Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2022-08-13 09:27 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2022-08-13 09:27 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: Snapshot (Life Is Strange)
My depiction of stopped time in this fic probably makes zero sense, but it's what you're getting.
Title: Snapshot
Fandom: Life Is Strange
Rating: 15
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Max stops time to save Kate. She can't get it started again.
Warnings: Attempted suicide.
Kate falls.
No.
Max is rewinding almost before she knows what she’s just seen. No. This can’t happen.
But she—
Fuck, her head is killing her, she loses her grip on time. She can’t go back far enough. And all she can do is stand and watch Kate, again—
She won’t accept this. No.
She focuses, she reaches out, she drags herself back into the past. Kate isn’t going to die here. That can’t happen, she won’t let it, what’s the point of superpowers if she can’t—
The timestream is trying to escape her again. She grits her teeth and digs her heels in, eyes tightly shut. She can barely think, everything else drowned out by the rush in her ears and the pain in her skull, like she’s trying to force her head into a space far too small for it.
And then the rush falls away to silence, and her eyes snap open. If she’s managed to get back far enough, she has to move, she has to get to—
Silence? She’s surrounded by students watching a disaster unfold. It’s raining. Why wouldn’t there be any noise?
The question hits her just before she finally grasps what she’s seeing.
The raindrops are hanging in the air, paralysed. The people are still. The world flickers around her, as if caught between one frame and another.
She didn’t just rewind time. She stopped it.
And she can’t afford to think about this, because Kate is back up on the edge of the roof, and this is her chance.
Her head is still throbbing, and the air feels thick, too still to move through comfortably. She forces her way to the dorm building, trying to keep her hold on this moment, the instant before Kate falls.
She can open the door, it turns out. It feels too early for relief, but she lets out a relieved breath anyway. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to move anything, with time frozen around her like this.
She makes it up to the rooftop. Kate is standing on the lip, and it’s horrifying to look at. But Max is here, she can make a difference from here. She can fix this.
Max moves toward the edge of the roof, slowly, cautiously. Everything in her is telling her to get to Kate now, but she can’t risk startling her into falling if time suddenly starts moving again. And she definitely doesn’t want to fall herself while trying to save her.
It’d be kind of funny, though, right? whispers a part of her mind that sounds like Chloe.
She’s close, now, close enough to reach out and touch Kate. But Kate’s too near the edge; there’s no way Max can get in front of her.
Max climbs up onto the parapet, cautiously, and edges sideways until she’s directly behind Kate. Wraps her arms around Kate from behind, very carefully. Tries to move backwards, bringing Kate with her.
Her foot slips, and she falls back, her heart and stomach vanishing in an instant – she’s been so focused on not falling, and now—
But it’s okay, she’s falling backwards, she’s falling onto the roof. She lands heavily on wet concrete, Kate dead weight on top of her (living weight, she reminds herself), and – she’s done it. She’s done it, hasn’t she?
It’s not like everything is fixed. Something forced Kate to that edge. But she’s not there right now, they can talk, they can do something. Max can help her.
There’s hope, at least. Kate’s still alive, which means there’s a chance, and that’s more than Max would have without her powers.
Max wants to get her off the roof while time’s still standing still. But hauling Kate all that way is probably beyond her. The idea makes her a little uncomfortable, too; it feels like carrying a corpse.
She drags Kate a little further away from the edge, at least. Braces herself. This will be a difficult conversation. But, with Kate lying on the roof, death a few steps away instead of right at her feet, it feels less immediately dangerous; Kate can’t make a terrible split-second decision right now.
Max puts herself between Kate and the front of the roof, just to be sure. Lets go of her grip on time.
Nothing happens.
The rain is still hovering in the air. The birds are still frozen mid-wingbeat. Kate is still lying there like something dead, like Max didn’t save her at all.
Max turns to look down from the roof. The people below aren’t moving.
-
The future’s always kind of scared Max. The uncertainty of it, the potential for things to go wrong; it’s like navigating a mountain path where the ground could give way at any moment. She guesses she doesn’t have to worry about any of that right now.
