Survival Of The Fittest

((...))

Katelyn Graves was going to die.

Here and now.

The few bits of the night sky visible through the cloud cover shined brightly, a tapestry of stars more brilliant than any other she had seen back at home. Snow continued to fall, covering her head, legs, and shoulders as she sat with her bag next to her, inside the beam of her own flashlight. Her back was against the base of a tree not far from where she and Kai had camped out all those days before. She already missed the time she had shared with him, because she was never getting it back. Her friends were not her friends anymore, just like Ash had said.

Tears filled her vision as she sniffled and gasped. Her hands were wrapped around the grenade launcher, with the barrel pointed at her feet. Her fingers trembled, and not from the cold.

Katelyn had nothing left. She was unloved, unwanted, worth less than nothing. No friends, no goal, nothing left for her to keep living for. Her whole existence was a curse, burdening everyone around her with her presence. She was an awful, selfish little monster who deserved far worse than what she got. If she died, everyone would be happier for it, and nobody else would have to die for her sake.

If everyone wanted her to go away, then she would.

When the pain became too much, she always returned to the call of the void, allowing it to whisper its temptations in her ear. Despite how much she wanted it, mulling over the decision still wasn't easy. Despite her convictions, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Something was holding her back, keeping her muscles frozen in place as surely as they would be if she brought another blade to bare against her throat.

She tried to build up the courage to do it for what felt like hours. She told herself everything that was wrong with her, over and over again. Her life had been one long string of miserable events. Her hands were covered in so many layers of blood that they would never come clean again. Kai abandoned her and California rejected her, Ren and Ash were dead because of her. A friendless, vile thing like her didn't deserve to live.

Yet, her fingers still refused to move. Katelyn couldn't manage so much as a single twitch, leaving her vexed and frustrated enough to set her grenade launcher aside.

She reconsidered her plan, trying to think of another way. Instead of taking action to end her own life, maybe she could do so instead through inaction. Like she had considered so many days ago, she could simply lay down in the snow, and let old Jack Frost claim her. It was simple, and easy. It would be uncomfortable and painful, but only for a little while. She knew how hypothermia killed. Once she got cold enough, she would be too delirious to even be aware it was happening.

And so she finally made up her mind.

Katelyn laid down in the snow, curling up and closing her eyes to wait for the inevitable.

Time passed, and the cold began to nibble at her fingers and toes as her temperature very slowly, but steadily dropped. Her layers of insulation delayed the inevitable, but as the cold crept into her skin, she eventually started to shiver. Then the pain went from pinpricks to burning, and she woke up with a fright. It took all her willpower not to dig into her bag and bring out her heater. She knew it would stop hurting eventually, and she was right. Eventually, as the cold dug ever deeper towards her core, it stopped bothering her. Her shivering slowed down, and her heart rate and breathing followed suit.

Katelyn blinked, and a fog settled in her mind. What exactly was she doing, again? She couldn't remember. Where was she? She looked around at what little was illuminated. She was outside and lying the snow. Why? Was it because she was... tired? Yeah, she was pretty tired. She must've wanted to take a nap. There was probably a more comfortable place for naps, but the snow was soft, and it wasn't the first time she'd slept outside in her life.

She glanced up at the stars, inexorably drawn to their twinkling beauty. As she looked, they seemed to swim in her vision, spinning round and round. Stars burst and reformed, orbiting each other, flashing into brilliance and then fading away. Slowly, the sea of stars began to take a recognizable shape, as though filling a glass vase. She watched it happen with a small, dim smile on her face. When it was done, it had become a swirling, shining silhouette of someone she once knew.

"What are you doing?" her sister's voice asked, from somewhere far behind the stars.

"Ash?" Katelyn slurred, her eyes half-lidded, and her lips so cold.

"This isn't winning," the star-ghost echoed.

"Are you a ghost? You're pretty," Katelyn muttered, with another dim smile. "I wanna be pretty too."

"You shouldn't be out here," said the specter.

"Why not? Snow is... comfy, hehe," Katelyn giggled, her mouth hanging open for a moment when she stopped, having trouble getting it to shut.

"Kitty. Listen," said Ash, the stars that made her celestial body spinning with more fervor. "This is important."

"Am I," Katelyn blinked, one eye, and then the other, "like, hallu- hallucinating? Does that happen with hypoth- hypothermia?"

