Only half a block away from the bar and Matt knows, immediately and unquestioningly—Fogwell's isn't going to be enough, tonight. He needs to draw blood. He needs to break bones.
Matt stops at home, muscles buzzing with anticipation. He sheds his winter coat onto the floor without breaking stride as he homes in on his prize: it's deep in the bottom of the chest, wadded up into a blood-crusty ball beneath his armoured suit. The scent of gunpowder and acidic sweat. Matt strips where he stands and pulls on his uniform like a kid on Christmas morning.
The trousers slide up and over his hips more easily than he was anticipating and, when he yanks the top over his head, it doesn't hug his chest and biceps quite like it used to. It's slack and unfamiliar, wrinkling like snakeskin. Someone else's blood is smeared near his ribs, making the fabric matted and hard, and he hisses an eager breath, taking it in.
His sense of smell is razor-sharp in spite of the whiskey and exhaustion, and the blood makes his head swim a little: he feels like a shark, ready to sniff out some fucker who's waving around an open wound and asking for it.
It doesn't take long, perched at the corner of a rooftop, before he hears a scream a few blocks away. Like a tendril of blood in saltwater, sneaking its way up his nose and floating across his tongue. Shortly after—the bright taste of actual blood, a girl's blood. His senses sharpen in anticipation. Muscle memory pulls his body tight as catgut as he zeroes in on her location.
Rooftop to rooftop, never second-guessing his steps. Fire escape to alley. He finds his targets' pulses, finally, and zeroes in on them. Nothing but hammering heartbeats and his own footfalls ringing in his ears.
And then he finds them.
The girl is cowering on the ground with her hands thrown up to protect her face. Her assailant has already punched her in the eye and split her brow, bloodied her nose, and Matt can hear the way the blood gets in her eyes and her nose and her mouth, making her choke and sputter with every breath. This close, the taste of her blood drowns out almost everything else.
It's a mugging, and the girl is mumbling something, her voice thick and nasal—is her nose broken? he can't tell from this distance. "Help me, please—please help me," and Matt tilts his head to scan the man, who's taken a few steps backwards, more confused than intimidated.
The guy has a knife in his boot, hard edge scraping against suede when his bodyweight shifts, and Matt rushes him, impatient for the fight. The bullet wound in his side screams at him, but the pain goads him on as he feints left, lunges forward, knuckles cracking against the mugger's eye socket. THUD—bone crumples under his hands, connecting deliciously.
The guy shouts, stumbles backwards. Slaps one hand up to cup his fucked-up eye, and Matt squares off, panting against the fire burning in his hip. He stretches his fingers out, feeling the stretch of scuffed skin against the bones in his knuckles, before tightening his hand back into a fist. He hears himself laughing, low and crazy, and the guy blinks at him through the blood streaming down his face.
He's desperate for this; it's everything he's been aching since he had to leave Wurth with all of his ribs intact.
"Jesus Christ," the guy says, "the fuck you come from?" He pulls his hand away from the gash under his eye to inspect the blood on his fingers. "Jesus Christ," he says again, and he starts backing away down the alley, but he's still stunned from the hit and his feet are clumsy. He nearly stumbles as he turns away from them to shuffle towards the mouth of the alley, towards the street, the relative safety of the streetlights and passing cars. Witnesses.
"My wallet," the girl mumbles at no one in particular, still in shock. Matt had nearly forgotten she was even there—that he had a reason to beat the fuck out of this guy.
(It's only later, the next day, when the buzz has left his body and he is all alone in his apartment, climbing into the shower, that he has enough clarity to feel disgusted with himself for it; the selfishness of this evening, working the demons out from under his skin by causing pain and destruction. Doesn't matter how much the guy deserves it. Would God not discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart.)
"What the fuck?" the guy gasps over his shoulder as Matt starts after him. "What the fuck? I'll leave her alone, man, here." He digs for something in his pocket, but before he can pull his hand free Matt takes out his knees, sweeping his legs out from under him.
There's a heavy crack as he hits the cement, his full weight coming down hard on his hipbone. Immediately, Matt's on him like a ghoul: sitting on his chest, hands braced on his sternum like he's going to suck his soul dry, and he rears back to hit him with all he has, three hard punches shattering his jaw, crackcrackCRACK.
"Stop! Oh my god, stop it!"
He barely registers the girl screaming at him, doesn't understand what she's telling him.
He understands the words, sure, but they don't make sense: she's screaming at him to stop while she wipes the blood from her mouth, while she presses her scarf against the cut in her eyebrow, and his brain is so flooded with endorphins that he can't process her mercy for someone who just a moment ago was treating her like prey.
"Please stop," she screams again. Her shrieks are so high and sharp, like razor-wire threaded in his eardrums, and so loud that they reverberate off windowpanes for blocks in every direction, lighting up buildings in Matt's mind's eye half a mile away. There are people standing across the street, staring at the entrance to the alleyway—her panic, or Matt's violence, has finally drawn an audience, and he can hear someone on the phone with a 911 operator.
"Fine," he spits, then, to the guy, who is barely conscious and probably unable to hear him at this point: "Play dead." He reaches down into the thug's pocket to pull out her wallet. He throws it to her, but she doesn't move to catch it. It bounces limply off of her lap and lands, muffled, on the pavement as she stares at him.
The eyelashes of her left eye are gummy with blood, gluing themselves together every time she blinks, but the moment he stands up and moves away from the mugger she rushes to his side to check to see if he's breathing.
"Just go"—Matt tries to touch her shoulder, but she pulls away from him and yelps, terrified: "Get away from me!" She's cowering, fumbling with bloody hands to try and dial a phone number, fingers slippery and useless against the touchscreen, and Matt realizes people are starting to gather, drawing closer. Someone says, "I'm calling the police!" but there are already sirens coming, and more people, and Matt bolts down an alley before anyone can come closer.
He drags himself back to his apartment and doesn't bother to wash the blood from his hands before he falls into bed.
Cold fingers slide across his hip, across his belly, rooting their way under the waistband of his underwear. A predator is a predator is a predator and if you don't move a muscle they'll eventually lose interest.
A low laugh in his ear: play dead. Playing dead is the one thing Stick will admit that he's mastered.
He's real good at staying quiet, at forcing his body to fall limp instead of trying to fight his way out. He can relax his muscles, one by one, and let himself to go somewhere else in his mind, like there's a man in a top hat waving a pocket watch in front of his eyes: You're getting very, very sleepy.
He's so good at it now that sometimes when he comes back, the hum of the pipes in Stick's basement getting louder and louder until he remembers where he is, he can't even remember what happened. Which is not to say he doesn't know exactly what happened, because the ache and the sticky-wet is always there to remind him. But he can't remember it. It's like he's gone so far away from himself that he was never there at all.
[A/N: Hello, yes, I am alive. Good to see you again.]