this is a wild game of survival

(a 'yellowjackets' fic)

who's in the shadows, who's ready to play?

are we the hunters, or are we the prey?

there's no surrender, and there's no escape

are we the hunters... 

or are we the prey?

' we won't be hungry much longer '

***

Girls are vicious beasts.

They hide it well—sharp fangs concealed under glossed lips and eviscerating claws sheathed under bright manicures. And yet even with blunted fangs and filed-down claws, girls draw blood and tear flesh. A girl leaves you a ruin begging for more, sweet smiles bearing fangs and filed claws drawing blood, devouring in a kiss, in a hunger. And words are girls' weapons, poison spitting from their candy-hued and wind-chapped lips, dripping from their blood-hungry tongues. A girl is told to sit still, look pretty and be silent because with her fangs pulled out and her claws removed, her words are her knives, her words are the poison she picks, and men fear a woman when she uses words to question, to hurt, to pour venom into the system and corrode it from the inside out. They fear a woman who spits poison because she might regain her claws and her fangs. She might become a beast again, feral and vicious.

And girls are nothing but more vicious when around other girls.

Girls love each other. Girls hate each other. Girls support each other and tear each other down. Girls are protective and possessive of each other. Girls give each other sweet candy in one breath and bitter poison in the next. Girls whisper dark secrets they swear to never tell and then confess them the next day. Girls promise to look after each other and be true to each other, then stab you in the back and smile at the look of betrayal and anger in your eyes. Girls leave each other and argue, then beg to come back and refuse to let go. 

It is a never-ending cycle of love and hate when you are a girl and you love and hate your fellow girls. 

A girl can pretend all she likes that she isn't, that the beast is tamed and she wholly loves women and herself, but in the end, she will bite and devour girls and herself.

— Ophelia Hemmings is such a tamed girl-beast.

She had the dream life. Good family, good grades, good college. She was both academic and athletic, playing on the Yellowjackets soccer team as one of the defence, and she liked to think she was fucking good at it, even as she used it as an excuse to look good on college applications. Because college is her ticket out, a ticket out of the shithole that is Wisakoyk, a ticket to a college that she ensures she becomes one of the greatest forensic scientists in the world—the perfect outlet of her fascination for the morbid and macabre, and a way for her to make sure no other families go through the pain her family has gone through with an unsolved murder, the pain of losing your sister, your twin, your other half, two years ago. The cracks it leaves under the facade, the hopelessness and depression and drinks. The way even though her parents try to be there, Ophelia knows they're distant and neglectful, that when they see her they see her sister, the daughter they lost. 

And maybe they're right. Maybe Ophelia should have been the one taken, not Sabrina. Maybe Sabrina would always be their chosen daughter wished to live and her the graveyard daughter no matter what she did. Maybe her urge to go into forensics is another facet of guilt, of not being the dead twin, haunting her as Sabrina does. 

For there is no greater pain that losing your twin, the other half of your soul. And there is no greater rage than being unable to give her true peace when her murderer walks in society, free and anonymous. Of being unable to solve it, no matter how much red string and amateurish attempts at finding suspects you could make. No amount of soccer or shooting targets in an attempt to hark back to her father teaching her and Sabrina to shoot on the weekends quelled the rage and guilt festering and tangling inside her, choking her like an overgrown garden.

So when she helped win them the kick that secured their place at Nationals, Ophelia felt like she was on top of the world. Even when Ally's leg was broken, even with the disastrous party, Ophelia felt like nothing could change the course of her fate. Nothing. Not even a teammate with shaggy blonde hair and a husky voice.

Nothing could stop her from getting out and burying her sister's ghost, her sister's guilt, when she found the one who murdered her and ensure no one else lives with the pain. To let everything so desperately go.

She was a girl who was desperate to lose everything, until she found the one thing she wanted to have but couldn't.

— Liz Lawrence is a girl on the verge of becoming a beast.

Her life has been nothing but suffering and red-hazed, blood-stained anger. The screaming matches between her parents that had been present ever since the moment she was born, the violence she saw first directed to her mother, then to herself when she started talking—and more importantly, started talking back. The bruises and cuts she had taken from a drunken father, the beatings she took so her brother never could. Liz would be painted black and blue a hundred times if the monster that was their father never touched Owen.

At school, Liz refused to show any weakness. She was vicious and crass, she talked back and screamed curses at assholes. She smoked and drank and glared and punched at anyone that dared look at her wrong. She started fistfights and was delivered detentions. She let out all the explosive mess of emotion she had out onto vandalised lockers and the teenage creeps she pretended were her dad but never were, pretended she was hitting him but she never was. She let the rumours all her bruises were from fights. Some were. Most weren't.

Soccer was a place where her anger, her rage at the world, was let out in a healthy way. In the field, Liz liked to pretend the ball was her father, and she kicked and kicked at it so many times she was surprised it didn't explode in a mess of blood and brain and bone, that it didn't transmute into his face and spill that gore down and over her cleats.

