Mauerbauertraurigkeit

[Fenris]

"WHY--NOT?"

She loathed every syllable that dripped from his mouth.

"HAVE--PLENTY."

Nia looked at the other boy. Still silent, still on edge, as though he could break into a run at any moment. She liked him, she decided. For no particular reason but that he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and realize this was the wrong place to be. If he wasn't so desperate for supplies she imagined he would have left Aoi on his own a long time ago. Of course whatever circumstance had led the two of them here had likely been caused by stupidity on both of their parts and not just Aoi's, so perhaps she was giving him too much credit, but it was effort, at least. She could appreciate effort.

There was so little of it. So little scratching and clawing. Some strong, some lucky. Precious few smart. She was so tired. Smart people died choking. Lucky idiots lived. It was funny. Wasn't it.

She wanted it to be funny.

She wanted Aoi to stop mocking her with that familiar demeanor of his. There was so little left holding her back.

Bite of the apple with one hand. She dug in her bag with the other. Two energy bars. She had enough that she didn't bother counting them. More than ten. She supposed she could ration them to one a day; as far as she was aware Survival of the Fittest didn't generally last more than two weeks, so it should be more than enough. Most likely soon enough there would be more corpses and their left-behind rations than there were living persons to partake in them. She didn't imagine many others would go through the motions of destroying what they couldn't take.

Precious few smart. Lucky her for that. Lucky her, still here, still alive. Lucky Aoi. Only luck.

Nia tossed the other boy an energy bar, not the greatest throw, perhaps, it clattered to the ground. She could spare it. It was an irrational action, she realized. She could just as easily not do so and the boy would be helpless from starvation soon enough. Or she could simply shoot him now and be done with it.

The angel of death on her shoulder. He was doomed one way or another, of course. But she was curious. There was so much more here to learn.

That's why her eyes were on him when she drew her pistol and shot Aoi in the head.

[Zetsu]

He didn't even have time to fully feel out the terror as it all went wrong.

He didn't have time to wonder what he'd done wrong. If he should've stuck to signing, if he had said something to anger her. He didn't have time to wonder why she would bother with throwing Garren a ration bar, and then shoot him, or why she hadn't just shot him earlier and be done with it. There was no logic to any of it.

He didn't have time to be grateful that he'd thought to give the escape plans to Garren, or to be mortified that any escape that happened would be up to Garren to pull off.

He didn't have time to think about his sad, miserable, wasted life. About how it really was immature in the end to spend all your time trying to be what adults said was mature. He didn't have time to think about how none of it had paid off, how both he and the world would have been so much better off had he spent his time doing something besides pretending that not needing friends was an acceptable way to cope with not having friends. He didn't have time to think about how much he hated himself, how much he hated other people for being better than him. He didn't have time to admit to himself that he'd been lying when he told himself, over and over, that hating himself at least made him better than all the other fuckos out there. Oh, and he never gets to realize that swearing isn't all that bad. Add that one to the list.

He didn't have time to realize that what he hated wasn't so much himself as the way he knew other people looked at him, thought of him. He hated the person they thought him to be, couldn't bear the thought that they were right. Accepted anyways that they probably were, even when they weren't. He never had time to let himself become the person that he wanted to be, to accept that he was making himself do so many things that he didn't need to or want to do and that didn't even make anyone else happy, for fuck's sake, why were you doing that, Aoi? He didn't have time to find the friends who would have helped him realize--it's okay, everyone deserves love, and not just the tough kind. Including you. And it's okay. Really, it's okay. He didn't have time to figure out that being a nihilist didn't make him cool, that he didn't have to settle for being a bad person trying to do good things, that he was actually a she, that it was possible to be a good person and happy at the same time, that there was nothing selfish or weak about needing to lean on someone else for awhile. He didn't have time to even think about the possibility that being happy with the person he was could be an achievable goal even for a person like him. There was no time. He would never become anything but himself.

All he had time to do was widen his eyes, and wonder about how it was possible that so much stuff can be packed into two or three pounds of grey matter, most of which did very little besides--

--And a moment later, his precious brain was just so much goo splashed and smeared over the ground.

[Pippi]

Y’know, for a moment, for a hot second, he’d thought that everything was gonna somehow turn out alright after all.
The urge to cut loose and run had grown stronger and stronger with each passing second. Like, this was literally the one big rule he had imposed on himself; don’t even think about interacting with the killers! Sure, there would be circumstances they could steal from a threat, sure there’d be opportunities they could get the jump on them, sure Nia wasn’t even anywhere close to being one of the top killers on the island, but do you know how you make absolutely certain you live for longer than five minutes when interacting with a murderer? You don’t interact with a murderer! Full fucking stop!

