Vegas and Pete: the series

Hunger Sated

POV Vegas

It was late, the sun had long set and I found myself unable to sleep. Being here made me anxious. I was so used to trying to outsmart everyone all the time, making sure I was always one step ahead. Now that I had no steps left to take I wasn't sure what to do with myself. Especially at night, I was used to going out to check the clubs, the casinos, or having a meeting where it was more about reading body language, then it was about what anyone actually said.

Not that that mattered now. My father had come in the early evening when I was tending to a still sleeping Pete, and gave me another lashing, this one was about something new. Apparently Uncle Korn had done something involving Porsche and Kinn and he'd been angry about it. I'd taken a few good knocks to the jaw and one shiner just below my eye.

Maybe that was a reason I was having trouble going to sleep, as each time I rolled over onto that side of my face it hurt. I sigh, and then exit the room intending to walk off some of my excess energy.

A while later I find myself approaching the pets room. I'll check in on them once more and then try to get back to sleep I think. So I quietly open the door and walk inside.

My hedgehog is asleep, cutely curled up in a small ball on the side of his cage. Pete is asleep on the bed, the covers half lying off him as if he'd kicked them down while asleep. I walk over to the bed intent on pulling them up for him, but I stop when Pete opens his eyes. He then painstakingly pulls himself up into a sitting position.

When he finally looks at me I watch his eyes pause on my new bruises. "He did it again?" He asks, though it's not really a question, more of an understood statement. "Are you okay?"

I feel myself scoff lightly at the question. "Are you not used to it yet?" He'd been here multiple times already. This was nothing new and it never had been. As someone who'd gone through the same thing before, it felt superfluous.

"And are you hurt?" Pete asks me.

This gives me a bit of pause. That was an entirely different question. One I don't think anyone had ever bothered to ask me before. My brother had always avoided it because he knew I would never tell him, and he'd seen it for so long, that like me he'd grown used to it. There was no point in asking.

Still it felt odd to hear the words. Are you hurt? Of course I was, I was hurt, I had been hurt.

I look down into the somehow softer pitch black eyes. "I am hurt." I tell him honestly. I don't remember the last time I admitted to that, not just to someone else, but even to myself. "But I don't know why it's not as bad as before."

It wasn't, somehow in some way, my face stung, but the hurt it caused hadn't made me want to lash out. I hadn't wanted to bury it.

I look down at Pete slouching in his covers looking at me like he knows why, but is simply going to let me figure it out, if I wanted to. "That's good." is what he says to me.

I pull my eyes away from him and they land on the uneaten salad that sits on the side dresser. "You're still not eating?" I ask him in a soft but exasperated tone. Even though he's hurt and needs all the strength he can get, is he really going to continue to starve himself?

Pete looks over at the salad and shifts his eyes off of me almost guiltily. "Didn't you make it a while ago? It just doesn't look fresh." He says and meets my eyes again. I clench my jaw, this picky little pet. I give him a sharp look before I turn and head back out the door. I then make my way over to the kitchen and search the cabinets for something that is easy to make.

I open up one cabinet and see it stuffed with instant ramen.

I make Pete some food after boiling up some water, softening the dried noodles, and adding in the spice packet. I transfer it to a simple porcelain bowl and grab a pair of utensils to eat it with. Then I walk over to where I'd left a book I'd been reading on the coffee table and, with both the steaming bowl of ramen and my book in hand, I head back to the bedroom.