SOTF Archive/SOTF Classic

((Kelly Nguyen continued from that you have the body))

Kelly Nguyen almost played an intimate round of footsies with one of the urns and pots that marked this graveyard. By the side of the foot, almost sending the bauble of clay careening to earth where it might have shattered. Momentum stilled, the various fragments of herself melodic in unison where they were otherwise unaligned, bleeding cacophonies. That one childhood song sung wrong- the arm bone connected to the, broken bone.

The small thing Kelly Nguyen almost knocked over did not fall. It tipped gently, then was lulled back to center as the weight of the flesh that had disturbed it guided it back.

Slow, deliberate. Every single movement, since the bullet had rended Kelly Nguyen's knee open. The exposed fat still bled shallowly, little bullion cubes of gelatin washed a lively wine red.

Kelly Nguyen watched the oblong bit of ceramic until it was dead still.

Then marched onward. One foot never falling behind the other, as it demanded obvious exertion and energy. That leading leg would lift, shadow it was attached to mutating into strange jagged shapes on the ground below. It would tautly resist gravity, flexion tightly constricting what was left of the skin around the slender tendon at the back of the heel, riding it up almost against the bone below. The foot would dust the earth once more, sole of a decaying shoe making not even a sound, as if it had never even returned from whence it came at all. Every step struggled. Every step demanded all the stars above.

Clearing the length of the garden took some time. Kelly Nguyen, at times, would almost bleed away into the shadows at the edges of each subsequent camera's field of vision. In spite of the sickly pale of her dress, capturing the moonlight but never holding onto it.

Shambling forward, rarely seeming to notice the lurking monstrosities around each blind spot. Paranoia infected the camera more so than it seemed to affect her. Occasionally Kelly Nguyen would check one way, then the other. Every now and then, neck slowly twisting, a sponge-like substance wringing out. One way, so slowly, then the other, the mechanical creaking of dry bone almost audible.

Somebody else was there.

Something approached it. Kelly Nguyen watched from the shadows, eyes lined by mask and by bangs, colorless. The somebody was considered. A boy. Almost as empty of life.

((Diego Larrosa still didn't want to be seen.))

He had not uncurled himself for the entire evening. He liked having his knees up to his chest; it meant having some form of cover.

He kept his arms firmly locked around his knees. If he didn't move, he could ignore the gummed feeling on his hand. He could pretend he was still clean.

His forehead was settled into the crooks of his knees, his head facing downwards. Not even the cameras could see him now. He felt safe this way.

This couldn't last forever. Nothing good did.

Footsteps approached, uneven. One foot dragging, the other foot lurching. Somehow more like tapping then stepping. No audible breath. He tensed.

He reached for the gun in his side. He looked up.

Swollen, purpled eyes met her.

There was a languid drip to their introduction. Blood coagulating as it ran out of use.

Much as the boy was battered, broken, reeked, Kelly Nguyen's face was impassive. A mouth was implied, somewhere in the formless mass of crinkles under the slope of a nose. It seemed to ripple, forming the shape of words that remained on the preferred side of dry lips.

Left, right. A minuscule motion that implied Kelly Nguyen's disapproval of something. The gun at hand was dropped, softly released, the barest of clattering. As Kelly Nguyen had before, the last time confronted with the implications of another's firepower. A statement, in eldritch body language. The language of immortal dragons.

Ever reflected in Kelly Nguyen's eyes, as she unceasingly watched the boy, implying that even her eyelids were an afterthought attached to her insectoid silhouette.

"We made it this far because we deserved to." Kelly Nguyen's voice had yet to succumb to the wear the rest of her fragile form. No battle scars, a conversational opener that could have been casually idled on in any amount of school halls between classes. Vital and healthy, alive, a nominally friendly tone.

The pauses between were measured precisely, as if intended to cook and boil.

"I think..." The smile on Kelly Nguyen's lips was only implied as opposed to being visible.

"It is our true nature."

One of Kelly Nguyen's hands came up, hovering over her chest, outward facing lines of her palms desiccated by the slow tightening of flesh against bone underneath. A peace offering, perhaps. 'Don't shoot', in that same language that their hollow husks shared.

"We see the world, the way they refuse to. No?" Kelly Nguyen saw the camera in that moment, not the boy's face.

Deserved to.

Diego had used those exact words against Morgan last afternoon. His friend deserved to die, he said. He'd wielded the words like blades, and they pierced. They deflected back onto him now, and they pierced.

His stomach churned. Even after she dropped the gun, his trigger finger itched. But he held back. Reciprocity. The concept of a 'we' interested him.

