Chapter Text
Gravity hooked her and her bones vibrated from the force of the sky falling away, a plane crashing down. Nat was intimately familiar with the sensation. Hysteria formed a vice that restricted her breathing down to nearly nothing, body immobile but for the desperate pulse of her heart, each beat terrified, each beat kicking faster and faster.
She was in the plane again and every single seat was empty. Nat knew what would happen, how the shape of the plane would both crumple and slide against the land below. They’ll be torn up by trees, walls torn open to reveal soft guts. Technically she was dying, probably dead, and she knew the plane just like she knew fear. Intimately, just like a father.
I died alone and surrounded by everyone left, Nat thought just as a hand touched her wrist. She looked down and barely recognized the chipped black nail polish and clunky silver rings. She recognized the face looking back at her even less.
Bleached hair, sleepless rings under the eyes. Natalie, Natty, Nat, Antler Queen… herself. Nat knew the beat-to-hell black jacket easier, cheap material trying so hard to replicate real leather, fabric cuffs scrunched up around the wrists. She bought it for the school year after a summer weeding gardens and trying to give a shit about landscaping for rich people, enough cash in her pocket to buy brand new, fresh from a coat hanger inside of a real, clean store, a basic universe away from the bargain bin specials she grew up with. Gently loved and with all the bruises and scars muted down to a dull shine! You’ll look just like the other girls. And that jacket, worn to shreds, got disposed of without a second glance after their rescue. Every jacket after was a darker, harder version of it. Zippers like teeth, material cold like a snake.
Those fingers, her fingers, squeezed around her wrist like a decent imitation of a handcuff. Nat can’t jerk away. She didn't know if she even should try. Pain was radiating from her chest, bleeding down from her shoulder, vision dissolving into spots.
“Get off the plane,” Nat told her very quietly over the sound of her heart beat failing, a low engine whining. “Get off and don’t ever come back.”
Her vision blacked out. There was nothing left, nothing at all—
Trees.
Nat staggered into the nearest one. Her chipped nails dug into the bark until her legs wanted to cooperate, wobbling around like some kind of drunk two hours after an AA meeting that couldn’t stick. An engine screeched louder and she pushed her forehead against the tree, feeling the textured whirls of the bark, a pulse banging against her skull from both the inside and outside. Misty killed me, she thought and the pain spikes up a notch.
Heat bloomed from the plane, the wrecked plane just a shadow away, and fire whooshed out and up. It was a near miss from her current post of sanity. And, despite the proximity to it, she doesn't even flinch.
Nearby Tai was screaming for Van. She lurched against Mari, alive Mari, and shook her by the shoulders. She then thrust away for someone else, everyone swarming and scattering, perfect Taissa Turner scuffed up and searching…
She, despite the pain, knew exactly how this went. If this was a story, this was the beginning part. She got off the plane and Tai was going to find Van, the others were going to eventually cluster like a hive of yellowjackets for real, and they were all going straight to hell.
The ending was obvious. Mostly everyone died, a few people lived, and everything was a total waste.
Nat forced her face away from the harsh skin of the tree and gazed back over at the flames, the black smoke throbbing in the air. A scream wrenched from her throat and it bled onto the wreckage, cut loose from mind. Hell was this, hell had been every minute since the plane crashed the first time, and she’s at the start again. There was plenty of bad, a legacy of it, but she had always been a seed of darkness. And something planted her out here once, made her come into full bloom.
She screamed again and again and again—
“Let me process you!” Misty snapped in her face while flicking one finger fast across her vision. “You’re in shock and distress—”
“Don’t touch me,” Nat snarled. The word process set her nerves on edge, made her want to get a wall to put her back against. She pushed her away with both hands, proving that they’re working and fully functional, that she was totally fine. Her bag was somewhere and it wasn't much, actually, packed for a soccer game, some kind of fancy ass party, and a weekend of bumming around a hotel to either nurse a loss or reward a win. Pre-Crash Nat never thought about the positives of packing, say, a first aid kit. She didn’t consider vacuum sealing a bag of winter clothing just in case she got stranded in the springtime and nobody came looking by the time seasons changed. The first thing she packed, and arguably the most important thing back then, was her flask.
There was a foggy memory of finding her bag the first time. Nat turned and wheeled around, legs rubbery, and scans the area. Tai’s designer luggage set, ironically twin to Jackie’s travel set, laid nearby like a fish out of water. Gen’s casual duffle bag was slouched across Van’s backpack. She’s looked and her head kept hurting—
Travis came from the brush with swollen eyes and a comfortable expression of anger on his face.
The heat from the smouldering wreckage goes ice cold. Nat stopped.
He looked at her like a stranger and Nat looked at him like he was alive for the first time in a long time. And if he was alive…
Misty went off to mend some other poor soul and Nat couldn't fill her lungs with air, busy shedding her jacket and rolling up her shirt sleeves in a dizzying desperation. This isn’t real. Her skin was nearly blank. A stubby burn is hooked below her elbow. This isn’t real, this can’t be real. No track marks. No thin scars. There’s trauma, lots of trauma, but she’s on one side of it.
Her fingers traced over her left arm like she could feel the damage that couldn't be seen when someone grabbed her. Their own fingers hooked around her wrist and it sent chills down her spine, a tiny plummet of anxiety that mimicked a plane falling, a body hitting the ground.
“Are you okay?”
The noise of everything was still ringing in her ears. Nat had to look up and stare into the face of Jackie Taylor, perfect and alive, complete with a pulse. “Jesus, Nat. I’m just asking if you’re okay. Did you hit your head or something?”
