Survival Of The Fittest

Fuck.

Okay, well... You know what, he could work with this. Shawn had maybe been a tad louder than intended, but that was fine! That was fine... That meant Abhishek was on edge, and if he was on edge then that meant there was a chance of things between him and John kicking off.

Unless of course John made it blatantly obvious they had nothing to do with each other, which meant that all he and Bethany had achieved was lose whatever surprise advantage they might have had.

Fuck.

Right, well, seeing as the two now had an outside entity to unite against Shawn didn't see much point in sticking around. Better to cut their losses and slip away before things got out of hand...

Or at least they would have if Bethany didn't go and reveal their position, Shawn opening his mouth to say something before she stood up to address the two herself.

FUCK.

Things had spiralled out of control quickly. Not to a disastrous degree, but enough to put him on edge. Still, as the jig was up there wasn't much point in hiding anymore. With a nervous gulp, he soon rose up beside Bethany, the two standing tall atop the small outcrop they had been hiding on. Taken aback slightly by Bethany's words, Shawn did his best to try and back her up nevertheless. 

"Y-yeah! You heard the lady!" he called out, trying to play it cool despite the voice at the back of his head desperately yelling at him to turn back and bug the fuck out. "In case you haven't noticed, it's three against one..." he continued, puffing his chest slightly as he gestured to himself, Bethany and John. "So if I were you, comrade, I'd be real careful about the next words to come out of your mouth."

Abhishek let out a dry chuckle. The whole squadron of hypocrites was out in full force. Every idiot moralist at the school had seemingly come together to bug him out of his gourd. And now they wanted, what, his fucking fire? Maybe they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their own. Practice what you preach.

Oh, and Bethany had butchered that passage. Basic literacy: it could change your life. Not that he had expected any better from the same people who conflated liberalism and communism. Stupid is as stupid does. Even for his admittedly surface-level knowledge of Marxist theory, this was basic.

"I'm glad to hear that you've finally seen the light, Beth," he opened, voice filled with the cold tones of faux-friendship. "I'm always willing to welcome fellow travelers and useful idiots. Your choice as to which one applies to you." Empty words—words were easy. He rolled his eyes. These people were fucking fools.

"Anyway, what's your endgame? I doubt you came this far only to launch a coup d'état on my campfire." He tapped the bat against his shoulder. Every so often, he shifted, never allowing any of them to get a lingering glance at his back. "I'm curious. Please, with your divine providence, take a moment to enlighten me."

While John didn't hold any particular sympathy for Beth and Shawn, considering they were sneaking up behind him, he didn't want them to get into any kind of conflict with Abhishek that was more dangerous than verbal. Sure, they could poke and prod and shout at each other all day, as it didn't make much of a difference, things were absolutely going to get messy if Abhishek started wailing on the two of them with his makeshift nail bat.

"Look, look," John said, stepping closer towards the trio. "There's quite literally zero need nor want to stand on this frozen mountain and heckle each other to death. We can either move on to what we want to do and be productive, or we can stand here bickering like idiots 'til the cows come home."

Stepping away certainly would've been easier. After all, he was no longer the main focus of the wannabe revolutionary. But still, he feared that if he did simply walk away, he'd come back down the mountain only to see blood on the ice. If he walked away and inadvertently caused the deaths of people, even people he didn't particularly like, he doubted the memories would ever leave him.

Beth ignored John. He'd been an instigating factor in the confrontation, but not intentionally by any means. Now he seemed set on becoming unimportant to it, so she let him be just that. No, her focus was on Abhishek, he was the one still spoiling for a fight after she'd tried to appeal to his better nature and asked nicely to share. Sure, Shawn had blustered about backing up their position with violence, and maybe that had been a bad move, but one could hardly blame him. Why shouldnt't they be prepared to defend themselves? Plenty had already died, some over far less than merely sharing a fire. If Abhishek intended to be unreasonable, then yes, they'd be well within their rights to put their physical safety before his obstinate need to be difficult.

Of course, fellow traveller was a term she'd heard plenty before. She'd been in the debate club long enough, and shamefully flirted with Canonist ideology long enough, to have been accused (plainly or stealthily) of being a fascist before. Was that what she was doing now? Of course it wasn't. It didn't even bear further interrogating. She'd come looking for the simple necessity of heat, and typical of the deluded Marx-worshipping troll, he'd taken that as an aggression.

"My endgame?"

It didn't particularly occur to Beth to confer with Shawn. She was holding the pick, after all.

"To sit around a campfire singing kumbayah, oh Supreme Leader."

She delivered the line with a venomous dose of sarcasm, irrespective of how sincere the actual statement had been. Her eyes dropped briefly to the silver crucifix on her chest, how the firelight reflected off it. She wouldn't be denied by a godless communist. Beth adjusted her grip slightly, raising the pickaxe in her hands just an inch or two - the muscles involved might not be that impressive to flex, but at least the weapon had a certain intimidating air to it.

