He pushed the door and it opened to a sharp white light that made him close his eyes for a second.
When he opened them, he was not in the stairs. He was not in any place he knew from this world at all.
A shiny wooden floor, white walls freshly painted, and a smell he recognized immediately even though he had not smelled it for months: floor cleaner mixed with the smell of cheap medical disinfectant.
He stopped at the threshold, his hand still on the handle.
"No," he said in a low voice. "This is impossible."
The room in front of him was his room. His old room, with its medical bed with raised edges, and a small screen hanging on the opposite wall, and a wheelchair folded next to the door, still bearing the same scratch on the left wheel that he himself had made once by hitting the edge of the stairs.
He walked toward it with hesitant steps, touched the handle of the wheelchair, cold and real under his fingers more than any illusion should be.
"This is not real," he said to himself, more than he said it to the room. "Illusion. It must be an illusion."
His own voice was not convinced by that.
He sat on the edge of the bed, because his legs suddenly felt a strange heaviness, a heaviness his body remembered before his mind did. He looked at his feet, tried to move his toes, focused, pushed with all the will he had.
Nothing.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, this is my new body, this is not..."
He stopped talking. Because a part of him, a quiet and cold part somewhere behind the panic, knew exactly where he was, even before he admitted it out loud.
He heard a door opening behind him.
"You finally woke up?"
He knew the voice before he turned. His mother’s voice, but not with the tone mothers are imagined with in stories. Cold, tired, heavy with something closer to boredom than worry.
He turned slowly, his body moving with a difficulty he had not been used to for a long time, the folded wheelchair next to the bed suddenly seemed as if it was waiting for him personally.
She was standing at the door, her arms folded, looking at him not as a mother checking on her son, but as if she was counting a loss in an account book.
"How many times do we have to go through this?" she said, and her voice did not rise, it dropped more, and that was worse. "Every two weeks, a new coma, new tests, new bills."
Loki did not answer. He did not find words, because part of him knew this scene, had lived it, and another part refused to believe he was living it again.
"Your father is at work, of course," she added, as if she was completing a sentence she had started years ago, a sentence that became part of an endless routine. "Always at work when something happens."
"Hello to you too," Loki said finally, trying to sound sarcastic as usual, but the sentence came out weaker than he intended, more like a desperate attempt to bring himself back to a familiar shape.
His mother did not comment on that. She did not smile, did not frown, only looked at him for another moment, then at the medical file hanging at the end of the bed, as if it tells her something more important than what her son might say.
"The doctor will come in an hour," she said. "Try not to cause them trouble this time."
She left without approaching him, and without asking him how he feels.
Loki remained sitting, looking at the closed door. He touched his legs again, with his hands this time, as if trying to make sure they exist at least, even if they do not work. Cold skin, bone underneath, no feeling.
"I remembered," he said finally, in a voice that does not resemble his previous voice ten minutes ago. "I remembered this place."
He sat there for a long time, not knowing exactly how long, because the clock on the wall stopped at three thirty from the first moment he entered, and its hands did not move a bit despite what felt like hours passing.
He heard footsteps in the corridor, light, quick, not his mother’s heavy steps.
The steps stopped at his door, but the door did not open. He heard light breathing from the other side, a small hesitation, then steps moving away again without entering.
"My sister," he said in a voice no louder than a whisper.
He did not call her name, he could not, as if something in his throat refused to form the letters.
He looked at the small screen hanging on the wall, turned off, black, reflecting his faint image. A man of eighteen, sitting in the body of a much younger boy, on the bed of his old room, trying to remember why the System chose to show him this exactly.
He thought of patience, the word he saw at the base of the stairs. He did not understand it there, and does not understand it now completely. Why this memory? And what does the Tower want from him by seeing it again?
He hated this question as soon as it formed.
He tried to stand in a futile attempt, his legs collapsed under him immediately, he fell to the floor with a dry painful sound. He remained there, on the cold tiles, not trying to get up again immediately.
"Okay," he said to the ceiling. "Okay, I saw the room, I remembered the mother, what next?"
No one answered, of course, but the door opened this time by itself.
No one was behind it.
Only light, a faint blue light seeping from the outside corridor, with the same color he knew in the stairs, mixed strangely with the harsh white hospital light, as if these two worlds were fighting over the same place for one moment.
He crawled toward the door with his hands, because his legs refused to carry him, and felt something like humiliation in that movement, an old humiliation, familiar, returned to him with all its weight as if he had never left it.
At the threshold, he stopped.
He looked behind him at the room, at the bed, at the folded chair, at the black screen that still reflects his face.
"I will not return here," he said, in a voice that does not carry enough certainty for him himself to believe it.
He crawled across the threshold, and the blue light swallowed him slowly, while the room behind him remained hanging in its place, silent, waiting for another visitor perhaps, another time, if there is another time at all.