Dying, as it turns out, is not exactly the way Chloe imagined it.
Of course, the last time she’d imagined it, she was probably high. When she was high, everything was bright colours and shifting shapes that made no sense when she tried to think too hard about them and made all the sense in the world when she didn’t care. She supposed, then, that dying was a similar thing – as long as you didn’t think too hard about it, it wasn’t quite so terrifying.
Of course, it wasn’t in her calculations to be killed in a bathroom but hey, life’s weird like that, right?
Nathan Prescott’s ugly face would be the last one she got to see, which sucked, but she didn’t get a chance to think too hard about it, because everything slowed down to a crawl as she felt with acute sensation the pressure of the muzzle of the gun pressed against her abdomen, angled up so it had a clear shot to her heart, and the way the cold, grimey white tiles felt on her back. The way that blind fury cast an unnerving shadow over Nathan Prescott’s face, the way his eyebrows drew together and his eyes glazed over as though he were somewhere else, and this was a movie being played out in front of him. The way her own panic was like an icy wave, chilling and energizing and burning all at once, her every instinct screaming at her that this was not going to end well, that she needed to run. She watched in almost tedious slow motion as something unseen startled Nathan and he snapped out of whatever glazed dissociative state he’d fallen into and terror made his eyelids twitch the tiniest amount, but that was all that Chloe needed to know that he was spooked, and that the first muscle to twitch would be his trigger finger.
The bullet didn’t actually hurt, in all honesty. It was cold, and she felt herself tense up, but the panic evaporated at once as the sound echoed through ringing ears and suddenly it was Chloe that was watching everything play out like a movie. Because it can’t be her that was falling forward, stars and patches of black dappling her vision as the mouldy tiles of the floor rose up to meet her as gravity sunk it’s claws into her and dragged her down. It just can’t be. She fell bodily to the floor without really feeling it as she crumpled against the tiles. Well, I suppose I’m dead now, she thought, almost serenely.
She heard a voice, almost as panicked as she was before, before the rippling of her vision started to overwhelm her and she closed her eyes to seek respite from it. The lights in the room were too bright, they burned her eyes even with her eyes closed. She was dimly aware that she was alone, that there was no sound around her, no more voice or muffled, panicked breathing. Then again, maybe it was just that her sense of hearing was the first thing to give out.
And then there was warmth where there was cold before, as something seized her arms and wrapped around her body. It felt a little like those writhing shapes did, the ones that curled around her when she was high, but this felt too real, too tangible. She held on to the feeling of whatever it was, because it was the one tether she could still feel to... well, to anything, really.
“I’m sorry, Chloe,” A voice said, muffled as though it was talking through ten layers of glass. “I’m so sorry,” The voice was familiar, but Chloe would never have been able to place it. To be honest, at the moment, she was losing the ability to think at all, and given that her chest was tight and she’d physically stopped taking air into her lungs a good solid minute ago, it seemed she wouldn’t be thinking at all much longer. The voice was crying, though, that much she could tell. Why was the voice crying? She would have given anything for the voice to stop crying.
But she wasn’t able to do much about it, because it was then that she died.
If she was going to describe it, she supposed it felt a little like flying. Not peaceful flying, though, not gliding through space like a great seabird spreading its wings. This was chaotic, violent, and if she had a body she could imagine it being thrown around like a rag doll in a storm, defenceless against the biting force that had her twisting and torn at the seams, drifting and hurtling through a great, undefinable nothing that stretched as far as she could sense without having eyes to see. It seemed to go on forever, being whirled around in this chasm of emptiness without any way to perceive what it was that was doing this – she wondered was making her feel these sensations, when she supposed her body was still laying in the girl’s bathroom of Blackwell Academy. If she was feeling, wouldn’t that mean she was alive?
After eons of being tossed around, Chloe hit solid ground hard. Or rather, whatever form she was taking on while in this maddening non-place was slammed into something more tangible than the wild winds that had carried her this far.
She was still for a moment, enjoying the fact that she had the ability to be still. She’d wanted to be still for so long, and now she was dead. Funny how things work out.
