Survival Of The Fittest

"Yo, Peg."

"What's up, Eyepatch?"

"I got you something. Here, catch."

"Pills?"

"Read the label."

"Oxycodone?"

"Yeah, that's the good stuff."

"Isn't this stuff like, banned or something? Where did you get this?"

"Chill out. It's prescription. For chronic pain. I thought it might, you know... help."

"I can't take somebody else's prescription!"

"It's my prescription."

"This isn't even your name on the bottle!"

"Okay, fine. I scored them for you. Happy?"

"From who? Your dealer or whoever?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Look, I am not taking drugs, and I'm definitely not taking stolen drugs!"

"Would you calm down?"

"Seriously! That stuff is dangerous!"

"I take it from time to time. It's not a big deal."

"It's a big deal to me. You know that I don't do any of that drug stuff, so why would you even think that I..."

"I was just trying to help. Jeezus."

"Is that all you were trying to do?"

"..."

"Are you kidding me!? Is that why you were so weird about Teddie?"

"That guy wasn't worth your time anyway."

"I'm leaving."

"Why are you being such a bitch over this? I tried to do something NICE for you."

"Keep your pills. And... just... don't ever talk to me again. I mean it."

=-=-=-=-=-=

Her ear was gone. Her ear was gone.

Well, the top inch of it, at least. Juanita hadn't dodged quite as well as she'd thought, and the naginata's blade had taken off and cut a red line into the top of her cheek. In the heat of the moment, she hadn't even registered it, and then she'd been hit with the tear gas and the wound became one raindrop in a whole monsoon of pain. It hadn't sunk in until later, after Ash had carried her away and she'd spent the longest minutes of her life coughing and drooling until the effects of the gas wore off. She'd stripped off her outermost sweater and her jeans, desperate to get rid of the lingering effects of the gas; then she'd reached up to snatch her hat off and then her fingers had found the raw remnants of her ear, and she'd shrieked.

Now she was slumped on the floor of another building, bleeding through the bandage wrapped around her head. She'd barely been able to walk, and Ash couldn't realistically carry her down the mountain. After a bit of debate, Ash had left her here while she went back to the church to get the others. For all Juanita knew, she wasn't coming back. She wouldn't blame Ash for wanting to ditch out, especially after today.

The dining area seemed safe enough - there were two dead bodies strewn around the place, but whoever'd killed them was long gone. They provided some measure of camouflage; Juanita was bloodied and practically ragged enough to be mistaken for one of them. If someone came in, she'd just flop over and do her best impression of a statue. And if they got close enough, she'd stick them with Eden's naginata. She'd swapped it out with Ash, reasoning that a pole weapon would be her best chance of surviving an attack if she was ambushed, and it could be used as an impromptu walking stick if she needed to flee. That was the plan, anyway. But Juanita wasn't sure that she'd be capable of standing up any time soon, much less fleeing. She'd pushed herself too hard in the fight, and once the adrenaline had faded she felt the cumulative effects of every kick, pivot and charge. Her knee felt like she'd put a gut to her kneecap and pulled the trigger. Thank God the tear gas particles hadn't wormed their way between the brace and her jeans - her hands were red and itchy, from where she'd pulled off her outer layer. Adding that kind of irritation to the screaming pain in her leg, well... that would be Hell on earth.

Not that she wouldn't have deserved it.

She was a murderer now. She'd taken Eden's life, attacked her and killed her, and would have killed Teddie too if the tear gas hadn't gone off. She'd done it on purpose. She'd planned for it, rehearsed it, and she'd gone out and provoked a fight to make it happen.

Laying here among the corpses, and breathing in the smell of their blood and decomposing flesh, was nothing compared to the punishment that she'd endure if and when she died. The pain that wracked her body right was nothing compared to the tortures that Satan had in store for her.

She knew all of these things. Knew the truth of them. And they tore her apart inside.

But she also knew, deep down, that it wouldn't stop her from getting into the next fight. Or the next. Or the next.

((Crystal Henderson continued from Finally, I am alone with my crimes, unrepentant.))

Crystal panted as she made her way up the path. She'd wanted an excuse to get out of the church and away from the frankly appalling energy the others were projecting in her general direction, but did it have to be so... urgent? She'd been hoping for a relaxing excuse for hunting. Robbing people. Just, you know, walking around. Walking. Not hustling.

But she'd well and truly sullied her reputation with the three she'd been stuck with, so when an opportunity presented itself she'd jumped at it anyways,urgent though it was, and now her chest was burning and she hadn't even run, it was just, like, so cold that the air seared her lungs when she took those big gulps of it. But Juanita needed help, and Crystal needed out, and if the lack of anyone truly armed got Jack and Dani and Kaede gunned down then maybe they should've thought of that before being so odious that their company was no longer desirable.

