it served to fill the space, which wasn't very useful.
Perhaps, if she had used it constantly for a few years, it wouldn't grate on her now. But it did grate on her in the beginning, the weight and the lack of function and the pointlessness of it all, to the extent that she barely acknowledged her prosthetic and only rarely wore it. That attitude carried over, reinforcing itself over time. The less she used it, the less she was used to it, the less she wanted to use it in the future.
And then when she did use it? It broke. The wrist was hanging out of its socket, a consequence of her misjudging how many grocery bags the hook could hold at an awkward angle. She rolled the arm on the table, looking into the gap in the hinge. Nothing had come out when it broke, so she wasn't missing any parts. Something inside had snapped, either metal or plastic. Hopefully something she could glue back together, because getting her arm properly repaired would require a trip out to the hospital that had supplied it to find out what the proper procedure was. This was the first time it had broken.
She poked the head of the screwdriver into the opening, feeling around for any loose or jagged ends. If something was properly broken she would have no choice but to take it to a professional, but she had glue if it was just a snapped rod or similarly simple break. Over the last few years she had out of necessity become adept at fixing small things.
Nothing about the inside of the hinge struck her as simple to fix or diagnose.
Harry flipped a page in his coloring book. He began to tear one out, carefully to keep the rip near the spine.
She stuck the screwdriver in the gap again, but it was a half-hearted gesture. She didn't like her prosthetic arm. She didn't like that it limited her, and she didn't like that having it at all meant she was forced to choose between fiddling with an insufficient stand-in or not wearing something designed to compensate in small ways for her disability. It wasn't a problem of money; this was one of the best prosthetics currently available. The technological development wasn't there yet.
It was still too complicated for her to fix on her own with insufficient tools. She set the screwdriver down in disgust.
It landed on a crayon, the handle rolling off the unexpected object. She looked up at Harry.
He was holding out a page of his coloring book. "Color with me?" he asked.
"Sure." She wasn't going to get anywhere with her arm. No point in wasting more time on it.
A red crayon, and a black and white outline of a fantasy dragon… The obvious path was obvious, but she was feeling contrary. She borrowed some of Harry's blue and green crayons and set about the flames, coloring them as blue with green centers.
"Mum, that's fire!" Harry complained.
"Now it's ice," she said. "See?" The dragon could be red, or maybe yellow. The flickering flame shapes, with some smudging around the sharp edges, were now a torrent of ice or freezing cold water.
"Oh…" He rolled a white crayon over to her and abandoned his own drawing to watch her. "Make snow too?"
The paper itself was already white, but she could use some blue to make the snow stick out against the background…
"Color in the scales?" she asked in return, passing him the red crayon.
"It should be purple," he said, bringing his purple crayons to the tail. "Purple and red."
Her prosthetic served handily as a weight to hold down the paper in lieu of an actual second hand. She left the table a while later knowing she would need to schedule a time to get it fixed, but also with a rather nice crayon drawing of a purplish-red dragon breathing ice to put on the fridge in a place of honor.
They were stuck in traffic. Worse, they were stuck in traffic within view of their destination, and had been for the last hour. Worse still, it was Harry's seventh birthday, their destination was an amusement park, and they were burning daylight sitting in the car while she resisted the urge to try out her repertoire of British curse words on the jackass who had rear ended the car in front of him out of impatience, and subsequently broken both of their cars so badly the single lane was blocked.
"Stupid cars," Harry complained. "Can we walk there?" He had started out as well-behaved as a little boy could be, but that was an hour ago and now his voice had a whiny undertone Taylor hated to hear. This was not the first time he had asked that question…
And it was not the first time she said, "no, we can't." Mostly because every so often someone tried to drive up the strip of grass on the side of the road, and discovered that there was nowhere to go but to hope someone would take pity any let them merge back onto the road proper once the traffic let up. The road was badly designed, with the edge of a pond on one side and a craggy hillock too steep to climb on the other. It would be scenic under other circumstances, but it clearly had not been intended for this level of traffic, accident or not.
Harry tried the door handle. The child lock was engaged, so his door stayed closed. "Mum, please," he whined.
A car horn blared ahead of them, and she could see figures waving their arms at each other in the distance, in front of the wreck. One of the two damaged cars revved the engine. A cloud of black smoke leaked from under the hood, and the car juddered to a stop before it could go anywhere.
"Look, they're getting out!" Harry pointed out. Closer to them, a mother and father helped their two younger children out of the car to sit on the trunk.
"Only to get some fresh air." That wasn't a terrible idea. She reached to unbuckle herself, planning on getting out and letting Harry out from the outside of the car to do the same–
The child lock flipped to 'off' and Harry's door popped open. Harry himself almost tumbled out of his seat. "Let's go!" he cheered.
Taylor quickly got out of the car and caught him before he could charge off towards the amusement park, her mind on the sudden failing of the child lock. She had not disengaged it. No part of her was anywhere near it when it flipped. Harry couldn't have, the whole point of a child lock was that the child couldn't get it open.
But it had turned off nonetheless.
