Disclaimer: I own the rights to more or less nothing seen here, nothing from Life is Strange or the Public Radio Alliance or Pacific Northwest Stories. This is entirely a fanbased work for personal enjoyment.

Chapter Four: The Drive

Nic

My friend and I will be leaving in about ten minutes. Safe travels.

Me

Ok.

Max was tired. At least, she was more tired than she had any right to be as she shifted in the passenger seat of the rental car her parents had been kind enough to secure for the two of them. They had been on the road for an hour and a half before she had lowered the volume on the impressive stereo system and decided she had better try to steal a half hour's nap. That had been half an hour ago, and Max had not slept a wink, even when the only sound in the cab was the occasional hum emanating from Chloe's throat, the whine of the engine and the sound of the wheels against the pavement. Whether it was the fact that she had been trying to sleep in a car seat to begin with, traveling unfamiliar – or at least, barely familiar- roads or anxiety about the trip, Max did not think that she was any closer to sleep than she had been when she had first turned the music down and closed her eyes. Since she was not sure that sleep was really a possibility, Max leaned her seat upward and looked not out at the interstate but to her left, toward the woman with the bright blue hair who momentarily split her attention between Max and the road, just long enough to turn her lips upward in a strange, almost abstract mimicry of a smile before focusing her eyes forward and returning to tapping on the wheel with one hand, in a rhythm that made no sense to anyone not listening to the music in her head.

Max wiped her bangs back from her forehead and adjusted her hair so that it was not in her way as she brought herself to a more waking state. She did not speak as she half leaned, half turned to her left. Beside her, Chloe sat both rigid and slightly back in her seat, her long arms extended fully, eyes wide. Despite an almost calm smile sitting on her face, everything else about Chloe looked anything but calm. Max reached out and placed a hand atop the cotton covering Chloe's shoulder. The woman shivered under the touch and her eyes shot sideways. Before Chlose could ask whatever question was forming behind her eyes, Max released her and sighed, looking down at the console between them. Two very tall (and as Max discovered when she picked them up) very empty cans of Monster sat on display. Chloe wasn't nervous, she was wired. How the hell did she even do that in half an hour?

At least Chloe was smart enough not to get into the other cans in the car, like those in the two twenty-four packs sitting on the back floorboards, beneath their luggage. The beer was the result of, after listening to Nic Silver's podcast in its totality, realising the most likely the only person Nic would 'trust to have my back' was likely to be a man called Geoff van Sant. It didn't help that when Max had asked Nic if he would be able to cover his expenses or anything, he thanked them for the offer but said that the friend he was bringing would want to have a beer with them before he willingly followed them into Arcadia Bay. At that point, two nights prior, Chloe had begun to lament that Nic was not bringing Meerkatnip alone. Max had thought about playing jealous just to mess with Chloe but ultimately she had not had the heart or the energy. Now that their focus on learning what they could about Nic and his motivations had paid off, Max and Chloe had both been hit by the realization that they were embarking on a journey which Max at least had promised herself she would never take. She knew Chloe was still unhappy about the trip in general, but she had begun to warm up to the idea of Nic Silver as a person.

"Well, Supermax has joined us," Chloe declared after a couple of seconds of silence. Max thought about stubbornly asking who 'us' was but she did not as Chloe popped her hands against the steering wheel as if for emphasis. The bluenette was in surprisingly good spirits considering the fact that they were almost halfway to a small town nearest the remains of Arcadia Bay called Edgeton. Instead of answering, Max remembered the curiosity and focus in Chloe's voice the night before as the two sat in bed catching the freshly released episode of Tanis and Chloe had spent some time theorizing about who exactly would have been able to hunt down and abduct someone like MK, the blunt and evasive hacker who seemed to work with Nic. In a way, Chloe's interest in all of this was a good sign, Max thought, though they had come to a mutual agreement days ago that whatever Tanis was, it had nothing to do with the events of the Storm, with time travel and a pair of sexual predators turning on one another. Nic was going to be disappointed, or maybe he would enjoy the story. Either way, Max was ready to tell it. It did seem like she might be the only one because as Max rubbed at her eyes, which were frustrated and demanding that she close them and try again for sleep, Chloe did not want to talk about the man they were going to meet or their podcast. She wanted to talk about anything else. "So," Chloe started, sounding as if she could sense that Max's focus had been turned inward and she remained firmly buried in her own thoughts, "how'd calling in go this morning? I forgot to ask. Did Mrs. Chase lose her fucking mind?"

"Someone else took the call, but they didn't sound impressed," Max finally said, yawning. She did not feel comfortable in the seat at all, and suspected that that had to do with the way the seatbelt was restricting her, reacting unkindly to her first lying back and then sitting up in her seat. "I'm sure I'm going to get plenty of crap about it when I go back in on Monday, or whenever." The Chase Space was beginning to become familiar again, as it had been when she was much younger, but in a vastly different way. It was beginning to become a reminder that she was a fish on the hook, completely at Mrs. Chase's mercy and that was something the woman seemed to have absolutely none of. I know, I know, 'there's no room for weakness in the world of art.' Chloe waved her hand in front of Max's face, and Max turned back toward her.

