She's dead. Wrapped in plastic.

[already_lost]

Once the screaming starts, I think it just might last forever.

It's what I've wanted, all this time. To open my mouth, unhinge my jaw, gulp down a big, big breath and scream. And scream. And scream. A real, ear-splitting, silver screen scream, you know? I've felt it building. Building up and up and up, down in the warm pit of my belly, this swelling pressure ready to break. A scream like an orgasm, and afterward, blissful calm and the first restful sleep I've had in...

In ages.

Once the screaming starts, I decide, really decide, that I all I want is for it to be over. I've been tired for five years. Longer. I can't remember a time when I wasn't tired deep in my bones. Even the coke doesn't help anymore.

It's better this way.

When the screaming stops, I'm bathed in warm, blue light. Surrounded in red. I've lived my whole life to die, I think. There's a ring on my finger. Was a ring on my finger. I felt it, the last lightening burst of pain, cold and bright and rattling my teeth, and then there was only light.

Then, there was nothing.


In the early hours of the morning, the sun cresting over the water, a clear plastic tarp floated along with the tide. It ran aground in a tangle of seaweed and ocean debris, settling in the wet sand. For a long stretch of time it was motionless. Then, with a jolt, the bundle of plastic lurched, flopped over almost comically, and pale arms emerged from the folds.

The girl, no longer dead but still wrapped in plastic, flailed, fighting against the tarp covering her face, and finally freed herself enough to gasp for air. She retched, vomiting sea water into the sand, and sobbed roughly. Her hands, bleeding, clutched reflexively at the sand, letting it squish wetly through her fingers. She shivered, squirming until her legs were free, and sprawled panting and nearly naked on the shore. The sun burned bright overhead. She watched a gull circle lazily. The air smelled salty and sweet. She breathed, in and out, and traced a finger along her ribs. Her skin was stained red but she was no longer bleeding. She'd bled all of it out, out, out. Lifting a hand, she blinked up at her palm, expecting her skin to be a sick, deathly blue. Instead, it was a healthy, if not waterlogged, pink.

Dragging in another breath, she let her hand fall with a plop into the wet sand, which caked in her hair and the flimsy silk of her panties, as the lazy tide swelled up around her. If she stayed long enough, she might just float away.

With that thought, and gazing up at the sky until her eyes began to burn, Laura Palmer opened her mouth, gulped down a big, big breath and shrieked with laughter. Violent, uncontrolled, terrified, joyous laughter. She cackled until her belly ached, until it exhausted her, until she could do nothing but giggle weakly, only for the shrieking to start all over again.

She laughed, and laughed, and laughed, even as she heard the sound of voices, of people coming closer. Once the laughing started, it wouldn't stop.

Comments

[hadtheshot]

Why he likes it out here, Chuck has never quite been able to figure out. It's the quiet, maybe, or the sense of resignation, the reminder of where he came from and how he got here. As often as not, being in a place like this makes him feel like he's just supposed to move on, to forget about it, and for him, that isn't in the cards. He'd rather think about it than push it away. Besides, at this hour and this time of year, unusually warm though the weather might have been lately, the beach is all but deserted, a welcome change of pace from packed sidewalks and people who will never, never understand.

This morning, he's got Max with him, walking along the sand, and it's Max who spots her first, barking and tugging at his leash. Chuck is about to crouch and ask what it is, an instinct despite the fact that Max would have no way of answering, when he catches the sound of laughter from a fairly short distance away, following it until he spots her in the sand.

Something in his stomach turns. He'd washed up on the beach those few years that seem like a lifetime ago, but he'd still been wearing his drivesuit, as if the bomb hadn't detonated at all. And while he's never really given a shit about other people and their usually irrelevant problems, the plastic tarp makes him doubt that her presence is the result of a fun night out on the beach with a date. He can't just leave her for someone else to find. He isn't that cruel.

"Max, stay here," he says, leading the dog over just far enough that he can tie the leash to a post of the boardwalk. Max barks again in clear disapproval, but Chuck has already started off towards the girl laughing in the sand, soaking wet and nearly naked. He keeps a slight distance, averts his gaze so he's not inadvertently staring at her exposed chest, but not so quickly that he doesn't see the red streaked on her skin. Jesus fucking Christ.

"Hey," he says, "hey, are you alright? Are you hurt?"

[already_lost]

"Fine. I'm fine," she wheezed, grinning wide and gasping for air. "I'm. Really, I'm fine."

She looked at him, at the man standing over her, young and handsome, and her clouded eyes seemed to clear. Gazing back at him, one arm curled halfheartedly across her bare chest and her eyes widening impossibly with mounting fear, she rasped, "I'm dead..."

And with that, she burst into a fresh peel of uncontrollable laughter.

