Lament of the Traitor King (Complete)

Chapter 97 - Awake, Alive

He should have taken the pills in the bathroom, Ash realized, bitterly.

Winnie ripped the opened bottle of sleeping pills out of his hand as he swallowed a few from the cap. She examined the label on the pharmacy bottle before she turned to look at him, her face twisted in her own tired anger.

"This? Again? I felt like we just talked about you and sleeping pills."

Ash took the bottle back, screwed the lid back on. "You try living like a Human without any magic, besides the occasional homicide, then get back to me."

Winnie, sitting in the aisle seat of the plane that they were riding in, jostled when a particularly large man pushed past her in the direction of the bathroom. After she readjusted herself, she hissed at him, "There's no excuse for it! You have no right to be giving Netta addictions." She turned away from him, shaking her head. In a disappointed voice, she said, "Me and the girl miss her plenty, you don't see us using sleeping pills to get over it."

Ash bit the inside of his cheek and turned to look out of the window. He wished that she could only experience, for a moment, what existence in his beloved's body was like for him.

When Ash had awoken amidst the rubble of the house, he felt a soreness and a grogginess that he had never experienced before that moment. When he turned, he was startled to discover that his only companion was a corpse that had been so mutilated that he could only recognize it as belonging to Hera because of the bloodied and ripped white cloth that partially adorned it.

It felt like he had a hangover, and the analogy fit doubly so, due to how he was unable to recall what had happened before he had awoken.

He barely turned around when he heard her voice, soft in the back of his mind.

You've awoken.

Ash stopped, closed his eyes to concentrate on the faint sound of his Witch's voice. He answered her, I don't remember much... He felt a swell of fresh desire, as he recalled something, some dream, that he felt with fading certainty. He felt a smile playing on his lips to recall it. You gave me a sex dream. There's something poetic in that, I suppose.

He had expected humor, indignancy - anything - in answer to his lewd answer to her. Instead, Netta softly said, When you sleep I may be with you, and I believe being with you like we once did is how you would most prefer our time be spent together.

Ash, strangely lethargic and growing horny from what he could recall of her time spent in his dreams, nevertheless stopped as he realized something in what Netta had said. He was taken aback so much that he asked it aloud. "You can be with me... when I dream?"

And then he heard it when he spoke. He heard, not his own voice when he spoke, but hers.

Remembering what it had been like to awake for the first time in Netta's body made Ash slam his eyes shut. He usually attempted to repress that memory, seeing little use in being miserable when he could not do a thing about it.

Besides sleep.

Neither of them had spoken in what must have been over ten minutes, when Winnie said, "Those pills - will you be good for tonight?"

In Ash's tiring mind, he found it hard, at first, to figure at what the woman was getting at at first. Cross, Ash snapped, "Didn't see me down the whole bottle, did you?"

Winnie sighed. "Well, no."

Ash maneuvered, wriggling further down into the seat. "Then once you let me get some fucking sleep, I should be good to go."