Alt-Power AU: Pushing Back (part 2)
The Hebert household was a warm, cheery place, even as the weather outside continued to hit record lows for the state. It was hard for mere physical cold to beat the presence of the family's heart, newly returned from the dead by a mysterious parahuman…
A mysterious parahuman who was perfectly content to stay home and reconnect with her mother. There was no school; Winslow had been shut down by the one-two punch of a brutal winter storm and the principal being embroiled in a renewed criminal investigation.
As it turned out, Annette Hebert had absolutely no intention of leaving a crime committed against her daughter unpunished. A half-dozen trips to the police station later, and what had seemed like a hopelessly mired case was moving forward, at least partially because the higher-ups were sick of dealing with her.
Taylor felt like she had been swept up in a friendly whirlwind from the moment her mother had asked about school, or even just from the moment the shock of everything had started to wear off. The house was clean. Take-out food was banned for the next month, and Danny was clocking out of work on the dot every day, not working late. The old artificial christmas tree had been dug out of the basement and set up again in a burst of festive energy. They were doing the holiday over again, and better yet, after a few calls, her mother had somehow ensured they had the money to do so without worrying about it.
"I do have friends," Annette had said mysteriously when Taylor asked. "We always help each other out. Money, giving rides…"
"Bailing each other out of jail," Danny added from the kitchen.
"That only happened twice," her mother had shot back with a guilty grin. "The point is, we're going to make up for lost time, and we're going to do it right."
And so Taylor found herself bundled up in a coat and gloves and on the Boardwalk, with her recently revived mother, headed to the nice bookstore she usually couldn't afford to look at, let alone shop in. Danny had split off from them, presumably to buy their presents in secret.
It didn't have the overly festive atmosphere actual christmas shopping usually did, the cold wind and snow were just dreary and the occasional fellow shopper lacked holiday cheer, but Taylor couldn't have cared less.
"We might have to get you a scarf," her mother remarked as they walked. "Are you sure you don't want mine?"
Taylor could feel her nose going numb, but as per usual, that was where she was concentrating her power. No scarf could ever go there, unless she was willing to sacrifice a glove or a shoe; the first thing to touch her nose would set off her power and be forcibly inundated with pure time–
Annette leaned over, and Taylor reflexively pushed her power away, down into her hands. Her mother's gloved fingers pinched her now safe nose even as Taylor's gloves rotted away, unnoticed. She shoved her bare hands in the pockets of her coat.
"Feel anything?" Annette asked jovially, completely unaware of what had just happened.
"Yeah, it's fine, just cold," Taylor managed, her heart pounding. Nobody knew she had powers, let alone that she was The Gravedigger that had the world working itself into a collective frenzy over. Not even her mother, who she had brought back from death. She wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible, and she really didn't want to accidentally use her power on her mother. Not when she had just gotten her back.
A large man in a bright red parka shoved past Annette, who recoiled from the push and shot his mountainous form a glare. "On the other hand, if I had a scarf it might go to teaching some people manners…"
"How?" Taylor asked as they continued walking. There weren't even that many people out and about; the man must really not have been looking to walk right into her mother.
"I have my ways," Annette said vaguely. They passed a high-end antiques shop, then turned off the Boardwalk proper to one of the side streets. The bookstore was tucked away in between a collection of taller buildings, a squat, one-story wooden structure that was always in some amount of danger due to existing in the same city as Lung and his occasional fiery rampages.
A girl with blond hair and green eyes exited the bookstore, a bag in hand, and passed by them. Then, a moment later, she doubled back, walking on Annette's other side. "Hey, are you Annette Hebert?"
"That would be me, yes…" Annette stopped to look at the girl, and Taylor stopped too. She looked old enough to maybe be a college student, but only just, so she couldn't be one of her mother's old students. There was a curious look to her, and her eyes flickered to Taylor once or twice.
"Oh, you don't know me," the girl said brightly. "I was looking up the people who got brought back by that new parahuman, you stood out. Do you mind if I ask you a question or two? I'm trying to do a report on it for a class."
"Maybe inside," Taylor suggested. It was still bitingly cold and windy out, after all.
"Let's just get out of the wind," the girl replied, turning toward one of the narrow alleyways between buildings. "It shouldn't be long, and I'm sorry but I'm just really overheated, that bookstore has the thermostat set to 'desert', I swear…"
Taylor and Annette followed the girl to the nearest alleyway. It was a clean, sparse opening between buildings, nothing like the alleys in the rest of the city. There weren't even any dumpsters. Just the green-eyed girl, and now Taylor and her mother, standing side by side.
"So, yeah, questions," the girl said brightly, setting her shopping bag down on the ground. "Any idea why? Hints, clues, stuff the mysterious parahuman might have said?"
"No, nothing," Annette said with a frown. "To be honest, if there were, I wouldn't tell you. I think I owe them their anonymity, and if I did know, it would just put a target on my back. Everyone is looking for them."
The grin slipped off the girl's face, leaving a blank expression that looked decidedly fake. "I figured as much," she said neutrally. "That would be why she didn't tell you." She looked directly at Taylor.
Taylor took a step back before she could help herself. She bumped into someone–
A hand clapped itself over her mouth. She let out a muffled yell and tried to kick back, but was lifted bodily before she could do anything except flail uselessly. Her built-up charge was already gone, wasted on her gloves, and she wasn't in a position to grab anything or anyone.
Another person – large, male, wearing a subdued black coat – stepped around her and grabbed at Annette. He got a good punch to the face for his trouble, but then he slugged her in response, and she fell like a stone. Taylor struggled harder, to no avail.
"Everyone's looking, but they're not looking in the right places," the green-eyed girl said somberly. "In case you were wondering, all it took to find you was a little bit of investigating and a good Thinker power."
Taylor glared at the girl, then at the man who was hauling her mother up. It was all a trap, that much was obvious, and their motivation wasn't in question…
"Don't let her touch you with her hands," the girl advised her goons. "She'll turn your clothes back into raw cotton or something. You, Taylor, just come quietly. We won't have to get nasty if you cooperate, and the alternative might not be good for your health. Or hers."
The goon holding her mother up shook her a bit, just for emphasis. She was barely conscious, her eyelids fluttering erratically. The green-eyed girl glanced at her, then grimaced. "Shit. I don't like doing this, you know. But it's me or you, and I know which I'm picking."
A phone rang, loud and abrupt. The girl took said phone out of her pocket, still ringing, and answered it. Whoever was on the end must have only said a few words, because she hung up almost immediately. "Okay, both of you are going to play along. We're going out into the street. Your mother hit her head, you're helping her, we're bystanders. Try anything, and you won't like what–"
Annette jerked in the goon's grip, flinging her head back. There was a crack, then a howl and blood was spilling out into her mother's hair as she twisted around and started biting. Taylor seized the moment and shifted what little charge she had built up during the confrontation to the bare hand on her mouth; to her surprise, said hand vanished after only a few days' worth of pulling, along with the goon holding her. She dropped to the ground, landing on her hands and knees.
"Shit!" the green-eyed girl hauled something out from her waistband; it was a pistol, sleek and black and deadly. "Don't make me–"
Taylor was moving, springing forward. The girl was already recoiling, but there was nowhere to go in the alley, nowhere to run. Taylor snatched the gun in one hand and punched the blond girl with her other hand, no power involved. The girl crumpled, and Taylor was on top of her, pinning her down while she fumbled with the gun, trying to unload it – or get it ready to fire, either would be good.
"Don't do that!" the girl shrieked, trying and failing to knock it out of her hand. "You don't know anything about guns, you'll shoot me by accident!"
Someone took the gun from over her shoulder; Taylor tried to turn around while keeping her enemy pinned, her knee on the girl's stomach twisting and eliciting a pained, breathless moan, but it was just her mother.
The gun clicked, clacked, and was leveled at the man Annette had so brutally bloodied. "Fuck off," Taylor's mother said bluntly, pointing the loaded weapon his way.
For a moment, it seemed as if that would be enough. Of the three attackers, one was pinned beneath Taylor and didn't seem capable of fighting back, one was bleeding from his face in several different places and weaponless, and the third… The third just wasn't there anymore.
That, of course, was when a cloud of darkness flooded the alley from above, thick and totally black. Taylor lost sight of everything, including the hand in front of her face. The world had gone totally silent.
