Never Learn Not To Love

[Ruggahissy]

"I don't believe you," Ivy said.

"Yeah, what fucking else is new?" Tirzah mumbled to herself, sniffling and slumping back down with her back against their shared wall. She was jolted forward as Ivy screamed and hit the wall. Tirzah looked back at the wall and glared. The floor creaked and she heard footsteps thudding towards the door separating the two rooms.

Tirzah sighed with resignation.

"I should have lied and just told you he jumped me. I thought maybe you'd stopped being a shitty person for five seconds. Not even through apocalypse, huh?" she said as she approached the door.

"You're mad I took something that you think is yours, right?" she said as they stepped into the doorway, seeing each other face to face. The stood for a moment.

Tirzah reared her head back and then smashed it as hard as she could into Ivy's forehead. A trickle of blood sprouted between them.

"Ask him yourself," she hissed, staring directly at her, eye to eye as the blood ran down her face.

[Fenris]

She wasn't listening. Or she was, in that the words reached her and didn't bounce off, but they didn't mean anything. Air and noise. Her footsteps felt too loud for her weight. Some buzzing voice in the back of her head wanted to stop her, or at least caution her; she was barehanded, she had no plan. Even that voice didn't bother directing her back out the door. That ship had long sailed. She kept walking. When the door opened she had no memory of which of them had done it.

Tirzah, Tirzah, Tirzah. Blood on her face but she looked more familiar with malice in her eyes. Ivy liked her better that way, if only to wash away the bare remnants of guilt that kept clinging to her stomach. The sound of her crying obliterated in her memory by the look on her face, the venom in her words, as though Ivy was wrong to believe that had been exactly what Tirzah had done.

The moment held, eye to eye, the finality of it, for a few more seconds. The adrenaline spiked in her, she could feel her heartbeat thudding in her ears, but she did not move.

Somehow she still didn't expect Tirzah to move first.

The taste of blood but not a metaphor, this time, she stumbled backward a step, blinking rapidly.

"You—"

Thinking was taking too long.

The rest of the sentence turned into a wordless cry of anger as she rammed into Tirzah, adrenaline pushing past the pain in her head, her arm, her side. Tirzah was bigger than her, yes, but Ivy was stronger and she hated her more and that could be enough, her legs pushing the bulk of their combined weight through the doorframe and slamming them both into


She didn't see the mirror until it was too late, but she laughed as it shattered at Tirzah's back.

[Ruggahissy]

Tirzah's back hit the mirror on the wall near the bed. A glittering silver shower exploded outward from the impact and the two girls.

As the two grappled, innumerable, scintillating copies struggled in response over the floor and the bed.

Tirzah felt some of the points pierce through her back through her crop top. The pain was washed over in a red river of adrenaline.

"You Strawberry Short Cunt," she growled. She took a deep breath and her wounds expanded with her. Tirzah shoved Ivy backwards onto the bed and then jumped on after her, straddling her and trying to choke the life out of her.

[Fenris]

Glittering dust. She could feel it cut her but she didn't feel pain, not really. Points of fire reflecting red in the dull light. It would hurt later. What mattered was it having time to hurt later.

The momentum of the tackle kept Ivy from backing up quickly enough to keep Tirzah at bay; her hands were on Ivy's shoulders, Ivy was on the bed, Tirzah's hands were around her neck. A thousand more pinpricks digging through her dress into her back. Her breathing no longer flooding her brain, no breathing at all, her fingers dug at Tirzah's but found them solid. Ugly noises. Her nails were sharp, they dug catlike trenches in Tirzah's arms, nothing, she reached out, nothing, too far away. Arms too short.

No energy to panic, no need, either. She was stronger and she hated her more and that would be enough. She grabbed at the bed, at the blankets, felt stings in her fingers as glass dust tried to bury itself in her skin, came up with a shard of mirrored glass. Long enough, sharp enough, her hand bled as she gripped it.

As she stabbed the shard through Tirzah's hand, she felt a sense of deja vu.

