Chapter Text
🕷 🕷 🕷
Contrary to popular belief I rarely lie. I can do a lot more damage with the truth, after all. Right now telling that truth would hurt more than anything else in the world, so I didn’t. I forced myself to be wrong and kind instead.
“Taylor… sweetheart. It’s—it’s gonna be okay.”
Now, I’ve tried a lot of audacious sentences in my life, but that one was a long shot even by my standards. All anyone had to do was look around to see how obvious this particular lie was, but I was really out of options.
Times Square was abandoned. Of all the places in the world to end up a deserted wasteland it wouldn’t have been my first guess. Since Scion began systematically eliminating humanity across every known alternate Earth it looked like everyone wise had gone home. Better to face the end with the people we love, after all. No one lived here except the models and animated characters flashing across the LED billboards nobody thought to turn off as they fled. They felt so out of place now; nothing but relics of an America that wouldn’t exist after today, one way or another.
The only ones dumb or desperate enough to be out in the streets were us capes. Parahumanity readied itself for the final phase of the final battle that was sure to commence any moment now. Those I’d passed in the street on my way here were capable of little more than panic attacks and violent sickness as they tried in their own way to recover from what Taylor had just done to them. Losing one’s free will probably hurt a lot more when it was the only thing most of us had left.
I couldn’t relate. Honestly? Served them right. If they’d accepted Taylor’s rule in the first place, she wouldn’t have had to conquer them by force.
Her army, for lack of a better word, was faring poorly without her. She wasn’t letting their distant screaming distract her. Her head hung low. She’d lost her mask at some point during this very long day. With intermittent spasmodic motions her neck straightened until she could meet my eyes. I had no other option than to drink in every clue and detail I could.
She’d gone back to the black bodysuit she’d worn when we’d been together. When she’d been Skitter, the hometown warlord, who had taken on everything the scariest motherfuckers on the planet could throw at her and won. The clawed fingertips, the extra armor, the gun at her hip… useless against our enemy, but comforting to her. She’d never settled into her role as Weaver, the hero, even though she’d inhabited that persona far longer. All her costume incorporated from those days was the white armor panels and the flight pack Dragon and Defiant had given her, part of their apology for the part they’d played in sending her down this tragic road.
I stared at her costume because looking at her face was harder. I hated avoiding unpleasant truths, but after seeing the tears and the echoing pain in her eyes? After comparing the punished rictus frozen onto her mouth to the way she so often smiled fondly when she looked my way? My resolve almost broke. Seeing what had been done to my best friend was almost too much to bear.
But I couldn’t turn away from her. I’d made her a promise, after all. I wasn’t going to leave her—or whatever was left of her—behind.
As our eyes met my power came to me, unbidden.
Wounds to face: self-inflicted.
Self-inflicted, accidental: loss of motor control. Responses to stimuli fading. Sense and perceptions of immediate environment compromised.
Perceptions: Near-total omniscience Thinker power stolen from the Clairvoyant extinguished bodily senses.
Raised head, looking at Tattletale-self with eyes: is not seeing Tattletale-self with eyes.
Mimicking basic human mannerisms, comforting, familiar, seeking connection with Tattletale-self.
Loss of perceptions, sense of self, mannerisms, speech, memory: not reversible.
Not going to be okay.
The spike of pain lancing through my head after far too much reliance on my power was nothing compared to the agony of the words themselves. If it were any other time or for any other person I would’ve accepted them as truth without question. Not for her. I always hated when Taylor reminded me that my power was fallible, that I didn’t have all the answers for her. Now I wanted myself to be wrong with a fervor approaching prayer.
At my side Bitch—Rachel, rather, she’d unmasked—finished reeling Doormaker in. The thirty-something year old man stumbled along, holding a length of chain she would typically use to leash her monstrous dogs. There was no expression in his face as he left the sixteen-ish foot radius of Taylor’s aura of total domination. The man had been an empty shell but for his power for a long, long time. Now he didn’t even have that. The Administrator, Taylor’s power, the part of her that had always been a warlord at heart; whatever you called that piece of her, it had burned through everything left of him.
Looking back and forth between him and my best friend, I could sympathize.
Rachel began to speak.
“What—”
“Let me field this one, Rache,” I interrupted. I hadn’t even known I was going to until I did. “I’ve got a few things left to say to the boss. Figure I oughta get them out of the way as long as I know she’s listening.”
I skipped over to grab Doormaker for a moment, looping my arm through his and squeezing his hand for just long enough to show that I maybe cared. It was a poor substitute for the hand I actually wanted to hold, sixteen feet out of reach.
Was I wrong to use him the way Cauldron did? He let me save Taylor when I couldn’t have otherwise, he let Taylor probably win this fight with our little god when we never should’ve had a prayer, but…
It didn’t matter. I was going to use him again, I knew. He’d seen everything Taylor had done to fight Scion. That meant he had answers for me that I needed.
