Bet you could imagine how glad I was, knowing that none of that was my problem. For the ladybugs, their problems just kept on piling and piling…
“Hey, you’re Berry, right?”
“…Yeah? Who is this? I can barely see in here…”
“You’re keyholder in that cottonwood tree, right?”
“…Yeah, you’re… You’re not an ant, are you?”
“It’s a great business you bugs run, y’know. I always liked it, especially how Ruby ran it all. She’s a real great leader.”
“…What’re you here for, you wanna talk to her?”
“Nah, just you.”
“You think I’ll just let you do tha– Oh.”
“Yeah. Those were the orders, anyway.”
“…Orders?”
“That Kelvin, heh… Y’know how Kelvin gets.”
“Wh-What?!”
“What?”
“How did you… Where’d you hear that from?!”
“I don’t know, we just hear things.”
“…What do you normally hear about?”
“Oh, I… I thought you knew. Aren’t you in charge of intel?”
“…”
“What about the foodwhoring? Know anything about that?”
“…What– What the fuck’re you tryin’ to get at…?”
“Look, Berry, I’m not here to break your testes or anything, I just wanna help you.”
“…”
“I mean, y’know what they say, right? The forest talks, we listen… That’s been our motto for thousands of days. The whole forest knows what’s goin’ on with you bugs. So does Kelvin, and she… she feels pretty bad for your tree. So, she came up with this great deal: A little somethin’ that’ll fix all your problems, long as you stick to it. You understand, right, Berry?”
“…Okay…”
“It’s real simple, it’s not a tall order. All ‘ya gotta do is chase a fruit fly.”
“…Chase a fruit fly?”
“Yeah, it’s easy. Just follow it wherever it goes, and at some point, it’s gonna stop. All you gotta do is catch it and bring it to your tree. Just do that without upsetting any other bugs along the way. That's it.”
“Really? That’s all I gotta do?”
“Yeah, that’s all she wants. Oh– Almost forgot. Don’t tell your tree about it. Keep this confidential.”
“…And why doesn’t she want me to tell the others?”
“From what I remember, Kelvin said somethin’ about… doin’ good things when nobuggy’s lookin’.”
“Well, you can stick it up your abdomen.”
“Woah, now… I don’t want to have to tell Kelvin you said that.”
“…”
“You gonna do it?”
“…Well, what’s in it for us?”
“We’ll help you out however you want, mainly with the food sources: Fruit flies, mites, lace bugs, you name it. Just… go easy on the aphids for us, if you can.”
“…”
“…?”
“…R-Ruby always says… that we could use more food…”
“Yeah… So, again, it’s simple. Just follow that one fruit fly, and don’t upset the others. I know how annoying the fruit flies can get, but tell me, you’re gonna do it?”
“…Um…”
“Well…?”
“…Alright, you’ve got a deal.”
“Kelvin’s gonna respect you lots for this, you won’t regret it.”
“Great… Now stay the fuck away from me.”
Sure, Jammy did exactly what Kelvin ordered him to that night, and it went smoothly, but if you ask me he could’ve been a little stronger. I never understood what his deal was, cuddling up to the ladybugs the way he did. It felt pretty disingenuous, and I knew that bug for around fifty to a hundred days. I was fine calling him a friend and fellow scout ant, I just didn’t really understand that part.
It was pitch-dark where Berry and Lucky were digging, and even darker in the spaces underneath, where Berry had his talks under the compost after many, many inches of digging. He could hardly see how far away he was from Ruby, Dot, and his buddy Lucky, who was just about ready to start regrouping.
“Berry?” he shouted a bit in the distance, digging out all the rubble.
“I… I…” Berry faintly muttered, too faintly for his buddy to hear him. He heard Lucky’s shout, but he was too stunned to even move from where he was, only flinching once Lucky finally dug deep enough to catch Berry’s digging path and reunite with him.
“Berry, there you are, I’ve been lookin’ all over!” Lucky said with relief. Even shrouded in the darkness, Lucky could notice Berry’s stiffness.
“…Hey, what’s the matter, you alright?”
