&Run

[Cactus]

In.

Outoutout.

In.

Outoutout.

In.

In.

In.

Out.

Outoutout.

In.

Fuck.

Outoutout.

In.

Fucking hell.

Outoutout.




Jesus Christ, he was going to die.

Now or later, it didn't matter. He couldn't even breathe properly.

He felt his foot catch a snarled root and he couldn't steady himself; instead he flew forward and was rudely introduced to the floor of the forest, his face smashing brutally off the dirt. He tasted blood, his lip was a casualty of the fall and instinctively, he rolled to his side, off the small path and into the ditch.

This was it. This was how the Connor Lorenzen story was going to end. No NFL dreams, no Lombardi trophies, no greatness. It was all going to come to an end in some dirty ditch. His heart pounded in his chest, the perspiration all over his face now coated in the dirt from his fall.

This was it. This was the end.

((Connor Lorenzen continued from Whatever))

Since he'd caught his glimpse at what remained of Nathan Coleman, Connor had done nothing but run, and scream. Fear had overtaken him; embarrassing but true. He didn't know how long he'd run for, but his voice had run dry after only a few minutes. He hadn't been going anywhere in particular — away from Nathan would have sufficed — but his powerful legs had driven him for a long time. All of those runs around the military monuments in Chattanooga had been a boon for his endurance, even after almost a week living off of depleted rations and whatever foodstuffs could be scavenged. That was the reality now, that was how things were going to be for him from now on. He could expect nothing, he could do nothing with what he already had — he had nothing.

So he ran until his legs had given out on him; his senses had abandoned him the second he'd seen the mangled remnants of Nathan's face.

Madison did that, was the constant casual reminder for him, and he knew that if he ever saw her again, she wouldn't — couldn't — be the same girl that he remembered. The Madison that he'd known was long gone, the person wearing her skin was as unfamiliar as any of the no-name classmates whose names he'd never cared to know. In the grand scheme of things, he'd never cared to know things like 'who the hell is Quinn Abert and why is she ever going to matter in my life'. Connor couldn't pick her out of a lineup, let alone know who she was in a situation like this.

Yet — some faceless person named Quinn Abert was one of the most dangerous people on the island, right next to Erika. Who he did know. Who he'd seen as recently as days prior. Erika had seemed like such a regular person! When they'd met on the roof, had she been gauging how easy it would have been to toss him off of it?

Speaking of dangerous human beings, he remembered shaking Claudeson's hand when he'd arrived at Swiftball those weeks ago. They'd made small talk, nothing extraordinary; Connor knew what had happened with Wyatt and Bret and so he wasn't eager to talk to the sanctimonious prick. That same sanctimonious bible-thumper was the very reason Bret Carter was no longer in the world. Bryan too, but Bryan had always been more of an acquaintance rather than a close friend. Bret, though... Bret was gone, and now Wyatt was off on a crusade to go and murder Claudeson. He hadn't recognized his friend, and Connor knew the next time he saw him, the odds were that it would end violently. The humanity had been drained out of Wyatt.

After what he'd seen; after Nathan? He knew. He understood.

Connor stared up at the sky, prone in the ditch. He didn't move. His face was covered in blood and dirt.

This was it.

This was where he would die.

His father would have scoffed at that notion. He was a Lorenzen, he was more than that, and he was not going to lay down and die in some ditch somewhere. That wasn't what they did. Their family was better than that, they were born leaders, born winners, and if he didn't personify that, he'd damn well better try. That was the refrain; much as it ever was.

But he couldn't help it. His hands quivered, his breaths were shaky and ragged. Now that he wasn't running, now that he wasn't helping the adrenaline pump through his veins anymore, he felt like the world was closing in upon him. Connor didn't have any tears to cry — he'd never been much for crying — but his chest felt like he had an elephant sitting upon it.

What was he going to do now?

Connor didn't know, but even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. Fear had him now, and for the time being, it had him exactly where it wanted him.

