Elias did not wake up screaming. If anything, waking was not the right word for it.
It felt more like drifting—like being pulled slowly upward through thick water, consciousness returning in fragments that refused to connect properly.
Sound came first, distant and warped, as if filtered through layers of cotton. A dull ringing lingered at the edge of his hearing, not painful, just persistent, like something unfinished.
He frowned. That was strange.
The last thing he remembered was… light. Headlights. Noise. The weightlessness of being thrown, followed by pain so sharp it erased thought itself. After that, nothing. Which meant—
"I'm alive," Elias muttered. The words came out hoarse, barely louder than breath. That made sense. Car accidents didn't always kill people. People survived worse. Broken bones, concussions, internal injuries—yes. Death? Not guaranteed.
He focused on that logic, clung to it.
The smell reached him next. Clean, sterile. Disinfectant. Something faintly medicinal. Hospitals smelled like this. Always had. His shoulders relaxed slightly.
Good. Hospital, he thought. That tracks.
He tried to move.
His fingers twitched.
Not much, but enough.
Relief washed over him, slow and heavy. His body felt wrong—too light, too numb—but pain existed somewhere underneath, muted, distant. Pain was good. Pain meant reality. He opened his eyes.
White.
Not ceiling-white with cracks or stains or fluorescent lights. Just… white. Endless, seamless, stretching farther than his vision could focus. There were no walls, no corners, no shadows. No sense of space at all.
Elias blinked.
Once.
Twice.
"…Okay," he whispered. "That's not right."
He waited. Surely this was some kind of post-accident haze. People hallucinated under trauma all the time. His brain was probably misfiring, trying to fill in blanks. White voids were common. Symbolic nonsense the mind created when it didn't know what else to show.
He closed his eyes firmly. Counted to five. Opened them again. Still white. His heart rate picked up.
"No," Elias said quietly. "This is… this is just a dream."
That was the most reasonable explanation. A dream stitched together from fragments of memory, stress, and shock. He had been exhausted. Angry. Emotionally drained. Of course his mind would conjure something strange.
Dreams were weird like that. He took a slow breath, then another, grounding himself the way he'd read online once. Focus on sensation. Temperature. Weight. Texture.
He felt… warm. Comfortable. There was no bed beneath him, yet he didn't feel like he was falling either. His body existed without support, as if the concept of gravity had been politely excused. That unsettled him more than panic would have.
"Lucid dreaming," he murmured. "That's all." That explanation slid neatly into place, and he seized it gratefully.
Lucid dreams could feel real. Extremely real. Some people could control them. Others got stuck in false awakenings, believing they were awake when they weren't.
Yes.
That made sense.
"I'll wake up soon," Elias said to no one. "Any moment now."
Time passed.
Or maybe it didn't. There was no sun, no clock, no sense of progression. Just an unchanging stillness that pressed lightly against his thoughts. Elias frowned again.
His gaze dropped to his hands. They were his hands. Pale, slender fingers, faint calluses from typing too much, a small scar near the knuckle from when he'd cut himself on a broken mug years ago. Details. Too many details.
Dreams blurred those.
He flexed his fingers slowly, watching the movement with growing unease. Every motion responded perfectly, without delay, without distortion.
"This is just my brain being annoying," he muttered.
He laughed softly, but the sound echoed strangely, absorbed into the white nothingness without returning. That wasn't right either. Elias ran a hand through his hair.
Stop overthinking, he told himself. You got hit by a car. Of course your head's messed up.
He tried to recall what happened immediately after the impact. Ambulance sirens? Voices? Pain? There was nothing. Just darkness. Which could mean he'd been unconscious for a while. Which could mean this was a coma.
"…That's it," Elias said, nodding to himself. "Coma dream."
That explanation settled him further. Coma dreams were long. Vivid. Sometimes people experienced entire lifetimes inside them. There were documentaries about it. Interviews. Scientific discussions. He exhaled.
"Alright," he said calmly. "Then I'll just… wait."