"Do what I say," the phantom commanded, louder. "Open your bag, and get out your heater."

"Um, I'm pre- pretty tired. I think I want to go to sleep," Katelyn yawned, the light briefly leaving her eyes, but only for a moment. "Maybe after I w- wake up?"

"NO, NOW," screeched the apparition. "DO IT. DO IT. DO IT!"

"U-Um. O-O-Okay! S-S-Sure," Katelyn stammered, jolted slightly more awake by the shout.

In a daze, Katelyn used all her strength to force her stiff muscles to get her up, depositing a thin layer of snow on her surroundings. With her head swimming, she reached over to her nearby belongings. The snow on top of it seemed to waver and spin in her vision, like whirlpool. She clumsily dusted it away, and tried the zipper. Inside her mittens, her fingers were too stiff to bend all the way, but she fumbled into a tenuous grip on it, and pulled. Inside, her heater sat at the top, and with both hands she struggled to pull it out, eventually setting it on her lap.

"Now turn it on," Ash intoned, "and hug it."

Katelyn dutifully did so, turning the dial and hugging it close to her heart, only half-aware. The warmth immediately hit her chest and rapidly spread through it, causing a rush of blood to her head. It felt wonderful, the warmest she had ever felt, even warmer than snuggling with her cat on a cold night. She began to shiver again, and held the heater tighter. Looking up once more, the stars danced in her vision, spinning in circles that now only vaguely resembled Ash.

"This isn't winning," the star-ghost repeated.

"But why should I?" Katelyn mumbled, blinking slowly, absentmindedly curling around the heater. "For who?"

"Because I told you to," Ash stated, warbling. "And for you. Only for you."

Before Katelyn could respond, the starry phantom began to crumble apart into nothing, leaving behind only the ordinary night sky. She stared into where it had been, blinking in confusion and waiting for it to come back. She heard her sister's voice, distant and quiet, one last time.

"Rethink this. Remember what I said."

And Katelyn was left in the silence of her own thoughts. She looked back down, and her head rocked side to side, processing her waking dream. She was too wrapped up in the warmth tickling her chest to notice she was bungling her own suicide attempt. After a short while, some semblance of sense returned to her, and she finally recognized that she had stopped herself in a delirious trance. As she warmed up, the pain of the cold pricking and stabbing her skin returned with a vengeance. All at once, she realized just how close she had come to dying, and her thanatophobia came screaming back, making her hug the heater so tight it felt like it was burning her.

What the hell had she been thinking? Her thoughts went in circles around the previous day's events, recalling Ash's death, Kai's abandonment, and her unfortunate run-in with California. The panic and guilt she had felt before crept up her spine all over again. She wanted them back, desperately, but she'd never have them back, not as they were. That had made her want to die, so convinced her life might as well be over.

Rethink this.

Her therapist had taught her a technique called re-framing. It involved questioning her self-constructed narrative about the event, and casting it in a different light. It was hard to do in the immediate aftermath of something so stressful, but it was a necessary coping mechanism to come to terms with it.

So what happened? Katelyn had never seen California so disappointed. She had thought that it was because California knew just as well as she did that she was a bad person. Kai had left her too, and she had thought it was for the same reason. She had convinced herself of that truth, but was she right? Her friends hadn't lied to her before. California told her that she still cared about her. Kai told her that he didn't hate her.

Yet, here she was trying to kill herself because they had rejected her anyway. Why had it hurt so much? It wasn't only because of the shame of disappointing them. It was because she loved them both so dearly, and she wanted to do right by them.

Only, she couldn't. They wanted her to stop killing, but to do so would be to die. Despite her best efforts to be comfortable with that, she was still so afraid that even her subconscious had kept her alive.

Death was like a toxic lover that she kept going back to whenever she was overwhelmed, despite it not giving a damn about her. She wanted the peace it offered, but the process always revealed that for the lie it was. The ending was never pleasant, in spite of thinking that her various new methods would be the peaceful end she wanted, every single time. Knowing so intimately how ugly and brutal dying in this place was only made the fear more acute. She didn't want to end up like her victims, but as it turned out, dying at her own hand wasn't any better.

"I d-don't a-actually w-want t-to d-die," Katelyn admitted, teeth chattering into the heater. "I d-don't h-have t-to d-die t-tonight."

Remember what I said.

