★

[Wham Yubeesling]

Verity Stewart had never really cared for the ocean.

((SS01: Begin))

It was the way she chose to give it its respect. It was like an album that everyone loved but her — she could see why people liked it, she could see how it changed everything from that point on, but it just wasn’t particularly her thing. Living in Miami meant that all throughout elementary school she’d been taught about how easy it was for the beach to kill you, and somewhere in all those lectures Verity wondered what was so worth the risk. She’d tried swimming in it and then she got hit by a wave and throttled all the way back to the starting point. She’d try surfing because one of her P.E teachers took the whole class out on a trip and she couldn’t even figure out how to stand on the board without it tipping beneath her. She’d tell the person next to her she wasn’t really all that into going to the beach during the get to know you games on the first day of high school and they’d go like “wait, really? you don’t like the beach? why do you live in Miami then?” as if she’d had a choice. As if she’d willingly decided to be born in Miami. As if she’d had any sort of control over the life she’d had so far.

She’d been born close to the ocean. It was only fair she’d die there as well. It was a circle. Retrograde. One thing in her life that had actually turned out cleanly.

She would’ve laughed, if she knew for sure it wouldn’t make her throw up.

She was at the very edge, holding onto and leaning over a railing that she really hoped wouldn’t snap under her weight and yeet her over. She would’ve tried standing up a little straighter, not putting all her mass into her hands, but she couldn’t help it. The knockout drug still had her. It’d taken her basically everything to stand up, look around. Now she was just trying to not get knocked out again. Felt appealing — lord knew she cherished the days where she could just stay in bed for several hours, drifting in and out of consciousness — but… no. End of her life. Kind of important. Kind of like a big exam or assessment — she knew she couldn’t be lazy. She knew she couldn’t procrastinate. She had to put all her effort in, do the best she could do, all for the privilege of mediocre results and more questions as to whether she was even worth it or not.

So she pushed herself. Stopped her head from drooping. Looked up from the sea below to the sky above. Saw the sunshine. The clouds. The horizon. The entire world beyond — micro and meso and macro. An entire audience about to watch the last days of Verity Stewart’s life.

How small she was, compared to everything.

And it was fine. Verity could breathe. Just had to do that. No need to listen to the voices in her head, no need to be scared about how the next couple days would go. The show hadn’t begun yet. She could just stand here.

Lean on the railing.

Look out at the ocean like she’d been doing all this time, and take in as much as she could until she was no longer the only person alive out here.

[Cicadan]

Long story short. He’d tried. Ish. Once upon a time he’d almost lived out the life of a noun in one of those YA fic Verity used to write back in the days when they might have cared about one another. He’d tried out verbs and tried on adjectives. He’d definitely, at some point, been born, and then all the rest of that junk had happened, like-

The Shortcake gear could have fit, it passed the eyeball test. He could have been wearing it right now if he hadn’t decided looking like an idiot mattered to him. There existed, in the nebulous form of arrhythmia, of heart pains irregular as the rest of his skittering heartbeat, a reason. A justification for the decisions he made. He couldn’t think of it, or he couldn’t remember that it existed. Another time, maybe.

Just like everything else. Shoulda coulda woulda. Gudda Gudda. Grocery bag.

((ES06: Begin))

tl;dr, he woke up, had an emotional crisis, wandered off after staring at the shitty mass-produced agonizingly hot girly pink dress the show producers had taunted him with. He had an inkling that the research on the kids they kidnapped for TV was pretty thorough. It was entirely possible the interns for this season knew more about Tim’s psyche and awkward fetishes and incorrect instincts than Tim himself did.

Tim hadn’t, like, watched any of those behind-the-scenes type shows in awhile. He had vague blur out-of-focus dodge-and-burn-tool memories that felt like meme photoshops that everyone else thought were hilarious except for him because he didn’t get the punchline, so on. Supposedly he’d once known facts about SOTF-TV, but if you asked him about it now he wasn’t sure where he was, why he was there, what he was supposed to do.

Resting a ways ahead of him, that was someone he knew.

Resting. Was that her body language? He wanted to hazard a guess… she didn’t look tired or defeated or anything, if he was allowed to guess. She was staring at the world, top to bottom, maybe wondering which direction she’d be going when some kid whose name he didn’t remember who’d shared five classes with him this year gunned her down.

He, meanwhile, was staring at her. Trying to remember something. Some fragment of the friendship they’d once shared.

