In the Year of the Cat (Queen or Freddie Mercury Fanfic)

65. Welcome Back

(Sal here.  Stay with me, guys.  This chapter is going to be hard.  Just trust me.)

It was like being underwater, being deep under water, like in those bottomless parts of the ocean where no light can reach, where the pressure itself is enough to crush a body into oblivion.  Were I conscious of the darkness, I would have been terrified, but my mind and body were one in absence.  I felt nothing.  I knew nothing.  I was nothing. 

And then, without warning, I started hurtling back toward the surface. 

Slowly, slowly, my senses returned, starting with my hands.  I felt something warm around one of them, like somebody was holding it tightly with both of their own.  The sensations crept up my limbs, bit by bit.  There were goosebumps on my arms; it was cold in the room.  A breeze blew down across my face and made my eyelids flutter.  I swallowed.  My throat was dry- and something plastic and painful had been forced down it.

Then, I heard broken voices drift limply into my ears.  A worried, low woman's voice.  "...You hear me, sweetheart?"

Blankly I thought about the voice.  After a moment, I recognized it to be that of my mother. 

Wait.  My mother?  What- what was she doing down here?  How did she get into the base?  It was a secret!  I had to be hallucinating. 

She kept trying to coax me awake.  "Julia?  Hey, Goose.  We're here, and we love you, can you hear us?  Can you-"

I moved my head a little, an attempt to nod.  My mother's worry turned into euphoria.  "Ian... Ian, look!  She's coming around!"

Now a somewhat more nasal tenor voice, soft with concern but pumped with hope, joined her.  "Julia!  Hey, sweetie.  Come on, open your eyes."

My dad was there, too?  What kind of family party was this?  All I needed now was for my brother Scott to join in, and the scene would be complete.

"Is she waking up?" Ah, right on cue, Scott!  "Hey, sis!  Hey!"

"Not so loud, Scott, come on," my mother chided, still gently slapping my wrist.  "She's been out for three days, she doesn't need anybody yelling at her."

That sounded normal, all right. 

I was back home.  Good old 2017.  That much I knew, that much of my brain was operational.  I was aware, but my emotions remained at a stand-still.  All I was concerned with doing right was pulling out of this vegetative state.

With my family cheering me on all at once, I began to stir.  I heard my dad call for some doctor to attend to me.  I wiggled my toes, lifted my hands, which were strangely so heavy at the moment.  The transport to 1977 hadn't been nearly this taxing.  Weird. 

All of a sudden there were many other voices blabbering on all around me while unfamiliar hands wrapped in latex manipulated and contorted me in ways I would have resisted had I been myself. 

Then something my mother had said hit me: "She's been out for three days."

Three days? 

Where was I?

At last, I had the strength and the courage to open my bleary eyes- which were immediately burned by the fluorescent lights above and all around.  Masked faces were peering down at me, checking my pulse, my blood pressure, my respiration, my whatever else they had to check.

Oh.  I was in a hospital.

A face with two blue eyes under rather cocky-looking eyebrows and above a surgical mask leaned over me.  "Hi, there," he said.  His youngish voice was rather brisk, no-nonsense, very American.  "How're you feeling?"