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1.
When Chris walks out of the questioning room three hours after all of them are picked up by the RCMP, it’s with a lifetime’s worth of exhaustion weighing him down and a splitting headache gnawing at the insides of his skull.
“Oh, man,” Chris mutters under his breath, sounding like a petulant child even to himself. He squints under the glare from the fluorescent lighting, rubbing his temples as he scans the nondescript hallway around him.
The hallway is lined with doors nestled into off-white walls, the floor a chipped linoleum that looks as though it’s seen better days. There are two uniformed officers conversing in hushed tones to his right, glancing his way every so often as though they expect him to do something stupid. To his left there are a few empty chairs, the door to the bathroom, a water fountain that looks like it was installed in the 1970s, and a single sad-looking vending machine. There’s no sign of any of the others, but maybe he’s the first one to finish getting questioned.
To be honest, Chris is so numb with fatigue right now that he can’t quite bring himself to care. His leg, which was bandaged up quickly but effectively upon arrival, is still throbbing dully despite the painkillers. Every part of his body aches, overused and overstrained, and he can barely stop his eyes from drooping closed.
The night’s events have left him so thoroughly overwhelmed that he practically feels empty; hollowed-out and scraped raw, as though every single one of his nerves has been shot to the point of uselessness.
Over the course of the past twelve hours, Chris is fairly certain that he’s experienced every emotion his body is capable of feeling. He doesn’t have room for any more.
For the first time since their arrival, it distantly occurs to him to wonder exactly where this station is. Red Deer, maybe, or Hinton. Hell, maybe even Golden. It’s a small town office, that’s for sure, and the only real assumption Chris can make is that they definitely haven’t made it all the way to Edmonton.
The bright red of the vending machine catches his eye again, and all at once Chris becomes aware that his stomach is growling so viciously he almost feels sick. The RCMP had made sure to get all of them rehydrated during the helicopter ride over, yeah – but he can honestly say he has no idea when he last ate a proper meal.
And okay, Chris gets the impression that he’s probably supposed to sit and wait patiently for someone to collect him, but it’s hard to give a fuck about that when all he can think about is how his stomach feels as though it’s about to turn itself inside out if he doesn’t get something in there as soon as goddamn possible.
Chris favours his leg as he edges a little closer to the machine, digging around in his pocket in hopes of finding enough change to buy something. His wallet is still in his backpack – which, great, is still at the lodge, so that’s another thing for him to deal with later – but he could’ve sworn he had at least one toonie stashed somewhere inside his coat.
He’s so consumed in the search that he doesn’t properly register the sound of one of the hallway doors opening; doesn’t take in the sound of soft footsteps on the laminate floor.
“Oh!”
It’s a soft exclamation, feminine and uncertain and almost certainly involuntary, and damn it if Chris wouldn’t know that voice anywhere.
He freezes in place as a rush of tension and uneasiness floods his stomach, hesitating for a long moment before turning around to face her.
It’s Ashley, of course. Standing there in the hallway with her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed protectively over her middle. She looks profoundly uncomfortable – almost unhinged with anxiety – and she’s staring at him as though she genuinely has no idea what to say.
“Hey, Ash,” says Chris neutrally, trying to sound casual and fine and totally normal, but there’s a high note of discomfort that seems to bleed through his words all the same. He coughs lightly, gives himself a little shake. “How… how are you holding up?”
“Fine,” Ashley says quickly, but Chris sees the way her eyes dart quickly down the hallway behind him. Hyper-aware and still searching for threats, and Chris supposes he can’t blame her. They’ve all survived a nightmare tonight, but the two of them have lived through their own particular brand of hell. “I’m fine, just… I’m fine.”
And the thing is…
The thing is that Chris still can’t look at Ashley without feeling as though he’s going to choke on the swelling sickening guilt of it all. As though he might turn himself inside out with it; as though he might throw up.
Because all that shit with the sawblades and having to choose might’ve been fake in the end, yeah. But at the time? At the time, Chris really believed that it was real.
And Ashley doesn’t know – can’t know, can never know what he tried to do to her. What he thought he was doing to her.
When it came right down to it, Josh made him choose.
And Chris chose wrong.
(And fuck, it hurts, it hurts to think about Josh. Still missing, still lost, maybe dead and gone or maybe alone and terrified. A knotted mess of grief and anger and hurt and betrayal, and he can’t handle it right now. Can’t reconcile his best friend Josh with the goddamn maniac who tormented him and his friends for the hell of it, let alone wrap his head around the idea of Josh being dead, and –)
In the end, it doesn’t matter that Josh has been his best friend since the third grade. Doesn’t matter that none of it was real, that Josh had been playing games with their heads the whole time.
In the end, Chris made the decision to let Ashley die.
All that time they spent dancing around each other, studying for midterms and laughing and teasing and getting closer – Chris had really thought that all of it had been building up to something real. Something special.
Now, though…
Chris has been running on nothing but adrenaline and sheer terror for hours, has spent the entire night genuinely fighting for survival with everything he had.
But now the danger has passed, and it’s just the two of them here, and he can barely look Ashley in the eye anymore. The shame of it is too visceral, too real. Filling him up and leaving a bitter taste in the back of his mouth, tainting every glance they share and every word they speak with something ugly and awful and incomprehensible, and all of it without her even knowing.
Because that’s the worst part, isn’t it: that Ashley has no goddamned idea. She has no idea that before anything real happened, before any of them were in any actual danger, Chris had already decided that she was expendable.
He feels fucking sick just thinking about it.
In front of him, Ashley fidgets where she stands.
“It’s just –” Ashley blurts out in a rush, drawing Chris out of his head and back to the moment, and for the first time he properly registers just how stilted and strained her voice sounds. Her eyes look slightly wild, like a small animal backed into a corner. She flinches.
“It’s just – it’s just that all of this has been so much, Chris,” she continues, the words coming faster as she goes. “So much all at once, and – and the thing with the g-gun and the saws would’ve been enough, you know? But all of the monsters and running for our lives and the explosion, and I just…” She fiddles compulsively with the sleeve of her hoodie, looking up at him with beseeching eyes.
When she speaks again, her voice wavers dangerously. “Chris, I’ve been so scared.”
Chris stares down at her, hesitating.
“I know,” Chris replies after a long moment, because it would be impossible to not know that at this point.
