Quite understandably, I screamed my head off.

"Oh Jesus fucking Christ," the nightmarish woman said with an exasperated roll of her eyes. Then she reached forward with her right hand to very firmly flick the tip of my nose with a gloved finger, and I stopped screaming to yelp and protect my nose, because holy crap did that sting.

"You done?" she snarked at me. "Or do you need a few more minutes? Because we don't have a hell of a lot of time for this shit and there's some shit you seriously fucking need to know."

"You bish, that stung!" I yelled as I kept my hand clamped over my throbbing nose and wondered if she had-

"-a metal plate on my fingertips? Nah, just an artificial hand. Lost the original one in a dogfight over Madrid," she calmly told me, then she arched an eyebrow. I felt a sudden chill. Did she s-

"-omehow read my mind? Shit you're thick, aren't you? We're in your head right now. Ugh, there was no way in Hell that I was as dense as you are at fifteen!" She paused, then frowned and stood up to comb the fingers of her right hand through her graying hair. As she did her sleeve pulled up, and sure enough, I could see the skeletal framework of her artificial forearm. I could see through the skeletal framework of her artificial forearm. "... Mostly sure. Eh, either way I grew out of it. Guess you're a late bloomer. One of the differences between us."

"I am nothing like you!" I defensively blurted out as I leapt to my feet, irrationally angry all of a sudden. I wasn't sure why.

Or maybe I just didn't want to think about it. Why she looked so much like mom. So much like...

"This self denial shit was cute at the beginning, but it's getting old really fucking fast, kid," she snapped at me as she got right in my face. "I don't just look like mom, just like you don't look just like her."

"Shut up!" I screamed at her as she leaned close to stare hard into my eyes with her own. Her false eye was an eerie, faintly-glowing red, and looked like an old-fashioned bomb sight. "You're just some stupid fucking voice in my head because of my power!"

"A voice that sounds just like you, if you knew how to enjoy a good smoke or three. I also look like you. Because I am you." She took a long drag of her cigarette, then flicked it away as she exhaled the smoke through her nostrils. "And if you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to listen, I'll keep you from ending up like me, and maybe we can keep your Earth from ending up like mine before it's too late."

My stomach plummeted into my feet as I suddenly felt cold, and as if in response, the storm in the distance grew louder, more furious. Closer. The woman, the other and older me, paused and shook her head with a sigh, and took a step back.

"Shit. Was hoping to explain more than this. But now you're about to wake up soon and fuck if I know just how much you're gonna remember. That fucking parasite jacked into your gray matter is being as much of a stupid little shit as you are, and doesn't get what's important yet. Heh, no wonder it likes you. But it'll understand soon enough. You both will."

Well. That wasn't ominous at all. A what in my head?!

"Look, don't worry about that for now." Of course I'm gonna fucking worry about it! "Just try to remember some of this when you wake up. And do me a favor, woman the fuck up about your little Russkie girlfriend and make a move on her already?"

Nataliya wasn't my girlfriend, you one-eyed half-robot bitc-!


I suddenly woke up, inexplicably really annoyed at myself, without the faintest idea why. Like, really, really annoyed. There was also something about the dream I'd been having, but it was already slipping through my fingers. [God fucking damnit Queenie!] For a moment, I wondered just who the hell was Queenie and why I was thinking about her. But then I forgot all about it and half-frantically crawled out of my hospital bed, and rushed into the bathroom because I desperately had to pee.


Getting around the hospital while wheelchair-bound was an interesting experience, and by interesting, I really mean annoying as hell. I wasn't allowed to walk given the gut-wound that I still couldn't remember even getting, but then I hadn't actually felt the wound to my right forearm either. I certainly could feel it now, unfortunately, a throbbing, achy unpleasantness that wasn't too bad as long as I was careful to not try to move my arm. The few times I'd forgotten though, the pain did an excellent job of reminding me just why my right arm was currently in a sling.

Pushing myself around the MTF with only one good hand was something of an exercise in self-flagellation, but it was either that, wait for a nurse or someone to have the spare time to push me wherever I was allowed to go, or sit in my room and quietly go bonkers. [More bonkers, you mean. Who the hell even says 'bonkers' anymore? What are you, sixty?] Oh shut up! Stupid voice in my head...

So anyways, I visited my classmates the first moment that I could.

I only got to see Conner once. After my surgery, I'd slept entirely all day Sunday, and even a fair part of Monday before I'd finally felt strong enough to ask to get out of bed, which is how I got the wheelchair. But he'd been the least injured of us. If it had only been just his broken arm, he would have been swiftly discharged, but his ankle had required reconstructive surgery. When I'd visited him, he'd been... apprehensive about me [which is understandable, he saw some serious shit, you all did]. But he'd been more annoyed still by the fact that he was going to be hobbling on a crutch for the better part of a couple months, and would need at least one more surgery on his ankle in the future. If it didn't go well, he'd almost certainly be medically disqualified from enlisting once he graduated.

