Chapter 21: The Last Temptation of Price
July 13, 2017
Rose Fichtner sat in the office at Haverford Asylum, picking the scabs on her knuckles. Two burly orderlies named Hank and Otto were standing behind her.
She examined the office in which she sat. Degrees in subjects Rose had never heard of from institutes of learning that Rose hadn't known existed studded the walls. And at its center was a polished oak desk, remarkably free of clutter. The papers in both the in and the out boxes were neatly stacked and held down by silver paperweights. And at its forefront was a black nameplate with the letters done in gold.
Dr. Darrin Partridge.
Minutes passed before the man himself entered the room. He looked like he was designed by the same people who make high-end gourmet corndogs that carried triple-digit price tags: filling the need for something low and common, but made by rich hands and with the best ingredients.
Doctor Darrin Partridge wore black shoes with no scuffs in their leather, and crisply creased khakis with neither frays, nor the traces of wear that plagued the wardrobe of everyone else who worked in the hospital. He wore a deep purple button-up with neither tie nor coat. His graying black hair was cropped as close as that of Roman soldiers, and a pair of rimless spectacles only served to magnify pitiless blue eyes.
Rose looked at Doctor Partridge, and saw a man dressed as a healer, enjoying all of a healer's luxuries, while holding no interest in serving anyone save himself.
Doctor Partridge sat down at his desk and opened a file he was holding. He looked at it for a few moments before tsk-tsking.
"Miss Fichtner," Doctor Partridge asked, "would you care to enlighten me about what went on yesterday?"
"That file there doesn't tell you?" Rose asked.
"Oh, this file tells me quite a bit, but files are one thing, and testimony another. Please indulge my curiosity."
Rose folded her arms in her seat and looked at Doctor Partridge out of the corner of her eye.
"Okay, who the fuck are you?" Rose asked. "Where's Doctor Bennett?"
"I relieved Doctor Bennett of his responsibility toward you. I'm your therapist, now. And you still haven't answered my question."
"Someone put their hand on me in the rec room," Rose said. "I told him he shouldn't do that."
"It says here you punched him. Broke his nose."
"Well," Rose said, "that would be me telling him, wouldn't it?"
Doctor Partridge merely blinked and nodded.
"That man whose nose you broke was named Gilbert Arias. He's twenty-three-years-old, with an IQ of seventy-two. He came in here because he tried to burn his grandmother's house down. Damnedest thing, though: if you keep him away from matches, he's one of the sweetest kids I've ever met. I asked him why he touched you, and do you know what he said?"
"Do I look like I give a shit?"
"He said that he slipped, and grabbed on to your shirt to keep from falling," Doctor Partridge said.
Rose leveled her green eyes at the doctor. "Now he knows not to slip and fall near me. See? It was a learning experience all around."
Doctor Partridge nodded again, before going back to the file.
"Doctor Bennett tells me you're not active in your group therapy sessions."
"No one has the right to what I'm thinking," Rose said. "Not Doctor Bennett, and not the other whackjobs I'm in group with."
"Ah," Doctor Partridge said, "with one exception. In a session a week ago, you were asked to write down the one thing the made you the most angry in all the world. And you wrote down…"
Doctor Partridge yanked a familiar slip of paper from the file. It was the one Rose had written on during therapy last week. The green from the felt-tipped marker with which she had written had bled through to the back.
He read the slip of paper. "'Max Caulfield.'"
The Doctor's frown deepened. Rose made her face stone and stayed just as silent.
Doctor Partridge folded his hands over his desk. "You're sixteen-years-old, Rose. You're still in foster care, barring this little detour to my establishment. You're two years away from aging out of the system. Which means in two years, if you break someone's nose, you go to prison. And I guarantee you, if you show your ass like you've been doing, you will not live to see nineteen."
Rose sneered. "Is this your Come-to-Jesus speech? Your little scare-straight tactic to get me to clean up my act and be nice to the foster kids who try to step to me instead of laying them the fuck out like I've been doing? You trying to tell me to straighten up and fly right?"
