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They say that scars show your strength. They show what you had endured, and that you’re going to carry on despite them.
Mike watches his hand curl into that shitty excuse for a fist, with a hollow spot where his little and ring fingers should be. He stares at it, and the spot insolently stares back at him. It feels wrong, unnatural. Unreal. His mind can’t cope with what his eyes are telling him.
He can still feel the fingers. He tightens the grip and he feels all five nails digging into his palm, but two of them not there. He cut them off with a machete, and now they’re gone and he’s crippled in more ways than he could describe.
***
These windows should be bulletproofed, she thinks for the eight time that day. Or at least barred.
The nurse keeps assuring her that there’s nothing behind them. They’re on the fifth floor, the only thing up here are birds. No, there are no monsters crawling out there. No, there are no psychopaths waiting behind the curtain. She’s allowed to take a look outside. She’s so pale, she could use the sunshine. She’s safe.
Jessica finds that hard to believe. The last time she dared to get close to the glass, all it took was a curious blackbird to send her flying to the ground, ducking her head, crying in fear.
After that, she doesn’t go back there. She wants to go back, but someplace entirely else. Jess misses the times when it was all so simple.
***
The car door shuts behind him and he flinches.
He keeps hearing the snaps. Of metal jaws and breaking bones and fire and mouths like bear traps. Every night. Every day.
Even now.
The terror hits Mike like a baseball bat and he clutches the wheel and grits his teeth to stop himself from screaming out loud. His eyes snap shut, but the eyelids are painted with bloodstains and flashes of wendigos. For what could be only milliseconds but feels like eternity, he’s back there. The horror that washes over him feels like ice cold floodwater.
It was real. It was all real. He can never pretend it wasn’t, because he will be looking at the raw proof for the rest of his fucking life. Every day for the next who-the-fuck-knows-how-many weeks and months and years and decades, he’ll be reminded that this wasn’t just a really screwed up nightmare.
And that’s assuming he will even live. Mike can’t bring himself to imagine any kind of future now. He tried, and all he saw were razor sharp teeth and milky white eyes, hungry and waiting.
He takes the bus instead.
***
Mom brings her some clothes on the night before. Her parents couldn’t find a way to get out of work to bring her home, but they made sure Jess would have everything she could possibly need here. Books, make-up, the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, enough flowers to flatter the entire LA Opera chorus, even her childhood stuffed toys.
However silly she could seem, for three days already, she only falls asleep when someone reads aloud to her, drifting off to restless sleep as she clutches Buttercup and Miss Tutu close to her chest, worn down and withered. The toys or her? Jess can’t tell anymore.
She never touches the make-up, and after staring dumbfounded at several pages that say something about spring fashion trends, she realises she can’t concentrate enough to even read the headlines. Flashes of snow and sharp claws keep creeping into the corners of her vision, and eventually she gives up and admires the flowers instead.
It’s a good thing that there’s so many of them. Dozens of roses, large sunflowers, bouquets of pink tulips and peonies, all wrapped with little bows and placed in cute painted pots and glass vases.
She almost can’t see the eerie white shadows among them.
***
He’s not strong. He thought he was, but he’s not. He’s not battle-hardened. He’s just empty, so agonizingly empty inside, like he left something else on the mountain besides just his fingers. What’s missing exactly, he can’t say. Maybe it was his sanity.
***
It’s like she’s stuck in a hazy dream, and every now and then clear reality sinks its fingers into her skull like cold steel. And that’s when she realises that none of it was a dream, and the nurse has to bring extra sedatives.
***
At the bus stop, Mike stops to let a young couple take a picture together without him in the background. He watches the girl hug her boyfriend and smile for the camera, and wonders if they’d looked this happy too.
He believes they did.
The contrast feels almost surreal. Them right now, shattered and screaming, with them back there, on their way to the lodge, playing in the snow and doing their best to outwit each other in innuendos and jokes.
On the photo that got lost in the mountains, they are not survivors; they’re just two fucking brats, cold and horny and blissfully unaware of what’s lurking in the dark. There’s a cabin waiting for them up on the road, and then shots of vodka, loud music, dancing to the beat, morning hangovers. Just good fun. No pranks, no wendigos, no screaming and pain and endless fear. Shit, life used to be so easy.
He smiles casually at the couple as they thank him for waiting, and makes his way to the reception. The smell of antiseptic and dry air-conditioned air hits his nose almost immediately.
***
She eyes the window warily as she unwraps her satin nightgown and lets it fall to her ankles. Her body is spattered with blotches of blue and green and yellow and purple, and there are also raw pink lines crossing her chest and arms, and Jessica shivers in the sudden cold. She should get dressed. Immediately. Something could be outside.
