This time, she had come too late.
He was still in the shack where he had hidden his clothes for the duration of the transformation, where they had found him and… blood was sprayed across the dim windows like a horrific version of something out of a comic book. And there he was: alone, gasping, a tight ball of pain on the floor. And here she was: fully dressed and hideously proper and almost unable to will herself to move any closer to him. Not only was the gore enough to make her think that she might be rather violently sick any moment, but she knew how much he would hate for her to see him like this.
But that only lasted a moment. A moment in which a spasm of hurt overtook Tom, forcing his head to jolt backwards, and for him to see her. The fear in his eyes was too much for her to bear, and with a strangled cry she took a few tottering steps forward and sank to her knees beside him.
"A-Allis-" He tried for a moment to sit up, then squeezed his eyes tight shut and with a small hiss of breath fell back again. She seized his shoulders to stop his head from thwacking back down onto the concrete and eased it onto her lap instead.
"Y-yes it's me, Tom, can you hear me?" Her voice sounded terrible: broken and unnaturally fast and high-pitched, but he made a sort of groan in reply and then words seemed to rush from her lips unbidden, everything she'd ever learnt from debate team forgotten in horror. "Listen, y-you're going to be perfectly alright, d-d'you hear me Thomas McNair? T-the others will come in a minute and we'll fix you up. You'll be fine. Then you'll have to have a bit of a restbite which you'll admittedly hate but you'll get to order us all around and-and then you'll end up right as rain a-and you and me, we'll go for walks in the park like we did on that weekend we first met. Do you remember? And you'll work too hard at that hotel and get up to all sorts and I'll pretend to be annoyed but actually love th-that that's the sort of person you are! I wouldn't have had it any other way. And some nights, maybe every night, I'll come up to your room and we'll kiss and do… other things. And I'll tell you what a wonderful human being you are and how much I l-love you b-because I really can't seem to express that right now when it actually m-matters. Which is fine because you're going to be fine, you're going to be just fine ok? o-ok?"
Her speech had sped up more and more until she had lost control of it and allowed her uneven breath to transform into brief, desperate sobs. All the time he watched her with half-closed eyelids, and when she had become too upset to carry on he limply lifted a hand toward her face, perhaps in an effort to comfort her, but it had quivered only a second in the air before falling back again. However when he tried to speak now, it came out surprisingly clearly, and levelly.
"I-it's 'alrigh' Allison. I know I won't be." He choked, grimaced and continued. "I want to go next to me Dad. And the others… tell them this were none o' their fault . A-and be safe. Please."
Allison wiped her eyes impatiently on the back of her hand.
"Of course."
"A-and… oh I do love yeh. And I love when you talk rubbish. Where-" his voice cracked painfully. "where were we gonna live?"
Tom's expression had gone back to a more concentrated form of desperation now, he seemed to be clinging onto her, onto everything, with all he had. And she needed to help; so she her best to compose herself, stroking his cropped hair that tickled her fingertips like the bristles of a paintbrush , forcing herself to speak lightly, hoping that this sham of reality might somehow keep him with her until help could be called.
"Well obviously we'd have to save up for a while, but maybe a house not too far away from old Honolulu, only in a smarter area perhaps. "dead classy" you know? Just a little house, small and smart and select. Which you could have fun knocking about with a sledgehammer for the first year or so after we moved in. And we'd paint it all the right colours. And stick up all the pictures we've both collected over the years, although maybe you wouldn't need your collage so much anymore. And every evening we'd both make or sandwiches for work the next day and then watch "the sky at night", even after they stop making them we'll have it on video or , well, whatever they have then. And it would be near the school that our three kids would go to, two girls and a boy- oh alright two boys and a girl. Names yet to be decided unless you've got any suggestions mister? And they'd have both my entirely impractical knowledge for books and so forth that school seems to condone, and your kindness and braveness and general understanding of people. And they'd all do the same chores and wear whatever they want and be whatever they want because it will be an equal opportunities household, even if your opinion on what the girls- girl can do is on occasion a little medieval. And we'd live and be together forever and live hap-"
"Allison?" She looked down, the dream fading around them, to see he had turned his face away from her, to the corner where there seemed to be something only he could see. His voice had been quiet, questioning like a child, an edge afraid and totally awed. But she couldn't see a thing.
"Tom, w-what-?"
He had gone limp in her arms.
She shook him a little, and his head lolled, all the tension gone from every muscle. She thought wildly of the kiss of life, resuscitation, the half-formed concepts they had told them about in DofE training. But something deep inside her already knew it was too late. She lowered the top half of Tom's body onto the cold ground and stared at him for a few long moments with glazed eyes.
She was drenched in his blood. That teamed with the draftiness of the shack was causing her to shiver badly, or perhaps it was something else. She couldn't seem to think. She couldn't seem to breathe.
Quietly, shakily, she lay down next to him. Holding him and burying her face into his still, wet chest, she waited for the others who would undoubtedly come and try to take him from her.