i think natalie often wished to see more of the jackie that was deep down, the one she could see once in a blue moon. not the popular captain – the vulnerable depressed when alone in her room jackie, the jackie who got all the girls to say nice things to each other because she didnt like her friends arguing, the jackie who looked like a wounded animal when shauna insulted her when all jackie could conjure up were movie quotes,

the jackie who didnt go inside that night, too idealistic in her concept that deep down – someone would have loved her enough to come outside and get her.

the concept that natalie felt that it was jackie’s heart that protected her that day, not the necklace. and the concept that jackie protected her because natalie was the only person to give respect to her remains after they ate her.

the necklace may have been a curse to the other girls, a signal they were next to die - but to natalie, that was jackies protection for her, keeping her safe. the second chance jackie wished she was given, she gave to natalie.

everyday i wake up and think about nat talking to jackies bones. like that scene is just engraved in my head so deeply. oh my doomed yuri jackienat…

thinking about right before the crash, jackie being told by the principal that the only reason shes captain of the team isnt because shes some outstanding soccer player, but because she has impact and influence over the other girls - the only one who can get them to be a team. then, she gets to the wilderness and gets that sense of purpose immediately taken from her, the thing she was told she was good at immediately eradicated the moment shes head first in a traumatic situation.

my top 5 yj girls btw. these are my angels

jackieshauna in the i saw the tv glow world is what i desperately want to see. (jackie as maddy and shauna as owen). shauna who slowly withers away with her inability to accept her queer and masc identity as she watches the only person who understood her disappear and fade into obscurity because she cant accept herself.

people always want misty final girl because it would make her have her ‘ultimate diva moment’, but in reality - the other girls are all she has to cling to in her life. the only sense of connection and understanding she has left in a world where no one understands her or wants connection with her, even if she understands that the other girls maybe dont like her as much as she loves them or think shes crazy and insane, theyre her sisters. misty final girl would equal misty in a horrible state of well being - not this grinning happy girl who finally killed everyone around her and is the last one standing. misty doesnt want to be the last one standing, she wants to be the person everyone relies on. in fact, mistys best ending in her mind would be for only her and another one of the girls to survive, so shes all they have left to rely on who understands what the wilderness was like, what trauma they experienced. she would adore to be the only girl another one feel they can connect to about the wilderness.

cant stop thinking about a version of jackie that escapes the wilderness - either the night of doomcoming or the night she and shauna finally break. she runs away from the cabin in the night, not because she thinks she’ll make it, but because dying alone far from that place feels less humiliating than dying outside in front of the girls who stopped seeing her as a person, let alone a captain, months ago.

she spends months wandering east, keeping the sun to her left in the afternoon like she over heard nat talk about once, always freezing and constantly on the edge of starvation. her survival skills are subpar at first and she almost dies of hypothermia multiple times, but the only reason she stays alive is the battered rifle she stole from the cabin stash when everyone fell asleep. at least when she kills a deer, the only person it has to feed is her now.

her aim is terrible for the first month but then, when your life depends on it every single day, you learn quick. shooting that shotgun becomes like muscle memory to her, the one thing in the wilderness that actually answers when she speaks. and by the time she comes across a group of hikers who are looking for some waterfall thats rumoured to be somewhere in the middle of the rockies - shes sunken eyed, feral and barely able to walk without staggering. they take her to safety, calling the local park rangers helpline who are quick to send a helicopter to pick up the ‘brave’ yellowjacket who survived months in the wilderness.

back home, she’s questioned for hours. jackie tells them everything exactly as it happened, well - at least the simple details. by the time she’s half way through, the case of the missing yellowjackets is rerouted to the polices main focus after months of it being a cold case summarised with a ‘presumed dead’ stamped on the news headlines. she turns eighteen and runs away the moment it happens, because nowadays staying home makes her feel more lost then when she was starving in the middle of nowhere.

months pass, and shes watching grainy news footage of her teammates being taken home from hospital in some bar in spain, halfway through a backpacking trip she cant really afford. she recognizes natalie’s eyes before the camera finds her face, more sunken then hers after they found her - if thats even possible.

the wilderness changed jackie. she goes by jax now, lives out her queer life in thailand where she drifts between beach towns and night markets, working odd jobs, keeping herself afloat with the money her parents send her. they hate how she lives, hate how far she’s fallen from the girl they groomed for being a suburban new jersey housewife to her teenage sweetheart jeff, but they keep sending thousands anyway, clinging to the fantasy she’ll come home someday and fit into their perfect mould.

sometimes, on the nights when the bars close early or she cant sleep after one too many coffees, jax scrolls through forums of unqualified obsessed ‘detectives’ and awfully written news articles about the famed yellowjackets. she pretends shes not looking for natalies name in the poorly researched ‘Yellowjackets Girls Soccer Tragedy - Where Are They Now?’ articles.

after a year or so she finds it though, a sign of life. its a paparazzi picture, a mugshot and a rehab facility. she could recognise that look in natalies eyes anywhere. hungry, hollow, surviving by a thread. jax envies her for still being close with some of the others as she scours reddit of evidence that taissa paid off her rehab bills. she envies her for the fact that shes not been frozen out of whatever pact all the girls back home seem to have. that they’ll all stay quiet, make no noise - no giving in to daytime shows offering hundreds of thousands just for a moment of hearing their tragic story, but most of all, that they still always know where each other are even in the most turbulent of times.

one night she sends an email to an address she shouldn’t have found, one that she did far too much digging to come across.

“you look more beaten up then van did after wrestling with that wolf.”

she doesn’t expect a reply, if some yellowjackets reddit page found the email then nats probably changed it already, but she hopes for one. leaving a small png attached to the bottom of the wilderness symbol she drew onto a napkin, the mole on her hand visible in the top right. weeks pass. then suddenly at 3am her phone lights up with a ping.

“Where are you?” is all it reads,

and then theres silence, until another email comes through,

“Jackie?”

and suddenly she’s 17 again, but older and with more scars, and the girl she had such a turbulent relationship with is reaching out like an olive branch that has bloodied thorns sticking out of it, but she knows she’ll grab it anyway.