Chapter Text
I was trying to remind myself why brutally vivisecting Emma Barnes and turning her into a horrific monstrosity was probably a bad idea. It was more of a challenge than I would like, I'll admit. It didn't help that she'd spent the past week peacocking around Winslow, as though she'd accomplished some grand victory rather than shoving an abused girl in a locker of filth, bugs, and disease. It was the kind of 'prank' that Jack might have approved of, which really speaks to how horrific it truly was.
And yes, I could admit that I had done far, far worse to completely innocent people in the past. It was still hard to reconcile that, but I refused to pretend my past didn't exist. That would be unfair to all the people who I had killed, or worse. It took me a while to come to terms with it, to be honest. Even if I freed myself from Jack's power, he'd still spent six years twisting me into his poppet and protege. That's not the kind of thing it's easy to unlearn, and that was also why I was struggling so hard with the impulse to kidnap the trio and twist them into better forms. Maybe I could make their outside match the inside, at last—Emma does so like to talk, maybe I could give her a few more mouths around her body and do a little poking into her brain so she has to talk all the time, wouldn't that be just—
I took a deep breath and pushed the impulse down, along with all the suggestions that my power was giving me for how I could go about modifying her, or making Sophia's whole predator schtick a little more literal by forcing her brain into a tiger's body, and maybe I could also put cute little Madison into a rabbit's body and then have a lovely chase between those two—
Okay, so maybe I wasn't quite as successful at suppressing my anger as I'd thought. I took another deep breath and tried to center myself. Meditation was a surprisingly useful tool for a Tinker, I'd found. It kept me from slipping into Tinker fugues without noticing, and it could help me better direct my thoughts and my power as a result. Not to mention that body-scan meditation served a double purpose for checking the status of all the embedded systems I had in my body.
I had a particular distaste for Madison, probably because she used the same cutesy routine that I'd perfected as Bonesaw. Seeing her use it just left a bad taste in my mouth and brought up memories I'd rather leave buried. I might not have grown too much since leaving the Nine—I'd long since removed my pituitary gland, after all, and growing meant a lot of modifications to all my systems that was a total pain in the ass—but I'd also taken steps to distance me as much as possible from my previous costume.
Bonesaw was a short girl who had worn bright pastel dresses with curling blond ringlets of hair, white stockings and black Mary Janes to pull off the innocent little girl look. I might not be much taller now, but in every other way I'd taken steps to distance myself from that image. I had short black hair that swept partially over one eye and a wardrobe of primarily black graphic t-shirts, open hoodies, and skirts festooned with belts and hanging chains. I wore combat boots pretty much everywhere and had piercings on my lip, nose, and eyebrow. On top of the cosmetic surgery I'd done to completely rearrange my facial features and the retrovirus which had rewritten my DNA signature, I'd made it pretty much impossible for someone to connect me back to Bonesaw without extensive Thinker powers. That, and being known as an emo made people more accepting of some of the… more concerning things that I sometimes said.
Taylor said she'd be back today, but I wouldn't blame her if she needed some more time. We'd been messaging on PHO since she'd been discharged from the hospital. I'd visited some while she was still in the psych ward, and it had been obvious that she had gotten powers in the locker. Well, obvious to me—I'd built a small specialized organ that responded to the presence of other parahumans back when I was Bonesaw, and I never saw the use in taking it out. Even if I hadn't I'd almost certainly have put it together. I was probably the foremost expert on how parahuman powers interface with neurons and the human psyche, after all. It would have been almost trivial to whip up a pathogen that would snap Taylor out of her catatonic state, and if she'd spent much longer I might have done so, but I also knew that it was usually best to just let Thinker powers settle in naturally. I hadn't told her that I knew about her powers, of course. It's not exactly the kind of thing you want to talk about online, and I didn't want her to feel like I was ambushing her either.
The city bus came to a stop outside Winslow's parking lot and a stream of students emerged, the wannabe gangsters staying in their little cliques and everyone else giving them a wide berth. And then, just as I thought Taylor might have stayed home, there she was. She stepped off the bus with a hunched expression and haunted eyes, and my enhanced hearing was able to pick up an increase in the ambient buzzing sound around us. It piqued my interest—that was almost certainly related to her power, but I didn't have enough information to figure out what it was quite yet.
