What is a writer?
A miserable little pile of words!


Call me MP or Miz


Fiction attempted, with various levels of success.


Yes, I do need help, thank you for noticing.



caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

I let Becky sit me in a chair and feed me ice cream, I wearily tell her nice civilian friends that yes, the Lizard Navy are aliens — yes, aliens from space — yes, that one they just saw, alien from space; well, I can't talk about it, but I've been on a...joint initial cultural exchange programme, we'll call it that. Yeah. Yeah, that's maybe what left Becky pining a couple of years ago, sharp-eyed friend with an axe to grind; thanks for that contribution.

Then, later, after her friends have gone, she leans on the archway with her arms folded around herself, looking at me slumped tiredly at her dining table.

"They explained how much it would disrupt my research participation," she says, in a soft tone that's absolutely not an apology. "Told me I'd have to turn some trips down."

And yeah. Okay. I can understand that.

"I'd have done the same in your shoes," I say glumly. "I'll get in the middle, run interference now that I'm back. If I make them hammer out something less disruptive, please will you take it?"

"I've been safe so far," she says, fingers worrying at the side seam of her sweater.

"I wasn't here." I run a hand over my face. "I wasn't here, Becky; she's only interested in going through you to get to me, and I'm back now. Let me make sure you're safe." Let me do this one fucking thing right. "I'm not above begging, if that helps?" and the corner of her mouth does an unholy little quirk of remembered satisfaction which isn't helping, woman.

I want to tell her that it was rough out there. I want to tell her — well, a lot of things. But even if it wasn't all going to end up heavily classified, there are things you don't burden the civilians in your life with.

I don't tell her that at the end of it, Girl Friday, last of the Beacons, looked at me expressionlessly through the window of the inner airlock door, and told me through the intercom: "I know what we did. You think I'm going back to Earth to be the woman who was a million Hitlers?" and flushed herself into space.

I don't tell her that, after all the rest of the cleanup, I had the lizards track that frozen body and atomise it with the ship's weapons. You'd have made a brilliant evil genius, Amanda once said; and it doesn't pay for an Evil Emperor to assume one's nemeses are taken care of.

"I missed you," I tell her exhaustedly, and it will have to be enough. And perhaps, for now, it is; when finally the evening balances on the knifeblade tipping point of, "Want me to go?" she shakes her head and holds a hand out to me instead.

I sleep properly when I'm wherever Becky is; always did. Jolt awake a couple of times in the night despite that, to find her watching over me, sleepless, eyes wide and worried.

"I need to talk to Amanda," I tell her in the morning, rousing her with quietly-made coffee, my jaw set at the dark smudges I've already put under her eyes. "I can — do you want me to come back, afterwards?"

She tenses like a bowstring, opens her mouth. I can see her strain to say something; but whatever it is, she collapses in internal defeat instead, eyes hollow.

"I missed you too," she murmurs, and that's — not an answer. Which might be some kind of answer in itself.

"No pressure," I tell her softly, looking away, and she draws in an uncontrolled breath.

"I'm worried about you," she blurts, and I look back at her. She's staring, weirdly intense.

...Think I'm gonna have words with people about exactly how the protective detail conversation went down. I reach out, tentative, and brush her hair away from her face.

"Do you want me to come back here?" I say, hating that I can't make it sound — calmer; and she stares and stares as if willing me to understand.

"Yes," she says finally, quiet and almost resigned. "Always."

Yeah. Something's fucky.

"Then I'll be here," I tell her.


The Hangar is pretty much the same, from the outside, as when I was running Spandex. There's a cluster of newer, smaller buildings round the back of it; back then it was just me and the five of the kids — Amanda and Marta and Dave. Aoife. Henri. They must have needed more space, after the expansion.

They don't balk at the lizards dropping the shuttle outside, so they saw us coming, and I get ushered in — politely, professionally, by some kid I don't know. Like I'm a total stranger to this place.

It doesn't feel like I am, not completely; not until the quiet knock on the door of what used to be my office, and the kid opens the door and ushers me in. Not until I'm in a room with the kid, my kid. Cruce's kid. Amanda.

That's like a punch in the stomach.

