“B– Berry… Berry… B-B–… Berry–”
I have no idea how, even with such a deep gash on his sternum after his guilt for killing a termite colony, his pride shattered multiple times under Kelvin’s authority, and two out of six legs detached from his body, plus his wings, he was STILL able to move, let alone speak.
I guess Kelvin really wasn’t lying about Jammy’s strength; she never lied to us, even about her enemies.
“B– BERRY…!”
Jammy screamed for Berry’s name in his desperate crawl to the ladybug’s territory. By the time night fell, the other ladybugs were asleep in torpor, but Checker noticed him immediately.
“…An ant? What the fuck–”
“L-LET ME IN! PLEASE!”
Checker immediately rushed, as fast as he could, within the bushes of the tree over to Dot’s room to wake him up, but it was hard for the headbug to budge while in such a deep sleep.
“Dot…? Dot, c’mon, get up, I need to get back to my post…”
“Wh… What? Checker?”
“There’s an… ant, at the entrance of the tree. H-He’s calling Berry’s name, and he’s hurt real bad.”
“What? W-Where’s Nino and Basel? Where the fuck’s Berry?”
Basel then rushed into Dot’s room as well, “I heard the shouting. Berry hasn’t come out of his room: probably still asleep.”
Looking outside the tree, right by Checker’s post, Dot and Basel peered down at that leaking sap, pathetically crawling towards their entrance. “Should we… let him in?” Basel looked to Dot.
“Let me see,” Dot responded, just about to gear his wings to fly down there, but… he stopped. He had this look of hesitation on his face once he revealed his wings, and it was pretty clear to me that he didn’t want to fly over there. Quite strange to me; the idea of flying was still fucking him up, after all this time. Even this late at night. How the fuck did Dot get any sleep?
“…Dot?” Checker asked, while the headbug was all frozen in place, like an idiot.
“Sorry,” he answered back quickly, hiding his wings again and just resorting to scampering. Took him fuckin’ forever to get to the entrance.
Once he finally got down there, it was now Jammy and Dot. Face to face. Even this dark at night, anybuggy could see it; Jammy looked up at Dot with a real, distraught sense of pure guilt and shame.
“What is it?” Dot questioned him.
Jammy’s pained face looked Dot in the eyes, tears starting to stream down. “I… I–”
“…You what? What is it?”
Jammy still didn’t say anything: Just kept on standing there, writhing in pain, breathing deeply while looking at his surroundings. For a bit, it looked like he didn’t know where the fuck he was anymore. Basel then flew down to where Dot was standing, looking at Jammy with confusion. “What the hell does he want?”
“I don’t know, I’m asking him and he’s not talking,” Dot said. “Thought the ants weren’t anything like the fruit flies.”
Hey, fuck you.
Anyway, Jammy still didn’t say anything, just breathing heavily with that same pain in his face.
“Talk!” Dot commanded, holding him by the antennae. Jammy still didn’t say a word, just looking pained, with a slew of thoughts racing in his head; he was too full to even lift his voice.
“…Fuckin’ waste of time. Get him outta here,” Dot told Basel as he turned back to scamper up the cottonwood again, hoping to catch up on his only moment of real rest. Basel looked over at Jammy, and then back at Dot.
“Dot… want me to just kill him? …He looks pretty bad,” he asked.
Dot paused before he could answer. He paused long and hard while staring at Jammy’s pathetic face again, but then remembered exactly what Jammy’s headbug was saying not too long ago.
“…No, Basel,” he said, commanding with increasing urgency. “In fact, get him outta here, out of this tree. Now.” Dot then began his climb back up the tree, looking too shaken to want to fly again. That bug could never find any fuckin’ rest.
Jammy, that paranoid fuck, was probably near-screaming inside his head while all this was going down. Eventually, those internal screams translated to actual ones once he started lunging at Basel, desperate to go inside and talk to Dot again. The headbug himself was too desperate to get back to torpor to care anymore.
