There’s a universal law that states that every single hospital room has to have several defining characteristics. The first is that it has to smell faintly like someone has tried to safeguard the place against vampires and food critics, or has tried to cover up a crime by committing an olfactory one. Hospitals smell awful, but nobody ever says anything because everyone assumes the smell has some medicinal purpose. Whether or not it does is a mystery lost to time. 

The second is that the lights are slightly too bright, the walls too off-white and there’s a stain on one of the floors that’s too faded to make out perfectly but too visible to ignore. Hospitals are, despite often being crowded and full of people, liminal spaces. Stepping into one, there is the distinct feeling of stepping into another world, one you don’t want to stay in for too long, for fear of finding out what’s on the other side. 

The third is the sound. There is a distant intercom that is ever so slightly unintelligible, crackling things that sound like words. There’s the sound of wheelchairs, trolleys and stretchers, every single one with a slightly squeaky wheel. But most importantly, every single hospital room throughout the vastness of the multiverse has a machine that goes ‘beep’. Electricity is not always a prerequisite for the beep. It simply is. 

So, on the third floor of a fairly ordinary hospital room, were two beds. In those two beds were two people. Both of them had recently died, in both strict and figurative senses. Strictly speaking, both of them had recently suffered severe physical trauma, followed by cardiac arrest, with a little bit of brain death sprinkled in to taste (as a treat). They had been, in every sense, clinically dead for a bit. That was undeniable, and it was written on the little sheets that hung off the foot of their bed, with a little question mark written next to it. In the past few days, there had been several scans done to confirm that these people were as dead as dead got.

Both of them were currently also sitting upright, hearts beating, if not happily, then at least with mild contentment, in their chests, and their brains slowly processing their environment. The machines went ‘beep’. That was because both of them had also been dead in a more ethereal sense. 

Daniel chewed on a sandwich, the only piece of food he’d recognized, and considered his situation. He was a seasoned warrior who had dealt with shenaniganry many times. He’d been to underworlds and dreamworlds, and while this one wasn’t like those at all, he was adaptable. It was the biggest reason he hadn’t freaked out when he’d seen his reflection in the knife they’d given him to cut his food. The girl’s body in the reflection was not unattractive, in that recently-hit-by-a-car kind of way, but it definitely wasn’t his. There was no hard jawline, no short (but secretly quite well-maintained) brown hair, and, strangest of all, even his eyes weren’t his. Instead of cold blue, they were a sort of amber-ish brown. There were… other parts to his anatomy he hadn’t had a clear look at, and he wasn’t eager to do so. Other than the severe discomfort, there was another element that kept him so calm, and that was in the bed ten feet to his left. 

Despite the exterior, he could tell by the body language, the stolen glances and glares, and even the facial expressions, that this was her. Sure, the body was masculine, the face unfamiliar, and large parts of the skin had taken on the colouration of a particularly spectacular nebula, but he knew. A part of him, the part that did the swashling and the buckling, that had punched dragons in the face and didn’t know when to stop, told him that he should go over to the other bed and end the fight, for real this time. 

A few things were stopping him. The first was that, well, the fight had ended. They’d both died. Wherever they were now, it clearly wasn’t back home, and he desperately hoped this wasn’t some third-tier afterlife from some small religion up in the mountains. That meant that she probably wasn’t entirely herself either, and in no position to do any slaying, conquering and/or pillaging any time soon. The other reason -- he still wasn’t sure if it was a more or less pressing one -- was that he got the distinct feeling that, if he stood up, the discomfort he felt now would quickly become a lot worse. He also wasn’t sure his legs could hold him very well. The pain in his body throbbed gently, to remind him that, even if it hadn’t fallen off a mountain, it had sure as hell been put through the wringer recently. 

The reason for all of this, of course, was complicated, in ways Daniel had no concept of. What happens when two universes hang out close together is that they begin to share things. Ideas. Stories. Sometimes names, letters and languages. And every once in a while, when a life is about to go out in both places at once, two worlds will share people. Daniel and Sally had, at the moment of both their deaths, been exchanged, like unwanted gifts after a birthday party. So had the Demon Queen and the unlucky soul she’d been swapped with. The problem with an exchange like this is that the body doesn’t travel along, so this was bound to be an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. 

On the other side of the room, the Demon Queen was also calmly contemplating murder. The knife and fork she’d been provided with would be terrible for an extended fight, but she had figured that she’d be able to get the upper hand regardless. She had, of course, also immediately recognized the man who had slain her -- heroically, maybe, but dead is dead -- even if he wasn’t wearing the same body. And this one was a lot smaller. She would easily be able to overpower it. She looked at her hands. Big ones, a lot meatier than she was used to. The hairs on their back seemed to have been shaven short recently, but it was still coming in thick and bristly. She grimaced, clenched and unclenched them. 

