agoodyarn | A different world (for Taylor)

Taylor holds back a sigh, watching the new girl without looking directly at her. She's a quiet shape taking her seat, her hair tied down tight in a single braid, her clothes dark and unremarkable, the only remarkable thing about her plain face the depth of the gray circles under her eyes.

Two girls in the front row, one tall and pretty with red hair and a jacket more fashion than practical and the other petite with blue pins in her hair, turn in their seats to give the new girl a cheery little wave.

“You can ask to sit somewhere else,” whispers the taller one, tilting her head towards the third seat at their table. “Mister Gladly's cool.”

Taylor pays attention to getting her binder out of her stained backpack, hoping the new girl takes Emma and Madison up on that. She looks their type, anyway.

Edited 2022-03-04 10:27 (UTC)

Clara gives them both a cheerful wave in return, but her smile is soft but determined as she shakes her head.

"Thanks," she says sweetly enough, accent firmly middle American, "but I'm good. Talk later?"

Because this place is a chance for her to be... well, relatively normal. After all, her parents know she's nothing like the other superpowered people in this world: there was no trigger, no traumatic event. Instead, there was a capsule and a message in a language neither of them could read and a baby that could lift a pickup. And that had made for a very very careful childhood trying to avoid notice even harder.

But now she's a teenager; now, well, she has a much better chance of blending in, hence the change in location. A chance to have a normal or even a heroic life.

Not that she'll ever forget being 'that strange Kent girl'. Which is why she's not moving one inch. She's got a stubborn streak a mile wide, according to her Ma, and it gets two miles wide when folks try to tell her who to make friends with.

So she'll turn to smile at Taylor hopefully, and dip her head.

"Hey," she says, quiet but not quite a whisper, "nice to meet you. I think he said your name is Taylor?"

Taylor's eyes go to Emma first before she looks over at Clara, giving her a brief nod.

"Yeah." And she should stop there, she knows it, can feel the long moment it takes Emma to turn back around.

"... Having an okay first day?" she ventures instead, voice so low some of the sounds are lost in the rustle of the classroom. Low enough to be ignored, maybe.

Clara doesn’t glance at Emma. But she can tell a couple of things from that look. Instead, she chooses to focus on Taylor, still radiating warmth. She keeps her own voice low.

“It’s going all right,” she says absently, “though I’m getting used to being near so much water, mostly. I know it’s Brockton Bay, but it’s still something else to see it and hear it and smell it all the time. It’s a lot different from endless farmland.”

"I bet. Have you been to the Boardwalk yet?" she asks, because the city, anything outside the school, is a safe topic.

She tests a few pens on the corner of her water-warped notebook, finding one that works. She needs to go to her locker, but she was almost late this morning avoiding Sophia, and hasn't had time.

She shakes her head easily enough.

"No, we haven't gone there yet. Pa wanted us to get the house unpacked and Ma's been trying to get the garden set up."

Moving had been a huge decision, and while they were doing comfortable enough with Pa's new job and Ma's business, they didn't exactly have the money for movers and the like. She'd done most of the 'moving' when she could.

"Do you go a lot?"

"Not a lot. Just sometimes. My- I used to go to the stalls a lot. Big flea market," she expands. "It's every weekend, rain or shine, south end of the Boardwalk. The north end is all the high street shops and tourist stuff."

"That sounds like fun," she says, perking up a little. They've never had a lot of money, but flea markets and rubbish sales always have something interesting. Maybe somewhere this big would have something to help her figure out where she came from.

"The south end, I mean. 'High street shops' are a little rich for my blood."

She glances over at Taylor, but the teacher looks back at them and she focuses her attention on what he's saying a little more visibly. Once the heat's off-

"Anywhere else I ought to know about, as the new girl?"

"The Boardwalk's pretty safe," she says after a minute, keeping her eyes on the timeline Mr. Gladly is drawing on the board. "The folk there hire security, and it's all right in sight of the PRT headquarters. But don't go down any of the sidestreets off it by yourself. One block back from there is Merchant territory. Bad news."

Taylor's never heard of a cape gang from Kansas - probably important to warn the new girl about, right?

She nods along at first, and her lips quirk a little at the mention of security. But the rest, the warning, makes her frown.

"So not the kind of merchants who buys and sells tchotchkes."