His mind flashes briefly to the way Ashley’s slow-burning terror had flared up into something bordering on outright hysteria back when they were searching for Sam in the lodge basement. The way she had seemed so close to falling to pieces half a dozen times throughout the course of the night, as though living through the shit with the sawblades had dislodged something primal inside of her that simply couldn’t be shoved back into place.
As soon as he sees the flash of hurt in her eyes, he immediately regrets his choice of words. He quickly raises his hands in what he hopes is a placating gesture.
“No, I mean – I know you were scared because we were all scared, Ash. It was… it was really fucking scary.”
“… yeah,” says Ash quietly, biting her bottom lip and glancing down at the ground, and Chris doesn’t really understand why she seems so upset about it. All of them were scared; they had every right to be.
Except…
Chris glances uneasily over at the two officers for a moment. They might be too far away to hear anything important, but he isn’t discounting the possibility of security cameras picking something up instead. He takes a step closer to her, trying not to think about the way her eyes widen ever-so-slightly when he does so.
“Is this about Emily?” Chris asks cautiously, making sure to keep his voice low. The way her entire body stiffens up at his words lets him know that he’s hit the nail on the head. He lets out a breath. “Ash, you didn’t know. None of us knew.”
“We almost –!” Ashley hisses before cutting herself off abruptly, her hands spasming helplessly where they’re wrapped around her middle. She bites her lip and scans around wildly for a moment before speaking again, this time in a whisper. “What if someone finds out? What if she told them?”
“Don’t you think she’s told them already?” asks Chris, and shit, Ashley looks so frightened he almost thinks she’s going to bolt. He reaches out to put a steadying hand on her shoulder, jerking his hand back and cursing himself out when she flinches at his touch. “No, Ash, I mean… it’s not like it was just you. Mike was the one with the gun, and…”
It feels as though something heavy has settled in the pit of his stomach. He swallows hard.
“And it’s not like I tried to stop you,” he finishes weakly, the words slipping out between numb lips.
I don’t want to know this, Chris thinks helplessly, feeling physically sick as the reality of it all sinks in. I don’t want to know this shit about myself, Jesus Christ.
He wants to take it all back. Wants to wake up in a world where none of this was ever real, where he doesn’t have to live with the knowledge of what he’s capable of. When the worst thing that ever happened to him was being shaken awake and told that Hannah and Beth are missing, Chris, they’re missing and we can’t find them, we can’t fucking find them, they’re gone.
And fuck, he wants all that to be gone, too. Wants to go back to being a dumb teenager with nothing but a stupid crush to agonize over, because none of this was ever supposed to happen.
They stand there in the ringing silence for a long while without speaking. It doesn’t take long before Chris feels as though he’s practically squirming with the oppressive discomfort of it all, and he’s glad that Ashley is avoiding his eyes because the last thing he wants to know right now is what’s going on inside her head.
Because none of it can be taken back. None of it can be undone, and neither of them can forget the kind of people they’re capable of becoming once they’re pushed just a little bit too far.
It’s Ashley who finally breaks the silence.
“I should…” she says after a long pause, shifting uneasily in place before looking over pointedly towards the bathroom door.
Chris takes a hasty step backwards, moving out of her space.
“Of course, yeah, sure,” says Chris in a rush, leaping on the chance to get out of this conversation with perhaps just a little bit too much eagerness. He avoids her eyes as he moves out of the way, and Ashley keeps her head bowed as she walks past him.
Chris keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the floor until she’s gone.
2.
“No,” says Chris dully, shaking his head at the old man as though to dismiss everything that’s come out of his mouth in the last five minutes. “I’m gonna go get him.”
It’s an easy declaration, confident and sure and absolutely fucking insane, and Ashley wrenches herself out of her haze of disbelieving fear to stare at him in disbelief.
“You can’t go out there, Chris!” Ashley blurts out instinctively, because of course he fucking can’t. Because it’s shitty that Josh might be dead, yeah, but he’s not worth dying over. Not after everything Josh did to them tonight; the whirring blades and the animalistic terror, making them look death in the eye and laughing about it afterwards. Not after he fucking tortured them.
— the screeching whir of the sawblade coming towards her as she pulls frantically at the restraints, struggling and fighting and straining so hard it feels as though she’s going to break her own wrists because oh god oh god Chris isn’t going to choose her, he isn’t, and she’s going to die she’s going to die he’s going to let her DIE –
When Chris glances over at her, Ashley is genuinely shocked at the sheer amount of venom in his eyes.
“I’m supposed to be his best friend,” Chris says fiercely, giving a full-body shrug and looking around in a way that’s much more aggressive than it is helpless. He catches her eyes, and Ashley feels a spike of profound irritation and hurt at how stubborn and stupid he’s being about this. “And I let him down.”
“No, he let you down Chris,” Ashley insists, leaning forward on the couch staring at him in stung disbelief, because she genuinely doesn’t understand this. How can Chris still side with Josh after everything he did to them? After everything Josh did to her? “He let all of us down.”
“I don’t care, I’m going to get him,” Chris announces pigheadedly, throwing his hands up in a dismissive gesture as he turns to leave, and Ashley jerks back minutely on her seat as though she’s been slapped.
— sawblades coming down towards them, closer and closer and louder and louder, and Chris across from her with the gun in his hand and an agonized expression on his face, and oh my god no no no chris chris chris stop no no god no CHRIS –
People are still talking around her, but it’s as though someone has turned the volume of the room down to a dull roar. Ashley clutches at the edge of the couch with both hands, staring down at her lap and profoundly aware of her friends’ eyes on her. Emily will be pitying and Sam will be concerned, won’t she, always so concerned because she can never keep her nose out of other peoples’ fucking business –
She can feel herself curling in on herself without meaning to, hunching over and cradling her middle as though she’s been wounded. There’s a clammy touch of another hand against hers – Sam trying to comfort her, she realizes distantly – but Ashley just flinches away and Sam doesn’t try to reach out again.
Chris and the old man are still talking, still standing right there in front of her, but it’s as though Ashley’s head has filled with white noise that drowns out everything they’re saying.