"No," Doctor Partridge said. "I'm trying to tell you that today's your lucky day."
Rose scanned Doctor Partridge's face. Rose hadn't had a lucky day since before her father died, and she held an innate suspicion of people who told her good things were coming to her.
Doctor Partridge stood up. "Right this way, Rose."
Rose and Doctor Partridge, flanked by Hank and Otto, walked down a drab, brown-tiled hallway to one of the therapy rooms, which looked more like converted classrooms to Rose than anything else.
Doctor Partridge opened the door to Room 108, and bade Rose to enter.
Inside was a man in a blue blazer over a beige cardigan, sitting in one of the sturdy plastic chairs that numbed Rose's ass during group sessions. His slacks were black, and he was wearing loafers. He also had a pair of rimless glasses, much like the ones Doctor Partridge was wearing. He had a boyish face that clashed with his graying hair.
"Thank you, Darrin," the man in the cardigan said.
Doctor Partridge eyed the man in the cardigan with a flat gaze before leaving. He did not take Hank and Otto with him.
"Have a seat, Rose," the man in the cardigan said.
Rose sat in the chair across from him, folding her arms and staring at him out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to be too familiar with her. She pilfered through her own memories trying to place him, but all older white guys kind of bled together for her.
"Who are you?" Rose asked.
The man in the cardigan smiled. "I don't suppose you'd remember me. I knew your father."
Just hearing mention of Daddy made the bottom of Rose's stomach drop, as though she were on a rollercoaster, but she tried not to show that on her face. She narrowed her green eyes.
"How?"
The man in the cardigan rubbed the back of his neck. "There's only one question you should be asking right now."
He stood up.
"'Do I want… a burger?'"
Rose had no choice but to look at him square on, which is the reaction she had to anything so weird.
"Huh?"
"Because I'm hungry," the man in the cardigan said, "and I could really go for a double bacon cheeseburger. Onions, tomatoes, the whole deal, and it would be rude of me not to invite you. Now, before you ask, I will not subject you to fast food, okay? I'm not gonna feed you horsemeat. If we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this right, so I am inviting you to come with me, and grab a burger at as fine a dining establishment as we can find.
Rose rolled her eyes. "Oh, for fuck's sake…"
"What?" The man in the cardigan asked. He seemed genuinely confused and almost offended.
"Are you one of those rich guys who troll insane asylums looking for crazy teenage strange?"
The man in the cardigan laughed. The motherfucker even seemed possessed of enough propriety to blush.
"Oh my God," the man in the cardigan said, wiping an eye underneath his glasses with his index finger. "Is that… is that a thing? Do people do that?"
"I don't know," Rose said. "Because if it is, and you do, then you look like the kind of problem violence can solve."
Rose heard one of the orderlies crack his knuckles behind her.
"No," the man in the cardigan said. "I don't want to do anything of the sort. Everything here… completely above board. If you like, you can invite your two burly friends back there to keep me honest."
Rose looked him up and down. "Why?"
"Well," the man in the cardigan said, "we have something in common."
"We do?"
The man in the cardigan smiled. "Sure we do. See, once upon a time, the two of us were doing just fine. We had family around us, we wanted for nothing, God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world."
The man in the cardigan sat back down again. He was no longer smiling.
"But for you, all of that changed in a girls' bathroom at a high school in Arcadia Bay, Oregon. All of that changed with a young lady named Max Caulfield."
Rose involuntarily started grinding her teeth.
The man in the cardigan straightened the cuffs of his blazer before looking at her again. "And what if I told you that my fortunes fell the exact same way. On the exact same day. Concerning that exact same Miss Caulfield."
Rose didn't feel her expression soften, but it must have. She felt the corners of her mouth ache from the frown she had let go of.
"How?" Rose asked.
The man in the cardigan leaned forward.
"My name is Sean Prescott," he said. "And I need to tell you my story."
August 31, 2019
A torrent of frigid rain pelted Arcadia Bay from a dull green sky.
