A long pause reigned.

“I’m disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said.  Then he smiled.  He turned and began walking away.  “Let’s go.”

…

That might be the most disturbing part of this entire scene. The way he just flipped a switch back to fake normality.

I say fake because real normal Brian would apologize.

“Just like that?”  I asked.

“We’re leaving her?”  Tattletale asked.

“Seems we have to.  Tattletale, can you use your power to make sure the lady from the Nine doesn’t pose a danger?”

Yeah, he’s just being super passive aggressive now.

Tattletale nodded, smiling.

“Then let’s hurry.  We wasted too much time here.”

Fucking hell, this was A Scene™.

He kept saying that word, traitor, hammering it in.

“Unless I take this gun and shoot that woman, who you’re convinced is a member of the Nine,” I guessed what he was getting at.

Oh yeah, what Brian just said was such a hammering of verbal brutality that I forgot that it’s also intense emotional manipulation and blackmail.

This is probably a chapter certain Brian haters point to, while ignoring or downplaying just how much his mind is compromised right now.

“Guess I had the wrong impression of you,” he said.  The emotion in his tone was so different that it caught me off guard.  Almost contemplative.

“Huh.”

If I thought of it as him emotionally closing down, it almost fit with the impression I associated with Grue.  At the same time, it didn’t quite jibe with what I was seeing.  Again, I felt that distinct discomfort.

I’m feeling it too and I’m not even there.

Though I may have more of a conscious idea of why.

Is this how I lose my mind?

At least she’s not quite as compromised as Brian and to a lesser extent Lisa seem to be, just yet.

I shrugged.  “I guess you did.”

I carefully holstered the gun, as if hiding it could keep it from coming up again in conversation.

At least it’s a non-verbal statement that reinforces the message of “no, no one’s using this”.

I snapped my head up to look at him in surprise.

“I wonder what it says that the notion of you being a traitor is so ingrained in my impression of you that it jumps to mind, even with the mist affecting me?”

Eesh.

“That’s enough,” I said.

“I know you like me.  I can read it on your face, I could see the way your eyes widened when you heard my name.  You’re an open book in some ways.  And I’ll tell you right now, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you.”

Fuckin’ hell, this is the worst possible way we could get to the point of him actually saying that. This ship just keeps getting more painful.

Well played, Wildbow.

I felt a nervous feeling deep in my gut.  It wasn’t pleasant, at stark odds to what he was saying.

Yeah, I can feel the contrast too.

I’m scared for where he’s going with this next.

When his mind is compromised in some way, Brian can be coddamn brutal verbally.

Grue’s words spoke to that feeling of trepidation.  “But this?  It’s telling me I could never have a relationship with you, never be close to you, because I’ll always wonder if you’ll stab me in the back or fuck me over, fail to do what’s necessary in a situation like this.

You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of Parasite, Taylor and Rachel.

I’ll never be able to shake that image of you as a traitor.”

Ow.

He scoffed.  “And you call yourself a supervillain?”

Not really.

“I call myself Skitter.  If someone wants to stick me with some other label, that’s their issue to deal with, not mine.”

This. This is a very good line.

“You’re not giving me the gun?”

“No.”

I think this might be building up to blows. Brian seems determined enough to actually try to take the gun by force.

Imagine if Taylor has to shoot him in the leg or something to stop him. Though that’s probably a bad idea, since he could bleed out.

He shrugged, “So you don’t care at all, about what happened to me.  You don’t care about this team.  And you’ll even look down on us while you do it.  Your contemptible friends.”

Dude, she doesn’t even remember most of what would make her care beyond “these people can help me survive”.

And you’re not exactly being a shining example of why she shouldn’t hold contempt for you right now.

“I care.  More than you know.  But you told me, not long ago, that I should follow my heart, trust my gut.  Fine.  That’s what I’m doing.  You attack her, I’ll fight to save her.”

The terms are on the table where we can all see them.

He barked out a laugh, “You’ll fight me?  You’re a traitor now?”

Don’t tell Rachel.

Also, hey, Brian, remember how someone on your team turned out to have joined with intent to betray? Yeah, that was Skitter.

The word hit home.  I must have flinched.

“A traitor again,” he added.

Yeah, he just made that connection.

What I did know was that I’d done too many things I regretted.  I wasn’t about to add something as serious as murder to the list.

Good bug girl. 🙂

Grue must have seen something in my posture, because he shook his head and turned away.  “Give me the gun, then.”

That is not the point, dude.

“Just use your power,” Tattletale told him.

Fuck, he can steal Taylor’s power.

Bug control vs stronger bug control tug of war!

