Chapter Text
ACT I: DOOMCOMING
(Lotie's POV, Doomcoming party)
The air feels static, thrumming with both vitality and something much, much twisted. Lottie looks around, almost losing her balance, the soft dirt caging her foot briefly.
There’s this... melody. A rhythm, maybe. It reminds Lottie of a heartbeat.
Storm, calm, shaking the very ground they all stand on.
Lottie looks around and no one seems to notice. But they do seem lost in their own visions, stumbling like chicks who just left the safety of their egg.
Curious, eager. Some a little scared.
A hint of royal blue seems dazzling for a few seconds. The color, so uncharacteristic except in the realm of the skies, stands out against the last rays of sun that filtered through the leaves. Shauna.
Shauna is staring at something, someone? Lottie can’t see. What she can see, however, is the way the reddish light of the torches somehow isn’t enough to disperse the darkness within them.
Something tugs at her skin. Something old and large, something that she isn’t supposed to feel. Except she does.
Goosebumps raise on her skin, her body leaning forward before she can’t even process it. It almost feels like her body is dormant, refusing to obey her.
Something is wrong. There’s a rift, there's no unity, no peace in the chaos. And it all begins with Shauna.
The voice... the entity? Lottie is not yet sure, she’s too afraid and held back to name it, but it feels like it’s giving a warning.
And it chose Lottie to warn it, to prevent it.
“Where is Jackie?” Her voice is not her own. It doesn't feel like it. Shauna, too caught up, too focused, doesn't answer. A thread snaps. Her hands rise to her shoulders, pressing.
“Shauna, where is she?”
Dark eyes drop, as if trying to guess what Lottie said by reading her lips. “Uh what?”
The push gets harder. The thread inside, connecting her, rooting her, is threatened to break. She had to do something. She knew it with the same certainty with which she still remembered Laura Lee's warmth, her faith.
“Jackie. Where is she?”
“Gone. With... with Travis,” She mutters, the last word spoken with an edge, as hurtful as a blade coated in the deadliest of poison. Lottie knew, she knew, that if Shauna had it, she would use it.
Should she use it?
“No. No, that’s not right... She doesn’t—” She cut herself off, hands raising to her face to wipe the layer of sweat that prevented her from feeling the slight chill of the forest.
That wasn't supposed to happen. Lottie had to stop it. Had to do something about it before it got the blood it craved, before it spilled into fertile soil. She grabbed Shauna’s wrist. In another situation, Lottie wouldn't think she would have been allowed it.
Shauna only seems to show compliance with Jackie’s touch.
But perhaps Shauna could see it too.
At least enough to let herself be dragged off with glassy eyes and slow panting.
Lottie decides then that what they were before didn’t matter. Not really. Because now they had the chance to grow with the universe and sow roots in the wilderness.
The door creaked and surrendered under her weight, rusted hinges screaming in protest.
Jackie and Travis—Travis and Jackie? It didn't make any sense. There was something wrong in seeing their shoulders touching as they were about to rise to the attic.
“What are you doing?” Lottie almost snarls, the usual calm and soft voice gone. The two startled, immediately turning around as if misbehaving children caught red-handed.
Jackie's eyes fell on her and then, as if pulled by gravity, towards Shauna.
Always Shauna.
No matter if her irises were closed by something close to grief, to betrayal. “What is it to you, Lottie?” Jackie almost hisses, even if her cheeks flushed in embarrassment. Lottie stepped forward. “And what are you doing here?” This time she spoke to Shauna.
“I…I don't know.” Shauna mumbles, having trouble keeping her eyes wide as she looks around in confusion, as if she genuinely didn't recognize her surroundings. As if the cabin dampened her senses, keeping her far from the connection of the trees and dirt.
The blonde expression seemed to soften, an old glimpse of the girl that cared so deeply for her friend, overtaking whatever hurtful emotions were boiling in her guts.
“What…what’s up with her?” She asked Lottie. She smiled softly. Now Jackie finally was asking the right questions. “She is connecting. It's fine. Everybody is.” Her words sent a chill down Jackie's spine, goosebumps rising at the unfamiliar oddness that Lottie displayed with her complicated grin.
