Alt-Power AU: Pushing Back (part 1)

The docks were cold and mostly abandoned, even in the middle of the day. Taylor paced back and forth in front of the administrative building, watching her breath ascend to the cloudy sky above.

Her face was cold, but her nose was tingling for more reasons than one. She crossed her arms and shivered. She had left the office waiting room a few minutes ago, just to check whether someone would come get her… Nobody had come. Her father might have, but he was busy negotiating with the CEO of some uppity building company. There was a big deal in the works, something huge, and he had to be here.

Even though she had just gotten out of the hospital. That just meant he wasn't willing to leave her home alone. She might have complained if she wasn't so eager to stay out of the house.

She walked aimlessly, a mental list running through her head, one tainted with dread. A dozen socks, one set of sheets, three sponges, and a variety of disposable products, mostly wrappers and cardboard boxes.

That was the up-to-date tally of all the things that had melted, spontaneously shredded, or disintegrated when she touched them.

She had power, that much was blindingly obvious, but she didn't know what it did or how to turn it off. Only being able to move the 'source' of said power around her body had kept her more valuable possessions from being destroyed by a touch, and as it was she couldn't afford to blow her nose, for fear the tissue would turn to ash again. She could move her power to her hands, or her feet, but then something would break...

Nobody was coming; she stepped away from the building and casually walked over to the nearest warehouse. There was no work going on today, mostly because there was no work to be had, so it was empty save for some bare pallets, a few crumbling piles of brick, and scattered bits of trash. The big sliding door wouldn't close behind her, but she really just wanted to get out of the wind… and away from prying eyes.

She had to figure out what her power did, and after an incident with a piece of paper spontaneously combusting on the kitchen table, she couldn't test it at home. This would do instead.

All it took was a little bit of mental effort to will the point of concentration from her nose to her hands. It was done before she even really thought about it, which was a mistake. She could feel herself pushing at her gloves, even though her hands weren't moving and she wasn't really pushing on anything. There was a pressure, a tactile sensation that made her feel as if she was putting pressure on something, something that slowly yielded.

Before her eyes, the close-knit gloves sagged, faded in color, and began fraying at the seams, even as she struggled to pull one off all the way. Five seconds passed, the gloves rapidly deteriorating. A sudden blotch of pale purple stained the left, but not the right, and then the right lost a finger entirely, revealing the thankfully unchanged flesh beneath–

Both gloves disintegrated at the same time, turning into puffs of black ash that mostly fell off her hands. Sixteen and ten seventeenths of a second from start to finish, though that was an inconvenient form of time measurement… She didn't know anything better, and she didn't know how she was so certain that was how long it had taken.

What she did know was that she was out a pair of gloves. Another thing to add to the list. "Great," she complained to the empty warehouse.

She wished she had brought something to write on. She also wished she had taken her gloves off halfheartedly trying and watching the change in fascination; something about watching her power weather and change objects was mesmerizing, and it distracted her at the worst possible times.

She walked over to the pallets and put her hands on them. The change was slower this time, partially because she had exhausted the built-up 'charge' she accumulated by not doing anything with her power over time. She didn't quite know yet what charging her powers before using them actually did; they still worked after she had used up all of the charge, with no obvious change in function.

The wood rotted before her eyes, starting in the cracks and progressing rapidly. Then the pallet split in half along a jagged edge. The piece she was still touching continued to age–

Age.

She watched with wide eyes as the wood withered and rotted before suddenly turning to dust like everything else did. One minute, thirteen seconds and two thirds of a fourteenth second. Her power wasn't destruction, it was time.

She aged things. She looked at her hands, her bare, innocent-looking hands, and shuddered. She aged things; it wasn't outright disintegration, but it was close.

If only that belated epiphany was all she needed to fully understand her powers. Some of what she had accidentally done in the last week suddenly made sense, but some of it didn't. Paper did not spontaneously combust just because it got old. Wooden pallets didn't split down the middle because of age, as far as she knew.

