- Location
- Earth, probably.
- Pronouns
- None/Any
A guardian angel of venom and fury.
Silence is Not Consent
- Thread starter justanothercat
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm
- Location
- The Internet?
What the others said, very intimate and moving, well done!
Rabbits Centipedes, George Taylor.
When did it become comforting, I wonder? Still, that's some kind of white noise machine, huh?
She hasn't exactly got a lot of practice, now has she, Tori?
Oh myyyyyyyy.
She's got her not so lil' bandage, too!
Oh good! And also, the stinging comment, you got me. Usually she's the one doing the stinging.
Tell me about the
Amy, girl, you got some problems.
See your earlier comment, Tori, that's nervous 'I don't know what to do so I'll just babble' patter if I've ever seem it.
Squatter's rights. It's more fun to doodle on furniture that isn't yours.
He does have bird powers!
Then Amy's a whole back-hoe. You're not fine, Tori, but there's people out there considerably nuttier than you and a jar of extra chunky peanut butter out there.
D'awwww
Tori, you're still naked! Don't melt her brain!
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A Touching Moment
This is so lovely... I don't know what I did to deserve all this art but thank you so much
Brightness 4.6
The steam from the shower, still heavy and thick in the air, was slowly condensing on the glass, misting over the clear surface and fogging the reflections. The fine coat of mist became beads of water which steadily grew, reflecting and refracting the light from the single bulb overhead.
I kept my eyes on one in particular, watching as it built and built until its weight was too much to resist, dragging it down. The journey was glacial at first but rapidly picked up speed; the drop pulled other smaller dewdrops with it, leaving a slick trail carved through the mist on the mirror until it finally ran out of room. It teetered there, clinging to the edge of the glass for a moment, before falling down into the sink with a plink.
I stared at where it had burst apart for a moment, then looked back up from the porcelain to the fragment of mirror still hanging onto the frame. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. Unfocused. My vision blurred until I could only see the fuzzy outline of my body through the cracks.
This close, through all the shards of glass, the girl staring back at me looked like a stranger wearing my skin. Jagged. Sharp. If not for the shock of bright yellow hair, the flash of blue in the eyeline, I might not have recognized her at all.
God, what was I doing? Why was this all so complicated? How did I get here? I didn't think I'd done anything wrong. I'd had reasons for everything I'd done; looking back I couldn't pick out anything since Skitter had rescued me that felt like a mistake, or that I wouldn't do again.
And yet, all those earnest choices had led me to a situation rife with problems that I had never imagined encountering and wanted no part in. I'd never signed up to face off with Heroes or flee from Dragon! I hadn't wanted to be party to a team of Villains ruling half the city, or complicit in their crimes! Why couldn't I just go home?
My teeth dug into my lip. I knew why. I couldn't forget.
Ever.
A shaky breath in. Skitter – no, Taylor; I couldn't think of her as Skitter right now, not after that. Taylor had left the room a few minutes ago after flying a change of clothes in for me via hornet express. At any other time the image alone would have me smiling. As it was, I couldn't even get the edges of my mouth to twitch.
Nothing about this situation was funny. Or easy. And there was no one I could ask for advice, nobody I'd known... before. Even if I dared reach out, I kept wondering what they'd say. What they'd think of my being here.
My fists clenched. My thoughts were running in circles. Again. I wasn't ready to deal with the… everything that my meltdown had dredged up. Or what I'd asked of Taylor. But I could focus on the surrounding details.
Like how I'd fucked up. Because I had. With the benefit of hindsight, I could see my mistake. Maybe it was a mistake I'd needed to make, but that didn't absolve me of it. I'd pushed Taylor too far, too fast. Implied intent behind her actions that might not have been there. That wasn't the same as condoning them, but I also had to admit I was the outsider here. Hadn't I just admitted how easy it was to get wrapped up in a situation entirely outside of my control? If Taylor had given me the benefit of the doubt again and again for this long, I owed at least that much to her.
My eyes caught on the fractured mirror again. It was barely holding together. In retrospect I was surprised that I hadn't put a hole through the wall. Which… was entirely unacceptable. My powers might be more unstable now, yes. And frankly, I could admit I probably was too. But that was the very first thing I'd been taught as part of New Wave: that our actions as capes were bigger than ourselves. Being a Hero didn't just mean having powers; it was an ideal and a vision for how they should be used.
I'd betrayed those ideals today. I'd fallen short.
I'd missed it in the moment, but looking back, Taylor hadn't been subtle about getting Charlotte and the kids away from me when I'd freaked out. I didn't know exactly what had happened, and I was still too raw to poke through the memories to piece it together myself. But I knew my aura had gone off again, at the bare minimum. We–I–had to acknowledge that.
My fingers curled around the soft cuffs of my hoodie, clean again, smelling faintly of detergent and fabric conditioner. Taylor had sourced more clothes than the initial ones she'd presented to me that first night, but this had stuck with me. Something about it, the fact that it was the first thing I'd worn at the time maybe? Meant it felt different. Safe. I needed that right now.
I looked at the mirror one last time, cracks and all. This was me, who I was, right now. I had to own up to it. For better or worse.
I turned, and pushed the door open.
"Find everything you need?" Taylor asked as I stepped back out into her room. She was standing near the bookshelf with her back to me – reorganizing, maybe? She was wearing a tank top and loose sweats, a marked improvement over the… previous situation.
I snorted. "Hard not to. Besides, you'd know if I didn't."
She paused, and I ran the previous sentence back in my head. Fuck. I hadn't meant to accuse her of–
"I hope you'd know by now that I'm not going to spy on you like that, Victoria," she said, confirming my thoughts. Was that a flicker of hurt in her tone? Or disappointment? Goddammit, I'd made a mistake already and the conversation hadn't even started!
"No, not like that!" I signed emphatically. "Just that if I had problems, you'd know. You'd hear from outside. I could knock. I know you'd hear."
Her shoulders slumped infinitesimally, and I resisted the urge to sigh. Talking to this girl felt like a minefield at the best of times, never mind now.
Seemingly mollified by my apology, she slid the book she was holding back into an empty spot on the upper shelf. I took a moment to consider her. Stalling for time, maybe. But there was also something… different about her.
I'd never seen Taylor in any clothing other than her signature silk, chitin, and kevlar armor. It made for an imposing figure, and by this point the entire city knew as much. But while I had been closer than most, and knew her proportions by this point, it was still strange to see her in casual clothes.
Her hair, black and shiny from the water, fell down her back in wet, unruly curls. It contrasted sharply with the white of her tank top, damp down the back from where her hair was dripping, slightly riding up as she strained to reach the top shelf. Taylor was a tall girl, taller than me, but even she couldn't reach everything.
The sweats she was wearing gave her a… softer appearance. Literally, since sweatpants were objectively the most comfortable form of clothing ever invented. But it was also the first time I'd seen her in anything that didn't look battle ready. She looked like any other girl. I could suddenly imagine meeting her in Arcadia, or passing by on the Boardwalk, or any other situation that wasn't the nightmare we were living through – and it said something that the idea of going to school or window-shopping at the Boardwalk like I had just a couple of months ago felt more foreign and unbelievable a concept than meeting Skitter there out of costume.
What would those two strangers think of each other? I couldn't help but wonder. The Taylor swallowed by Skitter's mask and the Victoria who wasn't broken – would they find anything in common? Any reason to talk, to share anything more than basic pleasantries before going on their separate ways? Two ships passing in the night? I couldn't help but feel a pang of loss at the thought, though exactly why I couldn't say. Much as Taylor had helped piece together the ruin of me that Amy left behind, I couldn't say it was worth it to meet her. That any of it was.
I bit my lip. That was the problem, wasn't it? That we had to meet this way at all. It wasn't fair, any of it. That we needed to go through this. Taylor's whole mess with Defiant and Coil, mine with Amy and Carol. None of it was necessary. Was it just circumstance? Bad luck? My gut twisted unpleasantly at the thought, the idea that acts of such horrific and intimate cruelty could be nothing more than accidents. Pointless punchlines to empty cosmic jokes.
"Tori?"
I blinked. I must have gotten lost in thought. Taylor had finished putting away her book, and was staring at me–wearing glasses? Had she needed glasses the entire time I'd known her? How had I never noticed?
"Glasses." I signed, almost unconsciously.
"Ah," Taylor said, reaching up to touch the square frames briefly. "Yeah."
We stood there for a moment.
"I didn't know you needed them," I signed eventually.
Taylor snorted. "Yeah, well, it'd be a bit of a deficiency in combat if I had lenses that could fall out of alignment, or contacts that could slip out."
"Then how?"
She jerked her head at the mask sitting on the table nearby. "I sourced duplicate lenses, and glued them into the housing of the goggles. Easier."
I stared at the mask with newfound appreciation. I had thought about it briefly, what felt like years ago now, but Skitter's costume looked professionally made, despite her having worn it since her debut. No one outside of established second gen triggers or the Wards had that kind of funding. That meant she did the work herself.
That was already more than most Independents did. But to go the extra mile and account for her own quality of life in the design? To not just accept the handicap and rationalize she wasn't going to be doing much reading with her mask on, but instead lean into it and integrate her glasses without compromising her protection? I knew I might not have come up with that after so much effort already spent on the rest. Especially not this early into my career.
"That's impressive. Wouldn't have known from looking."
A hint of red dusted her cheeks. "That's the point." She looked away from the mask and back to me. "Anyway, you wanted to say something? You were staring at me for an awfully long time."
I started to sign, and then paused mid motion. How would I even articulate what I wanted to say? It wasn't that I was hesitant to admit fault. I was squarely, if not in the wrong, then at least the place where I needed to acknowledge what I'd done to move forward.
No, the problem was that I was trying to dive into what was at best a sensitive topic with a cape who'd taken me in without question, and I had no idea where to start.
"Tori?" Taylor asked, taking a step closer.
I steeled myself. Nothing for it then, just start with the simple stuff. "I'm sorry."
Taylor tilted her head. "Why?"
"For…" I took a moment to swallow. My mouth was dry. "For losing control like that. In front of Charlotte and the kids."
She considered me for a moment. "You did do that," she eventually allowed, "and we do need to talk about it. The kids were scared."
My nails dug into my palm, but I kept quiet and took the scolding. Fair was fair. I'd fucked up and now I needed to hear this.
"But," Taylor said, "you were faced with… that… with no warning. We didn't plan for it. So long as it doesn't happen again… that's fine."
The breath left me in a rush. That… that was it? That was far less than I'd expected. I'd seen Skitter snap at her people when she'd been agitated, seen her... if not berate them, then at least address them when they'd screwed up. Charlotte in the midst of the Dragon incident came to mind. The tone she took with them was chilled at best. This... was not that. It wasn't quite warm, but it was a hell of a lot softer than I deserved.
Well. Fine. Fine, I could work with that. I was on the same page with her there. The last thing I wanted to do was to frighten a bunch of kids who were by outward appearance alone barely in the first stages of recovery.
"Agreed. Thank you for helping me in the aftermath." I looked away as I signed. I couldn't meet her eyes.
A slow sigh. "You're welcome. Someone had to. I'm glad you made it through."
That pulled a soft smile out of me. "Are you sure it wasn't too much? I know I was… asking a lot of you without much warning. Or discussion beforehand. And that sounds manipulative even to me–"
"Tori." She cut me off. "Did you intend to have that panic attack?"
I hesitated, feeling my stomach drop like the floor had fallen out from under my feet. I wanted to object, to argue how I should have had better control, should have kept my aura leashed even when I was emotionally volatile–
I shook my head.
"Would you have been able to calm yourself down on your own?"
Metal washed over my tongue. I felt the memory of spiderwebs parting between my shoulders, the couch turning into kindling between my fingers.
I shook my head.
"Did you need my help?"
Prickling in my eyes forced me to blink away a sudden wetness. I remembered the breathlessness. The terror. The way the world had spun, rootless and anchorless, alone in a dark pit of fear and filth and family-turned-foe.
I nodded.
"Then I don't see the issue."
I jerked up, my eyes snapping open to stare at her. My vision was blurry, but Taylor wasn't standing any closer. Her arms were slack by her sides. The walls rustled. Her lips were quirked up to one side in an awkward half-smile.
Was it really that easy?
"Are–Are you sure?"
She nodded. "You had a problem. I helped fix it."
I sniffled. Taylor had the grace to pretend not to notice as I discreetly brushed the tears out of my eyes. I had done more than enough crying for one day.
"Thank you. I appreciate it. That does just leave one thing."
She pursed her lips, but nodded at me to go ahead.
"I wasn't fair to you in our conversation before that moment on the radio."
She cocked her head. "This one you'll have to explain to me."
How to find the words… "The questions I asked. Do you remember?"
Her lips thinned. I was afraid of that. "Yes, I remember. If you want to revisit–"
I frantically shook my head. "No, it's not about that. I was trying to help you there. But I think I gave off the wrong impression."
"The wrong impression?"
I nodded. "I was trying to help you see what you did through fresh eyes. In a way you couldn't at the time. But I didn't mean you were in the wrong," my hands moved hard and fast, motions fiercer than they needed to be, almost sloppy, "for not having all the information when you got in too deep."
Taylor looked at me for a long moment. "I... don't understand," she said at last, and it sounded like it took an effort of will for her to say it.
Again, I crammed down the urge to sigh. She was trying. And I knew I was explaining this poorly. "Okay. Just trust me for a second. You did bad things, yes?"
Her hands were starting to fist at her sides, and the bugs on the walls were starting to peel off into the air, but she nodded.
"Okay. And I'm not saying those things weren't bad to do. We both agree there. But when you asked me earlier, if it was all pointless. If it was actually so easy the whole time."
I paused to take a breath. I had to phrase this correctly.
"It's not that simple, Taylor. What we did with Dragon only worked because I was there. Because you had someone to back you up; someone..." fuck, how did I say 'someone with an established presence and trustworthy reputation'? My ASL vocabulary was good, but not that good. "Someone... with a voice." I winced at the double meaning there, but it would have to do. "To say it was pointless because we solved it by reaching out ignores the effort it took to make reaching out work. The trust that we formed. The trust you earned."
"Then what was I supposed to do?" she asked angrily, taking a step closer. "That puts me back to the same damn problem! Of doing the wrong thing, or doing nothing!"
I took a breath. "You do what all of us do. Make the decision you can live with, and help the people you can."
"And what do you think I've been doing?" Taylor snapped.
"Look. You said you wanted to be a hero that first night, right?"
She scoffed. "Yeah, but that died as soon as Defiant–"
"No," I interrupted, "I'm not talking about a Hero as a job. I'm talking about the role. The code. The morals and virtues and principles behind the idea. Did you go out that night for other people, or for yourself?"
The bugs were swooping and diving through the air at this point, swirls and sinuous coils twisting through one another with dizzying complexity. I didn't dare look at any of them.
"Both," she finally said. "For others. And so that I wouldn't… turn into something I hated. Even though I did anyway."
I smiled softly. "Then that should answer your question. Try to remember that night, when you're facing one of those choices again. Remember the girl who stood up to Lung because he said he'd kill children. Remember the cape who was ready to fight Dragon for her people. Remember the Villain who saved a girl from her sister because it was right."
My fingers were burning from the end of that, but the look in Taylor's eyes was worth every painful tingle. Her glasses magnified the proportions of her face. Softened her otherwise sharp edges. There was something lost in there. A glimmer of something, someone else. That faint spark was worth the pain.
The silence stretched. She didn't seem to know how to respond, or what to say. So I braced myself and took the initiative. It only seemed fair after what she'd done for me.
I took a step forward. When she didn't stop me, I took another. Step by step, inch by inch, I drew closer until she was right in front of me. And still, that look in her eyes was there. As gently as a whisper, I brought my arms around her and wrapped her in a hug.
She made a quiet choking noise against my shoulder. I pretended not to notice. If I could provide a moment of comfort for the lost girl in those eyes, then I'd gladly turn a blind eye to her vulnerability while she took it.
And it wasn't just comfort for her. She was warm and gentle against me. Her hair smelled nice; fresh from the shower. Lilac and lavender.
After a moment, I hummed softly. This was exactly what I needed after that nightmare earlier today. It centered me, grounded me back to previous experiences like this with Dean. He had been so willing, so understanding of my need for distance and touch at seemingly contradictory times. It didn't hurt nearly as much to think about him lately but–
Wait.
Wait.
I just. Compared Taylor. To Dean.
Oh, fuck.
A/N:
So. Now we get into the meat of this arc. Where Tori can no longer deny the feelings she's having, and what they represent. The shower was the catalyst for this, yes, but not in the… sexual sense. Obviously. More the way that it demonstrated just how painfully intimate she was willing to be with this person that the only comparison she could make forced her hand. But now it's out in the open. I'm sure this will be handled appropriately and out in the open. Yep.
No essay today but I did have a lovely rec in the form of Together in Their Own Way. It highlights the way that intimacy and romance don't always go hand in hand, but that does not take away from either. Given today's subject matter, I thought it appropriate. See you monday!
I kept my eyes on one in particular, watching as it built and built until its weight was too much to resist, dragging it down. The journey was glacial at first but rapidly picked up speed; the drop pulled other smaller dewdrops with it, leaving a slick trail carved through the mist on the mirror until it finally ran out of room. It teetered there, clinging to the edge of the glass for a moment, before falling down into the sink with a plink.
