Alt-Power AU: Destructive Testing

He stood in front of her. Waiting.

"Don't you have something you should be doing?" Her voice was sharp, breathless.

"Nothing particularly urgent." He sat down beside her, his tinkertech armor frame clanking against the concrete curb.

"Could have fooled me." Her colors oozed with faded, unhappy emotions. Resignation sat at the top of the heap, and in some ways it was the least troubling of them all.

"Here to say a few words is a local hero," a tired older woman announced, the microphone doing nothing to hide how stiff and meaningless her false enthusiasm really was. She bled brown and gray to Gallant's eyes, not so much displaying the colors of her emotional state as leaking them. Apathetic, uninterested, nervous. "Gallant, of the Brockton Bay Wards!"

He walked out onto the old, creaking stage and took the sole microphone Winslow High possessed from their principal, the depressingly-named Blackwell. Black was his least favorite color for emotions, the color that meant he was either going to be doing some quick talking or filling out an incident report shortly after. Black, more often than not, didn't last long. Gray was the precursor, and gray could last indefinitely, but the black always meant the same thing. Someone at the end of their rope. The monochrome emotions were always bad, and black was the worst of them.

He looked out at his captive audience and saw a riot of colors, but so few were encouraging. The people behind them were not obscured, but their disinterested or hostile gazes, their bored little movements, even the way they stared at him… It all fed into what his power was telling him outright.

Almost none of them wanted to be here.

He didn't want to be here either, truth be told. But he had a job to do.

She was an attention-seeker. Troubled, stupid, seeking pity for the things she did to herself. The locker was just the latest attempt to make herself the victim. It certainly didn't have anything to do with the popular girls she tried to make out as the instigators, no, not at all. Just her pinning blame where none existed.

They said it in whispers. They hid it in a torrent of lesser insults and gossip, letting it slip out at opportune moments when nobody else would really notice or care, spreading the lie they pretended was truth. They laughed, like it was a joke.

Taylor heard them. She heard, the day after, as she returned to the halls of Winslow freshly humiliated and with a new fear of confined spaces and rusty metal. She heard in the weeks that followed. Emma and Sophia moved on once it was clear nobody outside the school cared, but the little lingering gossip groups acted as echoes, repeating the message long after it had been abandoned by the source.

She heard them, and if she hadn't come out of that day with something, anything, she might have listened. But she had something. It was small, disappointing, insignificant… It was hers, and she could use it. Would use it, once she understood what it did and how it could possibly make her a hero.

Until then, she did her best to let the casual cruelty slide off her back. The disinterested torment, the personal insults, all of it. Winslow was hell…

If things happened in hell, if small things were a little bit different, who would notice? Who would care?

"I guess…" she made to stand. "I guess I have to keep running?" She was confused, which was fair. This wasn't how she thought it was supposed to go.

"You don't have to." He didn't see why she would. She had stopped for a reason.

"I do."

"You don't. It won't help anything." He reached down and pulled a little roll of bandages out from under his leg armor. "For your hands."

She took the offered bandages. "It wouldn't help," she conceded. "I didn't think it would."

Her emotions were only sinking deeper into the gray depths.

"It's not all fame and fortune," he said, projecting his best 'I'm enthusiastic but genuine' speaking voice as he recited by rote the spiel they had everyone give at these yearly presentations. "The path of villainy might seem tempting, but the things that make it tempting are also what will ruin it sooner or later. I've seen it happen, and I've only been a Ward for a little while."

As he spoke, he watched the auditorium. He wasn't here to persuade potential capes away from villainy, not really. That was the mission statement, but if Piggot actually thought this would make a difference she would have sent more than a single Ward and a security escort.

No, he was here for more cynical reasons. 'Look and see if anyone is guilty when you mention turning to crime and the gangs', she had told him. 'Follow up with them after the presentation. Shake some hands, drop some pointed comments. We won't dig into existing cape identities, but I want a list of teenagers I can look at if one of the gangs gets a new teenaged parahuman anytime soon.'

It was far too Orwellian for his tastes, but someone had to do it and if he got out of it some other Ward would be stuck guessing and, much though he wanted to think better of his peers, probably doing some truly egregious profiling. At least if he did it he could be sure he was actually flagging potential issues, not just the guys who looked most like future Empire material or the girls who snickered the most at his latest corny mandated turn of phrase.