[Ruggahissy]

Tirzah yelped and pulled her hand away on reflex. The little scratches hadn't registered but the great splitting wound Ivy just made on her hand did.

A petty sort of vengeance welled up in her and she slammed her balled fist up down on Ivy's chest. Tirzah grabbed a shard from nearby and then used her forearm arm to clear all the rest of the mirror pieces from the bed. She wouldn't leave anything for Ivy to fight back with.

The piece twinkled when held at the apex and became a blur as Tirzah drove it down into Ivy's eye.

[Fenris]

Everything stopped.



She saw Tirzah. Tirzah looked wrong. Too flat, like a drawing, like an image on a screen, fuzzed behind a red haze that clouded her vision. Warm liquid trickled down her face. Her ears were full, not of her breath, not of her heartbeat, though she was all-too conscious of both. But of an unearthly, high-pitched keening she couldn't imagine the source of, no matter how much the sound made her throat hurt.

She saw Tirzah staring back at her in a frozen moment. Blood on her face, her hands. Tirzah's blood. Ivy's blood. Creeping terror crawling up her skin. She hated her more and that had to be enough but two big hazel eyes stared back at her. The one eye of her that could flooded and overflowed.


Everything started again, all at once, and Ivy hissed and spat and flailed like a wounded animal, nails scrambling for purchase on whatever exposed skin they could find. There was a way out. There had to be a way out.

What mattered was having time to suffer. She'd claw for every goddamn second.

[Ruggahissy]

Tirzah stared at Ivy in shock when the aftermath of what she had done was made clear. The jagged piece of mirror was still stuck in Ivy, reflecting back her own destroyed eye. She gagged slightly sounding like a cat about to vomit, but pushed down the wave of nausea that threatened to overtake her.

Then Ivy started to twist and buck under her. Tirzah tried to bat away her flailing, clawing hands and tried to keep her thighs locked around Ivy's waist, but she was moving too much and too wildly.

The only sounds were their respective grunts and small, girlish struggling noises. Tirzah was getting scratched on her arms and she hoped Ivy broke a nail. Eventually the other girl's spitting panic tossed Tirzah to the side. She landed next to Ivy on the bed.

[Fenris]

She was all whirling limbs, clumsy and chaotic, as Tirzah's weight fell off hers and she managed to sit up. Her voice stalled in the back of her throat, eerie white noise falling into a heavy blanket of silence, for only a moment. Her hands swept the bed for a new weapon and came up empty but for specks of shimmering dust scratching her skin like sandpaper. Tirzah was struggling, Tirzah would make it to the floor first, there was no time.

Ivy had a weapon.


Her arm shook, anticipation, terror, adrenaline, she couldn't imagine more pain but she felt it as she wrenched the shard of porcelain out of her arm.


Skin separated around it, her stomach clenched, shuddered, hot and cold all at once. She grabbed Tirzah by the hair, wrenched her back onto the bed. Hazel eyes, big and wild. Taunting her. Ivy dragged her own wretched body on top of Tirzah's, drops of blood hitting Tirzah's face like summer rain. Ivy breathed. Ivy was still breathing. Her own screams strangled themselves trying to crawl back out of her mouth. Even soaked in adrenaline, it hurt.

"No more."

Hoarse and broken.

The porcelain shard came down through one pretty hazel eye, her fingernails dug into the other, stirring a mix of blood and jelly. Her stomach churned. She didn't stop.

[Ruggahissy]

Tirzah rolled to get off the bed but was suddenly yanked back.

It happened so fast. She felt the revulsion and terror of seeing the shard head straight to her eye and then was aware of one light going out and a flood of pain.

She screamed a high, piercing scream which was suddenly interrupted and tailed off into a gurgle as she felt the porcelain shard go through her open mouth and cut through her tongue and the back of her mouth.

Tirzah lay back she felt her mouth fill, threatening to drown her in her own blood.

Before she could do anything else, the second light went out.

