Work Text:
'And we fought
'Til it came down on me enough to make my knees soft
And you poured over onto me just like an eavestrough
That filled up way too fast to hold'
“It’s snowing,” her voice is small and scared over the phone, unsettled in a way Shauna hasn’t heard since those nights huddled together in the cabin. “Look outside.” It’s 3:23am, and she’s only half awake enough to stumble toward the window in her dorm.
(For four seconds she half expects to see Jackie standing in the parking lot in her varsity jacket, hair up in a messy bun, smiling as she holds up a six pack of some cheap beer that was clearly swiped from her parents basement bar.)
But, this isn’t 1995, and Jackie is over 200 miles away - a fact that makes Shauna’s heart ache every single time she thinks too hard on it. When she looks outside again, there’s no Jackie, just flakes of snow falling down against the lights that outline the lot and a silence to the night that actually feels a lot like being in the woods - she almost can’t breathe until, “Shauna?” pulls her violently back into her own head.
“Yeah, it’s -”
“I don’t -,” Jackie starts at the same time, pausing as she shuffles around and Shauna’s not sure she’s going to continue. They’ve barely spoken since August, at least not in any real way, not in any way that matters. “I just .. wish you were still here,” she finally breathes out.
There’s a second where Shauna considers the four hour drive home, actually glances around her room for shoes and a coat, clocks the position of her car under the post, four spots in from the right. Jackie hasn’t been this honest with her in a long time; it’d be nothing to make that drive, to crawl into a bed she hasn’t been in since the summer, and give comfort to them both.
Instead, she settles on, “I do too,” fingers reaching for a necklace that hasn’t been there in months. “I’m really fucking sorry I’m not, Jac.”
Jackie sniffles, whispers, “I know,” but it feels a lot like she doesn’t.
Shauna’s body feels weak and a little like it’s not cooperating as she finds her way back into a lofted twin bed in a room belonging to just her after her therapist recommended she didn’t room with anyone this first year - something about PTSD and recovering from trauma. She’s just thankful on nights like this that Brown had been as accommodating as they were. Instead of making that drive, she manages to cocoon further into her comforter, pretending like this doesn’t almost feel harder than being stranded in the Canadian wilderness.
“My mom won’t leave me the fuck alone and I just want -” Jackie stops again, frustration seeping in, “She thinks I have an eating disorder now, watches me at every meal like I’m five again.”
“Are you - I don’t know, maybe she’s just worried about you.”
Most days, Shauna isn’t sure she didn’t make a mistake leaving for Brown. She’s never quite sure if this was what was best for them, even though that’s what she told herself the morning she slammed the trunk and hugged Jackie goodbye.
The time apart felt like what they needed after those 19 months. What they needed after Jeff, the miscarriage, almost losing Jackie - her therapist agreed that their codependence was probably borderline unhealthy and to give them a chance, a real chance at a healthy friendship, that maybe some time to be Shauna and Jackie would benefit them both.
Shauna remembers telling Jackie she took the acceptance to Brown, remembers the despondent look in her best friend’s eyes as she realized, and the cold shoulder she’d received instead of the congratulations she’d been sort of expecting. This didn’t feel better for them, it had felt like pulling at the hanging thread, like the beginning of the great unraveling of the years they spent intertwined.
She barely knew who she was without Jackie, and when that fact came to light during a session, it made it a little easier to go.
But, laying here tonight, just hearing Jackie’s labored breathing over the line, the vague sound of drunk college kids throwing snowballs across the quad filtering in through her window - Shauna wishes she could take it all back. They used to love the snow, and if they were at Rutgers right now like Jackie planned, they’d be the ones buzzed off cheap vodka, but all Shauna can see in the blackness of her dorm is digging Jackie out of the snow that fell that first winter.