Shawn was in two minds about the situation unfolding before his eyes.

On the one hand, a part of him just wanted to bug out whilst he still could. He had zero interest in putting himself in undue risk, get himself hurt over nothing, especially now that the element of surprise was long gone.

On the other hand, he also couldn't deny that a part of him still clung to the hope that he could salvage something from this mess. Take advantage of the raised tensions, push the others around him into the kind of conflict that'd help speed his ticket home along nicely. Despite Abhishek's bluster, he had zero doubt they could overpower the twerp easily if they all worked together, with John and Bethany ideally taking the lead of course.

The question though, was how exactly? At this point he doubted John could be relied on to instigate things, the guy was too level-headed, trying to de-escalate the situation before it got any worse. Admirable, if inconvenient, especially if they misstepped and he opted to take Abishek's side instead of theirs. Bethany however he suspected wouldn't need that big a shove, but she also wouldn't act without a good reason. A casus belli, so to speak.

Well, for now, perhaps he could try to poke the bear some more. See if he could give them a reason to be unreasonable.

"Yeah, you heard the guy Abbie..." Shawn replied, gesturing to John as he spread his arms wide. "We're all reasonable people, right? Last I checked none of our names were in the announcement, so I see no reason to fear anyone here..."

He looked Abhishek dead in the eyes. "Particularly you. No offense..." he added, the slightest hint of a smirk on his face.

Abhishek scoffed. Kumbayah, huh? It sounded like a utopia to him—and, last he checked, those didn't exist in the real world. Although, he did have to concede: he did like the ring of being called "Supreme Leader." If only he'd won the election, he would've had the chance to use it. You don't always get what you want, though. Sad!

So much for that. Stop the steal! Whatever. He always knew he would lose and slash or get disqualified and sent directly to the school gulag—schoolag?—by MacArthur. That was the whole point. That was the bit, and he had committed to it. It was entirely justified and worth the consequences to do so.

Fuck MacArthur! It was always fun to say. The principal shared a name with a military commander and constantly tried to act like one. The guy had absolutely zero sense of humor. Also, he wouldn't admit it, but he was still mad about having his megaphone confiscated during election season. "Sucks to suck," "skill issue," et cetera, he knew, but still.

"Well, see," he started. "Your Supreme Leader has some advice for you: a core component of Juche is self-reliance." It was true—if highly reductionist. "So, in that light, have you considered your bootstraps?" Biting sarcasm through knife-like teeth. A slight chuckle escaped from his lips like a capitalist across the Berlin Wall.

His gaze turned to Shawn. Someone who, as he knew from his time in the debate club, was all too easy to annoy. "I'm not afraid of you. In the Khmer Rouge, they'd dash you on the killing trees, four-eyes," he said, blatantly ignoring the glasses that currently rested on his nose. Hypocrisy was funny when he did it.

"Though, see, here's a funny thing: Corbin wasn't on the announcements either." A hook. Would they bite? "He certainly tried, though. But, I think he'd beg to differ about how quote-unquote 'dangerous' I am." He paused. "After all, hasn't socialism killed one hundred trillion people or whatever?"

By the stars, they really seemed dead set on conflict, didn't they? John couldn't think of a worse trio to try and deescalate conflict between. It was like an equilateral triangle of pain and arguments. In one corner, God's haughtiest soldier. In the other corner, the champion of Killpeopleism. In the third corner, the devil on both their shoulders. He would've had an easier time getting Guevara and Nixon to have a nice teatime together.

Even though it would certainly be challenging, all John could do was roll up sleeves and dive in. Best case scenario, he could get these bozos to separate peacefully before they started wailing on each other. Worst case scenario, he'd have to restrain whoever moved first and try to convince the others to not perform too harsh of a retaliation. While whoever struck first would certainly be deserving of it, John preferred not to see any more of his classmates' blood. Seeing Angelo's was already too much.

Thinking quickly, John made his way back down the path, stepping in between Kim Il-Sung's stalwart defender and the Sneaky Duo.

"STOP! Will you people just stop and think? Is it really so gosh darned hard for you to put down your egos for one freakin' second?! No one cares! Quite frankly, no one cares about whatever crap you two believe on this island. We're so far removed from a semblance of normal life that politics shouldn't even be an issue here, much less something to spill blood over!"

This was ridiculous. Even though John had never seen any version of Survival of the Fittest, he would take a gamble that the number of deaths caused over political disagreements was approaching absolute zero. He wasn't going to let something as stupid as an argument about whether God exists or not cause people to actually go meet the man.

