AU: Problematic Methods (part 1)
Deja vu was supposed to be a good feeling. Every time Taylor had read about it in books, it was described with a sense of mystery, something done and then done again, but partially forgotten and only partially remembered. It had seemed such a comforting idea, that she could have a long-forgotten memory come back because she did the same thing again later. Or so it had been described.
Like a lot of things in her life recently, how she hoped it would be and how it actually ended up being were two very different things.
Though it was one hell of a tangent to be thinking about deja vu while holding a knife to a world-famous healer's throat, and facing down Glory Girl's angry glare while knowing it was backed by the physical power one would attribute a steroid-addicted elephant. She was in more physical danger than she had been in… a week, at least.
Still, despite everything going on, it was the horrible, dizzying sense of deja vu washing over her that had her attention. She had never stood in a bank with a knife and black widows on dozens of people, never threatened someone, never felt the headache of her power being messed with, though that was going away now that she had killed the affected bugs on Panacea. The source was something else entirely.
"It's not the man that would bother her so much," Tattletale said slyly, speaking about Panacea's origins, her father, the supervillain she didn't know about. Something so deeply personal, turned into a weapon by a girl with a smug smile. "It's the knowing. Every hour of every day after hearing me say his name, she would wonder. She's terrified she'll start second guessing every part of herself, wondering if she inherited it from him, or if she was that way out of an unconscious desire to not be him. Knowing as much as she does already keeps her awake some nights, but knowing his name, knowing who he is and what he did? For the rest of her life, she would compare herself to him. Isn't that right, Amy?"
"Shut up. Just… shut up," Panacea retorted, her voice thick with emotion. Fear, dread, sadness, maybe. She didn't want to know, and Tattletale was going to tell her. Even though Tattletale herself had talked about the unwritten rules, about how dragging someone's family into things was taboo. This might not have violated those rules, but it was surely skirting close…
It wasn't the rules that Taylor cared about. It was the dizzying, stomach-twisting sensation of looking at a person and seeing someone else, hearing someone else's words. Tattletale, Emma… They weren't the same person, but here Tattletale was doing something far too similar. Using her stolen knowledge to break, or threaten to break, someone.
"I don't think you need to go there," Taylor said quietly, her voice thick with something she couldn't quite name, even in herself. A slow-boiling discomfort, laced with guilt. Whatever it was, it wasn't going away; Tattletale had already done most of the damage with her ill-gotten knowledge. The cat wasn't out of the bag, but the bag was meowing and demanding attention.
"No, not so long as Glory Hole does what's best for everyone," Tattletale said easily, completely disregarding what Taylor actually meant with that same smug, easy smile. "Here's what's going to happen. She'll go in the vault, lock herself in, and in return I won't speak on the subject. I won't say the one sentence that tears their family apart."
Glory Girl clenched her fists, "I can't do that. I'm calling your bluff, and if I'm wrong, I'll face the consequences of whatever you say."
"Very principled. Very self-involved too, that you think the secret and the consequences have to do with you and your overzealous nature. They don't. They have to do with her." Tattletale directed the laser pointer she had taken earlier at Panacea's forehead, "You won't be tickled pink, either, but the aftermath would be hers to deal with. Humiliation, shame, heartbreak."
Taylor could feel Panacea stiffen in her grip. She could see, in the back of her mind, a black-haired girl cringing, faltering, hurt by words, by betrayal. Deja vu, picking at her and pushing her into the position, not of Emma, that was Tattletale, but of Sophia, the physical one who held her down and helped the words hit hardest…
She was acting like Sophia, holding a girl, Taylor, down while Emma did her damndest to break her with words. All of Tattletale's kind words and seeming sincerity to her up to this particular moment took on a new light… Emma had been kind and friendly and nice up to that one turning point, too.
It shouldn't have felt like stepping out into the open, into sunlight, just to fall off a cliff. She was always planning to turn on them. Or, that was the plan. To wait until she had information on their mysterious boss, and then to betray them.
It wasn't the plan anymore, because that plan required she stand here and be one of the people she hated most.
She took her knife away from Panacea's throat and stepped back in one swift motion, leaving the victim – the girl – the healer – standing alone, unthreatened, unrestrained.
Tattletale froze, her laser pointer still directed at Panacea's forehead. Glory Girl's heated glare snapped to Taylor with a new intensity.
"To hell with this," Taylor said bluntly, pointing her knife at Tattletale. "You deserve to get your ass beat for trying that." She didn't have the presence of mind to say anything more eloquent or less offensive, even if she inwardly cringed at the line she did manage to deliver. It got the core message across, at least.
Glory Girl shot forward like a bloodthirsty dog that had just slipped her chain, but Tattletale was already ducking before the heroine even began to move. Glory Girl clipped her shoulder, knocking the villain to the floor with the slightest of glancing blows, but her flight was barely affected and she crashed into the far wall of the bank before she could slow down.
Glory Girl spun around and hit Tattletale with a diving tackle she couldn't dodge, and then Taylor had to contend with a healer taking a swing at her head with her bare fist, a move she didn't feel coming because she had killed all the bugs on Panacea. The impact jarred her, sending her to the ground, and Panacea was on her, straddling her midsection and raining down surprisingly ineffective punches.
A gunshot rang out, loud and sharp, and Amy froze. Glory Girl dropped Tattletale from where she had her pinned against a wall. The several dozen bugs Taylor had on Glory Girl were suddenly able to get to her skin, though Taylor didn't do anything with them; rather, she sent them after Tattletale, who was booking it for the exit, to where the other Undersiders were fighting outside.
Glory Girl recovered before she could make it, flying up and over to get between her and said exit, face twisted into a vicious sneer. "End of the line," she said dangerously, landing in front of Tattletale.
"For your precious family," Tattletale shot back, sounding more and more like Emma with every word that left her mouth, holding the gun close to her chest. "Amy–"
Glory Girl reached out, lightning-fast, but another gunshot had her staggering and Tattletale slipping out of her grasp again. Taylor only saw it because of her bugs… though Panacea had stopped punching, maybe because Taylor wasn't fighting back. It might have looked like she was unconscious, given the mask did a great job of hiding her face.
There was no mask on Panacea's face. Taylor saw her petrified terror clearly.
"–is pining after you," Tattletale finished with a vicious grin even as she pointed the gun at a momentarily defenseless Glory Girl and stepped around her. "Marquis is her father. Does incest run in her family, or did yours teach it to her? And she can do brains, just in case you didn't know."
Glory Girl faltered, her eyes widening. Tattletale fled out the door and into a cloud of Grue's smoke while the superheroine was still both shocked and without her invincibility – however that worked. Taylor could still track her, but she was getting away.
She was getting away, and horrified tears were welling up in Panacea's eyes.
Taylor refused to let it end this way. And when she refused, all of the bugs she had brought with her did too.
Swarms of flies, beetles, moths, and anything else in her range that could fly formed on the outskirts of said range, a block out. In every direction, along every street and alleyway, dozens of them. More formed closer, near the fighting, and they all dove into battle with all the viciousness Taylor could muster. Regent went down to flies up the nose and a punch from Vista, Bitch choked on moths when she opened her mouth to yell an order to her dogs, Grue got sideswiped by one of Bitch's dogs because he was distracted by stings on every uncovered bit of skin. Tattletale swatted at herself as she ran, mouthing words that couldn't be heard through Grue's darkness.