Later that week she sat down with the car door and a few tools to disassemble the handle. Nothing looked broken or missing, and it all worked when she put it back together, so she deemed the lock incident a coincidental malfunction, either a one-time fluke or inadvertently fixed by her disassembly and reassembly.
Two months later, something else happened that had Taylor revisiting her assumption about the car door.
It started with an accident. She had electric clippers, Harry had a towel draped around his neck and a sullen expression. His hair grew fast and neither of them had the patience to let it grow long, but for some reason he always resented the necessity when it came time to have it buzzed down to a respectable inch.
On this particular day, she had a headache and was maybe a little twitchy. When a car backfired across the street, she and Harry found out exactly how twitchy. Enough to fumble the clippers mid-trim and run them halfway up the back of his head while trying to grab ahold of them again, with no guard to moderate the closeness of the cut.
"Mum!" he yelped, jerking his head forward. She grabbed for the vibrating clippers, finally gripping the cord before they could succumb to gravity and crack down onto Harry's skull.
"Sorry, sorry," she apologized, hastily flicking the off switch so she could set them down and retake control. Years after losing her power and leaving that life, she still had those twitch reflexes. They just weren't any use, nowadays. "Are you hurt?"
"My hair!" he yelped, his hands on the back of his head. She had to pry them off to see what she had inadvertently done. A clipper-width bar of near-baldness ran up the back of his head, jerky and incomplete.
She continued the haircut, much to Harry's distress, but there was no fixing it. She eventually had to send him off to bed with the back of his head still an uneven mess of a reverse-mohawk.
The next morning, she was expecting her son to either still be grumpy, or to have totally forgotten about his hair. She hadn't; she already had an appointment set up for him later in the day, with a professional who might stand a chance of salvaging her mistake the night before. But in the meantime–
Harry tromped down the stairs, his full weight hitting each step as he walked without a care in the world. His hair was back to normal. Not normal as in correctly cut, normal as in unruly and getting too long, in need of a cut.
Taylor blinked, then rubbed at her eyes as her son came into the kitchen. Was she imagining things?
She reached out and ran a hand through his hair. "Hey!" he complained, pulling away, but she just followed him, feeling at the place she was sure she had accidentally buzzed down to stubble. There was no glue or other sign that Harry had somehow come up with a convincing disguise; his hair was actually there!
"How did you do this?" she asked, her voice distant.
"Do what?" Harry asked.
Powers. It had to be. Only one thing she knew could be responsible for someone regrowing an entire head of hair in a night, and it sure as hell wasn't anything from this world.
That, in turn, was a hammer blow to her conscience and confidence, a painful strike that came from absolutely nowhere and left her reeling, though she tried to hide it from Harry.
Harry had powers. There was only one way people got powers, one way when Cauldron wasn't involved. Trauma. Serious, life-redefining trauma.
Trauma he had experienced without her noticing.
Of all the ways to be like her father… No, even he hadn't missed the trauma that gave her powers. Not the final straw that broke the camel's back. He just didn't know enough to put two and two together. She had no such excuse.
How had she missed it?
She spent one miserable evening on the couch after Harry went to bed, fruitlessly thinking about the problem with her head in her hands. One evening of wallowing in self-recrimination. No more.
The next morning, one sleepless night and stress headache later, she went up to Harry's room and confronted her failure head-on. She might have missed it, but she would be damned if she didn't find out who had hurt her son, even if it turned out to be her.
"Wrong?" Harry asked, looking at her guilelessly as only a seven-year-old could. "Nothing is wrong."
Taylor sat on the edge of his bed, her headache still pounding away at the insides of her skull. "Are you unhappy about anything?" she tried.
"No?" Harry screwed his face up at her. "I don't think so?"
"Are you being bullied at school?" she asked. She would not be like her father–
"No," Harry said innocently.
"You know you can tell me anything," she offered.
"Yeah," he agreed.
"But you're not being bullied."
"No!"
"Your teachers are nice?" she asked.
"Yes," he assured her. She believed him, because he had complained about teachers before, and on one occasion she had even gone down to the school to confront the woman in question. His teachers weren't the problem.
"Is something wrong with your friends?" she guessed.
"No?" Harry looked at her. "I don't think so?"
Nothing he knew of, then. "Is there anything you need that I'm not giving you?" she asked, increasingly at a loss. Harry had a good life, she didn't spoil him rotten but she wasn't mean or distant, or maybe she was and she didn't know it…
"I think…" Harry smiled. "A television in my room!" he said enthusiastically.
He didn't have a deceptive bone in his body, not at this age, and she couldn't for the life of her think of anything in his life that would traumatize him to the extent necessary to even open the possibility of powers.
Neither could he, apparently.
She backed off then, unconvinced and uncertain as to what was going on. Unless Harry's power involved some form of super-deception she hadn't failed as a mother, but something strange was still happening.
Taylor didn't leave it alone, of course. How could she?
