Consciousness came back slowly, like something being filled from the bottom.
First there was pain — a deep, specific ache running from his right shoulder down through his forearm, the kind that had been sitting there long enough to become familiar. Then sound. The low ambient noise of a room, a fan turning somewhere above him, the distant texture of the city outside a window.
Then thought.
'Aagni.' The name surfaced first, the way the most important things always surface first. 'The fight. The street. The rain.'
He lay still and tried to piece it together. The last clear thing he remembered was the ground — the wet asphalt against his cheek, the rain falling on his face, everything in his body having reached its absolute limit. After that there were fragments. A shape beside him that hadn't been there before. A voice that resonated somewhere below normal hearing. A hand extended toward him in the dark.
And then nothing. A complete, total blackout that had no texture to it at all, no dreams, no half-awareness. Just absence.
'Is Aagni dead? Am I?'
He opened his eyes.
He had expected sky. The open grey of the overcast morning, the line of cleared cloud that he dimly remembered splitting open above him. Instead there was a ceiling — white, familiar, with a fan turning slowly in the centre of it. His fan. His ceiling.
He was in his apartment.
He turned his head carefully, cataloguing the pain as he moved. The arm was the worst of it — not broken, he could tell that much, but something had been done to it that normal rest hadn't fully resolved. Everything else reported in underneath that. Ribs. Left shoulder. The general condition of a body that had been through considerably more than it was designed for.
Arjun was sitting in the chair beside the bed.
He had a book open across his knee that he clearly hadn't been reading — his eyes had been on Rudra, and when Rudra turned toward him, a warm, quiet smile crossed his face. The smile of someone who has been waiting for something for a long time and is relieved, finally, to see it.
"So," Arjun said, "you finally decided to wake up."
"Aagni," Rudra said immediately. "Is he dead? Did the heroes finish it?"
Arjun's expression shifted into something mildly confused. "You really don't remember?"
"Remember what?"
"Rudra." Arjun leaned forward slightly. "You were the one who defeated him."
Rudra stared at him.
He pushed himself upright — carefully, his arm protesting the movement — and sat on the edge of the bed. He searched his memory again, more deliberately this time, trying to find something past the blackout. There was almost nothing. The shape beside him on the ground. The voice. A price being named. The sensation of taking hold of something that immediately rewrote everything it touched, moving through him like electricity or like a wave, too large and too fast to process consciously.
And then the blackout.
Whatever had happened in the street after that, his body had done it without him.
"I don't remember any of it," he said.
"I know," Arjun said. "I watched it. I still don't fully understand what I watched." He paused, choosing words with some care. "But the result was not subtle. You're all over the news. Every channel, every platform, every conversation in the city for the past —" He stopped.
Rudra looked at him. "They started calling you things," Arjun continued, redirecting. "The strongest hero. The greatest hero. Your face was everywhere before you even woke up, so your identity being revealed turned out to be the least of our problems. People were coming to the apartment. I've been managing that."
Rudra let this settle. His identity was out. That should have been a more alarming thought than it felt right now, but the alarm seemed to be waiting behind the larger question of what exactly he had done to a transformed Ashura with a steroid-amplified body using a technique he had apparently invented and then immediately forgotten.
'Maybe this was the cost that thing was talking about'
He looked at Arjun more carefully. Something in the phrasing caught Rudra's attention. He looked at Arjun's face — the complete absence of any visible injury, the kind of full recovery that didn't happen in days or even a couple of weeks.
"You were as badly injured as I was," he said. "I remember that clearly. But you look completely fine."
"I had time to recover," Arjun said.
"How much time?" he said.
Arjun's expression became carefully neutral. He looked down at his hand, then raised it and began counting fingers slowly. With each finger, something tightened in Rudra's chest that he didn't have a name for but recognised as the particular anxiety of a number being larger than expected.
"Three months," Arjun said. Then, with the precision of someone being accurate at personal cost: "Maybe four."
The silence that followed lasted about two seconds.
"FOUR MONTHS?!"
Rudra was on his feet without having made a conscious decision to stand, his arm sending a sharp objection that he completely ignored. "I've been asleep for FOUR MONTHS? That's how long I've been out?!"
"The arm is going to hurt less if you don't move it like that," Arjun said mildly.
"Arjun."
"Yes, four months. Closer to four than three, if we're being precise."
Rudra stood in the middle of his apartment bedroom and tried to process this. Four months. He had gone into a fight on a Tuesday morning in rush hour and had woken up, apparently, sometime in the middle of a different season. His father. School. Everything that constituted the ordinary structure of his life — four months of it had happened without him, and he had not been in any of it.
"If it weren't for him," Arjun said, his voice quieter now, "you might not have woken up at all. Or not correctly. The healers weren't certain what had been done to your system. There was something in it they didn't recognise."
Rudra turned. "Who are you talking about?"
Arjun glanced toward the door of the bedroom. His expression had shifted into something that Rudra recognised, after years of knowing him, as the particular look of a man who has been holding information and is relieved to finally be able to pass it along.
"It's about time he came in," Arjun said.
As if the words themselves were the signal — or perhaps they were — the bedroom door opened.
The man who stepped through it was lean and unhurried, with pale blond hair that caught the light from the window and a long coat that moved slightly with the motion of the door. He was not tall, but he occupied his height in a way that made it seem like more than it was. His eyes, when they found Rudra's, were calm and direct and carried the particular quality of someone who has already thought carefully about this conversation and knows exactly where he wants it to go.
He looked at Rudra for a moment without speaking, the way you look at something when you want your first impression of it to be accurate.
"You look better than I expected," he said. "Given what you did to yourself."
Rudra looked him. He had many questions for him but frist one to come out his mouth was,
"Who are you?"
Watcher looked at smile and says, "ahh Where's my manners" he stand in very formal way. One hand on chest second on his back bow a little, "my name is Edward Voss, and I'm the earth deva".