FIC: One Last Time (Thirteen PLL Endings)
I. Return to Camelot
Aria wakes up to sunlight streaming in through the wooded slats of Spencer’s barn. Last night’s storm must have blown itself out, which is great for their flight to Reykjavik probably being on time this afternoon, not so great for the present moment of the light making her eye sockets throb with pain. She puts a hand to her temple, flinching at the feel of her friendship bracelet brushing against her forehead.
She hears shuffling noises in the corner, manages to turn just enough to see Emily blushing furiously, as she zips up her blue Sharks hoodie and stuffs her bra into one of the pockets. Alison’s yellow tank top is crumpled in the corner, and Ali herself is pulling the t-shirt that Em was wearing last night over her head with a smile like the cat who ate a whole flock of canaries on her face.
Aria can’t be bothered to wonder about whatever they’re up to. Not when she’s groggy and her head feels like it’s been replaced with a bowling ball full of sand. And there’s no use trying to figure out Alison anyway. The Queen B is her own law, and secrets have always been her favorite currency.
Spencer moans as she gingerly stands up, then staggers over towards the hot plate to try and make coffee.
“What was in those drinks last night?” Aria asks, her voice cracking and a little hoarse. “I feel like I was drugged.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alison breezes. “You gals just can’t hold your liquor.”
“Seriously,” Hanna groans, her face a delicate shade of green. “I feel like I got hit by car.”
“I woke up like three times,” Spencer yawns. “I thought I heard a scream.”
Emily starts coughing, her face bright red, as Alison pats her smoothly on the back.
“No one screamed,” Alison scoffs. “You were probably having that anxiety dream about your French final again.” She casts a sidelong look at Emily as she says it, batting her eyelashes and leaning towards her a little. Emily gives her a shy smile in return and scoots towards Ali just enough so that their shoulders are touching.
Aria feels a tingle of deja vu, a murky sense that she knows something, she’s just not sure what.
There’s a loud buzzing from underneath her pillow. She reaches for her clumsily for her phone. As she blurrily tries to focus on the text from her mom, it hits her in a flash. A nightmare landscape of anonymous text message and faceless stalkers and Alison missing and an underground bunker and long lost sisters and red coats and black hoodies.
“Aria, are you okay?” Spencer asks, a concerned look on her face.
“I’m fine,” Aria tells her, shaking her head to clear out the residual strands of panic and fear. “I had a really crazy dream.”
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II. Boys Will Be Boys
“You?” Hanna exclaims, stunned. “You’re dead!”
Wilden laughs as he grabs her by the hair. “Have you forgotten where you are, little girl? This is Rosewood. Guys like me don’t go easy.”
“You killed Charlotte,” Alison says, spitting in his face as he checks the ropes binding her wrists.
“She outlived her usefulness,” he says, coldly.
“Why?” Spencer asks, still pleading for answers. “Why would you do this to us?”
His face contorts into an ugly sneer. “You still haven’t figured it out? After all this time?”
He kicks Emily’s unconscious body into a hastily dug grave in the Hastings backyard, then looks at the bound and gagged Aria appraisingly. He tosses her in on top of Emily, apparently deciding she’s small enough to fit.
“Don’t keep us guessing,” Spencer says, goading him. “You want to tell us. You won’t let us die without telling us the reason.”
“The reason?” He moves closer to her, until the tip of his nose is almost touching hers. “A detective to the end.” His voice drops to a hiss. “Little Sister.”
“No,” Alison says. “No. What are you saying?”
“Oh, is it finally falling into place now?” His voice is dripping with sarcasm and contempt. “You girls don’t know everything after all! How else do you think all that evidence got planted against you? How could someone have access to every single security feed in town? A badge and a gun and a smile will get you some truly amazing things. Did you think I helped Jessica cover up all of her dirty work out of the goodness of my heart? Because I didn’t. It’s who I am. I was born to it. I’m Charles.”
“Are you crazy?” Hanna scoffs. “I mean, obviously yes - you’re cuckoo for CoCo Puffs! But Charlotte was Charles. We know that.”
“Charlotte was a patsy. We never imagined anyone would believe that ridiculous story! It had more holes than a colander made of Swiss Cheese.”