A theory came to mind, spurred on by old memories of movies about time travel. Maybe it wasn't just age; maybe that piece of paper would have been set on fire in the future.

She turned in a slow circle, taking in the warehouse with new eyes, but there was nothing there to test that particular theory on. She didn't even know how she could test whether that was how her power worked. If she pushed something forward in time, but before she did it she resolved to do something to it regardless of what happened, would she be able to see whatever she did when she pushed it forward?

There was an old candy bar wrapper on the ground. She tore it in half, then set the two distinct scraps on the pallet.

The left scrap she resolved to leave intact, and the right she resolved to rip into shreds before she left the warehouse. She was firm in her intentions; regardless of what happened, she was going to do those two things.

Then she put one hand on each of the wrapper pieces and pushed them forward in time. The one on the left shriveled slightly. The one on the right failed to manifest new rips or anything else. Instead, it shriveled just like the other. Both burst into heat and curled up on themselves at the same time.

She jerked her hand away - thirteen seconds and seven tenths - and rubbed them on her coat to cool them down. Then she picked the shriveled, rightmost wrapper up and painstakingly shredded it, just to be sure. She would never know if her experiment worked if she didn't follow through; the little she knew of time travel, mostly from movies, said as much. Time had to be a complete loop, or an unbroken loop, or… something. If she quit a test halfway through because it didn't look like it would work, it was possible it only looked like it wouldn't work because she had quit...

Still, she had already seen it fail. Whatever mind-bending paradox might be behind her power, she hadn't managed to figure it out.

"I don't get it," she complained to the empty warehouse. It was well and good to finally know the basics of what she was doing, but she had hit a wall with what she understood. Maybe the failure of her test meant she was just aging things, not moving them forward in time, but maybe it just meant she hadn't tested it right.

In a fit of pique, she snatched up another piece of trash, an old chip bag. It was faded and probably had blown in from outside at some point. Instead of pushing, she tried to do the exact opposite and pull, under the reasoning that if she could do one, she could do the other. She clenched her fingers on the plastic and tried to yank where her power insisted on shoving. Something clicked over, and it felt as if she really was pulling.

The chip bag brightened, smoothed itself, and then after twelve seconds exactly, sealed itself. She pulled it open again, but there were no chips inside.

The significance of the fact that she had just successfully pulled something back in time was initially lost on her; the first thing that came to mind was that she could probably fix all of the things she had ruined around the house.

The second was that she could make the house furniture as good as new.

The third was raising the dead.

It was a crazy thought. It was a wild dream that couldn't possibly work out. Her power wouldn't work that way. She had no proof it did.

She rushed out of the warehouse anyway. There were plenty of alleys around the docks, none all that safe but none particularly interesting either, and she made a beeline for the nearest one, ignoring the wind swiping at her face and hands.

What she needed, what she was looking for, was a dead animal, anything that had lived but didn't anymore. She needed something to prove herself wrong. There was a technical term for powers working on organic or inorganic things, she was sure of it, though she couldn't remember what it was. It couldn't work, it wouldn't, she was just getting herself worked up over nothing. But she had to prove that to herself to really believe it.

There was a pile of trash next to a dumpster, and laying next to that pile was a very much alive alley cat. Clutched in said cat's paws was a bird carcass, gnawed on and very much dead.

Taylor picked up an old boot and threw it at the cat, trying not to dwell on what she was doing. The cat abandoned its prize and fled for the mouth of the alley, though it stopped to watch her spitefully, clearly waiting to return to its territory and reclaim its dropped prize. It hissed at her when she crouched by the dead bird.

She felt like hissing right back at it, if only to do something stupid and break the nervous tension that had fallen over her. One finger poked the bird's deformed breast - she had wild thoughts about accidentally aging diseases and in the process mutating them, and resolved to wash her hands as soon as possible - and she pulled with the power that pooled there, doing something indescribable to anyone without her same ability. She felt it keenly this time, her whole being focused on the task at hand.

The wounds popped out of existence; a chest snapped back into its normal convex shape. There was a loud squawk, then a sharp pain in her finger.

