Unpleasant reunion
(HN: TGS AU(My take). Chapter 12)
Nicky hated this shit so much.
Ever since he’d managed to get out, to claw his life back from Theodore Peterson’s cursed basement, everything had only gotten worse. The whole town, suffocating in its own hypocrisy, stubbornly pretended that nothing had happened. Nicky was right. From the very first day, he had been damn right about his neighbor! But to the common folk of Raven Brooks, he remained just a crazy kid rambling about conspiracy theories.
And then there was that bitch, Finch Allen. Thanks to her scathing article in the school newspaper, Nicky had officially turned into the local laughingstock. “Sicko Nick,” the psychopath, the guy with the nervous breakdown on the front page. For as long as he could remember, she had been turning his life into a branch of hell.
“Scum…” Nicky growled hollowly, pressing his ballpoint pen into the lined pages of his therapy notebook with force.
He was sitting at a distant table in the school cafeteria. The experiments in the library had exhausted him, and his internal calculator was reminding him harshly: he had to stick to a regimen. With his weight and exhaustion from insomnia, reinforced by the underlying draining current, starving was deadly dangerous. Every use of his powers required salts and glucose, so he lazily picked at his food, immersed in his own gloomy thoughts.
“Maybe I should just give up? End it all, die, and then they’ll all understand. They’ll regret the way they treated me…” The thought slipped in like a gray snake, but Nicky immediately smirked venomously at his own weakness.
“Ha! Who am I kidding? They’d probably just be happy. They’d throw a party instead of a funeral and raid my stuff.”
Nicky shook his head sharply, driving away the momentary weakness, and with quick, jagged strokes, sketched a schematic lightning bolt in the margins of his notebook. From the edge of the table, right out of his own shadow, a thin anthracite figure lazily poked its head out. Andrew. The Shadow tilted its head mischievously to the side, as if silently goading its master. Nicky cast a short, heavy glance at it.
“Well, whatever. I have another way to make them pay.”
Fear. That was his new currency.
Now, the rules of the game had changed. He was no longer a defenseless rabbit. By covering his fingers with an inky umbrakinetic layer, Nicky could broadcast primal terror straight into the synapses of anyone he touched. One contact—and they would be drowning in their own nightmares.
“Why couldn't Trinity have gotten that golden stone years ago? Or why didn't I find it sooner?” A fleeting anger burned his chest, but the guy brushed it off. Better late than never.
A rustle distracted him from his heavy thoughts. Nicky snapped his head up and his gaze landed on the person who had sat down right across from him.
Finch.
She sat there, smiling with a tense, nervous expression, and gave him a slight, purely symbolic wave with her fingertips.
“Hey…” she squeezed out.
Nicky slowly placed his pen on the notebook. His brown eyes, once emerald, turned into two cold slits.
“What do you want?” he hissed, not even trying to hide his disgust.
Finch bit her lip, looked down at the floor, and awkwardly scratched the back of her head. It was obvious how much she didn't want to be there, but, forcing herself, she looked back at Roth and got to the point:
“Listen, Nicky. I just wanted to apologize for what I did. For the article I wrote about you. It was wrong, and… I really shouldn't have done it.”
Nicky narrowed his eyes and instantly calculated her behavioral trajectory.
“Who threatened you?” he asked point-blank.
“Hmm?” Finch was confused.
“Who threatened you, Allen?” Nicky repeated, leaning forward. “I know you too well to believe you’re capable of apologizing to me on your own.”
The girl sighed heavily, throwing her palms up theatrically, admitting defeat.
“Fine! Your friends… they came to me. They smashed my damn camera and promised that if I didn't apologize to you, the same thing would happen to me.”
Nicky froze. His pupils widened for a moment in surprise. Trinity? Maritza? Enzo? Ivan? They did this for him? Went into open conflict to protect his trampled name? A warmth spread in his chest, but he quickly pushed the feeling deep down.
