Mostly Beta'd by: Night_stalker, DrWhoFan13
On one hand I should wait and go over this carefully for any mistakes. On the other hand, this is the first time in forever that I've had two updates ready to go in one day! Go me!
Annette wanted nothing more than to just curl up into a ball, put her head on Adrianne's lap, and shut out the rest of the world for a few hours. She had learned a quite significant number of distressing facts the night before, had gotten thoroughly wasted as a result of said facts, woke up hungover, and had a panic attack. Unfortunately, the rest of the world clearly wasn't cooperating with her desire to shut it out, and as with every other such time, all that Annette could do was to work with whatever she had on hand. What she had was snot and tears all over her face, a desperate desire for a shower given how gross and clammy she felt, hair that was undoubtedly a complete mess, total numbness from the chest down - had Adrianne somehow disabled her harness while she'd been… while she wasn't paying attention? Either that or she'd failed to put it back on properly, which wasn't impossible given her lingering hangover and how she'd woken up earlier.
Life sucked.
Annette was hyper-aware of the young Spider-Man trying not to stare without actually taking his eyes off of her because clearly he was ready for a fight if it came down to it. At the same time though, she was also aware of Taylor's uneasy tension as she lurked not quite behind him. And he
really was
ready; it was obvious in the tension of the teen's lithe yet
inhumanly powerful muscles straining through his costume and how he rested on the tips of his toes, ready to spring into any direction at a moment's notice if any of her half-deflated tentacles even so much as twitched at the wrong moment.
Taylor…
Taylor wouldn't even look
at her and it made something claw
frantically at the back of her throat and it was all that Annette could do just to keep all of her attention focused on the potential looming physical threat that was Spider-Man. Only Adrianne's suddenly tense arms kept her upright, which she appreciated. It added a sense of gravitas, as opposed to her having to prop herself up or lie on the floor.
But Annette… Annette didn't want to deal with this right now, not
any of it. Not Spider-Man, not Taylor, not Fisk's looming threats or SHIELD's attention, none of it.
She
couldn't deal with it.
She had no choice
but to deal with it. As the Bard put it, 'uneasy is the head that wears a crown,' and at that moment she was still technically the head of Alchemax. Plus, who was she supposed to let handle this? Even if she hadn't just fired Lonnie Lincoln, he would have been an even worse choice to deal with this particular intruder.
So instead of letting herself curl up into a ball or screaming or just sitting there on Adrianne's lap, Annette forced herself to take a slow, deep breath and briskly rubbed her face with both hands.
'This is why you don't take money from crime bosses, Annette, it comes with side effects like this.'
Then Doctor Octopus reached up and, with a calm that she didn't truly yet feel, tied her hair up (she
really needed to find out where the hell her hair tie ended up because now she was using her
own panties for the task because Addriene has been too embarrassed to help her put them on), adjusted her glasses, and mentally took stock of the situation. Spider-Man had - yet
again - intruded into Alchemax. For some reason Taylor was with him; was it an odd coincidence or had the young hero brought her along? She forced her eyes to fully take in the scene before her, and despite her inability to stand, she deliberately affected an attitude of indolent disdain for the entire situation, one hand planted on the floor to affect a casual lean as she draped her other arm loosely around Adrianne's shoulders.
She very deliberately did not react to the bewildered squeak that came out of Adrianne, who seemed to still be processing the impromptu confrontation with the young vigilante; likewise, she ignored how Taylor sucked in a breath.
A moment later, her eyes narrowed dangerously when she saw how Taylor's sole arm was firmly secured with webbing to her torso. When she saw how disheveled and worn out
her daughter the young woman looked, the ugly and hateful urge to
hurt someone began simmering in her chest. A certain young arachnid themed superhero
in particular, who had been responsible for
her daughter the young woman being hurt on top of causing quite a bit of stress for her.
"So not only are you breaking and entering onto private property
again, now you're abducting people and engaging in perverse voyeurism during intimate moments. I'm
fairly certain that the original Spider-Man didn't teach you that, young man. Unless the Bugle was right about him, for once." Dimly, she was aware of how empty and emotionless her voice sounded.
"Yeahbuh
whaaa???" was Spider-Man's retort even as he had begun to point accusingly. "I wasn't spyi-, I mean, I-I'm not a pervert lady,
you're the one doing, uh,
internet stuff with another lady in the middle of a hallway!"
"'Internet stuff,'" Doc Ock drawled out. "Is
that what they teach kids your age in Sex Ed? That
Lesbianism is 'internet stuff?' Absolutely
deplorable. Once again, the American school system disappoints me."
