Chapter Text
Returning to Wiskayok after nineteen months of feral, blood-scrounged survival is the mindfuck to end all mindfucks.
In the first week she’s back, Natalie links up with a few friends to score some weed, and they give her the most bug-eyed stare in the world, like she came back with a totally different face or something. It freaks her out a little, has her glancing in the mirror when she leaves, just to make sure she didn’t bring the veil and crown back with her.
A couple of them call a few times after that. She doesn’t pick up.
They were all made honorary graduates the year before. Dead girls mourned with degrees. It disgusts her; it makes her laugh. It’s not like anyone who actually did bite it out there has the capacity to be consoled by the gesture. Although, it is a little funny imagining Jackie Taylor’s ghostly visage brightening as she realizes in death: well, I may be worm food, but at least I technically graduated high school. A little funny, a lot fucked. That’s an apt descriptor for all of this.
Those of them that were (un)lucky enough to live end up trickling out to greener pastures. College, work, cross-country moves, you name it, a Yellowjacket’s done it. Must be nice, Natalie thinks, from her static enshrinement in Jersey quagmire. As time trudges by, she finds herself spending more time with her mother than she has in years. They waste away entire days, chain smoking in utter silence. They haven’t coexisted this peacefully since before her dad blew his own brains out.
Natalie is perplexed by this sudden symbiosis at first, but she soon traces it back to the fact that they aren’t saying anything to each other. That was what she’d been doing wrong in her relationship with her mother. She’d been trying to talk to her.
Again, a little funny, a lot fucked.
It’s weird as hell trying to fit back into this place. Everyone in town had already accepted them as dead, so coming home is less of a celebrated arrival and more a disturbing revival. Families buried hollow caskets out here; the city contracted stonemasons to etch names into small monuments jutting out from loamy ground. The general public seems loath to reconcile their presumption of sappily reminisced star soccer players rotting in absentia en route to Seattle, and the reality of what sorry husks of these ideals came home.
Natalie would be tempted to liken her current existence to a ghost in the eyes of most, but, in truth, it’s far more grotesque than that. She’s a collection of moldy limbs, a silhouette of stringy sinew weakly elevating a hanging mandible. She’s zombified and wretched for it. Her crumpled death certificate flutters out from beneath a heap of clutter. Presumed dead, it says. Her knee jerk reaction is to be offended that her mom didn’t frame it or something. Too bad.
She gets wasted and stumbles over to the graveyard one night, discovers her tombstone gleaming brightly in moonlight, in stark contrast to her father’s cracked and crumbling marker, a gray stump of a thing just a few feet away. She’s incensed upon learning that the empty, oaken representation of her corpse had been laid out beside him underfoot. She asks her mom–why next to him? You knew I would’ve hated that. The question splinters whatever amicable spell had settled over them.
She goes back to her grave once more after that. The stone is dirt-smudged and dull.
Whoever had been taking care of it isn’t anymore.
Exactly three months to the day they landed back home in Wiskayok, Natalie visits Lottie for the first time.
She’s been meaning to do it sooner, but, well. She’d been putting it off. The idea of navigating something like that on top of the absolute shit show that is her attempting to reenter society was literally unthinkable. Now that those attempts have petered out to a pathetic fizzle, there’s no point in delaying it any longer; she needs to see Lottie. For a million different reasons or for one, it doesn’t matter. She just fucking needs to.
She’s heard briefly from Taissa (who went to see Lottie before moving out to college like nothing fucking happened) that it’s a state-of-the-art facility. Three hundred count sheets and twenty dollar jello cups. That kind of deal. So, Natalie has high expectations, those of which are squarely met upon arrival.
As soon as she walks in, it’s bright. The whole place shines like a mouth of overly-whitened dentures. It’s a little affronting, actually. She has to squint through the entirety of the conversation at the front desk until her eyes adjust to the intense meter of fluorescence beaming out of the overhead lights.