This was to say, if something happened? Not Crystal's fault. Not Crystal's problem.

But she was busily trying to build a slightly more pleasant relationship such that she maybe didn't have to eventually let Danya use her to shoot every single one of them in the back, so at least performing a sense of urgency was important. What a drag, especially with all her stuff in tow, because hahaha, leaving any of her belongings with those three? No chance.

Slowly, Crystal approached the door to the building that had been indicated. Slowly, she took up position next to it, glancing around. Whatever the expectation, whatever her more positive opinion towards these two by contrast if nothing else, she wasn't planning to get bushwhacked by someone who'd killed Juanita and set up shop just waiting for suckers.

And besides, taking it slow let her take some more deep breaths before she had to talk.

Plus one.

- Ashlyn -

Ash wasn't running out on Juanita. She wasn't sure if that meant obligation or not: she was maybe willing, but she also didn't have many other options. Trust had never been her first instinct in John Endecott, so she had to stick to the few she could. Juanita could mess up and lead them to their deaths but that was only a positive in Ash's little black Death Note-shaped book, a nice little bloodstained bow ribbon bonus.

Crystal wasn't necessarily the best ally to be had, Ash had kind of been hoping the others might've stuck around. Who even knew where they were at this point, where their hunt might have taken them. They'd be back at the Church by sunrise the next day- allegedly- and Juanita would be back there, safe, in reduced but still maybe adequate health. Allegedly. Ash had never put much stock in the ability of plans to survive contact in reality, good for her mental health, so on.

The girl who'd trudged along in front of her, mostly in silence, had guts. Still inside her, at that. A bit of an enigma, one of those quiet sorts who seemed to not be awkward but who knew, they all blended together.

She had a proper gun- if they'd brought her along on the hunt Teddie 'Jack' Boyd and Aracellis Fuentes, among others, would probably be bullet hole infested corpses now, gently smoldering as bacteria fought for their juicy innards against the tyrannical cold. Might've been a good time, as opposed to the middling results the two of them had managed to post. Ash had brusquely let Crystal know she appreciated the fort being held down, and the aid being called upon at that very moment. Not much to say that wasn't obvious, but sometimes it warranted some outward gesture, even small. Ash supposed she'd learned that once upon a time, when she'd been younger and smarter, happier than her present self.

"Dani Jack and Kaede are out on a round." Unlike Crystal, Ash didn't hesitate to speak the moment she inserted herself into Juanita's peace and quiet. Her body creaked with every step- no amount of lugging around their leader or of carrying supplies on kilometer long walks could clear the icicles that slowly crystalized inside her veins. Turned out murder didn't keep the cold at bay- Kitty must have been freezing her ass off by now. Hopefully those stupid cat paw mittens of hers were holding up, assuming they hadn't been shredded up by NPC #2 or #3 that she'd offed.

"We'll want to get back before next sunrise or they'll probably think we're dead. Doubt it'd matter to them, but."

She appraised Juanita from where she stood, wondering if she was holding up without actually asking it.

The corner of Juanita's mouth tugged upwards a bit. It wasn't until she actually saw Ash that she realized how heavily the fear of abandonment had been weighing on her mind. That marked twice now that Ash had come back for her, when she could easily have just cut and run.

The reaffirmation of Ash and Crystal's loyalty meant a lot, though it didn't quite cancel out the revelation that Jack, Kaede, and Dani had gone off on their own. "They're out on a round? Huh. Did they say where they were going?" The three of them had no real weapons to speak of, and they'd left Crystal alone to guard the church. It was a weird decision, and it seemed vaguely out of character for someone like Dani to volunteer for anything that required extra effort. They'd definitely need to have a group talk when they all met back at the church.

Her vague attempt at a smile was dashed to smithereens when Ash mentioned needing to be back by sunrise. She swallowed hard, feeling dread in the pit of her stomach at the thought of hiking back down to the church in the cold. She was down to one sweater and her pajama pants - not nothing, but definitely not enough for a midnight winter hike. Her leg throbbed a warning.

"I think... I think we should spend the night here," Juanita said, stammering slightly. "Walking at night in this weather sounds like a terrible idea. We should wait until the sun comes up, at least. Besides, my name will be in the morning announcements, so they'll know we're not dead. Besides, for all we know they'll get into a fight and we'll have to go help them out. It'd be better to head there directly, rather than go to the church and then back again to find them, you know?"

If anyone asked, Connie had not just happened to be stooping down half behind, half underneath a table when someone else had first staggered in.

Any delays in introductions were just her biding her time to make the very best of entrances. The last one had been so lacklustre.

Her calfs were cramping.

"Agreed," Crystal said, hopping on Juanita's idea. "We can stay here. They'll be fine."