He missed those times with Verity, he guessed. Much as he’d tried (and succeeded) at drowning out the more vivid things that tried to tickle his five senses with Shortcake reruns and shitty EDM. Okay, honestly Explosion Collar was actually pretty good? Even if Fantano kept calling them derivative and edgeless. He was probably right about that take? Something about four-chord progressions and Skrillex-rip off bass, Tim in theory knew what Fantano was talking about. Tim just wasn’t particularly sure why he had to believe it. But someone had said it, and presumably they were smarter than Tim, and that logic was about as far as Tim needed to go to be reluctantly convinced? He guessed.

“I should know better than to ask if you’re alright but…”

Force of habit, consciously forced out.

Tim didn’t stare right at her, watching the weeds that had gnarled around the railings slender foundations. Felt wrong to look her in the eye for some reason. He kept his hands out in the open, distractedly patting his thighs, distractedly struggling to come up with a distraction.

[Wham Yubeesling]

There hadn’t been a starting gun.

But that wasn’t a surprise. Verity had never particularly had any real revolutionary takes on the show — only so much you could really think for yourself if the way you experienced the show was only in other people’s opinions on it — but something she’d always loved was how nobody’s game began at the same time as someone else. There was always that thing Buckley did during the briefing where he was like ‘ready to die? no? then perish’ but that was never when the game started — sometimes you were Clint Craig and you murdered someone for their weapon less than ten seconds after the game began, sometimes you were Jim James and you did nothing for three days and then died. It was about adjustment. How long until you realized you were no longer in the world where this was all a TV show? How much time before you had to give up the normal you once knew for the normal that passed around here? Where your life could end at any second? Where you had to kill if you didn’t want to be kill?

That was now, for her. Now there was another person here with her. Now she couldn’t pretend that she was the only person awake. It was a nice image to entertain, while she rippled and swayed over this railing like the ocean below her, but she knew she had to give it up. The game was afoot now, for better or worse. Pretending it hadn’t would only get her killed.

((SS01: Begin))

She recognized the voice behind her, but she didn’t turn around to meet him. Too much effort. She just-

“vuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

-surfed the wave of nausea that had just overtaken her. Let that illustrate how she felt about the whole thing. Felt her insides reach shore again, realized that those were actually pretty terrible first words for TV, and course corrected. Tried to stand up on her own metaphorical board.

“No. I’m. I’m fine. It’s just, uh, the gas is kinda…”

She honestly didn’t even know how talking could’ve been given an extra difficulty setting. She knew that there were some people at Mangrove who took this stuff for fun.

“Did you…? Gas.”

Was this what life was always like for them?

“Did… the gas? Do anything like this to you?”

[Cicadan]

She sounded awful... ly familiar, or just awful in general. Tim wanted to wince in sympathy, but the impulse to feel as nauseous as Verity sounded was a bit slow. They didn’t share their pains in any amount of real time.

They were suffering from the same malady. A bit too much SOTF-TV, all of a sudden. Tim was still hesitating to say the words- that he understood, that he got it. Still didn’t feel right.

((ES06: Begin))

The gas. Gas gas gas, he’s going to step on the gas? Tim had forgotten about the gas, actually. It’d happened and he’d been there, but maybe he might as well have not been. He felt okay. A bit empty-headed, but obviously that wasn’t unique to the circumstances.

“Hm… I woke up alright, dude, like? Like, after a long sleep. Hard to get up but…”

Something something, ‘had to go to school eventually’. The words cramped his throat, then he swallowed them down on a delay.

“I dunno how long the effects last. Did this happen in a previous season maybe?”

Tim walked a bit closer- specifically, towards the edge that Verity was clinging to. Not any closer to her. Just to be safe… Maybe? His joints bent and straightened in a coordinated way, but nobody he knew was doing the coordination. He found his own spot, equidistant from Verity, from the camera watching. The ocean looked nice, but in a vague way. Could’ve been postcard paint more than it actually spilled into his own two eyes.

“Forgot, I guess.”

He knew… some seasons? Not a lot. Still hadn’t caught up on that long backlog of classics the internet had recommended.

[Wham Yubeesling]

“Kind of… like, a lot.”

