Survival Of The Fittest

"There you go again, fucking off into your own fantasy world so you don't have to face how wrong you actually are. You see, Ashlynn, there's nothing even remotely rational about making yourself a piñata full of food and medical supplies, let alone expecting others to follow suit, so I can and I will."

Unbelievable.

[ Julien Leblanc continued from High Hopes ]

Now, Julien would admit that he was partly responsible for the argument he was currently in, since he had chosen to respond to Ashlynn in the first place rather than moving on without a word. But not fully. She was, after all, still exactly as blind as before in a place where seeing was much too important to be ignored.

"And it isn't about belittling anyone for anything, you fucking idiot. If we're to die here then I, ah, I'd rather die hoping that somebody will have a chance to move on from this, or helping it happen. You trying to trick others into sitting around a campfire singing Frere Jacques until somebody pulls a gun or they get their throats blown out does absolutely nothing for anyone."

Ashlynn had been working diligently on making signs that led her fellow peers in the direction of the town. They were made out of sticks and mud, the sole materials plentiful enough that were suitable for this sort of endeavour. She wasn't sure if it was her idea or Bryan's - some details such as that were easily lost in the fast-paced blur of excitement and activity that now gripped them - but if she had to guess, Ashlynn imagined that it was a Bryan idea. That sort of practical thinking was definitely his inclination, his comparative strength, the optimal way for him to personally contribute to the cause. It was laudable.

While he had worked in the settlement itself, Ashlynn had decided to go further afield. To venture out. There was an extra challenge - including in providing accurate directions, in setting up the signs in a way that created something visible and eye-catching against potentially rather murky backdrops, in reaching the areas where the chosen materials might not be as readily abundant - in certain areas of the map. Though her travels had been limited, restricted as it were by the need to survive rather than any desire to explore, she guessed that, if any location on the island were to have these problems, the south side was a good bet. Ashlynn admittedly was way out of her area of expertise here, but - oh well. She had to make do.

Ashlynn had been working along the outskirts of the Memorial Garden, finding the potted plants there a useful source of resources for her project. Her clothes were dirtied and muddied now. She'd taken to wiping away the excess mud on the legs of her jeans, having caught herself doing it as a reflex once and then quickly deciding that cleanish clothes was a luxury that she was bound to be without sooner or later. It was...cathartic. She knew that the prospects were slight, that hopes were low. She knew that it was not an easy task that she and Bryan had set themselves. But she was willing to do that, because, quite frankly, it was a change from the pointless wandering around that had defined the last two days of her life.

Then Julien arrived on the scene.

((Ashlynn Martinek continued from A Tragic Flaw.))

She had been polite to him. Explained her plan. Not with the view of recruiting him or evangelising to him, but because it was a good plan, one with demonstrably good intentions, and even someone like Julien, who she highly doubted was likely to be persuaded, deserved to have the facts. And he had insulted her. He had, this time, started the insults. There was video evidence of that! Unprovoked, callous, obnoxious attacks. As if he was just looking for an excuse to fight.

He could have disagreed politely. That would have been the end of it. Ashlynn, for once, was not looking for a row. Was not looking for a debate. She was on the verge of just walking off, telling him to fuck off, but he was wrong. Palpably, tangibly, inescapably wrong. The strawman portrayal of her plan, the doubting of her motives, it was all too much. It couldn't be allowed to stand. Julien had started a row. He had started this argument. He had made this nasty. Had made it another opportunity to revive old sores and relitigate old battles, and Ashlynn couldn't let him get away with that. He couldn't be allowed to get away with this kind of behaviour completely unchecked.

“Again, you always act like you know my motives." She was following him now, leaving a sign half-finished, a crude "MEE" and the first line of the T drawn in mud on a nearby temple wall. This had to be settled. She was looking squarely at him, her tone accusative, her fists clenched, her temper barely under control. She was in the right here. She was the reasonable one! For once, there was genuinely no doubt about that.

"And I’m not perfect! I know that! I try and fix that, but sometimes, I don’t like being told when I’m in the wrong! But what you do - what makes you uniquely unqualified to critique anyone ever - is that you assume that everyone has shitty motives. And I don’t know if that’s just pure cynicism or some sort of psychopathic rejection but, hey! You know what?" She paused, letting him interrupt if he was so inclined, but it was a pause for dramatic and rhetorical effect, and so regardless she carried on. "Not everyone else is a prick. And sometimes, just sometimes, it is worth taking a gamble! And if you wanna fuck off and die on your own, well, I'm sorry, but I can't stop you! And if you wanna come along and kill everyone there, well, that's probably a good strategy to 'win' this thing, so, sure, go ahead! But don't you dare act like everyone here is as cynical and selfish and hopeless as you are. Because they're not."