The moment she emerged from Grue's cloud, she was set upon by no less than three clouds of insects, gathered from across Taylor's range.
The Wards all stuttered to a confused halt mid-fight as Tattletale shrieked and then coughed violently, learning her lesson and closing her mouth against hordes of bugs swarmed over her face. She writhed on the sidewalk outside the bank, stung a dozen times over every time she seemed to be getting her wits about her. The other Undersiders were either unconscious or coughing on the ground.
They had fallen to Taylor's bugs in a matter of seconds. She supposed that was what they got for counting on the swarms of intelligently-guided insects to stay on their side. For assuming their Emma would keep their new Sophia under control.
A weight lifted from her torso as Panacea got off her. There was no look of gratitude on her face, nothing of the sort; tears streaked from her eyes, shed despite her best efforts. Taylor vaguely saw her flee, heading off into the depths of the bank's offices.
"She's a liar," Glory Girl said hollowly. "Isn't she?" It was just them, now. Alone in an empty, rubble-strewn bank lobby.
"I didn't…" Taylor coughed and rolled over; she could feel the bruises Panacea had left her with forming on her chest and face, however effective her armor had been in damping the force of her blows. "I didn't turn on her because she lied."
"It doesn't get you out of paying for your crimes," Glory Girl said. There was no fight to her words, and she was glancing off toward the back of the bank even as she spoke. "You're still one of them."
"I was undercover," Taylor objected. She could feel the Undersiders being subdued by the Wards. Tattletale had been frozen by Clockblocker, the other three were being tied up, and the dogs were being handled by Vista, who was twisting space to keep them away despite not being able to affect them directly.
"A likely story," Glory Girl huffed.
"Ask Armsmaster, he knows about it," Taylor retorted.
One of Bitch's dogs got around Vista's distortions, and Aegis flew out to intercept it. Glory Girl glanced back at the fight, then looked toward where Panacea had gone, visibly uncertain.
Taylor began sidling toward one of the fire exits. She moved slowly at first, but Glory Girl didn't move to stop her, so she made it to the door without incident.
There was nobody waiting outside, either. She ran across the street and into an alleyway, then dove into a waiting cloud of her insects. From there, escape was easy.
Nobody followed, but she didn't feel good about it. The only two people who knew she had fled were busy dealing with the secrets that had been rubbed in their faces, and she had helped it happen.
For a supposed hero, she certainly didn't feel like she had made a difference. Not in the right direction.
The next few days passed in a haze of pretending to be normal, suffering through whatever happened at school, keeping her head down… and at night, sleeping badly, if at all. The Undersiders had all been captured and were officially locked up in the Rig, Panacea was listed as 'safe and sound' in the newspaper article about the incident, and no official word had been given on Taylor's alter-ego, either on her villainous actions or her abrupt about-turn. Not even testimony from any of the people in the bank mentioned her or her threat of black widows, which stunk of a cover-up somewhere along the line… Either in her favor or not, she couldn't be sure.
Maybe Armsmaster had her back, despite discouraging her when she proposed going undercover. Maybe nobody wanted to rat her out when they knew she had been the one to single-handedly subdue all four Undersiders. Maybe nobody cared, since she was a new parahuman with no track record who had disappeared after the fight.
It didn't stop her from feeling guilty about what she had… whatever the legal term was. Aided and abetted, maybe. She hadn't stuck her verbal knives in Panacea and her family, but she had held her down for Tattletale to do it, and she had failed to realize what she was doing in time to stop Tattletale.
Lisa. To stop Lisa. But she didn't really consider them the same person, the same way she didn't see the Emma of her distant past and the Emma of today as the same person. It was a betrayal, but… not as much of one.
Whatever her reasoning, she only managed to keep herself from going out for a few days. Then the guilt drove her out. She stuck close to her house the first night, staying in an abandoned apartment she discovered and broke into through her bugs. She monitored the city within a two-block radius of her temporary hideout. Muggers, thieves, a group of teens with smoldering rags planning to torch a building… None stood in the face of a swarm swelling out of the sewers, or descending from above, or whispering and chirping from the darkness. The hardest part was being able to discern what was a crime in progress and what was not, but she spent an entire night on the task. Then another, and then another still, changing her location each time.
It was hero work, on a large scale, without getting full of herself. Without accepting credit or praise. The occasional victim she rescued was as terrified by her methods as the criminals were, though she never hurt the victims. They didn't thank her. She began to be able to parse the sounds her bugs conveyed, mostly through constant practice, but even when she could make out words, they were never words of thanks or praise.
It felt… cleaner… that way. Doing selfless work and receiving nothing in return. Like a penance for her crimes, a self-imposed one. She didn't need a costume, she didn't need a name… She just needed to sneak out at night, find a place to lurk, and remotely interfere with those who sought to do bad things under the cover of darkness.
It was the furthest possible thing from acting like Sophia or Emma.
One night, more than a week after the bank robbery, she set up in an abandoned warehouse, so close to her home that it was still on the edge of her range. She sat down in a dark corner, closed her eyes, and took stock of the bugs in her range, first moving to tag everything that moved, and then afterward sorting out who was doing what, and where, through additional placement of bugs.
Tonight, there was a duo of oddly-shaped teenagers walking the streets, moving confidently. Both wore costumes, and both costumes she recognized from the bank. Clockblocker and Gallant, a Striker and a Tinker, respectively.
"I… we find some criminals," Clockblocker was saying. His voice was low, more of a murmur, but the mosquitos and gnats that landed on his helmet felt the vibrations nonetheless.
"They sent us here because somebody else is catching them all, at least this week," Gallant replied. His voice was both easier and harder to parse; he didn't have a helmet to cover in bugs and get an accurate vibration out of, but in return there was no bulky helmet muffling his actual voice. It made it easy to keep track of who said what, at least.
"Yeah, and believe me, I pity the officers stuck bringing them all in and dealing with her," Clockblocker said with a full-body shiver. "What do you think her deal is?"
"I'm hoping we get a chance to ask her, if we get her attention," Gallant admitted. "That's why they sent you and me, I'm sure of it. Even if it's not officially an outreach patrol. Shadow Stalker was scheduled to patrol tonight, but they rescheduled her for tomorrow, and in a different part of the city."
"Oh, I don't know, she seemed like a great pick to reach out to the bug-cape who swarmed her own allies and made them choke on beetles," Clockblocker said. "Did you see the way she smiled when she heard about that?"
"You didn't see the way she felt about it," Gallant grumbled. "I don't think it's a good idea for those two to get too friendly. Skitter already has problems with appropriate force."
Taylor had been considering leaving them to their own devices for the night, but hearing the semi-insulting name they had for her, and that they thought she had problems with violence, forced her hand. She began gathering a sizable collection of insects in an alleyway the Wards would be passing soon.
"So we're here to give her the recruitment pitch anyway," Clockblocker summarized. "Because who cares about that, or that she helped try and rob a bank. Or that she turned on her team at the first sign of trouble."
"That's not exactly how it happened," Gallant said stiffly.
They walked right by Taylor's chosen alleyway, and she moved her densely arranged swarm out into the open behind them. It was not a quiet swarm, not at that distance, and both immediately turned around.
