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Gabriel Reyes didn't even know he died, at least not at first. It had felt like he'd been knocked out, brain rattling in his skull as he hit the ground. Of course he'd felt the pain as he went down, heat searing his nerves even as they relayed the impact of landing, but after that there was only darkness. Just like dreamless sleep, it felt like no time had passed at all-it was just a sudden shift from the traumatic end back into an equally traumatic waking. It had come slowly, light filtering in through his eyelids and sounds slowly unmuffling as his body reeled his consciousness back in. Iodine and rubbing alcohol scents trickled into his nose, raw and unwelcome along with the cold air against his arms.
His eyes cracked open to pure white light and a stern angel looking down on him with a clipboard in hand, and he wondered if he'd somehow made it to heaven for a brief moment. Dreamy and detached, he noted that he couldn't find his voice and his body was unresponsive. It felt like he was floating inside a half-numb slab of meat, mind swimming in a thick soup of sedatives pumped in through his arm. The angel was asking him questions, taking notes, and writing down things after looking at machinery, leaving Gabriel to slowly blink and stare without a word. As more and more of his consciousness was pulled back in, the more obvious a strange, annoying whine from the machine beside him became. With enough effort, he managed to roll his head over to face the source of the annoyance. It was a big screen displaying a green line. What was the point of that, he wondered, it wasn't changing at all. The angel jumped when he turned his head, yelling gibberish at someone unseen. Confusion and fear crossed its face, motion blurred in Gabriel's eyes but emotions clear.
The alarm seeped into Gabriel, unnerving him. Something was wrong here. All his extremeties tingled and prickled with needles, twitching as he forced himself back down into them. His whole body felt like it had been pressed down, lost feeling like a foot that had fallen asleep. Thick, hollow needles ached in his veins, rubbing against the tender cardiac walls as he worked his muscles awake. Saline and sedatives began to leak from the needleholes, needles slipping as he eased them away with drunken-clumsy fingers, ignoring the protests of the angel-like thing. The needles poured solution all over the sheets, mechanical pumps still pushing to make up for a lack of heartbeat even removed from his arms.
"Turn't'ff," He grunted, rolling over toward the machine and off the bed. The cold floor didn't hurt, but the blankets and tubed tangled around his legs sure were a pain. Tens of voices were conversing overhead, gibberish coming closer as slender hands tried to pull him back up and help untangle his half-numb body. Even through his haze he could now tell that this was something akin to a hospital. The explosion came back to him in fire and blood reds, no screams thanks to the sheer volume and suddenness of the blow, just deafening fury followed by silence and darkness. A clumsy hand slapped onto his face and tried to wipe away the numbness. "S'Jack?"
The white-clad woman tilted her head, unsure what he meant. Those tiny hands were busily scrawling something in seconds, though. The second thing to pop into his head was how long people who've been in accidents can be out before they wake back up. What if he'd been under for years?
"How...long?" Gabriel asked, trying hard to focus on the delicate, blonde-framed face. Whenever his vision blurred, his mind supplied a different face in place of hers. She ignored his question again and tried to press him back flat onto the bed. Everything was dulled by the drugs in his system, but a vague feeling of anger and regret slunk into his stomach. He resisted the push and pressed back. "How...How long?"
She said something that sounded like english but didn't quite process right. He stared at her blankly for a moment, then gave up. He'd figure that out later when he found someone more helpful. Everything felt distant and unimportant for the moment aside from getting himself back into working order. Against the insistant presses of small hands trying to urge him back down on the bed, he sat up and put his legs over the same edge of the bed he fell off of. Flexing his hands made the bursts of needles stronger, but that would fade after a while. The main issue was that his legs didn't seem to want to obey him, buckling when he tried to lift himself up with them. Swatting away the now-recognizeable doctor's hands, he continued to try to stand until he found himself back on the floor with blood leaking out of his nose in thick, dark speckles.