Being as the main power grid for the town was located outside its limits, the lights in Arcadia Bay were still on. Shop windows still peddled their wares, and solar-powered streetlights were still providing an amber glow to the inundated pavements beneath them in spite of the fact Arcadia Bay was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost town.
But even this wasn't technically true. Arcadia Bay still hosted two signs of human life.
One of which was Chloe Price, who soldiered down Bergeron Boulevard, her fedora channeling rainwater in a long spout in front of her, dousing her sweatshirt. Her trench coat was so soaked that it was sticking to the back of her jeans.
And she was doubting herself… but really, that was no different than any other day.
She knew that storms brought rain, and she knew, in theory, that a large storm would bring lots of it. But as she walked, chilled to the bone, every layer of clothing completely soaked through, she wondered whether or not she had jumped the gun. Whether or not the storm really would destroy a huge chunk of Oregon, and all of the evacuated townspeople along with it. Her resolve to stop the storm was still strong, but she didn't want to freeze to death or drown in the rain before she had the opportunity to do so.
My corpse's face is gonna be red if I die stopping this storm and everything was gonna be fine anyway, Chloe thought. My funeral will be a hoot. Here lies Chloe Price: She died because her scrawny ass was a Drama Qu—
Booommm…
Chloe's power kicked in automatically, without her wishing it to, and she was gripped by an immense pain. Not in her head (although that was coming), but in her chest. She looked in front of her, and then looked down, and pieced together what had happened.
This had been the…
Okay, I got shot once in the Blackwell bathroom, once in the junkyard… No, wait, twice in the junkyard. One of those I did myself by accident.
This had been the fourth time Chloe Price had been shot to death, and she could safely prove the old maxim true: You never hear the shot that kills you.
A bullet was hovering two feet in front of her, sending the air around it into transparent ripples. The front of her chest was an explosion of blood and… were those little bits of ribcage?
Cool!
Ow!
This was the instant when Chloe Price would have died… well… instantly.
And she knew damn well who was standing on the sidewalk behind her, holding the gun.
Chloe held out her hand and began the rewind. The bullet slowly began inching backwards as the rain fell up. The burning hunk of metal re-entered her chest. She could feel bone reassembling and organs knitting back together.
And it hurt like a motherfucker!
She felt the skin on her back close up, and she turned around as the headache was beginning to grow unbearable. Rose Fichtner was standing there, her hoodie obscuring the scars on her face, the muzzle flash from her gun still bright. The bullet was still traveling backwards, into the barrel of the pistol.
Chloe gripped the bullet between her thumb and forefinger, and let go of time.
Bang!
She imagined what this must have looked like to Rose: Sneaking up on an unsuspecting woman and pulling the trigger, only to have her catch the bullet before her brain processed that she had pulled the trigger.
That would have explained the fear on Rose's face.
Rose instinctively backed up as Chloe threw the hot bullet into the street with a flourish. Then she brought the gun back up again.
Shewas quick.
Chloe was quicker.
Booommm…
Spiral. Shimmer. Headache. Stop.
Hand held out, Chloe closed the four feet between her and Rose. With her free hand, she took the gun away from the teenaged girl trying to kill her.
Chloe let go of time, and Rose's trigger finger came down on nothing.
Chloe took less than a second to savor the expression of intermingled fury and horror in Rose's eyes before she pistol-whipped her on the scarred side of her face, sending her splashing to the rain-soaked sidewalk ass-first.
The Great Punk Detective wiped a small stream of blood from her nose before she pointed the gun down at Rose. To Rose's credit, she didn't cower from her own death.
It would be so easy to just put this little mistake down…
Chloe remembered that morning when she and Max were packing, when Max was telling her the story of Rose Fichtner, the girl who had called herself Lorraine Foster. She remembered recoiling inwardly at even the very possibility of she and Rose sharing any kind of common ground whatsoever.
But now?
Staring at the furious, ready-to-die teenage girl on the sidewalk, that common ground was all Chloe saw.
Well… I guess I'm not doing the easy shit today.
"You are the only person in human history ever to lose two straight fights to Max Caulfield," Chloe said. "It's adorable you think you're scary."
