Survival Of The Fittest

Ty couldn’t help but cringe a bit at Katelynne’s naivete, but couldn’t bring himself to speak to it. The only thing to say was that she would lose him and Princess and Diaz one way or another. Or they’d lose her. Collectively they only advanced the chances of the best of their group from “remote” to “hilariously unlikely.”

The truth of the matter wasn’t really what felt true here, though. Ty’s mind reached its claws out towards some other loose thread in Katelynne’s words, pawing at it in the hopes of finding something to pull at. Something else to say. Telling him fighting off Quinn was some kind of death wish, that she was a monster who wouldn’t hesitate. From where Katelynne was sitting, that might’ve been true. Whatever Quinn was though, it started out as a person. One who he had a foot in height and a hundred and twenty pounds on, give or take. Weapons aside, there was no even footing to be found between the two of them. If they met, she was not walking away.

Still, he understood that telling Katelynne that he was confident in his ability to beat Quinn until she stopped moving forever wasn’t terribly comforting. Even if it was to him, on some level. The predatory creature in his mind kept pawing at Katelynne’s words. Trying to find something to pounce on. Something he could respond to and not feel stilted or unfeeling. Something true.

Though, that was why he was here for her. To be cold, and still somehow comforting. Unmoving, when people needed someone who didn’t waver. Useful as the person he was, not some idealized Ty who reacted to things the way other people did. He answered her, near to a whisper. The words sort of just emerged without thinking about them.

“I’m not scared.”

No answer. Ty looked down and noticed that Katelynne had fallen asleep on his shoulder. He sighed, considering for a moment taking her back into the Temple, to relative safety. Of course that meant waking her.

Waking up in this place sucked.

Katelynne could stay, at least until it was someone else’s turn to take watch. Ty stared out at the road, thinking back to the last time he’d gotten decent sleep. A few weekends ago, they had a whole house between the two of them. They found a kind of safety neither of them had ever really felt before. Knowing they’d not have to face silence and darkness alone. Knowing they’d wake up and see each other into a new day. Made it easier to look ahead at the future, believing so strongly that was what awaited them. Feeling that there couldn’t be any reason they wouldn’t keep waking up together.

Even as frustratingly real as this all felt, Ty still couldn’t help but fantasize that he might soon open his eyes and wake up from all of this. That she’d be there, passed out on his shoulder, just like Katelynne was.

Maybe Erika was still there. Maybe, he thought, he’d soon find a way to wake up.

It was a hard ask, breathing in the tropical musk of hell. Let alone sleeping in it. Princess supposed she'd fooled the lot of them with her stillness. Really, she just wasn't much of a toss-and-turner. She was too void of substance to be healthy like salad. She'd groggily tried to peel herself off the floor when Kate had stolen out of the building. Like a thief in the night, a moonlit tryst.

Princess couldn't hear much of what had transpired, was blind to the winding paths that had been trailblazed by the sleepless. It had gone on a long time. Kate, at some point, had started crying. The barest wisps of their shadows visible by moonlight trying to bleed onto the temple walls implied they were now together, two odd shapes not quite fit for one another, shapely all the same. It looked rather nice, through the painful haze of exhaustion, the floor itself constantly evaporating away into the smoky horizontal line between her own dreams floating too close to earth and reality trapped by gravity.

An image of substance, for once. Storybook, fairy-tale, but all too real. Princess supposed she was a bit jealous she wasn't part of it? Hard to sort out the sterile beakers worth of her lab-grown emotions in her waking daze. Mostly she just wanted to hold Kate again. But that wasn't happening. Kate deserved a true protector. One with narrative weight, with value in name.

She glared resentfully at the bundle of monotone shapes that represented Lucas. Her bag, her security blanket by default, already lay open to one side. She proposed a toast:

"This is for you," a dry hiss, snake skin scales shedding, "the terrorist's literal poison. You did say you want to off yourself, right? Well here's to you. You need it more than I do." In one palm extended the cheap-looking thimble flask, the uneventfully clear liquid that promised a slow and painful death. Her weapon, all these days. Baby shoes, never worn.

Just a joke, really. A bad one, but her way of taking off the edge.

Lucas rolled over to face Princess.

"Nice one," he said, before sitting up, "I'd laugh if I didn't think you were seriously offering to me for a second.

