climbing up the walls

The first thing Nat registers is the smoke. 

An acrid, thick, chemical smoke, crawling up her nostrils like a fire, stronger than the stench of the whiskey on her tongue. It poisons her throat, the muscle constricting, her lungs squeezing desperately as they heave for fresh air. The room- the strange, tubular, seat lined room- is full of it, the plumes grey and enveloping, wrapping her in a haze. Heavy shadows warp across the aisle, the pocket-sized windows shattered unrecognisably, the bizarre, tinny walls bending in ways that no wall should. 

Nat blinks. Then blinks again. 

This isn’t right, she thinks. She was in her motel room just a second ago with a gun to the roof of her mouth. 

She looks down hesitantly.

She was in different clothes just a second ago. Whatever the hell she’s wearing now hasn’t seen the light of day since- since- 

“Shauna!” 

She knows that voice. Familiar. Haunting. Left in the past.

“Shauna!” The voice calls again, frantic. “Shauna get the fuck up!” 

Jackie.

“Jackie!” She calls out, surprised when her voice is high and juvenile, free of a smoker's rattle in a way it hasn’t been for two decades. It doesn’t make sense. She’s supposed to be dead . The gun was supposed to go off.

She tries again. “Jackie! Where are you? I’m back here!” It hurts to talk, her throat hoarse. Had she already been screaming? How long has she been here for? Where is she?

Agonisingly slowly, she braces her trembling fingers against the arms of the seat and pushes upwards. Her entire body feels like hell, aching cellularly, her joints throbbing when she stands. Maybe she is dead, or at least dying, and this is all just an asphyxia-induced hallucination- her neurons firing as her body shuts down from the blow to her head, that final flash of memory.

Memory. This has to be a memory, surely- it feels familiar, each step she takes down the aisle walked before. Her gut swirls with dread as she approaches the door, knowing that it’s going to be still latched shut. How does she even know that it’s still going to be latched shut? 

And how does she know what she’ll find on the other side?

It must be a memory. There’s no other plausible explanation. There’s no alternative theory- no way she’d be back here, on this fucking plane, in nineteen fucking ninety six. 

The acknowledgment of the fact that she is on the fucking plane jolts through her like an angry fork of lightning, and her stomach pinches itself into tangled knots. She can’t be back here. She can’t be. Any moment now all of this will fade to peaceful, tranquil, nothingness, and she’ll finally get her rest in the never-ending black that is death. She will.

She reaches the exit, and lo and behold, it is still firmly closed. Jammed. Maybe if she somehow stops the other Yellowjackets from prying it open this will all cease and become quiet. Maybe then she can get out of here. 

The other Yellowjackets crowd around the exit, barging the metal with all the force that a pack of lean, terrified teens can muster. Nat stands back, stock still, letting the grey smoke infiltrate her eyes and nose as she watches them: the other Yellowjackets, half of whom should be fucking dead, who are somehow fucking here. How the hell is Jackie fucking Taylor over by the seats, shaking Shauna, very much alive and intact, not missing an ear or torn to tooth-bitten pieces in a dozen hungry stomachs. 

“A little help here?” Tai calls over her shoulder. “Natalie!”

Nat blinks. Takes a deep breath. And as if by muscle memory, against her waking will, her feet carry her towards the huddle of familiar faces, something screaming at the back of her skull saying you have to do this, Natalie, like you did it before. You can do it again.

With a strength she hasn’t felt in two decades, Nat shoves her arms against the metal. It’s the first time she notices her hands; smooth, silky, unmarked by time. Like a teenager. Like 17 year old Natalie fucking Scatorccio. 

Around her the girls scream and groan, grunting as their foreheads slick with sweat, the plane door pushing open inch by painstaking inch. The metal creaks as the pressure rises, and she can feel the veins in her forearms squeezing and popping out into ruts. She feels like she’s going to collapse, and her vision turns white, and she dares to breathe a sigh of relief because maybe this is it, maybe she’ll finally die now-

But then the door pops open with an ear-scraping grate, thudding to the forest floor, and she’s still fucking living.

