Skein [Worm Altpower/AU]

[TanaNari]

There are common constructions using both

Click to shrink...

Oh, I'm not saying you can't do it that way- on some rare occasions, it's even the better choice- but running with one or the other is usually the way to go. Although 'broked' doesn't exist, so you just say 'broke' for that one... personally, I'd use 'shattered' or 'snapped', because they sound cooler.

Also, wooo, information entropy!

Click to shrink...

Damn straight. Taken to the ultimate extreme, you get the famous "six word novel".

 

[Spiny]

XIV.

Coming home felt strange.

Whiplash, Taylor thought, staring down at the scarred wood of the table. From insanity to normalcy. Lisa's apartment still seemed more real than her house, than the stale-quiet dining room, than her dad sitting across from her, hands clasped together. A plate of roast beef and carrots sat a little to her right, picked at and pushed around but otherwise ignored. Even the food seemed off, like she was only remembering the taste.

It was just the trauma talking. Things would settle soon. She hoped.

"...a teenager now, and you've got your own things to worry about, your own life... I get it." Dad sighed, and Taylor's brain skipped a gear, click-click-snapping back to the conversation a moment too late. Excuses for her inattentiveness were easy—exhaustion, worry, the seething mob of thoughts chipping at her focus—but every time Danny opened his mouth, they all snapped flat and hollow, arrows to nowhere. She knew what was going on. There was an itch, constant and needling, pricking at her brain, a thousand times worse than the vague urge last week. Seeing people's Webs didn't take thought anymore: it was subconscious and immediate, a low-level reflexive pulse of information that, when she turned it off, left her vulnerable and blind. Was this how Lisa felt?

Taylor stabbed at a carrot, stopping the frown before it hit her face. The memories loomed, then drained away, a hundred conflicting feelings squeezed jostling for position before she squeezed them into a nice, compact ball of Thinking About It Later. And she would, really. Later. When she could focus on something besides not focusing.

"...just want to look out for you, okay? I'm your dad. I love you. I want you to be safe." Click-click-snap. Taylor nodded mechanically, and looked up—against her better judgement—to meet Danny's eyes. Warm but pained, they almost seemed to sparkle, with little flecks of gold that blistered outward as she watched, growing fast and hungry into shoots and bulbs like blooming flowers—

She slammed her lens shut, and the Web winked out. The outlines of the nodes took a few seconds to fade, drifting through her head like the smoke-ghosts of dead fireworks. Head down, eyes low, don't let the guilt paint your face. Stopping her power took constant, conscious effort, forcing a process as natural as breathing to a grinding halt. It felt horrible. Suffocating. But she'd made a promise. Drawn a line. Danny's thoughts would be his own, if only for fear of what would happen if she persuaded herself otherwise.

The spring-loaded pressure in her head lightened—Dad had stopped talking. Her turn. "Yeah," Taylor said, with a second, more emphatic nod. "I understand, Dad. I got... caught up in things. It won't happen again." A sudden flash of fear made her swallow, and the next few words dropped lead-heavy from her mouth: "Am I grounded?"

48 hours of blindness, slow stagnation, trapped in here with nothing to release the slowly mounting pressure. Torture. She'd endure it if she had to—the alternative didn't deserve to be called one—but 'hell' would still be a charitable description. The room pressed in, squeezing smaller, darker. Taylor shifted in her chair. She wished there was more noise.

Danny's mouth turned up at the corners, a snapped-off smile that didn't match the worry on the rest of his face. "Not this time," he said, shaking his head. "Only this time, though. I'm fine with you going out with friends, but you need to let me know earlier."

Taylor smiled back, a much more genuine effort, though her relief was tinged with unease. She hadn't let Danny know at all: Lisa, masquerading as her, had waited until a while after sunset to negotiate the last-minute 'sleepover'. Reading the texts had been an uncomfortable experience—Lisa had mimicked her mannerisms and typing style eerily well—but Taylor was still grateful, despite the violation of privacy and the since-deleted contacts entry of'Tattletale, the Best and Coolest <3.'

"Thanks, Dad." She stood up, the chair scraping away, and braced for a few more seconds of eye contact. "I love you." Bushy brows, capillaries latticing the scelera. Irises, flashing like suncaught pines. A system of links. Parts of a whole. They were leaking stardust, veined with light. Her lens shied closer. She yanked it back. Two more seconds. One more second.