She’s assigned a nurse to escort her to the room–weird, but okay–and as Natalie treks down the hallways, she’s once more impressed by how the tiled floors squeak and sparkle beneath her knock-off Docs. The air is somewhat unpleasant; biting and medicinal, like someone went way overkill with a bunch of cleaning products, but that’s hardly the worst thing in the world.
The nurse stops in front of a door marked 507 with a rustle of scrubs, turning his stubbled chin towards Natalie.
“First time visiting?” he asks.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Natalie replies, somewhat sheepishly.
“Hm,” he nods, face oblique, and opens the door. “Charlotte Matthews? You have a visitor.”
Natalie does her best to stride in confidently, like she isn’t nervous as fuck and sweating through her shirt, but the show of self-possession feels glaringly childish as soon as she lays eyes on Lottie, sitting small and unsurprised on the hospital bed, an untouched tray balanced on her lap.
“You have ten minutes,” the nurse says. “And the door stays open.”
“Thanks.” Natalie mutters in response, gaze trained on Lottie’s face.
She looks okay, Natalie decides. Her face has filled out from gaunt, dirt-streaked planes to the soft skin and slightly pudgy cheeks of her pre-crash days. Her hair is long and shining, bangs curled delicately over her forehead in what almost seems like a purposeful attempt to obscure the thin, pale scar an inch or two above her eyebrows. She looks okay. She looks good. There’s a hardcover book lying next to her pillow, a vase of velvety-pink tulips set sweetly on the table underneath the windowsill, and an overall atmosphere of put-togetherness that Natalie had decidedly not been expecting.
When they were rescued, Lottie had been pretty distraught. Actually, unhinged is probably a better descriptor. She’d been murmuring unintelligibly under her breath non stop the entire ride over to the hospital in Toronto, and then, as soon as they touched down, she just stopped. Stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped doing anything, it seemed. They had to bring out a stretcher to get her out of the helicopter. Her eyes were shut tight and her lips were drawn closed. Natalie had felt oddly like something vital had been ripped out from her chest as the EMTs maneuvered Lottie’s unresponsive form out the cockpit door.
She’d started to stand up, to reach a hand out, to stop them, but then the pilot said something, and someone started crying, and Natalie caught sight of the looming hospital walls, the expansive sheets of glass glittering in harsh sunlight, the steel beams standing tall like great metal conifers, and she kind of lost her shit too. Internally, that is. Her brain garbled to a stop, her senses whittled down to a pinhole of too much, too loud, too big, and it was all she could do not to trip over her own feet as she stepped onto the freakishly smooth surface of the tarmac.
She’d seen Lottie once after that. It was just a glimpse through a mostly ajar door, but it was her. She was lying still, eyes closed, mouth shut, just like she had been when they touched down. She hadn’t been brought back to Wiskayok at the same time as the rest of them, something about doctors wanting to do additional testing. And now she’s here, and she’s sitting upright, staring Natalie dead in the face, and Natalie is looking away, because all of a sudden this too is strange and overwhelming in ways that it never has been before.
“Well,” the nurse moves out of view. “I’ll be back.”
Natalie balks at this. She’d expected him to continue hovering in the doorway for the entirety of the visit. There was a certain sense of security in knowing that the interaction would need to be kept light as long as someone else was in the room. Neither she nor Lottie speak as the sound of receding footsteps fades into a sole tick-tick-ticking of a clock somewhere on the walls.
“Nat.” Lottie says, finally.
Her voice is raw, like when she’d screamed herself hoarse before boarding the plane back to the states.
“Yeah?”
Silence. They stare at each other. Natalie’s stomach squirms. God. She should’ve smoked a bowl before this.
“...did you want to come over here, or…?”
Natalie stares wordlessly as Lottie speaks, intonation rough-edged and quiet. Watches more as the bridge of her nose crinkles in bemusement, as one of her eyebrows crooks up a little higher than the other, reconfiguring her features into an almost teasing expression, a faded remnant of times past. A memory. A challenge.
