As always, Dr. Bennett ran his morning checks with quiet efficiency.
"Still not up?" he murmured, more to himself than to the room. "With the data from last night and this morning combined, there should have been a response by now."
He hadn't slept well.
He'd spent half the night half-convinced that when he walked in at dawn, Kellan would simply be sitting up in bed, asking for coffee. What a moment that would have been.
He finished recording the last set of readings and slowly turned around.
He stumbled backward so hard he nearly knocked over the IV stand.
"What the—"
A pair of cold, sharp black eyes stared back at him. Unblinking. Fully alert.
Dr. Bennett's mouth opened. Closed.
"Kellan?" He approached carefully, like a man who wasn't quite sure the floor was still solid beneath him. "You're… awake?"
"Am I frightening you?" Kellan's voice came out low and rough, scraped raw from disuse—but it was unmistakably his. Dry. Measured. Faintly cutting. "You look like you've seen a corpse move."
"You're awake!" The composure Dr. Bennett had spent fifteen years cultivating collapsed entirely. "You're actually awake! I knew it—I told myself there are still miracles in this world—"
Kellan looked at him the way one looks at a mildly interesting insect.
He had no memory of how long he'd been under. The last thing he remembered was water—black and cold and absolute, closing over his head. Everything after that was nothing.
He didn't know how close it had been.
He decided not to ask yet.
His head ached. He reached up instinctively to press his fingers to his temple.
His arm lifted perhaps two inches before it gave out.
He stared at it.
"Don't force it," Dr. Bennett said quickly, stepping forward. "You just woke up. Your body hasn't caught up yet. Give it time."
Kellan stopped fighting and lay still.
The powerlessness was worse than the pain. He had never been powerless in his life—not that he could remember.
Then the pain arrived properly.
It came from everywhere at once—skull, spine, chest—a weight so total it felt like something was pressing him through the mattress and down toward the center of the earth. And beneath it all, cutting through the surface like a blade, the memory of freezing water filling his lungs.
He retched.
"Kellan—"
"Tinnitus," he got out, jaw locked. "Headache."
Dr. Bennett was already moving. He administered the injection swiftly and stepped back, watching.
Slowly, the edges of the pain softened. The ringing in his ears pulled back. The pressure in his skull eased to something bearable.
"Better?" Dr. Bennett asked.
"Marginally."
Kellan's shirt was damp with sweat. His face, already pale, had gone almost translucent from the effort.
Dr. Bennett let him breathe for a moment, then crouched and tapped his knee with the reflex hammer.
Nothing.
He moved to the other leg.
Nothing.
He straightened slowly, setting the instrument down.
Kellan watched him do it. He had already noticed the absence—the fact that his lower body felt not painful, not numb, but simply not there.
"My legs," he said.
"No response to external stimuli at present," Dr. Bennett said carefully.
"Meaning I may never walk again."
It wasn't a question. Dr. Bennett didn't treat it like one.
"There's a fifty percent chance," he said. "That's the honest answer."
Silence settled over the room, broken only by the steady pulse of the monitors.
Sixty seconds passed.
Then Kellan exhaled through his nose and said, "The company."
Dr. Bennett blinked.
"I need to know the current state of operations. Get me a laptop."
"Kellan, you just woke up from a three-year coma. You were given a sedative ten minutes ago—"
"Then I'll look quickly before it kicks in." His voice hadn't risen. It never did. "Get me the laptop."
Dr. Bennett got him the laptop.
He also raised the bed so Kellan could sit up properly, and stood aside while Kellan took his first look at the room.
The reaction was subtle—just the faintest tightening of the brow—but for Kellan Scott it was practically a gasp.
Red bedding. Red curtains. Paper lanterns. A large gold-edged character above the window that meant *happiness*.
He looked at it for a long moment.
"Did you redecorate," he said slowly, "while I was unconscious?"
"There's something I should have mentioned first," Dr. Bennett said. "Congratulations are in order, actually."
"For what."
"You got married yesterday."
A pause.
"Your mother arranged everything," Dr. Bennett added. "The young lady agreed."
Another silence. Longer this time.
The furrow between Kellan's brows deepened with measured precision.
"I was unconscious."
"Yes."
"I got married while unconscious."
"Correct."
"And you're telling me," Kellan said, each word coming out with controlled quiet, "that waking up today is a coincidence."
"Not exactly." Dr. Bennett cleared his throat. "The data suggests your wife had a significant role in your recovery. Her presence—her voice, specifically—was producing responses we hadn't seen in three years."
Kellan stared at him.
"Who is she?"