Taylor yanked her finger back, clutching it tightly with her other hand. The bird had pecked her.

The bird flew away, only to land on top of the dumpster.

The cat gave them both an evil glare that promised revenge.

"Fuck." She squeezed her finger, a sharp, unfamiliar feeling flooding her body. Not pain, that she knew all too well.

Hope.

She could raise the dead.

There was one dead person in particular who immediately leaped to mind. It had been years… But years weren't a problem for her, and neither was death, it seemed. All she needed was to touch.

Taylor hurried back toward her father and the office building, back to the negotiations that might mean work for a few dozen dockworkers, maybe for all of them if this Calvert guy was serious. She couldn't care less.

Life had given her the chance to take something back, and she wasn't going to waste it fooling around in alleyways.

Taylor stomped across the graveyard, the boots she had borrowed from her dad's closet heavy and ill-fitting on her feet. The old overcoat she had taken at the same time as the boots was similarly ill-fitting, but at least she had returned it to good-as-new condition. The opposite could be said for the scarf she had draped across her lower face; she had pushed it forward until it was barely holding together. The shovel she was dragging behind her was just as old, the head covered in rust, no power manipulation required.

There was more, she had taken pains to disguise every little detail that might point back to her, but at its core, her disguise was a pair of boots, a coat three sizes too wide for her and one size too short, and a scarf. A modest ensemble with which to publicly give the concept of Death a firm rebuke and a time-out in the corner.

The graveyard was empty at this time of night; she had made sure of that. Three days surveillance had left her tired but certain she wouldn't be disturbed until dawn, at the very least. The place she had chosen to set up in was further secluded, near the middle of the graveyard.

Near her mother's grave. But not too close; she had an ultimate goal that all of this preparation was serving, and it wouldn't do to fail because someone had noticed a name on a headstone in the video she would be shooting.

She set up her burner phone – though calling it a burner hurt her deep down, given how expensive a phone with even a mediocre video-taking capability had been – on a headstone, propping it up to have a clear view of two gravestones and the mounds in front of them.

Next, she took her shovel to the leftmost grave. Digging down to the coffin would have been an exercise in frustration and exhaustion, but she used her power to cheat. She had spent days experimenting, practicing, and generally thinking about its uses, and she'd figured a few things out.

As far as she could tell, the graveyard was going to be excavated, or blown up, or otherwise removed from existence in about four months; anything she used her power on there turned to rubble or just vanished, which was the reason one of the headstones had moved two inches to the left the previous night.

Her power didn't work on the ground itself, but chunks of dirt she fully separated from said ground were a different matter. A few months of pushed time and they turned to dust, or just disappeared. It was downright frightening - she didn't know what would happen to do that, since dirt definitely didn't normally disintegrate over the course of a few months - and she fully intended to pressure her dad into taking them on a vacation around that time, but it was useful.

When she hit wood, old but distinct, she stopped digging. All she needed was a place to stand, even if it was on top of the coffin; she was resigned to this entire affair being disgusting in the extreme.

By the time she had excavated the other grave, it was two in the morning. Nobody had noticed anything amiss; she wasn't surprised, she knew the Graveyard was never patrolled by cops or guards, but it was still good to know her plan was proceeding according to her designs.

It was good to focus on what was going right, because otherwise she would be shaking in her oversized boots with fear and anticipation. This was going to paint a target on someone's back, and all her planning was just to move that target off of herself… and her mother. If it went wrong, if she hadn't thought something through, she didn't know what would happen. Nothing good.

But it was too late to back out now; two unearthed coffins sat at the bottom of two strangely-shaped holes, and she didn't have dirt to fill the holes in with even if she wanted to. There would be no hiding her tracks.

She stuck the shovel in the ground between the graves, checked over her disguise once more, and had her phone start recording. Only prior practice - of course she had practiced everything she possibly could before working up the nerves to do any of it for real - told her the blinking red light meant it was working.

She stepped into the phone's field of view, moving with a limp. Not a fake one, though that would have been a good idea, a real one because apparently oversized boots caused blisters. She said nothing; her voice might have given her away. Instead, she gestured to the headstone of one of the excavated graves.

