(TAYLOR’S DEMONIC ADVENTURE) CHAPTER FOUR

There were some things that could not be understood from a distance, no matter how often they were depicted or discussed. Murder was one of them.

Taylor would later come to think that television had lied to her, through omission rather than exaggeration. After all, news anchors spoke of death with careful phrasing and catchy euphemisms, reducing it to numbers and headlines that slid smoothly into the next segment. Dramas reduced it to a single gunshot or a dramatic pause before the screen cut to black, as if the story simply ended there. None of them captured what it was like to lie awake in the dark with the unshakable knowledge that three lives had ended because of you, whether you had meant them to or not.

The weight of it did not press down on her all at once. Instead, it settled gradually, sinking deeper with every quiet moment, every pause in conversation, and every stretch of time where her mind had nothing else to occupy it. Even the fact that she was now a cape, something extraordinary by the standards of the world, felt distant and strangely irrelevant. The word itself carried no comfort, no promise of meaning or purpose. It was merely another label layered over a reality she could not escape, and it did nothing to make that reality easier to bear.

She had killed people.

It had been unintentional and uncontrolled, the result of a moment she had neither planned nor understood, but it was irreversible all the same, and that was the part that mattered. 

Throughout her stay in the hospital, the thought clung to her like a bad smell. It was there when she stared at the ceiling in the early hours of the morning, listening to the soft clicks, footsteps, and distant conversations of the building around her. It was there when nurses came in with practiced smiles and careful voices, their kindness unable to reach past the wall she had built around herself. It was there when her parents tried to talk about school, about recovery, and about what came next, as if the future were something she could meaningfully contemplate after everything that had happened.

Three people would never wake up again.

The thought arrived unbidden and repeated itself until it felt etched into her mind. Three people would never sit up in bed and groan about being tired. They would never complain about homework, argue with their parents, or laugh at something stupid their friend said. They would never chase their dreams, whether those dreams were small or grand or half-formed and selfish in the way most teenage dreams were. They would never grow older, never change, and never be given the chance to become anything more than what they had been in their final moment.

They would never eat again. They would never sleep. They would never cry.

And she would.

That was the part that hurt the most.

Yes, those same three people had made her life miserable. Yes, they had humiliated her, isolated her, and driven her toward a breaking point over and over again. Yes, she had hated them with an intensity that scared her in hindsight, a bitterness that had sunk into her bones long before the bathroom stall ever shattered.

But she had never wanted them dead.

She had wanted them to stop. She had wanted them out of her life, to leave her alone and forget she existed. She had imagined suspensions, transfers, and graduations that would carry them away from her forever, endings that did not require blood or finality.

Not this.

Never this.

Sometimes, in the moments between visiting hours, when she was alone, her thoughts drifted to places she did not want them to go. She imagined families she had never met, parents sitting in rooms that felt too large now, staring at empty chairs around kitchen tables. She pictured bedrooms left untouched because no one had the heart to move anything, closets still holding clothes that would never be worn again. 

How would she ever face them, if she had to?

The idea alone was enough to make her stomach twist until she felt sick.

On those days, Taylor would bow her head into her hands and cry until exhaustion finally claimed her. There was no dignity in it and no restraint, only grief and guilt spilling out until her body could no longer sustain it. When she woke again, her eyes were swollen and her chest ached, and she found herself bracing for another long stretch of hours spent pretending she was holding herself together.

The nights, however, were worse.

Sleep came only in short, broken intervals, never deep enough to offer rest or relief, and when it did come, it was haunted by half-formed images and impressions. Faces hovered just beyond clarity, shadows lingered at the edges of her vision, and there was a constant, oppressive sense of being watched by memories that refused to stay buried.

That became the format of her hospital stay, crying through the daylight hours and lying awake at night, staring into the darkness while the weight of what she had done pressed down on her.

It was terrible, and she would never deny that. Yet much later, when the pain had dulled enough to be spoken about without choking on it, she would come to recognize it as a turning point in her life.

Character development, Lisa would call it one day, wearing a grin like it was the punchline to a joke only she was allowed to make. Taylor would snort despite herself, and for a brief moment the memory would lose some of its sharpness.

But Lisa would not be wrong.

The world Taylor was stepping into did not shy away from death. It revolved around it, consumed people with casual cruelty, and expected those who survived to keep moving regardless of what they left behind. If she was going to endure what came next, she needed to learn how to live with loss, with guilt, and with the understanding that good intentions did not erase consequences.

And learn she did.

She learned in a hospital room that smelled of disinfectant and medication. She learned with her parents sitting beside her, lost and out of their depth, doing their best to comfort a daughter whose pain they could not fix. She learned through tears, sleepless nights, and the slow, painful realization that grief did not have an endpoint, only something you became better at carrying with time.

It was not a lesson she wanted.

But it was one she would carry with her for the rest of her life.