Chapter Text
1.
She wakes up in the hospital in the middle of the night. Not in one of the beds, though, but on a couch in the waiting room. The doctors wanted her to put her under observation, but she’s an adult, and she doesn’t understand how Canadian healthcare works, and she’s fine, anyway. Just in shock.
Her knee is bandaged but it doesn’t hurt. She feels nothing at all.
The realization of yesterday’s (?) events start flooding through her like a series of cold ocean tides. Her vision turns hazy, and it takes her a moment to realize that tears are starting to swell up in her eyes, only to stream down her cheeks, marking her face like shooting stars. She doesn’t know why this is happening. She is not sad. You can’t feel sad with your insides turned to brass.
She’s alone.
2.
The painkillers start wearing off a while later, between a Mars bar from the vending machine and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich brought by Chris’s mother. She looks distressed. Her Texan accent makes Sam think of a video tape Beth had showed her once in another life: Josh in a dinosaur costume, Chris dressed as Ian Goldblum from Jurassic Park. They were both so very little, maybe ten years old, bursting with enthusiasm as they roleplayed their favourite characters. Chris’s accent was so thick back then that it’d made her laugh. She’d laughed so hard she fell off her chair and scratched her knee and cried out, and Josh came to check if everything was ok and got so mad he didn’t talk to her for a week.
Her own parents are still trying to get enough money for a ticket plane, and for the first time in her life she’s grateful for the recession. This would’ve been so much harder with them as her anchor.
3.
She spends god knows how many hours in complete darkness, staring at the glass holding the darkness at bay, waiting for the break of dawn. There are no night buses to where she has to go, she had checked. But again, that was in another lifetime.
She gets up every time she loses count of her heartbeats (her phone is gone for good and looking at the clock makes her anxious) and stretches. She appreciates that her muscles ache. There will be time for numbness later.
Or there won’t.
She doesn’t care all that much.
4.
She glances at the clock one last time. She needs to leave now. There’s no time to lose. No time. No time until dawn.
She grabs the winter jacket Chris’s mother had bought her earlier, collects a few water bottles and steals every sandwich she can from the woman’s bag without waking her.
It’s been more than 24 hours. He must be starving. She’s trying to be optimistic. Trying not to think about the body of the old guy.
She goes to Jessica’s room, and she doesn’t really know why. All she knows is that the blonde had been through a lot that night, and her psychological damage matches the scars she’s going to have to live with for the rest of her life. She used to be sparks and stars, burning and shimmering, bright and careless, and she got turned into something soft, like a teddy bear with its belly torn apart, plastic eyes looking, but not seeing.
But she’s alive. She has a chance to go on.
Jessica and Josh start on the same letter, but their ends are drastically different.
5.
Jessica is awake, but Matt is not. He’s curled on one of the two armchairs in the room, all patched up, twitching slightly as he dreams of falling, falling, endlessly falling down.
Her eyes seem to glow in the dark, piercing right through and beyond Sam.
When she speaks, she whispers, voice raspy and breathy.
“You’re going to find him.”
Sam doesn’t know whether it’s a question, a statement, or a prophecy, but she nods. She is.
She opens her mouth, thoughts of deathly pale skin with a butterfly tattoo growing in her brain like tumors, but Jess closes her eyes, and Sam turns away. No time to lose, no time.
6.
Right outside Jessica’s room she bumps into Emily, who is carrying a jug of water. The girl- no, none of them are girls or boys anymore. The woman opens her mouth to snap at her, but one look into Sam’s eyes is enough to shut her up.
“Did you wake her up?” Emily whispers, and it’s so unlike her that Sam almost laughs.
“No. She was already awake. I wanted to ask her something.”
“And did you?”
“No. She doesn’t remember. And if she does, I don’t want her to.”
The brunette only nods in response. Nods! Their sour-sweet Emily, a person who would rather talk about directions for minutes than just use gestures; who would never miss an opportunity to share her opinion and never, ever apologized for it; who was the brightest of them all and never failed to remind them that, was now crumbled and quiet and gentle, bringing water to her ex’s girlfriend, even after everything they’ve done to each other.
Josh would have asked her whether she was going to wash Jessica’s feet with it.
Sam blocks the thought with all her might before it could do more damage to her psyche.
“You’re going. To find him?”
A question. The answer doesn’t matter.
“I’m just… going,” she says eventually.
“You’re an idiot, Sam,” she says, a bit louder. Old habits die hard.
Emily reaches into the pocket of her pajamas and takes out her phone.
“Take it. Fully charged, but you know how it is with smartphones.”
Sam nods in thanks, speechless. Nobody was ever allowed to even look at the screen of her next gen Samsung.
“There are some nudes on it, but you should save the battery anyway, so don’t even think about it.”
Sam really wants to crack a smile, but she’s full of cracks already and afraid of breaking, and Em knows exactly how much easier it is to act like a stone and become it, than try to remain as not-shattered porcelain.
“And… Sam?”
She stops halfway out of the corridor.
“Thank you. For telling Mike not to shoot me. Even if you didn’t… know for sure.”
