Madness in the Method

[Shiola]

((erika stieglitz continued from I'll Probably Get Homesick, I Love You, Goodnight))

It was one thing to stage an attack from the fringes of the Gardens; it was another entirely to escape one from the middle of it. Only the former was a situation Erika had any real confidence in. Being unable to dictate the terms of the engagement meant having to improvise more than she cared to. It led to stupid mistakes. It was the reason she couldn’t just run like she wanted to, given the increasingly difficult pain in her leg flaring up with each step. Indulging her curiosity by speaking to Darlene to speak to her was just the same; failing to control the situation, another mistake she couldn't afford.

When she’d last checked the collar radar, the two new signatures were moving steadily in her direction. It didn’t matter whether they moved that way with purpose and ill-intent or not; her reaction was the same. The urgency kept her fixed on the details, and not on the web of fractures that seemed to be spreading across the surface of her psyche. The question she preoccupied herself with now was who was approaching, followed by a concern as to what they were armed with and whether they had the resolve and skill to fight back. Given the dwindling number of people left on the island, Erika had no more illusions about what such a confrontation might look like.

The Martini-Henry wasn’t going to do it here, not on these terms. Looping the rifle back over her shoulder, Erika drew her pistol and limped back behind the cover she’d taken only minutes earlier; a collapsed archway, heavily overgrown with ivy. She reminded herself the proper term would’ve been concealment, not cover. There was no way it was going to stop bullets. With any luck, no one would think to shoot at it.

It was certainly possible that the girl who’d ran off had brought an ally back with her. Abe, maybe. Erika's eyes fixed on the area where Darlene fell, where Jonah and Michael still lay some distance away. If these newcomers reacted to the sight of the body, there would be an opening to spring an attack. One fast enough they couldn’t react to, couldn’t fire back wildly into the overgrowth. There'd be no chance to land a lucky hit, to injure Erika further.

I'm not like them. I won't join them. I can't.

Then again, it could’ve been anyone. The radar didn’t display names or student numbers. Just any active collars within a hundred meters. Still-beating hearts. Complicated internal worlds and wills to live and die. Meat that hadn’t yet been fed back to the earth. Even if she had names, Erika knew she wouldn’t really know who they were anymore. She had to prepare for the worst.

And what’s that, to me?

Her index finger tapped on the edge of the pistol frame. In her other hand, she held the collar radar. They were close, and they still hadn’t noticed her.

I have the advantage. Just need to figure out how to act on it. Keep it at range. Ignore the voices in my head, except the one that tells me how to get it done. Don’t even entertain other possibilities. I have nothing more to learn, remember?

There was a drill for putting people down, fast enough that they couldn’t shoot back. Twice to one target, and a third eight to ten inches higher. Two to the chest, one to the head. If she could step out without them noticing, and she was as fast as she knew she could be, it could be over in seconds. Two more locks to the door opened. Three, in the span of under an hour. If they had better weapons than she did, she could put them to work. This could all end today.

She looked down, through the open collar of her shirt at the bandages wrapped around her midsection. It wasn’t even the passively clawing pain that troubled her anymore, so much as it was the obvious reality that she didn’t have access to the strength and speed that once came so naturally. Exhaustion and brief lapses in awareness came in waves, threatening to draw her attention away at the worst possible moment. Any misstep was one too many.

Clenching her jaw, she drew in a slow breath, waiting. For an opening to attack. For a reason not to burn through what reserves of energy and willpower she had remaining. Erika wasn't sure what would be left if she did.

[Maraoone]

((Diego Larrosa continues from perverse verdict))

Futility laid slumped against a plant jar, eyes closed.

Futility's spilled blood had been sucked dry by the sun already, was now a tacky, sticky puddle, crimson bordering black, pungent.

Futility—

Marceline's hands rested on top of her belly, ignored the crossbow bolt sticking out of its chest.

Marceline laid at rest.

