Cum luna solem amat (If the moon loves the sun) (english)

Chapter 37 - Punches, urges and unfulfilled love (16+)

White woke up a little later in his own dorm room. He was tied to his desk chair and his head was hurting badly. In front of him on the desk were his glasses and an envelope next to them.

He could feel his hand aching slightly, his cheek burning and his jaw throbbing from the right hook he had obviously received. 

Someone was running water in his bathroom. 

Only seconds later, King appeared in the doorway.

"Oh, you're awake. I was hoping you'd be asleep until I left." He said in a frighteningly soft voice, grabbing the envelope and tucking it into his jacket, which was lying on the side of White's bed, next to his bag.

"King? What are you doing, why are you stealing our work and why are you tying me up?" White was completely confused, he felt infinite disappointment in his heart. Tears gathered in his eyes, he didn't even know why, he swallowed them down. He should be angry with King, he shout scream and shout because of what he was doing to him, but he felt incredibly sad. 

King didn't answer him. He grabbed the chair, turned it around to face him and rolled it over towards the bed, where King took a seat on the front edge and placed some water in a bowl, a few cloths and bandages next to him. Then he sat down in front of his prisoner.

He wiped White's face clean of the dirt from the parking lot, because when he had knocked him down, he had landed roughly in the dirt and scraped his cheek and hand. 

White just let happen what King did for him. During the whole dead silent cleaning procedure, White looked directly into King's face, who still refused to cross his gaze. 

When King had finished his cleaning job on White's head, he briefly untied his injured hand and cleaned that too.

As King turned briefly and stood up to put the dirty water away before continuing with his medical care for White and perhaps smearing the bed with the mixture of water, dirt and blood, White suddenly grabbed King's T-shirt. 

The just-packed man placed the water, plus cloths, on White's desk and turned around. 

"Let go of me." He said in a calm but menacing voice. 

"No! Not until you tell me what this is all about!" White wasn't ready to give up, he clawed even harder into the thin shirt fabric.

"KING! TALK....AT LEAST YOU OWE ME THAT! I know this is the last time we'll see each other, maybe forever, isn't it?" 

At first White shouted at King, but his last sentence was much calmer and sounded infinitely sad. 

King tried to tear himself away violently. He didn't succeed very well, because White clawed into his shirt really vehemently. As a result, King's shirt ripped open at the back, right up to his shoulder blades. 

White's breath caught in his throat when he saw what was underneath. 

His back was full of scars. Some old, some new, quite fresh wounds were visible quite high up, they seemed not long closed and slightly inflamed under transparent plasters. The arrangement was strange. They were long welts with small circular flesh wounds at their ends. White, who had a certain talent for recognizing patterns and number clusters etc., immediately saw that the wounds followed a pattern and that 9 wounds always appeared in a cluster. As if King had been hit several times with a "nine tailed cat", a medieval European torture divice. Older scars, on the other hand, which were already fading, looked randomly distributed, similar to stubbed out cigarette butts, or a welt from a whip, or a belt.