The Greatest Man That Ever Lived

[MK Kilmarnock]

((Wyatt Carter continued from that thread with the thing and the stuff))

Man, Tirzah really did have legs like a brick shithouse. They'd gotten both her and him far away enough from the ruins of that dilapidated lighthouse that they couldn't quite see it anymore. Last he knew, Marco had gone inside, escorted by Adonis (survived the fall, huh? It was what it was) to his corner as Tirzah steered him away. It was farther than he could have gotten by himself.

But she couldn't do this forever. He couldn't stand forever. The urge to sit down was pulling at him, causing a knee to half-buckle every ten or fifteen steps, and at this point Wyatt was just waiting for a branch or a vine or a wayward root to line 'em up and knock them down, beating them up and breaking a neck or two.

"Alright, let's find somewhere to play operation," he grumbled.

[Ruggahissy]

((Tirzah Foss continued from You Are Already Dead ))

"Yeah, you seem like the kind of kid who wanted to play doctor."

Tirzah removed the first aid kit from Wyatt's bag and quickly, but deliberately started laying items out. She went about the work of bandaging, stitching, and patching with a mechanical focus. Too risky to try and remove bullets, patch around them.

At a certain point she wondered why she was doing this at all. She was wasting resources. Not hers, she argued. The materials had been pulled from Wyatt's kit. It wasn't very good reasoning, since more kits meant more resources.

Tirzah knew she had to talk about something to keep his mind off of his injuries while she was working, but she really don't know what to talk about. Technically he was a captive audience, since it's not like he could just up and leave if he didn't like the topic.

"What's your favorite football team?" she asked, trying to keep a somewhat chipper tone of voice.

This is bad. This is hopeless. I don't know what I'm doing and I hate that.

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt managed a pained smirk at Tirzah's crack. It was good that she got that.

"You're not wrong," he said with a sigh. "Grew out of it kinda fast though. First got dome when I was twelve." It was a story he recounted multiple times around 8th grade and well on into high school, only stopping when it clearly wasn't that impressive when compared to other feats like laying cheerleaders or whatnot. Out of the blue, he decided to add: "Maybe twelve is a bit too young though. Just thinking about it now."

He noticed Tirzah wasn't making an effort to remove the bullets, but recalled one of the only interesting stories he heard in history where some... governor? Or was he a president? Some famous political dude anyway, he got shot and they tried to remove the bullet and kept poking and prodding around him looking for it until it killed him. So it might have been wiser to just leave it in, add a little iron to his body composition. Lead. Whatever.

"Titans, of course," Wyatt responded quickly. Out of the blue, but he'd always mindlessly pick up a sports conversation. "Even if they suck. Gotta... value home teams."

Everything hurt and he felt cold. It dawned on him why it was best to continue the conversation rather than think about that.

"Do you even watch football?"

[Ruggahissy]

"Ew," she said, without looking up from her medical work. She was winding gauze around the space where his collar bone could faintly be seen. "I don't want to think about 12-year-old dick," she said. Tirzah sighed heavily and wiped her bangs away from her face, which stuck a bit from the sweat of work and of the island's humidity. She left a sweep of red across part of her face in their place.

She kind of mumbled a sound of agreement in response to his musings on locational tribalism as it related to sports teams. Tirzah turned back to the bags and looked briefly at the contents, trying to mentally tabulate how much water they had now. How many bandages, how much food, how much antibacterial spray: the objects that were sand in their hour glass.

"No," she said, dropping into a cross-legged sit across from Wyatt. "I don't get any knowledge by osmosis from jacking off football players. I just thought maybe it would take your mind off," she said, gesturing to him generally.

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt grunted affirmation at Tirzah's apparent disgust. It was a good sign she wasn't like, explicitly turned on by little-boy peen, though her reaction gave him pause. He tried to think back on recounting the story. More specifically, he tried to recall what peoples' reactions were. Thinking, his old nemesis, but relatively benign compared to prolapsed intestine, his new nemesis who had just moved in and made the other neighbors look like chumps.

'... maybe it would take your mind off.'

"Huh?" Wyatt uttered, coming out of his trance. His mental file rifling had turned up nothing. He briefly pondered what that said about himself and moved on.

