I Don't Have to Be Your Friend to Survive this Show. This is Not Survival of the Best Friends.

[Laurels]

((Asa Rosen and Dee Dixon continued from Honey Badger Don't Care!))

((OOC: This post was cowritten by Laurels and Shangela))

“Ah! Motherfucker…” Asa muttered under his breath.

Asa was sitting on the beach, with his poncho and sweatshirt plopped on the ground next to him. Dee was assisting in cleaning and patching the wound on his arm. He was shivering from the cold, hoping Dee could finish fixing his wound quickly so he could put his sweatshirt back on. He continued to mutter under his breath.

“If you quit shaking like a pug tryin’ to shit out a peach pit, this would be a heck of a lot quicker.” Dee muttered with a pin clenched in her teeth. A cursory glance at the majority of her clothes suggested that she was used to patchwork. Fixing up jeans when they were torn from fences was one thing; patching up a gushing wound was an entirely other gambit. She apologized briefly before threading through his skin with graceless furor.

Asa rolled his eyes as he heard Dee’s muttering. If Norma-Jean hadn’t attacked a part of him that would force him to remove layers in the middle of December, he would have been okay. He would try to stop shaking, but his constitution was making that harder to accomplish. He didn’t see how it was his fault that he was shaking. To him, it seemed natural.

It hadn’t been too long since the two of them left the beauty parlor. Asa was still furious with Norma-Jean for attacking him, and had wandered to the nearby beach to get away from her. Dee managed to catch up to him, and the two moved to a more deserted area before Dee offered to treat his injury. The sun was starting to go down, so it was going to get a lot darker and a lot colder in the arena.

“There. I can’t say it’ll look too purty, but at least you won’t be gushing out like a faucet.” Dee interrupted her thought to soak gauze in some peroxide. Preemptively, she clenched tight on his forearm with her spare hand. She could be as soft as a kitten, but this was still going to hurt like a bitch.

“Alright, chuckles. Hold on. I’ll try and be real careful, but you gotta stay still as can be.” Dee didn’t even check for confirmation before she pressed the compress onto his arm.

Asa started to stir in place, gritting his teeth.

“AH! FUCK ME!” he cried out as the alcohol came into contact with the wound.

Dee paid little attention to Asa’s protest. She was still fuming mad at how mean he’d been to Norma-Jean. Sure the girl was useless, and sure she’d cut Asa with that weapon of her’s, but Dee questioned the manners (or lack thereof) that Asa’d shown her. Heck, if Dee had been on the otherside of that spear, she wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t shank Asa in the shoulder for being so damn rude. In a sick sense, patching him up was causing a satisfactory amount of pain.

“There we go. Good as new.” Dee looked at the tattered, haphazardly patched wound. Threads stuck out everywhere. If this was considered “new,” Asa should have probably checked out a warranty or something.

“T-thanks,” Asa blurted out, catching his breath.

Asa had never gotten stitches before in his life. He had been fairly careful as a kid; avoiding sports and outdoor activities had helped with that. It certainly wasn’t something he hoped to go through anytime soon. He grabbed his sweatshirt and quickly through it over his head.

As Asa instinctively wrapped himself up in his layers, Dee likewise prepared to move. It was all they had been doing since they’d walked out of there; move. Even with a gusher like Asa had, he’d still insisted that they’d keep going forward. She couldn’t figure out the grand plan Asa had behind hunkering down by the beach, but Dee was relieved to at least stop for a second. He hadn’t even given her a chance to talk about the elephant in the room.

“So I reckon that this whole ‘getting stabbed by Norma-Jean’ thing wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was walking out of there with our tails between our legs.” Dee didn’t mean to sound so condescending, but she was sure as heck still fuming from how he’d shoved her. “What now, chuckles?”

Asa pulled his head through his sweatshirt and looked over at Dee. He kept his face frozen and tried to not show that he was annoyed with her condescension.

“Yeah. That was obviously not part of the plan. I mean, if that loon just let us take what we were asking for, we could have maybe set a few wigs on fire then torched that museum. Now we have to rethink this. Maybe we can start a fire in one of the kitchens somewhere.”

Asa reached over and pulled the poncho back over himself. He was starting to feel a bit warmer now, although sitting on a snow covered beach certainly wasn’t making things better. Now his pants were getting soaked through.

