Survival Of The Fittest

What do we do?

What did you do?

Both questions remained pertinent to the situation at hand, and both questions were unanswerable to any particular degree of satisfaction, so as the two students had travelled, he hadn't even tried. Lori's shock at the inevitable series of events that had followed Emeka's psychotic break had only intensified throughout the evening, but once they had finally settled down for the night, he wondered if she wouldn't take the opportunity to leave him once he was asleep. The pleasant sounds of the nearby ocean were calming, and he slept easily, only unsettled by the few dreams he did have. It would not have surprised him were he to find himself alone in the morning.

Claudeson awoke, and Lori still remained.

Excellent. ((Claudeson Bademosi continued from The Chemicals Between Us))
His wounds from the encounter had been mostly superficial, though the scratch across his eye had seemed to only partially heal. His vision on the one side was slightly blurry and no amount of blinking made the blur go away. Considering that he felt the nail marks across his cheeks and his nose, he surmised that Emeka's death struggle had left him with a scratched cornea, or something equally as small yet insidious. It was yet another small throb to add to his varying wounds — Tyrell's beating upon the first day had left him battered and bruised, and while the swelling in his broken nose had finally decreased after a week's time, his ribs still occasionally reminded him that he was not entirely whole any longer.

Yet with all of that, the pain was a reminder that he was alive, and so he valued it — he treasured it. All of the rest of his emotion seemed to be a dull buzz, stuffed beneath the surface so that the enormity of what he was doing would not choose to overwhelm him. There was something there, something that Claudeson chose to avoid, a small voice within that screamed a silent scream, words that he could not understand.

Was it his faith? It seemed so shaken. His faith in faith felt virtually nonexistent, yet there was something within that drove him, that told him which way to go and which way to act. What he was doing was something that anyone in the community, anyone that he had once known; no one would understand. Yet for Claudeson, it all made so much sense. It felt somewhat right, somewhat accurate to whom he believed himself to be. Bret Carter was a menace, who needed to be removed from the world. Emeka was suffering, and Claudeson had ended that pain. As for Bryan?

He still saw Bryan's distorted face every time that he closed his eyes.

The audible crackle of the speakers was almost a guaranteed wake-up call, as the noise came from everywhere and nowhere at once, though he had not been asleep when it happened. The information that came with it left him more relaxed than he'd expected to — the Carter brothers were no more. He supposed that he had Tirzah to thank for sparing him from a parade of vengeance from a pathetic excuse for a human being. It made the work to come simpler. There were other noteworthy items from the list; Tyrell was still alive and still killing, and Sven; poor, damaged Sven had fallen off a waterfall. That meant that only Aurelien remained from his ill-fated hotel room, both Dante and Sven having passed on.

Those were all particularly intriguing pieces of information, but one thing the terrorists said was more intriguing than the rest — Emeka had been on drugs? He had appeared particularly lucid when he'd sat down at the fire, as had Manuel, but—

Of course; his eyes widened painfully as the realization came to him.

Waiting until the announcement finished, he allowed the silence to linger for a moment, listening to the soft sounds of the surf before he turned to look at Lori, tilting his head a little in curiosity. Perhaps Emeka hadn't been having a psychotic break after all. It changed nothing, but it added another layer to the girl in the owl costume.

"Drugs? Lori," his voice remained neutral, "what did you do?"

((Lori Martin continued from The Chemicals Between Us))

Lori was dragged forward by the hand for the rest of the day. Her feet shuffled along, pushing leaves and sometimes grass. Now it was sand. The sand made it harder to move and made her feel more the weight of moving. What happened?

The flashes of memory kept peaking up in the corners of her consciousness. The popped up, then she shooed them away again. But that took all her mental energy.

