In Weave and Woe [Worm/Wednesday]

[Shadelight]

The wake of Leviathan leaves two souls adrift, unbound from a city that's cursed with conflict. A letter from the past, however, presents a lifeline that they never even expected.


Thanks to my betas: Dysole, *FuryouMiko and Lucifra

Crossposted from Ao3. Also available on SB and SV.

While this was originally planned to be a larger story, mostly taking place in Nevermore, sickness and burnout has led me to keep this first chapter as just a oneshot instead.

---

It was surprising how quiet everything was, now that the rain had stopped. No rumbling of cars passing on the fractured, unnavigable streets. No chatter of locals or tourists either, with everyone focused on leaving the city. None of the attractions and advertisements for shops were working due to power being gone in most places. Not even the birds had returned to the Bay yet — one would think the tsunamis would leave some fish lying around for them to find…

A gust of cold wind lashed at my face with a prolonged howl, but I suppressed the urge to move, to adjust my hoodie, continuing to stare blankly at the tree that was in front of me. A few of the termites milling about on its trunk weren't as resilient, falling off due to the wind down to the ground. I had some flies pick them up and ferry them back to the object of my focus. Just another minute or two was all I needed.

The silence continued until it was done. I got rid of the bugs and closed my eyes, exhaling.

"They would've appreciated the gesture, you know. Regardless of the whole disagreement." Lisa shifted from one leg to another, likely from the cold, within arm's reach of me. "I mean it."

"Even Rachel?" I asked.

"Even Rachel. She wasn't used to people caring about her, so your efforts were a new thing for her to get used to. Believe me, she was warming up to you by the end of it… but such things need time." Time we were denied.

My eyes opened to look at the carved visage of a bulldog with empty eye sockets. It felt too soulless for the intense girl it was meant to represent, but I had never been an artist — that was more Alec's thing than mine. I wasn't sure what else might be more fitting, but this matched Rachel's mask without showing the original's cheapness. Hopefully, she would've liked it, or at least wouldn't have hated it that much.

"You were certainly the closest to her out of all of us. That has to count for something, right?" As Lisa mused aloud, I privately wondered how things would've changed were the others still alive. Would we have grown closer, now that I knew I wasn't giving them over to the heroes? How much had I not learned about them yet? Would we have truly become a team, more so than before?

…No, that was wishful thinking. I was ignoring the plight of Dinah; erasing her from my mind, from the equation. I left the team for her. Going back wasn't a thing I thought to still be in the cards, and now… now the whole deck was scattered completely.

And drenched, and bent, and shredded.

"I think Alec would've complained about his part not being extravagant enough." The corners of my lips twitched up at her comment for but an instant, despite the renewed prickling in my nose and eyes. As with the other two, Alec's was a representation of his mask — pale white, Venetian, with some filigree — placed to the left of Rachel's. A coronet was there too, skewed to the side just a bit.

"He'd probably request for me to honor all his consoles as well," I noted wryly.

Lisa sniffed after a clipped, wet giggle. "Yeah, he would." A glance in her direction revealed the blonde smiling sadly. "Gonna miss the asshole." Somehow, I agreed.

Almost as if acting of their own volition, my eyes shifted a bit to the right, between the impressions of Alec and Rachel's masks… and then up above them. A skull stared back at me. Judging.

I wasn't sure what to think about Brian, especially given all the developments from right before Leviathan. He was okay with letting an adolescent be kept in the captivity of our mutual boss, hooked on drugs and used as a glorified scrying orb, even though he had- has a sister of the same age. He somehow ignored the fact that he was already involved — we were the reason Dinah got captured in the first place, after all. Surely Brian could've imagined Aisha in her place? At least empathize with her somehow? Lisa said that was his 'core programming', prioritizing family and friends over other, random people, but it was so jarring to see him just shrug Dinah's suffering off without caring even for a fucking second.

A whirring noise out in the distance broke our shared rumination, and I turned my head to face the way it was coming from. Something obscured by the facade of the nearest building… A helicopter?

