Chapter 2
When consciousness came to them again, several hours had since passed by, though neither were aware of it - at least not at first. Ben was the first to come to, gasping slightly as he slid down from the log he'd grabbed onto (a memory of his, though vague at best) as soon as he and his cousin had managed to rise up and break the surface of the rampaging waters. Pulling Gwen up onto the log, as well, they'd drifted along for quite some time before their tired minds and bodies caught up with them, respectively, and sent them off into a dreamless sleep.
"Gwen…" Ben then whispered, before coughing, his voice hoarse as he cried out more loudly, "Gwen! Are you here?" He was hoping against all hope that she hadn't slipped from the log at some point in her sleep. It was, after all, amazing that the same hadn't happened to Ben himself.
"I'm here, I'm here," she called back, poking her head up beside him, startling him. "I woke up a few minutes ago and decided to dip into the water. Sorry."
"Well, you could've woke me up," Ben replied sourly, before turning his head to the side as his cousin splashed water onto his face. "Hey!"
"Hey nothing," Gwen answered him, a vague sort of half-smile, half-smirk on her face. "We survived a storm at sea. Sure we're now…" - she then paused to look all around herself - "…in the middle of absolutely nowhere, but still, we lived through that, whatever that was."
"True, we did," Ben relented, before splashing her back in the face.
It wasn't for several more hours of floating along, being driven and pulled by tides and currents, that the pair of Tennysons managed to come ashore the island. They were - at first - so thrilled at the prospect of finding the island at all that the rational emotions that should have twisted at their nerves (such as feeling lost, hopeless, done for, cast-awayed) were simply nonexistent. Clambering on out of the water, minding to not scrape up their hands against the seashells of the shore as the made their way, pushing up onto hand and feet to stand, Ben and Gwen soon found themselves dropped down again in exhaustion, though now upon wet plots of sand. They had found the beach of some island, so it seemed.
"I'm so glad we're out of that water," Gwen mumbled, her face turning to the side, her ear pressing into the damp sand as she faced Ben while she lay on her stomach.
"Ditto," he said to her, stretched out on his back as he stared upward at the strangely twilit sky, not knowing whether it was early morning or early evening.
Together, they soon passed out, exhaustion ultimately taking over even the emotion of being thrilled to find some sort of safety.
The sound of seagulls awoke one of them another stretch of hours later. Judging from the way the sun was rising in the sky, it was fairly early on in the morning, though not too early, Ben thought. Sitting up slowly, he made to brush what sand he could from his arms and legs, before looking over to Gwen. She was still sleeping peacefully as she could, so why wake her?
Moving to stand, Ben gave a stretch, and then slipped out of his soaking wet sneakers. Shaking his hair to rid it, also, of sand, the fourteen year old then stripped himself of his shirt and jeans, leaving himself only in wet boxers. Noticing a coconut lying randomly on the sands of the beach, he gave a chuckle. Some joke or other about an island phone floated to mind. A phone. Huh… a phone!
Rushing over to Gwen and dropping to his knees beside her sleeping figure, Ben was soon reaching his hand into her back jean pocket, trying to fish out her cell phone.
"Hey!" Gwen cried out, waking up unexpectedly, precisely as her cousin had his hand planted against her backside, down in her pocket. "Get off me!"
Shoving him with one hand, before rolling over to a sitting position, the messy-haired girl glared over at Ben, shaking her head somewhat. "What gives?"
"I was going for this," he said matter-of-factly, raising the cell phone he'd managed to locate just shy of being shoved away. "Sorry if you thought otherwise."
Blinking, Gwen then simply rolled her eyes, sighing. "Whatever, it's all good. So you wanted my phone? Why? Isn't it beyond waterlogged?"
"Well we won't know that for sure, necessarily," Ben replied defensively, before flipping open the phone and watching as a stream of water came pouring out from its speakerphone. "Or it is that waterlogged. Okay then. On to plan B."
"And what is plan B?" Gwen asked.
"Finding some coconuts to crack open, because I don't know about you, but I'm starving."