Chloe Price
A continuation of this fic, in which Chloe gains Max’s rewind.
“But that’s not good enough!” Chloe cried, almost wanting to shove Max away but unable to stand on her own at this point, in every sense of the phrase. The tiny brunette just held her with surprising strength, and every part of her just felt unraveled. Rachel had, for a full two years, been everything to Chloe. Every other aspect of her life had fallen apart, and Rachel was the only thing that kept Chloe in any semblance of a human. But now she was the opposite. Now she was the thing that made Chloe feel cold and alone no matter where she was. Max stroked her back, as if it could soothe her at this point. All that was left was for her to collapse from exhaustion hours for now, Max thought.
When Max saw the crumpled image of Rachel and Chloe blow towards the edge of the cliff, at first she just thought that maybe, maybe that was best. Maybe it was right that Chloe did not continue to carry that picture around in her pocket day in and day out. Maybe . . .
It blew over the edge, and Max could not live with that. She rewound.
“Huh?” Chloe asked, suddenly hugging air. She was somewhat used to this affair by now though, and had the good mind to look around her - it didn’t take long, as she found Max standing near the edge of the cliff, standing upright as she lifted the photograph just before it’s untimely demise. “Oh, oh, shit, thank you-” Chloe trotted over to her friend and took the picture from Max’s offered hand. She covered her mouth with her spare hand for a second and pulled it off to the side, as if she were trying to remove lipstick. “Thanks, Max. I let it go.”
Max nodded, and took Chloe’s spare hand into her own. Chloe’s hands might be large, but Max could still wrap her hand around Chloe’s palm easily enough. She pulled the bluenette over to the bench, noted the vomit, and turned to drag her over to the map they had marked the location of their secret fort onto. They both sat on the edge of it, and after a moment of silence, Max gestured towards the crumpled picture Chloe was gazing down at.
“Tell me about it. That picture,” Max said aloud, as if it were neither a request nor a demand, but a casual observation of the circumstances, like the weather.
Chloe nodded to herself, but stayed quiet, as if trying to recall the details again. Max gave her the time she needed as she tried to put the pieces together. “It was . . . I dunno, eight months ago. I came over after a fight with my step-shit and Mom - I don’t remember what it was about, but I was pissed off. Rach, she, um, she had a record player, and when I was angsting out, we’d listen to records. She had, like, everything recorded after the forties, although we almost never actually talked about music. She put on some, like . . . I don’t know, but I always liked Nemesis, so it might have been something from them. We sat and smoked, and we talked about moving down to LA, no warning, just packing up in the middle of the night and disappearing.
“We were like that a lot, you know? We knew it was horseshit and everything, but the dreams are what kept me going a lot of the time. Knowing, once we got the money, we’d just be gone, and I could write letters to Mom and everything but Arcadia’d just be gone. No surprise we never did, especially ‘cause of her and Frank but . . . God, even when everything was shit, we always thought it could be good, you know? Like, it was. Nothing could stop us. Nothing.”
Chloe choked a little, and Max rubbed her back with her free hand. Chloe had barely so much as said Rachel’s name in the past several weeks. Once Chloe had killed Jefferson, she had pretty much just shut down, shut it all out, and acted like it never happened. Well, that’s not quite right - she went to bed every night dreading her nightmares, and she rose every morning having barely slept, haunted by the ghosts of Rachel and Jefferson. Max knew, because she hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since the day she got her powers. All she saw were bullets in Chloe’s skull, unless she was seeing Kate’s broken neck, blood slowing leaking from her mouth.
Chloe heard something . . . very strange in that moment. The words seemed to grow out of nothing, but they came from below her: “Number nine, number nine, number nine . . .” she became aware, now, that this wasn’t just below her, but it was coming from the photo as if it were a speaker. She inhaled sharply.
“Max,” she uttered quietly. “I think I hear the Beatles from the photo.”
