#nic02

“Don’t fucking touch me.” He spat at the nurse, all but ripping his hand away. Life had finally caught up with Julian Sigara, the bloody beating that he endured being proof enough of that. With a shirt stained red, he’d crashed into the Hospital’s front desk. The situation hadn’t fallen in his favor...  but just maybe he could reshuffle the cards. Fix one thing with the ruin De La Torre and Jackson had brought forth. "I’m looking for Monica Pelletier’s room. I’m her... significant other. She was at the pier.” When he’d sent a text a few hours ago, he hadn’t gotten a response- although that was something he expected. Maybe she’d been wise enough to change her number, blocked his, lost her phone. The list could go on and on. However, as the silence permeated, he found himself at Northwestern. Not out of loyalty or care. Out of opportunity. If she was injured and saw him in his state... well, that could give off the impression that he had nothing to do with the blast. Who knew Zephyr’s fists were matchmakers?

Nic’s apartment had always been a place of refuge for Julian, comfort contained to four walls and the sense that they were untouchable from the outside world. How many hours had he spent there, arms wrapped around her frame, promises leaving his lips about what life could look like for them both? He’d come there, the night of Michael’s murder, once the deed was done. Bloodstained hands desperately reaching for hers, the good part of him that still breathed under layers of poison plunged into tumultuous guilt. The panic subsided once Nic came into vision, she always had that effect on him. Had she not been there, Julian would’ve found solace in anything that could give him a rush and feed into the monster he was slowly becoming. The monster that’d he let take control of his body with the pull of one trigger. But she’d opened her doors to him, embracing a man that’d murdered his own brother in cold blood... because love made them blind to such a transgression. And it sealed the fact that no matter what he did, however violent and twisted, she would stand beside him. What a horrible thing to realize for someone who took and took from people like Julian Pistris. 

The weather outside was warm, Montreal’s spring coming in full bloom under its star-sprinkled sky as Julian shifted against the fire escape. A cigarette illuminated his features, eyes cast downwards to the alley below. Remnants of the accident, bruises and cuts littered his skin. Catalina had managed to finally sew up the abrasion on his chest, though he’d yet to change those bandages, blood bleeding through the fabric of his shirt. A mess of a man. After their most recent run-in, where anger paralleled the storm that rage around them, Julian had gotten a reminder. To keep a woman like Nic, despite their history that would always place them together, he’d have to try a bit harder.  Addiction only worked if someone took enough to stay dependent. Death and the accident had been traumatic, and his disappearance had created a wall between them. Especially when they’d been so dependent on each other for survival, both knowing full well that neither had anyone else to rely on. Julian’s family, what was left of it, were more ghosts than blood. Nic had described her own relationship with her adopted family as nothing more than distant, like a guest living in the Pelletier house. Misfits always found each other.

 From the corner of his vision, he saw the light turn on in the living room, the unlocking of the door signaling that someone had finally arrived. 

Tonight they were already delightfully drunk when they stumbled through the doors of Purgatory, there of their own volition and not hanging off of anybody’s arm. Cass always felt free with Nic, she was able to forget just for a little while and behave how what she assumed a normal twenty-something would. “Birthday shots for me,” Cassidy shouted over the music, one hand grasping Nic’s arm and pulling her closer. She wasn’t particularly fond of acknowledging that another year had passed by, but it was an easy occasion to milk.