@oupires asked: ☜ + the one in s3 where she realizes they’re doomed to spend another winter in the wilderness 🤭
out in the clearing, overwhelmed by the smothering anticipation of the scientists' planned arrival, waiting, given the hour, felt nearly akin to standing on a cliff face, waiting to leap. like wild signalfire, sending butterflies fluttering in the dark, festering pit in natalie's stomach. worse, though, and against her better judgment, remained the fact that a blossom of hope had nestled itself quietly behind the jutting rungs of her ribs: a seedling that felt like it could drift away at any moment. she couldn't let it. not while more than half of their splintered faction craved a way out of their living hell of a wasteland. not when they'd wanted an end to the ritualistic violence, the persisting pressures of surviving, and the chaos of nature's ungovernable power; the madness that, over time, they'd whittled into some twisted version of meaning to make the losses they'd endured that much less senseless.
nat's fingers uncurled and dug into the sleeves of her jacket, her searching gaze shifting along every tenebrous break in the trees she could half make out. akilah and mari's whispers, murmured between themselves, hardly broke her engrossment in the lulling, still darkness. there was a quiet excitement in their voices; something almost more frenzied than that that seemed to walk a razor rope between anxious and wanting.
through the cacophony of the wilderness' fauna, natalie thought she caught the sound of twigs cracking; the susurration of dried grasses and tree roots rustling under the near - silent tread of infringing footsteps. she turned, then, as the shadowed silhouettes of two intruding shapes emerged through the trees — and in the stretch of a heartbeat, the length of time it took to read the defeat on melissa's face for what it was, to absorb the discontent on gen's, any smouldering hope they'd flinted into being amongst themselves evaporated into nothing.
natalie could hardly take it in, at first. could hardly reckon with the perplexity in akilah's eyes, or the way mari's face fell.
" what's wrong? " she asked, all the same, the low hush of her furtive whisper wobbling a little. they'd been perfectly tight - lipped, careful not to let a word of their plans leak into camp where they might be discovered. but nothing had ever been quite so simple as holding onto a secret. " something happened, " melissa offered, that answer alone enough to carve out the flourishing, flowering hope from natalie's chest in one swift motion. " hannah shoved a knife through that guy's face. "
the subsequent denial in akilah's voice cut through any dented, rusting resistance nat still felt against any reality in which this was her life, and theirs, for the foreseeable, miserable forever. " I'm sorry, what? we're not going? "
nat's heart stilled for a second, before it dropped in her chest like a weight around her ankles in freezing, ice - encrusted water. her extremities almost seemed to lose their feeling, the edges of her vision tunnelling into dusky, pernicious black.
that they wouldn't be going home tonight didn't seem possible, given how far they'd gotten. but the narrow window they'd planned for had slammed shut, without warning, cutting off their fingers at the callused knuckle. they wouldn't be leaving this place — the minuscule patch of the wild, untraversed world that'd already taken coach, jackie, javi. instead, they'd go back to their camp where brutality reigned above empathy. back to the huts they'd crafted and lined in deer pelts that scarcely kept out the rain. back to the animal pit that still stank of torture and human decay, and to coach scott's head, where it rested on the end of a hand - crafted pike: a terrifying portent of just how little humanity still existed there. back to the endless void that lead nowhere but to suffering.
a single tear beaded down nat's cheek before she could make any motion to stop it, to stifle it and lock it away into dormancy with every single one she'd shed for coach. for shauna's lost child. but when the others started to trail off, to make their slow, subdued sojourn back to their huts, like nothing had ever happened, an undammed flood of them started to rise behind her lashes, glinting a cold, blurring sheen. for a moment, she could almost pretend that she could still will them away — that the rolling, towering tidal wave of disappointment that'd crushed the air out of her lungs and rendered her fingertips completely insensate, despite the encroaching cold, could still subside somehow. that maybe there'd be another opportunity, somewhere in the distant, far flung future.
that if they survived long enough, there could still be another night like this. another knife. another plan.
that flickering, naive flame of short - lived consideration flared and shuddered out the instant nat dared to let herself appraise it, like someone had nipped at it with unfeeling fingers. only it hadn't been some punishing, outstretched hand that'd passed in front of natalie's glassy, thousand yard stare. it had been a single flake of glittering white, then another, and another — a shimmering, fine flurry, not dissimilar to the deluge that so often featured in the preludes to her worst recurring nightmares. a sudden and portentous icy draught. a huff of shaking breath that, for the first time in months, she could see as it condensed and misted into a fog in front of her very eyes.
the breath nat let out escaped at the crux of a despairing whimper, through cold - bitten, quivering lips: a shivering plea to the cold, lifeless sky, chased by a flash flood of rolling tears. a chest - rattling sob that no one would ever hear. winter was on their doorstep, unannounced, and there was nothing she could do to keep it out. nowhere to run. no way to escape it. six days trek through the woods with a man she wasn't sure she'd have trusted her bandana with might've saved them — even shauna, even lottie; but it was too late. the plan had crumbled, the knife nat had handed to hannah the key to its unravelling. and the snow that'd started to permeate the overhead canopy of fading, wilting green settled on her shoulders without permission, without inhibition, while she looked up into it: a gossamer dusting of it that endured, no matter how hard she shook in her loud, childlike anguish.
they were doomed. they'd only survived last winter by virtue of jackie's corpse and the barren, mold - infested cabin, out by the lake; by the ravenous, animal skin of their teeth. it hadn't been luck that'd seen them through exposure and starvation. just perseverance. just deranged, unstoppable desperation. this time, the notion of rescue dangled itself above it all, out of everyone's withering reach. it'd a been a pipe dream, as fragile as bone under eighty tons of falling steel and composite carbon — and natalie couldn't shake the thought that the loss of it had all but rendered laura lee's death a meaningless one. that ben's death had been for nothing. that jackie's remains had been desecrated for nothing. that she'd let javi thrash in the ice and bleed out in the snow for nothing.
that when the height of winter set in, the rest of their deaths would be meaningless, too.