She didn't know what this was, but she did know that it wasn't a friend stepping in to lend her a hand. Or maybe it was a friend intervening, but not her friend. So she reared back, slugged the blond one more time to keep her from doing anything tricky, and grabbed her face with an open hand, palm splayed over her mouth and fingers poking her closed eyelids, ready to use her power in an instant, either on the girl or on anyone who tried to grab her with her free hand. Her heart was pounding in her eardrums, the only sound in this blind, deaf world she had been plunged into.
When the darkness lifted, the alley looked much the same as it had before, but with two new figures, both quite clearly capes. One was all in black with a motorcycle helmet, and the other was in a ridiculous-looking white getup, and pointing a scepter at her mother, who had dropped the gun and was clutching her hand like she had a really bad cramp.
"This is embarrassing," the scepter-wielding one drawled. "I am never letting you live this down, just so you know."
"Let her up," the one in the motorcycle helmet said much more seriously.
"How about no?" Taylor retorted. "Make a move and she gets it." She had gone from hoping nobody ever figured out who the Gravedigger was to hoping these random villains knew who she was in under ten minutes, which would have been funny if it wasn't so absolutely terrible.
"Oh, no, you'll bring her back to life... from life," the scepter guy said sarcastically. "Does that mean she gets an extra life, or does nothing happen?" He apparently hadn't noticed her vanishing the guy holding her to start with, which didn't speak wonders for his competence as a cape.
"'Ut up 'egen'!" the green-eyed girl managed to yell. Taylor pushed her palm down harder on her face.
Annette stood apart from everyone, watching with wide, wary eyes. The blood dripping from her face made her look feral, and against someone without superpowers Taylor would have felt good having her mother at her back… but not now.
"This doesn't end well for you," the one in black said carefully. "Even if you do kill her. Especially if you kill her. So just let her go." He seemed competent.
"So you can finish the job and abduct me?" She chanced a look behind herself, but the alleyway was a dead end without even an obvious door leading into one of the buildings. Unless she spontaneously developed the ability to fly or was given enough time to reduce one of the walls to rubble with her power, the only way out was through the two men blocking her way. Three, if she counted the normal guy with the bleeding face, but she didn't; he looked ready to run if she so much as glared at him.
"This is boring," scepter-guy complained. At the same time, a muscle in Taylor's back clenched wildly, cramping for no reason, and she fell to the side. The blond started struggling the moment she moved, and the darkness descended again–
Taylor grabbed at the girl, swore soundlessly as her back cramp worsened, and snagged a handful of hair. Someone was on her, trying to pry her away from the girl, but she was done messing around, and if she was going to be kidnapped, she was going to screw over the bitch who had led her into this insane ambush in the first place.
She didn't push, not like she had with the guy who had grabbed her; that felt too likely to do nothing but make the girl physically bigger and stronger, assuming she wasn't quite an adult yet. Instead, she pulled, like she had in bringing her mother back. The seconds passed, her with a death grip on the girl's hair, one of the capes trying to yank them apart, her pulling with her power, incapable of seeing the effects but feeling the days, weeks, months, years fading away.
She was yanked backward after a moment, pulling hair out by the root from the feel of it. Undeterred, she twisted around and latched onto the man's glove, then started pushing at it even as he tried to shake her off. She fought like a mad dog in the soundless darkness, grabbing and holding on and hurting him with her power. Brick knocked into her shoulder, then she was dragged along the ground a bit. The glove frayed and fell apart, and she clutched warm skin for an instant.
Then she was out of the fog, her head dragged to the edge of the cloud by the man's struggles, and his hand slipped from her grasp. There was yelling, and she caught a glimpse of her mother snapping a familiar scepter over her knee and menacing the other cape with the jagged ends. The motorcycle-helmet guy took a few steps back, turned to see his fellow cape decidedly not winning his fight, and swore loudly. The bloody-faced normal guy was gone.
Taylor, for her part, scrambled to her feet and lurched forward. "Give, the hell, up!" she panted hoarsely. "Or I'll turn you to dust!"
"You and what–" The white-clad cape was cut off by a solid whack over the head. Annette kicked him as he fell.
A siren sounded close by.
The motorcycle-helmet cape looked around frantically, then thrust his hands out and covered them with stifling darkness for a third time. Taylor waited warily, her hands out, ready to use her power again, but nothing happened for the minute or so it took the wisps of absolute darkness to dispel themselves.
The motorcycle helmet cape was gone, but the white-clad cape was still on the ground, groaning. The sirens were closer now, very close. A child was wailing at the top of her lungs.
Taylor saw her mother, and their eyes met. Then a particularly piercing wail resounded from very close by, and they both turned to see…
The little girl couldn't have been more than eight years old, her face chubby and scrunched up, and she was sitting in a pile of too-large clothes, clutching her head and screaming. A bit of blood was welling up between her fingers, and there was a chunk of her blond hair missing. She was shivering in the cold.
Annette moved first, rushing over to the little kid – it was the same girl, green eyes and all, but at the same time clearly not – and taking her coat off to wrap her up. Taylor watched warily, but the little girl was, for all intents and purposes, exactly that. There wasn't even a hint of malice in her eyes, and she cried like a cold, confused, scared child who had no idea what was going on, not like a schemer plotting revenge.
The flashing red and blue of a police car's lights played out over the alley's walls, and a car rolled right up to the entrance.
It occurred to Taylor that nobody except this particular group of villains knew what she was. And that she really wanted to keep it that way, especially as she had just killed a man and turned a college-age criminal into a crying child. But there was no way to explain any of this without including her powers–
Annette stood, the girl clutched against her chest, fully covered by the coat, just as the first two police officers entered the alley, guns at the ready. One almost tripped over the cape.
"The other one ran that way!" Annette said forcefully, pointing out of the alley. "Big guy, motorcycle helmet, makes dark clouds… he was trying to kidnap us!"
Taylor fought to resist her jaw dropping until it touched the ground.
"Bob, radio the Protectorate, we've got a live one," one of the men said, crouching by the cape. The other stepped over him and approached the three of them.
"Miss, are any of you hurt?" the police officer asked. "Do you need us to call an ambulance for your daughters?"
"We'll be fine, you go get that bastard!" Annette said. Taylor nodded in agreement, not trusting herself to speak and possibly break the spell of misdirection her mother was weaving.
"There are already people on it, we came because of the yells but there were reports of black fog in the area, and that's a parahuman thing," he replied. "You said they were here to kidnap you?"
"Yes, that's what they said, but it didn't work out for them." Annette hugged the girl in her arms tightly. "It was self defense…"
"What was?" he asked.
"Beating that one with his own stick," she replied matter-of-factly, nodding at the cape who was currently being handcuffed.
The officer looked back at the cape in question, then looked to her with a huge smile. "Yes, yes it was. We're not going to hold you here, god knows it's freezing out, just give me your phone number and I'll have someone call to get an official statement later."
"Taylor, if you could…" Annette requested. Taylor responded by rattling off the number of their home phone, still in shock. Her head and shoulder were starting to hurt, along with the other scrapes and bruises she had accrued, and while the girl had quieted down to a pained whimper, her very existence was enough to induce its own headache.
The police car pulled away from the entrance to the alley, a groggy supervillain in the back, and Taylor followed her mom out. Annette assured the police officer that their car was parked close by, said her younger daughter – Rose – would be fine, she was just terrified, and they hurried away.
Danny was waiting for them in the truck. His expression upon seeing them was almost funny, if only because of the way his eyes bulged when he saw the child Annette was carrying. Taylor wished she felt like laughing about any of it, but the knowledge that someone out there had tried to abduct her, and might do it again, soured any thought of relief.
Coil stared blankly at the same computer screen in both timelines. He bitterly regretted closing the 'safe' timeline and splitting again to give his pet instructions mid-abduction. One of the regrettable downsides of his power was that he had to be careful when he opened and closed timelines, because if he ever opened one right before everything went to hell, he would be shit out of luck in both. It didn't happen often, he was careful, but on occasion…
In the timeline where he had called his pet and told her to attempt to coerce the Gravedigger into playing along with an abduction in plain sight, his forces had completely lost. One of the disposable thugs was dead, the other had fled and would need to be hunted down before he talked, and Tattletale was nowhere to be found, her fate unknown. Regent was in custody, and Grue had taken his sister right out from under his drugged-out mother's nose and skipped town. Gravedigger had gone home with her mother.
