Rat friends are forever friends.
I had an interesting dream last night. The details have gone a bit blurred on me after waking, but the essence of it was … a con? I think a con, I can’t quite remember what the intended/promised result was going to have been. I don’t remember how it started or what was meant to be gained by all involved. I just remember how it finished.
Three conversations, that the … character, I suppose, that I was inhabiting … had with the other three erstwhile members of the ‘team’.
The first was a woman, very cold, and concerned in an icy sort of way, warning him/me to be careful. We’d successfully inserted her into a position of power. Actually, I think that was the underline point of the con, though I don’t think it’s what we’d been sold on. We were supposed to get her in. Once we had, though, we couldn’t be her concern anymore, because she’d been put there for a purpose, and she had much bigger, more dangerous things to be worried about. We’d put her in to start taking down something that was a threat to all of us. There was, very much, an implication that regardless of anyone’s feelings, good or ill, we likely wouldn’t be seeing her anymore, unless things went very wrong, or very right.
Which was why, I think, she wasn’t overly worried about having cheated two of us, myself included. She was confident that either I’d understand what it was for, or that she’d shortly be somewhere I couldn’t do a whole hell of a lot about it. Which, as it happened, was fair. And why she’d spoken to me, and not the fourth member of the team. Which I’ll get to in a second.
The second conversation was with an older man, a slim, good-humoured, ratty sort of dude. And this one, this is the one I remember, that stuck with me out of the dream and kept it in my head. He’d gotten the money. She’d gotten the power and the actual point of the mission, and he’d gotten the money. He was cheerfully planning to leg it to another country and leave the rest of us to manage however. I think I suspected that she and him were old friends, and that getting him the money and getting him out before whatever she was involved in went down was at least part of the point. They’d cheated us, the pair of them. Left me and our fourth in the dust. But he was so friendly about it. Not in a false way, but in sort of compartmentalised ‘business is business’ sort of way.
He wanted to know if I’d be okay once he ran. I said I’d be fine, I had a friend to help me. He was delighted, wanting to know if that meant I’d properly hit on a lady we’d met during the con. Actually, I’d properly hit on the killer for a rival team we’d beaten to the punch. He was doubly delighted, not least because it meant I’d actually have capable protection. He apologised for leaving me to tie up loose ends and sort myself out, but he’d never doubted I was capable.
And then, he made an offer. A friendly, entirely genuine offer. If I needed to bug out later, and so long as I wasn’t trying to kill him, I could look him up. He’d give me somewhere to land. Because the job had involved leaving me in the lurch, but that was just the job. He figured we were friends, so if I needed it down the line, he’d give me a place to land.
Because yes, he was the biggest rat in this mess, but he was a rat friend, and rat friends are forever.
And then he bugged out, and she climbed her deadly tower, and they left me to tell the fourth member, the killer of our team, that they’d done so. Leaving us with nothing.
Because they’d been planning, friend or no friend, to leave me to deal with the loose ends. Whether that meant killing him, or getting killed, or finding my own way out of the mess.
As it happened, our killer was tired, and largely not surprised, and willing enough to just sit and commiserate about it. I hadn’t ever planned to even try to kill him, and probably he’d known that, so he wasn’t going to take anything out on me. But still. They hadn’t known that, though they likely could have guessed too. They’d left me very much in the lurch. Carrying the bag.
And, for whatever reason, I didn’t mind.
Rats or no, they were rat friends. And rat friends are forever.
Sometimes I very much enjoy my brain. It tells me stories in the form of dreams, a lot. I loved the tone of this one. This sort of weary ‘what can you do?’ vibe, in a world where betrayal is inevitable, but not necessarily cruelly meant. The job is just the job, and the rats are friends as much as they’re capable of, and that friendship matters regardless. Heh. Maybe more so, because you know the betrayal wasn’t cruelly meant, and it doesn’t mean help is forfeit in the future.
So, yeah. Sometimes your friend is a dirty rat. But that’s all right. He’s a friend regardless, and rat friends are forever. Heh.
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