Chapter Text
#1
Sue Sylvester stood atop a broken piece of fuselage, hands on her hips, surveying the mess around her. The plane had crashed. People were screaming, crying, bleeding—acting as if a little near-death experience was enough to excuse completely losing their heads.
Pathetic.
She blew her whistle, sharp and commanding. “Alright, listen up, you sad sacks of disappointment! I don’t have time for breakdowns, so if you’re not on fire or missing a limb, you’d better shut up and pay attention!”
The girls—shell-shocked, filthy, and freezing- turned to look at her in horror. Shauna clutched a bloodied hand to her forehead. Jackie was trying and failing to gather people in some semblance of order. Still coughing from the smoke, Natalie muttered, “Oh, great. She survived.”
Sue clapped her hands. “Congratulations, ladies! You’ve made it past level one of this nightmare. You didn’t die on impact; for some of you, that’s the most impressive athletic feat you’ve ever accomplished. Now, we move on to level two: Not Dying in the Woods Like a Pack of Morons.”
Taissa, ever the one to take control, stepped forward. “Coach, we need to—”
“Don’t say ‘stay calm and work together,’ Tai. That’s weak talk. What we need is a plan. And lucky for you all, I am here.” She cracked her knuckles. “First things first—roll call. If you’re alive, speak up. If you’re dead, stay where you are.”
There was an awkward silence.
“Alright, good talk. Now, priority number one, finding water.”
Still looking pale, Jackie stammered, “Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, wait for rescue?”
Sue let out a laugh, sharp and bitter. “Oh, Jacqueline. Sweet, naïve, soon-to-be-dehydrated Jacqueline. No one is coming for us anytime soon. And do you know what happens when you sit around waiting for help? You die. And do you know what happens when you die? We eat you.”
Silence.
Van choked. “I’m sorry, what?”
Sue raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on. Don’t act so surprised. We’re out here in the wilderness with no food and supplies—unless one of you is hiding a Costco membership in your back pocket, things will get dicey real quick. And we’ll have to make some tough calls when that time comes.”
Lottie, still dazed, murmured, “She’s joking. She has to be joking.”
Sue crouched down next to her, leveling her gaze. “Sweetheart, I have never been more serious in my life. You think survival is all ‘let’s build a little fort and sing kumbaya’? No. It’s war. And war means sacrifices.”
Jackie scoffed, trying to regain control. “We are not going to eat each other!”
Sue sighed. “Fine, Jackie. Do you wanna stay optimistic? Be my guest. But let’s say, hypothetically, we did have to eat someone. Wouldn’t we all rather have a game plan now, rather than later, when we’re too weak to make logical decisions?”
Misty, who had been disturbingly quiet until now, raised her hand. “I think that’s very smart, Coach.”
“Thank you, Misty. I knew you were a freak, but I respect it.”
Taissa ran a hand down her face. “Oh my God, we’ve been here for an hour, and you’re already bringing up cannibalism?”
“That’s called proactive leadership, Tai. But fine, fine! We’ll put a pin in the ‘eating each other’ discussion for later. For now, we focus on the essentials: water, shelter, and establishing a hierarchy. Because make no mistake, this is a team, and I am the head coach.”
Rubbing her temples, Shauna muttered, “This is an actual nightmare.”
“Wrong! This is an opportunity to prove that you’re not just a bunch of soft, suburban nobodies!” Sue’s eyes gleamed. “And you know what? By the time rescue does come, we’ll be thriving.”
Jackie narrowed her eyes. “You’re excited about this?”
Sue smiled. “I was born for this.”
And with that, Sue ran the wilderness like a goddamn military operation.
By the end of the first week, she had divided the girls into three groups:
• The Hunters (Natalie, Taissa, Van, Travis): “Congratulations, you’re the least useless when it comes to killing things. Do not come back empty-handed unless you want to be tonight’s dinner.”
• The Gatherers (Lottie, Mari, Akilah, Laura Lee): “If you idiots accidentally poison us, I will personally make you eat whatever godforsaken berries you picked until your stomach explodes.”
• The Cabin Crew/Carvers (Jackie, Shauna, Misty): “Jackie, you’re only here because your arms are too weak for hunting, and I refuse to look at your sad, underwhelming attempt at leadership any longer.”
Sue, of course, remained in charge.
“This is no longer a democracy. This is a dictatorship, and I am your benevolent ruler. Misty is my evil goblin assistant, and the rest of you are expendable until proven otherwise.”
#2
When Laura Lee found that rusted-out, definitely-about-to-explode death trap of a plane, Sue felt it in her bones; this was about to be some next-level stupidity.
