Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s something strange about being surrounded by people who have known each other forever.

You can be right there with them — laughing when they laugh, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the warm halo of the fire, part of the conversation — and still feel like a guest in someone else’s memory. Like slipping into a dream halfway through and pretending you belong in the story.

It wasn’t that they were unkind. If anything, they had gone out of their way to make you feel included. Offering you the last can of soda. Making space on the worn old couch without a word. Leaning over their knees to catch you up when someone mentioned a story that clearly had history behind it.

But there was weight to their closeness — a kind of gravity you could feel even in the spaces between words. Invisible threads stretched between them, stitching summers and breakups and bad grades and cheap beers into the fabric of every conversation, every glance. Entire arguments were settled in the arch of an eyebrow. Whole stories were told in the way one person nudged another’s shoulder. They didn’t have to say it out loud. They already knew.

And you… you were the add-on. The guest star in a show already halfway through its final season. The bonus track no one asked for, but no one skipped either. It wasn’t supposed to bother you. But sometimes, it did anyway.

Especially here.

Especially now.

The old Washington lodge sat like a forgotten heirloom at the crest of Blackwood Mountain, isolated from the rest of the world by distance and weather and the slow, stubborn passage of time. It was the kind of place that felt like it could remember things even if no one else did.

Heavy carpets softened your footsteps into nothing, like the house was swallowing your presence. Mismatched wooden chairs stood around the fireplace, worn smooth by careless elbows and too many drinks spilled by drunk teenagers laughing too hard to hold it steady. The long walls were lined with books nobody read anymore, their spines bowed like tired old men huddled against the cold.

And the smell… it was everywhere. Smoke and cinnamon. Pine and wax. Old houses had their own perfumes, mixtures of everything that had ever happened inside them — and maybe some of what hadn’t happened yet.

You sat curled up in one of the armchairs by the fire, legs drawn under yourself, palms stretched toward the warmth, pretending you couldn’t hear how their laughter echoed above you, moving through the old bones of the house. The place almost felt like it was listening — like it was holding its breath, just a little, as if afraid to interrupt them.

Even with the storm clawing at the windows, the place was full of warmth. Full of life.

Except you didn’t feel alive. You felt like a photograph taped to the wall, curling at the corners, not really part of the room anymore.

You shifted in the chair, adjusting your weight like that might settle the restlessness pressing against your ribs. The mug on the table next to you had gone lukewarm. Maybe it had been that way for a while.

Your mind drifted — not by choice, but the way thoughts do when they find cracks in your guard.

You hadn’t been invited because you were one of them.

You weren’t part of the group, not really. Maybe you never had been.

You were here because Ashley sent you that goddamn email.

Polite. Careful. Like she was offering a bandage for a wound she helped cause.

“I thought maybe you should come. For Josh. For all of us. I think it would be good. We all can heal together.”

For Josh.

And that was the moment you knew.

Josh hadn’t invited you.

Not to this.

Not to this thing they still had the nerve to call tradition, like it was sacred, like it still meant something.

Like playing board games and drinking too much in a house full of ghosts could stitch over the cracks.

Like pretending nothing had happened could fix anything.

You weren’t part of that healing. You weren’t even in the picture.

You were the name left off the group text.

The absence no one pointed out.

The afterthought.

It stung in a way you didn’t even want to name.

Because you hadn’t been here for them in a long time. You’d never really been here for them in the first place. The only reason you’d ever been drawn into their orbit was Hannah. The only person that made you feel like you actually belong in this group was sweet, soft-spoken Hannah, with her hopeful smiles and nervous fingers twisting bracelets around her wrist, like she could keep herself steady if she just kept her hands busy. You and Hannah — that had been the real friendship. Quiet, steady, safe. You never had to fight for her attention. She never made you feel like a guest.

And Beth, too, with her quiet protectiveness. The three of you in the background while the loud ones filled the center of the room.

But Ashley… Ashley had been your doorway into the rest of them. The link between you and the glittering, sharp-edged friendships everyone else seemed to fall into naturally. You’d let yourself believe Ashley actually wanted you around. That maybe this was becoming real.

And then the prank happened.

Ashley stood there. Laughing.

Filming.

Pretending it was funny.

As if Hannah wasn’t her friend too.