"I love you too." Danny stood, and the constellations winked out. They left little ichor-smudges on Taylor's lens as she turned away, banging the chair with her hip in her rush to escape the dining room. The varnished legs teetered on the carpet, threatening to fall—but she was gone, up the stairs to safety. A guilty retreat. At least the pressure in her head had dulled, the walls and doors between her and Danny's Web melting it to a low, buzzing thrum. Annoying, but not overwhelming. Bearable. For now.

Her room was... her room. Clean but not meticulous, some books on the dresser, some clothes strewn around her bed. A notebook on her desk, open to a page of scribbled Chinese characters. She'd been trying to learn—writing systems didn't come nearly as easily as words did. Everything was exactly as she'd left it, and why wouldn't it have been? The thought made her chuckle. Two days. That was it. A hell of a two days, to be fair. But it was over. Finished. And if she could just convince her brain of that, take those spinning chaotic honey-sticky memories of Lisa and shove them in some unmarked psychological drawer to rot, well, that would be fucking dandy...

Taylor sat down at her computer, fingers running on muscle memory, calling up familiar friends. A news report. A podcast. An article. Two interviews. The words flooded forth, soothing the itch inside her head and crowding away the echoing shock-flush warmth of Lisa's Second Web. A therapist would've scolded her, she thought, pausing one video and opening two others. Repressing negative emotions, leveraging distraction...but it was just a stopgap, a safety valve. She didn't hate Lisa, she didn't hate herself, she wasn't even that upset or scared—things were just jumbled. Taking some time to decompress while they fell into place couldn't hurt that much.

And hey—in a few more hours, she'd be fluent in Mandarin. That had to count for something, right?

 

[Spiny]

Explanation for the mini-chapter, pasted from SB:

Real short one this time, I know—I'm going to be experimenting with releasing smaller but more frequent chapters to keep my update schedule consistent and maintain a steady flow of content. This isn't a permanent change, and if it doesn't work, I'll probably switch back—but I really want to minimize the gaps between story progression as much as possible, to spare myself from the constant guilt of slow updates and my readers from having to constantly re-skim previous chapters to maintain context.

Click to shrink...

 

[TanaNari]

Explanation for the mini-chapter, pasted from SB:

Click to shrink...

Same strategy I used, and it's a good one- especially early on.

Also, I see you're using the advice I gave. That's actually quite the compliment. Thanks.

 

[Ack]

Hmm ... AU note here. Taylor and her dad don't use mobiles.

 

[Spiny]

Hmm ... AU note here. Taylor and her dad don't use mobiles.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, it was a minor detail I decided to change to make things flow a bit smoother. There's actually a mention of her having a phone much earlier in the fic, right before her first encounter with Lisa in the Docks. I hope I haven't crushed your suspension of disbelief too badly If it helps, I imagine both of them using the cheapest and least fancy early-2000s era flip phones possible.

 

[Ack]

Yeah, it was a minor detail I decided to change to make things flow a bit smoother. There's actually a mention of her having a phone much earlier in the fic, right before her first encounter with Lisa in the Docks. I hope I haven't crushed your suspension of disbelief too badly If it helps, I imagine both of them using the cheapest and least fancy early-2000s era flip phones possible.

Click to shrink...

Was watching the Matrix with a friend who had not seen it before (yeah, I'm gobsmacked too; she's 20). When Morpheus pulls out his phone and snaps it open, she said, "What the hell is that?"

I said, "Welcome to pre-smartphone territory."

 

[TanaNari]

Was watching the Matrix with a friend who had not seen it before (yeah, I'm gobsmacked too; she's 20).

Click to shrink...

Eh, The Matrix was a mediocre movie that got a whole lot of hype thanks to the graphics. It's not actually all that good.

What'll really make you feel old is:

"She's the same age as Final Fantasy 7."

 

[Spiny]

XV.

Sunday began at 5:30 AM, with the piercing shrill of Taylor's alarm. It rang for three long wails before finally tugging her up out of bed, messy-haired and groggy and stumbling. She felt fuzzy, but also vaguely grateful—saved from a Mobius loop of uneasy dreams, splinters of shining bone and sinew spinning into impossible fractals that waited to swallow her up. The sleepiness would fade in time, and for now, it was still an improvement on the stormy depths of her subconscious.

