When everyone started talking at once, she sighed again.
Ollie staredup at Noble and hesitated.How was he really?
He swallowed hard, flinching slightly as Mikael’s screams filtered through his mind, along with visions of the man on fire, his charred skin coming with a stomach-turning smell. He couldn’t stop the shudder as the feelings he had felt at the time slid home. Just as before, the emotions felt like his own, yet also foreign. They formed this sticky feeling of vengeful satisfaction, fueled by hate and rage that turned his stomach as it seeped into his very bones, spreading and bringing with it both elation and disgust.
But then that horrible feeling of hate and violence was swept aside, his insides freezing as fear grabbed hold.
“R-RED, PLEASE!”he screamed, shaking the familiar.
Failing…Olliewas failing. He was supposed to get Red to safety, but he couldn’t… He was too weak… Ollie couldn’t lift him, he’d always been too weak…
“Please,wake up! Ah—Red, please! You have to live! I can’t—ah—” he gasped breathlessly. “I-I can’t live without y-you!”
Flinching backat the desperation in his voice, the vision in his head shook apart and switched to a worse one, tears forming as he was helplessly dragged down, the smell of blood flooding his senses. Too much blood… There was too much…it wouldn’t stop…
“Sto-stop,”he sobbed. “Stop,” he desperately begged, as he pressed down on the familiar’s chest wounds. “STOP BLEEDING!” he screamed.
Ollie broke free of the memories’grasp as a hand tilted his face upward. Blinking rapidly up at Noble, tears trailed down his face as his own screams echoed in his ears.
“Ollie…” the man rasped, his concerned gaze staring down at him.
Taking a shuddered breath, his heart ached now, along with the rest of him, as he sniffled and tried to push back the overwhelming feelings weighing him down. But it was hard to not let himself drown in the devastating desperation that came, alongside a feeling of utter uselessness as he’d begged Red to wake up, to keep breathing, to not leave him. To not leave him like everyone else had...
But he couldn’t, and the man had asked him a question. How was he really…?
Ollie took another shuddered breath and rasped, “Bad…scared…disgusted… B-but do I-I really need to talk about it? I—ah…I just want to forget.”
When Noble hugged him, Ollie buried his face into the man’s broad chest as his tears fell faster.
“I know it’s hard, and you don’t want to think about it,” the man rasped softly. “And you don’t have to right now…but you will eventually.”
“Why?” Ollie couldn’t help but whine hoarsely.
“Because we can’t allow what happened to happen again,” Red said as he padded softly through the open doorway of his bedroom.
He looked over to his familiar, as Noble pulled back from the hug. Reaching for the cat with a sniffle, Red came right to him, leaping onto the bed and into his lap. Ollie hugged his familiar, running his hands through his soft, short fur.
“Ollie, you lost control, and I couldn’t reach you,” Red said after several moments of purring and letting himself be pet. “Noble somehow managed to, but your mind was not as itshould have been in that moment. And I think we all know what would have happened if he hadn’t come…”
Ollie swallowed hard, his eyes briefly closing as another image of a bruised, battered, and still burning Mikael entered his mind. “But it was still me…”
“It was, but it also wasn’t,” the cat replied vaguely.
“What else was it then?”
Red hesitated for a moment, before finally saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened in that moment, or what exactly came over you. Can you tell me what happened before you…appeared there?”
Ollie blinked. “Appeared?”
The familiar wrinkled his snout. “You…poofed there, quite literally, out of smoke.”
“I did what?!” he squeaked, before flinching at the pain the sharp words caused to his bruised swollen throat.
At the same time, Noble choked out, “He did what?!”
Winnie cut off what she’d been saying when everyone else spoke at the same time, wincing at the pained expression on Jahla’s face.
After a few moments of them progressively getting louder, using what she liked to refer to as her teacher or mom voice, she shouted, “Enough!”