“I don’t understand,” Alison tells him. “If you’re Charles, who was she?”
“An old friend of mine. From Radley. Your father did lock me up and throw away the key. Just because I tried to kill you a few dozen times when you were a baby. But boys will be boys, right? No need to ruin my life over a squalling little girl!”
He’s so intent on his story, he never sees the shadowy figures sneaking up behind him. Melissa Hastings shoves him to the ground as Mona Vanderwaal pounces on him with a rock in hand. She bashes him over the head repeatedly, until the back of his head is smashed in, and he’s thoroughly and unquestionably dead.
Melissa is already untying Spencer and the others, as Mona hops into the freshly dug grave to haul Emily and Aria out. Once that’s done, Melissa uses the toe of her Tory Burch boots to roll him over until he flops unceremoniously to the bottom of the hole.
“I brought shovels,” Mona offers, brightly. She hands them out and everyone slowly gets to work heaving the nearby mound of dirt over him. Melissa makes a call and Jason shows up half an hour later with three large rose bushes which they use to make the whole thing look like an intentional planting project.
“It’s over,” Mona declares, brushing the dirt off her hands when they’re finished. “For good this time.”
“And since he was already supposed to be dead, no one’s going to come looking for him,” Melissa nods.
“But what about Archer?” Spencer asks, her face white and pinched. “Tanner was breathing down our necks, she has evidence -”
“Had evidence, Sweetie,” Mona responds, patting her on the elbow.
“Dad got it tossed,” Melissa explains. “And the police just discovered an extra key to Lucas Gottesman’s car at the Kahn cabin. Along with a bloody sweatshirt with Archer’s blood and Noel’s DNA all over it. And Archer’s missing credit card. Even Tanner can follow that trail. So it’s case closed.”
“What do we now?” Emily asks, still a little dazed.
“We get on with our lives,” Alison answers, a smile slowly breaking over her face. “Who’s up for a sleepover?”
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III. Double Vision
“This is it,” Spencer says, barely able to suppress her excitement. She’s sitting elbow to elbow with the others in a black van that Mona has rigged up for mobile surveillance.
“I don’t like this plan,” Emily protests. “Why can’t we just go to Tanner with what we know?”
“Because we have no proof,” Hanna says, throwing up her hands. “And she’s never going to believe that some rando is walking around town wearing Spencer’s face.”
“Shh,” Aria says, motioning for quiet. “She’s on the move.”
They watch in silence as Spencer’s doppelganger leaves the Radley and hurries to a silver SUV. It’s an identical match to Spencer’s own car.
Mona follows her from a distance, headlights off, as they head towards the Lost Woods resort. Not-Spencer gets out of her car and looks furtively over her shoulder as she steps quickly into Room 2.
Mona parks out of sight, gliding soundlessly to a stop, as they all pile out of the vehicle.
“Ready?” Alison asks.
“Ready,” Emily confirms, clutching a taser in hand.
Aria nods, unclipping a can of pepper spray from her belt.
They swarm towards the room and Mona rigs a small explosive charge to the lock. At the push of a button, it explodes with a flash.
The six of them move into the room under the cover of a cloud of smoke. There’s instant confusion as they’re attacked from all sides by what seems like a small crowd of unseen foes.
As the smoke clears, Hanna finds herself with her hands around Spencer’s throat.
“Hanna, what are you doing?” her assailant gasps. “It’s me!”
“It’s not,” Spencer shouts, from where she’s tussling with Aria. “I’m the real Spencer!”
“Wait,” another Aria protests, “Who’s that?”
“Oh my god,” Alison says, looking around in shock. “We all have twins?”
“Isn’t it great?” Charlotte asks, clapping her hands with glee. She puts a hand to her mouth and does her best Oprah impression. “You get a twin! And you get a twin! And you get a twin!”
“You’re not the real Aria,” Emily cries, pointing to the one fighting Spencer. “You have beef jerky in your pocket!”
“And this Hanna’s roots are badly done,” Mona shouts, kicking Hanna’s twin with the lesser dye job to the ground.
“Em,” one of the Alison’s says, crouching behind her girlfriend. “We need to get out of here. All this violence, it’s not good for the baby!”