That was a disaster, but salvageable. In the other timeline, though… He had ordered Tattletale to go for the hard sell, to put her gun to the mother's head and force Gravedigger to submit to handcuffs and a blindfold. The mother had tried something, Tattletale had accidentally fired, and Gravedigger had all but gone berserk. None of his operatives survived in that timeline, not even Regent and Grue, and Gravedigger had been caught reviving her mother by the police, resulting in being taken into Protectorate custody. Even now, Piggot was probably smiling smugly in her office–
He scowled aimlessly and closed the timeline in which the Protectorate ended up with his prize. So long as nobody else knew where the prized parahuman was, or who she was, he could afford to wait until her guard was down, and then try again. Even if it meant losing the entirety of his Undersiders. With Tattletale likely dead, Grue fleeing, and Regent in custody, Bitch would break away, and he couldn't spare the resources to free Regent when he would be just as useless without the rest of his team. He could maybe be bothered to track Grue down and catch him, but his reach was not as long as Tattletale had been made to believe, and just driving out of the city in a car was enough to make it prohibitively involved and expensive…
He would wait, then go for Gravedigger. Nothing else really mattered, not when he would soon be able to grant life to anyone whose friends, relatives, or associates made it worth his while. Such a power under his control was easily worth sacrificing a few pawns.
Taylor set a plate of reheated lasagna down in front of the green-eyed child. The girl was sitting at their dining room table, a bandage on her head where she had been bleeding, clothed in an ensemble of appropriately-sized old clothing from the basement. She still had a quivering frown, though she smiled at the food.
"Thank you," she said respectfully before taking a fork and going to town on the lasagna. There wasn't a hint of scheming to the way she ate. She was just an eight-year-old girl, to all outward appearances.
Taylor sat down across from her. "Sarah?" she asked. The little girl had freely given her name after settling down on the ride home, which was weird; capes didn't do that.
"That's me," the little girl chirped, her frown disappearing.
"What's the last thing you remember?" she asked.
"Going to bed last night," Sarah responded, in between bites of lasagna. She had torn it apart with her fork, and was eating the noodles separate from the rest. "It was hot outside, and we saw fireworks out the window…"
Taylor reached across the table and put a hand on Sarah's hand. Sarah let her, not scared in the slightest. She didn't know that there was something to fear.
Taylor tried pushing the girl forward, just by a few weeks. Sarah's eyes widened, and she swayed dizzily. "Wha… That's weird," she giggled weakly. She tugged at the bandage and ran her hand across full, undamaged hair. "My hair is back!"
"What's the last thing you remember?" Taylor asked again. She knew what answer she was hoping for; anything other than the one she had already heard.
"I just told you. Going to bed. Seeing the fireworks! They were awesome." Sarah stabbed at her plate for emphasis, spiking another noodle.
"Oh." She leaned back with a sick feeling in her stomach. She could try again, test again, but she had a feeling it wouldn't change anything. Sarah's mind had gone back with her body, reduced to that of her eight-year-old self. No memories past the point where Taylor left her. That made sense, Annette hadn't remembered the weeks leading up to her fatal car accident.
But Sarah wasn't getting back her memories when Taylor pulled her forward again. Not unless she saw fireworks outside her window every night. It was possible the girl who had set them up to be kidnapped was gone forever, in mind if not in body.
Though Taylor didn't feel too bad about that specifically… That girl had been a bitch. It just made things really complicated.
"Hey," Danny said, coming into the kitchen, "how are things in here?"
"Your food is good," Sarah mumbled around a mouthful of lasagna.
"I don't think I can fix it." Taylor gestured vaguely in Sarah's direction.
"But you did fix me!" Sarah said, swallowing hastily. She pulled her bandage off completely to show her head. "See?"
"That's not quite what I meant." Taylor looked to her father, feeling helpless.
"Then we'll have to figure out the next best thing," Danny said, coming around to take the third seat at the table. "Sarah, can you tell me your full name?"
"Sarah Livsey," she said innocently. "Why don't you know that already? Everyone knows who I am."
"Well, you sort of fell into our hands out of nowhere," Danny said diplomatically. "Taylor, why don't you… explain… that. I'm going to go look her parents up and find out where she lives."
"But…" Taylor gestured wordlessly to the eight-year-old who was watching them both with wide eyes. "They might be a little confused!" She meant Sarah's parents, but upon second thought the same objection applied to her explaining this to Sarah herself.
"We're not just going to kidnap a child," Danny said firmly. "Sarah, where do you live?"
"California!" Sarah chirped. "Did you kidnap me?" She didn't sound bothered by the possibility.
"No, we did not." Danny shook his head. "I hope they moved to Brockton Bay later…" He left the room, presumably headed for the old desktop computer he kept around for work.
"What's Brockton?" Sarah asked curiously. "Why is it so cold out? Who are you? How did you make my hair come back?"
Taylor felt distinctly unprepared to answer any of those questions. She hoped her father found Sarah's parents quickly, and that they lived within easy driving distance.
Many questions and many half-truthful answers later, Annette came downstairs, having finished with her shower, and showed Taylor how to handle a far too curious eight-year-old. It involved a lot of distraction, a few games dug out from the basement, and then tucking her into bed. Taylor's bed, though she was happy to sacrifice it for the night if it meant Sarah slept well and stayed out of their hair for a while.
Once that was done, Annette flopped down on the couch. "I did not expect to be hit with such a blast from the past today," she muttered. "You were just like that at her age, Taylor. Swap out the hair and eye color, and you've got pretty much the same kid. Talkative, curious, easy-going."
Taylor took the other side of the couch. "That's… good." She had no idea what else she was supposed to say to something like that. Especially as she didn't think she was any of those things nowadays.
Danny entered the room, rubbing at his forehead, and claimed the empty reclining chair off to the side of the room.
"It's better than a screaming, traumatized child who just wants her parents," Annette agreed. "She's happy to be here, for the moment. It's an adventure. I hope it doesn't stop being an adventure before we figure out what to do with her. Taking her in to the authorities isn't going to be an option."
"Because it would reveal my identity," Taylor said quietly.
Annette turned to look at her. "Yes, and we don't want to do that," she said softly. "Not unless you want to go to the Protectorate, and if you did you would have already."
"I just wanted you back," Taylor admitted. "That's it. I didn't want to ever do anything else." Sure, there was the nagging urge to go out and bring more people back, to just use her power in general, but that would bring far too much trouble down on her head. Today's events only proved that.
"And I'm thankful," Annette assured her, leaning over to give her a hug. Taylor shoved her power to her bare feet and hugged her back. "I really am."
"But it makes me a target," Taylor sighed. "I'm sorry…"
"Better alive and in danger than dead," Annette said firmly. "Right, Danny?"
"Ideally, neither," Danny said, "but yes. That said, we have a problem."
"What did you find on her parents?" Annette asked.
"The Livseys are upper-class social climbers," Danny said bluntly. "One's a stock trader, one doesn't have a job. They weren't hard to find. They live in California, right on the coast, and they like their privacy."
"That sounds like a good thing," Taylor said. She didn't quite understand why he had said it as if it was a setback. "They're rich enough to fly out here and pick her up, right?"
"If they believed it was her, and that sort of person is often hard to convince," Annette explained. "It's already a crazy story, and asking them to spend money is just going to make them suspicious. Did they hire a private investigator when she went missing? You would have said if there was an active tip hotline or anything like that…" She looked to Danny.
He grimaced. "I don't want to speak ill of them when I don't know the circumstances, but I looked for that right off the bat. The biography section of their webpage mentions 'two lovely children, Rex and Sarah,' and doesn't say anything else. There's no mention of Sarah's disappearance anywhere, and it doesn't seem like it's an open case. Her disappearance wasn't in the newspapers, either, unless I just missed it. The newspaper websites are only just getting with the times down there."
"They don't have street crime so bad having a newspaper delivered is an exercise in futility," Annette muttered.
"So we call them and tell them anyway?" Taylor suggested. "I mean, the worst thing they can do is say we're crazy and hang up."
"That doesn't get Sarah back to them," Annette explained. "It's not bad for us, but it doesn't help her… We could go in person."
"It's across the country," Danny objected. "The truck doesn't have that many miles left in it. Something would break down before we got halfway there. We could just make a call to Child Protective Services and say we found her in an alleyway, and that we don't know who she is or who she belongs to. The Livseys would believe a government agency, and Sarah would give them her name so they would have to check."
