NEW STORY: TAYLOR’S DEMONIC JOURNEY (AN ALT-TAYLOR AS DC’S RAVEN FANFICTION)

If someone had told Taylor that she would one day have powers, that she would meet the love of her life, save the world, and eventually marry that same woman, she would have laughed bitterly through her tears. Back then, the very idea of having a future at all had seemed like a cruel joke, or perhaps an intentional attempt to insult her. She had believed that her story would end quietly, that she would fade into the background and never amount to anything. Sometimes she thought it might end more violently, either by her own hand, or by giving in to the urges that whispered in the darkest corners of her mind and striking back at the girls who had made her life hell.

But she had been wrong.

She had clawed her way out of that darkness, that suffocating depression left in the wake of her mother’s death, inch by inch, refusing to surrender. Through pain, fury, and a stubborn will to be more, she had built something greater than herself. Against all odds, she had forged a legacy that would outlast everyone who had come before her and, she suspected, everyone who would come after. Somehow, without even meaning to, she had become what she never thought she would be: the greatest hero on Earth Bet.

Now, years later, she sat within a small corner of the world she had helped create. The morning light streamed in through the curtains, turning the dust motes into drifting gold, and the air still carried the faint smell of breakfast. But beside her at the kitchen table sat Amelia, their hands loosely intertwined, the curve of a smile playing at her lips as the sound of laughter drifted through the open window, unrestrained and full of life.

Their children’s laughter.

Taylor still was not used to the warmth of it, or the peace that came with it. She was not used to the simplicity of a world that no longer made desperate calculations about who could be saved and who couldn’t, a world no longer balanced on the edge of annihilation. There were no Slaughterhouse Nine, no Endbringers, and most importantly, no Scion and the curse of the powers the entities gave.

Getting here had not been easy. Nothing about it had been. She had loved and lost, learned and suffered, and rebuilt herself more times than she could ever count. There were nights when she collapsed from sheer exhaustion or from mind-numbing pain, but she had always found a way to stand again. Somewhere along the endless struggle, she had discovered the meaning of perseverance, and found the strength to move forward even when everything around her begged her to stop. She had learned, too, that things could always grow worse, and that survival demanded readiness for that inevitable truth.

She had seen the very worst humanity could offer: cruelty without purpose, apathy dressed as concern, and the endless hunger for power and control disguised as righteousness and heroism. Yet she had also witnessed its best. She had seen compassion thrive among those with nothing, and courage take root in the hearts of people who had seemed so utterly devoid of hope.

She had lived, truly and completely.

And though she never took any of it for granted—the lives she had saved, the world she had helped rebuild, and the family she now held dear—there was not a day that passed without the memories of the past appearing at the forefront of her mind. She thought often of the choices she had made, the people she had failed to save, and she wondered, if given another chance, whether she would make the same decisions.

Sometimes she found herself wishing for that chance, not out of regret or dissatisfaction with her current life, but out of longing. She wanted to see it again: the faces of her loved ones, the fragile moments between them, and the little pieces of herself she’d left behind along the way. But even with all the power she wielded, and maybe because of it, she knew the past could not be rewritten without terrible consequences.

So, on nights when her home finally fell silent and sleep refused to come, despite the comforting warmth of her partner, she would sit and let the memories surface. She would follow them down that memory lane, tracing every step that had led her here.

shy girl with both familial and financial issues to the woman who had saved the world.

She thought of who she had been then, the lonely girl convinced the world had already forgotten her, that her life would never be more than pain and humiliation. The one who had no idea how deep her own darkness ran, or what she was truly capable of becoming. And then, she would think of who she had become in the end: the woman who had defied her very nature and saved the world. 

And to think, it had all begun on a day just like any other…