Survival Of The Fittest

((Kai Rosado-Prince continued from And No Lessons Were Learned))

The ringing in Kai's right ear never fully faded. His anger did, somewhat. It was mostly replaced with a hollow ache in the pit of his chest, though the flare of rage he'd felt at Kitty danced around the edges still. It rose and fell in erratic moments. He mostly kept his mouth shut to prevent it getting out.

They'd made their way into the basement of the quarters building. Back down into the dark, hoping that this time maybe it would shelter them. Kai slept fitfully. Once, he woke and was sure that he heard someone or something else moving around down there with them, but it didn't come close. He thought he might have heard footsteps ascending the stairs, but he and Kitty were tucked away as far from the basement entrance as possible, and he was asleep again before he could consciously wonder.

He woke again at the announcement. Lay there in silence as Danya's voice crackled over them.

Chloé's name tightened the knots in his stomach. His own made him taste bile. Salem's was no longer a surprise, but still a dull ache.

Kai thought of Cali again, where she might be and what she might be doing. How she must feel right now. He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and didn't turn over to look for Kitty or call out to her.

At some point he slept again, but he didn't really rest.

((The announcement woke her up.))

Katelyn let out a little, annoyed whine as it came to an end. She felt like garbage, groggy from a lack of sleep and exhausted from her labor the night before. After staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, she rolled over and began rooting through her bag, taking out a loaf of bread, a half-frozen bottle of water, and her flashlight, flicking the latter on so she could see. Her body protested as she set about munching on her poor excuse for breakfast, overworked as it was from lugging Ashlyn with her to the research station. Last night's brief trip into the snowstorm may not have been a good idea in the moment, it had at least turned into one in hindsight.

Stumbling onto Ash half-dead in the snow was a massive stroke of luck. The trip back had been awful, with Katelyn staggering into the research station shivering and on the verge of giving out. Once they were inside, Katelyn had set about treating the injury as well as she could by flashlight, cleaning the wound, sewing it shut, and dressing it with a heaping helping of gauze. Then, it was just a matter of resting for a bit before bringing Ash down to the basement to warm up by the heater. After all that work, Katelyn ended up passing out, all without telling Kai about her little adventure.

After burning through half a loaf of stale bread and drinking the unfrozen portions of the water, Katelyn sat up and, after some hesitation, pointed her light at her sister. With bated breath, she watched, and saw Ash's chest rise and fall. Katelyn let out a sigh of relief, and allowed her shoulders to relax. Glancing over to Kai in the dim light, she saw that he was still lying down, probably asleep. Now was probably the best time to tell him about what happened.

Katelyn pulled herself along the floor to where Kai laid, and very gently prodded his shoulder.

"Hey. Kai," she said, softly. "Are- Are you awake?"

Kai felt Derek going limp in his arms again. Still breathing but unmoving. Never moving again. When Kitty called to him, he shied back from her, but the intrusion of her voice and touch was enough to disrupt that half-memory, half-nightmare. The dark of the tunnels melted away to the near-identical dark of the basement.

"Mm," was the best he could do as an answer for the moment. Slowly, he pushed himself up to sit and then finally turned to look at her. With eyes still adjusting to the dark, she was just a vague, if familiar, shape at his side.

"S'morning," he mumbled for lack of anything else to say. He groped around the surface of his bag next to him for his glasses and put them on. Took a minute to sift through the mess of his feelings and decided he didn't have the energy to keep being angry. It always drained him. All he really wanted to do was keep sleeping still, but Kitty needed- something.

Though he wasn't actively angry in the moment, Kai could still hold a grudge. It made him feel vindicated and guilty all in one, but he still hoped that Kitty wasn't just after conversation right now.

"What is it?" His tone was low, grogginess still clinging to him.

Well, he wasn't obviously angry with her, so that was an improvement over yesterday.

"Hi, s-sorry," Katelyn murmured, suddenly finding herself walking on eggshells, talking to Kai as though he were a stranger. "Um, last night I c-couldn't sleep, so I went for a walk, and, u-um..."

She pointed her flashlight over to Ashlyn, illuminating her still-sleeping sister for Kai to see.

"I found Ash," Katelyn continued. "She was hurt bad, so I helped her. I don't think she's w-woken up yet."

Katelyn bit her bottom lip, suddenly aware of the awkwardness of this situation. Kai didn't like Ash, he probably liked her even less than Katelyn did herself. Having another person suddenly with them was a big enough shock on its own, let alone someone both of them had such strong negative feelings towards. She should've woken Kai up and told him about this beforehand, but that was in the past, and there was no getting around it now. At least Ash hadn't killed anyone, unlike herself. If Kai could look the other way when she had seven dead bodies to her name, he could probably forgive Ash for merely being a bad sister.