There’s a bitterness in the pit of Ashley’s gut, a wordless anger that’s been festering in the back of her head ever since she woke up in the middle of this nightmare. Because Chris is throwing his life away for someone who tormented them, who tormented her. And Josh never used to be all that nice to her anyways, did he. Used to make those gross comments about her when she thought he couldn’t hear him and she would shrug it off, she would always shrug it off, but after tonight – after making her think that she was going to die, not once but fucking twice –
Because Chris will always choose someone else before he chooses her, won’t he. Was willing to blow her brains out fucking seconds after he promised he wouldn’t let her die as long as it meant he could make it out alive, and –
— he’s pointing the gun right at her, right in her face, and Ashley screams and wails and begs him to stop, shakes her head and sobs at the pained expression on his face and her wrists are tied down but she pulls at her restraints anyways, keeps on begging him because it can’t end like this it can’t it can’t it just fucking can’t –
He’s a liar, Ashley realizes distantly. The truth of it settles over her like a heavy blanket, leaving her stifled and smothered and barely able to breathe as she swallows the revelation. A fucking liar who was perfectly willing to shoot her if it meant saving his own sorry skin, and he would’ve killed her, he would’ve killed her, he would’ve killed her.
She blinks, staring in blank incomprehension as people start filing out of the room, hardly aware of anything except for the mounting frenzy inside her own head.
“Ash?”
It’s a female voice, gentle and kind, and Ashley jerks her head up towards the noise – and it’s Sam, of course it’s Sam. Sitting next to her on the couch with an expression of delicate concern on her face; staring at Ashley as though expecting her to fall to pieces at any moment.
“Ash, are you okay?” Sam asks, biting her bottom lip and gently furrowing her eyebrws. She pushes a strand of blond hair behind one ear, then reaches out slowly to place a hand on Ashley’s shoulder. “Listen, I know that tonight has been a lot, but –”
“I’m fine,” Ashley says quickly, and it takes her a moment to realize that the words came out a little sharper than intended. She huffs out a breath through her nose, gives her head a shake. “Sorry. I’m fine. You’re right; it’s just been a lot.”
There’s a beat of silence, and Ashely becomes distantly aware that there are voices coming from the front door. Chris and the old man heading out to look for Josh.
And all at once Ashley feels a profound sense of calm fall over her.
She shrugs away from Sam’s comforting touch, getting unsteadily to her feet.
“Sorry,” says Ashley, her voice sounding oddly high to her own ears. She tries to force her face into something resembling an apologetic expression, and it’s just like drama class back in high school, isn’t it. Just like playing make believe. “I want to tell him good luck before he leaves.”
She only catches a glimpse of Sam’s understanding nod before she’s headig towards the voices, strangely aware of the way her body is moving as she walks over. It feels as though she’s gliding, feet barely touching the floor as she goes, and for the first time since this nightmare began Ashley’s mind has finally fallen silent. She turns the corner –
And there he is, standing in front of the open door. Wearing that stupid parka with the fur lining, his hands wrapped tight around another gun. The image sears itself onto her mind, a silent affirmation of what she has to do.
And it’s funny, because she always used to think of Chris as a genuinely nice guy. Cute and sweet, self-effacing and just a little bit dorky. A prankster and a funny guy, always teasing her and making dumb jokes when they studied together. She remembers all of it; her stupid little girl fantasies, their awkward flirting.
Chris’s assurances that he would always look out for her no matter what.
Ashley woke up this morning loving him, but now she can hardly remember why. The person in front of her is someone she doesn’t recognize, nothing more than a stranger.
For a moment, she wonders whether he might hesitate, whether he might change his mind – but the two of them only stare at each other for the briefest of moments before Chris turns his head and looks away, makes his decision one last time as he steps out into the cold.
Ashley doesn’t try to call him back. Just closes and locks the door behind him as that sense of quiet calm falls over her again like a dream, staring out into the snow-covered wilderness as the two strangers disappear down the stairs.
The wind rattles the windows and sends snowflakes dancing in the air, but Ashley doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Just hangs back and waits and watches, the sound of the gun going off in her face replaying itself over and over again inside her head.
She had been certain that she was going to die, back then.
Now…
Now it’s his turn.
She doesn’t know why, but Ashley isn’t surprised when it’s just Chris who comes stumbling back to the lodge. Clutching the gun in one hand and banging on the glass with the other once he sprints up to the door, visibly out of breath and his eyes wide in obvious terror.
“Ash! Ash, come on, this thing is right behind me!” Chris shrieks, and it doesn’t occur to her once to be afraid. “Please, let me in!”
It’s all white noise, because Ashley is hardly aware of anything except the loud bang of the gun as it goes off over and over again inside her mind, the remembered sound of her own voice begging him to let her live. She takes a slow step backwards and then another, barely registering his words as she stares back at him blankly.
As the grotesque, elongated spectre of a pale monster creeps up behind him.
Chris doesn’t understand what’s happening to him right up to the end, when the monster’s claws rip through his throat like it’s made of paper instead of flesh and sinew and bone. Ashley watches the whole thing play out unflinchingly, as though it’s something that has nothing to do with her. As though this is all some kind of movie or a game, not real life.
For a strange moment she catches the monster’s shrouded gaze, half-expects it to smash through the window and kill her too. But then it’s turning away with a snarl, choosing to ignore her rather than pursue her, and it doesn’t even occur to Ashley to be relieved.
And then the monster is reaching out an elongated arm, wrapping a long-fingered hand around the thing that used to be Chris’s ankle. Dragging the body away and leaving nothing but a decapitated head and trail of bloodied snow in its wake.
She distantly registers the fact that Mike has come barrelling into the room, but can’t really hear what he’s saying. Just keeps staring straight through the window as her breathing starts coming harder, as her whole body starts to shudder and shake.
“It was too late,” Ashley whispers hoarsely, slowly raising her arm to point outside in an almost childish fashion. There’s a gaping maw in her chest where she thinks her heart used to be, a battered wound oozing with resentment and spite that has finally been sated.
She can still see the dark shape of Chris’s head just outside the door.
“It was too late,” she says again, her whispered words oddly loud to her own ears.
She doesn’t resist when Mike takes her by the arm and pulls her away.
3.
It doesn’t feel right to wander away from the others, but Chris knows they’ll survive just fine without him. The injury to his leg makes him little more than a liability at this point, after all, and he knows he isn’t capable of doing much more than slowing them down. He hasn’t seen Ash or the others in at least ten minutes, so it’s not as though they’re going to miss him if he splits off on his own for a little while.
