Betrayed, Abbreviated, Needed
Maybe I should have run the other way. But no one was holding me back now, and though his voice was cold and angry, Jared was calling to me.
…
“It’s not in any danger from me, is my point.” For the first time he looked at me, evaluating the way I hugged the far wall, watching my hands tremble. “I won’t hurt you again,” he said to me. I took a small step forward.
Ian takes up the role of nonasshole boyfriend, at least, attempting to tell her that she doesn’t have get anywhere near her abusive ex-boyfriend and doesn’t owe him anything. He also objects to Jared’s next demand, that he leave, and he does so only when the brainslug insists, making him also the only person in the book who’ll respect how she feels even when he feels otherwise.
He scooted down the mat until he sat right beside me–the way Melanie had hoped for. Too close–it was hard to think straight, hard to breathe right–but I couldn’t bring myself to scoot away. Oddly, for this was what she’d wanted in the first place, Melanie was suddenly irritated.
What? I asked, startled by the intensity of her emotion.
I don’t like him next to you. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t like the way you want him there.For the first time since we’d abandoned civilization together, I felt waves of hostility emanating from her. I was shocked. That was hardly fair.
Being a prisoner in her own body is fine. Having another person crush on her abusive boyfriend, though, that gets a reaction. Truly, Melanie is one Strong Female Character.
Jared asks about if Melanie’s really there. Melanie tries to talk and the brainslug won’t let her, and she struggles and struggles and struggles to no avail.
Melanie’s anger continued to slice at me from the inside. Her jealousy swelled into a bitter flood that washed through my body and left it polluted.
You would think this would be self-aware on some level, but I don’t think it is.
Flashback time.
On the TV, two players are disagreeing politely on the sideline. The cameraman is close; we can hear what they’re saying.
“I believe I was the last one to touch it–it’s your ball.”
“I’m not sure about that. I wouldn’t want to take any unfair advantage. We’d better have the refs review the tape.”
The players shake hands, pat each other’s shoulders.
“This is ridiculous,” Jared grumbles.
As long as they’re honestly competing in skill, I really don’t see it ruining sports if players no longer want to cheat.
Jared flips through a few channels until he finds a track and field meet. The parasites are holding the Olympics in Haiti right now. From what we can see, the aliens are all hugely excited about it. Lots of them have Olympic flags outside their houses. It’s not the same, though. Everyone who participates gets a medal now. Pathetic.
Qualifying to participate in the Olympics is actually incredibly impressive all by itself. Furthermore, Haiti being even halfway to functional enough to host the Olympics is worth the death of all sports five times over.
Anyway, they’re hanging out in watching TV and she’s thinking about how safe she feels. There’s no explanation for why, when she’s on her own, she was terrified of houses and always worried the brainslugs would return but with Jared around she’s fine with hanging out in them to watch TV, but she says very clearly that yes, this is how it is, because Jared is so safe.
Melanie says he still makes her feel safe, despite the fact he intends to kill her.
I wondered if Melanie and I would have loved Jared if he’d always been who he was now, rather than the smiling Jared in our memories, the one who had come to Melanie with his hands full of hope and miracles. Would she have followed him if he’d always been so hard and cynical? If the loss of his laughing father and wild big brothers had iced him over the way nothing but Melanie’s loss had?
Of course. Mel was certain. I would love Jared in any form. Even like this, he belongs with me.
I quote here mainly because the book has skipped over the fact that who he is now is the person who tried to beat her to death, presumably because Melanie’s answer is still “Yes he is my precious husbando,” but the book has just enough shame to not want to admit to it.
Jared keeps rambling about how he doesn’t understand why she’s there or what they should do about it, although he’s obviously still expecting to kill her at some point.
I wanted to touch his face. I wanted it. Melanie did not like this.
If you won’t let me talk, then at least keep your hands to yourself, she hissed.
I’m trying. I’m sorry. I was sorry. This was hurting her. We were both hurting, different hurts. It was hard to know who had it worse at the moment.
Just what the fuck book.
Finally Jared gets tired of her muteness. He asks one last time for her to tell him, and when she shakes her head he does what anyone would do seeing someone gesturing no – he kisses her.
The brainslug is swept up in emotion and how she loves him so so
Melanie punches the dickhead in the face. The brainslug is horrified, grabbing the hand with her other arm, because obviously top priority is, as it has been all along, to smother Melanie.
So then the brainslug runs away, upset that Jared was just testing her, and Melanie upset because he kissed the brainslug.
We sobbed, beyond control.
One word snapped us back from the edge of hysteria.
From the mouth of the hole, Jared’s low, rough voice–broken and strangely childlike–asked, “Mel?”
