Nicolas:
Father.
Nicolas pauses in his flipping through of the sign language guide. Lately Wallace has been ordering him, with increasing impatience and bewilderment, to sit normally on chairs rather than crouching on the floor like an house-trained animal, but Nicolas has always found comfort in corners and crevices, not only because he has been trained to do so by brass knuckles and metal-studded boots, but also it is a practical vantage point for curling up and minimizing physical damage if a fist were to suddenly grace him with its company. He has not seen his father since three days ago when he was admitted into the mansion for medical treatment, having almost lost his right hand attempting to rescue the book from the grenade. Two days since he had woken up to see Wallace screaming at the doctor that he, Nicolas, is not a monster. It was a waste of Wallace's effort. He has been called a monster his entire life, what difference does one more doctor make?
The book was a gift from Wallace, his only earthly possession aside from his katana and the clothes on his body. It was burnt at the edges, but the contents were mostly intact. A right hand was not too heavy of a price to pay.
It is raining, Nicolas dimly realizes, feeling the strain of the windows against the gust. Yes, the wind will feel cool against his wounds.
A flash of camouflaged movement among the dipping crowns of oak trees below flickers at the corner of Nicolas' one working eye. The book drops to the floor with a soft thud, effectively obscuring its most recently opened entry - "Family" - when Nicolas leaves the room, his IV dripping steadily and forlornly onto the lush green carpet.
It is difficult to run. The downpour is steady, but not particularly brutal, yet a stabbing pain in his left thigh which throbs in increasing intensity with every stride is only allowing a lopsided limp. He cannot distinguish if the trickle of fluid into his boots is his wound reopening or the rain; he does not bother looking, his body has become so tolerant of pain that a single wound, as long as it does not kill him, is inconsequential. The wet grass and mud is cool against the blisters on his feet, finally freed from his combat boots.
He reaches the gate in time to see the disappearing silhouettes of the mercenary troops. Where are they going? Did they forget to alert him? No, the captain must have alternative plans of retrieving him. After all, the soldiers were not allowed inside the mansion.
"Ca... Cap... Captain." He calls out weakly, dumbly, impeded by the gate. The captain pauses and turns. Are they returning to the battlefield? He dimly remembers that his katana is still in the mansion. Nevermind, he can still deliver considerable damage bare-handedly. He have also learned his lesson about confronting mechanized weapons with exposed flesh. Maybe it's better fighting without the katana - he has always been captivated by the raw industrial power and precision of bullets.
"We don't need useless ones on the team," the captain replies impassively. His one working eye covered by dripping bangs, Nicolas cannot make out the captain's expression. He does not understand. Did he not try to make himself useful in combat? If nothing else, he made a loyal and trustworthy shield. That's the ultimate goal of his existence, no? The rain suddenly feels oppressive, suffocating. His body throbs. He shouldn't have tried stitching those wounds himself, a bloody messy careless affair that only exacerbated his enervation.
"If the celebre poisoning has advanced this far, it's not worth taking you all the way to Ergastulum," the captain continues. "Your time is up."
Nicolas' grip on the iron bars tighten. No, the captain cannot leave, what does that leave Nicolas? A noise creeps up from an unknown animalistic part of himself as his father turns and retreats.
"A... th... Fa...ther."
The man pauses. Yes, Nicolas just need to prove his usefulness. He has lost his right hand, but the celebre can curb the pain and fuel his brute strength. He will be useful, as a punching bag for the soldiers at the very least, as long as the captain is willing to keep him around. He will be obedient, has he not already proven himself obedient enough?
His father turns with a cold, livid smile.
"Don't try to act human," he remarks, retrieving something from his pockets and dropping it to the ground. Its contents spills lackadaisically onto the lawn - a celebre container, demure white tablets quickly dissolving in the rain.
"Monster."
Nicolas stands at the gate, his ruined right hand grappling blindly for a hold, until the procession disappears from view.
The pristine white of the gauze on his hand was graying from moisture and infiltrated with streaks of pink. The rain fell in gentle swells as Nicolas grapples with the consuming hollowness which has left him utterly enervated, on the brink of collapse. He can no longer feel the pain in his leg or hand. He too can no longer feel the chill of the rain and the slickness of the mud underfoot. Nicolas Brown is not the most sentimentally receptive specimen in evolution's great exhibition of emotional capability, but the numbness that has frozen his core is still thoroughly unnerving.
