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All of it is blurry for Nat – well, it’s not, some of it is clearer than the hands in front of her face but she doesn’t think about that, she tells herself it’s blurry – except the last two days before rescue. And the first four days after.
For six days, Natalie is inseparable from Lottie Matthews. And that’s what she remembers.
---
Lottie does it because she is tired. Lottie does it because she is hungry.
Lottie does it because it almost over.
She knows it in her bones. She can hear the airplanes when she looks to the sky, and she tastes medicine in the back of her throat. October air snakes through the corners of the tent they’ve constructed inside the remains of the plane (Lottie’s pretty sure it’s October, but only Shauna is still keeping track – at the very least it’s autumn) and chills Lottie to the bone.
Any clothes she might have had to keep it out, they’ve worn. Any skin she might have had to keep it out, it’s gone. She’s muscle and bone and barely even thought. Lottie Matthews is a whisper on the wind.
But anyway. Lottie does it because it is almost over.
She is almost back. She is almost trapped. She is almost, as they say, herself again.
The thing that Lottie does: she lays down beside Natalie when the darkness falls, and she wraps her arms around her, and she holds Natalie as close as she can.
Nat had been out for a bit, and she murmurs underneath her nest of blankets when Lottie slides in next to her. There are only seven of them left, now. That means more blankets for the rest. Lottie does not necessarily think this a good thing.
She doesn’t need the blankets anymore. She doesn’t mind being cold.
Nat rolls over in her arms, and her eyes are closed but her lips part and Lottie can swear she sees Nat whisper her name, two syllables, round and then flat, Lot-tea. Her heart warms as much as her heart is able. Natalie knows her name.
Sometimes, Lottie forgets their names. She forgets that Natalie is not just the Hunter, and Shauna is not just the Butcher. She wishes she didn’t forget. She wishes a lot of things.
“Are you awake?” she asks Nat, and Nat’s lips form a round oh shape. No. So she’s not.
(When they’re asleep, they’re never really asleep. None of them can sleep anymore. Lottie’s dreams are blood.)
“Natalie,” Lottie whispers, leaning her head in closer to Nat’s ear. Taissa and Van are bundled not a foot away. Lottie knows they can’t hear her, but she also doesn’t know that. “I don’t want to go back.”
Nat’s eyes open. “Lottie,” she says, in that deep way she has, “why do you think we’re going to?”
They look at each other for a long time.
“They’re coming,” Lottie says, and then she shuts her eyes and pretends to sleep, and Natalie does the same. But when the sun rises, their arms are still around each other.
---
They wake with the sun. They straighten the camp. Lottie sits at the base of a tree, that has become her tree, and watches the particles of the air dance. She follows patterns only she can see. Natalie, she hunts.
Everyone is quiet. Everyone has run out of things to say.
Things like this are how Lottie knows it is almost over – more than just the feeling of her gut. Even days ago, they might have fought, they might have picked scabs healed over years ago, slights from middle school and boy problems, just to hear themselves talk. There is the prevailing sense that everyone, now, has given up. That the silence is not worth filling, because who is going to remember it later?
After all, you always give up right before it ends.
Nat hunts. Travis no longer bothers. (Well, she was better at it anyway, Lottie wants to point out, but Lottie doesn’t talk much anymore. Not loosely, lightly, like that.)
Misty disappears. Lottie does not care to track where she goes. If something is wrong, she will feel it, in whatever part of her body It has chosen to occupy today.
Shauna carves. When she doesn’t, she fills pages with tight scrawl, writing and rewriting the same words over and over again. They’re letters to Jackie, Lottie knows, even though she’s never looked. Apologies. Threats. Benedictions.
Van and Tai make conversation no one else is allowed to join. Sometimes, Lottie hears Van explaining the plots of movies the way she used to for the whole group, back when there was enough of them (and enough of hope) to warrant things like entertainment. Sometimes, Lottie hears Tai talking Van through the intricacies of her childhood, a web of little stories knit to make a whole person. Like Tai is getting rid of it all, leaving someone else to carry it before she leaves.
(Lottie saw Tai in the woods once, standing on a log, the hunting knife against her throat. Tai did not know she was there. Lottie waited until Tai had sobbed, one loud, huge, gasp, and dropped the knife in the dirt and gone away. She carried the knife back to camp with reverence, and with thanks.)
(Like Van Palmer or Taissa Turner would ever die without each other at their sides.)
Midday is when the sun is highest in the sky. They all knew this one fact from earth science class. Midday is when Nat returns from the hunt. She has two rabbits slung over her shoulder, which is more food than they’ve had in a couple of weeks. (Ironic, that it’s the last day, Lottie thinks. One last offering from the Wilderness before it lets them go.)
Nat gives the rabbits to Shauna – dragged out of a grief-spiral-haze to do her damn job – and she finds Lottie. She lays the spear on the ground at Lottie’s feet like an offering. It’s carved from a thick branch and it’s what Nat’s been using since the spring, since they ran out of bullets for the rifle. She’s just as handy with it, just as nimble and deadly. Heat quickens in Lottie’s chest when Nat wields it, primal and unfamiliar and coming from another time when things like that mattered.
Nat nods to Lottie, and Lottie nods to Nat, the Hunter, the Prophet. Nat settles into the dirt by Lottie, their worn sneakers touching at the toes.