On it was inscribed 'Thomas Raines, 1963 - 2005, Beloved Father of Three'.

Once she had let the camera look for a few seconds, she walked back over, took the camera in her hand, and clambered down into the hole, moving slowly so that everything would be more than a dark blur. It was still dark, but at least it wouldn't be blurry.

This was it; her power wasn't charged, she had used up any charge on clearing the graves out, so she put her hand on the coffin and pushed, slowly and steadily. It aged.

Wood shriveled up and began to pucker, deteriorating in ways Taylor didn't understand, and then as she hit the several-month mark, disintegrated like everything else in the graveyard would.

She had planted her boots in the sides of the hole, not on the coffin, so she didn't fall. A shapeless bundle quietly thumped to the bottom of the grave, white and dark and–

She closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth, through her scarf, reached down, touched the most disgusting thing she'd ever felt in her life, and pulled back. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months… None of it as simple as that in her head, steady beats of a relentless clock, an endless heartbeat, speeding up the longer she pushed, going back longer, longer–

The flesh was cold beneath her hand, then it was warm. There was a thrashing, a deep-throated scream. A kick to the knee that might have hurt if it had been done intentionally, but as it was it consisted of an impact and a dull pain that paled in comparison to the thing happening below her.

He stopped moving shortly after the faltering kick. She opened her eyes and saw a man lying in the grave, bearded, hyperventilating, clothed – which she hadn't thought about, so she was glad she had brought his clothing back too – staring at her. His eyes were wide, his mouth worked silently.

She ended the recording with shaking fingers, then turned the phone off for good measure.

"Thomas Raines, I need your help," she said, her voice sounding high and tired and scared even to her own ears. It had worked, some part of her hadn't expected it to work, he wasn't comatose or dead again of shock or mindless or a zombie like she had feared. He seemed scared, but alive. And now she had to keep going, because her mother was lying in this same graveyard waiting for her–

"What?" Thomas asked. He sounded as scared as she was, and far more confused. "What do you need?"

"I'm a parahuman that can bring back the dead, and I only have until dawn," she told him, backing out of the hole. He followed as if in a dream, his entire body trembling. "I need help digging up the coffins."

"If I help, do I…" He turned and saw his own gravestone. He gulped audibly and turned back to her. "Do I stay?"

"You stay regardless," she assured him, worrying now that bringing him back had some sort of Master effect. She had expected thrashing, screaming, threats, tearful confusion, him running off or something else suitably nonsensical. Not fear and compliance.

"I'll help," he said, grabbing the shovel from the ground. "How did I die?"

"Caught in the crossfire of gang violence," she said shakily. She had looked up her first few prospective revivals, to ensure she brought back able-bodied adults who seemed kind and might actually want to assist her. She had been thorough, so that when it failed only her power would be to blame, and now that it was working she was glad to have her planning to fall back on.

"Are my kids still alive?" he continued, skipping over the other grave she had dug and going to the next. He wasn't a muscular man, but he still virtually tore through the dirt in comparison to how ineffectively she had dug.

"All three, yes." She moved over to the second grave and clambered in.

"Clair?" he asked more fearfully.

"I couldn't find her online," she admitted, leaning down to push her power into the coffin. Talking to Thomas was surprisingly calming; it gave her something else to focus on. Something more mundane, at least in comparison. Proof that what she was doing worked. "Doesn't mean she's gone, just means she's not as active on the internet. I'm sure your kids will know more." He had married young and had children young; all three were adults now. Two seemed to be estranged from the third, but she hadn't dug too deeply into that. It wasn't her business.

"Why me?" he asked quietly, so quietly she wouldn't have heard them if the graveyard wasn't so completely silent aside from their voices and the sound of his shovel biting into the dirt.

"You seemed like a good person and I needed to start with someone," she said.

"Funny," he muttered. "I didn't feel like a good person. Not good enough to be brought back from the dead."