“That’s not me,” the other Alison shouts as she trades blows with a possibly fake Mona.
“Emily,” the first Alison says, “you know me. You know every inch of my body.” She grabs Emily and kisses her hard. The moment they break apart, Emily tasers her, knocking her to the floor.
“She opened her mouth,” Emily says. “And I knew.”
Lights and sirens flash outside, and Detective Tanner appears in the doorway. “I have arrest warrants for all of you!” she declares triumphantly. She gasps and her eyes go wide as she takes in the sight in front of her.
“Arrest her,” the Spencer’s say simultaneously, pointing at one another.
“And her,” the Arias and Hannas and Alison’s and Emily’s and Mona’s echo, all pointing wildly around the room, from which Charlotte has already disappeared.
“No son Lindas,” a new voice says, as an identical Tanner twin emerges from the middle of the fray.
Tanner’s eyes roll back in her head and she faints dead away.
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IV. Season 60b
“I think ‘A’ stole my bifocals,” Spencer grumbles, making her way slowly over to the rocker on the porch of the Radley Nursing Home.
“They’re on your head, Hun,” Alison tells her. “But Emily got a threatening hologram about her orthopedic shoes.”
“And they took the jello off my dinner tray last night,” Hanna complains.
“Are you sure you didn’t eat the jello and then forget?” Aria asks, looking up from the orange and pink zebra print afghan she’s knitting.
“Hanna’s never wrong about jello,” Emily replies.
“I’m just saying, it’s hard to keep track,” Aria says, counting her stitches. “Most days, I can’t even remember who I’m supposed to be in a love triangle with anymore.”
“I have a plan,” Spencer declares, setting down her large print Agatha Christie novel.
“You’ve been saying that every day for the past fifty-five years,” Alison points out. “I’m not missing bingo.”
“Last time you led us on that wild goose chase through the kitchen, we knocked over all those juice carafes! I had glass in my hair for a week!” Emily shakes her head.
“And he was wearing those gloves because he’s the dishwasher,” Hanna reminds them.
“It’s going to work this time,” Spencer promises, brandishing her cane like a weapon. “We’ll stake out Emily’s locker when she goes to water aerobics. If ‘A’ makes a move to steal her shoes, we’ll be there!”
“Can we get my jello back?” Hanna asks.
“Yes!” Spencer promises eagerly.
“Then I’m in,” Hanna sighs. “I’ll ask Mona to help us.”
“Why?” Spencer huffs.
“Because she’s my friend,” Hanna replies. “And besides, she has a mobility scooter.
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V. Mr. Nice Guy
A masked figure is sipping whiskey with a gloved hand, watching several live feeds on a wall of monitors in front of him.
In the loft, Hanna is preparing for bed. Aria is up late at Fitz’s, typing on her computer. He types a few keystrokes and calls up a screen that mirrors her laptop. She’s working on revisions for the book. Boring. Spencer is at the barn, reading The Art of War. Emily and Alison are at the DiLaurentis house, cuddling in front of the television. Mona is spying on Caleb, who’s standing in a doorway across the street from the loft, trying to keep Hanna safe.
He should do something, make a move. Menace someone with a car. Erase the whole hard drive of Aria’s computer. Send a cryptic text. He yawns. Or maybe he’ll just hang out and play Minecraft.
There’s a loud bang, and the door to the lair flies off its hinges. All the Liars plus Caleb, Mona and Detective Tanner burst in.
He presses a button to set off the tear gas canisters, give him time to jump out a window during the smoke. But they don’t go off. He hits another button, one that should activate a plank of hidden spikes to fall on them from the ceiling. Nothing.
“Give it up,” Mona tells him. “We traced the signal.”
“And we hacked your feed,” Caleb adds.
“We disabled all your little party tricks,” Spencer says, leaning against the door frame.
He’s too stunned to move.
“Lucas Gottesman,” Tanner says, pulling out a pair of handcuffs. “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent-”
“I don’t understand,” Hanna says, her face pale and drawn. “You were my friend.”
“I just wanted you to notice me!” he exclaims. “I didn’t want to hurt you! I thought - I thought I could make you really scared and then rescue you! But you kept rescuing yourself! So I had to keep going if I ever wanted to break myself out of the friend zone!”