I stared at where it had burst apart for a moment, then looked back up from the porcelain to the fragment of mirror still hanging onto the frame. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. Unfocused. My vision blurred until I could only see the fuzzy outline of my body through the cracks.
This close, through all the shards of glass, the girl staring back at me looked like a stranger wearing my skin. Jagged. Sharp. If not for the shock of bright yellow hair, the flash of blue in the eyeline, I might not have recognized her at all.
God, what was I doing? Why was this all so complicated? How did I get here? I didn't think I'd done anything wrong. I'd had reasons for everything I'd done; looking back I couldn't pick out anything since Skitter had rescued me that felt like a mistake, or that I wouldn't do again.
And yet, all those earnest choices had led me to a situation rife with problems that I had never imagined encountering and wanted no part in. I'd never signed up to face off with Heroes or flee from Dragon! I hadn't wanted to be party to a team of Villains ruling half the city, or complicit in their crimes! Why couldn't I just go home?
My teeth dug into my lip. I knew why. I couldn't forget.
Ever.
A shaky breath in. Skitter – no, Taylor; I couldn't think of her as Skitter right now, not after that. Taylor had left the room a few minutes ago after flying a change of clothes in for me via hornet express. At any other time the image alone would have me smiling. As it was, I couldn't even get the edges of my mouth to twitch.
Nothing about this situation was funny. Or easy. And there was no one I could ask for advice, nobody I'd known... before. Even if I dared reach out, I kept wondering what they'd say. What they'd think of my being here.
My fists clenched. My thoughts were running in circles. Again. I wasn't ready to deal with the… everything that my meltdown had dredged up. Or what I'd asked of Taylor. But I could focus on the surrounding details.
Like how I'd fucked up. Because I had. With the benefit of hindsight, I could see my mistake. Maybe it was a mistake I'd needed to make, but that didn't absolve me of it. I'd pushed Taylor too far, too fast. Implied intent behind her actions that might not have been there. That wasn't the same as condoning them, but I also had to admit I was the outsider here. Hadn't I just admitted how easy it was to get wrapped up in a situation entirely outside of my control? If Taylor had given me the benefit of the doubt again and again for this long, I owed at least that much to her.
My eyes caught on the fractured mirror again. It was barely holding together. In retrospect I was surprised that I hadn't put a hole through the wall. Which… was entirely unacceptable. My powers might be more unstable now, yes. And frankly, I could admit I probably was too. But that was the very first thing I'd been taught as part of New Wave: that our actions as capes were bigger than ourselves. Being a Hero didn't just mean having powers; it was an ideal and a vision for how they should be used.
I'd betrayed those ideals today. I'd fallen short.
I'd missed it in the moment, but looking back, Taylor hadn't been subtle about getting Charlotte and the kids away from me when I'd freaked out. I didn't know exactly what had happened, and I was still too raw to poke through the memories to piece it together myself. But I knew my aura had gone off again, at the bare minimum. We–I–had to acknowledge that.
My fingers curled around the soft cuffs of my hoodie, clean again, smelling faintly of detergent and fabric conditioner. Taylor had sourced more clothes than the initial ones she'd presented to me that first night, but this had stuck with me. Something about it, the fact that it was the first thing I'd worn at the time maybe? Meant it felt different. Safe. I needed that right now.
I looked at the mirror one last time, cracks and all. This was me, who I was, right now. I had to own up to it. For better or worse.
I turned, and pushed the door open.
"Find everything you need?" Taylor asked as I stepped back out into her room. She was standing near the bookshelf with her back to me – reorganizing, maybe? She was wearing a tank top and loose sweats, a marked improvement over the… previous situation.
I snorted. "Hard not to. Besides, you'd know if I didn't."
She paused, and I ran the previous sentence back in my head. Fuck. I hadn't meant to accuse her of–
"I hope you'd know by now that I'm not going to spy on you like that, Victoria," she said, confirming my thoughts. Was that a flicker of hurt in her tone? Or disappointment? Goddammit, I'd made a mistake already and the conversation hadn't even started!
"No, not like that!" I signed emphatically. "Just that if I had problems, you'd know. You'd hear from outside. I could knock. I know you'd hear."
Her shoulders slumped infinitesimally, and I resisted the urge to sigh. Talking to this girl felt like a minefield at the best of times, never mind now.
Seemingly mollified by my apology, she slid the book she was holding back into an empty spot on the upper shelf. I took a moment to consider her. Stalling for time, maybe. But there was also something… different about her.
I'd never seen Taylor in any clothing other than her signature silk, chitin, and kevlar armor. It made for an imposing figure, and by this point the entire city knew as much. But while I had been closer than most, and knew her proportions by this point, it was still strange to see her in casual clothes.
Her hair, black and shiny from the water, fell down her back in wet, unruly curls. It contrasted sharply with the white of her tank top, damp down the back from where her hair was dripping, slightly riding up as she strained to reach the top shelf. Taylor was a tall girl, taller than me, but even she couldn't reach everything.
The sweats she was wearing gave her a… softer appearance. Literally, since sweatpants were objectively the most comfortable form of clothing ever invented. But it was also the first time I'd seen her in anything that didn't look battle ready. She looked like any other girl. I could suddenly imagine meeting her in Arcadia, or passing by on the Boardwalk, or any other situation that wasn't the nightmare we were living through – and it said something that the idea of going to school or window-shopping at the Boardwalk like I had just a couple of months ago felt more foreign and unbelievable a concept than meeting Skitter there out of costume.
What would those two strangers think of each other? I couldn't help but wonder. The Taylor swallowed by Skitter's mask and the Victoria who wasn't broken – would they find anything in common? Any reason to talk, to share anything more than basic pleasantries before going on their separate ways? Two ships passing in the night? I couldn't help but feel a pang of loss at the thought, though exactly why I couldn't say. Much as Taylor had helped piece together the ruin of me that Amy left behind, I couldn't say it was worth it to meet her. That any of it was.
I bit my lip. That was the problem, wasn't it? That we had to meet this way at all. It wasn't fair, any of it. That we needed to go through this. Taylor's whole mess with Defiant and Coil, mine with Amy and Carol. None of it was necessary. Was it just circumstance? Bad luck? My gut twisted unpleasantly at the thought, the idea that acts of such horrific and intimate cruelty could be nothing more than accidents. Pointless punchlines to empty cosmic jokes.
"Tori?"
I blinked. I must have gotten lost in thought. Taylor had finished putting away her book, and was staring at me–wearing glasses? Had she needed glasses the entire time I'd known her? How had I never noticed?
"Glasses." I signed, almost unconsciously.
"Ah," Taylor said, reaching up to touch the square frames briefly. "Yeah."
We stood there for a moment.
"I didn't know you needed them," I signed eventually.
Taylor snorted. "Yeah, well, it'd be a bit of a deficiency in combat if I had lenses that could fall out of alignment, or contacts that could slip out."
"Then how?"
She jerked her head at the mask sitting on the table nearby. "I sourced duplicate lenses, and glued them into the housing of the goggles. Easier."
I stared at the mask with newfound appreciation. I had thought about it briefly, what felt like years ago now, but Skitter's costume looked professionally made, despite her having worn it since her debut. No one outside of established second gen triggers or the Wards had that kind of funding. That meant she did the work herself.
That was already more than most Independents did. But to go the extra mile and account for her own quality of life in the design? To not just accept the handicap and rationalize she wasn't going to be doing much reading with her mask on, but instead lean into it and integrate her glasses without compromising her protection? I knew I might not have come up with that after so much effort already spent on the rest. Especially not this early into my career.
"That's impressive. Wouldn't have known from looking."
A hint of red dusted her cheeks. "That's the point." She looked away from the mask and back to me. "Anyway, you wanted to say something? You were staring at me for an awfully long time."
I started to sign, and then paused mid motion. How would I even articulate what I wanted to say? It wasn't that I was hesitant to admit fault. I was squarely, if not in the wrong, then at least the place where I needed to acknowledge what I'd done to move forward.
No, the problem was that I was trying to dive into what was at best a sensitive topic with a cape who'd taken me in without question, and I had no idea where to start.
"Tori?" Taylor asked, taking a step closer.
I steeled myself. Nothing for it then, just start with the simple stuff. "I'm sorry."
Taylor tilted her head. "Why?"
"For…" I took a moment to swallow. My mouth was dry. "For losing control like that. In front of Charlotte and the kids."
She considered me for a moment. "You did do that," she eventually allowed, "and we do need to talk about it. The kids were scared."
My nails dug into my palm, but I kept quiet and took the scolding. Fair was fair. I'd fucked up and now I needed to hear this.
"But," Taylor said, "you were faced with… that… with no warning. We didn't plan for it. So long as it doesn't happen again… that's fine."
The breath left me in a rush. That… that was it? That was far less than I'd expected. I'd seen Skitter snap at her people when she'd been agitated, seen her... if not berate them, then at least address them when they'd screwed up. Charlotte in the midst of the Dragon incident came to mind. The tone she took with them was chilled at best. This... was not that. It wasn't quite warm, but it was a hell of a lot softer than I deserved.
Well. Fine. Fine, I could work with that. I was on the same page with her there. The last thing I wanted to do was to frighten a bunch of kids who were by outward appearance alone barely in the first stages of recovery.
"Agreed. Thank you for helping me in the aftermath." I looked away as I signed. I couldn't meet her eyes.
A slow sigh. "You're welcome. Someone had to. I'm glad you made it through."
That pulled a soft smile out of me. "Are you sure it wasn't too much? I know I was… asking a lot of you without much warning. Or discussion beforehand. And that sounds manipulative even to me–"
"Tori." She cut me off. "Did you intend to have that panic attack?"
I hesitated, feeling my stomach drop like the floor had fallen out from under my feet. I wanted to object, to argue how I should have had better control, should have kept my aura leashed even when I was emotionally volatile–
I shook my head.
"Would you have been able to calm yourself down on your own?"
Metal washed over my tongue. I felt the memory of spiderwebs parting between my shoulders, the couch turning into kindling between my fingers.
I shook my head.
"Did you need my help?"
Prickling in my eyes forced me to blink away a sudden wetness. I remembered the breathlessness. The terror. The way the world had spun, rootless and anchorless, alone in a dark pit of fear and filth and family-turned-foe.
I nodded.
"Then I don't see the issue."
I jerked up, my eyes snapping open to stare at her. My vision was blurry, but Taylor wasn't standing any closer. Her arms were slack by her sides. The walls rustled. Her lips were quirked up to one side in an awkward half-smile.
Was it really that easy?
"Are–Are you sure?"
She nodded. "You had a problem. I helped fix it."
I sniffled. Taylor had the grace to pretend not to notice as I discreetly brushed the tears out of my eyes. I had done more than enough crying for one day.
"Thank you. I appreciate it. That does just leave one thing."
She pursed her lips, but nodded at me to go ahead.
"I wasn't fair to you in our conversation before that moment on the radio."
She cocked her head. "This one you'll have to explain to me."
How to find the words… "The questions I asked. Do you remember?"
Her lips thinned. I was afraid of that. "Yes, I remember. If you want to revisit–"
I frantically shook my head. "No, it's not about that. I was trying to help you there. But I think I gave off the wrong impression."
"The wrong impression?"
I nodded. "I was trying to help you see what you did through fresh eyes. In a way you couldn't at the time. But I didn't mean you were in the wrong," my hands moved hard and fast, motions fiercer than they needed to be, almost sloppy, "for not having all the information when you got in too deep."
Taylor looked at me for a long moment. "I... don't understand," she said at last, and it sounded like it took an effort of will for her to say it.
Again, I crammed down the urge to sigh. She was trying. And I knew I was explaining this poorly. "Okay. Just trust me for a second. You did bad things, yes?"
Her hands were starting to fist at her sides, and the bugs on the walls were starting to peel off into the air, but she nodded.
"Okay. And I'm not saying those things weren't bad to do. We both agree there. But when you asked me earlier, if it was all pointless. If it was actually so easy the whole time."
I paused to take a breath. I had to phrase this correctly.
"It's not that simple, Taylor. What we did with Dragon only worked because I was there. Because you had someone to back you up; someone..." fuck, how did I say 'someone with an established presence and trustworthy reputation'? My ASL vocabulary was good, but not that good. "Someone... with a voice." I winced at the double meaning there, but it would have to do. "To say it was pointless because we solved it by reaching out ignores the effort it took to make reaching out work. The trust that we formed. The trust you earned."
"Then what was I supposed to do?" she asked angrily, taking a step closer. "That puts me back to the same damn problem! Of doing the wrong thing, or doing nothing!"
I took a breath. "You do what all of us do. Make the decision you can live with, and help the people you can."
"And what do you think I've been doing?" Taylor snapped.
"Look. You said you wanted to be a hero that first night, right?"
She scoffed. "Yeah, but that died as soon as Defiant–"
"No," I interrupted, "I'm not talking about a Hero as a job. I'm talking about the role. The code. The morals and virtues and principles behind the idea. Did you go out that night for other people, or for yourself?"
The bugs were swooping and diving through the air at this point, swirls and sinuous coils twisting through one another with dizzying complexity. I didn't dare look at any of them.
"Both," she finally said. "For others. And so that I wouldn't… turn into something I hated. Even though I did anyway."
I smiled softly. "Then that should answer your question. Try to remember that night, when you're facing one of those choices again. Remember the girl who stood up to Lung because he said he'd kill children. Remember the cape who was ready to fight Dragon for her people. Remember the Villain who saved a girl from her sister because it was right."
My fingers were burning from the end of that, but the look in Taylor's eyes was worth every painful tingle. Her glasses magnified the proportions of her face. Softened her otherwise sharp edges. There was something lost in there. A glimmer of something, someone else. That faint spark was worth the pain.
The silence stretched. She didn't seem to know how to respond, or what to say. So I braced myself and took the initiative. It only seemed fair after what she'd done for me.
I took a step forward. When she didn't stop me, I took another. Step by step, inch by inch, I drew closer until she was right in front of me. And still, that look in her eyes was there. As gently as a whisper, I brought my arms around her and wrapped her in a hug.
She made a quiet choking noise against my shoulder. I pretended not to notice. If I could provide a moment of comfort for the lost girl in those eyes, then I'd gladly turn a blind eye to her vulnerability while she took it.
And it wasn't just comfort for her. She was warm and gentle against me. Her hair smelled nice; fresh from the shower. Lilac and lavender.
After a moment, I hummed softly. This was exactly what I needed after that nightmare earlier today. It centered me, grounded me back to previous experiences like this with Dean. He had been so willing, so understanding of my need for distance and touch at seemingly contradictory times. It didn't hurt nearly as much to think about him lately but–
Wait.
Wait.
I just. Compared Taylor. To Dean.
Oh, fuck.
A/N:
So. Now we get into the meat of this arc. Where Tori can no longer deny the feelings she's having, and what they represent. The shower was the catalyst for this, yes, but not in the… sexual sense. Obviously. More the way that it demonstrated just how painfully intimate she was willing to be with this person that the only comparison she could make forced her hand. But now it's out in the open. I'm sure this will be handled appropriately and out in the open. Yep.
No essay today but I did have a lovely rec in the form of Together in Their Own Way. It highlights the way that intimacy and romance don't always go hand in hand, but that does not take away from either. Given today's subject matter, I thought it appropriate. See you monday!
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- Location
- A nondescript grave
ayyyyy lmao, something to remind me to feel has posted again
- Pronouns
- Male
Oh Victoria please don't freak out again right now this day has had enough back and forth today.
First Dragon attacking/ leaving, then Coil's base exploding, Skitter's initial before breakdown than the Protectorate endorsing Amy leading to Victoria's panic attack, to finishing the conversation between Victoria and Taylor. Please, shelf it for a few hours and go with your new cuddlebug buddy.
First Dragon attacking/ leaving, then Coil's base exploding, Skitter's initial before breakdown than the Protectorate endorsing Amy leading to Victoria's panic attack, to finishing the conversation between Victoria and Taylor. Please, shelf it for a few hours and go with your new cuddlebug buddy.
Victoria needs to get some more of those Fragile One hands to help her sign faster if she's gonna keep busting out speeches like this.
But holy shit they both showed such unbelievable care for the other navigating the shower and this conversation like they did.
Unfortunately for both of them, Coil and Echidna pale in the face of the incoming danger - the double threat that is deeply buried bisexuality.
But holy shit they both showed such unbelievable care for the other navigating the shower and this conversation like they did.
Unfortunately for both of them, Coil and Echidna pale in the face of the incoming danger - the double threat that is deeply buried bisexuality.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Uhmmm....
I see only one ship, and it's sailing beautifully!
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
You wrote a touching romance fic and also got lucky, obviously.
Brightness 4.7
Deer freeze when they're caught in a pair of headlights. Everyone knows that. But it's not behavior unique to them. A lot of animals have a fear paralysis response. Before highways and cars came along, playing dead was a successful, albeit risky, survival strategy. Possums do it, too. You find it in cats, dogs and rodents. It's not even uniquely mammalian. Chickens, snakes, sharks... the list of species that decided sometimes "freeze" is more successful than "fight" or "flight" is long and diverse.
Human beings are among their number.
Dean, I thought, and my breath caught in my throat. My heart beat a hummingbird rhythm inside my frozen chest, but I couldn't move. Holding perfectly still wouldn't make Taylor lose interest, but try telling my hindbrain that. It felt like time had stopped, like that single fatal moment stretched out endlessly ahead and behind.
