Survival Of The Fittest

[Daniel Ozanne continues seeking from Further Torments And Slavery]

Daniel had no right to be called one who knows.

He couldn't even be called one who predicts, as much as he tried. He made guesses, he could weigh odds. But - as he was all to eager to test out when the slimmest odds suited him - if unlikely things never happened, people would have never invented probability and statistics to begin with.

Alex was dead, by the most prolific killer's hands. He was told it was an ambush. He could guess that it was hardly an act of altruism. Well, it might have been - Cedar was sympathetic to Kitty, after all. A whisper in his blood and dormant adrenaline doubted that, though.

(Was that the real reason he didn't shoot?)

And now he was here again, in the tent he dragged Tay to after they buried their friend, not knowing he'd do the same soon enough, now sipping water carefully, as if any spill could spell doom. Only now could he really sit with the fact that he did take some of Tay's things - medical supplies, mostly. It felt like he'd wasted so many bandages these days, and seeing Tay's blood stop seeping over ruined fabric and cotton in his dreams reminded him of Aion, what happened to that bastard anyway? If he didn't take something he'd have nothing left for himself. Others wouldn't feel as paradoxically charitable as Fitz.

(He'd end up like Cedar, which was probably a more noble fate than dying a robber of friends' graves. Did he really think the slim, slim chance he could live would ever justify such an action? What else could that slim, slim hope justify, that he wasn't ready to acknowledge because he wasn't yet desperate enough?)

Tay's "assigned weapon" was a joke. Handcuffs and a ball-gag. At some point he tossed the gag off the mountain to land who knows where, but the handcuffs were still with him, useless but not quite as insulting.

(Less insulting. Mm-hm. Sure.)

He took another slow, steady sip of water, sitting in the threshold of the tent's opening.

((Karin Han continued from by talos this can't be happening))

If Choi Latte and Whine Press had tried to follow her, they'd done a poor job of it. If they hadn't found her by now, they almost certainly weren't going to. Of course, her strategy of simply zig-zagging through the trees with a sort of if-I-have-no-idea-where-I'm-going-then-you-won't-either mentality had the downside of leaving her completely lost. Even with her freshly-pilfered map to guide her, she'd basically resorted to the age-old art of blind guessing.

Eventually she'd found herself in an abandoned cabin. It was colder than Ashlee Donovan's cadaver at this point, thanks to the busted window, but she'd made do. She'd eaten a miserly breakfast of one of the few remaining hunks of bread (stupid Choi had already eaten most of the stock, stupid athletes and their carbo-loading) and a hearty swig of water, and listened to the daily announcements. Ashlee's death had been read out with all the aplomb of a local news story about the resilience of urban pigeon populations. The announcers hadn't even bothered to mention that it had been an accident or self-defense, but they'd been quite happy to devote airtime to the startling revelation that Juanita Reid had made her lesbian status official by brutally murdering her beard. Go figure. But even if she'd been upstaged, the announcement still meant something. It had status. Weight. She was no longer Karin Han, the Crazy Alien Girl, she was Karin Han: Murderer.

She had mixed feelings about that. Jesus would be pretty pissed about it, but it wasn't like she was the only one in WAP that had killed someone. At least hers had been an accident, unlike Mal's attempt to kill Jessica Romero and Juanita's repressed lesbian rampage. The whole thing was more Victor's fault than Karin's. Besides, if Ashlee had been skinnier, it would have been a flesh wound, tops. It was hardly Karin's fault at all, when you considered all the angles - not that she really intended on thinking about it that much more. She'd spent the whole day and night cramming the idle moments full of her own mental narration, because if she thought about the incident, really thought about it, she'd probably start to feel guilty. And and she couldn't afford to get weighed down by kind of thing right now. Not when she was on her own and scrimping by with a weapon she could barely use and hardly any supplies.

So, no. It sucked, but it wasn't her fault. Just like Choi Latte - she'd hit her in self-defense, after the bitch tried to strangle her. Classic case of self-defense. And now that she was in the announcements, hopefully that meant that Choi Latte and Whine Press would think twice about coming after her.

With that mental quandary settled, Karin packed up the last of Choi's stuff and headed out in search of warmer climes. But her wandering didn't take her too far before she spotted a tent with some guy sitting in the frame. Perhaps she'd be able to score a little more food after all?

With the drill at the ready, she approached him.

Daniel caught sight of a girl approaching with a drill pretty quickly - wait, a drill? They were giving out drills? Damn. Even that would have been more useful to Tay than some fucking handcuffs and a ball-gag. Hell, it might have even gotten Steve out of that ditch! Anyway she was approaching and when he squinted he realized he recognized that face, and could put it to a name that was on the announcements. Motherfucker.

