Mind The Music And The Step

[Cicadan]

She was surprised she wasn't dead.

Not like she knew what being dead was even like, but, still!

The tears dried up fairly quickly, the quaking in her bosom turned to a stillborn buzz and hum that built up stale air. It was shock, shock that she wasn't already like James was- wherever he even was at all after the fact of his death, that Bridie didn't really know for sure- and that shock became surprise. She almost failed to pull herself up. When she did pull herself up it was slowly, sluggishly, as if she were dragging herself and her body out of water. Flecks of snow-white sand tumbled away from her face, tumbled down her hair. A fresh trickle of blood began to widen a canyon down her forehead, pooling into a bubble of a droplet right above her nose.

"I'm supposed to," she answered blankly. She stared at Bishop. Blankly.

"I mean, I guess..."

No, she didn't even know what she guessed. There was no way to know what was happening or why it was happening, and for the life of her Bridie didn't even begin to know how to process it.

"... I don't know. I'm doing my duty.

As a citizen."

She held a single palm up, level to her chest. Right near where her still-beating heart lay, wildly trying to remind her that she was still capable of running, hiding, fleeing. A reminder of her own life that she ignored.

"You should be doing it too. You've got the gun."

[Bowser]

(GMing approved)

“... W-what's wrong with you?”

Normally, Bishop would hesitate to say something like that aloud. Sure, he would wonder it as he would watch people ocasionally, however he knew how rude saying that would be. How much it could hurt somebody who was just trying to live their life. Right now though, he didn't care if he hurt Bridie's feelings. He didn't care if he offended her. He didn't care if she'd begin to cry again. She just killed a man and tried to validate it by saying she was following orders. Bishop found it quite hard to care at all.

“T-they tell you to k-kill and sentence you t-to death in the same b-breath, and you j-just... D-do it?  D-do you have any i-idea how messed up t-that is?”

His grip tightened around the handle, recalling just how easily Bridie pried the gun away from his former tormentor. His right index finger soon found its way to the trigger, and tightened its grip.

“A-and now, you want m-me to d-do the same thing.”

Keeping the gun aimed directly at her torso, Bishop couldn't help but to consider doing it. She was a monster, and Bishop knew she would try to keep playing. She had told him as such just moments before shooting her friend dead. But even then... Would that make him any better?

Well, obviously the answer to Bishop was an astounding yes. She had just killed somebody who had tried to help them, for no other reason than she was told to. She also made it plainly aware that she was going to keep playing as well, the second she got her hands on another weapon. If anything Bishop would still be the good guy in the situation if he killed her.

But even then, what good would killing her really do? Bishop had her weapon, he was the one in control here. Bridie, on the other hand, was helpless. Did she really have a chance to fight back? If she tried anything to harm Bishop, she'd be dead with very little fanfare. Just some idiot who did something stupid and died for it. There was nothing to gain for Bishop by killing her, especially since she would be marked as a threat in a few hours anyway, and an easy kill for anybody looking for revenge. Really, all he'd really do is please the people who put them here. Who are forcing classmate to kill classmate for no other reason than their own sick pleasure, or to see how much they could get their own citizens to actually do in the name of their country. Not to mention, he'd just be doing what Bridie told him to do. In a way, he'd be following the orders of monsters, doing their bidding right before he would meet his own end.

That wasn't something Bishop was keen on doing.

“W-well I'm not d-doing it. I-I'm not playing your s-stupid game.”

His voice was as shaky as ever, and needless to say he was as scared as always. However, there was also a venom in it. An obvious anger towards not only Bridie, but this entire god damn game as well. The daggers he glared at her only heightening that sense of rage that boiled within him.

Looking to his right, he could see the area that way was as clear as could be. He'd just need to back away from Bridie a little and he'd simply be able to run off. However, before he did so, he quickly realized he needed to do something before he booked it out. Silently circling around the girl, still keeping the gun pointed at her, Bishop slowly made his way to James' corpus.

"B-back up!" Bishop ordered, shoving the gun forward a little like some thug you'd see in some kind of film. He needed to make sure there was enough distance between himself and Bridie before he grabbed what he needed and left. He wasn't about to let her take two people out today. Thankfully, as Bishop asked, Bridie moved back away from him, giving him the chance to do what he needed to.