She was in so deep, guilty over everything she had done, but why? If she really didn't want to end up like her classmates and victims, and have her story end like theirs, the logical conclusion of that was everyone else dead, including her friends. She had been running from that truth, but she had to face it, like Ash had tried to force her to.

So, was she okay with everyone else dying so she could go home?

Ultimately, as much as she hated to admit it, the answer was yes.

She had killed long before reaching this place, like the small animals that she had hunted for fun on her own. If killing made her irredeemable, then she'd been irredeemable for a long time. Only now, she had a far better justification for killing: she had been kidnapped and forced into a game of kill-or-be-killed. The stress of it all had made her will to do good crumple over and over again, and that might make her weak, but it didn't make her irredeemable.

Lots of people commit great acts of cruelty under pressure. It was hubris to think she would be any different. When you were given no other choice, it was natural to choose yourself over everyone else. Her friends might not like it, because she was killing people now instead of animals, but that was their decision, not hers. She couldn't let them them impose their opinions on her. She had to decide for herself what was right and wrong.

Katelyn's head was starting to spin again, only this time she felt sick, and her limbs started to weigh her down.

The heater kicked off, its canister finally spent. She sat in silence for a moment, considering everything that had transpired up to this moment. She didn't have to die, if she didn't want to. It was as easy as reaching for another canister.

So she did.

Soon after, the heater roared back to life, gently popping as it continued to warm her.

She waited a while longer, holding it close. Eventually, when she felt she was warm enough, she set the heater down, and began to form a makeshift camp. She took Kai's umbrella out of her bag, plunging it into the snow and securing it against the tree, for a makeshift roof. Then, she grabbed her blanket, laid it out, set her heater upon it, before cocooning herself with it inside.

A little while later, and she passed out.

Light began to leak into the gaps in her blanket, and Katelyn woke up in a daze, coughing and sputtering. She thrashed her way out of her cocoon, emerging into the light of early dawn. She looked up at the sky above, the light a shade of orange-red. It was some time before sunrise. For a while, she laid in the snow, staring up at it, remembering the day and night before, and breathing deeply to regain her sense of self.

The announcement came on as she laid there, the screech of the speakers hurting her ears, but she didn't move, and only half-listened. The previous day's events had been much the same as always. She winced a little at hearing her own name again, and tuned out the rest, until she heard her name one last time and perked up. Another prize was waiting for her, for killing her sister. Then the announcement cut off, and she was left in silence once again.

Katelyn took another deep breath, and rubbed her eyes, resting her hand on her face. Coming so close to death yet again had sobered her up. She couldn't keep going like this, always looking for any excuse to hate herself, and trying to die as if that would actually fix anything.

She would be alone until she either died or went home, she reminded herself. Nobody else wanted to be her friend, but if she was going to do what her sister said and commit to trying to win, then that meant she needed to be her own best friend. She had never tried that before, so now was the chance for something new.

The key to defeating self-hate was self-love. Her therapist had told her that complimenting herself, even if she didn't mean it, could change her perspective over time. She hadn't believed that before, and still didn't believe it now, but if she was trying something new anyway, then she might as well give it a shot. It wasn't like she had anything else left to lose.

Katelyn sat up, rolling her neck and thinking to herself about what to say.

"I'm... good," she said, immediately getting a bad taste in her mouth.

That felt wrong to say, because it wasn't true, she wasn't good. Good was being selfless, and she was selfish, so she had to be bad. Lying to herself wouldn't make her feel better, but maybe the key was simply accepting it, and owning it? Killing her classmates hadn't been all that upsetting to her. What upset her instead was not wanting to internalize the label of "murderer". It didn't fit with her conception of herself, because she wanted to hold onto the idea that she was better than that. She wanted to be seen as good, and be the hero of her own story.

She had tried instead to be the villain of her own story when she killed Taylor, but she had gotten it wrong then. She wouldn't stop feeling bad by being as terrible as possible and desensitizing herself to it, she'd only make herself feel a different flavor of bad. How could she stop being bothered by it all? Ash hadn't seemed to be bothered by everything horrible she did. That might be the difference between her and Katelyn; Ash had already accepted herself as an abuser, but Katelyn still balked at accepting herself as a killer.