He'd liked Kelly before. A fellow high-achiever, bird of the same feather. She'd been nice enough to him two weeks ago.

She was telling him that was still true. We see the world the way they refuse to.

He could see the similarities, physically at least. Bloodied face, bloodied clothes, bloodied arms (he only noticed the missing hand, jagged bandaged stump in retrospect). He'd heard her name before, and she was still alive. She understood him more than Henry, Morgan had, at least.

We. Ty had used that word at him before. It had also made his stomach churn. But it had felt warmer back then. His finger still itched.

She was no threat to him. He would let her speak for now.

He spoke to her, face fully exposed, knees still up to his chest.

"Explain."

"Anyone ever give you that chance? I'm serious. Taking even a moment, I mean."

Eye contact was insistent, as little as Kelly Nguyen's eyes poked out of the cancerous mass of an au natural hairstyle.

"To really understand you."

The morning sun caught in a halo around Kelly Nguyen's silhouette. It painted the blood on the white of her dress like it were a portrait of sunset. Vibrant and lively, as much as Kelly Nguyen was patient and still.

"We're different now. We've changed."

A smile that couldn't be seen, heard in the lilt of her voice. Relaxed, as much as Kelly Nguyen's stiff spine was not. They drew a bit closer, growing a bit more in their tiny form to blot out Diego's horizon.

"We're not the same people going home." They drew a bit closer. "It's not home. Not for us, not anymore." Closer still. Growing, consuming. "We're different- they're the same. They're not waiting for us anymore."

Kelly Nguyen was too close. A frail hand, an only hand. Reaching out, as if to touch, as if to comfort. An odd concept written into the skeletal crook of her fingers, where the flesh almost took on the shape and color of what was underneath.

"We know better than that now. We stopped pretending, a long time ago."

"I... got to explain to someone once. Ty. He's dead now. He kinda got it. I think."

Diego said this feebly. The beginning of a retort.

His name hurt, but so did everything else. Nothing new.

"No one else got it, yeah."

He shrunk in on himself. His face started to settle into his knees again.

Kelly reached out for him, skeletal hand towards wounded shoulder. He winced, pulled in further. She pulled back as well, abruptly. A hint of offense. It didn't matter. He didn't care.

She had said that word again. We. We have changed. She wasn't wrong. He had had a shirt on two weeks ago. Kelly had had two hands. But, there was the attempt at a connection. She was drawing a line in the sand in front of the both of them.

No more allies.

This felt dangerous. He didn't want this.

He looked back at her.

"...not that it's not our home anymore. There's still gonna be somewhere to go back to.

"I think."

There had to be.

But, he hadn't really thought much about home beyond the concept of it, the idea of it, had he? He got hurt for it, he killed for it, but, he didn't spend much time thinking about how his family would react. If he'd even have a home to get back to. All he knew was that he wanted.

"...it won't be home as we knew it though, yeah."

His brows furrowed. His voice took on an edge.

"Why are you here anyways? What's your goal?"

"Tyrell... right. I knew of him. I imagine he might have gotten it."

Kelly Nguyen had watched his reaction impassively. There was a dangerous shadow drawn in a line right across that thing that approximated a human face, the shape of which seemed to be wound and wound until it could have cut open flesh. Something under tension, something that could snap.

Kelly Nguyen started to walk. Pacing in a slow circle. A classroom presentation might have gone about as well, as awkwardly, where a nervously uncomfortable, crippled shuffling bred with ill-advised ideas to give birth to the aborted placenta of a pitch. A call to action.

"You're right. Has to be a somewhere to go back to."

The distant crash of the sea, eerily loud when the island had shrunk so much in so few days. It had long ago replaced the hum of fluorescent lights.

Kelly Nguyen, back half turned to Diego on the apex of her back and forth. Her fist had for a brief moment tightened, as if she could have decked whatever it was that polluted the memory hidden from view.

Kelly Nguyen relaxed, turned back to her conversational partner with a nod measured by the graduated cylinder.

"You understand, though. No mercy. Another mob's worth of people who don't bother to understand us, on the other side."

There was a point on the ground between them that Kelly Nguyen wouldn't cross. She'd tried once, and seemed to actively avoid doing so again. Plenty of room between them, for all the gods they might have stopped believing in.

"I want everyone else to understand." Diego's final question had an answer, and it was spoken with no less conviction than anything else had been.

"The short-sightedness. Our class did not endure this much to cling to our old innocence. It is never coming back."

Kelly Nguyen shrugged. Their next moment of eye contact was a sustained challenge.

