He never had liked visions. They made him feel powerless and weak, and they left him with a right old headache afterwards, and not just any old headache either. The kind of headache that reassembled a very large, very painful hangover. It left him short of breath, exhausted and very sensitive to light and sound. Normally, he wouldn't mind having an ability that made him a somewhat superior being, but he would gladly sell it off if it meant that, for once, he could actually sleep instead of having someone else's life flash before his eyes.

So, now, as per usual, he sat up in bed with the duvet cocooned around his torso and his head leaning back exhausted against the wall. His breaths were short and sharp, and he could vaguely hear satisfied snores from the next room. A bead of sweat had become stuck in the crook of his nose, but he didn't quite have the energy to wipe it off, which probably had something to do with witnessing one of the most traumatic things he had seen in his entire lifetime.

He rubbed a hand down his face, almost as if he could take the memories from his mind. His chest was still rapidly heaving up and down as if he had just run a marathon. A marathon he had lost, if the ache in his muscles was anything to go by. Which it was. Because he only ever got that ache after a particularly strong vision. 

It was still dark out, and a sliver of moonlight filtered through the slight gap in his curtains, making him even more unnerved than he already was. He had always believed a gap in the curtains to be bad luck. He forced his eyes to stay open and adjust to the darkness because there was no way in hell that he was closing them, not if there was a chance of seeing that again.

Usually, when he saw the future, it was small, life-altering events. Like that lady he saw at the supermarket every Saturday, crying as she found out that her only son was gay. Or his headmaster, screaming at the television when his football team scored an own goal. Or his best friend, sulking over a disheartening test result. It was very rare that he would get something larger. That he got something like this. That he actually saw someone, someone he knew and cared about, die.