Hands numb, heart pounding, chapped lips and frozen eyelashes. Blue skin and a stillness that was the opposite of everything that made her Jackie Taylor. They thought they’d lost her. They thought their captain was gone that morning, the coldness nothing like Shauna had ever felt. Jackie barely survived those next few weeks, frostbite permanently taking the feeling from the toes on her left foot.
“Everyone’s worried about me, and it’s just - it’s fucking exhausting. I’m trying my best here.”
Shauna turns, pulling the phone wire out from under her, “I worry about you too, ya know.”
“Do you?” Jackie laughs, but it’s without an ounce of humor. “I’ve barely heard from you since you left. If anything,” there’s a beat and Shauna’s heart clenches at the implication. “If anything you’ve seemed the least worried of everyone. I hear from Nat more than you.”
“We email,” she tries, but she knows how lame it sounds the minute the words leave her mouth. “Jackie, I-”
“Save it, Shauna.”
“No, I just - I don’t want you to think that,” Shauna’s hand clenches in the sheets, mind reeling because none of this could be further from the truth. Jackie occupies every thought she has from the minute she opens her eyes every morning until the minute they close. She spends every single day wondering about her, if she’s okay, if she’s eating enough, if she’s warm enough, if she’ll decide to go to Rutgers next year. If she’ll ever get the Jackie Taylor back that left for Seattle that day.
But then, that Shauna Shipman is gone too.
“Of course I worry about you,” Shauna finally manages, eventually reaching for a phone cord that’s tangled and stretched out from the previous occupant of the room. “I think about you every day.”
“Then why did you - why do you feel so much further away than everyone else?”
“Because I am. Two hundred miles further, duh,” it’s an attempt at a joke that doesn’t quite land, and there’s no amusement on the other end. Her eyes fill with unshed tears, tears she hasn’t allowed herself to cry since that morning. Since the snow. Not even the morning she drove away did she allow them to fall. “Sorry, that was -”
“You know what I meant. I wish you’d quit fucking deflecting,” a stray tear finally does fall and Shauna’s quick to swat at it. Her body constantly betrays her in ways that feel so goddamn defeating here at four in the morning. “Can’t you just be honest with me? It’s like - why are you never honest with me anymore? When did it become okay to lie to me all the fucking time? It’s like once you started you didn’t know how to stop.”
When did she?
Jackie’s not wrong in asking - was it Jeff? Or were they drifting apart long before then, mouths full of things they couldn’t figure out how to say to each other.
Was it even ever about him? Shauna was seventeen years old then, making mistakes that almost had life or death consequences. She never thought to examine any of the reasons, never thought far past those nights in Jeff’s truck, and by the time she did her friendship with Jackie was fragile at best.
All she can think to ask is, “Are you still with Jeff?” and it surprises them both. She can feel Jackie’s inhale from all those miles away.
“No.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t understand. Those first few months after we got back, he just like…” Shauna shifts onto her side, waiting patiently. Maybe these were the questions they should’ve been asking all along. “I couldn’t really explain to him what it was like out there. What happened to us. You, Nat, Tai - you’re the only ones who get it, and I just .. I never really - and then there’s, you know, that my best friend was pregnant with his kid," she says it so casually but Shauna freezes anyway, face twisting at the reference.
After Jackie almost died, it was like they hit pause on everything from before. Paused everything that wasn’t survival. And after Shauna lost the baby, it was easier to ignore. They spent the following months clinging to each other, just thankful they were both still standing. They clung to each other harder as the subsequent losses of friends piled up, Coach Scott the last one they suffered through before rescue.
Just the four of them made it out.
Bruised, bleeding, battered by the elements - but they made it out. She held Jackie’s hand the whole plane ride home, both of them holding on for dear life, white knuckles and pounding hearts against barely steady ribcages.
They held onto each other in a way that made Shauna wonder if they hadn’t just bled into one singular person. They held on so hard that their parents weren’t sure how to ask them to separate, weren’t sure how to ask them anything really, because no one knew how to help that kind of recovery. They spent that summer with Nat and Tai, trauma bonding them together like nothing they’d ever known before.
