Kageyama's Darkness

The Waking Dream of the Night

Before I was even fully awake, the first thing I remembered was the feeling of the bedsheets. They were scratchy to the touch, like they'd been woven with some sort of barnyard hay. Terribly uncomfortable.

The slight annoyance filling me was enough for me to begin to stir. My lashes fluttered softly as I began to half open my eyes, though not enough to see anything clearly. I moved my arms and legs a little in the bed, caught off guard by how stiff my muscles and joints felt. Dear god, how long have I been asleep?

Gently, I began to open my eyelids fully. Or at least, tried to. I still couldn't see a single thing. I thought I'd done it, but my surroundings remained completely dark. Not as I'd been used to experiencing it, like some kind of dimly lit room, but utterly black. Almost as if I'd been swallowed into the night sky itself. I was left to take the logical leap that my eyelids weren't working.

What's up with my eyes? Why can't I open them? Am I having a stroke or something?

Fearful, I gave my eyes a few hard, frantic blinks, so exaggerated to the point where I could hear a deep growling noise in my ears. Almost immediately after, I felt like an idiot for jumping to conclusions. But more pressing was the fact that my sight was still black. It was unsettling.

Before I could even try to figure out what was up with my vision, I immediately felt a searing pain in the back of my head. It was pounding at my skull, the ache lining up perfectly with my heartbeat. I lifted my hand to the pain's source, only for it to be met with a papery surface. It felt like a bandage, and a thick one at that. Following it's outline with my finger revealed that it seemed to be wrapped around my entire head like a sloppily made sweat band. Ah, so that must be why I can't see. Whoever put this on me must've covered up my eyes by accident. My initial nervousness was quelled, at the very least.

That thought made a question pop into my head. Where was I, and who put me here? At the moment, neither of the answers were any closer to me than the moon, although, that didn't mean they were impossible to find. I shifted in the bed to sit up, back resting on the wall.

Sight restricted, I strained my ears to take in my surroundings. To my right, I could hear the light, pretty sound of a bird singing, and to my left, the quiet hum of some kind of electrical equipment, almost like a room heater. So a window and... something? And bandages on my head. I took a hard sniff with my nose, which was stung by the faint, yet harsh scent of antiseptic. Oh, am I in a hospital? Curious, I took my right hand to my left forearm and sure enough, felt a small plastic tube hooked into it. I was in a hospital room, and seeing as I was on an IV, it must've been a while since I got here.

"Alright, great, so I know where I am now," I began to whisper aloud to myself, feeling my brows absentmindedly furrow in concentration, "Wonderful, but I still have no clue why I'm here in the first place."

I'd gotten hurt, obviously, but how? I struggled to recall anything about how I'd ended up here, but my mind was completely blank. My headache made it a lot harder to focus than it should've been. Gritting my teeth, I tried my best to ignore it and thought back as hard as I could. Finally, I managed to recover a single messy, garbled memory. The feeling of running, hard. It was unmistakable. The straining of my muscles and lungs and the pounding of my heart in my chest were vivid, as if I was currently in the middle of a marathon. There was no doubt about it, that's definitely the last thing I'd been doing before somehow passing out.

"Ok, so, running," I said barely audibly, as if I were laying out puzzle pieces in front of me, "Running from what? Or towards what?"

I didn't know. No matter how long I made my mind linger on the memory, any slight semblance of context remained strikingly out of reach. Not even a single emotion or detail of my surroundings were present, just the feeling in my body of running. I couldn't help but get a little annoyed with myself. C'mon, head! Do your stupid job! Frustrated, I balled up my fist and gave my forehead a few quick, light taps, in way too much pain to be stupid enough to do anything harder.