rude awakening

[loficharm]

Martin wakes with a start and a quiet huff, not sure why. It's a little like waking up from a nightmare, only he doesn't remember what he'd been dreaming about at all — not even a sense of it. Instead, he's flooded by wakeful things: the feel of the sheets, crisp and wrong, like new, fresh sheets and not the ones with little stars on that he's had since he was practically a baby. The bed itself, much too big, the ceiling, the walls, the whole room, different, unfamiliar. Light coming in from the wrong window in the wrong place. And there's someone else here, with him, in the bed. A boy, his age, that he's never seen before.

All this happens very quickly, so quick that it isn't like he notices each of these little things independently, it's more like they flood him all at once, overwhelming and scary. The moment he realizes there's a boy beside him he sits bolt upright and flails back, kicking the sheets away with a little shriek.

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[statement_ends]

John has been told he's a heavy sleeper, and he knows he's a hard waker. His alarm clock is set on the far side of his little bedside table for that reason: he has to crawl halfway out of bed just to turn it off, and that wakes him enough that he's less likely to just roll over and doze off again.

But it's not the alarm that wakes him today. His bed is moving, the mattress dipping under someone else's weight, and John sucks in a breath and flinches, blearily indignant. The alarm hasn't even gone off, yet, and his grandmother's never roused him like this, and before he can even piece together what's happening, something collides with his hand and shrieks at him.

John eyes spring open, and his mouth soon follows. There's a boy in his bed! He scrambles back instinctively, far enough that he expects to topple off the mattress. But he doesn't, because the bed's enormous, even bigger than his grandmother's. It's not his bed and this isn't his room, and as he struggles to pull himself into a sit, he realizes this isn't even his shirt.

"What?" he squawks, fisting a hand in the fabric and tugging at it incredulously before looking back up at the other boy. "Who are you?" he demands, his voice scratchy and unsteady.