The voice in the darkness could be someone to help; someone to save. Maybe Mike was wrong before. Maybe Jessica survived the attack somehow, crawled her way free only to find herself all alone down here.
Chris has been lied to so many times tonight that he isn’t willing to take anything for granted, even things he’s seen with his own eyes. He’s not about to believe that any of them are really dead until he’s seen the body.
Besides, he pretty much already made peace with the idea of dying the moment he made the decision to blow his own brains out rather than let Ash die. Every minute he’s been alive since has really just been an unexpected bonus.
“I’m coming!” he calls out to the voice in the darkness, managing to hoist himself up over the partition with difficulty. He winces. “Hold on. I’m coming.”
His leg throbs and aches in protest when he makes the short drop to the ground below, and Chris can’t stop himself from letting out an involuntary shout of pain at the impact. The sound of it reverberates violently off the mine walls, echoing out into the darkness, and oh god, that definitely wasn’t a great start.
He soldiers on regardless, ignoring down the panicked little voice in the back of his head that keeps telling him to turn around, go back, what the hell do you think you’re doing, turn around.
You can do this, Chris tells himself as he limps his way through the craggy tunnels. He grits his teeth as cold fear starts seeping into his hands, into his bones. Keeps forcing himself to put one foot in front of another. Keep going. You can do this. Be a hero.
The sound of a girl’s sobbing echoes down the tunnel towards him again, and Chris feels another chill of terror run up his spine.
Whoever it is, she sounds really scared, he thinks shakily, and for a moment all Chris can imagine is what it would be like to be kept alive by one of those monsters. Strung up and abandoned and left to die down here, alone and terrified and knowing for every second of it what was coming for you.
The thought gives him the courage he needs to grit his teeth and keep staggering forward, ignoring the pain in his leg and reeling back the unbounded fear –
And then the tunnel is widening, opening up into a bigger cavern with the smallest hint of natural light filtering in from the ceiling, and out of the corner of his eye Chris sees something colourful lying on the ground.
Terror flares bright white in front of his eyes, and for a second Chris’s mind frantically cycles through every possibility of what the thing lying on the ground could be. A decapitated head, or a clawed-off arm still in its sleeve, or –
And then his eyes re-focus, and he shines the light over the ground, Chris realizes coldly that it’s Ashley’s toque.
It’s Ashley’s toque, and it’s absolutely drenched in dark wet blood.
“Oh no,” Chris whimpers, his voice rising into something strangled and hysterical that snags violently in his throat. There’s panic rising in his chest, visceral and frantic and sickening as he runs his eyes over the knitted purple stripes, desperately praying for it to disappear when he blinks.
He feels his knees give out beneath him, half-crawls forward because it can’t be real, it can’t be real.
“Oh my god oh my god Ash, no.”
Words are slipping out of his mouth like water through cupped hands, a stream of helpless denials that he couldn’t hold back even if he tried.
She was right in front of him just a second ago. She was fine just a second ago, this can’t… this can’t be…
His head is spinning like he might pass out at any moment because he can’t handle this, he can’t, he can’t fucking handle this.
“This can’t be happening,” Chris pleads in a high, pained voice as he wraps his badly-shaking fingers around the soft fabric, shaking his head in frenzied disbelief as hot tears run down his cheeks. He squeezes his eyes shut, feels something slick and wet when he clenches the hat in his hand. “This can’t be real, please, just… just tell me it’s not real.”
She can’t be dead, after everything they’ve been through she can’t be fucking dead. It can’t have all been for nothing. The sawblades and the gun and the kiss she gave him for good luck, it can’t have been for nothing. It can’t have not mattered.
It’s a trick, Chris realizes dumbly as he shakily gets to his feet. He’s breathing hard and the world is off-kilter and none of this is real, it can’t be. It’s just another trick, like Josh was playing on them before. Or… or it is real, but Ash is still alive somewhere and oh god he has to save her he has to save her he has to save her –
Chris is still physically reeling with panic and nausea and utter disbelief when he glances up and notices a trap door across the cave from him.
Ash.
He lets the hat fall to the ground, his hand still smeared with blood except it’s not it can’t be blood IT’S NOT HER BLOOD. There’s a pounding in his ears and this can’t be real and his head is spinning too much to think straight. He staggers to his feet and over to the trap door, his mind pounding out a constant throbbing litany of Ash and no and please please please please please, Ash, please.
He opens the trap door.
The last thing he sees is a flash of white and the swipe of long, sharp claws.
4.
Something heavy lands outside the lodge door with a squelching thunk, and whatever threads have been holding Ashley together over the course of the night come snapping apart all at once.
“Chris!” she shrieks, falling to her knees like a puppet with its strings cut. She claps a hand over her mouth, dissolving into whole-body shudders.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He was… he was supposed to come back to her. He was supposed to come back to her.
If he’d been a little bit faster… if she’d been a little bit faster…
“No,” she moans, drawn-out and agonized as hot tears spill over her face, making the whole world blur. “No, Chris… no…”
It’s horrible, so horrible she can’t stand it, can’t comprehend how this can happening oh please oh god this can’t be happening this can’t be happening.
She’s shaking apart, coming undone at the seams as she moans and screams and sobs at the sight of it, squeezing her eyes shut and begging, pleading with whatever god there is to make this a dream, please god make this a dream.
“Oh my god,” comes someone’s voice, low and masculine and horrified but it’s not Chris, can’t be Chris because his head is lying on the ground right in front of her. Mouth slack and open and his eyes staring at nothing and why is it still there, why is it still there. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Ashley feels herself slumping to the floor, actually feels herself giving because what does it matter? What the hell does any of it matter anymore? She screws up her face, wants to burrow into the ground and stay there and she wants to die she wants to die she wants to die.
Someone is saying words to her but she can’t hear them. A hand is tugging at her arm but she can’t feel it.
She lets herself be dragged along because it’s easier than resisting, numb to the world and everything in it except for Chris’s decapitated head discarded on the snowy winter ground.
5.
“Is it possible they could have killed him?”
For a moment, all Chris can muster is a dumbfounded look at the officer across from him, because… what? The wound in his leg is still throbbing despite the painkillers they gave him ages ago, a backdrop of persistent discomfort to the bizarre line of questioning.
