He’d woken up clouded, weak, and with eyes hollow and empty. His mother sat at his bedside, embracing him as he asked her with a hoarse throat what she of all people was doing there. The fact he was in a hospital dawned on him, and as the doctors talked to him of his coma status, his mind questioned. The wheels of his thoughts turned. Had it all been a dream? It was too real to be just a dream. Just a creation of his subconscious. The fact in his dream such figures were of such likeness to those he knew if only in passing…was it a sign? A way of his thoughts trying to tell him something?

It was in the past now. His body that had been bedridden and weak now back to almost full and complete health as it was before. Daily visits to the gym gave him back his body’s vitality, yet his thoughts still drifted to those dreams. Those faces in the shadows. In a small way, he mourned the deaths of those who hadn’t woken from their slumber. Part of him wondered if they too, dreamed dreams of cavaliers and queens, princes and witches, death and all the ideas that went with it.
Elzo had gotten them an apartment, and even though he opted to drop out of Hillworth and just take his G.E.D., Marlo felt like he’d missed something. Like the obvious had looked him in the face and he’d just seen a wall.

His brother had found love, Audrey Collins. Marlo wasn’t sure how to react. He’d known his brother had feelings for her, he often told him such before the coma, but to see the one person you thought you knew so well change so drastically… Marlo felt confused by the changes that had taken place. His brother in love and loyal. His mother with a spine. His father, giving him a claim to company assets.
He craved his old normality. He craved the old order of things. Yet memories that were not memories haunted him. His vision of the world had changed while his eyes had been closed.

The world had changed.

Marlo simply had to change with it.