Chapter Text
Amna prayed for rain.
It was easier when it rained. Not by much. Nothing could make her duty truly easy but - easier. There was something perverse in telling people their loved ones were dead when the sun was shining and the birds were singing.
Which both were defiantly doing as she walked up the driveway to the Hebert household, boots crunching on the gravel. She was an alien presence, an intruder into a world which did not belong to her. Dress blacks, full regalia with medal ribbons spilling across her front, clipboard held rigid, all capped by a hijab in deep purple. PRT purple.
A swing-set stood at the side of the front yard, on a patch of grass, plastic furniture worn down and well loved.
It would never be used again.
She reached the front door. Paused. Took a breath. Knocked - three times, precise raps - and stepped back. She should have had a partner with her, by regulation and by custom. But this was a house of a Ward, and the number of officers cleared to know that identity - even in death - was too low for that.
The door creaked open a prudently narrow amount, a slim, tall woman looking out. There were bags under her eyes, curly hair a tangled mess, jumper ratty and creased. Clearly she hadn't slept. Amna had only seen Blink without her mask a handful of times, but the resemblance was uncanny.
"I am Captain Amna Najjar from the East-North-East Department of the Parahuman Response Teams," she said, the script old and familiar and not a comfort. "Are you Mrs Annette Hebert, the mother of Taylor Hebert?"
"I - yes. I am," Annette said, confusion and worry fighting across her face. Amna had been a casualty notification officer before, many times before, but each response was different. A particular and a delicate horror each time.
"I have an important message from the Chief Director of the PRT. May I come in?"
Annette opened the door wider, stepping back and gesturing Amna inside. "Would you like some tea?" she asked, the familiar courtesy obviously, so obviously, used as a shield for anxieties, to delay revelation.
"No, thank you," Amna replied. Genuine thanks. She liked tea. But it was not the time. She faced Annette fully, squaring up to it like a boxer about to take a punch. "Mrs Hebert. The Chief Director of the PRT has asked me to express her deep regret that your daughter, Taylor, was killed in action in Boston on May 15th. The Chief Director extends her deepest sympathy to you and your family in this time of tragic loss."
Annette staggered, physically staggered back, stabilising herself with a hand on the wall by force of will. Her face was grey, a clammy cast. "I - I hadn't heard anything and I thought she might be hurt but - dead. You're…you're sure?"
"We are, ma'am."
PRT search teams had recovered the body in the early hours of the morning. Not rescue teams. They were far beyond that. Amna had seen video feeds of it, of her, from Boston, by way of verification before notification. Video feeds of what was left. It would be a closed casket funeral. At least it had been fast - crushed by falling debris and cut in half by Leviathan's tail.
At least, Amna hoped it had been fast.
"I…I don't know what to say," Annette said, with obvious numbness.
Amna nodded. She didn't say that she understood, or any other bromide. Against regulation and pointless besides, because she didn't understand. Not truly. Her little sister was a Ward but, alhamdulillah, she had never been on anything like the other side of the conversation. But she could at least nod, some form of acknowledgement.
"A Casualty Assistance Officer will be in touch within 24 hours," she said, instead, script and tradition safeguarding against emotion. Not safeguarding. Not really. Papering over it. She held out the clipboard. "Can you sign here to verify that you will be available at this address?"
"I can, I - " Annette began, and then hiccuped, tears beginning to gather in her eyes. "She's dead? This isn't some sort of - I don't know but - "
"Yes, ma'am."
The clipboard was still outstretched. Annette took it with trembling hands. It took her three tries to sign it, the pen skidding across the paper, shoulders wracked with silent sobs, tears tracking. Amna had seen it before. All of it. It didn't help.
She gave the clipboard back to Amna.
"Once again," Amna said, "on behalf of the Chief Director and the PRT as a whole, our condolences for your loss."
Rote. Insufficient. All that there was to it.
Annette grabbed her hand, sudden but not hard, not disarming. Not like some people had tried. The grip was thin and her voice a whisper. "Could you…could you stay? Just - just for a bit. I just - " She broke off, and swallowed.
Amna removed her hand, as gently as she could, fingers peeling free.
"I'm sorry, Mrs Hebert," she said, and she was, but this was the reality of the situation. "I have eleven more visits to make today."
