Silence is Not Consent

[justanothercat]

The heroes would be here any minute. That was the only thought I could process, echoing around my skull. Someone from the Protectorate would be standing in front of us soon, and I had no idea what to do. My public relations training hadn't exactly planned for this (I had to hold in an almost hysterical snort at the thought). Who would it be? Armsmaster? Assault? Battery? Miss Militia? Some new transfer I hadn't even heard of? A part of me didn't even want to consider the other option. That it could be a member of my family. I wasn't prepared for… whatever the result of that conversation would be.

"How long do we have?" The girl (Bitch?)'s voice staggered me out of my thoughts.

I glanced over at Skitter. She was nervous, I was sure. She certainly had reason to be, standing right next to me with the Heroes moments away. I thought I could see it. Something about the way she stood, the arch of her back leading into the paneling across her shoulder blades, the silk almost tight against her skin. Maybe I was just seeing things. But it helped to think she had as much invested in this as I did.

"Not sure. They were just around that corner, but they've paused for some reason. Could be any minute now," Skitter said as she idly adjusted the fit on one of her gloves. A nervous habit? It was hard to tell.

Okay, Victoria, try to think. What were my options here? In the immediate short term, I had two. I could stay here with Skitter and Bitch, or I could leave. I hadn't tried to fly since Amy, but I might have no choice when it came time to decide.

As if sensing my thoughts, Skitter turned to me. "Victoria."

I jumped, turning to face her almost guiltily. "You need to choose what you're doing."

There was a silence in the cool night air before Bitch snarled. "You're letting her leave?"

Skitter stuck out arm in front of her, and the girl quieted. "She's my charge, I let her do what she wants. But if she wants to leave, she has to do it now." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "I know you didn't want to be affiliated with us. I respect that. But I can't guarantee that your disguise will hold. If you're going to leave, do it now."

She was offering me the option to leave. Of my own free will. I had to remind myself of that. Because as much as she was phrasing this like a choice… something about her gaze was challenging. Like this was a test she was giving me. Of what, I wasn't sure.

I closed my eyes, trying to think. Even if I gave her the choice she "wanted" me to make… I knew she'd never respect me for coming by it that way. Nevermind what Skitter wanted, what did I want?

I didn't want to go back to my family. That was the biggest thing I kept coming back to. Could the Heroes guarantee that? I had no way of knowing. It was possible they'd put me up in the Wards, keep me safe. Or it was equally possible Mom would pull out some legal trick and they'd have to send me back to… her. That wasn't an option.

What about Skitter? She could keep me from my family, sure. But what about everything else? Even if the Heroes didn't recognize me here, it was only a matter of time. If I was going to do this, I had to be honest about it. Was I comfortable with being recognized working with Skitter? Absolutely not. Was it better than any other option I had…? I don't know for sure. But I couldn't think of another one right now, and the clock was ticking. Much as it pained me to say it, there was only one answer I could give her.

"I'm staying."

Skitter nodded, as if she hadn't expected any other answer. "Okay. Don't talk to any of the heroes. Even with your notepad. Just agree with what I say. Your cover is as a lost refugee that I'm taking to my territory. Clear?"

I nodded, my eyes breaking away from her to glance over at Bitch. She bared her teeth in a harsh approximation of a grin. I flinched, which seemed to satisfy her. She turned back to Skitter. "I still say we fuck 'em up. They're on my turf."

"Normally we would," Skitter agreed, "but we have Victoria with us. She can't afford to be recognized."

Bitch growled. "What do you mean recognized? Who is she?"

The sound of approaching footsteps cut our conversation short. "Bitch, I don't have time to explain it right now. Just trust me." A loaded look passed between them. It was sudden and small, but for a moment it felt weirdly private. I almost looked away instinctively.

Bitch gave a gruff nod, and apparently that was the end of it.

The footsteps made it around the corner, and at last I saw the heroes we faced. First was Triumph, his shiny gold armor utterly unmistakable in the gloom. Even this late at night it almost blinded me. Was that intentional? I always thought that those aesthetic choices were more than a little gauche–and this was coming from someone who chose the name Glory Girl–but I'd never had the chance to ask him. Now I never might. His powers were split evenly between a Brute rating to keep him in the fight, and a sound-based blaster effect to keep others out of it. Putting him up first made sense.

Next was Assault, and I had to double take at the look on his face. Assault was well known as the cheeriest among the local Protectorate, always the first to crack a smile or a joke. There were rumors that he had taken Clockblocker under his wing after the Ward announced his name; if so I wasn't sure how effective the Hero was at rounding off his rough edges. Assault's signature red armor was present, but his smile was gone. His mouth was pressed into a thin, grim line as he surveyed the surrounding buildings before quickly landing on us, assessing. Did he see a threat? I couldn't say.

I did notice the absence of his usual partner Battery. Their powers were incredibly synergistic–between her ability to charge and release energy and his ability to conserve and redirect momentum, the two were almost unstoppable in hand to hand. But Battery was… no, Battery was dead now, wasn't she? I remembered Tattletale telling me that when I first woke up. With the whirlwind of events in the time since, I hadn't really had time to process it. I'd almost forgotten, under everything else. But if it was true, I'd miss her. She was a good Hero. Shy, and a bit hard on Assault when she didn't need to be, but they balanced each other well. And no one could deny her track record. I guess we never would finish that conversation about mirrored powersets from a few months back…

I shook my head, forcing myself to focus on the present again. There would be time enough for that later, hopefully. Miss Militia came last, with her distinctive American flag half mask shielding the lower portion of her face. She was dressed in her regular combat fatigues, the olive green camo blending in surprisingly well into the urban landscape. She was holding a green Beretta pistol, but I knew from experience that her power could shift into another–much deadlier–form in a fraction of a second. Her effective range made her very good support, not that it mattered when we were this close. I had to wonder what Skitter was thinking, letting them into close range like this. From what I remembered, she was a ranged fighter. The Heroes were less than thirty feet away, surely she could have retreated before they saw us.

The three of them came to a stop almost immediately, and I realized that we were in a standoff. I retreated behind Skitter almost reflexively. If this was going to get into a fight, I couldn't afford to be in the way. Anything that hit me would instantly betray my Brute rating, and no amount of hair dye would deflect the scrutiny that followed.

"Skitter," Miss Militia called out, "Hellhound. What are you two doing?"

Bitch growled and took a step forward before Skitter intervened. "None of your business. This is Bitch's territory, not yours. Why are you here?"

Miss Militia tensed, her power flickering into what looked like a semi automatic shotgun. She told me once that her power didn't shift according to her conscious thoughts, but at moments like this it was hard to believe. "We're patrolling, looking for any remnants of the Nine, helping civilians."

The bugs around us buzzed in a low drone, catching my attention. It really was frightening just how quickly and quietly Skitter could amass her insects. "Then why are you stopping us? The Truce still stands through tomorrow."

"We can't exactly trust you of all people to hold to the rules of the Truce," Assault spat, glaring at us.

"What Assault is trying to say is that we were at the meeting to deal with the Nine, just like everyone else," said Miss Militia. "You claimed this territory while everyone else agreed not to make any moves. You're standing on shaky ground, Undersiders."

You could cut the tension with a knife. I tried not to draw their attention as I hesitantly leaned around Skitter, glancing between the three heroes and the villains. I was counting on Skitter's ability to hold Bitch at bay, but how long was that going to last?

"You're on shaky ground yourselves, Heroes," Skitter's voice echoed through her swarm. "We took these territories because the people in them were helpless against the Nine. We defended them when no one else did. Don't antagonize us for doing your jobs."

Assault took a step forward. "That's not the same thing and you know it! Don't quote our principles back at us like you have the moral high ground!" Skitter subtly tensed every time he opened his mouth. I had to wonder if anyone else noticed. I knew that Assault was capable of accelerating on a dime. Was she preparing for that? That was a smart, albeit distressing level of paranoia if so.

"And yet, here we are. Providing for the refugees you abandoned."

Miss Militia's eyes slowly strayed to me. Dammit. "Here we are indeed. Who is that behind you?"

I tensed, dropping eye contact. "No one of consequence. Another scrounger I'm taking back with me." Skitter's voice sounded as if she couldn't care less. I almost shuddered. I knew she was covering for me but… was that all I was in the end? I couldn't exactly refute the statement, but still...

Miss Militia didn't let the statement slide. "I think we should let her speak for herself, no? What's your name?"

There it was. The moment I was dreading. Praying that Tattletale's disguise and clothes would get me through this conversation, I slowly stepped out from behind Skitter and into the direct view of the three Heroes. They met my eyes, softly encouraging in the way I knew they were trained for civilians. And I was going to lie to them. I reached for my drawing pad. Skitter must have been thinking ahead as she pulled a small pocket flashlight out to be able to see what I wrote.

Skitter stepped to the side, intending to narrate my writing. "She can't speak–"

Assault gasped, immediately stepping forward. "I knew it! You villains are all the same! Let her go now or suffer the consequences, Truce or not!"

The rest of the Heroes tensed, looking between me and Skitter. No doubt they were all running the math of how to address a human shield. I looked at Skitter, panicked. I didn't mean for it to come out like that, she had to know!

The bugs around us swirled angrily, the drone rising in pitch to a whine. "You all claim to be Heroes, yet you didn't even let me explain her handicap." Skitter's voice was low and mocking as she turned to me. My fists clenched hard as I stared at her. That was low. Yeah, she might have phrased it that way specifically to make sure that the Heroes would give her time to explain but... the way she said it hurt.

"She can't speak," Skitter continued, "because she's mute. She'll write instead, and I'll read it."

The stances of the Heroes changed, if only slightly. They were uncertain now, lowering their guards. Would they take me at my word?

I swallowed and stepped to the side so I could at least look at the Heroes as I wrote. Skitter continued, "I was injured during the Nine. Skitter offered help. I had nowhere else to go."

"You have to understand why we can't trust that on its face, right?" Miss Militia said.

"And why not?" Skitter replied.

"Because with your record we couldn't trust you to take care of a preschooler, never mind a lone civilian," Assault snapped, taking another step forward. Bitch snarled, and the dog next to us let loose a growl that I felt echo clean through my chest. It was enough of a threat display that Assault stopped moving, but he didn't back down either.

Skitter's laugh could have cut glass. Not that there was much left after Shatterbird. "Because the heroes have done so well? I think not."

"So she can leave with us right now, then?" I felt myself freeze, as his attention turned to me again. "You wouldn't stop her?"

"That's her call. She came to us of her own free will, if she wanted to be somewhere else she would be," Skitter cut back. She stood stock still, but I could see the lines of tension in her shoulders through the silk.

"And how can we know that she's actually the one making the decision? We remember what you did to Shadow Stalker. There's nothing saying that Regent over there isn't puppeting her into a parody of acceptance for us while you scoop up another meat shield. Or should I say Hijack-"

I wasn't listening. The rest of the conversation devolved into a blur of raised voices and gestures. I think. The world was dark and dull. I could feel their eyes like ants on my skin. My fists were clenched so tightly I knew I'd shatter bone if I was holding Skitter's hand. Why am I even thinking about that? Shit. I couldn't– I can't–

"Enough." Skitter's voice echoed. The buzzing of her insects was harsh, almost metallic as they swarmed between us; a living wall of droning, squirming, writhing life that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. From the way the Heroes flinched back, they felt the same instinctive, visceral disgust at the display as me. "Believe us or not, I don't care. We're done here."

Just as we were about to turn away, a lone voice stopped me. Triumph, the single person that hadn't spoken yet.

"Glory Girl?"


A/N:
This chapter. Hoo boy. It sets up so much of what comes next. I've been waiting to see how you guys react to this next four chapter segment for the last month. There are a lot of really good moments in the backlog, but this section really is one of my favorites, even now. This whole arc really. It's gonna be spicy!

I mentioned writing out multiple versions of this interaction. Initially I totally forgot that Assault actually hates the Undersiders after the S9 shakes out the way it does in canon, so I wrote him in MM's place. This works a lot better and I'm happier for it, but boy it sure didn't feel that way when I needed to edit half of the content at the time. Thank god for backlog.

Today's designated shilling is for Impurity by the utterly fantastic Aleph and Earth Scorpion, the former of which has since joined the beta crew! If you notice my prose getting better, blame her. It's a story about grief and loss and trauma and vengeance, and how Taylor is always going to chafe under authority even when she's on the "right" side of the law. If you like SiNC for the themes of how scars and traumatic experiences change you in a lasting way and how the people who hurt you loom like a shadow over your whole life for as long as they're still free to hurt others, you will like Impurity for the same reasons. Happy reading!

 

[Aleph]

Skitter didn't hesitate. "Hi, M-Mrs. Dallon? My name is June

Click to shrink...

Ah, yes.

I think we all know what happened here.

Taylor is Great at Coming Up with Names

This was stupid. This was stupid, and I was digging myself deeper with every word.

"I'm going to be playing a character. This is not me giving you my name. This is not what I sound or act like outside of my mask. I am not unmasking to you in any capacity. With that said, I still expect you to extend the same amount of privacy to my performance, as I am providing to you for this conversation from the rest of the compound."

This was stupid, but what choice did I have? Victoria wanted to talk to her mother. I couldn't deny her that. I knew how important to her this must be. She'd gone through something horrific. And if I refused her, then what? What would she do? How would she react? Would she turn violent? I didn't know, but there was nothing I could do if refusing her made her angry. Not when she was at such close range. She could put a fist through my ribcage before any of my bugs could get to her.

She wanted to call her mom, and I had to let her. But she needed a voice. Which left me in this dilemma, gut churning in useless circles, cold dread dripping down my spine.

"That's fine. Truce." she wrote. Downstairs, one of the kids jostling around the entrance to the kitchen managed to knock the box of cans off the top of the stack that served as a larder again. Victoria must have heard, because she glanced down and then added "What about the kids? If they overhear?"

Another problem. My mind was still racing to figure a way out of this one, but I spent a moment's attention to confirm the headcount. Everyone was safely occupied on the ground floor. Nobody was anywhere near the stairs.

Nobody to offer any suggestions or rescue. I needed to think of something fast. My head swam dizzily. I was running out of time.

"They know not to come up here," I said. "And I asked Charlotte to keep them distracted by cooking more bacon. That always works."

She nodded, accepting that, and I took out a burner phone and started running through strategies in earnest. What to say, what to do... if I didn't come up with anything in the next minute, this wasn't going to work. My breathing quickened, and I pushed the frantic swarming out of my bugs out of the building, away from where Victoria could see. Come on, come on, think!

"I need a phone number." My heart pounded a hammerbeat on the inside of my chest. Could I stall? Could I just avoid it altogether? No.

Victoria scrawled the number out, and I input the digits, each one slamming into place like dirt over a coffin.

Fuck. I had to make a decision, right now, that wouldn't screw me over.

What was I going to call myself?

"I'm going to establish the character and why I'm calling," I said, mind working furiously. My real name was obviously out. Same with my minions, or Lisa or Rachel or... or my mom. I didn't want any of those names connected to Skitter. "You may want to take the time to pre-write anything you know you want to say ahead of time so there's minimal conversation delay."

Someone from school? But Emma was just as close, really - and the thought of using her name made my skin crawl. After what Regent had pulled on Shadow Stalker, I couldn't use Sophia's name without it sounding like I was mocking the PRT for that. The other bullies? In that moment I couldn't summon a single name to mind.

Victoria was looking at me. I couldn't stall any longer. My finger stabbed at the call button, and it began to dial. Frantically, I searched the room for anything that could offer salvation. Victoria? No. The terrariums, useless. Nothing out of the window, no pictures on the walls...

... but there was one thing.

"Hello? This is Carol Dallon."

The calendar, covered in notes about my bugs' feeding and breeding schedules.

I took in four letters stamped across the top of the page and felt the panic dissolve like a physical weight evaporating off me. I almost sagged with relief.

Okay. The hard part was over.

Now I just had to convince a veteran hero that her mute daughter was staying at my house after being assaulted by her other daughter, and that I wasn't a supervillain warlord holding her hostage.

Easy.

"Hi, M-Mrs. Dallon?" I said, eyes locked on the word that had saved me. "My name is June."

 

[Distraktion]

The trash piled up on the sides of the streets looked like it had been here long before Leviathan appeared, and the time since hadn't improved matters.

Click to shrink...

Trash, huh? That gives me an idea…

---

Trash Can​

The trash piled up on the sides of the streets looked like it had been here long before Leviathan appeared, and the time since hadn't improved matters.

Then without warning, some of the trash moved.

It had been doing that for a while, various wild animals scrounging for food or people hunting for various tchotchkes.

Earlier I'd seen someone dig out a whole box of beanie babies, and if I'd been able to talk I'd have told them that even Bubbles the Fish wouldn't be worth much with all that water damage. In fact, while Leviathan may have single-handedly destroyed the entire beanie baby market, I was secretly glad because it meant my collection was now worth millions.

But before I could talk to Skitter about potentially getting in on the ground floor of something worth way more than drugs or protection rackets, the trash moved yet again.

…and then it talked to me.

"H'lo, Miz Gory Gurl. Miz Skibber."

A strange monster made of pink goo, used diapers, and dirt smiled at me.

I let out a strangled scream, but instead of moving to protect me, Skitter just sighed.

"Hello, Mush." She patted me on the shoulder, as if to signal that this was perfectly normal. I was a little confused as to how one of the capes the Nine had killed was walking around and chatting with her, but she must have realized that when she added, "Mush is hard to kill."

"Yub." It…he nodded, shifting into an almost human-like shape before flopping down to sit on the curb. As he spoke, more and more flesh revealed itself, eventually revealing something that looked like a fantasy goblin. "Da Nime sed be on fire, bud I'm all goo and dirt. I'm fine now. Hiding out even gave me time to get cleaned up."

I didn't believe that it could really be that easy to survive the Nine, since killing people was kind of their whole deal. On the other hand, it was possible that after so many years doing it, their quality control had taken a serious dip. They probably had better things to do than remember to double-tap every single victim. I'd even heard rumors online that their actual body count was much lower than the Nine claimed, with most people just pretending to be dead to avoid horrible fates.

"First I played dead, which was easy since that Jack guy loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Lots of long, loud monologues...pretty sure he put Burnscar to sleep with one." He pulled up a pair of pants, shrugged into a dirty shirt, and then started digging through some trash. "Then they all just left, and that made it easy to slip out. I actually ran into them a few times after that, but they all pretended they couldn't see me, as if me being alive would hurt their self-esteem too much. Kinda sad, and probably indicative of—"

"We're on a timetable, Mush. Why are you here?" Skitter crossed her arms, looking more exasperated than annoyed. "If this is about Cherish, I'd like to remind you that I just said she dresses trashy, not that she actually is trash. Well, she is, but not like…physically."

"Oh no, it's nothing like that. I just wanted to give Miss Victoria…ah, here it is!" He stood suddenly, thrusting something pink and sparkly at me. "I hope you like it!"

It smelled faintly of pine-sol and coffee grounds, and seemed to be a get well card. At Skitter's nod, I stepped closer and took a better look at it.

The front had a drawing of a cartoon dumpster overloaded with garbage, and a skinny-looking trash collector who was dwarfed by it all.

Above it were words, in comic sans unfortunately, that read, "It's not called a Trash Can't…"

I took the card with two fingers, opening it despite my growing sense of dread.

Inside was a badly-drawn Glory Girl throwing the dumpster over the horizon.

The skinny trash collector was happy, and had more words under him:

"It's a Trash Can! Get well soon, from all your fans at the dump!"

It was signed by Mush, and had raccoon paw prints as well.

"Your incredible strength and perseverance have always been an inspiration to me, Miss Victoria." Mush's eyes were filled with tears, and he let out a little sob as I finally gave him some respect. "From one dumpster-tossing, trash-loving, garbage fan to another…please feel better."

Then he turned and ran away as fast as his little pink legs would carry him.

I was speechless…well, obviously, but it wasn't just a physical thing now.

"Miss Victoria?" I looked up, eyes damp, and heard Skitter sigh again.

Before me was a man made of rusted, blood-spattered metal.

It looked like Trainwreck had survived the Nine as well.

He had a card in one hand and balloons in the other.

"Listen, from one dumpster-lover to another—"

It was going to be a long day...

 

[justanothercat]

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Of course it was too much to ask that I get out of this conversation without the Heroes finding out. With dread forming a thick, sapping mass in my chest that made it hard to breathe, I turned to face Triumph and the rest of the Heroes.

