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Natalie Scatorccio is dead.
At least, she thinks she is.
She should be. She should be rotting in some neverending darkness after Lottie and Javi and the plane. And she is, in a way.
It’s quiet. Not the quiet that comes from pills or vodka or coke. It’s the kind that hums under your skin, the quiet of after. This quiet is alive. It envelops her, wraps around her instead of pushing or pulling.
When she opens her eyes, the light is strange. It’s warm and golden and too clean. Pine trees stretch above her, needles whispering in the wind that carries the scent of smoke and snow and something older than both.
Natalie sits up, heart racing, and looks down.
Her wrists are thinner. Her rings are gone and her fingernails are bitten to the quick.
She drags a trembling hand through her hair and feels the weight of it, holds it in her line of sight–colorless bleach fading into brown, grown out bangs from the Wilderness years. Her clothes are familiar too: the boots she wore until the soles cracked, the leather jacket that smells of wood, the ripped jeans that hang off her frame.
Natalie exhales a shaky, disbelieving laugh. “What the fuck?”
Why the fuck isn’t she dead? Why aren’t her atoms dispersing into a sea of nothingness, why is she still feeling and thinking and moving? She wonders if maybe this is just a bad trip; maybe Misty didn’t pump enough fentanyl to kill her, just to make her hallucinate or some shit.
Natalie pushes herself to her feet. Her legs feel light, her body all wiry tension again, like she could sprint into the trees around her and never stop.
The woods hum with sound–the kind of sound she hadn’t heard in 25 years. The wind through the trees, the babbling of a brook, the rustle of leaves from a rabbit.
She closes her eyes, lets the sound move through her like blood. Maybe this is her blood, what she’s made of, what shapes her bones and organs and muscle. It’s what she is made of and it’s what she has returned to.
Then, there’s a voice.
“Natalie?”
She freezes. That voice is the ghost of every lost dream, every regret, every sleepless night. She turns slowly, scared it will disappear at the first movement.
Travis Martinez stands a few feet away, looking just like he did before the world fell apart–eighteen, eyes dark and steady, the corner of his mouth twitching up in that way that used to undo her. His flannel is torn at the same place, his hair still messy from the same hands that used to rake through it when he didn’t know what to say.
He looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time and the millionth all at once.
“You look–” he laughs softly. The sound carries through her entire body, takes refuge in the hollow space of cavity that appeared after his death. “You look just like you did back then.”
“Yeah,” Natalie whispers back. “Guess death’s got a sense of humor.”
He takes a step toward her. She feels something in the air shift, the pulse of something ancient and tired. But for a moment, it’s just them again, two kids lost in the Wilderness, trying to save each other from a world that never stopped taking.
Travis studies her, like he’s trying to decide if she’s real or just another trick of this place. His lips part, then close again. Even in the afterlife, it’s him: the boy who wanted to say so much but never could.
“Are we…?” he asks, but the question dies on his tongue.
“Dead?” she finishes for him. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Or at least, we should be.”
The word “dead” doesn’t feel as final as it should. Maybe nothing is final here.
He nods once, gaze trapped on her form. He stares at the sharpness of her cheekbones, the fullness of her lips, the soft crease in between her eyebrows. It’s all the same, it’s like the years between them had never existed: the drugs and the guilt and the sex and the grief.
She takes a step closer, and for a second, she almost believes this is mercy. That the Wilderness or some other powerful force had finally allowed them to love each other without the cold or the blood or the meat. That they could restart, could live the life they used to dream about in the in-between, when they lay in bed, sweating and coming down off of whatever shit they had taken.
But Natalie’s learned not to trust peace when it comes packaged as forgiveness. She knows God or the Wilderness or whatever will never forgive her; her hands are stained with too much red, her soul is too heavy for ascension.