[Kermit]

"You. Football boy," a vaguely Eastern-European voice enunciated.

((Valerija Bogdanovic continued from Knight of Faith))

She stood over him, wearily looking down at his face. One of her legs was bent slightly, a bandage wrapped haphazardly around the knee. Red osmosed up and down the white lines on her track pants. She blankly aimed a submachine gun in the general direction of his head.

"They teach you rudimentary sports medicine, yes? I need you to help me, please," she stated, not requested.

[Cactus]

He hadn't seen her coming — oh Lord, he'd been wallowing in his own self-pity and he'd completely missed it. Connor had been searching for the easy pass and the lineman had come right up the middle; quarterback sacked for a loss. How much of a loss was yet to be seen. The gaping maw from the weapon virtually screamed at him, and he couldn't take his eyes off of it.

Football boy. Was that really all he was to his classmates? In the end, would Connor Lorenzen just be a nondescript football boy? He couldn't breathe.

"Y—ye—sure."

It was all he could manage. Some part of him was operating on autopilot, doing all it could to prevent his demise. His brain had checked out — please hang up, and try your call again, this is a recording.

Slowly, Connor pushed himself to a seated position, the face of his assailant matching the voice: unfamiliar and nondescript. Nobody special. No one that Connor himself had ever thought to bother to get to know. For a 'man about campus', he really didn't know as many of his classmates as he should have. Not knowing his particular girl's name might get him killed. Swallowing, he looked down at her leg. The bandage was soaked through with blood, and between that and the gun pointed in the direction of his head, Connor felt weak.

"W—what do y'all need me to— to do?"

The stammer was so unbecoming; he was the prom king, dammit. He was Steven Lorenzen's son and he should have been better than this. Steven Lorenzen never looked down the barrel of a gun, though. Connor had that one over on his father.

Steven had one over on his son, though. At this very moment, Steven was back home, sans explosive collar, either blissfully unaware or painfully unable to help his son. Steven Lorenzen was going to live another week.

Connor, probably not.

He was going to die.

His hands quivered.

[Kermit]

She took a step back as the boy sat up, following the position of his head with the barrel of the gun. She briefly glanced at the boy's shaking hands before looking back to his face. Her facial expression remained still. She gestured her head downwards in the general direction of her injured leg. Her fingernail scratched against the metal of the gun.

"...Surmise."

[Cactus]

The sound of the fingernail on the steel of the barrel sent a shiver down Connor's spine, though he didn't immediately know where it had come from. It was the sound of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, arriving in time to deliver him a reckoning. At least, that's what his fear-filled brain allowed him to think, taking another deep breath while he tried not to hyperventilate any more.

Surmise.

What the hell did that even mean? Sunrise? Smurf eyes? Sir fries?

The word echoed through his brain but he couldn't grasp a meaning from it. The simple fact that his mind was short-circuiting enough to fail at putting meaning behind words scared him far more than any explosive collar or any haphazardly-waved submachine gun. His body and his mind were his weapons, and thanks to malnutrition he knew that one of those was already compromised. If the other were to go, well —

That was probably why he was being held at by a classmate with a bloody wound on her leg.

Surmise, of course! The meaning crept into his mind; there all along but obfuscated by the terror that seemed to cover as far as the eye could see. What the hell had happened to this girl? His hands still shook as he limply grasped at the bandage, barely touching it, barely moving it. He tried several times, but he couldn't force his hands to come into contact with her at all. It was though they refused to believe that she were real, touching made it so.

"I don't, I — what happened to you?"

Was it a gunshot? A stab wound? She wanted him to figure it out; use his Connor Lorenzen-ness to solve her problem. His problem was that in this particular world, away from high society or football fields or a high school hallway, Connor Lorenzen wasn't worth half a damn — and he knew it.

He was here in camp on a tryout, and at this point, they weren't even giving him the ball.

