Chapter Text
The sky was blue when Derek opened his eyes, which was weird, because he was supposed to be dead.
He lay there for several seconds, gaze focused upward toward the infinite blue expanse, where picturesque cumulus clouds drifted in the gentle breeze that stirred his hair around his ears. Somewhere in the distance, a bird trilled its friendly call, whoo-ee, whoo-ee. The sound mingled with the soft murmuring of his breath.
His breath.
He was…alive?
He was alive, and his head didn’t hurt, and the thin fractured line in his glasses seemed to have vanished completely, and his very-not-dead fingers could feel the tickle of grass beneath them instead of the warm slickness of a keyboard drenched in sweat and tears and…other things. And his head didn’t hurt.
Deciding he had waited long enough, he pressed his hands against the ground–solid and firm and seemingly not at risk of vanishing–and pushed himself to a sitting position, blinking against the warm golden radiance of a sun hovering just above the horizon (rising, he determined, as he glanced behind him at his slowly-shortening shadow). Its light illuminated a vast field of gently-swaying green grass, stretching out around him on all sides as far as the eye could see. Even raising a hand to shield his eyes, squinting into the distance, yielded nothing but the uninterrupted upward curve of the earth softly greeting the uninterrupted downward curve of the sky. Infinite, from where he sat. As infinite as the perfect blue he had woken to.
As above, so below, Derek thought. Or…something like that.
His head still didn’t hurt.
Should it hurt? He remembered, hazily, that it should…or at least, he thought it should. He definitely remembered that he was supposed to be dead. Did that have something to do with why his head should have been cracking in two, should have been imploding like a dying star, his nose pouring blood onto the keyboard, blood dripping down his cheeks from eyes that saw nothing at all–
Derek blinked. His head didn’t hurt. And he…couldn’t remember what he had been thinking about just now.
“Probably not very important, then,” he reasoned, listening to the spoken words as they tangled with the light whisper of the breeze. Something about hearing the sound of his own voice warmed a place inside of him that he suddenly realized had been cold. He decided he wanted to hear it again.
“Time to walk, I guess? Assuming my legs work.” They seemed to, when he levered himself carefully to a standing position. His knees protested, but no more than would have been usual after falling asleep on the floor, or in this case, the ground. Come to think of it…when was the last time he had fallen asleep on the floor? It must have been…must have…
His head didn’t hurt.
“Right, or left?” Derek glanced in both directions. They seemed equally promising–or equally un-promising, depending on how you reckoned an empty field of grass. To his right, the sun continued, steadily, to rise, sending the purple pool of his shadow–at his left–skittering back toward him as if seeking refuge.
“Right it is,” he said, warming that steadily thawing thing inside him. He inventoried himself briefly–well-worn sneakers, good for walking; durable jeans and a comfortable sweatshirt, helpful if the night were to get cold as it fell. Glasses on his nose, unfractured and whole, clean of blood and tears, seeing only the world in front of him and free from the horrible refractions of that yellow light–
His head didn’t hurt.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, glanced once behind him, and turned right.