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There is a Bar at the End of All Things. If one isn’t looking too closely (or is perhaps watching much, much too closely) when something ends, a glimpse of it can be perceived. The last credits rolling past after a movie, the final bite of pizza sliding down into one’s gullet, the dying light from a gunshot and the last embers of life they herald. The end of anything is all it takes to see a flash of neon light or hear the clink of glasses together. Most people who chance upon this phenomenon pay it no mind. They conclude it’s a trick of the eye, something they misheard, or the questionable leftovers they ate an hour ago having unexpected hallucinogenic properties.
Taylor Hebert is not most people. Between the crack of gunshots, she hears the crack of peanuts.
In the middle of a forest.
There are reasonable explanations for this improbable inclusion. Her fractured mind or her failing body. Perhaps even the woman with the gun felt a tad bit snacky as she splattered Taylors brain across the forest floor. But no, Taylor hears the Bar as she slowly topples to the ground. And perhaps it is her damaged mind and body or just one last curiosity capturing her imagination as she dies, but she latches onto that noise and follows it back to its source.
“Oh, I didn’t expect you too.” Taylor blinks, the twisted bent of her thoughts breaking. She lifts her eyes and stiffens upon finding herself staring face to not-face at the skull of a skeleton. Said skeleton pops a peanut— the peanut—into its mouth with a hand cracked and yellowed with age before reducing it to pieces with equally timeworn teeth. The shadows cast by the pale cowl encasing its head shift, and for a brief moment, Taylor is half convinced the skull rolls its eyes. “Of course you would show up now.”
There are no bugs in the Bar. Or if there are, they are beyond her passenger’s ability to control. Either seems equally plausible when face-to-face with a desiccated skeleton eating peanuts . The why doesn’t matter for the moment. What does matter, or so Taylor thinks, is how she can defend herself if whatever Master is controlling this abomination turns on her.
There are other means to defend herself, but none quite as effective as her bugs. The knotted table between her and the skeleton is solid, pale wood she almost certainly cannot break into usable pieces, but the bowl of peanuts resting on it is another story. There’s also a wall packed full of liquors in bottles both familiar and alien behind the bar, stacked glasses beneath them, and even a strangely antiquated CRT TV perched upon a hefty wall stand. A soccer match, of all things, plays out on the screen. A team decked out in black and gold regalia is several goals behind their opponents in white.
“There’s no sense worrying about all that.” The skeleton’s words bring Taylor’s full focus back to it just as it swallows, the remnants of the nut that brought her to the Bar vanishing down the seemingly bottomless maw where their throat ought to be. “If I come for you, there will be nothing you can do to stop me. I’m relentless like that.”
Had it just read her thoughts? No, impossible. She had worked with Lisa long enough to know how easy it was to mistake predictive and deductive powers for mindreading.
“Skitter. No, Taylor .”
Taylor’s gaze snaps to the left enough to find who said that, still refusing to allow the skeleton out of her sight. It is a near thing, however, as sheer surprise nearly tugs her gaze fully to Victoria Dallon, who is seated to her left in an unfamiliar, hooded costume of black and gold. The spikes and overall dark design are nothing like the costume Taylor saw her wearing during the battle against the Nine. “Glory Girl? How? You’re in—”
“The Asylum?” Taylor’s mouth clicks closed. It’s strange hearing the hero speak so matter-of-factly about what many would consider a terrible place to be. “It’s complicated, and we have bigger fish to fry.”
Victoria’s words carry no animosity directed towards Taylor. She could work with that. Her eyes settle more firmly on the skeleton minion again. “Have you found the Master yet?”
The skeleton’s hand lifts to press against its face, the shadows of its cowl once again playing tricks on Taylor’s eyes. It is impossible for mere bones to so clearly convey such weary exasperation. “Oh you’re going to be an absolute bore if I let you persist with this drivel. Do keep up won’t you, Taylor Hebert?”
A knowledge— No, a Truth enters Taylor. A part of her rises up in protest—her Passenger?—but It cannot be resisted. It is the Truth , and the Truth is . It sweeps into her as an overwhelming tide that slithers into place and solidifies. A fundamental fact of how it all works, a stolen puzzle piece she’s been unknowingly missing her entire life, cast anew from the empty mold of its predecessor. She knows this... Knowledge—and dammit, she cannot even think of It as anything less than Above her—is not her own, but its validity is unassailable.