Sure enough, the girl ran into camp, beaming like she just won Nationals. “Coach! Coach! I found a plane!”
Sue turned, arms crossed. “Unless you followed that sentence with ‘and it’s attached to a functioning airport,’ I don’t care.”
“No! There’s an old plane in the clearing, and I think I can fly it!”
Sue blinked. “I’m sorry, did you just say you can fly a plane?”
Laura Lee nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah! I took lessons! In a Cessna! With my pastor!”
Sue sighed so hard she almost passed out. “Of course you did.”
Lottie, experiencing her "so-called" visions, placed a hand on Laura Lee’s shoulder and nodded solemnly. “Yes. The wilderness provides.”
Sue’s head snapped toward her. “Alright, that’s it, Psych ward Mary, you need to sit down and shut up before I have Misty duct tape your mouth closed.”
Lottie frowned. “The wilderness has given us a way out—”
“THE WILDERNESS HAS GIVEN US NOTHING BUT HEADACHES AND INFECTIONS!” Sue shouted. “And now you want to strap yourself into an ancient tin can willingly and ‘hope for the best’? Oh, sure. That’s a great plan. Let’s all go ahead and climb into the death plane, hold hands, and wait for Jesus to do a loop-de-loop before we crash straight into a tree!”
Laura Lee hesitated. “But—”
“No buts!” Sue pointed at the plane. “Look at it! That thing is older than Will Schuester’s awfully gelled hairstyle! Do you think it’s just sitting there, fully functional, waiting for you to swoop in and fly us all home like some goddamn Disney movie?”
Laura Lee’s confidence wavered. “I mean…”
“Let me put it this way,” Sue said, voice deadly calm. “If you step one foot into that plane, you are personally responsible for explaining to God why you thought a 16-year-old church pilot with zero mechanical skills was qualified to resurrect a hunk of metal that hasn’t moved since the damn Cold War.”
The group was silent. Laura Lee finally sighed. “Okay. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
Sue clapped her hands. “There it is! That's the first smart thought I’ve heard in weeks! Congratulations, Sister Christian, you live to see another day! BACK TO WORK!”
#3
“YOU’RE PREGNANT?!”
The words hung in the air like a heavyweight, and Sue’s eyes narrowed to slits. Looking like she’d just confessed to starting the apocalypse, Shauna tried to explain herself.
"How the hell are you pregnant?!" Sue demanded, stepping forward like she was about to wrestle the pregnancy out of existence physically. "I thought you and Jackie were lesbians?!"
Jackie’s jaw dropped. "What?!"
Shauna looked horrified...and flustered. "WHAT?!"
Sue threw up her hands. "Oh, don’t act so shocked! The whispering, the longing stares, the ‘Jackie and Shauna are attached at the hip’ energy, what was I supposed to think?!"
Jackie blinked rapidly. "I have a boyfriend!"
Sue whipped around. "Well, I didn’t know that because I don’t care about my students’ boring personal lives!"
She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to process this disaster. "So you’re telling me that not only are you not lesbians, but you, Shauna, brought a stowaway fetus to NATIONALS?!"
Shauna, face red, snapped back, "I didn’t know, Coach Sue!"
The girls shrank back as Sue breathed deeply, visibly vibrating with rage.
Sitting quietly, watching this unfold in absolute horror, Coach Ben finally decided to step in. "Sue, maybe we should all just take a—"
Without missing a beat, Sue whipped around. "Legless McGee, we do not need your input right now. This is between me and Little Miss Whoops I Smuggled a Fetus Across State Lines."
Ben physically recoiled. His mouth opened and closed several times, but no words came out. He just… stopped. Fully gave up.
Shauna, voice shaking, tried again. “Look, I didn’t plan this! I didn’t know before we left!”
Sue threw her hands in the air. “Oh, fabulous! You know what else we didn’t plan, Shauna? CRASHING INTO A GODDAMN FOREST. But here we are, and now I have to add ‘fetal survival’ to our already impossible to-do list.”
Shauna, still furious, glared at Sue. "You are the worst person I have ever met."
Sue clapped her hands. "Oh, I better be! Because the worst person you’ve ever met is about to make sure that your terrible decision doesn’t kill us all. And you know what? You’re welcome."
She turned to the group. " Alright, listen up, you barely functioning disasters. I don’t care how emotionally traumatized we all are, and we are not letting this pregnancy become another excuse for us to spiral into full-blown insanity. We are already rationing food, we have one-legged Captain Useless over there, and Lottie’s busy trying to build a cult out of twigs and nonsense. I will not let this derail my new mission of getting us out of here before Shauna’s baby is born with a beard from all the stress."