The only good things in her life were the brother she adored and swore to protect—from the world, from their father's rage—and Bree Morgans. Her best friend from childhood and fellow soccer player, as deeply traumatised as her from parents—except it was a house fire and deaths, not the abuse of a man who was supposed to love and cherish you, treat you as his princess instead of his most hated enemy. And they worked—Bree was loud, angry and violent to Bree's cold, oftentimes emotionless, and perfectly rational. And somewhere the tenuous line of love and friendship blurred and Liz made herself promise she would graduate and she and Bree would live together as they were and take Owen with them, to live without violence and rumour. She was going to make that happen.

And with the Nationals guarantee, the guarantee that Liz could score a soccer scholarship and go to college alongside Bree—who would be in science—that plan seemed just a bit more possible. Not even Allie's broken leg would make that plan go up in flames.

She was a girl who had one thing to lose.

— Bree Morgans is a girl who denies her beast.

She lives by facts and logic—every thing has a rational explanation, a way the world works. And its the inner workings of the world that makes Bree's mind tick, seeks her to understand how and why it does, to look deeper into the biology of things and carve them open with her scalpel and study them underneath her microscope.

The world is a scalpel away from being sliced open and dissected, and she seeks to look for the answers in the blood and guts, down to the microscopic cells. And it makes her feel so very, very godly.

It is better than understanding people—people are complicated and messy, people are both fascinating and confusing. Bree wants to study what makes people tick, to see the explosion of emotions and wonder if she can copy that, to peel away what makes a person a person and wear it for herself—a skin to rip away and slip into and hide her abnormalities, her struggles with connection. She wants to take a scalpel to the very emotion of human beings in the hopes of understanding and make herself fit in among humans, a cold, hungry thing learning to be warm and tame. To be those people, no matter how hard it is. Especially with the rumours circling that she is not a real person, that no one could look so emotionless and detached when cutting a frog apart and taking out its guts, to feel its blood sliding her fingers and the slide under her scope, to touch the heart of an animal and not show any emotion.

It's even harder with the years-old rumour she actually started the fire that burned down her parents' home when she'd been only ten—to hide how she stabbed them to death. A rumour when she was the only one who was unscathed and showed no emotion at their funerals.

And it doesn't hurt, most of the time. Because maybe she is not human—maybe she is a thing of stone, with a heart as frozen as her face. A frigid god trapped in mortal form. Incapable of feeling anything, chilling any emotion that threatens to rise even as she attempts to feel, and it's a struggle. And it's not like science.

Science is clear. Science is easy.

Science is not people.

The soccer field and Liz Lawrence are the only things that can make Bree feel any emotion—soccer is passion unbridled, soccer is the adrenaline and thrill of competing, of winning. Soccer was the thing Liz asked her to do and she accepted because she loved Liz—angry, imperfect Liz, whose explosion of emotions thaws the ice trapping Bree's. She has no rational explanation, no frozen way, to explain what she feels for Bree, the blurs of friendship tipping into something more, something dangerous. Something frighteningly joyful. Something she didn't want to give up, to lose. A god falling so in love with a mortal and risk dooming each other.

With the win that guaranteed them Nationals, Bree knew they would win—that it would be the win that would mark that as cold as she was, she could feel triumph, to escape, and maybe live with Liz after graduation and learn even more to feel with her, to take a piece of her fiery heart and join it with her frozen one. To make her just a little bit more human, a little bit more human, a little bit more doomed.

She was a girl who had nothing left to lose except for one.

— Tatum Carson is a girl whose girl and beast have blurred and changed.

Tatum has lived wild and eccentric—never caring what anyone thinks of her, so much so one would think she is a child of the woods and not of the city, that her parents were hippies and not business moguls.

That her friends would be bird and beast, not Lottie Matthews.

The girls were best friends. Their mothers had known each other since children, and they wished their girls for the same. And it worked. The two were inseparable, so close you'd think they were one person at time. That Tatum's wildness and Lottie's calmness completed each other, merged together, making them a pair where one wasn't seen without the other.

Tatum and Lottie. Lottie and Tatum.

And Tatum adored Lottie—Lottie was her entire world. Tatum would give up everything, even her life, to keep Lottie. When they occasionally fought they'd always cry and beg for the other to not leave the other, to stay, and the friendship would be fixed. And even Tatum wondered herself if they were one person—she hardly knew where she ended and Lottie began, their lives and selves so tangled into each other it was agony to seperate.

And when Tatum was not with Lottie, at school or on the soccer field, she was wandering the woods, drawing into her sketchbook, painting with eccentric shapes and wild colours in the nature near Wisakoyk. Completely at home.