“You’re insane,” Aria says, putting a protective arm around Hanna’s shoulders.
“She made me this way,” he protests, gesturing at Alison with his cuffed hands. “She made fun of me!”
Tanner gives him a shove in the small of his back. “Get going. You can tell us all about it at the station.”
“No one made you do this,” Emily says as they head for the door.
“How can you say that?” he asks, insulted. “I’m a nice guy!”
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VI. Everybody A
“It was me all along,” Jason DiLaurentis says, scowling. “I sent those text messages. I needed to make sure you weren’t going to rat me out to Dad about the NAT stuff.”
“But it was me who started following you around in a dark hoodie,” Wren Kingston declares, shoving Jason out of the way. “It was my idea to do psychological experiments on you all! Just for a bit of fun.”
“Idiots,” Melissa Hastings snarls. “I perfected it. I turned the whole thing into a game.”
“I was better than any of you,” Ezra scoffs. “I had the most cameras.”
“Actually,” Lucas mutters, “I had more. Plus I had sound.”
“I got the closest to actually killing them,” Shana Fring shrugs. “That oughta put me on the top of the pile.”
“Um, I locked them in an underground torture bunker,” Charlotte snarks. “For months.”
“But I tricked Alison into marrying me,” Archer Dunhill laughs.
“I shot Spencer,” Jenna counters. “And they shake in their fashion boots whenever they hear my cane.”
“I faked my own death to drive Spencer insane,” Toby laughs. “God, that was fun.”
“You’re all amateurs,” Mona says, flipping her dark hair over her shoulder. “Accept no substitutions. I clearly set the tone.”
Eddie Lamb pats her on the back. “You sure did, little lady. But you couldn’t have kept it up if I wasn’t smuggling you in and out of Radley.”
“And I helped with the spiritual elements of the game, considerably,” Pastor Ted admits. “God loves putting people through trials. So motivational.”
“I helped, though,” Sean adds. “I wanted to punish them for their loose ways.”
“I just like to watch,” Holden grins. “It’s nothing personal.”
A fistfight breaks out between Garrett, Lorenzo, and Holbrook over who planted more evidence, and the Liars use the argument as a distraction to cover them sneaking out of the Fitzgerald Theater through the backstage exit. Once they’re out, they double back to lock everyone else inside.
“Mona’s got it all recorded,” Hanna says with a big smile.
Alison rolls her eyes as she dials 911.
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VII. Everybody Gay
“Everybody get down!” Emily shouts, as a round of gunfire shatters the front window of the Brew.
“Whoever this is, they aren’t messing around,” Hanna mutters as a Moltov co*cktail skitters across the floor in their direction.
Aria kicks it away and leads them on quick retreat to barricade themselves in Ezra’s office.
There’s the sound of an explosion from outside and smoke starts to waft under the door.
Spencer picks up the landline on the desk. “The phone line’s been cut.”
Alison clutches Emily’s hand as Mona calmly rolls up her suit jacket and shoves uses it to seal the door.
There are heavy footsteps approaching. They’re almost here.
Just then, the bookcase behind the desk swings forward, revealing a secret passage.
“Come on,” Paige McCullers, hisses. “Through here!”
They hurry into the passageway as Paige locks the entrance behind them. She shepherds them down a flight of stairs and into an underground electrical tunnel where Talia Sandoval is waiting with a fleet of ATVs.
“What is this?” Alison asks, suspiciously.
“Are you serious?” Paige asks incredulously. “It’s the Queer Women’s Underground Escape Network. This town is brutal when it comes to burying its gays.”
“I’m not complaining,” Aria says, climbing on the back of Spencer’s ATV. “But I’m actually not-”
“Please,” Alison scoffs. “Like we haven’t been watching you make moony eyes at Spencer since we were all in tenth grade?”
“What about you?” Emily whispers to Hanna.
“What?” Hanna replies, indignantly. “You think Mona and I never -”
“Shush,” Mona cuts her off. “A lady doesn’t kiss and tell.”
Talia leads them on a wild ride for at least twenty miles of tunnel. They emerge by climbing up through a manhole in the back of the Radley parking lot.
