Chapter 47:

I sat up with a gasp, my hands flying to my shoulders - why did they do that?

I looked around, my vision blurred. "Where -"

"Shh," came a familiar voice to my right. I turned almost burst into tears.

"Lily?" I asked quietly.

"Yeah!" she said happily. "You're alive! You've been in a coma for so long -"

I curled up on the hospital bed and began to sob my heart out.

"Hey, what's wrong?" asked my flatmate tenderly.

She won't get it, she won't understand, I thought wildly. How could this happen? I had been so sure that this wouldn't happen, I had thought - Could it have been just a dream? "How long have I been out?" I asked from where my face was in my pillow as my shoulders shook with sobs.

She turned sober. "Um... Freya? You've been in a coma for almost five years. It's been pretty scary, you know, the doctor's'll be so happy to hear they've got you up and running again -"

"What happened to me?"

"You got hit - a truck. Huge one. You're mum, by the way -"

"What's happened to her?"

Lily looked supremely uncomfortable. "She died. Heart attack, couple months ago."

I stared blankly at the ceiling from where I had flipped over. I sang a snippet of a Green Day song:

"Read between the lines, what's fucked up and everything's alright. Check my vital signs, to know if I'm alive and I walk alone."

And promptly began to cry again as I thought about teaching Kili another song.

"What's wrong with you?" asked Lily quietly. "Why are you crying?"

"You don't understand," I whispered. "There was this place - I was in Middle Earth - Kili, Gandalf - Moonshadow -"

"You're not making any sense," she said, sounding rather alarmed.

She went to call a doctor, but I hissed, "No, Lily!"

She froze and came back to where she was sitting.

"Tell me everything that's happened."

"What do you mean?"

"What happened while I was gone? New Doctor Who season, more Sherlock? Please tell me Season 3 did come out?"

She brightened slightly and began babbling to me about the two shows, explaining Moffat's and Gatiss's plot twists and gushing about the new Doctor and how Season 4 of Sherlock was coming out soon -

And I wasn't listening. I couldn't, I couldn't focus on the shows that were my heart and soul in this world, because Kili wasn't here.

Finally, I sat up again, cutting Lily off mid-sentence. "I can't stay here," I murmured wildly.

I checked for pockets, for weapons - nothing. I cast a brief glance around the room - no guns, knives, poison, nothing.

"What do you mean, you can't stay?" asked Lily, looking alarmed again. "You weren't anywhere, you were on Earth!"

"And I'm never coming back, I'm going to spend the rest of my life with him, not here -"

"Who?" She sounded so scared and so angry that I almost told her the truth.

"Give me a gun."

Now she sounded terrified. "Why? What are you going to do?"

"Fine," I snapped, "Don't."

And I leapt up from the hospital bed and sprinted away, bashing through curtains and along hallways. Lily chased me, screaming for help, doctors, back up, anybody.

I burst up the stairs, flying through a closet of clothes and pulled a Doctor, stopping to change quickly into jeans and a T-shirt with a black wool trench coat and boots. Then I somehow burst out onto the roof and almost laughed out loud.

I was in London.

I would recognise that skyline anywhere, but as I looked around, I saw nothing but grey. This world had nothing to live for, not even Lily or my BBC shows.

Kili was something to die for.

And so Lily found me, standing on the edge of the roof. "Don't!" she screamed. "We just got you up, we thought you were dead!"

"There's nothing to live for here, Lily, not a damn thing," I whispered. "Not even you. There, I have Kili, I have Moonshadow, Rory, Bilbo, Gandalf, Fili - all of my dwarves. I have to save them."

Lily finally stopped looking scared and looked sad. "You broke, Freya. Something broke, in here." She tapped her temple. "You think you went to Middle-Earth? Watch this."

She pulled out her phone and showed me a video, dated five years ago. It was sped up, so it went over the past five years here on Earth - and all of it was me in a hospital bed. There were a few snippets of a machine that showed my brain activity skyrocketing, and I backed away from the phone.

"No. You're wrong. And even if it was true - I preferred the dream to here. This time, I'll make sure I'm really dead." And with that, I threw myself off of the roof.

It reminded me of that tree I had jumped out of in Middle-Earth, before we reached the mountain, and the cliff when Kili and Fili and Ori found the door. My hair flew up behind me, the coat just billowed in a gorgeous way, but my arms pinwheeled this time as I fell.

Halfway down, I started to wonder if I was wrong. Had it been real?

Too late now, I thought savagely to myself.

I felt myself hit the ground, hard - no magic this time to save me. Then everything went very, very black.

And on we go, to - Freya's next life? :)