Her morning routine skipped by, navigated more by feel more than conscious thought. Clothes, teeth, a spartan breakfast of OJ and a protein bar. The essentials. The house was quiet and still—Dad wouldn't be up yet, not on a Sunday. That was the idea. Taylor eased the front door closed regardless, coaxing the hinges with a ginger hand until the click sealed her away, forsaken to the outside. It was surprisingly cold, even for mid-spring. She regretted not bringing more than a hoodie.

Early-morning Brockton reminded Taylor of a skeleton, the desiccated bones of some long-dead carnivore scattered by the wind until they'd fallen into rough, untidy grids. Houses sat like discarded shells, bleached pale by wan rays of sunlight, and the occasional picket fence did a pretty decent impression of spiky teeth. She kept up the metaphor as she walked, looking for other approximations of anatomy: the trees could be hairs, hard and fossilized, and lonely traffic lights became trios of unblinking eyes, keeping vigil long beyond death. That was silly, she realized, giving the hoodie's drawstrings a tug. The garment shrunk obediently, shielding her from the last dregs of coastal mist, rolled over from the Docks. Eyeballs would've rotted years before anything else, and she wasn't even sure if hair could fossilize—but the whole thing was silly, a fabricated distraction from the everpresent worry. More static. The reason she'd come out here—besides escaping Danny and his buzzing demon—was to think. Just her and her thoughts, surrounded by the dormant husks of buildings. Things needed to be sorted, fitted into place, or she'd never let herself hear the end of it.

The small park was a marked upgrade in eeriness from the city streets, collecting just enough mist to make the houses beyond feel a little less real. "Park" was being generous, really—it was a few hundred feet of limp grass and some haphazard trees, anchored in the center by some kind of art feature—an aggressively ugly production of dark granite blocks—and there were exactly two benches, mirrored on either side. Taylor settled in the nearest one, shifting uncomfortably as the dew quickly soaked her jeans, but didn't get back up. The cold and wetness, they were just more static. This was a good place, a thinking place. The granite statue-thing, or maybe it was a fountain, she wasn't sure, was dead ahead, its blocky right angles stoic and nonjudgmental. They bore her gaze without complaint, letting her focus and arrange her thoughts...

Lisa's countertops were granite, weren't they? Or maybe it was marble.

Taylor sighed, a few shivery puffs of steam drifting from between her lips. Lisa. Sarah. Tattletale. Schrodinger's bitch, simultaneously everything she hated and too many things she wanted to be. Snarky, biting, thin-skinned and manipulative, but confident, too. Self-assured. Assertive like she was born for it. Charismatic, maybe even charming if you squinted right. She wasn't just comfortable as the center of attention, that hellish pit of fight-flight-freeze Taylor had spent her life avoiding—she fucking thrived in it. Big eyes and toothy grins and strategic flashes of blinding mental potency, teased like the contents of a too-short skirt—you noticed her, whether you wanted to or not. It went beyond magnetism; every facet of her persona was precision-cut to refract as much attention and emotion as possible. She navigated people like Taylor did their Webs, pushing and pulling, drawing them in with gravitic certainty until a reaction snapped into place, and did it all despite only having what amounted to very accurate guesses. Meanwhile, she, Taylor, bona-fide honest-to-God don't-say-it-too-loud-or-the-Simurgh-might-get-jealous fucking mind reader, had so far managed to solve precisely zero of her life's myriad problems, and had nothing to show for her horrifying potential beyond a perfect grade in Spanish. Still lonely, check, misanthropic, check, treated worse than dirt by half the student population and the girl she'd called her best friend check check and fucking check. Lisa wouldn't have stood for it. She would've planned and schemed and then staged a quiet coup, slowly laying the seeds and coaxing them to fruition until she had everyone at Winslow eating out of her hand like it was their idea...

Lying and exploiting until she gets what she wants, said that dark and prickly part of her, that bitter blackened sliver of never-letting-go. And you admire her for it.

And she did, that was what stung, though it wasn't admiration so much as envy. Whatever it was that Lisa had, that impregnable aura of flashbang swagger, shiny skintight secrets—she wanted it. Had from the second she'd met her. With someone like that, a constant bright and bubbly reminder of your own personal failings, hate came easy. Scary-easy. And maybe Lisa deserved it, after everything she'd done, picking at the stitches of someone else's life when hers was already so fucking effortless...