"Taylor!" I said, running over toward her. I felt a smile cross my face and made no move to suppress it. As soon as I got close enough, I leapt up and pulled her into a tight hug.
"Hey, Riley," she said. Her return smile was weak and wavering, but it was there. "How are you doing?"
I shot her my best incredulous look. "Really, Tay? I'm fine. Well, other than missing my best friend, but you know that."
"Yeah, I gathered that from the 31 messages I woke up to this morning," she said, her voice dry.
And sure, I knew that wasn't maybe the most normal behavior, but I also knew that Taylor didn't actually mind. She liked to read, anyways. "It's been really hard not to kill those three bitches," I told her. Every time I cursed, there was something in me that twitched a little, a reflex implanted by Jack and his twisted perception of what a young girl should be like. Every time, it felt a little bit like a victory over the bastard, which was why I occasionally got into trouble for cussing in class, but whatever.
She let out a little snort of amusement. "I'd rather you not go to jail for me, Riley," she said.
I shook my head, my short hair whapping against my ears. "I'm not an amateur! I could kill them and hide the bodies where they'd never be found." I was… mostly joking. Well, not about my skillset, but about actually killing them. I tried to avoid killing, now, at least for the most part. It brought down too much heat, and Taylor was usually morally opposed to it. My own sense of morals were understandably pretty fucked up, so I tended to use Taylor as something of a measuring stick in that regard. And it was what Jack would want me to do, so that was reason enough to avoid it as well.
"Still, they're not worth it," she said, and something hard entered her voice. "If I started to hurt them for what they did to me, I'd be lowering myself to their level."
That didn't really seem right to me—there was a difference between picking on the helpless and fighting back, as I was well aware—but Taylor could be stupidly stubborn about these kinds of things. Instead, I said, "Can I come over after school? There's something we gotta talk about."
"Of course, Riley," she said. Her smile faded as she looked over at Winslow, and there was a physical shift as she steeled herself for the day. Her face was a mask of bitter resignation, and once again I considered just how easily it would be to tear Emma Barnes limb from limb and stich her together with that little bitch Sophia, so that as soon as Sophia tried to use her power it would rip Emma apart—
No. Bad Bonesaw. We're being a good girl, now. A real good girl, not Jack's poppet. Not his puppet. Emma Barnes would live to see tomorrow, because destroying her would hurt Taylor more than it would help.
With a sigh, I followed Taylor into the hive of scum and villainy that was Winslow high.
~*~
To be honest, I wasn't very good at the whole school thing. It didn't help that the last time I'd really attended any kind of scholastic institution had been when I was six, before Jack had found me and slaughtered the rest of my family. And yeah, that probably should be harder to talk about, but I'm honestly so desensitized to violence, gore, and murder that any trauma I had over my trigger event was completely subsumed in the horror of the next six years of my life. That wasn't to say I hadn't gone to any schools in the intervening time, but I hadn't exactly been there to learn anything except experimental biology, and the teachers weren't exactly willing in their instruction.
That being said, the last thing I needed was to have child protective services coming down on me again. It had happened to me in the past, both in Philadelphia and New Jersey, and I'd had to get out of dodge fast before anybody could do a deeper dive on my identity and start to realize things didn't quite line up past a cursory glance. So this time, I'd chosen the worst school in the city with the least attentive staff and then I spun a story about having been home-schooled to explain any of the gaps in my knowledge. It helped that I had a few acquaintances who could set me up with some fake IDs for Riley Liddell and an official Consent to Emancipation of Minor form signed by an actual (if easily blackmailed) judge.
Anyway, the point was that I wasn't all that good at school. It didn't help that I really didn't care about most of the stuff they were teaching us. I had a pretty good grasp on math, if only because Mannequin had made sure of that, and I had forgotten more about chemistry and biology than the teacher would ever know, but when it came to classes like English, History, or World Issues? I really couldn't give less of a fuck. I scraped by with the minimum amount of effort and spent most of the class time either doodling or designing new Tinker creations. I knew it drove Taylor mad, and I did sometimes try in English for her, but I just couldn't bring myself to care about how the blue curtains symbolized depression or whatever.