Chloe tried to move something, and was pleasantly surprised when feeling and warmth flooded through four limbs, and she wiggled ten fingers at the end of two hands. Being dead, then, was not all that much different from being alive. The ultimate test, she tried to open eyes.
Being able to see was a welcome relief. Even though there was nothing really to see except a blackness even more intense than the darkest night Chloe had ever seen. Looking down, she took in her own body – slightly shimmery, as though it was a poor-quality projection rather than an actual physical human body. That’s okay though, because it means she has a mouth. Opening it, she let out a heavy, emphatic, “fuck me.”
No sound came out of her mouth though. This was okay too. All things considered, she was doing alright just to have an actual body.
So Chloe started walking. This was one of the few things she could actually do, and it sure beat sitting around in the middle of whatever black hole she found herself in. She wondered whether this was what the afterlife was – just walking. What a fucking joke. She’d laugh if she had a voice.
It wasn’t so long, before something disrupted the bleak landscape of black. It was light coloured, seemed to be some kind of rectangle. Chloe squinted into the distance at it, trying to make out the shape. It was weird, unfamiliar. But, somehow, it looked beautiful there, the one stroke of light against the infinite dark. It would make a beautiful photo, Chloe decided. Why she suddenly had photography on the mind, she couldn’t explain.
Either way, it was a gruelling trek to whatever the hell the thing was, and Chloe couldn’t help feeling slightly scandalised when she finally moved over to it, laying a hand down on top of it.
“A fridge,” she said, even though her mouth moved around empty, silent words. “The fuck?”
It was dirty and old, the freezer door swinging on rusted hinges, rotten and yellow on the inside. It was decades old. Even so, Chloe ran her hand along the top, unsettling layers of dust and soil. From the middle of the fridge down, it was particularly dirty, as though it had been buried for some time. Disgusting and ancient, it was as out of place here as Chloe felt. Although...
“I know you,” Chloe smiled, and made herself jump when her own voice croaked through a dry throat. The first sound she’d heard in what felt like years made her ears ring a little.
This wasn’t what first caught her attention, though, because all at once, an entire landscape was unfurling like so many plant buds flowering. Piles of trash and dirt rose up from the blackness, along with rusted old car wrecks and the weeds growing out of them. Stars appeared like pinpricks above her, casting light on where dirt had appeared beneath her feet. It happened all at once, and at the same time not nearly fast enough.
This was the junkyard. She’d been here a million times before, and even now, when she knew that it wasn’t real, it still felt like home. Turning her head, she took in the sight of the shed nestled in the piles of trash.
She was walking towards it before she even know what she was doing. Okay, she told herself with a smile. This is looking a little more like some kind of heaven.
She reached the shed and gripped the doorknob, swinging it open and stepping inside like she had so many times before when she was still breathing. But it’s okay, because even though things felt wrong now, a kind of haziness having settled over this junkyard as though it was in a dream, it was still the junkyard, and it was still home. She strolled inside, a smile on her face, but it fell away in an instant, her jaw falling open when she saw that she wasn’t the first to arrive at the shed.
Rachel Amber, as beautiful and aloof and damn near perfect as the last time Chloe saw her, glanced up from where she was spread out on the floor reading a magazine, her back against the wall. Her features arranged themselves into a bemused smirk. “Hey loser,” she said, affectionately mocking. “What the hell’re you staring at?”
Chloe closed her mouth, and opened it again. There was no sun, not even a moon, only dim little stars above their heads, but somehow Rachel was a light source all her own. She shone, bright enough to make Chloe almost want to cover her eyes. Almost.
Rachael picked herself up gracefully, reaching out a hand with a cigarette in it, a silent offer. Feeling like she’d never stopped doing this, that Rachel had never been missing at all but was right back where she belonged, Chloe took it. Taking a drag, she was completely unsurprised when she couldn’t taste a thing, not even feeling the wisping curls of the smoke dancing on her tongue. She dropped the cigarette as Rachel smiled warmly at her. “Let’s take a walk,” she said firmly, seizing Chloe’s shoulder and dragging her in that way that she did when she was excited.
“Okay,” Chloe managed to croak, disappointed when she couldn’t feel the warmth of Rachel’s fingers around her bicep.