"No," she said in the noises of a thousand insects, a trick she had been practicing all week, "It is not." Her swarm-clone was only a vaguely humanoid figure, lacking legs or arms that could move independently without becoming just a bunch of flying insects, but the voice was at least understandable and it could move as fast as the crawling bugs making up its mass could scurry. A worthy tradeoff, in her opinion.
"Yah!" Clockblocker screamed, jumping backward and falling onto his butt in the middle of the empty street. Gallant didn't react nearly as badly, but the bugs marking his position still jerked back a bit, indicating he was surprised too.
"Skitter," Gallant said confidently. "We were wondering if we were going to run into you."
"Thus you patrolling here instead of Shadow Stalker," Taylor said. "I heard."
"Oh, she can listen to us from… wherever she is." Clockblocker got to his feet and turned in a slow, dramatic circle, examining the street. "Wonderful. My nightmares needed some variety, they were getting stale."
"Knock it off," Gallant said. "Skitter–"
"That is not my name," she interjected. For some reason, Gallant immediately shut up when she tried to speak over him. Maybe he was just that polite. Or maybe the man-sized mass of bugs she was speaking through had something to do with it.
"It's the name the Protectorate gave you so Armsmasher had something to put in his reports on your… previous interactions. Sorry, but if you want to come in to the PRT building, you can register under another." He at least had the decency to look embarrassed over such an obvious trick. Or, she thought he did; sight through her bugs was a much harder trick than hearing, so she was still mostly relying on spatial awareness to 'see' what he did.
"Yes, let me take this time to sell you on the wonders of being a Ward," Clockblocker added sarcastically. "You get to spend time with me."
"I am not sold," she said.
"Then I'm out of ideas," he said, dramatically throwing his hands up. "Mind pointing me to a problem I can solve? I hear this area is getting a lot of calls about would-be criminals scared straight by biblical plagues. Do the plagues want help keeping them until the police arrive?"
Taylor considered that… and she considered the mugging she had interrupted while talking to them. It was mostly automatic at that point; interrupting the mugging that was, not talking to Wards. She hadn't paid the former much attention. There were two guys with knives who were running scared, and she would like to get them off the streets…
"Go two blocks to the North and freeze the two men who will run to you there, they were trying to cut a woman and steal her purse and shoes when I interrupted them," she said at length. A line of cockroaches scurried out to point him in the right direction, forming a living arrow on the ground.
"Just follow the brown-scale road, and you'll find the emerald castle of terrified thugs," he muttered to himself. "Is that how it goes?"
Gallant watched his patrol partner go with what Taylor interpreted as a sigh of annoyance, though she was iffy on what he actually meant by it. That he wasn't going with Clockblocker was interesting; it meant he might have something to say that he didn't want his flippant partner overhearing.
"Is he being led into a trap?" Gallant asked.
"No," Taylor assured him. "What do you really want from me?"
"I heard the whole story," Gallant admitted. "From Vicky. She's not happy about any of what went down, but she wanted me to tell you that she doesn't think you're a total bitch. Just one who really should listen to Armsmaster when he says no."
"They believe I was undercover?" That was more than she had expected, honestly.
"You put Armsmaster on the spot, so he had to tell them," Gallant said, crossing his arms. The Tinkertech frames around them screeched as they rubbed together. "We're not supposed to call you a hero, but if anyone asks you're not officially a villain, either. What you did wasn't official, but it's known that you did it with good intentions. Turn yourself in, and you'll get off with a slap on the wrist and enrollment in the Wards, but you didn't hear it from me."
"I won't be joining the Wards," Taylor said. She just didn't want to; not now, not in the foreseeable future. Her reasons were still valid, and added to them was the fear of becoming like Sophia. The Wards would force her to act like them, and she needed to find her own way first. Maybe once she didn't feel like she was teetering on a cliff, capable of falling off and becoming someone horrible without even noticing it.
"Yeah, we figured, but that's the official stance." He shrugged his shoulders. "Vicky told me you turned on them because you said you didn't want Tattletale saying… those things."
"I was too late." She didn't see why he cared, or why Glory Girl was telling some random Ward about what Taylor assumed was now a slightly more open secret, not common knowledge.
While she waited for an answer, Clockblocker finally ran into the two fleeing criminals. Two exaggerated high-fives later, and they were subdued. Taylor let her swarms in that area disperse back out, leaving no sign of her existence. The police would be along any moment; she had mastered the art of dialing and playing a pre-recorded message for them whenever there was an incident. They could track her phone, so she never bothered saying where she was. Just that 'criminals have been apprehended at the location of this caller by a massive swarm of bugs.'
The dispatch lady was getting more and more pissy in her responses as the nights passed, but that wasn't Taylor's problem so long as the police came.
"You tried." Gallant did his best to look her swarm in the eye, even though it didn't have one, or had many thousands, depending on how one counted them. "But if you really want to be a hero, you might want to go apologize to Panacea. You did hold her at knife-point, and you did hear some very personal things… It might mean a lot to her if you reassured her that you weren't going to spread any of it around."
Panacea… She still felt guilty about that. He was right, she really did need to reassure the healer that her scandals were safe at least from that avenue of discovery. If it were her, she would be worried sick about the criminal who knew everything blabbering about it online.
"That is a suggestion," she said noncommittally. There was no reason to let him, and by extension the people he reported to, know that she was definitely going to do so. He might claim they were ready to let her off with only forced induction into the Wards, but that was already enough incentive to avoid face-to-face encounters for the foreseeable future.
Finding out where Panacea would be on another night later that same week was not a difficult task. It would not have been even for someone without powers. There was an entire website dedicated to tracking Panacea's hours at Brockton Bay General Hospital, so that those coming to the city for medical tourism purposes – which really just meant getting on a waiting list and sticking around until Panacea got around to them – could up their chances by being in the same building as her and… hoping she healed them out of turn while on a coffee break, or something. That part wasn't clear.
What was clear was that she worked her official hours during the afternoon, and then fairly regularly came back at night and worked some more. Taylor set up camp on the rooftop of a parking garage across the street from the hospital, a blanket wrapped around herself to combat the cold and make her look like just another homeless person, and marshaled the bugs within the hospital.
There was a depressing number of said bugs for her to use, given where she was getting them from. Even a supposedly sterile environment had its share of pests. It took her no time at all to identify the mousy girl in robes moving from room to room talking to and touching the people within. From there, it was just a waiting game.
A long waiting game; Panacea did not take breaks very often. When she finally did, she snuck all the way up to the roof of the hospital with a bag of chips from a vending machine…
And a pack of cigarettes, which she wasted no time opening and lighting up with. Taylor was very, very mildly scandalized. If she was honest with herself, smoking was the least of the weird things Panacea apparently kept secret from the general public. But it was one more secret she now knew, whether or not she wanted to.
Still, Panacea was alone. She would just have to suffer an intrusion on her smoke break. Taylor formed a swarm sufficient for speaking on the roof behind her, then after a moment's thought began running a duo of beetles around in front of her, making them do perfect circles and loops like a duo of figure-skaters on concrete.
Panacea dropped her cigarette and snuffed it out with her shoe, then stomped on both beetles with extreme prejudice. "Go the hell away," she said croakily, her voice cracking in a way Taylor doubted was solely from the smoke.
"I came to check on you," Taylor said quietly, her voice a muted buzz, like a whisper just on the edge of audible.
"Check on your asshole buddies in holding cells, and stay with them," Panacea spat venomously. "Just because you got cold feet and the Arms-idiot's approval doesn't make you a good person."
