Survival Of The Fittest

Tenshi's smile vanished. Her lips moved on their own.

"waitwhatwhy-"

The blades hammered onto her arm and dug in.

A scream rang out from her throat, she could feel it as though it was an animal clawing its way out of her mouth, scratching every soft and fleshy part on the way up. The scream trailed on and on, with a mind of its own, only ever stopping for Tenshi to gasp. Her eyes stung. The skin around the wound stung, but...

But it always hurt, just not like this. And Tenshi already knew, on some level, that this weapon was no prop.

Though buried underneath layers and layers of comforting memories and wishful thinking, Tenshi already knew why this was happening.

Two things happened at the same time.

First, Tenshi screamed. This was unavoidable.

Second, Dawn failed to severe the arm with one swing. The sword got stuck a little bit into the bone with a nasty crack. And of course blood instantly begun to flow out.

Dawn froze. This time, it wasn't even her life on the line, but the sight of oncoming death still incapitated her.

For three seconds.

Then she ripped the sword out. The wound was alike a battle zone. One of the obsidian blades had come lose and was still stuck in the bone. A small fountain of red originated from there, overshadowing the bullet wound in nastyness.

Dawn had no time to stare. Quickly, she raised the sword and brought it down a second time.

The blade hacked through more and more flesh, and like a hole in a dam, blood began to flow. Tenshi had seen this before, too.



Even someone as sheltered as her didn't need to look twice at gore and blood of Cedar's wound to know it was bad. Even someone as sheltered as her knew there was no life in Cedar's eyes, when she last stared into them. Cedar was gone. On some level, Tenshi knew that from the moment she departed.



Her arm shook and jerked in Madeleine's grasp, and more blood began to spurt, despite the tourniquet's best efforts. The screams kept bursting out, too. Tears streamed down her cheeks, as her vision began to blur.

The tourniquet had come loose.

That was something Dawn should have taken notice off before the start. She had been to occupied with her worries while tying it, and so it had failed its job. Hence the amount of blood leaving Tenshi's body at every second.

"Wahhhh!"

Now Dawn was screaming too.

Her final strike felt weaker than its predecessors, but it got the job done. Bones broke, flesh ripped and blood flowed. Maddy fell back as the arm lost all connection to Tenshi.

Tenshi was still screaming, although it felt like a background noise in Dawn's head.

"Cassie! NOW!"

Cassie was shaking.

She watched as Dawn raised that bladed weapon high into the air.

She watched as it swung down, obsidian blades digging deep into flesh and bone.

She watched as it was raised again, blood spurting from that bloodied arm.

Down. Then up. Then down again.

Tenshi was screaming. Dawn was screaming. Cassie was screaming, albeit internally.

Externally, she watched wide eyed, holding that can above a lit lighter. Unable to take her eyes away from it all, transfixed by the horrific viscera pouring freely from that stump. So much blood, all at once.

When Dawn finally called out to her, she hesitated for a brief second, long enough for her finger to slip and get caught by the candle's flame. She dropped the can onto to the ground, yelping and scrambling to pick it up again, crying out as she singed her fingers on the heated metal before slipping her hand back into her sleeve to pick it up safely.

With time no longer on her side, she shot forward to press the white-hot end of that can against Tenshi's stump, letting out a barrage of apologies as tears ran freely down her face.

"I'M SORRY!!! I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M-"

Tenshi yelped at the heat, the sudden weightlessness, but that yelp fell from her lips without a scream tailing behind it. Only ragged gasps, and sobs.



The one thing Tenshi clung to more than Cedar's hand was her dreams. She clung to them even when they seemed impossible. Maybe that was easy for her, as Cedar sometimes lightly implied - her parents were always willing and able to back her, which wasn't something that could be said for Cedar's own (biological) parents. That didn't make it bad for her to dream though, did it? Her wish was simple. She wanted to be a star. She wanted to make beautiful music that would be enjoyed across the world. There wasn't any reason she should be barred from that - as long as she had a voice, she would sing. Hearing loss didn't take her voice away, and neither did getting kidnapped and put in a death game. As long as she lived to sing another day, her dream was still in reach. It had to be, because what else could she reach for?