It was dark now. She couldn't see, couldn't speak. All she could do was thrash. Tirzah fell off the bed and started seizing, thrashing, tearing, whatever she could. Mirror embedded itself further and she knocked over a bedside table.

The animal part of her brain was entirely in charge, even more so than normal. Horrifying darkness. The feeling of blood choking her and rising up and around her mouth, pouring out.

That was it. She had always been feral: a wild animal who no one had bothered to bring home. Tirzah was a cannibal girl who would tear through people with the same kind of indifference as a tornado or other force of nature. It would be hard to say that a hurricane was malicious. But then someone befriended the hurricane just a little and asked it for a favor and against all odds, the hurricane obliged.

She was a selfish person but --

The shard slammed down piercing her brain.

Tirzah Foss: Deceased

Not selfish enough.

[Fenris]

Ivy breathed.

Ivy was still breathing.

Only Ivy.


The world went dark, for a moment.

When the eye that could blinked open, spinning in its socket in confusion, she was slumped on the floor over a thing that used to be Tirzah. No sound, no movement, mouth agape and full of still-flowing blood. Eyes that couldn't be rightfully called open, or closed, or eyes at all. Twitches of movement that Ivy might have imagined. Her hand still gripped the piece of porcelain lodged deep in an unthinking skull, digging bloody ridges into her palm and fingers. She wrenched it out, thoughtlessly, sounds like pulling a rainboot out of a mud puddle, squelching, bits of pinkish-grey clinging to the point of the makeshift blade. She shuddered and her stomach shuddered along with her.

She barely thought to lean away. There was nothing inside her to spit up but bile, but she dry-heaved for a few more moments after.

Still breathing. Her eye darted back and forth between her arms. Left decorated with pinpricks of blood, fingers coated in the nameless ooze that still flooded Tirzah's eye socket. Right soaked in blood—the cut, she'd forgotten about it, almost, pulling the porcelain from her arm, in all the confusion, in the agony in her head. It hurt, now, now that she looked at it and remembered it was supposed to. She was pretty sure it was still bleeding, though it was hard to tell with the amount of blood already there. Her hand was cut in what felt like a hundred different places. Her back burned. Despite everything, running, ducking, tackling, rolling, falling, her rib, too, didn't bother her until she remembered it should. It almost grounded her, now, she was so used to that particular kind of pain.

Her reflection came back at her from a thousand mirror shards scattered across the floor. Not big enough to see clearly, but she saw herself, still. Pink hair, purple dress, red dress, pink skin, red skin. One blue-green eye and the tear track underneath it. And—


When she saw light again her face was pressed against the side of the bed. Her arm felt cold. She managed to push off the ground with her undamaged hand and make it to her feet for two or three wobbling steps before toppling to the ground like an unbalanced toddler. She was sobbing, she realized, the thick and heavy way she had the morning prior. For the same reasons, in the end. Her bad hand left smears of blood on the floor. She crawled.

There had to be a plan here. Right? She hadn't had a plan and it had worked but now she needed one. She was bleeding, she couldn't see how much or from how many places, she felt dizzy and static-y and wrong. She needed... something. To fix this. She had won, so she could fix this, she had time. She was still breathing. She needed something. Something. All her thought processes were interrupted every heartbeat with the throbbing in, in front of, behind, around, inside her right eye.

With trembling fingers, she reached up to her face. She could only see half of her hand. She felt her cheek. Blood. Blood. Something hard, and sharp, and wrong, her stomach clenched again and she dry-heaved and her fingers instinctively tried to grab at the thing but the pain


Awake. Had to keep moving. Her supplies were still back at the house, she'd planned on going back, always, god, Myles knew, he must have, of course she was coming back she'd never leave him—

supplies, she needed supplies, needed bandages. Bandages. Bag, Tirzah's, somewhere, she remembered. Guns. There were guns, they were her guns now, all hers, Ivy dragged herself across the floor, slowly, inch by inch. Bandages. The door. The door?

