Chapter Text
It had been over a decade since Natalie last saw any of her teammates.
Ten years since she’d even spoken to any of them, save the couple of short phone calls between her and Taissa- getting Nat out of jail and into rehab right before she turned 21, and then again a few years later.
They all existed in her mind as constants, as stains of her past that she could never scrub out. At the same time, though, they were fading with time and with distance. It’s like Natalie remembered some idea of each of them, some threads woven tightly into the fiber of her being, but was steadily losing touch with their faces, their voices. Even- and maybe especially- the ones of those who survived.
The couple of years immediately following their rescue were almost impossible to remember. It took Natalie some time to get out of Wiskayok, unlike Taissa and Van and Lottie who all split mere months after getting back. Even Misty had taken her ass to a state college an hour away, leaving only Shauna and Nat in the suffocating confines of their hometown .
She worked odd jobs to pay for drugs and liquor and half of her mom’s living expenses. She grieved the loss of her teammates and the Wilderness until the aching emptiness became solitude and the solitude became solace. She saved what little money she could under a loose ceiling tile in her childhood bedroom, tried not to pull any of it out when she got especially desperate for pills.
And she was quiet. Silent, almost, besides social conventions and clipped responses. There was nothing left of her worth using words for. Nothing worth talking about.
Somehow, eventually, her purpose came in the form of the local AutoZone where she landed a job right after her first stint in rehab. The work was satisfying, easy. There was always an answer to what headlight works for what car or which fuse to get and never any life-or-death situations. Natalie picked it up easily, her brain categorizing information and catching patterns as weeks passed.
Her manager was a butch in her mid-40s, pink-cheeked with stubby fingers and a short spiked haircut. She went by “Cizz” for a reason unknown to Nat (even though she learned her real name was Jennifer after taking her credit card to pick up a case of beer for the breakroom). Cizz saw something in Natalie, whether it was her ability to keep her head down and do her job, or the way she could drink or smoke any of the 200lb DudeBros they worked with under the table, she wasn’t sure. But Cizz kept an eye on Nat. Pulled her out of her own bullshit before hitting rock bottom, kept her coming to work, serving a purpose no matter how menial. Cizz even paid for her second trip inpatient, and kept her job waiting for her on the other side.
Nat never felt like she deserved such kindness, but some part of her did need it. She was 22 and had lost every single guiding figure of her life, either through death or a liquor induced haze. Cizz kept her alive. Kept her moving.
Nat would sometimes go home with Cizz after work. They’d chainsmoke and work on the revolving door of project cars in her overly hot garage, splitting cheap takeout meals and the occasional joint. Most weeks, it was probably the only thing Natalie had to look forward to. The inside of a car was predictable, unemotional. Something she could fix without any existential consequences or obstacles. Something she could understand through the fog of her trauma.
And Cizz didn’t pry. Didn’t ask dumb questions about the crash, didn’t ask about the times where Nat would get lost in her own head and pinch at her skin until it was bruised or bleeding. She focused on the engines. On the parts. On what goes where and what does what. And Nat loved her for it. At least, in whatever broken form of love could come from a person with so much fucking guilt.
But Nat could never stay on the wagon for long.
All it took was a random stranger recognizing her at a bar, asking invasive questions, making invasive accusations that, unfortunately, weren’t all wrong.
She had slammed his head into a table at the mere mention of Ben’s name, which was bad enough for her to catch a charge in the first place, but she only got into real trouble after the cops found the eight ball of coke in her purse.
It always seemed ironic to her that the punishment for possessing a bag of powder was more severe than causing actual bodily harm to another human, but then again, most laws seemed flawed upon her return to civilization.
After all was said and done, after being bailed out by Taissa and completing her mandatory twelve week stay at the rehabilitation center at the edge of town, Cizz fired Nat. Sent her on her way with a $500 cash “severance” and keys to the most recent car they had fixed- a forest green 1989 Ford Ranger, with the paint scratched to all hell and the bucket seats broken and useless in the back of the cab.
Natalie took the hint. On some gray Tuesday in September of 2003, unannounced and quiet, she left New Jersey.
The trailer park and her mother and her job grew further behind her as she drove west, refusing to grieve another broken half-life. It was two weeks of driving and sleeping and rationing her savings through the flattest parts of the US before Nat holed up in a public library to check her emails.
