Survival Of The Fittest

Ren's face was blank but Meena could guess what was running through their head.

Remember when he said that everyone at school thought Kitty would be the first to snap? Yeah, Ren wasn't excluded from "everyone". One of Meena's few virtues was that he had a modicum of integrity, which meant he never applied exceptions to people just because he liked them. So what if that meant some people who ostensibly considered Meena a friend got caught in the collateral whenever he declared (to himself, to the void) that people suck and should all die? Even if he only sometimes thought it, it was one of those things that if you ever thought it, it said something about who you were as a person all the time. It was their (Ren, the rest of Meena's friends(?)) mistake for approaching him. It was Meena's fault for being too afraid to be true to himself.

But also, a more pressing issue. How was gonna Meena answer the question of what he saw when he, uh... didn't see?

Robin's corpse was burned into his mind and yet the details kept eluding him. He could remember his torn open throat, and the blood all over his head and chest. It would be trivial to guess that that was what killed him - and if Meena told his story right, that would be the only truthful detail he needed.

"She slashed his throat. Like, Robin. Robin's throat," He was already stumbling over his words. Bad sign. Meena wished he was heartless and fearless and cruel and strong - well, he was cruel and heartless. Or could be. "I was- you know, I was just- I walked into a cabin and I saw her do that. Don't know how it like. Got... there..."

No wonder Meena hadn't wanted to talk about it.

Ren found a wall to lean against, closed their eyes, and allowed themself to rock gently back and forth; Meena would hardly judge them for it.

She hadn't been killed; she had killed. She had killed; she hadn't been killed. The relief flooded through their body, so intense, so thrillingly perverse, that they very nearly puked on themself. They were sick for feeling it, but what was there to do? If someone asked them to choose between Kitty’s life and Robin’s life, they would choose Kitty every time. Kitty was alive; she was alive.

They hoped for her sake that it had been self-defense. It wasn’t that he would’ve had it coming if that had been the case—okay, there’s at least a part of Ren that thought he had it coming regardless—but it would be easier on Kitty’s psyche if her hand had been forced. No doubt she would blame herself for being alive at his expense regardless, but anything that made the guilt easier to live with.

She was alive, right?

Ren’s eyes snapped open; they suddenly stopped rocking, straining to still their body. Meena might sugarcoat things if he thought Ren needed it. Ren did need it, but they couldn’t afford it, and didn't want it.

“Did you see what happened after? After she—after Robin died?”

Meena didn't intend to sugarcoat anything.

His words were cutting and heavy, he knew they were. Or, he knew they could be. Someone once described his writing as "raw" - it might even have been Ren (Meena didn't really agree but he hated it when other people kept batting away compliments by verbally contradicting them and saying haha omg this sucks though, not because it hurt or anything sentimental and sympathetic like that but because it sounded like inauthentic compliment bait, so he never said that out loud).

His words had the power to hurt other people, he just needed to say them, but he just couldn't fucking say them right. If he said the words like he intended to, Kitty wouldn't have accepted his lie about Robin with simple grim resignation, she would have been hurt. She would have screamed at him for saying such a thing. If he said the hurtful words right, he could take their cutting edge and cut the lingering thread of sympathy that tied him to Ren. He had so few to spare, and now he wanted them all gone. This was what he wanted, so it didn't make sense for his stupid tongue decided to tie itself in knots and refuse to be useful.

That stupid tongue, that wouldn't let him answer a simple question for a few moments.

"California was there. Kitty was there and freaked out when she saw me with the shotgun," he recounted - truthfully, this time. Or mostly truthfully. "And pointed the knife at me, but she like... put it down after I showed her the gun was unloaded. California was trying to get her to calm down."

The truth, with omissions. He didn't say I didn't do much, because that would be a lie - but Ren might infer it. But should he let them?

...he shouldn't. "I had-"

He was about to describe his plan as harebrained, crazy, but it might be better (for Meena) and worse (for Ren) for him to not do that, act like his plan was completely rational. Maybe then Ren would finally glimpse what was underneath the Meena they knew and cared for so much. Maybe they'd let go so Meena didn't have to.

"-a plan. To tell everyone that I shot him and Kitty only did him a mercy. She didn't take it though."

