My Body Is Ready

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Justin did this," Bert said, pointing at the body, "Justin Greene."

That would set it in stone. She named someone exactly, and she named them fully, and it was clear that it was them, I mean, it was obvious, it had to be, it had to be clear that it wasn't Bert because Bert wasn't tall enough to hit this person on the head. Benedict wasn't tall either but he was a good deal taller than Bert and nothing short of a full honest to god leap would put her at the right height, and even then, was what she had even good enough to do it, heavy enough to cause whatever the fuck internal bleeding happened with him, and if it was could Bert have swung it hard enough, and—

"He hit him with this big metal thing," she continued, "that looked like a pipe."

Well, that sounded specific. Fuck.

"Watch out for him, okay? He's gonna probably flip out and kill more people, so you gotta watch out. He's a standard issue white boy with blond hair and blue eyes and shitty teeth."

Bert turned back to the body, and then to the body that was standing up, doing something really strange.

"Camila what the fuck you're going to gouge your eye out stop that."

[Cicada]

'Why apologize?' Her instinctive almost-response, when Camilla apologized for something, who knew what, maybe it was everything that had ever happened that wasn't her fault anyways. It was familiar, almost comfortable verbiage to let spill. Camila was the sort quick to challenge her friends- she had literally just been willing to humor Benny, in the last awkward moments of his life, with her usual quick chops of cut and dry. Camila bit her tongue. Almost literally, as if that would shock her out of her play-by-play speed nightmare.

"Just trying to keep myself sane," Camila put her hand on thigh, where it buzzed with uneasy energy. Camila had the oddest compulsion to run, as if any amount of distance in any direction would have made any difference. "Sorry." She tried to quip. Maybe she still had a personality, though she certainly didn't feel like she had one.

"Benny. Mentioned Justin too. He was quite forgiving, of the bludgeoning."

Camila spoke just to fill the space with something. Not a form of idling she was very practiced with- her words came slow, clumsy, like she was trying to gulp down water between syllables. Maybe she was trying to keep her lungs packed to hyperventilation point- the euphoria of nearly passing out would at least dull the consistent void of endless screaming that had quietly settled into the crevasses of her brain.

"How do you know my name? I don't know you." She stared at the girl with the fiery hair and the squishy voice. Tried not to stare at Camilla too much. Tears were contagious, and friends were a vector no matter how much Camila tried to kill the friendliness in her, moment to moment, she continued to remain persistently mortal and thus suffering for it.

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

Camilla's first thought was to wonder who this "Justin Greene" person was. She never heard of a Justin in their class before. Maybe he was Parker's brother? No, she didn't think he had a brother in their grade.

She was asked why she was apologizing. At this point? Camilla was apologizing for existing. Or simply continuing to exist.

Especially after the gun that killed Beryl was fired.

She shook her head again, and wanted to apologize once more.

Those thoughts were interrupted by a name. Benny? The corpse here. No, it felt wrong to refer to it- him- as merely a corpse, not after the dead had been given a name.

Now Camila was asking Bert something. Maybe that would distract them long enough for Camilla to fall face first into the mud from exhaustion, probably choking on it in the process.

Why did every train of thought have to remind her of death? She didn't want to die. But nobody would want to live a second longer on this hell of an island either, would they?

She remained silent, and standing.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Oh.

"Oh, um,"

Yeah, that was kinda, um.

"I mean, I've heard about you? Seen you around, and stuff? I'm sure we have some mutual friends, or something."

Yup. That was totally what it was. Totally not that a weird Junior boy in the student government had a crush on Camila and asked Bert for her info, totally not. That didn't happen, not at all.

Boys. Girls. Crushes. Phones. All so distant, now.

"Oh, um, my name's Liberty," she said, "but you can call me Bert. Or Bert. It doesn't really matter. Anything's fine."

Well, jeez, this was awkward. Like, wow. Still introducing herself to people from her senior class now of all times, huh? Bert could've sworn that Darlene was the only one she hadn't spent any considerable time with, but maybe there were people even more unknown than that all along. Darlene was notoriously unknown. Camila was just sort of there. A known unknown. Hey, maybe that weird B.S. video they picked apart in history class that one time wasn't such a stupid piece of non-English trash after all. Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown knowns. Maybe those were good things to account for. Bert thought she was, on the whole, a known known. She was in student government, for fuck's sake! Didn't people care about student government!?

Bert turned and looked at Camilla, the weed-party-cute one. She looked pale, like she was going to fall over.

"Woah, you good?" she asked, "Hey, maybe we should get out of here. Y'know, away from the co—I mean, Benedict, right?"