Okay. Okay, okay. This, Natalie can deal with.
“Sure.”
She makes her way over to the cot Lottie is lying on. It’s an excruciating few feet, like wading through wet sand.
“You can sit.” Lottie gestures vaguely to the chair at her bedside.
Natalie sits, and, in turn, works not to betray a reaction to Lottie’s outstretched hand, which is extensively bandaged. The gauze is thickest on her palm, interspersed with an oversized wad of cotton and a few strips of papery medical tape. Her fingers and wrist are wrapped significantly as well, spiraling all the way down to where her forearm disappears into the sleeve of her hospital gown.
“Cute look.” Natalie quips.
It would’ve been fine leaving it at that. She can already see the curl of Lottie’s mouth lifting minutely in response, but it’s exactly that familiar sight that snags and pulls at the muscles of Natalie’s chest, imploring her to keep talking, to show that she’s just as cool and collected and absolutely-not-insane as Lottie seems in this moment.
“Lemme guess, it’s designer?” she jokes, reaching a hand out towards Lottie’s forearm.
Fuck knows why she deemed this a normal thing to do. After all, Natalie doesn’t do physical contact. It isn’t proof of normalcy for her to initiate something like this–if anything, it’s evidence of the opposite. Even back then, when they were out in the cold and they slept packed in together for warmth, it would’ve been out of character for her to casually go to touch Lottie like this.
She knows she fucked up the second she does it, too. Lottie’s expression shifts. Open to shut, quick as anything. She turns those deep, boring eyes away from Natalie, who, while mentally berating herself for such a bizarre move, also can’t help but breathe a quick exhale of relief at the break in scrutiny.
Lottie’s always been a little intense. Before everything went to shit, it used to only show on the field during athletically appropriate moments. She’d cut through midfielders like a serrated knife through water, executing complicated passes with such stolid focus that Natalie would have to poke her in the ribs and tell her to stop clenching her jaw so fucking hard, or else she’d break all her teeth. Ironically enough, Natalie’s now grinding her own molars at the suffocating silence she’s wreaked upon both of them.
“Sorry,” Natalie says stiltedly. “My bad.”
“It’s fine.” replies Lottie.
Her tone has grown vacant, her presence drifting. She isn’t looking back up.
“How’ve you been?” asks Natalie, because what the fuck else is she supposed to say.
Lottie looks up again. There’s a whisper of a breakage in her armored expression. The very beginnings of a smile. Rueful and pained, but a smile nonetheless.
“I haven’t been getting out much.”
“You really aren’t missing out on anything.” Natalie says, feeling it necessary to clarify this point in particular.
“I didn’t think I was.”
The comment takes Natalie aback. She swishes it around her gums like mouthwash before answering. “I–”
“Time’s up.” the nurse materializes at the door.
Thrown off by the abrupt interruption, Natalie startles, then nods jerkily, a one-two punch, before rising to leave. Before she can, though, something brittle-textured and tacky collides gently against her. She glances down. Lottie. She’s lifting her bandaged hand, the one Natalie had oh so clumsily gone to touch a minute or two prior, barely knocking it against Natalie’s limp-hanging arm. A sliver of cold skin, the exposed tip of Lottie’s index finger, unhurt and unbound, brushes the branching vein at the inside of Natalie’s wrist.
Natalie shivers. Her heart skitters in her ears.
“You should come again,” Lottie says. “If–if you want.”
“Okay,” says Natalie. It tastes like an oath. “Okay.”
She gets out of there as quickly as possible. Strides out onto the parking lot, inhales the city air whole and opens her mouth as if to scream.
Freshman year. She’s situated towards the back arc of a circle of her peers, woefully enmeshed in a drunken game of Spin the Bottle. Everyone around her is howling and hollering; she’s sitting, bullish and brooding, looking on with distaste. So fucking stupid how proud they are of getting wasted off their parents’ lukewarm sixpacks of beer. Like there’s anything special about that. Like there’s anything special about any of this.