I let him go, sending him to join Rachel’s pack, and prepared to argue with her.
When I turned to look at my teammate, hating breaking eye contact with my friend for even a moment, I’d expected Rachel to be pissed with me. Taylor meant the world to her, too, even if getting her to admit it was a lost cause. She’d fight for this, I was certain. I would have to search for the simplest words I could find to articulate just how badly I needed a chance to talk with Taylor while I still almost could.
Instead I was surprised to see kind eyes behind her tears. She nodded. Why…
Doesn’t know what to say.
Ah.
Imp, standing a few feet further back and off to the side, nodded when I tried to meet her gaze. Well. Anything she had left to say she could do so from within the nimbus of Taylor’s power. That… that was hard to think about. Hard not to let myself get distracted by the crashing wave of jealousy and loneliness that accompanied the realization. There were five-thousandish parahumans across all possible Earths and the only one who could stay safely at my friend’s side was my teammate, not me.
Somewhere behind me, Parian was tending to her wife’s wounds. Not a concern. Neither she nor Foil had ever really known Taylor or had the chance to see the good in her. Not a factor.
The Undersiders were deferring to me, at least. Never the fearless leader, not even the loyal lieutenant… just the last one left standing who could pretend she knew what she was doing.
Time to pretend, then.
Taylor regained my undivided attention. Christ alive, I forgot she’d lost that arm again. In the last three days she’d lost as many limbs as most people ever had in a lifetime (Victoria Dallon is an outlier and should not be counted) and she was still going. Did she look even more fucked up than she had thirty seconds ago? She—
Degeneration of mental capacity increasing at an accelerating rate; exponential, not linear decay.
Exponential; reduced to current mental capacity in one hour two minutes forty seven seconds (approx.) since powers broken by Amy Dallon/Amelia Lavere.
Mental capacity—inhalation, exhalation, microexpressions, walking, gestures—delayed, no longer rote.
Minutes; fewer than ten minutes remaining until total and permanent ego death.
I was used to my power hurting me. The axe-wound pain sinking deeper into my skull with every unconscious use was nothing compared to how badly the knowledge it granted me hurt.
“Okay then,” I said. Good, I could still manage something approximating false cheer. My phone was in my hand—when had I pulled it from my belt?—and I found myself gesticulating with the thing as I spoke. “I’d say we should talk strategy but I think you’ve already cooked up a pretty good one yourself. Also I don’t think you can really understand any of this sooooo…. yeah. Hey, I was really fond of the portal storm idea, by the way. Great way to extend your range across… everything that exists? It’s always such a thrill seeing you come up with these new tricks. Um, I’m getting nothing from your expression here. Would you mind doing something to show me you’re still—”
Taylor lurched forward. One step. Her human swarm followed in tow.
I heard my teammates scatter. I didn’t turn around to see it. Parian and Foil? Obviously: they’d never had the chance to know Taylor well or to see that she had our best interests at heart. She would always be Skitter to them, the unpredictable inscrutable supervillainess, no matter the fact that she’d been a hero for far longer. Imp would’ve dodged away too but only on instinct and as a response to groupthink. She was functionally immune after all. Even Rachel, who’d been ready to submit herself to Taylor’s control earlier in the day, had balked. She pulled her mutant dogs back on heavy chains.
Only I stood still.
Eighteen-point-six-two inches away. Tattletale-self two-point-six-four feet outside radius of Master power.
Two paces away.
I know. My power began to feed me information about how I could escape the most dangerous cape left on the planet. I pushed it all aside. I was far more afraid of leaving Taylor alone in the end than I was of her power.
Something about having every reality snuffed out one by one by an adolescent alien god reminded me of what things in life I actually valued. It was a longer list than I’d expected and it surprisingly included things like ‘all of humanity’. Maybe our species as a whole deserved the end of the world, but I’d wanted everyone to get a second chance despite that.
While I watched Scion eliminate us, first by the hundreds and then one by one, I’d accepted that second chance wasn’t coming. I’d made my peace with that. It was easier than I would’ve thought. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of getting wiped off the face of the planet by a beam of golden light, but it wasn’t looking like I was going to have any better options. So, I’d reasoned, why not spend the rest of my life with the person who mattered more to me than anyone else in the world? It wouldn’t be so bad, being erased, as long as we were erased together.
Once I’d decided to stay with Taylor until the end a few things became clear.
The first was that I should’ve made this choice much sooner. She was the closest thing I’d ever had to a home, after all.
