Warnings: mentions of child loss, grief, mentions of death and murderous thoughts.
The memories come like a flood, too fast and too deep. They crash into everything she thought she knew and break through the fabric of her life. Her child—oh god, her little girl—sits on her knees in the grass, a small smile on her lips, so innocent even now.
Her hands tremble at her sides as she remembers. The bargain, the rebellion, the sacrifice. She tried. He tried.
They both tried so hard.
“No,” she whispers, denying what can’t be denied. The proof is all around. It swarms like bees drawn to honey, stinging her over and over until the grief swells like venom beneath her skin.
She couldn’t save them.
She could never save them.
Jade sucks in a breath. She can’t see him, unable—unwilling—to look away from the child she’d lost, but it sounds shaky, pained, and she knows he’s seeing it too.
“We tried to save them,” he speaks, voice thick, “because one of them—,”
“No,” she shakes her head, not ready to hear it spoken aloud. Not by the sharer of her failure. “No, no, no, no.”
“Oh, god…”
His voice echoes in her mind, joined by not one, not two, but hundreds of versions of himself. Different faces, different lives, all the same soul, all the same path.
She knows him.
She has always known him.
“I can’t,” she turns away from the child, wiping furiously at her face, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
Maybe if it were just the one…
But no.
Over and over, again and again, how many has she lost? How many will she lose?
Julie? Ethan?
She doesn’t answer Jim when he reaches out, concerned. She just keeps moving, though where she’ll go, she doesn’t know. Every road leads back to here. Every life is paved to hell.
Victor. Eloise.
Thomas.
Was he extra? A spare? Is that why he was taken, was it only ever meant to be two, a boy and a girl? Had she brought him into a world where there was no place for him, no part for him to play?
Was it always going to be this way? Was there nothing she could do?
She moves blindly through the trees, her mind a mess of fragmented pasts she can’t quite grasp.
Branches snap behind her. She doesn’t stop.
“Tabitha!”
Jim. Her husband.
She loves him. His face morphs in her head, replaced by a graying beard, a rambling voice, breathless with the need to theorize, to understand, to—
Her eyes squeeze shut and she shakes her head.
His are the hands she’s held for years, but his is not the soul she knew when they were atoms.
How can she look him in the eye now when in them she will always look for him?
“No, I can’t,” she says, not stopping, not slowing.
He follows. He will always follow.
Another difference.
Jade doesn’t follow. He lingers, both where she left him and in her mind, a poison she’ll never be rid of, a lifeline she never wants to lose.
Jim’s hand catches her bicep, turning her around, his other hand curling around her shoulder. He’s angry, and how can she blame him? He hasn’t seen what she’s seen. He only knows that she’s running away, abandoning him the way she always does, but how could she not?
She should have left a long time ago.
She is toxin. She is the reason he is here. He could have had a life. Their children could have—
No.
She doomed them the moment they formed in her womb, cursed to have her as a mother, cursed to live out this twisted life.
Maybe Thomas was the lucky one.
This town didn’t need him and so it spared him. Julie and Ethan did not get to escape.
Everything is so loud. Her mind, her blood, the beat of her heart. It all roars in her ears until she can hardly hear what Jim is saying, his lips moving but his words not reaching.
It’s a plea.
He wants her to talk to him. To tell him what she saw.
How?
“I know why I see those children. Why Jade can see them. It’s why there’s more than one bracelet.”
Her eyebrows furrow, jaw clenching as she forces back the sting of tears. That stupid bracelet that she obsessed over, making it again and again because it never felt right. Because he lost them, or didn’t wear them, or didn’t like them.
His anger bubbles over when she tries to pull away. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying!”
Neither does she.
It’s insane. Impossible. Awful.
Did he not hear her when she said she couldn’t do this? Was it not obvious that she hurt, that life hurt, that all she’d ever known was this ache, this pain, this empty hole that nothing could ever fill?
