Rule 37: Never give up
If you'll recall, when we left Courtney and Duncan, Courtney had begged the interns to take her off the island, only to receive keys to the film vault instead. Meanwhile, Duncan and Bridgette had a begrudging heart-to-heart while Geoff retrieved the one thing guaranteed to improve any situation: Bunny.
And now, we learn their fate...
"Hey, Noah," Katie asked, breaking up the quiet around the pool deck. "Are you excited to go home?"
Noah didn't look up from his book. "You cannot begin to imagine."
"Like, it'll be good to see your friends again, right?" Katie said, slowly tearing up leaves beside the water. "And there are probably some things you miss after being gone for like, two whole months. Like shopping. Do you like shopping?"
Noah shifted in his lawn chair and looked out from behind the dictionary he had settled on his lap. He'd swiped it from under the reception desk, and having already exhausted every other piece of text on the island, it was his only option short of interacting with people.
Yet here he was, interacting with a person. Apparently, reading the dictionary wasn't enough of a clue that he would rather pass the next 24 hours in amicable silence. He gave Katie a flat stare.
"Getting to leave is exciting, right?" Katie continued. She was on her stomach, hand in chin, watching leaves float in the empty pool. "There's nothing to be, like...sad about. You know?"
Noah did know. Katie, perhaps not so much.
"Could you do us both a favor and take your denial elsewhere?" he snapped. Then, thinking that might have been a little harsh, he tacked on, "I mean, where's your Siamese twin?" Ah—still too harsh. God, this was hard.
Katie sighed. "She went with Justin and Leshawna to hunt for food," she said, poking at one of the floating leaves.
Noah raised a brow. "Without you?"
Katie nodded.
"And you're not with them because…?"
"Just not feeling it, I guess." Katie was quiet for a moment. "I'm not sure what I'm feeling."
Noah had a pretty good idea, but if Katie wouldn't use her words to tell him what was wrong, he had plausible deniability on his side. "Go for a swim or something," he said generically. "The water's fine."
Katie dipped a hand fully into the pool, and, after a moment, smiled. "How did you know?"
"Katie." Noah gestured vaguely to the ever-present, ever-perfect summer day around them. "The water's always fine."
She rolled her eyes. "I just don't want to unpack all my stuff, okay?" she huffed, turning onto her back and beginning to pantomime. "I got it done all neatly with Sadie last night, and if I try to get something right now it'll explode all over the place! I'll never get everything back in." She paused, letting her hands fall back to her sides. "Not by myself."
"Then don't pack by yourself," Noah said.
"What if Sadie's busy?"
"Find someone else."
"What if everyone's busy? What if no one wants to help me?"
Noah looked over the top of his dictionary again. Katie was staring straight up at the sky, hands folded over her stomach. Noah had a very good inkling that they weren't talking about packing any more.
"Get a dog?" he tried.
"A dog?"
Lady, who was hunting lizards by the treeline, looked over and let out a single bark, recognizing the reference. Dogs reflected their owners after all, and Noah was brilliant.
"Yeah," Noah said. "Dogs are good for keeping people company while they...pack."
Katie's head lolled to the side to look at him. "They are?"
Noah gave a short whistle, pointing to the girl by the pool. "Lady, go...help."
Lady trotted over and licked Katie's face, setting off a round of giggles that were much too familiar after seven weeks.
Satisfied that the fabric of the universe was relaxing back into proper place, Noah went back to his dictionary. Floccinaucinihilipilification. Noun. The action or habit of estimating something as worthless.
"Noah?"
He tried not to groan. He looked over the edge of his book and attempted to make his annoyance more obvious this time.
Katie was using that weirdly casual voice again, scratching Lady's snout and ears. "Are you excited to go home? To see your friends?"
His gaze flicked back down to the book. He didn't want to talk about himself, but if it kept her from going down the train of conversation they had been heading towards, then he was marginally more willing to oblige. "This may come as a shock, but I don't have friends back home. Or anywhere, for that matter."
"What about us?" Katie hesitated. "You and me. We're friends, right?"
Noah winced. He glanced around the empty pool deck to make very sure that no one else was around to see the color pooling in his cheeks.
It felt like eons ago now, but when Katie had first arrived to Playa de Losers, it was just Noah, Zeke, Eva, and Justin on the island. Katie was deposited on the dock by Chef wearing earplugs, as she was sobbing hysterically, completely unintelligible, and without Sadie.
Eva had been cold; Justin and Zeke had panicked at the sight of her. Noah had dismissed her because, frankly, not even a micrometer of that was his problem.
But hours later, when he came down from his room for a late-night snack and passed the glass lobby doors that faced the dock, she was still there, on the dock, huddled and crying with her suitcases, and goddammit, Noah hadn't survived being the youngest of eight without at least learning how make a sad person tea and get them in from the outdoors.
He carried her suitcases up to her designated room, then walked back to get her. He took her by the arm and guided her upstairs. When he returned to the dining room for his snack, he made her a hot tea and a glass of water. When he brought them to her, she was curled up in bed, still crying, so Noah set the beverages on her bedside table and accidentally caught her eye.
He sat with her wordlessly until the sniffling turned into snoring.
She approached him at breakfast the next morning, puffy-eyed and puzzling over where things were in the hotel and being surprisingly perceptive of the others avoiding her, so they spent the day together. And the next couple of days. And — jesus — basically most of every day until Sadie arrived two weeks later. Noah lent her books and put up with her incessant need to talk to someone about something and tried his best to avoid her in public spaces because Noah didn't need friends, especially not ones as dumb and nice as Katie.
Noah gripped his book more tightly and muttered an answer.
"What?" she asked.
"Yes, we're friends. If you insist on labeling it."
Katie smiled a little. She went back to playing with Lady, as if that was all she'd wanted him to say. "I think I'm going to miss you."