My racing pulse told me otherwise. It hammered on the inside of my ribs like it wanted to punch straight through my sternum. Would my forcefield protect me if that happened, or would it think it was friendly fire? I knew I could still cut myself shaving, so clearly my power had some way of telling when my pain was self inflicted.
(It let through people I trusted, too. I'd never thought of that as a weakness, before.)
Taylor's breath brushed my ear, and a trail of goosebumps ran down my neck like ants, tickling my spine. Fuck. Fuck I couldn't do this. Her arms were still around me, but now they felt stifling. Confining. Like they were trying to keep me here, keep me, close, couldn't get away–
Taylor must have sensed something, because she pulled back. "Tori?" she said, eyeing me up and down. "Is something wrong?"
That question. That question was going to haunt my dreams, I could tell. Was there anything wrong with comparing this girl to Dean? To feeling the same sense of safety and comfort in her arms that I'd felt in his? Was something wrong with the fact that this girl, who'd saved me from Amy, who'd just showered with me to ground me through a panic attack, was…
My eyes slammed shut, squeezing so hard they ached. I didn't want to. To name it. I knew what this was. I knew what I felt. But to name it, to actually acknowledge what I was feeling–
Out. I needed out.
"Tori?"
Reluctantly, I forced my eyes open again. Taylor's lips were firm, brow furrowed with what I thought was worry. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be right about that or not. No, wait, her bugs were zigzagging behind her, all slightly offset from each other, like a crowd full of people shuffling from foot to foot. Definitely worry, then. Fuck.
"Did I do something wrong?" she asked, and...
Fuck. She'd done nothing but try to help and now my freak-out had her thinking she crossed a boundary. I- I needed to clarify that this wasn't her fault, but the walls were suddenly chokingly close and the thought of her touching me again sparked a jolt of revulsion I hadn't felt in weeks and I couldn't stay in this place any longer. I couldn't. I had to get out.
"No, no it's fine," I signed stiffly, stretching the corners of my mouth upwards into something approximating a smile. "I just want to go out for a walk. Run. Fly. Sorry, words."
She looked at me for a long moment, before nodding slowly. "Alright. You know where the exit is."
I was already turning before her voice caught me. "Be careful."
I didn't dare look back.
"Dragon might still be around. Just a warning."
Sure. That's all it was. I nodded shortly before hurrying to the rooftop entrance and taking the stairs two at a time. I could've flown, but I could almost hear Carol's "no flying in the house!" voice. Funny how the little habits stuck.
I pushed past what remained of the shattered door frame–we'd never gotten around to repairing it when Dragon was doing her stakeout–and got a glimpse of the orange-pink-purple sky of Brockton Bay. The sun was setting behind Captain's Hill, setting fire to the tops of the low-lying clouds and painting long, deep shadows in streaks towards the bay. A gust of wind swirled through my hair, and with it came a sweet, floral scent - a flowering vine on the building two doors down that had escaped its containment around the drainpipe and exploded out over the past month to engulf half the wall. The petals were small and purple and delicate; not a breed I recognised. Fresh beauty, blossoming in the still air after an apocalypse.
I shot up off the roof like a bullet, so fast I didn't hear the sharp crack of air marking my departure. My field kept the wind off me but when I flew this fast I still felt the stifling weight, trying to pull me back to Earth.
No. Faster.
I pushed and pushed, flying as high as I dared before the rapidly falling temperature reminded me that my shield only kept me safe; it didn't help me breathe. That had not been a fun experiment the first time, and I was hesitant to repeat the experience. Especially without Aunt Sarah there to catch me.
My eyes opened–when had I closed them?–to see Brockton Bay spread out below me. This far away, you could see the entire city at once. The setting sun lent a reddish golden glow to the buildings, and dusk light reflected off the water like a thousand stained glass beads. I could see the forcefield of the PRTHQ, still run aground next to the docks where Leviathan had left it. I could see the boardwalk, little more than wooden kindling after the last few months. To the North the train yards were lensed with heat-shimmer and little columns of smoke from trash can fires and chimneys, while the remains of the boat graveyard wallowed in the shallows; shifted by the waves but still stubbornly present. Winslow and Immaculata would be buried somewhere in the urban sprawl, and a moment's search found Arcadia as well, still surprisingly intact.
Zoomed out like this, the damage to the city didn't look nearly as bad as I'd feared. There were breaks and gaps in the structures, a few missing landmarks and a general sense of worn-down, beaten, battered exhaustion. The bits near the water were really bad, and the crater downtown had only grown larger since the destruction of Coil's base nearby. But for the most part it looked pretty close to how I remembered it. For all the damage that Leviathan had done, the city had survived.
On another day, it would have been a hopeful thought. It might be one yet. But right now, it felt damning. It felt like an accusation of how bad things had always been, that I could look at the city I grew up in, the place that I called home, after an Endbringer and the Slaughterhouse Nine had both had their way with it, and... barely notice the difference. Had it always been this bad? Or had I become inured to the worst of the violence and scars as they'd happened, bit by bit, as something once beautiful had turned sour and sick without me ever noticing–
I shook my head violently, hard enough that it hurt. No. No, that wasn't what I was here for. That was a path to another spiral. And was also not the issue I needed to face. As much as I wanted to distract myself with something else, this was too important. I couldn't lie to myself about this. Taylor. Taylor was… I had... it...
Okay. Okay okay okay. Go slowly. Break it down like before. That helped. Fact: I had compared Taylor to Dean. Fact: I had felt safe and comfortable in Dean's arms. Fact: Taylor's presence gave me similar feelings.
I… liked… Taylor?
Nausea stirred a bubbling pot of sour milk in my gut. I forced the words out anyway. Forced myself to think about them. No focus on the implications, or anything else. Just the statement itself. Did I like Taylor? Did I want to hold her hand? To hug her when she was scared? To protect her? To… to kiss…
Nails in my palms grounded me from the surge of bile. Okay, nope, no, that was. Too much. Inconclusive data on that question. That reaction could be recent trauma; I was self aware enough to admit that much. I had… experience… with Dean, but I could come back to that and reconsider later. So, ignore the sexual aspect for now. Did I want everything else I'd listed?
I barked out a bitter laugh, my vision blurring at the edges. Did I want it? What a ridiculous fucking question. I'd already done all of that. Now that I was looking at my behavior through that lens, I was amazed she hadn't already said something.
But then again, when could she have? How would Skitter have raised this subject? When would Taylor have had time? Had there been any point, at all, when we were both close enough that the topic needed to be raised and not dealing with some kind of imminent crisis? It had been weeks since I'd first woken to Skitter standing over me like the world's most horrifying angel, but it felt like years.
I bit my lip, hard. I was doing it again. Distracting myself. Slinking away from the main subject. Did I like Taylor? My feelings were nebulous. Faint. Wispy. It was easier to put things in concrete terms.
Taylor was obtuse, often indecipherable. She had committed acts of such astounding cruelty that I genuinely feared her career would end with an arrest no matter what she did from here on out. She had… saved me, when she'd had no possible benefit to doing so, when rescuing me had put her at odds with the most monstrous cape in the city. She'd threatened civilians and held Heroes at gunpoint, multiple times. She'd stepped into the shower with me after taking her mask off for the first time only an hour ago, just because I needed someone.
I worried about her. She frustrated me. I wanted her to be safe. I wanted her to do better. More than anything else, I wanted to understand who she was. What made her tick. How could she be so callous and violent one moment, yet sensitive and thoughtful the next?
The wind brushed my back with a caress that didn't make my skin crawl, and I turned under its touch to look out over Skitter–Taylor's territory. Even from this far up it looked vast. Unmanageable if not for her power's wide range. No, unmanageable even with that. I hadn't interacted much with the logistics side of her operations, but beyond the current crisis it was hard to see Brockton recovering with warlords at its helm. How could it? Who would seriously invest the money, the time, the risk, into this decaying wasteland?
I didn't know where that left me, in the long term. Hell, I didn't even know how Taylor saw me! As if this wasn't complicated enough. Between the trauma and Dean and–
Something caught my eye, over the ruins of the boardwalk. Was that… the coffee shop where we had our first date all those years ago? God. It felt like a decade ago now. I floated closer, then sped up as I realized I was doing it, needing to see it for myself.
Then I let go of my hesitation, and fell.
I dropped like a stone, leaning backwards into the headwind. It was almost peaceful, in freefall. The world was so silent, but for the roar of the air in my ears. I closed my eyes for a moment, enjoying it, before I reached for the embrace of my power.
It wrapped around me like it always did, the one security blanket I had in the tangled mess of my life. Instead of halting my momentum, it pivoted and shot me forward, quickly closing the distance between me and the boardwalk. I actually had to slow myself down as I approached, acceleration bleeding off me as the wind did its part to bring me to a stop.
The boardwalk was spread out beneath me on both sides, all splintered wooden decking and pulverized facades and flooded basements. The coffee shop was a small, quaint thing; the kind of chain that you could walk past a hundred times without ever really registering.
It was almost unrecognizable now, between the sun, Leviathan, and the Nine. The windows were blown out, of course, and the insides were dark. Trashed. Whoever was in charge of this had clearly either seen the damage and decided not to come back… or had never made it back at all. The only thing that confirmed my initial guess that I had the right place was the closed sign, dangling by one remaining chain. It was a miracle it hadn't come off yet.
This was where I had met Dean for our first date, all those years ago. He'd been so shy, blushing in red splotches that made him look more hot and sweaty and awkward than charming or suave. He'd overdressed too, wearing something that wouldn't have looked out of place in church. Maybe his mom had suggested the outfit? I'd never asked, though I'd teased him about it more than once. I'd just gone with a skirt and a cute jumper I'd had at the time. I'd been so nervous, so terrified he'd wake up and choose anyone else. I could still remember the look on his face when he'd first seen me. Like I was something amazing and barely believable that he'd lucked into; someone he still couldn't believe wanted him. Someone more than just a dumb teenage girl who'd almost put her eye out with a mascara brush that morning while talking to...
Anyway.
A dull pain squeezed my chest, the lingering echo of the way my heart had ripped open when I'd heard his name over the armband. I breathed through it, trying to focus on the happier memories of him. The details of that first date were blurry now, and the booths where we'd talked over milkshakes for hours long gone.
I didn't know why I came here. Maybe I just needed to know for sure. But all I could think about was that look in his eyes, the feeling of his arms around me. The dispassionate way the armband had reeled off his name among all the others.
It hurt. It didn't make any of this clearer. It just hurt. That Dean was gone, that I'd never feel his arms around me again, that there was nothing I could do or say that would tell me what he'd think of all this. What he'd tell me to do.
I didn't know how to answer the question beating at me. Hell, I didn't even know what had attracted me to Dean in the first place; how was I supposed to work through a– an attraction to someone else? Dean and I had known each other for years. There was history there. Intimacy. Affection. The kind of familiarity that only came from staying up until 2am at a slumber party, laughing at some shitty romcom. I couldn't remember when it had hit me, really. Suddenly, I was staring at his face while he was laughing at some joke, thinking that I wanted to hear that for the rest of my life. That was when it had clicked. Even through all the fights, the drama, the breakups… he'd been the one for me. A safe, welcoming harbor to come back to. A partner who could always settle me down and bring me back to an even keel.
That was… not what I had with Taylor. To put it mildly. She was inhospitable. Violent. Temperamental. Confrontational. Harsh. And able to be unbelievably cruel with seemingly no warning.
But she was also kind, when she had no reason to be. Empathized, when it made her vulnerable. Protective, even–especially–at her own expense. And entirely willing to go to war for the people she cared about.
What was anyone supposed to do with that mess of contradictions? What was I supposed to do?
Guilt hooked barbed claws through my ribs, whispering accusations in my ear. Was I just excusing her behaviors because she showed me her nicer side? No. If that were true, I wouldn't have called her out when her actions crossed a line. And if that violent side was really all there was to her, she wouldn't have listened. That was why I'd stuck with her this long. Even through the mess with Dragon, the Heroes before that, and everything else. She did listen. Grudgingly, most of the time. But even if she didn't like it, she was willing to hear me out when I told her she was wrong.
The wind picked up, buffeting lightly against my field as some trash from lower down the dock blew past and plastered itself briefly to my shin. My heartbeat drummed in my ears. I closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. Slowing it down, narrowing my focus until it was just me and the rise and fall of my chest.
There was one thing that I didn't want to address, to even think about in all of this. I didn't even want to name it, because naming it would give it power. Thinking it might make it true.
But this was too important. I had to at least consider the possibility.
Amy.
She had done… a lot to me. I remembered far more of it than I ever wanted to. But at the same time, not nearly enough. Not enough to be sure. The days after she had initially… touched me… were foggy. Whether that was from the mind control itself or the violations that had followed, I didn't know. But I remembered the obsession. The intrusive clamor in my mind, in my hormones. The need to think about her. To be with her. In any way possible. It was sick, I'd known it even at the time, but it had still been there, drowning out any thought of restraint or sanity or shame.
I shivered, pulling my arms tight against myself, and wished I'd brought a bottle of something hot to wash back the bile. The sun was half gone over the horizon, and even through my hoodie the early July air was starting to get cold. Especially this close to the ocean.
Time to face facts.
I… liked Taylor. Maybe not romantically, although I could grit my teeth enough to admit I couldn't say that for sure. I hadn't ever liked girls that way before, that I could remember. Whether that was out of opportunity, heteronormativity, or just already being in a relationship for most of that period, I didn't know. There was no girl before Dean that I could compare to Taylor.
But.
Taylor had said that she'd forced Amy to heal me. She'd never told me the particulars, and at this point I didn't really want to ask. But there was that question. The nagging, creeping uncertainty in the back of my head, like a splinter under my skin. It refused to go away, this clammy dread that had taken root the moment I'd realized what these feelings were.
Would I have liked Taylor this way before?
Or had Amy left one last collar around my neck?
A/N:
This conflict was coming for a long time. A couple of people in the thread and comments have said as much, and for good reason. The creeping dread of the question Tori faces with this, is that it can never really be answered. Was she bi the whole time, and Amy perverted something she didn't even have the chance to understand herself first? Or is this an alien remnant of her abuser she can't quite leave behind, even if it would hurt her more to do so? How would you ever know for sure? You can't.
On a slightly lighter note, if you remember way back to the early days of the punchbuggy ship there was a fic by Caliiro named Intergalactic No Fault Collisions that popularized the pairing. My rec isn't for that though, but for their new fic From Fields of Elysium. Victoria is a detective who meets Taylor Hebert, a seemingly ordinary young woman who shares the same dreams of a hazy earlier life that Victoria does. It deals with family abuse, trauma, and the slow painful growth of two people in recovery. Happy reading.
Human beings are among their number.
Dean, I thought, and my breath caught in my throat. My heart beat a hummingbird rhythm inside my frozen chest, but I couldn't move. Holding perfectly still wouldn't make Taylor lose interest, but try telling my hindbrain that. It felt like time had stopped, like that single fatal moment stretched out endlessly ahead and behind.
My racing pulse told me otherwise. It hammered on the inside of my ribs like it wanted to punch straight through my sternum. Would my forcefield protect me if that happened, or would it think it was friendly fire? I knew I could still cut myself shaving, so clearly my power had some way of telling when my pain was self inflicted.
(It let through people I trusted, too. I'd never thought of that as a weakness, before.)
Taylor's breath brushed my ear, and a trail of goosebumps ran down my neck like ants, tickling my spine. Fuck. Fuck I couldn't do this. Her arms were still around me, but now they felt stifling. Confining. Like they were trying to keep me here, keep me, close, couldn't get away–
Taylor must have sensed something, because she pulled back. "Tori?" she said, eyeing me up and down. "Is something wrong?"
That question. That question was going to haunt my dreams, I could tell. Was there anything wrong with comparing this girl to Dean? To feeling the same sense of safety and comfort in her arms that I'd felt in his? Was something wrong with the fact that this girl, who'd saved me from Amy, who'd just showered with me to ground me through a panic attack, was…
My eyes slammed shut, squeezing so hard they ached. I didn't want to. To name it. I knew what this was. I knew what I felt. But to name it, to actually acknowledge what I was feeling–
Out. I needed out.
"Tori?"
Reluctantly, I forced my eyes open again. Taylor's lips were firm, brow furrowed with what I thought was worry. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be right about that or not. No, wait, her bugs were zigzagging behind her, all slightly offset from each other, like a crowd full of people shuffling from foot to foot. Definitely worry, then. Fuck.
"Did I do something wrong?" she asked, and...
Fuck. She'd done nothing but try to help and now my freak-out had her thinking she crossed a boundary. I- I needed to clarify that this wasn't her fault, but the walls were suddenly chokingly close and the thought of her touching me again sparked a jolt of revulsion I hadn't felt in weeks and I couldn't stay in this place any longer. I couldn't. I had to get out.
"No, no it's fine," I signed stiffly, stretching the corners of my mouth upwards into something approximating a smile. "I just want to go out for a walk. Run. Fly. Sorry, words."
She looked at me for a long moment, before nodding slowly. "Alright. You know where the exit is."
I was already turning before her voice caught me. "Be careful."
I didn't dare look back.
"Dragon might still be around. Just a warning."
Sure. That's all it was. I nodded shortly before hurrying to the rooftop entrance and taking the stairs two at a time. I could've flown, but I could almost hear Carol's "no flying in the house!" voice. Funny how the little habits stuck.
