Now You See Me

Thirty-Eight: The Witch Friend

With the nature of my recent experiences accounted for, waking up to an overwhelming sense of déjà vu was highly unwelcome.

I fidgeted; rough sand crunched under my spine. I could smell sea wind, but not feel water around me. My neck felt sore and cracked; my skin was dry and painfully so.

As if in response to this thought, sea water was suddenly sluiced over my body, instantly relieving all the symptoms and at the same time shocking me into total wakefulness. My eyes snapped open, and I stared in confusion at the dark grey cloud bank above my head. It took a long time for me to stop reeling, or at least it felt that way; even longer for me to rediscover where my toes were after such a long time with a tail.

Sound filtered through then; footsteps and vaguely familiar voices.

"Damien?" A shadow fell across me, blocking out the grey light and silhouetting the figure so I couldn't see their face. I jumped as a cascade of silver-blonde hair slid from their shoulders and dropped towards me where I lay on the ground.

"Lorien?"

They crouched, revealing the features of my friend from London, who had an uncertain smile on his face. I briefly toyed with the idea that I was dreaming, but then he reached out and brushed hair away from my eyes, and it felt way too real to be inside my head. I laughed; it was the first response that came to me. It seemed vaguely ridiculous that he should be here. I'd been in the sea – had he swum out to get me or something?

"I thought you were going to die," Lorien said, breaking the illusion in my head that he was some kind of hallucination, and it was only then that I saw tears on his face. "I thought you were not coming back." He sniffed. "Courtney said you would, but she was worried too. I could tell."

Chris.

I sat up as I remembered what had happened before I fell asleep, almost smacking our heads together. Lorien squeaked in alarm and fell over onto his backside. "Where's Chris? Is he okay?"

"He is..." Lorien wouldn't look at me. I looked around, immediately homing in on two figures a few metres away, crouched over what looked, for a horrifying moment, like a corpse.

Even when he moved and I realised he was alive, panic threatened to swallow me.

"Help me up," I snapped at Lorien, immediately regretting it when he flinched, "Please, Lore. I have to..." Tears ran down my cheeks and my voice cracked before I could stop it. Why had I let him sleep? It was obvious now that something had been wrong. I should've kept him awake, prioritised getting us onto the shore. "Please."

After another moment of hesitation, he got up onto his heels and put his hands under my armpit. The amount of my own weight I had to rely on him to hold was embarrassing. My legs still ghosted with the feeling of being melded, and they shook horribly when I tried to stand on my own. Lorien stepped back once I was upright, chewing on his lip. His hands steadied me as I wobbled, catching me neatly as I went over sideways. A freezing wind whipped off the sea, snatching at the towel I had around my waist; we ended up in some strange contortion around each other, where I was trying to stay upright and hold my towel firm at the same time as Lorien was trying to stop me falling over.

"You having trouble there?"

It was bizarre to hear this voice outside of my head again, and I almost responded as if it still was, when I realised that Leia herself was stood at my shoulder. She looked haggard; windswept and exhausted, she still managed to exude a weird kind of comfort, which was ironic considering that just the other day she seemed to represent half my problem. I'd never been gladder to see someone.