Survival Of The Fittest

Jonathan couldn't blame Lizzie for thinking that he was lying as he might not be thinking about what happened in the clearest way possible and he might not believe himself in her position. As soon as Jonathan opened his mouth to speak; Morgan was the one to cut in with saying that he was telling the truth about Michael and that it seemed that Morgan really wanted to find his friend. Jonathan wasn't about to tell him that he shouldn't look for Michael. That would make him look like a hypocrite as he was going to look for someone who was a murderer as well and he just wanted to talk about why it did happen. He had thought that everything would be okay after leaving Declyn…

"You're a really loyal friend, Morgan." He commented quietly as he shuffled his feet a little and he glanced around at his surroundings with more caution. "Maybe he does need a friend right now. Maybe he doesn't if he's too far gone. There are other people out there that can be bad influences..."

He thought of Teresa in that moment as she had almost caught him in her web of deceit and he shook his head slightly.

"I think that you-"

Jonathan felt his voice trailing off as he had seen something interesting that was almost hidden out of their sight and he found himself forgetting about Morgan and Lizzie because of the distraction. He did a bit of a power walk towards the object and then he realized what it was. A mountain bike. He grabbed one of the handlebars with his spare hand and he lifted it up slightly. He felt relieved to see that the tires were not flat and this could help him travel around the island more easily.

He glanced back at Morgan and Lizzie, then back at the bicycle and then back at the two of them once again.

"I kind of got a bit distracted there." He said simply with a stoic expression on his face. "You guys don't mind if I take this, right? I actually have to go and find.... someone."

They didn't need to know that he was talking about Declyn.

Her disbelief with the situation won out, and Lizzie let out a long, exasperated sigh. Of all the boyfriends in the world, she had to have the one with the big damn heart, didn’t she?

She laughed though. A small chuckle, but an honest one that was finished with a smile. She showed it to Morgan.

“You dummy. I already said that I wanted to help you with this. What am I going to do, walk off and wait to hear the news from you later? We both know that’s not going to happen.”

She moved back towards him, holding his hand again. She wanted to see him smile too. “Please stop pulling that face. I need you to keep it together for me, ok?”

Him worrying just made her worry. There was only so much time left for them, and she just wanted to ride it in a wave of careless coupledom. If that meant going along with Morgan’s crazy plan to find a crazy guy off his meds, who may or may not turn them both into lampshades or whatever it was he did, then she wasn’t going to think too hard about it. At least until Morgan came to his senses and got some of his self-preservation instincts back.

Maybe she couldn’t sympathise. Since she’d stopped being a bitch, she couldn’t honestly say she’d made any honest-to-God true friends. She had buddies and companions, plenty of people who’d forgiven her past or never seen it in the first place, but they were casual acquaintances. Sometimes it made her feel left out.

She’d been lucky enough to get someone like Morgan in her life, especially with how short it had turned out to be. Even if she didn’t understand those feelings of wanting to protect your true friend, she wanted to protect Morgan. If Morgan regained his will to not walk into a knife too late, then by golly at least they’d be together at the time and could say they wrapped it up doing what he thought was right.

She turned back to Jon, as he pulled out the bike. She found herself hit with envy for a moment, wishing that they’d grabbed that before company had arrived and reaffirmed her willingness to walk towards a loony because Morgan wanted to, before deciding to let it go. Morgan’s hand in hers kept her grounded.

“Unless it’s a tandem, you’d probably get more use out of it. Do you mind, Morgan?”

Morgan blinked at the bicycle, a little surprised by its sudden appearance. He hadn't noticed it before, so that Jonathan just seemed to conjure it out of mid-air gave him a surreal feeling. This whole situation was surreal — from waking up with an explosive collar on his neck, trying not to think about his now-dead teachers, hearing his peers and friends die, having to defend himself from homicidal classmates?

Surreal didn't even begin to explain it.

"Y—yeah man, you— whatever you want to do is fine. Go nuts." Morgan waved his hand at the bike, commandeering it the furthest thing from mind. Looking back at Lizzie, he couldn't quite find a smile for her. He knew exactly what he was pushing her towards, and there likely wouldn't be time later to feel guilty about it.

"I know, I just," he trailed off. It pained him to even conceptualize the words, put the concept into the world at all. If anything happened to Lizzie, he wasn't sure what he would do. Yet he almost hoped that it was a problem he would have to deal with, to spare her the pain of having to go through it herself.

"This is something that I have to do, and I know, it's probably a terrible idea." He turned to Jonathan. "Where did you see him? Probably long gone now, but... it's a start."