As if they hadn’t sat together in her bedroom whispering about stupid crushes, trading secrets like candy, talking about college plans and summer jobs and how everything was going to be different when they finally got out of this place.

As if none of it meant anything.

Ashley laughed as if she wasn’t standing there holding the camera, recording every second while Hannah’s world cracked open. While her face crumpled in real time — mascara bleeding into the soft skin beneath her eyes, her lip trembling as she tried to hold herself together in a room full of people who had never meant to let her.

As if she wasn’t part of the reason Hannah ran out into the snowy night — barefoot, humiliated, her heart in pieces, tripping over the words they all laughed at behind her back.

As if she wasn’t part of the reason Beth followed her — loyal to a fault, calling her sister’s name into the dark like it could keep her safe, like love was enough to undo what cruelty had done.

As if she wasn’t part of the reason neither of them came back.

Ashley smiled.

Laughed.

Giggled, even, behind the lens of that fucking camera.

And when Hannah disappeared into the trees, no one chased her.

Not fast enough.

Not like they meant it.

Some of them stayed inside.

Some called out a little, like that was enough.

Like shouting her name from the porch made them innocent.

But no one found them.

The search parties came later, after the snow had buried every real clue.

They combed the woods for days, and came back with nothing.

Well—

not nothing.

They found someone.

Not Hannah.

Not Beth.

Someone else.

Something else.

And Ashley? She cried later. She apologized later. She texted you later with words like “I didn’t know—”, “I didn’t mean—”, “I’m so sorry—”

But by then, what did it matter? The damage was already done.

When Hannah and Beth were gone, something in you went with them.

You didn’t want to try and be part of them anymore.

You couldn’t.

Not when every time you looked at their faces, all you could see was how easily they’d kept going. How quickly they smoothed over the cracks. How they laughed too loud and too soon. How they handled the twins’ disappearance like a passing storm — tragic, yes, but temporary.

They mourned in hashtags and group chats. They held their breath just long enough to say they cared, and then exhaled and kept living.

And you —

you couldn’t do it.

You couldn’t unsee it.

So you stopped answering their calls.

Let their messages pile up, unread.

Watched their names blur together into silence.

You cut yourself away from the whole thing like a rotting branch, before the sickness could spread further.

And in the quiet that followed, you didn’t miss them.

Not really.

Only Hannah.

Only Beth.

But Josh...

You couldn’t let go of him.

Josh, who had nothing to do with the prank.

Who didn’t laugh.

Who didn’t plan it.

Who didn’t know.

And who — in the end — suffered more than any of them.

While they whispered their regrets behind closed doors, while they posted photos and tried to pretend nothing had happened, while they apologized just enough to feel clean again…

Josh unraveled.

He lost not one, but both of them. His sisters. His heart.

And while the others drifted back to their lives,

you…

You stayed.

You were the one who came over every other day in those first brutal weeks, standing awkwardly in his doorway with a bag of greasy fast food and too much hope clenched in your fists. You cleaned his kitchen when the dishes started to rot. You changed his sheets when the smell of sweat and nightmares soaked through them. You took his car to get the oil changed when he forgot how to care.

You were the one who called Dr. Hill’s office, sat through being put on hold again and again, lying to bored receptionists just to get an emergency appointment scheduled. You fought with the insurance company. You sat with Josh through those first brutal sessions, listening to him fall apart in forty-five-minute increments, curling your fingernails into your palms to stop yourself from reaching for him.

When the appointments were done, you’d take him to that grimy fast-food place down the street — the one with sticky tabletops and flickering lightbulbs — and buy him the same thing every time: double cheeseburger, no onions, no tomatoes, extra pickles, large fries, vanilla shake. Not because he loved the food, but because you wanted to show him that every hard thing deserved something good at the end of it, even if the good thing was small and pathetic and smelled like fryer grease.

You knew his favorite movies, the ones that didn’t trigger bad memories. You brought him cheap DVDs when he wouldn’t leave his room. You picked out the ones with commentary tracks because he liked listening to other people talk when he couldn’t fill the silence himself.

You were the one who stayed when everyone else vanished behind awkward apologies and pitying looks.

You stayed because you loved him. Not out of guilt. Not because you wanted to feel like a good person. You stayed because you couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

And for a while… it worked. You saw flickers of the old Josh, the one who used to make you laugh until your ribs ached, the one who used to sit beside you with his shoulder brushing yours like it was natural.

