Feathers -eng ver-

Chapter 8- Welcome Back

"Narith? What's going on?" Estel had whispered in a small voice, standing still on the doorstep of his room. He had been awakened by noises coming from the hallway: Mikhael, Han and Narith were walking quickly from one side of the hall to the other, trying to keep control of the situation. In the background, he seemed to hear sobbing.

"It's nothing, Estel, don't worry. Go back to sleep." The brunette had replied, lowering himself to the little boy's height and patting his head, smiling gently at him. He wanted to make sure he didn't worry the little boy who was looking at him with his big mahogany, scared eyes. Besides, the three of them were already shocked enough.

"Narith! Where have you gone? Come back here we need you!" It was Mikhael's voice calling to the brunette. He could tell from the tone that something was disturbing them, Estel could sense it. As he could sense that they were not going to tell him what was going on, just like the other times.

"Go to sleep." The brunette urged him again, smiling at him and giving him a peck on the forehead. He patted his head again, then walked away to return to the Healer, disappearing from his sight and leaving him alone in the dark.

He knew what was going on; he had figured it out. It had been almost six months since that story had been going on, repeating itself every ten to fifteen days or so. He also knew who they were talking about.

Noya.

Since they had arrived at the House on the Hill six months earlier, the blond kid had started having nightmares or panic attacks in the middle of the night. Whenever this happened, he would start shaking and sobbing, convinced that that person was looking for him to take him back to the place from which he had escaped. Each time Mikhael, Narith and Han had to stand beside him, hugging him and making him feel safe, until he fell asleep again.

Sometimes it happened that he would stay awake and in that condition for a few hours, in which he would stare into the darkness with empty, frightened eyes, unable to discern reality from imagination or the few memories he had. He used to whisper and beg, praying for that voice to let him go. Often, in response to some too vivid memory of hands violating his body, he would even try to hurt himself.

Everything Noya remembered about his life before he escaped, he saw again in those nightmares. In a trance-like state, he relived every traumatic experience he had gone through.

Sometimes it lasted so long that Mikhael was forced to use magic to make him calm down. Each time then, after the three of them had managed to get the little boy through the panic attack and prevented the other kid from seeing it, they would have the Wizard-Healer erase the blond boy's memory so that he wouldn't remember those events.

Throughout the rest of his life, Noya had never known about the attacks of pure terror that had tormented him until almost his seventeenth birthday.

Estel, however, no matter how much the three of them tried to keep him away during those moments, he heard nearly everything, and those hellish nights had remained engraved in his mind, haunting him in dreams even years later.

          Estel suddenly woke up, jolting like a spring and instinctively clenching Len's shirt, who was resting on his chest, into fists. He thought he had managed to leave behind those kinds of memories, when Noya had his panic attacks in the middle of the night, but it was not so.

His heart was beating like a drum inside his chest, so hard and so fast that it felt like it could explode at any moment. Fortunately for him, the girl sleeping in his arms hadn't noticed -and was not noticing- at all.