Bootstraps? What was he, her dad? Bethany could make a fucking fire, that wasn't in question. The problem was that she shouldn't have to, that maybe if teenagers weren't a bunch of degenerate psychopaths unable to even share, let alone not kill one another, maybe none of this shit would be happening. She'd started her time on the island naively believing that after seven failures, her class could be the ones to break the sequence and prove their kidnappers wrong for once. Of course that had been stupid. Of course Aracelis fucking Fuentes had immediately tried to murder someone before her eyes, and ultimately end up responsible for Ethan's death instead.

Her dad...

And now, what, this glorified internet troll wanted to act like it was some great act of aggression to approach carefully, and ask nicely to cooperate? Then make the whole disagreement spiral into one about politics, as if moronic contrarianism was an actual ideology?

As a girl, Bethany had had a favourite toy. A stuffed lion. She'd named him El Ritchie. She'd thought that was funny. For most of her formative years, El Ritchie went with her most everywhere. Until Daniel Lyon had decided that it was time for her to grow up. Most of the resentment compacted into the core of Beth's being was directed at everything else that had come along with that, the hunting, the hiking, the gun ranges, the bizarre surrogate son he seemed set on turning her into. It hadn't all been bad, of course; she'd taken well to history and law, she enjoyed those. But largely, his active influence in her adolescence had been a misery to her. She rarely thought of the lion any more, but it occurred to her now. She wondered what had become of him. Perhaps he'd wound up in a thrift store, and some other child was enjoying his comfort now. More likely his fate had been the landfill: Bethany was hardly sentimental, but the thought of that made her a little sad.

Point is, she'd had comfort forcibly ripped away from her.

The day prior had been much the same. Bethany had a nice thing going, pleasant company and the ambient warmth of the hot spring. Aracelis had seen fit to tear that away from her too.

And now Abhishek seemed set on following suit.

Beth was no longer interested in placidly accepting other people holding that sort of power over her any more. What was the little goblin going to do, swing his ridiculous pointy stick at her? No. She was bigger than him, had a better weapon than him, and she had friends. John's appeal to reason went quite unheard, she assumed she could count on him to take her side, the side of reason.

"It's not like I'm asking for Ceaușescu's palace, you ridiculous child."

When had she gotten so angry with him? Had it come on this quickly, or had she just been keeping a lid on a more general rage for the last two days, one not quite discharged by her earlier outburst to Shawn? Hard to say.

"I have tried civility. I have tried appealing to your better nature. So let's do it your way."

Beth took another step closer. Gripped her pickaxe tighter. She wasn't going to give another inch, or be dictated to by inadequate men again.

"We're staying. You can accept that, or you can leave."

Shawn couldn't help but chuckle venomously at Abhishek's little four-eyes dig, wagging his finger with an expression that silently spoke "Ah-haa, I see what you did there. Very funny. Fucking hi-lair-iee-ous."

He diverted his attention to John, trying to stand between them all and act like the voice of reason. In most circumstances he would have agreed with him, especially when they all had bigger issues at hand than who they voted for. Alas, getting everyone to calm down was the exact opposite of what he was trying to achieve here, and who was he to complain if politics were the key to tipping this over the edge? Unfortunately, John's attempts at playing peacemaker did make this all needlessly complicated, Bethany's eagerness to get down to business putting Shawn on edge. The absolute last thing he wanted was to turn this into a fair fight, if it even came to that at all.

In a way, this entire situation reminded him of his favourite chess opener: The Queen was in position, backed up by the Bishop, ready to take out a vulnerable pawn and secure a quick and easy checkmate. But alas, there was now a knight protecting that pawn, one that required him to refigure his strategy moving forward.

Fortunately - in a manner of speaking - Abhishek might have just given him the nugget he needed to win John over if he played his cards right.

Shawn's sneer dropped at the mention of Corbin's name, his brow raised. He didn't have to play up his surprise at all, or the seething look in his eyes.

"The hell are you talking about?" he asked, eyes boring into Abhishek's.

Abhishek's grin only widened further. His fangs, now, were fully bared—and that took the form of a smile that was as wide as it was sinister and full of teeth. Twenty-eight or so, if you bothered to count them all. The Cheshire Cat was a suitable comparison.

"I don't know, Shawn—what am I talking about?" Abhishek said with playful malice. "Are you sure you want me to answer that question? The truth may surprise you." He twirled the stick in his hand and let the suspense linger as brown eyes panned across faces.

He'd played up the truth. The fight wasn't as fair or as dire as he'd made it sound. But they didn't need to know that. To him, it was spite. They wanted the moral high ground, but he wouldn't let them take it. He'd rip the earth out from under their feet.

"Your friend, Corbin, got himself injured. I tended to his wounds. He decided, in all his benevolence, to reward me with an attempt on my life." The truth, as he knew it. "He found out that appearances are deceptive—I trust he won't make any similar mistakes."

Let them be angry. Abhishek invited it.

