r/HFY•8 mo. ago

[The Shotgun Girl] Chapter 10 of 17

OC-Series

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You don't outwit Blackie.

That was one of the cardinal rules of our existence in this place, one of the basic facts governing reality. Just like the certainty that mirrors that reflect your whole face will spawn a clone -- which will then climb out of the mirror to kill you if the mirror is big enough. The certainty that clockwork soldiers stop moving once their key winds down. That bone spiders lie in wait in the dark but run from violent disturbance or light. That if something you really want or need is easy to get, it will hurt or kill you. And that if you pit yourself against Blackie intellectually, Blackie will win.

Now I was ready to add a corollary to the Law of Blackie Opposition: even if you do somehow come out the victor in a battle of brains with Blackie, Blackie still wins.

I had learned from our conversation-slash-confrontation. I had made progress and gained information. And now I was... more confused than before.

Part of me, the paranoid part, was loudly denouncing her little comment about wanting to kiss me as a cheap distraction. A rhetorical false flag, a bit of disputational misdirection. Sleight-of-wits. Typical shrewd Blackie tactics. Just a way to sow doubt and turmoil in my mind to keep me too emotionally off-stride to keep pursuing my concerns about her. A way of throwing me off the scent. Just as I should have expected from such a devious mind.

Only...

What if I was being too paranoid? What if she was actually being completely forthcoming the whole time? We were pretty scrupulous about honoring demands -- answering a fairly-won demand for truth was equivalent to swearing on a Bible for us. If I assumed that everything she had said was true, at least in the sense that she believed it, then all that stuff about her finding ways to be happy could mean that she'd been sincere about wanting a kiss. A kiss from me. After all, she'd been so taken by the idea of Red and Blondie being... a couple, I guess... that maybe she'd decided she wanted something like that for herself. In which case, was she really wanting me, or was she just wanting someone and it was just down to being me by process of elimination? Was it actual attraction or just a case of going jailhouse-gay and I was her only option?

And even if Blackie really did want... some kind of... something... with me, what did I want? I mean, I wanted out. I wanted freedom and identity and my due vengeance against whoever or whatever had done this to me. Those desires were simple and easy to focus on. Beyond that, I had honestly never much thought.

Or, what if she did genuinely want... involvement... with me, but only as a way to beguile me? Occupy my attention? Divert me from accomplishing my goals, like a Delilah to my shotgun-toting Samson?

And all that aside from her whole notion of none of us actually existing, of us being mere pieces of fiction. Constructs of words on some printed page. I mean, my first instinct was to reject that idea as sheer madness, naturally. But then, being trapped in an unending series of stately luxury homes where you frequently get killed, revive, and get killed again, ad nauseam, can't really be considered a footing of pure distilled rationality, can it?

That last conundrum, at least, I knew how to manage. Logically, if I was right about where we were -- or even if Blondie's or Red's theories were right -- and we kept on acting on those theories and working toward our goal of freedom, we might one day find our way out of here. But if Blackie was right and there was no escape because we were as fictitious as our environment, then we would of course not ever get out, but there would be no other negative consequence to our behavior. On the other hand, if Blackie was wrong and one of us was right, and escape was possible, but we behaved as if it wasn't and stopped all our efforts toward that goal, then obviously we'd miss our chance of gaining freedom.

That being the case, I opted for what might be called agnostic pragmatism. Whatever doubts I might have, whatever uneasy, slithery little existential whispers Blackie might have planted in my mind despite her claimed desire to avoid doing just that, I would keep working as if I was sure she was wrong and I was right. Nothing lost to me by doing so, right? It's not like this life had anything I'd be missing out on by staying on-task.

As for the rest of it, it just led to me chasing my own thoughts round and round in my head, which I've already said I'm not good at. Deep thought was for Blackie or Blondie, while I was more of a doer.

Therefore, I decided it was best to not think too hard about it and just get back to doing. And at the same time, to maybe get advice from somebody who was better at deep thinking than me.

******

It was a bit surprising how easy it was to convince Blondie to go and have a look over the wall alone with me.

I'm not sure what I expected, based on Blackie's 'reports' about Blondie and Red. Maybe the two of them in a lip-lock on the scullery counter, or waltzing around the kitchen to some unheard tune, a-blush in each other's arms. I wanted to say that such notions were outlandish... but Red had purred. According to Blackie, anyway. And why should I believe Blackie? After all, she...

She what? Blackie what?

Blackie was sly, that was what. Sly and clever and always got her way and always caught the breaks. And that wasn't fair and I should remember that.

At any rate, I did not find Blondie and Red doing anything as blatantly affectionate as Blackie implied or my imagination devised when I went back to the cooking suite. There was abundant giggling going on, but Red was at the scullery tap, washing her hands, while Blondie was poking at something scorched and lumpy and shaped vaguely like a huge, infected toe on the table across from the oven.

"My first attempt at currant bread was... less than successful," Blondie told me, completely deadpan.

I gave the mass a doubtful look. "That's bread?"

She shook her head. "No. It was intended to be, but a failure of this magnitude cannot be classed as a baked good."