[Kermit]

The barrel didn't move from the boy's head. She inhaled sharply through her nose as his hand grazed the bandage, and she leant sideways against a nearby tree for support, letting it take the weight off of her injured leg.

"I was stabbed in the back of the leg. I tried to patch it up myself. Didn't really know how. If you can fix it better than it is now, I'll let you go. That's all I need you to know."

[Cactus]

"Why would someone stab y'all in the leg?"

It was a silly question, yet it slipped out painted on one side with a genuine sincerity and the other with incredulity. Why would someone stab this girl in the leg — may have it had something to do with the submachine gun that she was holding, now aiming directly at his head? If Connor were a betting man; which he wasn't, he would have put money on her demeanour having something to do with it.

Which — good God almighty, he'd glossed completely over the operative word.

Not waiting to hear an answer to his obviously inane question, Connor looked up at her, stared her straight in the eyes, the fear subsided momentarily for what felt like disbelief at what he'd heard.

His hands stopped shaking.

"Wait. If? If I can do it, you'll —"

Before him barely stood a teenager; he recognized her, but didn't. It was as though someone else were wearing her face, inhabiting the body of someone he may have passed in the halls a thousand times, whose name he'd never bothered to know. The realization sent a chill down his spine, a helpless feeling that began to gnaw at him. He clenched his hands into fists.

If.

"Good lord, what happened to you? Who broke you?"

If.

So that was that, then. Connor Lorenzen would have to play doctor for this former classmate-turned-maniac, or he would die. Somewhere along the line, he missed the memo, he'd skipped the film session for this particular series of plays. Third and long, and all he had to throw was a basketball.

"If. Jesus."

His hands quivered once more, and he looked away from the girl and down at them. There were a lot of things that his parents had prepared him for. He could work his way through most social settings, could throw a football further than most could kick one, and once football was over he knew himself savvy enough to parlay the money he'd make into investments that would keep him wealthy for his entire life. He could do all of that, but somewhere along the line, emergency surgery on a stabbing victim hadn't exactly been on the list.

Yet that was exactly what he'd need to do in order to survive.

He didn't look up.

If.

If only.

[Kermit]

"I am not broken," she snapped. Inhaled. Exhaled. "My instructions were clear, yes? You have three options: refuse and die a coward, help me and die doing something selfless, or help me and live as a hero."

She chewed on the inside of her lip. Her next words were calm, measured.

"We are not enemies, you understand. I don't want to shoot you, but," she paused, "if you don't do as I say, I will have no other option. For both of our sakes, please, just try."

[Cactus]

Still looking at his hands, Connor shook his head. If this was how it all came to an end, he wasn't about to take it sitting down; metaphorically speaking, of course. Truly, he was sitting in the dirt. It was fourth down, but he was waving the punt team back. There was no way in hell that Connor Lorenzen was going to give up without going for it.

There was still time on the clock.

"Bullshit," he said, looking back up at the girl. His hands still shook in fear, but he had the same sort of resolute look on his face that he would have had at the pivotal moment of a game. "You're just as broken as any of 'em. On an ordinary day, y'all could have just asked. Done the ol', 'hey Connor, I messed up my leg, can you give me a hand?'"

Slowly reaching over to his own pack, he reached in with one hand and fished out the first-aid kit.

"But that ain't how things work in your world anymore, are they? It didn't even come to you to ask nicely, did it?"

Opening the first-aid kit, he fished the gauze and a set of bandages out, along with some sterile wipes. He placed them next to him, and closed the kit.

"Frankly, miss? I don't believe you. You're going to shoot me no matter what," he made eye contact now, "you're just trying to work up the nerve to do it once y'all get what you need from me. The way you're wavin' that thing around? If that ain't broken, darling? I don't know what is."

Shoulders slumping, he opened and closed his hands into fists to try and forget about the fear coursing through his veins. It wasn't just that, though. Fear, adrenaline, disgust, fatigue — all combined into a terrible cocktail that left him virtually unable to control his own body, which added a layer of disappointment in himself that he was trying desperately to shove down into whatever deep hole it had surfaced from.