"No, it does not," Taylor agreed. "Neither does me coming to see how you are doing. But it makes me a less terrible one."
"I'm doing shit, and my night just got a lot worse," Panacea griped. "Come to gawk at the freak?"
"Your secrets were yours, and they should have stayed yours," Taylor said vehemently, adding a deep undertone of carapaces scraping on concrete to make her voice firmer, more decisive. "They will never spread from me." Who cared that Panacea was the daughter of Marquis? Or that she had the hots for her adopted sister? Maybe the weirdos online, but certainly nobody Taylor would ever want to tell about what she knew.
"If only I could fucking believe that's all it takes to put the cat back in the bag," Panacea groused. She sat down on the roof and pulled another cigarette out. "What do you really want?"
Taylor refrained from giving an answer; silence felt like a fitting response. This, right here, was what she wanted. To check on Panacea, and to help her if she asked for it. However that might work out. Nothing more.
"It's not fair," Panacea added after lighting and taking a long drag from her cigarette. "You got away free, Gallant says they want you in the Wards. You helped rob a bank. You helped ruin my life."
"You ruined my chance at finding out who their secret boss was," Taylor blurted out. In her real body, on that parking deck across the street, she clapped a hand across her mouth a moment too late. She hadn't meant to say that!
Panacea laughed bitterly. "That makes me feel better," she chuckled. "At least you're suffering somehow. Never going to get that Ward promotion if you don't bring in the secret intelligence. Did you even get anything useful on them before you covered them in bugs?"
"Bitch attacks new team members on sight," Taylor offered. That elicited another short laugh from Panacea.
"Something we couldn't guess just by assuming they're all assholes and going from there," she specified.
"I was only with them for a few days," Taylor admitted. "Grue almost bled out on their couch, once. Regent complained about it."
"Good thing they didn't come crawling to me," Panacea muttered. "I have way too many innocent people waiting for my help to waste time on criminals who ruin my life to cause a distraction…"
She dropped her cigarette right next to the first and crushed it. "I'm going back inside to do good things for deserving people," she said dryly. "Are you done bothering me, or are you coming back tomorrow? I can have someone up here to capture you."
"I am nowhere near here," Taylor reminded her. Surely she didn't think the buggy, unearthly voice was really her.
Panacea looked around the roof, then at the mound of bugs Taylor hadn't bothered to fashion into any particular shape. "Guess you'll be here tomorrow, then," she said.
That sounded almost like an invitation, since there was no actual reason for Panacea to really think Taylor was coming back. Maybe it was the setup for an ambush, but it was still an invitation. And nothing Panacea had said or done shook the feeling of deja vu Taylor still had in thinking about her, and the parallels between them.
"I'll be here," she agreed, because it was what she thought she would have wanted herself to say, were their positions reversed. Someone who could make her laugh when she was going through a shitty time was worth talking to.
Taylor was there the following night, and the night after that. She got very little sleep that week, or the next, or the one after that, though Amy's breaks were short and happened around midnight, so she could usually get to bed before one in the morning.
Amy – as she insisted on being called after Taylor had addressed her as Panacea – wasn't in a good mood. Ever. She came up to the roof, she smoked, she threw out some truly caustic insults.
Then she mellowed out a little, more so with every visit. She asked for stories of muggers scared shitless by bugs, or she ranted about the idiots she dealt with on a daily basis.
Once those topics were exhausted, usually right around when she switched to her second cigarette of the night, she started talking about things Taylor very much doubted she felt comfortable saying to anyone else in her life.
"You're a shitty villain playing at being a hero and you already know how fucked up I am, so you can afford to sit here and listen to me," Amy had said once, before verbally lambasting one Dean Stansfield, her sister's on-again off-again boyfriend. Said ranting touched upon how she hated him for always stringing Vicky along, and then how she was sort of envious… and then she had gone quiet, before looking back at the mass of bugs that Taylor spoke through.
That had been it for that particular night, but the next night, after a rant about a man who interrupted her healing of cancer to ask for 'enlargements' to certain areas, she took up the subject again. Obliquely, talking about her sister's many encounters with the weirder side of being a celebrity cape… But she occasionally touched on her own feelings, and this time she didn't go silent after doing so.
It made Taylor uncomfortable, but not because Amy had feelings for her adopted sister. She was adopted, so there was nothing technically wrong with it, even if it was unusual. No, what made her squirm in her spot on the car packing deck was just hearing about it in general, the subject of Amy's attraction notwithstanding. She wasn't qualified to be a therapist, and that was increasingly the role Taylor felt she was playing in their nightly discussions…
But Amy didn't have anyone else, not even a real therapist. She was desperate to let out her feelings on a whole range of things, and Taylor was apparently the perfect no-guilt, no-repercussion sounding board for those feelings.
Taylor learned about the inner politics of New Wave. She learned about Amy's adoptive mother, who was a controlling bitch, and her adoptive father, who had depression Amy couldn't fix. A depression she was too scared to even try and fix.
She learned the details of one of the other things Tattletale had revealed. Amy could do brains, it was a moral objection stopping her, not a power limitation. Amy paled after admitting that, but she didn't demand any promises about keeping it secret, or anything like that.
The night after that revelation, Taylor snuck her way through the hospital and managed to be there in person for their nightly talk. It felt like the right thing to do.
"Want a smoke?" Amy held out the pack to her.
"No thanks," Taylor said, pushing it away. She sat with her back to one of the radiators, looking up at the sky. It was a cloudless night, and the stars glimmered fitfully, washed out by the light of the city.
"Got anything funny to talk about?" Amy asked, lighting a cigarette for herself. They were apparently her only constant method of stress-relief, even if they were a bad habit. More importantly, her power meant she couldn't get sick, and that extended to slow tobacco poisoning and lung cancer, so it was a harmless habit for her specifically.
Taylor had the feeling she would still smoke even if it wasn't safe.
"Does an Empire guy getting knocked out by an ABB guy at Winslow count as funny?" Taylor asked. "That happened. He used a lunch tray. Broke it right over his head."
"I healed that bitch," Amy exclaimed, smacking her free hand on the roof. "Big guy, shaved head, lump the size of an orange. He had a concussion, I didn't do anything about that, but I got rid of the skull fracture. Son of a bitch, I wish they would stop giving me gang members. They said he got jumped by the ABB, that it was an emergency and they needed his witness testimony. Assholes."
"Well, he did, they just didn't mention that he was asking for it," Taylor said. "Literally. I mean, I didn't see it, but it was the talk of the school."
"Where were you?" Amy asked.
"Eating in the bathroom." She wished she could take it back as soon as it was out of her mouth, but only because there might be a follow-up question. Amy had put way too much trust in her, there were worse people to admit that to…
She wished she didn't so clearly understand why Amy had confided all of her darkest feelings and secrets in someone who had held a knife to her throat not a month ago. Having no better options was not a nice feeling.
"Try not to let your sandwich touch the stall doors, you would not believe the kinds of bacteria I find in those places," Amy said vehemently. "Forget toilet seats, those aren't any grosser than the rest of the place. I don't know how anyone uses a public bathroom without being a walking plague-killer like me."
"It's Winslow, the whole place is a public bathroom." She thought back to the two separate occasions gym class had been called off because somebody took a dump in the middle of the gym in defiance of all common sense or decency. "Sometimes literally."
