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So I drown it out
Like I always do
Dancing through our house
With the ghost of you
“Tell me Graham,” she rasps, and it’s all she has in her not to fall apart right there in front of him, “tell me you couldn’t save her, no matter what you did. Tell me she was dead from the start. Tell me you didn’t just let her die.”
Warren watches her silently, his eyes running over her clothes, her hair, her face. He looks terrible, like he’d taken a casual jog through Hell on his way to get to Nathan Prescott’s side. Chloe knew Warren would go straight to him the moment word got out that Rachel’s body had been found. They’d been connected at the hip—fuck, more than, probably, which was not something she ever wanted to think about—ever since she’d found them all clustered in the parking lot that fateful day Max had found her way back into Chloe’s life, and there was no question that Warren had gone to Nathan, like Nathan deserved anything like that at all.
Like he ever deserved to have anyone care about him at a time like this. He had loved Rachel, she knows he did, but he had never once deserved to give her anything of himself to someone as amazing as her. She deserved better than anything he could ever give her—and she deserved better than she got in the end.
She deserved to be saved, and yet she wasn’t. At the end of it all, Rachel had been the one to die. No one had saved her. And it could have been because of the boy she held in front of her and the one she could feel standing in the doorway behind her, watching her every move.
Her anger throbs in her chest as her accusation races through her head, hanging in the air between them, unanswered and waiting.
If Warren had saved Nathan instead of Rachel—if he had let her die just so the rest of them could live—just so he could live—
Warren raises one of his hands, and she almost thinks he’s going to push her away, but he covers one of her hands instead. His palm is warm on her skin, a comforting anchor she hadn’t anticipated from someone she still hardly knew. Her hands clutch in automatic response to his touch, her pulse rocketing up the length of her throat, and it’s with the motion she remembers she’s holding onto Warren at all.
“There was nothing I could do,” he tells her slowly, and, God, she thinks she’s never heard someone sound so broken. He hadn’t even lost her—hadn’t even known her to lose her—and yet he sounds like he’s lost everything he’s ever had in those six words. Chloe finds, any other time, any other person, she would hate their guts for that alone. Because there was no way she could understand just what he’d had to do at the end of it all.
But, somehow, Chloe realizes she can’t hate Warren like she wants to. Not with everything she knows now. She knows he’s not lying to her, and the fact of it has broken him to pieces more times than she could possibly understand.
His voice cracks when he pushes, “Nothing, Chloe. I—reset after she’d already been gone. I’m sorry.” His voice drops to a whisper, and he sounds like he’s speaking to someone else when he says again, “I’m so fucking sorry.”
Chloe stares into his eyes, searching desperately for any hint of a lie she already knows was never there, and finds nothing. She feels something in her chest crack in response, like her heart was physically breaking apart at the seams. Like she hadn’t lost enough in life to get there in the first place, and Rachel had been the final blow to shatter her completely.
She nods once, quick and fast enough to hide the tears she could feel pulling at her eyes, and then she lets Warren go. She feels Max rush forward and grab her arm, something like Chloe’s name shaping her lips, but Chloe shakes her head quickly and turns to walk off. She couldn’t cry here. She was going to lose it, she could feel the need boiling in the marrow of her bones, and she couldn’t do that here. Not with him. Not with Nathan right behind her watching.
She just catches sight of Nathan when she turns sharply towards the exit, standing in the open doorway of his room and holding onto the frame like it was the only thing keeping him alive, and she resolutely pushes everything she can about him out of her head as she marches away, her boots a comforting thump that pulses in time with her heart, Max just behind.
She tries not to think about the fact Nathan looks like the ghost of himself as she pushes out the doors and leaves the dorms completely, or about the fact the sight of him at all hurts more than she had ever thought it possibly could.
She lets Max do the driving when they reach the parking lot. Max agrees silently and slips behind the wheel, and pulls out of the school’s parking lot with an ease Chloe is pretty sure her truck has never seen in its life.
Max doesn’t ask where to go. She only drives, the night falling around them and the streets going deserted the farther they get from the center of the bay’s life. Chloe sits slumped in the passenger seat, silent sobs wracking their way through her body, the tears she had thought she’d spent completely tracking their way down her cheeks with renewed vigor.
When she’d first gotten word that Rachel’s body had been found, she’d wanted to rip the universe to pieces in return for what it had taken from her, to shred everything she’d ever known and burn it to ashes around her, if only for the small vengeance the action would give.
Now, though, it was all she could go to stay upright in her seat. She was spent on emotion, on anger and grief and all the other things no one ever told you came with losing someone you loved. They had come and gone so much faster than they had the first time she had lost someone, and she wondered if it was because she already had a loss she’d never fully gotten over that the loss of Rachel had burned hotter and faster, rendering Chloe to a shell of herself in a shorter time frame than the loss of her father had.