I couldn't see his eyes, and I didn't want to. I had no idea what he was thinking, but he didn't say anything more.

Miss Militia made an aborted step forward, hesitating as the bugs Skitter had shielding us rippled out towards her like a wall of writhing cilia. "God… that is you, isn't it?" Her voice was soft, almost disbelieving, but it carried over the warning drone of the swarm. I wanted to hang my head, but I couldn't look away.

I nodded.

"We… we thought you were dead," Triumph said. I wrung my hands. How could I possibly explain the chain of events that lead me to where I am now, when I could barely explain it myself?

Miss Militia's eyebrows drew together in a hard line, as she turned back to Skitter. "And what is your explanation for this then? Another 'ordinary refugee' that you're taking in?"

Skitter didn't twitch. "Nothing she said was untrue. She was injured during the Nine, and she asked me for help. I provided. I know you wouldn't have done the same if I had asked, but that's not on me."

Miss Militia's gun warped into a combat knife. "Don't change the subject, Skitter. You're trying to claim ownership of a Hero, one who is unmasked and isolated from her family. You've provided her no place to turn to, and she believes there's no way out. You dyed her hair so that we wouldn't catch on. You know what you're doing is wrong."

"When Victoria came to me, she had nothing," Skitter's voice could have cut diamond. "I knew the risks. But she asked me. I had to say yes."

Assault chose this moment to re-enter the conversation. "I can't help but notice you never denied it when we accused you of mastering her with Hijack."

I flinched, my hands coming up instinctively. Skitter hadn't mentioned that her teammate was Hijack. It wasn't like I'd had time to see the rest of the Undersiders before this point. Was that just making excuses for her not mentioning him to me before? Would she have said something before I met him? I wish I could say for sure. But I knew (hoped) that Skitter would never let them do that to me. Then again… what if that's what Shadow Stalker thought? They were clearly willing to master and use a Hero before. Logically, I couldn't really expect anything different.

I took an instinctive step away from Skitter and towards the rest of the Heroes. Bitch growled as she watched, but I couldn't look her way. Assault must've seen it because he turned to me. "Glory Girl, I don't know what she's told you, but you have options. Here, with us. You might've done some bad things," he chuckled. "Trust me, I've had my fair share of mistakes too. But you shouldn't let that paint you into a corner. Or think that they're somehow the better option."

I wasn't… was that really what I was doing? I looked back at Skitter. She was unreadable, even by her normal standards. Her gaze didn't leave mine. I forced myself to consider all of my experiences with her. Not just the bank, but everything that followed. Did she push me into going with her? Or at least, not going with the heroes? Between the explanation Tattletale gave, and the questions she asked, I had to conclude yes. If only for my own safety. It was always easier to plan for the worst than hope for the best.

Fine, so she pushed me. Was it intentional? That was much harder to say. Tattletale was abrasive and uncomplimentary to the Protectorate, when she'd been explaining what I missed. Looking back on that… I don't think her goal was to go over that information at all. Skitter could have done so in her place. At one point, she did. No, if anything, Tattletale was there to verify that I wasn't a threat to her teammate. And despite myself, I had to respect that. Even if I didn't like it.

And as for her teammate… Skitter was kinder than she had to be; than I might've been in her place. I didn't mean that in the cuddly sort of way, obviously, but in the more heroic sense. She gave me choices at every turn. Sourced me things like the hoodie and notepad that I didn't strictly speaking need but helped me feel better. Instead of handing me off to her teammate to deal with or abandoning me in the house where she found me, she gave me the option to come with her. She could have just let a minion deal with me at her base, but she'd kept putting in her own time, calling my mom for me, keeping me close. Part of that was self serving; I was a potential threat, she didn't trust me around the kids, she wanted to keep an eye on me. But...

"You have to figure out why you should trust her."

Charlotte's words echoed in my head. Choice. That's what this all came down to. Maybe the Heroes would've kept me from Mom and my family until I figured myself out. Maybe they wouldn't — I'd never find out for sure now. But I knew that Skitter had done it when I'd asked. She'd believed me when I said that I wasn't looking for a fight, that I wanted a place to stay. It was time to return the favor.

My eyes were clear when I looked back at Assault. My stomach twisted, but I had a steady hand when I wrote it anyways. "I'm sorry"

I took a step back to Skitter. I could feel her and Bitch's eyes on my back, but I couldn't turn to them for support. I had to do this myself. "I'm staying with them for now"

Miss Militia sighed. "I was afraid it was gonna be like that, Glory Girl." She turned to Skitter, her eyes hard. "You need to explain how you found her. No tricks, no euphemisms. All of it."

I shuddered, my fists clenched tight. "That's not my story to tell," Skitter said, naked threat in every syllable. "And you can't pressure her for it."

Assault made a step forward, his eyes never leaving Skitter's even as Bitch and her dog growled. "Is that a threat?"

Skitter's laugh was covered up by the harsh, discordant thrum of her swarm; the grating chorus of a chittering, buzzing nightmare. I shivered. "A threat," she said flatly, "would imply some doubt about the outcome. This is a promise."

Miss Militia tried to intervene. "You have to understand why we can't trust you, Skitter, especially in light of you hiding Glory Girl's identity from us. It doesn't look good."

"You don't care about one of your own, and suddenly you decide it's your business?" Bitch snarled. "You fuckers don't have the right to be angry."

The hero was unfazed. "It's precisely because she's one of our own that I ask. If we took one of your dogs, you'd be angry too."

Fuck. I'd known Bitch for all of an hour and even I knew not to step on that landmine. "You saying you'll take my dogs?" The monster beside her tensed at her tone. "I'd like to see you fuckers try."

Miss Militia seemed to sense she'd screwed up. "I'm not saying we'd take one of your dogs. Just that you'd be angry if we did. That's why we need to know why Skitter took Glory Girl," she said, facing the Villain in question.

All this talking around me was starting to get… tiresome. I didn't want these questions to begin with, but the least they could do was ask me directly. I wasn't helpless (not again).

As if sensing my frustration, Skitter turned to me. "If you want to tell them, you can. It's your story. Just tell me if you want me to speak for you." Her voice was strangely soft, but I could hear the steel under the velvet.

I swallowed, and faced the Heroes. "What did Carol tell you?" I had to ask that much, even just to stall for time while I worked out what to say.

Triumph spoke up. "Like I said earlier, we thought you were dead. Amy took you to get healed after the bombing on Crawler, and that's the last we heard from you. We assumed that one or both of you were in the wind."

He glanced at the Heroes flanking him. "That's… part of the reason why we were patrolling here, to be honest. We knew the chances were low, but we had to keep looking. At least until we knew for sure either way."

So the Heroes were looking for me this whole time. I took a deep breath. Good. That was good.

"I appreciate that."

Triumph nodded. "It's the least we could do. You're one of us, no matter what. We look after our own." He gave Skitter a pointed glance, which she ignored.

I turned my attention back to the Heroes. "How long ago was that?"

Miss Militia looked at me worriedly. "Almost a week ago. Do you not know?"

I took a deep breath. Okay, that was good. It matched with what Skitter and Tattletale told me. It was an easy enough thing to check, but my memory was still suspect.

"Skitter told me, but I had to be sure. I was" I paused, trying to control the lump in my throat "indisposed for a big part of that"

"Glory Girl… Victoria, what happened? Why didn't you reach out if you were hurt?" Miss Militia's tone was gentle. I hated it.

"I was" I trembled, my fingers almost ruining the pen again, "hurt, when Amy got me"

The Heroes were silent as I wrote. Behind me, Skitter's swarm gently brushed my shoulder blade. It reassured me more than I wanted to admit.

"She healed me. Changed me"

Miss Militia's eyes sharpened. "What do you mean by that, Glory Girl?"

I looked pleadingly at Skitter behind me, who seemed to realize that I'd have no way of describing the thing I'd become.

"Victoria was… mostly not human, by the time I found her. I'm not sure what Amy was drawing from at the time, but it was a mishmash of flesh and bone."
I closed my eyes, willing myself to listen. I couldn't ignore this. Even if I hated that she–that anyone–saw me like that.

"I'm not sure if Amy planned it or not, but it took her some time to revert Victoria."

Miss Militia turned to look at me. "Is that true, Glory girl? Is that how you got injured?"

I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. "Yes and no"

You could've heard a pin drop as I kept writing. "Amy, she" my hand stopped. I couldn't make myself say it, even in writing. How humiliating was that? Here were the Heroes, people who I looked up to, modeled myself after in some cases, and I couldn't tell them what happened to me. God I was pathetic.

"It's okay, you don't have to tell us," Triumph said.

"No," Skitter cut in, her voice harder than I'd ever heard it. "You don't get to deny her now. You pressured her into this when I said it was her place. You asked her when I told you not to. Don't flinch now just because her pain makes you uncomfortable."

I had to blink the tears out of my eyes. Where–where did that come from? I looked at Skitter as if she was a stranger. That felt… too personal, too immediate to just be for my benefit. 'Thank you' I mouthed at her. I'm not sure if she understood, but a wasp gently buzzed by my cheek. Maybe that was enough.

My hand was shaky, but I forced myself to get through it this time. For myself. "Amy, she used me. While I was like that. I don't know how much. Don't remember all of it. But I know enough"

Assault's mouth was hard, angry, but to his credit he didn't look away from me like Triumph did. "Fuck."

Miss Militia's sigh was more weary than I'd ever heard from her. "I was afraid of that. You're sure?"

I could sense Skitter bristle, about to go on an angry tirade, but to her credit the Hero corrected without pausing for breath. "No, don't bother answering that. Sorry, I… I only asked because I didn't want it to be true. Not because I doubted you. Not over that."

The insects around us buzzed angrily for a moment before Skitter nodded curtly.

There was a pause for a moment, as everyone seemed to digest that. "So where does that leave us?" Miss Militia asked.

"Victoria asked to be with us. She can leave at any time. It's her choice." Skitter's voice was unyielding.

Assault's mouth was drawn harshly as he stepped forward. "No, we can't accept that. I understand what happened, Victoria, and I'm sorry. But Skitter isn't equipped to help you. You have to know that."

He turned his gaze to her. "More to the point, we can't trust you. Regent took Shadow Stalker hostage. He mastered her into an infiltration of the PRT. You lost the benefit of the doubt; you don't get to claim altruism now."

"Hah!" Skitter's voice was bitter. "You'd trust your judgment, but not that of one of your own? That's rich. I wasn't the one who refused to go after Bonesaw's hostage just because he was on 'their side'. I didn't call for bombing downtown while teenagers were fighting the Nine there. That was all you. You might claim that we have no morals, but even I don't stoop that low."

Assault took another step forward, baring his teeth. "It isn't about us! It's about her," he said, pointing at me. "We can't trust that she's making a choice, not like this. Maybe she is, and maybe that's good, but if it isn't we're allowing you to commit a crime on the same scale as her sister."

I flinched, closing my eyes. No, no, no, that wasn't right. Deep breaths, Victoria. You're making your own choices here — you went over this before. Just because a Hero compared the two of them doesn't mean that you're back there. With her. Not again.

Skitter didn't hesitate in responding with equal venom. "So what's your plan then, Hero? Rip her away just so you can be sure that you're right?"

I clenched my fists, my nails digging into my palms. Deep breaths, I repeated to myself. No one is claiming you here. You don't belong to anyone. You can always run.

"If that's what's required, then yes," Assault's voice was flat. I flinched. Skitter's swarm brushed my shoulder blade again, and I forced myself to let go of the rigid tension in my arms and unclench my trembling hands. I was safe here. I was safe here. I was safe-

"Let's not be hasty," Miss Militia said, "maybe there's a compromise. A field master screening or—" but I wasn't listening. Their voices blended together in my head. Assault's anger, Miss Militia's bargaining, Skitter's threats, Triumph's confusion, even Bitch's snarls. They all swirled together into a mess of noise and violence. I didn't know where to go. I just… I needed to be somewhere else. I needed out.

Suddenly the noise got louder. Much, much louder; a sudden chaotic clamor. I heard an impact – was someone fighting? I didn't want to look. I hunched down, covering my ears. Skitter's bugs must've been swarming around us; I could feel them on my forcefield bouncing off me like hail. Why was everyone doing this? Why did none of them believe me? Tears stung my eyes as I curled into a ball and trembled, still trying to breathe slowly as shuddering sobs forced their way out, shaking my shoulders with every messy in and out. I hated this. I hated it, I hated it, all of it–

"Victoria!"

A hand took me by the shoulder and forcefully pulled me head up out of my knees. Suddenly, I was looking straight into Skitter's mask, closer than I'd ever seen it. The swarm must've thickened when I wasn't looking because it was a wall of writhing blackness now, shifting and thrashing even as I watched. There was a sound like a gunshot — Miss Militia maybe? — off to the left. Triumph's sonic roar echoed off the buildings, but I had no idea what he was targeting. Judging by the sheer amount of insects in the air, there was a good chance he didn't either.

"Victoria!!" Skitter shouted, snapping me out of my spiral. What? What could she possibly want at a time like this?

"Victoria, turn off your goddamn aura!"


A/N:

So apparently the secret formula to get me to release a chapter ahead of schedule is to post five omake's in the SB thread in the space of an afternoon. Who knew? But with the backlog as it is I definitely don't mind doing this. Y'all rock.

This chapter. I have so many thoughts. But I'll settle on two. First, Skitter's line to Triumph? About giving a victim space to share their experience without worrying about the audience response? That might be the single best line of dialogue I've ever written. Full stop. I can't emphasize how much I agree with that, outside of this fic.

Second, the ending. Originally, I had other plans for Victoria's aura. But when I went back over the first three chapters to edit, I realized it had barely come up at all. That's when I realized, wouldn't it be much better if Victoria's powers (much like her body), once a safe and stable thing, had been changed and made unfamiliar by her trauma? In this case, panic attack + surrounding danger + desire for escape = aura. And those of you who are familiar with Ward might realize that this is even worse than it sounds. But I'll leave that for discussion.

Today's recommendation is Wolf Point by the awesome Redcoat Officer! It's one of, if not the best one shots in the fandom, and I don't say that lightly. It depicts the story of the ordinary men and women in the PRT, what they go through outside of the cities and gang wars, and what the ugly, small, other side of parahuman culture looks like. For better and worse. Can't recommend this one enough, criminally underrated.

 

[justanothercat]

The SB thread is insane, so blame them for this. I was gonna release this wednesday originally, but you guys get it now. Don't expect more early chapters, I can't keep eating through my backlog this quickly.

This is meant to happen anywhere from the beginning of arc 2 to the end of 3, feel free to imagine it where you'd prefer.

Bedtime Stories

Charlotte sighed, turning to the noise in the corner of the main floor. After the Nine debacle it wasn't surprising that the kids weren't sleeping as well as they used to. That, and Victoria wasn't exactly helping the home environment. Her teeth clenched as she remembered the Hero in question. She didn't trust her at first, had no idea what she was doing or why Skitter had brought her. And of course, that bit her in the ass, just like it always did. At least they had managed to come to an uneasy agreement in the time since. Small mercies.

Charlotte groaned as she stood up, arching her back to work out the knots and tension that lived in her spine ever since Leviathan. She had no idea which of the kids was making this noise, but it clearly wasn't going to stop. Victoria and Skitter were too busy to deal with this. Case in point, it was god knows what hour in the morning and they were still gone. That left just her.

She was silent as she stepped between the floorboards, careful not to make so much as a squeak on the water-soaked boards. It was a miracle with the damage that the Endbringer had left behind that the house was in as good condition as it was. Part of that was Sierra's insistence on having the floor treated immediately. She'd have to find time to thank her again later.

Charlotte carefully brushed aside the curtain in the room near the hallway entrance, only to confirm what she'd already known.

Tia was having a nightmare again. Poor kid couldn't have been older than six when she and her parents were driven out of their home by Leviathan, returning back to nothing but rubble and memories. They had taken shelter with Skitter for the food and shelter that her Boss had supplied… only for Tia to watch as her parents were cut apart by Mannequin weeks later. She hadn't looked anyone in the eye since.

Charlotte forced herself to slowly make her way to the bed where Tia was shivering. She really didn't know what to do, at times like this. She wasn't much older than this fucking girl was. She definitely didn't feel any more mature. But then… who else was there?

Gently, her hand shaking from nerves, Charlotte carded her hand through Tia's hair. Instantly the girl's struggles paused, and Charlotte froze.

Fuck. Had she done something wrong? None of the stuff she'd read had anything on how to approach kids in a nightmare. Was that even what she'd been having? Maybe she should just leave. Yeah, Charlotte didn't know what she was doing, clearly–

"Mom?"

Charlotte's vision was blurry, her lips pressed together in a thin line. Fuck. Fucking fuck. How was she supposed to… Tia didn't say anything to anyone. It wasn't her place, she couldn't…

Tia started sniffling again, the edges of her eyes opening glazed with pain, and that was enough.

"Shhhhh," Charlotte whispered, "I'm here. It's okay. Go back to bed."

Tia curled into her hand, settling into a more comfortable position. Her face was still wet.

It was at times like these that Charlotte wondered what the hell she was doing. What any of them were doing. She was grateful that her boss had rescued her from that hellhole from the merchants, that she'd given her a place here.

But in moments like this, with Tia's cheek warm against her hand, she couldn't help but hate her for it too.

 

[justanothercat]

How could I be so stupid? It was all that I could think of as Skitter's words sunk in. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It seemed so obvious, in retrospect. That my powers might have shifted after what Amy did to me. But I was focused on other things. Getting my feet under me, clothes and a bed, figuring out what Skitter wanted… testing all my powers again just fell by the wayside. It hadn't seemed important. I'd told myself it could wait.

I was paying for that now.

Another explosion sounded off to our left, and I flinched, clenching my fists and forcing my focus back into the moment. Okay. Okay, I just had to break the problem down one step at a time. My powerset had three – I winced as a pained yell sounded above the roar of the swarm – three main expressions.

The first was my Brute rating. Technically it was both super strength and durability, but the two were related so Mom had packaged them together. It manifested as a sort of shield around me, hovering a fraction of an inch above my skin, that protected me and gave me superhuman strength. When the field was overwhelmed it broke for a second or two - sometimes longer if it was hit hard enough. It made for a rating like Alexandria, but only in short bursts. As I only found out too well with… Crawler.

The sound of Triumph screaming washed over me, through me, vibrating through my ribs and making my breathing stutter. I crossed my arms over my torso and forced myself to inhale, slow and deep, until I felt less like I was about to puke. Keep calm. Stay focused. Go over what you know first. The second part of my powers. That was the mover rating. I could fly quickly, and make pinpoint turns without losing too much speed. Other than the obvious applications it was almost never relevant, and we'd never thought to test further. My forcefield protected me from the worst of the windchill.

The last – the crack of gunfire made me sob and curl in on myself, instinct muscling rational knowledge of my forcefield aside at the sound. The... the last power I had. The aura. The thing that was... causing all of this. We hadn't gone to the PRT to test it. Mom had been worried about them slapping a Master rating on me. Fucking... politics. But we knew it was mostly unconscious. It made everyone around me feel things. Awe. Fear. A mix of both, depending on how they felt about me. Judging by the fight currently raging, I could guess what it was doing now. But that didn't make sense! Even if the Heroes had been… less than empathetic in some respects… they hadn't seen me as a threat, had they? That was always the qualifier before. What changed?

Skitter snapped in front of my face. "F-focus Victoria, we don't have time! I c-can't keep them off us forever!"

I gasped. She was right. Whatever changed, it didn't matter. I just had to turn it down. And I knew how to do that. I reached for the mental switch and–

It wasn't there.

What?

No. No, it had to be there. These were my powers. I knew how to use them! I'd been using them for years! Where was it? I shook my head, my breathing quickening again despite my efforts. I'd always been able to pump my aura up or draw it in! But now it was gone. I couldn't flex my focus the right way. I remembered what it felt like, but there was nothing but an empty space there when I tried.

It felt like waking up missing a hand.

This- this couldn't be happening. Every parahuman class I'd ever had said that power use was instinctual! Not just right after their trigger, but perpetually! People could figure out new ways to manipulate their existing powerset, but the base mastery didn't change! Even what little literature there was on second triggers said as much! How could this be any different?

My vision swam, and I realised I was getting lightheaded. I was hyperventilating. Shit. I shook my head viciously. It didn't matter. It didn't, even if I felt the loss of that mental muscle like the loss of a limb. Right now, I just had to accept that–that whatever Amy did to me amputated my control over my aura. Fine. I–I could deal with that later. But right now I had to turn it off. My aura hadn't been on once since I'd woken up, so I knew it was possible.

