The pain arrived before the awareness did.
It established itself in the space behind his eyes and at the base of his skull with the specific, dense quality of something that has been present for a while and is simply now being noticed — not the sharp, event-specific pain of an injury but the deep, distributed ache of a system that has been running at unsustainable levels for too long and has, in the absence of any remaining emergency to sustain it, begun presenting its invoice....
His hands found his head on instinct. The groan that accompanied the motion was not performed — it was the involuntary, honest vocalization of someone whose body is communicating its current condition without asking for permission to do so.
He was covered in sweat.
