Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Isabel opens her eyes again, it is to complete and total darkness.

Did it work?

She’s still breathing hard, still wheezing, but it’s not as it was when she shut her eyes as Owen for the last time. Her mouth had been empty and dry, her tongue had felt prickly. Her lungs were still squeezing out hitching sobs though she was too dehydrated to produce any more tears. 

There is something partially blocking her airway. It is the consistency of snot. When she tries to inhale and it rasps against the back of her palate she retches. Her body convulses, tries to sit up, and she hits her head on the coffin lid. She ends up turning her head to the side, coughing and gagging. Her nails have already begun to scratch the wood above her. It creaks beneath the opposing pressure of the dirt above and her desperate pushing below.

Isabel?

A voice, clear as a bell, in her mind. Better than a sip of cold water. She cries out wordlessly, hopefully.

Isabel!

Another nasty cough wracks her body. She stubs her toe on the coffin lid when her leg jerks. It is cold as a refrigerator this far under the ground yet the crushing anxiety of being here makes her armpits prickle with sweat.

There is a noise outside. Something else for her ears to pick up, finally, instead of her labored breathing. There is the sound of dirt being flung up and out of the grave to land in a spray of chunks and rocks in the grass. She stops scratching. She waits. She trusts.

There is a wordless warmth transmitted across the psychic plane. Feeling the link again is like finally grasping something she’s been searching for in the dark. For so long, she hadn’t known– hadn’t remembered what she’d been missing.

The entertainment center had shut down. Not enough people wanted to take their kids out to play arcade games or in a germy ball pit. Not post-pandemic. Instead of packing it in when the first quarantine was mandated, the boss held out hope that ‘when it was all over’ they would be back in business. So it wasn’t a clean and simple shut-down. The center had a slow and agonizing death, where more and more things were sold and more and more last-ditch efforts were made and suddenly, Owen was in his forties. Back pain, a new food intolerance, a caffeine addiction, property taxes. And he didn’t know where to go.

The idea of getting in the ground to face… something, he didn’t know what– maybe The Pink Opaque, maybe endless darkness, maybe the flames of hell– it used to scare him. His heart had been beating like a jackhammer when he pushed Maddy away in the football field. He’d barely felt anything this time, when he walked on aching feet to where the stoners used to get high after school.

Sure he didn’t know what would happen. Maybe he would just die. But either way, this would end.

A splintered portion of the lid is wrenched off the coffin. Tara’s shoulder slammed into the hard packed wall of dirt to her left as she flung it away. Now Isabel could stretch her arms out. She could smell the lake water, the algae in the tide pools, the blooming bushes in the forest around them. And she is gathered up. Pulled into a sitting position.

“You’re here,” Tara says out loud. “You’re here, you did it! I was afraid you wouldn’t–”

“I’m sorry.” She may not be Owen anymore– the memories already feel so far away and grainy– but it must be consistent across all forms, all dimensions, her compulsion to apologize. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry it took so long. I took so long.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tara says, decisive but not dismissive. “You’re here now. The Midnight Realm is apart from our world’s time and space. It’s been seconds. Maybe not even that. You’re here now.”

“It was years, it was decades. I didn’t– after I ran away, after you left again I didn’t think about trying again for years. Not even after–” She can’t. She can’t talk about it. A lump forms in her throat when she thinks about that birthday party. About finding proof that Maddy’s message– there’s still time– was true. And then tucking it away again.

It’s true that only seconds have passed here. But the years in the Midnight Realm still feel real. She can’t help the wordless wail that escapes her.

Tara clambers forward. They are sitting in the coffin together, Tara is straddling her legs and rubbing her back, encouraging her to cry it out on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. We’re back together.”

“Could he send us back?” Oh God, the dread the thought evokes is nearly enough to make Isabel sick again.

“No. He won’t do that. I know where our hearts are. We’re putting an end to this.”

“And then what?” Isabel hiccups. Her head is still spinning, there’s no way she can formulate a coherent plan. A next journey. A next arc.

“Then whatever we want.”

