Survival Of The Fittest

((Mia Rose continued from Go to a school trip they said, it will be fun they said))

She had wanted to just keep on walking.

She wanted to walk for as long as it took for her thoughts to become clear. She wanted to walk until everything made sense again, until the idea that there were people out there searching for them all seemed like a possible reality, rather than an idiotic pipe dream. She had wanted to just keep on going, keep on trudging forwards, until she reached the edge of the island, and then just sit there, legs hanging into space, sitting there for as long as she possibly could.

But once she'd made her way through the maze of corridors in the asylum, traipsing through dingy hallways, feeling like she was walking in circles, the light guiding her way fading from sunlight to torchlight, eventually finding the entrance hall to the immense building, the sky had turned dark and it was nearly pitch-black outside. Even with her mind heavily preoccupied, and her emotional state in tatters, she knew wandering around outside right now would be a terrible idea, for so many reasons. Wander about in the dark, then who knew what would happen? She could trip and injure herself, or walk headfirst into danger; that dream of walking to the edge of the island could end with her walking off the edge and sinking down into the ocean below. But if she were to keep her flashlight on, then she'd be a sitting duck for any would be players. Her and Candice. She had kept up with Mia, a little behind but still there. Part of Mia was infinitely grateful that the other girl had enough faith in her to keep on sticking with her.

There was still that voice in her head, growing louder and louder, telling her that Candice deserved a better ally than her, that she'd be better off going solo even.

As she found a spare room to stay the night in, the thought grew in size, mixing with all the other fears and worries until they overwhelmed her, drowning out the hope she'd once had, until her exhausted mind had given out and she had fallen asleep.

There had been a brief moment of calm the next day, after Mia's eyes blinked open and she had shifted slightly, wrapped in tattered blankets stained with sweat and tears. A brief moment of un-clarity, where her mind was totally blank, and she was lying in peaceful comfort, not wanting to move.

Then, the announcements had started, and Mia had remembered exactly where she was. She had bolted up and sat straight upright in bed, wrapping the thin pillow around her head, pressing it tightly against her ears, trying desperately to block them out, an instinctive reaction to the sound of a man who was about to tell her that her friends were dead.

It wasn't until the third name had been read out that some semblance of her mind returned, telling her that she needed to hear this, to know just who had fallen. Wandering the island, hoping that they would bump into someone who had already been killed, would just about sum up everything that had happened to her so far.

It hadn't taken long for the pillow's position to be switched, Mia's face pressed against it instead, muffling her sobs of anguish and despair at every familiar name. Both Barry and Conrad were gone. There might even have been more missing friends, called out before Mia had been brave enough to try and listen.

She had slid off the bed as soon as the announcements had finished, grabbing an already rickety wooden chair and rendering it to nothing more than firewood by sending it hurtling against the far wall.

After that, she had sat on the edge of the bed for a while, wiping her eyes clear of seemingly endless tears. Then she had picked up her sunglasses, headphones, gun and bag, took a quick glance in what little remained of the window, and slinked outside. She had curled up against the wall of the corridor, knees tucked up against her chest, and waited for Candice to come out.

Now they were finally walking.

This walk was entirely silent. Mia couldn't think of a single thing to say to Candice. Not yet, anyway. She was still too preoccupied. Her mind was less flooded with horrible thoughts, but she still wasn't quite all right. Not in the slightest.

She was glad, oh so glad, that Al really hadn't killed anyone, that he was still innocent. But at the same time, it made the rift in her heart grow even larger. There really hadn't been any reason for him to ignore her, then. Nothing at all.

They were on a knife's edge, and someone she trusted had turned their back on her. She didn't know how she was supposed to get over that quickly.

Mia had almost been too preoccupied in tumbling the same thought over and over in her head that she nearly walked into the chain-link fence lining the cliff face. She stopped walking and gazed out at the ocean surrounding them in every direction for as far as the eye could see. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. A perfect mirror surface, the illusion shattered by ripples and waves, stretching to the horizon.

God, she wished she could be swimming right now. Just drifting onwards, not having to care about anything for a few precious moments.

There was no way of dangling her legs off the side like she had imagined, so Mia lowered herself down on to the grass, as close to the fence as possible, and tucked her knees against her chest again. Idly, she spun a blade of grass around the index of her right hand until it broke. Then she moved onto another blade.

A few minutes of silence passed.

"I'm sorry, Candice…" Mia murmured eventually. She let that hang there. She needed to hear Candice's reaction to gauge her next response.

Briefly, her mind wandered, and she wondered what Nathan was thinking right now.

((Candice Banks continued from "Go on a School Trip they said, It'll be fun they said"))


One and a half days later, Candice was at a loss for how to proceed.  Going around and looking for other people was... well, neither of them really had any faith that that would make any difference whatsoever in their situation.  They'd somehow managed to avoid running into people by accident as well, for better or worse.

