(no subject)
Who: Devin Kuhl (BLUEBEARD) and Jasper Reynard (MR FOX)
What: Payback's a bitch.
When: Revenge for this event. Thursday, 5pm-ish.
Where: Jasper's office, an undisclosed location somewhere close to the docks.
Rating: Rated R for violence, language, violence, and massive amounts of creepy.
DEVIN: Devin Kuhl had been planning this for days, now. Ever since Reynard had paid her that little visit. Her skin had healed up (leaving a thin, almost too-white scar on her pale skin, visible only from a very close distance) but her pride certainly hadn't. It was more than that, it was the way he'd made her feel - defenseless, pitiful, like one of those girls she wanted to cut open and rip apart. She didn't take kindly to being put in their position, not one bit. It set her revenge gears grinding, plotting out her next move... and that particular move was to come one seemingly-innocuous Thursday, right around five. Devin had been there since four, doing her best to lurk between cars, sticking to the shadows - it wasn't particularly hard to figure out where to stand and where to come in from, so that the cameras didn't see her.
Thankfully, doctors were all narcissists and had their parking spots marked - she easily found Jasper's vehicle and waited several cars down. Waiting had never been her strong suit. Nevermind the fact that she was out on bail and about to kidnap a man in somewhat-broad-daylight: her fingers twitched, drumming out a silent beat on her thighs, and she practically held her breath as she waited for him to get to the parking lot.
REYNARD: He was expecting some sort of fall-out from his act, but Reynard expected it with the general sort of breezy carelessness that you used for global warming and cancer. It was a threat, yes, but it was far-off. Distant. Inapplicable. Which meant that his sense of caution had worn down several days after the fact, and returned somewhat to a more regular state of watchfulness -- which meant that coming off from just another day at work, he wasn't wary. Instead, the man approached his car with the same casual stride he normally adopted throughout the day, already contemplating lists and plans. Get home. Check the dog. Check the voicemail. Drop off the paperwork. Break open the journals if he could stand the amount of asinine stupidity and wordvomit without feeling sick himself.
He rummaged for the keys in his coat pocket while walking. The man never left it for the last moment, because that meant fumbling at the car door.
DEVIN: Devin could see him, skirting the edges of the cars. She knew that the tale-sense would precede her, and alert him to her presence if she timed it even a little bit wrong. So it was all at once, out of the corner of the parking lot, on feet as silent as she could make them (and let's face it, Devin might've talked big and acted like a big guy, but she was almost adequately described as a slip of a thing). It wasn't hard at all to step silently on the pavement, rushing up behind him. This part, she'd argued with herself about for hours and hours. Chloroform was common and messy. Blunt force trauma was so unpredictable.
But a taser, on the other hand - quick, effective, and even though it was a disgustingly modern invention, certain artistic sacrifices had to be made in order to level the playing field. But she'd discuss that with Mr. Fox later.
"Lovely day, Mr. Fox," she said. And then shot, the metal probes delivering somewhere between 600 and 1000 kV of electricity upon impact.
REYNARD: His legs buckled. Like his entire body getting steamrolled by a truck, Reynard's nervous system suddenly twitched and keeled over, and he found himself face-down, cheek pressed to hard concrete. His lungs heaved and convulsed, his teeth gritting even as he drew ragged breaths between each little spasm. Respiratory difficulty, his dry medical mind told him. Jesus fucking christ was this undignified.
Well, guess the other shoe finally dropped.
Witty retorts piled up, clipped sentences and phrases bursting behind the dam, waiting for the moment he'd have control over his fucking limbs again.
DEVIN: Picking Reynard's keys up from the pavement where he'd dropped them, she opened his doors and loaded him, with some effort, into the back. Handcuffs and tape were too bulky for her to carry - but a good old fashioned plastic zip tie would keep Jasper from moving his hands very much. She made sure to fasten them nice and tight, behind his back. It was a lot of effort, hauling a fully-grown man into a car. She could've done it in a past life without too much problem, but being a girl had many, many disadvantages. She still managed, though with quite a bit more grunting than she would have liked.
"Hope you didn't have plans today," Devin said, with faux-cheerfulness as she climbed into the front seat. She smiled into the rear-view mirror, but it was much more of a baring of teeth than anything else. Animalistic, predatory. "I'll be occupying you for the rest of the evening. Maybe longer," she started his car, put it into drive.
REYNARD: Part of him was still mentally reeling from the massive burst of pain. It made him complacent and quiet, at least for the first few minutes, splayed awkwardly in the back of his own car with his knees drawn up at uncomfortable angles. Reynard was a tall man. He wasn't used to lying down in the backseat -- hadn't done so since he was a child, in fact.
Finally, a long while after Devin's first few words, he spoke up, eyes watching the garish parking lights flickering across the windows. Then citylights. They were out in the streets.