"You want to trust an eight-year-old to keep a secret from a government agency?" Annette asked skeptically, raising an eyebrow. "All she has to say is 'Taylor healed me' and they're going to bump it up to the Protectorate in case they can get another healing cape."
"I could… push her back in time a little more." Taylor didn't like her suggestion very much, but it would at least solve that problem. "I think she would forget about ever meeting us. If I did it in an alley, then we picked her up, it would be like none of this ever happened from her perspective. She wouldn't have any secrets to keep."
"That feels… " Annette shrugged helplessly. "Let's call it an option. Plan C. I don't particularly like dumping her on any government agency in this city. Are they all as bad as I remember?"
"Nothing has changed," Danny confirmed. "It might have gotten a little worse in some places, it's hard to tell."
"Exactly. So we don't want to do that." Annette crossed her arms and leaned back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. "And anyone who knows who Sarah is will know she isn't supposed to be that young… They'll call the Protectorate in no matter what Sarah remembers. Postcognitives are a thing. I doubt they would get anything from using a postcog on me, or any of the other people you saved, Taylor, but only because you were in costume. If they used one on Sarah…"
"How does that work?" Taylor asked. She knew, in broad strokes, what postcognition meant, it was seeing the past… That did seem like exactly the right power to catch her if they used her plan.
"I don't know, it depends on who we're talking about, but I assume they could touch Sarah and see everything she experienced over the last few weeks… That doesn't seem unreasonable, and she's the missing, youth-imbued daughter of a wealthy couple… It could very well happen."
"By that logic, we need to get her to the Livseys with a cover story they'll fully believe, so they have no reason to ask questions or go to the Protectorate," Danny mused. "Ideally, the story would be the truth, or close to it."
"So… I go up to them as Gravedigger and tell them I found their daughter, but I pushed her back a little too far?" She didn't want to go out as Gravedigger ever again, it wasn't safe, but a private meeting could be doable.
"Yes!" Annette punched the air above her, the rest of her body still limp on the couch. "That works. Everyone knows what you can do, if you bring her to them and prove it's you, they'll have to believe. You can imply she was dead, that way we get around explaining how we got her, and they'll take her back."
"I like it, except for how we're going to get there," Danny objected.
"I'll get my friends to set me up," Annette said dismissively. "Cindy still owes me majorly, and she wanted me to visit someday soon. She lives in Oklahoma now, that's halfway there. Sidhara lives in Illinois, she wanted to meet up… It might be an inefficient route, but I could probably swing it as a grand tour."
"You have friends all over the country?" Taylor asked incredulously. "Why don't I know any of them?"
Annette sat up to look at her. "College is a gathering of many people from many places," she said sagely. "I like to keep in touch."
"And you don't know them because most of them don't like me," Danny added, smiling all the while. "I 'stole' Annette from their little group. They don't come around to visit."
"Oh, you stole nothing I didn't want stolen, and that's just Helen who wants you dead," Annette said casually, waving her hand dismissively in his general direction. "Even she would tolerate you for a chance to see me and meet Taylor. The real question is whether you can leave for that long and still come back to a job that needs you."
"I have way too much vacation time saved up," Danny said guiltily. He looked away from Annette's sudden piercing glare. Taylor squirmed uncomfortably; she had the feeling her mother's sudden irritation was on her behalf… Her mother was not a quiet lecturer, and after the initial shock of it all wore off, she had given him an earful that was audible from anywhere in the house on the subject of his negligence.
"And is it still the case that nobody wants to do your job?" Annette asked neutrally.
"The yearly Ferry proposal is coming up, so I'm going to have to assign three people to cover for me instead of the usual two," Danny confirmed. "None of them will have the ability to take over for me, and none will want to, not when it means doing triple the work they did while filling in for me. I've got it covered."
"Then it's settled," Annette announced. "We're going on a roadtrip in the middle of the Winter, with an eight-year-old in tow, across the country to visit my friends and return her to her parents!"
Taylor had no idea how she was supposed to feel about that, not in the least because she had never been on a real road trip before. This would be, if nothing else, a new experience.
They had rented an old minivan, one with a back seat and plenty of storage space. They had stocked up on nonperishable food for the road. Taylor brought books, for herself and for Sarah. Danny arranged for people he trusted to fill in for him at work, and told the school that he was taking Taylor out. Permanently, for homeschooling, since Annette insisted on her never going back to Winslow, and Arcadia wasn't an option. A zigzag path across the country was traced on a travel map, marking out the connect-the-dots game Annette had played with her friends on a national scale.
Then, on a miserable winter day, they set off. It was just a normal drive at first, albeit in a rented car. But the ride was not a day trip, and at the end of the day they pulled into a motel, the first of many across the country.
The days flew by, sometimes, and other times every hour dragged intolerably. Conversations were had, songs were sung, driving games were played. Hours were spent staring out windows at snow, mountains, fields, and all sorts of other things as the terrain changed. They stopped off in Ohio to visit one of Annette's friends who was a professional chef – the food there was amazing – and then headed Southwest, to Arkansas.
There, they met another of Annette's friends, the infamous Helen who ran a massive rice farm. She seemed nice enough, but Taylor noticed the constant glares she sent Danny's way when she thought nobody would notice. Sarah noticed too, and asked about it, much to Helen's chagrin. They were on their way soon afterward, with a surprisingly large amount of money from Helen, donated to 'the trip'.
From there, they splurged a little; some meals became stops at fast food places instead of just sandwiches assembled from pre-bought ingredients, and the motels got a little nicer. Taylor was reassured by that; if her parents felt it was okay to spend a little more than the bare minimum, it meant they weren't on the knife's edge of running out of money for the bare essentials.
They headed out West, across vast empty spaces, passing a collection of massive craters in the ground, remnants of cape fights that were held out in the middle of nowhere because of how destructive they otherwise would have been. There was a monument to a failed attempt to establish 'cape monster truck rallies' out in the middle of one such crater in Kansas; as the monument's inscription read, the crater was all that was left of the endeavor.
Sarah liked running around in the giant hole. The sight of the monument to capes made Taylor wonder whether Sarah had possessed a parahuman power when they first met, and if so, whether she would ever get it back. She certainly didn't have one now.
There was another of Annette's old college friends in Kansas, but that meeting fell through at the last moment because of a family emergency. Annette offered help, but Maria said there was nothing she could really do, her brother had relapsed and needed to be taken back to rehab. They rescheduled and spent an extra night in a motel.
From there, an awkward day spent with a woman who clearly had other things on her mind. They drove South for a while, then West, reaching Arizona in good time. The minivan lost a tire right outside Phoenix, but a spare tire had come with it, so that wasn't a problem. They stopped at a really nice restaurant in Phoenix, and played mini-golf in a neon-lit course that gave Taylor a headache. It was still fun.
After that, only a few days of travelling stood between them and California. There weren't any more of her mom's friends to visit, aside from those they would be seeing on the way back, and she had read through all the books she brought twice, even the ones for Sarah.
The last day's drive was done in near-total silence. Sarah dozed, Annette and Danny took turns driving, and Taylor… She let her thoughts drift. It had been a fun trip, and she had the return journey to look forward to… But after tonight, there would only be the three of them. They were taking Sarah home.
She didn't know how she felt about that. Nervous, worried, anxious… sad. For all that they had gotten off to the worst possible start back in Brockton, she liked Sarah as she was now. But she also felt guilty about being responsible for her being as she was now, oblivious to half the life she had lived.
On the other hand, older Sarah had tried to kidnap her. It all sort of even out, or would once Taylor was sure Sarah was safe and where she belonged.
They drove into Santa Monica, California, as the sun was setting, and after some confusion over addresses, found the correct neighborhood. Sarah pointed out the house with her usual exuberance, and then they drove away, to wait for night to fall.
Taylor donned her coat and boots, and hefted her shovel over her shoulder. One hand steadied said shovel, while the other led Sarah along. Sarah had her own costume, a domino mask and an oversized trenchcoat, partially to protect her identity and partially because she had insisted.
The Livseys lived in a very nice house in a nice part of a nice city. They had security cameras and good locks, and all sorts of things that would be useful... if they defended against time incarnate. As it was, Taylor just aged the lock itself forward by hours until it was open – Mr. Livsey would have to go to work in the morning, after all – and stepped inside, her charge in tow.
