What he gets first is a breath of warm, humid air that makes him nearly gag, like an arm reaching down his throat that throttles his lungs. It’s a stark and rapid difference in his consciousness, and the fear that comes with it is so alien and strange that he can’t help the cry that comes from trying to force something out past the blockade. It shouldn’t hurt to breathe, it shouldn’t be a round and pushing force on him to breathe where he’d remembered nothing but angles and edges that come with the cold. he hates the cold, he hates it and…
Why does he hate it? There us a pain that keeps him grounded here and keeps him from rolling off of the beds that line the walls here, but the thought still rattles inside of his head like a coin at the bottom of a pot.
And he’s very, very aware that there’s nothing happening up there. The question remains.
He looks up, then down — undressed and sweating and shivering and looking at the darkened tips of his fingers. The numbness doesn’t register, by simple fact his entire body feels some kind of numb and his head is swimming and his stomach is taut and pulling like a bowstring. It’s all numb right now, it’s all…
The paleness of it catches his eye first, the white hairs that surround the edge of his vision like a shroud of death, and he knows that much at least, he knows that the fear he feels crawling up his spine has something to do with that, it has to. There’s no logical feeling for this then, there’s just… that. The fading ends of hair he can’t begin to think belongs to him. He pulls, he tugs on it and notes that yes, its attached to his head, yes, it looks like someone’s dipped his hair into paint with how suddenly the color halts. But it’s not his.
He has, after a brisk minute of bleary, half there consciousness, finally worked out a system. He finds a spot, he leans or holds his elbow against it, and with this other hand he saws and cuts with the nearest sharp object he could possibly find, something lost in among his affects kept close by for decency’s sake — inch by inch, the history of it falls off into a pile on the floor. The threat of it, to where only a spot remains. A damnable, white spot on his scalp, his brow that produced more and more of these hairs and he raises the knife —
“– Oh gods DAMMIT –!”
There is a clatter of metal and hand that grabs his wrist, and pulls him down but he does not resist, staring in wide-eyed shock at the man who had just dared to touch him — it’s that weedy little engineer that some people like to fawn over. There’s a brief moment of disgust that flashes across his face as he grumbles and drops the knife.
Enough sense in his head then.
“Ambrosine?! Ambrosine he’s awake — made a bloody mess of the place too — I’d get Fiel, if I were you. Oh she’ll have your head, Captain…”
He starts vaguely wondering, questioning.
How did he get here?
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