Chapter Text
Jackie knows she shouldn’t be walking away this far from the cabin, every step she takes into the darkness of the trees was a like a warning in her brain, a siren of sorts, but she didn’t stop, the anger and hurt in her veins acting as fuel for her to keep on trudging in spite of the frigidity of the air and the lack of proper nourishment taking a toll on her body. She walks past trees, the fire lantern in hand, the brown of its wood reminding her of Shauna’s Bambi-like eyes, big and brown, melting like chocolate ice cream under the sun, but thinking of Shauna hurts worse than ever, and Jackie actually has to halt as she relives the fight, the loathing in everyone’s eyes as they willingly watched her go, even encouraged her silently, the fear, anger and loathing in Shauna’s eyes, deeper than anyone’s. She halts in front of a small clearing of moss, the ground softer underneath her worn-out trainers here than anywhere else, the trees far enough that she has enough space to breathe.
Putting down her bedding, Jackie tries to ignore the cold biting everywhere in her body, making her feel like she was cold and insanely hot simultaneously. She sits down, vision foggy, and tries to brush her hair out of her eyes with frozen fingers. The letterman’s jacket, a shining reminder of her life in Wiskayok was certainly not warm enough in this weather and on top of that, the shirt she was wearing underneath was not too warm, she thought longingly of the fire by the cabin log but exhaustion was starting to take over, and coupled with Shauna’s betrayal, Jackie closes her eyes, hoping to shut off the pain away forever.
Unbeknownst to her in her fretful sleep, a few hours into the night the wind gets strong enough the hefty fire lantern tips itself over and catches onto a nearby bush, lighting the darkness and burning away at greenery like it was brushing away sand on a beach.
Jackie wakes up four times afterward, and during the first, she feels nothing but overwhelming warmth and smoke in her lungs, not the smoke from bongs or vapes she’d drunkenly stumbled into at parties, real smoke like the one at the crash, the memory of it making her eyes burn alongside the toxic air. She never felt more trapped, not at matches when the other team’s players would tackle her, not when her mother firmly put down Jackie’s choice and bent her to her will.
With tremendous effort, she looks to the left, where the path winds back to the cabin, and thinks of Shauna, and her place beside the brunette every night, warm and safe and inches away from her favorite person in the world, she closes her eyes with the memory of Shauna’s warm smile and extended hand after a particularly trying practice, urging her from where’d she tripped.
The second time she wakes up, she hears voices, voices other belonging not to her teammates and coach in the cabin, but new voices, and she feels hope in her chest, vision blurrier than shots with a grainy camera, and lets herself be taken away by arms, panicked voices surrounding her from all sides, and she imagines it’s Shauna even though she knows it’s not.
The third is more comprehensive. No longer is she on the dirty, mossy floor of the forest, but in a clean, sterile white room with the lights dimmed. Wait what? Lights, real modern lights, light in a bulb. Wow, her head hurt, why was she thinking about lights so much, anyway?
Jackie blinks, realizing she is in a hospital room, a real room, not the wooden one in the cabin, not the enclosed remains of the plane. Her head feels like lead, and every breath hurts, but she’s alive, ear ringing oddly as she takes in the sound of the beeping heart monitor, slow and steady, a clear reminder of her survival.
A figure hovers above her, dressed in a white overcoat, and through the ringing she makes out the words spoken, ‘are you feeling okay, Jackie?’
‘Where am I?’ She forces the words out, and her voice feels hoarse, like it’s been unused for too long.
The nurse, Vera, explains how the fire from one lantern caught on a bush, causing one of the biggest wildfires in the Canadian Wilderness in many decades, prompting firemen to douse the blazes, only to find a slightly hypothermic unconscious girl in the center the fire, a good 20 minutes from a cabin radiating smoke, lived in by a pack of starving teenagers, all of whom look eerily identical to the New Jersey soccer team in a plane crash a few months prior. Jackie’s friends, the nurse assures her, are all up and about, and some of them have even been elected to be sent back to Wiskayok, with the exception of herself and a brunette who refuses to leave with her.
She tries to nod, and the movement makes her vision dance but only slightly. Jackie turns her head gently to glance outside the window, but it’s blocked with snow. The sight of it brings back everything, and Jackie remembers her, Shauna, her best friend, her ending and her beginning. At once, the sound of the monitor quickens, and Jackie hears the doctor say something in an urgent tone before her vision blackens.