Noah's shoulders hiked to his ears. "At your own risk."
"And Leshawna," she said. "And Geoff, and Lindsay, and Beth, and Bridgette, and Courtney—"
"You're going to miss Courtney?" Noah repeated. He could see the merits of the others if he squinted, but Courtney...
"Well, yeah," Katie said. "I'm going to miss pretty much everyone! Except Heather. And Duncan."
"But Courtney," he said again. "The person responsible for separating you from Sadie?" For the most uncomfortable two weeks of my life, he almost added, but decided against it.
Katie crossed her arms and stuck her nose up. "I didn't say I was going to miss her a lot."
Noah smirked and returned to the next word in the dictionary.
"I mean, she's like, super bossy, but you've gotta admit that she's pretty good at, you know: being bossy," Katie explained. "I can appreciate that she's good at something I'm not." Lady nudged her snout under Katie's hand, and Katie complied. She thought for a moment and giggled. "Besides, watching her pretend not to like Duncan is like watching TMZ but a zillion times better."
"Oh. Right," Noah said, lapsing back into the familiar pattern of making listening noises every couple of minutes as Katie talked herself raw.
She went on for a little bit more about Courtney, then moved onto Leshawna, and made her way through most of the campers on the island, lazily scratching Lady's head where it rested on her stomach.
This went on until Noah reached the letter J. Given the speeds at which Katie talked and Noah read, this didn't take as long as one might expect.
"Noah!"
He jumped at Courtney's voice; Katie jerked away from the sound and almost rolled into the pool. As Courtney walked around the water and over to them, it became apparent that her capris were soaked through, and she was clutching at something on a lanyard around her neck.
"Noah, I need your help."
"You need more help than I can give you," he muttered, trying to disappear into the dictionary. Katie giggled.
Courtney came around to the side of his lawn chair. "You're the person who's been here longest and isn't a moron."
"Sad but true," Noah allowed, still keeping his eyes fixed on the pages. "Make it quick. I want to finish this in the next twenty hours."
Courtney squinted at the cover but didn't comment. "What's the best way to access Playa's basement?"
"Grab a shovel," Noah said. "Start digging."
Without missing a beat, Courtney slapped the dictionary shut on Noah's thumbs.
He sighed and looked around Courtney to Katie, wondering if she'd changed her mind about all of Courtney's supposedly positive qualities. Katie shrugged.
He set the book down and fixed Courtney with an unimpressed stare. "You could try the employee stairwell that none of us are supposed to be using."
Courtney clapped her hands together. "Of course! You're a lifesaver. Thank you," she said, before darting past him toward the main building.
Noah wondered if he'd had a stroke somewhere around the end of that exchange which had, impossibly, sounded like praise. He took his own pulse, just to be sure he wasn't in the middle of a medical emergency.
He and Katie exchanged a look. She did her one shoulder shrug again. Lady barked.
"She wants to play fetch," Noah translated, returning to his dictionary once he was sure that he was neither dying nor having an out-of-body experience.
Katie got up and walked over to the tree line to grab a stick. "You are, you know. A lifesaver," she said, as nonchalantly as she could manage.
"You must have me confused with someone else," Noah answered dryly. He tried his hardest to pretend he didn't notice the smile Katie tossed his way, and hid his own grin with the turn of a page.
Juxtaposition, the top entry read. Noun. The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.
"Trent, buddy," Cody called, knocking on the closed door of the arcade. "I know you're upset, but hiding won't make the time pass any faster!"
"I'm not hiding, Cody," Trent answered, pushing a joystick around on the other side of the door. "The door's open."
"I'm upset too," Cody said, speaking loudly into the doorframe, "but Gwen's still going to be there tomorrow!" She and Trent were together, now; Trent had won her over, fair and square, and Cody tried to imagine what would make him feel better, if their roles had been reversed. To have the promise of a reunion snatched away, postponed on such short notice—it was almost too much to bear.
Trent was probably devastated.
"I'm here to talk about it, if you want," Cody told him.
"Cody. I know," Trent said.
"I miss her too," Cody said, putting a hand over his heart. "The sound of her voice, the sweep of her hair…"
"Uh, Cody?"
"...the sight of her smile, the way she eats her sandwiches," he went on, growing more emotional with each memory. "Oh, time, why must you be so cruel!"
The door opened just as Cody crumpled to the floor, overcome by emotion and, most likely, some kind of hunger-induced delirium.
Trent leaned against the doorframe, looking down at his fallen campmate sympathetically. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Noooo, no," Cody said, hastily rearranging himself into a cool pose on the floor. He threw Trent a finger-gun. "This is all about you, my man."
"All right, then." Trent held out a hand to Cody and helped him to his feet. "Do you, uh, want to go doubles on House of the Deadly Living and never speak of this again?"
"Sure, sure. Whatever you wanna do," Cody said.
Trent patted his shoulder sympathetically and lead him over to the arcade game. Apocalyptic shoot-'em-ups weren't his specialty, but Cody liked them, and it would do well as a distraction.
Seeing Cody's emotional state, though, Trent wondered if he should be more upset about the delay—about not seeing Gwen for one more day. He missed her, of course. He missed her a lot. He thought about her so much, he sometimes didn't even realize he was thinking about her until his line of thought actually changed. But did his relative calm mean he didn't care about her as much as he thought he did?
Trent mulled that over, then shook his head. Nah. He was comfortable enough in their relationship that he'd patiently waited weeks to see her again without a doubt. What was one more day?
Cody picked up the game's plastic gun and arranged it in his grip. Though Trent was keeping his emotions in check, Cody felt sure that Trent was feeling the same way he was. Except more. And Cody's heart hurt at the thought of Gwen, by herself on Wawanakwa, with no Trent to play her the guitar, and no him to tell how much she wanted to hear Trent play her the guitar.