I thought back to when my aura first flared after my Trigger. I'd been so scared that it had spilled out of me at full blast. I'd just wanted everyone to go away. It'd been chaos. Mom was the one who'd calmed me down, talking it through with me until I was okay with letting people in. With letting her in. It always felt so nice when she hugged me. I missed her.

Fuck, no time for that. Focus on what matters. Calming my heart rate. I could do that. Miss Militia's shotgun went off closer to us, and I flinched away hard enough that I almost fell over, feeling the cold, wet, rough ground scrape against the sensitive forcefield over my shins. No, no, focus on calm. I could do calm. No problem. Deep breaths.

Looking for something, anything to distract me, I glanced over at Skitter. For someone who was right next to the epicenter of my fear aura, she was doing well. Her bugs swarmed around us, sure, but they were more a smokescreen than anything else. Her posture was rigid, her gaze fixed on some point further out past the swarm.

She looked away from what must be the Heroes to meet my eyes. "Victoria. Whatever you're trying. Isn't w-working."

I swallowed, and nodded. My heartrate was settling, but I could tell the aura was still up. What did that mean, then? Should we just run away? I knew Skitter wouldn't abandon Bitch to the Heroes like this. Bitch wouldn't abandon her dogs. And her dogs wouldn't go anywhere near me when I was like this.

With a grimace, Skitter stepped closer. The bugs likewise closed the distance, encircling us to within a few feet. The sound was almost deafening, but her words still came through clearly. "Yes or no: can you turn it off on your own?"

I forced myself to shake my head. I couldn't know for sure that I had tried everything. There were a few more tips and tricks I'd taught myself over the years that might work. But they'd take too long. In the time we had, I didn't have any answers for her.

Skitter nodded as if she expected that answer. "Okay. Do you t-trust me?"

I stared at her. That was a hell of a question to ask. Especially right now. Did I trust the Villain in front of me who'd lied to my mom's face about where I was and who I was with? Who stood up for me in front of the Heroes as if they'd insulted her instead? Who had no reason to not just drop me on the streets right now?

I met her eyes, and nodded.

"Good. Take down your forcefield."

What?! She had to be kidding. I almost scrambled for my notepad but Skitter put a hand on my field above my shoulder before I could finish the motion. I tried not to squirm at the threadsclawsbugssilktoomuch. "No. No time. I know you can take down your field. I've felt it. There's a chance your aura might be linked to it right now. You need to t-try."

I almost choked. Did she know what she was asking me to do? It was difficult for me to take my field down on a good day, and this hadn't exactly qualified to this point. Putting aside how exactly she'd 'felt' my field go down (and we would come back to that later), most of the time it just wasn't up to me. If I was scared, or anxious, or even just anything other than secure, it was up. To take it down right now in front of the Heroes who might just kill me by accident without it?

Skitter didn't look away. "I know it's dangerous. I know it's hard. But you have to do it, and keep it off. Trust that I'll protect you, and get us out. Can you do that?"

I swallowed. It came down to that night a few days ago, when she'd offered me her hand. Could I trust her? I… I had to. I had no other choice, and she knew it.

I reached out, and grabbed her hand. To center myself. I needed physical contact, something to ground me. If Skitter was surprised she didn't react.

Okay. I needed to ground myself. Focus on where I was now, and who I was with. Skitter. She said she'd protect me, keep me safe. She'd get us out of here. If she was going to give me up to the Heroes, she would've done so by now. I could trust that–had to trust that. Focus on the feeling of her hand in mine. It was warm, softer than I expected from the talons that replaced her nails. I knew now that it must've been spider silk. What other reason could she have to keep that many around? The threads were wound and woven tightly enough that it almost felt like one continuous texture across my palm.

My eyes opened. Wait, my palm! I did it! I turned to Skitter, and for a second I almost thought she might be smiling under that mask.
"Well done, Victoria."

I tried to focus on the task at hand rather than the anxiety in my chest. Now wasn't time for sentimentality. This was about fixing the mistake I'd made in the first place.

"Bitch, come!" Skitter's voice echoed strangely in the space around us. The bugs had drawn back now, not swarming quite so harshly or noisily. I had to assume that had something to do with my aura, though what exactly I didn't know.

"It's down now, it won't happen again," Skitter said, apparently responding to Bitch. Wait, did that mean she could definitely hear through her bugs? Or was I just that out of it? Regardless, that must have been the end of the conversation because Skitter turned back to me.

"Victoria, keep the field down. And don't react to anything I say to get us out of here."

I nodded mutely. Part of me wondered if this was always how it was with Skitter. If her fights were always this haphazard and full of bluffs. How real the impression the Heroes had of her was.

The bugs parted, and Bitch slid up next to us with her dog in hand. He was panting, with what looked like a mix of drool and… blood… dripping from his mouth. His tail was wagging. I didn't want to know.

Bitch looked at me and snarled. I tried to get some distance but Skitter's hand held me fast. Right, united front. I could do that. I turned back to Bitch and mouthed 'I'm sorry'. The look on her face said I soon would be. Well, I tried my best. The bugs thinned out in front of us, and I got my first glimpse of the Heroes since my aura had gone off.

Miss Militia was the most dramatic, her power changed into what looked like a grenade launcher. She held it cocked upwards in a clear bid to cover the distance between us if anyone moved. I didn't know if those grenades were loaded with confoam or live rounds, I had to hope for the former with my field down.

Triumph evidently hadn't had a good time in the last few minutes. Given his comparatively minor Brute rating and the size of Bitch's dog, I had expected as much. While he was better for the front lines than most of the Protectorate ENE, his power wasn't suited for it and it showed. His armor was dented and even caved in at points, particularly around the throat. I shuddered when I saw that. Thank god it didn't go any further.

Assault was the most untouched one, which made sense. His power was tailor made for getting in and out of sticky situations–literally. I'd be surprised if any of Bitch's dogs could get ahold of him for longer than the half second he needed to kick his power in. He was staring at us, his mouth pulled into a wavering line.

"Skitter," Miss Militia called, "what was the meaning of this? You attacked a group of Protectorate Heroes. We can't just let that stand."

Skitter stepped forward, not letting go of my hand. "You can and you will. My duty is to the people in my territory. Victoria is one. You won't touch her. I had to make that clear."

I forced myself not to stare at her as she talked. That wasn't how it went at all! How could any of the Heroes believe that this was a tactical choice?

But even as I watched, Miss Militia was shaking her head. "Skitter, if you do this, you're losing the benefit of the doubt. You can't take a Hero hostage, attack a relief effort patrol, and expect us not to retaliate."

My mouth opened, ready to say I didn't know what, before Skitter squeezed my hand hard. "Like you wouldn't retaliate anyway? The Rules didn't protect me during Leviathan. Or before my trigger. The benefit of the doubt? Don't make me laugh. You'll stand by the status quo in the end, and we both know it."

There was a tense silence. For a moment, I really thought she was going to do it. To shoot that grenade and go for the kill, regardless of me being in the way.

Miss Militia sighed. "Pack it up, we're leaving."

Assault turned to her, fire in his voice. "You can't seriously just expect us to–"

"I expect you to follow orders when a superior tells you to," Miss Militia's voice was harsh in a way I hadn't heard from her.

Triumph finished brushing most of the insects off his gold armor, and nodded. "We'll debrief at HQ and figure out what to do next."

Assault looked between them, obviously looking for some indication that this wasn't how things were going to go. But their stances were firm. For a moment he hesitated, and I thought he was going to lunge at us anyway, even if it meant putting himself against his own allies. He thought about it; I saw it cross his face as he rose onto the balls of his feet, his whole body tensing, shuddering with anger or revulsion or leftover fear. He growled, wavered a moment longer... and then turned and stalked after the other two, back the way they'd come.

Skitter pulled my hand as we turned to do the same, to finish making our way back to her territory. A voice stopped me.

"Victoria."
I turned back to see Triumph looking at me. "I know this… didn't go well. To put it lightly. But if you want to come back with us, you can. Open offer. Promise me you'll think about it?"

I swallowed past the lump in my throat, and nodded. That much, I could agree to. I squeezed Skitter's hand. She squeezed back.

With that, the Heroes turned their back on us for good, leaving us to continue walking. No one said anything on the way to the edge of Bitch's territory. At some unspoken agreement at one point Bitch stopped, nodding at us, before peeling back to head to her den.

I only had one thought as I headed back to Charlotte and the kids. Yes, I had a reason to trust Skitter now. But she had a reason not to trust me. I had betrayed her, even if only by accident, and turned a peaceful talk with the Heroes into a confrontation she had to cover for. Her entire team would get flak for it.

More than that… I mastered an entire team of Heroes. Allies too. Everyone involved. Even the damn dog. Mom had used every trick in the book to get my aura classified as a Shaker effect, but I knew what it really was. I altered the emotions of everyone around me, without asking, just because I was scared.

God help me, I was just like her.


A/N
Yeah. So that happened. I had ideas for how this confrontation would end while I was writing it, but I admit a lot of it just came together in the moment. But I'm definitely happy with how it did. Also, I wanted to thank Aleph in particular for her work on this. She basically rewrote half of this chapter and the work is far, far stronger for it.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the fandom, I need to make something explicitly clear. This is not an endorsement of aura theory. Discussion of such will not be tolerated. The last line is intended to show just how badly this experience has affected Victoria. That she is so traumatized and shaken by what happened that she would even make a comparison so blatantly false. I want to trust you guys not to take my words out of context here. But it needed to be said.

My rec this time is one that a lot of y'all have likely already heard of, but I'm shouting it out anyways. Another post-Leviathan story, The Postdiluvian Road follows Taylor and Lisa as they leave a ruined Brockton Bay after the battle goes much, much worse. This is a road trip story with many of the same themes of lasting injury, slow recovery from trauma and codependency as SiNC, and the girls don't always make good choices on their road trip as the petty crime they commit to survive frays at their trust in each other and occasionally gets them in over their head. Pre-relationship, but leading into Smugbug with a sequel on the way.

 

[RadioRobyn]

Going Out For Flowers

It had been days since she last talked to me.

Well, beyond the basics of food and water. I knew she was fine, physically, and I couldn't blame her for giving me the silent treatment. Not really, not after what had happened with the Heroes. I wasn't about to let them drag her away without her consent and she didn't tel-

It doesn't matter anymore.

Besides I had stepped out to get my mind off things, not run around in circles, or at least not in my head. Que sera, sera and all that jazz. God, Regent's weird obsession with 80's 'comedies' was rubbing off on me.

Anyways, the Boardwalk and what had once been shadier parts of the Docks were beginning to shape up. Sections of new streets, new sidewalks, a few new buildings, even a few stalls trading odds and ends had sprung up.

People weren't quite out in force in the early morning light, but it was more than had dared in the wake of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Even as I approached a section closer to the edge of my territory it looked more like a severely underfunded part of a city than the remnants left behind by an Endbringer. Though, people were less plentiful. Which made the lone girl sitting on the steps outside a dilapidated apartment all the more eye-catching.


If it was just that I wouldn't have given her a second glance. But next to her she held onto a small flower pot. A smattering of what looked to be lavenders and some larger petaled, wilting red flower.

She had noticed me staring. I needed to think of something fast before she did something drastic like call me over-

"Can I help you?" She called out, uncertainty filling her features.

Fuck.

I just had to wing it then. "Uhm, yeah. Those flowers are they- uh." Wait. What am I saying obviously she's not selling them, dumb ass. They probably were a pain to get a hold of in the first place.

The girl shook her head. A red streak of hair tucked away into a dark, messy bun jut out.

"Sorry, I can't give you these ones. They're for… someone special." A brief grin glimpsed her face. "Besides, I don't think you'd want the Rhododendrons."

Ah, I didn't want to impose on what was sure to be a brief, bright moment for her and her lover.

The girl, briefly cringing inward, slightly shook her head and looked at me anew. It was almost as if she were looking through me, for what I couldn't say. Was I acting too casual, too soon? Did she suspect me to be a member of some gang? Or had she caught on to my confidence out here alone, concluding that I had to be Skitter?

"So, tell me about them." Her easy smile slipped back on.

I took a step back. "About who?" my throat croaked out. There was no way she had figured me out in less than a conversation. Unless she- was she a Thinker? I couldn't think of a reason she'd unmask me out here in the open, to my face, instead of waiting for me to let my guard down to attack.

"Who you wanted the flowers for, silly."

Oh.

That was much worse.

"She uh-" I started, the girl's grin growing. "We, um, met just recently. Well, not that recently, just- we never really interacted before everything went, well y'know."

"Yeah, I know." Her reply was soaked in a wistful quality.

"So, yeah." I continued digging my own grave. "They're uh, rather smart. More attentive than I'd have thought before getting to know them better."

"Mhm." Damn that knowing glint in her eyes. It wasn't like that.

I held my arm. "But she's not in a great place right now. And I just don't quite know how to approach her now."

I huffed. "I mean, it's not like she's some fragile flower. She's far stronger than I could ever be, I... feel at a loss trying to comfort her, I'm afraid of making things worse."

"Making things worse?"

"I… it's not really my place to say. She's going through hard times."

Suddenly, the girl stood up, a determined air around her. "Wait right here."

I blinked and only just now, really looked at her. She wore dark gray jeans splattered with mud and an unseasonably warm, long sleeved faded purple sweater. Hints of a tattoo peaked out from her collar.

A gun was tucked in her waist line.

Before I had time to consider that, she bounded out of the apartment holding a can brimming with an array of pink and blue flowers.

"Fairy Lilies," she started, pointing out the pink flowers with eight petals "symbolizing new beginnings, perfect for your burgeoning relationship."

She briefly picked up a blue flower. "Clematis, showing your appreciation of her mental beauty."

Shoving the variable bouquet into my hands, she continued. " Lastly, Cyclamen to illustrate your tenderness and sincerity."

"I can't take these-" I began protesting.

"Shut up and go get her, lover girl." She smirked and walked away, her own flowers in hand.


A/N: I had to move some semblance of Cherish posting over here when I learned SiNC was on SV. Also, hi SV first time posting here, hope you enjoy.

 

[RadioRobyn]

Going In With Flowers

I had one last stop before I could skip town.

It had been two weeks since I barely dodged a fate worse than death and made the prudent decision to lay low. Waiting out the nine was the easy part. Selecting a location was slightly harder.

Hellhound's territory was out, too little to do and too much of a hassle to get the right responses out of her. Grue's place would've been fine if I spontaneously developed an interest in boxing. Tattletale was out, as even I couldn't fix that charming personality of hers. That and I was pretty sure her assuming I was dealt with is the only thing currently keeping me off her radar.

So I was left with one real option.

Skitter.

It was almost disappointingly easy to insinuate myself into her territory.

I picked the first lived-in building near the edge of her territory and now Elana had a new, most definitely not at all suspicious, roommate. No extremely wanted mass murderers to see here.

I barely even used my power!

But I knew it couldn't last forever. Eventually someone with a quarter of a brain would finally put two and two together. So I decided I would wait two weeks before making my leave. Mostly because Bonesaw was too impatient to wait longer than one, let alone two. Additionally, my odds of surviving another encounter with her were very real, and very terrifying.

Therefore, I had time to kill. Normally, that could hardly be called a problem. I was great at wasting time. I still had a few resources, but the smartphone with music I'd stolen was broken and that was my go to for situations like this. My other usual time wasters were off the table, lest Jack or Tattletale catch on.

That left whatever Elana filled her free time with. Which were flowers. So many flowers. In fact, she had books on flowers. Let me drive that home, she had books plural, on just flowers. Tabarnak, what kind of insane psychopath was I living with? To her credit, she used to work at a flower shop. Apparently that wasn't enough for her because she also had her own miniature greenhouse setup inside her apartment.

Needless to say, I picked up a few things about flora.

Alright, enough stalling.

I tried the front door, unlocked as they always left it, and stepped inside. A familiar, feminine teen boy laid on a pristine, alabaster white couch, his mop of dark hair in contrast against it. An array of retro consoles, both handheld and not, were strewn around him. One chirped brightly as he plod away at it.

I still don't know why Jea- Alec. Why Alec hadn't bothered to tell his teammates I wasn't languishing on the sea floor. But like the great sister I am, I was never going to miss a chance to screw with him.

"Alec. Ça va?"

He glanced at me, "Cherish," then went back to playing his game. "Why the fuck are you still here?"

"Aw, c'mon brother dearest you're not excited to see me again? After narrowly escaping hell I thought you'd at least grace me with a welcome back." I whined in the most annoying voice I could put on.

"I'd rather join the Nine."

"Wow, okay, low blow. You're not even gonna ask about the flowers?"

He sighed, deciding to wrench his eyes off the screen to confirm that yes, I was indeed holding a pot of flowers.

"What do you want, Cherish?"

"Cherie, now. Decided that Cherish was a bit too pretentious, even for me. Plus it's better that I leave her trapped at the bottom of the ocean."

He gave me a look I was growing accustomed to receiving from him. Disbelief.

"Cherie, you are nothing but pretentious."

For the sake of time I was going to ignore that one. I had other things to do today after all. Infuriatingly, my lack of response was what finally got him to put the handheld down and sit up to glare at me. I walked over a counter, Alec was never far from the kitchen, and set the flowers down.

"Rhododendrons," I began, looking at the slightly wilted reddish flowers. "Symbolizing caution and danger." Temptation, as well as being an invasive species, I left unsaid.

I lifted one of the few purple flowers. This one was mine. "Lavender, ironically denoting purity and devotion." Also associated with femininity, something rather common in our heritage.

"Lastly, marigolds." Their garish yellow clashed with the color palette of reds and purple but I thought that oddly fitting.

"Cruelty, grief." Jealousy.

Plastering a smile on my lips I turned to face him. If I was feeling generous I might characterize his subdued, yet growing concern as being for me rather than of me. But I knew better than to be generous. I walked to the door.

"Ah, I almost forgot one thing." Pausing in the exit I glanced at the pot of flowers and then to him. Had to catch his reaction.

"C4, plastic explosive. Set to detonate when picked up, on a timer of indiscriminate length."

He stood up, eyes wide. Now I had ruined his day, now I could leave.

"Fuck you, Cherie." he groaned, even if I was lying he had to take it seriously.

Finally, I languidly made my exit. I wasn't in a hurry, that timer was set to go off hours from now.

Fuck you too, baby brother.


A/N: I wrote the first half of this at 6 am and the second half in a panic when I woke up.

 

[justanothercat]

Content Warning: This chapter contains non-graphic depictions of rape and incest. Please read with caution.

Skitter was near silent as she made her way through the streets of Brockton Bay, moving at a light jog. Nothing betrayed her passage but the movement of her swarm. Millions of insects flew in shifting, obscuring patterns; veils and clouds and columns moving past and around and through each other. Amongst them, the cape in control of it all was just one shadow among the countless shapes that darkened the streets, indistinguishable and unnoticed.

That stealth was a hard won skill, and well worth the effort. Her footsteps used to echo before she thought to line the bottom of her suit's shoes with layers of leftover silk to dampen their noise. Getting caught by Lung on her first night out had been more than enough motivation not to repeat that mistake.

More silk silenced the noises that would otherwise come from her chitin and kevlar plating clacking against itself as sections shifted and moved over her with every motion. She had learned that trick from Mannequin, whose joints had been so well oiled and precisely machined that he'd practically been on top of her before she'd noticed him.

Last was her habit of obscuring sightlines. That one was… harder to admit. It had been gifted to her by Leviathan. She had been reduced to a bug, a speck in his awareness, not even worth killing. She couldn't let that happen again, and the first step was not letting her enemy see her.

Skitter reflected on the lessons she'd learned as she looked up at the rising moon, her goggles tinting the world a garish yellow. Everything was always hideously blue when she took her mask off. She had meant to change it initially, but by this point it was too much a part of her image for that. Besides, it was only a problem out of costume. That was a secondary concern.

The Nine hadn't been in town long, but they'd been thorough. The civilians told a gruesome story in the way they cowered as she passed, hidden in boarded-up buildings and pressed into alcoves to avoid her attention. Not that the shadows could keep them from her notice. It was hard to tell exactly when, but she'd long since started to depend more on her bugs for reconnaissance than her eyes. The latter were fallible, their vision and periphery limited, their fidelity poor past fifty feet. The former gave her supernatural, total awareness of her surroundings. It was hard to ignore an advantage like that.