[Cicada]

"Fair." Camila's friends tended to have other friends. She had many more friends of friends than she did friends- numerical common sense mostly, but also a very subtly lonely implication.

"Liberty. Student council."

Camila solely remembered the strange name, and she'd never before had a face to go along with it.

"Benny would have told us to move anyways." 'Us' was the wrong word, rather, Camila didn't belong except by dint of having happened to be there physically if not in many other senses of the word 'there'. "He wouldn't have wanted us distraught because of his body." She could hear him saying it there and then, and sworn it far clearer than it should have been when his lips were starting to slowly sink into muddy silt. Camila swallowed, suddenly. Had to force down the rising bile of her own overwhelming need to break down- a moment, she just needed a private moment to release it before she exploded into viscera.

Camila looked up, and observed that Camilla's pallor was indeed an IV drip sucked dry and wrinkled. That was just the last second shot of adrenaline that could get Camila to unconsciously stand, step over the body with her bag digging heavily into her good shoulder.

"How long has it been since you've rested? Cam."

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

Of course Camilla wasn't okay. She couldn't even fool herself, for once.

"Rested...?"

Her eyelids were feeling heavier by the second, every blink all too eager. Yet she did not dare close her eyes for more than a second- the red. She was sure it would be back.

What was the time, anyway?

What was the time when she woke up?

"I... I don't know."

Getting away from the dead boy seemed like a good idea. Despite it leaving his body, and Camilla never having known him, she felt a sense of heaviness in the air. Was a spirit gaseous? It seemed to replace the oxygen in the atmosphere. She lifted a hand to her mouth, and yawned. It wasn't a very big yawn, she hoped.

Did she even stop to sit down at some point during the day? Earlier on Max and Lucas seemed to just blaze forward, and after... she couldn't remember when she stopped running and transitioned to walking. The last time she tried to actually stop, lie down and rest was when she couldn't. Too much red. And it wasn't like she'd be any better at it now.

She swore she could hear a gunshot through the ringing in her ears.

She would not rest. But she would not stand for much longer either- at some point, her knees would have to give out. She wasn't sure if she looked forward to it or not.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Then we should go somewhere indoors," Bert suggested, "like, a shelter kind of thing, and spend the night there. Get some rest, for a bit, right?"

She hoped the Cam bloc wasn't too attached to the body. Bert wasn't carrying that anywhere, no sirree. It could stay here and get waterlogged. Bert was not responsible, the others said as much. Sure, he deserved better than this, but Bert could already feel the beginnings of blisters on her feet and needed to sit down before those blossomed into full on welts. She knew from the walk over that there were houses and stuff to sleep in, or at least rest in, or other indoor areas if they desired. They were not at a loss for them, at least.

"We could try the village, or the zoo, or the big houses," Bert added, "I know the map now, I looked it over on my way over here."

She did her best to exclude Benedict's corpse from her line of sight. God, what a gruesome thing to look at. He didn't have any obvious injury besides the head thing, but just watching him slowly get waterlogged wasn't fun for Bert, so she averted her eyes. Death probably wasn't going to be fun or interesting, and that was fine for Bert, since she didn't intend on coming face to face with it for a long time anyways.

Her eyes finally settled on a spot of rice next to his shoe and traced the length up and down with her eyes. Those sure were some plants, right there.

[Cicada]

Camila almost followed Bert's gaze, until she registered what it was angled at. Pointed right behind her feet, which was a place in space and time Camila had to do her best to forget. Bert mentioned the map, and Camila was almost inclined to cast the whole thing from memory. Impractical in many ways, but it'd protect what was left of her spirit, a tiny flickering flame caught in frigid wind. Over time, there would be more places she'd never want to go again.

Camilla's eyes seemed to be captured as film reel played at slow motion. Camila made her decision.

"I'd say avoid an obvious place where rest would be easy." She avoided calling them 'we'.

"People will be looking for those. We had... three buses, so maybe up to one hundred fifty or so students." A little spatial math, estimating, multiplying rows of two or three to a seat; even such a small aside was a welcoming distraction, disarmingly mundane. "Many of whom would prefer beds to camping."

Camila's next announcement forfeit Benny ever finding a worthy repose. She forced her revulsion at her own disrespect to be fleeting, lest she puke up her stress and her salvation.