He huffed. He vaguely recalled complaining to Ren about Robin before, how utterly baffling that whole sequence of events where he hit on Meena was. Maybe Robin assumed that he was basically Kitty with all the cool interests in murder and horror and cute stuff without all the mental health problems and terrible reputation. Robin was always an idiot, though.

"And California went off to have a freakout outside, Kitty went outside to console her, I stayed in the cabin for a bit pondering whether or not to shoot Robin's corpse anyway," you know, as one does, "then Kitty came back for her stuff, and she left."

Meena's tongue refused to say what happened when California returned. He had the feeling Ren cared more about what happened to Kitty anyway. Maybe he'd painted himself in a bad enough light, maybe some residual societally-ingrained impulse kept him from ripping off the bandaid, kept insisting he should soften the blow for Ren.

Fine. He'd soften the blow, in the same way rot softens a fruit.

"In my opinion," he said dryly, incompassionately, dead-ly, "she should have murked Ash first."

On second thought, Ren didn't need sugarcoating. Kitty was alive, but her whereabouts were unknown; Meena had tried to take the blame, and contemplated shooting a corpse; Meena had let Kitty go, but simultaneously, he had let her go off with nothing but a knife, but also simultaneously, he had let her go off with a knife; there was that other thing Meena had said; and then there was Ren, and Ren was thinking, ah, so this is what it feels like to want to laugh and cry at the same time. Then their body seized up, doubled over, quivered, and broke down, in the quiet, stifled way that Ren's body always seemed to break down--strangled laughter, or perhaps whispered sobs. Beneath it all, a hysterical, horrible relief, even more sickening than before: Meena was trusting them again, was their friend again. It didn't matter, or shouldn't matter, and it was doubly horrible if Ren's suspicions--which were their old suspicions, the suspicions they'd always had when it came to Meena--about why he had tried to take the blame were proven correct, but Ren wasn't and had never been any good at figuring out their priorities.

"I--"

They had no space in their lungs for solid words. They would have to wait until they had calmed down, which was perfectly acceptable; they would have more time to think of what an adequate response to Meena would even entail. A forced joke about how they would prefer for Kitty to leave Ashe for themself? A check-in on how Meena was doing after what was surely a traumatic experience? It all felt faintly ridiculous. How could there be a correct response, when there was nothing correct about what had happened? Perhaps there would be something more productive in thinking about what a correct response from Ren in this situation would entail, but Ren didn't know the answer to that one either.

Whatever. Meena trusted them now.

Ren felt their body's fits begin to subside; it was time to speak, now. They lifted their hands to their face, wiped away the tears with a single sharp motion, and looked up at Meena. Their words were planned, of course they were, and they said, "Thank you," and their soft, scratchy voice was level, of course it was, and they continued, "Thank you for not holding anything back. I'm glad you told me everything. I needed to know. I'm sorry I was pushy."

They let a moment pass, and then, because they had to know: "Your plan to shoot the corpse, take the blame...you don't have to answer this one, of course. But--what was the plan?"

The plan was to die. The plan was to hurt Kitty. The plan was he'd die to Kitty or someone who wanted to take revenge on Robin for whatever reason. The plan was to get the revenge on Robin and Kitty and literally everyone who Meena hated (which was everyone) (yes including Ren) (sometimes). The plan was that he hoped he'd die. The plan was that he hoped everyone else would die (yes including Ren) (Meena didn't actually know any of his friends very well but if he knew one thing it was that Ren was probably not planning on winning, so).

Meena paid no special attention to Ren's breakdown. To be honest, it was one of those things that Meena could probably dredge up to hate Ren at some point. Actually, he could take it and hate Ren right now, because why the fuck did everyone insist on making their problems his problems? Maybe he'd gotten so good at keeping a lid on all his mental problems that people went aha! A Mentally Healthy person! Time to dump all my problems on him because he can CLEARLY handle it but he couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle being told by people he only knew as an avatar and text posts that they wanted to die, and not only that they had a plan to die. He couldn't handle being told every detail of how their moms and dads abused them by yelling at and manipulating them and treating them like objects. He couldn't handle other people's problems - not because he was sympathetic or some bullshit like that, because it was... rude. Yes, it was rude, and that made him mad, so mad that he couldn't handle it.