Max paused her rubbing and looked over at her friend. “Are you . . . sure?” Her voice was soft but doubtful, as if this were just Chloe’s wishful thinking
But Chloe nodded confidently. “I’m pretty fucking sure I know the White Album, yeah. What do I do?”
Max took a deep breath as she tried to understand how to describe the process. “Here, um, just focus on the photo, keep trying to remember what was going on.”
Chloe just kept nodding, and there was some panic in her voice as she began again, “Okay. I guess we were listening to Revolution 9, not Nemesis. We decided we didn’t have to accept our fates here in Arcadia. We decided tonight would be the night we escaped - not seriously, but just a little fantasy. So we decided to, you know, have a little fuck-you to this shithole. That’s when we took this photo, and why she was staying so stoic. She didn’t want to show anything in front of a defeated enemy, she just wanted it to be over . . .”
The sound of the record was pulsating as if it were right at Chloe’s ear, and the image no longer seemed attached to the paper it was printed on. Instead, it was rising up, as if it were going to envelop her, but she didn’t stop, though that freaked her out. She just kept talking until suddenly, suddenly, she felt like she was being pulled down, like the Lex Luthor Drop of Doom had just reached its summit and now there was nothing, only gravity and no space, just falling.
Flash.
Chloe blinked, and coughed as her lungs were filled with smoke. She leaned over a little, freshly light-headed and dizzy, and she found a small hand patting her back, just as there had been a second ago. Revolution Nine continued from the exact point she’d been hearing it, seamlessly.
“You okay, Chlo? Want to take it again?” Chloe froze when she heard the voice - at least, as well as she could amidst her coughing. Still, she stuttered out a few more before she could raise her head and turn, her eyes locking onto the hazel eyes of Rachel Amber.
Chloe’s reaction was not what she would have wanted it to be. Her mouth covered her hand as she barely squeaked out: “Rachel?”
The tiny blonde’s head cocked to the side in concern at Chloe’s sudden change of tone, brow furrowing, wide lips turning down at the shift from anger to . . . what even was this? She wasn’t even sure, in this context. Chloe tended to stay angry for longer periods than this, and sadness generally gave way to anger, not the other way around. “Yeah, what’s wrong babe?”
Her big girlfriend didn’t respond normally, though, but instead practically lunged towards her, wrapping her in her long, muscular arms, and held her tightly against her chest - which was quite the reversal from normal. “Rachel, it’s you.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s me sweetie, hey there,” she assured softly, her words cresting into a high pitch made to comfort, and she quickly returned the hug, wrapping her arms around Chloe’s shoulders and holding herself a little closer to Chloe’s neck, kissing it softly. “You okay?”
Chloe tried to get control of her breathing, knowing from Max that these things did not last forever, and she’d only have so long to change the past. She put a finger under Rachel’s chin and pulled it up a little, so that she could look at Rachel clearly again. The smile that came across her face was so confused she had no idea how to decipher the emotions she was feeling, and Rachel had no way to interpret them, either. “Rach, c’mon. I know we joke about leaving, but let’s do it, okay? Let’s do it right now. Or tonight, so I can get some stuff from home, but let’s just leave, okay? Arcadia doesn’t have anything for us anymore - but like, LA could be incredible, right? Right?”
The same mix of pity, humor, and adoration that Rachel always got when Chloe brought up escaping came to her face. “It would be, Chlo, of course it would. But you know we can’t do that. We don’t have any money, I have no portfolio, barely any experience . . . but we will soon, I promise. You know that, we’ll do it.”
“But-” Chloe protested, on the verge of tears.
Rachel was quick to interrupt her though, not wanting to go too deep down this road. “Hey, hey, hey now. I love you.” She leaned up a little, and brought her lips to Chloe’s.
Rachel. Rachel. Chloe only realized now that she had forgotten what she felt like. What she smelled like, what she tasted like though the day. Right now, all she could feel was the heat of the room and for that brief second Rachel’s lips again, but it stunned her, because Rachel stopped feeling like a ghost in that moment, and became real again.
