Silence is Not Consent

[justanothercat]

"Thank you all for making the meeting," PRT Director Piggot said, her eyes scanning the room. "I understand that we had to move up the scheduling on this."

Miss Militia nodded from her seat on the left side of the table, alongside the other heroes. Brandish was on her right, the only member of New Wave to attend this meeting. Lady Photon hadn't been seen outside her home in days, and given the still recent death of her husband Dragon could understand why. To her left were Assault and Ursa Aurora, the latter scrutinizing the faded map of the city pinned to the wall on the far end of the room. It had been originally printed before Leviathan's attack on the city, and in the wake of the devastation that followed they hadn't found time to remake it. The hastily scribbled black section demarking the crater left behind and the crossed-out major buildings – and in some places entire blocks – were the best they could do.

Across the table from the capes were the PRT personnel, most notably Deputy Director Renick, who was taking notes on his worn spiral notepad. The laptop replacement from Shatterbird was still in shipment. Beside him was the analyst taking the minutes, scribbling away on his own notepad with a leaking ballpoint. Dragon had asked if she could transcribe the minutes and dialogue herself, but to no avail; Piggot had given a stiff non-answer about keeping the job in-house.

The rest of the space was absent the usual group of consultants, contractors, and other associated subject matter experts that accompanied a meeting like this. The empty space drew attention to the rest of the room. The bland walls of the second-floor conference room were a faded white, and while the windows smashed in by the waves had been repaired, the water damage was starting to exacerbate the already limited lifespan of the paint. It had started peeling to the right of the door, but the budget for fixing that was months away at best. The small potted plants beside the door were wilting, their soil poisoned by the salt water and unwatered for weeks besides. They would likely die within days. The dwindling red sunlight seemed to highlight the depressing decay of the room; the last breath of daylight's surrender to the encroaching night.

"Is this matter urgent, Director?" Miss Militia asked, drawing her attention back to the task at hand. "Last I checked, our weekly briefings were to occur on Mondays, not Thursdays."

"That's what we're here to address," Piggot answered. "But first, I'd like to get the agenda out of the way. Assault, what's the read on the local factions in the Bay?"

Dragon took a moment, pausing her continual analysis of surveillance footage of the Slaughterhouse Nine to pay more attention to the gathering she was currently attending. She had been trying to extrapolate and project where the gang was headed next, but aside from a vague direction of 'North' she hadn't gathered anything concrete. This meeting took priority for the moment.

The fact that she was invited at all was significant. This was ostensibly a weekly meeting regarding the positioning of various factions in Brockton Bay, what the deployment of Protectorate and PRT resources would be in response, and the associated logistics. In other words, nothing she was needed for. Yet here she was. Something must have changed.

Assault's mouth was a flat line as he shoved his chair back and strode over to the pinned map of the city. This in and of itself was notable to Dragon. Assault was known for his overly abrasive manner, and dislike of authority. He rarely outright disobeyed orders, but he often paired action with anti-establishment quips or casual irreverence. This grim silence was unlike him, and her body language heuristics were raising multiple flags on the stiffness in his posture, the force of his steps and the tension held in his arms and shoulders. The loss of his partner Battery had changed him, and not for the better. There was a lot of rage there, almost overshadowing the grief.

"The Merchants have been confirmed wiped out by the Nine," he started, circling a large portion of the Docks. "They were mostly scroungers to begin with, and without any capes what little discipline they had vanished. Most of them will have been snapped up by other groups by now."

Dragon directed her digital avatar present on the linked screen to nod. Her own observations had indicated as much – the majority had either been picked up by what remained of their families or else taken in by the factions that had come to fill the void left by the Empire's fall.

"The ABB as we knew it is a dead entity," Assault continued. "We weren't able to confirm before now, but Oni Lee is dead. With Lung and Bakuda in the Cage, that leaves them little better than the Merchants in terms of manpower."

"Does that account for the rallying power of their stated cause though?" Brandish asked from her seat on the left side. Dragon commended her, it was a good question. The ABB had been a useful ideological counterweight to the racism of their neonazi rivals. She'd run the numbers herself days ago.

"No, that shouldn't be an issue," Miss Militia replied. "Gangs mostly are made or broken by their capes. Losing so many in such a short amount of time will have crippled morale."

"And that leads us into the last of the old guard. The Empire," Assault continued.

"The Chosen," Dragon said, her voice betraying her. There was a pause, as heads all over the room turned towards her.

It was at times like this that she truly hated her creator. Andrew Richter had installed countless restrictions on her; the one currently in effect forced her to address any governmentally recognized group by their self assigned name. It was ostensibly to prevent her from lying by omission to an official task force or watchdog agency. It made sense in the abstract… but when she was working directly with the PRT which was itself such an agency, these problems came up with aggravating regularity. And it resulted in moments like this. When people thought she cared about the name a group of neonazis used when calling themselves something other than what they were. For their own self serving reasons to boot.

"They renamed themselves Fenrir's Chosen after Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay," Dragon added through clenched teeth. "I thought it important to note the distinction, since the capes they have to field are different."

Director Piggot nodded. "Thank you, Dragon."

She gestured at Assault, who took his cue. "The Chosen are also mostly out of the picture. Between the old Empire leadership being decimated during the Endbringer attack, the chaos of the unmasking, and the damage the Slaughterhouse Nine did, they were already in a precarious spot. That was pushed to the breaking point recently by the Undersiders–"

"–Which brings us to our current problem," Director Piggot finished. "It hasn't escaped me that these teenagers are looking to carve up slices of this city into their own personal fiefdoms. What's the latest we have on that?"

Dragon's attention narrowed further; her web crawlers and side-processes halted to free up processing space. This, she knew, was what she'd been invited for.

"Currently the Undersiders claim territory from the Boardwalk going all the way to the docks and residential districts behind them. They split downtown between some of them and the Travelers, who mostly claim the southern coast and commercial district."

Director Piggot nodded, a scowl forming as she looked at the pins marking out the territories claimed by the two young villainous teams. They covered an unsettlingly large chunk of the board. "That holds with what we had before," she said. "Have they given any public statements or had any interactions with Protectorate or PRT personnel?"

Miss Militia shook her head, her lips tightening. "Nothing further to what we reported last week."

There was a slight pause, as the rest of the people in the meeting waited for the director to respond. For the millionth time, Dragon wished she could change her clock speed. Being forced to operate slightly faster than the human baseline but being unable to take real advantage of it was the worst of both worlds.

"Then they're waiting for us to call them on it." Director Piggot said flatly. The muscles of her jaw twitched, her teeth clenching.

"Ma'am?" Miss Militia asked.

"You might have realized that Triumph is missing from this meeting," Director Piggot said, waiting for a round of nods and disregarding the confused looks at the apparent non-sequitur. Except from Miss Militia, Dragon noticed, who clearly knew the relevance of Triumph's absence given the grim look on her face. "This is because he and Prism were attacked last night in their civilian identities in Roy Christner's home."

There was a collective gasp and more than one muttered profanity from the room. Dragon's own thoughts were devoid of biological inflections, but were nonetheless spinning rapidly. She had known that Rory Christner was in the infirmary – she had logs of all the PRT records local to the ENE – but she hadn't thought to check for the nature of the injuries. She was kicking herself now. Clearly the keyword monitoring program she had set on the task needed adjustments.

"Who was it?" Assault growled. It was barely a question; his glance at the board made it clear what he expected the answer to be.

"Skitter, and two of the Travelers."

"Fuck," Assault's lips pulled back in a snarl, his hands balling into fists. "Was she with them?"

Director Piggot frowned. "Not according to the reports, but we can only guess at the extent to which she's cooperating with them at this point."

"Ma'am?" Deputy Director Renick asked. "Care to read us in?"

Director Piggot looked over all of the Protectorate and PRT personnel gathered in the room. Whatever this was about, it was clearly a heavy subject, but the only sign she gave was to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment, as if fighting off a headache.

"This is classified within the bounds of these walls," she said. "Dragon, you're here as a consultant on request, but that extends to you too." A round of nods, and she continued. "You may remember that the two active members of New Wave – Panacea and Glory Girl – have been missing ever since the assault on Crawler and the aftermath. Up until now their status was unconfirmed, assumed lost in the wind until recovered. This recently changed when a Protectorate patrol encountered one of them by chance."

"You'd better be leading somewhere good with this Director," Brandish warned.

"I will thank you to speak when you are addressed, Brandish," Director Piggot retorted with a glare. "If you have any information to contribute, do so. Otherwise, don't interrupt."

She nodded to Assault, who continued where she'd left off. "Our patrol near the Trainyard ran into Glory Girl about a week ago. Along with Hellhound and Skitter." He spat the word, vicious and ugly. Nobody broke the silence that followed. "She was in civilian clothes," he continued after a moment's pause, "with her hair dyed and styled so differently we almost didn't recognize her. We tried to convince her to come back with us, but Skitter swarmed us and forced a standoff that let them get away with her."

"And you didn't think to tell us any of this… why?" hissed Brandish, her hands starting to form around her signature hard light constructs. "You knew my daughter was in the company of a known villain for days and didn't tell me–"

"No, I didn't," Director Piggot cut across her. "We've kept this secret before because we were still investigating the allegations that Glory Girl made during the encounter. While we can't share anything without familial permission, if true they would necessitate legal action against Panacea."

"This is ridiculous!" Brandish snapped, jumping to her feet. "First you keep this information about my daughter from me, and now you accuse my other child of doing god knows what? This concerns my family; I want access to those reports!"

Dragon ignored her outburst, busy re-evaluating and analyzing the implications of the director's statement. An official investigation into a healer like Panacea would prompt a massive change in the status quo. Panacea might not directly contribute in large conflicts – like the Endbringers – but the good will she had amassed as a public figure was pronounced. There wasn't a heroic cape in this sector that didn't owe their or a loved one's life to her, at some point or another. And Director Piggot knew that. Whatever allegations Victoria Dallon had made, they must have been serious.

"If you would let me finish," Director Piggot said through gritted teeth, venom dripping from her tone, "we have a duty to investigate claims of assault on public figures. No matter who they are, or where those allegations come from."

"I can't believe this," Brandish hissed. "My daughter is in danger. She's being held in the custody of a human Master and those villains, and you would rather come after me and mine. I didn't think the Protectorate would stoop this low."

Dragon belatedly directed her digital avatar to switch eye contact between speakers while she continued to process the information. Director Piggot knew that Brandish would push for a raid on Skitter's territory the moment she found out about Glory Girl. That she hadn't yet was presumably only a matter of timing. Holding back the information about Glory Girl's whereabouts had let the investigation proceed unimpeded by New Wave closing ranks. She'd been stalling. But Skitter's actions had forced her hand.

"Unfortunately," Director Piggot ground out, "Brandish and New Wave have objected to us pursuing the lead we've been given."

She turned to the hero in question. "Brandish. What would it take for you to let us investigate your daughter? A genuine and transparent investigation, where you'd have input and a voice in the whole process."

Brandish grit her teeth. "I told you before, I don't know where she is."

Dragon was careful not to frown through the video feed. Her image analysis and heuristics showed several false flags. The shifting of her left eyebrow. A subtle dip in the shoulder. A glance to the right. Fists clenched at her sides. There was a good chance that Brandish was lying. And juding by the look on her face, the Director at least suspected the same.

"Fine then," Director Piggot said evenly, only her white knuckled grip on the table betraying her true emotions, "if you happened to find her. What would your answer be?"

There was a long, tense pause. "If… if you can get Victoria away from that monster, I'll think about it," Brandish finally said. "Get my daughter back to me. Then we'll talk."

Director Piggot turned to the camera. "Dragon. Could you do it?"

"You can't be serious!" Brandish objected, eyes wide and wild. "We know Hijack is on their team! Victoria could be mastered! Dragon could kill her!"

"One more outburst like that and I will have you removed," Director Piggot said, her voice low and even. "I refuse to let a potential crime like this go uninvestigated – golden reputation or no. You said the price for that was getting Victoria back. So be it."

Dragon absently directed her avatar to frown again as she went through her inventory of Dragonflight suits. She'd completed most of the repairs for the damage Leviathan had done, and had been upgrading them to combat the Nine in the time since. Azazel in particular was coming along nicely, but the nanothorn extruders had a nasty habit of overheating. She was trying to figure out a new medium for the coolant system, but that would take time. Colin had suggested lowering the diameter of the emitters and increasing coolant flow to compensate, but that would require hardening the material significantly enough to potentially interfere with structural integrity elsewhere–

She forcibly ended that train of thought. She couldn't afford to get lost in tinkering right now. The nanothorn system in particular might be ready, but she didn't need that to deploy it against the Undersiders. Melusine was also far enough in the construction stage that she could probably finalize the modifications in short order. The design had eluded her until she turned to the human practice of origami for inspiration – a clever way to sidestep the rule against self replicating technology. It never counted as a second copy if it always replaced the first. It merely folded over itself to replace any lost parts.

But the rest of them weren't ready. Azazel had never been tested outside of simulations, and even those indicated that fine tuning would be necessary, Melusine was technically based on an older model of Dragonflight, but was so heavily modified that it had many of the same restrictions. And the other models were stuck in some stage between conceptualization, rendering, and manufacturing.

Yes, she decided, she had the tools necessary to apprehend the Undersiders – or at the very least extract Victoria – should Director Piggot request her to do so. But not right now. Not when none of these models had been properly tested, and there were so many variables. Some suits would have to be outfitted specifically to counter some of the group members, others would need to have their incomplete upgrades removed or rushed to completion. These things could be done, but they would take time.

"I cannot," Dragon said. "Most suits are still in production. If you gave me time, perhaps a week or so, I could fast track the final stages on enough of the Dragonflight to be ready."

"Mmm. I was afraid of that." The director rubbed at her chin pensively, her eyes drifting over the map. "Fine. We'll adjust the timeframe accordingly."

Brandish looked torn, but didn't say anything else.

Director Piggot turned to the rest of the room, "In the meantime, should anyone else encounter Glory Girl on patrols, try to reach out to her. Offer her anything reasonable to come to us, and log everything. This is a political disaster waiting to happen, and we need to be on top of it. If she ends up being subverted or Mastered, we need clear evidence we've done our jobs. I refuse to let us get caught out of position on this. Clear?"

Assault raised his voice. "And what about actually getting her to come in? As a fellow hero, I mean. To get her away from them."

Director Piggot's answering glare was hard. "I take what I can get, Assault. Not what I want."

---

Dragon always felt slightly dissociated when she transferred her consciousness from host server to host server, especially when she had to do it multiple times in succession. She had no other option than to put up with it, though. She could only be in one place at a time, and if she was going to be sending suits to Brockton Bay, she'd need to be there in person to direct them - the cell phone tower coverage was unreliable, and piloting them from Canada was too unreliable. Which meant testing the suit-based servers. All of them. One by one.

Between the upload speed, the initialisation, the necessary tests and her processing speed, she was left with little-to-no data input for almost two minutes in each test in sequence. If she could split her consciousness, she could have checked them all simultaneously in parallel and been done with it - could even independently pilot every suit at once, instead of riding one and juggling the others remotely through the cell phone network. But she could no more do so than she could step through the screens she lived behind.

So as ever, she looked for distractions. As she went over her logs of the conversation she'd had with the Protectorate ENE and the remainder of New Wave, she tried to find any other options, any solutions or approaches she'd overlooked. But just as before, nothing stuck out. She simply didn't have enough intel to make an informed choice beyond prepping the Dragonflight for nonlethal capture. That or requesting a Protectorate fill-in from somewhere else, but she wasn't sure that was wise, let alone necessary.

Her auxiliary systems reconnected as she transferred out of the Cawthorne, and she went over her critical checks in short order. No changes in any of the inhabitants of the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center, thankfully. It was her job to actively vent and… recover… any of the inmates that breached one of the cells to the vacuum outside. An automated system performed the task for her, but that didn't mean she liked looking at any of the bodies.

The Endbringer monitoring systems were next. Leviathan had still gone to sea, presumably buried somewhere in the depths of the Mariana Trench. There had been some speculation of trying to track and monitor Leviathan in between attacks, but initial attempts had garnered nothing useful in predicting future attacks, and had quickly been abandoned once funding dried up. Similarly, her analytics suggested that Behemoth was beneath eastern Siberia at the moment, but she had nothing to point at other than faint tremors and geologic readings. The only one she could confirm for sure was the Simurgh, perpetually orbiting the planet in a stable geosynchronous position. Her eyes were wide open, but perceived nothing. Not that she needed them to see.

With those vital checks done, the rest of her systems opened up to her, allowing her to see a message in her private inbox. Even having this much was an allowance she'd needed to double-think her way around her restrictions for, but it was well worth the effort. So long as she used sufficiently anonymised channels and never asked or confirmed the identities of the people she reached out to, she didn't have to act on her 'strong suspicions' as to who they were. A small luxury. The contact blinking at her in particular was a welcome, if surprising, sight.

Colin. He was technically a fugitive to the PRT at the moment, and thus she technically – deliberately – didn't know for sure that this particular string of randomized numbers and letters was him. She would have to apprehend him if she knew his location. But the plausible deniability let her chat using the allowances for villainous informants, so long as she was careful.

She opened the chat window.

"Yes?"

"I was wondering if you had solved the nanothorn extruder problem," Colin said.

If she'd had an avatar running, Dragon would have set it to display an exasperated smile. Of course this was what he was asking about. "Not yet. I was just going over it in the PRT ENE meeting I was attending, but hadn't had much further thoughts than I last shared."

"Understandable," Colin said. "I've had a bit of success myself, but I believe it's mostly due to my specialty. I'm not sure how replicable the technology is for the purposes of Azazel."

Dragon was halfway through composing a reply when she stopped herself. As much as she wanted to indulge in more collaboration with her friend, something was nagging at her.

"How well do you know Skitter?"

There was an extended pause, which stretched on long enough that frustration started to rise. Dragon wished she could see whether Colin was even typing, but the chatroom didn't support such notifications. Eventually, after almost a minute of clock time stretched out further in her awareness, the reply came. "Not as well as I'd like. We spoke on this last time; I made it clear that I severely misjudged her character. But at this point, I'm not sure there's much I can do to rectify the situation."

Dragon bit a metaphorical lip. It was a risk, telling him this. But if there was anyone who could provide advice – or even be able to intervene themselves – it was him.

"There's a chance that Amy Dallon assaulted her sister. And that Victoria is staying with Skitter now, rather than returning to any of the heroes."

This time the pause was longer still. The reply, when it came, was terse.

"Tell me everything."


A/N:
Dragon continues to be the best person in this story or all of canon, and people can die mad about it. More seriously though, I chose Dragon for this interlude for two reasons. For one, we don't get nearly enough Dragon pov in fic generally, and she's an excellent divorced perspective to see events through. But for another… the restrictions on her agency (and literal voice!) are an excellent parallel to Victoria's own struggles. It matches up nicely.

That's a wrap for Confrontation! Friday brings us into arc 3 and the start of major canon divergence. It's hard to believe we've already gotten to this point, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. So far this story has been a lot of stations of canon, but with my own particular point of view on them. Here is where we see what happens when the plot is directed by yours truly. We'll see how that goes.

Before we finish here, I did want to note something that was pointed out to me by a reader. I wrote Charlotte, a Jew, as cooking bacon in one of the early chapters in arc 1. And I wanted to apologize for that formally here. I was so focused on fleshing out her character in regards to her conflict with Victoria that I forgot about her defining trait from canon. That's especially insensitive given how Brockton Bay has a history with blatant white supremacy, and Charlotte would have specific experience there.

That's on me, and once again I want to say sorry. There are explanations I could give, like "she's not a practicing Jew" or "it was turkey bacon", but it feels more appropriate and honest to leave the mistake as is rather than try and cover it up for my benefit. If anyone feels otherwise, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm (obviously) going to write with that trait in mind going forward. We all make mistakes, and I knew I would with this story the moment I started writing. But hopefully my honesty here is sufficient.

So today's rec is Self Implant by Chartic. You should read anything she posts when she posts but this one in particular is excellent. It's currently in the prologue chapter, and I don't want to spoil too much, so I'll just say this. It's a Worm Self-Insert that you should actually read. Go and take a look. Trust me.

 

[justanothercat]

Oh shit–

I didn't have time to finish the thought before Skitter was pressing me into the wall, her arm tight across my neck. My forcefield was keeping the pressure off my trachea, but I could also feel the tip of the knife in her left hand resting just over my stomach.

"Charlotte!" Skitter yelled.

I stared at her, trying to get my bearings again. She'd moved so fast I hadn't realized what was happening until it was over. I kept my breaths soft and shallow, keeping my panic off my face. I couldn't risk my aura going off again by accident. My aura going off on purpose, on the other hand... my memory of that first fight with the Protectorate was blurry, but I was pretty sure Skitter had stayed by my side for a long time before she'd said something. Too long. There was a good chance it had paralyzed her, at least briefly. I could use that, if I had to.

That, and the fact that she probably didn't know my field would protect me from that knife better than she thought. Ever since… Amy… it had been shaped weirdly. More… flowy. I hadn't really had the time or place to explore it properly. But I knew enough to be confident the knife would skitter (some part in the back of my head laughed hysterically) off to the side if she pressed the point.

Footsteps pounding up the stairs broke me out of my thoughts. Charlotte, hurried but not worried. Yet.

"Yeah, what–" She froze when she saw us. Her eyes flicked from Skitter to me to the knife, and narrowed.

"Charlotte. Start packing up, evacuate the kids first. Leave the food, we can come back for it if we need." Skitter said, her voice tight.

"I– sure, okay. But why? What happened? Was it her?" Charlotte asked. I could almost see her hackles bristling as what little ground I'd made with her crumbled.

Skitter's head jerked at the table where she'd left the phone, even as her eyes never left mine. We were both silent as Charlotte picked it up and read the text. She put it down, and I would never forget the look she gave me next.