Nicolas' memory span began with a beating by a forgotten soldier, when he was three. He had knocked over a liquor bottle, and by the time he came to, his left eye was swollen shut and a steady trickle from his forehead gave him the first taste of blood. He did not know whether if the captain was in the room, but in truth it would not have made a difference.
Born deaf, it took him longer than normal children to learn to communicate. It did not help that he was always abandoned in a corner of the room, too far away from the soldiers to catch a glimpse of their lips when they talked. The captain did not realize he was deaf until he was three, when a gunshot at almost point-blank range from the child did not even provoke a blink. Nicolas did not remember why he was kept alive after the captain found out - it would have been an enormous hassle to assimilate a cripple. But perhaps because he was such low maintenance, a quiet stoic child content to curl up in the corner and play dead by all intents and purposes, who as a baby quickly learned the futility of crying by operant conditioning - that the captain never bothered.
Around age five, the captain realized that a trained human shield is in fact quite valuable in the market, and that a human shield who can only stare blankly when the master orders "duck" would not fetch the profit he hoped to make. That's when a teacher was hired to teach him how to lip read.
He proved himself useful in combat. His scrawniness belied the strength and speed concomitant with his Twilight compensation. His first victim - an eccentric samurai-like figure sporting a katana wrapped in red ribbon - has affronted the captain while Nicolas crouched in his usual corner. He read the insult from seven feet away. Blood was already splattered onto the captain's face before the he had time to respond. Having only known the harsh militaristic life of the squadron, "mercy" was not part of Nicolas' rather limited vocabulary. The speed and precision with which his body sprang to deliver the single fatal strike felt natural, almost reflexive - as if he had been executing dissenters since his time in the womb. The man's skull was cracked before he hit the ground. The captain was surprised but mildly impressed - the only aptitude the boy had shown before that point was camouflaging into whatever corner he slouched The antiquated katana was given to Nicolas as a commemoration of his first kill, and although the long sword dwarfed his scrawny frame comically, it never left Nicolas' side because it was his father's first acknowledgement of his existence.
Although the squadron quickly came to recognize his combat prowess, it too discovered that a deaf boy who would not scream, resist or tell when hit is the paradigmatic ideal of the punching bag industry. The fact that he was the captain's son was never mentioned - he was warned harshly from ever calling the man "father." But when the captain is in the room, the abuse would be mostly verbal; in his absence however, the squadron was less reserved. Nicolas does not know why he never bothered resisting, or at the very least, retracting an exposed wayward limb from a metal boot when it came stomping down. Perhaps pain was the only distraction - visceral, but wholly tangible and immediate - in the asylum of solitude and numbness into which he has been imprisoned since birth. Perhaps it was a reminder that he was not a mere ghost cruising through the material world, but a sentient human being who hurts and bleeds when struck. Perhaps it was the only way to gain a wayward, disdainful glimpse from his father.
When he first fainted from celebre withdrawal, the captain had rushed over to inject him with the magical panacea which cursed through his veins exquisitely and pumped him with life. Seeing the captain's concern, Nicolas had felt a second surge of warmth in his core - that of being wanted and valued. For his father then, Nicolas will persist. He will become the ruthless meat grinder on the battlefield to make the man who just disappeared beyond the distant trees proud.
Wet thuds in the grass alerts Nicolas of someone's approach. The gait is light and unsteady - Wallace. A wet hand grabs him.
"Nic! Nic!" Wallace is visibly stirred - in fact Nicolas does not recall ever seeing such unmitigated excitement on the young master's face.
"Don't worry anymore, it will be okay. You don't need to work for him anymore," he pants, pausing for breath. "When I showed him the money in exchange for you, he took it without a second thought!"
So this is how it is? He was exchanged for money. Nicolas is glad, his father received what he wanted in the end. But more importantly, Wallace had exchanged money for him, the deaf mute who writes like a one year old child and talks like one even younger, the stoic whose sullen staidness and ubiquitous wounds could induce clinical depression in the most optimistic of humanity. A abstract and appalling gesture at the concept of companionship.
