Breathe

strong.

Clay was drowning.

"Help ! Anybody ! Help !" he screamed, but no one heard. The waves of the sea crashed over him. It was a road trip with friends gone wrong. There was no one to save him. He was going to die.

"Please ! Somebody !" he struggled against the rising tide. Water filled his mouth and went into his lungs. Clay began to panic, feeling his lungs buck against the sudden excess of fluid. Choking, his vision began to go dark. He kicked his feet hard. He had to survive this. He had to live. He had to see Nick and George again. He had to-

"Dude !"

The lights flipped on, and Clay was surrounded by a blinding light. He felt hands shake his shoulders, but he was catatonic. He couldn't move. All he could hear was the sound of the crashing waves, and all he could see was light.

"Clay, wake up !" 

Gasping, he shot into a sitting position, taking in his surroundings. Nick was sitting in front of Clay, his hands still on the older boy's shoulders. George stood beside the bed, looking down upon his anxiety-riddled friend. Both of Clay's friends' faces were saturated with worry. Clay had endured yet another night terror, his fourth this week and possibly his fifteenth this month. They were starting to become a common way of life, but that didn't make them any less terrifying.

Seeing that Clay was conscious and breathing fully on his own, Nick relaxed his arms and placed them in his lap. The clock on the bedside table read 2:08 am. It was excruciatingly early.

"What was it this time ?" George said in a low voice.

"Drowning," Clay replied quietly. This wasn't new. While most of his other night terrors were of failure or his friends dying, some of them were of him drowning- of him losing his grip on the one thing he thought he could control: his life. These dreams left him cold and out of breath. They left him shaking and paralyzed, whereas the other dreams left him completely defenseless and utterly alone.

The two friends nodded knowingly, then, after a minute, stood up to go to their respective rooms. 

"Do you need anything, Clay ?" George asked.

Shaking his head, Clay laid back in his bed, staring straight up at the ceiling. "Thanks, though. And thanks for coming in here and helping me."

Nick smiled. "It's really no big deal, dude. We're here for you." And they left the room, flipping the lights back off on the way out.

Clay sighed deeply. He hated the fact that he had night terrors at all, let alone multiple times a week. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to wake up to your brother's screams, to wake up to the sound of them in complete, inescapable agony. He shuddered at the thought. George and Nick must be so strong mentally if they really were okay with helping Clay deal with his demons on an almost-daily basis. 

Soon, the clutches of fear that gripped him finally let him go, and Clay slipped into a blissfully dreamless sleep. He woke with the light, and heard his best friends in the kitchen downstairs. Stretching, he got out of bed and walked down to meet his friends.

Nick and George were on their laptops. By the looks of it, George was browsing Amazon for new computer parts, and Nick was designing new merch. Clay poured himself some coffee and sat at the table next to his brothers. He didn't immediately drink his coffee; instead, he studied his friends' faces. Both boys were very tired, he could tell. The bags under Nick's eyes or the circles that lined George's were enough of a giveaway, but Clay could also tell by the empty mugs for coffee that were beside both boys' setups. 

Laughing, Clay tried to break the tension. "Long night ?" he poked.

Both boys glared at Clay jokingly, then Nick gave an exhausted laugh. "Yeah, after you went back to sleep last night, we both just came down here. We couldn't sleep, so we've been working since about 3."