The next time she wakes, the final time, there’s daylight and someone who embodies daylight for her perched by the side of her bed. The first thing she feels when she opens her eyes is the sunshine filtering through the window that was blocked with snow last time, and the person by her illuminated in it. Her hand, too, the one clasped to an IV is between someone else’s, the touch warm and soft and familiar.
Jackie moves her head to focus on her visitor and knows before her eyes do that it’s her.
‘Jackie?’ she hears Shauna say, the sound dimmer than usual, and Jackie remembers the odd ringing from last time and wonders if her ears had decided to take a trip and then crashed.
She hums in response, her voice not quite ready for the job just yet, throat drier than the Sahara itself. Shauna seems to read her mind and moves swiftly to procure a bottle of clean water in a glass, a real glass and not one of their dirty flasks.
Shauna helps Jackie up, and steadies her when the movement is dizzying, hand firmly around her shoulders as she helps Jackie drink, tucking a stray strand of hair from her face. Then Jackie speaks, and Shauna feels her heart break again, the crushed pieces shattered impossibly smaller.
‘Are you okay, Shipman?’
The question is sincere, and Shauna nods vehemently. Jackie’s face relaxes, and a few seconds pass before she speaks again.
‘Are you really asking me that?’ Shauna says, finding immense difficulty in keeping her voice steady, tears burning in her eyes. No, keep it together, she hisses silently to herself, Jackie has just woken up and does not need to deal with her weeping two minutes later.
The honey-blonde has the gall to look confused, ‘Yeah? We got lost in the woods for months, Shipman and you had to chop us meat from fresh game whilst being pregnant, and you had to deal with,’ she pauses, scrambling for her next words, ‘the consequences of your rage-fueled actions.’
Shauna stares at her for a few seconds, lost for words. Jackie currently has about 4 tubes attached to her, is thinner than anyone else on the team due to refusing food for weeks on end and has just survived an epic clash of being perilously frozen to being surrounded by open flames in a matter of hours. Yet here she is, speaking to Shauna like it’s a strategy meeting, tone determined.
Shauna’s silence seems to bother her though, and she watches as Jackie closes her eyes, and slumps back into her pillow, brows furrowed. She coughs a little, briefly but deeply, and Shauna remembers what the doctor had said, that Jackie had inhaled an unhealthy amount of smoke and her lungs aren’t completely clear yet.
The worry must radiate her face, because Jackie smiles faintly and says, ‘I’m fine, Shipman.’
‘Oh yeah, almost died in a forest fire after nearly freezing to death, and were unconscious for nearly a week, and the smoke in your lungs still hasn’t cleared, and you’ve got a massive fucking cut on your temple from tripping in the dark when you stormed out, but you are just chipper, aren’t you, Taylor?’
Jackie gawks at her in surprise. Shauna raises her eyebrows, daring her to disagree but it never comes, Jackie simply raises a hand to gingerly touch the stitched-up gash on her forehead, wincing as her hand makes contact.
Shauna cannot take it any longer. She leans forward and takes the girl into a secure embrace, careful not to accidentally cause Jackie any more pain.
Withdrawing from the hug, she watches as Jackie’s eyes droop, sleep taking over, and helps the girl lie back down. A copy of Wuthering Heights is tucked in her bag for this exact situation, she gives the girl a reassuring smile as she drifted off, hand still coiled around hers.
***
Jackie dreams of forest fires, the hateful look in Shauna’s eyes, and a baby cradled in the brunette’s arms, a baby with Jeff’s face. She wakes up with a start, gasping, and Shauna, who is still clad in a hospital shirt and some sweatpants over Jackie’s letterman, is on her feet at once, alert and poised. Jackie’s mind is clearer, and details of the fight, the betrayal and the terrible heartbreak that came with floods her memories, and Jackie finds herself staring at her once best friend with uncertainty.
‘Jax?’ Shauna asks, worry overflowing in her voice, big brown chocolate-y eyes swirling with concern.
Jackie stares, trying to quieten the turmoil in her mind. She imagines Shauna lying lifeless in the meat shed by that God-awful cabin and she imagines Shauna with Jeff, the two of them toying with Jackie’s emotions like puppeteers with strings, the two images blur and her vision dances. She swallows, hoping to have permanently pushed down the bile rising up her throat and braces herself for the agony and confusion the next few months, maybe even forever, will bring, but she won’t break. She will face the human equivalent of dry-sand of a boyfriend and her traitorous, doe-eyed best friend.
She chooses her next words carefully, holding on the iron bars of her bed for emotional support, ‘So, Shipman, tell me, has me accidentally rescuing all of you by nearly dying make me less boring?’