"In other words, I won't go down without a fight."

"Alright then."

John's voice had gotten much quieter since he'd last spoken. It was fairly obvious to him that words of reasonability were falling on deaf ears. They couldn't help themselves from escalating everything further. None of them had thick enough skin to let the stupid barbs and pokes bounce off of them. They were simply too stupid to know what was good for them.

If words of peace and understanding were failing, perhaps words filled with the threat of violence would get them to back off. Maybe fighting fire with fire was the right idea.

He spun around, facing Shawn and Beth fully.

"Listen you two. As much as it pains me to say it, I'm taking Abhishek's side this time. He was here first. This fire, this campsite, is his. You two sneaked up on us. You two are the liability here. You refused to just back down, you let Abhishek rile you up every single step of the way."

He stepped back, towards Abhishek's side.

"If you strike first, I will not hesitate to help Abhishek get you two out of here. Without anyone dying of course, but the way you've been talking, I'm not entirely sure you'd take the same courtesy."

Bethany stared at John as he convinced himself of how perfectly moral he was being. She lacked the strength to resist rolling her eyes before he was done.

"If. Remind me, John, who's threatening violence here? Who's even discussing a fight? Shawn and I have been nothing but polite in asking this petulant troublemaker to share, and he insists he 'won't go down without a fight'. As if that was ever on the table. Listen to yourself, you've let him convince you we mean any harm, and that he has some divinely granted right to let his fellow man freeze rather than tolerate our presence. He's refused to back down, and made a concerted effort to be riled up every step of the way."

Beth took one more step closer. Of course she was willing to back herself up with arms if that's what the other side had by now decided. Of course as far as she was concerned, Shawn's bluster earlier - that even she herself had considered threat-adjacent at the time - was justified and easily explained as an appeal to majority rule, not mob violence.

"But if you're so convinced that selfishness is the right call, by all means. Feel free to drive us off by force. You're both armed, I'm sure you could force us to leave if you're so set on..."

A hand on her wrist gave the girl pause. She whirled about to face Shawn, scowling at him in annoyance.

"What?!"

Shawn firmly shook his head as Bethany turned to face him. It was clear to him at this point that they had nothing to gain from pressing the issue any further, no matter how incensed he was by the foulness spewing from Abhishek's yapping mouth. In the end, they should have just bailed the moment they lost the element of surprise.

"Alright, have it your way..." he replies, looking over at John. "If you want to get all chummy with this lying scumfuck, be my guest. Not my problem if your name ends up in tomorrow's announcement."

Truth be told, he suspected there to be some truth to Abhishek's words, regardless of how absurd a notion it was that a twink like him could overpower a guy like Corbs. It just seemed too suspiciously specific to be plucked right out of thin air. Granted, it wasn't unusual for Abhishek to be full of shit, so who knows.

Either way, he turned to Abishek next, opening his mouth to say something... Before instead shaking his head. "You're pathetic."

On that note, he gestured to Bethany to follow him before turning away, trying to leave with some sense of dignity before Abhi got the chance to get the last word in.

((Shawn Bellamy continued in Castle))

Huh. That was unexpected. Abhishek had figured, should push come to shove, John wouldn't be on his side of the matter. It seemed that the other boy did, indeed, have an iota of principle to his name. Foolish but commendable. And beggars couldn't be choosers, could they?

The other thing was an expected result. As predicted, under threat of mutually-assured destruction, the imperialist wunderkinds backed down and bowed out. Midnight, for the moment, was averted. All bark and no bite—it was a given that they turned their tails and fled.

Abhishek, for a moment, turned back to John—not the type of company he liked to keep. Still, he smiled. "Well, thanks for the peace talks, tovarisch. I'm out. You can keep the fire." He swung his bag over his shoulder and started to walk in another direction: towards the town.

It was funny, in a way: all of this bluster over something he already planned to abandon. This entire thing had been utterly pointless, yet he'd proven his point regardless, just for the sake of spite. As he walked, footprints left in the snow behind him, he turned his head and said:

"Oh, and by the way, I didn't lie."

That was the last word. Soon, Abhishek was gone—he left nothing behind but the warm embers of the fire and the sting of his bitter tongue.

S031: ABHISHEK PANICKER — CONTINUED IN "Life Has Become Better"

Beth could only stare dumbfounded as Shawn capitulated. First the navy brat had turned on them, the very people his sort were supposed to protect, and now her gutless coward of a partner was backing down? As if those two actually had any intention of meeting them with violence?

For all his attempts to walk away with some dignity, Bethany could only feel humiliated. She burned with it. Just as when Przemek had wandered away from the Hot Spring and she’d had no real choice but to follow him, she could do nothing but glare daggers at the NKVD’s finest before turning on her heel and stomping after Shawn.

[Bethany Lyon is in another Castle.]