The idea that one of them could’ve killed the old man is so ridiculously untrue that he has no idea what to say in response to it – and besides, he already fucking told them what happened. The whole grotesque scene is permanently seared into Chris’s mind: the swipe of the wendigo’s claws, the gaggingsplutteringchoking noise Milgram made when he fell to his knees.
The sickeningly wet sound his decapitated head had made when it hit the snow-covered ground.
The idea that one of them could’ve – that any of them could’ve been capable of –
The memory of Mike shoving the shotgun right in Emily’s face flashes across his mind, Chris and Ashley’s voices urging him on in the background, and that line of protest quickly falls to pieces on his tongue.
“What?” Chris asks her blankly, the word snagging a little in his throat. “No. No, you don’t understand. Don’t you understand –”
“If he attacked you…” the officer begins again, her voice carefully neutral but there’s something quietly pitying in her eyes, and Chris can’t fucking handle this because she really believes that, doesn’t she.
She really thinks they killed him.
Chris’s head hurts, a dull ache behind his eyes that won’t go away. It makes him realize belatedly how hungry he is – and thirsty, fuck, because one little bottle of water on the helicopter ride over is hardly enough to make up for a whole night’s worth of running for his goddamn life. It pisses him right off, too, because how the fuck is any of this fair?
He narrows his eyes, leaning forward and enunciating each word clearly as he speaks.
“He saved my life,” Chris practically spits out at her, putting every bit of venom into it that he can muster, because this is just too much. “And I watched him die. I saw it happen. It was one of the wendigos, it wasn’t one of us, Jesus fucking Christ.”
After everything they’ve been through tonight, the sawblades and the monsters and the gut-churning terror that still hasn’t truly left him, the last fucking thing they need is a bunch of false accusations being flung at them by some dipshit police officer. The very last fucking thing, because why the fuck should any of them be punished for making it out alive?
“I see,” says the officer tightly, pursing her lips. She raises her eyebrows as she jots something down on the notepad in front of her, and Chris doesn’t think it’s his imagination that her eyes have lost a little bit of their kindness.
And suddenly all Chris wants in the whole fucking world is to have Ash here with him. To have her hand on his shoulder and her small presence at his side, trying to calm him down – or hell, maybe shrieking insults at the officer for asking him these kinds of things. She’s so goddamn unpredictable he can never know for sure what she might do.
It doesn’t matter, though, because Chris knows that she would have his back no matter what.
Thinking about Ash makes another person spring to mind, though. A twisted knot of grief and anger and betrayal that crawls up his throat, that makes him feel sick.
“Now, about this explosion –” begins the police officer, clearing trying to get them onto the next line of questioning, but Chris just shakes his head.
“No,” Chris interjects, cutting her off before she can ask another stupid question because there are more important things for both of them to be worrying about right now. “No, what about Josh?”
He feels a stab of panic in the pit of his stomach as he asks the question, as though saying the words has physically brought dormant fear back to life inside of him. He swallows hard, trying to keep his voice as even as possible. “Have you found him yet?”
“We haven’t been able to locate Joshua Washington yet, no.”
Her voice is rigid with quiet professionalism, and Chris feels a hot rush of helplessness and terror and anger that he just can’t hold back anymore.
“Look. Look, you need to go down to the mines,” Chris tells them for what seems to be the millionth fucking time, his voice practically shaking with the effort of remaining calm. He licks his lips, leaning forward because she has to believe him this time, she has to. “I swear to you it’s not a trick. Mike said one of the wendigos dragged him away, but he could still be down there, he could still be –”
The word ‘alive’ catches in his throat before he’s able to force it out, and it feels as though all of the anger has been sapped out of him. Chris slumps forward in his seat, holding his head in both hands and just breathing.
He let Josh die.
He let Josh die, and all of it was fake and then it fucking wasn’t, but no matter what he knows that Josh doesn’t deserve to die this way. Trapped under the ground, alone in the dark and scared out of his mind like Hannah had been.
Because Josh was screwing with their heads the whole time, knocked him out and made him choose, and all of it was so fucking sick he can’t even wrap his head around it. Josh put him and Ashley into the kind of situations that no human being should ever experience, but that doesn’t mean that Chris wants him fucking dead and gone and eaten and –
“I’m going to be sick,” says Chris as the nausea burns in his throat, clapping a hand over his mouth and staring at the officer with a stricken expression on his face. “Gonna be sick, please –”
The expression on his face must be enough to convince her.
“Bathroom’s down the hall,” says the police officer as she points at the door, but Chris is already stumbling towards it before she can finish. “There’s another officer in the hallway, don’t wander too –”
He pushes against the door and stumbles out into the hallway, the fluorescent lighting so bright it almost hurts after the careful dimness of the other room. Chris takes a few steps forward before he crumples to his knees, pressing a hand over his mouth and feeling the retching gagging sickness building up in his throat, and he’s gonna be sick he’s gonna be sick he’s gonna be fucking sick –
“Let me out of here!” comes a feminine shriek from behind one of the hallway doors, high and shrill and full of pulsing panic in a way that Chris knows, oh god. In a way he recognizes. “I fucking mean it, let me out –!”
Ash, his brain tells him distantly, and his body is already dragging itself up and onto his feet on autopilot because something’s wrong, she needs him, she’s in danger, Ash –
He turns to look just in time to see someone fling open one of the doors and stumble into the hallway, a blur of blue and purple and splattered red blood and it’s her, it’s her.
It’s Ash.
She’s practically tripping over her feet as she backs away from the police officer standing in the doorway. The man is visibly trying to encourage her to come back into the room but Ash isn’t having any of it; is shaking her head and backing away and saying something, and it takes a second before he can focus on the words, but –
“— not going back in there until you take me to see Chris,” spits Ashley fiercely, and it takes Chris a slow second to realize that she hasn’t spotted him yet. She doesn’t know he’s there. “I fucking mean it. I’m not answering any more of your questions until I see him, you jackass. I need to know that he’s all right, I need to know that he’s–”
“Ash,” Chris calls out quietly, not quite able to muster anything else, and Ashley reels around almost comically fast at the sound of his voice, her eyes locking onto him immediately. He’s bracing himself up with the palm of his hand pressed against the wall, and he doesn’t really want to think about how awful he must look right now.
“Chris!” Ashley exclaims, as though the word has been startled out of her chest. Her eyes are blown wide and she’s still covered in blood – real or fake, Chris can’t tell anymore, but the look of utter relief in her eyes is nothing if not real.