She knew, from years of living in this world, that capes did not exist here. Not in the news, not in the history books, and though she couldn't be sure, she thought not as secret government assets. Perhaps it was misplaced optimism to think she would be able to tell the difference between a world that truly did not have capes and one that had a few kept top-secret, but this seemed to be the former, not the latter. If a government had such an asset, they would use it, if only in deniable scenarios. They would also have to have impressively on-the-ball cape detection services, to find new triggers before they could make the news, which she found extremely unlikely. Harry was still here, with her.
She also had Contessa's word on the subject. This was a normal world. Contessa could have lied, but to what end? She could have lied about anything, and Taylor wouldn't know, but when all the evidence pointed towards her telling the truth…
Harry was the only anomaly. Him and his fast-regrowing hair. Hardly a power on its own, but if he had self-biokinesis, or something more esoteric with the same effect, that would be something.
Contessa's assurance in mind, it seemed likely to her that he was a second-generation cape. That neatly answered the question of how he had powers, and further reassured her that this world really was as normal as it seemed.
It did not, however, explain why he was unaware that he had a superpower. Powers wanted to be used. They were not always obvious in application, but she had never heard of a cape with a non-Thinker power who didn't know that they could do something abnormal. Experimenting was natural, using the power more so. Awareness of the power was the baseline starting point.
But in the weeks that followed that first incident, Harry did nothing with his new power. He truly didn't know something strange had happened, or that it was anything but an inexplicable one-off occurrence. She watched him closely, more closely than she had since he was a toddler.
She was not her father. She would know if he was sneaking out or experimenting with superpowers or even just stressed about not using his. He was none of these things.
Once she established that he was oblivious and not hiding anything from her, she was less certain that she understood what was going on. His power was not behaving as powers should. Neither was hers, but she had Contessa to blame for that.
Perhaps, she theorized, this too was a result of Contessa's interference. Harry might not have a power in the same way she did not have hers. It wasn't entirely blocked, but then again, neither was hers. She still had days where she felt as if it was looking over her shoulder, inaccessible but still there. It was blocked enough.
She spent many late nights and absentminded days thinking the problem over, but in the end that was the only conclusion she could reasonably come to which fit all available evidence. Harry technically had a power, but it was so disconnected that he might as well not, save for isolated incidents.
That was her ideal scenario if he had to have any sort of superpower, and she rather wanted to keep it that way. This world had no capes. This world, from her perspective, was better without them. For Harry to come along as the first superpowered individual, maybe the only one…
No. She had no desire to see where that might lead. He was a seven-year-old boy. As long as he didn't know, she wasn't going to tell him. If the situation changed she would do whatever was best, but she hoped it wouldn't.
"You said it would snow!" Harry complained, his face pressed to the window.
Taylor sighed. There was a tree in the living room, there were presents waiting to be opened, but the weather was Harry's first priority. Christmas morning was supposed to have snow, and instead Britain's contrary weather had decided today was a day for pissing rain. "Maybe it will snow later," she offered, knowing that it probably wouldn't.
"I want snow!" Harry yelled childishly. He was a child, she reminded herself, and a little disappointment was expected, though she wasn't going to encourage what looked like a budding temper tantrum if it continued. "Harry, inside–"
"Snow!" he yelled again, but this time he sounded happy, and she noticed that the rain had sometime in the last few seconds quite abruptly frozen into fluffy chunks of crystalline white that drifted in picturesque flurries.
"What the…" She joined her son at the window, twisting her neck to look up at the clouds. How in the world had that happened? Freak weather, or another expression of his suppressed power?
She was inclined to chalk this one up to coincidence. What power could possibly involve regrowing hair and affecting weather conditions? Without Harry realizing, no less?
"Kick it!"
The backyard had been turned into a soccer field, albeit only half of one due to size constraints. The lawn chairs had been taken inside, other toys cleared away, and on one side of the yard a plastic soccer goal stood behind Taylor, child-sized and thus too small for her to stand in. In the middle of the yard, Harry and a friend from school were inexpertly kicking at each others' shins and occasionally the soccer ball, which to this day she had yet to internalize as being a 'football', as per her new country.
In theory, she was the goalie whose complete lack of prior experience and, though it went unsaid, lack of an arm, would put her at about the right skill level. In practice, she was a spectator as her son utterly failed to get the ball away from his friend, and his friend all but tripped over it defending his claim.
"I'm trying!" Harry said petulantly. "You keep blocking me!"
"That's how you play!" Thomas exclaimed. "Kick it away from me."
Taylor frowned as the two nine-year-olds continued to skirmish. She wasn't big on sports, but even taking that into account it didn't look like either of them was actually having fun.
They came to the same conclusion quickly enough.
"I'm pants at this," Thomas complained, kicking the ball away. Harry ran after it, eagerly taking possession of it for the first time since they had started their little kicking war, and booted it at Taylor.
She blocked it with her free hand – "Aww," Harry sighed – and kicked it back and forth between her feet, getting used to the weight and rigidity of the ball.
"How about two on one?" she proposed. "No goalie. Me against you." They would have the advantage, and if necessary she could 'accidentally' lose the ball before anyone got frustrated.
Harry's answer was to run at her, eyes fixed on the ball. Thomas followed behind him, running out around to flank her. Taylor set her feet in the grass and kicked, sending the ball right past Harry.
