Work Text:
Baizhu did not even need to open his eyes to realise just how bright the light would be. Even with them closed, daylight burned through his lids, filling the darkness behind them with a raw crimson glare. His pulse struck behind both eyes, each violent heartbeat making that angry red flare brighter, while something dug at the sides of his temples, as if some small and furious creature were trying to claw its way through his skull.
The inside of his mouth had dried to a tacky film. His lips clung to his teeth, his tongue to his palate, and every attempt to part his teeth tugged at the stiff hinges of his jaw. Precisely as he had arranged them, specially shaped pillows cradled the natural curve of his neck, yet beneath that faultless support, the muscles had spent the night hardening into painful cords, and the slightest movement pulled them taut from the base of his skull to the edges of his shoulders.
Across his upper back, soreness lay broad and deep, pressing both shoulder blades into the mattress until the bones felt as if they’d taken root there. A cautious inhalation opened his ribs only halfway before something beneath his sternum tightened, and air hovered uselessly at the top of his lungs, while lower down, an irritation turned into a cough. Baizhu released the breath through his nose, slowly enough to starve the reflex for a successful few seconds, until the cough tore free regardless. Then a second, while his chest remained contracted from the first, scraping through airways already left battered and raw.
In the silence afterwards, four hurried thumps pounded beneath his ribs. The fifth was absent, which his heart corrected with a single brutal contraction, hard enough to pulse through his throat and disturb the emptiness beneath it. His stomach, meanwhile, drew itself into a tighter knot. Nothing remained inside it to surrender, though nausea pushed upwards all the same, flooding the back of his dry mouth with sour heat before receding into a low, persistent churn beneath his ribs.
Hours of careful stillness had driven the weight of his body deep into his lower back, leaving the muscles there bruised with pressure and both hips screaming at him to leave them be, while nausea had dissolved into a full ache across the base of his spine.
Curling the fingers of his right hand drew stiffness through every knuckle, the joints swollen enough that skin pulled tight across them. But he still managed to get them closed. The left, however, was not so cooperative. From shoulder to fingertips, he felt nothing of the mattress below him. If his fingers had separated as instructed, sensation told him nothing. Still, without opening his eyes, Baizhu tried again, the weakest of contractions travelling through his forearm as he finally managed to fold his fingers partway into his palm. He released them, waited, and then began the more exacting sequence.
His forefinger met his thumb. The middle followed after a slight delay. The ring with a tremor. The smallest found nothing on its first attempt, but by the second, feeling began to return in blooms of concentrated heat. Hundreds of thousands of needles pushed outwards beneath his skin, sharpening whenever he moved even an inch.
He completed the sequence twice more, and only when every finger had complied without too much argument did he consider the hand usable.
His thighs bore the aftermath of exertion he had not had the opportunity to perform, muscles dense with an exhausted burn that sharpened beneath the smallest contraction. He tested them only barely, yet even that brief movement sent fatigue down both his knees, where pressure gathered beneath his kneecaps, and his joints throbbed with all the wear of a day that had not yet begun.
Tension had gathered through his calves, the right drawn into a hard ridge beneath the skin while small, involuntary tremors travelled intermittently through the left. Any attempt to flex his ankles threatened to pull the former into a full cramp and expose a thick soreness buried inside both joints. And just beyond them, his feet remained cold enough to ache across the toes yet burned along the soles, every pulse carrying a dull pressure into the nail beds.
Reassured that nothing appeared to have changed overnight, Baizhu finally opened his eyes.