She continued on with the inclusive, plural, first-person pronouns. They of the same feather, same fate. She turned back to him, eyes peering at him through frizzy hair, mouth and nose obscured by surgical mask.

Call of the void. If he pulled down her mask right now, would he have already seen the wounds she wore?

He looked down instead.

The sandals she walked on were frayed. With each lopsided step, the soles stuck to the ground until the last possible millisecond, until they, hanging on with single straps, got hoisted up by limbs wrapped taut with skin.

His eyes continued to track the grass blades bent and smashed under her feet as she spoke.

No mercy. Morgan and Henry hadn't shown any to him. Billy hadn't shown any to him. They were all here, they understood what the island was like, to some degree.

He wondered, briefly, how strongly the people on the other side of the camera hated him.

He wondered if Mom, Ate were watching.

He rubbed the fingers on his scarred hands together. White and red rolls of dirt fell to the ground.

"...yeah. There's. No way they'll understand."

He continued staring past the grass, eyes dilated.

Worn to the knob of the bone, that strip of skin rising out of Kelly Nguyen's ankles. Normally slack, flexing with each step. Desiccated now, how it clung right to the definition of the bone beneath. With each step it might have all fallen apart, how the impact against ground caused the structure to creak and ache, caused the skeleton to become the flesh of the foot.

Until Kelly Nguyen stopped. Stood still, two feet tightly packed together, the line between her legs zipped up.

This was a normal conversation. Kelly Nguyen was watching him, with a normal poise, with a happy exhalation barely audible under her breath, that strange thing with a slightly crooked shadow that seemed to hover like a wraith in his presence.

"You get it then."

Like any conversation, between any two people. They could have been friends. It could have been a life before they'd both sacrificed other's.

"So. The question becomes, what do we do after this."

The question mark was missing. A lilt in the voice, rising pitch, but too mechanical to really be the sort of punctuation a normal, friendly girl would use.

"Surviving is easy. That's not the be-all of our purpose."

The camera's weight palpable. It blinked about as often.

"There has to be more, Diego. Don't you see? We've come this far to prove something, something besides the value of our own lives."

Easy.

Diego's eyes drifted up slightly. The bandages on the back of her knee hung on about as well as the sandals she wore. Exposed tendons, coagulated blood peeked from underneath reddened, saturated fabric.

He blinked a few more times.

A girl limping behind a tree, a final showdown viewed from above.

Marceline had done this to her. He'd seen it happen.

Easy, she said.

His eyes drifted further upwards. Yet more gauze, crimson, wrapped around jagged peaks where a hand had once been, the unbloodied parts almost blending in with the pale, blood-deprived forearm her hand had once been attached to.

He didn't like the way she was speaking right now. About the need to prove something. Henry had said that to him before.

He laid down his legs, exposed the bandage that wrapped around a ridged chest. Leaned back against the tree. His fists curled. He stared at her.

"Please. Elaborate, for me, what ideological purpose we have here on this island, what grand experiment we're all laying our lives down for right now.

"Do tell."

Eyes adjoined. Kelly Nguyen seemed to trace the way the pale baby of sunlight washed over the excessive stains of blood he was bathed in. Body language, translated into something more universal.

Kelly Nguyen's hand started to move. Gentle updrafts in the swish of her palm. The process of teaching probably looked less disjointed with more limbs left intact.

"Ideology is it exactly. Why do you think they died when we didn't?"

Kelly Nguyen seemed to refuse his leer any longer. She looked up to the sky, as if the early morning wisps of cirrus held answers no mortal tongue could place weight upon. Far away were her eyes, further still even the slightest tremble of weakness even as all the weight of her ragged form seemed to rest on both legs evenly.

"We made ourselves better. Better mentality. Willpower, that's the word for it. It's not complicated, I swear. Simple as 'whoever adapts best wins'. What we are now is something more than human, don't you think? That, that is a real statement. It means more than anything anyone could martyr themselves for."

Diego let out a sudden burst of air through his nose, smiled at her, cheek muscles pulling on bruised tissue. Silent laughter.

Better? More than human?

So, all his dead friends were less then?

These bruised, broken bodies they wore were some form of evolution?

His smile faded.

Yes, actually.

Lean into it, he'd told himself. Put in the work.

Lorenzo hadn't managed that. Ty had talked about how he was never content, how he always wanted to be someone else. How he struggled with himself, with what he'd done.

Lorenzo was dead now, reduced to remnants.

Kelly was still here. She had managed that.

Diego had been trying his best to do what Lorenzo hadn't, but there was always somewhere lower to go. Somewhere more monstrous more terrifying more cruel.