"W-wait, I'm not a lesbian!" Adrianne abruptly blurted out, even as Spider-Man awkwardly rubbed the back of his head and avoided eye contact. Taylor, still standing behind him, rolled her eyes and sighed.
"
Trust me, Miss Phillips. If you weren't my employee, I'd
enthusiastically change your mind about that in less than ten minutes," Doctor Octopus calmly retorted without taking her eyes off of Spider-Man, who despite his mask was clearly flustered and slack-jawed upon - if she judged his reaction correctly - realizing that he simply was not mentally prepared to deal with sexual humor just yet. She also noted with smug satisfaction the way that Adrianne tried not to shiver against her. "In the meantime, would you be so kind as to help me to my feet?"
Wonderfully, it only took Adrianne a brief moment to catch on. Then she slid a hand into one of the gaping tears in Doctor Octopus's ruined lab coat and dress. An instant later, the supervillain had to force herself to not react as an almost violent sensation of pins and needles heralded the return of sensation and motor control to her lower body, even as Adrianne made a show of helping her up. Well, it wasn't much of a show; it took a few seconds for her legs to begin obeying her brain and the younger woman was briefly instrumental in keeping her from falling over.
"Hey, I didn't say that you could move!" heralded a spray of webbing that was swiftly and smoothly intercepted by one of Doctor Octopus's tentacles. Though she was unsteady on her feet, that didn't stop her from firmly shoving Adrianne behind herself and out of the way.
And that was when Taylor let out a pained gasp and her appearance suddenly and violently distorted in a manner that was as familiar as it was horrific. It was also
impossible, but it was happening before their eyes all the same.
It was as if Taylor had become, briefly, an image on a television screen that had suddenly become badly distorted and heavily pixelated. For horrible seconds she stuttered back and forth, as if skipping backwards and forwards in time or maybe sideways, parts of her briefly the wrong color or oddly stretched in impossible directions.
Annette froze in disbelief as Taylor slumped against a wall and nearly fell over, so stunned that she didn't even react until she was suddenly being knocked to the floor by a sudden torrent of webbing. Only then did she snap out of her stunned horror, and when she did, it was
explosively.
With a wordless scream her pneumatic arms ripped the mass of webbing away before it could fully adhere. She was dimly aware of the remnants of her lab coat and dress coming apart at the same time, but at that point she was beyond caring. One of her tentacles smashed and shattered floor tiles and another punched a hole into the hallway ceiling but that didn't matter.
An instant later the young Spider-Man fearlessly sprung at her, blindingly fast but with precious little of the experience of his predecessor. She juked past the next two sprays of webbing that were fired at her and almost in the same moment he effortlessly flipped past one of her reaching tentacles, and then the two were suddenly clashing with far more immediate physicality.
In those first few seconds, Doctor Octopus immediately realized that either the young Spider-Man was physically stronger than his predecessor - highly unlikely - or that he wasn't nearly as aware of his own strength and as such, didn't know how much he needed to
hold back.
She realized this when he tried to shove her back and accidentally cracked two ribs with a noisy crunch the moment he pushed her, instantly forcing breath from her lungs with a wheeze and flecks of blood.
They
both realized this, in fact.
The eyes of the boy's costume went wide in horrified alarm even as a pained wheeze was torn from her lips, her glasses almost completely dislodged from her face; in the background, she heard Adrianne shouting her name.
'Oh my God, he damn near tore me in half
just now and he wasn't even really trying
,' Doctor Octopus thought dazedly
. She made a mental note to be properly terrified by that later.
Spider-Man froze in horror, and in that moment - even as she struggled to keep from reflexively curling into a ball - she struck back, one of her tentacles lashing out like a striking snake and slamming into his midsection hard enough to fold the boy in half. She thought she heard him retching behind his mask, but she couldn't be sure as she slammed him against a wall hard enough to put him partly
into it. She dimly noted that unlike him,
she'd had enough presence of mind to hold back with her blow.
All that mattered to her in that moment was the convulsing form crumpled on the floor behind him.
Annette's chest screamed
bloody murder as pain finally began to register and she distantly thought that there was a coppery taste on the back of her tongue, but she still sprinted down the hall as fast as she could. Taylor was
still glitching, for far longer than that other Peter Parker had and in that moment Annette had no idea how the hell she had
ever thought that the process was fascinating to watch. Somehow, Adrianne had slipped past both her and Spider-Man during their brief clash and was crouched next to Taylor as she continued glitching and convulsing, holding the thrashing young woman's head steady.
