CREATURE

・chapter 31・

Roman stepped out onto the terrace and shut the door behind himself with a soft click, feeling the frigid night air seeping into his skin. London was finally starting to quiet down for the evening, the rumble of traffic growing more and more distant as the city pushed into nighttime. He needed some fresh air, he decided, after another suffocatingly long day trying to make his body listen to him the way it used to. 

With barely more than a glance at the six-story drop below, he sat down on the balcony's ledge and propped his leg up. He lit a cigarette behind his palm and slipped the lighter back into his pocket, releasing a languorous exhale as he felt the droning warmth settling in his chest. He blamed restlessness and boredom for his recent nighttime smoking habit, but had an uneasy feeling that nicotine was the least of his problems. 

There was no denying it anymore, it was getting bad again.

He wasn't eating, wasn't sleeping, wasn't able to concentrate on anything worthwhile and instead he was caught in the throes of longing and frustration. It made him short-tempered and nearly permanently agitated with nothing in particular, but arguably, the nighttime anxiety was still the worst.

The unmedicated, untreated, occasionally unbearable anxiety that set in when he was a teenager and never really left. Anxiety he'd flat-out refused to treat with medication because it could numb out what made him good at his job, snuff out the fiery undertones in his personality and kill the deeper-than-consciousness chaos he was constantly craving.

Anxiety he'd been condemned to live with, and at one point in time, numbed away with hard drugs. But not this time, he reminded himself. He wanted a career that lasted into his thirties, and if he was ever forced to retire early, he hoped it flat-out killed him. Because god knows there was nothing else in the world after the stage.

On stage it was chaos, chaos of his own making, chaos that comforted, chaos that called him home.

Chaos that nearly killed him six months ago. Chaos he shut off, and swore if he ever ventured near it again, it would be on different terms.

Alone with his thoughts, he watched as the pale cigarette smoke evaporated against the night sky and faded into nothing. It had been hell. The past six months, it had been absolute, never-ending, soul-splitting agony. Not just because he was sober, but frustrated beyond reason being unable to do the thing he'd been training to since he was three years old. Looking back, he had no idea how he'd survived it. Because for all his talk of tenacity and determination, life without the stage had been a sanity-draining prison he didn't wish on his worst enemy. 

Coming back, he had a plan. Settle down, get back into shape, and give himself time to mend before he took on lights and applause again. And now, a month and a half in, that so-called plan seemed more like a slow death sentence.

Waking up every day knowing the same, dull, repetitive, purposeless schedule awaited him. Having to live out hours upon hours surrounded by people who expected him to be Roman Zharnov, all the while he was staring down the nauseating truth that he wasn't half the dancer he'd been six months ago. His body didn't listen the way it used to, didn't move and respond the way it once did. 

And he had no way of knowing if it ever would again. If he'd ever feel a lick of his chaos again. 

Six months ago, Roman Zharnov would have torn apart the very fiber of the world for a sip of that chaos. Would have unleashed all creation's capacity for havoc and anarchy, would have ripped heaven to shreds and dragged hell up to the surface, done anything, to keep that chaos beating in his veins. 

But this Roman was tired. This Roman couldn't bring himself to care enough to even try. Maybe this Roman had forgotten how to do it in the first place.