But then something changed. Slowly. Quietly.

It started with missed calls. Then unopened doors. Excuses that sounded thinner and thinner each time. And then nothing at all. Just silence. Just you standing outside in the freezing air with a bag of his favorite food going cold in your shaking hands.

Sometimes you thought you saw him watching from the upstairs window. A flicker of movement. A breath. But he never came down.

He pushed you out. Shut you out. Locked you out.

And now here he was, surrounded by the people who hadn’t stayed. Who hadn’t called. Who hadn’t fought for him. And yet they were the ones invited to this sacred, stupid “tradition.”

Not you.

You said yes to Ashley’s email because you wanted to see Josh. Because if this ridiculous winter getaway was going to somehow help him pull himself back together, you had to be here. Not for them. For him. And maybe — selfishly, stupidly — because you wanted answers. You wanted to ask him why. Why after everything you’d done for him, you were the one left behind. Why he’d chosen them over you.

Above you, their laughter drifted down through the beams of the house, sweet and sharp and unbothered.

They belonged to each other, still. Even after everything. Even after death.

And you — you were just the echo that wouldn’t stop haunting the edges of their story.

But you weren’t leaving yet.

Not this time.

Not without answers.

Chapter Text

It all started with Ashley.

You never would’ve met the others if you hadn’t met her during a last minute assignment in your first semester of college, when two strangers reach for the same battered copy of Dracula in the library and knock each other's notebooks to the floor like clumsy foreshadowing.

“Sorry–”

“Sorry–”

You both said it at once, voices overlapping like accidental harmony. A breath of silence followed – uncertain, then broken by laughter. Soft at first, shy. Then another chuckle, overlapping again, because saying the same thing at the same thing at the same time somehow made it funny, like the difficult life of a college student had cracked open a little to let something gentle slip through.

It felt like the beginning of something. Small, almost forgettable if you weren’t paying attention. But you were and you felt it. The way you might feel a breeze shift before the season changes. The kind of beginning that doesn’t announce itself, but settles in quietly, like roots growing just beneath the surface.

And Ashley… Ashley was easy to like.

She wasn’t loud or flashy. She didn’t try to win people over with charm or noise. The red haired girl who didn’t talk to fill silences and moved gently through the world, like she didn’t want to disturb it.

You were quiet, too. Not the kind of quiet that begged to be broken, but the kind that settled in like fog – soft, unobtrusive, and often overlooked. You didn’t like drawing attention, didn’t see the point in trying to fill rooms you didn’t ask to be in. With Ashley, that quietness didn’t feel like something to apologize for. It just existed, was accepted, even shared. You didn’t have to explain the silences or shrink beneath them. With her, you could simply be – two people who spoke more with glances than words, who didn’t mind if a whole hours passed without conversation, as long as you were near each other.

When you started to hang out more and more you realized there was something comforting about your study sessions – the way they always seemed to stretch longer than planned, how the scratching of pens and the turning of pages began to feel like a shared rhythm. The occasional sigh, the tapping of her pencil, the rustle of a sleeve as she flipped to the next chapter. Time passed differently around Ashley. It slowed down, softened at the edges.

Sometimes you’d meet at a quiet corner table in the coffee shop near campus, the one with those dusty windows and the mismatched chairs that cracked when you sat in them. The place where the barista knew her name. The place Ashley always ordered the same drink - something with cinnamon you never remembered the name – and she always asked how your week was going before you’d even take your coat off.

It wasn’t about what Ashley said that drew you in. It was the ease of it all, the small, reliable rituals. Sitting across from her with your notebooks open, smiling at the little doodles the other had done on the edge of a page. Rolling your eyes at a professor’s confusing assignment.

And somewhere in the middle of all that – between quiet library corners and the steam rising from shared coffee cups – Ashley began to tell you things.

Little things at first.

A childhood story. A place she used to go when she needed to think. A song that always made her feel calm.

And then, eventually, she told you about her other friends.

The friends she had since high school.

And that’s when you first heard the name Josh Washington.

It wasn’t how she said his name that caught your attention. It was how she didn’t. That small pause before it. Careful, like walking around broken glass in the dark, like maybe if Ashley said it the wrong way, the wrong thing, something sharp might cut through.

But when she talked about the twins – about Hannah and Beth Washington – she smiled.