"It's okay, it's okay," Annette hoarsely consoled, as much to Taylor as to herself. "I-I can
fix this, I
know I can." Even as the words left her lips, she fell to her knees next to her not-daughter and her tentacles tore and cut away the webbing wrapped around the young woman.
"A-Annette," Taylor began to gasp out, only to grit her teeth and hiss in pain as her glitching suddenly intensified and with a startled yelp, Adrianne reflexively jerked her hands away.
Annette had no idea what to do. She had no idea what to do, no idea, no idea at all and her heart was racing and her mind was spinning in circles and oh god oh god she was going to watch her child die all over again and she couldn't stop the panic clawing at her throat because the only thing that she could think of was another super-collider but that didn't make sense at all because Taylor came to her world via a Golden Sky portal and anyways her last super-collider was destr-
Annette blinked.
Chest on fire, Annette used both arms and one of her tentacles to haul Taylor off of the floor in a bridal carry, and almost immediately there was an even more severe stabbing pain right over the left side of her chest that hurt like
nothing she'd ever felt before.
Oh right, her cracked ribs.
She very nearly fell to the floor as her legs threatened to give out underneath her; it was only by shifting two tentacles to support her weight that she remained standing but doing so suddenly made it so much harder just to
breathe.
Dimly, Annette thought she heard someone shout or call out.
Rather than turn and look, she instead began sprinting through the building as fast as she could, because she knew exactly where to go and what to do. Her tentacles helped propel her, pushing off of the floor, grabbing onto the walls and ceiling to help keep her stable, but at the same time she felt every single impact
reverberate through her injured ribs.
When they reached the elevator, Annette didn't stop. Instead two of her tentacles ripped the doors off and tossed them aside like so much refuse. Before the destroyed doors had even finished falling she was already carrying Taylor into the elevator shaft and half fell, half climbed until they reached Sublevel Two.
Again, Annette's tentacles lashed out and smashed open the doors as if they were merely flimsy kindling, instead of the secured and reinforced security doors to her private laboratory below the Alchemax campus. An alarm diligently began to shriek, and was silenced mere seconds later with the activation of a hidden switch accessible only by tentacles such as her own.
Annette was limping and coughing now but she didn't dare stop, instead she carried Taylor past the things that filled her lab, all of them relics of the older woman's past - the original and incredibly uncomfortable back brace-like device that had first restored her ability to walk; the more refined and low-profiled version she'd created more as a tech demo than anything for the simple waldos she had used to make up for the limited mobility that she'd had at the time; the remnants of the harness with AI-directed titanium tentacles that had directly interfaced with her nervous system for increased fidelity and responsiveness and the blueprints for her failed Tritium fusion reactor that had killed her Rosalie and had nearly destroyed her career.
All of those and more, Annette half carried, half dragged Taylor past but even with her mechanical arms, the convulsing young woman was growing heavier and heavier and it was
so hard to
breathe. Annette didn't notice it when she tripped and began to fall.
But she did notice it when Adrianne and Spider-Man caught her and Taylor respectively before they could hit the floor.
Annette didn't question it, she instead desperately pointed and the two helped her take Taylor to the one thing in her private lab that just might save the young woman's life: the original test model for her super-collider.
It was
vastly smaller than either of the two prototypes that Annette had designed for Fisk. Instead of filling the majority of a building the size of a very large warehouse, this one barely occupied seventy square meters of space. It was smaller, cruder. Less efficient, obviously. But it hadn't been at all suitable for Fisk's purposes, which is why it had been all but forgotten… but not by Annette. Partially this was because it made a good test bed, and also because disposing of it would've been a pain in the ass.
But primarily it was because while the super-colliders that she had designed for Fisk had been intended to reunite the crime lord with his dead wife and child, Annette's original,
private design had been constructed with a
far different intent, but it should still suffice for saving Taylor.
The reclining chair was even still in the same position as when Annette had used it last - the same night after she and Taylor had first spoken actually - and she frantically pointed until Spider-Man got the idea and gingerly placed Taylor into it. Wheezing, she staggered over to the computer bank that controlled the device and booted it up for the first time since she'd first demonstrated it to Fisk, all those years ago after… After
what had happened (don't think about it don't don't
don't).
