Illusion Ain't Revolution

[Brackie]

Calista Carpenter was walking back and forth, wall to wall, trying to breathe and stop her heart from beating out of her chest.

It was insane - it was all just so bloody insane. Here she was, standing in some tiny church bedroom where she'd woken up, and it already took a few minutes for her to remember that everything that had happened since the sirens - her teachers being shot, the American man in army clothes talking about some attack her country had made, and then collapsing from sheer fear even before she felt the gas swallowing her whole after finding out that the goal was to make sure everyone was dead except one - was real. But it couldn't be real, it shouldn't have been. It happened to other countries, not hers. It happened to those faraway lands where people wiped their asses with one hand and ate with the other, or killed each other for a loaf of bread, or even worse it happened in Ireland.

So when Calista finally realized what was going on, she wanted to fly outside her own body. It didn't feel like it was happening to her. It was happening to another girl, someone she was watching down on from above as she began slowly erratically pacing around the room like a stunned mullet. But no, Calista Carpenter was a prisoner of the United States of America, the greatest threat to the world that had ever existed, and in a few days she was probably going to be dead.

But it wasn't right at all. She had a life, she had responsibilities, she had a job, she was going to be a beautician. She had siblings to take care of oh god what about them? Were they safe? What if they'd killed the entire school before taking them hostage? What if Celeste and Cody were laying dead with a bullet in them under a huge pile of other small children and that was all the Americans had left behind for her hysterical mother and Ian to identify? The thought almost made her knees give way again but Calista somehow managed to compose herself and do another round of the room, giving mindless glances to the bag on the bed.

Who the hell was going to take care of them now? There just wasn't enough time or people around to help them grow up, their mother worked full time and it was only thanks Calista doing her best every day with only a few scarce breaks for herself that the entire family wasn't on the street. They needed her. Ian could only do so much, and he'd only been around for less than half of Cody's life, how the hell was he going to step in and replace Calista? Even worse what if he left? What if there was no Calista and no Ian and no Christopher and just her mum trying to raise two kids all by herself when she hadn't even taken on those responsibilities in years?

Calista's shoe caught on the rug and caused her to stumble, bumping into the nearest bookcase on the way down. She caught herself partially on the shelf but then she was stuck. She had no energy to pull herself up from the ground, so all she could do was kneel on the ground, left hand planted on the empty bookshelf, head boring into the ground as she hyperventilated, trying to redirect any amount of energy away from forcing her breath in and out to doing anything else before she was stuck forever.

[Cicadan]

She could still hear the loud echo of gunshots, unceasing rattle to her skull. Two teachers and a student's nameless faces turned to finely sprayed red.

Maggie was huddled in the corner of the classroom and all her friends were screaming, and they were staring, and Mrs. Gimenez was on the floor at a weird angle and her neck looked like a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces put together wrong and red jello everywhere around turning a grosser darker color slowly. And Maggie was scared and she couldn't stop staring, and all the noises of all the screaming wouldn't stop and she couldn't hear herself breathe, it was heavy in her nose and throat like when Mommy helped her out when she had a cold but Mommy wasn't here to help out, and Mrs. Gimenez needed to help out, and Maggie needed to walk over and fix Mrs. Gimenez's broken throat because there were bad people outside and Maggie and her friends needed help, and there were loud sounds of explosions and they were like fireworks but more shorter, like it wasn't bright and pretty but instead an evil laugh that went bang bang bang bang

The echo slowly abated. Lena let it wash away with a focus on the outward surge of her breath, the cozy emptiness of her lungs.

She contemplated the pattern of lights stained in rich colors as it fell through church windows and onto her skin. Her pristine wrist painted a red more solemnly noble than blood. Her fist clenched around a knife, whose jagged angles erupted from her hand in a way that seemed violent and out of place. She'd tried to make the coldly sterile torture device friendlier, blanketing the handle with the thin string of the jack o'lantern she'd decorated her uniform with. It dangled like a child's keychain. It seemed out of place.