“Why would you say someone is coming to find us?” Nat asks after a little while.
It’s something they had all given up on, even before the winter. Definitely by the time Jackie – the Angel, Lottie corrects, because it is easier to think of her like that. By the time Jackie… yeah. Nobody talked about finding or saving after Jackie.
“I know,” Lottie says, so softly she hardly hears her own voice, “that something is coming.”
“Something,” Nat repeats, and understands what Lottie wants her to, which is not: there are people on their way to save us. She understands what Lottie needs her to, which is: the delicate peace is about to be disturbed, and nothing will be the same again.
“Lottie,” Nat mutters, in that way of hers. Exasperated, desperate. She never looked to Lottie like the others, never needed anything from her, except maybe for Lottie to be okay. Nat will never be okay unless her team is okay. Lottie is her team.
No one cares about Lottie like that.
The Hunter stands up, looking down at the Prophet – no, it’s Nat, looking down at Lottie -- it’s so rare that they’re like this. Looking down, looking up. “Why would you say you don’t want to go back?” Nat asks.
Lottie’s eyes are shallow and splintered and she doesn’t have an answer. Nat wants one anyway.
“Haven’t you seen me, Natalie?” she says when Nat doesn’t leave her alone. “Haven’t you seen the- seen it growing into me?” No, only Lottie can see it. “Haven’t you seen me?”
Nat looks. At Lottie’s hands, covered in dirt and moss and clutching the roots of the tree. The long tresses of her hair caught on bark. Her eyes the same color as the ground, her skin the sky, her teeth the bones they throw away when they’re done surviving. Lottie is a bone, sharp and discarded. Raw to the very air. Nat is the marrow.
Nat walks away without answering. Lottie sits against the tree for another hour, or a lifetime more.
---
That afternoon, they see it. The helicopter flies lower over the trees than it probably should.
Natalie gives Lottie a look. But she knows, the way she has for almost two years, exactly how Lottie knew, and exactly why Lottie was scared. (The trees told her, and with the trees, Lottie is less lonely.)
They have nothing left to write an SOS message with. Van suggests setting a tree on fire, but she doesn’t really mean it. They start a bonfire anyway.
---
“What if they don’t see it?” is the question the Vessel – sorry, Lottie thinks, Taissa – poses.
The sun has set, and the helicopter has flown over once more but not made any attempt to contact them. They are using all the wood they can find to keep the bonfire burning.
“They’ve seen it,” Van points out, “because they came back. We just have to keep it high enough and- and burning so that they can get back to us.”
“Why haven’t they gotten us already?” This is Shauna. “They clearly know where we are.”
“You can’t land a fucking plane in the middle of the woods, Shauna,” Tai snaps. “They probably landed somewhere else and they’re trying to hike here, or something.”
They can’t hike here, Lottie thinks, but does not say, because the Wilderness does not want them here.
“Yeah, right, okay.” Shauna relents, but there is a bite that nineteen months of hell cannot dull out of her. If anything, it has only been sharpened. Travis nibbles on a piece of rabbit meat, and everyone looks at him like they expect him to say something, but of course he doesn’t. The Healer (Misty, Lottie grimaces, forces herself to say) opens her mouth ambitiously, but nobody wants her to say anything, so she doesn’t.
“Listen,” Van says, staring so hard into the fire her eyes might burn. “We wait for the morning. Someone keeps watch all night; we’ll do it in shifts. Next time we see the helicopter, we try to flag it down. We give them until… tomorrow night. That’s two days, right? That’s… enough time.”
“You’re giving our rescuers an ultimatum?” Shauna asks at the same time Tai says “how do you know there will be a next time?”
How do you know. That’s her cue.
They all look to Lottie.
She’s sitting on the opposite side of the fire, hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket. Nat is beside her, so close Lottie can feel her body heart. The Hunter. The Prophet. Lottie. Natalie. Fuck.
“They will find us,” Lottie says, and the words feel strange on her tongue, made of cotton from dehydration. She can’t remember drinking today. This is enough for Van, who sits back, satisfied. This is enough for Travis and Misty, who nod like Lottie’s reciting the gospel. Tai is skeptical but doesn’t say anything. Shauna just stares at Lottie, like she always does.
(This is Lottie’s job. She proclaims.)
And then, like clockwork, everyone looks to Nat.
“We wait,” she says after as long of a silence as she’s allowed before they start to get fidgety. “We wait for them to come to us. We’ve waited this long. Van’s right, they-” Nat coughs, choking on her own spit. “They know we’re here. We wait.”
(This is Nat’s job. She decides.)
(Without Lottie, they would not know; without Natalie, they would not act. Who the hell put two teenage fuck-ups in charge of surviving?)
(And that’s the whole thing, really.)
Everyone’s happy with Nat’s answer, except Lottie, who doesn’t feel much of anything. Well- she feels Nat’s eyes on the side of her face, questioning, apologizing. Looking for something deep in Lottie that drained away a long time ago.
Travis is given first watch and takes it silently, chest puffed, a man just happy to be chosen. He looks at Nat like he’s trying to communicate something, but she is already going to the plane, because it is dark and she has to pretend to sleep, for the good of them all.
She looks behind her, but not to Travis: to Lottie. “You coming?” she asks, voice scratchy. She holds out a hand.
Lottie hasn’t touched someone in a long time.
