JUST A SERVANT

JUST A SERVANT
(1935) PRASIT SUWANWEJ'S POV (Age 19):

I woke up freezing. The sun was already up, shining through the high windows, but the bed felt like ice. I reached out without opening my eyes, my hand searching for Thanawin’s chest. My fingers just hit flat, cold sheets.

I sat up. The heavy blankets on his side were thrown back. He was completely gone, and the mattress wasn't even warm anymore. He had been gone for hours. The massive bedroom suddenly felt suffocating. The memory of the freezing hands grabbing my ankles and the rotting smell from last night hit me all over again. The heat and safety of the bathhouse felt like a hallucination.

A sick, heavy feeling settled in my gut. I bunched the sheets up in my fists just to give my shaking hands something to hold onto. This was the exact thing I had been dreading. That massive, invisible boundary going right back up. Yesterday was just a blur of too much touching and too much talking, and now I was just awake and shivering by myself. He probably just got called out for clan stuff, I reasoned with myself. You had a bad dream and now you are acting crazy. I kept thinking it, but staring at that empty side of the bed actually made my chest hurt.

I pressed the heels of my hands hard into my eyes. I just needed to calm down.

But then I felt it. A dry, freezing breath brushed right against my ear.

Stop him.

My spine locked up. My blood literally turned to ice. I scrambled backward across the huge mattress, kicking the blankets away, staring wildly at the corners of the room. Nothing. The room was bright and completely empty.

"I am just exhausted," I muttered to the empty room. My voice sounded pathetic. "I am just hearing things." I shoved the heels of my hands over my ears, pushing in as hard as I could.

Covering my ears didn't do anything. The sound was not in the room. It was crawling up from the back of my own brain.

Kill him to stop him. The next voice actually scraped the inside of my head. It was harsh and metallic. Then a bunch of others started piling on top of it. One of them was just choking and sputtering on dirty water. Before he burns it all down, stop him.

The whispers started overlapping. It turned into a chaotic, messy screaming match right inside my skull. Slit his throat. Stop him. Poison him. Stop him. I squeezed my eyes shut, pulled my knees to my chest, and started rocking. I was sobbing, but no sound was coming out. Who were they talking about? Thanawin? The clan leader?

I clamped my teeth down on my own tongue just trying to deal with the sheer volume inside my skull.

And then the noise just quit.

It didn't fade away. It completely shut off, leaving the room so dead quiet that my eardrums started ringing. I was sitting in the middle of the bed, hacking and gasping for air, tears pouring down my face. Before I could even wipe them away, the heavy bedroom door opened.

I looked up, my chest heaving. Thanawin walked in. My heart jumped into my throat. I just wanted him to hold me again.

But I didn't recognize the guy standing in the doorway. He didn't look like the man who kissed me in the bathhouse, and he didn't look like the man who shielded me from the dark. He looked like a statue. He scanned the corners of the room with a lethal, paranoid focus, looking for a threat, before he finally looked at me.

His eyes were completely dead. Flat, dark, and freezing cold. He didn't ask why I was crying. He didn't even come near the bed.

"Get dressed," he ordered. His voice was completely flat. "The clan leader is holding a ceremony. I need a servant to accompany me."

The air left my lungs. A servant.

Just hearing him say that made my stomach physically cramp. It was like I was right back to being the nobody he found in the woods. I just stared at his chest. I couldn't even form a coherent thought. After everything he said to me in the water, after the way he touched me... I actually believed we were finally close. But looking at the massive, icy wall he just threw up between us, pure shame crawled up my neck. Was everything yesterday just a game? Did he just get caught up in the moment and regret it the second he woke up?

I swallowed so hard my throat clicked. I forced my head to nod. "Yes, Master," I said. Saying his title felt like swallowing ash.

I scrambled off the mattress. My legs were shaking so badly I almost tripped, but I grabbed the heavy blankets and started aggressively smoothing them out. I just needed to do something with my hands so he wouldn't see them trembling. Once the bed looked untouched, I bowed without looking at his face, muttered an excuse, and practically ran out of the room.

