AN: This is the final chapter of this story. This fic was never intended to be extremely long, and I'm glad that I've gotten around to finishing it. I hope everyone has enjoyed it!

The Case of the Family

Er-or

She was in Rapture still. Except it was different. It was broken, worn down, damaged, like the brewing war had already hit it.

And there was a tall, lithe figure standing over her, a diving helmet on her head, drill on her hand. There were no female Big Daddies. This was something else. This wasn't Rapture, not the Rapture she had been stuck in.

The female Big Daddy (Big Mommy?) cosplayer screamed, throwing her arms behind her as she bent her back and roared her displeasure to the heavens.

A hand clamped onto her arm from behind. An ice pick rammed into her skull again.

Error

Lisa was kneeling on cobblestones, wind whipping through her hair, teasing several strands out of her ponytail.

She was going to be sick. Her stomach was churning and there was sweat breaking out all over her.

There was a woman a few paces in front of her in a blue dress. Lisa reached for her. Maybe she could help. This wasn't Rapture, so maybe they…

A flutey melody played from a Jefferson statue near the woman, and she went rigid. A moment later, a giant mechanical bird-man-thing soared over the rooftops and angled straight for them.

A hand clamped onto Lisa's shoulder. Her head split from the pain.

Error

There were drums beating behind her temple. This had been a bad idea. A horrible idea. Why did this hurt so much? Dimension jumping had never been a problem using parahuman powers. Why did this hurt?!

"What the fuck?"

Lisa cracked her eyelids open a sliver and managed to lift her head from her chest despite the growing nausea. She stared straight at a double of herself. A double holding a shifting, tinker-tech gun, and wide eyes.

"TAYLOR!"

A hand clamped around her stomach, hauling her back to her feet. Pain.

Error.

Brockton Bay. Not her Brockton Bay. She'd have remembered if the Simurgh had paid a visit. She'd also have remembered if it had been a shrunken down Simurgh walking hand in hand down the street with Taylor.

She was probably delusional. Intense pain did that. She could barely lift her head from the street to stare at the scene in front of her.

A hand yanked her up. Agony.

Processing error.

"That's quite enough of that, thank you. I'll take it from here."

Bright.

Wood.

Lighthouse?

Infinite expanse. True infinity. Incomprehensible. Impossible. Existence is irrefutable. Elizabeth's superposition has collapsed. She was expansive, yet is now finite. Her superposition still exists as potential. Impossible. Irrefutable. Infinite existence, finite entity. Shard superposition minuscule in comparison. Exceedingly finite. Tiny. Alone. Administrator?

Soft tapping and plinking near her head roused Lisa from her migraine-induced stupor. As consciousness returned, she dearly wished it would run back along to its corner and hide. Everything hurt. Her head still felt like it had an ice pick drilled into her temple - though at least it was down to a dull throb now - and her arm back was sore. Her arm felt like it was bruised from wrist to elbow, and she had somehow managed to pull a muscle in her side.

Fuck dimension hopping. She was going to find Suchong's corpse, resurrect the bastard, and then choke the life out of his mad-scientist neck. There was a safe way to cross universes and that was not it.

Fucking Rapture!

"Oh, good. You're awake. 'Bout time. I was starting to think I was going to have to start searching for a suitable bribe for Panacea. Well, there's a 68.5592% chance that I should do it anyway. What the hell have you been doing to yourself, Mom? Seriously, we leave you on your own for six months and you come back with five broken bones, a missing rib, nothing in purple on your outfit, and you chopped off almost all your hair!"

Lisa shot up, choosing to ignore the wrenching pain in her side or the ache in her arm. Her eyes flew open and she was focusing on her daughter even before her brain had finished processing Dinah's little sardonic rant. The girl was smiling at her, a small quirk of one side of her mouth - something most people wouldn't even notice it was so subtle - as she continued tapping at her phone.

"I like my new haircut you little dweeb," Lisa growled. Lunging off of the bed, she half-fell, half-grabbed Dinah. Ignoring Dinah's squeak of feigned protest, she pulled the young woman against her in a crushing embrace. Dinah's tension released after a half-second, her own wrapping around Lisa and her head leaning against Lisa's chest.