Rachel dragged her away from the shed, and Chloe wanted to protest, tell her friend that she never wanted to leave the shed ever again, but something stopped her. She would go wherever Rachel went, always.
As they walked, the junkyard began to fade into the distance, trees and logs and all the things Chloe remembered from the forest sprouting from the blackness. She let Rachel lead the way, watching as paint strokes of golden and red colour began to strike through the blackness, the light of the most brilliant sunrise making the trees glow and the blackness recede. Again, Chloe wished someone was here to take a photo. But who?
“Is this real?” She asked Rachel, her throat hoarse. “Am I real?”
Rachel looked at her long and hard, before laughing. “Of course you’re real, dipshit. What kind of bullshit question is that?”
Chloe reached out a hand to stop her friend, making the blonde girl pause and stare back at her quizzically. “Rachel,” she said firmly, and felt her mouth go dry and throat become heavy and sore, in the way it did when she was fighting tears. “Rach, I... I died. I got shot.”
Rachel frowned. “Did it hurt? Is that what you’re worried about? Are you in pain?”
Chloe shook her head, a little desperately. “No, I mean... I died...I... and you...” She gritted her teeth, shaking herself a little. She hadn’t cried since her father died, she sure as hell wasn’t going to now. “Rachel – are you dead?”
Rachel looked sad, sadder than Chloe had ever known her to be. Rachel was happiness and laughing and charming literally anyone who was fortunate enough to get to talk to her. She wasn’t whatever this was, these sad eyes and sadder smiles. “You already know the answer to that. I think you did for a while.”
It was all Chloe could do not to break down right there, in the middle of a reality that made even less sense than the fucked up one she was in when she was alive. Rachel was here, Rachel was dead. She’d died. How long had she been dead while Chloe had been putting up those posters, dreaming of what Rachel might be doing in L.A, wondering why she’d never called, or taken Chloe with her. Had Rachel been watching her when that happened?
“Rachel...” She said softly, wincing when it came out as a sob. “I... how?”
Rachel took a small step back, smiling. “You know that answer to that too, Chlo. You just don’t remember.” She turned her back and started walking again, glancing back to shoot Chloe one of her mischievous smiles. “Come on, slowpoke. Get your ass in gear.”
Chloe didn’t want to go anywhere. Chloe didn’t know where or what this place was, let alone whether she even wanted to go somewhere else within it. She felt rage course through her. If she’d have known this when she was alive, if only she’d been able to work it out, she would have had a shot at making things right, at making sure Rachel got the justice that she deserved. She would have gone to hell and back to do that for Rachel, because Rachel was worth it and more, so much more. And yet here she is, stuck where she can’t do a damn thing but follow her best friend, who seems remarkably blasé about the whole dying thing, to god knows where. Chloe felt a surge of fury and helplessness all at once, making her blood boil and her head ache. All she’d done, everything that happened in her life, it all led here, to this moment of utter disappointment and tragic grief.
“Life is fucking unfair,” she spat, making Rachel glance back at her in alarm for a moment.
“Keep moving,” was all Rachel said.
Keep moving they did, through the landscape of progressively appearing trees and foliage, climbing hills that only rose moments before Chloe’s feet set down upon them. This dark shit was starting to get real old. Seemingly not to Rachel though, who moved over the landscape with practiced ease and natural grace. After all, Chloe figured Rachel had been moving through it for a long time now.
The climb started to get steeper, and Rachel moved on effortlessly, but Chloe felt her chest tighten as she clambered through the trees and up the incline that seemed to lead to nowhere, only a higher level of blackness that gave nothing away. Rachel turned to look back at her struggling. “Almost there,” she said cheerfully.
“Almost where!?” Chloe snapped back, still huffing up the hill. “You’re gonna send me into cardiac arrest, douchebag!” She paused, considering. “Well, I mean, you would – if I weren’t already...”
“Come on,” Rachel said impatiently. “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
Chloe stopped, shaking her head wearily. “I just want to go back to the shed.”
“No,” Rachel said firmly. “A few more steps, and I swear to god you can rest.”