“I just hope we don’t have to deal with the same bullshit as we did back there.”

Dee’s eyes widened. Sure it was the same plan, but clearly that had it’s own merry little faults. What was to say that the next place that they wandered across would be different. Norma-Jean had let Asa off far too kindly, as Dee saw it. What would happen next time? What if the next person didn’t have a spear, but a gun?

“Is that it? Just burning down another building?” Dee wanted something more. Reassurance that they were the ones with the upper hand here. Reassurance that Norma-Jean had just been a fluke. A rud in the mud. Asa was smart, and that counted for something. But as the time dragged on, and as the cold snapped at Dee in a bitter, angry current of wind, all she could think of was how utterly fucked his plan had ended up being. “What if there’s another Norma-Jean. What then?”

And he wanted to just up and repeat it. Fuck that. Dee definitely thought in her head.

“Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t have much else right now. Last I checked, the assholes behind this game didn’t give me anything that gets these bombs off our necks and let us run off to freedom,” he said sternly.

Asa didn’t like Dee’s tone. It sounded like she really had issues seeing eye to eye with him. Sure, it was hard for most bipeds to see eye to eye with him, but he had hoped that there was some brain capacity to allow them to understand him.

“Oh, and if there’s another Norma-Jean…”

Asa picked up the brush axe on the ground. He held it in his right hand, holding the blade part in his left hand.

“...I doubt I’ll be as foolish as I was back then, and I certainly won’t run away like a coward.”

Dee thought back to Caroline, briefly, but significantly. She’d given this look to Dee as if she were the absolute dumbest for going along with Asa’s ideas. But Dee didn’t pay her any mind then. They were going to be different. They weren’t playing this game to win, or to get screentime. They were gonna raise some heck with the producers. Give them one heck of a headache. Then… then there was some bigger plan. Maybe they’d escape, or get out some other way. Dee really thought that.

Not now. “You’d kill her given another go around, wouldn’t you?”

“Hm?”

Asa looked back at Dee.

“Well, you saw her back then. She was prepared to stab me just because I questioned her ability to handle being a celebrity. Who knows what else she would have done if I even sneezed in her direction?”
“She was scared crapless!” Dee whipped back at Asa. She was off of her knees, finally eye level with Asa. “You don’t know Norma-Jean. She’s simple, sure, maybe a bit of a you-know-what, but she wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it spat at her like you did.”

Dee’s ducked down to grab at her bag. With the exception of the one lost Gatorade, a half-eaten sandwich, and the medical supplies she’d used to patch Asa up, everything had still been neatly packed away for easy travel. Her eyes never left Asa’s.

“Hey! I could have been a whole lot worse to her,” Asa retorted. “If anything, I was ruder to the salon than her!”

“Still. You were so mean to her. I got that she’d been acting up, but bless the Lord, Sissy’d gone and abandoned her. She was probably at her scaredest, and you come at her like a big ol’ wrecking ball.” Dee paused to take a breath, unintentionally huffing.

“Hey! I made it clear we were just going to get the stuff and then leave. We were perfectly willing to be nonviolent, and she lost her shit at the mere sight of me looking for a can of hairspray,” Asa added.

He was starting to get annoyed with Dee. How could she side with Norma-Jean over him? As he saw it, she had more reasons to be on his side than that girl’s. Asa set the brush axe to the side, although he still kept a grip on the handle. Norma-Jean had been stupid, but he worried if Dee might have caught the stupidity virus from her.

“Look, if she can’t keep a level head in this game, then she’s probably fucked anyways. I mean, in the time she took to jab a spear at me, she could have gone after her friend, but she had to act like I was the bad guy here.”

Game. Game. Game. It’s all he ever talked about. Strategy. Politics. Everything that uttered out of his mouth had some level of construction to it. Maybe he didn’t plan to come here, but Asa was sure as shit ready to participate. Dee recalled the first conversation they’d shared. What did he mention? That he’d be the dark horse to get ten kills? He’d been joking, probably, but now it didn’t seem all that funny.

“You know what I think? I reckon that you are the bad guy here. You’re so ready to gut the next person that you come across who so much as questions your ‘grand plan.’” Dee chewed at her inner cheek. She had scars running along the length of her cheek from suppressing many snide comments. But now nothing was there to hold them back. She opened her mouth and more malice erupted out.