It had been a long time since Lucas had been able to sleep.

[So, getting smothered in his slumber had never truly been an option.]

"Should go and offer that to Kate and Ty, see what they think," he whisper-slurred, "or how about don't, because it'd be dumb and ruin any chance any of us sleeping tonight."

"How do you ruin something that's already not happening?"

Princess groaned, surprising even herself with how loud and obnoxiously whiny it was. Was this to be a TeenNick rerun? Was that what she'd been reduced to? In a way, it was almost heartening. At least she had emotions- even if that emotion was the hardly Pulitzer prize winning 'cranky and tired'.

She bodily threw the vial back into her bag, where it unfortunately did not break into a million pieces. Her back violently hit the floor in protest, then promptly protested having so violently hit the floor.

"... You weren't supposed to be awake to hear that."

Sounded like a smile. First in a while. Went away fast, like all moments did. Only one thing on this earth had true staying power.

"You aren't supposed to be awake to say it," Lucas replied.

He looked at her, the vague blob in the dark that made pretentious noises and was, for the moment, his friend. It was startling just how dark the temple was. It felt like he was being watched by many pairs of eyes from the darkness—he'd have no real way of knowing if they had been joined by others, obscuring themselves, given the darkness. He didn't believe in ghosts, but if he did, this would freak him out.

"Are you afraid of the dark?" Lucas asked.

"Or is something else bugging you?"

That inky patch of maybe human shape splayed in corpse-like repose. Stared at the ceiling like it would stare back at some point.

"As told by Princess," she hummed, gently sing-song like the lullaby that absolutely none of them needed.

"I could go on and on." Conversational tone. As if they actually knew one another and hadn't even had the interest to bother to avoid one another like the plague in their prior life. "Rant about the tropes and the blocking and the scripting and the-" Ah. Stopped herself before she actually did what she was promising she'd do. She'd almost gotten worked up there- burned off the exhaustion. Almost. Her next breath then suffused into the still atmosphere of the room. A brief presence of something alive.

"Simply put. 'm not built for this. I'm... surprisingly okay with all of it. I think... Still all wrong though. Like, uh. Funnily enough the terrorist's games, mm, bil... bil-something..." Should have been a word for it. Somewhere in the screeching hypnagogic static that demanded she did the impossible and drift off into absolute vulnerability. "Demand character growth. Kinda. Not like I ever actually watched any of them, but. Get my point?"

If you were tired enough, it was hard to even tell if what was happening was in this world or the next.

"It's a story, sure. A production, but I can't make myself fit into it. I'm a ghost? Bored audience to my own death, Violet's death, Sapphire's... Should about cover my existential crisis."

I really hope I don't sound this fucking pretentious when I talk.

Lucas really didn't know what to say to Princess. She thought she an actress in a play, just like her previous existence as a mock thespian. It mirrored Lucas' won thought process too well. Just days ago he'd been pretending his actions were part of some heroic quest to avenge someone he barely knew and hyper-fixated on like the hopeless idiot he was. Who was he kidding? He just put a body in some bushes so he had room to sleep on a floor soaked with its blood. That was hardly heroic; even Gilgamesh had standards. Despite his initial reaction of disgust when Lucas first heard Princess, well, say a single word, he had realized that there wasn't much separating the two.

Maybe that was where the disgust came from in the first place.

"If it'd bore you to see yourself die, I could kill you in your sleep so you don't have to watch it," Lucas offered.

"Or you could get Katelynne or Tyrell to do it. Basically a fifty-fifty on which one would decide to do it, despite appearances."

He paused, and blinked away some tired from his eyes.

"Don't think anyone I know anyone who has ever lost quite that much on a coin toss before, though."

"I... um. It'd be dramatic enough a moment." After a moment of weighty consideration that was about where her mind settled the issue. It sounded good enough. Used to be that she'd had more artistic integrity than that. So she'd imagined.

"Couldn't ask any of you to do that to me though. And I'd hate looking any of you in the eyes while you pulled the trigger."

She felt exceedingly self-conscious all of a sudden. Defensive, like she physically had to scrub all the things she'd just been saying from the muck slowly eroding her flesh like pestilence. Didn't help that the echo of her own voice carried back at her off the walls- nobody ever sounded as nice played back as they did through the thick of their own empty skull.