And then her face is screwing up and she’s pitching herself down the hall towards him, too small and quick on her feet for any of the officers in the hallway to grab her or hold her back. Chris can see that she’s already crying by the time she reaches him, tears running down her face to mingle with the dried blood on her cheek.
She takes hold of his shoulders when she reaches him as if to hold him steady, but Chris can feel that her hands are shaking badly. Her black eye is a vivid purple against the paleness of her skin.
“Are you okay?” she asks him with a hitch in her voice, half-frantic and half-desperate as she appears to haphazardly scan his face and body for injuries, and Chris distantly realizes that he doesn’t really feel sick anymore. Doesn’t have room for anything in his head that isn’t oh god and Ash and thank fucking Christ. “They took you away, and I didn’t – I didn’t know where you were –”
“I’m fine,” Chris tries to reassure her, but even he can hear the bone-deep weariness dragging his voice down as he speaks. “Ash, I’m fine.”
His head is filled with hollow exhaustion, deadened and worn down to the point where he can barely think straight anymore, but at least she’s here. At least Ash is here with him.
He achieved that much, at least.
Over Ashley’s shoulder, Chris can see the two police officers exchanging words with hushed intensity. One of them points at the two of them; the other one shakes his head dismissively. As though there’s no point in stopping them from talking.
That’s good, he thinks. That’s a good sign.
“God, Chris,” comes Ashley’s voice, and Chris wrenches his gaze away from the police to look her in the eyes again.
She looks… frayed at the edges, near-frantic even though the danger is passed. (It is over, it has to be over, and Chris doesn’t think he could fucking stand it if they were dragged back into that hell again.) There’s something wild and defensive about her, as though she might scratch the eyes out of anyone who dares to come to close to them.
Her lip trembles, her eyes shining as she looks at him imploringly.
“I can’t… I can’t believe it’s over,” she babbles, shaking her head hard and staring at him as though he’s the only thing in the world that matter anymore. “Chris, please tell me it’s over. Please.”
But instead of focusing on her words, Chris finds himself think about the way her hands are gripping his shoulders: helping to keep him propped up as much as latching on to him for comfort. The way she’s standing with her back to the police, having positioned her body right between him and the potential threat.
And all at once it occurs to him that her frantic desperation to survive isn’t limited to just herself anymore. It extends to him, too – and for a moment all he can feel is profound, sinking sadness at everything it took for them to win each other’s loyalty.
“Yeah,” says Chris eventually, and she buries herself against his side. For a moment it seems like a mindless bid for comfort – until he feels her arm wrap around his waist, feels her small frame standing strong against his side, and he realizes all at once that’s she’s using the embrace to shoulder some of his weight.
It makes him feel less unsteady on his feet, and Chris tries to ignore the twinge of horror in the back of his head at the belated realization that Josh’s fucked-up way of forcing them together might just have worked after all.
“Yeah, Ash,” Chris says, his voice dull and inflectionless to his own ears. He leans a little more heavily against Ashley’s reassuring warmth, swallowing shakily and squeezing his eyes shut as he holds her close. “It’s over.”
+ 1
The force of the explosion is enough to knock Ashley off her feet, a brutal rush of heat that sends her hurling to the ground. She lets out an involuntary shout of pain when her back hits the ground, instinctively curling in on herself and covering her face with her arms to protect herself from debris.
Her shoulder hurts at the impact, a sharp stinging pain that Ashley can’t afford to think about right now. Her ears are ringing but she has to get up, has to move. She presses her gloved palms into the dirt and starts pushing herself up with shaking arms.
She glances up as soon as she’s forced herself into a sitting position – and finds her eyes immediately drawn to the lodge. The whole thing is set alight and burning, flames licking up into the air and crackling loudly in the stillness of the night. The light is so bright it hurts her eyes; after hours of stumbling through the darkness, it’s almost too much for her to look at.
As soon as Ashley manages to drag her eyes away from the flames, she’s able to start taking everything else in. She looks around frantically for Chris, scours around single-mindedly for until her eyes land on a darkened figure a little ways away, and –
And it’s him, it’s Chris, and he’s slowly getting to his feet with a pained look on his face but he’s fine, he’s fine, and she nearly starts crying right there at the sheer relief of knowing he made it out of there alive. She glances around and thinks she spots Mike on the ground a little further away, dragging himself doggedly back onto his feet with a look of fierce determination in his eyes. Sam and Emily are a little closer to the lodge, Emily already struggling to her feet as she swears and clutches at her broken arm. Sam remains on all fours next to her, shaking hard and gasping for breath after her desperate run for the door.
She sees Josh last, sprawled on the ground just a few feet away from her. Staring up at the burning lodge as he bleeds from a bad-looking cut on his forehead, his eyes fixed on the flames as though utterly spellbound by their brightness.
Ashley gets to her feet with an almighty effort, swaying a little with the effort of remaining upright. She hears Sam let out a ragged cough a little ways away, turning to look at her just in time to see another huge burst of flames flare up behind her.
“I d-didn’t think I could do it,” says Sam in a very small and shaky voice that Ashley can barely hear over the crackle of the fire, and it catches her badly off guard because this is Sam. Strong and steady and sensible Sam, who always seems to be in control of whatever situation she finds herself in. Always holding them together whenever they’re about to fall apart, and it just about kills her when she hears Sam let out a tiny sob. “D-didn’t think I was gonna make it out. They were so fast…”
To Ashley’s shock, it’s Emily who marches over to her without missing a beat. She starts tugging at Sam’s shoulder with her good arm, wincing in obvious pain as the broken one dangles wrongly at her side.
“Look, you made it,” Emily snaps fiercely, her voice dripping with steely purpose. She gives Sam’s shoulder another tug, clearly trying to get her on her feet. “You made it, Sam. Now get out your feet right now, we have to go, there could be more of them coming for us –”
It’s at that very moment, though, that Ashley abruptly becomes aware of another sound coming out of the darkness. Loud and mechanical, getting closer and closer, and it’s – god, is that –?
“Hey!” Ashley shouts sharply, waving her hands in the air and jumping up and down as the others’ heads swivel around to look at her.
Because with all of the chaos and terror, the running and hiding and fighting for their lives, none of them have noticed the sun coming up over the mountains in the distance.