Finch, interpreting his silence in her own way, continued to speak hurriedly, wanting to end this execution as quickly as possible:
“Look, I know I acted like crap, and there’s no excuse for me. That’s why I’m apologizing. I just don't want your friends coming after me. So…” She leaned forward, reached out, and gently, ingratiatingly placed her palm over his hand. “Forgive me.”
Nicky slowly lowered his gaze to her fingers resting on his sleeve, and then looked her straight in the eyes again. A cold, dark wave boiled inside him.
“Finch, to be perfectly honest, you don't deserve my forgiveness,” Roth said quietly, almost tenderly. “From the very moment I arrived in this cursed town, all you’ve done is make me suffer. Slandered me, harassed me, painted me as a madman. If you want my forgiveness, you’ll have to earn it. Though, I warn you, it won't be damn easy.”
“I understand,” she nodded, swallowing convulsively. “I did everything I could, I promise.”
Nicky couldn't take it and laughed dryly, brokenly. A light, barely perceptible itch of microcurrents ran through his veins.
“Sure, yeah,” he spat out sarcastically.
And the next moment, his hand caught her wrist like lightning. Nicky’s grip was dead. Finch jerked, but Nicky wouldn't let her move an inch.
Right before her eyes, Roth’s pale skin began to rapidly cover itself with a dense, pulsating inky shadow. The cloak crept over his fingers, spreading to her arm. Nicky’s whites of his eyes instantly flared with a pure, blinding white light, erasing his pupils.
Finch opened her mouth in horror to scream, but reacted instantly, pressing her free palm to her lips, muffling her own shriek. The broadcast of nightmares flooded her consciousness in an icy stream. Before her eyes, the space of the cafeteria floated, turning into eerie, distorted images of her deepest fears. She trembled, gasping for air from the mental suffocation.
“Good…” Nicky thought with satisfaction, watching her panic. He didn't want her screaming for the whole cafeteria to hear and calling for teachers. However, it was unlikely that any of this herd would dare to help her—unless someone else was itching to experience their own nightmares.
“Are you scared?” Nicky hissed, and his voice sounded with a slight electric crackle. “Are you scared of me, Finch? Great. Be scared. I want you to be scared. I want everyone around me to be scared! That’s way better than being a worthless punching bag that can’t fight back.”
He sharply uncurled his fingers. The inky cloak instantly retracted, returning his skin to its normal appearance, and his eyes turned brown again. Finch fell off her chair with a dull thud, right onto the dirty cafeteria floor, sobbing heavily, gasping for air. She looked up at him with wild, completely broken eyes, in which primal terror splashed.
Nicky smiled predatorily. He calmly gathered his pen and therapy notebook from the table.
“Good luck trying to tell anyone about this. Let’s see how fast you get thrown into the psych ward yourself,” he threw out in farewell.
Turning around, Roth walked unhurriedly into the depths of the hall, deciding to move to another, more secluded table. Several of Finch’s friends immediately jumped up to her, helping her up, but Nicky felt with his back how dozens of students’ eyes were following him. But now, there was no usual mockery in them. The taunts had evaporated. Instead, confusion, shock, and thick, sticky fear were frozen on the teenagers’ faces.
Nicky turned around and threw one single, annihilating, icy look at the crowd. The students immediately hunched their heads and hurriedly buried their faces in their plates.
It was damn pleasant. Finally, he had earned what was rightfully his. Respect? No, fear—that was much more reliable. He didn't give a damn if they left there traumatized. Nicky wanted every one of them to feel on their own skin what he had been stewing in for years: absolute helplessness and paralyzing terror.
And at that same time, by the serving counter at the other end of the long corridor…
“One, please,” Aaron said quietly, adjusting his black and white beanie pulled down to his eyes.