She exhaled, still seething. "Now, if anyone needs me, I’ll reconsider every life choice that led me here. Carry on."
#4
Sue Sylvester had been through a lot these past few months.
But this?
This was a new low.
It started innocently enough. Misty had once again been lurking around with her insufferable eagerness when she accidentally (yeah, right) left out her stash of totally-not-poisonous mushrooms, the ones she’d been planning to dose Coach Ben with because she was a deranged lunatic in orthopedic sneakers.
The mushrooms made their way into the communal soup because, of course, they did.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
Jackie and Travis, by some miracle, had skipped dinner because they were busy having sad, emotionally repressed cabin sex in the attic.
That small decision? Worst mistake of their lives.
Because the second the rest of the team started tripping, they realized that Jackie and Travis were the only ones not losing their minds, and, through some twisted groupthink logic, they needed to be eliminated.
Sue? She was sitting outside, sharpening a stick into a spear, as one does when one is stuck in the wilderness with a bunch of hormonal lunatics.
And then she heard the screaming.
#5
After months of psychotic deer attacks, questionable leadership decisions, and one very poorly executed mushroom night, Sue had had enough.
So when Lottie informed her about winter coming, she shifted gears.
"I have been informed by Schizophrenic Sally over here—" she jerked a thumb at Lottie, "—that winter is coming. Now, normally, I would recoil at this brand of mystical, cult-y, off the meds’ nonsense. But, and it physically pains me to say this, she has somehow managed to be useful."
The team blinked.
Sue continued, "She killed and provided our latest meals. I don’t know if she’s a witch, a con artist, or the next Oprah Winfrey, but I do know this—if frozen hell is about to descend upon us, then we are not going to sit here waiting to become human meat popsicles. We are moving south."
"Coach, we can’t go south—Tai and Van nearly died when they tried!" Natalie argued.
Sue shrugged. "Yeah, well, maybe they should have tried harder. And you know what? I’m shocked we haven’t lost at least four of you by now. I had bets on Misty wandering into a bear cave and Shauna bleeding out from that stowaway fetus she decided to bring to Nationals like a carry-on item. But nope! You’re all still here, wasting my time, so let’s move."
Jackie crossed her arms. "You’re just gonna march us into the unknown?!"
Sue threw up her hands. "Jackie, everything is the unknown! We crashed in the middle of Canada, the trees are whispering, Misty has the soul of a serial killer, and somehow, someway, I have managed to keep you all alive. So unless one of you has a better idea, shut the hell up, lace up your boots, and start hiking."
Van hesitated. "But what if—"
"No." Sue cut her off immediately. "The wilderness can suck my ass. You think I’m going to sit here and let the cold take me out like some common loser? I am Sue Sylvester. I have conquered high school athletics, local politics, and a decades-long blood feud with a man who thinks rapping about acapella is a valid form of artistic expression. You really think I’m going to let Will Schuester outlive me?! MOVE IT LADIES."
And so, against all odds (and several loud complaints from Jackie, Van, and Tai, they went south.
Within 72 hours, they stumbled upon a road, flagged down a passing truck, and were promptly escorted back to civilization—no rituals, no starving to death, no cannibalism. It turned out if you walked in the right direction, society was not that far away.
As they all sat in the back of the rescue vehicle, Sue stood in front of them, arms crossed, her signature look of unbothered annoyance plastered on her face. She stared at the group for a moment, her eyes scanning them as they sat there, exhausted and bewildered by the sudden transition from wilderness to the comforts of modern society.
She took a deep breath, stood tall, and gave them one final, no-nonsense address.
"This was unfortunate," she began, her voice steady and authoritative. "But it has tested your competence in the real world. Some of you? Surprised me. Some of you? Scared me. And some of you? Utterly useless. Exactly as expected."
There was a brief pause as the girls shifted uncomfortably, waiting for more.
Sue continued without missing a beat. "But, despite all that, everyone is still breathing. So, congratulations. You're all alive." She looked around at them, giving them one final, pointed stare. "Now, we will never speak of this again. Not unless it’s on an episode of The View."
Sue became a national legend. Sports analysts, survivalists, and actual military generals had reached out to interview her, wanting to understand how she had led a group of teenage girls out of the wilderness with zero casualties. She rejected every interview request, saying, "I don’t have time to explain basic competency to people who weren’t smart enough to be born me."
She did, however, write a bestselling book titled:
"From Cheerleading to Cannibalism: How I Survived the Worst Year of My Life With a Bunch of Useless Teenagers"
She now regularly calls Shauna "Mommy Wilderness" and refers to Ben as "Legless McGee" even in public interviews. She is now the president of the United States.