Ulterior motives? What ulterior motives? The desire not to walk all the way back the way she'd just come? The desire to not have to deal with the trio? The chance that maybe they'd take off and/or get themselves into the sort of bind that gave them greater appreciation for somebody with a gun on their side? Those ulterior motives? Sounded unlikely. Crystal was just backing up her teammate—one who they were here to check up on and assist in theory—and being a good member of the group.

"And they, um, needed some fresh air," she explained. "I was doing some palm readings and they got a little weird about that."

Diplomatic answer. Suggest that there's a story to be told, insinuate a measure of personal involvement, but place the responsibility on the other party. Crystal had had a long, cold walk to figure out how she was going to frame the situation, and the long and short of it was that those three needed to stop being such petty little drama queens. Crystal felt pretty sure that they were going to say all kinds of terrible things about the extremely mild implications she'd made once the group reconvened, and she was also pretty sure that wasn't going to do a single thing to convince anyone to give her the boot as long as she held the most potent weapon. So that was a state of affairs that would have to continue.

She glanced at Juanita, then back to Ash.

"They'll be fine. They're together. Probably having more fun anyways."

She only pitched her voice a little bit to suggest innuendo.

Then Crystal looked more closely at Juanita.

"...you okay?"

"That's not a good reason." Fresh air. Enough air for their lungs that they needed to have been missing from the church for hours by the time Ash had gotten there to fetch the cavalry. Maybe they thought they could stock up and live off the spare oxygen, that it'd somehow prolong their pointless survival.

Honestly not the stupidest thing Ash had ever heard in her life, on the off chance it was true. Getting there, but if she squinted at it hard enough it passed for stage of grief fodder.

"Well Dani's pretty good at fucking, so Salem tells me." An iron-sculpted smile that looked humorless if you didn't know her well enough. So in a mirror, Ash saw it as dead and lifeless. Intimidating, in that way she supposedly was.

"They'll have fun enough. Anyways. Yeah, Juanita's fairly fucked." Put enough weight on a healed leg and it would re-collapse, no matter how much time had passed since the injury. Juanita had put two lifetimes worth of weight onto it, fighting for her life. Some things never recovered one hundred percent from trauma- Graves family, so on.

"Staying here's fine if we don't mind Dani getting even stupider ideas than she's already had a chance to. It's your call, Juanita. I can carry you back if we're fine with Crystal handling the D."

"Defense." She clarified without skipping a beat.

Ash carrying Juanita around would probably be fine even in the long term. Ash didn't think she'd be alive long enough to really see the low calorie counts start to tax her stamina to dangerous levels. But still, they had been lucky so far, managing to score a kill with a system as unwieldy as theirs. It was more fortune than Ash was used to. She didn't care either way of course- when her luck ran out, she'd be sure to run someone else's luck out. Fair trade.

“It looks worse than it is. I’ll be fine once I can wash off some of this blood and stuff,” Juanita said to Crystal.

Needless to say, she was lying. She could barely move without hissing in pain. Her brain had spent the entire interval replaying the memory of that oxycodone, conjuring up the maraca sound of those pills rattling in their plastic cylinder. It had barely been a week since she'd stormed off and left them behind. Seven days ago, she'd been the kind of person who'd put herself through pain and suffering aplenty rather than do the wrong thing. Today she knew better. Out here in the trenches, there was blood on her hands and fire in her knee, and her ear was out there in the snow somewhere. Out here, there was no right, just an infinite kaleidoscope of wrongs. Today she'd have killed for that bottle. Literally. Those few seconds of adrenaline high, when mortal fear crowded out all the pain and she felt like she could run for miles, were heavenly. She could have had that feeling for hours if she had just taken the stupid bottle. It wasn’t fair.

Crystal might have bought Juanita’s act if Ash hadn’t, with characteristic bluntness, pointed out how wrecked she actually was. The phrase "fairly fucked" stung for its accuracy as much as its crassness. Juanita felt a burning shame creeping up the base of her skull. Sure, she'd led a successful charge, but then she'd had to be carried off the field, her weakness on full display. She wanted to leap upright in one smooth motion, show both of them that she could literally and metaphorically stand on her own two feet. But the power of spite was a pretty weak motivator compared to overtaxed muscles and exhaustion.

"I appreciate the offer, but it’d be better to move as a group. Besides, if Dani’s doing what you think she’s doing, we’d better give her a wide berth. I don’t wanna walk in on anything like that, especially in church." Juanita was unable to hide the disdain in her voice. Even if they weren’t doing that, Crystal's explanation made it sound like Dani had taken her besties on a pleasure hike, unarmed. They were wasting energy and time, and they’d left the church unguarded. All of that was unacceptable. She’d have to confront Dani about that after they met back up.