“Y-Yeah, it’s nothin’. F-First lockdown in a while, and I couldn’t see anything. Sorry.”
Berry would act all stiffly when he was nervous, as far as I’m aware. Lucky knew that too, “…Hey, it’s alright, you’ve no need to apologize, Berry. I know how dark it can get down here.”
Jammy was long gone by this point, already having burrowed his way back to our colony to let Slider know everything. Thankfully, the path he dug was just tiny enough for the ladybugs to not notice.
Anyhow, those two keyholder saps greeted Ruby and her son, and Berry couldn’t help but notice the sunken look on Dot’s face, after that hilariously embarrassing argument he had with his mother bug. He stood next to her with a wide frown, some semi-dried tears, and an unnatural stare at Berry; the keyholder shook where he was standing, almost suggesting that Dot knew what happened (He didn’t; he never knows what’s going on.) But Ruby didn’t look at either of them: Just stared off into the compost again, too drained to say a word. Lucky hardly knew what eye-games were going on among the rest of ‘em, but recognized how tense the air was for all four of ‘em.
By the time they suddenly heard distinctive clicking sounds from the surface, Dot shyly asked, “Wh-What’s that?”
“Oh, seems that Checker’s given the all-clear,” Lucky calmly said to the rest of the three. “C’mon, let’s head back up to the surface.”
So after the four keyholders brought the rest of the ladybugs back out from underground, Ruby shoveled back the soil into the hole Dot made, for those whiteflies and mites, not even looking back. Afterwards, she gave her son a look that seemed to signify a precedent she wanted him to follow; he didn’t say a word in response.
Dark as the sky was by then, it was hard for Dot to get any sleep that night. But soon enough, the ladybugs each fell into torpor, one by one. The following morning couldn’t have come any slower.
And that’s another thing I wanted to mention. Mornings and nights felt incredibly slow to us bugs, and that seemed to differ for the humans. I still have this one pretty scary memory of when I saw a human for the first time.
Several days ago, I crawled away from the ant colony and scampered on down the river, past the trees housing other colonies I was more familiar with, when I then happened upon a much more broad, grassy area without many trees at all. Off in the distance, on the other side of the river, there it was: A human. I’d heard some pretty nasty, terrifying things about those humans from several sources in the forest; they didn’t have any tarsal claws, mandibles, a proboscis, or even a fuckin’ aedeagus, but they had their own forms of those body parts, in all kinds of weird shapes. They were a thousand times larger than us bugs, but around seven times slower.
I had no idea what that human was trying to do there in the forest when I saw it. It wasn’t really making any of those big, crazy movements I was told about, but it was instead covered with some kind of weird, red liquid, like it was leaking it out, all over its body. It looked like it was crying, too, or what I understood was crying, while sitting there, shaking among the leaves. It was acting kinda weird also, like, what was it even crying about? Loneliness? There were a bunch of blowflies, maggots, and crows, all surrounding that human, picking at it while it stood still. It couldn’t have been alone then, right? I didn’t understand what the problem was.
But really, while it was being picked at, the thing I paid the most attention to was the huge tibiae and tarsi at the ends of its body: Y’know, the parts that let it move around. Humans had their own kinds of tarsi that pressed the ground in order to move, same as us, but they only ever used two, despite the four they had, compared to us who had six. Those two were all they need to be able to, uh… squish.
Humans had probably the worst squish out of every other predator in the forest… and that was what fuckin’ terrified me. I hated of a random squish that decided your fate out of nowhere; imagine me, Clover, an honest worker from the ant colony, squished. Solely for being under the wrong creature at the wrong time. Those fuckin’ humans are probably a worse mafia, and worse group overall than even the fuckin’ ladybugs. Bugs usually never cried, even before they knew they had to go down.
But anyhow, back to those ladybugs, they comfortably woke up the morning after that whole Blackjack fiasco, and got to their usual routines: Associates went foraging for food on their own, handlers held some control of the cottonwood’s territories, and Ruby’s keyholders, along with Nino and Basel, flew up to the gathering den with Ruby. That den was in probably the highest stump on that tree, tucked inside a hole on its side, where each of the highest-ranking members could convene while shrouded in the shrubs. Beats me how that tiny little space housed a pine-scented room big enough for them and a whole oak table at the center.
