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Amitie makes her way to her destination with an assuredness she doesn't often have. But she planned to visit her friend, and she knows exactly where she's going to find him, so of course she would be sure of where she's going. If nothing else, this one thing remains a constant, and she's taken this route enough times that she's found her way to it without even remembering she'd been trying to get to it in the first place several times before. Make no mistake, it certainly did take, "a few tries," but she found it important enough to keep doing it until she could find him without a second thought.
She peeks around the corner of the doorway, scanning the room for her target. She really doesn't need to, because he has a favorite spot and he doesn't tend to stray very far from it, but she likes to pretend it takes her a second to find him anyways. Once spotted, she cheerily greets, "Hi, Sig!" and bounds up to the figure, curled up and breathing soundly. "Still sleeping huh? I'm not surprised," she giggles, sitting down so her back is pressed right up against his.
"Well, I suppose I won't wake you up. I just wanted to talk about my day. I'd feel kinda mean, if I woke you up for that."
She gently bumps his shoulder with her hand. He snores in response. "But if you happen to wake up while I'm talking I wouldn't mind! We'll just talk about something I don't mind you actually hearing instead."
There's a long pause. And then another snore.
"Right! Glad we agree! Where do I start?"
She taps a finger to her chin with a soft hum. "Nothing exciting really happened in the morning. I ate breakfast! Which is, um, an improvement." Amitie looks at the floor, a nervous laugh escaping her. "I mean, you already know that, obviously."
She's quiet for a long, long time before admitting in a hushed tone, "I didn't really want to eat it, still. It tasted bland."
Sig inhales, and then sighs.
"But I did! So! So that's good." She blows out some air through her mouth, almost managing to get a strand of hair out of her face. Unfortunately it does just land back in her eyes, and she has to move it away with her hand anyways.
"Lunch was a little better I guess. I could taste the food at least." She looks at the ground, guilty. "I might be skipping dinner to talk to you though. Sorry. But I still ate breakfast and lunch! I think if I eat anything else today I might just throw it back up. Like I did a few days ago. And then I'll stop eating breakfast again. Like I did a few days ago."
She clears her throat.
"Class was pretty normal. Um, as far as our school's normal goes, anyways. I'm still bad at math! I know you're really shocked to hear this, but please, try to hold in your gasps."
She pauses like she's expecting a response. Sig's next breath sounds like it might be a mumble, but frankly it sounds more like a growl, or maybe a snore that's a bit quieter than all of his earlier ones.
"History is extremely boring, science is hard to keep up with, essays are hard but creative writing is... Also hard! But in a way that doesn't make me want to scream! Which is great, because I really need something to do that isn't magic. I mean obviously magic is what I want to do but um, you know, it's nice to have hobbies outside of your one greatest goal in life." She swallows, audibly. "Especially when you're having a really hard time being good at the one thing you want to be good at."
She bounces her leg and listens to the way every tap of her foot against the ground causes an echo in the empty room, down the empty hall, down more empty rooms and halls.
"So I started... Writing. Again. Um, I don't think you knew I even do that because no one should know, ever, but I do! Which is weird, I know, I can't even read for very long before I want to do literally anything else. Which is also why no one's allowed to see the things I write ever. They're not great," she admits, sheepishly. "But it's fun! Sometimes I look back on it all and go wow! I sure did make something."
Amitie begins to gesticulate, trying to find more words to say aloud. "I write fiction- I mean obviously I write fiction what kind of nonfiction would I write about aside from whatever's in my diary because of course I have a diary who doesn't have a diary-" Sig doesn't have a diary, because he's always paid so little attention to what's going on around him that if he tried to write about his day it would consist more of a bug journal than any diary entries. Amitie is ashamed to admit that she's tried to look for one. "- and it's mostly, I don't know, the usual thing you find in fantasy. There's a great hero who has great friends and an evil villain and sometimes the hero doesn't think... They can do.... What they're supposed to...... Um, so they, uh, they need the, the support of- of their friends..."
Amitie trails off, staring down the hall she'd come in through. She mumbles, frowning, "But they always win in the end."
She keeps staring down the hall, unseeing, thoughts fuzzy and far away. She bundles the legs of her shorts into her fists, breath short. The walls tilt. The floor doesn't exist. She doesn't feel like she weighs anything. She doesn't feel the fabric in her palms. She doesn't think she feels much of anything. She doesn't remember why she's here, aside from because she has to be, but she doesn't know why she has to be, but she doesn't want to be anywhere else, she can't remember what anywhere else would be, what anywhere else looks like.
"But sometimes I just write about the longstanding Barbie storyline I've been scripting since I was like 4 or something."