“We’re down here! We’re right here, just – come help us, please –!”
A helicopter is coming out of the night towards them, big and loud and real, it’s real, they’re going to be okay. They’re going to be okay and Ashley wants to cry, wants to shatter into a million pieces at the sheer relief of it. Finds herself beaming up at them instead, the wild joy of being rescued too impossibly big to keep bottled up inside.
She hears a few of the others start shouting up at it as well, waving their arms in the air until the helicopter starts to circle closer to the ground, visibly searching for a clear place to land.
It’s the first time Ashley has felt anything resembling happiness since this nightmare began. Since Mike first came bursting in through the basement doors looking as though he’d been through hell and back, shouting at them that Jess is dead and there’s something in the woods and for the love of god, we all have to fucking move.
For a second, she can picture the scene so vividly: her own panicked denials, Chris’s blunt skepticism, Sam’s searching questions.
The look of wrong-footed shock on Josh’s face.
“Ash!”
She reluctantly drags her eyes away from the RCMP insignia proudly emblazoned on the side of the helicopter at the sound of her own name – only to be confronted with the unspeakably wonderful sight of Chris striding purposefully towards her.
“Ash,” Chris says again, looking at her with an expression on his face that almost makes her want to cry. His eyes widen when he glances down at her right shoulder, quickening his pace into a jog for the last few steps. “Jesus Christ, Ash, you’re hurt –”
He reaches out a hand to touch her and Ashley sucks in a sharp breath at his touch, looking down for the the first time to see an angry-looking set of claw marks torn into her shoulder. It’s bleeding, but not too badly – must’ve happened when she was trying to get out of the lodge, and for a second she feels a little faint at the idea of how close one of those creatures must’ve got to do something like this.
“It’s okay,” Ashley says quickly, wincing as she becomes properly aware of the throbbing pain for the first time. Chris is still frowning at her with a concerned look on his face so she gives him a weak smile, trying her best to be brave. “It’s not as bad as Em.”
Chris doesn’t really look like he believes her, but he nods at her all the same. His hand lingers on her shoulder for a second longer than truly necessary, ghosting over the wound without really touching it. He gives her a look that’s heavy with meaning, and Ashley can’t help the way her stomach gives a thoroughly inappropriate flutter.
And then he’s turning to face Josh, the only one of them who still hasn’t managed to pull himself up off the ground.
“Hey, buddy,” says Chris cautiously as he walks over to stand beside his friend, a careful expression on his face that Ashley can’t quite identify. “How are you holding up?”
One of the helicopters is just touching down a few metres away from them, and Ashley can see the rest of their friends rushing to its side. There’s an instinctive part of her that wants to make a break for it, that wants to bolt for safety all by herself if she has to.
At the same time, though, the last thing she wants to do is leave Chris behind. She lingers a little reluctantly at his side, nervously keeping an eye on the helicopter out of the corner of her eye.
It takes Josh a second to respond, and when he does he just keeps looking as though his entire world has been pulled out from under his feet. He’s staring at the flaming lodge as though he’s in shock; as though he’s completely unable to process what’s happening in front of him.
“What?” Josh asks vaguely, and Chris takes it as his cue to step in. Ashley doesn’t blame him; just a few hours ago Josh had been having what had seemed like a full-blown mental breakdown, sobbing and wailing and crying out for his sisters as the rest of them pleaded with him to be quiet Josh please be quiet be quiet be quiet under their breath.
Josh licks his lips, still staring ahead with a dazed expression on his face.
As though he can see something that they can’t.
“I… I had all these plans,” Josh mutters under his breath as Chris reaches his side. “It was… it was gonna be…”
Chris leans down and grabs Josh by the arm and the back of his shirt, dragging him roughly to his feet.
“Sorry, bro,” says Chris bluntly as he hauls him forward, glancing nervously back into the woods as he starts to haul Josh towards the helicopter. “No time for kid gloves right now.”
Chris gives her a beseeching look, and without saying anything Ashley scurries around to Josh’s other side. She hooks her arm wordlessly around his waist and pulls him forward, grateful that it’s her uninjured shoulder he’s leaning on instead of the one that’s all cut up.
They make their way to the helicopter as though they’re competitors in some sort of strange five-legged race, and as soon as they reach its side a uniformed officer starts ushering them in.
“Oh my god, thank you,” Chris babbles nervously as the officer helps them inside, Ashley first and then Chris and then Josh. The other three are strapped into the seats behind them, all of them looking very eager to get off the ground. “Thank you so much, holy shit, we can’t – we can’t thank you guys enough for getting us out of there, seriously.”
All of them let out a breath they didn’t know they were holding as soon as the door closes with an audible hiss and the helicopter lurches upward into the air. And then they’re off the ground, roaring above the trees and too high up for even one of the wendigos to catch them now, and they’re finally, finally home free.
“Don’t worry,” says the co-pilot, a middle-aged man with a thick greying moustache. He turns around in his seat to give them a sober but reassuring smile. “Whatever trouble you kids have been getting into, it’s over now. We’re going to take you all to the nearest station so we can ask you some questions and get you some medical attention now, okay?”
“Thank you, sir,” says Mike earnestly from the seats behind them, his posture starting to relax for the first time in hours, and Ashley finds herself nodding emphatically in agreement. “We mean it. Thank you.”
They all fall silent for a while after that, too worn out and overtaxed to bother with words if they don’t have to. It’s a tight squeeze back here, the six of them taking up every single one of the passenger seats. They sit there for a while, the machine whirring and roaring around them, and Ashley privately marvels at how surreal it is to think about something like elbow room after everything they’ve been through tonight. Everything they’ve survived.
Ashley is just thinking about asking Emily how her arm is holding up when the helicopter’s radio transmitter suddenly crackles to life, a sharp burst of sound that makes all of them tense up. She and Chris lean forward in their seats, trying their best to make out the slightly garbled words.
“Sergeant, this is Aircraft 2. We have picked up two survivors on the mountainside but do not appear to have visual on any others. We will rendez-vous with you at the station in one hour, over.”
It is as though all the air has been sucked out of their lungs. Ashley shares a wide-eyed glance with Chris beside her, whose mouth has fallen open in an expression of desperately tentative hope.
Before the pilot has even opened her mouth to respond, however, Mike is leaning forward in his seat.