Green trees were all around them but dead leaves rustled on the ground, crushed by the toe of Nat’s boot. She flexed her wrist to one side, breaking Jackie’s connection by pushing to where her fingers met with her thumb, second nature. But then she leaned forward to grab Jackie, hands locking up on her arms, the gasoline taste of adrenaline sharp in her mouth. “You’re here.”
Jackie blinked owlishly. Something dark was smudged across her forehead. “Of course I’m here. We were literally on the same plane.”
Starving people do desperate things when something has been cooked. White pain flashed. Nat remembered eating what was left of Jackie, of sitting elbow to elbow with the others, desperate to eat and be full, chewing burnt mouthfuls of Jackie and her melted clothing, every bite bitter to the bone.
Her fingers unlocked and she let Jackie go. And then her feet started to move, faster and faster, a one man race for her bag.
Maybe Pre-Crash Nat knew exactly what she was doing when she was packing a bag. A flask sounded like a perfect solution to this emergency.
Everyone was sitting around the fire and playing ‘if your house was burning down, what would you save?’, but they already went and given it a darker twist, if a plane was going down, what would you save? Some of the answers were playful, like Laura Lee's teddy bear, to a bit obvious like when Van requested custody of Nat's flask. Voices peppered in fake and funny answers, louder for the darkness itself.
Nat was quiet, sitting alone, and with both hands clenched tight around the flask. She wasn't sharing it with anyone. Technically sobriety was a hard battle to win the first time around, but then she went and ended up dying sober.
What was the point? It was all going to dry up again. Did it even matter? Her problem with drinking seemed small to the shit Nat got into after their rescue, the highs she chased.
She sipped to replace one buzz with another.
There’d been an awful moment when she’d fallen into step with Travis earlier, migrating down a crudely made foot path from the wreckage to the burning campfires. His grief was so obvious that she nearly passed him the flask in automatic sympathy, but…
Travis and her had shared enough vices before. It was safer to keep distance, do less harm.
“—want your mom,” Lottie pitched suggestively to Tai, wiggling her eyebrows and looking almost cozy in the firelight, her sweater slung around her shoulders like she was modelling for a magazine. “Next time a plane goes down, I’m hoping she’s on board.”
“God, you’re gross,” Tai said, laughing with the others. They’re giddy post shock, post blood, post everything.
They would have to dig graves for the body tomorrow with the full advantage of light to work with. Another thing she’s already done before, Nat acknowledged, saluting the upcoming responsibility with another sip from her flask. The whisky burns like a good friend, singeing the back of her throat. She had been standing over the flight stewardess with Shauna and Tai when she nearly went and said ‘we should process the bodies soon before they rot’. Something dead provoked that urgency, the understanding that a knife could cut down through skin to purpling muscle, everything vital to keep going. Thankfully she shut her mouth before saying a single thought out loud, just silent while the two blinked tears away.
Those were just the wrong words now, wrong until they went hungry. Right now, everyone expected to bury the deal because that’s what they were supposed to do.
Nat wondered blearily about her own body. What happened to it? Did it get a grave? Would it be rendered down to nothing and swallowed whole? She was gone but everything from before…
It had happened. It would continue. She had been removed and restitched in a different place, but it didn’t seem fair that it could all vanish. Her body would’ve hit the ground, Nat didn't know if she remembered looking up at the night sky or if it was a made up idea inside her head, but someone would have to deal with it. Move it, call someone… tidy the place she left behind.
Jackie flopped down beside her before elegantly crossing her ankles and thrusting one hand out, clearly not caring that Nat’s picked a quiet place to quietly go insane. Fingers wiggled, a plain demand for the flask.
Her teeth remembered scratching against bone. Nat handed it over without complaint. She also snapped those teeth just to make an audible click in Jackie's direction to keep her away.
She took a fast sip and scrunched her face up. “God, that’s like a bottle of nail polish remover.”
“Forgot to pack the girly shit in my emergency bag this morning. What’d you bring?”
“Not enough, clearly,” Jackie scoffed at herself, a little quiet compared to the group nearby.
They’ve sat beside each other before. Nat’s knocked her knee against Jackie’s on a bus ride when Shauna was sick. Scatorccio and Taylor were on the backend of the alphabet so that put them within the same distance of the line up, matched by their near heights. But never like this. Not with Nat fracturing from the presence of two versions of herself inside of her skull, not with Nat vibrating with guilt and the old, dying taste of adrenaline. Never with Jackie fidgeting with her flask, tracing one finger across the unmarked surface. There was something unsaid that felt loud to her, a sensation that didn't slide away.
“What’s with the loner act? You’re acting like someone’s gonna bite you.”
Nat didn't know how to answer that. She was busy thinking about leaving Jackie’s bones in a wrapped up thing of canvas at the plane. Their plane, currently, is still smouldering. Thick smoke burns the back of her throat and she has to keep washing it away with whisky, desperate for a little more.
The flask calls to her. The metal glittered from the firelight, showed Jackie’s fingers holding it. Nat was about to ask for it back when Jackie asked another question.
“What do you think the purpose of all this is?”
I lost my purpose. And, purpose. Find a purpose. Even just looking for one is enough to set you on the path. Her skull throbbed and she was thinking about rehab and the harsh lights of an ER, washing up sober and wrecked. Chasing relief.
Nat looked at Jackie and her heart was racing, a wild thing under her skin. They were both here. She was back at the beginning.
The end, distant and near, had not come yet.