Ch. 59 | New Beginning 17: PIGS & LADDERS

For the next few minutes, neither of us says much. Strangely, the silence doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Alysa has practically melted into her sitting bag, one arm hanging uselessly over the side while she stares up at the ceiling, and somewhere along the way I realize I’ve done much the same. My shoulders have dropped, my jaw isn’t clenched anymore, and for the first time since walking into the Security Force HQ building, I’m not thinking about what I’m supposed to be doing with myself.

That realization catches me a little off guard.

Ever since I got here, I’d been painfully aware of everything I said and did. Marcus and the others were nice enough to treat me like one of them, which only made me even more nervous about screwing things up. Yashiro had taught me a long time ago to think twice before opening my mouth, and around Maevis I was never entirely sure whether saying the wrong thing would earn me a lecture or a premature autopsy. So I tried my best to act a certain way so I wouldn't step on any toes. In hindsight, that was not the wisest thing to do, as it would have only come back to bite me in the ass later, there is only so long one can keep a mask on before it eventually slips off.

Alysa, on the other hand, had just watched me choke on pizza, argue with her over an imaginary pantheon of pizza gods, and nearly start a fight over the last slice. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem too bothered by all that. Which only made it harder to reconcile the foul-mouthed menace I’d met in the training room with the strangely easygoing girl sprawled beside me now.

I wipe the grease from my dark, armored fingers and finally decide there’s no point putting it off for any longer.

“I don’t suppose you know how to turn back to normal ?“ I say, breaking the silence.

Alysa just shrugs. “No idea. I always just wait it out, and it disappears all on its own.“

“Uh-huh,” I reply, not sounding particularly convinced.

Something tells me this isn’t exactly the standard procedure for detransforming. Then again, despite being the vice captain, Alysa somehow strikes me as even less qualified to deal with this than I am. Unfortunately, my only other option is calling Miss Maevis, and I’m sure as hell not doing that unless I absolutely have to. So that leaves Alysa’s brilliant strategy: wait around and hope it eventually goes away on its own.

Truly masterclass problem-solving.

I shift around on the beanbag until I’m sitting a little straighter, then lean forward with my elbows against my knees. There probably isn’t a graceful way to bring this up, and after several minutes of pretending I’m not curious, I finally give up on looking for a pretext to start a conversation.

“So... what the hell happened back there?”

The change in Alysa’s demeanor was immediate.

Her smile doesn’t vanish, exactly, but some of the ease goes out of it. She glances over at me from where she’s sprawled across the beanbag, and her expression immediately tells me I’ve picked the one subject she didn’t want to discuss.

“You mean with the squad?”

“What else could I mean ? Or is yelling at people just a regular part of your day?” I say, raising a brow.

A short laugh escapes her, though there isn’t much humor behind it. “You’d be surprised.”

I wait for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.

“That’s all I get?”

“What do you want me to say?” Alysa asks, lifting one shoulder. “They don’t like me. I don’t like them. We’ve all made that pretty clear already.”

That was certainly one way of describing it.

“You were practically trying to start a fight with your entire squad for no reason whatsoever,” I say, giving her a pointed look.

“No reason?” Alysa’s voice shoots up a volume. “Those assholes are always on my case. It doesn’t matter what I do, they’ll always find something to bitch about. I finish a mission on my own? I’m a glory hog who refuses to work with the team. I hang back and let them handle something themselves? Suddenly I’m useless dead weight. I actually step in and help? Then I’m getting in everyone’s way or trying to make myself look good.”

She throws up her hands.

“I can’t fucking win with them. Whatever I do, they’ve already decided I’m the problem.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to go to war with them. You’re only making things worse.” I shift forward slightly, watching her expression tighten. “If they already think you’re impossible to work with, deliberately pissing them off every chance you get isn’t exactly going to change their minds.”

“You don’t understand!” she snaps. “There’s no talking to them. They already decided they hate me, and nothing I do is going to change that.”

I couldn’t really argue with her when I’d spent most of my life experiencing that exact same thing firsthand.

I’d spent years around people who took one look at where I came from and decided they already knew exactly what kind of person I was, which was why I’d felt so uncomfortable when they started asking me to turn against Alysa before I’d even gotten to know her.

That leaves me feeling overly conflicted.

I actually liked the others. Marcus had been friendly from the moment I walked in, Narun and Oba hadn’t given me any reason to dislike them, and Maya had gone out of her way to make me feel like I belonged here. After seeing the way Alysa treated them in the training room, it had been easy enough to think that they had every right to want her gone.

Except now I’d heard her side of it, and to my dismay, quite a lot of it made perfect sense.