“I want Skitter to acknowledge that she doesn’t care enough about this team or about me to do what’s necessary.

It’s not that she doesn’t care, it’s that she doesn’t think it’s necessary!

She can do that by admitting she doesn’t have the courage to shoot and allow me to do it.”

“That’s not what this is about,” I said.  “Murder is serious.  You don’t kill without being absolutely certain it’s right.

Exactly! We’re sympathetic protagonists, we can’t just kill anyone who annoys us!

And nothing’s certain for as long as we’re under the influence of this miasma.”

Very good point, thank you.

I stared at the bound woman who was prone on the ground, half-covered in my bugs.  She was looking in my direction.

“It bugs me.

This is too easy.  If the Nine were this easy to take out, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

That too. None of the Nine would’ve stayed down this long unless they were playing possum.

“Sounds like a pretty thin justification for backing out,” Grue said.

Look. The burden of proof is not on Taylor here.

“Yeah,” Tattletale added.

This kind of social pressure wasn’t the sort of thing I was good at coping with.  Just going by my recollection of how we’d planned many of our capers, I could usually trust some of the others to have my back when I was arguing a point.

Usually one of these two, in fact, but now they’re both against you. Welp.

Or I’d had some other motive or reason to go along with them.

“Why are you pushing so hard for this?”  I asked.

They are being weirdly pushy. This behavior is unlike them. Especially unlike Brian.

“Did you forget what they did to me?”  Grue asked, his voice cold.

…right.

Him specifically?  I had forgotten, yes.  But I could remember that scene, the emotions then, every feeling that I’d experienced afterward.  Frustration, hate, pain, sympathy for the pain he must have experienced himself.  I could remember the feeling of heartbreak, because someone I cared about was gone, in a sense.

And now he’s using what happened to him like a card to play to get someone to do what he wants, a guilt trip.

“No,” I replied.

“Where’s your anger, your outrage?  Or don’t you care?”

Yeah, this is definitely one of Brian’s uglier chapters.

“I care!  It’s-”

“Then end this.”

I shook my head, as if I could clear it.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking clearly, necessarily.  It was that my thoughts kept hitting that dead-end where I couldn’t reach back for context about people, about Tattletale and Grue and the Nine.  I was in the dark.

And Taylor doesn’t even know if they’re normally this pushy, for that matter.

Tattletale scowled, “Have you forgotten how aggressively we’ve been going after the Slaughterhouse Nine?  The attacks, the harassment, capturing Cherish and Shatterbird.  And now you want to leave one of them there?  We don’t have to get close to her to take her out.  You have the gun.”

You’re gonna have to convince the one with the gun that that actually is one of the Nine first.

I stared down at the weapon in my hand.

“Trust me,” she said.

For once, don’t.

“No.”

Both Tattletale and Grue turned to look at me.

I kind of assumed they were both doing that already.

“No?”  Grue asked.  “We’re a team, Skitter.  We’re supposed to trust one another when the chips are down, have each other’s backs.”

That doesn’t mean you get to bully your teammate into killing someone she isn’t sure is actually an enemy.

I didn’t like the implications of that.  Like I was failing them.

Yeah, no, that line right there was one of Brian’s ugliest moments. I’m giving him some slack because of the miasma messing with his head, but still.

But I shook my head.  “No.”

“Explain?” he asked.  He looked calm, but I could see the irritation in his posture.  Was the mist getting to him?

Probably.

“The miasma… if it makes us paranoid, it could be coloring our perceptions here.  Even Tattletale’s.”

Yeah, makes sense to me.

“I would know if it was,” she said.  She seemed impatient.

Are you sure?

“Maybe.  But I’m not certain enough about that to take another life.”

“You nearly took Siberian’s,” she retorted.

That is completely irrelevant, Lisa.

“Yeah.  Sure.  But that was different.”

“I don’t see how.”

Look around you. That’s how.

“What?”  Grue tilted his head as he looked over his shoulder at me.

“I was going to say she’s not always right, but I’ve still got that black hole in my memory of her, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.”

Grue rubbed his chin.  “Something to keep in mind, but I still think we should check this person out.”

As a reader, I say go with Grue’s plan! I wanna know who it was!

“I agree,” Tattletale said, a slight smile on her face.  She tugged on my hand.  “Come on!”

We had to stick together.  I reluctantly followed, knowing that separating from the group could mean losing them altogether.

Sorry, Taylor, two against one.

We stopped a few hundred feet away from the woman.  The silk strands had formed a cord around her arms and legs, and the work of the spiders had tightened the binding as she allowed it to slack.  She hadn’t made it back to her feet after falling to the ground.

You okay there?

Grue drew a knife.

