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Arcadia Bay hardly looks any different when Chloe awakes.
Golden, mid-afternoon sunlight cascades over the pointed tops of pine trees, rustling in the faint sweater breeze carried across from the bay. Pointed leaves of red, brown, and yellow crunch and crackle as they’re brushed across cracked pavement, and browning grass warns of the looming winter.
The town is small, mournful, always falling into the image of the past and shrivelling with every rebirth in spring, aimless and dull.
Chloe thinks she might be in Hell.
It’s an odd thing to think, really, given she hasn’t quite processed how she got here in the first place. Her mind is always playing tricks on her, whispering lies convincing enough to become truth in her moments of greatest despair. All things considered, she was at a pretty low point just moments ago: what she remembers is going to meet Nathan on Blackwell’s campus and confronting him about the money she needed to pay Frank off—and that he needed to pay her to keep her mouth shut about the fucked-up shit he pulled on her.
Her skin crawls at the memory, phantom pain prickling in her temples and along her arms, fingers swiping towards the inky, colourful bands of her tattoo to settle herself.
Only when she pulls away, though, does she notice the crimson plastered to her palms, and she immediately knows it's not a trick.
Right.
That’s right.
Chloe’s dead.
That’s why she’s in Hell.
Where once she might have been taken by panic, short breaths scratching at her throat and a cold shiver wracking her spine, instead she meets the realisation with a sigh of resignation. Of course, this is where it would all fucking end. Reaching for the last rung in her search for one more girl who left her, only to topple back into the shadows that had nearly claimed her the first time.
Only this time, they actually succeeded, and Chloe is fucking dead.
How the hell is she supposed to find Rachel now?
Her knees wobble as her skin pales, and she spots a familiar sight beyond the sudden appearance of railroad tracks. She blinks at the illusion, tilting her brow in confusion. Moments ago, she’d been outside Blackwell, staring out into the football field across the street, and now she’s approaching—when the hell did she start walking?—the comforting, jagged, decrepit edges of American Rust.
The loud crack of a gunshot ricochets in her mind, an all-too familiar echo from the world she left behind. Phantom hands grip her, shake her, press into her abdomen as she marches through the alleys of junk that she’d once called her only home; at least this one never had to mask its decay.
Amidst panicked screams and wails of agony, a voice sounds that tenses her body and gives her pause. She hears David, angry, reverberating around her. Her first instinct is to run, and the instinct that follows is to fight, but that instinct that overtakes her is, ultimately, to freeze.
She’s dead, wandering around a fucking junkyard, and all she can hear is her fucking step-douche screaming at Nathan and crying out in anguish.
What the fuck does he have to be crying for?
The walls of American Rust loom taller above her, towering shadows that stretch into a darkening sky. She can feel a warmth in her gut that pools against her shirt; she doesn’t have to check to know that it’s blood. She’s already seen it.
Elsewhere, she is being rocked back and forth in strong arms, a musty odour masking the reek of the girl’s room and a muffled sob ringing against her ear. A second warmth makes itself known, this one pooling instead in the corners of her eyes; she doesn’t have to check to know that they’re tears.
She’s in Hell, stuck in the backwater shithole the world forgot about—that she was never going to escape—as her one and only respite from her pain cages her in, forcing her to retread the steps of a demise still fresh in her dead memory—
“I’m sorry, Chloe.”
Chloe’s breath halts. Her eyes widen. Her jaw falls.
“Max?”
Chloe tastes cold rainwater on her tongue and falls to her knees with an empty sob.
When the memories finally strike her, they do so with great force. Hammering her mind are images of a life she never lived, a life even she never dreamed, a future foreign and beautiful to her.
She sees Max, barely taller than when she left with a head of cropped brown hair and those stupidly adorable freckles dancing across her cheeks. She sees a dark room lit only by the teal light of a pool—it had felt warm to the touch, she remembers somehow—which graces Max’s features and paints her in an affection she’d always thought she’d buried long ago.
She sees a pink morning, hazy amidst sleep and the smoke of her morning routine, and the rich blush that adorns Max’s features before—holy shit, she kissed her?!
Chloe laughs dryly at her own surprise, then and now, as she brushes the tips of her fingers along her bottom lip, hardly minding the smear of blood they leave behind. The memory tastes much sweeter, anyways.
And then, she sees the junkyard. Not towering, not blackened, but familiar and sickening. The dread that coils in her stomach precedes the hot tears that sting in the corners of her eyes, and before she even knows what she’s running towards she’s already muttering in protest.
