You can lose around 40% of your blood volume before you die. 40%, a very rough figure, the actual time it takes dependant on the rate of loss, and whether bleeding is external or if your lymphatic system can reach deep enough inside to drink up that turgid, misplaced mess from swollen body cavities. Account for all the factors that influence effectiveness and degree of erythropoiesis and the number becomes laughably meaningless, useful only as another thought for distraction.
Hojo started by counting the hours when his mind first settled into the pain - aided, of course, by the drug coursing through his remaining veins. The Valentines are - were - all doctors in one fashion or another, and their youngest son is certainly no exception.
You've such good technical ability, Hojo once breathed at him, delirious and ecstatic as the needle slid with precision into purple flesh, and Vincent laughed, a solid, rich sound.
Now, time itches at him even more persistently than the bonds around his body, the toothed and grinning wires that eat ever deeper into muscle and bone. Four hours, he established three times over before he simply gave in. Every four hours. What, presently, does four hours even feel like? Vincent's visits leave him the lowest order of lifeform, deprived of special senses in the edgeless darkness, a bundle of blissfully contented nervous tissue until the pain creeps insidiously back. He sleeps, sometimes, because there is nothing else to do, and is woken in almost every instance by the rhythmic sound of blood hitting concrete.
Hojo stopped counting when his body learned the routine ahead of his mind, nociceptors purring into consciousness as the drug leaves his body. Screams crawl with nails up a parched and desperate throat - not on command, but by sheer necessity, in response to the smell of the powerful analgesic tainting the puddles of bodily fluids below him. You can lose 40% of your blood before you die, depending on - fuck, too many things - but the span of time is impossible to keep track of. Vincent is the only consistency, every four hours. Vincent opens the door, backlit and brilliant, every 240 minutes. Vincent comes, 14400 seconds later, to raise his golden-gloved hand to Hojo's cheek.
"Please," Hojo begs, pleads, whines as cold metal strokes a phantom path to his jaw and he doesn't feel it through the searing agony everywhere else. "Please, Leviathan, please Vincent goddamnit please-"
And Vincent smiles as he pushes the drug in to an ever-diminishing circulatory system with technical precision. Hojo sighs when his vision turns white, fingertips twitching with release, and still doesn't feel a thing as Vincent's clawed finger digs into his cheekbone and draws another long red line to his neck.
"Are you having fun, Vincent?" he grins like a skull. Fresh blood follows the tracks of wrinkles around his mouth, and will clot there, eventually. What an ugly corpse he'll make when the inevitable finally comes, a tangle of red lines wrapped around patchy skin.
Vincent laughs, a solid, rich sound, as his tongue drags up the newly created wound.
"You have no idea how much..."