Survival Of The Fittest

((Michael Froese continued from the menagerie))

Michael walked back through the darkness. He'd never been on a livestreamed shirtless nature hike during the midnight rain before, but this was a time for firsts if one ever existed. He'd expunged himself of inhibitions.

He didn't know why he was going to the commissary, of all places. Maybe it was because he wanted to feel guilty.

...Yeah, that was probably it.

He liked the nighttime. It was peaceful. The only noise was the rain; the only thing to see was the black of night. There was nothing forcing him to stay grounded. It was just him floating.

As he neared the building, he began to sing. He made various noises with his gun as a way to imitate instrumentation. He danced to the beat.

His own personal metaphor. Maybe his own self-fulfilling prophecy, too.

"I woke this morning, to the sundown shining in.
I found my mind in a brown paper bag within.
I tripped on a cloud and fell eight miles high.
I tore my mind on a jagged sky."

He reached the doorway. He sang through.

"I just dropped in,
to see what condition my condition was in."

...

Silence from inside.

He picked a rock up from off the ground. "Throwing a grenade!" he said, before rolling it in. He figured anyone inside would be fucked up enough to fall for it.

...

Nothing.

"Hi, Jeremiah."

...

Nobody home.

"Cool, cool."

He danced through the door.

"Pushed my soul in a deep dark hole, and I followed it in.
I watched myself crawling out as I was crawling in."

He closed it behind him and kicked a pot into the path of the doorway. A noise trap like Nia and Alexander's. His foot grazed the hole he'd shot in the ground. He turned on his flashlight and shone it over in the direction of Jeremiah's corpse. He walked over.

"Got up so tight, I couldn't unwind.
I saw so much, I broke my mind.
I just dropped in,
to see what condition my condition was in."

Jeremiah was under blankets. Blankets were under a note. Michael picked it up and unfolded it, avoiding touching the parts stained with blood, and read it aloud to the tune of the song's first verse.

"This is the body of Jeremiah Anderson.
He was my be-e-est frie-eh-end.
Nick Ogilvie mur-ur-dered him he-ee-ere.
Please leave him alo-oh-oh-oh-ohne.
Tha-ah-ank you.
Ni-i-i-ia-ia Kah-rah-halios"

He placed the note on the ground and stripped away the blankets, one by one. The topmost one wasn't even bloody.

"Someone better label fools in big black letters on a dead end sign.
Had my foot on the gas when I left the road and blew out my mind.
Eight miles out of Memphis and I got no spare.
Eight miles straight up downtown somewhere."

The blood on the last blanket had already dried. He pulled it back.

"I just dropped in,
to see what condition my condition was in."

He looked at Jeremiah's bloodied face. It was just... a physical approximation of what Jeremiah had once been. His remnants.

"Oh, I just dropped in,
to see what condition my condition was in."

He looked at Jeremiah's crushed throat. He stared long and hard.

"Well... shit, Jeremiah, buddy, I don't know what I expected."

He placed all but one of the blankets back on Jeremiah. He picked the note up and placed it on the mound.

"It's alright if I borrow this, yeah?" he said, referring to the unbloodied blanket. "Thanks, Jere-bear. You're the best." He laid it out on the ground next to Jeremiah, covering the dry blood on the ground. He put his bag on the blanket, unzipped it, popped 20 mg of Prozac, grabbed a clean shirt, and put it on. He laid down on the blanket, using his pack as a pillow.

"'Nighty-night, my man," he patted his hand against a portion of the blankets that were covering where Jeremiah's chest was. "Sleep up, it'll be a long day tomorrow. See, it's funny because you're sleeping forever."

He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.


__

It was a pretty fucking stupid idea, but Michael thought it would probably work.

Beryl's idea was really, really dumb. She thought about it for a moment, then she made the mental note to probably never think about stupid ideas in the first place.

Okay, so this was actually a cool idea! Except that Beryl didn't think that way.

Beryl was probably one of the smartest, most smart, and most smart people in school. She probably also probably thought that way, but she was probably wrong about that too.

So why was Michael thinking about this now?

"Michael, we can't do this."

Michael was in the middle of an idea. He hadn't even fully fleshed out his idea yet. He couldn't just pull all this stuff all together in his head and then just throw it out the window because Beryl wouldn't let him. Maybe he should wait until he had more time though. Time was money in the making, you know, especially with all the shit he had to deal with in school.

