Survival Of The Fittest

One, two, three, hup-!

Andy jumped, to the best of his ability anyway. He didn't know how the fuck physics worked around here, but there was a more than slight worry that he was going to pull Violet's arm out of its socket if he let her do all the work. He braced one arm on the lip of the ball pit and managed to swing one leg up and out enough to catch a sort of hold with his knee and heave himself up the rest of the way.

"Oof. Damn." Andy flopped onto the floor next to Violet for a minute before giving her a weary thumbs-up. "Thanks, man. Chick. Whatever."

"They're still my friend."

It was a weird thing to say. Dante knew that when he was saying it. Blaise had killed him, he'd had a feeling and Camila had confirmed it for him, he'd laid down to rest and they'd just... done it. But they'd always been his friend, they'd always been strange and said funny things and made fun of him sometimes but that was okay, that was who they were. And probably if there was something he shouldn't forgive them for it was this, but he didn't want to not forgive anyone for anything. It felt ugly in his stomach, trying to be angry or resentful, not the least because it was hard to be upset about being dead when he felt so alive. It didn't really matter in the end, did it? He was still here. They were all still here, one way or another. He wished he could tell his parents, his sisters, Aurelien, but he'd see them again one day, and then they'd understand, too.

"I dunno why they did what they did, but I know they had a reason." He shrugged. "It probably wasn't good but if they thought it was then it was, to them. Y'know?"

He could ask them eventually, but he probably wouldn't, because it would be a weird thing to talk about. They could just go back to being the friends they were before any of this happened. That was all he could ask for.

The buffet smelled real good right about now.

"You want nachos? They're real, uh, orange."

---

So this wasn't the first time Axel had woken up in a ball pit with no memory of how he'd gotten there.

Which was a weirdly specific accolade, but the memories had come crawling back faster the first time, something about a friend of a friend who snuck a bunch of them into a Chuck E Cheese at night, one of those parties that would have made a wild story if he hadn't forgotten like 90% of it. Which meant it was a real wild party, yeah, but he only had some photos of Andy throwing balls at his head to show for it.

The memories weren't coming back this time. He was just... somewhere, and now he was here, floating neck-deep in a ball pit that was objectively way too fucking deep for any kids to be allowed near it, could you drown in plastic balls, probably? He wracked his memories and he didn't find a lot. The last thing he remembered with any clarity was spending way too much time stressing over whether he'd saved enough money to afford a limo and a good-looking suit and a decent bottle of whiskey for prom but he knew that wasn't it, firstly because how the fuck did that lead to a ball pit, and second of all because there were bits and pieces of more. Hel and Andy and Abe, which couldn't be right, could it, he remembered a long bus ride and birds and sunshine and the sound of Hel's voice and not really anything else.

He looked up and he saw Andy sitting on the floor and that, he guessed, was a good sign?

"Yo," he called up, dragging his arms out from next to him to wave. He looked at his left hand for a second and frowned but didn't know what he was looking at exactly.

"Wanna help me out, man?"

Oh hey, and then Axel was there. Cool.

Andy just kind of sat and looked at him for a few seconds, not immediately responding even though he was being directly addressed. 'Cause like, why wouldn't Axel be in the ball pit, right? Even though Andy had just been in there himself, and he hadn't seen or felt anyone else moving around under the balls, and he'd have noticed. Unless Axel was just like, chilling? Underneath a layer of plastic balls. Like you did.

None of that made any fucking sense, and for those few seconds something descended on him, squeezing his chest because something was wrong with this picture and he knew what it was but he couldn't say it. Then, Axel waving his arms around asking to be pulled out like a kid stuck in the deep end of the pool brought up a different hazy memory, and the bad feelings were chased away with a bright spark of amusement at remembering that they had, in fact, set foot in a Chuck-E-Cheese after age 10. Andy had forgotten about it, because honestly he'd forgotten about most of what they did that night. He wasn't sure how they didn't get arrested for breaking and entering. Maybe the place was shutting down?

Shit, was this the place? Was it just... after hours?

That didn't make any more sense than anything else, but you know what, he'd go with it for now.

Andy swung his legs around so that he could get on his knees, bracing one hand on the edge of the pit and reaching over to Axel with the other. "Yeah, come on you pussy. You're gonna get so much static electricity that your piercings will electrocute someone."

"Shut the fuck up, man."

