Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Barnes Household, Brockton Bay

This, she realized, was bad.

It hadn't quite clicked for her how bad until that Saturday, nearly a full week after it had happened.

She had been sitting in her kitchen, lazily swirling her cereal about in her bowl while scrolling through PHO on her phone. She had already been feeling a token level of anxiety all week. No one had come right out and said it, but Emma Barnes was very much persona non grata at school right now. Not because she had been picking on Taylor - no one cared about that much at all. No, Emma Barnes was a social pariah because, despite not a single person saying a single thing to the police when they had come to take statements on the topic, it was very clear that people didn't want to be in her immediate vicinity when Taylor finally came back to school.

It was simple math for the sheep that she went to school with after all. If there was any single person who was likely to get Parahuman powers and then go Carrie on the school with them, it was Taylor Hebert.

Now, Emma didn't believe, like Sophia did, that all Parahumans were Predators by default. There were too many outliers for that to be true. Parian? Useless. She stayed cooped up on the boardwalk all day doing puppet shows for children and shilling her custom made dresses. She herself could hardly classify as a prey animal like so many of her peers, and where were her powers? Still in the mail, evidently.

So she wasn't surprised that Taylor had ended up getting powers. It would figure that loser would need paracausal assistance to survive something as simple as a highschool prank. If anything, she was the one who should have gotten powers, in the dark alley when-

It should have been her.

And the fact that something so minor in comparison to her own struggles had bestowed Hebert with a power only reaffirmed her beliefs.

It was only now, staring at a steadily growing thread on PHO with a shakey recording of 'Nexus' dragging Lung around like a drowned cat that Emma realized, some Prey animals could fight back.

She hadn't wasted a single second after that. The house wasn't safe. Taylor knew where it was. She would have to run for one of the bolt holes that she and Sophia had setup together, just in case. Hurriedly, she threw everything she could think of into her - what did Sophia call it? Her bug out bag. Her parents were asleep, so she shamelessly raided her mother's purse for any cash she could find. Some toiletries came next. Then her baton, and the Bowie knife Soph had gotten her for her birthday this year. She was sure she was missing something, but she couldn't be bothered to check. She needed to be gone asap.

When she made it to the front door, she forced herself to calm down, as she casually strode out of it. A quick glance around - a stretching motion Soph had taught her that made the act seem casual - confirmed she was alone, and then she began to walk off.

She should have seen this coming. Taylor always got what should have been hers. She was the one who always acted resilient. Who made it seem like nothing would hold her down for long. It pissed Emma off, that hopeful way of seeing everything. Taylor could come back from misery because she had never actually had to experience real life. Real life wasn't school, where the prey ran around forming social hierarchies that she could kick over just for fun. It was out here. On the streets, below street lamps, in back alleys. It was ugly. It was terrible. And Emma was sure if Taylor had gone through what she had been forced to, the little bitch would have broken and never come back. Probably killed herself even.

And Emma resented her for that. Resented her so damn much. She knew what a trigger event was. Sophia had explained it to her once, in confidence. It was the worst day of any Parahumans life.

And Taylor Fucking Hebert had gotten her powers because of a fucking prank! Because even the barest taste of what real life was like was too much for her.

It wasn't fair! It should have been her! It should have been-

She stumbled, blacked out for a bit. She had to blink stars out of her eyes and reorient herself at the end of the street she was on.

Frowning, she continued onward. Soph would probably be arriving soon, and she already knew they would have to work quickly. She had been kept appraised of the PRT situation by her friend and things were suddenly looking very grim.

Oh certainly, until that point, Sophia had assured her that whiny little Taylor wasn't worth the PR hit that leaving her out to hang would be. They might not like it, but once they were both Wards the matter would be settled in house. Probably send Hebert to Boston or something citing personal differences. And if she didnt join, well, Soph already knew how to handle criminals.

But this new development with Lung... the PRT would bend over backwards to accommodate that kind of power, no matter how whimpy it's wielder was.

Carefully glancing around again as she approached the Junkyard, Emma deftly hopped the fence - a maneuver it had taken her months of practice to manage without ripping her clothes - and jogged lightly to an empty cargo container buried under a pile of smashed cars.

Containers like this were littered all over the Bay, the remnant of a brief time where they had been used as makeshift homes for the homeless - back before the city had chased them off. There had been many attempts to clean them up over the years, it as with many things in Brockyon Bay, there just wasn't any money for it.

Slipping inside the open door of the container, she carefully eased it shut behind her, then began unpacking her things.

It wasn't much later that she began to feel... something... in the back of her head. It felt curiously like an on/off switch, which was bizarre, because it simultaneously felt perfectly normal and incredibly out of place. Turning around, she found she could perfectly track the location of the switch with her gaze, swiveling it in a slow arc to the left as she tracked... whatever this was.

She was actually so focused on the task that she was quite surprised to find Sophia - well, Shadow Stalker in costume - slipping through the wall of the container in her shadow form. Perfectly in line with where she was looking in fact.

"Hey Ems. Got everything you need?" Sophia asked, quickly dropping a much larger duffel bag than Emma's own on the floor of the dimly lit container.

"I-" She began, then paused, pursing her lips in thought. Deciding just to go for it, she prodded the on/off switch that coincided with Sophia's current location.

With a squawk, Sophia shifted to her shadow form again, then with a panicked yelp, began to dart around looking for an unseen attacker when she proved unable to shift back.

Because Emma was still holding the 'On' button.

"God, finally. I've been waiting forever you know?" She said wistfully, releasing her hold on her power and letting Sophia change back to normal.

Whether she was talking to her power or Sophia at that moment, even she didn't know.

A/N:

Ah, that's where I dropped the QA shard.

I hope the sheer amount of 'Only I understand how harsh the world is' and 'noone suffers like I've suffered' present in this interlude is sufficient to characterize Emma as I see her. I always feel like shes wasted in fics where Taylor is outed and she breaks down or stops being relevant. She obviously believes far too much of her own hype.