Tyrant 3.3

Sharp edges dug into my back. On top of that it was cold, wet, and my forehead stung.

My body moved. Someone was dragging me, the jagged rocks scraping against my suit.

"Fuck, you're heavier than you look," an out-of-breath voice muttered above my head.

They pulled me again, and my feet came clear of the freezing water. My arm flopped back to the ground, my hand clenching reflexively on the coarse gritty sand. There was a thump nearby, the voice's owner collapsing onto the beach.

Not quite the fiery end I had expected.

I tried to twist my head to see my rescuer, but stopped as little explosions of light went off behind my eyes accompanied by a deep agony that ran from the crown of my head into my jaw. I think I must have made a noise because there was movement from my companion.

"Shit. You're not drowning or something are you? I think we were solid when we hit the water."

They moved closer, hands grasping across my chest and face. I groaned again, trying to express something. Not quite sure what.

"Well, you're breathing. That mask can't be helping, but not much I can do about it. It seems stuck down pretty ..."

She trailed off, and I heard a sharp intake of breath. The hands scrabbled at the back of my mask while she hissed under her breath. I made out the words "fuck" and "sorry", probably in response to my cries as the movements jolted through me.

The pain behind my left temple spiked as the mask peeled away. I screamed, or tried to. The sensory overload was sapping what little energy I had, and fast. I was so weak it was barely a whimper.

The hands dropped away from the mask that was rolled down away from my forehead, now folded double over my eyes and mouth. The wet material made breathing even harder, I felt like I was barely sucking in any air at all now. Gloved fingertips dabbed at my temple, the light touches stinging like acid.

"Fuck me. You got shot?"

I tried to respond, but nothing came out. The popping lights were reappearing in my vision, the soaked two-ply mask sucking in and out of my open mouth.

The fingers reached behind my head into my hair. A new pain spread from her hand and down my spine.

"Bullshit," she whispered. "How are you alive?"

I was so tired. The lights were fading away now. The mask sucked back in, blocking my mouth. I coughed reflexively but I wasn't strong enough to dislodge the material.

The beach was receding. I couldn't even hear the waves lapping the shore anymore.

She said something again and I felt her lurch forward, grabbing my mask and pulling it the rest of the way off, away from my mouth. That was better. Now I just needed to …

something.

As blackness engulfed me, I caught a final snatch of sound that echoed strangely. I knew I probably should have been able to make sense of the noises, but my tired mind wasn't working right. All I could decipher was a sense of shock from my companion.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me."

Cold.

It was a simple thought, but it felt important.

It meant I was alive, at least unless I had been wrong to dismiss the religions that included a frigid afterlife. Nordic Paganism? I was probably safe unless I met an opera-singing warrior angel in the next few minutes.

But the thought meant more than my continued life. It meant I was able to recognise the cold, able to understand that I didn't like it, able to remember ...

What the fuck had I been thinking? I had left my allies and friends to fend for themselves, and instead chased Oni-Lee into a fight I had no personal involvement with.

It seemed surreal, like my memories were of another person seen through a movie screen.

But I also remembered being that person. Thinking had been like trying to wade through syrup, each decision filtered across a vast distance.

In the end the choice to pursue the ABB assassin felt less like heroic righteousness or self-preservation and more an almost Pavlovian reflex to run down possible prey. Something like the dog and the mailman.

At some level I understood that I was thinking like me again. I could berate myself, and I was pretty sure that musing over comparative theology was a higher function. I was better in some fundamental way.

My head still hurt, but far less than I would have expected. Stung, more than anything, and that was probably related to the salt spray that wafted over me. My lips felt cracked where it had settled and crusted. Apparently I had lost my mask somewhere along the way.

I was so damn thirsty.

I sort of remembered there had been someone else on the beach, but it seemed even more disjointed than the rest of my recent memory. The explosion must have scrambled my head worse than the bullets. Whatever the reason, I couldn't feel anyone near me now.

Interestingly the beach was literally swarming with little things that I could connect with, crabs and mites and flies. I had more access to my environment than I had ever had on the Rig.

I was safe, which also meant I was alone. Whoever had pulled me onto the shore was gone.

Groaning, I struggled to prop my head up. It was dark, most of the night sky obscured by clouds, but there was still enough light to make sense of my location. I was on the beach, just down from the pier that jutted out from the end of the boardwalk. It was late enough that the few remaining streetlights were darkening, in preparation for the sun that would be rising soon.

And out over the bay ...

"Holy shit, right?"

I turned, strangely unsurprised to see Shadow Stalker seated a few metres away on the sand. She looked like I felt, staring at the new skyline with her arms clinging tight as she hunched forward over her knees.

