"What? No...." Leo tilted his head to the side, confused by Elle's questions. If this was a hallucination of his own design, why would it linger on the one thing he wanted to forget. Cradling his face in hers, he imagined that onlookers might give him strange looks but they just walked on by like they were just another lip-locked couple enjoying the festival.
He pulled away, his hands still holding onto hers. It all felt so real. Maybe this wasn't meant to distract him from reality, maybe it was meant to force him to confront it.
"Elle," The words were already failing him, Leo exhaling roughly in an attempt to force them out. He squeezed her hands tighter as he spoke. "You've been gone for five years...you fell into the river and they never found your body...you were declared dead."
Suddenly the notion occurred to him, maybe she wasn't a hallucination, maybe she was real. They never found her, it's possible she washed up somewhere with amnesia and has only just returned. He reached towards the lines in her face that he'd never imagined before, subtle signs of age that marked the passage of time. His brow furrowed with concern, weighing what made him more insane - hallucinating his dead ex or convincing himself she was still alive.
Before she could process and react, the sounds of sirens cut through the silence between them. The eyes of the town watched as the patrol car rounded the festival to the diner where a crowd of people began to gather behind a line of police. His brow furrowed, one hand letting go of Elle's as he stepped forward the other leading Elle.
There was rarely any crime in Widow's Peak that created a spectacle, most of the time the cops were someone you called after the fact. As they neared the fringe of those crowd, two figures stepped out from the diner. From this distance it took a moment to recognize them, but when they looked up and spoke he could see their faces clearly. Their eyes and voices might have been demonic but the rest of them still looked like Xan and Erin - two people he'd never expect to see together in life or death.
Leo had been to Xan's funeral, seen her too-stiff body in that casket. He hadn't been to Erin's but he remember when it happened, his parents had sent a floral arrangement. These two were definitely dead, without a doubt. He stood there stunned, his face twisting into an expression of horror. Out of instinct he let go of Elle's hand, stepping back to look at her - making sure her eyes hadn't turned black as Erin and Xan's had.
"What - who ...?" Leo struggled to get the question out, one hand going to his head hoping to keep himself from spinning out. He grabbed a hold of the closest person to him, pointing to Elle as he looked between them craze-eyed. "Do you see her?"
“What?” The stranger looked at him confused, still baffled at what they'd all just witnessed in front of the diner. They looked at Elle, then to Leo before pointing back to Elle. “Her? Yeah, I see her.”
Leo stumbled back, trying to put distance between him and Elle. “What are you?”