Blackmarch
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🕑 Added 2018-04-14 07:32:15 +0000 UTC “Hey, Dad. I’m going out for a walk.” Taylor started hesitantly as she started to slip on and lace up one of her rather beat up shoes. One of the few she still had after Sibby (Holy fuck was that weird) had admitted that she might have destroyed the rest in a playful fit by accident while Danny had been unconscious the first time around. It had been a while. “Because of...reasons.”She’d sounded very sorry about it...and, from what Danny understood, the woman had some serious impulse control issues...which was why he tried to be understanding about it. Partly. The rest, a good 80 to 85 percent of his ‘understanding’ was him realizing that, tire iron at the back of his car or not, he wasn’t going to be able to do much if the Siberian decided she didn’t much like his tone.
He wasn’t sure just how far his daughter’s control over the woman extended...but he wasn’t going to test it. A week’s worth of dying animal noises coming out of his daughter’s room that ended up with the striped cape walking like she’d been hit by a car or not, the Siberian was famous for being...mercurial at the best of times...and he only had the one pair of shoes left to lose.
Seriously. He wasn’t made out of money.
“... Yeah?” Danny asked, his smile brittle as he watched his daughter, his no longer virginal daughter, shoo off the full-grown woman that had decided to try and wind around her legs. To trip her up, all while going for a couple of ‘stealthy’, loving cheek rubs against the teenager’s crotch. “Where to? And what reasons?”
Danny had thought he’d known what awkward was once. Long ago, the first time he’d ever met Annette’s parents and he’d found himself as a fish out of the water. A blue collar worker in a white collar household that were Mets fans, one and all.
He knew better now. Much, much better.
“Sibby is getting…” Taylor trailed off in favor of pushing at the Siberian’s head again when she tried getting frisky. “She’s got cabin fever, dad. She’s bored.”
A chill ran down Daniel’s spine.
“The sex is wonderful.” The woman piped up in one of her rare moments where speech was her go to when it came to communicating outside of purrs and random destruction of the backyard and its wildlife. “But it isn’t everything. It isn’t the taste of blood on my lips or the screams of my enemies.” Then, she frowned. “Taylor isn’t exactly an acceptable target.”
“And I thank you for that,” Danny said seriously as he pretended not to notice how she was eying him like a, particularly juicy mouse. Thankfully, Taylor didn’t and she made sure to express her displeasure with a frown that had the striped woman cowering in place. “But would it kill you to put on a shirt or something? Underwear at the least?”
“It might,” Sibby replied, sounding just as serious as Danny had when she’d admitted that Taylor wasn’t a possible target of her impulses...besides the obvious ones. The ones that left Danny feeling unsure as to whether he should congratulate Taylor or get out the shovel. He was conflicted. “I’m not willing to risk it. Especially not with how much I’m wearing as is.”
“... You’re just wearing a collar.”
“Exactly!” She threw her hands up into the air and held them that way, almost presenting her inhumanly perky breasts to the man until a blushing Taylor hooked a couple of fingers into that collar of hers and started to pull her towards the door and the lesser of two great evils. Danny just shook out his newspaper and continued to pretend this was normal. “It’s got a bell on it! A bell! How am I supposed to stalk my prey if they can hear me coming before they even see me?”
“I have no idea,” Danny murmured, “but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
“Well, yeah! Of course, I will! That’s not the point though!”
“Alright!” Taylor called back shrilly as she forced the door open, a week of sex obviously not nearly enough to deal with her issues (of which there were many, and Daniel had no idea what to do with besides try and be there for her) as she fidgeted at the doorway and adjusted her cargo pants. Hopefully, she hadn’t forgotten to tape herself to her thigh before she left. Surprisingly, having to do that just so that you could go outside without getting stopped for indecent exposure wasn’t nearly as fun as that sounded. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours, Dad!”
“Have fun, kiddo!” Danny called back, already reaching for the beer before she even closed the door. Just a couple would do. With the way his life and his daughter’s life was going these days...he could be forgiven when it came to some midday inebriation, right?
It was a good thing that he’d already called into work. That was all he could say.
==========
“Armsmaster!” Hannah loudly called out as her fist pounded against the entrance Colin’s lab, uncaring of the mixed batch of troopers behind her, their fingers tight around their foam sprayers as she did. The time for calm had long left the building. The time for urgency was now. “Armsmaster, open the door!”
This wasn’t something she was used to doing. Somewhat. Sure, she was normally the one assigned to get the man whenever he worked a little more than was healthy. She was normally the one to get him on track when it came to things outside of the lab and patrols, like paperwork and photoshoots...but this wasn’t normally. Not at all.
Brockton Bay was in the middle of a red alert. An A-class, just shy of an S-class cape was in town. A cape that the PRT and the Protectorate didn’t exactly have a good history with. They needed all hands on deck and Colin wasn’t there. He wasn’t around to stand at the forefront. To make the plans and present some new technological marvel that he believed would fix everything from the common cold to the Endbringers, whether it was true or not.