Yelling echoed overhead as extra pairs of hands appeared to haul him up and back onto the bed, someone scolding him while another person pressed a pad hard under his nose. It didn't really hurt, it just felt a little warm. The pad came away with only a few smears of already-tacky hardening blood. Another pad, dampened with antiseptic, rubbed at the wound without stinging and disappeared again. The scene was just beginning to become annoying enough that he was about to get up and walk out the door, but someone slapped a leather cuff over his wrist and tightened it to the point of almost losing feeling in his hand again.
"T'fuck?" Gabriel grumbled, glaring at the blurry face at the edge of the bed. They tried to shove him back down, so he took a halfhearted swing at them, huffing when they stumbled away with a yelp. Stupid fucks, trying to push him around. Another pulled out a needle, but the doctor stopped them, pointing toward the still-whining green-line-machine. They put the needle back away and Gabriel wheezed out a quiet laugh, "Th's'right." The whining finally stopped when one of the blurry figures unplugged the whole tangle of machinery, though his sheets were already thoroughly soaked in drug-and-saline solution.
An even louder and more annoying machine whine pierces the air and sends everyone scattering like minnows while a small red light flashes above the distant doorframe. The doctor yells at him to stay put no matter what before dashing out after everyone else. That's an alarm. That means something bad. An itching, antsy feeling congeals in Gabriel's gut, making him shift in his bed and tug at the restraint. Sobriety slips in with the clarity forced on him by the alarm, chasing off the calming sedatives faster than they can be absorbed. Now that he can really understand what he's looking at, the room he's in looks less like a hospital room and more like an experimentation chamber disguised as one. The leather cuff suddenly feels tight and ominous on his yielding wrist. Yielding. It shouldn't have any give to it.
Reyes looks at his arm again, really looks, and it's not the ugly burn scars warping the skin that make his eyes bulge out of their sockets-it's the way the skin sags and the soft muscle is riddled with half-closed holes. His legs look no better beneath his hospital gown, softened and spreading with loss of cohesion-just as plagued with half-healed holes as the rest of him. He wants to vomit, wants to writhe, gags breathlessly-realizes he has only been breathing in order to speak-and gasps for air he doesn't need. The air feels strange inside and his lungs ache from the sudden stretch, protesting until he's coughing and hacking, doubled over with black phlegm speckling the wet white sheets. Wheezing-Forcing himself to take in air against the protest of his lungs-he works himself into a frenzy as each deep breath forces up more black fluid and an occasional cloud of inky fog.
"Th'fuck? Wha-" He hacked and thumped himself on the chest, skin crawling with fear and disgust, "What the FUCK!" Chest crackling in complaint, discomfort radiated from his sternum after the hit. He hurriedly shoved the gown up, bunching it in one fist while muttering "No, no, no no no fuck no, naw, this is-No," as the thick line of an autopsy stitch line came into view. The classic Y was emblazoned on his torso, double-thick from a more recent reopening. It looked like it was in the process of healing. It felt like he was the protagonist of a horror movie all of the sudden, coming to such a horrible realization with the loud blaring of an alarm in the background and mad scientists lurking in the halls.
The more he panicked, the more black air seemed to come pouring from his mouth, almost blinding him at its peak. The holes began to smoke in turn, shrinking down as Gabriel watched through the black curtain. His flesh itself seemed to shift under his skin, plumping and darkening in alternating patches as it swelled to its former glory. Cramps froze both his whole legs as muscle pulled back together and reordered itself-agony just forcing a black smoke filled wheeze out of him. Even the autopsy lines oozed inky blackness and sealed themselves. Now that his wrist had lost all yield and thickened, the cuff was digging hard into his flesh, thankfully distracting him from the dark wetness on his cheeks and the cramping in his feet and shoulders. His free hand fumbled with the latch like a drunk, pathetically trying to pry it off with all the finesse of a toddler before a violent cramp helped him tear it free from his wrist entirely. The harsh line the cuff left behind disappeared with a brief purple-blackening, leaving Gabriel free to clutch at his calves as knots formed and unformed in the muscle in rapid succession.
