The Flesh Cartel - Episode #7: Homecoming

hours—or maybe days—immediately following the darkness of his tomb were mostly a blur.
    “You liked school,” Nikolai said, leading Dougie down the drive and toward a neatly maintained trail that branched off into the woods. It was true. The air here was bracing, and fresh, and cold. Dougie took a deep breath, filling every last square inch of his lungs.
    “Yes, sir,” he said, feeling a little dizzy with all the oxygen, or maybe just with the sheer vastness of the outdoors—the mountains rising in every direction, the dense endless thicket of woods, the awe-inspiring emptiness of it all. Sublime , in the true Romantic sense of the word: stunningly beautiful and terrifying both. “It was my arena, my fight cage. The place where I could train hard and excel, the place where I could make—” He faltered, tripped over an exposed root, or maybe just his own two clumsy feet. Nikolai’s hand tightened on his arm, stopped him from falling, and he leaned into the touch, paused a moment to close his eyes and let it sink in. Cuffs. Chains. Cock cage. Plug. My master. He won’t let me fall. Be good for him.
    “Where you could make . . .?” Nikolai prompted.
    Dougie stared down at the path beneath his feet, at Nikolai’s hand on his arm. He couldn’t look ahead, couldn’t look up at all that open nothingness, at the whole world spread out before him. “My future,” he mumbled, nearly choking on the words, or maybe his sadness, or his shame, or the sudden emptiness inside him that rivaled the vastness of the forest around him. “Where I could make my future like Mat was making his. Except mine could last , you know?”
    Except for the part where it turned out it couldn’t. He’d never even gotten to taste it, not for a moment. Never would, either. Best just to forget about it. Focus on Nikolai’s hand on his arm, on the cuffs around his wrists, on the plug shifting in his ass with every step, and the cage stopping his cock from swelling at the stimulation. On his feet taking measured steps, one after another. On not running.
    “Your future will last, Douglas. As many years as I can provide. And your education will help to make that future, just not in the way you’d initially thought. But your intelligence and schooling have tempered you, made you thoughtful and acquiescent, and those traits have served you well.”
    Nikolai was quiet for a while after that. They walked in thoughtful silence up the trail, the path climbing a wooded hill. As they neared the top, he turned to Dougie and asked, “When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
    Dougie had to think about that, but suddenly it came to him. “A postman.”
    Nikolai chuckled softly. “And then?”
    “A fighter, for a little while, like Mat. But then he took me out in the yard and sparred with me and really hit me once by accident and I cried for like an hour and that was that. I think I was five.”
    “And then?”
    “Um . . . comic book writer?”
    “And yet you chose to study social work and clinical psychology. Do you feel any grief for your postman or fighter dreams now?”
    Oh, that was what he was getting at. “No, sir.”
    “Well then. Know that your dreams of a Ph.D. will pass from you, too. You’ll mourn them awhile, and then you’ll move on, create new hopes and dreams, ones more suited to the man you’ve grown to become.”
    He would. Of course he would. It would all be fine. Times changed. Dougie changed. Growing out of a dream wasn’t the same as having it just . . . die.
    Or be taken from you.
    Shut up, shut up, shut up. Dougie slammed that door in the corner of his mind again, and locked it this time for good measure. Nikolai hadn’t taken him. Nikolai was just . . . showing him a new dream.
    It was fine. It was all okay. Dougie would be okay. He’d survive. Thrive, even. Nikolai would give him everything he needed to go on. “Thank you, sir,” he said softly. He looked up at an old-growth poplar tree, its leaves an explosion of yellows and golds, a stunning contrast to the bright red oak beside it. Fall in the mountains was breathtaking. So different from the desert. So like his old home, back before Pattie and Mike. Back before his parents had—
    So maybe Nikolai had taken something away, but he’d also given Dougie something so very very precious back . He could get used to this.
    Nikolai let him, too, for a while. They meandered up and down an endless warren of deer paths and hiking