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"This is what you wanted. So why are you crying?"
Your voice sounded hoarse, words lost somewhere between the monotonous ringing in your ears. The constant static resounds in your mind, rattling within the empty space where thoughts should've been. There's a dull pain in the back of your head, but it pales in comparison to the sharp sting in your stomach. The sensation of it was sticky, disgusting, and warm. Warmer than anything you had felt in a while.
Nikolai kept his grip tight on the end of the sharp shard of stained glass lodged into your stomach. The window had a hole shattered in it, through moonlight streamed into the room and gleamed on his face in iridescent purples and blues. He could feel the sting through his pristine white gloves, the tips of which were slowly being stained red with fresh blood, trickling down his wrist slowly.
He did not twist the blade in further—something that seemed peculiar to you. You weren't unfamiliar with Nikolai's handiwork; he perfected the craft of murder with the loving touch of an artist. To delicately extract pleas and screams of pain while taking the victim hand in hand towards the end. To aim to entertain even without captive audience and live out macabre performance.
It was violence perfected to a nearly erotic form.
The aftermath wasn't clean. It could never be. The brilliant crimson stain upon white cloth was an imprint of a sin no soap could ever wash away. His conscience was steeped in it and guilt mulled into it fine enough to slip through the cracks.
His guilt, unavoidable as it was, often reared its ugly head now and then, and Nikolai felt it acutely during those long nights where no one could witness it's hold on him. Like a parasite that fed on the mind, it latched onto those memories and poisoned them all. The thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of the kill—all of it was tinged by a bitter aftertaste. Yet it is precisely this guilt that drove Nikolai to his violent ways. To overcome one's mind was an expression of freedom.
Yet, the compulsion to fight against one's base instincts was also a sort of self inflicted cage of the mind.
The serpent bites it's own tail, and in that there is eternity.
Nikolai was not oblivious to his own contradictions, nor to his lack of apathy, but so long as his search for freedom lasts—and he knows it will until his death—he must take pleasure in the suffering he inflicts. Not only override his guilt, but to bend his mind to his own absolute will, without the burden of morality and loss weighing on him. Until his own demise comes, he will live out this self inflicted contradiction; a need to contradict and a need to conform all the same.
He wondered often if you would be someone who would give him up laughing.
It's a shame he'll never know.
It's a shame too that at this time you are so acutely aware of how his body betrays him in his own efforts. His knife-hand trembles, and his laughs have becomed garbled. Like an animal in pain, his voice was split between choked sobs. In the reflection of the stained glass, he could not recognize his own self.
The man who looked back at him from his peripheral vision was disgustingly real. Too much like the person you saw when he was stripped away of the overcoat, the cards and never ending performance—his tearful expression is raw.
Oh, one's flesh is a prison.
Why does he cry? It's a good question. Nikolai has all the reason to be glad; in your death he would move another step to freedom. He was so fast this time, you couldn't even touch him before he stuck the jagged piece of window-glass into your stomach and the disgusting sound of flesh being torn into reached his ears.
Yet, it felt like the world was closing in on him again as he watched your voice grow soft, broken by quiet whimpers of pain. You endure it well, he thinks, as he watched the blood trickle out of your open wound and into his palm.
It felt like the closest he had ever been to you.
The closest he could ever be to anyone, for that matter.
And he should have been happy, he really should have been, but he can taste salt on his tongue and see you grow blurry in his gaze.
When you hold his cheek, and ask him why he cries, he feels even more bitter about his own lack of control over his emotions. He knows well that look on your face; it makes him falter, for he knows that even now, pulse fading and breathing labored, you are taunting him. Yet all the more so he leans into your palm, and in your wrist he could hear the faint heartbeat.
Nikolai always knew that act of his, save for his own death, would only further solidify his connection to the physical world. You looked his philosophy in it's eyes, like a dare. As if to say,
Go on. Try to save yourself in the only way you know how. Try to see how long you can run from yourself.
It's bitter resentment and desire all the same that holds his remaining sanity hostage. When he falls back to the familiar comfort of your lips, he feels it like a brand on his very soul instead. He puts up the shackles to his own bones, even as his hands attempt to sever them. When his wax wings melt, you are the ground he shatters his soul upon.
He can still hear the pain in your trembling words, the way your hand presses on the bleeding wound. Nikolai doesn't take out the blade. It's a slow end, drawn out and painful, but as you fade in and out of consciousness, the pain gradually becomes dull, till it only registers as a faint throbbing sensation. A warm ache in the centre of the body. He swallows your voice like it could heal the contradiction of his soul. As if it could make his mind give into his heart without feeling further entangled in the web of all the lies he told himself.
In his ouroboros trap, forever self consuming, his affection is as entangled with the world that binds him as you are. Yet, when you ask him, Kolya, why do you cry?, he thinks all the same that only you could hold him down to such a wretched world.
His gloves were drenched in red by now. With death holding your right hand and him the other, you felt real. Brought to the edge between the damned and the saved, the filthy and the clean—he wished he could have held you there for longer, for it's the only way he felt he could allow himself to.
The way you say his name reminds him of a home he had buried in memory a long time ago.
The stream of blood glistens in the pale moonlight, and in its reflection he could see his fraying resolve.
—
You lived to see the daylight, but Nikolai was gone.
He left no taunting note or playful calling card, only cotton in your wound and a warm sting in your eyes. Your quiet sigh melted into the cold morning air.
You looked out the hole of the broken window. A mourning dove on the wire cocked its head at you before it spread it's wings and left for the pale blue skies.