He tried to spin around, but the momentum of a nine-year-old boy was not so easily negated, and she ran past him while he was trying to turn around. Both boys followed in close pursuit as she closed in on the ball, stepped over it, and tried to kick it to the left. Her shoe skimmed across it instead, sending it forward, right to Harry.
She was upon him in an instant, but his footwork was better than hers, and Thomas was there running in between them as a human shield. She reached out with her good arm to clear a path, but they both called foul.
The game that followed was fast and chaotic, especially as none of them were very good at it. Taylor was slower than she remembered, though by no means unfit, and their yard had little bumps and divots in it from a younger Harry's time digging random holes and not properly filling them back up, meaning every foot placement was a risk.
She fell, several times. Harry cheered each time when she rolled back to her feet and got up. What sort of example would she be if she let a simple fall keep her down? Grass stains would wash out, or not. No big deal.
These moments, though? Memories of Harry yelling happily as his long-shot kick rolled into the goal, of herself reaching around him to kick the ball right from between his feet, of them falling in a tangle of overextended limbs while his friend laughed… she would keep those memories forever.
"She called everyone in from recess early," Harry recounted over dinner. "Way early. Thomas asked her why, and she told him it was because we were all being too rowdy, but we weren't, Jasmine wasn't even there today."
Jasmine was a girl in Harry's class that Taylor only knew by hearing of her various escapades. She put every other child in the class to shame with the sheer amount of trouble she could cause the moment no adult was looking, if half of what Harry said was true.
"Then the sub went off on Thomas," Harry continued, ignoring his steak in favor of telling the story. "Said something about him being a little worm, and nobody knew why she was being so mean, he hadn't done anything. Then her hair turned blue!"
Taylor's fork paused halfway between her plate and mouth. "Blue?" she asked.
"Bright blue!" Harry nodded. "All of it! She didn't even know until we all laughed. Then she went to tell the Principal, and he came to talk to us all, but nobody told because nobody got in trouble. I told him what she had called Thomas, and she didn't come back after he left."
So the substitute teacher had been taken off teaching Harry's class – which was good, Taylor already had a reputation at Harry's school for confronting teachers that she didn't want to reinforce – but there was no explanation for the hair.
She thought of Harry's hair, and how it always grew back if she cut it too short. Another incident to add to the list, this one also hair-related. It also happened at a time when he wanted something, in this case for the teacher to stop berating his friend, fitting the pattern she had observed.
"Do you have any idea how it happened?" she asked.
"I figure someone put dye in her hair without her knowing," Harry said. "If Jasmine was there I would say it was her."
"How fast did her hair turn blue?" Taylor persisted.
"Like that." Harry tried, and failed, to snap his fingers. "Remember when I told you about that chemical thing we got to do for a science experiment where the colors changed back and forth? It was like that. I reckon someone saw that and figured out how to make it happen for hair. Hopefully once the sub is gone they tell everyone how they did it."
Instant-change hair dye with a time delay… developed by a child still in primary school? Either Harry was in school with the next Einstein, or his power had acted up again, without his knowledge.
Should she try to teach him to control his power? The question came up every time something new happened, but the situation itself hadn't changed. Inexplicable things happened around Harry every few months, but he himself had yet to make the connection. He was old enough to keep it a secret if she told him, probably, but old enough to continue living his life as normal? No. She, at fifteen, had immediately decided to become a superhero. Ten-year-old Harry would do the same, with even less consideration for the much more significant effects of such a decision in a world without superpowers.
But was leaving him in the dark preventing all of the very real, very terrifying complications that could come, or was it ignoring a problem that would come either way? If she told him now she might be getting out in front of a disaster in the making.
If she told him now, she might precipitate a disaster where one would never otherwise have happened. All of the incidents so far were subtle, so subtle her mental list included a separate column of events she still wasn't sure about, like the weather that one Christmas morning.
At the moment, making a choice based on what she knew was about as useful as flipping a coin. She couldn't see the future. The only input she had from someone who could choose the future was that she would be happy, and that there would be no parahumans here, or something along those lines. The years had blurred her memory to the point where she could no longer recall Contessa's exact words, if she ever could.
No parahumans. There were a lot of ways that could be made true.
"Mum?"
She looked up from her plate, and saw Harry looking worried. "I'm fine."
"Headache?" he asked sympathetically.
"Not today, no," she said truthfully. This was not one of the days where it felt like her power was right there beside her, with the accompanying discomfort.
Harry didn't know that feeling. Hopefully he never would.
She wouldn't tell him, for now. The situation was stable. If that changed, she would revisit her decision.
The sun was shining, birds were chirping, bacon was sizzling in the pan, and Taylor could hear Harry running down the stairs, his sneakers thumping on the carpeted steps.
"Thomas wants to know if I can go swimming with him today," Harry blurted out as he entered the kitchen.
"When did Thomas ask that?" Taylor glanced out the window. It was sunny, but it was also very windy, and Britain didn't tend to have many swim-worthy days, even in the summer. This might be one of them, but it also might not.
