I suppose there was no way to know what had to happen

[Yonagoda]

Vasily considered tossing his clothes to the sea, but that wouldn’t really work well for him. It wasn’t like he was the opportunistic gross kind of person to sell them once he got out or anything, but he had no energy to find other clothes and he didn’t want to put on a shirt that advertised a team he didn’t feel like he belonged to nor a shirt that advertised a brand that he never consumed. Fuck Nestle.

Fuck all of this, actually.

He didn’t know how many seconds it took for the water to heat up, if it would heat up at all. He hated waiting sometimes, and his skin was shivering. He had been on a lot of cruises before and none of them had showers that were easy to figure out.

His hand dipped under the spray of water. Slightly too cold. He adjusted the knob. Slightly too hot. He adjusted again. Way too cold. Again. Too hot. Again. Too cold. Again. Too hot.

Fine, he’ll just bear with it.

The stinging on all his skin takes his mind off of things, anyways.

There still wasn’t a very clear answer of why he continued to do what he did with the dead body. It was something that he has been wondering about for a long time. It made him uncomfortable how comfortable he was. Maybe he just needed to build himself up. He told himself that he was going to do the worst things socially acceptable to do on this show so that he could prove to himself that he was capable of doing it to survive, but he wasn’t really sure how his brain came to all the conclusions it did. It just gave him a whim, and he sometimes likes to follow whims.

Well, that was a theory he came up with, anyways.

He would never know, and he wouldn’t try to justify it out loud unless he figured it out.

Well, that was just a promise he made on a whim, anyways.

There doesn’t have to be a justification. There doesn’t have to be correct characterizations or characterizations at all. He wasn’t just a product. He wasn’t just meat. He wasn’t just pixels on a screen. He wasn’t just words in a script. He was himself. He wasn’t anybody else. He was just himself.

He was just a naked little boy crying underneath the scalding shower.

He missed himself. He mourned himself.

This wasn’t a body he was comfortable in. This wasn’t a person he was comfortable being.

When he sunk into the bed, his comfort was a feeble little thing wrapped in layers of fear and paranoia. He closed the door. There wasn’t a lock. The average person needed 8 hours of sleep every day and you could only last 11 days without sleep. The symptoms of insomnia include everything from physical weakness to hallucinations, which Vasily absolutely did not want at all.

He wished there was a warm body by his bed. He wished that he was back home. He wished he was in a place where he felt safe and secure and loved and when he woke up he could wrap his hands around someone and give them the love that he wanted to give to people.

The pillows smelled like dust and detergent. It didn’t smell like a person, but he wrapped his hands around it anyways. He wanted that smell to sink into him.

His mind was dreamless. It just shut down, like an odd little robot. The human body was a machine, after all.



And when it powered up, there were still little glitches in the system. Problems that won’t be solved by a system reboot. Something something death equals powering down something.

He got his metaphors mixed up.

He looked over his clothing options, and sighed. Of course he got the pirate costume. Of course they gave him a skirt. Of course. Of course. Why wouldn’t they?

He put the track pants on. The white blouse. His socks, but not his boots yet, and nothing else. The gloves will stay in the defiled hall where they belonged.

There weren’t any eye drops, and he slept with the contact lens in. To be quite honest, Vasily wasn’t really sure what to do and he sure as hell hated himself for forgetting, because he has been told dozens of scare stories of bad little children who got eye infections that way, and he really didn’t want to be known as the first kid on SOTF to become blind with this stupid mistake.

Fuck it. Better now than later. He took out the saline solution, and then did some cleaning and tried his best to put it back in awkwardly.

And his prosthetic eye also felt rather dry and a little uncomfortable. He hadn’t cleaned it for a while, and looking back he should have put the eyepatch on when he was swimming, because the chlorinated water felt like it could have caused irritation. Vasily couldn’t find any baby shampoo to clean the eye with and he wasn’t sure if regular shampoo worked, and it’s not like he had bigger things to worry about right now, like killing people and not dying, so he just removed it and dropped it in his pocket, and then snapped his own (medical!) eyepatch on over the empty socket.

That was… a small percentage of his morning routine done?

There were no toothbrushes, so he substituted with rinsing his mouth with tap water and then chewing on a mint lifesaver.

He went to the bathroom, and then, uh, went to the bathroom, and then he stuffed a roll of toilet paper in his bag.

He went to bed with his hair wet, and when he took the bandanna off and quickly re-wrapped it around his wrist, the ends flew all over the place.

He’s always hated tuna salad, and he wasn’t really sure if it was good to eat after a day anyways, so he just decided to not risk food poisoning and threw it out and tried to convince himself that eating oyster crackers, seaweed, and some bread and gatorade for breakfast is a completely good decision. Almost like cocaine, but he was pretty sure he didn’t do enough to seriously affect him anyways.

