XVI Going on XVII (Butcher!Taylor)

Butcher was snarling, “…the children, just shoot. Doesn’t matter your aim, just shoot. You see one lying on the ground? Shoot the little bitch twice more to be sure. We give them no chances to be clever or lucky, understand?”

They were going to kill kids?

I couldn't act quickly enough, but I also couldn't contact anyone for help. Why the hell didn't I get a cell-phone? If I was already going to be sneaking out at night to be a hero, I might as well go all-out. But, of course, it would be a betrayal of dad, and of our mutual memory of mom. Sentimentality outweighs pragmatism every time.

Which lead me back to the present moment. The Butcher was super-strong, with a laundry list of powers, a rage aura, something to do with blood, and if my bugs were sensing right, enough weaponry on her person and gangers to deal some serious damage to a PRT van, much less an average person. A nine-foot bow, recurved and drawn with stacks of super strength were bad enough on their own — I would have to stay out of sight, and out of range of her aura lest I charge straight at her or faint outright from fear. Actually, fainting sounded pretty good right now; no one knew I was here, and no one would blame me for taking a nap on a gravel-covered roof this far out near the docks.

Well. Except I would, and the kids who wouldn't be around tomorrow. I swore under my breath, thankful the Butcher (as far as I knew) didn't have any kind of Thinker powers or super-hearing. I was a hero. If I wanted to be a hero, I had to save kids. Even if it was hopeless, even if I was so totally outmatched it went through absurd and back out the other end to not silly at all again, there was the spirit of the thing. Kids needed saving, and I was here to do the job. Sentimentality outweighed the pragmatic part of valor.

The first salvo I sent were minor nuisances, biting the hands or faces of the unpowered members of the Teeth. I didn't want to get clipped by a stray bullet before this all began, and they were thankfully all close enough to one another that it wasn't difficult to climb that swarm up pant legs or down from fire escapes. Flying insects with no weaponry flew circuits around the Butcher's head, keeping track of her and baiting her so I'd know where she was looking and how she'd react. She swatted one away with remarkable grace and infinite strength, sending it flying with unerring accuracy at another, two bugs with one stone. So... I probably couldn't just bother her back and forth across this street and alley until she gave up and went home.

"WHERE ARE YOU?" she howled, and I shivered. Her voice was… terrifying, meaty, hungry, playful, and dangerous. With a burst of flame she smashed through the corner of the garage across from me. "COME OUT COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!"

I tried to quietly but quickly step backwards across the roof, ducking back behind an air conditioning unit. I sent more bugs to bother her from the side I wasn't on, including a wasp that flew right for her eyes as she looked north. I didn't have any hope of actually getting through and hurting her, but if I could bait her for just a bit into thinking they were coming from there, protecting something in that direction…

An inhuman howl and scream, part guttural whoop and part sickening laugh, accompanied another report of flame and crashing of concrete as a pillar on the garage's north side was turned to dust. The roof of the garage started to make some deeply unhealthy groans in response, giving a good idea that the lifespan of the building's structural integrity would likely be measured in minutes. The Butcher moved with another howl, and another nearby building crumpled with the impact and echoed with another whine of bent and buckling steel.

I wished I had some kind of experience with battlefield analysis. I wasn't sure what I expected, going out heroing as a green newbie, but if I lived through this I'd have a whole list of lessons to learn from. For now, to live through this I would have to keep track of a few things. If I got spotted by her at a distance, I'd die from even a single arrow from that bow. If I got close to her, I'd die from being rendered stupid by her aura and doing something stupid enough like blindly rushing her so that she could smear me onto the pavement. If I stayed put, the building I was perched on would likely be next on her demolition derby. The longer I waited, the worse my chances were going to be.

