Chapter Text
Natalie Scatorccio is tired.
She has been tired for a while now, actually.
Physically, of course, after scaling a mountain in the middle of winter, carrying a large metal case filled with some sort of shitty communications system inside of it.
But in her head, as well.
She’s tired.
She’s so, so tired.
She doesn’t know if Mari made it out alive, or if maybe someone else died in her place—like Javi had for her.
She doesn’t know if she’ll make it back down the mountain.
She doesn’t know what’ll happen to her if she does once Shauna figures out what she, Misty, Van and Gen and Melissa have done.
She doesn’t want to go back.
She’d rather take her chances up here, alone, with a stupid radio box that doesn’t even work properly, in a seemingly endless slope of rocks and frozen ground and pure white snow, untouched save for animal tracks and wind.
She’s so bitter about it all.
All this hard work, all this time alive and all this time trying to keep everyone else alive—
And it still doesn’t work in the end.
I mean, she did manage to contact someone—but she’ll be dead either way.
She’s on her knees in the snow, with tears running down her face and smearing the black face paint around her eyes, which only makes them pop more, her hood still up.
The walkie-talkie connected to the radio box is still clutched in her limp hand.
Her breath is shuddering, and she wants it to choke and go stiff in her throat so she can die a less painful way than what Shauna has intended for her—so those animals can’t get to her body, but rather the real animals of the forest.
The man had told her they were tracking her location. That they would be there as soon as possible and rescue them all, and to hold out for as long as they could.
Natalie didn’t think she could, honestly.
She could feel the snow seeping into her clothes—into the fur of the pelts hugging her body, and she could feel how frozen her throat and nostrils felt from the air.
Sitting at the top of the mountain was good in hindsight to contact the people—
But she’s tired now.
And she wants nothing more than to rest after all the hard work she has done—even if it means lying down in the snow, and accepting her death.
Actually, she might prefer that entirely.
The thought settles into her bones the way the cold already has, slow and insistent, less a spike of fear than a dull, spreading numbness. It feels honest—and maybe even feels earned.
There is something almost comforting about the idea that she could just…stop.
That she could lie back down into the snow and let it take her the way it takes everything else out here. Quietly. Without asking permission. Without another argument, or another choice, or another failure she has to own.
She has made so many choices. Too many. Every one of them feels like it weighs a hundred pounds now, stacked on her chest until breathing hurts more than the cold does.
Natalie thinks about the things she used to believe in, back when belief was something you could afford. Fairness. Consequences. The idea that if you tried hard enough, if you did the right thing enough times in a row, it would add up to something.
That the universe might look at you and say, yeah, okay, you’ve suffered enough. Here’s a break.
She doesn’t believe that anymore.
What she believes in now is endurance.
Hunger.
Blood.
The sound of breath fogging the air in the dark. The way hope feels right before it dies.
She believes in the math of survival, how it never quite balances, how someone always has to be the remainder. She believes in the forest, not as something alive or thinking, like Lottie does, but as something cruel.
As something she hates with a passion, but something she’d much rather die to, over her own teammates.
She believes, with a bone-deep certainty, that she is tired.
Her knees sink further into the snow as her muscles give up arguing with gravity and her will.
The cold seeps in through the seams of her clothes, through the stitched hides and furs that once felt like armor and now just feel heavy. Everything she’s wearing smells like smoke and old blood and animal fat. It smells like the life she’s been rotting from the inside out.
Her fingers ache around the walkie-talkie, stiff and clumsy, skin cracked raw beneath the grime. She doesn’t remember when she stopped trying to call out again. She doesn’t remember when she accepted that no one was coming fast enough for it to matter if she laid down and let the snow sweep her away or not.
The man’s voice echoes in her head anyway, tiny and distant, like it came from another lifetime.
We’re tracking your location.
Calm and professional and So confident. As if confidence alone could bend time.
Hold out as long as you can.
Natalie lets out a sound that might be a laugh if it didn’t break halfway through her chest.
Holding out feels like a joke now.
Holding out for what, exactly?
For rescue that comes too late?
For punishment she already knows is waiting at the bottom of the mountain?
For Shauna’s eyes, sharp and hollow and furious, when she realizes exactly what Natalie has done?
She presses the heel of her hand into her face, smearing the paint further, black streaks dragging across her skin.
She feels ugly and small and very, very young. Younger than she’s been allowed to be in a long time.
She doesn’t want to go back.
The thought repeats, stubborn and childlike. She doesn’t want to go back to the camp. To the looks. To the rules that keep changing. To the loud threat of violence that rips through the air. To the knowledge that she crossed a line that she can’t uncross anymore.
Up here, at least, the rules are simple.
Cold kills you. Snow buries you.
Animals clean up what’s left.