"Hey, hey look!" Wallace holds up a small container, identical to the one his father just dropped outside the gate. "If it's celebre, we can just buy it from the doctor, so..." Wallace pauses, sensing Nicolas' discomfort.
Why, Wallace Arcangelo? Why pity such a lowlife? Why waste precious resources on such a pathetic excuse of a human being?
"...Nicolas?"
Nicolas closes his eyes; he could not understand why. When his own father would abandon him without a second glance, dropping his lifeline onto the ground like trash, when his squadron regarded him as nothing more than an animal with the genetic defect of bipedalism, that the young master would care enough to procure celebre for him.
Yet the exchange was made, his father has vanished with his final admonition, and the master is awaiting his response. Some mysteries in this world are meant to remain unsolved, Nicolas realizes.
Very well, Nicolas will repay Wallace's sacrifice; he does not have much to offer materially, but he has a body immune to pain and a mind immune to fear. If the master want Nicolas' companionship, he will remain by his side morning and night. If he want Nicolas' protection, he will block every strike of abuse, every cracked liquor bottle and lit cigarette, with his body as long as he still breathes. If he want Nicolas' life, he will leave Wallace his most prized possession - the katana - and commit suicide cleanly so the master will not be troubled with his messy corpse. It is the least he can do; for the first time in thirteen years, someone cares.
Neglected muscles strained to reflect the foreign swell in his soul. A childhood's worth of suppressed emotions erupts simultaneously into being - despair, solitude, confusion, hope, and joy? - clawing upward for physical release, his face contorting in confusion to the sudden deluge of emotional pressure threatening to burst and crack his sanity. His smile, laced with a historic reservoir of despair and pain which have paved its path, felt utterly unnatural, but was nevertheless genuine. Nicolas is glad - yes, someone cares.
Nicolas knew that Wallace was disappointed upon discovering his deafness. But Nicolas is persistent and sufficiently bright; mastering sign language will be akin to the cool-down lap after the marathon that was learning to lip read. He is still terrible at writing, but he can entertain Wallace at poker any day, a childhood's worth of stoicism has prepared him well for the game.
Yes, Wallace Arcangelo, it will be okay.
Wallace:
Wallace's left eye throbs like a nuclear fusion with each heartbeat, yet he would rather his right eye to have also fallen victim to the the cigarette's smoldering end than confront the truth of what it is perceiving.
His father crumples against the wall, elegant beige wallpaper splattered with an flamboyant explosion of blood, impossibly dark and viscous, like a lurid abstract-expressionist art experiment. A pool of red expands steadily onto the carpet, reinforced by steady rivulets dripping from the gaping diagonal wound spanning from left sternum to lower right stomach, every rib, entrails and organ along its path cleanly split. The astonishing speed by which Nicolas executed the blow nevertheless failed to leave the victim in a state of ignorant peace - no, his father's face is a ghastly display of primal fear and pain. Mutilated by a preliminary blow to the head which obliterated its entire left side into a bloody swell with only a minimal semblance of still being human, his father's face is reminiscent of an animal butchered in a unethical slaughterhouse - a helpless horror at the imminent cruelty of a death which he cannot escape. The utter indignity of the terror solidified and immortalized by rigor mortis as the epithet and microcosm of his life.
"...Fa...ther..." Wallace hears himself murmur, sinking to the ground, one hand clutching his ruined eye. The cigarette which the man had extinguished in his eye now appears negligible and inconsequential. Wallace's vision blurs as his brain short-circuits, unable to process the implications of what just occurred. The commotion of servants and guards approaching in a panic might as well have been occurring in his subconscious. Even the pain diminishes into nothing more than a peripheral distraction. A numb confusion envelopes Wallace in an impenetrable cocoon of paralysis, and at least for now he is afraid to venture to the reality beyond.
"Fa...ther" Wallace whispers again, almost absentmindedly, "father... it's someone else father. It's... it's not me." Gunshots in the outside hallway register, but they are beyond Wallace's domain now.