Samara signals to them from behind a tree, and the run through the woods after her until they get to a large clearing with a small plane running and at the ready.
Alison hops into the co*ckpit and the others strap themselves in. They follow the flight plan, landing in an abandoned industrial park on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Sabrina tosses them the keys to her car. There’s a map in the glove compartment with a rendezvous point marked for a dock off the south coast of Florida.
They get there at dawn, to find Maya St. Germain lolling on the deck of a sailboat. “Well, well,” she says, batting her eyelashes in Emily’s direction. “Look who finally turned up.”
She welcomes them aboard, then casts off the line, setting a course for a small island off the coast of Cuba.
“This really isn’t so bad,” Spencer grins, lounging on the deck and running a hand slowly down Aria’s side. Emily and Alison are holding hands and sitting in adjoining deck chairs. Hanna and Mona aren’t in sight, but judging by the noises coming from below deck, they certainly seem to be enjoying themselves.
The island appears on the horizon, a lush paradise of waterfalls and beaches. Alison squints at the shore, trying to make out the face of the two women waiting on shore to greet them.
It’s Charlotte DiLaurentis, waving happily with the hand that isn’t resting on Melissa Hastings hip.
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VIII. Nobody
Aria kicks the masked figure off the balcony. He falls like a sack of bricks, but lands on top of Spencer and Hanna. Spencer tases him, as Hanna claws at his face.
Mona flings herself on top of the pile, hitting him in the back of the head with a weaponized heel spike. Hanna takes advantage of the distraction and manages to pin his wrists long enough for Spencer to slap a pair of Marco’s handcuffs on him.
Alison hauls him to his feet as Emily covers him with her dad’s gun.
Hanna smacks him across the face, hard enough to knock the hood down. Mona reaches over and pulls down the bandana covering the bottom half of his face.
Ben Coogan spits in her eye.
”You?” Alison says, coldly. “You’re nobody!”
Emily’s face is a mask of shock and confusion. “Why?” she says, with genuine pain in her voice. “Why would you do this?”
“You think I didn’t know?” he says, bitterly. “All those times you bailed on our plans at the last second, because Alison needed something? You were supposed to be my girlfriend! Mine!”
“So find a new girlfriend!” Hanna suggests. “Don’t spend seven years on some weird hom*ophobic vendetta against all of us!”
“You’re all just as bad,” Ben announces, sounding unhinged. “You lead guys on, you break their hearts for fun! You don’t care about anyone but each other!”
“Can you believe it?” Spencer deadpans. “When we could have had our pick of predatory Rosewood men?”
“Wait,” Aria says, having just made it down the stairs. “It’s Ben? But - he’s nobody! I haven’t even thought about him in years!”
“I’ve thought about you,” he says, darkly. “All of you. The way Hastings always blew the curve in Trig. The time I changed a flat tire for you, Aria. And you didn’t even let me get to first base.”
“Because you were dating my best friend,” Aria replies, sounding disgusted.
“Who was sneaking off to the Kissing Rock with her perverted little girlfriend.”
“Give it a rest,” Hanna tells him. “I can’t believe we spent all that time being scared of a stupid little boy who’s obviously spent way too much time on Reddit.”
The sound of sirens approaching is getting louder. The police will be arriving any moment now.
“You’re a bunch of emasculating bitches!”
Alison shrugs. “At least we’re not mushy squash.”
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IX. Sometimes the Villain Wins
Emily still cries when she thinks about it. Two days after the blow up, after they caught Aria red handed and black hoodied in the woods, she walked up the stairs to Ezra’s apartment to find the whole place empty. Cleaned out. Blank walls. Like no one had ever been there.
They were gone. Ella said maybe to Italy. Aria called her from the airport to say they were eloping.
They’d all been so angry. Emily could still feel the white hot rage that tore through her at the thought of Aria throwing blood on their beautiful white crib. Of her wrecking the mobile Emily’s dad had made when she was a baby.
But the anger wasn’t permanent.
Something else would happen. Some new crisis would rear up. They’d all have to work together and be friends again.
But the only thing that happened was Aria and Ezra being gone.
The game stopped.
