#sorry if its rambly ir doesntmake sense

[shsl-heck]

I will say personally that I think it's very interesting she does not think of Heartbreaker's children as victims, "feeling intense pity not only for Heartbreaker's victims but for the kids in that situation" She feels bad for the kids who are having his power used on them and forced toendure the abuse and torture but she puts them in a different category from "victims". The reason that's so notable to me is that this situation should tick all of Taylor's Boxes for relating to someone as a victim. The children are being abused by someone in a position of authority over them, and the Guild/prt hadn't done anything about that because Heartbreaker was mostly content to just laze around and run his fucked up family dynamic. It's basically everything that would normally provoke a strong angry reactions from Taylor.

It doesn't prompt that reaction from her though because if it did she would have to recognize Alec as similar to her. She'd have to admit that just like her he faced horrible abuse/bullying, that the system failed him on every level, and that the reason he acts the way he does now (where people are neatly sorted into "ones I care about" and "those who have wronged the people I care about, and are thus deserving of basically any torment I can throw their way") is fundamentally not that different from how she views people. Taylor really doesn't want to do that.

She tries so hard throughout basically the whole story to put Alec into this little box where (unlike her) he's a dangerous, unfeeling, amoral person with no other understandable reason to do the things he does (funnily enough that's also how many people come to view Taylor). It's a load bearing example of compartmentalization; without the ability to separate herself from Alec everything she's built comes crumbling down, and suddenly she has to confront the reasonableness of her own actions.

" “Eh.  It’s hard to explain.  He cultivated us, bred for us, went miles out of his way to get us back if a member of his ‘family’ was taken from him.  Mounted a freaking crusade if it came down to it.  But when we were around, he paid almost no attention to us kids.  When he did pay attention, it was to discipline us or test us.  Discipline usually meant getting a dose of paralyzing terror for not listening to him, insulting him or even looking him in the eye, sometimes.  Testing happened on our birthdays or if he’d had a bad day… he’d try to set up a trigger event.  Not supposed to be so hard, given that we were second generation capes, obviously, but he started when we were eight or so.” “How old were you?  When your powers showed?” I asked, quiet, feeling intense pity not only for Heartbreaker’s victims, but for the kids in that situation. Whatever my feelings, Alec managed to look bored with the topic.  “Hard to tell.  Since I didn’t go to school, and nobody really kept records, I lost track of the years.  Ten or eleven, maybe.  I was his fourth kid to show powers, and there were eighteen or so of us when I left.  Most of ’em were babies, though.” Which made him, not Grue, the one of us with the most experience and seniority. Alec shrugged, “So yeah.  I worked for him for three or four years.  We did jobs, I learned the family trade.  Called myself Hijack at first.  He started to get on my case.  I think maybe he was having trouble affecting me the same way he did before my powers kicked in, so he compensated for that by riding me.  Pushed my limits, made me do stuff that was dangerous, stuff that was hard on my conscience.  Wanted me to break, beg him to stop, so he’d have leverage to get me to do what he wanted.” “And?” “And he ordered me to kill this foot soldier for a group trying to push us out of their territory.  After I was done, he told me I did it wrong, that I had to do it again with a captive we’d taken, and I knew no matter what I did, he’d make me keep doing it.  Just another way of pushing my limits.  I had convinced myself I didn’t care about the people I was hurting or about this guy I’d just killed, and maybe I didn’t.  Maybe I don’t, still.  Dunno.  But it was so pointless.” He shrugged, “I didn’t see a real reason to stay.  Walked away.  Changed my name, got fresh ID, changed my villain name too.” He’d killed someone on his father’s orders, which made him the second killer in the group. Armsmaster must have dug up that detail & drawn the right conclusions after connecting Alec to his prior alter ego. “When did this happen, this killing?” I asked, quiet, “How old were you when you killed that guy?” “Hmm.  I’d been gone for about two years before the boss got in touch with me, which was about this time last year, so three years ago.  I would’ve been twelve or thirteen.” "