They each got to that gathering den in their own unique ways: Some flying, others scampering. It was pretty easy for Lucky, always sitting in his own little perch; not so much for the rest.
“Had to scamper miles to get up here!” panted Berry, out of breath.
“Ah, what, first day on the job gettin’ ya down already?” Lucky playfully teased.
“Oh, can it, Lucky, I’ve been here for almost a hundred days.”
“Yeah, and I’ve been here for a hundred and twenty.”
“It’s still only a fraction of how long Miss Ruby’s been here...”
“Hey, Basel, you wanna move up to keyholder, don’t talk outta turn, alright?” Lucky teased to the handler, but then stopped once he looked back at his headbug, deep in her contemplation.
“We just got out of a lockdown…” interrupted Ruby, her more serious tone commanding every bug in that den, “…and we’re eating shit. Let’s focus on what’s important.”
They immediately stopped talking, noticing how coldly she spoke.
“What’s our current order of business?”
“Well, after the crow that ruined our night, there’s not much else to discuss,” said Sprout. “Aphid collection’s been stable, associates are behaving, and Checker’s out scouting, as usual.”
“Anything new from the ants?” Ruby then asked, turning to Berry, who immediately grew stiff.
“N-No. Nothing, as far as I could tell.”
“You sure?” she asked him.
“Yeah, of course,” Berry answered, a tad out of breath. Ruby paused.
“…Berry, wasn’t there something you mentioned,” Ruby asked, “Some new development on how some bugs went about their meals?”
“Huh? Oh, right,” he remembered, “It’s called foodwhoring, I heard some ants bringing it up, around two or three days ago.”
“Can you explain what that is?”
“It’s what happens when…” Berry didn’t know exactly how to explain it, but knew he was telling her the truth. “…When a bug takes younger prey, like an aphid, then lets it lay eggs, and… they eat the new parent alive.”
This casual explanation was the first time the other higher-ups were truly made aware of foodwhoring. Casual as Berry’s explanation was, they didn’t seem to treat it with the same seriousness we did…
“…I see,” Ruby pondered. “Do the bugs do anything to the eggs?”
…Especially when it came to that.
“I-I haven’t seen that myself, Miss Ruby, I just heard the ants talk about it… That’s as far as I’d heard,” Berry finished.
“Well, it reads to me like a loophole maneuver of the peace deal… but as long as our ladybugs don’t do anything to aphid eggs, it should be fine,” Ruby concluded.
“We can’t be so sure of that,” concerned Sprout. “Remember, we just got out of a starvation period after the last diapause, who knows what the associates are gonna do?”
“But our operations follow the peace deal, don’t they?” Ruby asked him rhetorically, assured that they did. “They always have. Lucky?”
“Yes, Miss Ruby?”
“Tell me again what happens to a ladybug that violates our deal with the ants.”
Lucky then scampered around the den for the peace deal paper, and then read from it once it was in his tarsal claws.
“All peace deal violators are to be immediately reported and marked for assassination by the fire ants, for abuse of our eased limits on the aphid population. Consumption of aphid eggs and aphids who haven’t yet reproduced suffices as an aforementioned violation. The marking is to officially be assigned by the colony’s leader, otherwise the killing itself constitutes as an unauthorized, and therefore a violation as well.” he read aloud.
“Right,” affirmed Ruby. “Those who break the rules, we report them, they die. That’s what it says on there, that’s what we all agreed to. We’ve followed this, and we’ve remained at peace ever since; we’ve never had to make a single report.”
The ladybugs thought for a second in silence.
“Anyone have a problem with that?” she asked with some reluctance.
“…Ruby,” Berry spoke up nervously, “If we don’t close this loophole, won’t the ants want to get back at us somehow?” The other keyholders seemed to agree.
Ruby thought for a moment, as that was a good point (and one she should’ve further considered).
