Life is Strange Here at the End of All Things

by FortressCaulfield

In the wake of Chloe's sacrifice, Max Caulfield may finally find the answers she needs from the last person she suspects, but she may not like what she hears. If she can find the courage to face the truth, she may even find a way to change not just Chloe's fate, but that of everyone she's ever loved! A new ending, once and for all!

7. The Strangest Dream

Chapter 7; The Strangest Dream

I had the strangest dream.
I dreamed I killed you again
Don't make me kill you again
'cause I couldn't bear to kill you
Again

-They Might Be Giants, Ondine

September 1, 2012

It was over.

Jane had won.

Max dug young Jane's notebook out of her bag to compose a letter that would remove herself and her very reality from existence. A few strange pieces of paper and plastic slipped out of the notebook and fluttered to the floor.

Max looked down at them. She looked back at the notebook. Jane, she wrote with shaking hands, You don't know me, but I come from a reality that was created after you went back in time to 1978 to save your aunt. I know you are planning that now.

Max looked back down at the loose papers. One of them was a laminated note card. That was strange.

I also know that your attempt to save your aunt's life results in losing your own. You mother's life goes in a very different direction with her sister alive.

The others looked to be newspaper clippings pinned to some notes. Or photocopies of newspaper clippings.

Huh.

Your parents both marry other people. I am born in your place. You are thrown into endless loops and your life restarts over and over again after you die.

She thought maybe she recognized the handwriting on that laminated card.

I came here via a power very similar to your own. I'm asking you, please, don't go back to 1978. Things are so different between our two realities. It's better this way for you, and for the people I love.

"But why are things so different?" Max asked the missing poster photo of Rachel Amber. "I mean, I know Warren said 'butterfly effect' but isn't that just a fancy way of shrugging? There has to be a reason, right?"

She looked back at her letter.

She looked back at the loose papers.

She looked back at Rachel.

"Okay. I think I get to be nosy one last time," she said to the poster, and picked up the papers.

It turned out she did recognize the handwriting on the laminated note card. It was her father's! Or, Jane's father, she supposed. Same guy. Different reality. Same handwriting. Mom's medication schedule, it read. Wowser! Max didn't recognize most of these drugs, but there were a lot of them. It was kind of mind-boggling to see her father's script referring to someone else as 'Mom.' She wanted to go see him and see what he was like. See for herself what he looked like with no beard.

The next set of papers were mostly newspaper clippings. An obituary and a few headlines all telling the same story of Jane's aunt of the same name. Jane Fisher. 9 years old. Died June 3, 1978 in a fall from the top of the Arcadia Bay lighthouse. Survived by her parents and twin sister, Katie. So that much, at least was true, and clearly, so was the psychological toll it had taken on young Jane's mother.

Clipped together she found the strangest of all; notes and articles about the blizzard of 1886. She'd heard of it, of course, one of few noteworthy historic events in her small town. A particularly nasty storm that struck right at the beginning of the Academy's construction. Nearly derailed the whole project.

Max shook her head in confusion. Why would Jane make a note of that? Had she been planning to time travel that far back? Max had never even considered going back before her own birth. Would Jane do that, she wondered? And why?

With these was a map of the 2nd floor of Blackwell, with a single room marked with a circle, and a hand-written note specifying 10:30am of a day a week prior.

Wait, it wasn't the room that was marked. It was the door! Max recalled that Jane's version of her time-traveling focus power worked using doors, not photos. If Jane had marked this particular door, there must have been a reason.

"Well, shit," said Max, lowering the papers. Her eyes met the eyes of Rachel Amber's photo in the crumpled missing poster. "Come on, Rachel, we'd better go see what this is all about."

It didn't take her long to find it. The second floor language lab. Still used on very rare occasions but mostly neglected, doomed to be replaced with more modern equipment sooner or later. Presently, the door was locked, although what she could see through the window next to the door seemed unremarkable. She looked down at the notes and articles in her hands. Two times seemed to stand out. One, the labeled 10:30 meeting on the prior week, would have been on the first day of orientation. Only new students, orientation volunteers and student government would have been on campus. The other date was that of the blizzard over a century ago.

"Okay, if I'm Jane, maybe I can use Jane's door power," Max said out loud. There was nobody in this part of the hall, and even if there was, she was past caring what anybody else thought of her sanity. Laying her belongings on the ground, she leaned against the door and placed both hands on its surface.

"I feel like an idiot," she told Rachel's photo, but no sooner had she said it than she felt time moving on the other side of the door. She could see and hear people moving in and out. She found it fairly simple to push up or down with her mind and sift through the visions on the other side. Once she had a handle on the ability, it didn't take Max long to dial in to the 10:30 meeting. The room was empty. Fast forwarding a while she saw Hayden and Dana, eventually joined by Taylor and Courtney and a few other kids she didn't recognize. One or more of them may or may not have been a Zachary and/or a Logan. They seemed to be waiting for somebody.