"They redecorated," Sarah said quietly, looking around. "And made Rex clean up his toys…"
Rex. Taylor had heard a lot about Sarah's older brother. She doubted he was still here, he would be an adult by now… She didn't envy Sarah's parents that explanation.
"You sit at the dining room table, I'll go wake them up," Taylor suggested. "Play along, okay? This is going to really confuse them."
"I know, I'm way too little," Sarah grumped. She did go to the dining room and pull out a fancy chair, so Taylor assumed she intended to do as told. Though she had taken the chair at the head of the table, which was probably where her father usually sat…
Taylor was more than a little sad about finally reaching the end of the journey. She liked having Sarah around, as annoying as the girl could be sometimes. But this was where she belonged, even if she was technically an intruder at this very moment.
The master bedroom was easy to find; it had double doors and a frankly ridiculous amount of decoration around the doorway, like someone had decided that it was the most important room in the house and should be treated as such. She pushed the door open, stepped inside–
And was met with a man holding a fireplace poker in one hand and a phone in the other, dressed in fancy silk pajamas that made the threat of being stabbed somehow less serious simply by making him look utterly ridiculous. A woman cowered on the massive bed behind him.
"Calm down," Taylor said gruffly. The poker was waved in her direction, so she reached out, pulled it from weak hands, and pushed at it until it started to visibly rust. "I'm here to give you something, not hurt you."
To her surprise, both Livseys visibly relaxed at that. She might have underestimated how much of a celebrity she was, if they were that willing to trust her word.
"Down in the kitchen," she elaborated.
"We'll be right down," Ms. Livsey said, clutching the blankets up to her neck.
Taylor left them to get dressed, returning to sit with Sarah at the table. When they came down, they were fully clothed and at least making an effort to seem relaxed. Both eyed Sarah as they took seats at the table, especially Mr. Livsey, but neither seemed to recognize her. Sarah was practically vibrating with repressed glee; she loved the deception, showing up with a famous cape and posing as her sidekick. Taylor had gotten an earful on that the moment they first told her about the plan.
"I am the Gravedigger, and I have brought back many people," Taylor began. "Usually, without incident. But one in particular I pushed back too far. It is hard to believe until you see, so…" She gestured to Sarah.
"It's me!" Sarah exclaimed, ripping her domino mask off and throwing it behind herself. "I'm back!"
"Oh." Mr. Livsey barely even looked at his daughter before looking back to Gravedigger. "She was dead?"
"It seems so," Taylor lied. "On the other side of the country, no less. It didn't sit right with me to leave her, and I couldn't age her up to where she should have been so she could return to you herself, so I brought her personally."
"And… you will take her with you when you go?" Ms. Livsey asked.
Everything stopped. Sarah stopped bouncing in her chair. Mr. Livsey stopped nodding to himself, a little thing Taylor hadn't noticed until he wasn't doing it anymore. Ms. Livsey froze, as if only then hearing what she had just said.
"This is your daughter?" Taylor asked. Surely she couldn't have gotten that wrong.
"It looks like my daughter, but my daughter is a teenager, not a child," Ms. Livsey said carefully. "I do not know what you do to 'bring people back', but I do not believe it actually does so. So that is not actually my daughter."
"Parahuman things always go bad somehow," Mr. Livsey agreed gruffly. "Can't trust them. Sorry you had to come out all this way, but you can take her somewhere else now."
"But…" Sarah whined quietly.
"All I do is push something or someone backwards in time," Taylor said firmly. She could barely believe this was actually happening, it was so far outside of her personal experience. A loved one coming back from the dead was supposed to be accepted with open arms, not rejected! "The Protectorate down in Brockton Bay did a thorough set of tests to ensure that what I do has no side effects."
"It's not the side effects, it's the principle of the thing," Mr. Livsey said firmly. "Thank you, but no, we do not want anything to do with this."
"Dad?" Sarah whimpered. "Mom?"
"I'll call the police," Mr. Livsey threatened. "Leave us alone, please."
For a moment, just one moment, Taylor considered thumping him upside the head with her shovel, or worse. Forget her power, she wanted to beat him with her bare hands for being so stupid, so close-minded. His daughter was close to crying right in front of him, and he was saying he wanted nothing to do with her–
She stood, hefted her shovel menacingly, then leaned down to pick Sarah up. The girl was heavy, but not too heavy, and she definitely wouldn't be walking out of her own accord. "You are making a terrible mistake," she said angrily.
Ms. Livsey turned away, refusing to look at them.
She still didn't believe it, but she left the house anyway, Sarah in her arms and her shovel awkwardly dragging behind her. The girl's crying only intensified as they made their way back to the car under the dead of night. Taylor was vaguely thankful nobody was around to mistakenly assume she was kidnapping a child, as that was probably what it looked like.
Their hotel room was sombre that night. Taylor was at a loss, and her parents didn't seem any better. The TV was flickering silently in the corner, but nobody was watching it.
"Did they seem like they were in denial?" Annette asked. She was sitting on one of the two beds, running her fingers through Sarah's hair as she slept.
"They seemed… sure." She wished it had been like that, something to argue against and eventually convince them was wrong. "Like it wasn't even a question." They were barely even surprised by the reveal, that wasn't the problem.
"There are some people who want nothing to do with parahumans," Danny said. "Refusing parahuman assistance, even if they need healing… Not everyone comes to Brockton Bay to seek out Panacea, some people refuse her even if she's willing to help them."
"Sarah did say she had the help of a Thinker power… in the alleyway." Annette's fingers moved of their own accord, soothing the girl. She was curled up in a miserable ball, having cried herself to sleep. "She doesn't have it now, but she was a runaway. She might have left home because of them."
"Meaning we're never going to get them to accept her," Taylor said miserably.
"What about the brother?" Danny asked.
"We couldn't find anything about him online," Annette reminded him. "It's like he dropped off the face of the earth. He might have run away too."
"I shouldn't have done anything to her, in that alley," Taylor mumbled. "This is my fault…" The older Sarah might have been a bitch supervillain, but she was capable of fending for herself. Taylor hadn't had to do anything to her, she had pulled her back in time to spite her in the heat of the moment.
"Hey, don't think like that," Annette said. "It happened, and it's not your fault her parents are horrible people. We just… have to figure something else out."
"Something." Taylor had no idea what that something would be. Sarah didn't legally exist, and showing her to anybody with the government would start the ball rolling to identify her as someone who shouldn't be so young, leading inevitably back to Gravedigger. It was an impossible mess, now that the only solution was no longer a solution.
The TV continued to flicker, more urgently now. Taylor glanced over, saw a screen with scrolling text at the bottom, like a storm warning, and started to read it.
What she saw chilled her blood. Endbringer, Behemoth, predicted to emerge in New Mexico in less than an hour. A general call for heroes, villains, any parahuman who could help to report to certain locations to be brought to the fight, or to do search and rescue.
Above the scrolling text, two news anchors were talking. Between them, a grainy picture of someone in a costume similar to hers. Not her, she had never gone out in costume anywhere near the water like in the background of the picture, but they didn't know that.
Of course, they were talking about her now. It was an Endbringer fight; if she was going to show up again anywhere, it would be there. Where there was a truce and she could do more good in an hour than was possibly at any other time.
"You don't have to go," Danny said quietly. Taylor realized he had seen the TV, and seen her looking at it.
"I wouldn't be fighting," she objected, just as quietly.
"You still don't have to go," Annette said.
"But I'm going to anyway." It wasn't really a decision; she hadn't wanted to do anything else as Gravedigger, but Endbringers were… bigger… than that. More important. She didn't know what kind of person she would be, if she stayed away when the entire world was hoping she would help avert an otherwise inevitable tragedy.
"Then I'll drive you there," Danny agreed. "Come on, we don't have much time."
Behemoth wasn't visible from the Healer's outpost, a good ten miles away from the Endbringer in question. Thus, Taylor presumed, people took to staring at the next most mythical thing within eyeshot. That was, unfortunately, her.
She felt distinctly underdressed as Strider dropped her off in the middle of a white pavilion. Her boots, her coat, the shovel she really didn't need for this but had brought anyway… It was nothing compared to the professional costumes of the other healer capes, or the medical outfits of those who were helping them arrange stretchers and blood bags under the pale light of the rising sun and the glare of bright artificial lighting.