Nat’s hand feels like holding the roots of the Wilderness. They bed down in a corner of the plane, and Nat warps her arms around Lottie and holds her like it’s an instinct. Lottie loses consciousness (she can’t call it sleep) within minutes, but she hears Nat whisper in her ear before she does:
“I see you.”
---
A man in a parachute and pilot’s helmet finds them early the next morning. It’s a sudden intrusion during Tai’s watch. She almost stabs him and when she finally drops the spear, she breaks down crying.
The man stays for exactly an hour – Natalie counts – to assess what they need. They need a shit ton of medical supplies, some painkillers, probably, and food. Nat could have told him that. But he makes a checklist in his little notebook anyway and then he’s gone.
The helicopter is back later that night to airlift them out.
---
This is what they take back with them (physically, at least):
Shauna, her diaries. Clutches them to her chest and refuses to let them go. You really want to relive this shit? Nat is thinking, but does not say.
Travis, Javi’s carved wolf. The only real thing left of him.
Misty, her team jacket, ratty and dirty after more than a year but Quigley is still embroidered on the sleeve, so it has to mean something.
Van, the mask Tai made for her for Doomcoming, that she somehow still has.
Nat, a crumbling paper map of the wilderness, just in case. She tries to take the gun, but they don’t let her.
Tai takes nothing. To start over, you have to have a clean slate.
Lottie, the skull of one of the last rabbits Nat hunted for them, wiped clean with water and polished by her fingers. She worries the bone all the way back. She can’t stop touching it, because if she doesn’t touch it, she’ll touch Nat instead. And she can’t do that.
Nat would have thought she’d take the empty orange pill bottle she’s had on her for nineteen months, in case the people at the hospital need to know her prescription, but Lottie hurls it into the wilderness before they go to the helicopter when she thinks no one’s looking. A final offering.
---
This is what they take back with them – inside of them, inside bodies rotting and wasting and wicked, they carry these things:
Nat holds the thrill of watching an animal fall to a bullet close to her chest and protects it. So too with the feeling of Lottie wrapped around her at night, like the wilderness was one great ocean and Nat was a life raft. The dark, awful things she took pleasure in when the world had nothing else to offer her, those, she would never forget.
She would never forget feeling useful, having Tai look at her like she had actual worth, providing for a family, being the girl with the gun. Maybe she would want to forget, but she would never.
Lottie takes so many things – hunger that she never quite recovers from, scars that heal papery-white and mark her forevermore. A glassiness to her eyes whenever she hears the wind whistle that she can’t quite disguise, trying to parse the messages (is it safe to hunt today? Is today the day the wilderness betrays them?). She takes the taste of blood on her tongue, her own and others’, and she takes a fear that her every step might be the wrong one, that whatever she does, she’s leading them towards disaster.
But Lottie leaves things behind, too.
She leaves behind the Wilderness, which had held her and unmade her and remade her, and in a way she leaves behind a good friend, and her worst enemy, and herself, and all three of those are the same thing.
She waits before her feet leave the ground to step into the helicopter, despite the man telling her to come, quickly, and Nat catches her eyes over his shoulder, and nods, so simple, so easy. I know, Lottie.
Nat has scars that will never heal, too, and they’re on her heart. Lottie gets into the helicopter.
No, Charlotte Matthews gets into the helicopter. Lottie is left somewhere behind.
---
The helicopter takes them to Calgary. A van in Calgary takes them to an airport. A plane at the airport will take them to a bespoke hospital in Vancouver, where there is apparently a whole floor reserved just for them.
None of them want to get on a plane, but driving the distance isn’t really an option, so they go. They go because they’re told, and maybe it’s nice, adults telling them what to do after so long.
Seven shaken, torn bodies are escorted from an industrial aircraft hangar to a private plane while reporters and photographers scramble to see an inch of them.
Lottie feels the heat of everything intensely, senses that had been dulled for so long coming back to life, despite the pain medication coursing through her veins from the kind needles of the paramedics. She feels the flashes of the cameras and the words of the well-meaning reporters like lacerations on shallow skin. The world is rushing water in her ears.
They tell her, later, that before she got on the plane she turned around and screamed. She doesn’t remember it at all.
The only thing she remembers from that flight is Nat, getting up from the seat where her state-appointed paramedic had unceremoniously plopped her down and sliding in beside Lottie, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and kissing her hair. Nat stayed with her the whole flight, and never stopped touching her skin.
---
The hospital in Vancouver is bright, fluorescent – and also cold. But they are used to the cold, aren’t they?
Each of them are given a room, and matching pajamas, soft cotton pants and shirts that are probably an upgrade from the hospital gowns they would usually give out, cause these poor kids. That’s all they hear, every corner they turn – these poor kids.
After she is checked over by yet another set of nurses, who confirm that yes, the scar on her forehead is permanent, and yes, she is severely malnourished (no shit, Shirley) (the nurse’s name is not actually Shirley), and yes, there is something wrong with her brain, isn’t there? after all of that, they leave her alone with a soft towel and a shower. The water pressure is not very good, but the shower is warm, and that’s something.
Lottie dries herself slowly, dresses slowly, pads across the hospital floor in her paper slippers slowly. There is no one in the hallway when she looks, and the sun has set, and when did that happen? (She can’t see the sun all the time, anymore. She never thought something like that would hurt her like this.)