"Supplies." Oh.

I recalled sitting in class once upon a time, back in middle school, watching a documentary on the recovery of Kyushu. Our current situation reminded me much of what I'd seen then. Both the documentary and… now were the aftermaths of Leviathan attacks, for one, but that wasn't the point. What I remembered most vividly was the footage taken from a helicopter above it all.

Flooded streets. Devastated buildings. Rubble, mud and trash everywhere. It looked like a swampy warzone on top of a landfill. The landscape changed in a matter of hours in the sped-up recording. I visualized ourselves from that point of view; mere specks, almost invisible to the eyes in the sky. It struck home how, in the grand scheme of things, we were still so easily comparable to ants.

Lisa shook her head before moving again, cradling her torso with her arms in a self-hug. I kept mine at my sides, hands balled into fists, bleeding excess emotions out through my bugs. She turned to me, and I met her gaze, but neither of us said anything for a few more seconds. Finally, though, she spoke up: "I know you're stalling."

I sighed.

"Come on, we're burning daylight." She took me lightly by the wrist and tugged at it. "The faster we get there, the better. Or do you want to give the looters a head start?"

No, I really didn't. We were unlucky enough already with the loft — someone had gotten there before we did, hours ago. A lot of the cabinets in the still-intact portion were left open, items strewn about, and some things like the stack of cash set aside for groceries and takeout were straight-up missing. The thing that annoyed me the most was the fact that the backpack I'd packed a week ago — first to stay at Brian's for a while, and then a second time after I'd all but left the Undersiders — was also taken. It was nowhere to be found, thanks to the damn looters, and the amber-trapped dragonfly he gifted me was gone with it.

I didn't want anything missing from my childhood home like that too.

"Alright," I conceded, then turned away. "But can we go check Brian's place again on the way there? Just in case Aisha came back?"

"You know that's not close by, Taylor. How about after?"

"Fine. Let's go rip the bandaid off."

Three unseeing visages carved into a lone tree watched us depart.

Rest well.

⨳​

As my dad's house moved into my range with a glacial slowness, I parsed what I saw through the insects still there, and my footsteps slowed — it was half-destroyed. Fuck. Fuck.

The vast majority of the black widows I'd kept in the basement didn't survive it getting flooded. That was the first thing I noticed being wrong, though far from the last, and it kept getting worse: the roof had collapsed, as did the second floor. Dad's room, mine, and almost all of mom's long-vacant office had crumbled down to the ground, barely recognizable. The chimney and stairs seemed to have saved the living room, still supporting it and part of the attic.

…And then my mind ground to a halt as I finally understood why there were so many flies. I sank to the ground, breathing heavily through my mouth, a distant part of me feeling sharp bits of concrete and other detritus dig into my palms.

I had some of the bugs convene in the ruined kitchen, praying to all creatures light and dark that it wasn't him. The moths and flies didn't detect any breathing. The spiders and cockroaches felt the person's pierced torso. If omitting all the disfigurement, the body type matched. There was the same thinning hair, now matted and filthy; the same gauntness...

The fact that the last interaction dad and I had was a fight made everything even more painful and unbearable, the sudden understanding of that slamming into my cerebellum without any mercy. I didn't even look him in the eyes as I left then, too hurt and angry. Hell, even now I could still feel that betrayal.

Why did he think that locking me in was a good idea? In my own home? I tried thinking from his perspective, but came up empty handed. It just didn't make sense to me at all. He'd never done that before, either, despite me getting into trouble with Emma quite a bit back when we were younger. It might've been part of Gram's advice to him, then, to display his power and control over me.

Yet, I still loved him regardless.

I belatedly acknowledged the hands enveloping my shoulders. Lisa. All the deaths of today, forever seared into my mind, flashed past yet again as I slowly slumped: Rachel, pulverized by Leviathan's water echo during our failing attempts at protecting a shelter. Brian, bleeding out with a broken neck as I laid merely several feet next to him, paralyzed. Alec, body never recovered; he could be out in the ocean, floating, or crushed by the numerous toppled buildings across the battlefield. Dinah, lost to Coil's base detonating once the Endbringer suddenly targeted it.