“Shauna. Shauna, hey, look at me—” She stepped forward, trying to reach. But Lottie stopped it, intercepting her wrist just as she had with Shauna before. The blood thrumming under it felt familiar, similar in its very core. And just like that, Lottie knew.
She knew what she had to do. Knew what was at stake, knew what It demanded—
So she tugged Jackie, roughly pushing her toward the small, dark closet where they saved what nature shared with them.
“Lottie—What’s wrong with you?! Let go—” She tried to fight Lottie off, but it was no use. Lottie was wiry, but tall, giving her the advantage and successfully holding Jackie as she opened the door.
“You aren't meant for him. He doesn't belong to you,” She hissed, pushing further. “You don't belong here, you have no purpose... Not yet, at least.”
Shauna stood behind, frozen, as if not really processing what was happening. Jackie cried out for her help; as some part of her instinct, maybe, moved forward. Lottie looked at her, really looked. And Shauna, as if tied by it, by the sheer will of something bigger than them, stopped.
“Lottie—stop!” With one last show of quiet strength, Jackie stumbled inside the pantry, her hands getting caught in the rotted, shrapnel wood that protruded on the frame of the door she was trying to hold onto.
Blood spilled, Jackie crying out as the cut sliced the palm of her hand deep enough to break the skin.
It dripped all the way down in small droplets as the final thud broke into silence, the faint protest of Jackie the only thing heard.
Lottie couldn't get her eyes off the dark red liquid dripping from the sharp piece of wood that caused it. Before more got lost to the wooden plank underneath them, Lottie's hand reached for it. The palm and fingertips were tinted, damp, and thrumming.
Lottie stared at it. She smelled the metallic tinge of it. The opportunity it offered. And just like instinct, she just knew. She knew it was a gift, a gift meant for them.
A chance to bring life under the overwhelming stench of death, of loss.
A chance to create.
She closed the distance with a still dumbfounded Shauna, whose eyes never left the door that was hit from the inside. Shauna barely noticed Lottie, but that was okay. She didn't need to be noticed. She just needed to give them all a savior, a light.
Her knees hit the ground, her head tilting up in reverence.
Worship.
It reminds her of the times where she caught Laura Lee praying a bit far from the cabin. Her hands were on top of her tights, her eyes looking at the sky as if it held all the answers, all the hope that the earth threatened to take away.
Lottie's own hands rose. The one that didn't have blood on it was raising Shauna's dress. Slowly, worshipping. This intimacy wasn't sexual; it was far beyond that.
Skin was revealed. Its natural hair regained its natural form, the softness remaining. Shauna didn't move. She didn't move when her bump got revealed into the warm light of the fireplace. She didn't move when Lottie left it exposed, staring at it as if it held all the answers.
The other hand, the one coated in the offered life, was softly pressed against it. Smearing it with soft, gentle circles, until it was impregnated with it. Shauna said nothing, didn't move.
She just watched, half-lidded. As if it were a dream of her own mind.
“You are going to save us.” Lottie whispers gently, resting her forehead on it, almost feeling a kick. Could they kick already? No, that doesn’t matter.
“You’ll be the bridge. The connection.” Lottie promised , because she just knew. She felt it so deep in her tissues, seeping all the way through her bones, to the very marrow.
The reason Laure Lee scarified herself until nothing of her remained. The reason they will remain united. The very same reason of the possibility of balance.
Everything else didn’t matter. Not the way Travis ran away, horrified by what he just saw. Or the fractures that shook the foundation of their team.
Because this meant unity. Future. And best of all, hope wrapped in benevolence gifted by the woods.
(Jackie's POV. Next day after Doocoming.)
Jackie was supposed to be unpacking in a hotel room.
She was supposed to pretend she wanted the bed closest to the window, so she could tease Shauna before pretending to relent with a huff.
She was supposed to be discussing last minute formations with Coach Ben to try and convince a stubborn Coach Martinez.
She was supposed to give a speech to her team, to reassure them and lead them like their captain. She was supposed to score, to miss, to connect passes and throw herself onto her teammates at the final whistle.
She was supposed to sneak with them later at night, to go to a bar with their fake IDs. She was supposed to make Shauna dance and spin around with her as they all chanted.
She wasn't supposed to be confronting Shauna in an abandoned cabin in the middle of no-fucking-where as to why did she have sex with Jeff Sadecki.
This wasn’t supposed to be her life.