She shakes her head. "The Archer's Bridge Merchants. Mostly-" She drops her voice a little again, unconsciously shifting slightly closer. "Mostly drug dealers but they have a lot of capes and they like causing trouble. Anywhere you see an M cut like a dollar sign, don't go there. We're in ABB territory right now, but it's mostly safe. They only mess with other gangs."

She’ll shift in too and she’s paying intense attention to Taylor. This all sounds like… well, like a lot.

“ABB?”

"Lung's gang," she expands. Lung's a name she thinks anyone might know - the invulnerable villain trying to outwar what was left of the Yakuza. "It's three big gangs in town - the Merchants, the ABB, and Empire 88. Merchants are the only ones that are really trouble for most people - they just like havoc."

The sound of a cleared throat at the front of the room makes Taylor start, and she moves abruptly back to where she started, retreating, cursing herself for drawing attention.

Clara, however, will look up and give the teacher an apologetic smile. She doesn’t say anything but she’ll take the blame for it.

After that, she’ll write a note:

Thank you for telling me about this. We didn’t have anything like this back in Kansas.

She gives the note a quick glance and a brief nod. It’s common knowledge here - giving her the basics is only decent. For the rest of the lesson, though, Taylor keeps her head down, silently taking notes as Mister Gladly introduces the new quarter’s lesson plan. When he quizzes a few students on what they remember from the fall, she scoots lower in her seat, and he doesn’t call on her.

When the bell rings, she’s quick to shove her things into her bag, watching the other girls again without looking directly at them.

Taylor will find, tucked in her bag, a little note that just says 'thank you for the helpful welcome' and her phone number with an invitation to call and chat later if she wants.

But she'll leave her alone for the time being. She's not about making her more of a target for the usual high school bullshit than she normally would be.

Unfortunately, she has to leave school early as her parents are bringing her out to get a few more things for the house. So she won't see Taylor until tomorrow.

Thanks to the chaos of the first day back after break, Taylor doesn't have time to get to her locker for two more classes, until just before lunch. It's in one of the far-flung wings of the school, and it's usually quiet, but there's something of a crowd in the corridor today. She stops when she sees why - there are Madison and Emma again, holding court, the two of them flanking a freshman, talking down about her clothes. Sophia's there too, outside the circle, her face its usually cold scowl. She almost turns around to go back, but that would mean she'd keep having to carry everything through the rest of the day.

The trio don't seem to pay her any attention as she skirts through the edge of the crowd to her locker, digging in her backpack for the books she needs to drop off. The piece of paper winds up in her hand - the note. Taylor pauses in front of her locker, scanning it, frowning to herself.

Why would New Girl - Clara - bother with this? Someone bumps into her from behind and she crumples the note by reflex, shoving it into her pocket, afraid someone has seen. Hunching her shoulders, she keeps her back turned to the trio's court as she opens her locker-

The smell that meets her is like a punch to the sternum, robbing her of the ability to breathe for a moment. Garbage - rotting, foul garbage falls from her locker, a soft avalanche that covers her feet, rises to her knees. She doesn't hear the silence that has fallen behind her until someone snickers, someone else laughs... Her shoulders draw up sharply, face burning, eyes watering from the smell, and she starts to step back, but that's when two hands hit her hard just below the shoulders, shoving her forward, into the grotesque locker. A hard kick follows against her Achilles tendon, and that's enough for her attacker to swing the metal door shut with a bang that makes Taylor's head swim.

For a second, all she can do is struggle to breathe. She's too tall for the space, the coathook on the wall jabbing into her temple, the back of her shoe caught in the locked door. And the air is poisonous, rancid. She shoves her mouth against her shoulder, tried to breathe through her jacket, forcing her back against the door to try to pop it open.

There is still laughter outside.

It doesn't open.

Both of those states go on and on and on and Taylor grows more and more frantic. She tries to kick the door, tries to throw her weight against it, but there is no leverage and her shoulders are too wide for her to turn around. Trying makes something pop and scream in the hand that's trapped up near her face. She screams, gagging as she shouts for help, until she can't hear anything but her own voice.

No one so much as tries the lock.