Taylor leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees as her hands cupped her chin, and stared moodily at the grass. It was all so goddamn messy. Did Armsmaster and Legend have to deal with this? Traumatized gang leaders, sympathetic terrorists? She'd been thinking about that, these last few days. Reconsidering. Maybe one day she'd work up the courage to visit a station, scope things out. It wouldn't hurt. The PRT's conflicts had higher stakes than hers, but they seemed so simple and clean by comparison:good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, us and them...

That was bullshit, of course, and Taylor knew it. Her cynicism wouldn't let her convince herself otherwise. Law enforcement anywhere, Parahuman or mundane, was all just one long gradient of justice and atrocity. The fantasy of the shiny-toothed protector, standing tall and resolute against a gnashing tide of evil—well, even the PRT didn't try to sell that. It was a nice thought, sure, a nice ideal, but capes weren't archetypes, they were people. And people had biases, made errors, could be stupid or selfish or snap and buckle under the weight of the world and do horrible, horrible things. The peace they enjoyed had been decades of compromise and reassurance in the making, and even now, there were still rumbles of distrust, slow-swelling earthquakes that propagated through worried headlines and interviews stuffed with loaded questions. And that was for the champions, the best of the best, the shining examples of what capes should be. If Brockton couldn't trust people like the Triumvirate, what the fuck would it think of her? Thinkers were dangerous, Masters were terrifying, and she expected the public to tolerate both? Someone who could, in the space of a blink, subvert their thoughts and twist their perceptions, making their words betray them? Not that she ever would, of course, but it was her existence, not her actions, that posed the threat.

The PRT might accept her, but the city never would.

The thought gave her a surprising amount of relief. She turned it over in her mind, letting it settle comfortably and spread its roots. Taylor Hebert would never, ever, be a member of the Protectorate. Full stop. The longshot dream was dead and trampled, its corpse burned and charred to ash—but that meant she was free of it. There was clarity in absolutes, a concrete stability that gave her direction and purpose. She couldn't be a Hero, capital H, with legions of fans and a plaque on a statue... but she could still make things better. She would make things better. The only question was—

A yappy, high-pitched bark jerked her from her reverie. She twisted around, scanning the park, and quickly found the source: a elderly woman and her tiny dog, one of those fluffy unidentifiable toy breeds with cutesy names and four-digit price tags. It was straining at the leash, each leap forward taking it about a quarter-inch off the ground, a valiant effort to protect its owner from the untold terrors of brooding girls who lurked on public benches. The woman waved at her, an apologetic smile on her face, and Taylor waved back out of subconscious reflex. Her mind was already elsewhere, picking greedily at the beautiful tangle of words behind those pale blue eyes and slowly-graying hair. Nodes and subshoots flexed like fingers, a mass of glowing digits that moved as smoothly as her own, and below, the Second Web pulsed sleek and clear, every peak a new burst of insight. With all the time she'd spent with Lisa, scrambling to match the blistering pace of power-boosted thoughts, she'd almost forgotten how easy it was. As the woman turned away, returning to her walk, Taylor brushed her lens against ten or fifteen nodes at once, offhandedly exchanging them with their neighbors. The Second Web quivered for a moment, then snapped back taut, the woman's emotions retaining their original positions—but there were tiny shifts, bumps in the topography, subtle idiosyncrasies she noticed without even having to look. Sometimes, when she made a swap in the First Web, little bits of the Second would carry over, artifacts of some long-decayed bond between the nodes. She'd noticed it before, on the way home from Lisa's, but had only managed a few covert experiments before exhaustion and residual headaches had forced her to stop. The idea had come then, a nascent glimmer of how things fit together—and what she'd witnessed now confirmed it.

Dog→breed|collar|walk→morning|daily|trip

Walk→morning→now→park→spring→peaceful→happy

Walk→trip→fall→pain→knee→hip→replace→fix→hospital→bill→fee→heal→slow→pain→worry

Walk→happy

Walk→peaceful

Walk→worry

Walk→pain

Taylor leapt from node to node, tracing along the extended sequence of swaps instead of actually carrying them out. She could feel the way the First and Second worked together, how a push here would pull there, swapping this would draw out that. It was so logical, laid out like this, a system of codependent switches she understood as plainly as the words they contained. That one had been easy, of course, two emotions weighing on the same word, but the process would hold for any nodes she wanted, no matter how disparate or opposed. There was no revelation, no explosion of newfound awareness like at the coffee shop or Lisa's apartment. Not something new, but the culmination of everything her power was meant for. Finding patterns, connections, commonalities, and exploiting them. Maybe she had some Tattletale in her after all. A couple fragments, snips and splinters, just like Lisa had of Emma—