In the middle of the circle, some sophomore guy is leaning in to kiss a girl that Natalie recognizes from math class. She can tell it’s going to be terrible just from the trajectory of his head. Sure enough, the girl reels back with a shriek in seconds, something about his braces hitting against her teeth. The guy remains perched on his haunches, frozen, one hand still lifted to cradle someone long-gone, all as his buddies whoop and rib him mercilessly. The whole thing reeks of those creepy depictions of nineteenth-century public shamings that she’s come across in her history textbook. A failure, a fuck up, a show. Whatever.
Frowning, Natalie turns away, biting the inner pocket of her cheek. Across the room, she spots a girl from soccer tryouts pouring booze into a solo cup. Solid idea. Natalie rises and exits the sad chaos, pushing through clamoring bodies until she comes to a stop in front of a dripping keg hefted up on a kitchen counter.
“Oh, hey,” the girl–Charlotte something–says. “You need a cup?”
She’s tall, Natalie notices anew. She’s tall and she dresses like she knows it. Her clothes seem hand-picked to accentuate her height. Her cheeks are flushed ruddy from alcohol, but her gaze is sure and steady–she isn’t slammed like most everyone else here. There’s an air of frustration about her, like she’s aware of this and trying her damndest to catch up.
“I guess.” Natalie admits.
“I don’t think there’s any more but,” Charlotte something smiles, soft, strained. “You can have mine?”
Before Natalie can argue the point further, the cup is shoved into her hands. It’s sort of a desperate maneuver, as if the other girl is anxious to be rid of it. Half favor, half passing on the weight. Natalie isn’t bothered by it. She takes a grateful sip.
“I’m Lottie.” says her drinking partner.
“Natalie.”
“I know. I saw you at tryouts,” Lottie says. “You think you’re gonna join the team?”
“Dunno.” Natalie says. “Maybe.”
A truthful answer would be “definitely not.” The only reason she was even there was because she hadn’t felt like going home that day. Or any other day, for that matter–she’d just so happened to stumble upon an excuse last Wednesday in the form of a flier tacked on the wall beside her locker.
“I think I will.” Lottie volunteers.
“That’s cool.” Natalie does not make much of an effort to say this convincingly.
Lottie’s chin bobs up and down in agreement with the timbre of her words. Typically, Natalie would be annoyed by that sort of overattentive active listening–what are you compensating for, anyway–but Lottie doesn’t seem to be doing it purposefully. It looks to be a subconscious movement as her eyes rove around the sweaty basement.
“I think I should stop now.” she suddenly says.
“Stop what?”
“Drinking,” Lottie says, lines of disappointment etched onto her forehead. “It kind of sucks.”
Maybe it’s the shitty weed she pregamed with kicking in, or the trauma of bearing witness to that ill-fated party game, or the way Lottie frowns like she’s smiling, like she’s telling a joke, maybe it’s all of that combined, maybe it’s something entirely different, but, ultimately, something in this interaction tickles Natalie. She snorts in amusement.
“Why’s it suck?”
“Just…y’know.”
This clarifies exactly nothing. Natalie indulges in a feeling of fleeting endearment towards this girl from soccer tryouts whose mauve lipstick is smeared onto the rim of the cup she’s drinking out of.
“This whole thing fucking sucks,” Natalie says decisively. “I’m out of here.”
She waits a beat before leaving, purposely loitering, looking not at Lottie, but at the stairs leading up to the floor above.
“Okay,” Lottie says. “I’ll see you at practice.”
It’s unclear whether she’d picked up on the implicit invitation or not. Either way, she doesn’t follow Natalie up and out of the house, and, either way, Natalie doesn’t think to refute Lottie’s assertion that she’ll be joining the team.