“Why?!” Chloe growled back, losing all patience. “What’s the point of any of this!? What was the point of anything?!”
Rachel didn’t even look taken aback. “I can’t tell you, you have to – “
“You left me!” Chloe shouted back. “You let me care about you, you never helped me then, and you’re not helping me now. You betrayed me and didn’t even give a shit about it!”
Rachel stopped, leaning back as her eyes widened a little. Chloe bent over, bracing her hands on her knees as she huffed. Where the fuck had that come from? She wanted to apologise to Rachel, to tell her that she was talking complete shit and had no idea why she’d said that. But then her mind started working overtime, and she was reading a handwritten note in her mind, and watching photos flick past her mind’s eye, photos of Rachel and a scruffy man in a small room – a trailer, really. There was a dog in the photos too.
Max liked animals.
Chloe bent over double, intense pain shooting through her mind as she let out a cry. Rachel seemed to move forward, but Chloe shied away from her touch. Groaning through the agony, Chloe sunk to her knees. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t stop the images, little polaroid photos of everything and nothing, of people she’d never met and yet knew everything about, and places that were so familiar and yet were completely foreign. Chloe herself was in the photos too, smiling as though there was nothing wrong even though she couldn’t even slightly remember when they had been taken, or by whom.
“God,” she gasped out as a maelstrom of voices and noise and pain ricocheted around her head like a bullet. Voices she’d never even heard before were telling her things she didn’t know, and yet had known for so long. Names on handwritten notes that looked unfamiliar, but when her own lips sounded them out she felt she’d said them a hundred times before. White hot fury and warm pleasure and icy sorrow and painfully acute fear coursed through her one by one until she felt like she couldn’t feel anything anymore, until they’d found their place in her memories – their rightful place, the place they’d always been.
A bullet ripped through her, not the one that she’d remembered from her death, the one fired from Nathan Prescott’s gun, but one held by a man in a suit, standing in the junkyard at night. She’d had tears streaming down her face, and Rachel’s filthy clothes were poking out from a hole dug by bare hands in the soil. Bright lights and pulsing sound of a party, the loss of feeling in her legs and arms, the sound of a camera clicking. Hands moved the camera away from a smiling face and if Rachel was bright, this girl was radiant, freckles like constellations mapped over a canvas of shining skin and bright, bright gleaming eyes regarding her with warm affection. It was all around her, and inside her, and it was all she could do not to scream.
There was a ringing piercing sound all around her, echoing and grating on her already tender mind. It took a moment for her to realise oh right, I am screaming.
Her mouth fell shut as she fell to her knees, leaning down onto all fours in the dirt made murky by the darkness of whatever half-world this was. She figured if this was the real world, and she had food in her stomach, she would have thrown up by now. Rachel was at her side in an instant, a hand on her back. “Chloe,” she said gently. “I know it hurts,”
“Max,” Chloe gasped, closing her eyes. “Oh, god.” Now, at last, after so long keeping a brave face plastered over her features when all she wanted to do was scream and cry, Chloe allowed the tears to leak from her eyes and she felt her body racked by violent sobs. She cried messily, grossly, but it didn’t even matter because Rachel’s hands didn’t waver from where they rested on her back, even though Chloe couldn’t even feel the touch. She cried for what felt like years, because time is fucked up in whatever world this is, and she may even have been crying for centuries and not even know it. “I remember everything,” Chloe sobbed, the tears splattering over the darkness. “I remember it all.”
Rachel was silent beside her, before leaning back to look at Chloe fondly. “You’re right, you know.” Rachel smiled. “Life is fucking unfair.”
Chloe leaned back onto her knees, wiping her face and dragging dirt down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.” She breathed, tears still slowly trickling down her face. “I really am. For everything. You didn’t deserve to die the way you did.”
“Dude, no one does,” Rachel said, shrugging as though it was no big deal. “But... I’m not in pain any more. And, for what it’s worth,” she reached out and took Chloe’s arm. “I’m sorry too. For Frank and... well, for everything. You didn’t deserve any of it either.”
“I... I’m sorry I was angry at you,” Chloe said again, squeezing her eyes shut to stop the tide of tears. “I was so angry at you, Rachel, I... I really thought you’d just left me... I wish... I wish you were in L.A, safe. Not here.”