- - - 

Now that she was all the way out of her grave, Isabel had a chance to look around at the world around her. It was nothing like the TV show. Either of them. It wasn’t like the way she remembered watching it in Maddy’s basement, with its saturated colors and pink tint. Not the way she remembered seeing it when it went to streaming, with the picturesque suburbs and perfectly green, trimmed grass.

“It’s different,” she blurted. Tara didn’t ask what. She waited. “From how we saw it on the TV. I watched it again, you know.”

“How many times?”

“Twice on the tapes. Well, I watched my favorites more than twice. But then again when it went to streaming. And it was… less. It seemed childish and stupid. I felt like it wouldn’t ever be the same as it felt watching it with you.”

Tara raised an eyebrow. “Of course he warped our perceptions of our own world. He didn’t want us to unlock our true memories. He probably sensed you were close.”

Isabel just nodded, too choked up from the memory of such deep hopelessness.

They reached a fence and jumped it, creeping around a building that looked abandoned. A shiver ran up her spine and she inched closer to Tara as they moved, knees slightly bent, ready to break into a run at the slightest provocation. Tara had one arm drifting out by her side, drifting toward Isabel as if to shield her.

Tara was always the braver one. 

Isabel kept an ear out for Mr. Melancholy’s sidekicks, casting a glance behind them periodically. She felt her powers thrumming under her skin. It felt good to be capable again.

They eased the back door open and crept inside. Tara grabbed an old broom in one hand just in case. There it was– Isabel knew the moment she looked, the moment she heard the low hum. The cooler, with the faintest glow around its edges. Their hearts were inside.

“Lock the back door,” Tara whispered. Isabel scampered forward to do so as Tara slid the broom into the handles of the set of doors across from them. Now no one could get in while they were busy.

The cooler wasn’t locked up at all. There they were, still glistening, red, beating. Isabel’s chest ached. “Do you want to go first, or should I?” Tara whispered.

Isabel reached out and cupped in her hands the fist-sized muscle that had been torn from Tara’s chest. She felt its aching as acutely as her own. Then she turned to her best friend, who wordlessly pulled down the fabric of her tank top, exposing the left side of her chest. There beneath her collarbone, the source of that empty feeling that had plagued her as Maddy. The edges of the wound were angry and red. Isabel reached forward with one hand, slipping her fingers beneath one of the flaps of skin. So gently, she parted them, giving her room to slip her heart back where it belonged, behind damaged ribs, nestled next to one lung. She held it there, feeling the tissue knit back together and the blood fill its chambers once again. Tara made a noise deep in her chest as Isabel withdrew slowly, clicking the ribs back in place as she went, running her fingertips over the split skin and watching it fuse back together under her touch, leaving nothing but a single pink line.

There they stood, just inches between them, as Tara breathed through the recalibrating of her circulatory system.

When she spoke, her voice was a little ragged, but so peaceful. “Your turn.”

Although Tara hadn’t flinched, Isabel almost expected it to hurt, or feel cold, but the feeling of her heart slotting back into place was nothing but warm and gentle– as was Tara as she slipped her hand back out, encouraging Isabel’s ribs back into place on her way. Having a heart again was uncanny for sure, and she was hyperaware of its weight after feeling the lightness of its absence for so long. She was left with a matching pink scar. Their hands her slick with each other’s blood, the air between them tinged with the scent of copper and soil, heavy with a quiet Isabel was hesitant to ruin.

Okay? Tara asked without speaking, without breaking the spell-like feeling.

More than. You?

Isabel felt a giddy happiness that wasn’t her own wash over her, and she grinned. Using their psychic connection was like riding a bike. A while on it and she was already recalling how to start letting go of the handlebars.

And start to fly.

With her heart back in her chest, her previous worries seemed so strong. Against the swell of their joined powers, nothing could put them back in the ground. No one. Not while there was one of them to look ahead and the other to look behind. Not while their very beings met in the middle like two oceans, ebbing and flowing, forever exchanging perceptions, sensations, through the porous barrier.

- - -

They leave the building a half hour later, dropping sneakers outside, soaked in blue blood. Tara reaches over to wipe a smudge of it from Isabel’s cheek, and they smile. Joined hands sense the pulse of the other, just there in the wrist, both thrumming in time with each other.