Really, by the end of the first day, it felt really hard to believe that this was really Survival of the Fittest.  Candice had always though the whole thing sounded like a bloodbath, and it started to be difficult to keep the sense that they were in danger when you could apparently go days without running into anybody else.

Is this really an island where my classmates are dying?

Such doubts, of course, were hauled out into the backyard and shot the next morning when they began reading a list of their classmate's names.  An incredibly unpleasant wake-up call.


Of course, since having no idea what to do in regards to forming a plan to keep herself alive just wasn't challenging enough on its own, Candice also found herself stumped on a more local issue.  Specifically, she had no idea what to do about her alliance with Mia.  They'd stuck together, but the entire time had been a super-awkward silence that Candice had no idea what to do about.  She didn't fault Mia for being quiet -- rather, given the shock the girl had received, it was clear that it should be Candice's job as her ally to help her recover.

It was less clear how she should go about doing that.  What should she say?

"It really sucks that someone you trusted just ran away from you in fear without saying a word.  I totally get how you feel."  Not really the most comforting thing to say.  Thus, the awkward silence continued.


And then, after Mia had been silent for so long that Candice thought she might've joined a monastery and taken a vow of silence, she apologized?  What the hell for?

Sure, Mia had been pretty spaced out for what was now a majority of their time together, but she'd also been through a lot.  It wasn't as though she had done anything really wrong.  Like say, tagging along and pushing all of the decision making onto an emotionally distraught teammate.

Contributing to scaring a potential ally away by making them feel outnumbered, while doing nothing to help convince that person to join them.

Being just a waste of space in general.

Or how about something like opening up her bag to get some rations on the first day, only to find that inside her bag there was a fucking gun, and keeping that fact a secret from her teammate because she was afraid that her completely honest partner might start being afraid of her.

Y'know, stuff like that.  Stuff that Candice was "accomplishing" as though she was checking them off of some kind of twisted "10 ways I want to dick over my ally before I die" bucket list.


How do you respond to an apology like that?  Candice was so lost for words that while mentally scrambling for a reply, she found herself vocalizing the conclusion she'd been desperately suppressing for some time now.

"Sorry... I guess this partnership isn't really doing us any good, is it?"

"We've not exactly been at Batman and Robin levels of success, have we?"

Mia glanced up at Candice, a small, idle smile with no meaning or feeling behind it, before looking back out to sea again, cool droplets of dew beneath her fingers.

"We're not even Bonnie and Clyde. We're probably closer to Bert and Ernie than anything."

She could be swimming right now. The ocean was so close. All she needed to do would be to get up, wander down the coastal path to the shoreline and dive in. She knew, though, that it wouldn't quite be the same. She had spent the vast majority of her swimming life in the pool, in a safe, secure environment, where the fear and anxiety would only crop up when she was preparing for a big race or a gala. Here, even with the feeling of her hair buoyed by the currents, the contrast of the cool water below and the warm sun above, she wouldn't be able to disperse the knowledge that she was completely trapped on this island, trying to replicate her comforts from home to no avail.

"None of its on you, though. I've been the one leading us around in circles and getting nothing done. Telling you plans and making promises that I could never hope to keep. Fuck, plans that I don't have a fucking clue about where to even start!"

Mia wound another blade of grass around her finger, broke it off, then held it up to her face, the thin green strip neatly bisecting the ocean in front of her. Then she released her grasp on it, let the wind catch it, and watched it disappear into the air.

She should be with Nathan right now. He had been on the other bus, right? She should be right by his side now, hand clasped in his own, zoning out from whatever it was they were being talked to about, just being safe and happy together. But Nathan was back at Kingman by now, probably wondering what had happened to her and all of his other friends, desperately praying that the worst-case scenario hadn't happened again. Nathan was still safe, and according to all the fairytales and TV shows and films and books and songs she'd watched and read and listened to, she should have been feeling so much happier at this fact than she was right now.

"You should probably go your own way from here on out. It'd be for your own good. I'm fucking lost."

Pretty much as soon as the words were out of Candice's mouth, she realized they were probably a mistake.  It was supposed to be a bit of self-deprecation.  Y'know, something like "Wow, we really suck at this, haha, let's do a bit better next time".  It was definitely the dumbest way to react to an apology short of coming straight out and saying "Mia, you're damn right that you can't do anything right."

She might've underestimated how much Mia was blaming herself for the way that things had been going.

"Mia, I..."

Calm down, Candice.  You don't want to blurt things out without thinking how she'll take it.

"We screwed this up somehow.  I don't know what we could've done right if we had another chance.  Fuck, I'm not even sure what it is that's wrong with how we're doing things.  I mean, we're still living, but we meander about, stumble across people and stumble away just as quickly... it's like we're just kinda there."

