Erinyes

A/N: Not quite canon-compliant. Photo time powers have been vaguely reworked, and the weather patterns have switched.

Erinyes

The ventilators hiss with pneumatic urgency. Max cradles the life-ending needle in her hands – like lipstick or a tube of chapstick, total Star Trek shit – spent of its fatal payload. A few adjustments to the IV and the endless dream would begin.

"Chloe…I can't."

"I'm an adult. I'm giving you the right." Even without motor abilities, that punk spirit rebels – Chloe's tone trembles with real anger, real disappointment. Betrayed once again. This blonde-haired Chloe, bedridden Chloe, so unlike her Chloe and yet the pure, identical same: Hand her a gun and she'll pull the trigger with her teeth.

Chloe continues to argue (persuasive, to be sure, she's clearly read up on medical ethics and euthanasia), and Max does what all best friends do when they can't stand each other – she tunes her out. This room used to be the garage – David's bunker, and somehow Max wants to laugh. The snowglobes have invaded, stuffed animals have taken over the world, and mankind has, at last, succumbed to their machine overlords of wires and pneumatics. But the backyard outside the window's the same and Max thinks she recognizes some of the photos on the walls. This is still home of a different sort.

"You said you wanted your last memory to be of us," Max interrupts Chloe mid-testimony. "Four days. You won't die on me until then, will you? I'll make these four days the best days of your life, and at the end, I promise, I'll grant you a glorious death. Let me tell you a secret." Like she's a gossipy thirteen-year old again, Max hisses into Chloe's ear, "The world's going to end."

It's not quite her saying these things. It's also Maxine, the Vortex Club Maxine who drinks at parties and threatens Alyssa over text. Someone harsher, crueler, less of a gap between the person she is and the person she wishes to be. Phantom memories emerge; she remembers Victoria nestled at her side, laughing at a doped-up Kate, the earthy taste of a good blunt.

She's the ghost in the machine.

"Woah, Mad Max, kinda intense there."

"We've only just reconnected. Don't deprive me of my bestie so soon." Max grips Chloe's hands she would never feel. "How about it, girlfriend?"

And fire rages in Chloe's eyes again, a wildblaze that would consume Arcadia Bay like she's always wanted. Max thinks of nuclear bombs. Though this timeline holds and never will hold any purpose – because she'll go back and do it all over again, condemn a man who never should've died – Max believes fiercely with her own flame that this time, if nothing else, she'll get it right.

She returns to Blackwell. Real heroic move, Max, after all your talk – but Chloe refuses to let her skip school for her (besides, now's when my nurse comes in to take care of all my bodily functions, you don't want to see that), so Max promises she'll come over as soon as school's out. She struggles to keep time straight in her head. Today's a Tuesday, she's fairly certain. October 7th? 8th? Yesterday they walked along the beach and gawked at dead whales.

Blackwell, too, is the same and not the same: the structure of the school, the red-baked bricks and fresh-cut quad and the copper statue of the founder – when Max steps through the gates she can believe she's never left her own time at all.

It's the people that's changed. Taylor and Courtney call out to her from the dormitory steps. As she grabs supplies from her locker, Nathan asks if everything's alright, she's been acting kind of weird, did her phone break or something? Warren ignores her in science class. And some, like Alyssa and Kate, actively seem to avoid her.

It feels less like time travel and more like alien abduction.

In Jefferson's class Victoria saves her a seat. Max gravitates there, and through weeks of subconscious muscle memory, dumps her bag on the desk with a casual, "What's up?" At this angle the sunlight through the slats paints the classroom in pointillism, familiarity and unfamiliarity laced together like weed cut with angel dust (she's smoked it, once, to prove the new girl's a badass, and to this day she dreams of the way colors run during the high).

"What was up with yesterday?" Victoria asks. "We were worried about you."

"I remembered I had to meet up with an old friend."

"Who? You should invite her to the party."

Victoria's button-down Dior shirt holds no paint stains, her Givenchy skirt pleated to maid-ironed perfection. She flaunts a new bracelet next to the gold bangles on her wrist. Dimly Max recalls giving that to her. How much did those interlocked hearts cost? Five bucks? Ten? All throughout class Victoria fingers it.