The second was that I treasured every moment at her side more than anything else. Holding her hands, melting into her embrace, even the kiss they’d shared a long time ago: I wanted more. There wasn’t much to live for, with most parts of most worlds getting scoured from existence. That curiosity, the need to find answers, was as good a reason as any to keep fighting. I wanted to explore these impossible, unnameable feelings with her. Over the years I’d seen enough of the way she looked at me, felt how she caressed me, heard the way she spoke my name. Even without my power reading her like a laptop screen I’d know that she wanted me just as badly, even if she didn’t know it yet.
The third that became clear, far too late, was that the two of us had been doomed from the start. Taylor made everything so fucking difficult, all the fucking time, because never made decisions based on what she wanted to do. The only thing that mattered was what she needed to do. Twas ever thus: her mission, whatever it was, came first. Her friends came a close second. Her own needs were a distant third. All Taylor had been thinking about for more than two years was averting the promised end of the world. She’d failed. Even if she’d never had a chance to avert this, she still saw it as her fault, as if she were some sort of savior ripped from a prophecy. So, this beautiful little martyr had to atone for this failure with blood. Scion’s blood, specifically; the only thing left in her was her unbreakable need to fight him, to hurt him, and maybe even to win.
Taylor couldn’t kill a god, though. She had to turn herself into something new that could. All her life she’d sold off little pieces of one girl’s humanity here and there to buy power, gain control, and win despite any odds. Why stop now just because she’d run out of things to lose?
I could’ve never forgiven her if she’d destroyed herself for nothing. Instead, for the first time since Scion’s omnicidal rampage began, I could see a future for myself.
What I really wanted, though, was a future for her.
The rest of this day would be easier if Taylor or what was left of her could take me into her swarm. I trusted her to make decisions for us no matter what. Letting her control my body utterly felt like the natural extension of that. The safest possible place in any world was inside Taylor Hebert’s embrace. Being subsumed into her might even be peaceful in its own way. I wanted a bit of peace and quiet with her so badly I ached for it. She’d be better at using my power than I ever was. If I tossed away my free will for her, maybe the headaches that had ruled me since my trigger event would fade. If I could just become one of her limbs, another part of her extended self, I could be with her until the end found us, whatever that end might be.
“Hey,” I whispered, too quietly for my teammates to hear. Taylor could hear me, though. She heard everything now. “It’s okay. If you want me, come claim me. I’ll be waiting.”
For a moment neither of us moved. There was chaos all across the battlefield as the tattered remnants of Taylor’s erstwhile army flailed about in want of orders that weren’t coming. I could hear the screaming and chaotic bursts of powers from across entire New York City blocks. I didn’t turn to look. All I could see was the fading consciousness behind her empty eyes.
Taylor’s body reached out. Her lead foot slid an inch and a half forward. Then she stopped. A moment passed. At last, the stump of an arm she’d been pitifully reaching out towards me with fell back to her side.
Does not need Tattletale-self. Will not take Tattletale-self.
“See, there you are again,” I murmured. I hoped my voice wasn’t shaking, didn’t betray any of the hurt I was feeling. I didn’t want what might be my last words to my best friend to be anything but kind. “You’re still in there. You’re still in control. Only Taylor could throw me aside like that.”
Mostly kind, at least. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck everything that had happened and everything that everyone has ever done that led us here. I was losing the only person in the world who mattered, again, and there was nothing I could do to save her.
If I didn’t start talking I really would break down, and I’d promised myself once I became Tattletale that I’d already cried enough for a lifetime. I wouldn’t start now, not even here past the end of the world.
“I’ve never been more impressed with you, kiddo,” I said. I took a moment before continuing to speak. One long inhale, one long exhale, to maybe center myself. It didn’t work. All I did was waste time she didn’t have. “You’re still in there. I can still see you. Not gonna lie, I almost wish I couldn’t; maybe that wouldn’t hurt so much. It’d be a bit easier if you were just the Administrator by now. It’s close, but then I see flashes of you, the real you, the person who is so stupidly selfless and brave and kind. You’re still the girl fighting for a world that never deserved you or the second chance you’re gonna give them. I always hated those things about you just a bit, but they’re all the same things I love about you too. And I do love you more than anything in the world.”
Loosened grip on Clairvoyant, wider stance; understands tone.
Eyes unreactive, lips not moving; no understanding of written or spoken English. Listening to sounds, not words.
Understands tone; understands that Tattletale-self intends to offer reassurance.
Believes that Tattletale-self is important, no longer remembers how or why.
Wider snarl, more open body language; attempt at smile.
Attempt at a smile; no longer able to smile.
Fuck.
Well. I searched desperately for a way to spin that little bombshell a bit more positively. Even if Taylor didn’t remember everything we’d done together, she still wanted to listen. That had to count for something. Right?
Rationalization; Tattletale-self is afraid, losing focus—
I know.
It didn’t matter. Taylor was still here, so I had to keep going for her.