"Earth to Max, come on back." Maybe she had been rather distracted, but every time Max grew quiet and found herself losing focus, her thoughts strayed to one of the issues weighing on her mind. "Are you going to be okay? You realize you've barely talked all day." Chloe emphasized this last in a playfully whining voice. The thing was, as much as Chloe practically bounced in her seat and was clearly full to the brim with one of the most disgusting energy drinks Max had ever had the misfortune of tasting, she was not convinced the other woman was exaggerating. While Chloe seemed to be either actively trying not to think of Arcadia Bay or to convince Max that she was not, Max could not stop her thoughts from eventually turning back to it.

"Sorry," she told her girlfriend, honestly. "I guess I'm just overthinking all of this. How did it go when you called in?"

"Oh," Chloe waved the question off. "They never even really asked any questions. They just told me to show up for my shift on Monday." Max nodded. Chloe had said that the restaurant was desperate for staff, but privately she thought they had more wiggle room, more options. Chloe could choose to look for another job, if she wanted to. That was, perhaps a struggle for another day. "I'm even considering it," Chloe finished. When she turned back to Max, her face was serious for a second and then she sighed exaggeratedly. "C'mon, that was funny."

"Sorry," Max repeated, smiling crookedly at the woman.

"It's going to be okay, Max," Chloe assured her as she hit the car's turn signal and went around a particularly slow station wagon the color of the walls of their old apartment, which was to say that it had once been white but had long since yellowed. "You were right about this. This is something we really need to do." Maybe Chloe was right. None of the reasons she had originally suggested the trip to Arcadia Bay for had vanished: Max still needed to see Arcadia Bay to quiet the last of those nagging voices in the back of her head and if they were going to tell their story to Nic it would be better if it were done on site. Privately, Max thought Chloe might benefit from the experience too, but it was not her place to make a decision like that. As long as Chloe came to Arcadia Bay willingly, Max wasn't going to ask much else of her.

For the next several minutes, Max returned to her attempt to sleep, but the seatbelt dug into her shoulder and the thickening traffic around them had jacked Max's anxiety up in a way she had not expected. Once more, the silence led Max down a familiar and unwelcome path of thoughts: names and dates and faces of those long departed and, in many cases, precisely how they had died because she had not saved them. Max did not expect this trip to rob her of her guilt over Arcadia Bay. She did not think anything or anyone ever could. Every last one of those lives were on her hands, but the alternative had been simply unthinkable. One might as well have put a gun in her hand and asked her to shoot Chloe herself. Kill someone, or through inaction let over a thousand people die. As soon as Max realized she was returning to the core of her frustrations, her stomach twisted in protest, throat closing slightly and she sat up. This silence was not just hurting her, not just leaving her alone with her thoughts. No matter how much Chloe pretended to be alright when Max turned her head toward the woman, she knew that the bluenette had been stuck behind the wheel for almost an hour without even her music to distract her from what had to be trying, uncomfortable thoughts.

Without a word, Max wrapped her hand around Chloe's CD case, popped the first one out of its case and slid the CD labeled 'Firewalk' into the car's player. Chloe looked confusedly toward her. The woman's face changed a few seconds after the first song began to play. Though she had gone back to looking at the road, Chloe had stiffened back up and neither confusion nor this false look of ease she had been wearing the whole trip thus far remained in prominence. Instead, as the first of the vocals poured in, Chloe's face split into a look that might be somewhere between anger and terror. She looked rather like someone who had just seen the ghost of a long dead, and unwelcome, relative. Her eyes did not break from the road ahead or the pale blue Altima ahead of them, but the bluenette reached over with her right hand and slammed her palm against the eject button once, without warning. Max swallowed as Chloe blinked and focused on the road. She read the watering of the woman's eyes and slowly took hold of the CD which was, by this point, sticking halfway out of the player. Max slid the disc away and began to look for the second in the case silently. She could not help but feel genuinely upset by what had just happened because it spoke to Max of some sort of buried frustrations. Chloe had not let onto any of those at all.

"You know, we're just over the state line," Chloe suddenly announced, not looking away from the road as she tried to force her voice back into the very picture of a comfortable, friendly chat. Max paused with the new CD in hand, one she had not even looked at, and stared pointedly at the woman. "Technically we've been back in Oregon for a while now." Max did not look away. Chloe refused to make eye contact. They sat that way in a strained silence for almost a minute, Max feeling as if part of her was afraid to look away for fear of missing something and another was scared to know what had just happened. The new CD rested halfway in the input slot for the CD player, but Max did not push it in for fear that it would start to play and give Chloe any kind of out. After a few seconds more, Max was forced to ask.

"What was wrong with that CD?" She asked this question gently, prodding. Was it possible that Chloe was frustrated with Max for trying to sleep on this trip? After all, the trip had been her idea and Chloe had originally been against it. Maybe it had been selfish of her to try to dodge the negative thoughts in her head made all the worse by the promise of seeing Arcadia Bay while leaving Chloe with no choice but to confront her own alone. If it was that simple, Max would feel guilty, but confused. What she had just witnessed was as close to a petty outburst as Chloe Price came, nowadays. Chloe still had her outbursts, of course, but never so petty, never so childish.