This would probably be the point where Axel would totally ignore Andy's hand and just like haul ass out of the ball pit without any help cause was he really gonna just sit here and let Andy call him a pussy? But like, turned out being up to your neck in plastic made moving kinda hard, and he was just gonna look worse if he tried and totally failed to lift himself, and then he'd be doomed to drown in disgrace in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit, which was not super how he was hoping to go out.

He grabbed his hand and grabbed the edge of the pit with the other, hoisting himself out with less resistance that he was expecting. He managed to not eat shit in the process and promptly sat on the floor next to Andy cause fuck if he knew what else he was doing here, right? Andy'd stared at him for like ten seconds before acknowledging he was there so he was probably not any more sober than Axel was.

Axel wasn't sober, right? He didn't feel sober. No, well, okay, he kind of did, but it wouldn't make any sense if he was, so he was gonna say he wasn't. A weird sense of deja vu hit him for a second and then it was gone.

"Dude, if I could actually do that though? Like that'd be a super-specific mutant power but, like, I'd be about it."

He looked around and wow there were a lot of people here, huh? He recognized... a lot of them, which was the weird part. Like, in that he recognized them as people from school, but not people who would be crashing a Chuck E Cheese at 1 AM or whatever. Just random kids from school. That didn't make any sense unless this was like, a school trip or whatever, but if it was a school trip how had he managed to get so fucked up he forgot how he got here, and also what kind of fucking school takes seniors on a trip to Chuck E Cheese.

They'd been going on a trip, right? It wasn't for another couple of weeks, though.

"So, uh, you wanna fill me in on what's up? My brain's got a bunch of pieces missing at the moment."

((Michael Froese (non-canonically because he didnt really die) continued from partway through this meanwhile post))

He blinked. His mouth didn't taste like vomit. He could breathe. His heart wasn't beating really really fast. His heart wasn't beating. Was his heart beating? He couldn't really tell. He was standing up. In front of Dante and Camila and some nachos. That was weird. They were supposed to be dead. He'd killed Camila and talked at her corpse a bunch. He blinked again. They were still there.

Oh.

He understood.

"GOD FUCKING DAMNI-" he almost managed to finish spitting out. Then, he was gone.

((Michael Froese (non-canonically) continued in the next line of the same meanwhile post))

She'd heard him out.

"That's your decision. And if you want to discuss it, know in advance I don't agree with your opinion."

It seemed like a simple resolution if any. Unreasonable to say she was happy over it, or had any manner of feeling about it at all. Dante's death was his own business. Strange concept, but Camila figured she'd get used to it.

"I know what nachos are, Dante." If she'd thought it was a joke or not she was willing to laugh. Short and curt, efficient giggle. Authentic recipe for a noise she'd been born with: equal parts girlish and disdainful. She'd probably never laughed it once in school in living memory. Maybe when Benedict had come up with a cheesy one liner. Not Cecil- his jokes were the sort you didn't laugh at. She had her moment of happiness, then took a breath after. "Ma used to make them with plantain chips. Little sweeter and they stay crispier longer. Best in Chattanooga."

"And not orange."

She held up her hand, as they began to extricate what was left of themselves and their no-longer-mortal coil from the ball pit. Gestured for his with a brief wave palm up, one finger extended at his own. She left him the option as they started to walk.

"When doesn't your brain have holes in it," Andy mumbled, and it was kind of a joke but it didn't feel very funny. Axel wanted him to explain, and not only did he not want to, he didn't even know where to start.

He rubbed his face, almost absently pressing the heel of his hand over his left eye.

How many people were here now? Him and Axel, that was two. Violet, and Dante and Camila over there. Five. Probably more people milling around, but he could clearly see five. He didn't like fives. He could clearly see.

"First, why don't you tell me what the last thing you remember is so I'm not just repeating stuff you already know?" Maybe while Axel was talking, Andy would figure out what he himself actually knew.

Julien emerged from the ball pit.

He looked around at the people around him, taking in the reality of where exactly he was. Once he had fully appraised it all, he simply burst out laughing and laid out on top. Because really, what the fuck else was there to do?

In some corner of the arcade, there was an enclosed booth decorated in dark colours and shadows, slogans on the exterior of it promising an "immersive, terrifying, heart-pounding experience" for a prospective brave (or perhaps jaded) player.

Somewhat fittingly, a shrill scream rang out from within.

Drew almost felt himself letting out his own scream as he heard a girl's scream from inside of a booth and he raised a slightly shaky hand to his hand, his heart was racing like an off-course race horse out of control. He wanted to flee instantly as he heard the scream but it felt like the sound had been so familiar to him and he knew that he had no reason to ran away from problems anymore. He just needed to make sure that he wasn't going to get almost jumpscared again.