Natalie exhales slowly, shakily. The sound feels loud in the open air. Her vision swims a little, the white of the snow bleeding into the gray of the sky until there’s no clear edge between them. She sways, and for a brief, disorienting second she thinks she might already be falling—and the only thing that stops her is the warm hand on her shoulder.
Wait.
What?
A hand, solid and warm, settling on her shoulder.
A hand. On her shoulder.
There is a person with her.
Their hand…on her shoulder.
Natalie jolts so hard it sends a sharp spike of pain through her spine. Her heart slams against her ribs, panic roaring up her throat as she whips her head around, breath tearing out of her in a strangled gasp.
Her first thought is Shauna.
The image comes unbidden, vivid and terrifying.
Shauna, standing behind her in the snow, that stupid fucking knife already out, face twisted in that awful, deliberate grin it gets right before she does something irreversibly awful or cruel.
Natalie scrambles backward, half-slipping, half-crawling, nearly dropping the walkie-talkie as she twists to face whoever is there.
“Don’t!” she blurts, voice hoarse and cracking. “Don’t touch me—“
The words tangle uselessly as her eyes land on him, wide, painfully so, like they’re gonna fall from her head.
Coach Scott stands a few feet away, boots planted firmly in the snow, jacket zipped up against the cold.
He looks…intact. Clean.
Alive.
His face is softer than Natalie remembers it being lately, the lines of strain eased, his expression gentle in a way that almost hurts to look at.
He even has both his legs.
It’s like he was never in the plane crash to begin with. Like he was just strolling and enjoying the winter snow and came across her.
For a moment, her brain refuses to cooperate. It’s like trying to force two magnets together the wrong way, logic sliding off the impossible shape of him standing there.
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“No. No no—what?” she says finally, weak and incredulous. “No. You’re—you’re not—”
Ben smiles, small and sad. “Hey, Nat.”
Her chest tightens painfully at the sound of her name in his voice. Not barked. Not demanded. Just…offered.
She shakes her head hard enough to make her vision blur. “T-This isn’t real,” she insists, the words tumbling over each other. “I’m freezing. I’m hallucinating. Or I’m already dead. This is—t-this is my brain doing shit because it’s shutting down.”
“That might be true,” Ben slowly bites out, but he still sounds nauseatingly calm.
She hates him for it.
“And I might still be here.”
Natalie lets out a sharp, humorless laugh. “You can’t be. Y-You can’t just—show up! You didn’t even know I was—”
“I know, Nat—“ he interrupts gently, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “I…I know where you are, right now, okay? I know your stressed, and scared, and—“
“You don’t.” she spits, her throat tightening as she leans away from him. “You don’t know anything anymore.”
The implication hangs between them, heavy and unspoken.
You’re dead, she wants to yell.
Or sob.
Or maybe both.
Natalie watches his face closely, waiting for it to change, for him to flinch or correct her or disappear entirely.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he steps closer, careful, like he’s approaching a skittish animal. When he reaches out again, Natalie doesn’t pull away. His hand settles on her shoulder once more, grounding and warm in a way the cold can’t quite erase.
“I’m here in a way that’s hard to explain—“ he says. “But I’m here.”
Natalie’s eyes burn, tears brimming up more than they already have. “Y-You’re not supposed to be…” she whispers. “You’re—y-you’re dead.”
Ben’s expression softens further, something like regret flickering across his features. “That doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you.”
She swallows, hard. Her brain is scrambling for something solid to grab onto, some explanation that doesn’t make her feel like she’s losing her grip on reality.
“I’m not strong enough for this.” she says, the confession slipping out before she can stop it. “I’m too tired, Ben. I can’t—I can’t do this anymore.”
Ben crouches in front of her so they’re eye level, snow crunching beneath his movement.
He looks so sad.
So gentle.
It makes Natalie recoil.
“I know you’re tired,” he claims, and he sounds just about as soft and kind as he’s making himself look. “Anyone would be.”
You left, she thinks, her nose scrunching. You left me and made me kill you. You left me.
Natalie’s breath shudders.
“No. No, you—You don’t get it,” she snaps, sudden heat flaring through the numbness. “Y-You don’t know what it’s like now. I’ve done things. I let things happen. I-I’m not—I’m not good.”
“Nat,” Ben gently sighs. “You were never supposed to be perfect. No one is.”
She shakes her head again, tears spilling over now, hot tracks against frozen skin. “That’s not enough.” she scoffs, but it hitches at the end. “Not out here—Not anymore. Being not perfect gets people killed.”
He doesn’t argue with that. He lets the silence stretch, lets her words sit there between them.
“You can still choose,” he says finally. “Even now.”
Natalie laughs again, sharp and broken. “Choose what? To go back down there and wait for them to tear me apart? To keep pretending I know how to fix things when I don’t?”