"U-Um, s-sorry for not, um, telling you sooner. I- I didn't want to w-wake you..."

It was almost funny that, after everything that had happened since they went their separate ways on the very first day, Kai could still get some kind of unpleasant shock from seeing Ash when he wasn't expecting to. It might even have been comforting. It was such a normal feeling intruding on the constant horror of the past week.

He took a minute to formulate his reply, studying Ash as he mulled it over. "I'm glad she's not dead," he said finally, and that was as close to true as anything he could say about it. He'd more or less forgotten the sinking certainty he'd had after letting her go on the first day that he'd be hearing her name again soon. It was a relief now to realize how wrong he'd been. Kai came as close to hating Ashlyn as he could hate anybody for what they'd done before the class was dumped here, but he didn't want her dead.

And as mad as he was at Kitty, he couldn't make himself feel that she deserved to come across her sister laying dead in the snow.

The quiet that stretched on between their words was thick with an awkward tension that had never been there before. Kai was no stranger to not knowing exactly what to say, but with Kitty, the shared silence between them had usually been enough.

"We've got plenty of... stuff," he continued after too long a pause. He looked away from Kitty and Ash to the pile of their assorted belongings. "Whatever she needs should be fine." More sat unspoken between those words and the two of them. The "if" regarding whether Ash would wake up at all and what would happen if she did. Even in the flashlight's bright beam, her skin looked waxy and pale like a mannequin.

The sick uncertainty that Kai felt and knew he shouldn't feel. That even if he didn't want Ash dead, he couldn't be sure that he wanted her to wake up, either.

Blurs. Indistinct at first. Smudges on a window pane, not identifiable as any color or hue of their own except "different from the rest." Then some little blooms of color, a lovely aquamarine, crackling with white bursts every now and again. Then a kind of magenta red, thick and billowing. She liked the aqua better. Wanted it back. Tried to figure out how she'd summoned it the first time, and only succeeded in making the magenta boil away into a dark root-beer brown, not black but aspiring to be. Some vestiges of light piercing the gaps in her eyelashes and showing her the insides of her own eyelids.

- Ashlyn -

Right now she felt pain, mostly, and a bit of vague annoyance. Twice now she'd gone down not expecting to get up. But she was still alive. And she was cold. Everything was cold. Even the bullet in her guts, a little dark star freezing her innards from the inside out. Still suffering. Still clinging to something raw and primal that kept the rest of her body ticking even after her mental faculties had announced that they'd be resigning due to ongoing toxicity in the work environment.

Voices. She heard them as lilts and undertones, familiar ones at that. But the words themselves weren't really taking shape in her mind, connecting themselves to any kind of meaning. There were people here. Must've pulled her out. Why? She'd been a long way out of anywhere, but the floor underneath her was made of floor, the inside kind. Who'd drag her dead weight in here? She couldn't see Salem doing it. That knight in shining armor stuff wasn't their style.

"Nngh..." she managed. Wasn't gonna have much more than that to say. Just a grunt to let them know that she was alive, and that they could do whatever they wanted with that info. Couldn't do much more than that.

When Katelyn heard Ashlyn grunt, she immediately rushed to her sister's side, eager to have an excuse to drop the awkward conversation with Kai.

"Ash?" she mewled. "Ash, it's- it's me."

Ash was breathing well, and even moving a little. She looked like garbage, paler than Katelyn had ever seen her, but she was alive. Katelyn had actually saved her sister. The thought made a surge of happiness well up in her chest, for a moment washing away all the darkness that had been clouding her thoughts. She might not have been able to save her parents or even herself, but she had saved Ash. A small comfort in these troubling times, but unfortunately for her, the happiness couldn't last very long.

Ash was alive for now, but she still looked half-dead, and it was still too early to tell if she would truly recover. Was Katelyn just drawing out her sister's suffering? Before, when she had been confident that Robin was suffering on the edge of death, she had put him out of his misery with only moderate reticence. Was this situation any different? Why hadn't she done that for Ash?

The answer was obvious enough to her: because she simply couldn't. The two of them have both hurt each other before, and fought more times than Katelyn could count, but she would never kill her own sister. Ash was all she had left of her family. Even if they were in a death game, and even if her feelings about her sister were complicated, and even if—in her darkest moments back home—she had wished she could trade her sister for one of her parents, she still couldn't help but care. She might not consider Ash to be one of her friends, but hurting her sister here of all places would be tantamount to hurting one of them all the same.

