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The earth shook beneath him.
It was not a simple quaking of the earth. It was much richer in familiarity, trembling not only the ground but Kabbu’s core. It could only be described as a tremor.
When the earth would quiver exactly like this, like it used to, like he knew, Master had always told him and Bit not to move unless they were absolutely sure that it had spotted them. So, Kabbu froze.
By the sound of it, by the feeling of the depth of the quakes, it was somewhere in the Outskirts. If Kabbu knew the beast, wishing then that he didn't at all, he knew it would not waste its time with Seedlings. It wanted more substantial, more sentimental sustenance.
It would soon be on its way to the Ant Kingdom.
His muscles were locked. Mentally, he was already whisking it away as the last reprieve his muscles would get before they would be gruelly tested in battle and defense. He would not back down. He would never back down. Not when it came to protecting them.
The shakes grew stronger, more powerful. A painting fell off the wall. The floor shifted beneath his bed. Still, he sat steadfast.
His eyes stared out the windows, waiting for a glare of red, a shadow to blot out the light spying in from the moon.
A great clamor arose. Before his eyes could move to the spot, to anticipate the arrival, the door and its way were busted open. Pieces of wall and door tumbled to their fate, rubble and dust fell and floated, and through the smoke, a pair of uniquely red eyes survey the room around them.
It has arrived.
Kabbu fell out of bed, the wood abrasive against his feet, dropping into a stance. He stepped towards the collapsed door, drawing nearer to the entrance. The only thing that could be considered a door there now were the cruel jaws of the beast.
Its eyes fall upon him. They tint a brighter shade of red, as if recognizing him, and acknowledging him. Its mouth seems to curl into a smirk.
There was no need for an exchange of greetings. They knew each other well.
Kabbu dared to look into its devilish eyes. “What do you want from me?”
The eyes bore into him, as if weighing its options.
Kabbu knew it doesn't understand, or would not choose to even if it could. But an overwhelming sense of confusion and incentive had overcome him, the words leaving his mandibles without warning.
“Haven’t you taken enough from me? What else could you possibly want from me?”
The beast grumbles, its eyes trending down, as if finding it insulting that Kabbu couldn't possibly know what it wants. Its head dips lower, and moves just the fang-length closer to him.
The beetle stood his ground.
“What can I do that would make you leave me alone? What can I possibly give you?”
The beast does not hesitate in tilting its head over to the triple bunk bed stationed in the corner of the room. A simple gesture, as if it hasn’t just asked Kabbu to fulfil an impossible request. The eyes focus back on him, a spot of drool dribbling from its teeth.
“No.”
Kabbu did not hesitate in denying, and shook his head vigorously.
“You cannot have them.”
The beast’s eyes flicker, as if annoyed at its bargainer. It lets out another warning growl.
“Is there anything else?” Kabbu pleaded.
The beast protrudes its head further in, prying around the room again, sniffing the air once or twice. It doesn’t even bother for more than a moment with Chompy’s bed, and it moves back, and swings its head back and forth.
“...Nothing?”
The head continues to negate, and then it unfurls its lips into something of a smile, as if thinking it has him backed into a corner.
Kabbu turned his back to the creature to gaze at the bunks. Vi and Leif lay there, somehow still peacefully snoozing away, safe and secure and comfortable.
He couldn’t go on without them. They could go on without him. Bit and Master could’ve gone on without him, too.
He turned his attention back to the beast. “T-take me, then! Is it me that you want? Is it me that you’ve wanted all along!? Just take me, then! Don’t hurt them!”
The eyes inflame as soon as he said the first word, glowing with a larger fire than Kabbu had ever witnessed. It holds back a snarl, baying at him, its patience wearing thin.
“Take me!” Kabbu pleaded, falling to his legs and scraping them against the caustic wood, “take me! Please, take me!”
The beast can not hold in its wrath for any longer. It roars, trying to get through to its partner that it will be accepting no substitutes.
