Inner Demons
Murderer.
You killed me.
You did this.
You did this!
Why are you running?
There's no place to go.
Taylor ran anyway, hoping that the pounding of her feet against the pavement would drown out the voices in her head. It didn't work. They screamed at her, taunted her, laughed at her, scorned her, insulted her, welcomed her. Because she was one of them now.
Butcher.
Worthless child. You do not deserve the majesty you have stolen.
You will not last. Your mind is weak.
Your will is weak.
We will hollow you out.
Make you empty.
Make you ours.
We've done it before.
"Get out of my head." She meant it as a command, but it came out as a whimper.
They laughed.
Get out of my head, she says!
Get out of my head.
Get out of our head.
You're outvoted, worthless child.
There's no room here. Go sleep outside.
She screamed. She screamed at the sky, at the night, at the city. She screamed herself raw as she prayed for silence, but when she gasped for breath the voices were still there.
Around her, lights began to turn on up and down the street in bedrooms and apartments as people began to wake up, wondering what was happening. And she could see them too, through the darkness, through the walls of their houses, whether awake or asleep. She could see their blood flowing through their veins, their hearts beating in their chests.
They noticed you.
They know what you are.
Kill them, before they tell others.
It's your only hope.
Ha ha ha ha. Hope. What a sad and desperate myth.
Taylor vanished and appeared a block away in an explosion of fire and sound. She teleported again and again, scorching the street and leaving a trail that the deaf and blind could follow.
Go faster! Faster! You're almost there.
Just to the end of the world and back, and you'll be safe.
Ha! Don't listen to them, worthless child. There is only one safety, only one peace.
There is only one way out.
Only one way you can be free.
You have to undo what you have done.
Die.
WWW
And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes.
And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit.
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Taylor knelt before her mother's grave, her head in her hands, tears in her eyes. It was a last resort for her, a refuge for when she had nowhere else to go. There was a ... goodness to this place, a sadness and a peace that she didn't want to use up. After so many bad days, she didn't know when she'd need a bit of her mom again for when life got even worse.
But there would be no worse day than this, no hour more desperate.
"I wanted to be a hero, Mom." Her mask lay on the grass beside them. "It was my first time in costume. It was going to be my way out of ... life."
Liar. You put on your costume to hurt people.
To kill people.
Like us.
Yes. Tell Mommy how you killed us. She'll be so proud.
Gritting her teeth, Taylor raked her fingernails across her face, but it didn't even hurt. She was stronger than she had ever been, but she couldn't even break her own skin. She bit her tongue next, but even as her mouth filled with the taste of blood, she felt no pain.
Choke on it.
Drown in it.
Die, die, die!
"I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't ..." A week ago, it had been the hardest thing in her life to not drown her school in a black and buzzing swarm and listen to them scream. Being a hero was the only thing that had held her back. Being a hero was her dream, her lifeline, and her one, lonely hope. And now ...
She grabbed at the collar of her costume, the spidersilk outfit that she had spent months putting together. It stretched and tore in her hands like plastic.
Because it was a stupid dream. It always had been, and now it wasn't even that. If she went to school tomorrow with the psychotic torments on the inside of her skull as well as the outside, she would break, and people would die.
Giving up ... giving up sounded like such a low, wretched option.
Until she compared it to anything else.
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Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains.
Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces, neither could any man tame him.
And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.
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Her mother's grave couldn't help her, so Taylor went to the Protectorate. Their headquarters sat atop an oil rig out in the bay, its green forcefield glowing in the night. The view of the PHQ was the main attraction of the Boardwalk, and Taylor could remember walking down the beach gazing at it. There had been something magical about it, something that made her feel safe.
They'll kill you.
Maybe that's what you want.
Yes. Fight them and make them kill you.
You'll be welcome in our hell.
"Shut up!" she said. "Shut up and let me think!" She had to speak her words aloud, because her own thoughts were drowned out by the voices in her head. "If ... if I go down there, they'll help me, right? They have to."
They'll kill you.
There will be blood.
There will be butchery.
"They're the Protectorate. They'll protect ... people from me." That was their first objective, to protect people from parahuman threats. How? "They'll ... send me to an asylum."
They'll bury you.
Hide you away.
You'll be forgotten.
You've been forgotten before.
That thought chilled her. She remembered being trapped inside her locker, not knowing if anyone was going to come help her, if anyone who cared would ever find her. In an asylum, they would try to counter her powers and keep her inside first, and try to help her second.
"But can they?" She could teleport. Her teleportation was limited by line of sight, so that meant no windows. She could see through walls too, though only circulatory systems. If she could teleport into people, then she couldn't be around anyone with a beating heart either. And then there was her original power, bugs, so she'd need to be kept several blocks away from anything she could use.
They didn't have asylums like that. The only prison they had that could keep her was ...
"The Birdcage," she whispered. The voices in her head began to laugh.
Yes! Do it! Send us to the feast!
We'll ravage the prison, until there's no one left but us.
