Some Life This Is - Kate the Chaser X Hoodie

9

She's back where she was. Where she always has been. Caged in and running. Oakside Park.

This is her least favourite nightmare.

The buzzing in her head gets worse, she sprints towards the map- the visitor center, anywhere away. The pages are nowhere to be found.
"H...help-" she rasps, voice dry and scratchy, barely even making a sound. She can't breathe, why can't she breathe? She sprints into the visitor center, looking around, and at the dead end. There's pages, but they're not right, they're not the right ones. She looks around at the dreary green tile around her, then back to the pages, only to find pictures of Lauren- where's Lauren? She looks around again.

Home. She's at home, she's at home and he's outside. He's outside and she's in here but he can get in- she runs around the house closing and shuttering every window, locking every door, even hiding in her closet like a child. There's a camera strapped to her hand, heavy, and a flashlight in the other. She remembers everything but it's all useless. She turns on the camera and carefully peers out of the closet, seeing nothing before going back in. A hand on her shoulder and she's darted out and downstairs, only to be back in her room, forced to perfectly relive what had happened. She tries again, and is forced back again, and HE is in the doorway.

She has to do it. She doesn't want to do it. Her body moves on it's own, throwing her out the window, to the ground below- no. She keeps falling, right into the mines.

The Chaser moves on its own, Kate watching from behind it's eyes, it's mask, as it runs down Lauren. She cannot scream as the chaser kills her best friend, yet she can feel the blood staining her hands through her gloves.

Then it resets, and Lauren gets away, and it all happens somewhere else, over and over. That's always how it ends, Lauren dead by Kate's own hands before Kate accepts the Chaser as her own, before they become one in the same.

She is Kate the Chaser, and she can't breathe.

She wakes up with a wheezing gasp, slick with cold sweat and tangled into the blanket. She rips the blanket without effort as she pulls her arm free to push herself up, the memories from before once again locked away. She can hear rain against the cellar doors, the ground slightly damp as she gets up and stretches in the cold cellar air. She turns on the single light and eats some food, really just a boiled potato and some jerky, but it worked enough to draw her mind from the nightmare and into doing inventory of what that have and what they need, checking her fur and bone projects, even finishing off a decorative knife and some animal carvings made made out of some antlers that'll go for a pretty penny each at the park visitor center. She pulls her one remaining mostly-clean jacket on and is putting the projects and some food in a bag when she hears a knock on the cellar door.

"Yeah?!" She calls out, slinging the bag over her shoulder and clipping her mask to the inside of her jacket. When she doesn't get a response she goes and opens the door, the rain having let up and a dense fog over the area. It swirls around her legs and down the stairs as she walks up and around the porch to the side door. Inside, Heather is talking to a park ranger over tea, making sure their license to hunt is in order and asking some nonchalant questions about when and what they've been hunting.

"And here's Allison, she does the most." Rogue, Heather, says, using Kate's made up name. "Her license is right here." She says, pointing out a game licence on the table. The ranger nods then gets up.
"Alright, everything is in order, thank you." She dusts off her pants then shudders. "I don't know how y'all live out here, gives me the heebie-jeebies- most other rangers won't get even half as close, even when hikers go missing." She says as she leaves, quickly driving off and away.

"That was close." Tim says from the kitchen. "I almost slipped up, he almost came back up." He grips the countertop, hunched over. Heather walks over and puts a hand on his shoulder, helping calm him down. "Relax, alright?" Her words are soft. "We had to register to 'vacation' here, my last id is still valid under a different address, you and Kate have fakes, Toby and Hoodie don't exist, and no officials besides her ever come up here and that's only to make sure our registration is up to date once a year- as far as they know we're only here for a month or two to hunt." She says, factual on all points. "Plus she doesn't pry at all."

"That doesn't stop it from being too close to our last mission for comfort." He pushes away from the counter and Rogue to go out to the porch to smoke. The mentioned woman sighs then turns around, noticing Kate's bag. "What do you say we sell those off then go have a bit of a girls' day, eh? I think we've been around these boys enough recently for a lifetime." She jokes, smiling. The moment Kate nods she grabs her hand and drags her out to the car, talking all about what they're going to do out on the town today as they buckle in and drive out of the woods.

"There's a diner I think you'll love actually, part of a chain but it's got some of its own stuff." She pulls into the visitor center staff parking lot. "Before that though go ahead in and do what you need to do." She nudges Kate, smiling, and drawing a smile to Kate's own face as she leaves the car and heads inside.