Leading us around in circles and getting nothing done, as Mia had described it.  For all that the two of them hadn't spoken to each other much in the past day, it seemed that they were still pretty in sync with what page they were on.

"I can't blame you for not being able to think of what to do.  If you've been coming up with plans where you don't have any idea how to accomplish them, then I just straight-up can't come up with a plan to begin with.  I'd be nice if it could be something like 'You come up with our goal, and I'll figure the means to reach it,' but it looks like we can't do that, either."

Their sole accomplishment so far was putting some new holes in an abandoned building.  And even that had been done before they started working together.

"I don't want to split up, Mia.  On my own, I don't think I'd have accomplished anything anyways.  I want to make this work out somehow, but I don't have any idea how."

In the end, it was just another thing that Candice had been unable to contribute towards.

"I don't want to split up, but... Mia, do you think that there's even a tiny chance we might be able to pull ourselves together and make this work?"

"I want to think we can make this work. I really do."

Mia pushed herself up, turning to face Candice, right hand gripping her left arm. There were tears sparkling in her eyes. They both seemed to be hurting, right now. They both seemed to be feeling useless in different ways. Mia at least had been able to think of even some vague direction for them to go in, some kind of barebones plan. Candice seemed to have lost all hope, all self-confidence drained.

At least she hadn't been abandoned by someone she thought was a friend…

Mia felt sick at herself the moment she thought that. This wasn't a competition. This wasn't a race to see who could feel shittier about themselves the quickest. They were both in just as bad a way. They were both stranded on this island, told to kill or be killed. There was no use getting filled with hatred over something like this. It was like boasting to someone in front of a firing squad, whilst you were strapped to an electric chair.

Candice had hit the nail on the head. It had been like they were just existing for the past two days. They were still alive. That was always the most important part. But Mia just felt powerless. It was frustrating and demoralising. She didn't want to split up from Candice. But this was going to be the first decision Mia had made on the island that would actually bear fruit.

"If it helps, you've been part of the reason I've been pushing forwards here. Like, Christ, you barely knew me before this shitstorm happened, yet you've been sticking with me all this time, no matter how many dumb decisions I've made. I… I really appreciate it."

Mia brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. Somehow a smile had found its way to her face. A moment passed. Then she pulled Candice into a hug.

"I don't wanna split up either, but I just need a little time by myself. Just some time to clear my head and gather my thoughts, alright?"

She gently squeezed Candice, holding onto the other girl for a few moments more before letting her go. She scratched the back of her neck, before running her fingers through her hair.

"Listen, tomorrow evening, soon as it starts getting dark, I'll be back here, I promise. I'll wait for you. Unless, y'know, you get back here first, of course."

Somehow, Mia managed to muster up a small grin. She pulled her sunglasses down to rest on the bridge of her nose, and broke into an awful Arnie impression.

"I'll be back."

And with a wink and a wave, Mia turned and headed off.

((Mia Rose continued in Elapsam Semel Occasionem Non Ipse Potest Iuppiter Reprehendere))

Candice remained at the tops of the cliffs for quite some time.  It wasn't like she had anyplace in particular that she wanted to go; as she had said earlier, she'd been letting Mia make all the plans.  So for the time being, it looked like she had switched from accomplishing nothing all over the island to accomplishing nothing in a single place.  Such wonderful progress.

She knew that, in the end, she couldn't just stay like that forever.  There was no point in her and Mia splitting off from each other if they couldn't come up with some ideas for how to proceed from tomorrow evening.  She immediately tossed out the urge to say "Well, I'm sure Mia will have some input when she gets back."

That was the kind of thinking that had led to this in the first place.

But what could she do?  she'd been tagging along after Mia for so long that it was a bit of a struggle to remember what she had been doing before that.  Well, they'd more or less run into each other within minutes of waking up, so it wasn't like she'd really accomplished much before then.

Thinking back... exploration, maybe?  She had a vague impression that she'd been about to do something like that when she met Mia.  Come to think of it, one of the non-plans that they'd come up with when setting out from that first building was to check out their surroundings.  They'd gotten distracted from that course of action by their diplomatic failure when they ran into Al, so in the end they had pretty much abandoned that idea before attempting it.

Rather, Candice suddenly was struck by the realization that in two days she'd only seen part of two buildings on one part of this island.  There was no way that lack of knowledge wouldn't come back to bite her somehow if she didn't take steps to correct it.

She was tempted to put off leaving until morning came, but she fought off that urge.  If she didn't take the first steps now, she'd just find another excuse tomorrow.  Then she'd find another one the day after that.  Besides, the main argument in favor of staying, that it'd be dangerous to stumble around in unfamiliar territory in the dark, was still a better alternative to staying here.  These cliffs were a bit too open and visible for her to camp out safely.  She'd best find someplace else to sleep tonight.


((Candice Banks continued in This time I might just dissappear))