Her phone chirped from her belt, and Skitter took the opportunity to stop before the curb. "L, apple."

"A, pea. Anything yet?" Tattletale's voice sounded tinny through the phone's speaker.

Her awareness washed through the building around her, the bugs in and around the walls giving her perception. Most people didn't know how many insects were around them on a daily basis. Within the city, there were millions of them for every human being. Over the whole breadth of her range, there were billions. And each one of them formed a data point she could use to pinpoint enemy locations, actions, obstacles, anything. It had taken her some time to refine and process that information from the migraine-inducing chaotic white noise that had almost made her think she'd gone mad after gaining her powers, but she was far past those days now.

"If they're here, they're doing a good job hiding. Hard to tell anything else." Skitter's voice didn't carry much further than her mouth by design. Even if anyone had been within range to hear, the roar of the swarm drowned out anything intelligible further than a few feet. While she could choose to manipulate her mandibles, legs and wings into a semblance of a voice, she could just as easily drown out everyone else. That she had learned from Grue. Information denial was as important as its acquisition.

Tattletale sighed. "I suppose that's just as well. Jack did say they were leaving."

Skitter grunted, her attention still on the buildings around her. "Feels wrong to trust him."

A laugh came through the phone. "I can't disagree with you there. Finish up the patrol, and let me know if you find any of them picking at the scraps."

Skitter hung up without a word. She had only covered perhaps a quarter of her territory, and the day wasn't getting any younger. Without a mover power it would take hours to comb the entire area, even with her comparatively massive range helping.

Her muffled footsteps started up a steady beat again, hidden under the roar of her swarm, as she started making her way closer to the boardwalk. Tattletale was probably right, as usual. It was unlikely that Jack Slash had broken his word. He only stood to lose face in the action, and he had to know that the net around him was closing the longer he stayed. Retreating was the smart option, and while he'd break a sworn promise on a whim if he thought he could get away with it, he wasn't stupid.

Then again, she mused darkly, the last time she discounted an option open to the Nine as being tactically unsound, Mannequin had murdered a quarter of her people. She couldn't afford that again. The loss of her reputation alone would drive people elsewhere, and she wouldn't have any way to distribute food past that point. No, the only way forward was to be seen looking for the Nine publicly, even if she knew it was probably pointless.

Skitter let out a sharp, involuntary laugh at that, caught by the vicious irony. Here she was, then; doing the same things that she disdained the heroes for. A PR stunt, a patrol purely for publicity, when she could be doing more useful things elsewhere.

"We're fine here, boss, go make sure the monsters are gone." Charlotte's words from earlier that night came to mind. It was good for the kids, at least. Good for Charlotte too that she had something to do, a job to perform. If her being out here allowed them those things… maybe it was worth it.

The bugs around her buzzed and flew in complex swirling patterns as her scouts combed through the surrounding areas. Skitter nodded, turning to the South. Good, that was this section cleared. That meant there was just–

She froze, her motion aborted midstep. There was something just on the edge of her range, only barely in her territory. An abnormally sparse concentration of insects. On any other day, she would've ignored it, but she couldn't help but think back to the last time she'd felt anything like this. Insects covered every square inch of the urban landscape around her, almost without exception. There could only be one real reason for the discrepancy: enemy action. Bonesaw.

Skitter ground her teeth as she marshaled the bugs in her swarm into a more offensive formation, wasps landing nearby to pick up the spiders nestled in her hair. She couldn't afford to ignore this. She had to assume the worst. Maybe this was just a particularly industrious exterminator she'd come across, though with the city in this state she doubted it. Regardless, there was no harm in… preparing, just in case.

With her insects loaded for bear, she moved closer to the building. As she jogged, she noted the surrounding distribution of arthropods. It wasn't just at the immediate site, it was a slow gradient of lessened presence leading to a rough circle of absent space. That, more than anything else, drew her to a halt.

This was unlike Bonesaw's usual profile. Whatever gas she or Mannequin used worked instantly, and only to an exact range. Maybe this was some new tactic, a way to fool her senses by not leaving such a clean border. But it could also be someone else.

Skitter pulled the phone from her waist. "T, mango."

"R, stringbean. Any way you could make that a bit less specific, Taylor? I almost know what you're trying to say."

Skitter clenched her fist. "Not the time Tattletale. Possible contact. Bonesaw."

Instantly, the snark was gone from Tattletale's tone. "Indicators?"

"Bugs absent from an almost two hundred foot circle around the house, leading out to a slow gradient past that. Haven't seen anyone in the windows yet, and my dragonflies haven't gotten close enough to know anything else." Skitter's voice was sharp.

"Hmmm. Could be one of them, my power isn't giving me anything more specific without being there. You want backup?"

She forced herself to think. What would Tattletale being here solve for? The better her information on a subject, the more on track her analysis was, and nothing beat firsthand observation for her power's purposes. But that wasn't a guarantee that she was accurate, even if she was right there. The bank had proven that much. If this was Bonesaw, having Tattletale in her ear to play intel and arrange for warning and rescue if necessary was probably the best play.

"Hang back, but get ready to move. I'll text you the address so you know where to find me. Alert the rest of the team similarly. If I don't contact you within fifteen minutes, assume the worst."

She could almost hear Tattletale's nod across the phone. "Copy. Good luck."

Skitter put away her phone, and resumed her jog. She tried to think over her options as she made her way closer to the house. Her immediately deadly swarm was on her person, and without a specific reason she wasn't moving it from there. It was too useful as a defensive measure. Normally she would attempt to land some insects on a cape's clothes or hair to mark them positionally. More on their joints and limbs would give her a progressively better model of their body, letting her perceive and react to their movements before they even finished making them.

None of that was an option here. If this was Bonesaw–and she had to assume it was–then any insects on her would be recognized immediately. That meant her usual strategy was a no-go. What did that leave?

Her breath came in pants as the house approached, and she paused at the curb a block away to try and recover. Vision. That was the only way she could see to get intel at this point without committing. That left the dragonflies as her bug of choice. It was a good thing she had thought to breed some weeks ago, their mating season usually ended about a month and a half back.

With a buzz, her scouts were off. They easily cleared the roofs of the apartments around her, soaring to land on the lintel of a window by the attic of the house. She had been searching for a way in this entire time, and found one in the handiwork of what must have been a termite infestation chewing most of the way through the bottom of the frame before whoever this was had cleared them out. It was trivial to fly some up, clasped between the mandibles of the large wasps native to the area, to finish the job. The dragonflies were just barely able to squeeze through the opening, but it was enough.

Skitter focused as the insects made their way through the house. Dragonflies were masters of powered flight, but she had to force them to glide as much as possible while mapping the interior. She didn't know how sensitive the mystery cape's senses were, but she wasn't discounting anything.

Her dragonflies found what they were looking for in the master bedroom. Bug senses were usually harsh and discordant at the best of times, but hearing was usually the easiest sense to tap into. The vibrations of most sounds were so powerful that insects literally resonated in place. This let her know that whoever she was looking for was in the middle of the room talking, likely sitting on a bed. Skitter slowly gathered her dragonflies in a hopefully unobtrusive position just above the overhand for the door, and forced their senses to resolve into an image. She held back a groan at the expected spike of pain. Trying to force hearing from insects was bad enough, sight was worse. The sheer sensory disconnect was too much. But she only needed a snapshot here, to judge before she went in. Finally, for a moment, she was seeing through the eyes of her insects. She instantly regretted it.

The cape was Amy Dallon. Panacea. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was the… thing on the bed. A misshapen mess of body parts, flesh, and sensory organs. It was hard to tell what it was, to be truthful, but the golden locks of hair and glazed blue eyes confirmed her suspicions. Glory Girl. Fuck.

Skitter's eyes were drawn to Amy. "Vicky," she said, panting, "you have no idea how good this feels. How long I've waited. But it's okay now, I promise. I'll fix you after, you won't have to remember a thing. I just–I need this. You understand. Of course you understand."

Skitter turned, almost involuntarily, to the memories of Tattletale confronting Amy almost a week ago. Her accusations of mastering, of manipulating her sister. How Amy had never once denied it, how she'd flown off with her sister instead. That look in her eyes when Skitter had left her in the hospital to spread the cure to the rest of the city.

She couldn't deny it any longer. She was watching a hero abuse, rape her sister, warping her into that thing, all while mastering her so that she couldn't resist. Fuck.

Her heart pounded as she started running again. No. She had to do something. She couldn't afford to call Tattletale or anyone else, not right now. Regardless of the risk of being caught, of the fact that Amy was one of the worst match-ups for her power, she had to act. What she had already seen was going to torture her for days, she knew. Nevermind what Glory Girl must have been going through this entire time. How long had she been like this? Hours? Days?

The bugs on Skitter's person buzzed angrily. Finding that out could come later. Right now she had to interrupt Panacea. How could she neutralize her though? Her mind raced as she crossed the sidewalk and slipped through a gap she'd opened in the door earlier. Bugs on her person was a terrible idea, the bank had proved as much. Anything Panacea touched, she could suborn. That meant if she did strike, it had to be sudden and overwhelming.

But, while a strike from ambush was her preferred method… it wouldn't work in this case. Panacea was too close to Glory Girl, and the last time she'd used her as a defensive shield. Skitter couldn't count on the other cape being immobile. That meant intimidation, with a fall back of hand to hand. With the touch ranged biokinetic. Great.

She didn't break the bedroom door down, but it felt like a near thing as she slammed it open. "Get off her. Now."

Panacea slowly looked up, pulling her head away from her sister, face still glistening. "S-skitter?! What are you doing here?"

Skitter took a step forward. "None of your concern. Back away, now."

Panacea swallowed, scrambling away from the bed before straightening up to meet her eyes. "I don't think so."

Skitter slowly drew her combat baton. "Think carefully about your next few words, Amy"

Amy's face hardened. "No. You don't understand. I was healing her. You interrupted. I was so close, and you're distracting me. Y-you need to leave so I can finish."

"Look at her, Amy!" Skitter shouted, the swarm vibrating harshly as she gestured at what was left of Glory Girl. "Sister or not, this is unacceptable! We gave her to you to heal, not to do this!"

"Y-you don't get it," Amy said. "I've been keeping myself bound by my rules for so long, when I finally let go I didn't know where to stop! And I-I only changed one thing. One tiny thing. But then she was so angry and I tried to fix her but she wouldn't let me and then Crawler got her and I had to heal her but I couldn't and–"

"Enough."

Skitter's swarm made the walls boil and the ceiling churn. The room darkened as a roaring mass pressed itself against the window, drumming countless mandibles and stingers against the glass. Her form blurred and expanded, bugs spread out from her like a dark, writhing halo. Towards the edge of her range, wasps and cockroaches brutally massacred a few rats in a dumpster. It didn't help.

"I don't care what you did," she growled. "I don't care what you meant to do. Fix. Her."

Amy's lip trembled. "I-I can't! You don't know what it's like, to see her like I do! Only all my mistakes, so wound up and tangled over themselves, I wouldn't even know where to start! I can't, I keep trying but I just can't."

Skitter was still for a moment, considering. As hard as it was to say… Amy was telling the truth here. Everything from her body language to her tone to the smell of her sweat said as much.

She sighed, slowly lowering the baton. "Fine then. You can't make it like this never happened. Just put her back as close as you can to the way she was. Surely you can do that much."

Amy glared at her. "Like you'd know! I've just been trying to clear up this mess since the bank, the mess you left behind! You and that purple bitch you were with. If you hadn't been there, none of this would've happened!"

Skitter froze, and carefully let out a breath as she clenched her baton. This was for the girl on that bed. It was worth admitting weakness.

"Maybe that's true. Maybe this is my fault. But for just this once, Amy, prove me wrong. Prove that you're still Panacea, the hero that can fix anything. Out of heroism, out of anger, out of sheer spite, I don't care. Fix her."

There was a pause. For a moment, she almost thought it worked.

"N-no. You need to get out. Now. Then I can focus. Then I can…" Amy's voice trailed off, but Skitter had heard enough. She knew what would happen if she left. The same thing as what happened after she trusted Amy with her sister after the hospital. No. Not again. There was only one option left.

She took a step forward.

Amy instantly tensed. "Don't come any closer! I have bacteria on my skin, I'll make something out of them and kill you!"

Skitter paused. Amy probably could, if she chose to. The former hero certainly had no reason to hold back. Slowly, her gaze turned to the girl on the bed. To Victoria Dallon. The one she was doing all this for. Who she'd first seen almost pulverizing her at a bank months ago. Was this really worth it? Would anyone notice if she left her?

…Taylor. Taylor would notice. The girl who set out months ago, trying to be a hero.

Fuck.

She straightened, her eyes looking into Amy's. The other cape seemed to sense she wasn't leaving. "What do you think you're doing?"

"You will fix her." Skitter drew the gun from her belt. It was heavy in her hand, leaden and cold and solid. But lighter than the guilt would be of leaving.

"We just went over this, you–"

"You will fix her, because I will leave you no choice." Skitter's voice was harsh and merciless, wasps and spiders buzzing through every syllable.

"But I can't, that's what I'm trying to tell you!"

Skitter took a long look at the cape in front of her, and the misshapen form of her sister behind. "Fine. Then that leaves me only one option."

Her swarm surged forward, coating Victoria.

"No! What are you doing!"

Skitter's pale yellow eyes stared straight into Amy's. "My bugs can sense the smallest pheromone or temperature change. If you stop healing her to put insecticide in her veins to keep me away, I'll know. If you try to use her forcefield or aura to drive me off, I'll know. If you do anything other than erase your mistake, I'll know. You can try. It might work. It might not. But if you fail, if you don't heal her…"

Every insect froze for a second as she cocked the gun, and the click of the safety and slide were deafening in the sudden quiet.

"... then I'll put you out of her misery, Amy, and kill your sister myself."

---

She wished there had been another way.

Skitter let out a slow breath, as she returned home to her lair from a meeting with her team. The group had tried to pressure her again about how she'd found Victoria. Considering how immediately relevant it had become, they had a right to ask. It still wasn't her story and thinking about it wasn't going to help anyone.

Grue had been… less than pleased with how the situation with the Protectorate patrol had resolved itself, despite her assurances. Alec had just laughed, while Bitch herself was almost murderous over her 'hiding' Victoria from them. Tattletale, however, was strangely silent. She'd have to talk to her later, it seemed.

Charlotte stood up from her seat in the kitchen when Skitter opened the door, walking to the entryway. "Welcome back, boss. Any changes?"

Skitter stretched, giving the surrounding area one last cursory glance. "Nothing of note. The mission is on for tomorrow, so you'll have to manage without me. Otherwise, no changes."

She glanced towards the back. Charlotte seemed to pick up her unspoken question. "She hasn't moved yet. I looked in a couple of hours ago, left her a plate, took the empty one. She didn't even glance up."

Skitter suppressed a groan. Great. Victoria had shut herself in her room immediately after they came back from the disastrous walk, refusing to leave or talk to anyone. She had tried to respect her privacy, but it had been days with no changes. If not for the bugs she had her tagged with confirming that she was still there, she'd be worried the former hero had left.

And now, it seemed, she had to play therapist. Or at least, the closest thing any of them had to one. She wasn't equipped for this; she couldn't talk to her own father to save her life! But, as usual, no one else was willing or able to do it. Charlotte, despite her best efforts, couldn't let go of her bad first impression. Tattletale had the opposite problem. Which left her.

Skitter slowly walked up to the door, weighing her options. What would be the best approach? She could try and talk with her bugs in the room, but Victoria might see that as intruding on her space, and lash out violently. Passing a note through the gap wouldn't guarantee a response, and Victoria hadn't written back to any of the previous ones. At this point, something had to be done.

"Victoria?" Skitter asked, projecting her voice through the wood. "I need you to knock twice if you can hear me." There was a pause. The lone midge she had in Victoria's hair shifted, turning towards the door. Skitter waited for what seemed like an hour, but probably wasn't more than twenty seconds.
And then...

Two knocks.

She sighed. That was the first hurdle cleared. "I'm going to come in. I need to talk to you. Knock twice if you understand what I've said."

Another two knocks, more hesitant this time.

This was the worst of it. She hated to ask but… for her own safety, she had to. "I need to confirm that you will not attack me as I enter. This is your space, and I am entering it."

There was a long pause, nearly a full minute. For once, Skitter tried not to eavesdrop on what soft noises came beyond the door. She was mostly successful.

Two knocks.

"Good. I'm coming in."

Skitter opened the door, and winced. The room wasn't trashed, but it definitely felt like someone had been living in it full time for days. Clothes were unwashed and strewn across the floor. A book in ASL, one she had managed to get a few days ago and slid under the door, was left half open on the bedside table.

And in the center was Victoria, sitting on the bed, hands holding her knees, her face hidden. She hadn't showered, and the dye had left her hair dull and flat and stiff, falling over her forehead in brittle, greasy strands. It stunk. It didn't reach the door, but Skitter's bugs could smell it easily; the ammonia was starting to reek. Skitter didn't know how she could stand it. If it was her, she'd be frantic to be clean.

She tried not to let her frustration show. At herself, at the situation, it didn't matter. Victoria would take it the wrong way, and it wasn't helpful. "Victoria. I need you to listen."

The girl softly nodded, not raising her head from between her knees.

"I'm going out later today to meet with a cape. An independent, Parian. You might've heard of her?"

Another hesitant nod.

"Good. I'm talking to her about potentially helping the people she's sheltering. I need you to come with me."

Victoria's head shot up, her wide green eyes meeting hers. She didn't need a notepad to read the confusion, the fear, the disbelief on her face. Something in her chest twisted.

"I know you might have questions. And I'll answer them. But I need to know one thing."

Those green eyes didn't leave hers.

"Do you trust me?"


A/N:

Alright. So now you know how this canon divergence started. Skitter patrolled one street to the left. That's all it took. I really wanted to write this chapter, ever since the fic started. On the Monday I wrote this, I started at 2.1 and I wrote eleven thousand words just to get here. And I'm glad I did. Skitter is a fascinating viewpoint to write from, especially when you've spent so much time outside her head looking at her. I hope I helped that come across right.

Today's rec is Ghost in the Flesh by Redcoat Officer (again). As with all of his work, this one is fantastic. It's also long and complete! Basically it follows Sonnie from Sonnie's Edge who's been thrown into Brockton Bay for little apparent reason (at first), stuck in her Beastie. It's a really interesting mix of the usual Case 53 fic, but centering a protagonist who knows exactly who they were up until this point. Go give it a read.

 

[Aleph]

Okay, I've been doing a lot of commenting and editing in the Discord for this fic, so I have been compelled by @justanothercat figure I might as well translate them over here. I'm going to be compressing all of my deep-dives into every chapter in Arc 1 into this one post, so I'm going to spoiler-block them just so it doesn't take up a mile and a half of screen-space, because some of these breakdowns are going to get pretty in-depth.

This is copied over from SB and so the quotes lead there and are probably broken, don't worry about it. I'll go fix them later, maybe.

Spoiler: Synopsis

The summary is one of the most crucial, important parts of any story; it is the only part that you can guarantee everyone who finds your story will see, and it is the pitch you give to everyone to convince them to click through in the first place. Fuck up here and it won't matter how good your prose or characterisation or themes or action choreography or anything else are; if the elevator pitch sucks, nobody will read it.

"In the stories, the girl gets saved from the evil villain by the hero, and they lived happily ever after. So why is it a villain had to rescue me from real evil? From my sister?"

Victoria wakes up in the aftermath of the Slaughterhouse Nine to Skitter standing over her, with some choices to make.

Click to shrink...

This is a very, very good one. Conveys the whole theme of the story, check. Grabs the attention, check. Hints at the conflicts inside, check. Succinct and simple second paragraph that doesn't overdo it, check.

A++, this is legit a really, really good summary, and the best credit I can give it is the fact that when I scrolled up through the list of fic chapter announcements on the Discord to see what had been posted recently, this summary of all of them was the one that grabbed me by the lapels and made me go I want to see where this goes.

I may be somewhat biased here, because I'm British and therefore adore understated descriptions; they appeal to me both on a humour level but also much more on an elegance of language level. But that second paragraph in particular, the one after the quote, is both very elegantly efficient with its wording: "this is the starting line, this is a hint at what it's facing", but also has an ambiguous double-meaning. Because it means Victoria has some choices to make, certainly. But it can also be read to mean that Skitter does, too.

Spoiler: 1.1

"You did what I asked, now leave before I make you."