His mouth ran as he elaborated on the benefits of heroism and the pitfalls of crime, but it was his eyes that were doing the real work. His eyes and his power.

Standing out in the crowd of disinterest and apathy, there was a young man who radiated contempt at every word Gallant spoke. Elsewhere, in the front row of seats, was a short, swarthy girl who was fairly guilty about something. Near the back of the auditorium he recognized Sophia, slouching forward in her seat and radiating pure anger. She had steadily gotten worse recently; something in her personal life must have been bothering her.

He tried to see where she was glaring; her gaze was fixed on someone further forward in the audience, heated glares attempting to burn a metaphorical hole through the head of… someone…

There. A pale girl who was staring off at the space up and behind his head as he lectured his inattentive audience. Unremarkable to the naked eye, but to his power…

Outwardly, nothing had changed. She still took their mockery and casual strikes and infantile pranks. They still hurt, even.

But every time they made her mad, when Emma got a rise out of her, she sent it to Sophia. A little building block. No, smaller, a grain of sand dropped on her being, resting there within her, unmoving. And her own anger lessened by the same tiny, insubstantial amount.

Every time they mocked her body, whenever they made her feel like she wanted nothing more than to hide herself from the world, she sent that self-loathing and depression to Madison, the faux-cute prankster. A little more almost every day, and Taylor… broke even. Sometimes.

Every time she doubted herself or wondered whether she was doing the right thing, she strove to offload as much of those feelings as she could to Emma. It was a drop in the bucket, but a drop that stayed, and a drop that no longer plagued Taylor. It might do more good with Emma, if she was even feeling it at all.

All Taylor could see was the accumulation of her little grains of emotion in the people she sent them to. She had no idea how Emma was feeling on any given day, except that whatever she felt had a little extra guilt attached to it. Sophia was angry, but how much of her anger was her own? Mr. Gladly seemed to be more frustrated lately, but was that because Taylor had been feeding him crumbs of the frustration he caused in her on a daily basis, or was he just finally starting to burn out?

As the days went by she continued to add to their little piles of sand whenever she had the chance. A grain here, a grain there, always the same things for each person so she didn't muddle any potential results.

Winslow was her testing ground. Winslow and home, where she poured every ounce of positive emotion she could muster into her father whenever she could. She would make a difference. Surely if she just kept trying… She did have a power. She wasn't just hallucinating.

She wasn't. It was real.

"If you want to talk, I'm listening," he offered.

"Will it be used against me?" She was suspicious… But she was wrapping her roadburned palms. She still cared. A little.

"Maybe," he admitted. "Or maybe it will help us understand. You have to admit, it looks bad."

"It does." No denial. No justification. More despair, flooding over everything. Not a single positive emotion to be seen.

The girl was eye-catching in the same way that a horribly disfigured stray cat was. He watched out of the corner of his eye as he wrapped up his insipidly ineffectual speech, wary and disturbed.

It wasn't that she was depressed, seriously so. It wasn't the fear and guilt she felt whenever she looked at him. Nor was it the total lack of all but the faintest shadow of hope.

No, the disfigurement was much more visceral than the specific emotions she was feeling. It was the dull, chipped-away nature of them all that hurt to look at. If the average person was a colorful road sign, this girl was a road sign that had been scoured by wind and sand and sun until it was too faint to be read, colors a mere suggestion, the surface pitted and scratched and worn away to a uniform dullness.

He passed the microphone back to Blackwell, who announced that it was time for everyone to go back to their classes, and stepped down, off the stage. The students swirled around him as he made his way through the auditorium, smiling and waving and spouting encouraging comments whenever someone made eye contact. Most of the students avoided him, but some crowded him – a boy with glasses tried to ask him about who his favorite hero was and which Tinker he most wanted to be like – and it made the going slow.

The girl was one of the first out of the auditorium, but Gallant wasn't worried about losing her in the crowd. He would know that scrubbed-dull palette of emotions anywhere.