I pushed past what remained of the shattered door frame–we'd never gotten around to repairing it when Dragon was doing her stakeout–and got a glimpse of the orange-pink-purple sky of Brockton Bay. The sun was setting behind Captain's Hill, setting fire to the tops of the low-lying clouds and painting long, deep shadows in streaks towards the bay. A gust of wind swirled through my hair, and with it came a sweet, floral scent - a flowering vine on the building two doors down that had escaped its containment around the drainpipe and exploded out over the past month to engulf half the wall. The petals were small and purple and delicate; not a breed I recognised. Fresh beauty, blossoming in the still air after an apocalypse.
I shot up off the roof like a bullet, so fast I didn't hear the sharp crack of air marking my departure. My field kept the wind off me but when I flew this fast I still felt the stifling weight, trying to pull me back to Earth.
No. Faster.
I pushed and pushed, flying as high as I dared before the rapidly falling temperature reminded me that my shield only kept me safe; it didn't help me breathe. That had not been a fun experiment the first time, and I was hesitant to repeat the experience. Especially without Aunt Sarah there to catch me.
My eyes opened–when had I closed them?–to see Brockton Bay spread out below me. This far away, you could see the entire city at once. The setting sun lent a reddish golden glow to the buildings, and dusk light reflected off the water like a thousand stained glass beads. I could see the forcefield of the PRTHQ, still run aground next to the docks where Leviathan had left it. I could see the boardwalk, little more than wooden kindling after the last few months. To the North the train yards were lensed with heat-shimmer and little columns of smoke from trash can fires and chimneys, while the remains of the boat graveyard wallowed in the shallows; shifted by the waves but still stubbornly present. Winslow and Immaculata would be buried somewhere in the urban sprawl, and a moment's search found Arcadia as well, still surprisingly intact.
Zoomed out like this, the damage to the city didn't look nearly as bad as I'd feared. There were breaks and gaps in the structures, a few missing landmarks and a general sense of worn-down, beaten, battered exhaustion. The bits near the water were really bad, and the crater downtown had only grown larger since the destruction of Coil's base nearby. But for the most part it looked pretty close to how I remembered it. For all the damage that Leviathan had done, the city had survived.
On another day, it would have been a hopeful thought. It might be one yet. But right now, it felt damning. It felt like an accusation of how bad things had always been, that I could look at the city I grew up in, the place that I called home, after an Endbringer and the Slaughterhouse Nine had both had their way with it, and... barely notice the difference. Had it always been this bad? Or had I become inured to the worst of the violence and scars as they'd happened, bit by bit, as something once beautiful had turned sour and sick without me ever noticing–
I shook my head violently, hard enough that it hurt. No. No, that wasn't what I was here for. That was a path to another spiral. And was also not the issue I needed to face. As much as I wanted to distract myself with something else, this was too important. I couldn't lie to myself about this. Taylor. Taylor was… I had... it...
Okay. Okay okay okay. Go slowly. Break it down like before. That helped. Fact: I had compared Taylor to Dean. Fact: I had felt safe and comfortable in Dean's arms. Fact: Taylor's presence gave me similar feelings.
I… liked… Taylor?
Nausea stirred a bubbling pot of sour milk in my gut. I forced the words out anyway. Forced myself to think about them. No focus on the implications, or anything else. Just the statement itself. Did I like Taylor? Did I want to hold her hand? To hug her when she was scared? To protect her? To… to kiss…
Nails in my palms grounded me from the surge of bile. Okay, nope, no, that was. Too much. Inconclusive data on that question. That reaction could be recent trauma; I was self aware enough to admit that much. I had… experience… with Dean, but I could come back to that and reconsider later. So, ignore the sexual aspect for now. Did I want everything else I'd listed?
I barked out a bitter laugh, my vision blurring at the edges. Did I want it? What a ridiculous fucking question. I'd already done all of that. Now that I was looking at my behavior through that lens, I was amazed she hadn't already said something.
But then again, when could she have? How would Skitter have raised this subject? When would Taylor have had time? Had there been any point, at all, when we were both close enough that the topic needed to be raised and not dealing with some kind of imminent crisis? It had been weeks since I'd first woken to Skitter standing over me like the world's most horrifying angel, but it felt like years.
I bit my lip, hard. I was doing it again. Distracting myself. Slinking away from the main subject. Did I like Taylor? My feelings were nebulous. Faint. Wispy. It was easier to put things in concrete terms.
Taylor was obtuse, often indecipherable. She had committed acts of such astounding cruelty that I genuinely feared her career would end with an arrest no matter what she did from here on out. She had… saved me, when she'd had no possible benefit to doing so, when rescuing me had put her at odds with the most monstrous cape in the city. She'd threatened civilians and held Heroes at gunpoint, multiple times. She'd stepped into the shower with me after taking her mask off for the first time only an hour ago, just because I needed someone.
I worried about her. She frustrated me. I wanted her to be safe. I wanted her to do better. More than anything else, I wanted to understand who she was. What made her tick. How could she be so callous and violent one moment, yet sensitive and thoughtful the next?
The wind brushed my back with a caress that didn't make my skin crawl, and I turned under its touch to look out over Skitter–Taylor's territory. Even from this far up it looked vast. Unmanageable if not for her power's wide range. No, unmanageable even with that. I hadn't interacted much with the logistics side of her operations, but beyond the current crisis it was hard to see Brockton recovering with warlords at its helm. How could it? Who would seriously invest the money, the time, the risk, into this decaying wasteland?
I didn't know where that left me, in the long term. Hell, I didn't even know how Taylor saw me! As if this wasn't complicated enough. Between the trauma and Dean and–
Something caught my eye, over the ruins of the boardwalk. Was that… the coffee shop where we had our first date all those years ago? God. It felt like a decade ago now. I floated closer, then sped up as I realized I was doing it, needing to see it for myself.
Then I let go of my hesitation, and fell.
I dropped like a stone, leaning backwards into the headwind. It was almost peaceful, in freefall. The world was so silent, but for the roar of the air in my ears. I closed my eyes for a moment, enjoying it, before I reached for the embrace of my power.
It wrapped around me like it always did, the one security blanket I had in the tangled mess of my life. Instead of halting my momentum, it pivoted and shot me forward, quickly closing the distance between me and the boardwalk. I actually had to slow myself down as I approached, acceleration bleeding off me as the wind did its part to bring me to a stop.
The boardwalk was spread out beneath me on both sides, all splintered wooden decking and pulverized facades and flooded basements. The coffee shop was a small, quaint thing; the kind of chain that you could walk past a hundred times without ever really registering.
It was almost unrecognizable now, between the sun, Leviathan, and the Nine. The windows were blown out, of course, and the insides were dark. Trashed. Whoever was in charge of this had clearly either seen the damage and decided not to come back… or had never made it back at all. The only thing that confirmed my initial guess that I had the right place was the closed sign, dangling by one remaining chain. It was a miracle it hadn't come off yet.
This was where I had met Dean for our first date, all those years ago. He'd been so shy, blushing in red splotches that made him look more hot and sweaty and awkward than charming or suave. He'd overdressed too, wearing something that wouldn't have looked out of place in church. Maybe his mom had suggested the outfit? I'd never asked, though I'd teased him about it more than once. I'd just gone with a skirt and a cute jumper I'd had at the time. I'd been so nervous, so terrified he'd wake up and choose anyone else. I could still remember the look on his face when he'd first seen me. Like I was something amazing and barely believable that he'd lucked into; someone he still couldn't believe wanted him. Someone more than just a dumb teenage girl who'd almost put her eye out with a mascara brush that morning while talking to...
Anyway.
A dull pain squeezed my chest, the lingering echo of the way my heart had ripped open when I'd heard his name over the armband. I breathed through it, trying to focus on the happier memories of him. The details of that first date were blurry now, and the booths where we'd talked over milkshakes for hours long gone.
I didn't know why I came here. Maybe I just needed to know for sure. But all I could think about was that look in his eyes, the feeling of his arms around me. The dispassionate way the armband had reeled off his name among all the others.
It hurt. It didn't make any of this clearer. It just hurt. That Dean was gone, that I'd never feel his arms around me again, that there was nothing I could do or say that would tell me what he'd think of all this. What he'd tell me to do.
I didn't know how to answer the question beating at me. Hell, I didn't even know what had attracted me to Dean in the first place; how was I supposed to work through a– an attraction to someone else? Dean and I had known each other for years. There was history there. Intimacy. Affection. The kind of familiarity that only came from staying up until 2am at a slumber party, laughing at some shitty romcom. I couldn't remember when it had hit me, really. Suddenly, I was staring at his face while he was laughing at some joke, thinking that I wanted to hear that for the rest of my life. That was when it had clicked. Even through all the fights, the drama, the breakups… he'd been the one for me. A safe, welcoming harbor to come back to. A partner who could always settle me down and bring me back to an even keel.
That was… not what I had with Taylor. To put it mildly. She was inhospitable. Violent. Temperamental. Confrontational. Harsh. And able to be unbelievably cruel with seemingly no warning.
But she was also kind, when she had no reason to be. Empathized, when it made her vulnerable. Protective, even–especially–at her own expense. And entirely willing to go to war for the people she cared about.
What was anyone supposed to do with that mess of contradictions? What was I supposed to do?
Guilt hooked barbed claws through my ribs, whispering accusations in my ear. Was I just excusing her behaviors because she showed me her nicer side? No. If that were true, I wouldn't have called her out when her actions crossed a line. And if that violent side was really all there was to her, she wouldn't have listened. That was why I'd stuck with her this long. Even through the mess with Dragon, the Heroes before that, and everything else. She did listen. Grudgingly, most of the time. But even if she didn't like it, she was willing to hear me out when I told her she was wrong.
The wind picked up, buffeting lightly against my field as some trash from lower down the dock blew past and plastered itself briefly to my shin. My heartbeat drummed in my ears. I closed my eyes, and focused on my breathing. Slowing it down, narrowing my focus until it was just me and the rise and fall of my chest.
There was one thing that I didn't want to address, to even think about in all of this. I didn't even want to name it, because naming it would give it power. Thinking it might make it true.
But this was too important. I had to at least consider the possibility.
Amy.
She had done… a lot to me. I remembered far more of it than I ever wanted to. But at the same time, not nearly enough. Not enough to be sure. The days after she had initially… touched me… were foggy. Whether that was from the mind control itself or the violations that had followed, I didn't know. But I remembered the obsession. The intrusive clamor in my mind, in my hormones. The need to think about her. To be with her. In any way possible. It was sick, I'd known it even at the time, but it had still been there, drowning out any thought of restraint or sanity or shame.
I shivered, pulling my arms tight against myself, and wished I'd brought a bottle of something hot to wash back the bile. The sun was half gone over the horizon, and even through my hoodie the early July air was starting to get cold. Especially this close to the ocean.
Time to face facts.
I… liked Taylor. Maybe not romantically, although I could grit my teeth enough to admit I couldn't say that for sure. I hadn't ever liked girls that way before, that I could remember. Whether that was out of opportunity, heteronormativity, or just already being in a relationship for most of that period, I didn't know. There was no girl before Dean that I could compare to Taylor.
But.
Taylor had said that she'd forced Amy to heal me. She'd never told me the particulars, and at this point I didn't really want to ask. But there was that question. The nagging, creeping uncertainty in the back of my head, like a splinter under my skin. It refused to go away, this clammy dread that had taken root the moment I'd realized what these feelings were.
Would I have liked Taylor this way before?
Or had Amy left one last collar around my neck?
A/N:
This conflict was coming for a long time. A couple of people in the thread and comments have said as much, and for good reason. The creeping dread of the question Tori faces with this, is that it can never really be answered. Was she bi the whole time, and Amy perverted something she didn't even have the chance to understand herself first? Or is this an alien remnant of her abuser she can't quite leave behind, even if it would hurt her more to do so? How would you ever know for sure? You can't.
On a slightly lighter note, if you remember way back to the early days of the punchbuggy ship there was a fic by Caliiro named Intergalactic No Fault Collisions that popularized the pairing. My rec isn't for that though, but for their new fic From Fields of Elysium. Victoria is a detective who meets Taylor Hebert, a seemingly ordinary young woman who shares the same dreams of a hazy earlier life that Victoria does. It deals with family abuse, trauma, and the slow painful growth of two people in recovery. Happy reading.
- Location
- Earth, probably.
- Pronouns
- None/Any
God, that is the question isn't it? And it's gonna hang like a fucking albatross.
Ask Tattletale? Of course, the trouble is wether you believe her, both rationally and emotionally.
Oh shit, I don't think I've ever seen that issue brought up in Punchbuggy before. Maybe that's because most of the time it's not taking place in the timeline where Amy altered Victoria, but still, that's such a nightmarish What If to stymie this relationship.
So the options here would be:
- Ask Taylor: embarrassing and frightening because it means having to relive that moment when she saved her
- Ask Lisa: Some of the above, with the added wrinkle that Lisa was a huge mega bitch the last time they met and I don't know if that's changed. I also don't know if Tori would trust her to tell the truth considering her track record.
- Ask Amy: Fuck Amy. Like, if you told me Tori was gonna put her fist through Amy's skull if they ever meet again, I'd believe it. And if not her, Taylor already said she'd pull the trigger.
She sort of has no better option than to ask Taylor. That, or just not say anything and agonize in silence. But we've had a lot of that so far, so I'm kinda thinking she's gonna bite the bullet and ask.
So the options here would be:
- Ask Taylor: embarrassing and frightening because it means having to relive that moment when she saved her
- Ask Lisa: Some of the above, with the added wrinkle that Lisa was a huge mega bitch the last time they met and I don't know if that's changed. I also don't know if Tori would trust her to tell the truth considering her track record.
- Ask Amy: Fuck Amy. Like, if you told me Tori was gonna put her fist through Amy's skull if they ever meet again, I'd believe it. And if not her, Taylor already said she'd pull the trigger.
She sort of has no better option than to ask Taylor. That, or just not say anything and agonize in silence. But we've had a lot of that so far, so I'm kinda thinking she's gonna bite the bullet and ask.
- Location
- United States
Taylor isn't going to know. Taylor can at most say "I told her to undo all her changes to you at gunpoint and to put you back the way you were." But Taylor didn't have any certain way of knowing that Amy was complying, and even if she did, Amy said she couldn't fully restore Victoria and that she could only do an approximation.
The Official Timeline
It's come to my attention that some of the specifics on dates and timelines have been confusing. And my own writing has been a bit contradictory. Sorry about that. I went back and made a few edits (mostly spacing things out, the largest was shifting the PRT announcement one day later from when Tattletale told them about it), and events should now reflect the following timeline. I will amend this as we go. Please tell me if any detail doesn't match this.
CANON
SiNC
Start of Arc 1
Start of Arc 2
Start of Arc 3
Start of Arc 4
Start of Arc 5
CANON
- Sun 12th June - Slaughterhouse 9 leave Brockton Bay
- Thu 16th June - Canonical Yamada Interlude with Victoria in the asylum
SiNC
Start of Arc 1
- Thu 16th June - Skitter finds Amelia & Victoria, rescues the latter from the former. Victoria wakes up in a bathtub (1.1 - 1.5).
- Fri 17th June - Victoria asks to call Carol, visits Bitch,(1.6 - 1.B)
Start of Arc 2
- Fri 17th June - Victoria, Skitter and Bitch encounter the Heroes, Victoria has a flashback and flares aura. (2.1 - 2.3)
- Wed 22nd June - Skitter reaches out to Victoria (2.S). Takes Victoria along to visit Dolltown, negotiates with Parian, gets shot by Flechette and flown back (2.4 - 2.8).
- Thu 23rd June - Skitter receives treatment overnight, briefs everyone. Victoria goes to see Carol, Skitter attacks the Mayor's mansion. Victoria demands explanation, Taylor explains Coil (2.9 - 2.11). Meanwhile, PRT decide to call Dragon in (2.D).
Start of Arc 3
- Thu 23rd June - Carol warns Victoria that Dragon will arrive in a week, tops, forcing her to do some fast-talking to Skitter (3.1).
- Fri 24th June - Victoria convinces Skitter to go to the other Undersiders and gets them to call Dragon and try to negotiate with her, to limited success. Victoria asks for Skitter's help in confronting the Heroes; Skitter is down. (3.2 - 3.7).
- Mon 27th June - The girls have a tense confrontation with the Heroes and get ambushed by Dragon's arrival on their way back, forcing a chase sequence that ends with them trapped back in Skitter's base (3.8 - 3.9).
- Trapped inside, they navigate a tense phone call with Coil and Victoria cares for Skitter's injury, without her (yet) demasking. (3.10 - 3.12).
- Thu 30th June - Taylor looks over her supplies/situation and is frustrated she can't do anything (3.T).
- Sat 2nd July - Victoria tries to have a shower and has a breakdown instead (3.13). Aiden gets overwhelmed and runs away, Victoria goes out and retrieves him from Defiant (3.14). Skitter has a conversation with Victoria about her past with Armsmaster (3.15), interrupted by Dragon making her move and Coil's takedown (3.16 - 3.F).
Start of Arc 4
- Sat 2nd July - Taylor takes the mask off, asks what the point was. Victoria talks her down, and Tattletale rings with news of an official PRT statement the next day. (4.1 - 4.2).
