Chapter Text
The ringing in his ears was the first noise he heard.
“He’s in shock right Anya?”
“What is-…Captain?”
“Can he even hear us?”
He faded in and out of consciousness, hoping for that blissful release that wasn’t going to arrive. Being carried gently in a cradle-like embrace, as if whoever was holding him wanted to shield him from the horrors of himself.
What horrors he was didn’t become apparent until he next awoke. His body was on fire. Every inch, every sinew, every piece of the rotting corpse he now and forever after would call his prison. Parts of him that weren’t covered in already soaked through bandages were sticking to the thin excuse for a mattress below him. A tsunami of pain crashed into his body as he tried to shift around, but the scream that ricocheted around his head escaped his throat with only the whisper and creak of a moan. A dying tree in an otherwise already dead forest.
The movements of agony weren’t all a waste, and they did reveal a couple of things to the captain. He was currently in the medical wing of the ship, the beeping noises that interweaved with the humming in his ears were real and not, as he had assumed, a self inflicted delusion. He looked down, towards the right of his cot and saw Anya, asleep at the desk. Relief at seeing her safe was quickly overshadowed by the want of what was sitting in front of her. Painkillers. He’d seen them before, taken them once or twice too, his body hadn’t yet really begun to fail on him, but he was a weak man.
The thought of his body snapped him back into confronting what he’d been trying to avoid. Looking at it. He laid there for what felt like hours, each breath a burning, pulsating, almost insurmountable task, knowing that he would have to contain his reaction no matter what he saw if he didn’t want to choke on his own vomit. These thoughts were accompanied only by the wheezing of his own breath, and the smell of months old fruit, burnt meat, and the ever present suggestion of mint, as if to torment a crew who hadn’t had a fresh vegetable or real sunlight in months.
Looking at his own body was a mistake. What’s seen is never unseen, and this was the opposite of an exception to that cruel law.
Red. That is what he saw first. It was everywhere, pushing out from behind bandages like mashed strawberries. What he first perceives to be some remnants of skin are revealed to instead be fully unsalvageable burnt ends. Like secondary motion, what was left would shift after he did, and while he had little medical experience beyond his lifeguard training as a teenager, he knew that wasn’t a good thing.
As he looked on and on, repressing a gag instinct all the while, he realized something. He hadn’t noticed at first since it was normally so natural and without thought, but he now couldn’t remember a time in this new conscience when he’d blinked. The horror dawned on him the way only such permanent consequences can. He was never going to blink again.