Maybe it was because her dad’s death had been sudden, and, somewhere, Chloe had known Rachel was gone long before it had come true.
She just hopes she wasn’t getting used to it. She’d take anything else—but getting used to death wasn’t something she’d just accept.
The night sky starts to come alive with the streetlights that peppered the roads, drawing Chloe’s attention out the window, and she realizes, with a kind of sick start, that she doesn’t want to just drive along until she couldn’t take the world itself anymore—she wants to be somewhere. Somewhere specific.
Somewhere she absolutely was not supposed to be.
“I want to go to the junkyard,” she says quietly, roughly, sounding like she’d been smoking a pack a day for all eighteen years she’d been alive.
Max looks over sharply in surprise, then looks back at the road with the expression still on her face. “We can’t,” she says when Chloe doesn’t retract the request. “It’s a crime scene. It’s all taped off.”
Chloe doesn’t have the energy to snort like she normally would when Max tried to be sensible. “She’s dead, Max. They won’t be patrolling the area at all times of the night. We’ll sneak in and dip before the sun rises.”
Chloe wouldn’t actually, but Max doesn’t need to know that. Chloe wanted to go into that bunker she and Rachel had called their own and never leave again. But Max doesn’t need to know that.
Max presses her lips together, hands so tight on the wheel that her knuckles show white through the pale skin of her fingers. She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and the night grows around them as they drive aimlessly around the town. It’s just as they’re about to pass the road that forked off to the main drag for a second time that she finally says, “You don’t want to go back there, Chloe. She’s not going to be there anymore.”
That hurts more than she thinks it should, considering how long she had lived with the thought that Rachel had simply abandoned her. That was easier than actually losing her, she guessed.
Chloe shakes her head, though it does absolutely nothing to dispel the feeling curdling in her chest. “Not for that. I want to go to our base. I just—” She pauses on a breath, suddenly aware she didn’t have the words necessary to explain what she needed from the place to someone who had never lost like she had. “I need to.”
Max glances over again, and there must be something about Chloe right in that moment, because she only sighs, returns her eyes out the front windshield, and turns them in the direction of the junkyard.
It’s cold inside the small room when they find their way there, Chloe’s truck hidden in a small copse of trees no one ever bothered to pay much attention to. Colder than Chloe thinks it should be, considering she’d never much noticed the draft that went through the walls before. It looks pretty much the same as it had that last time she had taken Max there, with the CDs spilling all over the place and the dusty boombox sitting neatly in a corner, old T-shirts and flannels flung haphazardly into dirty corners and utterly forgotten. Chloe fishes a wrecked Led Zeppelin shirt off the ground and holds it against her face, aware of the dust and dirt it must have collected in all the time Rachel had been gone but needing something that had belonged solely to her right in that moment to keep her tied to reality.
“Why is everything so fucked,” Chloe moans into the fabric, allowing Max to guide her to the floor and sit. “Why couldn’t she have just run away and made it? Why did it have to take her away?”
“Because life is terrible,” Max replies, her voice small. A particularly strong and strangely freezing draft blasts its way into the room, disrupting some of the papers Rachel had left behind, and Max cringes into Chloe’s side. Chloe leans into her in turn, and Max moves to wrap her arms around her, pressing Chloe’s cheek to her chest.
It lasts only a few moments before Max goes suddenly rigid, and Chloe pulls her face away from the shirt to find Max staring out the window like she was seeing a ghost.
“What?” Chloe asks when she can’t see anything herself.
“I thought I saw…” Max starts faintly, then trails off and shakes her head. “Never mind. I think grief is making me see things I used to see when I had my powers.”
Chloe snorts, and it’s a mean, cruel sound. “Grief. Like you have any idea.”
“I know what it’s like,” she tells her softly.
“No you don’t, Max,” Chloe snaps, and she can’t help that her voice is suddenly half a plea.
“Yes I do, Chloe,” Max refutes without missing a beat, her head whipping around and her expression one of hurt. “You have no idea what I went through. I lost so many things, and I almost lost so many more.” She stops, just long enough to visibly grit her teeth, and when she starts again, she sounds like she already had lost it all. “I lost you, Chloe! I lost you so many times!”
That makes the air catch in Chloe’s chest. Makes the feeling of hurt wash over her fresh and new, like it had never been there in the first place and wanted to make itself utterly known to her every senses.
“The guns,” Mas starts again, before Chloe is ready to hear. “The argument, the car, the train. God, you died so many freaking ways, Chloe! So many times! And I—” Max’s voice goes out, her eyes darting frantically to Chloe like she’d said something she hadn’t meant to, and that’s how Chloe knew. She’d always been aware Max had not told her every little detail of the strange time journey she had gone on, just like Warren too had kept most of the details from everyone around him, but she had assumed Max had at least told her everything that related to Chloe herself. She can tell right now, though, that the assumption was wrong.