"Is this how you brought her here?" Spider-Man asked with an odd note of accusation and curiosity. Unable to speak because she couldn't stop coughing and because she didn't want to
think about why she had originally conceived of the device, Annette frantically shook her head. Instead she waited impatiently for the long seconds it took the device to boot up, finally taking the time to push her glasses properly back onto her face. Rapidly punching in her login info, she impatiently tapped her fingers and tentacles while the machine started up properly.
The moment she could, her fingers
blazed across the keyboard, rewriting entire sections of code and adding even more as fast as she could. She didn't have time to test
anything and that was
completely unacceptable but she didn't have time,
Taylor didn't have time. So despite how much it went against the grain, Annette guessed. She changed some parameters and tightened others. This was going to be a gamble of immeasurable proportions, and she hoped, praying to a nonexistent God that she didn't truly believe in, that Richards wasn't doing another 'experiment' at this moment. Her fingers stabbed at keys so hard that one of them broke and without even pausing, her tentacles tossed the broken keyboard aside and replaced it with a spare pulled from a drawer within scant seconds.
Annette only paused and hesitated when she couldn't think of anything more that she could possibly change or edit, but after only a fleeting moment of hesitation she fully activated the device. Alea iacta est. Either it worked, or well, she closed her mind to the alternative.
No.
It
WOULD work. She was one of the smartest people in her entire field, if not the
entire city, she
knew this device,
it was going to WORK.
She wasn't going to lose Taylor again.
A moment later, Taylor's prone and convulsing form was enveloped with light as the machine's targeting device scanned her from head to toe. Then one by one, manipulator arms positioned the six emitters around her in a precise ring; twice as many would have been preferable for greater precision but Annette hadn't
needed that many when she first built it and she was cursing herself now for settling for six.
The moment the device had a complete lock on Taylor's unique signature it activated, encasing the young woman and everything around her in a field of violently shifting and prismatic energy that seemed to eerily shift in time with her increasing glitching. For a brief moment, it was as if several different young women occupied the same space, all of them whole and healthy and similar enough that they
had to be Taylor Hebert, yet each one also distinctly
different.
One was impossibly, jaw-droppingly, stunningly
beautiful, which made the inhumanity of her appearance - an almost impossibly voluptuous creature of living metal rather than flesh with gems adorning her forehead - all the more jarring. Another was a menacing armored figure with a stylized XV emblazoned on her body that was reminiscent of a spider. Then there was one clad in a sand-colored t-shirt and military trousers, and her left arm was covered down to her elbow with a vibrant tattoo of crimson roses. The last was surrounded by a corona of blazing fire in the form of a bird of prey with a bird of light shining brilliantly across her chest… who almost immediately turned and looked right at Annette, giving the older woman such a pained and bitter-sweet smile of longing and understanding that Annette's heart
clenched in her chest.
And then suddenly the field being projected around the chair stabilized and there was only a one-armed Taylor Hebert, sucking in air as her glitching finally stopped.
~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~ ~~{}~~
"Doctor Octavius, I am going to
seriously stress that you
really should be on your way to a hospital," Adrianne coolly said. Jaws clenched tight, Annette did her best not to scream out loud as she sat in a wheelchair clenching her armrests with a white-knuckled grip. Yet despite her efforts, a ragged gasp was torn from her lips as the younger woman's fingers continued to very carefully probe the sides of Annette's chest. Another time, Annette would have enjoyed a lovely woman delicately touching her naked chest. Unfortunately, there was nothing even remotely sexy about the way Adrianne's fingers gently explored the reddening flesh on her chest and sides.
"The third and fourth ribs on the right side of your chest and the third through the sixth on the left side are definitely fractured, and I'm convinced you have lacerations to
at least one of your lungs from bone fragments," Adrianne continued. "Fortunately, you don't
seem to have any further damage to your spine, but you already have
a lot of swelling."
It wasn't a surprising diagnosis, given that Annette felt as if someone had lodged shards of glass inside her chest… which wasn't as impossible as it sounded. Powered individuals could be
strange, no pun intended (though the actual man himself was definitely
quite odd since he'd stopped practicing medicine).
Spider-Man was
very deliberately not looking at her - that likely had a
lot to do with the fact that Annette was undressed to the waist - though he visibly flinched and fidgeted as Adrianne brought up the older woman's injuries. Taylor, who had been sitting sullen and quiet within the energy field that now surrounded her but kept her confined to her chair and the machinery around it, gave the boy a decidedly frosty stare even as he half turned just enough to peak over his shoulder at the two older women.
"... Further damage?" he anxiously repeated while looking like he was trying not to shrink in on himself.