“So! Even though just talking to you hurts so fucking badly, there’s no place I’d rather be. Even—even though I’m losing you in real time and I can’t do anything to stop it. You knew what that would do to me but you did it anyway because there was no other choice, in the end. I know that, so for you, I’ll stop being selfish. I can be hurt later. For now, I’m staying, you can’t get on my ass for saying goodbye because I’m still not breaking the ‘no-goodbyes’ rule. I have faith in you, more than I ever thought I could have in another person, so I’ll believe that you can pull through if you try. After everything we’ve been through together, you at least deserve a little faith.”
As I spoke Taylor fumbled around for something in her utility belt. Well, no, that wasn’t strictly true—she had the Clairvoyant doing it instead, as she still only had the one good hand. It made no real difference, as she wasn’t limited to just one body anymore. After only a moment she’d found what she was looking for. Her cell phone, Protectorate standard-issue, began to crawl across the space between us. She was using a system of spider-silk pulleys and stronger bugs, mostly roaches, to send it towards me.
In the distance, the frequency and pitch of screams increased once more. The ambient horror of capes recovering from what Taylor had just done to all of them was gone, replaced with the acute fear of their true enemy.
Scion is here.
Taylor would see it, but she didn’t react, even though whatever confounding measures she’d put into motion on other worlds had just been defeated. Well, if she thought this was more important, so did I. Her phone reached the edge of her power’s range and after gently depositing it onto the sidewalk she took a half step away. I reached forward and grabbed it, tapping out by muscle memory what I knew her PIN would be. She hadn’t told me what it was; she’d tested my power once by seeing if I could guess it. It took about two seconds.
The phone opened to the dial screen.
She wants to call me when this is over and she’s forgotten how.
I was beginning to lose track of how many things we’d lost. I watched her watching me as I tapped out one of my burner phones’ numbers. The long brown hair she’d always been proud of had fallen in front of her eyes. She didn’t seem to notice anymore. It hardly obscured her vision. She’d always kicked herself a bit for the vanity or foolishness that led her to keeping her hair down and free while in costume. By the time she’d changed her mind, it was too much of an iconic part of her look to change. I wish I’d told her how pretty I thought it looked when I’d had the chance.
The phone was ready to ring me up at her leisure. I deposited it right outside the edge of her power’s range like I was leaving a sacrifice to a god. Taylor spooled it back in towards herself, pocketed it using someone else’s hands.
“I promise I’ll be better, Taylor.”
I’d spoken before I realized what I was doing. My trademark grin almost broke, everything was suddenly too much. I couldn’t allow that. It was the better half of my mask, part of what created the persona of the brilliant and competent supervillainess and not a scared lonely girl way way way outside her depth. I couldn’t be competent or useful to her right now though; all I could do was be honest.
“When you’ve come back to us, when you can understand what I’m saying to you, I’ll tell you all the things I should’ve told you a long time ago. I know the way I kept my secrets always pissed you off a little bit. Gotta understand, I was only scared. I was scared that if you saw how ugly and small I really was that you wouldn’t let me stay by your side. I’m sorry for that most of all. I should have trusted that part of you more. I know that you could never reject me, just like I’d never reject you. So…” I concluded, sticking my pinky and pointer fingers on one hand out and raising them to my mouth and ear respectively. “Call me?”
I waited for her response as if any response was coming. A bullet the size of a sedan interrupted our tragic silence, shearing through one of the giant shitty billboards that infested this place without even slowing down. I wouldn’t have even known what happened if I hadn’t recognized the magnified gunshot sound of Chevalier’s Cannonblade. A fraction of a second later the shot clipped a building a few blocks away properly and something structural gave way. Imp cried out something about making sure the M&M store was safe which I tried to ignore.
The sound of a building collapsing was intimately familiar to me by now. The fruits of a misspent youth, I supposed: I’d recognize the sounds of steel girders failing and stone facades crumbling and glass shattering like a rolling wave anywhere. Even so I had to turn to look, to see the destruction for myself.
In doing so I lost sight of what actually mattered.
My two-second distraction cost me my last moments with my friend. Taylor, I realized too late, sprinted the moment my back was turned. Transcribing a perfect arc to keep me just outside her range (but only just) she sprinted towards the chaos. Then as I watched, helpless to follow her, she remembered that she could fly. She turned a corner two blocks north and disappeared out of sight.
I never saw her again.
I saw her body still shambling around Midtown as the final battle concluded and the messy aftermath began. I saw the Administrator, the entity we would later call Khepri—those of us even willing to speak its name at all. Taylor, though? Sometime in between returning Taylor’s phone to her and the death of Scion, my best friend disappeared. She wouldn’t have even noticed it happen. After all, Khepri didn’t need remnants of vestigial humanity. Those parts of its brain could be freed up for extra storage space.
The phone call I’d been waiting for never came.