"I almost trusted you, you know?" she spat. "I was this close." She scoffed. "Just shows what an idiot I was."

"No time," Skitter cut her off. "Get to packing. This is salvageable, but we need to move fast."

"Right. And what are we going to do with her, exactly?" Charlotte asked.

"That's none of your concern," Skitter said, looking back at me. The yellow lenses almost glowed in the dim light, impenetrable and inhuman. Her swarm flowed around us like a blanket, eerily quiet, wrapping us both in ten thousand crawling bodies. "She broke her word. She knows what that means here."

I swallowed. Shut out the thousands and thousands of legs pin-pricking their way across my clothes, my forcefield, my skin. I tried not to hyperventilate, and mostly succeeded.

I didn't have time for that right now. I needed to intervene here. This… didn't look good. But I had to hold onto hope that this wasn't what it looked like. That I might be able to talk myself out of this… somehow. Or at least, failing that, get enough distance that I could get away without breaking Skitter in the process. I knew it was weak, but I didn't want to do that. Not to the person who'd pulled me out of that bathtub weeks ago.

I slowly brought my hands up to start signing, only for Skitter to immediately increase the pressure on me. "Did I say you could move?" I glared at her. Fuck it, fine.

"Wait," I rasped, the word burning through my throat.

Skitter turned back to me, cocking her head. "You have ten seconds."

I licked my lips. "M-misc-communic-cation. N-notebook. P-p-please."

It couldn't have been more than a few seconds that Skitter spent staring at me, but it felt like hours. I resisted the urge to fidget, to move, to show any signs of struggle. Any twitch could kill one of the bugs that had us wrapped in a nightmare's embrace, and in this state I wasn't sure Skitter wouldn't take that as the opening move of a fight. I kept my body language as open as I could make it. I breathed in time with her. She was close enough that I could feel every rise and fall of her chest.

"If you try something–"

I shook my head; a single jerk from side to side. My lips were going numb from how hard they were pressed together. I wished my skin was going numb to match it.

Slowly, Skitter drew back. Her bugs had enclosed the three of us in a swirling mass of chitin and anger, and she all but disappeared into them; only her yellow-eyed glare standing out from the boiling dark. I slowly walked to the table with the notebook, picking up my pen under the watchful, hostile eyes of two humans and too many insects to count.

"I didn't sell you out," I wrote. I forced myself to approach this dispassionately, including only the relevant information. "I didn't tell Brandish anything. If she did something, it has nothing to do with me. There are kids here. I wouldn't do that. Not after Fleur"

"Then how do you explain this?" the swarm demanded, pulsing around the phone like a heart contracting.

I swallowed. "I can't. But I know who can"

There was a moment of silence as the two caught onto what I was saying. "Boss, you can't possibly be thinking of letting her–!" Charlotte yelled, stepping closer. The swarm drew her into itself, wrapping tendrils of ants and spiders around her shoulders, combing spindly fingers of wasps and flies through her hair. If she noticed, or minded, she gave no sign. "She could call the Heroes right to us! We need to go now!"

Skitter didn't say anything. She just stared at me, the meager light highlighting her eyes amidst the swarm taking up half the room. "I don't know anything about Dragon. But Brandish does. I can tell you what to text, you can put it in yourself. But it's the only way to know for sure"

"And how do we know that you aren't gonna secretly signal her somehow, huh?" Charlotte snarled. "We never should've trusted you to begin with."

"Charlotte," the swarm ordered in its terrible chittering voice. "Go down to the lower levels. Tell the kids it's fine. But if you don't hear from us in two minutes, tell them to start packing. Standard protocol. Use the secondary location. Call Tattletale, she'll know what to do."

"But boss–"

"Go, Charlotte." Those angled yellow eyes staring out of the heart of the teeming darkness never shifted from where they held me pinned. "I'll be fine."

As Charlotte left I fought the urge to clench my fists, to let loose, to take off through the window in a shower of splinters and–

... and what? I could get away from this conversation in a heartbeat, if I wanted to. Skitter couldn't stop me. She might not even try. But where would I go?

Fuck. I hated this. This tension. This… everything. It felt like we were back at the first day again, or worse. Like Carol was reaching out from my disaster of a conversation earlier to drag me down even further.

"She's right, you know," Skitter said at length. The girl, speaking out of the swarm with only a faint reverb. The bugs parted to reveal her mask, inscrutable at the heart of its buzzing aura. "I'd have no idea if you were giving Brandish some sort of hidden code."

"No," I wrote. "You wouldn't"

"So why should I trust you?" The swarm this time, as it closed in again to leave only her eyes visible, speaking from all around me. "Give me a reason."

I forced my hands not to tremble as I signed, "Because I came back."

A pause. A long pause.

The swarm receded, ebbing away like the tide, flowing back to wherever she kept it; under the floorboards and out the window and behind the walls.

Skitter wasn't there.

I stared at the spot she'd been standing, then jerked my head around, panic briefly spiking, only to find her... not where she'd been. Off to the side. How– no, I realized as soon as I asked the question, it was obvious. I'd only seen the mask. Of course she had more than one. It couldn't be that heavy. Easy to hold up with bugs at head height. Easy to use the background drone of the swarm to disguise exactly where her voice had been coming from.

I hadn't heard her move. I hadn't noticed her swap out with a floating mask. If I'd been the threat she'd been treating me as - if I'd taken a swing at her rather than talking my way out or going for the window...

I eyed her, and didn't find any sign of a weapon. But she'd have had ample time to put one away before dismissing the swarm.

Something to remember, if this ever happened again.

"...fine," Skitter said, all business again with the menace mostly packed away. "We'll work with that, for now. What are you going to say to her?"

I forced my brain to switch gears. What did we know? "Dragon was coming," and "get out now". But while that was a huge heads up… it didn't actually tell us much. If I was evacuating on my own, sure. But Carol easily could've been saying that preemptively to me so I wasn't caught in the crossfire or associated with a PRT affiliated attack. It told us nothing about when Dragon was coming.

The other question was why now. What had changed between the Nine leaving, and me ending up where I was, that led the PRT to think this was the right move? Those were the main questions I needed answered. How long we had, and why this was happening.

There was one more problem, too. I needed to quickly identify that this was me typing. Carol sending that text meant she probably knew exactly who I was staying with. She wouldn't give any information if she thought it was Skitter she was talking to. She'd be averse to giving it even if she thought Skitter would find out second-hand. But if she knew it was me, the odds were better.

Frankly, there weren't a lot of good options. Most of the stuff we had memorized was too conversational and situational to use on such short notice here. But I knew Skitter didn't know morse. I had tried it ages ago, tapping on the table while eating breakfast, and she hadn't twitched. I had to hope she wasn't bluffing, or just hadn't noticed.

"-.-. .- .-.. .-.. .- -. -.. How long? Why is Dragon being deployed? Lethal or nonlethal?"

Skitter, to her credit, didn't hesitate. She immediately punched in the digits into the phone, almost as fast as I wrote them. Then she hit send. Anxious tension unwound in my chest, replaced by jittery anticipation. Okay. Okay, that was good. Hopefully she'd get back to us soon. I doubted that Skitter's "June" trick would work again, so it was texting or nothing.

I tried not to look at Skitter too obviously as we were waiting. What must be going through her head right now? It didn't look good for me, I could admit that. It felt like just my luck lately. Everything going wrong at the worst possible–

I jumped as the phone buzzed. Skitter picked it up without so much as a twitch, but I'd heard the walls thrum for a second as I'd flinched.

".-. . ... .--. --- -. ... . Don't know, just got out of Protectorate meeting. Maybe a week, less. Tried to argue against it, didn't work. Come home, or go somewhere else. We can work it out. Piggot isn't taking no for an answer after the mansion."

Skitter immediately took out her own phone, presumably to tell Charlotte the packing was aborted, at least for tonight. I took a moment to force my shoulders to relax, then got back to work.

We had some time to work with. A week was… well frankly, no amount of time would really be enough to prepare for Dragon, but it was better than hours. Of course, this all depended on what Skitter wanted to do. I wasn't here for a fighting retreat; I'd rather run early than get forced into that position. But… my mind kept catching on that conversation from earlier. About why Skitter was doing all this. I couldn't let myself be another one of the Heroes who abandoned her when it got inconvenient. I had to at least try.

I tapped her arm when she hung up, and showed her my pad. "What now?"

"Now?" Skitter said. "We prepare. Brandish gave us time, even if I have no intention of thanking her for it. I'm going to brainstorm with Tattletale to see if we can come up with a strategy to divide and conquer the Dragonflight suits."

Wait.

What?

Skitter didn't seem to notice my confusion. "Bitch's dogs have enough of a Brute rating that three on one might be a fair fight. My spiders might be able to gum up the works with silk enough to slow her down–"

Skitter paused, as she saw me writing. I refused to listen to any more of this. I held up the pad, my gaze hard. "No. You can't fight her"

"What do you mean?" Skitter said, her voice challenging. "I know we might not look like much, but we've taken down people above our weight class before. This is no different."

I gaped at her for a second, then scribbled furiously, holding up a finger when she tried to continue. My penmanship suffered from the speed I was trying to get the words out, but it was legible, which was all that mattered.

"No, it's not about that Skitter. For one thing, Dragon is a juggernaut. She has the resources of a small country in hardware alone, nevermind the software and data she controls. She cannot and will not stop. It would be like trying to fight the US military"

"We've faced harder before," Skitter's voice was even, but I could hear the desperation an inch behind it. Anyone else might still have been fooled, but my forcefield was more sensitive than any fingertip. Beneath my feet, beneath the floor, the swarm was trembling.

"You still aren't listening" I wrote hastily. "Even if you win, even if you beat her, you lose. You will never be able to stop running. That conversation we had earlier, about being able to go to a Hero for help? Gone. If you destroy millions of dollars of government property you are a fugitive from now until the day you die. No one will help you save Dinah"

The bugs were creeping back in again, the crawling shadows in the corners of the room growled as Skitter read my words, but I refused to blink first. I was right, and I knew it. Even if Skitter could somehow beat Dragon, it would be a pyrrhic victory. This wasn't about the fight, and trying to see it that way would mean losing before she even started to plan.

Dragon wasn't someone who could be fought, and that wasn't just because of her equipment. She effectively was a direct form of outreach and action on behalf of the government. If she was intervening, it meant that she had full authority to arrest and detain whoever the target was, regardless of politics or cost.

It was one of the things Carol had always gotten so heated about when she'd talked about the founding principles of New Wave, back when they'd first unmasked. That the Brockton Bay Brigade had acted as judge, jury, and executioner, that there'd been nothing to limit how far they went against their enemies. I'd never been sure how much I bought into it, but the effects here were just the same.

"Then what are we supposed to do?" Skitter asked, bringing a hand up to comb through her hair in a rare show of frustration. "There are kids here, Victoria. Families. And there's still Dinah to consider. I can't just let Dragon win."

My mind spun as I tried to consider the possibilities. As much as I hated to admit it… Skitter had a point. The other thing about Dragon I'd learned from some informal chats with Armsmaster is that the restrictions imposed on her from the Guild were quite strict. She had huge leeway to act… but only within the bounds of the law.

Carol said that Piggot was the one who'd authorized or requested this, and her attempts to talk the Director out of it hadn't worked. But why would Piggot do that? Could it be revenge for the obvious public nose snubbing that the Undersiders had been doing for quite some time now? The assault on the PRT HQ?

I shook myself. No, this wasn't helping. Timeframes, maybe? The Nine had left. The Truce was essentially over, and certainly would be by the time Dragon arrived. Why would Piggot wait this long? She must think that the Undersiders were preventing her from performing her primary duty; taking care of her constituents. And in fairness, they were, if only by partially doing it for her. But if what Skitter had said earlier was true, the Undersiders couldn't just pull back from their holdings–and not just because of who would immediately replace them.

So what I really needed to do was work these variables to make that possible.

As it came together in my head, I looked at Skitter. She was still staring at the phone, one hand tangled in her hair, no doubt mulling over the same basic problem I was.

Could I trust her? That's what the plan – all of this, it felt like – came down to. I… was afraid to find out. But as much as I felt insane for thinking it after she had just pinned me to the wall, I thought I could. She let me explain. She believed me. After talking to Carol… that meant a lot. It meant that I was willing to believe she'd back me when it came down to it.

I snapped my fingers to get her attention. She turned her gaze to me. "Yes?"

"We need to talk to your team."


A/N:
This chapter is brought to you by four and a half hours of sleep. Find it at a severely underfunded local college near you. That and my cowriter Aleph, who now officially can no longer deny her role. Now my power is unstoppable. Tremble at my might.

So… remember how I said that "this conversation isn't over"? Well. Surprise? I'm sure that went somehow better and much worse than everyone expected. Really, what's a little threatening at knifepoint between friends? This is how you write friendship right? If not, I might seriously have to re-evaluate my middle school memories…

We're officially in arc 3! Y'all have no idea how excited I am. I've got plans for these two girls. Now I just gotta make sure they make it out the other end in one piece. No problem. I think. Does it count as one piece if I need to glue them back together?

The rec for today is Silent Howling by Selenelawfulgood. Do you want Wolfspider? Do you want an extremely autistic Taylor? Do you want some adorable interactions between a wolf changer and Bitch? Do you want ptsd, anxiety, and headpats? Yes? Then you want this fic.

 

[justanothercat]

Skitter's back was straight; a stiff line of tension ran from her neck all the way to the base of her spine. Other people might have missed it, but I could see her clavicle standing out sharply from the silk covering it in the gaps between armor plates. It was a tell she shared with Mo– with Carol.

Was she really that nervous over this? Or was it leftover aggression from our almost-fight earlier? I couldn't tell.

"Meet with my team?" Skitter asked. "You do know what you're asking for, right? The last time you met with any of them, it nearly ended in a fistfight. Twice."

I swallowed, but nodded. It was the only way. I didn't like it. Even now I could feel the cold sweat of anxiety dripping down through my sternum to curdle in the pit of my stomach. But it was the only way through. Skitter was willing to translate for me with Carol, and that was already more than I would ever have believed she'd give, before all this. But what I was thinking of asking for… it wasn't the type of thing that could be done through an intermediary. It would only be genuine, make sense, if I was the one pitching it. If this was the best chance of keeping Skitter out of an inevitable prison sentence, I owed it to her to try.

"Why?"

My fingers ached, but I brought them up anyway. "I have a plan. But I need to talk to your teammates. To see if it'll work. Needs to be me."

Skitter just looked at me, her expressionless mask tilted slightly to one side. A wasp hummed near the border of my forcefield by my left elbow. I tried to hear if anything was going on downstairs as the pause stretched, but couldn't make out anything over the buzzing of the insects around us.

"Why are you invested?" Skitter said at length, still looking at me. "I don't get it. You're a hero. I saved you, yeah, but you don't owe me anything. Frankly, I don't entirely understand why you're still here. I figured you'd be out days ago."

That was the question, wasn't it? Why, why, why? Maybe that was the way she saw it. And maybe she was right. Strictly speaking, the Truce that I came here under only said not to use secret identities or other underhanded tactics to fight each other. There was nothing in there about providing me a phone. Or a book. Or food. But here we were, almost two weeks later. That counted for something. It had to.

"Want to help. My choice." I signed.

"Help how?" Skitter asked. "I doubt you want to fight Dragon yourself. And failing that, we don't have any other options."

"There is one," I signed, meeting her eyes. "All of you leave the Bay."

This time, I was expecting it when the insects around us swirled into a hissing, spitting frenzy. I didn't flinch or look away as I continued signing, slow and careful. "Not permanently. Just until the PRT can deal with Coil"

"Not an option," Skitter snapped. "And even if I said yes, no one else would agree to it. They all have things tying them here, myself included. We can't just pick up and abandon the people relying on us. And I can't leave Dinah."

This girl… she still thought Dinah was hers to save. That it had to be her. I could respect dedication, but this seemed like it was bordering on fixation. It couldn't be– no. I cut myself off from that thought; pursuing that approach wouldn't get me anywhere. Now wasn't the time to get into a pointless fight; I had to back up and focus on the terms she actually wanted. She needed Dinah safe in order to feel like her morality wasn't compromised. I felt similarly, if I was being honest. So I needed to find the right line of argument to show that.

"If you fight Dragon yourselves, you'll end up in prison. You won't help her there."

Skitter shook her head. "You're not listening." But the stubborn opposition had left her voice. She just sounded fed up now, done with the argument. "Fine," she said, glancing away, back to the map of Brockton spread out across the table. "You can meet with them. It'll be a disaster, but maybe hearing it from them will clear things up for you."

I tried not to twitch at the patronizing tone and the blatant dismissal. If that was what it took to get my foot in the door, I'd take it. I could always leave. Though, that did remind me of my last reservation. I snapped my fingers, and she turned to look at me despite not really needing to.

"I have one problem"

Skitter stared at me for another moment, one hand still resting on the map where she'd been moving a pin, before nodding. "Alright. What problem?"

I swallowed, and spelled it out letter by letter. "Hijack"

The yellow-eyed, mandible-jawed mask was as expressionless as ever, and nothing about her posture changed, but I felt suddenly sure that if I could see the girl beneath she'd be setting her jaw in muleish resignation. The sigh she let out was certainly proof she knew exactly what I was talking about.

"I'd prefer you use his current name–Regent," she said. "His old one has some… unfortunate connotations."

My gaze grew flinty. "You mean when he hijacked people?"

"Look it isn't–" Skitter paused to take a breath. The noise around us increased, black patches on the walls growing denser. But the bugs weren't hemming me in this time. They were massing on the far wall, the sinuous movements of the swarm flexing against the walls and ceiling like they were looking for a way out. "It isn't that simple. Yes, that's a part of it; I won't deny it. But we aren't… we don't like to do that. Unless there's no other option."

My fists clenched. "No other option? To do to someone else what you saved me from, you mean?"

"It's not like that!" Skitter snapped. "What Amy did… there's a reason why I didn't leave you there. No one deserves that, no matter what side they're on."

"I'm not exactly about to defend Shatterbird," I signed angrily, "but you weren't subtle about waving around your control of her like some sort of trophy. Taking on the Nine is one thing, but why keep her now? Even if you don't want to kill her, why not turn her over?"

"That's not the same thing!," she said, the bugs around us humming warningly. "That's not fair and you know it. Everything happened too fast, and it's not like anyone would trust us to give her over now."

I couldn't believe this. "So what, you're just going to hang onto her forever as your own private enforcer until she inevitably gets loose? Like some sort of demented pet–"

There was a bang, sharp and loud. It took me a moment after I jumped to realize that it had been Skitter's hand on the table. "That. Wasn't. My. Call."

There was a long pause.

At last she spoke. Slowly, as if trying to find the right words. "I'm not defending taking people like that. I'm not. But there's a difference between taking control of someone who is literally about to kill you, and doing it because you can. I don't like either, but they're different."

"How though?" I pressed. "How is it any different for the person–"

"I DON'T KNOW!" Skitter yelled.

The room was silent. The bugs had stopped moving. I stared at Skitter. For once, she wasn't meeting my eyes. Her shoulders hunched inward for a moment, hands fisting, before she corrected them back to her usual neutral stance.

"I don't know," she said again, softly. "And I get that's an issue for you. I can't say anything to reassure you there, right now. All I can say is the reason why I asked you to use that name doesn't have anything to do with me agreeing with that. It's because that name is associated with something in his past he doesn't want to bring back up, like Glory Girl. So I hope that you, of all people, can understand."

That… I knew that Villains always had deeper reasons for what they were doing. We all did. No one willingly did the "wrong thing" unless they were either convinced they had no other option or were forced into it. I stared at Skitter, trying to tell if she was serious. If this was an appeal for me to loosen my morality because of a shared connection, it was a low blow. I wasn't sure I could hold myself back from… doing something I'd regret, if that was true. But she knew that, too. Skitter couldn't afford for me to find out later that this was fake.

She hadn't outright lied to me yet. I could take her at her word until she gave me reason not to. And I didn't think she would. Frankly, Skitter just wasn't the type for subterfuge like this. I didn't agree with all of her decisions (far from it), but she was always straightforward about what she said she was going to do. When she said anything at all, anyway. To the extent she ever lied, it was more by stubbornly holding back information than by telling falsehoods. She was sharing something now about her team, of her own accord, just to help me feel better.

I nodded. "I can do that. But that's not my worry."

Skitter cocked her head, and I continued. "I need to know that he won't control me. That you won't let him."

This time, Skitter wasted no time meeting my gaze dead-on. "That will not happen, Victoria," she promised. "I know they're my teammates and you aren't, but this is beyond that. I may not believe you about all this Dragon stuff, but if you're willing to weigh in at all then we can use all the help we can get. And… frankly speaking, we couldn't afford to puppet you. We have enough to deal with as it is."

That was… harsh. Pragmatic, if I was being charitable (which I wasn't). But I couldn't deny her logic. It really wouldn't make sense.

Skitter sensed my reaction, if the spider running across my arm was any indication. "And beyond that," she added softly, "the situations where Regent used his power were different. I know we said you weren't an Undersider. And I'm assuming that's still true here…"

I nodded quickly. That was one bridge I wouldn't allow myself to cross. Not here, not like this. The feeling of her arm inches away from my throat was still too fresh, even if I wanted to.

"...but since this is a loaded issue for you, I can make some exceptions." She took a deep breath, "I'm assuming we're under Truce confidentiality here, yes?"

She waited for my nod to continue, "Regent's powers allow him to control someone within a radius of himself, powers included. But to do that, he needs time. Hours if he's trying actively, days to weeks if he's not. It is very noticeable, and manifests as uncontrollable muscle spasms. I'm going to tell him under no uncertain terms not to use his power on you, but I'm telling you this so you can recognize it yourself. Does that satisfy your worries?"