"Well…" Harry reached into the cupboard for a plate. "Wednesday."
"It's Sunday now," Taylor noted. "He asked you to go today?"
"Yeah, his mom is going to pick us up." Harry held the plate out.
She lifted two pieces of bacon out with the tongs and dropped them on his plate, then pointed at the fruit bowl. "Eat something more than just bacon and I'll consider it. When is she coming?"
"Noon," Harry admitted.
"If the weather is still nice you can go." She would speak with Thomas' mother beforehand, just to get an idea of where they were going and how long they would be gone, but he was a good kid and his parents were reliable. Not like the parents of some of Harry's other friends.
Harry cheered and ran back up to his room, off to do something or other. He had taken to drawing recently, though Taylor remained unconvinced he would stick to that particular hobby any longer than the others.
She spent the morning cleaning up and then working out in their modest backyard, enjoying the windy, nicely warm day while she could. Thomas' mother pulled up just after noon, and a few quick assurances had Taylor sending her son off to the pool, confident that he would be in no real danger.
She could have gone herself, but Harry deserved time to play with his friends without her hovering nearby. She wouldn't smother him.
The weather was still good and she had a collection of old nordic myths she had meant to read, so she set out a lawn chair and continued to make the most of the weekend.
Hours passed, and the sun began to descend in the West. She'd just gotten to a story about Loki and a very questionable plan involving a horse and a gift for Odin when an elongated shadow passed over her face. A bird. She paid it no mind…
Until it passed over again, and she heard the fluttering of heavy wings.
"What…" She looked up, squinting against the sun, and could have sworn she saw a massive brown owl flapping over the roof of her house, barely missing the tacky weathervane she had never cared enough about to bother removing.
Owls didn't fly in the day. Not often. She dropped her book on the lawn chair and stood, peering up at the roof. Maybe it was injured. There was a news story about two big owls getting trapped in a chimney a few months ago. And one about an owl flying right into an open window and refusing to leave a house a few weeks before that… The birds seemed to be stupid here in Britain, owls especially.
She went inside and walked to the front door, intent on looking to be sure there wasn't a big bird carcass decorating the front yard or something equally ridiculous.
There was a bit of yellow parchment on the floor in front of the mail slot. It was the wrong time of day for mail.
Taylor stopped in the front hall, a peculiar old feeling creeping in on the edges of her mind. A stifling paranoia.
Something was off.
She wished she had her bugs. Being able to instantly know that the house was as empty as it was supposed to be would have been ideal. As it was, she casually entered the kitchen and took one of the long, serrated kitchen knives from the block.
Then, and only then, did she approach the front door, leaving the anomalous parchment alone for the moment.
Someone rang the doorbell just as she was putting her eye to the peephole. She jumped back, knife at the ready.
They rang again.
The fish eye view of her front porch given by the peephole revealed the visitor to be an old man with a startlingly long white beard, wearing an old-fashioned suit, his hands empty. Some salesman, perhaps, or a government official of some sort.
She backed away from the door, the kitchen knife heavy in her hand.
"Get ahold of yourself," she muttered, returning the knife to its block. The doorbell rang a third time. Her car was in the drive, so anyone with a modicum of common sense would assume there was probably someone home.
It was nothing. This world didn't have capes, didn't have a reason to hunt her down. If some shadowy government agency was aware of Harry, they would have come for him years ago. She hadn't even worried about such things in years, a little bit of weirdness shouldn't be enough to set her back.
She wiped her sweaty palm against her jeans, set her shoulders, and forced a stiff smile onto her face. "One moment!" she yelled, then went back to the front door.
The old man was indeed old, and his face crinkled up into a spiderweb of wrinkles as he smiled disarmingly at her. "Hello, is this the residence of a Mister Potter?"
She frowned. "No? I think there are some Potters up the road, but don't hold me to that." All of that stupid misplaced paranoia for an incorrect address? It just went to prove that it was stupid and misplaced. In this world, anyway, and this was her world now.
"Are you certain?" the old man pressed. His eyes flicked down, and she realized as she shifted her foot that she was standing on the bit of parchment. It crinkled forlornly as her sneaker scuffed it.
"I'm Taylor Hebert, not a Potter," she offered, resisting the urge to look down. "You are…"
"Ah, where are my manners." He smiled. "I am Albus Dumbledore. May I come in?"
"Why?" she questioned. "I've said there are no Potters here. Whatever business you have with them, I'm sure you need to get to it, and I wouldn't want to delay you any longer." Maybe a bit rude, but she still had an American accent and he was probably going to assume she was rude regardless. It wouldn't hurt to let the old man in and give him some tea, but she would rather just return to her book and he clearly had something else he needed to be doing at the hypothetical Potter household. Selling vacuum cleaners, maybe.
"Ah, but I…" He frowned briefly. "Perhaps you could humor me… Do you have a son?"
She thought of her Harry. Green eyes, a charming smile, messy hair that she had yet to convince him was worth getting some hair gel for, that odd scar on his forehead… "Yes."
