Chapter Text
Taylor could not feel a thing.
Was that correct? She could not feel a thing but she was distantly aware of faint, numbed sensations. A weight on her legs and chest, confusing sounds all around. It took a long time for her to even realise that she was hearing anything, that the weight on her was not normal but implied that something was resting on top of her. She spent what felt like a century putting things together, and trying to work things out.
The last sensation she remembered was laying on the ground, no, not the ground... on the twisted and ruined piece of metal that had formerly been the door to her locker, covered in filth and unable to even raise an arm, her strength depleted.
She had freed herself, in that moment of desperation, as she reached her lowest point possible... something happened and her eyes had twitched.
She had been laying there atop the ruined metal for a while, her eyes pulsing... had somebody found her?
Or was she dead? What was going on? Her mind was all confused, it was like trying to push through a wall of treacle or something like that. Or like when you wake up from a long sleep and struggle to get yourself to wake up, struggling against the warmth and easy comfort. She could just about open her eyes and peer with hazy, blurred vision around her.
Her first thought was that the world was far too bright and hazy, details were very slowly fading in.
There was something beside her.
It took her several minutes of staring blankly at it to realise that yes, it was there. The strange lines superimposed on her vision was indeed a curving tube reaching down from a large blob of liquid, and it reached all the way down to the bottom of her vision. It took far more effort than felt nature to look down to see that the tube terminated in her own arm.
A... drip?
That's what those were called right?
A drip.
You used them to... to...
"---lor!?" somebody was touching her, something warm had just wrapped around her hand.
Taylor knew that smell, it was familiar. It was that pretty gross and strong cologne that her dad used, yeah, she could feel the callouses on the hand that surrounded hers.
She tried to say 'dad,' but It came out as one long sound without definition or even syllable.
Propping her up so that she was half sitting, half laying in the hospital bed. It took awhile for her to fully wake up and, blearily, talk with her father. He sat beside her; his hands wrapped around her own as if afraid she would disappear if he let go.
A doctor bustled in and was speaking, describing what had happened to her. She struggled to follow along. Severe Sepsis? Blood infection?
"---you have suffered some organ damage, especially your heart, so you will have to take it very carefully until it can recover, Miss Hebert," the doctor rattled off. "You need to avoid intensive exercise until you show signs of recovery, and you're likely to suffer a condition called Post Sepsis Syndrome. Whilst the symptoms vary, you'll likely be in quite a bit of pain for quite awhile I am afraid---"
A small pamphlet was handed to her father.
She would need to read that, right?
The doctor kept listing things off at her, things she was struggling to keep up with, the heady sensation of the drugs were not helping. Her father was doing his best to take all this in, there were papers to be signed and she was barely cognisant of being asked her opinion on a number of topics. What sort of opinion could she give right now? She barely understood what was going on, she felt so very numb.
She should be feeling something , right?
"---We did a scan and whilst the PRT had been concerned that your daughter had gained Parahuman powers, we found no evidence of such---"
Would things be different if she had gained Parahuman powers? Would they be hurrying to heal her, wanting to put themselves in her good books. Wait, they scanned her? Wasn't that a lot of money?
"---so, we're going to put you on a list for Panacea, but to be honest, it will be quite a while. Whilst Post Sepsis Syndrome is unpleasant there are a lot of critically ill people ahead of you," it almost sounded as if she was being admonished for being locked in that steel coffin and contracting blood poisoning.
The world was not fair.
Due to the damage done to her heart by the sepsis she could no longer go for jogs in the morning, could not move faster than a walk without her heart beginning to hurt and her vision beginning to darken. Just lifting her school bag for her first day back at school felt like a monumental effort that left her muscles struggling.
"Have you taken your tablets Taylor?" her father asked, hovering over her.
"Yeah, I have," she patted a pocket of her bag, which contained the little cardboard packet with the blister pack pills within.
Drugs from the hospital.
To numb the constant aches and pains, which were so great that they boarded on paralysing. The only downside was that they had the side effect that alongside the physical pain... she did not really feel much at all. Taylor hated the idea of drugs, but in the choice between constant, near overwhelming pain and feeling barely anything at all, what sort of choice did she really have?
She felt numb, both physically and emotionally. For the last few days that she had been home after being discharged from the hospital she had mostly floated around, comfortably numb. The world was very different when you barely had the strength and motivation to do anything.
That, combined with the pills to deal with the fact that it was now so, so hard to get to sleep, left her in a zombie-like state in the morning.
The drugs required to mitigate the after effects of severe sepsis were almost as debilitating as the condition itself.
If she could feel it, she would be miserable.
As it was, she rested her head against the window of the family car. Her father would not be able to drop her off every day, but for her first few days back he had offered. It was nice of him... the news that she was much more likely to suffer heart attacks in the future had evidently gotten to him. For the last few days he had been hurrying to take care of her, to reduce the amount of difficult things she had to do.