Kabbu stood back up when the sound subsided. The beast is looking at him, looking through him, eyes alit with exasperation. Challenging its gaze, he digs deep into its leer, searching for an answer.
He found one.
The beast does not hunger for him. It does not crave his flesh. Maybe it did, at one time, but that craving had long since been satiated by something close enough. Now it only hankered for his own suffering. It loved the very idea of getting as close as it could to devouring his heart without having to take a single fang to it. It loved the actual feeling of it most of all. So long as Kabbu loved, so long as Kabbu would welcome others into his big heart, the beast would be waiting, lying low, watching for the perfect moment to burst it open and gorge itself on whoever found their way to his heart, licking them clean before sneaking away, leaving an empty, broken heart in its wake.
It was a state of fulfillment that a meal by itself could not fill in the same way. While pleasurable in the moment, eventually meals are ruminated, absorbed and replaced. This was more than just taking lives for itself, it was laying waste to another. To know that it was the reason why someone cries at night, someone struggles to get out of bed, someone’s heart needs endless patching up.
It would not take even a sip of Kabbu’s hemolymph, but it would happily lap up his tears.
He stepped forward. “Is that it, then?”
It grumbles again, leaning towards the bunks before unsheathing another sickeningly delighted smile.
“No,” Kabbu reiterated, voice growing sharper as to echo his horn.
Believe it or not, Kabbu was not scared of the beast. Beyond the typical reasons of why he should, like the teeth and the jaws and the claws and the brutal strength and the memories, Kabbu did not fear the beast. Why should he? He’d already conquered it once before. What was stopping him from doing it again? What was stopping him from telling it no?
The beast doesn’t know, it can't know, but it is not the one in control here. When it had thought it good to slink here and show its face in his territory, in his home, it had given itself up to Kabbu’s own claws.
And, for it, he would not be forgiving. He would be berserk.
A low rumble travels up the beast’s throat. Its eyes narrow, that rotten smile plastered on its face making way for something dangerously close to a snap of its jaws.
“No,” Kabbu wielded a roar of his own, standing his ground on the line he had drawn. “You will not have them! I…I have slain you once before! I will not hesitate to do it again!”
The rumble stops. The beast’s eyes graze over him, briefly, with an almost curious glint buried within. Then, they upturn. Its mouth opens, but not in a baring of teeth. Its eyes form half an oval, a half that Kabbu knew. He knew that shape, because he’d seen it in Bit’s and Master’s and Eetl’s and Stratos’ and every beetle’s eyes he’d ever come to know.
It…it’s laughing at him. Out of malice, out of contempt, of smugness and haughtiness and vanity and ego and pride and arrogance and hubris.
It was not a laugh, then. Kabbu knew laughter, it'd been around him his whole life, between procuring it himself and the countless times when he prompted it from his friends. What lay before him was not a laugh. It was a sneer.
How…foolish of it. Dim and half-witted. Naive. It still hasn’t learned to consider him a threat.
Kabbu decided that it will never get the chance to learn.
It continues to snicker and scoff, finding it all a great joke. It would have banged its head against the doorway if it hadn’t ceased to exist.
The beetle lowered his head and pointed his horn forward, directing it right for those boastful eyes, standing back and tapping a foot against the floor as he prepared for take off.
He was sick and tired of being disrespected, feeling small and powerless and undermined, constantly and continually being the rookie and the runt. He was sick and tired of always being the escapee, always being the hunted, always being the one to flee, perfuming the air with those delicious fear pheromones.
Sick and tired. Sick and tired.
He heard the echoes of Bit and Master and Eetl and Stratos and Sunny and Reed and Merab and Butomu and every beetle he’d ever come to know and every beetle that he ever would come to know and every beetle he’d never come to know and every beetle that came before him that flapped their elytra and triumphed with their horns and fell from stems and branches and fingers and moved the earth’s dirt and shook earth’s ground and sucked the juices of earth’s fruits and played under the light of the stars and the sun and fluorescent bulbs and microscopes and cameras and both watchful and adoring eyes and wriggled their legs as they tried and strived to right themselves in the places that they were, are and will be.