“I know,” Rachel said gently. “Me too.”
Chloe ducked her head. “You should have told me about Frank.” She said, a little firmer.
“I know.”
“I loved you.”
“I know that too.” Rachel said, squeezing Chloe’s arm gently.
Chloe met her gaze. “I mean... I mean, I was in love with you.”
Rachel held her stare for a long while, a careful pondering gaze that was as gentle as it was heartbreaking. Before she even said anything, she stood back up slowly, bringing Chloe gently back to her feet. She wasn’t going to say anything, and that was okay. Chloe straightened up, sniffing and wiping her eyes again with a heavy sigh. “Okay. How much further do we need to go?” Chloe asked in resignation, looking back around at the trees.
Rachel smiled. “Not so far. I think you know the rest of the way. And... and I think you should go the rest of the way on your own.”
Chloe shook her head, frowning. “Come with me.”
“I can’t.” It was the truth, Chloe realised, even if she didn’t really understand why yet.
She stared at Rachel long and hard, because she knew this was her last chance to. She took a few steps towards the top of the hill, before glancing back at where Rachel was standing, for just one more look. Rachel grinned and waved at her to hurry. “Move it! You walk as slow as my grandma!”
“Punk,” Chloe breathed, smiling at last. She kept walking, but couldn’t help glancing back to make sure Rachel was still there. Her heart back-flipped when she couldn’t see her blonde haired friend, but instead a lone doe moving through the trees, it’s head bowed and it’s footfalls silent.
She knew the way from here, she’d walked up to the lighthouse a million times before, and even in this darkness that followed her like a cloud, she could find her way there. She could find her way back to the lighthouse with her eyes closed. It was a long walk, though she stopped feeling tired and started feeling downright exhausted. The weight of memories that she should never have even had were weighing heavily on her, more heavily than anything.
The stars started to get brighter as she approached the top of the hill, and the colours around her became more pronounced, more bright against the starkness of the black. A chill breeze brushed at her cheek and she swatted at it, chasing the sensation.
Trudging up the final few steps was the hardest, her feet dragging along the ground. She was scared that she was going to fall forward onto her knees and never be able to get back up, but she reached out her hands and felt old wood beneath it. The bench had grown from the blackness in the way all the other things of this world had, and now it was sitting exactly where it should, on the precipice of the most magnificent view in all of Arcadia Bay. The lighthouse sprung up, immense and beautiful, at her side, and she gazed up at it with a small smile. The rest of the lookout spot emerged in similar sudden clarity, all bright colours and perfect textures that she longed to run her fingers along.
Chloe faced the sky that was beginning to bloom before her, awash with reds and golds and oranges at that perfect stage of evening – what had Max once called it in another life? The Golden Hour. She looked around her, her features falling a little as everything came to a standstill, exactly where it should be.
“What do I do?” Chloe said aloud, hearing her own voice echo around her, sending some birds from a tree fluttering into the sky in alarm. She faced the lighthouse, her brow furrowing. “What do you want me to do!?” She shouted up to it.
Turning back to the view of Arcadia Bay, she watched the waves rush the shore, making those rhythmic hushing sounds that Chloe loved listening to as a kid, but grew annoyed with as a teenager because. She breathed in the smell of pine needles and salty spray, closing her eyes. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was her heaven. Maybe this was where she was supposed to be for the rest of time, sitting in the place she was the most happy. It made sense – maybe the junkyard was Rachel’s heaven, and this was hers.
You don’t even believe in heaven, Chloe reminded herself. She was the least religious person of all of them.
Something caught her eye when she opened them again, something white fluttering down by the bottom of the bench, wedged at its bottom. She reached down and plucked it from where it was trapped, bringing it up to her face with a smile. She knew it at once, of course, the luminous blue butterfly perched on the lip of a metal bucket. Not a remarkable shot in the photographic sense, but in every way that mattered it was the most perfect photo that was ever taken. Ever. It sent shock waves of warmth through Chloe and she took a deep breath before freezing.