Hell will be empty, and all the devils will gather here, in one tiny, bursting head.
And those were her two choices. If she tried to live a normal life, she would break. She would hurt someone, kill someone, and the heroes would come after her, forcing her to fight again. She could embrace the Butcher torment the world until someone else killed her like she killed the last one, or she could let the heroes send her to the Birdcage while she was still holding on enough to make that choice. Then her body would be torn apart and her mind would be passed along from one violent killer to another as she lived out her everlasting damnation.
Taylor fell to the ground and wept as the demons in her mind began to laugh.
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But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him.
And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.
Now there was there night unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.
And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter them.
And forthwith Jesus gave them leave.
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You always want to give up. But you can't.
That wasn't one of the Butchers' voices, so it must have been her own.
"I don't know what to do," she whispered. It took all her strength to endure the petty cruelties of high school. How was she supposed to deal with super powered insanity? Even dying would just send her mind to a new host. "There's no way out."
There's always a way out. There has to be.
"There's never been one before." When her mother had died, Taylor had survived, but only as half of what she had been before. Emma's betrayal cut her in half again. And this? With this new disaster, there was barely anything of her left.
She was just a weak mind buried in her own skull, going insane and waiting to either go out with a bang or a whimper.
"There's nothing special about me," she muttered. She wasn't being harsh, just stating a fact. "The other Butchers would have done everything they could to find a way out, and they failed, every single one of them!" Friends, family, willpower, determination, none of those things had helped them, so they wouldn't help her.
The only thing she had that none of the other Butchers could use was her bug powers, for all the good that was. She had spent her entire stay at the hospital coming to terms with her powers after the locker. The constant feedback of her swarm had nearly broken her, but having ten thousand tiny, writhing bodies under her control was nothing like having fourteen extra minds screaming in her head.
In fact, it was the exact opposite.
The opposite ...
"No," she whispered. "It can't be that easy. Can it?"
Too many bodies, too many minds, too many bodies, too many minds.
A nearby ash sphinx moth fluttered against a street light. Taylor could feel through its legs, see through its compound eyes, smell through its antennae. She was the moth in every way but the mind, and she was each of the Butchers in mind alone. She took hold of one of those minds, the first Butcher, and shoved him into the moth.
Another she put into a carpet beetle, another into a crab, then a dragonfly and a wolf spider and a house cricket. An ant, a millipede, a firefly, a housefly, a gnat, grasshopper, a termite, a jumping spider.
One by one she emptied her mind, giving each Butcher a body to call their own, a body they wouldn't need to share. And in the end, there was silence.
WWW
And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind, and they were afraid.
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It was several days before Taylor went out in costume again. She had needed to grab her costume from where he had left it by her mother's grave and repair it which had slowed her down. With half a dozen Brute powers, she might not have needed the extra protection, but she wanted it. It reminded her of who she was.
Armsmaster came alone to meet her. That wasn't a sign of trust. He just didn't know what she was capable of yet.
"I wasn't expecting you to come personally," Taylor admitted. He was the leader of this branch of the Protectorate doing what amounted to trash disposal.
He eyed her through his helmet, his heart beating steadily in his chest. "Too many captures have been botched by poor follow throughs." He glanced down at her peace offering, Oni Lee, lying on the pavement. "And I wanted to meet any independent hero bold enough to try to capture Oni Lee on her first night out."
She almost smiled at that. She wished that her first night out had gone half this well. Capturing Oni Lee was a simple matter of driving him into a mindless rage, letting him chase her far away from Lung, then countering his teleportation with her teleportation and superhuman strength.
Oni Lee muttered something that she didn't understand, possibly a slur or a curse in a different tongue. Armsmaster frowned. "He's still conscious?"
"I didn't want to risk causing him brain damage," she explained. "So I broke his arms and spun cobwebs in his eyes." She waited for him to connect the dots and saw his heart beat faster when he did.
"You're Butcher."
She had expected that. Butcher's article on PHO had been updated, saying that the previous Butcher had been found dead with spider bites on the inside of his mouth and that the new Butcher would have bug powers.
"No I'm not," she said. "I killed Butcher, but I am not Butcher."
Butcher fluttered and flew around them, skittered and scurried through the cracks in the sidewalk. She kept three of them in her head for bloodsight, danger sense, and teleportation, but their voices were easy to deal with when she knew that she wouldn't have to endure them forever. And they tormented her less when they knew that they too would soon be granted peace.
He frowned and, if the beating of his heart was anything to go by, he seemed to believe her.
"Then who are you?"
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And he answered, saying, My name is Legion, for we are many.
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A/n I got this idea while reading HowlingGuardian's Here Comes the New Boss (Nothing like the New Boss). It was the first and only story I found where Taylor got the Butcher's powers, and it was actually kind of funny when the voices of dead supervillains in her head had to be the voice of reason. I thought about writing this as an omake over there, but then I decided to build up one of my own threads instead of contributing to someone else's, because I'm generous like that.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my Bible study.