"Eleven years ago," Annette quietly gasped out as she tried to shift to a more comfortable position that didn't cause her broken ribs to irritate her lungs, then let Adrianne help her ease back into the upper half of her bodysuit. There was no way in hell that Annette was getting her harness back on anytime soon which was
irksome, which meant that she was stuck in the damned wheelchair. Even her discarded sports bra would have put too much pressure on her injured ribs.
For once, Annette was genuinely grateful for her small chest and that she'd passed on ever getting breast implants. Excessive weight on her chest was the last thing she wanted to deal with. Fortunately she could breathe more easily now, but she still tasted blood, especially if she tried anything more than short, quick and shallow breaths.
"Drunk driver came out of nowhere, t-boned my Acura," she said softly, once she'd gotten enough breath in her lungs. "The worst of my injuries was a severed spine. Below my T5 vertebrae, I'm completely paralyzed." She paused, taking several seconds to just breathe even as Spider-Man slowly rested his head in his hands. "The harness lets me walk under my own power; the extra hands for my work came later."
"
Oh my God I beat up a cripple," the boy groaned in dismay. Somehow, Annette resisted the urge to say 'again.' She would have liked to say it was due to a nigh-heroic amount of willpower, but really she had just run out of breath. More importantly…
"
Not. Crippled," Annette all but growled at the boy as she glared at him once more. "I get by… just
fine, as long as amateur, nosy brats don't go… breaking my
ribs."
"Hey,
you're the bad guy here, not me!" Spider-Man retorted as he pointed with an accusing finger. "
Your super-collider almost destroyed New York, and despite that you go and build
another one and it's snatching people from other Earths again!"
"Amazing," Annette softly said as she stared coolly up at the angry young hero. "
Every word… of what you just said was
wrong."
The young Spider-Man sputtered indignantly as Annette rolled her wheelchair past him.
"This young woman is one of the very few refugees from the Golden Sky Incident that wasn't kicked off of our Earth by
Reed Richards." She couldn't stop herself from hissing out the other scientist's name. "She had been on our Earth for… roughly four months, I believe, by the time the first super-collider was being built. And all this time, she hasn't glitched even once, until now. I surmise… that this is either due to the method of her arrival operating on functionally different mechanics than the super-collider, or that something about our world has changed since then."
Annette had to pause for a moment, suddenly lightheaded. She took a moment to try her best to draw in larger breaths for a few seconds before continuing.
"And given that just yesterday, l learned that the reason that my super-collider malfunctioned as it did is likely due to whatever device or means that
Richards used to interdict all interdimensional travel to and from our world, I suspect the latter."
*Wait,
what? Uh-uh, no way," Spider-Man said in disbelief. "He's like, the smartest dude on the planet,
ever."
"One of my classmates at MIT used to work for one of the professors at his farm," Adrianne interjected in a soft voice. "Despite being a
mechanical engineering professor, he planted a tree in the path of a gate, and didn't realize why that was a bad idea. Us smart people can make the same mistakes as anyone else. We're just more likely to miss them, because it's easy to think being smarter makes us infallible." She turned towards Spider-Man and added, "The greater you are, the greater your mistakes can be. And if our theory is correct, Doctor Richards has made a
truly great mistake in how he chose to resolve the refugee problem we had from the Golden Sky."
"Fucking
Tinkers," Taylor quietly grumbled as she sluggishly sat upright, looking exhausted and pained.
"
Language," Annette's mouth sharply chastised before her head could reign in the impulse. Taylor gave her a look, one that Annette coolly returned with an arched eyebrow. There was an odd moment of tension, and just when Annette thought that she'd already overstepped whatever it was that she and Taylor
didn't actually have, the younger woman awkwardly averted her eyes. Then came an awkward and uncomfortable moment of silence as Annette and Taylor nervously stared at each other, while Adrianne and Spider-Man stared at them staring at each other.
It was
intensely uncomfortable, and Annette would have paced if she could, but rolling back and forth in her wheelchair would have looked ridiculous and also would have made her arms tired and her chest hurt even more.
"How… do you feel?" Annette immediately hated herself for the banal and cowardly question. Worse was that she could literally
feel Adrianne and Spider-Man staring.
"She's Doc Ock's daughter, isn't she?" she heard the boy quietly ask Adrianne, only to yelp indignantly when her researcher sharply elbowed the young hero in response.