"Now I'm gonna help you out here, but not because you're pointing a gun at me; but because we're people, and that's what we do. So maybe hold off pullin' the trigger the first time it hurts, you understand?"

Connor reached over and began to undo the bloody bandage.

[Kermit]

"You say 'your world' as if we aren't both in the same place. Try asking someone like Erika nicely," she exhaled sharply and winced as the bandage came off. "I don't know you, Connor. I don't know what kind of person you are. On our very first day here, there were already people throwing other people off the waterfall. I don't know if you're like them."

She closed her eyes for a few seconds.

"You're naive, like the people who put us here," she opened her eyes and gestured her head toward a camera. "If that's your definition of unbroken, then I am broken. Paloma Salt and Caroline Ford did it," she winced again. "I wouldn't call this broken. I would call it..." she trailed off and idly scratched her thumbnail against the gun again, "...pragmatic."

Her mouth curled into a frown.

"I am not your 'darling'. Don't call me darling. It's infantilizing and it's sexist. My name is Valerija, with a 'J'. An hour ago, I shot the only person on this island I knew I could still trust," her voice turned to a growl. "Don't pretend like you know my reasons. Just know if this was about killing you, I would have shot you before you knew I was here."

[Cactus]

Rolling one's eyes was likely one of the least intelligent options while having to treat someone's wounds at gunpoint, but Connor couldn't help himself. As he unwrapped the bandage from the girl — Valerija, thank you very much — her leg quivering, he allowed his annoyance to come up in the form of a condescending laugh, soft and under his breath.

"Ah, 'course; you're one of those social justice types. Well y'all can think what you want, but I didn't mean anything by it. Besides," he grunted as he gingerly separated the last of the bloody bandage from her leg, tossing it aside into the brush. "If anyone's actin' like a child, it's the girl who's wavin' a gun around. I reckon that we've seen a lot of the same people, and none of them tried to stab me."

Grabbing an alcohol pad from beside him, he tore it open and unfolded it.

"This might sting. Sorry."

His stomach turned as he saw the wound; it looked ugly and the congealed blood was dark, flaking off as he tried his best to clean the wound. Connor didn't want to press too hard, lest he risk starting the bleeding again, but after a few wipes, he grimaced at the now visible stab-wound that she was showing off for him. Like most warm-blooded males, Connor was all for being shown some leg, but this wasn't exactly what he had in mind. Grabbing some gauze, he pressed it against the wound itself, and looked up at Valerija.

"Hold that there, please."

Giving her a moment to follow his instructions, he leaned over and grabbed the wrap, and tightly started to wind her leg in it. Connor had no illusions that this was going to save her, and he'd basically done nothing but clean the wound and change the bandage, but with any luck it would prevent him from being shot. He also made a mental note of the names she'd mentioned. Erika was probably the top killer on the island, but the evening he'd spent with her and Juliette, she'd still been mostly lucid, if not distracted.

"All right. That," he finished wrapping the bandage and then taped it together, attaching a safety pin for good measure, "should do it. Ain't much, but you shouldn't bleed out any time soon."

Crumpling up the packaging for the used medical supplies, Connor tossed it into the bushes. Right now, saving the environment was about the last thing he gave a single solitary fuck about. Looking back at her, he shrugged. She still pointed the gun at him, and he wasn't about to stand up and move until this girl was long gone. Still, something bothered him, and while his heart was pounding and his hands had barely stopped quivering enough to dress her wound, he couldn't stop the words that he offered next.

Advice, perhaps. It came off more like a gentle scolding. Even terrified and at gunpoint, Connor felt like he was loosely in control. When he'd been alone, the world was closing in, but now that one of his peers had surfaced — it was odd, but strangely welcoming.

