Not According To Plan (Preath Fanfiction) (Co-written by @uswntloves1723)

3: Two-Harry Show

Tobin's POV
Time: ???

"Jesus!" I shout jumping back, no longer half asleep. "Allie!?"

If the remains of a pale pink lipstick, and her lost-Tinkerbell shade of blonde, I don't think I would've recognized her under the discolouration of her skin. It hurts to see her like this, mostly because she's such a close friend but also because my left eye is killing me for some reason. "What happened to your face?" I ask.

She raises her head - which appears to weigh a ton by how she's moving - then slings it around sluggishly. "I... don't know."

"Did they give you the pill?" I stare into her strangely dull eyes. "Don't close your eyes on me. Allie?"

"Yeah, I'm good," she says, her eyes shut and eyebrows fixed in a furrowed position, her hand seemingly rubbing away at a headache. "It's good, er, it'll be good. Are you okay?"

"Other than being dehydrated," I admit. My tongue feels roughly reptilian on the roof of my mouth. If I had fallen asleep, my tendency to sleep with it open would've made it worse.

"Hey!" Allie hollers through the bars. "Can we at least get some water? You're not a very good hostess, you know, leaving us-"

I shush her aggressively. "Do you want to get beaten up more than you have already?"

She looks at me like I'm crazy. "They feed off fear. You can't let them win."

I want to chastise her for comparing our situation to a game, as if we have no obvious disadvantage here and it's just another 11 v 11 on the field, but then I remember it's way too early not to fight. But we have to play it smartly, and I think Allie has some useful info. "Wait, hostess?" I ask. "I thought a man brought us here."

"I thought so too, but there was someone else." A string of aggravated coughs interrupts her speech. I pull her up and set her against the wall, away from the dusty ground. The light in the hallway shines across her, and that's when I see pink marks the width of a man's fingers shooting up her neck, mostly on her right side.

"What did they do to you?" I say, though I really mean to be asking. "You look like you've been through hell and back."

"Yeah, I think I got the brunt of it. But like, don't be offended, but you don't look too great yourself." She said it without even looking at me.

"What do you mean?" I haven't seen a mirror lately, but there's no way I look as terrible as she says I do. Then again, Allie is known to exaggerate. At least hearing her somewhat raspy kindas, likes, and other filler words means she's probably coming out of her daze. I know I'm guilty of the same vocabulary—in fact, I'm probably worse—but somehow, Allie can pull off the Valley Girl way better than I do long before she talks.

"Have you seen you from my angle?" she asks. "Your eye is like, so black. Like, a raccoon and a panda and like a pitbull with an eye birthmark had a human baby, and you got all their weird eye genes so the area around your eyes is that much blacker." As if she hasn't already affirmed herself, she adds, "Like, uber-black." She reaches out to touch it.

"Don't," I snap, chopping her hand away like a clapperboard. "It hurts. And if it's as bad as you're saying, I don't want it to get it infected."

After removing from my head the initial vision of a creepy anime girl whose sclera has been overrun by inky blackness, I realize that Allie just described an interspecific orgy which led to the birth of a new species with DNA from three parents. Then I have to force that out of my head, backtrack, and make sure Allie is aware enough to tell me everything that happened to her—and hopefully, at a reasonable volume. "Anyway," I say, "you're sure it was a woman?"

"She had me pressed against her chest on the way over here," she says through gritted teeth. "I'm sure."

Judging by the shape she is in, I decide not to press anymore. Besides, I think I see a shadow standing under the hall light. Unless it's facing the wall, its symmetrical shape suggests somebody's watching us head-on. I almost hope I'm imagining it, but I also hope I'm not. "I think you should rest," I say. "And I should, too. Neither of us are thinking right."