How should she proceed? Lori felt sick as she went to sleep, tried to sleep. Should she leave Claudeson? He had saved her once, but what happened with Meka was frightening. Who else would even want someone like her? Someone who couldn't do anything right and who everyone probably hated before the island, with a few exceptions. Eventually she did sleep. Lori awoke the next morning to the screeching of the speakers again. She scrambled, pulling her belongings close and resting her back up against some tropical looking tree. Out in front of her was the ocean. She was in just her chartreuse sweat pants -- now looking more dingy and less chartreuse than ever -- and her white camisole. The jacket was still lost.

Lori picked up her head when Meka was mentioned and then when the announcement had ended she looked to Claudeson with wide eyes when he addressed her.

"No -- I -- Drugs?" she said, each word being more high pitched. Should she blame Meka? Pretend she had no idea what he was talking about? What if he demanded to go through her stuff? Maybe if they were a little morally gray it was for the best. After all, the most successful people in life were all bad people. If they weren't bad, they wouldn't have been successful. And she did want to be successful.

"I have some -- some -- yeah. But it's LSD, it's not lethal. I just -- I thought maybe we couldn't trust them and I -- so I just -- I drugged them. A little bit." she said, finishing with her forefinger and thumb an inch apart to emphasize how little the drugging was.

"I'm sorry."

The frank admission stunned Claudeson to the point where he actually leaned away from Lori in surprise. Meka's psychotic break had not been one at all; Manuel had not gone insane after all. They had been under the influence of psychotropic drugs. Their bodies had been polluted with the same sort of horrible carcinogenic substances that he had so disdained when he'd guarded the door at #Swiftball. What was even more shocking was that they hadn't —

"Oh my."

A small part of his own subconscious was screaming at him; crucifying him for even allowing shock to enter the equation after the senseless acts of violence that he had perpetrated. Bryan's face still haunted him and yet he sat, floored at the honesty and the audacity that Lori had to dose their guests against their will. He looked into her eyes, and he saw remorse, but more so for the omission than for the action itself. Lori truly was fighting the battle between good and evil; he saw that as clearly as ever now.

"I believed that he had gone psychotic. That he was a danger to himself — to us. I had no idea."

Would that have changed the outcome for Emeka and Manuel? Perhaps. Seeing Emeka like that had demanded an action, the indignity of the loss of decorum for a man as Emeka had been was devastating to see, and his actions, while grotesque, had been the only option, the only way to prevent his memory from being perverted any more.

"And — how did you manage to obtain drugs?"

Claudeson kept his voice calm, judging the situation and trying not to let his true surprise in Lori's actions shine through. The scratches on his face still throbbed, a faint reminder of where the drugging had led them. He knew that she would answer him honestly. If nothing else, her honesty was a beacon for them.

For him.

Lori frowned, feeling like her parents were grilling her about drugs that they had found in her room. This was a hypothetical, of course. She would never do drugs. That was just a distraction and she didn't need any distractions to derail her from her goals in life, which were difficult to achieve with her various circumstances as is.

"They're not mine. I would never do drugs; that's for losers," she said emphatically. "I -- I found them in my bag. I guess they were supposed to be my weapon," she said somewhat sheepishly. "Which is pretty unfair, don't you think? Like everyone on this island gets to have some kind of gun or a sword or *something* and I get stuck with drugs! I really thought I was a goner when I saw that!"

Lori seemed to forget that Claudeson was there for a moment and swung her balled fist backwards, hitting the tree roughly. Her breathing was heavier now. She blinked a few times and seemed to remember that she was having a conversation with a second person.

"Er, yeah. But now I do have something. You know, just in case I need it."

Of course. It made a great deal of sense as to why the campfire had turned the way it did, when it did. Lori had offered both Emeka and Manuel some water; she must have drugged them early on. At the very least, it did not seem as though she had any intention of sampling her designated weapon on her own. Gripping his own designated weapon; Min-jae was slung around his chest, having been quiet since the encounter with Bret in the woods. The crossbow had been an incredibly fortuitous draw, Claudeson knew that. Yet the fact that Lori had a psychotropic agent, and had been more than willing to administer it to other classmates was just another example of her internal struggle.