She’s not sure this is actually an improvement.
For obvious reasons, it’s hard to judge how long time has been like this, if how long is even a question that makes sense here. Clocks don’t move; night doesn’t fall. Everything just stays where it is, trapped in this snapshot of a rainy afternoon.
Except Max.
If someone asked, she’d guess it had been two or three weeks, maybe. She wishes someone could ask.
She’s started touching people on the hand or shoulder or wrist when she walks past them. Just to feel the warmth in their skin, to remind herself that they’re still alive. They’re not dead, they’re not carved out of stone. She’s not the only living person in the world.
But, when no one else is breathing or thinking or moving, it doesn’t feel like there’s really that much of a difference.
This is her power doing this, right? So... when she dies, will time start moving again?
She guesses she’ll never know either way. Plus, if it’s her power behind it, she might be the only one who can fix it. Dying isn’t an option; there’s too much at stake.
She just wishes she knew what to do.
Not like there’s anyone she can ask.
She can interact with things, to some extent. She can open doors or books, she can write in her diary. She can’t use the internet; browsers don’t open, and, when she pushes aside a motionless person in the computer lab to use the browser they were already on, pages don’t load.
She can’t play music on her CD player or her laptop. She can play the guitar, which raises a lot of questions about how the strings can vibrate, how soundwaves are still able to travel through the air. But she guesses the air must still be able to move, even if it’s only the air around her; she’s still breathing.
Maybe she doesn’t need to breathe any more. Maybe she’s just doing it out of habit. She should definitely have needed to eat by now.
Just as well she doesn’t seem to get hungry now. She’s pretty sure you can’t cook things if time doesn’t pass, and she’s not sure she wants an eternity of salads and sandwiches, walking to the next town whenever the stores run out of bread.
Not that this is great either.
She still tries to use her power sometimes. To push time forward somehow, or to rewind, just in case that somehow gets things unstuck. But nothing ever happens.
Maybe she wore her power out somehow. Maybe it needs to recharge over time that doesn’t exist any more.
She mostly just stays in her room, burying herself in books. When nobody else is around, she can almost pretend that things are normal.
It’s still too quiet, of course. She’s started humming to herself, talking to herself. By this point, it’s barely conscious.
Right now, if right now means anything, she’s lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, one ankle crossed over the other. Thinking about Kate, about where this all started.
She could throw Kate off the roof, see if that gets things moving again. But it wouldn’t work, would it? Kate would just end up hovering in the air.
And then it hits her, and she sits up sharply: what is she thinking? What the hell is she thinking?
She needs to get out of Blackwell. She needs to get as far away from Kate as possible. She’s not going to kill a friend over a faint possibility.
-
Driving isn’t an option, obviously. She’s pretty sure it’s not possible to get a car started right now, and, even if she could, the roads aren’t clear.
In the moment, when she was saving Kate, it didn’t feel like anything existed outside that rooftop. But people were still going about their lives, driving their cars, and those people are still on the road. How far would Max get if she tried to weave around them?
So she’s going to have to walk.
She’s pretty sure Warren keeps a book of road maps in his car. She throws a brick through his window, with a muttered apology.
Or she tries, at least. The brick goes still in the air the moment it leaves her hand.
Warren’s in the crowd beneath the dorm building, of course; she knows where pretty much everyone in Blackwell is at this moment, and most of them are there. It’s the last place she wants to be right now, but she pays him a visit, fishes his keys out of his pocket. She should probably have tried that first.
It feels so strange, taking his keys from him and having him not react at all, not even acknowledge her. She pictures his confusion and indignation, demanding to know what she’s doing.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just need to get out of here. I’ll give them back.”
He’d respond to that as well, of course. He’d want to know more; he’d be concerned, maybe. She tries to explain, although it’s not easy to put into words.
She has an entire conversation with this boy who can’t hear her. And she keeps her word: she comes back to return the keys, in the end.