The place is running like a well-oiled machine, professional, quiet. I assumed they were on company manners for me, everyday chatter and lightness backburnered.

But I don't think Spandex is like that, any more. I don't think she is.

She turns away from the big wall screen, dozens of kanban crises, and it's like looking at—

I don't even fucking know what it's like looking at. Not her mother, that's for sure. Cruce has been a lot of things, but never cold, and I'm looking right a block of pure chilled steel without a trace of human warmth. The kids, back when I left, were wearing matching Spandex-logoed leathers, and Amanda had a terrible little bright yellow jacket she wore over it, our little ray of shitpost sunshine.

"Oh, fuck," I say, staring at her, at her mother's face stripped of all the caring, a stonefaced warlord, in the black stealth-bomber-faceted armour plating she doesn't physically need — bulletproof; my costume, some version of, right back to the days when I was a bleakly barely-human child assassin motherfucker. "Oh, fuck, kid, I'm so sorry—"

"Spandex rates fourth, these days, then," she says, in a hard professional voice like being beaten round the face with a tombstone.

And that's.

Fuck.

That means she can track the shuttle. I think that's what she's letting me know? And the MIB still can't, so Kallisti must have cooked up new sensor capabilities for Spandex in the meantime, and that's—

—well, after Red Team, sure, yeah of course fuck

—but that means she knows where I've been, she knows where Cruce is—

"First stop that's not a threat assessment in any capacity," I croak, under eyes that just observe my squirming without a fleck of feeling, logging pitiless data, like I'm a single-celled pathogen on a microscope slide.

She gives a single grunt of icy, meaningless laughter.

"I should have been here," I say.

"Yeah," she says, and coolly prods her office intercom. "Somebody bring Quiesce a cup of coffee," she says, in a measured, professional way, "give her the visitor tour, and then show her out," and she releases the button with a pointed little flick of her thumb.

"I'm working," she says to me, and turns back to reordering the world via her Ops board, one problem at a time.


Amanda's kids are kind enough not to throw me out until I've finished crying at the memorial plaque outside. I never met the new recruits, didn't know Ruby or Candy; and that feels like I let them down, perfect strangers who died wearing the uniform I first put on my kids, died for the good fight the way Spandex wasn't ever supposed to, like the least I could have done is got back in time to know them. Henri and Aoife, though, my kids—

"I still don't know what the fucking Mesmerist's deal even was," I tell the brass plate, my fingers white from clutching at the granite marker it's bolted to. "Just a guy, in the end, like all of them. Didn't even see me coming."

If they were monsters — and oh, they fucking were — what does that make me?


The Lizard Navy land the shuttle back outside Becky's place — thank fuck she wanted to live out of town. I scrub at my face, knowing I'm not doing anything useful about the tear tracks, and one of the lizards — Bob, I think — hisses at me about something I ought to care about.

"That's fine," I say dully. "No, not a threat."

I need to get my shit together so I can get to the bottom of whatever's the matter with Becky, before I make that worse; so I breathe deep, trying to settle myself, trudging between the ship and the house.

"Becky?"

She's here; my vibration field extends way past the reach of my body. There's her heartbeat, somewhere back in the house; kitchen? I kick my boots off.

(Nagging feeling. What's—)

"Hey, Becky?"

I trail tiredly through the house towards her.

(Nagging feeling. What—)

And I don't know quite when it hits me, only the cold jumble of terrified adrenaline and the snap of knives into my palms as I bolt the last few steps toward the kitchen doorway, because

(Nagging—)

there were two heartbeats back here, and I always knew that, and the only way I didn't consciously know is that some motherfucker messed with my head—

it's as pathetically one-sided as I was always afriad it would be. I round the kitchen doorway as a lethal force, and before I'm halfway across the room I've simply lost motor control and slopped over, rubber-kneed, knives chiming away across floor tile, arms not responsing to break my fall. My head smacks searingly into the floor, and I can't even curse, numb tongue smearing out barely-even-sounds.

Becky makes a terrified noise, seated on one of her tall breakfast stools; doesn't move. Probably can't.

And I will kill people.

I should have killed them all the first fucking time.

Fucking OCULUS.


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