"How nice," he said. "I could certainly go for the entire evening. I do so like my women with stamina." Reynard's tone was droll and off-hand. He was wary now, and cautious, but he was also keeping that bothersome rising note of fear tacitly shelved away. He'd expected something like this, after all. The backlash. The fallout. As long as the crazed bitch didn't kill him...
DEVIN: Getting out of the parking lot had been a worry for her, but in the end the garage attendants were just as careless as she expected them to be, with their magazines and their bored faces. She drove right out, into the city and then toward the outskirts fairly quickly. When you had the kind of personality that Devin had, you had the tendency to stumble across old and abandoned places to carry out grotesque crimes. She had a small mental collection of places like that - where she could chop a bitch up, if she needed to. Where good places were to hide bodies. That sort of thing. Not that it was information that she ever planned on using, really, but it was good to know.
"Oh, good, you're awake," Devin's voice was dripping with honey, not unlike a snake with venom seeping from its teeth. "I bet you knew this was coming. You're not really the type who would've been afraid of it, either, which is a fucking shame. There's nothing like watching somebody who's scared that they're about to get fucked with." Devin took joy in the little things like that.
She was a relaxed, calm sort of driver, moving at a leisurely, Sunday-drive-in-the-country sort of pace.
REYNARD: He was quiet again. He was mainly trying to keep the streets straight, but it only took a few turns before his mental map failed him and there were, indeed, no clear visible indications where they were going. Reynard moved for a moment, testing the limitations of his restraints -- but quickly realising the risk of falling flat on the cramped floor, he soon stopped writhing.
"Nothing quite like it," Reynard eventually responded. "But it's far better when they don't see it coming. That's what made last week with you so damn enjoyable."
He kept his eyes trained upwards now, inspecting the little-noticed ceiling of his car. Theirs was an odd conversation: trading banter across seats, from front to back, dry scathing words exchanged between traffic lights. She'd lost very little of her composure during their last encounter, despite being smaller. Female. And on the other side of a knifeblade. Accordingly, he did not miss a beat. If this was to be round two of their violent sparring, Reynard would maintain his calm -- and his temper -- as well as possible, and for as long as possible. He would wait to see what, precisely, sort of entertainment she had in mind.
Oh, but he missed his knives. Part of him wondered if after this (if you live through this, a pesky little voice piped up in the back of his mind), whether he would begin carrying one or several around, like a small but efficient concession to paranoia. Time would tell.
DEVIN: Fingers tightening on the steering wheel, only slightly, was the only indication that what Reynard had said, about last week being enjoyable, had gotten to her. Otherwise, she seemed perfectly normal. She adjusted the rear view mirror and sped up just a little bit. She fell silent until they got outside the city limits. Then, her conversational spirit came back to her.
"I'm glad you brought that up, how much you enjoyed last week," she spoke in a tone that came directly from the same place where that 'creepy vibe' did, wherever that was. Somewhere in her unconscious, maybe. The biggest part of Bluebeard she had left. It wasn't a particularly different tone of voice, it just had a certain quality to it. "I'm sure that you realize what you did. You put me, fucking goddamn Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper and the person who's responsible for shit you'll never even hear about, on the other side of a knife. And you used it to your fucking advantage that I'm stuck in this fucking prison of a body."
To say that Devin was angry would be a massive understatement. But she was capable of keeping her control despite it, and she squeezed the steering wheel tighter to keep her hands from shaking. "You purposefully put me in a situation where I was a helpless little bitch," she took a deep breath, and glanced into the rear-view mirror. She smirked, a little bit. "I'm going to personally make sure that favor is repaid. Whatever it takes."
REYNARD: And there it was: a wholly unfamiliar sensation crawling up his spine and oozing its way into his mind. It suffocated and writhed, and Reynard himself was unwilling to admit that it was fear. He hadn't heard small petite female in that voice; he'd heard something else, something which lurked and waited and died and was born again and was, for all accounts, far too much like him.
He decided not to answer it. Witty quips only carried you so far, and making her angrier was, perhaps, not the best idea at the moment.
DEVIN: Satisfied with Reynard's silence, Devin reached over for the radio, fiddling with the channels until she found one playing something decent. Decent to her, of course, was industrial and gothic-sounding. Suffice it to say, it probably wasn't on Reynard's presets. Her mind completely focused on what she was about to do, the music helped set the mood for her. She turned it up loud, swerving and speeding once she was pretty sure it was safe to. The place she pulled up in front of was the stereotypical 'run-down warehouse' looking location. It was gritty, dirty, and quite possibly in New Jersey.
She'd been watching the place for a few days, now. There was very little chance of getting caught there. She parked the car behind a dumpster, and shut the car off. Taking a deep breath, she turned to look at Reynard in the back. "Are you going to behave on the way in, or should I taser you again? Because seriously, that was fucking hilarious." Leave it to Devin to find tasering funny.