Cody took a few deep breaths. He had to keep it together. For Trent. The musician looked so cool, standing next to him with his plastic gun at the ready, like he didn't even understand panic as a concept. But Cody knew what Trent was working so hard to repress. He could be strong for the both of them. And for Gwen.
They played through the first stage in relative quiet, other than coordinating to make sure they didn't accidentally shoot each other through the zombies. When they got their stats at the checkpoint, Cody's score was more than double Trent's, but neither of them seemed to mind.
The second stage required fighting zombies and vampires.
"Gwen probably loves vampires," Cody sighed.
Trent sighed back. "Yeah. She does."
Stage three required rescuing a young, dark-haired girl from the apocalypse on the streets and escorting her to a safe zone.
"Do you think Gwen's lonely?" Cody blurted. Then, regaining his composure, he added, "I mean, she's probably upset about having to stay another day. I would be upset."
Trent grinned. "Are you nuts? Gwen's finally alone, by herself, away from all us dummies. I bet she's doing backflips."
"I would be lonely." Cody slowly stopped shooting zombies and lowered his plastic gun as a creature of darkness mauled his character, splattering blood all over the screen. "I miss her," he admitted softly.
Without Cody, Trent's character was quickly dispatched. The words GAME OVER filled the screen. Trent's shoulders slumped, and his smile turned wistful. "I miss her too, man. Every day."
"Even if she did only see me as a friend...she was an awesome friend," Cody said, turning to lean against the game.
Trent did the same. "She is an awesome friend," he corrected. "Always will be."
Cody nodded. He looked over at Trent and saw most everything he wanted to be. Quietly, he asked, "How do you stay so cool about all this?"
"What? Me?" Trent laughed, a little nervously in the face of Cody's sudden candor. "I don't," he admitted after a moment, putting it into words for the first time. "I'm...nervous." He crossed his arms and tucked one ankle over the other. "I'm over-the-moon excited to see her, but what if she won't talk to me? Her last memory of me on that island is me kissing Heather." He hesitated, made a face, then clarified, "Of me getting kissed by Heather."
"Yeah," Cody said. "I saw that in the episode highlights. Not your finest moment."
"I know."
"But hey, it's been weeks," Cody said, subtly trying to copy Trent's cool and collected pose. He kept wobbling and couldn't get the slump of his shoulders quite disinterested enough, so he gave up on the casual side-lean and opted for a back-lean instead. "She's probably forgiven you!"
"Maybe."
"And if she's still mad," Cody joked, "she'll probably just drop a bunch of ants in your bed."
Trent snorted in a very un-cool manner. He had to admit, even ants sounded the tiniest bit better than the verbal deliverance Gwen might have otherwise had in store. "You think?"
"Oh, I know."
Trent relaxed a little further against the console. "That...weirdly makes me feel better."
"And you know what'll make you feel even better than that?" Cody asked. Imitating a generic action movie poster, he grabbed both plastic guns from the game and struck a pose. "Murdering zombies! Pchew! Pchew!"
Trent chuckled, taking the gun from Cody and starting the game again. "Thanks, man," he said.
"Any time."
The game fired up, and they entered the first room together. Trent was starting to get the hang of shooting pixels and cleared his half of the room with only minimal assistance from Cody. When his character did die, however, he found himself distracted.
"Dude, are you gonna hit continue, or do you need me to do it for you?" Cody asked absently, squinting one eye shut to better aim at the creatures of the night. Trent gave a thumbs up and Cody smacked the button with the flat of his gun.
"You know, I always knew Gwen was gonna make it all the way," Trent said.
"Oh yeah?" Cody asked, automatically mashing through a string of dialogue.
"Definitely. From day one. When that yacht dropped me off, and I took one look at everyone on the dock, I knew I didn't have a shot. But Gwen…" Trent smiled dreamily across the room while Cody's avatar ran around him to pick up the slack. "There was just something about her, you know? The moment I saw her, I knew that she was gonna win."
Cody shot a zombie ambling for Trent, then dispatched two more on his own half of the screen. "What about Owen?"
"Owen was...a surprise."
"You're not worried about him and Gwen on the island, by themselves...are you?" Cody asked, doing his best to not be worried even as he said it aloud.
"Of course not." Trent shrugged. "I trust Gwen. Besides, remember when Owen hit on me?"
Cody looked up, startled. "He hit on you too?"
Trent looked back at him. The two stared at each other for a long beat, then returned their absolute attention back to shooting zombies.
"Wow, did you catch that game last night?" Trent said awkwardly. "That was wild, huh?"
Cody stared at him for as long as the stage would allow (knowing full well that they'd been without live television for two months now) before it dawned on him that Trent was probably trying to move the conversation far, far away from Owen. "Oh. Riiiiiiight." He shot Trent another finger gun with the hand that wasn't holding the fake gun. "Those sports teams are probably...scoring a lot of points."
Trent nodded, exhaling. "Totally."
Two levels later—completed in total, mutual silence—the door to the arcade opened, and Courtney peeked her head in.
"Cody, Trent! Great, I found you," she declared, marching in and standing beside their unit. "Wow, this looks...exciting. Making good progress?"
"Oh, hey, Courtney," Trent said, pressing the pause button on the game. "Not really. I'm not so great at—"
"Sorry to hear that," Courtney interrupted, her pleasant tone of voice unchanged. "I was hoping I could borrow Cody to help me with something."
"I don't know where Duncan is this time," Cody said preemptively. "Sorry."
Courtney shot him a look that could have obliterated a concrete wall, and Cody fought the urge to jump into Trent's arms like Scooby-Doo.
Quickly enough, she schooled her face back into formal pleasantries. "Do either of you know how to access the basement?" she said, pointedly ignoring Cody's comment.