“To keep going,” Ben says simply. “To try.”
“I’m not strong like you think I am, Ben.” she rasps, her voice biting through the cold air with a brittle gasp. “I-I just…I don’t want anyone to die anymore.”
Ben smiles faintly. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
She looks at him then, really looks. Notices the way he seems almost too solid against the washed-out white of the mountain. Notices how the air around him doesn’t steam when he breathes.
“You’re just asking me to suffer more.” she mumbles quietly.
“Yes,” he admits. “I am.”
Natalie closes her eyes, exhausted beyond words. The cold has settled deeper now, her limbs heavy and distant.
It would be so easy to just…
let go.
Funny thought that she might die like Jackie Taylor. Accept she doesn’t have anyone to put her bones in a duffel bag and say some kind words to her. Not even Mari or Van.
“I don’t want to.” she whispers, and she wants to tear her own hair out from the tiny whimper that her voice is—how little and scared she sounds. She shouldn’t sound like that.
Not after all the bullshit she had been put through. Why is this what scares her most?
The thought of having to continue on?
“I know,” Ben says. “But you can.”
A long, silent minute passes. Then another. The wind whistles around them, tugging at Natalie’s hood, biting at her exposed skin.
Finally, she nods. Just once.
She doesn’t even know why she agrees. She doesn’t have anything waiting back home for her more than a whole lot of slut shaming, an alcoholic mother, and likely people who will be saying a lot of bullshit when they get back.
She would rather just let herself fucking die—but for some ungodly reason, she agrees, and she nods.
“I-I’ll try.” she chokes, and she can feel the way her lip wobbles briefly. “I…I-I don’t know how long I can keep doing it. But—But I’ll try.”
Relief floods Ben’s face.
He reaches forward and pulls her into a hug, firm and grounding, his arms solid around her shoulders.
Natalie hasn’t felt the feeling of a good hug in so long—she flinched at the touch, and she can’t bring herself to hug him back.
He feels real.
Like he is really there.
Like she didn’t drive a knife through his heart only weeks ago in a bloodbath of a mercy kill.
“You made the right choice.” he murmurs, a harsh frown twisting on his face. “No matter what they put you through. No matter how bad it gets. You stay alive. You endure. You try again.”
Natalie stiffens slightly. “Why are you saying it like that?” she asks. “It’s not a fucking rule book, Coach.”
Before he can answer, another voice cuts in.
“Because it...kinda is.”
Natalie jerks back, spinning toward the sound.
Mari stands a few steps away, barefoot in the snow, wearing nothing but a thin, pale gown that flutters uselessly in the wind. She looks younger somehow. Softer. Unmarked. But her clothes are rugged and dirty, just like her own.
Natalie’s heart lurches violently.
“Mari?” she breathes. “How did you—how are you—how the fuck are you—“
“I didn’t survive it.” Mari says bluntly.
The words hit like a punch.
Natalie stares at her, the truth clicking into place with sickening clarity. “Oh.” she whispers. “You…you didn’t make it.”
Mari shrugs lightly, but her eyes are kind. “Guess not.”
Natalie’s chest caves in on itself. “I’m sorry, Mar—I thought…I thought I could save you. All of us. I thought Hannah would get the card.” she says immediately, desperately. “I tried to—I didn’t know where you were—”
“I know,” Mari says softly. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Natalie wipes at her face, hands shaking. “Then why?”
“Because you’re still breathing,” Mari says. “Which means you still have a job.”
Natalie frowns. “What job?”
Mari tilts her head, considering. “Think. Act. Endure. Avoid dying in stupid ways, avoid injuries, avoid unnecessary drama…Y’know. The basics. Like a reality Tv show about survival or some shit.”
Coach sighs in exasperation next to Natalie.
“That doesn’t make any sense.” The brunette-blonde croaks. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Mari cocks her head and her brows knit together as she looks at the girl crouched before her, her expression twisted in what Natalie can only describe as something…faintly apologetic.
“We all know more than we’re supposed to, Nat.”
Natalie turns to Ben, panic flaring. “Coach?” she asks. “What does she mean?”
But Ben is gone.
Natalie staggers backward, heart hammering, confusion spiraling into fear.
She whips her head back to where Mari is.
“What—“
She flinches.
Mari is gone, and instead, a stag stands before her in Mari’s place, massive and still, its breath fogging faintly.
Dark blood stains its fur, multiple puncture wounds marring its body. One deep incision gapes in its chest. Its back right leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, like it’s almost about to fall off. Its ribs press tight beneath its skin, crooked and wrong.
The injuries look familiar.
Too familiar.
The stag lowers its head until its nose brushes Natalie’s chest.
