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When the glee of calculated mania melts away, seeping cold, brackish water through the fissures of Ogata’s psyche, he feels only the dark; the outline of the dark where it layers upon itself, the spectral abstractions of it, the violent texture of naught threaded through itself.
There’s a hand on his face--maybe. He can’t tell if he smiles, he can’t tell if the impulse to nip and thrash has manifested, only another shade of the dark falling over itself, dry and sticky with heat that pulses from his gouged eye--that, he can feel, if nothing else. He marvels at how excision feels so much like presence, some animal curled in his skull and popping back its lid, throbbing with weight, much like a tooth knocked loose, a mouth gaping with want.
And then, pain, cruel in its plainness, made all the more intense for its nakedness, no brush of cloth or whip of cool air against skin to abate the sensation. There would be some level of scholastic curiosity, for the complete dearth of tactile input, for the way the pain does not localize but instead soaks through his very consciousness, but he is too overcome with it to consider.
Ogata’s back arches, lifting off the hospital cot as a pained whine kicks its way through his lungs, slipping through the involuntary clench of his teeth. He can’t tell.
“Hey, bastard.”
Suddenly, there is something new in Ogata's world; different from the damp, ozone smell of Sugimoto's skin and the distant rumble of his voice, angry and gentle in turns. Different from the throb of pain. Something has parted, and there is water, blessedly cool, the drip of it through his incisors suddenly articulating the landscape of his mouth--he can find his teeth, can find his tongue and his jaw. Can find Sugimoto’s forefinger stretching the canvas of his cheek to compress flesh near his ear, the pad of his thumb pushing into the divot beneath his chin to keep his head turned to receive the water. Cannot find anything else.
He flickers his tongue, and he feels the water spill from the corner of his mouth, highlighting the edge of his throat as it barely misses the absent bob of his Adam’s apple. He imagines Sugimoto cursing, his wrist jerking in an effort to keep Ogata still and compliant, and he thinks, again, that his lips curve for it. Instead, that thumb strokes the arcing line of bone that forms his lower jaw, smoothing over his facial hair in a consoling gesture.
Bewildering, uprooting some of the vicious brambles growing in Ogata’s intestine, twining thorns into flesh, freshly pinkened for his blind vulnerability. He aches, viciously, and he is sure now that he is thrashing, that hand against his cheek tightening, each joint articulating its firmness against his face, another hand pressing right at the end of his clavicle, the narrow point where it joins his shoulder, and he can feel the ragged draw of breath entering his throat.
More water at his lips, and this time he smiles with a certainty, unexpected levity at finding his body once more--the attachment is unexpected, but not quite totally incongruous. When he laughs, Sugimoto’s fingers tap in reprimand against his mouth, and it makes him smile more. This time, his vision of Sugimoto’s furrowed brows and lips parted with a bemused irritation are true to life.
“You idiot… Why would… Asirpa, and everything with…”
“Fuck you for… to me, and it’s not…”
“I’ll kill you.”
Eventually, the receptacle drains, whatever it was, and Sugimoto leaves him to the cot, for the feeling to seep out and for the pain to sidle back into the spaces it leaves, his spine twitching for the sporadic pains the lingering poison drives through his nerves. His blood soaks the bandage black, trickling across the bridge of his nose and down the cut of his jaw. Ogata feels nothing. The storm withdraws.