𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘬 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨; 𝘦𝘷𝘢𝘯 𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳

the fachan and the fool

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Camden supposes that she's partially to blame.

Maybe.

Potentially.

Because she really should've noticed. In any other situation, she would've. But her eyes were weary and her vision blurred, her thoughts far removed from the road she traveled on and instead lingering in vivid memories. In the space between the trees, she saw the shape of her mother, somehow both lingering and fleeting. In the endless stretch of road, she saw the broken, crumbling stone of her burnt, decayed home. In the ever-darkening skies she saw the light in her father's eyes, sparkling and wise. It's been too long since she's slept. Hallucinations dance just out of her view, her darkest thoughts finding prominence in her current state.

She's not quite sure what snapped her out of it, exactly. She just knows that one moment, she is cruising, Bear's snout resting on the top of her thigh as he sleeps, her hand loose around the wheel, snores from the backseat echoing around her car. Everything is fine. Relatively. She feels distant from reality and then suddenly, everything is familiar. And Camden is abruptly present.

Carefully, slowly, she slows her car, and looks around the trees that oddly feel reminiscent of her home. Panic crawls up her throat, and she hopes that the sleep-deprivation is playing with her sanity. Bear senses something is off as she pulls her car over on the side of the road, tilting his head at Camden as she jerks the gear level into park.

Eyelids so impossibly heavy it's starting to hurt her head, she jumps up on her knees, twisting around and resting her chin on the top of the seat behind her. "Oi!" she calls out, voice sharp and loud and firm.

Evan was sleeping soundly, splayed across her backseat, stretched out as much as the car would allow him. But now he is jumping upright at the sound of her voice, gasping at the shock, and shooting up to sit. "Fucking hell, what was that for?"

"Something's wrong," she tells him. "I feel like I know where we are."

He yawns, mouth wide like a big, dumb cat. His storm eyes are droopy. "Sounds like the opposite of a problem to me," he counters.

Camden shakes her head, not bothering to argue with him. "Been driving for ages, feel like we should be closer to London by now," she grumbles, trying to keep the dry sleep from her voice. "Toss me that map, would you?"

Mumbled complaints that Camden can't be bothered to decipher and a bit of shuffling, and Evan has pushed the somehow already crumbled map into her hands. Her hand goes above her head, slapping around on the car ceiling until it finally taps against a light, illuminating the car. Evan flinches at the brightness. "A warning next time, yeah?"

Camden ignores him, her eyes frantically tracing over the small, intersecting lines. "No, something's definitely wrong," she asserts, now filled to the tip with dread like it's fresh concrete. Her stomach rolls and her eyes burn. She cannot handle a wrong turn. "We should be there by now."

This piques Evan's interest. He sits up a little straighter, leaning in to get a good glimpse of the map before her. "Show me," he commands, voice low and gravelly. At least he sounds as desperate as she feels.

Her finger points to a spot on the map, and she tries not to sound as close to tears as she is but every single moment she is awake the world gets heavier and heavier, darker and darker. She tries not to think of how many hours it's been. "This is the road we were on. I should've followed this one," she says, tracing the line south, "and that should've brought us closer to London, but somewhere I must've gotten turned around."