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3001?

What?

What was this?

He was supposed to be dead.

This couldn't be.

He unfolded an arm. And then a leg. Then stretched from his middle. It felt like he was lying down on something squishy. Then something else occurred to him.

The pain.

Hundreds of hornets felt like they were stinging him from the inside. He sat up, folding into a fetal position. It hurt. However, he reasoned that he could take in his surroundings from this new, slightly higher vantage point.

Looking around himself revealed nothingness. No brightness. No objects. No nothing.

Wait...

There was definitely something.

A faint light.

Very far away. Very dim. But it definitely existed. And it was getting closer.

As it approached, he saw something within it. Something was holding the light. Whatever it was had a faint illumination on themself.

With only a few paces between it and himself, he realized what it was.

SCP-2521.

It was holding a dull flashlight, probably covered in dust or low on batteries. Who knew which one it was?

It reached him, crouching down.

He didn't know what to do. Should he do something? Say something? Perhaps.

"SCP-2521? Is that you?"

Joy seemed to fill the creature as it made a soft squealing noise. It pulled him into an embrace. Something within him felt like he was going to die again, but that wasn't true. This was neither tight nor restricting like before. It was a soft and caring hug. The first experience only hurt because the creature wanted him so badly, he reasoned. Now that it had him, there was no need to hold on so desperately. All was okay.

Thinking about how much the first embosom hurt redirected his attention away from the creature. He was still in pain. The stabbing feeling in his stomach was apparent again. Trying to squeeze the pain away didn't help. Discomfort wanted to stay with him.

His strain seemed to stress the being. It looked so unaware as to how it could help. It laid him back down, feeling over his body as if trying to find the source of his agony. After passing its hands over the affected area, it seemed to disappear.

A few minutes of thinking brought him to the source of this suffering. SCP-217. He was told that the effects could include pain like this. What a time to kick in.

There was a sound. Then a frigid cold on his stomach. Looking down revealed 2521's "hand" holding something -- probably an ice pack -- to the source of his pain.

This thing sure did seem to care about him ever since he talked about it. But how did it find this? Didn't it only understand information about itself? Maybe there was more to be discovered about it.

Still pressing the ice to him, 2521 pressed its head to his and nuzzled him. What was this? It definitely wasn't the immediate suffocation that he had first expected, but this was okay, too.

Understanding this thing definitely seemed like a good goal for now. Studying some strange monster until the day he died wasn't exactly what he came into this wanting to do, but it was better than being cooped up in a prison cell.