Quickly kneeling down to James' body, Bishop could feel all of that rage and bravado he had just a moment ago suddenly get sucked away as he finally got his first up close look to what death really looked like. The rage doll like way his joints bent, the hole in his chest that spilled a waterfall of blood onto the sand below, the limp lifeless expression on his face, the way his eyes had already glazed over and rolled towards the back of his head. Bishop couldn't help but to be stopped cold for a moment, just barely able to keep himself from crying as he looked at the lifeless man beneath him. Knowing that this could have been him if he waited longer to dive at Bridie, and that this would 100% be him in just a few days, it obviously shook him a great deal. Not to mention the previously stated fact that James was only here because of Bishop in the first place. As he felt a wave of guilt wash over him, he quickly unzipped the bag. Biting his lower lip as he tried his best not to break into tears. If it wasn't for the person still on the beach with him, he might have hesitated before looting a deadman's bag. However, he knew if he waited for too long that he'd only be sealing his own fate. Something he did not plan to do.

It only took a moment for his hands to find what they were looking for. Pulling the box of ammo, the gun manual, and the medkit out of the bag, he quickly unzipped his own and put them inside. He considered taking more, not leaving the rest for Bridie, however he was already struggling to carry the supplies they had given him already. Really he only took what he absolutely needed or, in the case of the medkit, wanted to keep away from Bridie. Besides she likely wouldn't be able to carry much either. At least, Bishop assumed so.

Rising back to his feet, Bishop looked at the girl one last time.

And then, without another word, he turned, kicking the hot sand into the air as he ran off from the scene.

(Bishop Smith continued Elsewhere)

[Cicadan]

Bridie's palm dug into the sand and the grit eroded a bit at the soft spaces between her fingers, stinging. She'd quietly held the position Bishop had backed her into until he'd vanished, and then she'd held that position longer yet. Bishop was gone yet his words still echoed in the hollow of her skull, like he was still there and still pointing the gun- the one she'd lost to him, in her failure- at her face.

Her body idled, and she began to scratch tunnels through the sand, pecking through the grains with her fingers.

She was stunned, her mind tried to sort through the haze. It was true that people did sometimes ask what was wrong with her, and people did sometimes stare at her with a really scary and saddening expression in their faces like Bishop had. They always liked to yell and shout- like Bishop had- about how she was wrong- like Bishop had- and how she should feel bad. Also, like Bishop had. He'd said it, she could sort of remember the words still, much as stress had blurred the recordings into garbled soundbytes. Something about how she just 'did it', and how it was 'messed up'.

Something else, about how she was told to kill and sentenced to death by the same person. She remembered that with stark clarity.

'They' were the people who commanded her to do what she did, she realized, it couldn't have been anyone else because nobody else had really told her to kill. They were the Government, and the Director, to whom she owed fealty and loyalty as was their due for their having made America great and strong. 'They' sentenced her to death. That was the price of her citizenship, and of the honor of being a citizen. She didn't particularly understand why that was a bad thing, to have her life as the collateral for everything her country had so far given her. Yep! She'd thought about it quite a bit in the past hour or two, and every single time there seemed to only be one conclusion that followed the simplest and most familiar of logic! She supposed she had to dismiss Bishop's concerns, as a result. He seemed to be a good man, a passionate man who had probably been an upstanding citizen. Same with James, same with Zeke. But none of that mattered, not when the way forward was so clear that even she could make obvious sense of it.

She sighed and stood, dully happy to be alive and to have a chance to prove herself still. That expression on her face shifted gears. From neutraling she went to energetic, a nod and a smile putting spring into her step. She'd failed, and failed some more, but that had never stopped her before. She wasn't dead yet!

Meanwhile, death stared her in the face, and she could observe it up close for the first time. Bridie stepped over to James' corpse and stood over him, soft eyes appraising the lifeless whites, milky and slightly goo like a cracked open egg. Once more, she wondered what this particular, somewhat gross sight meant. Where the blood came from, and where it would go with James himself gone. And where, just where had James gone to now? What was left of the boy she'd once called a friend?

Bridie knew that was a question she had no chance of answering, because even adults couldn't answer it for her. Every time she asked there was a different answer, of 'happy farms' and 'afterlives' and 'burning pits of fire', and none of those things seemed congruent, and that left Bridie no better off than before she'd asked the question. She didn't like that, no sir, and she didn't like the question itself. Thus she once more ignored it after it rubbed it's sticky fingers in a massage over her cranium, coaxing out odd visions of tombstones.

She knew bodies weren't supposed to be left out in the open. Pappy liked to take her to his Mom's grave. He said she'd been a good woman, and she believed him, and Bridie thought James didn't look right just left out under the sun. She only had her own instinct to go on, oddly enough. Nobody had told her how this was supposed to be, the handling of someone no longer with them on this Earth. There was no code to follow, none explicitly stated.

She eventually decided to swim him out to sea. When his body vanished beneath the waves she came back and tried to dry off again. But she got impatient, and eventually moved on with her bag full of two dead man's things and her head full of thoughts of continuing the fight.

(Bride Mossberg continued elsewhere)