And now dad too. Dad. Was Lisa next? What then?

"I'm sorry," she whispered, hugging harder. I did the same as more tears streaked my face.

I was grateful for the lack of comments as Lisa held me while I cried. I eventually managed to get myself moving again, though, leaning on her maybe more than I really needed to. It was still daytime, but that evidently didn't scare all of the looters trying to profit from other peoples' misfortune. I had some hornets sting one such pair nearby, about a block away, on our way to what was- what used to be my home.

"Why the hell did he stay?" I whispered in dismay. "He should've gone to a shelter! He- Why?" Did he decide to wait on the off chance that I'd come back? It was unlikely, but still possible — the very last words I'd heard from him were "You can come home anytime." I could see him sitting there, hoping to catch me entering before we'd both go to the Endbringer shelter a dozen blocks away.

Clenching my teeth, I heard another sentence that dad had uttered before that phrase, sounding in my head like a faulty recording: "Please do keep in touch."

I hadn't.

"Heart failure," Lisa murmured from behind me. We went inside, or at least what passed for it now. The hallway was a total mess, which was to be expected. It hurt to look at. The collapse had taken out the banister, and the supports have splintered into the opposite wall, sticking out like the quills of a hedgehog, or an echidna. The glass from the frames of so many photos glittered in the afternoon light, spilling in from the doorway, and the coat rack lay unceremoniously at the bottom of the stairs. Pushed all the way there by a wave somehow, probably.

Lisa put a hand on one of my shoulders, and I was tempted to shrug it off, to lash out, to do something. She squeezed and let go of it by herself. "That, or a stroke. Not sure which. Must've happened when he heard the sirens, so by the time the first wave came…" She didn't finish. She didn't have to.

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

I sat on a still-intact dresser and exhaled. A small part of me didn't believe Lisa's mental autopsy, instead deciding to twist the blade even deeper: what if it wasn't his body giving out on him at the worst moment? What if, instead, this was intentional?

I felt sick.

"Taylor," Lisa called out to me, crossing her arms as I met her eyes. "Don't. Trust me on this one. That's not what happened and you know it. Those what-ifs will keep hounding you until you're just a ball of neuroses and self-loathing, so don't let them win."

"And if they're right?"

"That's the thing — they aren't."

I couldn't answer.

She stepped away, turning to pick up a framed photo lying face-down on the soggy carpet. I was reminded of the one I'd accidentally damaged when venting my frustrations during the fight with dad, feeling an influx of shame. Did he put it in the basement? Did he replace it? If I was right, it was the one of all three of us at Kings Dominion during a road trip, a single summer before mom had died.

I ordered my swarm to search for it in the background, hoping to identify it by the split in the frame.

Lisa's face was half-lit by the streaming sunlight from the collapsed wall. "And yet, you'd not be wrong for being angry at him," she said. "Even now."

"But he still-" I cut myself off. 'But he still' what? Still cared? still loved me? Whatever words I had wanted to use, they just died on my tongue as I tried to pronounce them. The disappointment I kept down for so long suddenly bubbled up; the disappointment in his… inaction. It was then contrasted by the heat of shame, moving across my back in torturous waves.

"Yeah, he was grasping at straws back then, pulled out a bad one. I get that. What he also did — for a whole year, in fact — was see how much bullshit you had to endure daily at school. Tell me, did he do anything about it?" No, but- "He didn't. And don't try to tell me that he couldn't have done anything — he could've. He had some options, but he used none of them, deciding to instead watch everything from the sidelines." And then he tried to assert dominance when I pushed back.

"I just… I thought he'd understand me. Is it that wrong for me to want?" I paused for a moment. "Also, should we talk about him like that?" He was gone now, after all.