Chloe saw that she was standing near a storm drain, and took this opportunity to deposit the gun within. She could hear it splash in the flooded sewer beneath them.
Rose was inching away, so Chloe used her right hand to grab her by the collar of her hoodie. Her left hand balled into itself.
Thwack!
Chloe's fist glanced off of Rose's cheekbone on the unscarred side of her face. Chloe could hear her grunt in pain.
Thwack!
Her second punch sank into the connective tendon that joined the jawbone to the rest of the skull, and Rose grunted again. Chloe pulled her left back a third time, and…
CRACK!
In a switch-up, Chloe brought a hard, unforgiving elbow into Rose's mouth, and this was the point that the scarred teenager started howling.
Never let it be said that I let her get away scot-free, Chloe thought. She grabbed Rose's shoulders and got right in her face.
"Sean ditched you," Chloe said. "He left the fucking country, and you're still here doing his dirty work."
Rose spat out one of her front teeth, and a small pool of blood to go with it. "Fuck you!" she said. "I'm loyal!"
"No," Chloe said. "You're controllable. You're so pissed off at the world that you'll follow anyone who indulges you. You don't want to be happy. If you were, you'd tear your hair out trying to figure out what to do with it. You want to be right. You'd kill to be right. Because if you're right, then the world revolves around you, and it was against you the whole time."
Chloe brought Rose closer. The steam from each woman's breath mixed in the air.
"And I know this," Chloe said, "because when I was your age? I was the exact same way."
Chloe let that hang in the air.
"Someone very wise told me recently that if you've only ever met someone at their lowest point, then you haven't met them at all… And I don't think I've met you yet."
Chloe threw Rose to the ground, and stood, looming over her.
"And that someone was Max Caulfield," Chloe said. "And if you ever meet her again, the one thing you will do before running as fast as you can in the other direction is thank her. Because she just saved your fucking life today."
Chloe turned and walked away. She had gotten three feet before she heard whimpering mixed with the falling rain.
She turned around. Rose was still on the sidewalk. And she was crying.
"It's not fair," Rose said, letting a dribble of blood fall from her broken mouth. "IT'S NOT FUCKING FAIR!"
Chloe had a very real, very burning desire to tell her that life wasn't fair.
But then again, Chloe had come to find that life wasn't particularly unfair, either.
Life was just life, and went on regardless of what anyone thought of it, and all the fairness and unfairness of existence came from the people you surrounded yourself with. How good were their hearts? How long was their reach?
It was strange like that.
But Chloe thought all of that would have sounded stupid if she said it out loud, so she just walked away.
Further into town Chloe went, away from the business district and into the residential suburbs leading to the outskirts of town.
She heard footsteps on the pavement behind her. A flash of fear bloomed within her at the scenario of Rose having followed her after her beatdown, coming back to finish the job, but that flash tapered away almost as soon as it came into being.
From the sound of them, these footsteps were too small to be Rose.
She knew exactly who was following her.
Chloe called over her shoulder without stopping. "Fuck off, Tobanga!"
But the footsteps continued unabated behind her, telling Chloe that Tobanga did not, in fact, fuck off.
Chloe whirled around, sending a sprinkle of rainwater from her drenched hat and soggy coat. Tobanga was standing six feet away, smiling. Chloe glared at her, part in irritation, and partly because one of Tobanga's supernatural powers was that she could stand in a massive storm and not get wet. Her jeans and Oregon Ducks jersey looked like it had come fresh from the dryer.
After a moment, Chloe turned around again and resumed her march. Tobanga continued to follow.
Tobanga didn't say anything.
No, but as though she were answering through demonstration the question "What would annoy Chloe Price the most right now?", Tobanga started singing.
"We some southern boys, with the farmer strength, ain't NOBODY MAN ENOUGH TO FEEL THE PAIN! And you could be next, you better get respect, 'cause ain't NOBODY BREAKIN' THIS REDNECK!"
Chloe whirled around to face the immortal being staking her. "Oh my God, what the fuck are you doing?"