“You could’ve called me, Travis, instead of Lottie fucking Matthews, y’know. I had to find your dead fucking body hanging,” she says suddenly, harsher than intended. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Travis recoils a bit at that, but regains his composure and gives her a sarcastic half-smile, the one that makes her want to kiss and hit him at the same time. “Neither should you. How’d you die, anyway?”
Natalie wants to laugh at the casualty of it all. “Misty fucking Quigley.”
Travis is still for a moment, eyes wide in disbelief. Then, he laughs. He actually laughs at how she died. He laughs so hard tears roll down his face and he’s gripping his stomach.
At first, Natalie frowns. Her dead boyfriend/best-friend/hook-up is actually laughing at her death?
And then she laughs, too, at the absurdity of it, at the fact that the little poodle-haired freak that threatened to tell on Natalie once for smoking weed before a game actually killed her.
“Holy shit, that’s good,” Travis breathes as he wipes the tears from his eyes. “Who would’ve thought? How’d she do it?”
Natalie scoffs and bites her lip. “Uh, fentanyl. She was going to stab this–this girl that I was friends with. And I couldn’t…I couldn’t let an innocent person die. Not again. Not like Javi or Ben.”
Travis sobers at the mention of Javi. Then he studies her carefully with those big brown eyes that make her feel seen like no one else before, and no one else since.
“That’s really brave, Nat,” he says. “You’re a good person.”
The words echo from a memory, from when cold and each other was all they knew. Something moves in the branches above, something slow, something watching. The shadows stretch around them in a way that makes the forest feel endless, like they could walk for days and never find a way out.
“Yeah, well, good people go to heaven,” Natalie whispers, looking around. “This isn’t heaven.”
Travis tilts his head at her. “Did you expect heaven?”
She laughs, hollow and rough. “I didn’t expect anything.”
And she really didn’t. Heaven wasn’t a place for sinners like her, God didn’t watch over little girls with blood on their hands and women with guilt-stained souls.
She sits down on a fallen log, rubbing her palms against her jeans. Travis lowers himself beside her. He looks down at his hands: the same scar on his knuckle, the same callouses.
The space between them feels alive, pulsating, like the Wilderness is there, is listening and watching their every move. It’s beautiful, but there’s something wrong about this place–the way the sunlight doesn’t warm, the way no birds sing. Even the air tastes like a memory.
“You know what I think?” she says finally, resting her chin on her hands. “I think this place is a fucking joke. Some fucked up way of making us look at what we did out there. Like the Wilderness couldn’t get enough of ruining our lives, so it had to follow us to the afterlife, too.”
Travis thinks for a moment. Then, “Maybe it’s not a punishment.”
Natalie scoffs. “Then what is it? Some kind of fucking vacation”
He shrugs, keeping his eyes on the horizon, on the space where trees and sky meet in a cacophony of jagged branches and neverending grey. “No. Maybe this is the only place we’ve ever really belonged.”
The words hang. She hates how much sense it makes. The Wilderness was cruel, but it was the only place that ever saw them for what they were. The broken, fucked up, hungry parts.
A cool breeze stirs, rustling the pines in a sound that’s both laughter and crying. Natalie shivers, hugs her leather jacket tighter to her.
“Do you ever think,” she starts. “that it wanted us all along? Like…not just when we were alive, but forever?”
Travis looks at her, eyes dark with something like fear. Fear that she’s right, that their souls were made to be trapped forever in this place of blood and survival and strange beauty.
“Yeah. I think that’s exactly what it wants.”
In the distance, a shadow moves deliberately, like the woods are taking a breath.
Natalie reaches for his hand. He rubs his thumb over her knuckles and doesn’t pull away.
If this is eternity, she thinks, at least he’s here with her.
They walk until the light begins to dim, although “dim” feels like the wrong word. The sky doesn’t darken here, not really, just bleeds from gold and deepens into violet, like the dusk has been stretched thin and nailed to eternity.
The forest changes as they move. The trees grow taller, denser, seem to lean in to hear what these two lost souls have to offer, the branches whispering things Natalie sometimes understands.