“Hey,” I said.  I grabbed his arm.  “What are you doing?”

“She’s obviously a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine,” Tattletale said.

Is that sarcasm?

“Fill me in?  Because I must have missed something.  Doesn’t seem that clear to me.”

“Think about it.  Why is she wearing a mask like that, if not to filter out the miasma?  She knew about it in advance.”

What sort of mask? Also keep in mind that regular gas masks don’t work on this.

“Maybe,” I said.  I could make out something like a gas mask or filter, now that Tattletale had pointed it out.  “Maybe there’s another explanation.  It could have something to do with her power?”

Is this Spitfire?

“It doesn’t,” Tattletale said.

Careful. We very recently had two reminders that you can be wrong when you get tunnel vision-y.

Are you absolutely sure?

Thinking about killing someone was one thing.  I’d always assumed I might have to do it out of necessity to save a teammate… I’d even come close to doing it when attacking the Nine, not long ago.  Couldn’t recall who it had been, but I’d gone all out, used potentially lethal stings and bites.

It was all of them, actually. Well, all currently living ones.

That had been at a distance.  Now we were looking at killing someone face to face.

Not quite the same thing, is it.

The mask, there was another reason for it.  The-

Tattletale interrupted my thoughts.  “If you guys aren’t going to do it, I can.  She was following us, she was prepared for the miasma, and I’m positive she’s a bad guy.  My power, you know.”

I don’t think the Nine were prepared to unleash this, though.

And “she’s a bad guy” can mean a lot, ranging from

“does criminal jobs for money” to “wants to destroy every planet in the galaxy because she’s goth” and beyond.

“We can’t be certain,” I said.

“With my power, I’m five hundred percent sure.  Trust me,” she said, grinning.

Between last chapter and this one we’ve been given enough reminders that Lisa’s power isn’t foolproof that each time Lisa brings up her power as her reason for being 100% sure makes me three times more certain she’s wrong.

Taylor, you’re gonna have to step in and keep Lisa from murdering Spitfire.

She started toward the heroine.

Oh jeez, now Taylor’s going the other way, sure enough that the victim’s a heroine to call her that in narration.

To be fair, that might be the case. The heroes have been wearing gas masks today, so it could just as easily be one of them as it could be Spitfire. More easily, even.

“No,” I said.

“Skitter’s right,” Grue said.  “She could be playing possum.  Best to avoid being reckless.  Keep our distance and finish her.”

…that was not Skitter’s point but yeah, fair.

Fortunately, the only one with a good ranged attack is Taylor, unless Brian borrows something.

“That’s not what I meant.  Let’s just leave,” I said.  “I’ll make that phone call to, um-”

“Coil,” Tattletale supplied.

I nodded.  “We’ll get the information we need, get ourselves cured, or track down the Nine.”

Probably not gonna be that easy, but it’s a good chain of objectives.

Of course, Lisa’s pretty sure they’ve already caught one of them.

“Cherish could lie,” Grue said.

It took me a second to place Cherish’s name.  Names were slipping from my mind too easily.  “Maybe.  We’ll use our own judgement to corroborate her facts.”

Lisa’s power might not be flawless, but at least it’s good at lie detection.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

She nodded.

“I’m going to bind her now.  If it doesn’t work, or if she has a way of breaking free, we should run, with the decoys for cover.”

Alright, so it’s a her.

That might be a good thing.

Tattletale just smiled.

The bugs swarmed our pursuer.  I’d minimized the number of bugs on them, just to be safe, with the drawback that I wasn’t getting a full picture of who they were.  The bugs couldn’t get to her flesh to sting or bite her, but they were telling me she was female in general shape.

Victoria?

I had them deploy the silk they had prepared.  I focused my efforts on her arms and legs.  It took only a couple of seconds to get the threads in place.

Nice work.

She tripped as the silk went taut mid-stride.  Raising one hand to try to catch herself, she found silk threads hampering those movements as well.  To avoid landing face first, she twisted herself in mid-air so she hit the ground with her shoulder instead.

There is the issue that if it’s Victoria, she should be able to fly, probably.

“Got her,” I said.  “Let’s keep going.  We can lose her.”

“We should investigate,” Grue said.  “Make sure she isn’t a threat, and deal with her if she is.”

Hell, maybe she can even help.

“With this miasma affecting us, there’s no way to be sure of exactly of just who we’re dealing with,” I pointed out.

“We have Tattletale.  She can tell us if this person’s a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

Probably, yeah.

“Tattletale’s not-”

I stopped.  Where had that come from?

Informational muscle memory! Things you’re used to saying, that come out of their own accord under certain circumstances!

If they can find more of those, they might be useful.