A home better than the one in town. Because it was here she could hear the forest, whispering to her, telling her to live as herself, to be bold and free. To be wild, to be a beast as much as she is a girl, to never be leashed and to always stay hungry until her hunger could be satisfied.

To never leave Lottie, because Lottie was important, and Tatum had to be by her side no matter what.

And Tatum was eager to listen—the forest, the wilderness, was her friend and her friend never betrayed her, not like how her parents did when they cheated and divorced one another. It never lied to her, not like her false friends did. And it never, ever tried to change her or make her think she was crazy like so many people did, whispering at seeing her paintings of woods and antler-crowned women and strange symbols and snowy woods with circles of girls dancing around alters with offerings of blood and flesh.

She was Alice and the wilderness was her Wonderland, until Lottie could also be Alice.

And Tatum had to keep Lottie, she just had to. And even without the wilderness, Tatum needed to have Lottie—she could never, ever lose her. She had to stay and Lottie could say the same, two girls who lived their whole lives orbiting around each other needing to collide to be even closer. To try and do the impossible and merge into one being.

Tatum would beg Lottie to stay, to adore her and worship her and never leave her or let her leave. And the feeling was reciprocated.

So when they won the state championships and headed to Nationals, Tatum let herself pray for one thing—that what happened after they got on the plane would not let her lose Lottie.

She was a girl who was desperate to keep the one thing she had—no matter what.

Four girls on the verge of beasts.

And the plane crash that dooms them all in the Canadian wilderness.

As the hope for rescue dwindles, a choice must be made, a choice all the Yellowjackets had to make as they remained in the wilderness, and the winter grew closer. As a force, a darkness, made girls into the monsters they've always been and the natural supernatural, the wilderness growing claws and teeth, hungry for the blood of girls and beasts, as Ophelia's haunting grows stronger and she grows closer with Natalie Scataroccio as they hunt for food, and Bree and Liz slip further past the divide of friendship and the divide between girlhood and beasthood, as Tatum falls even more into Lottie's orbit and they cling to each other tighter, becoming all but one.

And that when winter comes and the hunger calls for flesh and bone and the wilderness demands its blood sacrifice, when even twenty-five years later and in the belief that the survivors escaped the wilderness and the darkness and horrors within it but only to believe wrong, that they instead brought it with them, had it inside them, as it threatens to loosen the dark secrets they kept so well-hidden, they must make that choice.

Become girl-beasts again.

Become the hunter... or the hunted.

***

' and let the darkness set us free '

Cast

Natalia Dyer as Ophelia Hemmings (teen)

and

Zoe Kazan as Ophelia Hemmings (adult)

Sophia Lillis as Elizabeth "Liz" Lawrence (teen)

and

Bryce Dallas Howard as Elizabeth "Liz" Lawrence (adult)

Letitia Wright as Bree Morgans (teen)

and 

Lupita N'yongo as Bree Morgans (adult)

and 

Maya Hawke as Tatum Carson (teen)

and

Courtney Cox as Tatum Carson (adult)

with

the 'yellowjackets' cast as themselves

Timeline

yj s1-2

Warnings

This fic contains mentions or descriptions of: Swearing, underage drinking, drugs, abuse, guns, horror/supernatural themes, blood and gore, mental illnesses, trauma, survivor's guilt, cults, toxic relationships, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and cannibalism. This is rated as Mature and should be read with caution

Dedications

To my lovely peeps: stilestastic, starryeyedturtle, and harringtonsss. You guys rule <3

Author's Note

So... the Yellowjackets bug has bitten me 

Anyway... welcome! I am literally obsessed with Yellowjackets and had to make a fic for it, and I am literally so excited for it! However, I want to wait until I finish my Stranger Things fics before I focus on writing this, so until then it will be marked as Coming Soon

Also, I think I did pretty okay with the casting choices (but I have to give credit to starryeyedturtle for observing how Natalia and Zoe look EERILY similar to each other)

So, the relationships are: Ophelia x Natalie (hunter gfs/strangers to friends to lovers), Bree x Liz (friends to lovers) and Tatum x Lottie (cult leader and right hand gfs/codependent friends to toxic lovers), and I hope you like them. Tatum x Lottie is VERY codependent and a bit unhinged, Bree x Liz is slightly less unhinged, and Ophelia x Natalie is gonna be the least toxic/most sane out of them all in both the teen and adult years (also, no Nat and Travis, they're just friends in this)

So, the way this is gonna go is that there will be Then chapters (the characters as teens/in the wilderness in 1996) and Now chapters (the characters as adults twenty-five years later), and the acts will be divided into the seasons. I know basically every Yellowjackets fic has the teen and adult arcs in seperate acts, but it makes more sense for me to do this

Overall, I hope you enjoy this fic!

GhostWriterGirl out!

Disclaimer

I don't own Yellowjackets, all rights go to the creators and Showtime, and neither do I own any gifs used. I only own my characters and this story. So please don't copy :)