Karin was a part of the unfortunately-named school Christian prayer circle. If he had a nickel for every person from there who murdered someone, he'd have too many nickels. Whatever happened to Though shalt not kill? Maybe his mom was right about church people.

He reached into his bag and pulled out the terrible, unwieldy gun, in a terrible, unwieldy way that caused the haphazardly stuffed-in handcuffs to fall out. If Katelyn was scared off by this, surely Karin would be too. Hopefully. He didn't even set aside time to load it this morning, so.

(Why wave around a gun that you're supposedly so unwilling to shoot?)

"Hi, Karin," he muttered, keeping the gun at hand, but not yet raised.

"Hey, Daniel."

Daniel "Blah-niel" Ozanne. The guy oozed blandness. It was baked right into his name - nobody who had too much of a stick up their butt to let themselves be called Dan or Danny was ever going to be the life of any party.

Or so she'd have said, if he wasn't holding a pretty nasty-looking gun. It wasn't pointing at her, which was why she hadn't already taken off into the trees. In fact, even if he had pointed it at her, it'd still be more civil than the last several social interactions she'd had. That said, the presence of the gun meant that robbing him or intimidating him was probably off the table. The presence of the handcuffs that fell out of his bag meant something else, but she wasn't sure what. He hadn't shown up on the announcements, which meant he wasn't a killer. But he had someone else's weapon, which meant he was, potentially, a thief. Maybe he could use a partner in crime.

She held up one hand, and used the other to stuff the drill in her bag before raising it in the universal signal for surrender.

"I know what the announcement said, but it was self-defense. I come in peace."

"Cool," he said, not letting go of the gun. He spoke casually, like he was greeting someone who wandered over to his desk in the minutes before the period ended. "So what did you come for?"

Honestly, Daniel would have taken any answer that didn't involve murder. On either of their ends, to be clear.

(Why did he have to clarify that?)

He believed her, though. Well, that wasn't quite the right way to put it. He was willing to believe her, and questioning that seemed... unproductive? Unnecessary? Or maybe just overly tiring.

What did she come for? Weapons and food. At this point it didn't matter if she got them from an ally, an enemy, or a corpse. But she wasn't about to tell him that.

Karin's eyes did a quick scan, comparing the scene in front of her to what little she knew about Blahniel. As she'd previously noted, Blahniel had two weapons. He hadn't killed for them, which meant that he'd robbed them, looted them, or been willed them by a departed ally. The last thing seemed most likely - Blahniel was a social butterfly, the kind of guy who didn't stand out but seemed to have a passing familiarity with everyone. Only notable thing about him was that he had a weird hate boner for Aion Rhodes; the prevailing rumor was that they'd had some kind of bad breakup (which Karin had helpfully supplemented by adding in that the split had been caused by one of them having a fetish involving mallard ducks). Even if he had robbed or looted somebody, he wasn't the kind of guy who'd be alone voluntarily. Which meant that there was a very obvious right answer to his question.

"Honestly? At this point, I... I don't know. I guess I just wanted someone to talk to for a bit. It's really lonely out here."

She was surprised to discover that this wasn't a lie. In the past twenty-four hours she'd been screamed at, tackled, strangled, and yeeted. The idea of just... sitting down and not finding herself in mortal peril was actually kind of appealing.

"I mean, look at me." Karin gestured at the entirety of her body, which didn't take very long. "I'm not built to make it on my own. There are a lot of people out there killing. And your name hasn't shown up in the announcements, so I'm guessing you're not out here to play the game. I figured it'd be safe to talk for a bit, at least."

And yet, she'd approached him with a drill bit. Pros of bringing that up: he'd let her know she wouldn't be able to get away with anything funny? He guessed? But take a look at the cons: she, a murderer, would feel rejected and have her attention drawn to a weapon she might use if she did anything funny on say, impulse, the moment she got close enough. So it was decided, he wasn't gonna bring it up.

"Same, honestly. And sure. You can sit down wherever."

He knew a little about Karin. She was in the prayer circle but not like as one of the really out-there devout members (you know them when you meet them), she was kind of weird about aliens, she seemed to enjoy gossip and shit-stirring. Now, she had killed someone, allegedly in self defense. Ashley, the announcements said? No, Ashlee, there we go, one of the more popular cheerleader girls. She seemed like such a nice person, though? Hm.