She was the futility Kelly had mentioned to Diego, apparently. Kelly had guided him to the gardens beneath the manor house, where Marceline had abandoned him, and then she had simply left him to find the corpse on his own, as if the corpse by itself would parse Kelly's riddles and cryptic metaphors for her. It didn't. He thought if he called her futility enough times, then he'd understand Kelly's point of view a bit more. He didn't. He couldn't stomach it. He felt like shit.

His eyes were drawn to her hands more than anything else. They were simply placed palm down. Not splayed, not curled, futilely gripping at that which killed her. They rested on top of her belly, below the bolt, making no attempt to retrieve it.

She was so peaceful.

It made the announcements all the harder to believe, because Marceline hadn’t killed herself, apparently. He’d watched her walk off into the rain, assuming that she would walk off the cliffs, or shoot herself. Had she been on her way there, anyways? Had Marco simply expedited what she’d meant to do herself? Or, had she simply not wanted his company? Had he not been enough for her at that moment?

Corpses didn’t answer questions, anyways. Best to just leave it be.

The body looked content where it was. She was already lying amongst flowers. Nothing more he could do than pay respects somehow, abstract well-meant thoughts that he hoped would reach her somehow but probably wouldn’t.

He stood in front of her, hands clasped. Looked at her a few seconds further. Swallowed a lump. And then he walked on.

He couldn’t tell where Kelly had gone off too. These gardens, in particular, felt rather labyrinthine, now that he was in its midst. Her disappearance was mildly alarming, but he felt sure he’d find her again. There was no reason for her to go off, really.

He thought for a moment about the announcements. Justin was gone. That was one less ghost breathing on his shoulder, one less possible source of twigs snapping or leaves rustling or gunshots in the distance.

Speaking of, he'd heard one just earlier. But they punctuated the silence in half-hour intervals in this island. Gunshots formed part of the baseline of paranoia he had acclimated to, if not settled into. It was something, but odds were it wouldn't concern him until it did, and it hadn't yet, so he proceeded through the maze of leaves as normal

Something that struck him, really, was the decay. It crept in past the constant copper smell he’d been dealing with since his nose broke. It felt stronger here.

It became somewhat obvious why after a minute of walking. There were bodies around every corner. He’d seen plenty of them scattered around the island in all his days here, but they seemed especially dense here. Most of them were nameless at first glance, so they were painless to look at.

That was too easy.

The first body he’d happened upon after Marceline was Roxanne. Band girl, Roxy, they’d never been close. The next, a few meters after was Jonah, he believed. Sports guy. He didn’t know any of the sports guys well. They’d all scared him, one way or another. The body next to it was unrecognizable, face blown out. It would remain nameless.

And then, in a clearing, past those two bodies, was a girl, chest blossoming crimson. The blood was still wet.

He tried to remember her name.

Leaves rustled behind him.

[Shiola]

The radar showed one of the signatures breaking off, moving elsewhere. Either lost, or spreading out to search the Gardens. Either way, it meant she only had to deal with one of them at a time. Erika pocketed the collar radar, and slowly drew the hammer back on her pistol. Two shots to the chest, once in the head. She’d have ten left in the gun after that. More than enough to finish it without having to reload.

Peering through the Ivy, could only see the bottom half of the person stepping through the clearing. No urgency in his step, not like he was looking for someone. At least, he wasn’t looking for someone alive. The way he walked from one body to another, it seemed almost like the way someone would have perused these Gardens when this place was new.

He crossed out of view, passing in front of the planter Darlene had hidden behind. She listened for his footsteps. Tried to approximate where he might’ve been standing. It wasn’t much use - the din of insects and birds was too much white noise to even try and make out something as soft as footsteps at this distance.

Erika did a final brass check on the pistol. It was ready. Taking another shaky breath, she wasn’t sure she could say the same about herself. Every time she tried to control her breathing now, she was forced to acquaint herself with the smell and taste of death. There was a sickness in her breath that didn’t just come from the Garden full of bodies. It haunted her every moment. Inhaling, she felt bile at the back of her throat. Exhaling, she found her hands barely able to keep still. This was more than just anxiety. The realization made what she did next less of a decision than an impulse.

