It Never Had To Get So Dark - Father Paul Hill x Reader

Ten

It's a confusing thing.

Waking up from certain death and instantly knowing that something is different without being able to tell what, only feeling it somewhere in the back of your mind as a voice incessantly tells you that something is off.

The room being completely unfamiliar doesn't help the situation, a groggy mind can barely make sense of the fact you are awake without the added factor of a place you can't recognise.

At least that was my case.

I had all but jolted awake, like my system had hard rebooted itself and gave it one final kick to get my body back in motion.

It wasn't the first time I had experienced coming around after having my body completely shut down but this time felt more violent, unlike the grogginess I rose to while lying in a hospital bed.

There were no bright lights and continuous beeping, just a dull room and a silence that was only broken by my hacking as my sudden reflexive intake of air choked me.

I felt stiff as I forced myself to sit up, a wave of nausea instantly washing over me and the little amount of light coming through a gap in the curtain stung my eyes and made my head pulse.

Pinching my eyes shut, I lowered myself back down and waited for the feeling to ebb away before opening them again to take a look around, perhaps to even gather my thoughts.

Not that there was much to take in.

The room was small and drab in colour, just about big enough for two people with a nice sized bed, a side table on either side of the headboard and a chest of drawers, there were two closed doors and frames on the walls but not much to look at by the way of personal effects. A humble room that I could barely focus on without my head throbbing painfully.

Everything was something too vivid and yet also too dull, it was like I was stuck in a visual high and trying to focus on anything too closely only made my head hurt more, even the barely filled room was too much to take in.

I tried to take things slower as I raised my hand to my neck, flashes of the attack coming back to me and churning my stomach yet again but not as badly as the fact that I found nothing there.

There were no injuries to my throat, no tears or chunks missing, not even indents the size of pin pricks, there was simply nothing to imply that I had been attacked by anything, not an animal nor a weird vampire thing.

How was that possible?

I was not falling for the 'it was all in my imagination' trick, but my brain couldn't make sense of what had occurred otherwise.

Though that wasn't saying much given that I couldn't even make out what was in the frames on the wall, so how did I expect to try and string together logical and cohesive thoughts?

A bit of familiarity finally entered the room by way of scratching and whining coming from the other side of one of the doors, the one that sat to the right side of the bed.

"Kura?" I asked, rolling over in the bed as a mixture of emotions blended with the sensory overload into something both sickening and relieving.

The door opened shortly after I had settled and a flash of white and sandy coloured fur forced its way between the door and the doorframe so that he could bound to the bed, leaping up with all the energy of a new-born pup.

"There's my boy!" I said, instantly feeling a rush of excitement that momentarily extinguished everything else as I flung my arms out to ruffle and hug him as he squirmed this way and that, uncertain of what to do with himself until settling on flopping against me, his tail wagging like he'd hadn't seen me in a year.