Dana said, "Well, still no answer on text. It's weird. It's not like Rachel to be late."

"That's really rude of her to ditch a meeting that she called!", chided Taylor.

Hayden added, "Usually she's here before everybody else."

Conspiratorially, Courtney confided, "I think she wanted to talk about Jane. She's worried Jane wants to like, join the Vortex Club. Or destroy it." Hayden visibly winced at both possibilities.

Dana offered, "Oh! I saw Jane leaving the building when I arrived. I didn't even think she was supposed to be on campus!"

Taylor crowed, "So not Vortex!"

Max smirked. More Vortex nonsense. That was the last thing she needed to hear. She let go of the door and could feel the time portal close. The eerie yellow glow that surrounded the edges disappeared. Whatever had been the significance of that meeting, Max couldn't see it. Maybe Jane had planned to meet Rachel there?

That just left the date of the blizzard.

"Okay, little door, time for a trip in the Wayback Machine!" Max leaned into the door and wound it all the way back to 1886, decades flicking past in the blink of an eye. Just as she was starting to wonder how the metaphysics worked on a door rewinding through time to before its own construction, she felt the chill and dry air on the other side. She heard... nothing. No, not nothing. The distinctive, eerie quiet of heavy snowfall, when all the world is smothered.

"Well, this is the most fucked up thing I've done all day," she told Rachel's poster, "and I'm not even in my own body right now!"

Max opened the door, and there was snow. Great fat pelting flakes you could feel landing. The woods behind the school were caked in white, bending under the weight of it.

Amid the snow, some thirty feet below the door, she saw the barest foundations of Blackwell academy, little more than the basement slab and some basic framework and nothing else around for miles. Just below the door, in an outline of disturbed snow was a figure kneeling, huddling, trying to stay warm. A figure with hair like running honey and a very familiar red flannel shirt. A single blue feather danced in the breeze by the side of her head.

"Rachel!" called Max, instinctively.

Rachel turned. She seemed to be favoring one leg, as if she had injured the other in a fall. "JANE!" she screamed in a furious, panic-stricken voice, "What the hell is this? What did you do to me?"

She was shivering. Only wearing shorts. She wouldn't last long in weather like this. Max stumbled for a reply, still trying to process what she was looking at it. The snow swirled around her into the Blackwell hallway. She stammered, "I don't... what did I do?"

"You left me here to die!" Rachel screamed in frustration and the wind suddenly kicked up. The gust sent Max stumbling backward amid a swirl of snow and slammed the classroom door shut. She could feel the tunnel through time close when the door did, the moment her fingers left it. The distinctive yellow glow dissipated from the edges of the door frame. Max slipped on the snow and fell, banging her head against the lockers on the far side of the hallway. Her vision and hearing felt disconnected from her head. She was losing the focus! Slipping away back to her own world where the back of Jane's van and a straitjacket awaited!

The ruckus had attracted the blonde security guard Max had seen earlier but failed to recognize. He was running to her from the far end of the hallway, near the stairs, calling, "Miss Caulfield! Are you okay?"

Once she heard his voice, muffled and indistinct though it was, she finally realized who he was. In her defense, without his tattoos and goatee, anybody from Max's world would have found it hard to recognize Frank Bowers.

"Shit! Shit! If you're here... How could you be here?" she tried to say, but she was rapidly losing control of Jane's body. The focus would end any second. Her vision was fraying at the edges.

With one last burst of will, she tore her letter from Jane's notebook and crumpled it into a wad. She turned onto her hands and knees and started to crawl. Her limbs, Jane's limbs, no longer wanted to obey her. She had to fight for every inch as she crossed the hall, reached up with shaking hand and stuffed the letter into the hallway recycling bin.

She'd be damned if she was going to let Jane win now.

October 24, 2013

Max's realty; her actual reality; coalesced around her. The faint lingering scent of jasmine from her shirt collar and the musty canvas smell of the old straitjacket. The cold metal floor of Jane's van. The steady rumble of interstate 5. In the driver's seat sat Jane. Old Jane. Cragged face. Dirty jeans and worn sneakers.

"You told me there is no destiny," Max said, clambering awkwardly to her feet. There wasn't quite enough room for her to stand straight and keeping her balance with her arms restrained was tricky, but she didn't want to have this conversation lying on her back.

"So, you're back!" said Jane from the driver's seat, looking back at Max in the mirror, "Did you enjoy your trip?"

"Nothing is meant to happen, it can only be made to happen. Those were your words!" replied Max. Blood trickled down her nose. She shook with anger.

"You realize what this means, right? Your little trip into my student ID photo? It means you can access dead realities! You do have the power to restore my timeline! Are you sure you want me to know that?" Jane said, pulling her thin lips into a sinister smile.

