His hands wouldn't stop shaking.

It was below zero, wherever he was. 

He felt as though he was frozen through to his heart, as if it were an icicle in his chest, but he could feel it still thumping in his chest. Somehow. 

Brett was standing on crystallized ice, in the middle of a lake. The shore was far away, lined with snow-covered firs. The sky was white and unforgiving as it unleashed fat flakes of snow that gathered on his eyelashes and the inside of his collar. 

The sensation of being watched buzzed at the back of his mind, but he couldn't tell who it was. Lauren? Calista? The bear? Some other malevolent being Maybe it was just the dregs of the ketamine hangover trickling through his consciousness. Because none of this was real. It was a dream. He knew that. Nothing he did here would matter. Nothing that happened to him here would matter. Except in his head.

Unfortunately, that did matter. 

It mattered the most.

He heard a cracking sound beneath his feet. Looking down, he saw the ice splintering into a Y-shape, and he knew it wouldn't hold him much longer.

Someone was laughing.

Carefully, he took a step in what seemed to be the safest direction, where the shore seemed to be reaching for him. The ice accepted his weight, and he carefully lifted his other foot and set it down, cautiously, in case it were just pretending to be solid. In this way, with his gaze set upon his feet, he made it halfway before he heard another crack. This time it was small, just a hairline fracture, but he knew how fast these things could happen. The ice would open its waiting maw and swallow him whole if he let it. He remembered reading somewhere that, in this situation, you should get down low, spread your weight out evenly. It was in this way he ended up sprawled over the ice, army-crawling his way slowly. The cold seeped through his clothes, his flesh, into his very bones. 

The laugh came again, high-pitched and cruel. It was someone on shore, hidden in the trees, tickled by his brush with death. He didn't know which was worse, to fall through the ice and drown or to face whatever was laughing at him from the darkness. Before he could decide, the laughter stopped and he heard whispers from all around. A man's voice, a woman's, even a child's at times. He waited no longer and forced himself to move. He was sure, somehow, that to stop moving would mean death. 

Only ten paces from shore, he saw something beneath the ice, color where before it had been the purest white. His skin seemed to shrink as he realized it was the shape of a human. Somehow he knew. 

He knew it was Lauren.

Unable to keep crawling, he stopped and stared at her frozen features. "I'm sorry," he sputtered. "I never meant for this to happen." The truth was he never really meant for anything to happen. He wandered through life as though lost in a deep, dark wood, drawn to anything that offered a glint of light. Unfortunately for her, she had shone like a golden beacon through the trees. 

Again, he heard the ominous crack, but he couldn't make out where the ice had broken. He looked all around, but it was a solid block. But beneath him, something was changing. The figure, before motionless, began to move. He watched, astonished, as the white began to melt away and he saw Lauren clearly. She was smiling. The rosiness in her cheeks returned, and she blinked once, twice, and then waved.

And then the world turned upside down and he realized that he was the one stuck beneath the ice. He couldn't move. His entire body ached with the cold, and he was trapped.

Lauren laughed and then turned, floating away from him, leaving him for dead. Wherever she was going, he was sure it was to a better place, and this thought eased some of his guilt.

Warmth flooded through his forearm, and he remembered he was dreaming on Calista's couch, and he let himself awaken to Calista, who was pulling him out of the cold, back into the living.