head muffled by a fog of black toxin, mind vibrating with manic energy, brain a mass of irradiated tissue flaring aggressively
body ripped and shredded from the inside, the gouges left behind drowned in a ravaging contaminate and sealed over, skin and muscle fusing back together, every cell corrupted and reformed
there’s no sound. no light. no feeling in existence other than the chemical tearing through my system, igniting each nerve as it goes and goes and—
That. That is my world for more beats than my frantic heart should be able to survive.
But I do. Survive.
When reality shifts and shudders back to life around me, terror takes hold, stripped bare, naked and pure.
It takes my congested psyche a moment to register FISA’s medical as nonthreatening.
The smell hits me first, acidic and sterile. My stomach roils, the same bile rushing up to wash against the back of my throat. I gag on the nasty taste, choking it back so it doesn’t come spewing out of my mouth. Then my eyes snap open, and things gets infinitely worse. Shining pale light is everywhere, overwhelming in its intensity. I squint, pain plucking at the receptors in my corneas.
When I shift on the medical bed, my body stages a hopeless rebellion, bombarding me with violence, looking to start a war it can’t win. My entire being seems to ache, bones too sharp beneath my skin, muscles pulled taut and crispened along the surface like they’ve been scorched by an unforgiving heat.
Even the thin sheets on the bed feel like they’re rubbing my hyper-sensitised skin raw. I want them off me, but I can’t move to rip the fabric away.
Noise hits me next, and I immediately wish my eardrums had remained soaked in silence. It’s so loud in here, a constant bombardment of machines rhythmically beeping, and LED lights buzzing incessantly, and the shuffle of people rushing everywhere, shoes scuffing the floor and clothes rustling every time they move.
My senses go into overload, and the closest beeping sound gets louder and more frenzied. People—doctors—gather around my bed like a plague of locusts. They try and talk to me, but I can’t make the words sound right. It’s just more noise.
A rush of cool bliss hits my nervous system, and I understand, somewhere in my mind, that they’re drugging me, but I can’t make it matter. I’d do anything, accept any consequence to forceconsciousness to back the fuck off, for these feelings to drain away like fluid from a ruptured lung, to scrape them out as you would pus from a wound.
As reality fades and the darkness snatches me back with frostbitten claws, I can hear the faint sound of someone—him—shouting a word that could be my name.
An indiscernible amount of time later, I wake up again, and this time the world is only slightly less agonising to deal with.
I blink up at the persistent glow of light smothering medical’s ceiling, lying there for a while, working up the courage to try and move again. A daunting prospect, to be sure, given how badly it went before.
This time when Jack says my name, I can hear him clear as a bell in an abandoned tower, loud and echoing through the empty space between us.
Turning my head is easier when I have a goal worth risking it for. Jack is sitting in a chair beside my bed. He looks, to be blunt, like shit. There are dark circles under his eyes and a redness around them, indicating a lack of sleep, which is a real feat because Jack doesn’t need much to stay functioning in the first place. His hair is a blond mess and clearly unwashed. He’s wearing his FISA gym gear, looking a bit like he’s gone ten rounds with a group of professional fighters and then tried to run a marathon afterward.
Cautiously peering around, it seems as if I’ve been put in a private medical room. Jack and I are alone for the moment although I imagine the medical agents—probably led by Rex—will be invading my room soon enough.
Jack is watching me with an intense stare, the green of his irises so much more vivid with my newly mutated eyesight.
“Leo?” Jack’s voice is a sonic boom that vibrates across the small amount of space between us.
I realise belatedly that he isn’t shouting like I thought; my ears are just interpreting it that way because they’reenhancednow. The thought makes me feel vaguely disjointed, the intellectual knowledge of how I’ve changed grating up against the inherent belief that I shouldn’t be capable of these things. That no human should be.
Guilt slices through those thoughts, cutting them cleanly in two. I can’t think that way. After all the times when I told Jack he wasn’t the inhuman monster OI tried to turn him into, the idea that I’m now mentally backtracking on that, just because it’s me we’re talking about, is absurd.
I screw my eyes shut and try to block out the instinctual fear, the sense of abject wrongness gnawing at my insides like bugs with razor-sharp teeth.
Jack speaks again, quieter this time. “Hey, it’s a lot, I know. Just take a breath, okay?”
I try to do as he tells me, breathing in deeply through my nose and then expelling air from slightly parted lips. My mouth is as painfully dry as my throat, which makes breathing more difficult.
“Water?” I croak at Jack, keeping my eyes tightly shut so I won’t see whatever face he makes at the sound of my damaged voice.
Jack must have been holding the water already because the rim of a plastic cup is immediately pressed to my lips. I part them and tip my head at the right angle to avoid spilling water everywhere. Jack is careful, gentle in that way he pretends to be incapable of, letting me take sips from the cup. Ice-cold water spills down my abused throat, and the relief is instantaneous.
When I’m done, Jack takes the cup away, and there’s the rustle of him moving around, probably to put the cup on the floor since there are no tables nearby. I can feel him watching me.
I crack my eyes open, skating a gently probing gaze over him again. He looks strung out, and it makes me wonder how long I’ve been in medical.