He sat.
Or thought he did.
The white space did not change. Minutes—or what felt like minutes—passed.
Elias' calm began to crack.
"Okay," he said again, louder this time. "This is taking too long."
His chest tightened, not with fear yet, but with irritation. He had always hated things that didn't follow rules. Systems that behaved inconsistently. Problems without parameters.
"This isn't funny," he said. Silence.
A faint pressure brushed against his awareness, like someone observing him from far away. Not threatening. Not kind. Just… exist. Elias' spine prickled.
"Look," he said, forcing steadiness into his voice. "If this is some kind of near-death hallucination, fine. If it's a dream, fine. But I don't believe in afterlives, and I definitely don't believe in—"
He stopped himself.
Don't say it.
Don't give the thought shape.
Transmigration.
Reincarnation.
World hopping.
Those were fictional tropes. Narrative devices. Not real experiences normal people had on random weekday nights after buying convenience store food. He scoffed softly.
"That only happens to protagonists," he muttered. "And I'm not one."
The white space remained indifferent. His irritation faded, replaced slowly by something colder.
Doubt.
"What if…" Elias began, then shook his head sharply. "No."
He pressed his palms together, feeling the warmth, the texture of skin on skin.
"I have a job," he said firmly. "I have rent due. I have an unfinished project and a terrible boss and a stupid argument in a comment section that I regret."
His voice wavered slightly at the last part. "I don't just… disappear."
The idea offended him. People didn't vanish like that. Lives didn't end with neat narrative transitions. There was paperwork. Hospitals. Families to notify. Consequences. This—whatever this was—ignored all of that.
"I refuse to believe this," Elias said quietly. The words felt important.
Whatever was happening, he would not accept it until reality itself forced his hand. Until there was proof so undeniable it crushed denial completely. Until then, this was a dream.
A coma.
A hallucination.
Anything but the impossible. Elias crossed his arms and stared into the white.
"Wake me up," he said.
Nothing happened. For the first time since opening his eyes, unease crept into his expression.
"…This is stupid," he muttered.
And somewhere, far beyond the white, someone write—patiently.
*****
Elias coughed.
The voice was dry, harsh, ripping itself out of his chest, as though it were foreign in his body. It was painful--painful enough to jerk him rudely back to his senses, to weight, to a body that now felt very real. His throat was on fire, lungs hurting like he had breathed water rather than air.
He groaned moved as the world tilted.
White became ceiling. Real ceiling. Splintered in one, slightly yellowed, and a light fluorescent buzzed over his head, which was definitely exasperatingly ordinary. He smelled it at once, sterile, medicinal, overlaid with something slightly metallic.
Hospital.
"…Ah," Elias muttered hoarsely.
His head throbbed. It was not painful, but a dull, constant pressure, as some person is pushing a thumb between his skull and his brain. He put up a hand to rub his head--and stopped.
The hand stopped halfway.
It looked… wrong.
The fingers were longer. The skin smoother. The veins under the surface had been laid a little differently, in a manner unknown to him, and causing his stomach to contract. His nails were cut, trimmed, and yet not bitten as his always had been when he felt the stress rising up on him.
Elias stared. "…That's not right."
Little by little, very little, he sat himself up. It was not as difficult as it should have been, not so difficult as a person who had just been struck by a car, or jumped off a bridge, which is what he appeared to have done based on the fragmented memories.
The blanket shook down, and underneath the blanket of hospital clothes lay a narrow frame on which he had never noticed a shoulder before, the collarbones being even sharper.
He moved his legs to the side of the bed.
The floor was cold. That feeling helped to bring him down, but did not comfort him.
His eyes wandered over to the reflecting surface of the opposite cabinet adjoining the bed. It was no mirror, but enough of a mirror to reflect a face.
He stared at it. The returning face was a handsome one. Objectively so. Straight lines, light skins, straight nose, clean jaw blunted down only by youth. Dark curls tumbled dishevellingly over his brow, and his eyes were not his. They were too light. Too calm.
