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The first time Igor felt it he wasn’t even Igor yet.
It was there in his last moments as a nameless hunchback, violently pressed between Victor and a pillar, that the feeling began: a warmth that seemed to fill out the newfound space in his upright body.
He wasn’t sure he’d call is pleasant, but pleasant was a concept with which he was completely unfamiliar. This could be it, Igor supposed.
He kept feeling it every time Victor grabbed his arm or touched his face or called him brilliant. He soon came to believe that there must be things even beyond pleasant because surely pleasant alone couldn’t be enough to drive him the way this feeling did. It must be something more that made Igor throw everything he had into trying to earn Victor’s praise, into doing something, anything, worthy of his adoring gazes. He didn’t think it was pleasant that grew hot within him and clawed at the inside of his chest demanding more.
Being with Lorelei confirmed it. Being with her was pleasant. Being with her made him feel lighter, as if all the things he carried with him were someone else’s burden, and the comfort he found in her arms made him feel as though nothing could ever hurt him again. Igor wondered if this was how she used to feel when she soared above the circus goers, so very close to flying. The way he felt with her was everything Igor ever craved in his previous life of misery. It was just the right amount of warm, like sitting beneath the sun in spring; it was unyieldingly saccharine like the circus’ candy floss, in every way the antithesis of pain and cruelty.
And yet everything Igor had ever wanted had become not nearly enough.
Pleasant lived up to its name, but it was nothing compared to want, to need, to desire. To the things Igor felt for Victor. The same way he became numb to suffering with no kindness to compare it to, so too did Igor become numb to pleasantness when it became monotony. The one note sweetness Lorelei offered could never satisfy the craving within him for the unpredictable. Being with Victor was a constant battle between being fulfilled and being infuriated. Every moment they spent together a delicate balance on a knife’s edge. It filled him with something so far transcending pleasant that the nameless hunchback he once was could never have even dreamt of it. How could Igor ever again settle for tedium when Victor had shown him a world of exhilaration?
But Victor was gone. And Lorelei was here. And Igor supposed that he could make do with pleasant.