The Dream Was Just The Same

[Brackie]

((Ma'afu Tuigamala continues from Legoland Empire))

The Fijian giant was lost in his own head.

This was the first time, in a long time, he'd truly been on his own. Upon waking up here, a week ago to this day, he'd never been without support, without his friends. Never. But times changed. People changed. Liam changed, and Jason changed, and entire waves of faces upon faces he remembered brushing past in the hallway changed, and...and he was so afraid that he was changing with them.

The main thing that helped him...no, not helped, forced, to realise this was the relative ease with which he came to the logical conclusion of begetting violence with violence back then. The Maf who walked onto that bus when he was still a part of society would not have even bothered to pay such a thought with the time of day, but now everything was so different. He'd stopped that guy in the cave, Nick, without even asking and just held his life in his fingertips as it flopped around like a goldfish lowered into saltwater. That wasn't Maf. He'd tackled down the guy with the gun, without even gracing the possibility that there was a peaceful solution. That wasn't Maf.

Maf shouldn't have turned out like this.

For the moment, he just needed some time alone. It was the cowards way out of it, but ultimately, he needed it, he didn't just want it like he wanted to get off this island. He'd run, a bit further than any amount of running he'd partaken in back home, and for better or for worse (even though he really believed that things could only get worse at this point), he'd found an abandoned building.

Not just any abandoned building, though. A two-story graveyard. Outside, there were bodies, the Kronwall brothers, and some girl who he remembered from the cheerleading squad. Eve. Evie. Eva. Edie? There had to be something better than that, hell, he'd remembered chatting distinctly to a few of those girls...

But standing out here in the open air wasn't what he planned to do at all, no. There was better room inside. Less...bodies, more likely.

Oh. Wrong, apparently.

There was an overwhelming stench of just death, death, and more death the moment he wandered through those doors. He could practically see a sea of bodies, body parts, everything, the whole abattoir shebang. It was 10 times worse than outside, since there was no sense of actual inhabitance, so now he was alone with the dead.

Well...there were worse places he could have gone.

Like staying back there...

His mind was filled with doubt. And the weird thing was, after all this time of running and regret, he still didn't know whether or not he made a bad decision. There was all this common sense telling him he shouldn't have ran, but a nagging feeling swept over him at that most important moment, telling him that the crowd of people already there were going to see what he'd done, and...

...and what? What had he done, really? He'd just saved Jason's life. He guessed that, only a guess, because he wasn't an island mystic, and it was still a long long time until the announcements. So...his decision was really a Schrödinger's decision. Good and bad at the same time.

He walked through the sparkling ocean of broken glass, splashes of blood, and everything seemed the same. Just another place where the dead could just rot and die, over and over, simultaneously individually.

But there was one thing that caught him out. Through the madness that surrounded Maf, from death to destruction, the only thing that caught his eye was a piece of shoddy architecture in the form of a hole in the wall. That wasn't normal. Instinct told him to act on that, act on this reflexive perplexity. So he did that, he walked forward into a cobblestoned path of crunching and the occasional glob of putrid matter, and examined a particularly obscene hole in the wall.

Maf wasn't a master electrician, but someone had taken something out of this wall. There was nothing there, when it's pretty obvious to even a dimwit like he himself was at times that you need something in a wall of a house so it can keep running. That's architecture 101. But there was large pieces missing, so much there that wasn't there that it had to be done by someone. Not a terrorists.

He leaned forward, about to get a good look inside, when a crunch under his foot turned mid-sound into a scrap. Maf blinked, perturbed by a sound that should not have been there, and looked down.

There was a small note attached to the sole of his shoe. He inhaled sharply, and he finally smiled. A piece of paper, a small one, something that could tell him...well, something. Maf leaned forward, and yanked it off the sole, ready to read what was left of it after what could, hell, what was probably and really, days of decay to the font.

Were he eating, he would have choked. Were he in any danger, that danger would have been no more because he would have died of this shock first. It was her handwriting. It was Jennifer's handwriting.

And yet again, another name came up. Nick Reid. He doubted highly she was speaking to Nick LeMonde now, so yet again, there lay the two names on the same cloth. Someone who's name would not leave the air of the announcements. Someone who he wasn't even sure if he was ever here, someone who for all intents and purposes had not even read the first note.

And once again, he was plagued with another decision.

The note told him where she was.

The note told him where she was.

So that meant that whoever was here before him and after her knew where she was as well.

But there was no way, absolutely no way, to know how old the note was right now. It could be days, it could have been here the whole week at least, and he had no way of knowing if she even followed up on this.

But there was on very certain thing to know here.

No harm in finding out.

Maf rigorously unzipped his bag and pulled out the map. He didn't even bother wasting time, he found the mountain, and he found where he was now. Now he just had to walk, run, gallavant, get the hell up to that mountain and hope to whatever gods lay up there that this note was recent, and that there really was a Jennifer Perez up in the mountains, waiting for someone.

But that someone was Nick Reid.

An ill thought, such an ill thought, hadn't even occurred to him over this span of time. For so long, he'd been wrought up with trying to find her that he hadn't even fathomed to think about whether or not she wanted to find him back. Maf and Jennifer shared something special, something that he wasn't sure he'd ever shared with anyone else before, but...

This sickly thought fell to the wayside as quickly as it cruised in, however, and he did what he planned to do.

He shoved his map back into his bag, he ran outside past the waves of death, past the further bodies, and scanned.

Maf saw the mountain, and finally with a real goal, real purpose, and real possibilities entertaining him, sprinted.

((Ma'afu Tuigamala continues in I Will Follow You into the Dark))