He didn’t usually do night stretches, nor morning ones, but he gave himself five minutes to try to sort his joints out.

And… that was it? Probably. If he missed anything important, then it wasn’t important. He made do the best that he could.

He looked in the mirror- with his white ruffled blouse and none of his piercings screwed in (oh, so that’s what he forgot), hair a mess and with no makeup, eyebrows pale enough to disappear into his skin tone. The whole pool thing from yesterday thankfully did not cause any significant damage, but he still felt just a tad more burnt. It didn’t feel like it was him. It wasn’t the Vasily that he tried to make sure everybody saw- the rebel, the fashionista, the one in control of himself. This version of himself felt like it wasn’t real, which was stupid because in the end this was the real him.

It wasn’t the version of himself that the audience saw yesterday.

Good. That wasn’t himself.

The blouse and the track pants being combined was hideous even when he wasn’t on national television, but was he really vain enough to look for better pants?

Yes. He was. He absolutely was. It was all for himself, anyways. Self care. All that shit. He opened a few doors, looked through a few rooms, found a pair of too-loose black pants, and immediately changed into them, still using his old belt. He isn’t going to wear fucking aquamarine pants on national TV.

Allright, now he was done. Probably.

No. No he really wasn’t. Fuck.

He still had a lot of pent-up energy in him. It really wasn’t something that he could help. He usually was the opposite of energetic.

There were still words in his throat.

“Hey, audience. I know this sounds lame and that I probably shouldn’t, like, make a point or whatever.”

He sat down on the bed, fingers twiddling against each other.

“But I just wanna, like, apologize to Mrs. Evan’s family and maybe clear up some misconceptions? I know what I did made me look bad, but, like, I think most of y’all don’t know that I respected Calla a lot. Like, she was really cool and shit. And I don’t really want her legacy to just be this, y’know. I don’t want her to just be known for dying early and for someone pulling an AnArchy or whatever with her.”

He sighed.

“Calla was super into Survival of the fittest, and all things that involved death. I was, too. We were both kind of morbid, and weird, and at times a little bit annoying, but she had the guts- absolutely no pun intended oh my god- but yeah, she, like, she really wasn’t afraid to be who she was. She had all these strong opinions that she was unafraid to defend, and I think she probably would have wanted to be known for cooler stuff? Survival of the fittest wasn’t just a hobby, it was a passion for the both of us, and it was really rare for me to be able to… I guess I connect to someone who’s also into the same dark stuff. She once told me that one of her favorite contestants was Agustin Olivera. I think she streams, but I’m not sure what. She had really good grades-like, she’s really smart, and she just knows a lot, and she was real fucking cool, OK? I wished I was like her sometimes.”

He couldn’t stop his legs from bouncing. He looked down and his hands were shaking.

“I have a lot of things to say to and about Calla. Do you know that she absolutely hated Jewel? Like, it’s weird cause they’re so alike. She even listened to The Cure. And I guess the least that I could do is to maybe ask people to not focus on that. Or her and Cassini Evans, too. I don’t really think I deserve to talk about her after that. I think her ghost’s pissed at me.”

“Anyways, thanks for listening if you listened. And no, I didn’t enjoy doing that to her. I probably wouldn’t do it if I knew what was going to happen. I won’t explain it, either. But i think if she were alive to watch that, she might have found it pretty cool. It’s probably the sort of fucked up shit she’s into. Oh, and, uh, I can’t say shit about Seth ‘cause I don’t know shit about him. Sorry ‘bout that.”

Should he ask anything else?

“Actually, no. Mr and Mrs. Dunn, I’m sorry. I guess I do know some things about him. Seth was, well, I haven’t really talked to him much before but he really tried his best, you know? I think maybe he had a great sense of justice. I feel like maybe he could have been a decently nice dude, and what happened was terrible, but I had to do it. Mr and Mrs. Evans, I want you to know that you raised a great, intelligent, and passionate daughter. Calla was someone that deserved better, especially after she died, and I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. Dear… Ms. Evans, ha, um. Dear Cassini’s mom and grandmother: Cass was full of spirit, and she was brave and she always stood out. I never got the zodiac as a hobby, but you know what? I respect that. I think that she died hating me. I hate that. And to Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez- Ivan was a cunt and to be honest while your podcast was OK, he was also kind of fucking insane. Like who the fuck trains their entire life because they want to be on here? Like, yeah, we were kinda friends but holy shit dude what did you feed him as a kid?”

That’s it. He put his boots on and pretended it never happened.

“Anyways, I’m done here. Now continue to, like, jack off to porn of dead teens.”

He walked out of the door with everything in his hands.

"Oh, and. Don't think you know me just by what I said. Don't think you know who all these kids whos lives I ruined or ended just by what I said. 'cuz you'll never know any of them. They're dead, and their thoughts died with them, and you should probably stop speculating about whatever drove them to do whatever."