my face is all wet cause my day was rough. [AU & RW]
When it happened, it didn't seem real at first. In fact Luci was convinced it was merely a nightmare, that he'd nodded off in the middle of watching television or had fallen asleep in the shower after a shift. One moment he was kissing Jean-Paul, enjoying the fact that they had some time alone together, and the next he wasn't. It was probably that which should have clued him in and maybe if he'd been thinking straight, maybe if he'd taken stock of the situation, he'd have realised how odd it was that Nico had left his side. After all, why would his brother -who had been nothing short of a human limpet in the days following Val's disappearance- suddenly reassert his independence. But for whatever reason, Luci didn't think about any of these things.

When he opened his eyes he found himself sitting on a bed in a strange room that -no, wait. It wasn't strange at all, he realised on closer inspection, in fact there was something eerily familiar about it. Something about the layout reminded him of their old apartment -their first apartment- except that the decorating scheme was different, in the sense that there was one for a start. The cramped, one bed apartment that he'd shared with his brothers had been primarily decorated with drawings and scribblings which Nico had done himself. After a while Val had begun to pin them up on the walls, and Luci had always wondered if he'd done so to encourage Nico's artistic talent or to simply cover up the spots with the worst mildew and damp. He'd never had the heart to ask though, instead nodding and hmming in the right places when his opinion was asked for. They'd both looked so proud when he'd come home from work and discovered the new, brightly covered walls in the kitchen.

He was suddenly shaken out of his trip down memory lane by the sound of a door closing shut and the unmistakable presence of another mind in the next room. Tentatively, Luci reached out with his own, trying to gage if it was familiar, friendly, hostile. Anything that might clue him into why he was here. He regretted it the second he did, not expecting the sudden onslaught of thoughts and pictures which rushed over him, threatening to drown him in their perversion. It was the one downside of telepathy that no one ever seemed to talk about. The things that maybe you didn't want to hear, the kind of things that made you want to rush to the nearest police station or officer and beg them to take the person away. To lock them up and lose the key, let them rot in a cell like you knew they deserved. But you couldn't of course, not without proof. So you felt helpless, or worse, you felt guilty. Responsible somehow.

The difference was, this time they were about him. This person, this man, he was thinking of what he was going to do to the boy in his bedroom. Except that Luci wasn't a boy, he wasn't fourteen years old anymore. Or fifteen, or sixteen. He was a grown man fully capable of doing the one thing he'd always imagined he would to this monster, he'd dreamed of it when he'd lain in bed at night fighting the urge to throw up and turning over to ignore the confused, worried look in his brother's eyes. Since that first night he'd come up with a million different but equally agonising ways he would make the bastard suffer for what he'd done. Hurt him like he'd been hurt, make him understand that he'd taken something from him that Luci couldn't ever get back.

In all the years that had passed it had never crossed his mind that, when finally presented with the opportunity, he wouldn't be able to carry out a single one.


[NARRATIVE]