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Tai refills the wine glasses, passes one to Misty, and wonders what Van would say if she could see her now.
She’s asked herself that question a lot over the past couple of decades, but never more than in the last two months, now that she can’t pick up the phone and find out if she really, really wants to know.
Van would think she’s crazy, she knows that much, but her chest aches with longing to know the exact joke she’d crack about Tai spending her Friday night getting drunk in Misty Quigley’s living room.
Tai’s never been half as funny as Van was, so she can only really conjure up the horrified look she’d give her, but that’s enough to make Tai smile.
“You know, I thought I was flirting with a drinking problem not too long ago,” Misty announces, almost proudly, after taking a healthy sip of wine.
Tai snorts at the mere thought, immediately knowing where that idea stemmed from. “You missed Nat that much you decided to pick up her worst habit?”
Misty’s mouth droops into a small frown, her brows furrowing as she decides how to take that, or maybe to consider if it’s true.
Tai knows it is, one way or another. Whether she started drinking to cope with her loss or as part of her fucked up quest to become her, of course it was about Natalie.
Everything was always about Nat for Misty. She can’t imagine that’s changed in death.
That makes her think of Van again, because she figured that out long before Tai did. She either knew something Tai didn’t or she could just relate to that in a way Tai never could.
Because as much as Tai loved Van, she never let that be everything; couldn’t let that be everything. Not until the end, when it was too late for it to be enough.
“Do you ever see her?” she finds herself asking before she can stop herself.
Misty’s head tilts. “Who?”
“Natalie,” Tai says, taking a sip to steel herself before asking again. The wine goes down roughly, her throat suddenly tight. “Do you ever… see her?”
“Sometimes,” Misty admits freely, putting her glass on the table as she shifts in her position on the floor to get more comfortable. She bends her knees, hugs them to her chest, and looks so much like a teenager on a cabin floor that Tai has to look away. “The first time I saw her was the night I got drunk at a bar, actually. The day of her funeral, after spending the afternoon clearing out her storage unit. It stirred up a lot of emotions, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you.”
Tai feels a pang of guilt at the admission, remembering the way Van scolded her for forgetting to tell Misty about the funeral. Not that she missed much. It sounds like Misty honored and mourned Nat better that day than they did.
“I see Van sometimes, too,” she says instead of apologizing.
“I’m not surprised.”
“But is that normal?” Tai worries. She’s already got enough abnormal shit to deal with.
Misty shrugs. “I think it’s normal for us Yellowjackets,” she decides as she takes a sip, always happy to be the same as the others in any way. “And at least when we do see them, we know it’s just a subconscious manifestation of our grief. It’s not like we’re delusional and think they’re really still here and talking to us like Shauna did with Jackie in the meat shed, am I right?”
Misty Quigley is hardly the authority on what makes a person delusional or not, but Tai isn’t going to argue with her, and she doesn’t really care anyway.
Whatever reason she’s seeing Van, whatever that makes her, Tai doesn’t give a fuck. She’s just glad for it. It’s all she has left.
/
“How can I miss her so much when I hadn’t even spoken to her in so long? How does that make sense?” Tai asks three glasses of wine later, drunk enough now to openly bare her soul to Misty Quigley like she’s her best friend. She tries not to think about the sad fact that she might actually be at this point. “I survived without her for over a decade, so why does it feel like I’m dying now that she’s gone again?”
“Well that’s a silly question!” Misty exclaims from where she’s now sprawled out on her back on the floor on the other side of the coffee table. Tai can’t even really see her anymore. She’s just a perky, annoying voice right now. “It’s the absence of hope. Duh.”
“Yeah,” Tai absently agrees, because she’s kind of been ignoring Misty’s rambling about how annoying Walter has been since she broke up with him months ago. But when her words permeate the fog in her brain and she realizes how true they are, it makes her chest so heavy she has to fall back against the couch. “Yeah. Fuck.”
Misty, not burdened by the same weight as Tai, suddenly bolts upright.
“And, and! She was your person! Like Nat was mine,” she theorizes further, speaking like she’s solving a riddle, or a case. Like Tai’s question wasn’t mostly just rhetorical venting. “The one person in the whole world that got you. You know?”
Tai does know. That’s exactly right. “Yeah,” she mumbles again, the alcohol only able to numb so much of the sadness.
“So just knowing she was out there somewhere in the world still was a comfort,” Misty continues, her smile fading as she considers what she’s actually saying and the reality of why she understands it so well starts to sink in. “But now, now that she’s dead, it’s like… It’s like—”
“I’m alone in the world,” Tai finishes for her.
Misty perks back up so fast it’s almost scary. “You’re not! I’m right here!”
Thanks to the wine, Tai finds it more sweet than delusional, which is why she just says, “But it’s not the same,” instead of laughing in Misty’s face.
“No, you’re right,” Misty agrees, her shoulders slumping in defeat. Not hurt by Tai’s words, but by the truth of them. “It’s not.”
They sit and drink in a sad, companionable silence for a while, two women bound by tragedy, a common goal and a missing half.