But it is. As she stared down at the person who she loved the most in her whole life right after she tore her heart wide open with nothing but written words.
“How could you? You don’t even like him!” Jackie cried out, the demand almost coming out as a desperate prayer.
Shauna's eyes, which were wide and afraid, seemed to change, to darken as if tapping in the version of her that would never say all those hurtful things about her.
“And you do?” The dare is inappropriate, it’s ugly and it harms as a blade.
“What has that to do with–”
Shauna arms open, nostrils flaring. “Literally everything!” She laughs out. “Do you know, how insufferable have you been since freshman year? Constantly talking about Jeff, breaking up every week and making it everyone's problem just for you to go back to him every single time?”
Her voice is already raspy, breathless. Jackie steps back a little in recoil. She looks around, to search for someone, something to come up to her defense. Most all look away, uncomfortable and trapped as they literally can't go anywhere else.
The silence feels like another betrayal.
“So what? You decided that the best course of action was to just go and fuck him behind my back?! You…-you were supposed to be my best friend.” The last sentence felt like a sentence, like something crumbling right under her feet.
“Yeah, that was all I was right?” She hisses. “Jackie Taylor's best friend. Your shadow. Your sidekick. That was all I was ever allowed to be right?”
Confusion makes her eyes furrow. Has she ever been the villain in Shauna's story? Didn't Shauna see how much Jackie…
“I was the one who said “I love you” everyday just to be met by silence.” Her body drops, as if all that anger from before left, a fire extinguished, reduced to nothing but smoking coals that yet burned all the same.
Jackie's mouth opened and closed, her voice gone as her head froze, all the moments of her whispered I love yous playing in her head.
Jackie never said them back.
She couldn’t.
But Shauna had all the bad reasons for why.
“I was the one which Jeff went to every time he needed to know something about you that he should have known. I was the one that told him you loved poppies, that you loved Italian food but despised fish because the texture made you want to throw up.” Each confession slashed through the fabric of Jackie's reality, dismantling it. “
“I was the one…Always. Even the one who went with your Nana to buy you that very same necklace wrapped around your neck for your 16th birthday. Because I know gold suits you best.”
Her hands immediately reach for it. Shauna doesn't follow the movement, as if already having seen how this plays out. Perhaps she has.
“So you wanted him the whole time? It’s this what this is about?” Jackie asks, voice hoarse and shattering at the ages.
She would never have imagined that these words would get out of her mouth. Shauna disliked Jeff, hated him even. Jackie knew it in the way she rolled her eyes when she mentioned him, in the way her smile drifted away when he got close.
Had she read it all wrong then?
And if so, why did it hurt so much? She didn't even care about Jeff that much.
She laughs. A true, deep, wrong laugh that borders the line of irony and mockery. A flinching sound.
“Of course that's the conclusion we are reaching!” Shauna accuses. "The jealous best friend, in love with her perfect popular boyfriend that could never look at her twice.”
Indignation flared in her chest. The way Shauna twisted her words and made them her own made her—it’s like she wasn't the girl Jackie has known for all her life.
“Well then, what if I told you that it was never about him. That I couldn't give less of a fuck for Jeff fucking Sadecki?”
“Then why?! Why would you do this to us? Write... write all those horrible things. Allowing me to plan out a future that you clearly don’t want to be a part of! Why... why would you go to him?”
The dam inside her started to lose its solid structure, cracks revealing little scars that poured the repressed emotions she has held in for so, so long.
The feelings that she didn't dare to acknowledge, the ones that hunted her in the dark and coldness of her room. The ones that she refuses to acknowledge because if she did, it would change everything, she would change.
She felt the eyes, the judgment, the awkwardness and, even worse, the realization. Not from all, but from enough to make Jackie feel as if she is as clear as glass.
From Tai's eyebrows lifting ever so slightly, to Misty taking it in as if they were back in lab class.
Everything she has ever tried to retain, to hide, is painfully slipping away, and there is nothing she can do to stop it, helplessly watching it fall. Watching as Shauna burns it all to the ground.
“Because he was the closest I could get!” The frigid coldness Jackie felt stick to her bones since the days they ended up here, or maybe even before, gets momentarily replaced by a scorching heat.
So intense, that she can feel every nerve, every single blood cell in her body boiling.