Trent shrugged. "The employee staircase, maybe? I've only used it once, when I was way too sleep-deprived to handle the song in the elevator. Could've sworn it lead one level lower than Playa's ground floor."
"I tried that," Courtney sighed. "It leads to a darkroom, nothing else."
"Then I'm out of suggestions," Trent said with a resigned shrug. "What are you looking for? Food?"
"No," Courtney answered. She turned to Cody. "There was room below me in the elevator shaft when it malfunctioned. Is there a floor below the lobby?"
"It's possible," Cody said, tipping his head to one side. "There are some blueprints in the yacht, if you want to know for sure."
Courtney's expression lit up. "Perfect. Say no more."
"But—"
Without a second glance, Courtney rushed out of the room, shouting "Thank you!" as she went, her footsteps thudding down the hall in what had to be a sprint.
Trent and Cody watched the arcade room door swing shut. The she-wolf boss howled in the game behind them, splattering the screen with a bloody question. Continue?
"I think I could keep venting my repressed emotions through a supernatural murder spree," Cody said conversationally. He reloaded his plastic gun with a ch-chik. "Go again?"
Trent reloaded his own gun and clapped a hand over Cody's shoulder. "I'd love to."
Beth gingerly lead Tyler in the direction of the elevator, doing her best to support his weight whenever he teetered off-balance. "Are you s'th-ure you wouldn't like to lie down?"
Tyler shook his head and immediately regretted it, his cranium throbbing where the intern's walkie-talkie had, so it seemed, connected with his brain. Beth grunted as she stood him up straight again.
"I...think you do," Beth said, watching Tyler's eyes go in and out of focus. "You might as'th well, right? There'sth not much elsth'e to do today."
Beth propped Tyler up against the wall and called the elevator. When it arrived, it brought the sounds of Courtney swearing loudly. Beth peeked in and found her on her knees, a set of keys in each hand, and apparently unaware that the elevator had moved without her say-so.
She was pushing and shouting at a previously unrevealed panel of buttons. "Goddammit, go lower, you piece of garbage!"
Beth took a step back and guided Tyler away as quickly as she dared.
"Um, let's s'thee if they have ice packth's in the kitchen."
"There is nothing in this kitchen!" Heather screeched, hurling a spoon clear across the room.
As of that morning's announcement, one thing had become clear: Playa now operated under "survival of the fittest" rules—more than it ever had on Wawanakwa. The group was trapped with limited resources, and as the alpha predator in their little Darwinian experiment, Heather had taken it upon herself to claim the kitchen and all that remained there as her territory.
Yet as she combed through it, pulling open drawers and cabinets and slamming them shut when they turned out empty, it became clear that she'd laid claim to less than she'd thought.
Heather screamed again, just for the sake of it, and exited the ballroom to oust whichever herbivore had taken over the tiki bar on the pool deck. She was halfway through the doors when Courtney nearly knocked her over, sprinting down the hallway with no notice of the inconvenience she'd caused.
"Better hurry if you want to finish all your homewrecking by tomorrow!" Heather called after her.
Already most of the way down the hall, Courtney came to screeching halt, whirled a tight 180 degrees, and channeled a nest of king cobras' worth of venom into, "Bite me!"
She turned and swept out of the building. Amused, Heather watched as she went. "Well then."
Grabbing her suitcases from the kitchen entrance, she stalked off in the direction of the pool. Cannibalism really didn't sound half bad.
"I'm telling you, there's a kitchen on here somewhere," Justin insisted. "I know someone mentioned it."
Sadie, Justin, and Leshawna, the trio most dedicated to the cause of finding food, emerged from the lower levels of the yacht, having determined that the ballroom and bowling alley were barren. They squinted against the sudden return of the glaring sun and, by now so used to the angle of the boat, were disoriented to see that the beach adjacent to them was more perpendicular than it was parallel.
"So, where did they say it was?" Leshawna demanded.
"I wasn't paying attention to that part!"
Sadie's stomach growled loudly. "I can't believe this," she wailed. "How could they starve us to death like this?"
"There is food here," Justin reassured her. "There's a kitchen."
"How much food?" Sadie said. "What if we don't have enough, and everyone has to fight like that book we read at school with the kids and a pig and the flies? Or what if it's like in the movie where the kids have to kill each other for reality TV and—OH MY GOD we're on that show right now, aren't we?!"
As Sadie began to hyperventilate, Leshawna sat her down on the yacht deck and fanned her face with a discarded bit of cardboard.
Justin knelt on her other side, careful not to slide with the angle of the boat. "Sadie, no one is going to take the food we find. They'll have to get through us first." He indicated their third companion. "That's why I brought Leshawna. No one wants to fight Leshawna."
"Aw, thanks, J-Crew," Leshawna said. "Didn't know you had that kind of foresight."
Justin put a hand over his heart. "This island has taught me a lot."
Leshawna's expression flattened. "But not how to find a kitchen, apparently."
"I'm working on it!"
Faintly, over the crashing of waves, a scrabbling sound could be heard. Then, louder, the jangle of keys. The rope attached to the railing of the yacht swayed and grew taut: someone was climbing up.
"This food isn't for you!" Sadie shouted at the intruder. "We found it first, and Leshawna is here to fight you to death on national TV!"
"Depends who it is," Leshawna intoned.
A moment later, Courtney's arm came into view as the CIT pulled herself up onto the boat.
"Courtney!" Justin sighed, choosing to hope this would go really well instead of really not. "Hey, Captain, do you know where the kitchen is on this yacht?"
"I'll know in about thirty seconds," she said, speed-balancing her way across the deck and into the captain's quarters, slamming the door shut with enough strength that the yacht angled two more degrees.
