I Never Said That I Was Brave

[delicateMachine]

((Boredom had no right to rank among the dangers of the island.))

Still, the tedium was beginning to weigh on Alice's mind. Everything had been quiet since Chuck and Saachi left to presumably murder each other. She sat against the stairwell wall atop the lighthouse, facing the area opposite the cliffs. Low enough that she wouldn't be easily seen, but still able to scan her surroundings for an early warning of any threats.

There hadn't been any threats. She almost wished there was one, irrational as the thought was, just to scare her back into being able to pay full attention. Her life was depending on her ability to react to any danger, but she just. Couldn't. Focus. Her eyes glazed over, and she found herself idly wondering about what her cat was doing, or the Cleric build she'd been wanting to try out (she'd banned herself from thinking of family and friends, at least directly) until a wave crash or gull cry shocked her into realizing her inattentiveness.

She was really feeling her solitude for the first time since Eris had died. No one to share the burden with, no one to keep her mind sharp, no one left she could ever trust to give her even the slightest relief. She was, in a way, grateful that the terrorists had confiscated her sketchbook. It couldn't tempt her away from her vigil.

Alice sighed, hugging her legs. She quietly hummed an ode to progress and technology and tried to remind herself that she'd have a lifetime of fascinating endeavors ahead of her. She could pay the price of a week or so of tedium, broken up by explosions of fear. She had to earn her place.

[Latin For Dragula]

((PLEASE))

It entered through the front door. No attempts were made to hide its presence. Its loud, resounding steps up the stairwell could almost be taken as an announcement.

She would be here. It knew she would be here. It just knew.
This isn't how we do this.
It's how I do this.

It climbed slow and deliberate, one step at a time. There was no need to rush. She would hear it. She might try to hide, but the only escape was at its back. She might try to fight, but it had taken her once before.

Half-way up the steps it began to slowly tap its gun against the wall as it walked.

[delicateMachine]

Fuck.

Even through her dull haze of existence, it hadn't been hard for Alice to spot Katarina - she was the only moving thing for hundreds of feet around.

It was already too late to run without being seen, and Katarina had a gun, not a nigh-useless crossbow - Alice couldn't risk hoping for miraculous inaccuracy with no cover in sight. Katarina knew she was here, too. If it had been anyone else, she might've hoped it was a coincidence, that they'd soon veer off to terrorize a different locale, but Eris's body was gone.

Katarina would know that someone who cared was still around.

Alice began to hyperventilate as she ducked down out of sight, for what little good it would do her. Would she hide, and try to slip away through some superhuman display of dexterity and guile? Would she fight, and face someone she'd soundly lost to with two other people backing her up? Katarina knew Alice was there. but she didn't know exactly where. That was the only advantage she had, and it was inexorably ticking away, faceless and callous like the cuckoo clock she had dismantled so long ago.

Footsteps. Knocks. She didn't have time. Sure, she'd planned, she'd had nothing else to do, but execution was her weakest point.

Alice pressed her back against the cylindrical wall, opposite of where Katarina would emerge. Would she immediately circle the tower to finish off her search? Would she take a moment to scan the horizon? Alice would only have seconds to realize, to react. She deliberately breathed calmed her breath, tried to will her heart to slow. She wasn't dead yet. She had to start thinking in terms of possible, not probable, for once in her life.

[Latin For Dragula]

You can't just walk in. She'll shoot us. Or attack us from behind. Or grab the gun. She's already tried before, I remember, if that's what this is about I remember it all fine fine fine just stop sto-
This is what I do. I'll do it however I want.
...
You never got it. You kept trying to convince yourself they weren't your friends. They weren't human. They weren't even really alive. But they were. You always knew they were. That's why you hesitated.
...
They're human. We're not.
I am.
I'm not. And I'm you.

It stood in the door way scanning the wide expanse of dark sky before it. It never made it this far last time. There had been no time to deliberate on where the girl could be hiding. The gap in its knowledge hardly registered though. The walkway rounded in a circle. It began to walk with one slow, loud step at a time, letting each one echo through the air for a few seconds before the next. She would be found, either deep in her hiding hole or trying to make a mad break for the exit. And It was in no rush.