She almost seems overtaken by something, something that pushed her deepest truths to reveal them one by one.
Shauna had never been this honest. Jackie knows. Because Shauna did that, she kept it all to herself. Never showing, never caring of it’s consequences.
“He still smelled like you, you know. The two times that happened. He had your lip gloss marks on his jaw, the one that tastes like watermelon. He had faint marks still on her skin and I…”
Shauna, whose anger, whose deepest continent resentments took the reins, seems to slowly, carefully retreat to leave something that somehow felt more dangerous.
“...I believed that if I rubbed them off hard enough, I’d be printed with them too.”
Ragged breaths, the fire they managed to light alive crackling. Jackie stared, as if she had just seen Shauna for the first time.
“Ironic right? That the one girl I resented for being possessive, self-centered, controlling and totally caught up with the fantasy of being Wiskayok perfect, boring, tragic little princess the others had written for her, is the very same one I love.”
A confession wrapped in thorns, miscommunication and repression.
A break in the thick ice. Words finally daring to describe a reality that they both had been so hard to deny, to hide. Shauna doesn't seem to try to do so anymore.
“Why didn't you say anything?” Jackie stutters, defeated. Shauna took that and wielded it like another blade.
“Like you don't always pretend nothing happened!” Shauna protested, indignant. Hurt. Her tears now fully matching Jackie's.
“Not after we kissed ‘for practice,’ even if you had been with Jeff for years. Not after you gave me the cold shoulder every time you got jealous because I breathed near someone else, but then pushed me toward Randy as if that's the best I could aspire to. You dismissed it, laughed as if it were some—”
Shauna's voice, which had been fueled by rage, finally revealed the profound sadness. But not for long. As if realizing, her pupils sharpened again.
“Some joke. Because kissing girls wouldn't be in your life plan, right? No, it would ruin your precious little image. And you couldn't take it. You’d drown without it.”
“No—that’s not...” Jackie almost whimpered, the defeat of it all tightening her throat. She couldn't do this, not right now, not here. Not with people around, not with her heart shattering.
She wasn't even supposed to be here.
“I can’t—I can’t do this.” Panic starts to crawl up her legs, her arms. “I can’t even look at you. I don’t even know you.” She started to walk toward the door, needing to breathe. Needing some air that had been used for Shauna to say all those things.
“Yeah well,” Shauna chuckles. “Maybe you never did.”
The final nail in the coffin. The last stab to her heart. A sentence. That was what it felt like. She opened the door, determined to storm off, to just go far.far away from this cursed place. But of course, the universe couldn't grant her that.
(Nat's POV. She and Travis return to the cabin.)
“Where are you going?” Nats' raspy voice ask in confusion, standing face to face. Travis was right behind her, looking confused. Her eyes lowered, she didn't have it in herself to look at some other person that hated her.
“I’m sleeping outside.” She mutters, expecting for Nat to move. But she didn't.
“Yeah, right.” Nat chuckles ironically. “Not if you want to catch hypothermia. Summer is long gone, its fucking cold out there. And it's not like you know how to light a decent fire.”
The humiliation churned even more in her stomach, desperation making her want to cry. Another dig, another judgment. She tried to move past her.
“Why do you even care? Just move Nat-” She gritted out, the pillow and quilt she had under her arm being gripped tighter.
The bleached blonde eyebrows furrowed, not expecting to hear the genuinely upset tone in Jackie's voice.
She finally looked over her shoulder. Shauna, standing in the middle, cheeks streaked with tears, trembling despite the fire.
The girls, quiet, watching in the corner and throwing mutters here and there. It didn't take long for her to have a minimal guess of what happened.
Rolling her eyes, she easily pushed Jackie inside, Travis closing the door behind them.
“Okay, what the hell happened? Why aren't any of you telling her to, I don’t know, not to go sleep outside the middle of the fucking wilderness where we know there's a pack of hungry wolves and God knows what else?”
It finally caused some reaction. Realization. As if they genuinely didn't realize the danger that it could be. The sight, the ignorance, angered Nat.
“Why aren’t you stopping her?”
She doesn’t even have to say the name of the girl she is asking that too.
She just lock eyes.
Shauna flinched, even when trying to hide its. Her body tilted slightly, as if bound by memory and instinct. But the forced it back, forced her eyes to remain cold even if they were reflecting the flames of the fireplace.