So he pulled out his phone, which now had a bunch of emails and text messages that he had to read to get to the bottom of. He looked at the messages that he had read so far. They were all pretty short, basically just stuff he already knew. Stuff that he could probably figure out without going back and reading those other emails. He didn't mean to be rude to Beryl, but he didn't want to ruin any chances she had with her friend. So he just kept reading.

"Well, we could always start with these."

He looked at one of the emails. It was from one of his classes. He knew the names of most of the people in here. He knew most of the names of the people that might be able to give them some useful advice. He knew that there might be someone else out here who would be much, much smarter than them. He knew that whoever that person was, he should just run. Run away. Run to the moon. Run to some other solar system. Just... just... leave.

"Leave us alone, okay? We can talk about this. I mean... we can go out for drinks and stuff, or we can just hang out and hang out. We could even make out at the beach once in a while. It's a weird thing to do, I guess. We might just end up making love to each other. I don't know. Maybe."

He looked at the other email. There was one from a girl that he didn't recognize. He didn't know her name either. He didn't know if she was his friend. He didn't know if she was even his girlfriend. He didn't know if she even knew that he knew that he knew that he knew the person he knew was dead. He just knew that he didn't know if he wanted to die knowing that that was what he had to do in order to make friends.

It wasn't his fault that he had to die this way. It wasn't even Beryl's fault that she had to die this way. She didn't get to make these tough decisions. Michael didn't get to make these tough choices either. It was Beryl's fault that he had to die like this. It was Beryl's fault that he had to die like this.

It hurt to look at him right now. It hurt to think about how much pain it was going to take for him to die like this.

It hurt, honestly.

So Michael had talked himself into this. Yeah. That was it. He was in.

For the first time in a while, he was actually in a place where he could actually make friends. It made sense. It was just going to be a long process.

He'd tried talking to Beryl once. Nothing. He closed his eyes, closed his mouth. Long dragging. Finally he opened his eyes, looked at the timer on the fridge, and blinked a couple times.

"FIVE MINUTES TO -

__________

He was on a boat. He was strapped into some kind of contraption. He was surrounded by people he didn't know.

He was on board the tiny fishing boat the locals called a "Bugle".

He didn't know the owner.

He was, however, pretty certain he didn't know the guy on the top of the boat. That guy was, apparently, the island's king. His voice carried with it an air of authority, authority that he held in common not only with the king but also with his guest.

The guy who was on the island was apparently the only person here who knew how to fly the fuck out of here.

"So," Morgan said, "what do you think we should do?"

There was silence.

Michael looked at the guy on the boat. He was tall. A lot of people said he was short. It was a tall order to live up to in the sky-high city of New York, where everyone carried themselves with the air of royalty.

But the guy on the boat was a king. And when the pressure was on, the pressure had to be brought down. And in his head, there was an idea. An idea to use to take the world by storm, to make the king fly. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, what the fuck was this all for? A few sentences? A joke? He'd be funny? Yeah, probably. But not when his guest was about to be thrown into the real action by some stupid shit he'd just read.

He looked at the guy on the boat. He looked like he was having a good time.

He looked like the guy on the island.

"You know, we could... you know..." His hand reached out to the guy on the back of Morgan's head. "We could be pilots."

The island of lies

Michael was floating on the ocean. He was alive. He was fine. He just...needed help with some of the mental stuff. Like, he needed help figuring out how to describe what happened to him, what happened to the other kids, how things were going for him, how he was feeling, how people were treating him, stuff like that. Stuff like that made everything else seem easier. Like, he needed help explaining things. Just like he needed help thinking things through. Like, he needed help with being a human. Like, he needed help with being human. Stuff like that made everything else seem easier. Like, he needed help describing things.

All he needed was someone who could fly a plane. Flies weren't too hard to come by in the city. In the real world, though, they weren't really supposed to be able to fly planes. Hell, most of the stuff humans were designed to do was stuff that animals had been doing for millions of years, shit like bipedalism and so on. Stuff that was pretty much impossible to do by hand in the real world.

Well, Michael actually did fly a plane, and he pretty much crushed a guy's head open while he was down. Even if he hadn't crushed his head open, he probably would've crushed another guy's skul-

__


Michael woke up. His dreams had been meaningless, meandering. He was glad for that. He looked over at the pile of paper, blankets, cloth, flesh, and bones he called Jeremiah.

"Morning, my dude." was all he said. He moved his pack against the wall, grabbed his gun, and stared at the door. He could still hear rain. He popped four dexedrine spansule pills, his normal dose. He waited for the morning announcements.

They started. Michael listened.