"Lost my taste for them," Chloe lied immediately. What she did next though, was to reach for the CD case on Max's lap. It did not take a genius to guess that Chloe's intent was to secure and do away with the apparently offending CD. She could easily break it with one hand at the risk of cutting herself on the pieces or just as easily roll the window down and toss it out onto the interstate to shatter against or beneath the wheel of another vehicle at seventy miles-per-hour. And if she does, Max told herself as she pulled the CD case out of Chloe's reach and sat it between her right hip and the door beside her, I'll never get the truth out of her.

"In that case, I'll keep it for myself," Max insisted. Instead of getting more irritation out of the woman, Chloe just made a face and put her hands back on the wheel. Max considered trying to lighten the mood by sticking her tongue out at Chloe, goad her into laughter or at least calming down. Instead, the woman looked to be trying to place a calm, collected look overtop the remains of the distraction, the pain and frustration Max had just seen plainly etched into her face at the first couple of bars of a song that Max was pretty sure she had never paid close enough attention to herself to recognize even if she had likely heard it before. Max went quiet when Chloe did. Is Chloe doing bad?

Maybe Chloe didn't like to bottle things up when she was afraid that talking about it would make Max angry, but she certainly had done so once. The result of that had been a blow up that had convinced Max she had finally lost Chloe. There had been an agreement after that to be as honest as they could with one another and though it had been tested from time to time, by Max more than either of them, she had thought they were long past the time where something was going to bother either of them that significantly and go undiscussed. This is the worst time to push her, Max decided, but maybe it's an even worse time not to. They had agreed, no more bullshit, no more hiding things from one another to spare each others' feelings and no more lying. Max had done her part ever since the day she revealed the imagined Rachel Amber's threats against her girlfriend. Now, Chloe was not doing hers.

"Chloe," Max started, as softly as she could. "I know you're not telling me everything about what has you upset." Where a moment ago Chloe had been trying to return to drumming on the steering wheel to a beat in her head, as soon as Max spoke the woman's hands gripped it tightly enough that her knuckles began to shine a fairly bright white against her already pale skin. "We agreed to tell each other these things, right?" They had. Max was not asking for confirmation's sake but instead to drive the point home. It wasn't that she wanted to make Chloe feel guilty: Max felt enough guilt in that moment to hold within her mind a lifetime's supply for both of them.

"The CD is kind of special to me," Chloe finally said, though she said it so quietly that even the fairly modern engine of their Ford Fiesta and the heater running on low to keep the cab liveable nearly drowned the response out. Max blinked and fixed a completely unsatisfied look on her face which Chloe finally took in at a quick glance several seconds later. There were several CDs in this case which Max knew to be special to Chloe. One of them was an EP put out by a shitty rock band called Pisshead that had operated out of Arcadia Bay until its vocalist died in the storm. Tracking a working copy of it down had been the effort of a full month and Chloe only took it out of its case when she felt especially melancholy and nostalgic. Several other CDs made appearances when she was angry, when she was feeling romantic or when she felt inspired in some artistic way. For the most part, maybe half of the discs in the old black KoRn CD case were special to Chloe, which was why Max both handled the case and its contents with care and absolutely had not been willing to let Chloe at the CD she had been clearly intent on destroying. All told, Chloe's answer had not been an answer at all. "I only play it when I want to talk to someone, okay?" the woman asked, sounding put upon and upset. Unfortunately this did nothing to quiet the guilt or concern boiling in Max's knotted stomach and even less to really answer any of Max's questions.

"I don't understand," Max told her, putting sincere effort into keeping her voice calm and even. This was doing nothing for Max's nerves.

"I won't lie to you, but I'm afraid you'll read too much into this." Max did not speak again. She simply waited as Chloe swallowed, roughly, and blinked hard at the road in front of her. "I only play that CD when I need to talk to Rachel." Quite suddenly, despite the heater's best efforts, Max shivered and felt rather cool indeed beneath her dark blue hoodie. Chloe saw this, because her face immediately reddened and contorted into some mix of grief and mortification. There's a part of Chloe that is always going to belong to Rachel. As soon as she had given voice to the threatening thought, letting it out into the universe to to speak, Max quickly told herself,in no uncertain terms, to shut the hell up. If that was how it was, if part of Chloe would always be Rachel's, maybe that was only right? If roles were reversed, if Chloe were to die, would I ever be able to let go of her completely? The idea both upset Max further and pushed the thought of Rachel Amber as some sort of rival force away again, back to the filing cabinet of dumb ideas where it belonged. Fuck no. She would never be able to let go of Chloe Price completely, not for all the money in the world or with a gun to her head. Max started to speak finally, sure she could form words that might calm them both down and send a portion of this sudden strain packing. "It's not romantic," Chloe insisted immediately. "I swear. I just tell her about things I've seen or done lately. Things I think about from back then." Max did not shut her mouth but she waited in silence until it seemed like Chloe had come to a natural pause. They swerved a little harshly into the center lane to go around another slow moving vehicle which Max did not pay any attention to.

"Chloe," Max started, and no sooner had the name left her mouth then Chloe picked up where she had left off.

"I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to get the wrong idea, because I feel silly doing it, okay?"

"Chloe," Max tried again.