Tobanga's grin grew wider. "I'm playing you to the ring!"
Chloe's natural reaction to this was to let her expression sour further.
"Oh, c'mon!" Tobanga said. "This is the match of the century! Chloe Price versus the biggest waterspout in recorded history!"
Chloe just blinked.
"A waterspout is a tornado at sea, Chloe."
"I know what a fucking…."
Chloe stopped talking and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Look," Chloe finally said. "Let's just pretend—just for a minute, not too long—that you're actually useful. If you were actually useful, what would you do or say right now? Because if it's nothing? Say and do that."
Tobanga cocked her head to the side. "No one will know you did this."
Chloe got chills hearing that, though she didn't know why.
"All they'll know," Tobanga said, "is that a storm came and then broke apart before it reached shore. They'll have no idea why. No idea who gave their life to save them. If you get a big-ass tombstone in Arcadia Bay Cemetery, it'll be because Max paid for it. Not because of your merit as a human being. There aren't going to be spontaneous outpourings of grief in public. There isn't gonna be a Chloe Price Day. I'm not saying it's right… but it is what it is."
Chloe sighed before she spoke.
"And the reason you're saying this is… what?"
Tobanga started smiling again. "You knew this already, didn't you?"
Chloe put her hands on the wet hips of her jeans. "Do you honestly think I'm sacrificing myself for the fucking applause? I'm doing this because it needs to be done!"
"And it's just that simple?" Tobanga asked. "How many people do you think would walk into certain death if they drew your number? Because I have to tell you, from personal experience? It's not many."
Chloe blinked, and behind her eyelids in that split second she saw pale skin, blue eyes, brown hair, freckles, before the illusion of happy memory cracked when the blink concluded.
"Just one," Chloe said.
Tobanga folded her arms. "Well shit, Chloe, it seems like you have your mind made up… I knew there was a reason I liked you."
Chloe turned and walked away. No footsteps followed her. But Tobanga called out anyway.
"You sure you know where you're going?"
Chloe was sure.
She knew exactly where she was going.
The door that was supposed to be locked was not locked.
Chloe was covered in mud from her heels to her knees after her trek up the hiking path at Koch's Folly that led to the lighthouse. Chloe was halfway up the cliff (that was a hell of a lot slippier and slidier in this torrent of rain than she would have liked), before she remembered that the door to the lighthouse had been locked for years. She didn't have her picks on her, and the lighthouse was the sturdiest building in town for what she had planned. If she couldn't get in… well, she'd think of something.
But when she got to the top of the cliff, after looking over the ocean to see that the storm had gotten a hell of a lot bigger and a hell of a lot closer, she saw a bright yellow post-it note on the lighthouse door. It was hung high up, near the top of the doorframe, to keep it dry, no doubt.
She read.
Thank you for letting me fulfill my purpose.
I know something you don't know.
-S.
Samuel. And he was writing of himself in the first person. Nothing sane could come of this.
Chloe knew there was no one around, so she had no problem letting her thoughts out through her mouth.
"Could this town stop being weird for five Goddamn minutes?"
Chloe tried the door, and the knob turned effortlessly underneath her hand. It had been jimmied open.
She had spent so much time out in the rain that not feeling it coming down on her clothes felt weird. She stood and dripped in the entryway after she closed the door behind her.
The glass display counter that served as the base for the gift shop had been emptied, behind which the similarly bare postcard racks had been placed. And though the floor was still carpeted (and moldy-smelling), nothing else from the lighthouse's former time as a tourist destination remained. Save for two books on the top of the counter, whose titles she couldn't make out from this range. The only light in the room came from the one window to the side of the long spiral staircase that stretched all the way to the top of the structure.
Chloe took of her coat and threw it on the display counter, where in landed with a wet splat, and she gently placed her fedora on top of it. She wrung some of the excess rain from her sweatshirt, and stamped her muddy boots before sitting down on the metal spiral staircase.
She listened to the wind and the rain outside, spatter helplessly against the ancient and sturdy brick and concrete structure of the lighthouse. This place was ancient, built to last, and was the only place in town that had a shot in hell of standing up to what needed to be done.