So they’re finally synced together for a second, and what is it that does it? Fucking Jared. As soon as this is resolved Melanie will presumably go back to her slow slide into nonexistence, because she’ll fight for her man but not her life.
Anyway, Jared’s here to explain the obvious, which is that he was doing that for actual Melanie and not the brainslug version.
Melanie doesn’t buy it, he was still totally cheating on her by kisssing her body in the hopes she was inside. Meanwhile, the brainslug is going on and on about how unfair it is that Melanie’s mad the brainslug is getting kissed and generally able to interact with the world.
He goes away while the two of them emo and emo and emo.
They go to eat.
On the tray was a rather large piece of red meat. My mouth started to water, even as I rejected the portion I’d been allotted. “It’s too much.”
Punching someoneL terrible. A slab of murdered animal: delicious.
“We have to eat all the perishables the first day,” Jamie encouraged me. “Everyone eats themselves sick–it’s a tradition.”
God, learn to store food.
All is back to normal! They politely ignore the bruises and scrapes covering her face and go back to talking about the dolphindragonflies.
“So… um… hmm… the, uh, third set of grandparents… They traditionally serve the community, as they see it. On Earth, they would be the breadwinners, the ones who leave the home and bring back sustenance. They are farmers, for the most part. They cultivate a plant-like growth that they milk for its sap…”
So wait. Out of three grandparent sets, plus all the parents, only one grandparent set actually gets food for everyone?
Later, they start asking her about healing again. Again, she explains she’s a useless idiot. People are displeased.
“Uh–about the Vultures…” Ian said–the words were forced, a deliberate subject change. “I don’t know if I missed this part sometime, but I don’t remember you ever explaining about them being ‘unkind’… ?”
It wasn’t something I had explained, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t really that interested–this was just the first question he’d been able to think of.
Well I am, book, and it pisses me off that like just about every question, you skip right over the answer.
Anyway, turns out that the secret everyone’s been keeping about the hospital is that Walter is sick. His bones have started breaking and they think it’s the cancer finishing him off.
I bit my lip against the suggestion I wanted to make. Of course there was nothing to do for Walter. Any of these humans would rather die slowly and in pain than trade their mind for their body’s cure. I could understand that… now.
I would really have liked to see you figure this one out, instead of halfway through the book you mentioning in passing that you’ve converted to their way of thinking. Especially because I can’t even tell if you do get it, or if perhaps the author herself subscribes to some weird dualism issues – you do understand it’s less a trading one for another and more a dying faster than slower thing, right? I can’t be sure.
Turns out the guy’s been asking to see her, so now that she asks, they’ll let her go.
They run into the glowering Kyle, and they try to reassure her.
Jeb’s made his opinion very clear,” Ian said.
“What do you mean?” I asked Ian.
“If Kyle can’t accept Jeb’s rules, then he’s no longer welcome here.”
Of course, unlike the standard dystopia, you can’t actually kick someone out. If he’s caught, the group is caught. So kicking anyone out is going to be done with a bullet through the head.
(This is part of why Jeb’s whole MY PLACE MY RULES BITCHES attitude is so bothersome. They can’t actually leave and make their own one with blackjack and hookers if they want.)
Because you do belong here, oddly enough, Melanie whispered. She was very aware of the warmth of Ian’s and Jamie’s hands, wrapped around and twined with mine. Where else have you ever had this?
Nowhere,I confessed, feeling only more depressed.But it doesn’t make me belong. Not the way you do.
We’re a package deal, Wanda.
No, they’re not. She could leave the body at any time and give Melanie her life back.
(Also, seriously? She’s never had friends hold her hands? The only way I can make sense of this is that souls are all so similar and harmonyjoy that they don’t form strong individual friendships.)
One of those dim blue lights greeted us as we approached the hospital wing. (I knew now that the lanterns were solar powered, left in sunny corners during the day to charge.)
You guys have multiple underground rivers and you’ve trying to work off solar power? Okay, I know that hydroelectric will take some engineering, but you’re INSIDE CAVES it should not be that hard to figure out you need a better system here, especially when you’re also trying to grow crops on that same sunlight.
When she gets there, he thinks she’s his old wife.
This whole sequence is inexplicable – the book even explains that the two of them look nothing alike, plus of course she’s still horribly battered, so presumably he’d be saying this to anyone who looked halfway female. Why don’t they have someone else in here for him, though?
Anyway, she stays to keep comforting Walter. In the morning, he’s lucid and able to see her horrible injuries, but she easily deflects his concern.
