Wavesofsubconsciouslapped back and forth across my mind, some awash with vivid light helping me to the surface. Others, crashing onyx anchors that sunk me back down under.
Slumber played at my head for some time before the bright crack of light won out, and I gasped a breath as I broke through the surface of sleep. I blinked slowly, eyelids slacked with strange weight and my neck crying as it twisted upright.
“Oh fuck,” I hissed out, cracking my neck until I felt satisfying pops on either side.
My head. Fuck, my head was pounding. Sluggish. Muck slathered through my thoughts as they tried to pile together and form a single thread of sense. That thread snagged as I looked around and found myself sitting up in a seat I didn’t remember going to sleep in.
What the fuck…?
Unfamiliar faces surrounded me. Some sleeping peacefully, some knitted together in concentration while they read, and a couple staring straight back at me. Confusion jerked my sore neck back as they eyed me with caution, judgment splashed across their assuming features.
“Who the fuck are you?” I croaked, my voice still riding the edges of sleep. As if I’d spat at them instead, the two people staring at me steered their glaring down to their hands and pretended I hadn’t even spoken.
With their heads ducked down to mind their own fucking business, a sheen of light poured in from behind them. I squinted against the assaulting brilliance, that thread of sense fraying razor thin as I eyed the porthole of sunshine.
Windows? Tiny windows? Does our hotel room have tiny windows?
Strangers with pairs of extra strangers next to them sat still across the aisle—aisle?—and I dropped my eyes to the two seats next to me. Empty. Both of them.
Wait, why the fuck were there seats? Who the fuck were all of these people? My head snapped side to side, trying to make sense of the confusion—
Just then, a rumble vibrated beneath my body in its seat.
And my heart seized.
My body stopped. All of me stopped. I wasn’t breathing, wasn’t thinking. My heart wasn’t thumping with life or anything even resembling it. Dead air pivoted my head towards a splinter of light spilling in next to me.
A wall. I was next to a wall that shined rays of cutting light through a manufactured crack. I could only see about an inch of what lay on the other side aside from the light.
Clouds. Pillows of white and a snap of blue petered beneath the lip of the eggshell white wall next to me.
Strangers. Aisles. Seats. Clouds. Rumbles.
Panic. Screaming. Burning. Death.
Plane. Plane. Plane.
How. Why.
Jonathan.
Almighty terror fisted my heart, crushing sputters of oxygen out of me. Muscles in my body twisted to stone, my bones and flesh turning cement. Heavy. Everything was too heavy. I tried to breathe, but my lungs couldn’t lift my chest.
Panic jackknifed up my throat, bleeding hot blood up and up. It filled my mouth full so I couldn't scream for help, stuffed my ears so I couldn’t hear anyone who might offer it.
I was on an airplane. Like Jonathan. Just like Johnny when he—
Heat reached its fingers up my chest to choke rationality from my brain as the clouds passed beneath what I now knew was the window next to me. I’d been on planes growing up, just not since I was sixteen and my entire world came crashing down in fiery ash and bloody screams.
The fire. The fucking not-so-friendly fire was an inferno lighting my body from the inside. It bypassed my hands and just fucking ignited my blood with cries and agony and brimstone. My skin vibrated against it, whimpers lashing the silence until I realized they were coming from me.
But I couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t stop the whimpers or the harsh cuts of air slicing my throat as I sat there, flashes of Johnny sitting next to me, yelling, crying, seconds from dying flooded in.
Movement out of the corner of my eye dragged my head, and I found him.
Him.
Fear clashed full-speed into the anger that tried to rise, smothering its flame to the ground. There was no time for anger now. Not when we were thousands of feet up in the air and a motor malfunction away from mirroring the death of the only person I had loved in this entire fucking world.