"I must simply have the wrong last name," the old man said, beaming with sudden comprehension. "I'm terribly sorry. I do indeed have the right house, though. He would be just about to turn eleven?"
"Eleven a few months ago, actually," she said carefully. "What are you here for, though? My Harry hasn't gotten into any trouble lately, and he's never mentioned anyone with such a memorable name."
"Ah, he would not know me. I am headmaster of a special school, and we would like to offer him a… may I come in?" He ran his hand through his beard. "I confess, it is quite hot out here and I am sure you would like to hear about this opportunity at length. You strike me as a curious young woman."
"Come in," she offered, stepping back from the doorway. She still wasn't a hundred percent certain this man was legitimately what he claimed to be, but refusing him outright might seem suspicious. If he did try something she could break his elderly kneecaps with next to no effort, so she didn't feel like she was in any physical danger.
He winced as he stepped into the shade of her home. "Ah, thank you miss Hebert. Might I ask if a mister Hebert is home? You may appreciate not having to explain this to him all over again. And Harry, of course."
"There is no mister Hebert, and Harry is out with friends, but I'm sure I can pass on whatever it is you have to offer," she suggested, leading him into their modest living room.
"We could wait," Dumbledore offered as he sat down on the worn old couch.
Taylor took the armchair in the corner, leaving a healthy amount of space between them. "No, please go on. You mentioned a school."
"Yes." Dumbledore nodded. "You could consider us a trade school, of sorts. We always offer places to children of alumni when they reach the right age, and our records listed one Harry Potter as living here."
Taylor frowned, outwardly nonplussed. Inwardly, she was more than a little concerned. Babies didn't come from nowhere, Harry did of course have actual parents – likely miserable deadbeats given Contessa claimed to have found Harry abandoned on a porch in the middle of the night – but until now she had never even known his true last name. As far as the world and Harry himself were concerned, he was Harry Hebert, and for this man to say otherwise…
How did he know?
"I didn't go to any trade school," she said suspiciously. "What was the name of your school?"
"Hogwarts," Dumbledore said seriously. "School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
She waited for the punchline, but there wasn't one.
"Right," she said, deadpan. The thumping of her heart seemed abnormally loud in her ears. "Prove it."
"You had only to ask," Dumbledore said, removing a stick from the sleeve of his suit. "Something simple, I think…" He tapped the coffee table, and it turned into a dog. A living, breathing black Labrador that immediately set to scratching itself behind the ear.
Taylor realized far too late that it was not normal to maintain a poker face under such circumstances, but any belated reaction would seem even odder, so she didn't bother trying to fake more than a detached, matter-of-fact sense of surprise.
So much for this being a normal world.
"That does explain some things," she said thoughtfully.
"I imagine it does," Dumbledore said knowingly.
Everything was wrong.
It was a nagging feeling, baseless but persistent. A lingering pain from her past, perhaps, but not one that would go away, no matter how often she got blackout drunk and was late for work the next morning.
The other librarians were worried about her. It had been getting worse these last few months, as she had more and more bad days.
"Taylor, dear, you really must get more rest," one of the older women said to her as she rubbed at her forehead. She said something else unimportant.
"I'm fine," she replied, and said something to assure her coworker that it was indeed fine, and went about her day. Then she went home, like every day.
There were children playing in some of the front yards lining her street, enjoying the little bit of light between school letting out and the early but lengthening spring sunset catching up with them.
Her yard was empty. As it should be.
One of the neighborhood children came up to her as she got out of her car. Thomas, a teen around… Thirteen years old. He asked her something trivial, and she replied, then shooed him away.
She didn't know why he insisted on talking to her. She was a thirty-year-old single librarian with no children of her own. Maybe it was her arm making her mysterious in the eyes of a child.
Maybe something was wrong. The nagging feeling was back, amplified by the sensation of eyes over her shoulder.
"No," she grumbled, seeking out a bottle of soda from the refrigerator, cold and promising a minor relief from her headache.
That was getting worse too. Any day, it felt, she could accidentally breach the thin wall keeping her power out.
She wasn't sure why she was holding it back. The rest of her life was a bland daze that she had trouble caring about. Having control over insects wouldn't make it any worse. She couldn't be any more alone than she already was.
Meeting people just… didn't work. Her job was mostly fine but the librarians had gotten pushy in the last year and she wasn't sure why. Didn't help that she didn't feel like getting into any real relationships, and that most of the people she met on a daily basis were library patrons, often rude ones. She could go out to socialize, but that never panned out. It also didn't help that she had stopped trying at some point in the last ten years.
Her problems were self-inflicted, but at the same time…
"Fuck you," she said as she raised her bottle in toast. "Contessa."
What had Contessa said? Go forward. Be normal. Sealed off her power so she couldn't cause trouble, tossed enough paperwork at her to prove she existed here, and then buggered off.
Taylor brought the bottle to her lips, then realized as the metal cap hit her lips that she hadn't opened it. She had already slumped into her armchair – at some point – and didn't feel like getting up, so she held the cold bottle against her forehead and let her eyes slip closed.