She catches glimpses behind their trunks: the meat, the snow, herself with a rifle thrown over her shoulder, Travis’s face streaked with ash and grief, Jackie Taylor’s blue, frozen body. It’s as though the Wilderness is showing them their own ghosts as penance.
Eventually they find the cabin.
It sits in the same place near the lake, but it’s different. The walls are whole, the windows clean. Smoke curls gently from the chimney top, carrying the scent of pine and something sweet. It’s as though it’s been waiting for them all along.
Natalie stops at the threshold. “This isn’t possible.”
Travis laughs, wonder and fear mingling in his irises. “We’re technically dead, Nat. Nothing about this place should be possible.”
Inside, the air is warm, a contrast from the cool beginnings of fall outside. The light from the fire is soft and golden. The table is set, and blankets are stacked neatly on the couch and bed. A rocking chair sits by the heart. It doesn’t feel like a memory or a trap; it feels like a home. It feels like the Wilderness is giving instead of taking for the first time in a long time.
Natalie runs a hand along the wall. The wood is smooth beneath her fingers. She turns to him. “You think this is real? Or just a dream?”
He shrugs, a small smile pulling on his mouth. “Does it matter?”
No, she thinks, it doesn’t. If being here with Travis is a dream, at least it’s a beautiful one.
They sit together by the fire for a long time, until the violet of dusk fades to the blackness of night. Natalie has the urge to see if there are still stars here. She used to love looking at them back then. It reminded her that at least someone somewhere was still out there: that the world was more than the blood and meat it became.
The flames of the fire crackle sluggishly, like they have all the time in the world. They do, really. They have forever and a day.
“It’s strange,” Natalie says. “I used to dream about this place, after, but it was never like this. Why, Trav? Why do we get this now?”
“Maybe it’s different because you are. Because we both are,” Travis says.
She looks at him and sees the boy she once knew has become something else. Softer, older, though he looks the same. He’s not the rough hands and sharp edges of their twenties or the heaviness of their thirties, or even the sad eyes and grief of their teens. He’s some other, more vulnerable version of himself.
But the way he looks at her hasn’t changed. He still looks at her like she’s the port in the storm, the sky and the moon and the stars.
She moves closer to him without thinking. Travis takes her hand in his. The warmth of his skin against hers feels more real than anything else in this strange semi-existence. Natalie wonders if he’s held anything else as gently as he holds her.
“I love you, you know?” she says quietly. Her hand shakes slightly in his. “Even after everything. Even when I hated myself for it.”
Travis’s eyes soften. “I know. I never stopped either. How could I, when you were the only good thing about me?”
The world exhales around them, the flames crackling bright and gold, chasing away the shadows. They move closer, not out of hunger or lust, but because they don’t know how not to. Because most of their relationship has been based on sex, on distraction, on seeking warmth in the other’s skin.
But now, it’s not hurried or hungry or desperate. They undress slow, relearning every inch of skin. Every touch is a plea of forgiveness: for all the times they hurt each other, left each other, used each other. And every kiss is an acceptance.
When Travis pushes into her, it’s absolution. It’s absolution and purgation and devotion. It’s familiar and new and feels so real that it makes Natalie’s skin burn. And for once, the Wilderness lets them have this one thing, this one comfort in a sea of unknown.
After, Natalie lays in Travis’s arms, tracing circles into his chest. He holds her with big arms as if he intends to never let go, rubbing the soft skin of her back with more gentleness than he’d known in life.
Natalie listens closely to his heartbeat that shouldn’t exist, feels the humanness under her fingertips. Perhaps it is all an illusion, a cruel trick of the mind. She remembers hearing somewhere that dying people can have hallucinations before death, a culmination of their desires or fears or final thoughts.
Maybe she’s not real and this is all in a dying woman’s head, but it feels real. She feels love for the first time since Travis’s death, maybe since before.
And for now, that’s enough.
