I believe people can change, but only for the worse

[Badb†]

[Zoe Leverett, continued from The Charm.]

Her new-found momentum for getting shit done didn't last past the outskirts of the woods.

Days passed without incident.

Lonely, wandering days spent agonizing over the smallest aspects of survival on the island- marking the boundaries of each danger zone, keeping her food and her torch batteries rationed, learning to tell the time from the position of the sun in the sky- with only her thoughts, the chirps and whispering of wildlife, and the canned rasp of the morning announcements keeping her company. Zoe was on edge, brandishing her machete at every rustle of the leaves, chirp of the birds above her. She was running on little sleep, and less food, and would sometimes catch herself drifting out of focus, talking to herself absently to dull the isolation as much as she could. Despite this, she knew was doing better than most. She was alive and she was not in any immediate threat. Not many had that luxury.

Zoe found herself falling into a routine rather quickly. In hindsight, she supposed she was grasping for any kind of regularity, any aspect of her life she could remain in control of while her boyfriend was killing and her friends were dying around her. It began when she awoke each morning shivering after a night of restless sleep, usually with enough time to pack her bags and put out the small fires she stoked in the evening before the morning announcement blared through the loudspeakers. When Danya greeted the island, Zoe would be sat, hands anxiously clasped, rocking nervously through each name, each fake-out to scare them into killing, waiting for her hiding spot to be declared a danger zone. If it was safe, she would find a suitable location to set up camp, carve a large cross into the bark of the nearest tree, then venture onwards to find supplies. In the absence of any bodies for grave robbing, she would stalk small animals, machete in hand and tears in eyes, constantly reminding herself that she needed to survive. After tying her trophies to her canvas sack, she would haul them back to her marked tree, where she would retch as she skinned them over the open fire, then retch harder, maybe vomit, as she found clumps of hair in the mouthfuls she tore from the bone.

Then she would go back to sleep, dream of shapeless nightmares, and start her mundane cycle all over again.

Around the third or fourth morning, the announcement caught her off-guard. Zoe had awoken earlier than expected and after pacing around for a while, she had decided to leave the fire burning while she went to scout out potential locations for the next night. After she found a particularly promising clearing, Zoe pressed her right hand against the bark of the nearest tree and carved her marker into the bark with her left. The announcement sounded as she was half-way finished with the first stroke. Zoe stepped back, letting her arms fall to her sides. There were worrying trends. Max was now a four-time killer, and an MVP to boot, rewarded with a weapon in the town. Zoe thought about following, waiting on the outside of the danger zone with open arms for the tearful reunion, but she shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind. Her thoughts were focused on the attempted escapes.

They took precedence.

There had been an increasing number of deaths announced caused by tampering, or attempts to remove collars. Zoe knew how that ended, and it ended with people like her being blown up to scare people like them into submission.

"No," she said, aloud. She was growing angry, she realized. Her grip on her machete was tightening. "No!"

She put all her weight into her swings, hacking at the bark of the tree with all of her repressed frustrations and screaming until her lungs were hoarse. If she died for their pointless attempts at tragic martyrdom, everything she had done on the island was for nothing. She would have wasted days of her life hunting, stealing, fighting for survival only to have it ruined by some selfish assholes with a messiah complex and an inflated sense of self-importance. Zoe stepped back, exhausted, gasping for breath. The bark had been stripped away, and there was a concave hole filled with scratches- scar tissue- from her machete strikes. Zoe exhaled sharply, took her glasses off and glared directly into the lens of the camera, planted in the trunk of another tree, well above reach. She felt like bowing, but it wouldn't have been appropriate.

She just stood, exhausted, staring up at the cameras. Her intentions clear.

Not a single person was escaping this island before the end.

[Riki]

[Joachim Lovelace, continued from Path of Pins - That is in the Southern Town, Overpass]

Something happened after Joachim left the bridge. Something that was very good at ruining his mood. To be more specific, he found the corpse of Grace, one of the people he robbed together with Jaq on the very first day. That was not the mood-ruining thing. The fact was that it was where he was supposed to meet up with Jaq again. Supposed to meet up, because Jaq was not there. Joachim was smart enough to know what happened.