“N-NO! S-Stay back!” Basel shouted, trying to keep Jammy constrained outside the entrance of the tree with all his strength. Jammy, however, still had enough force somehow to resist most of Basel’s pushback, giving it every remaining ounce he had. The ladybug held well enough on his own, though. All while screaming Berry’s name, too. I remember seeing Dot stop his climb back up the tree just to see how much Jammy was struggling in Basel’s tibiae. I guess it would’ve been easier with Nino there, but Basel was too caught up in the struggle to even think of his whereabouts.
But I had somebuggy else’s whereabouts in my curiosity as all that was going on. Throughout all this fuckin’ mess, where in the forest was Ivy, Dot’s perfect waste of time? Well, by the next day, she was out living her best life. Instead of trying (and failing) to pollinate Dot, she went about pollinating some flowers, including this one pretty-lookin’ sunflower. She normally went about her days like that: Pollinating sweet, healthy-looking flowers for her nutrition, visiting friendly insect territories, and overall not being a nuisance. That’s part of why we liked her, and she liked us.
Really, even past the fact that her pollination method was envied across the forest, even among some of the bees, she just genuinely had a great personality. I don’t know, she just had this light around her, y’know? The kind of light you didn’t want to see dimmed, but just to be left alone to admire the beauty of. She liked spending a lot of time around lights, and it showed through how she acted around them. I didn’t get to know her as much as Phido knew her, but she seemed like a great bug to be around.
Speaking of which, as nature’s proven time and time again, one light often attracts another. That same day, Phido was taking a crawl outside the burrow, scouring for fruits like Slider ordered him to. That was when he happened upon Ivy.
Ivy had passed by the burrows before and struck up conversation with some of the ants there in those days, even chatting with our queen at one point. Ivy knew those ants fairly well before, and my guess is that she gathered, based on how we moved, how cruel the ladybugs must’ve been. I mean, she knew we had our role in this forest as somethin’ like its enforcers, so her attitude toward the aggressors in our business was bound to spring up eventually. But that almost changed for a moment, when she first met Dot.
But that mess came and went. This time around, she was to meet with her friend Phido again.
“Somethin’ got you down?”
“Oh,” Ivy said while pollinating, “Phido, I… I didn’t expect to see you here. What’s new?”
“Ah, just the usual… Helpin’ Queen Kelvin run her business. Y’know how it goes.”
“Keeping the ecosystem together, right?” she said, with a light little smile on her face.
“Yep, just… keeping our compromises intact with the other trees.”
Phido’s speech turned a tad bit more quiet after observing Ivy’s looks. She kept her smile on her face, but she turned to the side and dropped it a bit; Phido noticed.
“…Everything okay?”
She couldn’t hide it. “…N– Not really,” she muttered, starting to lose her balance on the flower she was pollinating. Poor girl was still reeling over the day before, with that whole Dot situation.
“What’s goin’ on? Tell me,” Phido gently urged, flying over to the flower she was on. Ivy, appreciating the gesture, held his tarsi lightly.
“It’s… this ladybug,” she sighed.
“Which one?”
“Y’know a ladybug… named Dot?”
Phido’s antennae twitched a bit in surprise; he instinctively got a little closer, “Y-Yes, I think so, what happened with him?”
Earlier that day, Dot himself was sitting down at the oak table in the gathering den that day. He had his head bowed down in what almost looked like shame; knowing him, it probably wasn’t shame at all, but he looked real mean, and clearly bothered. Berry and Sprout were in there, too, but standing closer to the walls of the den, away from their headbug. It felt far more shadowy than usual in there; the shadows of the leaves that made up the ceiling felt far more pronounced than they ever had been before that day. Sprout was especially quiet.
“Where’s Nino?” Dot asked his keyholders, just sitting there in the dark silently.
“I… I have no idea,” Berry said, with a sigh, “Last place we left him was that parasitoid colony.”
Dot raised his voice a little, “Hopefully Nino didn’t get infected; we don’t know if he’s writhing in pain right now.”
It then briefly fell upon each of their minds whether or not retrieving Nino was worth the effort, to which Dot immediately knew there wasn’t any point. Besides, after how Dot had been handling his interactions with Sprout, there was no way he would’ve been up to
“Maybe… Maybe I shouldn’t have sent him out there,” Dot sighed.