Now or never.

Forcing herself back to her feet, Erika emerged from cover. She stepped quickly towards where she expected the boy to be standing, forcing herself through the pain. A grey cloud seemed to rise at the edges of her vision, and she reached the point she’d meant to walk to without an especially clear awareness of how she got there.

The silhouette appeared in front of her, his form now somewhat identifiable. Her gun was immediately trained on him, but she’d stopped herself from pulling the trigger for one very good reason. He held that reason in his hands, pointed back towards her. She could barely recognize his face, as battered and bloody as it was. There was enough of him left to remember his name. Diego Larrosa. She’d known of the Gardening club but didn’t talk to many of them. Back home she’d thought they’d have a common interest in the cultivation of certain psychoactive plants, but they hadn’t responded to her occasional prodding about the issue with anything other than awkward pauses and changing the subject.

The weapon he held in his hands she didn’t fully recognize, but she could see enough. Shock at his appearing closer than she’d expected was the first reason she stayed her hand - the second and more pressing reason was the knowledge of what would happen if he pulled the trigger.

“Diego.”

Even if it was the last thing he ever did. Even if it was just his muscles seizing up as she put a bullet through his brain. She couldn’t risk it, if she was looking at what she thought she was looking at.

“If you pull that trigger, you kill both of us.”

[Maraoone]

He'd taken hold of the grenade launcher as soon as he heard the leaves.

Diego was stood in front of Erika Stieglitz now.

She looked worn down now. Her face seemed more or less spared, warpaint around eyes aside, sunken eyebags aside. He envied her for that. But her pale skin somehow failed to reflect the rays of sunlight that hit her, so that she came off as more as gray than white. There were bandages around her chest, leg, arm. Multiple weapons. More resembling a guerrilla soldier than a high school student.

She reminded him of himself, in short.

He didn't think there was a single announcement that passed by without her name. Twelve announcements, and about every single one of them had her name on it.

There was nothing stopping her from showing up on a thirteenth.

Holding the grenade launcher had been impulse, really. He should have gone for the pistol in his waistband. Guns were meant for encounters like this. But it was too late to change course.

The muscles in his arms burned. He felt ice in his veins.

He gulped.

"I will. I will kill both of us."

Looked at her wide-eyed.

"You really think I'm gonna let the person who kills me off this island?"

He shook his head quickly, kept his eyes locked on her.

"If you pull that trigger, you kill both of us."

[Cicada]

((The leaves didn't make a sound when the strange things that crawled underfoot skittered through the overgrown foliage.))

"Anyone pulls the trigger now, it would be futile. A waste."

Kelly Nguyen contemplated the other girl, the nominal amount of humanity left leaking out of the sack of her skin. That other girl was a lot of battered, a lot of bloody, a lot of broken, a lot of guns.

Kelly Nguyen's own grip on her own gun was firmly wound into skeletal threads of her stringy fingers, muzzled by how the stock dug slightly into the earth by her one good leg. Her eyes found the others' first, long before the glare of her weapon and friendlier than, that homemade sculpture of Kelly Nguyen's face plastered over with a mask and the metronome of her own stillborn breath.

"Too many lives sacrificed, too much of yourselves lost and broken, you see. Shooting each other now would be a pretty bad way to use all that potential."

The word potential, smiled through teeth beginning to recede into the shape of Kelly Nguyen's skull.

"Going to be all shooting each other eventually, sure."

Tone was friendly was polite was kind was cornstarch crumbling through the fingers. "Right Diego? We talked about this."

Conversation was chit-chat was banter was bloody massacre. "These fights of ours, these kills, they are not a means to an end. We are something emergent, the three of us, far removed from the flesh and blood narrative of this island."

Kelly Nguyen stalked the tree line, almost callously unconcerned about the obvious shortcomings of her gun being scarce, being cloistered on the far side of the conversation. She barely seemed to move. She was still right beside the both of them.

"They do not understand."