“I’m not her keeper anymore.” The words, heavy and defiant, even sounding almost defeated, seemed to grab some sort of physical force strong enough to make Jackie swagger.
Nat saw this. She always saw it, even if she usually pretended she didn’t give a fuck about anything.
She watched a Jakcie and Shauna, being so…so intertwined into each other in a way that friends weren’t. She remembers rolling her eyes in the first years of middle school at the sight of them.
Seeing how difficult it seemed for them to separate for a whole hour, as if they sound combust if they did.
How Shauna cheeks went scarlet with anger, eyes anything but friendly as she stared down the substitute teacher that forced Jackie to eat strawberries.
The way Jackie always dragged Shauna around, and got offended when some else tried to take her away.
Oh, the scandal, when the school administration made the decision of placing them in different classes to control their “attachment issues”. The two ended up in the B class by the end of the first week.
She saw all the talks, all the laughs, all the petty discussion that ended with a shy, puppy-eyes Shauna offering Jackie her hand. And Jackie reached for it.
Always.
It was later that she understood that perhaps, just maybe, she was somehow jealous of what they had. The way they knew everything about each other, and seemed to love each piece no matter if it was good or bad.
Was that what soulmates were supposed to be? Nat didn’t have anyone, not really.
It felt unfair. That they got to find each other.
But this? This truly made her shake in fury.
“I don’t know what happened. But what I do know is that this isn’t fucking Wiskayok,” She starts, stepping forward almost menacingly. Jackie finally retreated, surprised by the change of attitude.
“This is not one petty high school drama fight that ends with you being passive aggressive until graduation and then not speaking again.” She looks around, locking eyes with each other.
They were surprised, the younger ones looked away, clearly intimidated.
“This shit is serious. Are you even fucking kidding? People are dead! Do you all even realize it or have you all lost it?”
She yells, pointing around the room. The silence in between each pause is deafening.
“So no, Jackie, you are not sleeping outside. And all of you fucking allowing that to happen? Well, that’s just fucking insane. I mean—“ She snaps, pointing at Travis.
“Travis and I go to the fucking woods for the whole day, so we can have food, so we can—so we can have a chance, and then when we are back, I have to deal with this shit?”
“You.” She declares. She was tired of watching. Back in the day, she could have just left and gone drinking somewhere else, but now she is fucking trapped and she is not putting though JakcieShauna's homoerotic, codependent friendship.
“You don’t get to leave because things get hard.”
Her jaw opens in indignation, the spark of defiance igniting but Nat is faster.
“Yes, you do that. You are so fucking worried about what others will say, of what it will look like for Perfect Miss Taylor. Well, I have some news for you,we are in the middle of nowhere Canada. No one cares.”
“And you—” Nat redirects towards Shauna, who already had a defensive posture.
“Stop acting like such a fucking Saint. Poor Shauna Shipman, so misunderstood and broody.” A helpless sarcastic chuckle escapes her. “If only you could use all those big brain words for once and grow a pair instead of having other people guess what’s fucking wrong with you.”
“So for the sake of everyone stuck in this goddamn place, you two do us all a favor and get your shit together.”
The last word rings through the cabin. Everyone stares, never having seen Natalie Scatorccio lose it this much.
Most because they thought she didn't really give a shit about anything else that wasn't inside of a bottle or someone's pants.
“Well, they all can go fuck themselves” Natalie thinks for herself, as she moves past them, already done. Her brain is pounding, her feet aching, and she just wants to close her eyes.
The others finally start moving. Slowly, carefully, no one daring to add something.
Just as Nat is about to go, she catches the sight of Lottie, grinning as if she knew some universal truth. The sight irks something within Nat. She didn't have the energy to deal with Lottie’s culty bullshit tonight.
“It’s okay, Nat,” Lottie reassures, so gently the blonde barely heard her. She wore a dopey smile, eyes slightly glazed as if she were seeing something far beyond these decaying walls. Goosebumps rose all over her spine. “Things are already changing.”
“What?”
Lottie's dark, almost pitch-black eyes land on her. Nat feels so transparent she almost flinches. “Everything will regain its balance. She and I made sure of it.”