“Well, we can’t really… make our ladybugs do anything.” Ruby told them frankly. “Again, we’ve never needed to since… those days. Besides, why should we take the blame for the mistakes our associates make? As soon as we see somebuggy breakin’ the deal, we’ll murk them. That’ll remain our course of action.”
“What if there’s something we don’t… catch?” Berry shyly opined, spurring Ruby to elaborate in a brief speech.
“I want to ensure that we get one thing clear, and it’s something I told my son when he was just a larva: United as we are as a business, don’t be mistaken. All ladybugs are solely responsible for what they do in this life. Whatever we don’t catch is something that shouldn’t have been our business to begin with. We continue with what occupies our time up here, and we accept what happens after. We answer for it ourselves.”
“But, are the ants actually gonna respect that?” Lucky asked.
“Yeah, what if they just label us a mafia again and wait for us to slip up, like they did with the last generation?” Sprout added. “They won’t respect us then, will they?”
“Respect… Respect is a tricky word for us ladybugs,” Ruby continued, “I’ve heard my shares of scorn among the forest’s many insects, not just the ants. But, unforgiving and hurtful as it’s been, we’ve earned these labels. I don’t know how, but we’ve earned them. We all earn the labels we’re given, and that’s something we need to remember, if nothing else. The ants make that clear; they’re the forest’s protectors, and we’re the abdomen-holes of the forest… so at this point, we live under their terms.”
The ladybugs sat in silence upon hearing that.
“…I fuckin’ hate that,” Basel spoke up. “To the ground with those fuckin’ bugs…”
“Don’t speak like that,” Ruby told him, a little sternly. “Don’t add more to your label.”
Basel then stood there in the den, silent and embarrassed after that correction. The rest of the keyholders looked on at that idiot, then at their headbug for what more she had to say about us.
…Tsh, Kelvin’s great, isn’t she?
“…I know well how difficult this is for all of us. No ladybug has ever done what we’re doing, but I’ve lived long enough to understand how these ants operate, and what it is they value. That’s why I brought my son with me when I made the peace deal, and I can pride myself on that. He made us look like fools at the table, yes, but he made us look fantastic in front of the ants. It was his pacifism and innocence towards those aphids that spared us all from the grave. The associates who choose to shill and go out to… foodwhore, as the ants called it… They’ve all dug their own. So, as the ants do best, they’ll serve for us as our motivation for avoiding consequences… and we’ll ensure our bugs don’t overscamper.”
Once Ruby finished up with that, she turned to the others. Seemingly bearing a million different thoughts, Berry quietly sidescampered to the exit of the gathering den.
“Honestly… I’m not too sure about this plan,” he said.
“…I’ve exhausted myself explaining my intentions, Berry,” Ruby said, a little out of breath with a tired smile.
“I don’t know, I– I don’t mean to question your authority, Miss Ruby, the plan just…” he paused, conceding, “…Maybe I should go out and find food. I gotta think this over.”
Ruby noticed Berry’s anxiety after a little while, understanding it, then paused. Her cold tone started to warm up a little the more she noticed him, addressing his doubt without a second thought.
“Well, we could always use more food, couldn’t we?” she laughed a little.
But under conflicting feelings, he hesitated, “I feel bad leaving now, I– I should make myself more useful. Do you want me to bring Dot over? Maybe he knows more about this… foodwhoring business than any of us.”
“…No, that won’t be necessary,” the headbug told him, reciprocating his generosity. “You’re free to go, Berry. Remember, stay away from the smaller aphids and ants; just keep to the usual.”
“Yes, Miss Ruby. Thank you,” he said, calmer, noticing the smile she gave him as he flew out of the den.
With Berry now on his way out, Ruby let out a sigh as she turned over to the keyholders. “Is there anything else I haven’t mentioned on this matter?”
The others didn’t know what to say. Neither did she, as her own words started to dawn on her a little.
“…Lucky, let me read from that peace deal again,” she asked him. Once he passed her the paper, she began silently reading through some of it, noticing a few words she hadn’t read as closely, donning a subtle, difficult look on her face.
