WHO: Jack and Hope WHAT: Jack tells Hope she’s dead WHEN: Day 2, evening WHERE: the halls WARNINGS: language, talk of death. Jack is a massive douche
Jack had no idea how much time had passed when he opened his eyes again. He was still sitting on the floor where he had collapsed seemingly moments before but it was louder now, with more people around him. Teddy had said he was losing his sense of time and maybe that was true, but Jack didn’t especially care if it had been hours or years. He was still dead. Someone walked right through him, seemingly stepping on his knee, and Jack shivered but felt nothing. “I’m having a very literal existential fucking crisis here and these assholes can’t even see it.” He snorted and laughed darkly. He idly reached out, trying to grab the ankles of people passing by but of course nothing. Shouldn’t he be able to possess someone? Maybe that was how he got out of here, by stealing someone’s body. Except he couldn’t even touch anyone. That seemed more pressing than the moral concerns.
A girl caught his eye, one with a familiar face. She had been on the island with him. “Hey,” he called, waving. “If you can see me, guess what? You’re fucking dead.”
Hope turned her head. One of the frat boys was sitting on the floor. It was something that Hope would have rolled her eyes at, but the words caught her focus more than his position. She put her hands on her hips and turned all the way to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He gave her a pitying look. It was unfortunate that she could see him, but there was a bitter, vindictive part of him that wanted to drag down as many people as he could. And after all, he didn’t know her. She was nothing to him. “You’re. Fucking. Dead,” Jack replied slowly, over enunciating each world like he was talking to a child. “And not in a funny haha you’re dead way or an angry I’m going to kill you way. We are, quite literally, dead. So.” He fixed her with a wry look. “Sucks to be us.”
“What are you talking about?” Who just sat on the ground and told people that they were dead? Hope definitely didn’t appreciate his tone, and she should have completely dismissed him. But it was such a bizarre thing to say. Bizarre and yet….
Hope thought about the mangroves. She thought about her friends disappearing. How nothing had been right since she’d found herself on the beach that morning. “Why are you saying that?”
Jack snorted. “You” he pointed at her, “I forgot your name but you do not pick up on things easily, do you?” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m saying that because we’re dead,” he continued patiently. There was a part of him that knew that this wasn’t a fair or healthy way to cope, but he was angry, angry and confused and lost, and that anger was better than sinking into a depression he couldn’t be sure he could escape from. His head tilted as someone approached. “Watch.” Jack finally stood and walked towards him. “One moment I’m here and the next…” he took one step forward, right through him, until he appeared on the other side, the man none the wiser. “I’m here. Magic. Ta-da!” He gave a little bow before he came up next to her, leaning in like he was sharing a secret. “Like I said. Dead.”
To Hope, who could not see any of the new people around them yet, it looked like Jack had just taken a step forward. “Were you supposed to disappear or something?” She shook her head. “What happened to you guys this morning?”
“Huuuuuh.” He regarded her curiously for a moment. “You didn’t see him? The person who just walked right through me?” Interesting. He would have been inclined to side with her, to think that maybe this was all in his head, if today had gone differently. However, he had seen Izzy fail to get anyone’s attention, he knew that Max and Teddy were experiencing the same thing. It was too late to be swayed. “Must be in denial then. There were things I couldn’t see at first too. But sooner or later, babe, you are going to have to face the truth, as fucking terrible as it is.” He paused. “Have you tried talking to the hotel staff today? Or opening doors? Or have you seen anyone disappear?” That would prove it.
“What person? We’re the only two people here.” Hope looked around. The island had been strangely empty since this morning. It should have been crowded, but Hope had barely seen anyone. She’d seen her brother and he wasn’t even supposed to be on the island. The questions bothered her. *He* bothered her. The smugness of his too handsome face. The sheer horribleness and ridiculousness of what he was saying.
But Hope could see that he believed it. He completely believed this. She wanted to completely dismiss his questions. No she hadn’t talked to any staff. No she hadn’t opened any doors. But the last gave her pause. “My friends…” she started. But then she shook her head. “...You’re crazy. What happened to you today?”
As soon as she said the first two words, she regretted them.
Her friends. That was his in, and he couldn’t deny the sick pleasure he took in determining that. Misery loves company, as they say, and it was another cliche he now wholly understood. “Wellllll,” he started with feigned nonchalance, and he held up a hand, raising a finger with each point. “I woke up on a beach with no memory of how I got there, and I saw my friend, who is not supposed to be here, but he couldn’t see or hear me and I walked right through him. And then I started choking suddenly and I honestly thought I was dying, which is just hilarious in hindsight. I couldn’t get into the hotel- the doors wouldn’t recognize us- and the staff couldn’t see me either, and then, guess what, I ran into another friend who shouldn’t be here and she what?” He cupped a hand around his ear as if waiting for an audience to call it the answer, “ding ding ding, she also couldn’t fucking see me. And. And! In a plot twist I really didn’t see coming, the wing we were staying in? Yeah, it’s in fucking ruins.” He glanced over at his hand with a look of mock shock. “Well, shit, I ran out of fingers before I got to the kicker- trust me, you will love this. I saw Izzy.” He paused, and the look he gave her was suddenly serious. “I was talking to her and then suddenly, poof, she was gone. And when she came back, I saw her… I think she drowned, that’s how she died. She couldn’t breathe and her eyes went lifeless, and then she was coughing up water.” He fell silent but this time it wasn’t for effect, it wasn’t part of the joke. He frowned and averted his gaze, finally breaking character and looking truly traumatized. He felt the briefest pang of guilt over telling her all of this, and Izzy would kill him if she knew-
He had to laugh. It was too late for that. Someone had beat her to it.
