Chapter Text
Her breath felt as if it was trying to carve out her throat into a raw mess, and Taylor didn't exactly know what to do about it.
Cry, maybe, but that didn't feel right, and more to the point, it would be humiliating to do in it in a library. Screaming was also out of question, given the whole, library part of the equation. And frankly, she didn't quite know whether the screaming would be out of panic, frustration or a criminal amount of self-pity that dwarfed anything that any of the bullying, jeering and shittiness of her life had brought on. So, she settled instead into her go-to response of silently brooding, trying to settle her breathing, while glaring at the articles on the computer like they owed her a life-dept they refused to pay, and pondered on how best to deal with the situation at hand.
Parahuman. A term that technically described someone with powers, but more accurately applied to the corpses-to-be that wore capes, pretending with every breath that their lives weren't forfeit when the yearly disaster struck.
Taylor was one, of course, as the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of bugs that crawled, skittered and clawed at one underneath the library could attest.
Having powers should've meant she could do what was right, that she could strike out and prove that she mattered. But instead, as her desperate gulps for air could attest, it had signed her death warrant, presumably within the next few months. They were due for an attack, for an entire region of the world to be broken, drowned or driven insane, and all anyone could do was hold their breath and hope they weren't next.
Taylor, rather pessimistically, felt with her rotten luck, she'd be next. Even at 15 she understood that that thought process was rather negative, and hinged a little bit on her desperate want to have some justification for how dour she was, but it wouldn't exactly leave her.
She supposed it was natural. Taylor had grown up knowing the world was ending, of course. Everyone knew it, since it was hard to argue against it when the entire structure of the planet was falling apart at the seams.
Taylor didn't have to go far to know it. Technically, she didn't even need to leave the city, simply gaze out to the shore, to the brass walls that buffered it, scrapped together in a hasty attempt to keep out the worst of the rumbling storms that raged across the oceans of the world. Some days, she didn't even need that.
Hard to argue with the world ending when unscheduled eclipses can just happen, if one of them decides to blot out the sun with pearly white wings.
People sometimes told her that the world hadn't been ending before she was born, just a decade or so before, in fact. That felt unreal, like a fairy tale that adults told kids to foster hope. It had to be, in a way. What sort of horrible turn of fate is it to be born into the one slice of human existence where the world had started falling apart? Where mountains split, where dawn could break under the waves, where singing was treated as something to be wary of?
No, Taylor refused to accept that the world only starting ending recently. Perhaps the gargantuan terrors that tore everything apart like a hammer to glass had simply fallen into myth, awakened again when heroes were born anew.
She took in a ragged gulp of air, realizing she hadn't been breathing at all as thoughts raced, and clutched at the underside of the table.
The word underside made her frown, wide lips tugging at a gaunt face to make the sallow skin look even more egregious. Last night, caught up the rush of her first outing, of trying out for the first time with eagerness and anxiety in equal measure settled upon her breast, she had ended up saving a group by that name. Well, not quite. Undersiders was really what they were called, but it was close enough that the entire word felt sour in her mouth.
Nice as they had been, and they had been nice, they were villains. Bad people. And, yes, the meeting with Armsmaster had shown her that even the walking-dead that tried to do good were horrible, but so was the rest of the world. And Taylor was trying to do the right thing, which pointedly wasn't aligning herself with bad guys who looked at the broken mess that was Earth, and decided to make it worse.
"And then, she just-" Taylor muttered, the words coming out raspy and with far more heat than she intended.
Tattletale. The girl had posted about their outing on a site, which Taylor would've never stumbled upon if she hadn't looked her up. Wanted to meet up, because she 'owed' a favour to her, and that screamed bad idea to her.
The library was old, every surface just that little bit dirty that spoke of use and not enough janitorial budget, the tables just that bit sticky, or with scribbled on words that didn't quite fade. Greys skies made the already dim atmosphere seem oppressive. All of life felt oppressive at the moment, honestly. The chittering of the bugs under her power, the fizzing electricity, the smell of wood and that faint scent that came before the rain.
