From that moment on, everything was a blur for Tim. He had only just been roused from his dreamless sleep, his mind as smooth and blank as the freshly-fallen snow, when he was cut down. And now all he knew for sure was that he could feel the life draining out of him. It flowed, little by little, through his body and out of the ragged edge where the stump had been ripped away from his trunk. He tried to fight it, forcing himself to stay awake, knowing that if he slipped out of consciousness again it might be the last time. But he couldn't keep his mind focused on much more than that.
There were sights and sounds around him, but he could hardly summon the energy to understand them, let alone remember them for more than a few seconds. They hit his glass eyes, and whatever part of him was responsible for hearing, like skipping stones making ripples on the surface of a pond, doomed to dissipate and disappear. He could only hang on to a few flashes of memory. The trail that his trunk left in the snow as he was dragged away from the spot. Mindy, who must have been thinking the same thing he was, trying to talk to him as she pulled him along with all her strength, just to keep him awake. Her saying something like "I guess that book you got me really did come in handy, huh?", as she hustled him back toward the road. "We just need to get you to the appointment place. They can fix this." And the look on her face when he didn't respond.
Even the brisk wind that surrounded him while he was strapped to the top of the moving car, Mindy driving at a breakneck pace below, wasn't enough to shake him out of the mental haze. He saw vaguely familiar streets whiz by him as she drove back into town, but as hard as he tried, he couldn't keep track of where they were or how much longer it would take to get to the appointment. The appointment. That was where they were going, right? He didn't remember if that was what she said. But from where he laid, every intersection looked the same, and every traffic light. Every street the car turned down seemed shorter than the last as they approached their destination. But time itself was slowing as Tim's mind wound down. Then a disturbing thought ran through him. If every step of the way took longer than the one before it, they'd never make it. He would be stuck traveling to the appointment, waiting for his salvation, for all eternity. He didn't have it in him to figure out if that made any sense or not.
Tim wasn't sure what was happening after that. He must have been taken off the car's roof and carried inside at some point. His vision grew blurry, and he couldn't separate the noise all around him into words. At any moment, he knew, he could let it all slip away. He just wanted this endless, incoherent moment to be over. But he resisted that urge with every last ounce of his strength. He was pulled into a room full of people and rested awkwardly against a folding chair. Next to him was something bright and yellow. If he could just focus on that, whatever it was, he could stay awake.
He stared blearily until the yellow blur started to resolve itself into a familiar shape: a sunflower with a smiling face. But then he knew he had to be hallucinating. Penny. Oh god, Penny. He had abandoned her, lonely as she probably was, when he stopped showing up to that support group. And he hadn't even thought about her since then. Why did his dying brain have to torment him with visions of what he'd done wrong? Couldn't it just let him rest in peace? He wanted to apologize, to say something to this figment of his imagination before it disappeared with the rest of his mind, but he was too weak. This had to be the end, he knew it. He tried to close his eyes and let the darkness wash over him, but nothing happened. He dimly remembered that he had no eyelids. He hadn't so much as blinked in the past ten weeks. It didn't matter. Right now, he couldn't see a thing, anyway.
And then, suddenly, all his branches started to tingle at once. He numbly thought that death was going to come at any second. With what little strength he had left, he instinctively tried shutting his eyes one last time. And this time, somehow, it worked. He could feel them close, and he could see the gray fuzz that surrounded him turn a little darker. Shocked, his eyes flew back open, and now his vision was a little clearer. The endless blur was shrinking back into shapes and colors. And his whole body trembled, as thousands of tiny little needles started to meld back into smooth, uninterrupted skin. He blinked again, trying to get used to the feeling that had been kept away from him for so long.
And when he was done, his vision was even better. He looked down at his rapidly changing body, watching twigs and limbs knit themselves back together into a more familiar shape. Another blink, and he was wearing clothes again. Not ornaments, and not a costume, but actual fabric covering what was, by now, mostly human skin. Blink. He felt a sudden pressure deep inside his chest, which hammered out a rhythmic pattern and sent a flood of warmth out into every part of his body. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. He had a heartbeat again! And blood, and flesh, and everything that came with it. He was alive!