The freckled blonde scoffed. "I can live with a little haunting. Now, what you need to remember is that everyone deserves good parents. Danny was barely a parent."

"Where are yours, then?" I asked, speaking by accident. Shit. My tired brain was working overtime, and it was showing. "Wait, sorry-"

"No, no, that… that supports my point, actually." With a sigh, she sat next to me, looking up. "I ran away from mine. I'm not gonna give many details on my actual trigger event 'cause I'm still far, far from ready to touch that specific topic with a sober mind, but I will tell you what came after."

"You don't have to," I started, but she waved me off, still not looking at me.

"Just listen. So, imagine that you-"

"Wait," I interrupted again, much to Lisa's annoyance. I pushed past the lump in my throat. "Let's… actually do something, too. Search the place." The sight of the broken wall and the wreckage beyond it made my heart ache. "Because I don't think we're going to stay here for the night."

Her studious gaze was weary and melancholic, and she bobbed her head downwards in acquiescence. "You have a point there."

We both stood up, and I walked towards the door that led to the living room, now off its hinges. The only other location here still somewhat safe for us was the sliver of mom's home office up the stairs and to the left, but what remained of it was pretty small. I decided that we'd take a look at it last.

Thankfully, the living room door didn't need much jostling to get pushed away. Inside, it looked as if the room had been smashed by a wrecking ball, then hosed by a fire truck through the resulting hole. Almost everything on the walls had been washed off, the books had started to meld into a soggy mass of paper in one of the corners, and the TV was cracked across the middle. A kitchen knife had ended up embedded in the back of the couch somehow, having torn the cushion open on its way from the kitchen, and everything was soaked through and starting to smell.

The way through to the kitchen — and dad's… body — was blocked by rubble. I didn't stare long.

"Okay," Lisa said, moving to pick through the battered books half-heartedly. "Ready now?"

I put down my replacement backpack we had grabbed back at the loft onto the torn couch, opened it up, and then nodded. Deciding to check the drawers under the TV first, I knelt before them and started rummaging around.

"First, try your best to imagine living in one of those bougie families like up at Captain's Hill, the ones that act classy and rich. Not exactly the Stansfields, as those guys are actually rich, but maybe someone that's roleplaying as them. That's what my family was like." I honestly never would've guessed. "You go about your day as always — get driven along to some umpteenth outing, stand around next to your parents while looking pretty for the other snobs, maybe say some rehearsed stuff too, et cetera, et cetera — and when you get back, on one of those days…" I could hear the shakiness in her voice near the end, there. "...something bad happens." We make eye contact. "You blame yourself. And then some more. And then you break."

And trigger.

"I got the answers to all of those what-ifs and other questions I asked myself since then, but also the answers to things that I didn't ask. You should know how it works by now — it gets sidetracked sometimes, and is hard to shut up. The me of yesteryear didn't have any practice in keeping the mouthy cretin in her head on a leash yet… which, of course, led to the fact that I had powers get discovered by my parents pretty early on."

I closed a drawer, clutching an old family album, while still raptly listening to Lisa detail her past. "And then?" I prompted. "Did they try putting you into the Wards or something?"

"Ha!" The Thinker barked out a laugh. "That would be priceless. Yeah, no. We lived in a town, not in a city." She stopped moving for a second or two. "Midway between here and Boston, actually. It wasn't big enough to warrant a PRT outpost — hell, I don't even remember if there were any local capes around. What my parents actually decided to do was to pull a Coil and exploit me much like he exploited Dinah. No blatant captivity or forced addiction to drugs, mind you, but it still sucked when they didn't give a damn about me having migraines — caused by their questions — apart from just offering some aspirin and saying to tough it out. Oh, and the icing on the shit sundae was the voice in my head also constantly whispering in my ear about how all they truly cared about were their wallets and other hedonistic crap. Me? I was just a means to an end. 'A hidden cheat code', as Alec would put it."

