Chapter Text
When Taylor Hebert was three, the bottommost step of her porch gave out while she was walking up it. Startled, she fell against the rest of the wooden staircase and cried, in that way young children faced with a new type of pain so often do. Though her mother and father were quick to lift her up out of the hole and carry her inside to tend to her leg, splinters picked out with tweezers and burning, pungent antiseptic applied to her scrapes, covered with kisses and Alexandria-themed bandages, she still saw the ugly underbelly of the stairs. Rotted wood, made weak with rain and salt-air and mold, housed and nurtured bugs, nasty crawling things who scurried away from the light and exposure to seek refuge in the cool embrace of the dark.
Her father filled in the hole that night, incensed by his daughter's pain. He stomped, hard, in his steel-toed work boots from his time as an actual dock worker and not a union bureaucrat, until another rotting board gave way or, by some unseen metric, he judged them safe. He sprayed something from a nozzle, hand moving a pump up and down, into each gap in the stairs, layer after layer of cleansing agent poisoning the homes of the creatures who thrived on death and decay, and brought fresh wood to cover their extermination.
There were cuts, short and deep and weeping, along her palms and fingers, where she had clawed and punched and scratched against the metal of her locker door. There were gashes, too, along her legs and face, from when she had flailed against the harsh surface of her prison, breaking both skin and fabric as easily as if they were wet and weak with mold and rot.
She sank to her knees, not for lack of hope but for lack of strength, body hot and frail as if with fever, and her hands submerged in putrid refuse and fermenting blood. She felt the writhing of maggots grow stronger, purposeful, as they sensed heat and life and host. She felt fear grab hold of her.
Suddenly they were upon her, upon the flesh of her fingers, and a strangled cry tore out of her throat, dying in the thick fumes of the locker. She felt them wriggling against her skin, and then burrowing into it, and then through it, popping out the other side bloodied and fat. They dug against her wrists, but went no further, content to sate themselves on the gristle of her hands.
When she was eight, she first heard her father swear. He had been very careful to not let her hear such things, the reputations of dock workers and unions aside. He had been careful about a great many things, lately. He’d been more reluctant to let her accompany him to work on those rare days she was out of school and neither he nor her mother could find a sitter, much preferring to let her stay with her mother during her lectures. He told her to avoid the Docks, not go out alone, or with only Emma, and to never go out at night. She already knew this, but the look on her father’s face convinced her to agree without complaint.
He’d been ranting about the Boat Graveyard, about the Mayor and his rejection of the Ferry, and he said something about him having his head up his ass. He paused, mouth stopping even as her mother reprimanded him and she giggled. The next time she went with her father to work, she asked to see the Ferry.
The dock was a sad, pathetic thing. Warped wood, covered in grime and cigarette butts and broken glass, tethered a meek, rusting boat, paint peeling and anchor covered in barnacles. Farther away she could see other boats, larger but otherwise identical in neglect and abandonment, their hulls full of holes and flecks of oxidizing metal, and she wondered if this is what the corpse of a dream looks like.
She seemed to sink deeper into the rot, but soon realized that it was not her that was moving. The refuse rose up around her, a cloying cocoon of filth pressing against her in some perversion of an embrace, and she saw through the tears and crust in her eyes it seemed to yearn for the gaps in her hands, pressing up as close as it could to the holes but never entering them.
Hot, sickly sensations coursed through her, and she felt the burning of infection starting at the tips of her fingers, worming down her hands, her veins, her arms and chest and legs. She tried to bend her fingers and wrist and found she could not. She screamed again, a hoarse, wet sound, and tasted bile.
When she was thirteen, her mother died. She didn’t remember most of the details, a detached numbness clouding her mind when it wasn’t overwhelmed by grief and loss and disbelief. Death was something cool and distant and impersonal, something that happened to others, overseas in wars, or to Endbringers, or closer to home to gangs and overdoses. It wasn’t personal. It shouldn’t have been mundane, at the very least. How could something as plebeian as a car crash kill the light of the world, the rock she was tethered to? Something as base as texting while driving shouldn’t have been the reaper of her mother’s soul.
It wasn’t.
She barely registered the thought at the time, but she saw, amidst the heap of twisted metal and gently smoking rubber, rust along the brake line to the front two tires. It seemed almost purposeful, the placement of the decay, as if it had been set there - but that was impossible, and just her longing for a reason to her loss. She didn’t think on it anymore, mind moving to the impossibility of her loss, and spoke no word of it aloud.
Was this it? Was this all she was now, all she had been? A repository for abuse and pain and now, now a home for disease and insects and rot? What was the fucking point!? Was she dead? How long had she been dead?!
It was with a start that she realized there was no true difference between her and the muck around her.
She heard a song, a sweet song, and her mind detached from her body, her vision leaving her locker even as she felt the bugs around her start to swarm, felt her eyes swell with pus and maggots start to chew at the ocular flesh.
She saw her mother’s grave, and heard the song, and realized it was not a song, it was a voice, a thousand voices, giving praise for what they now infested. She saw the tombstone erode, black corruption eating it away in seconds, and saw the coffin she had been laid to rest in, polished wood without luster, soft cloth ragged and moth eaten. She saw her mother.
She saw her mother, body bloated with poison and formaldehyde, saw it drain from her, saw her coffin breached, saw her skin take on the quality of corpses, saw the worms crawling through her, the mites feasting off her, and she understood.
She snapped back to her body, to her sanctuary, her temple, where she was undergoing apotheosis. She saw the mush cling even tighter to her, but still it failed to enter her, and she understood it to be a test.
She tore at her skin wildly with fervor, with abandon, and grasped great handfuls of the wet mash, and pushed it against her skin, coaxing it into her wounds, into the burrowing tunnels of her tenants, into the gaps of her eyes and nose and ears and throat and pores and soul.
She was consumed fully and wholly by that she loved, and that which loved her. She felt the burrowing insects pulp against the surface of her skin, felt them enter her veins and reform, taking hold of her utterly and fully, disease and vermin and infestation and filth and crawling rot and corruption complete her, soothe the ache in her soul, and rejoiced in her unity.
The walls of her temple rusted by her presence and her will, and she lovingly gathered the flakes in her hands, cupped them against her skin, put them against her heart, into her heart, so that she might always carry with her the holy ground of her transformation, her ascension. Flies and gnats buzzed around her head, a crown, proclaiming her loyalty to that which decays.
She left the school, unseen. She had fear to spread and corruption to offer to the parasites of Brockton Bay.
When she was fifteen, Taylor Hebert rotted .