“No,” she begs, “no, no, not this one, please not this one…”
She’s shown the memory of Rachel’s corpse regardless of her pleas. Even back then, she’d reeled back in tears before ever seeing the extent of her decay, but Chloe knows. Somehow, she knows, and it makes her never want to see it again.
She sees red. Figuratively at first, gun in-hand and a set determination to her jaw. She knows she wants to kill Nathan fucking Prescott without even knowing he killed her first. Wherever she was, she avoided that fate, and then she swore to make him meet it instead.
She also sees it literally, at least for a brief flash before her vision goes dark; the flash of a muzzle is all that accompanies this vision.
And then…
“Max,” she'd said then, “it’s time.”
Chloe knows what she chose, what she offered, what she lost. She feels chilly, soaked arms coiling around her as she embraces herself, hoping the hug never ends, and then she feels those familiar lips again; this time, she doesn’t feel surprise, but sorrow.
“Don’t you forget about me,” Chloe pleaded amidst the roiling storm that, elsewhere, would have taken countless other lives.
“Please,” Chloe whispers privately, fragilely, “don’t forget about me.”
The memories soon fade from view just as Chloe cries the last of her tears, and she knows what she has to do. She grants herself a final moment of grief for what she never had before she pulls herself to her feet and trudges towards the centre of the junkyard, parsing rusted cans and yellow grass as she approaches a column of smoke and fire. Orange light dances across her vision, excited and frantic, pushing black shadows behind whatever comes across their path.
Sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, shadowless and wearing a set expression of burning anger, is Rachel Amber.
Chloe stills for a second, at first stunned that—after six months—she finally gets to see the girl she’d given everything, who’d taken the rest with kisses as thanks and nothing more. She’s already grieved, then and here, that for six months Rachel’s been dead, but that’s not something she can change. Especially not since she’s dead, too.
How the hell do you even start a conversation like this?
Ever the charmer, Rachel lifts her head in Chloe’s direction, her features dulling when she meets her gaze.
“Chloe Price,” she murmurs; it sounds like a eulogy, her name. “You finally found me.”
“Rachel,” Chloe calls and, before she even knows what she’s doing, races towards her, scooping her up into a panicked, desperate embrace. Fingernails dig into cold skin, and the odour of rot slips away into the faint aroma of lavender. Soon, the only warmth Chloe feels is the fire to her back.
Rachel doesn’t hug her back, at least not at first. She heavily buries her face into the crook of Chloe’s shoulder and gives a withering sigh.
“I’m so sorry,” Rachel murmurs again, finally reaching to pull Chloe closer against her. Chloe lets herself be held. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Shush, you,” Chloe whispers, a weak laugh gracing her tone. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Amber.”
Rachel’s hands fall from Chloe’s back, and she feels her presence slip for a moment. Chloe blinks, searching momentarily for Rachel; her vision settles as morning crawls across the scene, a crisp morning sun shining down on the junkyard.
Dirt sits in disturbed mounds between them, Rachel idly brushing her palm along where Chloe knows she’s been resting for so long.
“You’re dead,” she mourns.
Chloe’s lips tilt into a confused but teasing smirk. “I mean, yeah. I got shot.”
Rachel blinks tearfully. “Because of me.”
“What?”
Rachel shuffles closer and reaches to take Chloe’s wrist in her hand, gently upturning it. Chloe’s hand falls open limply, her long, pale fingers curling outwards as Rachel lifts her other hand to graze her palm; dirt falls in the wake of her chilled touch, filling the creases and tumbling between her fingers back down to her makeshift grave.
Chloe studies the dirt for a moment; it’s normal fucking dirt, she knows, but with the way Rachel regards her, she has her own mystical answer for what she’s just given Chloe.
“You remember the story of Daedalus and Icarus, right?” Rachel begins, and in all of her affections Chloe tries so hard not to roll her eyes. “To escape the tower they were held in for years, Daedalus crafted a pair of wax wings for him and his son to fly away. To escape.”
Rachel traces the lines of dirt in Chloe’s palms, a delicate circuit that Chloe watches attentively.
“Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, lest the heat of it melt the wax of his wings and send him tumbling to his death.” Rachel’s fingers still as she closes Chloe’s hand in, clasping it tenderly.
Chloe raises a questioning brow at Rachel; maybe it’s the disorientation of Hell getting to her, but she’s not quite sober enough to follow. “Are you…saying you flew too close to the sun?”