I blinked, trying to place the voice. It was familiar, but it had been so long since anyone other than her spoke to me, I felt…

"No, I need to explain, to tell her why -"

I flinched back, tensing as I grabbed the edge of the bathtub I was in. Porcelain cracked and splintered under my…fingers? Fingers. I had fingers. I don't know why, but that felt important.

"I don't care. Leave. Now." The voice came out harsh, as swarms of blackness chittered over the walls behind us.

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So, starting off, one of the big questions this fic raises right at the start and never answers in explicit detail is exactly what went down between Skitter and Panacea. When we get it explained to us, it is specifically getting it explained to us, in-character, by the characters involved - specifically Lisa and Taylor. Or rather, Tattletale and Skitter.

As such, it's a messy, partial account subject to the natural limits of people summarising a confusing and chaotic time period. There are gaps and details left out both for brevity and to avoid triggering Victoria and for reasons of the girls' own. Some things Skitter insists on making clear - like that she left Victoria in Amy's hands - but others are largely glossed over as unimportant.

For instance: how exactly did Skitter force Amy to undo what she did? Her power makes "threaten with bugs" at the very least less effective than usual, unless Amy didn't think she could "kill or disable on touch" in sufficient numbers to stop an assault. Was it weaponised guilt? Sheer intimidating charisma? A gun, or knife, or similar non-organic weapon? We don't know. It probably doesn't really matter to Victoria. But it's a minor mystery that the narrative hooks us with immediately; the end of a confrontation that conveys in only five lines who is speaking and what the outcome of the previous scene was, but leaves the details of what led to it vague and suggestive - details that are only cleared up now, fourteen chapters in, via a Skitter Interlude flashback.

The first sentence of a story, the first paragraph and the first page are the most important in the whole thing. You need a strong hook to grab people by the interest and get them wanting more. Raising questions is a good way to do this. Conveying an interesting situation succinctly that has a lot of potential places to go is another. Setting up a tense situation where the reader is anticipating possible strife is a third.

These five lines do all three.

I flinched back, tensing as I grabbed the edge of the bathtub I was in. Porcelain cracked and splintered under my…fingers? Fingers. I had fingers. I don't know why, but that felt important.

(...)

I shut my eyes, clamping my hands over my ears. It was too much, I couldn't process. I couldn't let anyone see me, smell me, touch me. There was the distant sound of a door closing, and then silence.

"Glory Girl?" the voice said. I shut my eyes, my nails digging into my palms. God I never thought I'd be so happy to be able to do that again.

(...)

The porcelain beneath me was cold and hard. The hand wasn't. It was warm. Warm hand on skin, reaching, grabbing, pulling, twisting. Clothes slipping off to the floor. Sight line bleeding and bending around the edges. The sound of breathing, hot and desperate.

I screeched and flinched back into the corner. Nononono not that… not her, never her, please don't make me go back, please I don't want it. I'll do anything just make it stop-

(...)

"Are you able to talk?"

I opened my mouth and-

"____________"

"Okay," Skitter said, even as my thoughts kept spinning, "different question. Do you want to talk?"

I shook my head. Talking led to thinking led to remembering led to— no. Easier not to. Safer.

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Another thing we set up very early and very well is Victoria's trauma. I personally do not speak from personal experience with what this kind of violation feels like (thankfully), but I've read first-hand accounts. This makes clear immediately what take on Amy the fic is going with, and does so starkly, uncompromisingly and very effectively.

I don't have as much to dig into about this, but yeah, it's a very strong starting place for Victoria that doesn't downplay the horror of her ordeal and makes clear immediately that recovery is not going to be a quick, easy or trivial process; that what happened to her was terrible, and hurt her very badly, and will not be brushed over by the narrative or treated lightly.

Again, good work.

Skitter turned around. "I'll get you something more permanent to wear. Go get cleaned up." She paused as she headed out of the door, her hand catching on the frame. It was minute, but I could see her fingers twitching. If I didn't know any better, I'd think I was talking to a girl just as out of her depth as I was. "I didn't see anything. I won't watch. Knock on the door when you're done." Then she left.

(...)

Was this the moment where her patience finally ran out? Where she blasted past what remained of my boundaries and forced me to dress in my old clothes? If not now, then when? Was this even still the same Skitter that I met back at the bank so long ago? The one who casually held the lives of everyone in the building in the palm of her hand. The one who led to this entire mess in the first place. She certainly didn't seem to be acting like it. That Skitter would have just… left. At best. In retrospect, the Undersiders' MO until that point didn't match the bank job or everything that came after. It was also Skitter's debut, and I couldn't help but think the two were connected. How much of that had been…?

(...)

I caught a bitter twist of a smile on my face as I turned to put up my hair with the hairband Skitter had left. Speaking of which, that left my final option. Skitter. One of the… maybe not the biggest villains in the bay, but the scariest. This was a villain who had chosen to keep an entire bank hostage with black widows, who fought Bakuda head on without flinching, who put down Lung when her partner had already been out cold. Someone so unpredictable that the Protectorate regularly told me not to engage with if I spotted her. A villain who, when deprived of any other options, picked up one of Armsmaster's halberds, ran up to Leviathan, and stuck it where it hurt. The same person who… helped me, when she had no reason to.

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Another mystery this sets up early is Skitter. And this is an interesting one, because it's a mystery suffused with dramatic irony, in that the reader has much more knowledge of Skitter than Victoria. Now, I'm somewhat biased here because I adore external viewpoints of protagonist characters whose head the narrative spends most of its time in; I love it every time it happens with Keris enough that it's a semi-common thing.

(As an example aside; I still remember one of the scenes in A Cloudy Path where after multiple arcs of Taylor being a neurotic, anxiety-riddled, overwhelmed, desperately-paddling-to-keep-up mess behind her mask who practices how she holds herself to not look stupid and is constantly overthinking and insecure, we finally get to see Aeon from the PoV of a refugee picking her way through post-Leviathan Brockton Bay. And she's described as this majestic, almost ethereal being, untouched by the grime or the ruins of the city, floating effortlessly above the ground, her voice clear and ringing, utterly still in the air, as if she's not even mortal.)

But regardless of personal taste, this gives a great duality where, in these sections, we as the reader can guess at some of what's likely going on behind the mask; we can model Taylor off what we know of her from canon and draw conclusions and make deductions about how she probably is nervous and out of her depth. But the narrative doesn't show it. She looks as goddamn inscrutable to us as she does to Victoria. So, like seeing through a set of old red-and-blue-style 3D cinema glasses, we get both views. We can intuit what Taylor is likely thinking under Skitter's impassive facade; we know the currents and the winds that shape the sailing patterns in there, but the precise movements of ships on the sea of her thoughts are still left a mystery to us. It's really fun when seeing a character from the outside like this instead of from comfortably behind their eyes or shoulder effectively renders them a totally different and much scarier person.

This is, again, a hook that works very well at getting the readers invested and keeping them reading more, wanting to see when what they know of Taylor Hebert will come out from what Victoria is learning about Skitter. Because the question is also raised as to exactly how healthy the whole Punchbuggy relationship is in this, and at least early on...

Skitter had been, well, not nice, but definitely not who I remembered her being. And that brought up a whole other issue. How sure could I be of any of this? I couldn't exactly trust my memory since… that had happened to me.

I shuddered, and leaned back against the wall. The cool tile felt slick with my sweat and… whatever else was left on the back of my neck.

Okay, I could at least acknowledge that my recollection of events was suspect. And more to the point, nothing said that anything before that point couldn't have been altered. Maybe Skitter herself really had been planning this all since the bank, and I couldn't know any better. For all I knew this was a scheme between the two of them and—

(...)

I wished I could laugh at that. Comfortable, sure. At least she'd given me a familiar setting to focus on. Truce rules. No mastering, no secret identity tricks, no going after people for whatever else they did in costume. Fine, I could deal with that. The last thing I needed was Skitter going after the rest of my family. My identity was a matter of public record, sure, but there was a difference between fighting one of us at "work" and showing up at midnight unannounced. Aunt Jess had found that out the hard way.

Taking my silence as a response, Skitter continued, "My teammate is close by. Do you want to talk beforehand?"

I paused. She mentioned her team earlier, but she didn't say which one was coming now. For all I knew, it might be that bitch Tattletale again. Or Hellhound with those nightmare dogs of hers. Or someone even worse. I didn't know what to expect with the rest of her team. Skitter might be terrifying, but at least she was a somewhat known quantity.

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... it is made very clear that, yes, Victoria is still working within the mindset of someone who has very, very recently been betrayed and horribly abused by someone she trusted. She is paranoid, she is twitchy, she is looking for intention to do her harm in every action or shadow near her. Skitter scares her, she is spiralling down into elaborate catastrophising about what her intentions might be, and the only thing that settles her in this first chapter is the familiar, "safe" ground of her cape life and the Truce; anchor points she understands and which aren't tainted by the rape; things she has seen tested - by Skitter - and confirmed as real, actual constraints on what capes will and will not do. The Unwritten Rules are bullshit, but the Truce does have real binding power.

Even then, though, she's jumpy and twitchy and considers Skitter, not safe, not even trustworthy, but specifically a known quantity. She knows what Skitter is. Her current presiding trauma is that someone she thought was safe turned out to be horribly, horribly dangerous in a viscerally scarring way. Skitter is not safe, but she knows how Skitter is unsafe, and it's both a way that has nothing to do with rape or sex or the ways she was attacked, and which she is also provisionally safe from as long as her shield remains up. It is also a form of danger that is unlikely to be hiding an Amy-style threat - if Skitter had urges like that, she would not play the creepy intimidating bug Master.

(This may or may not be true; sexual abusers can wear as many faces as there are people, but it is at least what Victoria is subconsciously assuming based on the experience she has just had with sexual abuse and what she is now modelling it based on. An open, creepy, intimidating, in-your-face threat that subjects you to intense pain is not one that sidles up to you, takes advantage of your trust and then molests and controls you.)

Some notes: this story deals heavily with themes of rape recovery and trauma. That's the central narrative. Please be aware of that, and protect yourselves accordingly. I'll note that I haven't personally experienced what Victoria has gone through here, so while I've done my research and I have sensitivity readers, I'm going to get some things wrong. I'm open (and eager!) for feedback, but please keep it constructive. Also while this story is going to be canon compliant in regards to the timeline for a while, it will eventually diverge. I'm choosing to stretch the time between existing events after the S9 to give Victoria a more realistic time for her recovery arc. Please keep this in mind.

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And then a solid author's note, with good "before you start reading" content warnings in the tags.

Spoiler: 1.2

"Well don't sound too excited to see me," Tattletale drawled as she settled into the chair across from me at the table.

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I like the chapter transitions in play here. This is good, snappy and efficient with its time; doesn't waste wordcount, just gets straight to the important bit: Tattletale is now here and is Causing Problems And Tale-ing Tattles.

There was a faint whining in my ears as I was thrown back almost a month ago to that day in the bank.

(...)

Most people think tunnel vision happens when something makes you so angry, so emotional, so vulnerable, that everything seems to fall away. Your vision narrows, the periphery goes dark, and everything seems tinged with red. Well, it's nothing like that.

Maybe tunnel vision isn't even the right word, but in this moment, I couldn't find anything else that felt like it fit.

Everything seemed sharper, harder. My vision never felt clearer, but instead of Tattletale's words, it was the tiniest things I found myself focusing on. The crease at the corner of her eye behind her domino mask. Was she angry? Nervous? The incessant ticking of the clock on the wall. I hadn't even noticed that when I sat down, yet now I couldn't unhear it. The low grinding of my fingernails into the hardwood of the table as I tried to keep myself from… doing something I knew I'd regret.

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Sensory details are good. This is a story about trauma, and so this is something you want to keep in mind: keep these around. Partly it just makes for good, flavourful writing that feels grounded in the characters' subjective experiences and not a bland white room that has no texture. But for trauma of this kind especially, this kind of viscerality and sensory impact is going to be super important in selling the scars from what Amy did to her. Emotion is based in the body; our reactions to strong feelings are physical. It's bloody hard to describe most of them with the crude limitations of language, but if you can convey the sensation of that happy little tense-and-tremble ripple that starts in your belly and shivers gleefully through your ribcage and spine as you wriggle in your seat with excitement at something, it makes the reader feel it far more than if you just go "I felt excited and happy".

TL,DR do more of that, especially since, right now, Victoria is probably a lot more comfortable labelling the physical responses than matching them to the emotions they stem from. She can say she feels nauseous, that she can feel her shoulders hunching instinctively, that her skin feels clammy, that she's suddenly tired and just wants to go to bed and not deal with people - and not label it as "ashamed" or "violated".

A word cut through the noise.

"Tattletale." Skitter was looking at her, posture loose and relaxed.

"Hey, I was playing nice, no need to get upset," Tattletale said, almost deliberately casual as she glanced over at Skitter.

"No, you weren't," she said.

The noise was all around me now, the constant whining and scratching. I turned my head to the side and suddenly I understood why. Skitter hadn't raised her voice – she didn't have to. The wall behind her was writhing, cockroaches and wasps and spiders and ants and who knew what crawling over each other in a frenzy. It was enough to drown us. A distant part of me thought back to my Parahuman studies course. Was this an instinctual reaction? A display of power? How fine was her control over these insects? Was the Master component all I had to worry about?

I swallowed roughly. Skitter was staring – glaring – at Tattletale, who seemed to be equally as worried about the situation as I was. Her eyes were wide, one hand clenched around the armrest as the other seemed to slowly be moving towards her belt. Shit. I had to break up this situation, but I couldn't think of the words.

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Again, that dramatic irony in Skitter's cryptic front. And also the horror of her power. Good catch that the details of Skitter's range and the level of control she has over her bugs and how much feedback she gets from them is very poorly understood at the moment; Victoria doesn't know, and is consequentially underestimating it quite a bit because Taylor's power is goddamn fucking terrifying and utterly broken, who the fuck would call this nightmare a "weak" power?

Ahem. Sorry. Minor bug-bear there. Moving on.

Did I remember…? I remember going in for a punch, the wind whistling in my hair. I was unstoppable. Then a hit, and pain. Pain like I never felt before, searing through my skin, my clothes, my hair, my eyes–

I knocked once.

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First thing that isn't just unambiguous praise here, though not criticism either. Obviously, Amy and the rape have rather overshadowed Crawler and the acid. But Crawler and the acid was still, as shown here, a nightmarish experience. Probably literally. I do feel that the acid should also have left her with some trauma, and as she processes what Amy did to her, it's going to make room for some of what Crawler did to her to start bubbling back up. Especially whenever she gets hurt, because her shield means that Victoria largely lives in a world without pain, and that means that when pain does happen, it is going to be a very, very strong sensory reminder of the last time she felt it.

Here you do however have a solid positive, in that because of how the human brain works, she's not going to have the acid trauma come up until she has the mental space for it. Like, this is how trauma works and why backsliding seems to be a thing. It's not always that we truly "backslide", it's often just that we deal with some stuff and that gives us space to start processing other stuff that we'd just totally shut down and repressed up to that point, so it feels like the "new" stuff came out of nowhere just as we were getting better, when in truth it was there all along, just unaddressed.

It just so happens that as a happy side-effect of this, it spaces out Victoria's trauma at a narrative pacing level too; the acid stuff is unlikely to come up until she's dealt with enough of what Amy did to her to make room for it.

Moving forward, here we have Skitter and Tattletale unpacking what happened to her. This is good, but I mostly broke it down in chapter one, talking about how it's a good way of doing it, putting it in the mouths of the characters themselves. I won't go line by line, but some things that jump out at me:

I stared at her, my focus narrowing. This was it. Tattletale. She was the reason why Amy got her hands on me in the first place. I had taken such pains to pull away, to police myself, despite that thing that she put in my head, and yet she got me in the end anyways. Turned me into that wretch.

Grey fingers snapped in front of me. "Breathe, Victoria."

I gasped, air flooding into me, into my lungs. Mine. I controlled them. I flexed my joints slowly; hands, elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles. Head to toe. I opened my eyes—when had I closed them?—and looked into Skitter's eyes.

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This is good. It's a very understandable initial response, but it's showing immediately afterwards that this is not Collateral Damage Barbie as she is so often depicted in fanon. This Victoria is trained - may well have sought out training on her own initiative - on the psychology of trauma. There are bits later on I recall where she notes her own responses and knows offhand how the healing process functions. She's learned the tools and processes to break out of a spiral or panic attack, and uses them. This is someone who has put thought, effort and study into knowing how to help frightened, hurt people, not just by punching the big obvious threat, but by addressing the hurts that aren't physical and giving them psychological help.

But now she is the victim. And she has the toolbox to help herself, but she never thought when she acquired it that she would ever be in need of it herself. She always thought of herself as the strong one who would be caring for other broken people. She didn't expect to be the one who got broken. Which is sadly very true to life. We never think it will happen to us, and there's an almost unavoidable element of victim blaming we're naturally inclined towards just to avoid tackling the scary thought that it could. "Oh, there must have been signs", people say, because they don't want to confront the idea that there weren't, or that they would have missed the signs too and might be missing them right now

Skitter knocked twice on the table. I startled. Why had she knocked? Surely she could've said something.

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This part is interesting, because, mm. There's a lot of things that could be going through Taylor's head here. And I do wonder - and this is one of the "ambiguous cryptic Skitter dramatic irony" things - how much Taylor is identifying with Victoria right now. She was, after all, also betrayed by the girl she was very close to, with no apparent warning. And this seems to be a deliberate case of putting herself on Victoria's level, mirroring what she's able to do, to build identification and trust. I'm not sure whether she's doing it intentionally with that in mind - I have no doubt she would, I just don't know if she knows that much psychology - but it's an interesting action from her regardless

She took a deep breath. "It meant leaving you behind. With her. I knew what she did, I told her to fix you, told myself that the Nine and the rest of the city were too important, but what matters is I left you there."

My mouth opened before my brain quite realized I had nothing to say. What could anyone say to that? To someone admitting to your face that their mistake led to you getting… I swallowed tightly. Okay. I wasn't… able to deal with this right now. But I could focus on one thing. Skitter didn't need to tell me this — it served her purposes much more to gloss it over — but she was highlighting it rather than letting me put the pieces together myself. It didn't make it okay… but it was enough to make me want to hear the rest of it.

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And it then leads into her confessing - indeed, outright stating - her complicity in Victoria's ordeal. Which I actually think is one of the very early things that starts building trust with Victoria. It's still not a healthy positive relationship, but it entrenches Skitter much, much more firmly in the camp of the Known Evil. She's still dangerous, she's still creepy, she's still a very real potential threat. Victoria still, as shown in later chapters, fears Skitter's wrath and isn't sure if she'll react with sudden, excessive violence to her privacy being violated or her rules being disobeyed.

But this choice right here; this brutal honesty as she comes clean about the fact she left Victoria in Amy's hands and why and that her reasons don't justify her choice - this, I think, it what convinces Victoria's subconscious, before she's known the girl for more than an hour, that Skitter Is Not Amy Dallon.

It's not much of a foundation. It's not, in and of itself, a positive relationship. But it's a foot in the door that I think all the later choices to go with Skitter, to trust her enough to follow her back to her territory and a place she controls, to sleep in her house, to stay with her, to not violate her privacy - all of them are built on this. Skitter Is Not Amy. She may be a monster. But she's an honest monster. She will not lie and sidle up sideways and betray Victoria. If she hurts her, she will do it to Victoria's face.

And that's much, much less frightening to Victoria than going home.

"But as far as the stuff related to you, that's all we know about. Normally we wouldn't go so far out of our way for a hero, but..." She gave a meaningful look at Skitter. "Well, the Rules may be Unwritten, but that doesn't mean that we don't treat them seriously. Unlike some people."

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Mmm. Yeah, okay, so. Question. What's your take on the Rules? Because certainly my view is that they're bullshit and that Lisa made them up, or at the very least vastly, vastly overstated them, to talk Taylor into joining up with a little villain gang of "robbers" who were just playing a harmless game with the "cops". They definitely don't apply to villains in anything but the absolute broadest possible terms of "things people vaguely try to avoid getting caught doing, because it makes the people you do them to retaliate hard and gets you more PRT attention. The entire E88 gets outed and no other villain group appears to particularly give a flying shit, ffs.

It seems like SiNC takes a similar jaded eye to them, which I like - they see entirely too much universality in fanon.