At least we were reading Frankenstein right now. That was a story I could get behind, even if Victor was a wuss of a Biotinker who freaks out over a simple reanimated corpse. I mean, I'd first reanimated a composite corpse when I was eight years old, and I sure as shit didn't scream and run away to leave it to fend for itself. Admittedly, that was partially because I'd already installed a control matrix into its decaying brain, but that was just another reason why I was a better Biotinker than stupid Victor Frankenstein.
I had even tried making some actual comments in class, but apparently my insight into how Victor might have been able to harvest and dissect bodies, and the challenges he might have faced in trying to use composite body parts with different blood types and immune responses, was both 'disturbing to the other students' and 'not relevant to the current discussion.' And I hadn't even mentioned any real Biotinker-y details, making sure to keep it to a lay-person's level! At least Taylor had been on my side there.
In a better school, they might have noticed my extreme aptitude for certain subjects and my disinterest in others and decided that I needed more support or a tutor or something. That kind of attention could easily snowball into investigations into my home life, and then I'd have to burn another identity and start over somewhere else. In Winslow, I was just another lost cause like all the other wanna-be gangsters and the druggies and dropouts. It wasn't like I would ever need to know this stuff, not when I already had a stable job that paid exorbitantly well, but I couldn't bring myself to regret coming to Winslow because that was where I'd met Taylor.
I'd like to think I'm pretty good at reading people. It comes with the territory of being an internationally famous serial killer—you need to know who's going to run, who's going to break, and who will fight to their last breath no matter what. I noticed Taylor pretty early on, since we had several classes together, and because much of the social hierarchy among the sophomore girls seemed to revolve around bullying her. She was a complete outcast, suffering indignities and insults almost constantly, but she didn't lash out in anger. She just took it, added it to her notes, and then when her complaint to the teachers or the office was ignored she made a note of that as well. There was anger there, to be sure, but there was also a quiet strength in coming back to school again and again without ever bringing a weapon or reaching out to the gangs for support. It was a rare trait, that kind of unbending spine, and it had grabbed my attention fast.
I probably could have gotten into Emma Barnes' little court, if I'd really wanted to. I certainly had enough experience with cruel and unusual torment, after all. But that was exactly what the old Bonesaw would do, what Jack would want me to do. And, well—I'm self-aware enough to know that I read as a little off to most people, a little too intense. Emotional regulation wasn't exactly a skill that was encouraged amongst the Nine, after all. There was a good chance I'd be something of an outcast no matter what I did, honestly, and teenage girls were as bad as chickens when it came to turning on each other at the first sign of blood.
Befriending Taylor was easy enough, as well. The girl had been desperate for any kind of connection, and she was more than willing to look past some of my peculiarities in exchange. I hadn't expected to form any kind of real connection, but the more I'd gotten to know her the more she wormed her way into my heavily-modified titanium-mesh sheathed heart, as well as all of my cardiovascular backup systems in case my main heart gets damaged. In fact it was almost alarming, how quickly Taylor had become an integral part of my life. I'd gotten used to living on my own in the past three years, but before then I'd spent most of my life constantly surrounded by five to eight other people. Dysfunctional, deeply broken, and monstrous people, admittedly, but they had been family. Jack had been like a father, the Siberian was somewhere between a sister and a family pet, Shatterbird was an annoying older cousin, Mannequin was my quiet uncle, and Crawler the boisterous one. And looking back, I can see how warped and twisted it all was, but under Jack's grooming (both with his Master power and the more mundane methods) it had all felt perversely domestic. I liked to be around other people, and spending so much time on my own had left me totally touch starved.
I latched onto Taylor like a limpet, and once she realized this wasn't another attempt by Barnes to trick her, she had held on just as hard. Taylor was quiet and reserved at first, but once you got her on a topic she cared about she could be a total motormouth. She loved to talk about old books and movies and art, always pointing things out that I'd never have noticed on my own, and she was happy to listen to me ramble about biology and prosthetics—I had to tone down some of the more obviously parahuman parts, but it was still more of myself than I could show to anybody else.
