Fanfic / Aftermath (Worm)

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Taylor Hebert dies of toxic shock syndrome while trapped in her locker, leaving her father heartbroken and vengeful. But seeking justice is complicated when one of the perpetrators has strings to pull in law enforcement — and then Danny starts hearing what sounds like Taylor's voice.

Aftermath is a completed Worm fanfiction, written by ack1308 in June 2015. It is published on FanFiction.Net (here), SpaceBattles.com (here), Sufficient Velocity.com (here), and Questionable Questing (here).

The tropes do not end here...

• Compelling Voice: Danny triggers with a Master power, able to infuse his voice with commands that must be obeyed. He doesn't immediately realise why people are being so helpful, though, as he's too focused on what he's trying to do.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Tomato paste is a messy writing material, but it's easy enough for bugs to manipulate.
• Destroy the Evidence: Sophia really doesn't want Taylor's bullying notes to be found, and figures she can swipe and destroy them under the cover of searching the house.
• Faking the Dead: Inverted by Taylor, once she constructs a new body, and wants the PRT to help pretend that she was only ever in a coma.
• Hardboiled Detective: Dana McAllister is assigned to investigate Taylor's case, and is dedicated to her work, even when presented with obstacles like the PRT stonewalling her. She spots the inconsistency in Greg's death scene, and puts the pieces together that Sophia, one of the bullies, is Shadow Stalker, who is at the Heberts' home, just in time to defuse a confrontation between Sophia and Danny.
  Dana considered the sweetly smiling picture. Looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.
  It didn't make a difference; she didn't care what they looked like. If they were guilty, she'd arrest them.
• He Knows Too Much: Once Greg has spread the misinformation that Sophia gave him, she murders him so he can't tell the police anything more.
• Hive Mind: Quite literally. Taylor's trigger moved her mind into the insects of Brockton Bay. Her original body died, but she has retained a degree of consciousness and memory. The more bugs she gathers together in one place, the clearer her thoughts.
• Make an Example of Them: Shadow Stalker tells Greg that Danny Hebert has links to organised crime, and that Taylor's death was a message from powerful people upset with him. (It's all fabricated; she just wants to muddy her own trail.)
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Greg's murder is staged to look like mere carelessness. Sophia suffocates him with a bag, then loads his computer screen with a mixture of photos of Taylor and pornography of other brunettes, suggesting he was trying something autoerotic. However, a detective spots the fact that the posters around his walls are mostly of blondes; the computer images don't fit.
• Never My Fault: Sophia isn't sure how she should feel about having killed Taylor, except that she takes it as evidence of Taylor being weak.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: A PRT scientist acknowledges that in theory, parahuman powers could result in someone dying and becoming a ghost, but it's more likely that Danny is merely imagining Taylor's voice as a result of trauma and stress. Taylor actually moved her mind into all the bugs of Brockton Bay, while her body died.
  Corben: As for the case you posited; yes, it's been known for people to apparently die when they get powers. Some capes are able to form what look like ghosts. Some are able to speak at a distance, without being seen. Some can even create duplicates of their own bodies. All of that together, is it possible? Yes, sir, it's possible. Is it plausible, or even likely? I have no idea.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: In an alternate ending, Danny commands Shadow Stalker to put her crossbow under her chin, and comes within a hair's breadth of making her fire it before he's talked down.
• Reverse Psychology: Shadow Stalker correctly guesses that telling Greg to keep quiet about the (mis-)information she gave him, will result in him blabbing about it online.
• Tantrum Throwing: Danny has a breakdown when he arrives home from the morgue, shattering ornaments, embedding the remote in the TV screen, and throwing a glass jar of tomato paste against a wall. The latter results in police investigators not being immediately suspicious of the high number of bugs in the house, figuring they're just after the food, until those bugs start clustering around Taylor's notes.
• The Worm That Walks: Taylor constructs herself a new body, from bugs, so she can be back with her dad. She looks human, but is actually made up entirely of bugs, allowing her to shrug off injuries and freely release or reabsorb individual bugs.