He let out a long breath that he didn't even realize that he had been holding and his heart beat was going back to a more normal beating rate.

He stepped closer to the booth and he peeked his head inside, staring at the person in front of him in disbelief. Then he felt a huge wave of emotions overwhelming him in that moment.

"C.....Cam...?" He could barely whisper more clearly and he felt his vision start to cloud over with wet tears. "Is.... Is it really you? Ha.... Hahaha!"

He felt himself wanting to hug her. But his body was frozen in shock and awe.

At some point Camilla's breathing stopped, the stinging stopped, everything stopped, until it started again.

She could breathe again, though she shouldn't need to, shouldn't be able to. It was dark, still. When she opened her eyes, the only light came from a flickering "GAME OVER" screen in front of her, and she wondered what high-concept Tumblr-writing-prompts bullshit she'd found herself in.

Because she might as well, she took in the details of her surroundings. It was an arcade booth, and she was sitting upright against the seat of it, the light-gun-thing hooked into the place it was supposed to be hooked, into until somebody pulled it out and slipped the machine a token. The game over screen itself made her assume it was a horror game, what with the blood and gore and dark environment with the blue zombies fading out into the score screen, which had some random high number as a score, and then went to a weirder screen- something about measuring fear response? Said it had been measuring her heart rate, to see that.

Her heart rate was listed as zero.

The screen flickered the prompt to put in another token to continue, but Camilla averted her gaze from it, looked down at nothing. The memory of what happened, what she did, came rushing back to her. She wrapped her arms around herself, and leaned her head into the wall, squeezing her eyes shut.

Maybe it was all just a nightmare.

When she closed her eyes, she saw the stable floor. She saw the girl who had tears in her eyes after shooting Beryl. She saw the tiny storage room of the infirmary she was stuck in. She saw Bert's face - or what was left of it, when she last saw her. She saw Drew's half-rotted arm. She saw the look of terror on Theo's face as he realized what she was about to do. She saw the blood running from where Julien's eyes used to be.

And the last thing she saw was Diego's face.

She stood up, and peeked out of the booth. Some sort of knock-off Chuck-E-Cheese sorta place.

Was... was this a joke? Was this hell? It had to be hell! There was no other place she could have gone! And hell had to look like this. This was what some higher-up on the Celestial ladder thought would be a good place to put a damned soul like her, or some shit.

She pulled her hand away from the curtain to the outdoors and turned her back to it.

Then she screamed and collapsed onto the floor, curling up into the fetal position.

After some time, damned if she knew how long, of inelegant sobbing on the ground, when someone moved aside the curtains and let in the gaudy lights of the arcade outside. Gasping for breath she shouldn't be able to take, she looked up at the intruder, her eyes reddened and barely able to stay open.

"Drew...?"

"You're... you're not supposed to be here..."

When Theo argued that nearly everyone would go to heaven when they died, he hadn’t expected to be proven right so quickly. Although, admittedly, a table at a fast-food restaurant would perhaps not quite the entrance he had expected. It was not a particularly calming environment; the buffet tables smelled of grease, the monitors radiated with quietly violent noise.

He glanced vaguely at one of them, showing Camilla strangling him. It was rather dispiriting, watching his death from an outsider’s perspective. Was this how she had seen it? The pathetic, useless struggles of someone who couldn’t defend anyone at all?

The aftermath of his death was horribly casual. She dropped him. His body fell with an unceremonious thud. She spoke to someone on her walkie-talkie. Camilla still sounded so kind, so sympathetic to others’ difficulties. So why did she kill him, someone who wouldn’t even merit a moment of her time had he not joined the gardening club? Was he somehow worse than everyone else? What did he do to deserve her fury? He felt vaguely resentful, knowing that she could still smile so sweetly with his body still warm.

He kept watching as she descended into her own private world, talking to the dead, whispering to herself, calling out to invisible figures. If he hadn’t seen what had driven her to her madness he would probably have pitied her. But he knew just how deeply the darkness in her could go.

When she finally found Diego, sitting weakly near a tree, he looked away. It would be too painful to watch the last of his friends finally fall, even if it meant Diego would join him soon enough. He got up and left, not daring to look back.

————————

Other than the food and the monitors, it turned out, this place really had very few things of interest. He tried a few of the arcade games but they all became tedious after just a few minutes. Eventually he gave up on trying to distract himself and just ambled aimlessly amongst the garishly decorated machines. As he listlessly scanned the remaining aisles, he saw someone familiar.