- Sun 3rd July - PRT announcement about how they took down Coil, in which Dragon covertly apologizes. Carol announces Amy will be healing again. Victoria does not take it well, killing Cenpai as she has another panic attack. Taylor comforts her, gives her the new name "Tori" and helps her shower. Tori realizes the depth of her feelings and takes some time alone to think about what this means. (4.3 - 4.7).
- Mon 4th July - Carol has breakfast with Amy, remembering how she showed up at her front door at June 16th and how she secretly hijacked the PR announcement to announce the healing schedule (4.C). Tori arrives back in the early hours of the morning, realizes her powers have changed, Taylor says they have to do power testing.(4.8)
- Tue 5th July - Aisha Interlude (4.A) in which she spies on Tori and Taylor talking about something important, reads journal with Charlotte conversation (4.9).
- Wed 6th July - Tori and Taylor visit Atlas. (4.9).
- Fri 8th July - Power testing in the forest. Testing her aura and shield (4.9 - 4.11), Taylor attempts to contain the aftermath (4.T). Tori dissociates and loses memory until...
- Mon 11th July - Undersiders meeting, discussing strategies, unmasking, Dragon call Taylor suggests field master screening. (4.12 - 4.14). Meanwhile, Brian is not coping well. (4.B).
Start of Arc 5
- Mon 11th July - Tori attempts to argue the unmasking plan to Taylor (5.1), The two of them take the issue to Lisa who sees her own side of the issue (5.L). Tori talks out some final details with Lisa (5.2).
- Wed 13th July - Tori goes over plans with Taylor for the Undersiders meeting. Taylor and Tori meet up with the rest of the group out of costume, and Tori tries to pitch the idea to the rest of the group. An argument breaks out, Bitch punches Tori and leaves (5.2). Tori flies after Bitch and they talk the problem out. Tori accidentally bonds with Rachel and is asked some hard questions (5.3). Tori gets back to Taylor and relays what happened with Rachel. Taylor shares some of the last few issues she's had with the Heroes in the past, Tori is determined to reach out to the Heroes to bridge the gap. (5.4).
- Thurs 14th July - Skitter has a phone call with Dragon, arrange things with Defiant for the next day (5.5)
- Fri 15th July - Tattletale, Skitter and Tori meet with Defiant in a neutral location to discuss plans. Defiant serves as intermediary for call with the PRT. Tori realizes she needs to address things with her family privately (5.5).
Last edited:
Brightness 4.C
C/W: this chapter contains depictions of parental abuse, spousal abuse, ableism, and implied domestic abuse.
She woke to a grumbling stomach and the sound of birdsong outside her window; an offensively cheerful high-pitched noise that would not shut up and seemed determined to burrow inside her ears and force her out of bed at whatever unholy hour this was.
Carol turned to the side to glance at her alarm clock, and sighed. Six thirty. Her alarm would go off in about twenty minutes; there was no point in trying to get more sleep now. Besides, the gnawing ache in her stomach meant it was pointless to try. She needed to eat.
Tossing the sheets off her side of the bed and stretching as she sat up, Carol looked over at the man sleeping to her left.
Mark. He had been so… different, lately. She didn't know what to make of it. For so long the things in his head made it difficult to do anything. From cleaning the house, to taking out the trash, to caping, to feeding himself, Carol had stopped trusting her husband a long time ago.
It had been even worse after Leviathan. Mark had never really recovered from the coma or the brain damage he'd suffered defending their home. Before he couldn't be trusted to feed himself; afterward he'd had to be helped. Part of her had never quite forgiven him for that. For leaving her without leaving her, for taking away what little support she had, however unreliable, and replacing it with more of a burden than ever. It was a crude, ugly, awful thing to think; still more so to say. But when your partner of two decades was reduced to a near-vegetable with the functionality of a two year old it was hard to be charitable.
Lips pressed together in a tight, unhappy line, Carol watched Mark's face carefully as he snored. She brushed his over-long fringe away from his face and frowned. It had been too long since any of them had gotten a haircut, and it was starting to show.
Until recently, she would've cut his hair herself. Who else was going to see him, to notice? But then… Amy had done what she'd always said she couldn't. What, if Victoria was to be believed, it had taken Bonesaw threatening her to do. She healed her husband. He wasn't just back to the way he was before Leviathan, he was better. Alert. Curious. Questioning. Almost like the man she'd fallen in love with twenty years ago.
If it had been love.
Had it?
Another growl from her stomach interrupted Carol's thoughts. Pondering how long Amy's "fix" would last could wait. Right now she needed food.
She carefully slipped out of her side of the bed, the sheets barely rustling as they settled down onto the mattress. Carol held her breath, then sighed when nothing happened. Mark had always been a light sleeper, prone to waking up at the worst times possible. She wasn't ready to deal with him this early in the morning. Not when she was still getting her thoughts together.
He stayed sleeping soundly as she softly padded around her bedroom, putting on a slim bathrobe before easing the door open. No noises, and this early in the morning meant her youngest wasn't likely to be up yet. One less thing to deal with.
As she made her way down to the kitchen, Carol ran through the list of tasks she had allotted for the day. There were some remaining items and cases at the firm she had to get to, Piggot had wanted a meeting about god knows what, and she hadn't heard back from Dragon yet on the details from the raid and fallout.
They might be keeping her out of the loop, but Carol wasn't stupid. The Dragonflight had been in the Bay for almost a week; Victoria had to be in one of the places they'd had under surveillance. But the PRT weren't telling her anything, and Dragon was ignoring her requests for an update–
Amy appeared, almost out of nowhere, right in front of her when she turned the corner. Carol bit back a scream. "Amy!" she snapped, heart in her throat, "what are you doing?"
The girl blinked at her in sleepy, startled confusion. "S-sorry. I was up. Needed food."
Carol took a deep breath as her heart settled back down. "Be careful next time, it's not safe to startle people like that while everyone is so on-edge. You of all people can't afford to be reckless or irresponsible with your safety."
The girl nodded, glancing down and to the side, avoiding eye contact. Carol frowned, but held her tongue. Frankly it was a miracle the girl wasn't giving her lip this early. She'd take any boon she could, at this point.
The silence held as the pair walked the rest of the way to the kitchen. Carol studied her other daughter out of the corner of her eye. Her shoulders were slightly hunched inwards; her spine bent forward. She'd need to give the girl another lesson on heroic posture; the public needed clear symbols of strength and morale more than ever at the moment. The bags under her eyes were darker than usual, but then again Carol could say the same thing of herself.
No one had slept well since they'd found Bonesaw in their living room. Amy had gone missing for days afterwards. Victoria barely said a word for just as long, and then she went missing too. And when Amy had finally come back, she'd been… different.
"What do you want me to do, Mark?" Carol hissed, facing off against him across the disordered living room. "What's your suggestion? Please, share! You clearly have opinions; let's hear them!"
The man in front of her tensed; his shoulders came up defensively and his jaw tightened. "I don't know!" he shot back. "But since I came to, both of our daughters have gone missing, and it's been a week! Are you even trying to find them?"
Carol scoffed. "Of course I'm trying! You think just because you haven't been watching over my shoulder, I've been doing nothing? I've been following up any leads I can find, while you've been stuck at home 'recovering'. But please, if you have any better ideas, enlighten me. Tell me how you're going to fix this."
Mark flinched at the icy venom in her tone. "That... dammit Carol, you know that's not fair. I'm not saying you've been doing nothing, we both want them back. But I just… I don't know what to do."
She softened. It was hard not to, when she felt the same way. Part of her wanted to call out his backpedaling, remind him that he'd questioned her commitment to her family only seconds ago, but she wrestled it down. Now wasn't the time to treat her home like a courtroom.
"I know, honey, I know," she sighed rather than follow the impulse. "I want them back too. But we don't even know if the Nine are fully gone. We can't just go traipsing into gang territory, hoping that we'll stumble across them on the streets. This isn't the Brigade anymore."
She clamped her mouth shut and forced herself to stop talking there. It would be so easy to continue. To say what they both knew but dared not voice. That New Wave had been circling the drain for a long time now, and with both Neil and Eric gone, there wasn't much hope of a revival. Nevermind this mess.
"We just have to keep calm, and pursue all the available leads," she said instead. "However small. It's the only thing we can do."
Mark nodded. "I know. It's just… it feels so awful. Like we're not doing enough."
Carol grit her teeth. As though she didn't know that. As though she didn't feel the same way. It wasn't her job to have to manage him like this; couldn't he see she was already shouldering the entire team? Her daughters were in the wind, Sarah was still grieving and in no condition to lead, Crystal was little better, and now her husband was–
A knock on the front door interrupted her thoughts. The two glanced at each other, before smoothly sitting up from the couch and approaching the door together. Carol reached out to the doorknob with her right hand, conjuring a hardlight sword behind her back. She didn't have to look at Mark to know he was pre-charging an orb to throw.
At least this much hadn't changed. Their domestic life was a mess, but in the field they still made a good team.
Carol tensed as she pulled the door open. If this was an enemy cape she'd have to shift to her Breaker state in an instant to avoid getting caught in Flashbang's signature attack. In that moment she could use the distraction to get behind them and–
Amy looked up at her. Her hand was still outstretched in preparation to knock again. She was soaked to the bone, giving her the look of a drowned rat, and the rainwater dripping off her tangled, sodden frizz didn't help the image. She was trembling like a leaf, and her teeth were audibly chattering. Her clothes clung to her thin frame, ratty sweater and stained jeans dark and wet. Her other hand was folded defensively across her chest.
Carol wanted to hit her.
The porcelain clattered against the stone countertop. The sound was like a gunshot in the cold, tense silence of the kitchen. Amy hunched in her seat, flinching at the noise. Carol didn't acknowledge the reaction as she poured a single serving of cereal into the bowl, setting the box down before turning to the fridge to get milk.
Amy hadn't been eating well these past few days. God only knew why. But as always, it fell to her to take up the slack. If she didn't feed the girl, it would be sure to blow back on her somehow. Besides, a certain part of her almost wanted to just to get her to stop moping.
She looked miserable, sitting slumped on the stool in front of the breakfast bar. She still wasn't meeting Carol's eyes, instead fiddling with a napkin on her lap. It wasn't as though Amy was usually responsive in the mornings, to say the least, but something was off here. Normally Carol would either be dragging the girl out of bed or trying to lure her downstairs with the scent of coffee. But Amy had been up before her.
She clenched her teeth. "Something wrong?"
Silence.
Carol let out a sigh, just barely escaping through her nose, and turned to get the coffee machine started. Maybe that would be enough of an incentive to talk. Normally she would be more willing to drag whatever it was out of the stubborn girl, but this early in the morning she couldn't be bothered. Eventually she'd either talk or stop sulking about it; one way or the other the problem would resolve itself.
"C-Carol?"
Ah. There it was.
"What did we say about that?" she said, still facing away.
A swallow. And then, "Mom?"
Carol finished pouring the coffee beans into the grinder, closing the top and fingering the on setting. The high pitched whining would make conversation difficult, and Amy clearly wanted to talk about this now. So she could wait.
"That's better," she said, turning around. "What is it?"
"It… it's about healing."
Carol's eyes hardened, her hands clenching beside her. No, she had to shut this down now. Couldn't let it take it fester, take root, transform into something she couldn't deal with later.
"What about it?" she said evenly.
Amy looked to the side. "I-I know you want me to." She seemed to realize what she was saying, and looked back at Carol. Her eyes were wide and desperate. "And I want to! I promise I want to!"
She let the silence drag. "...but?"
Amy looked away again, down at her hands clenched around the napkin. "I just… don't know if now is the right time. If it's too soon, if people will see why–"
"People will see what they always have," Carol said smoothly. "New Wave has a reputation, and we have to keep that going now."
"B-but if the heroes–"
Carol growled, slowly placing her hands down on the countertop.
It was better than the alternative.
"I don't care about the Protectorate. You need to heal. You need to fix what you broke. Or do I have to remind you about the mistake you made?"
The girl swallowed, blinking tears out of her eyes. "No, you don't." She swallowed to whet a dry throat, and nervously licked her lips. "Can... can I see her?"
Carol's lips thinned.
"Finish your first week of healing. By then she should be away from that villain, and we can discuss it." It had been hard enough to get Panacea public credit for resolving the situation, but she'd needed to do it, approval be damned. It gave her the PR to get back to healing without these ridiculous accusations on her back, and she'd prove herself then. Piggot would understand, once she stopped shouting and remembered how much good Panacea did.
"But I don't want to hear any more complaints until then, do you understand? No more whining. No more requests."
Amy took a shaky breath, and nodded. Her mouth was a tight, thin line.
It suited Carol just fine. She wasn't looking for a response.
"Where. Were. You?"
Amy flinched back, her eyes darting around the room in search of an escape, but Carol didn't give her any time to think. She advanced on the cowering girl, using her height to tower over her. She'd waited until Mark had left to go tell Sarah that they'd found Amy. He wanted to use his newfound agency, the independence.
And she wanted the chance to interrogate Amy about what had really happened.
"I-I don't–"
"Get to the point," Carol hissed. Her hands twitched by her sides. "I don't care how complicated you think it is. You left a week ago, and Victoria is gone."
She trembled, still not making eye contact. Carol didn't need to meet her eyes to know what was hiding in them. Guilt.
"S-so you know that Bonesaw had… forced me to heal Dad," Amy started hesitantly, glancing up at Carol. She bit her lip. If Amy wanted to try to win some leniency by starting with information Carol already knew, she'd play along for now. Anything to get the story out of her. Once she had Amy's account, she could pick it apart and cross-examine her to find the facts.
Amy paused, looking up with nervously imploring eyes and waiting for Carol to nod impatiently before continuing. "I was… running. From Bonesaw. From everyone. The Siberian was coming after me and I d-didn't want you to get involved."
Carol had been in enough court cases to know when a client was lying to her. Amy definitely wasn't telling the whole truth here, but the bit about the Siberian seemed real. And the subtle shudder and the glance at the missing fingers of her left hand all but confirmed it. She'd let it slide.
Amy swallowed. "So the... the Crawler thing happened. And Victoria was… hurt. The Undersiders brought her to me. To fix."
Carol ground her teeth. "And you trusted them?"
For the first time in the conversation Amy looked up at her, angry. "No, of course not," she snapped. "But I had to get Victoria, and they had her. It was the only way. I got her, and took her away from them."
"Fine. But if you had Victoria and healed her, what happened for the rest of the week?"
Amy looked down at the floor again. "I… Crawler did a lot to her. I had to heal her. But I didn't know how. I-I messed up."
Carol could not hit her daughter. She could not do that. Her nails dug into her palm. "What. Did. You. Do. To. Victoria?"
The girl quivered in front of her, hunching in on herself. "I-I tried to fix her. I p-promise I tried. Crawler got her with his spit, all this horrible acid and venom and enzymes and... s-so I made her a– a cocoon. To keep her together so I could heal her. A-and it was working, I got... I stabilized her and got her away from the Undersiders, as fast as I could. I found a workaround for how much biomass she'd lost. I fixed all the acid damage, I had the venom byproducts under control and I was cleaning up the leftover damage from the enzymes. But I– I got tired. It had been hours. And I hadn't slept, or eaten, or... so I took a break. Just a short one. I was scared and we were alone and I needed– I just needed someone to tell me it was okay."
She sniffled, blinking back tears. "S-so I changed a couple of things in her cocoon so she could give me a hug, a-and smile at me, and– and help me keep going, but... then I had to reverse what I'd done to keep healing her, and it caused complications, so I had to deal with those. And then I had to wait a while to be sure she was stable and all the healing was finished, s-so I took another break, and changed some more things, but... that caused more complications."
"What kind of complications?" Carol demanded. She felt sick. Something between the lines here was wrong; her instincts were screaming at her.
Amy sniffled again. Carol wasn't sure she'd even heard the question, or if this was all just pouring out unstoppably now that she'd started. "I... her hormonal and neurochemical levels were all unbalanced from all the pain and trauma and... stuff. So I put her in a trance so I could work on her. Without her backhanding me as she thrashed. And I had to put her further under because her body kept getting further and further from– and I was going to fix it, I was going to put everything right, put her back to normal and make her forget the whole thing so she wouldn't have to remember, but I just– I kept messing up and having to make more and more changes and it was getting harder and harder to fix them and get back to how she started, and I was so scared because... because she hated me. Hates me. For what I d-did to her."
Carol's hands flickered, fingers curling around weapons that weren't quite there. Yet. "So you're telling me that you violated your sister. And couldn't put her back together. For a week."
Amy nodded miserably. "I-I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go home. Not when she was l-like that. Wanted to fix it. But everything I did just... broke her worse."
And there it was. The thing she'd been so afraid of this whole time, ever since she'd locked eyes with that angry five year old in that closet all those years ago. The outcome she was so certain of since Sarah–damn her–had convinced her to take Amy.
She'd known it would end up like this. That this snake, this imitation of a daughter, would betray everything she loved. And yet now it had finally happened… she didn't feel anything. Maybe it was numbness. Guilt. Satisfaction at being proven right.
Deep breaths. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Carol hadn't been to therapy in close to two decades, but some of the little things still stuck. She knew if she reacted now, she'd explode. She'd tear the girl in front of her apart. And she couldn't do that when she didn't have all the information yet.
"So then why are you here?"