"Can... c-can you drink water? Or eat?" Katelyn asked, after some hesitation. "We've got t-tons of supplies, and you need it."

Kitty.

The name crashed into her like a runaway train, shoving her through the fog and confusion and into some sort of clarity. Her eyes snapped open wide.

"K-Kitty..." she groaned. Waved her hand dismissively at the offer of water. Couldn't really figure out how to get her tongue working right so it could form the word "No," so she'd have to hope her half-assed charades would get the point across. Just the thought of trying to push any food down her throat made her nauseous. God only knew how many holes there were in her guts right now. She'd probably leak like a sieve.

She coughed, and it sent a cascade of aches and pains through every branch of her nervous system. She spat out something wet and foamy. Took a few deep breaths, staring up at... whatever was up there. Roof. Nah, the other one. Sea something.

"Wh..."

Another cough, jarring her whole body. Like she was one of those old jalopies in the cartoons, with springs and gears rattling loose with every bump in the road. "Where's... where're we?"

She blinked slowly and forcefully, trying to reset. Looked up again, at the dark expanse of the... the... the sea... the ceiling. Yeah. There it was. Brain working again. All that knocking around reconnected a few wires. "How'd I get here?"

Well, that solved one conundrum for him. Kai sat back, watching as Ash came to and Kitty rushed to tend to her. He watched long enough to gather that Ash probably felt as awful as she looked, and that was all he could manage.

Ashlyn was dying. Maybe not in the next few minutes, hours, or even days. But there wasn't going to be enough time and resources for her to recover. She needed a hospital and a team of professionals, and all she was going to get was Kitty's first-aid in a dirty basement.

Did Kitty realize it yet? Was she in denial about just how bad the situation was, or had she dragged Ash here in part for the hope of closure? Kai might as well have tried to read Chinese upside-down as figure out what was going on in Kitty's head at this point. But he knew a thing or two about denial.

He also knew that he couldn't sit here and listen and watch whatever passed between them. Even if neither girl realized or acknowledged it, this was maybe- probably- almost definitely one of the last chances they'd have for a private conversation. He didn't want to stray far from Kitty, more from fear now for what would happen to anyone who ran into her than for what they'd do to her. But for now, tucked away in the basement, things seemed safe enough. He could spare them some privacy for a bit and come back when he judged enough time would have passed for Ash to pass out again.

Anyway, Kitty had wandered far enough while he was asleep, hadn't she. His presence clearly wasn't that much of a deterrent, either. Kai guessed he should be thankful that she hadn't found anybody besides Ash.

"I'm going to- get some air," he mumbled. He kept his head down as he got to his feet to avoid the low-hanging beams on the basement ceiling and gathered his bag and Meena's shotgun. "I'll be back in a little bit." The underlying meaning in his words was clear enough.

He didn't offer Ash any other greeting or goodbye before leaving. Anything she could say to him about what had happened since they last saw each other, he'd probably already said to himself at this point.

((Kai Rosado-Prince continued in Me & Cinderella))

Ashlyn was talking. She was talking! That was a great sign, and Katelyn could feel her frayed nerves already returning to normal. Maybe Ash would be able to make it after all, though the thought couldn't help but make Katelyn wonder if Robin could've made it too, if she had at least tried to help him.

If she hadn't killed him... where would she be now? Would Kai still love her? Would Ren still be alive?

No, no. She couldn't bear the thought. The cascade of events that followed her initial mistakes with Robin were too complex to chart a clear path of cause and effect. For all she knew, she might not have even found either Kai or Ren if she hadn't carved the bloody path she had through the island. Her current situation with Ash was different, because Robin had been truly done for, unlike her sister. She was only considering alternatives now with the benefit of hindsight. Besides, if she could go back in time, it would've been better to stop herself from melting down and lashing out to begin with, rather than trying to fix the aftermath.

"We're-" she started to say, before she heard Kai mumble behind her.

She listened to him gather his belongings and walk away, watching the vague shape of him in the dark as he left.

"Um, stay s-safe," she shouted to him, pushing down her worry that she wouldn't see him again. "Come back if you run into tr-trouble!"

Once he was gone, she took a deep breath and turned her attention back to her sister. Talking to her was suddenly much harder without Kai.

"So, uh, we're in the b-basement of the research station. I found you out in the snow, and I brought you back h-here. I patched up your, u-uh, injury. You're safe, now."