She took another, slow breath, before looking out at the sea, a wide grin spreading across her face.
The trip back down the hill was ten times shorter than the trip up it, probably because Chloe was running as fast as she could possibly go, her beanie falling off her head somewhere on the way. She didn’t pick it up, she couldn’t stop for anything. The road that led from the forest into Arcadia Bay was rough gravel, and her shoes crunched over it as she sprinted. Cars honked at her as she ran, and she cheerfully gave them the finger. The light of the sunset lit her way and she ran to chase it, because the darkness was closing in – not the darkness of the empty half-world, but the deep blue darkness of night.
In the streets, things became easier, where the ground was level and paved. She knew exactly where she was running, and made straight for it. She went past the house that had the big backyard she used to play in, the one with the high window she was so used to climbing out of to avoid the watchful eye of her Stepfather who, yeah okay, didn’t turn out to be quite so bad. She ran past the bus stop too, even though it might have made more sense to stop and wait for a bus.
She swore and cursed the fact that Blackwell Academy was right at the other end of Arcadia Bay, where only the buses could get to it conveniently. All the same, she knew she could be as quick as a bus in a pinch, and by the time she tore up the steps to the campus, taking them two by two, she was drenched in sweat. Still clutching the polaroid photo of the butterfly in her hand, still grinning like an idiot. The campus was empty, it was probably way past student curfew by now. She turned her face to the dormitory, grin widening impossibly.
Because yeah, being alive is a fucking train wreck of an experience. You can work your ass off for something or someone you love more than anything else only to have it count for nothing. You can have your hands tied behind your back while the people you care about are hurt and torn away from you, and you know you could have done something if only you’d known. Even when you do know, even when you can manipulate time as easy as you can rearrange the books on a shelf to be the way you want it, even when you’ve walked through a hundred different realities, there’s always the chance that you’ll be gripped by gravity and slammed back to earth to face what you’ve done. You’ve always got to face the consequences, even when you’ve been running from them for so long that you’ve forgotten what they even are.
But walking through all those different time streams and realities has to count for something, right? Even though it was all undone, even though the storm claimed Chloe as its price for keeping everyone she loved safe, she had been everywhere in a hundred different ways, and in the grand scheme of things, that had to count for something. Because, yeah she’d been tossed around in a storm for a long time, even after she’d finally died. She’d been stuck in that damn maelstrom for way too long, and she never even realised that she had a lighthouse guiding her home the entire time. Even after she’d given in, let that bullet pierce her heart and do the noble thing, was it so weird to think that being a time traveller meant that there’d be a hundred other Chloes floating in limbo through time and space and everything in between? And would it be that much weirder to think that, even then, there’d been a light shining her safely home?
Even through it all, even though she didn’t believe in heaven, Chloe had to admit that life, while generally a fucking unfair experience, has the capacity for miracles.
Chloe lifted a fist to rap a knuckle on the hard wood of the door once, twice, three times. She gripped the photo in her hand tighter as she heard a groan and movement from inside the room. It was a few moments before a bleary eyed Max, in her pyjamas and with a dopey confused expression that Chloe loved more than anything else, appeared at the door. Her expression changed in a matter of moments, her eyes widening and shining as they took in the figure at her door with rapturous adoration. Chloe grinned, a small laugh escaping her lips. Max grinned too, her eyes wide and still not leaving Chloes’ as though she was looking at something big and bright and perfect. Chloe knew how that felt.
Chloe’s lighthouse had always been here, even before Rachel helped her find it. And Chloe could have found that light in her sleep. It was the most perfect light she’d ever known, and she’d spent her entire life (and death,) trying to chase it. She never would have thought going through so much pain was worth anything, but she would have done it a thousand times over if it meant she ended up back here again, where she was always meant to be.
Because life’s not perfect, it’s hard and it hurts. But god, is it all worthwhile in the end. She felt the warmth of Max against her as they met in the doorway and her nose was buried in tousled brown hair and Chloe didn’t think she’d ever wipe the smile off her face again.
It wasn’t that long ago that she never would have smiled like this. Chloe smiled wider and squeezed her eyes shut, laughing.
Life, she supposed, is strange like that.