(Despite everything, he couldn't say he was confident he knew who would and wouldn't kill or rob or otherwise hurt others once put in this environment. Sure, there was the fact that every factor dragged one towards murder, like leaves on a river. But there was also the fact that Daniel could never know anyone deeply from a cursory glance, not even himself.)

She'd guessed him out in one. The logs in the seating area weren't far off, so she sat on the nearest of them. It'd be good to keep a little distance between them, just in case Blahniel changed his mind and decided to get shooty. Goodness knows it hadn't taken Choi Latte much to go from repressed nerd to Boston Strangler wannabe. She let the bag slip down her arm and hit the snow. Putting the drill out of reach like that was risky, but on balance she wagered she either wouldn't need it, or, if she did, that she'd be so outmatched that it wouldn't make a functional difference.

"Thanks," she said, rubbing at her throat. It still ached. Not as bad as last night, when it felt like she'd been gargling road crush, but still pretty bad. Choi Latte had a killer grip, Karin would give her that. Probably had a lot of experience gripping some other things. After a moment of thought, she pulled her scarf down a bit, so Blahniel could see the bruises.

"I dunno about you, but I've been having one hell of a time out here."

"Aren't we all?"

Daniel let the shotgun rest against his bag, and glanced over at it. The handcuffs were still on the ground. He reached over and put them back in, and he rested his arm across his bag. Close enough to grab the shotgun should he need to, but far enough that it didn't feel like he was interrogating Karin at threatened-gunpoint anymore.

His eye fell on the bruises, for a second. He couldn't tell the age of bruises just by looking at them from afar, but from the way Karin was acting, it at least seemed to still ache. Ashlee was yesterday, so maybe it was from that incident. Maybe it was more recent than that. He didn't know.

"What happened, by the way?"

Karin stared at a patch of snow. She'd stitched the two attacks together in her mind, making it into a patchwork of lies and truths, where some of the lies were more true than the truths, and some of the truths felt less real than the lies, and some of the holes where things went unsaid contained the biggest lies of all.

"I was with a group, holed up in an abandoned bar in town. A bunch of us girls and Victor Grail. Karen Nguyen... Shannon Choi... Maya Press... Julia Garcero... Ashlee. Spent three days with them. And Victor was... really creepy with the girls. You know how he is, right? At first I thought he was just being a macho meathead, that he just liked being the only guy and having us all depend on him... but he started getting more and more aggressive, and giving off some really creepy vibes... and one night, it got... real bad. I told the other girls about what he was doing. I wanted to warn them, try and get them away, but... they didn't listen. They didn't want to just take my word for it, so they confronted him."

She grimaced at the memories of what'd happened next. "He found out that I was the one who told them, and lost his mind. He started screaming at me, then he grabbed me, picked me right up off the ground and just threw me. He took everything. And the other girls... they just stood there and watched him attack me. They all took his side. Because, I mean... who's gonna believe the girl who talks about aliens, right? Even after he hit me, they were still on his side, and they were just gonna leave me there to die. So I... I panicked, and I rushed one of them and grabbed her gun, and I pointed it at him and... I was too freaked out to shoot straight. She got in the way. I ran off into the woods, While they were freaking out, I managed to grab Shannon's bag, and my drill, and I just took off. I've been running ever since."

"If they find me, they're probably gonna kill me."

After a moment of thought, she looked up, with a melancholy sort off shrug. "I dunno. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut."

The story seemed passable at first. It'd probably fall apart with too much critical thought, so probably better to put Blahniel on the back foot, get him talking about whatever he'd been through.

"How about you? Those handcuffs have a story?"

Something about Karin's story nagged at Daniel, like a burr in his boots. The other girls believed her enough to confront Victor, and then just... Believed him instead? People could be pretty gullible, sure. He didn't know what Victor said to convince them Karin was lying. But if it was accompanied by literally throwing her - a literal demonstration of his likely attitude towards women - what could it have been? It was frustrating to hear.

(Imagine if he treated his mother's stories of his father with the same level of doubt. What he did was often horrifying, too awful to believe happened in plain sight, in broad daylight, where people let him get away with it. He knew what people could get away with without consequences, especially people like...)

Anyway. His own story.

"Oh, those?" He glanced into his bag. The handcuffs glinted back. "These were Taylor's, originally. I met them on the first day."

He held his tongue back from speaking everything he knew about Tay from the brief time they knew each other, as if to cling to their presence by re-engraving the information in his brain. He'd never felt the urge to do that before, even with people who'd been in his life longer, and left it. The difference, of course, is that those other friends weren't dead, and that he didn't meet them here.

