Chapter Text
A "happy birthday" message came in on his phone, and it reminded him what day it was.
"What do you want for a present?"
He went through the short messages from the others, one by one.
He remembered how, by the campfire in the Fog, they'd talked about every trivial thing to death, his own and the others'. Star signs, blood types, favorite foods, birthdays. Time had been endless there.
Jake's birthday was in autumn, he thought. What day it fell on, or whether Jake had ever even said, he couldn't remember.
He remembered the profile lit by the fire.
Through all that endless, nightmare time, there was one moment—Jake looking over at him, the faint ghost of a smile—that he keeps coming back to, again and again. A miracle of a moment.
"Where in the world are you?"
He didn't want to believe it had been a mirage.
He bolted out of his apartment with no time to spare and just barely made the bus. He'd found a spot to stand when his phone buzzed again. Another message from Nea, who'd sent the birthday one earlier. This one was just a URL, nothing else. He tapped it, and a catalog page for men's underwear opened up. He shoved the phone into his pocket in a hurry and glanced around. Nea's jokes could be hard to read sometimes.
He didn't remember much about how they'd gotten out of the Fog.
The revolving lights and sirens that lit the night woods in a horrible strobe. The screams of one of the others thrashing as the rescue crew pinned him down. A voice shouting that it was all right. Had it been a dream—reaching out through the chaos, catching hold of a hand, crying out a name?
The others would sometimes be nowhere to be found. Sometimes they'd been called into a Trial. Sometimes they hadn't, and still weren't by the campfire. Jake would vanish sometimes, melting into the depths of the woods. Toward the end—not long before the nightmare of the Fog was over—there were more and more times when he was nowhere to be found. That day when the sirens and lights tore through the woods and everything ended—had he really been there?
That memory—reaching out, my hand closing around a gloved one—had it been some fragile, wishful thing, a bubble my longing blew into being?
After they were taken into the hospital, there was little chance to see the others. Someone seemed to have decided it would be a bad influence for them to be together. Every day they examined his body and his mind, made him tell the same story over and over, and Dwight was worn down. Everyone had been in the same situation, he heard later. He never learned what the investigation concluded, but once his body had recovered, Dwight was released.
Meg and Claudette and Nea had been in the same hospital, so they'd been able to exchange contact information.
Thanks to that, the connection with the others has held, unbroken, right up to now.
And so they confirmed to each other that what had happened in the Fog hadn't been a dream. There was no explaining it, and not one person believed them, but they had truly shared that nightmare stretch of time. They told him clearly that in that time, in that place, when they'd despaired of it ever ending, they had all taken each other's hands.
And that the one who wasn't here now had truly been there too.
Dwight believes that Jake really had been there too, when they were taken into the hospital. He'd seen the back of that khaki jacket, and he'd heard the name "Jake Park" in something one of the medical staff said. But when he was discharged, Jake wasn't there. Even when he asked the nurses, they only shook their heads in silence.
Dwight wanted to see Jake more than anyone.
Every day since, he'd tried every way he could think of, but there was no trace of him.
It was as if no such person had ever existed in the first place.
The blank where he wasn't showed no sign of filling as time passed, and an unbearable desolation came over Dwight.
Today marks half a year since he came back from the Fog.
This was the kind of day Dwight's birthday landed on.