But Aoi had just started talking - well, signing, whatever, same diff - to Nia whilst Garren’s feet had felt like they were stuck in clay. And talking. And talking, without getting gunned down, ignoring Garren’s own frantic, waved hand signals of ‘stop whatever the fuck you’re doing right the shit now’.

And Nia had started signing back at him. And so Garren had decided to stop. And to stay still. And to see how this played out.

He’d silently wondered when Aoi was gonna make a decision for the group, when the other boy was gonna step up and do something, hadn’t he? Well, there he’d been. Doing something. The least Garren coulda done was stay quiet and put his faith in his ally.

Garren had taken the map quickly, wordlessly. To be honest, he had, like, no clue how much concentration you needed to sign effectively, so he hadn’t wanted to disrupt them both mid flow or anything like that. At some point, Nia had flung one of the energy bars towards him, apropos of, he guessed, the conversation she had been engrossed in. Hadn’t been the greatest throw, but in fairness, Garren wasn’t the greatest catcher; she coulda launched the bar with pinpoint accuracy and he’d probably have let it slip through his greasy butterfingers. It had landed at his feet, and he’d bent down to pick it up.

His fist had clenched, crushing the map in his grip, and his entire body had tensed up, as the crack of a gun and the sudden rush of air passed overhead.

And that was how he found himself now. Still bent double, arms instinctively raised up, looking to his left, at Aoi’s body sprawled out next to him, unmoving. Garren had seen a whole bunch of people get shot in the head before. In anime, video games, movies, that sorta shit. You got used to it after about the tenth time; you saw one ‘boom, headshot’, you’d seen them all.

Turned out, anime didn’t really portray the smashed eggshell that used to be Aoi’s head, the blood and fluids coating the ground around it, the limbs stuck out at unnatural angles. Funny that.

Dumbass.

And Aoi was just as stupid.

Fucking… goddamnit.

Slowly, he turned to face Nia, trying to ready himself for the second bullet that was sure to come. It took him a few seconds to realise it didn’t exist, and when he did, he slowly straightened himself up. He wasn’t shaking. His stomach wasn’t churning. Soon, he had to imagine. Soon he’d catch up with himself.

“What…”

He could have left it at that, honestly. Would have summed up the scene in front of him pretty nicely, he felt. His mouth carried on working, though, slowly stumbling out another question.

“Why… just him?”

[Fenris]

He didn't run. That was fascinating in and of itself, though Nia supposed she shouldn't attribute to strength of character what could more easily be explained by shock. She barely let her eyes flicker onto the thing that was once Aoi, another body, this one bereft of most of its brain matter, no longer relevant, another tie severed. She'd seen more than enough. The boy seemed spellbound by the sight, at least for the moment. Was the sight still so foreign to him, she wondered? She did not dwell on the thought, lest her odd sympathy for him be replaced by something else.

She put down the gun. Still within easy reach, the boy just far enough away from her she was quite confident she could put a bullet through him in time if it turned out she'd overestimated his intellectual capacity. When his eyes turned from the corpse, he seemed surprisingly composed.

Why indeed. There was still plenty of time for her to change her mind. Invent some excuse. Eliminate the witness, not that those were needed, considering the existence of the announcements. How different the dynamics of this game would be if the killers were anonymous to the island at large. She imagined she might be a bit more proactive in such a circumstance.

She raised a single finger instead, a universal gesture needing no translator. Wait a moment. Paper and marker, dug up from her bag. She wrote one word in quick, dark strokes, such that he wouldn't need to approach to read; her interest in him did not extend to trust. She turned the page to face him.

NAME?

[Pippi]

Nia held up a finger, ducked down, and vanished out of sight. For a moment, she was gone. For just a moment, Garren was left to his own devices. Nobody to force him or convince him to stick around with a two-time killer. The perfect opportunity to run.

And yet here he was, staying, waiting around patiently like a good little boy, just because Nia told him to.

Why?

Well, y’know, when a girl talked to a beta cuck like him, then he didn’t have any choice but to- Nah, he wasn’t even gonna finish that. Anyone who still believed he’d be thinking like that hadn’t been paying attention. No, there were a couple other reasons he was sticking around to see what she’d written down.

First was also the most obvious; Nia had a gun, and even though he’d grown a spine in the past few days, it wasn’t solid steel and bulletproof. He didn’t wanna make someone with their finger on or in the vicinity of a trigger mad, or annoyed, or even a smidge cheesed off. You know what the best thing to do is when someone armed and dangerous gave you an instruction? You follow it to the goddamn letter.