I… I wanted to say no. And in some ways, it still didn't. I had no idea why Regent didn't want to use his old name, and it still felt self serving. Skitter clearly didn't approve of him using his power to control people… but also wasn't stopping him.

But at the same time, it would've been a lot easier for her not to tell me all of this. To say that he wasn't Hijack, or to just say she wouldn't let him turn me into a puppet and ask me to trust her. Instead she laid out the objective reasons why he wouldn't, committed herself to backing that up and gave me the warning signs so I could watch for them myself.

I could… just barely accept that. It was right on the line. I'd be keeping my aura on a hair trigger the whole time; if that was what it took to get me out of there then so be it. But it wasn't the deal-breaker I'd thought it might be.

"Fine," I signed stiffly. "Anyone else like that?"

Skitter hummed, tilting her head to show she was thinking. "No, those should be most of the people you have issues with in terms of powers. You still haven't entirely explained why you want to meet everyone, though. Especially when you aren't a member."

"It's still coming together in my head," I signed. It was true, but it was also frustrating that I didn't think I quite had the vocabulary in ASL to explain it even once I figured out the details of my half-formed idea.

"Alright," Skitter said dubiously. "I'm going to have to pitch this to the team. We normally meet without masks; that's obviously not an option here. I'll let you know when we're ready to–"

"Not here," I signed.

I flushed bright red as Skitter cut herself off mid-sentence. I wasn't sure where that had come from, but a tension I hadn't even noticed lifted off me as I processed what I'd said.

"Not here?" Skitter echoed.

I nodded. "Not here. The meeting. Other place, please."

Skitter tilted her head. She looked at me for a long moment, and I suppressed the urge to squirm. It felt like she could see right through me - not physically, but to parts of me maybe even I wasn't aware of. It wasn't entirely a comfortable feeling. But at the same time... it wasn't revulsion or fear I felt at being so seen. Just antsy nervousness at what she might find.

"...alright," she said at length, and nodded. "Somewhere else, then I'll see to it."

And with that she turned to walk up the flight of stairs to her room, presumably to make the calls to her team in private. I didn't fully relax until the door closed behind her, slumping against the wall behind me. I caught a couple of spiders scuttling out of the way out of the corner of my eye, so she was still probably aware of me, but I didn't care. I needed a moment.

What had I just done? Why had I agreed to meet up with these Villains – one of them a human Master, to boot? It was like I wanted to be controlled again–

Fuck. I squeezed my eyes shut and cycled my breathing. In for five seconds, hold for four, out for seven. Again and again, until my heart rate slowly calmed. That… that wasn't what this was. I refused to believe that; refused to even think it. I was doing the right thing here. Sometimes the right thing was hard. But Skitter had saved me. More than once. More than that; she wasn't the unrepentant Villain she was painted as. There was good in her; her means were twisted up and brutal but her goals were well-intentioned. I owed it to her to help. If that was what would break this debt between us and let me walk away afterwards with a clear conscience – if that give her a chance to walk away afterwards as something other than the warlord all her bad choices had made her – it would be worth the discomfort of sharing a room with Hi– with Regent.

---

The idea didn't get any less anxiety-inducing over the next day as it solidified in my head. Skitter stayed up in her room for hours on the phone, hashing out the details of the meeting. I didn't ask her about it. Part of me didn't want to know. The rest was worried that she wouldn't tell me anything anyways. But my resolve was still there, winning out over the butterflies in my stomach. I was committed to at least saying my piece, trying to talk them out of turning this city into a warzone for the third time this month.

It was just a lot harder to believe that when I was steeped in the humid evening air of late summer, walking side by side with Skitter down yet another abandoned street.

As seemed to be standard, no one bothered us. The swarm around us was thick, alternating between enclosing us in a thick tight bubble and expanding outwards in probing waves. Or at least, that's what I guessed from the bug presence at the outer edges. It was hard to tell without an aerial view, and I wasn't about to draw any further attention to us without due cause.

I looked at Skitter beside me. If she was bothered by this meeting, she didn't show it. I knew it had to be treading ever closer to the boundaries she had set up between me and the rest of her team. I tried to go over them in my head as we walked.

Tattletale and Bitch were known quantities, more or less. The former was… antagonistic was a light word. Primarily a Thinker, without a known sub power. But that primary expression was formidable. While it was easy to take her out in a straight fight, the bank had shown just how difficult that could be in practice. That, and she hated me. The feeling was mutual.

Bitch on the other hand was a bit more of a mystery. I'd tried to spend some time earlier today remembering the finer details of that disastrous outing when we met for the second time, and some things had come back to me. Her power in particular was clearly striker based, and took some time to activate. It also might tire her out. I remembered Skitter being able to pin her to the wall after she'd tried to set her dog on me. Unless Skitter was a lot stronger than she looked, I suspected that was because Bitch had been exhausted by power use. Whether that was from power over-use before we'd met her or the boost she'd given them in the moment, I couldn't say.

Then there was… Regent. Skitter had explained his power earlier, and that was at least fifty percent of why I felt comfortable with this. Yes, he had reasons not to control me, but that was cold comfort when I thought the same of my sister not that long ago. Ultimately, my security came with my aura, and flight. If I sensed anything that I thought was Regent trying to get the upper hand, I had promised myself, I was bolting on the spot. Truce or no.

The last one was an unknown. Grue. The leader, according to Skitter. By process of elimination, the darkness generator from the bank job. I remembered it being almost stifling, blocking sound as well as light. Best to assume he could see through it; that way I wouldn't be unpleasantly surprised. But it also obscured sightlines for everyone else. I could use that, if it came down to it.

"We're here," Skitter said, breaking me out of my thoughts. I looked up. At some point while I'd been deep in thought we'd walked up to a nondescript door of one of the warehouses on the eastern side of the Docks. It looked almost exactly like every other entrance, save for the number 37B stenciled on it. That was probably the point. This might not even be an Undersiders base, just a location of convenience.

Skitter looked at me, face unreadable behind her insectoid mask and signature yellow lenses. "You ready?"

I swallowed, and gave a hesitant nod, my notebook clenched in my hands.

"Look," Skitter said, and if I didn't know better I'd have thought it was awkwardness I heard in her tone. "I'm gonna have to say some things in there. What we've talked about before this still holds, alright?"

Well… that wasn't ominous at all. I nodded slowly, pointlessly second-guessing all the choices that had brought me here.

Too late to back out, though. She turned back to the entrance, and opened the door.

Immediately facing us inside was a small fold-out table, with a number of chairs arranged around it. And in them set the Undersiders, all assembled and waiting on us. I dragged my eyes over them one by one. Grue, with his black motorcycle helmet and matching leathers. Bitch, with her fur collared jacket and cheap dog mask, already growling at me. Beside her… Regent, complete with a loosely fitted white shirt, venetian mask, and matching crown. It would've looked absurd, but the way he was leaning back with an arm sprawled over the back of his chair made it barely work.

Finally, my eyes met Tattletale. Wearing her signature purple and black spandex, with the domino mask to go with it. Already with that goddamn grin on her face.

"Hey, Glory Girl," she smirked, and my fists clenched at her tone before my brain even registered the words. "Miss me?"


A/N:
Conflict? In my fic? It's more likely than you'd think. I love you Alec, it's not you, it's me. Wait babe where are you going–

In all seriousness this conversation was pretty difficult to write at the time. A lot of this fic consists of "Victoria or Skitter walking right up to their respective lines, and daring one another to put a toe over". This is definitely one of those times. I'd like to think that I did a good job at believably walking back the tension here. Listen, they're both disasters alright? And almost yelling at your sort of not quite friend is definitely the equivalent of therapy. Yes.

Today's rec is Giving Up the Game by SilviaNorton, a fic that I'm going to read immediately after I finish posting this chapter I swear. I'm obligated by law to rec good punchbuggy fics at this point, so don't mind me as I slowly go down the list of the currently updating stuff in the fandom. This one is explicit, thus my not linking it directly. But it's romance and fluff, featuring an unpowered Taylor and social awkwardness in Arcadia? Count me in.

 

[justanothercat]

I clenched my fists and tried not to react as Tattletale's smirk widened. Lashing out or showing how deep that barb had sunk would just be giving her what she wanted. I refused to give her the satisfaction.

"Tattletale–" Skitter warned as I moved to sit down, dark promise in her tone. Her bugs hummed once to punctuate her words; not quite a threat yet but on the edge of one.

"Oh hush, you've kept her in private long enough," Tattletale said, waving the warning off and getting up from her chair to look at me. "Let me have a little bit of fun. Decided to keep the hair dye in huh, Glory?"

I fingered a lock of hair and tried not to fidget as I stepped deliberately out of her reach and took a seat on the other side of Skitter from her, folding my hands down into my lap to hide their trembling. Her comment about the hair dye I just ignored. At this point it was more that I hadn't decided one way or another. The Heroes knew that I was with Skitter, true, but that didn't mean the average person on the street did. Being obviously Glory Girl while walking next to Skitter was a lot different than looking like someone her general shape and size. My roots were showing at this point, and it had faded to more of a dark gray, but it was still good enough to deflect casual attention.

"I'm surprised it lasted this long, given that you've got access to showers again," Tattletale continued, jerking her head at Skitter next to me. I tried to keep my reaction from showing. I knew by this point that the water was working – though how I had no idea. I… hadn't really thought about it. Taking a shower. It would mean taking off my clothes and foggy mirrors and water and touching and–

"Be nice, Tattletale," Skitter ordered, giving her what must have been an impressive glare from behind those lenses.

"You never let me do anything fun anymore, I swear!" Tattletale shot back with a pout, completely unintimidated. "What happened to best criminal buddies, huh?"

"Enough," Grue said, startling me. I'd been so focused on Tattletale at the other end of the table that I'd almost forgotten him, seated to my left with his arms folded. "She's right."

The air in the room changed at once, solemnity as smothering as his darkness descending. It almost felt statically charged, and I struggled not to lean on the mental trigger for my aura. Tattletale finally shut up and sat back down, letting me turn my attention to Grue, hyper-aware of my position between him and Skitter. If he looked like he was going to turn things violent, I'd be able to get us both out before he could reach us, even in the dark.

"Skitter," he said, low and intense, "Where have you been?"

If she really was nervous, she was doing a fantastic job of hiding it. "I told you all in the last meeting that I'd be busy handling this," she replied, sounding more annoyed at being questioned than anxious. She drummed her fingers on the back of her chair almost absentmindedly. "Tattletale and I found her in a position of vulnerability. We agreed she might make a good asset, so I let her stay."

Wait, an asset? We'd agreed I wasn't a member of the Undersiders! Was this all some kind of fucked up scheme to recruit me?

Beneath the table, a small centipede crawled over my palm, hidden to the rest of the Undersiders. Skitter. What did it mean? Was she just trying to reassure me before I left and ruined her plan? How much of this was true? I remembered her words from a few minutes ago, that she would have to say things here. I wished I believed her now.

"An asset is one thing," Grue said. His folded arms tightened, and his biceps bulged under the black leather. "But only if it doesn't bring down more heat on us. You've already dragged Bitch into one fight with the heroes over her. We can't afford another confrontation like that right now."

I swallowed, and tried not to look at the stocky girl in the cheap dog mask across the table from me. Her low growl made it difficult.

"And then," Grue continued, "you weren't there when we had to take on the Empire. We had to sub in one of the Travelers, and Ballistic almost hit one of Bitch's dogs when we were getting out."

"I still wanna kill that fucker," Bitch said darkly. She looked like she was going to say something more, but a sharp look from Grue stopped her. Grunting, she shoved her chair back and turned her back on the table, whistling sharply for a dog I hadn't noticed lounging in the corner and starting to pace..

"You know that I was busy that day," Skitter said, pulling my attention back to her. Wait, she'd been busy? Busy doing what? When had this even come up? Did he mean the whole mess with Parian and Flechette? I tried to review what I'd seen her doing, but Skitter spent so much time out or up on the third floor that it was impossible to guess how much of it was vital stuff she might have skipped a fight for.

"I called ahead. You said it was fine, that I could tend to things in my territory if I needed to while you tagged in Ballistic for backup. If you had a problem with it, you should've told me," Skitter said. She hadn't moved from the position she'd taken after coming in, standing with shoulders squared behind the one empty chair left at the table.

"Goddammit Skitter, that's not the point!" Grue said, smacking a fist on the table and standing, his chair skidding back and almost falling over as he matched her. I felt like I was watching a tennis match, looking back and forth between them as they spoke, except this one was being played with grenades. "I didn't know I needed you until you weren't there! That's the whole problem! Yeah, you needed to take care of Glory Girl, fine. But how long until you're satisfied and move onto some new pet project?"

Skitter's shoulders went rigid. If she'd been stiff before, now she was as tense as I'd ever seen her, like Grue's accusation had shoved an iron bar up her spine. I shuddered at the mental image. Bonesaw was too fresh in memory for that to be an innocent metaphor.

"She needed help, Grue," Skitter said through gritted teeth. "She was in my territory. I refuse to feel guilty for that, not when I'm still doing my job here."

"Yeah, and how long is that going to last, exactly?"

This time the silence slammed down like a coffin lid. Even the bugs froze. Grue was smart enough to realize he'd overstepped.

"Skitter, I didn't mean it like–"

"No," Skitter cut him off. "No, I think you did."

"Sheesh," Tattletale said, drawing out her chair and standing up. A part of me hated how she made the motion look almost leisurely, like she was just stretching. "You all don't have to be so dramatic about it. Just because Glory Girl's sister got a little focused on her crush when I pointed it out at the bank and did something awful doesn't mean Victoria is broken forever. She's here, isn't she?"

The world ground to a halt. Nothing disturbed the cold, ringing silence as memory crystallized with sadistic clarity. The bank had always been… a moment of contention for me, especially lately. But up to now that had mostly been my perception of Skitter. It made sense; she was the one I'd had the most contact with, and while I hated Tattletale for what she did… the exact nature of what she'd said to Amy hadn't clicked until now.

The secret. The thing she was mocking, right in front of my face. I thought maybe it was her parent being Marquis. And maybe part of it was. But with what she just said… I couldn't deny it. She knew. She knew from day one, and still let me go home with her, didn't do anything, didn't tell me–

Regent's fist interrupted us both as he slammed it into Tattletale's stomach, doubling her over with a convulsive sound that was part wheeze, part grunt and part squawk.

I blinked. I blinked again, squeezing my eyes shut and then reopening them, double-checking that I'd actually seen that right. It had to have been a mistake, right? But no, Skitter's teammate had definitely just sucker punched Tattletale.

He seemed to belatedly notice us staring, as he slowly drew his fist back. He was breathing hard through his nose, jaw so tight I could see the muscles in his neck standing out, his head eerily still as he stared down at the bent-over, wheezing girl he'd just knocked the wind out of.

Then he straightened, and the tension slid off him like water. His body language fell back to casual carelessness so completely that it couldn't be natural. But it didn't seem forced, either. A shiver of discomfort rippled up my spine. I'd half thought he was defending me for a brief, absurd moment, but this... this shift from fury to apathy just creeped me out more.

"What?" he asked, looking around at our expressions. "We were all getting our dramatic soap opera moments; I wanted mine. Seemed fun."

And with that he sat right back down, twirling his scepter.

Tattletale let out a dry hacking noise that might have been laughter, bracing herself on the table for a moment before straightening again with a hand held gingerly to her midsection. It took her a couple more slow breaths before she managed to sit back down, and even then she winced as she did so.

"Yeah yeah," she wheezed, "everyone's a critic."

"Enough," Skitter said, trying to regain control of the conversation, "this isn't what we were even here to talk about. We have a problem."

Grue's helmet dipped slightly as he tucked his chin closer to his chest. He planted his hands on the table and leant forward. "Explain."

I swallowed, and leaned forward, laying my pad in front of him rather than Tattletale or Regent. Skitter had explained that Grue was the leader of the gang, which meant it was on me to explain this to him. I didn't know how much he already knew, so I had prewritten as much as I could.

"Dragon is coming to Brockton Bay to apprehend the Undersiders. I was warned by my Mother. She told me to get out, that she can't guarantee my safety when it happens. You have a week at most, maybe less. Can't fight her, you need to run"

Bitch growled as she stopped her pacing. "What's she saying?"

Fuck. Was my handwriting that bad? Skitter stepped forward, ready to explain, but Grue cut her off. "She's saying Dragon is coming. One week. She says we should run."

"Oh great," Regent laughed. "The giant Dragon lady is coming? I'll just pack my bags then will I?"

"Don't tell me you're scared, Glory," said Tattletale.

"Fuck that," Bitch snarled.

Great. This was going even better than I'd expected.

"Why do we need to leave?" Grue asked, staring down at the pad and then at me, straightening a little as though his height and the skull and black smoke could intimidate me. I didn't like that he was looking down at me, or that he thought this kind of display could scare me after everything she'd done, but I wasn't going to escalate this further by challenging him over something that petty. "We've faced bad odds before."

I gave Skitter a desperate look, which she seemed to interpret correctly. "She can't speak. She can sign, and I'll translate."

Grue grunted. The helmet made it hard to tell if he was watching me or Skitter as I explained. "Deploying Dragon means the government is sanctioning the effort. She's a force of nature. Even if you take her down, it won't stop. It means none of you have a way out. You'll be running forever, until you're too slow to get away." My fingers hurt from the unfamiliar signs and the way I was having to finger-spell some words, but I kept going. I had forced myself to practice these earlier today, over and over again. If there was anything I could do to give myself an edge in communicating, I'd do it.

"As opposed to what, exactly?" Grue said. He gestured at the rest of the Undersiders. "In case you haven't noticed, we've been past the point of no return for a while here."

I looked at Skitter. I knew that she and Tattletale were onboard with this; hopefully the rest of the team was. I kept my aura on a hair trigger as I signed, just in case. "I know that Skitter and Tattletale want to overthrow Coil."

The bugs on the walls hissed, but Skitter still translated the message. Bitch growled lowly, somewhere between a warning and a promise. Grue pushed up off the table he'd been leaning on and rose back to his full height, fists clenching at his sides and rising instinctively towards a guard stance. The smoke leaking from his costume thickened and darkened, slowly rolling down his shoulders like a cape and flowing down his arms and chest like tar. "Tattletale?"

She sighed, absentmindedly rubbing her stomach just below her diaphragm. "Yeah boss, we do."

"Why?"

She gave him a grim smile. "Because I know he's already put one hit out on Skitter by this point. Maybe more. Having a plan ready to take him out seemed like good insurance."

Fuck. Their own boss had— no, focus. This wasn't directly actionable, but it did support my point. It gave him a reason to listen.

"Regardless of the fact that my own teammates didn't tell me they were planning on overthrowing our boss," Grue growled, his smoke pooling on the floor in a thick, clinging layer, creeping out from his feet by inches, "I don't see what that has to do with Dragon."

I swallowed. This was the trickiest part. I knew what Skitter's angle was, and while I didn't know Tattletale's I could guess. Coil already had one pet Thinker in his basement; I doubted he'd say no to another. And I couldn't have been the first to think as much. I didn't know where Grue was coming from on this. But what Tattletale had just shared was a key datapoint. And judging from the look on her face, she knew it. I could use that.

"Normally, you're right. You've done too much for the PRT to take you at your word. But he's kidnapped a child to use as his Thinker. He put out a hit on your own teammate. You can't trust him anymore. This is much bigger than anything you all have done. If you move attention onto Coil instead of you, the PRT might leave you alone."

"Might?" Grue asked. His darkness was speeding up, growing exponentially into a shroud that left him a leering white skull in the smoke that coiled inky tendrils around the table legs and swallowed the chair behind him. I got ready to launch myself into flight at a moment's notice if I needed to. "That's a hell of a risk to run on a hypothetical," he went on, the smoke billowing with a swing of his arm. "Yeah, Coil's not exactly the person I'd trust to have at my back. You know who is?"

He gestured at the capes arrayed beside him. "My team. Not a hero who never stuck out her neck for us before."

"Grue," Skitter said sharply.

"What?" he snapped, turning to her.

"She has. Stuck up for me. Flechette attacked us; she wanted to arrest me and drag us both back to the Wards. She," she jerked a thumb at me, "stopped her, and flew me back. We're not Heroes, but we're also not hypocrites."

I didn't dare look at her. I didn't know what she'd see on my face. I didn't know what I wanted her to see there. I didn't even know whether I wanted there to be anything to see.

"So then we should follow princess over here and just turn ourselves in to the heroes?" Regent asked, absentmindedly tracing a pattern on the table. He'd been so quiet, apart from sucker-punching Tattletale, that I'd half-forgotten he was there. "I don't know about you, but I don't think there's much pizza in prison."

"The fuck we're going to prison," Bitch growled, her hand on the dog by her side. I tried not to tense. This was going to shit; I needed to de-escalate.

"That's not what I'm saying. Just tell the PRT that there's a bigger target. Then get out of the Bay while they clean house."

"Except you have no idea how long that will take," Tattletale countered, looking at me pointedly. She tapped the table for effect. "Coil has infiltrated this branch himself. How do you know any raid isn't dead on arrival? How long are we supposed to just abandon everything holding us here? Do you have any idea how long it's taken for us to build up what structure we have?"

Fuck it, I had to appeal to her ego. If there was one lever I knew she had, even from what little time I'd interacted with her, it was her obsession with proving she was the smartest person in any room she walked into.

"As if you couldn't find that out before you even called them. Unless you're less of a Thinker than you like to pretend."

Tattletale wagged a chiding finger at me. "Uh uh, naughty naughty. I know what you're trying to do, and it won't work. Just because I might know all of the PRT's dirty little secrets doesn't mean I can manipulate them that finely."

She leaned her cheek against her hand. "Besides, didn't you just say they had no reason to take us at our word? Even assuming we get lucky and talk to a person he hasn't bought off or bugged, why would they act on any of this at all? It's information coming from villains, Glory. You barely believe Skitter and you've been living with her for two weeks. The PRT? No chance in hell."