“I think… we should spend the night, and head out in the morning. We got a kill today, and we deserve to rest and recuperate. Besides, if things get hairy, it’s better to have all three of us mobile. If we move out after the morning announcements, we should be able to meet back up with the rest of the squad by noon, and then we can coordinate our next hunt from there.”

Oh. Ohhhhhhh.

Connie got it.

Okay well that was fun wasn't it? She'd walked in on a kill crew. She'd seen a little blood and all in her brief glimpse earlier, but she hadn't realised exactly what she was looking at.

She stayed a quiet little fieldmouse, and she thought, and she thought a little more.

There was no fooling around. If she was stupid, she was dead, and she'd be remembered for being stupid and dead, in that order. Not acceptable. So how to be alive. She could do smart and alive, only...

Connie didn't make a face because she was staying as still as possible. But she thought like she was making a face, which was good enough for now. Creeping out all sneakily was smart. It was also just kind of whatever. Kind of whatever was pointless. Even then, part of her pulled towards safety, regrouping, and counting her blessings.

Was she scared? Connie tried to work it out.

Sheeeee. wasn't sure. She hadn't cast herself as a victim getting stalked by a group of killers. That wasn't how it was supposed to shake out. Didn't matter. Circumstances had put her in that role. The noose was narrowing even though they all didn't know it. Just had to walk to the wrong spot at the wrong time, they'd see.

Mm. Maybe she was scared some. Maybe something else alongside, which was a feeling much easier to put a word on. Excited, in that vein of grim fascination she had when a story or a movie was hitting just right with the gore and the thrills. Good thing she already knew she was like this.

Three people. Guard was down. Didn't think there was anyone else around. At least one of them hurt. Could be quick, could be slow. Connie was faster than some, not so fast as others. With a little surprise in her favour then..

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Connie scampered out from behind her table, straightened, turned.

"Love that look for you," Juanita, right? Blood across her face and ear. Looked grim. Looked real.

Connie's nerve didn't hold long enough to get cute about it. She stepped back through the door deeper into the building's interior and with a slam, ran off.

She was going to return. Had things to do.

((Connie continued in Inverted Hostility))

"Right then," Crystal said. "I could, uh, sit down too. Start fresher tomorrow."

There was a lot of information that she'd gleaned from this brief interaction, most of it to her pleasing.

Ash made fun of Dani. Good.

Juanita seemed unhappy about Dani's proclivities. Good.

The other guy came out of it worse than Juanita did. Good.

Strictly speaking, their priorities were probably misaligned. Scooping up kills was irrelevant. They were, all of them, victims and weapons at the same time. The point was to tilt the balance away from the former and towards the latter. A knife that sawed through bone wouldn't be as sharp the next time it was called upon. One more dead was one more dead, while an injury that caused lasting damage might trip them up at a critical point. The best idea was to be sharp at the final moment, to be wielded with precision. Until that point, they should be testing themselves against whetstones, not cinderblocks.

But that was Crystal's understanding, for Crystal's path. Whether the others shared it was irrelevant, or maybe even detrimental. A dull blade could still turn an attack, and a dull blade that shattered to save your life was a resource smartly expended. And if it came to blade against blade, the sharpest had an edge. So Crystal didn't intend to throw herself against whatever random people they came across unless she could get away with it, but if the others did that was fine. If Dani did, that was definitely fine. She'd just have to keep an eye on what resources they acquired, on the delicate balance.

It was fine. She had a plan. She had it worked out. She just had to—

Someone new was moving, talking, and Crystal in her ruminating and relief to not be walking anymore was several seconds slow on the draw. She had her gun pointed in the general direction Connie had run off in only as the slam of the door echoed.

Crystal's heart was hammering, and she raced over to the door, weapon at the ready, all set to pursue like a cat chasing a feather at the end of a string, and then she stopped. Thought. Took a breath. Looked back at the others.

What was there to gain? What was there to lose?

Juanita looked somewhere between baffled and appalled, sputtering something. Crystal thought that she looked a second away from forcing herself to her feet and trying to run down the departing girl.

Whetstone, or cinderblock?

"We're definitely a little tired," Crystal said. "Missing things."

She shrugged, smiled. Everybody's fault meant nobody's fault. Crystal grabbed a table with her non-gun-hand and heaved, thinking to pull it in front of the door, and that, yeah, that didn't happen.

"Let's block the door," she said. "She knows we, uh, mean business. Hopefully she'll just go. Somewhere else."

Another shrug.

"Or we shoot her, I guess," Crystal said.

If she was sharing the burden of moving the tables, it was only fair she share the credit for what she'd have to do if it came to that.

((Crystal Henderson, Juanita Reid, and Ash Graves continued in Give Me a Kiss to Build a Dream On))