Her words triggered a growl in him, and a chuckle from somewhere else. Laurent again, his leeches watching, watching, watching... There were pulses of sickness in his guts unpleasantly distracting from the issues at hand. Everything was simply out of control again. He could hear her, yes, feel that somewhere her words would have ordinarily stopped him in his tracks - scrub him from her mind? Why? Why? - but he was not his own anymore. He hadn't been since she had left.
Nikolai took a drag from his cigarette and then stood up, reaching for his pants as he did so. Pain rippled through his body as he moved too quickly, stepping wordlessly into his clothes like he had down with Mitchelletto the night before. The irony was enough to make the leeches giggle with pleasure, pulling on his ball sack like a school yard bully. Nikolai swatted at nothing, stumbling as his perception swayed.
"Enough already!" It was only afterwards that he realized the words shouted at the swirling shadows in his mind's eye were also murmured aloud beneath his breath. Sonya would have undoubtedly heard them. Even more reason to get the fuck away from her as quickly as possible. There was another inconsolable swell of pain in his chest that felt like being on fire.
"Everything is different now, Sonya." He wanted to tell her just how different things were - about Mitchelletto's return, about Laurent's trickery, about his own submission to them both as he blacked out into a version of himself that he couldn't control - but his mouth filled with a black stickiness as soon as he brought either of the names to the tip of his tongue. Nikolai swallowed hard on Laurent's laughter in his ears. "More than you could ever imagine."
He couldn't look at her now. Not as he withdrew from the Venom and the heroin, not as Laurent crawled beneath his skin, not as he would be forced to obey whatever lunacy Mitch wanted him to do. Not as he burned without her and drowned in consequences of his own madness. It was stupid to think that he could go back to who he was before she left, as if she would just allow him back in the way he was.
It was stupid to think he was the same person who fell in love with her, and that it would be simple to love her again.
Nothing mattered anymore. Not if she didn't remember him like he needed her to. Not if he wasn't his own.