Kelly Nguyen considered the still freshly ground meat of the corpse sharing the pathway with them. Pointed rather helpfully at it, with a slow, mechanical nod of her head. Her neck only settled after much the same way frames of a film real browsed in slow motion implied that movement was happening at all.

"We do. It's why we have survived." Her shattered arm came up, sudden flourish, she slammed the pump of the shotgun into the leftover bone and gore. A brief and uneventful metallic ricochet, as used casing was lost to irrelevance. The noise of the gun loading completed, with Kelly pushing what was left of her lost arm against the slide to return it to fore. Two new rounds, as many targets.

The gauze wrapped around her annihilated limb's stump, already purulent, began to weep once more, slowly bloating the fiber of the soggy bandage until it began to drip. Kelly Nguyen didn't seem to notice.

"They thought surviving was enough, we know better."

[Shiola]

So here they’d stand. Her eyes locked to Diego’s, searching for any sign of self-destruction in him. Any sign that he thought she’d pull the trigger anyways, and act first. Erika gave him nothing. At this distance she got a good look at the damage that had been done to him. There was a conspicuous quality to his voice that made her think he must have been missing some teeth.

She wasn’t sure she cared if the person who killed her made it off the island, though she could see why he might. A petty sort of vengeance. Denying life out of hate, not out of necessity. If she died here, she wasn’t sure she cared so much about who lived on. More that whoever they were, they might understand her. They might take that understanding with them, to the world that remained. That her memory wouldn’t be so condemned.

Maybe he would get it. Another reason not to pull the trigger. In her mind she imagined the two of them standing here stoically until the end, neither able to give any ground. Right until the end.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones here. Erika noted motion from the corner of her eye, but recognition didn’t follow. The second signature on the radar, of course.

She began to talk. Of course.

Erika stepped to the side. Not away from Diego; any motion that created distance between them would break this standoff, and not in her favor. The barrels of their weapons seemed fixed, both following one another as she moved. Erika moved only to see who was speaking to them. This person didn’t join in the standoff, at least not in the context of pointing any sort of weapon at anyone.

It would’ve been better to not move, at least so she didn’t see where the voice was coming from.

“Kelly?”

They’d been in photography together. Kelly was skilled, and driven. She was missing an arm. Kelly was someone Erika might’ve expected to make it far, in the real world. Here, maybe, too. What she didn’t expect was the withered mess of a human standing before them. She was missing an arm. Masked, though Erika was certain she didn’t want to see what might’ve been underneath. Part of her wondered if Kelly had been one of the bodies she’d passed on the way here, because in many ways she was scarcely distinguishable other than the fact that she was standing. And she was missing an arm.

As she spoke, Erika looked from Kelly, to Diego, and back again. In her own outstretched arm she saw how, in spite of days of constant sunshine, her skin seemed to have something of a pallor. They all looked broken, but Kelly worst of all. Her words confirmed as much.

Erika listened. She was one half of a captive audience, after all. Her finger never left the trigger. Some of the things Kelly said made sense. Erika could feel it; the distance she had created between herself and everyone else, and the damage it had caused. More than it was meant to. The need for understanding never seemed to leave her mind, even if it had no practical purpose here. From the looks of things she was sure these weren’t empty sentiments Kelly was uttering. Diego knew it, too. Their names had appeared on the announcements before; not as much as her own, but enough to remember that they had. Kelly killed a Lucas, but Erika couldn’t remember which one. Diego killed Morgan; that was something Erika didn’t forget. The thought made her tighten her grip on the pistol.

There was something more, though. Kelly had a point, she just hadn’t reached it. Maybe they all seemed like the same kind of predator, carrying the same kind of damage. That was a trite sort of observation, not the one she was really coming to. What did she mean by something emergent?

She winced as she saw Kelly rack the shotgun she carried with the bloody stump. Her calculation had been that she’d lack any kind of dexterity to do so, that the weapon was more of a prop than anything. Apparently not. It barely changed the balance of the situation. If she’d meant to kill Erika, there wouldn’t have been this preamble. If Kelly made a move, Erika had no reason not to shoot Diego and consequently kill them all. If only out of spite. Maybe she did understand Diego better than she suspected.

