Chapter Text
I knew the moment something was different.
It didn’t mean much because I couldn’t do anything about it. I was still trapped in that locker, still fighting to get out of the filth, and I still couldn’t do anything to change that. But I could escape in a different way.
The bugs. There were so many of them. They were everywhere, and I was one of them. And I was all of them.
It was easy to stop being Taylor Hebert and start being them.
I was still me. I could still feel the awful textures and temperatures, the shortness of my own breath, and my knees digging into the unforgiving metal. I still remembered when the walk up to my locker, the harsh touch on my back when I was shoved in, and the dread I’d felt knowing I had to go back to school after a too-short winter break.
Farther back than that, all the things that made me Taylor Hebert were true: the ways my childhood had shaped me, the way my mother’s death had torn me apart, how my friendship with Emma had broken me… Fifteen years of being Taylor. But there was so much more than that.
I felt so small, and there was so much around me. It was small too, but the sheer quantity made it hardly noticeable. Here, Taylor didn’t really matter. She was a speck in the noise, and I was happy to lose her in it.
Still, I knew she was there. That I was there. That someone freed me, and that I was screaming, and the paramedics were taking me away, and there were doctors, and Dad was there, but it didn’t really matter because, at the same time, I wasn’t really there. I was just watching.
Until I wasn't.
The scratchy sheets on my skin were suddenly too much. There was- What was that? A noise? There was beeping and whirring—machines—but there was something else too. Something more dominating. And- and- and-
And it was too much in a whole different way.
“Taylor!”
I blinked, and it felt like the first time I’d done it in years. Not because my eyes were dry or anything. Just because of how alien it felt. How alien everything felt.
But I recognized Dad. Of course I did. How could I not? He was here, and everything was going to be okay.
Going home and hearing the voicemail on the recorder that Taylor was in the hospital was terrifying, but not more than sitting beside her hospital bed waiting for her to wake up because at least for that one, Danny knew what was coming next. Not how, but still what.
He didn’t detect it, not at first. Taylor opened her eyes, and her body started moving, and she reached for him, and all Danny could feel was relief, relief that his daughter was okay and nothing seemed wrong. But then the nurses came to inspect her, and Danny grew nervous that they would find something he’d missed.
And they did. As much as Danny hoped and prayed that they wouldn’t, they did.
It was little, at least. The change. Small enough that Danny could explain it away, at least for now.
“There’s something going on with her eyes,” one of the nurses said aloud, moving a little flashlight around, making Taylor blink at how bright it was. She was sitting up in her hospital bed at least, legs dangling over the edge, but she still just looked so weak. Danny hated it.
“Her mom had that. When she was stressed. Something with the blood vessels,” Danny told her. It was a lie, and everyone in the room knew it, but the nurse still accepted it, not even taking note of it on her clipboard, and the rest of the tests resumed.
The results of the last rounds of tests, the ones that they ran once Taylor was awake, were inconclusive. Danny didn’t know if that was the truth or if there were more good-hearted people covering for them. Because to Danny, the answer was obvious.
Taylor hadn’t been in a coma because there was anything physically wrong with her. She’d been unconscious for so long because getting shoved into that locker had triggered her mutation.
The science on the X-gene was still spotty, but it was still well documented that trauma, especially physical trauma, often caused mutations to manifest. And what Taylor had gone through definitely counted as traumatic.
Not traumatic like Danny had experienced. Not like Annette either. But it was also well documented that second-generation mutants were more likely to have an activated X-gene themselves.
It hadn’t been when Danny and Annette decided to have kids. They’d assumed it was possible their daughter would be like them, but they’d hoped… Well, that she wouldn’t. And so they’d never talked about it. Not with Taylor at least.
As Danny drove Taylor home from the hospital, he regretted that choice.
There were a thousand ways to tell her, and a thousand ways it wouldn’t work. If his dad pressed him about his mutation, Danny didn’t know what he’d do.
But Danny wasn’t his dad. Even if things had been tough since Annette died, Taylor still knew he was there for her.
He could tell Taylor that avoiding his gaze wasn’t going to keep him from knowing something had changed. He could tell her about Annette. That she hadn’t really died in a car crash.
But both of those options were easy ways out. Danny could use an easy way out, but he owed it to both Taylor and Annette to do this right. He couldn’t make this about them. Even if this was for Taylor, he had to be honest about himself.
“Can I tell you something?” Danny asked as he and Taylor picked at their meager dinner. The meal was fine. For Taylor’s first night back, Danny had put the effort in to make something decent. But neither of their hearts were in it. Not knowing the inevitable conversation was coming.
Taylor probably hoped that Danny would just let it go and pretend everything was fine. He’d done that far too much, though, and they’d ended up here as a result. There was no more avoiding this.
Taylor looked up, confusion etched on her face, before dropping her gaze again and giving a half-hearted shrug. “Sure?”
She probably wasn’t expecting Danny to want to say something. She was probably expecting him to ask questions. To pry. And he probably should, but in this moment, he knew this was the right way to do it.
Even if he hadn’t quite thought this far ahead. What was he even supposed to say right now?
He knew, but he probably should have waited until after dinner to start this.