“N– No, Dot,” Berry carefully told him, “Who would’ve been there to keep Dice from doing somethin’ stupid? What good’s an unsupervised fruit fly, right?”
Dot thought for a few seconds on Berry’s tone, and how it matched his own. Dot then addressed him, “…Maybe we’ve been treating those bugs wrong. I don’t know.”
“The fuck’re you talkin’ about?” Sprout then asked, with seriousness in his tone. This was Sprout’s first time addressing Dot since their little argument from before. He continued with some sarcasm, “Those fruit flies, they’re saps, aren’t they?”
“Well, maybe we should… hold off on being judgmental,” Dot said, to the rest of the den’s unfamiliar confusion. “I remember how he was acting the day before; he was… really terrified,” he continued, nostalgically, “Imagine, the bugs that’ve been after you for thousands of days, now askin’ you for a favor out of nowhere. I’d slip up, too.”
The other keyholders didn’t know what to say. They knew this side of Dot, but I bet that they must’ve preferred it to be during a more convenient time than this.
“…I don’t know, should I forgive? Is it right to forgive Dice for not showin’ up, or saying what he needs to?” Dot said. It must’ve been nothing short of a miracle for the log that Dot wasn’t in the mood to eat ‘em up. Even through a hunger spell as bad as this one.
After a bit, Berry nervously crawled over to the seated Dot, knowing how he felt. “I think… I think Dice would appreciate you forgiving him like that,” he said, in earnest. “I remember… Miss Ruby was talkin’ about us being the abdomen-holes of the forest, in the eyes of everybuggy else. She was wonderin’ how to get rid of those labels…”
“Maybe that’s the way to do it,” Sprout muttered, in a bit of a low sympathy, but still silently holding onto the loss of Lucky. It wasn’t hard to tell the regret he must’ve felt at letting his death go unsolved.
“Yeah,” Dot agreed. “If I’m nice to the forest, maybe they’ll treat us differently. I was thinking, maybe that’s the kinda leverage we need.”
They weren’t necessarily wrong, but I had to ask: Before Dot could worry about being an abdomen-hole to the rest of the forest, wouldn’t it be better if he worried about being an abdomen-hole in the eyes of his own mafia? It boggles me still that his tone never waned from selfishness, for a single moment in his whole story, even at his most considerate or vulnerable for others; he always expected something in return.
“…Or maybe… Maybe those labels are just stuck the way they are, I don’t know… I mean, what doesn’t the forest know about us at this point?” Dot then thought out loud, looking down again with a sigh. “I guess Kelvin really does have us in a chokehold…”
Berry remembered that look from Dot, keeping his mind on that highly-esteemed compliment Dot gave him a few days back, about making for a good underbug. The sadness Dot felt suddenly prompted Berry, without really thinking, to get up and persuade his headbug in a different emotional direction.
“Well, fuck Kelvin, let’s just get back to doing what we need to do,” Berry then said, with a bold confidence. “We’ll feel better off that way, right? Won’t we?”
Dot offered a light smile, “You… You might be right, Berry.”
“Y– Yeah, let’s go foraging, or something… later today,” Berry said, a bit carelessly, just innocently wanting to soften the air again.
“…Sure, let’s hold off on the Dice situation for right now. We can go foraging now, if you like,” Dot said, now wanting to start following Berry, looking to feel better however he could.
“Wait, what about that ant, down at the entrance? Basel’s all alone with that thing,” Sprout stopped them.
“…That’s true,” Dot agreed into a thought, then looked up at him, “Wanna help him out?”
Sprout reacted to Dot’s thoughtless request with the awkwardness it deserved.
“…What? I… I mean, I’ll do it, but…”“…”
“Nevermind, I’ll do it. Forget it.”
Honestly? I’m totally with Sprout on this one; how the fuck’re you gonna tell the keyholder you just yelled at the day before, to go on and help your own handler hold back some leaking sap, a task he literally had to lose torpor over, while you go out and forage?! What kind of abdomen-backwards headbug orders his bugs around that way? Good thing Ivy left that fuckin’ mess when she did.
“It… It’s starting to feel normal again,” Ivy said, sitting together at the flower with Phido, “Now that I’m here, it… it feels better. Like home.”