“We’ll go soon,” Rachel promised a few seconds after their kiss broke, and sat upright instead of against Chloe, leaning her forehead against her tall, crinkled girlfriend’s.
As Chloe for fumbled for words, she realized she had a secret cache available from her terribly, terribly spoken best friend. “Yo, Rach? I . . . I’ve gotta tell you something. Something . . . hardcore. But I need you to believe me, okay? No matter how crazy I sound, please just trust me.”
Rachel nodded, her eyes just centimeters from Chloe’s, bright and blue, their eyelashes nearly touching. “I do. Tell me.”
Chloe took a ragged breath in, and blew out as she exhaled. Then a quick breath in. Her words felt like air being dragged out of her. “I’m . . . from the future. I came back to save you.”
Rachel did not giggle, or cock her head to the side curiously, or give Chloe a puzzled look, or make a joke. None of the stuff that Chloe had expected in response. Instead, slowly, slowly, their foreheads drifted apart, and Rachel looked her in the eye from several inches away. She swallowed loudly. “So . . . I guess that means I’m dead, huh?”
Just hearing that from Rachel herself felt like a blow in Chloe’s gut, and she imagined that her breath must have escaped like a soul to a dementor’s kiss, but she was just shot in silent shock. Even back here, she could not escape that.
A sad smile crept across Rachel’s lips. “My power moved to you, huh? You . . . can time travel.”
Now it was Chloe’s turn for a loud swallow as her world was turned upside down, which was all that seemed to happen in the world of her and Rachel. “You . . . could do it too? You were a chrononaut like Max?”
Rachel raised herself up a little on her knees, and reached forward, running a hand through Chloe’s hair, not quite meeting her eyes anymore, instead looking at the point where she pushed her hair behind her ears. “Past tense - I really am dead, I guess. By Max do you mean . . . Caulfield? Your old friend?”
Chloe nodded, though bothered that Rachel wasn’t answering her clearly, though it was clear enough what she meant at this point. “Yeah, she, she came back to Oregon a few months ago. We teamed up and she had super powers. She just sent me back in time, just now, through a photo. That one, the one we just took,” she said, looking down at the abandoned digital on the flood between the bed and the wall, where a tall mirror stood - that they’d been using to set up the shot.
Now Rachel’s gaze drifted even further from Chloe, and her voice began to sound distant as she realized that, sometime soon, she was going to die. She had no idea how, but she was certain it was coming. “Well . . . it’s good she got the power next, huh? But. How? How do I die?”
Chloe’s melancholy twisted at that, returning to her eternally-accessible bitchface, though coated with more menace than Rachel was exactly used to. She was used to rage, but it was always aimless - this seemed cold and narrow, though, like a knife. “You don’t have to! It was Jefferson, Mark Jefferson, your teacher. He overdosed you, but, Rachel, Rachel, look at me-” Rachel complied, unable to disobey the intensity in Chloe’s voice right now “- I killed that motherfucker, all right? He killed me, but Max brought me back, and I killed him with with my bare fucking hands, okay? Okay, I killed that motherfucking piece of shit and i-” her words were rapidly escalating towards hysterical and unintelligible, and Rachel wrapped her arms around her again and brought her to her chest as she sat upright on her knees, a very normal position for them - and Chloe completely broke down into sobs.
Rachel’s parents didn’t even come to check; they were used to these sounds from Rachel’s room by now. Chloe cried, and Rachel comforted. It was just a sound of the house, like the records in Rachel’s record player.
It was Chloe, though, who made an effort to resume the conversation after a minute or two. She had so much saved up - Rachel could only react as the next eight months of Chloe spilled out. “And you lied to me, Rach. You don’t just deal to the Vortex Club for Frank. You’re fucking him behind my back, and you never told me.”