There was nothing important, no one checking in on her, just some stupid copy-pastas and reminders for bills she no longer had to pay. That is, apart from one from the Wiskayok AutoZone. No body text, just the subject line with a 701 phone number and Cizz’s automatic email signature.
It took another week for her to call it.
“Casselton Trucking Center,” a lilting northern accent drawled from the other end of the gas station pay phone. “This is Sawyer.”
“This is- uh- Natalie. Scatorccio. I got your number from Cizz?”
There was a pause, some shuffling. “What the hell kind of name is Cizz?”
“Oh,” Nat stalled, uncertain. “It’s a nickname, or something, I think. Maybe you know her as Jennifer?”
“Ohhh, fuck, right. Jenny did mention something the last time she called. You’re- I wrote it down somewhere- Nat?”
“I, uh. Yes. I’m Nat. I worked for Ci- Jennifer for a while. She sent me your number.”
“Yeah, my kid sister talked pretty highly of you. Told me to offer you a job if you wanted it.”
Nat’s head spun, trying to pull any information about Cizz’s family from her memory. But her and Nat’s relationship wasn’t one of sharing family dynamics and life stories. It was affection through anticipating the part one of them would need next, through showing up to work with two coffees instead of one. It wasn’t ever verbal.
“What kind of job?” she asked, finally, figuring that if she trusted anyone in the god-forsaken state of New Jersey, it was Cizz.
“Mechanic work. Diesel trucks. I’m just out west of Fargo.”
Nat fidgeted with the cord of the phone. “I’m not, like, licensed or anything though.”
“Kid, it’s North Dakota. As long as you do your job, no one cares.”
She was thoroughly confused- leave it to Cizz to be all cryptic and weird- but she didn’t necessarily get any red flags from Sawyer. And she also didn’t have any other prospects, or really anything to lose.
“I’d like to take you up on that offer, then,” she concluded somewhat awkwardly in an attempt to be professional.
“Alright,” Sawyer confirmed, to the same degree of awkwardness as Nat. At least they had something in common.
One more phone call, a couple of short email exchanges, and six days later, Nat landed herself in Casselton, North Dakota.
It was a poor excuse for a town - less than a single square mile of dilapidated houses and bars before dispersing into homesteads and farmland. Sawyer lived seven or so miles outside of town in a converted barn with his wife, Madison, his 6 year old daughter, Kimber, and two German wirehaired pointers that seemed to have full human rights.
The shop was a few dozen yards from the house, a massive metal rectangle with 12 foot tall garage doors at either end and a big corner walled off for an office and bathroom. Semi cabs sat half-constructed on the concrete or in lifts, imposing and so much bigger than what Nat was used to.
“So, Natalie,” Sawyer started, taking a seat behind his unkempt desk. He was scrawnier and much taller than Cizz, but their faces were uncannily similar. “Or Nat?”
“Nat is fine.”
“Okay, Nat, how about you tell me what you can offer me and then we can work out an arrangement. Sound good?”
Natalie’s anxiety spiked, the feeling warm and sharp in her chest. It had been so long since she had felt anxiety about something as mundane as a job interview and it almost felt… good? Normal? Like she hadn’t spent her 18th year of life starving and hunting and committing humanitarian crimes that left permanent bloodstains in the gaps between her teeth. Or that she’d spent twelve cumulative months in rehab over the past five years.
It felt like she was just a regular human person in their early 20s, doing regular civilized things.
She cleared her throat.
“Yeah, so, I’ve been working for Jennifer off and on for about three years. Most of it was retail stuff, pointing customers to the right products for their vehicle and such. We did a lot of mechanic work on the side, and I guess I got pretty good at it. I know my way around most engines, I think, and I learn fast. The diesel stuff is new to me, but I’m sure I can pick it up.”
“You good with all the basics? Rotating tires, changing oil, brakes?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
“That works for me,” Sawyer shrugged, shuffling some papers on his desk. He was a man of few words, like his sister, and Nat already appreciated it.
“You got a place to live?”
Natalie absently pinched at the skin on her forearm. “Uh… no. I don’t. But I’ve been living out of my Ranger for a few weeks while traveling so I was planning to just do that until I could find something.”
