Coming to consciousness after a long time out can be an overwhelming experience. What starts as a whisper of sound in newly found ears builds into a shrill, whining scream, ringing angrily from inside the mind and searing the eardrums painfully. Smells are indiscernible, only vaguely registered with overpowered intensity. This one was salty, stinging the nostrils and making it difficult to draw in air. It could be tasted too, in the back of the throat as air rushed into raw, unwilling lungs for what felt like the first time. Feeling in the limbs comes back slowly and is rather unpleasant, hot and with an achy numbness.
He was tired, his body rejecting the waking process defiantly as it begged for rest. The sea had been kind to the young wolf pup, but even in kindness the ocean can be forbidding. Though he was not broken, the boy was most certainly bruised under his drenched, silvery white coat. His small body gave a sudden lurch, his head kicking back over the wet, white sands and charcoal muzzle parting as liquid gushed from his lungs. He didn’t cough, didn’t suck in air with greed, but his ribs heaved in quick, short breaths that tore at the lining of his throat. What hurt most of all, though, was the murderous sound in his head of which he was growing steadily more aware. It seemed to be splitting his skull apart, like something was on the inside pushing against the walls until they caved.
Though the pain remained, the ringing in his ears began to subside, fading out to the world around the semi-conscious boy. Sharp winds cracked over jagged boulders further up the shore, whistling as they broke along the coast, and the roar of the ocean crept its way into the slowly waking mind. The surf stretched out and licked the pup’s body, pushing him further up the shore, but did little to quicken his journey back to reality. Inside, he was barely grasping on to a sense of self, the notion of I, me, and my. It made everything worse at first, knowing that the hurt was his hurt, the burning lungs were his lungs. The searing pain in his head only intensified at such a discovery, as if warning him not to dig any deeper. But he had no control; a conscious mind was an active, infinite tap of thought.
He was alive. Noel was alive and laying on a beach, though where he could begin to imagine. He could not recall these sounds as something familiar, each and every nuance foreign and strange. The boy wanted to open his eyes, wanted to see this unknown, but couldn’t quite figure out how. His head hurt just trying, only adding to the hot pain that was already there. Everything in his body was telling him to sleep, to drift, everything but a small piece of self tucked deep into the recesses of his mind. His face scrunched tightly in a painful expression as that part of him fought its way toward the surface, the only visible sign of inner struggle.