She was talking to Sig. "Here," is where Sig is, and Sig is not anywhere else except where she is right now, and that's what's important.
The natural light of the room has shifted to an orange hue, and she does not want to acknowledge that the sky was blue when she had started talking about writing.
"Well, I guess scripting is a bit of a big term for 'playing with dolls,' but I'm writing it now, so it's basically like I was scripting it so I could write it out better later. It's a multi-genre emotionally harrowing super serious masterpiece. It's the one thing I'm going to publish but only after I'm sixty and I've perfected it to the letter because it deserves nothing less. Barbies are really serious business. I'm sure if you were awake you'd understand."
She leans back a little so she can feel more of Sig's back against hers. Fishes for more things to say.
"I've been trying to get higher chains more consistently. Quickly, I mean, without needing to think too much about it. I destroyed Klug after school! ... And then Raffina kind of obliterated me." She nudges Sig's shoulder again. "Look, I'm learning new words, too! I didn't know what obliteration was yesterday."
Sig breathes.
"Kinda sucked though. I feel a little bad because I didn't really take it well and Raffina had to backtrack and try to comfort me, but I didn't want her to go easy on me because that'd ruin the point of getting better. She tried to remind me that I've beaten her plenty of times, but it's just..." She sighs through her nose. "It's not good enough."
The room is silent except for the gentle rise and fall of Sig's breaths. He'd stopped snoring a bit into her talking.
"Sorry, I know that's like, not a good way to be thinking." She laughs again, but it's more like a forced breath that happens to have some noise mixed in. "It's just hard when-" She takes a sharp breath then releases it with an anguished sound. "Nevermind, um. Anyways."
She pulls her knees up just enough to press her elbows to them and rest her chin on her hands. "Lemres is back. I know you certainly don't want to hear that but I'm telling you anyways because you're probably going to be seeing him and he's probably going to be giving you candy."
Amitie looks to the scattered candies on the floor. "Like I think he has been doing."
Most of them appear to be open, probably less because Sig's been trying them and more so they would be able to lure in bugs. It's worked, to some degree. Amitie can see a large group of ants crawling all over a chocolate bar. She can feel them crawling all over her, too, even though if she looked she wouldn't be able to find even one. She can feel their collective thousands of legs crawling across her skin, until her limbs are numb and she can't tell the difference been the legs and their pincers, can't tell if they've begun taking pieces of her to feed on.
She sighs and lets herself lean back until she's lying across Sig's body. "But it's nice that he's been coming by more often! I know you don't really like it, but everyone else is glad for it. It's just nice to have someone around who- I don't know. Knows what he's doing, I guess? Maybe that's a bit much, but he's navigating this better than most of us."
Amitie presses her hands to her eyes. "I don't know if he's getting any support, though. I mean, I know you weren't-" she interrupts herself with a hiccup, then course corrects, "It's not like he'd be that broken up, right? But he still cared. Still... Still cares..."
Her hands drop. "But none of us can really help him. 'Cause he's like, older and stuff. We don't really know how and he doesn't let us, much. We wouldn't know if, um, if it upset him, much. That's the thing about Lemres, I guess. Impossible to know."
A few seconds pass. Sig starts snoring again.
"Wow. Talking about Lemres is just really that boring, huh?"
Amitie takes one of his hands gingerly in her own. "Okay, fine, I'll change the subject."
She stares at the ceiling, feels Sig's body shift slightly for every inhale and exhale against her back. She closes her eyes.
"I found um... I found.... I found these really cool beetles. I tried... I tried really really hard to figure out what they were, for you. They were, um... Steel? Steelblue... Steelblue." She frowns and screws her face up at the ceiling. "I think they were ladybugs. But really shiny, and, uh, blue." She squeezes Sig's hand. "They made me think of you. Um, you know, they're cute, and they're blue, and uh, bugs, and pretty, and you probably would have had a lot more to say about them than the one book I found that had a picture of them did. The book didn't go on any tangents. I liked it when you went on tangents."
She stops speaking, but she's very bad at doing that for very long. "I liked it when you talked."
Sig, of course, does not say anything, because he is asleep.
"It's really hard," Amitie admits, hazily, "it's really really hard. Trying to pretend you're just, having another nap and I can just say whatever I want to you and you won't hear it, but you'll wake up soon and then- and then I can tell you all about it again, except, only the parts I actually want you to know."
Amitie laughs, but it's laced with desperation. "Will you? Remember this? When you wake up, are you going to remember all of the things I've told you while I waited?"
