I stood away from the railing, stuck my hands in my pockets to keep them warm.  “Never.”

Yeah, no, this is not something Taylor is willing to budge on.

“Never’s pretty final.  If you’re so certain, what do you have to lose by hearing everyone out?  Hearing me out?  I’ve got coffee and lunch in my bag, we can sit down, talk it all out.  If you’re willing, we can then go meet the others.  I’ll talk to them with you, back you up, keep Bitch from murdering you.”

I guess that’s fair enough? The main thing Taylor has to lose here is her mood, I suppose. And her life if Lisa and Brian fail on that last thing.

I shook my head, turned and rested my back against the railing, looking at the memorial, rather than the city.

So many dead.  So pointless.  What was wrong with this world, that it was this fucked up?

It’s written by an author with a penchant for fucked-up-ness.

That people like Sophia and Armsmaster were heroes?  That there couldn’t even be a proper funeral for the people who had given their lives, because of a small handful of grandstanding idiots?

That first one comes from people defining themselves as heroes or villains. Well, I suppose Sophia is an exception on that front, given her arrangement with the Wards, but you get what I mean.

“Maybe you don’t know what you want to do because what you really want to do is come back.”

Not gonna lie, I’m not discounting that option. Maybe it’s possible to mend relations with the other Undersiders.

I didn’t reply for a minute.  The quiet was disturbed by the noise of not-too-distant helicopters moving over the city, some capes flying alongside them as guards.  It would be another drop of much-needed supplies.

Nice. Though the necessity of guards for the supply helicopters has some nasty implications for what some of the villains are up to.

I sighed, “They wouldn’t have me, and those guys won’t budge on the thing with Coil and Dinah.  Not really.”

Fair enough.

“Probably not.  I mean, even if they took you back, you’d have to eat crow, accept a few concessions, like Coil’s ‘pet’.  There’d be no more playing around.  You’d have to go all-in, from here on out, if you expected to convince them you were legit.”

Yeeah.

I shook my head.

“You want to be forgiven for what you did?  It’s not going to be easy.  There’s going to be a sacrifice on some level.  And that starts with giving up that stubbornness, being willing to talk to them.  To talk to me.

I suppose so.

You might even change your mind, find yourself able to look past thing with the girl, for the sake of having friends, doing the things you want or need to do in other areas.”

I mean… it’s unpleasant, but it might be a necessity.

Question is, does Taylor want to be friends with people would would be willing to look past that whole situation? Judging by the end of Buzz, that’s probably a no.

“Become a hero?  Strike out on your own?”

I shook my head, stressed the words, “I don’t know.”

“No hard feelings if you want to go that way.

I mean, solo heroism is an option, but it seemed like Taylor got a bit sick of the “heroes” in general last chapter.

Again, I can talk to the others, ensure they don’t go straight for revenge or any of that.  We don’t hate you, now, hurt as some of the others might be.  Except maybe Bitch.  She probably hates you.”

Heh. Very reassuring.

“Really, I don’t know,” I told her, exasperated, “I don’t like or even respect any of the heroes I’ve met, I don’t even see the point of it.  As villains, we faced down other villains.  It wasn’t so different from what I’d be doing as a hero… but what did we really accomplish?  What does anyone accomplish, if all we end up with is this?” I gestured out at the cityscape stretching out below us.

It depends on how you see it. Do you see a broken city, or a surviving city?

That said, we do know that Endbringers seek out places with lots of tension, violence, etc. I don’t know to what extent that’s public knowledge, though.

Other than that… I guess “fun”. This seems like a prime opportunity to call back to 3.6 and Tattle’s theory of the game of heroes and villains.

“No?  I mean, I knew you hadn’t gone home yet, but I thought maybe that was our fault, you protecting your dad, staying away from places we’d know you frequent.”

Ah, now the comment about making the others leave her and her dad alone makes more sense.

“I’m still hurt, still mad at him.  Mad at myself, too.  I guess, more than anyone, I expected my dad to understand, to give me the benefit of a doubt.

He kind of did, for a while.

And going home would be going back to the way things were, which is the last thing I want.”

Oh yeah, the escapism is still on.

I suppose the Shadow Stalker revelation doesn’t help either.

“So you don’t want to go home, you obviously don’t want to go to the Birdcage, and you turned down an offer to join the Wards.”

A revelation which Tattle might not know about yet.

Though I did suspect that she found out when Taylor and Tattle met eyes last chapter…

I hesitated, “Yeah.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Taylor is kind of stuck now.

What even is she going to be when she finds out what to do? 

Hero? Villain? Civilian? Rogue?

Those last two seem unlikely. This is a story, after all.

“So everything I’ve been through, all of this, it’s-”

“My fault, pretty much.  That’s why I’m saying I’m sorry.  I mean it, too.”

I sighed.

I see.

But I mean, this doesn’t remove Taylor’s agency in actually accepting the offer.