[delicateMachine]

Step. Silence. Step. Silence. Each closer than the last. Slow, deliberate. Katarina was posturing, and this irked and intimidated Alice in equal measure.

Holding her breath, Alice crept alongside the wall, moving in the opposite direction than Katarina approaching from. The walkway was wide, but it wasn't that wide. She could buy herself a few more seconds, but this wasn't sustainable. Her foot would land just a bit too hard, or she would breathe just a bit too loud, and then it'd be over. Katarina would know where she was, and she'd lose her only advantage.

Katarina stepped. Alice stepped. Twice. This was ridiculous. Even if she managed to sneak undetected to the stairwell entrance, she wouldn't be able to descend its length before Katarina realized what was going on. Even without her bag, the other girl would be faster, and her bullets would be fastest of all. This wasn't a solution. This wasn't even an effective postponement.

Her pursuer was making a show out of this. Flaunting that she had the upper hand. It was true, but Katarina had no way of knowing that. No way of knowing that Alice hadn't found a gun or even a knife in the day since they had met, no guarantee that she wasn't stomping straight into an ambush. How the hell was she still alive? How had no one punished her for her overconfidence yet? Had she siphoned away some of Irene's luck when she blasted the girl's fingers off?

Alice had the superior position. She had the superior strategy. She had a proper reason to live. All she was missing was the proper tools. She objectively deserved to win, here; but the world had to flaunt its arbitrariness again, didn't it?

Her entire life, she had thought of uncertainty as a fatal specter, lying waste as it pleased to every plan in its ever-shifting grasp, no matter how strong, no matter how considered.

Here, though, discord would be her knife, even if she had to grasp it by the blade. She didn't know what the hell was going to happen, but neither would Katarina, for a vital few seconds. No matter how much chaos engulfed her, she was certain of one thing:

Alice Gilman was not going to cower, or run, or in any way allow herself be effortlessly murdered by a complete fucking imbecile.

When Katarina circled into sight, Alice charged. She would claw, and bite, and gouge, and make Katarina bleed for every future she had stolen.

[Latin For Dragula]

She screamed and she charged and she caught It offguard to a measure. When their bodies collided it was all It could do to get an arm up between them as Its back was forced against the railing. Cold metal pressed painfully into Its back to remind It that there was nothing comforting standing between it and toppling over to the ground below. If Alice kept pressing, and It kept failing to respond, there was only one conclusion. That much was obvious.

At least it would have been if that was the game It was playing. But It didn't feel the cold against Its back. It didn't notice the scratch marks across Its face from her flailing swipes. The strain against Its arm didn't factor into its plan. If Katarina noticed these things she chose not to comment on them, or the fact that It hadn't been using Its right arm to fight back.

Neither Katarina nor Alice would notice the barrel of the gun creeping inch by inch as the struggled until it was pointed right at Alice's knee.

No one within earshot could miss the following gunshot, though.

[delicateMachine]

There was no room for thought. Alice tackled Katarina and pushed her against the railing, Katarina failed to plummet over the edge. This was a problem. So she struggled, and she clawed at the face of the girl who had murdered her best friend, hoping to catch her off guard or to at least catch an eye, and she ignored the pain as the wound in her right arm began to reopen, and she mustered every measurable portion of her meager physical strength to not fail the brain that had gotten her body this far.

If there had been room for thought, she would be considering this:

If you repeated this exact scenario a hundred different times, with a hundred different Alices and Katarinas, what would your findings be? How many Katarinas would fail and fall to their death, whether it be from a snapped neck or the more excruciating killer of two shattered legs? How many would claw their way back to a solid foothold?

How many Alices, then, would manage to get the gun away from her? How many would turn the tables and claim the weapon outright, securing victory with the single twitch of a trigger? How many would kick the weapon out of Katarina’s reach, only to find that they would have much preferred a bullet to being beaten bloody and senseless?