And... strangely enough, it pissed him off. Oh, so very, very much. It was not really anger at being abandoned, but actually worry. Worry about Jaq, who was defenseless, and emotionally troubled. Well, he hoped she was, because that meant that she did not really mean to abandon him. No, wait. He should not hope she was because that would mean that she'd be better at surviving out there.

...ah, for fuck's sake.

Joachim at first thought about shooting the person he saw standing in the woods, before he realized that there was a fellow student near him. She seemed a bit distressed, but was not Jaq. Joachim readied the gun, but he made sure not to aim it at the girl as he approached her.

The face did not seem really familiar, probably one of the quieter students who didn't get much attention from everybody else. He noticed that she had a machete. But as far as he could see, there was- oh, there was blood on it. And were those little animals hanging from her bag? ...oh dear. Well, this'll prove interesting, at least.

"Hey, you there. Who're you?"

[Badb†]

Zoe stood panting, machete held tight in her trembling hand, trading her sternest glance with the cold glare of the camera lens. She supposed she was waiting for some form of validation. She waited for a beep from her collar, a message from Danya telling her to go forth and cut those escapees down! or, if they mistook her show of aggression for a protest, an explosion. There was nothing, and Zoe felt afraid. Message received? She thought, rapping her index finger against the moulded handle of the machete. No news has to be good news, right?

Truth be told, she had no idea where to start. Escape attempts were kept off the announcements for obvious reasons; the most information Zoe had received from them were the names of the attempted escapees who were stupid enough to tamper with their collars. Asking around was a bad idea as well. It was counter-productive to their efforts to go around loudly proclaiming their intent to escape the game, so beyond a list of her classmates who could have the potential to stage a large-scale escape in her head, Zoe had nothing to go by. Beyond seeking those people out and hunting them down, her best bet was to lie low for the while, play the part of the direction-less wanderer, and hope that she ran into someone who knew something about an escape plot.

Zoe sighed, deciding to play it by ear, and trudged back to her old camp site, grabbing the rest of her things and stomping out the fire with the worn sole of her yellow converse. Over her awkward, clumsy stomps, she heard the sound of bushes rustling in the distance. It was too consistent to be the wind, and the sound of grass and leaves crushed underfoot too pronounced to be an animal. Zoe pulled back, stepping forwards. She turned around to face the direction of the noise. Her machete arm tensed.

Someone was coming.

It took a moment for Zoe to connect the figure who approached her with the face of anyone she ever knew in school, which Zoe took as a bad sign. It meant that everything she knew was wrong, and that she could no longer rely on half-forgotten memories of the way people used to be around school to judge character. When she connected the face to a name- Joachim- she tensed up. She had heard his name on the announcements- only once, unlike Max-the-four-times-killer- but he had killed, and he was given a reward for killing, and that made him dangerous. Zoe was jumpy, alone for long enough to be afraid of her own shadow, but she wasn't stupid enough to try something when he had a weapon in his hands. He asked who she was, apparently bewildered by her appearance. Unwilling to let go of her weapon to raise her arms, she stood perfectly still, and spoke slowly.

"I'm not a problem." She asserted. "Zoe Leverett. You're Joachim, right?"

[Riki]

"Yep, that's me."

Zoe Leverett. Yeah, definitely not the slightest clue about who she was. Didn't matter. What he found to be more noteworthy was her assertion of not being a problem. This meant that she, probably, was sane enough to realize that he was far to powerful for her to handle. Joachim could not help but smile a little at the thought of being dreaded. Actually, it just dawned on him in that moment what he kind of person he must be for his classmates. Multiple killer, with a knife, and worthy of a Best Kill Award.

Not that Joachim thought good of concepts like "glory", but... he could not deny that he enjoyed his reputation. He pondered, how will Rosemary's words - he was certain she'd tell people of him - influence that reputation?

Well, as enjoyable these ponderings where, he knew he had something else to focus on.

"Zoe..."

He should ask her about Jaquilyn. Use the information to locate his companion. But... back then, when he was alone with Grace's corpse, the revealations he had there...maybe...maybe...maybe...

"Do you fear me?"

[Badb†]

Fear.

