Butcher's Bill 1.3.1

I had always wondered just how much influence the passengers had on us; Now I had the sinking suspicion that I knew, because as the powers of past Butchers blossomed in my mind, they brought uninvited guests with them.

There was no way to relate to Quarrel's power without having a mind that also thought of the world in terms of targets and connections, so when her power was transferred to me, her way of thinking was too, my mind stretching to accommodate the alien logic.

Her predecessor, Red Ronin, had thought in terms of division, separation.

Rhinohide. Leverage. Commando. Ulfserker. Flint. Tripwire. Devil Child. Mongrel. Rotmonger. Forearmed. Lancet. Butcher. Each of them had their own necessary viewpoint, their own way of looking at the world that sat just so slightly orthogonal to human patterns of thought.

If it had been just the shock of fourteen alien sets of thought patterns, I might have been able to handle the strain... but with the powers, came the memories. How to use them. How they had been used.

I remembered immobilizing someone with pure pain, gloating as they writhed on the floor. I remembered the sweet taste of flesh as I tore open my opponent's shoulder with my predatory jaws. I remembered the despair of having accidentally killed Butcher, the pride of having found a way to kill the bastard without getting infected, the grim resolve of deciding to kill rather than to be killed. And time after time after time, the sense of surrender, the slow and inevitable dissolution of self into a being that had only one desire: to become a more and more perfect killer.

And against that wave of bloodlust and violence and despair stood, well... me.

For a little while, I blanked out, or maybe it was that "I" ceased to exist as a concept that made sense - but somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, there was a place where I and my passenger met, and that went up against the fourteen shards that made up the Butcher. It wasn't really like a one-on-one argument at all, but in later times when I thought back to it, this is how I remembered it:

That wave of memories, that collection of power, was trying to tell me that I had no chance of using those powers without understanding them. Wanted me to abandon my consciousness, and to let the Butcher run the show.

I fought back.

The Teeth were born in Brockton Bay? I ran the Undersiders, and we owned it. The Teeth had fought the Slaughterhouse Nine and barely survived? We'd beaten them. Fourteen alien powers? Try fourteen colonies of bees. My power, my viewpoint, just happened to be bugs. What it really represented was unity. Coordination. Many small pieces becoming a whole. That was something that the Butcher needed, something that it had always suffered from.