Chapter Text
It was cold and dark, and Taylor Hebert was still stuck in her rotting corpse.
Her awareness was the only thing she had in the cradle of her grave. All she could do with it was replay the events that led her here.
The locker. Closed in by filth, Taylor had screamed her throat hoarse prematurely. She could've used her voice when the insects began biting her. Digging into her skin, taking little bits of Taylor in their mandibles and carrying it away to their secret dens in the walls of Winslow High.
She could've used her voice when her throat had started swelling. It had become harder to breathe. Taylor had spent the last of her air trying to push the locker door off its hinges, and passed out.
When she came to, she was no longer herself. Her body was cold and foreign, skin clammy, sensations dulled. The filth no longer smelled, and everything she heard rang in her ear twice echoed.
After Taylor Hebert was finally discovered by an underpaid janitor, emergency services were called. At this point, she had no longer been able to move. The attempts at resuscitation were barely felt. One, two, three, four, five, clear. Ribs breaking under CPR. Her body jolting as she was defibrillated.
The hospital. She listened to her father cry. Do something! Danny had yelled, and more, at the doctors. But they told him that Taylor was in a vegetative state. Try as she might, none of her own screams reached Danny Hebert. All she could do was watch a grown man sob on her unresponsive cadaver.
And a cadaver it was: Taylor Hebert wasn't in there anymore. She was in the air around it. A sphere with the radius of a foot or two, Taylor watched the machines beeping and Danny growing progressively more haggard and despondent.
A woman in red-and-white robes visited. Panacea, the doctors called her. Braindead, she called Taylor, a second after placing her hand on her body. Danny had to be restrained and escorted out.
The morgue was where the cooling started and the tedium set in. She had only the humming of refrigeration and other corpses for company. If they contained ghosts, they chose not to reveal themselves to Taylor.
Taylor regretted not appreciating the morgue while she could. The morgue had lights. The morgue had people carrying corpses in and out on occasion.
The grave had only darkness and cold earth. Six feet under, what passed for her vision was unable to reach the ground above. Did her father visit her grave? Did he leave flowers? Did Emma visit, come to apologize, or vandalize the headstone?
All Taylor had for company was insects. She wasn't even close enough to feel any other would-be skeletons around. Worms in the muck, ants crawling on her eyelids, roaches entering her orifices.
A wooden casket did not keep insects out. Her body was a feast for critters. Luckily, she couldn't feel things anymore.
Unluckily, she was a disembodied spirit with intact faculties. Death was a horror, but the mind can become accustomed to even the most terrible of things.
So it was that Taylor tried her very best to not think about the living, aside from her little friends she was feeding. Sometimes, a spider found its way in to hunt the little flesh-eating beetles that enjoyed her eyeballs and other soft tissues. They liked to nest in her brain, lay eggs there. The little ones ate each other.
Was this it? For everyone? No afterlife, no oblivion, only endless solitude awaited at the end of the human condition? It was a dreadful thought. Taylor reminisced of her mother. Had she, too, been screaming at Taylor and Danny from her corpse after the crash? Was she in her grave, right now, cursing their names for not noticing her plight? Reminiscing on the classics to keep herself sane, reminiscing on the good times?
Taylor's good times were too far gone to ponder upon in any way that made her feel better.
She tried her best not to think. To simply observe the insects having a grand old time with her meat.
Surely, once the insects were done, once the casket and her bones had all decomposed, she would be free. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably not.
Taylor wished she'd been cremated.
⁂
"Come oooon, little bugger. Eat more. You're not full yet, aren't you?"
Taylor wasn't talking to her bugs. She was only imagining it. Her ghostly senses could not hear her own voice. She hadn't heard anything in...days? Weeks? She'd do terrible things to hear the voice of literally anyone. Mr. Gladly, Emma, Sophia, Danny, Armsmaster, freaking Jack Slash.
Anything but the darkness and silence.
All Taylor had was her bugs. The vague impression of little things skittering in the dark, munching, snacking. If ants carried enough of her away to their nests, would she get to see someplace else?
"No no no, don't put your web there! That's where the ants come from!"
If only she was so lucky. No. She was here forever, stuck in this little coffin with the bugs and her rotting–
Grander than anything Taylor had ever witnessed or conceived of, the being filled her vision, mind, entire existence with its slithering, faceted mass. It poked, prodded, swaddled and stroked the world, which vibrated in turn, causing the entirety of the luminescence to react and readjust itself.