The murmurs of the scarabs and the stags and the longhorns and the divings and the clicks and the darklings and everything and everyone who had ever lived like him flooded his mind, growing louder in their incantations translated from a language he didn't understand yet knew by heart and soul, lending their energy to course through his own veins. The plight of his species, of his brethren, was not all for naught. It never had and it never would be. But he could ensure it and prove it right here and then and now.
Don’t cower. Don’t take it. Don't give in. Don't accept it. Fight with your life. Fight for your right. Fight for your meat. Fight for your flesh. Fight for your survival.
He couldn’t go on without himself. He had to go on. He needed to go on. He wanted to go on.
It hasn’t even noticed him. It doesn’t think to make note of him, where he is, what he’s doing. It doesn’t matter. It has the teeth, the jaws, the claws and the brutal strength and the memories. It has the means to chew and spit out his heart. It doesn’t have to care about him. It doesn’t have to care about anything, besides where it would find and who exactly would be its next meal.
Kabbu charged, his legs supplanted by the sheer force and will and power of an innumerable and infinite amount of limbs.
Still, it doesn’t care.
He barreled into the beast, the eyes only opening and realizing what it’d just done far too late.
Kabbu roared again.
“Get out of my life!”
An urge hatched in the clefts of his being. It grew, nurtured and fertilized, and grew, bigger and faster and stronger and more powerful and all-encompassing. His brethren’s cries and chants unified in their volume and amount and tone and timing until they dominated his environment until it was all he could think about, all he could ever hope to think about.
Overpower. Overcome. Overpower. Overcome.
Overcome the odds that are stacked against you. Overpower the hunters who thought their odds good. Overcome the limitations of your body and your flesh. Overpower the ones who sought to feast on it.
Prove them wrong. Prove them all wrong. Prove to the earth that you belonged, that it had not made a mistake when it had planted you in the soil and brought you up from the ground. Prove to the world that you were filling your niche better than anything else could ever dream to achieve.
To be a beetle was to beat all.
And he cut and he cut and he cut and he cut and he cut, cutting until the dark red glow of its eyes extinguished for good, no longer able to spot him or his heart or the ones that rested inside it, and its face would be maimed beyond recognition, even beyond his recognition, and slashed to pieces and smaller pieces and more numerous pieces, and there would be nothing left of it, only shrinking shards of scales and a pool of hemolymph declaring that there once used to be.
He cut until he was exhausted, to the point where continuing to cut wracked his body with pain, and still he cut. He would not stop until it was eviscerated. He would not stop until he was covered in what remained, dripping off of him like a bottled spray of victorious berry juice, washing over him and soaking him and cleansing him, a far more appeasing and quenching and satiating bath than water could ever hope to be.
He wanted it all. He wanted to feel it settle against his chitin, trickle down his horn, squelch underneath his feet. Use it to smother the scales as he crushed them beneath. Make it ooze and flow and drain through the banks in the grass, to form a swamp, a swamp where hungering, selfish desires drowned.
It was soaking him, coating him. It hid him and enveloped him far more effectively than clothing ever could.
He would tear into what remained, use his claws to seize it and rip it open and apart and in half, spattering and splattering and strewing it all over, thoughtlessly, like what it had done to them. Wrench one of its teeth and use the sharp end of it to carve, mindlessly, no shape or sculpture in mind, to slice and hack for the pure pleasure of it all, the pure overcoming and infectious tingling that filled his mind with indulgence and glee.
This is what it had wanted to do tonight, when it came here. What it intended. Now the only thing it would taste would be forcefed doses, jammed savagely and brutally and uncaringly down its throat, of what it prescribed to them.
He knew it wouldn’t understand. It was too imbecilic, too witless, too lesser to get through its thick exoskull, the exoskull that he was deforming and mutilating and shattering. It didn't matter. He felt it. He felt the karma, the retribution and reckoning and undiluted satisfaction. And that was all he needed.