Clown cult Phillip was dead. Only half of the people on the island who'd been there at Phillip's apartment were still alive. Michael and Lucas.

Michael remembered the order of elimination.

Ophelia'd been out first; she wasn't even on the trip.

Then Lucas, who was still alive.

Then Phillip, who was dead now. His elimination left Michael and Beryl still in the running.

Michael remembered what happened next.

Beryl had smiled.

"Me and you." she had said.

She had passed the dice back to Michael.

Michael had rolled a five.

"I win." she had said. She got to be the game master or whatever.

Then she rolled the dice again.

"Game's over." she had said. Then she was gone.

Michael understood now.


Bree was dead too. She'd died in the same clusterfuck as Phillip, apparently. Napoleon complex Zach stabbed her. It stung. She and Michael were bio buddies. She was his main connection to the popular crowd. She was how he knew all the dirt.

She would have really done something with her life if this hadn't happened. She was smart.

Michael was the island's best person at marine biology now. It was a weird thought. It was a selfish thought. It was an honest thought.


He appreciated the mercy kill pun but wouldn't dare say it out loud. Kelly was a murderer now. That was weird. Kelly was his friend. Kelly had poisoned someone to death. It was surreal.


The announcements ended. The menagerie was a danger zone now, so... that was cool. Marco and Nick were probably having A Time.


Michael looked up at the same camera he had looked at when Jeremiah had died.

He stared through.

"'Sup, I'm still here."

"Phillip Olivares was a juggalo. He invited me, along with some other people, to his apartment once to play this weird game with dice and fate and stuff? Morton's list, it was called. I remember I kept making jokes in my head about how he was about to sacrifice me for his clown cult. Someone shot him."

"Terra Johnson was religious, but like, weird religious, if you follow me. I didn't know much about her. She was shot by the same person that shot Phillip. She also shot the person who shot Phillip."

"Mikki Swift was the person who shot Phillip. She had a wild-ass first name. She threw a big party for grad, everyone was invited. She called it Swiftball. I didn't go. I regret that. She was a double murderer."

"Bree Jones was my friend. She was great. She was really, really, really good at marine biology. We were bio buddies. She was how I got all my juicy gossip. She was stabbed."

"Sapphire Waters had a punny name, I guess? She was another arty, occulty kid. Not really my crowd. She bled out."

"Danny Chamnanma's surname was really hard to spell. He was a gamer dude. Weeby. I didn't like him much, but I can't really hold anything against him. He was stabbed."

"Cammy Walker-Grimsley was hipstery. I didn't know her well, I was a closet hipster. She fell to her death."

"Kyle Harrison was one of those kinda socially awkward, won't hit puberty until he's twenty, owns a lot of shirts he got from bible camps kind of kids. He was shot. Someone won a prize for killing him"

"Ron Kiser was a tryhard. Shit, that's rude of me to say, but it's also true, so... sorry to his family, I guess. He was shot in the back."

"Desiree Beck was a gamer girl. She streamed on Twitch. I bet at least one of you weirdos watched her streams. She was shot in the head."

"Kayla Harris got locked in a bathroom during Swiftball. I'm on friendly terms with her murderer right now, which is weird. Marco Hart killed her with a Freddy Krueger glove."

"Next up is my boy Jeremiah Anderson." Michael made shooting gestures and snapped his fingers at the corpse. "He had argyria - his skin was discoloured from colloidal silver use. He knew ASL. He seemed like he'd had a rough childhood. I watched him die. I watched him choke to death on his own blood. I watched him suffocate. Nick Ogilvie killed him. Y'all on the internet, remember to make 'choke me daddy' jokes about Nick. Not Jeremiah - just Nick. I won't explain why right now."

"Mercy Ames was popular-ish. I didn't know her great, but she was nice. She was poisoned."

"Gina Petrov was also popular-ish. She was a floater between cliques, sort of - except actually, come to think of it, she hung out a lot with Eastern European kids, which is like, oddly specific, but whatever. She was shot."

"Caroline Ford was Mormon. She was very Mormon. She'd like, literally just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, I think? She was who shot Gina. She broke a camera and her collar got blown."

"M'kay, that's it. Second verse, same as the first. Talk to you tomorrow, maybe."


He looked away from the camera once more and stood up, walking to a table near the center of the room. He flipped it over, its legs facing away from the building's entrance.

He had an idea.

He walked back over to Jeremiah and pulled the blankets off. He was definitely still dead. Maybe a bit ickier than he'd been when Michael arrived during the night. Michael could see dark splotches on the parts of Jeremiah's skin closest to the ground. Livor mortis.