"I- Didn't use to think like this much. I had a real motive back home- y'know." She was speaking a bit too fast. No control to the ramble. She'd have scoffed at herself, if she'd still resembled herself in any way. "I hid it from everyone, Kate even. I was trailer trash." Somewhere Mom was watching, wasn't she? Princess could have enjoyed the moment of self-immolating catharsis- she did, even, but only as a third-party witness to herself. "One parent, grandma left a gaping hole in the mortgage when she died. Uh, like? I didn't care too much about narratives or whatever. I just wanted to get out of there. Save up for a car, go somewhere else called anywhere else. Maybe keep acting if I could afford to. Get myself a girlfriend. Got that one done, then she up and died."

Say her name, coward.

"Christ." She grunted, high-pitched as the frustration suddenly boiled over. "Why am I telling all this to a boy? You." Her arm erupted through the dark, a blot of shadow vaguely closer to Lucas' face or what might have passed for that general shape. Closer than all the other incomprehensible bits of void. "Your turn to say stuff nobody else should be forced to sit through? Please."

Some time passed, and Katelynne stirred awake off of Tyrell's shoulder. "Sorry," she rubbed her eyes, "must be more tired than I thought."

After a few more moments of silence between the two of them, she cleared her throat and pushed herself off the step. "I'm, uh, gonna go check up on the others."

She stopped at the door, her hand caressing the old wood. "And, uhm... thanks, for... ya know..."

She left it at that as she squeezed back into the darkness of the temple.

---

Quinn killed again; this time it was Meilin... really sweet girl.

Erika killed three times. One of them was Yuka's sisters. Katelynne didn't reflect on crossing her path back in the woods that much considering everything else that's happened, but it was kind of hitting her that now Yuka was all alone now. Sure Katelynne's gone through a lot in the past week, but she didn't lose a sister. She didn't lose two of them.

It was still way too hot. The inside of the temple at least had the shade going for it, but everywhere felt like you were walking through soup. Katelynne was really glad they stopped for water now because otherwise there'd be no way they could've made it through a day like today.

At least it was pretty quiet, all things considering. No one came to bother them, which honestly was a huge relief. Katelynne really didn't feel much like talking to anyone especially after the thing with Tyrell last night, so the less people the better. It was hard enough trying to throw Princess off with her somewhat prodding questions as it was.

Tyrell had a lot of... colorful things to say after the announcements and took a walk for the last few hours. In the meantime, Katelynne decided to try and clean up the place. Said it was to make the place feel more like home when Lucas asked what the heck the point was, but honestly it was just something to do.

At least she could get rid of this angel painting. She turned it face down as she carried it out the building and set it against the outer wall somewhere out of the way. She clapped her hands together afterwards, smacking off the dust and dirt.

After the announcements hit, Ty had left the group to take a walk. Every name felt like another burden.

Gervais didn’t make it; much as Ty didn’t want to believe it, the beating he’d given him might’ve been a contributing factor in his demise.

Nathan’s death was difficult to fathom, and Ty tried not to imagine how that might’ve gone. It had been a beating of some kind. He really didn’t want to imagine that. Realistically speaking there was no way to stop it from happening, but it still left a sour taste in his mouth regardless. Once, they’d all elected him class president. Ty had voted cynically, but he knew at least a few people did it because they knew it’d made him really happy. Happier than any of them would’ve been.

Claude killed Bret Carter. For some reason, that didn’t feel the way Ty wanted it to. There was no satisfaction. Just emptiness. Maybe because he didn’t do it. Maybe because in a way, he was one of the reasons it happened.

Lorenzo killed again, and he had a gun. That would complicate things.

Diego, one of Chris’ friends, had killed too. Finally found the stomach for it, after what he’d seen. Maybe because of what he’d seen.

Drew was dead. No details, but he could’ve seen a mercy killing with the way things were going. It was hard to imagine Declyn killing him for any other reason. Ty hoped he’d helped more than he hindered, but there was no way to know. He could guess, but that hurt too.

Nine. She’d killed nine people. Nine steps closer to being the last one standing. Nine more cracks in whatever was left of her psyche. On some level he still wanted her to live, even after everything. On another, he knew there wasn’t much of her that was surviving this; that part of him was glad she was suffering.