His horn weaved like a spider did silk. Slashing every which way, south, west, east, north. Northern and northern and northern, to split the exoskull cleanly and gushingly in half, to reveal what he already knew, that there was a sad excuse for a brain tucked inside. He punched into it, dicing it and pounding it into mush, more mushy than it already had been. He could feel the hemolymph piling at his feet, gathering enough to lap against his waist. Just what he wanted. Just what he needed.
It drizzled into his own eyes, coarse and corrosive and jerking his tears. They seeped down his cheeks, only to meet up with the same liquid that had triggered them.
He jumped into a pond of it, a swamp of it, splashing it all over his face and horn and elytra. This was not a mess. He was not messy. He was cleaner than he’d ever been, cleaner even then when he had pupated, when he had turned into an imago. Cleaner than his larva, cleaner than his egg.
He’d finally scrubbed away that which could not be seen.
He rolled around in the swamp, submerging in it, immersing in it, pervading himself in it. He would not be satiated until it had filled his every crevice, every part of him that could contain it. His kill, thanks to its size, held a lot of it. It was the first time he had ever been thankful for something about it.
Vaguely, he heard footsteps rushing in his direction. Leafbugs. They were leafbugs. Trying to steal him from his kill. Trying to leech off of his hard work. Trying to pilfer some of the meat he had spent all his life waiting to butcher.
He whirled around to face them, stomping his feet into the pool to keep his balance, spraying hemolymph in any and all directions, onto and against the tall grass and the lilypads, his vision a torrent of purple and red and maroon and bridges spanning over murky waters being overrun with a much more viscous and indissolvable liquid.
He’d kill them, too, if they tried to purloin his catch, if they got in his way. He wouldn't stop at anything. He couldn't stop at anything. Nothing could stop him now.
Hemolymph was spilling off of him in a deluge, raining upon the puddles of itself and the scales and organs and orifices it used to roam within. He would not delay in adding more to his collection, so he could savor it and relish in it and dance in it, cup it and pluck it from their drying figures and pour it over his sopping body.
The footsteps grew louder. He saw them, two of them, one holding a bow and arrow. Those could not harm him now. They would not leave him with a single scratch. He dropped into his stance, ready to draw hemolymph, ready to slit and pierce and cut.
“Kabbu!”
He…he knew that combination of sound. He knew what had combined it, too.
The footsteps got closer. He put his claws up and shielded himself. From what he did not know. He peeked through the little gaps, daring to see what was coming after him.
They were upon him in an instant. But they did not rip and tear into him, pulling his limbs from his body and letting his life flow out of his sockets like a waterfall under a bridge, they…caressed him. They held him, and hugged him, and spoke to him in soft whispers and gentle, caring voices. They did not growl at him, bay at him, snarl at him, snap at him, and evidently they had no interest in his flesh.
They had interest in himself as a living creature, as a being.
He was beginning to recall what that felt like. And he was beginning to recall that he had interest in their beings, too.
No…no, more than interest. It was something more than that. It was something like…love.
He loved them.
It wasn't leafbugs. They weren't leafbugs. It was…Leifbugs. And Vibugs. A moth and a bee. He…he knew moths. One had helped him. He knew bees, too. They came from a hive. They were not hostile. They were…friendly. Friends…family.
Kabbu opened his eyes.
Instead of seeing the dead, decaying, quiet husk of the beast pinned underneath him for the second time in his life, instead he stared at a hopelessly uncountable amount of sliced vines, lacerated and penetrated and incised wildly, with no thought, lesser feeling behind it.
He…he knew what remains he was perched upon.
It was the door.
He slowly turned his gaze back up, to face the moth and the bee, whose eyes were overflowing with deep concern, and not malice or contempt.
He was swamped with guilt.
They had names. He knew their names. Did he have a name, too? Was that what they were saying? He couldn’t remember his. Could he remember theirs?
“N…ne…” No, that wasn’t right. More guilt.
“L…l…le…” he tried, staring at the moth.
“V…v…vye…” he tried again, glimpsing the bee.