“It’s okay,” I told her.  “I think… I think if it happened again, I’d still want to be part of the group, want to have met you guys.  I’d want some stuff to go down differently.  Dinah, my dad, having things come out like they did after the battle with Leviathan.”

Yeah… it’s not been without its problems, but it’s been fun.

“We can’t take back what happened,” Tattletale said.  “But we can try to fix it.  Some of it.  You could go back home.  Face the music.  Tell your dad some or all of what happened.  You could go somewhere else, or I could convince the others to leave you and your dad alone, if you wanted to do that.”

They’re not already?

“I’m not ready to go home just yet.”

She’s not willing to face the music. She’s not ready to find out what sort of genres Danny has gotten into while she was gone.

Danny, at home: *plays Evanescence, Good Charlotte and My Chemical Romance loudly over every speaker in the house*

She shrugged, smiled a little, gave me an apologetic look with a tilt of her head, “And my plan worked out.  Of course.”

Sort of, at least.

…

Did Coil make one reality where he told the chosen Tattletale what he’d just learned, and one where he didn’t and tried to let the delayed arrival do its thing without alerting Tattle to Taylor’s presence?

“Of course,” I replied, dryly.

“It might have ended there, but then Grue mistook you for a villain, and you didn’t correct him.

Ah, right. And Tattle couldn’t– wait, yes she could. Anyone else sworn to secrecy on Coil’s powers couldn’t, but Tattle could blame her power for knowing it.

It was interesting enough that I played along.

This sounds more like Tattle anyway.

The idea of recruiting you came when he was finishing his introductions.”

Nice.

“Damn,” I muttered.  What had happened?  Not knowing was almost worse than hearing we’d all been slaughtered.

No use dwelling on it now, I suppose.

“Anyways, point of this explanation is this:  Knowing we had an imminent fight with Lung coming, knowing Lung planned to pyrokinesis our general area until he rooted us out, got civilians to finger us or brought in enough capes to make life difficult for us, I called Coil.  He said he’d help, told us to wait five minutes, then take the more direct route, straight into the heart of ABB territory.

Sooo then there was another timeline where they didn’t wait and came either before or during the main part of Taylor’s fight.

Did they find out in that reality that Taylor was trying to be a hero, and report that to Coil, who then reported that to the Tattle in the reality he chose? No, that still doesn’t make it so she’d know before she met Taylor.

“We go, we take out a contingent of ABB gangbangers and scare off Oni Lee.  Then I get a call back from Coil.  The other reality?  We left earlier, went a different route.  Got in a fight with Lung before you showed.  You decided to attack both our groups while we were occupied fighting each other, worn out, only Lung was stronger at that time, too strong for you to do too much.

Ahh, I see!

By the time you realized you’d have to work with us to stop him, which wasn’t long, it was too late.  Lung was too tough.”

Sounds like Taylor died in that one. Possibly also some of the Undersiders, though someone would have to escape to report this info back to Coil.

“And the fight with Empire Eighty-Eight?”

Lisa frowned, “Apparently that was one case where he saved our hides.  Remember that call I got?  Telling me to be careful?  Same thing he did with the bank robbery.

Yikes.

Tells one version of me to push us to be careful, tells the other to go in for direct confrontation. 

Oh dang.

Yeeah, I could see the confrontational route not really working out.

Knowing how he works, I try to nudge us in one direction or the other.  The group of us that went in for the headlong attack?  We got taken down.”

“That happened?” my eyes widened.  That would have been the fight with Night and Fog, and it hadn’t been pretty as it was.

Yep. There were a lot of ways that could’ve gone bad – and, in another reality, did.

I guess I can blame Coil for the anti-climax, huh? 😛

“Did we die?”

Lisa shrugged, “Not sure.  He didn’t elaborate, often doesn’t, unless it’s key info.  But Coil decided not to go with that option, so it was clearly worse than what did happen.  Or worse in his eyes.”

Yeah, evidently.

Tattletale nodded.

“He’s been doing that from the start?”

“Some.  The bank robbery, he had our back.  But timing was sensitive, and I guess he wanted to maximize the chances that he’d get Dinah, so he didn’t have a concurrent reality where he kept us out of action.

Makes sense, although I suppose he could’ve opted for a secondary reality where he sent someone else. Another team, or maybe some of his soldiers (though that would make the crime traceable back to him).

And, according to him, we succeeded in both cases, though Bitch got hurt in a fight with Glory Girl in the other one.  Lucky for us, I suppose, that the world where she didn’t get hurt was the same one where Coil got his captive.”

Ouch, yeah.

I winced.  Even an offhand mention of the role I’d played in what happened to Dinah elicited a painful stab of guilt.

Yeeah, Taylor’s not quite over that yet.

“We didn’t have him for the fight with Bakuda, but we did have him for the fundraiser.  He had the other version of us in reserve.”

In other words, they were guaranteed to win because if they didn’t, he would’ve chosen the reality where he didn’t ask them to try.

This is a really cool concept, and can act as a very good device to explain plot armor while throwing the characters into incredibly risky scenarios.