Amy snorted, wiping the snot from her nose. It spread across the back of her hand in a shimmery, slimy streak. "S-Skitter found me."
Carol's breath froze in her chest. A vice clamped around her ribs. Fear and rage curdled in her gut, coiling around one another in a writhing, crawling tangle. "What."
"S-she found me. Threatened to kill her unless I left. I… put her back. As best I could. Then I left. Didn't know where else to go. So."
It was the betrayal she'd always expected, always known was coming. Amy had broken her sister, and then abandoned her to a villain to save her own skin. But… Carol didn't see the gloating villain she'd been picturing all these years. Not Marquis' skin-crawling smirk. Not even that… man. Instead, she saw a small, scared, broken little girl. Someone who'd made a mistake, who hadn't known how to fix it, but had tried her best to help her sister anyway. Someone forced by a villain, by a captor, to do something awful.
Amy had hurt her sister. Had, from the sound of it, turned her body into something unrecognizable and twisted. But… she hadn't wanted to. She'd been trying to help. To rebuild her sister after Crawler had maimed her. And, villain or not, she'd succeeded.
Slowly, she stepped forward. Amy tensed, but didn't move. Carol's hands came up, palms out, and still she didn't move. That was what convinced her. That Amy was willing to stand there, in the knowledge that Carol could cut her in half, and think she deserved it.
She reached out, and pulled the girl into a hug. Amy squeaked but she didn't let go, holding her daughter tightly against her.
"We will find her," she whispered, a fierce promise against her ear.
How could she do anything else?
A/N:
That was Carol. And Amy. You wanted to know what was happening, how Amy got back to her home, why the radio announcement went the way it did. Now you do.
I don't have a ton to say beyond that. This chapter is… I always wanted to do Carol justice in this story. I read the canon interlude so many times to get this right. And while the subject matter is… less than pleasant, I hope I managed that much. If you want more reading on the subject, today I'll link some of the external reading I did on Abusive Parenting, and how they perceive their own children. It helped me get some of the particulars right. It is not light reading. Otherwise, take care of yourselves out there.
This last point is... sorta spoilers? Though it's more to do with my direction as an author, so read at your own discretion
Tori will never be at risk of being raped or mind controlled by Amy again. No matter what the text might look like, know on the narrative level I'm never going to write that. Now granted, the threat of that happening might be real for Tori, and she'll react accordingly. But if you're sensitive to the content itself, know that I'm never going to write that. This story has not, is not, and will never be about that.
She woke to a grumbling stomach and the sound of birdsong outside her window; an offensively cheerful high-pitched noise that would not shut up and seemed determined to burrow inside her ears and force her out of bed at whatever unholy hour this was.
Carol turned to the side to glance at her alarm clock, and sighed. Six thirty. Her alarm would go off in about twenty minutes; there was no point in trying to get more sleep now. Besides, the gnawing ache in her stomach meant it was pointless to try. She needed to eat.
Tossing the sheets off her side of the bed and stretching as she sat up, Carol looked over at the man sleeping to her left.
Mark. He had been so… different, lately. She didn't know what to make of it. For so long the things in his head made it difficult to do anything. From cleaning the house, to taking out the trash, to caping, to feeding himself, Carol had stopped trusting her husband a long time ago.
It had been even worse after Leviathan. Mark had never really recovered from the coma or the brain damage he'd suffered defending their home. Before he couldn't be trusted to feed himself; afterward he'd had to be helped. Part of her had never quite forgiven him for that. For leaving her without leaving her, for taking away what little support she had, however unreliable, and replacing it with more of a burden than ever. It was a crude, ugly, awful thing to think; still more so to say. But when your partner of two decades was reduced to a near-vegetable with the functionality of a two year old it was hard to be charitable.
Lips pressed together in a tight, unhappy line, Carol watched Mark's face carefully as he snored. She brushed his over-long fringe away from his face and frowned. It had been too long since any of them had gotten a haircut, and it was starting to show.
Until recently, she would've cut his hair herself. Who else was going to see him, to notice? But then… Amy had done what she'd always said she couldn't. What, if Victoria was to be believed, it had taken Bonesaw threatening her to do. She healed her husband. He wasn't just back to the way he was before Leviathan, he was better. Alert. Curious. Questioning. Almost like the man she'd fallen in love with twenty years ago.
If it had been love.
Had it?
Another growl from her stomach interrupted Carol's thoughts. Pondering how long Amy's "fix" would last could wait. Right now she needed food.
She carefully slipped out of her side of the bed, the sheets barely rustling as they settled down onto the mattress. Carol held her breath, then sighed when nothing happened. Mark had always been a light sleeper, prone to waking up at the worst times possible. She wasn't ready to deal with him this early in the morning. Not when she was still getting her thoughts together.
He stayed sleeping soundly as she softly padded around her bedroom, putting on a slim bathrobe before easing the door open. No noises, and this early in the morning meant her youngest wasn't likely to be up yet. One less thing to deal with.
As she made her way down to the kitchen, Carol ran through the list of tasks she had allotted for the day. There were some remaining items and cases at the firm she had to get to, Piggot had wanted a meeting about god knows what, and she hadn't heard back from Dragon yet on the details from the raid and fallout.
They might be keeping her out of the loop, but Carol wasn't stupid. The Dragonflight had been in the Bay for almost a week; Victoria had to be in one of the places they'd had under surveillance. But the PRT weren't telling her anything, and Dragon was ignoring her requests for an update–
Amy appeared, almost out of nowhere, right in front of her when she turned the corner. Carol bit back a scream. "Amy!" she snapped, heart in her throat, "what are you doing?"
The girl blinked at her in sleepy, startled confusion. "S-sorry. I was up. Needed food."
Carol took a deep breath as her heart settled back down. "Be careful next time, it's not safe to startle people like that while everyone is so on-edge. You of all people can't afford to be reckless or irresponsible with your safety."
The girl nodded, glancing down and to the side, avoiding eye contact. Carol frowned, but held her tongue. Frankly it was a miracle the girl wasn't giving her lip this early. She'd take any boon she could, at this point.
The silence held as the pair walked the rest of the way to the kitchen. Carol studied her other daughter out of the corner of her eye. Her shoulders were slightly hunched inwards; her spine bent forward. She'd need to give the girl another lesson on heroic posture; the public needed clear symbols of strength and morale more than ever at the moment. The bags under her eyes were darker than usual, but then again Carol could say the same thing of herself.
No one had slept well since they'd found Bonesaw in their living room. Amy had gone missing for days afterwards. Victoria barely said a word for just as long, and then she went missing too. And when Amy had finally come back, she'd been… different.
"What do you want me to do, Mark?" Carol hissed, facing off against him across the disordered living room. "What's your suggestion? Please, share! You clearly have opinions; let's hear them!"
The man in front of her tensed; his shoulders came up defensively and his jaw tightened. "I don't know!" he shot back. "But since I came to, both of our daughters have gone missing, and it's been a week! Are you even trying to find them?"
Carol scoffed. "Of course I'm trying! You think just because you haven't been watching over my shoulder, I've been doing nothing? I've been following up any leads I can find, while you've been stuck at home 'recovering'. But please, if you have any better ideas, enlighten me. Tell me how you're going to fix this."
Mark flinched at the icy venom in her tone. "That... dammit Carol, you know that's not fair. I'm not saying you've been doing nothing, we both want them back. But I just… I don't know what to do."
She softened. It was hard not to, when she felt the same way. Part of her wanted to call out his backpedaling, remind him that he'd questioned her commitment to her family only seconds ago, but she wrestled it down. Now wasn't the time to treat her home like a courtroom.
"I know, honey, I know," she sighed rather than follow the impulse. "I want them back too. But we don't even know if the Nine are fully gone. We can't just go traipsing into gang territory, hoping that we'll stumble across them on the streets. This isn't the Brigade anymore."
She clamped her mouth shut and forced herself to stop talking there. It would be so easy to continue. To say what they both knew but dared not voice. That New Wave had been circling the drain for a long time now, and with both Neil and Eric gone, there wasn't much hope of a revival. Nevermind this mess.
"We just have to keep calm, and pursue all the available leads," she said instead. "However small. It's the only thing we can do."
Mark nodded. "I know. It's just… it feels so awful. Like we're not doing enough."
Carol grit her teeth. As though she didn't know that. As though she didn't feel the same way. It wasn't her job to have to manage him like this; couldn't he see she was already shouldering the entire team? Her daughters were in the wind, Sarah was still grieving and in no condition to lead, Crystal was little better, and now her husband was–
A knock on the front door interrupted her thoughts. The two glanced at each other, before smoothly sitting up from the couch and approaching the door together. Carol reached out to the doorknob with her right hand, conjuring a hardlight sword behind her back. She didn't have to look at Mark to know he was pre-charging an orb to throw.
At least this much hadn't changed. Their domestic life was a mess, but in the field they still made a good team.
Carol tensed as she pulled the door open. If this was an enemy cape she'd have to shift to her Breaker state in an instant to avoid getting caught in Flashbang's signature attack. In that moment she could use the distraction to get behind them and–
Amy looked up at her. Her hand was still outstretched in preparation to knock again. She was soaked to the bone, giving her the look of a drowned rat, and the rainwater dripping off her tangled, sodden frizz didn't help the image. She was trembling like a leaf, and her teeth were audibly chattering. Her clothes clung to her thin frame, ratty sweater and stained jeans dark and wet. Her other hand was folded defensively across her chest.
Carol wanted to hit her.
The porcelain clattered against the stone countertop. The sound was like a gunshot in the cold, tense silence of the kitchen. Amy hunched in her seat, flinching at the noise. Carol didn't acknowledge the reaction as she poured a single serving of cereal into the bowl, setting the box down before turning to the fridge to get milk.
Amy hadn't been eating well these past few days. God only knew why. But as always, it fell to her to take up the slack. If she didn't feed the girl, it would be sure to blow back on her somehow. Besides, a certain part of her almost wanted to just to get her to stop moping.
She looked miserable, sitting slumped on the stool in front of the breakfast bar. She still wasn't meeting Carol's eyes, instead fiddling with a napkin on her lap. It wasn't as though Amy was usually responsive in the mornings, to say the least, but something was off here. Normally Carol would either be dragging the girl out of bed or trying to lure her downstairs with the scent of coffee. But Amy had been up before her.
She clenched her teeth. "Something wrong?"
Silence.
Carol let out a sigh, just barely escaping through her nose, and turned to get the coffee machine started. Maybe that would be enough of an incentive to talk. Normally she would be more willing to drag whatever it was out of the stubborn girl, but this early in the morning she couldn't be bothered. Eventually she'd either talk or stop sulking about it; one way or the other the problem would resolve itself.
"C-Carol?"
Ah. There it was.
"What did we say about that?" she said, still facing away.
A swallow. And then, "Mom?"
Carol finished pouring the coffee beans into the grinder, closing the top and fingering the on setting. The high pitched whining would make conversation difficult, and Amy clearly wanted to talk about this now. So she could wait.
"That's better," she said, turning around. "What is it?"
"It… it's about healing."
Carol's eyes hardened, her hands clenching beside her. No, she had to shut this down now. Couldn't let it take it fester, take root, transform into something she couldn't deal with later.
"What about it?" she said evenly.
Amy looked to the side. "I-I know you want me to." She seemed to realize what she was saying, and looked back at Carol. Her eyes were wide and desperate. "And I want to! I promise I want to!"
She let the silence drag. "...but?"
Amy looked away again, down at her hands clenched around the napkin. "I just… don't know if now is the right time. If it's too soon, if people will see why–"
"People will see what they always have," Carol said smoothly. "New Wave has a reputation, and we have to keep that going now."
"B-but if the heroes–"
Carol growled, slowly placing her hands down on the countertop.
It was better than the alternative.
"I don't care about the Protectorate. You need to heal. You need to fix what you broke. Or do I have to remind you about the mistake you made?"
The girl swallowed, blinking tears out of her eyes. "No, you don't." She swallowed to whet a dry throat, and nervously licked her lips. "Can... can I see her?"
Carol's lips thinned.
"Finish your first week of healing. By then she should be away from that villain, and we can discuss it." It had been hard enough to get Panacea public credit for resolving the situation, but she'd needed to do it, approval be damned. It gave her the PR to get back to healing without these ridiculous accusations on her back, and she'd prove herself then. Piggot would understand, once she stopped shouting and remembered how much good Panacea did.
"But I don't want to hear any more complaints until then, do you understand? No more whining. No more requests."
Amy took a shaky breath, and nodded. Her mouth was a tight, thin line.
It suited Carol just fine. She wasn't looking for a response.
"Where. Were. You?"
Amy flinched back, her eyes darting around the room in search of an escape, but Carol didn't give her any time to think. She advanced on the cowering girl, using her height to tower over her. She'd waited until Mark had left to go tell Sarah that they'd found Amy. He wanted to use his newfound agency, the independence.
And she wanted the chance to interrogate Amy about what had really happened.
"I-I don't–"
"Get to the point," Carol hissed. Her hands twitched by her sides. "I don't care how complicated you think it is. You left a week ago, and Victoria is gone."
She trembled, still not making eye contact. Carol didn't need to meet her eyes to know what was hiding in them. Guilt.
"S-so you know that Bonesaw had… forced me to heal Dad," Amy started hesitantly, glancing up at Carol. She bit her lip. If Amy wanted to try to win some leniency by starting with information Carol already knew, she'd play along for now. Anything to get the story out of her. Once she had Amy's account, she could pick it apart and cross-examine her to find the facts.
Amy paused, looking up with nervously imploring eyes and waiting for Carol to nod impatiently before continuing. "I was… running. From Bonesaw. From everyone. The Siberian was coming after me and I d-didn't want you to get involved."
Carol had been in enough court cases to know when a client was lying to her. Amy definitely wasn't telling the whole truth here, but the bit about the Siberian seemed real. And the subtle shudder and the glance at the missing fingers of her left hand all but confirmed it. She'd let it slide.
Amy swallowed. "So the... the Crawler thing happened. And Victoria was… hurt. The Undersiders brought her to me. To fix."
Carol ground her teeth. "And you trusted them?"
For the first time in the conversation Amy looked up at her, angry. "No, of course not," she snapped. "But I had to get Victoria, and they had her. It was the only way. I got her, and took her away from them."
"Fine. But if you had Victoria and healed her, what happened for the rest of the week?"
Amy looked down at the floor again. "I… Crawler did a lot to her. I had to heal her. But I didn't know how. I-I messed up."
Carol could not hit her daughter. She could not do that. Her nails dug into her palm. "What. Did. You. Do. To. Victoria?"
The girl quivered in front of her, hunching in on herself. "I-I tried to fix her. I p-promise I tried. Crawler got her with his spit, all this horrible acid and venom and enzymes and... s-so I made her a– a cocoon. To keep her together so I could heal her. A-and it was working, I got... I stabilized her and got her away from the Undersiders, as fast as I could. I found a workaround for how much biomass she'd lost. I fixed all the acid damage, I had the venom byproducts under control and I was cleaning up the leftover damage from the enzymes. But I– I got tired. It had been hours. And I hadn't slept, or eaten, or... so I took a break. Just a short one. I was scared and we were alone and I needed– I just needed someone to tell me it was okay."
She sniffled, blinking back tears. "S-so I changed a couple of things in her cocoon so she could give me a hug, a-and smile at me, and– and help me keep going, but... then I had to reverse what I'd done to keep healing her, and it caused complications, so I had to deal with those. And then I had to wait a while to be sure she was stable and all the healing was finished, s-so I took another break, and changed some more things, but... that caused more complications."
"What kind of complications?" Carol demanded. She felt sick. Something between the lines here was wrong; her instincts were screaming at her.
Amy sniffled again. Carol wasn't sure she'd even heard the question, or if this was all just pouring out unstoppably now that she'd started. "I... her hormonal and neurochemical levels were all unbalanced from all the pain and trauma and... stuff. So I put her in a trance so I could work on her. Without her backhanding me as she thrashed. And I had to put her further under because her body kept getting further and further from– and I was going to fix it, I was going to put everything right, put her back to normal and make her forget the whole thing so she wouldn't have to remember, but I just– I kept messing up and having to make more and more changes and it was getting harder and harder to fix them and get back to how she started, and I was so scared because... because she hated me. Hates me. For what I d-did to her."
Carol's hands flickered, fingers curling around weapons that weren't quite there. Yet. "So you're telling me that you violated your sister. And couldn't put her back together. For a week."
Amy nodded miserably. "I-I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go home. Not when she was l-like that. Wanted to fix it. But everything I did just... broke her worse."
And there it was. The thing she'd been so afraid of this whole time, ever since she'd locked eyes with that angry five year old in that closet all those years ago. The outcome she was so certain of since Sarah–damn her–had convinced her to take Amy.
She'd known it would end up like this. That this snake, this imitation of a daughter, would betray everything she loved. And yet now it had finally happened… she didn't feel anything. Maybe it was numbness. Guilt. Satisfaction at being proven right.
Deep breaths. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Carol hadn't been to therapy in close to two decades, but some of the little things still stuck. She knew if she reacted now, she'd explode. She'd tear the girl in front of her apart. And she couldn't do that when she didn't have all the information yet.
"So then why are you here?"
Amy snorted, wiping the snot from her nose. It spread across the back of her hand in a shimmery, slimy streak. "S-Skitter found me."