REYNARD: He tried not to express his distaste for the music; so the exasperated sigh went unvoiced, but he may have rolled his eyes a little, unseen in the back of the car. They finally stopped in a state he knew and visited often, but this warehouse was far beyond any sort of New Jersey recognition he may have had. He turned a little, trying to get an angle where he could see Devin in the front.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll behave."
There was a deeply self-ironic cant to his voice. Reynard did not enjoy being subservient, but at least he could be wheedling and sarcastic while doing so.
DEVIN: Smirking a little bit, she got out of the car and opened the back door. She reached in, grabbed him by an arm and hauled him out, doing her very best to avoid showing that she struggled with it. If she was a female in the next lifetime, she was just going to off herself and try again, because this was bullshit. After a bit of struggle, she managed to pull him out of the car and to his feet.
"Walk," she said, something pressed at the base of his spine that felt an awful lot like the taser. Possibly because it was. She reached into the front seat on her way past to pull out her purse, and she slung it over a shoulder. It being Devin Kuhl, there wasn't lipstick and hair ties in that purse.
REYNARD: Reynard walked. He walked with a casual and confident shamble, one foot in front of the other, but he was far more self-conscious than not; it was all image here, and he knew it, and she knew it. "I liked your other place better," he said, glancing around at the dilapidated building; "this one isn't quite so good with the interior decorating."
Poisonous sardonicism was his crutch and his pillar; it kept him standing and it kept his spine rigid, his voice frosty. It kept him going.
DEVIN: If it had been any other time, Devin would've smirked and joked back. She had a dark sense of humor that tended to win out no matter how angry she was. This, though, was a different situation. She was in a certain state of mind that allowed for no joking, no sarcasm, nothing like that. "Couldn't do this in the city," she told him, shaking her head. "Too much screaming. Blood's a bitch to get out of carpet."
The door was left open. She pushed him inside, curling her leg around his ankles to trip him. It was a low blow, she knew, but that was what she had to work with. She didn't have the body strength to take him down without help, and that made her blood boil.
The warehouse was dim, the sunlight filtered in through dirty, broken glass. The place smelled faintly like dust and metal.
REYNARD: Sprawling flat on the ground for the second time that evening, Reynard had ample time to breathe in the concrete, absorbing all the myriad smells of abandonment and disuse in the warehouse. He saw shadows and he saw darkness, but his eyes soon adjusted; there was a small flicker of pain now, too, where his ribs were scraped and his jacket torn from the fall. That flicker of pain burst into a thread of anger, and he snarled from the floor before even realising he'd caved to the rage--
"Bitch."
DEVIN: There was a pause. Devin blinked down at him, looking somewhere between enraged and amused. After a second, the scale tipped in the favor of anger, and she hauled a foot back. Before she could stop and think about it, she kicked him twice in the ribs, her thick boots helping her out in that attempt. "Oh, really?" she asked him, rhetorically of course, leaning down. Her hand curled up in his hair, pulling it hard up, stopping when his face was level with hers. She looked him in the eye.
"Think hard, Mr. Fox. Does it really seem like a good idea to call me that?"
REYNARD: He crumpled in on himself, only possessing enough state of mind to think through the explosion of pain 'Yes, that'll bruise' before he was yanked up again. When their eyes met, their boiling rage met too; it was obvious in every line of his face, the narrowed eyes and the furrowed brow, and that little twitch at the side of his mouth that wouldn't quite settle into one thing or the other.
"Get your little revenge over with, Kuhl," he spat.
DEVIN: Despite the urge to find a good curb and just stomp on his face for a while, Devin knew she had other things to do. Better things. More worthwhile things involving knives, and (hopefully) breaking Reynard just enough so that he felt the way she had. That was all she had in her mind to do - repay the favor. How far that would entail going, she had no idea.
Getting him to his feet was another challenge, but now she had that adrenaline flowing. They were only a few feet from their final destination in the building, anyway, one of those handy support beams. She dragged him toward it, snipping the ties on his hands. That was risky, she knew, but there was no other way to get him tied to the beam.
REYNARD: Ever the opportunist, Reynard saw that brief glimmer of freedom and broke for it -- the second his back was against the beam and the ties were cut, the man swung an arm free for a punch, loaded with brute masculine strength. It was simple and lacked class, and perhaps aiming for the face wasn't the cleverest thing ever, because the blow was short and sudden and inaccurate, only glancing off her jaw. Brawling had never been his specialty, and never would be -- but he tried lunging for liberty nonetheless.
DEVIN: And really, she should have seen that coming. Making a sound of surprise when she was hit, she held her hand to her face for a moment, watching him. And in the next moment, she was reaching for that taser, again, set aside on the concrete. That time, she took a far greater pleasure in shooting him with it, watching the barbs fly out and his body stop and jerk and fall. "Seriously?" was all she asked him, walking over to his body once the taser was off again and the electricity had stopped.