I let out a slow sigh as I tried to gather myself. It was more difficult than I'd like. You grow up with your family telling you your whole life that you're going to be someone – somebody important. That you're going to help people, put a smile on kids' faces, beat the bad guys black and blue and red, and the fantasy gets to you so bad that eventually it becomes reality. You throw yourself so hard into it that afterwards that, at some point, you forget you were anything else.

Eventually, things start to make sense again. Everyone has a role, and you get the one you were told to fit in since you were a kid. But then, when the chips are down and the people you… care for… turn on you. It's the villains you were fighting against that bail you out. How is someone supposed to respond to any of that? What was I supposed to do with that? Even if I assumed that what they just told me is true, which I had no real reason to, that meant what? Did I arrest them? After they saved me? Did I leave and tacitly ignore two of the biggest villains in the Bay right in front of me? If I left where would I go? To the family that had abandoned me? Would they even believe me over her? To the PRT after they hung the villains and me out to dry when bombing the Nine?

(Would the Victoria who went into that basketball game recognize who stared back at her in the mirror now? Should she?)

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And yeah, some excellent introspection that summarises and starts off Victoria's journey here. Because while canon Victoria isn't Fanon Collateral Damage Barbie, she does have flaws, and one of the really big ones is a very black-and-white sense of the world. That's one of the major differences between Glory Girl and Antares (whose "warrior monk" self-identification I'm very much a fan of and who approaches Ahsoka in being a very pure Paragon archetype). And having that naivety fractured here has already put her on the path to becoming, if not literally Antares, then at least more Antares than Glory Girl. It'll be a long way to get there, but she's been pushed (by Amy) down that first and most important flight of stairs, and is now wrestling with the question of moral complexity and where the lines of "good guy" and "bad guy" are drawn and who even defines what they mean or who should go in which box.

I had some ideas for specific conversations/issues Victoria would have with characters surrounding Taylor immediately, and Lisa was one of the most obvious. I love her, but she really does suffer from chronic foot-in-mouth disease.

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I also love Lisa. And yes. Yes she does.

That's part of why I love her, tbh.

Spoiler: 1.3

Brockton Bay had seen better days. I knew that much before I stepped outside into the gloomy June air, but it bore repeating. Leviathan had crashed into the boardwalk and coastline with all the impact and subtlety of a bomb, and the weather hadn't been kind on what remained. Warehouses and open lots, already left in a state of disrepair from decades of economic stagnation, were literally rotting at the seams. The temporary camps and edifices that were starting to replace them weren't much better.

The scars of the Nine covered and crossed all of this. I could see the blackened crater of Piggot's plan to fire bomb them towards downtown. Tattletale hadn't mentioned any civilian casualties in her summary of the past few days, and I still wasn't sure whether to thank or curse her for that. There was still smoke rising from somewhere in between the bomb site and wherever we were. I had no idea what had caused that, but I doubted the fire department would be getting to it soon– if ever. The average time to get running water restored after a Leviathan attack trended towards six months on an optimistic estimate.

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So, refugee life. This is set in post-Leviathan Brockton Bay, and I'm sorry Cat but I am once again going to say that A Cloudy Path is one of the best portrayals of such that I've ever read; it felt like a decaying, flooded city of ruins and refugees and desperate people. This description lands, but there's another factor involved that I think makes it fall a little short.

And it is, to summarise, people. Cast size is very important in a narrative and fundamentally shapes what the story feels like. Some books have vast, sprawling, labyrinthine casts, Worm among them. Others are incredibly tightly focused, with single-digit casts. To be clear, I'm not talking so much about characters mentioned in the story, or even characters who Do Things - I am specifically talking about the people who get, if you like, screen billing.

Impurity's cast is, essentially:

• Primary cast: Taylor, Amy, Megumi, Purity.
• Secondary cast: Emma, Annette, Portent, Dean, Victoria, Lisa/Dox, Theo, Armsmaster, Miss Militia
• Tertiary cast: Uber and Leet, Piggot, Leah and Sam, Carol, Triumph, Dauntless, Mister Crypsis, Velocity, Megumi's boyfriend, Krieg, Dragon, Max Anders, Nessa, Thomas Calvert
• Extras

The core cast? Four people. The important cast that aren't basically just one-off mentions? Barely a dozen. Less than thirty people total for a 200k fic.

In SiNC Arc 1, the cast is as follows:

• Primary cast: Victoria, Skitter
• Secondary cast: Tattletale, Charlotte, Bitch

And that is, basically, it. Amy is not a character in SiNC so far any more than Danny is in Impurity. She is a monster, a looming dread hanging over the narrative. The cast, for what it matters, consists of five people.

That's good! It means that the story is very, very focused on what matters. But it falls down in one critical way, which is that Skitter's base, in the later bits, doesn't feel populated. It's justified, on multiple levels. Skitter is obviously keeping the traumatised Brute hero away from her people, partly to keep them safe from Victoria and partly to keep herself safe from the fallout of being associated with Glory Girl being with her. Victoria is keeping mostly to her assigned room, which is a private one held empty for the Undersiders when they visit. Charlotte is setting herself as a roadblock against Victoria interacting with anyone else.

But the result is that it feels at times like Victoria is staying in an otherwise unoccupied building with only two co-residents. There's nothing I recall about her hearing other people downstairs, about her hiding in her room when she picks up on chatter or laughing or shouting downstairs, or the vibrations and creaks you feel through the floor of someone else moving around the same building you're in, or signs of other human presence.

Now, since I wrote this originally in the Discord (just prior to the posting of 1.7), some edits have been made to the later parts of Arc 1 prior to posting to fix this issue - footsteps pounding down a corridor downstairs, or her hearing a brief argument in childish voices in the next room, or a muffled crash from down below, etc. All these things give better narrative conveyance of the presence of other people than Charlotte mentioning them or the narrative telling you they're there. Saying there are other people in the building isn't enough; you gotta feel it. You don't need to show them, because they're not cast or characters - they are environment, and that sensory grounding is a good way of making them part of the environment of these early days in the same way that I was talking about earlier, with how it conveys emotion better than simple descriptions like "I felt happy" or "I was worried".

The additions made in response to this comment, I feel, really helped the sense of environmental texture of the building being populated and full of the signs of other people living there - especially since they're children, who are not generally quiet, and moreover stressed refugee children who are in less-than-comfortable conditions, who will therefore be prone to complaining. Probably not to skitter, but certainly to Charlotte.

SPEAKING OF WHOM.

Spoiler: 1.4 / Charlotte

No quotes for this one, just a dive into our second major supporting character for this fic.

Charlotte is a good cast member, good role in the narrative; she's both a hostile push away from Skitter, a hard barrier to entry, but also the gateway to a new view on her.

Psychologically, Charlotte is I think actually another factor that seems to be offputting at first glance but actually, at a narrative and psychological level, does an enormous amount to bond Victoria to Taylor in much the same way as that brutally honest self-incriminating confession. She does not want Victoria around, and that's stressful, in the way that hostility and people not liking us always is, but it's also reassuring. She doesn't want Victoria. She dislikes her. She is suspicious and hostile to her. She is trying to push her away.

Charlotte, like Skitter, Is Not Amy.

So while on the surface level she's angry and threatening and offputting, at the instinctual gut level that Victoria is emotionally operating on, where her fresh and still bleeding trauma scars are, Charlotte is safe. She is safe because, again, like Skitter, if she is a threat she will be a threat that comes at Victoria head-on, that she can see - and Victoria is relatively confident in her ability to handle threats like that. They don't scare her like the subtle ones now do.

And with that deep-down minimum level of safety and trust in place, Charlotte also offers something else that makes Victoria instinctively grab for it like a life ring: insight into Skitter. She is a walking revelation that Skitter is not what she seems, is not who Victoria thought she was - in both a reassuring way (that is to say, she's better than Victoria though), and also one that matches with the discrepancy Victoria already observed (that Skitter helped her). Charlotte is a way to understand what's currently confusing her, a puzzle piece that hints at further questions but also further answers. This ties back into the dramatically ironic mystery of What's Going On In Taylor's Head in a way that, again, the audience understands better than Victoria but not perfectly.

And here's the last bit, and this is quite subtle.

Charlotte doesn't want Victoria around. She is trying to push her away. Due to how the human mind works, we tend to value the things that were hard to get considerably more than the things that came easily. Yes, Charlotte's initial front is off-putting, yes, she initially repels Victoria from staying with Skitter. But that very barrier she's made herself into means that when Victoria starts to work her way past that front of hostility and chooses to remain here, when she earns her place... she is going to value it a lot more. More, possibly, even than her place in New Wave. Because that was always hers as soon as she got her power. But this? This, she won, through effort, with difficulty. She's going, again perhaps not even at a conscious level, to be proud of winning the right to stay.

And when we consider a circumstance to be something we made the choice to do and have put effort into obtaining it and are attached to and proud of the achievement, we are much, much more attached to that decision than if we're simply doing it by default.

It makes perfect sense that, having made the shaky and conflicted initial decision to stay and then had to fight her way past the barrier guardian to earn her place, Victoria is subsequently a lot more certain of and committed to her choice to remain there.

Like I said, this isn't so much a comment on 1.4 specifically as much as it is a deep-dive into Charlotte's role in the narrative and in the dynamic of Victoria's place in Skitter's territory and group; how her hostility to Victoria staying is what initially makes it uncertain if Victoria will choose to stay, but also makes it a lot more certain that she'll choose to remain after she does, because she forces Victoria to invest a lot more into that choice.

Knowing this kind of thing about a character, I find, helps write them, because you know what the long-term narrative effect of her hostility is or will be, and can therefore precision-craft the forms that hostility takes to lead to the end result of an even-more-attached-to-the-group Victoria. The higher the bar to jump is, as long as you can get someone to jump it and think it was their own decision to do so, the less inclined they are going to be to go back over it.

Spoiler: 1.5

I stared at her. My jaw didn't drop, but it was a near thing. She didn't have to do this. I knew I'd said it before, but it hit me even harder this time. There was nothing obligating Skitter to treat me like this. Especially not given how we met all those weeks ago at the bank. Yes, according to her, this was all because Amy did something horrific beyond reckoning. And yes, her extending me this basic courtesy was to prevent future arguments with her lieutenant. But if that was the case, why the casual mention of letting me learn sign? Or the unspoken assumption that I was going to be staying longer? No, I couldn't mistake this as anything else. Skitter was being gentle to me because she could.

Click to shrink...

So, this bit. Mmm. Yeah.

Let me gather my thoughts here for a mo.

As if to confirm my thoughts, Skitter turned to me and leaned in close. "Whatever you may think of me and the Undersiders, these kids came to us when they had nothing, and we gave them a place to stay. I didn't ask questions of them, just like I didn't for you. Do not judge them."

I swallowed and slowly nodded.

Sure enough, as I retreated to a small nook in the kitchen, kids began to emerge from the small curtained areas in the main living room. Almost none appeared older than thirteen. But most were much younger, closer to seven or eight. No wonder Charlotte emphasized not waking the "residents" up last night.

Most of the kids were quiet, especially as they saw me, but I was surprised that they all at least waved hi to Skitter. She didn't respond to any of the greetings but she did nod at each one as they passed. I couldn't help but stare at her as the kids lined up to get breakfast. If I was confused when I woke up... Well, now I was just lost. She couldn't be doing this for the image, or she would've made a larger public spectacle of this. But instead, she and Charlotte did just the opposite. Looking back on it, they both used deliberately obfuscated language to hide the ages of the kids from me. Maybe until I could be trusted, judging by last night? That or it just couldn't be reasonably hidden from me any further.

I shook my head. No, that wasn't helping. No matter what the reason, the fact was that Skitter had taken these kids in when she didn't have to, without any expectation of reward or quid pro quo. Just like… just like she did for me. I didn't know what to make of this girl. This person who would casually threaten a scavenger with a living nightmare one moment then take in a wounded Hero and a batch of presumed orphans the next. Every time I thought I had her figured out, she surprised me.

Click to shrink...

So, yeah.

This is basically feeding into the central theme of this whole story, which is that of the lines between good and bad and hero and villain and right and wrong and kind and cruel.

And I think it works that it scares Victoria. Because the kindness in Skitter is inherently linked, on two levels, to the cruelty in Amy. The villain's mercy isn't just a parallel and foil to the hero's monstrousness, it's directly what saved her from it. Even on the best of days, in the most stable mental place possible, humans hate admitting we're wrong about things. Victoria would be averse to this theme, this idea of the mercy and kindness and gentleness and compassion in Skitter, just for how it challenges all her preconceptions and beliefs.

But it's worse than that. Because the dichotomy, the two-facedness, the... I almost want to say duplicity - I really do think it is a potential trigger for Amy. Like, I've been walking around that point a lot, referencing it over and over with how the brutal, self-incriminating honesty of Taylor and Charlotte's antagonism towards Victoria makes them feel safe and "not like Amy" to her.

I do think that Victoria is going to have, going forward, big trigger issues with people not being what they seem. Hiding parts of themselves. Pretending to be things they aren't, or concealing things they are. Because her sister, her boyfriend and she has no idea who else hid this horrible, awful thing from her for years, and then assaulted her with it in an absolutely horrific way, and I really can't see any way for her not to draw parallels between that kind of lying about oneself and the way she was personally victimised.

In a way, even with this being a pleasant surprise rather than a horrible one, I'm surprised she took it so well. I would not have been the least bit surprised if she'd gotten angry at Skitter for being so gentle with these kids, even right here in front of them. Because if Skitter, the terrifying bug cape, the warlord, the monster - if she's gentle with traumatised rape victims and generous and protective towards children and heroic enough to take a spear to Leviathan's ass, then she is a liar, and how can Victoria trust anything she does?

She doesn't react like that, of course. It would - especially now, at this point in the story, so early and while Taylor is still treating her as a very real threat - absolutely tank the course of the romance.

But I think it is entirely plausible as a reaction she could have had. I think Victoria will have a very, very strong temptation to retreat back into black-and-white, hard lines, Carol-esque thinking. This is right, this is wrong; these people are good and these people are bad. To layer herself up in a simple world of simple definitions and get angry and violent at people who don't fit into them, or who dare to trespass across the boxes.

After all. It's what she's learned from home.

I swallowed and wrote the first thing I'd ever say to Skitter on the notepad. I could tell by the expression on Charlotte's face as I turned it around that this was going to be about as complicated as I thought it would be, but this was important enough for me to ask anyway.

"I want to call my Mom."

Click to shrink...

On a more technical writing level, just like the very, very strong opening lines of the whole fic, this is a great example of a chapter closer on a cliffhanger that sets up the next chapter beautifully and gets the readers on tenterhooks for it with minimal effort or reveal. A lot of writing, I think - at least in this fic - rests in the things not said, the gap between framing and execution.

Quite a few times now you've set up something that's going to happen and painted the broad strokes of it in the reader's head, but left the details blurry until you get there. This is a good way to foreshadow that maximises anticipation as the reader has a lot of scope to fill in details but minimal information to confirm them, and therefore has more to wait for (another good way of doing this is 'quotes or excerpts of in-universe media from later on' method that you may have seen in some types of fic, where you know that something that will lead to this article about an injured member of a team being written, but the excerpt doesn't have enough in it to give away exactly how it will happen).

A blank space stretching out in front of the reader that could lead anywhere is a mystery, and hard walls of visibility like that can be fun, but the really great mystery plots tend to be the ones where you can see a hill up ahead and maybe a light in some kind of building a bit past that, but it's all misty and dark and so the exact road you're going to walk to get you there is very unclear and perhaps even seems impossible to successfully navigate - yet there the landmarks are, so presumably you'll reach them somehow.

This technique doesn't always automatically make for a great mystery plot, but most of the great mystery plots are ones that use it. But if I get onto that topic we will spend the next ten thousand words talking about Knives Out, so let's move on.

Spoiler: 1.6

Instantly, all conversation in the kitchen ceased. The kids must have been talking, or otherwise making noise when I wasn't looking, because the sudden lack of verbal noise hit me like a truck. The only sound that remained was the clicking and hissing of the bugs surrounding Skitter like an aura. The wasps and hornets were vibrating their wings so rapidly her outline almost appeared to blur.

And still, Skitter didn't say a word. She just looked at me, her yellow lenses as indecipherable as ever.

Click to shrink...

"I'll do the talking, Charlotte," Skitter said. Her voice was dead even. I couldn't help but notice that there was a not entirely inconspicuous stream of bugs coming from upstairs to hover around her at this point. Was it an instinctive reaction? A defensive move? An attempt to intimidate or show bravado? I couldn't say. But I wouldn't let her faze me.

"How can I trust that you won't betray us?"

I swallowed. What answer could I give her? I didn't even know what kind of answer she was looking for. Another Victoria might have appealed to her track record in New Wave, to her sense of duty and fairness, to her status as a Hero. But I couldn't do any of that. After Leviathan, I couldn't rightly tell her that a Hero would never betray her. After today, even after the misunderstanding was cleared up, I couldn't say that she'd never question my integrity. In the end, there was only one answer I could give her.

"You can't. All I can say is that I'm here under the Truce, and I have yet to break that. I'm not asking you this as Glory Girl, I'm asking as Victoria."

Click to shrink...

Again, we're very much not in a place yet where Skitter comes across as safe. She's intimidating, she's scary, she's cryptic and utterly and unreadable behind that mask. Your intentions on that score are still very much within the safe zone' Victoria here is standing up for herself but is on shaky ground and knows that Skitter doesn't trust her much more than she trusts Skitter. So, once again, she leans on the Truce as a safety blanket and guarantor that holds genuine binding power over capes.

Skitter stared at me. "No… that's not what I meant. Victoria, how are you going to make a call when you can't speak?"

I froze. Oh my god, she was right. How could I have been so stupid? I hadn't even spoken in this conversation. How could I possibly have a phone call? My sketch pad stared up at me, my hastily scribbled words from earlier almost mocking now. My face must have been bright red. I was mortified.

"I don't know. Didn't think about it. Sorry." My hand was shaky as I wrote.

Skitter paused as she read, then considered me for a moment. This was the first time that we were sharing a silence that felt awkward, rather than imposing.

"Do you need someone to speak for you?" Skitter said.

Click to shrink...

Going back and checking, if we count the initial rescue and provision of non-triggering clothing (which I think was a happy accident on Skitter's part, but it worked so w/e) as one act, the confession of her wrongs against Victoria and offer of a place to stay as a second and her easy forgiveness of Victoria being caught snooping and gift of the notepad to help her communicate as a third, this offer is the fourth major act of charity and altruistic help that Skitter has made to Victoria, and it's in chapter 6. She's been averaging slightly more than one genuinely considerate and meaningful deed or action every two chapters - not just minor or easy things, but going out of her way to some extent for Victoria's sake and comfort.

Mmm. Yeah, nothing specific to draw from that, just an interesting statistic for the pacing. Positive, I think - you do a good job showing how these may be seemingly minor things; a change of clothes, a notepad, a phone call - but they are actually pretty major and affecting in context. The stakes may be low objectively, but we're at a very drawn-out, granular and street-level perspective here, so the emotional beats are strong.

All of these actions have non-charitable reasons, of course. She gives her the notebook because otherwise she'd get into more arguments with Charlotte; she gives her new clothes because her old ones were covered in blood and guts and who knew what, and were setting off taylor's trigger; she confesses to her wrongs because she figures at the time that Victoria probably won't be staying with her and she doesn't want her to find out later that Skitter lied to her face about something so huge.

But none of these reasons really matter compared to what those little kindnesses mean to Victoria at a time when she really, really needed them. And even with the pragmatism behind them, you can see the deliberate choice to not be as callous as she could have been.

Moving on, I did really like the note that the trigger surprised you as much as Victoria and that's why you left it in. In some cases I'd be critical of ad-libbing the plan like that, but for specifically a trauma trigger showing up by surprise in a story about trauma? Couldn't be more appropriate, and it's handled very well in showing the innocuous action that set it off, the visceral sensory flashback that it sent her into and the dissociative state she dropped into in response. And then, again, Skitter being the one there when she comes to. Pragmatically, it's because she doesn't trust Victoria not to break things if left unsupervised and wants the squishies out of the way. But at the same time, it feels, subjectively, like her not leaving Victoria alone when she "could" have just walked off. Again, that deliberate choice not to be callous.

Okay. Okay. One thing at a time. I had to calm down. I couldn't afford to lose the one thing that let me actually communicate. Deep breaths. In and out. Slowly. After a few minutes, my heartrate calmed. I relaxed my hands. Focus on the immediate, put it into words. That was a flashback that I went through. A flashback to when Amy… raped me.