It might be the longest time Tai has ever seen Misty quiet and it’s as unnerving as it is sad. She sits up and reaches for the second bottle of wine, popping the cork and pouring some into both of their glasses.
“She really did know all of me, even better than I knew myself,” Tai muses as she settles back in her seat, eyes glazed and staring at the sherry. “I know people say that, but it’s actually true in our case.”
It takes Misty a minute to understand what she means, and when she speaks, her words are a little slurred. “Oh! Because of your sleepwalking other personality?”
“She didn’t just know how to handle it, she literally knew things that I didn’t remember doing.”
Misty’s back straightens a little at that, leaning in curiously. “Like what?”
Tai hesitates for just a moment, her brain slower than her mouth when she admits: “I was the one that started the fire.”
She doesn’t know why she says it.
It’s the wine, obviously, but she also blames the crushing loneliness too. It’s a desperate attempt to fill a void that she just acknowledged never can be. Least of all with Misty fucking Quigley.
“What fire?” Misty questions, her own freaky brain lagging too. But she figures it out herself before Tai has to explain, and her eyes widen behind her glasses. “Wait, you mean the fire? You’re the one that burned down the cabin?”
“The other me did,” she clarifies firmly, hearing the words in Van’s voice. She had to remind her of that over and over for good while, back when the guilt was fresher. “I didn’t even know I did it. Van didn’t tell me until years later because she knew I’d never forgive myself. Forget everyone else ever forgiving me.”
It isn’t until that moment that Tai considers the trial and Coach Scott of it all, and she hopes they’re as far from Misty’s mind, too. Even though, from what she remembers, Misty moved on from that pretty quickly. At least a whole lot faster than she has from Nat.
“Wow,” she says, seemingly not thinking of Ben at all as she actually smiles. Tai can’t tell if she’s just happy to be let in on a big secret or if maybe she had suspicions that were just proven right or what, but she’s not going to question it. She’s just glad Misty isn’t pissed. “That’s quite the secret you two shared.”
That’s an understatement, Tai thinks, as she really considers the truth of that. Of what Van took on for her, because she loved her that much.
“Secrets usually fuck up a relationship, but ours was already so fucked by the time I found out that it almost brought us closer together,” she says wistfully, pausing to down more wine. “I guess it really is like you said. Just knowing she was out there, keeping my secret, the only other person in the world that knew the worst thing I’ve ever done…”
“Trust me, I understand better than anyone the way a secret bonds two people,” Misty snorts, taking her own big gulp of wine.
“Yeah?” Tai wonders in amusement, not even having to give it a second of thought to know who she’s referring to. It’s just a question of how seriously she should take her. “Is that how you always got Nat to keep showing up on your doorstep? You had dirt on her?”
Misty is all too happy to correct her. “Oh no, it wasn’t her secret,” she says proudly. “She kept my secret. A big one. Way bigger than yours.”
Tai snorts into her glass, now sure that Misty is embellishing in that Misty way of hers, but not sure why. To relate to Tai or to exaggerate her relationship with Nat?
But either way, Tai plays along, drunk enough to find some kind of relief in Misty’s usual antics, even if it makes her miss the days when she and Van would make fun of her for them together.
She pushes that thought down before it can fully form and when she says, “Whose body did she help you bury?” she’s only half joking.
“Nobody!” Misty insists indignantly, her wine sloshing but not spilling as she gestures emphatically. “Why does everyone always go to murder with me?”
“Just playing the odds,” Tai laughs, curling her legs underneath her. “So, what was this big secret then? I told you mine, you tell me yours. Isn’t that how this works?”
For the first time tonight, and maybe ever, Misty looks hesitant to speak, to break the little pact she had with Nat by letting someone else in on it.
Tai gets it. She kind of already regrets doing it herself. But they can blame it on the alcohol and feel a little less alone.
It seems like Misty quickly comes to that same conclusion because she takes a deep breath and blurts out, “I broke the plane’s emergency transponder.”
Tai feels the gravity of the confession the way she’s supposed to and immediately understands the implications, enough to know that if she was sober, it might have just sent her into some kind of homicidal rage even Shauna’s recent actions haven’t triggered.
But she’s not sober. She’s almost finished her fourth glass of wine. So what she does instead is burst into maniacal laughter.
It seems to startle Misty, almost scare her, which Tai honestly didn’t know was possible, and it just makes it all even funnier.
“When?” she manages to gasp out between cackles.
“On the first night,” Misty answers, slow and wary, even in her own inebriated state. “I must say you’re taking this a lot better than I expected. Natalie punched me in the face when she found out.”
That image just makes Tai laugh harder, doubling over as it plays on a loop in her head. It makes her feel less bad for laughing about it, knowing someone else reacted appropriately and at least clocked her for it.
“When was that?” Tai asks again through her tears, the words buddy cops coming to mind. Their little alliance a few months ago had struck her as strange then, and this would make it make a little more sense.
“A few nights before Nat called for help, the same night Hannah killed the bear guy,” Misty answers, still eyeing her but seemingly accepting that her reaction is genuine, even if nonsensical. It’s not some kind of trick. “I don’t know how much Van told you about that whole thing, but I saw her with the scientists’ broken phone and thought the transponder might have a part that could fix it and I was right! But Nat caught me looking for the piece and well, kind of lost it and decked me. But that’s understandable, obviously.”