So, better to get this over with sooner. I had a few tricks up my sleeve, one of which literally. But I’d need a good dose of luck and maybe something beyond that: a plan to put into action. When action grows unprofitable, gather information, one of mom's favorite books had said. I remember her reading out loud to me when I was younger. I had the information advantage for a brief but collapsing window. My mother's voice continued in my head, when gathering information is unprofitable, sleep. Okay. That was a plan. A really dumb plan, but better than my fate if I did nothing. I stood up, noisily turned on the gravel roof, and took a quick step before tripping and falling, arms flailing. "AH-" I cried before the impact with the roof cut me off.

"THERE YOU ARE!" The Butcher howled, teleporting to the near face of the building and vaulting into the air, landing near me with a crunch. As soon as she was near, I wilted in pain, screaming out. So much for playing dead. I hauled myself to my feet in a hurry, painfully, clutching at my arms, my chest. I wanted to lay down and cry, but more than that I needed to get near her, tear her face off, tear my now bleeding arm off and beat her with it. I knew the aura was affecting me but it didn't matter. And then I looked her straight in the eyes, as she towered above me, and I knew I was nothing. I was outmatched, outserved, overpowered.

Her smile was one of absolute victory right before the carnage, and I shook to my core. Another wave of pain washed through me and I doubled over, tearing my mask off to vomit nothing but acid onto the ground. I looked up again, tears pouring down my face, and as she moved with the speed of super strength to close the distance between us, I spoke instinctively, begging, whimpering. "Please," was all I could say. By the time I finished the single syllable she had me in her grip, brute ratings times however many, and she broke my arm as though it was nothing. Every nerve ending lit up with pain, but the upside of feeling her pain blasts in short succession was I wasn't sure I could even tell the difference. My hand spasmed as it brushed against her hair helplessly.

There. At least she would be inconvenienced for a little while, maybe those children would be safe. I had no brain power left for poetry or nuance, nothing left but pain and the presence of the Butcher cutting into every instinct and impulse in my body. I knew I was going to die, but somehow I was certain I was already dead, and this bright flaming sun that was tearing my limb like tissue paper would be the only thing I saw. Nothing left but her, my pain, and my power. The spiders I had held in my hand attempted to bite her behind the ear, having woven their way under her hair. No luck, I thought. Skin super strong, or something. All reports coming from my body were blinding white, but I could feel my little bugs. Try the nose, I told them. The eyes, the mouth.

Then, something loud enough even I heard it over the sound of pain thumped next to us, and The Butcher went flying, taking half of my arm with her. She was in the mouth of some dinosaur… lizard… flesh… monstrosity, beating it across the face with the weapon she had to hand, which I think was my radius and ulna? I must have been losing blood, then, but everything happened within seconds and I couldn't believe my eyes. Somewhere in the back of my senses I knew my widows had injected their venom, I could hear it like someone calling out to me. Maybe my brain was broken? I whipped around too quickly, crying out from pain between tears, only to realize that, in fact, someone was calling out to me. Several someones, riding atop a pair of those lizard-creatures.

Then suddenly a tall man all in black was standing near me. I blinked again. "You really saved us a lot of trouble,” he was saying. His voice was deep, masculine, but muffled by the helmet he wore. He was dressed entirely in black, except there was something about his face in the inky blackness that gave me the impression of a skull. The other figures on the roof had gotten off their mounts and it hit me.

"Oh. I get it. You're my psychopomp." I said quietly, knowing they must be able to hear, despite being unable to raise my voice. I stood there, clutching at my stump with my other arm, and felt a strange sort of serenity wash over me. The fear and anger and awe and everything overwhelming in the Butcher's clutches was passing. I wasn't sure where she was but she couldn't hurt me, now.

Death continued, his smooth baritone reassuring despite the fact that I didn't understand. "When we got word the Butcher was aiming to come after us tonight, we had a little bit of an argument. We were debating strategy for the better part of the day. We eventually decided, fuck it, we’d meet her halfway. Wing it. Not my usual way of doing things, but yeah." The Butcher wanted to die? She didn't seem the type, but I suppose leaping from body to body must've gotten tired.

