"What's this?" Taylor perks up when Ravi puts the plastic box by the side of all the other tools of medical trade already arrayed on the table. Syringes, vials, scalpels, a stethoscope he dug up back home, tweezers, towels, disinfectants, and others of which purpose Taylor only has a vague idea, but all looking ordinary enough. She's yet to spot any obvious tinkertech either here or back at Ravi's, though that's not saying much given how she herself probably counts as tinkertech after a fashion. She's not so clear on the legalities of it.

"My sewing kit. I figured we should sew you up best we can."

"Oh. Right. Yeah, of course." The man did say they'd be fixing her up after doing a basic check-up on their ride to the morgue. Maybe she shouldn't have been expecting… some sci-fi bullshit or whatever Adam's memories faithfully supply her own imagination with. "So, what do we start with?"

"Unless you have a preference, I'd like to take your vitals. Blood pressure, heart rate, hearing your lungs, the works."

"But- I don't have those?" Taylor frowns. She's told him her heart's not working, hasn't she? She's pretty sure she did.

"Probably, yes. But it won't hurt to confirm that to establish your baseline. I've had subjects with a tenth of a regular heart rate, but it was there. That guy over there-" He points behind him with his thumb in the direction of the storage room, where his other, less human creation resides in its plexiglass cage. "-runs at a hundred beats per minute, which is as good as defunct for your regular rat. Mind sitting down?"

Taylor shrugs at the explanation, before hopping atop the metal table - most likely the same table she'd had her innards exposed to the world. She rolls up her left sleeve, uncovering the tightly bandaged forearm she and the tinker have dressed before leaving his house. It's a temporary measure for sure, but in the likewise, and hopefully temporary absence of better options, it'll have to do. Ravi said he'd rather figure out whether giving her a transplant would even work before snatching some skin off of a corpse. With the unliving state of her body, the graft would need to assume a similar condition, since otherwise even should it take, the rot would soon set in due to a lack of necessary sustenance provided by her body. That, or not take, and rot for more obvious reasons.

For her part, Taylor's just fine with keeping her arms wrapped for the time being. It's a preventive measure more than anything, so that she doesn't fray at the edges of her wounds any more. Replacing her own skin because of some scrapes seems a little extreme. Somehow, Ravi bringing it up was not terribly surprising.

"Let's see." The doctor murmurs as he fits the band of the blood pressure meter around her arm, then fiddles with the pump. Hmm.

"Why are you guys always using those old things?" The question has always nagged at Adam whenever he had his blood pressure taken at a doctor's, and it's something Taylor must admit to feeling curious about also, now that the question has surfaced in his- her mind.

"The sphygmomanometer?" He looks up from the readings.

"Uh, if that's what it's called? I mean, we had a digital at home and..." No, wait. That's Adam's. She and Dad actually had the one with the manual pump, too. He would always pump it just a little too hard for comfort. The ass.

"Budgetary reasons. You buy one and you're set for the century. And it's not that much harder to use than the modern stuff, which you'd think wouldn't be a problem in this field, but the things I've seen things in college..." he presses the pump a few more times, stiffening the band around her arm to the point Taylor thinks she almost, sorta, maybe feels the tiniest bit of discomfort.

She hums in understanding. Budget constraints. Yeah, she can see it. If it's not broke, don't fix it. "So what does it say?"

"It's not done settling, but so far it's a zero. Let's wait a moment, alright? Actually, here, I don't want to miss it if there's one beat per, say, two or three minutes." The man leans in, pressing two of his fingers against Taylor's throat, almost causing her to instinctively grasp his hand to break the offending fingers. Seriously. She gets that he raised her from the dead, and that she had little say in such matters back then, but he could stand to at least ask now.

They stay like that for a minute, then two, the silence stretching into the awkward, urging Taylor to nervously glance around at anything other than the man in front of her, his eyes fixed upon her neck with a look of absolute focus.

"Still nothing." The man finally draws back. "Let's check your lungs next. You said you got shot?"

"Yeah. Four bullets. I think one went out the back, like, here." She points to the spot somewhere beneath her left shoulder.

"Right, well, shirt off."