Cold floods her body all at once. Ugly. Freezing. Like electricity is bolting through her limbs and frying her brain with such heat that it only feels like a really bad chill.
Her body rocks sideways into the snow, the white powder puffing out around her from the impact as her eyes roll and flutter shut.
Did a Stag seriously just send her into shock and kill her?
⋆⋅⚽︎⋅⋆
The first thing Natalie opens her eyes to is the sound of a railing, metal screeching, a heavy jolting pop that reverberates through her chest.
Her stomach lurches violently, sending a wave of nausea curling in her gut, and she thinks for a moment she’s about to vomit everywhere—but she’s jostled from that thought.
Literally.
She’s thrown forward, her chest slamming into a firm row of two seats in front of her, knocking the wind from her with a wheeze.
The seats shudder beneath her, rattling against the floor, throwing her forward and then snapping her back like a ragdoll.
Her hands fly to the armrests, clutching the textured plastic so hard her knuckles ache, but it doesn’t stop the shaking, doesn’t stop the chaos slamming into every sense. She tastes metal in her mouth, sharp and sour, and hears the shriek of the engines cutting through the cabin, a grinding, screaming roar that vibrates under her skin.
Seats? Armrests—cabin? No—she was just on a mountain top. In the cold. With coach, and Mari, and the fucking stag, and—
Her eyes dart everywhere at once.
A bag tumbles down the aisle, bouncing against seats with a hard clack, spilling its contents; Notebooks, water bottles, the dull glint of broken metal and glass.
Girls are screaming, if not just straight up violently sobbing, some clinging to one another, arms tangled in desperation.
The smell of sweat, fear, and recycled air mixes with a faint sharp tang of smoke from somewhere in the back of the plane, not far from her.
She sees Lottie, white-faced, sobbing loudly in such a sane way that makes Natalie suck in a loud gasp of air herself, as if sharing the grief and fear of the cries with her. Lotties hands are clutching Laura Lee’s arms as Laura Lee—Laura Lee, who is supposed to be dead—prays loudly, the words sharp and frantic, tumbling over each other, trembling in fear and urgency.
Jackie—Jackie, who she ate—is shaking Shauna—Shauna, who ate Jackie and went crazy—violently, shouting something Natalie can’t make out over the din, while Shauna’s eyes flutter, barely open, like she’s been asleep for decades.
Misty—Misty, who had the damn transponder—sits a few seats away, frozen, arms limp, eyes wide, staring at nothing in particular.
Javi—Javi, who she let drown in her place—is wailing in his seat, twisting around, gripping at Misty’s chair, a sound full of raw panic that makes Natalie flinch.
The plane jerks again, a violent pitch downward that steals her breath, makes her heart slam into her ribs. Oxygen masks pop down around her, dangling, swinging wildly, whacking her head and the seats.
Coach Martinez moves fast down the aisle, checking every girl, shouting instructions she can barely hear. She doesn’t even have it in her to feel shocked at the sight of him standing again. She had barely realized it was him, she hadn’t seen him in so long.
The whole cabin feels like it’s vibrating with panic, every noise amplified, every motion exaggerated, a cyclone of chaos that drags Natalie’s mind along with it.
She’s in a plane.
The plane that she’s almost positive is hidden in a heap of untouched fluffy snow, with marker scribbled over its side in bold letters.
So much for that working out.
Her own breathing is ragged and loud in her ears, a desperate, shallow gasp that she can’t control.
Her body feels too heavy, too light, and completely unresponsive at the same time.
The cold from the high and yet rapidly lowering altitude sneaks through the vent, icy gusts biting at her neck and hands, reminding her that the mountain, the snow, the frost—she had been there.
And now she’s here.
With people who have been dead for months. With people that she has eaten.
With people who she fucking hates.
Everything moves too fast. Too close. Too loud. She wants to shut her eyes again, and just pretend that she’s dead and this is her hell—that this will just continue forever, and she’ll never actually crash, and she’ll be okay—but fear pins her open.
She wants to curl into herself, hide under the seat, disappear—but she can’t.
Every jolt, every shout, every slam of luggage against metal, is right there, inescapable, and happening.
She knows all of this.
She remembers it.
vividly.
Every panic-stricken face, every flailing movement, the way the cabin tilts just so—she’s been here before. She doesn’t know how or why or what it means, but it claws at her chest and her stomach and her lungs all at once.
She squeezes her eyes shut for half a second, and when she opens them again, the forest outside the window is closer, rushing at them, green trees blurring into one another, impossibly fast.
Her throat tightens.
Her limbs shake. Every nerve is screaming. She’s alive. She’s moving. She’s—she’s still here.
They are crashing. All over again. As if she hadn’t gone through months and months of starvation and fear.
She’s back in the plane.
Back to the start.