Survival Of The Fittest

((Kai Rosado-Prince continued from new liver, same eagles))

The knots in Kai's stomach had never quite untwisted since leaving Salem back in the forest, but as the town came into view, the borderline queasiness finally began to ease off. Maybe it was counterintuitive. He had no idea what state he'd find Kitty in, nor any idea about anything else except where to find her and what he'd heard over the announcements.

But he was going to find her. That was what mattered.

The sun was already beginning to sink in the sky, washing the landscape pink and orange where it peeked through the clouds. Between winding his way through the forest and his erratic path away from Salem, it had taken Kai all morning and into the afternoon to make it this far across the island. He paused to catch his breath before really venturing across the boundary between the road and the outskirts of town, lowering the umbrella from his shoulder and leaning on it slightly like a walking stick.

He wasn't feeling too winded. It was more nerves. The idea of prowling through the houses where Chloé and Marshall had set up their little mock civilization after the terms he'd left them on built on his unease. Buildings drew people, and he'd done his level best to avoid people since yesterday morning. Salem had more or less convinced him that was the best course of action.

He only needed to brave the prospect of running into somebody else until he found Kitty. They could build a shelter somewhere else away from here. As far away as possible.

Still, he hesitated before crossing that invisible wall almost like he expected to stumble over a tripwire that would alert everyone in the area that he was there.

The blood on Meena's face felt a little like too-thick makeup, gross and kinda runny after wearing it for too long. Running water wasn't exactly in good supply though, so... just gotta live with it. Maybe find a river or a conveniently melting snowbank to wash it off in before s/he died.

Or not.

[Meena Lalita Kumar continued from Grief Seed]

She he did she want to die a man or a woman? he walked ahead of Ren, as fast and recklessly as he liked. Which wasn't very fast most of the time, to be very honest. Firing a gun five times felt like running a marathon for how much it drained his energy, even into the day after - the way he ran down the mountain trail seemed beyond him, in a way it never had before.

Meena was seventeen years old, and very tired. He didn't even like Sailor Nothing, he was skeptical on it to begin with, and the SA completely ruined it for him, but damn if its opening line wasn't a mood sometimes.

He saw someone in the distance, but didn't really react at first. He saw the guy, registered that there was in fact A Guy there, but couldn't bring himself to have any further thoughts about it, not until he got closer at least. Saw his face. His first thought, annoyingly, was that Ren would probably be pretty fucking happy about this turn of events. Happy enough to have no reason to hang around Meena anymore.

His voice was devoid of energy, and devoid of (perceptible) malice. Meena walked forward, his words dragging on the airways behind him. "Kaaaaaaiiii."

[Ren Vu continued from We Will Find You]

Ren stared, slightly unable to believe that it really was Kai in front of them, and slightly bewildered by this disbelief.

They had entertained the possibility, that morning, when they heard about Kitty, a reward, and the bar in the town; they had wondered, and it hadn't seemed unlikely, that they wouldn't be the only one, that Kai or Cali or perhaps even Ash would be drawn by the news. But they hadn't dared to get their hopes up. Kitty would be enough, especially with the number of deaths she had accumulated yesterday alone, and it wouldn't do to be greedy. This was their best, and possibly only chance, to get a reliable idea of where Kitty could be, and insofar as Ren was superstitious, they believed in trying not to ask for too much. For Meena to have agreed to go with Ren to the hunting lodge was luck enough.

And yet--it was unmistakably Kai they were looking at.

Ren raised their hand to wave, opened their mouth to shout a greeting--and found that they could not make a sound. They opened and closed their mouth several times, as though this would dislodge their voice--what do you say to a friend, anyways, whom you had been worried you would never see again?

They gave up, and, forgetting themself, ran towards Kai.

Kai started a little at Meena's voice and then again more visibly when he turned to look at her and took in her appearance.

"Hi," was all he could dumbly manage for a moment. Took a few more seconds to dredge up the right words for the zombie lurching towards him. "Are you- hurt-?"

Stupid question no matter the answer. Kai knew that, but he had to ask. He was relieved in two senses when Ren caught up and promptly launched themselves at him.

They weren't usually the one to do that - it was more Kitty's thing - but Kai reacted with tuned reflexes, planting the umbrella more firmly on the ground for steadiness and opening his other arm wide to catch them.