Then they hear a helicopter. Someone else runs in to make sure she’s not signalling the helicopter. By someone else, I meant a dick-haver, them being the only people in the story who matter anymore.
The brandy they’ve been using to drug him runs out. You know, why aren’t they growing poppies? The garden variety is perfectly good for it, and it’s not even hard to harvest. They should be growing all sorts of herbs, in fact – you don’t have to believe herbs are a particularly good alternative to conventional medicine to recognize they’re better than nothing whatsoever. And you’d think crazy off the grid survivalists would know at least some useful herbs. Anyway, cue screaming and misery and suffuring by proxy.
It was strange to see such depths of compassion in a human, particularly Doc. I couldn’t look at him the same way after watching him live Walter’s pain. So great was his compassion, he seemed to bleed internally with it.
Humans having compassion should have been a basic part of the invasion. The fact people don’t want to attack people who look like them and really don’t want to attack people who look like people they knew would have been a huge part of their successful takeover. After all, they hate violence and can be detected with a flashlight to the eyes, any human who wanted to attack the brainslugs could’ve torn a bloody path through them before one of the evil, evil seekers showed up to rescue the rest. Certainly that people trust their family members was a factor they used in tricking people into coming and getting brainslugged in the early parts.
Watching all this she decides that the doctor is so super nice he must not torture and finally stops thinking that’s an issue, because apparently she was thinking that all this time and just never bothered to ask him if he was plotting to torture her as soon as the rest gave the goahead.
It doesn’t occur to her that sympathy for one creature doesn’t mean sympathy for another, despite the fact her own compassionate species is fine murdering human consciousness and eating the meat of every other animal on the planet.
“Make it stop, Gladdie, make it stop!” Walter begged me. I wiped the sweat from his face while he crushed my hand.
Here’s another part where we don’t see any of the brainslug culture. They believe suffering is bad, were horrified by what Melanie had gone through, but would have had no problem painlessly killing her. Yet our brainslug doesn’t seem to have any urge to just put a pillow over the guy’s face, even when he’s begging for the pain to stop.
Does the brainslug concept of suffering and euthanasia not apply to their own kind? But no, they obviously have a code that advocates suicide when faced with torture.
Finally, Jared returns with some morphine he’s somehow managed to find. The doctor quickly gives Walter some, only for Jared to say that he only found a little, and so if they’re going to give him a morphine overdose, they can’t wait long. Which seems horribly wasteful to me – morphine overdoses are the solution when you have plenty of morphine. When you don’t, kill them some other way and save the morphine! He’s passed out now, just smother him.
Meanwhile, the brainslug has a meltdown at the idea of death.
I just… I can’t stand the… finality. It’s so absolute. I’ll never see my friend again.
How many of your other friends have you gone back to visit, Wanderer?
I’ve never had friends like this before.
My friends on other planets were all blurred together in my head; the souls were so similar, almost interchangeable in some ways. Walter was distinctly himself. When he was gone, there would be no one who could fill his place.
God dammit.
There’s actually a good point to be made about the difference between someone being gone but still existing and someone being dead. Does it matter, when it comes to mourning them? No, I don’t think so. If she’d learned Walter was leaving to go to some other hidden safe zone and she’d never see him again, I don’t think she’d care much.
The reason we’re set up to treat this kind of loss differently is because we want to prevent death.
Since I’ve been talking about chickens, one of the things we’ve been looking for is someone who knows how to kill them, because there are no chicken vets around and sometimes things go badly. But no one does. We live in an area with a lot of immigrants. Many people will say they kept chickens as children and ate them. None of them want to kill chickens. Not killing chickens is presumably on the long list of things that they like about America. Killing things is upsetting. I think part of it is the very thing being danced around here – the idea it can suddenly have its consciousness depart while we can see it’s still there. The cats brought in a baby bunny once and my mother’s meticulous inspection of the body could find no wound. She left it out in the faint hope it was playing dead so well even we were fooled. Had it left, we’d never have seen it again – instead we buried it sadly. With the pets we’ve killed over the years, there’s always been a sense of unrealness to the whole affair – it just doesn’t seem like it should be right, that it’s over, that there’s no going back or fixing it.
Maybe it’s our whole object permanence setup – the idea that if you don’t see the thing depart, it can’t be gone, and there’s something just not right about the idea some invisible thing can be there one moment and gone the next, without any fanfare and yet impossible to undo.
And how much more would this mean to something that lives in a world where there’s no death? Where everyone you meet will live forever?
But instead her point here is that she doesn’t care if all her friends die, because they’re replaceable. There are lots of chickens and lots of bunnies, so who cares? But this person is unique, and it’s the loss of uniqueness that’s the tragedy, not the death.