Summoner - Chapter 2 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series
Chapter 2
Notes:
Her dad had visited.
They didn't let him in with her, but there was a lot of noise and a screen, and…
And she felt like she was looking at a caricature of someone she used to like.
He moved wrong. He emoted wrong.
Not as bad as some others, not nearly as sickening to look at as some of the doctors, but he was just… off. And try as she might to muster energy, some kind of greeting, it just felt… so insignificant.
They might as well have dragged her to a booth and put a stranger on the other side that spoke a different language.
What was she supposed to do or say? She wasn't entirely sure.
Taylor Hebert would have… tried something though.
But she had nothing.
The most she could do was stare and occasionally nod a yes or no to his questions, those she bothered allowing her brain to process.
He began crying, eventually. Not sobbing, not loudly, just sniffling and stuttering words that she let fly through her ears and out into the ether.
The pang of guilt she felt was a welcome addition. Milder than the brush of air on her skin and not nearly as pleasant, but it was what Taylor Hebert would have felt at accidentally making her dad cry and worry.
Well, no, that… that sounded weird, even in her head.
She was Taylor Hebert.
She almost thought about herself like some separate entity there.
It was a common mistake, and a side effect of having to compartmentalize so heavily since the incident to not go mad or start gibbering in Noxian tongues instead of English, but it was still something she had to catch herself up on-
Someone was touching her.
Oh.
The visit had ended.
Dad left.
She felt welcome guilt, and she drank it in like a woman in a desert would a chilled glass of water.
It was nothing compared to what dozens of others she knew had felt.
But this guilt was hers.
So she would savor it until disliking the feeling became normal again.
As they dragged her back to her room, her eyes wandered to her arm.
The armband was green.
How does one unmake thousands of years of life and experiences, even if only experienced dimly and muted?
How does one combat and figure out the dozens of completely contradictory ways of life and philosophies paired with so many people and creatures and gods and demigods, ones which she knew and believed all had merit?
But some did not.
But they also did.
Did they not?
What was merit, and who decided what its conditions of acceptance were?
She cut that path of thought clear with a sigh, and started a new one.
Or rather, backtracked to her first question.
How does one unmake thousands of years of life and experiences, even if only experienced dimly and muted?
Time slipped through her fingers like smoke, yet even she could see the aftermath of its passing, the soot left behind on her empty hand.
Time was the answer to her question.
And she had nothing but time.
There was no impending doom, no quest across the seas, no impending event that would haunt her heels here. No black mists of death, no ghosts, no warships on the horizon.
The quiet hum of her ceiling fan and the occasional buzzing of the doctors they sent to her were the only distractions.
Her hair got longer.
They cut it.
She couldn't care to stop them.
It was oddly liberating, to be so beyond giving a damn about how she looked that she could probably go for a walk completely naked and just not care .
She heard time and time again how with age, that self-conscious feeling faded. She'd even seen it in old people, how they just didn't have any fucks left to give about how other people saw them.
To look at the lump of hair on the floor and not despair about how the only part of herself she liked was taken from her, but instead consider making a bracelet out of it, like some kind of trophy, was... nice.
After all, it wasn't like she had not lived as beasts and monsters, with only fur and chitin to shield her from the elements.
Her sense of fashion would likely be somewhere between "awesome cosplay" and "why are you wearing leather and tooth necklaces" when she got out of here.
Not that she would follow said fashion sense, outside of… maybe making a hero costume. Too attention grabbing otherwise.
Did she even want to be a hero?
She didn't have the room in her head for such questions.
She picked another thing of memory, another piece of Taylor Hebert - who was her, she was Taylor Hebert- and began the strange, dizzying process she liked to call "self-brainwashing", trying to polish that piece and fit it back into the overwhelming mass of perspective and knowledge she had gained that had displaced it.
The calendar on the wall moved with every day, likely to help her keep track of time. She tried a couple times.
Unfortunately, reading made her eyes crawl and squirm. It just didn't look right. It didn't look Ionian, it didn't look Noxian, the curves were too smooth but not smooth enough-
It was just… plain old English.
And she had a mere decade and a half of experience with that, compared to the other languages.
She couldn't quite remember the order in which the months were arranged either. It was different in Runeterra, that dead world, different in three of the six or seven regions of that place.
Still, she could speculate that a couple months had passed.
Then again, it might have been two years for all she knew.
Having lived for thousands of years tended to give one a very skewed, demented sort of view on the passage of time. Between ageless demons who considered time a linear line to walk up and down on, immortal beings, and short-lived humans, it was an absurd mix that did not help her whatsoever.
Progress on that… reconstruction front had been slow, but… fairly steady.
Even if she had done enough introspection to qualify for an eidetic century old monk in some obscure Chinese temple, frustration slowly coiled around her.
It was a little too slow.
Sure, she no longer looked at the doctors and was caught halfway between bowing, sneering at them, vomiting because nothing they did felt or moved or looked right, or wondering how their flesh tasted and all three hundred and seventeen ways she could kill them in less than ten seconds without using any… souls. Heroes, champions? Whatever she might call this sort of 'conjoinment' of their souls.
And that… was a massive improvement.