To say that was something, him hiding away whenever something big came up, she meant, that Colin just didn’t do was an understatement. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the cameras in his lab that showed he was still moving, she’d have been wondering if he was even still alive.
“COLIN!” Hannah yelled again while her power cycled through several different options before settling on an M4 Carbine with a shotgun attachment, loaded with the closest thing to Anti-Tinker breaching rounds that she had. Desperate measures but, at this point, that was the only thing she could think of doing after over two hours of being ignored in favor of whatever it was he was doing...before the door finally slid open without fanfare, seemingly in direct response to her cocking her gun.
She wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the case.
“Colin,” Hannah started with a warning tone as she walked into the lab, feeling somewhat like a mother duck as the squad ambled in behind her in what was almost a single file line. “If you’re in the middle of calibrating your halberd instead of going to a briefing again, accounting is going to have your ass.”
That had Colin looking up from his helmet, looking as frazzled and disheveled as Hannah had ever seen him...and then he went straight back to work.
Hannah had to admit...now she was scared.
Normally she would have felt sorry for bringing up the Tinker Nuclear Option known as accounting, knowing how much the Leader of the Protectorate valued his work... But right now she didn’t give a fuck. He didn’t give a fuck. No one gave a fuck. Everyone was on edge, and they were scrambling everyone for this. Even undercover officers and injured personnel.
She’d even seen one officer, a perpetual desk jockey named Bob that was just barely passing the basic fitness tests wheel into work with his equipment in his lap.
“Colin!” She shouted again as she walked deeper into the depths of the barely lit room, avoiding boxes of scraps like they were landmines… Which they might very well be, considering Colin’s fastidious nature. It was yet another thing that he didn’t do. All of...this. Yet another sign of instability, an underlay to the atmosphere of the worst sort of Tinkering in progress and a single, solitary spot of light in the darkness.
This wasn’t what she thought of when she thought of Colin. This was the sort of scene she expected in one of Squealer’s garages, sounds and all. The sound of a drunken mechanic trying to get a transmission out. The sound of metal on metal and the breaking of things that were worth more than everyone one person in this room made in a year...and all to the sight of Armsmaster, covered in grease and clad only in a pair of his own brand of boxers as he fiddled with his helmet.
“Jesus. Armsmaster’s snapped,” One of the troopers behind her whispered, “Johnson won the pot.”
Hannah’s left eye made a minute, annoyed twitch. Mostly because, quite frankly, this wasn’t the time...with the rest of it because she’d put fifty dollars into that pot and she’d never be seeing them again.
“Psst. Hey. Over here.”
Hannah slowly looked over to a nearby corner. One that happened to be away from Colin who, at the moment, seemed more crazed than not so that she could look at a slightly damaged monitor.
“Found me.” Dragon nodded. Sighed. Made the room just that little bit worse, thanks to the hairline crack on the screen and the unidentifiable red liquid around it. “And I’m glad you’re here. Colin hasn’t taken the news well...”
“What news?” Hannah asked quietly from under her breath, her voice almost lost under Colin’s sudden cursing when something sparked. “And what the hell is going on? No one’s seen him in days!”
“You don’t know?”
“All I know is that we don’t have the time for this, Dragon.”
Dragon got a pained look on her face. Annoyed. Exasperated. “I know. Just understand me when I say that he was already under a lot of stress over...” Dragon paused. “Several projects that we’ve been collaborating on. They haven’t been going as quickly as we hoped they would. So, when he tried to relax by looking over some alternative news sites and—
“I need more gold!” Collin called out before, with a sweep of his arm, he cleaned the right half of his desk and threw everything on it to the floor. “NANOTUBES!”
—well...it didn’t work out.”
“Obviously.” Hannah’s most decidedly lethal gun started cycling through several non-lethal options. Five or six before it hit ‘high-powered bear taser’ and decided that it was good enough. “What did he see that was so bad though?”
“Just give me a moment.” Dragon sighed and gave the other woman a look of sympathy. “And you’ll see it on the screen...brace yourself.”
Hannah, and everyone else but Colin who was now busy trying to do a decent impression of a steam-engine with his mouth, were left absolutely speechless.
“It’s hanging down to her knees.”
Alright. Mostly speechless.
==========
“Look, Taylor,” Sibby started, sounding painfully pleased as she shoved a cell phone that she’d stolen from a skinhead into the younger girl’s face. “They got our good side and gave it a decent name even.” The Siberian, not taking no for an answer, forced Taylor to read what might have been a contender for the worst day of her life. “Big dicked girl bares pussy to the world. Classy.”
“Oh, God,” Taylor whispered before she buried her face in her hands. “Kill me now, please.”
“They even got that part where you fucked my throat until the collar broke.” Sibby continued, acting as if she hadn’t heard a thing. “Which is kind of a shame.” The older cape sighed wistfully. “I was starting to get used to hearing it ring.”