"All the things that are different between our worlds... Chloe, William, Jefferson ... even Frank fucking Bowers! You changed all of it! It was you!"

Jane stared grimly ahead at the highway. After a minute's contemplation, she answered quietly, "It was me."

"Why?"

"To get you to trigger your power, you idiot! As soon as you came into existence I had to share my link with you, even though you couldn't access it, even though you weren't born yet! The half of my power that would become yours was stolen away from me! You tell me how that's fair!" Jane spat in anger, "I knew the only way I was going to be able to save my reality was to get you to trigger."

"How did you know what my trigger was?"

"Oh, I didn't. What you're seeing is the result of trial and error. Centuries worth of it! Triggers are rare and random. Direct personal threat doesn't work. It's always something obtuse. Something unexpected."

"Direct... personal..." Max said, pondering what that must have meant for prior Maxes in Jane's other loops, "How many times, Jane? How many times did you kill me?"

"Oh, Max," cooed Jane in a mocking tone, "It's so cute that you think I counted."

"Are you sure you want me to know that?" Max parroted.

"Maybe it's important that we understand each other," Jane replied with a weary sigh.

"Make me understand then!" snapped Max, "How did Frank Bowers go from security guard to drug dealer?"

Jane's anger simmered. She explained as if lecturing a child, "I didn't know what your trigger would be, so I set about making the world around you and your friends as dangerous as I could. Didn't you ever wonder why such a small town as Arcadia Bay has such a huge drug problem? I tried keeping local criminals out of jail to see what that would do, but it took me several tries to find a guy who really made a difference. Damon Merrick. Nasty piece of work. He's dead now, but he dragged so many other people down into the sewer with him. Frank Bowers was just one of many lives he ruined. You should have seen the job he did on Rachel Amber's mother!"

"You kept this guy out of prison?" Max asked, not entirely following.

"Destroyed some key evidence before the cops found it. In the original timeline, they sent him up to Snake River around 2009 and he never came back. What a waste of a perfectly good dirtball!"

"And without him, Nathan wouldn't have access to the drugs he used on Rachel or Chloe or Kate," Max mused. She had never really pondered just how much blame Frank was due for Nathan and Jefferson's crimes, but to hear Jane tell it, this Damon Merrick was really the one at fault. Without him around, Frank's life apparently would take a very different turn. She had always assumed that if Frank wasn't there, someone else would just fill the void, but maybe that wasn't quite true. Maybe without this Damon Merrick to set up the suppliers, or the networks... Max didn't really know crime. Maybe without him, all that was left was; what did Courtney say? Sheldon and his fucking sticks and seeds?

She thought of Sera Amber as well. Beautiful, pristine Sera. What had become of her in Damon Merrick's world? Max didn't know. She wasn't sure she wanted to.

"What about Mark Jefferson? Where did you dig him up?" Max asked.

"That was one of the first things I changed. And the best part is that one was your idea," replied Jane, shooting Max a devilish grin in the rear view mirror.

"Mine?"

"Early on, I broke into your room to get ideas and there was this photobook. You had it on a place of honor on your desk. Like a shrine. The Dark Corner," Jane crowed, seemingly relishing this particular reveal, "I did some digging and found out who he was and what happened to him. In that reality, like in mine, he was in jail, but I knew I had to get you two in the same place."

"No!"

"Oh yes! So, my next loop, his first victim, the one that was going to send him to jail, she has ... you might say, an accident and without her testimony, Jefferson walks. I'll admit, it took a couple tries to pair him with you after that. He had shows in Seattle but you were so damn shy you would never actually approach him. I had to try a different tack and I thought maybe if I could get him to teach, that would do it. Once you line the pieces up it's all pretty easy, really. That Prescott kid! So impressionable! They got him the job at Blackwell, and that drew you right to him!"

The bottom dropped out of Max's heart. Had she really been a Jefferson apologist? She knew she had been a fan. After all, in this reality, he was the main reason she enrolled at Blackwell, just as Jane had planned, apparently. She hated the idea that in other realities she had ignored his crimes just because they didn't happen to anyone she knew. She hated the idea that she had admired the man and not seen what he really was. She hated it with the stomach-turning certainty that it was probably true, in the sickening way that one recognizes the worst in themselves.

Worse, it meant that everything that Jefferson had done in her own reality was directly her fault. Not in the way Jane meant it. Not in the twisted reasoning of a psychopath, no. Jane may have freed the man and sent him to Blackwell for her own twisted reasons. But she only ever thought to try it because Max Caulfield herself had been selfish and short-sighted enough to venerate a criminal since she cared more about photographs than people. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to put her fist through a mirror. She wanted to roll into a ball and cry.

But she knew there was probably worse still to hear. "And William Price?" she asked Jane, barely managing to keep her voice from cracking.