"Hey," he said breathlessly. He squeezed Ren right against his chest, glancing between them and Meena. He could guess why they were here and probably what had happened before they found him. For a few minutes, none of that mattered. "Hey." He felt like a broken record. It wasn't such a bad thing right now.

Meena said nothing as Ren ran past him, towards Kai. He could have had that. Well, no, actually he couldn't, not what he was witnessing right now. If Meena accepted a hug from Ren way back when they first met up on this island, it would have been awkward and cold, because Meena and Ren didn't have what Kai and Ren had. That was why Meena refused, and he had to remember that.

He reminded himself, over and over in his head, that he was just too different from Kai to ever experience this, as he watched.

"No, I'm not hurt," he lied.

Kai's hugs were good, even for someone as normally touch-averse as Ren.

For a moment, there had been the shadow of a doubt--they should have asked for permission first, Ren of all people should know that--but by then Kai's arms were around them, warm and safe, tight enough to squish Ren's soul back into their body and remind them that they had one. They were okay. They hadn't fucked things up. It was possible for them to find someone and hug them and not fuck things up. It was pure indulgence, hugging Kai, and to indulge too much was dangerous here--but it was impossible not to cling to the feeling of being held, when they had long accepted the possibility that they would never experience that feeling again. A selfish reason, of course--but they allowed it.

Ren allowed themself to remain buried in Kai for a long, long time--then they took a deep breath, released him, and stepped away.

"I missed you," they said, because they couldn't help themself. "I have, um. Updates. I guess. Things you should know. Meena's the only person I've been traveling with; neither of us have gotten hurt, so far. I can vouch for her; she's a good friend."

Ren looked over their shoulder and felt a twinge in their gut, but it was true; Meena was a friend to them. They raised their hand, gestured with their fingers: c'mere.

Turning back to Kai, they went on, "We heard that Kitty's been summoned to this area, and came here to look for her. Is that why you're here as well?"

Kai let Ren go without resistance, however much he wanted to keep squeezing them like a stuffed animal. They didn't normally like being touched too much, so the long hug was rare enough already. It had felt good while it lasted. Until he had to remember why they'd felt the need to hug each other so tightly in the first place.

He nodded along with Ren's "updates," giving Meena another glance when she assured him that she was okay. That ruled out one explanation for the blood, and he figured that was probably going to be buried somewhere in the updates that Ren hadn't gotten to yet. A bush he was happy to continue beating around for the moment instead of trampling through. He only really knew Meena through other people like Ren. She'd always struck him as a soft, sometimes nervous person, not too unlike Kitty or Ren themselves at times. She kept to herself a lot, and that was something that Kai understood and respected, at least.

"Yeah. I came here to look for Kitty. Just got here." Kai nodded towards the town. "Um, I was here a couple days ago. There's..." How to put it? "...people I think it would be best for us to avoid. Not because they're really dangerous to us, just, um." His eyes flicked briefly over to the shotgun that Meena was carrying, which he'd noticed but semi-consciously refused to focus on before.

"Chloé's gathering people up. When I was with them, she was talking about wanting to- do something, to deal with people that have killed. If they found any." She'd had little success with the second part of her plan with just the announcements to go by. As far as Kai was concerned, he was going to keep it that. "So yeah. I think I remember which house they were holed up in, and we can avoid it. That's all."

It occurred to Kai for the first time to wonder if Chloé and Marshall had ended up with possession of Jess's gun. All the more reason to stay far away.

Some part of himself was watching him talk about this stuff, coming up with survival tactics beyond anything he'd ever had to consider camping out in the woods. That part still hadn't fully gotten over its disbelief. If anything, it was stronger now. It was wondering at the rest of him and how over the course of four days, he'd started to adapt to being here.

The phantom memory of Dominiqua's blood seeping into his gloves made his fingers twitch.

Meena's lips twitched upwards, and his head naturally fell into a tilt. If you looked at just his mouth, his expression could have been mistaken for a smile. Just his eyes - mistaken for a glare, at no one in particular.

Ren was a liar. Meena knew this, but he only now saw them lie outright to another person. What, exactly, had Meena contributed so much to Ren's life that they felt the need to not only call him a friend, but a good friend? They both knew full well that there was nothing that justified calling him that, not in reality.