"Two minutes to contact!" Strider yelled to the whole pavilion, before popping back out. A moment later, the Dragon armbands echoed the same message.
"Hey, you, Graveperson."
Taylor turned, more surprised by the irreverent address than actually being spoken to, and saw Panacea. Unlike most of the capes in the room, she recognized the Brockton Bay native, white robes and all. "Yeah?"
"Welcome to hell." Panacea gestured to the large room around them. "Got any experience?"
"None at all," Taylor freely admitted. "I don't do healing, not really. I raise the dead." That alone was enough to get her worldwide attention, but she wasn't going to make herself seem any more valuable.
"Well, good, that'll make this even more hectic," Panacea said gruffly. For someone who was by all accounts a walking miracle worthy of the name Panacea, she really had a bad attitude. Not that Taylor could blame her; she sympathized. Quite a bit, now that she thought about it. Panacea didn't even have a secret identity to hide behind when she wanted a moment's peace.
"Over there, we'll line up the dead," Panacea continued, pointing to a section of the pavilion marked off by black tape. "You'll… do whatever it is you do. Is it biological?"
"No, it's not." She didn't want to answer any more clearly than that.
"Then I'm not going to waste my time trying to see how it works," Panacea said bluntly.
Their armbands beeped once. "Thirty seconds to first engagement," Dragon announced.
"Good fucking luck, and try to keep your cool," Panacea concluded. "Don't touch the ones that come in with bags over them, that's Tinkertech to keep them from irradiating us. Flense has to hit them before we can do anything." She pointed to a creepy-looking cape decked out in red and metal bits reminiscent of Hookwolf. "And they're going to be even more fucked up afterward, but that's unavoidable. We don't have anyone better at dealing with ambient radiation this time."
"I'm plenty good at it, bitch!" Flense yelled from across the pavilion.
"If only you didn't put them through the equivalent of a sandblaster in the process!" Panacea yelled back. "And your name doesn't make sense," she added in a gruff mutter that had Taylor laughing despite the situation.
A loud, insistent dial tone from the armbands cut through her muffled laughter like a knife through butter. Taylor moved over to the black-taped area and put her shovel down, out of the way.
It was less than two minutes before Strider popped in with a dozen screaming, crying, or deathly silent capes. One was nothing more than an oozing puddle that seemed to be failing to rebuild itself into an upright shape, another was clutching at a crushed arm, two more were impaled by a single piece of metal–
Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals swarmed the group, separating them out with frightening efficiency, and two were being wheeled over to Taylor on gurneys. She met them halfway and immediately began pulling them back. The revival was almost instant, though she took them back several hours just to be safe.
"Leviathan!" one of the two yelled as he came to. He looked around wildly, clutching his head.
"No, Behemoth," Taylor corrected. She wondered what he was–
"Leviathan is attacking, he's right," the other cape she had just brought back chimed in. "I drowned… But where…"
"Uh, nurses?" Taylor called out, waving her arm frantically to get someone's attention. "These guys are confused, I'm not sure why, but they're fine, where do I send them?" They were fine, she didn't know what was up with them thinking they were fighting the wrong Endbringer… But Endbringers screwed with a lot of the weirder powers that should have been more effective against them, it was probably just that happening to her. Confusion wasn't that big of a problem, looked at that way.
A nurse came over and wheeled the two confused but healthy capes away, and another brought four more. Taylor sunk into her job, pulling with all she had, constantly. She ignored the confusion, the mutters of 'Leviathan' and 'Brockton Bay' and 'I didn't even go!', it didn't matter, just the Endbringers trying to screw with her somehow. She had her job, she was doing it, she was ignoring the shrieks and wails of the injured that echoed through the rest of the pavilion, ignoring the waves of dead her armband counted off, especially because not all of those dead were making it to her. She couldn't save everyone, but she could save everyone they brought her and that had to be enough.
Her patients, though she tried not to look at them, were dead in a variety of ways. Crushed, burned, no obvious cause, missing most of their skin – Flense, she assumed, given those were the ones who were taken to him first, even if they were dead on arrival – or immolated from the inside out. So much variety, so many faces hidden behind masks or stuck in the grim rictus of death.
Then one came to her from nowhere; she could have sworn there was nobody behind her, but when she turned a woman in a suit was wheeling another gurney her way. The fedora on her head stuck out, but Taylor assumed the doctors were finally flagging and calling in replacements, so she didn't really care.
The man inside was different from the rest of her patients.
"That's a new trick," she grumbled as she reached in and gingerly touched the bare bones hidden behind shreds of a costume. He looked like he had been dead for years… and it was taking her much more time to bring him back. He had been dead for years. This wasn't a Behemoth kill, this was someone else.
She tried to pull her hand away, but the woman in the fedora was there, stopping her. "Hero," the woman said simply. "Would you deny Hero a return?"
The words struck like a hammer, and she found herself pulling more time from him without asking any more questions. Hero had been dead for years, he had been the best Tinker, the world considered his loss a tragedy, she hadn't even known what happened to his body–
He was gasping under her hands, his costume restored to a glory she only knew from pictures and videos. He lurched out of the gurney, looking around wildly.
Then he fell through the world, disappearing from sight. The fedora-wearing woman tipped her hat and did the same, falling into an instantly-appearing hole in the ground.
The next set of dead bodies was wheeled over to her, and the nurses were asking what the matter was, and she was left wondering whether what she had just done was real or a strange hallucination brought on by stress.
She wondered while she pulled others back from death; there was no time to waste.
Taylor had always imagined Endbringer fights as just that, a fight. Where both sides had a chance of winning. She had been sorely disabused of that notion by the end of the day.
Behemoth had been repelled; nobody knew, even now, what he had come to attack, but he never made it there. Casualties were the lowest they had ever been, one in ten capes permanently dead by the end of the encounter. Those who remained dead were the ones who had been turned to ash, or crushed so thoroughly nobody could find the body. The ones that Taylor couldn't get to.
She had worked through the day and into the night, along with Panacea and the other healers. First the capes, then the civilians, so many civilians…
The Protectorate had taken over a hotel for the healers, still under the Endbringer truce, and told Taylor she had a room on the ground floor if she wanted to sleep. Alexandria herself stood guard outside her room, silent and imposing.
She didn't want to sleep. She had a feeling that she wouldn't be allowed to leave her room again if she did, Endbringer truce or not. But she was dead on her feet, and they could just grab her now anyway, so she slunk to the hotel room and collapsed on the bed shortly after midnight, not even bothering to remove her costume.
She was right on the edge of blissful sleep, darkness closing in behind her eyelids, when she felt weightless.
Then her bed hit the ground and she jolted wide awake, her eyes opening just in time to see a portal closing on the ceiling of a blank, white-tiled room nothing like the hotel room she had been in five seconds ago.
She sat up, her head spinning, and saw the same suit-wearing woman with a fedora from earlier that day. She stood in front of a table with three bullets, two orange folders, a box of surgical gloves, and a pistol, all laid out neatly in a row. Said table was right at the foot of Taylor's bed.
"You are in absolutely no danger," the woman said the moment Taylor had worked up the motivation to speak.
She opened her mouth to ask what kidnapping counted as, if not danger–
"I am offering you a deal, not kidnapping you, and you will go free afterward regardless of what you decide," the woman added, smoothly cutting in just before Taylor could get the words out. "I am Contessa, and I am the most powerful Thinker to ever live, just as you are potentially the most powerful Striker, barring a villain in Chicago and a warlord in Syria."
'Most powerful Thinker' made Taylor think of the Simurgh, but she didn't think this was how the Simurgh tended to operate… City-dooming screams and massive angel-women were her hallmarks, not portals and a fedora.
"What do you want?" she asked, actually managing to speak for the first time since being abducted.
"You to use your power in the interests of my organization," Contessa said simply. "Cauldron. We do whatever it takes to preserve humanity."
"I don't want to work for a shadowy secret organization," Taylor objected, quite reasonably in her opinion.
"There is a difference between working for someone, and working in their interests," Contessa replied, unruffled by her objection. "In this case, the balance heavily favors you. We wish only to ensure you continue to use your powers as you feel is right, without fear of the danger that will come from others seeing you do so. Consider this a sponsorship. Cauldron will provide you with information, transportation and security. You will do what only you can do, as you choose. We will suggest potential uses, but never demand, extort, or require an action from you."
