The chapters will alternate between perspectives of the girls, I forgot to mention that before. Here's the next chapter guys! Sorry it's a little short but I liked where the chapter ended so I didn't want to add more than was necessary.

Please, review the story, reviews give me life!

Reese – The Ponderings of Bear

"Where are we, Sienna?" Reese whimpered as she trampled through the woods behind a determined Sienna. They had been walking for hours, but Sienna just would not stop. Reese couldn't see why, if they were looking for Alice and Mia, they could be going in a very wrong direction. There was no way to tell where they were going at all! For all she knew, she could be travelling even further away than they had anticipated

They had awoken a while ago in these strange, dark, dreary woods but had no recollection of how and when they had gotten there. The last thing Reese remembered was looking at a really bright star, a star that seemed to get a closer and closer to her until…darkness.

It was rather disorientating, waking up somewhere else, and at first, Reese had not remembered what had happened the night before until Alice's words swirled around her brain once more "I wish that we lived."

Then she woke up beside Sienna, still wrapped in the blanket from the night before, winding, twisting, mangled trees leering above her, the pungent smell of dirty leaves filling her nose. She had found that she had become smaller than usual, the same height as Sienna, who was now half her usual size, and more filled out than usual. "Like, we didn't just sit around this god awful town and wait."

As soon as Sienna had realised her big sister was missing, she had immediately become frantic and nothing Reese did calmed her down. So, she had ended up giving in to her youngest friend and travelled through the woods with her in search for both Alice and Mia. "I wish our life was some big adventure, an adventure of, like, epic proportions"

But after a while, it became clear to Reese that they were not about to find their friends anytime soon, it was becoming even darker in the woods now, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for Reese to see through the haze of black left behind as the sun disappeared into the horizon. Sienna didn't seem to have noticed, she just carried on through the forest, tripping and stumbling over everything in her path. Her sheer determination at that moment was something that Reese admired, but she was being fucking stupid. They needed to stop before she hurt herself. "And just that, well, that we weren't just some insignificant girls. I wish we were significant, an important part of something special. I wish we lived."

Reese groaned as she tripped over yet another warped tree root, she could've sworn it hadn't been there before, she called forward to her still hysterical friend. "Sienna! We need to stop! We're not going to be able to see if we carry on much longer!" She saw Sienna freeze ahead of her, the other girl had not noticed night fall, "Look just stop," Reese said softly as she edged toward Sienna, carefully watching for obstacles in her way, "I'll come to you, and we'll try to make a fire or something…"

Sienna said nothing. She just stared ahead into the blank dark of the forest, either seeing something that Reese couldn't, or simply watching in case she suddenly could see. Reese's heart broke as she thought of Sienna's desperate, distraught howls earlier in the day. Sienna loved her sister so much, Reese could see that now. Alice, although rather shy around large crowds, would do anything to protect her dear little sister, even if it meant going against her own fears, or putting herself in danger.

Now that Reese thought about it, she realised that this was probably the longest the two girls had spent apart. Well, unless something particularly bad was happening to one of them, so Reese could see why Sienna was panicking. Anytime she had been separated from Alice, one girl had been royally screwed over in ways that Reese couldn't even bear to think. It was the reason they were like they were, Reese noted, Alice was shy and untrusting towards strangers because people had made her that way, and Sienna had become brash and overconfident, which meant that Alice always had to make sure Sienna wasn't doing anything stupid. Reese couldn't even imagine how Alice was feeling if this was how Sienna was acting.

By this time she had reached Sienna's side and tugged the smaller girl to the ground. The other girl collapsed, and then moved so her back was leant against a tree. Reese shrugged the blanket from around her shoulders and tucked it around her companion as she started to collect dry sticks and leaves for kindling. She tried to remember everything she could from the nature and survival TV shows she had watched extensively when nothing had been on. Bear Grylls: Born Survivor had been something she was particularly a fan of.

She gathered everything she could remember Bear said you would need to build a fire in the wild, and began to rub one stick to the others to create a spark. Sienna watched on in wonder as Reese tried to light the fire but nothing seemed to get the sticks to light. She was beginning to get frustrated, when two soft hands placed themselves atop of hers.

Reese looked up in shock at Sienna, who had leant forward, and begun to move both of their hands down the stick. "Bear," She said quietly, "always says you must move your hands on the stick in a downward motion, to create more friction."

"I didn't know you watched Born Survivor…" Reese said quietly, embarrassed that she had forgotten the little fact. She was supposed to be the smart one, after all.