Leshawna, Sadie, and Justin exchanged a look. "Did Mrs. Delinquent née CIT just agree to help us?"
Some shuffling and approximately twenty-six seconds later, Courtney shoved open the door of the captain's quarters once more, kicking out a shallow pool of crumpled papers from Cody's frantic brainstorming. She had a giant stack of blueprints rolled under one arm and a few smaller sheets in her hand.
"Second deck from the bottom. Take the starboard staircase," Courtney said in a rush, holding out the papers to Justin. "Freezers are in the back of the room, but I'll warn you now, there's nothing in the manifest to indicate that there's anything in them."
He stared at her, and at the papers. "Uh, what?"
"Downstairs," she simplified.
Courtney pivoted and flapped the papers in Leshawna's face when Justin didn't reach for them. Leshawna snatched them out of Courtney's hand with an eye roll. Courtney was climb-sliding back towards the beach-side of the boat before Leshawna had even held the blueprints up for inspection.
"Wait!" Sadie called. "You aren't going to help us find food?"
Courtney paused, hanging off the outside of the boat with one hand. With the wind in her hair and the fierceness in her eyes, she almost looked like a superhero out of Harold's comics. The dark, intense, overdramatic one that everyone still listened to, for some reason.
"Check Chris McLean's cookbook," Courtney said.
Justin squinted at her. "Meaning?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," she admitted. She released the railing, dropping off the edge and, presumably, down to the sand below.
Sadie looked between her compatriots and Courtney's dramatic exit. "She needs to eat too, right?"
Leshawna looked over the blueprints, finding the room marked as the galley and clicking her tongue. "Her rage will keep her full just fine."
Eva exited the gym, fresh off the high of obliterating a punching bag and aching for a shower. With everyone else minding their own business, she'd managed to reach a state of workout zen that she was rarely able to accomplish and was actually smiling to herself when she spotted Courtney in the hallways.
The smile slid off her face.
Courtney was wandering in circles, mostly hidden behind a sheet of blueprints as large as she was tall. She was muttering and pacing, scowling at the framed picture in front of her in the otherwise empty hallway.
Eva groaned. At last, one of them had completely lost their minds.
Courtney stood between Eva and the elevators, so Eva tried to stay as unapproachable as possible as she passed behind Courtney, still nose-deep in her blueprints.
"Eva," Courtney said, "you could punch through a concrete wall, right?"
Eva paused, and might have thought the question for someone else if she hadn't been directly addressed. "It depends on the concrete."
"Concrete put in by Chris McClean."
Without turning, Eva shrugged. "Probably."
Courtney tossed aside the blueprints and backed up, staring down the wall in front of her like a charging bull. "Perfect."
Eva passed without further comment, drinking from her water bottle. Behind her, Courtney began to slam and thud into the wall, but Eva resolutely refused to turn around. You couldn't reason with crazy. And besides, Eva was in her zone. Trying to stop Courtney would be counterproductive to them both.
As she waited in front of the elevators, the slamming intensified. It went on as lights indicated the slow arrival of the elevator, and Eva briefly considered popping her MP3 player back in, but Courtney's shriek of frustration cut off just as the elevator arrived.
The sounds of Courtney's anger paused for a long beat. Then, they were replaced by laughter.
Eva considered getting straight into the elevator without another glance, but curiosity got the better of her. She peered back down the hallway and spotted a set of discarded blueprints, the framed picture swinging on its nail.
There was not a single sign of Courtney in the entire length of the bare hallway.
Eva walked back to the elevator stiffly, clutching tightly at her water bottle. She'd been on the island for eight weeks now. Maybe Courtney wasn't the only one who'd completely lost her mind.
Courtney was still giggling to herself when the secret door to the secret elevator to the secret film vault closed shut behind her. Her adrenaline and panic had mixed into a new cocktail of delirium, and she found herself laughing so hard that she had to temporarily lean against the elevator's railing.
There was a secret panel with a keyhole behind the photograph, which featured a child in the snow. Sledding. Rosebud. Citizen Kane. Camera Crony the Film Major. It was the kind of crazy logic that only applied to whatever pocket dimension Playa de Losers seemed to exist in.
But she'd figured it out. Sure, she'd needed a few tips from her fellow inmates, but they'd borne delicious, film vault fruit. Biting her tongue to stifle her laughter, Courtney straightened up as the elevator began its descent. It only had one button, which meant it could only go to one place.
With a sharp chirp, the elevator stopped, and the metal doors opened smoothly.
Whenever Courtney had taken the time to imagine the film vault, it had gone one of two ways. Some days, she'd seen a massive chamber, like the prop room, turned into a giant technical headquarters with 600 screens. On other days, she'd pictured a ramshackle job like Chris's security tent on the island, barely managing to stand. After so much consideration, neither would have surprised her.
What she found instead was something different entirely. Courtney stepped out of the elevator into a room no bigger than a janitor's closet, yet it was the most state-of-the-art thing Courtney had seen in two months—maybe longer. A giant LED screen took up most of the back wall. Underneath it was a metal desk with three large, widescreen monitors side by side and a streamlined keyboard that Cody would have fainted over.
On either side of the desk, there were what appeared to be film-to-digital conversion machines. Every inch of wall space that remained was full of USB drives that hung from labeled nails on the wall.
Courtney closed her mouth, then rolled her eyes. She should have known that Chris would dump the bulk of his money into producing the show instead of buying updated equipment.
Courtney took one more step into the room, pulled the closest drive off the wall, and turned it over. It was labelled with a code that she didn't recognize. She picked out a couple more drives, leaving gaps in the backdrop on the wall, and compared them one to another.
When the codes refused to morph into something logical, Courtney dumped the drives into a drawer in the desk in front of her, already overwhelmed by the thought of replacing them in the correct order among the hundreds—thousands?—that hung on the wall.