[hadtheshot]

The first thing he thinks is that she's goddamn nuts.

It's a funny thing, though, death, and there's no normal reaction to something like this, dying and then waking up, washed up like debris on the shore. He blew himself up on the bottom of the ocean floor, dying in the line of duty like a part of him always knew he would. It isn't hard to guess from the sight of her that she didn't get that much say in the matter. Dead girls don't usually wrap themselves in plastic and throw themselves into whatever body of water she'd been in before she got here.

So he sets his jaw, hating himself a little for being here, for letting himself get involved in whatever is going on here, but he crouches in the sand, still maintaining a careful distance so as hopefully not to seem like a threat. Shit like this doesn't exactly come easily to him, but maybe because she seems to have turned up the same way he did, he thinks he might as well make an effort.

"Maybe you were, but you aren't anymore," he says, voice without its typical brusque edge. Shrugging, he slips off his bomber jacket, the one that he once found here not too far from where they are now, and offers it to her. "Here."

[already_lost]

Her laughter died away and she frowned at the jacket hanging from his outstretched hand, as if he'd presented her with some sort of unknown, alien object.

"Oh," she whispered, realizing how exposed she was practically rolling around naked in the sand in broad daylight. Slowly, she sat up, knees drawn to her chest, one ripped stocking rolled down around her calf. Reaching for the jacket, she let her fingertips brush his knuckles, just to see if he was real.

He felt real enough.

The leather was soft under her fingertips. It was heavy and warm with body heat as she slipped her arms into its sleeves. Pulling it around herself, she ducked her head and discretely sniffed the collar.

He smelled real enough, too.

"You know," she said, matter-of-fact, "You don't look like an angel."

[hadtheshot]

As strange as all of this is, Chuck relaxes a little when his jacket wraps around her, some of the tension leaving his shoulders as he lets out a breath. It doesn't change the fact that something obviously fucked up happened to bring her here in this state, but at least she doesn't have to just lie around naked on the beach, and he doesn't have to try to keep his eyes carefully averted while also explaining what's going on. Telling someone about Darrow is usually difficult enough under the best of circumstances. This... It's something else entirely, and nothing he could have predicted.

"Trust me, I'm definitely not one of those," he says wryly. "My name's Chuck."

[already_lost]

"Hi, Chuck," she said, her voice taking on a soft, almost dreamy quality. She could make this all a game, if she wanted to.

"I'm Laura," she said, looking down at her hands. Her fingernails were broken. One of them was blue, blood pooling under bed of it.

Her eyes drifted back to his face. She studied him, gaze flickering over minute details. Moments before, she hadn't been able to stop laughing. Now, she felt detached from herself, floating in the bottom of a deep, dark well. His face appeared flat, like a two dimensional photograph. A picture behind glass. Nothing was real.

"It's okay, that you're not," she said, with a teasing curl of her lips. "I'm definitely not one of those, either."

[hadtheshot]

The longer he crouches here beside her, easier though it may be now that she's got his jacket on, the more apparent Chuck finds it that he really doesn't know what he's doing. It isn't as if this is something he could have prepared for, and while it seems, at least to him, that she's dealing with this as well as anyone in her position could, there's a largely unfamiliar worry twisting in his chest. He's never been any good at caring about people, and she's a stranger, just some girl who showed up here under the worst possible circumstances. There's no one else, though, and someone ought to be here for her, to try to help her, inadequate as he might be.

"Hi, Laura," he says, an echo of her phrasing, though without her accompanying lilt. He can't help frowning, anyway, glancing at her hands when she looks at them, wondering again what in the hell must have happened to her before figuring that just the sight of her tells him enough. "Listen, I... You don't need to tell me anything, but do you think you need to see a doctor?"

[already_lost]

"I'm already dead, what's a doctor going to do for me?" Her smile was playful, bright and teasing. At any moment, she was going to double over and vomit the contents of her stomach into the sand.

It was over. He did it. He killed her. Now what?

She wiggled her toes, one foot bare and the other covered in nylon. There was a tear in her stocking and her big toe stuck out from it. She chuckled softly.

[hadtheshot]

The simple answer is that he doesn't know what might have been done to her, but Chuck isn't going to say that, and he isn't going to look her over for any signs of injury, either. He doesn't know what dying will or won't have fixed — he certainly turned up in better shape than he would have been when he died — but he doubts she needs a stranger's eyes on her when she's wearing so little. He's not going to try to talk her into going, anyway, just like he isn't going to point out how strange it is to see her smile like that while talking about being dead.

People deal with this shit in different ways. Given his tendency, even now, to go looking for fights around every corner, a tooth still chipped in his mouth from the punch he took on New Year's, he's in no position to judge.

"Didn't know if you were still hurt, or anything," he says, shrugging awkwardly. "What about some clothes?"