The coffin's wood disintegrated under her hands, and she was met with another corpse. She closed her eyes and pulled, speaking as she did. "Good enough for me." But maybe she just had low standards.

Humans, she had heard once from someone who didn't yet realize she was both a social pariah and not into math in the slightest, didn't get exponential growth. They barely, as a rule, truly understood addition. There were studies, he had said, oblivious to the fact that she was only listening because it was human interaction with a peer not yet tainted by Emma, that proved people couldn't empathize with a thousand starving children any more than they could with one. That they didn't understand what exponential growth really was, either. It was all addition, and therefore not quite understood. Or something like that.

She knew what he meant. She had done the math; if one person dug up a grave for her while she was bringing back another, and that new person helped too, and so on, she would rapidly go from spending most of her time digging to spending all of her time reviving people. It wasn't quite exponential growth, but it was close enough that now, having lived it, she still didn't fully understand how it had happened.

The sky was beginning to grow light in the East; people were spread across the graveyard, excavating coffins with shovels, with borrowed tools from the graveyard upkeep staff shed, with their bare hands. Dozens roamed the graveyard, selflessly helping her instead of seeking their families or going to the Protectorate as she had advised those who didn't want to stay and help.

There had been surprisingly few of those. Hearteningly few, really; she didn't know what it was about being brought back from the dead, but it seemed to bring out the best in some people.

The sun was coming, and she casually – or as casually as someone exhausted from doing the impossible could be – walked over to the next grave. Throughout the night she had given certain names for her helpers to seek out, ones she had looked up that sounded likely to pitch in. Most of those she had revived already. One had been excavated, the coffin pulled out and opened so she didn't have to waste time on getting to the body, but not yet revived.

Annette Hebert, the reason for all of this, though if she had played her cards correctly nobody would ever suspect it.

"Sweety, offer's still open to carry you," an older woman called out. "Or bring them to you."

"I can walk," she objected, limping up to the coffin. It still scared her, how helpful so many of the people she had brought back were being, but she had asked and they had said they didn't feel a need to do as she said, or anything like that. One memorable revival had ended with the man she brought back spitting in her face and cursing her out before fleeing, so she was mostly certain there wasn't any sort of Master effect, but it still bothered her.

Not as much as not doing this would have. She stuck her hand into the coffin, felt around, and pulled. Her mind wandered as she pulled time back from the body, the one body she had come here hoping to save, not simply planning to save as a smokescreen.

There was movement, then a sharp scream. Two women, one a therapist and one a nurse, quickly reached in and helped her out, then gave her a quick rundown of what was going on.

Taylor forced herself not to look, or listen, or acknowledge her own mother in any way. It helped that none of this felt entirely real; she could pretend it wasn't Annette. For her own sake; she had no illusions that the Protectorate would be questioning everyone here, and if anyone saw the new cape embracing one revival but none of the others, or even showing her some sort of interest, it might put her mother in harm's way.

She limped on, only barely catching that her mother would be staying and helping. That made her feel good; her mother was one of the good people.

Then the sun peaked out over the horizon. Many of the people around her stopped moving, sighed, or otherwise stopped working. Word had gotten around that this was a miracle that would end when the sun came up. More misdirection, and an excuse to leave before anyone caught on. She was already amazed that nobody had come, nobody had seen what was happening. She had expected something to go wrong.

Something almost had; she almost hadn't made it to her mother before her self-set deadline.

Everyone was looking at her.

She shook her head sadly and turned away from the coffin she had been walking toward. A great sigh went up from her… helpers? Followers? Rescues?

"Okay, everybody," a gruff man called out as she walked away. "I can't tell any of you what to do, and I know plenty of you want to go find your families, but I can tell you my former bosses would have my hide if I didn't say that the Protectorate is going to want to get all of you into medical observation, just in case. Follow me if you want to get a head-start on that and get out sooner!"

"They gonna take the girl, too?" a gruff woman demanded.

"They'll want her," he replied. "But if she wants to come in, it's her choice. I'm certainly not going to force her."