"Believe in me father, please..." Wallace pleads brokenly. Yes, it is of absolute crucial importance that his father believe this. This is not his desire. Indeed, he is bitter toward his father's unjust treatment, toward the loving attention with which he doted on Michel, and the callous malice which is invariably reserved for himself. Yet the man was his only family, and he would never have wishes such a fate upon him regardless of the bleak circumstances. Father gave him life, it is not excessive to repay him with an eye.
In the adjacent hallway, Nicolas is now human only in its most fundamental biological definition. An animalistic primal instinct for self-preservation has assumed absolute control of his body, and at the moment, he is simply dragged along for the ride as a prisoner in his own mind.
This is certainly not the first time that Nicolas has witnessed gratuitous, senseless violence of an obvious superior to an helpless inferior - although it is one of the few instances during which Nicolas himself is not the helpless inferior. Historically, Nicolas always endured abuse with the objectivity of an onlooker - although the mental detachment cannot ease the pain, observing himself from the perspective of student observing a surgical demonstration on an anesthetized animal effectively curbs any anger or resentment . Sympathy - for himself or others - do not exist in Nicolas' limited emotional repertoire.
Yet the instant the father dragged the son against the wall by the hair, striking him across the face with a full-arcing blow to splatter the walls with bloodied saliva, the rage that Nicolas have kept suppressed throughout his childhood erupted into being. When the cigarette burned its way through Wallace's eye with a sizzle, his katana was already drawn. The father was sent flying across the room to collapse against the opposite wall, the metal reinforcement in Nicolas' boots instantly shattering the left side of his face. Nicolas doubts he had much time to register the pain before a clean sweep of his sword severed the man's torso like tofu on the chopping boards of a rushed chef. The explosion of blood stained his katana with the repulsive unctuousness of decomposition, the grimy hilt slipping slightly in Nicolas' hands. Reaching up, Nicolas wipes the warm fluid from his brow, but only ended up spreading the unctuous moisture evenly over his forehead; his mouth tastes of metal.
Wallace has collapsed onto his knees by his father's fallen form, his eyes blank, quietly chanting "father" as if a mantra to help his newly departed soul to pass on.
A clattering of footsteps in the adjacent hallway alerts Nicolas that his job is not finished. A blur of instinct and conditioning, Nicolas darts out the open door, his katana now primed with an appetite for blood. A maid standing closest to the doorway is the first to go; her head is sent flying in a neat arc across the hallway, spinning in a vortex that sends blood flying radially in a spectacular display of Newtonian circular momentum. A faint vibration in his shoulders - a stir in the air pressure so faint that it barely exceeded the threshold of neuronal depolarization - but Nicolas' preternatural combat instinct nevertheless alerts him to block and dodge. With a loud resonant clang, the bullet strikes the groove of his katana, centimeters away from his shoulder; carried by the jilted momentum, Nicolas allows himself to be pushed back a few inches before sidestepping the first bullet's brethren. Performing an 180 in trajectory, the pubic curl of smoke still dispersing from the spot on his katana that had blocked the bullet (there is a slight dent, Nicolas will never forgive the bastard for this), Nicolas does not pause to locate the gun - having already gained a prediction of its position and distance simply from the force and angle of the bullet - before sinking his vengeful blade into the aggressor, who has yet to recover from the gun's recoil to fire a third bullet. Gun and torso alike severs in an detonation of steel splinters and organic matter. Next to him, a panicked, paralyzed maid is not granted the chance to turn around and confront death with blissful ignorance before being split diagonally across her torso, in the same manner as the father. Bloody footprints marred the pristine maintenance of the carpet as Nicolas chases down the remaining guards, bodies dropping amidst curtailed screams with each controlled swing of his katana, like marionettes cut from their string, blood and urine mixing alike on the increasingly dismal carpet.
In less than two minutes, Nicolas is peering down, from a familiar vantage, at the fallen mutilated bodies of his foes, each as if processed by an industrial meat-grinder. Indeed, that is Nicolas' job in battle, and he cannot spare attention or energy on preserving the integrity of his enemy's lifeless vessels. Having seen death in its endless variations, Nicolas knows that there is no dignity in it regardless of proprietary pretenses. He exhales, not from physical exertion, but from the trance of profound concentration and detachment into which he must fall to achieve the instinctual predatory rhythm that drives his body when he kills.