That didn’t suddenly make Alysa innocent or the others wrong, but it did make the whole thing far more complicated than I’d hoped. The worst part was that I could see where both sides were coming from, which left me going in circles trying to figure out who was actually in the wrong—or whether there even was anyone to blame. Knowing people, I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole mess had started over something stupid and grown worse every time somebody refused to let it go. Either way, I clearly wasn’t getting the full story yet, and if I wanted to understand what was really going on, I was going to have to prod Alysa a lot more to get to the thick of it.

“I haven’t seen how they treat you day to day, so maybe there’s more to it than I know. But I did see what happened with Maya.” I lean back slightly, watching her. “You were shoving her around like she was there for you to kick around whenever you got annoyed. You really don’t think that was a bit much?”

Alysa’s expression tightens, and for once she doesn’t fire back immediately. She looks down at the pizza box and starts folding one corner of the cardboard inward with her thumb.

“Maya knows I wasn’t actually trying to hurt her.”

“That’s no excuse to go around treating people like they are some kind of pests,” I say, giving her a stern look.

“I’m not making any excuses.” Her voice comes out louder than before, but some of the anger has already drained out of it. “She was getting on my nerves, I was already pissed off, and I took it out on her. Here, happy now?”

Not really, but it was probably the closest thing to a confession I was going to get.

“So you do think you went too far,” I reply in an attempt to end the discussion right there.

Alysa groans and lets her head fall back against the beanbag. “I think maybe I could’ve handled it better. There. Treasure that sentence, because I’m not ever going to repeat myself.”

Despite myself, I almost smile. “That sounded suspiciously close to an apology.”

“Don’t push your luck.” She snarls.

“Okay, okay.” I lift both hands, grinning. “You got it, boss.“

Alysa looks away, her mouth twisting slightly.

I study her face.

There is bitterness there now, but not the dramatic kind I'd expected from someone trying to convince me she was completely innocent. If anything, she looked tired.

“Listen, she starts again, ‘‘I don't care what justification they use. I'm not letting anyone walk all over me just because it'll make their lives easier.”

That struck home, and something uncomfortable ttwistedinside me.

“I'm not saying let them walk all over you,” I reply defensively.

“Well, it sure sounds like it.” She says as she shoots me a dirty look.

“I'm just saying, all you are doing now is making everything worse.”

Her jaw tightens.

“Okay, what the hell do you want me to do? Smile while they talk shit behind my back? Let them treat me however they want because I'm supposed to be the bigger person ?”

I sigh.

“Nobody is telling you to just stand there and take it.“

“Yeah, right,” she says, sarcasm dripping from every word. “I should just lie down on the ground and let them fuck me, is that it ?“

I roll my eyes, everything I had been saying so far had been flying past her ears.

“All you’re doing now is pouring gasoline on a raging fire. If they’re already pissed at you, going out of your way to piss them off even more isn’t helping anyone—least of all you.” I shake my head. “Honestly, you should know better. I’m starting to feel like I’m arguing with a child.”

“Who the fuck are you calling a child ?” Alysa snaps, sitting up straighter.

I can’t help the grin tugging at my mouth. “Who indeed. That’s a great question, could be anyone, really.”

Her eyes narrow at me for a second, and I brace myself for another argument, but instead, something mischievous creeps across her face.

“Oh, is that how it is?” She pushes herself off the beanbag. “Fine. If we’re children now, we might as well act like it.”

We. Funny how I got lumped into my own insult, but I was gonna let this one go for now, as I was genuinely curious as to where this was going.

I raise an eyebrow as she disappears toward one of the cabinets along the wall.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.” Alysa flashes me a grin and turns back to the cabinet.

Alysa comes back a moment later with a brightly colored cardboard box tucked under one arm and sets it down in front of me.

“Well? You playing or not?” She asks, looking perfectly serious.

That catches me off guard.

I hadn’t thought about board games in years. Hell, I’d never cared much for board games when I was younger. Most of the time, Violet and I only played because we were bored and had nothing better to do after a long day, though she always treated every match like her life depended on it. Back then, I’d never thought much of it. Remembering it now made something ache deep in my chest.

I hadn’t known it at the time, but those stupid little evenings with her had probably been some of the happiest days of my life.

“Yeah,” I say, already leaning closer. “Why not?”

Alysa’s mouth spreads into a grin as she flips the box around.

PIGS & LADDERS is printed across the front in enormous pink letters, surrounded by cartoonish-looking pigs climbing ladders on two legs with overly dramatic facial expressions, if not for the large dice floating above them, you wouldn’t be able to tell that this was a board game at all.

I continue staring at the box intently, as if it was going to reveal some deep secret had I stared at it hard enough.

Who the fuck even comes up with this stuff ? I thought to myself as I leaned back against the table, ready to start the game.