Chapter Text
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Chapter 1
It’s a big world full of small people, thought Tyler. It was just his luck to be born in one of the smallest places of all: Jericho. He knew there were cities that would satisfy him – maybe New York, London, Toronto, Bucharest, or even L.A. with its population of influential outcasts, driven all the way to California during the frontier age – if only for a while. Someplace with others who could hold a conversation, who understood drive, and most of all who’d know that coddling Betty Boslin while she whined about petty inconveniences was a waste for everyone involved. Oh well. You can’t change where you’re from. And all things considered, Tyler had advantages, even on others of considerable merits: for example, he could morph into a ten-foot-tall monster with a thought.
But even before he knew about his hyde, he’d known he was different. By the time he made it to kindergarten he could read years above, and running around a playground couldn’t hold his attention. For a year or so he’d been an outcast for all he was a normie: reading over lunch breaks, avoiding the child-wrangling that pretended it was education by simply being above it. He didn’t make friends, unsurprisingly. The older kids weren’t any better, and they had their own problems besides (like thinking themselves above him, funnily enough).
All that changed when he went wandering in the woods behind his home, one sunny day on his first summer break. The other kids would go exploring with their friends, and for all Tyler had no interest in them, he was woefully bored lounging around with no one and nothing to play with. His parents didn’t have hardly any friends themselves. Well, he was trekking through the undergrowth, jumping and running and occasionally even laughing, when he came across a baby bunny.
He watched it for a moment. It wasn’t so young that it ought still to have been in its nest with its siblings (not that Tyler had any such thoughts) and it merely watched him watching it, clearly on edge. A small child and a small rabbit are more or less a match. So Tyler smiled wide and took a slow step forward, trying not to spook it. It tensed but didn’t bolt. It should have. He paused, sensing that he needed it just a little calmer, and then lunged. Grasp! Of course it tried to run, but Tyler was just a little too fast and it just a little too slow. He snagged it by a hind leg, and in his excitement and the bunny’s struggle – which was intense – he spun and dashed it against a tree trunk.
It stopped struggling.
For a moment Tyler was stunned. He hadn’t thought this far ahead! It wasn’t that he didn’t want to hurt it, but that he hadn’t really consciously planned to. It had simply happened. Now that it was dead, however… he crouched low to the ground and brought it to his face. It looked asleep, peaceful – minus, of course, the quarter-sized dent in the side of its skull, out of which seeped blood. It was to this that Tyler was drawn. Such a small wound in such a small animal, and all its quick-running life was gone in a flash. He set it down for a second, unable to resist sliding his child’s thumb across the wound. He marveled at the blood that coated him and laughed. Finally! A game he enjoyed. He poked it for a moment, and then reached for the leg, the one he’d seized. It was hidden under fur, fluff and fat (he didn’t consider how lucky he’d been to catch it), but beneath it all it was maybe length of his index finger. He grinned for a moment, grabbed the foot and the torso, and pulled.
Rip. Off came the leg. And just a moment later he heard a call: “Tyler!”
It was his mother’s voice. No doubt she was concerned that he’d gone off into the woods alone. His father had only grunted when he saw him going. Tyler didn’t mind that she was coming. In fact, he couldn’t wait to show her his toy, and what he’d done to it! With that thought he stood, grabbing the leg he’d just yanked free and the broken bunny corpse, and headed in the direction of her voice.
That day had been an important lesson for Tyler. Certain games he couldn’t play. His mother hadn’t been angry with him, only distraught and scared that her only son might get into trouble. So she swore him to secrecy from his father and later, when he was at work, sat him down and explained what was and wasn’t normal. It wasn’t very complicated: most people were normal, and they did normal things; Tyler was abnormal. He needed to pretend to be normal, or else everyone would hate him. When he asked why that mattered, she told him that no one could make it alone in the world, not even him. “You have me and your father right now, Tyler. That won’t be enough forever – and we can’t fight the whole world, you know?” 6-year-old Tyler had wanted to disagree, but he didn’t usually argue with his mother, and in this case she was right, he knew. Tyler, for all his gifts, couldn’t take on the whole world alone.
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7 years later, 13-year-old Tyler Galpin sat in the front seat of his mother’s SUV. It was a Friday and his 7th grade class was going on a field trip to an amusement park – a proper one, not like the carnival that came to Jericho every year. Tyler wore a small smile listening to his friends bicker in the backseat, while he watched the endless pines streak past the passenger window.
“Listen, I know you don’t even like Marvel – ”
“– I so do –”
“– but there’s no chance in Hell –“
“– language! –”
“– Wolverine beats Spiderman! Who are you kidding, Jo? And, uh, sorry Mrs. Galpin.”
