god bless catastrophe

[Cicada]

((Demetri Futscher continued from why does mario sometimes jumps and sometimes he fists))

((Credit to backslash for assistance with Mercy's lines.))

He was getting more comfortable with the gun now, slowly graduating the tiers of awkward white boy dance. Maybe up to middle school tryhard flailing now, right down to the being alone with himself and his thoughts.

Alone was the wrong word- he had a group of sorts to attach himself at the hip to. He'd walked Charelle slow- they'd taken plenty of time to rest. He'd split from her just before they'd reached the one house with lights on. He wasn't sure he wanted to confront others yet.

Anyways, he trusted them with Charelle's safety. Maybe? They'd probably let him tag along, if he asked. Maybe he'd just do that usual thing he'd do where he'd, like, mumble the question and no one would hear it and then he'd go on as if nothing had happened and everything was still going as he'd envisioned and planned it.

See if everything went as he'd envisioned it he'd-... eh. No, he couldn't even have sex with Sakurako in his own dreams, that was how cucked he was. Besides, she was way cooler and he was beneath her, even in his waking fantasy realms. Besides besides, it was the dawn of a third day without running water. He was already starting to be able to smell himself, so he couldn't imagine he was anything less than totally ripe to a more sensitive nose. Allegedly estrogen made the olfactory receptors pick up more unpleasant smells or something. Sometimes that fact made Demetri wonder how girls could even be heterosexual in ordinary circumstances- it was that kind of fact that could keep him up at night, staring blankly at his own ceiling. Or like, what had once been his own ceiling.

Maybe when he died Dad would put up his room for rent. Make back some of the money he'd wasted on his son.

Drizzle was beginning to tap dance over his brow, he'd already adjusted his increasingly wet bangs a couple of times to keep the itch out of his eyeballs. Free bath, he guessed. He'd peeled off his shirt for now- there was that fanservice the terrorists were looking for, he was sure- so his bare and barely hairy chest could freshen up a bit and his linen could stay kinda clean, hidden away in his bag.

What wasn't hidden away was his gun. He bore it with two arms and a needless amount of pointing around corners and waiting for some arbitrary 'clear' signal. The soreness was slowly abating over time. Felt like his biceps would be a bit tighter against his sleeves next time he got his shirt back on- turned out that island was surprisingly good for trimming men out of the paper doll outlines of incels. Though he couldn't imagine that he'd be feeling this physically good in another day or so- the crash would be hard without a day for recovery and without good macros. He couldn't imagine these shitty Costco crackers were any good in terms of dietary protein.

He was searching the houses, not expecting to find much.

Behind every door was the same bed and empty kitchen cabinets and lurking dread of finding another dead body. If he was being honest with himself he probably just needed the excuse to get out, clear his head a bit. As much as he managed to keep the steady stream of faggotry and goon-ready jokes going through his mental, he was still feeling totally out of it. Haunted by Felix, by Yuko, by dead faces familiar and unfamiliar and all too familiar because he'd seen them up close and personal. Haunted by the creeping from left-field thought that he was somehow disrespecting all their memories.

It was two more of these same-looking houses in a row before he reached the one where Yuko and Felix were probably still hidden away. Somehow he could tell that one in particular out of the shitty prefab lineup. He probably needed to turn around but here he was, still carefully peeking around corners with useless ducking and weaving and being tugged along with the gun like it was his dog on a leash.

The second set of announcements started, and that was what finally got him to pause. All other thoughts fled as Danya casually squat all over all the real estate in his head.

Mikki. Fuck. Charelle was going to hear about that and how would she-

Zach, dude, what the fuck did you-

Lorenzo. What the fuck. Couldn't be- Demetri had almost forgotten about him, but Demetri might have assumed Lorenzo would be the type to- but no, he'd never been that bad a guy, it couldn't be that-

Kyle was dead, and who the hell would kill a dude like that, what had he ever done that was worth-

Ron too, destined for little after high school, now destined to be a meme template on /sotf/,

And who would have thought, that someone like Erika would have it in her, Demetri just couldn't believe that

All the names and all the memories associated with those names moved too fast but lingered too long, Demetri couldn't keep up, and couldn't understand-

"Kelly Nguyen got a mercy kill"

she

"oh no wait, she killed Mercy Ames."

---

Demetri hadn't ever thought much of the Tennessee River. Spending a morning working out on one of its trails was pretty chill in the most literal sense, but Demetri didn't do too much outdoor workout because who the heck wanted to see that? Bony man ass in the same shorts he'd been able to wear since middle school flailing around and sweating up a storm like the typical liberal college girl desperately contemplating her gender options between male and female and 'sure why not'.

Could have been that he was feeling more self-conscious than normal. He was still marinating in the suspicions that Kelly had been judging him for his repeated near-misses with encountering puberty. Here he was, chilling with one of his best friends in world, straight-talker straight-shooter (maybe straight-sexual? who even knew with her in particular) Mercy and all he could think about was his own social faux paus that he was stacking up like all the nonexistent currency he could use to buy his way to happiness with a waifu. No job, no money, virginity forever. Simple economics.

What had they even been talking about? It was like, he was trying his damnedest to listen but he wasn't really hearing her. She was watching a cyclist rush by the opposite way, she was on one end of the bench, he was on the other because of course he had to put maximum space between himself and herself because sure they were friends but he didn't want to awkwardly project the wrong signals or maybe he was overthinking it or-

"By the way."