At least Lucas Brady killed himself. The bastard finally did something right. Something he probably should’ve done a long time ago. If only he’d had the balls to before he killed Andy. Ty said as much out loud after the speakers went out, and he could tell it made the rest of the gang uncomfortable. Another reason to leave.

So he’d walked, aimlessly. Selfishly, leaving his group alone to fend for themselves. He should’ve been able to process it all, swallow his heavy thoughts, and move on. Do what had to be done, what was necessary. Quit the bullshit and the whining and self-pity.

But the armor he’d once worn was just gone, ground down through every confused attempt to redefine himself here. In place of whatever he believed he was, there was just guilt. The precious little time he’d slept had been a morass of nightmares; of things he’d done, things that had been done to him, and all he might do in return.

There wasn’t anything he could do but cool off. Move around a bit. Protect Katelynne and Lucas and Princess from himself, until he could calm down. Resolution was beyond him, but numbing himself to the pain was still an option. It was too easy to lash out at stupid things, too easy to overreact.

He kept to the trails, so it was easy enough to backtrack. Followed them to the manor house, and the strange collection of houses that occupied the island’s central plateau. Ty kept to the perimeter of the area, never going too far from the treeline. Eyes peeled for threats, bodies, supplies, any information he could bring back to the group. Anything useful. He felt bad enough for walking out to begin with, and for being so volatile as to have to do so. There ought to be some mechanism to control himself, he thought. Some bundle of nerves that let him shut down the twitching, the needling urge to destroy whatever it was that was causing him pain.

Everything. Himself. Anything he could get his hands on. Just to make it stop.

A few minutes into his quiet search, his eyes caught a glimpse of something. A flash. A colour. Nostalgic. Bright. A green that was hard to find anywhere else on the island.

Lorenzo.

Ty nearly dove back into the treeline, hoping that he hadn’t been noticed. The announcements mentioned a headshot, so he had a gun. Closing the distance was paramount. Stalking him, following him as long as necessary until -

What about the others?

He froze, rooted to his spot behind a tree. Fists clenched, staring straight ahead. Fighting, against everything he knew he was, not to fight. To at least think it over. To be anything but himself.

Taking a glance back towards the manor house, he turned and bolted back the way he came.

---

Ty tore up the path towards the Temple, running faster than he probably should have. There was always a chance he was followed, or that Lorenzo might move from the Inner Circle. Chances he couldn’t take, not when there was an opportunity like this. Not when there was finally some clarity of purpose in this godforsaken place.

Katelynne was outside, standing next to what looked like the remains of the angel painting he’d destroyed on the first day. The sight of her caused Ty to slow down, wary that his panic might give way to a worse kind of alarm on her part.

Considerations he couldn’t afford to make. Not now. They had to know what was going to happen. He’d warned them.

“I saw him. I fucking saw him, out by the houses. Lorenzo.”

Ty shrugged off his daypack and tossed it at Katelynne’s feet. That and the rest of his things could stay with the group for now, in case he didn’t make it back. Hopefully the message was clear enough.

He shook his head, still catching his breath from the run. Lucas and Princess weren’t anywhere to be seen.

“Take it. I have to go. I have to end this, Kate - I have to. I’m sorry.”

There was someone in the distance, running in a full sprint like this was the Kentucky Derby.

She took a few steps closer, cautiously until she realized who it was.

Tyrell.

"What's, uh, what's-?" she asked, cut off by his panting as he slowed down.

Wait, Lorenzo? What houses? When?

Her eyes went wide. She stuttered as he threw his duffel down in a huff and tried to catch his breath.

This was it. He was gonna go march off to his death, just like that. But...

Before he got too far down the road again, she managed to scramble together the words and waved her palms at him. "Wait! Tyrell! Please... please be careful."

He didn’t expect her to tell him to stop. She had to know he wouldn’t.

Nevertheless, he turned back to face her. Katelynne wanted him to be careful. Asked him for it. Did anyone ever expect that really made someone safer?

No. But it meant she cared. Ty sighed, and shook his head. The words he’d wanted to say to her the previous night came to mind.

"Look, at some point you're gonna have to realize that one way or another you're gonna keep losing people...”

Ty paused, the words feeling like nihilistic poison as they left his mouth.