-
She seems to be able to walk as long as she likes; it doesn’t wear her out. Which is some good news, at least, even if she’d trade it in an instant for someone to talk to her.
She has the road atlas in her satchel, but she hasn’t looked at it yet. She didn’t really have a plan for where to go, at first; she was just walking away from Blackwell. It took her a while to realise she was heading toward Chloe’s house.
No real point in going there. It wasn’t like anyone was going to be able to let her in.
She’s heading for the junkyard now. It feels like a place she can say goodbye to Chloe, before she carries on to wherever she’s going.
Maybe it’s pointless, maybe it’s sentimental. It doesn’t feel like she can do anything else. She doesn’t want to walk away from Arcadia Bay without looking back.
Max reaches the junkyard, and her heart tightens when she realises Chloe is actually there. Sitting on the hood of a wrecked car, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the air. The rain doesn’t seem to be bothering her.
She’s as still as everything else. A part of Max was expecting her to be normal, to be living and moving; she hadn’t even realised before this moment. Somehow, if anyone could have escaped time freezing, it feels like it should have been Chloe.
Max sits on the hood next to her. Watches her for a while. Reaches out to sweep away the raindrops above her head; she’s not sure why.
“Things are really fucked up right now,” Max says.
She leans against Chloe’s shoulder, and closes her eyes, and tells her everything.
Nobody’s listening. But it helps, maybe, a little.
She still doesn’t know where to go or what to do. But she might as well head south. Aim for Los Angeles, in honour of Chloe and Rachel.
-
A couple of miles out from Arcadia Bay, Max walks out of the rainstorm.
It hadn’t really occurred to her that that would be possible. She’d known, on some level, that it couldn’t be raining everywhere. But somehow it hadn’t felt real.
It’s been overcast for weeks, the air full of raindrops. If she’d stayed where she was, it was going to be like that forever.
Max looks up at the sky. There are patches of blue in places; she can see clearer skies beyond the clouds, a long way ahead.
She doesn’t know if time will ever restart. But, in this moment, she knows she can see the sun again, and maybe that’s enough of a goal for now.
Title: Snapshot
Fandom: Life Is Strange
Rating: 15
Wordcount: 2,100
Summary: Max stops time to save Kate. She can't get it started again.
Warnings: Attempted suicide.
Kate falls.
No.
Max is rewinding almost before she knows what she’s just seen. No. This can’t happen.
But she—
Fuck, her head is killing her, she loses her grip on time. She can’t go back far enough. And all she can do is stand and watch Kate, again—
She won’t accept this. No.
She focuses, she reaches out, she drags herself back into the past. Kate isn’t going to die here. That can’t happen, she won’t let it, what’s the point of superpowers if she can’t—
The timestream is trying to escape her again. She grits her teeth and digs her heels in, eyes tightly shut. She can barely think, everything else drowned out by the rush in her ears and the pain in her skull, like she’s trying to force her head into a space far too small for it.
And then the rush falls away to silence, and her eyes snap open. If she’s managed to get back far enough, she has to move, she has to get to—
Silence? She’s surrounded by students watching a disaster unfold. It’s raining. Why wouldn’t there be any noise?
The question hits her just before she finally grasps what she’s seeing.
The raindrops are hanging in the air, paralysed. The people are still. The world flickers around her, as if caught between one frame and another.
She didn’t just rewind time. She stopped it.
And she can’t afford to think about this, because Kate is back up on the edge of the roof, and this is her chance.
Her head is still throbbing, and the air feels thick, too still to move through comfortably. She forces her way to the dorm building, trying to keep her hold on this moment, the instant before Kate falls.
She can open the door, it turns out. It feels too early for relief, but she lets out a relieved breath anyway. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to move anything, with time frozen around her like this.
She makes it up to the rooftop. Kate is standing on the lip, and it’s horrifying to look at. But Max is here, she can make a difference from here. She can fix this.
