Compulsion (Lead Zeppelin) (Fanfic)

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Every choice has a consequence.

Compulsion is a crossover between [PROTOTYPE] and Worm by Lead Zeppelin.

The story starts with Alex Mercer waking up in Brockton Bay instead of a Manhattan morgue, with no memory of who he was or how he got there. After an encounter with Taylor Hebert, the situation begins to spiral out of control, with Alex becoming a mercenary and later a mentor to the impressionable young superhero, all the while attempting to balance staying undercover in a world that would ruthlessly hunt him down if his true nature was known.

It can also be read here and here.

Compulsion contains examples of:

Adaptational Badass: Bakuda in this story, since Lung dies in the beginning. Because of this, she takes over the ABB for real. Since Lung's not there to curb her ambition, she takes things up a notch.
Adaptational Heroism: Due to Alex's criticism of Taylor's plan to become a double agent on a villain team with a high-level Thinker, she ends up rejecting Tattletale's proposal to join the Undersiders. She afterwards realises it was a good move, since Tattletale threatens her over the phone about not revealing their civilian identities, and Armsmaster's reaction to her telling him this is to reveal that Regent is an alias for Hijack, a Master who could have controlled her, or is controlling her.
Adaptational Villainy: As commented by Alex, the description of Bakuda's torture of a couple for trying to get on her good side seems on par with what the Slaughterhouse Nine would do.
Aloof Ally: Alex to Taylor, big time. He even starts out with the intention of grifting her out of the Undersiders' down payment and leaving her to die if it's convenient, though that quickly changes when he realizes just how useful she is.
Amnesiac Resonance: Alex Mercer is still quite a competent biochemist, even if he knows nothing about himself.
Animal Eye Spy: Taylor figures out a way to better sense through her swarm using jumping spider vision and katydid hearing in addition to her normal tactile sense.
Animorphism: When experimenting with the limits of his Voluntary Shapeshifting, Alex discovers he can successfully take on animal forms as well. His attempts at replicating bioelectricity, however, didn’t go quite as planned.
The Anti-Nihilist: Lucky consoles Alex after his Broken Trigger by explaining his view of the universe: that the universe is beautiful, a person shouldn't just focus on the scary bad parts of it, and that even if humanity is utterly insignificant, we shouldn't care about it because the Universe doesn't care about us either. He also points out that maybe Humanity is special, since superpowers had to have seen something in us to come to our lonely planet.
Arachnid Appearance and Attire: Instead of being labeled the villain Skitter, Taylor takes up the suggested name of Arachne after Triumph, a Hellenic lore buff, informed her about a different version of the myth. Aside from fitting well with her All Webbed Up tactics, she relates to the anti-authoritarian message of the myth as it is summarized to her.
Asshole Victim: The majority of Alex’s victims are this.
The Atoner: Taylor makes it her personal mission to make up for semi-accidentally Mastering Alex when she was slipping unconscious.
The Assimilator: Alex can take a person’s memories and skills for his own if he manages to consume their brain intact.
Autocannibalism: Alex eventually consumes the Blacklight-infected remains of his human body. The only part he chooses not to eat is his brain. Getting rid of his human parts actually makes him stronger, as it gives him more room to store Blacklight tendrils, thereby achieving a ‘critical mass.‘
Bad Powers, Bad People: The ability to consume people and assimilate their skills and memories could hardly have gone to a person more dangerous and amoral than Alex Mercer.
Bed Trick: Alex unintentionally runs afoul of this trope when impersonating someone’s husband, but after a moment of temptation, he decides that rape by deception is a bridge too far, even for him.
Behavioral Conditioning: Powers in general use this to encourage their hosts to undertake advantageous behaviors, and Queen Administrator in particular grants Taylor a boost in range and capability whenever she’s around Alex. It wants her to stick around so it can gather data from Alex’s ever-changing biology and the conflict he generates.
Bee Afraid: Despite her new cape name, Taylor’s also been prioritizing flying venomous bugs, particularly bees, which can fly roughly as fast as an Olympian can sprint.
Begin with a Finisher: One of Alex’s most consistent lessons to Taylor is to hit as hard as possible with the opening attack.
Beware the Nice Ones: In the Arachne-Revenant team, Alex is the one that attracts most of the scrutiny for being Obviously Evil, but Taylor’s actually the one responsible for most of the (non-lethal) ass-kicking. Alex mostly just screens her and draws aggro while her swarm debilitates most of the combatants.