The entirely inane conversation continued well past the point that Tyler felt his cheek muscles begin to ache. But holding a smile wasn’t only for when people could see you – mostly it was for yourself. If you smile enough, you don’t give in to the bitterness and anger and frustration. And the less of that you let yourself feel, Tyler knew, the easier it was for people to think you genuinely liked them.
In fact, Tyler had almost nothing against his “friends,” Jonah and Carter. They weren’t at all different than anyone else their age, so far as he could tell. He simply had a nagging sort of dislike for them, much like for his father, because they were dull and got in his way (inviting him to things, talking to him. He had to go or they’d stop being his friends, which might compromise his cherished veneer of normality). In 1st grade, newly equipped with a mission, Tyler had become amicable with every student in his grade, and any of others whom he came into contact with often enough. And every year he slipped into whichever friend group he could with the least amount of effort – now, lately arrived in middle school, it was a group of 3 friends: Carter, Jonah, and Lucas, the mayor’s son. It had been easy to slot in this time because Carter and Jonah had something of a delightful little complex: Lucas was the mayor’s son and everybody knew it, which meant he was pretty well friends with everybody. But ever since 1st grade he’d been special friends with Carter and Jonah (Tyler could attest to this). So the two of them felt like Lucas was theirs, while Lucas didn’t especially appreciate being constrained. This made Tyler an excellent bargaining chip for the two boys, which he exploited as much as possible to avoid actually being friendly.
Well, on this occasion Lucas had taken another car – chaperoned by his father – which was also populated by a few other of the most popular students. Carter and Jonah were probably bitter about this, but they hadn’t acted it so far at least. Still, you see the drama that teenagers can’t help but make the center of their lives? If there was more in it for him, Tyler could have owned this school.
Speaking of, Tyler wasn’t sure what his goals were yet. He knew he wanted to be great – and he knew he would succeed – but the means eluded him as of yet. His mother told him he was very young, which he couldn’t argue with, and that he should just focus on the present. But when the present is so damnably dull, who could blame his fantasizing? The day would come when he finished high school and moved off to college, and with his grades it would be one of the best in the country. He wouldn’t pick based on academic merit but on the city, choosing somewhere he would be surrounded by like-minded people, people with whom he could achieve great things. That, however, was the sum-total of his plans. And it didn’t make surviving the drama and boredom of 7th grade any easier than it had 6th.
“Tyler,” his mother’s voice said, “what are you thinking about?”
Oh. Oops. He had completely tuned out his “friends” and had probably been staring morosely into the woods. That wasn’t good. There was a reason these sorts of ‘planning’ thoughts were supposed to be restricted to when he was alone in his room, late at night.
“Ah – nothing, mom.” He glanced back. Fortunately, neither of the boys had noticed. He spoke quietly.
“Will father be home for dinner?”
“Will we?” He chuckled slightly. Naturally he wasn’t actually looking forward to the ‘amusement’ park. Calling it amusing didn’t make it so.
“But really, Tyler, do try and have fun today. This is the sort of thing boys your age go crazy over! Fast rides, high heights, funnel cakes! I’m sure you’ll have fun.”
Sometimes his mom talked like this, and Tyler appreciated the constant warnings to keep the façade in full force. Have fun, boy. Be normal. He heard the subtext. (Francoise, of course, really just wanted her son to enjoy himself).
“Don’t worry, mom. I will. Are we almost there?”
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His mother was dying. He had turned 16 three days ago, and his mother was dying. The Christmas before felt like it was yesterday – waking in the morning to his mother’s laughs (one of the few times he was sure to hear it), the smell of pancakes, presents under the tree. Everything had been normal. He and his mother had talked and smiled, and everything had been normal (Tyler didn’t usually think about his father. He didn’t hate him, he just didn’t think about him). Well, he felt stupid now. She must have been dying already – most have known this would be her last Christmas. And she hadn’t told him! She’d let him sit there and be bored, thinking about things that didn’t matter.
His mother shouldn’t have mattered either. But Tyler was the farthest thing from stupid and could acknowledge his own shortcomings – he knew he loved her as much as he did anyone. And it wasn’t because she was great, she fit the word normal as well as anyone he knew, but because she was his mother. How pedestrian.