Sienna nodded solemnly, "Yeah, all the time. Alice hated it, never did like anything that taught her anything to do with survival, Alice didn't." The stick finally produced a spark and Sienna pulled her hands away from Reese's and leant backwards once more. "She figured she knew everything there was to know about survival from…past experiences."

"Knows," Reese said quickly, moving away from the fire herself.

"What?"

"Knows," Reese repeated, "Alice isn't dead, I know she isn't. So she still hates Born Survivor, because she never stopped, and she knows everything about survival." Silence fell between them, the weight of the situation bearing down on them.

After a while, Sienna sighed, "How do we know that, Reese? How do we know that she isn't dead? We don't even know where the fuck we are! How could we possibly know where my sister is?" Her voice rose as she became more frustrated with their current predicament and Reese was rather…scared, if she were honest. Sienna was the nice one, she was almost never angry with anyone. Not even…never mind.

"Sienna," Reese's soft, gentle voice broke through Sienna's rambling. Jesus, she wasn't used to being nice and, uh, unsarcastic, to people. "We can't know for sure if Alice is okay…or Mia, for that matter, but we have to believe they're okay. If we give up now, we'll never find them, but at the same time, we have to rational about this." She moved around the fire, so that she was sat beside Sienna. She wrapped on arm around the girl's shoulders. "We need to be strategic about this, actually think about where we are going and what we are doing. We don't know where we are, Si, anything could be lurking around."

Sienna unconsciously shuffled closer to the older girl, "Do you think we'll be okay, Reese?"

"I think," Reese said, looking into the orange flames of their small fire, "that we could be. If we remember everything Bear taught us."

Sienna giggled, "I'd rather not drink my own piss, if I'm honest…"

"Nah, me neither," Reese said with a small laugh. "I promise I'll protect you though."

"I'll protect you too, Reese," Sienna grinned at the other girl, and Reese couldn't help but wonder just how Sienna planned on doing that, she wasn't a vicious person at all. If Reese were totally honest, she'd say that Sienna would probably cry if she had to hurt someone to protect Reese, of all people. Back home (Reese was absolutely positive they weren't at home anymore), Reese and Sienna hadn't been close. Sienna, whilst smart and understanding and funny, was also very immature and naïve, something Reese just couldn't deal with. "Alice thinks I'm the one who always needs protecting, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to protect her…or others sometimes." Sienna said, reminding Reese that Sienna was also very loyal. To her friends.

Reese could be found to be a rather…headstrong person. She needed to be right, she had to prove herself, she strived for the praise of others. She thought, perhaps, that it was possibly because of the neglect she endured at home. Her parents didn't love her, she knew that. They left her at home along for weeks when she was just five years old. One day, Reese accidently set fire to the house and the police, having found out about her parents neglect, took her away from her childhood home.

She found herself in foster care, with a bunch of other kids who deemed themselves superior to her and she ended up lost. She couldn't find a home in the foster home, but she had found a home…in Alice and Mia and Sienna. They didn't care that she was the 'weirdo foster kid' that everyone else deemed her to be, but they dealt with her, through everything.

That was why Reese knew that she was ready to protect Sienna. By taking her in and being her friend, Sienna had saved Reese's life, so Reese felt as though she had a debt to pay to the girl and she was willing to do anything to fulfil it.

The two girls stayed like that for a long time, curled up into one and other and watching the beautiful dance of the majestic flames.

"Reese," Sienna mumbled after a while, "Do you think Mia and Alice are together…like us?"

Reese thought about it for a second. Were they together? Most probably, it seemed logical enough, "I guess," Reese said, "but even if they weren't together, I reckon they wouldn't stop until they found us."

"You really do like us, don't you?" Sienna pondered, and Reese could tell she was on the verge of sleep, "I wasn't sure until yesterday, but, you were really crying. You only cry when you're, like, really sad, so, you must have been heart-broken."

"Of course I like you guys!" Reese chuckled, "I may be a bitch, but, I know when I have something magical."

"That was sweet, never heard you be sweet before."

"Yeah, don't get used to it."

Sienna chuckled at the response and nuzzled her herself further toward the older girl. Reese was kind of uncomfortable in her current position, this was the closet she had been to Sienna in her whole life. She'd mostly been close with Mia whilst they had grown up, although Alice and Mia had some weird bond that Reese didn't understand. Alice had a habit of panicking in crowded areas and, while Reese could never handle her in those situations, somehow Mia knew how to handle it.

Reese squeezed her eyes shut. She hoped her friends were okay, because, well, they were seriously all she had.

