Chapter Text
They say the human body has five sensations.
***
The first time Simon wakes up, he coughs.
Before he even knows he’s awake, or alive, or anything but dead in a hundred tiny pieces at the bottom of a bloody trench, he’s coughing so hard it’s painful, and for so long he can’t even breathe in.
He coughs so hard, and for so long, it knocks him right back out.
***
The second time Simon wakes up, he coughs again, but less so. It doesn’t hurt quite so much, and it’s not so violent, and after a minute or so, he pulls in his first clear, clean, fresh breath. He pants, interspersed by coughs, desperately sucking in air in a way only instincts can direct.
That is the first sensation returned to Simon: feeling. He feels his chest and throat ache, and the relief of fresh oxygen is almost euphoric. Before he is aware of anything else, Simon feels.
The second sensation, is sound. A voice echoes in his ear, though it is muddy, and unclear. Before he can grasp at it, focus on it, try and figure out what it is, it’s gone, replaced by not quite silence, but close to it. He thinks he hears a distant beeping, but beyond that, it’s quiet again.
He returns to his first sensation. What else does he feel? He’s… laid out on his back. His back is pressed against something oddly soft. Not soft in the way that it would be soft against one’s fingers if they brushed a hand across it, but soft in the way that it’s stuffed with something cushiony, but its upholstered roughly. A COI bed, it must be. COI beds are only comfortable if none of your skin is touching it, and you pretend you can’t feel the metal springs beneath it.
Strange. His cell bed, if one could even call it that, doesn’t so much as have the luxury of being upholstered at all. Has he ended up in the medbay again? Cut himself on a machine again, or perhaps been involved in another fight? Now that he thinks about it, he is hurting quite a bit. He’s sore all over, his left side more so than the other, and since he doesn’t remember how he got here, and on top of the headache, he wonders if a concussion isn’t partially responsible.
Fight, then. Shame. He’s stuck in that cell for life, he knows, but most of the other guys aren’t, anymore. Anyone picking a fight with him is losing more than they’re gaining, just adding more days to their realization before they can-
***
Blood. Heat. Condensation. Darkness. The sting of bandages on his arms, concealing a damaging more than what they were meant to be healing. The tackiness of a control panel under his fingers, coated in his sweat. The flash of a camera (I didn’t know I didn’t know it was supposed to be a camera that’s not an x-ray that’s a machine that’s a weapon it wasn’t supposed to happen it wasn’t supposed to happen it WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN-)
***
Simon shoots upright. Or, he tries to. He gets maybe an inch or so up before a fabric strap across his chest he’d failed to notice slams him right back down. As he wriggles, he feels soft restraints across his body, holding him down on this bed.
Alright, enough of this 2 sensation bullshit. He’s skipping to the most important one; he begins craning his eyes open. It stings, and they’re heavy, but he needs it, he needs to see, he needs to know.
The first thing he sees, is a white(ish) ceiling. Illuminating. He cranes his neck to look around the best he can while he’s still pinned down. The room is without note, and empty of anybody else. Four short walls, nothing on them, the same yellowed white paneling that all of Oxide Station is equipped with anymore. Nothing on the walls, no other beds. This is not the usual medbay. Yet as he continues to crane his head, he sees a screen connected to wires connected to his body, reporting his heart rhythm, and a saline bag hung, with its tube that runs to an IV in his arm.
Speaking of his arms. It’s his right arm. The IV is barely visible, how it seemingly disappears into a massive wrapping of bandages up and down from his elbow.
The left arm is gone. He blinks at the space where it should be. His right wrist is restrained in a leather and fabric cuff attached to his bedrail. The left cuff remains empty, open, flat against the rough hewn sheets. There isn’t even really a restraint on what’s left of his left arm, just a bit below the shoulder. Probably not even much of a risk, three inches of stump that can’t reach or harm anything.
Simon is interrupted in his reverie by the door to his room opening. Two people walk in, covered head to toe in… something? Simon is overall familiar with what usual hospital PPE is, but whatever these folk are wearing seems about 5 times thicker and bulkier than the usual, and he can’t even really see their faces for the full size masks they’re wearing. He wants to be glad to see human beings again, actual people instead of just voices in or out of his head, but its hard to reconcile these people who more closely resemble the demons in his nightmares than actual humans.
The first one to walk into his room, the one now closer to his bed, speaks first.
“Are you actually awake this time, or are you still stuck somewhere else?”
He blinks at this person, before opening his mouth.
“I…” He’s interrupted by another coughing fit. Just that one syllable felt like a grater against his throat. He tries again.
“I’m awake,” he gets out.
The first person turns to the second, and says something to them quiet enough that Simon can’t hear, before turning back.
“Glad you’re finally with the land of the living. How do you feel?”
He thinks about the question for a second. How does he feel? He’s sore, he’s uneven, he’s confused, he’s scared, he has no idea what’s going on or how he’s alive, if they recovered the data he fought so hard to preserve, if after all this pain he’s even going to be allowed his freedom after so many unkept promises-
He settles on; “Like shit.”
The person snorts. “Yeah, we figured as much. How much pain are you in? We can hook you up with more painkillers if it’s getting too bad.”
Simon regards them suspiciously. Why waste valuable painkillers on him? Even if he’s earned his freedom, any drugs they have are in short supply. Why bother with him?
The person seems to notice his trepidation. “Don’t worry, they gave us permission. You’re an important person now, you know.”
They don’t even allow Simon a moment to process whatever the hell that means before the second person pipes up.
“You’re practically a hero, now.”
That pulls him up short. A hero? In one period of wakelessness, he’s gone from nameless convict to important hero, worthy of painkiller drugs. For what? For piloting the latest doomed sub and somehow managing to not die? For calling a captain on her bluff and begging for his life even despite the part of him that knew there was never a chance of him making it out alive?
The mind reading doesn’t seem to end there. The first person speaks up again.
“I know it doesn’t make sense yet. You can ask us any questions you have while we’re here. We won’t have all the answers, but you deserve to know what’s going on anymore.”
They start to mess with the screen reading his heartrate, and he asks his first question.
“What happened?”
The doctor (or the person who Simon figures is a doctor) pauses in their actions. They turn to the other person who followed them in, and ask them to continue in what they had been doing. They turn back to Simon and ask, “What’s the last thing you remember?”