“That… does help a little, actually. Thanks.” Andie smiled weakly. “…it’s been a long day though, and I think I should go get some rest now.”

And with that, the conversation ended. Unceremoniously, and perhaps a little anticlimactically. Loose threads and confusing emotions left dangling and unresolved. No dramatic resolutions or insightful finishing statements. If this had been the season finale of a TV show, it would have been critically panned.

Andie hated it, and she just wanted to go home. No, she didn’t even really want that. After a good day’s work, she usually wanted to go home - to snuggle up in her blankets and either drift off to sleep or dissolve back into her dreams, depending on whether it had been school work or dreamwalker work. But right now, she just wanted everything to stop. Right now, she was something she almost never was - emotionally exhausted. Not a sleepy kind of emotionally exhausted, with a fuzzy vague feeling of satisfaction. No, that sort of exhaustion was familiar to her.

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This… this just felt bad. Not even any specific kind of “bad.” It wasn’t like anything, because it wasn’t something. It wasn’t like the depression she got from being low on Will to Live, because it wasn’t nothing. Not nothing, not something, not anything, it was just a generic negative feeling, and Andie really wanted to just lose consciousness until the feeling went away on its own.

Unfortunately, there was still a long ways to go until Andie got home. In dreamwalker form, sluggish emotions meant a sluggish body, so she had to walk the whole way to the building her apartment was in, all the way up the stairs to her actual apartment, and into her room where her physical body lay asleep.

…but when the conscious becomes unconscious, the subconscious comes out to play. To think. To process emotions and information. To shred the mind into a hundred separate pieces, and slowly puzzle it back together, this time more whole than ever before. Because if Andie did not go to sleep, she could not wake up - and if she did not Dream, she could not Awaken.