Victoria's the one who's changed the most, new woman in an old skin, a crib-swap between timelines. She touches Max constantly, no concept of personal space, whispering sly jokes and rumor, and, at one point, during a long drone of a lecture, she rests her chin on Max's shoulder. She smells like exotic, overpriced flowers. Even when she answers Jefferson's questions, she lacks that obsequious, flirtatious manner.

I believe in your talent. You don't need to stoop to any tricks.

Damn. Did Maxine really say that?

It's not until the end of class, when they're gathering up their cameras and laptops, that Max realizes Victoria hasn't changed at all.

"Kate, you coming to the End of the World party?" Victoria calls. "All the boys would love to see you again!"

"Stop it," Max snaps.

Victoria frowns. "What's up with you? It's just a joke."

"A shitty one. Kate, I'm sorry – "

But Kate's already gone. Max doubts Kate wants to speak with Maxine anyway. She's surprised, a bit, that Kate's still alive. Who saved her from the fall? Did she even make the attempt?

(Ah, Kate's video never circulated. Maybe Maxine's not a complete bitch.)

Max ignores Victoria's confused apologies. There's more important things to worry about than Victoria fucking Chase and whatever soulmate of hers this alternate self's turning out to be.

William greets her at the door. God, how old is he? As if all those years she saved him from inserted themselves in the middle. He pushes his frayed sleeves to the elbows, wrung through one cycle too many.

"Good to see you again, Max! Chloe's waiting in her room. And don't let anyone know I told you this, but Joyce baked a fresh batch of cookies."

Max says, "I'm going to kill you."

" – batch of cookies."

Max says, "That sounds lovely, William. Can Chloe eat those?"

"I haven't seen her say no yet." He hesitates, an uncharacteristic silence. "It's good to have you back. I mean it. I've never seen Chloe so happy since."

The Price house has mutated down to the marrow of its plumbing. Entire rooms transplanted onto the base skeleton, ramps spliced in the doorways, bills grafted on every flat surface. It's the small things that feel the most out of place. The family's plasma TV and Chloe's old CRT have switched places. Different stickers on the refrigerator. Max flips and catches the miniature Eiffel Tower, fantasizing Chloe's joy from its summit. And too many things are missing to count.

(She tries not to think about the pair of crutches abandoned in the upstairs storage).

"Max! About time you got out of prison – what the hell is that?"

Grinning, Max unpacks her guitar. Her guilt hasn't missed Chloe's fleeting apprehension. Chloe, or a part of her, didn't believe she would return.

"I'm a girl of many talents."

She strums a couple songs from her pitiful repertoire. Blackbird, HotelCalifornia, More Than Words – the frets fall on clumsy fingers, because Maxine's too busy partying to practice regularly, but she finds the rhythm. Some things you never forget.

Chloe sings, clear-toned, her voice deeper (and probably more in-tune) than their thirteen-year old duets. Their vocals harmonize perfectly, as they've always done, note-to-note, breath-to-breath. Max's amazed she's never done this with her Chloe. Eyes closed, ears only, you can believe this timeline turned out as she'd always intended.

When Max launches into Wonderwall, Chloe breaks up.

"Wonderwall? Wonderwall? You're such a basic bitch!"

"They told me this one would make me popular," Max mutters.

"Don't sell the camera, Neil Diamond. I'm joking, you're awesome. How did the words go? To-day's gonna be the day…"

The final E-minor lingers like a heartfelt catharsis. Max sheepishly admits that's everything she knows. Besides, it's cookie time. Joyce's cookies taste the same whether in this universe or the next. Max breaks off small chunks for Chloe, shivering when Chloe's tongue grazes her fingers (Cinnamon, Max thinks with sudden, gut-roiling nausea, Victoria tastes like cinnamon – ).

Later, as they watch snow fall in eighty-degree heat, Chloe says, "Do you ever feel…"

"That things aren't quite real?"

"Nothing's seemed real ever since the accident. I feel as if I'm living someone else's fucked-up life. I mean, do you ever feel that time hasn't caught up to us?"

