“Let me know when she’s not in your range anymore,” Tattletale said to me.  “I’ll try to use my power to make sure she isn’t following us.”

Sounds reasonable.

What doesn’t sound reasonable would be for the girl to follow them unless she thinks a gun wouldn’t take her out. She’s been listening to this discussion of whether or not to kill her and should know that getting caught a second time would be very bad for her survival chances.

I nodded.

She hugged my arm, “You’re stubborn, but we’re still friends, right?”

Maybe I should’ve read this bit last session. We’re winding down from the intensity of the Scene. Though I’m guessing Taylor isn’t going to be quite as keen on immediately forgetting what happened just now.

I nodded again.  I felt like I was back in school, in a situation where I couldn’t say anything without saying the wrong thing.  Strange, to recall being around the bullies rather than in the company of my team.

Yeeah, this ain’t how it’s supposed to be.

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.