Survival Of The Fittest

((Valentin Shulgin continues from et Refaire et Refaire et Refaire))

"...and then she died the next day," he said, a downturn in his voice.

And so ended the story of Valentin and Chloé, Chloé being the one, single ally Valentin had found during their three days apart.

Valentin had relayed this story from a position next to Alexander, the former cross-legged, the latter prone on the floor still, Valentin's coat his headrest. He relayed this story as the catching-up they had meant to do for a long time, a sort of discussion to see where they were currently at and where they were to go, but also as a way to spend the time. There was a lot of time to pass nowadays, you see.

The remainder of the seventh day and the entirety of the eighth and ninth days had been spent in this small little outstation. Alexander had spent most of that time drifting in and out of consciousness, so when the news of Chloé's death came on the dawn of the eighth day, Valentin had had no one to share his grief with, no one but the howling wind that groaned outside their little room.

Valentin's muscles yearned, ached for action, to be doing something of worth. Uncovering flaws in their collars, recruiting allies, all those big promises they had made to themselves at the start. Instead, Valentin had spent his time administering water to Alexander, doling out what little portions of bread and granola their portions could afford, making sure Alexander recovered from the exhaustion and hypothermia that had been inflicted on him by this blizzard.

Two announcements had passed in the time it took Alexander to recover.

Twenty people died in the time it took Alexander to recover.

There was a silence that followed the end of Valentin's story. There were many such silences, these days, with Alexander not having the energy to fill them. So, in the space of this particular silence, Valentin could not help but think of Chloé's parting words to him.

You can sit there and do nothing until death inevitably comes. But that is not something I will be a part of.

If Chloé was still here, she would probably ask if this was all worth it. Valentin had spent two and a half days nursing him, and yet Alexander might still perish today, or the day after, be it from illness or homicide or some other misfortune. She might set up a comparison, ask if those twenty students that had passed in the night were worth Alexander's two and a half days. Other people might have declared him a lost cause days ago, left him to the blizzard, or left him to thirst, starvation. There were worthier causes, better uses of time to pursue, they might say.

But, Chloé had done exactly that, considered Valentin and Alexander lost causes, cut her losses and ran. And yet she had died without accomplishing much of worth herself, not more than twenty-four hours later. And had she found her loved ones in that time? Or had she died in the wilderness, stuck between one destination and the next?

There were many things Valentin could have done better, many ways he could have utilized his time better, sure. But at the end of it, the story was this. The terrorists had put them on this island to kill, and yet Valentin had spent a significant portion of his time nursing someone back to health, prolonging life in a place meant to end it.

And was this not something of worth too?

Valentin asked himself that, and yet still he looked outside, anxious. The wind had calmed by now. The snow was lesser. The outside looked more inviting.

They would catch up first, and then they would go on to the horizon, however scary it might be. Alexander finally looked well enough to respond, at least.

"What did you accomplish, while you were out on your own?"

((Kelsey Brewer continued from Seventh Umbral Era))

She wasn't sure how much longer she could do this.

Another day was dawning, whether she liked it or not. One more farewell to that half-darkness she stalked, filling in shadows with scheming faces and strangling limbs. One more day, in theory, off her remaining lifetime. She'd suffered no direct attempt on her life—a couple indirect ones, maybe, but that hardly seemed to count around here. Yet math and precedent seemed to suggest her stochastic end was inevitable, that someone or something would find her sooner or later. There were frighteningly few left by this point. Had she done something right to count herself among them? Or, she mused, choice names burning in her chest, had she done something wrong?

She came to a small building she hadn't yet ventured into. Sparse as the island's former habitations were, there always seemed to be something left to explore. Some new nook or cranny for Evie to be lurking in, awaiting their blessed reunion. Arriving at the open doorway, she pushed through into the small space and stopped. Two occupants, seemingly engrossed in reminiscence. One as ragged as she looked. One as ragged as she felt. Clearly, danger and strife had come calling at some point, though their permanent residence seemed to preclude their ability to draw each new breath. She paused at the threshold, let the funny axe she carried swing down to her side. In her grip, but not in her intentions.

