Drabble 1

Upon waking up, he didn't have enough true consciousness to register that he was awake. His eyes weren't open, his surroundings didn't change, the only difference was that the blackness wasn't shut in the way it had been before. There wasn't a way out, he was just almost done with something he hadn't know about starting, or maybe it was better to say that he was nearing a surface. He didn't know what was actually going on, so he needed a metaphor, some tangible thing that he could grasp, because it had been longer than he could remember since anything resembling coherency had lived inside him. All blurs of color and shape and nightmare, though none of these had seemed to fit together. There had been no sound and no feeling, his body had forbidden these, because he hadn't had the strength to be awake, and if something had woken him from his rest prematurely there was no guarantee he could have woken up following that.

His vision was smeared by a veil of cotton when he opened his eyes at last, so he lacked any true sense of where he was, and closed his eyes again. The strange way that everything was mixing made him dizzy. He relinquished a careful breath, allowing the sounds of the day to sink into him, though it was only birdsong for the moment. Now, for the other missing sense; he probed for it out of curiosity, and soon found out why this might have woken him up. It felt like the skin on his arm was being burned into, and he was quite aware of each sensation associated with this. Not just a heated knife, but one composed of fire, licking away at his muscle after it cut in, along the rough gashes that spread over his arm. He might have screamed, but he didn't know who was near enough to hear it, so he turned over and jammed his mouth and nose into the pillow resolutely. He wasn't waiting for it to stop, because he knew there was no chance of that happening soon. He lacked the means to deprive this particular fire of whatever it used to burn, and a muffled, choked off laugh ended up in the pillow as he thought bitterly that the bandage around his arm would have done away with any oxygen, as tight as it was. No, he was only waiting until he gain the composure to handle this.