The Mist and the Lightning. Part 19

“Daddy, would you like an injection?”

“N-no-no, thank you, please don’t! I'm fine.”

“Okay. Then go back to bed. And try to sleep.”

Kors groped his way back to the trestle bed, took off his camisole and shirt.

So far, they didn’t bother him. He warmed up under the covers, and the wine he drank made itself felt, giving some peace of mind.

Suddenly, Kors heard Nik make a strange sound. He seemed to sob, groaning softly, as if in pain, and his quiet moan turned into an equally quiet hissing.

“Ver!” He called loudly, and, apparently, having remembered himself, he added already in his mind, “Bring me this damn plaster and cotton wool,” and then again cursed out loud in unclean language.

“Nik! What happened to you?!” Kors shouted excitedly. Jumping up abruptly, he sat down on the couch.

“What’s the difference to you?” Nik answered coldly. “After all, I’m a piece of shit in a dirty candy wrapper.”

Kors froze ashamed:

“Why do you need cotton wool and plaster? Doctor Cassiel warned that when the poison finally begins to leave your scar, inflammation may begin. In recent days, the skin around was very reddened, did the inflammation intensify from shaking on the road? Yes? Just don’t put the steel brackets in again, I beg you!”

“That’s not your business! I will do what I want!”

“Nik, please! You are offended and angry with me, I understand, but be reasonable.”

“Don’t call me Nik again! For you, I’m Nikto! And I’m not offended and not angry with you, daddy master!”

Kors was well aware that Nik was mocking him, calling him daddy, but he didn’t want to give up so easily:

“No, no. Nik, please! I never really got mad at you. Were you listening to my thoughts on the road? My memories of you?”

“It was hard not to hear you jerk off incessantly to my human appearance in your head.”

“No! I didn’t jerk off… you have misunderstood…” Kors heard Verniy run into the tent. Nik began to mentally communicate with him and was distracted from the conversation with Kors. It pissed him off. “Nik, I was wrong, I admit it…”

“Fuck off and shut up now,” Nik hissed softly again. Kors suggested that he applied cotton soaked in a healing agent to an inflamed scar.

“Son, it’s my fault, I thoughtlessly started treatment and irritated your old wound. Let me help you,” pleaded Kors, he was madly worried that the Demon would completely disfigure the face of his son.

“No!”

And Kors couldn’t resist:

“You're ruining everything now! You won’t be able to apply the medicine properly! You don’t know how to do it! Stubborn idiot!”

“Ah, look, you washed me again and didn’t dry me! But I’m not going to sit and cry anymore after you yelled at me! Mister daddy, shut up, I said, otherwise now I’ll put a plaster on your mouth, and not just on your eyes! And if you want, I’ll fasten it with a steel bracket so that you will completely shut up!”

Kors froze and fell silent. He was very worried that Nik would spoil all the treatment without supervision now.

Nik walked over to him.

“Don’t talk to me. I forbid you to talk, you understand? Everything you wanted, you already told me in the Fort.”

Kors remained silent, not knowing what to do, whether he could answer or not. But he involuntarily mentally said: “Son, what’s wrong with your face?”

Despite the prohibition, Kors didn’t dare to call him Nikto.

“What’s wrong with my face? Nothing. It’s covered in black scales, you know,” Nik answered aloud. “Don’t address me mentally! And now I will touch you with my nasty paws, and you will wet your pants from fear, right, daddy?”

Kors grabbed his head.

“Forgive me, forgive me. I will try to accept your essence and this image of you, in our world you are in merger with my son, and…”

He “heard” how Nik abruptly closed his thoughts from him, as if loudly slamming the door, and moved away from him:

“Sleep!”

Chapter 3

Skid Row – Wasted Time 

Kors is locked up again in some empty and dark cell with no windows. Is this a dream? Or is he “catching” Nik’s memories again? Kors has already understood that as soon as dark holes, low ceilings, cells, basements, unpleasant sensations of tightness in a closed space and darkness appeared in his visions, these were the memories of his son.

Darkness and limited space. Kors is no longer afraid, he doesn’t experience panic attacks and claustrophobia any more. He separates from Nik’s consciousness, in which there is emptiness and no thoughts and emotions, as if he is dead. Kors separates because he wants to see him from the side. There is no light source here, but Kors “sees” anyway. Nik is so small! Shit! Kors, as always, falls into Nik’s childhood memories.

He is too small, he is probably not yet five years old. Maybe a little more, but even for five years he looks small and thin, and the expression on his face is so serious and adult, not at all childish. Cheekbones are clearly distinguished on a thin face, there is no roundness and plump cheeks that are often inherent in babies. Pale face with harmonious features. Nik is very handsome, despite the fact that his face is grimy, as if smeared with earth, and his lower lip has already been ruined, rings stick out of it. His lips are black, also in soil. Did he eat soil? Nik’s hair is not cut or combed, it’s tangled and dirty, however, as always. His crown is also dirty with soil. He is badly dressed. He is wearing a short jacket and torn pants. This is frank rags, so old that it seems decayed. Nik is sitting on the bare dirt floor in this crypt-like closet where there is nothing else but him. He sits alone, dirty, covered in soil, thin, lonely. Kors involuntarily remembered Shagezh’s childhood memories. Zaf also always kept him in a closet. What kind of wild methods of upbringing do you unclean ones have?