“There’s a loft,” Sawyer pointed to the ceiling. “On top of this office. You can rent it out if you want.”
“How much?”
“Consider it part of your pay. The loft and two grand a month, cash, under the table. I don’t fuck with the IRS.”
Natalie actually, genuinely, wanted to smile. “Deal.”
North Dakota was painfully boring at times, flat beige land and desaturated skies. Natalie missed trees, and rain, and real cities.
The cold here - the cold was something else. Brutal and bruising months of Sawyer and her dunking their hands into a bucket of warm water every few hours just so they could keep turning bolts.
Strangely, though, the cold was a sort of comfort. She didn’t have to fear it out here. She had hot water and food and real winter clothes and even if she didn’t? There was at least shelter and dozens of rifles on the property. There was a type of safety here she had never known.
And there was also some sort of peace. On the warmer days, the wind rolled through the fields and turned the land into a shimmering fabric. The sun lingered in the sky until 11:30 on the dead nights of summer, the sky a rainbow bleeding out with time.
Sawyer had no schedule, so neither did Nat. They worked when there was work and stopped when it was done. She spent her off days exploring Fargo, combing thrift stores and record shops and running errands for Sawyer.
And, most importantly, the wilderness wasn’t as loud as it had been. It still hummed in every stretch of silence, still invaded her dreams and woke her up drenched and nauseous some nights. But it felt smaller somehow, it could be concealed by mindless errands or whatever compartmentalized zone she entered when working.
For an entire year, Nat lived in this superficial state. It was nice- she wasn’t drowning in her own memories as much as she once was, but she wasn't necessarily present, either. She was floating, numbed out by repetition and the slowness of Casselton and an expensive Busch Lite habit between her and Sawyer. It was okay. It was what she needed.
Cizz never called. Sawyer never mentioned her. But they proved to be one and the same when Sawyer pulled Nat into his office with a stack of paper packets.
“What’s up?” Nat asked cautiously, anxiety mounting in her chest.
“You’re good at your job, kid,” Sawyer sighed, almost reluctantly. “You can do this shit by yourself now. And you’re better than being stuck here. ‘Specially at your age.”
Natalie felt the floor drop from under her.
“What do you mean?”
Sawyer started flipping the packets in front of her, one by one. “ASE exam,” he started. ”Letter of rec. Signed log of service hours. And applications-“ he splayed three in front of her like cards. “Portland, Chicago, Denver. There’s jobs for diesel mechanics everywhere.”
She took a long minute to take in the information. “I- uh- thank you, first of all. For putting all of this together. But what if I want to stay here?”
“You don’t want to stay here, kid.”
And something deep within Natalie knew he was right.
Two months later, Nat watched Sawyer, Madison, and Kimber waving from their porch in her rearview mirror until her tires kicked up enough red scoria dust to blot them out entirely.
A few months shy of 28 and Nat had finally found a semblance of peace.
She had a decent job working on logging trucks, made decent money. She rented her own condo in a complex that sat right above uptown Portland, shrouded in trees but close to the city. She saw her friends a couple times a week. Went to concerts and drag shows and shitty Burnside bars, only drinking enough to get tipsy. Enough to dull the permanent ache in her stomach and let her forget about what she’d done, if only for an hour.
And she stayed away from drugs. Mostly. Indulged in a joint or gummy with her friends when they decided to stay in instead of go out. Maybe some shrooms or acid at the bigger, louder shows. She’d never fully outgrow her trauma. She didn’t want to. She didn’t deserve to live without guilt for what she had done. But she was coping, she was stable. She had learned to live with the baggage. She kept her worst habits in check.
They visited her in dreams. Jackie, Ben, Mari. Laura Lee sometimes, Javi even less. And they were kinder over time, more forgiving. But they were her burden to bear. It was Natalie who could remember them in their honesty, without the canopy of lies the survivors used to cover their asses after leaving the wilderness.
There was a heavy comfort in how she carried all of them. As if honoring them in her memory could eventually earn her freedom back, even though it never would.
Even though she wouldn’t allow it.