Boxing Lessons for Superman: Taylor gets these from Alex, and in turn, Alex gets these from consuming people for their skills, which gets an enormous boost from consuming Victor, although the latter doesn’t quite work out exactly as Alex expected.
Cassandra Truth: Alex attempts to explain parthenogenesis to Über and Leet while reaming them for taking insufficient precautions against Leet’s chimeras reproducing, but they dismiss his concerns. Director Piggot is the only other person who takes the escaped chimeras seriously as an ecological hazard, as Leet is widely considered to be a joke along with everything he creates.
Chaotic Good: Taylor has zero faith in institutional authority, but she still believes in heroes and is determined to do the right thing.
Chronic Hero Syndrome: Taylor introduces herself to Alex when she attempts to save his life by drawing gunfire. Alex isn’t quite sure whether to be impressed by her courage or amazed by her stupidity.
Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: How Taylor feels when running damage control for Alex’s antagonistic interactions with the New Wave heroes.
Combat Parkour: Victor is skilled enough to use this in a manner that’s actually useful and not just theatrics.
Consummate Liar: Both Taylor and Alex. Taylor, because she can offload her emotions into her swarm and justify almost anything to herself, and Alex because he’s a borderline sociopath who can construct mental simulacra of his victims that can act exactly as they would. Fittingly, they both deceive each other.
The Corrupter: Alex is attempting to be this to Taylor, with mixed success. He generally hides his intentions to turn her as ruthless as himself behind the guise of "educating" her on effective battle tactics—attacking from ambush, going for the eyes, picking up improvised weapons, fighting dirty, attacking the opponent’s weak point, etc.
Cosmic Horror Story: As standard for Worm, but it really gets to Alex when he undergoes a Trigger Event and sees the Shards, and realises just how insignificant he is to these vast, planet-sized, inter-universal beings that see him as nothing more than a somewhat interesting microbe; exactly like the real Alex Mercer was like when creating Blacklight. Knowing this turned him into a Straw Nihilist, at least for a little while.
Curb-Stomp Battle: Alex’s fight against the Teeth cell in Boston. The scary gang of psychos got crushed with contemptuous ease.
Dead Person Impersonation: Taylor is horrified by the implications of Alex’s ability to potentially pass himself off as dead people by using their DNA to reconstruct a template. She still has no idea Alex can assimilate whole people, not just their DNA.
Despair Event Horizon: Alex undergoes one, when Taylor Masters him and he discovers that she has had the ability to control him the whole time they've known each other. This leads him to question if Taylor ever cared about him, or just considered him a game. He also wonders whether any affection he might have had for Taylor as his protégé was due to being secretly manipulated by her. This gets so bad that he ends up having a Trigger Event, and a Broken Trigger at that.
The Dreaded:
- The Endbringers in general and Leviathan in particular are a lingering source of dread for many of the characters, regardless of which side they’re on. Lung, the baddest parahuman in the Bay, considered Leviathan an unkillable force of nature, and upon first learning of the Endbringers’ existence, Alex’s reaction of horrified disbelief and awe was akin to a Japanese person witnessing the atomic bomb fall.
- Queen Administrator becomes dreaded by Alex when he discovers the practically unimaginable size and scope of the power differential between them.
Eating the Enemy: Alex eventually decides this is a wonderfully efficient means of solving problems discreetly, though his definition of “discreet” is a bit of a relative term.
Endearingly Dorky: This character trait is what saves Tsuneyuki “Lucky” Yoshida from being eaten alive by Alex, despite being a pot dealer that pays tribute to the ABB and wears their colors.
Even Evil Has Standards: Alex may be a remorseless monster, but even he draws the line at rape, and despite the fact that he also murders teenage gangsters, he’s reluctant to hurt or kill kids.
Evil Mentor: Alex becomes this to Taylor, though she just considers him a Cynical Mentor.
Evilutionary Biologist: What Dr. Mercer was before becoming a viral hive-mind and composite organism. He still carries over a lot of these attitudes and scientific skills, even though he’s suffering from retrograde amnesia.
Eye Scream: Taylor’s natural inclination and talent for this is encouraged and pushed even further by Alex.
