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Taylor walks in the door, and Lisa drops a cup for the first time.
She’s got a preternatural sense of space, even by ghoul standards, so she never accidentally knocks things over, and she’s very rarely surprised. On the rare occasion something catches her off guard, it’s almost always something horrible, and she’s good at bluffing against the horrible things.
This isn’t horrible or maybe it’s so horrible that Lisa can’t feel the pain, like a first degree burn. She lets go, porcelain shattering on the floor of the shop, and Sabah looks over from the other side of the counter. She sees Lisa and the broken glass. Confusion crosses her face and then it morphs into understanding as she sees Taylor coming into the store. Then it turns back into confusion again.
First, because Taylor is supposed to be dead. Lisa told the others that Taylor sacrificed herself so the rest of them could escape the full scale assault on the Underside Cafe, like Alec and— arguably— Noelle. Taylor went into a fight with Alexandria already half starved. That’s like bringing a knife to a bazooka fight. Besides, if Taylor had lived, she would’ve tracked them down. There wasn’t a body and all of Taylor’s records disappeared from PRT systems, but that didn’t mean she’d escaped. It hadn’t been a lie. Not entirely.
Secondly, because Taylor wears a dove’s white coat.
“Lisa?” Sabah asks under her breath as she tries to pretend she’s not staring.
“Grab the broom,” Lisa says, sounding more confident than she actually is. She has to force the words out. They feel thick in her throat, stuck like a piece of food swallowed wrong. “I’ll take care of this.”
Taylor isn’t alone. That’s almost as much of a blow as seeing her in that white. Maybe it’s worse. Lisa doesn’t recognize the four teenagers following Taylor, chattering amongst each other and pretending not to be on the prowl, but they’ve got to be doves too. Fledglings just out of the academy. Or— something else. Taylor isn’t wearing her eyepatch anymore, which almost makes Lisa wonder if she’s hallucinating, but one of her followers wears one just like it.
Lisa doesn’t have time to guess. She steps out of the way of Sabah so the other girl can clean up the mess Lisa made, and— by the time that’s done, Taylor’s at the counter.
Her followers are chattering among themselves and talking about what they want to order. Lisa listens to their banter, notes a joke about ‘nose kagune’, and tucks it away for later use. She doesn’t bother trying to process now, not with Taylor right there. Her thick dark hair, which used to reach down her back, is cut short, cropped in a military style that reminds Lisa more of Rachel. She looks bare without her curls. She doesn’t wear her glasses anymore. She hasn’t needed them since the transformation, of course, but she wore them without the lenses as a comfort thing until the whole thing with Coil’s so-called “ghoul unity project” happened.
Taylor started wearing them again shortly after coming back to the Underside. It’d seemed like a good thing at the time.
Taylor takes Lisa in, studying the full breadth of her like it’s the first time they’ve met, and Lisa has to force herself to exhale. She measures her next breaths so they’re normal, though if Taylor’s hearing is still as good as it was then, she’d know Lisa’s heart is beating a mile a minute. It’s not just that she doesn’t say something— Lisa wouldn’t expect her to reveal anything obvious in front of her minders, if that what the younger doves are. It’s her body language. This is Taylor with strangers.
With a stranger. With Lisa, a stranger.
“Are you okay?” Taylor asks.
Hell no, Lisa doesn’t answer. Instead, she says, “Oh, yeah. We go through dozens of those a month.”
Usually, it’s Aisha or customers accidentally knocking things over. But it’s not technically a lie.
“Oh.”
Unsettled. That’s the word for the emotion Lisa recognizes on Taylor’s face. She doesn’t like not having the full answer, but she’s not going to ask more, so she sits with the uncertainty like a badly digested meal.
“You reminded me of someone I used to know,” Lisa explains, even though she knows it’s dangerous. It is Taylor, no matter how many superficial changes the doves made to her. It’s her voice, her jawline, her awkward way of standing like she doesn’t know how much space to take up. “It startled me.”
“Hopefully a good someone,” Taylor says. It’s not a question, so it doesn’t demand a reply.
Lisa shrugs. “She was good to me.”
Taylor narrows her eyes, as if looking for something within Lisa. Lisa doesn’t know what it is, so she can’t offer it up or hide it. She just remembers the last time she saw Taylor. It was only a couple of moments in the retreat. None of the other Undersiders saw it, let alone heard any of it. Lisa has the best senses of any ghoul she’s ever met, and even then, it was distant. When Rachel slapped Lisa on the back and told her not to look back, she hadn’t known what Lisa was looking back on.
Taylor on the ground. Not dead. Covered in more blood than a human is able to lose and live, but she hadn’t been human for a long time. Still, it was a lot even for a ghoul. Kneeling, trying fruitlessly to get to her feet. Alexandria’s quinque propped against her eyelid, held in one hand while the other was on Taylor’s chin, tilting her head up. Lisa heard the words, heard Taylor’s voiceless attempts to speak that came out mostly as gurgling noises, and Alexandria’s passionless words.
Not a promise. Not a curse. Inevitable.
”You will be my weapon.”
Of course she’d let the others think Taylor was dead. Of course she’d stopped looking once the files disappeared. She was terrified that she’d find— something like this. Lisa had spent so long trying to coax color back into Taylor’s life, and now it’s all gone, leaving her even more drained than she was when they met.
“Okay,” Taylor says, glancing up at the menu even though she knows what she wants already. Taylor always gets the exact same thing. And— she does. No food for her, obviously, though her followers get snacks. Lisa watches her find a table, and then forces herself to look away.
It hurts like watching her die all over again.