“Yeah, there’s no pressure here, Ivy,” Phido responded, pollinating the flower with her. “You’ve been good to us, so we’ll be good to you. That’s our business, that’s how it works.”
“Well, I like your business,” she said, with a faint smile.
“And we like yours,” Phido said in a chuckle while continuing to pollinate, “If that… fuckin’ ladybug wasn’t good to you, just imagine how he was being with us. It’s not fair.”
“Yeah, he was always treating you bugs like shit,” she said.
“I don’t get what his problem was.”
Truthfully, nobuggy did.
“At the same time, I… I can’t help but feel bad, y’know…?” Ivy admitted, “Ever since he took control of his business, everything felt… off. But I get it, he– he just lost his mom–”
“Yeah, but he didn’t have to treat you like that,” Phido interjected. “I mean, look at Slider; he lost a really good friend, a wasp named Oreo, and y’know why that happened? It was ‘cause of Dot’s fuckin’ keyholder, Berry. We had a deal in place to make up for them and their foodwhoring.”
“Foodwhoring?” she asked.
“It’s when a ladybug takes an aphid, a young aphid, for themselves, until it lays eggs… Just carelessly fuckin’ devouring that thing.”
“That’s… disgusting, Dot was involved in that?!”
“Supposedly,” he said, rightfully accusitorially. “He didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“…And to think, that’s who I was crying over…” Ivy thought out loud, feeling better, to Phido’s affirmation.
In all fairness, it didn’t go down exactly like that, but like Phido said, if he wasn’t doing anything to put a stop to it, it might as well be just as bad.
“But yeah, Slider lost a dear friend ‘cause of his stupidity,” Phido continued. “We were tryin’ to set things right, but he fucked it all up.”
“Wait, is… Is that them now?”
“Wait, I… I think that is–”
“No way…”
“Ha! That really is them!” Phido quietly exclaimed, “Those fuckin’ saps!”
The both of them were suddenly staring out into the distance, laughing at the amazing coincidence; Dot and Berry were scouring for food right in front of them.
“What’re those bugs doing now?” Ivy said, finally starting to crack a smile. “Is it busywork?”
“I guess that's what they call it,” he answered with a smirk, then looking back at her as he laid there with her under the sunflower’s petals. “I remember, they used to gloat about takin’ all the aphids before we had the chance to. Back when Ruby was alive, rest in peace,” Phido said, wanting to show respect in front of Ivy. “Now look at ‘em, trying to hunt a whitefly like that’s all they got left to do.”
“I’ll never forget when Dot asked me to let out pheromones for him, like he’s a fuckin’ blowfly–”
“Ew, don’t compare him to those!” Phido pleaded with sarcasm, “That’s an insult to the blowflies!”
I remember Ivy laughed at that joke like it was the first time she laughed in ages.
Dot and Berry were pacing around for that whitefly and trying to corner it, hunting it like it owed them honeydew. But really, it didn’t; she was just minding her business, scouring for phloem within that array of leaves that made up the backdrop of their whereabouts. All she was trying to do regarding those ladybugs was hop from place to place.
“C’mon!” Dot said, struggling to corner it.
“Over here!” Berry panted.
With the way those ladybugs were moving, you could almost look at it like Dot’s mating dance to try to win Ivy back, with Berry as the wingbug.
Obviously, it was nowhere near working.
In those ladybugs’ attempts to corner that whitefly, it then slipped, allowing Dot the window to catch it in his mandibles, swiftly eating it whole, exoskeleton and all. He shuddered a little catching it in his mouth, as that was now his third or fourth kill, but he was getting the hang of it.
“Hey, Dot, wanna share it with me?”
“…Oh, what? Sorry, I ate it already.”
“Ugh, c’mon, you oughta think about us more sometimes, huh?” Berry said, mostly teasingly.
“…C’mon, let’s find another bug,” Dot quietly responded, scampering off that leaf to another with some other prey on it. Once Dot found a good spot, he followed it. Berry followed Dot, Phido’s eyes were following Berry, Ivy’s eyes were following Phido’s, and I was following everybuggy else.
