What if Claire didn't have the choice to be human after Myrnin saved her in Last Breath? How would the book have changed after that? What would happen to Claire and Shane's relationship? To Claire and Myrnin's relationship? This is their story, told in a horribly short series of mini fics.

Enjoy.

(Quote from Last Breath, pg 269, ch 16)

She was weirdly calm. There was no way she could resist that pull. It was like a black hole, and she was standing on the event horizon.

"Claire."

It was a whisper in the hurricane that roared around her, but she recognized the sound. Myrnin. That was Myrna's voice.

"Here!" She screamed, as the void pulled her away. "Myrnin, help me! Help!"

The spinning peaces of reality around her seemed to slow down. She saw herself reflected in one side of a jagged shard, and then it turned, and she saw Myrnin's face in it. He looked worried, and there were lines of of effort around his mouth that she had never seen before.

His hand reached out to her, but it was as if he was trapped behind the glass; his hand slapped against it, and then the spinning shard turned again, and she lost him.

Claire twisted. There, in another piece, she saw him again, reaching out.

"Take it," He was trying to tell her. It wasn't a voice-it was something else, a kind of whisper moving inside her, like blood in her veins. Only she no longer had blood, or veins. This was cumming out of her very core, the thing that had survived her body.

Her soul.

"Take my hand."

She couldn't. He was on the other side of that glass, and the pieces were moving, and she was being dragged inch by inch into the dark.

Then she saw Shane in one of the spinning, glittering shards. He was on his back, propped up, staring out of the shred of reality, and he looked so agonizingly alone.

"Take my hand, Claire-do it now! " Myrnin's whisper sounded desperate now. Anguished. This was hurting him, too.

She kept her gaze on Shane's face , but she lunged for Myrnin's hand as another piece of reality slid past her.

Her fingers broke the cold, icy surface and touched his.

And reality came back together. She could still see the cracks, hear the awful noise of the darkness beyond that, but Myrnin's hand twisted and closed around her wrist in an unbreakable hold, and she fell, and fell, and fell. . . .

And took a breath.

A real breath.

It hurt.

Really short, I know, but I'm working on three other story's. The part that actually comes from me will be in the next chapter.

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