Mouth open, she almost let some word of friendly conversation escape. Almost.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "et Refaire et Refaire et Refaire"

Alexander grimaced, his jaw clenched in consternation, locked tighter than a fortress. His cold, stern eyes dodged Valentin's like criminals on the run. His hands balled themselves into fists. His nails dug into his palms like daggers. And he sat there, silent, staring outward. He felt tired. So tired. But more than that, he felt angry. At this place. And at himself.

In the time he spent here, two announcements passed.

In the time he spent here, twenty classmates had died.

And it was all his fault.

He remembered what had happened on the second day. The day they encountered their first corpse of many. And, without thought or care, he had condemned her for her fate; he had thought her valuable only as a means to an end, as an object lesson—mistakes to learn from. He did not even bother to recall her name. To this day, he could not remember it.

And then, in a voice that was as cold as it was callous, Alexander had admonished Valentin to dare suggest that they spend a single second to show their respect for the dead among them. He scolded him for the mere thought of wasting what valuable time they had. And now, in this place, for two days, he had lied around and done what? Nothing. Nothing at all!

And now, he had wasted more time than any single corpse on the island would have taken to bury. And that was time they could not afford to spend. And, as his eyes finally caught Valentin's, there was a less harsh look, dazed and downcast. And he wondered why—why had Valentin stood by him? Why had he not abandoned him? What reason did he have?

Alexander believed that were the roles reversed, he would not have left Valentin to die. But part of him feared that he only told himself that because the other option was unacceptable. And with that mindset, he wondered again, why? It would have been easy for Valentin to take that knife and euthanize him. And it would have been even easier to leave.

So why did he stay?

"..." For a moment, he was silent. And then, with a shaky breath, Alexander pulled himself up to sit and answered. "I went and found the body—her body. Ingrid Wilde." It was hard for him to think of the corpse as a once-person. But he made himself speak of it as such. "And with it, I gathered some information about the collars," he noted, pressing a finger to his.

His hand took the knife from its sheathe, held it up, and tried the point on his finger. "The indention hardness of this knife is somewhere between sixty to sixty-three HRC on the Rockwell 'C' scale; its scratch hardness is around five to six HM on the Mohs scale. And it barely left a mark on the collar at its strongest point." He turned away again and stowed the blade.

"In other words, we are back to square one," he said, a terse anger in his voice—one not directed at Valentin but at himself. "I apologize. All this time wasted, and still nothing to show for it. Nothing of value, anyway." His left hand rose to encounter his face, and he placed it on his forehead, his long, spider-like fingers curling to scrape his scalp, one eye covered.

At the moment of Alexander's apology, Valentin understood, finally, that what Alexander felt was not disappointment in him, but frustration. In turn, Valentin felt a mix of emotions: relief that he hadn't done anything wrong in Alexander's eyes, but also, was that disappointment he felt? Given the haggard state Alexander had arrived in, and the silence they had stewed in for the past couple of days, Valentin had ascertained that whatever had happened, Alexander felt no urgency to speak about it. So, the expectations he had for what his friend had accomplished were tempered, but it was still depressing to have it confirmed, that they were at square one, as Alexander put it.

There was a disappointment, but Valentin had nowhere to place it, as he did not wish to direct it at Alexander. There was no more time for any petty squabbles, like the one they'd had over Marian's body. There was no more time for anything but kindness.

So, he placed his hand on Alexander's left arm. Valentin noted, to himself, that Alexander's skin was no longer clammy, pallid, the chill of meat left in the freezer. Some hints of suppleness, color had finally crept back into his veins, the damage inflicted on him by the snowstorm finally beginning to recede. There was warmth, in other words.

"It's not nothing," Valentin spoke carefully.

A weak smile appeared on Valentin's lips.

"We know we can't slice through the collars. And we know a trip to the hot springs probably won't do anything about it."

The words felt hollow still, despite all his good intentions. Anything to convince himself the sum of their efforts was more than zero.

"I don't know how much there is left to accomplish, but if you're feeling up to it, then, we can set out there and..."

Valentin swiveled his neck over to his side, and his breath caught in his throat.

A girl stood over them, blocking the exit. There were a number of notable features about her: the purple highlights in her hair, the monster-grin mask, her rail-thin stature. What grabbed his attention the most however was the axe by her side.

Ten days here, yet this was the first time he'd directly faced anyone with a lethal weapon.

"Kelsey," he greeted her tentatively. "May I help you with anything?"