Right. That. She's known she'd have to do that since the thought entered her mind to ask him to extract the bullets, and it's not like she's never been naked in a doctor's office. It's just strange to think she actually sorta knows the person asking her that. Sure she's been visiting the same general physician since she can remember, but she didn't actually know him - there was always a layer of professional separation distancing her physician from being another human being in her eyes rather than just the doctor. Also, she'd been wearing a bra when going for a check-up for a few years now, and she still hasn't picked one up since running away from home. She really ought to look into getting one, now that she has a place to stay and clean up at. No regrets, though. It would've been a killer to wear even her own for a week straight, much less Carla's, especially seeing as her skin doesn't heal.

"Um." She glances away to the entrance - a staircase leading up from the basement the morgue is located in - from where any entering person would see them clear as day. "Shouldn't we move this somewhere else?"

Ravi blinks at the question for a second, apparently confused by her words, before a look of comprehension dawns upon his features.

"Oh, right. Of course, of course. The storage, then? Can you help me carry all the tools? I didn't think. Sorry."

Taylor hops down from the table and picks up roughly half of the assorted equipment in lieu of answering. It takes them a minute to relocate to the cramped little room with its very lively, very unliving resident. They end up dragging a couple of chairs too, what with the lack of space on the counters there for her to sit on, much less lie down.

She pulls her sweatshirt off, soon following with her shirt. It's weird, but Ravi is a doctor, and the tinker who brought her back, so it's not like he didn't see her before.

"Take a few deep breaths," the man instructs her after he puts the stethoscope over her heart, flinching away with a pained wince the moment she complies. Funny. It's always been the other way around when a doctor put the cold metal to her skin. "Yeah, definitely a punctured lung. Like nail on a chalkboard, that one."

"Can you fix it?"

"I can close it up. Somewhat. Normally I'd sew it close and boost your cell reproduction rate for a few hours but uh- well that's not really on the table here. I would have to open up your chest cavity first, though."

"Do we have to do that?" He really doesn't want anyone opening him up. Or poking him, or having any sharp objects of any kind near his person really. Once was enough, thanks you very much.

Taylor shakes her head.

"No. No we don't. Your health isn't dependant on it for the time being since you don't have to breathe. There won't be that much difference if I just stitch your skin together without any physiological processes going on in there, anyway. You'd still be leaking air. Really, it just sounds bad. At least that's what I think from just eyeballing it. I'll be taking samples to make sure, but I don't see any signs of progressing necrosis. Not any more than what you came here with the first time, I mean.

"Okay, let's do that. The bullets?"

Without a word, Ravi puts the stethoscope away. He doesn't need any. His apologetic expression when he picks up the - suddenly menacing - tweezers, says it all. Fuck. Must they be so big?. He's always had to look the other way when getting his shots and this seems like-

Taylor squashes down that line of thought. They're about to dig out bullets buried somewhere inside her, they're not plucking eyebrows, suck it up! ...And she's talking to herself. Great.

Her hands clench on the edge of the table she's leaning against with an audible groan of the plywood. Just great.

"Should I be awake for this?"

"Well, no. But given your current state I know neither the dosage or even the sort of drug needed to put you under. Besides, if you can walk around with bullets lodged inside you then this should be small potatoes. By the way, since you're awake, would you mind pulling your skin taut around the wounds?"

It's a feeling neither Taylor nor Adam have anything to compare it with when Ravi forces the tweezers' arms inside the bullet hole. Not quite pain, but more than simple discomfort. A pressure that feels vastly larger than the actual size of the tool digging into her flesh. Similar, in a way, to how a gulp of water feels much bigger inside one's mouth compared to when they spit it out.

"Please try not to squirm, or breathe if you feel like you need to. Actually, do you mind holding the light? Thank you." The tinker instructs, already handing her the small flashlight, freeing up his hand to put a finger inside her chest and pull the wound a bit more open - a supremely uncomfortable experience. Even more so when the memories of being stabbed, of the thug twisting his blade in his stomach, flood Adam's mind. To the point he fails at both the breathing and squirming parts of Ravi's request.