Rachel shakes her head with a rueful smile as tears start to draw dark lines of mascara down her cheeks. She pulls Chloe’s hand close to her lips, warm despite her cold touch, and dusts a small, sorrowful kiss against her knuckles.
“No,” she says, “you did.”
When she looks back up at Chloe, her eyes glisten with months of unshed tears.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Rachel—”
“I’m sorry!” Rachel wails, and the sky bursts with white light, blinding and overwhelming. Chloe presses her eyes shut, hoping to avoid being blinded by Rachel’s white-hot anger.
A chill runs the length of her spine, and the memory of rainwater washes over her.
“Rachel, stop!” Chloe finally manages to say, but her voice is carried by ripping winds and angry thunder into nothing, dying beyond the tempest of her fury.
Somewhere, in a life unlived, she marvels at the display of vengeance and anger conjured upon Arcadia Bay, flashes of lightning lost in the swirling vortex hovering over the bay. In this…whatever Chloe should call it, though, her heart drums in her chest, raucous panic accompanying relentless passion.
Rachel’s revenge may have been too simple a term, now that she thinks about it. Tears flood past her eyes, catching the wind and turning to ice-cold rain that pelts her skin. A familiar scream tears its way past her lips, fading between anguish and a thunderous roar. As her fingers twitch towards her palm, forks of lightning streak across the white sky, and the tempest unveils itself as Rachel’s grief.
But Chloe’s grieved, lived her life elsewhere and knows what her heart had yearned for all these years. She was loved, cherished, and she will be missed. She is already missed by the woman who gave her this gift, this burden, this epilogue.
Chloe approaches, crossing the ripping torrent of winds that try to buffet her aside, and stands before Rachel, her pleas worn in her eyes.
“Rachel, please listen to me!” Chloe calls out, hoping not to be drowned again. “This isn’t your fault!”
Rachel shakes her head, fingers curling into tight fists. “I lied to you. I pulled you into my life, made you do things I never should have asked you to do!”
“And I was happy to do them!”
“Bullshit!” Rachel roars, and the tempest grows.
“No, it’s not! Jesus, Rachel, do you think I’d have come looking for you if I wasn’t?” Chloe steps forward again, shielding her eyes from the single column of white light that descends upon them from the centre of the vortex.
Rachel’s jaw sets. “Let me do this for you, Chloe. David, Nathan, Mark, fucking Arcadia Bay.” A weak smile crosses her lips, and she finally holds Chloe’s gaze. “This can be your revenge. You always wanted to set Arcadia Bay ablaze. Let me do this for you, Chloe.”
Chloe shakes her head violently and takes another laborious step; Rachel stands barely a foot from her now, and she clings to her as she squints, digging her heels into the dirt mound Rachel refuses to part from.
“But I don’t want this, Rachel!” Chloe begs, tears welling in her eyes. “I just want you! ”
The tempest falters, lightning fizzling mid-strike as the gale slowly unwinds.
“Just…me?” Rachel asks, somewhere between confusion, shame, and astonishment.
The grip Chloe holds on Rachel’s shoulder tightens. “Duh, idiot! It’s always been you! I never wanted to leave Arcadia Bay burning, I just wanted to leave with you. ”
Rachel’s lip twitches into a snarl as her gaze drags away from Chloe. “Even after everything I’ve done to hurt you.”
Chloe’s heart pangs, a sting of faint anger fizzling before it can take root. Rachel has hurt her, sure. Every night they spent getting close to that unspeakable something that Chloe was so ready to put words to, Rachel would pull away, swallow that word back, make Chloe’s skin sizzle and lips buzz with lavender before leaving her cold hours later. Somewhere else, Chloe wonders if Rachel ever gave Frank that same chill, and her chest constricts at the thought that Frank ever got more of her than she was offered.
Fuck, loving Rachel Amber stings.
But her heart also swells alongside memories of a life lived and not forgotten, of the thrill of bounding onto moving trains and sharing so close a space, the strum of woeful electric guitar setting the rhythm for her racing heartbeat. She remembers the absolute wreck she was on-stage in sophomore year, stumbling over lines and trying not to laugh at herself until Rachel’s smirk gave her that cue. She remembers her eyes filling with pride upon seeing Chloe’s fresh blue hair, running her fingers through it and eliciting responses Chloe kept ready for those sizzling nights, and she remembers every long evening spent at the lighthouse overlooking the horizon—their eventual freedom—and settling into a quiet, gentle peace.
Loving Rachel Amber stings, and Chloe could never love any other way.
“Please, Rachel, listen to me,” Chloe says evenly, firmly, loosening her grip as the space between them shrinks. “It’s just us now. We can be angry, or we can be vengeful, but we can just be us . Don’t hurt Joyce or…” she swallows, the name that sits on her tongue tasting bitter and sweet all at once, “or Max. Just be with me.”
When the winds finally fade and the sky darkens to night, Rachel hangs her head and falls against Chloe again. Chloe helps her stay standing, even as her own knees begin to buckle and her strength wanes, and holds Rachel until the sky pours flakes of ash around them.
“Why are we here?” she asks, her voice small. Chloe hasn’t heard her this frail in years, not since they found unique solace under a blanket of stars.
She hardly has to wonder how long they've been dead.
“It’s a sign,” Chloe remarks with a gentle smile, looking up into the night sky as her hair catches the ashes. “Let’s leave.”
Rachel pulls away, her hands resting against Chloe’s shoulders; she draws her fingertips along the dangling lock of blue hair that frames the right side of Chloe’s face, a habit she’d picked up long before she’d worn this colour.
“I…don’t want to. Not yet.”
She blinks, and when she looks upon the parking lots of the Two Whales Diner, a midday sky casting a white gleam upon the decaying buildings lining the street, Rachel leans miserably against a familiar RV, her arms crossed in front of her chest.
Chloe winces as she looks upon it, fear coiling in her chest. “Did you love Frank?” Chloe asks in a voice too small for her hurt.
It takes a moment for Rachel to respond, but when she does she sounds resolute. “No. I only told him what he wanted to hear.”
Chloe nods carefully and braves the next question, the one that she’d kept locked behind her chest every time her heart skipped a beat. “Okay. Did…did you love me?"
Once again, Rachel pauses.
“No,” she says after a withering breath, and Chloe feels her jaw tense before the soft tenor of Rachel’s voice calms her. “I still do love you.”
They’re back under the golden spotlight of the stage, ridiculous costumes and all. A promise sits between them, veiled by purple prose spoken in perfect iambic pentameter.
“Then why?” Chloe asks, falling to one knee to meet Rachel. “Why not tell me when you knew how I felt?”
“Because it scared me. You scared me.” Rachel recites the words expertly, never faltering or pausing. This admission is one she must’ve had months to rehearse. “All we’d ever talked about was leaving Arcadia Bay. I’ve never known what it means to stay in one place, so…it terrified me when I realised there was somewhere I wanted to stay. With you.”
“In character!” shouts a man from behind them, hidden backstage; Chloe rolls her eyes and flips him the bird.
“But you still slept with Frank…you never told me.”
An empty audience gasps, and Rachel stumbles to both knees weakly. Chloe moves in to catch her, shooting a daggered glare at the audience only she can hear, and rests her palm against Rachel's shoulder to draw faint, comforting lines across stretched black fabric.
Rachel lays a hand overtop Chloe’s and meets her gaze again; her eyes are swollen and ringed with pink. “I hoped, maybe, I would stop feeling the way I did. And when I didn’t, I thought about you finding out. I thought about you hating me. I wanted to become someone you could hate, so that if you ever did find out…if I ever did tell you…” She swallows and tucks her lips between her teeth, taking in a hiss of breath. “I wouldn’t have to be the one leaving you.”
They’re back in American Rust when Chloe blinks again, their hands joined and knees knocked together. Where Rachel had been buried, there is now a hole in the earth, a haphazard attempt at refilling it leaving yellow crime scene tape beneath mounds of rot and soil.
“Rachel,” Chloe starts, “I could never hate you. Even if sometimes you make me wanna wring your neck.”
Rachel chuckles dryly at the remark and replies in a coarse voice, “Sounds kinda hot.”
Chloe rolls her eyes and brings their foreheads together, her eyes fluttering closed; when they open, she’s sitting on a patch of green grass across from a congregation of people in black, wiping away tears on a bright, sunny day.
Of course she’d be here for her own funeral.
Joyce presides over her casket, a polished wood Chloe has no doubt probably cost her more than she was able to spend; it’s nicer than anything Chloe expected to be buried in. Red rings her eyes and nostrils, and Chloe’s heart splinters at seeing her wearing the same outfit she’d worn for her dad’s funeral.
She wonders if, maybe, they buried her in her father’s boots, or her precious blue beanie; a closer look assures her that she’s at least in a plot beside William.