Five years! You can fit the age of the universe between the cracks of that time span. Unbearably, Max wants to go back, before rewind powers, before Rachel Amber, before Seattle. She understands Chloe better the second time around, because she's already experienced it once: For all the lost time between them, the new hobbies and new friends (or vanished ones), the two of them reconnect as if they've never been apart.

If they were decrepit and grey and three timelines removed, they'd act the same as they were at thirteen.

She eats dinner with the Prices, and if Joyce and William intermittently wipe away tears, well, they've more than earned a small slice of happiness.

When the table's cleared and William's singing at the dishes and Joyce changes uniforms for her second job, Chloe asks, frail with hope, "See you tomorrow?"

Max scoffs. "I've brought my toothbrush and PJs. You can't kick me out that easily."

"You're free to stay as long as you want, hon," Joyce calls.

Chloe's smile dazzles so brightly that Max wants to bottle it up for dark nights. Then it dims.

"Don't you have homework and shit?"

"I'm a scholarship student, baby."

"I just – I know you have your own life, which I obviously don't, but I don't want you to feel like you owe me anything."

I owe you more than one person can ever give. What holds her here? Blackwell, Victoria, Rachel's disappearance, even photography, in this prelude to apocalypse: photo negatives, doomed to obsolescence. Not so much forgotten as never existed all. Some people would kill for clean beginnings.

She wants only one thing from this life, so that if she continues to fuck up everything like she's been doing, she can remember back to these four days during which she made Chloe – or at least one infinitesimal timestamped version of Chloe – truly, irrefutably, happy.

"Maybe I do owe you something." Max nods sagely. "Or maybe your house is way bigger than the dorms, and your mom cooks way better food, and you have a huge-ass TV."

Chloe doles out her laughter in peals: She doesn't laugh as often as when they were young, and likely she never would, but Max suspects nobody does. Time steals certain things away.

"I'm picking the movie tonight," Max announces. "Prepare to have your video collection judged."

At eight pm in the autumnal dark with katydids buzzing beneath dark pines, they settle in to watch Equilibrium. Max swears she won't fall asleep this time, but she brushes her teeth and changes into her pajamas anyway (so I don't have to do it later) before crawling under the sheets with Chloe.

The homecare bed's spacious this side of the tubes, and Chloe's body bleeds heat. "I know you can't feel this," Max whispers, "but we're totes playing footsies right now." Chloe's legs extend impossibly long, sharper and bonier than even that beanie-wearing skeleton from her own timeline, skin so thin Max's nails might shred them like tinsel. She puppeteers Chloe's arm around her shoulder. She leans in, and Chloe leans out, supporting each other like a camera's tripod.

Chloe's watching her, not the film, blue eyes meeting blue like simultaneous lightning bolts –

We were never meant to be apart.

…Max wakes to the gentle beep of the ventilator.

"I can't believe you fell asleep again," Max groans. "You really need to get your act together."

"When'd you get so old?" Chloe jokes. The morning sun turns her hair into thousand-degree fire. Then, gentler: "I dreamed of flight. Saw Arcadia from beneath the wings of birds. We perched on a high cliff to watch the misted ocean."

"See any tornados?"

"Eat breakfast before you go. I smell pancakes."

Max stretches. In her sleep she's wrapped around Chloe like a possessive slinky. Distantly, she hears William singing. She does smell pancakes.

"I wish I can stay here forever."

"You can't." Chloe's voice rings with elegiac tones. There's steel beneath. "I mean it. I don't want you to sacrifice anything for me."

I'd sacrifice worlds for you.

Max thinks of chiaroscuro. Aperture, exposure, blobs of light in an out-of-focus background. She splays her fingers against the ceiling and thinks about rewinding this moment, forever and forever.

The school day drags. She makes excuses to Victoria for not returning to the dorms and excuses to the teachers for not turning in homework. Oh, and apparently there's a chemistry test today, something Max is pretty sure doesn't happen in her original timeline. She wonders what Rube Goldberg chain of events connects a girl's car accident to Ms. Grant scheduling a test a year later.

One fruitful result from school: She learns more about Nathan.