She emptied her head of all thought, because all of the thoughts she wanted to think were frightening. Chloe flattered herself, in her younger and more malcontent years, that she would go out in a blaze of glory, but since her life had come within a millimeter of ending on a skuzzy high school bathroom six years prior, she had devoted little thought as to how she was going to go out at all, save for the moments when her life was actually in danger. Gunned down by a drug dealer? Drowning after she had jumped into Koch's Folly to escape The Bull? Gutted by a crazy millionaire's even crazier protégé in an abandoned executive suite?
No. Chloe had been right the first time. She was going to use time-travel powers to face off against a massive storm.
Blaze of glory it was.
As she warded off all cohesive thought over the next hour, using the still-advancing storm as white noise, a truth slowly made itself known to her: Waiting for death was still waiting… and waiting was boring.
Chloe got off of the spiral staircase and walked over to the display counter where the two books were. She picked them up and wiped the dust off. From Outer Space by Jose Chung, and The Sudden Stop by…
She heard the doorknob to the lighthouse door slowly turn.
"Oh, shit…"
Chloe readied Jose Chung's From Outer Space in her hand, ready to throw it at the intruder. Aiming right for the head, the scarred face, the green eyes, the broken mouth of Rose Fichtner.
I knew I shouldn't have let her live. I knew this was gonna bite me in the…
The door opened, and a familiar figure entered.
Chloe dropped the book.
"Oh, Goddammit, Max!"
Max Caulfield closed the lighthouse door behind her, before turning around. The rain had soaked her to the bone, made her paler, bringing out the knot on her forehead and the strip of raw flesh around her throat from her misadventure with Rose and the extension cord. Her camera was still around her neck.
And she had fury in her eyes.
"Has anyone ever told you," Max said, "that widowing someone the day after you marry them is a really shitty thing to do?"
Chloe rubbed her face. "I don't think you get how this whole saving the town thing works, Max."
"Oh, bullshit, I don't! I took a bullet for this town, and for you!"
Chloe couldn't say anything to that. She had her there.
"Why couldn't you stay in the bunker?" Max asked.
"I think the better question here, is how did you get out of the bunker?"
Max put her hands on her hips. "It isn't a prison, Chloe! I saw you weren't in the bunker, knew exactly what you did, and asked to leave. I signed a liability waver, and I came here. Why didn't you come with me?"
"You saw that storm," Chloe said. "You know damn well that the bunkers aren't going to save anyone!"
"Do I?" Max asked. "Do you? How can you be so sure?"
"I'm not!" Chloe said. "I don't know if I'm panicking, or if that storm is gonna rip the shit out of Oregon, but I do know that I'm not betting Arcadia Bay on an I-Don't-Know, alright? I'm… I'm not betting you."
And mercifully, that seemed to still Max's anger.
"Okay," Max finally said. "So… So what's the plan here? What exactly are you going to do?"
Chloe sighed and assembled the thoughts she spent the last hour trying to banish.
"I was having that cigarette you bummed for me, and… and for some strange reason I stopped time. I wanted to… I dunno… live in one of the pictures you were taking this morning. And I look up, and I see that the only thing moving is the storm. Time stopped, but the storm was still spinning… And I realized two things."
Chloe scratched behind her ear. "The first thing is that the reason these powers don't work outside of Arcadia Bay, is because these powers don't affect anything outside of Arcadia Bay. That storm was so far out of range, that my powers didn't do anything to it."
Max nodded. "And what's the second thing?"
"The second thing," Chloe said, "is that these powers and that storm both come from the same place. Which means something has to happen when they interact."
Max looked at Chloe out of the corner of her eye. "So…"
"I'm going to rewind the storm," Chloe said. "By hand."
"Using your powers?"
Chloe nodded.
"You have no idea that that's going to work," Max said. "For all you know, you could do something worse."