Taylor screws her eyes shut, grasping at the first thing to come to her mind to replace the image - a rotating ball of light against an endless void, like in a video about neutron stars she'd- Adam- no, she'd seen a while back. Computer science class. Somehow it'd shown up in general recommendations and she hadn't had anything better-

"Okay, that's one. Here. Look." The tweezers, a small bullet between their arms, appear in her sight when her eyelids flutter open. The slug leaves no blood in the tin basin it's promptly dropped into. "I think this one bounced off your rib, found it just under your heart. There's a fracture, I think. Hard to say without damaging it further."

Taylor gives a non-commitical hum. She's getting a feeling things are gonna get worse before they'll get better regarding her body. From what she's gathered, this shouldn't be an issue as long as she lives on to get fixed eventually. Apparently, her creator can remake someone else's body parts into basically her own, DNA and all. Most of what the man said could as well be Chinese from how much she got from it, but in layman terms, she can be rebuilt if need be.

"Alright, now if you could just move the light… you know what? Here, let me." He grabs her wrist to place it in the right spot before getting to work on the second bullet. Adam once again closes his eyes, once again imagining a spinning ball of light, before Taylor elbows him out of the front seat, just to take over the mental exercise.

"Can you pull it a bit more? I can't see a thing in there."

Taylor doesn't blow out a breath only by the virtue of not having one in store, but compiles all the same.

"Do you often ask your patients for help like this?"

"Not many good opportunities in my present field, I'm afraid. Plus, this isn't really a surgery for one person. In a hospital you'd get a full team for an extraction like this. Morgues have quite the lower standard of professional care, hard as it is to believe." Taylor bites on her lip, unsure if she's just been chastised or not. "Here. One left." Once again, a bullet enters her line of sight, held between the tweezer arms, again it clunks against the metal container, again does Ravi move her hand to shed light on another of her wounds, and again Taylor closes her eyes.

"Ow," she appropriately deadpans at the pinprick of a feeling. It's more than the other two extractions have evoked, but also not enough to make her as much as twitch. It's surprising, more than anything.

"You felt that?"

"I felt all of it, just, this was kinda-sorta painful?"

"Good to know. That's the one in your lung. Yeah, there's no way I can sew this up without better access. I do have to say though, it's holding up well all things considered. Good thing the police use 9 millimetre, anything bigger would literally rip your insides out. Not really a problem, but it's less work for me."

"Do I want to-" A memory surfaces in her mind, replacing the luminous bulb therein with videos of a fellow gun enthusiast testing out everything between the flintlock up to and including a 12-pounder cannon on pig carcasses. What the hell… who in their right mind would literally call their bullets R.I.P.s Oh. Oh. "Nevermind. I already know."

"The brain?"

"The brain." Taylor confirms.

Seconds after, the tinker makes a triumphant noise, pulling out the last bullet right after.

"Alright, let's disinfect it all and fix you up some stitches."

Oh! "Since we're on the topic, how long will these hold?" Taylor motions to the line running down the length of her chest.

"Months at least. The thread is standard in the industry, but the standard's good. We don't wanna risk our clients spilling their guts all over the coffin. I meant to take it off once you woke up since you were meant to heal, but um- well that's not happening any time soon."

"How soon is not soon?"

"If everything goes well… a few months?" He dabs at the wounds with an alcohol wipe.

"...How few are we talking about?"

"Well, that depends on a number of factors." The man perks up. "To be completely honest, a lot of the time I don't fully know why something works or doesn't. Tinkering doesn't have much to do with conventional science, there's a lot of trial and error to get exactly what I want, as you can tell, obviously."

"Obviously," Taylor parrots with considerably less enthusiasm, warily watching the man as he prepares the needle and thread.

"Thing is, I tried fixing some of the rats that came out wro-eugh, not how I wanted them to. The results were… mixed. And by mixed I mean exclusively varying degrees of failure before I changed gears and just decided to start fresh to a much better result."

"Oh."

"Now, now! Not to worry! I gave up back then because I had no reason to continue, not because I thought it was impossible. Harder than starting from scratch, yes, but absolutely doable I'm sure." Ravi's face scrunches up with a wince. "That said, it's going to take time since I can't tinker on you just yet."

Taylor's brows furrow.

"Why not? Isn't that the whole point?"