“So. You could say it’s been a fucking day,” he finished dryly, but he was unable to fully hide how shaken up he still was.
He was getting way too much enjoyment out of telling her this, and Hope frowned. But she could also see that a lot of it was a front. He wanted to mess with her. Wanted a reaction. If you didn’t listen to the words themselves, he was doing exactly the kind of thing she would have made a point to ignore just to deny him that satisfaction. Hope wasn’t the type of girl who’d let a frat boy rattle her.
The problem was, even before she’d seen him sitting on the ground, Hope already was.
The other problem was that she could tell he was rattled too.
Maybe it was empathy. Maybe it was a distraction from hearing about Izzy’s death. Or maybe it was something else, a vestige of maternal instinct. But when Jack started talking about Izzy drowning, Hope reached over and put her hand over his hand.
It became a lot harder to ignore a thing when someone else was pointing out what deep down in Hope’s heart, she already knew. She didn’t want to acknowledge it, but Jack was forcing her to. She’d spent so much of her life scared that no one would believe what had happened to her. Now she was faced with someone making the same leap, and even though he meant it cruelly, she couldn’t quite bring herself to let him down.
“So if we’re dead,” Hope said, flickering in the light as she said the words. “What are we doing here then?”
The sudden contact made him frown, and then the guilt set in properly this time. He was an asshole, but here she was, extending a small kindness. Normally he would shrug it off, normally it wouldn’t register for him at all, but after a day of being ignored, of being invisible and intangible, the contact felt more soothing than he cared to admit. “Now that’s the million dollar question. I really don’t know. I don’t even know how long it’s been. Maybe this is normal when you die or maybe there’s something about this place that doesn’t want to let go.” The fight was draining out of him now that she was listening, really listening, and he shrugged helplessly. “I just want to know what the next step is.” Jack didn’t want to be dead. He didn’t want to vanish completely. But he also didn’t want this, whatever this was, and if there was no way to interact with the world or no way to come back, maybe a true death was preferable.
The part about him not knowing how long it had been disconcerted Hope as much as the rest of what she was trying to get a grip on. She looked at him with wild, unsure eyes, remembering seeing her brother on the tour. “If we’re dead and we’re still here, then we’re ghosts.” Her spine straightened.
“I know what my next step is.”
He nodded. It had seemed like something that didn’t need to be said. “We are very lame, ineffective ghosts but. What’s your plan then?” he couldn’t quite hide the flicker of genuine curiosity. He knew his was to make contact but the how of it was still up in the air. Jack wasn’t quite ready to tell her about Sydney, not out of some selfish desire to only save himself or out of distrust. He was afraid to voice it aloud in case nothing came of it, in case he could never really make himself understood by the living. But maybe they could all work together and maybe she would be a good asset. After all, she seemed awfully determined for someone who had only just realized the truth.
Her eyes steeled. “If someone drowned me. Drowned Izzy. I need to find out who it was.” He seemed to think they were ghosts because of where they died. Hope was more inclined to think it had to have been the how.
Jack inhaled sharply. Someone. He had never considered the possibility that maybe their deaths weren’t tragic accidents. “Fuck, you’re dark,” but there was a small amount of respect in his voice. He hadn’t thought she had it in her. “Maybe she just drowned. We’re on an island, surrounded by the ocean.” But he sounded less convinced by the word. On the beach, he had been too panicked, too focused on trying to breathe, that he hadn’t really analyzed what he had felt. But if he really considered it, the signs pointed towards not choking on but choked by. He swore his throat tightened at the memory, and he swallowed hard. “Who would want to kill us though?” he asked softly.
“So...Izzy drowned... And you died.... And I died.... And everyone on the beach this morning also died?...We just all happened to be on the same trip?” She shook her head. “No. Maybe a boat could have sank with all of us on it, but if it was some peaceful accident, why would we all be here?” She didn’t feel peaceful. Something had happened.
“I don’t know,” Hope said. “But we need to figure out who and why.”
Jack had never really stopped to think about what happened to people after they died. He had never especially believed in ghosts or heaven or hell. It was entirely possible that this was what the afterlife was like. But it was also entirely possible that she was right. . The terror was creeping back in, and he felt it again, a light, teasing pressure around his neck, and he raised a hand to his throat protectively. It was nothing. He couldn’t die again, he reassured himself. It was just fear. “I want to know the truth,” Jack agreed. “No matter what it is.”
She noticed the way his fingers moved to his throat and the gesture struck her as curious, but Hope didn’t comment. The sinking feeling in her chest made her doubt then that she was as convicted as he was. If she was dead, it was just easier to think about how it might have happened instead of that she was.
“I need to find my friends,” Hope said. Especially if they’d run into Jack before this. “If you find out anything, let me know okay? I’ll do the same.”
She looked at him and reached over and squeezed his hand, and then Hope was gone.