It was hard to be positive, weeks after her experiments started. Hard to muster up the enthusiasm to still care. It was routine to dump her newly kindled anger on Sophia, guilt on Emma, depression and self-loathing on Madison, and frustration on Gladly, but it never seemed to make a difference. They all had veritable piles of emotional grains stacked up within them, but Sophia maybe was hitting harder. Emma and Madison were both more vicious than ever, and Mr. Gladly had assigned a project that was going to take hours to complete if she even bothered, when it would almost certainly be wrecked before he could see it.

She wanted to be a hero… She had wanted to be a hero. Or maybe she just wanted her maybe-power to fix her problems. She would settle for her dad coming home on time from work, or Emma backing off, or Sophia getting into a fight with some gang members, or finding Madison crying in the bathroom. Something to prove she was making a difference, that she wasn't just coping by imagining that she could do something.

"I didn't know what I was doing," she admitted.

"Did you not?"

"I'm still not certain I have a power."

It was clear as glass to him that she did. "You do."

It just didn't work the way she might have thought it did.

The crowd thinned out as the students dispersed among Winslow's many scathingly-lit halls. The PRT agents who had come with him hung back to speak with the principal, leaving him to his outreach. The lights overhead all burned fiercely, as if they had just been replaced, and cast a distracting glare on his visor as he searched the school for the one he had seen.

Something was seriously wrong with her. Something he could maybe help. His emotion blasts almost never did any long-term good, but they always put a bright flare of foreign emotion into his targets, and a bright flare was exactly what that girl seemed to need. It looked like she had been bleeding emotion, as impossible as that was, for months.

In fact… He put his hand up to his helmet and switched on the internal communication device. "Gallant to console."

"Hey, Gallant, done intimidating the junior thugs?" Clockblocker answered.

"Clock, I've got a potential Master victim here," he said quietly. "Her emotions look like someone took sandpaper to them, I've never seen anything like it. Trying to catch up with her now."

"I'll tell your security guys, get them on alert," Clockblocker offered, all business now. "Want me to call in Protectorate backup?"

"I'm not planning on seeking out the Master, just talking to the victim and maybe bringing her in to get a statement." He spotted a swathe of pale imitation colors in the hall ahead of him, pinned in by two much brighter individuals of anger and vindictiveness, one of whom he knew.

Sophia might be involved in this too. She had been glaring at the potentially Mastered girl. This was getting complicated.

Madison was out sick, and Emma and Sophia were picking up her slack with their own brands of torment. Mr. Gladly had made fun of her in front of the class, poking at her lack of a project to show. There was an unannounced assembly. Her dad was going to be working late all this week, setting up another presentation to try and get his dockworkers hired, and he had barely remembered her long enough to leave her money for pizza.

Taylor was having a miserable day, but she just didn't have the energy to care. She sat through the assembly, listened to Gallant's warnings against villainy, and tried not to think too hard about it. She wasn't a villain. She wasn't doing anything wrong. It felt like she had to care to be a villain, or a hero for that matter, and she just… didn't. She felt empty.

When the assembly ended she tried to get a head start out of the auditorium. Computer class was next, and it was one of her few completely untainted classes. She would get there early and leave as late as she dared, like every other day.

Sophia and Emma cornered her halfway there. Her route was getting too predictable. Maybe she would care enough to think of an alternative tomorrow.

"It's shit, then," she muttered. "Nothing I ever did made any difference."

"Gallant, we've got a squad coming your way to apprehend the villain," Clockblocker reported.

Gallant was thankful only he could hear that. "Belay that, hold them back, I've deescalated the situation," he hissed. "Keep them away."

Out loud, he said, "Emotion powers are tricky."

"How would you know?" She glanced at his power armor. "Your power is easy. You make things. I couldn't even tell if I was doing anything. Until it all went wrong."

He saw it before he reached them. The casual bullying, yes, and he would have words with Sophia about that…

But more immediately important was the emotional leeching. Anger built up in the pale girl's emotional layout, not quite as dull as everything else, only to be siphoned away. At the same time, Sophia's anger grew a little brighter, a little more urgent. She punched the girl, hard, then spun around and stormed off, visibly seething. Her companion, the redhead, got some of the girl's regret, adding to a pungent, complicated mix that already made Gallant uneasy. She didn't leave.

"Possible Master may be manipulating multiple individuals, transferring emotions from one to the others at detriment to all involved," he muttered, trusting the microphone to pick him up. "Shadow Stalker involved, potentially unaware, potentially a target. Moving to get the primary victim isolated."