"What do you think happened, Reese?" Sienna asked with a yawn.

Reese shrugged slightly, "At a guess, Alice's wish came true, we've been given a chance to live a life of great adventure or whatever the fuck Alice wished for, I don't know. I didn't think it would actually work! To take us to a completely different place completely, though, that WishStar had some wit, I tell ya."

"This is Alice's wish? S'not exactly what I was expecting..."

"Me either, Little Bennet," Reese said softly, using the nickname she used to call her by. Alice was Big Bennet and Sienna, Little Bennet. Reese couldn't exactly pinpoint where it started, but the sisters, who were only born ten months apart, had loved it.

Sienna laughed once more and pulled the blanket so that it covered both she and Reese. Once again they fell into silence, and Reese wished she could know what was going through the other girl's mind. It had always been hard to read Sienna, the girl was erratic, always changing her mind. So indecisive, so inattentive. Reese was sure she had the attention span of a goldfish sometimes, but here she was, eyebrows creased, movement limited as she sat as still as possible, contemplating something that Reese did not know.

"How do we carry on?" Sienna asked after a while. "Do we just like, keep walking? Or do we try and exit the forest? I suppose that way would be easier to get our bearings, and perhaps find someone to help us…but the others could be in here!"

Reese frowned, why had she not thought of that? She felt awfully embarrassed now for her own stupidity. "Well, I guess we should try and get out, we could wind up getting ourselves lot going further in…but, then again…which way is out?"

"Maybe the light will show us?" Sienna contemplated, looking around at their dark surrounds, barely seeing past the glow of their fire.

"We can only hope." Reese replied, "But we need to stay here for a bit, rest up, it's been a long day." Sienna nodded against her shoulder, "Maybe the daylight we also make us more rational about our decisions…"

"I'm kind of hungry," Sienna complained quietly, as though Reese had never said her last few words, "We walked all day without break, easily."

"Then we shall start tomorrow off finding food," Reese decided, "If there's any in these stupid woods."

"I was thinking about that earlier…" Sienna said, "There isn't any other sound here, is there? If you block out the sound of the fire, there is nothing to hear, at all, not even a cricket. It is as though…we are completely alone."

Reese listened, concentrating hard on anything but the fire. Sienna was right, there was no other noise, they were alone. Wait, no, she could hear something else… "Do you hear that?" She spoke into the other girl's ear, her voice barely wavering above a whisper.

"Yes," The brunette breathed, "what is it?"

"I don't know…" She admitted. She concentrated hard, she had to figure it out. It sounded like leaves. Crumpled leaves. She thought hard, what could it be? It could be anything out there. She tightened her grip around Sienna, there was no way the girl was going to die on her watch. Leaves, she thought, are all over the ground, someone is walking towards us. "I need you to not panic, okay?" Sienna nodded quickly.

"What have we here?" Spoke a smooth voice suddenly, that made both Reese and Sienna jump in shock. "Two dwarves? How…" the man seemed to ponder his thought for a moment, "delightful." He finally decided, although his words were just dripping with sarcasm. "What, pray I ask, are you doing in Lothlorien, My ladies?"

"Uh, we're lost?" Reese said tentatively.

"Lost?" The man said haughtily, and for the first time Reese noticed his perfect long hair and pointed ears, "One never comes to Lothlorien without purpose and getting lost in here, is rather…unlikely. Tell me, why are you really here?" He raised a bow and arrow from his side, pointing it at Reese's head.

"No, please!" Sienna said desperately, "We just woke up here, we really are lost, honest!" She nodded, as though agreeing with herself. "We're not from around here, we've never even heard of Loth-whatever before!"

He contemplated this for a moment, relaxing his aim the smallest amount, "Lothlorien." He spoke suddenly, "It is called Lothlorien."

"Yes, that!" Sienna agreed, "See I didn't even know the name, believe us, please…" She smiled questionably.

"Haldir."

"Yes, Haldir, could you possibly help us?"

"Why should I help you? You could be assassins!" He hissed and both Sienna and Reese recoiled at the sheer malice in his voice. A shiver rolled down Reese's spine as she looked

"We need to speak to someone who is good with magic!" Reese added quietly, "Do you know anyone like that."

"I know a fair few, but my Lady Galadriel would be best for you, if what you say is true."

"I promise you it is." Sienna insisted desperately.

"Okay," He said, lowering his weapon, "come now, we must hurry,"

Not needing to be told twice, the two girls jumped up and followed the strange, pointy eared man.