Dot not sharing that whitefly did sour Berry’s mood a very microscopic amount, but looking down at the leaves, those familiar-looking grass-blade patterns, that tiny dwindle of a sadder mood started to grow a little.
“I… I feel stupid,” Berry then slipped under his breath.
“What’s wrong?” Dot asked, overhearing it.
Berry stared at Dot nervously, then looked back down, “N– No, just thinking of Lucky–” he said,
Until suddenly, he caught himself.
“…Oh, right. You remember anything else from that day?”
“Th… That day?”
Berry’s pause prompted Dot to pause as well, questioning his nervousness.
“…Yeah, what happened that day?”
“…”
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Ivy asked, a tinge of sentimentality to her voice as she and Phido watched from afar.
“Ah, I thought you were over him already,” Phido teased, “C’mon, want me to take you down to the burrow? For a little change of scenery?”
“N… No, I’ll… I’ll do that in a second,” she said, looking a little closer at them.
“…That day,” Berry was slowly telling Dot, “I… I remember, that parasitic wasp– he… he already flew off when I got there, and…”
Dot studied Berry’s changing, worried facial expression as he was speaking.
“…I remember, I wanted to die right there, the moment I saw him.”
“…I get the feeling, Berry, I remember when Mom died, too.” Dot said, a little understandingly. “I still miss her…”
“Me too. Feels like she’s still here sometimes…” Berry said, then turning quieter, “Like she’s calling to us.”
Berry’s words then arose a thought that crossed Dot’s mind, making him slowly change the subject; his compound eyes followed.
“Berry, there was this… ant, who was calling your name.”
That fact made a chill run all through Berry’s exoskeleton.
“…W– W-What do you mean, Dot?”
And that was it; Dot couldn’t ignore his nervousness anymore. He stared at him silently, noticing well the emotional quiver that defined Berry’s voice.
“…I d– don’t know anything about that…”
Berry’s look got even more stressed, as in his head, he was now carrying the weight of what felt like all the events that took place ever since Dot’s first kill. All the hemolymph-shed. Tears started welling up, and Berry’s limbs grew shakier and shakier. From there, it felt like his speech couldn’t even come out; there was no way it could.
“I’m not a sap, Berry,” Dot told him sternly. “Tell me what you did.”
Berry couldn’t take it anymore.
“Dot, I– I have to tell you something–”
“Yeah, you clearly do,” Dot immediately answered, his tone turning far more serious than I had ever heard it before. “Spill. NOW.”
…It got ugly. Fast.
“When we were… underground… Jammy… Jammy stopped m–”
“Tell me who that is,” he immediately interrupted, trying to talk calmly, but noticeably shivering; he almost faintly recognized that name.
Berry just looked straight at the ground in response, shaking madly,
“…An ant. A– An ant from Kelvin’s colony. The ant who… called my name.”
Dot couldn’t believe his antennae.
“When did this happen?”
“S– Seven… Eight days ago,” Berry answered, under suffocating pressure, “…B-Back when Ruby was around.” Dot almost didn’t want to stand anymore.
“He said… th– that if I f-followed a fruit fly… killed it… brought it back… while being nice to the other bugs, to do what they w-wanted…” Berry shakingly muttered, losing his breath while he was slowly talking, “…It would be good for the tree. And that I couldn’t tell anyone else about… wh-what we agreed to.”
“No… No, no, no–” Dot muttered and repeated, reeling on the leaf they were both standing on. His legs felt paralyzed. “W-What else–”
“I…” Berry hesitated. “I followed the fly… and I got caught in a spider web. They didn’t t-tell me about that part. Th– There was a parasitic wasp, named Oreo… and Lucky–”
By the time Berry mentioned Lucky’s name, he needed to stop speaking, near-gagging as memories flooded of him and his best friend. He then felt the force to continue, losing all his breath.
“…Lucky broke me out, and g-got the fruit fly, but… but he refused to let Oreo out… when he asked.”
Dot stood there motionless.
“And… I think that… got Lucky killed,” Berry finished, not even bearing to look up at Dot’s face again: Just trying to catch his breath, now that it was all gone.