“I want to show you something, but it’s kind of gross, so I understand if you want to wait until you’re done eating,” Danny told her, picking his words carefully.
Taylor pushed her plate aside. “I’m not really hungry.”
Danny wasn’t either. He stood up, the legs of his chair scraping against the floor, and he turned around. “I know this is going to seem weird, but…”
He trailed off and pulled his clothes back just enough to expose his tailbone.
He could hear exactly how loud Taylor’s silence was. “Is that- Is that a tail?”
It wasn’t big, he knew. As much as he didn’t want to look at it, Danny stared at it every morning when he got ready to start his day and every night when he prepared for bed. It was a pale shadow of what it had once been, but it was still more than enough to fill his hand. More than enough to show that he too was different.
He grabbed at it, feeling the bare skin, and let his fingers dance around the scars at its base. “It used to be bigger. Um, a little less than four feet. I got it removed when your mom told me she was pregnant. I tried to have it removed, I mean. It started growing back.”
Taylor didn’t say anything. Danny tucked his tail away, fixed his clothes, and turned back around.
She wasn’t avoiding his eyes anymore. Danny could see the faint honeycomb pattern on the whites of her eyes just as clearly as he had when she’d first woken up.
Not as big of a mutation as a tail, but still a visible one.
“Does it hurt?” Taylor asked, eyes not straying as Danny sat back down.
Danny opened his mouth, but no words came out. His instinct was to lie. It wouldn’t be bad to, he reasoned. Parents did what they had to do to protect their kids, whether that be pretending their wounds didn’t hurt or surgically removing their tails. Totally the same.
But Danny was telling Taylor this because he wanted her to be honest. And that meant he had to be honest too.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “The surgery- I couldn’t exactly go to a regular doctor. It was… It hurt a lot. I amputated a limb, Taylor.”
It still hurt. He’d worked on the docks before getting his tail removed. Did the physical labor with a series of soft ropes and elastics binding his tail to his body under his clothes. He thought he’d be able to continue after the surgery, but his lower back still screamed in protest anytime he tried half the things he’d used to be able to do.
So, it was office work for him. Still on the docks, but not what he’d once been.
“For me,” Taylor concluded aloud, and Danny very quickly replayed what he’d said so far in his mind. He had said that, hadn’t he?
Again, he wanted to lie and say that wasn’t true. To assure his daughter and say what she needed to hear to be safe and protected.
But she was a mutant, and being a mutant was an ugly reality.
“We wanted you to have a normal life.”
“Mom went along with it?” Taylor clarified, and Danny nodded. “She knew?”
Danny blinked a couple times, surprised, and he watched the realization dawn on Taylor’s face. Of course Annette knew. A tail wasn’t an easy thing to hide from your wife.
That wasn’t all of it, though. “Your mom was a mutant too.”
“Really? What was her power?”
Danny told Taylor about her mom a little bit. Not everything. Not about… Well, the day Annette got her powers had been a terrible day. It was before Danny and Annette were together, back when they were just classmates and not really friends, and Danny had gone to Annette’s apartment to work on a class project, and Danny had found her with skin coated in diamond and a razor blade between her fingers.
The physical change wasn’t permanent, but it had saved her life back then.
And during the car crash.
“She could pass as human, but her power activated whenever she was about to get hurt,” Danny explained. “When she got into the car crash…”
He trailed off, throat feeling thick, and Taylor finished the thought for him. “She didn’t die in the car crash, did she?”
Danny shook his head. “Her power saved her. People saw, though. The Empire hunted her down.”
And they’d shattered her. There had been no body for Danny to identify.
“Is that why you cut your tail off?” Taylor asked, and it took Danny a second to realize she was talking about the Empire.
Danny shook his head. “They were just a White supremacy group back then. I only knew about them because some of the guys at the docks had trouble with them. They didn’t really get big until more mutants started showing up at the beginning of the 90s.”
Brockton Bay didn’t have that many mutants, but Danny saw a side of the city the average citizen couldn’t. They said there were thousands of mutants worldwide these days, and Danny didn’t doubt that at all. Hell, he’d bet money that there were over a million. After all, he and Annette couldn’t be the only ones hiding their mutations.
There were a lot in Brockton Bay. At least a couple dozen that Danny could think of off the top of his head. Not all of them alive, but still a couple dozen in the nearly fifteen years since Danny had tried cutting off his tail and severing his connection to his mutanthood.
“I don’t really know what I was thinking back then,” Danny told her. Cutting his tail off hadn’t really done anything other than make him feel incomplete. As scared as he was when it started growing back, the fear was nothing compared to the relief. “Neither me or your mom could completely shut off our powers, so there wasn’t really any escaping it. Not having anything physical showing I’m a mutant just felt safer, I guess.”
“What is your power?” Taylor asked, and Danny realized he’d never told her. “Unless it’s just having a tail.”
He laughed a bit, and he knew it sounded forced. “It’s a rat tail. I can talk to rats.”
“Oh. That’s…”
He chuckled again, and he thought it sounded a little more genuine this time. “It’s a little more complicated than that. I can see out of their eyes, and I can take control of them if I want to. And…”
“And?”