Emma. Her stomach dropped as she remembered what she'd done on Friday afternoon, the look in Emma's eyes. Raw, flensing hatred, concentrated and distilled, and Taylor, fucking mastermind that she was, had given it all weekend to stew. All the scheming in the world wouldn't save her from the Monday morning bell, good as an executioner's, and the biblical wrath of the Trio that would follow. No one would defend her; they hadn't once in almost a year of torment. The teachers, the administration, her father, her fellow students—quiet sympathy was as far as they got. They couldn't help. Or wouldn't. Didn't matter.

She didn't need them.

Taylor stood up from the bench, blood pumping in her ears, and restored the woman's nodes in one clean tug, almost as an afterthought. She took off down the sidewalk at a brisk jog, the bonfire crackle of excitement and ambition warding off the chilly air. A plan was forming in her mind, the pieces rising phoenix-bright and meteoric from sixteen years of hopeless ash. All her wants were weaving together, all her aspirations suddenly in sync. It would be slow and arduous and hilariously risky, if it even worked at all, but that didn't matter. Any agency at all was still so much more than she'd ever had, then she'd ever dreamed of. This was her chance. She'd never felt more ready.

Everything was connected, so everything could be changed.

Time to start acting like it.

 

[Spiny]

When Danny came downstairs, Taylor had just finished cooking breakfast. Excitement and adrenaline had buoyed her home from the park, sneakers bouncing off the pallid slabs of sidewalk—but she could only run on fumes for so long. Pancakes and bacon sizzled in their respective pans, the sight and smell pulling her stomach in impatient twists. It was a lot of food. More than enough for her and Dad. She'd eat now and then hole up until dinner, be strategic. minimize the interaction. The temptation. The chance to slip.

"You're up early," said Danny, over the seething pop of bacon grease. "Especially for a weekend. Everything all right?" Every word an incandescent hum, a stretched-out sun, a glowing livewire Taylor fought to insulate. She could already feel the pressure, that awful, swollen itch...

Deep breaths.

"Yeah," Taylor murmured, eyes fixed on the pan. "Couldn't get back to sleep, so I went for a walk." Another pancake on the plate, edges crispy white and center golden brown—then reach for the batter, tip and pour. There was a rhythm to it. Something to focus on, interleaved between the nauseating Morse code flashes of their conversation.

"Ah." Silence for a while, cool and merciful. Nothing but the stove. "Sleepover must've thrown your rhythm out of whack." Danny peered over his glasses at the steadily-rising stack of pancakes. "Still have your appetite, though, huh?"

"Yeah." Two responses in one; nice and efficient. Another pancake flipped onto the plate."I made them for both of us." Taylor upended the bowl, scraping the last dregs of batter from the edges into the pan. "Didn't want to waste them."

Dad nodded wordlessly, taking a plate and spearing the top two of the stack with a fork. "You want anything on them? Butter, syrup, whipped cream?"

The two-step clunk of the fridge opening mingled with the gas burner and the crackle of grease. Sounds. Just sounds. No meaning, no density, empty and hollow, not like—

"Syrup's fine," Taylor said abruptly. "Just syrup." The last pancake fell onto her plate, cratered and misshapen. It would taste fine, at least. She took it for herself, along with three others and a pile of bacon, and headed for the stairs.

She could feel Danny's gaze as she stood up, grasping either side of the loaded plate. "Is it okay if I eat upstairs? There's a really big World Studies project that I haven't really started yet, and it's due Monday..." In her imagination, the words drifted outwards, faltered, and fell, weighted by the greasy kitchen air and a thousand lurking snags of strain and suspicion. In reality, they just hung there, Danny's expression morphing from bemused to frowning to thoughtful. She'd always—hated was too strong a word, but she'd never liked that look. Too circumspect, too hard to read; 16 years in the same house and she still could never quite be sure what he was—

The thought froze, icing over into a slow, sinking chill. Taylor swallowed. Nothing good was down that path, just the omnipresent pulse, the golden wasp of lost potential. Use it. You'll help him. You're crippling yourself. Wasting your gift. Again-again-again, a vicious heartbeat resonating in her head. The high from the park was fading now, almost gone. Nothing left but little static-sparks. Danny's presence was a void, sucking in her light, and as the seconds passed it seemed less and less fair that here, in her own house, was the only place she kept herself chained. Maybe, she teased herself, her power just wanted new data. Maybe it would be satisfied with a quick skim of the First Web—but maybe not. Didn't matter, really. It was the principle. Taylor Hebert would not be broken. Not by Lisa, not by Emma, and least of all by herself.