She does not sit across the table from raised remains or any other approximation of such a defilement. No, she sits in the presence of Death, swathed in His pale robes and the comfortable embrace of His sanctum, the Bar at the End of All Things...
... and He is still eating peanuts.
“What did You just do to me?” Taylor grips the table, the pale wood a lifeline keeping her afloat in a sea threatening to engulf her.
“He did it to me too.” Taylor’s eyes minutely jerk towards Victoria, but she still refuses to allow Death out of her sight. “I’m sorry.”
It is a strange feeling to have Victoria Dallon, golden child of the New Wave, empathize with her. It is also not what demands her attention. “‘Oh, I didn’t expect you too,’” Taylor repeats. “‘Of course you would show up now.’”
Death grunts, and Taylor’s hold tightens, the grain of the table coarse against the pads of her fingers, exposed through her torn gloves. The realization that she has two hands is abrupt enough to threaten derailment, but she manages to keep her focus. “What were You doing here when I arrived?”
Death’s response is as predictable as it is pedantic. “Eating peanuts.”
He cracks another goober, and Taylor only just barely restrains herself from smacking the bowl off the table out of pettiness. Death’s smug grin—trick of the light indeed—as He pops it into His mouth makes it clear He is toying with her. “You know what I meant.”
“I do know, yes.”
“Victoria?”
Her fellow parahuman is less inclined to play along with Death’s shenanigans. “He’s been interrogating me for my perspective about the events after Gold Morning.”
Taylor is unfamiliar with the name, but she can guess. “Scion’s rampage?”
“Yeah. You’ve missed... a lot of important events since disappearing.” Victoria leans forward, brow pinched and elbows planted, contrasting her loose forearms resting against the wood. Worried but trying not to show it. She likely knows it’s pointless in the face of His scrutiny, but if so, she’s going through the motions all the same. “I’ll fill you in later. If there is a later.”
And there it is. The crux of the issue. Taylor’s full attention returns to Death, and she imagines it won’t be leaving Him anytime soon. “You want to end the world.”
“‘End the world’ is such a brutal, incomplete truth.” Death swallows, hand already reaching for another peanut. “I want to end all of the worlds.”
Taylor had wanted to be better. To do things better . No regrets, she’d told the woman in the woods just minutes ago. No regrets, but she would do things differently if she got the chance. This place, this confrontation isn’t going back, but it is a chance. It’s an opportunity to make new choices, to approach problems from a fresh perspective, now that she’s seen where the way she’s been doing things leads.
“No.” But she can’t. There’s too much at stake to do anything less than be relentless. “I won’t allow it.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t understand. It’s unbecoming.” Death gestures over His shoulder, and the TV changes channels. The low resolution soccer match gives way to a video impossibly clear for the aged hulk of a relic, but it’s the video itself that truly grabs Taylor’s attention. Heartbreaker smashing his mouth against an unknown, doubtlessly mastered woman as she moans breathlessly. A white woman with a metal mask and crown leering at a black man pinned to the ground by a metal stake. Bonesaw gleefully stitching pieces of ebony skin to Mouse Protector’s body, the cheesy hero’s eyes spinning wildly in their sockets in obvious pain. Coil caressing Dinah’s sallow face as he asks questions of his ‘Pet.’
“People are more than just the sum of their failings,” Victoria pressed, her words passionate but composed. That more than anything makes it clear to Taylor the woman at her side is not Glory Girl, is not the reckless Brute who’d casually destroy whatever stood between her and her goal. “More than that, the monsters You’re showing here aren’t representative of the human race as a whole.”
“You still argue in favor of preserving this?” Death remarks with a tsk.
Behind Him the TV unfolds, video bleeding out into reality. Taylor’s mind buckles, struggling to make sense of what she’s seeing as atoms become pixels in a wave that engulfs the Bar until a mosaic of pain and suffering is all that’s left behind. Sophia shoving her into darkness and filth while Emma watches with malicious satisfaction. Mannequin slitting the throat of the gray-haired doctor in her Territory. Coil shooting her in the chest and leaving her for dead. The Butcher elbowing her, leaving her reeling on the ground with festering wounds and moving on to her friends next. The woman with the gun, its barrel aimed at Taylor’s head.