He gazed upon the girl, white sundress dulled, absorbing more than reflecting light.

He was terrified.

She was wrong about one thing, he was certain of that. This would not be permanent. Whoever, whatever they turned into on this island, it would stay here. But, if he wanted to live, if he wanted to really lean into it, then here she was. The pinnacle, the nadir of it all.

They only had to be here one more day. One more day, he had to be like her. And then he'd never have to be like her again.

He nodded slowly at her.

"...yeah."

His agreement came quietly, as if part of him didn't want her to hear it.

Things in that girl's shell clicked when the noise that passed through his lips was just loud enough to barely be heard. Soft chitin, and mandibles. Kelly Nguyen's teeth forming a singular shape, top to bottom, under the fillet bits of her skull.

Kelly Nguyen moved as if attracted to the sound. Pressing closer, but not yet crossing the line that had been dug between. Her feet didn't seem to move. Nor did the rest. It was just somehow closer, reflecting some scrap of what was left of Diego's dignity in the shiny part of the eyeball.

It knew, by the tension in its hand, the weight of its own gun. Where precisely that gun was, if it rushed, like equilibrium returning to the world.

Closer without moving.

Closer still.

It would pick up its weapon and snuff out what was left of either of them, before Diego could even react.

Kelly Nguyen relaxed. That pleasant cheer still leaked through her lips, featureless as the words and the tone were hidden on the wrong side of her mask.

"It makes sense, doesn't it." Every question as much a demand as it was a suggestion. "I'm right, aren't I. You've seen it, I've seen it. They try to break you. Marcy and the rest, they ripped me up, like-"

The still weeping stump her once-dominant arm ended in. If it had a hand that fist might have seen nails driving blood out of the palm, clenched so righteous it hurt. Blood continued to be the price paid. The soak of the bandages should have been what was left of her vitality, squeezed out of her marrow. Yet still, Kelly Nguyen stood triumphant.

"They lacked vision. They tried to limit us, but we could not be limited. We are better than their petty smallness."

He nodded faster.

"Yeah," he said louder, more surely. His own volume scared him.

"They do."

He couldn't deny it anymore. She got it. She understood him on this point, at least.

"This"—he pointed towards his face, discolored and swollen and bloodied—"was from someone who wanted revenge. He didn't care for survival or home anymore, I think."

Bruised knuckles turned inward, bandages strained against a rising, sinking chest.

"He just- he just wanted to send me. He wanted to send me flying off the cliffs because he didn't fucking get it. His friend didn't get it too. Talked about how it's our job or whatever to figure out why we're here, to not kill each other and waste away our days because it's our moral duty or obligation or some bullshit like that. To just, to just lay down our lives for no reason!"

He took in a few more deep breaths, pace slowing, blood cooling.

He looked up at her.

"I'm still here, and they aren't. So, you're right. We are better."

A few seconds of silence stretched on between them. His mind finally caught up with his words. He'd said it. They were better than Henry, Morgan, definitely. But Cam? Ty? Theo? Declyn? Drew?

Marcy?

Phlegm slid down his throat. He forced himself to swallow it.

"What... happened, by the way? Down there, with Marceline?" His tone was softer this time.

"They cling to those old moralisms."

Kelly Nguyen's words didn't seem to cross the gulf between the two of them, all empty space desolate of meaning, save for how loud those words suddenly were. The spell of calm almost broke like a fragile illusion, all that was left was an excited girl, tiny, barely functioning, rambling to herself with the first genuine smile she'd worn in lifetime's worth of her fury at the world.

She spoke, but not to him.

"Strong picking on the weak. Justifications, it's all justifications. They were never better. They were just trying to rip us apart. Eat us, so that our substance would fill their hollow and empty world views."

... Her mask had briefly been remade. As if what boiled under couldn't be contained.

Kelly Nguyen's tone settled, like blood starting to fester.

"You were in the house, then."

Once more, a voice that approximated schoolyard chats, as if that were still the norm.

"It was her friend, that was the girl Marceline had to kill." Meditative, calm recounting. Body perfectly smoothed over, words as vague as any others she could have spoken, as if the events she recounted had no gravity that could even hint at the trajectory of the celestial bodies lurking above.

"I think she was trying to figure it out, too. But she didn't have the strength to follow through. She tries to find her, Marceline kills her for her troubles."

It was a lovely story, much as any nakedly political anecdote could be on the podium.

"Her name was Roxy. The name we should remember, if any. Her life was a total loss, wasn't it. Marceline killing her was an action without an end goal. What was she fighting for, exactly. Survival. She didn't even get that. Avoidable waste."