It was hard to describe. “Sometimes I throw up these mutant rats, but I haven’t done it in a while.”
Not since Annette died, and Danny felt like his life was falling apart.
Taylor made a face. “Gross.”
Danny grinned a little at that. “Well, what can you do?”
It just kind of slipped out, so casual Danny hadn’t even noticed it until Taylor froze, abruptly sitting up a little straighter. Immediately, Danny wanted to backtrack.
“You don’t have to tell me if you’re not ready,” he told her, even though he really, really wanted to know. Would he take after Annette? She looked so much like her. Or would she take after Danny? Or would she have something totally unique and utterly Taylor?
“I- Bugs?” she cut herself off, but Danny still got enough to know she took after him. “It’s something with bugs. I can sort of… feel them, and after you said that thing about controlling rats…”
She trailed off. Bug control, Danny had to guess. Maybe something more physical too, given her parentage and the beginnings of a change visible in her eyes.
“We’ll figure it out,” Danny promised, “but you know no one can ever know, right?”
Taylor nodded, and then, wordlessly, she got up and hugged him. Danny hugged her back, and, despite everything, he thought they might be okay for the first time in a long time.
Dad worried a lot. Which, I got. There were Empire kids at school, and there was just as much anti-mutant stuff as there was racist stuff, even though there were way fewer mutants than… Okay, that was a bad comparison. No one deserved to be treated the way the Empire treated people.
But it was weird for me to be one of those people. I was empathetic, obviously. I knew it was bad. Mom and Dad had always been nervous about Empire stuff, and I thought that was just them being parents. I’d never really been afraid, except in the way that all girls were taught to be afraid.
If a man ever tries to grab you, jam your fingers in his eyes and scream. Don’t let yourself be taken to a second location. If you end up in a trunk, punch the taillights out and stick your hand through the hole to wave for help.
Mom had ingrained those lessons into me since I was little, and I knew Emma’s mom had taught her the same. This was different, though.
This was more real. Like, I knew that bad stuff happened to girls all the time, but it was really easy to go on with my life and say that it would never happen to me.
But mutant stuff? Mutants were actively hated in a way I could never comprehend or relate to, at least before I got powers, and even then, it was so big I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Pretty much every mention of mutants I saw on the news had to do with a hate group. My mom had been killed by a hate group in my own hometown. And Dad hadn’t exactly said he’d had any run-ins with them, but he was sort of vague in a way that made me think he had. But even if he hadn’t, he’d still mutilated himself to protect himself from the chance that he could.
Dad’s worries were very much founded.
I was already pretty nervous at school with the bullying and all. I got a few weeks off from school since I was in the hospital and all, and Dad was working on getting me some colored contacts to cover the changes to my sclera, but even if I could hide my mutation, the idea of going back to school as a mutant was terrifying.
Walking the halls with a secret this big, knowing that people were willing to hurt me for even less? Trying to navigate the bullying while hiding my powers? Even just at home, it was pretty hard to keep my senses from getting lost in the bugs when I got distracted, and sometimes I made them move without even wanting to. I couldn’t imagine keeping a grip on it at school.
And then something amazing happened.
Genosha. A mutant nation, the news called it.
It was on every news station within a few days of my return from the hospital. Dad acted like he wasn’t interested, but with my bugs, I could sense him up late watching the news every night, soaking it up like a moth hypnotized by a flame.
He wanted to go. I didn’t need to ask to know.
I voiced this, but to my surprise, he shook his head.
“You need to finish school,” Dad told me. “Your mutation isn’t that visible. You could have a normal life.”
I tried not to make a face. “You’ve seen my normal life. It sucks. We tried to get me to transfer to Arcadia, remember? This is like that, but bigger.”
And better. A fresh start. I didn’t say it because it sounded corny, but I knew Dad knew what I meant. It was so much easier talking to him these past few days.
Still, Dad didn’t look convinced. “The UN hasn’t approved anything yet. Once it does, there might be planes, or maybe boats…”
I abruptly realized Dad’s hesitation. It wasn’t just a decision to leave our lives in Brockton Bay behind. I had no idea how we would actually get to Genosha, and, considering neither of us had the power to fly halfway across the world, attempting to navigate any avenue of transport would involve outing ourselves as mutants. I could understand why Dad didn’t want that.
“We can wait, I guess,” I told him, and we talked a little bit about saving money to afford the travel costs if and when the option became available, and then the conversation got a little more optimistic. What our lives would look like there, what it might feel like to not have to hide our powers, whether Mom would have liked it there…
The UN announced its recognition of Genosha as its own nation, and the conversations became less hypothetical and more real.
And then, very suddenly, the news took a deep, dark turn.
Dad had started going back to work because it’d been long enough for me to be at home alone, and we needed the money, but this was a big enough day that he’d taken the day off so we could watch the limited news footage of the celebration together.
I was grateful for it because it meant I didn’t have to watch the Sentinel attack alone.
It was a good thing everyone else in Brockton Bay was suddenly glued to their TVs as well, or they would have seen the city’s bugs and vermin grow agitated and fearful as despair overtook us.
Genosha was gone, and our hopes for salvation were gone with it.