—
There was a funeral, of course. PRT arranged and Protectorate sponsored. A private service, just for people privy to Taylor's identity. Annette was invited. She went. Dry eyed. She wasn't done crying. She didn't think she'd ever be done, because each time she thought she'd exhausted it, wrung herself dry of tears with pallid nothing left behind, she would - stumble across something of Taylor's. Or a memory would fountain up. A food, a place, a name. And it would start all over again. Wrenching and gasping.
But this wasn't a funeral for Taylor. Not really. It was for Blink. For the Ward. Still had to go. Felt she had to.
It was a small affair. That had surprised her. It shouldn't have but it did, when she was ushered into the church by soft-voiced sympathetic-faced PRT officers. Thirty people, perhaps thirty five. No costumes that she could see, black suits and dresses all around, a sea of the same.
She wondered, brief and bitter, whether the PRT issued funeral clothes.
They gave her space. She was - glad of it. The first hours, the first day, had been grief in a haze, and piercing loneliness. The second still stood, the first receding from haze to broken glass clarity and jagged memory. Every memory was, now. Even the happy ones. Especially the happy ones. Minefields remembered.
It began with a eulogy. The Casualty Support Officer - and trust the PRT to economise, to compact, all of that into a capitalised rank and duty - had asked if she wanted to give one. She couldn't. Not here, at least. Not for Blink. She wanted to mourn - she was mourning her daughter. The separation wasn't real, Taylor had been both, for all she had downplayed that part of her life, had - had done a lot.
And would never do anything again.
Instead, a brown-skinned, athletic woman in a suit with an American flag lapel pin - Miss Militia, Annette thought, though she couldn't be sure - addressed them. "The Gospel tells us," she said, "that there is no greater act of love than sacrificing oneself for one's friends. In this respect, as in so many others, Taylor went above and beyond the call of duty. Without orders or communication, she faced down an Endbringer to save fourteen capes from the hospital. I have a number of friends who would not be alive today if not for her valour and devotion to others."
More followed in that mould.
Director Piggot, because Annette recognised her from the news, read a prepared statement - because it sounded like that, something tested and refined - about how Taylor had embodied, "the finest traditions of selfless service."
A heavyset man with a cropped beard said that she had done, "the Protectorate and the country proud."
"One of the best heroes I have ever had the privilege to serve with," said another. A child. Eleven. Twelve? One of the Wards, with the diction and bearing of a combat veteran.
It made her want to scream. She didn't. She wanted to. So badly.
Taylor wasn't a soldier, she wanted to say. She was a girl, a child. She should have been - going to school, gossipping, sneaking out late. Not patrolling, not training, not - not throwing her life away against monsters that no one, no one at all, had ever beaten. Not truly and not really. The service, the testimonies. They assumed it was - it was a valiant sacrifice. Regretful, yet dulce et decorum. A tragedy, but a right and proper one, in service to a greater cause.
It went on.
"Honoured the service," said one, a PRT officer.
"A hero, and a friend." Another Ward.
A Latino teenager stood, took the lectern. "Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord," he said, with absolute solemnity, something that should never have to be said. "And let perpetual light shine upon her. For the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God shall rest in peace. Amen."
Taylor hadn't even been Christian. Did they know? Did they care? It wasn't part of the script, part of the pageantry, the mime of remembrance without restitution or correction.
You sent my daughter to die. You sent my daughter to die. You sent my daughter to die.
And you won't even apologise.
—
Sophia stood in the ruins of her life and didn't know what to do next. It was literal and not literal and both. Taylor's room at the PRT. Their room, in every way that mattered. Moved in together fourteen months ago, a home for Sophia and one away from home for Taylor.
And now she had to disentangle what had been inextricably linked. She didn't know how. Didn't even know how to describe how she might do it. Taylor would have known. She always had the words, even when Sophia didn't or couldn't or - she'd always had the words.
She could keep everything, she thought, numbness allowing the temptation. She wanted-not wanted to. She didn't want to lose anything, not a thing of Taylor's. But she couldn't stand to look at them either and she couldn't stand -
Around all day. She crossed the room, opened a dresser, something something anything to do.
The cuddly pig fell from its perch on the top shelf. She caught it instinctively. Looked. Swallowed a sob and grinned all at once. Taylor's present to her for her fifteenth birthday. A gag gift, a joke neither of them - a joke she didn't remember. Taylor had called it Piggy, because her imagination had clearly run dry. Just a joke. But Sophia had kept it, and held it. Used it as a reminder, when the nightmares came and they did come and it helped. A bit.
That was a lie. It helped a lot more than a bit. Not as good as Taylor herself but - good, all the same.