"Is this where you…" I started weakly, confused as the other figures were pointing at something and speaking, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with me. What happened after you died? "...take me to another place? Or ask me to work with you?" I was pretty sure that was a thing. You die, Death or the Reaper or whoever takes a liking to you, you work for them or him as one of them. Or him.

He laughed, and I smiled, through the tears. I felt he must've been smiling, though a skull for a head always looks like that, right? Infinite jest, I knew him once. What's his name. "I didn't expect to do the recruiting pitch, here and now, but we could give you a lift. The least we can do, I imagine."

I laughed. How I could have come to be laughing with Death I didn't know, but Life had dealt me a pretty raw hand, and admittedly I was probably in shock.

After a few seconds he asked me, "Hey, are you… hurt?"

I laughed even more at this, doubling over again, tears coming easy, losing my breath a little. I thought Death would be a sinister presence, pointing at a grave! Or a boatman with a chessboard – not someone so… relatable, so funny. Did it say something that the only person who had spoken in a friendly way to me in months was the Grim friggin Reaper? "Hurts, he wants to know if it hurts." I said, chuckling and wheezing.

"No one ever suffers but you," another voice finished. She was… purple, and yellow, and green, and sly and friendly too. I blinked several times. Likely not famine. Maybe she's War, if there's four horsemen? In a Helen of Troy sort of way? Maybe I could be Pestilence, then. I was certainly well equipped for it. She was saying something else to Death, but I didn't catch it. "...minor Brute rating, clearly, to be standing."

Death nodded to her, and then walked to speak to their other companions. Were they Reapers too? Or souls that perished like mine did tonight?

"You really did a number on the Butcher. She's getting creamed down there, at least compared to what we expected." This… Helen, this War spoke to me knowingly, with that same comforting friendly air that Death had.

I had to ask. "She won't kill any children, tonight?"

War gave me an easy smile. "No, I think the world will be safe from the Butcher tonight, until whatever disorientation effect you put on her wears off and she licks her wounds." She was about to say something else when her head snapped east, seeing or hearing something in the distance.

The smile she’d been wearing faded, “Heads up. We’ve gotta scram."

One of the other figures nodded in response and whistled, one short whistle followed by two long ones. After a brief pause, the building was suddenly rattled by impacts. In just moments, the three creatures leaped from the alleys to either side of the building and onto the roof.

Death turned towards me. I was still standing on the opposite end of the roof, by the fire escape. “Hey, do you think you can ride?"

I closed my eyes for what felt like a second, and when I opened them, I was laying on my side and Death and the other horsemen were gone. A futuristic motorcycle was parked on the street below, and the Butcher was nowhere to be seen either. Before I could finish figuring out what was going on, an apparition who looked a lot like Armsmaster called out to me something that I didn't understand. It looked as though he flew up onto the roof, but the six-foot long weapon the spirit held kind of jerked as he landed. I was pretty sure I saw the tines of a grappling hook retreating back into the end of the sci-fi looking scythe. "You gonna fight me?” He called out.

"Hopefully not?" I muttered. “We're on the same side, I think,” I said, a little louder.

Stepping closer to me, he tilted his head, “You don’t look like one.”

"I'm new." I was sure I would get my duds and cool hourglasses and whatever else I would need to help wayward souls pass soon. "Uh, first night on the job."

He softened a bit at that. "You look like you've been through a little bit of Hell."

"Maybe? No, I think it was all just Earth." I couldn't remember visiting Hell, if we had. I mean I had survived Winslow; the afterlife by comparison mostly seemed like a lot of rooftop conversations.

He seemed to react to that in a way I didn't understand, but there was a lot I didn't understand, so I tried to take it in stride. "The Butcher is still out there?" he asked. I nodded. "Then I intend to go bring her in." He patted his scythe, clipping it to his back and turning his back on me. I suppose a big-shot Reaper would make his name in the underworld circles by bringing in someone who had evaded death so many times?