"The same reason medicine isn't just given to humans without a battery of tests and checks usually involving animals. When I said failure I meant that some of my rats went berserk. Some killed themselves trying to get through the glass." He taps the sole container in the room with his knuckle, startling its occupant into a frenzied dash towards the finger, teeth bared. "This one's actually less aggressive than those were, if you'll believe that. That's not the worst of it though, some of the others outright died."

Oh. Well then.

"Objection withdrawn. Months it is, then."

Ravi shoots her a chagrined smile, and disappointed though she is, Taylor can't help returning it. It's funny. All the ways in which she got fucked over, and yet this probably being the best she could hope for. Aside from the biotinker actually getting her resurrection right on the first try, of course.

"Alright, I'm just going to get a few samples and stitch you up. Do you mind if I take a little bit of tissue from one of your wounds?"

Much like alcoholic vapor, the somewhat easy atmosphere hanging in the air goes up in flames.

"What? Why?"

"I'd like to see if there's any advancing necrosis. I don't think there is but it'd be good to know for sure. I only need a grain of sand worth, don't worry." That- doesn't sound so terrible. She's lost more than that when she fell down her window the day she woke up from the dead, and more later besides.

"Okay. Anything else?"

"Saliva, urine, blood." The man pulls out a breadcrumb of flesh from one of her wounds with a hooked metal tool. "Though I'm not sure how to go about getting that one, your blood is um, not there, so we can't check that."

Wait. "What's that about blood?" She thought it was just dried up.

"You don't have any. Well, not in your veins, there's all the blood your tissues were filled with when you died, but even that is diluted with embalming fluid now. Though, maybe fluid is the wrong word for it, you're still very much dehydrated." The words prompt Taylor to resolve to read up on funeral proceedings, just so she won't have another curveball thrown at her that way.

"How does that even work? I mean- isn't blood like, supply lines for the body?" The girl contains her urge to jump at the tickling sensation of a needle piercing her skin.

"I had to sidestep that when I was working on you. You know, before I sent you on to the funeral house. Your blood was already barely in a liquid state so it wouldn't work as a vector. I had to improvise a replacement. You'd think I'd have thought about it before, but I always tinkered on my rats right after killing them, or even still alive." Yeah that's- not something she needed to hear. "I still have some of the solution around. I'll show you." He ties the last loop, cuts the thread off, then moves out of the storage room to return with a bottle of - water?

"Um."

"It's milk. Well, used to be. I used it as a base for a colony of- it's not bacteria but not really a virus either. Point is, this is what is powering your body."

"So it's like- superpowers juice?" She wonders what it tastes like.

Ravi appears to be on the cusp or replying, then he closes his mouth, giving the bottle in his hand a contemplative look.

"You know, I didn't think about any other use for this but now that you mention it… I think it would give anyone alive injected with it a seizure, or at least a heart attack, but you might be onto something here. Anyway, let's finish up here."

Soon enough, all five sutures are put in place, allowing Taylor to throw her shirt on and follow Ravi out of the room, listening to his animated speech all the while.

"I think I could take some of your bone marrow instead of your blood. See if I could get it to start working independently of your body while I'm at it. Are you salivating again yet? I keep water in the fridge. Just a second, I'll get you-"

An unholy noise stops the both of them in their 's eyes snap around the area to finally rest on the present company. Specifically, his pocket, from which the man casually pulls out the cellphone blaring Toxic as if it were a reasonable thing to set as one's ringtone.

"Duty calls, give me a second" Ravi announces after a glance at the screen.

It takes more than a second, around a minute in fact, as the tinker asks about some location - thrice - dashing to and fro around the morgue in search of a pen and paper. Eventually, he simply writes the address down on his hand.

"Joys of having a day job." He flashes her an apologetic smile once he hangs up the call, one she tentatively tries to return. "I envy the Protectorate tinkers sometimes. But then I remember they have to go out and fight the villains so it all balances out. Anyway, as much as I'd love to continue here, I did mean it when I said duty called. Field work. Will you be fine by yourself for a few hours?"

"I think so?" She looks around the morgue. It's not like she's going to ravage the corpses in search of brains. She's not even properly hungry. Most of all, she's not going to risk stumbling across her- Adam's body.

