Life is Strange AUs

Max: Hey, Chlo?
Max: I think someone else might have rewind powers

Chloe: hold up still driving
Chloe: Oh, sick, why do you say that?

Max: Well, I keep rewinding.
Max: Except I’m not doing it.
Max: Stuff is just sort of rewinding at random parts of the day.

Chloe: And you remember it?

Max: Yeah, that’s normal - why wouldn’t I?

Chloe: IDK.

Chloe, satisfied with a fourth-ounce bag of weed she’d picked up from Frank, started up the path to the lighthouse. At a certain point, if she kept this up, she would have to change her name to Penelope, but for now, it just helped her relax at the end of the day.
She had hoped Max wouldn’t notice the rewinding. She hadn’t noticed the first one, the big one. About a week ago, Chloe had been sideswiped by a drunk driver (while hardly having been in better condition herself), and her truck had rolled. She had accumulated several lacerations across her torso and sustained a severe concussion. When she was taken to the hospital, they discovered she had lost two pints of blood and she received an infusion of A-. Within seconds of it flowing in her veins, Chloe was awake, so incredibly awake, and so incredibly confused. She felt her accident happening over and over, felt the hospital bed, felt the junkyard’s earth in her fingers as she dug up Rachel. She felt them all, and when she reached out, she could grab them.

She hit her brakes before ever entering the intersection. A large black SUV zoomed through a red light, and she was never hit. Her wounds were gone - no bandages on her head, only her blue beanie. She had texted Max, and Max remembered nothing.
She played with it a little, but she didn’t want to push it like Max did early on. Even if she was characterized by recklessness, she didn’t want to imagine all of the ways in which things could go wrong if she was noticed using it, or if she hurt herself.
Her first game had been simple. She took a hackey sack and tossed it forward, then rewound time after it fell, moving to where it would fall and catching it, playing pass-back with herself in her room after Max had gone home. It only took a few seconds of rewind, which left her a little winded, but didn’t really cause her pain and discomfort.

The second one had been a little bigger. She walked into a convenience store, grabbed a few beers, and walked out. When the cashier had attempted to call the police, she just rewound the second his hand touched the phone, and even when she started to feel light headed and a headache formed, she forced the rewind until she vomited on the sidewalk outside. She had taken back a full fifty seconds.
She knew, by this point, more about the extents of Max’s power. She could withdraw several minutes at time, so long as she didn’t black out sometime within those minutes. Chloe, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to push a full minute, and anything past the slivers of time it took to take back an offhand comment or catch something in the air had triggered one of those stress nosebleeds that Max got. During the game with the hackey sack, Chloe had actually come up with the terrible/brilliant idea of just using a tampon for her nostrils.

She also quickly noticed that Max was not oblivious to her rewinding. The first time she’d used it, she had taken a selfie with Max’s camera, then tried to rewind it before Max noticed, but the camera just printed it out anyway, and Max had grunted as a webpage she was on backed up in a timey-wimey sort of way. Max thought she might have just done it accidentally, but Chloe quickly realized the mistake. 
Chloe could also see Max rewinding now. Objects would fly back onto desks, awkwardly-asked questions would be revised. Once or twice, Max had even tried to use it on Chloe herself, but Chloe had, after duplicating some of her words, simply asked - “Did you rewind me just now, Max?” and Max quickly admitted to it.

Chloe sat down at the park bench at the top of the hill, adjacent to the light house. She reached into her denim coat and slowly withdrew the object of today’s experiment.

God, and there she was again. Chloe had done her best to tear down each and every one of the posters she had put up, to stop the presence of the eyes that could never look back at her. God, would they even want to? Frank had said she was part of Rachel’s problem. Maybe, under the circumstances, Rachel could forget that, she could fall back in love with Chloe … but maybe not.
The picture didn’t even look like it was the two of them together. That’s why it had made such a good missing poster, but now the distance between them seemed so poignant. She wondered how she’d ever missed it.