"From the fact I'm fu-... in a bad way. Yeah." Wyatt turned over one of his hands, the most animated gesture he had the energy to afford. "Was just thinking, maybe you need to swallow for the information to pass on! You know, genetic memory or some shit." Wyatt wheezed a laugh. Blowjob joke, just like old times. Just him and Tirzah and bleeding to death. Just... like old times? He took a deep breath that finished like a sigh, albeit a raspier, slightly gurgle-y one. He thought cursing and joking and thinking could make him ignore the pain entirely. While it did help - the benefit of taking one's mind off an injury was simply obvious - they were basically slapping a band-aid on the Titanic and calling it good.

A lot of band-aids, actually. And he honestly wasn't too sure what they were doing anymore, because with each second the pain was getting worse. A lot worse.

"H-Heh... I'm kicking myself for losing that gun." Wyatt turned his head away from Tirzah. Something about her made her very hard to look at right now. "If we still had it you could shoot me in the head and just be done with all of it."

[Ruggahissy]

"I don't know. I thought maybe I'd know how to deal with you better, but blowing your dad doesn't seem to have helped," she said, pretending to be thoughtful.

Tirzah watched him kind of wheeze and whistle like a bouncy castle that was starting to deflate. She sat with her elbows propped up on her crossed legs and her hands supporting her chin, looking at Wyatt. "Yeah..." she said, looking at the ground. Maybe he knew what she knew. Tirzah couldn't see any way that this wasn't the end of the line, but this wasn't Toby or Ron. They didn't really have time or see it coming.

"Is that what you'd want?" she said, looking at his face for any slight changes in emotion.

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt didn't turn back to look at Tirzah. But from a profile, his cheek drooped as the smile faded.

"It'd save us both a whole lot of trouble, yeah?" He chewed on his cheek, struggling with listening to those words echo in his own ears as he knew many resources were being strained right now, and not the least of which was time. There wasn't a lot of time left.

[Ruggahissy]

"Yeah," she answered in the affirmative.

Tirzah looked at her bag for a moment and then leaned over to unzip it. She felt around inside for a brief moment -- she'd kept it towards the top to be ready at a moment's notice -- and withdrew the Kel-Tec P-32. It was a small thing and it was appropriate for her. She set it on her lap and made an awkward throat clearing noise.

"Wish granted."

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt turned back.

His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. He knew how he wanted to react just from years of instinct. If Tirzah had brought a piece to school he'd... no, that wasn't a fair comparison. If she approached on day one, maybe even day two and just produced a gun like that when he hadn't expected it, he'd probably leap back like she'd just opened a can of rattlesnakes. Momentary shock all the same, just far more animated. It was funny to him, in some dark sad way, that he could imagine exactly what his body would do and his nerves even made all the same tingles like he'd done it, only he was unable to.

The shock wore down, and Wyatt made direct eye contact with Tirzah. 'My eyes are up here', only he was caught staring at a pistol and not her tits or something. 99% of the time he knew which he'd rather feel.

Wyatt chuckled. He chuckled, partially, in disbelief. Partially it was just a take on how absurd it was, and maybe there was something else tucked in. He thought it may have been relief, but Wyatt was never too good at looking in the mirror and deciding what he had felt. He didn't think about it, he just felt it without trying to understand. Looking at the gun made him feel a lot of things, some conflicting, all at once. Some bad, some good. Hard to say where the balance was.

"You had one the whole time?" Wyatt leaned his head back against the tree and laughed again. "Shit, what did you even need me for? Girl was packing CRAZY heat! Ha- AURGH..." Too much laughing. Wyatt clutched his stomach. "Well, bless your heart. You're a regular fairy fuckin' godmother." He shot a grin at her through one squinted eye.

[Ruggahissy]

Tirzah's eyebrows furrowed in confusion. He was laughing and that was better than a lot of the other possible reactions. His eyeline panned down from her face to the gun in her lap. Tirzah picked it up and laid down on her side so that she was still facing Wyatt.

