Chapter Text
The doorbell rings and Taylor flinches. She shouldn’t have any reason to flinch, but she knows that there’s no good reason for the doorbell to ring at this time of day. The mail already came this morning, hours ago, and her dad is the only other person that would come around. He wouldn’t ring the bell.
Taylor takes a deep breath and pushes herself off the couch and to her feet. She’s shakier than she’d like, but two weeks in the hospital and psych ward will do that to a girl; she’d only gotten out yesterday. She walks to the door with a sense of dread, knowing nothing good can come of a mid-afternoon visitor. She tries to reassure herself that this is a neighbor asking for a cup of sugar, or a busybody door-to-door campaigning for mayor, but the thoughts ring false.
She makes it to the door and open i– Taylor slaps it shut and stumbles into the wall as soon as she catches a shock of red hair. Emma.
What is she doing here? She never came here, she was content to keep the bullying to school – Stupid! Of course Emma would come by to rub it in, of course she wouldn’t leave Taylor’s home alone forever, of course she would demolish that last vestige of a safe place just as Taylor’s at her lowest.
“Taylor?” Emma calls from the other side of the door, voice clothed in condescending worry. “Taylor, I know you’re there. I– We need to talk. Can I come in?”
As Taylor panics, hundreds of thousands of blips in her mind writhe. Insects, under her power’s control. She’d only learned she wasn’t hallucinating them a couple days ago. Taylor heaves in ragged breaths as she tries to push them down, push the iotas of light back into the darkness, tries to ignore the numerous little buggies all around.
“I guess not. That’s fair,” Emma mutters, barely audible through the door. Louder, “Listen, Taylor, I– I’m sorry.”
Taylor sinks to the floor, sliding down along the wall. She buries her head between her knees in a useless attempt at blocking out Emma’s voice.
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Emma continues on. “She was never supposed to go that far. She told me she wouldn’t. She said if I did what she said, she wouldn’t have a reason to go after you like that. Please, Taylor, you have to believe me when I say I didn’t know about the locker.”
Emma sounds genuine. Taylor wishes she didn’t. She wishes it was easier to tell when the other girl was lying. The only thing she can rely on to navigate that is the knowledge that Emma is lying, because she must be lying. What she’s saying makes no sense.
“I didn’t. I didn’t know about it. She said we were done with you. She told me she was happy, that we didn’t need to go any further. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let you– I would have told you, or told someone. I–”
Emma stops talking to shiver audibly. It’s January.
“T-taylor, are you there?” Emma asks. She sounds distraught, almost in tears. “Taylor, please, I– I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where else to go. Please , Taylor, I need you. I can’t– I don’t– I–” She sobs.
Emma… sobs.
Taylor stares at the door, tries to stare through it, tries too hard and is hit by a headache. She winces and grits her teeth, then forces herself onto her feet, clawing at the wall to get there. It’s a trap. Taylor knows this is a trap, somehow. It has to be. There’s no way Emma would show up at her door begging for help – The old Emma wouldn’t have to beg, and the new one would rather die than reach out with anything gentler than a knife.
“She’s going to kill you,” Emma wimpers through the door, her voice coming from lower than before. She’s on her knees?
Taylor doesn’t know what to do. She should call the police or her dad, but that wouldn’t help. Not against Emma. Not for Taylor. She should go upstairs and ignore Emma, but then she might break in. She should grab the baseball bat from the kitchen and beat the snot out of Emma, but she definitely shouldn’t do that.
She could run. Taylor could go out the back door and leave. But then what? Emma’s shown she’s willing to come to Taylor’s house, so why wouldn’t she come back? Running wouldn’t fix anything. Calling for help, hiding, running, fighting: none of those will do anything other than maybe get Taylor arrested.
She– She has to confront this, head on. Taylor throws open the door and snarls, “Get the fuck a–”
Only for her voice to seize when she actually sees Emma, on her knees, tears streaming down splotchy, red cheeks. Her makeup isn’t running, because she’s not wearing any. Taylor hasn’t seen Emma without at least some makeup on in almost four years. Her hair is limp and oily, like she hasn’t shampooed in a week, and her clothes are closer to what Taylor would wear: a sweatshirt and unattractive jeans, both obviously nicer than anything Taylor owns, but not the standout, trendy, fashionable sort that Emma trends toward.
All of that has far less of an impact on Taylor than Emma’s swollen, black-and-purple-bruised eye. It’s ugly, wholly and fully hideous in a way that doesn’t at all line up with what Emma should look like.
“Emma, what?” is all Taylor can find in herself to say.
Emma shakes and sobs instead of answering, and Taylor has even less of an idea of what to do than before. For a while, maybe a minute, she just dumbly stands there and watches Emma cry on her knees on her front porch. She looks up and around, and doesn’t see anyone else on the street: no Sophia, no sycophants, no camera crew, no family. Nothing. As impossible as it is to believe, Emma is here alone.
Against her better judgement, Taylor doesn’t just shut the door and go back to the living room to finish her book. Instead, she reaches a trembling– She takes a breath and does her best to still her hand’s shaking, and then reaches out to lay it on Emma’s shoulder.