The worst part was that he didn’t know why she was dying. In 8th grade a kid called Janet’s father had gotten cancer, and Tyler had watched from a distance as the girl got sadder and lower and paler every week, until eventually she stopped coming in for a while. While that had been going on, he’d often walked home with thoughts of the man himself in his head: how did he look? What did dying really look like? When he took his last breath, when the light left his eyes: what was that really? He had wanted to be there to experience it. Probably that minor obsession had stemmed more from boredom than true fascination, but at least fucking Janet knew why her father died. Cancer was boring and simple and clear. Everyone got cancer if they lived long enough. But in April he had asked her straight up (when his father was out, of course): is it cancer? Not only had she denied it, she denied she had any serious illness at all! So he snooped, and it turned out that she wasn’t going to the doctor – actually, she hadn’t been to the doctor in months. Probably not cancer then, he concluded. Because it was certain that both his parents knew his mother was dying. Anyone who spent ten minutes around them would see it. She was pallid and weak, and he treated her like an invalid. Both of them, however, entirely refused to speak of her illness. What a joke.
It was a mystery, Tyler supposed. It was something to do, something to try and solve. But everyday she got closer to death, and everyday he woke up frightened. Besides, he never had cared much for mysteries.
He did the basic stuff: rooting through old family albums, trying to find birth records. Maybe it was something hereditary, he thought. Something terminal. But he didn’t find anything. He couldn’t even figure out where she went to high school. She’d always spoken like she was from Jericho or at least the surrounding area, so he’d always assumed she’d gone where he went. Oh well. This sort of thing wasn’t working, clearly. So he started waking up early and listening to his parents through a bug he planted under the kitchen table, ordered discreetly online. Whatever they were saying when he wasn’t around must hold the solution.
The school year ended, and then it took two weeks of listening to mindless small talk in the early hours of the morning before he heard it:
“How much longer?” It was his father’s voice, gruff, newly awake.
“I… Donovan. I don’t want to give up hope, but –”
“I can see bloody well it isn’t working, Fran. Lying to ourselves doesn’t help. It isn’t working.”
There was a pause.
“No, I guess you’re right. It isn’t any weaker. All the pills… they’re just making it angrier. I’m weak, but the second I turned I know…”
“It’d be full strength anyway. And out of control.”
“Yes. But if I stop taking them, it’ll break free. I don’t know when – this year for sure. It’s just been too long now, my love.”
Tyler heard his fathers heavy breathing. He sounded heartbroken.
“Don – we knew this day would come.”
“I don’t know if I can accept that.”
“Yeah.”
Well, thought Tyler. I have even less idea what the fuck is going on.
He didn’t keep investigating. His mother tried, really tried, to pretend that everything was fine, but the house had an atmosphere – it was like she had already died, and everyone was mourning her. He stayed up late into the night trying to figure himself out, trying to understand himself in a world where she was dead. It was slow going, but the time came when he just wished she was dead already. He felt stuck, like he couldn’t move on while she hung around pretending, deceiving.
The very next morning he got his wish.
Upon hearing his father’s words (the body was already down at the funeral home), the first thing he felt was relief. Finally! All that moaning was finished. And then he felt hatred. Immense, powerful hatred for the world and for God. What the hell was the point of everything, he wondered. All these years, all this time. And she just dies for nothing, from nothing. Nobody understood, he knew. Not his father, whose eyes held no surprise; not his ‘friends’, the same ones he’d had since middle school, who barely had an original thought; certainly not fucking Janet with the dead father who had probably whined and cried when she got the news: no, grief was pointless. But everyone and everything could go to hell.
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Senior year was here. Tyler’s life had had its ups and downs, but at least he was still alive. That wasn’t something to be taken for granted, no! Clearly not. It would have been stupid if he’d died, of course – all that wasted potential – but apparently that was how the world liked to operate. The fact of the matter was that for all his greatness, he would die. And probably he would suffer and rot away alone, regretting his failures, unable to take a shit without help. Until then, however! He had another year of high school, wasn’t he lucky.
With a little bit of distance between, he could be honest with himself: he hadn’t handled his mother’s death very well. All those years she’d been his grounding force, his foundation, the thing that kept him and his façade of normalcy together. When she died, he wasn’t particularly interested in keeping it up. Well, there was something to be said for timing. His friends had been at just the age for a little juvenile delinquency, and Tyler took great pleasure in riling them up. Petty vandalism, some graffiti, bullying the freshmen. None of him made him feel better, of course. And in the case of Lucas, who sometimes came along, it was clear he felt pretty out of place. But at least the other two took a perverse sort of pleasure in the cruelty. Tyler might have admired it if there had been anything real behind it. Instead it was little more than a slight distraction.
