United We Live

Twenty One

The mother burst into the room, having run the whole length of the building to reach it.

"Alex!" She cried, hurrying to the bedside in total relief. Reaching out a hand to stroke her son's face, she met his blue eyes and immediately froze.

"Hello?" The boy responded looking at her in confusion.

Pulling her hand back like she'd been stung, the mother felt her heartbeat quicken.

"Oh my God," She breathed, looking at the nurse.

"That's not my son."

0o0

Niall's head was throbbing. There was a low rumble in the back of his head, like the music movies play when something scary is about to be revealed and the audience is anticipating it whilst simultaneously dreading it.

He looked over the faces before him, yet none of them were familiar.

It was disconcerting, how they kept coddling him. Patting his leg and petting his hands, speaking him in low voices that were meant to relax his racing mind.

But they kept calling him Alex.

Who's Alex? Why did that name sound so familiar?

As much as he wanted to lie there, pondering what was happening and why these women had him confused with someone else, there was something else pressing on his mind. The incident. It flashed through his mind in painful bursts, causing his fingers to shudder.

Thunder. There had been thunder. Rain.

And then he had made his mistake. Something he would remember for the rest of his life. When his foot stepped over the threshold from the safety of the tour bus into the sheets of rain outside where the lamppost provided the only light in the night.

"Sweetheart? Can you hear me?"

Eyes refocusing on the nurse before him, he realized that she had been talking to him for some time and he hadn't been paying attention to a single word. She was looking at him with a solemn expression, eyeing his heart monitor as it droned on.

"Where am I?" He finally asked, wearily allowing a hand to travel up to his aching head.

His fingertips met cloth, and he shuddered. His head was heavily bandaged.

"You're in the hospital, honey. They found you weeks ago washed up on the riverbed with a nasty head wound. Weather was bad so they brought you way up here, 'bout an hour North of where they found you. Lucky your mother was looking for you, she identified you the minute she called asking for John Doe's."

Niall let his eyes slide over to the women who still stood in the doorway. Her face had gone an ashy grey, as if all the blood had fled from her face. He supposed it probably had, given her screeching revelation the minute she entered the room and took one good look at him.

The nurse's words seemed too finally register on the women's face, because she turned sharply took eye her with a cool and calculating stare.

"That boy is not my son. My son has brown eyes!"

The nurse let a frown grace her features once more, her shaking hand looking down at the hospital records before her.

"Your son has dirty blonde hair, yes? 5'8'' Type A blood type? Went missing some weeks ago?"

The women seemed verging on hysterics, as she gestured her hands towards Niall's direction with wildness to her eyes that he had never seen on a woman before.