"Look Hebert, as pissed as I am... I don't think I'm actually that pissed at you specifically," he confessed to me the day he was discharged. "This sucks. I mean, this really fucking sucks. But if it hadn't been for you and Sokolova I wouldn't be hurt, I'd just be dead, and so would a bunch more of our classmates. So no matter what anyone else says about you, you're okay with me, both of you." Then he blushed and looked away when I started crying.

I couldn't help it.


Miyares woke up the next day. Half of the hospital knew it, because, well, his mom is loud. Davis and McNeal had been visiting me that day, and it was a relief to have McNeal pushing me around that day. Davis would have done it, but his wrist was in a splint and McNeal wouldn't let him even try. It was a massive relief to know that the two had gotten away with mostly cuts, scrapes and bruises beyond the black boy's busted wrist, though from the way McNeal kept tongue-lashing him every so often, I got the sense that his wrist might have been his own fault, which McNeal was quick to confirm.

"There we are, trying to get Conner and Miyares clear while those fucking crazies were distracted with you bringing the boom everywhere, and this goofy clumsy fuck trips over his own damn dress shoes," she scolded him with thinly veiled disgust. The boy, and it was so easy to forget just how big he was for his age especially in comparison to McNeal, cringed sheepishly and rubbed the back of his head with his good hand. "'Liz, c'mon, don't tell her that! I keep telling you, I tripped over a piece of rubble!"

"You lie like a mattress!" she said with a sharp elbow to his gut that made him flinch. I tried my best not to laugh too hard and not strain my side, because I was pretty sure that they were laying it on pretty thick for my sake, and then there was the tender looks she'd give him when she thought that no one was looking, and admittedly it had taken me a while to even notice that there was something there. I honestly didn't have a clue as to just how the two made... whatever that was even work. But... maybe I wasn't the best judge of that sort of thing.

In any case, all three of us got a kick out of watching the Latino boy's mom and aunts and sister fawn over him given the way that they all went on in such a rapid-fire barrage of Spanish that even if I knew the language, I wouldn't have had a hope of following it. Honestly, it was like something out of a movie, and kind of made me wish that my power gave me subtitles or something. [No can do there. The Rose's comms are still fucked to hell, remember? Since, you know, you still can't even talk properly?] Oh, right.

Then I wondered just what the Rose was and just why the name sounded familiar. I could've sworn that I'd heard that before. [Oh for the love of... you're killing me with this shit Queenie, and I'm already dead.]

There was a lot of crying and weeping and yelling, so much yelling, and the three of us quietly decided to leave when one more relative showed up, a very, very big and stoic-seeming guy with a very obvious ankle monitor and being escorted by men damn near as big as he was. Clearly, there was a story there, but he did seem awfully familiar somehow and not just because of the resemblance. Might be the way he ducked and flinched when Miyares' mother, who was very likely the big guy's mom too, reached up and slapped the back of his head so hard and so loudly that it had the MPs on guard in the hallway briefly going on alert before quietly chuckling.

Later, I visited Nataliya by myself.


It was... hard, going to see her. In part, it was because she didn't seem to have any family that lived nearby, and even then wasn't actually allowed other visitors that she might hurt. Somehow, I was an exception to that rule, even wounded and healing as I was. Though I quickly realized that I needn't have worried.

She was completely catatonic, and had been so since I had passed out in her arms on the way back to base Saturday afternoon.

Her room had been placed only a few rooms away from mine, mostly to keep us both under a combined security assignment, but not so closely that a single attacker or group of attackers could easily kidnap, hurt, or kill us both at once. That was a little chilling to learn, but I couldn't exactly fault the logic. Though it would've taken a Brute to lift Nataliya out of her hospital bed, as heavy as she was in her other state. It's true what they say about the beds making people look tiny. That was especially true in her case as she lay curled up into a tight ball around a pillow as she stared at the wall of her room with dead, and dull green lenses for eyes. The doctors only knew that she was alive because she was breathing, and from what I'd been told, General Harper had even authorized specialists from the PRT to come and assess her condition and share any insights they might have had, just in case that her catatonia might have been something unique to Parahumans. They couldn't put an IV in her for fluids because she had no veins and her metal and polymer skin broke every needle the doctors tried to use, and didn't dare try to run a tube up her nose to feed her intravenously because no one could figure out how her organs worked in her current state, or if she even still had organs. The only mercy was that she wasn't soiling herself either.

Nothing.

