Every day is a struggle in the Brackett-Strode house. Annie wakes up to Laurie's screams in the middle of the night, sometimes just before sunrise, making falling back to sleep impossible. They argue almost as hopelessly as they are in love. Annie has to be forced out of the house, sometimes physically, but still refuses to admit that she has a problem. Laurie spray paints the walls and hangs up posters that feel like they're mocking what they both went through.
In short, it's a fucking mess. And Annie doesn't think it can get much worse than it already is.
It's dark, rainy, and the beginning of September when she realizes she spoke too soon. She wakes up to the bedroom light on, and the overwhelming smell of blood. At first, she thinks it's just a nightmare, or a flashback, until she sees Laurie sitting on the floor of the bathroom. She's covered in something wet and dark, holding a knife Annie recognizes from their kitchen.
"I – it's not mine," is all she can say, and Annie doesn't bother with questions.
She shuts the door, strips the other girl's clothes off, and pulls her into the tub. They don't talk as Annie uses steaming hot water, soap, and her hands to clean the blood off.
Afterwards, she tucks the blonde into bed, ignoring the way her hair soaks the pillows, and locks herself in the bathroom alone to cry and bleach the clothing.
(She gives up and burns them the next day. She never cared much for that shirt anyway).
"I keep having nightmares about a river of blood," Laurie won't look at Annie as she talks, won't even lean towards her. She's sitting on the sofa, picking at a hole in her jeans, across from Annie's spot in one of the arm chairs. There's a fire going, but the blonde still feels like she's freezing. She hasn't felt warm since she left the house the night before.
"The dreams won't stop. There's a woman in them, and a boy dressed like a clown. They – they told me that if I added to the river they would leave me alone."
"Did you –" Annie takes a deep breath. "Did you hurt someone last night?"
Silence.
"Laurie, did you kill someone?"
"I'm so sorry, baby," is all Laurie gets out before they both start to cry.
(It was a girl at a party, she explains later. She was stoned out of her mind and couldn't find her way home when Laurie offered to help. She led the girl down into the woods, by the train tracks, grabbed a rock, and smashed her head open when her back was turned. She dragged the body into a ravine, just to be safe, and came home to Annie).
"This is the third time I've found you like this," Annie sighs, dragging Laurie towards the bathroom. "How full does this fucking river have to be?"
"They don't say," Laurie manages, and Annie raises an eyebrow. Every other night that she's woken up to a blood-soaked blonde, she's been completely silent, save for the occasional sniffle or disjointed ramble.
"If you –" Annie hesitates, realizing the gravity of the situation she's about to put herself in. "If you need to keep doing this, I'll come with you next time. You're too out of it afterwards; you're going to get hurt. Or caught."
They stand under the shower together, soapy hands pulling through blonde curls, someone else's blood running down the drain.
"Out of all the things that could have gotten me out of the house, I never pictured this," Annie muses, leaning over to push the body of a boy around their age into a semi-shallow grave. Laurie wipes the knife off, her lips quirking at the comment.
"Fuck, baby," Laurie pants, her body twisting in a way Annie will never get sick of.
This is what she wants to commit to memory. The feeling of Laurie's skin, slick with sweat. Her hands gripping onto Annie's hair, Annie's thighs. The way she repeats "baby" and "I love you" like they're the only words she knows. How she tastes.
Not the way she looks with her hands around someone's throat, or the handle of a knife. Not how she cries "baby" and "I love you" desperately, trying to keep Annie from being disgusted by her.
"We're getting too good at this. We shouldn't have a routine for killing people."
Annie lies awake in the middle of the night, total darkness surrounding her and the girl sleeping beside her. The window is open, and an occasional breeze keeps floating through, along with the sound of crickets. Laurie is covered in nothing but a sheet, her bare chest rising and falling in a now-familiar rhythm.