I shuddered. It hurt to say, even in my head, but I knew I had to. My sister raped me. And while I hadn't worked personally with any victims for an extended period before now, I knew from the few Protectorate Affiliate courses that I had attended on the subject that the trauma from experiences like the one I had gone through were likely to be… triggered… suddenly and often. Especially this early in the recovery process. At least here I knew what had caused it: Skitter reaching out to me. Many people weren't nearly as lucky. Even something as inconsequential as a smell or a shirt color could be enough. Skitter herself seemed aware of what she had done as well and had promised to avoid it in the future. I didn't know what that looked like, but at least she said she'd try. I was okay. Or well… I wasn't okay. I was self-aware enough to admit that. But I had a way forward. And the first step of that was calling Mom.

Click to shrink...

I spoke about this back up in 1.2, and this was the bit I meant; how Victoria has very clearly sought out training for this. She knows the mental territory she's been dumped in, she's familiar with the recovery process... but all of her training was done on the assumption that it would be others who got hurt; that she'd be the strong, untouchable hero protecting victims. She never thought of herself as a victim until, suddenly and horrifyingly, she was one.

(Also props for having her acknowledge how much it hurts to say, but clenching her fists and putting words to it nonetheless: her sister raped her.)

"There is one other person who could help," Skitter said, looking to the side for the first time since our conversation started.

I underlined the, "Who?" I wrote before.

Skitter turned back and met my gaze.

"Me."

Click to shrink...

And again, one of those "frame the upcoming situation to allow the audience to go wild speculating, but with minimal actual detail about how it will go so they have maximum anticipation for the next bit" cliffhanger endings.

Spoiler: 1.7

Why would Skitter volunteer for this? How could she possibly feel comfortable with this? Did this mean she was about to unmask to me? I had no idea if I'd even be comfortable with that. Unmasking was a huge expression of trust and vulnerability for capes. I knew that much, even if I had been out ever since my trigger.

For Skitter especially this would be the case. My parahumans studies course covered some bits of the psychology that went into costume design, and while it wasn't always reflected in reality, I would bet it did here. Full face masks almost always indicated a desire to engage with the world at a distance, or to project a persona completely divorced from the person behind it. I didn't know which it was for Skitter, but either would fit.

Click to shrink...

This shit. I reeeeeaaaaaally like this. This is candy to me. The implications of character design, the psychology - even subconscious - of one's own costume design, the- huh. Actually, again, that's another point I keep talking around that I've referenced with a lot of Victoria's feelings of safety, etc - the extent to which this fic can be read as based on motivations that the characters often aren't consciously aware of. Victoria sorting things into Safe and Not Safe by their parallels to Amy, the way Charlotte's opposition to her is pushing her away on the surface but actually drawing her in at an undercurrent level by making it clear that being part of Skitter's crew is something worth having, et cetera. It's something I've always been interested in, the pressures and motivators that drive us unconsciously, and this calls out one of Skitter's very well and very naturally via the medium of Victoria trying from her outside perspective to sort out whether Skitter is a threat, or trusts her, or what.

(I basically cannot get enough of academia-in-fiction; if you give me a wizard university with actual dissertations and papers based on real academia where someone's thesis might have a title like "a comparative analysis of the effects of the lunar phase on nightblossom-based fertility rituals in the Atagadian, Parlash and Unadi traditions" I will consume that shit like high-grade cocaine.)

I nodded gratefully as she gave the items to me, giving me time to clean off my hand with the cloth. It really was silk, and soft at that. I almost felt guilty getting it dirty like this.

Skitter seemed to notice my hesitance. "It's meant to clean up messes. If it gets dirty, I can make more."

Well, it was her handkerchief. I carefully wiped my hands down, being sure not to smear the blue ink onto my note pad any further. Skitter was already doing me a favor, I didn't want to owe her another by making her get replacements.

Click to shrink...

Less to say about this, but I do like it - Victoria being careful, trying not to overstep her welcome, not wanting to damage or dirty anything enough that Skitter will kick her out. And Taylor just being like "I produce literal yards of this stuff; it's machine washable, I do not care, go wild". Fun little character beat that sets the mood for both of them.

I paused as I considered that. Mom asked me about my school life fairly regularly, but it had been a while since we had last touched base about something that… mundane. If I–or rather Skitter–told her that I had been found by an unlikely classmate, would she really scrutinize that? Normally I'd say absolutely. Mom may be Brandish on the side, but Carol the lawyer was her full-time job. But right now? After the Nine and not having seen me for a week or more? I thought (hoped) that she'd just be so happy to hear from me that she wouldn't think about who was talking. I guess we'd just have to trust that.

Click to shrink...

Hoooooo boy, okay, so I have some Big New Wave Thoughts, but they're probably more Impurity New Wave Thoughts than SiNC New Wave Thoughts, especially given that half of SiNC New Wave is, like, dead, and they're not really Carol Thoughts, so I'll leave them lying for now. But it's certainly very telling that Victoria describes her mother as being Carol the Lawyer as her full-time job and Brandish the Hero on the side.

"I'm going to be playing a character. This is not me giving you my name. This is not what I sound or act like outside of my mask. I am not unmasking to you in any capacity. With that said, I still expect you to extend the same amount of privacy to my performance, as I am providing to you for this conversation from the rest of the compound."

Click to shrink...

90% sure this is Taylor pep-talking herself and dealing with her anxiety about the phone call she's about to have to make (oh, and also the fact it'll be to a renowned hero) by making it A Tactical Problem She Can Work Out A Plan For And Then Execute The Plan So It's Not A Feelings Thing, It's A Project Thing.

I believe very, very firmly that Taylor shares with Danny the quality that they are very good at doing things and can talk your ear off all day about a Project like getting the ferry running again or taking over a chunk of the city and arranging logistics for it, but are terrible at feeling things and will clam up like snails retreating into their shells when it comes to talking about their emotions. Annette was the one who was good at feelings and emotions talk.

Relatedly, actually, I also suspect that in terms of emotions and specifically anger issues, what Taylor has, specifically - at least in my interpretation - is Annette's temper, with Danny's magnitude. That is to say, she gets the extent of her temper, the amount of angry she's able to be, from her father and his proclivity for red-hazed rage that he's always kept a very tight lid on because he's scared of what he'll do if he doesn't. But the type of anger she has? That cold, disassociated, dispassionate ability to justify and commit brutality and violence?

Yeah, I read that as having been Annette when she was younger. She was the one who burnt cold, who was able to be cruel. But she never went so deep into it. Taylor has Annette's scarier, colder, more controlled fury with the force of Danny's explosive red-hot bouts of wrath. It makes for a dangerous combination, as several people in canon found out.

Skitter didn't hesitate. "Hi, M-Mrs. Dallon? My name is June, I'm calling from the downtown refugee camp near the Brockton Bay Hospital. I was hoping to speak to you?"

My jaw dropped. Who was this, and what had she done with Skitter? The sheer cognitive dissonance almost knocked me out of the conversation. I didn't even know it was possible for her to sound that ordinary. Her apparent age seemed to shrink by almost three years. It was incredible. Skitter was many things, but I'd never have thought an actress was one of them.

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Yeah, I gotta say, I really love Victoria's "?????" reaction here. It's hilarious, and a genuinely good comic beat to break the tension. Because, mm.

So, this is something I learned writing Impurity. Which is a really good fic, don't get me wrong. It frequently gets thrown around with words like "the Wards fic" and "one of the best altpowers in the fandom" and stuff, and it's beautifully scripted to lead Taylor to that point at the end of Arc 6 where she makes a hard choice and it matters, because it really, really feels like she could have made the easy one instead.

But getting her there is a slog. Impurity is one long train wreck of stripping away Taylor's support structure, attacking her sense of security, provoking her trauma, amping up her frustration and hammering the still-sore triggers of her grief. The whole story is precision-tooled to deliver her to Arc 6 in a suitable mental state to do something really, really stupid. It's painful to read, at times. A lot of chapters and arcs end on downer notes or frustrations she feels powerless to fix, because the whole point is to build that feeling and stoke that flame until she snaps and decides to do something about it, permission or no.

It works. It makes her choice at the end mean so much more that she made it in her darkest hour like this, after probably the worst month of her career as a Ward, with the weight of so many awful things pressing down on her. It was one of the keystone scenes of the story, that at her absolute nadir in the fic she still proves she's worthy to be a hero.

The cost, though, is that the atmosphere can start to depress the readers, especially when it's plodding along in the early bits with no pay-off. It's a pity, because I do feel that the ending makes it worth it, but I acknowledge that getting there is hard. SiNC is going the other way - it's a story of healing that's slowly building Victoria up, not breaking her down. But it's still going to be hard at times. Again, especially early on. So breather episodes, lighter notes among the pain and misery and trauma, comic relief beats and small victories - those are very important to keep from exhausting your audience with the seeming hopelessness of it all during any extended hard bits. Make sure to sprinkle them in - not awkwardly or obviously, but in natural little ways like this. The bookshop scene in Postdiluvian? Where Lisa and Taylor are just hanging out and enjoying each other's company? That (and a couple of other bits) were things I deliberately seeded in as breathers, although they did serve other purposes as well. Likewise the bit in the fancy hotel where they scam a lawyer and visit the zoo and so on and... date, let's be real. They basically go on an extended date. But that was written in part to be another breather episode too.

"Victoria. I need to ask, this is really important. Did you manage to save the cat?"

The cat? We didn't have a cat, ever since Dad got… worse and kept forgetting to feed it. We ended up letting it go, and no one ended up wanting to ever talk about it again. After that, Mom suggested using it as– the code! The security code! That's what Mom was doing right now!

I glanced up and saw that Skitter was staring straight at me. Behind her were a formation of fireflies, softly glowing while forming the word 'WRITE'. I smiled sheepishly and wrote down the answering phrase.

"Yes, the tabby cat is fine. A little under the weather, but she'll pull through," Skitter carefully read off the notepad. She may not be familiar with the call and response itself, but she clearly understood what was happening regardless.

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Heh. I do like the little Undersiders code they have - which you demonstrated back in 1.2 - and it's nice seeing that they're not the only ones who do it.

I grabbed the pen and wrote. "I'm okay. I was hurt during the Nine after Crawler, and I lost my voice. I'm trying to see if I can get better, but it's hard. I didn't reach out before because I didn't have a phone until now. June was very nice to offer me one. I'm with her now, and she's been taking care of me," Skitter read off, before giving me a look. I tried to meet her gaze, but it was surprisingly hard. She was playing a character, and I was playing to that character. Besides, it's not like I lied in any of that. Just… embellished a bit.

Click to shrink...

Self-serving or not, this marks the first time Victoria has intentionally done something to protect Skitter from the heroes, and also the second time she has acted based on what is in Skitter's best interests and comfort (the first being deciding not to snoop). An important moment, small as it might seem! A lot of Arc 1 is like this; small moments that build the foundation for what's to come, things like the Skitter Is Not Amy axiom that everything later requires for the necessary trust to exist.

The thing about foundations is that they're mostly underground. You don't really see much of them, especially in the finished house. They're not flashy; they don't look very impressive. But they're very, very important to do first, and to do right.

There was a silence as we looked at each other. Did she see the same thing that I saw reflected in those yellow lenses? I know she said she was playing a character, and she definitely wasn't June, but I couldn't help but wonder how much of this was us pretending at all. This felt real.

Click to shrink...

I have no actual specific analysis or commentary here, I just want to call out that this is gay as fuck.

(Aleph: *writes long, complex analyses that delve deep into the psychology of characters and the subtleties of how trust and trauma and terror function at both a conscious and subconscious level, as well as interrogating the technical elements of layering themes into narratives and setting and maintaining tone and how certain uses of language and inflection points can grab and hold a reader's attention to pull them into a constant cycle of 'just one page more...'*
Also Aleph: "GAY.jpg")

I tensed. I wanted to relax, but something in her explanation gave me pause. "Everyone…" what did she mean by that? I didn't– If going home meant seeing her again, then I couldn't do it. I don't know what I'd do. If Skitter barely touching me just now was enough to set me off, I didn't want to know how bad I'd get. I was a Brute. What if I hurt her, and it was my fault? I don't know if I could live with myself. Was that even a thought I was supposed to have? Suddenly I was paralyzed. What if Amy hadn't fully removed those fucked up urges from me, and this was evidence? God, if I couldn't even trust my own thoughts–

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Yeah, as I think I said before; just as Victoria has the balanced push-pull away from and towards the untrustworthy and villainous known threat that is Skitter, so too is she both desperately attracted to the comfort and commiseration of home but also violently repelled from the fear of Amy being there and the related fear, which in some ways is even worse than seeing her sister again, that if she tells them what Amy did to her they might not believe her.

I forced my hand to be steady as I wrote out the last few lines. "Okay, Mom. Love you too. Talk soon," Skitter said, her own voice shaky as she hit the end call button.

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I do like the shakiness to her voice. Phone Calls To Moms are a loaded subject to her.

Skitter got up to go, and before I even knew what I was doing I reached out and grabbed her arm. Instantly the insects in the room flew into a frenzy of activity. The centipedes in the terrariums next to me started hissing and climbing over each other. The fireflies, so innocent before, started forming a whirlwind of glowing lights above us. Further back in the room I could hear the buzzing and scratching of spiders and wasps and god knew what. Skitter very carefully turned her head to look back at me.

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And this really shows a brief but telling snapshot of what's going on in her head: firstly that she's very much off-balance here, and secondly that she's still very much scared of Victoria's Brute qualities, aware that if Victoria snaps and goes on a rampage here, Taylor can't actually do shit to her. Absent plot backing, she's Taylor's natural counter.

... that's an interesting point, actually. In canon, Aisha was the only one who ever realised that Taylor offloads her physical reactions to what she's feeling into her swarm, pointing out her "hornets doing F-22 drills" when she was mad. I wonder if Victoria will be in a position to notice the same trait, here? To learn to watch the bugs, instead of the expressionless mask and impassive body language. It'd be a nice way to portray how she's not just Collateral Damage Barbie like a lot of fanon portrays her; she is in fact smart as hell.

As she made her way down the stairs, it occurred to me that this was the closest we had ever gotten, and both of us were lying through our teeth the whole time.

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And this line just tickles me delightfully. I love sentiments like this, heheh.

Spoiler: 1.8

I knew rationally that the base wasn't any emptier after Skitter had left. Or at least, not that much more empty than normal, all of the kids were downstairs. I could still hear the occasional raised voice and creaky floorboard. It's not like any of them had anywhere else to be, and Charlotte certainly wasn't going anywhere. Skitter hadn't taken any of the bugs on the second level with her either. I wasn't entirely sure what she was doing with all of them up here, now that I thought about it. Maybe it really was some kind of intimidation play?

The point was, I knew the base was as occupied as usual. But I couldn't help but feel that Skitter had taken something with her when she left. A breath of air maybe. I glanced around at the terrariums. Maybe it really was the bugs. Skitter had left almost twenty minutes ago now, so presumably they weren't under her control. Judging by the mosquitoes I kept having to shoo away from my face especially, this was normal bug behavior. Was that what was setting me off? The almost paradoxical nature of the bugs acting normally? I had to admit that having Skitter around was convenient in that respect. I definitely didn't miss the constant gnats and pests that usually hung around this time of year. They must be getting in through the gaps in the plywood over what was left of the windows.

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This is an interesting insight in that the bugs do act visibly differently when Skitter is within range: she hasn't yet learned or doesn't bother using the trick of letting them appear to still be acting naturally, likely because she has no actual use for such covert spying. Still, it might be something she learns, especially since in this strife-ridden hell city ruled in part by a bug controlling warlord, people are likely going to start watching the bugs as a survival reflex.

I'm also very proud of having pointed out that Victoria should pick up on the terrarium thing. : 3

Charlotte turned on the overhead lights, casting the room in harsh lines and dark shadows. She stood by the light switch, her back to me, for what felt like a minute.

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immense drama energies. splash page manga panel right here.

But in all seriousness, what I've said before still stands: Charlotte is a good character with a very strong narrative role that gels beautifully with the story's main theme of "no easy black-and-white divisions, people can be good and bad at the same time". She's pushing Victoria away and yet luring her closer, rejecting the idea of her having a place here while confirming that Skitter has given one to someone in exactly Victoria's position. It makes her very compelling because even as she is the big domestic antagonistic force, she's also living proof both in her insistence that Victoria fuck off and just her existence in Skitter's care that the thing she's trying to push Victoria away from, that place in Skitter's organisation, exists, and is a thing Victoria could potentially achieve.

She turned back to face me. "When she found you, what did she do?"

I blinked. "She asked if I needed help." It sounded so naively simple when I put it like that, but it was the truth.

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Taylor is, at the end of the day, a paragon. A dark paragon, but a paragon. And there's a delightful kind of... almost serenity to a paragon who's grown enough along the "at peace with who I am" path of development, because, like, something happens and there is no doubt at all in them of what to do. Taylor doesn't quite have that serenity and peace with herself, but she does hold to the central ideal of the paragon.

When you find people who need your help, you help them.

Yes, it might cause absolute fucking chaos. Yes, it might get them killed. Yes, it might fail horribly. But they see A Bad Thing Happening and they exist in a world where there is no need to go "what should I do" because there is only one thing to do, and they have long since accepted that they will do it no matter what it costs.

It's probably the mindset that Steve Rogers' "plant yourself like a tree and tell the world 'no, you move'" thing in Civil War was trying to reference except that Civil War was contrived garbage with a ridiculous manufactured conflict that made no sense.

And this same quality is also the mindset that makes dark paragons such good and such terrifying villains. Because they know with absolute certainty that they are right.

What side of Skitter was real? Was it the villain who threatened my sister in the bank? The one who faced down Leviathan on foot? The girl who fought the Nine and lived? The person who saw what Amy left of me and offered me a place to stay? The teenager I heard on the phone earlier today? They all blurred together in my head. Always with the dark gray bodysuit, the everpresent swarm of bugs, and those eyes. Those bright yellow lenses that showed nothing but felt like they stripped you bare all the same. How could they all be the same person?

I felt like I was driving myself crazy, trying to fit all this together in my head. None of it made sense. When I met her she was a villain holding innocent people hostage. Fine, I had a category for that, I could predict her behavior. And she doubled down in the time since. Yeah, she faced down Leviathan and the Nine, but those were equally possible by an effective–if terrifying–villain.

But then there were these moments that refused to leave me alone. The way her voice was so soft on that phone call to mom. The obvious gentleness she showed towards the kids. The fact that she was housing them at all! And most of all: the way she saved me. It would've been so much easier for her to just… leave me there. To not bother. Why didn't she? What was it that made her show mercy to me when so many other times she'd chosen violence? My fists clenched, and so did my stomach; my muscles tensed into a hard angry wall like I was bracing for a punch. Or about to throw one. I wanted to just… shake her until she told me what she wanted. What she meant.

When she opened the door, I almost jumped in surprise.

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Nothing precisely new to say here, but excellent continuation of the dramatic irony/mystery of Skitter sub-theme.

I still hadn't come to any conclusion when Skitter came back up the stairs holding a small cardboard box. Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I didn't know how she'd take it, but it was the only way I could think of to solve this spiral I was in. She looked down as I caught her eye.

"Yes?"

I grabbed my notepad, my hand trembling as I forced out the words. I turned it around to face her.

"I want to leave."

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And again, a strong finishing line.

Spoiler: 1.9

No one really knew how many insects Skitter had on or around her at any one time. I remembered reading somewhere while browsing PHO that most of the combined biomass of animals on the entire planet was contained within arthropods, so I suspected the answer was well into the millions. The point was, it was practically impossible to distinguish individual insects when Skitter seemed to bring a swarm with her wherever she went. They flew through the air in a complicated dance. They crawled through her hair and clothing. They even hummed under her words. It wasn't exaggeration to say I'd had never seen Skitter without them.

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*quietly screams in Postdiluvian PTSD over trying to work out how many bugs of what types are in a given area in a given location; information that Taylor has effortlessly at her fingertips all the time but which is very hard for a normal person to research*

Like, how many insects does Skitter have access to? When she's a villain or an antagonist or is in a position of relative power like this, the answer is always just "enough". But for a street-level, "barely scraping along with resources" story like Postdiluvian, "how many bugs does she actually have?" actually matters. Quite a lot.

Care to take a guess as to the research available on "how many insects are typically available within a two-to-three-block radius of [environment], and of what species?"

I will enlighten you.