So she waited, silently, impatiently, as Dad chewed over the papery, low-calorie excuse. He turned down the stove—the bacon settled from a wrathful sizzle to a hiss, placated—and looked back, brows creeping upward. "Taylor?"

"Yeah." The silence felt like it would devour her. Had she—she had. Again. Fuck.

"...I said, that's fine." Danny's frown was back, carved deeper for its absence. "But before you disappear again, I want to know what's going on. You seem... distant. Distracted all the time. It isn't like you." He sat down again, turned the chair to face her with a reluctant creak of wood on wood. "Is it something at school? Relationship problems? ...something else?" There was a small, hopeful pause, which Taylor refused to fill. "I care about you, kiddo. I want to help. I'm not going to judge you."

Her power would've been overkill, here. So much painful earnestness, so much well-meaning concern, she could see it in his face, hear it in every word; this was the closest Daniel Hebert would ever come to begging and it very nearly punched right through her. Emphasis nearly. Something rose up and stemmed the rising tide of corrosive crawling guilt, something dense and steely, and Taylor gave a slow, calculating blink. Don't you dare break your promise, she thought, and for once all the other biting insecurities were silent.

"I'm, uh. I—I mean, it's..." she began, the picture of confidence. "It's not bad, or anything. You know, uh—" Fuck, shit, what had it said on her phone— "You know Anne? The girl whose house I stayed at?"

Danny nodded, eyes showing his interest even if his face didn't. Go on, they said, pleading. Open up. And she was, so she didn't have to feel guilty. She still did.

"Uh, well, we've been hanging out, and I—" Too late, Taylor realized she had no idea how to finish what she'd started. Lisa's involvement had been fresh in her mind and immediately convenient; that had been enough. Now what? Fuck. "I'm not sure, I guess. It's... nice to have a friend outside of school, so I've been thinking about hanging out again, a lot. Trying to figure out schedules and stuff. That's all," she finished, the sheer awkwardness of the delivery strangling its sincerity.

Dad stared at her, pensive and withdrawn, frowning slightly as he digested what she'd said. Pulse-pulse, went the Web, wreathing the unspace around his head in a gorgeous golden halo of temptation. How very biblical. Taylor caught the bitter smile before it hit her lips.

"That's good," he said finally, his face somehow steeling and softening, both at once. "That's really good, Taylor. I'm glad you're making friends." Something lingered at the end of that sentence, like a silent vowel—he wanted to say more. She waited obligingly. "...but if that's really all it is, then I'm really happy for you. And I'll support you no matter what, in whatever way I can, but you're—you should know—" He paused, sighing, "Whatever happens, I want you to be safe."

"I will, Dad," she replied, ingrained and automatic. The halo shined a little brighter. "Don't worry."

That got a laugh, a quiet one that didn't quite reach his eyes. "It's my job to worry," he said, the words leaving his lips as little strands of gossamer, shining like sunlight and close enough to touch. Too close. Taylor's jaw tightened as her lens crumpled reluctantly shut, losing focus on the filaments until they hazed away to nothing. "Just make sure you know that— know what you're comfortable—I mean, if you decide to... limits are—"

The discomfort in the room had long since reached critical mass, and the Taylor of three months ago would've stared at the floor, hating every second of its suffocating presence—but now she tuned it out, more focused on evading the sunspots inside her head. Just a little more.

"...all right," Danny finished, defeated. "I trust you, kiddo." There was her cue, exit stage north.

"I—" The first, easy response died on Taylor's lips, and she summoned up a bland successor to hide the reeking body. "Thanks, Dad." She turned and left, fingers squeezing tight around the now-lukewarm plate of pancakes, and started quickly up the stairs. Her thoughts trailed behind in a tumbling cloud. What had he meant, in those last few words? What was he worried about? Depression? Self-harm? The wrong crowd? Gang inductions? Gang abductions? Drugs, alcohol, se—

Oh.

