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Felix is dreaming. He knows he is, because he’s had this dream more times than he cares to count. But he still can’t change it.
“C’mon Oscar, what are you scared of?”
He watches Oscar climb, face set and knees wobbling. He watches him slip. He watches him fall.
Then he’s on the ground, Oscar’s body lying twisted and still at his feet. This, he knows (no matter how much he wishes he didn’t). Except it’s not just Oscar’s body, this time. Jake, Sam, and Andy are on the ground too, limbs bent and eyes open and quite obviously dead, all because of Felix. He blinks, and there are more bodies, bodies as far as he can see (he can recognise the few closest to him; Ellen, Phoebe, his parents). And he knows, with the certainty that comes in dreams, with the certainty he carries every day of his life, that it’s all his fault.
“Felix.”
He looks up. There’s a figure watching him, like the one he saw the night of the storm. They raise a hand, and the sky starts to darken and the ground starts to shake.
“Felix.”
He wants to shut his eyes, pinch himself, force himself awake. But he can’t. He never can. The tremors in the earth increase, to the point that cracks start to appear and the ground shifts like water and he stumbles, and then Oscar starts slipping towards a gaping fissure and Felix throws himself forward to catch him and-
“Felix. Felix!”
Felix comes awake sharply and all at once. There are no bodies, no figure, no cracks in the ground waiting to swallow him up. He’s in Phoebe’s back room, and he fell asleep looking over Alice’s Book of Shadows (the first thing he does is check, but it’s not open to anything incriminating and neither is his diary), and Jake is standing over him, eyes wide and concerned and hands outstretched, like he’s going to touch.
“What the hell?” he asks.
Jake’s hands drop, but he doesn’t lose that stupid concerned expression. “You seemed like…”
“What?” Felix asks, trying for sharp and mocking and you don’t know me, but he’s still half asleep and it comes out more tired than he’d like.
Jake’s face drops a little anyway, and Felix inwardly sighs in relief. He doesn’t talk about his dreams with anyone, not even Ellen. “Nothing,” Jake says. “Find anything?”
“No,” Felix says, and he’s so used to lying now it slips easily off his tongue.
Jake frowns slightly, and for a second Felix’s stomach clenches. But all Jake asks is, “How late were you up?”
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” Felix replies, rubbing his face and trying to stretch out the kinks in his back from falling asleep over the table, the compression of his binder round his chest a dull, ever-present ache. That, at least, is true – he can’t even remember deciding to shut his eyes.
Jake’s frown deepens, and Felix has to resist the urge to roll his eyes. “You have to sleep some time,” Jake says. Then, “Can I help?”
“No,” Felix says sharply, and he doesn’t care about the expression that flickers across Jake’s face. He’s so tired, and still trying to shake off the dream, and the only thing that Felix could use to fix his mistakes was broken. “You don’t have to do take care of me,” he adds.
“What?”
“I’m going to get us home,” Felix says, making a show of going back to consulting Alice’s Book of Shadows. He owes them all that much.
“Is that what you want?” Jake asks, cautiously, and Felix looks sharply back up at him.
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asks, and tries not to think of all the many reasons.
“The other day, you said…” Jake breaks off. He won’t stop looking at Felix. “You should rest.”
“I can’t,” Felix says, and he didn’t really mean to say it but it’s true. “Just, leave me alone.”
“Felix-“ Jake starts, but then Sam stirs and he snaps his mouth shut. They’re both still and silent while until Sam seems to settle back to sleep again, but then Jake immediately turns back to Felix, because apparently there is no getting out of this conversation.
Felix stands up abruptly. “Come on,” he says quietly, beckoning to Jake as he heads over to the back door. If Jake wants to have a conversation, then they can have it outside where there’s no risk of the others waking up and joining in.
It’s still early, and the sky has only just begun to lighten. It makes Felix squint anyway, as he leans against the wall and waits for Jake to speak and tries to forget his stupid dream.
Jake doesn’t speak for a long time, and when he does, he doesn’t say any of the things Felix expects. “Remember when we were kids?”
Felix does. He remembers chasing Jake’s puppy up and down their streets and learning to find coins in gutters. He remembers sleepovers in backyards and not caring about mosquito bites. He remembers the nights him and Jake spent in each other’s beds, helping each other weather their storms. But he also remembers the crack of eggs against his bedroom window, the bruises from footballs thrown at him, all the times Jake had called him ‘freak’. And he remembers how Jake has been in the past week, yet another thing that’s better in this world. Things have been strange between them since that conversation on the bus, and he doesn’t know what he thinks of Jake anymore, but they’ve come too far to go back to when they were kids. So all he says is, “Really. You want to go there.”
