Chapter Text
Four pairs of feet trampled through the dirt and twigs of the forest floor, a flight of pure desperation. Once every couple dozen feet one of the fleeing individuals tripped. They were always caught, buoyed onward by their companions, and the running would continue. Their unsteadiness was understandable given the circumstances: none of them had walked on anything but hard concrete and plush carpet in over a year and the dips and bumps present in a natural forest floor threw their sense of balance for a loop. There was also the weakness of all four of them in consideration. Routinely starved and unwatered, the quick bites of food and drinks of water before they left their prison only helped give them energy for their escape and did nothing to revitalize their bodies.
The smallest of the four tripped and this time landed on her knees. All three of her companions turned and all started to reach for her.
“I- I can’t,” the girl whimpered.
Two of her friends flinched back but the third, the one who had been in the lead, reached down and pulled her to her feet. “You can. We’re almost there, Aria.”
“You don’t know that!” Aria exclaimed, voice near tears. It was always near tears, had been for months now.
“I do .”
One of the girls turned to look back the way they’d come. “We have to be. How much longer do you think-”
“Mona will be okay, Hanna. We’ll find someone and we’ll tell them where to go. She’ll get help.”
“I don’t even know where the bunker was now…”
“Five thousand, two hundred and four steps north-”
“Of course you know,” Hanna said, smiling tightly. “Still Spencer Hastings, after everything.”
Spencer still held Aria up, Aria leaning heavily into Spencer even though Spencer was just as thin and malnourished as her tiny friend. Their last friend, Emily, stood off to the side with her arms wrapped around herself.
Hanna kept looking back the way they had come. They had left Mona back in the bunker that had been their prison because Mona had barely been able to walk on her own. Cece had left her in the hole for a week and Mona was already so thin…
“Come on,” Hanna said. “We have to keep going. Spencer says we’re close, so we’re close.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Emily whispered. “Just like she always said. The middle of nowhere and no one for miles in any direction. We’ll die before we find anything.”
“I’d rather die out here than in there,” Hanna snapped. Emily flinched again and Hanna felt a twinge of that old guilt, muted and tired from all of the guilt she held inside of her from the things she had done and said in all of their time in the Dollhouse. “Better to be in the world again and die under the stars,” she said, trying to gentle her voice.
“Our bodies will be found,” Aria said. “Our families will finally know what happened to us.”
“We are not dying,” Spencer said fiercely, partially shoving Aria off of her so that Aria had to stand on her fawn-weak legs. “We’re going back to our families, we did the hard part. If you give up now, I swear to fucking GOD-”
“I’m not,” Hanna said, turning fully to face Spencer. “You said we’re almost there. So we are.”
Spencer nodded shortly, her chest tightening at Hanna’s faith. Spencer was just repeating that because she had to believe it for all of them.
Spencer took Aria’s hand, feeling bad she had shoved Aria away to get the girl to stand on her own two feet again. “Let’s go.” Spencer gave Hanna a look. Hanna turned and took off running, in the lead now with Emily only inches behind. Spencer pulled Aria along behind her, keeping Aria on her feet as she did.
It took another half hour of running, hope slipping from their hearts, until the ground under them suddenly changed from woods to asphalt in the darkness of the night and Hanna flew forward at the change, slamming face first into the road and scraping her right elbow and cheek raw. She yelped briefly before biting down on her lip hard, instinct telling her to shut up, shut up, Cece liked when they screamed -
“Hanna!” Emily and Spencer yelled in unison.
“I’m fine,” Hanna grit out as she got to her feet. Emily put a hand on her arm, briefly, a butterfly flutter of contact before she stepped back. Emily had barely touched any of them in ages, so the contact filled Hanna with a flood of warmth and love. “You good, Em?”
“I managed to stop myself before tripping.”
Spencer let Aria’s hand go to pull Hanna toward her, examining her cheek and arm in the dim light the crescent moon provided. “You’re bleeding.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Hanna said.
Spencer gave Hanna’s uninjured cheek a small, sharp pat. Hanna shut her mouth. She got the message, Spencer didn’t want her being glib about being hurt. It was never Spencer’s favorite thing.
“We made it,” Aria said from where she’d wandered forward, huge eyes drinking in the sight of the road. “We actually made it.”
“Now we just have to wait for someone to drive by. Wave them down, have them call the police, put a marker here so I know where to start with giving directions back to the bunker.” Spencer gave Hanna’s hand a quick squeeze before she started to gather rocks and already start marking off the place she had emerged from the woods. Emily started to help her while Aria floated closer to Hanna and started to fuss over Hanna’s scrapes. Hanna let Aria mother her; when Aria could act as caregiver it was the most Aria she was, allowing her to focus on others rather than the hurt and grief that swallowed up her thoughts.
Their wait was longer than their run. The girls wound up sitting in the cold night air for hours, huddled together with Aria and Hanna glued to Spencer’s sides and Emily sitting centimeters away from touching Hanna, close enough to get warmth from her friends. Every so often Hanna would reach out and tap Emily’s hand where it sat so close, letting her know that if she wanted to lean on Hanna she could. After a few hours of shivering, Emily pressed herself against Hanna. Hanna immediately wrapped her arms around Emily and Spencer and Aria moved in, surrounding Emily in a group huddle. Emily shivered in the middle, and it wasn’t all from cold.
The first rays of sunlight were peeking over the horizon when the car came.
Perhaps luck was in their favor after all. In the dead of night a car could have run over them sooner than see their attempts to wave them down.
As it was when all four girls ran straight into the road the car stopped over fifty feet away from them. A surprised, bleary-eyed man got out of his car and demanded to know what was going on.
Spencer stepped forward. “I’m Spencer Hastings and these are my friends Hanna Marin, Aria Montgomery, and Emily Fields. I think if you call the cops you’ll find they’re looking for us.”
.
Caleb Rivers had been waiting for the call for one year, three weeks, and five days when it finally came. It was so early it woke him but as ever he jumped to attention when a call he wasn’t expected came in, grabbing the phone before the third ring.
“Hello?” He asked, so alert no one would suspect he had woken up seconds before.
“It’s them, Caleb, it’s them.”
He was out the door before Toby could finish.