Michael raised his gun in both hands, pointing it at Jeremiah's right shoulder. Safety off, hammer down. "Sorry bud." he said. He fired.

It was the first gunshot wound he'd seen in his life. It was also the first person he'd shot in his life, which probably should've felt more momentous. It was a dead person, but it was still a person.

He picked a pot up from off the ground and pressed its handle into the wound. The blood from the wound was kind of goopy, but it would serve its purpose. He walked back over to the upturned table and started writing, using the pot handle as a pen and Jeremiah's blood as ink. He ran out of blood a few times, but he eventually finished.

On the table, prominently in view from the door, inscribed in big red letters, were the words "Fort Jeremiah".

Michael tossed the bloodied pot into the corner of the room and walked back over to Jeremiah. He draped the blankets back over his figure and placed Nia's note on top.

He walked over to a different table, near one of the side walls of the building, and sat down. He deliberately placed himself so that he wouldn't be immediately visible to anyone opening the door. He'd be able to see the door open, but the person entering's view of him would be blocked by the door. The noise trap was still there, too.

He held the gun casually, resting both his arms on the table. It was aimed at the entrance, ready to fire if needed.

He waited.

The door swung open partway, hit the pot. Metal scraped hardwood with a lame murmur. The door was arrested for a moment, and the weight of a person on the other side stalled, a bubble of filmy fat trying to mix with water.





"If anyone is in here, I'll leave." She sounded like rusted metal and swallowed nails, flakes clogging and gumming the holes stabbed through her throat.

The door shyly crept open another inch, pushing the pot a little further along and on its way.

Michael hadn't moved since he'd sat down. He heard a metallic, grinding sound. He'd heard it once before, when he'd been on the other side of the door. He stopped waiting.


"If anyone is in here, I'll leave."

He could tell they were the words of someone who'd been having a real bad time. He could tell they were also the words of someone who wasn't actively looking for people to murder.

They weren't a threat. They were someone who would probably understand.

He had an idea.

He flicked the safety on, and slowly, silently slumped over. His face pressed into the table. Both his arms lay still, in front of his head. He held the gun tight with a dead man's grip. He stopped breathing.

Other than a faint heartbeat, he looked just as dead as Jeremiah.

The door flew open, the pot politely got out of the way with only some grand amount of clatter and racket.

((Camila Cañizares continued from Rakshasa County))

Yesterday's midday rain had made no further impact on her- she'd already been soaked to the bone and far from a state of being able to do anything about it. The silhouette that took it's first uncomfortable steps through the doorway was a skeleton with some token papering of skin and a once pretty blouse now virtually fused to her, inch by inch, still weeping rainwater and seawater and sweat and probably tears at some point or another. A layer of sliminess had slowly settled onto her- every single motion felt like it was cling wrapped and put away in a fridge for later- she was cold, so cold that she'd already forgotten how to shiver because she'd used up all her energy trying and had started to burn memories for the fuel. Her bad arm was now a medical textbook still and caption. From the hem of her short sleeve down bruises were slowly swallowing her flesh a brackish shade of Grimace purple.

Her movements were slow, even when she was sure she was alone. One foot forward seemed such a colossal amount of effort as to be unfeasible. A second later she'd made progress.

She observed, belatedly, the state of the room. Her pupils dilated, as she struggled to comprehend in her sluggishness.

She rolled her eyes with difficulty, feeling blood rush the wrong way to make her sick and dizzy.

The corpse shape under the blanket was no longer a shock, if anything she merely envied whoever had managed the feat of actually making a body presentable where she'd utterly failed twice. Envy was a strong word for an emotion she no longer had the energy for.

It was the bloody message on the tabletop that drew her ire. Loud and garish and probably disrespectful in some way or another. She stared at it blankly, waiting. A moment later became a second and her patience fizzled, the fuse wet like the entire soaked rag that was the entirety of her mortal flesh and blood existence. She considered the message from a different angle, a whimsically careless tilt of her chin to one side. No point. She still felt nothing about this. It was a table with blood on it.

Wasn't even a fort. No point in playing pretend, there never had been.

She trudged and hobbled over to the human shape blankets. First, the note. She didn't know any of the names involved, none with faces to be attached. Maybe she'd already burnt up those memories, but she doubted it. There was a certain beautiful meaninglessness to that in particular. She'd only ever really known enough people on this island that she could have counted them all up on one hand, and most of them had already managed to die on her watch.