Taylor kept walking. Not to the PRT building. To home, where she would ditch her costume, collapse into bed, and fail to sleep until it was time for school. Then she would sleepwalk through school, because she was dead on her feet.

It had been worth it.

Piggot glared daggers at everyone in her crowded office. Armsmaster got daggers to the faceplate of his helmet, Miss Militia to her eyes, Velocity to his chest for variety's sake. If glaring daggers was a power, everyone under her command would have been wise to hope she never got it. She would rival Jack Slash out of pure irritation.

"Explain to me how this happened," she said coldly. "Specifically, how we didn't know about it until a mob of recently-dead people turned up at our doorstep."

"Nobody tampers with the graveyards ever since the 'no valuables in graves' policy took effect," Armsmaster reported, his voice clipped. "It was decided that monitoring graveyards was a waste of manpower. The odds of a biotinker or biokinesis user pillaging graves are abysmal. The freshly dead are more useful in every conceivable way, and we do have guards on all sources of such."

"The ABB and Coil's mercenaries were clashing near the Docks all night," Miss Militia volunteered. "We spent most of the night trying to break it up."

"The Undersiders pulled off another string of robberies on the other side of town," Velocity added. "I was busy trying to keep them corralled until backup arrived."

"Said backup was busy with the ABB since Lung had just decided to show himself," Miss Militia said. "The response teams were all pulled to deal with the aftermath of his brief appearance."

"My Brute Tranquilizer field test was a success, and the next iteration will drop him in under sixty seconds regardless of escalation," Armsmaster concluded. "Tonight was a total success on the topic of the ABB, and I am a few weeks of Tinkering away from hard-countering Brockton Bay's single biggest threat."

"Enough." She resisted the urge to lean back in her chair, just as she was resisting the urge to beat Armsmaster's helmet against the table until he learned to look at the bigger picture. The worst part was that, on a different night, she wouldn't be mad at all. All of that was totally reasonable and generally positive news. Lung was one step closer to a defeat that didn't end in him retreating or burning the city down, Coil had showed his hand in a way that angered the ABB, meaning more inter-villain conflict in the future to grind both sides down… The Undersiders getting away was bad, but Velocity totally depriving them of their spoils was good.

"Any other night, we wouldn't be having this conversation," she said darkly. "Because any other night, we wouldn't have totally missed someone raising the dead under our noses and getting away with it!" She slammed her hand on the desk, eliciting a loud crack. To their credit, none of the heroes flinched.

"We have all of the revived under Master-Stranger isolation protocols," Armsmaster offered. "Preliminary results show no signs of degradation or biotinkering, or indeed any signs of death at all, or fatal wounds, healed or not. They also exhibit no obvious loyalty to the parahuman who brought them back, beyond that to be expected of someone who saved their lives and asked for nothing but a few hours of manual labor in return, and that optional."

"And the video?" Piggot inquired.

"One of the revived had a phone, one that was purchased only two days ago," Armsmaster continued. "The video on it was shaky and hard to make out, as typical of phone cameras, but the parahuman can be seen. No obvious gender, and no voice to analyze because they don't speak. Either Caucasian or disguised to seem as such, we see their hand, and not a Tinker unless they went to great lengths to disguise their tech as a Striker ability. Said ability is used twice, once to disintegrate the coffin, and once to rejuvenate the corpse. Analysis is still pending on anything more in-depth than that, we've only had it for a few hours."

"So we know nothing important," Piggot growled. "We don't know why they chose that graveyard, whether there was any method to who was brought back or not, or who they are. We don't even know if the people brought back are under a subtle Master effect or totally clean. And the moment the press gets ahold of this story, there will be demands from dozens of family members to see their loved ones, and then to release said loved ones."

"Sounds about right," Velocity agreed. "But… why is this a problem? Sure, it's inconvenient for us, but they're bringing civilians back from the dead. It's not like they've gone and dug up all the biggest villains of the last ten years or something."