"It is stupid, I know it is. I don't believe in ghosts or an afterlife or being able to talk to the dead." As if scrambling to justify something she had no reason to feel guilty for, Chloe's voice rose a hitch and more quickly she added, "It's not just her, either. I talk to mom too. I don't- I can't remember when I started doing it. I just – one day I was just sitting alone in that fucking apartment, I'd smoked the last of the dope, I had a night shift at the diner in a couple of hours and Blair was taking the night off so I was going to be alone and I just started talking to Rachel." Chloe only fell quiet when Max reached over and very slowly, very gently set her hand on Chloe's right hand, not hard enough to cause the woman to jerk the wheel. The bluenette still jumped.

"Chloe," Max said, more forcefully. "I get it, okay?" Chloe freed her hand from beneath Max's and, with a sound far too similar to a sniffle for Max's taste given the woman's watering blue eyes, she held that hand out toward Max.

"What do you want?" she asked as Chloe's left hand remained firmly on the wheel.

"Give me that CD. I want to get rid of it." The woman's face remained red. She looked fucking miserable, and guilty and it was all stupid.

"No," Max told her as upset and anger stole over Chloe's face.

"Why the hell not?"

"If something ever happened to you and I found someone else but they asked me to stop talking to you, Chloe, I'd tell them to fuck themselves with an exhaust pipe and then get back to me on that one." Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, Chloe's fell open slightly and the majority of her upset was replaced with a surprise comical enough to make Max laugh through the memories of Arcadia Bay, the images of a Rachel Amber who had been conjured up by her mind, Chloe's mind or both to torture her and even through the knowledge that they were speeding at over a mile a minute toward the place where she had once damned over a thousand souls. Her chuckle, however brief, seemed to be the signal that the air had changed. Chloe's grasping hand returned to the wheel and she sat in stunned silence for a second or two more before she, too, started to laugh. Being that graphic and that verbose was Chloe's territory, and Max felt awkward infringing on it.

"Wow, big words from Ms. Caulfield." Maybe they were, maybe not, but she felt like she had, at least, pierced the wall that had formed between the two during the last couple of hours of silence. It shouldn't really be this easy to get us in that state, though. Max blamed it on the exceedingly stressful situation they found themselves in after having spent the last few months trying to keep things relatively light in their lives. I think the Rachel thing has been bothering Chloe for a long time and adding it on top of all of this just fucked things up. Besides, some of the severity of the moment had to be in Max's head, worsened by spending time alongside the morose and morbid thoughts which she could not shake about either the past or the future. This all suggested to Max that maybe they had kept things too light for too long, now. While Chloe did not immediately change the subject to something serious, she did sound a little relieved and a little more honest about her emotional state when she spoke next. "Are you getting hungry?"

"I might be soon," she told the woman. "And we could always just stop now and go ahead and trade off. I can drive you know."

"I know," Chloe told her, not taking the bait Max tossed out for her. In the past, Max had been ribbed more than a little for her early attempts at learning to drive. She had just gone from living in Seattle where she did better taking public transportation to living on campus at the school she attended. There had been no need for a license until recently. Max hoped that Chloe passing up that avenue for giving her shit was not a bad sign. "I've been a really bad influence on you," Chloe finally admitted, though she sounded proud as she said it and a grin had begun to sneak its way onto her face, Max's outburst bringing out a visage of amusement where before poorly disguised tension had been been evident in every word and every glance.

"Good," Max insisted. Chloe's answer was a low whistle either of surprise or appreciation which did nothing to make Max feel less silly for exploding. "I just wasn't going to be the reason you stopped talking to Rachel if it felt right to you," she explained. It was important that Chloe heard her say those words.

"I understand, alright," Chloe told her, though she sounded a bit more on edge than she looked. "I was just feeling self-conscious. I'm with you, Max and I don't want you to ever question that you're the person who makes me happier than I've ever been, even if Rachel still rattles around up here sometimes." Chloe first gestured to and then rapped lightly against the right side of her beanie. Max knew the woman was referring more to her memory of Rachel than that of the Dream Rachel, the vindictive Not Rachel who Max suspected she had played a part in giving birth to. Max had to admit, though, that she never wanted to see Rachel Amber outside of photographs again and not just because she feared it would fuck her up again but because it would mean that Chloe was unwell and again projecting a part of her fears, her subconscious out into the world.

"I get it, and I promise you I understand and you don't have to apologize." Max pushed in the CD that had long been sticking half out of the player, biding its time. For the next few minutes she sat quietly while they were treated to the musical stylings of Motorhead. It seemed to calm Chloe down, though the thing that it really did for Max was force her to focus on anything other than the thoughts in her head. Lyrically, she actually enjoyed most, though not all, of Chloe's music. She had learned a long time ago the music's value while angry or upset, too. It just still wasn't in her wheelhouse. Traffic thinned around them as they pushed past roughly Portland, Oregon some time later. Max 'whew'ed under the tone of the music. Somehow, though, Chloe either saw or heard this and turned a song ostensibly about a rebellious and unsuccessful gambler down.

"Wowzers," Max sighed, "that traffic sucked. I really appreciate you handling it." Chloe's grin came back in full force and it replaced some of Max's negative energy with an appreciation for the woman beside her.

"It's no problem, you just have to be okay fighting with assholes for every inch. I like doing that."

"That's just one more reason I'm lucky to have you." At this the bluenette preened slightly as the song in the background assured them that the only card they would need was the ace of spades.

"You should really stroke my ego more often, you know," Chloe advised her matter-of-factly. "I am kind of a badass."

