Chapter Text
I’ll stay here with you, daddy. Mom, we will bring back the Timberline to its fortune together. We will be happy again, all together.
We’ll be forever together now.
She walks. She is barely conscious of her walking, but she keeps moving, somehow. She moves through the hotel. Not as if she belongs to its space, no. More like she belongs to the ghosts that inhabit there.
There are barely any thoughts in her mind at this moment. Most of it is ice–cold numbness, and very few thoughts can be formed beyond that barrier.
Nicole looks around numbly, barely even recognizing the place where she spent so many hours, helping his f— Leonard to arrange new ideas and events for the hotel. Some part of her is surprised to find he is not there waiting for her at all.
She hears a click, then another, and another. Although she doesn’t understand why, she still moves toward the source of the sound.
The old computer is on, somehow, and somehow, letters are slowly appearing on its screen. For the moment, all that can be read is:
I
R
V
Nicole wonders idly why that is remotely familiar. Then more letters follow and her chest starts to feel as if her heart was being stabbed against her ribs with every increasingly strong heartbeat.
I
N
G.
And memories rush back inside her mind with the force of a typhoon, and now her heart is breaking under their weight, and Nicole realizes that she’s staring at the screen while a flood of tears streams down her face. She still stares, unable to make her body move in any direction, because, she realizes flatly, there are no more paths to take.
It’s over.
Another soft click. Nicole wonders why Rachel won’t stop hurting her. She just wants it to be over. I—I want my mom and dad. That’s why she came here in the first place. She missed them. She missed them, so she came into the office looking for them.
Why are they gone?
I miss them both, she thinks, and for some reason, it seems like a deafening realization.
HELP, reads now the screen. Nicole doubts she would have helped this girl when she was a kid at all. Perhaps it’s true what they claimed. Perhaps she did hate her.
HI. Nicole is still staring at the screen, the meaning of it all eluding her exhausted brain, wishing to rest once and for all, perhaps return to the car, given that mom and dad don’t seem to want to see her as much as she wants to see them. She intended to do something in the car. Didn’t she?
M, finishes the screen, and Nicole feels her eyes open wide in realization. The message is now complete and it reads:
HELP HIM.
“Wh— I— WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”, she roars. She didn’t know her voice could still make sounds, she didn’t know she still had it in her to feel rage. But she does. “Irving is DEAD!” The typing has resumed before she has even finished.
DYING.
“Irving is…”, she mutters, still unable to process what she’s reading for a moment. The realization dawns on her with the force of a hammer.
Not Irving is dead, no. Irving is dying.
Irving is not dead yet.
Nicole runs. She bursts into the first open room she finds, then heads for the wardrobe. She gathers the blanket, and sprints for the front door. There are boots there that she puts on without thinking. There is a cloak there she takes, trying to breathe through her panic and the smell of dust. She doesn’t even have time to realize she doesn’t know where to go because there is a light by the door.
Nicole pushes it open and the blizzard makes her whole body hurt in an instant. The light flickers, it’s really hard to see outside, but it has a blue glint to it and Nicole has nothing to lose. So she follows it.
She sees nothing more than white, faded trees and frost that clings to her eyelashes for a while. One of the longest moments of her life, although it is greatly surpassed by the second where she finally sees the body lying on a hill, up ahead.
Nicole screams, or she thinks she does, because she can’t hear anything beyond a roaring noise, but her throat clenches and stops the flow of air as she runs. She falls, she gets back up, she fights against the ice on her way towards the body there.
Irving is white, or purple, and looks very much not alive. Nicole wraps the blanket around him, then lifts him using his armpits. It takes a couple of tries because her hands have lost all their feeling and she doesn’t care. She drags him, walking backwards, for what feels like an eternity and the briefest moment of all.
The doors are open and Nicole doesn’t spare a thought to close them. She drags Irving towards the restroom. At any other moment, it would have been by logic: that’s the warmest place of the hotel, and it’s near the entrance. In her current state, she just moves. There are no thoughts in her mind, other than not dead yet, not dead yet, not dead yet.
She takes the stairs once more and runs to her room. She takes the duvet, runs back down and now, for the first time, takes a second to consider the body in front of her.
Irving is livid and very still, and Nicole can’t picture that he may be still alive. But that won’t stop her now. She bursts into action again. She fights with his rigid limbs to get rid of the damp clothes. When she doesn’t succeed, she runs to the kitchen, takes a knife and cuts the clothes until she can no longer feel her fingers, numbed by the cool, and fears she might cut him. Nicole then rips what is left of them, throws them away as best as she can until all that isolates Irving from the cold floor is the rag, and only then Nicole wraps him with the duvet.
Nicole can feel herself slipping away, but this is not enough, and she knows, as if her brain had suddenly recovered every brain cell. She goes to the garage. Not running, not this time, because all strength has vanished.
And she rises her phone, calls a number, and simply states that Irving is not dead yet, mom and dad are gone, and that she is going to sleep now.
She walks. She is barely conscious of her walking, but she keeps moving, somehow. She is not surprised to find herself back to Irving’s side, dragged to him by some unknown force of will that seems very much not her own, because she can’t find it in herself to care, really.
She collapses there and moves as close to him as her hurting muscles may allow, and everything dissolves into snow white.