Julien let Ashlynn have her fill of talking for the moment before responding. "You aren't the most morally complex of people, and it isn't hard to understand someone so straightforward." It wasn't meant as condescending, just a simple statement of fact. "Though, ah... that clearly goes to waste, along with anything else good about you, sadly."

He cared not for the motives, the altruism she was naive enough to claim was her own. Because it honestly wasn't, when all was said and done; she was just trying to fill an old pair of boots made long before her time. If she wanted to walk in them, die in them, whatever, then that was her choice. But he wasn't going to take her spewing bullshit about how her spin of an idea that had been tried and failed before would magically work this time, daring to try and tell him he didn't care enough.

"See, you know those little sparks of intelligence that come out when you rub your only two brain cells together?" The bitter cocktail of hatred and dejection steadily overflowed and leaked into Julien's voice, flooding anything else away. "You should have kept more of them, you stupid fucking cunt. I have to think about people who mean the world to me and... and..." The words stuck in his throat, but Julien didn't need to say them to see the things he most wanted to avoid the reality of; the frozen terror on their faces, silently judging him for his failure to be the friend he should have... If they had faces, or heads, left at all. The worst that he could imagine was not so merciful.

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"And you think I'm hopeless, huh? Fuck you. I wouldn't want to be anything else."

Julien hated her, so very much more than before.

Ashlynn stood, hair blown across her face, rain trickling down her features, ignoring the elements. They had been a concern earlier - had made the mud runny, easy to handle but hard to settle, had made standing around and walking outside a thoroughly unpleasant endeavour - but when worked up, when passionate, Ashlynn did not let discomfort stifle her. She knew she wasn't perfect. She knew - oh god, she had plenty of time to reflect - that she was sanctimonious and self-righteous and sometimes a wee bit illiberal, ironically enough, in her attitudes to others. She was working to change that. Her self-reflection over the past few days had made her more confident, more bullish, in the decisions that she was certain of.

She wasn't certain if this plan that she and Bryan had would do much good. But she knew it was the right thing for her to do. And she knew that Julien - who had attacked her so unprovokedly, had started unveiling these diatribes of vitriol and resentment without even a hint of provocation - was in the wrong for making this so unpleasant. She was angry. Furious. Her voice was infused with an aggrieved anger, but she had not taken them here. That was all Julien. That was all him. And then he called her a cunt - was he, like, going through a checklist of being unpleasant? - and Ashlynn was quick to respond.

"Oh, fuck you, Julien. You think you know me? You don't even know the CliffNotes version of me. We've never even properly talked before. We've only argued. You're not the expert on me. I'm sorry you're in this mess, I'm sorry we're all in this mess, but if you want to go Danya's job for him by starting arguments and insulting everyone you see who is trying to make positive change?" Ashlynn paused, to let her volume steady out slightly. She needed to speak loud, to convey her emotion and get over the weather, but she needed to be the calm and levelheaded one here.

"Then go ahead. Do whatever the fuck you want. All that matters right now is that you started an argument because you're a pathetic man with no imagination, no sense of purpose, and you can string together an eloquent insult but nothing more than that. There's no point in talking to you further. If you survive, I hope it's fucking worth it."

She stepped forward, pushing past his shoulder as she did so. A petty thing, a trivial thing, but it felt good. Ashlynn knew that she had to stop being petty, stop being obsessed with having the last word but...well, she couldn't quit cold turkey. Best to restrict it, at first, to those who arguably deserved that. And that was a category that Julien, who had so aggressively attacked her and launched into an even more priggish spiel than she had, fell into. Ashlynn knew that, on this at least, she was in the right. And the record would bear that out. She was right.

What she'd said to him had been painful all on its own, but that final petty posturing was just the cherry on top, pushing out against the limits of his temper and tipping then over in a way nothing ever really had before. The hand he had tucked away in a pocket brushed up against something cool to the touch, fingers slipping into the handles, and in that instant Julien had his answer to it all.

He reached out and grabbed her by the wrist, whatever cutting remark was on the tip of Ashlynn's tongue lost forever to the scissors that slammed into her throat, points biting deep and punching through something vital. Self-righteous anger faded abruptly into wide-eyed shock, and the wound was already leaking a bright shade of red around the edges, flowing down her throat, out onto his hand...



Oh.



Julien pulled them free.

He hadn't let go of her wrist. However little his kindness was worth to either of them any more, it still compelled him to ease Ashlynn to the ground instead of simply letting her topple over. Without so much as a word, though. What use were apologies any more? However sorry he looked, acted or felt would be lost in the reality of this.

There could no reparation for this, just like there had— no.

No, this couldn't possibly compare to anything else that he'd done before.

