Chapter Text
As it happened, the hands on their clocks were suddenly in sync and it was 3.06 AM on the 21st of December, the longest night of the year, in both 2015 and 2043. Cole twitched in his sleep in the all too soft bed at Ramse’s place. Cassie frowned in hers and tried to find a comfortable position in Cole’s old bunk bed. Somehow the powers of the universe glanced at them and saw their pain and longing. It was time to let these two lost souls share their misery.
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Cole was walking in a strange red forest, all the leaves were red and the grass too. He heard a dark woman's voice saying "You are walking through a red forest, the grass is tall", and he thought why is there someone telling me what I'm doing, I can see that. But then he heard another sound, a fairer woman's voice, sobbing between her pleas of no. He knew that voice. "Cassie?" The sobbing stopped. He looked around but he couldn't see anyone. "Cassie? Are you there?" Suddenly he was in front of an old worn down house. Lying on the steps up to the porch was a fragile figure he recognized immediately. “Cassie!” Cole rushed forward and somehow he expected Cassie to disappear in front of him, like she had in so many of his dreams, but instead when he reached for her she turned around and looked straight at him. “Cole?” Cole lunged forward and collected her in his arms. She was real. How was she so real?
“Cole? How… how are you here?” Cassie was confused. She’d had this nightmare a thousand times it seemed like, but this had never happened before. The man in the plague mask had always come out of the house and just as he was about to touch her she had always woken up. But now, now she was in Cole’s arms instead and he felt so real. Maybe it was because she knew she was lying in his bed surrounded by his smell but either way, this wasn’t a nightmare anymore.