I didn't stop walking until I was locked inside my own tiny quarters. I leaned my back against the door and slid down to the floor.

I pulled my clean servant clothes out of my trunk. My hands were vibrating. I could barely shove my arms through the sleeves. Do not cry, I ordered myself. I blinked hard, staring at the ceiling until my eyes burned. If he sees your eyes are swollen, he will know. He will know how easily he broke you.

But my chest hitched, and a hot tear spilled over my cheek anyway. I scrubbed it off violently with my rough sleeve.

He was just embarrassed, I told myself. That had to be it. He was the untouchable master, and he completely lost control of himself in that bathhouse. He was probably just mortified that he let a servant see him like that. He was trying to rebuild his pride. That had to be the reason.

I repeated it over and over in my head, because if he had just gotten bored of me already, I wasn't going to survive it.

"Prasit, we need to go."

The voice coming through the heavy door made me flinch. My hands froze right on the buttons of my shirt. It was Thanawin, but he sounded completely different. The warmth from the bathhouse was totally gone. He just sounded like the cold master of the house giving an order.

I couldn't hide in here. I had to go out there and look at him, even though my chest actually hurt just thinking about those dead, freezing eyes. I took a shaky breath and aggressively wiped my wet face with my sleeves. I had to look normal. I had to just be the servant again. Opening that door felt like walking out to a firing squad.

I reached for the iron latch. But before my skin even touched the metal, the temperature in the room completely dropped out.

The flame in the oil lamp didn't even flicker. It just died. It shrank into a tiny blue spark and then went out completely. Pitch black hit the room so fast I couldn't even see my own hands.

We are running out of time, the woman hissed.

She wasn't in the room. The voice vibrated violently right against the back of my skull. It smelled like wet dirt and rotting leaves.

The candle is getting smaller.

My lungs locked up. The freezing air squeezed my throat shut. Before I could even back away from the door, a sharp, blinding pain split right down the center of my brain. It felt like my skull was actually cracking open.
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(1990) DR. LERT KANCHANAWONG'S POV (Age 26):

The blinding pain in my skull was so intense I completely passed out.

"Are you finally awake?"

That rough, dry voice jolted me awake. I sucked in a massive breath and instantly started choking on nothing. I pried my eyes open expecting to see the room, but it was just completely dark. Blinding pitch black.

I expected to be back on the freezing floor of the servant's quarters. I grabbed at my chest, but my fingers hit a modern cotton shirt. My own clothes. The smell of rotting mud was gone. The room just smelled like old dust and heavy incense. I was sitting upright in a chair.

There were no overhead lights. I couldn't even see the walls. The only light in the entire room was one tiny candle flame sitting on a small table.

The blind old woman was sitting right behind it.

I just stared at her face in the orange glow. My brain was completely misfiring. I touched my own face, realizing I was back in my twenty-six-year-old body, but my nervous system hadn't caught up. I could still feel the hot bathwater. I could still feel Thanawin’s massive hands holding my waist. My chest was physically aching from the humiliation of him staring at me with those dead eyes.

This wasn't a movie playing in my head. I didn't just imagine all of that. I literally lived through it. I really was that pathetic servant boy. I tried to yell. I wanted to demand an explanation for whatever sick ritual she was doing to me, but my vocal cords just wouldn't cooperate. My stomach was doing flips. I genuinely thought I was going to puke right there in the chair.

The old woman didn't seem to care that I was having a meltdown. She just stared at me through the dim light.

"You have other things to see," she stated. No emotion in her tone at all. "We are not finished yet."

I dug my fingernails into the wooden arms of the chair. "Wait, stop—" I managed to choke out.

"What I am going to show you next," she interrupted, totally ignoring my panic, "is where the hatred started. It is the cause of this tangled situation, and the exact reason you are carrying so much bad karma."

Before my brain could even process that sentence, the candle just snuffed out. Absolute pitch black hit the room again. That horrible, violent gravity latched right back onto my skull, pulling me straight down into the dark before I could even take a breath.