Did that adequately describe what Zoe felt any more? Everything she had spent the last few days working on was a carefully constructed façade, a veneer of normalcy meant to shelter herself from the hard, obvious truth, the indignities and brutalities of the island. For Zoe, fear had meant driving her knife into the base of a rabbit's spine to keep herself breathing, moving from makeshift campsite to makeshift campsite, hiding all trace of her presence and diving into the under-brush from every small noise in the middle of the night, because she could never bee too sure which ones would kill her if they got the chance.

Zoe feared death. Everyone did, and anyone who said they had made their peace with death was either lying or mentally ill. Mostly, she feared being the scapegoat. The lonely wanderer killed to awaken the conscience of the heroic group of plucky escapees to remind them that their actions had consequences, that lives were at risk. A warning they would inevitably ignore at best or, at worst, shrug off as collateral damage. Perhaps there would be some anguish. Unrelated declarations of shock. But she would be mourned for five minutes only, and then they would return to their self-righteous and selfish attempts to regain their freedom at the expense of everyone else.

Zoe was never going to die for someone else's crusade.

That was fear. Fear was the worst of them, masquerading as the best. The real enemy pretending to be the heroes, convinced of their own moral superiority to the point of self-righteousness, creating contrived, exclusionary plots that would only lead to more death, in the long run. For what? So twenty people could be spared from death. Tough luck everyone else, you weren't cool enough to hang with us. Selfish bastards, unconcerned with anyone's lives, least of all their own. That was why she needed to go out and kick them in the teeth. That was why she needed to show them how the game worked. Fear was her motivation to win this game. Fear was the knife in her hands embedded in someone's skull.

She would never be afraid of the players. They were honest about their selfishness. They never felt the need to gild it with the justification that their hands were clean as long as they didn't push the button.  That's why, even as tears threatened to form at the corners of her eyes, Zoe stared straight at Joachim, her grip on her machete unyielding.

""No,"" she spat.

[Riki]

No.

Two letters, one syllable, but still, few words could hold as much might as a 'No'. What was it that gave this word power? The sudden, unexpected denying of an outsider's influence on one's own life? Or maybe the, just as sudden and unexpected, invalidation of Joachim's worldview? Or perhaps because the ability to look at a decaying world - all the misery and violence and... fatalism - and simply say 'No' is one of the ultimate expressions of free will?

Joachim looked at the small animals hanging from Zoe's belongings.

Well, maybe it should not have been that unexpected.

One way or the other, Joachim's fleeting delusion of greatness went away as fast as it came. This time, though, an emptiness replaced these feelings. Joachim realized, bit by bit, that without Jaq, he had nothing. No motivation, no company... no guilt, no euphoria, no thrills, not even anger could provide not what he yearned for, and obviously... nor could pride.

All that was left was just dull stagnation, and the question 'What now?'.

Joachim stared at his conservation partner for a few seconds, contemplating his place and her place in this, small, violent world, before an answer to 'What now?' began to form within Joachim.

"Why do you kill? ...or why would you?"

[Badb†]

Zoe blinked rapidly, fighting away the tears that welled in the corners of her eyes as she awaited the violent reprise of her answer. She had slighted Joachim's undoubtedly fragile ego, and she knew how this kind of confrontation played out. It would, by all accounts, begin with the laughably cliched assertion of his superiority. A well-worn statement, perhaps, of how fear was well-justified around a dangerous individual, aimed more at massaging the killer's ego than striking fear into the heart of the victim. She would be allowed to get a token response of her own in, an eleventh hour display of defiance, but once her fate was set it was the killer's show. The attack itself would follow, a sharp burst of activity that Zoe would be unable to defend herself against. Then came the bloody conclusion of her story, spliced with her decaying thought process as she came to understand some universal truth or perhaps, for maximum effect, thoughts of her loved ones at home. A well-choreographed display of brutality, acting as her personal denouement. The ultimate tragedy would be of overcompensation; machismo on the killer's part, perceiving the defiance as a slight on his honour too great to forgive, and Zoe's Hamartia would be thinking that she could stand up to the killer.

Zoe steeled herself, awaiting this fate, internally repeating her mantra- Never afraid of the killers- as she awaited the cold steel of the knife or the deafening whip-crack of the gunshot, aware now of how tenuous her position truly was.

