Warning: this one is very long but I really didn't want to split it into chapters. There is not a lot of sex in it (it is in the romance section) and it is definitely not a quick tug story. My apologies for any mistakes, particularly in the medical details, that is not an area of expertise for me.
As usual it is my own work and isn't to be reproduced without permission.
Please feel free to vote and or comment, I'd love to hear what you think. BB1212
There was no single point in time where you could say I woke up. Or regained consciousness. I gradually became aware of extreme pain, but it wasn't as if the pain was suddenly increasing. No, it had always been there, just as strong, but I simply hadn't realised that it was pain before. My realisation that it was pain kind of phased in, and soon enough I felt like I was drowning in a bottomless sea of agony. It was so bad that I couldn't work out where the pain was, it was just everywhere. I vaguely remember trying a couple of times to work out where the pain wasn't, but that didn't work either. The pain was a monstrous thing that wrapped around me, and penetrated me right to my core. It was omnipotent, ever present, all seeing and totally pervasive. Even when the regular, but not nearly frequent enough, calming rush of what I later found out to be morphine brought some fuzzy relief, the pain still didn't go away. It just stepped back as I soared on the strange and drugged-out winds of chemical fantasy. It watched malevolently as my mind drifted off to strange places that I had never been to, or even heard of. Places of the fevered imagination, of dragons, of flying people and of talking animals. But even then, in those far off fantasy worlds, I knew the pain was waiting. It was just biding its time, and the drug fueled hallucinations began to incorporate a sinister and dangerous edge of fear. I didn't want to return, I wanted to just keep floating away and escape the pain forever. I searched for the way out, I chased after it in my mind but for some reason my mangled body and my drugged out semi-consciousness would not permit me to leave.
I vaguely remember voices, usually female, and lights. Not 'the light', my way to escape, just drug diffused regular lights. I vaguely remember cries of distress that occasionally weren't mine. I vaguely remember flickering movement and noise. I vaguely remember being held down. But these things were just fleeting snippets of awareness that punctuated the pain. They were the tiny high points that seemed to only be there to make it more obvious how low the low points really were. I had no sense of time. I remember voices around me, but it was like the people were talking another language or were under water. The voices were frustratingly indecipherable and my brain eventually stopped struggling to understand and just gave up and let the noise wash past me. To my battered consciousness it was just a rambling bunch of incomprehensible sounds drifting down the relentless river of life as I absently watched from afar.
Then I remember laughing. Not happy laughing but vicious, malicious laughing. When this happened, the fuzzy relief wasn't nearly as noticeable as I had come to expect, and the pain laughed manically too as it remained in control and prevented my drug fueled flight.
"Who are you?" a quiet, feminine voice asked. It took me a while to realise that the noise was words and that I had actually understood the words. My heart soared as I suddenly realised that I must be on the way back from wherever it was that I had been. But then I tried to think of the answer and I came to the horrifying realisation that I couldn't answer the question. I don't mean that I was physically unable to talk, which was certainly the case, I mean that I didn't have that information available. I had absolutely no idea who I was. I couldn't remember my name, and on top of that I also didn't know where I was from or what I did for a living. I could suddenly remember lots of relevant questions, but I didn't know any of my answers to them. I froze up in panic.
"I know who he is," a second voice said, and the words were dripping with contempt. Somehow, I knew that the nasty voice matched the evil laugh. I waited, hoping desperately to hear her next words, but the voices faded away as the pain came rushing back, seeking once again to invade my helpless body. But this time it wasn't just physical pain, it was mental pain too. I hadn't realised up until that point that I had no memories, but now I was suddenly faced with the fact that I had just a basic awareness. I was only the broken physical outline of a person without any detail of who or what that person actually was.
The lights and the blurs eventually morphed into the vague shadows of people, then the vague shadows of people eventually morphed into actual people, and those people were all nurses and doctors. I had already guessed that I was in a hospital, but the reason became obvious as I discovered that my left leg was in traction and both of my arms were in full casts. I had bandages covering parts of my head, chest, left hand and my left leg.
"What is your name?" I looked beside my bed and struggled to focus. Eventually I saw a woman of about forty staring at me with a somewhat disapproving frown. She was in a spotless white nurse uniform, and her black hair was tied back in a very severe looking bun.
"It's... it's... uh, don't... remember..." I croaked. Even my voice wasn't working properly. Strangely the nurse smiled at my response, and when she did, she looked so different that it was almost as if a new person had arrived.
"You're with us at last," she said happily.
"How... long...?" I was trying to talk, but it felt like my throat didn't know how to.
"I'll try and answer all of your questions at once," she mercifully interrupted. "We don't know who you are, but you were brought in eleven weeks ago after a serious car crash." I mentally reeled, realising I had been unconscious in hospital for almost three months.
"Do you remember what happened?" I shook my head a tiny bit. Damn that hurt.
"Your car went off the road near the top of Hansard Mountain," I knew Hansard Mountain, it was spectacularly steep, and very rugged going.
"You went about eight hundred metres down the side, and the car was burnt out and totally unrecognisable." She looked at me for a moment.
"You were totally unrecognisable too. You were the only survivor, and there were many times when we didn't think you'd pull through." I shivered. There was someone else in the car too. Was I driving? Then the fog started to come back and the nurse started to get blurry again.
"You have no ID and the car was registered to your boss, but even he has no idea who you really are..." Then I was gone again, the real-world ghost returning to his fantasy world where the ghosts were suddenly real.