Breathing sharply out of his nose — something that caused him a small amount of pain, considering that Tyrell had broken it on the very first day, he looked down at Min-jae and back up at Lori.

"Of course, fear is a very understandable response in that circumstance. But Lori," he hesitated, his mouth suddenly a little dry. "I must ask that if or when you deem it necessary to act similarly in the future, you — I must," his calm expression broke for a moment into a deeply pained grimace, "you must warn me, first. I need to know what is happening so that I do not— so that we are on the same page."

So that no one else gets needlessly hurt, is what he wanted to say, but he left it there. Emeka was generally an upstanding individual and someone that Claudeson knew was a respected member of the class. It was not beyond comprehension that he would have had a psychotic break due to the stress and pressure of Survival of the Fittest, but strangling him had not been Claudeson's first choice.

Had he decided to spare the boys any more pain, he would have shot them in their sleep; allow them a quick end.

It was the right thing to do.

Strangling Emeka had been messy, it had been careless, and his motivations had been unknowingly altered by his tortured companion. Her duality was on full measure, and Claudeson knew that the two of them needed to trust one another. They did not have anyone else. Leaning over, he reached out and placed a hand gently on Lori's forearm.

"The drugs are a tool. I know the person that you are endeavouring to be and I know how difficult that must have been. But we must stick together. I fear that after what we— what I have done," Lori's name had not been on the announcements, she would not face anyone's wrath, "the road ahead will not be as simple for us. I need your strength, Lori. Please, trust me."

Claudeson smiled. His face may have been ragged from the scratches, beaten from the battles and black and blue from days gone bye, but his teeth still gleamed white in the morning sun.

Lori clutched the rifle close to her like she was hugging a stuffed animal as Claudeson started. But soon she was nodding her head vigorously.

"That seems fair. Yeah. I'll let you know. We're a team and that's how a team should go, I guess."

She clenched her fist when he said that he knew the sort of person she was trying to be. Not because she was upset but because she felt bad. What kind of person was she trying to be? Good, nominally, but only because people liked good people and being good was what you were supposed to want. Really, if she had her way she would probably be going after everyone who made her mad. There was a slight upside in that a lot of them were probably already dead without her intervention. But was that enough?

"Sure, I trust you...." she said. "Maybe we should get going," she said, looking around cautiously.

Nodding, Claudeson appreciated Lori's commitment to the cause. He believed in her, and right now, that was more than he could say about anyone else still alive on the island — himself included.

"We are; if we are to remain at full strength for the trials ahead, we will need to lean upon one another. Undoubtedly at this juncture, anyone who remains will not be as friendly as we might otherwise hope for. We must be cautious, we must stay vigilant."

Taking a moment to truly look out and see Lori, the rifle still clutched in her hands like some form of life preserver, Claudeson shut his eyes and took stock of his own injuries. The encounter with Emeka had left him scarred but in decent enough shape. His eye was still sore and felt as though he had sand within it, and he imagined that his face likely looked none the worse for wear. Yet with Lori and with Min-jae by his side, he knew that whatever their eventual goal, they would have a high probability of success.

"Do you have any suggestions as to a plan of action?" He sounded the words out carefully, allowing the thoughtfulness to show through. Lori needed to feel as though she were truly an equal partner in this alliance — he believed her to be, though she was volatile. They were connected now, the reality of what each of them had been a party to sitting between them like an unspoken bond.

"Hmmm. Well, I'm really glad that you asked and you value my input," she said very seriously. It was heartfelt. She was touched that someone was looking to her for her opinion on a plan of action. And really, more people should have, she thought. She also briefly wondered if she might be cheer captain by default now before bitterly remembering that Ivy was still around.

She gathered her things in preparation of them moving out.

"Maybe we should try to find some other people and ask how they plan to live out their final days. Maybe we can convince some people to be more peaceful, more considerate, more.... you know, honest?"

