Awareness came slowly, first in the form of something pressed firmly against his cheek. He tried to reach for it, but the same something was pushing against his hands and arms as well. He felt a solid, uniform pressure down his torso and thighs, and it was a full dizzying minute before his scrambled brain integrated the information into a realization that he was lying face down on a hard surface.
Scent came next, dust and old oil and the specific type of musty odor that came with a general air of neglect. He frowned, because he couldn't see anything that looked neglected, and it occurred to him that he couldn't see anything at all. One of his hands was near his face, he thought, but moving it closer was a task of herculean proportion. His limbs felt so very heavy.
He found his eyes, shaky fingers questing over them. They were closed, which at least explained why he couldn't see. He knew how to open them, but his eyelids were as heavy as everything else. He didn't know how long he might have drifted before jolting to awareness again, startled by the feather-light touch of his own hand against the bridge of his nose.
No, he thought, and it was surprisingly clear. He opened his eyes, seeing the blurry outline of his fingers against a shadowy backdrop. He blinked, the sandpapery feeling in his eyes fading, and began the task of sitting upright. His head pounded in time with his heartbeat, and he swallowed hard against a surge of nausea, squeezing his eyes closed again. The dark behind his eyelids helped, and when the vertigo faded, he risked opening them slowly.
He was on the bridge of a ship, unfamiliar in layout, at the foot of a railing bisecting the space in half. The lights that had been dim when he'd first woken now bright. Motion sensors? he thought distantly, and tried to stand. He had to clutch the rail to stay upright at first, and the vertigo was worse than it had been before. He clenched his jaw and tried to breathe evenly.
Something about the bridge seemed cramped, although the ceiling was too far above his head for him to reach and there was more than enough space for multiple people to move between the workstations. He leaned on the railing, carefully looking around. What he was beginning to think of as the front of the bridge was divided into a block of screens. A few of them were cracked and dark, and a few more had static. The rest showed still video of hallways and rooms, none of them familiar either. He looked curiously at one particular screen that showed an array of silver pods with blinking lights cascading over one end, but nothing else happened and he lost interest.
He reached for his pocket and then broke off the gesture, not sure what it was that he'd wanted. He knew there was something in his pocket, but as much as he'd reached for it automatically, he also knew that right now was not the time. He shook his head at the certainty of the thought and then regretted it as the room tilted around him. It took what felt like several minutes of clinging to the railing for his vision to clear, and he was breathing hard by the time everything settled. The pain had gone from a steady pulse to a dull and constant roar, and he rubbed at his temples, but it didn't help. He turned his attention outwards again, to his surroundings, on the off chance that there was someone hanging around who could tell him what was going on.
No one else was on the bridge, conscious or otherwise, unless they were stuffed behind the bulkheads, and he really didn't want to start tearing out the walls. Not only was there no one present, there was nothing to suggest how he'd gotten there, and he froze as he failed to remember where, exactly, he was.
"I was," he said, voice rough in his throat, and then stopped. He had no idea why he was on the bridge, or even on the ship. He cast his thoughts backward, trying to pin down the last thing he did remember, and came up against a misty gray blank. The pain in his head intensified as he tried to push past the slippery barrier, and as hard as he tried, he couldn't bring up any memories at all. "I am," he said, and then with increasing desperation, "My name is," and none of it brought even a flicker of recognition.
The pain spiked, driving him back down to his knees, stomach churning. He tasted bile at the back of his throat and pushed it back where it belonged. He ended up sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, back firmly against the rail for support, trying to breathe. It was several long moments before he could scrub at the dampness on his face with a sleeve, and then he had the vague thought that he should be wearing some sort of coat or jacket, but it was gone before he could bring it to any sort of proper recognition. Pressing after it threatened to bring a resurgence of the pain, and he let it go.
"I don't know my name," he said, the words tasting odd. It struck him that he couldn't even identify the language he was speaking, and that suddenly struck him as hilarious. He laughed until his stomach hurt for an entirely different reason, and then just as suddenly the laughter turned to tears. He tried to choke down the unexpected sobs, but he couldn't stop crying any more than he'd been able to stop laughing, and it was terrifying enough that he managed to wrestle himself into submission. "I don't know who I am," he said, but this time it was a problem to be solved.