Cal set his laptop on the dining room table. He pressed the power button and fished the flash drive the doctor had given him from his pocket.

"Are you going to play a game?" Lewis asked, approaching, peeling a banana, twisting a 'Y' hand. His blue eyes were bright with interest.

"No. I'm going to look at some pictures," Cal answered him, moving a 'C' hand shape from his cheek to the held up palm of his left hand. He pulled out a chair to take a seat at the table. This was their 'not as nice' dining room table. The really nice one was in storage in the garage for when Lewis and the yet-to-be-born baby were old enough to treat nice furniture nicely. The holidays was around the corner and Gillian told Cal stories of last Thanksgiving when they'd had everyone over to the new house. They'd brought out the other table and created a big 'L' for everyone to sit at and cooked a feast. They sounded like good stories. Cal wished he remembered them.

"I like pictures," Lewis noted.

"Would you like to have a look?" Cal offered. Lewis nodded so he pulled the four year old onto his leg. On the computer screen the flash-drive opened a folder. There were several tens of files all labelled with a date, going back to May the 12th 2018, to the ones taken two days ago when Cal had gone in for his, what was now a bi-monthly, check up.

"What's this Dad?" Lewis curled up his left hand into a 'wh' hand gesture, while holding on to his banana with the other.

"These are pictures of my brain."

"Your brain?" Lewis turned to him with a slight frown, pointing to his forehead like his father had done.

"Yeah."

"In your head?"

"Yeah, in my head," Cal agreed, double clicking the first image open. He was going for reverse order, which meant they were looking at the scans taken a few days ago.

"How do they take pictures of in your head?"

"They have a special machine that can take photos of inside your body." Lewis looked at him strangely, eyes flickering to his father's hands as he signed. "Like you can get photos of your bones?" Cal went on. "Like that but a little bit different." He indicated the screen and Lewis turned his gaze, biting off a large piece of banana with his mouth. What Cal had had was a functioning MRI scan. It showed what areas of his brain 'lit up' when he was performing different, specific, mental exercises while images were taken of his head. They ranged from focal point thinking, to basic maths, writing, interpreting written and oral language, and hand-to-eye coordination special tasks. A regular MRI showed the structure of a brain. But a functioning MRI showed, like the name suggested, function; how his brain was working, not just where.

"That's you Dad?"

"Yeah that's me," Cal confirmed. The image didn't really look like a brain, more like a kind of oval with darker areas around bone and along the fissure down the centre that separated the two brain hemispheres. Cal hadn't had a look at these kinds of pictures in so long. Since his degree work, he was pretty sure, but then he wasn't sure he could trust his memory anymore. There may have been another reason why he'd looked at a brain scan recently, but if there was, he couldn't recall it. When he'd been in the coma MRI's had been taken while he was unconscious. They had been taken to show the swelling in his brain. Of course he'd also been tested for brain function, to make sure he wasn't brain dead, but those were EEG's and PET scans; passive testing he didn't have to be awake for to really give an amazing result. Not like the fMRI.

"That your brain?"

"Yes," Cal asserted again.

"It's pitty," Lewis noted, signing 'beautiful'. He shoved more banana in his mouth and tried to hand Cal the skin.

"I don't want it," Cal told him with a shake of his head. Lewis leaned forward to put the rubbish on the table. Then he wiped his fingers on the front of his shirt. "You like the colours huh?" Cal asked him of the scan again, bringing his hand to his chin/neck area and fluttering his fingers. The different colours were associated with the amount of activity in a specific area of Cal's mind. An EEG measured electrical activity and was recorded in a wave. But they weren't interesting to a four year old. A PET involved radioactively tagging chemicals in the blood, which would show up on the scan by rushing towards areas of the cerebral cortex where blood flow and metabolic activity was increased, which suggested areas of intense brain function. PET's were going out of style. fMRI's showed a similar response but a magnetic resolution image was so much more detailed.

"There's lots of colours there," Lewis pointed a finger and waved it around in front of the screen before moving the hand to his chin to mimic the sign his father had just used.

"Yeah," Cal agreed, which was a good thing. Compared to the images when he was comatose, which only showed activity in sub-conscious processing, like breathing and registering sounds, these new ones showed all kinds of colours all over the place, in Cal's primary motor cortex, his primary somatosensory cortex, his primary visual cortex, primary auditory cortex and, most importantly, two areas where he processed and understood speech, Broca's and Wernicke's areas. His injury had been to the left side of his head and frontal lobe. That was why Cal had had such a hard time with his hand-to-eye coordination upon waking. And it meant his speech could have been affected, because language comprehension and production was in the left hemisphere of his brain. He had been lucky. It wasn't good, but it could have been so much worse.