~*~
Finally, the bell rang and released me from English. It turned out I had a lot less patience for hearing about questions of nature versus nurture when it came from Mrs. Wellings rather than Taylor. I had already packed up my stuff, so I was out in a moment, skipping down the hall just slow enough to not get called out for running. Taylor had math last period, on the other side of the school from me, and I wanted to get there before any of the bullies. I did my best to dodge out of the way of the other students who were starting to file out of the classes, although I did have to shoulder past a group of skinhead wannabe gangsters who didn't get out of the way in time. They probably hadn't expected to be shoved aside, not when I barely broke 5 feet tall and looked like I was probably a hundred pounds soaking wet, but I had enough implants and wetware in my body that I actually clocked in at just over three hundred pounds, and the guy I clipped went careening into one of his buddies as I ran past.
When I got there, I saw that I'd failed. Maybe I'd gotten too predictable, or I was just too slow, because there was already a group of eight girls in a small cluster around the lockers. And, naturally, there was Emma and Sophia, with Madison clinging to their shadow like a little parasite.
"...don't know why she keeps showing up, not when she can't remember to take a shower," Emma was saying as I got closer.
Madison giggled. "Maybe she likes smelling like that. Probably makes her more attractive to her Merchant clients."
I rolled my eyes. Taylor hated drugs, and she obviously didn't smell bad. She was fastidious in taking a shower every morning after her runs, and even when she was sweaty and tired she didn't smell bad per se, just a bit musky. And I'd know, since my nose was about ten times better than the human baseline.
Of course, the chorus of idiots was still yapping. "Do you think she's even taken a shower since she got herself trapped in that locker?"
At that, I saw Taylor go tense, her fingers curling up into a tight fist. She had iron control, usually, but people also got weird around their trigger events. Then she went still, her face going almost eerily calm, and I immediately clocked the signs of a thinker power at work. I still wasn't quite sure what her power was, but I had some theories based on her trigger event.
"Taylor-Taylor-Taylor-Taylor!" I cried out, running toward the group. I saw Emma go stiff while Sophia tensed, but the rest of the group just seemed annoyed. Two of the girls tried to block me off, but it was easy enough to slip around them. I had experience with weaving between Blaster powers and dodging Movers while in the middle of performing experimental surgery on an involuntary patient, two out of shape teenagers weren't going to stop me.
"Hello, Riley," Taylor said, with a twitch of her mouth that was almost a smile.
I grabbed her arm and turned around, ignoring the crowd of bullies around us. "Come on, let's blow this popsicle stand! I gotta talk to about that thing."
"Liddell," Emma said, disdain clear in her voice. "I would have thought you'd have learned to stay away from Hebert by now, but nobody ever said you were smart."
"Emma! I didn't notice you there." I said, smiling extra wide at her in that way I knew was just a little too large to be normal. "Has anybody ever told you that kneecaps are a privilege, not a right?"
Sophia stepped forward, getting in between me and Emma. "Is that a threat?" she said, her hands coming up in a way that seemed almost casual but spoke of extensive combat training.
I looked up at Sophia, five feet nine inches of lean muscle and anger issues, and couldn't help but giggle. She was very far from intimidating me. Even if she used her powers, I had quite a few surprises prepared for capes who thought intangibility would be enough to handle me. Figuring out which cape she was had taken me a few days after I met her, but it hadn't been too hard to put the pieces together. I was still trying to narrow down what would be most effective against Shadow Stalker's known powers, but I was confident that one of my preparations would work out. "You'd look so beautiful with your skin peeled open, Sophia," I told her.
Her expression twisted into one of disgust, and then she was taking a swing at me. I ducked underneath her arm, giggling, and danced back away from her follow-up strike. She looked like she wanted to press the attack, but there were too many people around us now and too many phones were coming out. Naughty girl, worried about breaking her little probation! It was just too much fun to toy with her.
Taylor grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me away. I let her, smiling back with all my teeth exposed. There's some more words tossed around: 'freak' and 'sociopath' and 'attack dog.' It doesn't bother me, though—I've been called so much worse in the past, and it was true back then. At least when they were talking about me, they weren't talking about Taylor.
