I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 38: Waking Up.

POV: Regulus Au Nyx.

It hurt.

Everything hurt so much.

His whole existence was just pain. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

It felt like there were needles thrust deep into his body, his joints felt like they hadn’t been moved in eons, his right hand still throbbed with unbearable pain.

Worst of all, he had a nasty headache.

Consciousness arrived in pieces, the way it arrived after serious damage.

Sensation first, the full inventory of what hurt and where and how badly, his body running its own assessment before his mind was awake enough to contribute. The needles in his joints. The deep bone-ache of someone who had been stationary for too long. The specific throb of his right side that was wrong in a way he couldn’t immediately articulate, a wrongness that his brain was circling around without landing on directly, the way you circled around something you weren’t ready to look at yet.

The headache sat behind his eyes like something that had moved in and intended to stay.

Regulus couldn’t even remember when the last time was when he had a headache this bad.

He became aware of sound next. The low hum of medical equipment. The ambient quiet of a building at work. Somewhere close, the soft turn of a page.

He became aware of light. Dim, artificial, the particular quality of a room where someone had made a decision about brightness and it wasn’t his decision.

He became aware, slowly, of being watched.

Not in the way you felt surveillance. No, but In the way you felt attention.

Specific, close, the particular weight of eyes that were not casual about the act of looking.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was unfamiliar.

White, institutional, the kind that told you nothing about where you were except that wherever it was had a maintenance budget.

He turned his head.

To his own dismay, his eyes widened before he could hope to control them.

He found, sitting in the chair beside his bed, the most unreasonably pretty person he had ever seen in his life.

He stared.

The person looked back at him with half-lidded aquamarine eyes and the expression of someone conducting a quiet assessment.

Which was rich because Regulus was fairly certain he was the one who had just woken up and should be doing the assessing.

Silver hair. Small frame. A cardigan that was doing something deeply unfair to the overall situation. The general impression of someone who had been assembled very carefully by something with a very specific vision in mind.

He stared for what was probably too long.

Not probably, he definitely stared for too long.

What was worse however, was what came out of his mouth next.

"The angel?"

Regulus paused, surprised by his own lack of restraint.

The person blinked, and a voice, not theirs, came from somewhere further left.

"Another contender joins the fray!"

Regulus turned his head and found the man he’d vaguely registered earlier, no longer leaning against the wall but standing upright with the expression of someone who had just witnessed something that had made hours of waiting entirely worth it.

"Silas." A voice came from the window further to his left. Flat. Warning.

"I’m just saying," Silas said, not even slightly chastened, "we have a running tally and he just entered the competition."

"There is no competition," the person in the chair said.

"There’s absolutely a competition."

"Silas." The window voice again, sharper.

Regulus looked back at the person beside him.

They were looking at him with the expression of someone who had received an unexpected piece of information and was processing it with extreme composure. Which was doing nothing to help the angel assessment and everything to confirm it.

"I apologize," Regulus said, because he was, apparently, still capable of producing words. "That wasn’t... I wasn’t fully conscious."

"Clearly," the person said.

"I don’t normally-"

"Say things like that?"

"Out loud."

Something moved at the corner of their mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape of one that had looked at the situation and decided not to commit but hadn’t fully decided against it either.

"Aris Ashborne," they said, by way of introduction. "You’re in the awakened association’s medical wing in Ilvane. You’ve been unconscious for approximately fourteen hours."

Regulus absorbed this.

Then he absorbed the name.

Ashborne.

The weight of everything attached to it arrived in sequence—the dynasty, the history, the institutional significance, and underneath all of that the considerably more immediate fact that he was lying in a medical bed having just called what was probably a scion of one of the founding awakened families of Kairan an angel, out loud, as his first words upon regaining consciousness.

He looked at the ceiling.

"Of course," he said.

"To be fair," Silas said, from across the room, helpfully, "you’re not wrong."

"Silas," said the window, now sounding genuinely dangerous.

"I’ll stop."

"Thank you."

"...In a moment."

"Silas!"

"The tally is currently," Silas continued, with the energy of a man who had identified a hill and chosen it to die on, "Gareth at two separate occasions, an entire crowd outside a dungeon gate, seventeen people in this building alone since yesterday morning, a medical examiner who technically wasn’t supposed to be affected by that sort of thing, this entire room, now including the Aureate whose first word upon waking from a fourteen hour unconscious state was—"

"That’s enough," Aris said.

The mildness of his voice somehow made it more final than volume would have.

Silas stopped.

Sat down.

Looked extremely pleased with himself in the private way of someone who had made their point and was comfortable letting it rest there.

Regulus looked at Aris again. At the composed expression, the half-lidded eyes, the cardigan that was still doing what it was doing, which was not exactly good for his strained mental fortitude.

There was something underneath the surface of all of it that he couldn’t quite get a read on, which was unusual.

Regulus was very good at reading people, he’d built his entire operational framework on it, and the person sitting eighteen inches away from him was returning approximately nothing legible.

That was interesting.

"You pulled me out?" He asked.

"Yes."

"From the Aberrant dungeon."

"Yes."

He looked at his right side. At the flat space under the blanket. Took the full inventory of it, let it settle into the category of facts rather than feelings, which was the only way he’d ever managed to deal with significant information without it managing him first.

"My arm," he said.

"Gone below the elbow. Reconstruction options are available. A specialist has been contacted."

Direct. No softening, no apology built into the delivery.

Regulus found this, unexpectedly, the most useful thing anyone had done for him so far.

"How long was I in there," he said.

Aris looked at him steadily. "How long do you think you were in there."

Regulus considered the question. The dungeon. The sea. The things in it. The way time had moved differently inside, or hadn’t moved, or had moved in a direction that the word time didn’t quite cover.

"I don’t know," he said. Which was not a sentence he said often and tasted strange.

"Neither do we," Aris said. "The dungeon’s internal timeline doesn’t correspond to external elapsed time. We’re working on it."

We, Regulus noted.

He looked around the room properly for the first time.

At the woman by the window who had the particular bearing of someone accustomed to being the most politically significant person in any given room, at Silas who was still quietly celebrating something, at the woman in the corner with a novel in her hands which she showed no signs of looking away from.

"Who are you all," he said.

"Virginia Halcyon," the window said. "Heir to the Halcyon Family."

Perfect, he had walked right into the hands of a Halcyon first thing out of the dungeon.

"Silas Carter," said Silas. "High A-rank. Consultant."

"Consultant?" Virginia repeated with a raised eyebrow, with the tone of someone encountering a word being used incorrectly.

"It’s a working title."

"Amari Stormborne," said the one with the novel, without looking up. "S-rank. I’m here for documentation."

"Documenting what," Regulus said.

"This," she said, with a gesture that encompassed the room, the situation, and apparently him specifically.

He looked back at Aris.

Aris was watching him with the quiet attention that he’d been watching him with since he opened his eyes, steady and unhurried, the expression of someone who had been waiting for a particular moment and was now simply present for it.

"You have questions?" Aris asked.

"Several."

"Some of them I can answer."

"And the rest?"

A pause.

"The rest," Aris said, "are going to take a little more effort than we can afford to put in for now."

Regulus looked at him for a long moment. At the composed surface and the thing underneath it that he still couldn’t read, that kept returning nothing legible no matter which angle he approached it from.

He was going to figure it out.

That was, he decided, now a project.

"Start with what you can answer," he said.

Aris nodded once.

And started talking.