“...but I'll try. Bye, Katie."

Until now he’d just called her Katelynne. The nickname felt weird to say out loud. It wasn’t just hers. Katie Marsden, his sister. Katie Agustien, his friend. Katie Kirkpatrick, a companion. Hand-in-hand standing on the ledge, talking about stepping back but still looking over it.

He’d failed them all. Some things, he couldn’t fix, no matter how much he wanted to.

There was one thing he knew he could.

((Tyrell Lahti continued in Hello, My Name Is Human))

Lucas couldn't remember what he said to Princess when she asked him to embarrass himself. He'd fallen asleep just a few minutes later, he was certain, and not bonked over the head. Maybe he bonked himself over the head with the floor? Either way, the memory was gone from his mind. He woke up a few hours later, and found Tyrell going for a walk, and Katelynne back inside. She said she wanted to clean the place, and Lucas had absolutely no idea what the point of that was, but she seemed set on it. Lucas just shrugged and went outside. He had his own beautification to do, he seemed. There was a body out in the bushes that he needed to take care of. Kyle smelled putrid. Absolutely filthy. Disgusting, wretched stench. And yet he had to move this thing, give him a burial somewhere else, perhaps at sea, maybe at the base of the cliff, just somewhere that wasn't inside the temple. Or near it. He didn't want to smell him anymore. And of course Lucas was seated just a foot away.

Why was he sitting next to him, then? Because he had to make sure Katelynne didn't come over. She was doing her stuff inside at the moment, but if she decided that there was something she needed to throw out, Lucas needed to brood over here so that she'd pick the other side of the building. He couldn't move Kyle on his own without some level of catastrophe taking place, he was certain, so he'd just wait until Tyrell came back to get ready for corpse disposal. What a fucking shitshow this was, eh? Lucas twiddled his thumbs and looked out into the distance. From where he was sitting, it looked like the island ended just ten feet away from him. Maybe he could just toss Kyle over the edge. He was a lot lighter without the head, right? And without the blood, that had to be some weight, right? Maybe he should give it a try. He wasn't all worn out from the day yet, maybe he had more strength than yesterday, and getting a hold on him like bridal style would get him all up in the central mass area and yeah maybe he could do this on his own but

but it felt weird just going in like that. Kyle was dead, but he was still, well, sort of a person? A dead one, a finished person, but he was a person, and though there was no soul to appease Lucas still felt like there was some level of respect that needed to be paid. Or, well, some level of discussion to be had.

Uh.

"See any movies lately?" Lucas said to the corpse.

That was about as ridiculous as this was. Kyle didn't need to consent to being thrown into the ocean. He was dead! Dead men cannot consent. At all. Neither could people who were mentally out of sorts, or putting themselves in danger, that's what Lucas knew from experience, but people could act in their own interest and do things for their own good. So it was for Kyle's own good that Lucas would be putting him into the ocean, where nothing bad could happen to them.

Did people wind up fucking corpses on Survival of the Fittest? Lucas had never seen it. Corpse fucking didn't seem out of the question for the weirdo murder type people. Lucas wasn't that eager to lose his virginity. Hell fucking no! That was disgusting. Under no circumstances. Ew. Fucking disgusting. Lucas felt like throwing up.

Jesus, why did he think these things?

"I'm just gonna," Lucas said, standing up and dusting off his pants, "like, I'm just gonna yeet ya. Okay? I'm gonna give you a good throw, right over that cliff, and then you'll be in the water or something. You like water? Didn't you like, uh, bible shit? Isn't there a christ fish or something? You can swim with all the Jesus fish, okay? How does that sound, Kyle?"

Kyle did not respond, because he was a corpse.

Lucas cursed under his breath and bent down to lift up the corpse. He squatted down, put his arm under Kyle's knees and just beneath his shoulders, and tried to lift with his legs. Surprisingly, Kyle left the ground, but only by a few inches. Lucas' arms felt shaky, and he was only able to pivot Kyle out of the bush before he dropped him on the dirt.