Quickly she puts on her jeans and a white ruffle high-neck top, and buttons the light cardigan up to her neck. She fiddles with her long sleeves, and can’t help but notice how covered she suddenly is. This wasn’t picked on accident.
There’s a memory stored in her brain somewhere, when she was still dazed from hours of comatose-like sleep, of her mom dropping the bundle of clothes on her chair. She digs through the blackness that’s the past several days, and suddenly she hears her mom’s voice clear as day:
We can’t have you look like you’re a victim of domestic abuse, right honey?
Jess frowns. That’s wrong. That’s so very wrong, that’s bullshit and she doesn’t care. Since when does she care? She never did. She still doesn’t.
They can drag her through ice and snow and slam her down the elevator shaft and break all her ribs and shriek into her ears until tears rush down her cheeks, but this will never change.
Mike would never hurt her.
Mike is coming.
Mike.
***
She’s sitting on her bed, silently studying her hands that are covered with scratches. At the sound of the door closing, she raises her head slowly and blinks even slower.
Then her face lights up like a morning; drowsily, then suddenly her tired eyes sparkle like sunshine.
“You’re here,” she whispers.
Something inside of him knots a tie on his stomach. Jess is alive. He never realised how beautiful her eyes are. He wants to look at her until everything else goes away.
He wants to tell her this. Instead, he carefully moves away several vases of lilies and sits in their place.
He says: “Of course I am.”
She says: “I knew you would come.”
She goes back to staring at her fingernails. Mike takes her hand, and her fingers automatically curl around his; she grasps his hand like she never wants to let go of him again. Fuck, he should be the one yelling this.
“Thank you, Mike,” she says. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“Anytime, Jess.”
Her cheeks are hollow and her eyes are sunken and framed by dark circles, and he knows how shitty he looks himself, with his deformed hand and broken brain. But to Mike, she never looked better than now, when he watches her shoulders rise up and down with each breath, wonderfully alive.
“You look like a movie star, babe,” he smiles.
“Oh yeah,” she laughs, and there’s a slight trace of humour back in her voice. “Sure I do, Mike... Like a one that just got out of rehab.”
“We are such junkies, aren’t we.”
“I like your junk.”
She finally smiles. It’s a ghost of her former smile, the bright, wicked one that sent him to his knees from Day One. This one, however, gives him wings. He couldn’t save her. She saved herself.
She’s strong and so, so brave, even if she doesn’t know it, and he’s proud. So fucking proud.
Mike remembers the first sight of her after everything. Him, exhausted and still coping with the fact that she didn’t die; her, bruised and cut and filthy with dirt and dried blood that the medics were carefully cleaning with cotton balls. Both of them, terrified. When she looked at him, it was as if she was looking right through him. Then her eyes focused. Then she clasped her palm to her lips. Then she started crying, saying his name again and again until they had to sedate her.
He fell asleep waiting for her to wake up, and woke up with his back stiff and his eyes still sore and red from his own tears.
Last thing he saw of her before now was a face that looked way too close to the one which haunted him through that fucking night. A dead face. A face he was too fucking late to rescue.
He thought he’d lost her entirely.
Yet here she is, alive. Not well, not safe and sound by any measures, but alive. That’s a start.
He still can’t believe this miracle.
So he leans close and kisses the top of her head. She smells like peaches and chocolate.
“Damn, Jess, you’re tough,” he says, and the corners of his lips go up and up, until he grins like an idiot, but he couldn’t give care less. He will grin like this for the rest of his life, if it means that Jess stays alive. “You’re the toughest son-of-a-bitch I know.”
She lets out a sigh that sounds like a weak attempt at a chuckle. “Well, when my knight’s off doing his own whatever, a girl’s gotta save herself.”
He laughs. She hugs herself. He helps her pack her things, and then carries the bag across his shoulder. She backs away as he opens the door. She wants to put eyeholes on every door she ever comes across from now on.
Mike puts his arm around her while they walk the hallway. He feels how tense she is the entire time, twitching and pulling close to him, as close as she can get away with. She can get away with anything.
“Hey,” he says, “it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay.”
Jess leans into him and closes her eyes firmly as he pushes the buttons in the elevator. She buries her face in his shirt. Mike rests his chin on her head. They stand like this, eyes closed and hearts beating slow and steady, like a messed up version of wedding cake figures, and he couldn’t feel more at peace.
“We’re gonna be okay,” Jess finally repeats after him, her voice muffled by the fabric.
And when she says it, for the first time in ages, he actually believes it.
They’re wrecked and bruised, beaten and scarred for life, but maybe, just maybe, these wounds could be one day mended. Not cured, not erased, but healed. They won’t show their strength or survival; they will show their patience.
And as Mike gently strokes Jessica’s hair as he guides her through the crowds, he thinks: this is it. This is the first step.
Instead of fighting their pain, they could live with it.
They will get there.