“They’d love you,” she said once, over hot chocolate after watching a movie at your place, the sleeves of her sweater pulled down over her hands. “You’re… You’re their kind of person, I really want you to meet them.”

You hadn’t really believed that. Not at first. From what you heard, the Washingtons liked to party. Ashley would talk about those parties sometimes during late-night study sessions, smiling into her tea, eyes going far away. Bonfires. Lake houses. Cheap beers lifted from someone’s older sibling’s garage fridge. The kind of wild stories that belonged to people with more confidence and better clothes than you.

You weren’t the life-of-the-party type of person. Never had been. Parties made your skin feel too small, like wearing someone else’s jacket – stiff and unfamiliar. Books were safer than people. Words behaved better on the page than they did spilling out of people’s mouths. And strangers? Strangers were harder to read than the complicated plots you liked to lose yourself in, with their jagged motivations and sharp smiles.

So when Ashley said, “they’d love you,’’ you thought it was just kindness. A nice thing to say to someone quiet and a little awkward, the kind of gentle lie friends tell to make you feel like you belong in a room you’d never ask to enter.

But then, the following week, when she asked if you wanted to grab a coffee – saying she had a surprise for you – you had a feeling. A quiet certainty. Ashley was going to introduce you to one of her friends.

Shocking even yourself, you said yes.

Maybe it was loneliness – quiet, persistent – the kind that settles in on slow evenings when the sky turns dark too early, your phone sits silently face-up, and the television hums with old reruns of shows that once meant something but now only remind you of who you used to be.

Or maybe it was curiosity. That tug in your chest to finally meet the people Ashley always brought to life in her stories – voices you’d only heard secondhand, names wrapped in laughter, in nostalgia, in the kind of warmth that made her eyes light up every time she mentioned them. You wanted to understand what made them shine so brightly when she was in her own world, inside her memories.

Maybe it was something softer, dumber – the quiet hope of learning what sat behind that careful pause when Ashley spoke that name.

By the time the next week rolled around, you’d been living with the thought of Ashley’s “surprise” like it was some half-feral thing pacing just outside your door. You tried to busy yourself that morning with laundry, dishes, scrolling aimlessly through your phone but the hours seemed to be frozen in place, you felt like it was taking an eternity for just a couple minutes to pass. Every time you thought you’d stopped wondering, your mind looped back to the same question: Who?

Who would you meet today? Which one of Ashley’s dear friends would you actually see for the first time? Would it be Chris, the crush she mentioned so many times you could almost sketch his face from memory? Or Emily, the one Ashley said could be a little too blunt for her own good? Maybe Hannah? Or Beth? Or – God – was it Josh?

Three hours before you were even supposed to leave, you were already pulling on a coat. Your bedroom had started to feel airless, like the walls were listening in on your restless thoughts. So you walked through the streets, aimlessly, until your feet carried you to the coffee shop, as if they’d been planning it all along, far earlier than planned.

You slid into the corner booth with a sigh, your back to the wall so you could watch the door. The air inside was warm, thick with the smell of roasted beans and the faintest thread of vanilla syrup. You looked out the window for a moment at the sky, sagged and grey, winter pressing its weight against the windows. You turned towards the table once again and tried to read the notes in your notebook, pen balanced between your fingers, but the words blurred into nothing.

The bell over the door chimed, and your head snapped up before you even thought about it. Ashley walked in first, her scarf pulled loose, cheeks flushed from the cold. Two girls followed her inside, two girls that shared the same face, but clearly not the same personality. One moved quickly, words already spilling before she’d even stepped fully into the room, voice warm but confident.

The other one though was the exact opposite. She trailed half a step behind, sleeves tugged over her knuckles, her dark hair fell loose, a soft curtain she seemed to glance through rather than around, and her eyes – wide and curious – landed on you for a second too long before darting away, you weren’t sure if the light pink on her cheeks were because of that ot the cold outside.

Ashley slid into the booth across from you as if it were any other day.

“Hey! So I figured it’d be fun to introduce you to a couple of my friends from before college,” she said casually – too casually, as if she hadn’t just tilted your entire week, maybe your whole life, onto a new axis.

“This is Beth and Hannah,” she continued. “I told you about them before. They’re awesome! You’ll get along in no time.”