“Those who violate the deal but aren’t marked for termination pose a greater risk for the colony than keeping it active.”
…Look, I get it. I knew well how desperate she was to get her bugs out of starvation. I knew it, Kelvin knew it, we all knew it. But still, keeping that peace deal together was up to her. Everything was in her tarsi the whole fuckin’ time.
But before she could keep reading that part, she heard some scampering from below the gathering den; she, Lucky, and Sprout looked down to see what it was.
“Ruby?”
“Libelle?” Ruby recognized her voice, “What’s the matter?”
“I need you to come down, quick…” she told her, with a sense of urgency, and some anger, “…We got our first fuckin’ shill to deal with.”
That was as far as I was able to record from inside that gathering den by that point; from then on it was a bit murky.
I couldn’t find the exact details on where Berry went after he left the den, but the way Jammy entered our ant colony sometime afterwards seemed to offer a hint.
“Kelvin, Kelvin!” Jammy shouted, barging into our entrance, in an unusually angry tone for an ant. “What did you do, what did you do?!” he muttered, loud enough to interrupt the worker ants in the burrow.
I remember that moment as if it happened just the day before: The first time anybuggy ever let out a complaint against Kelvin in the quarters of the working burrow. No associate ant dared to speak out against Kelvin in such a way or question her authority, especially not in any of the fuckin’ working burrows. None of us had any right to; all of us were merely associates in her eyes. It was an easier way to organize our responsibilities than whatever the fuck the ladybugs were tryin’ to do.
“K–Kelvin…!”
“Jammy, what’re you doing?!” Phido, a hardworking tertiary associate in our colony, came up from a lower burrow to ask him. He was a little small, naive, and soft-spoken compared to the other ants, but he always tried to be a strong bug, in more ways than one. And that’s part of why I always liked him. I remember scampering in on the whole altercation and wondering why Jammy, whom I had known for so long, had suddenly switched up like this, and in front of such a sweet ant like Phido.
“I– I need to talk to Slider! It’s urgent, it’s fuckin’ urgent!” Jammy said with a hint of anger in his tone.
“Whoa, wh-why do you need to do that?” Phido asked, responding to Jammy’s hostility with that trademark pacifism of his; that’s another thing I liked about him. “I’m not going to let you speak to our associates like this, c’mon.”
It was then that Slider dug up from an inner burrow, “Hey, what’re you all doin’?! Carry on!” he shouted to the other workers, who promptly got back to their work, scampering in and out of the colony. “Jammy, what the fuck’s goin’ on?!”
“You dishonest son of a botfly! You didn’t tell me that Fuzzball would be involved in this!” he shouted, fuming.
“Wh-What’s he talkin’ about?!” Slider looked over at Phido, who was equally unsure.
“It’s the fuckin’ deal! The deal with Berry!” Jammy kept shouting, becoming less and less sociable by the seconds.
“Ugh. Phido, get him ‘til he calms down and bring him to Kelvin, I’ll be there shortly,” he shrugged with tired disgust.
“Hey, DON’T fuckin’ scamper out of thi–”
Slider scampered out of that, without a second thought. Phido then quickly subdued Jammy with sleep pheromones, which worked like a charm, and held him on his back. Struggling with all his might, that strong little buggy brought Jammy into the burrow’s deepest corner, where no other ants, aside from the hardest workers (us), were allowed inside. I followed each of them closely.
Jammy then woke up and found himself facing a displeased Kelvin, and immediately froze in place. That’s the one sight nobuggy wanted to see. But when he awoke, she started speaking to him, very softly.
“Tell me… what all of this is about… before I kill you.”
“I– My queen, I… I made the deal with Berry,” he said quietly, fearing for his life.
“So you saw fit to complain, knowing you did the right thing?”
“I… I didn’t know Fuzzball would be involved, my queen… I–”
But he stopped himself, seeing her crawl around the burrow a little. She normally moved around like that; it helped her think. When she knew what to say, she spoke.