The batteries ran out and it triggered a self-destruct that singed Mona’s eyebrows, left a black scorch mark on the ceiling of her apartment.
The case against them for Archer Dunhill’s disappearance went away. Mary Drake set a fire in the evidence room on her way out of town, and Peter Hastings dug up some dirt on Tanner. Emily never finds out what it was, but it was enough to convince her to declare Sara Harvey the likely perpetrator. Case closed.
For the first year, they’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It never does.
A is gone.
And so is Aria.
“It was him,” Spencer declares. “It was him all along.”
This is the thought that twists Emily’s stomach into knots at night. If they’d told someone, anyone. If Ezra had been led away in handcuffs for sleeping with an underage student. If that could have prevented everything else that came after. If Aria would have been standing there with the rest of them in the delivery room when Joy was born. If. If. If.
“It was him,” Spencer says, every time they see her. She says it over coffee. Over drinks. When they’re out running early in the morning. It’s burned into consciousness, a mantra of self-reproach.
They all feel it, more or less, even if Spencer is the only one who can’t shut up about it.
They should have known. They knew Cece was working for him. They knew he had cameras everywhere once. That he kept files on everyone. That he didn’t think laws applied to him.
“It was him,” Spencer says, over Thanksgiving dinner.
“Unless it wasn’t,” Hanna says, bitingly. She’s been drinking straight vodka since noon, has drowned all the f*cks she has left to give.
Everyone at the table freezes at her words.
“It wasn’t her,” Alison says firmly, putting a restraining hand on Spencer’s arm.
“I’m just saying,” Hanna says, waving her arms emphatically. “We obviously didn’t know either of them as well as we thought.”
“She was our friend,” Emily insists, quietly.
“Well they’re gone and we’re here and one way or another it’s over!” Hanna says, her words slurring a little. “Believe whatever you want! That she didn’t know! That she didn’t choose him! Maybe they’re both innocent little lambs and the day they scampered off, a piano just happened to drop out of the sky on the real A’s head! But I’m done, Spencer! I’m done talking about it and theorizing about it and tearing myself to pieces over it!”
“It was him,” Spencer repeats, coldly. She walks out of the room and out of the house and out of Hanna’s life for good.
She tells Emily the first time she hires a private investigator. She doesn’t mention hiring the second or the third or the eighteenth.
Alison tries to discourage her from recruiting Mona to blue snarf Ezra’s brother. It’s a dead end. They’re not in touch with him either.
Spencer refuses to believe it.
She gets arrested breaking into Wesley’s apartment, spends a week in jail before Peter can grease enough palms to smooth the whole thing over. A month later she gets caught trying to infiltrate the offices of the Fitzgerald Foundation with a stolen security badge.
Mike gets married. Byron gets sick. Ella’s face is thin and haunted.
Aria never comes back. Never even calls.
Spencer hires a forensic accountant. She goes undercover at the publishing house to find out where the book royalties go. The answer is nowhere. They build up in an unused account in the Cayman Islands. Spencer flies down there, tries to pay Caleb to hack the bank’s mainframe. He calls Veronica. Veronica sends Spencer to rehab, hoping the fourth time will be the charm.
When she gets out, she’s wild eyed. She believes Charlotte is alive. She wants to go back down to the Doll House and search for clues they might have missed.
“She might be his prisoner,” Spencer says, her voice breaking. “She might be dead. He could still be playing the game with her! Torturing her! She might be married to him and never know!”
They read about Hanna’s third marriage in the tabloids. She’s divorced from both Caleb and Lucas, and Emily caught her stumbling out of a room at the Radley with Mona the last time they were supposed to meet for brunch.
Emily watches Alison tucking in the girls at night and feels grateful that all the drama, all the pain, somehow led them here. This house. This family. This steady love.
One day, she’s standing on the bed, balancing with one foot on the window sill as she tries to hang a new curtain rod. The sunlight streams in with the curtains temporarily down, glinting off something small and metallic, embedded in the fancy scrollwork above the antique dresser mirror.
She stands perfectly still, tries not to look directly at it. Continues with her curtain project and pats the duvet until the bed looks smooth and undisturbed. She calls Ali, who calls in Mona, who traces the satellite feed to a remote cottage in the south of Iceland.