She wasn't going to find what she was looking for with the codes alone, she realized, so she sat herself in the chair at the helm of the three computers, fighting down the wriggling nostalgia in her stomach for a yacht deck and her co-captain.
The computer was password protected. After three dozen password attempts related to film and film majors, Courtney typed CITIZEN MCLEAN and was startled to find the home screen opening in front of her.
Aside from the numerous film editing programs, there was only one file on the desktop, titled "Shot List". Clicking it opened a database, thousands of rows long, detailing every shot taken of every moment on Total Drama Island.
After two months with no technology and a PDA that required only basic texting skills, Courtney's fingers itched to type on a keyboard properly. But before she got carried away, she reminded herself why she was here: she needed to find and destroy the footage of Duncan being expelled from her room on his first morning. All other incriminating evidence could wait until the mother of all incriminating evidence was located and burned.
Courtney opened a search window.
SEARCH: PLAYA DE LOSERS
The window showed two thousand results. Courtney muttered a swear.
SEARCH: PLAYA DE LOSERS, WEEK SEVEN
She got a couple hundred results. Everything from taped poolsides to B-Roll footage of what the island weather looked like on that particular week.
SEARCH: PLAYA DE LOSERS, WEEK SEVEN, GIRL'S HALLWAY
She received an error message and no results. Foot tapping in annoyance, Courtney struggled to remember anything about the morning of Duncan's arrival to Playa that could be codified into a few simple keywords. Humiliation? Embarrassment? Lifetime of Regret?
Treating the wireless mouse as a stress ball, Courtney attempted to curb her frustration because of course—of course not even this was going to be simple. She cleared the search window.
For a long beat, Courtney stared at the flashing cursor and chewed her lip. She needed an easy search. Something broad enough to comb through. Her fingers moved.
SEARCH: DUNCAN
Thousands of results filled the page, but thankfully, all were categorized with further tags. DUNCAN; Audition Tape. DUNCAN; Arrival Footage, Camera #8. DUNCAN; Confessional 1A.
Courtney scrolled through the files, watching the descriptions blur by. They looked to be in chronological order. If they included footage from Playa as well, that meant what she sought would be closer to the end. Right after—
DUNCAN, COURTNEY; First Meeting.
Her scrolling faltered. She'd glimpsed other names in Duncan's search results (talks with other boys in the Bass Cabin, challenges that he didn't do alone), but her own name brought her up short. Hesitantly, Courtney scrolled a little further down the list. Roughly two hundred results later, she found another file tagged with both their names and the words "Not So Sucky" and "Camping Day Two."
She did the only logical thing and changed the search parameters.
SEARCH: DUNCAN, COURTNEY
Six hundred files were tagged, but Courtney had no way to gauge if that was too few or too many. A few descriptors jumped out at her, though, particularly the ones marked with both their names and "Confession Camera." She selected one at random and the corresponding USB code appeared. Courtney retrieved the drive and plugged it into the computer. There were a few dozen large video files within the single drive. Cross referencing the shot list, Courtney found the one she was looking for and double-clicked.
The large LED screen against the back wall loaded the video, frozen on an empty Confession Cam stall. Courtney leaned back in her chair and hit play.
The screen stayed unchanged for a moment. Then, the view swung wildly as the door was thrown open and shut. For a moment the camera shuddered, then it refocused on an image of Courtney from six weeks ago, her face covered as she screamed into her hands.
The tuneless rage lasted about a minute. Then, she took a deep breath, straightened up, and folded her hands on her lap. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she smiled pleasantly for the camera.
"I'm going to kill him."
On video, Courtney inspected her nails absently. "Being a politician with a career to preserve, I'm obviously going to make it look like an accident. Heaven knows ninety percent of the challenges here are made to kill us anyway. No one would notice a hole in his canoe. Or if his clothes smelled a little more like bear bait on a forest challenge. I could push him off a cliff or murder him in cold blood and everyone would blame Chris." She sighed, looking longingly past the camera. "It would be so easy."
The Courtney on camera considered this for a long moment. Then, with a quick head shake, she composed herself and smiled genuinely. "There! I did it. It's on tape now, which means I can't do it without implicating myself. The temptation is totally gone! Now I just have to…" Her smile fell. "...endure six more weeks of him." She glared into the middle distance, then at the camera. "Well, crap."
The video stopped as the door to the Confessional swung shut, the motion sensor deactivated.
Courtney stared at the frozen image, having entirely forgotten that she'd taped such a thing. She hadn't even mentioned Duncan by name, and still, Camera Crony knew enough to tag him in it.
Scowling, Courtney returned to the list of results. A string of them were labelled "Deer Hunt". She picked a short one, retrieved the drive, and hit play.
The video showed a segment of the woods midday. The sounds of muffled conversation grew closer, slowly, until finally something intelligible could be understood.
"We're going to the medical tent, Drama Queen," Duncan's voice explained from off screen. "Now chill."
The two of them came into view of the camera, just as on-screen Courtney jerked Duncan to a halt. They were in their antlers and deer tails, interlocked with each other as they tried to make it back to camp.
"Duncan! Why are we going to the medical tent?! Do you not realize that it's all the way across the island from the dining hall?"
"As a matter of fact," Duncan mimicked, "I do realize that the medical tent is 'all the way across the island from the dining hall!'"
On camera, Courtney looked legitimately worried by this announcement. She hadn't noticed Duncan's resulting expression at the time, too concerned over being dragged about in the woods by a boy she knew was very reckless and very into her. But Courtney now saw what she hadn't noticed in person: the split second of genuine panic that crossed Duncan's face.
"Oh, wow, Princess, paranoid much?" he asked, grinning. "I swear I won't try anything on you, all right?" He held up his hands in surrender. Once Courtney visibly relaxed, he added, "Unless, of course, you want me to..."
