(MxM) Tales of a Shifter (P4)- The Blood

Chapter 19 - The Boy & The Lion

Chapter 19

Time passed day by day.

The Procedures went on each day as normal. Brandon and the Flame were feed new energy. Then he went back to Nora.

At night Brandon would often dream about Kail. But he never told anyone about the times when he did dream of Kail.

He didn't have the words to describe it....and for some reason he didn't feel safe talking about the dreams with anyone. Not even Nora. So he hid it and spent his days pretending that the dreams were nothing serious.

Sadly there was a darkness about all of these events that Brandon never quite noticed.

Something twisted in his life and in the way that the Alchemists functioned around him, but it was safe to say that even though Brandon was rapidly growing in intelligence and in the physical aspects of his body, emotionally he was no more mature then a young child or a teenager. He had very weak concepts of morality...or critical thinking.....because this was how the Alchemists wanted him to remain.

Even with Jacob and Nora.....there was a disconnect between reality.

When Brandon was with them he felt loved and cared for and protected...but every day Jacob and Nora simply went away and allowed the painful procedure to happen to him.

They never spoke about what happened....or the food that he was given afterwards to replenish his Flames power.

So in this way Brandon functioned as if this was all normal, because no one, even his friends didn't stop to teach him otherwise.

Food was food.

The procedure was the Procedure.

And the pain that he endured was as natural as eating dinner before bed.

Time continued to move forward.

Somehow during this time Jacob had begun to accompany both Brandon and Nora on their trips to the garden each night to eat. They sat in the middle of the square garden, beneath the small square of the sky that never seemed to change only for Brandon to go to sleep each night and restart the next day.

Like endless clockwork.

***

That isn't to say that some days were not more eventful then others.

On one such day after Jacob had taken Brandon to the library...and Nora was running late...

Brandon accidently acted on something that he had been feeling for Jacob since the Lion had first spoken to him many years ago and got a response he wasn't prepared to receive from the kind and calm Lion Shifter.

It was a few hours after the Procedure. Brandon had been fed, cut open, healed, cleaned and put back into his room, where Jacob had come to him and spirited him out of his room taking the youth with him into the Library when the two sat in a very companionable atmosphere and waited for Nora to appear.

But Brandon was soon anxious with waiting and worry. He put down the book he was reading groaned slightly and looked over at Jacob who was sitting in a high backed cushioned chair reading a slim brown book.

"Ja...whats taking her so long!?" Brandon softly whined to the Lion jumping up from his seat and walking over to a book shelf where he put the book back into its proper spot. Then he turned to Jacob and made a face.