Taylor leaves the locker. The locker leaves her, perhaps. Suddenly she is in the school as a whole, part of it, split into tens of hundred of thousands of selves, each wrong, each pouring back sensation that makes no sense, warped and abrasive and so unutterably magnified that all she can do is shriek in panic.

She doesn't know what it is that's bothering her. There's something just at the edge of her perception that won't stop, that's telling her something is wrong, that has her picking at flicking her own fingers to distract herself. Her mother is the one who notices her in the car, arms drawn up and frustrated. Neither of them quite know what to do until they start heading home from their new-to-the-area errand and Clara immediately reaches for the door handle.

They know how this goes. They're parking and there's a woosh of air and nothing else.

But the next anyone will see or hear Clara, it's in the school, at Taylor's locker. She doesn't play any games, doesn't tamp down her strength as she tears the door off of the locker. The only saving grace is that she doesn't fling it at the lockers across the way.

"Taylor... Taylor!"

She falls back, jerking, screaming as she tries to find her body again, tries to find her own senses amid the millions. Some of her reacts to the light of the locker opening, scurrying into safer darkness, and she clenches her eyes shut hard against the light, struggling against the hands that catch her. The sounds she's making are animal, feral as she claws to try to get free, heedless of the wrist that's plainly broken, feet skidding on the trash still piled around them. Whoever filled her locker plainly emptied the girls' bathroom trashes to do it, and they did it weeks ago.

She's got an ear on Taylor's heartbeat, her muscles, even the way the blood is flowing inside of her. She can't sense her power, or what she's doing with it, the location of her soul; those things are well beyond her today. But she will slow down, not speak again, just hold her up, keep her steady, keep her lifted so she doesn't have to slip and slide. If Taylor claws at her, who cares? She'll be fine. She just has to make sure Taylor doesn't break her nails or her fingers on her. That's the concern.

Taylor can't manage her body, can't understand how her limbs are supposed to work when there is so much conflicting information. Her struggles are disjointed, spasmodic, and they're exhausting her quickly. By the time a teacher runs up, at last alerted because her shouting is no longer muffled inside the locker, she's collapsing in Clara's arms, hands clenching hard on her clothes.

The crowd has scattered, except for a few remaining with their phones out, and he spends a second telling them sharply to leave before coming closer, skirting where a few roaches are fleeing the heap of trash.

"What's going on? Miss Hebert, can you stand?"

Taylor's eyes only clench tighter closed, and she hunches her shoulders up to try to cover her ears too.

"No, she can't," Clara says firmly, and despite the fact that she just moved here, and despite the fact that she's no longer in Smallville anymore, Clara's going to put on her best Clark command voice, the one her mother uses when the PTA gets riled up and useless, as she looks up at the teacher again.

"She was stuck in here. I came back to get my books and I heard her and got her out. Have you called the ambulance? She needs medical attention."

Taylor makes another pained, upset sound, almost more hiss than voice. She can hear their voices, but can hear them a thousand times, through ears and ears that aren't ears, every sense aggressive and multiplied so many times over.

What they're saying doesn't matter. That she can't understand it does.

"Here, bring her in here," the teacher says, pointing to the door he came out of, a few dozen yards down the hall. "Miss Hebert? Taylor? Calm down for me." He puts a hand not on Taylor's shoulder but on Clara's, and speaks past her. "Mister Higashi, I want that video. Did you see who did this?"

Clara picks up when her heartbeat spikes, when her muscles clench, and she lowers her voice considerably.

"The noise is upsetting her. Whisper."

She knows from her own experience that it can be no help at all to modulate that way, but it can also be just what someone might need to get a handle on things. She's had to work out her own coping mechanisms over the years to deal with her senses.

She'll get Taylor to the other room and she'll hold her until she's got a place she can lay her out.

It's a small classroom, and the teacher points her to the chair at the desk - not somewhere she can lie but at least better than the student chairs. He stays in the doorway a moment, telling the students still in the hall to disperse, except for two, three that he tells to wait here where he can see them for another teacher, and then he pulls his phone out of his pocket.

In short order, people begin arriving. First a few of the para-educators, to corral the witnesses and keep order. The principal. And then paramedics at last. Through the entire process, Taylor can't make it back to herself, can't stop the deluge of information she can't use, can't do anything but try to block it out, holding onto the only solid thing she knows where is - Clara's arm.

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