Ash recognized the voice. Kai. Ugh. A lifetime ago, they'd kicked off this whole shebang with an encounter chillier than their surroundings. After she'd left, she hadn't seriously expected to see him again. He'd thrown away his entire artillery - soft and fluffy as it may have been - on the first day, and the odds of him avoiding the knives and bullets bristling among the underbrush weren't great. Well, so much for her career as a psychic. Wasn't really a surprise that he and Kitty had found each other, now that she thought about it. Kitty had experience with hunting. Stood to reason that she could use the skills to find pals as easily as prey.

Ash wasn't really thrilled about having Kai here. Wouldn't really have been thrilled having anybody else here, really. But the simmering mutual disdain she'd always had with Kitty's friends added an extra air of discomfort to the whole scene. Kinda like looking into the opposing team's stands during a big game. They were part of the situation, but, you know. Rooting for the opposite outcome that you were. Kai probably wouldn't metaphorically be in the bleachers holding a "Let's Go Grim Reapers! Flatten That Pulse!" sign, but he'd probably nod along to the cheerleaders' chants.

Sounded like he was leaving anyway. She didn't bother saying goodbye.

Kitty talked at her a bit. They were in the basement of the research station. Nearby where the legion had scored their first kill. Poetic, in some way. Not a good poem, though. A shitty haiku you'd write for English class with no real emotion behind it.

Kitty had patched up her injury. Ash didn't like that. Didn't like that one bit. Kitty needed the supplies for herself. Shouldn't be wasting them on charity. Kitty also told her she was safe now. Didn't seem easy to believe that, under the circumstances, but Kitty had more kills than anybody else, right? Best defense is good offense. Sure. Go with that. She reached up and touched the bandages. "You..." Ash let out a small grunt of pain, and looked away. "You shouldn't've done that. Waste of supplies."

"Wha-" Katelyn stammered, confused. "Why would it be a w-waste?"

She had just saved Ashlyn's life, and now her sister was telling her that decision had been a mistake? Where on Earth had Ash gotten that idea from? Was it some sort of reflexive criticism, the kind that Ash would always nag her with back at home? Her lower lip briefly curled into a snarl as she tasted bile in the back of her throat, remembering how Ash would always chide her, tell her she was doing something wrong no matter what she actually did. Even now, when her sister's life was on the line, somehow she still managed to get criticized.

Right. In the rush of carnage that had defined the last week of her life, she had almost forgotten just how many problems the two of them had.

When they were younger, they would bicker over everything, screaming at each other until they came to blows, and Ash would always win, because Ash was so much bigger and stronger than her. Then their parents died, and Ash blamed her for it, convinced her that it was her fault that they died, a belief she still couldn't completely shake. Ash had made her feel like a monster just for the crime of being born. She stopped, eventually, but instead, in its place, she started to treat Katelyn like a baby, too stupid and feeble to make her own decisions, always in need of a "strong hand" protecting and guiding her.

Now, everything was different. There was undeniable proof, seven bodies worth, that Katelyn did not need protection or guidance. Nervous and volatile and awkward and impulsive as she was, she could still handle herself, and she could make decisions for herself. Even if they were the wrong decisions, she was still strong enough to deal with the consequences. Couldn't Ash see that too?

"You're my sister, and I saved your l-life," she stated, forcefully, pinpricks of indignation creeping into her voice. "Can't you be grateful, f-for once?"

Ash grimaced, both from the lingering pain in her abdomen and the frustration that came boiling up when Kitty talked back to her. Kitty's tone, her defiance, they pressed her buttons like nothing else could. Could've called it a sister thing - no older sibling gladly suffers an affront to their natural spot in the hierarchy. But that was only part of it.

Elephant in the room was, Kitty wasn't like other kids. She was difficult. Always. Nothing could be simple or easy, it always had to be a meltdown. Like one of those afternoon Japanese cartoons where the world was endangered by a different thing at the exact same time every single week. Every issue was an emotional apocalypse in the making.

Kitty needed more correction than other kids. More guidance. Because she couldn't see things on her own, she didn't think the way other people did. Couldn't take anybody else's point of view, not for one second. If you wanted her to see things another way, you had to make her. Her mind ran on rails, and if you wanted it to change course you had to shove it, hard. It was the only way. It was the only way to help her. To smarten her up.

