A Hundred Days | Dan Howell x Reader

Chapter 33.

Dusk.

The light is waning and the hazy glow of summer stars dot the midnight blue heavens. A trail of your shaky footsteps traipse toward the ocean, though the waters have begun to fade them. The frigid waves grasp your toes; a jolt of electricity shivers through your body and cripples you.

The late, amber sunlight glistens on the water like the stars above, and it is beautiful, but you do not notice; the rip's icy hand curls around your ankle, your other ankle, your calves, your thighs, your middle, now past your chest— and rising steadily— your throat is in its clutches, your vision is awash with salt, and whether it is saltwater, or tears, you cannot tell, for it is all the same.

You're drowning.

Inside your head you thrash, kick, and scream, but your body responds to nothing; an eerie stillness has come over your limbs.
The sun is now gone, for the cruel waves have swallowed it too, and you are being pressed down by the sea into its black, dark depths, still screaming, for there is water in your eyes and in your mouth and throat and nose, and you are sinking into the abyss.

And then suddenly, the weight on your chest is gone, replaced by an endless, gaping hole.

You lie on the beach, untouched from the outside, the long stretch of sand desolate for but your own leaden limbs, and the water empty and calm, for but your own reflection. The reflection doesn't seem to you as yours, and yet it is.

The storm rages on in your head, but still you lie on the shore, your mind vacant and your body unmoving. You are but a distant onlooker to the scene where you yourself lie dead.

Then you sat up, awake, a gasp caught on your lips.

Your palms hurt.

Looking down, you realised that they were scarred with angry red crescent marks, spotted with tiny pinpricks of ruby blood, evidence that your nails had been dug firmly into the tender skin stretched across your hands.

Back and neck aching, you noticed that you were still on the kitchen floor, as you had been last night. Your every appendage was numb; you were freezing, and so was the flat, given you'd forgotten to set the heat before dropping off, and it was now 6:00am on a briskly-cold, New York December morning. You remembered reading an article that noted that the colder the room one slept in was, the more likely nightmares would occur, and decided this, and not the fact that you were so blatantly homesick for London and your friends, was the reason for your doomsday dreams.

Stretching as you stood, knees popping, you saw that your planner had been laid open to Friday, the 15th of December, and though a little note that read a hundred days was what struck at to you at first, releasing a tear from your left eye, host party for work!" scrawled in massive letters caught the eye that had spilled the tear across the letter p of "party" . You slipped from where you had been leaning against the counter and almost dropped the now-empty wineglass you had been holding since last night.

"Shit", you murmured. "Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!"

You hadn't bought food, let alone planned a menu, or vacuumed, nor had you cleaned the bathroom, and the little succulents you had arranged about the apartment were in various stages of decay (gasp! not the succulents!).

You threw yourself down the hallway after safely depositing the wine glass against the wall on the countertop, into the bathroom to fix your bed head before some serious party-preparations were put into full swing.

You were going to plaster a smile on your face and have a damned ball at this party.

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