“This world has caused you both so much pain and suffering, and what’s been done unto you is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.”
Death is speaking, but He’s gone, as is Victoria and the table. Taylor is alone with the violence, consumed by it— engulfed . Her knife slips so easily into Lung’s eyes, carving them out. Coil tells her she isn’t a killer, but she puts a bullet in his brain for Dinah. Her swarm slips into Alexandria’s lungs, drowning her on dry land while Tagg unknowingly condemns himself to inevitable death. She guns down Aster in the same breath as Cherish and Screamer, a split second decision snuffing out a toddler’s life, ending her potential.
“Allowing it to linger is unjustifiable. Allowing you to linger is unjustifiable.”
All that pain and death, all at her hands.
All to one end. The clarity is brief, but it’s enough for her to manage, “Don’t underestimate us.”
The world stumbles. The violence doesn’t leave, but it fades, superseded. “You have no power here. There’s nothing you can... Ah.”
So many stars. The universe so vast.
“Interesting.”
We’re so small in the end.
Taylor lurches forward, catching herself on the pale table. Victoria mirrors her, panting. It’s over, gone back from where it came. Taylor spares the CRT TV a moment’s glance, quietly marveling at the innocuousness, then her eyes find Death’s empty sockets.
Those yellowed, desiccated fingers curl around another peanut. She expects Him to eat it, but He offers it to her instead. Bemused, she takes it.
“Try to stay out of trouble, hm? I’ll see you later.”
Then He is gone and with him so too the Bar and its pale wood and its horrible TV. Disoriented, Taylor shakes her head and finds she and Victoria are in a bar in plainclothes instead of costumes. A booth of dark, sleek wood with cushy seats, and a table to match. Someone scores a goal on one of the wall-mounted TVs, a flat screen, and patrons all around the bar cheer, glasses thrust into the air. Fuck, it’s even the same game from the Bar. It takes her moments to get her bugs on everyone in the room, and even then, she only feels marginally safer for the effort.
Victoria wets her lips. “What... just happened?”
Taylor eyes her, weighing her options. Whatever fate that forest held for her, she’s been given a second chance. To do better. To be better.
“No parahuman can read thoughts,” she murmurs, the din of the bar keeping the words between her and Victoria. “But Death? He’d already proven He could.”
Victoria considers that. “And something you thought about stayed His hand. What was it? How on Earth did you convince Him?”
Taylor looks around with her own eyes at the bar. At its patrons. At a world after Scion. At the world she helped save—twice now. It doesn’t feel different, and her chest tightens, unable to suppress the worry that all her effort meant nothing in the end.
She returns her attention to Victoria, and though her costume is gone, Taylor remembers it. She is different. It’s enough to make the tightness abate.
“I hurt a lot of people along the way, and I did all of it in the name of fixing things, making them better.” Taylor shrugs. “Ending everything everywhere, even in the name of stopping the suffering. He’d be a hypocrite to do it.”
Victoria smiles after a moment, a soft, thoughtful expression. Warmth replaces tightness, and for a moment, Taylor fears Victorias is using her aura. The thought is momentary and easily discarded. The feeling is too delicate for that.
“Well. I suppose you’ve done it again then. Thank you, Taylor.” She pauses, then her smile takes on a mischievous light as she nods in the direction of the soccer game on the TV. “Let’s hope the world never needs a hat trick, yeah?”
Taylor does not roll her eyes. She and Victoria don’t have that kind of relationship. But she does raise an eyebrow. “Let’s.”
“We should celebrate.” Victoria starts to scott out of the booth. “Have a favorite drink? It’s on me.”
“I’ll pass.” Taylor moves to follow. “Not my thing, and I need to figure out where I go from here.”
“Taylor.”
They’re within arm’s reach. Close enough that Victoria could stop her if she wanted. Instead, she holds out her hand in invitation. “At least let me call your friends? I’m sure they’re worried sick.”
Taylor eyes Victoria’s hand then considers the woman herself. She’s older. Not much, maybe a few years, but she’s grown. The girl who so carelessly hurt others in the name of heroism had changed.
“I would do it differently,” she’d told the woman in the woods, “given a chance.”
Taylor rolls the peanut still in her hand for a moment then clenches, cracking the shell. The fragments fall away, leaving two nuts behind.
“I... suppose one drink wouldn’t hurt.”