She hiccups again, and tries to circumvent her incoming hyperventilation by talking more, which is a pretty poor way of stopping breathing too little. "I mean probably not because you're kinda terrible at remembering things in the first place but maybe you might remember some of it but really I think if you remembered anything it'd just be the bugs I try to tell you about," Amitie keeps laughing, even though it doesn't make her feel any better, "I bet when you wake up the first thing you're gonna do is get on that tangent I was hoping for when I was looking at those beetles, huh? That's probably going to be the only thing you thought was- was important enough to-"
She can't put off breathing any longer, her head already dizzy. She lets go of Sig's hand so she can throw her arms over her face. She groans, loudly. "Did you even care!? Did it even matter to you how scared everyone was, how much we wanted you back? Did you hear any of us at all? Did you even try to fight back!?"
She sits up, but she's half slid off of Sig so now she's sitting in front of him rather than behind, her legs still slung over his body. She pounds a fist against his chest. "It's like you just wanted to throw everything away! Just let anyone who asks to borrow your magic to do whatever they want with it and then give up when it goes wrong! It's like you don't even care how much it hurts, you lazy, distant, inconsiderate, STUPID-"
She forces herself to inhale as much air as she can in one go, and then consequently chokes as she sobs. She curls in on herself and lets herself keen for a minute before continuing. "I mean it, Sig, it hurts. I have to wake up and remember that you're not going to be in class and then I have to walk into class and I have to see your empty desk and I feel this- this- I don't know! I don't know, my chest hurts a lot and it makes me want to keel over and stop breathing. I think it's actually killing me."
"Heartache," is the only descriptor that comes to mind, but to a middle schooler with limited understanding of what that entails it's embarrassing to say aloud to even someone who can't hear a goddamn sentence that's getting said, let alone a single, innocuous remark. Love is a word for her closest friends, or for her family, or for someone like family, or for burgeoning feelings, or for whoever she feels is deserving of it.
Grief is a word that does not care which definition she'd use for Sig. She lost him. He's as good as gone.
Amitie curls in on herself, probably kicking Sig in the back in the process. It's not like he'll feel it. She spends anywhere between a couple of minutes to several hours (in her mind, at least) howling in her arms, sorrow bouncing off the walls of the ruins no one's been able to bring Sig out of. It's utterly impossible to drag him out of the room he was found in after everyone woke up, and no attempts to teleport him out by any means seems to amount to anything.
He lays under a dilapidated stone roof, sun and moon and starlight filtering through the massive holes, bathing him in heavenly light, unless none of the three are in the sky at the moment. Then he soaks instead in the dark, silhouette nothing more than a shadow of what he used to be.
Bushes began growing rapidly around his sleeping body upon the return to the waking world. He almost looks like a classic Disney Princess, cursed into a deep yet inexplicably peaceful looking slumber, doused in a gorgeous natural light and surrounded by, admittedly, very pretty and colorful flowers.
Hydrangeas. Obviously. They make Amitie ill. They don't seem to follow the logic they should, uncaring for the acidity of the dirt they grow from and even less caring for how difficult it should be for them to grow so rapidly and so beautifully in the environment they've picked. She tears out the red ones, sometimes, throws them into pits she can't see the bottom of. She feels bad about it, when she's in the right mind. She's usually too mad to stop.
Sometimes there's bouquets around him, too. A few she's delivered herself, though none of them are hers. It feels like acceptance that he's dead. He's not dead. He's still breathing. He's not dead until he's done breathing.
Regardless of which flowers are growing around Sig's mostly still form, there will be no true love's kiss to save him, Disney logic be damned. No one knows if he'll ever be allowed to wake up. If the seal can ever be lifted without risking Sig emerging as... Something that isn't him. If there's a chance that maybe he'll just wake up on his own, fine, and everything can go back to normal naturally.
Amitie just has to hope it's possible. That it could happen, that he will be allowed to wake up one day, some way or another.
She heaves out a few unflattering, tearful wails before she's finally allowed to breathe. Swallowing, she shakily admits, "I think the worst part, is that," she shakily inhales before bursting into laughter, "is that I can't hug you, when I cry, because I'll get- I'll get, snot and tears and probably drool all over you, and I don't want you to- to have to be soaking in that, for who knows how long." She sniffs, draws another breath, and adds, "It's not really possible to bring you to a bath, or shower, or anything. I think the only reason you don't already smell terrible is because you're rolling in flowers."
She uncurls herself. She blinks, and she's still crying. "Not that, um, not that you usually stink, it's just, um, you've been asleep for a pretty long time now and- and I think anyone- sorry."