The smell from the high school cafeteria was the most ordinary, suffocating mix of overcooked meat, cheap sauces, and wilted salads, which hit his sensitive sense of smell hard. Aaron, to be honest, wouldn't have even noticed the difference between the current state of the school and what it was like five years ago. The only thing that seemed strange was that the local administration had swapped the middle and high school buildings for some reason. But for Aaron, there was a plus: he didn't have to relearn the floor plan of the corridors and look for detours to the classrooms.
“Of course… right away,” the cook muttered fearfully, mixing fear with hidden malice, while dishing out a portion.
Aaron just sighed inwardly. He was used to that tone. After that terrible catastrophe at the amusement park that his father, Theodore, had designed, and which had claimed the life of poor Lucy Yi, the whole town had rallied in a single impulse of hatred. To Raven Brooks, the name Peterson had become synonymous with a curse, squalor, and deadly failure. Although earlier, when that park was just being built, every teacher had considered it an honor to hang on Theodore’s every word and praise his engineering genius.
“If only they knew the true reason why we once had to flee from Germany to this backwater…” the guy thought grimly.
Suddenly, Aaron’s pupils widened sharply. The cook brought a heavy knife down with a swing, cutting the juicy turkey to drop a piece onto his tray. The procedure itself didn't bother him—after a tough school in Minnesota, the local catering seemed substandard, but quite tolerable. Something else frightened him.
Instead of the cook’s face, he clearly saw Nicky’s face. A broken, destroyed Nicky. Tears were rolling from his eyes, mixing with the blood that was literally flooding his entire face. This ghostly Nicky seemed to be screaming at him silently:
“If you don't push me away, if you don't make yourself hate me—this will happen again! We will both die!”
Aaron squeezed his eyes shut convulsively and shook his head. The hair under his hat stirred from cold sweat. Just his imagination. Just paranoia, insisting that everything would definitely go to shit.
Taking his food tray, Peterson turned around, intending to go out into the courtyard—eating in the fresh air was always more pleasant, and the empathic overload from the crowd was already starting to press on his temples with the usual migraine. But as soon as he took a couple of steps, the poisonous whisper of students gathering near the walls reached his ears:
“It’s him again, isn't it?”
“So the psycho is back…”
“Asshole.”
“We need to stay away from him, or he might slit our throats.”
Aaron didn't even clench his teeth. That, he could tolerate. The opinion of these nonentities didn't concern him, and after the basement and Mya’s death, ordinary teenage taunts had become a mere trifle. He was ready to walk past, but the next remark thrown at his back made the soles of his feet literally stick to the floor:
“Yeah, one Sick Nick was enough for us, now this one has shown up too.”
Aaron turned on his heels sharply, like in a ring. His brown eyes locked onto the speaker.
It was Seth. The local basketball star, tall, fit, confident, polished boy. Rubbing against him was his eternal shadow and best friend—Ruben. Popular, athletic, superficial jerks—the absolute opposite of what he and Nick had been.
“…What did you just say?” Aaron asked hollowly, with a fawning threat, taking a step forward.
On Seth’s face, for a split second, distinct agitation flickered, bordering on panic. And not in vain. The basketball player had a good memory: in middle school, Aaron, unable to withstand his bullying, had broken Seth’s jaw with one precise, practiced boxing punch. Back then, Peterson was only eleven, and he had gotten a huge earful from his parents at home, but Seth had apparently learned his lesson.
“…” Seth remained silent, shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“I asked: what the fuck did you just say?” Aaron repeated, this time much louder.
Peterson moved decisively toward the athlete, dropping his lunch tray onto the nearest table with a dull thud. The teenagers sitting at that table reacted instantly—they grabbed their plates in fear and scattered, as if Aaron were infected. Anything Peterson touched, in their eyes, automatically carried bad luck.
“…Nothing,” Seth finally squeezed out, backing away. Repeating maxillofacial trauma wasn't in his plans for this semester.
But Aaron didn't stop. He could digest insults directed at him, push them deep down, and endure them for the sake of Aunt Lisa. But Nicky? His best friend, the guy for whom his heart still ached from unspoken, complex feelings? No way. Nicky didn't deserve a single rotten word from these freaks. Even if Aaron himself had made a firm, exhausting decision to break all ties with him for his own safety. If you want to protect, make him hate you.
