Chapter Text
Somewhere in Arcadia Falls, there is a girl in a school bathroom. A blue butterfly creates a perfect photo opportunity, and another girl with hair the same color as the butterfly gets shot only a few feet away.
The girl raises her hand, and time stops.
At the same time in a diner across town, Ben Arnold winces and presses a hand to his forehead. He waves off concerned questions from his friends, and then collapses onto the remnants of his breakfast.
The cool plastic of the table against his face, the smell of coffee and syrup, the faint guitar from the jukebox - it all fades into black.
Ben comes awake caught in a maelstrom of wind and rain, pelted by it from all sides. He’s in the forest.
The sky is clouded over, thunder shaking the ground beneath his feet.
Emily screams from somewhere, and he’s wheeling around trying to find the source of the sound when he collapses again.
Ben wakes still hearing Emily’s voice. “Ben, are you okay?” Emily frowns, pausing in her explanation of the new sorting system in the library. “Ben?”
“I think he’s waking up. Ben, can you hear me?” Ben blinks slowly, and sits up. Across from him, Sammy is glancing at him and Emily with worry creasing his face. “Should I call someone?”
“No, no,” Ben mutters. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
Emily is holding his hand, and she squeezes it gently. “You sure? You passed out, Ben.” He sees it in her face before she even says anything, as her frown grows deeper and she bites her lip. Something’s not right. “God, you’re bleeding!”
He reaches up to discover that Emily’s right. The skin under his nose is wet, warm, and when he pulls his fingers away they’re dripping red. “It’ll be fine, I probably just hit my nose when I fell onto the tab-” Ben tries to say, but Emily shakes her head.
“I don’t know if you hit the table hard enough for that... Did you hit your head on anything else lately? Can you tilt your head toward me?” Ben obeys rather than answer aloud and lets his girlfriend tip his head right and left to look at his nose. The blood is drying on his face now, sticky and cool.
Sammy pushes their dishes to the side and grabs as many napkins as he can out of the dispenser and offers them to Ben. “Here, take these. I’m going to see if they have a first aid kit here.”
He jumps out of his seat to call over Joyce, the woman who runs the diner.
Ben gets the oddest feeling of déjà vu.
Even once the blood had been cleaned and Ben had dismissed his friends’ concerns until they stopped bringing them up, the casual atmosphere of the breakfast had vanished. This was supposed to be a happy reunion - Sammy hadn’t been in town for ages. The last time the three of them had been in the same place, Ben and Emily had still been dancing around their feelings for each other like a pair of idiots. Well, Ben had been the idiot, at least.
Ben had been worried it would make things awkward between the three of them now, but the moment they had all sat down at the beginning of this morning, it had been like Sammy had never left.
Although apparently, all it took to make things awkward again was to pass out and bleed from your nose. Who knew, right?
Ben drummed his fingers against the tabletop, trying to come up with anything to talk about other than the intensity of that storm in his vision. The sound of Emily screaming. How awkward it was to sit around a table saying nothing.
“So, Sammy, tell us more about the radio jobs you had while you were in Seattle? Sounded like you had some pretty unbelievable gossip earlier, and I need proof!”
Thank all the deities for Emily Potter.
Sammy shook his head, grinning ruefully. “I don’t know if I can deliver on that part of it. You hear so much gossip on the radio there, someone could tell you the sky turned green and you’d have to talk about it like there was a possibility it could be true.” He started pulling one of the only clean napkins to bits as he talked, telling Ben and Emily about his radio nickname and frankly insane stories about celebrities, both local and national.
After Sammy had finished a particularly outrageous story, Ben leaned back in his chair, laughing. “Buddy, I gotta be honest with you. That does not sound at all like the Sammy Stevens who left Arcadia Falls all those years ago.” He was kidding for the most part. Sammy seemed to pick up on the little bit of him that wasn’t kidding, though, and only offered up a half-hearted grin. He swept the remnants of his napkin into a tiny white pile, and said something about how everyone changes at some point, even the people who stay.