It’s the best lead they’ve had in ten years.
They take Hanna’s plane.
Spencer is vibrating with nervous energy as they hike across a lava field with a compass.
There’s no one there when they reach the darkened house. It’s dusty and abandoned, but with a bank of screens still running a video feed. The DiLaurentis Fields bedroom. Spencer’s barn. Hanna’s penthouse. Mona’s townhouse. The Radley.
Spencer finds a newspaper wadded up in the fireplace that’s only six months old.
She turns to Emily, her eyes bright and shining with tears.
He’s still out there.
Maybe she is, too.
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X. What Lies Beneath
Mona is dressed in a fashionable white lab coat, studying a vial of clear liquid. Leslie Stone adjusts her glasses and uses an eyedropper to draw a sample, which she drips carefully onto a litmus strip.
She studies the results carefully before turning to Mona.
“Oh my god,” Leslie mutters. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“The Carissimi Group,” Mona observes. “They’ve been contaminating Rosewood’s water supply for years! Hallucinogens! Poppers! Bath Salts! The entire ‘A’ game is nothing but a mass hallucination!”
“But these other compounds,” Leslie says, putting some of the water onto a slide and studying it closely under the microscope. “ I’ve never even seen before. This chemical co*cktail, over time, in conjunction with the mind altering serotonergics - this has the be the root cause.”
Spencer bursts into the room, flanked by Hanna, Emily, Alison, and Aria. She yanks a clipboard out of Mona’s hands and quickly scans the results.
“It’s a toxic stew,” she declares. “Phosphorus. Astatine. Rhenium. Argon. Carbon. Hydrogen. Ytterbium.”
“Speak English,” Hanna requests. “Not Chemikawhatsit.”
“Altogether, these trace elements would bond into a poisonous mucky goo,” Mona explains.
“So this is it?” Emily asks. “This is the reason for everything that’s happened to us?”
“It tracks,” Spencer declares, as she begins feverishly writing out the chemical formula on a whiteboard.
P At Re Ar C H Y
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XI. Sharked
“We need to figure out who AD is,” Spencer says, spreading a diagram of the Radley on the countertop.
“It’s me,” Sara Harvey exclaims, as she bangs a gloved fist against the window. “Haven’t you learned anything? I’m behind everything in this town!”
“Did you hear something?” Emily asks.
“I don’t know what happened,” Hanna mutters. “I got so bored for a second, my eyes just glazed over.”
“I know,” Alison yawns. “But we have to solve this somehow.”
Sara storms into the house. “It’s me,” she shouts. “I’m AD! I wanted to show you all! That I’m still relevant!”
Her reveal is met by the sound of group snoring. At the sound of her voice, all the Liars have fallen asleep.
“Fine,” she snarls. “That’s just fine!”
She stomps off towards the bathroom to leave a menacing mirror message. As soon as she’s done with her shower.
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XII. Normal Again
Alison is writing her name on the chalkboard.
Mrs. Rollins.
Her friends burst into the room. “It’s too late! He’s here!”
Spencer grabs Alison roughly by the shoulder and propels her out into the school hallway.
“Go!” she shouts at them. “Get her out. I’ll hold him off!”
She sees Aria’s leopard print heels careening around the corner, sees Emily grab Alison’s hand as they hurry after her. Hanna alone stops and looks back at her for a long moment before she, too, breaks into a run.
Spencer hears their footsteps echoing as they sprint at full speed towards the exit to the faculty lot. She turns to face the hooded figure moving towards her.
“Spencer!” a familiar voice calls, sounding muzzy and distant. “Spencer!”
In a white padded room at Radley Sanitarium, Spencer tears the sleeve of her hospital gown as she knocks over a metal tray of pills.
“It’s you,” she yells, frantically. “You’re A!”
“You’re safe,” Wren Kingston promises in his most patient voice. “There’s no more A.”
“I need to warn the others!” Spencer shouts. She holds her empty hands in midair and makes typing motions with her thumbs. She looks around the room, her eyes wild. “Why won’t they answer? They never answer!”
“They can’t answer,” he says, gently. “You know they can’t. Some part of you knows it. Think, Spencer. You remember. There was a fire. Thornhill Lodge burnt to the ground.” He taps the wedding ring on his finger. “Melissa barely managed to pull you out in time.”