“She...?” Looking around, the girls, who seemed rooted in their place, start to move, pretending as if they didn't see anything. It was one of the curses of this place; no intimacy whatsoever.
Everything suddenly becomes everyone else's business, too. She tugs her hand, the taller girl putting up no resistance as she lets herself be pulled away all across the cabin.
“What are you on, Lottie? Who the hell is she? What did you do?”
Nat hisses, dropping her hand to cross her arms. Lottie just rests against the wall, back straight and posture confident.
If she was hurt because of the accusation, she didn't show it. She didn't seem to show anything human these days.
“I just helped them. To find balance. If they are connected...” Lottie starts, as if genuinely excited by the idea that seemed to be twisting her head. Nat hated seeing her like this. “Then they won't be taken away. Neither of them, not with a common purpose.”
The riddles are starting to worsen Nat's headache, her hands grinding on her temples. “Taken away? What’s that supposed to mean, Lot? Listen...” She sighs. “I need you to snap out of this... trance you are stuck in. It’s unsettling. The other girls are actually starting to believe in whatever... woodsy culty bullshit you are preaching.”
Lottie eyebrows furrow, as if genuinely confused. “It’s not preaching, Nat... it is comfort. It’s—it’s hope. If we listen, if we actually listen then—”
“Enough, Lottie. Please.” Natalie finally snaps. Her eyes are wide, the last of her patience slipping away. What she would give to have a fucking drink right now.
“This ‘comfort’ led you to actually trap Jackie in the pantry! Led you to make Van grip onto a stupid bone as if it would actually do something to keep her safe! Not to talk about Travis—” She chuckled with no hint of humor, voice getting rough.
“He heard the fucking howls, he was scared shitless when I finally found him, because apparently, some of the girls seemed to fucking mistake him for a goddamn deer or something and started chasing him like rabid raccoons. Do you know how insane this all is?!”
The rant stops with ragged breaths, Nat's sea grey eyes brewing like an endless storm.
“It’s not what I do, Nat. Neither you, or the girls, or Travis. It’s this place Nat, it's alive.” Lottie, whose emotions seemed to have delayed, suddenly burst alive. “It has a rhythm, a flow. We just have to listen. So that's what I did.”
Nat grunts. “Oh? And what was that? What did the trees tell you, Lottie?” She almost sneered. It's insane, the way the words slipped from her mouth. Because just a month ago, she would never picture herself talking like that to her.
Not to Lottie.
“That all we need is balance. A bridge. We need our team, our roles. Jackie was being eaten alive Nat.” Lottie defends, almost as a plea. “But now…now she has been given a chance, an opportunity to step in. A silver lining. She will give it to her.”
“...She?” Nat mumbles, entirely lost. Her feet speed briefly forward, as if trying to reach for an answer. The smell of rotten wood and the crackling fireplace felt too heavy.
“The child.” Lottie tilted her head, as if it was obvious. “She will be the one, Nat. She’ll belong to them, to us.”
A frigid wave shook Nat’s system. Whatever this was, it could get really bad, really soon. Lottie talked about Shauna's baby as if it were a messiah of some kind. And well, everyone knows how the chosen ones end.
“Lottie. I won’t ask again. What exactly did you do?” Nat asked, voice finally trembling as she closed her distance. Her arms rose, hands on Lottie's bony yet solid shoulders.
Nat remembers putting them there numerous times before, between soccer celebrations and drunk dances. Now, it was a desperate plea to get a grip on the girl she once thought she knew.
“Listen to me. This baby is Shauna’s. It’s not some... some tool, Lottie.”
“But I never said it wasn't Shauna's, Nat.” Her own hands rose to her wrists. “Only that, in the same way Shauna and Jackie are intertwined, so will the infant.”
Nat couldn't sleep that night. Not that she usually did. She already had troubles before they were stuck here, so she wanted a change. But now, the usual overthinking about how shitty her life was was brutally replaced by dreams of Lottie.
Of the picture Travis described after she had sped in when the girls were about to corner him.
Lottie's hands, covered in Jackie's blood, passing it on Shauna's belly, murmuring things, promises that were meant for anyone else not to be heard. She convinced herself she was just exhausted, that it was the reason paranoia crept in like a vile spreading.
But there was that little voice, wondering if Lottie or... or this place, really was doing something irreversible.
And what would it mean to them in the long run.