If she combined the lessons from her therapist and Ash, then maybe that would be the way she could finally feel better. Love herself because of what she was, and not because of who she wanted to be. Be bad not because villains had more fun, but because that was who she was. Love herself not in spite of it, but because of it.

With that in mind, she started again, with the truth. She didn't care if the cameras could hear her.

"No, I'm not good," she said, steadily. "But I'm... fierce. I'm more dangerous than anyone else. I'm the apex predator."

Her classmates wanted her dead, but she was stronger than they recognized, and tougher than they could see.

"I'm sneaky, and I'm a threat," she kept going, standing up, a kind of light filling her voice that was never there before. "I'm a hunter, and a gravedigger by birthright."

Her classmates would be coming for her, but she was smarter than they thought, and more clever than they would ever know.

"More than anything," she whispered. "I'm... a survivor. Nobody else could've gone through what I went through and come out the other side."

Katelyn looked down at the ground beneath her, taking in everything she had said. It didn't feel entirely sincere, but it was still all true, demonstrably so. She might not be used to it, but she actually kinda liked saying nice things to herself. This was fun. No reason for her to stop.

"I'm not uniquely bad. I'm not the only one killing. I'm selfish, but that's okay. We all have to be selfish sometimes. Besides, my sister wanted me to win. My cat would be really sad if I never came home."

California had told her that nobody's life mattered more than anyone else's, that everybody died. Her former friend had been right, but in hindsight, that only increased Katelyn's conviction. If none of their lives were more valuable than anyone else's, then that meant she deserved to go home just as much as everyone else. If everybody died, then she didn't need to feel bad about having to do it herself.

And if her so-called friends judged her for it? Then that was their problem, not hers. Even if she couldn't stop loving them, and still wanted them to come back, she couldn't make them. Until they did so of their own volition, she didn't have any friends. And if she didn’t have any friends, then she didn’t have any more expectations to live up to. She had nothing left to lose, and no hope of ever getting it back, but in a way, that was liberating.

With that thought, it felt like something had finally clicked into place. Whatever had changed, whatever threshold she had crossed, she actually kinda liked it. Even though it felt alien to her, she wanted to live like this from now on; loving herself regardless of what everyone else thought. She felt strange, but free, almost like a new person entirely.

If she was a new person, then she might as well start treating herself like one too. Kitty was the name she had taken on to represent her true self, all those years ago. It was what she preferred to be called, but she still thought of herself as fettered little Katelyn. If she was being true to herself, and it certainly felt like she was now, then maybe she should embrace her chosen name completely.

"I'm Kitty," Kitty said, hands over her heart. "And I'm not going to hold back anymore. I've taken control of my life, and I've stopped letting the world happen to me."

She was tired of beating herself up. Hurting people was in her nature. Her whole life it had been a weakness, but maybe now it could become a strength. Whatever she had to do here, if she made it out, she could spend the rest of her life atoning for it. At least that way, she'd still have one left to live.

The thought crept into her mind, could someone so broken and empty like her manage to make that life worth all the suffering and violence? Yes, she rebuked herself, because being broken and empty meant was that she could piece herself back together into something new, and fill herself with whatever she wanted. She could go home, pet her cat, start over, and build a new life from scratch. She could write a book, she could draw a comic, she could climb a mountain. The possibilities were endless.

"I want to be beautiful, like a tiger," she said, doing a little twirl in place like a ballet dancer. "Every movement deliberate, and sharp. When someone kisses me, I want them to taste blood."

A lifetime ago, Salem had asked her what was driving her, and she finally had an answer for him. Buried deep within her heart, she had hope that there had to be something better for her. If the universe wouldn't give it to her, then she'd take it by force. Why should she care if it all came down to luck? She would make her own luck, twist her fate into a shape she liked.

"I love myself, and accept myself for who I am, warts and all," she finished, giving herself a little hug, ignoring that it still felt forced. "I won't let anyone or anything convince me otherwise."

Everyone already thought she was a psycho, so why try to be anything but? If her whole existence truly was a curse, then let her be a blight on the whole world.

Kitty reached down, and began to gather her belongings and put them away. Umbrella, heater, and blanket in the bag. Grenade launcher slung around her neck, where it belonged.

She would cut away all the guilt, and leave behind only her determination. If she died tomorrow, or even today, at least it would be without any more regrets.

Kitty was going to win, or Katelyn Graves was going to die trying.

((It was finally time to go collect her prize.))