They share two classes together, and her refusal to sit near him sparks agitation. He asks her what's wrong, if he's done something, what he can do to make up. He offers weed. This side of him, concerned, generous, almost sweet, contradicts all her theories. People can't change this utterly between timelines; Max finds herself believing in a soul. Nathan's still a bully, an addict, a spoiled rich kid, and clearly mentally unstable, but he lacks…

Malevolence.

When the bell rings, she declines Victoria's offer to hang out.

She finds Chloe at her computer playing some sort of card game, manipulating the cursor with her mouth.

Max springs up behind her. "You've turned into a total nerd."

"Yeah, well, when you're stuck inside all day, there's not much else to do."

"Up for a trip?" Max hefts her camera bag. "There's a place I've been dreaming about."

They borrow William's car with its bevy of handicap accessibles. "Call me if anything goes wrong," he says. "I'd feel more at ease going with you, but I get it, at your age nobody wants to hang out with their uncool dad."

If only you knew.

Alternate Maxine parades her license: sneaking out at night, unknown faces in a lime-green sedan back in Seattle. Her parents had been furious to find that dent in their car. The thrum of the steering wheel's familiar, as is the wind whipping her sleeve. Maxine drives with one arm out the window, flipping through the radio for something rock-ish. If they make a left here they'll leave Arcadia behind.

She wonders, when she renounces this timeline, if part of Maxine will stick with her.

She parks at the base of the hill. The lighthouse towers at the peak, abandoned decades ago like so much of Arcadia Bay. She had walked through childhood streets without recognition. The town's dying, and no amount of Prescott cash infusion will resuscitate it. Part of her mourns. Part of her, the Chloe part, exults.

They follow the trail up. Chloe's wheelchair grinds dead things underfoot. The evergreens cast long shadows, bark inscribed with messages and love letters and profanities, all poetry. Max talks about Seattle. She talks about the friend she left behind, a blue-haired punk girl Chloe would've gotten fabulously along with.

"A highschool dropout who smokes weed all day?" Chloe sniffs. "Sounds like a total loser."

When they reach the light house, Victoria and her cronies are smoking on the cliff.

"Maxine?" Comically, Victoria rubs her eyes. She's more than a little drunk (or high). "Chloe Price?"

"Queen Bitch," Chloe says.

For some reason it never occurred to Max that Chloe and Victoria might know each other despite yes, they did go to the same school up until a year ago. But she's completely unsurprised they hate each other's guts.

"This is your friend?" Victoria says incredulously. "This is who you ditched the Vortex Club for?"

"You're in that elitist poser club?" Chloe says.

Taylor, baked out of her mind, giggles. "Want a joint?"

"We've known each other since we were kids," Max says. "What're you doing here?"

Victoria gestures vaguely to the water. Courtney tosses a beer bottle over the side. "It's been a shitty week. Now that you're here, maybe today won't be a complete blow-off."

"Actually, I was hoping to be alone with Chloe. So if you don't mind…"

It's the wrong thing to say. Victoria's drunk and abandoned and jealous, and she jabs her cigarette into Max's chest. "Fuck off, Caulfield. Nobody ditches me."

"…won't be a complete blow-off."

Max takes Victoria by the hand a little ways over, to the shade cast by the lighthouse. A cool wind blows. Victoria shivers in her thousand-dollar blazer. She stumbles, gripping Max's arm.

The Chases own a gallery in Seattle. Now where'd that tidbit come from?

I know how this art game has to be played. It's brutal. You need more than talent…but you make me believe maybe I'm good enough.

Max nurtures that alien warmth.

"As you can see, Chloe doesn't have long left," Max says, and it's all Maxine when she leans forward, touching foreheads. "Let us be alone for a while? We'll do something tonight, just the two of us."

Victoria's defiance crumples. Surely the Queen of Blackwell can't be this easy. But her breathing slows until they sync, in and out, breathing the same air.

"Tonight. Don't ditch me again."

"You know she's probably like, a serial killer, right?" Chloe says when they're alone on that stretch of hill.

"I don't know how it started," Max admits. She'll parse the memories before she leaves, probably, to figure out how to defrost her own Victoria. "We barely know each other."

"You seemed pretty close to me."

Max unslings the camera from her neck. "Come on, Chloe. Ready for your photoshoot?"