Maybe she retreated too far into that fantasy to the point where she believed it was already in her grasp, believed and held it close and squeezed her eyes shut to any evidence to the contrary, but what else should she have done? There was no anesthetic, no one here whose comforting words she could understand, and no Cedar to hold her hand. These dreams were all Tenshi had. Reality was trying to tug her out of bed, tugging out the blood from the wound when she already lost so much yesterday, tugged the arm off the joint. On her remaining hand, her fingers jerked and clutched at the cot.

"J-just-" She closed her eyes again. All she needed was one more song. "Just five more minutes..."



Every sound after that was a wordless wheeze. Whatever air she breathed out, she caught a little less when she breathed in.

All that screaming, and she'd lost her voice.

She lost her breath too,

over the course of

two minutes.



S040 - DECEASED

[Tenshi Fukushima-Yves chased her dreams. 110 students remain.]

"I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M Sorry I'm Sorry I'm sorry I'm..."

Tenshi stopped moving.

Cassie stopped moving as well, staring long and hard as Tenshi's face turned grey right before her eyes.

The can slipped from her fingers, rolling off that cot and landing with a metal clink on the floor.

At which point, Cassie unleashed a banshee wail that put the death whistle to shame.

The arm was off, but their work had just begun.

While Cassie did the cauterizing, Dawn let the sword fall to the ground where it lost a few more blades. She retied the scarf-turned-tourniquet, this time properly. The flow of blood lessened, but it was still not enough.

"Fitz! Bandages!"

She rushed through the cell to Fitz, who was holding the requested items. With uncharacteristical rudeness she ripped the bandages out of his hands and walked back, forgetting about him for the moment.

For the next two minutes, Dawn would press the bandages around the parts where the can couldn't reach. All the while watching Tenshi's movements get weaker.

And weaker.

And weaker.

Too weak to actually see them.

No. Not even that. Dawn knew what had happened, even if she didn't want to.

Two shaking finger felt for Tenshi's pulse.

The results were clear.

While Cassie let out a scream that would forever echo in her head, Dawn sunk to her knees, too shocked to even cry.

Madeleine didn’t know what was worse.

The noises Tenshi made as Dawn crudely hacked her arm off,

or that feeling when her arm went limp, fully severed.

And now she was dead. She’d died. Madeleine knew this was a possibility, but even still…

Letting go of the severed arm, she rushed out of the room, into the snowy exterior, and threw up.

Fitz passed items through the bars as they were needed. It ultimately didn’t matter.

Dawn fell to her knees, Cassie screamed, Madeleine sprinted away.

Fitz didn’t do much of anything. Just watched the body, face blank, and then watched everyone else fall to pieces. Outwardly, he seemed calm. Inside his pocket, he clenched the choker so tightly that his nails – normally perfectly painted, but the dark blue was starting to chip – dug into his palm and drew blood.

After a moment, he withdrew his hand from his pocket and wiped the blood off on his jacket where it layered over the blood of Tully, Cedar and Tenshi. Then he stepped into the cell, near where Tenshi’s pack was. Moving carefully past Dawn and Cassie having their respective meltdowns, he picked the pack up.

Then he left the cell, moved Cedar and Tully’s packs together as well by the wall where he’d left his gun, sat down and unzipped all three bags without a word, before starting to sort the belongings within into four tidy, equal piles.

Cassie screamed. And screamed. And screamed some more until her voice turned hoarse.

She looked down at her shaky hands, noticing that there were specks of blood on them. Tenshi's blood, likely from one of her severed arteries. She tried to wipe it from her hands, only to smear it some more, stumbling backwards desperately clawing at herself to get those tainted specks off of her.