Beth flopped into the seat next to Ashley with a loud sigh, dropping her heavy bag on the floor like she owned the place. “I swear to God, if their espresso tastes like watered-down dirt again, I’m filing a complaint with the International Coffee Court."

The words tumbled out of her like she’d been waiting to say that for a while, and you startled out a laugh before you could stop yourself.

That’s when you noticed that Hannah was still standing, shifting slightly on her feet as though unsure whether she should squeeze in with her sister and Ashley or next to you. Her dark eyes flickered up and caught yours once again, seemingly making a decision based on that, and smiled – a small, tentative, almost hidden smile.

She sat next to you slowly, carefully, as if you would tell her to sit somewhere else, you gave her a small smile to ease her worries.

“It’s not that bad” Hannah murmured glancing at Beth, her voice soft and comforting.

“Oh, please!” her sister groaned. “I’ve tasted better coffee made by vending machines with rust inside.”

“I think I’m going to join your class-action lawsuit,” you heard yourself say, siding with Beth before you even realized it. Truth was, you only ever came to this coffee shop because Ashley loved it. You’d never actually ordered coffee here – always hot chocolate or lemonade – anything to avoid the bitter, burnt taste you couldn’t stand.

Beth’s face up with your words. “Finally! Someone that gets me!”

You didn’t know it but that was it.

That as the start.

And just like that, the awkwardness was gone, as if it had slipped out the door without anyone noticing.

Beth took control of the conversation with her dramatic hand gestures, theatrical rants, every word sharpened with humor but softened by affection.

But Hannah.

Hannah was the reason you stayed. Her humor didn’t arrive with fanfare – it slipped in quietly, steady, the kind that lingered long after the moment passed. She had her own way of making jokes, soft and a little unexpected, but she also laughed at you and Beth when you ganged up on Ashley – especially over her atrocious taste in coffee. Her laugh always seemed to catch her off guard, quick and almost startled, like she hadn’t meant to let it out. And every time, it made you want to try again, just to bring it back. That smile – wide, a little crooked, she at the corners – shifted the air around you in a way you couldn’t quite name, but you felt it all the same.

And you found yourself leaning in towards her without meaning to.

Somehow, without either of you steering it, the conversation drifted toward books – safe ground for two unapologetic bookworms. It didn’t matter that your shelves might as well have been from different worlds. In fact, it made things better.

You admitted your love for unreliable narrators, tragic characters doomed by the narrative, stories that left you gutted in the best-worst way. Hannah countered with her devotion to oft romances, the kind where you knew the ending from the start, you knew that those two characters would end up together but you wanted to watch it unfold anyway. Every time you disagreed, something warm uncurled in your chest. The back-and-forth wasn’t a wall between you – it was a thread pulling you closer.

You offered your favorites, Hannah offered hers in return. You poked fun at them, just enough to make her eyes go wide. She’s gasped – half scandal, half laughter – pressing a hand to her chest like you’d insulted her first born.

“You can’t be serious!”

And then started defending them, quick words tumbling over each other, her voice carrying just enough heat to make you push again, to see what other sparks you could set off.

And Ashley? Ashley just watched you both with a knowing curve to her mouth, like she’d been pulling the strings all along and was now seeing the scene play out exactly the way she had imagined.

By the time you all stood to leave, Beth was already making production out of it, insisting – loudly, theatrically – that you join them next week for lunch, like your presence was non-negotiable.

Hannah’s invitation was different, just like everything about her, it was softer. She glanced at you, then away, then back again, as if deciding whether she’d regret saying it.

“If you wanted… We could maybe do a little book club? Just us? You know, nothing formal. Unless you hate that idea –”

“I’d love that,” you said, before she could talk herself into silence.

Hannah looked at you then – really looked – and her whole face lit up.

For a second, the noise of the coffee shop faded – the clink of cups, Beth still chatting in the background, the hum of the winter wind outside – and there was just the warmth between you, steady and unhurried. You found yourself wishing the moment could stretch, that you could stand there with her a little longer, watching the light play across her face.

“You’re one of us now,”Beth declared, looping an arm around your shoulders while you walked to the exit like you’d been adopted.

And somehow… it felt true.

Not because of Beth.

Not because of Ashley.

Because of Hannah.

Right from the start, you belonged to her – and she belonged to you – in that quiet, undeniable way certain people just fit in the empty space in your life.

You hadn’t realized how rare that was.

Not yet.

But you would.