Jonathan was just staring at the both of them as they said that they didn't seem to mind what he did with the bicycle and he just give Morgan and Lizzie a slight nod of thanks. He wasn't sure where he actually wanted to go next and he needed to mull over it in his head. He needed to find somewhere else to rest as he didn't feel like disturbing the other two anymore and he just wanted to take a nap in peace. Maybe somewhere which he could barricade? It was worth a try.

He still wondered about how Michael was doing. Was he actually in a more worst state of mind after what had happened in the woods? It wasn't as if he had an answer for that. Maybe no one was ever going to be okay on this island as it was driving more and more people to do things that they would not normally do and there was no way that he could do anything about it.

Morgan was talking to him again and Jonathan was pulled back into the real world.

"I saw him in the woods. I don't know if that would help...." He said as he shifted himself onto the bicycle with ease and he shifted his eyes over to the ocean that was a bit away from a distance. "Hope you can help Michael, Morgan. If not...."

He looked back at Morgan with seriousness in his dull-drooping eyes.

"...Someone will have to stop him eventually."

He let the comment sink into the cold silence around them.

"Bye." He said stoically before leaving them to do whatever it was that they wanted to do.

((Jonathan Meyers continued in Among The Sef))

Oh good, they were literally walking into the woods to find a crazy guy! No doubt the woods where loads of people had already been murdered! Christ, she’d seen these movies. Morgan was screwed, in likely a very painful manner, and she was going to wind up a Final Girl.

Wait, shit, she wasn’t a virgin anymore!

She tried not to let the exasperation of walking into their next R rated feature together (a different genre this time) show, as she squeezed Morgan’s hand. Instead she watched Jon cycle off into the great unknown, perhaps never to be seen again. Perhaps he was going to be Michael’s next victim, and they’d find him hung by his nipples from a tree. Great scene, five stars for them.

She let out another quiet sigh, squeezing her shears in hand as possible titles for the flick ran through her head. The tagline would inevitably be ‘Shear Menace!’ at this rate. She hoped it was at least one of those movies where the Final Girl actually survived, instead of getting killed two seconds before the credits. In a perfect world it’d be a movie where the Final Girl and her boyfriend both survived, but good luck naming one of those.

“Should we go there now?” she asked Morgan, still trying to put on a brave face rather than picture what his entrails would look like on the outside. She was starting to really hate Michael.

Boy, Jonathan sure was a beacon of shining light and happiness, wasn't he? Having retrieved the bicycle from wherever it had come from — why there was even a bicycle on the island at all was a whole other question — Morgan watched him go, not altogether unhappy to be rid of him. Jonathan had laid out some unpleasant truths, particularly the one that his best friend might not truly be his friend anymore. Feeling Lizzie's hand grasp his again, he lazily shook his head out of the daze and turned to look at his girlfriend. She didn't deserve any of this, and there was a degree of guilt within his soul for the terrible fate he was dragging her towards. Like a moth to the flame, Morgan couldn't help himself.

His friends were in trouble, and even if they weren't truly his friends any longer, he needed to try. Of course, that begged the question — he'd been so concerned with his best buddy, he'd forgotten all about his other friends. What of Jonah, of Henry? In the state Erika was apparently in, he'd be more than happy not to see her again; he couldn't imagine how she'd been driven to kill so many so easily.

Was it truly easy?

"Y—yeah, I guess."

Of course not. It wasn't easy. It couldn't be easy — for Erika, for Michael, for any of them. Killing someone, and actually honest-to-goodness intending to take them out of this world wasn't something that most people took lightly. Even if they were just following a twisted sense of self-preservation or a distorted view of what one needed to do in order to survive, it shouldn't have ever been easy. Maybe for someone like Quinn, whom always looked like they hated everyone, it was simpler, but it still shouldn't have been easy.

The second it became easy was the second that you understood that people were damaged in ways that you couldn't even fathom.

Morgan didn't want to believe that about his friends, about Michael, or Erika, or anyone else who'd succumbed to the murderous haze that seemed to have randomly picked his classmates off. Even someone like Wyatt, the dickbag who'd had no problem beating the hell out of him to steal his things, even he hadn't killed him. If Wyatt Carter could wait six days in hell without killing anyone, what was everyone else's excuse?

He was suddenly very unsure about finding his friend.

"We should, uh, we should press on, then."

The problem was, Morgan didn't know what else to do.

He'd never been all that good at thinking ahead.

((Morgan Dragosavich and Lizzie Lebowski continued elsewhere))