Or do you only treat the “wrong” children this way? Like Shag and Nik? Nik’s hands are tied wrist to wrist. His hands are brought together, palm to palm, he somehow strangely presses them to his chest, and then the rope goes to the ring in the wall. Why did the witch tie a small child in a dark room alone? Why did she tie his hands together? “She didn’t treat you that well, Nik!” – Kors thinks bitterly. But his son never said a bad word about her, and always called her “my foster mother”, or simply mother. He didn’t say “witch”, didn’t call her by name, he said – my mother. And Kors sees now that Mara clearly didn’t deserve this title.

Nik shudders a little, as if he is listening carefully to something, but total silence reigns around. Shaking his head slightly, he removes his hands from his chest and suddenly begins to scrape the dirt floor. The floor is hard, but Nik must have had enough time, because the hole he scratched in the floor is quite deep. He slowly and somehow mechanically stupidly scratches the ground with his nails. There is neither a mug of water nor a bowl of food nearby. Maybe the poor boy really its soil. Nik scratches, scrapes the ground, and, as if angry, in some desperation raises his hands tied at the wrists, clenches his fists and nervously taps them on the top of his head. How familiar is this movement to Kors! Son, why are you digging the soil? Are you trying to dig a tunnel? To dig your way to freedom? Kors is overwhelmed with emotions of love for Nik and resentment for the witch. How could she treat his son like that! Animals are better treated, and he was a child! Kors’s heart is filled with such pain that he can no longer look at this simple and at the same time unbearable picture.

“Gods, son! Son!” he screams in some kind of frenzy and sees that Nik is shuddering, raising his pale face, his empty eyes staring into nowhere. His lips move barely perceptibly, not a sound comes out of them, but in Kors’ head it clearly flashes: “Father?” It's like Nik is putting it right into his brain, without using his voice or language. Only emotions. Again and again, with such surprise, he seems to ask: “Father? Father?!"

Kors freezes in surprise, emotions overwhelm him, and he begins to “fall out” of the past. The picture gets blurred, but he still manages to hear a sharp cry: “Dad, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!"

And Kors falls out of his strange state. He wakes up, realizing that he is lying on a camp bed in a tent, but in his head, full of despair, it still continues to sound:

“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave…”

No, it couldn’t happen! It just couldn’t happen! Nik couldn’t feel him there at that moment and hear him, because Kors was just seeing through t the past. And the witch couldn’t treat his son so badly, she needed the child. She herself bought him for the Demon to share his body. So it’s not even the past, but a bad dream. It’s just a nightmare. Just a bad dream! Bad. Dream. Forget it!

What time is it now? His eyes were still tightly covered with plaster. But usually Kors always woke up early, only recently in the Fort his unchanging schedule has gone astray. It probably isn’t even nine in the morning yet, thought Kors. He heard the pounding of rain on the roof. So it hasn’t stopped raining yet, it’s been raining all night? Behind him lay Arel. Kors had no doubt that it was him. The prince was lying very close, clinging tightly and, as usual, placing his relaxed and therefore heavy arm on Kors. He pressed his face against the back of Kors’ head, and he felt his warm, measured breath on his hair. Kors didn’t remember how he fell asleep, didn’t remember when Arel lay down next to him. Most likely, Nik, using his power, put Kors to sleep, just knocked him out, and Kors was offended by this. “Why, like this, without asking, against will, put a person to sleep? Without asking even my desire? He treats me like a thing!” Discontent and irritation were rising in him more and more, and his mood was shitty since the very morning. He was unbearably infuriated by the plaster on his eyes, the sticky layer was pulling his skin, and in general, waking up in the morning, he just wanted to open his eyes, rub them, but Kors couldn’t do this. The way Nik had treated him yesterday was terribly upsetting now, too. Not only did he make him humbly kneel at the threshold, shivering from the cold, but he also blinded him. “I don’t want you to see my face! You won’t see my human face again!” What a crazy idea? Another stupidity in which there is no point, except for humiliation. Senseless humiliation. However, this is absolutely in their style – to humiliate for no reason and cruelly, always the same thing, nothing new. Lis has to be painted like a jester, I have to be blinded. And Nik does this not for the first time, Kors remembered how for several days he was forced to wear uncomfortable shameful glasses in which nothing was visible, and now even worse, Nik just plastered his eyes over. Silly games of an eccentric, cruel boy. “I don’t punish you, daddy.” Hypocritical rubbish, what else are you doing! You allowed me to be beaten! Kors preferred to believe that it was not Nik himself who hit him, but the prince. And then he simply ordered “sleep” and knocked him out.

Kors felt heat from Arel lying next to him. Their camp bed was not wide at all, it was uncomfortable to sleep on it together even in an embrace, and the heavy brocade blanket with which they were covered with their heads now also was annoying Kors. Under it, together with Arel, it was stuffy and hot. Stuffy, hot and cramped. Kors rather rudely threw off the prince’s arm and sat down. Getting out from under the warmth of the blanket and Arel, he immediately felt the damp coolness of moist air. Down below, a draft blew across the wooden flooring, chilling his bare feet uncomfortably. There was a strong smell of tobacco, yesterday’s lamb, sweat from clothes and unwashed bodies, but the smell of cigarette smoke still reigned over all the rest.

“Nik…” Kors called, but immediately stopped short. “Nikto! Son!” He added cautiously. “Can I address you? I really have to!”

“Hmmm…” Apparently, Nik was lying very close, from the side of Prince Arel, and, it seemed, right on the floor: