Work Text:
Rage eviscerates Nat in the usual way.
She is torn to shreds by the wicked teeth of her deepest insecurities and oldest fears. She is deconstructed, bone by bone, and laid out like a fossil on the examining table of a ravenous archaeologist.
Oh, they can see her now. A scared little girl. A child alone. A single voice buried beneath a windstorm of howls and screams.
But she’s right.
She’s right, and if only they would listen to her, she wouldn’t have to be so fucking alone.
“Just stop it, Nat,” snaps Travis, pulling down his hood and brushing the snow from his lapel. “If you’d join us once in a while maybe you wouldn’t hate it so much.”
“Join you?” She laughs once. Curt. Incredulous. “Join your pseudo-religious, mental-circle-jerk cult playing make believe out in the woods?”
Nat’s seething. Her voice is so sharp she tastes blood in her gums.
“What do you think you’re achieving out there?” She jabs a finger in the direction of the open cabin door. Through the trees, Lottie is leading the others in meditation or tree hugging or satanic worship — whatever the hell is it they do out there. Nat gave up caring a while ago.
“We’re fucking starving!” she screams. “And while I’m out there hunting all day, this is what you’re doing? All of you? I mean, am I the only one that hasn’t completely lost their fucking mind yet? God, don’t let that be true because if it is, we are so fucking screwed. I can’t do this on my own.”
Travis rolls his eyes and Nat briefly entertains kicking his teeth in.
“If you’re on your own, it’s because you made it that way,” Travis snipes under his breath. He’s too much of a coward to say such a cruel thing with his chest. Why can’t he just be a man about it?
Hot tears prick Nat’s eyes. She blinks them away.
“You’re choosing her.”
“Her?”
“Lottie. That’s what you’re doing. She touched your chest and you saw god, or whatever the fuck, and now you’re choosing her over me. I know I fucked up with Javi but, jesus, you’ve been icing me out for weeks!”
Travis has the audacity to look bored. “I’m so over this.”
“Oh, you’re over this?” Nat steps up to Travis, jaw quivering, fingers curled into fists at her sides. She searches his anxious eyes for an answer. “What is it about her that has you all under this goddamn trance? Why can’t you just wake up?”
Travis says nothing. He hangs his head and that pisses Nat off so she shoves his chest again and again.
“Why?” she begs. “Why won’t you wake up? Just wake up!”
Her screaming rouses the attention of the others and before she knows it there are hands all over her, pulling her back and holding her down. She thrashes and fights but without a goal, without a purpose. She just wants to fight.
She wants to fight but there are tears in her eyes and a stone in her throat and everybody in the world is on somebody else’s side.
It’s a losing battle.
Her whole life might be summed up by those four words.
“Hey,” somebody coos softly. “It’s okay, Nat. Just breathe.”
Lottie puts her hand on Nat’s chest and she moves to smack it away but Van has her left hand and Taissa has her right. She’s pinned to the wall with no hope of escape.
Somewhere amidst the chaos, Travis has disappeared. Nat swears she hates him.
“Look at me,” whispers Lottie. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey,” warns Van.
Lottie frowns, but it’s not disappointment Nat sees. It’s concern. She takes a small step back. “Let her go.”
Taissa and Van share a look. After a moment’s hesitation, they let Nat go and take a few quick steps back, but Nat doesn’t bite. Keeping her back pressed up against the wall, she thuds her head against the wood and takes a trembling breath.
The rage is still there, boiling just beneath her skin. She thinks it’ll be her ruin.
Lottie glances at the others. “Can you give us a sec?”
“Sure,” says Van, eyeing Nat with apprehension.
Taissa turns to Nat. “Are you gonna behave or do we need to tie you down?”
“Save the bondage for Van, I’m not interested.”
“You know, just because we’re in the wilderness, doesn’t mean you need to become a feral animal.”
After giving Nat one last disdainful look, which is returned tenfold, Taissa and Van follow Travis out of the cabin. The door closes hard behind them, rattling Nat’s teeth.
“You can go on after them,” says Nat, unsticking herself from the wall. “I don’t need you to babysit me.”
“Are you okay?” Lottie asks, head tilted.
“I’m fine, no thanks to you.”
“I don’t understand, have I done something to upset you?”
Nat remarks that Lottie’s big, brown eyes make her look like a deer caught in headlights. Maybe that’s why everyone falls for her crap. Who says no to Bambi?
“I wanna know what it is,” says Nat, “that’s making everyone around here flock to you like a junkie to crack. Why nobody seems to be doing anything about our actual fucking problems ‘cause they’re all too busy singing Kumbaya with you around a damn campfire.”
Hurt colours Lottie’s features and Nat ignores the pang of guilt stirring in her chest.
Bambi is a deer Nat would shoot dead with a bullet between the eyes if it meant surviving another day.
“If it makes us feel better, what harm can it do?” challenges Lottie. “I’m not pretending to be something I’m not, but they want this. They need it. It helps them get from one day to the next.”
A tear breaks free from the corner of Nat’s eye and leaves a clear trail in the dirt on her cheek.
“But what about me?” she croaks. “How do I get from one day to the next? What the hell do I have?”
Lottie’s looking at her like she’s a wounded animal and usually Nat would lash out and rebuild her defences right about now but something stops her. That something is a cool hand on her face.
“Don’t,” Nat breathes.
“Let me help you.”
“Nothing you can do—“
Between one heartbeat and the next, Lottie’s hand moves from Nat’s cheek to her chest. She’s suddenly much closer and all the breath gets caught in a pileup at the back of Nat’s throat.
Lottie’s eyes are at once empathetic and intense, inviting and confining. Nat is literally speechless.
Their foreheads meet without force and Lottie’s eyelids flutter closed, fingers splaying out over Nat’s chest, feeling for the life in her. Impossibly, her reach extends beyond the tips of her fingers and slips between Nat’s ribs and lungs, closing around her quickly beating heart.
Her heart is in Lottie’s hands and it feels heavy.
“Just breathe,” says a voice a million miles away.
Nat has lost sense of time and space. She’s somewhere else, far from the hell of everything she’s ever known. A creek babbles. Birds sing to one another. Sunlight stabs up through the ground and illuminates a path through the trees. There, at the end of the tunnel, Lottie is waiting for her with antlers sprouting from her head. She is haloed by light. She is clean and calm and poised.
She is the most beautiful thing Nat has ever seen.
“Take my hand,” whispers Lottie. Her voice sounds like the murmurings of trees, like creaking pines and rustling leaves.
Nat takes Lottie’s hand. The light that is everywhere is now inside her. It’s in both of them.
“You’ll never be alone again.”
Gasping, Nat stumbles backwards into reality and only avoids falling because Lottie is holding her hand.
“Shh.” Lottie shushes her and strokes the hair out of her face. “You’re okay. It’s okay.”
Nat clutches her chest, stunned. The heaviness in her heart has been lifted and she keeps waiting for it to crash back down around her but Lottie’s still stroking her hair and so it doesn’t happen.
“How—“
“I don’t know. I felt that you were in pain, so I took it away.”
Nat looks down at herself, half expecting to see blinding light bleeding out through her bones. She looks the same. Dirty, unkempt, half-starved.
Lottie, however, looks changed.
“You… touched me. I felt you.”
“Yes,” blushes Lottie. “I felt you, too.”
“I was ready to kick your ass.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Different.” It’s the only word Nat can think of to describe it. In an instant, Lottie reached inside her and cooled her wrath. She showed her a life without pain and doubt. Nat doesn’t want to call it hope, but that’s what it tastes like. “Who are you, Lottie? Seriously?”
Lottie takes Nat’s hands. The world beyond the windows grows a little brighter.
“I’m your friend, Nat, and I’m with you. We all are. Ours is not a losing battle if we fight together.”
Nat doesn’t think to question how it is that Lottie seems to be able to read her mind.
“I’m still not joining your cult.”
Lottie laughs. Pines creak. The wind sings.
“You don’t have to join in with the group if you’re not comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean I can’t still be here for you.”
“Right. So you do one-on-one sessions now?” jokes Nat. “Do those cost extra?”
The ghost of the smile on Lottie’s face fades into nonexistence. She leans in close enough that Nat can feel her breath on the crest of her upper lip.
What would it be like, she wonders.
“We’re all connected, I can feel it,” Lottie says softly. “There’s something under the surface, binding us all, and we have to hold onto it if we want to make it. Can’t you feel it? It’s so alive right now.”
Nat licks her dry lips. “I guess.”
Oh, but she feels it. She feels it in the imposing force coiled around them, squeezing their bodies together like a slowly constricting python. She feels it in the urge to do a bold and reckless thing. She feels it on Lottie’s lips when she kisses her.
Lottie doesn’t react like somebody who is surprised, but she doesn’t reciprocate either. Instead, she lets Nat crush her desperate lips against hers for a few short seconds.
When she breaks away, Nat keeps her eyes squeezed shut and her brows knitted together. She’s confused. Embarrassed. Maybe she should have kicked Lottie’s ass.
They breathe heavily in one another’s silence.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Eyes still closed. Fists balled tight. Blood rushing in burning ears.
“Look at me.”
“Actually, I’m good like this.”
“Open your eyes.”
Stubborn to the end, Nat refuses right up until Lottie’s cracked lips graze the corner of her mouth. It’s a gesture so tender Nat thinks the meat might slip right off her bones. She dares to open her eyes.
Lottie’s smiling at her. “I told you. We’re all connected.”
“I really don’t know why I did that.” She doesn’t know why she wants to do it again, either. “What did you do to me? Some sort of voodoo, hocus-pocus shit?”
“No,” frowns Lottie. “That was all you, Nat.”
“Bullshit.”
“Five seconds ago you didn’t believe in my voodoo, hocus-pocus shit and now it’s your scapegoat. So, which is it?”
“I don’t know,” Nat mumbles, staring at the snow falling outside and the black smoke rising from the fire because it’s easier than facing her.
“Which are you more afraid of, Nat? Being alone or being happy?”
The following stretch of silence spans lifetimes.
“I’m just afraid.”
“We’re all afraid, but it’s easier to manage when you’ve got help.”
Nat finds just enough courage to look Lottie in the eye. The faint scar on her forehead. The dark, matted hair. The streak of mud on her neck that’s been there since she went to gather firewood in the morning.
She sees a girl.
She sees a miracle.
“I wish I was strong like you,” confesses Nat.
“You are strong.”
“No. I don’t know what you’ve got inside you, but these people trust you. They rely on you. When they look at you, they know you’re something special.”
“They just see what they want to see.”
“No, don’t do that. Don’t make it small. They see you just as you are.” Nat pauses. “So do I.”
Somehow, Lottie’s wide, round eyes grow wider and rounder. “I see you, too.”
“You do?”
“I think you’re one of the best of us,” says Lottie. “Maybe we get a little carried away sometimes, but your feet are always on the ground. You bring us home. I admire that in you. I always have.”
Nat chews her lip to keep it from wobbling. She’s not usually so soft and it perplexes her that Lottie is unraveling her with such swift ease. If her rage made her vulnerable, then whatever this is strips her naked.
“It’s okay to be afraid, Nat, but please don’t be afraid of me.”
“Shit,” utters Nat, shaking her head with disbelief. “Do you think we’re all losing our minds out here?”
“I don’t know,” laughs Lottie. “Maybe. But I promise it’s more fun to lose them together.”
Lottie weaves her fingers through Nat’s and squeezes her hand. Nat doesn’t pull away from her even when she presses a chaste kiss to her cheek.
She doesn’t know what’s happening, or why it feels like there’s an entire sun burning inside her chest when Lottie puts her hands on her, but Nat knows one thing for sure.
The only way out of the darkness is to follow the light.