She needed bandages but she needed help. She had to get back. There was no way in a million years she could, not like this. Bandages. Bag. She crawled. Her own sobs became white noise. She could do this, she had to do this, had to fix herself, had to find him. She wanted to stop so badly. Moving hurt so much. Everything hurt. Breathing hurt. She wanted to stop but she wouldn't. Couldn't do it, to herself, or to Myles.

She'd promised. Inch by agonizing inch, she held herself together.

[backslash]

"IVY-"

Wheezing, steps throwing up dust and dirt as he ran, choking on it, bag bouncing against his back feeling like it was pounding a bruise into his skin. Myles wasn't built for doing the fucking 500-meter dash, especially not when he was trying to scream at the top of his lungs. No answer came back to him.

Where was she and why wasn't she answering?

((Myles Roux continued from Right Now, I Feel No Pain))

Even as he barreled through the rows of houses, Myles could feel himself running out of steam already. He knew without really having to think about it consciously that as soon as he stopped, he wasn't going to start running again. His legs and lungs burned, and he could feel a stitch forming in his side.

No matter how much he shouted, Ivy hadn't called back, and she hadn't appeared, this village wasn't even that big so she had to hear him at some point sprinting from one end to the other shouting her name, and what if she'd just run off and left them because he yelled at her, but she wouldn't do that-

Maybe there were other options, but the only ones Myles could focus on were that Ivy had had enough and abandoned them, or that something horrible had happened because he let her go.

He'd half expected to hear the sound of shots behind him, Garren's head getting blown off because he spent a precious few seconds shoving Myles out the window instead of saving himself and maybe once he found Ivy and everything was okay he'd spend a little while feeling kind of bad about that but all he could hear right now was his heart pounding in his ears and Ivy not fucking answering him.

"IVY!" His voice cracked.

[Fenris]

When she came to again, it didn't hurt. Not in the same way.

It was a relief for a moment, as long as she didn't think about it too hard. Memories of agony vague in retrospect. But what they'd been replaced with was bad, worse, wrong, ice crawling through her veins. She felt cold and numb and sluggish. The bag. She had needed the bag, she'd been crawling toward the bag. It was so far away. How was it still so far away? She pushed herself forward but her bloody hand slipped on the wood floor and stopped her dead. Had to keep moving. Had to. It was comfortable, almost, the numbness, she remembered pain and didn't want to remember it more and the realization that her thoughts were turning in that direction was the most terrifying thing yet.

Giving up was death. Real, actual death. There was no rest, no giving up, had to keep moving, had to. Keep clawing. She was shaking. Vision halved and blurry, keep moving. Couldn't give up. She wasn't sobbing anymore. She couldn't hear her breathing, either. Just her heartbeat. Loud and steady. Death, death, dying, blood, maggots, Tirzah, Beryl, Tristan, Max, Wyatt, keep moving. The bag. The fucking bag. Her nails dug into the floor, begging for purchase. Another inch. Another. It hurt. That was good. But it hurt so much.

She heard a voice, in the distance, so far away she might have imagined it. So familiar. Maybe just a memory dredged up from a better time. A hallucination. Another inch, maybe less. The bag felt like it got further away every time she looked at it, a blur behind a tearful eye. She reached out as though it might jump into her hand.

She heard a voice. Not so distant, this time.

"Myles?"

It stuck to her mouth, barely loud enough for her to hear, but she'd heard him that time, she had. He was out there. He was searching. He hadn't given up on her. She reached for the door but it was just as far away as the bag was, taunting her. She could barely make out the bullet holes that Tirzah had left there. Streaming beams of sunlight. Her head felt so heavy.

"Myles—"

Not enough. Her throat was so dry she choked on the attempt, coughing up blood that might not have been hers. Her vision was swimming. She tried to move but made no progress. She tried to push herself up but her body wouldn't leave the floor.

Ivy breathed. She was still breathing. She would keep fucking breathing.



"MYLES—!"