And as the summer came to a close - as Shauna announced she was leaving, Nat devolved further into self-medicating, and Tai poured herself into law books and looking for new college options - Jackie closed herself off in ways none of them had seen and by the morning Shauna left, she watched in her rearview mirror as Jeff’s car pulled up into the spot her car had occupied for the months since their rescue.
By Thanksgiving, Shauna felt like they were best friends in name only. Like because they couldn’t hold each other so fiercely, they didn’t know who to be to each other. Like Jackie said it out of obligation. And they emailed occasionally, but she couldn’t look at Jeff, couldn’t be around them, couldn’t think of that night in the attic of the cabin, screaming as Jackie held her hand through labor and loss of a baby that no one quite knew how to feel about.
It was all so fucked up.
“Oh,” Shauna finally breathes out after a tense silence, “we’re, um, talking about that now?”
“Maybe we should’ve before,” Jackie snaps back, tone colder than when she’d first called. The clock blinks 4:15, and even this half argument feels better than all the months they spent skirting around problems that drove wedges into the cracks. She softens, repeating, “Maybe we just should’ve, Shauna.” There’s a pause, and then, “We kept putting it off and now everything is so .. everything’s so weird. And I just can’t -”
“Can’t what?” she prods as Jackie stops short.
“I can’t lose you, okay? Like, I’m just so fucked up, and nobody understands. And we’ve lost so much and you’re -” she breathes a few times, Shauna doesn’t have to be there to know she’s rubbing at teary eyes. “You’re all I fucking have, and I don’t even know how to sleep without you here anymore. I haven’t slept right since you left, and I’m so tired. I don’t wanna do this anymore -”
“Hey, hey,” Shauna interrupts slowly, sitting up in bed, trying not to be totally freaked out at the words pouring from Jackie, so unfiltered. “Hey, no. Jac, I’m right here. You’re not losing me. And I’m just not losing you, not after - I’m just not. I can’t imagine doing any of this without you, and I just keep thinking that I almost had to. So, please don’t talk like that. Please,” she begs, finally letting a few stray tears fall, scared that if she lets anymore go she may never stop.
She clenches her teeth harder when Jackie finally whispers, “Don’t cry, Shipman.” And it’s the way they know each other that she knows Jackie’s sitting there frowning, always hating when Shauna cried. “I wish I could hug you, ya know?”
“I know,” a few more tears drop onto her sweatpants and comforter, “I fucking miss you. I miss you so much it’s hard to breathe. And I know I don’t say it, I know I pulled away, it was the only way I could leave you. Don’t you get that?” she struggles to get words out, and Jackie’s crying too, and this just wasn’t supposed to be how this phone call went. “I’m not even sure if it was the right call leaving, but I don’t know that I could’ve stayed either. I don’t think it was good for us. I think for us to make it I had to go, okay?”
Minutes tick by, enough that feel like forever, until Jackie gathers herself enough over the phone. “You always were the smart one, huh?”
Shauna laughs then, tasting the salty tears on her tongue that haven’t really stopped, “I wish I could hug you too.”
“Of course you do, I give the best hugs,” Jackie says through a few sniffles and a half laugh, and it’s the most Jackie thing that she’s said in a long time. Shauna’s never been so grateful that she’s still here. That she’s still in this world. “Maybe we can talk more, um, like when you’re home? Like really talk about... all of this shit.”
It feels like a weight off her shoulders hearing Jackie say that. Like they have a future that Shauna wasn’t sure she saw when she left that morning. “Yeah, we can. I think we need to,” she glances around the room, early dawn poking through the blinds. “Promise me something?”
“Anything.”
“Best friends forever?” she asks like they’re little girls, like it’s fifteen years ago before the crash, before soccer, before boys and the world started to pull at the edges.
“Forever, Shipman,” she can hear the smile in Jackie’s voice then, “Duh.”