She respected the note's request, and replaced it without checking underneath. Someone had put in the effort of writing a message, and that carried a gravity no amount of threats at gunpoint or fists shoving her under the sea could ever have replicated. This Nia had a script as neat as Camila's own. Camila supposed this was the poignant telenovela moment where she would have reflected that she and this Nia might have made for good friends in another lifetime. But no, in another lifetime where they both weren't fated to die in messy repose that idealism still would not have been what Camila wanted.

She deserved this peculiar loneliness, dodging away from and around the corpses that also didn't want her around. She understood that fact.

There was another silhouette of humanity slumped against the table's far end, obscured from the somber gray of the outside world's rain-drenched sunlight. This one was without blankets. He was slender, but not yet in the way where the flesh began to sink onto the skin in uneven patches- a way Camila was now very familiar with, a fashionable look all her friends seemed to have caught onto. Camila supposed there might have been enough blankets on the first corpse to cover this other. She could be so kind onto a stranger's final resting place where she couldn't have summoned the courage to do so for her old friends.

As she understood it, as she had sobered to understand of herself and her own weakness that she'd tried to bluster away in another life in a city called Chattanooga, she was scared of the finality. She'd driven herself forward- playing pretend as much as that idiot who'd tried to make a tomb for corpses a playfort- in pursuit of being something besides the girl who'd gotten all her friends killed.

She'd failed, and maybe now she could finally rest. She wasn't even sure why she was still walking. Still standing, still breathing, still here.

She approached the body.

Benny led her, beckoning, cheekily encouraging her to find her way like she 'always did'. Dante supported her fragile remnants of an arm, silently taking the burden of her agony. Tonya stalked just behind her, grumbling that Patrice was waiting for her auntie to return.

She was still lost. Still hurt. Still long gone.

No point in playing pretend.

Camila reached the corpse in a moment of total silence, her own breath laggard.

"... Are you kidding me." She grumbled.

"I can hear you breathing. Get up already."

Michael hadn't been expecting the girl - he guessed, the voice sounded feminine - to take more than maybe a minute and a half to approach. In the end, he'd only been able to hold his breath for a a bit under minute.

He listened to the girl's shambled footsteps. She went to gawk at Jeremiah first and stopped for a bit. There was some shuffling, and then the footsteps resumed, getting closer. They stopped again. He could hear her breathing. She was close. She was really close.

He took a deep, deliberate breath in.

The girl reacted about as well as expected.

He slowly lifted himself off the table, his movements jerky. He based it on how people looked when they reanimated on The Walking Dead. It was a conscious metaphor on his part, made for his own benefit.

He turned his head towards the girl and stared into her eyes. He knew the look; his eyes had it too.

He recognized her. Camila. One of her arms looked fucked up. She was soaked. Michael was pretty sure that this was their first time speaking to one another. She hung with the stoners, so he'd always kinda avoided her on principle. He'd be lying if he said he'd never shittalked her to Bree (he didn't know they knew each other). Bree was still dead, that reminded him.

His gaze floated over to the bear hanging from her hip. He stared into several of its eyes. It reminded him of Beryl, sort of. It seemed like it would have fit with her aesthetic. He appreciated that. He saw it was holding something in its hand.

...oh. Huh. That was sure... something. He'd never seen one of those before. He didn't want to think about if it fit with Beryl's aesthetic.

His gaze went back to Camila's eyes. He shrugged and gave a sympathetic half-frown. His affect was flat.

"Me too. You can sit down, if you'd like."

His breathing had broken the tension like the punchline to a bad joke. Camila wasn't the type to pity laugh. Though by now she wasn't the type to laugh in any sense of the word. Ever again.

His janky back and forth trying to get back up was likewise either a bad joke or legitimate head trauma. Camila could do little about it either way. That particular combination of things- piss poor humor, brain damage... Benny all over again, knowing Camila's luck. At least this face was one she didn't know, didn't care about, would never have cared to know.

He observed Regina for a moment. Camila, noiseless as the gesture was humorless, was able to fold over her not-broken arm that sort of worked and have her bear wave the boy's way. Like waving a sword, but a far more phallic greetings.

He looked more alive than her. Something about his aura was different. Something about her even being able to perceive such an immaterial thing at all was all the stranger.

"I don't intend to stay."

She leaned against the nearest chair back, heavy and inert. She was suddenly conscious of sounding like wet laundry slathering itself over floor tile.