"I–" Taylor began, only to cut herself off when Contessa picked up one of the three bullets and loaded it into a pistol. Not the one on the table, one she had pulled from somewhere out of sight.
"I will demonstrate," Contessa said calmly. "First, transportation. Repeat these words. Door me, Hebert residence, Taylor's room."
"But…" She hesitated, but there was nothing else she could do. "Door me? Hebert residence… Taylor's room."
A portal, edged and bright as it formed, snapped into existence between her and Contessa. She saw her bed there on the other side, still ruffled from the day they had left.
She scooted forward on her hotel bed and tentatively reached out, sticking her arm through the opening. It was cold on the other side, and she could smell the distinct smell of her house, wet and with that Brockton Bay scent that she had been missing while they were traveling the country… It wasn't a particularly nice smell, but it was home.
"Door me, Cairo, ten thousand feet up, to her left," Contessa called out from behind the portal.
Another portal snapped into place right next to Taylor, a wind rushed into it, and she made the mistake of looking into it. Endless space loomed, and she caught a glimpse of a foreign city far below before she jolted to the right, away from the drop her entire body was screaming would be fatal.
She hit white tiles with a thump and lay sprawled on the floor, her heart pounding.
"Close doors," Contessa said calmly, and both portals snapped out of existence, the wind disappearing. "You can go anywhere, anytime. Rumor has you on both sides of the country on the same night. You would be able to make those rumors reality, if you wanted."
Taylor stood, because something deep inside her made her unwilling to cower in front of Contessa, no matter how intimidating she was. "Okay," she said shakily. "I see that."
"Next, protection." Contessa raised her pistol off to the side and pointed it at a blank wall. "How many people do you think are currently intending to abduct, assassinate, or coerce Gravedigger into serving them at this very moment?"
"A lot?" she guessed.
"Three hundred and forty two separate groups, over a thousand individuals with the resources to make them a genuine threat, and no fewer than three national governments," Contessa said blandly. "Cauldron is offering protection. Let's start going down the list. First, the Yangban. One of their more warlike ministers is the driving force behind the plan to abduct you in an unprecedented strike on American soil."
Taylor felt a sinking horror growing in her gut.
"Door," Contessa requested, followed by a string of numbers too fast for Taylor to follow. The portal opened directly in front of Contessa's pistol, smaller than a baseball.
Contessa fired. There was a startled yell from the other side, and then the portal closed.
"The plan will fail as internal one-upsmanship induces a small civil war over his death, ensuring that the Yangban do not target you or anyone else outside their country for the next year, as that particular man's successors fight for dominance." Contessa loaded another bullet into the same pistol, leaving only one more on the table.
"Next, something closer to home. Coil. He was behind the single abduction attempt you have thwarted so far. He plans to try again, the moment you return home. He has also abducted another parahuman child in your absence, to aid him."
A frown crossed Contessa's face, the first expression Taylor had seen on her. "He is one of our customers. He was useful. He owed us a favor." She flipped the gun out and held it up to Taylor.
Taylor recoiled, though she wasn't close enough to take it anyway. "I'm not going to shoot him!" she objected. Maybe he was a terrible person, he had kidnapped a child, but she couldn't just pick up a gun and shoot him without any warning, or anything.
"Then he will be dissuaded in another way," Contessa said coolly, laying down the gun and picking up the final unloaded bullet. She held it in her hand like a precious stone. "Door, Coil or Thomas Calvert, whichever is currently present."
A portal opened, and the bullet was thrown through. Taylor saw a tall, spindly black man reading a newspaper in a nice kitchen. The bullet bounced off his forehead.
"Gravedigger is a Cauldron operative," Contessa said firmly. "Consider her off-limits, and do not consider this a favor fulfilled."
"And let that girl you kidnapped go," Taylor added impulsively.
The man – Coil, Thomas Calvert – gulped, slowly lowering his paper to the kitchen table. "Understood. On both counts. My apologies, Gravedigger."
The portal closed.
"I am capable of taking steps to eliminate or dissuade every threat to your well-being in under an hour," Contessa said simply. "You, and your parents. I can do so with minimal violence, or as I see fit, whichever you feel you can accept. I can do this indefinitely, and only the Endbringers and Scion are outside of my ability to predict and counter. Even then, you can simply have a door take you away."
"For me and my parents?" she asked, though of course Contessa had just said as much. "Just so I use my powers how I want without worrying about it?" The deal sounded too perfect to be real, but… Contessa clearly didn't need to lie or trick her.
"Yes." Contessa said. "And another thing. Sarah Livsey." She gestured to the two folders that had been sitting on the table since before Taylor got there. "These are two sets of official adoption papers, identity forms, and a collection of classified documents that prevent anyone from digging too far into the former without attracting the attention of Alexandria herself. Door, Brockton Bay City Hall, Records department, filing cabinet forty two, under the left file." The leftmost file dropped out of the world.
"She is now legally in your parents' custody," Contessa explained. "There will be no problems with her existence, legally speaking. You may take the other folder with you when you go."
Taylor stared blankly at Contessa. She had barely even considered what would happen to Sarah, there hadn't been time. Adoption wasn't an option, it hadn't even been discussed–
"By the time your family returned to Brockton Bay, your father would have decided to talk to the Mayor himself about the situation, and there would have been an elaborate plan concerning how to make it happen while preserving your secret identity," Contessa explained. "One that would take years and ultimately fail." She took two disposable gloves from the box on the table and pulled them on as she spoke. "Keep it secret until they decide to do it, then give them the folder. I've included a note to ensure they do not find any fault with you for hiding it."
Taylor mentally added 'seeing alternative futures' to her list of powers this 'Cauldron' group had. It was a long list, and only getting longer.
"Do you want further incentives?" Contessa asked. "It would be just as easy to ensure the three people you hate most suffer a rash of misfortune. A gun found in the violent one's bedroom, for instance." She lifted the gun that had sat there all this time without a purpose, holding it in gloved hands. "Door me–"
"No, no more," Taylor gasped. It was tempting, so tempting, but she felt like she was dealing with the devil, and the further she got into debt, the worse the reckoning would be when it came. Compared to that, getting Sophia arrested was not worth it. "I don't need anything else. You just want me to use my power? You'll have suggestions as to how, but you won't force me to do anything? You'll protect my family from everything?"
"Yes, to all," Contessa agreed. She put the gun back down and pulled off the gloves, one by one.
"Then I agree. I agree. Just… put me back." She took a few shaky steps forward to take the folder; if it was going to happen, and she was pretty sure it would, she would rather not mess up the Thinker's plans. Even if the idea of adopting Sarah was… not unpleasant, just sudden. The last she had seen of the girl, she had been bawling her eyes out because her parents didn't want her back.
"You may do it yourself," Contessa said. "And when you do, speak to Alexandria. She is a part of Cauldron. Ask her, and she will confirm it."
Another impossibility, but one Taylor could live with. "Door me, the hotel room this bed came from?" she requested. She hoped that would work, she didn't know the address.
Her bed dropped through the floor yet again, hitting the ground with a crack, and she found herself looking down into the room. She cast one last look back at Contessa, who was watching impassively, then jumped down onto her bed. The portal closed above her.
"I'm going to need some answers." Alexandria casually bent a piece of metal into a ring around her pointer finger, then straightened it again. It was a pointless gesture given who she was talking to, but she wasn't at her best and it made her feel more in control. "Gravedigger was real. You knew from the start."
"Yes," Contessa said flatly from her position perched atop a pile of toaster-sized iron cubes. Alexandria didn't know what the cubes were for, or why Contessa had them in the kitchen of Cauldron's base, and she didn't particularly care. 'Part of the path' was the only answer she would get if she asked. It was likely to be the only answer she would get to her intended question, too, but that she cared enough about that to try anyway.
"Why didn't we snatch her up the second you became aware of her?" Alexandria asked irritably. She had been assured Gravedigger was an elaborate hoax by all her people in the Protectorate, those that reported to Alexandria, Director Costa-Brown, and the moles under Cauldron's employ. That was the only reason she hadn't started a nationwide hunt for her. In retrospect, that had to be Contessa's meddling, probably intercepting and altering all outgoing communication on the subject from Brockton Bay, but that didn't answer the real question. Why?
"The path to conscripting her and obtaining the use of her powers was… troublesome." Contessa paused for no apparent reason, then continued to speak. "It involved abducting Bonesaw, contracting to Toybox, eliminating Toybox afterward, and had a number of very undesirable side effects."