Of seasons. A lot of seasons. She’d just kind of slipped on her surfboard and fallen right into the wave but what she meant to say was that this happened in a lot of seasons. Sometimes a couple people woke up before they were 100% okay to wake up so they just sometimes stood up and walked around and in general either looked like they were drunk and/or infected with something. Most of the time they couldn’t really handle being awake and dropped right back to sleep again. Some of the time they were able to get awake enough to stay as such. Do things. Get a couple minutes ahead of the rest of the competition when it came to…

Came to…

Came to something. Something Verity wasn’t going to get, if this…

Her body throttled like her dad had been speeding and he suddenly had to break. One of her knees buckled out from beneath her. There was a second where suddenly she really needed the railing in front of her to keep from going the way of the many people who woke up then immediately conked back out.

Then there was another second.

Her knee fixed itself. Her mind woke itself up a little more. The wave had passed, but she was still feeling a little water… water… waterlogged. That was the word.

“Game isn’t... started yet,” she said, a little more clear than her previous sentence. “We’re not supposed to be here.”

[Cicadan]

A lot of seasons, yeah. That was right, for sure. The words of someone who knew more than Tim did always became a persistent echo in the depths of his mind. There was a seismograph down there solely, recording all the errant vibrations that hit his ears even if he didn’t like the sound of ‘em much. Scrolls of paper, whole temples worth of other people’s opinions, all had to be saved and archived.

Tim listened to the foamy crash of the ocean, licking at the rocks far below them. He tested out the railing with a Leviosa (oof, not a good reference), a swish and flick of the wrist. He was pretty sure a casual step forward would end in him falling into the ocean, when his bony hips smacked into the safety guard and it casually caved in.

He didn’t want to do it, he guessed, but somehow it was still a temptation? Something kind of cool about indulging the sensation of living life on the edge, something like that.

“Wait, what do you mean?”

He actually was not sure what she was talking about? He knew she knew her shit, as an eminent SOTF nerd, AKA, someone far more normal and in the mainstream than he was. She probably wouldn’t have appreciated being called a normie. He didn’t know. It’d been a while since she’d been anything besides the memory of a friend.

“This is it, isn’t it? We can start… killing people, like. Right now.”

He relaxed his spine, settling onto his perch.

[Wham Yubeesling]

“Not-”

Ti-

“Not yet.”

Time to stop looking at the ocean.

She turned. Or, like, rotated. She kept one hand on the railing as her body turned, as she made her back face the ocean rather than the front. She didn’t look at Timothy. She looked past him, at the… room. On the top of the ship. A room thing.. Looked out for… that. Looked out for that.

“See that?”

She pointed at a camera, roughly five or so metres away from the two of them. It was pointing at the floor. No lights. Didn’t look like it was on.

“Game… hasn’t started yet. Not yet. We’re-... early.”

The wave hit again, but it wasn’t so bad this time. She could still stand. She could still adjust the... really ugly blue sash that she’d put between her parka and her shirt, from her left shoulder to her right hip. She could still stare at the camera as the lights came on, as it perked, moved, started staring at the both of them.

“We’re up early. Feeds don’t-” Wave. Tumble. Cede. Wasn’t as bad as the last one, but it sure still made talking suck. “Feeds don’t start for another half hour. Anything we do here is for the episode itself. Not for- not for audience.”

[Cicadan]

He hadn’t noticed. The shape of a camera had been too self apparent? He guessed he hadn’t actually looked at it until just then. One of those mental shortcuts- two-dimensional shadows came to life and came to evil when they lurked in the corner of his eye.

“Oh, yeah. I remember now.”

He’d forgotten. There was just a difference in how he expressed that fact, the amount of syllables he used on the different sides of his skull.

He saw her looking his way, the same way someone saw the themself-shaped void of sun-avoidant blob that followed themselves after the fact. An afterimage, an academic fact more than it was really there and only apparent if they tried to look for it… Yeah. Tim still didn’t really know why they didn’t talk anymore? It had stopped at some point and it had become an acceptable fact of life some time before the true point of cessation. Tim continued to not really look at Verity as he checked his bag. Kind of seeing her had reminded him of something he’d heard of on his aggregator sites: the secondhand secondhand from Twitter and Reddit.

The teams. He’d seen like… enough clips of Jewel to hate her like all the pundits and talking heads told him to to know her colors. It’d taken him longer than it should’ve to get it had been intended as a reference to the white whale.

“You mean like, their bonus footage or whatever? I remember one of the Seasons… uh, twenty something. Supposedly there was a sex scene that happened before the cameras started that never got put into compilations and the diehards for that season are still hunting through old archives from, like, garage sales of the old show producers or whatever.”