They take pictures until she runs out of film. Chloe against the lighthouse, Chloe against the bay, Chloe over a ring of stones. She's shy at first, but ever since they've been kids Chloe never could resist Max's camera. It hurts, capturing what Chloe's lost, what she has, what she may have (is there a tense for alternate realities? There should be). The ocean wind tosses Chloe's hair like a bouquet of shells. Behind her, in the deep tumultuous cerulean, fishing boats that sailed with the morning tide return to shore. The gathering air has the tang of ozone.

Together, in the golden hour, they pick out the best pictures to feature on Max's Memorial Wall.

"You look beautiful," Max says. "And I'm not just praising my own camerawork."

Chloe rolls her eyes. She's always been good at that, but like blindness or deafness enhances other senses, her quadriplegia has infused that roll with a universe's worth of exasperation. "After the accident, people used to tell me I'm beautiful all the time. So brave and unique and all that bullshit. It made me fucking sick. Like I wasn't hot before? I'd rather be Quasimodo if I could have my arms and legs back." She smiles; the tracheotomy tube crinkles. "When you say it, I believe it, because damn, I do look good. What about that shot – no, the one before – yes, that one! You're really fucking good, Max. I bet I could model to sell wheelchairs or some shit."

Their laughter drifts with the gulls. Max tucks the photos into her camera bag, cursing herself for skimping on film. The cost of anachronism.

The moon passes over the sun. The eclipse reddens the world, turning oceans into blood. Max holds Chloe's hand, a habit from another time. The doom of the world is lovely.

Tornado's not far off. Max doesn't know how to stop it. Maybe she never will. The universe (ha ha) demands its Price, but right now she can't bring herself to care.

She returns to the dorms high on secret panacea. She pins up Chloe's pictures on the Wall over the important hollows she's always saved bare. No defacement here; bizarrely, she finds that the spray-red "NOBODY MESSES WITH ME BITCH" added a certain panache.

"Maxine? You back?"

Of course it's Victoria (Maxine recognizes her knock by the insistent triplet rhythm), lounging in a long chemise, holding a bottle of wine.

"Let's chill. End of the World party's tomorrow, I don't wanna do anything exciting tonight."

Victoria's room still lies across from hers; whether friends or enemies, some thread connects them. The message scrawled on the whiteboard's different but no less pretentious: Try to be a rainbow in someone else's cloud (Maya Angelou). If hypocrisy were a bludgeon Victoria can atomize the planet. Max remembers the room's art noveaux extravagance, neat to a compulsive degree, luxe items (clothes, computers, camera) scattered too prominently to be careless. All this is familiar to Maxine, even comfortable. She spread-eagles on Victoria's bed like she sleeps there (maybe she has), Victoria curling up beside her like a fist.

They pass the bottle. Max stomachs the liquor better in this world than her own. Fire like a matchstick thrown down her esophagus.

Victoria, expectedly, talks shit about everyone at Blackwell. Hayden's right; Victoria is funny when she's drunk. Without Max to bully, she fixates on poor Juliet, that stuck-up reporter, how dare shecall out the Vortex Club?

"Is that new?" Max points to a photo: a Bigfoot mid-tackle, one leg off the ground like he's flying.

"Logan asked me to take some pictures of the football team. Like anyone cares about sports at an art school."

"It's fantastic. You can hear his knee snapping."

"Of course it's fantastic. I took it. Victoria Chase, sports photographer. That'll get me into Kroft."

They both prefer the flash of the shutter to the stillness after: a supernova brightness, eclipsing what's commonplace. Shockingly, Max recognizes that same self-disparaging tone, so similar to her own. So this is why Victoria's drinking at ten pm on a school night. She brushed it off in public, but the rejection still hurts.

"Not this again, Vic," Max complains. "You're an arrogant twat if you thought you were going to get into Kroft at eighteen."

"I'm not the one who submitted a fucking selfie for Everyday Heroes."

"You said you liked it!"

"Only 'cuz you submitting a shitty picture raises my chances of winning."