He didn’t say anything as he ran to the figure outside the machine’s entrance. All he did was run and wrap him in a tight hug.

It was Drew.

He hadn’t been there for Drew when it counted, maybe, but at least Theo could be with him now, right? A small gesture, but more than he had ever done on the island. He could try, at least. He let go, suddenly realizing how abrupt this hug might have been for Drew.

Theo smiled self-consciously. “Sorry! But I was just so happy to see you again!” His eyes drifted towards someone lying on the game machine’s floor. It was yet another familiar face, although this one was not nearly so welcome.

His fists clenched involuntarily as he stared down at her.

It was Camilla.

Why was she here? She was supposed to be back on the island, engaging in her ridiculous murder spree, wasn’t she?

He had been dreaming of this opportunity, truly, even though he still didn't know what to do with it. So many opportunities came to mind, none of them particularly pleasant. He wanted to scream at her for hours, nothing specific but simply an expression of rage. He wanted to break down and cry, moaning about all the injustices she had heaped upon him. He wanted to grab Camilla by the neck and show her just how it had felt to “go home”.

But staring at his own killer at her nadir, all he could see was someone struggling to be heard and comforted, just like he had. And, try as he might, he couldn’t keep up his anger anymore. Trying to forgive and forget was hard, but trying to keep hating one of the few people who had cared for him, loved him even, was just too much. His fury softened into a pitying weariness.

Theo knelt down next to her, afraid of accidentally stepping on Camilla’s head or Drew’s toes. He swallowed awkwardly, his mouth too dry for anything more than a perfunctory question. “Are you okay?”

He suddenly remembered what happened the last time he had tried to comfort Camilla, and swallowed again.

Drew couldn't even answer Camilla as he felt someone's arms wrap around him and he felt like his breath was being taken away. He felt like his eyes were watering when the familiar person pulled themselves away from him and he couldn't even make himself hug Theo back. He was really here with Theo and Camilla. No Declyn. He wondered if Declyn had moved on without them and Drew felt slightly sad about that. But he was still with his friends and he wanted to stay with them both longer.

"Theo..." Was all that he could whisper and he couldn't even look away as he watched the other boy talking to Camilla. He felt himself wincing as he had seen Camilla killing Theo and he wondered if he let them talk alone. But for some reason, he was afraid to leave them.... This time he was going to stay.

He followed in suit with Theo and he knelt down on the opposite side of Camilla and he couldn't stop looking at the both of them. They both felt so unreal to him; but they were really there and he just wanted to hold onto the both of them forever. He wanted to hold Declyn. He wished he could hug Diego and tell him that everything was going to be okay. But he couldn't do that.

"....I missed you all so much. I was so lonely here." He said quietly. Then he reached out to grab Camilla's hand and he used his other hand to reach for Theo's hand as well. "I'm just so relieved to see you both again. Even if it's not the best way...."

Theo's stare was heavy, and Camilla ducked her head down, away from his eyes. She wanted to curl into herself more, as though being crushed by it. She wanted to sink into the ground and vanish.

When she peeked up again, Theo knelt down by her, no trace of the vengeful fury that should have been there. And Drew was there with him. She felt Drew's fingers brush hers, and she drew her hand away. She got up, only to scramble away, her back meeting the other wall of the arcade's booth. Her breath also had weight to it - weight that shouldn't have been there because she shouldn't be breathing at all.

"No, I-"

She looked to Drew, and Theo again, rapidly blinking. It somehow made her vision more blurry than it was getting.

"You didn't-"

"I'm-!"

"You're-!"

Camilla stopped herself. Her breathing not only had weight, but a panicked edge.

"Is... if you're here, then-"

"I thought-"

"I thought I was in hell..."

It was unnerving, listening to Camilla stumble so clumsily on her words; she had always been so calm before. But Drew being there helped, in a way. Even if this was a mistake, at least he wouldn’t be alone in making one. Still, Drew reaching out so physically was reassuring, and he felt a little calmer than before. He mouthed a quiet “thank you”. It wasn't a proper repayment, but gratitude was all he had to give.

When Camilla finally managed to say something clear, he winced slightly. He had been hoping to avoid discussing the moral aspects of the last few days’ events until they had gotten through everything else. But maybe there was still a chance to avoid it, at least for now. “I really don’t think this place makes moral judgments about people. It feels more like … a waiting room for something more permanent.” He sighed. “But let’s get you back up first, yes?”