"A total badass," Max insisted, playing along as they pulled off of the interstate, down an exit whose sign claimed to have plenty of places to eat within an easy distance. She split her attention between the highway they turned out onto and the woman beside her who reacted to this response with more preening. "And cute too."

"Gorgeous, I'd say," Chloe corrected her.

"Gorgeous," Max agreed as she caught sight, maybe a quarter of a mile down the road past a couple of gas stations and a liquor store, of a bright yellow Denny's sign.

"Throw me down and have your way with me gorgeous?" Chloe queried. Max figured she had no choice but to disappoint the woman, not firing back as Chloe took their game a step further. Instead, she pointed toward the Denny's excitedly. Chloe sighed as if they were both missing out on a great opportunity. "Well, whatever, there'll be no living with you for the rest of this trip if you don't get your pancakes."

"You damn well know it," Max promised, sitting up straighter in her seat as Chloe merged into the right lane in order to pull off of the highway. No matter how much she tried to sit up straighter, Chloe still rose above her. Max wondered if she could subtly raise her seat when they came out of the Denny's without Chloe noticing and teasing her for it. Most of the time it didn't bother her to look up a bit at the woman, but with this damned seatbelt digging into her now sore shoulder, it got a bit trying. Nonetheless, she looked up at Chloe and blinked away freshly watering eyes as she took in the strangely content smirk on her face. Chloe does so much to take care of me. Sometimes I still don't understand why. Either way, gift horses and mouths, right?

For Chloe's part, she really had tried to embrace Max's music or, at the least, suppress the urge to sigh at it. As she slid the CD Max had chosen into the player, though, Chloe got the feeling there were going to be the occasional sighs spread throughout the remainder of their journey, but she was fairly certain she would at least be able to resist rolling her eyes. Unless of course that made Max laugh, or turn red, or even made her pull a cute face. Other than that, Chloe was sure she would be able to resist. Max had gotten with the program, to a degree, on the heavier music: she at least appreciated it more than Chloe had ever dared to hope, and far more than expected. In return, Chloe wouldn't bitch about Max's music, even though it was all indie, folk or,worst of all, indie folk. It was all so mellow and ended up either being cloyingly happy and about nothing which Chloe could keep track of or it was this stupid bittersweet sad that carried plenty of weight but didn't offer any way to get it off her shoulders. That seemed pointless to her: if you wanted to be sad, there was plenty of shit going on out in the real world that was fucking upsetting. Then again, Chloe reminded herself as the first track started, you're only so down on it because you're extra fucking touchy today, aren't you? Max pulled the car off of the old highway they had just detoured down for breakfast and onto the interstate. Chloe could see her tense up slightly as they approached it. Her girlfriend's anxiety was not at a managed state, even with her medication, which you forgot to make sure she packed.

As she had throughout the meal, Chloe thought about apologizing to Max once again for her drama over the damned Firewalk EP. While Max had done her best to assuage her guilt about talking to Rachel and that was something which Chloe would have to do some soul searching about, very little but time was going to rob her of the feeling that she had taken what was already a stressful day and added a bit more in the way of headache and guilt and all those lovely negative emotions that went along with any discussion of Rachel Amber. Max had even heard the album once or twice before it had taken on its new meaning. The brunette hadn't been a stranger to it, so it made sense that Chloe's overreaction had triggered Max's curiosity and led to the woman digging deeper in. Okay, so short of filling that cooler in the back with ice you don't have and popping a cold one, which could get you in deep shit, what can you do to make the rest of the trip better? Max, it seemed, had some ideas on that front.

Chloe spotted a bit of movement out of the corner of her eye and found Max's right hand resting atop the gearshift. Considering there was no particular reason to shift gears in an automatic car while going seventy down an interstate, Chloe recognized the gesture for what it was and settled her left hand overtop of it, eventually lacing her fingers in Max's. Though they still sat in silence as the next song on the disc started, Chloe no longer felt as anxious or as if she might compulsively apologize and bring up the earlier tension. In fact, other than the connection with Max, the physical which augmented the emotional, Chloe mostly just felt full of pancakes and eggs. Totally fucking worth. She thought that in the moment, at least, but she feared that evening when she popped a beer with Max, Nic and this Geoff character, she might regret it. By now, they had both drawn some fresh conclusions about Nic Silver, who, by the way, Chloe thought really ought to cash in on that name and go full-on game show host.

Nic, Chloe had decided, was genuine. He was just someone of questionable objectivity attempting to hunt down the answer to some kind of real, actual mystery in this era where all the information in the world was always at your fingertips. To hear him talk the way he had when he came to visit them, he had found that mystery, even though the podcast didn't exactly reflect it yet. As of the brand new episode which had dropped two days prior, it still did not. That being said, it was possible that since the story that she had heard so far, Nic had changed or experienced something that made him something more or something beyond the person she and Max had listened to for what amount to a few hours spread out over the last several days. It was possible, but she was dubious. At the very least, though, the Nic they had met seemed different from the person featured hunting down leads in these episodes in one major way: he seemed a lot less cheery, overall. You did kinda threaten him with a wrench, though. He had also come off more focused and determined to get what he wanted. In that way, if only begrudgingly, she rather liked the man they had met.