Dot thought back to the death of his mother. He thought back to Lucky, Libelle, he thought back to the meeting with Kelvin, he thought back on everything, and suddenly, through it all, he realized there was nothing more he could do.
Off in the distance, Basel and Sprout were reluctantly trying to hold that ant back from entering the cottonwood while he was leaking out. But all that was in front of Dot now was Berry, lookin’ like a half-dead shell of himself, groveling at Dot’s tarsi while he standing.
But there was nothing he could say anymore.
“You… You…”
I knew every bit and every detail of how the next few moments you’re about to witness took place. So did Phido, so did Ivy. And that’s how I’ll tell some of it.
Dot’s speech quickly failed him, and without saying another word, his legs grew weak and he collapsed onto the dirt. Just his whole underbelly, laying there, like he surrendered his body to it; Berry was left unsure what to do, or why that shaking Dot would let himself fall like that.
But then, just as Berry got closer… He suddenly felt a pair of mandibles run through him.
It happened without warning; he just rammed his mandibles and tarsal claws into Berry’s stubby little body: One blow, with next to no thought involved. The pain had Berry shouting ‘til his voice gave out; once the keyholder collapsed onto the ground, Dot thought of doing more to him, just to make him feel worse, but he just couldn’t go ahead with it at this point; Berry was so full of tears, full of dust in his compound eyes, he couldn’t even move. He just kept his leaking, strained underbelly onto the dirt, as if completely giving up, but he still found the strength to start crying real hard in front of him, one last time.
“M-My tarsi…! M-M-My f-fuckin’ tarsi! O-Ow– Fuck–”
The dirt scraped Berry’s body hard, with the pain in his pierced underbelly turning unbearable. Coughing, holding in his wounds, Berry just begged for his life while Dot just stood there, with a thousand different thoughts pacing through his mind, each of them trying to escape through his eyes.
Ivy and Phido, on the other hand, couldn’t believe theirs. They were just watching that scene from afar in total disbelief, looking at each other in silence, their eyes stuck to what this savage, insane ladybug was gonna do next to one of his own kind.
But Dot’s head was absolutely full. From memories of the smartest ladybug in the tree, to the comfort he knew in the bar, to the mother who raised him, all of them now gone, and with Berry being the only bug in front of him to blame, he couldn’t let it go.
Berry turned his face right into the dirt, having completely given up on running away; his limbs were too weak to even move anymore. Berry just laid there, shaking more than he ever had before in his life.
And that was when Dot raised his tarsi to the back of his keyholder’s head, and touched it a little lightly.
“Wh-What the fuck is he doing?!” I remember hearing Phido say at that moment. Poor bug was probably panicking, trying to keep Ivy under control, both their voices sounding so distressed.
“He– H-He… He’s not going t–”
“I– I think he’s going to,” Phido answered Ivy, both of them disturbed to their core.
They both knew exactly what was about to happen. Everyone there did, and none of them wanted to see it. I didn’t either. Dot didn’t even want to.
But more than anything else, Berry didn’t wanna be the bug to feel it.
Dot had to hesitate once he had Berry in this position. Tears were welling up in Dot’s eyes, thinking back on everything he lost: From his mother, to all he knew and loved.
But for Berry… one eyes was leaking hemolymph, while the other was leaking tears.
Dot brought his tarsi closer to the back of Berry’s head… Ivy and Phido watched…
And then the truth hit him.
Dot was never going to be able to see it all again, anyway.
…Berry’s limbs stopped moving after that.
Dot, shaking uncontrollably by this point, yearned to shield his eyes, but he knew he couldn’t once he finally opened them. As if unable to move himself, he limped over to that motionless body before him, and just kicked it: Just weak little kicks with his tarsal claw, onto his now-pierced underbelly. Nothing leaking out anymore. But Dot kept going, barely able to handle any of what he was actually doing, but knowing well in his exoskeleton that he couldn’t escape it anymore; this was now who he was.
It’s at this point where Dot started to break down crying. He sobbed harder than he ever had before in his life, but still saw fit to continue those kicks anyway: His pointless attempt to avenge his mother, for something Berry didn’t even hold all the fault for.
