Chapter Text
October 2012
“Taylor, are you absolutely sure about this?”
Taylor Hebert had never known her father, Danny, to be a joker—sure, some leeway came with the territory of being a dockworker—and sure, they hadn’t had the best relationship in some years now—with both of them being ghosts in their own home—so this could feasibly be a recent development. It could also be reasonably said that the comedic nature of this comment was a derivative of her sleep-addled mind.
Snorting mirthlessly, she found herself watching the dust motes drift within a beam of early morning light filtering through the truck’s window.
“And what other options do I have? Becoming a janitor? The bitches three have pretty much ruined my life.”
There was a brittle, manic bite to her tone—one that made her father wearily glance at her—a look that she fruitlessly pretended not to notice in the cramped cab.
“Taylor—Little owl—we’ve talked about this—”
The ever-patient tone of his voice grates raw against her exposed nerves.
“Yes, we have! Which is why we both know that this is the best option for me, and why we agreed that this is better than community college, or the docks, or trade school. I need out, Dad. I know you don’t agree with this, but I need it.”
Daniel Hebert finds himself frowning at his daughter—not an uncommon occurrence in the many similar arguments they’ve had about this exact subject in the past few months—ever since Taylor got it in her mind that joining the military, of all things, would be her ticket out of the bay. He had made the error of bringing the fact that her mother—dear Annette—would have heavily disapproved of this—with her rejection of the patriarchy and the military industrial complex extending as an instrument of it—gobbling up the impoverished to fuel the oppressive arm of western imperialism. He had watched his little girl shut him out in real time months ago, the second the words left his mouth.
Taylor idolized her mother. Bringing her up after the accident had become a Hebert household sin—not one that was ever acknowledged between the two—but one that existed in the periphery of every single stilted interaction between father and daughter, nonetheless. Bringing up Annette to get Taylor to see reason flew in the face of the unwritten outline that both had let shape their conversations since the accident—an outline that opened with Danny asking “how was your day at school?” and closed with his daughter lying directly to his face about how it wasn’t that bad; an outline that had already been steadily on the decline since Taylor was briefly hospitalized for being shoved into her tampon-filled locker in 2011.
It didn’t matter that what Danny was saying was true—that Annette would have hated it. It didn’t matter that Taylor wasn’t giving the rest of her options a fair shake. His daughter had always been a one-track mind—one that would fixate on a single way of accomplishing a goal, and stick to it with extreme determination.
The second that Danny brought up Annette in conflict, he lost. As simple as that. He had watched his daughter lock up and refuse to speak more than a single sentence at a time to him for weeks. He had watched in real-time as this fantasy shifted from a fixation within her mind to one that she would go to any lengths to drag into reality just to prove that he was wrong—and that her way is the best way.
She had always been this way with her fixations. He remembered way back when Annette was still with them—when they were still family friends with the Barnes—when his daughter was still a motormouth with a gap in her teeth and a miles-long smile. He remembered when Annette had told him to put a stop to her Alexandria phase—as she didn’t want her daughter supporting a fascist in a cape—and he remembered the resulting fallout from that. Prior, his daughter had been a middling cape fan at best. Afterwards, she ate, slept, and breathed nothing but capes for a solid year—something they brought up as ammunition to demonstrate her stubbornness whenever needed for years to come.
In the end, they were saved only by Emma dragging her out of it and into whatever the next fleeting childhood interest to take her fancy was. Neither Danny, nor Annette, had any doubt that without Emma there, Taylor would still stubbornly be regurgitating facts from the Protectorate newsletter and wearing Armsmaster themed underwear to this very day to subconsciously spite them—and she came by it completely honestly.
Danny himself was a union man who, despite the collapse of his industry, still clung to it like a man shipwrecked to a lump of driftwood. Every day, he dragged himself to a career in decline—to petition a mayor who has already written off the docks as a lost cause—to tell another dock hand that no, there still aren’t any jobs to help him feed his kids. He did this despite declining pay and with the bay turning into a powder keg around them.
Annette, too, had tied herself firmly to the causes she believed in—despite the open disapproval from her parents. She had been an early advocate of the Lustrum movement—a movement that lived and died before its time—leaving behind a turbid legacy in its wake.
So sighing, Danny reached for one of the few parenting techniques that he could use in this situation to keep things from boiling over.
“As you’re already set on this, and I can only keep you from doing this for at most a few more months, I can only ask you to promise me that you’ll come home if you feel at any time that this isn’t for you.”
“Yes, Dad,” Taylor groans, “We’ve already been over this a billion times.”
