I am all by myself / The trees are not trees / The birds are not birds / And I am not me / But something that has been walking for a very long time.
YELLOWJACKETS. Lottie Matthews
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Chapter Sixteen.
Away from any light beaconing through the windows, Sade's body rocks back and forth in a hypnotic fashion. Nails digging into her fleshy palm. With shell shocked eyes, Natalie had departed to the plane to bury what was rest of Jackie's husk of bones, offering Sade to come lay their former captain to rest. She offers a black scrunchie to Jackie's body, then plants herself in the dark attic corner, refusing to leave.
Moments later, the ladder ascending into the small attic creaks with a hint of a new shadow and pattering footsteps. Sade doesn't need to look up to understand that it's Lottie. The Matthew teen walks on the balls of her feet, habit when she's nervous. Her occupied hand holds a blue cup of tea and something else—a folded paper, crinkled in the weak light seeping through the attic's fractured window. A relic of love. Or a weapon, if she needs it to be.
She kneels before Sade, the floor groaning beneath them like a dislocated joint, setting the tea down, steam rising between them like the ghost of a breath. "Drink this." She requests, voice light, kind. Sade doesn't move an inch. Her fingers, stiff and achingly, stay curled into her palm, crescents of blood pearling at the cuticle. Outside, the wind gnaw at the snowy trees.
"No luck with Natalie, huh?"
"Yeah, none with you, either. Believe it or not." Lottie sighs, a slow exhale, and reaches out. Her fingers brush over Sade's ruined fingers, gentle but firm, like a painter steadying their hand before the first stroke. "You need to take something in, it's really cold, y'know?"
The words should be warm. Instead, they chill. Sade swallows around the knot in her throat, the weight of silence pressing against her ribs like wet canvas. Lottie tilts her head, considerate. "You should've went with Nat," she adds, pillowy. "Jackie—she would've wanted you there."
Sade finally lifts her gaze, and it feels like exhaustion. "Would've wanted Shauna to go." She mutters, voice stiff. Whenever she talks now, the sentences are fractured, brittle as the bones of small dead birds left to winter. She can hear them snapping, feathered ghosts whispering in the rafters of her chest.
You should've went with Nat. The words echo, fur material of her black coat folding against her like a pair of restless wings.
An expression like grievance bleeding into Lottie eyebrows, falling over her lover like water. A part of her doesn't exactly understand what Sade means by go. To bury the Taylor girl's bones? To retrieve Jackie from outside that night? Or wish it had been Shauna instead, lying there in the earth, cold and emptied? The thought flickers across Lottie's face like a decaying bird too close to a loyal dog—brief, shuddering, gone.
The attic sways with the wind, the wood grunting like something alive, something ancient. The light from the fractured window filters through in brittle slats, cutting shadows across Sade's hunched frame. Dust moves in the air like memory. Lottie exhales, slow and measured, the way a person does when trying to tame a wild thing. Her free hand unfolds the paper in her lap, fingers smoothing over the creases as though they are scars. The words inside—Sade knows without looking—are Lottie's from months ago.