Failed a Spot Check: Alex's meeting with Faultline has him shockingly realise that he is from an alternative Earth, since in his now-destroyed-wallet he had one dollar bills, but Faultline points out that Earth Bet uses one dollar coins, and the one dollar bill has been out of circulation for decades. Alex is further shocked when he reviews his memories from the people he had consumed and finds that he technically already knew this, but had subconsciously brushed it off as "normal" because his consumed memories considered it "normal", despite Alex having a conflicting set of memories about one dollar bills that also considers them "normal".
Fingore: By coincidence, both Bitch and Über suffer from graphic mutilations of their right hands in separate incidents.
Foe Romance Subtext: In the alternate universe omakes featuring an Alex that joined the Protectorate, Alex deliberately pushes these buttons with the Director, as a way of taunting her for her Ellisburg-related hatred and disgust for monsters like him. It’s secretly mutual, and Emily despises that fact very much.
Food Chain of Evil: Alex tends to eat criminals and gang members, under the rationale that they die or go missing all the time, and are thus less likely to be investigated and linked back to him. However, he does eventually question whether that was his sole motivation for doing so.
Freudian Excuse: Alex’s mother was an abusive felon, and he spent much of his childhood in foster care. He can’t remember much beyond vague associations, but the marks it left on his personality are blindingly obvious. Tattletale even highlights them explicitly.
Fully-Embraced Fiend: Alex’s near-total amorality, obsession with superiority, and sadistic tendencies all work together to make his mental adjustment to his new body parts and cannibalistic diet almost trivially easy. He’s far more disturbed by the prospect of his personality getting diluted by the memories of his victims than he is of the fact that he’s become a nightmarish abomination.
Getting High on Their Own Supply: Tsuneyuki “Lucky” Yoshida, an ABB-affiliated pot dealer, seems to make a habit of sampling his own edibles.
Half-Truth: Alex lives and breathes the art of telling technical truths to suit his own purposes. He derives immense enjoyment from saying things that are particularly ironic or manipulative.
Healing Factor: Alex has a doozy of one, relative to the setting. He managed to walk off having the top half of his body obliterated.
Horrible Judge of Character: Heroes such as Triumph, Lady Photon, Brandish, and Glory Girl privately or not-so-privately consider Taylor to be one of these for teaming up with Alex. What they don’t know is that Queen Administrator is doing everything within the limits of its ability to influence its host to sabotage Taylor’s judgement of Alex’s character. It wants her to overlook or dismiss the fact that Alex is Obviously Evil so that she’ll spend more time around him and it can collect data on Alex, but the best it can manage is to tip the scales so that Taylor believes Alex is simply a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
Horror Hunger: Alex woke up with this, and it’s never gone away since. In actuality, it’s not so much hunger as the urge to infect human hosts, which gets translated into hunger by Alex’s human brain. Without infecting fresh biomass, Alex’s viral body cannot reproduce or repair itself. When he is too damaged or goes too long without consuming, this manifests as a terrible affliction akin to a mixture between starvation and radiation sickness.
Human Aliens: Inverted for Alex. Alex's hive mind and genetics make him very similar to the Entities pre-cycle ancestral traits, making him a product of Convergent Evolution. It's the main reason why the Queen Administrator is so interested in Alex, since he could be critical to saving the Cycle: if he was a genuine homologue, then that would indicate another Entity being nearby that might take Eden's place. But if he's the product of convergent evolution, which QA has since found out, then Alex himself could possibly be used as the replacement^note.
Humble Pie: Bakuda serves up one hell of a slice to Alex, but even that pales in comparison to what Queen Administrator does to him.
Hungry Menace: Alex is an impulsive jerk at the best of times, but when he gets low on biomass, all bets are off.
Ignored Expert: Pretty much no one takes the threat of Leet’s biotinkered minions seriously except Alex and Director Piggot, both of whom actually have experience with biological weapons, but the likes of Triumph and Taylor just don’t see the potential for invasive species or runaway harm.
If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: When considering whether to join the Undersiders, Taylor frets that they’ll make her do something she "can’t take back" in order to prove that she’s a villain.
I'm a Humanitarian: Alex's "diet" consists primarily of humans. Aside from an initial frustrated reaction, he seems to accept this change in diet with frightening equanimity.
I Miss Mom: Taylor has a pang of this emotion after some high-stakes wordplay. She misses her mother’s penchant for riddles and witty wordplay, and hates feeling like her mother is missing out.
