Saffie couldn’t bear to be in the garden for a moment longer. How could her mum even contemplate turning her own brother’s life support off? She ran back into the house, up the stairs, and as she entered her bedroom, she couldn’t hold her tears in. Her parents had completely torn the place apart. There were no posters left on the walls, her shelves were empty aside from some meaningless new decorative ornaments, and the duvet cover they had replaced her pixel-art one with was pink and covered in flowers.
Saffie collapsed to her knees and Acorn buried his head in her side. She needed Dax to put his large, comforting hand on her shoulder and tell her that everything would be okay; that her parents were completely unjustified and they would pay for what they did. She needed Dax now more than ever.
As she knelt there on her bedroom floor crying, a blurry line of text popped up in the top left corner of her vision.
NATE: Hey.
Saffie was in no fit state for small talk. She tried to blink away the message, but it wouldn’t disappear, so she forced herself to think the words “Message Nate.”
SAFFIE: I can’t right now, Nate.
NATE: What’s the matter?
SAFFIE: My parents are evil.
NATE: Care to elaborate?
SAFFIE: They destroyed my entire childhood in a bonfire.
NATE: Are you serious?
SAFFIE: I wish I was joking.
Saffie didn’t bother to say anything else, and she spent the next half an hour in the same position on her floor, just staring at the now bare walls in a complete daze and listening to her parents retreat into the the living room as the bonfire slowly crackled to nothing. Eventually, another message popped up:
NATE: I’ve got something for you.
SAFFIE: What? Where are you?
NATE: Outside your window.
Saffie glanced up to see Nate perched on the other side of the glass once again, Talia sitting calmly on his shoulder. She got up, rubbed her red eyes with her robe sleeve (which was in reality her jacket sleeve), and yanked up the window. Nate hopped to the floor with a loud thud, but Saffie didn’t care about the noise this time. If her mum walked in and found a boy in her room, so be it. There was little more she could do to disappoint her parents at this stage.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“That was a big bonfi-” he started, but stopped himself when he saw the state of Saffie’s bedroom. “Man, they really stripped this place bare, huh?”
“Every last thing,” Saffie confirmed, noticing that Nate looked a little different from the last time she had seen him. He was now wearing a brown leather style tunic and the weapon in his holster was a curved, more impressive blade than he used to have. He noticed she was staring at it and pulled it out of its sheath.
“I got it as a reward for hunting a Snickerback,” he said proudly, spinning it through his fingers with much greater mastery than Saffie was expecting. He’d evidently been doing a lot of training at the Warrior’s Guild. With a quick twist of his wrist he caught the hilt and stabbed the tip into Saffie’s now empty wooden desk so it was standing upright.
“If my parents did something like this to me I’d go crazy,” he said.
Saffie drew a deep breath.
“Yeah, well my mum is threatening to turn Dax’s life support off so I kind of haven’t got a choice but to shut up and accept it.”
“Are you any closer to waking him up?” Nate said, tearing his eyes away from the bare shelves and looking back at her.
“I have no idea,” Saffie said truthfully. “I mean, I’ve been battling my butt off and I still don’t have access to the counterspell. What if I can’t get the experience I need in time?”
Nate pulled a bottle filled with bright blue liquid from his belt and held it out.
“I know it’s not much, but it might help.”
“What is it?” said Saffie.
“A Potent,” said Nate, urging her to take it. “It completely refills your MP, then overfills it by two hundred percent. As a mage, I figured it would be more useful to you than it would to me. I hardly ever cast spells, and when I do, they cost barely any mana because they’re so basic.”
Saffie accepted it cautiously and popped the cork, sniffing the contents. It had the familiar bubblegum smell of an MP restorative, though this one also had a strong hint of aniseed.
“This guy called Ruben from the Alchemists’s Guild gave it to me,” said Nate. “He was telling me all about some secret foraging trip he was about to go on for some rare ingredient, which seemed a bit loose when the trip was supposed to be ‘secret.’ Have you met that guy yet? He’s quite a character.”
“Yeah,” said Saffie, remembering her and Ashmi’s interaction with Ruben at the Mage’s Guild potions store. “He’s actually a year above me in my school. My training partner at the Mage’s Guild seems to think he has a crush on me.”
At these words, something in Nate’s expression changed.
“Does he have a crush on you?” he said.
“No,” Saffie replied flatly. “He doesn’t. He was just acting weird around me because he thinks I’m diseased and he doesn’t want to catch whatever I’ve got.”
Nate chuckled.
“Why would he think you’re diseased?”
“Because everyone does. Everyone in that school hates me. The only friend I’ve ever had is my uncle, and I don’t even have him any more.”
Nate gave a wry smile, which for some reason really ground Saffie’s gears.
“Why are you grinning?” she snapped.
“Is it really that inconceivable that someone might have a crush on you?”
She felt her anger rising.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”
“Wow,” said Nate.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You really have no idea, do you?”
Saffie couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“No idea?” she blurted. “It’s YOU who has no idea! You have absolutely no idea what every day is like for me in my school.”
“How do you know I don’t have any idea?” Nate retorted. “You don’t know anything about me either.”
Saffie could feel herself shaking. This kind of arguing was the last thing she needed right now.
“Can you go please?” she asked.
“I was only trying to-”
“Just go,” Saffie urged.
“You know what?” Nate said, his tone changing. “I’m sick of this. Since we met in the park, all I’ve tried to do is help you, and all you’ve done is reject my help and be rude to me. You say you’ve never had a friend other than your uncle. Well I was happy to be that exception. But it looks like you don’t want anything to change.” He plucked his blade from the desk and said, “Come on Talia. We’re not welcome here. Not now or ever.”
“Nate, wait,” Saffie said, knowing deep down that everything he had said was right, but he didn’t turn around. Without another word, he shimmied down Oakley and hopped the fence, disappearing from view.
Saffie stared into the darkness. What had she done? Nate was the only person her own age who had ever shown her any morsel of friendship and she had completely resisted it. Was it some kind of defence mechanism?
She tossed and turned that night, her mind consumed with conflicting thoughts of different people; Dax, her mum, the girl in the purple robes… but the one who remained at the forefront of it all was Nate.
At around 4AM she couldn’t bear her insomnia any longer, and she sent a message to him:
SAFFIE: I’m sorry. Can we talk?
She eventually fell into a troubled sleep, but when she woke a few hours later, there was no reply waiting for her.