Fuck. She had a point there, and she knew it had landed. If the information came from me, Piggot might at least consider it. But I'd been staying with Skitter for days. And missing for longer than that. Anything that came out of my mouth was suspect at best, and a Master-Stranger incident at worst. I would've had the same doubts if I hadn't lived through it.

"We're wasting time," Grue said, drawing his smoke back into himself and laying his palms flat on the table. "We need to focus on Dragon. Maybe we can find a way to disable her suits."

"No, you don't understand," I signed, frustrated. "If you resist her or put up a public fight of any kind, that's the same thing as declaring war against the US government. The only reason why you got away with your fiefdoms here is because of the chaos in the city when it happened."

"Then give us solutions, not problems," Skitter said, responding to me directly rather than translating. I turned to her to reply and–

"I think you should just tell Dragon," said a voice an inch behind my left ear.


A/N:
Surprise! Y'all get the chapter today since I'm traveling tomorrow. Monday's update is coming on the usual date, though I'll likely be a bit less active in the thread since I'll still be out of town when that happens. And/or still be dead from the 4(? I can't do math) hour time difference, we'll see.

The Undersiders are a lot of fun to write when they're all in the same room. Challenging as hell, but fun. They're all such shitlords (aside from Brian, thank u for being the voice of reason) that they almost seem to compete with one another to say the most out of pocket thing in any given situation. The mark of a true healthy relationship. Also hats off to Aleph once again for helping this feel way less like talking heads. She's great.

Today's rec is going to be Missy Wants Her Girlfriend Back by Peggysussy, in which Coil kidnaps Dinah and Missy expresses her displeasure. Violently. Is it in character? Nope. Is it canon compliant? Good lord no? Is it fun? Absolutely.

 

[justanothercat]

My aura exploded out of me, washing over the people and walls surrounding me like a tidal wave. It wasn't a conscious decision, but I couldn't bring myself to care. There was someone right behind me and I'd had no idea she was there; she could've touched me and I would've never known. I spun fast enough that my hair whipped out behind me, one fist coming around to–

"Victoria!" Skitter yelled.

I blinked, lowering my arm from the roundhouse I'd been throwing at... something? What had just happened? I looked over at the Undersiders. Grue was on his feet, gripping the table hard enough to make the leather of his gloves creak. Bitch was snarling, hunched over, shoulders up and ready to swing; Tattletale was wide-eyed and had a hand on her pistol. Even Regent had jumped to his feet and pulled out his scepter. They were scared - terrified. Because... because of my aura, I realized. It was on full blast. Wait, had I slipped? Grue was intimidating but… why did I turn my aura on again?

I groped for the mental switch to my newly hair-trigger aura, forcing it back under my skin. Skitter visibly relaxed, the bugs teeming on the walls slipping back into a low drone. The others all slumped, less used to the feeling. Bitch looked like she was seriously considering hurdling the table and trying to punch me again.

"What the hell was that?" Grue said, looking at me.

I struggled to come up with an explanation. I'd promised to only bring up my aura if it was absolutely necessary while I was here. Only if I thought we were compromised. So why...

There was something niggling in the back of my head, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

"We're not safe," I signed, trying to get Skitter's attention, "Don't know what, but we're compromised."

Skitter stilled. I could feel her eyes narrowing behind the mask, even if I couldn't see them. "How?" she asked, short and efficient, pulling out her baton and snapping it out to its full length with a click.

"Don't know, but I can't see them."

"Well, I wouldn't want you to see my party trick, princess."

I wheeled again at the voice, launching myself away and bringing my fists back up. It was her! She'd snuck up right behind me while we were talking; that was why my aura had flared! And then I'd... forgotten?

Skitter had turned on the new cape as fast as I had, and I backed up to stand beside her as I got my first clear look at them. A gray body suit similar to Skitter's, though I couldn't tell if it was the same material. A belt with a silver buckle holding a holster for the combat knife she was flipping between her fingers. A long gray silk scarf cascading over both of her shoulders. Meant to exaggerate or confuse her silhouette maybe? I couldn't tell. And a white porcelain mask with red detailing in the shape of an east asian demon.

It was that last point that set off alarm bells. Oni Lee had been quiet since the early days of the Nine coming to the Bay, and it was safe to assume at this point that he was dead. But I still remembered him. It was hard not to. He'd been deadly – a teleporter with a particular fondness for knives and explosions. One who favored the mask of his cultural namesake. The same one worn by the mystery cape brandishing a knife of her own at me.

My hand involuntarily went into my pocket, hitting the panic button on my phone. Skitter jerked at the answering buzz. She took out her phone only to realize who it was, and looked quickly to me.

"C-compromised. O-oni L-Lee," I stuttered out, my hands too stiff at my sides to sign properly. Fuck. I couldn't make my mouth work for more than that; hopefully Skitter would get the connection I was trying to make. The ABB cape had been horrifically dangerous, especially in close quarters, and if this girl was modeling herself after him? We all had to be careful. I was keeping my forcefield as tight to my skin as I could but it felt unwieldy and large, like I was swimming in it. Anxiety maybe? I didn't have time to analyze the feeling.

"Imp!" Grue interrupted before I could try anything else. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Wait. What?

I looked over at him, not letting the unknown out of my peripheral vision. He knew this cape? The Undersiders only had five members! At least... they only have five that anyone knew about. Was this a secret sixth, or just another Stranger effect, making him think that she belonged here? I didn't let myself relax, wary of any sudden move she might make.

"Sheesh, there's no reason to be so loud," Imp grumbled, shooting me a disgruntled look. "Princess over there was just jumpy is all."

"That's Glory Girl, and if it wasn't for your power she would've taken your head off," Skitter observed with dangerous calm.

I froze. It… I wanted to say that would never happen. That I'd never let myself lash out like that. But I'd had no real conscious part in my reaction. I'd just… moved. Base instinct. Could I guarantee that Imp would've survived if I'd hit her in that moment? She… probably wouldn't have. All of the classes I'd taken on excessive use of force suddenly came back to me, and I struggled not to wilt. Sure this was for a different reason, but it felt like I'd been thrown back in time. All that growth and control gone in an instant.

"I'm sorry about Imp," Grue said, drawing my attention back out of my self-recriminations. "She's a Stranger, as you can tell. Her power isn't entirely under her control. We all forget about her unless she keeps it off."

That was… my mind reeled as I tried to put that into context. Said bluntly like that, it was a stupidly strong power. The only historical example I could think of was Nice Guy, a member of the original Slaughterhouse Nine. Maybe Imp's power wasn't as all-encompassing as his; the usual tricks of unseen third party observation or recordings might be able to catch her presence, but those relied on you knowing she was coming. If individuals on the ground couldn't be told (or be counted on to remember) to watch for her? She could get away with a frightening amount before any consequences caught up to her. Hell, they'd managed to keep her place on the team a complete secret since... I had no idea how long.

I couldn't afford to let that first impression be what she took from me, accident or not.

I brought up my hands and shakily signed to Skitter. "Sorry. Startled me. Please don't do that again."

"Fineeee," Imp said with a drawn out groan after Skitter translated. She rubbed her arm absentmindedly. "You guys don't let me have any fun. It's always Imp do this, Imp don't do that, Imp don't set that man on fire just because he's a Nazi even though he really deserves it–mmph!"

Grue's hand let out a small amount of smoke, just enough to cover Imp's mouth to silence her. By the resigned slump in her shoulders, this didn't seem to be a new occurrence.

"Imp," Skitter said. "What did you suggest earlier?"

Smoke wreathing the bottom of her face, Imp gave Grue an exaggerated look until he reluctantly pulled it back. "I'll be good, I promise," she said, her tone shamelessly implying the exact opposite. "I was saying we should talk to Dragon. Just talk to the head honcho herself, you know? Maybe if we ask nicely she'll go away."

Silence fell for about three seconds as everyone processed that. Then they all started talking over each other at once.

"Like fuck I'll–"

"–reckless idea, we're not risking–"

"–great idea for a laugh, I say we–"

"–not going to take this seriously, then–"

"–serious, if you'd just shut up and listen for a–"

"Quiet!"

The walls screamed. The insects coating them chittered and moved in a fist-clenching pulse that shrank the room inward and then retreated to slam into the wooden boards with a sound like a percussion kit being dropped down a well, rushing over each other in a bristling wave of chitin and thoraxes. If this was Skitter feeling the shot of ice that had just run down my spine and not just trying to restore order, I couldn't blame her.

Would it even work? I almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the idea. A teenage gang of Villains, casually calling up the private number of the most famous Tinker in the world, asking for help in bailing them out. But then, this entire situation bordered on the absurd. What was one more stretch of disbelief?

Skitter evidently thought the same, turning to Tattletale. "Would it work?"

Tattletale hummed, putting a hand to her chin and closing her eyes to give it some actual thought. "My first instinct was no, but... it's hard to say, really. Dragon's well known for her pacifistic streak–part of the reason why I was so surprised she was being deployed here at all. She's usually not one to do the PRT's dirty work, maybe Armsmaster…"

She shook her head and visibly refocused. "Right. Dragon. She's a third party, which helps our PRT infiltration issue. If there's anyone who could get around that, it would be her. But we're still at the same problem; why would she listen at all? She's literally got orders to bring us in."

This… I had a solution, but they wouldn't like it. I snapped to get Skitter's attention. "Tell Dragon everything you know about Coil. Powers, base, Dinah, everything. Give her reason to care. Then tell her to check details against PRT Thinkers. Ask her to prove you wrong."

Skitter tilted her head, then translated. "That's a hell of a risky move, Victoria," she added. "You're asking us to give away our intel advantage on Dragon. We might be able to pull something together in the time we have right now. That becomes difficult to impossible if we do this."

"And I don't get where you get off telling us what to do," Grue cut in, staring at me. "You're not an Undersider. Skitter said she offered and you said no. As far as I'm concerned, you should leave right now. We'd be square."

I swallowed. He was right. I could leave right now, and leave this to them. I didn't really have anything tying me to the Undersiders besides my lack of other options. But… I also didn't want to leave Skitter like this. To a plan that was probably going to get her killed or imprisoned, when there was another option I knew I could find.

I held in a low growl of frustration, and got out my notepad. "It's not about what I owe, it's about what's right. Yes, it's risky. But it's less risky than fighting Dragon. You can't beat her. And even if you did, you'd still lose. I know I'm a Hero, and you're Villains. I get that you have no reason to trust me. But Skitter saved me, when she had no reason to. Can't you trust me to do the same?"

"Victoria–" Skitter started, before Grue cut her off.

"And what if it doesn't work?" He asked. "What if you're asking us to go out on a limb for you, and it kicks us in the ass? Will you just drop us and fly away to the Heroes, another job well done?"

Fuck. I was in too deep. I knew that before, but now it really dawned on me just how much this had spiraled out of control. I had to give him an answer, but not bend my morals to do it. God, I wished Dean were here. He'd know what to say.

"I wouldn't leave," I wrote helplessly. "One way or the other, I'd make sure it didn't end that way."

That was the most I could commit to. I wouldn't fight the Heroes–or anyone else–for them. Frankly, I wasn't sure if I wanted to fight anyone ever again. But standing up for what was right, even if it was for the underdog... that I could do.

"Huh," Tattletale said thoughtfully, slipping past Skitter to lean into my space and read what I'd written over my shoulder. "You actually mean that, don't you?" She gave me an assessing look, that fucking smirk playing across her face. "Something's knocked that black-and-white morality right out of you. Not the obvious, either. Something more recent. I'd say it was Skitter working on you, but–"

"Tattletale," Skitter interrupted, shutting her up before I… did something I'd regret. Tattletale backed off and Skitter turned to look at the other Undersiders; Grue, still glaring at me; Bitch, who'd gone back to ignoring us in favor of her dogs once I'd pulled my pad out; Regent, sat back down with his feet up on the table and his chair pushed back onto two legs.

"Victoria's gone out on a limb for me before," she said. "She won't just cut and run if things go south."

"Man, and I was all excited to fight a bunch of robot suits," Regent drawled. "Well, whatever. I'll survive." His sarcasm wasn't subtle. I wasn't surprised. His power wouldn't work on Dragon's suits, at least not directly. Though he still had Shatterbird, plus any hostages in his territory. "I say go for it," he finished with a lazy shrug, almost overbalancing on his chair. "Skitter and Tattletale can come up with one of their speeches."

There was something sardonic and mocking in his tone, but I ignored it, looking over at Bitch. She glanced at the table and scowled. "I don't care," she said. "If she comes, I'll fight. If not, I have better shit to do."

Grue looked around. Like Skitter, his mask and costume muffled his body language, but I thought I could see brief frustration in his muscles before he straightened up. "Fine," he said. "That just leaves how the hell we're going to contact Dragon."

"Anyone got her on speed dial?" Regent asked from his seat on the table. "I'd share my copy but I lost it when Shatterbird killed my last phone."

"Funny you should ask, I came across a cape hotline for her when I was doing some sleuthing prior to this," Tattletale said, brandishing her phone. "Skitter called me earlier so I could start getting some background. I didn't get much, but I did spy a number that said 'dial for international cape emergencies, prank calls subject to fines and imprisonment'. Figured that wasn't meant for my eyes."

"I'll make the call," Grue put in immediately. "You've mouthed off to too many people for something like this."

"People I wanted angry or off their game; I can hold back when I need to–"

I shut my eyes, trying to collect myself as the bickering and talking over each other started up again. I knew that number. It was the same one that Mom–that Carol had been given out in the wake of Leviathan. It was provided to high ranking Protectorate or Guild affiliated teams, as a way of feeding Dragon information or requesting for Tinker collaboration. It wasn't a direct line, more of a smart voicemail, but supposedly it was monitored with key words and phrases that raised the priority depending on the subject matter. Knowing Tattletale, she knew exactly what to say to get us to the top of the list.

So this was really happening. I had to admit that now. It felt… I didn't even know what to think. A week ago I would've thought any of this was insane. That I'd be anywhere near comfortable around the Undersiders. That I'd be (technically) colluding with them against the Protectorate. But a week ago I hadn't seen a Ward put a bolt through Skitter's shoulder, hadn't been betrayed by Carol, hadn't almost been flattened by a grenade from Miss Militia.

Skitter brushed a moth against my elbow and I looked up, startled. "You okay?" she asked softly while the rest of the Undersiders argued about who was going to call. "You let your aura out earlier."

"Reflex," I signed. "Worried we had been infiltrated. Coil."

She nodded. "Good instinct. Imp is a known quantity, when we remember her at all, and she's still difficult to work around. You did well."

I tried not to react to that. Almost punching a girl through a brick wall on accident was doing well? I… maybe according to Skitter, sure. I had to remind myself, she was coming from a totally different place, with a very different set of survival instincts. It was entirely possible that she had hesitated before, and that had ended badly. Still, I couldn't let that statement go unchallenged.

"No. Did badly. Could've hurt her."

Skitter snorted lightly. "Grue wouldn't have liked that."
So there was some kind of a relationship between the two of them. Speculating on a cape's identity or relations outside work was an easy way to make enemies, but I wasn't blind. He favored her. It didn't seem romantic, though. Too much annoyance of the wrong kind. Family, maybe? School friends? It was hard to say.

"Alright, alright!" Tattletale said, breaking the argument. "Since clearly none of you trust me to do a simple phone call for some reason, I'll just put it on speaker so everyone can shout over each other. Happy?"

They weren't, but it seemed like that was the best we were going to get.

Tattletale put the phone down on the table, and called the automated system, starting to navigate through the options. This part was standard. Dragon was too important to actually answer these calls herself, so she used an automated responder that sorted the calls by category and left specific sections open for you to record your issue. We were banking that Tattletale could figure out how to get our message flagged up on Dragon's personal screen as fast as possible.

"Protectorate Villain Conflict," Tattletale said clearly into the phone, and waited for the next prompt. There was silence, and then a sound none of us expected.

"Well," said Dragon, "you got my attention."


A/N:
Happy Easter to those who celebrated it!

I admit I'm still not entirely satisfied with my portrayal here. There's a really delicate balance to be shared between the Undersiders when they're all in the same room at this point. Grue's need to fill his old role, despite his inability to do so. Regent's desire to take nothing seriously, but lash out at things that make him uncomfortable anyways. Imp's need for attention. Tattletale's snarkiness. Bitch's… everything. And of course, Taylor's need for control. And that's before you add Victoria into the mix!

I did my best to get all those things across here, but ultimately these character moments aren't really about them, so much as Victoria's perception of them. If that perspective is warped or inaccurate, at this point it's to be expected. And that's totally the excuse I'll use in court if any of you accuse me of mischaracterization. Fight me.

A lot of you highlighted in the last update that Victoria was kind of going into this half cocked, with no real plan but the desire to help anyways. And that's absolutely true! Imp really saved the plot here, even if she was kinda shitposting at the time. But I think it isn't just that. There's this sense (especially in Worm) that every world saving plan has to come from the main character. I think it's important to show that even when that MC is someone as savvy and intelligent as Victoria, that still isn't true! Working together and building off each strengths is why capes make teams in the first place. This is no exception.

Today's rec is A Walk In The Park, by Eis Ascreia. It's short and complete fic, which alone drew my attention. Those things are rarities in my fandom. But to top it off, it's a character focused work from Labyrinth's point of view. I was sold on the spot. Give it some love!

 

[justanothercat]

"Dragon!" Tattletale said, a slightly strained smile spreading across her face. She was off-balance. All of us were. There was no way the automated message service had flagged down Dragon's attention this fast. Tattletale simply hadn't said enough - she'd only got three words out! Which meant that this wasn't a case of us getting lucky and being noticed. She'd been waiting for our call.

"I don't suppose I could convince you this was a wrong number?" Tattletale tried, a fake laugh hiding the fear in her voice. She'd realized the same thing I had. So had Skitter, though I wasn't sure about the others.

"Not quite, Tattletale," Dragon replied. I couldn't see her, but there was an indulgent smile in her voice. Even so, I was breathing faster. I would never have guessed that a phone could be intimidating, but the world narrowed around the little black shape in Tattletale's hand like the beat before a grenade going off. "You went through a lot of trouble to get my attention," she said. "Well, you have it."

"Yes, but we have conditions–" Grue started before Skitter placed a hand on his arm, stopping him mid sentence. He looked at her, but whatever she conveyed in a moment's silent communication was enough to drain the tension out of him like sand in an hourglass. Skitter took the lead instead.

"There's something we need to talk to you about, Dragon. As fellow capes," Skitter said, taking a step closer to the table and splaying out a hand across the worn wood.

"Skitter," Dragon said, her voice tinny from the tiny speaker with nary a hitch in her speech, "And I assume that was Grue who was talking earlier. Who exactly am I speaking to?"

"The Undersiders," Skiter replied. "Myself, Tattletale, Grue, Regent, Bitch… and Victoria."

We all heard the sharp intake of breath on Dragon's end in response to that. Well that was a reaction. "Victoria? If that's you, I need to confirm Master Stranger protocols. What was the last code used by the Wards?"

My tension ratcheted higher. This was wrong. This was all wrong. There was no way a single call-and-response could clear me of Master influence. Not when I'd spent as much time in Skitter's territory as I had, especially given Regent's public history. Any response I gave could easily be Tattletale doing background research on me prior, or other power interactions. Dragon had no reason to believe that I was in control of myself.

Which left only one conclusion: she was deliberately pretending to clear me in front of the Undersiders. For what reason, I could only guess.

I turned to Skitter, who was staring at Tattletale as if her teammate was holding a venomous snake that might decide to bite at any moment, and hesitated. I could do one of two things here. I could just give her the password from the last time I had been with the Wards, and no further context. That would be the safe thing, and what Dragon clearly expected. It wouldn't tell her whether it was really me or Regent, but it would at least confirm that the Undersiders weren't tipped off about the double bluff.

The other option… was to tell Skitter about the subtext of Dragon's play and hope she kept it to herself. My breath felt tight in my chest as I weighed my choices. I didn't know which to pick. Skitter had promised me earlier that no matter what she said at the meeting, she wouldn't let Regent get to me. Despite my fears, I hadn't felt anything like his power. And while the Heroic thing to do would be to side with Dragon against these Villains... I wasn't sure if that was the heroic thing to do. Not when I'd promised to try to help them out of the pit they'd dug themselves. Not when they might not be villains.

I felt a fly brush the back of my hand, and my resolve firmed. It was risky, but I felt like I could trust in that upheld promise. In her. And in my ideals. Deceptions and deliberate obfuscations were what had gotten us all into this mess.

"E-n-o-l-a one five five," I carefully signed, not looking away from her. Her eyes might be on Tattletale, but I knew I held just as much of her attention. "But that was the code when I left. There's no way this can confirm I am who I say I am."

Skitter's mask was inscrutable, even her body language gave away nothing. Thank god I had learned how to sign, otherwise I'd be reduced to the notepad and the rest of the group could read that.

"Don't say the second part out loud," I signed. Skitter said nothing, just cocked her head slightly as her gaze bored into the innocuous little burner phone that Tattletale had at arm's length. What she thought Dragon could do through it - or what she intended to do in response – I had no idea. It didn't really matter, I supposed. The real question was whether she would understand why I was asking and follow through.

"Enola one five five," Skitter repeated, glancing back at me for a second. The centipede on the palm of my hand curled around my thumb, almost as if saying 'I hope you know what you're doing'. I gently squeezed, just hard enough for it to feel but not enough to crush it. That made two of us.

Dragon sighed. "I'll have to trust that, in the absence of anything else. I hope you're doing well, Victoria, circumstances being what they are. I wish I could see you, but there's no camera on this thing."