She'd heard the sounds of wood and floor thumping like arrhythmic heartbeats, they'd been audible for some time. They'd sounded human and she'd been disinclined to investigate. She cautiously approached the door off to the side of the organ's imposing silhouette and investigated. The room beyond was elegantly spartan. The rug was plentiful, the shelves would have been bustling in their time. A few chairs were untouched, upholstery freshly inviting without spent warmth. The girl kneeling against one shelf was loosely bundled hair and heaving shoulders.

Lena reminded herself to breathe with regularity.

"Are you... alright." Her voice was quiet, hoarse. She wasn't sure she had the energy to project it, or the willingness to pretend to try.

Mommy told Maggie and her friends and Maggie remembered what Mommy told her, that she had to be quiet, and that if she wasn't quiet the big loud gun noises would come back and take her friends away

Lena exhaled softly, kept the weight of her gaze firmly on the chair furthest away.

[Brackie]

It was a rush, all of it. Calista couldn't keep her composure, but that didn't change her stance. She was still futilely clutching the bookcase trying to breathe, and now she just wanted to cry, but she couldn't get enough breath in. Every time she tried her throat tightened and she nearly collapsed. She was being crushed by nothing, and it hurt just as much as if she were being crushed by a block of concrete. It all just fucking hurt, no matter the thought. She tried forcing herself to think of happy times, like going out for that one weekend to that beach town in Cornwall, or that time she got an A on a test she hadn't studied for, and nothing helped. But the sad thoughts weren't making it worse, just keeping her as constant as everything.

The only thing that made it worse was the voice, asking if she was alright. As though driven by instinct she threw her head up and bore her eyes into the intruding girl.

"No, I'm not FUCKING ALRIGHT!"

She didn't mean to shout, but it was the only thing in her mind that prevented herself from asphyxiating.

"Some FUCKING AMERICANS HAVE KIDNAPPED US AND ARE MAKING US KILL EACH OTHER! WE'RE ALL GONNA BE DEAD IN A FEW DAYS, SO NO, I'M NOT ALRIGHT!"

There was a strange part of her that was almost afraid to litter her sentences with swears. She realized it was because she sounded just like Celeste right now, trying to swear. No matter how old she got Calista always hit her over the head for it so being put in the same position made her feel the same way. She didn't want to swear - it made her feel like a toddler. She wanted to scream though, just to keep herself from breaking.

"I SWEAR I-"

And there it was - she'd stopped shaking. Her hand felt steady rather than a pillar of her entire being, and Calista felt normal again. She quickly took in a breath, and it didn't feel like the entire process would destroy her body once again. She, almost embarrassingly, cleared her throat.

"I-I'm sorry, I just...needed to do that."

She felt better. She wasn't fine, she wasn't okay, but at least Calista was better.

"Fuck!"

She also needed to do that. And yet, it still felt like a child swearing because they knew the words.

[Cicadan]

Suddenly there was motion, and Lena observed some shade of spilled brown as prey did predator.

"No, I'm not FUCKING ALRIGHT! Mommy had Abby cuddled against her tummy and Mommy was shushing Abby because Abby wouldn't stop screaming because Abby's Mommy was gone, Some FUCKING AMERICANS HAVE KIDNAPPED US AND ARE MAKING US KILL EACH OTHER! And Mommy said be quiet, and she said it over and over, and if Abby wasn't quiet WE'RE ALL GONNA BE DEAD IN A FEW DAYS, they'd find them SO NO, the men with the loud guns would find them I'M NOT ALRIGHT! the men with the loud guns would make their bodies fall apart like the Mrs. Gimenez had I SWEAR I-" Lena had a knife, and that knife taunted her with it's black hole weight dragging on her entire arm.

Lena noticed her own life-giving breath had begun to tremble. She steadied it, and loosened the vise around the briar-sculpted handle still sitting in her palm.

The other girl was pretty, in an abstract way. The more Lena memorized the softness of her nose and cheeks the more unfamiliar it all seemed. She reminded herself to stay calm.

"It's okay," she tried. She stared at anything that wasn't the all-too-real clarity of the other girls eyes, soon as she could.

"This isn't good," she agreed in her thin voice.

Abby stopped crying, after a while, and the house with the broken glass windows on the edge of town had been their miserable home until Mr. Sun had decided to start walking away.

"We.. Have to stay quiet." Spoken like a rather pitiful apology.