"I can see why you left," I admitted. "That must've been horrible." Would I have done the same, though, were I in her place? I wasn't sure. Maybe.

Lisa sighed and stood up, walking to me. "Point is, while our predicaments aren't too comparable — exploitation versus neglect 'n' all that — they both still count as abuse, last I checked." She shrugged.

"There's also the thing with yours being awful from the start while-"

"Yeah, I know, I know. My parents got worse when they found out about me being a cape, and your dad got worse when he'd lost his wife. If I were you, I'd have run away like you did a week ago, so clearly you're still doing something right here."

I looked away. "Sure doesn't feel like it…"

From the corner of my eye I could see a wry smile making an appearance on Lisa's face. "That's just how it is, sometimes, unfortunately. Did you get what you needed, at least?"

"An album, mostly." I tapped my bag. "Some surviving books too. Dunno."

"Let's check upstairs, then, and dip."

I hummed.

Slinging our backpacks over our shoulders and walking back to the corridor, we turned to the staircase and considered attempting to climb it. The upper floor had almost completely come apart inwards, though, and didn't look stable enough. Just as I stepped towards it, the rubble shifted slightly, and about nine tenths of the insects I had in mom's office got squashed as the unscathed portion collapsed into the living room.

"...Shit," I cursed in exasperation.

"Saves us a trip up…" Lisa trailed off as she looked back into the room we'd just left. "...stairs. Huh."

Frowning, I moved away from the stairs and approached her. "What?"

She said nothing.

"Lisa? What is it?"

Instead of answering me, I heard her mutter under her breath: "The fuck do you mean, 'deliberately'?"

"Lisa?"

She entered the living room again and stopped at the new pile of debris. I followed her. As she crouched down, I saw the thing she was currently so intrigued by: an old wooden sewing kit. It was one of mom's, but I didn't remember the reason she switched away from it to some new one. It must've fallen from the now-ruined attic into her office before the more recent collapse from just a minute ago.

The fall made it crack at the side, while also revealing a… false bottom? I watched Lisa peek into it.

"What the hell?"

Dumping my annoyance into my swarm, I tried again. "Lisa, talk to me. Or, at least, let me see for myself."

"...Your mom was a precog..?"

My mom was a what.

"Look." Lisa glanced at me, showing the false bottom more closely. "Wait, we gotta open it first." She hummed a bit, then offered the kit to me. "The weak point's here."

"Let me see." I directed a small stream of flying insects into the crack to map out the compartment's insides. The walls were smooth — likely polished — and there was a letter. No, an envelope. Oh, and there was a hole near the top of the secret cavity's back. Was it for a key? It seemed like it, but the external side of it was blocked by a piece of thin wooden panel and painted over to blend in.

I frowned.

"A key goes here," I explained my thought process aloud. "I can have termites chew through the panel bit, but I'm not sure where the actual key went. Or if there even is one."

"Easy — I have a few lockpicks on me." Lisa reached into her bag and pulled out a set of them in a compact container.

"That works."

About five minutes later, a clack softly reverberated from the now-unlocked bottom.

As I gently took the envelope out of it, Lisa's brows rose upwards. "Holy shit. Look — I was right!"

"How the hell…" I whispered in awe at the sight.

The middle of the plain, off-white envelope had 'Taylor & Lisa' penned on it in cursive; in cursive that I knew by heart — that was mom's handwriting. I could recognize it anywhere.

"W-what?.."

"I thought it was just a trick of the light…" Lisa's eyes were boring into the letters with an intensity I hadn't seen before. "Power says it's at least four years old. The paper, that is, not the kit." She shifted to sit next to me.

We looked at each other, then back to the envelope, already knowing what next step we'd take. I took my combat knife out of its sheath and freed the letter from its pale bastille.

---

My beloved daughter,

At the time of me writing this very letter, you're in the backyard busy chasing Emma around our tree, giggling about. The weather's wonderful today — it's almost summer, with nary a cloud hanging in the sky. It's warm and soothing, the soft breeze included, and the perfect environment for some lazy sunbathing.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your current timeframe, if I am right.