His feet were planted into the ground. Really, he ought to be offended by Ren's offer, as though they had peered into his mind yet again and tried to tempt him to delay his descent with nothing more substantial than a lie and a treat of empty sugar.

Someone was mentioned. Ah.

How could Meena forget.

They were the outcasts. They were the hurt people. It was us against them, always, and Meena? You could hardly say he ran in the same group as Chloé, unless the group was "everyone who wasn't Ren, Kai, Kitty, and California". Of that group, Meena was on the margins, ever at risk of being pushed into the outgroup, the category of people whom it was okay to hurt and mistreat and speak badly of (moreso than usual, that is).

Not like Meena had actually seen this group's inner workings but there's no way they're as harmonious and friendly and nice to each other as Ren made them sound. Firstly, because Ren was a liar who spoke nothing but good things about people who were anything but good (exhibit A, Meena himself). Secondly, because they were all people with innumerable little fucking tragedies in their lives, tragedies that would excuse any amount of monstrous behaviour (exhibit A, how they all still felt comfortable enough about finding Kitty even after she killed - count em - five people).

Staring felt uncomfortable. Staring felt rude, for all that his browbeaten, fear-driven politeness felt a world away. Staring filled him with disgust for these people. So instead, Meena stared away, onto the open road.

Thankfully, there was no need to make sure that Kai was on the same page as Ren. He was ahead, if anything--he had names and places, knowledge that was actually actionable, a plan that was more than a vague trajectory. All good things to have. If Ren felt a twinge of disappointment when they realized that Kai would not insist on drawing out the moment of reunion, that he was as willing to be pragmatic as they were, then they ignored it to focus on the information he was sharing.

"Chloe, you said?"

Ren frowned; leave it to Chloe to try to put together something resembling a society in Survival of the Fittest. They couldn't even blame her, really; it wasn't too far off from one of the possibilities that had passed through their head and been discarded, several days ago, when they had first found themself waking up in the snow. Impractical, verging on impossible--for someone of Ren's abilities. Bad luck, then, that Chloe had gotten the idea into her head.

It was easier to think about in hypothetical terms: imagine a scenario where your class president was looking to kill one of your best friends. Imagine that she's doing so with good intentions. Imagine that you have to stop her. To make plans as if for a thought experiment wasn't ideal, but it was the only way for Ren to make plans at all; it was impossible for Ren to think of Chloe as a real enemy.

They said, hesitantly, "That's...that's good to know. We might see them at the hunting lodge bar, too, if they're taking a proactive approach. When did you last see Chloe? What did she have, in terms of people and weapons?"

Meena's absence gnawed, and Ren couldn't help glancing over their shoulder again; there had been time enough for him to join them, if he wanted to. It wasn't a surprise that he'd stayed back, but they had to hope; they couldn't very well stop trying.

They couldn't give up on him. That was the point, wasn't it? Meena was testing them, searching for their limits, trying to determine exactly what it would take to push Ren to abandon him. How conditional is your friendship, Ren? Don't you know I'm a lost cause? At what point will you learn to stop caring about me?

No doubt Meena would hate the idea of being Ren's pet lost cause, but their answer had to be: never.

"It was just her and Marshall, and... Jess, when I left." Kai didn't know how to elaborate on Jess. He didn't have anything to give there other than speculation, so he awkwardly backed away from the topic and continued around it.

"...They might have a gun. But I don't think that they're-" Again he had to rummage around for the word that felt right. "Chasing people down. We'd have heard."

Kai had to believe that. That if Chloé really was determined to get rid of certain people, and she had the means to do so easily, she'd have done it. He'd have heard her name more than Kitty's. She either didn't mean it that much, or Kai had rattled her, or she'd really stayed put in her house and waited for people to come to her. Maybe she just didn't have the gun after all. Any of those were okay options. It made things a tiny bit easier, and he'd take anything he could get.

He followed Ren's glance back at Meena, and he almost asked whose blood was on her face. He bit his tongue.

"We, um. We should get going. I don't know exactly where the bar is."