"I... was thinking the same thing, actually."

She gave her standard-issue smile nobody could see, a sort of aloof chuckle that died inside her mask. That acknowledgement of, isn't this fucking crazy? You're looking Kelsey Brewer up and down—that's not the crazy part—looking at her, evaluating, wondering if she could just fucking murder you. If she could. And being absolutely 100% serious about it. Watched her dignify that concept by letting down that funky axe thing she carried and setting it by the door. Taking another step in, recontextualizng her presence with the implicit answer of course the fuck not.

"I mean, all these little vials and packages with names my parents taught me to pronounce rotting away in the medkits they gave us, and nobody to share that with."

She shrugged, entertained a little hope she wasn't intruding on something. A larger one that she was. There was so much she was missing. So much to be jealous of, to have someone to speak openly with. To even be able to say, when your days were endless monotonous terror stretching far behind and shortly ahead; hey, where's my fucking girlfriend, yes both senses of the word.

Alexander's skin was sickly and pallid, pale as a bedsheet ghost. His eyes tensed, shut tight, like fortress gates. His lips curled in on themselves, turned downwards, a pained grimace, and he clenched his teeth tight in his mouth, hard enough to hurt. 'It's not nothing,' Valentin reminded him, but how little it was! He had wasted so much of the little time they had!

"I agree," he rasped, so weary. Every word felt like a dagger in his heart.

Then, one watchful and wary eye peered out from his curtain hand towards Kelsey, the intruder in their midst, their moment. He struggled to his feet, hand grasping towards the wall to pull himself up and face her, face his fears, but the movement shot a bolt through his body, half-asleep, pins and needles coursing like static electricity inside his bones.

His eyes flickered to the axe.

His hands flicked to the knife.

The girl in front of them—Alexander did not know her name, though Valentin had called her 'Kelsey'—did not seem dangerous at first glance. Outside of her weapon, her demeanor was poised but calm. Her clothes were unsundered: no blade mark tears, no bloody stain across her canvas. His eyes saw no threat. But Alexander did not trust his eyes anymore.

He doubted her. But, at this point, he had begun to doubt his doubts.

Alexander had lingered on his mistakes ever since he and Valentin had reunited. And, of all his follies, the worst, he now knew, was how he treated the people around him. He had viewed them as tools at best and enemies at worst. Every approach met reproach. And so, each time and every time, he turned his back to them, content to remain an army of two.

Before, those around him were problems. Uncontrolled variables to be solved, meaningless noise in the results of his experimentations. But, in actual science, noise was a portion of the process, part and parcel of progress. Sometimes, science was messy, and sometimes, you would get results other than the ones you wanted. He understood that better now.

So his heart told him.

A long time ago, when his father had died, a young Alexander taught himself to think with his head, not his heart. And every time, it had brought him nothing but pain and remorse. He grew lonesome. And he made himself believe it was better to be alone in your righteousness than together in wrongness—because the alternative was that he was wrong.

It was a difficult habit to break.

And so, despite the protestations of his heart, Alexander turned his head to Valentin again, the very same suspicions reflected in his eyes that he had shown so many times before. And he took a breath, convinced himself that, once again, he was right. And he opened his mouth for a moment, tension in his bones, and he mouthed those last, fatal words:

"I don't trust her."

Valentin also allowed himself to be wrong.

Think of it like that sudden, countervailing burst of energy that pushes you away from the diving board. You're ready, you're ready, you're not.

She seemed lonely, the words she spoke were so desolate, begging for attention. Here was someone in need of help, here was someone who could be an ally. She stepped away from the axe, even. But, still, it was there, just an arm's grasp away. There was also that willingness to just walk upon the two of them, silent, looming. And then, finally, Alexander's distrust, that final push backwards. In this moment, he allowed that paranoia to set in, to push him away from a classmate of his.

To Alexander's mouthed words, Valentin gave a quick nod.

Then, he turned to Kelsey, and regretfully, painfully, thought of what next to say.

"I think we're good, actually."

A gulp. A pointed stare at the space between Kelsey and the door. A silent plea to just let them pass.

"Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be on our way soon."

He placed his hand on Alexander's. Prepared to pull him up, pull him aside. Whatever came next.

