My eyes fluttered open for a moment before falling, quivering, back to where they had rested before. The light that entered in that small moment slapped me in the face, pain shooting from my temples to the bridge of my nose. A torturous headache nearly slammed me back to that blackness that I despised so much.
"uh..." I groaned, fighting to keep from being consumed by the swirling darkness. As the pain in my head burst forth with another forceful attack, and the darkness that filled my internal vision turned from ebony to maroon. Involuntarily, I gasped another choked moan.
Footsteps shifted past me, softly clicking on the hard floor. What would have sounded nearly inaudible to most else attacked my ears with a roaring loudness. I tried to curl into a fetal position and cover my ears, but my limbs were so heavy...so unbearably heavy.
More hot rods of pain shot down my spine and through both my body and mind. Its heat made my flesh sizzle and my atrophied muscles quake with endurance. A scream tore from haggard throat, straining the muscles as I tasted the amazingly strong metallic flavor of my own blood. The sound, resounding in my ears, made my headache seem to split my weighted head in two.
A cool hand was placed against my quaking, shivering brow. The touch it imparted upon me seemed soothing, yet unbearable.
"N...uh...no...go..." I stammered as best I could between gasped breaths. The noise I created came back to me, echoing inside my mind and ricocheting off my skull, causing immeasurable sensations of fiery torture to travel down my arms and scorch my fingertips in a blazing show of agony.
My only source of comfort was removed as the hand easily slipped off of my perspiring forehead. Panic gripped me as I realized I was alone once more. Louder and louder I stammered, doing the best I could to ignore the crippling shoots of torment that lanced trough my whole form.
"Shh, quiet. I'm going to give you a sedative. Relax." a calming female voice stated, its musical qualities slicing through my red haze like a knife through flesh.
That same cool hand lifted my right arm effortlessly, where I had tried to strained to even flex the muscles. A quick prick was felt, and I began to lose myself to the coming darkness again. Within moments, I had returned to the restless slumber from which I came.
~*~
The grey-haired doctor leaned against the metal doorframe, staring on the scene with helplessness. The white walls and tile floors contrasted the pale man's skin and snowy white hair perfectly. His bare-chested patient almost had an angelic look about him.
Sighing, the doctor moved to aid his dark-haired nurse, who was administering a tranquilizer to the spasming man. Once the convulsions and moaning had slowed, then ceased, the nurse removed her worried gaze from the handsome face of the ill patient to the haggard one of her employer.
She took a deep breath and released it in a slow exhale, tresses of her curly black hair mirroring the motions of her heaving bosom as she did so.
"He'll sleep for awhile longer." she said. "What do we do after he regains consciousness again?"
The doctor shook his head. "I don't know." he replied, letting his grey eyes fall to the slick tile underfoot. "I just don't know."
The nurse turned to glance at the man in the bed again. She remembered how he looked when he first washed ashore here, and his deterioration became plainly evident in his sagging skin and withered limbs. The white sheets had come untucked around his sweat-soaked form. The woman carefully pulled the wrinkles covers up to his chin as he slept.
"...Call the group. Tell them that he had regained consciousness momentarily." the doctor stated, his eyes rising from the floor to the sickly green heart monitor that beeped more sporadically than rhythmically.
"Yes, doctor." she replied, leaving her patient's side and exiting the small space.
Silence pervaded the room once more, and the physician glanced at the man's chest, rising and falling with each shallow breath he took.
Once again, the doctor sighed.
"Sleep well, Sephiroth."
With that, he turned, clicked off the lights, listened to the shrill beeping a moment longer, and shut the door.