She watches as the little color in Shauna’s face dissipates, and interjects before the other can answer, words tidied up like folded laundry, ‘oh wait, no,’ Jackie brings an IV tube-taped hand on her chin and sighs in mock thought, ‘or does it make me more tragic?’
‘Jackie….’
‘SHUT UP, SHAUNA!’ Jackie yells, the sound of it has the most terrible effect on her throbbing head, but she doesn’t care. ‘I’m glad you’re not dead, which I don’t know if you feel the same for me or not, but yeah, get out of my room.’
Shauna tries again but Jackie yanks her arm away, wincing and the brunette falters. It’s hurting her, Shauna thinks, and God have I done enough of that.
As she’s exiting the room, head hung in apology, she thinks she hears Jackie muttering, ‘I hope you can fix this.’
***
The day passes by uncertainly, and Jackie watches as a familiar brunette lingers around her door, peering at her through the circular glass opening of her door, ducking to conceal herself whenever the door swings open in the wake of nurses and doctors filing in. Her parents, too, arrive sometime after the doctors discover her fully awake and announce that she is fit to see visitors.
The notion confuses her, how was Shauna here this morning, looking so small and worried like she’d expected Jackie to fall apart in her arms, the broken pieces begging to be put back. She pushes the thought away, and smiles sheepishly as her parents walk in, her mother immediately scooping Jackie into a tight hug, only stepping away when her father shooe’s her and embraces her harder than when her pet hamster died in kindergarten.
‘Hi, guys,’ She mutters, taking in their tired faces, her father’s face gaunter that it’d been summer of ’95 when the stock market crashed and her mother’s more strained than when Jackie informed she’d gotten a tattoo on her wrist a few months ago.
‘We missed you so much, sweetie,’ her father speaks first, and Jackie is surprised to hear the tremble in his voice, never having heard him cry in the 17 years she’d known him. She watches, pained, as he breaks down in quiet sobs and cradles one of her hands to his chest, pecking it wetly, and holding onto her skin as though she’d disappear if he let go.
Her mother observes from a small distance at this exchange with the saddest smile Jackie has seen even after the five months they were stranded, and it hits her with the force of 10-ton truck that her parents, despite their bossiness and aloofness, do love her. Of course, she’d imagined this exact scenario several times, playing and replaying it in her head during the nights when she’d feel the worst, but reality had somehow, bewilderingly proven to be more heartfelt than her imagination had ever been.
Marilyn Taylor had always been somewhat of an emotionally distant mother, always commanding Jackie on how to dress, behave and who to befriend, who to ignore and all the little things in life that Jackie would come to know mattered as much as a drop in the ocean during her time in the Canadian Alps. Today, however, her mother proves her wrong as she perches on the chair beside Jackie’s bed, (her father had ignored that completely and had simply bent down on his knees to match Jackie’s eye level), and caresses her hair with a soft gaze Jackie thought was lost in the jumbled memories of her much younger self.
Heavily medicated and overcome by this unexpected display of emotions from her usually inexpressive parents, Jackie’s head feels light, like she’s walking on clouds and the soft ground beneath was threatening to give away at any minute.
‘So,’ her dad asks, clearing his throat and Jackie’s heart swells at the prolonged presence of the tremor in his voice, ‘what happened down there, sweetie? We met Shauna on our way here, and ran into Vanessa and Taissa at the airport, they said you were responsible for the fire that saved everyone, but why were you out there alone? Are you okay?’
Sighing heavily, Jackie began recounting the plane crash and the surreal days that followed it immediately, finding the lake and the cabin, the all-consuming hunger and eating whatever poor animal they could hunt, the dead guy in the cabin and Jackie’s increasingly painful distance from Shauna and the team until a fight broke about the beliefs of one immensely misguided Lottie and everyone else who seemed to think she was evenly remotely correct about the Wilderness breathing down their necks like some divine force, twisting their livelihoods and deciding their fate. She kept out the part about Shauna and Jeff, a thought which made Jackie’s stomach churn and threaten to empty what food the nurses had deemed safe to give her.
By the time she finishes the events leading to her storming out with the fire lantern, with a few undesirable details like how Lottie told her she didn’t matter anymore or how Shauna called her a weak, tragic, boring, pathetic and self-obsessed bitch, her parents are looking more worried than they were upon arrival and Jackie think she might have done a bit of a overkill with it.