Alexandria felt her usually indomitable mind coming to a screeching halt. The Path found obtaining Gravedigger difficult?
"Her powers mean that there is no easy way to safely contain and control her, especially in the case of a potential second trigger, and her mentality ensures that she will destroy anything she perceives as harming her or hers. It would be doable, but extremely convoluted and wasteful." Contessa shook her head. "So I checked how 'path to obtaining Graveyard's voluntary cooperation with Cauldron and Cauldron interests' looked instead. It was simple. Foster confusion among all other interested parties so they would not snatch her up, except for Coil who was left alone to fail. The girl she obtained from foiling Coil would lead her out to the west of the country, further throwing off pursuit. The girl's parents were bribed to want nothing to do with any offer of their daughter's return, for a surprisingly small amount of money. This caused Gravedigger and her family to want to take the girl in despite the obvious legal problems inherent in such an idea."
"And?" Alexandria asked. It was unnecessary to speak, Contessa would have continued anyway, but it made her feel better about being monologued to if she participated.
"Behemoth's arrival near where I had intended to intercept her on the way back to Brockton Bay was unexpected," Contessa admitted, "Endbringers always are. If it wasn't for her efforts, we might not have stopped him from reaching the healing pavilion and eliminating her. But bringing her Hero and then buying her continued cooperation by offering to ensure the girl was legally theirs beyond reproach, and protection in perpetuity for Gravedigger and her family while not forcing them to abandon their normal lives? Simple, and always the plan. She now works for us in all but name, and will use her powers to revive, heal, rejuvenate, or destroy as we wish, so long as we restrict our requests to things of a heroic nature. Path complete, save for ongoing maintenance."
"And–" Alexandria began, intent on asking more questions.
"You're going to have to be the one to tell Hero about all the things Cauldron has done in his absence," Contessa said abruptly. "Door me, Kansas City, under the pile." A portal opened up parallel to the floor, and the entire pile of toaster-sized iron cubes fell through, Contessa passing through last. The portal shut after her.
"I hate you," Alexandria said helplessly, already picturing the verbal firestorm Contessa had delegated to her. Hero had very strict morals, as strict as Legend if not more so, and he would not be happy with many of the things Cauldron had done… She had planned to make Eidolon explain it!
Taylor sat on the bus, her backpack on her lap, and flipped through her new Spanish textbook. Arcadia, as it turned out, required a foreign language credit to graduate. They also apparently had a waiting list she had randomly been chosen off of, but she wasn't inclined to think too hard about that. Random, convenient coincidences happened around her now, and she had a bargain with the one behind them. She could ignore the oddities and focus on the things that mattered.
Like catching up in a totally new class on top of remediating all of the subjects Winslow did teach. Her days were filled with schoolwork, both at school and at home. Having a near-failing grade in English class and an English teacher for a mother was not a relaxing combination, even if her grade was mostly bad due to interference.
"Biblioteca," she muttered to herself as the bus bumped over a pothole. "Library." Not that she was going to the library; she was going home. Arcadia's bus route didn't take her all the way, but a three-block walk wasn't bad, all things considered.
The bus slowed to a stop, and a handful of people got off. Taylor shoved her book in her backpack, slung it onto her back, and followed them off. Nobody from the bus was going her direction, but she didn't mind.
The walk home was quick and easy; Brockton's cold snap had finally petered out, and wet slush paired with bright, sunny skies was infinitely better than snow and clouds. Despite the weight of her backpack, Taylor felt light. Happy.
As she neared her house, she saw a familiar pair of figures in the front yard. Annette was doing something with the slush lying around everywhere, picking it up and tossing it in Sarah's general direction. The younger girl laughed and threw slush back.
It was good to see Sarah happy; it was taking time for her to fully come to terms with her change in circumstance. Having her own parents saying she wasn't real, that she was a parahuman thing that was sure to go wrong, refusing to have anything to do with her…
Suffice to say Taylor was glad to see Sarah playing instead of moping around. Even if the younger girl was running toward her with a double handful of slush.
"Not the backpack!" Taylor pleaded, confident that her new, waterproof backpack could take the damage a contrarian child with watery ammunition would almost certainly deal out.
"Come here!" Sarah screeched as Taylor ran up the driveway and leaped onto the porch. She paused there, long enough to take a direct hit on her backpack, then turned and raised her arms menacingly. Sarah shrieked and fled.
"I'll be out in a few minutes," she said to her mother, before going inside the house. Her schoolwork could be put on hold for a few minutes. She just had to toss her backpack in her room and put on some waterproof gloves–
There was a portal in the living room, set against the far wall, and Alexandria stood by it.
"Or not," Taylor said to herself. "Give me a second to drop my backpack somewhere… " Her hero-worship of Alexandria had run its course, and she had been looking forward to playing around in the slush…
"Today, we'll be checking whether you can undo or degrade Grey Boy bubbles," Alexandria said neutrally.
Just like that, Taylor's reluctance vanished. She dropped her backpack on the kitchen table and grabbed her costume's coat and boots from the hallway closet. The domino mask was in the coat pocket, the Tinkertech obscuration device provided by Contessa was sewn into the back.
"I want to be back in time for dinner," she informed Alexandria as she stepped through the portal into the usual blank white room. There was something thrilling about mouthing off to the famous hero, in the same way poking a scorpion might be thrilling.
"As do we all," Alexandria said neutrally. "If this works, it will take up the next few weeks to undo them all, in addition to your parahuman asylum visits."
"Got to keep up the image," Taylor quipped. She was feeling nervous, like she always did when a new challenge was presented to her. "Let's go."
Another portal opened, and she immediately saw the grey haze in the air a few dozen paces beyond the brick corridor it led to. She clenched her fists and steeled herself. This was what the Gravedigger did. She saved people. Whether they were trapped in an endless loop of torture, parahumans who would rather be reverted to children than continue to exist as they were, dead from fighting Endbringers… Or just civilians who didn't deserve to die the way they had. It was all a drop in the bucket, but that drop wasn't worthless. Not for the people who happened to catch it.
Author's Note: I very much enjoyed making Annette a badass in this story. Turns out, running with a somewhat rough crowd in ye olde days teaches some valuable skills. Having her take Regent's scepter, break it, and then beat him with the pieces might have been a bit much, but it happened in the background and was funny, so I did it anyway.
So, Taylor's power. Anyone guessed?
Yeah, it's dimensional trickery, not just time travel. Think Scapegoat. When Taylor pushes or pulls someone or something, she's accessing alternative dimensions and copying what is there; there's still movement along the time axis, but less 'pure' this way. In addition, brains have their own peculiar shard-based safety limitations. Thus pushing forward not giving future knowledge, pushing back regressing the mind, and pushing forward after pushing back not restoring the mind (because that's still technically pushing forward). The same applies to computers and other sensors, by the way; it's more of a 'no pretending to be a precog' limiter than an actual limitation.
And you know what the fun / morbid / horrifying ramifications of that are? At some point in the future, Taylor is going to go 'oh, let me heal you' to somebody and push them back a few minutes. They're then going to freak out because their new mind will not remember anything that's been going on, and will instead remember what happened to them in the source timeline (we see small hints of this in the Endbringer fight, and Contessa has been keeping Taylor to situations where she won't notice ever since, as part of the 'keep Gravedigger happy' subpath). Taylor's power becomes less and less 'time travel' and more and more 'dimensional replacement' the more her world butterflies from the source world (said butterfly point is 'getting time powers instead of canon bug-controlling powers', FYI).
Which, if you think about it, is pretty Worm-esque in terms of being screwed up and horrible, especially given she won't understand it until she accidentally permanently replaces someone with an extradimensional clone while trying to help them… Technically, she's already done this with everyone she's used her power on, it's just not obvious in-story. As an example, alternate universe five-year-old Sveta is indistinguishable from 'Pushing Back universe' five-year-old Sveta, because she's been pushed back before the divergence point (and yes, Taylor helped Sveta that way, she's been going through parahuman asylums offering her aid since the Cauldron deal). On the other hand, waiting a few years and then pushing Danny back five minutes will effectively overwrite him with another universe's Danny, which is an absolutely terrifying power.
But none of this was relevant to the first part of this story, which is why I cut it where I did. If you, the reader, didn't like where this second part went, it doesn't spoil the first part. If you did, then there's no harm done.