Lois awoke shaking. She was shivering - cold because of the fact she had, once again, failed to correctly dry her sheets, which explained why they were missing from her bed - but shaking because of the dream she had just woken from.
Staring at the clock at her bedside, she watched ten seconds tick away before she realized her dream was becoming increasingly hazy with the passage of time.
Focus, Lane, she commanded herself. This is important.
Because, for some reason, it felt impossibly pertinent to Lois to know what she had just experienced. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what had happened.
She had been falling through space, with an intense pain in her side, staring up at a yellow sky. But the beams of light, instead of traveling down from the sun seemed to be pointed up. Maybe she was falling into the sun? She didn't know.
But somehow, she had ended up on her back. She was lying somewhere - with lights. This time, everything was white. And there was beeping. And it was getting dark.
Lois opened her eyes. 4:17 am. She groaned. She didn't try to make more sense of her dream... Instead, she let her lids droop and felt her mind go blank.
In a hospital room, miles away, a doctor signed for a set of lab results for the local John Doe. She flipped through the report, scanning the facts and figures that were the only clues to the ailments of the man lying in front of him. The strength of his vitals were growing, but his immune system was still very much deficient. The toxin that had entered his bloodstream seemed to be dispersing, but his body was not creating antibodies.
What was most worrisome was his brain activity. For most of the day and night, John Doe's brain seemed almost dormant. There was little function - but for a few moments, most often in the middle of the night, the activity was frenetic before it once again died down. The doctor worried that these periods of hyperactivity might be signals of seizures or hemorrhaging in the brain. She doubted how much longer John Doe would survive.
A.C. had just arrived at Watchtower to debrief Chloe on his latest saves and the continuing search for Green Arrow. There was no sign of Oliver, but A.C. had managed to lead a group of stranded fishermen back to port. It had taken the better part of two days to return them to land, and in the meantime, the fishermen had given A.C. a nickname.
"They called me Ariel! For god's sake, do I look like I wear a seashell bra? The least they could've done was call me Triton - Poseidon - anything! But they picked the damn Little Mermaid... Man, I should've just let them find their own way home. They probably would've ended up at the bottom of the sea with those crazy scientists who tried to dig tunnels under the ocean floor. Geothermal heating my ass."
Suddenly, Chloe perked up.
"A.C., you are brilliant."