Cal showed his son that when he had been handed a piece of silk, the 'touch' centre of his brain had activated, there, at the top of his skull, his primary somatosensory cortex. "And when I saw a picture of you this lit up," Cal showed him the area for visual processing in his occipital lobe.

Lewis looked up at him for a second. "Is your head all better now Dad?" He scooped the air away from his mouth.

"Yeah," Cal told him. "It's all betta."

And it was. Even though the dark sections of the scans showed the areas of Cal's brain that was essentially 'dead' tissue now, there was also a lot of promising evidence that showed his brain had actually rewired itself. The right hemisphere was where non-verbal processing was conducted, spatial reasoning and emotional perception. Even though the prefrontal cortex was an area of memory, there was no definitive reason why Cal had any memory loss and he was still frustrated with being unable to find a reason why. He liked to know the 'why'. He wanted to know why those particular years had been blocked out.

"Where's Mum?" Cal asked Lewis. He had actually brought this home to show her.

"She was upstairs," Lewis noted, pointing to the ceiling.

"Can you go get her for me? Tell her what we're lookin' at." He used 'bring' and 'tell'.

"Ok," Lewis waited until his father had put him on the ground then ran off.

Cal closed the current image and pulled up another, where Rockwell had identified a lesion during one of Cal's early MRI's. It had been removed by a scalpel but it was strange to see it there and then, in the next scan, to see that it had gone, removed with surgical precision, excuse the pun. Cal opened another file that was a picture of his latest brain scan. He shrunk the size of the window so he could have the old scan next to the new one. The 'black hole' of his brain was smaller. He looked again, checking the magnification to make sure it wasn't just an illusion.

"Lewis said you wanted to show me a really amazing picture of inside your head," Gillian said as she approached where Cal was sitting at the table. She leaned down and draped her arms over his shoulders, leaning in so she could see.

"Does the dead tissue seem less in this image?" Cal asked her. This was not something he had gone over with Rockwell that afternoon at his appointment. Rockwell had shown Cal how well his brain was functioning now and which pathways had activated during which tasks, but nothing about the 'black hole'.

"Hm," Gillian noted. She leaned in closer and then was silent for a moment. "Are the magnifications the same?"

"Yep I already checked that."

"It's possible for neurogenesis," Gillian pointed out. She straightened up and walked around him to pull up a chair of her own. When she sat she rested her hands on her belly, where the baby had pushed out.

"I've neva actually seen neurogenesis in action though," Cal noted lightly, amazed. His brain was 'healing' itself. Or at least it was producing new neurons to replace the ones that had been damaged during his accident. When he'd done his degree work, all the way back when, neurogenesis had been unheard of. He wasn't sure that that part of his brain would ever work the way it used to, but neurons, the little cells in his head that transmitted messages to each other and to other systems in his body that made him breathe, eat, talk, run and a whole host of other things, looked as though they were actually regenerating.

"This is your brain injury?" Gillian asked, pointing to the dark section.

"Yeah."

Gillian stared at the screen for a while longer. "It's scary seeing it like that."

"Yeah," Cal agreed again, because it was. And he hadn't been awake to experience it all in real time. To know that this was his head was surreal. "Probably won't get much betta than that though," Cal noted. Because neurogenesis was age limited. The older Cal got the less likely it was that new neurons would be built. He'd take what he could get, obviously.

"So this was your scan from the other day?" Gillian pointed to the right of the screen.

"Yep," Cal confirmed. He closed the old scan and showed her the set of new ones. He told her about the tasks he'd performed while the images were taken and she noted, pleased and impressed, how his brain had reorganised a few of the pathways to compensate for what it had lost. Gillian pointed out all the right processing centres, musing more to herself than Cal and he took that opportunity to watch her. Things had been steadily getting better. Things between them, things with Lewis, things with work, things with life. They were having another baby and Cal was starting to understand just how crazy that really was. It was a freaking one in a million. When he first woke up he didn't understand why he had had a kid with her, or more accurately, why he had agreed to have more children at all. Now that he saw her pregnant and could see her at home with Lewis, it made a lot more sense. A lot.

"You'd make a fascinating case study," Gillian noted, turning to him. Cal was already staring at her but she didn't call him on it.

"Thanks a lot," he retorted. "Was that an insult?"

"No," Gillian smirked at him in response. "I wasn't suggesting you were a freak of science."

Cal chuckled. "That definitely sounded like an insult," he muttered. He reached over and closed the lid of the computer.

"Oh are we finished looking?" Gillian noted lightly.

"Yep. Have to go find your son. He's been quiet too long."

Gillian looked around alarmed. "I thought he followed me back downstairs."

"Nope," Cal got up and pushed the chair back to get out from against the table. He stopped and gave his wife a kiss, pressing it against her hair. She looked up and gave him a smile. "You go relax," Cal told her. "I'll find the munchkin."