"Like I said, y'all could have just asked. The gun wasn't necessary. You may have decided to check your humanity at the door, but that ain't what I'm all about. If you'd been paying attention the last four years, you mighta understood that. Sounds to me like the one common feature of all your negative relationships might be you. Neither Caroline nor Erika tried to take a shot at me; heck — I camped out with both of 'em over the last few days."

Both of them — Caroline had been obviously insane and died the next day, and Erika had followed that night by murdering a whole bunch of people, but he wasn't about to offer that detail. Brushing some hair out of his eyes, Connor looked around the area. Not a soul could be seen. His heart started to beat faster. He'd helped her out, fine. But now? To her, he had outlived his usefulness. Connor knew it would have been smarter to be a bit more diplomatic, but this girl thought that just because she'd killed someone and waved a gun around, she could talk to anyone she wanted, however she wanted. Terrified he may have been, but deep down inside, he was still Connor Lorenzen, and he wasn't about to let himself be walked over.

"So what now, Val?" After being called a sexist, Connor wasn't so easygoing that he was going to allow her the dignity of saying her full name. He may have been a lot of things, but he didn't believe sexist to be one of them. "Was the 'if' just a load of dog shit, or are you actually going to let me walk away?"

[Deamon]

"I'll take him in."

((Forrest Quin continued from i see u))

And here she was. New location, new plan, new group. It was a strange twist of fate. Somehow she had come out ahead. She didn't just have a group, she was leading a group. Not that she had done anything to deserve her good fortune. She was after all merely leeching off of the others, because that was how she rolled. Her main goal remained the same however. She wanted and needed to find Abe, the only issue was she had no idea where he was. Like herself, he had been a ghost. Showing up on the announcements neither as a victim or a killer. The only thing that would allow her to say he was on the island with any certainty is that he had been on the trip. She knew that because she had been with him that night, potentially the last time they'd be together.

Strictly speaking, though there was nothing to say they existed on the island as far as stats went. They'd had no quantifiable impact as far as the terrorists cared. Maybe that was the best way. Maybe that was their key to success. Regardless, she had numbers and it was easy to work with numbers. A group was the perfect hiding place, especially when you only had one working arm. It had been a good plan at the start. In fact, looking back she had probably made the right call leaving that group when she did. She was the only one of them left alive after all. The other three had all been murdered while she was still going strong. Winner was her, despite what logic may have dictated. But there was still an emptiness in her, no matter what she tried to raise her spirits.

Luckily enough she had stumbled upon something to take her mind off it. It was also a chance to add to the group, and she wasn't going to turn that down. She had taken the scene in from a distance, watched as it played out and now she was making her move. The recruiting drive was open and Connor was worth it. Good draft pick or whatever.

She held up her good hand in a half-wave at the pair using her index and middle fingers as she approached.

"I mean, it's better than the alternatives."

[Kermit]

"If you'd been paying attention the past six days, you'd understand there were ten people who were not afforded the privilege of walking away from Erika and Caroline. You'd understand almost half the class so far has been denied their right to walk away from this place."

Val exhaled through her nose in contemptuous disbelief.

"I can surmise you think the common feature of all your 'positive relationships' is you, yes? That the only reason you are alive is that you are 'Connor'? That," she paused in indignation, "that Erika would not have killed any one of those nine people had they just been 'Connor'? As if 'Connor' inherently deserves better than any other person here?"

A rainbow-haired girl approached and offered to take the boy in. Val briefly glanced over at her, then back at Connor. "You can go. Not because you are Connor, but because for the first time in your life, you've worked for what you needed."

She looked back at the rainbow girl. "You can have him. His self-conception - sranje -" she scratched her fingernails against metal again, "- his entitlement makes him a liability," she said, propping herself against the tree with one hand. In her other hand, she still aimed an empty gun in Connor Lorenzen's general direction.

[Cactus]

"You're damn right I walked away because I'm Connor." His shoulders were up; fear had given way to annoyance and the gun didn't matter anymore because she had questioned his integrity, and in no world; Chattanooga or Survival of the Fittest, was he going to stand for that.