"Great. I'll be locking the door, but there are spare keys in the drawer under the TV. Make yourself at home, alright?"

And like that, he's gone.

Taylor stares at the man's back, up to the very moment he dashes up the stairs and out of her view, leaving the girl alone in the morgue. Alone, with a bunch of bodies. Bodies with brains that Taylor can't deny she feels like extracting. Much like Adam would extract cold chicken out of the fridge when feeling peckish and decidedly more alive than at the moment.

She rubs her face, then makes her way back to the storage room to retrieve her sweatshirt. Brains are not something to snack on. She can handle a few days without eating easily enough. It's not pleasant, food is pretty much constantly on her mind after the first 24 hours or so, but she doesn't need to eat that often, she doesn't think. Every four or five days should be enough. Aside from human grey matter being a pretty deficit goods that she probably shouldn't indulge in, it's something she also doesn't want to indulge in.

That's a lie. She does want to. She wants to gorge herself on brains like she once would on a meatloaf. She wants to stuff herself until she's cursing her lapse of judgement and questioning her life choices when she lies down and feels her stomach complaining against such horizontal arrangement.

This doesn't mean she's going to. Putting aside the fact having someone else's memories and baggage crammed into her skull is hardly pleasant, it feels disrespectful to the people, good people like Carla and Adam, whose misfortune fuels her existence. She's got to eat, sure. She won't let herself starve to death, and it's not like she's hurting anybody by picking their skulls clean after they're already dead. Just… that's the thing. She's got to eat. Just like everything else alive in the world, it's something she has to do to stay that way. Therefore, it's not at all morally questionable since brains are the only food that can keep her going. Thing is, eating a pudding because she feels like it feels quite a bit distinct to eating a brain when she doesn't actually need to. God, this really must be how the vegetarians feel.

As she makes to leave the tiny room, the teen taps the plexiglass, causing the rat within to ponderously wander closer to the wall, sniffing at the air every few steps. It's a much different reaction to the one Ravi got from the rodent. Maybe it remembers the man tinkering on it; rats are said to be pretty smart, and Taylor imagines there were needles involved, or something else pointy or sharp.

"You'd eat the whole ratkind without a second thought, wouldn't you, buddy?" She leans closer to the glass, staring right back at the sniffing rat. "Must be nice, not having to think about all that stuff."

Predictably, the rat doesn't answer.

Taylor breathes in and blows the air out, giving her fellow ressurrectee one last look before turning off the lights and stepping back out into the main space of the morgue. Alright, Ravi mentioned a TV. She hasn't watched any TV in a week, and though she'd never been an avid consumer of the medium, the girl has to admit she finds herself excited at the prospect of watching- news probably. She should watch the news. She'd been basically cut off from the wider world for almost two weeks, if she were to add up the time she spent being dead.

Before that, though, Taylor takes the time to explore the morgue on her own for the first time. She wasn't in any state to pay proper attention when she and Ravi passed through last night, with the only thing on her mind being hunger. It's quite spacious, if cluttered. Which feels strange, because, hey, what can one need to cut people open and look inside, right?

A lot, apparently. Aside from what she expected to see, that being a wall of body fridges (She wonders which one was hers. She wonders which one is Adam's) and the operating table in the middle of the basement, the place looks more like some weird fusion between a laboratory and a restaurant kitchen, with shelves stacked with towels, and cupboards, and lockers, and sinks, and scales hanging from the roof. There are tables like the one in the chemistry classroom, though with actually working sinks. Two separate areas looking much like the kitchen annex at her biotinker's home, one with a microwave with a number of surgical tools arrayed beside it. A corner with computers, two, for some reason, and a giant - safe? Oh! A dishwasher! Must be for the surgical tools.

Taylor fiddles a bit with the door, one for some reason equipped with a locking mechanism but lacking a traditional handle (would it kill the manufacturer to screw on a dollar worth of utility?), and indeed. There are scalpels and pliers, and… dinner plates inside. Okay. Sure. Why not? There is a fridge here too, with… a heart lying wayside a half-eaten fish with a side of fries. Also, water.