"You saw that storm," Chloe said. "Define 'worse.' Max, why do I have these powers? Why did Jennifer Healy? Or you? The Traveler rewinds time, The Traveler brings storm. We were given powers we weren't supposed to use! That makes no fucking sense! But… But what if it's more complicated than that? This power, and the thing this power brings, link somehow."
"So," Max said, "if I just rewound the storm six years ago, then I wouldn't have had to go to another timeline to eat a bullet and save everyone?"
"This is just my theory," Chloe said, "but… technically? That last storm was a hell of a lot smaller than this one. You'd have had to go into town to rewind, and there aren't any buildings down there sturdy enough to withstand it. You could have tried, but I think a building would have come down on top of you instead. Or you'd have been blown away, or something. This lighthouse is the only safe place I could think of doing this at."
Something just occurred to her.
"Max, how did you know I was here?"
"Oh," Max said. "That…"
Ninety minutes earlier…
The dip in Delaware Street was evened out by the downpour. The storm was visible over the trees, and Max Caulfield was chilled to the bone.
She had to keep a hand over her eyes as a visor against the torrent of precipitation pelting Arcadia Bay.
Good Lord, Chloe…
Max remembered Chloe gloating last year about how she turned The Bull's own into his opposition after she found out that he was an informant for the FBI. She used his own extravagances against him because he was, in The Bull's own words, "a dramatic motherfucker."
Max supposed it must have taken one to know one, because this was Chloe all over. Her wonderful qualities were veined with a self-loathing streak that coincided, on occasion, with acts of heroism. Chloe wanted to—
Rose Fichtner emerged from the corner of the block that Max was leaving. They almost bumped into each other.
Max backed up, eyes wide with terror, and did the only thing she thought to do in situations like these, when the tools were at hand.
She raised her camera, and took a picture.
She brought the camera down, and Max saw that Rose was staring daggers into her… but she wasn't moving. More so, there were bruises on the unscarred side of her face, and she was bleeding from the mouth.
"I think she's going to the lighthouse," Rose said, revealing pink and broken teeth.
A moment passed before Max figured out that she could respond.
"How do you know?"
"Because a storm's coming," Rose said. "That's what they're there for."
"And then she just walked away," Max said.
Chloe saw that Max was eying her up and down.
"You broke her mouth."
"Yeah, well," Chloe said, "she shot me, so…"
Max examined Chloe's body for bullet wounds.
"Don't worry," Chloe said. "I got better."
The awkward silence filled the lighthouse as both Chloe and Max tried to figure out what to say next.
"So how does this work?" Max asked. "You just rewind the storm, and… that's it?"
Chloe sighed. "When you had your powers… when you used them… do you remember this, like, spiral? That got shorter the more you rewound? Like a fuse on a stick of dynamite that burns out?"
"Yeah," Max said. "I remember that I could only rewind to the end of the spiral, and I had to stop because the pain got too bad."
"Max… this storm is huge. I'm going to have to go past that point."
The look on Max's face was uncomprehending.
Chloe put her hands in her pockets. "I… I don't think I'll have anything left after that… I'm sorry."
Now it seemed that Max understood. She turned around.
"We were gonna grow old together," Chloe said. "Like, real old. So old that we'd start wearing Canadian tuxedoes. Y'know, jeans and denim shirts? I was even gonna start wearing a bolo tie."
Even with her back turned, she could hear Max snort at that one.
Chloe smiled. "Matching… white… perms, Max. You'd take up carpentry so you could make bird-feeders that look like New England bed-and-breakfasts, and I'd get into glassblo—"
"Stop it!"
Max whirled around. There were tears and anger in her eyes.
"Don't joke about this! This isn't funny!"
Chloe stopped smiling, and opted to speak softly. "It's my life, Max. It's my death. These are my terms. I'm going out a smart-ass. It's how I lived."
Max walked up to Chloe and took both of her hands.
"I met you in elementary school, Chloe. And ever since that day, it has never just been your life."
Tears started welling in Chloe's eyes. She made no effort to hide them or wipe them away.