Emma was watching me with an expression of utter disgust that made me feel warm, because it meant I'd managed to protect Taylor from the girl's little games. I knew that Emma hated me, both for being friends with Taylor and for being more or less immune to her bullying. I didn't care enough about school to be bothered when she went after my homework, I didn't give a shit what she said about me when I'd spent six years enslaved to a man capable of finding and needling at every small insecurity, and my enhanced strength and reflexes meant any attempts at physical intimidation tended to flop.
Sophia watched us leave as well, and there was something dark in her eyes that I recognized. She had killed before, and she was willing to kill again. She was dangerous to most people, but she also recognized that in me as well. Everyone else thought I was just saying disturbing things to try and get them to back off, but she knew I was dead serious. Heh, dead. And she really would look so pretty with all her skin peeled off, exposing all those carefully toned muscles to the air. And I would need to deal with her eventually, because she was the kind of person who always needed to escalate her violence.
Hmm. A problem for another time, I supposed. Killing a Ward would draw too much heat, and Taylor probably wouldn't like it anyways. My hand went to my pocket, reaching for the familiar cool disk of metal that I always kept there. No, I wasn't going to be killing Sophia Hess, although there were plenty of ways to discourage certain behaviors without actually resorting to murder. Hopefully things wouldn't get to that point, though.
"You don't have to do that, you know," Taylor said quietly, once we'd gotten far enough from the group of girls.
I rolled my eyes. This was an old argument, and not one I cared to rehash right now. "I know, but I wanted to."
"They already think you're a serial killer or something," she said. "Joking about stealing Emma's knees or flaying Sophia isn't going to help."
"Who said I was joking?" At her flat stare, I relented. "And so what? I really couldn't give a fuck what they think about me.
"I know, but… Emma has power here, and her dad has connections. And Sophia's got half the track team wrapped around her finger. I just don't want to see you hurt, not over me."
"Trust me, Tay. None of those girls could actually hurt me on their best day." I smiled at her, patting her hand gently. "And I have connections too."
Her lips twitched upward, just a little. "Oh yeah? You've got some friends in high places?" she asked.
"You'd be surprised," I said, wiggling my eyebrows suggestively. "Let's just say that I've got a fair number of people who owe me favors."
"I'm sure you do," she said, smiling slightly. It was okay she didn't believe me—I wouldn't believe me either, if I didn't know the full story.
We caught the bus a few minutes later. I got Taylor to start talking about one of the books she'd been reading, a Victorian novel called North and South. It was the kind of story that I knew would put me to sleep if I tried to read it, but hearing Taylor light up about all the commentary on the changing social stations, the importance of unions, and the consequences of the industrial revolution made it all seem interesting. She had this broader sense of history that let her make all these connections that would have gone right past me, and it soothed something in me to listen to her talk. I was able to add a few things as well—apparently one of the characters died from inhaling cotton fluff, and I was able to tell her about byssinosis and other types of pneumoconiosis, like black lung or silicosis. I didn't mention that I was most familiar with the last one because Shatterbird's power produced so much silica particulates that I'd needed to take both curative and preventative measures for the rest of the Nine. Still, Taylor seemed interested in what I had to say, and she had some stories from her dad about how the Dockworker's Association had fought lawsuits over asbestosis in the past.
It was a nice bus ride, and it was nice to have someone who didn't just tolerate my biology rambling but was actively interested in it. Eventually we reached our stop and made our way to Taylor's house, a worn down two story building with worn paint and a roof that probably needed some repair. Her dad's truck was still gone, which was to be expected since he didn't usually leave his job until 6 or 6:30. I knew that his absence, the way he seemed to prioritize his work over Taylor, was just another straw to the camel's back, but that wasn't something I could fix right now. And for the moment, it would let us have a private conversation without fear of being interrupted.
I'd been over a fair few times before. Sometimes we'd hang out at the mall or down by the boardwalk, but Taylor didn't have much in the way of an allowance and she was too proud to just let me pay for things—and it wasn't like I could really explain just how much money my job pulled in, not without revealing more than I wanted to. So most of the time, we just hung out at Taylor's house or my apartment.