It was a little unsettling, and there was a second of silence after his statement that this time Ben did not leave Emily alone to cover. He began to talk about the radio show he wanted to start up here - an AM talk show, he was thinking, where listeners could call in and they could chat about the town. Arcadia AM, maybe.
He didn’t say anything about asking Sammy to be his co-host for it. That would be weird, right? Sammy’d only just gotten back from Seattle, Ben didn’t want to overwhelm him.
Sammy just nodded and agreed with Ben’s points about the benefits the show would have.
Ben feels like he’s missing something, in between Sammy’s dark eyes and his messy hair - it’s longer now than it was when they were teenagers, pulled back into a loose bun. There’s something quiet in his face, something small. Ben can’t figure it out.
Emily was still gamely trying to keep a conversation going, but even she had to realize that it was a losing battle at some point. “Well,” she said at last, “you gentleman can talk all day, but I do have a library to run! I have a business meeting today, and no, Ben, it’s not with the guy from the froggery. Don’t be an ass, trust me, I know he’s creepy without you telling me every time he makes a pass at me.” Ben shut his mouth before a single word escaped, and just grinned at Emily.
She smiled back and took his hand to pull him up out of the booth. They kissed, and Sammy shook his head and teased them about overly public displays of affection.
It felt natural.
It felt more familiar than it should have, and Ben could not shake that sense of déjà vu.
The feeling persisted until all three of them were piled into Ben’s car and on the road. (Ben promised to bring Sammy back for his car later. He and Emily both had not wanted to leave Sammy just yet.)
They were idling at an intersection, Ben and Emily belting off-key Broadway tunes and Sammy failing to control his laughter enough to tell them how ridiculous they sounded. The light changed, and Ben maybe was a little distracted by the music and Sammy’s laughter and Emily’s voice. He started accelerating, only to have to slam on the brakes as a beat-up truck blew through its red light. There was a girl in the front seat with blue hair, and she didn’t even look at Ben when he honked at her, just flipped him off and kept driving.
“Dick move,” Ben grumbled before carefully checking the intersection and continuing on.
Sammy was still giggling, shaking his head. “Hypocrite. You were the only one of us with a car in high school, I know you ran more than your share of red lights.”
Ben was protesting that Sammy had no proof of that and Emily was laughing at both of them but agreeing with Sammy, and it was all too short a time before Ben pulled into the Blackwell library's parking lot. There were several other cars in the lot, and a couple students hanging out on the steps. Above them all, the sky was gray but clear, without a cloud to be seen.
Emily jumped out onto the pavement before Ben had even come fully to a stop, and blew a kiss towards the car as she jogged towards the library. “Talk to you boys later!” She disappeared into the library, leaving Sammy and Ben alone in the car.
“Have you seen the new library?” Ben asked, twisting around in his seat to face Sammy. “The one from when we were kids got condemned and they tore it all down, Emily’s library is totally new. It’s gorgeous in there.”
“Especially when Emily’s in there, right?” Sammy teased, and Ben blushed the same shade of red he’d always turned when Sammy used to tease him about that hopeless crush he’d had on Emily when they were kids.
Ben cleared his throat, and turned back to look out the windshield. “I better get you back to your car. You wanna hop in the front?”
“Yeah, sure.” It was when Sammy was outside of the car that he saw it - off to the side of the library stairs, two people were arguing. He stopped before getting into the front seat, frowning. “Is that Deputy Gunderson?”
“It’s Sheriff Gunderson now, and I have no idea,” Ben said from within the car, and he leaned over the center console to see what Sammy was looking at. He grimaced when he saw them, and pulled himself all the way over the console to get out of the car. “That’s Gunderson alright, and it looks like he’s harassing a student. Ass.”
“Should we intervene? She looks scared.”
