“You ready?” Kinzer asked.
“Yeah.”
Kinzer assessed the edges of the nose flesh. He figured that was as clean as he could get it. Placing it over Hayde’s open wound, he thought of the intense pain Hayde was about to experience. His hand with the needle trembled. He hoped this would subside and not increase the time it took him to complete his task.
Hayde closed his eyes, his jaw clenching, his forehead and temples creasing. He tightened his arms against the pipe behind him.
Kinzer pressed the needle to Hayde’s flesh and gritted his teeth. As much experience as he’d had with suturing during the War, he’d never been able to desensitize himself from the intense empathic pain he experienced during the procedures, and he could already tell this wasn’t going to be any different.
“Keep your mouth open,” Kinzer said. “It’ll help you move less. The rope I tied around your head’ll work okay, I think, but the more you move around, the harder this is gonna be on both of us.”
Hayde did as he’d been instructed.
As Kinzer stabbed into Hayde’s face, his forehead dampened with sweat.
Hayde screamed out and pulled at his bindings. His feet wiggled in the rope as he tried to kick about.
Between Kinzer’s shaking hands and Hayde’s trembling body, the next stab into Hayde’s face went too far out, and Kinzer had to withdraw it and try again.
“Please, be as still as possible,” Kinzer said. Hayde didn’t respond, but Kinzer knew that he must’ve been thinking something along the lines of, “What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?”
Hayde’s tear ducts seemed to be attached to a waterline as a steady flow rushed down either side of his face.
Pulling the fishing line through the next piercing in Hayde’s flesh, Kinzer wiped his forearm across his eye—an attempt to get rid of some of the sweat that was starting to collect and blur his vision.
“You know,” Kinzer said, starting the needle through the edge of the loose nose, “I never really think about the flits. But it’s weird imagining a group of immortals that never had a chance to experience Heaven.”
Hayde unleashed a howl as Kinzer picked into his flesh again.
“No one even considered doing anything against the Almighty’s will. There was such freedom… or so it seemed. Certainly, Heaven had a hierarchy that no one dared question, and the criteria for being one of the Almighty’s chosen few was shallower than anything even the mortals could conceive of. You see it on Earth, too. The wealthiest seem to have the luxury of reveling in nonsense. That’s what Heaven was… for the most beautiful, that is.”
“Is this supposed to be helping?” Hayde cried.
All through Kinzer’s rant, Hayde had continued screaming and whimpering, flailing about. “Because it’s not.”
“Yes, it is,” Kinzer said. “It’s steadying my hand, so shut the fuck up.”
Hayde hissed and writhed as he seemed to savor a moment where Kinzer wasn’t digging into his face.
“Heaven was the land for the beautiful… and no one else. It was peace, but it was oppression, because there was no questioning the Almighty’s ways. No questioning why the beautiful were the most valued. No questioning why the rest of us had to work to satisfy them. It was just the way things were. It’s strange thinking that flits never experienced that paradise you spoke of… because had you, I doubt you would revere it as you do.”
Kinzer continued rambling on about the effortless days of Heaven as he stitched Hayde’s nose back on and then as he worked on Hayde’s ear. After an hour and a half of Hayde’s screams and whimpers, Kinzer’s face and the pits of his shirt were dripping with sweat. He took deep, steady breaths, a habit he’d developed during the procedure—one he hadn’t shaken. He used his blade to cut the fishing wire at a knot he’d made at the base of Hayde’s ear. With a still-shivering hand, he leaned back and placed the bloody needle on the floor beside him.
Hayde had stopped crying about twenty minutes earlier, though the screaming had been steady throughout.
Blood slid down the swelling edges of his nose. That and the haphazard nature of Kinzer’s stitches made him look like Frankenstein’s monster.
“How was it?” Kinzer asked.
Hayde glared at Kinzer like he wanted to say, “How the fuck do you think it was?”
“Well, it’s over now.”
“You fucking asshole!” Hayde shouted, struggling with his restraints, which Kinzer prided himself in, for had they been vulnerable, Hayde would have surely freed himself at some point during the excessively painful ordeal.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” Hayde continued, clearly venting all that he’d been thinking previously. “When I get free, I’m gonna rip your fucking nose off! And your fucking dick! And tear your fucking eyes out, you cunt!”
There was something refreshing about seeing Hayde back to his asshole self. It almost made Kinzer feel less like a bastard for all the pain he’d put him through.
Hayde whimpered as he turned to the wall, a seeming attempt to hide his sadness.
Kinzer’s guilt returned.
He wondered if he’d had to be so cruel to find out where Maggie had been taken, or if he’d wanted to be so cruel to fulfill some dark impulse within himself.
