Author's Note: I think this probably sets some sort of record for turnaround time. The reviews and new readership totally made my week – thank you so much to all of you! I've still got a overwhelming amount of 'real' life responsibility and issues swirling around right now but I will try to continue at a good pace when it comes to updating.
This segment deserves a strong warning. This chapter contains the usual strong language and content. Warning to anyone squicked by violence against children/ young teens.
Nathan sprung up from the couch and began pacing. He ran his hands, covered in dried blood, nervously over the thighs of his soiled clothes. He hoped that the still damp stain in his lap meant that it had been a dream. He shook his head trying to fight off the pressing pain at the right side of his head. The withdrawal pains were subsiding with each day, with each kill, but every morning he still awoke with the most searing pain at the right side of his head. Between the pain and worry, Nathan felt as if he were falling forward into his anxiety as he fumbled with his blood-covered clothing in the entryway of the living room.
Nathan looked down a short hall. It looked like his home but things were different; the furniture was new, the scent of fresh cooking hung in the air, and was still noticeable over the rank copper scent coating his clothes, and the carpet beneath his feet?
Nathan lifted his foot as he heard the tell-tale squishof his shoe crossing over soaked carpet. The thought that behind one of those doors – that Dr. Reid was behind one of those doors – Nathan wanted to think that he would have more control than that, that he wouldn't be so consumed by lust and rage that he'd actually…
He took a deep breath and flung open the first door to his right, a bedroom door.
It should have been his room; dark, covered in comic book clippings, a few music posters, and those blackout curtains that his mom had placed in every room of the house, so she could sleep after her all-night shifts. Nathan's room had been repainted to a sweet butter yellow with large moldings and a soft beige carpet. The room was brighter than Nathan could have ever imagined it. The pastoral colors and the whimsical decorations, Nathan felt like the memory of Reid up against him in that hard wooden chair, that had been reality and Nathan had awakened to a dream.
A pale pink and white bed sat in the middle of the room and it wasn't until Nathan had turned the corner of it, headed to open the closet, and come upon a girl. She was no older than fifteen, lying in several large streams of blood. Nathan looked, filled with panic, and immediately dropped to his knees and began trying to contain the blood. The images of what he'd done rushed him in rapid succession; she'd gone with him quietly enough but she's suspected him as soon as they were alone together, and because of that, it was too late.
Nathan had stabbed her the moment she turned to him to flee. She crashed up against him, clawing, screaming, and doing her best to fight him off. The intensity pushed him to the edge as he was lost in the frenzy of it all; the moving hands, dodging each other, all the while wanting to connect, two determined bodies moving in opposition to each other. All she wanted was for him to stop, she'd said as much as he lay over her, on the freshly carpeted floor, when he'd gained the upper hand and she'd cease to physically fend him off.
There was something about this one – she'd set the standard for all others to come after.
All of this registered with Nathan as he looked around the room, defectively trying to clean up the blood that surrounded her, and remove any thing that could give him away. The reality of the situation was that this one, the girl, would be the one to get him caught. He couldn't picture anything after her or beyond the new searing pain in his right temple.
Yet the gap in his memory, the time between her and Dr. Reid, were invisible to Nathan's mind. He knew they were there, in there somewhere, but he couldn't get at them, not until the burning stopped. Nathan sat back on the blood-smeared carpet and began to rub at his temple in a tender yet repetitive way.
Nathan tried his best to fight off the pain, chalking it up to weakness, to the addiction, it was imperative that he make it down the hall. Is Dr. Reid down the hall? Were those memories, still poised to rush him in flesh and blood?
Nathan stood and walked slowly, each footstep registering in the side of his head, and he was somewhat thankful for the pain that was distracting him from possible fear.
Stopping in the hallway and taking little time to hesitate, Nathan threw open the door directly to his left. An empty bathroom with no sign that he or a victim had been there. As Nathan's temple continued to spark and burn he thought about victims. Weren'tweallvictims?Weallsuffersomethingthatistheworstpaininourlives,whatifthatdoesbreaksomeofus?Ifitdoesbreakus,butourbodiesdon'texpire,arewethewalkingdead,inaway?They'revictimsonlybecausetheycoulddiewhentherestofthemdid.
Nathan was angry. He was angry at being hurt, sick, dying, all the while, being locked out of sight. Nathan was angry that she would get the attention for one instant moment of suffering in her life. He'd lived in pain for longer. He had to find a way to keep them around longer.
At the end of the hall were two bedroom doors, one at his left, and another at his right. Nathan threw open the door to his left and tripped back in shock at the sight that greeted him.
They'd all been in this room together, Nathan recalled; the daughter in the other room, Mom, and Dad. Getting into the house was easy, he'd broken back in many times, when his mother had come home unexpectedly and he'd been out too late. It was an effortless slip into the master bathroom window and he was prepared for what would come next.
The fear had been so much different this time. Nathan had never killed a man and nothing prepared him for the jolt that ripped through him when his eyes burst open, surging with shock, at the realization that he'd been cut. Nathan was terrified of him trying to fight back but he didn't, he just struggled to gasp for breath, and meaninglessly try to struggle away from the knife that had already entered him. The feeling of his heavy head falling, helpless, into his hand frightened him even more – it was if now he knew what Reid would feel like.
The memories, and Nathan's understanding of reality, suddenly came into sharp focus as his hand connected with the last bedroom door. She was sitting in that wooden chair, Reid's chair, and she was tied just like Reid had been tied, but this wasn't Reid, and she wasn't dead.