[Brackie]

In the moments Calista took to calm herself, she noticed she hadn't even taken a notice of who she was speaking to. She looked up at the girl and saw it was Lena, a girl she had literally never spoken to outside of the context of school. Not the best start, but it's not like Calista was going to give her stick for existing. At least she wasn't an American soldier, and at the very least she hadn't decided to become a participant in whatever nightmare they'd found themselves in. It could always be worse. She removed her hand from the shelf and used it and its twin to part her hair from her face, getting a better look at Lena. She was one of those foreign girls who were everywhere at her school like they owned the place, but she wasn't loud and threatening so the point was moot. But she also had a large knife in her head with something attached to it, so Calista wasn't about to go reminding her of her distaste.

"Yeah no shit this isn't good."

Calista didn't mean to be so snippy but Lena was stating the obvious. But she agreed with her second point.

"Probably a bit late for that now, but yeah."

Calista's voice carried even when she wasn't a POW, so there's no telling how far it went during her dummy spit. If anyone was in the area they'd know where they were, or where Calista was rather since Lena was too quiet to even register decibels in Calista's honest opinion, and if they decided they wanted to kill her then and there there'd be no stopping them, unless Lena was a secret super soldier in deep cover, or Calista herself was a sleeper agent. Her thoughts were of less weighty things now, distant from her potential dead siblings and now wondering of the possibility of being able to do a backflip over some lad with a rifle, so that was a good sign.

"I'm...ugh."

It still felt weird, however, to talk of herself being "fine" or "alright", so the words died on her tongue. She'd never be fine as long as she was here, wherever here was.

"I need something to...drink, or eat, or whatever."

She did keep her voice lower than before, at Lena's behest, but she still picked herself up from the floor and walked over to what was essentially her bag.

"They gotta have given us food or water or-fucking 'ell."

A long metal rifle sat in her bag, stretching the frame of the material out so it looked strange. She saw other stuff, but the giant gun was taking up most of her attention.

"Fucking 'ell."

[Cicadan]

Even when she wasn't being yelled at Lena's discomfort tensed the springs in her Achilles heels. Normally when she had the option to not speak to someone she did just that. She wasn't sure if that was an option in this particular here and now. Turning her back seemed like a moral failure of some kind. Lena wasn't sure what she needed to say... but as it was, she needed to say something, even to this feminine silhouette's worth of distinctly vague features.

The other girl was loud. That much was certain. Her voice was violent like gunshots even when speaking in a calmer tone. Lena remembered gunshots, though she uneasily dismissed that memory before the echoing caved in her skull.

"Maybe," Lena offered.

She didn't feel like she was getting the timing of her responses right. There were vast empty spaces of stillborn time after the other girl's talking at the void.

"There's food in the bags," Lena continued, belatedly elongating her spoken delay. "It, um. Doesn't look particularly good."

You have to eat, Abby. Abby was silently crying and the tears stained the collar of her shirt.

Please eat.

Lena saw the gun too. The implication of the gun's sound, long before it would ever be fired. Lena stared, it seemed that the weight of her stare had suddenly retreated some distance even though it was in the exact same place.

"... Don't..."

[Brackie]

Calista began taking a better look at the rifle sitting in her bag, and saw that it wasn't exactly a gun. Wasn't exactly something she could really aim at someone and go 'bang!' with either, more like a really weird crossbow. So naturally, it wasn't the most useful of items she could have gotten.

Useful?

It seemed to make Lena nervous though, as though Calista had been staring at it for quite a while. The other girl wasn't particularly loud, but Calista wasn't hard of hearing. Being perfectly honest, the gun-thing didn't exactly make her feel safe either - now, of all sensations, she felt like a condemned soldier in a Roman Colosseum; doomed to failure and death, but a shiny comforting gift to keep her occupied. It could have been better, but even if it had been better Calista probably wouldn't have been able to shake it.

Reaching in, she pulled the gun out by the tip and examined it. There had to have been forever between the barrel and the trigger, and it still looked empty, like there was a large chunk of it missing. There didn't seem to be an inside, whatever the inside of the gun was usually called. Come to think of it, it probably was a crossbow, just one she'd never seen before in her life. God knew how to use it though.