Now the second reason… the second reason was much harder to pin down. Much less a concrete thought, more a… shattering of his previously concrete thoughts. Cause avoiding all killers from the announcements, yeah that was a good plan, yeah, that had no real downsides. You catch wind of Erika, you bolt. You catch a glimpse of Quinn, you hide until she had gone. If you locked eyes with one of ‘em, then your fate was out of your own hands. You just had to hope that, for whatever reason, they’d run out of Murder Juice that day.

And yet, Aoi had still trusted her without a second thought.

Sure, it had ended up with his galaxy brain splattered across the ground like an ice cream cone (okay yeah he was definitely gonna throw up when this was said and done), but the fact remained. He had trusted her. She’d only been up on the announcements once, after all. No doubt there were people who trusted the other single-time killers, someone who thought the world of Katrina or Kelly.

Odds were, there could very well be someone who would defend and trust Quinn with their life.

Hrmm.

Garren didn’t have any more time to consider this, though. Nia had just flipped the notebook around. For a moment, he considered staying quiet, but again, Nia had a gun. Nia had shot people. One plus one equals two dead idiots with their grey matter coating the dirt. And was there any point in giving her a fake name? If she was planning on shooting him, she could do so right now, she was mute as fuck so she couldn’t ask other people about him for whatever reason, and the only time she’d hear his name on the announcements would be. Well. If she outlived him.

“Garren,” he said, still riding the crest of the wave of nausea and fear that was soon to crash down on him. “Garren Mortimer. Y’know, to differentiate me from all the other Garrens at school.”

He took in a deep breath. Step too far? Maybe. He guessed he’d see soon enough.

“If you recognise me cause of that and you decide to shoot me… Eh. Can’t say I didn’t deserve it. Live a dipshit, die a dipshit.”

[Fenris]

Nia wondered, briefly, if Garren would be more disappointed or relieved to know his name meant absolutely nothing to her.

Perhaps absolutely nothing was an overstatement; it meant about as much as every other name she'd heard on the last several mornings. It meant a name spoken in bored tones by teachers, attendance called, hands raised, possibilities for group projects, teammates in gym classes. It meant he was a classmate like any other, that she would hear his name again in a day or two or five and then never again. But nothing else. It was clear he thought his reputation proceeded him, and clearer still that he feared for what that meant, but—

She was going to make some mental remark about how meaningless high school cliquishness should be in this environment, but she glanced again at the oozing brain matter that previously made up the consciousness of one Aoi Mishima, and took a step back.

It wasn't the same, though.

He couldn't understand.

She brought marker back to paper; her message this time was longer, long enough she couldn't write it in large enough letters not to risk him coming closer if she tried to hold it up again. Instead she balled the piece of paper and, giving him a moment to acknowledge the action before performing it, tossed it in his general direction.

I don't know who you are. I knew who he was, and that's why I killed him. As far as I'm aware you haven't done anything worth killing over. If I'm incorrect in my assessment I'm sure you'll let me know.

Jokes. She was being funny. It was funny. Wasn't it?

Compassion fatigue most often struck doctors and those working in disaster areas. Garren barely seemed to notice the corpse at his side after a few short moments of shock. Was this not a disaster area? Were they not all tired?

She was so very tired.

[Pippi]

He didn’t laugh.

Maybe he would have if Nia had laughed, again because of the ‘do whatever makes the possibly crazy person with a gun happy’ rule. He couldn't tell for sure; he still wasn’t acting like he wanted to with Aoi’s body lying next to him. Everything still felt dull, like he was deep underwater, with everything muffled. He definitely wouldn’t have laughed because he found it funny. Even if it had been a good joke to start with, he really didn’t find the subject of death all that hilarious.

Fucking weird, right?

He frowned instead, eyes fixed on the crumpled scrap of paper clutched in his hand. He was lucky as all hell, it seemed, to have run into the one person from George Hunter who had no clue who he was. Or was he? Maybe Nia wasn’t the exception but the rule. Maybe nobody gave as much of a shit about him or despised him as much as he thought. Which… yeah, that’d be a real boon now, make his goal of getting people to join with him and follow him a hell of a lot easier. But, look, thinking about the possibility that his entire life had been an even bigger waste of time than he’d even thought feasible didn’t really sit all that well with him!

And there was more, because of course there fucking was. The answer to ‘why the fuck did you shoot your friend in the head’ was still up in the air, far as Garren could see. ‘Because she knew him’, apparently. Cool, except she’d only killed people, and he was pretty damn sure she knew more than two people from school. Had she been suspicious of Aoi in a way she wasn’t of him? Did she have her own internal logic that she was unwilling to tell others about, that led to certain people getting killed? Suspicious to be sure, but ultimately well intentioned?