Was Alice aiming to be a statistical outlier? Had her ambush earned her the right to enjoy the comfort of probability on her side, or was she doomed from the start? Would looking at a graph of her chances of survival help her rationalize what was to come, the comfort of cold certainty that only hard numbers could give?

What would happen if you increased the sample size, then? Or if you took into account the multiple possible plans available to her? Would running and hiding have been viable, after all? How many Alices would catch a gunshot between the shoulder blades, how many would be spared by the combination of distance and an untrained markswoman? Was there a way out that she hadn’t even considered?

What if you widened the scope of the experiment to cover the entire length of her stay on the island? How many Alices would have left the lighthouse after Eris died? How many would have kept the harpoon gun? How many would have shot Irene with it? How many would have convinced how many Erises to head elsewhere? How many would have never climbed up the looming spiral staircase in the first place? How many would have gotten sick on the day of the field trip?

No matter how many Alices could have survived, the gunshot brusquely announced that this Alice wouldn’t be one of them.

She cried out in pain and shock, collapsed backwards as her leg gave out from under her, releasing Katarina. She tried to catch herself with her right arm, but that, too, failed her. She ungraciously collapsed face first into the floor.

Alice could have scrambled towards the door, could have crawled on one good arm and one good leg only to tumble down the length of the stairwell. Instead, she pushed herself off the floor, supported her back against the wall, sitting up.

Pride was a slow killer and dignity was worthless; but if the outcome was inevitable, Alice would prefer to look her murderer in the eyes.

[Latin For Dragula]

Fine. It worked.
It stared at her defiance.
It worked.
She didn't understand.
We should finish this and leave before someone comes.
It would make her.
Stop that.
For Alice their exchange lasted a second, maybe less. But It would make sure it lasted much, much longer for Katarina.
What are you-
It shot her in her foot.
She's alrea-
Other knee.
You c-
Shoulder.
Ther-
Other foot.
I-
Stomach.
STOP
It had paid no more attention to whatever jerking white noise Alice emitted than It had to whatever pain she had caused them. All of Its focus was on carrying on to the next shot.
But she saw it. She saw everything. The barrel jerking, the sound echoing through the air around them, Alice's blood spraying across the platform, and her terrifying stillness every time one rang out. She should have been screaming. She should have been fighting back. That was the girl she'd run from, she knew it, she'd even admit that she'd run from her if it would make their world make sense again. But the only indication she got that she felt anything at all anymore were the tears streaming from her eyes after the last shot left her stomach bleeding all over her jeans.

[delicateMachine]

For Alice, the shock of still being alive hit harder than the bullet through her foot. She’d lost, she’d failed in every meaningful way, and though she hadn’t had the time to understand her death (not acceptance, she would never seek out such a anesthetizing, traitorous emotion) she’d had no reason to doubt its arrival.

There was no logical reason for her to still be alive. She wasn’t moving, Katarina was mere feet away, there was nothing preventing her from pressing the barrel of her gun against Alice’s forehead and quickly and cleanly annihilating every last trace of conscious thought, her foot wasn’t even close to being near her center of mass-

Shot after shot followed, and shock compounded upon shock; but numbness quickly lost its novelty and was replaced by pain sprouting from every new gaping wound and infecting the entirety of her body, her brain, her consciousness itself; banishing rationality and leaving nothing but animalistic fight-or-flight to replace it, but even instinct was helpless against the sheer weight of mortality holding her down.

The final bullet hit Alice hard in the gut, knocking the breath out of her.

In a rational world, she would have never had to feel this pain, and what did she have left to cling to except rationality? Katarina was a remorseless murderer but that did not preclude the presence of intelligent thought. Clearly, she had been too charitable.

Alice did not want to die, but she did not want to live like this, either. She realized now that this was no accident, no tragedy of a botched murder attempt. Katarina wanted her to be feeling this pain. She wanted to see her break down in choking sobs, tears and snot running down her face in equally disgusting measure, begging her for life before finally dealing the final blow, high on her control over death itself.