But he was too much of a coward to say no, so. Whose fault was that, really? Whose fault was it that Meena bristled inside - Ren's for saying sorry, or Meena's for listening this long? He could have walked away at any time. That would have cut the cord more effectively than any of his cutting words, which were evidently a lot duller than his writer friends said they were. Well whatever, he always knew they were lying about his alleged way with words.

"I said it because Kitty's plan was also stupid," he said, hoping Ren wouldn't notice the crack in his voice. It was from anger, nothing more and nothing other. It wasn't like his words could actually hurt anyone anyway so he could say whatever he wanted about Kitty. "Or like, was it even a plan? She said it was a misunderstanding or something but like, come on. Do you think anyone's gonna believe that? ...not without a scapegoat."

He gestured at himself. "I just volunteered as tribute."

Meena's words hung in the air, all hard edges and barbed points, cutting and heavy; they filled the garage, filled the space between Ren and Meena, and they refused to dissipate. In all their their years of knowing and worrying about Meena, Ren had never expected the answer to come so directly.

Ren was still; they had looked at Meena before, but now they stared. Away from the gap in the door that Ren had come in through, the garage was dark; Meena was a shadow amongst shadows, his outline barely visible against the darkness, and Ren couldn't make out his face at all. No matter; Ren already had the answer they were looking for, though it had come with an unexpected bite. They had seen harshness from Meena before, in brief glimpses, usually when Ren had crossed some unspoken boundary and he needed to push them away; they did not know this cold, cruel spite. If they did not have more important things to attend to, they would have told Meena not to talk about Kitty that way.

Instead, they simply said, "You could have spread the story that it was self-defense, or that Kitty was defending you. You didn't need a scapegoat."

Here's a secret about Ren: They love making their friend's problems into their problems. They don't love the problems themselves, of course, or their friends' distress, or so they tell themself; and they certainly don't love how much they love it. They just loved being able to do something. Sometimes the problem was a tricky homework assignment; sometimes it was a breakup; sometimes someone wanted help with a cosplay--anything could do the trick, as long as it meant that Ren was needed, that Ren was useful, that Ren could stay.

Of course, to wish to be constantly helpful wasn't necessarily to wish constant problems on one's friends. When a friend tells Ren that he is suicidal, of course they aren't happy that their friend is suicidal; they're happy that their friend, already being suicidal, had been willing to tell them (or, at least, that he had been willing to imply it to such an extent that his meaning could scarcely have been misread), and that they could now do something about it. That's what Ren has always told themself, at any rate.

Are you happy now, Ren? Are you happy that one of your friends wants to sacrifice his life, and that he has finally told you about it? Meena was one of the people Ren was willing and planning to die for, and it would be hypocritical to tell him to value his life more, but never mind that. Ren wanted to shout at him, You should have volunteered me instead, you asshole.

Instead they said, as gently as they could, "Meena...how long have you wanted to die?"

"...I-"

"You-"

Meena's words stopped and started, like he had raised a knife and hesitated to actually stab it.

He'd been nothing but disgusting to his friends, usually. Since before this whole thing, even, he had very little to offer anyone other than pithy comments and memes for the group chat. He could never be a shoulder to cry on like Ren was. It made no sense that they wanted to stick around.

It made no sense, it would never make sense, and it made no sense because Ren was lying.

They had to be lying when they said they cared for him, because they didn't care for Meena, it felt like they cared for a shared hallucination, some house of cards of deception and lies-by-omission haphazardly built up in a way that just happened to form the image of a person you'd actually want to hang around. Was it still a lie if you didn't know you were lying?

Well Meena didn't have to answer that question because Ren had to know they were lying. They were astute, and their gentleness was sharper than they could ever know. It poked holes in things and let them have tiny glimpses through them. Ren had to know at least a little about what Meena was really like, and given how long they'd known each other, they probably knew quite a bit. Maybe Ren had just been playing along with this shared hallucination this whole time, just waiting for the moment they'd... they'd what, with that information? It didn't matter! They were lying!