True, the remnants of common sense spoke up in time: there were dozens of witnesses around. If a fight broke out on the very first day, they would unconditionally blame the “son of a maniac.” Aunt Lisa, who had just found a good job here, would have hellish problems. And there was simply no other high school in Raven Brooks. If he got kicked out, there would be nowhere to run.
Aaron frowned, closing his eyes for a moment. And when he opened them, his pupils were covered with a barely noticeable, sinister green haze. His empathic radar turned on at full power.
Seth’s aura appeared before him in all its glory: dirty, wildly pulsating, broken by waves of fear. The basketball player’s heart was ready to jump out of his chest. Peterson smirked inwardly, realizing with devastating pleasure that he had scared the hell out of this jock just by looking at him. Boxing stance, heavy hand—Seth knew Aaron could destroy him. With a small, predatory smirk, Aaron took another languid step toward Seth, forcing him to press against the wall, when suddenly…
“… Aaron? ..”
This voice sounded like a clap of thunder in a clear sky. Weak, hoarse, breaking on a high note.
Peterson froze, and his face instantly twisted in shock. The sound came from behind a table a little further away. Aaron slowly, as if overcoming the resistance of an invisible force, turned his head.
It was Nicky. Exactly him. Lush, disheveled brown hair, the familiar spiral on his chin, the oversized blue hoodie. Only he looked… lousy. Thin to the extreme, emaciated, with cracks on his lips and some kind of wild, feverish gleam in his eyes.
Aaron’s entire carefully constructed strategy—to finish school quietly, not to cross paths, to observe from the side, and to leave town before Roth even found out about his return—cracked and fell to hell in the very first second. The plan failed. There was only one way out, which in Peterson’s guilt-distorted brain seemed correct. Retreat. Urgently.
“… Shit,” Aaron muttered through his teeth.
Turning around, he ran away from the cafeteria without caring what it looked like from the outside, covering his tracks through the corridors.
“… Aaron! Stop! Stop, I’m telling you!” Nicky shouted desperately and furiously at his back, and the heavy thud of his sneakers immediately echoed behind. The Looter, a former school track and field champion, had taken off in pursuit.
Aaron ran fast—his athletic background, his boxer’s stamina, and long weeks of survival had developed flawless automatism in his body. But Nicky was faster. Nicky was unnaturally, frighteningly mobile. In an adrenaline rush mode, spurred on by hyperactivity and gymnastic flexibility, Roth moved like a broken, lightning-fast zigzag.
Peterson didn't even have time to figure out how the blue hoodie flashed from the side, the air around heated up, and Nicky, spinning a sharp somersault off the wall, blocked his path with a dull skid.
Aaron braked, almost crashing into him. Up close, without the saving distance of the school cafeteria, Nicky looked even more frightening. Emaciated, pale, with ragged wounds on his shins hidden under his pants, and thick brown hair sticking out in different directions. Aaron smiled bitterly, barely noticeably.
“You haven't changed at all,” Aaron said quietly. His voice sounded even, but somewhere at the very bottom of that intonation, something alien, broken, was scraping. “Except you became… gloomier.”
Nicky reflexively clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white. The heart in his fragile chest was hammering at such a frantic rate that it seemed it intended to break his ribs and jump out. His brain was frantically scanning the face of the guy standing opposite him. The night-vision goggles on Nicky’s forehead, a gift from Aaron, seemed unbearably heavy now.
“Aaron?..” he exhaled, and that exhale sounded like the hiss of steam escaping from a boiler. “Damn it, what are you doing here?..”
Aaron didn't answer. Instead, he swayed dryly forward and took a step past, pushing Nicky slightly, emphatically indifferently with his shoulder.