I sat down at the dining room table, letting my backpack slip off onto the floor, as Taylor started making tea. It was something of a ritual for her, one I inferred had started with her late mother, and she was adamant on doing it every time I came over. I just sat there, absently swinging my feet, and watched as she carefully measured out two teaspoons of loose leaf tea from a mason jar into two metal infusers as the electric kettle came up to temp. She added a small amount of room temp water to the bottom of each mug and then added the boiling water, so the temp would be high enough to extract the tea and just low enough to keep from scalding the leaves. I liked watching her work, watching the little wrinkle on her brow as she focused and her steady and deliberate movements.
She set one of the mugs in front of me and set the other one in front of her seat, sitting down opposite me. "It's a new blend that I'm trying—let me know what you think."
"I will," I told her. "How are you doing? I know you said you were fine, but—"
She cut me off. "I said I'm fine because I'm fine, Riley." She sounded a little exasperated, but not truly irritated, so it looked like she wasn't too upset. "I mean, obviously things with the… the locker was bad, and it wasn't fun staying in the hospital, but I'm fine now."
Which was obviously bullshit, but I didn't think she'd respond well to me pressing her now. "Are you a hundred percent positive that I'm not allowed to disappear the trio?"
"I'm sure," she said, but she was smiling. "I told you, no killing."
"I could disappear them without murder," I replied, with mock offense. Well, maybe a little bit of real offense, but Taylor didn't know about my capabilities so it wasn't like she meant anything by it.
"And how would you do that?"
"I've got it all planned out," I said, gesturing with my hands to demonstrate. "We just gotta get 'em to testify in a court case against a mafioso. Then the feds will have to put them into witness protection, and badabing badaboom they're out of here!" I let my voice slip into an exaggerated mafia accent for the last part.
Taylor laughed a little, actually laughed, which I counted as a win. "And where are you going to get a convenient mafioso for this little scheme?"
I waved my hand dismissively. "I know a guy," I told her. Well, he was actually a member of the Elite, but it was an East Coast cell that had grown out of a mafia group and still had some of the same stylings. He'd lost a leg to an overzealous hero and had paid handsome for a top-notch prosthetic replacement. I was sure he had a competitor in the organization that he'd be willing to set something up in exchange for a favor.
It was clear that Taylor didn't believe me, but she was amused by the idea. "And if the mafia idea falls through, do you have a backup plan?"
I spent the next few minutes as we waited for the tea to steep detailing increasingly hairbrained schemes for non-lethally dealing with the trio, with Taylor trying to poke holes in my plans. None of them would be quite as satisfying as a proper murder or vivisection, but Taylor was adamant about taking the high road. Probably for the best, really. It would bring too much attention down on Taylor and me, and she didn't need that when she was still starting out her cape career.
Once the tea was steeped for long enough, I pulled out the infuser and took a sip. It was a jasmine white tea, but it had a nice kick that I could identify as coming from cinnamon and cloves. It was definitely a pleasant taste, but I didn't have enough experience to tell if anything should be tweaked. My tongue had been enhanced, like the rest of my senses, but that had mainly been so I could detect poisons and do some basic chemical analysis. "I like it," I said, smiling at her. "The cloves are definitely an interesting touch."
I was rewarded with one of her shy smiles, rare and precious because she only ever smiled like that around me, and only when we were alone. I wished I could capture that smile in a pendant and keep it around my neck all the time. Well, not literally, even if that was within my capabilities, just—some of Taylor's literature nerdiness had rubbed off on me.
With Taylor finally looking relaxed, I realized that this was probably the best time I'd get to talk about what we actually needed to discuss. I'd been trying to figure out the best way to start this conversation, but I was pretty sure it would be best to just rip the sutures out, so to speak. "I know you've got powers," I said, and admittedly it was a little abrupt.
In retrospect, I probably should have waited until she wasn't taking a sip from her mug. Tea exploded out form her mouth, covering the table, as she started to hack and cough. Her eyes went wide with panic, and through her coughs she managed to get out, "What? What do you- I mean, how?"
I winced. Okay, so maybe I could have been a little more tactful there.