Amitie wipes her face with her arm, trying to get as much facial fluid off of her face as possible. "I really hope you can't hear what I tell you. I really, really hope you didn't hear any of that. I'm sorry- you're not... You're not, stupid, or inconsiderate, or lazy," she sniffs again and furrows her brows. "Maybe a little distant sometimes. But that's not- it's not a bad thing."
"I didn't mean any of, of that part. That was mean." She hiccups, and curses the hiccup, because it moves her entire body and hurts her chest and she really doesn't need that part of her body hurting more. "It wasn't your fault. I know... I know you were fighting it, too."
Amitie finally lays on her side, looking over Sig's face. "I'm the only reason you're here. Everyone was relying on me and I failed them. I failed you."
She reaches out- to do what, she isn't sure, maybe touch his cheek or brush his hair out of his face or something equally as corny- but she stops herself because she remembers she was wiping snot all over her arm and to be quite honest she's pretty certain all her crying into them had to have gotten some on her hands.
"So- so you have to understand why I have to be hard on myself. Because if something like this happens a second time, I can't fail again. If you wake up, and we have to fight again, I need to win. I need to be prepared."
She starts to breathe, in the way one is supposed to, as opposed to the way you would into a paper bag. "I'm sorry if you... If you'd rather I didn't, after I said those mean things about you. But I'd like to sleep here again tonight."
Amitie hiccups again, then insists, "I did really good last week! I only- just three nights! I only slept here three nights, which is less than half the week, so it's okay if I spend a little extra time here this week, right?"
She shifts, trying to get as close as she can without touching. "I know people get worried about me when I do this but I keep having nightmares and..."
And sleeping around Sig is the only thing that abates them. Meena's influence, she's sure. Meena still hovers around Sig, still affects his dreams. She keeps him from having the terrible nightmares you hear about people who are comatose having. Makes sure that if he can't be happy awake, he'll at least be happy asleep.
And every time Amitie sleeps here, in the ruins, next to Sig, she gets to dream that he's awake and they're talking and if she tries real hard she can delude herself into believing that's really him. That Meena connects their dreams and she's talking to the real him.
Logically she knows that's not what's happening but she is pretty sure Meena is trying to apologize to her as well. She's not sure if she can accept it, but she's not going to squander the gift. Meena seems to get better at making his likeness, his imitation, every time.
Amitie has slept for entire days trying to prolong her time with Sig. Trying to live in a world where everything is still the way it should be.
Meena is not that stupid anymore, however, and can and will interrupt her sleep with loud, jarring sounds that startle her out of the dream. At that point any further attempts from Amitie to return will just result in an empty void. Better than the constant nightmares terrorizing her in her own home, but there's no point in picking the eternal darkness over just getting up and going through the day when all she wants is to see Sig.
She misses when Meena felt bad enough to just let her talk to Sig forever, but unfortunately people started dropping by into the ruins to voice their concerns for her, talk aloud about why it's bad for her to be doing this, forcibly pull her out one way or another, and Meena clearly picked up on it. Amitie does not talk to Meena, even though she knows she's there, but she is just a little bit furious that she has the gall to be looking out for people's well-beings now, of all times.
She's also a little bit furious that it works. Meena has somehow figured out when the "optimal" time is for Amitie to wake up, go home for breakfast, and get to school somewhere close enough to "on time." How she has done this without leaving Sig's side she doesn't know, but if she had to guess through the meddling of her friends, and paying just a bit too much attention when she talks to Sig.
Amitie keeps mumbling until she finally trails off and finally drifts to sleep. Sig is waiting for her in a pretty, soft flower field, free of the color red except what remains on the both of them. Their surroundings are blurry and out of focus, but as long as Amitie doesn't look, as long as she doesn't try to make it her focus, it doesn't matter what it looks like. Her focus is solely and entirely on Sig, and the way he smiles just the slightest bit when he sets eyes on her. It's nice to see him sitting up, covered in pretty, shiny blue beetles.
And she stalls when she wakes up, but she knows Sig would probably prefer if she had breakfast over continuing to ask his unmoving body how he feels this morning. Meena's imitation of him always tells her he's really proud of her when she does, and she's gotten desperate enough that she'll seek its approval just as well.
She apologizes quietly for ending up half cuddling him despite her attempts not to touch him, and tells him of course she'll be back later, and she'll try to be nicer this time. She picks herself up and mutters something about how when Sig does wake up, his entire spine is probably going to hate him for sleeping on the floor so much, because her spine hates her and she's not even the one in a coma, and then she makes her way back home.
Amitie doesn't get to hear Sig mumble, doesn't get to see him reach for a warmth he can't feel, but knows that he's lost all the same.