No the FUCK you aren't, she thought so loudly she nearly started and spun in place to see who'd shouted it. She shivered at the sudden riot of emotion lashing up her spine. The audacity, the absurdity, the pain of it. The assertion that that pair before her were, by any identifiable or imaginable metric, even remotely 'good.'' Stumbling and casting about and disgorging the overflowing purulence of their mistrust. Good, fine, dandy. Of course. Never better, surely. Just as surely as she, the rail-thin—and even rail-thinner as of late, to her overt dismay and secret delight—doormat of a cheerleader was a viable threat, edged weapon or no. Willing and able to enforce her will to the ultimate overriding of their own, to deny the sum of their existence on her whim. Totally. Absolutely.

Her chest burned for that long moment she regarded them with wide eyes gone glossy, and for more than one moment after. They had, by her estimation, absolutely no reason not to trust her. And yet they didn't. The worst of it was, she couldn't find it in herself to blame them. They truly were all desperate and broken by this point, and though she herself had escaped the truest horrors, still the past week and change were the deepest depths of privation she'd ever experienced. Visions of arms soft and strong curling around her back, pulling her closer in to that shared communion of comfort and admiration, occupied her mind with a fervor bordering on obsession. If here she found them not just limp instead of spread in welcome but thrust forward to actively push away all comers, the true tragedy lay in the things those eyes had seen and those hands had done, the oaths that had crossed those lips to bring them to that point.

But that didn't mean it hurt any less.

"Fine," she said and stepped across to where her axe lay propped and seized it by the handle. She carried that momentum forward, cornering herself in the abbreviated space a healthy distance from the door and spinning to face them with the weapon shouldered in what she hoped was a manner not to brandish but to guard. To say that, sure, she could think of them as capable of seizing the thing and using it to hew her limb from skinny limb. That the course of normal conversation with such villains as them might include precautions against such pleasantries as unprovoked murder. If that's what they wanted. She fixed her gaze on Valentin's.

"It's cold outside. Colder than in here. You should be aware of that."

Cold too were the words that left Kelsey's lips.

An immediate, overwhelming sense of regret went through Valentin. But his words could not be taken back. Perhaps it was a mistake, perhaps it was a sixth sense. Whatever the correct decision had been then mattered no longer, all there was was the decision that had been made. The way Kelsey glared at them, the way she wielded her axe ensured there was no going back.

So, all Valentin could bring himself to say was, "We know."

He considered, briefly, apologizing, but it occurred to him that it might be more offensive than assuring. Best to commit to the path chosen.

And so, with haste, Valentin pulled Alexander, and the two set off into the beyond.

((Valentin Shulgin continues in Далеко бежит дорога))

Colder yet was the chill that ran down Alexander's spine, shivering flecks of ice in his veins, as the doubt crept in again. His head said to leave; his heart screamed, screamed, screamed to stay there, to issue his overdue retraction. Turn his head to his best friend, to the girl he left to destiny, say his sorries, and admit for once in his cut-short life that he was wrong.

He did no such thing.

Instead, he swallowed his doubts when he should have swallowed his pride. And when he spared one last, fateful glance towards the girl, he said nothing at all, no words, no salve to sate her or save them. And so, a step behind Valentin at every turn, he walked forward, footsteps on the road they paved like ticks of the clock towards their impending fates.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED IN "Далеко бежит дорога"

And so it was that regret lingered unanimously in their hearts while their bodies dispersed to the frigid winds and whatever fates awaited them.

Kelsey blinked away her tears. For for brief an interlude it had been to her aimless wandering, it stung with surprising force. But, she reasoned, there was no end to brevity in misfortune. A slip, a stab, the pulling of a trigger. A simple phrase to calcify a tender, hopeful feeler of amiability. Really, it was as much a qualifier as anything else, the lack of time to steer a different course. How... not happy, for such things as joy existed only in her old life, but reliving at the very least, calming and ameliorating by degree, things could have been if they'd only a proper chance to explain themselves.

Being a human was so fucking complicated.

But of all the things in evidence, the lack of Evie was first and foremost and crystal-clear. And vitally, deathly important before time's noose drew too tight to unravel. She lingered awhile, her body resting and her spirit chafing in the cold silence, and then made her way out the door.

((Kelsey Brewer continued in Answers))