The way Kelly spoke, though - it seemed like at the very least she might’ve been entertaining the possibility. Talking about survival not being enough. It was talking around an idea, more than anything. She was sure whatever that idea was, it would determine Kelly's next move.

Survival wasn’t just enough. It was everything. Yet Erika felt it; some truth, there in those words sputtered from behind that mask. She wanted to hear more.

Surviving for thirteen days and taking seventeen lives, and she felt no more secure in her purpose, her identity. Less certain that making it out of here had any merit beyond the increasingly faint possibility of something better. Nothing had been made better by her actions so far. What chance did she have if she made it out of here? This didn’t feel like surviving. Seventeen lives lost was no victory. It didn’t make her somehow more alive. Less, if anything. Darlene’s last moments made that abundantly clear.

She’d told herself so often she’d had nothing left to say to anyone still alive. Listening, though - that wasn’t breaking that covenant with herself.

“What’s your point, Kelly?”

Erika's gaze turned back to Diego.

“What the fuck is she talking about?”

[Maraoone]

Kelly emerged with about as much forewarning as she'd disappeared, which was to say, none. He startled, slightly, did not pull the trigger, thankfully. He kept the launcher trained on Erika, turned slowly as she stepped sideways.

He was surprised Kelly hadn't taken the opportunity to leave, to shoot, given that they were facing the biggest killer on this island. But little about Kelly made sense. All he knew was he had to be like her. To be like her he had to understand.

So, he listened to the words again. Listened to her lecturing and preaching and sermonizing. And, it made as much sense as it had before. So, maybe It would help if he contextualized the words in his own way. Maybe that would bring him closer to her mindset.

"She's- uh, she's talking about how we're better than the rest of the island. How we've evolved, adapted."

He closed his eyes, shook his head. It felt weak coming out of his mouth, like a synopsis.

"Look, I don't entirely get it myself. It's- it's better if she explains herself, I think. She just brought me here to show me something."

His gaze turned back to Kelly. The grip on the launcher tightened.

"What did you mean by futility? Why was Marcy the embodiment of futility?"

[Cicada]

How blase. How casual, how familiar. 'What the fuck' indeed. The sum total of Kelly's worth and value and impact on the world was a 'what the fuck', with every single vowel energetically wrung out of the spongy tongue of some valley girl bitch. That was what they tried to reduce her to. Those that didn't understand. Kelly still had to prod, poke, pry, with all of the one hands she had left, the one hand she'd earned by bloody trial and nasty phlegm washing up her own throat when the fever tones vibrating in her own skull got too close for comfort. She had to tear down these failures of vision.

Kelly Nguyen shifted in place, gently. Her face a blank canvass she hoped others would paint on.

"Right, Diego."

Acknowledgement produced familiarity. Niceties paid, niceties earned.

Kelly Nguyen creeping down the halls of George Hunter High School with too many limbs.

"So, what do I mean?" Accent perfectly innocent, any old question, asked at any old time, at any old era when the world had not yet changed and violently spit them all out. "Well see, Erika. We're broken already."

Kelly Nguyen gingerly patted her broken arm. Careful, palm floating barely against the grotesquely pallid skin. Assembly line rhythm. Once, twice.

"That's why I said Marcy didn't understand. Roxy told me she was fighting for survival. That's limited, Erika, that's petty."

Thrice.

"Because-"

[Shiola]

Better than the rest of the island? It sounded perverse. They were standing in a Garden full of bodies, aiming guns at one another, and talking about how they were somehow better for it. As Kelly spoke, Erika couldn't help but cock her head in disbelief. Not once did she let her gaze linger too long on either of them, nor could she let her guard down. That didn't mean suppressing her visible disgust at it. Erika imagined it probably looked absurd, coming from her.

It wasn’t that different than what she’d been telling herself about the bodies, before. About Darlene. Except Erika had just imagined they were different. Not better. The things that she knew made her capable of getting this far weren’t things anyone should want to be good at. It was another human value assigned to a situation that was fundamentally inhuman.