Taylor was not expecting a Ward to interrupt her regularly scheduled mocking. Much less for him to warmly introduce himself, then ask if there was somewhere private they could talk.

Of course, that only set Emma off. "Oh, Taylor," she sighed dramatically. "What did you do now?"

"Nothing!" She hadn't done anything. Except use her power just now. Gallant was a Tinker, maybe he had some sort of emotion sensor. Maybe he could see the little piles of emotional sand built up in Emma and Sophia.

There was only one thing for it.

"She hasn't done anything–" Gallant began, but it was too late. Taylor was already yanking the first of the many, many grains of guilt back from Emma to cover her tracks.

The entire pile tumbled down at once, flooding back into her.

"I know because I have one." With those words he had guaranteed himself a long lecture on safety and secrecy, but it would be worth it. He needed her to listen.

"Pull the other one," she retorted, without any heat. The darkness smothering her wouldn't allow that.

"Really." He flicked a ball of anger at the pavement in front of them. The red projectile clearly originated from his bare palm. "The tinkertech is misdirection. I see and can shoot emotions."

"Huh." She let out a short, bitter laugh. "Would you look at that."

The redhead screamed as a flood of guilt and doubt leaped from her to the Master victim, who sagged and let out a long, loud keening sound.

Gallant reached forward and caught the girl just before she collapsed against the nearest locker, holding her up and discretely flicking a counterattack of optimism into her side. It did far too little for his liking, and people were gathering around again, noticing the drama happening around the obvious Ward. Sophia was coming back, and the redhead–

Gallant had to quickly put the Master victim down and defend himself from a vicious handful of fingernails aimed at his face. The redhead screamed something incomprehensible as she clawed at him, and then Sophia was there pulling her away and yelling, adding to the din.

Gallant didn't notice the girl was fleeing until after she had scrambled out of the circle of gawkers.

The guilt pounded at her skull like a newly-caged animal, a thousand-pound gorilla knocking around inside her trying to break anything it could reach. She scrambled away from Emma and Gallant and Sophia, back into the crowd and then away, leaving her backpack behind.

She had to get away, to get out! This was all her fault and she was a villain and she deserved it but she didn't want to be arrested.

She ran, her shoes cracking against the tile floor.

"So trust me, I know a thing or two," he continued. "You've been… giving them your feelings?"

"Little bits," she said softly. "It never did anything."

"And you took them all back at once from the redhead." There was a logic to it.

"They all came at once," she confirmed.

"I think I know how to help you."

She looked up at him. "Why would you help me?"

Gallant left Sophia to deal with her friend. "Console, be advised, primary Master victim might actually be the Master victimized by her own power," or not a victim at all, but he couldn't believe those pale, barely-there emotions were a positive side-effect of power usage. Besides, no actual criminal would react to seeing a Ward by pulling a massive amount of guilt into their own psyche and then running away.

"Are you in pursuit?" Clockblocker asked.

"Yes, on foot, she's headed out of the school." He caught another glimpse of overwhelming guilt bordered by faded fear and depression just as she swung around a corner and out of sight again.

If she was a victim, he needed to catch her before she got away or hurt herself. If she was the Master, he needed to catch her for much the same reasons.

She could run, but he could run too, and it would take more than a fifteen-second head start to get away from him.

Taylor skidded around a corner, bumping into a row of lockers, and frantically sought a way out, any way out. The front doors were closed, Winslow's one on-campus officer spent all his time there, she might be caught if she went that way.

Instead, she bolted into Gladly's World Issues classroom, ran to the window, and heaved it up. It opened easily, she remembered him opening it to 'let some fresh air in' after Madison detonated a little personal stink bomb and blamed it on her.

"Stop!" Gallant was behind her, at the door to the classroom. She pulled herself through head-first and fell to the ground under the sill. Old mulch and fresh discarded cigarette butts fell from her clothes as she scrambled to her feet and kept running, out into the faculty parking lot.

Gallant was right behind her, somehow. He must have gone through the window; he must really want to catch her.

"Can you pull back the emotions you've put in other people?" he asked, gently but firmly.

