Chapter 455: Chapter 455: Awake [Win-Win]

Arion had drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness so many times that he could no longer tell where dreams ended and waking began.

He knew pain. He knew cold. He knew the frightening sensation of his own body slipping out of his grasp no matter how hard he tried to hold on to it.

Nothing stayed simple for long.

Sometimes he was floating.

Sometimes he was falling.

He thought he heard voices through the thick water – physicians, nurses, someone speaking too quietly, and someone else issuing orders in the tone adults use when they are trying not to sound afraid. Every sound came to him warped. Too far away one moment, painfully close the next.

His body no longer felt like a thing that belonged to him.

That was the worst part.

Not the pain, though there was plenty of that – deep in his bones, under his skin, in his head, and in the strange aching pressure behind his teeth and spine and chest. Not the weakness either, though weakness humiliated him in ways he had no words for.

It was the betrayal.

His hands did not always move when he wanted them to. His breathing sometimes caught on nothing. Heat surged through him without warning, then vanished so quickly it left him shaking. His skin felt too tight. His ears rang. His bones hurt in places he had never known bones could hurt.

And underneath all of it, there was something else.

Something wrong.

Something alive.

He could feel it pressing through him in waves – an ugly, restless force moving under his skin as though another shape were trying to learn him from the inside out. He did not understand what it was. No one had explained it in a way that made sense to eight-year-old bones and eight-year-old fear. He only knew that when it came, the room became too sharp, too bright, and too loud, and his own body stopped feeling like home.

He hated it.

He hated that the adults looked at screens before they looked at him.

He hated that everyone kept saying words like ’stable’ and ’responsive’ as if those were good enough.

He hated that his body was doing something terrible and important and no one had asked him first.

When he woke properly this time, it was not clean.

His eyes opened to a white ceiling, white light, the hiss of something mechanical, and a stabbing awareness of every part of himself at once. His throat felt dry enough to crack. His arm hurt. His chest hurt. His head hurt. Even the blanket over him felt too heavy.

He breathed in sharply and regretted that too.

A monitor changed rhythm somewhere near his head.

Arion blinked hard and turned his face slightly.

The room came together in broken pieces. Tubing. Glass. A chair. A line taped to the back of his hand. A tray on wheels. White walls. Too much white.

He hated white now.

A nurse moved into view and said something gentle that he immediately distrusted.

He didn’t answer.

His tongue felt too thick in his mouth, his thoughts too slow and too fast at the same time.

Then it came again.

That thing.

A violent twist under his skin, a deep wrongness that rolled through his body so suddenly that his back tensed and his fingers clawed at the sheet before he could stop them. Heat crashed through him. It made his teeth ache and his lungs pull too hard at the air.

Arion made a sound before he could stop it.

The nurse was there at once. Another voice joined hers. Adult calm, which meant that something bad was going on and they were trying not to let him see it.

He wanted to tell them to stop talking like that.

He wanted to tell them something was inside him.

He wanted his father.

He wanted his mother and sisters.

Instead, he tried to sit up.

Pain ripped through his side and shoulder so fast his vision blurred. Hands came toward him, handling gently, and that made everything worse.

“No,” he said, though it came out broken and hoarse.

“Your Highness, don’t—”

“No.”

The wave under his skin surged again.

He could feel it. He could actually feel it. Something changing. Something was pressing at him from the inside, like his bones had become too small, like his body had forgotten how to be itself and was trying on something new by force.

Fear hit him then, clean and ugly.

His breathing went uneven. He grabbed at the monitor lead on his chest with his free hand, suddenly certain that if he could just get enough things off him, he might be able to breathe properly again.

The nurse caught his wrist before he managed more than a desperate tug.

“Arion—”

“No!” This time it tore out of him louder, thin with pain and fury. “Get it off—”

His own voice startled him.

So did the weakness behind it.

He hated that too.

The physician appeared at his bedside a second later, speaking in that measured tone adults used when they thought children were close to breaking.

“Listen to me. You’re safe.”

He looked at her with wet, furious eyes. “No.”

Because he wasn’t.

Safe things did not make your body betray you while everyone else watched monitors and said words you did not understand.

The pressure surged again, harder this time, and a shudder ran through him so violently his teeth clicked together. It felt like falling and burning and drowning all at once.

“Make it stop,” he whispered.

That was the moment the room changed.

Someone moved quickly toward the door. Someone else said something about response threshold and another number Arion did not care about. The monitor near his bed changed rhythm again, faster now, closer to panic.

He wanted to scream at them that he could feel it.

That it wasn’t just pain.

That something was wrong inside him.

That his body did not feel like his anymore.

Instead, he curled in on himself as much as the lines and weakness allowed and clutched the sheet with shaking fingers.

Then he saw movement beyond the glass.

A familiar shape.

Dark clothing. Still posture. Someone standing exactly the way powerful people stood when they were trying not to alarm everyone else in the room.

Uncle Dax.

Arion stared, his eyes blurring with tears, and for the first time in a long time, he began to cry.

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