Shrugging, Calista placed it on the bed, and began feeling around inside the bag for food. She felt a few shiny metal poles for some reason, but eventually, some plastic slipped by her fingertips, and she pulled them out as well. The wording was weird, lots of initials and army words, but it looked vaguely like foreign food, at least the foreign food someone would expect from a weird evil country like the United States.

"What the hell are these? Em Are Eees? Are they food?"

[Cicadan]

Lena saw into the distance, infinitely, though the walls were cramped against them like the small rooms of Lena's distant past.

The past drew closer the further away she looked. It was a trick of the light that she'd learned. Light moved through time and carried history with it. As the stars above, so too those mortal things below.

Her exhale hung like a damp cloth stretched just tight over her lips and nose. Slow. Stifling.

Abby, stifled against a motherly firm hand until she was still and quiet.

Lena faintly watched the other girl put her gun back into the deep fathoms of her bag. The other's grip had been seemingly lost to the crowd of her fingers, toppling over the edge. It implied some lack of comfort- God willing, the gun was a thing alien to either girl. Lena's prayer was yet without answer.

"I... wouldn't know." Lena put on a vaguely embarrassed smile. Not that she felt the meaning, nor that she considered her one-member audience. "I was never the best at English, erm.. vocabularies." Ultimately...

Irrelevant, she supposed. She could remember, though, that she'd not eaten before coming to school. She could see that far back in time, asado burned on open flame, dinner left untouched on her plate. Pa had put that dish away and Lena had lingered on for the evening, waiting for that day she'd called tomorrow. She'd eat then, she'd told herself. She, now, could see she, then. But not the other way around.

Her eyes sharpened like the lead of a pencil, focus returned. "I'll let you try a bit of mine... if you want, to be sure." Lena wondered after the fact if gifts actually helped her feel any less terrified of the receiver.

[Brackie]

Then what the hell are you doing in my country then? Don't come here if you aren't going to learn the language, it's that fucking simple.

Lena didn't know what they were either, which was a fat lot of help. Calista didn't want to get killed by one of her classmates, but she also didn't want to starve, even for a few hours - all it stood as was a reminder of the bad times in her life, and if she was going to get out of here, then she needed to not be reminded of that. She needed to think forward, think of plans, think of how to actually get out of there, and not return to being unable to breathe because of how scared and worried she was.

She could think of her siblings later - they were probably fine. Probably not dead. Hopefully.

"Yeah, for sure, if you know how that works then I guess I can have some of yours," Calista responded, almost absentmindedly. Her attention was back to her bag, and she was starting to take everything out of it. The metal poles she felt before had sharp tips, like spears. With the vaguest of understandings of how this whole thing worked for the Americans, this was probably part of her big gun - they were the crossbow bolts, or the weird equivalent. She still had more to go through, though, and popping them in and testing it out wasn't high on the list. She had to know what she was dealing with, and what she had to deal with it - take inventory, as it was.

Before she knew it, there was nothing left in her bag, and everything was lain haphazardly out in little sections on the bed. Useful stuff was in one group, stuff that looked like food stuff was in another, and the stuff she supposed went with her big gun was in its own group of stuff. She took a small step back, looking over everything.

That's not much.

It wasn't much at all - she didn't know what the hell she was going to do with half of it. The Americans had given her the tools to kill her classmates and survive on whatever island this was (Was it an island? Was that piece of blank paper with the first aid kit a map on the other side? She could check in a bit) and nothing more. The tools for escape were somewhere else, probably out of reach.

Calista held her head in her hand. She didn't know what the hell to do.

[Cicadan]

The promise of audible chew, of moistness to her tongue and lips, at least drew those other preconceptions of ancient and macabre histories of a out of sight and out of mind. Food was ease of mind.

Abby choked 'til spit bloodied her lips, her sobbed entreaties unspoken with each dry-fish heaving and gasping.

That... thing, with the face of a lantern, wearing a rut into her palm, was a thing she was only too glad to get rid off. The sickle-like spike perhaps harvested the parapets from a brimstone-forged castle wall of hell, she could deposit it on a side-table with a deafeningly morbid thump. Like closet door squared away against the corpse hidden within. Lena was glad to now have two hands free and neither obsessed with the weight of weapons.