"Hive of scum and villainy," Amy said darkly. Unlike the taunts Talyor had suffered over the last two years, the insult didn't really sting. Partially because Winslow was exactly that, and partially because Amy calling her a villain was… not a joke, but not really serious, either. Not anymore.
"One of the lesser-known doorways to Hell itself," Taylor riposted.
Amy blew out a cloud of smoke and sighed loudly. "No, that'd be my house. My own personal hell. So goddamn awkward. Carol keeps looking at me like I'm going to sprout some bone clubs and descend into villainy if I stub my toe, Vicky tries to pretend it's all fine and convinces herself it is until she gets too close and remembers it isn't… And it'll get worse, sooner or later. Vicky didn't tell anyone about… me. Just about the thing with Marquis. She's keeping the rest to herself. For now."
"So it's out, but it's not, and you get the worst of both worlds." She did not envy Amy her home life.
"It can always get worse," Amy said darkly. "If it weren't for… this…" she gestured to the otherwise empty rooftop, her pack of cigarettes, and then to Taylor herself, "I might have gone crazy by now. Instead, I throw the crazy at you."
"It's not crazy," Taylor said softly. "You're not. You're just under a lot of stress."
"Doesn't mean I can't go crazy, just means people will have excuses to point to when it happens and the world asks why their famous healer is growing mushrooms and babbling incoherently in a padded cell somewhere," Amy said derisively. "Oh, she was stressed. She was the daughter of a villain and lusting after her own sister and she just couldn't take the pressure of being a good person, of course she snapped. Nobody look any further, case closed, it's all her own fault or nobody's fault!"
Amy's angry rant sputtered to a stop as she threw her hands up and slumped back against the air conditioner. "It's not like I was really happy before, but at least I could ignore my problems."
The tinny ring of a cell phone cut through the silence that followed, an annoying blaring noise that had Amy grimacing as she fished through her robes to find it. She grimaced again when she saw who was calling.
"Hello?" She held the phone to her ear with both hands, straining to hear whoever was on the other end. "I swear, Vicky, if this is another 'I fucked up, come heal my problems away' call I'm going to hang up right now." There was an overly harsh edge to her voice.
Whatever Victoria said on the other end, it cut through Amy's defensive bad attitude. She flinched and almost dropped the phone. "What? Now? Like, right now?"
Victoria said something else, and Amy hung up. "Shit," she blurted out. "I was just saying it could be worse. The fucking Undersiders just busted out of the Rig!"
Welcome, Bug.
PHO: Messaging
-Private
-Past messages
-Sort by: Recipient
-Tt
Bug: Bug here. Would like to meet, but want proof you are Tt. I'll reciprocate if needed.
Tt: Proof? Last night you didn't say anything until I asked your name. Big guy had a mess of nasty bites and you pepper sprayed him and I told my pal G that when he asked. Good enough?
G R and me will meet you at the same spot we crossed paths last night, k? Don't have to get gussied up if you catch my drift. Rest of us will be in casual wear.
If we meet at 3 will that give you enough time to get there from library with everything you need? let me know
Ta ta
Bug: See you at three.
Tt: Dirty move, Bug. You don't ditch a party halfway through like that. Not after insulting the host. But I guess I get it. You don't like how I throw parties. Could have told me before.
Tt: Would have saved us both a lot of trouble. But I'm not mad. Meet up somewhere now that I'm not grounded anymore?
Tt: This doesn't have to mean anything permanent. You objected to my methods. Strenuously. That's it. You just did it in public.
Tt: but you could stand to make it up to us. No real harm done, an apology would be enough. Maybe wash a dog or two for B.
Tt: Don't ignore me, Bug. Your account is a default one. It has default settings. Like showing when you last logged in. I know you saw this.
Bug: We're done. That's it.
Tt: So I struck a nerve. Or a dozen of them. Don't let that push you away without even thinking about it. Wouldn't that mean you're letting them win? The ones who made you so sensitive to certain things?
Bug: Your powr is the thing I hate most about the person I hate most. Just without the buildup or earning the ability too cause harm. I'm off any team with you on it. I won't be your enforcer. i should have seen it sooner.
Tt: Calm down. It's just a power. Yours isn't pretty either. I'm just using what I have. If I could have smashed through a wall to escape, or put her out with a touch, I'd have done that. But all I do is see secrets and talk. Can't fault me for putting them together.
Bug: I can and do. Especially when you followed through. Were done.
Tt: You won't even meet up and hear me out in person? Messaging is so impersonal.
Bug: I don't trust you. Not after that. If I see you in costume, I will catch you. Again.
Tt: And out of costume? Just assessing my level of risk, here. Heroes don't do that. Ask any of your new friends. Or not new friends. You're not a Ward yet, even if they're leaving the door open to tempt you in. One wonders why.
Bug: I'm done talkng to you. Find me out of costume and I will catch you. I won't hunt you out of costume, but thats it.
Tt: So be it. You know, you're a real bitch when someone gets on the wrong side of your tilted little moral compass. Those weren't secrets they could keep forever, anyway. I did her a favor. Not something worth hanging my entire team out to dry over.
Bug: Finally decided I'm not coming back? The gloves come off now? I wish I was surprised.
Tt: You're the one still talking to the Thinker you just declared your enemy. I'm going to pick at you until you sign off, and you're going to sit there way longer than you should because you feel guilty and want proof I'm a horrible person who deserved what she got.
Tt: Let's start with your loneliness. It was so bad you latched onto the first people to not treat you like shit. But you've got a victim complex, too, or a hero complex. Or both. Which was it?
-Logout
-Logout Options
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-Disable Activity Status on Profile
-Disable Email Alerts
-Change Username
-Change Name from Bug to: _
-Cancel
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Tattletale and her gang – they had treated Brian like the leader, but Taylor couldn't see anyone like Emma in a secondary position – had made a clean escape, aided by Circus, who up until that point had been assumed to be a solo villain. Nobody knew where they had gone, and spelling out the address of the Undersiders' previous hideout in bugs for one of the Ward patrols had yielded a Protectorate raid, which uncovered nothing but an empty building.
Having Tattletale out and about was nerve-wracking; Taylor had told her off on PHO, and gotten scheming and insults for her trouble, but she spent the rest of the day nervously waiting for the retaliatory hammer-blow to fall. Tattletale knew so much, and someone with Emma's proclivity for striking where it hurt would have so many options to dig into her life. Only the 'unwritten rules' protected her, and Taylor had watched Tattletale flit around violating those with Amy.
But nothing happened at school, save for Sophia shoving her to the ground between classes, and that was barely an annoyance compared to the looming threat on the horizon. Even Sophia seemed preoccupied; her shove didn't have any of the usual brutal thoroughness.
Taylor knew it was pathetic that she could tell Sophia's mood from the way Sophia hurt her, but she would take what she could get when it came to her apparently untouchable bullies. They were still horrible, but she had so many other problems out beyond the confines of Winslow.
That night, she went looking, as it was one of the nights Amy didn't sneak out to go to the hospital. That meant it was also one of the nights she usually set aside to get a full night's rest and stave off exhaustion, but she was too worried to sleep. Instead, she wandered the city, starting from their previous base of operations and spreading her reach from there.
She found absolutely nothing.
It occurred to her, while she was yawning through the next morning's classes, that if anyone could hide from her, it would be Tattletale. Knowledge was her weapon and her shield, and she had observed Taylor using her power. She might not know about how Taylor could hear and vaguely see through her bugs, or how she could speak through them, but such a secret would not stay secret for long.
