A FRACTURE IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS ✓

TYLER

The soft, repetitive ping of his heartbeat on the monitor was the first tether Tyler had to reality when he woke up.

When he first woke up the second time, he was confused, rattling the bed as his fear of being trapped consumed him. He was still in that room, in that chair, tied with wires and needles and bags of blood to keep him alive-

And Josh.

Josh was there, in a chair pulled up to the side of his hospital bed. Tyler blinked and settled down so he didn't wake Josh up, who'd fallen asleep with his head in Tyler's lap.

Gently, he raised a hand to rest it on top of Josh's head, but saw that his hand was blackened and dripping blood. The strong smell of metal and dirt overwhelmed him. Josh fell off the chair and onto the floor, his eyes wide and white with a bullet hole in his forehead. Tyler jerked forward to sit up, the scream building not making it past his lips.

He never made it out. He's still in that room.

Tyler woke up to a doctor flashing a light in his eyes, the once steady beeps now blaring quickly. For a moment, he could've sworn the doctor started to laugh. He gasped for air, his chest turning tight and heavy, and felt a hand squeeze his.

"Tyler, you need to breathe."

Josh's panicked voice brought him fully out of the nightmare, the world around him coming into razor sharp focus.

As Tyler learned how to breathe again, the doctor moved away, sliding his stethoscope back around his neck. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Joseph."

"It..." Tyler coughed, his throat painfully dry. "It's doctor."

Josh laughed, tears in his eyes, and kissed Tyler's hand. "Don't ever scare me like that again," he whispered, burying his face in Tyler's side.

"I'm sorry," Tyler said, awkwardly patting his head.

His body felt foreign, like his skeleton had been replaced with someone else's. He couldn't understand why, until he saw himself in the mirror above the small sink to his left.

The thin hospital gown hung loosely on his skeletal frame, not leaving a lot up the imagination. A nasty, maroon colored scar about an inch long started from the right corner of his mouth and curved upwards. Smaller, less noticeable scars lined the circumference of his neck like rungs on a ladder, along with the pink circles burned onto each of his vertebrae.

His eyes had sunken into their sockets, and his skin was sallow and pale. Bruises like watercolor covered the rest of his body, along with the rest of his scars and newly healed surgical scabs.

"How long was I out?" He asked, touching the scar on his mouth.

"The first time or the second?" The doctor started to type something on his computer.

"Both."

"Thirteen hours when you arrived, two hours since your seizure."

Josh grimaced.

Tyler's vision tilted, but he squinted and tried to focus his eyes on his boyfriend. "Is that normal?"

"For trauma patients like you, especially since you're one of the more extreme cases we've had, anything's possible," the doctor said. "If I'm being honest with you, it's a miracle you survived. With both the internal and external damage you'd endured, anybody else would've given up the ghost a long time ago. You're one tough son of a bitch."

Not tough enough, because that was the last thing Tyler remembered hearing before waking up in a bathtub, a female nurse scrubbing him down with a washcloth. The bathtub was filled with bloody water and soap suds. She smiled when he looked at her, and he noticed she was holding a knife in her other hand.