Allana let herself be guided inside, complacent as a sleepy child being herded towards bed. The moment she was inside the entryway, however, she stopped in her tracks and swayed slightly, eyes moving listlessly across the familiar room. I need to tell her. I need to make sure… but the frantic impulse that had driven her across Lawrence through pain and fear and cold had abandoned her now, leaked from a damaged mind like water through a sieve, and taken the strength it had lent her with it.
“Jen had a party here once,” she said as she raised a hand and pointed vaguely towards the kitchen, “there was a keg in there. Rose, the first Rose…she doesn’t remember any of this. The one we have now. Sometimes I say something about things that happened then and she’s confused.” She paused and looked at Ava for a moment, considering. If I went away and then came back again and didn’t remember any of it, would we be friends? It had been pure chance that Jen had adopted Ava into her little circle. Now that she was a year removed from the naïve, lonely girl who had landed in a park in Lawrence and set about trying everything she’d never been allowed with the foolish arrogance of a spoiled child Allana wondered if she would have tried so earnestly to befriend the older girl just because Jen had said it was a good idea. Would she make it back to eating ice cream and mocking Sam and stubborn loyalty? It wasn’t a comfortable thought, especially when she was about to ask her… but it slipped away again. “There was a keg in the kitchen, and I wasn’t even going to come until they told me I couldn’t. You weren’t here yet.”
Not here yet, no. Not here. I can’t be… suddenly she was struck by the idea that maybe she’d never made it to Ava’s house at all, that she’d crumpled in the street and she was dreaming this. That Lucifer would walk through the door and begin again where he’d left off. Without the Force everything had the quality of a dream, a facsimile of the waking world she’d been shoved into. Like everything died and they’ve all just agreed to prop up the corpses and go on with their day, just keep smiling and walk past the dead trees and don’t look for the strings. She shuddered violently and took a step back, then lurched forward again as she hit the corner of an open door. The silence, the muffled quality pressed down on her until, desperate for a way to break out of it, to be sure she was awake, she remembered that nothing had hurt in the dream. Quickly, eagerly she raised her fingernails to the underside of her forearm, digging them in until blood welled around them. That hurts, she thought, and let out a shaky, relieved laugh.
It gave her courage enough to begin, “Lucifer was in my dreams. I don't have the Force any more.” She looked at Ava directly for the first time. "It might get worse."