Max moves toward the edge of the roof, slowly, cautiously. Everything in her is telling her to get to Kate now, but she can’t risk startling her into falling if time suddenly starts moving again. And she definitely doesn’t want to fall herself while trying to save her.
It’d be kind of funny, though, right? whispers a part of her mind that sounds like Chloe.
She’s close, now, close enough to reach out and touch Kate. But Kate’s too near the edge; there’s no way Max can get in front of her.
Max climbs up onto the parapet, cautiously, and edges sideways until she’s directly behind Kate. Wraps her arms around Kate from behind, very carefully. Tries to move backwards, bringing Kate with her.
Her foot slips, and she falls back, her heart and stomach vanishing in an instant – she’s been so focused on not falling, and now—
But it’s okay, she’s falling backwards, she’s falling onto the roof. She lands heavily on wet concrete, Kate dead weight on top of her (living weight, she reminds herself), and – she’s done it. She’s done it, hasn’t she?
It’s not like everything is fixed. Something forced Kate to that edge. But she’s not there right now, they can talk, they can do something. Max can help her.
There’s hope, at least. Kate’s still alive, which means there’s a chance, and that’s more than Max would have without her powers.
Max wants to get her off the roof while time’s still standing still. But hauling Kate all that way is probably beyond her. The idea makes her a little uncomfortable, too; it feels like carrying a corpse.
She drags Kate a little further away from the edge, at least. Braces herself. This will be a difficult conversation. But, with Kate lying on the roof, death a few steps away instead of right at her feet, it feels less immediately dangerous; Kate can’t make a terrible split-second decision right now.
Max puts herself between Kate and the front of the roof, just to be sure. Lets go of her grip on time.
Nothing happens.
The rain is still hovering in the air. The birds are still frozen mid-wingbeat. Kate is still lying there like something dead, like Max didn’t save her at all.
Max turns to look down from the roof. The people below aren’t moving.
The future’s always kind of scared Max. The uncertainty of it, the potential for things to go wrong; it’s like navigating a mountain path where the ground could give way at any moment. She guesses she doesn’t have to worry about any of that right now.
She’s not sure this is actually an improvement.
For obvious reasons, it’s hard to judge how long time has been like this, if how long is even a question that makes sense here. Clocks don’t move; night doesn’t fall. Everything just stays where it is, trapped in this snapshot of a rainy afternoon.
Except Max.
If someone asked, she’d guess it had been two or three weeks, maybe. She wishes someone could ask.
She’s started touching people on the hand or shoulder or wrist when she walks past them. Just to feel the warmth in their skin, to remind herself that they’re still alive. They’re not dead, they’re not carved out of stone. She’s not the only living person in the world.
But, when no one else is breathing or thinking or moving, it doesn’t feel like there’s really that much of a difference.
This is her power doing this, right? So... when she dies, will time start moving again?
She guesses she’ll never know either way. Plus, if it’s her power behind it, she might be the only one who can fix it. Dying isn’t an option; there’s too much at stake.
She just wishes she knew what to do.
Not like there’s anyone she can ask.
She can interact with things, to some extent. She can open doors or books, she can write in her diary. She can’t use the internet; browsers don’t open, and, when she pushes aside a motionless person in the computer lab to use the browser they were already on, pages don’t load.
She can’t play music on her CD player or her laptop. She can play the guitar, which raises a lot of questions about how the strings can vibrate, how soundwaves are still able to travel through the air. But she guesses the air must still be able to move, even if it’s only the air around her; she’s still breathing.
Maybe she doesn’t need to breathe any more. Maybe she’s just doing it out of habit. She should definitely have needed to eat by now.
Just as well she doesn’t seem to get hungry now. She’s pretty sure you can’t cook things if time doesn’t pass, and she’s not sure she wants an eternity of salads and sandwiches, walking to the next town whenever the stores run out of bread.
Not that this is great either.
She still tries to use her power sometimes. To push time forward somehow, or to rewind, just in case that somehow gets things unstuck. But nothing ever happens.
Maybe she wore her power out somehow. Maybe it needs to recharge over time that doesn’t exist any more.