The student did look frightened; she was shrinking back against the stone sides of the stairs and clutching her bag to herself like a shield. Ben didn’t even say anything, but Sammy could see his hands tighten into fists, the corners of his mouth fall. Ben stalked off towards Gunderson and the girl, and Sammy followed close behind.
“Hey, Gunderson, back off!”
Something about the whole scene was sharp and painful and familiar to Ben, and for a second he wondered if he closed his eyes if he wouldn’t be seventeen again, shouting down the new deputy Gunderson over some bullshit rule he’d only started enforcing that day.
“This ain’t none of your business, Benjamin,” Gunderson said in that slow voice, and that hasn’t changed either, each syllable carefully planned out before he says it.
Before Ben could do something really stupid, Sammy stepped up to stand by his side.
“We aren’t looking for a fight,” he assured the sheriff, and god if this wasn’t a scene straight out of Ben’s memories. The past seemed to slow the present down, till it all playing out in slow motion. “There’s no need to argue,” Sammy continued, “I just think that maybe you could remember that you’re talking to a teenage girl, not a hardened war criminal.”
Gunderson looked back at the girl, a washed-out pale fear coloring her cheeks and holding her still against the stone wall behind her. His lips curled into a sneer as he turned to face Sammy and Ben again. “I’m sure you boys think you’re helping,” he said, the look on his face saying the exact opposite. “But you don’t know what the kids in this town get up to.”
“With all due respect, sir-” and Sammy kept talking but Ben couldn’t hear him anymore.
Ben couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He was stuck in something that faded at the edges like an old photograph, memory glossing over the forgotten pieces of the scene.
The air tasted of salt, and rain pelted Ben’s face. He was at the edge of the cliff, staring at the gray sky that became the gray water to the gray coast, all melting together. There was a storm in the bay, and nothing could be heard over the rushing wind and waves.
Then he blinked, and Sheriff Gunderson was shaking his head but walking away, and the girl was stumbling over a thank you and fleeing in the opposite direction of the sheriff. Sammy’s hand was warm and solid on his shoulder.
“You okay, buddy?”
He turned, catching Sammy’s gaze and knowing Sammy must have caught his own and seen the uncertainty and fear there. “I- Maybe you should drive us back to your car. I’m not feeling great.”
“Sure, Ben. You sure you don’t want me to just drop you off at your house? I can hang out for a while if you want some company, and we can go get my car later.” Sammy’s eyes were warm and friendly, and Ben missed this more than he had realized.
Still. Sammy must have had places to be, and Ben would be fine. He didn’t want to monopolize his friend’s first day back. “Don’t worry about it, I think I just need to sit down for a bit. I’ll be fine by the time we get to the car.”
“Alright. Just… Be careful, okay? I don’t think anyone wants a repeat performance of this morning.” Sammy squeezed Ben’s shoulder, and the two of them walked over to Ben’s car where it still idled in the parking lot.
The drive back to the diner seemed longer than it had before, and Ben was almost asleep in the car when he heard Sammy gasp. He blinked awake slowly. “Wha’ happened?”
“Look outside!”
He blinked a couple more times, and sat up in his seat. “Is it snowing?”
Sammy nodded.
They’d pulled to a stop, only a few blocks away from their destination. But there was nothing they could have done to keep going, because it seemed like everyone had stopped to stare at the snow.
It had been sunny minutes ago.
Wordlessly, Ben pushed his car door open. It seemed like real snow - sharp points of cold along his bare arms, melting in seconds.
“It’s like magic,” Sammy murmured, his breath misting up in front of him.
And looking around, maybe it was. The snow was still light, but it seemed to deaden the regular sounds of the town. Snow lightly blanketed the grimy streets, covering decades of misuse, and still the flakes fell.
Ben shivered.
It wasn’t a storm yet, but it could be. He’d have to call Emily after her meeting, she was definitely okay but… He had to be sure.
He could still her scream from his vision earlier that day.
He’d call her soon.
Emily never picked up the phone.