He looked back at me over his shoulder, then walked back to an arm's reach. "I think you're in shock," he said. "You'll need medical attention; a PRT ambulance has been dispatched to come this way." He clipped some strange glowing ring around the stump of my arm, and only as his motorcycle was pulling away did his actions hit me.

Was this a tinker-tech tourniquet? Wait, a PRT ambulance? A siren was audible in the distance over the midnight quiet of this part of the city. Was I… "no, no, no." I said aloud, mumbling and fumbling the words spilling out. "No, no, no, no, no. What. What? What?" I was on my knees as the sirens drew near to my location. The confusion of everything that had happened over the last — I had no idea how long, I had clearly blacked out — maybe thirty minutes, rolled over me as the shock and adrenaline wore off. I screamed, on my knees, bellowing at the sky. "I'M ALIVE???"

Not for the first time tonight, I wept, as my voice carried and echoed, and the ambulance drew near. The tinkertech was probably some sort of beacon, I imagined, or if not, perhaps my yelling and screaming at discovering I was in the land of the living would help anyone triangulate my location. And "anyone" may have been the operative word, as a body came crashing out of the sky, like a wounded bird.

And falling into my arms, or arm and a half, was Butcher XV, foam rising from her mouth, body flailing and beginning to go limp. There, looking me dead in the eyes, in our intimate helpless embrace; beautiful and regal and terrible, emotional aura flickering between rage and fealty, coiffed blonde hair stained with rubble and ash and blood, Victoria Dallon died.

-----

 

The search for sense within nonsense is fundamental to being human. The animal primate has no need; he sees the same sense in everything and has no ideas to break that hold on reality. But to be human is to sift through streams of nonsense wide enough to be an ocean, and to find that thin craggy edifice of patterns that match reality somewhere in the gulf. To be parahuman merely makes the ocean that much bigger.

Cacophony was an understatement.

At its core, cacophony is about sound, a phonic experience. What I felt was something much, much more overwhelming. The phenomena was simultaneously tangible and surreal.

I saw (the way one sees in memory) and felt (the way one feels a memory) a cacophony of memory, manifold and overlapping and interweaving, a chrysanthemum-like mandala of experiences.

I remembered my mother's face after my father died, her hair dyed blonde with her new husband, her hair grey and braided in a casket, her straight black hair caught on an ornamental earring, her hair stained red with blood.

I remembered the first girl I ever fell for, her pink nails and soft voice and wicked smile and smokey eyes and dark skin and biting laugh and plain face and supple body and cute smirk and the strength of her hands and the care of her hands and the touch of his hands and the warmth of their hands and the blood on her hands (and my face) from her blood.

I remembered my first night out with powers, the joy and the fear and the wind in my hair and the blood, the hope and the presence and the certainty and the blood, the vertigo and astonishment and frailty and the blood.

This lasted a long time, longer than I would’ve liked. There was never an end point; experience and emotion swooned past me and rocked me into another, without point of reference beyond me, me the only anchor, all the me's that had ever been, countless or innumerable, that continual constant point of view camera, the ever-me that felt it all. Few—but too many—were the memories of death, of my own death, of dying that I remembered and knew hadn't happened to me, because I was Alive, damnit, but I remembered dying and having that memory doubled, the killing and the dying from both points of view.

Fourteen memories of gaining the memories and falling swiftly into them and sinking into the new terror, the new Me that came to be. The memories never stopped for those me's before, but they resolved in a way, cowering or crazy or cautionary or caudiacal or cubleforth or cxxmpstantish or cfernial or cgthlty or catastrophically cbmian, each time before, you could stand up, you could see the patterns and work with them, the memories where they matched up or didn't, the me's found a way.

I saw in the memory the moment they each figured out where there was the most overlap. Consanguinity. The blood, that's the same. The blood, where we could always go forward. That's the way each I made it work before. It all comes back to the blood. Love, blood, and rhetoric, something deep within me echoed. The blood is compulsory.

The only chance for air was the blood, the only place things made sense was the blood, the next step to being a person again was the blood. Others' blood, though my own was spilled these fourteen - fifteen times. A litany of failures-to-follow that first fundamental rule: Don't die.