Part of the problem was that they never took it far enough. He knew – he’d imagined it enough times – that goading them into something real, standing over them while they did it, watching: that he would enjoy. A proper beating, for example. But the closest they got was a strange and increasing hatred of outcasts. It was odious, really. Most of them were no better than anyone else, but they certainly weren’t worse. Some of them even had unique abilities – like telekinesis! – which they were doubtless wasting. It was a boring hatred, based on insecurity. And of course it made them sloppy. Long-haired Xavier (Tyler hadn’t known his name at the time) and his ‘beautiful’ mural, how fun they’d found it to destroy. Tyler had known while it was happening that he wouldn’t talk to them again, notwithstanding some punishment for their idiocy. The very least he’d demand of any followers of his was that they follow him, especially followers like this who were little better than brutes. Running off to commit their own brutish bullying was unacceptable. Worst of all, it turned eyes towards him. He might not have destroyed the mural himself, but he’d stood and watched it happen. Plus, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from smiling at Xavier’s blubbery look of sheer despair and sorrow. That was always the best part.
It wasn’t worth the boot camp and the therapy. Boot camp was a parade of ‘authoritative’ dropouts who could barely string a sentence together ordering him through exercise routines, and Kinbott might have been fun to manipulate under different circumstances. As it was, though, Tyler simply didn’t want to discuss the things she did – his mother, his friendships, his father. It was all so terribly irrelevant. His mother was dead, his father meaningless like he always had been. And he hadn’t ever had a real friend. So, like everything else in his life, it was a waste of time.
It didn’t take long for him to realise the last place he wanted to be was at home now that his mother was dead. So he woke up early one Saturday and shoved his resumé under the nose of every proprietor in Jericho. A week later he was a barista. It was better than hanging around his father, if only just. At the time it was almost Christmas junior year, and he was seriously beginning to question his ability to survive another year and a half in this town.
Then one day everything changed.
He was coming out of the Weathervane in the evening sunlight, after a long day of fantasizing about putting knives through his customers throats, when a woman approached him. She smiled – too sweet, too fake – and told him she was called Marilyn Thornhill, and she knew what had happened to his mother. He recognized her from the café, of course, a regular (always seeming to order something different) and wasn’t this interesting. She took him into her car, gave him a file, answered all his questions. Finally Tyler understood the strange conversation he’d overheard between his parents. Turns out he wasn’t a normie, either – he had another side, some beast he could turn into. But it was dangerous, and he needed help controlling it.
She didn’t rush him. She let him walk home that night, marveling over everything he’d been told. He didn’t think much about his mother, to be honest, that was useless now. But the fact that he was a supernatural being with an extremely powerful alter-ego? Yes. It was entirely too fitting.
After his next shift she was there again, and the next and the next and the next. Eventually he simply asked her how to unlock it, and she told him a master wasn’t optional. This was Tyler, of course, so he didn’t believe her. Even if others were too weak to control themselves, he would manage it. And now that he knew what to look for, he didn’t have any further interest in listening to “Thornhill’s” cloying voice or her fake laugh. Next time she tried to wave him over, he walked right by.
His mistake was underestimating her.
He didn’t see her again. Instead he felt a sharp pinch in his neck and saw no more. When he woke again he was in a cave, chained to the wall, and there she was. Her smile was real this time, and she knew her way around chemical (and even physical!) torture. It was quite impressive, really, and anything but boring, so he didn’t mind too much. Until it actually worked, and he felt his body bending in half, his bones breaking, his spine elongating. He roared, and it was like a fog took over his mind. He was himself, but not. He lacked restraint and logic. He simply dashed through the woods, screeching, until he found a deer and tore into it. There wasn’t any reason for it – he wasn’t hungry. He did it anyway, and he loved it. The smell of the blood, the fear, the adrenaline coursing through its veins: all of it was delightful.
A few minutes later, when he was dripping with blood and trying desperately to regain his control, he looked up and saw her, a giant smile on her face. In a blink he swiped at her, intending to claw her face off – but something stopped him short.
“Now now, Tyler. None of that. You’ll listen to mommy, isn’t that right? You’ll do whatever she says. Turn back now.”
He didn’t want to. He wanted to shove his hand into her stomach, grab her innards and tear them out. He wanted to watch her surprise as her pet turned on her. He wanted her to choke on her blood and to be the last thing she saw.
Instead he listened, and turned back.
That was almost eight months ago. Since then he’d killed three people, and accepted that he couldn’t balk her direct orders. To be honest, for all her rhetoric was tired, he didn’t mind. Compared to killing a deer, killing people was… delicious. Tyler had always known it would be, and it was twice as good as a monster. The only question was whether he’d find some way to turn on her before her grand plan came to fruition. For all his general disinterest in her, he still longed to watch her die. He owed her a few things – she’d given him the monster, really – but that meant nothing to him. She was nothing. And she dared to control him anyway, so she would die, hopefully in great torment.
He was simply less than motivated to try at the moment. There wasn’t any rush.