It’s much easier to see them all for who they are – not the Survivor, or the Healer, or the Butcher -- when they stand in the hallway, in the shadows of their doors, just small shapes in the darkness. Travis, Misty, Shauna, Taissa, Van, Lottie – right across the hall, Natalie. They all came to the door at the same time, like they all knew, like they’re all still wired together.
“I have the corner room,” Shauna says, and no one needs to ask any questions.
They drag pillows and blankets and pile up on Shauna’s floor. Tai and Van make a yin-yang with the curl of their bodies, Shauna leans against Travis like a pillow, and Lottie holds Nat in her arms and warps both legs around her waist, like a koala with a tree branch. Nat is warm, truly warm, and Lottie can’t remember the last time any of them were this warm. She smells like hospital soap and just below, in the roots of her hair:
The Wilderness.
They brought it back with them.
That’s what gets Lottie to fall asleep that first night.
---
In the morning, the nurses find them curled up together and tsk. But still, these poor kids. So nobody really says anything.
---
It takes exactly one day for them all to disappear.
Taissa is the first. Her parents arrive in Vancouver early in the morning, and after a lengthy conversation with the doctors, she is transferred to somewhere expensive in Boston and she’s hugging them all goodbye. She takes the longest with Van. They have a hushed, whispered conversation that Lottie tries hard not to listen to, but she hears words like forever and try and help.
A couple of hours later, Van slips away, and they get it piecemeal from the nurses that Taissa’s parents paid for a ride back to the States and Van will be following her girl, wherever she needs to. For however long that lasts, Lottie thinks cynically, and feels bad for thinking it.
Travis and Misty are next. Travis is reclaimed by his mother, weeping in his arms as she processes the loss of her husband and youngest son all over again, and Travis just stands there and holds her. Before he leaves, he gives Lottie a scrap of paper with his family’s house landline on it, and he asks her to call. Once upon a time, boys asked Lottie to call them, but Travis doesn’t mean it in the way they meant it. And Lottie says that she will.
(Maybe, she will.)
Misty tries to say goodbye, but nobody is all that interested in speaking to her.
Lottie and Nat and Shauna stick to each other, a triangle of traumatized girls, while the doctors poke at them again and again and again. They are given a strict schedule to eat on so that they don’t go crazy and actually eat themselves to death, which feels impossible, right now, but apparently it isn’t. Shauna’s looked at more than most, given the whole pregnancy thing, but it’s been almost a year and her body has somewhat healed. A miracle, they say. A miracle, all three of them agree, would have been the kid surviving, but oh well.
Each of them are given little cups of pills. Vitamin supplements, pain medication. Lottie has an extra, tossed in among all the others, blue and white and bigger than the rest. She isn’t sure what to do with it yet, so she palms them and stashes them in her pillowcase.
By the end of the first day, Shauna’s mother has arrived, and Lottie and Nat watch from the window as she is driven away, staring mournfully out the window, big eyes seeing nothing. Lottie wonders what kind of life Shauna is going back to. She wonders if Shauna cares, or if she stopped thinking about life when she found Jackie out in the snow.
---
So it’s just Lottie and Nat left behind.
Lottie, because her family is still trying to figure out what to do with a crazy-dead-not-dead daughter whose funeral cost them more than a trip to Madrid, and they’ll remind her of it.
Nat, because she isn’t sure if she has family left to worry about stuff like that.
The hospital prods and prods, but Nat doesn’t give them a phone number, an email, nothing. They ask Lottie, and she gives them the name of her father’s company and nothing more. That’s all they need to track him down, ideally.
Matthews Global Solutions are the last words Lottie says out loud, at least according to the nurses. Nat hears her talk plenty, when the sun has set and the strangers have disappeared. When it doesn’t matter that they’re inside, tucked into a bed, wearing clean clothes and smelling like soap and cradling full bellies. When they can still be the Prophet and the Hunter. Or whatever the fuck else they want to be.
---
On the first day of it just being the two of them, Nat comes and finds Lottie before the sun is up.
Lottie is awake – has been since the sun went down, actually – and is sitting in a stiff hospital chair by the window in her room. She has a book in her lap, which she can’t remember the name of but she’s pretty sure was required reading from last summer – or two summers ago, or whatever – but it doesn’t matter that she can’t remember the name cause she’s not actually reading it. Having it there is like a defense mechanism, or something. Nobody tries to talk to her if she’s reading.
Nat comes and finds her and sits down at her feet. They’ve been given some real clothes, so Nat is wearing a gray zip-up hoodie that is too big for her and a pair of Adidas track pants that she’s similarly swimming in. She’s quiet, just looking at Lottie, for a long time.
Lottie is looking out the window, at Vancouver, a city she’s starting to hate really slowly just for what it represents, but then she’s looking at Nat, and they’re looking at each other, and Lottie:
Stands up, goes over to the bed, and lets Nat lay down next to her, so they’re pressed side to side, their hands brushing each other but refusing to hold on in case something comes to drag them away.
“You’re not okay, right?” It should be offensive. But coming from Nat, Lottie knows exactly what she means, the unfinished half of the sentence: I’m not okay either. It’s a plea for acknowledgement, for someone else to point out how fucking insane it is that they have to just go back to the world like nothing happened.
Lottie shakes her head. Nat bites her lip.