She doesn't have to demand Max explain though, which is lucky, because she can’t seem to breathe, never mind speak.
“I had to kill you, once,” Max tells her softly, her voice a high, gentle cry, and she sounds like she’s asking for forgiveness at the same time. “You asked me to pull the plug, and I—I did. I killed you. I let you go.”
Chloe has no idea what Max is talking about. She can’t even begin to think of when something like that might have occurred, or what plug Max could possibly be talking about, but, for the first time, she’s not so sure she wants to know.
“When?” she hears herself say anyway.
Max chokes. Her hands clutch at Chloe’s shirt tightly, her chin pointing away from the top of Chloe’s head. Chloe can feel Max’s heartbeat racing against her shoulder where it pressed into Max’s sternum, an erratic thrum that seemed more alive than anything else in that moment.
“I don’t know,” she admits weakly. “I don’t know. Everything got so confusing after a point. With Warren involved, and the Vortex party, and when we schemed to get Jefferson. There was a point, when I was in the chair, and he had left a picture close by. Nathan hadn’t come yet, or Jefferson had stayed longer than we thought he would, or you were late and he was trying to break Nathan or— I can’t remember, the panic had—confused me. But I—used it. The picture. And it took me to a different world. And I killed you.”
“That didn’t happen, Max. That was— It had to have been the mind games Jefferson played, or the drugs he was giving you before Prescott attacked him. You made up a memory when you were passed out. You dreamed it. That didn’t actually happen.” Can't have happened—time control was one thing, but different universes? That wasn’t possible. “Warren and I rescued you and Nathan. We got David. We escaped, and we were okay. That never happened.”
“It feels like it did,” Max whispers.
“You were okay when we found you. You weren’t acting extra strange.”
“I was riding on the happy high that the plan had worked. It never felt real until weeks later when I couldn’t forget.”
And that—that part was what got her. Because you don’t forget. Not when it’s real.
You forget ninety-percent of your dreams after you wake up from them, Warren always said. It’s what he had told Chloe that day he explained he’d fallen through time, as a way to help her understand he had actually lived through that time more than any of them combined. You don’t remember the things that never actually happened to you, the things you never actually experienced. You’re not supposed to remember them. It would make living in reality too hard. Too confusing. You forgot most of your dreams almost as fast as you had them. You didn’t forget reality.
But Max had not forgotten.
“Why are you telling me this?” Chloe asks quietly, her head spinning. She was smart enough to know the idea of multiple universes wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, but that didn’t mean she wanted proof they were real. Especially not in the way Max was telling her.
“Because I’m trying to tell you I know how you feel. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love. I get it, okay?” Max pulls back, just enough to look Chloe in the face, and her expression tells Chloe everything. “I get it.”
Chloe stares at her. Looks into her open face, eyes wide and pained and trying so desperately to let Chloe know she understood, that she’d also had to let someone she loved go in a way she never wanted, and feels a kind of comfort she’d never known she could feel.
“Okay,” Chloe tells her softly, and something in Max’s expression breaks. She pulls Chloe close again, burying her face in the crook of Chloe’s neck, and Chloe holds her tight as a fresh wave of sorrow worms its way into her heart.
And together they stay the night in that bunker, not quite sleeping, holding each other close as the pain works its way through their systems.
And Chloe thanks the same world that had taken so many things away that, at least this time, she wasn’t alone.
The funeral is nothing like what Chloe knows Rachel would have wanted it to be. And she thinks, as she stands there in the early rain with Max by her side, that maybe life never happened the way you wanted it to once you were gone, and that was why it was taken from you at all.
Because what happened after you were gone wasn’t for you. It was for the people you left behind.
A few weeks later, Chloe returns to the bunker. She returns a number of times before this time, but it had always been with Max in tow. This time, she returns alone.
Max is out with Warren, trying to retain some semblance of the lives they’d only tasted before Rachel’s body had thrown them all into disarray, and Chloe is on her own for those handful of hours. She knows she should probably use the time to do something that would better occupy her senses, something that wouldn’t remind her so sharply of Rachel, but she goes anyway. More because she had accidentally found her way to the junkyard once climbing into her truck than because she had actually meant to go there, but she thinks maybe that’s a sign. So she parks her truck, and she goes to the place she once shared with Rachel.
It looks exactly the same as it always had. Still dingy, still scattered with things most people would consider trash, still one of the only places she ever considered to have held some of the best memories of her life. She takes a turn around it, running her fingers along the graffiti on the walls, tapping her nails on the old posters and notes and lists she and Rachel had stuck up ages ago as a way to bring a little life into their surroundings. She picks up the shirt again and tosses it onto one of the tables, telling herself she wanted to take it home like she had so many times before, knowing yet again she’d simply forget and have to try again later. It’s not until she reaches the dusty, ancient boombox sitting in a shadowed corner that she stops.