Ashlynn knew Julien to be a dick. Ashlynn knew Julien to be some kind of disproportionate, judgemental, obnoxious prick that hid whatever redeeming features he had very well. She didn’t hate him – hate was a strong word, one to be reserved for only the most abhorrent or deplorable of individuals – but he seemed to have an obsession with her. One that, if she actually reciprocated the intensity of his feelings, would make for some interesting psychoanalysis. She didn’t think he deserved this fate, or anything even close to this fate. That would have been petty. Ashlynn liked to think that she was not a petty person.

What she hadn’t expected – and here her broadly Rousseauian view of her own generation failed her – was for him to be capable of such an appalling act of violence. Those thoughts, rather more complex than the standard reaction to being stabbed, rushed through her mind as he brought the scissors up to her neck.

Once it pierced the skin, her thoughts were somewhat simpler.

Fuck.

This…hurt.

The physical pain was bad enough. Ashlynn immediately found herself trying to breathe in, to yell, to fight back, all reflexes that only added to her pain and just resulted in her gasping and limply flailing her free arm about. It was…pathetic. Laughable. She felt contempt for herself, an emotion that rose up in those few moments that she wasn’t preoccupied with the agony of getting stabbed in the throat. She stumbled back. Didn’t fall as much as she expected.

And then Julien pulled out the blades – and they were small, pathetically small, how could they do so much damage? – and her hand reached up to replace his, the sole motion she found herself able to do. There was more blood than she thought possible. A river flowing out of the hole in her neck. She was gurgling and babbling, and blood had somehow reached her face and had somehow splattered all over her legs and all over both of her hands and how did it get everywhere so quickly? How was it so messy? How was it so…

And thoughts like that were fleeting because as soon as they took a lucid shape, a new wave of pain grabbed her attention, even when nothing new actually happened. This was just the reality of Ashlynn’s existence now. Clutching her throat as she sank, with a gracefulness that was not in her control, to the ground.

She suddenly felt the rain – each drop hitting the open wound in between the cracks in her fingers like an extra stab. It was cold and venomous and stinging, and Ashlynn felt her blood mix with the rainwater and it flowed everywhere. Down her fingers, onto the ground, even back down her throat. It was excruciating.



It was probably too late to go over what she’d done, to pick apart her mistakes. A part of her mind, mostly drowned out by the agony and terror but still active, doing what was for Ashlynn the equivalent of the whole ‘life flashing before her eyes’ thing, was picking it apart anyway. As if there were lessons to be learned.

It had started off innocently enough. Ashlynn had been making her signs. That was good, right? And if it was wrong, if it was incorrect, it was certainly far less immoral than how others had been spending their times on the island. She had spotted Julien. Which was good. Inclusivity. Maybe it was a – no, it definitely was a strategic mistake with hindsight. But she had tried. She had shown Julien a kindness. “Hey, hey,” she had called out to him, “Bryan and I are getting together with some others to try and make a safe zone and - oh, hey, Julien, you doing okay?” And maybe that was a mistake, because she knew that question was triggering for some, that some people took it as a cruel joke or a sign of stupidity, and fuck, she did not mean it that way, but it was an instinct.

Julien had carried on for a moment, lagging behind in his recognition of her words, but he turned to face her. He reacted well at first! Ashlynn had been hopeful. "About as well as I could be, thank you. What was that about a safe zone again?" His tone had, at first, been sincere. Curious, sceptical, inquisitive. Virtues in Ashlynn’s eyes. Nothing to suggest that he was capable of murder.

Ashlynn had then laid out her – no, their – proposition. “Well, if we want to beat this - or rebel against this, at least show that we’re not going along with this like sheep - then we need to band together in some way. So Bryan and I were thinking, we band together, meet up, make systems to settle disputes and allocate resources.” She was in full flow. Here, Ashlynn would have admitted to a vice. “Stand firm against any killers, just bring a modicum of society back here.” She was too grandiose, certainly. Too ambitious. Liked the sound of her own voice – at least fancied her skills as a rhetorician.

Any possible interest from Julien had given way to disappointment. "You, ah… Goodness. I was going to ask if you realise that most people are killing others precisely so they can go back to society, but evidently being dumped here somehow hasn't changed you, so I won't count on rational discourse. And that aside, it wouldn't accomplish anything even if you did make it happen except invite death on everyone participating."

She had not been the first one to throw an insult. Ashlynn had escalated it, maybe, but nobody could accuse her of starting this. She had engaged Julien as an equal, and now…

But she did escalate it. There was no point in denying that. She should have walked away, accepted a loss, but no. She felt attacked. Verbally attacked, and that warranted a verbal response. “Well, first things first, fuck you. I didn’t realise I was talking to somebody who responds to injustice by just going along with it. Or maybe I should have. Because you’re still exactly the same sanctimonious know-nothing that you’ve always been. At least I try to make a difference, Julien. Better than you.”