“Yeah. I… yeah.” Swimming in the pile of random shit on the table next to Lottie’s hospital bed is a TV remote, which Nat fishes out and points at the boxy set hanging from the wall on the other side of the room. “Want to watch something? It’s kind of like white noise for me. It’s been helping me not… panic, I guess.”
Lottie reaches down so she can hold Nat’s hand, cause she just needs to for some reason, and says, quietly, “yeah,” her voice scratchy from disuse.
Nat practically beams, if her mouth were still capable of such a thing.
The nurses find them crammed into the tiny bed when it’s time for lunch, watching MTV, and none of them say anything because it shouldn’t be their place to tell these girls how to heal, even though they’re getting paid to heal them.
Eating is hard. The doctors said it’s because they shrunk out there, their bodies eating their muscles, stomachs contracting around nothing. Nat is able to get down a little bit at a time – soft things, like Jell-o and rice and soup that doesn’t taste like Jackie’s old belts – but never meat. The nurses had given her plain, unseasoned chicken and she’d thrown it right back up again. Her teeth tearing into it – it felt wrong.
It isn’t hard to notice that Lottie isn’t eating much. She nibbles on the corners of the crackers she’s given, something about extra acid in her stomach, but she spends most of the day sipping at a constantly-refilling bottle of water with electrolytes in it, barely puts anything down.
The nurses bring them toast and scrambled eggs today for lunch, because soft is still good for them. After they leave, Nat watches Lottie push the eggs around her plate and remembers, so strangely, a team sleepover when they’d all woken up early to go to Denny’s. Lottie had ordered eggs and hash and dumped so much ketchup on her plate it looked like someone’s throat had been slit.
When the nurse comes back in to check Lottie’s vitamin drip, Nat gets her attention with a little wave of her hand. “Do you think it would be okay if I got some ketchup?”
The nurse frowns. “I’m not sure acid is just what you need right now, honey.”
“I know, it’s just…” Nat looks down at her eggs mournfully, putting on her best victim pout. “I kinda missed flavors like that, out there.”
She’s not above manipulation. The plane crash/starvation survivor schtick always works.
The nurse brings a little packet of ketchup like the kind you grab by the fistful at McDonald’s. Nat hands it to Lottie wordlessly.
Lottie looks between the ketchup and Nat, who’s looking back at the TV like nothing just happened, like she didn’t remember that Lottie likes ketchup on her eggs and thinks they taste weird otherwise. Like it isn’t such a small thing that means so much.
“Thank you,” Lottie murmurs, squeezing as much of the packet onto her tray as possible.
They eat in silence for a little while, watching some black-and-white movie that’s playing on one of the daytime channels. Guys in suits with little pistols and pretty women with fur coats. Lottie thinks she might have done well as a 1930’s femme fatale. It’s a joke she might’ve cracked if the atmosphere was a little less somber and she was feeling a little more-or-less herself.
They spend the rest of the day lumped together in Lottie’s hospital bed, with the TV on as background noise. Nat presses herself up against Lottie’s longer frame, using her raised arms as cushions. There’s still something she can smell on Lottie, in her hair, under her skin – a whisper of the trees, of the dirt.
After the sun has set, and Lottie’s fingers gently brushing through Nat’s hair have gone still for long enough that she thinks Lottie is asleep, she asks: “what are you most scared of, for when we go back out there?”
She points with one crooked finger to the scary city outside the hospital room window.
Lottie’s chest stills, and then she says, shakily, “what, do you want an itemized list?”
Nat hadn’t been expecting a joke, and she laughs louder than she meant to. It feels nice, in her throat. She’s missed laughing. “Sure. Hit me.”
“Okay.” Lottie licks her still-chapped lips. “Four things. Number one, seeing my parents. I don’t want to know what they’re going to say, or answer any of their questions.” Nat nods; makes sense, from the little she knows about Malcolm and Bridgit Matthews. “Number two, having to remember how things work. Like traffic rules and how to pay for things at the mall. Little tiny things that I haven’t had to think about in so long. Number three, I- I don’t want to be by myself again.”
Nat leans up on one arm to look down at Lottie, at her stupidly big brown eyes and quivering lips. “I know it was all fucked up, but we were all together out there, and I didn’t go a day without seeing someone else, who I loved. And now I’m going to be alone again, and I don’t really like who I am when I’m alone.” Lottie chews on her bottom lip, tearing off chunks of dead skin with her teeth, and Nat reaches up to stop her – touches her so gently with the pads of her fingers. She feels Lottie shiver.
“What’s number four?”
Lottie’s eyes are unfocused. “What?”
“Number four, Lot.” Nat traces her hand across Lottie’s lips, down the side of her face, and smiles at the way Lottie tracks the movement with her eyes. “The other thing you’re most scared of out there.”
“Oh.” Lottie hesitates, then sits up. At first, Nat thinks she’s not going to tell her, but then Lottie reaches a hand into her starchy pillowcase and pulls out a handful of little somethings.
White and blue pills. Three of them, settled neatly in Lottie’s palm. Nat reaches out a finger to poke them; their surfaces are slightly sticky, and they clack when they roll together. They don’t look like any of the pills they’ve been making Nat take.
“What are they?”
“Loxipene.” Lottie stares down at the pills in her hand like they might grow teeth and bite into her. “My old prescription. For the… you know.”