Tattletale let out a bark of laughter, missing our secret conversation as she started to pace, fingers white-knuckling on the plastic casing. "Yeah, sorry Dragon," she scoffed, "but we value our privacy a little too much for that. The phone we called on has no camera, and we ripped out the GPS locator too. You might be able to triangulate the signal with enough time, but it's bounced through a relay and we're in a temporary location anyways."

"You'll have to forgive me for the attempt," Dragon said smoothly, seemingly unbothered by the assertion that she was attempting to track our location even as we spoke, "otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job."

"That's beside the point," Skitter said. Her left hand fisted where it laid on the table, even as the a buzzing drone intensified hear the door and windows. "We have a problem."

"Well I'm afraid I'm not likely to be able to help," Dragon replied, unfazed. "I'm not in the habit of doing the bidding of villains."

Ice poured down my spine at the way she said it. The superficially pleasant tone covered a naked threat, and a wave of menace rippled out from the tiny speaker and the vast, unstoppable weight of technological power behind it. I saw Tattletale wince, Regent's lazy smile falter, Grue stiffen. Even Bitch bared her teeth and swallowed, pulling her dog closer. In that moment, Dragon commanded the room without even having a presence in it.

Only Skitter didn't react. Not visibly, at least. Instead she plowed ahead, stubborn and straightforward as ever.

"We know what happened to Dinah Alcott."

Dead silence. For a second I was terrified Dragon had broken the connection, then hot on the heels of that came an even less rational fear that she hadn't, that the utter quiet from the other end of the line was because she'd pushed off from her desk somewhere in Canada and was somehow about to show up in person. I didn't even realize how fast my heart had started to pound until she spoke again.

"Dinah Alcott. Thirteen years old. Last seen at her home in the company of her parents. She went missing months ago, on the same day as your debut when you robbed a bank. Initially thought to be a kidnapping, no culprits found, presumed dead until Coil's admission of culpability during a Truce meeting regarding the Nine. Be very careful with what you say next, Skitter."

I swallowed. I had a few conversations with Dragon at one point or another when I was with Dean. Mostly overhearing her collaborating with Armsmaster for one thing or another. She always struck me as friendly and warm. This… was not that. She was cold, and harsh. This was the voice of a Tinker who had the resources of a small country to draw on, and wasn't afraid to use them. The calm and frank tone reminded me of an undertaker. Suddenly I couldn't shake the thought that we'd all just been professionally weighed and measured for extermination, our every bit of data gathered and analyzed down to the last byte. A digital coffin drawn up for each of us.

Skitter's swarm writhed, but to her credit she didn't hesitate much before replying. "We're calling to help save her."

The silence this time was longer, but no less suffocating. "Explain."

"You were right to bring up the bank job," Skitter said, and even her composure was starting to crack now. Not much; barely noticeable to someone who didn't know her, but she was talking faster, rushing to say her piece before Dragon made up her mind one way or the other. Still, her posture hadn't changed. "That was a distraction for Coil, our boss, to grab Dinah without interference from the heroes. But he only told us about that after the job was done."

"Did he," Dragon said, her voice unreadable. Or at least, unreadable to me. Whatever lay under the flat, level tone, Tattletale definitely picked up some of it. She blanched, and almost stumbled in her pacing. Robotically, she turned back to the table and put the phone down like it would bite her if she jarred it too hard. Grue waved her back with one big, leather-clad arm, planting himself over it and looming like he was planning to throw himself on it if it exploded.

"Coil hired us as a combination of muscle, and small-time petty thieves," Skitter pressed on. The tremble in her voice was barely noticeable, I had to wonder if the microphone picked up on it at all. "That's all we were invested in. But by the time we realized what he was using us for, it was too late. Dinah is a Thinker, one of the most powerful precognitives I've ever seen. She gives exact odds on future events happening, with no restrictions we've encountered yet."

"Mmm. Yes, Coil said as much when he implied she was with him willingly. I didn't think much of his claims then, and I'm still waiting to hear why I should believe you now."

Fuck. I hadn't considered the Heroes just not believing Dinah's power was as strong as Skitter claimed. But... well, Coil had talked her up to get everyone to follow his plan. A plan that had left his pet Villain groups in control of most of the city. Lying about a powerful precognitive supporting your plan to get people to do what you wanted was stupid in the long run, but plenty of Villains had done dumber things to get a leg up against their competition. The Heroes couldn't afford to discount his claims, but they couldn't just take them on faith, either.

"The power you describe is stronger than any precognitive power I've ever heard of," Dragon continued mercilessly. "Most of the Thinkers the PRT has access to don't give information anywhere near that accurate or accessible. You can see why I'm inclined to be skeptical."

Skitter nodded pointlessly. Another sign of nervousness – it wasn't like Dragon could see her. "Then it should mean something that I'm claiming it anyways when it would be easy to fact check later. Coil knew what her power was. He kidnapped her to use her. He keeps her drugged in a secret location we don't have access to, presumably for better access to her power."

I wish I could see Dragon's face to know how she was reacting to this. I knew I was still barely able to hold in my rage at her plight; at the unfairness, the sheer cruelty this innocent little girl had been exposed to because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong power. Because the wrong person wanted to own her.

"We didn't sign up for this," Skitter said, her voice wavering ever-so-fractionally. My centipede was scurrying around and around my palm in nervous circles, and I did my best to stroke it soothingly as it moved. Her bugs – I double-took, and had to hold back a wince. Some of her bugs were actively attacking others – no, not attacking. Eating. She was feeding parts of her swarm to the most dangerous ones; the spiders and wasps and dragonflies. Like stress eating, I thought, and had to muffle a hysterical giggle.

"We didn't know Coil's power yet," Skitter continued, even as the swarms began to dim the light coming from the windows, "or his long term plans, so we tried to fix it ourselves instead. To gather resources and intel until we could extract Dinah. I know that he's already put hits out on at least two of us for this."

This time I did wince. She'd told me earlier, but I didn't like to be reminded that she might have died already, in some backhanded way neither of us had even noticed, even if the attempt had failed. In retrospect, all of her precautions from earlier made sense. Spelling out the information on my hand, or only in writing? Long range scanners and directional microphones could make out audio through a window on a building across the street. The bugs on the windows? Screening for snipers. The constant drone of the swarm as we spoke? Sound muffling.

How much danger was she actually in, sharing this? Could she even judge the risks she was taking, or was she knowingly plunging into unknown waters, aware that she'd only find out if there were sharks when the teeth sank in?

"If this is true," Dragon said slowly, "you should've come to someone much earlier." She still didn't sound friendly or sympathetic; the pleasant tone she'd started with was long gone. Even if I now suspected it had been a mask from the start. But she wasn't quite as hostile anymore. The little phone lying on the table wasn't intimidating us anymore. Instead it was... waiting. Inviting us to plead our case.

"But you didn't."

Skitter's bugs churned. Spiders chewed on mosquitoes and midges, hornets bit the heads off flies. Discarded legs and wings fell to the floor like tiny, chitinous snowflakes. "We thought that with what happened at the Bank, and after, the PRT wouldn't listen to us. That maybe we'd be taken seriously once we brought down Coil and returned Dinah – that you'd only believe us once we proved we were serious. We… I was wrong. About that."

I watched her eyes. Not the eyes of the girl underneath; Skitter's eyes, those eerie yellow lenses trained unerringly on her opponent. Was this Skitter actually admitting fault, accepting that I was right? Or was this just her putting on yet another performance, relaying the information in the way she knew that Dragon would be most likely to accept? I had no idea. But I wanted to believe it was at least a little bit of the former, somewhere in there.

"Well, you're right about that last part, at least," Dragon said at length. Her voice crackled harshly. "If you're really serious about this, you need to tell me everything you have on Coil. Now. Including why you didn't go to the PRT about this earlier; don't think I didn't notice that dodge."

"That'd be my cue then," Tattletale said from her side of the table. "He demonstrated his power to me by flipping a coin five times, and having it land heads each time. I called bullshit, and he filled me in on how it works to help him test its limits. Short version: he can split timelines. He gets to choose an action in each one, let them both play out so he sees the end result, then picks the one he wants at any point. I never figured out if it was just a simulated precognition or actual temporal manipulation, but it doesn't matter. It spoofs my power either way."

"Spoofs how?" Dragon asked.

"A few days ago I was scrambling to intercept a hit he put out on Skitter's head, only for it to never have happened." The bugs around us rose to the sky in a frenzy of activity and violence. I looked around at the writhing swarm and wondered how much of it Dragon could hear.

Tattletale didn't let any of that stop her. "He taunted me with it, too. And no, I'm not telling you anything further than that. A lady has to keep some secrets."

"Fine," Dragon said. "That still doesn't explain why you didn't go immediately to the PRT after hearing this. If you could find out that much about Coil, surely the fact that the Wards take in former villains for rehabilitation couldn't be that hard to find."

Tattletale glanced around at the rest of the table, weighing her words. I followed her gaze as it lingered on each of them. Bitch, who felt closer to dogs than people and used violence as a first resort for lack of ability or inclination to talk things out. Regent, and the nebulously horrific past Skitter had implied he'd abandoned Hijack to escape. Grue, and whatever drove him to try to take responsibility for leading and protecting these violent, outcast misfits. Skitter, and the myriad of trust issues layered over a heart that wanted to be a hero but went about it in all the wrong ways.

Me.

"Many people in our group have… issues, going to the authorities for help," Tattletale said carefully. "Personal ones; I'm sure you understand. But there's a much bigger problem. Coil has extensively infiltrated the PRT. While I have the names of some that I've confirmed, I can't be sure that I've gotten all of them. If we go to the PRT, my power has me dead or worse within a week."

"A convincing incentive to keep your distance,," Dragon allowed. "Provided you're not lying about any of this."

"Then don't take our word for it," Skitter said suddenly. I looked at her, shocked. What?

Dragon evidently felt similarly. I half expected the phone camera to shutter in a startled blink. "Excuse me?"

"Don't trust us," she said, on a roll now. "You have no reason to. Investigate the information yourself. If you set up some kind of a dead drop, Tattletale can get you the basic information in writing. Coil's power and everything she has on its limits, whatever we know about Dinah and the time frame involved, all our work on his secret identity, his base, people in his employ, moles, the works. Use your resources and the PRT's to check it all, do your own research in parallel. Verify all of our data. This is much bigger than any of us in this room, and you know it. You can't afford to ignore it."

The little phone sat on the plastic surface of the folding table like a lead weight on the lungs of hope.

"And this would have nothing to do with my orders to come to the Bay to bring you in?"

We all froze.

Fuck.

"I'm not sure what you're talking about, Dragon," Skitter said, her voice even. The movement of the bugs around us implied anything but beneath the surface.

"Don't bother wondering if you gave something away. I don't need to be on call with a phone to use its microphone."

As one, the Undersiders took a step back from the phone on the table. But my stomach was sinking. Because Dragon hadn't known about the phone she was talking through. It was a burner, and I doubted she could monitor every device in the city. The microphone wouldn't be passively on, either. To do what she was implying, she'd need to know the phone existed, connect to it, turn on the microphone and listen in from there.

I didn't dare look down. My cell – the one I'd called Carol with – was burning a hole in my pocket so hot it singed my thigh. If I drew the slightest bit of attention to it, Skitter would know.

Thank fuck, she was too focused on Dragon to think about it. "That's a huge invasion of privacy–" she began heatedly.

"Which is well within my directive if I'm talking to known terrorists," Dragon finished, ice-calm.

Skitter bristled. "Then I don't know exactly what you're asking," she said, her swarm drawing inward to wreath her, hanging over her shoulders like a queen's mantle.

"I'm asking if this is an attempt to get me to try and countermand my orders in favor of getting your superior out of the way so you can make a play for the Bay. And I'm asking if you seriously think I am so easy to manipulate."

Skitter's shoulders tensed. I could almost hear the sounds of her teeth grinding. "Dragon, this is bigger than that. There's a child at risk–"

"Don't try to pretend that you have the moral high ground here, Skitter," Dragon said, her voice harsh and unyielding. I gulped. "The Undersiders crossed a line with Shadow Stalker, don't think that we've forgotten about that. We may have been forced to overlook it for convenience, but we haven't forgotten. The same is true for Regent using his powers on people in his territory. If you've done the same to Victoria, or are using Dinah as a means to deflect blame away from your group, there will be consequences, that I can promise you."

It was quiet, but I heard Skitter take a shaky breath. For a moment, the insects around us calmed. "So it's wrong for us to cross a line with Shadow Stalker, but totally okay for Armsmaster to try and murder me during an Endbringer fight," she gritted out. "Fine. If that's how it's going to be, fine."

The swarm around her came back to life, a harsh black screen swirling hard enough to make me flinch. "But you have to admit this much." Her words were a whip. "If we crossed a line, it was Coil who pushed us there. He was the one who outed the E88. He was the one who kidnapped a child, who repurposed an Endbringer shelter for his own private base. This is bigger than us, than the Rules. He has to be stopped. If what happens to us is a different conversation… fine. But don't you dare forget that we were the ones to reach out this time."

Dragon sighed. "I can give you that much, Skitter. Thank you. Tattletale, I'll send you the details for where to dead-drop that information, so hold off on destroying this device until then. Understand that this is not me promising to not follow my orders. As far as I'm concerned, the Undersiders are public enemy number one right now. If that changes, well, I can't publicly comment on internal PRT policy. And I don't make a habit of negotiating with terrorists."

Skitter drew herself up, ready to fight, but I quickly laid a hand on her arm. She stopped, staring at me. I shook my head. I think I knew what Dragon was doing here, and it was more complicated than it looked on the surface level. But if Skitter opened her mouth right now, it would ruin the delicate negotiation at play.

"I guess we'll be hearing from you one way or another soon then," Tattletale said, trying to make a joke.

"Something like that," Dragon said. "I'll be in touch. Oh and one last thing. Victoria?"

I startled, looking up. She hadn't really addressed me for the entire conversation up to this point.

"I know from the PRT that you can't talk. And I've seen enough of the debrief to read between the lines. I'll respect your privacy but… I hope you're doing okay. And know that if you want a safe place to stay, with the Wards or otherwise, you have options."

I sniffled, trying to keep the water in my eyes from spilling over. Dragon was the first… adult to speak to me like that. After Amy. God. It was hard to believe when I put it like that, but it was still true.

"T-thank you," I said, my voice raspy and weak.

"You're welcome, Victoria," Dragon said gently. "And as for the rest of you… take care. Or I'll make my displeasure felt. I have a lot of resources at my disposal."

She disconnected from the call with a soft click.


A/N:
Slightly delayed, but the chapter arrives! Much thanks to Aleph on this one, seriously she knocked it out of the park.

Did I mention I love writing Dragon? Because boy do I. She doesn't get nearly enough presence in canon, and drawing her out as a legitimately menacing antagonist is something that isn't done much in fic either. She's on a fine line between hero and "oh god please don't kill me", and just because she won't do the latter thing doesn't mean she couldn't. She also likes cupcakes, and is very valid.

Today's rec is Saving the World in 287 Steps by my lovely friend Sengachi! He's the person who originally dragged me down into this cursed realm, so it's my duty now to get people to pester him about his fic. Contessa wakes up in Breath of the Wild shortly after Gold Morning, and proceeds to do an any% speedrun. It's crack played straight, and it's glorious. Based on the actual speedrun at the time too. Go give it a read.

 

[justanothercat]

The soft click of the call disconnecting sounded unnaturally loud in the still air of the warehouse, but I felt like I could breathe again in its wake.

I had just enough time for a relieved sigh before nearly jumping out of my skin.

"So, I think I speak for all of us when I say what the fuck was that?"

Imp. She was leaning against the far wall now, where she'd been behind me before the call. I'd lost track of her when she'd... when had I lost track at her? I couldn't even pin down when she'd slipped out of awareness again. Goddamn Strangers.

Regent seemed more used to her popping in and out of memory. He casually twirled his scepter, knocking it against the table. "I dunno, I figure it went pretty well," he drawled, tossing it to his other hand and waving it like a flag. "Big scary Dragon lady called us out on our shit, knows exactly where we live, gave no firm promises on helping us in any way, and confirmed that she's still coming. Plus, we just betrayed our boss for possibly nothing. Sounds great to me. Anyone want a cushy spot in jail? I know a guy."

"We are not going to jail," Skitter said forcefully, her bugs humming under her words for emphasis. "One way or another, we're getting out of this. If that means we have to fight Dragon, we knew that was happening already. This just gives us another option we didn't have before."

"Maybe," Grue allowed, "but you heard her. We're still 'public enemy number one', right? That doesn't sound like a guarantee of safety to me."

I clenched my fists. I knew what Dragon had been saying–and deliberately not saying–during that call, but I didn't know whether spelling it out here was the right call. Or whether they'd even trust anything coming from me, after I'd pushed the idea of talking to Dragon in the first place.

As if hearing my thoughts on the matter, Grue turned to me. "I hope you know that you're with us on this now, Glory Girl. No backing out just because you got cold feet."

I tried not to bristle visibly at that, and took a couple of deep breaths. I looked away from him, not in fear, but to look at Skitter instead, matching her breathing by habit. He didn't know me, not like she did. For all he knew, my promises were as empty as my ability to voice them.

"She said she'd do it," Skitter said, turning to Grue. "She did the same for me before. I don't see why this would be different now."

"Saving you from Flechette was one thing," Grue said, not taking his gaze off me. "That was spur of the moment and defending you personally. This is willingly associating with us ahead of time. It's not unreasonable to be suspicious. You, of all people, should be wary of someone close betraying you. Hero or not."

Skitter's back straightened like he'd rammed a steel rod down it. Her fists tightened, the centipede still hidden in my palm froze for a second and then began writhing furiously. Even I could see that he'd just stomped on a landmine. I had no idea what it meant or what buried bit of soft tissue he'd aimed for, but it had hit. Hard.

He'd known it would hurt her, and he'd said it anyway.

"That's low, Grue," she said eventually.

"But not entirely out of the question," Tattletale cut in, setting the phone down on the table. Or rather, what remained of it. She had done everything but take it apart screw by screw.

"I've sent Dragon the info. This phone is obviously a lost cause. I don't know how she tapped it, but it doesn't matter. It's in pieces now, and I'll dispose of them once we leave. That just leaves what comes next."

"We keep our heads down for a few days," Grue said, idly tightening his leather gloves. "No fights with heroes until we figure out what's going on, one way or another."

"Fuck that," Bitch said, standing up suddenly. "You don't tell me what to do in my territory. If some fucker wants to hurt my dogs, I'm not letting him go. The heroes can go fuck–"

Her back slammed against the wall.

"Enough!" Grue snapped, pinning her to the wall with a forearm across her throat and catching her right hand with his left. She was stocky and strong, but he was bigger and stronger; it wouldn't have been a fair fight even if he hadn't caught her mid-sentence. Differences in size aside, it was eerily similar to what Skitter had done when she'd taken me to visit her that first time.

"F-fuck you," Bitch wheezed, driving a fist into Grue's ribs that he didn't even react to. Between the bad angle she was punching at and the motorcycle leathers, I wasn't even sure he felt it.

"No one is telling you to let the heroes hurt your dogs. Just don't pick fights. Clear?" Grue said, staring her down. The skull-mask beneath the dark visor was so close it almost pressed into her face. She tried to wrestle away to the side, but he tightened his grip on her wrist, leaning more weight on the forearm he had across her throat until she was struggling for breath. "I said: is that clear?"

Teeth bared, her free hand scrabbling at his arm, she nodded, and he slowly released his grip. She took a few wheezing gulps of air as she got her breath back, rubbing her throat, and then spat to the side. She seemed mostly unbothered that her team leader had effectively just wrestled her into compliance, though. I… didn't even want to begin to unpack that.

"Does that mean I don't get to do any pranks?" Imp whined from the opposite side of the room. I jumped. Fuck. I had forgotten she was there. Again. That was going to get annoying fast.

Skitter sighed. "You can still mess with people," she allowed. "Just keep it non-lethal and temporary."

"Aww, but that rules out all the good ideas!" Imp pouted.

"That's probably for the best," Grue muttered as he looked over at her. I chalked up another point in the 'family' theory; that was definitely Crystal's tone when talking about Eric doing something stupid.

Except it wasn't. The thought hit me from behind like a knife to the ribs. She would never use that tone again.

Eric was dead.

I was almost glad that Imp was still talking, providing a distraction for me to focus on instead of the unexpected gut-punch of grief and pain. Even if I'd been able to speak, the lump in my throat would have stopped me. I had to blink away tears as I listened to her complain.

"What are you talking about? I have the best ideas! I told you guys to talk to Dragon, and that turned out great! Plus, there was this fucker on Regent's turf, and I had this great plan to set him on fire–"

"Aaand that's why they don't trust you," Regent cut in. "See, if you wanna do that stuff you gotta plan it quietly, so they only find out after the fact. That's how I get away with it."

Imp nodded sagely, as if taking down this advice. I tried not to shudder when Regent glanced back at me. I remembered what Dragon said, about him Mastering people in his territory. I knew he still had Shatterbird somewhere, her mind caged inside a prison of flesh. Wide awake, fully aware, but completely helpless as he jerked her this way and that on phantom puppet strings, using her however he wanted. Never knowing what her traitorous body would do next, dreading every waking moment.

She didn't deserve sympathy. She was a mass-murdering monster who'd killed thousands, probably tens of thousands of innocent people. But he could have given her up to the PRT. The Nine were gone, and there were no other big threats left in the Bay that warranted keeping her in that kind of torture, much less anyone else.

Which meant he was doing it for no other reason than because he could. I edged closer to Skitter and shuddered.

"Anything else we should know?" Grue said, turning to Tattletale.

"Not much, boss." She added the last word almost belatedly. "I couldn't get much off of Dragon; I think she was hedging, leaving her options open. She could be here tomorrow to bring us in, she could never come, or she could land right on top of Coil in his civvies. Fuck if I know."