"Is what I keep telling myself. Might still be stuck to this spot when you also drop dead." A blunt appraisal, but also a window into her soul. More emphatic than the foggy obsidian beads her eyes had become these past two days.

"Still alive, somehow."

Survivor's guilt, Michael could tell. He felt something similar, except it was more like survivor's regret.

Just regret. He still wasn't sure if he felt any real real guilt about anything that had happened during his time on the island. He knew he wanted to feel it, at least.

The commissary had taken on a somber, mourning kind of air. The ambient light was a dull blue-grey, dyed by the weather. The only sounds audible from within were the rain and whatever noises the building's occupants deigned to make.

"Hey, I'm cool with it. My name's Michael. If you want to talk about what, uh, happened," he idly tapped the pistol against the table. "I'm here for you."

He kept eye contact with her and tried his best to hold down his tears. This time, his best was enough.

Therapy island.

The air was stale, somehow dry as a biscuit when all the world around them was the sky's naked sobbing. It must have been the corpse then. This is what Dante was reduced to, the worst and least useful of air fresheners.

She didn't bother starting with her name, and couldn't have thought up a more useless means of introduction if she'd even tried.

Camila began to slowly, painstakingly undo the tie binding Regina to herself.

"Not used to, how you put it, 'talking about' things."

It was almost her excuse to say nothing at all.

"I tried to help Dante. He died. I tried to be there for Benny. Also died. I liked both of them. Maybe something more than that." If there had been any fluctuation in her empty echo of a tone she'd have needed laboratories worth of equipment to find it. "My friend Tonya's gone rogue. Of some sort. I don't even know because I didn't have the energy to stick around and beat any sense into her." She unconsciously bit at one of her lips to hydrate it. Like trying to lick sand. "I was pretty pathetic there too, but I'm getting used to that 'being pathetic' idea."

She spoke fast, enunciated. A presentation she wanted over and done with. It was possibly the most she'd spoken in one go since she'd woken up. On island. From her mother's womb. Something like that.

Supposedly confessing the sin made it feel better, like pressure escaping a valve deep in the chest. Hadn't helped one bit. Camila felt no different. She couldn't imagine how people endorsed making the self vulnerable like this.

"What about you?"

At least she was keeping eye contact. He looked weak, she looked weak. They stood on even ground, and maybe that dynamic was at least comfortable where no other interaction ever really had been. Regina observed their exchange from all angles, finding a new home slumped atop the table. Just shy of the beginnings of the blood announcement.

"And why the table."

Michael listened to what Camila had to say. He took every word to heart; he had an obligation to.

Dante.

Benny. That name hurt.

She confessed to feeling a confusing, ambiguous like-maybe-love feeling for the two dead boys.

One of her friends had 'gone rogue'. Teen Mom Tanya.

Then she called herself pathetic.

Michael related to too much of it. He kept a strong face.

Camila asked him the same question he'd implied asking her. Also asked about the sign written in blood.

"Mmm," he paused. He'd answer that first. Honestly, it was hard for him to justify. "It's a memorial, I guess - except it's not a memorial to just the sanitized version of events, if you understand what I mean. Like, it's not just a name engraved into a wall like the SOTF memorial; It's his blood -" he pointed his left hand toward the pile of blankets. "- Jeremiah's blood. It's Jeremiah Anderson the person, not just Jeremiah Anderson the name. I was there when he died - accessory to his murder, legally speaking. It's mostly aimed at, uh," he pointed up at a camera and looked through the lens. "Them. The viewer."

He looked back at Camila and scratched his neck. Time to answer the first question.

There was a lot. It seemed almost absurd to him that he'd only been on the island for a bit over fourty-eight hours.

He tried his best to condense it.

"I fell in love."

It was a half-truth. He pinched the bridge of his nose. His face contorted. Floodgates were open. He couldn't hold himself back anymore.

He was crying, but it was different kind of crying than he'd become used to. It made him feel human again.

"I-I fell in love with a girl after -" he inhaled sharply. "- after I let her die. I fell in love with her after I let her die. I-I just... I'm just afraid. I'm afraid of myself and -" he paused. "I'm mostly afraid of myself, I think. Other people don't scare me anymore. I just -"

He looked at his own reflection in Camila's eyes; finally got a chance to look into his own eyes.

They were different from hers.

He looked down at the floor. "- I was there when Benny, uh... when he got hit. I'm sorry."