Implacable Man: Alex as Revenant is already starting to amass a reputation for wading into extreme danger and not giving up until his quarry is either dead or neutralized.
Improv Fu: Alex’s fight with the Teeth. He essentially went in with no plan except to simply overwhelm them with his strength, speed, and (stolen) skill.
Improvised Weapon: When dropping in on the Teeth, Alex’s introduction is to use one of the Teeth as a projectile against another, then throw the armchair the thug was sitting in. He also kicks a coffee table right into Hemmorhagia’s knees.
Inferiority Superiority Complex: Alex would never admit it willingly, but despite his pretensions of complete independence and indifference, he craves external validation.
Insufferable Genius:
- The Brockton Bay Police Department certainly sees Armsmaster as this. He hasn’t managed to completely alienate Taylor yet, but given his dearth of interpersonal skills, it’s only a matter of time.
- Alex is highly educated, and by God, he will rub everyone’s faces in it at the slightest opportunity.
In-Universe Factoid Failure: Alex chews out Leet (not literally for once) over the fact that he overlooked parthenogenesis and self-pollination when doing his biotinkering. Earlier, Alex himself suffered one of these when he overlooked the fact that bioelectric organisms are not actually immune to their own electric shocks.
I Was Just Passing Through: Despite the fact that Alex plays it cool and aloof, Taylor sees right through his offhanded suggestion to team up on a more permanent basis, even though she can’t continue to reliably pay him.
Jerkass Has a Point: Taylor begrudgingly concedes this when Alex points out in brutal detail just how unworkable her plan to infiltrate the Undersiders is.
Kick Them While They Are Down: Taylor is appalled when Alex literally does this to a defeated villain.
Kill and Replace: Alex’s favorite infiltration tactic.
Know-Nothing Know-It-All: The Empire 88’s standards for who among their number counts as a “history nerd” seem pretty low, considering one of their ideological proponents doesn’t seem to know the first thing about black history, the fall of the Roman Empire, or the historical prejudice against the Irish in America.
Lack of Empathy: When it comes to some of Alex’s more unpleasant victims, he doesn’t give a damn how much of a Freudian Excuse they may have. The fact that he is forced to literally feel what they felt doesn’t necessarily mean he feels any sympathy towards them.
Leave No Witnesses: This is Alex’s approach to his extracurricular activities. No one can see him eating people and live.
LEGO Genetics:
- Alex Mercer is capable of taking genetic codes apart and building a full genetic template from scratch.
- Hax, a Dunsparce made by Leet, combining the genes of a threadsnake, a human, and a cicadia-killer wasp. Notably capable of parthenogenesis, and currently running free.
Limb-Sensation Fascination: Alex is fascinated by his tendrils at first rather than repulsed by them. Later, when he takes the form of a dog and grows a tail, he finds it unsettlingly odd, but not too strange compared to his limbs becoming radically different proportions.
Living a Double Life: Alex doesn’t have much of a civilian identity, but he keeps his public face as the hero-aligned mercenary Revenant and his private murder spree as separate as possible.
Loophole Abuse: Taylor's power in canon allowed her to control various arthropods and invertebrates, anything from worms to crabs to even sufficiently bug-like Case 53 capes, per Word of Wildbow. Alex's unique biology makes it so that's he basically a huge interconnected series of simple nervous systems likened to a hive mind in the shape of a man, with accumulated, active “junk” DNA from myriad sources, including arthropods. This means that Taylor can actually sense him in her bug radar (though it gives her a massive information overload and headache) and feels as though she could also take control of him if she ever abandons the legal and moral issues behind that.
Ludicrous Gibs: The most common result of facing Alex Mercer is being left as a quite literal puddle.
Mix-and-Match Critters: Leet still has some of these left over from his earlier days before he burned out his biotinkering skill tree on making video game minions.
Mook Horror Show: An Interlude from the perspective of an unpowered Empire Eighty-Eight gang member becomes this.
Multiform Balance: Alex runs into this issue surprisingly often. There are benefits and trade-offs to most of his weapons and forms, particularly his default human form, which can blend in but can only do a fraction of what his claws and stinger can.
My God, What Have I Done?: Taylor is horror-struck when informed that she accidentally Mastered Revenant after being knocked out, and her friend was so traumatized by this that he underwent a Trigger Event. She outright compares herself to her bullies - whom she hates.