(And, he didn't fail them like he failed Taylor.)

"I accidentally caused them a panic attack by shooting too close to where they were. Once they'd calmed down, we had some stuff to do - so basically they'd found Steve, you know, the guy with the YouTube channel, stuck in a ditch. So we set out to find a shovel, or something to get him out, which uh..."

He ran a finger across the cold metal of the shotgun, and drew a breath in. The faces of corpses flashed in his mind.

"...didn't go so well. When we got back he was dead. Tay ran off, and-"

His finger stopped. He averted his eyes from Karin, and stared into the trees.

(Reckless, until someone else's hide depends on it. Not fast enough. Not dangerous enough.)

His voice deflated to a mutter. "...ran into Katelyn."

He shook his head lightly. "I ran after them but by the time I found them, it was... They weren't dead yet, I tried to patch them up, but..."

It was too late, but he just couldn't bring himself to say it (because he had a chance, no matter how slim - or that's what he wanted to believe.)

Taylor Thorne, A.K.A. They-ler Thorne. Not a bad person, but Karin hadn't been surprised to see them cut down early. They hadn't struck her as a particularly strong person, and given their weird history with Kitty "I Like To Put People Into" Graves it wasn't shocking that that had turned out the way it had.

The news about Steve was a bit of a shock - the announcements had said the was stabbed, but it sounded like he'd fallen down a ditch. Leave it to Steve to try and jazz up his own murder to seem cool.

"That's awful, Daniel."

She took a breath. Whatever else she was, she wasn't... entirely inhuman. She could steal feel things that weren't resentment, annoyance, and anger. They were just a lot harder to summon. Took a lot of effort.

"I'm sorry you had to go through that. But... I'm sure you did your best, and they appreciated that. I'm sure Taylor was happy that you were with them in the end. Sucks to die out here, but... I dunno. I think dying alone sucks worse, somehow. I only have one friend in the whole school, and she didn't come along, so I'm gonna go it solo, sooner or later. Not looking forward to that, at least."

Something twigged in her mind. She gave Blahniel a curious look.

"You said you tried patch Taylor up, right? Need any medical supplies? The kit I've got is barely opened, I took some pain meds for my throat, but everything else is still there. I don't know any of that medical stuff, but if you get a scrape like that it'd probably help you out of a jam."

Daniel often wondered what therapy was like.

He really only heard about it second hand from Genie and his mother, and they didn't really talk about what actually happened, just their opinions on... whether it should exist? Whether mom should go? Something like that, that his kid brain just wasn't mature or knowledgeable enough to digest. All he knew were from stock scenes and depictions in books and TV, and he often figured it was inaccurate or out of date. So, would a therapist sound like Karin? Probably not.

(But it felt nice - too nice - to hear someone exonerate his failures like this.)

Enough of that. He needed to be practical. Come to think of it, he'd used an awful lot of his medical supplies on others. There would be enough left for him, if he stayed out of trouble and didn't get cut too deep, or get shot up too badly, or get wounded too many times in the coming days... there wasn't enough left for him.

"Yeah, actually." He looked back to Karin. "Not just Taylor, I used a bunch of my bandages to patch up Aion on the first day. So like... I am kinda running low."

He waited to see if Karin's offer was charity, or something else.

"Well, like I said, the medkit in my bag is basically untouched. We didn't have any injuries in the bar, so none of us really had a reason to use it. And, realistically... I mean, look at me. Anybody sneezes on me and I'll break a bone. So I'm either healthy or I'm dead. If you want the whole shebang, minus a few pain pills for the road, it's yours."

She scratched her head. "But, uh... I don't suppose you've got any spare food kickin' around? I've barely got anything left. I'm pretty good for water, so I guess the only other thing I'd really need is like... tools or stuff I can use, you know? I'd take those handcuffs off your hands if you want. Could throw in some of Shannon's extra shirts. You could tear 'em up for bandages, or burn 'em to keep warm. No pressure either way, just a thought."

"The whole thing? That's too much. Bandages will do just fine."

(Take and take and take and take and...

How much did he take from Taylor?)

"I do have some extra rations I could give you," he answered, quietly glad that Karin didn't ask for any water. "But like... why would you want handcuffs? I mean you can have them if you want them, but like..."

He pulled the damn things out of his bag, and dangled them, as if that'd make his point any clearer. "Why?"

It wasn't that Daniel didn't want to get rid of the handcuffs - but for the same reason he didn't want them, he wasn't sure why anyone else would. He was tempted to tell her they came with a ball-gag, but held his tongue on that.