The violent reprise never came. When she finally opened her eyes, she was met with a stare, and a question. Why would she kill? Unnecessarily philosophical of Joachim, perhaps, but Zoe was almost appreciative of that after four days of surviving alone, concerning herself with the most basic acts of surviving over meaning, over purpose. Her arms fell limply by her sides, and Zoe thought about how best she could answer, while keeping the underlying motives hidden.

"I have- would have- reasons," Zoe said finally, thinking of the collar detonations, and how easily she could end up among their number if the technician monitoring her misconstrued her fixation on the attempted escapes. "I don't want to die for someone else's crusade."

The vaguest of hints, perhaps, but she hoped it was enough to deter external suspicion. Then Zoe got the idea of turning the tables, firing back a question of her own before Joachim could have a chance to process her answer.

"What is it for you? Obviously, trying to get to the end. Beyond that, though." Zoe asked, hurriedly. She was making it up as she went along, improvising, approaching with cautious steps. "Got some kind of grudge against society? Get off on the adrenaline? The feeling of exhilaration? Or can't you feel, 'cause your head is fucked?"

[Riki]

That was a vague answer. Not too vague for Joachim to be unable to get any information out of it, but still something that would require some extra context. What he understood was that she did not wish to die as the consequence of someone's zealous - hence, 'crusade' - own path, but before Joachim could further try and interprete her answer, she hurled the question back at him.

Déjà vu? Yes, déjà vu. Just a few hours earlier, Rosemary asked something quite similar. He answered with what Jaq would said. Now, did he believe in it? That was probably was true to some extent. Of course, there was something bigger and by now Joachim realized that lying to himself further was futile. He enjoyed the killing, the thrills of the island. Any moral concerns he had about it were shed away, or at least in the process of being completely discarded. And that was fine. That is what he realized when he contemplated his fate on the island next to Grace's dead body. Ordinary values would not cut it in an extraordinary situation.

Still, without Jaq, there was something definitely missing. One could use a metaphor here. Say, Joachim was a chimney, and Jaq was the one igniting it. The fire would burn on it's own, but would, without someone to keep it running, eventually fade away.

"You know, my old life was boring and meaningless anyway. Then this happened and suddenly something caused me to be. ...And since I'll die anyway, I guess, well...

Answer two and three."

He scratched the stubble on his neck.

[Badb†]

Zoe paced nervously around Joachim, rapping her fingers against the grip of her machete and repeating her mantra in the back of her head as she awaited- moreso now- the violent reprisal. Joachim ostensibly held no ill-will towards Zoe for deflating his ego, was responding honestly to all her questions, and had remained calm as she attempted to probe at his motivations. At this point, Zoe decided, she should have felt safe enough to let her guard down. Which only served, in the end, to make her more nervous.

In the meantime, Zoe had to stop herself from smirting incredulously as Joachim explained, in no uncertain terms, that the reason he killed was because his life had been boring and meaningless before he had awoken on the island, and that the wildly different set of rules and constructs had given him purpose, as if there was any kind of enlightenment to be found on the island. The concept of finding yourself, or any kind of true self, on the island sounded utterly ridiculous to Zoe, but it sounded ridiculous enough to be true. Joachim had been honest, both about his chances of winning and his motivations for killing.

Never afraid of the killers, she reminded herself.

"At least you're honest," Zoe replied, finally, stopping her nervous pacing to stand face to face with him. "You're not trying to blame anyone else, or convince me that you're the good guy."

Still no reprise. Zoe paused for a moment, now convinced of Joachim's sincerity, and mapped out possibilities in her head. If Joachim felt as if he had found himself on the island, and kept himself going on the high, it served to reason that he would want to keep the high going for as long as he possibly could.

I can exploit this, Zoe thought.

First, though, she needed to know what Joachim got out of trading questions with her.

"What do you want from me?" She asked, steeling herself for the response. It was obvious that getting him to help her was going to require some improvisation. "It's obvious you're not trying to kill me, or I'd be dead already, so what's your angle?"

[Riki]

At least he was honest. Joachim weakly smirked at that and not for long, either. Still, he took it as some sort of compliment, even if he knew that it was not meant to be one. Grasping for straws, he guessed.

Then she asked him why exactly he was approaching her. ...an actually quite good question. Why was he talking with her again? What was the meaning, the purpose? He wanted to find Jaq, and he could ask Zoe whether she saw his companion. Should ask her, perhaps. But that wasn't the reason he approached her in the first place.