She didn't understand why her life was so hard to engage with. Some days she felt mostly normal, but other days she could barely remember anything she said to anyone, or what they had said back. The doctors all said she was mentally and physically fit, and no psychiatrist could help her when she couldn't truly unburden herself. So she just… drifted.
Maybe it'd been stupid to assume anyone who had gone through what she had could ever settle into a normal life.
She had entertained thoughts along those lines often enough in the past year, but on this particular night of no importance, she reached a tipping point. She was always tired, often miserable, usually some level of confused or dazed, and she didn't know why except to blame it on not being the person she used to be.
"Fuck it," she said aloud to her empty house, and mentally gave in. Contessa had promised that she would never become the merged monstrosity of the final battle again. Contessa's promises weren't doing so hot these days, but she still believed in that one, if only because it was made out of self-interest.
The last vestiges of the decade-old barrier between herself and her power crumbled, and she could feel it coming back. Little blips of sensation beyond her body, old familiar friends. Starbursts popped against her eyelids, painless but distracting.
Her power settled back into her head slowly, in stages. It fit like a long-dormant extra limb, much like getting her other arm back might be, but more cerebral. There were thousands of insects within two blocks of her, hundreds of thousands, and they all snapped into focus, bundles of sensations. Not people, only bugs, as she had expected.
After her bugs settled in, the fog over her mind lifted, piece by piece.
There was a distinct impression of satisfaction somewhere other than her own thoughts. It came from without, not within, and it came so strongly she could recognize it for what it was.
Back on Earth Bet, she had never managed to communicate with her power, but not for lack of trying. That had just changed, and she had a dull awareness of satisfaction morphing to… anger?
"Didn't know powers could be angry," she huffed, her eyes flicking open. She probably shouldn't have said that out loud, Harry…
Who was Harry? She felt foggy again.
The feeling of external anger intensified, and the fog parted. Harry was her son.
Since when? Since… Contessa gave him to her as a baby… A full decade ago!
"What the hell?" she choked, memories flooding into her head. Insects all over the neighborhood spasmed and started marching in formation as she shuddered and bolted to her feet, her hand on her forehead as an abominable headache sprang into existence behind her right eye. "What the absolute buggering fucking shitting–"
She slammed her hand against the wall, cracking the drywall, and sprinted upstairs. There was a door on the left of the second floor hallway, a doorknob coated in dust. She flung it open, and inside there was a boy's room, decorated in posters and pictures and with a dresser still flung partly open from a hurried packing spree. The bed wasn't even made.
Harry's room. Her son Harry. She had a son.
Her power radiated consternation, or something akin to it. She had a son, and she had forgotten him.
No. She gripped the doorknob so hard her hand hurt, pulsing in time with the pain behind her eye and in her stump.
She had been made to forget.
'I can take young Harry to the train,' Dumbledore – Dumbledore, the old man with the beard – had said. She remembered now, that morning. She had helped Harry pack, gone through his new textbooks with him one more time, plied him with advice on people and school and superpowers, the latter barely disguised as uninformed speculation. He'd hugged her and promised to write every week. They were going to get into the car. Dumbledore had shown up and offered to take Harry to the train.
'I'd been looking forward to driving him to the station,' Taylor remembered objecting. 'Why are you really here?'
'To do what needs to be done,' Dumbledore told her, and his stick – wand, Harry had one too now – was pointed at her face and she was stumbling back.
Dumbledore went inside, and by the time she had recovered from her inexplicable haze, he and Harry were gone.
Then she had gone about her day, not once thinking about how the old man had all but kidnapped her son from under her nose after assaulting her with some spell.
Not once thinking about her son at all.
"Fuck!" she screamed again, anger like nothing she had felt in years making her heart race. She had been violated, her mind toyed with, and she had never even been allowed to notice.
More memories came to her, restored – yes, that was it, restored, they had been fogged or taken entirely – by her power. By the alien consciousness looking over her shoulder all these years, blocked but not blind.
She remembered Diagon Alley, a culture shock and a half. Her and Harry, Dumbledore escorting them from shop to shop. Magic, magic everywhere, moving objects and shady people and strange robes, all pointing to a vibrant, impossibly well-hidden society nestled in the heart of the normal world. Harry got his wand; she waited outside because the wandmaker was an odd fellow who didn't appreciate normal people.
No, she had been told that. She didn't know it was true. Dumbledore went in with Harry, and they left with Harry's wand, but she had left her son alone with that man then. Who knew what had been done to him while he was out of her sight. She hadn't thought it long enough to be a problem then, and she hadn't suspected Dumbledore of anything.
Dumbledore had been polite. Inquisitive, perhaps, but she remembered…
'Are you certain you do not know the Potters?' he had asked her while they walked through the Alley. 'It is only that the letter is magically addressed…'
'I am no Potter, and Harry's father…' she had hesitated, thinking about what lies would best fit an unknown world with unknown investigative capabilities. 'Maybe he was a Potter. That wasn't the last name he gave, but it was a one night stand and I couldn't honestly tell you much more.'