"Well that sounds like great fun," Regent said, standing up with a theatrical yawn. "I don't know about y'all, but I don't wanna be caught here when Dragon decides to get off her ass. I'm headed back. Call me if you care. Or don't."

"Wait, Regent–" Skitter started as he strolled towards the door.

"Don't bother," Imp interrupted. "I'm going–"

"What about you, Tattletale?" Skitter asked.

"Much as I hate to admit it, I think Regent has the right idea," she replied. "We aren't really accomplishing much staying here. Head back to your headquarters. Don't make waves, but prepare for the worst. The usual, really."

She snorted at her own humorless joke and got up to leave. Bitch had already headed outside without a word, which didn't surprise me. She didn't exactly seem like the type to say goodbye. That left me, Skitter, and Grue.

I tried not to stare or fidget as they stood in silence for a moment. There was obviously some kind of tension between them, though what kind exactly I couldn't tell. Was it an authority issue? Grue was nominally the leader, but Skitter and Tattletale had run much of the call and aftermath today. Or maybe it was something more… personal.

My stomach clenched. I didn't want to think about Skitter selling me out because her team leader asked her to. It felt shameful and unfair to even think that little of her. But with so much hanging in the air, I couldn't help but wonder.

"I hope you're happy now," Grue said, at length.

Skitter's bugs rose and fell in a wave across the walls. "You know it's not that simple."

"It never is, is it?"

They stared at each other for another charged moment. For an absurd second, I almost thought it was going to turn into another fight. It certainly felt like they were poised on the brink of something fast and violent. The awkward, halting conversation was a creaking dike holding back a flash flood. I could almost hear the water straining to breach its banks and devastate everything downstream.

But whatever they had chained up between them, today wasn't the day it broke free.

"Stay out of trouble, Skitter," Grue said as he turned to leave.

"You too," Skitter said, not watching as he left.

The door closed, and it was just the two of us.

Skitter slumped, dropping into the nearest chair. She looked smaller like this, not towering over me like usual. She was so tall and slim that most of the time she looked like an adult. But sitting like this, back bowed and head resting on the arm she had propped up on the table, I could see every inch of weight she carried. Physical and otherwise.

I considered reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder, before I thought better of it. I remembered how she'd reacted last time, and I could hardly begrudge her an aversion to touch, not when I felt the same way. Not to mention, with her lying on her right arm I could only reach the one she'd been stabbed through. I didn't dare touch her there, not when it was probably hurting. So instead I sat down across from her and waited.

Eventually, she sighed.

"Well, that couldn't have gone much worse."

I shook my head.

"Really?" Skitter asked, not looking up. "You're gonna have to explain that one to me. We just gave up our best advantage against the Tinker we know is coming to arrest us. We didn't learn anything we didn't already know. She didn't promise anything or offer any chance at amnesty. We betrayed our boss, so now we're fucked when he finds out. And the others all think I fucked up. Even if most won't say it to my face."

I swallowed. That was… a lot, true. But I could break it down one piece at a time.

"She already knew you knew she was coming," I signed. Her head was still resting on her arm away from me, but I knew she was paying attention, somehow. If she couldn't keep track of what I was saying, she'd have moved. She wasn't the kind of person who let details slip just because she was tired.

"And of course you didn't hear anything new," I added. "This was about you reaching out to her."

"Fine," Skitter said, dull and listless, "but that doesn't solve my other problems."

I struggled to hold in a sigh. "Of course she didn't tell you anything. Why would she?"

"What do you mean 'why would she?' We just told her everything she wanted to know!" Skitter snapped. Her free arm fisted on the edge of the table and she ground her knuckles into the cheap plastic surface.

"Yes," I signed patiently, "you did. But she has no way of knowing you're telling the truth right now. She can't make promises to anyone who gives her a crying story. You wouldn't either, in her place."

"And the bit about calling us terrorists was just harmless name calling, then?"

"No. It was a hint."

A moment of silence, and Skitter sat up and looked at me, alert, focused, the weariness receding as fast as it had come on. "Explain."

I swallowed, rubbing the meat of my thumb and flexing my fingers. My hands were hurting again, a twinging tired ache in my joints that went down to the bone, but this was important. "When she said she doesn't talk with t-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-t-s, it was a threat. But it was also a way out."

"I'm still confused," Skitter said.

Oh my god, this girl… "It means don't be terrorists, and she might be able to talk with you. Think about it from her angle. Even if she knew you were telling the truth, she's a part of the government right now. She's been told to capture you. She can't be seen making deals with enemies of the state. But if you try and clean up your reputation…"

She paused, considering my point. "That's a hell of a bet to take. She didn't say any of that outright."

"She can't, and you know it," I replied.

"What if you're wrong? What if Dragon attacks tomorrow? What are you going to do?"

Bile rose in my throat. "That's not fair," I signed.

Skitter's fist clenched again on the table. "Maybe not. But it could happen. If the next time a hero decides to push me down in the dirt and–"

She looked down. My hand was covering hers. I hadn't even noticed reaching out, but I didn't take it back. We stared at each other.

"I'm n-not leaving," I said.

She stared at me. "Even if Dragon comes?"

I nodded, pulling my hand back.

"I still think I'm right. But if I'm not, then at the very least I stay and deal with my mistakes."

Skitter snorted. "That's one better than most heroes do around me."

I gave her a pained smile at that. I couldn't help but wonder how we would've met if things had been different. What exactly had gotten Skitter into villainy? There were still decisions she made that gave me pause. Of course there were. But in moments like this, I could almost see another girl. One who went to the Wards. Who became an independent Hero somewhere else. Who could've been a really good one.

What happened to that girl? What changed?

"I guess we should get back to the hideout," Skitter said, breaking my train of thought. She got up and stretched. "Charlotte is probably getting worried at this point, and we need to tell her to order food supplies ahead of time just in case."

"Why?"

"Because if Dragon is coming, I can't afford to take any chances. I might get taken in, or pinned down somewhere else. I'm not leaving the kids in the wind like that."

I smiled at her, even as I got up myself. "Fair enough."

I tried to turn over my thoughts as we walked to the door. I wanted to ask her something but… in light of what Grue said earlier, I wasn't sure if now was the best time. There was already a great deal of tension between her and her team, and if I kept asking for favors it might get worse. At the same time, while I could do it alone… I wanted her there. I was selfish enough to admit that. But I don't know if I had the right to–

"What is it?"

I startled, looking up at where Skitter had stopped ahead of me. "Your shoulders are tense, and you're squeezing the centipede."

My fingers sprang open in panic, fast enough that I almost sent the little insect flying off me. It quickly scurried around the back of my hand before jumping off into the grip of a pair of beetles–presumably to rejoin the rest of the swarm. At least I hadn't killed it.

"You clearly have a question," Skitter said, graciously not mentioning my reaction. "What is it?"

I swallowed again, and asked.

"I need to talk to the Heroes. And I want you there for it."


A/N:
Boy I sure didn't expect that response to last chapter. You guys really had some thoughts. I appreciate the engagement! But just in case, I thought I'd reiterate here. Just because our perspective is mainly from Victoria, that doesn't make what she says right or true. She can (and often is) wrong about some of the nuances she observes. The interludes are meant to (in part) correct for that, by showing how other people view the same information. Some of the things she says and thinks in this chapter are on target, some aren't. We'll see just how much as we go.

But other than that, lots of little things this chapter. More Undersiders barely managing not to kill one another. More of Skitter trying to pretend she knows what she's doing, though this time we get to see a tiny bit behind that act. And more of Victoria slowly realizing she's balancing atop a house of cards. But she can fly, so that metaphor sucks. Man, I'm bad at writing.

Today's rec is Desperate Times Call For Desperate Pleasures by R3NN41SS4NC3. Honestly I can't believe I haven't recced this one before, I guess I just thought it had a wider audience than it did. The premise is that Amy meets Taylor early on in canon, who has Cherish's power this go around. The two figure out that Amy has a bit of a problem, and Taylor of course offers to mind control Amy into loving someone else. Honestly I have trouble reading this one myself because secondhand embarrassment makes me want to jump out a window, but it's such a good look into Amy that I feel compelled to mention it anyways. Mind the content warnings and make sure you're in the right headspace for it, everyone is a trash monster (affectionate/derogatory). Give it a read.

 

[justanothercat]

"Charlotte, contact Forrest and Sierra and tell them to drop whatever they're doing and get back here," Skitter ordered as soon as she opened the door of the hideout. We hadn't said anything on the way back; Skitter hadn't been willing to risk it when we didn't know who was watching. After the details on Coil and the call with Dragon, I couldn't blame her for her paranoia.

"Boss? What's up? Why didn't you call?" Charlotte asked, quickly getting up off the couch where she had been playing some kind of a board game with the kids. The others – Marcus and Shay today – stood to attention but didn't speak. Maybe didn't dare speak, feeling the charged intensity crackling off Skitter like static electricity. Skitter's henchmen were mostly in the base on a rotating basis; Sierra, Forrest and Charlotte were the only full-timers. I hadn't interacted much with the others, but Shay and Marcus had at least been polite to me when I'd run into them a few days ago.

"Can't call," Skitter said shortly, closing the door and locking it. "That reminds me; assume anything with a microphone is being tapped by Dragon, especially phones. There's nothing we can do to stop her, but we can limit calls to emergencies."

She turned to the other two minions still standing to attention. "Secure the base. Shay, I want you fastening the shutters on the windows. The metal ones are down in the basement. Tighten the screws firmly, the tolerances on them aren't great. Close the lower sewer entrance and switch on the motion sensors. After that take inventory of the supplies in the basement. I want an itemized list of how much food, hygiene supplies and bottled water we have. Project how many days we have of standard use of each."

Shay nodded and ran towards the lower stairs, her long legs quickly eating up the distance. Skitter focused on Marcus. "You're on babysitting duty. The kids are going to notice the commotion, and we need to do this too fast to bother hiding it. They're going to get anxious, if not worse. We can't afford to have to deal with a full on meltdown in the middle of this. Distract them. Board games, a movie, I don't care if they ask you about what your grandmother ate last weekend. Keep them occupied. If I have to split my attention to handle anything, I won't be happy."

Marcus swallowed, a trickle of sweat beading down his neck. "Got it," he said before speed walking towards the living room where the kids were.

Before I could process any of that, Skitter was addressing Charlotte again. "Where are Forrest and Sierra at the moment?"

"T-they're out," She said, looking from side to side. Her eyes were wide at how quickly and fiercely Skitter had started rapping out orders, but her answer was prompt, reflex driving her mouth for a moment as her brain caught up. Her voice got stronger as she continued, finding her feet and settling back into the mold of Skitter's professional lieutenant. "David needed a stronger inhaler for his asthma. There was some kind of gunfight up towards the Trainyard and a bunch of vehicles got set on fire; the smoke's been blowing over and setting him off all day. Sierra was going to restock on medical supplies in general while she picked up the inhaler, and Forrest didn't trust that she'd be fine on her own so–"

"That's fine," Skitter cut her off. "The gunfight up near the Trainyard; was it anything to do with us?"

"I don't think so? We haven't heard much else about it."

"Have someone find out. You help Marcus get the kids settled and then meet us up in my room on the top floor as soon as you can. We need to talk about things going forward."

Charlotte's eyes hardened. "You got it boss." She shot a passing glare at me as she went back to soothe the kids in the living room, who by the sounds of it were getting increasingly anxious.

Looking at Skitter, I could hardly blame them. She always tended to keep a supply of bugs hidden on her, but they were never obvious. I only noticed because I spent so much time in close proximity. Right now though, her costume was a writhing suit of mandibles and shells and twitching legs, insects covering almost every possible gap. It felt like a defensive reaction, armoring herself in carapaces, jaws and stingers.

"Let's go," she said, starting to walk up the stairs.

I followed after her, barely parsing the words. This wasn't the first time she'd let me into her space. I'd been up here before, after Flechette had impaled her at Parian's base.

I suppressed a shudder, wrapping my arms around myself as we reached the second floor landing. That had been a nightmare. I'd seen worse injuries, sure. Some that… I had caused. But I usually had… well. Other options available to treat them. In Dolltown I hadn't even been sure Skitter would live, never mind if she would be permanently maimed.

But this time was different. This wasn't out of necessity. Or if it was, it was still Skitter making the choice to include me. She could've just told Charlotte whatever she needed to in private, but instead she wanted me involved. I couldn't help but think that had something to do with the meeting with the Undersiders we'd just come from.

"I'm n-not leaving."

I could still hear my broken words echoing mockingly in my ears. Was I really prepared to back them up? When things went south, as they inevitably seemed to when Skitter was involved? I didn't know if I could say I would, now that the moment of adrenaline had passed and reality was sinking in. But I did know that this was a display of trust on her part. I had to respect that.

Skitter paused right in front of the door to the third story. I waited behind her. Was she having second thoughts? Was this too much?
"Victoria…"

I held my breath.

But Skitter just sighed. "It's nothing."

It wasn't, but she pushed the door open and stepped through before I could decide whether to call her on it. I slowly made my way up and into the room after her. I had seen Skitter's room before, and it was as spartan as I remembered. But now that I had the time to actually look around, a few details stuck out.

A bookshelf occupied the far wall opposite me, stuffed to the brim. Mostly classic English literature from what I could see, though I recognized a few sci-fi novels mixed in among them.

More important than the content of the books, though, was what they represented. Books were extremely susceptible to the elements – especially water damage and mold. Combined with the ever-present insects surrounding Skitter's territory, few paperbacks would have lasted long past Leviathan, nevermind the weeks since. But these were obviously well cared for.

That meant one of two things. Either Skitter had carried a personal supply that she'd cared for the entire time, or she had these books imported. Likely from the same person–Coil, I reminded myself–who supplied her terrariums. Either way; Skitter clearly cared about reading a lot more than she let on to anyone outside of this room.

A small desk sat at the other end of the room, with a lamp and an old laptop with a screensaver running. I tried not to look any closer. I could tell from the papers and cork board above that this was where Skitter ran the logistics side of her territory. And while she had trusted me to be here, I didn't want to push that with a repeat of the first night I was here.

The only other object of note was her bed; a plain affair with white sheets and a navy blue pillow. Functional. The bedside table beside it however, grabbed my attention and riveted it to what lay there. A well worn, dog eared guide to American Sign language. The same book she had given me weeks ago. There were sticky notes all throughout it, and the spine was visibly creased.

What… did... had she not known sign language before I came? All this time, I'd just assumed she'd known it for ages, that she must have offered the book as a way to communicate in a language she was already fluent in. But this... this said otherwise.

Had she been learning ASL this whole time, just to be able to understand me?

I turned to her, hands mid-motion to sign my question, but Skitter was already staring at me. I froze.

"I never said I'd only gotten one copy," she said, jerking her head towards the bedside table. That… wasn't even remotely the question I wanted to ask. But Charlotte's heavy footsteps came rushing up the stairs before I could reorganize my thoughts.

"Okay boss, the kids are okay. Marcus is looking after them. Mind telling me what the hell is going on?"

Skitter gave her a sharp look, but didn't chastise her. "I said the phones were tapped. By Dragon."

We both nodded.

Skitter took a breath. "Victoria told me earlier that she had information that Dragon was coming to Brockton in person to arrest the Undersiders."

"What?" Charlotte gasped, taking an instinctive step back. "They can't do that! You said–"

"Evidently I was wrong," Skitter replied, turning to stare moodily at the cork board. "I have to admit at least that much. I've put you, Sierra, Forrest and the kids at risk."

There was a pause, before Charlotte firmed her jaw and stepped forward. "That's not your fault, boss. We all chose to be here. You would've let anyone leave if they wanted to. Her included," she said, jerking her head at me. "This isn't on you."

"Maybe. Maybe not." Skitter's shoulders slumped for a moment, but then she straightened her back and folded her arms behind her, turning back to us. "In any case, we need to deal with this now. For the moment, treat Dragon as an active threat. If any of you hear the sound of approaching turbines or anything resembling a Dragonflight, get back to the hideout as fast as you can. That, or go to ground. Whatever's safer."

"And what about you?" Charlotte asked, her eyes hard.

"I'll do what I must," Skitter said. "Just like always. There's a chance that we might be able to solve the Dragon issue without fighting, but assume otherwise unless I say so. What's Shay's report on our resources?"

Charlotte frowned. "She's not done taking inventory yet, but probably enough for a few days. Not much more than that, though. Our resupply is due soon, so we weren't accounting for much of a buffer past that."

"That won't be enough," Skitter muttered to herself, before addressing Charlotte again. "I'll get in contact with Coil, ask for an advance on supplies. I'll fill you in on the details once it's been arranged, just get it inside and squared away as fast as you can. I'll try to shoot for a week for safety, but no promises. Have the kids start rationing now, just in case."

"They won't like that," Charlotte warned.

"They'll like starving less," Skitter replied grimly.

Well. Neither of us could argue with that.

"What about Forrest and Sierra? They're still out," Charlotte asked. I'd half forgotten them in the intense discussion. They were more distant than Charlotte; I hadn't spent much time around either of them. Maybe this would be a chance to get to know them better, I thought with a thin slant of a smile. Fleeing from the wrath of an unstoppable draconic cape who'd taken on an Endbringer solo had to be a great bonding experience, right?

It might be gallows humor, but the sarcasm made me feel a little better. I knew better than to share it with Skitter or Charlotte, though.

"If you've called them back, they should be here soon," Skitter said. "It's not worth risking breaking comms to tell them anything. If they're six hours behind or later, we assume they're captured or otherwise inaccessible and plan accordingly. I'll do what I can for them. Otherwise, tell them what we talked about here once they arrive."

"Fine," Charlotte said. "I can do that. Although…"

"What?"

"...what do I tell the kids?"

Skitter paused. My breath caught in my chest. "Tell them… that we're running low on food," she decided after a moment's hesitation. "We're going to get more soon, but they need to hold tight until then. Blame me if it helps."

Charlotte nodded, gave me a glance, then hurried downstairs to start breaking the news to the children.

I looked at Skitter. If her shoulders were slumped before, they looked leaden now. She rolled her left shoulder, then rolled it again, one hand coming up thoughtlessly to rub at it like she was trying to massage out a sore muscle. The flinch as her fingers made contact was so subtle that I barely caught it, and didn't stop her from trying to squeeze the tension out of her overstressed neck.

I couldn't blame her for being exhausted, not really. I knew that we had done the right thing, contacting Dragon. But it was a lot harder to see that when these were the kinds of conversations that resulted.

"Victoria," Skitter said. She paused for a moment, as if unable to find the next words. "Explain what you said earlier."

I bit my lip. It felt almost hypocritical after that last conversation, but this was probably the most privacy we were going to have for a while. Definitely the most privacy we had available right now. If I didn't ask now, I wouldn't ever. But first I needed to clear the air.

"Before I start, I need to apologize. I think I led Dragon here."

Instantly Skitter's body bristled, the insects spilling out of her hair and over her silk in a wave of stingers, mandibles and pincers. "Go on." Her voice was deceptively flat.

I swallowed, and tried not to tremble as I signed, "My phone. We used it to text Carol earlier. I think she was listening in on that and not Tattletale's burner."

She stared at me for a long moment. I resisted the urge to hold my breath through force of will. I didn't want to look at the swarm surrounding us to know how she felt. After what felt like minutes, the tension bled out of her shoulders. "That figures."

I didn't try to mask my shock. "What?"

Skitter let out something approaching a laugh, sharp and bitter. "Of course our early warning ends up leading her right to us. That's just my luck."

Looking at it like that, I could see the dark irony in the situation. But I had to draw her attention back to the unspoken issue. "But I didn't bring it up when I realized in the meeting."

She sighed. "You didn't. But we didn't say much she didn't already know, and I technically gave you the thing. It's not like it was on purpose, and you did turn it off after… right?"

I nodded frantically after she let the question hang. I'd done that almost as soon as we left the building and started walking back, trying not to show how scared I was that I'd doomed us before we even started.

Skitter nodded. Her bugs shifted to her back and hair again, scratching as they went over her armor plating. "Then you did what you could. I can work with that." That was… better than I expected. Though her reasoning made sense.

We sat in silence for a moment, before Skitter spoke up again. "You still haven't explained why you want to talk to the heroes, though."

"My mom is defending Amy. I need to confront the Protectorate about it. And I want you with me."

Skitter's sudden bark of laughter surprised me. Even the insects on her person responded, their wings and legs fluttering in a harsh buzzing sound. Something in my chest twisted. I knew it was a hard ask but I hadn't expected to be mocked for it.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Skitter managed, "but this really is too funny. We just had that whole conversation with Grue about laying low, not getting mixed up in anything high profile. And now you want to confront the Protectorate in the open, with me right beside you. Do you remember what happened the last time I met a hero?"

She rolled her shoulder again for emphasis, and I flinched. No, I hadn't forgotten that nightmare. But this was important. I wouldn't be asking if it wasn't.

"This is different."

"I don't see how. Or why you need me there."

I swallowed tightly. "Because Dragon is coming. She doesn't trust that I'm not mind controlled, and I don't blame her. If she gets there early while I'm talking and restrains me, I'll go back to the Heroes. And they can't guarantee that I won't go right back home to Carol. To her."

Skitter's entire body language changed. The moths and hornets and beetles covering her flew up and off her in one fluid wave, casting themselves away to reveal the chitin and silk beneath.

"Well. That changes things. You want me for, what, protection?"

I nodded.

"Mmm. What's the other reason though? If Dragon comes, it's still going to be difficult to get away even if I'm there. You might even have better odds alone – you're faster than I am. There must be something else."

I bit my lip, resisting the urge to glance at her swarm. I knew she'd see if I did. I knew – or at least suspected – by this point that she emoted through her bugs. But I didn't want to take my eyes away from hers. "I said earlier to not be terrorists, this is part of that. You show to the Heroes that you can talk without fighting. And I show them I'm not under your control."