“The same thing as always,” Peterson twitched the corner of his lips in his old sarcastic manner. “Came to ruin everything.”
A heavy, ringing silence hung in the corridor. It was so dense that it seemed it could be touched by hands, and only the rhythmic, dull thud of Aaron’s turquoise sneakers could break it.
Nicky froze, looking at his retreating back. For a split second, pure, childlike joy flared in his brown eyes—so fleeting that a human eye could barely catch it. “He’s here. He’s alive. He’s back.” But in the very next moment, Roth’s face distorted uglily, as if dozens of polar emotions were locked in a mortal battle inside him. Past curiosity, the basement, betrayal, the crowbar, Mya flying off the roof—it all hit him in the head at once, burning out the remnants of his sanity.
“…You…” Nicky whispered. His voice betrayed him, cracked, and then instantly transformed, becoming icy, prickly: “Shit.”
He took off. A step, a jump—and his fingers latched onto Aaron’s shoulder, forcing him to stop. Inside Nicky, everything was screaming: “He’s here, nearby, just hug him!”, but paranoia and the terror he had endured screamed louder: “He left you in that darkness! He hit you with a crowbar! Everything went to shit because of him!”
Aaron slowly turned his head. His eyes widened. Having an “empathic radar,” he felt with his skin how Nicky’s aura exploded with broken, dirty colors. Peterson saw every microscopic twitch on his friend’s face.
“Nicky…” Aaron exhaled, and something pleading, deeply hidden, slipped into that sound. “Are you… are you okay?..”
“Okay?!” Nicky literally exploded. His voice cracked, breaking into a furious falsetto. “After everything you did?! You… you dare ask me that?!”
His thin, sinewy hands were shaking minutely. He would clench his fingers into fists, preparing to strike, then spasmodically unclench them. Chaos was raging inside him: he wanted to beat Aaron half to death for leaving him alone, and at the same time cling to him, begging him never to disappear again. He couldn't choose.
Aaron felt this mental storm through his extrasensory perception, and his own palms under his hoodie sleeves began to shake from an encroaching migraine. A plan. He had a clear, burned-into-his-brain plan: Nicky had to hate him. Nicky had to stay away from the “monster” who only brought death. Seeing Roth break was physically painful, but for the sake of his friend’s safety, Aaron decided to take the most desperate, ugly step. He decided to hit where it hurt. For both of them.
“I…” Aaron swallowed viscous saliva, his voice broke into a rasp for a second, but he forced himself to sound as cynical as possible: “I just wanted to know. Considering your pathetic state… You look like you just took a mud bath. It’s no wonder Mya always said you stank.”
That name—Mya—cut through the air like a whistle and hung between them like a merciless guillotine. Both guys froze dead.
Nicky sharply lowered his head. He clenched his teeth so hard that a distinct, painful ringing echoed in his ears, and his jaw muscles were seized with a cramp. Tears boiled in the corners of his eyes, but a wild, primal rage wouldn't let them roll down.
“Shut up…” Roth wheezed, and that sound came from somewhere deep inside his emaciated body. “Shut up. You have no right to say her name. You…”
Aaron, considering his cruel mission accomplished, took another step back, intending to leave, but then flinched in fear.
The skin on Nicky’s hands began to darken rapidly in patches. A dense, anthracite umbrakinetic cloak crept over his forearms like living ink. The shadow behind his back stretched out uglily, and in his eyes, erasing the brown color, a blinding, ghostly white light began to flare up.
They stood opposite each other in the empty corridor: one gasping for air from rage and injustice, and the second—completely paralyzed by his own monstrous guilt. Aaron looked at the guy with silent shock. The one he wanted to hurt least of all in the world was breaking right before his eyes, changing emotional masks every second. Joy at meeting, wild resentment, rage, tears, anger—all this spun into a mental whirlwind that Aaron’s empathic radar absorbed like a sponge, blowing up his own head with hellish pain.
