the truth about survival part II • an Alicia Clark fanfiction (girlxgirl)

ii. truly alone

"Kamille?"

Kamille felt Oliver rest his hand on her shoulder, but she shook him off harshly and spun around. She could see he was expecting her to yell again, but a broken voice came out instead.

"Are they really gone?"

He frowned, swallowing hard. "It's the only explanation I can think of. We checked everywhere. If we keep looking, it's only going to hurt more and more. I know you know that..."

Kamille felt her lip quiver like a child, tears flowing down her cheeks. "I have to be alone. I-I'm sorry for yelling. I–" She didn't finish, instead walking past him and leaving the cabin.

She ignored Mía's sympathetic gaze by the campfire and ran past her, a fair distance away from the cabin so she could be alone for a moment. It was dark out, but the glow of the moon lit her path as she finally stopped by a stream, glaring into the nothingness ahead.

She'd known for a while that they may have not survived. But admitting that came with a whole shit load of emotions that she wasn't prepared to deal with. Ignoring that and being proactive about it meant she could hold onto that sliver of hope that maybe they had made it, maybe she'd find them.

She knew now though, that it was stupid to think so optimistically in a world where she'd lost anyone and everyone she'd ever cared about.

She cried hard, angrily and furiously and painfully, punching the tree to feel something other than heartbreak. The acceptance was yet to settle in, so she screamed and let it all out. She couldn't keep living in the past – they were gone. Alicia was gone. The girl she'd fallen in love with, the one person she had left who fully knew her, was gone. She would never see her again, hear her voice, hold her hand, kiss her... she would just become a memory now, the one thing she had wished wouldn't happen.

She was gone.

–

This time was different.

When her parents had died, Kamille kept going for Adam. They had each other, constantly pushing through every day for one another. Then she lost him, too. And she thought she had no-one, but she had Alicia. Then Madison and Nick and Travis and everybody else fell into the picture, and she was no longer alone.

But now she had lost all of them, and she was alone. She had nothing to fight for, nobody to give her a reason to keep going. Everybody she had, left, so what was the point in surviving?

It was never discussed, but Oliver and Mía allowed Kamille to stay with them for as long as she wished. She never really left the cabin, aside from the occasional step outside for fresh air. She was mourning for a long time, unable to accept that Alicia and Madison were gone. She half expected them to find her there in the cabin, showing up out of the blue. But they didn't, and each day passed where they became a painful memory, added to the collection in the back of her mind.

Oliver and Mía left her to it at first, knowing she needed the time to grieve. But then days turned into weeks, and weeks stretched into months, and they knew they had to coax her back into the real world.

Kamille couldn't care less initially, not seeing the point. She would try for them, to keep them off her back, but then fake smiles turned into genuine smiles, and her reason for crying felt stupid when she saw what she was missing. Two unexpected people had given her a reason to keep going, a reason to move on from who she'd lost without simply forgetting about them. The hard times she thought were permanent no longer were.

They were patient and thoughtful and kind, and Kamille realised that despite the circumstances, Allah had thrown them into her life when she'd needed them most. She couldn't give up on surviving. Alicia certainly wouldn't have wanted that, just as Adam wouldn't have. They would want her to keep going and to truly live the best life she could, so that's what she vowed to do.