"They also haven't come in to submit to power testing and after that to bring back all the heroes who have died in the last ten years," she retorted. "Any idiot would think to do that if their power actually worked that way. There has to be something else, either a villainous leaning or a power limitation. Neither inspires confidence." No, there had to be something else. A reason he or she wasn't using their power for good. She would bet anything that what they wanted wasn't going to be good for Brockton Bay.

Taylor sat awkwardly on the couch. Her father paced in front of the windows, gazing out at the drab, empty street beyond. It was a school day, a work day, but the phone call they had received the night before ensured both that neither of them was willing to go anywhere, and that neither had gotten enough sleep to function normally anyway.

The Protectorate, after a week of announcements, waffling over safety, and scientific mumbo-jumbo on the rare occasion they foisted someone knowledgeable upon the reporters, was finally letting the recently revived leave custody. One Annette Rose Hebert, along with all the others but Taylor didn't care about them, had been given a clean bill of health, and was coming home. She was being driven away from the Rig right this moment, in an unmarked patrol car so as to avoid the press, and the releases were being staggered for the same reason…

Whatever they were doing, it was enough that there weren't any obvious reporters waiting outside for the reunion. There would have been, if anyone knew Taylor was the mysterious parahuman responsible for all of this, but that secret remained safe.

They had christened her parahuman identity 'The Gravedigger,' in reference to the only thing she had ever been known to do, and there were hundreds of reported sightings all across the country already, not a single one confirmed. The costume sat at the bottom of her closet, buried in a pile of dirty laundry any self-respecting investigator would avoid pawing through. It certainly hadn't been to New York, or Mexico City, or Las Vegas, or any of the other places she had been 'seen.' It had only been used once, that night in the graveyard.

She didn't plan on ever going out in costume again. Any future appearance would be fraught with danger; she doubted she could do anyone any good if every criminal organization in the world descended on her the moment she went out as The Gravedigger. It just wasn't safe or practical…

And if she was honest with herself, she didn't feel the urge to find a way around that particular set of problems. There were too many dead, too many deserving people, too many undeserving people, and then the resource problems of bringing any substantial number of people back… It just wasn't worth it. Not on a large scale.

She had what she wanted. Everything else was just a smokescreen, and she didn't need the smokescreen anymore. Maybe it was selfish, but the world had never given her anything for free, so she didn't feel obligated to give back any more than she already had. Not for now.

Her father stiffened, his hands grasping the curtains like he was going to throw them apart and smash his way through the window. A car door thumped outside. He rushed to the front door, his hand flexing uselessly over the doorknob.

Taylor remained on the couch, anticipation freezing her in place. Her heart thumped, and she shifted her building charge erratically, trying to figure out where was safest to keep it. She continued to spend some of it on pushing the couch back, a few days every few seconds, nothing more but enough to keep it from building, but she would have to stand and she didn't know what affecting a living human would feel like.

The doorknob twisted; she reflexively shoved all of her lingering power into her socks, which disintegrated instantly as she shoved them forward in time. Her feet were bare, but so long as nobody stepped on her toes she could forget about her terrible, obtrusive miracle of a power.

A familiar silhouette stood in the doorway, framed by the grey skies behind her. She was wearing plain clothing, and her hair rustled in the wind. There was someone behind her, waiting by a car, in uniform and completely unremarkable.

"That was a particularly long drive," her mother quipped weakly, her wide mouth quirking into a soft smile.

Taylor found herself standing and hugging her mother with no understanding of how she had crossed the room, or gotten past her father, or anything else, and she knew it wasn't her power at work, just her overwhelming joy.

Author's Note: This is only the first half of what I had planned for this particular one-shot, but it's getting long and this is a natural cutoff point, so I suppose it's now a two-shot. Ah, well. I can and do promise a second part, it'll be coming sooner or later.

Also, in case anyone is wondering: Taylor's power is not as simple as 'moves things back or forward in time'. Oh, it does that, but it does so in the usual entity-power style of things, and isn't a solution to entropy… meaning there's more going on beneath the surface. I'll have a full power breakdown at the end of the second part to this prompt, so as to not spoil the complications that serve as the catalyst for said second part.