My Skull Runneth Over: The tsunami of memories from Alex’s first consumption were particularly overwhelming because he was so weakened that he didn’t have much of a mind left to resist the onslaught. The experience was so disorienting, it obliterated his sense of time and self for a while.
Neutral Evil: Alex is a textbook Type 3. He’s more than willing to exploit human laws and the Unwritten Rules of capes when it suits him, while contemptuously drop-kicking those same rules whenever he thinks he can get away with it.
Not Quite Flight:
- What Alex does can better be described as gliding. He can jump incredible heights and use his tendrils to compress air like a turbine, but he’s too heavy and un-aerodynamic to really fly.
- Hax is very maneuverable, but she can only manage to fly about as far and as long as a chicken can. Alex sardonically refers to it as “glorified jumping.”
Obviously Evil: Alex, so much. Taylor dismisses it as a side effect of being a Case 53, but more or less everyone notices Alex’s edgy aesthetics, hostile attitude, and his Resting Murder Face. Some even openly comment to Arachne that they’re completely bewildered that a young superhero would ever trust someone like him.
Oh, Crap!: Capsid 4.5 ends with Alex having a Trigger Event. Double Oh, Crap!, though: he's having a Broken Trigger!
One True Love: The Warrior refuses the Queen Administrator's request to study Alex to get a replacement Entity for the Cycle, because the Warrior sees no point in it if it doesn't revive Eden, It's counterpart.
The Paralyzer: Alex gains this ability from Hax’s modified wasp DNA. Upon testing it on an unfortunate victim, he discovers it can effectively render a human quadriplegic in seconds, much like how a normal parasitic wasp paralyzes insects.
Partial Transformation: One of Alex’s most consistent tricks is transforming only part of himself, either to serve as a disguise or a weapon.
Pest Controller: Taylor’s getting into tune with this power even faster than in canon, and finding novel uses for it. All because of Alex, both directly and indirectly: directly due to Alex's constantly adapting training methods, and indirectly because the Queen Administrator gives her power boosts as a reward for being in close-proximity with Alex.
Pet the Dog: Alex does so both literally and metaphorically in one instance, though he had an ulterior motive. He’d wanted to consume a large dog for the purposes of gaining a nonhuman disguise, but he decides to simply take some DNA from his fur instead in a rare act of mercy.
Pragmatic Villainy: Alex likes to think he has no morals whatsoever, so he often rationalizes going after deserving targets and enemies this way. He really is quite pragmatic when it comes to his methods and execution, though, even if his motivations are biased.
Properly Paranoid: Several examples stick out.
- Armsmaster’s precautions against Taylor after contact with Regent were entirely justified, as his suspicion that Regent is an alias for Hijack is entirely correct.
- Taylor has a moment of extreme trepidation when Alex lures her to an abandoned factory, wondering if he’s secretly a murder or something. As she witnesses him execute Oni Lee shortly thereafter, her concerns were proven entirely accurate.
- Offscreen, Director Piggot blows up at Triumph for failing to call in news of Leet’s escaped biotinkered chimeras immediately.
- Alex descends into a truly spectacular paranoia spiral against Tattletale. As her interlude shows, she really is aware of what he suspects her to know.
Psychotic Smirk: Whenever Alex is enjoying schadenfreude or condescension, which is often, he wears this expression.
Puppeteer Parasite: What Alex essentially becomes when impersonating someone. He recreates a simulacrum of their body, including their brain, and controls them from the Blacklight virus hive-mind making up his body.
Red and Black and Evil All Over: This is Alex’s fashion aesthetic, and it causes him problems when people assume it means he’s a member of Brockton Bay’s local Neo-Nazi gang.
Replacement Goldfish: Queen Administrator believes Alex is key to getting an Entity to replace Eden in the Cycle, due to him having similar genetic traits to primitive Entities.
Serial-Killer Killer: One of the many ways Alex attempts to rationalize his actions is by targeting gangsters and murderers instead of more vulnerable homeless people.
Shapeshifter Baggage: Hits Alex hard. Unlike Parahumans who regularly give the middle finger to physics, Alex is massively inconvenienced by the fact that his body obeys the law of conservation of mass. He’s incredibly dense for his size, and at critical mass for a particular human form’s volume, he can weigh many hundreds of pounds.
Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: Alex can get rid of most cuts and gunshot wounds in less than a second simply by shifting his biomass around.
Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy:
- Lung and Oni Lee effectively function as this, despite the fact that Lung is the one who can blast fire and Oni Lee tends to fight with knives. Oni Lee’s Stealthy Teleportation is what inverts the melee-ranged dynamic, and their powers’ synergy makes them an extremely formidable pair.
- Alex and Taylor have this dynamic, though Alex does use guns and thrown projectiles from time to time. He’s the short-range brawler and bodyguard, while she’s the scout and long-range attacker.
Slasher Smile: Alex smiles very rarely, and it’s even more rare that his smile shows teeth, but when he does...
Lucky: Oh Jesus. Cut that shit out, you smile like a fuckin’ serial killer.
Smug Snake: Alex treats pretty much everyone with disdain, at least at first.
Smug Super: Surprisingly, Alex is actually a subversion of this. He regards parahumans and humans as equally worthy of contempt. He certainly enjoys his powers, but he considers himself superior to others on the basis of his mind, not his powers. He knows better than almost anyone else alive that humans and parahumans aren't so different, due to the fact that he has access to their memories.
The Sociopath: As of waking up, Alex fit this to a T. However, the change in perspective garnered from his victims’ minds, not to mention his apprenticeship with Taylor, has forced him to undergo some changes.
Sociopathic Hero: How Alex/Revenant comes off to most people. He inflicts major, gruesome injuries to costumed villains and their mooks like he’s handing out candy to trick-or-treaters.
Spotting the Thread: Becomes something of a running gag or in-joke between Alex and Taylor. She told him her bugs can help her perceive differences in his disguises, no matter how hard he tries to fool her. Of course, Alex doesn’t know she’s cheating...
Split-Personality Merge: Alex is so damaged after his first fight with Lung that a little bit of Lung’s personality gets mixed up with Alex’s default personality.
Stoners Are Funny: Seemingly played straight by Lucky, but subsequently subverted when he undergoes a drastic change.
Switching P.O.V.: This overlaps with Multiple Narrative Modes. The story alternates between Alex and Taylor’s perspective. For thematic reasons, Taylor is narrated in first-person perspective, and Alex is narrated in third-person perspective, as are the Interludes.
Technically Naked Shapeshifter: The clothing Alex Mercer wears is just as much a part of him as his flesh.
Those Two Guys: Detectives Angela Emerson and Kwon Lee-suk. Their arrival essentially amounts to an instant pain in Armsmaster’s ass as they call him out on some of his more questionable methods.
Toxic Friend Influence: Alex is this to Taylor. Her ethical boundaries are constantly being questioned and pushed by Alex.
Unfazed Everyman: Lucky. He isn’t exactly unfazed by his brief stint as Bakuda’s bomb slave, but he certainly doesn’t leave the cape scene afterwards, either, despite being a normal guy.
Villain with Good Publicity: This is the impetus behind Alex taking the cape persona of the mercenary rogue Revenant. He’s not exactly well-regarded by the heroes, but pretending to simply be a rude, edgy jerk that’s working for the heroes and motivated by money deflects the worst suspicions from him.
Those Wacky Nazis: The Empire 88 gang are unambiguous and proud neo-Nazis. Their ideology, raison d’être, and recruiting methods are given a closer look by an interlude chapter from the perspective of one of their human members, Marcus Fahy—a teenager who is, ironically enough, Irish.
Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere: Alex suffers from this to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much he’s consumed recently, but the urge is always there, and it annoys the hell out of him.
Alex, thinking to himself: It was one thing for Alex to feel insatiable hunger for human flesh. That was normal, at least for him, and he was more-or-less used to it by now. The fact that Taylor was a kid, though, just made it weird.
We Want Our Jerk Back!: When Alex uses a charming simulacrum to try to smooth things over with Taylor following an argument, the change is so jarring and the performance is so convincing that it's creepy for Taylor. She demands that he act like his genuine self around her, no matter that his genuine self is a jerk.
The Worm That Walks: How Taylor perceives Alex’s viral Hive Mind.
You Are Who You Eat: This applies to Alex so aptly that he starts to worry about his mind becoming like the Ship of Theseus, slowly eroded and replaced by other personalities until it becomes something unrecognizable.