Oh, my god.

Taylor froze, her free hand squeezing her room's half-turned doorknob in an abrupt death grip. 'Be safe. Know your limits. Don't do anything you aren't comfortable with. Be sure it's what you want. The health-class platitudes swam through her mind, enveloping her in a crush of mortifying magmatic heat. Dad thought she was—that she wanted to—she and Lisa—

Cursing softly, she wrenched the door open the rest of the way, briefly entertaining the idea of going back downstairs and making it clear exactly how she felt about 'Anne'. But that was the panic talking. It was too late now, not after she'd made a show of leaving the kitchen...

Do you even know how you feel?

Taylor snatched a notebook and a pen off her desk, leaving her plate of breakfast to sit neglected in its place. She'd get to it eventually, when she felt less like a dense molten ball of self-contradiction and frustration. Right now, though, she didn't need something to eat, She needed something to do.


************

The rest of the day passed spasmodically—little bits of time skipping by, crackly and disjointed, here and there. Taylor tried to lose herself in videos and podcasts, in the bloodrush thrill of a new language tightening into place, but even that had lost its luster. With what she'd done, what she could do, scraping words off news reports felt hollow. Unsatisfying. Her lens strained at its confines, Some food she barely noticed eating, some more awkward 'conversations' with Danny, finger-quotes because they weren't talking to each other so much as past each other's heads…

And eventually, mercifully, it was late, late enough that she could feel the prickling push of exhaustion behind her eyes. She yawned, dislodging herself from the couch; at least she'd tried to actually follow through on studying. It hadn't been going well—she'd read and reread the same passage in her World Studies Textbook four or five times , retaining just as little the last on skim-through as the first, but now she was free, sentence served. A snap of closing pages, a stretch, a nod at Danny and a cursory good-night, and in another thrum of skip-time Taylor was staring upwards from her bed, sightless, painting the darkened ceiling-space with scatterings of imaginary stars. What felt like hours passed that way, lost a smudgy whirl of thoughts—the plan, the future, the Trio's revenge, Lisa... and still more, later, that she wouldn't remember in the morning.

Morning was a blurry, anxious rush—get some food, some books, pack, bus, don't think about the looming specter of your impending doom and humiliation, bite your nails, consider, then reconsider, what you're actually about to do—is it worth it? Can I really pull this off? What if I hurt someone? Do I care, if that someone is Emma? Should *I care? She spent the busride slumped in her seat, worrying in circles, until Winslow welcomed her with its familiar, soothing deluge of links. The halls were drenched in gold, painted with the hazy early-morning thoughts of the entire student body, and Taylor felt her worries fade as the tide swelled. There was just too much going on to dwell, too many clean connections to bother with her own ugly knots. She trailed past the lockers, lost in everyone's thoughts but hers...

Morning→

Class→

Monday→

Students→

Homework→

Next→

Lunch→

Eat→

Eleven→

And then she'd had two classes, just like that, running half on Apprehension Autopilot. Nothing had happened, not yet, which made it worse. Food soon. Was she hungry? Hard to tell. Her lens was open wide, absorbing Winslow's errant thoughts—warm and thrumming, a black hole sun. Waiting, for hopefully not much longer.

Come on, Taylor thought, eyes fixed front, parting the sea. Make your fucking move. Hundreds of thousands of datapoints, but nothing that mattered: nothing from the Trio. She'd scraped what she could from the orbiters and worshippers, the hangers-on, but they were clueless—vague feelings of premonition, anticipation. Anyone could see that.

The announcement came just before she reached the lunchroom. She felt it reverberate through the meta-Web of students, each one lighting up in microsecond succession. Taylor→office→punish→trouble— The theme was boring, painfully obvious. A few judging stares, a couple casual shoves—they bounced like rubber, wisps of wind in her gathering storm of validation. Numbness blossomed in her stomach, her steps heavy; she didn't feel confident so much as free of fear. Whatever they could do, she could endure. She was above this now. Needed to be, for the plan to work.

The intercom died with a cough of static, and she took the walk to the principal's slow, with cold hands and a dead woman's swagger.

 

[alethiophile]

Nice to see this update again.

Taylor and her dad, though... it doesn't help now that every bit of social contact is a temptation to use the power, but ouch.