so I know you’re all probs sick of this storyline, but I’m,,, not done //
Nick had opened the drawer to get the 99% he likes to use to clean his knives. Sitting at the very top is a collection of photos he doesn’t recognize. While curiosity puts them in his hands, numbness keeps them there. The first photo is one of him sleeping with Mike’s hand next to his body. The next is also of him, sitting at the edge of a bed with his back to the camera. He recognizes the shirt as one that Mike lent him in one of the days he spent in Mike’s room following the guards attacking him- before he found out he was a well kept prisoner and not an employee. They get worse the longer they go on. Pictures of him changing in his room when he thought he was alone. There are several of him in the shower. In one of the last photos in the stack, he’s facedown on a bed with bruises from the guards marring his skin. He doesn’t know how to describe the feeling looking at these photos. It’s strange, yeah. He didn’t know the pictures were being taken, he didn’t consent to them, and now they’re in his kitchen in a tangible reminder of being betrayed and hurt. Nick holds them in a tight fist as he storms to the living room and throws them down on the coffee table in front of you and Sonny.
“What the fuck are these?”
You pick them up and examine them before dropping them like you’ve been burned. “When you were gone, Dodds sent them to me and Sonny to upset us.”
“I didn’t- I didn’t know. He- I didn’t know.” Nick thinks back to the one afternoon he did know that pictures were being taken. Smiling. Laughing. The flash of the camera. Fear. “Why did you keep them? Are there more?”
Sonny stands up and leaves the room, leaving Nick alone with you and the pictures on full display. The best word he’s come up with to describe how he feels is violated. He wants the pictures gone. Now. But he can’t bring himself to touch them, knowing what they are. More than once he reaches for them but his pounding heart stops him before his fingers make contact. The way you look at him makes his heart sink too, seeing the pity in your eyes and your worried expression.
Then Sonny comes back and hands Nick a few more pictures. The first is torn so that it’s just him, smiling at the camera. But he knows that the other half of the image was Mike smiling with him. The next is him holding one of the new knives Mike had given him, an excited look on his face. Then come the ones from the photoshoot. Staring at something behind the camera downright adoringly. Then relaxed and spread out on the mattress. Then there’s the worst one. He’s lying on his back, laughing a little. His hands posed at his sides, shirt hiked up, Mike’s arm along the side of the picture. Moments after this was taken, things got darker.
Nick thinks he’s going to throw up. He drops the photos to the carpet and if he could move, he’d run. His chest is burning and he can’t breathe, oh God he can’t breathe can’t breathe he’s suffocating and he can’t think. Cold hands close around his wrists and he nearly screams, trying to jerk away because he can’t move can’t think can’t breathe.
“Breathe, Nicky, you’re safe. I won’t let you go.”
A second voice, higher-pitched, chimes in. “Stop, I don’t think that restraining him is helping.”
Reluctantly, he’s released and Nick stumbles backwards because all he can see is the flash of the camera. Ghost hands pinning him down, being growled at to ‘fucking stay still, or I’ll make you.’ He can’t do anything to save himself.
I will never tire of this storyline @space-carisi . Thank you for it!
SVU addict 