[center][h1][color=8882be]Sig[/color][/h1][/center]

His hand...didn't feel like his own. That was the best way of putting it. There was pain, still, and other sensation, but it was detached, like someone else was feeling the pain. The same was true of his leg. Worse, still, was that he couldn't clear his nose of the scent of his own burning flesh.

Sig looked down at his hand. White bandages covered it, then, but he could remember what it looked like from his daily cleaning. Skin charred black, split like a sausage to expose inflamed flesh, tendrils of ash and crimson twisting around his arm and tapering off near his elbow. It was pretty gross, but he thought the scar might look cool when it healed.

"How is the pain, today?" The nurse's lilted voice came from the door and gave Sig a start.

"Oh," he said, taking a moment to clear his throat. He wasn't used to speaking. After the first couple days of being visited by his cousin, who had ensured Sig's parents that he was okay, he hadn't seen really anybody. "I mean, I was hit by lightning. What are you asking me, here?" He smiled at her.

Sam - that was the nurse's name - looked up and gave him a hollow grin. She was cute, in a way. Blond, a little chubby. He had tried his best to make a connection with her, but it was clear to him that he was just another object of tedium in her day. He probably wasn't looking particularly handsome, anyway. He certainly felt about as gross as his hand.

"Better than yesterday," Sig finished.

"Okay," she said. "How's your walking?" Sam threw him through the usual battery of tests and questions, taking his monitor cables off, and informed him that he would be moved from the resuscitation room into a stretcher bay with other patients. He was happy for the company. Several days alone in the hospital had stretched his sanity and plagued him with nightmares. Even awake, he had sworn he heard voices in the room with him.

Sig didn't see anybody else in the stretcher bay, at first. He was about to open his mouth, a sarcastic thought half-formed on his lips, when he caught a shadow in the corner of his eye. It froze him solid, and the feeling he had after the accident came surging through him. Sheer horror. The feeling that he had died.

His head spun to look at the entity, but it was...just a girl. She looked young, worn, battered. A bruise like a purple snake wrapped around her neck, and she stroked it idly.

Something was seriously wrong. Sig forced himself to look away from her, even as Sam pushed his bed in the slot next to her. Even with a curtain dividing them, the feeling of wrongness permeated from the girl and threatened to smother him.

"Let the nurses here know if you need anything," Sam finished, leaving the room. Sig shook his head. He realized he was almost hyperventilating. It was stupid. There was nothing wrong with [i][/i]his girl, his head had just been a little weird since the accident.

"Hey!" Sig half-shouted, reaching from his bed and throwing the divider curtain open. "Come here often?" It was a stupid joke, but Sig chuckled, desperate to alleviate the tension.