His breath grew heavier, like it always did when he started going down that spiral staircase to the underworld. He let it drop, and did not try to breathe it back in. People kept trying to stop him from going further, but he had to go further. He had to go right to the very bottom. That would be his escape - not just from the island. It would have been an escape from everything, even if he'd never ended up here. Meena had given up on the idea that he was ever going to get better - the only way to go was down. Maybe people were scared of what he'd do when he got there, and just dressed up that fear as concern for him as a person. Don't make him laugh.

His eyes grew misty like it always did when this thoughts started and didn't stop coming, and he hated it. He wanted this, didn't he? He was so, so ugly when he cried.

"It- don't- just STOP!" Meena turned away from Ren, but was prevented from taking a step further by a wall. He stared and tilted his head up at it - anything to prevent his head from hanging, anything to give the tears an uphill battle to fight.

It started two years ago. Maybe three. Meena had been a new friend, then, and the two of them had still been figuring out what that entailed; mostly they had been sending a lot of memes about their hyperfixations to each other. One spring day, Ren sent Meena a gif of a group of Animal Crossing villagers bringing their butterfly nets down on a single unfortunate victim, over and over; beneath it was the caption, "Happy Ides Of March!" An hour or so later, Meena texted back: "God, I wish that were me." Ren's head tilted; they pursed their lips; they said nothing, then, but the thought was already there. Since then, they had received a steady trickle of other memes, jokes and half-jokes and horrifying little comments, and since then, the thought had grown, had sat heavier and heavier in the back of their mind, in their throat, on their tongue. They had been trying to find a way to push it out of their mouth for so very long.

Oh, no.

It wasn't that Ren hadn't expected tears. They didn't know exactly what they had expected (though they had, of course, asked the question anyways), but tears had seemed a reasonable possibility, and Ren had braced themselves in preparation. Evidently it hadn't been enough; Meena's sobs burned at the agency in Ren's limbs, and they found themself unable to move, stranded, looking at the back of Meena's upturned head. Meena was so far away, too far, so deep was he in his personal hell, and Ren could never have been an Orpheus anyways. They hadn't a clue as to how they might descend into Meena's underworld. What was the point of forcing your friends to accept your help, if there wasn't even anything you could do?

The least they could do was apologize.

They said, "I'm sorry. Oh my god, I'm so sorry, Meena," and more than ever before, they hated the sound of their voice, steady and unchanging, cold and arid, barren as a battlefield. They said what they meant, they always did, and yet somehow they never meant what they said, because there was never any fucking meaning in their voice. It wasn't that Ren was insincere, exactly. There is nothing dishonest about a voice that is as hollow as its speaker. Nothing would have been wrong if Ren hadn't insisted on playing the role they were playing now, if they hadn't insisted on taking Meena's trust. They really were no good at this. They really were absolutely no good at this.

But their voice continued, "It's just--I've wondered for years, I have, I never was sure if you wanted me to ask about it. And the moment never seemed right, the moment never seems right to talk about something like this, and it always just feels so invasive...I'm being invasive right now, aren't I. I'm sorry. You don't have to answer the question, you really don't. I'm sorry I asked. I'm here, you can come here, if you want, if there's anything I can do. Or I can back away to the other side of the garage. It would be perfectly understandable, if that's what you prefer."

They couldn't, at the moment, of course.

Meena pressed his wrist against the space between his eyes as the tears grew big and heavy enough to fall down his face despite his best efforts. He could feel a headache starting to bubble up, and he hated that. It seemed like such bullshit that tension in the brain could make your head feel tense too.

Ren knew. Ren knew all along. Honestly, it was really surprising to Meena that they had been paying this much attention to him for all these years, didn't they have anything better to do? Meena knew they they because if they knew about that for so long, then they for sure knew the other thing, the big thing, the unfortunate truth about Meena.

But if they knew, why the fuck did they stick around so long?! Esper, his once-boyfriend, didn't even stick around that long - they'd known each other for six months, gotten together, and then six months later it slowly but surely dawned on him that Meena was just like this, down to the sickly marrow of his bones. And when he did, he left, not even with a single text but a slow but sure drawing away, making promises of "next time", "after this break", "once I get a job", without ever intended to make good on those promises, maybe just to avoid seeing the real Meena again. That was the sensible reaction to Meena, the real Meena, wasn't it?

