Survival Of The Fittest

"...Christine wasn't on the announcements. She's alive. I promise you, she is alive."

Val needed everyone who was still here. She closed her eyes. "Claudeson's gone. Jessica, please don't go after him. It'll be luck if we find him. Maybe Princess'll meet up with him and bring him back here. We have t-" she interrupted herself. "-We're in this together. We're all in this together."

Camille looked at how Jessica reacted to her response to Claudeson's departure, and did feel bad. Camille normally had a very live-and-let-live philosophy, loath to even stray near anything that was paternalistic or interventionist in the affairs of others. Just don't hurt others and contribute a bit to making a fair and just world, then chart your own path. But such an approach was likely...if not outdated, then at least ill-suited to their current predicament. It probably came across as cold. But even if Camille had wanted to stop Claudeson, what could she have done?

Probably would have gotten a bloody nose if she tried to stop him physically, which, at least, would have some poetry to it.

She joined the two, kneeling down to make the conversation feel more intimate, hoping to show her own commitment to the bonds of necessity that the group had.

"Uh. Christine Bright was on the announcements." Camille assumed that Val assumed that Jessica had been referring to her sister Christina, which was an easy enough mistake to make, but as awkward and blunt an interjection as it was, it was one that Camille knew needed to be made. Letting false hope and misunderstandings fester was not good. After all, as soon as the words had left her lips, Camille began doubting her own recollection of the announcements - hoping, as crude and triggering as it was prone to be, that some sort of recap would be available to settle such doubts and ambiguities and solve disagreements about the memory of the announcements. What if she had been wrong? What if Christine Bright wasn't on the announcements, and Christina Rennes had been?

It wasn't a good place to be, to be doubting her own senses or her own memory, especially not with regards to such a grave and morbid subject. She knew that human recollection was fallible, subject to biases and prejudices, but she had made sure, doubly sure, to be as accurate in her memories of the announcements as possible. Camille normally trusted her senses - such metaphysical and incorporeal quandaries as the nature of perception were normally only philosophical for her. Interesting, of course, in that sort of low-stress pop philosophy way, but not ones that ever truly troubled Camille directly. Now she was wishing that she had thought about those stresses more meticulously, done more to prepare.

Whatever it was, Camille hoped, for Jennifer's sake, that she was right and that Val was wrong. The death of Christina would surely be extremely traumatising for Jennifer. As awful a thought as it was, Camille found herself wishing that, if they were to die, it would be on the same day to spare them the agony of life apart, knowing that she would be wishing for the same small mercy were Lionel and Farah here with her. But that Christina was still alive was scarcely a comfort - Christine might have been a friend of hers, or there may well have been some great island connection between the two. Connections Camille might have forgotten, or might have never been able to know.

"Val's right," Camille continued, wanting to move on from that depressing subject as quickly as possible. "We've got to stay together. But Claudeson - he wanted to go. He had to-felt he had to...'undertake this next trial by himself'. Direct quote." Well, paraphrase. "If that's how he finds meaning under these circumstances, I couldn't be the one to stop him."

The moment Valerija finished her refutation of everything Jessica said, Jessica felt as though she was beginning to lose her mind.

Christine was dead. She knew it because it was on the announcements not that long ago, and she knew it certainly because she'd been speaking to her only yesterday. And now Valerija was telling her it didn't happen? What was going on? Did Valerija not hear the announcements? Did she mishear them? Oh god, did Jessica mishear them? It was all too much. She just couldn't understand what was going on.

At least, until Camille stepped in and pointed out that Jessica was right all along. It made her feel a bit more grounded, but not enough. All it did was confirm that, once again, Christine was dead after running off, and now Claudeson was running off as well and there was nothing any of them could do about it, at least according to the other two girls. She knew they were wrong, because Jessica had been in their exact position before and she just knew that if she'd been better at finding Christine she'd still be alive, and Jessica herself wouldn't have been beaten and mugged and pushed from the waterfall. But she could only look at them down on the ground as she realized fairly quickly the truth of the matter was that for some reason, for some unknown reason, they were just absolutely convinced that Claudeson needed to do whatever he did that involved Christine's killer, and were fairly ready to let him do it.

Jessica didn't agree.

But there wasn't really anything she could do about it now.

"...okay."

She wasn't okay, not remotely. But that wasn't Valerija and Camille's problem anymore.

"...okay, we can stick together."

Jessica nodded, at nothing in particular.

"...but can we do it somewhere else? Here, it's just...over there."

She didn't really know what she was saying anymore. She wanted to say that the fact she could constantly seeing the waterfall cascading in the distance made her anxious, but what was the point of words anymore?

OH SHOOT CHRISTINE NOT CHRISTINA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Val cringed both inwardly and outwardly. "I - I thought we - your sister, I thought - I'm sorry..." Her voice squeaked, her arms hugging her own chest in shame. She really hoped Christine Bright's family hadn't been watching for that.

A dark thought appeared in her mind, something about controlling the flow of information. She didn't want to deal with that kind of stuff right now.

Camille validated her guess as to what the whole deal with Claudeson had been; agreed with her, too.

Jessica wasn't doing too great, still. The girl seemed traumatized. Val empathized with her, mostly.

She still wasn't 100% confident in speaking this soon after the Christine snafu, but she got over it. "Let's... we can go. Let's go, I mean - I guess."

((Val continued ELSEWHERE))

Camille didn't know what to say in response to Val's belated realisation that she'd mixed up Christina and Christine. Her instinct was one of those tried-and-tested phrases of meaningless comfort - don't sweat it, it's not a problem, don't worry about, something like that - but that could easily be heard as her commenting on the deaths themselves.

But Val had apologised, it had been done without malice, they could move on.

"Sounds like a plan." A very basic plan, a far cry from the grandiose missions that they had sought to embark on earlier. But with the fabric of the group fraying at the first sign of trouble, it was time to, for now, return to basics. Take stock.

"Do you need any help?" she offered Jessica.

((Camille Bellegarde continued elsewhere.))

Her sister...

Jessica had never really fathomed the possibility her sister could have been on the announcements. When she'd woken up, she'd never even really parsed the fact that her own twin, the closest person in her life, could die before her. The -een of Christine's first name could easily have added an -a to the end of it and suddenly Jessica would be truly alone in the world, and Jessica was so concerned with trying to figure out if she was okay with herself she never even considered the possibility.

Valerija's concern led down a path that Jessica didn't want to travel. Camille's led down one with a lantern somewhere.

"I'm...I'm fine, I can walk, I can move, and...stuff."

It probably helped she had nothing to carry. Valerija and Camille had their own bags, and Jessica only really had clothes that were still slightly damp from the previous day and nothing else besides her wits.

As the three girls left the camp, Jessica realized just how utterly directionless she felt, even compared to her home life. She always had only a vague smog in her field of vision that let her know that something was coming, even if she couldn't tell exactly what, but the moment she woke up on the island it turned to thick black smoke. She could put one foot in front of the other, but that was it. She didn't even know if the smoke would clear, or if it would only clear the moment she encountered someone even more dangerous than Teresa and Reuben and she fell through the sky again thanks to her badly placed steps. But her day spent around Valerija, Camille, Princess and Claudeson taught her something that made it easier to take even the smallest steps through the black.

And that was that everyone was in the same smoke now.

((Jessica Rennes continued elsewhere))