"Let's go. Now." She spoke fast, sounded confident. "I'll help you guys get wherever you chose to go." Unspoken, her intent to follow not a step further than that. She was reminded that Tyrell had similarly abandoned them in such a way- the prior 'them', the one that Camila had belonged to seemingly years before, like a cobweb childhood memory too sticky to burn away no matter how much it haunted the darkness behind her eyelids, the silhouette of Dante's ghostly eyes. The friendly brown started to reflect green. Two sets of eyes in one, both asking her questions she couldn't answer.

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

Shelter. That was good. She tried to get shelter. The world decided she shouldn't get any. The world was probably right.

Camilla wanted a lot of things. Sleep, being able to sleep somewhere comfortable in particular, was the top shot-term thing in this moment. Of course she'd be a fool to think it was ever that easy and she learned fairly early on that what one wants in life is usually irrelevant. That lesson should have been drilled into her head even further than it had been hammered in the past the moment she found herself in this hell.

"Yeah. Let's go. Anywhere but..."

The other Camila had the right idea. Or was she the other Camilla? Was Camila with one L older than her? Like that would answer her question at all.

Anywhere but here.

She made good on her unspoken words, and began to walk.

The mud felt heavy as she dragged her feet to... wherever. Anywhere that wasn't a swamp would be good enough for her.

As she walked, even the air felt heavy. Her own feet, and body, felt heavy too. It was too much to truly stand soon enough, as her feet seemed to stop moving, and gave out under her. She had to close her eyes, despite what she saw there, but she kept them open for just a bit longer.

Maybe not sleeping in a swamp was too much to ask.

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Well, the first step to being anywhere but here is to start moving over there," Bert said, pointing off in a random direction, "so let's get moving, okay?"

She let her words hang in the air for a bit before she gave the Cam's a warm and toothy smile.

It had been a bit since she'd smiled, she realized. Between the thing with Darlene before all this started and this all starting hadn't been much opportunity for her to show her teeth. It ran in stark contrast to how things usually were with her, she thought. Usually she was a bundle of friendly energy, or tried to be! Letting smiling go by the wayside was totally by accident, though. She loved smiling. It made her feel happier, most of the time. Even if she had to force it, like she did now.

Bert got a few paces walking in the direction that she had pointed at before she stopped smiling and looked over her shoulder.

"Oh," she noted, "by the way, do either of you have any water? I left my bag in the woods by the weird art shit."

If the other two wanted to offer her some, they'd have to do so when they caught up with her; Bert walked fast and free.

[Liberty "Bert" Wren continued in Sink Or Swim, Better Dive Right In.]

[Cicada]

That was a bit upsetting, in a petty way. A welcome mote of irritation, a purposeful losing the forest for the trees. Bert having lost her supplies so casually was, in it's own way believable. Camila could have mistaken this for any other school trip, maybe time had displaced the lot of them into their elementary school days and a teacher would come along to chide Bert for her irresponsibility. Camila herself felt that need for a moment, but the fight in her receded like tide. She stopped wanting to vent hot air, and like a stale balloon stagnated.

Irresponsibility was going to get Bert killed, and practically speaking that was not Camila's concern. Camila, still, endeavored to offer water. A parting gift, maybe. It was the wrong move, an objectively stupid move that might exacerbate Camila's future suffering, but Camila made the move on instinct and endeavored to not question her own impulses too much. Down that way lay yet more unwise cavorting with risk, her own and others'.

Bert moved fast. Camila drifted in pursuit.

First, Camila offered Camilla a hand, silently. A shoulder too, if she physically needed it, stable enough when it was the one opposite the side of her body still being roiled by the orangy-red flames of patches of her own aggravated bruising.

On that note, they went. Two cripples racing against time and losing. Uncomfortably familiar.

Camila was obstinately there for Camilla, a physical presence, up until she wasn't. It was better that way. A palpable helping hand, but one that did not linger.

((Camila Cañizares continued in don't show, tell))

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

Even if it was fleeting, and the circumstances were unpleasant, Camilla appreciated the gesture of a hand, to lift her back onto her feet. That moment, and Camila herself, vanished. Blown away by the wind.

There were happier times on her mind now- well, relatively happier. She supposed her party experience was rather miserable in their last moments, even with Julien's help.

She never properly thanked him, did she? Hopefully he wouldn't get himself in too much trouble before she could do so. At least she could be happy that she got to say "I love you" to all the people she wanted to say it to. Right up to that moment she never quite considered herself a loving person, but she supposed people raised in this day and country- including herself- often underestimated platonic love.

Of course, she could only hope. Opportunities to speak, give thanks, and give in general were as fleeting as Camila's brief return to her life.

The red and ringing that passed for a dream reminded her incessantly as she slept.

[Camilla Bell continued in Sink or Swim, Better Dive Right In]