Chloe took a long breath, not really sure how this worked. She just stared at the picture for a long time, trying to bring the whole thing into focus, trying to see all parts of it equally. She tried to remember the moments surrounding it, back in Rachel’s room. How everything smelled, the music they had on … all of it. But it did not do any good. 

Chloe grew frustrated, but she held onto the memory. “Maybe …” was all she said aloud, and then she rewound. She grasped time and wound it around her palm, and forced it back. Here, by the lighthouse, it was hard to even see time rewinding - things did not change much from moment to moment. What really struck her was the sounds - the whispers she heard as she rewound. They made no sense, but they chilled her, because she knew the voices. Hers. Max’s. Rachel’s. David’s. Mom’s. Just whispering to her, taunting her as time wouldn’t go back any faster.

Blood dripped from her nose, but she didn’t break her concentration. Time started to siphon itself into her blood stream, the pressure rising, filling her constricted body with heat. It was like air into an oven, and her skin kept it all in, baking her insides. She felt like, if she just kept rewinding, then the setting sun would just roast her alive.
But she couldn’t. The blood just kept dribbling down, but that was nothing like a bullet to the head. She was dizzy, but it was nothing like smelling the rot of her girlfriend. Who cared. Who cared.
Even as she fell to the ground, vomiting, she couldn’t let time go. The picture was crumpled in her hand, and finally, her vision gave out. It was only for a moment, but it forced her, along with everything else, to let go of time.

When the symptoms subsided, Chloe was already crying, collapsed on her knees and leaning all the way forward, hair nearly touching the ground. 
A minute later, she received a text.

Max: It happened again. Someone rewound time - quite a lot of it. My smoothie unblended itself. It was pretty wild.

Chloe: …

That ‘writing message’ ellipses lasted for quite a while. Then,

Chloe: It was me. I rewound time.

Max: … thank you for telling me, Chloe. What did you just try to do?

Chloe: Really?
Chloe: That’s it?
Chloe: Not ‘hey Chloe, since when do you have time control powers?’

Max: You got the blood from me; they told me while you were still unconscious. Not, like, the doctors - the blood people. Apparently they shoot you a text if they use your blood.

Chloe: WHAT?
Chloe: YOU REMEMBER YOU OATMEAL-COATED RAISIN?
Chloe: WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY ANYTHING?

Max: I thought you might not remember …
Max: And when I realized you were rewinding you didn’t seem to want to bring it up so …
Max: What did you just try?

Chloe: Your photo trick.

Max: Why?
Max: Oh.
Max: You tried to save Rachel, didn’t you?

Chloe clicked the info button and hit call. Max was quick to pick up.

Chloe: “Why can’t I do it, Max? Why can’t I go back?”
Max: “I don’t know, Chlo. Maybe you didn’t get all of my powers? How are you doing?”
Chloe: “Real fucking shitty right now, actually.”
Max: “Yeah I … I imagine.”
Chloe: “I mean, how fucked up is this? If we just had a picture of you two, none of this would have to happen. You saved me so much with this stupid fucking power but I can’t stop it, not once.”
Max: “Chloe …”

Chloe held her phone in her hand for a moment, but just sat there crying for a moment, not wanting Max to hear her anymore. But that didn’t matter.

“Chloe?” came the voice again, except this time it wasn’t from the phone. 
Chloe was quick to her feet, but as she spun around, she quickly lost her footing and stumbled, still light-headed from rewinding and vomiting. “Max?” she asked; “How are you here?”

Max ended their call and slipped her phone into her pocket. “I’ve learned from tricks with selfies …” and with that, she closed the distance between them, and wrapped Chloe up in her arms. And that was all it took for the tall but so, so fragile girl to collapse into her best friend.
“What world gives us so much power … and still … I can’t save her?”

Max didn’t have an answer. She knew the question well, so well, ever since three weeks ago, when she was on the roof with Kate, and it had all failed her.

“We’re not gods, Chloe. I’m so sorry.”