She reaches for a bottle, remembering Ravi's words about rehydrating, only to freeze as another memory floats to the surface of her mind. That of a bottle just like the ones in the fridge containing some seizure-inducing tinkertech power juice.

Tap water it is.

There's a toilet, bringing up the number of sinks (and working taps!) in the morgue up to five, and finally, what must be a break room tucked into the side of the basement opposite the fridges, which is where the TV is located across from a beat-up couch - easily the oldest piece of furniture she's seen here yet - with a table in between. The whole place looks surprisingly fresh, if not exactly new, likely thanks to how clean it's kept, without any dust that she can see lingering anywhere. She wonders who's keeping it all so shiny. Ravi? She can't imagine working, caping (or tinkering, whatever), and then having to keep this place so pristine to boot. Probably a cleaning service. Hmm. Does he just- hide all his cape stuff on the days the cleaning is done? Does he keep it all elsewhere? She hasn't seen anything that screams cape anywhere. Then again, he is a biotinker. Her own unhealthy looks aside, nobody pegged her for a parahuman's work when she was out on the streets.

The girl makes to pick up the remote, only to freeze as her eyes land on the pile of papers upon which the device lies. Newspapers.

The TV forgotten, Taylor sets down her glass of water and picks up the whole stack, feverishly sifting through the assorted items. Newsweek, National Geographic - the very issue she'd been reading in the library yesterday, and ah, Brockton Daily January seventh, sixth, fifth… which one was the one with her story, again? Aha!

She throws everything beside January the second aside. Front page, too! Guess even in their shithole of a city a kid dying at school is rather out there. Page three, let's see...

A tragedy at Winslow High School. A prank by three students has ended in a classmate's death… A prank? A fucking prank? They call this a prank! Here's a prank; her funeral. She came out swinging the next day or thereabouts, it was all just a fucking prank bro!

A prank!

The girl throws the paper back onto the stack, both out of anger and afraid she'll rip it to pieces should she read another word, then runs her fingers through her hair, before shooting up to furiously pace the expanse of the tiny room in an effort to work out some of the rage bubbling in her stomach. She even tries a breathing exercise at one point, but having grown used to not breathing, all it does is make her feel as if she put an expanding balloon in her chest.

It takes her further few minutes for the storm of emotions to subside. It's wrong. It all feels wrong. Not the article, although yes, that as well. She shouldn't be dropping into a flight of rage at drop of a dime from reading a few choice words. Poor choice words though they may be. A fucking prank- no! No.

Taylor puts her face into her hands. This isn't her. This anger. Not for any moral or other such abstract reason, it simply isn't her. She'd never been so quick to anger, not when she lived through the school staff ignoring her situation at every turn, not when the bullying was happening, certainly not when she as much as thought about it. Oh there was anger aplenty, deep, festering, and rooted. Never to glimpse the light of day. Why is this so different?

...Didn't Ravi mention his rats becoming super aggressive? She did go berserk at those policemen back home. Same as she almost did yesterday when her tinker did a Heimlich on her. She'd learned better than to lash out over the course of the last one and a half year of torment at the hands of the Trio. Learned to stow her anger deep and tight to the point it became natural to do. This whole week it feels like her first instinct to any perceived threat has been to lash out. To attack. Is her resurrection the cause behind it, or is it just all those bottled-up resentments finally coming to fore?

Perhaps Ravi would know. Or perhaps he'd decide she's too dangerous to be allowed to live, like he'd decided with his last human subject.

She needs to learn how to control this, and sooner rather than later.

Taylor picks up the paper again, this time without sitting down. Maybe walking while reading will redirect the excess energy she would otherwise put towards anger. Alright. Alright. Calm. The paper is not to blame, only the people writing it. A prank. Fucking hacks. Journalism at its finest, gotta rush the article out while shit's fresh before anybody has the chance to do basic investigation, it's why he dropped his journalism course in the end.

Taylor slaps herself to disentangle her own thoughts. Not that she disagrees with her passenger, especially knowing what Adam knows. Knew.

Scowling, the girl returns to the text.