It was hard, near impossible, for Natalie to keep the self-punishing voices at bay. Even now. She needed them. She deserved them. And at the same time, she had to manage. She had to wake up each morning and feed herself. She had to go to work. She had to find a path forward no matter how much her past dragged her back. She had to be stronger than the feral animal caged inside of her.
So she found things that helped. Loud music, a busy schedule, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, extroverted friends. In her most suffocated state, it was tattoos. Always tattoos. They were pain with a reward at the end, they were something permanent on her fleeting physical body, they were stability.
They were socially acceptable masochism.
The amount of blank skin on Natalie's arms diminished each year. The list was somewhere in the 30s at this point, building with each passing breakdown. Each piece was a mirror, a reflection, a memory. She had constellations and a hunting knife and a circle of spikes around her left elbow. A rib cage, a raven, a row of teeth. Some thistles, some vines, some roses with dainty little thorns. Anything that was a motif, a symbol, of her life.
May was never an easy month. This year, the thirteenth would mark twelve years since the crash, and Natalie felt the day approaching in splitting headaches and early morning nausea. It was harder to forget in May. It was harder to maintain momentum.
A sunny Friday after work brought about the latest breakdown. The trees moved just a little too similarly. The air was just a little too familiar. Natalie’s body was in Oregon, but her head was stranded hundreds of miles north and eleven years in the past.
And this lapse of control, this immersion, scared the shit out of her. More than her ignorant relationship with drugs. More than the ghost of her father.
Natalie could carry the people with her, but not the place. Not the half alive entity, or the personification of a mass psychosis of teenage girls. Not whatever was with them out there. Nat could only keep pushing if she wasn’t there. If she was civilized, sheltered. If she kept herself in her body.
So, she wandered into a tattoo shop, alone. One of those open studios in west Portland with lots of thriving plants and big windows but absolutely no parking or HVAC system. The new-age ones that only hired men if they passed a certain line of Portland-style quirkiness or queerness.
She didn’t even really know that she wanted a tattoo, but she wanted out of her head. She wanted to get back in her body, to compartmentalize.
The front desk was unmanned, so Natalie planted herself on the cracked green leather couch and started thumbing through flash books. Lots of trendy minimalism and feathers. A few trying their hand at hyper-realism and a few super traditional artists. The one that maintained her interest, though, was the one with the purple cover. The one filled with dissected animals and diagrams of organs and taxidermy. They churned her stomach in just the right way. They’d be at home on her body.
“Do you have an appointment?” A soft voice floated towards Natalie’s ears.
“No,” she started, turning one more page before peeling her eyes off the art and towards the person. “Just looking.”
And it took a second, or five, to figure out who the fuck Natalie was looking at. She registered the clothes first, a lavender slip dress and a draping teal shawl. Then the tattoos, delicate ornamental pieces like jewellery across warm olive skin. High cheekbones and dark brown hair and eyes that knew something. A thin silver scar sitting right above raised eyebrows.
“Natalie?” she asked, stunned and pale, like she wasn’t really sure if Nat was real.
Nat stood up, then sat back down. Opened her mouth and took a breath as if she knew what she was about to say. Managed nothing but a deadpanned,
“What the fuck.”
“What are you doing here?” Lottie marveled, stepping towards the couch like the distance might change something.
“I live here,” Nat responded, simply, too tongue tied for pleasantries. “What are you doing here?”
“I work here,” Lottie gestured around the shop, then to the purple binder still clutched between Nat’s chipped black fingernails. “Obviously.”
Silence fell between the pair, bewildered and awkward.
“These are yours?” Nat tried, going for confidence and giving the flash book a little wave. “That tracks.”
“Why’s that, Natalie?” Lottie’s voice relayed Nat’s name like honey, like music, betraying all of the sincerity that Nat was trying to hide with her own words. Her breath filled the quiet before answering.
“They’re all just so eerie, haunted…” Nat trailed off before deciding to finish her thought. “... and, uh, beautiful. It just makes sense for you.”
Lottie’s lips pressed into something of a smile.
“So you’re scared of me,” she concluded.
Natalie scoffed.
“Like hell I am. You’re dressed like a fuckin ayahuasca cult leader, or something.”
“Ouch, Nat,” Lottie teased, fake-wounded. “I was going more for Wiccan cult leader, but it's probably all the same to you, huh?”
“If it walks like a cult and talks like a cult,” Nat shrugged.