At first Alice was resolute to remain stoic, to give herself this last victory, pointless as it may be; to cling to her own willpower until the last, to prove that she possessed at least one final strength.

Then she realized that Katarina could just walk away, could just leave her to slip into the nothingness of blood-lost sleep, give her just enough time to fully comprehend what had happened, what she was losing. This revelation, hypothetical or no, was enough. Alice broke, hating herself the entire time.

She sobbed, she choked, she coughed and spat blood from her mouth and then sobbed unto what would be infinity. She weakly pressed a hand against her stomach and it came back wet, and red, and she stared, and she could feel the blood starting to pool under her, and

At last, clarity came.

The universe stretched out before her and then became infinitely small, multiplying with every blink she took, until it reached the horizon, past the horizon, farther than any lifetime could ever hope to see, and she could see the connections form to create an endless network of spiderwebs, and she could see herself trapped within each and every strand.

At last, she understood the entirety of creation. At last, she realized that she was in Hell.

She saw Eris, and she saw Irene, and she saw both of their faces replaced by an endless procession of strangers that she knew intimately well, and she saw herself on this lighthouse, and she saw herself on this same lighthouse but on another island, and she saw herself bloody and discarded by a poolside, and

she felt water fill her lungs and then turn into fire burning her from the inside out, she felt every segment of every bone in her body break and be mended and break again, and she was pierced by bullets and knives and swords and spears, and hands wrapped themselves around her throat and bludgeoned her and she was falling, now, but she couldn’t even remember if she had been pushed, and she let herself fall to pieces and be stitched back together over and over again, and she could still feel the needles even though she couldn’t see the seams, and

At last, she remembered that she wasn’t her broken body. She realized that she wasn’t this body.

Back in the real world, or what had passed for it for eighteen long years of blissful ignorance, Alice’s choked sobs turned to choked laughter turned to manic cackling. Slowly, methodically, she brought herself back to her feet, using the wall for support. She ignored the complaints from her body. It wasn’t hers, not in any meaningful way. It only had to hold together a little while longer.

She stopped laughing, but she couldn’t stop smiling as she stared Katarina down. “Hey, hey, why’d you stop? Come on, keep wasting all your ammo so you can get off! Shoot me and shoot me until there’s nothing left, you idiot!” The world around her was fading away, but that was okay. She could still talk, and laugh, and she was laughing now at her own joke and at Katarina’s own stupidity, and she was laughing at everything because nothing was real!

“What, can’t find my heart? Don’t know where a heart is, dumbass? It’s riiiight here,” Alice said, pounding a fist against her chest in a mock heartbeat, polluting her sweater with even more blood. “You really think you’re gonna make it out? Huh? You couldn’t kill fucking Irene, and she gave you two shots at it! She delivered herself to you with a nice little bow and everything and you still let her get away! What’re you even doing?”

She was swaying now, under her own weight and under her own ecstasy, and she knew her time was almost up, but that was fine! Eris hadn’t escaped, and Alice hadn’t escaped, and Katarina wouldn’t escape either, so they’d all see each other again, in time, even if they never realized it!

“You think I’ll get to remember first next time, Katarina?” Alice said, playfully drawing out the girl’s name, “You wanna know what’ll happen then, huh? You wanna know what I’ll do?”

She took one single, faltering step forward, extending her bloodied hand towards whatever was driving Katarina. A grin split her face open, ear to ear.

“Guess.”

Alice fell forward. There was nothing left for her here.

[Latin For Dragula]

There was one pair of words echoing through Its head through Alice's whole speech.
End it.
One concrete thought as she had her dying gasps.
End it.
It wasn't listening. It had no interest in what she had to say. It had no investment in her continued survival.
End it.
But it made no moves.
End it.
Didn't shoot.
End it.
Didn't twitch.
End it.
Didn't breathe.
End it.
And when it was over, it stepped over her body and began to walk towards the stairs.
Why?
Because you want to win.
I didn't want this.
...
I didn't.
You're right.
I-
Maybe I don't care what you want anymore.
It left the light house in silence.
((It moves on.))