Jake sighs in frustration and it makes Felix’s skin prickle. “What do you want me to say, Felix? You don’t want to talk about then, you don’t want to talk about now-”
“Maybe I just don’t want to talk to you,” Felix interrupts, but that just makes Jake sigh again.
“Things’ll be different when we get back,” he says, with such conviction that Felix wants to laugh.
“You think so?” he asks, because Jake is even stupider than Felix ever thought if he thinks two weeks can undo two years.
“I know so,” Jake replies, and Felix kind of wants to punch him. “Felix, I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Felix says, scowling, because Jake apologises like it changes everything and it may be something but it’s not enough. He doesn’t look at Jake.
“Do you?” Jake presses. “Because it seems like you don’t believe me.”
Felix doesn’t know what he believes. He doesn’t know what Jake wants from him, or even what he’s willing to give. “What, you want me to just forgive you?”
“No! Just believe me when I say things’ll be better.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Felix scoffs. Part of him knows he’s being deliberately uncooperative, but he’s so tired and he keeps seeing dead faces and his ribs ache from sleeping in his binder and he just wants to get them home and not talk about this anymore.
“Felix-“ Jake starts, but Felix has had enough.
“What do you want from me?” he demands. “Do you want things to just go back to how they were when we were kids? Because they can’t, okay, I messed it all up, we can’t just undo it. I’m going to get you home, okay?” he adds, trying to be slower and calmer before he says too much. “I’ll fix it, so just leave me alone.”
Jake is quiet for so long Felix is on the verge of going back inside, but then he says, “Not everything is your fault.”
Felix freezes. “What?”
Jake is actually smiling at him. “What happened with us, it wasn’t just you. I was a bonehead, it was more me than you. And us being here isn’t your fault either. Don’t blame yourself for everything.”
Felix feels sick. He hates himself for just standing there, letting Jake reassure him, letting him say it’s not your fault when it is, and he’s made it worse by lying since the day they got here. “You don’t know me,” he says, very quietly.
“I do,” says Jake, and Felix wants to punch him again.
“You did,” he corrects.
“And I’m trying to again,” Jake insists, like the stubborn idiot he is.
“Why?” Felix asks, and it comes out a touch too desperate but he needs to know.
Jake’s silent again for a while, but then he says, “I never hated you, you know? I tried, but I couldn’t.”
Felix knows the feeling. He doesn’t know what to do with it. “What do you want from me?”
“You should sleep,” Jake says, after a pause.
Felix scowls. “I’m trying-“
“I know,” Jake interrupts. “But you can stop to sleep for a bit, yeah? It’ll be easier when you’re not so tired.”
“That’s not going to just fix everything,” says Felix.
“Then what will?” Jake asks, far too reasonably. “Sleep will make it a bit better though, yeah? You can take my bed.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Felix says, quickly, but Jake just smiles at him again.
“I know,” he says. “Come on.” And Felix goes, because he’s selfish, and will take what little comfort he can get.
There’s a fluffy unicorn sitting on Jake’s pillow. Felix glances between it and Jake, eyebrows raised.
Jake shrugs. “Mike gave it to me.”
“You said. Why?”
Jake shrugs again. “Because I stood up for him.”
Felix thinks back to that moment on the bus, how he’d said kind of like the old you. How he’d wondered, if only for a moment, what Mike Parker had that he didn’t. Finally he says, “You take it, I can’t sleep with it staring at me,” and presses the toy into Jake’s hands.
“Okay,” Jake says, then, “Go on,” because Felix is still lingering on the edge of the bed. Felix wants to scowl, or roll his eyes, but his eyelids are too heavy.
“What are you going to do?” he asks, as he slides between the covers. The mattress feels amazing on his back, even if his binder is still cutting into his ribs.
“I’m used to being up this early. And I actually slept last night,” Jake says, and Felix’s eyes are already sliding shut but he knows Jake’s smiling.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and lazily flaps a hand in Jake’s direction for pulling it back under the warmth of the blankets. “Night.”
“Night, Felix,” Jake murmurs, and Felix could be eleven again. He falls asleep before remembering he’s not supposed to wish for that anymore.