This was certainly the trickiest question, because Joachim did not really know the answer. Which meant that he should improvise.

"Well, I kinda didn't know what to do. I mean, I have to find my ally - Jaquilyn Locke - but aside from that I have no idea what exactly I should do now."

...actually, that seemed to fit very well. No idea what to do know, and he talked to Zoe because he hoped she'd give him some spark, some initial ignition. A reasonable hypothesis, Joachim figured.

[Badb†]

Et voila, Zoe had the situation under control.

For all their bluster, when the egos and the self-justification and the validation of Mr. Danya on the PA were stripped away, the killers were just as aimless and meandering as she had been. Zoe almost felt disappointed at the revelation. She had spent the past four days convincing herself of the profound honesty of killing on the island only to come face to face with one third of the day's MVP's- a group, she reminded herself, that included Max- and found him sorely lacking in profundity. Zoe neither knew who cared who this Jacquelyn was beyond vague recollections of hearing her name mentioned, as a killer, once or maybe twice.

Even the killers were looking for someone. O, but the island loved its He-Who, She-Who.

"I'm looking for people too," She admitted, with a shrug and a resigned exhale. Only a half-truth, half-lie, half however you want to frame it. "I don't have a list or anything, but you'll know who I'm looking for when you see them--"

Zoe crouched down and slipped her pack off her aching shoulders, planting it upright in the soft mud and setting her machete flat beside it. Over her four days of aimless solitude, Zoe had just about destroyed her assigned daypack. The weathered canvas was fraying at the seams and torn in about three places, and splattered with rusty red-brown stains of dried mud, blood, and caked-in chunks of animal viscera that had resisted all her attempts at scraping them off with her blade. The freshly skinned bodies of Zoe's most recent kills stared dead-eyed as she rummaged through the contents of her pack, hanging tenuously from the carrying handle by coarse twine Zoe had found tied between trees on the outskirts of the forest.

"What I said earlier, about not wanting to die for someone else's crusade," Zoe began, searching the bottom of the bag for her last bottle of water. "Those people I'm looking for, I think we could-"

She paused.

Her eyes met the flayed animals dangling from her pack.

She tried to avoid their judgemental gaze.

The unblinking eyes followed her each time she averted her glances. Staring in the corner of her vision. Zoe fell backwards into the mud. Staring. She groped blindly for her discarded machete, wrapping her fingers around the handle. Staring. She screamed, hacking frantically at the cords, severing them until each skinned corpse slid off her bag and into the mud.

Zoe rose to her feet, gasping for air, standing above the pile of skinned corpses with her machete clasped tight in both hands, waiting for them to move. Waiting for the nightmarish, unblinking stares. Then she blinked and recoiled, aware that Joachim was still there.

Zoe stepped back from her bag and the pile of bodies, her arms flopping to her sides uselessly. Finally, she exhaled sharply.

"I-I-I... C-Can you get me out of this forest?" She stuttered, visibly shaken- shaking- from her brief lapse of control. "I can-- the people I'm looking for-- I can explain everything once we're out."

Another pause. Another sharp breath.

"Please just get me out of these damn woods."

[Riki]

Zoe admitted that she was looking for people as well. Not necessarily very shocking or odd, but Joachim was nonetheless surprised, if very little, by that statement. Perhaps she was not very successful. Or, what Joachim found to be far more likely, she was looking for people whose lives she wished to take.

'Not dying for somebody's crusade,' no?

Joachim wasn't sure whether she heard her name on the announcements, thus could not know whether she has killed someone yet or not. Frankly though, he felt that this question would be answered soon one way or the other.

Then something happened that did surprise Joachim. Startled him, made him take a few steps back and, if ever so slightly, made his grip on the gun tighter. The bodies of the small animals hit the floor. When the first fell, Joachim flinched, but remained vigilant. The girl had a freak-out, and Joachim mind could not bring forth a single idea which would tell him what to do.

Not a single... except for 'Kill her'.

Joachim stared at Zoe... It seemed to be the right way to act. Fuck everything else, just shoot. Or take out the knife and stab her until she is nothing but a mass of flesh laying on the forest ground. Joachim licked his lips, the thought of charging the hysteric girl, try to overcome the dangers a person in such a state of mind would pose... the thought was more than appealing.