Being the Demon Queen came with certain perks and drawbacks, but a seething disgust for her own body had never been one of them. It was like wearing a shirt after someone else had run a marathon in it. A particularly sweaty someone. She shuddered and took a breath. Maybe killing the man who had traveled across half a continent just to kill her would give her some sense of resolution, or at least give her something to focus on that wasn’t the meat-suit she had suddenly been trapped inside of. On the other hand… this place was more than a little alien to her. It was a lot smoother, with more metal and a material that felt like a mixture between hard wax and glass. The tray next to her bed was made of it. The headboard was made of it. It was everywhere, and the fact that she had no idea what it was frustrated her. Going by the way the Hero in the next bed over was touching everything around him, he didn’t know it either, whereas the healers who had come to check up on them seemed fully comfortable in their environment and their strangely baggy clothing. 

One of them entered the room, a man who looked like he measured sleep in minutes and ate when it was convenient, which clearly wasn’t enough. He had once upon a time been tired, had come out the other side, and now seemed to be in a sort of permanent state where rest was something that happened to other people. 

Daniel watched him approach with apprehension as the radio in the hall chattered incomprehensibly, words that may have made sense if it wasn’t for the static and the mumbling. “Piggling bokter Mittens to harbiology,” it announced, only furthering Daniel’s suspicion. 

“How are we feeling today, miss?” he asked, and it took Daniel a hot moment to realize that the physician was talking to him. Daniel was many things, but a ‘miss’ was not one of them, and he tried to resist the impulse to correct the man with a ‘hit’. 

“The same,” Daniel said, glaring. “Not dead.” He wiggled his toes to emphasise his point, because clearly sitting up and talking wasn’t doing the trick.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hrmm.” The man grunted like he was mildly offended, and took up the clipboard from the foot of the bed. He looked at it for a moment, then at Daniel, then at the paper again. “Says here you told a nurse that you’re under the impression that you’re…”

“My name is Daniel,” Daniel said, daring the man to try and confront him about it. Instead, he got a look of… compassion? That was a weird one. He’d expected confusion, maybe anger or the desire to start an argument. 

“The very best of luck with that,” the man said in the kind of voice people use when they feel sorry for someone they know is about to have a really bad time. He clearly had experience with it. “I’m afraid I can’t just change markers and pronouns on this thing, but I’ll make a note of it anyway.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do your parents know?”

“My parents are dead,” Daniel said flatly. They’d passed away some time ago, and he’d processed it easily. Peaceful deaths both, and he had never been particularly weepy person to begin with. 

“But it says here they’re…” The man looked at him again and clenched his jaw. “I understand.” Daniel had the feeling a lot was going unsaid here, but he’d realized fairly quickly that people in the hospital had quickly mistaken him for the girl whose body he was in, and he wasn’t about to risk his medical care by pointing out that he had no idea where he was, or the meaning of a lot of the words that he was being bombarded with. 

Of course Daniel had no idea what words like ‘insurance’ meant in this context, or what a ‘pick-up truck’ was, and he had only an inkling of what a ‘traffic violation’ was, but the staff didn’t need to know that. He had an incomplete picture in his head, and the other half of it was, sadly for Daniel, currently in the head of a girl stuck in his body, a world away. 

“Now, about your saviour,” the man said, and walked over to the other bed, where the Demon Queen glowered at him. “We still haven’t found any ID for you, I’m afraid. You…” he checked the document attached to her bed, “still don’t remember anything?” 

She shook her head, and then paused. “I do know my name,” she said. Even whispered, her voice was a loud, rasping one, and knowing to look for it, Daniel saw her briefly wince at the sound of it. He knew why. He was better at hiding it, but his own voice was wrong now in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The doctor raised an eyebrow and held a pen to the clipboard.

“Go ahead?”

“My name,” the Demon Queen said, “is Eliza.”

The doctor looked at her for a stunned second, then looked at Daniel, and then back at her, back and forth like he was watching a particularly slow-paced tennis match. “You’re both…” His other eyebrow went up too. “O-kay. Do either of you remember... Well, anything about the other yet? Who the other is, that kind of thing? Girlfriend, partner, etcetera? I don’t know what we can do insurance-wise, but it might, you know, help.”

Daniel and Eliza looked at each other for a moment. There was a brief, unseen powerplay for a moment. A fly crossing their gaze would have been microwaved in seconds. Sure, neither of them was likely to murder the other right away, but Daniel would be damned if he was going to let the Demon Queen out of his sight any time soon, and he knew she probably felt similar to him. Both of them smiled wolfishly in agreement. Their conflict, clearly, was going to continue in this world too. 

“Yes,” they said in unison. The game was on.