"Why didn't we run?" Max asked. "We… We should have…"
"Because I'm selfish," Chloe said. "Because even if I died, I could say that for one moment… just one before the lights went out… that I was as smart, and as kind, and as brave as Max Caulfield."
Max's face crumbled, and she buried her face in Chloe's sweatshirt.
The tears were falling freely down Chloe Price's cheeks. "You took a bullet for Arcadia Bay. You did it for me… I can take a storm for you. To make sure you're safe… Because that's how much I love you."
A flash of lightning, and a bolt of thunder that shook the lighthouse.
"It's here," Chloe said.
"It can wait," Max said. "Just… Just a little bit more."
And so it could. Chloe breathed in Max's damp hair, and if the fates saw fit to send her to heaven, then that was one hell of a cloud to go out on.
More lightning, and more deafening thunder.
The rumble from the outside sent dust and stray plaster from the walls.
Chloe's arms tightened around Max as the smaller woman's head nuzzled itself deeper into the taller woman's shoulder.
A moment that should have been an age passed before Max looked at Chloe. The minimal light brought out her blue eyes, the small knot on her forehead, and the thin, pink strip of raw skin around her throat.
"Chloe," Max said. "Are you ready?"
She looked down at Max, luxuriated one last time in memories and dreams, past and present, from this reality and beyond…
…and smiled.
They kissed. It was soft, and it was sweet, and if Chloe went to her grave with this being the only warmth and love that she ever felt, then she could have gone there saying her life had been well-lived.
"I am ready for the mop-shit," Chloe said.
"Don't you mean 'mosh-pit?'"
"Yeah," Chloe said. "That, too. I think you need to get clear, now."
"I'm not letting you go."
Alarm sprang in Chloe's heart. "Max, I don't know what…"
Max silenced her with a look. "I am not letting you go."
Chloe simply nodded. She marshaled every force she had within her, every bit of energy she had. She gripped Max tightly with one hand…
… and raised the other.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…
On this dark day in Arcadia Bay, when storm clouds blocked the sun, the only sign of natural light in the town's exterior was a sudden radiance located in the area of Koch's Folly. But that radiance spread over the town as quickly as one of the storm's flashes of lightning. The radiance would have looked, to an outside observer, like a shimmer: as though two angles of every physical object were trying to show themselves at the same time.
That outside observer, were such a person raised in America and of a certain age, would most likely have recalled an old dish soap commercial where just one single drop of the product in question sent the caked-on grease on a dirty dish scattering for the edges.
Because that is what it looked like when this mammoth storm made contact with the town of Arcadia Bay, and the radiant energy that coated it.
The wall of water that the storm brought to shore immediately pushed back, breaking up the cloud into an angry mass of conflicting wind and vapor.
Even when the tide rolled back in, it was inhaled into the radiance, leaving behind no trace.
And that outside observer, in the five long minutes it took for the storm to disperse, would have seen the sky steadily brighten, would have seen tendrils of the black cloud of the storm scramble to its outer edges, as though it was trying to get away from the vacuum of radiance converting it into nothing.
Until finally, something else matched the energetic brightness of Arcadia Bay.
The sun came out.
…OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…
The pain was unbearable.
Blood poured from Chloe's nose, streamed from her ears, dribbled down her tear ducts, and pooled in the gaps between her teeth. Her eyes had rolled back to the whites, and veins were sticking out in her neck, her temples, her forehead, seemingly as thick as gym ropes.
And Max just held on tighter.
…OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
And with that, Chloe had nothing more to give. And the radiance of The Traveler's power receded instantly from the town, through the lighthouse, and back into Chloe's body.
At which, three things happened in rapid succession.
The first was that Max held Chloe's limp body up as all energy left her.
The second was that the lighthouse itself rumbled and buckled, with massive cracks veining the brick and concrete surrounding them.
And the third was that Chloe's heart stopped beating.
"It's okay, Chloe!" Max said, holding her up. "I've got you!"
But from what Chloe could immediately gather through the searing pain in her chest, who had who did not matter a single bit.
The last thing Chloe Price saw before she died was the lighthouse crumbling down on top of them.