They knew a lot less about their theoretical fourth member of their party. All signs pointed it to being a man also featured on the podcast, by the name of Geoff van Sant. All she knew about him was that his brother had been some kind of hacker type who hung himself, apparently used to sell trips to Tanis as cancer cures for exorbitant amounts of money (which made no sense for a person living in his brother's basement) and Geoff was apparently involved in all of this Tanis stuff for the sake of finding out what had happened to that brother. He also, as her mother would have put it, had a 'little problem with alcohol.' Chloe considered the policy of serious discussions being handled over a beer far from the worst idea that one could put forth and again, were they not in a vehicle hurtling down the interstate toward a nice, long coastal highway, Chloe might have been into her second or third beer already, especially with the way the music filling the cabin was starting to make her feel morose. I just hope he's not some kind of closet douchebag, Chloe thought. Admittedly, this Geoff's status as ex-military and Chloe's less than stellar record with people of that designation probably explained the concern about that point and she had to do something about that particular inclination toward prejudice before it got out of control.

One mellow, kind of sad song about lost love ended and while they waited for what Chloe thought was sure to be another to start, she decided to jump on the moment and bend Max's ear. The woman sat a little more relaxed behind the wheel despite the fact that the traffic was starting to thicken up around them as people likely preparing to travel the same highway they were headed to for sightseeing purposes began to pour onto the interstate. In fact, the only sign of the anxiety Chloe knew was almost always rolling around inside of Max's skull was the slight frown on her lips and the way that she did not really squeeze back as the two held hands. Most people would see these things and mark them as simple concentration on the road, but Chloe and Max had spent almost every free moment together since Arcadia Bay, if one discounted the three months Max had spent hospitalized. Chloe knew better. Otherwise, though, Max seemed as content as she was going to be when one considered where the two of them were currently headed.

"So," Chloe mused, her attention firmly back on the podcast which had so distracted her from obsessing over the idea of seeing Arcadia Bay again over the last few days. "What do you make of those diary entries this chick is reading on Tanis? They're some weird shit. I wonder if they're from that weird LSD Tanis cult." Over the past few hours, bringing up the podcast had been enough to earn her exasperated eyerolls. Now, though, Max seemed to welcome discussion and Chloe would rather talk about a podcast whose authenticity she had at first held serious doubts about than she would sit and brood on what they were going to see in Arcadia Bay.

"I mean, they're weird but, why them?"

"I don't know, taking away names and shit? That sounds pretty culty." Max's lips quirked slightly upward. "Some eerie ass shit."

"Yeah, taking the names away is weird, but didn't the 'Runner' say it was because names could confuse people?" Max asked her after she got over whatever momentary amusement had gripped her. They passed the end of an empty on-ramp so Max merged back into the right lane. Chloe also had to admit that Max had a point on that. Max remembered a lot of the details of this whole thing better than Chloe did, which was strange to her and occasionally annoying, simply because she was sure she had been paying closer attention to the show, or at least trying to. Chloe had found herself toying with the brunette's hair on more than one occasion instead of focusing entirely on the show. That's her fault, Chloe thought, a little bit petulantly.

"Sure, but then why won't they tell us where they got it from? They usually tell us about everything else they read, but Nic doesn't say anything about it. That friend of his, Alex, I think it was, just keeps reading it." Max chuckled.

"Chloe, it's only been six episodes. Maybe they'll tell us on the next one."

"Or," Chloe suggested, an exaggerated devious grin on her face, "when they get here, we bribe Geoff with a beer to let us sit on Nic for a bit until he talks. You know, just like we used to with Mi-" Chloe swallowed suddenly as she realized what she had been about to say. Max had never once met Mikey North, much less been present for their antics. I need to find him, she thought to herself. "Like when we wanted to get something out of one of us when we were kids." If Max noticed her slip up or thought anything of it the woman didn't comment. Instead, still sounding a bit amused she shook her head.

"Maybe," Max told her. "You know, you got really into all of this." The statement didn't sound judgmental, if anything the look on Max's face when she shot a glance sideways and her pale lips again quirked up, was pleasant surprise.

"Hell yeah," Chloe admitted, openly. "No wonder Steph sent it to me. I was just in a shitty mood when it all started." Chloe paused to ponder how best to continue, not to mention to throw a foot up onto the dash like the uncouth hillbilly she knew she was in the eyes of most Seattleites. Max's response was to finally squeeze where their hands met. Chloe swept her beanie off her head and settled it on the dash next to her right foot. This car felt a little on the cramped side. Slowly, Chloe gathered her thoughts and realized that finally, she was turning away from the "I guess I wrote it off as part of Steph's weird Arcadia Bay obsession and didn't look closely enough at it. I know I shouldn't have judged her. It was her home for sixteen fucking years." Max shrugged and nodded, making a face as if to say that she had a good point. Chloe pulled at the belt across her shoulder without really thinking about it.