The other girl did some other thing while Lena mindfully busied herself. The package that advertised 'MRE' also adverted instructions in equally unimaginative font. Lena followed them with a certain meditative slowness, focusing on ambient noises of her own breath washing down her slightly constricted throat. She neatly split open the creamy beige packet that would allegedly turn the turgid block called 'chicken' into a more appropriate texture. A petite thimble's worth of water, and the 'heater' was sat against a bookshelf to do it's job. Lena could feel the unease inherent to how many words seemed to demand air-quotes even if in space of her mind only.

"The ration should be ready soon..." She turned around. Nodded shyly. "I see you, um. Organized your stuff."

She wasn't sure what else to say, how else to say what else she had to say.

"This will be..." She...

Tried. She wanted to at least be capable of getting along. Much as an unfamiliar face put a glassy weight to the vitality of the vulnerable whites of her eyes. She had lived through this past before. She had survived the Americans before. It was her imperative, she assured herself, that she at the very least had to give another good go at it. Lest the memories become... all too real and all too quickly. She could still hear Abby...

"Unpleasant. I'm sorry to say." She couldn't lie. Not to herself, let alone to the other girl. She felt the packet of water she'd set aside, it's unseasonably fermenting warmth. She cleanly dunked the 'chicken' packet into it.

[Brackie]

Calista turned back to Lena when the other girl noted what she was up to.

"Yeah, I guess I'm just...figuring out what I've got to work with here."

No matter how long she looked at the supplies strewn across the bed, the answer remained the same: not enough. Calista, and probably everyone else as well, had been given enough to kill each other, but not nearly enough to do anything against the entire American army. She was too scared to try, regardless - Calista didn't know what was going to happen, but she didn't want to just up and kill herself like that. She wasn't worth it, she deserved more.

Maybe she was reaching the point where what people normally deserved no longer applied.

Near wordlessly she turned around, leaving her stuff spread about, and joined Lena's side as they began to dig into what looked like a gelatinous tinged blob. Calista had been poor most of her life, but never poor enough to resort to army food, so she was clueless as to what it would taste like.

The answer came quickly because the MRE tasted like she was eating duck down soaked in salt and brine. Calista didn't visibly gag, as she'd certainly had worse in her life, barely, but it was still an unwanted surprise - somehow, she expected the Americans to feed their people better, as though their skill at mass culinary arts was how they'd become global dictators. She eventually swallowed, noting mentally how the taste lingered long after the esophagus claimed the food, and turned to Lena.

"No offense but that was one of the worst things I've ever had in my life."

She coughed slightly, her mouth feeling slightly like the inside of a fishwife's laundry.

"God, what the actual. I once snogged a guy with a bad tooth and it didn't taste half as bad as that."

[Cicadan]

That was right. The other girl, by God's grace, could survive as well.

Lena's body language remained shy- a painted line of action through the arc of her spine would have cast her motion in a wayward silhouette, vaguely splashing into the far wall from the other girl's weighty presence. Their eyes only met through peripheral vision.

"It's bad." Her agreement was at least without any sort of gross and overbearing ulterior motive. She swallowed the soupy rubber pellet of protein, with dry-throat pains. "And that's a... colorful? Colorful metaphor." Lena rather liked that particular allusion, blunt in both imagery and character. It put her at ease some, to remind herself that she sat next to a warm body with something more than alien motives, inscrutable hopes and dreams.

Lena understood well, how much of a person's personality could be lost when guns started to sing their banshee's wail.

"I've never kissed, but... I could imagine..."

They would not be lost. Lena could aspire to having that much courage, even as the sweat of her palms could will forth the livelihoods of a farmer and a hundred.

"That is- to say! I think we should come together. Travel- I mean-.. for safety's sake."

The fear of dying together, at least, was a distinctly familiar fear.

[Brackie]

Well at least it wasn't just her - weird things always happened to people who got knocked out, they ended up in old people homes early to get abused by the staff, or they ended up running a school. For a brief moment, she wondered whether the knockout gas had her addled, but it turns out it really tasted like shit to everyone. Kind of a relief, come to think of it. At least the boring kind of relief.