How sweet.
Winslow was the same as before.
She walked along, by all logic she should go to homeroom first, but now she had to go somewhere else she had to visit.
The nurse’s office.
"Excuse me, I need to drop off my tablets," she said, by means of explanation as she stepped in.
The school nurses nodded.
They had a small safe for students with medical conditions to store their various drugs.
Handing over the packets, she should probably feel some manner of trepidation. Would the trio stoop so low as to try and sneak in to steal the tablets that she relied upon to make it through the day? The average person would say that doing that would be a step too far. But this was the same group who put her into the locker, who put her in this place to start with.
"I'll put them away for you dear, when do you next need to take them?"
"Lunch, they have to go with food."
"Okay, thank you, I'll see you then," the nurse had smiled at her.
She forced a similar expression before she departed. Unfortunately, because the world is not fair, there was somebody waiting outside, leaning against the wall opposite with arms crossed over her chest and eyebrow raised.
"Why were you in the nurses then, Hebert?"
"Tablets."
She should probably feel scared or intimidated, but it was hard to feel anything at all. So instead she stared down at Sophia… wow, when she was not hunching all the time the other girl was a few inches shorter than her. Strange to think.
"What are the tablets for?"
"... Blood poisoning."
A grunt.
Taylor watched her leave neutrally.
What a twisted, horrible person.
Not as bad as Emma, Sophia was just a brute. It was harder to begrudge the dog that bites a person than its owner that sic’s it upon you.
Overall, her return to school had surprisingly little fanfare.
People were curious about what, exactly, happened to her locker. The door had been found ripped apart as if it had been hit by some manner of vehicle, there was even some talk that she, of all people, might be a Cape. If nothing else, that rumour meant that suddenly people were keeping a bit of a distance, nobody wants to mess with somebody who might suddenly fire a laser out their eyes or turn you inside out.
Even the trio were keeping a small distance.
but she had seen that before.
The calm before the storm, the flight of the stone through the air before it shatters a window.
Oh, there were questions though. She did not put much energy into answering them, though, just monosyllabic answers, because the matter did not really deserve more.
The school board had already drawn its own conclusions about the entire thing before she had even woken up from her coma, before she had even been asked about it all. So, what could she really contribute, apart from a narrative that would be rejected?
They did still ask, at least.
Hooray for wanting to talk to the victim after the fact.
"And how did you break the door to the locker, Miss Hebert?"
"If I had the strength to do it, then why did I not break myself out? No offence, but a metal door is less valuable than my life."
It was the longest thing she had said all day.
Amazing how quickly that one can kill a line of questioning. Even unreasonable people sometimes have to look facts in the face.
Especially when the person you are talking to does not rise to any point or comment.
It was the night after her third day back to normality that she discovered that she had a power.
Well... was it a power?
The hospital had said that she did not have the required gemma in her corona pollentia to have parahuman powers, so whatever it was she was doing was not a proper power. It wasn't even anything special. She had been staring into the bathroom sink at the water within, a mill pool like surface, idly wondering on whether it was even worth washing her face when she began imagining pulling the plug and the cycling of the water down the drain.
Water turned anti-clockwise in this hemisphere, right? Or was it anti-clockwise...
Suddenly, her left eye felt weird.
Twist.
The water formed a little vortex as she stared at it.
Slowly at first, but within a moment or two the water was moving much quicker, sloshing over the side of the sink.
Had she not been drugged to the gills, perhaps she would have had a more intense emotional reaction. As it was, she closed her left eye and after a few seconds the vortex had disappeared and the water had settled back into a flat surface, with just a number of bubbles moving in a gentle circle to indicate the movement of water under the surface.
...
She imagined the water going the other way, keeping the left eye closed.
Her right eye twitched, the water moved.
This was all just a little weird, the bathroom carpet under her feet was getting rather wet at this point but this strange power of hers was eliciting surprise and confusion. She had not felt such strong emotions in days, this was novel, it was... enjoyable, to feel again.
So... she could make water turn?
Wait, no.
Focusing on a tree outside, she made a number of twigs snap and fold back on themselves, she could force the movement more and more, until, with a great snap a small branch splintered and fell. It took concentration and effort. Weren’t most powers like this not supposed to work on living matter?
She paused in her preparations for bed, ignoring what was left of the water in the sink to stand instead at the bathroom window. It was small and had only a limited view over the Hebert’s small back garden.
She focused on a point in the distance, a bamboo pole in the neighbour’s garden that was being used to grow some manner of creeping plant.
Twist.
She really needed to learn to control this strange power better, the bamboo pole less twisted than exploded, falling apart into dozens of pieces with ease. It was not even that hard... She tried again on a distant tree, squinting with the other eye to focus on it. Just like the other tree, she could twist and move it from afar. Her left eye twisted things to the left, her right eye to the right.