Hearing Diego back her up was almost worse. To what end, did he think this was going? Kelly didn’t seem like she was offering anything akin to salvation in this diatribe of hers. While she might’ve been wearing the worst damage, she wasn’t the one here with the greatest claim to speak on matters of survival, or killing.

Yet, Erika knew she still didn’t have anything left to say. For all her experience, she'd come up with nothing that made it feel anything less than abhorrent, empty, hollow. The means to the end she desired seemed to rob that end of any meaning. She couldn’t indulge that impulse; to explain, to account for, to rationalize. It always hurt, and she didn’t have enough left to take much more hurt in that way. Part of her preferred the idea of acquainting them all with a grenade then the thoughts that had rampaged through her mind the last two weeks.

It was impossible not to be interested in what they had to say, however, even if it was as offensive to her ears as this place was to the rest of her senses. These were the first people she’d spoken to at length who had killed, after Tyrell and Paloma. She'd spent so long searching for answers within herself, anything else seemed at least worth entertaining.

Ultimately, it was also time spent not being blown to pieces. Erika interrupted Kelly. Listening didn’t have to be passive.

"What - what else is anyone supposed to fight for? Nothing else can matter here, 'cause they didn't give us any other option."

[Cicada]

Speak and listen. Say words, be heard. Familiar mote of the old Kelly, the one that had been born, raised, bred by pedigree into the birthright of being oppressed by their institutional advantages: white bitches, decorum, propriety, the rich and the privileged getting away with murder and with horrid incompetence. It had been the yoke Kelly had ripped off her neck, because that was their real means of control, this collar cold and rigid around the bones of her collar meant nothing because it was no true threat, not compared against the threat of complacency, of the haves versus the have-nots, those who would lord their oppression over the little innocent ones like the Kellys of the world, their hands icier, more violent than the terrorists could ever have designed-
it was supposed to work
And Erika's questions were any conversation, aimed like the barrel of a gun at the face of any Kelly, the cruelty of suppression, of groupthink, of not understanding the inviolate truths that pervaded this world- the right to mutate, to become something infinitely better and seize all their imperialist design empires built on crumbling sand and dirt and to break it and rip it up like they DARED to do to HER BODY, her SACRED SELF

Kelly Nguyen was calm.
it was SUPPOSED TO WORK
Erika just needed some perspective.

"Why," Kelly Nguyen emphasized, stressed, with the quietest and most relatable and approachable tenor that possibly existed in the clarity of her mind, "would we fight to escape this island when they will reject us for winning?" The venom occasionally escaped, in little egg shell flecks of bloody foamy spit against the mask.

"Think about Marceline. She fights her way to the end. Gets home. And then what? What has her precious survival earned her? She is irrelevant. She is hated. She is broken- do you understand me? We- we no longer belong. What we are supposedly fighting for is empty- worthless."

Kelly Nguyen searched their eyes. Erika had to understand, Diego had to understand. The dragon's embrace, coiling around all of their bodies.

Kelly Nguyen discarded her loaded gun, in one smooth and angry thrust of her fist. She did not need it. The weapons meant nothing- it was the will behind those weapons. Superior mastery of the self.

"The purpose of violence is change, Erika. You have no idea how long I've been thinking about this. All that photography we did together- it was just preserving an old idea, an old ideology that must crumble, that must be thrown down and left to rot." Kelly Nguyen's fingers on her one hand cramped, seemed to almost dislocate, with each gesture, each desperate pump and thrust as if she could physically shove her truths down the onlooker's throats.

"This violence is the true nature of things- society was a lie, thrust onto us, it's beauty was empty and vapid."

Heavy breathing. Slow, steady stalking towards the stranger's corpse. Casually shoving aside the dead thing with one foot as Kelly Nguyen held her hand up, almost as if demanding heaven come down to meet her halfway.

"What we have been forced to endure is ugly... raw, beautiful. In it's own way. These trials are the natural order of things, they are-"

[Maraoone]

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait WAIT."