“What is this plan, anywho? You told me that we’d be really giving those producers a headache by raising a ruckus. Then what? Are we gonna escape? Are we gonna wait it out until it’s just us?” That was probably it. Dee thought back. It seemed like such a while ago, but Dee reckoned that it’d only been hours. He’d made some sort of comment that he’d be the dark horse winner in all of this, racking up those ten kills. Dee? She’d be decapitated. Was that his plan? Wait it out until it was just them, then off her for the easy victory?

“You’re the smart one, Asa. What’s next?”

Asa tried to remain calm as Dee rambled. He tried to listen to everything she said, then have a retort that would allow her to see his point. However, she was clearly losing any sense of lucidity he thought she possessed. Asa shook his head. He really thought she was better than this.

“First of all, if that was really my plan, I wouldn’t be so damn obvious and upfront about it. Second, I think I’m at least cautious enough to not kill people for disagreeing with me. I’m on my school’s debate team, so I know how to handle scathing criticism and throw better arguments back.”

“THIRD!” he said, raising his voice, “I’m still working on what’s coming next. But as I see it, there’s a chance that as long as we alter the environment to our whims, we can radically alter the game and maybe increase our chances of survival. I can’t control everything in this game, but I can at least make my mark on it by taking the reins and deciding what will and won’t happen.”

“We can’t be too stupid. If we even want to get close to surviving, we’re going to have to be smart and realize when we’re going to have to make the tough choices. That’s what I’m planning on doing, and if you can’t understand that, then I feel sorry for you.”

The tears that flickered down Dee’s cheek instantly felt cooler and cooler as they left the warmth of her eye. By the time she could taste them, they were cold and salty. “So you don’t know what to do next? You act all smart and above all this, but I am darn sure that you don’t have a better idea than I do.”

“You know what? No. I understand that. I don’t understand you.” Asa was supposed to have this all together. She’d trusted him to have some sort of grand scheme out of here. “Face it, buddy, you don’t got a leg to stand on. You’re not some mastermind, gaming this system. You’re just a gosh-darned kid, pouting because he’s stuck here. Burning down a building isn’t different than breaking a toy.”

Asa tightened the grip on the brush axe. This girl was really casting doubt on him, and he hated that. She had the gall to look down on him when he was the only one offering an idea of what to do next. She was starting to get on his nerves. Everything she was saying was pissing him off more and more. He had to strike back.

“If you really don’t think I’ve got a leg to stand on, then you must not have any legs at all, because at least I’m trying to do something in this fucking game. You can continue to whine and talk like you’re on a fucking Disney Channel show, but unless you show some goddamn initiative, I don’t see what gives you the right to act like you’ve got any moral superiority here.”’

Dee was still tearing, but she didn’t feel as defeated. That feeling was replaced by something more potent. “Maybe I’m not as ‘smart’ as you think you are, but I at least know when something isn’t working. Like your plan.”

“I hope you do go ahead and get a building more lit up than a Christmas Tree. Then I hope you stick around to burn down with it.” She turned and walked away. Half way across the beach, Dee thought to turn around and apologize for her outburst. But then the survivalist in her cautioned against it. His plan was suicidal at best. Maybe they’d blow his collar sky high for ruining the battlefield. Maybe someone would beat them to it. It was too risky a gamble to place such high faith in him; in anybody really.

Asa watched as Dee made her retort and walked away. He realized that she would have done that. When people didn’t know how to win a fight, they often just backed off instead of responding. Clearly, Dee was one of those people. Asa stood up and watched her walk away. He wasn’t done with her yet.

He dropped the axe to the ground and cupped his hands around his mouth.

“Well have it your way, Billy Barty!” he shouted. “I don’t you anyways! So you can just go ahead and fuck off for all I care!”

Asa turned back and knelt to the ground. He picked up the axe and grabbed his bag. He began to walk off, trying not to follow after Dee. He decided that she wasn’t worth his time, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to try and make up to her, especially since he didn’t think he was in the wrong. He’d probably do better on his own anyways. That’s how it always went in this game.

((CJ3: Asa Rosen continued elsewhere))
((IS1: Diana “Dee” Dixon continued elsewhere))