Ugh. The questions wouldn’t stop. He’d known this was gonna be hard, but he’d always thought that actually doing it would be the hard part. Not the questioning. Not the self-doubt.

“Well... “

He continued to speak slowly, picking each word as it came, not letting it leave his lips until he was certain it was the right one.

“If you’ve got no reason to kill me now, I’m doubting you’ll find a reason from this point on. I dunno if you can trust me on a lot of things, but, uh, this is one of them.”

Garren paused, then folded the piece of paper up, slipping it into his pocket.

“Uh, if I go now, will you shoot me? Cause if you do, that’s a serious dick move, and I’ll be real pissed for the last three seconds of my life.”

[Fenris]

See? They were having fun.

Nia was tempted to shoot him solely for the absurdity of doing so, at the very moment it would be least expected, but whatever few moments of soulless humor she might theoretically derive from the action would fail to manifest in reality. He seemed eager to leave; she wondered, too idly to put pen to paper to ask, if he had any plan beyond removing himself from the vicinity of a murderer and her corpse. If her assumptions were correct he had no water and now only an energy bar to his name; he was near enough to the river to collect water, if he had any spare bottles, though it was altogether possible he lacked even that much.

The energy bar was a gift capriciously given. An experiment. A test. Water would be an actual boon, not that she was willing to go that far. Not that it mattered to her. Dehydration could kill in three days, less in the heat and humidity. A convenient way to escape responsibility for the inevitable. Perhaps she was underestimating him, or perhaps she had overestimated him from the beginning. What did it matter? She was rapidly losing interest. Her result had been obtained moments after she'd pulled the trigger.

A nod and a smile would be enough to send him on his way. It was more instinct than sense that moved her to look at her papers again, to write some parting words, perhaps, but her fingers stumbled onto used sheets, words scrawled quickly by her busy hand. She had meant to add a fourth edition in the morning, during announcements and then, after the distraction those provided, during her sojourn to the pier. But she had—not forgotten. She never forgot. It was more important than forgetting.

She didn't care. She didn't need to know. Notes were needed when friend and foe were distinct and distinguishable. What differentiated any of them, now? Danger was only difficult to spot for people too naive to expect it. After danger was nothing. An indistinguishable mass.

Aoi had distinguished himself. He smelled like singed hair. Just a touch of rot.

She wrote a few words on an empty sheet and folded it into the other three, tossing the lot at Garren like a paper football. The best that could be said for her aim was it didn't land in the mess of blood and brain.

I have the sense this will be more useful to you than I.

[Pippi]

A smile and a nod. Wasn’t exactly a blood oath, or spitting in your hand and shaking with it, but Garren wasn’t really in a position to ask for more. And even if he did say something like ‘Actually, I would like a fully written confirmation that you won’t pop a cap in my dumb idiot face, please. With a signature’, nothing was gonna stop Nia from, y’know… doing that, if she felt like it. All he could do was trust her now.

God. Talk about doing a full 180. He’d come into this, steadfast in the knowledge that the one thing he couldn’t do was spend more than half-second with a killer, nothing but a fleeting glimpse as he cheesed it in the other direction, and now he was telling himself he had to trust her. And after he’d gone and… y’know… to Aoi, too.

Ah, there it was. The reluctance to talk about the thing two feet to his left, the delightful feeling of rising bile. Reality was coming back to hit him like a massive fuck-off freight train, and he needed to get out of here… well, he really needed to have gotten out of here about 15 minutes ago, but he sure as fuck needed to leave now.

And he was on the verge of doing so, when the ball of paper landed at his feet, somehow managing to roll to a halt with only a splattering of mud tarnishing its surface. Garren looked between it and Nia for a moment, before hastily picking it up and shoving it in his pocket. Later. He could see what she’d written later. It was time to go, go go go.

… Almost.

“One… one last thing.”

He realised, and his stomach realised it too, that his gaze was fixed on the apple Nia had been eating. It was little more than a core now, a couple bites of fruit on the top and bottom. Of all things, he was reminded of the sort of pathetic depths even he’d never sunk down to; y’know, buying used panties off of egirls on Twitch for ridiculous prices.

He felt the tiny weight of the protein bar in his pocket, and his stomach twisting itself into knots, and he knew he really didn’t have any choice anymore.

“You, uh, gonna finish that?”

[Fenris]

She giggled.

It was funny. Unquestionably.