"I saw Erika after she'd already murdered people; she was already far gone, and yet I extended a hand, talked to her like the human being that she is, that I know, and lo and behold, I ain't pushin' daisies in the ground. I feel sick about the other people, of course I do. But I'm still here, just like you are."

Inhaling sharply through his nose, he was aware of a secondary presence in the area and the only peripheral in his vision was a melange of rainbow colours that were unnatural to the forest they occupied. Natural, on the other hand, to a different type of 'Forrest', one whom he was silently thankful had arrived. His pride was about to push him over the edge and he couldn't imagine he'd be shot in front of witnesses.

"For the first—"

Connor pointed his own weapon at Valerija, his index figure of indignance.

"Now you listen here, darlin'," he added an extra layer of scorn and cranked his accent up to twelve, knowing how patronizing she would find it. "You have no idea what I have or haven't worked for in my life, so maybe instead of fantasizing about havin' what you don't and killing the people you say you care about to feel like a big girl, you should move along and think about why everyone you run into seems to want to hurt y'all."

Was she going to shoot him? She might — he'd basically asked for it, yet she hadn't taken any kind of aim yet, so he held out hope. What he'd done was stupid, and yet it was a bit of a trigger-point for him, but listening to someone question his work ethic was one of the few things that really made him steam. If he had to get shot to defend his own honour, so be it. He wasn't going to let some murderous nobody tell him who he was, just like he wasn't going to let anyone else make the decisions in his life for him.

Connor's adrenaline rushing, the fear subsided for the moment. Finally glancing over at the newfound rainbow in his midst, he nodded in her direction.

"Forrest. Great to see you."

It wasn't necessarily — they were more acquaintances than friends, but they'd always been friendly and Connor was more than happy to trade a murdering insecure social justice warrior for a hippy burnout.

He'd even throw future considerations into the deal.

[Tonyksin]

[Amelia Fischer Continued From i see u]

Forrest had gone ahead of her and Christina just a bit.

Amelia wasn’t the best at walking fast, so she understood. It wasn’t like she was far enough ahead that Amelia couldn't see the rainbow-haired girl at least, so she just continued at her own pace following dutifully behind. Another day had passed by rather uneventfully. Another night where she was too scared to sleep. She tried, she really, really did. But every noise the island made in the silence of the night broke any kind of sleep she attempted. She may have gotten an hour at most of undisturbed rest. She lied to the others and pretended she had slept, but it was getting harder and harder. That was also possibly why she was walking so slowly.

Amelia had to keep reminding herself what she was doing. Forrest and Christina being with her helped, but only a little. She remembered that she was on an island. She remembered that she was scared. But it felt like bits and pieces of things she ought to know were missing when she tried to think. She knew that Dolly was gone. She knew she hated the person who did it. But she couldn’t remember the name. It had been driving her mad all day. It was scary. She felt like she was losing herself. She did her best to seem okay, but they must have known there was something wrong. She was sure of it. Or maybe she was just being paranoid. She couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

Forrest had stopped up ahead. Amelia stopped for a second, too. Forrest was talking. That meant there were people. Or a person. Well, wasn’t that the same? Was it better if there were one person or multiple? One sounded dangerous, but two could be just as scary. But maybe not. She guessed it depended on the people or person. But what would she rather? She didn’t know. It was too hard to think too deeply. It made her head spin and hurt. But Forrest was talking and that meant she could possibly be in danger, right? Maybe? Or she could be fine, but still. Amelia was the protector. She had the gun.

Amelia walked over, gun held up and walked up next to Forrest. A girl and a boy. A very handsome and large boy. The girl had her gun pointed at the boy. So Amelia pointed her gun at the girl. That made sense, right?

“Guns are dangerous. You shouldn’t point them at people.”

Her sweet little brain didn’t comprehend the irony of what she was saying, since her gun was pointed at someone as well, but hey, any kind of thinking was going pretty rough for her right now so cut her some slack.