Thumping her upside the head, Danny pauses to take his daughter in. She looks so much like her mother—with her long black hair, expressive mouth, and willowy figure—she especially looks like Annette when she glares at him like that. It causes him to tear up a bit, if he’s honest with himself.
With one hand, he kills the truck’s ignition, and with the other, he reaches for the car door.
“Okay, Kiddo, let’s get this show on the road!”
Following an absolutely historic eye roll, Taylor trails him into the crisp October air. Dew sticks to the blades of grass and darkens the sidewalk, and the sun is just poking over the trees—whose molting leaves litter the ground by the truckload in bruised reds, yellows, and browns.
Their first few breaths mist the air as they proceed in silence to the little corner spot within a strip of stores—none of which either father, or daughter frequent—to the Brockton Bay recruitment office.
Pulling open the propaganda-plastered glass door for his daughter, both were hit with a blast of warm, stale air—the type of air that’s so dry it’ll instantly chap your lips. The inside of the center was spartan, to say the least. It was a wide-open space—that still somehow felt cramped with the amount of junk and people crammed into it. Yellow halogen lights buzzed overhead, and the floor was coated in that utilitarian schoolhouse carpet that you find covering a pure slab of concrete—in fact, that word was adequate to describe the feel of the whole place—utilitarian. The walls were a drab green, and in the furthest right corner stood an American Flag.
“What can I do for you all?” Asked a salt and pepper grey man in fatigues. He was placed behind the Army table, closest to the door.
“We’re just shopping around,” Danny replies, offering the man a tight smile.
“Well, y’all can start shopping over here!” Offers a man just north of his early twenties in black PRT sweats.
“We don’t have the cool uniforms, but we more than make up for it in benefits!”
“Oh yeah, and also we get to work with superheroes—that’s always a big draw.”
The PRT, while not an official branch of the military, is treated in a very similar manner. In a world where new capes can pop up at anytime, anywhere, and where cape battles are a daily battle, protection and cleanup from cape-related instances have become an important part of national defense. After all, when a stranger or master could just waltz in and subvert your whole national infrastructure, an instrument made to respond specifically to these parahuman threats shows itself to be quite useful.
In recent years, especially, it has been drawing more manpower than most of the other armed forces combined; it turns out in a world where one disgruntled soldier can trigger and melt straight through the side of a carrier with laser eyes, fixed set-piece battles and clean conflicts are a thing of the past.
So too had foreign conflict become unprofitable. The resources gained were worth much less than the casualties caused by even one parahuman being created in an airstrike, or open conflict. That’s not to mention that at any time an Endbringer could show up and lay waste to an entire country. No, those resources were much better spent elsewhere. Traditional warfare has gone the way of the dodo. And nuclear threats were pretty much nonexistent as Scion had dealt with that pretty early on—back when he was still going around saving kittens from trees. The new age of the parahuman has greatly reduced the number of grunts trained and fielded, and with a decrease in need, came a decrease in funding, and a decrease in benefits.
The PRT, on the other hand, saw a recruitment boom. There is always a need for more people equipped to deal with parahumans, as there are always more and more parahumans. They discovered early on that the benefits had to be incredible for any sane person to even consider trying to deal with someone shooting lasers out of their ass. In the early years, attrition rates within the PRT were ridiculously high. This led to a drastic increase in the benefits received by troopers, and the current-day recruitment tactics, as the old ones, the same used by the police, were deemed ineffective.
Of course, none of this is what got Taylor to sign her name on that dotted line—with reluctant parental approval from Danny, of course.
“What are you looking for in your potential future career, Taylor?” The recruiter had asked after running through the standard spiel.
“A ticket out of the bay, ideally,” she quietly offered with a faint smile.
To that, the man set down a map of the United States in front of her.
“Pick anywhere you’d like.”
With that, Danny Hebert knew that his daughter was sold. And so, he signed along with her.
No father wants to see their daughter in a dangerous field of work. But ultimately, it’s no father’s decision as to what his daughter decides is the correct path for her. He had already voiced any objections he could come up with prior to this. If those were not adequate in swaying her, then the new ones to go alongside working with parahumans certainly wouldn’t be either.
And after they run through some testing, and are given an information packet and instructions,
And after they’ve returned for the night
and are sharing another quiet dinner
Danny looks to his daughter and says:
“I’m proud of you, Little Owl.”
Because what father can possibly be angry when his daughter is forging her own path—even if it’s not the one he, nor Annette, would have chosen for her? No, Taylor is standing on her own two feet, just like they wanted for her. He may not like it, but it would be hypocritical to shut that down. So, he holds his tongue and enjoys the tearful hug that Taylor offers him in response.
“Love you, Dad.”