An outdated-feeling factoid for an outdated-feeling dude. His hand sifted through his bag, through the soft silky folds of the dress he’d packed as if he’d ever find the right time to wear it. His own team colors were in there and he just hadn’t recognized what they’d meant until now. He didn’t even remember the specific shade, some sort of generic white.

Different color from Verity’s, for sure.

“Good thing, isn’t it? Like… you look horrible right now, no offense.” His sympathy pains stayed on his side of the invisible wall between them, his face stayed accidentally neutral. “If I were anyone else it might already be click click and lights out or… yeah.”

[Wham Yubeesling]

“More like the episodes that air. If… if what happens here matters enough. If we matter.”

One last wave. More like one more wave, but the way the malaise felt like it was happening to someone else told Verity that it wasn’t going to be a problem any longer. The light around her was kind of being a jerk right now, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d make it to the other end of this ship even if she put her mind to it, but the stuff wasn’t affecting her brain. Or, like, affecting much of her brain. Anything she said here wasn’t going to be garbled because she was still stoned on whatever drugs got put in her. Anything she said here was going to be garbled because she was Verity Stewart and the amount of times she’d spoke a non-garbled sentence this year was probably only in the double digits.

But she was awake. Mostly. So long as she was looking at Timothy her eyes wouldn’t scream at her so hard.

He was…

He was…

Cosplaying. Maybe. Almost crossdressing. Verity had seen him do it before. It was fucking weird, but she hadn’t judged. He just kinda liked doing that. Just kinda liked doing a lot of things. Like talking to strangers at bandcamps. Like showing her better RP forums than she’d ever been on. Like looking at her writing, occasionally. Killing her darlings. Making her concise and minimalistic like everyone wanted her to be, for some reason. He hadn’t done any of it this year — Verity hadn’t interacted with him at all this year, god did 12th grade blow — but it was appreciated regardless. He was a friend. Or, well, as close to a friend as she could have in this day and age. Even if they didn’t talk now, even if Verity basically hung out in the Mental Health Benefit Room Which Actually Had A Different Name But Verity Couldn’t Remember What It Was Right Now every time she could. Timothy was a person. Timothy saw Verity as a person. He mattered.

And now he was going to die. Same as Verity. It was either one or both. No inbetweens.

“Yeah… RIP you. Rip us.”

God, had this game not begun for Verity yet.

“What-”

She took a breath.

“What are you going to do? Out here.”

[Cicadan]

“If we matter. Huh.”

Well he probably didn’t need to repeat it if he had nothing to add besides verbalization to the effect of having nothing to add. Tim watched Verity continue to look like she was going to puke. From a distance that was probably out of range of the projectile vomit. But still didn’t feel all that safe? Tim’s impulses were to go backwards to protect himself or to go forwards to pretend he didn’t even consider the more selfish option. He could’ve-

Okay ha no way platonic touch was on the table, why had he even thought that? He knew who she was, he knew who he himself was and the jury was somehow out on which concept he knew less.

And in the end, of course, he stayed stock stil. Thighs slowly growing moss and rust and barnacles out here.

“F to pay respects,” he committed to the conversation(?), as noncommittal as his empty and desolate head could produce anything at all out of the generator output of an understaffed power station.

“... Dunno.” He took his damn sweet time breathing instead of articulating. “Well. Uh, what are you gonna do?”

[Wham Yubeesling]

“God.”

She stopped looking at Tim. Tilted her head upwards. Just kinda stopped looking at everything. Even the sky was just kinda not there right now because she was trying (emphasis: trying) to think and when she thought about things she just kind of stopped thinking about the world around her and forgot that important thing called ‘spatial detail.’ All her critics called her out on it. Probably pretty fairly. She’d never felt like she was good at physical description back when she was 13 and actually had to walk the talk of ‘I’m gonna grow up and become the next Stephen King’ and so when she was 14 and she started RPing for the first time she just decided to fuck that shit. Not use physical description at all. Dab on all the haters.

She wanted to be like that right now. She wanted to think things through. She wanted to be like one of her characters and in the two second gap between individual lines of dialogue consider everything that had happened in her life up until now and determine just what path her life took next. Navel gaze. Quite literally navel gaze. She wasn’t actually looking at the ocean right now but god. She was going to die in the next few days. At least give her the opportunity to use some fun language.

Think about things.

See this through.