[backslash]

And there, beautiful, like the voice of fucking God, there she was. The answer came from a house he'd already passed, and Myles skidded to a halt, sending up another cloud of dust and making himself choke again.

"IV-" He cut himself off coughing, and only then did the sound of following footsteps register with him. He turned just in time for Garren to more or less bowl him over.

In the frantic confusion, all Myles did was slap at him and cough out something that sounded vaguely annoyed, because his heart was in his throat and his lungs were burning. He could hardly breathe as it was. He felt like he was dying. Ivy sounded like she could be dying. He couldn't feel relieved yet.

"Get off!" He grunted at Garren once he was able to catch enough of his breath to form words again.

[Pippi]

Christ, he wasn’t built for this.

((Garren Mortimer continued from Right Now, I Feel No Pain))

His lungs were fucking burning as he ran, heels kicking up dirt and clods of grass and dust, bag slapping against his side where he’d awkwardly swung it, slashes in his thighs and ankles feeling all of a sudden very real and very much aflame. God, speaking of, his entire body felt like it was being scorched from the inside out, right to his very soul.

Here lay the unfortunate marriage of a diet of pizza and jalapenos and an exercise routine consisting of the walk from his bed to the toilet, and a breakneck sprint.

Part of him was telling his brain to shut the fuck up, that there were bigger things to prioritise than the pain in his lungs, but it wasn’t like he was gonna just suddenly stop running now that he was feeling the strain. Emmett was behind him with a gun. Myles was in front of him and out of sight. If he stopped running he’d either be left behind or riddled with bullets. He had to keep running.

Besides, he felt as though the only way he’d stop at this point was by being stopped, adrenaline had such a strong grip on him.

Myles was out of sight, but it was easy for Garren to follow him; he just had to follow the sound of his voice. Not a hard task in the slightest. He could only hope that Emmett didn’t feel like clambering through a window today, or that all the other players were having a nap on the other side of the island, because right now, he was practically blaring through a loudspeaker ‘I AM A SITTING DUCK’.

Even so, he was struggling to hear anything at all now over his own increasingly harsh breathing and the ringing in his ears from exertion and close proximity to gunfire. His body dragged him around one corner, down a row of houses, round another corner, and then, all of a sudden, there he was, stopped right in the middle of the road.

Way, way too suddenly.

Garren’s attempts to slam on the brakes were futile, and he careened into Myles, sending them both slamming heavily down to the ground in a tangle of limbs and bags. He saw nothing but stars for a moment, feeling like he was about to throw up, a weird, weak tapping sensation at his hip. It took him a moment to realise it was Myles slapping at him, urging him to, essentially, Get The Fuck Up, Dipshit. Garren pushed himself to his feet, leaning against the side of the house they’d stopped next to, sucking in deep gulps of air, closing his eyes.

“Why the fuck’d… you stop, dude?”

[backslash]

"Ivy," Myles wheezed out, like it was the only word he could say anymore. Garren's weight was thankfully lifted off of him, but Myles stayed sprawled in the dirt for several moments more before he could gather the strength to sit up and then shakily get to his feet. His legs were wobbly already from the exertion of running.

So Garren was alive, which meant that Myles didn't have to feel bad about anything that might have happened to Garren on his behalf. That was good. Ivy was here. She was close, he'd heard her even if Garren hadn't. It wasn't wishful thinking or his imagination. He'd heard her.

He looked at Garren for a moment, slightly unfocused. "You're bleeding. You should do something about that." His own voice sounded far away underneath the rushing of his pulse in his ears.

He turned away again without waiting for an answer, hobbling back to the houses he'd already passed. Empty. Empty. She was here. He'd heard her.

"Ivy?"

No answer. Empty.

Closed door, but there was a hole in it, just below eye level. Like a peephole in one of the doors at the hotel. Myles paused, and with a sense of the surreal, he leaned down to peer in.

He was met with the set of a slasher film, everything broken and red, and there on the floor, unmoving-

Myles threw the door open without any further thought, not sparing a second to think about who else might still be inside waiting.

"IVY!"