It was as if the veil that obscured the world had been lifted. How long it had taken him to regain some shaky awareness of the world around him was impossible to tell. It could have taken seconds, minutes, even hours.
The progress had taken on a kind of life of its own, seemingly calming Sergei as he gazed sightlessly at ceiling above him.
A voice, indistinct and distant, murmured something to him. He took in a breath, orienting his head to catch the sound better. The world had taken on shape and substance beyond the maddening haze.
Still, in the back of his mind, the reel of old memories played out in his mind; old scents, old sensations, sights, sounds. They seemed more real than the cold metal beneath him.
Finally, a word pushed itself past the desicated lips, raspy and faint from disuse. "холодный." The placing of the sensation seemed to make it more real. The cold seemed to pierce flesh and bone, and his limbs drew instinctively closer to his core. A breath became a cough, phlegm spattering on the table beneath him.
He heard a rustle, and his mind automatically placed it as human. The slurred query of, "кто там?" was the closest his mind could come to coherency. One of his fingers twitched, the flesh dragging across the chill metal, too loud in the room.
Another question, the normally deep and booming baritone, had wasted significantly, rendering the, "где я," to little more than a bewildered whisper.
[[Translations from beginning to end, "Cold", "Who are you?", "Where am I?"]]