Disclaimer: I don't own any of the movies or characters from the "Cabin Fever" franchise. All "Cabin Fever" movies and their characters belong to their respective owners. I don't make any money from the writing of this story.
*****
Marcy opened her eyes with a sharp gasp. All she could see was blackness.
It took her a while to remember where she was.
She was in a motel room - not the cabin. The disaster at the cabin was weeks ago. It was over. She'd survived it. She was safe now.
It was only a nightmare.
Her heart was still racing, only now it was racing in terror, not passion.
It only became worse as her mind reorganized the fact she'd just relived from the fiction. Yes, she was safe; "death" was no longer stalking her. But Karen was really dead, and a new life really was growing inside her.
All those emotions she wasn't able to feel in the dream suddenly dropped on her like a shipping container.
For the longest time she was unable to navigate through the confusion of them all. She was extremely distressed, but for no particular reason, and yet, for a million reasons all at once.
Eventually, once she had calmed down, she owned up to herself with scathing honesty. What she had done with Paul in the cabin was *wrong*! Not just because she had slept with him, but because she did it to forget about Karen. And Karen deserved so much better than that!
Karen was sick, dying and probably in pain. Karen was alone and probably so very scared. Marcy was right there and she did nothing. She didn't tend to Karen, she didn't dress her sores, she did nothing to ease her pain. At the very least, she could've kept Karen company; could've talked to her and try to keep her spirits up. But Marcy didn't do any of those things.
But even worse than simply walking away from Karen in the midst of her suffering, Marcy had cruelly carried on like Karen didn't even exist. She seduced Paul without the slightest regard for the hold Karen had upon his heart, nor the indecisive attraction Karen felt for him. She broke the trust of friendship. She even broke her own rules about unsafe sex. All for the sake of finding some distraction that could make her forget that Karen existed. Because being aware of Karen meant being aware of the sickness eating away at her; and Marcy was just too fucking cowardly to deal with that.
But Karen deserved better. Much better.
Now, Marcy found herself in an eerily similar situation. She was so eager to pretend that the baby inside her wasn't there; so willing to forget it. She wanted it to simply go away because it would make her so much happier if it, and all the complications that came with it, simply didn't exist.
That was exactly how she had treated Karen. It broke her heart remembering that she'd rejected her friend like that. Marcy would've given anything to be able to go back in time and undo her selfishness; to do whatever she could to be there for Karen. But she couldn't.
And yet she could. The baby inside her was just like Karen: frail and in need of Marcy's help. If she chose to reject it, it would die. This was a fresh chance for Marcy to be the better person she dearly wished she had been before. This was her chance to do the right thing and help someone who needed her, instead of just tending to her own selfish preferences.
If she kept acting as shamefully as she had in the cabin, if she made a habit of turning her back on others every time they became an inconvenience to her, what kind of shallow, lonely life would that amount to? She was only still breathing because EMTs had come knocking on the cabin door before she got as sick as Karen. What if one day she needed to be rescued and nobody cared enough about her to come to her aid?
The EMTs... The rescue...
It occurred to Marcy that at the moment she left the cabin there were two unwanted parasites inside her body. One was the virus that eventually destroyed Karen: death. The other was the seed that Paul had planted inside her: life. As she had laid on the bed with Paul spooning her from behind she had wished so dearly for life; wished that the sickness would not finish her, even though she felt that that was almost certain to be her fate. And here she was, her wish granted.
Her fortune seemed to turn when her baby was conceived. The disease took Karen, but Marcy and the life inside her were spared. While Marcy couldn't bring herself to believe that the baby had actually saved her life somehow, she nonetheless saw a parallel between their fates. Marcy had been granted the chance to live at the same time as the one inside her.
Now, to callously discard that other life seemed like an insult to everything Marcy had prayed so earnestly for. She had a renewed appreciation for how precious life was. She was immeasurably grateful that hers had been spared. Now, with another life in her own hands, Marcy felt she could do no less then to grant the same mercy.
The thoughts she was having scared her immensely. Her train of thought was taking her somewhere she really, really didn't want to go. Beginning to panic, she tried to recall Paul's counsel from before.
"Nothing you can do can undo the past."
"There's no point torturing yourself because of what we did."