Mortifying if anyone else knew about it. Kill-everyone-who-knew-then-herself mortifying. But not Taylor. The secret had been safe with her. Like everything else was - had been.
Everything except -
The memory hit like a punch, had the force of one, and she sat back on the bed, rumpling the covers. Reeling.
Sophia had broken her leg in Boston. Rubble in the water and snap and down and in the hospital, on a stretcher. Then Leviathan had changed course. Heading inland. Heading inland to kill them. But Taylor had appeared, blinking next to her and bringing her out, onto a hill far from it all. Safe.
Taylor had turned, gathered herself to jump back to the hospital. But sweat had been beading her brow, her legs were shaking. Sophia could remember it clear as day, clear as anything. She'd protested. "Please, it's too dangerous. You're nearly out of charges."
And Taylor had looked at her, grinned the way she always did. Said, "It'll be fine. See you in a sec, Sophs."
Disappeared.
Hadn't come back.
If she'd just listened, if she'd just stayed, please, just -
Three knocks on the door. Very neat. Dean's thing. It snapped her out of it, and she hid the pig under the covers, buying time by asking, "Who is it?"
"Dean," he said. "Can I come in?"
"I guess."
After all, if she didn't, he'd just loiter and be concerned. It was a harsh thing to think. True, though. And they - they were friends. But by association. Taylor and Victoria had been close, two motor-mouthed nerds, and Dean and Sophia were pulled along in their wake.
He let himself in. She was still sitting on the bed. They looked at each other.
"I don't need your sympathy," she said.
She didn't. She didn't.
"I don't think you need it," he said, agreeably. A strength of his, peeling back defences and barriers, absolutely genuine and earnest. He was concerned and his concern was real and - Sophia thought, in a different world, that she might have hated it. But not here.
"Where's Victoria?" she asked, brusque, to cut off anything else.
"In the Bay, yelling at crabs," he said, and shrugged easily. "We all deal with grief differently."
"Really? You don't seem upset," she said - she snapped - and saw how wounded he looked in the barest instance - and said, "Sorry, that was - "
"It's fine," he said, a hair too quickly. "And if you need space?"
"No. It's." She took a breath. It caught. Another. It caught too. Pathetic. She knew she was being pathetic, but she couldn't stop herself, and she wished Emma were here - or Taylor, most of all, but she wasn't and she never would be. "I was just thinking."
Dean's expression, his faint smile, was unbearably patient. Inconsiderately considerate.
"I loved her," Sophia said, a rough-edged, rough-voiced admission and not to him, not really. A sounding board, if that. "And I never told her. It just, I couldn't find the right time." Undergirding it what she didn't say but they both knew, some faint notion, lingering from what therapy couldn't achieve, that it would be undignified. Weak.
"She knew," said Dean, with absolute confidence.
"I know that!" Sophia said. Paused. Continued, calmer, fractionally. "I know. But there's, there's something important to saying it and - and I never did."
And, she thought, with sick, twisting realisation made worse by the fact it wasn't truly a realisation, she never would.
—
I was pretty tired when I got onto the bus. Which is kind of stupid, when you think about. I'd just been going shopping, and there wasn't much tiring about that - even with the police patrols and the army barricades. Certainly nothing compared to actually fighting in the gang war. Which I'd taken a day off from. Brian's idea, and a pretty good one, too.
Still, I was on my way back to the Undersiders, groceries in hand. Weird how quickly I'd fit in, made friends. Good, though. Still a twinge of guilt about the whole undercover thing, but only a twinge. Anyway, easy enough to ignore when we were fighting proper villains like the ABB.
Paid the fare - found a seat - arranged my bags - annoying flash as the evening sun caught in the windows - rubbed my eyes. Looked up.
Sophia Hess was sitting in the seat across from me, head in a book. When did Sophia start reading? I swiped the question away. Not relevant. She hadn't been there before. What was going on?
"Fuck," I said, before I could stop myself. Precise encapsulation of my mood.
She looked up, sharply, and I braced. I wasn't going to back down, wouldn't give her the satisfaction, no matter how she'd crept up on me.
"T-taylor," she said, stumbling over the word, face growing ashen.
"Oh, so you've realised I have a name?" I said, squaring up because no matter how weird it was, we weren't in school and she was not going to push me around.
"But," she said, sounding hopelessly lost. Her book dropped from nerveless fingers, and she reached out, as if to touch me, just stopping short. "You're dead."
I looked at her flatly.
"I'm what?"