Chapter Text
Taylor didn’t remember much about the locker.
She didn’t remember hitting her head on the back of the locker when one of her tormentors shoved her in, passing out. She didn’t remember the jeers and taunts from the other students, glad it wasn’t them being shoved in a locker filled with rotting tampons and human waste. She didn’t remember being left in a biohazard overnight. Nor did she remember slowly losing feeling in her extremities in the cold, unheated school building.
She certainly did not remember a pair of otherworldly beings dropping shards of themselves. Nor remember a shard falling at her.
She did, however, remember the light that shattered the shard and kept her warm until she was found the next day.
A light of limitless potential…
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Daniel “Danny” Hebert snarled as he slammed the door of his truck shut, the force of the anger-driven door rocking the old clunker on its suspension. Not two weeks ago, his little girl had been found, locked in a locker filled with…with…filth! And no one was doing a god damned thing! There wasn’t enough evidence, or there weren’t any witnesses. Bullshit. Taylor told him about the crowd’s laughter. But it was just a ‘prank gone bad.’ Danny sneered as he thought of the police detective who declared their case closed. ‘I doubt he’d be singing the same tune if it was his daughter locked in a biohazard.’
Stepping over the rotted first step onto the porch, Danny took a moment to calm down. The tall, gangly man had a temper, he knew, but Taylor didn’t deserve to see him like this. After a long while of deep, slow breathing, Danny finally felt the anger recede enough to continue. Unlocking the door, Danny entered the house he shared with his daughter. “Taylor, I’m home!”
Silence greeted Danny’s entrance. He frowned, his brows bunching over his wireframe glasses. Taylor should be home, she’d only just been released from the hospital yesterday. “Taylor, honey?” Still nothing. Worried, Danny opened his mouth to call out once more when he heard a noise in the kitchen. Following the sound, Danny entered the kitchen and froze in place. He blinked. There, spread out on the table, was the contents of the toaster. Or, at least, what was once a toaster. And sitting there in her wheelchair, fiddling with the heating coils, was his daughter. “Taylor? What…what is…?” The words seemed to get stuck in his throat.
Taylor looked up, her brown eyes looking overly large behind the lenses of her own pair of glasses. “Dad! Hi, I…” Taylor trailed off as she noticed the mess on the table, as if for the first time, confusion etching its way across her face. “What?”
Danny looked carefully at his daughter. Taking apart appliances, not being aware of what she was doing…the signs were obvious to an old cape geek like him. “Taylor, are…are you a tinker? A parahuman?”
Taylor bit her lip as she shrunk into herself, her face shadowed by her long and curly dark hair. “I…I triggered in the locker.”
Despair flashed through Danny at the thought of making his daughter relive that nightmare. “Oh, Taylor.” Moving around the table, Danny went to his knees and embraced Taylor. As she returned the embrace, Danny doggedly ignored that Taylor weighed less than she should, or that only one arm was hugging him back.
After a long while, Danny and Taylor finally released each other. Danny took a seat next to his daughter and looked at the ex-toaster strewn across the round table. “Soo…what exactly are you making?”
“Well…” Taylor looked at the parts before her. “It will be an arm…I think.”
Danny stared, first at the table, then at his little girl. “An arm?”
Taylor nodded. “Yeah, once it’s done, it’ll make things easier. I just got to figure out how to…attach it first.”
For the first time since she’d returned from the hospital, Danny forced himself to look at his daughter’s knees and left elbow. Or rather, the bandaged stumps that used to be the knees and elbow. Of all the injuries done to his daughter, Danny resented her tormentors for those the most.
Oh, they hadn’t been involved in inflicting the injuries that resulted in a triple amputation to save her life. No, the loss of Taylor’s arm and legs was a result of the ambulance taking her to the hospital from the school getting caught in the crossfire of a cape fight between the gangs. The paramedics were all killed, with Taylor surviving with her arm and legs crushed into skin filled with jelly. Still, if it wasn’t for those three…girls, Taylor wouldn’t have been in that ambulance to begin with.
Shaking himself from his thoughts before they spiraled into hate and rage, Danny turned to Taylor. “Is there anything I can do to help?” If she could make an arm, it was dollars to donuts that Taylor could make legs. And by God, if there was anything Danny could do to see his daughter walk again sooner, there was little that would be able to dissuade him.
Taylor smiled. “Well…do you still have those old RC toys?”