Oh, she felt a little lightheaded... had she been holding her breath whilst making use of this power of hers?
That was bad, her damaged heart and lungs could not handle stress and such things so well.
Taylor closed her eyes, restraining her new curiosity to focus on the breathing exercises that her father had found online for her. The light-headedness and rapid beating of her heart gently slowed down. She would have to be careful in future and make sure not to tax herself so much.
But the locker, it had been found all twisted and warped right? Had she really done that? Forcing metal like that was far more than just making water and a few twigs snap.
She wanted to know more about what she could do.
At school, things were slowly sliding back to how they were before.
The trio were beginning to move back to their original tactics, like hunting dogs cornering a fox or small animal they were growing more and more open in their discussions, glancing over at her frequently. That habitual stress was returning whenever they did, the automatic response of her body whenever they looked her way in that speculative manner, as if weighing up the pros and cons of an action.
... What would happen if she just... twisted them?
She had not tried using her new power on a living creature. Well, not on something that actually had flesh and blood.
And yet...
She rather wanted to, if only to see if she could. It was such a dangerous thought, though.
Then again, she had been forced down a slippery slope already, and been given no choice. She had always tried to be a moral person; she had once dreamed about being a Hero when she was older. Like Alexandria. But right now, she didn't feel a thing at all apart from a mild curiosity to see just what she could do with her power.
So she tested it out.
There was a rat in the garden.
It turned out, her power did work on living creatures.
It was gruesome to watch, but also fascinating. It elicited a morbid curiosity, if that is what it looked like when her power was used on a rat, then what would it look like if used on a human being? She tried to tell herself that it was a line she could not cross, but at the same time she was only telling herself that because it was what she was supposed to believe. There was no thought of revulsion, of secret shame for entertaining the idea.
She could perhaps go to the PRT to explain her power, see if perhaps they would be able to help her?
Maybe, as somebody with a power of some sort, they would get her priority treatment from Panacea? But then again, the PRT had taken one look at her, realised that she did not have a gemma and left without any further regard for her life, they only cared about people who could be useful to them . How would her life have changed if she did have one? How much of a priority would she be compared to now?
The PRT was not the answer, they had not helped her before so there was no point in coming to them now.
And then---
The metaphorical sword of Damocles finally dropped, the near invisible thread that had been holding the blade aloft finally snapped and the opening salvo occurred whilst she had been walking to her second to last class of the day. Just a few words and being shoved into the wall, the signal for things to begin anew as they had been before. In a way, it was a small relief that there could be no more ambiguity about the situation anymore, they had shown their hand.
The only difference now was that the words did not hurt, even Sophia shoving her elicited nothing, she was so numb to it all that she had simply turned her head, idly watching as the insults came her way.
The smug smile, and usual pointless aggression, the childish insults. All of them were just twisted people, and right now she wanted to make them twist just so very, very much. The thought made her smile, very faintly.
For that, she got called a freak and a half dozen other things.
They gave up eventually.
She rather suspected that she had confused them, that their opening salvo was supposed to be far more effective.
Still.
She did not want this all to start up again.
Over the next two days it only increased, and the temptation to take care of the problem only grew. When you deal with this sort of situation and nobody will help, you have to deal with it yourself. But of course, a normal person could not. She was weaker than Sophia, Emma was a queen bee and any sort of effort would see a disproportionate retaliation from the school and others, it was an utterly hopeless situation.
An utterly hopeless situation before she gained her power.
After school that Friday she slowly made her way down a different route back home. She could just take the bus, but the air was nice today and even if her heart was weak, a relaxed walk was good for the mind as well as the body.
Emma's window faced out towards the street, and her desk looked out over it.
When she had homework, Emma always sat at the desk to blitz through it, the girl was by no means stupid but her passion was hardly for anything academic.
Taylor glanced towards the window.
Emma was there---
Twist.
She looked for barely a second and then continued her way. A solitary glance was all it took.
She really should have felt some manner of horror, but the drugs helped to numb anything, any sort of remaining love and empathy was washed away by the haze. But even in the split second that she glanced that direction, the way her former best friend contorted was delightful. It was like water moving down a drain, except that the drain was the centre of the face, barely even with time to make a sound before all sorts of material splattered on the window.
Taylor continued her walk.
It brought a strange elation to her.
Oh god... it was the first time she had really felt anything in days, weeks even. It made the cocktail of faint emotions from testing out her power on the tree seem like a dim glow against a blinding light. The strange, slightly perverse joy of what she did to Emma was like the satisfaction of a warm towel after stepping out of the shower into a cold room.
For just a few minutes it made her feel alive
... She had given Emma the dignity of dying in her home, completely unaware of what was going to happen.
Did she even feel pain?
Her body felt the waves of relief... Emma's words would no longer be a problem, and she could feel something.