"Fuck," he muttered. Just lifting with his legs wouldn't be enough. He'd have to toss him with his whole body, maybe break off in a run, get a running start and scoop him? Or maybe getting Kyle to support himself somehow was the weight. Fireman's carry? Lucas didn't want his head socket so close to his face, but he might have to do that. Jesus fucking dick. This was the worst. Lucas started to pace around the body, doing as much of a circle as he could while still in the shade, his hands in his pockets, face stuck in a grimace that was pointed out towards the sea. If this wasn't the worse day of his life, then it'd have to be tomorrow, or the day after that. One of these days would be the worst of his life. Or maybe it was when Desiree would shot. That'd make more sense. Was that a camera, pointed at him from that corner of the roof? What did Ophelia think of all this? God. Milo? Was Milo looking at this?

Lucas opened his mouth to say something, but was interrupted by Tyrell's hurried return to the building. Katelynne had strayed outside—fuck!—to throw out a painting, and was talking to Tyrell. Lucas peered over, and listened in, but still found himself unable to speak. The one thing keeping Katelynne from turning around and finding out that the body wasn't totally taken care of was his silence. Tyrell seemed panicked, talking hastily about someone he'd seen out in the woods—Lorenzo, right, that was a killer's name, and someone on his list—that he needed to go kill.

But if he was going to go and kill Lorenzo, then who was going to move the body?

Helpless, Lucas watched as Tyrell threw his stuff to the ground at Katelynne's feet and ran off into the distance, leaving her in the doorway. He turned around and went back behind the building. The corpse hadn't moved. Thank god. What would he have done if it was mysteriously gone? Probably jumped off the cliff himself. He was pretty sure that the cliff he saw just a few feet away wasn't it, that if he got close enough he'd see that the island rolled down for at least a couple hundred more feet in that direction before finally terminating in a steep drop, but he wasn't tall enough to see over that edge. Twenty feet away? Optical illusions were weird. Maybe he'd walk down there and get rid of it, if he could carry the body long enough. It was possible, if he did the fireman's carry, but he wanted to try bridal style again.

It wasn't really necessary to lift Kyle's legs. They could dangle, and he'd be fine. Weights drooping towards the ground, but less that Lucas needed to carry. He could put an arm around Kyle's waist, and an arm around the part of his back just below his shoulders, and basically be holding a fifty, sixty pound weight with some things dangling off of it. Gravity would take care of those bits. Anchors! Yes. Thank god Kyle was small. Lucas hefted him up and found that his hold was working, for whatever reason. He was doing it! Kyle was moving, because Lucas' feet were moving. It wasn't easy, but at this rate he could make it over to the real cliff in no time. Like, ten minutes tops. Hey, and Lucas moved a little faster if he leaned forward, too, that was good. Now that was cooking with gas. Lucas took a step forward, and another step, and another, and the false cliff was approaching, and he could see over it, and there was yet more land before him, and at the bottom right before the real edge was a group of people, and maybe they could help him carry the body, and hey wait didn't they look sort of familiar, and

and his foot fell wrong on a rock, practically a pebble, that he hadn't seen, and he careened forward, rapidly approaching the ground before he stuck out his hands and managed to catch himself before his head smacked the dirt.

"Holy fuck," he said, "that was, shit, that was fucking close."

Lucas lifted himself and checked his hands, making sure he hadn't scraped them up too bad. His left palm was a little scratched up, he'd dug it a little too far into the dirt, but he hadn't really broken through the skin. His right hand seemed pretty immaculate, all things considered. Of course, his wrists hurt, what with the sudden shock absorption and all, but generally Lucas seemed to be pretty alrighwhere the fuck did Kyle go—

He peered over the ledge and saw that some commotion had started in the group at the base of the cliff. Also, they seemed a little bigger than before.

Like, one desiccated corpse bigger.

"Shit," Lucas muttered as he backed away from the cliff, "shit, fuck, shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitfuck."

He turned around and went back around to the front of the temple. Maybe they hadn't seen him. Maybe he could go inside and curl up in a ball in the corner and hide. Yeah. That'd be nice.

When he rounded the corner, Lucas had a distant, disturbed look on his face, and not a single word on his tongue.

Lucas had definitely said something, but it hadn't been memorable enough to commit to. Could be that she could remember little after dismally long dawn-lit hours of pained wakefulness. She'd long lost count of the number of times she'd started counting the seconds ticking by. Constantly getting up into the thousands, without sleepiness being lured any closer to her still body. The only memories that could survive such a trial, inevitably and of course, were those of her own humiliating improv work. It was only fair that she'd smeared her entire carefully constructed persona over the wall like feces, only proper. Well, maybe Lucas had forgotten what she'd said, done her such a small kindness.