"Yeah," she said again, in answer to his question regarding her length of possession of the gun. "I told you what I needed you for. I wanted protection. I didn't want to have to shoot everyone who I thought looked at me weird. That's just bad strategy, not smart. Look at the big killers now. They're not going to make it to the end. Too many people looking to avenge someone or wanting to take down someone they feel good about taking down. Even if they take out some of those people looking for them, a lizard is gonna get eaten by ants if there's enough ants."

Tirzah sat back up, holding the gun in her right hand.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this. I wasn't supposed to shoot you until there was only like 20 of us left."

She let a few seconds go by.

"That's a joke. I don't know what I'd have done. Guess it doesn't matter."

[MK Kilmarnock]

Tirzah's strategy had been in line with Bret's. Wyatt nodded along in solemn concurrence. All of this just highlighted what he already knew deep down. Bret had been the strategist and he had the right idea by not just wantonly killing people. Wyatt was on board with that, but he had more trouble selecting the fights he picked. It wasn't supposed to be like this, just like Tirzah said. He was supposed to meet Claude and kill him for what they did, then they'd get down to the last twenty and Tirzah would turn-

Hold the phone.

"Huh!?" Wyatt's face screwed up in confusion, only letting up somewhat when Tirzah backpedaled. He let it go. She was right again, it didn't matter.

"I'm just... bummed, I guess," Wyatt said. Every bit of his voice and his posture and expression reeked of fatigue. The pain was still there but he was beginning to grow tired of it. All of it. "That I didn't get to do what I wanted to do. Kill Claude, at least give Bret that, and whatever else." He rolled his eyes before dropping his chin back to her. "We were supposed to go farther together. Like, the three of us. Just fell apart so fuckin' fast." He repeated the last three words under his breath.

"I guess that was all I had to tell ya."

[Ruggahissy]

"Yeah," she said, in a tone of voice that was a mixture of agreement, torpidity, and a little bit of comfort.

"If I do this, I need to know who will want to come after me," she said quietly. "And if you want me to go after Claude."

Would she really go after Claude? Maybe, maybe not. But it might give him comfort to know that someone was going to be working on his unfinished vengeance. The warmth of violence was something Tirzah was comfortable with trying to provide.

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt looked up and off to the side. He raised a big meaty fist and extended fingers one at a time.

"Connor, Ace, Ivy, Faith..." he worked his jaw. "That's most'a the big ones. If I had a pen or something I'd write you a note, 'I asked her to do it cuz dying, sorry lawl.' Something like that." He let his hand drop and breathed shallowly.

"Maybe you should just leave'm alone. Not the same as me or Bret killin'm. And I think it'd make me happier if you just lived rather than doing something stupid like I did."

Wyatt wobbled his hand, if only a few inches off the ground.

"Buuuuuu-urgh. But, if the opportunity shows its ass-ugly head, don't hesitate to cap him. Because fuck that little bible-thumpin' cunt."

[Ruggahissy]

"It's fine, I can remember. You know, like my life depends on it," she said, weakly attempting the joke.

She sat next to Wyatt so that her left leg was touching his right leg.

"Thanks for saying it would make you happy if I lived."

Tirzah looked down at her knees, lightly flecked with blood. Her blonde eye lashes started to flutter rapidly. She exhaled deeply and felt her eyes well up a little and her mouth fill with the taste of blood.

"Do you want a countdown or something or do you not want to know?"

[MK Kilmarnock]

Wyatt flashed a bloodstained-tooth smile at Tirzah. Even in death, making the ladies happy was something he was good at. Hell yeah, that was him, Wyatt Carter, a man's man to the end.

Other than taking the easy way out, which this technically was, but survival wasn't an option anymore. It was also the smartest thing, what they were doing. It'd be better for Tirzah to get an obvious load out of the picture. "Yeah. No problem. I mean, I meant it." Wyatt turned away from Tirzah and shrugged up his right shoulder; relaxing it was something of an inner struggle.

"Just go for it whenever. In the meantime, I'm gonna regale you with the time my brother and I whupped the unholy hell outta Ty Lahti. You know the guy, face like a totem pole? That one." He didn't hurt for some reason. Lungs were working pretty good too, because of course now they would decide to. "Honestly, you would have thought it was him hunting us down or summat but I think he was afraid. Shoulda seen him at Rainbow-Brite's house, that big fuckin' party, I think you know the one. Fucker kept a wide circle..."