But she was still caught in that feeling of being four feet too tall and four feet too short, but also the same size, yet still being certain that something and everything about her surroundings were tampered and warped and somehow wrong.
Some days she managed to solve some philosophical conundrum, break some kind of absurd worldview that plagued her mind. Those were the good days.
This was not a good day.
Any topic on which the… she'd just call them legends. Any topic on which the legends felt strongly about was doubly as frustrating to deal with. Because she had been them. She could understand both, completely opposing sides, and everything in between.
Taylor Hebert did not do that, not before the incident. So she had make a token attempt to fix it.
And the subject of 'mercy' was amongst the most contentious ones.
She constructed scenarios to test her own mind, her thought patterns.
Does she spare this faceless thing that wronged her, or no?
From most of the people on the Noxian side of life, she had learned the simple way to deal with everything and the world itself. A ruthless, brutal way of viewing life.
'An eye for two', they called it in Noxus, and their point of view, while varying, was self-evident. Someone breaks your leg? Smash both their kneecaps in retaliation. In fact, maybe you should do it preemptively and save your leg while you're at it.
If that sounded a little psychotic, it was because to some extent, it was.
She liked that type of thought a little too much, it felt like.
The polar opposite side was the Ionian side of life she'd experienced.
The best comparison she could make was 'cartoonishly good-hearted'.
Ionia was as if someone had taken medieval Japan, China, and threw a hundred fantastical elements into the mix. How kind-heartedness and forgiveness had risen out of that mix, she wasn't sure.
An example, an easy one, was Riven The Exile. A white haired woman hailing from Noxus, an orphan.
She'd lived her life.
It was one of the worst ones.
She was a soldier that had fought Ionia for Noxus for years. Excelled, killed hundreds of Ionians during the first invasion. Slaughtered them. Innocents too.
Then eventually gave it all up, out of guilt, out of realization, out of desperation. Self-exiled herself to Ionia, working as a farmer for an old couple, in exchange for shelter. And Ionia eventually found her, and… granted her enough mercy to stand for trial and be forgiven, eventually leaving her alone to live her life.
They even welcomed her, after she had proven guilt, after she had proven that she sought nothing but redemption, isolation, or if neither was possible, death.
Were the scenario flipped, Noxus would have had her beheaded on sight, unless she defected and swore fealty to the Noxian empire. Then, she'd have been welcomed with open arms, all forgiven and forgotten, so long as she kept fighting for them, with them.
She knew better than anyone what harsh circumstances and a harsher world will do to a man, how quickly one tumbles down the path of no return. She'd been that man, that woman, hell, she'd been that spirit.
But her inner debate remained unsolved, and so, eventually, she pulled herself out of it, finding that she was getting increasingly mired in memories and fading lives, sinking into something that was gone.
She couldn't do that too much. This was life, this was reality. She had to spend her time here until she got used to it again.
She stared at the ceiling until her legs started cramping from disuse.
Eventually, she shuffled up to the calendar on the wall, a digital one with a little screen.
And after a couple seconds of squinting and feeling vaguely ill and almost like a bumbling tourist, she read the word 'February' on the top line.
That was… somewhere in the start of the year. Second month? Third?
She'd spent about… just one month in here? Maybe two?
That was… phenomenal progress, actually. She had assumed much worse.
Her lips curled into a smile.
She would like to get back to a normal, boring life. There was such a thing as too much excitement. Most of the legends she could think of had lived lives that were a mixture of violence, fun, sex, all three combined, and usually had a bit of tragedy and insanity thrown in there. Or a lot of it.
Much like Earth Bet's parahumans, if she thought about it.
So some part of her was oddly happy about just… going back home. Back to school, back to her normal, boring, calm life.
It wasn't a huge part, of course. She had berserkers and maddened, frenzied demigods trapped in ancient weapons in her arsenal of experiences. She knew how exhilarating and fun carnage could be, how it felt to bathe in blood and smell the dust, smoke, death and blood in the air as it clumped and hardened on one's skin.
But she much preferred to have a bit of time to just… regroup. See what she could do, prepare for the future, or not prepare for the future and just… coast through life.
She feared that the thrill and joy of new experiences might have been stolen from her, and that was one heavy thought that utterly crushed her heart every time it rose.
She'd lived through a lot. Too much. Would she ever find someone, only to have sex with them and think to herself ' Ahri and Nidalee and half the female legends have had so much better' ? Would she even feel the need to find someone? Many of the legends in her mind had found people they cared for, been with them. She had lived those experiences through them, as deadened and muted as they were. Was there a point in seeking something she'd felt before? She didn't find much reason, but it was all just a hypothetical.
How did she even end up thinking about that?
With a heavy sigh, she decided to discard that line of thought and just wait.
Maybe in another month or two, she could get going, start paying attention, go back home after some chats with the doctors, but she wouldn't be making goals and deadlines here.
That felt like setting herself up for failure.
Notes:
im stealing the band system from another fic or mb they stole it from Worm idk
Anyway the colors on the armbands mean:
Gray: Temporary Stay
Green: Extended Stay
Yellow: Extended Stay, security measures and precautions needed.
Red: Permanent Stay, Strictest security measures and precautions necessary.
Next chap is back to Brockton Bay.