“…You’ve taken up space in this colony for many, many days. I’ve let you. The space you filled in this ant colony was suitable enough for that of a messenger, so that’s what I sent you to do, but I needed to omit certain details from you.”
The other ants, myself included, were stunned. The space you filled… Kelvin never used language like that unless you were dead to her.
“I knew well your reverence towards Ruby and the ladybugs; you have no space to lie in front of any of us,” Kelvin continued. “Your responsibilities were to get a keyholder ladybug to take the deal. Fuzzball’s responsibilities in that matter belong solely to Fuzzball; you have no part in them. What the ladybugs decide to do… That will be their decision when it comes.”
“Yes, my queen.”
“Do not call me your queen anymore,” she told him sternly. “Your continued weakness in front of me warrants no respect.”
Each of the spectating ants in there froze and shook a little, and I have to admit, I did too. This was the first time I ever saw Kelvin completely dismiss another ant’s life. Granted, he was the first ant I ever saw that complained to his queen. Nobuggy in a colony would ever do somethin’ like that.
“…Are we gonna kill him?” Slider asked. Kelvin paused, staring deeply into Jammy’s horrified, regretful face.
“No,” she answered. “Jammy, you’re relieved of all your responsibilities tied to this colony, effective immediately. Leave now.”
Without saying a word, he left. The other ants and I just stood and watched; what else were we supposed to do? We had just seen in front of us probably the most brutal punishment we’d ever seen an ant get. Even death would’ve been better, at least better than living with the fact your queen views your life as worthless.
After a while, I then received Kelvin’s permission to follow Jammy outta the burrow, to see where he was going. I was far enough away for him to not notice me, but the way he was moving suggested that he had a destination in mind. He was clearly unfit for the colony, but how insane could you be, as an ant, to show your face in the cottonwood? There was no way he was that attached to the ladybugs, to the point where he’d want to go near them again.
And surely enough, I was proven right; in his scamper through the forest, he turned his sights to a different tree, much farther away: One that housed termites.
The termites shared the forest in a deeply isolated cluster; they never bothered any of the other insects in the forest, never gave an opinion on the ladybugs, hardly even communicated outside their colony. No connections at all. They were total saps, if you ask me, and Jammy heading towards them felt… off. Guess he felt more at home with the saps. But the look on his face… It combined determination and dread, into something different entirely.
Well, whatever. I couldn’t picture myself infiltrating a space like that long enough to report it, so I had to turn my back on him and focus my attention towards our burrow; our scouts found something that they wanted us to check out. Those scouts… We had some of the best in the forest; they always found trouble in just the right places.
Hey, speaking of which…
“Berry?!” Lucky shouted, deep in panic. “Berry, what the fuck happened?!”
By the time this went down, Kelvin knew we were set.
It was a miracle for them that the spider wasn’t around yet; she was probably off in some other corner of the bush, adding more to her web. Seeing Berry desperately squirming for his life in her silky death trap caught Lucky way off guard.
In fact, it brought to Lucky’s mind a time when headbug Ruby scolded him hard, for how he handled a particular situation in the past.
Shortly after they got out of their last winter diapause, Lucky was fighting it out with Checker over scheduled cottonwood lockdowns, arguing that the warblers wouldn’t return from their migration yet since it was still quite cold out. To him, that meant there was no need to lock the tree down, and wouldn’t you know it, Lucky’s little oversight cost the cottonwood five of their associates the next day; a woodpecker and a warbler showed up and terrorized the fuckin’ place, and they weren’t even ours. This and another isolated instance immediately let Ruby know that Checker could never leave his post, no matter what.
Lucky never forgot how loudly Ruby reprimanded him that day. He could only imagine what she’d say now, now that Berry was quite literally facing death in the clutches of a spider web.
Once Lucky swooped down to save his friend, his flight pattern shook the web a little, startling the other bugs also trapped there. “Berry, y-you’ve got some serious fuckin’ explaining to do,” Lucky nervously scolded.
“I… I was chasing this f-fruit fly…” Berry blubbered nervously, fearing for his life.