Maybe Ren was such a terminal fixer that they thought Meena could actually be fixed - they were astute, but they didn't have the most common sense. Maybe they played along and swallowed the bile that they surely felt towards him at least some of the time when the house of cards toppled and the real Meena peeked through the cracks, because they were convinced something better could be unearthed. Maybe it just made them feel better to imagine that nobody was actually irredeemable trash even when the truth was right in front of them.

He once finished off a rant to Ren with long distance relationships never work out anyway. It wasn't the first time he'd said something cynical like that. Ren's response was something like you know that's not true, and then offered to help him work through that breakup. It wasn't the first time they'd responded like that. And they'd keep doing this kind of thing, keep sticking by when Meena couldn't see what on Earth they saw in him, but he realized now it was probably nothing to do with him, actually. More to do with proving a point. Right? That was at least the only explanation he could think of. But Ren wasn't just trying to convince themselves, they never were - they were always determined to convince Meena too.

He wanted to scream about how much he hated everyone, hated all of his friends, hated his family and everyone watching, and most of all hated Ren. If he spilled his guts out, every ugly thought he was actually thinking, the best outcome would be Ren pulling out their gun and shooting him dead on the spot, a good outcome would be the two of them never talking again for the rest of their short, miserable lives. He wasn't scared of that. But there was a chance - some tiny chance - that Ren would stand there, stubborn to the end, and say you know that's not true.

And the thought that scared Meena the most was that he might believe them.

Once, Meena was a kid who burst into tears and liked the attention it got him, and believed in Santa Claus all the way up to sixth grade. It would be undeniably comforting to be told that no, this wasn't who he really was. It would also be undeniably false.

"You- you don't-! You don't know, you don't know-!"

He was going to finish it with the real Meena, Ren could probably finish it with anything, and to be honest it would have been nice to just burst into a scream that ripped his throat so thoroughly to shreds he lost his voice forever. He turned slightly away from the wall, just enough to see Ren's face kind of, while hopefully still obscuring his.

"You have to- you have to be...!"

He was about to take a deep breath but interrupted himself.

"YOU'RE LYING!"

He snatched his bag and rushed away, ducking under the garage door and scrambling outside. He got a few paces, before his hyperventilating prevented him from running like before. Staring back at the garage door, only part of the way open, he thought about how on earth he got out of there so quickly. It felt like crawling away from an accident and looking back at the wreckage, wondering how you even twisted yourself out of there.

About what? Ren was so taken with identifying the lie that they had told--there were any number of things they might have done wrong just now, but when had they lied?--that they didn't register Meena's movement until he was already halfway out the door.

"Meena! Wa-"

Too late; he was out, and for a few seconds, Ren was still unable to will their body into movement, still waiting for the mysterious force pinning their limbs in place to dissipate. Then they twitched into action--bag shoved through the opening, hands and knees on the ground, scrabbling to crawl through.

They could not lose Meena. It had not mattered when Timothy fled before them; they could not lose Meena. They could have bore it if Meena left intending to live, if Meena's chances alone on the island were better than they were with Ren, if they were not utterly convinced that Meena's name would ring over the announcement before they ever saw him again if they so much as let him out of their sight. That Meena wanted to die, that the good choice, the selfless choice, the choice they would make if they actually cared about Meena and cared about honoring his wishes would have been to let him go--was immaterial. Ren was selfish. They wanted Meena to live.

The concrete tore at the skin on their hands, they bled; they were out. Gasping for breath, they sprinted to their feet, rushing forward before they had even found their footing, head turning swiveling, eyes scanning frantically--

And saw him, not more than 10 feet away. He wasn't even running.

And out of the emotional wreckage, Ren came crawling out.

He stood there, staring, before turning away from them. As he hobbled away, nothing coming out of his throat but the sounds of Meena choking down the freezing air against his will.

Behind him, he could hear Ren's footsteps, crunching against the snow and beating against concrete, as if determined to follow his every footstep into Hell. As if they were dragged along by a string, that Meena still wasn't brave enough to cut.

If Ren wouldn't leave him alone, he hoped they'd fall into the pitch black and dissolve into it just like he would.

[Meena Lalita Kumar and Ren Vu continued in Shattered Moon]