Carol's breath froze in her chest. A vice clamped around her ribs. Fear and rage curdled in her gut, coiling around one another in a writhing, crawling tangle. "What."
"S-she found me. Threatened to kill her unless I left. I… put her back. As best I could. Then I left. Didn't know where else to go. So."
It was the betrayal she'd always expected, always known was coming. Amy had broken her sister, and then abandoned her to a villain to save her own skin. But… Carol didn't see the gloating villain she'd been picturing all these years. Not Marquis' skin-crawling smirk. Not even that… man. Instead, she saw a small, scared, broken little girl. Someone who'd made a mistake, who hadn't known how to fix it, but had tried her best to help her sister anyway. Someone forced by a villain, by a captor, to do something awful.
Amy had hurt her sister. Had, from the sound of it, turned her body into something unrecognizable and twisted. But… she hadn't wanted to. She'd been trying to help. To rebuild her sister after Crawler had maimed her. And, villain or not, she'd succeeded.
Slowly, she stepped forward. Amy tensed, but didn't move. Carol's hands came up, palms out, and still she didn't move. That was what convinced her. That Amy was willing to stand there, in the knowledge that Carol could cut her in half, and think she deserved it.
She reached out, and pulled the girl into a hug. Amy squeaked but she didn't let go, holding her daughter tightly against her.
"We will find her," she whispered, a fierce promise against her ear.
How could she do anything else?
A/N:
That was Carol. And Amy. You wanted to know what was happening, how Amy got back to her home, why the radio announcement went the way it did. Now you do.
I don't have a ton to say beyond that. This chapter is… I always wanted to do Carol justice in this story. I read the canon interlude so many times to get this right. And while the subject matter is… less than pleasant, I hope I managed that much. If you want more reading on the subject, today I'll link some of the external reading I did on Abusive Parenting, and how they perceive their own children. It helped me get some of the particulars right. It is not light reading. Otherwise, take care of yourselves out there.
This last point is... sorta spoilers? Though it's more to do with my direction as an author, so read at your own discretion
Tori will never be at risk of being raped or mind controlled by Amy again. No matter what the text might look like, know on the narrative level I'm never going to write that. Now granted, the threat of that happening might be real for Tori, and she'll react accordingly. But if you're sensitive to the content itself, know that I'm never going to write that. This story has not, is not, and will never be about that.
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- Pronouns
- Male
Thanks, I hate it.
View: https://youtu.be/7tOkpntQtBM
Seriously, though. That was horrifically beautiful.
View: https://youtu.be/7tOkpntQtBM
Seriously, though. That was horrifically beautiful.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The stablest cape family in Brockton Bay. I think even Theo, Max and Kayden would say WTF.
Though the worst thing is that they are so deeply damaged that I can't guess when is the trauma acting or the person.
Though the worst thing is that they are so deeply damaged that I can't guess when is the trauma acting or the person.
Geas
Meat Thing
...
*steeples fingers*
So Amy all but outright flat out admitted to Carol what she did to Victoria, and Carol apparently rolled a natural twenty on her denial and let the subtext and the implications in Amy's tone sliiiiiide right past her. Right now I'd bet dollars to donuts that - at the moment - due to the way that conversation went, it's completely flown over Carol's head that Amy's 'violation' of Tori went a hell of a lot further than Amy is saying, or just doesn't want to consciously deal with it so she isn't.
And this chapter just makes it abundantly clear to me that Amy should have been taken from the Dallons years ago, following up with a court-ordered assessment to determine whether or not Victoria should be placed elsewhere as well. It also makes me uncomfortably aware that if I were ever crazy enough to write a self-insert fic, I'd probably give Carol Dallon cause to try to kill me.
I say this because I suspect I know exactly why things eventually got to this point with the Dallons, that this situation was eventually able to happen. I'm familiar with too many child abuse cases that I can see the parallels.
*steeples fingers*
So Amy all but outright flat out admitted to Carol what she did to Victoria, and Carol apparently rolled a natural twenty on her denial and let the subtext and the implications in Amy's tone sliiiiiide right past her. Right now I'd bet dollars to donuts that - at the moment - due to the way that conversation went, it's completely flown over Carol's head that Amy's 'violation' of Tori went a hell of a lot further than Amy is saying, or just doesn't want to consciously deal with it so she isn't.
And this chapter just makes it abundantly clear to me that Amy should have been taken from the Dallons years ago, following up with a court-ordered assessment to determine whether or not Victoria should be placed elsewhere as well. It also makes me uncomfortably aware that if I were ever crazy enough to write a self-insert fic, I'd probably give Carol Dallon cause to try to kill me.
I say this because I suspect I know exactly why things eventually got to this point with the Dallons, that this situation was eventually able to happen. I'm familiar with too many child abuse cases that I can see the parallels.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I really like the casual entitlement and dismissal of any perspectives not her own, giving herself permission to do whatever she wants, no matter how it affects other people.
And anyone disagreeing with her actions is obviously being unreasonable, otherwise they would be agreeing with her. They will come around and if they don't, it's just evidence that she shouldn't take their perspectives seriously.
A good depiction of the way abusers think.
And anyone disagreeing with her actions is obviously being unreasonable, otherwise they would be agreeing with her. They will come around and if they don't, it's just evidence that she shouldn't take their perspectives seriously.
A good depiction of the way abusers think.
Kaernetron
Feuergeist
- Location
- Weit, Weit dort Oben
And here is this story's reason why I want to knock Carol's teeth out with a brick. Seriously, that woman...
Krazyfan1
Worrying for the future.
- Location
- Australia
look on the bright side, Carol isn't immune to wasps.And here is this story's reason why I want to knock Carol's teeth out with a brick. Seriously, that woman...
Brightness 4.8
I don't know how long I spent staring at the ruins of that cafe, but by the time I got my bearings again night had fallen. I'd been doing that a lot recently. Losing time. Drifting off into reverie for hours. The wind had started to pick up in earnest now, the cooling earth combining with the still warm water of the Bay behind me to fuel an offshore breeze. It tugged playfully at the hem of my jacket, brushing along my arms and legs as if inviting me to follow it out to sea, away from this city of pain and prejudice.
I pulled my arms in close, shivering. Hours spent staring, and I hadn't come to any new conclusions or insights. Not that I'd really expected any. How was I meant to know if I'd really been 100% straight before? What kind of test was there for that? Who could I even trust to help me figure it out?
I bit my lip. No, I couldn't afford to go down that rabbit hole again. For the time being I had to focus on the immediate, actionable things. I was… attracted to Skitter. To Taylor. I could admit that. But acting on it would be a horrifically bad idea in every way imaginable.
For one thing, while I didn't want to get pulled into another panic spiral, it was an objective fact that I didn't know where these feelings were coming from. Skitter had saved me when I had no one else. She'd protected me over and over and over. How could I be sure that my feelings weren't misplaced gratitude or warmth from that? I didn't have to talk to a therapist to know starting any kind of a relationship with doubts like that was ripe for disaster.
And that assumed these feelings were even mine. If Amy had really changed that part of me… then I had no idea how deep the change went. Would it revert suddenly? Turn into a twisted parody of affection or deepen into her brand of sick obsession? Would it wink out when (if) things got sexual, or would adding sex into the mix trigger pathways of addiction designed to keep me caged? Maybe I was catastrophizing, but just the thought of the landmines that might be lurking in my hindbrain was awful enough that I felt like giving up on relationships for life.
And none of this was even touching on the fact that Taylor was still fucking Skitter! New Wave or not, she was still a Villain! In what world could anything between us possibly work? This wasn't some star crossed romance where the power of love and friendship prevailed! I'd had that life, and it died with Dean. I wasn't about to risk opening myself up like that again.
No. Better not to act on any of it. Keep my distance, set new boundaries if I needed them. Taylor would understand. Especially in light of the past few days. There was no need to complicate our already fragile relationship. I wouldn't force her to bear the burden of my sad obsession.
I shook my head, letting my hands hang loose by my sides. Slowly, sadly, I looked up at the cafe one last time. In the waning sunset, the play of shadows and light on broken glass gave it a pretty, fractured beauty. For a moment I was back in that afternoon with Dean so long ago, charmed by the cute tables, the nice waitstaff, by him. Not a care in the world.
Then it was just dark shapes in darkness, and Dean was dead again.
There was nothing left for me here.
It had taken some time to find my way back to Tay–Skitter's territory. I was approaching it at night, and most of the city still didn't have lighting, though some areas like downtown and the commercial district were starting to come back on. That left most of Taylor's area as patchy, feeble streetlights standing out in the inky blackness. It took me a good half an hour to find the specific flickery street lamp that stood a few doors down from her base. And that was where I was hovering now.
I worried at my bottom lip. What was I supposed to say, if she asked me what had happened? Where I'd gone? I didn't want to make things even more awkward than they already were. She didn't need to know about my likely misplaced feelings. But if she asked me directly… I felt like I owed her honesty, at this point.
I swallowed, and slowly unclenched my fist as a moth fluttered across it. There was nothing for it. If Taylor didn't ask, I wouldn't tell. If she did, I'd worry about it then. Either way, standing around here when she clearly knew where I was would just make things worse.
I let myself drift down, coming to a stop just in front of the door on the ground level. I went to knock, but the door opened inward on me before my fist made contact. I blinked as I came face to face with Charlotte. She didn't have her mask on.
For a moment, her silhouette blurred and Skitter was standing in her place. Thin silk skirt ragged and torn. Bugs streaming off of her in pulsing waves. Silk bodysuit and kevlar body armor still stained a dark red.
A blink, and she was Charlotte again.
"Boss told me you were standing outside," she said to my unasked question. "Figured you might need an invitation."
I smiled. One way or the other, it seemed that I had finally earned the girl's trust. Now I just had to keep it. Easier said than done.
"Thank you, it was getting cold out there."
Charlotte frowned, and I cursed inwardly. Of course she didn't know sign, and I was going to have to get the notebook and–
"She says thank you, she was getting cold," a voice from behind Charlotte whispered.
A shudder ran up my spine. I peeked over her shoulder and immediately regretted it. Taylor (and really who else could it have been?) had put together some kind of a vaguely humanoid shape of what looked like hornets and cockroaches and spoken through it. Or... vibrated, maybe? The sentence was almost incomprehensible through the buzzing and chittering, but it was close enough to make out the words. Christ, that was unsettling.
"You're welcome," Charlotte said, cutting off my thoughts. "Catch anything on your way back?"
I shook my head.
"I didn't see anything either," Taylor said. "We should be clear for the night."
I froze. That… that wasn't normal. It had been prickling at the back of my neck for a while, but suddenly it came together.
Skitter had never shown the ability to hear someone else that clearly through bugs. At least, not nearly this clearly. See me sign, yes. I hadn't figured out the details with her before now, but I'd signed enough without visual contact to know she could see me regardless. But she'd never had a full on conversation with someone she couldn't hear with her ears before. I'd noticed as much when I casually referenced bits of conversations I'd had with Charlotte and others, and she'd needed clarification earlier. And those had happened in the house with her! Unless she was truly frighteningly paranoid and had been keeping some of her cards close to her chest this whole time, something was off.
"I need to talk to you," I signed carefully. "Are you in your room?"
Taylors bug mass nodded at me (and what a sentence that was), so I took that as my cue to hurry upstairs. I tried to put my thoughts in order as I went, taking the longer inside route instead of just flying up to the roof entrance. Normally a sudden, unforeseen new trick like this… wouldn't be a big issue. Or at most I'd file it away as another power idiosyncrasy. Perhaps Taylor's emotional state interacting with her power expression.
But given recent events, I couldn't afford to write it off as just a fluke. Not after my aura had gone off that first day with Skitter and Bitch. And then again later. That… third hand from my forcefield. A million other tiny things I hadn't had time to put my finger on until now.
My power wasn't mine anymore. I didn't know how different it really was, but I was certain it had changed. And if there was a chance that was true for Taylor too, finding that out in combat could get us both killed. We needed to know going into whatever mess was coming next–and I knew something was coming, if only because it seemed like something always was–so we could plan ahead with full knowledge of the tools we had available.
Taylor was already waiting for me just beyond the entrance to the third floor. "Tori?" she said, inspecting me. Her mask was off, and her eyes were sharp and assessing. "Is something wrong? You were out past midnight."
I bit my lip. "Yes… and no."
She tensed, shoulders rising, one hand straying to where her mask hung from her hip. "Are we in danger? How close? Where?"
No, no, this was getting us onto the wrong subject. "Not that kind of problem. You heard Charlotte earlier."
Her brow furrowed. "Yes… I did. Did she say something else?"
I shook my head. "No. That's the point. How did you hear her, if you were up here?"
Taylor's face cleared. "Ah. I had my bugs near you. I heard through those."
Dammit, I was right. While this might be good in the long run… no cape liked talking about their powers. And especially not their triggers. I'd have to approach this carefully. "Have you always been able to do that?"
Taylor frowned, the tension disappearing as she considered. "No, it's recent. A few days ago I think. I tried before but anything like seeing or hearing would just blast me with garbled noise and fuzzy patches of light and dark and give me a migraine. But I can make out the odd word or sentence, sometimes. More so since Leviathan and the Nine than before." She looked back up at me. "Is this leading somewhere?"
I swallowed. "Trust me. Need data points. How do you sense through bugs normally?"
"Tori," she said, tensing slightly, "I don't know why you're suddenly asking me all about my powers–"
"Trust me," I begged, looking her dead in the eyes. "I think I might know what's going on. But I need to know for sure. Don't want to poke something sensitive by accident."
She looked at me for a long moment. "Fine. I can sense every bug in my range individually. And move them too."
For a moment, all thought of my theory failed me. My jaw dropped as I struggled to process the sheer mind-boggling level of information and control that simple sentence implied. She knew where all of her bugs were to such a degree, without line of sight or a numerical limit? And could control them individually? I didn't know how many bugs on average there were in a city block, but it had to be millions. Maybe tens of millions. For the kind of swarms she could gather in the range I'd seen her demonstrate? I wouldn't be surprised if it edged into tens of billions.
Fuck, if anything proved our powers came from somewhere else, this was it. No human brain could manage that kind of processing power. Every human brain on the planet put together would probably fall short.
Okay, okay. No getting lost in the absurdity of Skitter's power. Calm down, focus on the immediate. I needed to confirm restrictions. "No line of sight? Numerical limit? Can you perceive space or distance through bugs alone?"
She nodded. "No limit that I've found, if they're in my range they're mine. And I'm not sure if judging space is accurate, it's not like it's attached to a distance measurement unless I have a comparison. But I know where all of them are just like I know where my hand is when I'm not looking."
Proprioception. That's what she was talking about, except outsourced and externalized to a scale I'd never heard of. Not only tracking every bug, but also every bug's position relative to the rest. I'd treated her swarm as an extension of her body before, but I'd never realized it was so literal. I'd have to figure out how to better exploit that later.
"Okay. Last question, I promise. What were you feeling when you started to hear through them? When you heard through them best?"
Her shoulders went right back up, and she glared at me. I didn't look away. I knew what I was asking, knew what she'd likely say. But this was too important not to be sure.
"Alone," she said finally. "Scared. Helpless."
I let out a breath. "Thank you, Taylor."
She huffed. "Here's where you tell me why you needed to know."
I held in a knowing look. Not the time. "Have you heard of Sechen ranges?" My hands ached as I painstakingly spelt the unfamiliar word out sign by sign.
She cocked her head at me. "I don't believe so. Not with that term anyways."
I looked around the room. While I could explain this verbally, a diagram was usually better. Taylor seemed to understand my look, as she had her bugs pick up a pocket notepad from the nearby bookshelf and fly it to us, along with a pen. I watched the coordination with new appreciation - a dozen wasps all gripping the edges of the book, spaced far apart enough that their wingbeats didn't interfere with each other, flying in perfect formation - and gave her a thankful look before setting it down on the table.
I flipped to a two-page spread and started to draw a basic diagram of a humanoid figure, along with the twelve power classifications. Opposite it, I wrote: "You know the basic power classifications by now. Has anyone told you the theory of emotional links between them and triggers?"
Taylor shook her head almost before I finished the sentence. Alright, good to know what I was working with. "Researchers hypothesize that certain types of powers are more prevalent during certain emotional states while triggering. It's not exact, but it is a correlation. Master powers, for instance, are typically linked with isolation"
I could feel her tense next to me. "Your point being?"
I finished the diagram, and focused on the link between the outline of the human I'd drawn and the link to the 'Master' label.
"Sechen ranges are a further corollary to this"
I wrote the word 'isolation' inside the person.
"As your feelings more closely match the state of your trigger"
I drew an arrow towards 'Master'.
"Your power gets stronger. Faster. More reliable or pliable. Focused."
Another arrow, back to the person.
"This in turn influences your emotional state in that moment, causing a feedback loop with power expression and experimentation"
I turned back to her, and I didn't need to explain more to see that she'd understood.
"Yeah," Taylor said, taking a step forward to look at the diagram more closely. "I hadn't heard of that name before. But Li–Tattletale explained it to me in similar terms."
I tried to ignore that near slip.
"Have you noticed this yourself?"
She nodded. "Sometimes my power is a bit quicker to respond. My range tends to fluctuate. At first we thought it was random, but she pinned a lot of the behavior according to this. The closer I am to…" she paused, and I let her work through the moment herself. This was part of the reason why I wanted to be so delicate about this. "The closer I am to that," she said finally, "the bigger it is."