But then she calmed down. And then with one question Joachim felt something new.

Can you get me out of this forest?

...

"Alright, get your things ready and we're going... somewhere else.

And then I'll listen, 'kay?"

[Badb†]

"Yeah," Zoe replied breathlessly. "That-- that sounds okay."

Verbal contracts were based on a system of mutual trust and respect, which made them tenuous at the best of times. Even as she gasped her mantra, Zoe wondered if their loose arrangement would last to the edge of the forest. Joachim had been straight with her so far, but his ominous destination of somewhere else reminded Zoe that this was a temporary arrangement at best and certain death at worst. Joachim had been given plenty of opportunities to kill her, though, and had refrained from taking the shot.

Perhaps the fear of mutually assured betrayal cut both ways.

Following Joachim out of the forest had become the most sensible option, however temporary and tenuous their alliance was. Staying and waiting for someone else to find her- or worse, trying to make her own way out- would only end in a downward spiral. Within hours, Zoe realized, she would slip back into her routine of survival above all else. Perhaps she would survive longer that way, but it would be an existence, not a life. Zoe wanted to spend her last few days as an active participant, not an aimless nomad wallowing in self-indulgent dreams of purpose in grim, bloody solitude.

It was time to gather up what was left of her possessions and leave. Strangely, Zoe had found herself too preoccupied to give her possessions any thought after waking up on the island. Most of her luggage had been kept in her suitcase, which she had checked before she boarded the plane. Her carry-on luggage had been an unwieldy black duffel that contained only her sketchpad and bundles of clothing too bulky to check with her suitcase. Zoe recalled packing warm clothes out of habit, hiding a couple of thick, drab sweatshirts and her favourite scarf amongst the lighter summer clothes and her sister's dog-eared paperback of Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

When Zoe had recovered her bag on her first morning on the island, it was empty save for the clothes. It was obvious why her sketchpad was taken; she could have easily used it to transfer messages to other students, without the overseers seeing. Barely thinking straight, Zoe had shoved what she could into her assigned day pack and made for the edge of the island, which was where she had encountered Oscar and Cooper-not-Carter. Which meant, ultimately, that her sweaters were still in there.

Still shaken, lungs filled with bitter morning air, Zoe knelt in the dirt and rummaged through her tattered day pack, hunting for her spare clothes. After some digging she found a charcoal gray sweater and her frayed black scarf, and pocketed her reading frames to put the garments on. Zoe pulled the sweater on with little effort, rubbing her hands in concentric circles to warm them up. Her trembling hands still fumbled their way through tying the fraying tartan fabric. She settled on a triangular style associated with western anti-heroes and struggled to her feet, shouldering her now much lighter pack. Zoe still shook under the soft fabric, but the reassuring warmth allowed her some measure of comfort. Enough, at least, that she could finally slow her panicked breaths.

"I think.. I think I'm ready to go," She said finally, rapping the flat side of the machete against her leg in a marching rhythm. "Just lead the way, Joachim."

[Zoe Leverett, continued in Rio Bravo.]

[umop-ap!sdn†]

Zoe was ready to go, and she had elected Joachim the leader. Any direction would eventually take them out of the woods, the question was which ways wouldn't take them deeper first. Joachim found himself first walking towards the remains. Jaq's knife was on the ground beside it, it was clear what had happened. A fight, a loser, and a tool. The other party had taken off for whatever reason.

He wished he could phone Rosemary and ask. She was better at riddles, after all.

The gentle rain left trails on Grace's cold, dirty skin. The blood from her neck had finished pooling, and was now seeping down into the earth.

Lead the way? To where? For what? The terrible aura the woods emitted scared the other players away, that was their saving grace. He looked back up to Zoe, who looked more than ready to be going. If they were leaving, now was as good a time as ever. And straight ahead was as good a direction as ever.

"Alright." His voice was flat as ever. He wordlessly bent down over Grace and pulled her bag from under her arm. He tugged it off her shoulder, being careful not to touch her clammy skin. Her body shifted, and then came away from it.

"Along this way, then."

((Joachim Lovelace continued in Don't You Think this Outlaw Bit Has Done Got Out of Hand?))