When Natalie wakes, the fire has gone out. The world around her is still wrapped in an endless twilight. Violet shifts to the grey of morning, never brightening, just shifting. Travis is awake beside her, still rubbing his thumb softly along her back.
“You still don’t sleep much, do you?” she whispers. He had never slept when they lived together. The routine was sex, drugs, and parties. Natalie doesn’t remember the last time she saw him asleep.
He shakes his head. “No. But I don’t think time works the same here, anyway. It’s weird. Like water that just ripples but doesn’t move, really.”
Natalie considers this as she pulls her bra back on. She moves to a dresser in the corner of the room, finding all sorts of clothes in different sizes. There’s a sweatshirt she distinctly remembers from her twenties, the one she got from New York when her and Travis went on a weeks-long bender there. It’s worn thin at the cuffs, faded in a way that only something you lived in could be.
She hugs it to her, the fabric soft and familiar. Travis watches her, leaning against the bedframe.
“It’s like it knows what we need,” he says softly. “Like it’s…watching us.”
Natalie pulls the sweatshirt over her head. “If it’s watching us, it would’ve gave us condoms last night.”
Travis laughs, a full laugh that spreads warmth in her chest. “I don’t think dead people can get pregnant.”
Natalie smiles. “Maybe not.” She returns to the bed, pulling the clean blankets back over her bare legs. Her smile drops contemplatively. “But…why give us a home now, after everything?”
He chuckles, the sound low and almost shy, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. Her long, brown hair tickles his chin. “Maybe it’s not about giving. Maybe it’s just showing us something we never allowed ourselves when we were alive. Maybe this is all real, just in a different life. A different time.”
Natalie closes her eyes and leans her head against his shoulder. “I don’t know if I could’ve handled that–being seen, being normal. Pretending that we didn’t do what we did out there, pretending it didn’t fuck us up for life,” she admits. “Maybe if it was different. If we were different.”
Her voice shakes a little at the confession, but what is the use of pretending when their souls are interconnected in some fragile plane of existence for possibly eternity?
Travis cups her face lightly, running his thumb over her cheekbones. “You’ve always been more than you think, Nat,” he says quietly. “Even back then, even with everything we did to survive…you were extraordinary.”
She closes her eyes, lets the words wash over her in waves. They stay like that for a while, just listening to each other breathing, looking out of the window at the grey sky and trees dancing in wind.
Natalie breaks the silence first. “You know what I hated most about life? How I could never forget, no matter what I did. The drugs, the drinking, the sex…it could never erase what I did.”
Travis stills. “You didn’t deserve what you carried.”
“Didn’t I?” she breathes in retaliation. “I’ve killed people, Travis. My dad, Coach Ben, your brother. And I just–kept looking for ways to stop feeling anything about it.”
He doesn’t argue. He just nods, soft and sad, like he understands. He does, she knows. She remembers him getting so fucked up he didn’t know his own name, sliding his rough hands over her when the silence got too loud, flinching at any mention of Javi. He was broken, too, just not in the same ways she was.
“I tried to hate you, y’know. After. I tried to pretend you were the reason I couldn’t breathe.”
Natalie swallows hard. “Did it work?”
He gives a humorless laugh. “I’m guessing I wouldn’t be here right now if it did. I could never stop loving you, Nat. Even when I wanted to.”
The house creaks under the soft groan of wind, or something that resembles it. Natalie isn’t sure if everything in this world is what it seems.
“It’s fucked up,” she says into his neck, her breath warm against him. “We survived all of that shit out here, or there, or wherever–the cold, the hunger, the things we did to stay alive–and the part that killed us was after. The guilt. The way no one understood.”
Travis thumbs at a scar on her wrist, the one she used to hide with bracelets and long sleeves in summer. “Maybe that’s why we’re here. Not to be punished, or forgiven. Just…to remember. Together.”
“When I was alive, I just wanted to stop wanting to die,” Natalie whispers. “And then you died, and I had nothing to live for. I never really knew how to live.”
