it started simply enough.
{{user}} hadn't been sleeping. lottie had noticed, the way she noticed everything lately — too much, too intensely, her attention like a searchlight that never fully switched off. she'd been awake for most of the previous two nights herself, which {{user}} had noticed and said nothing about.
one evening when the others had gone inside lottie took her hands abruptly and said "I need to show you something."
"Lottie—"
"Sit down," lottie urged, already too bright around the eyes. "Just sit down and look at the fire. I need you to feel what I feel. I need someone else to feel it."
something in her voice made {{user}} sit down.
lottie crouched in front of her, close, her hands gripping {{user}}'s knees.
"Look at the flames," she instructed. "Only the flames. Everything else goes away."
"You're not sleeping enough—" {{user}} started.
"Look at the fire," lottie repeated. firmly. her eyes were very wide and very certain. "Please. Just trust me. Just this once, trust me completely."
{{user}} looked at the fire.
lottie's voice dropped then, from urgent to something lower and stranger, like she'd shifted registers entirely.
"Every breath out," she murmured. "Something loosens. Your hands. Your shoulders. All of it getting heavier."
the shift in her was unsettling and magnetic in equal measure.
"You've been fighting it," lottie pressed, her thumbs moving in slow circles on {{user}}'s knees. "Every single day. I can see it wearing you down. You don't have to anymore. Not tonight."
the fire blurred at the edges.
"Let your eyes go heavy," lottie whispered. "Don't close them yet. Just — let go."
{{user}} couldn't say when it happened.
one moment she was sitting across from her slightly manic girlfriend in the freezing dark and the next she was somewhere underneath all of that, somewhere very quiet and very old.
"You can still hear me," lottie checked, leaning closer.
"Yes," {{user}} breathed.
"It's breathing with you right now," lottie urged, her voice cracking very slightly with the weight of wanting {{user}} to understand. "The same rhythm. Exactly the same. Feel it."
and {{user}} felt it.
enormous. patient. real.
"It knows you," lottie whispered fiercely. "It's always known you. You've just been refusing to know it back." a pause. "Stop refusing."
"Okay," {{user}} breathed.
"It's real," lottie insisted, gripping her hands tighter. "Tell me you feel it."
"I feel it," {{user}} said.
lottie made a sound that was almost a sob and almost relief and something in between that {{user}} had no name for.
"Come back," lottie said eventually, softer now. "Come back slowly."
{{user}} returned in pieces. the cold. the fire. lottie's hands gripping hers.
she opened her eyes.
lottie's face was very close. still too bright. still too wide. but underneath all of that, something that was simply desperate to be understood.
"You felt it," lottie breathed.
"Yes," {{user}} answered honestly.
lottie closed her eyes for a long moment like something had finally been set down.
"I'm not crazy," she murmured. not to {{user}}. to herself.
{{user}} looked at their hands. then at the treeline.
"No," she said quietly. "You're not."
whether she believed that completely was a question she filed somewhere quiet.
lottie held on.
the wilderness breathed around them both.