Decadence

Causality

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

-Shakespeare

Nicholas's P.O.V

If someone had told me a mere twelve hours ago that I would be standing by Damien's bed side after he suffered a bruised rib and had been confined to his room or that I would be forced to watch Aidan pace around said room in a "less than composed" manner, naturally, I would have regarded them suspiciously, not to mention incredulously. Right now, however, I wasn't quite sure what to think. We'd returned home with unexpected company to boot. That is to say that Severin, Aidan, Mikhail, and Rayne had all come along as well. In Aidan's case I didn't so much as mind considering the original purpose of Damien and me revisiting my old family home had been to go get him after Mrs. Lilia had shockingly informed us that he'd gotten himself involved in some trouble with Severin the day before. The addition of three other Saunders in the Alloyd Estate now besides myself though only served to put me on edge, despite the knowledge that Rayne wouldn't do anything and that Mikhail himself was a bit nervous since he was also in an unfamiliar place, there was obviously still Severin to worry about, though he was still sleeping at the moment.

It was about ten in the morning, with everyone else having been wide awake at this point. Neither Aidan nor I had been to sleep to the whole night however, and the only reason Damien had gotten any shut eye was because of the effect of the pain killers administered to him beforehand. Even as he laid in bed now in an ornery mood, he complained about how his mother had refused to perform healing magic on him in favor of teaching him to take better care of himself, even after we had explained that the injury hadn't necessarily been his fault. To frustrate Damien further, she had advised all the other members of the main house to refrain from doing so either and unfortunately for us, the only one who had even mastered some semblance of healing magic according to Aidan was well… Severin. Things were just fantastic for all of us at the moment.

"It's hard to tell at first glance but that Severin character has a few screws loose doesn't he Nicholas?" Damien seethed quietly, filling the awkward silence of the room with his lone statement addressed towards me.

"Something probably triggered it in all honesty. He's not usually prone to violence unless he falls into hysterics, which has been happening less frequently over the years as I've heard."

"And I suppose the catalyst that finally set him off has something to do with either the reason why Aidan ended up at your family home or what happened afterward?" Damien pointed out intuitively, wasting no time in trying to make sense of things.

I glanced nervously at Aidan, who was still pacing around with his arms crossed besides me, and confirmed, "More than likely, yeah that's probably what happened."

"It sure as hell seemed random to me when he snapped. I can't even think of anything that would push that guy's buttons…," Aidan chimed in dismissively as if to counter our theory.

"Funny since that sounds exactly like something the person who made him snap in the first place would say," Damien insinuated, which made Aidan stop in his tracks and whirl his head around to look at him.

"Excuse me?" he asked with a slightly raised tone, already tense and defensive, "It sounded like you were just trying to shift the blame on me for a moment there."

"Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't" Damien's gaze narrowed and it was in that instant that I sensed that things were about to quickly go south.

And they did. Aidan unfurled his arms and pointed his index finger straight at Damien, his other hand, clenched into a fist, shook indignantly by his side. Heat emitted off Aidan's body in waves, which I could easily feel now that Damien had riled him up. I watched, my eyes flickering back and forth between the two of them and hoping that no matter how angry Aidan became, he wouldn't actually lay a hand on Damien in his current state because at the moment it appeared as though Aidan was ready to pounce on the other teen and start going at it with him. Concerning Damien, who was still unable to even sit up straight without constant pain, I knew that he would be fighting a losing battle if he really wanted to antagonize the short tempered male.