Nat does know. She had seen Lottie rubbing her thumb over the words on the prescription bottle time and time again until the ink was faded away. She had known Lottie to talk to the shadows even before the plane had crashed. A part of the team always knew, and had never asked, because that was the Yellowjackets way.
Not anymore.
“Do you… why haven’t you been taking them?” Nat asks carefully. “If it makes all the crazy stuff go away?”
Lottie shrugs. “I guess I got kind of used to the crazy stuff. And I don’t think I’m the same girl who took these, so maybe I’m… scared if I take them again I’ll become someone totally new, and I don’t want to, I guess.”
Nat lays a hand over Lottie’s, closing her fingers around the ominously bright pills. Too bright against Lottie’s brown skin.
Nat doesn’t want to go back to the girl she was, either.
“Take your time,” she says, even though she isn’t sure if that’s the right thing to say, but Lottie just nods and shoves the pills back into her pillowcase, and then flops down dramatically on the bed, tugging Nat down with her.
“Stay with me tonight,” Lottie murmurs into Nat’s hair, and like the good little hunter she is, she complies.
---
They wake up like one person.
Lottie’s arms are around Nat’s neck, fingers tangled in her stringy, dingy blonde hair. (Half brown, half blonde now, still beautiful, would taste like home to Lottie if she could take it in her mouth without it being weird.) One of Nat’s legs is flung over Lottie’s hip, the other pressed between hers so their feet are lined up, fitting against each other like puzzle pieces. The cotton pajama pants Nat is wearing had ridden up in the night, and her cold skin presses against Lottie’s.
Nat blinks herself awake slowly, used to rising quietly to begin the day. Lottie had thought it might take longer to adjust to sleeping in a bed again, with real pillows and blankets and padding, but she supposes sleep is one of those things the body just knows how to do – like how for normal people, they can trust the things they see and hear, and eat without throwing it all back up again. She’s been sleeping deeply in the warmth of the hospital bed, and even more soundly with Nat pressed against her.
Nat, though, has always been a shallow sleepover. Lottie knows this from before, when any of them moving an inch across the cabin floor would make Nat sit up and scrub at her eyes, and from before, when she would periodically get up during sleepovers to find an open window for a smoke. Lottie used to watch her secretly, eyes shining in the moonlight.
It’s not a secret now.
Nat sits up, disentangling their limbs, and Lottie watches shamelessly as Nat stretches her arms above her head, her ill-fitting shirt rising and showing a sliver of her back, alabaster and marked with scars. Little scratches and cuts that may heal, but haven’t yet.
Lottie expects Nat to get up and go to her own room, or something, but she lays back down, face to face with Lottie, and tangles their feet together again so some part of them is always touching.
The sun is barley risen, and Nat’s eyes are the moss of the wilderness in the low light. Unbidden, Lottie says, “what do you think your funeral was like?”
It was never something they talked about out there. The idea that anyone might have mourned them, or forgotten them, or buried empty caskets under depressing tombstones. Although sure, it probably happened, and they all thought about it, from time to time – no one could say it out loud. It was like admitting that they were already dead, and all they were doing was waiting for their empty bellies to suck them dry. Even in the end, it was too hard to do that.
The Nat Lottie had known might have snorted, or made some crack about nobody having loved her enough to have given her a funeral, but the Nat in Lottie’s bed right now just closes her eyes.
“I think it was small. Probably just my mom. And I’d bet she couldn’t afford a wake or anything, or… or yeah, anything. So it’s probably just a marker in the yard, or whatever.” It, her grave. Lottie wonders if Nat will ever visit it someday, spit on it, maybe, lay flowers on it, maybe. “What about yours?”
The question is gentle, but somehow, the hot prongs of it had made their way into Lottie’s heart long ago and the answer is already on the tip of her tongue. “Too big of a deal. They would have overcompensated,” they being Lottie’s shitty parents, “to make it look like they actually cared while I was alive. Music, photos, fancy casket, the whole thing.” She rolls over to stare at the ceiling. The symbol is patterned into the panels there, but she pretends she doesn’t see it. “I’m sure they invited people who never knew me. And I’m sure they used that one portrait of me from sophomore year that my father had taken that made me look like a murder victim.”
Nat doesn’t say anything, but she tangles their fingers together. Lottie traces the fine bones of Natalie’s hand, the hard nubs of her knuckles, the little spots where she knows there are freckles, from too long looking.
“Do you think,” Nat asks carefully, “your parents knew the plane was going to go down?”
Lottie thinks for a second.
“No. If they wanted to get rid of me, they would have done it in a way that generated less publicity.”
---
They go the whole day, and no one comes for them.
The nurses come back halfway through the day, after they’ve watched at least four movies on the fuzzy classics channel on the hospital TV. They probe when they bring lunch: anyone we can call?
Nat, once again, shrugs and says not sure. They ask Lottie, but Lottie doesn’t answer. She barely responds when they call her name, eyes glued glassy to the TV set. So they turn to Nat, and they ask her.
“Her dad is Malcolm Matthews,” Nat tells them, and feels Lottie flinch beside her. “I don’t know… their phone number, though.”
(That’s a lie. She had it memorized, once, back when things like phone numbers mattered.)
Just when the sun is starting to set, the nurses coax Lottie into a shower and take the opportunity to pull Nat out into the hall. They say things like severe trauma coupled with psychosis and diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was six and we weren’t sure if you knew.
