Searching for a Former Clarity

[Saiketsu]

Nikolai sneered, shaking his head in his hands. "Of fucking course." The cigarette remained pinched between his lips, burning his eyes with smoke.

"How do you even know who I am?" His words dripped poison, lashing out like an animal trapped. Cackling and swirling in his head where Laurent's eyes watched.

[The Cedar Witch]

A flare of anger sent a glare to his back.

"Because I tried to scrub you from my mind but it didn't work," she hissed, sitting up on her elbows.  After last night, did he really think she didn't know who he was now?  Missing details and moments wasn't the same as missing entire people.  The hurt squeezed her chest.

"It comes back in bits," she added, defensive in her imperfect articulation.  It felt like fumbling for an explanation, painfully vulnerable in ways she never had been.  The old habits, old traits of that fractured identity, roused more anger quelling beneath the surface. 

[Saiketsu]

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.

[The Cedar Witch]

He didn't see her look of confusion and concern while he continued to battle against something she could not see or understand.  Should she ask?  Should she attempt to pierce the barrier of his mind to discover what was happening?  That wasn't how she was with him -- another thing she recalled.

But everything was different now.

"Obviously," she muttered under her breath in reply, glaring at his back as he dressed.  Everything would always change, that was the very nature of existence as it unfolded in endless similarities and patterns like a flower blooming with endless petals curling out from the center.  Predictable and unknown all at once.  This tangental objection stayed silent on her still tongue as she wondered if that was the sort of thing they would discuss and debate on in the past.  It seemed likely, but there were no memories to fall back on.

"Are you leaving, then?" she snapped, crushing the cigarette into the ashtray on the bedside table.  "Just like that?"  There was no hiding the hurt in her voice, and she burned with foolishness and anger at once.