"Jeremiah Anderson the person. The name." She repeated his words to test out how they weighed on her tongue. She thought of her responses. Could have been long-form, maybe eulogizing, poignant, and not even a second later:

"That's bullshit." She stated it without venom, merely as a matter of fact, words that came out of mouths and entered ears, no other context or value needed. "Them," she iterated his term. "They, just see a crazy boy dancing around and dipping his fingers in a corpses blood." She shrugged, though she wasn't sure movement of her shoulders had even happened. Could have been that she was just a floating head by now, all well wishes without the passion or verve to make any of them come to life.

"If that's what you want to do then power to you. But your train of thought has no wheels."

She struggled to remember. Something else possibly relevant.

"There was no Micheal who killed a Jeremiah. I heard them. So blaming yourself as an 'accessory' is another reach. Self-defeating. Maybe that's what you're going for." That was just her opinion, anyways. Camila accepted that she wasn't the sort to have particularly a correct understanding of things. She'd been ready for a lifetime's worth of living with that concession. Some lifetime it had turned out to be.

She watched him cry and accepted it. Emotions were healthy, and she welcomed them, much as she personally could do nothing about his. She didn't look away. Maybe she looked sympathetic. It was hard to tell what shape the mask of her face had been melted into in all the jungle heat.

She was reminded that it was for the best that she get going. Long before his life became her next failed responsibility.

"Maybe it's for the best that people like us stay away," and she said it as much for herself as for him. She wanted to hear how it sounded. It seemed unpleasant. Like an empty sentiment, it seemed to have no meaning. "If we cannot trust ourselves."

... Well. Maybe she could say this much. She still didn't recognize him. She had no obligation to feel burdened by anything besides this moment they shared- it was one memory, and nothing she'd keep for much longer.

"Benny mentioned it. Justin." He wasn't looking at her. That was okay- she liked it this way too. Well. Liked was also a strong word. "Benny didn't blame him. Said it was an accident. Just like him to."

He'd been letting his tears fall freely. One had beaded onto the floor, a small puddle she carefully rolled over with her toe, that it was softened out of being.

"Love is complicated." Another admission. Another platitude. Once more it seemed something less than the sum of its parts. "Don't think either of us can help the freakshow ways we experienced it. Benny and I, I wanted him to be my first time. I couldn't do it- I'm just not programmed that way. I don't think he even understood, even thought it was his fault, up to his dying breath."

"What we had wasn't any less real." Then suddenly, she exhaled hard through her nose. She almost seemed annoyed with herself- it was the most honest emoting she might have done in some time.

"And now I'm going on with the bullshit. I blame you."

Maybe Michael wanted them to see him as crazy. Maybe he wanted to see himself as crazy. Maybe it'd make him crazy for real; make the inherent pain of life go away.

He wasn't crazy. At least, not anymore. He was too tired to keep trying to be crazy.

She said Jeremiah wasn't his fault. Called him self-defeating. Said maybe that was the point of what he was doing.

It was. It was usually the point, he realized. Even before the island, it had usually been the point. He didn't know if he knew why.

She talked about how maybe they deserved their self-imposed exile. He didn't want to think about that.

She talked about Benny. About how he'd said it'd been an accident. Michael knew it hadn't been an accident. He didn't correct Benny's posthumous words. He didn't have the heart to.

She talked about love. About Benny again. About how they'd almost done the do. About how it hadn't worked out. About how it had still been real. He heard a harsh, spasm-like breath. He heard her emotions bubbling over.

He smiled a bittersweet smile. "In the end, bullshit's what makes us human, I think." He looked back up at her face. "Tonight, your ghost will ask my ghost 'Who put these bodies between us'." Back into her eyes. "It's a song lyric. I remember thinking about it when Beryl - she's who I, uh, yeah - when she was being buried at sea. Seemed relevant. I don't think it's ever not relevant, really."

He listened to the rain for a few seconds. His eyes drifted around the room. "At least you knew how he felt, I guess. At least you have some kind of..." back into her eyes again. "...Closure. Hold on to that closure. Never let it go."

The gun tapped consciously against the table.

She silently repeated it, her lips along moving as he spoke lyrics to some song she'd never have cared to know.

"Doubt it. My ghost would have better things to do with my time." Camila's eyes remained inert. Her lips were a single line, thin as paper. Vitality had fled her like blood fled the wound. But she was still there, all the same. Somehow still watching him, somehow still waiting for this moment to mean anything more than tongues and noises and corpses anew.

"The narcoleptic." Disrespectful form of address, but the most Camila was entitled to using when all the name Beryl meant to her was a tall silhouette in some forgotten classroom and a crackle of coherent static the day after Camila had woken up to her inevitable reckoning with death. "I can't lie and say I knew her. If that line would have worked on her I can't say the two of us would have gotten along."