Another suffocating pause, pregnant with unwanted memories and unsaid words. Lottie’s eyes softened into something familiar.
“You haven’t changed.”
Natalie just nodded.
“You have.”
Lottie shifted her weight, as if she was considering whether to be proud or insulted. She stared at Nat with a gaze more than a decade old. Like they were still 15, on a soccer field, and nothing that bad had happened yet. Not her dad, not the crash, not the hell they escaped. She had changed, yes, but she was still Lottie.
“So, did you, like, want a tattoo?” Lottie asked, breaking the silence to figure out where to go next.
Natalie felt the uncertainty, too. There was no manual for navigating this interaction. No semblance of normalcy to cling to. Whatever history there was between her and Lottie was far from mundane.
“I guess,” Nat concluded. “If you don’t feel weird tattooing me.”
Lottie huffed.
“We’ve been through weirder."
The tension lifted as the pair worked through the familiarity of placing, shaving, stenciling. It was kind of like making a new friend, but one that already knew her baggage. One that she didn’t have to give the rehearsed disclaimer: Yes, she was on the Yellowjackets plane. Yes, it was horrible and they starved and scavenged and managed. No, she did not ever want to talk about it further. And no, she was not interested in any future camping or hiking trips.
She told Lottie about how she landed here. About Wiskayok after Lottie left, about Cizz and North Dakota and the niche she’s molded her life to.
Lottie’s explanations were a little more filtered. Short sentences outlining the timeline of being sent to Switzerland, of essentially forcing her father to buy her out of their relationship: she got money, he got peace. She used the money to set herself up in the first city she felt safe in, to put herself through a tattooing course at Captain Jacks and score an apprenticeship with someone who wasn’t a misogynistic old white man. She’d been licensed for over three years, steadily gaining clientele and, therefore, security.
Lottie, like Nat, was surviving.
Maybe it wasn’t living and maybe it never would be. Maybe they lost that chance at the ripe age of 17 in the wake of burning flesh and metal. At least it wasn’t rock bottom.
The tattoo - a scorpion, poised to strike - started to materialize on the flat plane of Nat’s chest, nestling up under her collarbone and stretching onto her shoulder. It didn’t mean anything apart from a nod to Nat’s sun sign, but it just felt right. A piece of her body she had no idea she was missing.
Lottie was slow, light, painstakingly gentle. It almost didn’t feel like a tattoo, more of a deep itch, doing a lukewarm job at grounding Nat into the physical realm. It was even worse when she realized that Lottie could still read her tics after all this time.
“You anxious?” Lottie asked, low, just inches away from Nat’s skin. Natalie’s cheeks flushed red, caught and exposed.
“Not, uh, about any of this,” Nat half-lied. “Just been a weird week.”
Lottie nodded knowingly, turning to soak a fresh paper towel in green soap.
“There’s some weird shit happening with the stars this week.”
“Oh, right,” Natalie rolled her eyes dramatically. “It’s the stars making me anxious. Nothing to do with the twelve year anniversary of, you know, everything.”
Lottie wrinkled her nose, almost in disgust.
“You keep track of dates like that?”
“You don’t?”
“I think it would kill me if I did.”
And there it was again. That silence that was anything but empty, pressing on every exposed nerve in Natalie’s body. A reminder that everything was real: the crash, their crimes, Lottie etching ink into her skin. A sobering acknowledgement of why she came here in the first place.
“Can we go back to not talking about it?” Natalie rasped, quiet, broken.
The buzz of Lottie’s machine filled the room once more.
“Of course.”
She could tell Lottie wanted to say more, that she was biting her tongue between her sharp ass canines. But whatever it was remained unsaid, traded for the steady scrubbing motions of shading needles and gray wash ink.
Just over three hours later and Nat was wiped, washed, bandaged. She started to fish for the cash in her wallet, but was promptly stopped by warm, calloused hands.
"You’re not paying for this,” Lottie laughed.
“What the fuck? Yes I am.”
“I owe you a lot more than a tattoo, Nat. I’m not taking anything from you.”
“But-”
Lottie’s eyes were sparkling, her face serene in stark juxtaposition to Natalie’s scrunched expression.
“Just don’t be a stranger, okay?”