REYNARD: It felt worse this time. It wasn't the good old-fashioned connection of steel-toed boot to skin and bone, not force and impact, but a type of indescribable pain that flickered and danced its way through the nervous system. Reynard already knew, somewhere deep down, that he did not want to feel that taser again -- it was an animalistic fear that ran even stronger in his blood than the cocky piece of shit that was Mr. Fox.
Reynard bit down on his lip, hard enough to draw blood. He tried to say something back -- "yes, very seriously" -- but the worlds came out slurred, and now it was fairly easy for him to be lashed to the support beam, limbs slack and still shaking.
DEVIN: Smirking just a little bit, she got him back to his feet and tied to the beam, hands held with another zip tie and feet with a length of nylon rope. Didn't want any kicking or fussing, of course. "You think you're the first person who's ever tried to escape from me?" she asked him, checking to make sure he was securely tied, and then pulling the taser's barbs from his back, setting it aside. "Come on. We both know how it feels when your prey tries to escape." Amusing, was her best word for it. Like watching a mouse try to get away from a cobra inside a glass tank.
Devin opened her purse, pulled out her favorite knife - it was old-fashioned, shiny though the handle was starting to rust just a little bit. "Has Mr. Fox ever come back as a girl?" she asked him, genuinely curious.
REYNARD: "Not -- that I can recall," he answered haltingly, head back against the pillar, catching the smallest moment of rest. "The name rather forces it, I believe. Miss Fox, Lord Mary, and the tradesman's son? Doesn't sound right. The tale would be all wrong." Distaste for the possibility dripped off his tongue; it made it fairly obvious what his opinions would be regarding flipping the coin. Centuries of misogynism were hard to prevent.
And it was hard to suppress centuries of being a connoisseur of blades; Reynard caught a glimpse of Devin's knife out of the corner of his eye, and already found himself assessing its pros and cons, its merits and its flaws, and pondering which section of the edge would be best for parting skin. It took him another moment to fully realise that it wasn't his. It was for him.
DEVIN: Snorting a little bit, she shook her head, crossing back to stand in front of him. "About as wrong as 'Bluebeard' as a chick," she agreed. "Obviously I can't grow a fucking beard. Tale shit isn't going to save you. And trust me, it sucks." She ran her thumb along the edge of her knife, thoughtfully, watching a dot of blood appear. She'd sharpened the knife earlier, so it was perfect. "All I want to do is find some cute little blond and cut her fucking insides out," she confessed, and ran the blade down the center of his chest, tapping at the buttons on his shirt but not quite cutting anything yet. "And I've got all this chick bullshit going on inside of me, and it doesn't make sense and then some asshole," her voice was raising, now, in volume, again with that strange tone to it. "Comes along defending some bitch I didn't even know was his and fucking rubs it in."
Her hand wanted to stab, push the knife right into his belly. It lingered there for a moment, and she took a deep breath.
REYNARD: She took a deep breath, but he held his. Reynard's body unconsciously tried to shy away from the blade, trying not to give in to the deceptive rise and fall of his chest. Positive, negative. Up and down. Whenever you breathe in, I breathe out.
"I could have asked more politely, but I believe in powerful messages," he said, his voice whisper-thin.
DEVIN: "Well, we have that in common," Devin had control over herself, after taking a couple of deep breaths. It was a slow path back up his chest, mostly because she stopped to cut off each of the buttons on his shirt, one by one. They clattered to the floor, and she paid them no mind. She didn't say a word, simply opened her canvas and made a cut along his collar bone and down his chest, a thin and shallow one to match the one he'd given her.
"There's payback for the scratch you gave me," she hummed, thoughtfully. "But there's still the matter of you making me feel like a woman. I can't let that go so easily," she was more talking to herself than to him, though she would certainly listen to any of his input.
REYNARD: Aw, matching scars. How sweet.
He repressed that comeback, and bit down on it with gritted teeth -- again, angering the woman with the knife might press this towards some injury he wasn't prepared to live with. So far, this was... surpassable. This was simply detention, albeit sadistic; this was house arrest and a slap on the wrist compared to the worse alternatives. And hearing her pondering the possibilities, Reynard did, of course, know the answer.
I know exactly what you could do, but that's the one thing you're not doing.
And knowing that, Reynard found himself saying, "I must kindly request that, whatever you do, you leave that--" A significant pause. "--to me. One of us emasculated is bad enough. And there are so very few in our league these days."
Reynard's eyes were lidded, his voice quiet. Perhaps making his worries heard had been stupid; she could use that. But there was such a thing as male pride, and knowing when one has gone too far, and knowing what would bring on an inevitable onslaught of never-ending revenge. And he trusted that Bluebeard knew those limits.
DEVIN: A second passed, during which what Mr. Fox was implying sunk in, and Devin repressed a shudder. She could disembowel chicks from here to Hell and cut wombs out of women (ah, the Ripper days had been incredible) but mention castration and her nose curled at the thought of it. She couldn't even bring herself to threaten, to use it against him. "Fuck you," she said after a second, reaching up to swipe her thumb along, collecting the blood from his chest. She liked to get her hands a little bloody when she worked.
