Chapter 1

He was fighting. Then he was falling, falling for an eternity, it seemed. Finally, he came to a stop, unable to move. Words came to his hearing, but were unintelligible. He could not see, feel or touch. Slowly, his body regained its ability to feel.

"You said he would stop breathing once you removed his breathing tube! What's wrong? Why is he still breathing?" a now intelligible voice was asking.

"I'm sorry Mrs. Winslow. I said he should stop within moments of the breathing tube being removed," a male voice responded.

"I can't stand the idea of him suffering," the voice said, then broke down into sobs.

"Your son's brain activity is not present in any tests, except for the most basic part of the brain stem. Those control the autonomous portions of the body. Breathing is one of them. It is remarkable that he is still breathing at all," the male voice said in explanation.

While the conversation was going on, the man on the bed struggled to regain control of his body. He concentrated, and could almost see in his mind as connections were re-established. Feeling came flooding into his being, and he groaned out loud.

"Jason?" asked the female voice. A word surfaced in his mind.

"Mo... mother?" he said in a whisper, struggling to get the word out.

"JASON!" screamed the voice, and he felt weight upon him. He tried to move his arms to, what? Push her? Hold her? But he was unable to do more than twitch.

"Mrs. Winslow, you have to get off him! I have to examine him, and see what's going on," snapped the male voice.

The name Jason seemed to fit with his body. Memories started forming, and in his mind he saw several disjointed images of a woman, who seemed to match the voice he was hearing, and several reflections of Jason in a reflecting surface... mirror, yes, a mirror.

While the image and name went with each other, he was sure he was not Jason. Why did they call him that? He was tired. His eyes fluttered, but refused to open. A pressure on his eye and a bright light, followed by less light, then darkness as he fell into an abyss of sleep.

Three weeks later, Jason was being wheeled out of the hospital. He had been doing therapy since he awoke from his coma, and was making a remarkable recovery. His memory was still fragmented, as he had suffered a severe head trauma. The doctors had not held out any hope, and Kim Winslow had kept going for as long as she'd had hope.

Finally, she had accepted that her son would not recover and had agreed to pulling the life support, and letting nature take its course. That was when Jason had made his miraculous recovery. Everyone was amazed and his mother was overjoyed. The doctors did a battery of tests and scratched their heads. What had occurred was totally impossible, and they were excited over Jason Winslow's recovery.

Memories welled inside Jason's head over those weeks, and he got a good grasp on who he was. Or rather, whose body he was inside of. He knew this was not his own body. He knew he had been somewhere else until he found himself in Jason's body. He just didn't know the how or why of his presence inside this person's body.

While he had been allowed to go home, he was still doing therapy every day. His mother tried to get him to slow down, but he pushed himself to get this body back into an acceptable (to him) condition.

He had been in a traffic accident, and in a vegetative state for almost nine months when he had regained consciousness. The doctors had run tests, at their own expense, to try to determine what had happened.

The MRI of his brain showed that his brain function had increased over and above what a normal brain should be doing. The doctors had wanted Jason to stay in the hospital so they could observe this remarkable activity, but he and his mother were adamant about his going home.

He felt as if he was stranded in a reality he had no control of, and no hand in the making of. He kept dreaming of an other place. It was a place he longed to be but could not remember why he wanted to be there. Every time he woke, he forgot most of the dreams right away.

This too, frustrated him. There was vital information he was missing. While the memories of this body were slowly returning in stops and starts, he was unable to connect with the people around him.

This body's mother, (his mother now) was a good person who cared deeply for her family. He felt badly for her, that he could not return the love she was showing him. He knew that he was causing her emotional pain.

She had been very hovering the first few days of his return. He had firmly asked her not to smother him. He saw the pain this caused her, and regretted it. Still, he was grateful for her help, and tried to show his appreciation in small ways.

She had been warned by the doctors that there could be a personality change, and she chalked his behavior up to this. She desperately clung to him. She had lost her husband in the same accident that had almost killed this body, his body. He was going to have to get used to thinking of this body as his.

Along with relearning to walk and talk properly, he had to relearn reading and writing and other mundane skills. It came quickly, as his mind already had this information. Still it required effort on his part to re-establish connections to those parts of his brain that stored the information.

He also had other abilities that he knew none around him possessed, and kept quiet about them. If he concentrated, he could see fields of energy around him, but was unable to do anything with them... yet. He knew what they were, but could not manipulate them in any way as of yet.

He had taken to jogging through his neighborhood, recently. He practiced sensing the energy fields. He got to where he could tell the difference in this energy; between plant, animal, human, or even inanimate objects, without really looking at them. He could tell where anyone or anything was in relation to himself, for several hundred feet around.

He lived out in a place called the suburbs. His mother was a stay at home wife, and his father had been a rising executive in the insurance industry. He had no other siblings, and he and his mother had been very close, prior to the accident.