Camila took another breath in, and noticed only then that she hadn't noticed the rusty stench of a body slowly growing stale in some time.

"I don't think it makes any difference." She held his gaze evenly. "Closure or not he's gone- and she's gone too. The only people any of what's left over matters to is ourselves. It's a bit selfish in a way. Maybe." She didn't sound too convinced. She wasn't, really. She could hardly claim the skeptical position when she was still half sure someone was waiting for her when she finally stopped moving for good.

She hadn't noticed it until now, that she was starting to pull out her chair, slowly creak her way onto it.

"Are you trying to intimidate me?"

His gun, which had only been relevant when he'd made it so, was arrested by two of her fingers. Barely, with only the lightest of feather's worth of pressure resting against the flick of his wrist. He could have overpowered her easily.

"You're doing a bad job." Maybe she sounded like she could have smiled. She still wasn't going to, of course.

The narcoleptic. She said Camila wouldn't have gotten along with Beryl. It was a true statement. "Mmm, Beryl was big on bullshit."

The girl spouted some pseudo-nihilism in response to the closure thing. Michael disagreed. He knew that was one of the differences between them. He knew it was one of the few things keeping him alive.

The girl had nothing left to hang on to; nothing keeping her alive, he saw that now. Nothing other than her own heartbeat. She was empty. She was a meat computer.

She'd be a mercy kill.

She touched the gun, softly pressed it against the table. Michael didn't interfere. The pistol physically connected the two now, like a bridge over the great divide.

Another bittersweet smile. "No, intimidation isn't really my style, I don't think. It's just... you're not you anymore, whoever you were. She's dead too. She's already gone; I can tell when I look into your eyes. Just..."

He closed his eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. There were tears. Opened eyes. Looked back into hers. Gave a sympathetic grimace. Softly shook his head.

"...if you need a way out."

"She probably died happier than I will, then."

Camila's finger began to tap softly on the barrel. It felt supple, solid and thick. It transmitted her energy to him, and his energy to her, and bounced almost riotously for it.

"I can't imagine who else I'd be."

Tap-tap went a rhythm she'd danced to with her mother once.

"Besides myself."

Camila Cañizares had been a girl who'd been ready to seize a purpose in life- whenever it would be that she'd find it. She'd always assumed it would be inevitable. Claude and Benny had believed in her. Cecil, Tonya, they'd reminded her of what really mattered. All the sum total of what she was and she'd spent the past few days of her life at least kind of naked, and certainly lost. It had been unfamiliar from the moment she'd opened her drug-kissed eyes and shaken off the dust of stillness.

She'd never gotten that dust off. It had settled thicker, and she'd been slowly wearing her own sarcophagus. Bit by bit.

Even the way she thought, now. Slow. Tepid. She'd have belittled herself if she was still herself.

"I don't think I have anything to live for," she admitted, softly, weakly. "And I'm not afraid to die," with a bit more conviction.

The dead in her eyes remained a bit closed, heavy like a slab. She was staring right at him and she couldn't quite see through the tears, they made him as anonymous as anything else she'd ever talked to before it had keeled over and died. She hadn't thought much about the future, about what was left. She'd pretended she still had a reason. She looked away, traced the grain of the rough-hewn table between them.

"I don't know." She really didn't.

"I can't imagine who else I'd be. Besides myself."

The words echoed through Michael's mind. They described the opposite of his own problem. He knew all about who 'himself' wasn't. He knew he wasn't broken like Camila. He knew he wasn't full of childlike wonderment like Beryl. He knew he wasn't not Michael Froese.

Ah.

Camila - Camila = 0. Naught.

He wondered if he'd just been the catalyst for Camila's equation. He felt himself start to slip back towards the mindset he'd been in yesterday. The fragmented
thoughts like these
but he focused on the rhythmic vibrations running through the gun. Grounded himself. He needed to be there for Camila. He needed to be strong. He had that responsibility now. He had that to hold on to.

He watched the girl look away. He listened to her quasi-answer. The fact that it wasn't a no told him enough. It burned away at his facade.

He leaned over the table. Hand slipped off the gun and embraced over the girl's (tangentially back over the gun (safety still on!)). He felt her knuckles in his palm. Hand hug. Real, warm, human; at least on his own end. His tears slowed.

"It's okay," he squeezed her tight. "Whatever you need me to do, it's okay. I promise it's okay."