"I don't do that." As though he'd blasphemed or something; then again, and Devin wasn't saying it aloud for obvious reasons, but this was the first man she'd put a knife to, ever. It took her a second to get her footing again. The implication alone had made her miss something that otherwise might've actually endeared Reynard to her - he put her in an us. It was a league that she'd missed because of a self-disgust driven isolation.
Her knife strayed, making a few lazy cuts in its wake, not quite accidental but not entirely purposeful either. Incidental, perhaps.
REYNARD: Familiar. So damn familiar, but this was all wrong, and it was coming from the other end; it was interesting to note the short battle of expressions that flickered across his face with every little slip of the knife. First a wince, brought on by the pain; then an ironing out into cold, hard and impassive; then the little twitch in his lips. The blood pooled into his dress shirt, violent crimson against the perfectly-clean white.
DEVIN: Once she was satisfied, for the moment, Devin set the knife down, moving to sit beside her purse. Silently, she went through, nonchalantly pulled out a plastic bag and put the knife in. She stuck the bag, and the knife, back into her purse. "You know, no hard feelings, man," she said, pawing through the bag for the thick, black cloth, a couple of feet long. "You and I have got a lot in common," she leaned up, carefully putting the cloth over his eyes, taking away his vision. She passed her hand in front of his eyes a couple of times, testing it out. "Who knows, we could even be friends." Her hand came to rest on his chest, rubbing some of that blood in and getting it all over her palm, which was sort of the point.
She leaned up a bit further, watching his face - less than an inch away and holding her breath so that he wouldn't feel it. It was an odd impulse that came over her, leaning closer until she could almost feel his lips on hers. And then she pulled herself away quickly, taking a few steps back, and then a few more.
REYNARD: The burning sensation of the knife on his skin had had his back arched, pressed hard into the beam behind him. With every little cut, fight-or-flight adrenaline had been slowly generating in his system with no actual way to dispose of that pent-up energy, straining against the ropes as he was -- it was a curious sort of frustration, and not one he had ever experienced. Futility. But it hit close enough to another type of frustration such that he recognized it, and his body and skin prickled, on-edge and wary and frigid and dissatisfied.
And then there was a moment of silence, and the curious absence of anything happening. He could tell she was close. But without sight, the moment was lost on him.
DEVIN: Devin had thought about helplessness for a while. Sure, it made you feel helpless to not be able to control what happened to you. But not even knowing what could happen, not being able to see what was coming, that was another level altogether. She made sure to slam his car door shut when she got to it, and to rev the engine when she started the car up. This was the risky part, the leaving part. She didn't plan on going far, of course - far enough that he had no clue where she was or if she'd come back. That was her goal, of course. She squealed the tires on the way out of the parking lot, driving maybe a quarter of a mile before she stopped the car again.
REYNARD: He was good at waiting and biding his time when necessary, but he didn't know Devin. He could not predict her actions, nor guess her responses -- perhaps she really had departed. So he spent the intervening time squirming and writhing, tugging at his cords, testing the limits of his restraint. There was some slack on the ankles, but his hands were tied fast.
Reynard cursed aloud, smashing his weight back into the beam, then struggling to move again. Definitely carrying around a knife at all times from now on.
DEVIN: From where she was parked, she could see the warehouse - therefore see if he managed to get loose (which she doubted would happen) and, more importantly, if anyone else came across him. Devin poked through his glove box, idly, played with the radio for a while and send a couple of text messages. It would be bad to leave him for too long, but an hour wasn't horrible, in the grand scheme of things. And she was pretty sure that, after an hour of abandonment, she could be confident that her revenge was acceptable. She felt even with him, by her strange standards.
After an hour, she walked back down to the warehouse, bending to untie her boots and slip them off before she moved across the cement floor, socks falling silent.
REYNARD: An hour had left him time to ponder and reflect, letting himself go slack against his confinements, and letting the ropes take his weight, even if it dug painfully into the skin of his wrists. That'll bruise, too. He busied himself with making a mental tally of hurts as the blood slowly coagulated and dried, weighing injury against pride against his actual reasons for doing this in the first place. Self-fucking-sacrifice normally wasn't in Mr. Fox's vocabulary; but nowadays, it was hard to win trust without being a prince.
An hour was enough time to grow tired and weary, and for his anger to simmer away, leaving only a grim determination to wait for morning, at least, and to put all his affairs in order once he made it home. (If he -- no, once he made it home.) Someone would come along. Someone would drive by. Or she would return.
DEVIN: A swiss-army knife was produced from one of her pockets as Devin circled him, reaching out to cut the zip tie without warning. It put her behind him, nothing blocking his access to the door. As far as she was concerned, it was over; she'd left his keys in his car, left his four-ways flashing so he'd see the car once he was outside. She'd even put his radio back onto the channel she'd found it on. That was how Devin liked to carry out her revenge - completely washing her hands of it once she was finished. If the other party chose retaliation, that was their decision, but as far as she was concerned... it was over.