The existential nausea rewound itself along my core, and this time they came faster, faster still, memories of having power and gaining power and using power and moving on to the new power, the new combined collection of powers ever growing in potential and dwindling in clarity. The faces of mine, the faces of myself, my many faces and each one more real or sure than I had felt in years. This one, when I was older than my father, this one, heartbroken and vicious. This one, terrified but ready to do violence. This one, annoyed at the anthill and ready to rain chaos. This one, charming, weary from when I had felt the whole world on my shoulders. This one, when I was thirsty only for the blood of that girl who caused it all.

And then I recognized a face in a memory that the other I’s weren’t used to. Of course, I wasn't used to any of this, but I was, and now this face was one I knew but I was new to. A girl, bitter and afraid and nearly foaming with rage. Barely a teenager, but she's tall enough. Black hair in curls, and splattered with some blood, soon. She looked at me and I in my memory looked at her and twisted, and she reached out to touch my hair and —

That's me, I thought. That's a me I am now, I was, I will be. I reached out for this lifeline just like that girl (me) reached for my hair (her, me). And as soon as I grasped this memory I kicked as hard as I could like I was treading water.

I pushed every other voice and every other memory away from me, not caring where they went as long as they went away, not-here, and I clung and I kicked and I clung and I kicked and I shoved and I bit my tongue and lip but the blood was going away, not growing, some small offspout somewhere allowing the blood to pour away, to drain out until it merely remained as the permeated color, staining the core of my existence rather than drowning it, as I held on tight to this one strand of memory that held the face of that girl.

I still couldn't make sense of any individual sensations, but there were more pictures that matched up and assembled into a whole. My city, my timeline, my history. Things were doubled instead of exponentially scaling to manifold asymptotes. Breathing was hard but even a painful breath was still actual, metaphorical air. Within myself I finally unclenched, just a little bit, and then whatever train of sensation or thought I was on was interrupted as I heard a voice speak clearly, with some venom. It was my voice, not my voice. It was my only other voice. The memory cascades bifurcated, sorting themselves haphazardly into non-overlapping magisteria of the self. Two screens playing two movies, blurring at the edges together, side-by-side above a blood-tinged stage.

The voice continued to speak, and I realized I could understand language again, after a thought. I remembered my mother and her love for language, her facility and skill for skewering any weak arguments, her inimitable defense as strong as my - no. That wasn't me, despite those memories. I remembered my mother and her love for language, the liberation of literature, that art that could say in words what could not be said in words.

"Took you long enough." She said it with a finality, an edge; I hardly knew her voice outside of her own memories - which were my own and not my own, saw and felt a distinction as long as I focused on it. Her voice was powerful, feminine, and felt like it came from above me. I looked and she was there, onstage, in front of the screen, bearing down onto me where I sat in the front row.

"Hi? Hello. I'm, uh." I fumbled. I had shoved everything away from me… had I pushed myself away in the process? No, I was there. But those memories, my memories, they were still sticky and tainted with blood. Was there really so much blood in my real past? So much… actually, I couldn't think about it. My mind retched, shuddered, trying hard not to see-feel that particular memory, even though it was so very my own. I had been stained with blood since the first moment I had powers.

The voice tapped its foot, impatiently.

I spoke up. “Hi. I'm sorry."

The voice's eyebrows raised, and the tone was mocking. "You should be sorry!"

"I am, I am! Um. What should I be sorry for?"

"You dumb little… okay this is weird. Where are all the others? Why aren't they screaming over us right now?"

"Um." How to answer this. "I pushed them away, I think. Sent them somewhere. So I could think, I think."