She'd finally flickered out on that bit of wishful thinking. Must have been maybe six in the morning, judging by the light bleeding through her eyelids before she'd lost awareness of it.

Sun was high in the sky when she woke. Felt like a particularly odd homage to the now-seemingly otherworldly indulgence of sleeping in. Nobody seemed to be around. Given at least some space to herself, and only still just leery enough of the threat of other sentient beings that she found shelter behind one of the temple's many hanging... tapestries, they must have been, bulky panels of silk. Everything changed, and the worst of the tropical soup her pores had been cooking up in her slumber was wiped away with the pajama pants- whatever, not like she'd be using them again. Ever in life, et cetera. A black off the shoulder that had been intended for 'be at the pool without swimming' shenanigans, creamy beige capris. Princess noted with distaste that her shoulders were an entire paint swatch paler than her hands- an entire week on a perpetually sunny island and she couldn't even get the tanning right.

She had to imagine her face looked atrocious. She'd always hated her rinky-dink nose. She contemplated the still-existent makeup kit in her bag. But it was hard to even summon the energy to imagine, let alone do. She ran a hand through her hair, observing by her efforts the amount of knots each individual strand had worked itself into.

She stepped out from cover, seeing Kate watching off into the distance out the temple's main door, discarding the 'how do I look' snark faster than she could even contemplate it.

Kate mentioned Tyrell had run off to hunt down... Lorenzo? One of the island's multitude of murderers, by now. Actionable, at least.

"He'll be fine. He seems like the sort who couldn't die even if he himself wanted to."

Kate didn't seem to respond well to that particular phrasing. Princess smiled, apologetically. A genuine enough gesture, in substance if not in style. Princess' dry lips could barely form shapes.

"I'm suddenly feeling, um. Very ill." Indeed. The waking grogginess was now percolating into a very particular form of sourness of the stomach, curdling in shape, like a wound left to fester. "I'll need to-"

Was that screaming? In the distance- three, maybe four people. Closer to the water than they were. Princess glanced over her shoulder- saw Lucas, haunted by ghosts perhaps real and perhaps of his own crumbling thought process, approaching from around the corner closest to the cliff side.

"... Better we not ask, honestly. But I won't tell you what to do... Not any more."

She touched Kate's knuckles, and tried to mean it. Then she quickly meandered away before anybody else was caught in the crossfire of her nausea. 'Back in ten', she promised, over her shoulder and already long gone.

((Princess McQuillan continued in deconstruction))

Katelynne watched helplessly as Tyrell dismissed her concerns and ran off for parts unknown, trampling over every leaf and twig in his warpath. She frowned, hands clasped back together in front as he disappeared into the foliage.

"...You better." She sighed. She never really got to thinking about it much, but maybe this was how Mom felt sometimes.

Something moved in the corner of her eye. Her eyes jolted over, but... nothing.

Hmm. Maybe the heat was starting to get to her.

She picked up Tyrell's things, continuing to stare for what felt like hours where Tyrell disappeared like she was a forelorn navy wife overlooking a cliff by the water waiting for her sailor to come home. She shook her head and moved to go back into the temple when Princess interrupted her, still sleepy-eyed from assumingly just getting up.

"Hey, uhm... Tyrell's gone. Said he's going after Lorenzo. Dunno if he'll be back or not."

Her frown held at Princess's quip. She just let it go; it wasn't the hill to die on right now.

Besides, she was right.

Then suddenly Princess had a pained expression, lightly clutching her stomach with talk of being sick. Katelynne was about to speak when-

screaming. From over yonder, on the island boundary. Past Lucas, approaching with his face frozen in a thousand mile stare like he just committed a murder himself.

It better not be that.

And now Princess was gone, too, quick enough Katelynne couldn't even tell her to be careful before she was already out of her vision. Wish she got the memo that today was Ditch Katelynne Day.

At least Lucas was still here. Physically, anyway. Princess suggested not to ask, but something told Katelynne that she had to.

"Hey, everything okay?" she approached him, hands pantomiming her words. "You, uh... you got something on ya. Right here."