She'd just have to call a cab to go home.
REYNARD: After so much silence and inaction, Reynard was startled when the weight bracing his wrists suddenly... disappeared. He fell slightly forward, but caught his own balance and immediately ripped off the blindfold, the cloth winding through his tight-knit fingers. Not seeing Devin in the room ahead of him, he set to forcing his way out of the ropes at his feet, which was easy enough. Once he was free from the beam, the man instinctively stepped towards the exit ... before turning to see her behind him.
He stood there and surveyed Devin for a moment, as something almost like understanding passed between them. He could see she had a Swiss army knife. The score was about as even as it could ever be. After another few seconds of thought, Reynard stepped forward and lifted his hand to her face -- not a physical blow this time. It was softer, but had far more of assessment to it than sentiment; he brushed his fingers across her jaw, where the hit had connected, and then shook his head and left without another word.
Reynard's shirt was disheveled and open, his subtle cuts stinging in the chilly night air, his wrists slowly burning, and his ribs starting to kick up a cacophony of complaints. But oddly enough, he had stopped minding the pain. He was bruised and shaky, but incredibly prepared to go home, take a long shower, and call it a day. He would drive too fast and too recklessly on his way back to New York, and he would slam doors on his way into the apartment, and the water would hit painfully steaming-hot as he would scrub out the blood.
But it was a day, and they were even.
What: Payback's a bitch.
When: Revenge for this event. Thursday, 5pm-ish.
Where: Jasper's office, an undisclosed location somewhere close to the docks.
Rating: Rated R for violence, language, violence, and massive amounts of creepy.
DEVIN: Devin Kuhl had been planning this for days, now. Ever since Reynard had paid her that little visit. Her skin had healed up (leaving a thin, almost too-white scar on her pale skin, visible only from a very close distance) but her pride certainly hadn't. It was more than that, it was the way he'd made her feel - defenseless, pitiful, like one of those girls she wanted to cut open and rip apart. She didn't take kindly to being put in their position, not one bit. It set her revenge gears grinding, plotting out her next move... and that particular move was to come one seemingly-innocuous Thursday, right around five. Devin had been there since four, doing her best to lurk between cars, sticking to the shadows - it wasn't particularly hard to figure out where to stand and where to come in from, so that the cameras didn't see her.
Thankfully, doctors were all narcissists and had their parking spots marked - she easily found Jasper's vehicle and waited several cars down. Waiting had never been her strong suit. Nevermind the fact that she was out on bail and about to kidnap a man in somewhat-broad-daylight: her fingers twitched, drumming out a silent beat on her thighs, and she practically held her breath as she waited for him to get to the parking lot.
REYNARD: He was expecting some sort of fall-out from his act, but Reynard expected it with the general sort of breezy carelessness that you used for global warming and cancer. It was a threat, yes, but it was far-off. Distant. Inapplicable. Which meant that his sense of caution had worn down several days after the fact, and returned somewhat to a more regular state of watchfulness -- which meant that coming off from just another day at work, he wasn't wary. Instead, the man approached his car with the same casual stride he normally adopted throughout the day, already contemplating lists and plans. Get home. Check the dog. Check the voicemail. Drop off the paperwork. Break open the journals if he could stand the amount of asinine stupidity and wordvomit without feeling sick himself.
He rummaged for the keys in his coat pocket while walking. The man never left it for the last moment, because that meant fumbling at the car door.
DEVIN: Devin could see him, skirting the edges of the cars. She knew that the tale-sense would precede her, and alert him to her presence if she timed it even a little bit wrong. So it was all at once, out of the corner of the parking lot, on feet as silent as she could make them (and let's face it, Devin might've talked big and acted like a big guy, but she was almost adequately described as a slip of a thing). It wasn't hard at all to step silently on the pavement, rushing up behind him. This part, she'd argued with herself about for hours and hours. Chloroform was common and messy. Blunt force trauma was so unpredictable.
But a taser, on the other hand - quick, effective, and even though it was a disgustingly modern invention, certain artistic sacrifices had to be made in order to level the playing field. But she'd discuss that with Mr. Fox later.
"Lovely day, Mr. Fox," she said. And then shot, the metal probes delivering somewhere between 600 and 1000 kV of electricity upon impact.
REYNARD: His legs buckled. Like his entire body getting steamrolled by a truck, Reynard's nervous system suddenly twitched and keeled over, and he found himself face-down, cheek pressed to hard concrete. His lungs heaved and convulsed, his teeth gritting even as he drew ragged breaths between each little spasm. Respiratory difficulty, his dry medical mind told him. Jesus fucking christ was this undignified.
Well, guess the other shoe finally dropped.
Witty retorts piled up, clipped sentences and phrases bursting behind the dam, waiting for the moment he'd have control over his fucking limbs again.