It was so strange to hear the present and the past spoken of in the same sentence as if there was nothing between them, but in this situation, there really was no difference between the past and the present - or the future and the present. Time travelers may see time differently, but they recognized its inevitability better than anyone. “Yeah . . .” Rachel said softly, knowing there was nothing she could do to make Chloe un-know that, and knowing it was not worth it in comparison to the weight of everything else. Chloe knew. She couldn’t rewind her confession to save Chloe’s feelings. Chloe knew.
“Why?” asked Chloe
“I love him,” Rachel replied.
They were both so deadpan in this, it was hard to recognize the immensity that this was to both of them.
Chloe’s lips were nothing but a flat line. “Don’t you love me?”
It hurt Rachel so much to hear the tone in that. For who knows how long, Chloe had genuinely been wondering if Rachel loved her. She had been doubting it for days, or weeks, or months. Whenever she found out, she came to the conclusion that it all came at the price of Chloe herself. Rachel shook her head - not at the words, but at the genuine thought. “Of course I do, Chloe. You are my love; you’re my first love, you’re the One for Me. But I love him too. It’s complicated.”
Chloe just stared up at her, glassy-eyed and quiet, and for a moment, she got to feel something a lot like Max must feel - getting to pull out something that hadn’t happened yet in a conversation as a justification for something else. “But Frank said . . . that I was part of you problem. I was part of why you wanted to leave Arcadia. He said I couldn’t understand you.”
Rachel felt like she was being lashed for her sins, because it was her words and thoughts coming and cutting her now - she’d never consented to have them exposed, but here they were, flushing out her pain. She swallowed again, not wanting to turn this into hostility, but still defensive: “I . . . I thought you couldn’t! I . . . we. Frank and I. I went to Frank when I was too stressed out - for drugs ‘n shit, you know. And he became part of them. He became part of my escape, like a vacation. And I love my vacation, but I love my life, too. I need you, because you’re soft and my everything, but I need him, because he’s firm. I-” she was speaking fast, a lot like Chloe often did, because there were all these things she had wanted to say for so long and now she finally could, she had to. But Chloe didn’t intend for her to finish them.
“Do you just love broken people, Rachel?”
The question was not a lash. It was a stab in the heart.
The tears finally filled Rachel’s eyes.
“No, no, no . . . you’re not broken. You’re not broken. I love you. You’re perfect. I love you so much, Chloe, I wish you knew.”
Chloe’s hands came to Rachel’s cheeks, and they were big and soft and warm - they didn’t have the anger that Rachel expected behind them. They were just there, and they brought Rachel’s eyes along them, up towards Chloe’s. “Rachel. I can be firm and strong for you. I can do anything for you - shit, I have. I searched for you for months. I found your body. I killed your killer. I traveled through time to save you. So just do this for me: run away with me. We can even take Frank, I don’t care. Just don’t let it happen. Don’t die.”
But Rachel could see it. She could see the white rim of time closing in, creeping through her windows and shrinking her room. She shook her head, bluejay earring bobbing a little in response. “You don’t get it, do you?” she asked; “If I don’t die, you can never travel back to warn me. Max never gets my power to send you back, and I never know how to stay alive. I die all over again.”
“NO!” screamed Chloe, hands dropping from Rachel’s cheeks to her shoulders, physically shaking her in frustration. “NO! FUCK THAT! YOU CAN’T, you can’t, you can’t . . .” but she saw it too. She saw the borders of reality closing in on this freeze-frame of time. It was all coming to a close. “You can’t forget this,” she begged.
Rachel reached up, and peeled Chloe’s hands off of her shoulders, taking them in her own. Their tears both fell down on their hands and laps. “I won’t forget, Chlo. I won’t forget. I love you - I won’t forget. I love you. I love you. I . . .” but it just kept getting quieter and quieter, as if Rachel were being muffled.
And Chloe was enveloped in white as the memory disappeared.