He was ashamed of himself. Ashamed to be near them, ashamed to be detectable to them, ashamed to be visible to them.
He wanted to hide his face.
He couldn’t. Each of them were holding each of his claws.
The bee uttered that mix of sound again, gazing at him with tears in her eyes, her fur ruffled and matted and messy and wet and unclean.
It made him feel bad. He tried to repeat after her, to see if that would make her feel better.
“K…ka…ka…boo?”
Kaboo?
The bee’s eyes widened.
No, Kabbu!
He said it again.
“Ka…Kabbu!”
The bee smiled, and dove into him.
Her fluff rubbed against his now dry chitin. He liked the way it felt. It felt like a bed. It felt nicer than a puparium.
The moth followed the bee, and he had nice fluff, too.
They’d let go of his claws, now, and he was able to use them to do something he felt some kind of compulsion to do: wrap his arms around them.
He felt all warm and fuzzy inside. Was this love he was feeling? He liked the feeling of love. No, he loved the feeling of love.
And he loved them more than the feeling.
If he loved them, shouldn’t be able to remember their names? It would only be good. Right. Polite. Polite? What did polite mean? Something good, he supposed.
“Le…Leif! V…Vi!”
He felt their grasp grow tighter, though certainly not in a constricting sort of way, like a snake would do. He felt safe in their touch, their embrace, and he made his own grip around them tighter, so they would feel safe like him. They did not object to it, so they must've liked it, too.
“Kabbu!” They kept crying. “Oh, Kabbu!”
He felt like he should say something. “I…”
“I”...I was a weaving of sound he used to use a lot, wasn’t it? Those were called words, weren’t they?
“I…I don’t know…where I am…”
The moth, who he now remembered as Leif, left the hug to look into his eyes. He still only saw concern and love in those opposing eyes. “You’re…you’re home, Kabbu. In the Ant Kingdom.”
“The Ant Kingdom…” Kabbu tested the words on his mandibles. Suddenly all manner of syllables and vowels and contestants began to pour out. “O-oh, yes, the Ant Kingdom! In Bugaria! I live with you and Vi and our pet Chompy and we work as explorers in the Explorer’s Association!”
Leif blinked at him a moment. Was he wrong? Had he said something wrong? He was still adjusting to saying things again.
“That’s…that’s right, Kabbu,” the moth replied, offering the faintest of smiles.
Vi, her arms crossed, still had a look of concern on her face. “Kabbu, do you know what a doctor is?”
“Of course I know what a doctor is,” Kabbu huffed, “I’m only good friends with Isau.”
The bee brightened dramatically at that. “Well, guess what, you’re gonna get to see her tomorrow!”
Kabbu clapped his claws together in excitement. “Ooh, happy days! I haven’t seen a friend in a while…”
His eyes drifted up towards the moon. It was nighttime. Nighttime usually meant activity, and searching for food, and flying, and everything else he was usually compelled to do. But, for whatever reason, he felt so tired. Sleep would do him good, maybe.
He crawled towards the still doorless entryway. “Come on, team,” he beckoned, “we should get back to bed.”
Leif and Vi glanced at each other for a second, a second that Kabbu caught, but they relented and followed him inside. No one seemed to care about the door.
It was long since dead and decimated, but if it did come back this way again, there was no longer even a door for it to break through. Somehow, the idea and thought of that comforted him.
Three times the beast had approached Kabbu with a hunger.
Two out of three times, between the two of them, the only one who ended up with a sense of satisfaction was Kabbu.
Eventually, everyone climbed or flew back into their beds. Kabbu grabbed his Bug Ranger plush, holding it close against his chin, finding it not as warm or snug as the bee’s and moth’s fluffs, but still politely soft.
“Leif…Vi…” he called their names up to them.
“Yes, Kabbu?” they replied, quickly.
“I…I love you…”
And he smiled, his eyes a half-circle of forgiveness and joy and warmth and love.
It felt good to say those words again.
It felt very satisfying.