DEVIN: Picking Reynard's keys up from the pavement where he'd dropped them, she opened his doors and loaded him, with some effort, into the back. Handcuffs and tape were too bulky for her to carry - but a good old fashioned plastic zip tie would keep Jasper from moving his hands very much. She made sure to fasten them nice and tight, behind his back. It was a lot of effort, hauling a fully-grown man into a car. She could've done it in a past life without too much problem, but being a girl had many, many disadvantages. She still managed, though with quite a bit more grunting than she would have liked.
"Hope you didn't have plans today," Devin said, with faux-cheerfulness as she climbed into the front seat. She smiled into the rear-view mirror, but it was much more of a baring of teeth than anything else. Animalistic, predatory. "I'll be occupying you for the rest of the evening. Maybe longer," she started his car, put it into drive.
REYNARD: Part of him was still mentally reeling from the massive burst of pain. It made him complacent and quiet, at least for the first few minutes, splayed awkwardly in the back of his own car with his knees drawn up at uncomfortable angles. Reynard was a tall man. He wasn't used to lying down in the backseat -- hadn't done so since he was a child, in fact.
Finally, a long while after Devin's first few words, he spoke up, eyes watching the garish parking lights flickering across the windows. Then citylights. They were out in the streets.
"How nice," he said. "I could certainly go for the entire evening. I do so like my women with stamina." Reynard's tone was droll and off-hand. He was wary now, and cautious, but he was also keeping that bothersome rising note of fear tacitly shelved away. He'd expected something like this, after all. The backlash. The fallout. As long as the crazed bitch didn't kill him...
DEVIN: Getting out of the parking lot had been a worry for her, but in the end the garage attendants were just as careless as she expected them to be, with their magazines and their bored faces. She drove right out, into the city and then toward the outskirts fairly quickly. When you had the kind of personality that Devin had, you had the tendency to stumble across old and abandoned places to carry out grotesque crimes. She had a small mental collection of places like that - where she could chop a bitch up, if she needed to. Where good places were to hide bodies. That sort of thing. Not that it was information that she ever planned on using, really, but it was good to know.
"Oh, good, you're awake," Devin's voice was dripping with honey, not unlike a snake with venom seeping from its teeth. "I bet you knew this was coming. You're not really the type who would've been afraid of it, either, which is a fucking shame. There's nothing like watching somebody who's scared that they're about to get fucked with." Devin took joy in the little things like that.
She was a relaxed, calm sort of driver, moving at a leisurely, Sunday-drive-in-the-country sort of pace.
REYNARD: He was quiet again. He was mainly trying to keep the streets straight, but it only took a few turns before his mental map failed him and there were, indeed, no clear visible indications where they were going. Reynard moved for a moment, testing the limitations of his restraints -- but quickly realising the risk of falling flat on the cramped floor, he soon stopped writhing.
"Nothing quite like it," Reynard eventually responded. "But it's far better when they don't see it coming. That's what made last week with you so damn enjoyable."
He kept his eyes trained upwards now, inspecting the little-noticed ceiling of his car. Theirs was an odd conversation: trading banter across seats, from front to back, dry scathing words exchanged between traffic lights. She'd lost very little of her composure during their last encounter, despite being smaller. Female. And on the other side of a knifeblade. Accordingly, he did not miss a beat. If this was to be round two of their violent sparring, Reynard would maintain his calm -- and his temper -- as well as possible, and for as long as possible. He would wait to see what, precisely, sort of entertainment she had in mind.
Oh, but he missed his knives. Part of him wondered if after this (if you live through this, a pesky little voice piped up in the back of his mind), whether he would begin carrying one or several around, like a small but efficient concession to paranoia. Time would tell.
DEVIN: Fingers tightening on the steering wheel, only slightly, was the only indication that what Reynard had said, about last week being enjoyable, had gotten to her. Otherwise, she seemed perfectly normal. She adjusted the rear view mirror and sped up just a little bit. She fell silent until they got outside the city limits. Then, her conversational spirit came back to her.
"I'm glad you brought that up, how much you enjoyed last week," she spoke in a tone that came directly from the same place where that 'creepy vibe' did, wherever that was. Somewhere in her unconscious, maybe. The biggest part of Bluebeard she had left. It wasn't a particularly different tone of voice, it just had a certain quality to it. "I'm sure that you realize what you did. You put me, fucking goddamn Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper and the person who's responsible for shit you'll never even hear about, on the other side of a knife. And you used it to your fucking advantage that I'm stuck in this fucking prison of a body."
To say that Devin was angry would be a massive understatement. But she was capable of keeping her control despite it, and she squeezed the steering wheel tighter to keep her hands from shaking. "You purposefully put me in a situation where I was a helpless little bitch," she took a deep breath, and glanced into the rear-view mirror. She smirked, a little bit. "I'm going to personally make sure that favor is repaid. Whatever it takes."