"You sent them somewhere? How dare you! How did you? I couldn't ever do that. I don't think anyone else pulled it off either, but for once I can't exactly check all their memories on the subject, only my memories of their memories, so. Hm." The voice seemed to become suddenly contemplative. “God. It feels good to have some space to think. I wonder what power interaction this entails. You know, the Butcher is something of a unique case as far as recorded parahumans go. Of course, you’re probably thinking ‘Victoria, what about Case 70s?’ And of course, I wouldn’t blame you for making that mistake. But transmigration is a different thing than trigger-induced confabulation or collaboration as the case is in the 70s, or many of the plural systems that we see both in the cape population and in the general population; it’s hard to say without better data or at least anecdotal evidence - and don’t get me started on the paucity of that, let me tell you - whether or not the Butcher’s situation is unique, the way power expression is always distinct, or merely the first of a type, like any of the clades the literature has arrived at so far. There’s some speculation that other “collector” Master/Trumps obviously exist but do a better job hiding it, and that the Butcher is only known because of the single-minded bloodthirstiness keeping, well, us in the spotlight.”

The voice stopped, maybe to take a breath, though I wasn’t sure she needed to, at this rate. Then, despite the fact that she had been speaking to me, she seemed to suddenly notice me for the first time. “YOU! You filthy little maggot. What the hell do you think you were doing? What do you have to say for yourself?" It wasn’t exactly a question, but it also wasn’t not one. I could feel her glaring at me, could almost see it in my mind's eye.

"Uh… um. Sorry, I'm." I said out loud. "I haven't gotten the hang of this yet?"

"Jesus christ. First I get tricked by villains into being saddled with the murderhive, then days later I get taken out by one of them, forced to live inside her head. just. great." Victoria was scathing, haughty, imperious even still.

I cowed immediately in response. Maybe it was just conditioning Emma had trained into me over the last year of hell, maybe it was something Victoria was just a natural at, but I felt so very small. I did my best to shrink into myself, wilting like a violet. "I'm sorry," I offered.

"Great, the big bad… who are you, anyway? …knocked me over and now she's such a pushover that someone's gonna take her out soon. We'll be footnotes together as the shortest-lived Butchers." I could feel her eyeroll.

"I… my name is Taylor."

"Tailor? What, are you on loan to the Undersiders from Parian?"

"No, I mean. That's my real human name. The one my parents gave me."

"And your cape name is…"

"Didn't, uh. I hadn't thought of a good one, that wouldn't make me sound, uh,"

"Like a bug to be stepped on?" She cut me off. Damn it to hell, I was trying to talk to this hero and she's just a bully inside my own head!

"Like a villain!" I finally let out, frustrated and humbled. "I didn't want to sound like a villain."

"Ha! You're this creepy, of course you're a villain." Victoria's voice struck me with a chord I couldn't describe. It was… cocky, triumphant, something, it was…. distinctly Emma-esque. “I can tell. There’s no sense even talking —”

"Wachet AUF!" I shouted. The voice echoed in my mind, and seemed to fill the space for a brief sharp second. I was as surprised by the outburst as my cogicohabitator, but I couldn't let this happen to me again. Not again, not again.

"Did YOU just tell ME to FUCK OFF?" Victoria sneered and roared all at once, layered on top of one another, a lion in a cheerleader's outfit with all of the dangers of both. Something somewhere switched and a layer of power rippled around her voice and all the logical fear and emotional resonance with past trauma was doubled, and I shrank in awe of this figure that loomed on the stage above me in this nowhere space together forever... in my head.

Right. My original point.

I took a few deep mental breaths. "No," I said, as politely as I could and as firmly as I dared, "I told *me* to *wake up*." When nothing filled the silence that followed, I continued. "It's German, I think."

The wrong thing to say, clearly, as the umbrage and anger and fear and - that whiff of blood - hit me again, and I saw my error. "I'm not a fucking Nazi either, holy hell! My mother - she had this vinyl record when I was little, she’d play it sometimes when my best friend and I were being lazy on the Saturday morning after a sleepover. It was…" Of course, that was back when my mom… and Emma… well. I shivered in myself as the reels showing on the screens began to whirr and break down.

Victoria yelled something inchoate, but I was focused on my task. "It shouldn't be too hard to —"

-----