The brunette sends her a tiny, fragile smile, turns around and leaves.
7.
She gets to the end of the corridor leading to the main hall and pauses. There’s no way they’re going to just let her leave. She’s one of the crazy kids, instantly recognizable. They’re definitely not allowed to let her go until they realize that what they’ve been saying was true; That the last Washington kid is either dead or undead somewhere deep underground. That it was all his fault, and not his fault at all.
There’s no time, she reminds herself. There’s no time for stopping. If she doesn’t start moving, she might start thinking. And if she starts thinking, she might start wondering who Josh was talking to when he-
She shudders.
It’s only because of the cold.
She takes one decisive step - or rather attempts to, because somebody grabs her by the arm, turns her, and pulls her close. A hand starts stroking her hair.
Every fiber in her body wants to push Mike away; she doesn’t want to be touched like this, such gestures indicate that she’s delicate, precious, loved, and she cannot be any of those things right now.
I trust you.
She’s got no time.
“You’re shivering, Sam.”
“Look, Mike, I appreciate your concern, but-”
“I cannot let you go down there. Not alone. Not again, Sam.”
“I have to,” she whispers, and she knows it to be true.
“You don’t. If you wait just a little bit more, if you let the rescue team work-”
“They have no idea how to even get to him. But I remember. I remember everything. I can do this on my own,” she says a bit louder, and finds herself believing that, too.
“I can’t let you die for what could already be a corpse!”
“I am going to die for whatever I feel like! And you had told me he was still alive the last time you saw him.”
“The last time I saw him he was bonkers! You have no idea what he could do while he was… alone. Down there. Tell me you thought about this... possibility.”
Hearing somebody else mention it fills her head with white noise. She needs to move, to run, before she lets herself be convinced, lulled by the thought that leaving him alone is better than trying.
“He’s alive in there,” she growls. “He’s alive, and alone, and hungry, and if I don’t go now I’m going to spend the rest of my life hating myself. And that’s way worse than dying, Mike.”
“Not in my book,” he insists. “You’re one of the few friends’ I got left, I won’t let you go kill myself for nothing. Or get trapped in one of those mines and end up like Hannah, I just can’t let you.”
“Mike...” a small, soft voice manages to startle them, echoing somewhere from behind. “Let her go.”
Ashley is standing in the hallway, a tiny, sad pixie with a black-eye and in hospital gown. She is carrying a scarf.
“You would do the exact same thing for Jess. Already did. So let her.”
“That was before-”
“You wouldn’t hesitate even if you’d known about the wendigos,” the blonde argues. “You’d still go. Let me.”
He stares at her for a while, and just when Sam is about to forcefully push him away, he steps back.
“If you… if something happens to you,” his voice breaks. “If you don’t come back with all your fingers intact, I’m going to kick Josh’s ass like he deserves.”
Sam stares at him, trying to muster just a tiny bit of affection towards him, but there’s nothing. She’s an empty well.
“Back in the mines… there should be a gun and some bullets near the water basin. I… was kind of hoping he would find it. If, you know... So that he would have a choice.”
8.
“Chris is still asleep, but he’d like you to have this,” Ash says when they are finally left alone. “I mean, it’s technically a present from his mother to me, but-”
“Thank you,” mumbles Sam, because that’s what she’s supposed to do.
What is this, “Fellowship of the Ring”? She hears Josh as if he was standing right next to her, voice dripping with sarcasm. It doesn’t frighten her. It’s comforting. He never really left, just walked a bit further away.
As long as you’re not Gollum, she answers him. And now she’s a little scared.
She needs to focus. There is no time.
“Tell Josh,” starts the red-head dramatically, then pauses. Sam’s almost out of patience. “Tell him I’m sorry for the scissors. And for everything. And that we’re even.”
Sam nods in agreement, drapes the woolen, pink scarf around her face to hide it, and walks out of the hospital.
9.
She’s desperate to fall asleep on the bus, to get a few hours of rest, but she spends the ride on the edge of reality and fantasy. She supposes it’s even more exhausting than any nightmare could ever be, but she is allowed to be afraid of one thing, so she chooses to stare at her own reflection instead of closing her eyes.
The pink light of the sunrise is making the hills and mountains look like something out of a Pixar movie, but does nothing to make her feel less anxious. Ashley’s scarf keeps her warm, but she misses her own red one, and she wishes she could have her old boots back, because while Chris’ mother had good intentions, she’s never experienced a weather this cold. The two sweaters she’s wearing are itchy, and her bra doesn’t fit, and the jeans are a bit too tight, and climbing is going to be such a pain…
But the thing she misses the most is her phone: her collection of funny pictures with her very-alive-and-very-not-traumatized friends, the messages from Josh and Chris from two years ago (which, to be honest, consisted mostly of ancient memes), recordings of Beth playing the piano, a video of her and Hannah reenacting the dance from the Breakfast Club, and at once she starts feeling such heated hatred for Josh, for his therapist, for his parents, for Hannah, that she cannot breathe. The pain puncturing her chest twists her stomach into cold knots, making her entire body shake in vicious, silent rage.
She doesn’t cry. There’s no point.