It's… basic, she supposes is the right word. Not in appearance as much as structure. Workshop stuff. Description of event, police statement, student and faculty testimony, fucking Blackwell saying she was a troubled child-

She tears the page in two uneven chunks, before crumpling the paper into a ball and throwing it at the wall. There's no point reading. Adam had seen the same article with relevant details swapped in and out hundreds of times. Next up would be how the perps seemed like such good kids and that Taylor was always so quiet and how there were no signs that anything bad was happening. A mention of the potential charges levied at the end. If she read fucking Gladly saying how the Trio always seemed like such good students and what a tragedy her death was she'd go the Winslow right fucking now to force feed him his own shit after ripping it out straight from his stomach. There isn't a single doubt in her mind the spineless fuck won't say anything to help the investigation - that would mean admitting his own failures, and the "man" is too terrified of not being liked by the kids in his classes he willfully ignores the blatant disdain they all feel for a thirty-something man sucking up to teenagers. She can't imagine, nor does she want to, the headspace that would lead one to becoming like this. Not even at her lowest point did she contemplate going to a kindergarten to make pretend at having friends.

A pained groan rumbles in her throat. So much for staying calm. She's worse than all those people going to the gym on the second day of the new year.

She drops back to the couch and turns on the TV. She can't read this stuff, she'll ask Ravi, he's the one keeping the papers, so, presumably, he's read them. After all, she does want to know what's happened regarding her own murder. To the Trio, the school, that bitch Blackwell. What she doesn't want is to work herself up to a point where marching to the school to kill her teachers seems like a good solution to blow off some steam.

Seconds pass without anything but the blue screen of the TV making a quiet, high-pitched whine. Then a minute. Then another. Long enough for Taylor to start wondering whether something is broken, which is when the signal finally goes through to show the local news channel.

Traffic. Yeah, no.

She changes the channel only to find ads playing, then again, and twice more. With a few more clicks of the remote it becomes apparent the TV only has five channels available. Please. She just wants some cartoons to take her mind off things at this point - she knows all the usual suspects behind the traffic backing up in Brockton; if it isn't Lung, then it's Hookwolf, if not Hookwolf then Squealer, if not her then it's some other cape because it sure isn't construction work that's causing it. But fine. If her choice is between hearing that and some soccer mom expressing her wide-eyed disbelief at a beet stain coming off her kid's T-shirt thanks to the nano-whatever power of Persil, then news it is. She so happens to know Tide is cheaper, and just as good, anyway. At least, that's what she remembers Carla thought.

Even when the anchor moves on to another topic, it's nothing particularly interesting. Something about Medhal donating to a local youth centre, then coverage of a car accident with two wounded, the closing down of a hardware store after it was robbed blind by Uber and Leet. Same old really. It immediately saps whatever enthusiasm Taylor has had for watching TV. That is, until her eyes fall onto the info strip.

The Ward Shadow Stalker to transfer out of Brockton Bay.

Huh. Now that's actually news. She wonders what that's about. What's happened while she was out of the loop? Did anything? Wards are still dependants, so it may very well simply be that the hero's parents are moving or something, and so she's moving out with them. Not like she can do anything but waste her time and energy on baseless speculation.

Not that she has anything better to do. Lazing around on a couch is hardly a more productive way of spending time. It's pleasant enough though, just being able to do that without anyone giving her the stink-eye for daring to look the part of a homeless person taking up a bench, but not a very productive all the same.

Once again, Taylor changes the channel, this time finding an episode of the Bold and the Beautiful, episode… 5000-something. Give or take a 1000. It'll do. It's mindless entertainment. Perhaps more mindless than entertaining, but hey, maybe it'll bore her to sleep. That'd be nice. She'd spent much of the night staring at the ceiling, wide awake, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Who knows? Maybe there really is no other shoe. Maybe this really is a second chance at a life.

Maybe she can make something of it this time.

Author's note: You know, I fasted for 5 days specifically to know how it feels like to not eat anything for a time when I was restarting this story. It was meant to be a full week but it turned out I stopped physically feeling hungry on the second or third day. After that point it was just a mental urging, constant and supremely distracting. I also became lethargic, grew cold, and experienced bouts of dizziness. So I stopped, secure in knowing I have an inkling of how Taylor would feel after two additional days.