Rachel sits beside her, resting a hand on her knee. Her eyes fall to Max, who stands over the wooden coffin she’s been laid to rest in, tearfully smiling at a blue butterfly that sits before her; Warren Graham has one hand on her shoulder, and Kate Marsh stands on her other side, clasping her hand in hers. She can’t help but envy that they can comfort Max in her grief, though she’s not sure whether she envies Max too.
She’d have loved comfort in her own grief years ago, but she knows how it stings, how it hollows, how it debilitates. Chloe can comfortably say she never wants to experience that pain again, and even more comfortably wish Max well in her sorrow.
“That’s her,” Rachel notes flatly, still looking across the cemetery. “The Max Caulfield.”
“Yeah,” Chloe says with a nod.
Memories of that other life flicker in her mind’s eye, evoking a pang of melancholy as a dusting of pink brushes across her cheeks. She hopes, desperately, that Max kept true to her word, that every memory they built was never tossed, that she still has every picture she took of a life that never was, that the courage and loyalty she’d displayed for Chloe stays with her, for her own sake and the sake of her other friends.
And, selfishly, she hopes she remembers that kiss. Maybe Chloe awoke something in Max that morning, or maybe she’d harboured those sentiments all along. As long as Chloe was always her first.
“I guess she’s cute,” Rachel remarks lightly, leaning against Chloe and looping an arm around her bicep.
Chloe snickers, laying a protective arm around her shoulders and tugging her closer. “Rachel, we’re dead. You don’t have to be jealous.”
Rachel quirks an eyebrow at Chloe, a devilish expression gracing her features as she glances up at her. “Who said anything about being jealous?”
It takes Chloe a moment to parse Rachel’s reaction, and when she does she delivers a light shove and a scoff. “That’s my best friend you’re ogling!”
“Oh, best friend?” Rachel says amidst a small bout of laughter. “And what does that make me?”
Chloe halts, her hand hovering above Rachel’s shoulder. As her body is lowered into the ground, she lets her eyes fall closed; when they open, her and Rachel are overlooking the bay, catching the golden hour in its rippling tide.
“I dunno,” Chloe admits, turning to face the bay. “What does that make you?”
Rachel hums thoughtfully as her attention also turns to the beautiful bay before them.
“This place has always felt like the edge of the world,” Rachel says after a moment of silence. “Our backs to the only world we know, infinity before us. The promise of freedom caught in the vast expanse of the ocean. It always felt like I could take one step off this cliff and be elsewhere.”
“Where’s elsewhere?” Chloe asks, and Rachel shrugs noncommittally.
“Anywhere I wanted.” Rachel sighs and draws her fingers along the grass in front of her. “We never did escape, did we?”
“We have all the time in the world.”
Rachel nods weakly. “It’s been a hell of a ride, Chloe Price.”
“It doesn’t have to end here,” Chloe tells her. Drawing her gaze back to Rachel, she lifts one knee up and takes her hands in hers. “We have the world ahead of us. Infinity and beyond. We can fly beyond this isle, Rachel.”
Rachel drags her gaze up to meet Chloe’s, and hope fills the green of her eyes, a shimmer she’d missed for those six lonely months without her. “The corners of the world our mere prologue.”
Chloe nods and pitches forward, planting a chaste kiss to her forehead; it earns her a soft smile from Rachel, followed by a more passionate kiss that she cranes up to steal. In life, Rachel’s lips had reminded Chloe of her stasis, of the universe halting her in her pursuit of happiness; now, it appears in death that the universe is happy to let Rachel’s kisses mean anything but heartbreak.
They part, still seated together at the edge of the world, before Rachel stands, leading Chloe up. “Where should we go?” she asks dreamily.
Chloe shrugs. “I think last time I mentioned a road trip. Could be fun.”
Rachel laughs, melodic and full, and it warms Chloe’s skin. “Chloe, I don’t think ghosts can drive.”
“Well, I’ve never been a ghost, so I’ve never actually tried. What’s stopping us?”
Rachel smiles softly and turns to face the bay, Chloe’s hand still kept in hers. “Then I’m ready when you are.”
Chloe peeks behind her, catching the orange light of sunset cresting over the pointed tips of pine trees as they settle into the shadow of night. A spattering of coloured leaves crunch beneath her feet and crackle in the faintly salty sea breeze that washes over them.
Hell is empty , she thinks, and all its devils are here .
With a squeeze of Rachel’s hand and the world ahead, Chloe steps forward and takes the plunge into a brave new world.