Emma flinches.
Emma never flinches.
Feeling adrift, Taylor finds herself taking pity on the bitch. “Come on, get inside,” she hears herself say.
Emma pushes herself to her feet and tries to compose herself, sniffling and wiping her face with her sleeve and staining it snotty. She follows Taylor inside, her eyes downcast, and Taylor shuts the door behind her. Taylor keeps an eye on Emma as they go to the living room and sit: Taylor on the couch, Emma in the chair. Taylor feels like she should get Emma some tissues, or a glass of water, or something, but she doesn’t. Emma doesn’t deserve that. She’s already gotten more pity than she deserves.
“Wh–” Taylor’s voice cracks. She winces, expecting a round of mocking. When none comes, she clears her throat and tries again. “Why are you here?”
In a tiny voice, Emma replies, “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Taylor grits her teeth. “You said that already. That doesn’t answer my question. Why are you here? What are you talking about? Why would you think I’d want to hear about whatever you’re crying about, much less help you?”
Emma flinches with every sentence, curling into herself until she’s miserably tiny looking. “I… Fine,” she says. “Don’t help me, but please just listen?”
Taylor says nothing, and Emma takes that as permission to talk.
“It’s– It’s Sophia. She’s crazy.”
“She’s not the only one.” Justified as Taylor feels for that snipe, she can’t help but frown at how Emma shrinks further into herself from it. She feels like a bully, which is all sorts of complicated that she’s not capable of dealing with at the moment, or maybe ever.
“I’m sorry,” Emma says. “I never meant to… I didn’t want things to be like this, but I didn’t have a choice.”
Taylor snarls and stands, but before she can call bullshit, Emma shouts over her,
“She was going to kill my family!”
and Taylor’s stunned back into her seat. “What?”
“Sophia. She said if I didn’t do what she said, she’d kill my family and then– and then… you. I was trying to keep you safe.”
“Fat lot of good you did there.”
Emma winces. “I know. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She wasn’t supposed to go this far. She promised me you’d be fine but–”
They both hear the unsaid, but you’re not fine.
“Why should I believe any of this crap?” Taylor snarls. “If Sophia’s threatening your family, why didn’t you call the cops? You had a year and a half to do it, and instead you, what? Went along with everything she told you to do? What the hell sort of excuse do you th–”
“Shadow Stalker!” Emma interrupts.
Taylor blinks. “Come again?”
“Sophia is Shadow Stalker,” Emma repeats. Her eyes plead desperately for Taylor’s understanding. “I would have gone to the PRT, but they can’t hold her. She can move through anything. If I snitched, she’d know, and she’d kill everyone. Dad, Mom, Anne, you, and me.”
“But… she’s a hero,” Taylor counters weakly, mostly just reeling from the news.
“No,” Emma says, shaking her head solemnly. Her one visible eye full of terror. “She is not a hero.”
“She’s a Ward. They wouldn’t let a Ward…” She can’t finish the sentence. Too much is falling into place now: the particulars of some of the bullying, why no one bothered to help, Emma’s abrupt personality shift.
“I got her to join the Wards,” Emma says, like every word is another stone in her lungs.
Taylor can only stare at her, confusion writ across her face.
“She was getting too much heat from the empire, so I convinced her to play it safe and join. I thought – hoped – they would get her under control, or move her to a new city, or she’d let slip what a monster she is and they’d take her down, but–” Emma chokes up. She can’t continue. She doesn’t need to.
“She joined in November,” Taylor states numbly.
There’s too much info to take in, and every bit of it is a world shattering revelation, dominoing on a galactic scale into the heat death of Taylor’s feelings. The two sit in the quiet. Taylor tries to process, and Emma tries to stop her hand from shaking. Taylor takes a breath, and pushes the information into a box in her head. She can process later, after she’s gotten the full story.
“It happened while I was at camp, didn’t it?” Taylor asks. “That’s when you and Sophia met, right?”
Emma nods.
“How?”
Emma takes a visible breath, and then recounts the story of the alley, how she and Uncle Alan were ambushed by the ABB and Emma was almost mutilated.
“And then I looked up, looking for some sort of escape, and I saw Shadow Stalker, sitting on the roof of the car. Just… watching. She had her crossbow and a knife, but she just sat there and watched as they pressed a knife to my face and– and she– and they– I didn’t– I just–”
Emma’s words cut off with a plaintive wail as she expunges the memory. Taylor can only watch as the girl she once called a sister falls apart over something from over a year ago. She’s never seen Emma cry this much before, not when she came in second in Junior Miss Brockton Bay, not when she broke her leg and had to skip Halloween, not ever. She reminds Taylor of Taylor, after her mom died, but at least then Taylor had Emma. The only person Emma has had is Sophia . Taylor started to get better before everything with Emma fell apart, but Emma never had a chance to do more than pretend.
Taylor so fiercely wants to comfort her, but she can’t. She stays rooted in place as she watches the outpouring of pain. Even now, with Emma so rawly opened and bleeding, Taylor can’t trust it. She keeps looking for how Emma’s going to turn this on her and use it to hurt her. She can’t figure it out, but she keeps looking.