…

…

It wasn’t working. Nobody could just phase out and start thinking like that. There was a sky and a sun and a set of clouds up above. There was a Timothy and a live camera in front. There was a railing behind her. There was an endless ocean far, far below her. There was a whole bunch of things about the world beyond that she’d already gazed about, right when this game hadn’t quite begun yet.

But it had begun.

She was here. In a place. In a space and in a world.

This was real life. She was here. Had to… adjust. Had to try and redefine. Or else.

((SS01: Begin))

“I dunno. What I always thought I’d do, I guess.”

Translation: be really pathetic and then die. Not even begin to meet the expectations she had of herself. Be completely forgotten in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah.

That was her.

[Cicadan]

Well that had been a productive spot of dialogue between two naturals. So much for the ‘hope I shape up and start being clutch when the apocalypse comes’ hopes and dreams of his. They’d vibed in mutual awkwardness and the most productive thing Tim had done had been staring at… the roll of the ocean waves, the rust starting to claim the rails creeping out of the earth. Verity, occasionally. He had some words for the scenery: paradoxically bone-dry, parched, thirsty. The podunk middle-of-nowhere edge of the world that people could fall over and never be seen again. He had more words for worldbuilding than he did for saving them or even saving himself. Useful, right? Eesh. He was going to die the same chump he’d been intending to live as.

Verity had different plans. Tim suddenly remembered, with whiplash to the neck and clarity polluting his vision.

He almost felt legitimately shocked for a moment. Almost had to start burning energy on actually thinking of excuses. She was just bluffing. She’d chicken out like anyone realistically would. He could run faster than her.

Who cared, really? Any amount of fear or righteousness or concern he could have for Verity or aim at her or throw in her face (knocking her off the front of this ship, they were still in a particularly precarious place such as that, he’d only kind of forgotten) would be wasted, wouldn’t it? Even if this was going to be a problem it wasn’t like Tim could do anything about it. No action hero muscles or magical girl transformations to yoink out of his poorly-fit-denim-clad ass.

No RNG, no rolls. Tim couldn’t fluke a win or be saved because someone happened to like his characterization. As if.

“You’re gonna… kill people, right?” His tone betrayed nothing, because he accidentally wasn’t trying to say anything.

[Wham Yubeesling]

“What?”

Her eyes went from the sky back at Timothy. She just… stared. Into his eyes, but not quite into his eyes. At his face. At his eyes. Nothing at whatever was beyond the surface level.

“No? What? What the fuck?”

[Cicadan]

“Oh, uh. Sorry.”

Tim only saw the floor. Anything else was a detail irrelevant to his state of mind: defeated, crushed, as if hearing the word no was as powerful a rebuke as getting shot and added to someone’s kill counter. He touched the dirt with the tip of his shoe. Rolled his toes, up and down. He almost glanced up at Verity when he found more things to say and unnecessarily said them but he didn’t quite manage the transition from Point A to Point Ayyyyy.

“I just remembered you said something like that. First time we met, that stupid band camp I always went to even though I sucked and didn’’t practice?”

He remembered that part more than the good times they’d shared back then. Remembering mistakes and cringe was Tim’s claim to Zoomerism. Finally Tim looked up and shrugged kind of in Verity’s direction if he generalized.

“I was about to say I probably had to stop you- I know, totally believable- but it’s good to know we’re in the same boat of running around trying to not die…” Tim tried to sigh but didn’t have the conviction. Came out like a cough. “Like, delaying the inevitable. I guess.”

[Wham Yubeesling]

“What?”

It was like one of the waves. She’d been hit and plowed and completely submerged in the wake of it to the point where every part of her skin was defined by how the wave was pounding it except instead of the malaise and tiredness and the feeling that your body really just wanted to stop doing stuff it was something else. Bafflement. Vexation. When someone in class said something you absolutely could not believe that they believed and you just had to join in the queue of people ganging up on them going ‘lmao what the absolute fuck, dude.’ No. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Verity wasn’t even sure if she’d actually heard all the words he said in there because what the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck.

“It’s not- no.”

Her voice had raised, somewhere in there. Wasn’t a shout, but it wasn’t the level she’d been when she looked calmer.

“People just… say those things. When they’re mad. When they’re fourteen and’ve been at this shitty school for over a year and have had to deal with every thing and person inside it. They don’t-”

Breath. Heavier than the ones she might’ve given before. Like she was in the ocean. Like it was her last gasp.

“They don’t mean that. Like-”