"If I'd never come back to Arcadia Bay and I found out that it was destroyed, I'd probably be a little messed up by it, too," Max replied in her soft voice, the delicate one that suggested delicate topics were being addressed. Chloe didn't want to give voice to the thought that rose in her head at this, but she knew it was true: if Max hadn't come back to Arcadia Bay she would be dead and the town would have never been destroyed. If I was supposed to die in Arcadia Bay, am I living on borrowed time? she wondered as, unbidden, she recalled Max's description of the car accident which had nearly taken her life in Los Angeles. Apparently her line of thinking was not unique to her, because Max's hand had gone lax in hers again and over the sound of some drug-influenced and airy sounding song which had started off talking about, strangely, copulating banana slugs, Chloe could hear whatever Max was going to say catch in her throat. It almost sounded as if the woman was choking on her words. The woman hurtling them south at seventy miles-per-hour went pale, as if all of the blood in her body had rushed out and then fell quiet. Chloe followed a chain of causality in her mind back not to the terrifying moments in the girls restroom at Blackwell with a gun being waved in her face, but back to the day that Rachel first disappeared, when Chloe had decided she would do whatever it took to find the girl and get them both out of Arcadia Bay. Chloe's fate had been sealed that day and it had taken Max swooping in with super powers to stop it in its tracks. She cast about wildly in her mind for a topic of conversation as Max untwined their hands ejected the burned mix CD.

"Could you grab the disc from the third slot in my case?" Chloe swallowed and when her throat still felt dry she decided not to risk answering out loud. The disc in question, the one she was replacing the one with the odd tune about banana slugs, was labeled Carrol & Lowell and Chloe thought it was a new one. She certainly didn't recognize it by sight, at least. Not looking up at Max for the moment, Chloe switched the two discs and let the player begin trying to read the new CD. Chloe cast about for another topic and slowly lowered her booted right foot from the dash to the floorboard. Putting it up really had not made the small cramp in her leg any better. She would just feel better, at least slightly, when she could stand for a while.

"So, Danny was at the meeting last night," she finally settled on. No color returned to her girlfriend's cheeks but she did perk up slightly, and some poor mirror of a smile tried to rise to the surface of her face. Chloe's smirk at this was genuine. She knew Max felt for the boy.

"How's he doing?" the woman asked her.

"Well, I told you he'd been absent for a couple of weeks, but he's okay. I guess he was just kind of busy and not feeling up to the group. His mother's been helping him get on T." Max nodded and though the relief was brief and fleeting (she really did not know the boy, after all, save for their one or two conversations) it was genuine enough that it made Chloe shake her head at the woman.

"Good," Max told her. "Good." For a moment Max paused and listened to the lyrics of the song filling the cabin and then said, "you know, I was watching you talk to him that night. Did I ever tell you that my girlfriend has the biggest heart in the world?"

"Did I ever tell you that mine's a sappy ass nerd?" Chloe deadpanned back. This earned her a frown, but she responded by squeezing the woman's hand. Max turned her attention back to the road for the moment, but Chloe was distracted by the song. It wasn't that it was inherently bad, no worse or better than anything else Max played, but she had caught onto the lyrics of the song over the last minute or two and now that her attention was turned on it, it was beginning to make her slightly uncomfortable. This was mostly because the song seemed to be about someone's mother dying. "What even is this song?"

"Death with Dignity," Max replied, offhandedly. It took the space of about two seconds for Max's face to change to a sort of dawning comprehension and then the photographer tried to free her hand from Chloe's, as if to change the song. Chloe held tightly and did not let her. She wasn't about to be a downer all over Max's downer music, if that made any sense.

"It's alright," she promised. "I wasn't trying to make a big deal about it."

"It's not okay, we both deserve to be happy." Chloe laughed at that. Happy was not going to be even a vague possibility. It took the brunette some convincing and Chloe did her best to try to distract Max from the idea of ejecting her CD by making her laugh, but eventually Max got her right hand free by claiming that it was cramping and, finally, Chloe watched her pop the CD from the player. Following the photographer's instructions, Chloe found a CD toward the back of Max's plain, black case which was a mix of alt rock she had made Max about a year ago. At the very least it was going to carry a little more depth than 'my mom is dead and hey, that's sad'.

Chloe really did not perk up again until they came off of the interstate finally, to a coastal highway which led straight through Arcadia Bay and beyond to the town of Edgeton, which was where they had reserved two rooms for three nights. The feeling of returning to her decimated hometown had crossed from unpleasant and guilt inducing to something near panic in the pit of her stomach. To be fair, it had begun before they had finally reached that coastal highway, but now that she was within sight of the ocean it reached a fevered pitch. Chloe's response was to ball her hands into fists in her lap, curl her toes inside of her boots and clamp her jaw shut. If she did not move or speak, if she kept her focus entirely on staying calm, then she would stay calm long enough to reach the hotel and take a breather. Somehow, an emotional breakdown in a car felt a lot worse than one behind solid walls and closed doors.

"It's nearly over," Max said, in her quiet, soft voice. Chloe latched onto it. When she had first seen Max after her return to Arcadia Bay, Chloe had marked that as a strange change. Max had always had the tendency to be soft spoken when things were delicate, but this had been rather extreme. For a time the voice had completely disappeared and Max had tried to speak in a projecting, confident tone. Now, Chloe was not sure if that had been a sign of Max's attempts to overcompensate for how upset she was or not, but since coming out of the hospital some months ago, it had made its return. That voice kept out of certain areas of their life and Chloe appreciated that, but in others it was all too common. Chloe took it mean, in this case, that Max was thinking more about her concern for Chloe than herself. That being said, the tension had begun to return to the photographer's body. Chloe could see it in the way Max sat and the straight angles she held her arms and neck at at all times. Not even the music playing from the disc Chloe had made her was doing anything for Max. It wasn't doing anything for Chloe, either. They might as well have sat in silence, listening to the engine or the tires on the road.