No... something aside from his own breathing is faintly stirring in the air current. Pausing, Nicolas channels his senses into the hairs on his skin, registering their subtlest sway from disturbances in the ambiance, and pinpoints the unmistakable metabolism of life. Two people remains missing from his body count.
A broom closet? The door is ajar - they are careless, although nothing short of a bunker designed to survive a nuclear holocaust can stop Nicolas at this juncture.
The pair huddles in the corner of the grimy closet, with no trace of the social grace which earned their favor and respect in the mansion, mother clutching son, her face turned away. From the crack in the open doorway, Michel eyes Nicolas' bloodstained blade in paralyzing terror, eyes dilated and gaping, his scream stifled by his mother's hands over his lips. A worthless attempt at self-preservation, although the pair probably never paid enough attention to know that Nicolas is deaf.
Where is your condescension now? Nicolas mused mildly, pausing in front of the open door, his back still turned to the pair - let them hope, let them burn with uncertainty and anticipation - for a few seconds longer before he seals their fate. Distant episodes of haughty grins, of derisive taunts, of contemptuous backward glances flicker across Nicolas' vision. Wallace is no legitimate threat, since there has been never any question of who will inherit the father's fortune; yet the stepmother have nevertheless coaxed and wheedled the mansion's staff and guards to regard Wallace with the same kind of odious disdain as that of his father. Nicolas experiences another emotional swell that chills his blood and causes him to subconsciously tighten his grip on the katana - so this is the desire for revenge? Not only for Wallace's ignominy, but for his own. If the pair is to die, then let them double as scapegoats for Nicolas and Wallace both.
It's time to stop toying with his prey.
Turning languidly around, Nicolas meets the widening eyes of Michel. Merciless vengeance in eyes of the former interfaces with petrified fear in that of the latter, and Michel understands.
He will show no mercy, Nicolas decides as he softly approaches the huddling pair. Seeing Nicolas advance, Michel extricates himself from his mother's grasp with a wail of panic and cowers against the wall. Tears and snot mixing, he looks dumb and ugly from fright, in pitiful contrast from his usual noble affectations.
"Please, please! Don't hurt me!" he screams, blindly waving his arms over himself. The shrill echoes of his plea reverberate throughout the small closet, and Nicolas suddenly is assaulted by reeling flashbacks to countless episodes of a dark-haired boy - himself - crouching just as helplessly, an aggressor towering over and delivering methodical blows that shake his entire small frame, blood trickling stealthily down his face. Never once had he asked for mercy.
Does he think that a simple plea will suffice?
Nicolas' katana crashes down on the mother's spine before she turns around, this time with such uncontrolled raw force that it snaps in two with a diffident clatter. Michel screams, his mouth gaping in breathless horror as the animalistic noise claws its way free of his lungs, and scrambles to his feet while Nicolas pauses briefly over his crippled katana.
The bastard's cowardice had provoked Nicolas to break his blade.
Rage, blinding and all-consuming, erupts and ignites Nicolas' inner tundra into the cataclysmic furnace of Hell.
With a heavy crash, Michel collapses to the ground in a howl of agony, his right hand pinned to the ground by the tip of Nicolas' broken katana that is now buried no less than six inches into the cement. Trapped unless if he is to suddenly grow a spine and chew the assaulted hand off.
It will take too much time to extricate the rest of his katana from the woman - Nicolas will finish this job with his bare hands. Straddling the boy, Nicolas looks down at the once handsome heir of the household, now reduced to a drooling, insensate fool with fear.
"Please! Please! Spare me! I didn't do anything. Please, PLEASE!" Nicolas' eyes dilate as a murderous instinct flares to submerge every protest of restraint.