All of which meant that looking for her was probably a waste of time, at least so long as Taylor stuck to the obvious strategies Tattletale could anticipate. Given she didn't have any strategy other than 'wander around and use bugs to check buildings', that meant she needed to think of something else.
She decided to bring it up with Amy at their nightly meeting; Amy would almost certainly want to help, given her simmering hatred for Tattletale. Or she would want to go hunt down the villainous Thinker herself…
Suffice to say that Taylor knew enough about Amy to know that while she could maybe do that if she really put her mind to it, she wasn't willing to do so. Meaning she would be stuck in her normal routine, hating herself a little more for not being able to chase after a villain like anyone else in her family… Or hating herself for wanting to break her self-imposed rules.
Amy was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a well-adjusted superhero. Taylor knew she had no room to talk, but the fact remained. She would only be feeling worse about all of this.
The school day dragged to an end, and Taylor dragged herself onto the bus, onto an unoccupied seat, and then a while later off the bus again. She dropped her backpack, made a passing attempt at doing her homework – a lost cause, given it would just be stolen when she tried to turn it in, she was failing most of her classes by now – and then made herself a quick meal. There was a note on the fridge that had been there that morning; her father didn't expect to be home until eight, another late night.
She passed the hours lying in her bed, occasionally napping but otherwise using her powers to watch the neighborhood from a thousand perspectives. Immersing herself in all of the different points of view was disorienting, at first, but the longer she did it the more she found a sort of chaotic clarity. Everything was so large and crazy and complicated, but she had all the limbs and antenna and eyes and ears and assorted other parts to understand it all, so long as she could wrap her mind around it. And she could; she never had trouble processing all of the sensory inputs.
With enough time in one place, she could build up a mental map of a truly impressive area, the entirety of her range. She knew everything that existed there, everything that moved, everything that lived. From the silverfish in the walls to the cockroaches she relocated from one neighbor's kitchen, she had her feelers everywhere, and everything that wasn't her was tracked.
This, if she could refine it, was a Thinker expression of her Master power. Or, that was how she would have put it; PHO was annoyingly contradictory on how ratings worked, given the Protectorate had never actually released their official system to the public. They probably would have just labeled her a Thinker, or bumped up her Master rating, though neither was quite right.
This was something Tattletale didn't know about and probably couldn't infer all that easily. Therefore, it was something Taylor desperately wanted to improve.
Danny's old pickup truck turned onto their street and into her range, passing by that one abandoned warehouse and driving into the edge of what passed for a residential district. Part of the reason their neighborhood was so crappy was because it abutted the old industrial extension of the docks. It was good for her father's commute, but bad for… everything else. Except her new need for dark, unoccupied spaces to breed spiders; being within range of an abandoned building or two was convenient for that. She didn't have to keep her spiders in the basement now that she knew of a better place.
He pulled up, came into the house, and went about his evening after poking his head into her room and seeing she was sleeping. He had never questioned her increasingly obvious change in sleep patterns; she wished she could chalk it up to her being stealthy or having good excuses, but the truth was he just wasn't there enough to notice, or involved enough in her life to wonder.
It was a blessing when she wanted to do her thing without worrying too much about him getting suspicious, but a curse on the rest of her life.
He went to bed at nine-thirty, and she snuck out at ten. The walk to the hospital took about an hour at her pace, and she would have been up on the roof by eleven-thirty…
If her bugs could find Amy. Which they couldn't. She wasn't in the hospital.
Imaginary alarms began ringing in Taylor's head, loud and strident for all that they weren't actually there. Amy breaking from her schedule so soon after Tattletale broke out… The two were probably connected. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it was Amy. It was safer to assume that if something was going to happen to her, it wasn't going to be good. Her luck was awful.
Taylor circled the hospital once while her bugs double-checked everyone inside, then set off toward the nice part of town where the Dallons lived. She had looked up Amy's home address back when she was trying to get in touch with her, and thankfully still remembered how to get there from looking at a few maps. It took another hour to find their house…
And again, Amy wasn't there. A pair of fat little flies found only two people in the Dallon household. One was a man sleeping alone in a King-sized bed, Flashbang. The other was obviously Victoria Dallon, by process of elimination. She was sitting up at the kitchen table, drinking from a hot mug.
Taylor flinched as Victoria swatted at one of her scout flies with blinding speed and excessive force. Her fly was obliterated. She tried to pull the other one back, but Victoria stood and glared at it.
As much as Taylor wanted to ignore it, that wasn't the behavior of someone who suspected nothing. She was out in the open, walking down the sidewalk across the street from their house.
Come to think of it, Victoria might be able to see her through the window from where she was standing. Taylor turned her head and glanced that direction–
Yes, she was being glared at, not just her fly. She resisted the urge to say something absolutely vile; Amy was rubbing off on her. Instead, she waved, beckoning for Victoria to come out and talk. She would have used her preferred method of speaking through bugs, but there weren't that many in the Dallon household and Victoria might think it was the precursor to an attack, not a friendly conversation.
As Victoria came out the front door, Taylor fervently hoped it would be a friendly conversation. She got the impression Amy and Victoria barely talked anymore, so she had no idea how much Victoria knew.
"You're one bad answer away from a drop-kick that will land you in the bay," Victoria announced as she came floating over the empty street to hover a good five feet up in the air in front of Taylor. "What are you doing here?"
"Making sure Panacea hasn't been kidnapped by a Thinker with a grudge," Taylor said semi-truthfully. "Tattletale broke out, and now Amy's not sticking to her normal schedule. And she's not home. Do you know where she is?"
"Oh, that." Victoria dropped down to the ground, her suspicion apparently appeased. A wave of gratitude swept over Taylor. She recognized it as foreign since Amy had explained at length how Victoria's power could feel, but that didn't really stop it from affecting her.
"Yes?" Taylor asked impassively, letting a few ants attempt giddy somersaults in her stead."You know?"
"That's not… It is Tattletale's fault, but it's nothing new." Victoria crossed her arms, looking distinctly uncomfortable in her sweatshirt and sweatpants. It certainly gave her a drab look compared to her usual radiance – the aura again, Taylor sent some of her flies to go fly in enthralled circles and continued to ignore it as best she could. "You know," Victoria continued, oblivious to the insect worship directed toward her, "I just thought it was better to make sure Tattletale couldn't use the same secrets against us again."
"So you told Carol about all of the things she said, not just some of them." Taylor tilted her head to one side; Amy said it made her look creepy and disapproving, and that was exactly the impression she wanted to convey. "And Carol did… what?"
"She took Amy out to go see a therapist," Victoria admitted. "Like, right then. Even though nowhere is open after five. I don't know where they are now."
"Well… shit." That sounded ominous as hell, and Victoria clearly shared her opinion to some degree, if she was sitting up waiting for them to come back. Nobody well-adjusted and reasonable dragged their daughter out in the middle of the night to hunt for a therapist.
"Yeah…" Victoria shifted uncomfortably on her feet, floated up a few inches, then dropped down again. "I don't… I didn't want to make it worse."
"You almost certainly did, though." Even if Victoria didn't anticipate this exact response, she had to have known Carol wouldn't react well. Amy was already treading on the edge with all of the stress she carried around on a daily basis, what Victoria had done was like tossing a rock to someone who was barely keeping their head above water, and hoping it was one of those rare rocks that floated.