She puts up one shaky thumbs-up, but her parents still look at her as though she fell from the sky – oh wait, she did fall from the sky. Suppressing a chuckle, Jackie feigns nonchalance, ‘what about you guys?’
‘Not the same without you,’ her father answers, a strain in his voice most unlike his usual unreadable demeanor. A sadness falls over them at his words, and Jackie looks between one parent to another, both of their eyes fixed on hers, as if she would vanish if they averted their gazes.
A few minutes pass, and Jackie dives into the Jello the nurse had brought over earlier, her father’s phone rings and he excuses himself, Jackie watches with trembling hands as he leaves, the spoon betraying whatever was wrong with her nerves. She should’ve expected this, with the way her mind turns fuzzy whenever conversations go on too long, how the light is always too bright and the way words dance on the small TV placed on the other side of the room, she feels as though she’s seeing everything in poorly wound saran wrap.
She does not, however, expect her mother to gently ease the quivering spoon from her fingers, and plunge it to the plastic cup, scooping a reasonable amount of Jello and bringing to Jackie’s lips, which are, by then, slightly parted in shock.
‘Oh, come on,’ her mother laughs, even though there’s a sad note in her voice, and Jackie doesn’t know if it’s at her surprise or the surreality of having her back after nearly half a year, ‘it’s not like I ever stopped loving you.’
‘No,’ she finds herself saying, taking a big bite of the Jello and letting it’s sugary taste ease her nerves, ‘you just stopped showing it.’
For a minute, she thinks she might be admonished, but her mother nods solemnly and simply says, ‘I’ll try harder from now on.’
Jackie smiles and she swears the Jello tastes better in her mouth after that.
***
‘Morning, cutie!’
Shauna brightens at the sound of Jennifer, the nurse in her ward and probably the sweetest person in the entire world. It is a new day, and the sunlight is filtering through the window as Jenny pulls them apart, Shauna’s eyes catch on the bougainvillea flowers on the trees surrounding the hospital building, and an idea brighter than the sunshine coating her room pops up in her mind.
There’s a drawback though, she doesn’t have any money, and the disappointment must show in her face because Jennifer has paused her checking of Shauna’s vitals, even though she’s perfectly fine, ‘everything okay, sweetie?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know,’ Jenny begins, a slightly teasing note in her otherwise affectionate voice, ‘I heard the best friend of yours woke up and has been secretly asking other nurses if you were okay.’
Shauna’s head snaps up so quickly that she hears her neck crack, ‘Really?’
‘Totally,’ Jennifer smiles, so infectious that Shauna can’t help but smile too.
The others had been discharged relatively early, and Nat had insisted on staying behind to check on Jackie, much to Shauna’s chagrin, but she too had departed 2 days earlier. By then, Shauna’s daily nurses, Jennifer and a smiling chap old enough to be her father called Rick, had figured out two things, the first that Shauna cared about Jackie more than anyone else in the entire world, and the second that things had gone downhill for them since the plane crash. So, the night before Jackie woke up, Shauna told them everything, including one life-changing truth that she’d never been brave enough to acknowledge.
That she is in love with Jackie.
The thought, even now, makes her shudder, and she pushes it away, caging it in that corner of her mind where it belonged, as prominent as ever. It was going to be fine, though. Shauna would love Jackie, no matter the cost, and this time, she wouldn’t fail to show it or commit atrocities that suggest the opposite of this absolute truth. She sees now that Jackie had never meant to hurt her, and in time, they would fall back in place, Shauna would try everything in her power, albeit limited, to make sure of that. 17 years of knowing Jackie, and Shauna is sure of one thing – that she will make Jackie her best friend again. Maybe even more than that, a sly voice in her head thinks. The thought makes her blush, but ever since Travis had confided in her, after a particularly painful breakdown regarding her situation with honey-blonde, that Jackie admitted to never liking Jeff, Shauna think she might have a chance. It was tiny sure, but Shauna Shipman would steer this small ship, man.
Shauna giggles at the thought, swallowing her pride, she begins the smallest of phases of her plan.
‘Hey, Jenny?’ Shauna asks, the embarrassment she feels as asking for a favor will not overpower her love for Jackie, and she tries to rid her mind of it.
‘Yeah, sweetie?’
‘Could you,’ Shauna swallows, now or never, Shipman, she thinks to herself, ‘you buy me a bouquet of poppies by like, this afternoon?’
Jenny’s grin gets impossibly wider as she answers, ‘Tell me and Rick how it goes with the girl, and it’s on the house.’