Immortals | ✓

02 | art

━━ αθάνατοι ━━

HEARING her voice in the middle of this nightmare wasn't something I had anticipated. But there she was, waking up and groggily asking someone what had happened to her while I lay there; my senses coming back to me slowly. In the first few moments of my consciousness, I wondered the same thoughts as hers. 

What the actual fuck had just happened? 

My ears weren't ringing as if they were stuck between a gong anymore. My body was deprived of all the haunting types of pain it had just seemed to have gone through. In fact, if it made any sense whatsoever, it felt ten times better. Did it seem...rejuvenated? Because of that pain?

My eyes had opened to a familiar setting a few minutes ago. I had been here, this was the infirmary at the far end of the campus. I had been here barely a month ago to get my last vaccine booster shot. Now, had been laid out on one of the ten beds now, there was no one in the room except Aethera, who was sitting upright in her bed which was beside mine, while one of the nurses took her blood pressure. 

"Mrs Rose, can I get some water after this, please?" She asked and it was then that I realized my hearing, maybe, hadn't recovered from all that ringing. 

She must have muttered those words but I could hear them clearly. She was almost two meters away from me, murmuring those words to the nurse standing right beside her, and yet it felt like she had spoken them right beside my ears. Seconds later, the nurse moved the tray and I could feel the tray hitting the ebony table, an edge scratching the wood. And suddenly, when I took a breath in, I heard everything; from the water dripping behind the building to the birds fluttering ten metres over our heads. 

No, there is something wrong with me, I thought, repeatedly for the next few minutes. There had to be something wrong, I shouldn't be feeling like this, not after that kind of pain. The agony of it was simply too much for me to even expect myself to wake up, yet here I was, laying in this bed with all my senses intact, feeling better than ever before.

With that thought in my mind, I checked everything. I tried moving my hands, and my legs, I even tried to touch my ears to find out if they had burst open because sure enough, they should have. My limbs shouldn't have been alright, they should be buzzing with pain or burnt from the fire that I had felt enveloping them. But they weren't and that fact alone scared me. In those few minutes, whatever I experienced seemed new...fresh. Every muscle I moved, from the tip of my lips to the tip of my fingers felt different. It felt foreign. 

Energy passed through me as if this was the first time I had felt anything physically. Every time I tried to move a limb or the smallest muscle, my breath hitched with the discovery of this newness. 

"Oh, Art is awake too!" The nurse chimed out of the blue and I winced in response. Too loud. 

"Aethera, Art, everything seems normal to me, at least. I am just going to go for a minute and inform Dr Mathers and he'll be with both of you shortly." Mrs Rose left the room as soon as she spoke those words, in a stride that seemed to be a little too hasty on her part. 

Aethera shifted and finally got up, her feet dangling beside the bed, her back against mine, and tried to get up. As soon as she got up, she sat again and let out a breath, that I could clearly hear was shaking. There was a single drip attached to her arm and somehow I knew that this drip made her uncomfortable. She was simply twitching too much, her back was stiff for a second and then it would twitch. 

I heard a muffled cry a second later and as if it was a reflex, I was up in a minute, removing my drip and walking towards her. It wasn't until I stood behind her, barely a step away that my last memory of her came back to me with a sudden flash.