Chapter 7: Chapter 7: A Mild Mush Chase
Guardian
a Worm/Destiny Crossover
Chapter 7: A Mild Mush Chase
After swearing up and down to the police that she wasn't a villain, murderer, or any combination thereof the mood got a lot less tense. By that, Taylor meant they weren't pointing their guns in her general direction. This pleased her, and the police were pleased in turn to have their hunch about her proven right. Since everyone was such good friends, she got to have a conversation with the officer in charge about what went down. It took almost as long to describe everything that she'd done as it did to actually make it happen. The fact that she'd tried very hard indeed not to kill anyone, or even seriously hurt them, seemed to win her some points with the officers as they herded the seven thugs into various backseats.
Wait. Seven? "There should be eight."
The officer she'd been speaking to – a short, compact man with the squarest jaw she'd ever seen, looked up from his notepad. "Yes?"
She pointed back at the store. It looked a little under the weather, with broken windows and bullet holes and an impromptu door made by...someone. "I took out eight Merchants. Seven normal guys, and Mush. It smelled like him, anyway."
He fixed her with eyes entirely too perceptive for a police force as reputedly apathetic as Brockton Bay's. "You're certain."
She shrugged. "As much as I can be. He didn't get a chance to use his power, so it might not have been him."
His jaw worked, and he held up a finger in the unofficial sign language gesture for one minute, please. A quick conversation was carried out over radio that had the tendons in Officer Square Jaw's neck flexing. "Something tore a huge fuc – er, freaking hole in the back of the store. There's a trail of garbage leading to a nearby storm drain." He clipped his radio back onto his vest. "That something Mush is capable of?"
Her only recourse was to shrug again. "I don't know. I'm sort of...new to the scene."
Square Jaw's thick eyebrows rose, then he whistled, high to low. "Hell of a first night, kid."
She huffed a laugh, both more tired and awake than she'd ever been. It was a strange, heavy sensation, one only made worse by the fact she'd have to go home with a huge bruise on her face and a busted knuckle. To distract herself, she wondered. "What are you going to do about Mush?"
A calloused hand thumped against a Kevlar vest. "Me? Nothing. I turn it over to whichever PRT cape that got the late shift and they take it from there. Hey, you need a doctor to look at you? That's some shiner you got going."
The skin around her eye felt thick and hot and she knew it would be tender to the touch. She did it anyway, and hissed a breath out through her nose. Curiously, even as the blunt edge of pain was dragging itself across her skin she could feel the swelling going down. Her Light healed her, too? Was there anything it couldn't do? She made a mental note to go over the finer details with Ghost later, tomorrow or something, as she shook her head. "I'm tougher than I look, officer. I'll be fine. Is there anything else you need?"
Square Jaw gave her a look that seemed to agree with her statement. The head-to-toe he gave her was assessing, taking in the tears in her shirt, the scuffs on her pads, the splash of blood on her pants, and the knife at her back. He shook his head. "Nah, go get some sleep, kid."
"I plan on it." After she let her dad and Sabah fuss over her for an hour or three. If they were still awake. Once Square Jaw was looking away, she faded into an alley to make her way home. She wasn't far enough to miss his parting words, though.
"Tougher than she looks? That's something right there. That is something."
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Taylor was wrong. It wasn't her dad and Sabah who fussed over her in the strangely bright light over the kitchen table. It was just Sabah. Her dad had, around the time she was sliding in the shop's back window, succumbed to sleep. Taylor could still see him, if she leaned way back in her seat. His head tilted back, mouth hanging open, glasses in his shirt pocket and snoring the night away. She'd wake him up when she could finally convince Sabah that the blood wasn't hers and she hadn't been stabbed, cut, or shot.
"You were punched, though!" This was delivered as if it made the fact that Sabah was dabbing at her bruise with a cotton pad soaked in hydrogen peroxide any less pointless. From above, her now visible Ghost made the metallic chirp that heralded some sort of input.
"She was also thrown through a desk."
Taylor managed to not roll her eyes, but it was a very near thing. "Thanks for that, Ghost. She'll calm down now."
"I am calm!" Something broke through the veneer Sabah had been so careful to maintain. It was momentary and hidden in the flash of emotion in her dark eyes and a tremor in her hand as she reached for Taylor's gloved hand, peeling it off and hissing at the angry, purple skin around her right ring finger. "I'm calm. I'm very, very calm."