In time, Ash had found a better way. A different, gentler kind of shove. More flies with honey than vinegar, etcetera. Instead of smacking the bad out of Kitty, she'd cajoled it out. Fussed and nagged and babied her. Kitty didn't like that. Ash didn't exactly like it either, but what was she supposed to do? It was Morton's Fork: either baby her and piss her off, or let her screw up and get hurt and start beating herself up over it.

So, again - what was Ash supposed to do? Just let Kitty make shitty choices? Back home, sure, maybe. The whole mess with Robin Valenti proved why that wasn't a great idea. But out here - was Ash actually supposed to just shut up and let Kitty waste her supplies on someone who didn't want them, and then have none left when things really got bad? What kind of shitty sister would she be if she didn't at least try, for God's sake?

"It's not about being grateful, Kitty," Ash said, doing her best to keep her voice measured despite the anger rising in her gullet. "It's about winning. You're playing to win, aren't you?"

A stupid question. Obvious. You didn't rack up a body count that high unless you planned on taking it all the way.

"You're not gonna win if you waste your supplies on other people. No matter who they are. You've gotta think about this stuff."

"Huh? You think I've b-been playing to win?"

Katelyn sat back, no longer perched next to and looming over her sister, instead a little further away, staring at her dumbfounded. That was the second time she had been asked that question. The first time it had been from a genuine place of uncertainty, but Ash hadn't asked because she didn't know, she was asking for confirmation. She had never actually understood what went on in Katelyn's head before, what made her so confident she did now?

At least that had clarified Ash's reaction. She had made the wrong assumption about Katelyn's motives, again, and was doing the same thing she always did with that incorrect information. Unfortunately for her, Katelyn had already sung this song before, and the encore wouldn't be any different. Would it be nice to get out of this place? Sure, but...

"No," Katelyn answered. "I- I haven't. That's only down to l-luck, and I'm not lucky enough. I just..."

She trailed off, searching for a way to explain her actions. Weirdly enough, she felt like Ash of all people would understand why she had killed so many others. Ash wouldn't question it, she would probably criticize the manner that Katelyn did it, instead. They had that shared trauma that only siblings did, that let them intuitively understand why the other was such a disaster. As Salem had put it, they were both bad news by birthright.

"I just haven't been letting the world k-kill me, either," Katelyn finished. "Doesn't mean I need to be a complete monster. I can st-still care for my friends and my sister."

Six or seven isolated incidents of self-defense in almost as many days. On paper, that was hard to swallow. Even the legion would have hesitated before taking Kitty on after her name started cropping up all over the announcements every day, so why would isolated randos try their luck against her? Didn't make sense unless they had a serious death wish.

Ash looked at Kitty, somewhat muzzily. Yeah, if you didn't know her you'd just call bullshit. Think she was making excuses to justify the awful shit she did. But if you knew Kitty, you'd know that it wasn't that simple. Kitty wasn't a normal person. You couldn't judge her on what a normal person would or wouldn't do. Couldn't take her word as gospel because what was true to her wasn't necessarily true to anybody else.

She'd killed half a dozen people or more. Wasn't like Kitty had a great track record with other people. Maybe her victims had just panicked, seeing her after what they'd heard she'd done. Maybe they'd seen those weird gory drawings she did, or heard her enthusiastically talk about horror flicks. What would any garden-variety classmate think when Kitty showed up looking like she was the love child of Hello Kitty and Jason Voorhees? They'd probably lost their shit, and Kitty being Kitty, she'd probably taken their panic as a threat and overreacted. And, hey. Maybe some of them really had been violent. Look at Aracelis, the legion, Eden's motley crew. There were a lot of people out there ready to throw down, with or without provocation.

So, yeah. Kitty might have been bullshitting her version of events, but Ash kinda doubted it. Kitty had two modes - either everything was her fault, or nothing was. She was either the sole cause of wrong in the universe, or a cosmic plaything swept along in the tides of fate. She wasn't much of a liar, so if she said that her victims had tried to kill her first - or in Robin Valenti's case, had earned her wrath twice over. Fuck that guy - Ash was content to believe that she believed that, even if it was only a small and very biased part of the whole story.

Ash thought a moment longer before responding. It was still hard to get her thoughts in order. "It's not luck. You've been out hunting since we were kids. You've been..." Ash paused for a moment, trying to wrack her trauma-addled brain for a way of delicately phrasing what she was gonna say next. "You've been... defending yourself, for a long time too."

"But it's not about being a monster, either. If you don't want this world to kill you, that means, your friends... me... We're all gonna have to go. Anything you do to help us hurts you. Knowing that doesn't make you a monster. Just makes you... smart."