She was near finished her disgusting portion of food when Lena suddenly brought up two things in succession: one, she'd never been kissed, and two, she thought they should stick together. She wasn't sure what she could do about the first one, since she wasn't a dyke, but the second part seemed easy enough; in fact, she'd stood next to Lena for a fair bit now with nothing to protect her while Lena had a large knife in her hand she could have killed her with at any moment, and yet Calista was still alive. She knew some people in real life, reportedly friends, who would have taken the opportunity to shank her for funsies, yet Lena did no such thing. Maybe that was a sign.

In fact, it was strange how much calmer she felt near Lena than she had near actual people like Lena in real life, and they weren't even able to kill her in a moment's notice. Of course, some of them probably were, depending on what they looked like, but not all of them.

"Sure."

She swallowed the last portion of army food like a sick duck, before turning back to her bed of stuff.

"Of course, I dunno if I wanna leave here. Block the door and it's pretty secure. And it's not like I'm gonna go hunting classmates or something, I just wanna...well, I dunno. I wanna live, but like..."

She let a silence hang in the air before placing a chair underneath it.

"...how do you even win something like this?"

[Cicadan]

Lena, remembering of the all the many things she'd learned in her disturbed childhood, ate her meal with a thankless gratitude to God. It did not go down smooth, but she carefully choked on what did not go easy with no audible protest. Between them the packet quickly emptied, as if set to by starving dogs of war.

For now, she had plenty of precious food left.

Daddy whispered and Maggie couldn't hear him. Maggie knew that they did not have much food since the house with the cans and her tummy now hurt, but if her tummy complained the bad noises would start again. They were just outside the door and next to the broken glass window that Mommy ducked under with her eyes all big from fear, and they marched really loudly and their boots sounded like the bones that Abby had cracked when Mommy had forced her to eat back at the house with the cans.

"Okay," Lena softly affirmed. She had not expected it would be so easy to convince, and she hadn't expected it to feel like so little had actually happened. She'd never asked much of her peers before this moment. Not even a pencil, as she was always sure to keep so many spare of her own. Pencils fit in the hand much easier than knives, Lena had since decided.

"As long as nobody is hunting us," Lena picked her words carefully, right there from the bowl of her memory, gingerly washing her tongue with syllables that reminded her of parents on the other side of the ocean. "We can hide in one place."

Daddy said-

"Non ci piove." She could remember how he smiled while trying to comfort her, but she could not echo his smile.

She did not know how to answer the other girl's last question. She searched for her best approximation of comforting words, but all she could find was what Daddy always said. 'All will be alright if we trust in God. Non ci pivoe.' She didn't know if it'd have the same meaning to the other girl. Or any meaning at all.

Eventually, "what's your name? Um. If I may ask."

[Brackie]

This girl was weird.

"I...uh. I dunno, I got a few people who hate me at school, but...bloody hell, it's not like they'd kill me for it, would they? I mean sure I shoved Kat into a wall at that party but she wouldn't..."

Calista was trying to think of how to end that sentence, but to be honest there was an ending that completely contradicted those last few words. Maybe there were some people out there who figured that they wanted to kill others before they killed them, and that included taking out people who'd given them grief back at school. Calista wasn't the easiest to get on with, she knew that, but would people really want to find her and kill her just because she didn't like them or they didn't like her? It just seemed unfair.

Then again, this whole situation was unfair. It's not like Calista chose to be born in the country that just struck a blow to America. If she'd done it all over again, sure, she probably wouldn't have been born anywhere but England, but she didn't even do anything. She'd done nothing to America, and neither had any of her classmates. They were innocent, at least of this.

Of course, Lena had another question. Her name. A small bottle suddenly crashed inside her stomach, it must have contained a dose of anger. And it quickly became apparent why, since Calista suddenly realized she hated having been asked that, especially from someone in her class, because it was as though they hadn't been in the same rooms and same lunches for years on end. Calista didn't have too many friends outside of her group, but she could still name people like Kat and Pippa and Yian and Sebbo from a lineup. Yet here she was, just a brand new girl to Lena. She'd been nothing their entire school life, apparently. Not even registered as a name.

This showed on her face briefly; her expression darkened for a few moments before she opened her mouth and repaired her faint smile.

"It's Calista."

And you should fucking know that.