March from Darkness | ✓ (to be edited)

THIRTY-FIVE

DARAYA

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying down, something sitting on top of me as my heart raced in my chest. Everything was blurry, and I felt more than I saw hands touch my face. Voices spoke, but they were warbled, unable to be understood. I rolled to the side quickly, hearing a gasp as I leaned over the side of whatever I was lying on; the bile burned my throat, my stomach churning as the weight of everything I had remembered made my head spin. I gasped between each heaving of my stomach, a patch of blurry redness growing larger.

I tried to talk, but I couldn't even understand what I was trying to say. Nothing made sense, and I could barely form any coherent thoughts, my senses on complete overload, every breath a task.

I don't know how long I vomited up red bile, but eventually it stopped; I felt warm and cold, my eyes slowly focusing on my surroundings, my body willingly relaxing as someone rubbed the back of my neck. I blanched at the metallic taste in my mouth before I slowly understood that I truly had vomited up blood; more specifically, Phrer's blood. I felt my face warm as I thought back to the events of the last few hours, but it quickly faded as I was bombarded with feelings of extreme guilt and heartache.

"...he doing alright?" a voice asked, the cadence familiar.

"Yeah, I think he's done now," another, this one closer to me, probably belonging to whoever was rubbing my neck, answered. "There was a lot that needed to be purged."

I groaned, bringing a shaky arm up to my face and wiping the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand. I moved my hands under me, trying to at least sit up, but my arms gave out and I faceplanted back into the bed. The hand moved from my neck to my side, but I shrugged it off and tried again.

I sat up, my back falling against the headboard and my eyes began to focus on the people in the room. Khatá sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, his head tilted to the side and his eyes all-knowing; Lucifer stood in the middle of the room, a hand held over his mouth, supported by his other arm across his chest; Baryn and Sāma were standing together near the door, their voices too faint for me to hear; and Phrer sat next to me, now dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a black tank top, his silver eyes narrowed in concern as he scanned over my face.

"What... what happened?" I asked, my voice hoarse and quiet.

Phrer handed me a small, damp towel for my mouth before he answered. "You are finally Daraya. Apparently, all of your memories have been restored, so there's that. It just ended up being a far more violent process than we expected."

I wiped my face before nearly rubbing my lips off with the cloth in an attempt to get the blood off. "What's with the bloody vomit?"

Lucifer went to say something, but Khatá spoke first, an eyebrow raised as he assessed me. "That's not vomit, that's just blood. None of it is yours, which would be concerning under any other circumstances." He looked over at Phrer pointedly, who stiffened for a moment before he relaxed and looked at me. "Your body understood what was going to happen, so it ingested a lot of blood in order to sustain itself through the process. It just didn't know when to stop and drank far more than it truly needed."

"Gee, I wonder why," Sāma deadpanned, causing Baryn to stifle a laugh.

"Good gods, is it that evident?" I asked, a small part of me mortified at the fact that my relations were not able to be kept a secret from anyone.

"Well, if it wasn't before, it is now," Lucifer chuckled, his blue eyes filled with mischief. I placed my head in my hands, trying to keep the warmth from my face. "Daraya, it's fine. It was bound to happen anyways."

"Unfortunately," my brother tacked on. One look at his face said that he was anything but happy that this had occurred, but he couldn't do anything about it now. I went to move and felt something brush against my legs; I looked down and noted the black sweatpants that now covered me.