It really says something about Tai’s one track mind that the thing to get her laughter to falter is the mention of Van.
“Van knew too?” she questions, trying to keep her voice steady and her stomach from rolling.
Tai doesn’t know how to feel about the possibility that Van might have hidden something so huge from her, especially after just realizing how much their secret truly did bind them together while they were apart.
“Oh no, she was just in on the phone plan, we didn’t tell her where the part came from and honestly, she didn’t want to know,” Misty reassures her. She smiles a little when she reiterates, “Only Nat knew what I did.”
“For over twenty years,” Tai acknowledges, calm enough now to truly consider the implications of that fact. She thinks back to all of her conversations with Nat over the past two decades and it makes her head spin to think of that extra weight she was carrying the whole time. For Misty. Jesus Christ. “And she took it to her grave.”
Misty seems to be doing the same thing as her eyes shine the way they used to when she’d look at Nat.
“Yes,” she says, then takes a sip, probably to hide her smile.
The sight of that familiar look makes something click for Tai, something she hadn’t considered because she was too busy cracking up to realize until now.
“Well, fuck me. Maybe you’re not so crazy after all,” Tai muses, which earns her a confused look from a tilted head and it makes her chuckle a little again, but more softly now. “Oh, you’re actually more batshit insane than we’ve always thought. But I mean about you and Nat… You didn’t make all of it up in your head, did you?”
Misty’s eyes narrow as she pushes her glasses up, not sure how she’s supposed to take that. It’s as much of a compliment as it is an insult, but Tai means it as the former.
“No, I didn’t,” she finally says firmly, more serious than she’s been this whole night. “I know you all think I was just delusionally obsessed with Nat, and maybe I was a little. I probably wasn’t her best friend the way she was mine. But we had a real bond. I know she cared about me. ”
Tai would have started laughing again if Misty had said that any other night, if she didn’t know what she knows now.
But her entire perception of Natalie has changed in the last five minutes, more so than her perception of Misty has, even though it was Misty’s deep dark secret.
They all would have put Misty’s head on a spike if Nat had told them while they were still out there, so Tai understands why she didn’t then, but for her to keep that secret even when they came home and wanted nothing to do with Misty anyway, to keep it for over twenty years…
For Nat to trust her enough to let her help figure out what happened to Travis, to cover up Adam’s murder…
Tai knows better than anyone what it means to keep a secret like that for someone. And more than that, she knows what it can mean for the two people that share it.
“Yeah, I guess she really fucking did,” she has no choice but to agree, letting out one last laugh of disbelief before she empties what’s left of her wine.
She hasn’t wanted to talk to Van about something this badly since the first time she noticed something going on with Shauna and Melissa all those years ago.
She would kill to know what Van would say about all of this, and the wondering makes her smile sadly; Van always did think there was something going on between Misty and Nat.
Tai highly doubts she ever would have guessed it was this, but still.
You told me so, she thinks bittersweetly.
/
Tai doesn’t know where she is when she wakes up the next morning, and she’s even more confused when she realizes the answer is Misty’s house.
She tries to remember how she got here, and she can recall agreeing to meet up to discuss the latest results of Misty’s Melissa stalking, but she has no idea how she ended up spending the night.
When she sits up on the couch, she’s hit with a wave of nausea and an unbearable pounding in her head, but when she sees the two empty wine bottles on the table and Misty passed out on the floor, she’s also flooded with relief.
She doesn’t remember last night because she got drunk. Not because her other self took over.
Tai’s foot bumps the coffee table as she stretches her legs, and the clinking of the bottles startles Misty awake.
The other woman shoots up like she’s been resurrected, her hair wild and her glasses askew on her face. She fixes them and seems to speedrun the same process that Tai just went through.
“Did we have a sleepover?” she asks once she’s taken the entire scene in.
“I don’t think this counts as one,” Tai grumbles, pressing her palm to her forehead. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Misty thinks, struggling to find a solid memory as much as Tai is. “Um, I think maybe how I thought I had a drinking problem before.”
Tai snorts at the irony, remembering the way she’d dismissed the idea. “Well, maybe you should cut back.”
“Maybe we both should,” Misty counters sternly. “I assume I didn’t drink both of those bottles on my own.”
Tai can’t exactly argue with that, so she doesn’t. Instead, she asks, “You got anything decent for breakfast in this place?”
Misty perks up, no match for a hangover. “Of course!” She scrambles to her feet and grabs their dirty, empty glasses. “I still have all of Nat’s favorites. There’s bacon, sausages—”
“I’m a vegetarian,” Tai cuts in tiredly, trying to swallow her urge to vomit. “How about some toast?”
Misty seems disappointed to not get to make the feast she so badly wants to, but just nods and leaves the room with a, “Coming right up!” before she disappears into the kitchen.
Tai watches her leave, suddenly filled with that familiar certainty that she’s forgetting something important.
But what else is new?
In Tai’s experience, sometimes it's better that she doesn’t remember.