Normally, seeing her like this would calm Annie down. It would remind her that there's still some innocence left in Laurie, no matter how many people she kills. But tonight, she can't stop thinking about how, twelve hours earlier, Laurie pushed down on the neck of a strung out prostitute in some back alley. The crack, and the sudden blank look in her eyes, will stick with Annie forever. So will the way Laurie shook it off. Just committed the crime, had a quick cry (the quickest yet), and went about the rest of her day.
She wants to believe that the Laurie she's looking at is still her Laurie. Still the Laurie she grew up with, still the Laurie she fell in love with, just very, very damaged. Not a monster that she's protecting.
Annie leans over, quick and quiet, to drag her index finger down the ribs in front of her, tracing a scar that only she and Laurie know about, before pressing her lips to the spot just between the blonde's shoulder blades.
"Please don't hurt me, baby," she whispers across the soft, salty skin. "I know you can't help it lately, but please, unless there's no other option, unless I ask, don't make me one of them. I want to be more than that to you."
It's more of a prayer to whoever might be listening up above, but she hopes Laurie's subconscious takes note, too.
The guilt radiates off of them, Annie is sure of it. Whenever she thinks about leaving the house, maybe see Laurie at work or go shopping, her anxiety creeps up on her. It crawls up her spine, sits on her chest. Fills her with thoughts of how people would look at her and just know.
After Michael Myers sliced her open, killed her friends, and ruined Laurie, she stayed inside because it didn't feel safe to leave. The anxiety would whisper about how he would be waiting somewhere in the shadows for her.
Now when she heads towards the door, or even thinks about leaving, it reminds her that everyone will know what she's done. That she's no better than him. That she protects Laurie similar to how his mother tried to protect him.
So she locks the doors, draws the curtains, stays in her robe. She tries desperately to keep her panic at bay, and only leaves with Laurie.
Annie is never the one to do the killing. It's Laurie's imaginary blood river, so it's Laurie's job to fill it. The brunette is there for moral support, to hide evidence, to lure the soon-to-be-corpses if need be. She's there to protect Laurie.
The day they underestimate someone is the day this changes; the day she gets blood on her hands.
He looked weak, scrawny, and strung out, so when Annie reached to undo her seatbelt, a hand on her thigh stopped her.
"I got this, baby."
So she sits in the car and waits for Laurie to come back to her, crying and saying it's done. The tears haven't been happening as much lately, they're both becoming desensitized, but Annie prepares herself for them anyway. The same way she prepares herself to clean up a dead body in the next hour: with a "you have to do this, no matter how much you don't want to" attitude. She looks at cleaning up a crime scene and cleaning up a sobbing Laurie as the same thing, most days. Both are done as damage control to keep her love from a nervous breakdown and any punishment. Both are done to keep Laurie safe, to keep Laurie as whole as she can be. It's becoming Annie's mantra. ("Safe and whole, safe and whole").
But the tears don't come. The sweaty, bloody, knife-wielding girlfriend doesn't make an appearance either.
What reaches her, instead, is the sound of Laurie screaming Annie's name.
The man they picked out has Laurie pinned behind the abandoned building they planned to leave his body in, his hands wrapped around her throat, pushing her hard into the gravel, and Annie sees red.
(She knows it isn't fair of her. They were trying to kill him, after all).
The hunting knife she carries for protection when they go out, the one that's never been used, sinks into his back, into his ribs, into his neck. She slashes at his arms until he lets go of Laurie, neither caring that his blood is spilling out onto them both. She doesn't know how many times she stabs him. All she knows is that when she stops, Laurie is out of breath but alive, and he is out of breath for good.
She throws up afterwards, tears stinging her eyes as stomach acid burns her throat.
Laurie helps hold her hair back, and Annie wants to laugh at how ridiculous it is. They killed somebody, his sticky, crimson blood is in the process of drying to them and staining their clothes, but God forbid she get puke in her hair.
"Oh, God. What did I just do?" She chokes out, wiping her mouth off on the back of her hand.
"It's called murder, baby."
They kiss each other awake from nightmares, making promises in the dark that everything is going to be okay.
(It's not).