Desperate times, desperate measures. Even if the boy hadn't been starving, unless he had the temerity to earn a prize himself (a possibility that, in her limited interactions with him, she felt comfortable dismissing outright), a chance to take the last few nibbles of her apple would be his last chance to eat anything fresher and more flavorful than compressed sawdust. It had limited pleasure to offer her, the flavor saturating her tastebuds already, and she had her orange and banana leftover besides. She would be losing close enough to nothing.

She would be gaining close enough to nothing, too, considering she never expected to see the boy again and moreso expected him dead within the next two days. But you never knew. Better to be owed a favor than not.

She gave him a moment's warning, and tossed the apple.

He caught it when it mattered. Metaphorical, perhaps. Or meaningless.

It didn't matter.

She waved.

[Pippi]

Thank God that this was the one time that The Girl Who Could Not Throw and The Man Who Could Not Catch failed miserably at their jobs.

The apple, or what little remained of it, was already starting to turn brown. It was slimy in his hand, both from the natural apple juice and Nia’s saliva from biting into it. Unappetising enough, so he was really glad it hadn’t taken a dunk in the mud as well.

There was no hesitation as he took a bite from the top half of the apple. It was barely a mouthful with barely any flavour remaining. But it was some nutrition, and some + nothing was always better than nothing + nothing. It’d give him another few minutes, and maybe those minutes would allow his legs to power forwards to someone who’d spare him a chunk of bread.

He’d eaten worse before, anyway. Nothing could ever top that Sour Patch Kids cereal for pure, undiluted, garbage mouth feel.

Garren didn’t return the wave. He wanted to puzzle out his thoughts, figure out exactly how he was supposed to go about dealing with killers when he bumbled into them, but not here, not with Nia still on the scene. He wasn’t friends with her, he knew that much. He wasn’t going to suddenly turn around and try and be all buddy-buddy with the girl who’d shot his ally right in front of him.

He stared at her instead for a few seconds. Then he ran, apple in his hand, papers in his pocket, bile rising in his throat.

((Garren Mortimer continued in The match is struck. A blazing star is born.))

[Fenris]

"GOODBYE," Nia didn't say with words because she couldn't, and didn't say with her hands because the action would be futile. They felt tangled, anyway, her fingers, with the mental acknowledgement that she would never have opportunity to spin sentences with them again. As far as she was aware there was one person left on the island who would understand her, and after what had happened last she saw him she was more liable to communicate with him via bullets than signs. She could sign at the cameras, she supposed, but her parents could barely sign anyway, and on this island her parents might as well be figments of her imagination, for all the good thinking of them would do her.

She was supposed to miss them. She imagined the impassioned cries of her classmates to the eyes on them, asking to be or not to be observed, listened to, stating their last wills and testaments, saying goodbyes. A fascinating sociological study, if only she was on the other side of it, if only she hadn't convinced herself that the museums in DC would be worth the crowding, etcetera, pointless thoughts, everyone she loved would still be dead, anyway, what would it matter? No, Jeremiah would have stayed home if she had. He would have. It was her fault.

She was alone again, anyway. Alone with beginnings of rot.
It was her fault.
It was what she deserved.

She considered dropping her erstwhile reward weapon off the waterfall; the rocks and the water ought to ruin it for anyone else, and she was fairly confident from her experimentation that the additional weight of the gun was not going to be counterweighed by her ability to aggress with it. But her pistol had limited ammo, and if she was unfortunate enough to fall into more serious firefights, she would not be thankful for her sacrifice of firepower. The weight could be dealt with. Besides, the severely unlikely possibility of the gun surviving the fall would inevitably come back to haunt her. Her own life was the only thing that sufficed to protect it, as she hardly cared what destruction it might wreak beyond then.

It hurt more than she'd like, climbing off her rock; it had been easy to forget pain with how long she'd been sitting still, and with the distraction of company. Her shoulder hurt from the wild shots she'd taken. Her side hurt from the wound she'd suffered the day prior. She'd taken care of it, changed the bandages, the butterfly strips held fast, for now, and the pain became unnotable through stillness and concentration, but the moment she moved it angrily reasserted its presence. The butterfly strips almost certainly would break the moment she had to move any more quickly than a light jog, and without an erstwhile ally to threaten into assisting she wasn't sure how she'd take care of it.

It will be fine, some voice said in her mind. Uncharacteristically. Objectively incorrectly.

Maybe that didn't matter.

Maybe the alternative to fine was death. Maybe, assuming that binary, fine was, at least, more correct. The world was relative. She was injured, and exhausted, and alive. Jeremiah was dead. Stepney was dead. Alexander was dead. Beryl was dead. Dozens of people whose names and faces didn't matter to her were dead.

She was fine.

The world was ending.

>> The world refused to change.