"Joyce's husband? Oh, come on, that's an easy one. You really need me to tell you?" Jane replied in a way that seemed almost sheepish.

"You killed him! You were driving the truck!"

Jane nodded grimly, "I was driving the truck! That took a couple tries to get right too. It's not easy to cause a fatal accident without hurting yourself. Now of course, I've done it so many times I could kill him with my eyes closed. Well, except one time," Her eyes flicked to Max in the mirror, narrowed to a slit, "There was one loop... he just plain didn't show up. Took me a long time to figure out what happened and course-correct. Years."

"That was the timeline I changed! He took the bus!" Max said.

"Yes. I know," Jane replied slyly.

Max's eyes went wide as she came to realize what Jane was implying. She felt like she'd been kicked in the stomach, "You paralyzed Chloe! You killed her dad! You fucking BROKE her! Over and over, just to get to me! I'll fucking kill you!"

"All that will do is waste my time and serve to annoy me," retorted Jane, changing lanes suddenly to throw Max off balance. She was forced to lean against the wall of the van to avoid falling over. Jane continued, "And besides, I didn't ruin that girl's life. You did! I don't know the exact chain of events how Damon Merrick plus Mark Jefferson plus William Price equals your trigger event, not to mention all the dozens of other little changes I made, but of all the combinations I tried, that was the first one that did the trick. Trial and error, like I said. In MY world, Chloe Price was just some random nerd I ignored, with a living father and no dangerous drug dealers or psychotic photographers in her life. I wouldn't have had to do anything to her at all if you hadn't stolen half my power. You help me put the world back as it was and she can be that again!"

"Fuck you!" was all Max could manage to reply. Her heart was pounding and her brain was filled with a red heat.

"Look, I know it sounds bad. I mean, I like Joyce Price. You think I wanted to kill her husband over and over and over? Hell no! See how noble you are after a thousand years of desperation!"

"Fuck you, Jane! I saw what you did. I saw the blizzard! You fucking killed Rachel! You told me the first thing you did with your power was save your aunt, but really it was murder a girl over some petty fucking high school rivalry! You blame the way you are on being stuck in these loops, but in truth you're just a sick fuck, and you always have been!"

Jane suddenly tapped the brakes, sending Max crashing to the floor in a face plant.

"I'm not like you, Max. I didn't have every little fucking thing handed to me on a goddamn platter! Your mom was stable. Your family had money. The kids at school didn't know you as the crazy lady's daughter. I had to fight for everything I ever had; Every scrap of respect, every ounce of control! When I found my power, I made the most of it, just like you did. I'm not going to apologize for that."

"None of that justifies all the people you've hurt and killed!" Max said through clenched teeth.

"Max, you've got to understand, none of them are real! You, your friends, your family, the William Price you know. They're not real! They're just copies of the people from my reality. Ghosts! Echoes! Nobody you've ever met was real, except for me. And I've got an entire world to save! So you've really got to think about the future. You've got to think about what's going to happen in the next loop if you keep pissing me off like this. You will help me fix my world because I will find a way to force you. What choice do I have?"

Max shuffled as far back from Jane as she could, until she was leaning her head against the back door of the van. She wept bitter, angry tears as her mind raced for a way out, when suddenly her sight was filled with a glimpse of a summer's day, asphalt rolling away behind. She shook her head, worried about how hard she'd hit it, but then came another vision, of the coastal road north of Arcadia Bay. And another, of a winding mountain road flanked by pines.

She had used Jane's door power in her focus. Maybe she could duplicate it now! Jane never said it had to be a stationary door!

She pressed her face against the van's rear door and concentrated, seeing fleeting images of various roads and alleys and garages around Arcadia Bay and Seattle and many other places she didn't recognize.

"What are you doing, Max?" said Jane, obviously sensing Max was using her power. "There's nowhere you can go I can't follow!"

She was right. Or was she? Max's mind swam. She thought of the last glimpse she had seen of the mountain road and it reminded her of Steph and their trip through the pine-covered hills. They had talked about...

Dead realities! Jane admitted she couldn't go there... but maybe Max could! Jane's reality in the focus was a dead one and she'd gone there! If she could just find a dead reality, one she knew, one that was familiar... She quickly pressed her face to the door and sifted, searching for anything recognizable that she would know had to be from a dead reality. Luckily, Max had been to at least one dead reality that was very distinctive.

"Stop it, Max! There's no escape! Even if you get away from me I'll just drive this thing off a cliff and start a new loop, and then I won't go so damn easy on you. Is that what you want? All I have to do is die!" screamed Jane.

But Max didn't hear her. She had found what she was looking for and all her hearing was filled with the roar of wind and the hiss of rain. A yellow light surrounded the rear door of the truck. She lodged the point of her elbow behind the latch and pulled.

The door opened, and Max tumbled out through time.