“Maybe I really did destroy him?” Something broke inside Aaron with a crack. “Maybe I’m even worse than I thought?.. God, I really am too terrible. I’m a monster.”
Had he really pushed Nicky away forever a long time ago, back there in the basement?
The silence between them stretched and snapped like a guitar string.
And at that moment, Nicky snapped. But it wasn't a combat lunge, not an electric shock, or a dirty uppercut. It was a desperate, insane, spasmodic jerk forward. Roth threw himself at Aaron with all his weight, his fingers latched onto the dense fabric of his white hoodie, and with a dull thud, Nicky pressed Peterson back against the corridor wall.
“WHY?!” This scream, hoarse, broken, almost animalistic, echoed through the empty passage. “WHY DID YOU ABANDON ME?!”
Aaron was stunned. His brown eyes widened from the stinging pain in his chest, but he didn't even try to block or apply a hold. He just went limp, letting Nicky do whatever he wanted.
“WHY DIDN'T YOU COME?!” Nicky shook his collar with force, as if trying to physically shake out of him all the answers that had held him in mental captivity for these long two years. “I WAITED FOR YOU! I SURVIVED ONLY TO SEE YOU AGAIN!”
Roth was almost screaming from crying, but the oncoming tears literally boiled away, dried up by the white electric light that pulsed in his eye sockets. The inky darkness of the umbrakinesis ate into his skin deeper and deeper, Andrew behind his back twisted silently, duplicating his master’s rage.
Aaron swallowed convulsively. Instead of breaking free using his colossal physical advantage, he just exhaled quietly, exhaustedly, right into Nicky’s face:
“Because I… I hate you, Nicky…”
Nicky growled animalistically, gutturally, shaking him harder:
“DON'T LIE TO ME!”
“It’s the truth!” Aaron suddenly shouted back, and his trained, usually calm voice broke into a desperate wheeze. “You were always sticking your nose into my father’s house! You were sticking it where you shouldn't have, even though I clearly, in human terms, told you: stay the fuck away! It’s all your own fault!”
These words hit Nicky in the gut. They proved stronger, heavier, and more devastating than the iron crowbar with which Aaron had hit him in the basement.
Roth flinched noticeably. His fingers, spasmodically clenching Peterson’s hoodie, weakened for a moment. He wanted to believe it was a lie, but his paranoid mind, used to doubting everything, treacherously whispered that Aaron was sincere.
“You…” Nicky’s voice faltered completely, and from his whitened eyes, breaking the magical glow, large, hot tears flowed anyway. “You were my first friend… You were the only one I ever had!”
He made one last attempt to press Aaron into the wall, but his strength, undermined by ion hunger and emotional burnout, instantly left his fragile body. Nicky’s legs buckled. He began to slowly settle down, sliding down Peterson’s clothes and slipping into dull, helpless sobs. “Why… why did you do this to me?.. Why… why did you just leave me here alone?!”
“Because… because it will be better this way,” Aaron replied quietly, his face turning to stone, looking somewhere over his disheveled head. “I’m telling you, Nicky… it’s over. Leave.”
“…But I’m still your friend, Aaron. Still…” Nicky squeezed his eyes shut, letting the tears flow freely down his cheeks, dried by the current, washing away the remnants of the inky shadow.
Aaron froze completely. His breathing was ragged, heavy, his arms hung limply along his body. He was literally stunned. Initiating his cruel plan, he had expected anything from Nicky: a crushing punch to the jaw, furious curses, screams that he was an ungrateful pig and a murderer. He was ready for physical pain. But he was completely unprepared for this.
Nicky’s thin, trembling hands, instead of clenching into combat fists, suddenly crawled upward and spasmodically, with a death grip, clutched Aaron in a desperate, rib-breaking embrace.
The guy buried his face in Peterson’s dense shoulder with force, staining his white hoodie with tears. From there, from the depths of his clothing, the first stifled, hoarse sob came. Then another. And a second later, Nicky Roth, the terror of school bullies and the newly minted master of shadows, was shaking with his whole body, sobbing into the chest of his old friend as if years of accumulated, unbearable pain were being ripped out of him alive right now.