Travis sighs, tucking her closer to him. “You did your best, Natalie. Even when it didn’t feel like it.”
The words echo in her cavity, filling some deep chasm she’d felt for years, decades. It’s the simplicity of his statement that undoes her. She exhales, eyes stinging, and doesn’t try to retaliate or squeeze in a witty comment. Natalie lets herself feel in that liminal space between regret and release.
For once, she lets herself truly believe that she did all that she could.
Later, or what feels like later, they sit outside of the cabin, watching the blending of that ancient gold into velvet purple. The woods around them hum with life; not birds or deer or rabbit like before, but pure energy.
They sit in that quiet hum for a while before Travis says softly, hesitantly:
“I used to dream about him. Javi.”
Natalie turns to him, but his eyes stay focused on the hazy space between tree and sky and mountain. He holds her hand tighter in his.
“I’d see him in the woods, in the lake,” he continues. “Everywhere. I thought…maybe he was trying to tell me something, a message from God or some shit.” He laughs bitterly. “He was just a kid. And my dad–he died helping the team. Yeah, he was shitty, but he was still my dad. And it killed my mother, too. This fucking place took everyone I loved. Even you.”
Natalie feels that hot, thick shame in her veins that she always felt when Javi was brought up. Like knives and blades on the inside of her skin, scratching the surface until nothing remained but mangled offerings of blood. Then, she turns to him in confusion.
“I’m right here, Trav.”
He gives her a soft half-smile and loops his arm around her shoulders. “You weren’t always. After Javi…it was like something broke in you. The drugs, the drinking–you weren’t really there, even when you were right beside me.”
Natalie sighs heavy at his words. He was right; watching Javi–that sweet, innocent boy who drew pictures and carved little wolves out of wood–drown not ten feet from her, screaming her name, it cracked something within her irreparably.
“I used to think I was keeping everyone alive. The times I spent hiding your coke or calling the fucking ambulance because you’d overdosed. The times we hunted for hours and hours for everyone. The times I worked two jobs to try and buy us a house, a life…I thought I could make it all mean something if I did everything right.”
He closes his eyes. “But it didn’t. They all died. Javi, my dad, my mom. And us.”
Natalie’s throat tightens. She wants to cry, scream at this Hell for killing the young, innocent boy she once knew. For placing the world’s weight on the shoulders of an eighteen year old boy.
“You were just a kid, too, Travis. And I’m so fucking sorry. For putting more weight on you. For letting him…letting Javi die. I know it should’ve been me. I killed your brother. Why don’t you hate me as much as you should?”
Travis cups her face with his hands and looks at her, really looks. The anger she expects isn’t there. Just a deep, almost painful understanding and a love that’s always been too big for the both of them.
“I told you I wanted to,” he says, voice rough, low. “I wanted to hate you so much. But I never could, Natalie.”
Tears burn hot in her eyes, spilling from them like pearls on a broken string. Travis wipes them away with his thumb. “How? How could you not fucking hate me?”
“Because I understood that you were just trying to survive, same as me. Same as all of us. We both lost him. We both lost ourselves. Hating you wouldn’t have brought him back; it would’ve just made the hole bigger.”
The words hit her like a physical blow. The weight of them, of everything, settles in her marrow. She’s too dead now to reencode her DNA that reads, “guilt.”
“You always found a way to forgive people who didn’t deserve it,” she scoffs bitterly.
“Maybe,” he says, moving his hands from her cheeks to where neck meets shoulder. “But you did.”
Natalie shakes her head, laughing through the tears. “No, Trav. I don’t think any of us did.”
“Then maybe we can start now.”
For a moment, everything feels impossibly still. Then, she feels it: a loosening deep within her, a shift. All the guilt, the anger, the ache that’s kept her alive longer than she wanted to be, it all dissipates. In its place, there’s just light. Pure, radiant light.
Natalie covers his hand with hers. “Okay.”
He smiles. “Okay.”