So, whenever Dad, Davis or McNeal weren't visiting, or I wasn't sitting with Miyares and keeping him company, I sat in her room with my wheelchair next to her bed and read out loud to her from the book I'd bought her. For once I was grateful for my non-functioning vocal chords. The speaker strapped to my throat by a choker didn't get sore or tired or dry. It let me take my time reading The Hobbit out loud to her, in the very same way I faintly remember Mom doing for me, with as much animation as I could and taking care to differentiate the characters I spoke for with differing voices as best as I could.

When I wasn't reading to her, I told her about our classmates. Conner's whining and grumbling about having to use a crutch with a broken arm. The peculiar intimacy of whatever McNeal and Davis's relationship might be despite how much she often poked fun at him. And of course, the wild chaos of Miyares' family visits. I was painfully aware that what I was doing was somewhere between gossiping and rambling. But I was desperate for some kind of reaction out of her, anything.

I would have even welcomed her bizarre gluttonous lust for toffee.

It wasn't until Wednesday that I happened to glance at her while turning a page and realized that she was finally looking at me. And it was only me she paid attention to. But it was still almost another full day before she began actually responding to people beyond tightly squeezing my hand in her own.

That Thursday night, I was woken up to Nataliya crawling into my bed to curl up against my back. I thought it'd dreamt it until I was woken up for my morning medications to discover her still curled up against me and softly snoring against the nape of my neck, hugging me so tightly that I ached in places. She was human again. But when she woke up, she almost immediately became metal and polymer again.


Friday

"And how do you feel about that?" With a start, I blinked in confusion at my therapist, and very eloquently asked her to repeat the question.

"Bwa?"

She softly laughed and her eyes crinkled behind her glasses. Her enormous afro puffs were a shiny brilliant gold, with a band of white vertically splitting each one in half like a racing stripe. She had continued the theme with her makeup, her eyes and lips both limned with gold along with a single white stripe straight down the middle of her bottom lip. The bright white of her jumper dress made the gold of her makeup and hair and the dark cocoa of her skin stand out even more, with thick-knit gold stockings on her legs and gold wedge pumps. Even her artificial arm was gold that day. As weird as she dressed, I had to admit, it made her as eye-catching as she was visually quirky.

"I asked you, how do you feel about Nataliya finally responding to you after two straight days of being unresponsive?" she gently repeated.

I'd been ... trying not to think about it actually, and felt my face begin to grow hot even as I awkwardly half-shrugged. Dr. Thatcher arched an eyebrow, also gold of course, and her pleasant smile seemed to grow just a little wider and warmer.

"You seem to find that embarrassing Taylor."

"Sh-she crawled into my bed!" I sheepishly admitted. I admit that I'd made fun of the, ah, softness of the girl's body probably more than was was polite. In fact, I'd been pretty fucking rude about it in retrospect, when the truth was that the other girl had a lot of hard muscle as well. I'd felt quite a lot of both when I'd woken up to find her hugging my back. "How can I not be embarrassed by that?! It was weird!"

"Is it truly so strange that despite the early difficulties the two of you have had, she's grown to prefer your presence above others?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"Because it makes no sense! Why would she want to be friends with a stick-thin twig like me anyways?!"

"Nataliya isn't Emma, Taylor."

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't speak. I wanted to deny that I'd even thought of, of her anymore, ever, but the words caught in my throat.

"I understand that your feelings about Emma are extraordinarily strong. But you shouldn't let them color what you feel and think about Nataliya. She doesn't deserve that, and neither do you."

She let me sit there in agonized silence, my chest hurting. Then she very gently said, "Taylor, I'd like for you to think about just what it is you feel about your new friend, and how it differs from what you used to feel about Emma. We don't have to talk about it, not right now. But I would like for you to think about it. Nataliya is in an especially fragile state, now more than ever before, and the things you say to her, the way you treat her and interact with her, they matter to her far, far more than you've allowed yourself to think about. And I think that, on some level, she has an effect on you that you don't like to think about."

I didn't even realize that I was shivering, until she stood from her chair at least, then reached to softly pat my good shoulder with her flesh and blood hand. It was only when I was calm again that she gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I think we've explored your feelings enough for today, Taylor. But remember, I'd like for you to take the time to think about just what your friend Nataliya means to you right now. It's more important for her recovery and your own than you might think it is."


Nataliya quietly slipped back into my bed again that night. I couldn't talk to her, not then, and she wasn't exactly in a state to do more than cling to my back and shiver. So I quietly read more of The Hobbit to her instead, until the arms wrapped around my middle turned into flesh and blood again. And if I heard her quietly sobbing as she shuddered against me, I didn't comment on it, as much as I wanted to. Mostly because it was all I could do to keep my own voice level. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep. So did I a little later.