Of course I knew, Nat wants to scream, she’s my best friend, and she means it. But she can’t react, because scratching a nurse’s face with her too-long fingernails might test the patience of everyone who’s been tolerating her thus far.
So Nat just nods and shrugs and says “okay, do you need me to do something?” The nurse who had pulled her away clearly doesn’t know what to do with this reaction; she just sends Nat back into the room – Lottie’s, but Nat hasn’t been sleeping in her assigned bed, so what does it matter? The nurse’s name is Theresa, and she’s the same one who’s been checking the toilet for flushed pills and vomit every morning. She doesn’t trust them.
She shouldn’t.
Lottie gets out of the shower, and she somehow looks worse that way, with her hair all damp and her skin dewy. She lets Nat go after her and, damn – for all Nat feels less than real now, less than whatever she was pretending to be before, creature comforts like hot water do something to her. It’s a little easier to manage humanity in the claustrophobic little shower stall, the steam scalding her skin.
When she’s done, smelling like hospital soap and that residual survival smell that she doesn’t think will ever go away, she goes back into the room in just the thin hospital bathrobe. Lottie is sitting up in the bed in the t-shirt Nat had left behind, spooning leftover Jell-o into her mouth. Her mouth twists into a pout when she sees Nat, still damp, hair dripping on the floor.
“Can you…?”
“Yeah.” Nat climbs on top of Lottie, slides one hand beneath the collar of her shirt – Nat’s shirt, the hospital’s shirt, does it matter – and kisses her soundly, her hand over Lottie’s heart. Both of Lottie’s hands go into Nat’s hair, tugging hard at the brown roots.
It is like it was out in the wilderness, and it isn’t. Both of them are warmer. Both of them are cleaner. When Nat ghosts a hand over Lottie’s ribcage, she can’t feel the bones quite as prominently as she could before, despite how little Lottie’s actually been eating. Her heart feels stronger, too, a raggedy little muscle pushing everything it has through Lottie’s lips and into Nat’s, like she would give her her life if she had to. Like she hasn’t already.
The world isn’t ending anymore, but Lottie kisses her like it already did, lips hungry and desiring for flesh (again) as they descend to Nat’s neck, her incisors slicing through thin skin. Nat feels the warm trail of blood and inhales sharply when Lottie’s tongue darts out to chase it.
“They’re gonna notice.” She used to say this about the others – the team. Now, she says it about the nurses, and means it in a different way. Not they’re gonna ask questions. But they’re gonna think you hurt me. Or they’re gonna think I hurt myself.
What’s the fucking difference?
Nat tugs Lottie down, so they’re both lying on their sides, and she presses them together chest to chest and when Lottie is done cleaning up her neck, she reattaches them again at the lips and Nat lets herself asphyxiate. She didn’t want to die out there, in the cold and the dirt, but in here where it’s warm and she has a little something back, even if it isn’t herself – she’s done all she can. Maybe this is the right way to go, with Lottie Matthews devouring her, piece by intricate piece.
They kiss until they fall asleep, and neither of them mention it in the morning.
---
Lottie misses the self that she left behind in the wilderness, but she’s getting used to living again. Sleeping between layers of sheets, changing her clothes with the rise and fall of the sun, eating food that was meant to be eaten.
She still doesn’t talk to anyone but Nat, but you don’t need to talk to be human. You just need to breathe, and school your face so the panic doesn’t show. Lottie is getting good at that. She blank-stares at whatever she has to until they leave her alone.
She doesn’t want her parents to come back, but she wants to get out of this fucking hospital. At night, her arms wrapped around Nat, she daydreams about stealing an ambulance and driving away, building a life that’s just them and nothing else, and it can be that way forever.
---
Nat doesn’t think she ever wants to leave this hospital.
It’s nice and hazy here, and so far they haven’t let up with the morphine, which, yes – she’s rationing it out, drawing out the high as long as she can, and it helps. It keeps everything but Lottie at a distance, and she needs that right now.
Nat thinks that maybe the rest of her life could be lived within these four walls, eating shitty hospital food and watching reruns on TV and living half of a life. It could maybe even be upgraded to three-quarters of a life if Lottie would stay here with her, would never leave her side and would treat her like royalty under the cover of darkness. Lottie’s tongue on her skin and fingers in her hair are bringing her back to life, stroke by stroke.
Nat pops one of those extra strength pain pills and thinks, I don’t hate this.
---
On the third day, Nat wakes up early and creeps into the shower, pressing gentle kisses to Lottie’s forehead, more gentle than she deserves. While she’s in there, the nurse Lottie vaguely recognizes as the-one-probably-assigned-to-her comes into the room to check on her, read obscure numbers off of the chart attached to the end of her bed, and remove the IV drip from her arm; Lottie’s been getting her strength back, doesn’t need it all the time now, although she likes the way it makes her feel cold and numb.
The nurse hands Lottie a little paper cup of pills, and Lottie takes them slowly. She slides the biggest under her tongue and holds it there.
The nurse flicks through the charts and, disinterested, says “we’ve gotten ahold of your parents. They’ll be here soon.”