"Yeah, I know." Victoria sighed, looking down at the sidewalk. "You're the one she's talking to, aren't you?"
"Yeah." She cast Victoria a brief, very unfriendly glare. "She needed someone to listen to her, and she wasn't getting it from anywhere else." It was getting easier to chastise Victoria; her aura was easing off.
"Hey, don't give me that crap, I would have listened," Victoria bristled. Taylor almost flinched, the sudden switch from mild awe to pants-wetting terror downright painful, but she managed to hold herself steady, save for the general wave of terrified actions that swept across her minions. She was understanding more and more why Amy at least partially blamed Victoria for her feelings, even if she still wasn't sure that was right.
"You are not someone she can confide in," Taylor said steadily, conceding the point. It wasn't like Amy could confess to the object of her forbidden affection; neither of them would want that.
A car drove past, slowing as it neared them. Taylor had felt it coming but didn't think it was important; it was a rough truck with construction equipment in the back, not something she could imagine an upper-class lawyer driving. The headlights illuminated Victoria from behind, casting a shadow over Taylor.
Victoria turned, a hopeful look on her face, only to audibly huff. "Why are they…" she trailed off as the truck sped up again, passing them.
"Construction workers keep odd hours," Taylor observed. It was possible they were thieves of some sort, but if they were, they would have been scared off by a cape in the middle of the sidewalk…
The truck slowed, just out of sight of them, and turned into a driveway.
"Weird," Victoria murmured, unaware of what Taylor was still observing.
The workers, two large men, got out and began pulling bolt cutters from the pile of equipment. They both had hoods, as if Taylor needed any more hints.
"They're thieves," Taylor told Victoria as she mustered a cloud of moths, and then a strike force of spiders riding roaches. The two separate armies struck in a one-two punch, the moths blinding the men and the spiders delivering the psychological blow by swarming up their legs. A faint scream was audible from where she stood, all that could be heard of a piercing, decidedly unmanly shriek from one of the men. "They've been handled."
"You are seriously freaky," Victoria said loudly. "When you say handled…" She floated off the ground once more, punching the palm of her hand ominously. "I could really use some target practice."
"If you want to hurt men cowering on the ground," Taylor said steadily. She mustered a force of crickets from the lawns and used them to loudly dissuade the men from attempting any sort of resistance; she had found that bug noises were intimidating when one already had spiders on one's face, regardless of what kind of bug was making the noise. "You can go tie them up, or I can let them go with a warning. I stopped them before they actually did anything illegal."
"Never interrupt a crime before they do something, you'll never get any charges to stick that way," Victoria immediately replied.
"I'll keep that in mind." Except for when she was intercepting potential rapists or murderers; as a general rule, the moment one or more men followed a woman into an alleyway, she rolled up a swarm and asked questions later. Nobody was going to be traumatized or killed on her watch just because she wanted to make sure a crime had been committed before intervening.
"Want to go on a patrol?" Victoria asked out of the blue.
Taylor looked back at the Dallon household, then at Victoria floating there in her sweatpants. "Now?" she asked.
"Yeah, now, I'll get my costume. You need to learn some basics, and I need to do something." Victoria held out a hand. "Stay right there!"
Taylor had the feeling that she wasn't going to get out of this… and aside from dreading her exhaustion tomorrow, she didn't really want to. If she couldn't find Amy tonight, building a rapport with Victoria to maybe be kept in the loop for when Amy did come back… That was definitely worth an awkward patrol in the middle of the night.
Welcome, Bug.
PHO: Messaging
-Private
-Past messages
-Sort by: Recipient
-Glory_Girl_Official
Bug: Is this the right account?
Glory_Girl_Official: Ur A's BFF, rght? Frm lst nite?
Bug: Yes.
Glory_Girl_Official: What did i say right b4 I wnt home lst nite?
Bug: That you would be in touch. I didn't know my own phone number, so I told you to contact me on PHO. You said I should do it so you know you got the right one and aren't talking to some weirdo with a similar username.
Glory_Girl_Official: It is u! Gotta know ur own #, hw else u gonna give it out?
Bug: I only have it for calling the police. Did Amy come home? How is she?
Glory_Girl_Official: Got back after i did, way l8. Didnt say anything to me. :(
Glory_Girl_Official: Mom ws all weird, tho. More than normal.
Bug: No word on what they actually did for all that time?
Glory_Girl_Official: None. U gonna talk 2 A 2nite?
Bug: If she sticks to her normal schedule, yes.
Glory_Girl_Official: Bring me wth? I dont know whre u 2 meet. Just that u do. & that u come stalk her if she doesnt show.
Bug: She really values her privacy when we meet… I don't think she would be happy to see you there. Don't invade her safe space, she doesn't have anywhere else.
Glory_Girl_Official: A has wird tastes in grlfrnds. Or therapists. Whtever.
Bug: You'll stay away? Not follow her until you can corner her and bombard her with apologetic looks?
Glory_Girl_Official: U relly do tlk to her a lot. Fine. Only cause u r there 4 her. I get why i cant be. Doesnt mean i like it.
Bug: I'm not all-knowing about any of this. I was just trying to make it up to her, and we started talking. I listen and I'm not stuck in the middle of her problems. I'm not replacing you or anything.
Glory_Girl_Official: Can u? Wld make thngs less awkward. If ur into it, I approve! :)
Bug: If you mean what I think you mean, no. We're just friends.
Glory_Girl_Official: :(
Bug: I've got to log out now, the library is closing.
Glory_Girl_Official: U know u can use PHO on ur phone, rite?
Bug: ...I do now.
-Logout
One groggy school day – patrolling with Glory Girl in the middle of the night was exhausting, even if she was far more subdued than Amy had described her – and long nap later, Taylor was once again out in the night, breaking into the hospital. Or trespassing; she didn't know exactly what type of criminal activity her actions fell under. The hospital was open, but she wasn't supposed to be there and she definitely wasn't meant to be sneaking through a back stairwell and up to the roof when nobody was looking.
She found something new on said roof; a duffel bag stuffed behind an air conditioning unit. It was a large, grey lump that couldn't have looked any more suspicious than it already did. She crouched by it and unzipped it, just to be sure it wasn't a bomb.
It was full of clothing, toiletries, and other miscellaneous items. Taylor felt like the stalker Victoria had accused her of being; this was obviously Amy's bag. She zipped it back up and staked out her usual spot on the other side of the roof.
Amy came out late, closer to one in the morning than midnight, and she didn't have her cigarettes. She looked terrible, with dark shadows beneath her eyes.
"I can't take it anymore," she said with no preamble, slumping down right next to Taylor like she had been mortally wounded. "I can't. It's too much. I'm getting out."
"What happened?" Taylor asked.
"Carol went apeshit about my interest in Vicky," Amy moaned pitifully. She sounded too exhausted to cry, the sort of exhaustion Taylor knew from experience. "She drove me around all night, lecturing me nonstop while she looked for a place that was open. Like anyone is going to run an all-night therapy business. It was 'your sister' this and 'keeping secrets' that, all night. Nonstop. She grounded me, I'm not allowed in Vicky's room, Vicky isn't allowed in my room, she's going to buy locks, I'm in serious trouble if I so much as touch anyone in the family… I can't take it. It was hell before she knew, and now it's going to be even worse. I feel like I'm suffocating there."