"Right." That made sense, her trigger condition seemed a fairly straightforward emotional link in that respect. "I was afraid of that."
Taylor looked at me. "Afraid? Why? Knowing more about our powers is good."
I closed my eyes, and took a second to put my feelings into words. "Yes, knowing our powers is good. The problem is that we don't."
She frowned. "What do you mean?"
I opened my eyes, glaring at her. "What do you mean what do I mean? Taylor, these ranges are supposed to be temporary. Do you feel that way right now?"
She shook her head.
"Then what is Charlotte telling the kids downstairs?" I pressed.
She stilled as my point hit home, and opened her mouth, but I kept going before she could speak. "We're in a power vacuum right now, Taylor. Coil and the Travelers are gone, and Dragon is probably already on the way out. If you want to keep doing this, you need to know exactly what you can do and how. For the civilians at the very least. And you just finished telling me your power may be changing permanently and you don't know why. We need to test this, both of us."
"Both of us?" she asked. "Tori, I don't know why you're so upset about this. If my power is changing we can find out–"
"It's not just you!"
The silence hung over us. My hands shook from the force I'd finished the last sign with, one trembling finger pointing at her.
"My aura. My forcefield. That hand," I stumbled over the word, "that came out of me a few days ago. None of that is normal. I have no idea how much is different, how much Amy might have changed."
I swallowed. My fingers ached, bones throbbing painfully in time with my pulse.
"So you're saying our powers, yours and mine, are different. Changing."
I nodded. The moth from earlier brushed my cheek. She stewed in broody silence for a moment. Then...
"Okay then."
I blinked. What? What was okay about this? I looked up, and had to hold back a groan. Taylor's jaw was set, and the look in her eyes was one I knew all too well at this point.
"If our powers have changed, we just need to test them to see what's new. Together."
Well. That just left me to do a long session of power testing, while trying not to step on any trigger landmines, right after I realized what my feelings were.
Fuck.
A/N:
I really love this aspect of Tori's arc. Obviously it's fit in between everywhere else, but the realization of her (maybe) feelings isn't an all at once moment. Rather it's the point beyond which she starts to interrogate everything she feels about Taylor. Is the trust real? Where does it come from? Is she just bonding to her savior? Is this affection platonic? Romantic? How can she tell?
Maybe this is just me being ace-spec, but I tend to think the actual lines between romantic and platonic affection are actually a lot simpler than people think. If you try and get yourself out of the box of "my partner is my end all be all and everyone else is secondary", it turns out a lot of the behaviors and feelings you associate with romantic intention also translate to friendship. Only the context changes. But if you don't have that context, how can you tell?
Anyways, today's rec is another fic by JarHills. Graceful Beginnings tells us the story of Weaver trying to get used to the Chicago Wards, and figuring out where her boundaries are. Prescient for this chapter. It's a oneshot, and it features a rare pair so well done here that I'm totally not obsessed with the idea of their dynamic now. Nope.
I pulled my arms in close, shivering. Hours spent staring, and I hadn't come to any new conclusions or insights. Not that I'd really expected any. How was I meant to know if I'd really been 100% straight before? What kind of test was there for that? Who could I even trust to help me figure it out?
I bit my lip. No, I couldn't afford to go down that rabbit hole again. For the time being I had to focus on the immediate, actionable things. I was… attracted to Skitter. To Taylor. I could admit that. But acting on it would be a horrifically bad idea in every way imaginable.
For one thing, while I didn't want to get pulled into another panic spiral, it was an objective fact that I didn't know where these feelings were coming from. Skitter had saved me when I had no one else. She'd protected me over and over and over. How could I be sure that my feelings weren't misplaced gratitude or warmth from that? I didn't have to talk to a therapist to know starting any kind of a relationship with doubts like that was ripe for disaster.
And that assumed these feelings were even mine. If Amy had really changed that part of me… then I had no idea how deep the change went. Would it revert suddenly? Turn into a twisted parody of affection or deepen into her brand of sick obsession? Would it wink out when (if) things got sexual, or would adding sex into the mix trigger pathways of addiction designed to keep me caged? Maybe I was catastrophizing, but just the thought of the landmines that might be lurking in my hindbrain was awful enough that I felt like giving up on relationships for life.
And none of this was even touching on the fact that Taylor was still fucking Skitter! New Wave or not, she was still a Villain! In what world could anything between us possibly work? This wasn't some star crossed romance where the power of love and friendship prevailed! I'd had that life, and it died with Dean. I wasn't about to risk opening myself up like that again.
No. Better not to act on any of it. Keep my distance, set new boundaries if I needed them. Taylor would understand. Especially in light of the past few days. There was no need to complicate our already fragile relationship. I wouldn't force her to bear the burden of my sad obsession.
I shook my head, letting my hands hang loose by my sides. Slowly, sadly, I looked up at the cafe one last time. In the waning sunset, the play of shadows and light on broken glass gave it a pretty, fractured beauty. For a moment I was back in that afternoon with Dean so long ago, charmed by the cute tables, the nice waitstaff, by him. Not a care in the world.
Then it was just dark shapes in darkness, and Dean was dead again.
There was nothing left for me here.
It had taken some time to find my way back to Tay–Skitter's territory. I was approaching it at night, and most of the city still didn't have lighting, though some areas like downtown and the commercial district were starting to come back on. That left most of Taylor's area as patchy, feeble streetlights standing out in the inky blackness. It took me a good half an hour to find the specific flickery street lamp that stood a few doors down from her base. And that was where I was hovering now.
I worried at my bottom lip. What was I supposed to say, if she asked me what had happened? Where I'd gone? I didn't want to make things even more awkward than they already were. She didn't need to know about my likely misplaced feelings. But if she asked me directly… I felt like I owed her honesty, at this point.
I swallowed, and slowly unclenched my fist as a moth fluttered across it. There was nothing for it. If Taylor didn't ask, I wouldn't tell. If she did, I'd worry about it then. Either way, standing around here when she clearly knew where I was would just make things worse.
I let myself drift down, coming to a stop just in front of the door on the ground level. I went to knock, but the door opened inward on me before my fist made contact. I blinked as I came face to face with Charlotte. She didn't have her mask on.
For a moment, her silhouette blurred and Skitter was standing in her place. Thin silk skirt ragged and torn. Bugs streaming off of her in pulsing waves. Silk bodysuit and kevlar body armor still stained a dark red.
A blink, and she was Charlotte again.
"Boss told me you were standing outside," she said to my unasked question. "Figured you might need an invitation."
I smiled. One way or the other, it seemed that I had finally earned the girl's trust. Now I just had to keep it. Easier said than done.
"Thank you, it was getting cold out there."
Charlotte frowned, and I cursed inwardly. Of course she didn't know sign, and I was going to have to get the notebook and–
"She says thank you, she was getting cold," a voice from behind Charlotte whispered.
A shudder ran up my spine. I peeked over her shoulder and immediately regretted it. Taylor (and really who else could it have been?) had put together some kind of a vaguely humanoid shape of what looked like hornets and cockroaches and spoken through it. Or... vibrated, maybe? The sentence was almost incomprehensible through the buzzing and chittering, but it was close enough to make out the words. Christ, that was unsettling.
"You're welcome," Charlotte said, cutting off my thoughts. "Catch anything on your way back?"
I shook my head.
"I didn't see anything either," Taylor said. "We should be clear for the night."
I froze. That… that wasn't normal. It had been prickling at the back of my neck for a while, but suddenly it came together.
Skitter had never shown the ability to hear someone else that clearly through bugs. At least, not nearly this clearly. See me sign, yes. I hadn't figured out the details with her before now, but I'd signed enough without visual contact to know she could see me regardless. But she'd never had a full on conversation with someone she couldn't hear with her ears before. I'd noticed as much when I casually referenced bits of conversations I'd had with Charlotte and others, and she'd needed clarification earlier. And those had happened in the house with her! Unless she was truly frighteningly paranoid and had been keeping some of her cards close to her chest this whole time, something was off.
"I need to talk to you," I signed carefully. "Are you in your room?"
Taylors bug mass nodded at me (and what a sentence that was), so I took that as my cue to hurry upstairs. I tried to put my thoughts in order as I went, taking the longer inside route instead of just flying up to the roof entrance. Normally a sudden, unforeseen new trick like this… wouldn't be a big issue. Or at most I'd file it away as another power idiosyncrasy. Perhaps Taylor's emotional state interacting with her power expression.
But given recent events, I couldn't afford to write it off as just a fluke. Not after my aura had gone off that first day with Skitter and Bitch. And then again later. That… third hand from my forcefield. A million other tiny things I hadn't had time to put my finger on until now.
My power wasn't mine anymore. I didn't know how different it really was, but I was certain it had changed. And if there was a chance that was true for Taylor too, finding that out in combat could get us both killed. We needed to know going into whatever mess was coming next–and I knew something was coming, if only because it seemed like something always was–so we could plan ahead with full knowledge of the tools we had available.
Taylor was already waiting for me just beyond the entrance to the third floor. "Tori?" she said, inspecting me. Her mask was off, and her eyes were sharp and assessing. "Is something wrong? You were out past midnight."
I bit my lip. "Yes… and no."
She tensed, shoulders rising, one hand straying to where her mask hung from her hip. "Are we in danger? How close? Where?"
No, no, this was getting us onto the wrong subject. "Not that kind of problem. You heard Charlotte earlier."
Her brow furrowed. "Yes… I did. Did she say something else?"
I shook my head. "No. That's the point. How did you hear her, if you were up here?"
Taylor's face cleared. "Ah. I had my bugs near you. I heard through those."
Dammit, I was right. While this might be good in the long run… no cape liked talking about their powers. And especially not their triggers. I'd have to approach this carefully. "Have you always been able to do that?"
Taylor frowned, the tension disappearing as she considered. "No, it's recent. A few days ago I think. I tried before but anything like seeing or hearing would just blast me with garbled noise and fuzzy patches of light and dark and give me a migraine. But I can make out the odd word or sentence, sometimes. More so since Leviathan and the Nine than before." She looked back up at me. "Is this leading somewhere?"
I swallowed. "Trust me. Need data points. How do you sense through bugs normally?"
"Tori," she said, tensing slightly, "I don't know why you're suddenly asking me all about my powers–"
"Trust me," I begged, looking her dead in the eyes. "I think I might know what's going on. But I need to know for sure. Don't want to poke something sensitive by accident."
She looked at me for a long moment. "Fine. I can sense every bug in my range individually. And move them too."
For a moment, all thought of my theory failed me. My jaw dropped as I struggled to process the sheer mind-boggling level of information and control that simple sentence implied. She knew where all of her bugs were to such a degree, without line of sight or a numerical limit? And could control them individually? I didn't know how many bugs on average there were in a city block, but it had to be millions. Maybe tens of millions. For the kind of swarms she could gather in the range I'd seen her demonstrate? I wouldn't be surprised if it edged into tens of billions.
Fuck, if anything proved our powers came from somewhere else, this was it. No human brain could manage that kind of processing power. Every human brain on the planet put together would probably fall short.
Okay, okay. No getting lost in the absurdity of Skitter's power. Calm down, focus on the immediate. I needed to confirm restrictions. "No line of sight? Numerical limit? Can you perceive space or distance through bugs alone?"
She nodded. "No limit that I've found, if they're in my range they're mine. And I'm not sure if judging space is accurate, it's not like it's attached to a distance measurement unless I have a comparison. But I know where all of them are just like I know where my hand is when I'm not looking."
Proprioception. That's what she was talking about, except outsourced and externalized to a scale I'd never heard of. Not only tracking every bug, but also every bug's position relative to the rest. I'd treated her swarm as an extension of her body before, but I'd never realized it was so literal. I'd have to figure out how to better exploit that later.
"Okay. Last question, I promise. What were you feeling when you started to hear through them? When you heard through them best?"
Her shoulders went right back up, and she glared at me. I didn't look away. I knew what I was asking, knew what she'd likely say. But this was too important not to be sure.
"Alone," she said finally. "Scared. Helpless."
I let out a breath. "Thank you, Taylor."
She huffed. "Here's where you tell me why you needed to know."
I held in a knowing look. Not the time. "Have you heard of Sechen ranges?" My hands ached as I painstakingly spelt the unfamiliar word out sign by sign.
She cocked her head at me. "I don't believe so. Not with that term anyways."
I looked around the room. While I could explain this verbally, a diagram was usually better. Taylor seemed to understand my look, as she had her bugs pick up a pocket notepad from the nearby bookshelf and fly it to us, along with a pen. I watched the coordination with new appreciation - a dozen wasps all gripping the edges of the book, spaced far apart enough that their wingbeats didn't interfere with each other, flying in perfect formation - and gave her a thankful look before setting it down on the table.
I flipped to a two-page spread and started to draw a basic diagram of a humanoid figure, along with the twelve power classifications. Opposite it, I wrote: "You know the basic power classifications by now. Has anyone told you the theory of emotional links between them and triggers?"
Taylor shook her head almost before I finished the sentence. Alright, good to know what I was working with. "Researchers hypothesize that certain types of powers are more prevalent during certain emotional states while triggering. It's not exact, but it is a correlation. Master powers, for instance, are typically linked with isolation"
I could feel her tense next to me. "Your point being?"
I finished the diagram, and focused on the link between the outline of the human I'd drawn and the link to the 'Master' label.
"Sechen ranges are a further corollary to this"
I wrote the word 'isolation' inside the person.
"As your feelings more closely match the state of your trigger"
I drew an arrow towards 'Master'.
"Your power gets stronger. Faster. More reliable or pliable. Focused."
Another arrow, back to the person.
"This in turn influences your emotional state in that moment, causing a feedback loop with power expression and experimentation"
I turned back to her, and I didn't need to explain more to see that she'd understood.
"Yeah," Taylor said, taking a step forward to look at the diagram more closely. "I hadn't heard of that name before. But Li–Tattletale explained it to me in similar terms."
I tried to ignore that near slip.
"Have you noticed this yourself?"
She nodded. "Sometimes my power is a bit quicker to respond. My range tends to fluctuate. At first we thought it was random, but she pinned a lot of the behavior according to this. The closer I am to…" she paused, and I let her work through the moment herself. This was part of the reason why I wanted to be so delicate about this. "The closer I am to that," she said finally, "the bigger it is."
"Right." That made sense, her trigger condition seemed a fairly straightforward emotional link in that respect. "I was afraid of that."
Taylor looked at me. "Afraid? Why? Knowing more about our powers is good."
I closed my eyes, and took a second to put my feelings into words. "Yes, knowing our powers is good. The problem is that we don't."
She frowned. "What do you mean?"
I opened my eyes, glaring at her. "What do you mean what do I mean? Taylor, these ranges are supposed to be temporary. Do you feel that way right now?"
She shook her head.
"Then what is Charlotte telling the kids downstairs?" I pressed.
She stilled as my point hit home, and opened her mouth, but I kept going before she could speak. "We're in a power vacuum right now, Taylor. Coil and the Travelers are gone, and Dragon is probably already on the way out. If you want to keep doing this, you need to know exactly what you can do and how. For the civilians at the very least. And you just finished telling me your power may be changing permanently and you don't know why. We need to test this, both of us."
"Both of us?" she asked. "Tori, I don't know why you're so upset about this. If my power is changing we can find out–"
"It's not just you!"
The silence hung over us. My hands shook from the force I'd finished the last sign with, one trembling finger pointing at her.
"My aura. My forcefield. That hand," I stumbled over the word, "that came out of me a few days ago. None of that is normal. I have no idea how much is different, how much Amy might have changed."
I swallowed. My fingers ached, bones throbbing painfully in time with my pulse.
"So you're saying our powers, yours and mine, are different. Changing."
I nodded. The moth from earlier brushed my cheek. She stewed in broody silence for a moment. Then...
"Okay then."
I blinked. What? What was okay about this? I looked up, and had to hold back a groan. Taylor's jaw was set, and the look in her eyes was one I knew all too well at this point.
"If our powers have changed, we just need to test them to see what's new. Together."
Well. That just left me to do a long session of power testing, while trying not to step on any trigger landmines, right after I realized what my feelings were.
Fuck.
A/N:
I really love this aspect of Tori's arc. Obviously it's fit in between everywhere else, but the realization of her (maybe) feelings isn't an all at once moment. Rather it's the point beyond which she starts to interrogate everything she feels about Taylor. Is the trust real? Where does it come from? Is she just bonding to her savior? Is this affection platonic? Romantic? How can she tell?
Maybe this is just me being ace-spec, but I tend to think the actual lines between romantic and platonic affection are actually a lot simpler than people think. If you try and get yourself out of the box of "my partner is my end all be all and everyone else is secondary", it turns out a lot of the behaviors and feelings you associate with romantic intention also translate to friendship. Only the context changes. But if you don't have that context, how can you tell?
Anyways, today's rec is another fic by JarHills. Graceful Beginnings tells us the story of Weaver trying to get used to the Chicago Wards, and figuring out where her boundaries are. Prescient for this chapter. It's a oneshot, and it features a rare pair so well done here that I'm totally not obsessed with the idea of their dynamic now. Nope.
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- Location
- Earth, probably.
- Pronouns
- None/Any
She was so caught up in the euphoria (and fear) of learning more about powers that she momentarily forget she was a being with serious trauma and new, unexpected feelings.