I mean, look, as far as Kelvin knew it, that splinter from before? That was all Dot. And as far as I’m concerned, with all of this? All the dislike I’ve held toward this fuckin’ insect? Kelvin was never wrong. Not for a fuckin’ second. Sad to me that Ruby and her piece-of-shit son played such a convincing farce on us back when he made those peace deal negotiations, but that’s the way it is with these fuckin’ ladybugs. That short day Dot and Berry had together proved what all of us already knew. I mean, you could say that a bad day doesn’t define you, but how far could you really take that with something like this?
All the ladybugs there, even Ruby never fuckin’ asked for this out of someone like her son. Foolish as she was when she was alive, she kept her word about never killing one of her own. But her son just had to be different. That fuckin’ bug always needed to have something wrong with him.
And that’s why I feel bad when I think back on his mother. It’s like what I said before; no one wants to give birth to a piece of shit. But all that Dot was left to deal with now? It really couldn’t have happened to a better bug.
Ivy could see that, too; that look on her face watching all of that go down said more than anything else I could ever write. I remember how quickly Phido took Ivy back down to the burrow; that poor girl was shaking so much… To say she dodged a squish would be a fantastic understatement.
“…Sprout, Basel, there you are,” Dot said, now in the gathering den by this point, having waited there for so long he didn’t even check the entrance.
He was a little out of breath in there, and he didn’t look too good at all; but thankfully for him, none of the other ladybugs knew about Berry yet; it was pretty far away from the tree, anyhow. “What’s the story on that ant?”
Basel, looking Dot up and down, couldn’t give him an answer; he had the most graven, depressing look on his face.
“…What is it?” Dot asked again, his look turning worried.
Sprout finally spoke, “…Nino’s dead, Dot. He’s gone.”
Dot couldn’t speak; they shared a silence together over the loss of their friend. Dot really didn’t know about what happened to Nino after the Fuzzball situation, but he now had quite a bit on his plate to worry about, having to process two more of his own, dead, one of which he directly caused, on top of all the other ones lost in the pile that he set up.
The silence they shared really lasted just a few seconds since, of course, Dot still had our ant’s life on his mind, more than the life of his own fuckin’ species.
“Who told you? How do you know?” Dot then asked Basel, who couldn’t even speak.
“…It was that ant,” Sprout answered for the silent Basel. “He saw where Nino got taken. It was just outside the parasitoid nest.”
“…It was the last thing that ant said, before he died, too,” Basel sadly told him.
Dot immediately caught that, and shivered inside, looking straight to the ground. Sprout noticed it immediately.
“…What?” Sprout questioned him.
“…”
“Dot?”
“The ant…” Dot muttered in a low tone, “That ant is dead?”
Sprout looked at Dot incredulously, unable to focus now on anything else but the odd timing of Dot’s question, “…Yes. He is.”
With thousands of thoughts in his mind, Dot asked again, “Where did he die?”
The keyholder felt cornered here, muttering, “Why do y–”
“TELL ME where the FUCK he died,” he shouted right into Sprout’s face, like the reactive piece of shit sap he always was.
The room shook again, but Sprout was familiar enough with Dot’s power to do that. It was nearly impossible for him to suppress how upset he was by this point, but he tried his best, knowing how distressed Basel was. Sprout pulled through on that like a fuckin’ champion, if you ask me.
“…It was just outside the border of the entrance. Not all the way in,” he answered in a deeply composed, but judgmental tone.
Dot’s look immediately changed. “He… I thought he died in the cottonwood.”
“No. Technically, no,” Sprout said in that same tone, completely confused on why Dot was asking that.
But Dot cared little for his concerns, for at long last, Dot let out a wide sigh of relief. He was nearly hyperventilating, as if a parasitoid larva just passed his underbelly without any pain. He then smiled and fell to the floor of the den after that sigh, and felt himself breathe much easier than he had before. Sprout was just left there wondering what the fuck Dot’s deal was with that ant, acting like the whole tree was saved from certain death or something. But, all Dot could do now was smile.
And Sprout’s confusion here was totally warranted; Dot was letting out that smile as if he actually fuckin’ earned anything from us.