She shouldn’t have escalated. If, for nothing else, because it was naïve to do so. Back in Chattanooga, escalation was usually just verbal – or the trivial kind of physical. But not here. Not in this environment. Her whole purpose had been to get around the violence, to escape and circumvent the cycle of destruction that the terrorists had designed, and she hadn’t taken it into account when defending her proposal.

But Julien had escalated too, his temper growing more ferocious, his annoyance – as if he was entitled to that emotion, of all emotions, in these circumstances – all the more palpable. "And you're still the same one-note bitch you were, clearly. Have you had to look at anyone's corpse yet, Ashlynn? Honestly, even if you have, feel free to go and fuck yourself. There's no difference to be made when everyone's made up their minds."

Ashlynn had had to respond to that. “Almost straight away after waking up I was putting my hands on a bullet wound Hel received. Don’t try and belittle what other people have gone through, Julien, it’s not a good look for you.” Virtue signalling? Was she guilty of that here? It seemed such a trivial thing to do, but if that had been what provoked Julien to kill her... “What I am trying to do is trying to seize a small slither of hope for safety, for comfort, for hope. And don’t you lecture me about rational discourse when you’re the one who started shit, when you’re the one who starts throwing out insults, when I’m fucking trained in that shit and you’re just some arrogant weasel who can’t even comprehend the simple thought that some people would rather die trying.” Okay, the boasting and ad hominems were there. Not good.

But…

She hadn’t deserved this. Ashlynn could say, with confidence, politics aside, that she had been in the right, and Julien had been in the wrong.




And it turned out that dying as the righteous martyr, the moral victor who had fought valiantly for a cause yet died as a result of their failure, sucked. Ashlynn didn’t have a chance to row back her choices, to change her decisions, but she couldn’t understand why people with more opportunities to do otherwise took this risk. It was awful. Admirable, of course. But awful.

Her eyes glanced over to the camera that was voyeuristically watching her bleed out, that was watching her grasp limply at her throat, trying in vain to apply some sort of pressure or put some pause to the bleeding. It shrugged off the rain. Was callously unaffected by the suffering it was documenting. It was mocking her. A gaze at once Orwellian and objectifying and goading and exploitative, and Ashlynn realised that, if she was destined to die a martyr, smashing a camera would have been a much more effective use of her life.

Would have at least added to the terrorists’ expenses.

But no. She’d died for an argument. She’d died the moral victor, sure, but what she had done was leave Bryan to shoulder the duties and risks of this project by himself, and…well, even if she couldn’t morally be blamed for the fact Julien stabbed her in the throat, maybe he had been right on one thing, and maybe Ashlynn was capable of some astounding levels of idiocy.

He had let her down gently. Maybe he still had some decency, some recognition that he’d fucked up. Maybe that meant he realised that she had won the argument. Again, trifling. Ashlynn had lived most of her life believing that dying for a cause felt good, but nope! It felt fucking awful. It felt like metal tearing flesh and puncturing her windpipe and lacerating her arteries and blood sticking to her fingers and each breath feeling like a battle against every force of nature.

She didn’t want Julien to die. She wanted him to survive. She wanted everyone to survive. But also life would be far greater a punishment than anything the island could throw at him.

She lifted her hand up. Limply. Weakly. Drenched in rainwater and blood, she gave him the middle finger.

And that was one thing about her death that did feel good.

Maybe Ashlynn was a bit of a petty person after all.

G011 – Ashlynn Martinek: Eliminated

With a final splutter, her hand fell down and her head rolled to the side.

Far be it from him to begrudge her that final farewell.

Never again.

---

Work finally done, some length of time he didn't track later, Julien closed his eyes and rested for a moment. Sure enough, there she was.

The next thing he thought of was the cold. His shaking hands, his face, Ashlynn herself... all numbed and sapped of warmth by the unrelenting wind and rain. That was not the end of his pains, either. Julien looked at one of his hands, seeing a fingernail bent back and away from where it was supposed to be. Getting as close to a proper grip as he could manage took a few moments, but once he had it he slowly peeled it the rest of the way off. It hurt, but it was not the first to go on this day. Besides, he had been through worse, was coping with worse and would continue to. The skin on his fingers, palms too, had been ripped open in several places; even soaked as the ground was, digging a grave with his hands was exhausting painful.

But he had embraced it, and in time had earned the result he wanted.

Julien had lowered Ashlynn in and buried her, only missing her bag of supplies, her weapon and a single silver bangle that had caught his eye. It seemed the right thing to do, seeking to ensure something of her carried on past the end of her road, and so it was clasped tight in his hand now.

His hands would need to be cleaned, it occurred to him, given where they'd been, the open wounds and blood that wasn't all his they were covered in. With the mess they were in, it was an inevitability that he'd make mistakes. Using them for... anything would invite further pain too.

He couldn't wait.

"Goodbye."

[ Julien Leblanc continued elsewhere. ]