The first blow shocks Michel into silence, the impacted region of his face swelling immediately into a flaming shade of vermilion. Unlike the rest of his squadron, Nicolas was trained not to be a soldier, but a killer - his responsibility was not to gradually wear opponents down to an level of enervation amenable to capture, but to destroy, preferably within the first blow. At the age of four, his sand punching bag was replaced with a wood stump and has remained ever since, although nowadays it is replaced approximately once a month, when it would be reduced literally to a pulp. Practically, Michel dies with the first blow that delivered a level of trauma equivalent to a car accident on the highway. But the following three minutes during which Nicolas delivers his remaining blows is not long enough for death to pervade Michel's limbs and senses. By the fourth blow, Michel jerks up reflexively and vomits blood over Nicolas' hand that is grasping his shirtfront. Yet having seen more blood than the typical wartime hematologist, Nicolas continues unfazed, his body a slave of unfeeling routine. Michel's left hand, pinned to the ground by the katana's tip, continues to twitch until the eleventh blow, at which point nothing remains of his face aside from a bloody smear, his skull collapsing to spill its soft content onto the cement. His pupils, which has disappeared progressively as his eyes rolled backward into his skull, is once again visible in the dislodged eyeball garnishing the ghastly mount of gore on the ground.
"N... Nic?" Wallace walks tentatively, one hand still over his burnt eye, as Nicolas retracts his fist from the final blow - the fourteenth? He has lost count.
"What... is going on? Tell me..." Wallace asks slowly, mind reeling from the sickening scene; the carnage in the hallway was horrendous enough, but this... this is inhumane. To beat a child until nothing remains from the neck above... only an insentient beast could follow through.
Nicolas registers the horror and disgust in Wallace's remaining eye, his rationale staging a successful mutiny against his vengeance to once again take charge. He does not need to look down at his victim to perceive his appalling barbarity - he have gone too far. Nicolas remembers the horror of watching his father's silhouette diminishing into the trees. Mutilating his family is no favor for Wallace. The dumbstruck shock in Wallace's trembling eyes is only a confirmation.
Quietly, Nicolas dislodges the tip of his katana from the ground, Michel's pinned hand falling limply away. There is no possible justification for his savagery; death is his only means of atonement.
In a single leap, Wallace crosses the room to slap away the blade Nicolas is poising against his own throat. The tip lands with a demure clatter as Nicolas falls backward, not from the force of Wallace's blow, but from surprise at his sudden action. Who knew the apathetic youth is capable of such livid passion?
"This is wrong!" Wallace spits slowly, his eyes concealed by downcast bangs, although Nicolas could predict the darkened blue that would reflect his cold rage. "It's early for that right?"
Grabbing a fistful of his tank top, Wallace hauls Nicolas to face-level. The baggy tank top stretches to accentuate Nicolas' deceivingly scrawny size.
"I'll never forgive you... for what you have done!" Wallace breathes, the tremors wracking his body reaching Nicolas via the connection of Wallace's hand at his shirtfront. Nicolas watches in fascination as Wallace's usual nonchalant poise cracks, each falling shard provoking an agonizing, clipped sob. Sixteen years of tectonic pressure finally finds a fracture along the facade of poise and erupts on a seismic scale that is as awe-inspiring as it is horrific.
"AS IF I WOULD LET YOU DIE!" Wallace screams, a lifetime of bitterness channeled into a rictus that could adequately serve as a microcosm of the sum of humanity's rage over its long anthropological history. One bloody left eye swollen shut in jarring contrast to the boiling fury in the right, for the moment Wallace is replaced by a vengeful incarnate of the deity of ire.
"Just like what you did to my stepmother and Michel, just like what you did to my father... you'll die full of painful memories, the agonizing memories will kill you when the time comes!" He bellows, the wordless force of his conviction compensating for the sounds which Nicolas cannot hear.
"That's your fate, understand? That is your fate!"
Nicolas' shock at the outburst - Wallace, whose friendship have gifted him with a newfound sense of purpose, suddenly a material manifestation of hatred - subsides. His violence, rather than liberating Wallace, have wronged him much more than his father ever could. If this is the manner of penance Wallace deems fit, then he will abide. Remorse tightens a vice over Nicolas' chest until the imposing tunnel vision is no longer only a result of Wallace asphyxiating straddle.
Wallace's furious face gradually fades behind the darkness spreading its numbing tendrils over his vision. When Wallace first took him in, Nicolas had vowed to protect him at all costs. But he have gravely miscalculated his method of fulfilling this promise, and now that the bridge has been nuclear blasted into the stratosphere, there is no means of return. Wallace wants him to die from painful memories. Very well then, he will persist to confront his rightful fate, his repentance.