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I remember this fucking place, Ellie thinks, staring around the horribly familiar room. She stands in a store situated in a long-abandoned mall, watching two painfully familiar teenagers dancing to music. Immediately recognizing this as a dream, Ellie spends a moment attempting to wake herself up, but she has never been good at that. So, with a sigh, she tries to walk over to the girls and tell them to shut the fuck up before anything can come to get them. But Ellie walks straight into an invisible wall, preventing her from moving any closer. Fuck…
She sees her younger self kiss Riley on the lips, and it looks as awkward as she remembers. Riley kisses her back, and the sight brings a slight smile to Ellie’s face. Despite knowing what comes next, she remembers that moment fondly. It was her first kiss, after all.
Even though she knows it is going to happen, when the Stalker crashes into the store, Ellie still flinches, slamming her fists against the invisible wall in a futile attempt to break through it. She doesn’t even know what the fuck she would do if she could run over there; after all, this is only a dream. Even if she saves her younger self and Riley right now, she’ll just wake up and remember the fact that Riley is dead, and Ellie was the one to put her out of her misery.
“Run!” she screams, but younger Ellie and Riley don’t hear her. Still, she doesn’t stop shouting, smashing against the barrier keeping her away from a recreation of her worst memory. “Get away from there!”
Nothing works, and the scene continues playing out like her memory. Even as Ellie punches and kicks and screams, she is powerless to stop the frantic struggle and the heartbreaking aftermath. She nearly pukes when her younger self holds out her bleeding arm, tears in her eyes when Riley shows her bitten hand.
Time seems to warp and flicker, and hours vanish in the blink of an eye. Ellie now stares at herself and Riley as they huddle on the floor, both girls asleep. For a moment, she’s puzzled, but then it makes sense—this is all based on Ellie’s memories, which are patchy and blurred from the sheer trauma she went through.
As Ellie watches herself sit up and gently shake Riley’s shoulder, turns her head. She knows what comes next, and she doesn’t want to see it. Not again.
But she hears it. Every. Single. Moment.
She hears Riley snarl and shriek, and her own horrified scream. She hears fumbling and a thud as Riley tackles her younger self to the ground. She hears her own voice, thick with tears as she begs Riley to stop. And… she hears the gunshots.
And, worst of all, she hears a heavy thump as Riley’s lifeless body hits the floor, just before her younger self bursts into jagged, heart-wrenching sobs.
And then, with no fucking warning, Ellie wakes up. She flinches into consciousness, staring up at her bedroom ceiling with blurry vision—which she soon realizes is caused by the tears in her eyes. When she blinks, they spill over, trickling across her cheeks. Shuddering for breath, Ellie rolls onto her side, hugging her knees to her chest, those memories still playing through her mind. They’re so vivid, and the emotions so raw.
Curled up in her bed, Ellie cries silently, trying and failing to forget that terrible day.