Meena didn't have to hear that twice. He walked, in the direction he knew the town to be in, because if left to their own devices Kai and Ren would be like her parents and her aunts and uncles after a party, constantly hovering around the entryway talking about how they have to go and never actually leaving. They were the exact same breed of selfishly selfless.

Ren nodded. "Right, it wouldn't--"

And then, without a word, Meena set off.

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Time passed. They walked. Things that wanted to be said were left unsaid.

((On the lonely road out of town, walked a small, skittish girl.))

The felt cat ears on Katelyn's hood bobbed up and down as she trudged down the snowy street. She didn't know what to do now that she had been kicked out of the bar. Her friends hadn't reached it in time, and her encounter with Alex made her loathe to loiter in one of the houses nearby, trying to see if they would come after all. She had been a fool to get her hopes up. At this point, she was sure that she would never find them before they died, and she wasn't sure if she could face that reality. If it weren't for the fact that she might at least run into Kelsey again, she was prepared to give up the ghost on being anything but lonely ever again.

She stopped on the road, her two spears jingling against one another on her back. The weight of the grenade launcher pulled on its sling and on her neck by extension, and that was already starting to hurt. Putting it away might be for the best, but her hands were full with the billhook and machete. She had far too many weapons at this point, and all of them were weighing her down. It would've been best to ditch some of them, but she couldn't help but hoard at the paranoid thought that if she left any of them behind, someone would end up using them to kill her.

Katelyn shook her head, refusing to let such an irrational idea creep into her mind. She needed to stay focused and keep moving, at least to the place where she told she would meet Kelsey. With a weary sigh, she continued her lonesome march to the town's entrance. She walked for some time that way, her only company being the layers of blood on her hands. That was, until she reached her destination, and skid to a halt when she saw who was already there.

Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. For a moment, she forgot how to breathe. A shout forced its way up her throat and out through her mouth.

"KAI!"

She was already racing towards him before she said a word. Every bit of tiredness, every ache and pain, and every worry had left her all at once.

"KAAAAIIII!!"

Once she reached him, she dropped her blades in the snow without a second thought, tackling him with a hug the same way she always had, closing her eyes and burying her face in his chest.

"You found me," she whispered, already starting to cry. "You found me..."

Meena’s continued silence was awkward, but if she wasn’t going to press any issue, Kai wasn’t either. He followed her lead and started walking once more.

And with none of the fanfare that Kai felt there should be, a familiar shape appeared at the mouth of the road.

Even from this distance, he could see that the colors of her clothes were wrong. Stained. He could read the exhaustion in her posture. The glint of sunset light off the weapons that she was carrying and wearing.

She called out his name, and his feet carried him forward without thought. “Kitty!”

Kai had already dropped the umbrella by the time Kitty reached him, opening his arms fully to catch her. She smelled like stale blood and dirt and sweat. It was honestly pure luck that Kai didn’t get severely jabbed by any of the sharp points she was wearing.

He didn’t care. For the moment, he didn’t care. He hugged her tighter than he ever had. For that moment, if she had asked him to never let go, he would have obliged.

For those seconds, the names and the weight of what she had done and what had happened to all of them didn’t exist. They weren’t standing outside this abandoned town. They could be anywhere else in the world. Wherever they wanted to be.

“I’m-” So glad you’re okay, even though she wasn’t. So glad I found you. None of the words that came to mind felt adequate.

“I’m glad we made it,” Kai finally mumbled into Kitty’s hood.

That the reunion was happening here and now meant that they had fucked up-- that they had been too slow, had left things to pure luck. Not that it mattered now.

It didn’t matter to Ren in the slightest.

Kai was gone, running, shouting, and Ren found that they had to resist following suit--why were they resisting? Kai and Kitty had already given away their position, after all--because, for the second time that day, Ren wasn’t quite sure that they weren’t imagining what they were seeing. It felt as though Kitty would evaporate before their eyes if they didn’t hold her, call her name, confirm that she was real.

Their resistance held, for a few seconds. They scanned their surroundings--not very thoroughly--for threats, observers, anyone who might’ve just been alerted to Kitty’s presence and react badly to it. They worried about leaving Meena behind and on his own.

But a moment of joy was being dangled right before them, and it was easy, in the end, to justify complacency. Ren's feet followed Kai’s, and they embraced Kitty from behind.