Taylor's heart hurt. She reached out to cover Sabah's hand with her free one and wrap her fingers around the other girl's. The squeeze she got was briefly strong, then relaxed. "I'm fine." What could she say to reassure her friend? "On the way back I had a talk with Ghost. Turns out I've got some regeneration on top of everything else. I'll be back to normal in the morning."
Sabah's lips twitched and her eyes flickered between their joined hands and Taylor's Ghost bobbing merrily about in the air above the stove. "You were never normal, Taylor. This is just further proof." She blew out a breath, gave Taylor's hands a final pat, and stood. "Okay, so...I don't really know what we're supposed to do now."
Taylor lifted a hand. "I'm in favor of a shower. Then sleeping until I'm physically incapable of it."
"No, although those are good ideas. I really like the second one." Sabah did a circuit of the Hebert household's tiny kitchen. "What I meant was, like, with your patrols and stuff."
"Do you want me to write a report? I'm not really seeing what you're getting at."
Taylor watched Sabah come back to flop in the chair across from her, skidding a half-inch across the linoleum. "Me neither. I guess it's more...anticlimactic than I was expecting, this whole thing."
Eyebrows rose. Her dad snorted in his sleep, loud enough to wake himself. Momentarily. "If you got bored, you're welcome to come with me next time."
It didn't take Sabah two seconds to snap her reply. "No. Definitely not. I am not going kung fu fighting with you. Besides me not wanting to like, at all, I do have a business to run." she checked her watch. "Which opens in four hours. Shit. I need to get home. You gonna be okay without me?"
"Maybe." Taylor smiled at Sabah's exaggerated huff. She walked her to the door and got a very tight hug, then watched her vanish into the night. Fatigue hit like a sledgehammer. Bed time. As she trudged upstairs, herding her half-awake dad in front of her, she thought that there was going to be a lot of tea in her future if she kept this heroing business up. Did it come in pallets?
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The sheer amount of joy she took in sleeping until noon was indescribable. She was a bookworm of no small talent, and the daughter of a college professor beside, and as far as she was concerned there did not exist a word in any language to fully explain how she felt. Sprawled beneath her thick comforter, limbs contorted comfortably, head buried under her pillow, she grumbled as the sun managed to sneak a ray of light through a gap in her curtains. She lay there, breathing deep and slow through her nose, as she gradually woke up. As she did so the sounds of the house came to her lamentably keen ears. The news droned on about the fight at the convenience store while her dad hummed something to himself as he moved around the kitchen. Eggs sizzled, the coffeepot burbled and bubbled, and it was basically the soundtrack of a morning.
A happy, pleasured whine escaped her as she stretched, luxuriating in the slight burn of her arms and legs as they started moving again. Her neck popped and her pillow slid off the bed, landing with a quiet thump on her bedroom floor. "Alright." Her voice was hoarse, and her throat hurt. "I'm up."
"I'll let the world know, Guardian." Her Ghost's voice came from somewhere by her desk. She didn't bother looking before waving a hand in that general direction and grunting. "I'll tell them that, too."
"Funny." Words hurt. Oddly enough, her body did not. She'd gone to bed last night with ugly bruises on her eye, the left side of her ribs, and her fist. This morning, they were all gone and in their place was dry-mouth and a sore throat. Which was odd, considering she probably wasn't coming down with something. Or maybe she was. It'd be oddly like her to get a cold or something after her first night on patrol. She stumbled into her bathroom for her morning routine and came out fully awake. Because she was feeling shy or because she wanted to mess with it, she made her Ghost wait outside her room while she dressed. Her neck felt oddly naked without her scarf. Her back felt light without her knife.
Out in the hall she saw her Ghost bobbing from frame to frame, examining the pictures the Hebert's had deemed worthy of immortalizing on a wall. There were a bunch of her parents; a wedding photo, a carnival, that kind of thing. Thankfully Taylor managed to keep the baby pictures in albums by way of extensive negotiation and a carefully executed temper tantrum when she was ten. "You have any idea why my throat is so sore?" She massaged it as she asked, trying to soothe the aching tissue within.
"You snored." Her Ghost didn't even turn around. In turn, she didn't even consider it. "Loudly."
"I don't snore!"
A sound like a chainsaw-wielding maniac attacking a pile of mulch emerged from her Ghost. Along with some mumbling that, while the content would forever remain a mystery, was definitely her. "I'm sorry, Guardian, but you very much snore. I'm pretty sure it woke your dad up."