Eventually, Emma quiets. She’s brought her feet onto the chair so she can wrap her arms around her knees and she stares at nothing in particular. Taylor can’t stand it. She can’t bring herself to reach out and offer comfort, but she can’t just sit there either.
She gets up, goes to the kitchen, and fills a glass of water for Emma. At the same time, she grabs one of those blips of light in her consciousness – a fly – and lands it on Emma’s head. If she tries something while Taylor’s in the other room, if this whole thing was some weird trap to get access to her living room, Taylor will know.
Emma does nothing. She doesn’t so much as twitch until Taylor returns to the living room and prompts her to take the water. She takes it, stares at it for a moment, then drains it. Taylor sits back down. Emma finishes the water but keeps the glass in hand, spinning it in her hands slowly. For a while, there’s only heavy silence. Then,
“She gave you that black eye, didn’t she?” Taylor guesses.
Emma nods. “I tried talking to her yesterday. I told her the locker was too far, that you could have seriously died. That that wasn’t the deal.”
“The deal?” Taylor asks. “What deal?”
“Sophia and I made a deal. She said I owed her, and she wanted to be friends.” Emma shudders. “But she–”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Taylor challenges, trying to catch the lie. “Why would you owe her if all she did was watch?”
“She fought off the gangsters after she watched. She wanted to see if I was a– a predator or prey. When I saw she wasn’t going to do anything, I screamed and clawed at the…” She takes and lets out a wet breath. “Then she jumped in and beat the shit out of them. She followed me and Dad home after that. She wanted to be my friend. She wanted to be my only friend. When I told her about you, when I said you were my best– my best friend, she said she’d ‘take care of you.’
“Then I made a deal. In exchange for her not killing you, I had to break our bond. I had to make it so we could never be friends again. And then I saw you walking down the sidewalk. I thought if I was mean enough, you’d take your ride to Arcadia and we could be done and you would be safe , but… but you still came to Winslow, and Sophia, she said I had to drive you off, prove to her that I was her friend. She said that if you really weren’t my friend, I wouldn’t care if she pushed you around, or if we called you names, or any of the other horrible things we did to you. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, she was supposed to stop, but she never stopped so I couldn’t stop or she’d kill you, just for me not hating you! And then… then the locker. She told me we were just going to ruin your locker, but then she pushed you in and–”
“Stop,” Taylor whispers.
“And you were screaming and begging and I wanted to help but I was scared if I did, Sophia would do something even worse.”
“Stop, Emma,” Taylor grinds.
“But then you went quiet and– and I thought you’d died in there and– and that it was my fault because I couldn’t keep Sophia in check or–”
“SHUT UP!” Taylor shouts. “Shut. Up.”
Emma flinches and stares at Taylor with wide eyes, terrified of… terrified of Taylor. She stares at Taylor like she thinks she might get hit, or worse. The anger falls out of Taylor at the sight. She’d never seen Emma scared like this. The girl in front of her is so different from the Emma at school or the Emma from their childhoods. Emma…
For almost a year, Taylor wished that Emma would change back to the girl she knew. That wish was killed by inches, and Taylor thought she’d said goodbye to any hope or want of Emma changing back and making things how they used to be. Things aren’t how they used to be. They can’t go back.
But Emma changed once. Maybe she’s changed again?
Or maybe this is all a ruse. Maybe she’ll change again-again, back to bitchiness. As much as Taylor wants this, she can’t have it. She can’t trust it. This is too easy. Everything Emma’s said could be a lie. The black eye could be makeup. The story about the ABB and the alley and Shadow Stalker might– It’s a trick. It’s a trick to get Taylor to try and out a Ward: a felony. Emma’s trying to get Taylor sent to prison!
“I don’t care,” Taylor says without inflection.
“What?” Emma asks, trying to sound small and pitiful.
“I don’t care, Emma. I don’t care about your sob story. I don’t care why you’re here. I don’t even care if that black eye is real or not. We’re not friends. We’re never going to be friends again, because I cannot trust you. I know how good a liar you are, and I don’t believe a single word you’ve said today.”
Defeat and despair fall onto Emma’s face, and she quickly covers the mask with another mask of stubborn dedication. “Fine. You don’t trust me, you don’t want to be friends, you don’t care about me: fine. That doesn’t matter. Just. Just tell me what I can do. Tell me how I can make it up to you or make things right, or at least make things better, please. I’ll do anything. I’ll fess up, I’ll go to the cops, I’ll tell everyone everything if that’s what you want. Just tell me and I’ll do it.”
Taylor stares at the begging girl for a long moment. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
Emma’s face falls. She says nothing more. She stands, moves to the front door, and casts a look back to Taylor. Her mouth opens, and then closes. It opens again.
“The offer’s open,” she says.
And then she leaves, shutting the door behind her. Taylor locks it, then returns to the living room to peek through the blinds to ensure Emma actually leaves. She walks down the drive, turns onto the sidewalk, and disappears down the road. Only then do Taylor’s shoulders fall.
“Fuck,” she says with a shake of her head.
Fuck indeed.