She mostly just stays in her room, burying herself in books. When nobody else is around, she can almost pretend that things are normal.
It’s still too quiet, of course. She’s started humming to herself, talking to herself. By this point, it’s barely conscious.
Right now, if right now means anything, she’s lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, one ankle crossed over the other. Thinking about Kate, about where this all started.
She could throw Kate off the roof, see if that gets things moving again. But it wouldn’t work, would it? Kate would just end up hovering in the air.
And then it hits her, and she sits up sharply: what is she thinking? What the hell is she thinking?
She needs to get out of Blackwell. She needs to get as far away from Kate as possible. She’s not going to kill a friend over a faint possibility.
Driving isn’t an option, obviously. She’s pretty sure it’s not possible to get a car started right now, and, even if she could, the roads aren’t clear.
In the moment, when she was saving Kate, it didn’t feel like anything existed outside that rooftop. But people were still going about their lives, driving their cars, and those people are still on the road. How far would Max get if she tried to weave around them?
So she’s going to have to walk.
She’s pretty sure Warren keeps a book of road maps in his car. She throws a brick through his window, with a muttered apology.
Or she tries, at least. The brick goes still in the air the moment it leaves her hand.
Warren’s in the crowd beneath the dorm building, of course; she knows where pretty much everyone in Blackwell is at this moment, and most of them are there. It’s the last place she wants to be right now, but she pays him a visit, fishes his keys out of his pocket. She should probably have tried that first.
It feels so strange, taking his keys from him and having him not react at all, not even acknowledge her. She pictures his confusion and indignation, demanding to know what she’s doing.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just need to get out of here. I’ll give them back.”
He’d respond to that as well, of course. He’d want to know more; he’d be concerned, maybe. She tries to explain, although it’s not easy to put into words.
She has an entire conversation with this boy who can’t hear her. And she keeps her word: she comes back to return the keys, in the end.
She seems to be able to walk as long as she likes; it doesn’t wear her out. Which is some good news, at least, even if she’d trade it in an instant for someone to talk to her.
She has the road atlas in her satchel, but she hasn’t looked at it yet. She didn’t really have a plan for where to go, at first; she was just walking away from Blackwell. It took her a while to realise she was heading toward Chloe’s house.
No real point in going there. It wasn’t like anyone was going to be able to let her in.
She’s heading for the junkyard now. It feels like a place she can say goodbye to Chloe, before she carries on to wherever she’s going.
Maybe it’s pointless, maybe it’s sentimental. It doesn’t feel like she can do anything else. She doesn’t want to walk away from Arcadia Bay without looking back.
Max reaches the junkyard, and her heart tightens when she realises Chloe is actually there. Sitting on the hood of a wrecked car, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the air. The rain doesn’t seem to be bothering her.
She’s as still as everything else. A part of Max was expecting her to be normal, to be living and moving; she hadn’t even realised before this moment. Somehow, if anyone could have escaped time freezing, it feels like it should have been Chloe.
Max sits on the hood next to her. Watches her for a while. Reaches out to sweep away the raindrops above her head; she’s not sure why.
“Things are really fucked up right now,” Max says.
She leans against Chloe’s shoulder, and closes her eyes, and tells her everything.
Nobody’s listening. But it helps, maybe, a little.
She still doesn’t know where to go or what to do. But she might as well head south. Aim for Los Angeles, in honour of Chloe and Rachel.
A couple of miles out from Arcadia Bay, Max walks out of the rainstorm.
It hadn’t really occurred to her that that would be possible. She’d known, on some level, that it couldn’t be raining everywhere. But somehow it hadn’t felt real.
It’s been overcast for weeks, the air full of raindrops. If she’d stayed where she was, it was going to be like that forever.
Max looks up at the sky. There are patches of blue in places; she can see clearer skies beyond the clouds, a long way ahead.
She doesn’t know if time will ever restart. But, in this moment, she knows she can see the sun again, and maybe that’s enough of a goal for now.