Fresh, natural air rushes in, and she scrambles out onto the dirt. Oxygen has never tasted so good; like shrubbery and water, Canadian wilderness clean, unlike the shitty fumes of New Jersey and the stale air of mildewed motels. Nat swallows it in unrestrained gulps, heaving for breath as the sprawling forest whirls around her.

Behind her Jackie and Shauna stay inside the wreckage of the plane to try and save Van. Either way, she knows it doesn’t matter, it won’t make a difference: Jackie will force Shauna out and ditch Van, but Van will make it out by herself. Then they’ll find Coach Ben, writhing beneath a heavy metal wing, and Misty will mercilessly take the plane’s fire axe to his mangled leg, blood splattering on her glasses. 

She’s lived this before. All of it. 

“Why am I here?” She screams, as loud as her scratchy lungs will let her. “Let me go!” 

The wilderness doesn’t answer. There’s no guiding white light. Not like she was ever a believer, anyways. But it was worth a shot. 

Nat flicks her eyes around desperately, in search of something, anything, that will get her out of this whole fucked up, confused, mess. Her gaze catches on a figure in the treeline; tall, gangly, silky, cropped black hair and tan skin. 

Travis. 

Coach Martinez. 

Maybe, just maybe, if she gets to that tree before Laura Lee does, before they find the girl clutching her teddy to her chest and screaming like she’s just seen the devil, she can save Travis’s dad. Just maybe. And maybe, if she saves Coach Martinez, whatever is holding her back will get her out of here. 

No, she thinks. That’s ridiculous. He had a goddamned tree branch impaled through his torso and fell out of the sky, for fucks sake. Nothing they do will save him. 

But maybe she can spare Travis some of the pain. Stop him from seeing it. 

Nat takes off through the woods, sore feet pounding against the dry ground. Green and brown blur around her, the shrubbery bleeding like ink into her eye line as the air whooshes past her hot skin. He’s further than he looks, standing in a clearing, staring up at the cloudless sky in search of something, hands clasped at the back of his head. 

“Travis!” She calls out, and he spins to face her. It really is him, alive, not strung up by the metal of a crane hook in the middle of a shitty steelworks. Only this, she realises, is 17 year old Travis. He hasn’t kissed her yet. She hasn’t kissed him. They haven’t spent half of their life together, fighting and fucking and grieving and screaming. 

She reaches an embankment of dirt, and starts to scramble up the soil as it slips away beneath her boots. But then she’s suddenly flying, hurtling towards the hard ground with force, her vision darkened by a shadow; a tall, shapely, achingly known shadow, a shadow whose absence has felt larger than life for half of Nat’s time.

“Nat!” 

Long fingers stretch down to the ground. A slender, smooth, bracelet-adorned wrist. 

“Oh my god! Nat!” Lottie fucking Matthews breathes frantically, tugging Nat up off the ground. 

“Lottie?” Natalie says disbelievingly, unable to stop her hands from flying to Lot’s torso, checking her over, touching her, tapping at her skin. It really is her.

Lottie’s pooling eyes meet hers, teeming with something that isn’t quite right. Not terror, not pain; something else, that bleeds with confusion, familiarity, and Nat just fucking knows. Knows that this isn’t some fucked up dream, isn’t some fucked up hallucination conjured in her dying moments, isn’t a memory. This is fucking real, because somehow, in some impossible way that she doesn’t understand, could never understand, Lottie Matthews is here, living it too. Living this again.

“You...you feel it too?” Lottie cries out, bracing her arms against Nat’s shoulders. 

“Yeah, I fucking feel it!” Nat screams and jumps back, scrubbing her nails against her face. “What the fuck, Lottie? What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know!”

“Why the fuck are we back here?”