Work Text:
Natalie sits outside of the only tattoo parlor in Wiskayok, thrumming her fingertips against the worn steering wheel of her car. Music plays quietly from the cassette in the player, and she tries to distract herself from the lyrics of the song.
I knew her when she was someone with something to say – she’d never throw it all away.
Tangerine. Vixen. The band Natalie never thought she would find herself listening to. The song that reminds Natalie of her. Of Jackie.
Natalie swallows as she thinks of how she had seen the cover of the cassette on the shelf of the record shop she used to frequent with Kevyn before the crash. She used to roll her eyes when she would pass by the hair metal section, thinking of all of the times she would get stuck listening to the same shitty songs by the same shitty bands on Jackie’s Walkman when she would get the unfortunate opportunity to sit next to her on the bus rides to games.
Now, six months after being rescued from the Canadian Wilderness, Natalie finds herself listening to the band that she had (barely, if she was being completely honest) listened to Jackie rave about because this album was different. This album makes her think that maybe Jackie Taylor wasn’t all that bad after all – even though she had always known it.
She’s glad that she had something to remember Jackie by, because unlike the other survivors, Natalie didn’t take anything from Jackie.
They had taken, and taken, and taken from Jackie while she had been alive, then they had taken her body in death and consumed it as a way to survive when that first winter had come, and they continued to take from her when they had been rescued.
Shauna had taken Jackie’s heart necklace, because Jackie was just as much of a piece of her as that necklace had been part of Jackie. Lottie had taken one of Jackie’s bracelets that she had gifted to her that Jackie had kept as a trinket from a time in life that was so far in the past that it almost seemed like another lifetime – but Jackie had always been the sentimental type. Misty had taken the eyeshadow palette that Jackie had applied to her face on the afternoon of Doomcoming – Natalie was sure that there was more, but she couldn’t remember. All that she remembers is that she was the only one who didn’t take, and take, and take from her dead Team Captain.
Part of her had wanted to keep Jackie’s necklace. She felt that Shauna didn’t deserve it after the way that she had used it to initiate the hunts and murders of the other girls – their friends – but she had known better. The only way Natalie would have been able to take that piece of what she, and the others, had lost would have been to pry it out of Shauna’s cold, dead hands.
Natalie wanted to commemorate Jackie somehow, in a way that didn’t involve taking advantage of her more than she already had while Jackie was alive.
Despite appearing to be not the best of friends to the others, Natalie had a deep rooted respect and admiration for Jackie, and she had tried her damn best to follow in her footsteps when she was the leader out in the Wilderness – leading in fairness and kindness, just like Jackie would have wanted.
Natalie’s way of commemorating Jackie was with a tattoo – since she couldn’t physically have Jackie’s necklace, she had thought of getting the shape of the small charm tattooed on her left shoulder blade — a little piece of Jackie that will stay with her forever.
The place on her shoulder where she had thought that she had felt a touch from a strong presence behind her the night the snow started to fall in the beginning of the second winter. It had felt like something, or someone, was with her, and Natalie had a hopeful, maybe even foolish, feeling that maybe it was Jackie finally making her presence known to her (although maybe she didn’t deserve it) and not some cruel prank that the Wilderness played on her to give her a false sense of comfort.
She glances to her passenger seat where her yearbook lays, and sighs. She didn’t have any pictures with Jackie and the Yellowjackets at home, and it was surprising enough that her mother had even thought to keep what would have been her senior year yearbook around. She would have thought that her mother would be glad at the thought of Natalie dying in a plane crash.
The yearbook is the only reference she has for the shape of the charm. There’s a slightly blurry team photo taken at the last practice before Nationals, and Jackie is too far away from the camera for it to pick up the actual shape of the necklace. Then there’s Jackie’s yearbook photo, which Natalie had tried so hard not to look at, because looking at Jackie frozen in time, forever captured in a moment of joy, completely innocent and unaware of the horrors that would soon come a mere few months after that photo was taken, fills Natalie with such an intense sense of grief and guilt that it makes her want to retch and vomit all of the contents of her stomach out until she’s numb and teary-eyed.
She reaches for the yearbook before she steps out of her car, checking her watch to make sure that she wasn’t late, but almost late – a habit she had picked up as a way to get under Jackie’s skin at soccer practice. Old habits die hard, she supposes.