Ship's A Goin Down

[MethodicalSlacker]

[Lili Williams continued from The Making of a Soul]

They finally announced Kizi's death. Good. Let the world know of the injustice that came to pass. At the very least, they kept her out of it. Lili shuffled along the bridge, gun in her hands, bag over her shoulder. She figured she would go back across to the other side of the island just to see what was going on over there. Plus, she wanted to see if her gun worked. Didn't necessarily mean that she wanted to shoot somebody, but she figured that if there was somewhere that she could get some target practice in, it might be the pub. She could stack some glasses on the counter and see if she could aim straight enough to hit some of them. Lili was unaware of the nature of shotgun ammunition, but one thing she could tell from the size of the gun itself was that it was very likely to have high recoil. At the very least, she needed to make sure that she didn't go flying over backwards when she fired the thing.

Not much had changed on the bridge. It looked a little more weathered, and she could feel the radiating energy presence of footprints that her eyes could not see, but apart from that, it was still the same old metallic eyesore.

She was about halfway across when something caught her eye. Slowly, she put her bag down off to the side where she could keep an eye on it and walked over to the side of the bridge.

Something was floating in the water.

Lili had no idea what it was - it was too far off - but the sight of something bobbing up and down in the waves was enough to set her mind alight with possibilities. It could be Jennifer's corpse, somehow coming up for air, brought up by a school of fish as a throne of Poseidon and as an offering to the sky. It could be her own shoes, coming to rest pathetically on the surface of the water. Maybe other people had tossed some stuff in, following the unseen example that she had set.

Completely oblivious to the sound of approaching footsteps, Lili stepped closer to the edge, trying to get a better look.

[Zetsu]

((Asuka continued from Creature Comforts))

"Thinking about jumping? Cause if you are, I wouldn't mind chatting first."

[MethodicalSlacker]

There simply was no way of discerning what it was that was in the water. That much, at the very least, was certain, and there wasn't much of anything that Lili could think of to remedy that. She could try finding binoculars or a telescope, but she had a feeling that those weren't exactly in abundance around here. It wasn't that she doubted that those things were assigned as weapons to some poor souls, but if they had, they had probably been broken in some sense. That, or they were so far away that between the time it took to get to them and back, the object in the water would have already disappeared. No, there was no use in-

In...

...

Somebody was speaking.

Somebody was saying things to her.

They snuck up on her, out of nowhere. All that Lili could make out was the word 'jump'.

That was enough for her.

Lili whipped around, swinging her gun up into her hands, her finger on the trigger, and pointed it toward the source of the noise.

Now was not the time to take any chances.

Not today, when there was so much on the li-

Wait, what?

Asuka?

The weight of what she had just done was slow to impact her, but when it did, it broke her like a ton of bricks. She had just pointed a gun at someone innocent - her friend, no less - and without a second thought. If she hadn't recognized the face, she probably would have pulled the trigger without much of a second thought. That cold reality settled in among the rubble and made a house out of the broken masonry, occupying what was left of her thoughts.

At one point, she was on the opposite end of a gun just like this, no further from death.

"I was," she began to say, but stopped herself.

There wasn't any justification for this.

For what she had just barely stopped herself from doing.

[Zetsu]

"Guess not. You gonna kill with that thing, then? If you're planning on not dying, you will have to make at least one. Or maybe you're not planning on killing but want to enjoy yourself a little more before your inevitable death?"

Asuka glanced over the edge of the bridge at the cold, stony-grey water below. It looked hard, like you'd break your bones if you hit it. At this height, you probably would.

"Not a bad view, I guess, if you're trying to enjoy yourself."

[MethodicalSlacker]

Her nervousness only grew as Asuka began to speak, suggesting that she had been intending to kill somebody at some point. Lili shook her head, still somewhat shocked and unable to speak. She had only taken the gun in self defense, honest! There was no real reason she'd have to kill somebody. She had more than enough food and water to last her for however long she ended up lasting, so why would she go off and kill someone.

The only reason Lili would kill would be for enjoyment, and after holding her dying friend in her arms as she breathed her last, she didn't think she could do that to somebody else.

"I thought I saw something," she finally said, "Out in the water. Can you find anything out there? I've lost my glasses."

She didn't know how she could explain to Asuka why she had turned the gun on her without going in depth about her whole story. This whole time, she'd been looking for a friend she could confess her thoughts and feelings to without fearing rejection. Someone exactly like Asuka. Now, she was here, and she couldn't say anything. Had her whole journey, all this time, been pointless?

"I'm sorry I pointed the gun at you," Lili blurted out, "I got spooked, and I was afraid, and, and..."

Her breathing got heavier, and she took a step back away from the edge of the bridge.

[Zetsu]

Asuka looked over the side, shrugged.

"Nope. Don't see anything."

Asuka turned her eyes back to Lili. Try though she might—and she had to try, the girl seemed on the verge of hyperventilating—she couldn't think of anything meaningful to say.

"Calm down, it happens. Not like I could do anything about it even if I did decide to get angry over your waving a gun in my face. No weapons here. And I can't really blame you for not wanting to die, either."