Amy sniffled loudly, and Taylor saw silent tears tracking down her cheeks. "It's not my fault… None of it is. She treats me like dirt. Right? It's not just me?"
"It's not, it's really not," Taylor hurriedly assured her.
"I don't think I would believe that if it wasn't for talking to you, and that scares me too," Amy admitted, her voice low and pained. "That I might just sit there and take it… I might snap. I can't be there anymore."
"You definitely shouldn't stay in the same house as Carol if she's coming down this hard on you," Taylor confirmed. "It's not healthy."
"Say that again," Amy said bitterly.
"It's not healthy," Taylor repeated, entirely willing to validate her feelings on that topic as much as necessary. "It really isn't. Do you have somewhere to go?"
"I was going to ask the nurses until I found one with a spare couch or something," Amy said tentatively.
"But you don't want to be followed by Carol," Taylor objected. "She would ask around the hospital. You need to get away, to get some space." An idea was taking shape, a connection of a need and an open space. "I might have a place, if you don't mind taking an unoccupied building."
"It…" Amy looked over at her. "Where?"
"There's an abandoned warehouse I've been using to breed spiders," Taylor explained. "It still has running water in the bathroom," which she only knew because she had a habit of stopping there before going home so she didn't wake Danny by using the bathroom at home, "and it's warm near the back. I can take the spiders out."
"Is it near an Arcadia bus route?" Amy asked.
"Probably, it's right on the edge between districts." Taylor herself had been given the choice between the two.. And she had chosen Winslow. Stupid, in hindsight, especially because she had done it in order to stick with Emma, whose house was firmly in Winslow territory.
"Are you asking me to stay at your lair?" Amy sighed. "I shouldn't."
"It's just a place I kept my spiders, I don't have a lair," Taylor objected. "It's on the edge of my… Let's just say it's within my range often enough." She had almost given away her house's general location.
The way Amy's distraught gaze momentarily sharpened to something more alert, there was no 'almost' about that, but she didn't call Taylor out.
"So it's not much, but it's somewhere nobody would know to look with the absolute basics," Taylor concluded. "You're welcome to it."
"Fuck, in for a little, in for a lot," Amy muttered. "Okay," she said more clearly. "I… I'm stopping early tonight. We can go now."
What followed was a surreal experience; Taylor led Amy down her mostly unoccupied staircase, keenly aware of the bustling activity only a few feet away in most directions, separated by walls and doors. She herself was used to navigating without being seen, with plenty of stops and starts, but Amy was not and after the first two interruptions to their descent had pushed ahead and led the way with no fear of the doctors who occasionally came through.
They stared, but Amy waved them off with an imperious look that had them ducking their heads. Taylor wondered what the power structure was like, if people who were usually at the top of the totem pole were deferring to a teenager who came in and worked for free, doing more in a day than they would in months…
She didn't ask; Amy wasn't in the mood to answer questions. She was barely in the mood to be out and about; even her walk was slouched and miserable.
Once they were out on the streets, Taylor took the lead again, directing Amy toward her warehouse. She was more conscious than usual of how dark and ominous the city was at night, at least with the paths she usually took. She cut through alleyways, abandoned buildings… anything to keep herself out of sight.
Amy was very much out of place with her white robes and big duffel bag, but they managed. Taylor compensated for her companion's presence by being more proactive with her bugs; people knew she was around, but they didn't know where or why.
For the normal people and powerless thugs, that was enough to clear a path; they didn't argue with an obvious parahuman telling them to go somewhere else. With luck, the normal sort of person would have been the only kind they ran into on the way to the warehouse.
Of course, luck was the one thing they both never seemed to have. Her first glimpses of oncoming danger were mere pinpricks of sensation, bugs squashed or batted aside by hulking shapes running the same alleyways she was leading Amy through, coming their way.
"Get down," she hissed as the marauding beasts came closer, headed directly down the same twisted route she had planned to take. She led Amy behind a dumpster, ignoring the other girl's quiet gagging noises at the pungent odors wafting from it, and had her crouch there. The dumpster would offer some protection, but not enough, not if those creatures came through and kicked it in the process. The hunk of metal and trash would crush them as easily as the dogs' bony carapaces would…
"What is it?" Amy whispered fearfully, her eyes wide. She clutched her duffel bag to her chest.
"Undersiders," Taylor said reluctantly. She was able to set more bugs on the creatures as they got closer, and those shapes with those passengers could not be forgotten. Bitch was there, of course, but so were the rest of them. Tattletale included.
"Shit!" Amy hissed. "Take them down!"
That wasn't a feasible option, not if they were forewarned, not when they were barreling toward her without even knowing it. The dogs wouldn't go down to a few bug bites, not jacked up from Bitch's power, and Taylor had no handy contingent of Wards to deal with them this time. But it could work as an excuse, a bluff. Taylor nodded and concentrated swarms in certain places.
The dogs skidded to a halt in front of an alleyway carpeted in bugs of all sorts.
"We can just go through," Taylor heard Regent saying lazily. "Squish, squish, Bitch has paw-cleaning duty after. No big deal."
"It's Skitter," Tattletale said calmly. "She'll have some sort of trap if we try it. So we'll just turn around and go back the way we came."
Taylor flooded the street behind them in bugs for a short distance, totally emptying her reserves to do so. She didn't think she could out-think the Thinker, but surely Tattletale couldn't get that much about her plans just from watching bugs. It might be enough to bluff her.
"Tonight isn't the night," Tattletale said slyly, speaking loudly. "We're not even doing anything. Yet. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about settling the score. I've got something planned. Consider this your friendly warning."
Taylor sent the bugs behind them rushing forward in a suicidal charge; sure enough, Bitch and her dogs opted for turning and running through, and Grue blanketed her 'trap' alleyway in darkness, just for good measure.
Darkness fell over where Taylor and Amy were crouched, too; that was how close the Undersiders had been. Amy grabbed the mandible of Taylor's helmet and refused to let go.
The Undersiders made it out of her range before the darkness ended; Taylor had plenty of time to listen to the deafening thud of her heart in her ears. She had managed to convince Tattletale not to come through their alleyway. It was a victory. A small one, but a victory nonetheless. And one that made her feel good, not like she was turning into someone she would have hated.
Author's Note: This one I've split into two because it's just that long. 20,000 words is my self-imposed limit for a one-shot, which is more of a stylistic choice than anything required by outside factors. I've written plenty of long-form stuff over the years; short-form is what I'm trying to do here. Breaking stories like this and trying to make both parts stand separately yet connected (Like Pushing Back) is a personal challenge.
When will the next part come? Hell if I know, sooner or later. It's already 5k words into being written, but this is one of the two most busy times of year for me. Combine that with having a 700,000+ word story finally reaching its last handful of chapters that I still have to write on a schedule, and another story going alongside that, and I'm a very busy person.
Also, I've edited this chapter to remove Tattletale repeatedly dodging Glory Girl's full-speed attacks; as was pointed out to me, she can't do that in canon, and fixing it wasn't hard.
And, much more recently, I've edited it to correctly reflect the nature of Taylor's emotional quirks. She doesn't not feel emotions, or shunt them off for her bugs to feel, she just physically reacts to them with her bugs, not her human body. Thank you to the readers who pointed out that I had that wrong, it's a pretty egregious error.