She grumbled wordlessly, then followed the smell of scrambled eggs to the kitchen, having more or less conceded the point. It was very hard to argue with evidence like that. Not that she wouldn't confirm it with a third party source. Okay, fine. She was going to ask her dad the minute she was done eating everything put in front of her. And some of her dad's bacon.
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It was a Taylor who had eaten entirely too much food that folded herself into the living room couch. Fishing the remote from underneath one of the cushions and flicking it to the news, she settled in for a food coma that would probably last until dinner. Or until her dad reminded her she had homework. The newsreader was a new one, some elaborately coiffed optimist with orange skin who droned his way through what he clearly saw as a slow news day. He also had something stuck to his teeth, a piece of spinach or something, and it was almost fascinating to consider how exactly that got through the screening process before the broadcast started. Did he sneak a salad under his desk and wolf it down during a commercial break? Why was she thinking about this at all? Maybe because it was opine about salad sneakers or ponder why, exactly, she'd just let Mush go.
Realistically, it made sense. Mush, as grungy and ill-regarded as he was, had years more experience in the cape scene than she did. He knew his limits, when to push them, and when to back away. He wouldn't have lasted this long if he didn't. So while he wasn't a major player, he at least knew of them and their favorite moves. She didn't. Despite her research, which her encounter with Sabah had proven to be slightly unreliable, there was a lot she didn't know. Without armor, without any real training, or any way to safely and non-lethally remove people from the fight, she'd only had two things going for her last night: surprise and being underestimated. Had she gone after him, she would have done so without both. It made sense.
But she still felt guilty about it. Mush was a criminal. Someone who, by definition, was a terrible person. So he laid low, flew beneath the radar, what-the-fuck-ever. There were plenty of bad things he could do and not draw lots of attention to himself. The Docks were the Merchants' territory, inasmuch as they had territory, and it was more or less a black hole. A person could vanish into there, and never come back. Or worse, they could come back changed. A drugged out shell of themselves, consigned to a short life of addiction, withdrawal, fear, and debt. Maybe Mush wasn't involved in that. Probably, he was.
She was drawn from her train of thought by the Breaking News sound alert blaring from the TV set. The reader had somehow managed to get the spinach off his teeth, and was looking more human than robot now that he actually had some news to report. "We're getting news that, right now, there is an altercation between capes at the intersection of Lord Street and Lombardo. We repeat, that is Lord and Lombardo. Citizens are being urged to avoid that area until the conflict is resolved. We're going to cut now to our helicopter camera to give you a live picture of what's going on."
What was going on was a piece of the universe out to prank her. She had spoken of the devil – thought of him, but splitting hairs wasn't her – and he had appeared. At the intersection of Lord Street and Lombardo, less than a mile from the Docks, Mush had made a reappearance. A staggering, disjointed, oddly floppy reappearance, but there he was. Street debris flowed around him in a miniature hurricane, acting as both shield and armor as he gathered the bigger pieces to turn himself into some kind of junk robot. It would be going a lot smoother for him, if there weren't two members of the Protectorate doing their level best to bring him down. Well, one member of the Protectorate. The other was a Ward, but they were part of the organization too.
Kid Win was taking potshots from his hoverboard with his energy pistols, doing poorly enough with them to make Taylor's professional pride hurt. She'd never even shot a gun before and she was pretty sure she could do better than that. He was staying well out of the line of fire, which was more than could be said for the Protectorate hero below. With lightning lance a-flashing, Dauntless charged Mush head-on, battering through the wet newspaper hurricane with his shield. The lightning that came from his lance didn't look quite right to her, or maybe it was missing something. Something her own knife's blade had. Regardless, it did a good enough job to get the hero close enough to engage Mush in hand-to-hand combat. Things ended pretty quickly after that.
Mush was down, in cuffs, and Kid Win did a victory lap of the air above the intersection. All in all, it wasn't a bad showing for the local hero team. Quick, efficient, and apart from some singed asphalt, no property damage. This was the kind of clip that would be making the rounds for years as every good image was milked from it for one reason or another. There was something about it that bothered her, though. If what she'd thought about Mush earlier was true, then why was he found so easily and then went down without much of a fight? She voiced the thought to her Ghost, who'd had been right there with her the whole time.
A chirrup later, and she had her answer. "Someone did punch him really hard in the head not too long ago. Concussions are nasty business. Or so I'm led to believe. I don't actually have a head to experience it myself."
So she'd helped bring down a villain a few hours before it actually happened. Huh.
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