Too empty.
Elias raised a hand. The reflection followed. He frowned. The reflection frowned.
"…What a waste," he murmured.
The words came out flat. Not horrified. Not panicked. Just… tired. He was waiting until something should. For fear to crash into him. To feel sick, or unbelieve, or hysterical laughter. To fill his eyes with tears, or his breath to snatch.
Nothing came. His face did not change. He gazed at himself critically, professionally, like the eye of an outsider.
I can not even smile, Elias said to himself. "Or cry."
He tried. Nothing.
The phrase was chilly composed.
"…What is this?" he whispered.
As he thought otherwise, the door opened. One of the nurses appeared, tablet in hand, and a middle-aged doctor with heavy eyes and a clipboard under his arm came right behind him. They stopped when they beheld Elias sitting up.
"Oh," the nurse said, startled. "You're awake."
The brows of the doctor hunch together at once. You ought not to be sitting up so early.
"I am okay", Elias said reflexively. This voice, his voice, was smooth, steady, calm, a little hoarse.
The physician approached closer and shone a little light in the eyes of Elias. "Any dizziness? Headache? Nausea?"
"A headache," Elias answered. "But nothing severe."
The physician took a long time to examine him. "Do you know where you are?"
"…A hospital."
"And your name?"
Elias hesitated. The answer came anyway. "Elias Graves."
The physician nodded and took a note. Do you not recall what has happened? Elias' gaze drifted away.
"It seems, apparently, I did something stupid," said he.
The nurse sighed. "That's one way to put it."
The physician cleared his throat. "You were found on the bridge. Witnesses told that you stood on the railing. In time fire rescue came to the rescue.
"…I see."
You are so very lucky, the nurse added a little too sharply. "Very lucky. If they'd been a minute later—"
"Life is precious, you know. You're still young. Twenty years old. You have a future."
Twenty. Elias took that to himself. Younger than he had been. The physician looked at the nurse and looked at Elias. Have you a guardian that we should call? Family?"
Elias shook his head.
"No," he said. "There's no one."
The doctor paused. "No parents?"
"Disowned", Elias answered as if it were a matter of indifference. The word felt… familiar.
The nurse appeared embarrassed. "Then a friend? Anyone?"
Elias thought of it, again he shook his head. "No."
Silence stretched the entire ward. The physician wrote something on a clip-board. "You will have to be monitored. I would not have you out of my sight just yet, with the stunt you just made."
Elias nodded obediently.
The nurse hovered and bothered with the IV and talked a little about second chances and life and how stupid despair might be. Elias was a good listener; and when necessary he nodded; but his mind was wandering. His phone buzzed.
He looked down.
The device was not the same-smoother, not well known brand, but it opened his thumb without difficulty. He was led by muscle memory that he was not aware of.
The screen lit up.
Messages flooded in. Not concern. Not relief. Mockery.
Did he fail even at dying? Attention-seeking bastard. Evan family disgrace. Just disappear already.
Elias scrolled.
His expression didn't change.
Photographs uploaded- snapshots, doctored photographs, inhuman headings. A boy alone in formal attire with lowered head is frozen into digital eternity muttering into whispers. The memories slipped into position with stomach-turning effortlessness.
Scandals.
An illegitimate child.
A failed heir.
A public disgrace.
He lowered the phone slowly.
The nurse was continuing to speak. "and you must consider about—you should consider about—
"Sure, I will," Elias replied, breaking in.
She paused, and was startled by the sureness in his voice. As they got out, Elias picked up the ID card lying on the bedside table. He stared at it.
Name: Elias Graves
Age: 20
His fingers tightened. "…Damn it."
The last element fell into place.
The novel.
The cursed comment.
The half-brother of the main character.
The suicide attempts were made by the one who tried to commit suicide early in the story.
The disposable character.
Elias sat up against the bed, and looked at the ceiling.
No panic came. Nothing but a bone-weary resignation. "…What a ridiculous joke."