Max hiccups, wine-drunk. Victoria's laughter sounds like waking up to soft rain on a weekend, and Max didn't know Victoria can laugh in a way that's not snide or condescending. Is this what Maxine sees you better believe it, you time-skipping thief, now either give me my body back or kiss her –

Max squeezes Victoria's hand. "One day, when we're at the top of the art world, Kroft's gonna beg us for a picture – "

" – and we'll tell them, Fuck off."

They toast nonexistent glasses.

The alcohol sloshes warmly in her gut. Max wonders if she'll carry this vice into the next world. Already sleep floods in, already she regrets the inevitable morning hangover, fumbling in Victoria's drawers for Excedrin.

Half-asleep, Victoria murmurs something, a pavlovian habit, a claret hallucination, dream-axioms.

A word strangely like Cauliflower.

And in that limbo between sleep and semi-consciousness, Max pities what she's created and what she'll destroy.

She arrives at Chloe's house still buzzing from hangover. Victoria takes it well when Max tells her she won't attend the End of the World party. You said she's important to you. Next time, we're getting blasted.

Chloe yawns, clearly post-nap. Sleep fuzzes her eyelids, hair matted to one side where her shoulder dipped. She looks muted. The end of their promise hangs like a red eclipse: You think this'll last? You can't stop respiratory collapse, insolvency. Tornados will take us all.

Max rattles the thing inside the flat jar. "Got a surprise for you."

"Is that hair dye? What color?"

Max smirks. "Guess."

She's never applied hair dye before. They bumble through the instructions together, splattering blue on clothes and bathroom walls (You wanted your eyebrows dyed too, right?). They paint waterfalls with gloved fingers. The chemical smell burns like a chlorine kiss. The result's uneven at the edges, and it's not quite the same electric shade – more sky – but Max takes a photo and tucks it into the pocket closest to her heart, so she won't lose it between the transition.

"I look badass," Chloe says.

"Badass," Max agrees.

They spend the afternoon at the junkyard. It's reverse déjà vu, Max introducing Chloe to it instead of the other way around, and it's not until they pick their way between the school bus and the yacht that Max understands why this place attracts them both: They're children again, exploring attics and fenced-in corners, convinced of krakens swimming in every shadow. Captain Bluebeard and Long Max Silver sail again.

That shack where another Chloe, another Rachel, graffitied their LA dreams squats lonely and forgotten in the shadow of a radio tower.

They climb the railroad tracks so close to the train that the shockwave ripples like a blast of July heat, threading brown hair with blue.

Chloe thinks out loud, "Why do I know what it feels like to be run over?"

That evening, after salmon surprise and chocolate cake, they loaf in the backyard with fireflies flickering behind their eyelids. Every object here, every tree, every clump of soil, oozes memories. Chloe never could throw anything away. The grill where they helped barbecue with sticky fingers. Bongo's grave. Neptune's Revenge, beached on the lawn, still flying that tattered T-shirt they charcoaled a skull-and-bones on to. Max thinks that eighteen's too young for nostalgia. She sways on the swings and tries not to look at the dead birds.

"Thanks for staying with me," Chloe says. "I know you'd rather be at that party. I did not peg you for the Vortex type."

"Do you still want to die?"

The air's muggy, throat-constricting. Twin moons glimpse down like the pupils of a chthonic god.

"I didn't think I could be happy again," Chloe says softly, as soft as her nape feels under Max's fingers. Max desperately wants to look at her but she can't, she would break, she would crumble to dust. "Being together this week…it was the best farewell gift I could've hoped for. Before sleeping I used to pray for a power outage to shut off the ventilator. Even you – you never visited once in those five years! Do you know how abandoned I felt? Some days I hated you more than anyone else. Who gave you the right to waltz back into my life? I imagined our reunion so many times. I'd yell at you and scream and guilt-trip you, and you would beg me to take you back. And when I actually saw you again – " she tilts her head, moonlight balanced upon her cheek – "it all melted away."

Max smears away Chloe's tears. She almost tells her, then, as she contemplated telling her these past halcyon days. About rewind, about timelines, about the storm. But Chloe, beautiful Chloe who's selfish except when it actually matters, should never be forced to make that choice, and Max knows which option she'll choose.

Chloe will never sacrifice her father over herself.