“You… you scum…” Nicky exhaled through choking tears, hoarsely but absolutely honestly, tightening his fingers on his back.
Aaron stood like a stone, not knowing what to do. His hands, which a second ago were stubbornly pressed against the wall, wavered hesitantly, rising. The mental bond, their unique synergy, was now working to the maximum—he felt without words, with every cell of his body, the bottomless abyss of loneliness into which he had pushed Nicky himself.
Roth cried even louder, almost choking on his own breath. His thin shoulders convulsively shuddered. The ink stains finally faded away, his eyes went out, and on Aaron’s shoulder lay an ordinary, deadly tired, malnourished boy who had simply buried his face in the chest of the only person to whom he had once trusted his life.
A siren wailed in Aaron’s head. His entire plan, all this defense carefully built in Minnesota, was now collapsing with a crash. A couple more seconds of such hugging—and Nicky, with his technical mind, would calculate his empathic aura. He would understand that Aaron was lying. He would understand that Aaron loved him and was trying to protect him. And that couldn't be allowed. He had to act. Right now. Even if his own heart would be torn to pieces by it.
Aaron sharply, with all his might, twisted his shoulders and stuck out his elbows. The fragile, exhausted Nicky was thrown back by a powerful push. He didn't keep his balance and stumbled slightly, almost falling.
Peterson, not losing a second, turned around and walked away quickly down the corridor in silence, his footsteps echoing.
“…Aa… Aaron?” Nicky muttered confusedly through heavy sobs, smearing tears across his face.
“Don't follow me,” Peterson threw out coldly, without looking back, pulling the visor of his hat even lower.
But Nicky, driven by his stubbornness, which bordered on madness, took off again. He quickly closed the distance, his gymnastic stride allowing him to catch up to his peer almost closely. He reached out his hand, wanting to grab the white hoodie fabric again.
“A-Aaron… what are you—? Let’s j-j… just tal—”
CRASH!
The next thing Nicky’s brain managed to register was Aaron’s sharp, explosive turn. Peterson acted on pure boxing reflexes. Aaron’s right hand flew, backhanded, directly into Nicky’s face with a swing. With Peterson’s weight and trained technique, this hook was crushing for any peer.
Nicky flew back like a rag doll, lost his balance, and collapsed onto the hard floor of the school corridor with a dull, bone-crushing thud.
“Not. A. Word. More,” Aaron muttered hollowly. He stood with his back to the exit, only slightly, at an angle, turning his head toward the fallen one.
Nicky, gasping from the shock and the encroaching fear, leaned convulsively on his right hand, trying to lift his body. His head was spinning on a wild trajectory, colored circles floating before his eyes. With his left palm, he instantly grabbed his face—his fingers covered his cheek and nose, where the main blow had landed. His cheek was burning with hellish fire, and his nose, judging by the characteristic crunch and sharp, piercing pain, was broken. From under his fingers, thick, dark blood began to drip rapidly down his chin, flooding his blue hoodie.
Roth slowly raised his beaten, deadly tired, shocked, and absolutely horrified face. His gaze met Peterson’s.
His friend’s eyes… Aaron’s eyes were dangerously, neon-glowing with a bright green light. His empathic radar was working to the limit, recording the triumph of another’s fear.
“…I made myself clear. Stay away from me,” Aaron added in an icy tone, turned around, and walked away with a rapid stride, disappearing around the corner of the corridor.
And Nicky… Nicky remained sitting on the floor, curled up into a ball and convulsively holding his palm on his aching, broken nose. Blood flowed through his fingers, dripping onto the linoleum. Tears flowed from his eyes in a continuous stream, and his pupils narrowed from shock with a painful, unnatural speed, turning into tiny black dots.
“…No. Aaron couldn't have…”
“…”
“He couldn't have, right?”