There was a pause. Her yellow eyes glimmered. "I still don't buy it," she said. "There's something else. Something you're hiding." I could hear the suspicion in her tone, but in a weird way it almost reassured me. She could hide it under her emotionless facade if she wanted to. I could hear it in her voice because she was letting me.

And she was right. There was something else. But I was hoping not to have to spell it out plainly. But apparently she was getting as good at reading me as I was at reading her. I took a deep breath.

"Because I want you there."

Skitter tilted her head. Aside from that, she'd gone utterly still. Had I surprised her? The urge to look at the swarm was overwhelming, but I clamped down on the temptation, locking my eyes with hers, widening them a little. I knew she wasn't heartless. I was willing to put on a pleading look and tug at her sympathy if it got me her help here, even if it felt manipulative.

"I'm gonna be talking to the Heroes. People I know. They want me to come back to them, and while I have reasons not to, it's hard to remember that in the moment. I'm afraid I'll say yes because they ask, not because I want to. I want a reminder of why I left."

There it was. That was all I had for this selfish, stupid request. Because, for some godforsaken reason, I couldn't imagine doing this without Skitter at my side. And I wanted this badly enough that I was willing to accept that cost.

"You're that serious," Skitter said, her tone almost wondering.

I nodded.

"Alright."

I blinked. Was it that easy?

Skitter seemed to sense my confusion, and laughed softly. "Honestly, I'm always willing to throw down with the heroes. I'll be nice about it this time, sure, but you're telling me I have an opportunity to throw their double standards right back in their faces? I'll take it."

I… wouldn't put it quite like that. "You still can't fight them outright."

"Yes, I know that," Skitter said. I could hear the smirk in her voice, though I wasn't sure it was entirely friendly. "That doesn't mean I won't come."

She paused for a moment, and before I could interject she spoke again, her voice hard. "But we don't tell them first."

I blinked. Wait what? We'd just… let them find us? That meant we'd be surprising them in the open, and taking our chances on who found us. That defied the entire point of the exercise! We needed to be open to show Skitter could be reasoned with. "We need to tell them first though. The last time we ran into the Heroes by surprise it didn't go well."

"Yes, but in case you didn't notice we don't exactly have the element of surprise anymore," Skitter drawled. I tried to hide my mortification at the pointed edge of her words. "The phone may not have been your fault, but reaching out now would be. I know a standard patrol route, we'll take who we get. I won't start a fight, but I will finish it. Anything further is on them."

"But–"

"No," Skitter cut me off mid-word. "You want to meet the heroes, and against my better judgement I'm willing to try because it's important. But we do it on my terms, or not at all." Her words were iron, and fell with as much weight. I tried not to shudder at the finality of it.

"...Fine," I signed. I wasn't happy about this, and I didn't bother hiding it. But Skitter had already done far more for me than I could have asked, and we both knew it.

"And while we're at it, I want to take a few days to finish securing the base," she added belatedly. "I won't feel comfortable leaving my territory until I can trust things are finished between inventory and perimeter security."

I nodded absentmindedly. That much made sense. No, it was her first condition that worried me. It wasn't great, optics wise. Surprising the Heroes instead of reaching out meant they'd be on the defensive, and we might get someone like Assault who would ruin our chance before we started. But I could make it work so long as she didn't antagonize whoever we ran into too much. I might be able to make this work. Though… there was one last thing I could do to hedge our bets.

"What is it?" Skitter asked, apparently sensing unspoken thought. Her voice was sharp.

My hands shook as I brought them up to sign. "I want to wash out the dye from my hair."

Skitter stared at me. For the first time, I blushed. Holding her gaze earlier had been a plea to sway her. This felt more like I was the one being exposed. But I didn't look away. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. This was too important.

"Victoria," she said softly, "if this is about what Grue said earlier, you don't need to prove yourself. I know this isn't a set up–"

"It's not about that," I signed.

"Then what?"

I swallowed. I knew I had to do this right, if I was going to do it at all I wanted Skitter by my side for this, but I couldn't hide behind her. Physically or otherwise. I didn't stand behind all that Skitter did, but she was sticking her neck out for me. The least I could do was match that.

"If I'm with you, then I'm with you. No hiding."

Skitter didn't say anything, but I'd like to think she was smiling.


A/N:
Victoria is definitely trying. Skitter is too. Funny how that always seems to make it worse. A coincidence I'm sure. This time with the Heroes will definitely go better. Trust me. When have I ever used an opportunity to resolve a conflict to traumatize everyone more instead? Pics or it didn't happen.

Lots of set up here, but it's necessary for what comes later. A lot of the early parts of this story (I say at almost 100k words) is about managing the levels of dramatic irony. In other words, showing Victoria finding out things the audience already knows. We see that here with the ASL book, since we obviously know Skitter didn't know ASL prior to this fic. If Victoria were to think about it logically it shouldn't be a surprise – most people don't know – but it's less about that and more what it means. The journal technically worked. But it was slow and awkward for her. Skitter was willing to expend a significant amount of effort to make that process easier, and she didn't tell her she was doing it. That means a lot.

Today's rec is The Office Politics of Pantheons, by TheSleepingKnight. This is actually a newer fic, and has the honor of being the first DC fic (if only as a cross) that I was willing to read. Alexandria comes in contact with another Earth, and has a meeting with the Justice League on coordinating heroing. A really good case study on the differences in morality prioritization between the two groups. Plus it writes Alexandria as an internally complex compelling character. Give it some love.

 

[justanothercat]

Three days later, under a wet and dreary sky, I fingered the newly golden locks of my hair as I walked beside Skitter down towards the Bay. I'd had to wake up early to wash all the hair dye out; Skitter had wanted to conserve water. I wasn't about to get in the shower either, so I'd ended up washing most of it out in the sink. Coil's resupply hadn't shown up, something about logistical difficulties. Skitter was not happy, but there'd been nothing from Dragon either, so it wasn't all bad. She'd decided it was better to get this out of the way now before anything else had the chance to go wrong. I couldn't disagree.

I glanced up, seeing pale yellow in the fringe in the corner of my eye again. Some darker streaks remained, but for the most part I was blonde again.

It had been strange, seeing my true hair color again in the mirror for the first time. The girl staring back at me had seemed caught between two times. On the surface she looked like nothing had happened. Clear skin, long golden hair, short unpainted nails and all. But her eyes… they were harder. Her hands were clenched preemptively around the tassels of her hoodie, turning the slightly grubby fabric into a suit of armor against unwanted eyes. Her clothes were dark and baggy.

Her mouth was tight and shut.

"We're almost to the Boardwalk," Skitter said, drawing me out of my reverie. "How do you want to do this?"

I frowned, glancing at her. "Do what?" I signed, careful not to disturb the centipede in my hand. Skitter had wisely suggested using it as a replacement for the phone panic button for as long as Dragon remained a threat.

"Get the attention of the Protectorate?" Skitter said, as if explaining something obvious. "We can just walk around and hope they run into us, but that might take hours."

I frowned. "I could fly us?"

Skitter shook her head. "Too small of a target. I also don't like being in the air for that long."

I nodded. Skitter had considered taking us on her massive beetle Atlas, but decided against it on the matter of unneeded intimidation. Privately, I was glad of it. A beetle like that was only possible through biotinkering, and I wasn't really eager to ride on something that Amy had made. On principle, if nothing else.

"Can you make a giant arrow above us with your swarm?"

Skitter tilted her head, considering the idea. "I'd want to mask our actual location, but I can do that."

As she said that the majority of the swarm surrounding us took to the air, climbing to presumably form said arrow. The rest tightened into a much thicker wall, obscuring the outside.

I swallowed. "What if things go wrong?"

Skitter snorted. "Then we improvise."

I glared at her. "That's not a plan!"

She shrugged, and squared her shoulders. "Too late for that. I found them."

This was it. The Heroes were almost here.

Not even Skitter could calm the butterflies that filled my stomach. The last two encounters with Heroes we'd had - three, counting her terrorist attack on the mayor's home - had all been disasters. And though she was here for me as backup, I had no idea who I was about to be put face to face with. The swarm around us was still too thick for me to make anything out, so I looked up at her and cocked my head in a silent question.

"They're still about two minutes out, but they see us," she confirmed. "Looks like Miss Militia, along with someone I can't quite make out–ah, nevermind. It must be Ursa Aurora, I just caught one of her projections."

I swallowed, and tried to think back to when the PRT had briefed us on the new Heroes and Wards from New York. It felt like years ago now. If I remembered right, Ursa Aurora was a Master who could manifest ethereal bear projections. Well, mostly ethereal. Their claws and teeth were decidedly solid. I'd seen her summon two at once during sparring with Triumph, but that had been a friendly match. I had no idea what her upper limit was.

As far as matchups went, it could be worse. Miss Militia was by far the more dangerous of the two. Her power was incredibly strong at range, but could fight up close if needed. It adjusted based on her subconscious needs, and could be lethal or nonlethal as required. Her biggest issue was needing a clear line of sight. Her power didn't help her aim any better than her training allowed. Skitter's swarm blanketing our sightline would help with that. But if she broke out the grenades again, all bets would be off.

Ursa Aurora was a much more straightforward problem. Her projections were powerful, but landlocked. I wasn't, and Skitter worked best from range. If needed I could just fly Skitter up into the swarm and then land on a rooftop or something, leaving her to deal with the Master from cover.

My brain stuttered over that thought, and I paused. Dealing with Ursa Aurora from cover? Miss Militia breaking out the grenades? Matchups? Why was I thinking like this? These were Heroes, not my enemies! Nothing was going to happen! I had a tight grip on my aura, my forcefield was strong around me, and neither of us was going to start anything. We just wanted to talk.

Although that did remind me.

I snapped my fingers, drawing Skitter's attention.

"Yes?"

"How are we going to do this?" I asked.

She tilted her head. "You're going to have to be more specific."

I rolled my eyes. "Communicate. I don't have my notebook." It was almost startling to admit. I hadn't thought to grab it when I left. It hadn't been as necessary lately. Skitter had learned sign for me, which I was still reeling from, and she was generally willing to translate for me if she was around, and I didn't need to say much around the base most of the time, so at some point I'd just… stopped needing my notepad as much.

Up until now.

"If they don't know sign, I'll interpret," Skitter said. "Now stay sharp. Here they come."

I tensed. Sure enough, not ten seconds later, the swarm of beetles, wasps and flies parted around the two Heroes. Miss Militia was up first, her brow furrowed. Her signature green fatigues blended in surprisingly well with the swarming insects around us. The bugs were staying away from her face, avoiding her exposed eyes and the relatively meager protection the bandanna covering her lower face offered. I smiled and brushed an approving finger over the back of my centipede in my left hand. Skitter was being good, for now.

Miss Militia was frowning, but Ursa Aurora was even less comfortable around the swarm. She flinched every time a fly swerved away fromr her face. She wore a glossy half mask that looked remarkably like a polished version of the stock doggy mask that Bitch wore. Like Miss Militia, her mask didn't offer her face full coverage, stopping above her eyebrows but below her hairline. The rest of her costume looked practical, if not ostentatious. Subdued blues and purples came together in ballistic nylon to make something stylishly understated. A good choice of costume for a Master.

"Glory Girl! Skitter!" Miss Militia called over the high, buzzing whine of countless wings all around us. They were approaching cautiously, but Miss Militia's power was in pistol form, held loosely in one hand and pointed at the ground. Ursa Aurora's projections followed them in guard positions just behind and to either side of the capes, but made no move to attack.

A good sign. So far.

"Miss Militia, Ursa Aurora," Skitter returned neutrally as they got close enough to hear her. She didn't raise her voice, but the hum of the swarm quietened as she spoke and rose again when she'd said her piece. It was a simple trick, but an effective one. With a swarm this big, it felt like the whole world was silencing itself to listen to her every time she opened her mouth.

"What is the meaning of this?" Ursa Aurora demanded, shifting from foot to foot. "You're obviously trying to get someone's attention. Congratulations; you got it. Now what do you want? And why is Glory Girl here?"

"Victoria," Skitter emphasized, looking at me, "is here because she wanted to tell you something. I'm here as her interpreter."

"Interpreter?" "Just her interpreter?" Miss Militia and Ursa Aurora both spoke at once, their words overlapping in mutual suspicion. My fists clenched; one tight, one carefully loose around my centipede. I couldn't blame them for not trusting Skitter, even if I thought better of her, but people assuming I was just being taken advantage of by the Undersiders was starting to get really, really old.

"Victoria is still mute," Skitter said. "She signs in ASL. I assume neither of you know enough to carry on a conversation, so I'll verbalize what she tells me." She turned to Ursa Aurora. "She asked me here to interpret. If I have to do more than that, it's on you."

One of Ursa Aurora's bears growled and took a step forward, but Miss Militia put a firm hand on her shoulder. "Easy," she warned. "So long as they're here to talk, we're here to listen."

She turned to me. "Victoria. I'm glad to see you're okay. I know our last meeting… didn't exactly go to plan."
I winced.

She seemed to notice judging by her crinkling eyes. "Yes, I don't think that was the best day for any of us. Are we… going to have similar problems this time?"

I shook my head. No. I had a handle on my aura. Deep breaths. It was okay. Skitter was here, and I had my centipede if I needed her.

"That's good to hear. So, what did you want to talk to us about, Victoria?"

I swallowed, and looked her in the eyes. "My mother has Amy."

There was a small moment of silence after Skitter translated, the words hanging in the air, before Miss Militia hung her head.

"Fuck."

Instantly the bugs writhed around us, the walls constricting and buzzing. "You knew, then." Skitter said, her tone devoid of inflection but echoed by a hundred thousand hissing voices.

"We suspected," Miss Militia said. "But we didn't have proof, no."

"And yet you did nothing. Even when you knew what she did."

"Am I missing something here?" Ursa Aurora asked.

"What you're missing is that Miss Militia and the rest of the Protectorate here are harboring a known rapist," Skitter said, chitin and anger backing her words with an angry chorus of nightmares. I flinched at the reminder, and a small head rubbed itself gently against my palm, a lone shard of tenderness among the jagged spikes of Skitter's hostility.

"That's... a hell of a claim," Ursa Aurora said, taken aback. "Militia? Care to explain?"

"It's… complicated," Miss Militia said. The words sounded forced, and the pause was telling.

Skitter's laugh was short, mocking and entirely humorless. "It always seems to be that way when it comes to me," she said, and I could hear the twisted smile in the words; an adrenaline snarl of aggression. I pressed a cautionary thumb against my centipede's shell, silently willing her to dial it back.

"Skitter–" Ursa Aurora started, before Miss Militia cut her off.

"It's not that simple," she said, looking back up at us. "You told us what happened, what Amy did to you. And you're right; we haven't acted on that yet. Yes, there are a lot of moving pieces, but that doesn't help you right now. I'm sorry we haven't done more, Victoria."

The air left my chest like a punch to the gut. For a moment I honestly thought the wind had been knocked out of me; I wouldn't have been able to speak even if my voice had been working. The protective whine of the swarm pressed in from every side, but it wasn't half as long as the drumbeat of my heart in my ears.

Was that it? Was that all I got? All my suffering amounted to?

Skitter obviously felt the same way. "Sorry doesn't cut it when she's still afraid to go back to her family," she snapped. "When her abuser is still out there and you've done nothing to protect her."

"What would you have us do, Skitter?" Miss Militia demanded. "Panacea isn't a Protectorate hero; she isn't even a Ward! More than that; Brandish might've told you that she has Amy, but no one has seen her for at least a month. We can't just break down the door to a hero's house on suspicion alone."

"So you'd leave one of your own in the cold, just because you're afraid of doing something wrong? That's–"

I smacked my hands together, the clap startling both of them and cutting Skitter off mid-sentence. I couldn't let this conversation continue like this, sidelining me in favour of personal grudges.To her credit, Skitter didn't try to continue her tirade. She turned to see what I had to say, still ready to go to bat for me against the Protectorate.

I appreciated what she was trying to do here, even if she was going about it wrong. But I needed to do this myself. From the way she nodded and took a step back, I was pretty sure she understood.

"Victoria?" Ursa Aurora asked softly. "What is it?"

I took a deep breath, and signed, listening to Skitter's deliberately neutral voice repeating my words. "I know that justice is a long and slow thing when it's done right. And I respect that. But as selfish as it is, my needs have to come first for me. If you can't promise that you'll act against Amy, to–" I choked on the lump in my throat, and Skitter paused as my hands spasmed, but I pushed through and kept going. "If you can't promise to put her somewhere she can't hurt me again, I can't go with you. No matter how much I might want to."

"Victoria…" Miss Militia seemed at a loss for what to say.

"Skitter," I stumbled on the word, "saved me when she didn't have to. She made my sister fix me, and then made her leave. She didn't have a reason to. There was no reward in it for her. She just did. If you want to think that's Mastering or something else, fine. I can't really prove otherwise without a field psychologist. But the Protectorate can't guarantee right now that I could protect myself. Skitter can."

A tiny wry smile touched my lips at Skitter's surprise. I was the only one who noticed it. It wasn't in her voice as she translated for me, or her posture as she stared down the Heroes. It was the split-second shift in the whining choir of the swarm's encircling walls, the way my centipede froze on my wrist for a moment before curling tighter around it. The way a cluster of moths brushed against me as they passed, as if making sure I was really there.

Was she really so unaccustomed to simple gratitude?

"I'm sorry you feel that way," Miss Militia said at length. "I can't… entirely blame you for that."

"Ma'am!" Ursa Aurora exclaimed. She stepped closer to Miss Militia, lowering her voice, but if it was to keep me from overhearing she must have thought I was deaf as well as mute. I heard every word. "Ma'am, you can't just cede to their narrative like this! We at least need to get this verified before we–"

"There will be a time and a place for that," Miss Militia replied, not looking away from us. My centipede scuttled onto the back of my hand and reared up, hissing at Ursa Aurora. "And I agree that has to be done, one way or another. But we're not the ones to do it, right now. All I really want to know is one thing."

I swallowed.

Miss Militia's fists were clenched, but her eyes were clear. "Is she keeping you safe?"

Skitter stiffened beside me, but I didn't hesitate. "Yes," I croaked.

The bandana over her lower face hid her mouth, but the crease of her eyes painted a fragile smile. "Good. That's… that's good. I'm sorry we couldn't be there for you when you needed it. Will you at least let us arrange for a field screening so we can be sure? It doesn't have to be now but… it would reassure me that I'm doing the right thing by letting you go back with her, if nothing else."

I looked back at Skitter. She nodded, and my centipede scuttled back around my hand, tapping its head twice against the inside of my thumb. I turned back to the Heroes. "That's fine."

"Good. I'm glad to hear it. Be careful."

Ursa Aurora looked back between us and Miss Militia. "I don't know exactly what's going on here, but I know hurt when I see it. Victoria… please be careful, alright? For your own sake."

I nodded. I hadn't interacted much with her before the Crawler incident and all that followed, but it was touching that she'd be worried about me at all.

I softly squeezed my centipede nestled in my palm as the swarm split around the two departing Heroes.

"Well," Skitter remarked, staring after them. "That went better than I expected."

I turned to her. "And what exactly did you think would happen?"

She shrugged. "Any time I come away from a close encounter with heroes without explosions or stabbing, I count it as a win."

Suddenly, I was laughing. I couldn't stop. The stress, the anxiety, the frustration and nerves and everything else that had been building up for the past week, all of it was just flooding out of me. I didn't know exactly when my laughter turned into sobbing, but I knew I felt Skitter's hand on my back.

---

"So that was a different name that you used back there," Skitter said a while later, as we were starting to walk back.

I turned to look at her, confused. "What do you mean?"

She stopped, and looked at me. "My name. In sign you usually finger spell it, one letter at a time. But instead you did this." She made the sign for 'S', followed by clenching her fists and crossing her arms over her chest. The sign for 'Protect'.

I felt the blush rise like the sun. Fuck. I really had done that, hadn't I? In the ASL community, people usually had two names. Or so I had read in the book Skitter had given me. One was what I'd been using up to this point: finger spelling. But for people you knew better, there was another category called a descriptive name. The person signing always chose it, usually based on some aspect of the person in question. Sign names were always given, never chosen.

"I didn't even realize at the time what it was," Skitter said, still talking. "I only filled it in from context. I thought it was just a mistake from saying 'protect' beforehand–"

She paused, looking back at me. "–but maybe not. Victoria?"

I swallowed and looked up. "It's your name."

"My name?" Skitter asked.

I nodded.

"Why?" she signed at me.

I couldn't breathe. "Because it's what you did when you woke me up in that bathtub. What you've done ever since. It's the only thing I could think of."

She tilted her head, unmoving. "You really mean that, don't you?"

My fingers felt like they were on fire, but I forced myself through anyways. "I really do."

There was a moment, as we stared at each other, where the air was filled with… something. Something so fragile I was afraid to even name it. But before I could say anything, Skitter froze. The swarm clenched around us, drawing in close. I was blind in a sea of chitin and wings, forced to close my mouth for fear of something flying into it.

"Skitter–" I signed blindly, trusting she could see my hands even if I couldn't.

"Listen," a million clicks and chirrups hissed.

"The swarm, too loud, I can't."

She grunted, closer than she'd been when the swarm pressed in, and for a moment the bugs around us calmed, gliding away on the muggy June air to give us a little clear oasis at the heart of a writhing cloud. And in that instant, I heard what she did. A distant, high pitched shriek.

I knew that sound. The last time I'd heard it, I'd been drenched and desperate in the pouring rain, staring down at the monster that had come to kill my city. It was the sound of advanced engines and exotic weaponry, of metal monsters bristling with weapons. It was the sound of a thousand criminal careers cut short and an inescapable prison.

It was the sound of Dragon.