This time, when he took a gasping breath, what came from him wasn't just a noise that emanated magically from a chunk of plastic. He could feel the air rushing into his lungs, and he laughed as it rushed back out again, in spite of himself. He felt his chest with his hands - and then he realized he had hands! He laughed even harder when he saw his fingers again. All these things had once been so mundane to him, he could never have really appreciated them. Now, it all seemed a little overwhelming. There was all this motion, all this life going on underneath his skin - the heat that his body now started to radiate once again, the barely noticeable itch on one corner of his lower back, the sensation of his bladder starting to fill and the knowledge that he'd need to relieve it before too much longer. It made him a little nauseous - which was another thing he hadn't been capable of all this time. He kind of wished the transformation return trip had been a little slower, more gradual, so he could get used to these things one at a time. But he knew that was a silly thought. He had never felt so alive!
Tim became a little more self-conscious of exploring his restored body when he remembered that the room was full of other people. But they were all doing the same, except for the one who'd just cast the restoration spell, and Mindy standing along the wall nearby. He happened to look to one side, and was struck by the appearance of a very memorable face. It took him a second to remember where he had seen that woman before, because the rest of her body (as attractive as it was) didn't seem at all familiar to him. But once the connection came to him, he had no doubt in his mind. The last time he had seen that face, it had been surrounded by a ring of yellow petals. It was Penny, unmistakably, in the flesh. He hadn't been hallucinating after all - she was actually here!
"Uh, hi," Tim said nervously when he realized that she had noticed him looking at her. He felt his heartbeat, which had only just come back to him, start to accelerate. He almost started to worry all over again that he was about to die before he remembered just how normal that was.
Penny smiled, looking equally nervous. "I accept your apology," she said, smiling awkwardly as she suddenly stopped herself from patting her own skin.
"What?"
She laughed a little bit. "Before we got changed back, you kept staring at me and whispering, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She tried to mimic how he had sounded with a low and plaintive voice. "But it's okay - really. We were all going through a really tough time there. Whatever that whole 'Christmas cheer' thing was about, I'm sure you were just trying to come to terms with it all. I don't blame you for walking away. Hardly anyone stayed in that Zoom group for more than a couple weeks."
Tim blushed, embarrassed to be reminded of his outburst, and how everything that came after it had all gone down. He briefly thought that this had to be the most incredible coincidence of all time, that she would turn out to be living in his very neighborhood. But then he remembered that the support group was specifically for people in the tri-state area, and there were only so many restoration centers the government could set up in any particular city. Still, though, what were the odds that their appointments would be on the very same day, at the very same time? He remembered what Mindy had warned him about fate and destiny and all that jazz. But even so... what if maybe... just maybe... there was some sort of magic at work here that had brought the two of them back together?
"I have to say," Penny continued, "you look a lot better like this than you did on those Zoom calls." He was pretty sure he knew what that tone in her voice meant.
"I agree," Tim blurted out in response. "I-I mean, uh, I would say the same to you. No, like, um, you look really..." His tongue, which still felt uncomfortably warm and slimy in his real-life mouth, was getting tied in knots the longer he looked at her.
But Penny just giggled. "I'm glad we're on the same page. Do you want to get coffee together sometime?"
Tim grinned from ear to ear. "It's a date! ... Wait, no, I mean, it doesn't have to be a date, like a date date, we can do whatever you want if that's okay with you..." The thought that they were about to exchange phone numbers made Tim realize that, for the past couple minutes, there had been a furious buzzing in his pocket, which he had completely ignored because he was bombarded with all these other sensations. He pulled out his phone, woke up the screen, and immediately saw hundreds of texts and missed calls from the past few months. He didn't need to worry about that just this second, though. He went straight to Contacts and put her number in, then shoved the vibrating device back into his pants. He would explain what had happened to his family. Eventually.
But something else troubled him. He didn't know why his immediate thought was to say it out loud to Penny, though. He was definitely a lot less reserved now than he was before Halloween. "Don't take this the wrong way," he started, "but are you sure we should do this? I mean, we barely even know each other. And I wasn't much of a... companion to you before when I had the chance. I just don't feel like I've really... earned any of this."
Penny's beautiful, beautiful smile didn't dim for a moment as he explained all this. "That's not a problem," she said. "If we barely know each other, then let's get to know each other. Now that I'm the real me, and you're the real you, I think it'll be a lot easier. And we'll have plenty of similar experiences to talk about when we go on that... you know what? Yeah. It is a date."
And then both of them could let out a great big breath of anxiety.