It all felt too much. Isolating, even in a public space, desperate and frustrating.
Her eyes darted over the few tabs she had managed to open on the worn down library computer. She had the blog post Tattletale had made, alongside an article cataloguing the parahuman mortality rate. Next to it was a list that felt sickening having open: every place the walking apocalypses had razed to the ground.
Each of those little tabs added to the feeling of hopelessness. Added to the heavy breaths that shuddered in her throat, to the hardening grip on the old table, to the warmth spreading throughout Taylor's body. Prickles, like bugs along her skin, like stares of bystanders, watching her.
She needed to be a hero, to do things right.
Nothing in her life felt right. It felt broken, messy, desperate. Multitudes of terrible that whispered of the nothingness she would accomplish, of a face in a coffin, buried under dirt, leaving her alone.
Being a hero would change that. Even if it lead to her death, which it would. Of course it would, because that's what being a parahuman meant.
Taylor was going in circles.
She pursed her lips, forcing her breath through her nose, ignoring the way her throat clogged. Eyes narrowed at the invitation from Tattletale. The villain owed her one but that didn't matter..
With an herculean effort, Taylor let go of the table, her fingers feeling like they should be trembling, but somehow remaining steady. She raised them to the keyboard, pads brushing against the individual keys, and tried to push them down.
Her body didn't move.
The bugs did, nervously pattering about like priests late for mass, but nonetheless her fingers refused to type.
'No, thank you'. That was all she needed to type. Hell, technically Taylor could just ignore it, go about her day, miserably pondering her imminent demise, going through the motions at school, maybe manage to stop a crime that wasn't between two villains. Ignoring it wouldn't bring her closure, and might even lead to the purple clad villain to seek her out, which brought on so many issues it wasn't even worth listing.
So, Taylor would reject it.
A deep breath. Calmer now, less ragged, less like forcing it into her lungs.
Her fingers twitched.
Three words.
Eyes focused on the blinking cursor, popping in and out, in and out of sight, silently asking her what she would write. The pixels were fuzzy, that quality of green and red and blue that melded together at the edges of most screens from when she was a kid, the abhorrent font of the forum staring back at her.
A wasp violently stung a bee, again and again.
Taylor grit her teeth.
Before she forced her feet to move out of the stillness of the house, to the salty, fume filled air of Brockton Bay, her dad had told her to be safe. To not go out at night. Her dad's opinion, it felt so distant, even just a few hours after. He always felt distant, even when they were sitting at the same table.
Safe. What did safe even mean?
She pressed one key. Then another. Then deleted both.
Safe? The world was ending, and Taylor had done nothing with her life, nothing really mattered, and at any point in time, they could all die.
Taylor typed, two words forming behind the cursor. Then deleted both.
Safe, what a joke! There were gangers around that trafficked and murdered and ruined everything just because they could; school was a shitshow that left her more drained than the stupid fight she'd leapt onto the previous night and her relationship with her parents was either talking to a gravestone or not talking at all. Why did being safe matter? A mountain walked, the bottom of the ocean shone and singing crackled through radio with melodies that haunted folk for days, and her dad wanted her to not go out at night.
She moved her fingers, and pressed on different keys than before, brutally smushing down any regrets or fears or hesitation.
Taylor wanted to do something right in her life. To make a difference.
Peering through the dirty window, Taylor locked wide watery eyes with the wall that bordered the shores of her shitty home. They barely broke 30 feet in height. Barely being a weird word to apply there but it was true. Even if it towered over her, even if it towered over anyone in the city, including the giant nazi twins and the damn dragon she had bitten over and over again, it looked puny. Japan had walls that were hundreds of feet tall, and the fact that half the country now slept beneath the waves spoke of how much that mattered.
Armsmaster had said that the Undersiders had been managing to stay off the radar for a long time, causing problems, being villains. One of them was a murderer!
The world was ending.
She hit the post button before sense could catch up with her.
Taylor might as well try to do right, before the Endbringers, like everything else in life, robbed her of the chance to do so.