Chapter Text
When Rachel wakes up, the air around her is cold. The ground is made of ice, and the arctic runs through her veins.
She can’t feel.
She can’t think.
When Rachel wakes up, she wakes up with her knees to her face, her back bent like a bow, and with a world of dirt around her. It crumbles off of her when she moves, her arms and legs sluggish and numb, tingling with the pins and needles that came before the movement. Her eyes feel glued shut, heavy and stinging, but she pries them open as far as she can as she struggles to right herself. Her head swims. She feels like she’s drowned to death on dirt and oxygen.
She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know how she got here. Her mind is nothing but a cavern of echoes, her thoughts nothing but a blur.
She can’t remember anything.
Slowly, she pulls her legs under her and pushes up, her whole body straining with the effort as her knees scrape through the cold ground. Something flashes through her mind the moment she settles back on the toes of her shoes—the memory of a room, dark and hot beneath the bright beam of an isolated sun; of a man, his glasses reflecting light she can’t see the source of; of a boy, his face hardened instantly to a mask; of a strawberry-blonde girl streaked blue with rebellion and a willingness to follow Rachel to the edges of hell and beyond; of a harsh curse filtered through syrup and then a sharp pinch that burns bitterly down the length of her throat and a world that moves too fast for her to feel—
Rachel’s heart stops.
Flashes of unintelligible things, smears of murky colors she can just barely discern as things she knows—Chloe a truck a room Jefferson a mask a girl blue purple Frank red and red and red photos magazines a train a horn a storm her dad her mom her mom her mom—rush through her mind, assaulting her senses before she can even try to think, and with a jolt like she’d been struck by lightning, Rachel comes back to life.
She twists, suddenly unable to breathe, and coughs violently, dirt spraying from her mouth like it had been nestled there in her throat all along, hacking deep and rough on her knees until she felt raw from the inside out. Her nails dig into the soil, the icy granules pricking sharp beneath their jaggedness, and the feeling starts to ground her. She stares at the tips of her fingers as she struggles to regain her breath, suddenly realizing something about them wasn’t ... right.
The red paint that she’s coated them in is chipped, missing in sharp chunks where her nails are torn and bleeding, the beds crusted with dried blood. She stares harder, unable to recall when her nails had become this way, how that could have happened, what she could have done to make them this way—and then she blinks, and her nails return to the uninterrupted perfection she last remembered them to be.
She inhales on a scream, rocketing away from her own hands, holding them both as far away from her as she can with her fingers splayed to the deep, endless sky and those perfect nails on display. Panic bubbles in her chest, a gurgle crawling up her throat, and she tilts her head back and nearly lets loose a curdled scream of a sob.
But she doesn’t, because it’s right then she realizes with a start there’s no moon in that dark sky despite it very clearly being night, and she’s struck dumb on the spot.
No moon, no clouds … and no stars. Like a half-assed video game, the sky arches above her, black and blue and blank. It scares her more than she has words for, and she has to squeeze her eyes shut just so she doesn’t lose her mind right then and there.
Where is she?
She pulls herself back up again, dropping her hands into the deep of her lap so she won’t have to look at them, and inhales sharply.
“Hello?” she calls nervously, her broken voice carrying as if she were in a small room. She looks around further, but it’s only her and the never ending expanse of nothing. There are no walls. She can’t see anything else. At all. Nothing should be blocking her voice in a place where the sky was never-ending. It doesn’t make sense, and the result isn’t what she wants.
She can do better.
She fists her hands until those perfect nails bite sharply into her palms, and she tries again.
“Hello?” she repeats, just a little louder, and this time her voice across as if she were calling into the deep of a cavern. For a moment, she almost expects her voice to call back to her again. Just like she’d expected the first time she’d called out.
The panic returns threefold, and she struggles not to break down to it right then and there, mystery of her new universe be damned.
Was she high? Had she been slipped something while partying with a rough crowd? This didn’t feel like a trip, good or bad. It was far too vivid, and she was far too aware of who she was, even if she didn’t know where she was.
A sudden spike of anger, pulling from somewhere deep within her, shoots up her throat, and tears spring to the corners of her eyes in response. It’s gone almost as fast as it had come, but the back of her tongue tingles with the taste of copper as it fades clean away, and she realizes she has bitten into the flesh of her tongue without noticing.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t react—not yet, not just yet. She doesn’t have the strength to.
She feels like a mannequin, stiff and cold, like a corpse dug from the earth and left on display, a Black Dahlia of the modern age—but she was still breathing. Still bleeding. Still—alive.
Still alive.
… Wasn’t she?
The blood is gone as suddenly as it had come, and she can’t taste anything. She still hasn’t moved.
More flashes hit, clearer but no more comprehensible than the ones before—a girl with freckles and brown hair she only slightly recognizes; a boy with brown eyes, nerdy shirts, and a warm grin; night falling on the Arcadia Bay lighthouse; the roaring of a train as it nears; a cyclone careening towards a pier she knows well; a gun pressed to a black and white shirt, the fabric wrinkled beneath its force; a shot that blasts through her very core and a burst of blood that boils with the taste of terror deep in her veins and—
Death hits her. Sends her careening back to the freezing ground, and her hands slide deep into the dirt like she’d been thrown through it.
“No,” she whispers to the unyielding earth, but it feels like a scream.
Something is coming. She knows it. She feels it. She doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know why. She barely knows what, but she knows.
She knows what she did, and she knows she has to stop it before it can be done.
Something somewhere deep within her bursts to life. Calling to her. Craving her. Commanding her.
Like a puppet on a string, Rachel lifts her hand from the dirt and snaps her fingers against her will. And the world shifts.