Her last thought was simple but in vain….
NO! I WON’T PROTEC THEM
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Jocelin yelped as her hand slid across the work table where she'd slumped and pressed against the hot end of her soldering iron. Eyes snapping open and clutching her burned hand she stared around her workspace in the garage almost as if she'd never seen it before.
She was supposed to be dead. She'd -felt- herself die.
Her breathing quickened as she tried to have a panic attack and she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to calm down. The feeling of how angry she'd been when she'd died was still fresh and vibrant. She whimpered softly as she curled up in her chair and tried not to cry. She'd been battered and broken, she'd lost her friends and knew they had to have died too, she'd felt the anger and the pain and the feeling of being let down again and then she'd been turned into dust. Everything was so vivid and bright almost as if each emotion was a bright spark somewhere in her mind burning it's way into her soul. She wanted to scream but her voice wouldn't work, still in fear of one of the monsters out there would hear her and she would be forced to die again
She didn't know how long she spent there trying to get herself under control and try to make herself stop feeling that sensation of dying over and over again. It could have been minuets or it could have been hours but eventually the sharp red burning of her hand overtook the rest of the emotions in her mind. She wasn't dead. She could still feel pain and you couldn't feel pain if you were dead.
Losing her grip on her hand and sitting up in her chair she looked at the red welted skin where she'd burned herself. It wasn't too bad but the pain seemed to pulse with her heart beat.
Heart beat!
Clamping her hands against her chest she felt the beating of her own heart. The pulse of her heart under her hands brought more tears to her eyes. She was alive. She wasn't dead and she was home. She was sitting in her work room where she'd been making a necklace for her mother for Christmas when she'd been ripped out to the Surrounding. She was right back where she'd disappeared from but it hadn't been left the same. Gone from the table was the jewelry she'd been working on and now one of her mother stained glass projects was sitting on the table half finished. That must have been why the soddering iron was on. She reached out and brushed her fingers over the cool glass and smooth solder that held the pieces together. It seemed like her mother was making a large piece with a Shepard and a sheep and she wondered for a moment if it was going to be for something or just for fun.
She probably would have sat there for a while thinking about the glass piece if she hand heard a gasp and a crash behind her. Turning around she had a moment to register that her mother had dropped a teacup on the stairs before the woman scrambled down the rest of them and pulled her up out of the chair and into a hug that threatened to break her ribs.
"Jocelin! My baby ..." Her mother babbled everything she could think of as she clutched onto her daughter. "We thought you were dead. So many people went missing and we haven't heard anything."
She didn't know what to say to her mother’s babbling and instead just clutched onto her shirt and cried. She'd never thought she'd miss her mother so much but for weeks she'd though that she would ever get to see any of her family again. To be back in her mother’s arms was the best gift she could have ever been given.
"Mom ..." Her voice wavered and she felt her mother’s arms tighten around her again.
"No. We're going to take you upstairs and get you some tea and we're just going to sit on the couch." Juliet shook her head and her arms loosened slightly before she led her daughter upstairs.
Her mother sat her on the couch before going into the kitchen to pour two cups of tea for them. They sat on the couch for hours just watching the news and not talking. She wasn’t sure she could actually talk about anything that had happened yet and was glad that her mother didn’t ask either. She was just happy to have her daughter back and could deal with everything else some other time. They watched some cartoons and a nature program and eventually the news. Stories were already starting to pop up about missing people reappearing back where they’d disappeared from but no one had answers. Those that did offer answers were quickly billed as having delusions or were said to be unstable because of their ordeal.
She knew that someone would come to the house to talk to her officially at some point. She would have to go back to school and get back to her life and her mother would have reported her missing. She would have to tell them something and she knew she couldn’t just tell them the truth. It was obvious already that they wouldn’t believe her.
They wouldn’t believe anyone.