Kelly's monologue truncated. Diego held his hand up towards her, kept the grenade launcher trained on Erika with the other hand.

He knew this. He knew what Kelly was saying. People wouldn't understand. People here didn't understand, people outside didn't understand. But.

If this was beautiful? If this was the true nature of things? If this was the natural order of things? If this was what they were meant for, then,

"You're, uh, you're saying... we should kill people? Off the island? We should. Just continue? With all this?"

[Shiola]

No part of Erika felt like it had any right calling anyone else insane. And yet, everything Kelly said sounded insane. It was frustrating to hear someone suggest that Erika had no idea how long she had been thinking about this. Did Kelly understand who it was she was talking to, either of them? What they had done? That she called back their past before the island only seemed like a tactic in service of this viewpoint she’d taken.

They were a captive audience of two killers, and who they were seemed to matter less than what they seemed to have become. Erika couldn’t deny that their pasts seemed to matter little now, but she didn’t reach the same conclusions about it. She didn’t want to think about it. Yet she had to, now. Forced to agree, or not. Forced to come up with an answer after two weeks of finding and losing them.

And Kelly had so much confidence in her speech, in spite of how she seemed to be physically disintegrating before Diego and Erika’s eyes. Carelessly dropping the gun she’d been toting, as if it was less of a weapon than the venom spewing from her mouth.

It rang hollow. She didn’t speak with authority.

Erika knew she could speak to the nature of what they were doing. She’d spent so long convincing herself of it. Yet before she’d found herself in this compromised position, Erika had been once again looking inward and finding nothing of comfort. Nothing worth saving. Her instinct pushed her to say something, to rebuke the idea that all her and Diego had been fighting for was some worthless nothing. Shutting down the suggestion that they were broken forever. Believing that there was a way to come back was the reason she’d started, it was the reason she couldn’t seem to stop. Even if it felt like a false hope by now, she had to follow it to the end to be sure of that.

Kelly shoved Darlene’s corpse aside like it was nothing. Meat. As hollow and empty a shell as the empty brass casing lying next to the body.

Except, that didn’t feel right. Not after seeing it in contrast to Kelly. She seemed less like a person and more like a vessel for… something else. Maybe she was right about that. The corpse was recognizably Darlene, and she’d known how to die, and that made Erika feel something real again. Like there was a way to be enough. Walking through the path she’d cut for herself, she’d assumed it would forever be out of reach.

Diego interrupted Kelly, pointing out where she was speaking to like someone might point out a sign on a road. Erika held her gaze on Kelly, despite her pistol continuing to point directly towards Diego. Some part of her hoped against hope that wasn’t where Kelly was going with all of this. That there was another answer that could account for what she felt, for Darlene, for Tyrell, for all of them.

Her own response came out as barely a whisper.

“...you really think this is beautiful?”

[Cicada]

do they not feel the weight of the heavens on their shoulders, demanding their attention, the weight of everyone watching who dares judge them for their actions, the sheep to their lions teeth, this is a mandate they have taken on, to become something greater than their own mortal husks can bear, to fall apart, to slough at the joints, the knees and ankles and elbows and shins will be but bone, it will not matter, they will be immortal, i will be immortal, how can they be so BLIND
Kelly Nguyen let their voices echo. Questions that might have reached her ears. An answer was the polite response. What was expected of her.

Whirring of the camera, idly shuffling in place.
they don't understand me
"Yes."

Simply put, one word, all that was needed.

[Maraoone]

Diego cackled, lungs expanding, rib wound tearing beneath its bandage.

"What the fuck?"

[Shiola]

Diego’s laugh was an ugly noise. It sounded like it hurt.

Erika only let out a tired sigh, shaking her head in resignation.

Her gaze momentarily shifted to what remained of Michael.

“We're all our own main character. Everyone has a story. Stories need villains.”

She looked back up to Diego. The story of her time on the island was written on her face, in her expression, in her silence and the stillness of the gun still pointed towards him.

Still, she said nothing.