She ended up a Yellowjacket, of course. Not because of Lottie, but because, a week after that, Natalie’s fucking asshole of a dad accidentally shot himself in the head, and she ended up skipping school until her mom finally spoke to her again and told her to go, at which point she’d missed out on nearly two and a half months of class and the only way to circumvent failing the grade was to ‘participate wholeheartedly in an extracurricular.’
Prove you want to be here, the school counselor had said. That’s still probably the funniest shit Natalie's ever heard.
She goes to see Lottie again a week later. Or, she tries to see her, and then gets majorly shut down by the hospital personnel.
“She’s not accepting visitors right now.” they say apologetically. “Family only.”
It isn’t a dig, but it oddly feels like one. Natalie bikes back into town–the crappy excuse for a car they’d owned had been impounded a week after the plane went down, apparently–and decides to stop at the park instead of going straight home. ‘The park’ being a Wiskayokian institution, the kind of arboratorial fishbowl you spend a ridiculous chunk of your life in, a little planet capable of evolving from Capture the Flag arena to prime outdoor make out territory.
Natalie’s hooked up with a few guys here. A couple girls, too. She can’t really remember any of that now. It all just feels like borrowed memories. Not that the memories had been all that precious in the first place, but still. She’d like to think of these things and feel as if they happened to her, not to someone who just happened to look and sound and act like her, an unfamiliar simulacrum that existed before the crash.
She sits on a bench overlooking the grass and lights up a cig.
There should be legislation allowing ‘people you were stranded with in the middle of nowhere for nineteen months’ to occupy the same space on a medical form as ‘family’. If anyone’s going to be cleared to accompany someone in crisis, it should be the ones who’ve seen them in crisis crisis. Lottie’s parents have no fucking clue what she–or any of them–did out there. No one does.
Natalie sighs, stubs out the cigarette butt prematurely.
She doesn’t want it anymore.
“I heard you came the other day.” Lottie says.
“Yeah, they kicked me out.” replies Natalie.
A little less than a week later, and she’s back. Call it boredom, or not. She just kind of wanted to see Lottie again, wanted to get another peek at her, clean of forest grime, sitting soft to the elements. She’s out of the surgical gown, Natalie notices, and dressed in peaceful shades of blue. Her shirt is unbuttoned pretty far down; as in, Natalie can tell that she isn’t wearing a bra. There’s something additionally comforting about this, about seeing her like this. There’s that mole beneath her collarbone, there’s that smattering of freckles peeking out from the swell of her chest, there’s that sloping rise and fall as she breathes–
“Nat?”
“What?”
“You’re kind of…” Lottie trails off.
Natalie drums her fingers against her thigh. Conversation came easier this time around; they greeted each other much more casually when she entered the room a minute or two ago, but it’s hard to gain much of a footing when it’s happening within ten minute windows. The hurriedness of the situation is tangentially reminiscent of the harried fervor of starvation and survival they’d lived through. She bounces her knee, waits, waits, waits.
“Nothing, never mind.” Lottie says.
She looks tired, eyes ringed bruisish and heavy-lidded. Her hand and arm are still bandaged, her voice is still hoarse. She’s staring out the window to her right, facing away from Natalie.
“Have you been sleeping?” asks Natalie slowly.
“They give me meds for that.”
An adept dodge. Natalie searches for a path back in. “Tell them if the meds aren’t working.”
“I know that.”
The words come out gravelly and aggravated. Alarmed, Natalie looks up. Lottie had been sitting upright, propped up by pillows, but she’s since bowed over at the waist. Her arm is moving roughly, but the hair cascading down her shoulders is curtaining whatever she’s doing from view.
“Whoa, Lot, hey,” Natalie rises from her chair. “You want me to–should I call for someone?”
“No,” Lottie grits out. “Just give me a–”
She sweeps her hair back with an irritated sound. In her lap lies a discarded scroll of white gauze and tape. She’s tearing it off, Natalie realizes with a jolt of panic. Upon closer examination, she’s horrified to find that Lottie’s arm, the one she’s pulling bandages off of, is covered in a thick, oozing blanket of raised welts and scabbed over sores.