"She's
not my mother/daughter," both Taylor and Annette coolly retorted almost simultaneously, only to then give each other almost identical bewildered expressions. Spider-Man almost ran his mouth again but when Adrienne began positioning her arm to elbow his ribs again, the young hero wisely shut his mouth.
Annette did her best to firmly ignore the two and keep her attention focused on the young woman sitting across from her.
"I feel like I just fought an angry dragon again," Taylor finally admitted.
Despite how often Annette struggled to remind herself that
this Taylor was not the one that she'd given birth to, that particular turn of phrase had her suddenly feeling a little faint.
"
Again?"
Taylor averted her eyes.
"... I told you before. I was a monster. A part of that was doing things because I had to."
Annette felt her chest clench with pain in a way that had nothing to do with her fractured ribs. Then she rolled her wheelchair forward and stopped just before she would have begun penetrating the field that protected Taylor from whatever effect that was trying to erase her from existence. Being that close to the boundary effect had her skin tingling unpleasantly.
"I knew
exactly who you were, the instant I first saw you with my own two eyes," Annette softly said. "But I'm not the Annette that you
deserve to have. Something in me broke after
my Danny and Taylor died in that car accident. Rosalie Murphy, the woman that I might have married when I finally began healing from losing you and your father… S-she
died, not just because I made a mistake but because of my arrogance, which also almost destroyed Manhattan Island. Then… Then I got worse, because… I-I got worse."
She couldn't actually
say… It. Just coming this close to acknowledging
It made her feel hollowed out and empty like a box kite dancing on a violent breeze, and for a brief moment she could only stare at a point past Taylor as everything in her field of vision darkened and her blood tried to turn to ice in her veins.
An eternity later, or maybe just a couple of heartbeats, she focused on Taylor's face once more and found the young woman staring intently with no small amount of alarmed concern.
"I've hurt people since then," Annette forced herself to say. "Sometimes to make a point, or just because I could. But always because I had to. Though, I'm beginning to wonder lately, if it was because I had to, or because I only
thought that I had to. And someone who I could have and maybe
should have thought of as not an enemy… Well, he's dead now, and that didn't have to happen. So that's probably my fault. So, I suppose what I'm saying is that you're not the only woman here who calls themselves a monster."
"... Okay," Taylor very quietly said, and something in both her tone and in the way she gazed at Annette eased a tightness in the older woman's chest. For an unguarded moment, it felt as if they were truly looking at one another for the first time.
"Ten outta ten Hallmark moment, but that doesn't explain your little mini-collider," Spider-Man quipped, and just like that the moment was ruined and it was all Annette could do not to groan in disgust; judging from how Taylor noisily exhaled through her nostrils and pursed her lips, her feelings might have been very similar.
"So on top of violently beating women-" "
H-hey!!" "-with feeble justification, you're also insufferably rude as well as impatient," Annette said with a sneer as she turned towards the indignant-seeming young vigilante. "But to answer your question, this device merely inspired my super-collider design. It's purpose had nothing at all to do with transportation between parallel worlds. In fact…"
Annette paused, suddenly pensive because the explanation was uncomfortably close to
It. Yet almost perversely, she felt a sudden need to explain.
"... In fact, this device was… to put it as simply as I am capable of, it was an experiment to see whether or not the targeted destabilization of extremely local space-time - an observer operating the equipment, to be precise - would allow said observer to perceive other aspects of reality as their physical structure was… discorporated."
Annette very carefully did not react as she heard Adrianne's horrified gasp of understanding.
A moment later, Spider-Man must have grasped it, judging from the way he suddenly went rigid. Only Taylor didn't seem to immediately understand, but she was intelligent enough to grasp from observing the other two that the machine currently saving her life wasn't quite so benign.
"Mostly, I thought that it would have been really nice to see for myself whether or not there was an afterlife before this device disintegrated me completely," Annette admitted. "Of course, it failed to kill me, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. But it failed in a very unexpected and enlightening way that instead allowed me to gaze into other worlds. So I suppose that as a suicide attempt, it was a wonderful failu-"
Annette didn't get to finish, because that was when Taylor lunged through the field protecting her to wrap her sole arm around Annette in as tight a hug as she dared.
A/N: Sorry for the wait. Those who can recognize the 'four other Taylor Heberts' referenced in the chair scene get tasty internet cookies. Also this is only mostly beta'd. After having this doc sitting idle for... uhh... too long, I suddenly felt inspired to finally finish this chapter and post it. Look at me, being all productive. Hear that universe? I'm being productive again. So would you kindly get your boot off of my neck?
(j/k)