"No," Chloe told her, sucking in a sharp breath as she did so. "This is just the beginning." For the next several minutes their voices stayed silent. Chloe took it to mean that Max could not find an angle from which to argue with her and as for Chloe she had gone back to making sure that she did not let out the ball of aggressive grief rolling around inside of her. Max was the first of them to speak, telling Chloe to check out a sign approaching ahead of them. Bright orange, it declared that part of the highway ahead was closed and they would be sent through a detour. It was a detour which, judging by the mile marker associated with it, looked to begin just before Arcadia Bay. They never cleared the main road. They never opened Arcadia Bay back up at all.

That was alright, though. The town had so many back roads that the four of them were sure to find a way in, even if they had to get out and walk. Chloe had not been a fan of this idea to begin with but now that they were what amounted to fifteen miles outside of Arcadia Bay, she was not going to be turned back by roadblocks, barriers or fences. None of that bullshit, she told herself, seizing onto the determination as it fought against the unpleasant cocktail of other emotions she was going to have to deal with. Chloe dug her phone from her pocket and decided it would probably be smart to give their soon-to-be companions a heads up.

Me

Highway detour arnd Arcadia Bay. Will meet u 2 at the motel

Nic

Gotcha, gotcha.

Chloe blinked at the response. Before, Nic had always been short, maybe even terse and professional over text. This was short, certainly, but it had been a quick and seemingly uncharacteristic response.

"You going to be okay?" Chloe asked Max as the sign indicating that they were nearing the detour came up several minutes later.

"Yeah," Max promised her. "I've just never driven the backroads, myself." Sure enough, the highway spilled out onto a road which must have been paved in response to the detour, because when Chloe had last been in this part of Oregon the road had been about five feet thinner, a tiny gravel road which no one who did not live in the area would have wanted to look at for long, much less go down. Some land clearing had been in order. Trees had been cut away at the sides of the road and in some cases their stumps still stood in testament to the fallen flora. Max made a tsking sound as they passed one very large stump whose tree must have once been old and impressive. Now that the road had been paved and was being maintained, no tree which hung over it seemed to be safe. Is this really going to be cheaper than cleaning up part of Arcadia Bay? Or better? It's gotta cost more.

"Ugh," Chloe mused, "I think we're going to end up passing pretty close to Bruss just to get to Edgeton. That's fucking absurd."

"No one's going to want to cough up the cash to clean up an entire town," Max muttered, sounding a little bit offended. "They're gonna have to make a decision soon, there's no way they can leave this highway like this. Has to be bad for tourism." There weren't a ton of reasons to come to Arcadia Bay's neck of the woods. Taking a coastal tour of Oregon, seeing the sea, stopping at beaches and eating fresh seafood at roadside restaurants was more or less the major appeal of the area. That was why the highway ran along the coast as often as it could. This long, almost certainly looping northward detour had to be a turn off for roadtrippers. Chloe craned her neck a few minutes later and even rolled the window down so that she could stick her head out. Even squinting as hard as she could, there was not a point where Chloe could make out anything that might have been related to Arcadia Bay, not even an old sign. She did think, though, that if they were about five miles closer to what had once been the center of town, she might have been able to see the old lighthouse sticking up from the top of the cliff through the thick treeline. All in all, it might have added twenty minutes to their trip, but eventually this detour did as promised and spat them out in the small, dying town called Edgeton, Oregon. Once a factory town, it was now suffering from a lack of jobs, a lack of fresh money flowing in, much like many factory towns in the area, much like Arcadia Bay itself had.

It was not awkward to enter the town and find the motel in near silence because Edgeton was so tiny that it took them no time at all to cross it and find, with the help of a built in GPS system, a squat, two-story brick building in a rough U-shape. They pulled into the parking lot and Chloe considered whether or not she had ever paid the building any attention on those rare occasions she had come to Edgeton. She could not remember having done so. Thick looking and dark green with peeling paint, the door to room 14 beckoned for her, so while Max checked them in Chloe unloaded their three bags, the cooler packed with ice from a stop just after their breakfast food extravaganza and, finally, two large cases of cheap, mercifully intoxicating beer. By the time they had taken turns in the restroom and shower and planted themselves out in front of their room in two of several thin, plastic chairs which sat spread all around the front of the building (even on the walkway around the second floor) their companions for the next couple of days had arrived. Chloe looked up at the truck as it pulled up, and spotted Nic through the windshield.

"Did you remember to put some of the beer on ice?" Max asked her as Chloe squinted to see what was waiting for them in driver's seat of the truck, behind the wheel.

"Of course I did," Chloe snorted. She was a little bit offended that Max would ever assume that she, of all people, would be so uncouth as to abuse her position as the one in charge of entertainment as to forget to chill the beer. Chloe leaned forward. Either she needed glasses or she was already getting tired.

"What if it's not Geoff? What if it's that MK chick? I don't want you to have any ideas about leaving me."

"That'd be a dumb idea, though, wouldn't it?" Chloe asked, grinning. She spotted the driver and, admitted to herself that when he was very clearly a man in his thirties, she was only a tiny bit disappointed.