All of the nurses have gotten tired of trying to get Lottie to talk, so this one just smiles tightly at her and leaves the room to do whatever it is nurses have to do when they’re not trying to turn monsters back into girls again. Lottie rubs at the callus that has formed on her thumb – she’s not sure from where – and, insistently, tugs at it with her teeth. The skin rips and she peels it off, letting the open air sting the sensitive area. It still doesn’t really feel like anything.
They’ll be here soon. The window outside Lottie’s hospital room, once oppressively transparent, now feels inviting. She could climb down the side of the building and sneak through the city and sleep on park benches among the birds and eat from the dirt and the trees. She could rob a bank and buy a houseboat and never set foot on solid land again. She could do just about anything that isn’t going home with her parents.
But no. Because Nat comes back into the room, the corners of her lips drawn back in a facsimile of a smile, and she reaches out with grabby hands at Lottie, who lets her come back into the bed. Nat smells medicinal, but Lottie takes fistfuls of her wet hair and tugs anyway, bringing their lips crashing together.
Nat, at least, is here. Nat, who is synonymous with trees and dirt and the scary haze of unreality, who doesn’t exist outside these four walls either, and never existed within them to begin with.
---
Nat, who maybe never existed at all.
Lottie is napping when she thinks of it. Nat is a warm and steady presence on the other side of the hospital bed, but hallucinations have been warm before, and they have been steady. She doesn’t know, she can never really know, that Nat didn’t pack up and leave when the others did. That Nat is still here and still wants her, or that she even sees her at all.
Fuck.
Daylight filters in through the hospital’s thin curtains and stains Lottie’s face. She climbs out of bed and digs under her pillowcase for the little stash of blue and white pills.
There’s a cup in the bathroom; she takes two of them with water. She goes back to sleep.
Nat is still there when she wakes up.
---
In the dark of the night, Nat and Lottie lay beneath the hospital sheets. Nat’s hands are under Lottie’s too-thin shirt, thumbing along her ribs. Lottie, predictably, has hers tangled in Nat’s hair.
“Promise me something,” Lottie asks, but her voice sounds wrong even to her own ears. “Promise me that- you won’t leave me like the others did.”
Nat’s mouth cracks open. “The others didn’t leave you, Lot. They just had other places to be.”
It’s true, but it’s not. Lottie sniffs. She pushes herself closer to Nat, so that her cold hands lay flat against her stomach. “You don’t.”
“Yeah.” Nat licks her chapped lips, eyes never leaving Lottie’s.
“We understand each other. We’re the only two who do.”
It’s too much, or maybe it’s not enough, or maybe Nat just closes her eyes because she’s tired and it’s late and neither of them have had enough to eat for more than a year. Maybe Lottie’s hands scratching gently along her scalp just have that effect on her. A girl can dream.
“I don’t- I’d never leave you on purpose, Lottie.” Nat’s eyes stay closed, her mouth tipping into a sleepy frown. “Wouldn’t wanna do that.”
“Yeah.” Lottie leans in to press a soft kiss to the corner of Nat’s mouth and watches as her lips chase Lottie, even when she leans back. “No, you would never do that.”
“Would never,” Nat hums, and then her head is lolling against Lottie’s shoulder, and she’s asleep.
---
Lottie’s parents arrive before Nat wakes up in the morning.
They come to see her in her hospital room, but when they take it all in – Nat curled around her like a mother fox around her pup, Lottie’s sunken eyes and stringy hair – they escort her out into the hallway to talk.
They bring a nice lavender dress for Lottie to wear, and some conditioner for her hair, and her mother places a hand on her shoulders and says “my darling girl” and Lottie just stares at the ground.
Together, the three of them – while Nat still slumbers away, and Lottie wonders if maybe she should have stopped giving Nat her dose of sleeping pills after all – they meet with the psychiatrist assigned to the survivors’ case. He tells them Lottie hasn’t been talking, hasn’t been doing much of anything. Her mother and father look at each other over her head and nod firmly, as if saying this is what we thought, and there’s a plan in place.
There’s always a contingency plan in place for Charlotte Matthews.
They send her back to gather her things, but Lottie doesn’t have things, she just has Nat, and Nat won’t count as a carry-on to Switzerland. (God, if only she would – Lottie would take her everywhere.)
But Nat is still asleep when she returns. And she can’t wake her up just to tell her, she can’t. She can’t say much of anything at all. Even around Natalie. There’s nothing left to say.
---
Nat wakes up, blinking medicated sleep from her eyes, and Lottie is standing at the foot of the bed like a ghost in a pale dress. Clean and pretty. No, it’s not Lottie. It’s someone else who Nat never really thought she’d see again.
“Lottie?” she asks, but Lottie is gone. Charlotte Matthews waves one hand in a silent goodbye, and then she’s leaving, feet dragging against the ground as she disappears from the room, from the hospital, from Natalie’s life.
And that’s it. That’s fucking it.
“Don’t ever make me promise you anything, ever again!”
Nat screams it as loud as she can, but she never knows if Lottie hears her or not.
---
They don’t hear from each other again. (Until.)
Charlotte wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, the image of Travis’ hanging body still fresh on the backs of her eyelids, and she thinks there is a cold gun barrel pressed against the roof of her mouth. She feels and feels but there is nothing there.
Natalie’s name drifts through her mind, unbidden, like a prayer. Like a small, forgotten thing.
So, this is why Charlotte is still alive. To make sure Natalie doesn’t do anything stupid.
She gets out of bed.