After All the Hell We've Been Through, I'd Still Bet On You

[Cactus]

You sad, yellow excuse for a human being.

For years, you thought that you had everything figured out. There was nothing that wasn't within your grasp.

You made the football team on your first try, no big deal. You worked your ass off, you said. Your last name had nothing to do with it, you said.

You said a lot of things, didn't you?

All of the it-girls in school wanted a piece of you. Ivy couldn't keep her hands off you in junior year. It didn't work out, ain't no problem. Madison was standing there to pick up the pieces. She was a better fit anyhow. Ended up being a little more sane, little less of a flagrant whore.

Popular guy, never wanted for nothin'. Everyone wanted to be your friend, but you were loyal to your original crew. Wyatt and Bret had been there for you for years, loyalty is important.

Money? Pffft. Toss it on the credit card, Pop'll take care of it. What's another dollar?

You were the starting quarterback, so it only made sense that you were the team captain, too. Everyone followed your lead, after all. When you spoke, they listened. No sweat.

Everything was easy; livin' on easy street. Until you weren't. Until you thought to yourself that hey, maybe people might respect you a little more if you made some of the hard choices. Go off the beaten path a few times. Hard work was in your DNA, but what was a little struggle for the ol' constitution?

Turns out, you didn't know what struggle meant. Deciding which school would give you both the most money just to go there and the most opportunity to play football and choosing to go against your family's wishes wasn't exactly tough sledding. Your father would get over it, he was too proud a man not to see the forest for the trees. You knew you were right, which was the part that was probably so irritating to everyone else.

But it was okay, because you knew how to overcome adversity.

What a joke.

Guess what, Connor? You haven't overcome shit, because when the chips were down, what did you do?

You ran away and you hid. Waited for your daddy to come and get you.

Some fucking leader.

Some fucking man.

You're nothing but a baby-back bitch.

A bitch who didn't even try to find Madison. The same kind of bitch who let Ace go off with Ivy. A bitch who watched Wyatt walk off to his death even after knowing that Tirzah wasn't playing with a full deck. You could have prevented that, you could have stopped even a little bit of it. But what did you do, instead?

You hid. You avoided. You cowered.

You don't deserve the air you're breathing.

---

Connor exhaled; he wasn't cowering now.

The teen stared long and hard, his eyes narrowing. His target was before him, all he had to do was plunge the knife down. His internal monologue had been beating him down for hours, throughout the announcement, well after Faith had abandoned him. She was correct; he wasn't seeing the situation for what it was. He had believed himself above it all, that the terrorists wouldn't be able to touch him, either thanks to his innate high standard of character or the high balance of his father's wallet.

Connor had been wrong, and with that as the prevailing thought that suckered him in the gut, he brought the knife down as hard as he could.

((Connor Lorenzen continued from Meet Me in the City))

For its part, the empty water bottle didn't do a single thing to defend itself, but his aim was clumsy and the only thing that he accomplished was to send the empty container clattering down beside the stump that he had rested it on. The small blade from the multitool was only designed to be used in the most perfunctory of tasks, plunging it into an evil terrorist water bottle wasn't where it would excel, or even acquit itself at all. As he brought the blade down onto the stump, it simply folded back within the tool, the only harm caused to Connor's failing self-confidence and perhaps, he supposed, to his dignity.

"Dammit," he cursed out loud, throwing the tool to the ground in frustration.

He wasn't cut out for this.

Murder, after all, was a game to be carried out by those without remorse, without feeling. There were exceptions of course, but Connor wasn't sure he fit any of those exceptions. It was one thing to inflict manslaughter upon another individual. Accidents happened; whether in a terrorist death contest or not, but to actually look upon another person and decide to remove them from the world? That was a line that was daunting to even consider crossing.

For years, his parents had prepared him for all manner of challenges, instructed him in any manner they could even conceive of to set him up to be a success in his life. He knew there would be obstacles, of course. Adversity came along for everyone, and he had always known that how you dealt with such adversity was the true measure of a man.
After being measured for eleven days, Connor knew that anyone who was looking to gauge his performance was bound to find him wanting. He hadn't completely bungled things, of course. There were positives.

"I'm still alive," he muttered to himself as he slowly retrieved the multitool from the ground. It wasn't enough, but it was more than he could say for many of his peers — his friends. Hell, from his friends to his enemies — who they were, he couldn't say — they were all dead. Everyone was dead. There was no more George Hunter High, class of 2018. There would only be one single, ravaged survivor.

Would that be him, after however many days it took?

The bravado that he was so easily able to slip into when his peers were around was nowhere to be found. It was simple enough to put on a smile for someone who needed it or offer a reassuring thing to say to someone else who looked down, but convincing himself that he had even a snail's chance at making it out of this alive was an impossibility. It was as though his internal monologue had not only turned against him but it had switched languages as well.

Connor didn't speak defeatist.

Looking at the tool in his hand, he stuffed it back into the pocket of his pants. If he were going to have to defend himself against one of his more deranged classmates, he'd probably have better luck throwing it at them. His throwing arm had been called a weapon by more than one of his teammates, though at this point he was more likely to be the guy who brought a pile of rocks to a gun-fight. There couldn't have been more than twenty people left alive and he could imagine that the number of guns assigned to a group of nearly one hundred and fifty had likely consolidated themselves into most of the people or groups still remaining.

So where did that leave him, when it was all said and done?

He stood in front of the stump, staring off into the woods. Help, or at least the type that he'd been expecting since the very beginning, was not coming. No one would be here to see them off the island safely, Faith hadn't been wrong. Her words hadn't been meant to hurt, but they had finally been what had taken down his shields the whole time. Perhaps his willful ignorance was the only way that he'd been able to avoid the harsh reality of it all, but he missed that ignorance. He missed the moments where his own mind hadn't turned against him and torn down the legacy that he had built up within himself.

Picking up his pack, he wore a sour, sad expression. His chest filled with sorrow, but Connor Lorenzen wasn't the crying type. If he could own nothing else that might get him through this, his work ethic could never be taken away from him. Hard work didn't always pay off, but it always got noticed. If he had nothing left of his own self-worth and value, Connor knew that he would work his ass off. At the very least he could leave some sort of a legacy that he wouldn't be ashamed of.

Were that the case, he knew that as it stood, Connor surely had his work cut out for him.

For the first time in his entire life, he just wasn't sure that he could get the job done.

The game was on the line, and his hands were shaking.

((Connor Lorenzen concluded in The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows))