POV: Regulus Au Nyx.
It hurt.
Everything hurt so much.
His whole existence was just pain.
It felt like there were needles thrust deep into his body, his joints felt like they hadn't been moved in eons, his right hand still throbbed with unbearable pain.
Worst of all, he had a nasty headache.
Consciousness arrived in pieces, the way it arrived after serious damage.
Sensation first, the full inventory of what hurt and where and how badly, his body running its own assessment before his mind was awake enough to contribute. The needles in his joints. The deep bone-ache of someone who had been stationary for too long. The specific throb of his right side that was wrong in a way he couldn't immediately articulate, a wrongness that his brain was circling around without landing on directly, the way you circled around something you weren't ready to look at yet.
The headache sat behind his eyes like something that had moved in and intended to stay.
