16

Nicholas wakes up to someone screaming.

He doesn't wake up from deep sleep, though. He has been lying in the place that's almost halfway between sleep and wakefulness, pleasantly aware of the warm body beside him, of the hand still tucked into his, of the messy blonde hair splayed partly on his face, of the head on his shoulder.

So, it's more like that he has been awake all this time. He has just been choosing to stay asleep.

However, the screaming does him in, jolting his muscles into action as his eyes shoot open. "What?" he asks. Vision still blurry, he tries to search for the source of the noise.

Nick hurriedly rubs his eyes until the scene in front of him finally comes into focus. Richard is the one yelling, though he thinks that the initial scream had come from a girl. Probably Stella, he thinks, considering how Valeria has just stirred awake beside him.

"What's happening?" she asks, stifling a yawn.

"Stella's lost it again!" Richard yells at them, "That's what's happening. She's lost it and she's screaming and-oh shit she's gonna make a run for it."

Nicholas searches his field of vision for Stella, stopping when he spots the brunette some distance away, moving her hand frantically as if she's beckoning them towards something. Though from the urgent look on her face, it seems like she won't be waiting and beckoning for too many seconds longer. Instantly Nick gets up, Valeria following suit, and wraps his hand around Richard's wrist so as to stop him from running away, too.

"What is going on?" Nick asks, squeezing Richard's hand so as to make him focus.

"Ella-she'd gone to pee, okay?" Richard says hurriedly. "And she saw something out there, I don't know what. She's just yelling that there was something there and that we need to go see." He takes in a deep breath, "And we need to go see before she runs off without us."

Just then, Stella calls out for them one last time before she starts running, making her way through the trees toward the unknown destination only she's aware of.

The others stand there for a second, frozen in frustration.

"Bloody God damned hell, not again," Nicholas mutters under his breath before he sets off after Stella, yelling for the other two to follow. "Let's go, hurry up!"

They run like they'd run last night, only this time they're following Stella whereas last time they were trying to follow Keithia. Trees zoom by Nick's vision in a frenzy. This time around, since they're already lost, he doesn't even attempt to remember where he's going and what places he's bypassing.

"Stella, slow down," he calls out when he sees her losing her balance once but not reducing her speed.

Stella doesn't even so much as look back, let alone slow down. However, a few seconds later, she lets out a yelp and trips over something in her way, falling down head first.

"Ella!" Richard screams from beside Nick as the three of them race forward.

Valeria helps Stella up into a sitting position.

"I told you to slow down," Nicholas says, prying away her hand from her leg. When she cries out at this, he winces.

For someone who tries to be so passive and indifferent to the environment, Nicholas finds himself to be too readily effected by anything related to the people he cares about.

He looks up at Val then, catching her worried stricken eye. She gives him a nod of reassurance.

Breathing in deeply, Nicholas examines Stella's leg. She has a twisted ankle, he deduces. He hopes it's not broken. However the bleeding toe, bent to an awkward angle, does look broken. He gulps, cursing in his head.

Richard takes off his plaid over-shirt and tears it at the bottom until he has a long strip of cloth. "Here," he gives it to Nick, "tie this around her ankle."

Stella cries out more when he's wrapping her foot, though she refuses to let a tear escape from her eye even though her face is twisted in pain. Richard and Valeria hold one of her hands, each, for support.

"There," Nicholas says when he's done tying up her ankle to the best of his capabilities. He can't do any anything about the toe, though.

"Now," he gives Stella a stern look to which she just scowls back at him, "What the hell is wrong with you? Where the fuck were you even running to? Hadn't running off gotten us into this mess to begin with?"

Stella looks away for a moment before she sighs and looks back at her friends. "Okay, fine. Shit. Fine, I messed up, okay?" she says, her voice catching at the end. Nicholas chooses to ignore it because he knows this is what she would want. "I thought I'd seen someone. But before I could get a proper look at the face or anything, the person ran away," she says. "They were wearing white, I think. So," she sniffs and rubs her nose once. "So, I'd thought it was-"

"Me," comes a voice from the side. "You'd seen me. I'm sorry for running away."

Nicholas, along with everyone else, turns around only to find Keithia standing there, looking as perfect as ever, not a hair out of place.