Aad

"Aad."

Smee wondered if the man had been waiting for him to wake up and once again, was surprised at his ability to still feel unease. He didn't move from his usual position of staring blankly at the ceiling but answered all the same.

"What?"

"Aad. My name is Aad."

"Welcome home."

Aad scoffed bitterly – the hopelessness was already beginning to settle. Smee's unease felt treacherous. There was no safety in silence and no joy in conversation. He sat up, staring defiantly at the floor. Aad was the first to break the quiet.

"How long have you been here?"

"A long time."

Panic flashed across Aad's face for a moment. Everything about Smee exuded disaster and decay and in that moment, Smee was a mirror to his future.

"Does Jeremy know we're here? Maybe he'll write us back in."

"Jeremy's loyalty barely extends to his own girlfriend, what does he care about honouring a couple forgotten characters ."

"Samantha left him, actually." Aad mumbled awkwardly.

Smee raised his eyebrow and felt the ghost of what was perhaps smugness at the thought of his writer having been dumped. Samantha wasn't much better than him though. Before he had been forgotten, Smee had found a tiny window in Jeremy's mind through which he had seen her. Another writer who thought too much of herself, much like Jeremy. From Smee's quiet window, he'd watch them talk of the things they had read and learned – knowledge that lived no deeper than their throats, existing only to prove that they were people who read.

"I bet he took that well."

"It was carnage. An angry, violent man we'd never seen before broke into the pages we lived on and attacked us. From it, one of us lost his tongue, another was made unkind, and two were killed off in a car crash. Poor sods, it wasn't even written well."

"And you were forgotten. Death might have been better."

Aad fell into silence and looked away, realising once more that he had been born but forgotten, granted no death and cast away to this indefinitely rotting place, the unloving home of Smee. His half-heart ached from the memory of what pure, unadulterated hope had felt like. Back in that place, when life was being written, Aad's tattoos were vibrant and brightly coloured. Since his banishment, the colour had drained from them in shock.

Smee tried to remember the characters that had lived on the pages with him but failed. Vague snatches of memories came to mind of him laughing with the Remembered and Written when Jeremy had left them alone for the day, but everything else had been consumed by the walls. The memory of laughter felt strange and uncomfortable in his chest and so he pushed the thought away.

Eventually, Aad and Smee lay down one after the other, between them both, a pair of eyes stared at the creamy white ceiling above them and two halves of a heart pattered into a slow lull, almost in synchronicity. The screeching and scraping of the dark, damp walls quietened just enough for Smee to notice the difference.

As Smee slept, he dreamt once again of the wooden bridge, spinning once again amongst the sound of footfall. This time, Smee found himself not just spinning noiselessly but stamping as he spun, forcefully driving his feet into the wooden bridge further and further until it shook with the intensity of his movement and began to splinter. He carried on, possessed by the movement of his limbs, unwilling to stop even if had been able. The bridge groaned and cracked and Smee stamped on until the entire structure began to fall apart, dropping deep into a black abyss along with Smee.

Smee woke from the feeling of falling and jolted suddenly awake, confused not only by the first nightmare he had ever experienced in this place but also by a strange growing pressure in his chest. The suddenness of his waking had awoken Aad who looked at him with an awkward concern.

Embarrassed and confused, Smee gruffly turned away and Aad quickly busied himself with examining the walls with pseudo-curiosity. Some moments passed and Aad turned himself towards Smee, who still had his back to him.

Aad attempted to sound as casual as possible. "Didn't realise nightmares existed here."

"Yeah, sorry I forgot to put that on the bloody brochure."

"You were thrashing about in your sleep like some crazy bastard…"

"Great thanks."

"Do you have nightmares a lot?"

Smee turned and stared at Aad and wondered if Jeremy had purposefully made him this annoying and why the walls hadn't eaten away at his desire to speak yet. If anything, he seemed more chatty that when he had arrived.

Aad continued obliviously. "I'm just saying, if you want to talk about them, we can do that, I mean, before I was forgotten I had nightmares all the time, I think it was part of my character. What's your favourite nightmare?"

"Look, I don't know if Jeremy flicked through some CBT self-help book when he wrote you because God knows that arrogant plank of wood won't see an actual shrink, but I'd prefer it if you kept your janky therapy talk to yourself."

A strange noise came out of Aad's throat, something between a donkey bray and a dying bird. His eye widened in confusion and shock, unsure of the noise that had just escaped him.

"Now who's the crazy bastard."

Aad's mouth opened into a deformed half smile. The corner of Smee's mouth twitched.