"I wish I can freeze this moment," Chloe says, leaning into Max's hand. "Jump inside one of your photographs. But the worse I get, the more my parents'll try to keep me alive. They don't deserve that. You, too, Max – you deserve your own friends, your own life. I can't keep you all to myself. Even if I live a million years I'll never be able to tell you how grateful I am. You're my best friend, you're my arms and legs, you're part of my soul. There's no future for me. But there is for my parents and for you."

Gently, Max rests her head on top of Chloe's (of all things this is most surreal, to be taller) so her own tears would travel down and mix with hers and maybe birth something new.

They wake with the sunrise, so early neither Joyce nor William have returned from their second (third?) jobs. William's taken the car, so they walk down to the beach through the pelting rain and gale. The tornado warning's already gone out: E6, a freak storm, gathering with speed theoretically impossible.

"There's a drive-in theater showing Planet of the Apes," Max says.

"Railroad tracks always make me feel better."

"Imagine us in William's car, snuggling under comfy blankets, snacking on waffles."

"Remember when I fell here skateboarding and broke my wrist?"

The ocean rises in solid sheets. The blinding spray hits them the same time as the roar, as if someone jacked up the stereo of the world. The tornado's bigger than in her visions, a mountain, if mountains breath lightning. Small dark things soar in orbit, trailing comet-tails of detritus, and Max realizes those are rotting whale carcasses disgorging mid-flight.

The shoreline's receded almost to the road. They're alone at ground zero.

On a high cliff the lighthouse's rotating beam catches them on and off, on and off, promising safety. Perhaps the only safe place left. But they're not here for safety.

"Max, this is insane! Did you know this was going to happen?"

The beast stalks them from above the water. Within its maw she glimpses galaxies. How can the universe work so hard to destroy one girl? What crime has Chloe committed except existing?

This story would end as all stories ended.

It's inevitable, Max reflects, peering through reverent fingers. She knows a little about entropy and the heat death of the universe. Why was she given this power? To change fate? To not change it? A distant quote (anime summers, ballerina princesses) resurfaces: May those who accept their fate be granted happiness. May those who defy their fate be granted glory.

Or maybe there is no purpose. Coincidence. Cosmic playthings. Chaos theory. The wind whistle sounds like the storm laughing.

Max shouts, lips stinging from brine, "Do you ever wonder why something so precious was taken from you?"

"Of course I fucking do!" Chloe's scream matches the tornado, and Max feels fiercely, murderously proud. "Why was I the one to get fucked over? Why do my parents have to pay the price? While shitbags like…like Nathan Prescott and Victoria Chase cruise through life without a single worry in their heads? How is any of this fair?"

Max cups Chloe's jaw, hair slicked by surf, rivulets streaming down each other's skin.

"I'll undo it all, you understand? I promise I'll never abandon you again!"

They kiss against the storm and the fury. Timelines collide: She's kissed Chloe like this before, she'll kiss Chloe like this again. It's that same double-dared kiss redolent with chlorine and cigarette smoke, it's that same kiss on the cliffside as she tears a photo in two (where did that memory come from?). They drive east, east, east to a destination neither of them know –

Chloe gasps, throat palpating like a butterfly wing.

"I promised you," Max whispers. "I promised you glorious death."

The beast is close. The sand at their legs funnels into its mouth like the rings of planets.

Chloe's wheelchair vibrates, pulled forward inexorably, and she doesn't look afraid.

"Who are you, Max?"

The photograph's in her pocket, wet and crumpled, blue butterfly lighting on a pail. She's memorized every pixel inside that frame. The sirens blare urgency, urgency, get back into your homes. The sirens are wrong. Time's a mere suggestion; with a flick of her arm she can twist time into infinite pretzels.

"I caused this." The moment Max says it she realizes it's true, and instead of scaring her it feels like release, like a long exhalation, a vendetta won. She's not sure whether she's Max or Maxine now; perhaps the difference never existed. "I'm the fury in your head. I'm your retribution against the universe. I am the storm. I'm your best friend, and I will save you."

"I'm glad it was with you."

The storm can't be outrun. Soon she'll leave this place, this Chloe that's not hers in a world that's not hers. But for now Max stares down the end of everything, and she waits a little longer.