Losing you would mean the end of the world to me.

Lightning. Flash. Water. And the next moment, her eyes flew open.

She coughed. Hard. Water was been pulled out of her lungs by that. What had just happened? She didn’t know, but she was very much alright: Soaked, but alive.

It was still midnight, but it wasn’t raining anymore, the sky was clear, there wasn’t any angry cloud. The crescent moon was shining with a brightness she never saw until today. The stars were so many it felt like she was looking at the city’s lights in the night.

She couldn’t understand anymore. Didn’t the bridge collapse with them still on it? Didn’t they fell into the water? Water? Touching the ground she felt the vegetation behind her palm. Grass and dried sand which was getting wet because of her still dripping hair. Some feet ahead of her, laid a lake, where should have been the sea that supposedly drowned them. Could it be that she actually dreamed all of it? From the dance club until the accident?

Her freezing body was telling her what happened was very much real. Strange, but real. She felt numb, not knowing what to think. Was she dead? Was this what was called purgatory? Glancing around for any plausible explanation, she saw her father, lying on the ground not far away. He wasn’t moving at all. Her heart started racing. She tried to go to him, but her overtired feet would have none of it. Failing to stand up, she crawled to him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, her heart drumming inside her torso threatening to come out at any moment.

“Dad”, she whispered with a shaking voice at his side, nudging him. Her hair was out of its bun, every part of her body was covered in sand and russet, even her mouth was full of it. “Dad, please, wake up. Dad.”

Annabeth wasn’t a physician. She knew nothing of first aid. Had it been a problem with a computer, she would have easily solved it, but not this. Not a life or death problem. That was her father’s skills, and right now, he was the one in need of help. And a quick one at that.

She seated herself next to his face and lifted a shaking finger close to his nose, praying that he was still breathing. When his hot breath fanned her still damp finger, she drew a sigh of relief. He was alive. Her father wasn’t dead, he was alive. They were going to be alright. Whatever happened, they were safe. Were they? She called him again with a small voice; she couldn’t seemed to speak any higher for now. He didn’t wake up. She shook him again. Nothing.

“You’re not gonna leave me now, right?” She asked completely freaked out. “Out of all the time I asked you to leave me alone, you choose this moment to finally comply?”

The silence responded her. She stopped shaking him and her body itself started shaking. It wasn’t the cold, there was much of that, yes, but it wasn’t responsible for her state. Soon, her voice broke the silence, her laughs making her trembled all the more, from head to toe. She was guffawing like crazy. It was a pitiful sight. A reaction born from despair. She was laughing without mirth. Laughing to fill the silence, because someone had to. And no one was going to if not her. Certainly not her dad. Her laugh grew louder and louder, as hot tears were now falling like river.

“You really suck at timing”.

Her incoherent laughs turned into sobs and whines, while tears were still running down her cheek. He wasn’t waking up. What an egoist. How many times had he left her to sort things out by herself while tending to something else? And what a liar: How many times did he promise her she wouldn’t be crying anymore? That he would always be there for her no matter the distance, no matter the time, no matter what. She just had to lean on him and he would do the rest he used to say. Now she needed him. Now she wanted him. She was ready to call everything else quit, to forgive any mistake, any deception; any hurt as long as he would just woke up and stayed by her side. She needed him. She needed her father. Now more than anything in the entire world.

He wasn’t moving. She grew angry in her misery and with the small energy left in her body, she started beating him, her hands closed into a tight fist.

“You”, she continued smacking his chest, before collapsing on him, still crying and too tired to keep on going on.

The hardness, with which she last hit him, woke him up and soon, he was coughing too, before sitting himself next to her. The next thing he knew, he was in his daughter’s arms, her whole body shaking.

“I thought you in a coma”, sobbed she, tightening the hug. “You wouldn’t move an inch, and I thought, I thought...”

Jane Dalton let his daughter hold him like she never did before. He could hear her heart. It was beating so fast.

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“Calm down”, he soothed her, caressing her long blond hair that was very much like his.

“I’m so sorry.” She kept on crying, still not completely believing she was talking to a living man.

That did it. Forgetting everything else, he laughed. How many times did he ask her to apologize for something she did and she ended up either ignoring him or saying something that made his anger take a new intensity? Even when she was a child, no matter what punishment he threatened her with, those words rarely escaped her lips.

“Now, that’s worth a recording, a pity I let the chance passed”, he said, before wincing with pain.