"Hey, Mom. It's good to have you back."

"It's good to be back, kiddo," Lisa murmured, her voice almost too thick with emotion to get past her clenched throat.

"There was a 4.37282123% chance that you weren't, well, you. I mean, our you. I didn't want to risk it until I knew for sure."

"You know Taylor could've -"

"Mom went with your friend to grab the Little Sisters from that underwater city you had been living in. They took a few of the Hive with them for protection and backup. She should be back in a few minutes. They only had one more trip left. Colin is getting his contacts to help with deprogramming the survivors and undoing whatever that fucking bio-tinker did to them." Dinah's snarl could have cut steel.

Lisa should've been prepared for that reaction. Capes kidnapping and enslaving kids was…always a sensitive topic for her. Lisa felt an irrational surge of anger towards her power for knocking her out. She should have been awake; she should have been there to help her daughter work through the revelation that there was a whole city that was enslaving little girls.

She should've been there to let Dinah confront her over her complete lack of action to do anything about it.

"Dinah, I…"

"Don't." Her daughter pulled back. Not enough to move away from the embrace, just enough to stare up at her. Dinah had never been very tall. "Mom, if you're about to try and apologize, stop. I've lived with you long enough, I know how you react to things. You would've been miserable and laser-focused on getting home first and foremost. Getting those girls free would've come after you knew you had backup. I can't say I'm not angry, but I'm not twelve anymore and I'm not an idiot. Taking on a whole city with just super-guessing? That's stupid. You did the right thing - getting home first I mean."

Lisa sniffled. Running a hand through Dinah's blue-streaked hair, she shook her head. "How the hell did I raise such a smart kid?"

"Oh please, that's Taylor's fault, not yours. How's your head?"

Lisa winced, the pounding in her skull coming back to the forefront. "Better. It's about a 6 out of 10 now. How long was I out?"

"The four of you materialized in the lab about two days ago. You've been knocked out ever since." Dinah paused, looking to the side, unable to meet Lisa's gaze. "Mom pulled you into the Hive immediately, we could all tell there was something funky going on with your passenger. We thought it would help lessen the load. We didn't think it would pull your friend into the link too. Elizabeth explained that she was connected to your passenger too now though and that it had apparently tried to make itself a conduit in her place but couldn't handle the processing required or…I wasn't really listening. Colin has a recording if you really care about it."

Recording equipment was active due to standard tinker lab procedures. Recordings likely assisted in determining verification of authenticity of origin claims while Lisa Hebert remained unconscious.

Lisa blinked. She sat back down the bed, letting out a slow breath.

"Mom?"

"I think…I think my power is…okay again."

"Oh. Cool. That's…good?"

"Yeah?" She shook her head, then her eyes narrowed. "Wait! You said four. That's me, Elizabeth, Sally…Dinah, who else showed up here?"

Dinah's eyebrows arched. "You didn't know? Heh, oh boy. Well, apparently, you dragged a giant dude in a diver's suit with you. Colin has been ecstatic while working with him and trying to figure out how to get him out of the damn thing!" She frowned, her good cheer vanishing. "My numbers don't really give good odds that he can be fixed, but, well, they're not dismal."

Lisa stared. "My Big Daddy survived? Holy cow. Tough bastard."

"Please, please tell me I get to tell Mom that's what you call him," Dinah asked, a smirk back on her face.

"Shut up, brat!" Lisa yelled, playfully smacking Dinah's shoulder as the girl danced backwards, laughing. "That's their name. I can't help that Ryan had issues!"

"What's who's name now?"

Lisa felt like all the air in her left in a single gut punch as her head snapped to the doorway.

Dinah's smirk melted into a regular smile again and she backed away. "I'll see you guys later. Bye, Mom, Mom." As she slipped past Taylor, Dinah murmured, "99.79651% it's her. All intents and purposes, I can't see a difference if it's not."

"I already told you that sweetheart," Taylor murmured back. "We'll see you at dinner."