Courtney stomped on his foot.
"Damn it, Princess, that hurt! What are those shoes made out of, lead?" He put his hand on her shoulder to rub at his instep, and in the present, Courtney noticed the way he suddenly was trying very hard not to smile when she didn't toss his hand away.
"I'm being merciful, so consider yourself lucky," Courtney snapped. "Say anything like that again, and you'll find my foot in another extremely painful place for you, capiche?"
She pulled his hand off her shoulder and began marching them back the way they had come. She didn't get far; Duncan grabbed her by the wrist and began leading them the way he'd set before, Courtney shouting at him the entire way.
The video ended, and Courtney looked back down at the screen in front of her and the comprehensive list of moments she'd shared with Duncan on camera. Every mention, every look, every outing, meal, and interaction.
She could make it all go away.
Courtney stared at the two drives in her hand, the confessional and the deer hunt, then set them to the left of the keyboard. She stood and started making a pile.
Scrolling through the list, she added their campfire conversations and all of their exchanges during challenges. She pulled down all the footage from the confessional where they mentioned each other, and everything from the camera that had recorded his dumb Hook Man story and their kiss on the Bass's doorstep. She grabbed their embrace and the moral support they'd offered each other in Phobia Factor, and she tracked down over five hours of dead-of-night footage from Basic Straining alone.
Even after that, a couple files remained. A few confessionals from Duncan after she'd been voted off; segments of the Tri-Armed Triathalon (also tagged with Leshawna's name); Courtney's mentions of him while on Playa for that special they filmed.
She'd leave them; Camera Crony still had to cut together a show, after all.
Her pile of drives accounted for maybe a week's total footage if you watched it all back-to-back without sleeping. Her entire relationship with Duncan only made it a week, end-to-end—maybe less. Courtney wasn't sure how to feel about that.
As she made her way to the end of the list, Courtney felt her frustration growing with the pile of drives; the footage of Duncan being thrown from her room was nowhere to be found, even among the relatively few results filmed on Playa. She was in the process of deciding if she should search through all the results again or call it quits when the very last Wawanakwa search result caught her eye.
She read and re-read the miniscule description, her pulse suddenly pounding in her ears.
DUNCAN, COURTNEY; "Castaways," Confession, Treehouse Cam #4
Courtney pushed back, stood, and carefully stepped over to the necessary drive. Carrying it to the computer, she weighed it in her hand, suddenly wondering if she'd been tricked; it seemed too impossible that she'd so simply found the missing piece to the puzzle that was her and Duncan, a single line in a database of millions while her ultimate goal still eluded her.
She held her breath as she plugged in the drive. The videos loaded and her cursor hovered over the indicated file.
She told herself it didn't matter now if she saw it. So what if she finally learned the truth about Duncan's past? She and Duncan were over. As soon as she finished trashing the footage she'd compiled, they would never have been. Their relationship would be wiped from existence.
Biting her lip, Courtney clicked the file. The video opened up on the TV overhead, just as all the others had. The framing on this one was tighter—a close-up on Duncan's face and shoulders, mid-reaction to something that was being said. Through the dull static of the tape and the muted light of the treehouse, the blue of his eyes appeared almost green.
It didn't matter, Courtney reminded herself, her cursor hovering over the play button. It didn't matter that he made her feel desirable and supported, that he made her think outside the box and question everything she knew about what she wanted. It didn't matter, because he didn't want to get back together with her, and she had never wanted to be with him in the first place.
The cursor shook with the tremor in her arm. She looked up at Duncan's face and, for the first time, realized how different he looked on the other side of a screen. He was all hard lines, odd angles and shadows. Courtney wondered how she looked behind the screen, and whether it was different than the person Duncan saw in front of him.
Slowly, she looked back at the drives on the desk. She stared at two months of experiences and weighed them against one three-minute clip.
Her hand steady, Courtney closed the file.
"How are you doing?" Bridgette asked.
Duncan gave her a thumbs up as sarcastically as possible, holding a folded towel to his mouth.
Geoff had been sent to retrieve some ice, which left Bridgette and Duncan alone again. They sat at opposite ends of the tall rowing machine Geoff had used to block the door—though it had been improperly assembled and didn't look much like a rowing machine at all. Bunny hopped between their laps like he couldn't decide who was his favorite surrogate parent.
Duncan sat, unusually quiet since his release from the sauna. Bridgette didn't know what to chalk that up to, but she felt at least partially responsible.
"Sorry for shouting at you," she said, rubbing her elbow.
Duncan snorted.
Bridgette raised a brow. "What?"
"I don't think anyone has ever apologized for shouting at me," he said dryly, half into his towel. "Ever."
"I'll be the first, then," Bridgette said.
"Don't apologize, Malibu," Duncan said. "You had stuff to say and you said it. Most people don't get that far."
Bridgette looked around the room, unsure what to do with Duncan's new camaraderie. "So, you and I…are good?" she chanced. "Or at least not any worse."
Duncan rolled his eyes. "Don't make me laugh anymore. My face hurts."
They lapsed back into comfortable silence.
It was strange.
Given everything Bridgette knew about Duncan, she had expected him to bolt the moment he was freed of the sauna, content to ignore her existence (and their heart-to-heart) until the show ended. Heck, Bridgette would have put money on it. But he was here, still, sitting as if he had nothing better to do than wait for ice and babysit Bunny.
There was nothing in his face to indicate that he had anything to say at all. Bridgette should have left, probably, but she couldn't ignore her near-supernatural people skills and the feeling that she needed to stick around. So she waited.
"I stabbed my uncle."
Duncan didn't take his eyes off the sauna room door, even when Bridgette stiffened.