It was a fine enough plan. What did she believe would happen? In Lori's view, 95% of their class were idiots, immoral, or immoral idiots. Eventually, any line of questioning would reveal them to be as such. But at that point she could feel justified in whatever response she had. To anyone looking in, to Claudeson, she'd given them a chance. It would be a real chance of course. Lori just didn't have faith that any of their classmates would meet even the lowest threshold of decency.

It was just simple common knowledge.

"Whaddya say?"

Listening as Lori both gathered her thoughts and collected her things, Claudeson found himself gently nodding in agreement at her conclusion. It was the righteous path to offer each of their classmates the chance to redeem themselves from whatever misgivings or horrific deeds that most of them were by now, guilty of. You're no better. "Honesty might be fleeting in such a situation, but thankfully," he caressed MIn-jae, still slung around his chest, "we are prepared for such an eventuality."

A list of people's faces scrolled through his mind's eye, trying to recall a single person that still walked the island whom he would be interested in coming upon. There was one name in particular that stuck out, one face that he'd been unable to forget — next to the distorted, bloodied face of Bryan Merryweather, one face haunted his waking hours and stalked him in his nightmares. He won't let you walk away. "There are not a great many cla— friends of whom I would appreciate the opportunity to confer with at this point. Perhaps Princess, or," his eyes lit up in sudden recognition. Yes, of course. There was one classmate with whom he would dearly like to see.

"Faith; yes — I believe Faith and I have to catch up."

The student council vice-president had been nothing but cordial and pleasant to Claudeson during her tenure in student council, and yet still, through it all, he felt the sting from the loss in the election, all these many months later. There were so many things that could have stung him more, so many injuries and so many inflicted wounds, and yet still, he remembered the shame, the sadness and the humiliation of having to offer his help to the person who had just beaten him.

She had revelled in the victory; but to his face had been nothing but contrite. A perfect politician. The lies disgusted him. Yes, they could find Faith. He chose not to utter Tyrell's name out loud. Lori would blanch at the suggestion and considering the mayhem that the awful boy left in his wake, Claudeson knew that another encounter with Tyrell would not go by as peacefully as the last.

"Whom did you have in mind?"

She must have had someone — Lori's suggestion had been loaded. She wanted to find someone, discuss something with them, and be that an excuse to deal with her own unfinished business, Claudeson knew that she was still grappling with her own fading sense of morality. It would be enlightening to see which side of the coin she would come down upon. You could help her do the right thing. But you won't, and you know it. You're an embarrassment.

"Hmmm," she said slowly, tapping her index finger on her chin.

"Well I'm not even really sure who I would want to talk to when it comes down to it because, you know, there are so many people -- Paloma," she ended suddenly.

"I think. But I'm not picky. We can see Princess or Faith. It's all good! I trust you."

And she did somewhat. Mostly because he seemed to trust her. But she was becoming a little more cautious. The memory of the incident with Meka was still fresh and although it could be argued by some (unsure who) that she was partially at fault, she wasn't terribly comfortable with Claudeson's response to the situation.

"After you."

((Lori Martin continued elsewhere))

"Paloma — yes, of course."

Claudeson nodded in agreement, though he was more than a little surprised at Lori's suggestion. Paloma was not blameless in many of the things that had happened thus far, and had been the very first person to draw any sort of blood, if he remembered correctly. Abel Zelenovic had been a popular boy around school; Claudeson still remembered his arrival to Swiftball. Stepney and Abel had been boisterous and popular, and both of them had been quick to indulge in whatever alcohol they could get their hands on.

Both of them were now dead.

Lori gestured for him to lead the way, but something in her expression, it gave him only the slightest of pauses. There was something else there, a hesitation or something that was left unsaid. Whatever it was, perhaps she would share it with him. Perhaps she would not. Either way, their fates were intertwined now, and anything that happened going forward would be with them as a partnership rather than two individuals.

Paloma, Faith, Princess; whomever they came upon would understand.

They would have to.

He would make certain of it. ((Claudeson Bademosi continued in When You Kill What You Are Meant To, There is No Remorse))