**OK, FOLKS: HERE IS THE SCARY PASSAGE. I WILL DEPICT, AS THIS CHAPTER PROGRESSES, A VERY BRUTAL SEXUAL ASSAULT. SKIP THIS IF YOU'RE NOT UP TO IT.
VAGABOND
The water wasn’t even that cold, but the shock of feeling it without the filters of his energies nearly knocked him out.
As the water coursed down his body, the man watched as the riverlets ran and criss-crossed his skin. Matching the feeling of the water to the sight of it. It looked like trying to observe something from very far away. Or through a fog. Something you hadn’t seen for so long that you found yourself reminding yourself that, yes, that was what it was supposed to look like. Like this. Yes. Like this.
His hair flopped forward in a black mass of coils and tendrils, and for a second, he felt ridiculous.
No more need for this, I guess.
He had decided he no longer needed his powers. Not now, not after they were all dead. Because, oh, yes, he killed them all. Every last one.
But as one promises never to do something, and then suddenly finds where they need to do that self-forbidden thing, he opened the gates of his mind, and with far more relief that he would have ever admitted, he let the Lights out.
Its surged over the strands of his hair, in a surging flair, the dye was ripped off, and what had gone into the shower as a black-haired man, emerged, shakily still, a radiant, Apollo-blond. The Lights were gone. Again, he did not need them, but he was glad they were always there.
Drying, he caught himself in a mirror. I look appalling. And that man is still screaming. “Shut up, already!”
The world shook and shattered.
“There you go,” Brent said, pouring the last of the wine.
“I got more,” Stephanie assured them all.
“Anybody care which kind I get? Red, white?” Omri called out from the kitchen.
“Nope!”
“Let the photographer decide,” Stephanie said grandly.
Omri came out with three bottles. “One for each?”
“Me likey,” Brent said.
“Gimme,” Stephanie said, fumbling with the corkscrew.
Omri plunked himself down. “You sure you don’t mind us all drinking through your wine supply?”
“I hardly ever use it,” Stephanie said. “I’m hardly ever here to use it.”
Must be fun being employed, the perennially unemployed Brent thought.
“It’s, what, Paris, then Rome?” Omri asked the model.
“And then Berlin and Stockholm after that,” Stephanie added. “Thanks,” she said to Brent, “for house-sitting.”
“Better than my usual digs,” Brent replied, easing back into the chair.
Omri blinked. “Isn’t your ‘usual digs’ a boulder?”
“’Rent-free boulder,” Brent corrected. He tipped the wine bottle back.
“Has you there,” Stephanie snickered. It was so easy to forget how shattered he was.
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