"Jesus fuck," Gabriel sobbed, no longer holding back tears as his back muscles shifted under his skin of their own accord. It felt like someone was tugging on his muscles with a fishhook, clawing at his pectorals and digging thousands of teeth into his neck. As burning flared up in his skin, his abdominals spasmed and cramped, forcing a harsh clench and a wave of inky bile out past his teeth. Gagging and sputtering, wave after wave of jet-black sunk into the already-soaked sheets while fire raged across his back and down his arms. Burning alive once again without fire, he managed a strangled yell between wet coughs of soupy blackness and full-body shakes. He was dying again, but in reverse. Everything was becoming undone in the most agonizing way possible. He couldn't manage any thoughts more coherent than "What the fuck?" through the bone-shaking tremors and nerve-frying heat.
"Help," he managed to squeak before the muscles between his ribs coiled and tangled and choked him off. Diaphragm spasming under the sudden crushing pressure, his lungs throbbed and fluttered against his creaking ribs until just as fast as they came, the cramps died away. Left with nothing but the full-body aching and a silent, fearful wondering of "What did they do to me?", Gabriel rolled himself to the edge of the bed and propped himself up. He had to get out of here before they did anything else to him. Whatever they'd done was so wrong, so fucking wrong, hellishly cruel. He cussed to himself as he tried to stand and collapsed into a pile on the floor. Everything hurt and his mind was going a mile a minute, but his heart still wasn't budging.
At least my arm don't look like something outta Evil Dead any more, he remarked grimly to himself as he levered himself off the cool tile. Whether it was the cramps or the remaining traces of sedatives dumbing him down, it took three tries just to get back up on his feet. There was still no one in sight as he stumbled over his own feet into the hallway. Whatever set off that alarm must've been one hell of a problem. The emptiness of the halls was convenient for escaping, but he couldn't leave in just the hospital gown without raising serious suspicions. In this state he seriously doubted he could disarm a guard, but all the nurses seemed to have fucked right off...
Well, staying could mean an eternity of "scientific testing", aka torture, so it was better to try and fail than give up without a fight. A folding chair from further down the hall seemed like an appropriate enough improvised weapon, so he dumped the jacket and book off it and tucked it under his arm. He strode down the hall with purpose, bare feet slapping the tile softly. There had to be someone in this godforsaken place he could get a change of clothes from...
As luck would have it, he almost walked straight into a security station as he rounded a corner. Rocking back on the heel of his foot, he snapped out of view with a widening of his eyes. Shit, that was close. Still, that was what he'd been looking for, so it was a good thing...only, there were two guards there. He looked down at the folding chair tucked under his arm and shrugged. Better to go down fighting, he mused.
"YAAAAA!" He howled as he leapt around the corner and slammed the metal chair down on the first guard's head, their face disappearing as they crumpled. The leap and the scream had caught them both off guard and intimidated the second enough to give Gabriel time to get a swing in before they could draw their gun. Their chin crackled and tipped up with a whump, chair creaking and swinging wild into the wall. Blood spurted and dribbled out of their mouth, a tiny hunk of flesh hanging from their lip and falling to the floor. Pain spread from Gabriel's hip. The fucker had managed to shoot even after a homerun swing, gun barely unholstered. Okay, maybe it was an accident. Impact-triggered.
Hissing, he swung the now-wobbly chair again and heard the satisfying crunch of a skull breaking under the frame. The metal groaned and one leg snapped away in his hand when he tried to lift it for another swing, leaving him with a sharp pike. Much better. The first guard was still alive, fiddling with his radio in spite of his massive concussion. Gabriel squatted down, ignoring the loud pop of his knees, and drove the spike into his neck. Blood drizzled out of the open end of the chair leg, soaking into their uniform. Gabriel tutted and shook his head. "Guess I'll take the other one, then."
--
His escape after that had been nothing but a matter of acting; he put on a stern and tired persona(not to say he wasn't really, really tired) and talked his way out of the little security center out back. The front gate was heavily guarded and the signout process looked a little too complicated to pull off in this state, but it was easy enough to intimidate a scrawny little thing into agreeing that you were to switch shifts and patrol the back lot. All that he had to do after that was walk off into the darkness, and he was home free. Dully, he noted that his bullet wound had already closed up.