FUCKING NONE.

The moment I showed her the notepad, every insect in the room stopped dead. The ever-shifting wall mosaic froze. Her hair shed beetles and spiders. Even flies paused mid wing-beat.

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But yes, this is an excellent description of Skitter Being Scary, especially this bit. The way the bugs echo her body language is great for this, and while Victoria hasn't quite yet learned to watch the hornets fly F-22 drills when the masked cape isn't emoting, this is a step in the right direction.

The kids nearby had fallen silent, watching us. Still, Skitter didn't say a word. She just stared at me. The bugs may have recovered from earlier, but I couldn't help but notice that their pattern was different now. Skitter had a habit of placing bugs on people. I wasn't even sure she was aware she was doing it; I knew almost no one else was. I only noticed because my forcefield was hypersensitive ever since… Amy. I felt the gnats and flies trying to land on me even now. I didn't know what she was trying to do. Maybe she was trying to get a sense of my body movements, to tell if I was about to burst into flight. Or tensing for an arrest. But I couldn't look away to ask. She didn't let me.

Charlotte apparently felt about as lost as I was. "Boss? Tell her that we don't work like this, right?"

Skitter looked at me for a moment longer. Then she said a single word.

"Explain."

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And speaking of working things out, this is Victoria's first explicit awareness of the bug-tagging. As well as, you know, Skitter's intimidating reputation covering up the fact that she's just super fucking awkward. Because I'm pretty sure that's what this is. She's not being cool, considered and calculated here. She just doesn't know what to say and is therefore being blunt and short-spoken to get more information.

The mask really covers up a lot of the tells that would normally poke holes in her charisma - and it's going to be very interesting to see if and when she demasks to Victoria how that charisma gets punctured (although by that point she will probably know Skitter well enough that it won't matter).

"I'm going crazy in here. I need to walk outside."

She cocked her head as she considered me. I held her gaze. I refused to explain myself any further. Not on this.

Skitter gave a short nod. "Okay. If you want to do that, I need to come with you. I don't want to deal with something happening to you and the heroes blaming me. Is that acceptable?"

I tried to figure out what the girl behind the mask was thinking as she was talking to me. What she saw, what she wanted. On some level it felt like she must have been just as much out of her depth as I was trying to navigate this. Or at least, I hoped she was. That would be a little karmic justice. I figured I was owed a bit of that lately.

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She is absolutely out of her depth, and she is definitely thinking "she is dangerous and I can't afford for her to get so frustrated she starts lashing out", but also.

Also.

Taylor Hebert, under the mask, very much understands claustrophobia and going crazy cooped up inside after something traumatic.

... you know, it's interesting that, like... Victoria doesn't understand Skitter at all, and Charlotte doesn't understand Skitter's decision here. But Victoria is kind of starting to understand Charlotte's loyalty to Skitter, and Taylor actually understands and finds herself empathising with Victoria a lot more than she thought she would and, frankly, I suspect rather more than she really wants to or is comfortable with. Even at this early stage.

It's only going to get more so as she starts getting pulled between Victoria and Dinah and the Undersiders. Likewise as Victoria starts uncovering more about Why Skitter Is The Way She Is. Honestly, especially in the aftermath of the Leviathan thing and the breaking of the Truce, I suspect that when Victoria learns what Armsmaster's role in Taylor's incredibly stupid "I'll be a mole" idea was - even just to the extent of "... fine, I guess, sure", she will hit the fucking roof. Like, this shit is why we have a bug-controlling warlord ruling a city district and refusing to trust the authorities, you asshole. That is a bad outcome! Don't do things that lead to that!

I let out a long breath. It had hit me, right as Skitter had walked in the door, that Charlotte was right. I had to figure out a reason to trust Skitter. That she would do right by me, or at least, not do wrong. And the only way to do that was to test her.

I had no idea going into that conversation how she was going to react. If she was going to keep me here by force, finally accuse me of being a drawn out spy, maybe even allege that I was faking my freakouts earlier.

Shudders wracked my body at the last thought. Thank god I didn't have to relitigate that. Small mercies. But all of those options–and more besides–were possibilities. I knew that much. The outcome… could've been better. Maybe it was context, but while she hadn't said that I couldn't leave, she hadn't exactly denied it either. I didn't know what to make of that. Though it could've also just been the way the conversation went. I wish I knew Skitter well enough to tell what she wasn't saying there.

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And yes, she makes clear that she was boundary-testing, even at the potential cost of her own mental health.

And the thing is, there's subtext here. Because Skitter passes with flying colours, but she passes in two ways.

The first is obviously just that she doesn't refuse or get angry or throw accusations or react badly in any way to Victoria's demand; she accepts simply and without drama and acts immediately to give Victoria what she needs. But the other way is that she doesn't bend immediately or just let Victoria walk all over her. Because Victoria needs to feel safe here, and as much as Skitter is a threat she wants to feel safe from, Skitter is also the devil she knows and the boogeyman who is keeping all other threats away. Her scary implacability is a very weird subconscious reassurance even as it's an intimidating source of lowkey anxiety.

So, she doesn't fold immediately. She flexes her power, purely unconsciously. She stops and thinks (out of awkwardness, but it looks like rational consideration). She requires an explanation. She puts conditions on her granting of Victoria's request - simple, non-confining and wholly understandable ones, but still signs that she doesn't just give people what they want.

As is becoming a usual thing for me to say here; all of these have reasons and none of them are intended to produce this effect and neither Skitter nor Victoria are really consciously aware they're doing so. But all of this signposts that this space is under Skitter's control, and if someone else shows up at the door with demands - someone like Amy, or her worst fears about Carol - she will not just step aside and hand Victoria over

I walked across the living room, past the curtains and the ever watchful kids, and sure enough, Skitter was standing by the door. "Have everything you need?"

I nodded.

Skitter looked me over then motioned back to the kitchen. "No you don't."

I stared at her. What could I have possibly forgotten? I was wearing the clothing she provided earlier, so presumably that was disguise enough. We were going out under the cover of night, so my dyed hair would hopefully be a big enough difference to throw anyone off identifying me. My Brute factor would cover everything else. What was I missing?

"Your notepad?"

I blushed bright red, mortified. God, I felt like a child having to be reminded of her bag on the first day of school. How could I be so stupid? Suitably chastened, I made my way back to the kitchen to grab it. I tried not to react to some of the kids snickering. Ignore it. It probably wasn't about me. After passing by Charlotte, who would be sure to lord my mistake over me later, I was back by Skitter at the door.

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Cute, but also tragic. Her confidence is really shaken at the moment - she's holding it together fairly well, but even minor things hit her much harder than they used to. The Victoria prior to Leviathan would have laughed something like that off, joined in on the joke in good humour.

I looked at Skitter as she walked beside me. The locals didn't think about bothering us, even this late at night, and I could see why. She cut an imposing figure just walking along in her costume. Her profile was already blurred by the way the skirt clung to her waist, trailing off into gossamer strands. The dark gray color of her suit and chitin armor overlay worked together with the dim lighting to confuse her with the dark concrete and brick that surrounded us. And all that was without considering the swarm of bugs literally blocking observing sightlines.

She was terrifying, doing nothing more than walking down the street. She was every inch the villain that the PRT and my mother warned me about. Ruthless. Alien. Silent. And willing to be horrifically violent seemingly on a whim. I should be taking her in. I should set myself loose right now, turn her in to the authorities, and get the people in her territory the help they really needed. She could answer for her crimes, for the things she'd subjected so many people to. Including me. It made so much sense.

And yet.

This was the villain who'd been housing me for the past few days. The same one who held my sister at knifepoint in the bank. The one who'd helped calm me down after a panic attack. The one who admitted she left me behind with my… rapist. And the one who saved me from her.

None of this was fair. None of it was right. In the stories, when the girl was saved from the evil villain by the hero, they lived happily ever after. Except now the villain was the sister, and the hero was the villain.

An aching cramp pulled at my jaw, jarring me out of my thoughts. I opened my mouth to work the tension out, and realized where had come from. Somewhere along the way I'd clenched my teeth. My shoulders had hunched up, my arms were tight with tension - I was even stomping along the street hard enough that my footsteps were audible over the swarm, scowling.

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The stuff I was saying up above about black-and-white morality and easy boxes being attractive? Laid out here like icing on a cake. You can see the visceral anger at Skitter for how this isn't fair or right and for how she's not playing her part, displacing blame onto her for the fucked-up-ed-ness of the whole situation...

Skitter had noticed. Or her insects had. "Problem?" she asked, barely glancing my way.

The ache in my jaw intensified as my teeth started grinding again. Now that I had noticed it was almost impossible to stop. I was surprised she didn't hear it, the sound was all I could hear. Or maybe that was the pounding blood in my ears. It was hard to tell. God, why couldn't she just… stick to one thing? Even as she was exuding more potential violence than Shadow Stalker on a bad day, she still stopped to ask me what was wrong. Even before I said anything. Fuck.

I stopped and faced her, trying to get my thoughts together. "No, just thinking."

She nodded and kept walking. "If you see any potential problems, snap twice. While I run a tight ship here, you probably overheard earlier how there are still problem cases."

I shot her a look as I hurried to catch up; anger giving way to incredulity. She really had no idea how she came across to other people, did she? Even if there were problem cases–and I had no doubt that there were– none of them were likely to get within half a mile of us like this. Skitter's disembodied yellow eyes peeking out from a swarm of insects were enough to scare any criminal straight, and that was coming from someone who (used to be) very proficient in terrorizing Nazis.

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... and then forcing herself to let it go, this isn't the time, getting mad at her won't help.

She only just made that forcible pull-back, at least half just because she was thrown by bafflement, and she still might have lapsed back into anger; she's still clearly tempted by the lure of easy boxes to sort people into even as she mentally draws a line between extremist black-and-white thinking and herself (and sort of stares longingly over at it)...

I showed her my pad. "Why did you save me?"

Skitter cocked her head, but to her credit she didn't take my question at face value. It must have been half a minute before she came up with an answer.

"Because it was right."

A smile slipped onto my face before I could stop it. A real, honest, wide grin. Maybe the first one I had since she woke me up in that bathtub. Maybe… this didn't have to be that complicated, right now. Maybe it really was that simple.

"Then thank you. For taking me in."

Skitter paused, the insects humming around us. The night air was thick as I stared at the yellow glare of her lenses, but for once I wasn't afraid.

"Someone needed to."

"But you didn't."

She looked at me for a long moment before she started walking again. "No. No, I didn't."

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... but then this response from Skitter kind of snaps her out of that temptation of how easy it would be and makes her go "no, yeah, if black-and-white means I lose genuinely Good responses like this because they come from people I don't expect, I can be content not falling into that trap."

It won't be the last time she's tempted. Mark my words. This is gonna be a theme, and I suspect it will hang around even after she sorts Skitter into "good". But that response from Skitter sort of affirms her decision not to cling to the boxes as her first response.

It's also very gay, which is always a plus for such things.

Spoiler: 1.B / Rachel

So, Rachel.

Barker gasped as Bitch's fist caught him in the stomach. He tried to recover but Bitch didn't let him, following it up with a right cross that put him on the ground. She could feel his impact through her shoes. Bitch didn't give him the time to recover.

"Angelica, paw!"

She responded immediately–like a good dog should–slamming her paw into his chest. Barker grunted under the sudden weight.

"Hey! He didn't–"

Bitch snarled at Biter before he finished talking. Full of shit, both of them. Words words words; she didn't have time for any of it. She put her hand on Angelica. Felt the strength coursing through her, the reassuring weight. Her power still ran strong an hour after she had last used it, and Angelica was tens of times her normal bulk, tense and ready to shred and savage on her command. She bared her teeth at the thought.

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Someone on the Discord back before this was posted said that the only feasible way to start a Rachel Interlude is with the power of ~incredible violence~, and I'd broadly agree with that; it's a good hook into the Interlude, it sets up her mood going into the interaction with Skitter and Victoria, and it fits her personality.

But Rachel has always been interesting to me, because she is, in a profoundly weird way, the Team Heart. Grue is in it for his safety and his sister. Tattletale is the clearest "professional villain in it for the money and thrills" of the bunch. Regent wants to stay clear of his dad and get his shits and giggles in. Aisha just wants to cause trouble. And Skitter is a laundry list of control issues, trust issues and attachment issues wrapped around a dark paragon - she's the closest after Rachel for how she's fundamentally motivated by protecting people and doing what's right, there's just a lot layered over that drive.

Rachel, though. Almost everything Rachel does is, fundamentally, altruistic. She spends all her time and all her money on rescuing people from slavery and abuse, looking after them, teaching them, ensuring they have food and medical attention, giving them engaging things to do so they're happy and healthy and worry-free.

It's just that because of her power giving her a cheatsheet when it comes to dog behaviour and what I heavily, heavily suspect to be moderate-to-severe undiagnosed autism interfering in her social development from some way prior to her Trigger, she reacts to dogs like they're humans and humans like they're dogs. So the "people" she spends all her time and effort on helping are dogs, and she reacts to humans she doesn't know as if they're random mutts you see on the street after a childhood that has taught you that Strange Dogs Will Bite You On Little To No Provocation - with aversion and aggression.

But, like... translate Rachel's behaviour back across that inverted response, and she's basically a saint. If she didn't have that inversion, if she were still treating dogs and humans the normal way around, she would be going out of her way for complete strangers to rescue them, protect them and care for them. Even people she'd never seen, only heard of, driven by nothing but the thought of the conditions they were being kept in. Even when they lash out at her or attack her for trying to help. Even when everyone tells her it's pointless and calls her a criminal for doing it.

And just as someone generally wary of strange dogs can get attached to a specific dog who is part of the family and come to love them and trust them and treat them as part of the family, so Rachel can learn to trust specific, individual humans. That's what Taylor managed to do, working her way into Rachel's confidence, and that's what made it hit so deeply for Rachel when she learned that Taylor was planning to betray them all along - it just affirmed everything she'd ever thought about humans prior to that point and that she was an idiot for trusting Taylor in the first place.

What I'm basically saying here is that Rachel being shown to be very averse to trusting Taylor again here is right on the money, and Rachel giving not one singular shit about New Girl also makes perfect sense. But once she starts seeing Victoria as a person; once Victoria "proves" she can be trusted and gets past that initial barrier of mystifying bullshit that separates Rachel from every other human on earth, Rachel is probably going to swing round to being one of her strongest supporters on the Undersiders, because as soon as she can empathise with her, she will, hard. Because Rachel is actually a really kind, compassionate person under the gruffness and violence and severe autism inhibiting her social interaction skills. And she knows, intimately, what it's like to be hurt by people you trusted and who were meant to be your family.

Bitch's teeth ground together. Fuck. Even after all that had happened, Taylor knew how to talk to her. She couldn't even be angry–which just made her more angry! Was it a trick, the other girl's attempt to appeal to how she saw the world? Taylor's face was covered, but it wasn't like that mattered. Bitch couldn't tell what people meant on a good day. Instead, she looked at the shoulders, the waist, the wrists. Was her spine straight? Her stance wide? Was she squaring her shoulders?

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I don't know if you're deliberately writing Rachel as severely autistic, but this perfectly fits into Rachel being severely autistic, and I do very strongly champion the view that her power did not do one singular thing to inhibit her ability to read humans. She already found it impossible to read humans. It's why she was bounced around the system so much, it's why she never got on with any of her foster parents, it's why she looked for companionship and affection in a little puppy that unfortunately turned out to be a coyote.

All her power did was go "oh, your long-term stressor is that you feel isolated and lonely and people don't make sense to you? And you're scared right now because your doggo is in danger? Okay! I will make you REALLY GOOD at understanding doggos, and also let you MAKE DOGGOS STRONG so they can be your friends and protect you!", with the delicious toxic spiral that of course she immediately threw human companionship over completely in favour of the furry four-legged people who actually made sense and this just isolated her further and led to more conflict with human society.

"The fuck do you think you're doing?" Bitch screamed, her power flooding into Sirius at full throttle. She was seeing stars, but it didn't matter. The second that the dog had enough power, she was going to sic him on her, and damn the consequences. This bitch thought she could touch her dogs? Hurt them?

Taylor was suddenly in front of her, legs sweeping her off the ground and knocking her against the wall. It was so quick Bitch didn't even have time to react. Her head hit the concrete behind her, and she saw stars for the second time in as many seconds.

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Another relationship milestone for Victoria. She's seen that Skitter will defend her verbally against her own teammates by telling Tattletale to knock it off, but that's not too much of a risk to her own position. Now she's seen that Skitter will defend her physically from her own teammates with violence, even a teammate she is very obviously already on shaky ground with.

And while she justifies it...

"K-knew you'd c-cross me again," Bitch whined through the arm pressing against her windpipe.
"Ssssirius, hur-"

"No," Taylor said forcefully. "She didn't know. I'm trying to save your dog. She's a Brute, Bitch. If Sirius attacks her, he'll get hurt. Understand?"

Bitch groaned as her head throbbed in time with her heart. She nodded slowly, not breaking eye line with Taylor. "W-what about her? She t-touched my dog."

Taylor nodded. "She shouldn't have. But she's mine. I decide how she gets punished. Clear?"

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... Taylor has a notable habit of making a decision for emotional reasons and then finding a lot of very logical, sensible, convincing reasons why it was the rational thing to do all along.

(Also, while it's not romantic in the slightest... "she's mine" o_o. Portentous. Taylor is trying to explain her relationship with Victoria and what they are to one another in language as simple as possible so that Rachel will understand. And what she comes up with is... "she's mine".)

It had been a few minutes since they set out now. Bitch wasn't good with distance; never had been ever since she was a kid. She didn't know if it was damage from one too many hits to the head from one of the matrons or whatever her trigger did to her, but it was what it was. What mattered was she didn't know exactly how long they had until the edge of her territory.

The whole idea of a territory was bullshit anyways. Who was anyone else to say where her range ended? Supposedly every one of these buildings was "owned" by someone with a fancy sheet of paper to prove it. But what did that matter when one of her dogs could rip them to shreds? What did any of it matter when no one lived here to claim it except for her? It was all bullshit.

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Again, yeah, strong themes of neurodivergence here and a complete lack of intersection with abstract, non-practical societal concepts. And frankly, in the absence of the unspoken (and therefore invisible to her) threat of Men With Guns Wot Will Do Violence On You If You Don't Play By The Rules that fundamentally underpins most state-backed societal concepts like land ownership and finance and law, she's... kind of got a point. That stance of hers doesn't work when the US can in extremis escalate up to "roll the army in to deal with the problem", but in a ruined city like this and with the government already overstretched, Rachel's immediate, local concentration of force means a lot more than anything the state says. The state, after all, isn't there. The lady with the giant dogs is.

... if it weren't for the fact that she'd get impatient ten words in and punch me, I'd actually really love to talk to Rachel about how she sees money, because currency and our entire financial system is basically fundamentally a giant game of pretend that only works because everyone buys into it on the understanding that it benefits them to have an established token of value to trade goods and services with. She obviously understands that it's practically important and can get her things that are actually useful, which is why it motivates her; it's simple enough that regardless of how stupid the whole thing is that More Dollars gets her More Dog Supplies. But I'd be entirely willing to believe she'd think it was kind of dumb to have whole jobs that are basically just moving around made-up numbers of how many imaginary gold pieces people have.

"Heroes. Incoming."

Bitch jerked her head to face her. "Here? In my territory? We gonna fight?"

Taylor cocked her head, considering. "We haven't been doing anything, looks like a standard patrol, but we can't afford to have them see her."

Bitch swore. "The fuck do you mean? New Girl?" She turned to the girl in question, snarling. "The fuck is your problem then?"

She opened her mouth but didn't say anything.

Bitch clenched her teeth. "I swear if this is a set up–"

"Too late. They're here."

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And, once more, an excellent closing note cliffhanger to finish both the chapter and the arc on. Not only that, but an excellent inflection point. The end of an arc, or more accurately the transition point of an arc, is generally a place you want to aim to put at a point where the status quo has changed, irrevocably, in a way that cannot be changed back. You want it to be a Point Of No Return - not always bad, just fundamentally different. The plot has moved forward, a new video game area has loaded, the events going forward will involve factors and elements that they did not involve before.

Arc 1 of SiNC was about Victoria recovering from the aftermath of her ordeal in the strange and new but relatively safe and isolated company of Skitter and her minions and the children she is caring for.

Arc 2 of SiNC is going to be about her having to dive back into the wider world of heroes and deal with other capes again.