The old man had nodded and not pressed her any further. He asked other questions, though. About her reaction to magic, which she explained as having expected something was strange because of Harry's own accidental magic. About her arm, which she had attributed to a car crash. About her parents, who she truthfully said were dead, and her accent, which she attributed to living in America for the first few years of her life, something backed up by the documentation Contessa had given her all those years ago.
In the present day, she stormed out of Harry's room, restraining the urge to break things for her son's sake, as it would be his wall she punched through if she let herself. The various insects under her command weren't so lucky, and many died as she worked out a tiny fraction of her wrath.
Harry had wanted to go to that magical school. She had wanted him to go, despite not possessing a lick of magic herself, according to Dumbledore. Why kidnap him anyway? Why erase her memory? Dumbledore had thrown a monkey wrench into her head, and now she could see exactly how massive and intrusive it was!
She remembered her coworkers asking her about Harry. She remembered spouting lines like 'oh, he's doing great at his boarding school' and not so subtly steering the conversation away, all without actually remembering her own words or the subject of conversation at the time. Whole conversations and encounters were blanks she was only now filling in, ripped from her mind by some sort of continuous Stranger effect even as an associated Master effect had her unwittingly hide her own selective amnesia to avoid arousing suspicion.
It was clever. Clever like taking a wrecking ball to a mailbox and not caring that there was nowhere for the mail to go after. Her life had gone rotten with Harry's absence, partly because of her intermittently foggy memory hindering her and partly because not remembering his existence stripped one of the few truly bright points of her life away, leaving her with nothing. Less than nothing, almost a decade that she had been forced to retroactively remember as empty and pointless, a blur that lacked the center focus of her life.
She fled her son's room, retreating to her own bedroom. Dark, muted colors and a nice bookshelf greeted her, as pleasant as always…
She leaped at the bookshelf, a shaking thumb running across spines to find a photo album, right where she now remembered it. A picture of Harry as a baby graced the front cover, apparently enough to trigger the Stranger effect and ensure she didn't touch it for months.
Months. Harry had been taken from her at the end of August, the start of the 1991 fall semester. It was March of 1993 now.
Her son had been stolen from her life for nineteen months and counting.
Angry did not begin to describe how she was feeling. Murderous was closer, but not quite there yet.
She hadn't been Skitter, or Weaver for that matter, in a long time. She had grown soft by choice, leaving her power behind and trying to live a normal life. She had been happy. Genuinely happy.
Now, though?
"Thank you," she whispered. "For bringing my memories back."
Her power conveyed a sentiment close to her own, vindictive determination.
"Now let's get him back."
So, the changes:
The space between 'Contessa leaves' and 'Taylor accepts Harry / her new life' was, in the first draft, mostly just assumed. In this one, I put a lot more emphasis on this being not an okay thing, pumped up the subtle wrongness of the whole explanation scene a bit to make it less subtle, and generally wrote that out as its own mini-arc. This was always in my mind as what happened between those scenes, but I originally chose not to show it for… some reason. I want to say pacing, because I'm still a little iffy on whether it works in its current iteration here, but I think it's more likely I was just rushing this chapter to get to what I actually wanted to focus on.
I Added in some in-between scenes where Taylor more thoroughly interacts with the world around her, fleshing out her existence through this time period. Wilma the neighbor, the librarian birthday party, that sort of thing. Also, a mention of investments, as one user was at least partially right that basic trends in technology should still be predictable. No outright munchkin though, that's just tacky in a story that's not intended to be about such things. She wins some, she loses some, she's comfortable but not rich. No big change in her overall situation. (If I keep this additional scene, there will be a modification to chapter two to follow up on her altered financial state, but it won't change anything plot-important.)
I put in some more bonding scenes between Taylor and Harry throughout the chapter, to believably build a connection between them and a personality for Harry. Didn't have enough of either in the first version. I don't know if I have enough even now, but I didn't want this chapter to be the biggest chapter in the entire story. I might do a few more in-depth scenes as extra canon here. Harry's eleventh birthday, for instance, was a scene I wanted to depict until I realized it would take a good 5000+ words to do properly.
I removed Taylor drinking and having a drinking problem later; one reviewer was quite convincing in explaining exactly why that doesn't make sense for her from a psychological standpoint. It was never a big plot point or something I was attached to, and I'm a sucker for a well-reasoned analysis, so I dropped it. Her life can suck just as hard without alcohol.
Taylor's reaction to Harry showing signs of powers has been expanded upon and then brought up again later. No change in conclusion, but her reasoning is more thoroughly walked through.
In general, I removed the italics 'narration' bits in between scenes. Anything worth telling is worth actually depicting instead. Nobody suggested this, it just ended up redundant. These actually should have been warning signs to me when I first wrote this chapter; the desire to 'skip over' so much that I needed narration detailing what I was skipping is a red flag of insufficient writing. Most of them didn't survive the other changes I listed above, anyway.
It's still not perfect, and how it all works together is hard to discern after spending so much time on it. How it serves as the springboard for the rest of the story, which takes all of this for granted and doesn't really build much upon, it is even less clear to me. Thoughts?