The lead-up to Halloween, with its changing leaves and pumpkin spice bullshit, sends Laurie into a frenzy. Spending the night elbows-deep in someone else's entrails, their last words still fresh on their lips and her ears, is happening more and more frequently.
Doing to strangers what was done to you is no way to heal, but nobody is telling her that. And the one person that might is too busy mopping up behind her, trying to keep her safe, to think about it.
"I know you! You're the Sheriff's daughter! Aren't you going to help me?"
Annie won't meet this victim's eyes as Laurie sinks a knife into his chest.
"Why are you just standing there?" His final words spill out with a gurgle of blood.
"Laurie, no. Don't buy that stupid fucking book."
(She buys it. And Annie is left picking up more pieces of the already broken girl).
Halloween comes, and she convinces Laurie to stay at home, to stay with her, to stay where it's safe. She leads Laurie up to bed, where she whispers comforting nonsense into the blonde's ear, her hands slipping under her t-shirt to trace shapes and patterns across her back.
It isn't safe, they learn, when Michael kicks in the back door with a loud bang.
They huddle together in their shared bathroom, both doors locked and barricaded. Pressed so close together that they're breathing each other's air, it's the only thing, besides Annie's hand gripping hers, that Laurie finds comforting right now.
Brown eyes meet blue, and Annie's voice comes out choked and small, but serious.
"This is it, Laurie."
A familiar blade presses against Laurie's hand, the hand not interlaced with the smaller girl's, and her eyes grow wide.
"Nononono –"
"It's the only option and you know it."
"No, baby. I can't."
"Yes you can," Annie releases the knife into her grip, her hand now coming up to cup Laurie's chin. "I've seen you do it."
"You're not them, Annie! They were hookers and strangers and redneck assholes. Not the love of my fucking life."
Footsteps are coming up the stairs, and they both say a silent prayer that the bathroom doors will hold.
"Either you do it or he does," Annie whispers, her forehead falling against Laurie's, brown hair mixing with blonde. "And I would really rather it be you."
Laurie slides her lips over Annie's as she simultaneously sinks the knife into her side. She's careful, contained, and precise. She doesn't wiggle the knife. She doesn't go too fast or too slow. She presses exactly where she needs to, with the sharpest blade on hand, to make this as quick and painless as humanly possible. With her victims she didn't care too much about how they felt, but with Annie it's almost all she can focus on.
She swallows the gasp that comes out as the blade goes in, her free hand curving around the brunette's jaw, immediately wiping any tears that fall as she pulls the knife out and pushes it into a new spot. When Annie finally lets out a loud, pained cry, Laurie does the same.
She's sure there's another universe, one where she's crying things like "stay with me, baby".
But in this one, where Annie's death is on her, she repeats "I love you, I love you, I love you" as she cradles the smaller girl, carefully lowering them both onto the cold tile.
In both universes, sobs still slip past her lips, but right here, right now, there aren't any pleas.
When Michael stabbed Annie, it felt like he was taking something from her. But with Laurie as the one on the other end of the knife, it feels like it was supposed to happen this way. If she has to be ripped away from this world before she's ready, she's glad it's Laurie's doing.
Laurie's lips pressed to hers are the last thing Annie feels, not the knife in her gut. Not the blood pouring out, covering the floor, their clothes, Laurie's hands. She remembers that when they first kissed, after the Halloween that led them here, her first thought had been "We could've been doing this for all this time? We've missed out on years of this?" So she's grateful that this, the soft, perfect pressure of Laurie's mouth connecting with hers, is the last thing she senses. She's never been so sure that Laurie is both the love of her life and her soul mate.
The last thing she sees before her vision blurs, and eventually fades, is Michael grabbing Laurie, tearing her away from Annie's side.
And, a moment later, the last thing she hears is a scream, sounding a lot like her name. The dying girl doesn't realize, but it's the last sound to escape her lover's throat before it gets slit open.
Her heart swells, so full of Laurie Strode, before giving up.
They meet on the other side and nothing hurts.