Damn, was this what counted for small talk when you're trapped in a death game? It'd explain a lot of things, certainly. Like why Asuka was so bad at it.

Asuka stretched, yawned. It was a good stretch, but a crappy yawn.

"Nevermind that. How's your time here been, so far? Got any plans for the future?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

She didn't stop breathing heavily. Instead, she just started talking, and wouldn't stop.

"Future plans? None, except walk around with this gun and shoot anything that tries to kill me. I've been thinking of going over to that place with the helicopter - I can't see if it's still there - because I've never been over there, but now I was probably going to go back over to the radio tower just because I can, and it's really tall, so I might just go up to the top and just jump off? There's nothing else to do? I don't want to die, but I don't want to be bored, and-"

There was a second part to Asuka's question. It was the first part to come out, and likely warranted answering first, but Lili's mind wasn't thinking in a linear fashion anymore. It was more of a soup than anything, a steaming hot alphabet soup with too many consonants and, strangely, punctuation marks.

"Well I've been wandering consistently, from Day One, and I went over the bridge before, and I traded someone for a toy lightsaber, which is here, right on my waist, and nowhere else, because it shouldn't be anywhere else, that wouldn't make sense, right? Right. Right!"

Lili started laughing.

Let it all out. You need this. I need this.

"Then I found the other Lily, at that radio tower that I was going to jump off of, and she just kind of got pissed off and left, and then I walked around a bit before I went and threw some suitcases at a chandelier, and then this fucking Darius guy comes up and asks me to help him carry a goddamn stinky corpse halfway across the island, and he didn't even have any fucking cigarettes to give me for it, so of course I go along with him, and then we got separated, and then I left him, and then, and then, I..."

Lili stopped to catch her breath. Her grip on the gun tightened, as if she needed to hang onto it in order to stay rooted to this reality. Like an anchor resting on the seafloor, keeping the ship of her soul from drifting too far away from port.

"I found a girl named Kizi, and we found Penelope and Ben Fields and Raina, and we made a pacifist group, and then eventually we went back over the bridge to the asylum and Ben left to check on some things, so Kizi and I went off to make posters for the group, but then some fuck with a gun comes in - this is his gun, I think - comes in and shoots her. So, I take his gun, the other guys come back, they chase him away, but that just didn't feel right, so I, I left them too, and I probably shouldn't have, but I did, and now I'm here."

She paused, wondering if there was anything she was missing.

"Oh, and Ben's dead too. I found his body."

She left out the part about kissing him. If Asuka asked about romance, she could say that, but she was worried it'd scare her off.

Oh well. Not much to lose at this point, anyways.

[Zetsu]

"Did you cry?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

Lili blinked.

"What?"

Something wasn't right here.

No, something dreadful was creeping up and onto her shoulders.

It was perched, like a bat, and it was whispering misty nothings into her ear.

Because, the truth was, she hadn't cried.

Not a single tear for Ben.

Did Asuka know what happened?

Had she somehow seen?

Was there some guiding intuition, leading her to ask such questions?

"Why...why do you care?"

It wasn't like she'd let Asuka know that, though.

Not in a million years.

[Zetsu]

So she hadn't.

Well.

"How do you feel about not having cried?"

...

"Do you want to die?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Stop..."

Lili clutched a hand to her head, and started shaking it back and forth. She hadn't even answered her first question truthfully, and already Asuka was moving in for the kill with another, as if reading her mind. She lowered her hand again, looking for something to hold onto, bag still slung along her shoulder, cramping down on her body, pushing her further and further down a corridor that only led inward into herself. The only way out was through, and-

Do I want to die?

...she started seeing red. Her heart started pounding out of her chest, and her blood started to flow. All she could think now was that she wanted an out. Asuka had been her friend, so why wasn't she acting like it right now? What had crawled up her pants and died? What was setting her off?

And how dare she? How dare she imply that...that Lili deserved to die for what she had done? Yes, that's what she was implying, by asking such clinical questions. She had been under stress from the beginning, and there was nothing that she could have done about it to change anything. Was this really a threat? What had happened to Asuka to make her turn bad? Was she asking if Lili was okay with dying, so she could push her off of the bridge or something? Thoughts started to swarm the inside of her head, making her a prisoner in her own skull. Now, she could hear her heart where her brain was supposed to be, and over a week of delirium flipped a switch in her brain, the mass of swarming thoughts crowding over to weigh it down.

Lili didn't want to die. She looked Asuka in the eyes for a moment. What she felt staring back wasn't Asuka, but something else. An Other Asuka. She felt no empathy for what had taken the form of her friend. It wasn't her friend. She was being tricked.

Boiling to a fever pitch, Lili raised the shotgun in one swift motion, and fired it at Asuka. She didn't stick around to see if it hit - instead, she took off running, with the intention of going far, far away, where no impostor of her friend, or specter of the past, could catch up to her.

She ran to God.

[Lili Williams continued in Crown of Shit (Liar's Chair).]

[Zetsu]

((Asuka continued in Sublimation))