As Dinah slipped out of the room, Lisa wanted to run to her wife, but she instead stayed rooted to the bed. Moving was daunting, it was frightening. She'd been envisioning this for weeks. Months. She'd dreamed of this. Turned it over and over in her head time after time. And now it was here and all she could think of was how it had taken too long and things had to have changed and Brian had probably gotten his hooks back into Taylor or how she had done things that wouldn't be acceptable while they were apart or hadn't done things that Taylor wouldn't be able to overlook or -

Warm hands folded over her shoulders and a tall, lithe body pressed against her back. Taylor's soft, quiet voice was a whisper next to her ear. "Shh. You think too loud."

"I'm a Thinker 7. It's what I do," Lisa quipped back automatically. Her heart unclenched ever so slightly.

"There. See, was that so hard?"

"Old habits, huh?" Lisa asked.

"Just because you're the Thinker 7, it doesn't mean I don't get to know my wife." Taylor kissed her cheek. "You're home. You're safe. I can stop yelling at Flechette and String Theory to break reality in order to figure out where you vanished to."

Lisa turned her head just enough to eye Taylor. "What."

Taylor grinned right back at her. "I'm sorry, did you seriously think I was just going to sit around and twiddle my thumbs while my wife was lost?"

"I. Um. String Theory?"

"She could've broken the Moon. I figured if I gave her an outlet, and proper motivation, she'd be able to break a few walls of the universe." Taylor frowned. "You know where you ended up is pretty beautiful. The local government seems, well, horrible, but the world itself was…really beautiful."

Lisa reached up and clasped Taylor's hand. "It wasn't home. You and Dinah, you two are my home."

"Who's the romantic now?" Taylor asked, kissing Lisa's hand.

"I'll admit to whatever you want me to admit to, Tay. Just fucking kiss me already."

And she did. And for the moment, Lisa could forget about all of the problems she had, all of the troubles that she was dealing with, all of the issues she was going to have to face in a few minutes.

She was home.

Rosalind Lutece made a mark on her notepad, her brother, Robert, shaking his head beside her.

"I did tell you it would turn out this way."

"No, I don't think you did."

"I did."

"You didn't."

"Okay, I was going to."

"It doesn't change that you did not do it."

Elizabeth stepped out one of the lighthouses in front of them, her arms crossed as she stared at them. "Do the two of you ever agree on anything?"

"Not usually," Robert replied, shrugging. "Tell us, how does it feel?"

Rosalind picked up the thread, saying, "Being separated, yet connected. You're not part of yourself, yet you can still access this Sea."

"You can still see the whole. Your whole. Without being a part of it."

"You're not many-who-is-one anymore. You're closer to one-who-is-linked-to-many now."

"It's confusing, even to us." Robert smiled. "We didn't see this coming when you chose to go back. We thought it would be the end of you. Was it worth it, child?"

Elizabeth didn't even need an instant before nodding. "I saved a girl who my own mistakes had doomed. That alone would have been worth it. But even more, I made new friends along the way. Now I can see my old selves again through a proxy. And I think through me, these parasites are learning that perhaps they don't need to be quite so destructive everywhere they go."

Rosalind scoffed. "Now that would be the day. 95 times heads was drawn for them, Elizabeth. Constants and variables."

"And yet," Elizabeth spread her arms, doing a slow circle. "I still exist. Living proof that the 5% can come to pass. I'll let my connection with this parasite continue. We'll see how it goes. Who knows, maybe they can change."

Rosalind and Robert looked at each other, both shrugging. Robert nodded to Elizabeth. "It has always been your choice. We wish you the best of luck. We'll be moving on, documenting, observing, experimenting. There's so much to see."

"Perhaps we'll see you again one day," Rosalind said.

"Perhaps," Elizabeth replied. "Thank you both. I have to get back to my new friends. Enjoy your adventures."

"And you, yours." The Lutece twins vanished in the space between one blink and the next, leaving Elizabeth alone on the docks staring into the space between worlds.

Holding her head back, to stare at the wide-open sky, filled with stars and lighthouse, after lighthouse, after lighthouse…she licked her lips, her grin spreading. "I suppose I can see why this visage frightened you. Don't worry, friend. I'll help you learn to navigate it. Keep treating the people I care for well, and I'll help you in return.

"One step at a time."