It had been one of those not-secrets that no-one ever really talked about, how the world had been broken ever since powers became a thing, but how there had still been an uneasy stability. Heroes fought villains and they both kept the civilians out of it. They kept the damage down, it was never an open war. And the worse things that powers made, the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Blasphemies and the Endbringers, they were just the natural disasters of the new age, no more predictable than the earthquakes and hurricanes of the previous generation.

Fragile as it was, there was a balance. It made sense. People could trust that unless they heard the sirens, they could go to sleep and the world would be there when they woke up.

Both sides equaled out.

I turned back to the ocean, watching as the ruins of the burning Rig collapsed into the water.

It was a long time before either of us spoke again. The darkness of night had blurred and faded at the horizon, and colour was streaking the sky.

The wreckage had long since burnt itself to embers, only the heavy pylons that had formed the supports of the structure remained, angling haphazardly out of the water like the legs of a drowned titan.

The world seemed paused, even the sandflies were subdued, I barely had to stop them from following our smells on the wind.

I was pretty sure Shadow Stalker was still there, but I hadn't looked back for a while. She had sat in silence for a time and then vanished from under my bugs, presumably retreating back into her shadows. I could see the appeal myself, the snatches I remembered from before we hit the bone-chilling water had coloured the world an unearthly lilac-tinted monochrome. Even amidst the destruction it had been beautiful and serene.

Who wouldn't escape to such a world?

As for me, I was less hiding and more frozen by a hundred competing demands. The whys and the hows and the whos. Especially the whos. Who survived. Who didn't. Who was responsible. Who could I make pay?

The last desire no longer surprised me.

I hadn't really come to terms with the new me before today. I hadn't accepted that I was no longer just the daughter Annette and Danny had raised, the girl they had been proud of. I couldn't accept that the bullies had finally succeeded in destroying the person I had been.

The truth was they hadn't broken me with the locker. They had torn Taylor apart day by day, inch by inch. The girl Annette and Danny had raised was happy, carefree, forgiving. I hadn't been that girl in a long time, and I should have realised it long before I got my powers. I had become something else, sad and angry and vengeful, but still desperately clinging to a past that was long gone. Pretending Emma might snap out of it and be my friend again, all the while hating her and what she had become.

Pretending that Taylor was still in me somewhere, putting her memory on like a mask for my own benefit. I refused to let go of that innocent girl, because accepting she was gone meant they had won. The new me they had made was too proud for that.

Now that old conflict was unimportant. Anachronistic, even. I had changed and my world was different for it. That child and those bullies had no place in my life, the Taylor mask was an impediment.

I could have stopped our enemies at the bank from the first moment. The rooftop showed that to be true. Everyone would have been safe.

It hadn't been uncertainty that had held me back, nor unfamiliarity with my powers. My powers had been crying out to be let loose, to fight at my command, but I had been afraid. Afraid of the anger that I had denied, afraid to lose that little girl that I still wanted to be. The same fear that had kept my head down and my hands still no matter what they did.

I had been afraid of what I could become.

Well, now I had become. It was past tense. I had watched my anger come to life in a spray of viscera. That anger lived inside me and my power responded to it. Hungered for it. Resisting my anger was resisting my power, hamstringing me and risking my allies.

My fear had been removed by the blunt surgery of his gun. All that had been left was my core, my uninhibited self. My ally had stepped in, to move the limbs I couldn't operate and to do other things I had never even imagined, but it still moved to my intent.

My intent had killed, not monsters but normal people. Good people if not for his manipulation. Those deaths were on his head.

My intent had protected my friends. I had wondered earlier if I was a monster, but a monster would never protect.

My intent had prioritised my vengeance. That wasn't the action of a monster either. A monster didn't choose, it was a human who made a choice. A choice born of a bitter fury and disappointment so strong it over-rode my other needs.

Maybe the Chief Director had been right, even as she was so wrong. I wasn't dangerous to my friends directly, not in the way she suggested.

I was just selfish.

My problem wasn't anything as simple as a monster inside me. I was the problem, me and my despair turned to anger.

You couldn't fix a problem without accepting it existed. I had read that somewhere.

I gazed across the bay. It didn't seem so hard, really, to do what needed to be done. The two forces that drove me were nearly balanced, to destroy and to protect. I just had to nudge them, tilt the axis to where I wanted it.

It certainly made it easier now that the two forces were neatly aligned. If I wanted to protect Brockton Bay, someone was going to have to die.

"We should get going," came a quiet voice from my side. "Find the others."

I glanced across, watched Shadow Stalker brush sand from her thighs as she stood.

I nodded.

She was right, about everything.

AN: So yeah, Taylor is growing up (for better or worse?). Interestingly I actually intended Taylor to go in a totally different direction here (continue the self-loathing "am I a monster" stuff for a bit longer, but she refused, slapped me upside the head and told me to write her with guts.

More importantly OMGOMG SOPHIA FOUND OUT BEFORE TAYLOR WTF?!