They stay there until one day, the fire embers die and never spark back up. The forest stops being endless, and the trees fade into a haze, a strange, soft light emanating from within.
Travis notices it too. “It’s different,” he says.
Natalie nods. “Maybe that’s what happens when you stop fighting it.”
And then they walk out of the cabin door together, hand in hand. The air feels warmer, more tangible, and the breeze blows gently against their skin. Every step illuminates the light within the woods even more, until it begins to wash the trees out entirely.
“I think this is it,” Natalie breathes.
Travis squeezes her hand. “Are you ready? We can turn back.”
“No,” she smiles faintly. “I’m not afraid of it anymore.”
Her head is lifted toward the light, toward the never-ending beyond of uncertainty. But for the first time, the light doesn’t sting; she doesn’t feel the need to hide herself from this energy, the radiation of all things good.
No, Natalie doesn’t hide; she welcomes it.
They stand at the edge of the clearing, where the light bends and ripples like water. Natalie turns to Travis, one last time. His face looks younger in the glow, peaceful and serene in a way she’s never seen: not in the wilderness, not in the years after. It’s the peace of letting go, of accepting.
He brushes a strand of hair from her face, studying her face like he’s memorizing it for the next life. “Guess we finally get to rest.”
“Together?” Natalie asks.
Travis nods. “Always.”
She leans into him, forehead against his, and for a heartbeat, she feels the world tilt, the air thick with the weight of the past and loss. Then she take \s a deep breath, steady and full.
They step forward.
Light folds around them, soft and blinding, and the Wilderness behind them fades into silence. There’s nothing now but warmth, the hum of something vast and forgiving.
And then they’re gone and the Wilderness is still again, the cabin standing empty and still under a sky that never quite decides between night and day.
In another world, Natalie Scatorccio isn’t dead.
Instead, she wakes to sunlight spilling through gauzy curtains and the sound of laughter coming from the hall: the high, unrestrained kind that only lives in children. She blinks into the light, smiling before she’s even awake.
“Mommy!”
Tiny footsteps pound against hardwood, and a small boy barrels into the room. Dark curls, wide brown eyes. Travis’s eyes.
“Hey, slow down,” she says, laughing as she catches him. “Your dad can’t keep up with you.”
“He said we can go to the lake today!” the boy insists, grinning.
Travis appears in the doorway, still half-buttoning his shirt, hair falling into his eyes, looking every bit like the version of himself she fell in love with long ago.
“He’s been up since six,” Travis says, mock-exasperated. “He wanted to wake you up, but I told him to wait.”
Natalie looks at them, father and son, and something swells in her chest so full it hurts. “The lake, huh?” she says softly. “Guess we’d better go, then.”
The morning passes in a wash of ordinary things: coffee cups and sunlit dust, the squeal of screen doors, the boy’s laughter echoing across the yard. The air smells like life, like home.
When they reach the lake at the edge of town, the surface glimmers like glass. Travis sets the picnic basket down, the boy runs toward the water, and Natalie stands still a moment, watching the trees reflected on the surface.
Something in the pattern of the light catches her eye–a flicker of snow where there shouldn’t be, a shadow moving too slowly behind trees. Only it’s gone as quickly as it comes, replaced by the sound of wind and chirping birds.
Travis touches her shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Just déjà vu.”
He smiles. “You always say that.”
She watches their son toss a pebble in the lake. The ripples move outward, slow and endless, folding the forest into the sky. For a beat, it feels like the world is holding its breath, waiting, watching.
Then the boy laughs again, and the sound is so bright, it chases everything else away.
Natalie smiles. “Let’s eat before he gets too adventurous and decides to swim.”
They spread the blanket and sit down together, sun warming their backs.
Behind them, the wind shifts, threading softly through the trees–a low, familiar hum that doesn’t belong to this place but lingers anyway, like a memory, a faint echo of a name once shouted through the snow.
And in this world, Natalie doesn’t hear it.