"I can. You saw." She shrugged her shoulders, and he knew the apathy that implied was in no way faked.

"What else did you give others?" he pressed.

"Anger to Sophia, self-loathing and depression to Madison, frustration to Gladly," she listed.

No, that wasn't it. "Who else?" There had to be someone else.

"My dad…" she whispered. "I gave him good things. It didn't make him any better."

"Take that back. Right now, if you can." Her emotions weren't dull because she was being Mastered, they were dull because she was pushing them onto anyone but herself. "You need it."

"I want him to care…" she objected, feebly. "I wanted him to care about me."

She was fast, he would give her that. Once they were out on the streets, she really picked up the pace. He chased her down the sidewalk, avoiding pedestrians and other obstacles, and he kept up, but only barely. If it wasn't for her pale aura contrasting the brighter emotions of everyone else around, he would have lost her several times over.

His armor squeaked at the joints. His actual limbs were faring little better, and his chest burned as he sucked in air to keep himself going. One of them was going to falter, to slow down, and it might be him.

Then she looked back, over her shoulder, and saw him. She turned and darted out into the road, a startled and terrified human deer in the headlights of an unlucky taxi.

The car almost hit her; she fell back and it was so close she felt the wind as it passed by right in front of her shoes, honking wildly all the way. Her hands burned from the impact.

"Stop!" Gallant yelled, "Just stop, you're going to get hurt!"

But she had to keep going. She forced herself up, across the street, and another half a block before the pain in her hands became too much. She tripped again, her legs uncooperative, and recovered long enough to turn down a road that had been blocked off for construction that wasn't currently going on, stepping around the traffic cones and temporary fencing.

There, she could have made her escape. Maybe. But she was just so tired and hurt…

It was over. Gallant was already there, right by the cones, and she saw a truck blocking the other end of the construction site.

She dropped herself down on the curb, held her hands out with her wrists up, and waited to be cuffed.

It was over, and she couldn't muster the will to care. She deserved this.

So much for being a hero.

"You need those emotions," he said. "It's hurting you, not having them." Not as much as it would be if she hadn't been offloading her negative emotions, too… But that wasn't good either. She was a faded mess of apathy and ignored feelings, and retaking her guilt would destroy her. He could see it destroying her, here and now, the faded feelings darkening with every passing moment as the guilt affected everything else, overpowering because it was the only fully realized emotion she could feel.

Then she bloomed like an opening flower, a rush of hope and determination and empathy and desire flooding in to brighten the pale imitations they had left behind. All immediately tainted by the guilt and the other negative feelings, but there once more.

"What did I do to myself?" she whispered. "It's… I feel. So much better."

"Gallant, I'm being overridden, the PRT guys are coming in right now," Clockblocker warned him.

"We're out of time for now," he admitted. "Taylor." That was her name. "You're going to be arrested."

"I know. I never wanted this." Tears streaked down her face, leaking out unnoticed. "Please, I wanted to be a hero, I didn't know what I was doing."

"I know, and I'll make sure everyone knows." He would. She needed help, and as far as he knew she hadn't really hurt anyone, though that could very well have changed… Someone needed to check on the girl she gave all her depression to. But they would all be okay. "Just… cooperate and you'll be okay. They'll probably try to get you to plea into the Wards, go for that, just get someone to look over the contract so it isn't too restrictive. They can help you figure your power out there."

She nodded feebly, and when the PRT agents rushed around the corner, containment foam grenades at the ready, they were met with the sight of Gallant gently tying her wrists together behind her back with one of the zip ties he kept in his armor for such an occasion.

The PRT agents weren't so gentle, despite his admonishments, but Taylor cooperated with her head hung low. The fight was gone from her, if it could ever have been termed 'fight' in the first place.

But her emotions weren't all so horribly faded anymore. And there was a little bit of bright white hope nestled in there among all of the less pure feelings.

Author's Note: The ending of this one is very open on purpose; I don't plan to continue it but any sort of epilogue would be rushed, and it's pretty clear what's going to happen from here on out. This story was one of three very short scenes intercut to provide context to the others. The downside of that format is that once you've reached the end of the three scenes, continuing breaks the pattern.

Anyway, next time on Chunks of Worm: It'll probably be 'The Games They Play', but I make no promises.