In doing so she tripped backwards, head thumping back against the bars of that cell, her hands shooting up to grip onto the back of her head as she slid down into a sitting position. She blocked out the world around her as she curled into a ball, clawing at her hair, rocking back and forth as she muttered those words she always uttered in times like this.

"I want to go home"

"I want to go home"

"I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I wanttogohomeIwanttogohomeIwanttogohomeIwanttogohome..."

It might have been an hour, or it might have been a few seconds, but somehow, Dawn's mind begun to access the situation.

Tenshi was dead.

Dawn blinked.

Tenshi was dead.

Dawn breathed in.

Tenshi was dead.

Dawn breathed out.

Then she finally made a decision.

The decision to not let Tenshi lie there like that.

Returning to the desk with the first aid kit, Dawn pulled out the emergency blanket. Back at the bed, she spread the blanket over Tenshi. It was a little bit too small, but most of the carnage was hidden. Only her feet were lurking out. As well as the arm lying on the ground. The thought of picking it up disgusted her, so Dawn elected to carefully shove it under the bed with her shoes, leaving a blood trail. That was the extend to what she felt able to do at the moment.

It was only then that Dawn noticed Fitz rummaging through several backpacks.

She walked up to him, watching his actions for a few seconds. Finally her confused eyes grew angry.

"What are doing?"

Madeleine sank to her knees, staring at her own vomit, and wrapped her arms around herself.

She didn’t cry.

She just stared vacantly.

Cassie had stopped screaming, though now she was smudging blood all over her hands and clunking against things and muttering the same words over and over. Madeleine had yet to return. Dawn was wrapping the body up, tucking it away like it never happened.

His eyes went back to Cassie first, clearly handling this worse than Dawn. Then he looked back down, picking up a bottle of water from one of the piles he was making.

Dawn finished tucking the body away and asked what he was doing. Fitz squinted back at her, like he was wondering if this was a joke, before he waved his hand over the pile.

“Splitting the supplies,” he said flatly. “What does it look like?”

He got up, crossing the room with the bottle of water, stopping briefly by the first-aid kit to find one of the wipes supplied with the first-aid kit. He poked both the wipe and bottle of water through the bars, giving Cassie the lightest nudge with the bottle before putting it down. His eyes lingered on the bundle that was now tucked under the bed, blood still trickling from it.

“We all want to go home. Please, just shut up,” he said, leaving the tools for her to clean the blood off properly before striding back towards the piles of the supplies. He added to Dawn, “Madeleine ran out. Should get her before someone else does.”

He sat down and went back to sorting. Voice level, like nothing had happened at all.

"I want to go home."

"I want to go home."

"I want to go home."

"I want to go home."

"I want to g-"

Cassie flinched as that water bottle poked her shoulder, instinctively pulling away from the bars until she realised what was being handed to her.

She went deathly silent as Fitz told her to shut up. A part of her felt deeply shocked by the sheer bluntness of his remark, her chest tightening as she found herself torn between bursting into tears and screaming in anger. And yet, a part of her also felt something akin to relief that he wasn't coddling her, that he was confirming what she already knew deep down about herself: She was being hysterical. Useless. Pathetic.

Cassie didn't want that. She wanted to be brave, like Dawn and Madeleine. She didn't want people to think she was unreliable. That she was a burden, that she couldn't even do something as simple as cauterizing a...

She tried to distance herself from the body on the cot, putting a lid back onto that bottle and screwing it tightly. Brave people didn't cry, or freeze up, or hide. They acted. She needed to be less like herself, and more like Fitz, who was already sorting through Tenshi's things before she had even gone cold. 

She reached a shaky hand out for that wipe, picking it up to start cleaning the blood on her hands. "Th... Thhh-thankyou..." she mumbled, quietly so that he didn't snap at her again, using her forearm to wipe the wetness from her eyes.