He looks at the white burn marks that cover most of Spencer’s right arm. Thinks unwillingly of the lighter Melissa found clutched in her hand. They disposed of it, of course. Peter Hastings discreetly bribed the fire marshall for a verdict of faulty wiring.
“No,” Spencer whispers as she rocks back and forth in her chair. “No. No. No.”
Wren shakes his head and makes a notation on her chart. Every day, the same note.
Six years of the same six words.
Diganosis: Persistent dissociative state. Condition unchanged.
----------------------------------
XIII. Blow Us All Away
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Mona asks. “Because once it’s done, there’s no going back.”
Spencer looks around at her friends. “Anyone not feeling sure?” She smiles a ghost of her old smile, a sad echo from the time before.
“I’m all in,” Hanna says, raising her hand. “What about the rest of you?”
The other girls raise their hands, a look of grim determination on each of their faces.
“This is it,” Alison says. “This is how it ends.”
Mona types a code into a device she’s attached to the base of the cell tower they’re standing under. Below them, the town of Rosewood is silent and still. An electromagnetic pulse is loosed over the town, triangulated with two other towers where Caleb and Melissa are stationed.
“That’s enough to wipe out any hard drive, flash drive, cell phone, or security camera down there,” Mona announces. “The servers at the police station will be fried. The power grid is sparking.”
Any final traces of evidence about their involvement with Rollins are erased. Dust motes in the cybernetic universe. The stand together quietly, watching for the next signal.
Finally a red flare streaks across the sky, launched from Melissa’s position.
“She’s made contact with my mom,” Spencer says, relieved. “Get ready for Phase II.”
Twenty minutes later, the Pennsylvania National Guard rolls into town and starts evacuating residents per the governor’s order. With the Rosewood section of the power grid failing, no emergency services available, and rumors of a gas leak beneath the Radley - they waste no time in getting the populace out. They move house to house, knocking on doors and shuffling people into emergency buses to shuttle them to a temporary Red Cross shelter over in Ravenswood.
They watch everyone being hustled out of town with a fascinated detachment, like watching the tunnels of an ant farm.
“It’s going to be a new beginning,” Alison says firmly, seeing Emily staring out at the room of her old house.
Five hours later, the troops declare the evacuation complete and roll out, erecting road blocks around the perimeter. A flare shoots up from Caleb’s location.
“Phase Three, Motherf*ckers,” Hanna says with a smirk.
The whir of a drone cuts through the darkness. It lowers itself towards the ground, hovering at waist height. Aria pulls out a package of fireworks and fastens them to the underside of the machine.
“I love you guys,” Spencer says, as they light the fuses together.
They don’t waste any time once the drone is airborne. They pile quickly into Spencer’s SUV and tear off at top speed towards the Philadelphia airport.
They see the fireball flash reflected in the rearview mirror, feel the ground shake under their wheels as the town explodes.
It’s all behind them now. The bodies. The blackmail. Sometimes the only way to win the game is to blow the entire board off the face of the earth. Leave nothing behind but a crater where the underground bunker used to be.
Jason has the Carissimi jet fueled up and waiting for them. Emily and Alison want to get married in Paris. Start fresh in a place that smells like baking bread and champagne. They’ll stay there for a few months, maybe a few years. Mona already has a space picked out for Hanna’s design studio. Aria will write a few novels. Spencer’s planning to rendezvous with Melissa in London, then head to Morocco to track down Mary Drake.
It’s time to look forward, now. Not back.
Ash from the blast rains down on their windshield.
Spencer meets Alison’s eyes in the mirror as she flips on the wipers, turns the radio up.
The "Welcome to Rosewood" sign is blackened and charred from the heat of the blast, but the red paint is still wet, still faintly visible.
The final words stenciled carefully by A's gloved hand.
Goodbye, Bitches!
There's a metallic clang as Spencer runs it over.
The ash drifts down and covers the final 'A' message.
The Liars tail lights fade into the distance.
Notes:
I can't believe it's almost over.
(Also, I do know how to correctly spell PATRIARCHY, but there's no periodic element Ri.)