And he was interrupting her literally in the middle of her point about... modernism, maybe it was, he didn't know? One of those movements of art that he really didn't get as much as he tried to understand it but whenever she explained it it made sense anyways, up until he'd lose the specific memory of what she'd said and would regret it because she'd made it sound good but he just hadn't been able to retain it beyond a broad and vague sense of 'getting it' which wasn't possibly good enough.

"Kelly." Her name was like a talisman, leaded, weighing down and poisoning his spirit.

"Why? Like, do you really have that much faith in me, cause I sure let you down." God like, he hoped he didn't sound as whiny and weak as he'd just heard himself to sound in the playback. She was looking back at him. Sighing. It was taking a while. A long time, actually, a whole second had passed and she was still staring him down like he was the shit staining her shoe. Probably. Maybe it was pity.

"I thought it could be fun for both of you, you know, to like really get out of your comfort zone?"

Maybe her neutral tone was her signaling she was done and tired of his bullshit.

"Try to get along with people you don't talk to a lot?"

Getting him to read between the lines.

"AlsosheseemslikeyourtypeIdunno."

But she was still here. Still bothering with him, for some reason.

"Sorry I made things weird, I guess. Just forget about it, if you want."

---

How could he ever forget?

He could still hear her, in fact. She'd always had a commanding voice for her size, part of the reason he'd ever noticed her at all. The badass cheerleader who'd worked her ass off to improve herself and fight off the voices in her head in a time when most of his peers were constantly giving into instant gratification and being infected by society's illnesses. She was standing right behind her, now the taller one when his knees hit the ground and his palms followed a second after, the frothy mud of the earth bearing his Hollywood handprints for posterity.

She was still there, only, she was now not there and she would never be there again.

It didn't fucking matter, really. It wasn't about her not being there for him, or not being there for her family, that wasn't the idea that was looping through the loudest echos in his brain over and over until it overwhelmed whatever it was he called good sense. No, it was her own journey. She'd been an inspiration, somehow. An ordinary girl who had somehow ended up telling a story he didn't even need to be part of to be touched by. She'd been one of those rare people who could really have helped him see past the bullshit. She'd made him feel like he could have ever improved.

He hadn't, of course. He'd brushed her off and made his failures into their in-jokes and he'd probably never even realized how much of a burden he'd been on her spirit, not until now, not until it was already way too late to ever say he was sorry.

But who the fuck cared about him? He was some lanky unattractive dumbass with a shitty haircut who was sobbing in the mud.

Flat out bawling. He'd never cried this loud before, because men didn't cry as far as he was aware and concerned, but he couldn't stop it now if he wanted to. His palms groped, there was no surface to cling onto. No salvation for his suddenly floating and empty shell. It was disgusting, really. All the mud caking onto his jeans, the tears burning his cheeks red to flatter the slimy green snot trailing down until it bubbled over his lips. He made noises like a dying dog, and somewhere else on the island the parrots were having a field day mocking him too.

Fuck them all. If anyone saw him like this he wouldn't have given them a second glance.

Squeak, went his mealy hiccup as he tried to gulp down air before he pathetically lost it to the heaving of his lungs.

Squeak, went his heart as it fluttered, pained from the sheer exertion of admitting that this was real, that Mercy Ames would never breath another defiant breath. This was heartbreak then. He never thought he would have lived to see the day he'd get to experience it.

He wasn't going to live much longer anyways.

He tried to push himself out of his animal stance, hoist up his elbows and knees into some semblance of stoic masculinity. Couldn't have failed harder if he'd found a tutu and started twerking in it. He was still collapsed, to the earth, weak and pathetic and wishing it had been him, that he'd somehow been there to-

Kelly. Kelly had done this. He'd always thought Kelly had been lying through her teeth, had been obscuring something evil, he'd always had the nightmares where she'd wander into Yearbook Club with a gat and start squeezing the trigger but no, that was just bias after the fact but who cared, he knew it now, he knew her, she was, he was-

And he desperately seized at the gun tumbled to the ground and polished with a fresh coat of soggy earth, he could use this, he could-

Who the fuck was he kidding.

He and his slimy hands and his naked torso erupted, he suddenly, clumsily exploded into a forward run, could have been him running for the trees, or the hills, or to the nearest cliff to throw himself off of it, he

Was running for his friends. Garren, Max, Faith, they were still out there somewhere, and there was no way he could help them, no way he could save them. They deserved to live too, somehow, he could succeed where he'd let Mercy down, where he'd let her vanish from sight and from mind and he'd forgotten the important things in life, and he was abandoning them too, Sakurako and Charelle but he needed to do this but he could not do it because he was scared and he didn't know where he was running, running to, running from, away from

He couldn't run fast enough to catch up to Mercy. Not now, not ever again.

But he was still running, and he wanted to scream. He wanted to shout to his friends that he was coming, that they needed to hold on just a bit longer, that he'd be there.

Nothing came out. A hysteric boy broken into a hysteric run and all that violent image and circumstance and he was still too cowardly to tell it to the world.

There was no purpose, just running.

((Demetri Futscher continued in Heeling of The USS Dekcuc))