It was examining the world. No, the creatures there. No, the entire space itself. Some parts of it wound and wound and rewound, like time itself was its playing, while others grew and shrank and moved and pierced the Earth and the sun and there was so, so many of it. And yet there was only one, and something was missing, and it was so very, very confused–
Air. Light. Taylor was...aboveground? She could move. She could move!
The vision, dream, mental breakdown – whatever it had been slipped from Taylor's mind as inconsequential compared to the relieving sense of freedom.
She could see! Like normal! A light coating of snow covered the rows of headstones, the graveyard's stone fence loomed in the distance – and swiftly Taylor was there, when she wanted to be, now looking back at the countless graves behind her. One among that myriad was hers, but she wasn't stuck in there anymore!
Trepidation, excitement, relief. So much relief. She...had no body, sure, Taylor was a whisper on the wind, but she could feel the wind and hear the sounds of traffic in the city!
Free. Free! "Bye bugs, hope to never see you again!!" she screamed happily, and she could swear she almost heard her voice. It was still just a memory of it, but there was a way, she knew now. She wasn't just a tiny sphere of localized omniscience anymore, a haunting in her corpse, she was...uh.
...Was Taylor a ghost now?
⁂
The first thing Taylor did with her newly-discovered power of spectromotion (like locomotion, but for ghosts) was to go home.
The state of the Hebert residence did much to dull her excitement.
"...Dad?" Taylor tried as she floated through the front door. That, itself, was an interesting experience. There was a brief resistance, then her vision went from staring at the door to staring at the dark entryway of her home. Parts of the porch were still in her local awareness, but she was distinctly inside now.
"Dad, I'm home! I'm alive? Or, um, undead??"
There was no reply. Taylor felt unease. The house was too still, too dark, too cold. But, she told herself, if she couldn't hear herself then it was normal her dad couldn't hear her either. She wanted to see her dad, then she could figure out communications.
But Danny was not home. And it didn't seem like he'd been home for a while.
His room was messy, the bed unmade. Wardrobe left open, the scent of stale dust in the air. Danny's pillow looked stained with dried tears.
Taylor's room was as she'd left it. Even the plate off which she had her late-night snack was left by the computer, the breadcrumbs still there.
Basement, bathroom, utilities closet, living room – everything was normal, but still. Frozen. Dead.
...No, no. Taylor shook the thought off. So what if the house was dark? So what if the electricity was out? The fridge wasn't running, the food inside had spoiled, but so what? It didn't mean anything. Her dad was fine. Maybe he was crashing with his friends? Yes, the house must've reminded him too much of the dead women in his life.
Clinging onto that bit of optimism, Taylor left home to float to the residence of Kurt and Lacy. Danny wasn't there, and there were no signs of a guest staying in. Danny wasn't working at the Docks. Taylor haunted a group of dockworkers, but they did not speak of Danny. She followed one home, and Danny was not there.
It was getting concerning. But! Surely! Taylor's dad was...out drinking? Yes, that's what he had to be doing. Drowning his sorrows in beer. On a legendary bender, it would be a fool's errand for Taylor to bumble around looking for him. She didn't even know what bars he frequented. He'd get over it, or run out of cash, and have to come home eventually.
Yes. That was a good explanation. Taylor swept her panic under that rug and considered what to do next. This was only good form. It was the Hebert Method of problem-solving, passed from parent to child for generations. Ignore your main issue, and put your entirety into working on secondary issues. Repeat until problem solves itself or you die.
Taylor had several options to avoid exploring the reasons behind her father's absence. Some that came to mind immediately were:
- Attempt to communicate with a stranger via words. Spooky ghost sounds!
- Attempt to communicate with a stranger via moving items. Poltergeist!
- Go to school. Ew.
- Visit a
friendacquaintanceclassmateEmma. She didn't really know where anyone else lived. - Visit a church, very carefully. Maybe she'd materialize on holy land? If crosses and priests burned her, it would be best to learn quickly of this weakness.
- Fight...crime? Surely, as a ghost, she had ghost powers of some kind.
- Visit the PRT office. Armsmaster might have ghost-vision in his helmet.
It would definitely be a good idea to figure out what the date is, too. She couldn't have spent time underground for too long, as it was still cold enough to snow, but for all she knew it could be a particularly cold April night.
Decisions, decisions.