It had been a year already.
A single long year of recovery, of carrying a flashlight everywhere and flinching every time the lights went out, and still she didn’t think she was any better. She didn’t know if she’d ever feel better again.
Sure, she was alive, and she was back home with her brother. And while he was more patient and understanding than she had expected, feeling like an inconvenience at best and a burden most of the time, he didn’t believe her. He didn’t believe a word of what she said had happened. After all, why would he? It sounded crazy, it sounded like fiction.
But fiction hadn’t killed Alan Wake. She had to watch herself do that.
She still regarded mirrors with a certain level of mistrust–once, she could have sworn she saw her reflection smirk back at her. But it couldn’t be Succubus, right? She was dead, erased by the brightest lights Nora could find… right?
It had grown to be too much. She had fled. Under the cover of night, she had slipped out of the house while Gabe was sleeping and boarded a bus, and later, a plane. She didn’t have much money, but it was enough to get her where she was going.
Alan didn’t have a grave. They hadn’t found the body, and Nora never saw him again after Succubus’s sheer fury bent and twisted the Dark Place around them, changing Nora’s surroundings and leaving the doppelganger alone with the man she’d killed.
Nora had gotten her revenge for that–oh, yes. But it didn’t make her feel any better. Nothing ever did.
She made her way to Cauldron Lake, hating that it was where the darkness resided but knowing that it was the strongest real connection she had to Alan anymore. When she got there, she knelt by the shore, careful not to touch the water.
“I miss you, Alan. I wish–” She almost said that she wished he’d never promised to get her home, but as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she cut herself off, horrified. That meant she would never have really met him, never have fallen in love… Maybe she wouldn’t be grieving now if that was the case, but she couldn’t wish away their affection.
“I wish you were here with me,” she finished instead. “I wish I hadn’t let her get her hands on you. You should have been the one to get out… not me.”
It would be so easy to walk out into the water, to let the lake swallow her up and bring her back to Alan. She half-wanted to. But she made no move to get up.
“I’ll do my best, okay? Everything you did, you did for me. I know that. So I’m not going to give up. I’m going to live, no matter how hard it gets.”
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