I don’t sleep yet, though. The migraine won’t let me.

Sometimes, when I hurt like this, I wish that magic worked like… magic. That I could snap my fingers and heal myself. That I could say some catchy words and get rid of my curse. But I’m not that good of a magician, and magic isn’t that compassionate. It’s unstructured and violent and needlessly contradictory, and I’ll never practise it well enough to bend it to my will.

Other times I want to go back to the six months I spent absolutely shitfaced when I first got to Glasgow, waking in and out of sobriety, having an exasperated Fadwa help me stumble up my stairs and into bed.

But liquor doesn’t keep the visions away. It just makes them judgemental. I used to wake up with a hangover migraine next to empty Buckfast bottles, only to see a nightmare Owen with leafy red hair and too large eyes leaning over my bed, his face sad. I got sober because of him, in the end, and I hate him for it a bit.

“I think your visions are a gift,” he used to say whenever I was bitching about them and havering on about chucking myself off a cliff. “Maybe you should embrace them. I would.”

What a shitty fucking gift.

Fuck Owen and fuck the visions and fuck the migraines. Fuck memories of my past and fuck me while I’m at it. Really, truly, all around: fuck my life.

Part of me thinks that if something were really, truly wrong, Owen would have called me. It’s not like we talk often — or ever, really — but we’re still friends. Kit is the one who turned on me, not Owen. We’ve always been close. And he called me to tell me about Cormac’s funeral, didn’t he? Why wouldn’t he call me about this?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we aren’t close. Maybe I closed the door on that friendship when I ran away from home.

When I fall asleep, it’s with my head shoved under my pillow, thinking of Kit.

I’m not surprised when I feel his weight settle in bed next to me.

I knew it was coming; this happens often enough, and I’ve learnt by now to recognise the patterns of my strange dreams. Of course this would happen tonight.

One arm comes around my middle, crossing against my chest and pulling me back into an embrace. His body is always warm when this happens; always firm, always alive, always smelling faintly of the coast. Always exactly as I remember him. There’s a lurch of pain and guilt and fear in my stomach as I lean back into his arms, because it feels so good, and in these moments I miss him so much.