The Lost

36- A Goodbye

Azure

The morning came with a surprising lack of problems. During the long night, the rain had eased off and the clouds seemed to have moved on from over the forest. After all the flooding and thunder it had seemed to me like the rain would go on lashing against the tent forever, but it turned out to be the classic sort of summer storm; gone as quickly as it came.
I awoke to find the outside oddly silent. There was no more pattering on the tent fabric. The trees and leaves had stopped rustling. If there was wind, I couldn't hear it. No more thunder either. It took me a moment to notice the birds, for even those sounds were distant. The tent somehow made them seem further away.

It was light outside. That type of glow that comes after the dawn, and it was heating up the green walls. I had no idea of the time, but the strange rejuvenation I found in my limbs told me that I had slept longer than usual. Come to think of it... I had slept without interruption, the full duration of the night. Not once had I abruptly woken up seemingly without reason as I often did. My head didn't hurt when I stretched out and my eyes opened easily. It was a pleasant surprise, actually.
For a moment after the morning stretch, I laid still and listened to the ambience of the forest. Warbling and dripping and the gentle rustling of the tent. Something else too... voices.
I remembered quite suddenly that I wasn't alone in the tent. And exactly whose tent my friends and I were in.

Slowly, I rolled my head over to my right. I don't know why I moved with such secrecy. If he was here it was over. Rosin's wings continued to be useless for any sort of travelling, and we wouldn't be able to get out of here on foot, no way. I had tried that once before. With... unfavourable results. Trying not to draw attention to us was already pointless if that voice belonged to the face haunting my head.
The voices sounded familiar, but they were hushed so I couldn't make out exactly who it was. The part of me that insisted I was only being paranoid was all but drowned out by the slight possibility that I wasn't being paranoid. The glaring what-if— what if it really was him? I did the only thing I could think to do and turned to wake Aspen.

But Aspen was gone.
The little piece of fabric we had used as a blanket was cast over me and me alone, as if he had never been there at all. I blinked a few times but didn't have the nerve to move more than that. Az? Any lingering mind-fog was swept away. I was sleepy but not delirious; he was actually gone. My heart beat harder, a warning of the impending panic. Where is he? Any other worry faded out of my mind. I had to know where he was and I had to know right now. Now. In any other environment, I wouldn't have panicked, but...
If I looked further ahead, to where the end of the table met the back of the tent, I could see the orange outline of Wren. Pink and brown near them. Rosin. Wren, Rosin, and no Aspen.

I sat up straight and the fabric fell down onto my legs, a few loose threads of my hair in it. All around me I looked for him, wondering if he or I had moved away from each other during the night, but the boy wasn't anywhere on Mike's jumper. Az? My head snapped to my left as the unease grew into panic, panic into fear— then it immediately dissipated.
Aspen was right there. Talking to Mike.

I let out a sigh that seemed to go on forever. Nothing like a nice shot of adrenaline to start the day.
My friend was sitting on the edge of the table, wings folded on his back, hair longer than I had ever seen it before. Almost to his shoulders now. He was facing away from me, but I could tell from the shifts in his shoulders that he was talking. That low humming in the air sounded like him too. What surprised me wasn't so much that he had somehow woken up and slipped away without me stirring, though it was still surprising; Aspen was never awake before me. But what made me look twice was that my friend was talking to Mike. Mike the human— the human that Aspen hated.
The tired-looking human was sitting on the floor of the tent so that his face was level with Aspen's. Mike's hair was messy too, funnily enough. The blonde had almost gone fluffy from the wetness of last night. And so had Aspen's. That made me smile. I had never noticed how similar the two of them looked before now.