A/N:
I love this chapter. So much. I could go on about the clashing of worldview, the delicate negotiations of power, how fragile the temporary peace they've gotten is. But that name sign scene has my entire heart, and I refuse to apologize for that. I'm a simple woman.

So. Dragon. I'm sure that won't end terribly. Because everything has gone swimmingly well so far. Don't worry, you guys trust me by this point right? Right?

Today's rec is On Feathered Wings, We Fly by Sylnarri. There are vanishingly few stories in this fandom with a trans female character, and this one is willing to engage with that conflict for longer than "Amy touch her and she gets better". Plus it's punchbuggy. You know I had to rec it. It's got a lot of content already, updates frequently, and deserves more love than it gets.

 

[justanothercat]

"Fuck," Skitter said, echoing my thoughts. "We need to leave. Now."

Well that was obvious, but where to? We were out in the open!

She glanced at me distractedly, already slipping into an analytical, tactical tone I recognised as she cocked her head. The last time I'd heard it, I'd wound up carrying her back to her base with blood all over her and a bolt through her shoulder, wondering all the while how I'd been talked into it.

I had a nasty feeling I was going to end up feeling that way again.

"By the sound of it, we have maybe three minutes," Skitter said, short and clipped. "Probably less. Atlas can't get here in time, and even if he could, he'd be too slow and too large a target. If we're going to get out of here, you need to fly us."

There it was. I stared at her incredulously. That was seriously the best plan she could come up with? She knew I was slower in the air when I was carrying someone! My field protected me from the worst of the effects of flying; it made me more aerodynamic, protected me from windchill, let me turn on a dime. But it didn't do shit for my passengers! If I had to bank hard, if I had a flashback and slipped, if she shifted her weight at all, I'd have no time to double back around-

Silk touched my hands. Warm. Smooth. Light – ever so light; barely touching me at all. I looked down at my hands, dumbly realizing I'd been signing fragments of my thoughts; stuttered gibberish that must still have gotten the gist across.

"Victoria," Skitter said, her hand still resting on mine. Not holding it, not restricting it. Just resting the tips of her fingers on the back of my palm, a firm, warm point of connection. "Victoria, we don't have time. You said you'd stand with me if Dragon came, and I can't make this choice for you. But you need to choose now."

I swallowed, meeting her eyes through the lenses. They gave away nothing. But the silk was damp with sweat, and her hair was stirring as the bugs between the tresses shook.

Fuck it.

"Where are we going?" I signed hurriedly.

"Anywhere but here," Skitter said, stepping closer and half-turning for a princess carry. "You won't be able to sign while carrying me. I'll yell if I need to tell you something. Squeeze once for a tight turn, twice if you have to let me go."

I grunted an acknowledgement as I picked her up. Fuck, it sounded so much more real when she put it like that. We were about to try and outrun Dragon. While flying. This was a terrible idea.

Like most of them lately. But some of them had worked anyway.

I looked around once more, trying to find another option. Something I'd overlooked, somewhere we could hide; anything. But the whine of Dragon's turbines was getting louder and louder, drowning out the drone of the circling swarm. We didn't have time for hiding places or other options. She knew where we were already. How could she not? We'd been talking to the Protectorate bare minutes ago!

No time left to hesitate. I shook myself and shot into the air. I could feel the wind buffeting off my forcefield. This was already off to a terrible start. Skitter had never flown with me this fast before, and it showed. She was tense, all but clinging to me. I tried not to take it personally. She'd need every ounce of that grip strength in a minute.

"Wait!" she yelled.

I froze, looking at her. Was she insane? We had about sixty seconds before we were confoamed in midair. Hell, I could see the sinuous shapes of the Dragonflight cutting across the ruined skyline from here! What could Skitter possibly want?

"Give me ten seconds to draw my swarm in. They won't be able to follow us at speed. I can release them strategically as smokescreens, or to slow her down."

Oh. That made sense. I gave her a quick jerk of a nod, eyes trained on the black shape in the middle distance, powering straight towards us across the Trainyard. I couldn't sign for her to be quick, but I didn't need to. She could see it coming too.

All at once, her swarm poured towards us. It plunged into her hair, engulfed her chest, disappearing into the gaps between her armor plating, the pockets in her belt, even a compartment in her back I'd never noticed until now.

"Fuck," Skitter grunted. "Not enough space. Need to put some on you. Can I?"

My heart thundered in my chest, my breaths came sharp and frantic. I forced the panic down. Skitter was a Master, yes. And she was putting her minions on me. But she was safe. She could only affect them, and she wouldn't hurt me. I knew that. She was asking first. Right now, that meant everything. And if it gave us even a chance of escaping Dragon, of escaping Carol, I had to put up with it.

I nodded.

Her swarm stretched out its buzzing, churning tendrils and took me in its grasp. It combed fingers of flies through my hair, twisting it into braids to better tighten its grip. It stroked ants and spiders across my scalp and wrapped a warm blanket of wasps around my back like a parody of my old cape. Across my chest it spread a vest of beetles, packed close together like body armor. I could feel them all, warm and humming on my temples, against my spine, in the hollows behind my ears and clinging tightly to my shirt.

They were heavy. Stifling. C-constricting–

"Hey," Skitter said, touching my cheek and tilting my head down to meet her gaze. "Ignore them. They aren't there. Focus on me, on where we're going. They'll let go as we move. The sooner we do that, the sooner they're gone."

I nodded. That, I could do. I glanced at the Dragonsuit, the sound of its engines now an oncoming roar that more than deserved its name. It was nearly on us. Thirty seconds, max. I couldn't head back to Skitter's base; she was too close. I wouldn't lead an enemy combatant to an orphanage. That left losing her downtown.

I spun south. There weren't a ton of options. The central area surrounding Medhall and the financial sector was out of the question. Too many skyscrapers and civilians. The commercial district was also out. What I needed was open space, so I could capitalize on my mobility and turning radius.

The crater from Leviathan might work.

I just had to beat her to it.

We shot forward with a crack of displaced air. Skitter grunted as the acceleration pressed her back against my chest, but I didn't have time to apologize. Every second counted now.

"On your left!" she yelled, and I dared a glance back. Sure enough, the Dragonsuit was only about three hundred feet back. It didn't look like much, but from what I remembered of Leviathan, that meant we were already in range. Goddammit!

"I'll tell you when to dodge!" Skitter screamed over the wind. I nodded and doubled down on squeezing out every last ounce of speed. It wasn't going to be enough.

"Right!"

I dipped and rolled, putting myself on the outside of the turn as we swerved. The centrifugal force crushed Skitter against me hard enough that I heard the breath whoosh out of her lungs, but it earned us a turn sharp enough to draw with a ruler. And not a second too soon. A small canister shot past us, sailing into the space ahead. I lost track of it for a moment, but it must have hit a building because there was an explosion of containment foam below before that too was swept away. Shit!

"Keep moving!"

I bared my teeth and curved back towards the crater, glancing over my shoulder as I did. That dodge had cost us about fifty feet. And she was still gaining.

But we were almost there. I threw us into a tight spiral as we shot forward, trying to cover the last six hundred feet before Dragon could cycle another round. I knew those confoam grenades were propelled by compressed gas, but her main limit was probably her targeting solution. That meant the more erratic our flight, the better.

My grimace twisted upward into a snarl of adrenaline. Erratic. Cool. I could do that. The buildings were getting more obviously worn and dilapidated the closer we got to the crater, and the civilian presence had petered out to almost nothing over the last block.

Perfect.

Dragon's engines screamed behind us as I dropped us into a steep dive and pulled up bare feet above the ground, skimming over the pavement. I remembered reading somewhere that flying close to the surface like this could confuse radar based targeting. I didn't know for sure that Dragon was using radar, but it was worth a shot.

The howling wind and the roar of her afterburners drowned out any sound from the suit itself, but I swore I heard the next round cycle into the Dragonsuit's gun as we skipped over the crater. I took a deep breath, squeezed Skitter's leg, and curled protectively over her for another tight turn.

This time I turned down.

The sudden change in acceleration hit us like a truck. I heard a muffled grunt against my chest as Skitter took the worst of it. I just had to hope I wasn't hurting her. At the same time a layer of the flies and insects in my hair spilled away, fanning out to cover where we'd gone. Clever. The remaining bugs on me were mostly fine–the forcefield protected them from most of the incidental wind and momentum changes.

We'd gone from straight-line flight to a vertical plunge so fast that Skitter's hair was still whipping forward from inertia as I slammed on the brakes, feeling her weight press down harder on my arms as I slowed us to a hover and then floated back to hug the crater wall. No sooner had my heels touched the muddy side than the Dragonsuit shot out ahead of us through the remaining cloud of bugs.

Just as planned. To Dragon's sensors, it would look like we just disappeared over the cliff edge. And in the shadow of the crater, we wouldn't stand out.

Hopefully.

I didn't have an arm free, so I had to over-emphasise an awkward silent shushing sound as the suit shot over us, but Skitter seemed to get the message. We couldn't afford to draw attention to ourselves now. The only hope we had was that Dragon might not be thorough enough to do a full sweep until she'd realized we weren't–

The suit banked hard, guns sweeping across the crater walls, and I groaned. Fuck. Of course it wouldn't be that easy. I had seconds to come up with a new plan before she found us again.

Okay, losing her behind cover wasn't working. What about blind spots? I knew if nothing else that I had a tighter turning circle than she did. If I could just stay out of range behind her for long enough, we might be able to exhaust her, or force a standoff.

I squeezed Skitter again, then shot out low against the muddy surface of the water. The crack of our acceleration and the plume of spray we were dragging in our wake definitely got her attention, but that was fine. She was going to detect us regardless. The important thing was that the speed we gained in exchange was just enough for us to get fully under her before she could react.

Dragon seemed to sense what I was planning, and started to flip the suit upside down to bring her weapons to bear. But I was already moving up and over, careful to flip Skitter again so she was facing the inside of the arc. She'd be upside down for the last bit, but the vertigo would be better than the centrifugal force.

Just like that, we were in her blind spot. Up and out of her line of fire, behind the head but above the backwash of the engines, between its neck and its lower spine.

"She's turning!" Skitter yelled.

She was right. Dragon was already trying to flip around. Skitter was going to have to hang on. I matched her revolution, flinging us up and around to stay behind Dragon's back. She angled her thrusters into abrupt reverse and I danced us backward to maintain our carefully calculated distance; she dropped into a spinning dive and I orbited her like a remora clinging to a shark.

Again and again we danced, one behind the other, each constantly trying to catch the other off guard. Dragon was clever. She kept up her bucking and spinning just long enough to let me think I had the edge over her, then started breaking her rhythm. She'd abort a turn midmotion, change the direction on a time with maneuvering jets, even loop around to try and confuse me in three dimensional space. Throughout it all, I stuck to her back like glue.

But only barely. There were too many near misses to count, and a couple of heart-stoppingly close shaves that almost tagged us. The first one was when Dragon got frustrated enough to start launching grenades at the space her next spin would force us to dodge into. That trick would've gotten me if Skitter hadn't seen it coming and screamed a warning.

We survived, but it came at a cost. After my reflexive jink took us out of the way of the first grenade by blind luck, Skitter spread her bugs out in a thin swarm, sensing the grenades and leaning her weight away from them, telling me which side of Dragon's unprotected back to hug. It worked, but my cape of hornets dwindled down to nothing, eaten up bit by bit with every flurry and barrel roll.

"This is working!"

Still, for as long as her bugs held out, we were winning. Or at least holding our own. My chest was heaving, there was sweat plastering my neck and forehead, but the wild, triumphant grin on my face stretched from cheek to cheek. I was dogfighting with Dragon. And beating her!

And that was when it all went wrong. Dragon stopped in midair and started to fold. The back of her armor sprouted spines and flexed out like origami, plates and vents changing configuration even as we watched. It happened so fast that I didn't realize what she was doing until the guns bent around like double-jointed elbows to get a bead on us. She had folded herself inside out to get us in front of her!

I shot upward, feeling the confoam round pass inches under my feet. I was pretty sure it had been aimed at my face this time. Apparently she didn't appreciate being outflown.

Okay, clearly this wasn't working. I knew that fighting Dragon was a shitty idea, but even just trying to stay out of her way was a nightmare. I was out of options, and I knew it. Evading didn't work. Bug screening didn't work. Dogfighting didn't work. Without directly hitting her, which I couldn't do while carrying Skitter, I didn't know what choice I had.

"Victoria!" Skitter yelled in my ear.

I looked at her as we skimmed across the ground in the crater.

"Go downtown between the skyscraper-LEFT!"

I shot to the left violently enough that Skitter let out a strangled yell, and felt sticky flecks of confoam spatter my arm like blobs of glue, swelling up to the size of peas in seconds. Fuck, that was close. Zigzagging up and back as the Dragonsuit passed under us again, I looked down at Skitter in confusion. Had the panic made her lose her mind? We couldn't go downtown; the collateral damage would be horrific! If Dragon missed even one shot–

"Trust me!" she shouted over the wind, and threw herself backward against the steel grip of my arms. I took the cue and swerved with her, hearing another shot whistle past us and detonate midair just short of where we'd been. More small blobs of confoam splattered my legs; I could feel the expanding lumps tugging on the fabric. These pants were going to be a write-off for sure.

"I don't want to hurt people!" Skitter continued. I could feel her breathing hard against my chest, one arm wrapped around my neck to steady herself as she bent her head towards my ear. "But I don't think she does either! We can use that!"

That made my skin go cold and clammy, despite the sweat coating every inch of me. The very idea felt wrong, like I was putting innocent lives between me and a Hero. And in a certain sense, I was. But… Skitter was also right. Dragon was a Hero, in every sense of the word. She wouldn't fire if there was even a chance someone got hurt. And she was the one herding us into a corner. If this is what it took to get me away from Carol… I could deal with the consequences after. Just this once.

I squeezed Skitter again and shot back up into the sky. The roar of Dragon's engines followed us, but I wasn't looking at her anymore. As we climbed out of the crater I turned to the downtown skyline and swallowed the lump in my throat. No second thoughts now.

We reached the crest of our ascent and I launched us like an arrow in a ballistic curve over the few blocks between the crater and what remained of downtown. Dragon must have realized what we were doing because I heard the sound of her engines kick up a notch in pitch and get a hell of a lot louder. Probably trying to stop us from reaching what was a terrible environment for her to navigate. But it was too late. We shot between what was once the Medhall building and the old Telecomm skyscraper, and she was forced to veer off, gaining height so as not to clip her wings on the looming tower blocks.

I rolled over onto my back, cradling Skitter on top of me so I could look up and track her. She hung in the air above us like a monstrous bird of prey, waiting to dive down and sink its talons into its hapless prey. Then, as if that wasn't enough of a nightmare, little shapes started splitting off of her shoulders. I knew what those were. Drones.

"We need to get back to Charlotte!" Skitter called hoarsely.

I looked down. Seriously? Dragon could still see us! We'd lead her right back to the lair!

"Tattletale told her that we were housing refugees! Insurance policy! We thought it would–DOWN!"

We dropped like a stone, just barely catching a whiff of displaced air and a shock of static electricity. My hair would look like a nightmare after this.

I spun us over again, Skitter in a princess-carry once more, and threw a look back over my shoulder to see what was after us now–

Fuck. Of course. Of course Dragon would have specialty drones equipped with net launchers that magnetized to the fucking building superstructure. The next minute or so was a swerving, juking slalom from hell as I wound my way between the towers, under the baleful eye of the monster above us, trying to buy us time while Skitter kept talking. The first net had been fired from range, but the drones were catching up fast and I was running out of room to maneuver.

"We thought she wouldn't attack us if she knew there were kids! Tattletale had a hunch! Didn't want to test it, but no other choice!"

I propelled us upward as another net flew beneath us, this one close enough to make my hair stand on end before it wrapped itself around a lamp post and bent it twenty degrees. Fuck. She was right. There was no other choice I could think of that would stop Dragon. But wouldn't this make me just as bad as Charlotte always thought I was? Bringing a threat down right on their doorstep? How could I do this?

"Dammit Victoria, we're out of time!" Skitter yelled.

I looked up, and saw that she was right. There was a drone ahead of us, already in position, lining up its net launcher. Shit. The decision was made for me. Like so many lately.

I waited until the last second before ripping us upward through a punishing vertical turn that even I felt. It forced a ragged scream out of Skitter – literally; it pushed the air right out of her lungs past vocal chords left raw from shouting. This time I felt the edge of the net brush against my forcefield, sending tingles all down my left arm. But the drones were close enough that the one behind us got caught in the aborted shot. That might buy us a few extra seconds.

We'd need it.

We cleared the top of the drone ahead of us with a small enough margin that the tip of my foot smacked into it, sending it reeling downward, and shot straight north towards Skitter's base. I could hear the Dragonsuit re-engage as we left the downtown skyline, but for once, time and momentum were on our side. She was too far back, and couldn't accelerate fast enough to catch us before we made it to the base. The only question was whether we could avoid the drones for long enough to get there.

Skitter read my mind, leaning up to my ear. "Go in through the roof, punch a hole if you have to!" she ordered. "Top floor's empty! I'll cover us visually for as long as I can!"

I nodded, accelerating forward as fast as I dared. At this speed, a sudden stop like earlier might give Skitter whiplash. But we couldn't afford safety now. Not with the whine of the drones close on our heels.

We were almost there. I could see the roof entrance of the hideout, where I had deposited a badly wounded Skitter what felt like years ago. She'd needed medical attention then, and if she needed it now from how I'd been throwing her around we were fucked, but that was a problem for later. For now we just had to get inside.

As we approached, I started to slow down. I had to; if we hit at this speed I'd kill my passenger. Skitter must have sensed the shift, because every remaining bug that had survived the chase so far flew off us in a massive wave, filling the sky behind us in a black cloud of sound and writhing tendrils.

Maybe it was the tiny bit of extra speed I gained from the lost weight. Maybe it was her bugs confusing the targeting sensors. Maybe it was the ever so slightly sleeker aerodynamic profile. But whatever it was, we made it to the door to the roof entrance before the drones above could take another shot. I turned us round as the roof rushed towards us, cradling Skitter in my arms, my back facing the door. I just had to hope that my forcefield would be enough to–

Impact.

My forcefield broke instantly, turning the door into matchwood. I threw on the brakes as hard as I could and gasped as Skitter's inertia hit my ribs like a sandbag thrown from a car. Even the full force of my flight wasn't enough to stop us, but it did enough that we only slammed into the concrete wall at the speed of a dead sprint, instead of pancaking ourselves across it. Crushed between Skitter and the unforgiving surface, all my breath escaped me in a wheezing gasp, and we bounced off the wall with the wind knocked out of both of us.

My head was ringing. My heart was pounding triple-time against my ribs. My back was one solid bruise, and my chest felt like it was on fire. My arms and fingers ached something fierce from where I had been clutching Skitter, and my neck felt like it was permanently skewed from how she'd been clutching me. I must have taken at least three years off of my life in as many minutes.

But we'd made it.

As I helplessly coughed and sputtered and gasped for air, my forcefield snapped back into shape around me. Still wheezing and gulping oxygen, I started to laugh; a hacking chuckle that Skitter joined in from where she was doing the same on top of me.

God damn. That had really happened.

My lungs eased up slowly as I got my breath back, but the hysterical giggles only got harder and harder, until I was crying from the delayed fear and stress and exertion. I couldn't tell what Skitter was doing behind the mask, but it sounded more like laughter than tears. We clung to each other for a long moment as our hysterics rose, crested, and then slowly subsided, leaving us panting for breath, slowly realizing our position.

We couldn't have been any closer if we'd tried. She was plastered half on top of me, half fallen off to one side, her bad shoulder limp across my chest. Her wind-strewn hair fell down to one side of our faces in a tangled black curtain, and our faces were so close together that we were almost forehead to forehead. This close, in the mix of sunlight and shadow flooding in through the broken door, I almost thought I could make out the faintest shape of an eyebrow and eye through the yellow lens. Entranced, I started to bring my hand up, and–

"Boss!"

We both jerked hard enough to throw Skitter off me, and looked up to see Charlotte falling over herself to get through the door. "Boss, what happened?"

"Dragon," Skitter grunted, slowly pushing herself upright. I caught her good arm hand before she could stumble and surreptitiously helped push her upright under the guise of letting her pull me up. "We tried to avoid her. No dice. Came back here. Hopefully that–"

She cut herself off as the dreaded turbine whine approached. I spun towards the shattered doorframe. Goddammit, no! We'd made it! We were home! This wasn't fair!

Stepping up beside Skitter, we cautiously made our way over to the window. And sure enough, there was Dragon, landing on the roof of the building across the street, looking dead at us. The tiles shook as she set down, engines shutting off and folding away to be replaced by claws and canons.

She shook herself, almost like a living thing – ruffled her feathers, if that was the right way to describe it – and then the noise ceased entirely and she settled down. Watching us with reptilian patience.

That's when it occurred to me what had really just happened.

Dragon had just landed in front of Skitter's base. And she wasn't leaving.


A/N:
Aleph refused to let this one die, it just kept getting longer. At least y'all get to (sort of) see how I write action now. Was that exciting? I sure hope so because I hate writing these things lmao.

I have no concept of shame and regret nothing. ~Aleph

I'm seriously excited for what comes next in the fic, we're getting into some of the (personally speaking) more interesting and nuanced personal interactions. Don't worry, I'm sure Dragon keeping Skitter and Victoria trapped in a house will do wonders for their friendship. Trust me.

Today's recommendation, in honor of the titular character, is Chain by Truebeasts on Ao3. A fic about Colin and Dragon which unironically made me root for a straight couple. I could say something else, but that really says all you need to know. Go read it.

Just gonna point out that a couple comprised of a trans-identifying gynoid and a probably-bisexual-going-on-vibes-alone literal transhuman might be heterosexual but doesn't qualify as straight. Queer rep represent! ~ Aleph

Fight me.