"Does that mean it's a baked bad?" Red called over, chortling. She had a splotch of flour on the tip of her nose.

"Not half as bad as that joke," Blondie retorted. Her eyes rolled, but she was smiling just the same. She turned back to me and I could see that she had a matching flour-dot on her own nose, just about the size of Red's fingertip. An unfamiliar little pang went through the depths of me when I saw that -- why, I don't know. "I was doing the recipe from memory, but I lost track of ingredients and amounts because somebody kept distracting me."

"It was me!" Red sounded proud of herself. "I was the distracting distraction that distracted you."

"Yes, you were." Blondie's smile was indulgent, warm. Warmer than the ones she showed Blackie or me, maybe. Or maybe that was just Blackie putting notions in my head. "An absolute top-class impediment to progress. But then, you've never been one for doing things by halves."

I frowned, then felt a bit ridiculous for scowling in the middle of such merriment. Which made me scowl that much harder. "So, you two haven't gotten anything useful accomplished since lunch, is what I'm hearing."

Red joined us, wiping her hands with a rag. "We had fun, Brown. You are vaguely aware of what fun is, aren't you?"

"Fun doesn't get things done. Fun doesn't make us progress."

Blondie cut her eyes at me. "And did you accomplish anything with whatever you were up to all by yourself?"

I didn't want to glower even harder, really I didn't. But I glowered harder anyway. Blondie chuckled a little at my non-answer.

"But was Brown by herself?" Red inserted. "I thought Blackie slipped off with her." Her eyebrows waggled and her grin turned sly.

I sighed. "Just because you--" I stopped myself before I could blurt anything stupid about the two of them. Now was not the time or the situation or the mood to have that conversation. I couldn't help but remember Blackie's words about cherishing the purity of love. I didn't know if that was what we really had here. But all the same, dragging the notion out just to score some cheap banter points seemed wrong. Crass. A degradation of those who were dear to me. So I bit my tongue and instead turned back to Blondie. "Never mind all that. I actually came in here to ask if you were ready to go get a look over the north wall with me."

Blondie just blinked at me for a moment. "It had honestly slipped my mind entirely, Brown."

I was starting to wonder if I was the only person here who understood the word 'priorities', but I tried not to let that show in my face. "Well, we still need to," I said. "I mean, you're our navigator and you can't very well figure out which way for us to go next until you've seen the options and checked them for patterns, right? That's how you do it. Gather information. Compare it against previous data. Make as informed a decision as possible before we proceed."

Blondie regarded me thoughtfully, head tilted a little. It reminded me just enough of Blackie's supercilious looks to notice, but not enough to put my hackles up. "Yes," she said after a bit. "That's the idea behind the process." Her eyes flicked up and down over me and I realized I was fidgeting a little. She pursed her lips and nodded. "Very well. You and I will go right now and collect the necessary data."

Red stiffened in protest. "Hey! We're baking, here!"

Blondie smiled and tapped her on the nose with her finger, right on the existing dot of flour. "Now, now. The second batch of dough is already in the oven and all it needs is to be timed and then pulled out when it's done. Just don't let the fire die down. You can do that by yourself, can't you?"

"Of course I can, but I don't want to." Then Red perked up. "Hey, why don't you and I go to the wall and Brown can stay here and watch the oven?"

Blondie's eyes cut to me, just for a heartbeat, then back to Red. "I thought you were my baking student and number-one kitchen helper?"

Red huffed theatrically and parked her butt on a tabletop. "Fine. But you don't get to scold me if I nibble on the bread when it comes out."

Blondie's smile deepened. "I would expect no less. But I reserve the right to scold you, anyhow."

A look passed between the two of them that made me feel weirdly embarrassed, like I'd blundered in on someone getting dressed, or hiking up their skirt in the privy, or something. But there was something else there, too. A little stab of exclusion, a feeling of being locked out of something that others shared. I can't say I much liked it.

At any rate, the passage of a few minutes found Blondie and me dragging a mattress across the rain-slickened lawn. The mattress was a narrow one we'd pulled off a day-bed in one of the sitting-rooms, six feet long and the ticking stuffed with feathers and goose-down. It had become our practice when climbing the boundary walls to throw down something soft at the foot of our climbing-spot, in case of a fall. When we were preparing a crossing, we'd pad it heavily with as many mattresses and cushions as we could manage. That was mainly for Blackie's and especially Blondie's sakes, them not being the best of climbers and Blondie being a bit top-heavy, to boot. But such a pile took time to gather and for our little scouting expedition, a single mattress would be enough. My plan was to do the climbing and looking myself and just relay what I was seeing for Blondie to record in her book. For that, I'd have felt confident climbing with no safety pad at all. The vines clung pretty hard to the rough bricks and if you picked a good thick patch to try ascending at, going up was no big challenge. But Blondie had insisted.

Of course, she had no idea I had a secret ulterior motive in getting her where I could talk to her in private...

"So, um, what is it you're wanting to talk to me alone about?" Blondie asked as she wrestled with her side of the heavy mattress.

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