I'll be honest: I have been omitting a certain fact about myself. To protect you and your father both, believe it or not, however recently I have been doubting this choice of mine with increasing frequency. This latest glimpse, being a self-fulfilling prophecy, only served to stoke the fires of my worries even more. If what you're suffering from right now is all my fault, then I am truly sorry. I hope you'll forgive me.

Perhaps, my dear Taylor, you recall some moments of me stopping suddenly upon touching some object. In fact, the you of my time had witnessed me doing so yet again just an hour ago. Maybe it has always been normal to you, so you thought nothing of it. If not, and you spoke about it with Aunt Zoe, she would probably have likened it to a seizure, and I suppose she would have not been technically wrong. It is a peculiarity that has existed in our family since before Scion appeared, placing us as among the ranks of Outcasts; capital 'O'. The more modern term for them, as you might know from school by this point, is 'Case 13'.

As you may have already guessed, I anticipated you and your blonde friend finding this letter within my now-discarded sewing kit. I did, yes, because I watched you as you did just so: I had a vision that started right before the house — or were they the stairs? — resumed collapsing. The thing that I kept so close to my heart, perhaps overly stubbornly, was my status as a seer.

And now, you finally know the truth. Defining it as a condition, an ability, or both is up to you — it's a simple matter of perspective. Semantics.

Why I am confessing this to you now is due to your potential next destination. If my fears are correct, and both your father and I are indisposed, then it's safe to assume that you don't have any place to go. Maybe the same even extends to Lisa. If that's true, and your Aunt Zoe can't take you in for some reason or another, then there's one other valid path you can embark upon despite the distance: seeking the aid of my sister — and thus your aunt — Morticia Addams. Her oddball family is a fixture in Outcast culture, hence my reveal.

I'm aware of, perhaps, far too many rumors surrounding them. I'd fallen prey to some myself, even, before finding them untrue. Some are real, but most are usually hyperbole; people certainly love to demonize what they can't understand. What I'll admit with utmost certainty, Taylor, is that they will never spurn family — that's unheard of. If you ask them for help, you will receive it. They may be strange, they may be morbid, but they aren't heartless.

Whether you'll choose to travel all the way from here to New Jersey, or stay and find shelter somewhere else in the Bay, I trust Morticia to explain more in my stead — be it in person, via telephone, or somehow else.

Now, with that out of the way, may I mention how beautifully you had grown up, darling? And were those some faint muscles I saw beneath that hoodie? Did you take up track, by any chance? Or some other sport?

What sorts of things have you accomplished in all these years? I can only speculate, as the vision didn't give any hints. Oh well. Whatever you put your mind to, I know you can succeed in — you've proven it time and time again, sweet child o' mine.

How did you and Lisa meet, I wonder? School? Through Emma? At the library? There must be a story there somewhere, and I know how much you adore stories… Speaking of whom, I'd like to have a quick word with her. Would you mind passing the page to her for a moment?

⊱⊰​

My daughter's companion,

It's a delight to 'meet' you, regardless of how flawed our method of communication is. It's been a while since Taylor had made another friend besides Emma, so I'm glad that her social circle expanded at least a bit since now. It deeply saddens me that you've both been caught in what looks like a catastrophe — a flood? — but do keep in mind that Taylor's relatives will welcome you as well. I'm sure of it; don't lose hope.

I wish you luck with whatever you'll need it for, and thank you for staying by Taylor's side during such a tragedy. The knowledge that my child isn't all alone feels like an enormous weight being lifted from my shoulders.

⊱⊰​

Come what may, I have unending faith in you. Both of you, in fact. You may find trouble, but you'll overcome it. Lean on each other when needed, and trust in yourselves.

…And Taylor, my dearest owlet, I love you dearly, as does your father. We always will, even in death, so don't forget that. Stay strong.​

⁓Annette Rose Hebert, née Frump​