“Berry, c’mon! What do I always tell you?!” he interrupted. “If the prey flies too far from the cottonwood, don’t persist! And why a damn fruit fly, of all the prey in the forest?!”
“I’m gonna die… I… I’m gonna die…!” Berry pleaded. “Get me out!”
“You’re not gonna die on me, bug,” Lucky reassures. “I’m breaking you out of thi—”
But Lucky couldn’t finish his sentence; his eyes were locked onto a parasitic wasp stuck on the web as well, far enough above and to the left side of where Berry was trapped to not infect them. Despite that, and despite the adhesive constraining its limbs, its contagious body still squirmed, writhing in dripping, toxic saliva. That was more than enough to have made Lucky lose it. Shivering and backing away, astonished at the doom he and his friend were now under, he knew he had to tell Ruby about this. As Ruby taught them when they were all just larvae, no ladybug could survive a parasitic wasp infection, and neither a close- nor a far-range encounter with one was allowed to go unreported.
Lucky lowered his tone when addressing Berry, but by this point, he was anything but composed.
“It’s one thing to run into a spider web,” Lucky whispered harshly, looking up, “But with a parasitoid in there too…?!” He looked back down at his body, relieved not to see any sign of infection on him. He hesitated before talking, not believing what he’s about to say himself, “…I’m breaking you out of here and I’m reporting this to Ruby.”
“Fine, fine, just get me out, Lucky…!” Berry desperately cried.
As much as Lucky loved his friend, he absolutely would’ve left Berry to die had he gotten infected. Given how small their numbers were, there was no chance that that mafia would risk letting anybuggy into their tree with a parasitoid infection. In a nervous sigh, Lucky looked through the ground for a small branch, or maybe a human-dropped glass shard, or some other object. But he felt his attempts at searching intercepted by the cries and complaints from the other trapped bugs of different species: a butterfly, a cockroach, a mosquito… Y’know, the kinds of bugs Kelvin makes deals with all the time.
Looking at all those bugs on her web, I could tell; that spider clearly had her work cut out for her.
“H-Hey, you’re just gonna leave us here?!” pleaded the butterfly.
“I have a name too, y’know!” said the mosquito.
“This’ll follow you to your graves!” shouted the cockroach.
After a bit of searching, Lucky eventually found a tiny oak splinter. The other desperate bugs reached their tiny, shaking legs in the hopes of snatching it from his grasp; he didn’t need to fight them off, though; they were already doomed in their constriction.
“Berry, I swear, Ruby’s gonna be so fuckin’ pissed at you,” he muttered as he tried breaking his fellow keyholder free from the web; it snapped off relatively easily. Lucky occasionally looked up at the parasitoid above them on his left; far away as it was, the looming threats persisted all the same.
Feeling a hunger pang, Lucky turned around just before they both made their way back.
“Wait, hold on,” he muttered, turning to break the fruit fly out from the web as well. The other trapped insects sighed with cringe at Lucky’s action here, knowing that the poor fruit fly wasn’t gonna see the next day. Then again, neither were they.
The fruit fly’s tangled body trembled with fear once Lucky broke it free, but it was odd to him why it didn’t buzz. Normally, they buzzed all the time, and it was annoying as fuck, but this one… He didn’t even try to wriggle his way out of the situation. …Was he accepting his fate? Lucky thought, but he couldn’t be sure. Either way, the fruit fly looked tasty enough to bring back home.
Just as they were about to start their flight back home, they were interrupted one last time.
“H-Hey, Berry? You can’t break me out, too?”
Berry hesitated with a gentle, noticeable sensitivity, looking for any opportunity to be friendly; that plea came from the parasitoid.
“Outta the fuckin’ question,” immediately retorted Lucky.
With that last word, both of those ladybugs left the spider’s habitat and began their flight back home. Seeing Lucky in a mid-flight tussle with the trembling fruit fly, Berry took the chance to look back at the parasitoid trapped in the web, increasingly getting further away from it. They both frowned at each other; one of their fates was sealed, the other’s fate was uncertain. They didn’t know who had it worse.