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Content warnings (planned): References to mutually nonconsensual sexual encounters, psychological abuse/gaslighting, bug horror, themes of identity death, themes of suicide, possibly more that are slipping my mind atm.

Content warnings (what's posted so far): Bad poetry

Starting off as an alternate perspective of BeaconHill's brilliant "I Am Skitter", "Am I Skitter?" has become a college AU of the original which follows Emma as she is led to betray her best friend, and as she eventually falls prey to the darkness inside her.

Timeline note: All canon characters depicted as around Emma and Taylor's age had their birthdays moved from 1995 to 1992 to make them college-age (and also to make me feel more okay with what Emma is eventually going to go through). This had no effect on the major players in the Bay because I do not want to deal with butterfly effects. The first chapter brings us to just after Taylor and Emma's graduation from high school, in May of 2010.

Current planned updates every other week. Nine total chapters in the outline, some may be split into mini-arcs.
Skitter Begins 1.1a

In a time long ago, when I was three,

I met a girl who took to me.

Her hair was dark; her eyes were bright,

We sat and played until the night.



That evening in bed, when sweet dreams came,

Quite glad I was to know her name!

Taylor and I would surely be

The best of friends the world would see.



In a time long ago, when I was four,

I took my friend to the candy store! :)

We chose our flavors, ate our fill,

And Daddy was there to pay the bill.



My friend had a story that she made up

About a cape, a strong grown-up

She said he flew around the world

But spent each night with his little girl



"Who is it?" I asked, and Taylor smiled:

Imagination, running wild!

I had one too, and so we played.

Our heroes and villains filled our days.



For many years we told our tales,

The city grew hard and sirens wailed.

The world was tough? Our minds were tougher,

Heroes provide a perfect buffer.



But stories get dark when times are sad,

Some of our "heroes" still were bad.

The news told us the city's doomed,

So rougher stories quickly bloomed.



One tale stood out above the rest,

Skitter passed every villain's test.

With bugs and fear she made her name,

She killed the killers, took the blame.



Taylor was scared of Skitter's ways,

She wished for older, better days.

But I knew best what she did not,

That vicious Skitter could cleanse the rot.



Taylor, in time, came to agree:

A hero considered could Skitter be.

With Nazis and drug-pushers ruling the city,

We wanted escape, no matter how pretty.



A solace between us, a secret we honed –

Skitter was Taylor's and mine, alone.

When the city depressed us, some comfort we found

In stories of Empire brought to the ground.



The stories we wrote taught us both skill,

She took to the stage, I took to the quill.

We made a commitment as childhood did end:

We'd stick together and always be friends.



The day after high school, Taylor was greeted

By producers from Broadway: An intern, they needed.

Apart for a summer was more than we'd faced,

But I knew the world should see her posthaste.



The next day I hugged her and said, sniffly,

That fall, in the college, together we'd be.

Thus bolstered, I watched the bus take her away,

Then everything went to fucking shit.

AN:
Alright, here goes on my first proper Worm fanfic that I've written multiple chapters for! (I've tried a couple in the past, but never got past the one-chapter barrier.) I've got the first three chapters of this fic basically finished pending a bit of proofreading, and feel pretty confident that I can keep scope creep from pushing me too far off-outline. At the current rate my chapters are coming out, it looks like the outline should end up expanding to somewhere between 40k and 70k words. As the header should say, this story does get pretty dark eventually. The main character is unequivocally not a good person, and she suffers for what she does.

I'm not very familiar with SV in particular, and honestly only picked it because my reading of the rules leads me to believe that almost all of my story can be posted here, whereas sections of it are, at the least, skirting the rules on SB. I'll still probably have a few snippets that end up on other sites just because I don't want to push boundaries - even if they are aged up in my story, the characters here are based on characters that are underage in the original work's canon.

Feel free to leave feedback - I don't currently have a beta reader, so I greatly appreciate any mistakes that you catch or just ways you would tighten up the prose. This isn't quite a first draft, but it is the result of my own commitment to not let "perfect" be the enemy of "published". And yes, the poetry is very simplistic in structure and irregular in meter - in my head, it was an allegory for trying to fit the simplistic patterns and worldviews of youth increasingly inefficiently over age and a worsening world. I'm not satisfied with it, but hey, I wrote it in like an hour to provide something to put in the first post before I get to the actual prose of the thing.
 
Skitter Begins 1.1
This all started in high school. Things were happy, then. Taylor and I loved to tell stories about how cool it would be to be superheroes. Taylor would draw pictures, and she was pretty good at it. We'd share them on the internet and write up bios for the heroes and the villains they fought. I always preferred the bad guys. Something in me liked the idea of struggling against the system, but still playing by its rules. It was a safe kind of rebellion, I think.

Taylor liked the heroes. She had this sort of idealism about her, and she was so shy around other people that I think maybe she thought being a hero would help her find a place or a role where she'd fit in.

We had fun, those first few years, when life was simpler.

It was our junior year when everything took a turn for the worse. Ever since Marquis's capture, Brockton Bay had been relatively quiet - basically all of our childhoods. Just up the coast, though, full-scale turf wars had broken out in Boston. One anchor on the TV had called it "the Boston Games." Most were too horrified to call it anything but tragedy.

That was less than half an hour away, and some of the tension spilled over to Brockton, too. Fleur died that August to some low-level criminal, and New Wave was never really back out on the streets after that, not like they had been. In September, I wrote some of that feeling into a new story.

