Bittersweet - ENHYPEN

The Still Monster {-} Part Two

This was never, ever, ever supposed to happen.

None of it. Not once second of anything that has happened today, the day before, the week before, frankly the last four months have been nothing but a waking hell—

Niki needed a breath.

He couldn't take one.

There were flashes, screams and bitter rage burning his head, the feelings of claws in his skin, the feeling of his teeth clamping down on fur, the feeling of pure, physically embodied betrayal. A blur. A headache. A throb of pain smothered in red. He stumbles almost blindly forward with a fist tangled in his own hair, shouldering the wall as he collided with the doorframe, anguished growl spilling over his lips.

The eyes.

They lingered.

He keeps groping forward, nearing desperation, manic laughter burning his ears with a phantom gunshot to his head, and he is losing even more sense than he even had to give away. Once he hits his knees, it's like he doesn't even feel the floorboards, and is instead back on that hill, hand clasped around its throat, and he relives the sensation of his flesh being torn open, and it's like the heat was about to consume him where he sat.

It wasn't him. Niki grabs at his face, crumpling over, the light overhead flickering in his mind, and he feels it all over again, one blistering moment after another, a despairing hiccup of frustration tearing through his chest as his arm is torn open again, and again, and again, while he stares into a pair of inhumanely orange eyes, and a lurching pain crawls up the cavern of his heart when his fingernails dig into the skin of his forehead.

Eyes, pain, desperation. Flashes, endless, boring into his brain. He can't see. He can't feel.

The air is restricting again. His skin is crawling and on the verge of combustion. Niki feels like he's about to combust. Part of him wishes he already had.

It's too much—it's all too damn much. The distinct look of fear in the eyes of the beast, while its claws scraped against his bone, as if it dared to feign remorse for all the blood in its vile maw—Niki can't do this anymore. All he sees is red. All he feels is red. The heat around his face bubbles up through his fingers, through the cracks in the floor, and if his breath so much as hitches wrong, the roof over his head would crush him under it instead.

He could scream right now and nothing would notice. His voice would be lost to the wind and never heard again.

Until, of course, he inevitably came out from the brink of death, and had to relive it all over again. And again. And again.

"Niki-"

He snaps, a vile sound leaving his throat, as his face contorted against his will to a violent snarl, and his gums ache where fangs now resided. Worse than even that, was the boiling emptiness in his throat, longing for bloodshed and misery to drown everything in his wake.

Until he meets Jake's eyes.

And suddenly he can see again.

He almost wishes he couldn't, because now he has to take in the wince of pain Jake was fighting, and is lead to the unfortunate realization that it was due to the bruising grip against his wrist, and Niki immediately lets go. He feels the rise and fall of his lungs burn against his chest, he hears the panting of his bated breath, and he realizes now just how shaky his muscles were, as if his entire body was on the verge of collapsing, and he almost wishes he had.

He notices, also, the way the floor around him had warped and splintered as if the top layer had been boiled off.

He scampers away when he regains the will to think, flinching his arm away from Jake's wrist as his disorientation fades into fear. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—any of this."