“It’s because we’ve been here before. I remember. Somewhere deep down, I remember.”
She couldn’t remember her daughter’s name, but she knew her face. Didn’t know her birthday, or her favorite color, or the sound of her voice when her lips formed around the word “mama.”
She couldn’t recall her first steps, her first words, or the way her face had scrunched up at her first taste of solids.
All she knew was the sound of her tears in that godforsaken cave, echoing off stone wall until it formed a song of heartbreak so strong not even the monsters could touch it.
And she remembers them, too. Not well. She can’t recall their names, nor what had really led them to do what they did, but she remembers the hatred.
No. Hatred is too kind a word for what she feels—what she felt—for them. She remembers the loathing.
It doesn’t burn like she thought it would. It freezes. Everything it touches turns to ice within her. Mostly, it yearns. It wants to reach them. To seep into their filthy, inhuman skin and claw and tear. It wants to rip the immortality out of them, to steal their life and give it to the children they’ve stolen from her, to take from them like they take from everyone else.
“The reason I felt what Miranda felt,” she continues, clutching his jacket, willing him to understand, “is because I was Miranda. And Jade, he was Christopher.”
She looks away, his gaze too heavy to meet. “We’ve come back over and over again because we failed the first time,” her voice cracks on the word ‘failed’, shoulders curling in on themselves.
He doesn’t understand. Can’t. “The first time?”
She nods. “Yes. Jade and I were here at the beginning. We tried to save those children and set them free,” a sound ripped out of her, high pitched and keening, “because one of them was ours.”
She sucks in a breath, lungs burning. “She was our daughter.”
Forgotten and alone.
She left her little girl all alone.
How long?
She can’t breathe, she can’t breathe, she can’t—
“No,” Jim denies, “no, that’s not…”
She wishes it wasn’t. Wishes her with all her heart that her little girl, her little boy, every child she’s lost was here, alive, happy. She would take their place if she could. Lay down her life on that fucking slab of rock, let those monsters bleed her dry, steal her years until they belonged to them, until she was nothing but a sacrifice given to grant them their eternal existence…
But she can’t.
She tried to offer him a smile, reassurance she doesn’t feel. “It’s true. I feel it,” she swallows, stomach clenching with dread, “I need some time.”
He doesn’t deserve this, it’s not his fault, she’s running again, it’s all she does, she leaves, abandons, forgets.
“Can you give me some time?”
He nods slowly. An agreement he doesn’t want to give but is far too good to deny her.
She gives him one last look. One last attempt to see him, to recognize the man she’s loved, the one she’s spent this life with—and still, there’s an ache in the love, as if his presence can’t quite fill a hole she’s only just noticed she has.
"when you cut a worm in half, it grows back into two worms." -> boyd stevens, s1e10
or alternatively, how the show uses a brief single throwaway line in the very first season to foreshadow a transformation that begins in season 2 and culminates in season 4.
sara and boyd's conversation in the forest feels mundane in the grand scheme of things, but it loops back into the narrative. worms are odd, strange creatures. sara wonders if they know where they are, or if they just enjoy burrowing themselves in the dirt regardless of it. her curiosity and the way she looks at the world may just be why the voices were able to reach her in the first place. boyd on the other hand, finds them weird regardless, and states the outlined line — the line that not only foreshadows his encounter with strange worms the very next seasons, but also the fate of his son's then-girlfriend.
martin slices him open and deposits the worms beneath his skin so he can die in peace. boyd slices smiley and deposits them into him — except smiley here, is the metaphorical worm. he's been, in a manner of speaking "cut in half." the rules of the town grew two more monsters from it. they used fatima to facilitate his resurrection and sped up her own fade into becoming a creature. by the end of season 4, she has become the second worm (a creature).
one single line, spoken at the end of the very first season that perfectly describes the event occurring later down the line. I love this fucking show.
areudirty
annaxmalina
snowghoul
blakekathryn
gummygunk