"Some guys robbed a local shop. A boutique, I guess you'd call it. Stole a lot of stuff. Nice stuff." He took a deep breath, then pressed on. "I was in the neighborhood. I didn't have the cleanest record, so...I ran, when I heard the sirens. My uncle was police captain. It was dark. He cornered me in a backyard. I didn't know it was him and I...overreacted." Duncan swung his arm mechanically: a stabbing motion behind. "I had a couple other minor offenses already. Stupid stuff. But no one in my family—on the force—believed me when I said it was an accident. Hell, they didn't even believe I wasn't a part of the robbery."
A muscle in his jaw twitched. "My uncle wanted me to learn a lesson. My parents agreed." He blew out a breath, folding his legs atop the rowing machine. "So off I went."
Duncan glanced over at Bridgette once, quickly, then resumed looking at the far wall. Bunny hopped over and nestled between his crossed legs.
"You asked me what I did," Duncan said impatiently. "That's it."
"Right," Bridgette said automatically, "yeah, I guess I..." She took a moment to center herself. "I thought it would be worse."
Duncan smiled, then immediately winced. He adjusted the towel at his lips. "Yeah. That's what they all say."
"This might be a stupid question," Bridgette said, "but...why don't you like people knowing? Stabbing a cop is pretty in line with your image."
"I don't care who knows," Duncan grumbled. "Anyone can know."
"With one exception," Bridgette said.
Silence.
"Why not Courtney?" Bridgette asked.
"You wanna know so you can run off and tell her?" Duncan snapped, growling as he split open his lip again.
"Courtney and I aren't on speaking terms right now," she said, dropping her gaze to the floor. "But even if we were, I wouldn't do that." Bridgette turned to him, head tilted. "Do you trust her?"
Duncan wouldn't look at her. It took him a minute or so to say anything at all. "You're the first person to ever apologize for shouting at me," he said. "Courtney's the only person to ever believe in me. This island's full of firsts, I guess." He laughed, weakly. "My family doesn't trust me, let alone believe in me."
He lowered the towel from his lips, and leaned back to look at the ceiling. "I know I play into it. I'm an asshole. I cuss, I pick fights—hell, I only went after Courtney because she was hot and watching her lose her shit was funny." He swallowed. "But after a while, I realized that all the yelling might have meant she actually...cared, and I..."
He trailed off. Duncan's free hand moved to pet Bunny. "I always thought I'd hate if someone thought I was soft. But damn—you don't realize how miserable you've been, having everyone think you're garbage, until you find someone who doesn't think you're garbage."
Duncan scratched Bunny gently behind the ears, but his expression turned sour. "Turns out she was secretly wondering if I was garbage all along. How about that?"
Bridgette shifted her weight on the rowing machine, further from the edge and closer to Duncan. She asked herself what Geoff would do. After a brief hesitation, she lightly bumped Duncan's shoulder with her own.
"I'm not going to tell her, Duncan."
He shrugged, closing his eyes to the room and covering his mouth fully with the towel. "It doesn't matter now."
Courtney yanked the drive from the computer port. In her haste, the stack of drives by the keyboard unsettled and clattered to the floor.
As Courtney held the drive with Duncan's secret in both hands, she realized that she hadn't, technically, been wrong.
It didn't matter.
She snapped the drive in half.
It took a little help from the corner of the desk and some stomping to ensure that it was sufficiently obliterated, but she did it. It was gone. Courtney left the pieces on the floor, along with the mess of drives that held her time with Duncan on Wawanakwa. She headed for the elevator. Wiping her eyes clear of any lingering emotion, Courtney put on her game face and set her watch.
They had nineteen hours before Chef returned to take them to the finale. Not long at all, considering everything she would have to do to win Duncan back.
But Courtney was a CIT, and CITs got things done.
She'd be lying if she said she didn't relish the challenge.
"Nothing really matters... To meeeeee."
From strayphoenix: Let me just say that this chapter was super intimidating to write. For all intents and purposes, this is the emotional climax of 8 years of storytelling and character development and hoo boy was it a challenge to get just right. By the fact that some of these lines caused us actual physical pain to type out, you know we're doing our job right. Which lines were your favorite?
Also, we noticed a slew of new readers recently! Hello guys! Welcome to the party! (How did you find us?!) We noticed many of you stressed over updates and abandonment issues. Please be aware that we update every 4-6 months. If you don't see us posting for longer than that, THEN feel free to panic and run around your houses cursing our mothers. If we're under the 6 month mark, rest assured we are slaving over the next chapter with every scrap of spare time we can wring from our busy lives.
ALSO also, we've seen some comments about printing this all out as a book once it is ended. Rina and I have plans to go through the whole fic and publish a polished, single-reading, complete story on AO3 once we're finished. We wouldn't dare edit it here on ff since we'd hate to cut out someone's favorite line or restructure someone's favorite scene for the sake of coherency, but that is certainly something for everyone to look forward to upon the completion of this fic!
Next chapter: The clock is ticking down on DxC's future! Tick-tock-tick-tock.
From Contemperina: WOW does this chapter make me distressed. stray and I had to think long and hard about how the campers would react to a delay (happy? Sad? Angry?) and decided on a sort of...limbo. Of course, that can only last so long, now that Courtney has set her mind on something.
Question: what do you all think of Duncan's backstory, now that you have it? Literal years ago, stray and I sat down and tried to imagine what he had done that was so out of line with his image that he didn't want to share. The only logical conclusion? It was an accident. So, does the headcanon jive with you? What did you always imagine?
To echo stray, welcome to all our new readers and welcome back to the old! We are so glad to have you, and your comments mean the world to us. (Whenever I see one, one of the first things I do is text stray and ask if she wants to write, so they quite literally affect our speed of production.) We're writing for you (and also us, because we're stubborn, but mostly you)!
Thanks for reading!