“Lottie, what the fuck–”
Lottie’s fingers, which had been scrabbling at the remaining padding, find clear purchase and violently rip off the cotton that had been protecting her palm. The thin skin there is criss-crossed with a grid of precise, overlapping lines of ribboned scar tissue, like she’d slid a whetted knife across her palm hundreds of times, sliced through layers of tissue until her hand was tattooed with the cuts.
No, not like. That’s…that’s exactly what she did.
“Sorry,” Lottie says, sinking fingernails into her palm without so much as a wince. “I’m not trying to freak you out, but it’s in you, you know? It’s in all of us. If I could just get it out–”
“Is there a button or something?” Natalie hears herself say aloud. “To contact someone? Where’s the fucking button?”
Her mind sizzles and falters.
Blood rises up from the crescents of Lottie’s nails.
Natalie lunges onto the bed.
Lottie yelps, but Natalie crawls on top of her, muffling the noise, blood pounding against her skull.
“Stop, stop, stop.” Natalie says; an incantation.
Lottie struggles against the hold. Natalie panics further–she has her pinned to the bed, but Lottie’s stronger than her, she’ll overpower her–and so, before she can think twice about it, she rips her arm out of Lottie’s blood-smeared grip and hurriedly shoves the meat of her forearm into Lottie’s half-open mouth.
“Stop.” Natalie says again.
Lottie immediately stills. She stares up at her, hair tousled, wide-eyed, unblinking.
“Bite.” Natalie instructs.
An innumerable set of emotions flicker across Lottie’s features in an instant. If Natalie hadn’t seen it herself, she wouldn’t believe a person capable of conveying that many feelings at once. It’s so fast she can only identify a few–determination, desperation, exhaustion–but just as quickly as they flood out, they evaporate into the ether, leaving Lottie’s face to show a single, all-consuming gratefulness.
She bites.
Natalie flinches against it, against Lottie’s teeth sinking sharp-edged points into the soft flesh of her arm. It’s painful, more painful than should be easily accessible. There’s a primal signal in most people’s brains, a sort of mental blockade dissuading them from offering themselves up to certain danger. Natalie should be yanking her arm away, and a part of her is yowling to, but a larger, louder part is gluing her in place.
“Fuck, fuck, Lot, fuck–”
It hurts, it stings, it’s too much, it's too much-
“Ow, shit!”
Gasping, Natalie reaches up her other arm to brush a trembling hand across Lottie’s forehead. The lone scar sinks into her vision at the same time as Lottie tightening the hold of her teeth, biting down harder still. There’s a certain transcendence to this cross-section of image and sensation. A karmic interlacing of sorts. She’s reminded of that party, the first time they talked, of Lottie handing her the cup. She’s reminded of the cabin, just before it burned, of Lottie lowering her head and handing her the crown.
Full circle.
Natalie isn’t bothered by it. She’ll hold on to something, onto anything, for Lottie. That she understands implicitly, as they lock eyes, Lottie underneath her, flushed and breathing hard through her nose, sweat trickling down her temple, incisors clamped around skin–
And then, Lottie is unlatching her jaw, and Natalie is drawing her arm back, and they’re separate again, and Natalie is clambering off the cot, shaky legs on the linoleum floor, and starting over to the door.
“Ten minutes are–oh.” the nurse, who’d ducked his head into the room, looks pleasantly surprised. “Right on time.”
Natalie doesn’t look back as she leaves. She feels the stare, but she doesn’t look back. Her arm throbs at her side. She feels a little like grinning, a little like sobbing. An unfamiliar catharsis washes over her body. The indentations of Lottie’s teeth remain embedded in her skin, flushed angry red around the marks, little beads of ruby blood pricking out from where Lottie had bitten down hardest.
She bikes back home to the tune of whirring spokes, forearm stinging against the contrasting current of wind, and takes the shortcut through the graveyard.