This—this had been Rachel’s, too. Because it was always too quiet for Rachel, and she had changed that as fast as she could.
With a finger she can’t seem to keep from shaking, Chloe presses play on the old junky machine, and out wheedles a shitty indie song that they both had hated ironically until they played it so much it grew on them, and they loved it unironically from that point forward.
It was the last song they had listened to together before everything happened and Rachel had vanished without a word, and it brings forward a surge of something painful that tracks right up the length of Chloe’s throat. She swallows hard and pushes on, closing her eyes and pacing around the room. She remembered all the stupid things they did, the way they’d have the junkyard to themselves and play music as loud as they possibly could, because no one would yell at them when there wasn’t anyone around to hear, and they’d dance and break things and laugh until they were crying from the weight of it all.
Her feet move around the worn floor, tracing the same steps she knows she’d taken a hundred times before in a dozen different ways, but it doesn’t feel the same. So she stops, and she stands there, and she allows the song to play out around her.
“I miss you,” she tells the air, and, as if in response, a cold chill threads its way around her, bringing with it a strange sort of hope that Chloe can’t know the origin of.
The song stops abruptly. Chloe’s listened to the song enough times to know it hadn’t been at the end, and she frowns over at the player like she could tell what was wrong with it just by looking. It doesn’t start playing again, and Chloe decides, okay, the damn thing has finally given its last. It was old, anyway. She’s surprised it lasted as long as it did.
She sighs, walks her way back to the boombox with the intention of taking the CD home with her, and freezes when something catches her attention just out of the corner of her eye. She turns sharply, swearing she saw a white, glowing animal, only to be greeted with the same junkyard scenery she’d always known.
“The hell?” she half-whispers, eyes searching, and then jumps when the music suddenly starts back up again. She snaps her attention to it, her heart suddenly racing, and her mouth is dry when she whispers, no louder than a breath, “Rachel?”
She doesn’t know where the idea came from. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, doesn’t believe in the paranormal enough to think the life of her dead best friend was in the room with her, changing the things around her, but she’s not so sure it had been her thought in the first place. She goes to stop the CD, and a gust of wind so strong it knocks her beanie off blasts through the room, sending all the papers within into a fluttering tailspin. She jerks her head around, already aware there would be nothing for her to see, and nearly jumps out of her skin when her name calls from the doorway.
“Chloe?”
Chloe whips around, her heart hammering in her chest, and there’s Max, standing in the open doorway, looking frightened much in the same way she had that day Rachel had been found.
“I’m okay,” Chloe tells her quickly, but the statement is slightly marred by the way her voice cracks over the second word, and then further by the sniffling that immediately follows it. She needs a damn tissue. She rubs at her nose with her forearm instead.
“What happened?” Max asks as she steps over the threshold, looking at the papers all over the floor. The song had come to an end at that point, and it had been the last on the CD, so there was nothing to accompany her growing confusion.
“Wind,” Chloe explains faintly, but it sounds like she’s lying. Max looks up, her brows knitted together over her eyes. Chloe takes a deep breath and, with a kind of resolution she didn’t realize she had in her, shoves the strange happenstance away for a later time. Because enough weird shit had happened to them for more than one lifetime, and she had no want to add to the confusion right then. “I was listening to our music,” she finally says, gesturing to the boombox.
She doesn’t have to clarify which “our” she means; Max knows Chloe doesn’t mean her. Max presses her lips together, still looking worried, and she searches Chloe’s face. “Are you okay?”
Chloe doesn’t answer immediately. She knows Max isn’t asking in the same way someone else might—she’s only asking about right then, in the moment right now, if Chloe was okay.
And Chloe realizes, yeah. She is. She might not have been just moments before Max had shown up, when Chloe had been walking the room and realizing she had lost some part of herself when Rachel had left that she’d never get back, but she is now. She is now, because now she has Max.
She was never going to be who she had been—never be the person Rachel had allowed her to become. Chloe had moved on from that long ago, and she knows now, more than ever, that she could never hope to go back.
Chloe will never be the person she had been for Rachel. Never again.
But that was okay, because she had Max. And Max loved her anyway.
“Yeah,” she tells Max, and she doesn’t miss the way Max’s eyes light up in response. “I’m okay.”
And it wasn’t a lie. Because, at least for right now, she was okay. With Max there by her side, she was okay.
Max smiles at her. She smiles back, and then reaches out, pulls Max close, and starts the CD over again.
And, outside the window, in the form of a spectral deer, a girl-turned-god watches them closely, knowing she was never going to let anything terrible happen to Chloe Price ever again.
And I chase it down
With a shot of truth
That my feet don't dance
Like they did with you