Chapter Text
Max and Chloe naturally reunite on October 6th, 2013. Surprisingly, Max has finally found the courage to reach out to her best friend since she arrived in Arcadia Bay. After playing a bit hard to get, Chloe folds pretty quickly the moment Max offers to pay for lunch on their first rendez-vous—a little gesture to start making amends for being a shitty friend for the past five years. Chloe decides to surprise Max with her dad’s old camera as a belated birthday gift, to which Max reacts with even more enthusiasm than anticipated.
On October 7th, Chloe is with Max and nowhere near the Blackwell bathrooms.
She opens up about what happened with Nathan, and Max advises her to stay safe and not confront him until they have something to frame him with. Chloe tells Max all about Rachel and her disappearance, so the two decide to investigate to find out what happened to her. They also both talk to Kate and reassure her that they will find whoever hurt her, and potentially Rachel as well.
They come up with a plan to play Sherlock and Watson and enter Blackwell at night. When they do, they find an extra key to the Principal’s office (without blowing anything up!), and gather some evidence on Nathan. They also find a suspicious stack of money—they doubt it will really be used for what it’s supposed to be—and decide they will repay Chloe’s debt to Frank with it, and Chloe promises Max that if they’re lucky, they’ll use the leftover dough to go on a trip to Portland for the day. Max hopes they actually get to do it.
The next morning, Max kisses Chloe for a dare and neither of them knows how to address it, so they silently agree to talk about it when this is all over.
The next day they pay Frank and manage to squeeze more information out of him. After reviewing all their clues, it turns out they all point to an old barn owned by the Prescott Family. Chloe is reluctant, but Max doesn't want to waste any time and convinces her to tell David, so that he and officers from the ABPD can investigate the location. Several hours pass without any news, and they start to think that maybe they got it all wrong. What they don’t know is that they are in no way prepared for the truth behind that discovery, until they are forced to face it.
Max can still hear Chloe’s screams at the news of the recovery of Rachel’s body, and after learning about what Nathan did to her. Shockingly enough for Max, Nathan wasn’t even alone: the mind behind it all was in fact none other than her professor and idol, Mark Jefferson.
Max still shudders at the memory of his statements to the press and the court. All that talking about innocence, desperation… Max wonders if she was ever meant to be next. After Kate. After Rachel. Lucky for her, she’ll never find out, and those monsters will never get out of jail, or at least that’s the best they can hope for.
The Vortex Club’s End of the World party planned for Thursday night is cancelled out of respect for Rachel.
Max learns that Victoria has won the Every Day Heroes photo contest, and that Principal Wells will be accompanying her to the exhibition in San Francisco. Part of her wishes she’d been braver earlier that week and handed in her photo, but deep down she knows everything is going as it should, and that eventually her time will come anyway.
The next day—Friday, October 11th—Max and Chloe are chilling on the beach at night, alone, taking in the moment and all that they’ve been through this week. Max finally sees a glimpse of her future: one where she can do what she loves most, with the person she loves most by her side. Chloe, for her part, can finally mourn Rachel properly, knowing she can lean on the most important person in her life through the process.
The coming months are going to be hard, but at least they’re together.
And maybe, at last, they can finally make up for lost time.