“Jess!” Mike yells over the roaring sound of the helicopter around them, and when Ashley turns around she sees something wild and slightly unhinged blazing in his eyes. “Jess, is that you?”
There’s a sickening pause, and for a while there’s nothing but silence on the other end of the line, and then –
“Mike?” comes a male voice on the other end of the line, and holy fucking shit, it’s as though a giant knot of tension that Ashley didn’t even realize was living inside her chest comes undone all at once.
“Matt?” Ashley demands loudly, grabbing the back of the co-pilot’s seat with shaking hands. Behind her, she hears Emily let out what almost sounds like a sob. “Oh my god, Matt, is that you?”
“Ash!” comes Matt’s voice again, sounding beyond relieved at the sound of their voices, and oh god, he’s alive, he’s alive. “Oh my god, you have no idea how happy I am to hear you guys right now. Mike, Jess is here. She’s fine – shaken up too much to talk much right now, but – she’s fine.”
Ashley spins around just in time to see Mike register the words, and it’s like – oh god, it’s like watching a rag doll fall off a shelf. She sees something desperately disbelieving cross over his face before he’s slumping forward in his seat, head in his own hands and heaving out a shattered sob.
“Oh my god,” says Mike in a strained voice, shaking his head back and forth as tears start spilling unrestrained down his face. “Oh my god, Jess, thank Christ. Thank fucking Christ.”
“Is…?” comes Matt’s voice again after a moment, a whole lot more uncertain and tentative than he sounded a moment ago. There’s a long pause before he finishes the sentence. “Is Emily there with you?”
He doesn’t sound hopeful, as though he’s just waiting to hear the confirmation of what he already knows to be true.
Which is why it’s so profoundly satisfying when Emily leans forward in her seat and practically yells.
“I’m right here, you asshole!” she shouts joyfully, surreptitiously using her sleeve to scrub the tears off her face. The stunned silence on the other end of the line is enough to make her let out a slightly frenetic laugh. “Practically intact, fifty foot drop and all. Jesus Christ, Matt, I thought you were dead.”
And it’s wonderful, so freaking wonderful that Ashley just can’t hold back anymore. She lets out a choked sound that’s half-laugh and half-sob, her mouth twisting into a watery grin and aware that she feels more grateful to be alive than she can ever remember being in her entire life.
Next to her, Chris is smiling down at her so brightly that it almost makes her want to kiss him right then and there. She feels his fingers brush against hers; just an accidental touch, barely there at all. She impulsively reaches out and tangles her fingers with his own, brimming with wild elation that she can’t quite manage to contain.
The look of stunned delight on his face is enough to tell her more than years’ worth of laughing and teasing and awkward flirting was ever able to.
Two seats down, she hears Josh speak for the first time since they left the ground.
“Chris,” Josh mumbles, the words slurring a little bit as he speaks. He has to say it a little louder to be heard over the sound of everyone else’s euphoric chatter. “Chris.”
It takes a second for Chris to break out of their moment, but as soon as he does he’s turning around in his seat, continuing to hold Ashley's hand even as he moves to face his friend.
“Hey, man,” Chris says in a pointedly neutral voice, giving Josh a quick and entirely unsubtle once over. Ashley leans forward a little to look at him too; sees the way his eyes have gone a little unfocused as he stares straight ahead at nothing in particular. She feels an uncertain twinge in the pit of her gut; a half-remembered memory of a pill bottle left on the bathroom at the Washington mansion counter a few years ago, of the days and weeks Josh used to miss every once and a while during their last few years at high school. “Everything okay?”
For a long time, Josh doesn’t say anything. He just keeps sitting there, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular, the dark circles pronounced and evident under his eyes.
He’s quiet for so long that Ashley almost starts to think he isn’t going to say anything at all, until –
“Chris, I need help,” says Josh in a rush, his voice quietly urgent in a way that makes something twist uncomfortably in Ashley’s stomach.
She feels Chris’s fingers tighten ever-so-slightly where they’re laced with hers.
“What do you mean?” Chris asks more vehemently, turning so that he’s facing Josh a little more fully. “Are you hurt?”
“Josh, are you okay?” asks Ashley nervously, worried about overstepping but also wanting to help, and she feels Chris give her hand a squeeze.
Josh just shakes his head, his mouth hanging open as he speaks.
“I did something… I did something real bad. I did something –” Josh swallows the rest of the words down as though he might be sick on them, swaying slightly in his seat before finally turning his head to look at his best friend. “I need you to take me to the hospital, okay? When all this is over, I… I need you to take me there.” He gives Chris a slightly panicked look, as though the request is something that could be refused. “You promise, right? You promise you’ll take me there no matter what.”
Ashley blinks, holding her breath, and she can tell that Chris is caught off-guard by the way he hesitates to answer the question. And then –
“Of course, man. Don’t worry about it,” says Chris, giving Josh a calming smile that looks well-practiced on his face. Ashley lets out a breath, allowing herself to lean a little more heavily on Chris’s side. “I promise.”
There are a few moments of hesitation before Josh nods, and Ashley can actually feel the way Chris’s shoulders relax beneath her. The way he leans back a little more fully into his seat, starting to relax properly for the first time in a very long while.
She can see the sun coming up in front of them as they soar through the sky, out of the nightmare and back to the land of the living, and it’s hard to believe that all of it really happened. For a moment Ashley finds herself wondering if anyone will believe them; if anyone will find the body of the stranger in the words, or the burnt remains of the wendigos in the lodge. If people will think they’re crazy, or that all of this was just another elaborate prank.
It doesn’t take her long to realize that she just doesn’t care. Can’t bring herself to care about more than the fact that they are alive, and they are okay, and that all of them are going to get out of this at least mostly intact.
Can’t bring herself to think about anything other than the warmth of Chris’s fingers laced with her own, the reassuring solidity of his body as she leans against him and finally allows her eyes to drift shut.
At one point during the flight, she wakes up briefly during a patch of rocky turbulence. She can tell that Chris is still asleep against her, the gentle in and out of his breath just barely tickling her hair. She blinks her eyes half-open groggily, reluctant to wake up if she doesn’t have to – only to notice Josh’s eyes lingering over the two of them curled up against each other in the early morning light.
And well, Ashley thinks as she lets her eyes drift closed again, there’s no real harm in that, is there?
Let him look.
The End