"Skitter", I called her. A dark hero I had come up with. She was a young cape, had only just gotten her powers, and she was using bugs to do her dirty work. Taylor hated the idea when I showed her. She liked the idea Skitter as a villain, sure, and the bugs were a neat enough power, but the hero was a hard no. Too creepy, too nasty. Nobody wanted a hero that fought crime with flies and cockroaches.

But the heroes we had left weren't cutting it, either. The Protectorate were basically cops, scared to break the status quo. New Wave had seemingly relegated itself to galas and charity events. Shadow Stalker had been pulled into the Wards, and the Wards were the government's PR-friendly anything-but-child-soldiers.

Skitter was different. She didn't play by anyone's rules but her own. She didn't have a name, didn't have a costume, didn't have a team - but she had a purpose. The Empire 88, the gangs and other crime families, the corrupt politicians, the unchecked police: she was going to bring them all down. She was a hero because no one else was doing the job. That's the kind of hero the real world needed, and that's what I wrote.

Our city wasn't great. Taylor and I saw things we weren't supposed to see. Heard things we weren't supposed to hear. It's little surprise that Taylor warmed up to my idea of Skitter as a hero after a while. She started putting together her own pictures for the story, drawing Skitter wearing a costume made out of bugs - a costume that was a living thing, almost. She chose a voice for her, and though she never said it directly, that was the moment I knew that Taylor agreed with me. Something was broken in Brockton Bay, and Skitter was at least hero enough to try to deal with that.

Skitter was a fixer. The corruption, the racism, the organized crime... Skitter fixed it.

It was escapism, yeah. We didn't want to be there. But what I didn't expect was how much of our city would seep into the story, or how much we'd use it to change our version of the city. Taylor liked that part best, where Skitter's actions inspired kids to stand up for themselves in school and fight against bullies, to reach out and befriend the lonely girl or the boy who didn't speak English.

We kept writing stories about her through the end of junior year, and into senior year. Skitter became more and more violent as time went on. The heroes we had in the real world were content to arrest the criminals and let them escape again, but Skitter would track them down and kill them. It wasn't pretty. I liked the parts where Skitter hunted the worst of the worst. Taylor liked the parts where Skitter saved people and inspired them to save each other. Most of all, though, we both liked the parts where we got to imagine together a better way for Brockton Bay to be.

We never published our stories online. They were our thing, between the two of us, and it felt wrong to expose it to a wider audience. It was weird, but in a way, Skitter was ours. She was an expression of us. Still, we both recognized that the writing was good. Taylor would read to me some nights, when we were supposed to be asleep, and we'd whisper so her dad wouldn't hear. Even in whispers, her words had power. She was a natural actress, and her voice would rise and fall at the right spots, and her passion for Skitter and the city would shine through.

I thought in those days, if she didn't care so much about Brockton Bay, she could have gone anywhere. Instead, she applied to Brockton Bay Community College, same as me. We both got accepted - of course - and Taylor got invited to intern on Broadway for the summer. I was jealous, and I was sad, but I was happy for her, too.

Her dad insisted that she take a tube of pepper spray and a folding knife. I gave her a box stuffed with cupcakes and snacks I'd baked for her, and a book of fairy tales. She said it was silly, and I said she was silly, and she hugged me, and I didn't want to let go.
 
Skitter Begins 1.2
That night, walking home from the library, a man stepped out of the pages of our stories and
into the path right in front of me. "Your money, or your life." His voice was a growl, his teeth were
yellow, his breath was rotten. There were two guys behind him, holding baseball bats.
To Skitter, people like this would have been small fry. She'd have laughed, and then they'd be
covered in biting, stinging, crawling horrors. I don't think she'd have even reached for the weapon I
should have been carrying in my purse. If she felt like showing off, she might have foregone the bugs
entirely and beat the shit out of them herself.
Writing Skitter had given me a kind of security, an assurance that fights of life and death are
between the big people with big powers. Little people like me were safe, because little people like the
ones in front of me weren't real threats.
The reality struck me that I should be afraid. I wasn't safe, I wasn't hidden, I wasn't protected. I
was a mouse, and the wolf had caught my scent.
In a story, I'd have talked my way out of it. I was good at that sort of thing. But they weren't
here for a conversation.
"Well? Money or life?" the one in front of me demanded.
I fumbled for my purse, and the zipper stuck.
A shadow landed behind them. My three assailants didn't notice. The shadow was slender, with
a crossbow slung over her shoulder. She was dressed in a hood and a costume with a bodysuit, skirt and
sleeves in dark gray, a stylized metal mask and metal bits and bobs dangling from her belt.
Shadow Stalker, or so I guessed. The crossbow gave her away. She'd recently graduated from
the Wards, and the PR debacle that arose from her refusal to join the Protectorate was all over the news.
She was shorter than I'd thought she'd be.
"Money or life," the leader of the trio repeated.
"I have pepper spray," I lied, "and I know how to use it!"
He laughed, and his two buddies joined in. Then Shadow Stalker moved.
If I'd blinked, I would have missed it. The crossbow bolt went through the leader's hand,
knocking the knife right out of it. Her punch dropped the second guy, and his head hit the ground hard.
The third guy swung his bat at her. She didn't try to dodge or deflect it, didn't raise her arms. She just
let it pass through her.
It was one of the creepier things I'd ever seen. The bat passed through her shoulder and mask
without any apparent damage. She was a shadow.
Except she wasn't a shadow. Her fist was solid as she punched him in the solar plexus, driving
the wind from him.Then, as fast as the fight had started, it was over. All three men were unconscious on the
ground.
"You don't really have pepper spray, do you?"


A/N: Sorry for the unedited quality, my dad died and I've been sick. Might come back through and redo this one.
 
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