Taylor felt herself die a little bit on the inside. It was amazing how she kept finding out that there were still bits of her that haven’t died, considering the hits she’d taken over the years, with this only one of many. Stephen Hawking was wrong. It wasn’t Turtles all the way down. It social death and mortifying moments.
Not helping matters was the fact she felt herself twitch and twitch hard at the memory. The traitor. She hadn’t believed them when ‘they’ said it had a mind of its own, ‘they’ being her dad...she’d been wrong.
Stupid Dad. Stupid penis. Stupid male wisdom...
The sound of tortured metal was more than enough to snap Taylor out of her dark thoughts, and it was for a good damn reason as well. A couple of steps away, Sibby had gotten bored and decided to sharpen her claws (was that a thing that she actually had to do, or just something that she did for fun? She wouldn’t give Taylor a straight answer about it) on one of the gangbanger’s cars.
Taylor couldn’t help but cringe. Not only at the noise tearing away at her eardrums but at the sight of what she thought might have been parts of an engine block clattering to the ground… Taylor was a lucky girl, seeing how she was still in one piece and all that. She really, really was.
“Sibby. Do—” Taylor cut herself off in mid-sentence and thought some more.
Why exactly did she want to stop Siberian from doing what she wanted with those cars? Not only did they belong to literal Nazis, they also belonged to literal, stupid Nazis. Obvious deviant lesbians in public or not, you did not attack the Siberian with a baseball bat.
Seriously. Fuck Nazis. Superior race her skinny, pale ass.
“Sibby,” Taylor started reluctantly while the Siberian looked over at her, her blood red claws still peeling strips from the mess even as she gave Taylor her attention. “Don’t make too much of a mess. Don’t want some poor animal to get tetanus or something.”
Sibby only nodded and went back to happily turning what was once a mid-range pickup truck into glittery curly cues of razor-sharp confetti.
=============
How had it come to this? How? What had gone wrong?
Emma could only continue to stare even as the video cycled back to the start and her hell began again.
Madison had sent her a text. A link to a video that was blowing up all over the net when it wasn’t getting torn down by the mods. The sheer amount of random emojis and punctuation marks told Emma that her little tag-along had been panicking when she was writing it.
What the hell could be so important that she had to ‘stop everything, clap hands emoji, watch, eggplant, right now!!?!1! Eggplant’? There was nothing so important that one had to use eggplant. Nothing that Emma had been capable of understanding anyway, until today. If only she had known. If only she’d been given a warning...she wouldn’t have clicked the link.
That the title might have been enough warning, all by itself, was something that Emma carefully ignored. This was all Madison’s fault.
It had opened with wet sounding smacks and screams of pain. Far to chaotic and guttural to be anything than real. The rapid shaking and screaming coming from the cameraman told her nothing about what was happening. It was only after the ding of a hollow metal object hitting someone’s head did the camera finally come to a standstill, landing on its side in the dirt.
This was all Taylor’s fault.
Emma sucked in a breath through clenched teeth when she saw her. The Siberian, the walking natural disaster. Standing there in full, lightly blood-spattered form. Casually bending a metal baseball bat into a pretzel...before crumbling it into a metal ball. Then, with an uninterested look, she tossed it over her shoulder and started stalking towards the camera.
When someone else walked into the frame...that was when Emma’s eyes widened in surprise. Disbelief. Pure, overwhelming hate… Even worse things as she watched Taylor walk into the frame. Taylor? Taylor. Why was Taylor there? What was she doing there?
“Watch where you’re tossing things, Sibby. You nearly hit me.” Taylor was… Lecturing The Siberian? And she was listening. The Siberian, The Siberian...had a sheepish smile on her face as she kicked at the dirt.
“Sorry, babe. Not used to being a two-person show.”
Babe?
“Well, you need to get used to it. I’m nowhere near as durable as you are, no matter what you think.” Taylor sighed while The Siberian’s sheepish look turned up into a pair of narrowed eyes and a catty grin. “Getting a piece of metal to the head isn’t something I can take.”
“... Maybe you have a point.” The older woman replied as she walked over to Taylor and—grabbed her by the crotch, making Taylor roll her eyes with barely even a hint of embarrassment besides the glow of her cheeks. “Maybe, just so I don’t have to worry…?”
“I am not going to carry you around like some kind of demented reverse fanny pack, Sibby, just so you can keep me invulnerable.”
“You’re no fun.” The Siberian pouted before she fell to her knees and started pawing at Taylor’s pants. “Can I get a quickie at least? A taste?”
“Really? Right here? Right now?”
“Of course right now. Nothing like some humiliation and destruction to get the blood going.” The striped lady said, her tone implying that Taylor had just asked something stupid as her blood red nails tucked themselves under the waistband of Taylor’s pants and started pulling them down. “And I want them to watch. To see how a real woman does it.”
When those pants came down to Taylor’s knees, Emma blanked.
[DESTINATION]
When she came back to herself, only to see the Siberian’s throat bulging, her collar creaking while Taylor’s hips slammed against her face—
[AGREEMENT]
—she started screaming.
