Afterlife.

My entire world was an outlook of sorrow. The colour seemed to have drained from every pixel on the television screen that was my life.

The view from my hospital bed three hours after the “accident” as they called it was killing me. But the world had already lost one person and I could not do it to my family. My body fought the bleeding and the fractured skull alongside the doctors. It wouldn't be that easy to fight the pain and utter loneliness within me.

The nurses came and went, each with a grim expression that matched my mood.

I couldn't take the sympathetic glances and pats on my hand anymore. They were helping the wrong person, I couldn't do anything with this. I didn't deserve it. I wasn't dead.

I was fine.

I didn't need any counsellor. They told me that the images I had seen would be with me forever and that I needed to take medication to sleep. That I could fight the PTSD with good will and determination.

They didn't realise that I didn't see anything-

I hated this hospital.

The small TV screen was flickering in the darkened room as the high-pitched beeps and squeaks of the hospital's routine went on around me. The IV tube in my hand itched like hell and I tried to find something to do.

I started counting cracks in the wall to my left.

I was still counting when a crack of light appeared and someone entered the room.

"Phillipa? Phillipa Veltine?" A voice chimed and I glanced at the slim, young woman at the end of my bed. Her shadowed face was familiar. Too familiar.

"Anne! Anne, you're okay." I scrambled to the bottom of the gurney I was on and the woman moved away. I sat statue still, upright; as if any movement I made I would scare her away. The pretty, skittish girl with the face of a ghost.

She ran her hand through her blonde hair and I smiled slightly. I tried stilling even my breath so she wouldn't be nervous. I didn't want my new found hope to run away from me so soon after discovery.

"Anne, what are you doing here?" I breathed with the last of my held breath. She shook her head.

"Miss Veltine, I'm here to look after you? It's my job." She replied. And then I realised.

Her voice was all wrong, too high pitched for Anne's wonderful, syrupy tones.

I looked closer still.

Her hair tone was entirely the wrong colour, not the blonde I thought it was but a honey brown like my own. My grief addled brain had tried to soothe me with a false interpretation of the banal, quite unsympathetic nurse before me.

Like I said to the psychiatrist, I didn't see anything-

She stepped closer, alarm clearly present on her too wrong face and I realised I was shaking violently. I pushed her away and violently pulled the IV needle out of my hand. A small alarm sounded, calling out to all who would listen of my betrayal to the medics as I wandered down the corridor, dazed and confused.

The white door to Dan's room was opposite me and I pushed on through it. His body lay unnaturally in the bed, wires attatched to electrodes on his chest. His leg was hung high in traction and the nurses were just finishing an ankle-to-knee cast on it. The childish idea of tickling his pink toes as they protruded from the edge of the off-white tubing fled as quickly as it had come. His eyes were open and unblinking, tracking my cautious movements across the room towards him.

My hand groped for his and the tears came thick and fast.

And I didn't see anything but my dead best friend.