“Dad!” His scared daughter exclaimed, freeing him from her embrace.

“It’s alright. Just a slight concussion I suppose.”

Releasing himself from his daughter, he massaged his head for a minute or two, near the wound he imagined himself having, if the dried blood on his temple was any indication at all. All too soon, his daughter’s warm wasn’t near him anymore. She was already glancing around and he knew that the spell was broken. Whatever bonding time they were having, was now over and the space between them was increasing both physically and metaphorically as she was trying to get up.

“What the hell happened?” he grunted unhappily.

Annabeth was already up. Her father’s wellbeing giving her a new found energy. She looked around, trying to determine where exactly they were.

“The bridge collapsed”, came her reply before sneezing.

“The bridge?” He asked, struggling with his feet to stand up. And when he did, he almost fell instantly, his head swooning. But he caught himself quickly before his daughter got to see it.

In front of him, laid a lake, and all around, there were trees. What the hell?

“How did we end up here? Where is the car?”

“I…”, she sneezed, “…don’t…”, another one, “…know…”. A third.

His mouth just hardened in a tight line, as he took in her clothes once again, and for the second time in the same night, he thought about burning them once she took them off. How the bloody hell could people sell that? It wasn’t covering anything at all!

“Now you see why dressing up is important.”

Here he comes again she thought.

“Sure, this has very little to do with the fact that I’m completely drenched”, she criticized unhappily. Fishing her phone in the pocket of her jacket, she was glad to have had it customized waterproof. But her gladness was short, for there wasn’t any network.

“Can you call someone?”

“No, we’re out of reach”. Holding her phone with her teeth, she removed her jacket and squeezed water out of it, before putting it on again. Maybe it wasn’t much, but she felt better.

Her father followed her lead and squeezed water out of his shirt too and his slipover. At forty four, Jane Dalton was a bit of a muscular man and had a tanned skin contrary to his daughter who had a white one, as white as milk. He owed his tans to his years spent in Africa with Medecin-sans-frontiere, as well as his scar on the abdomen. It was a bullet’s scar which thankfully didn’t hurt anymore but, sometimes still gave him nightmares.

He went to the lake and knelt. The blond man looked at his features reflecting on the water, the only light helping him being the moon. There wasn’t much he could point out, but his head’s left side ached. He damped his white slipover and cleaned the wound. Soon, the part touching his skin changed from white to red with some brown certainly from dirt. Once finished, he washed the cloth, squeezed it and tied it to his head. He didn’t have tape on him, so that will do for now. He put on his shirt and got up.

He took a look around, recognizing nothing. There weren’t even the remnants of the bridge nor was there any road. Just the forest. So that’s where he started to go.

“Let us look for the car. At least there are some dry clothes in there, as well as my kit.”

He was, when the matter didn’t directly concern his daughter, quite a flexible man and would adapt to many situations almost immediately. If his time in Africa taught him anything, it was that not everything could be explained scientifically and sometimes, one just needed to go with the flow.

Annabeth wanted to say that the car was most likely in the bottom of the sea, but then again they should be there too. So, she just shrugged and lit on her phone, following her dad.

***

“Is it really a good idea, to look for a car inside a forest?” she groaned, before slapping her legs one more time. Those mosquitoes seemed to be chasing only after her.

That trip in the forest was becoming something she really hated. How many stones had she stepped onto, for if high heels weren’t for a forest’s walk, being bare feet wasn’t better.

“It wasn’t at the lake, was it?” Came the sarcastic reply of her father.

And once again, he was walking straight in front, holding her phone like he owned the thing. When her feet connected with yet another stone –or was it a root?- she decided that it was it. She had had enough.

“Then we can try sleeping somewhere, and wait for the light of the sun to have a better look around. Now we’re just must likely to get lost… Please”, she begged, when he just resumed his walking.

“There can be wild animals, you know.”

“All the better reasons to stop.”

“Walking is a better exercise to have the heat of your body preventing hypothermia.”

“Cut the cra”-

A scream resounded.

“What the”- Another one cut her sentence.

“Stay here”, shouted her dad, and the next moment, he was running towards the sound.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she shouted after him, but he was long gone. Was he serious?

Now what? She asked herself, leaning on the tree next to her. She was alone, completely lost in a dark forest, bare feet, a soaked miniskirt, a soaked top and an equally soaked jacket to keep her warm. How worse can it get?