REYNARD: And there it was: a wholly unfamiliar sensation crawling up his spine and oozing its way into his mind. It suffocated and writhed, and Reynard himself was unwilling to admit that it was fear. He hadn't heard small petite female in that voice; he'd heard something else, something which lurked and waited and died and was born again and was, for all accounts, far too much like him.
He decided not to answer it. Witty quips only carried you so far, and making her angrier was, perhaps, not the best idea at the moment.
DEVIN: Satisfied with Reynard's silence, Devin reached over for the radio, fiddling with the channels until she found one playing something decent. Decent to her, of course, was industrial and gothic-sounding. Suffice it to say, it probably wasn't on Reynard's presets. Her mind completely focused on what she was about to do, the music helped set the mood for her. She turned it up loud, swerving and speeding once she was pretty sure it was safe to. The place she pulled up in front of was the stereotypical 'run-down warehouse' looking location. It was gritty, dirty, and quite possibly in New Jersey.
She'd been watching the place for a few days, now. There was very little chance of getting caught there. She parked the car behind a dumpster, and shut the car off. Taking a deep breath, she turned to look at Reynard in the back. "Are you going to behave on the way in, or should I taser you again? Because seriously, that was fucking hilarious." Leave it to Devin to find tasering funny.
REYNARD: He tried not to express his distaste for the music; so the exasperated sigh went unvoiced, but he may have rolled his eyes a little, unseen in the back of the car. They finally stopped in a state he knew and visited often, but this warehouse was far beyond any sort of New Jersey recognition he may have had. He turned a little, trying to get an angle where he could see Devin in the front.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll behave."
There was a deeply self-ironic cant to his voice. Reynard did not enjoy being subservient, but at least he could be wheedling and sarcastic while doing so.
DEVIN: Smirking a little bit, she got out of the car and opened the back door. She reached in, grabbed him by an arm and hauled him out, doing her very best to avoid showing that she struggled with it. If she was a female in the next lifetime, she was just going to off herself and try again, because this was bullshit. After a bit of struggle, she managed to pull him out of the car and to his feet.
"Walk," she said, something pressed at the base of his spine that felt an awful lot like the taser. Possibly because it was. She reached into the front seat on her way past to pull out her purse, and she slung it over a shoulder. It being Devin Kuhl, there wasn't lipstick and hair ties in that purse.
REYNARD: Reynard walked. He walked with a casual and confident shamble, one foot in front of the other, but he was far more self-conscious than not; it was all image here, and he knew it, and she knew it. "I liked your other place better," he said, glancing around at the dilapidated building; "this one isn't quite so good with the interior decorating."
Poisonous sardonicism was his crutch and his pillar; it kept him standing and it kept his spine rigid, his voice frosty. It kept him going.
DEVIN: If it had been any other time, Devin would've smirked and joked back. She had a dark sense of humor that tended to win out no matter how angry she was. This, though, was a different situation. She was in a certain state of mind that allowed for no joking, no sarcasm, nothing like that. "Couldn't do this in the city," she told him, shaking her head. "Too much screaming. Blood's a bitch to get out of carpet."
The door was left open. She pushed him inside, curling her leg around his ankles to trip him. It was a low blow, she knew, but that was what she had to work with. She didn't have the body strength to take him down without help, and that made her blood boil.
The warehouse was dim, the sunlight filtered in through dirty, broken glass. The place smelled faintly like dust and metal.
REYNARD: Sprawling flat on the ground for the second time that evening, Reynard had ample time to breathe in the concrete, absorbing all the myriad smells of abandonment and disuse in the warehouse. He saw shadows and he saw darkness, but his eyes soon adjusted; there was a small flicker of pain now, too, where his ribs were scraped and his jacket torn from the fall. That flicker of pain burst into a thread of anger, and he snarled from the floor before even realising he'd caved to the rage--
"Bitch."
DEVIN: There was a pause. Devin blinked down at him, looking somewhere between enraged and amused. After a second, the scale tipped in the favor of anger, and she hauled a foot back. Before she could stop and think about it, she kicked him twice in the ribs, her thick boots helping her out in that attempt. "Oh, really?" she asked him, rhetorically of course, leaning down. Her hand curled up in his hair, pulling it hard up, stopping when his face was level with hers. She looked him in the eye.
"Think hard, Mr. Fox. Does it really seem like a good idea to call me that?"
REYNARD: He crumpled in on himself, only possessing enough state of mind to think through the explosion of pain 'Yes, that'll bruise' before he was yanked up again. When their eyes met, their boiling rage met too; it was obvious in every line of his face, the narrowed eyes and the furrowed brow, and that little twitch at the side of his mouth that wouldn't quite settle into one thing or the other.
"Get your little revenge over with, Kuhl," he spat.
DEVIN: Despite the urge to find a good curb and just stomp on his face for a while, Devin knew she had other things to do. Better things. More worthwhile things involving knives, and (hopefully) breaking Reynard just enough so that he felt the way she had. That was all she had in her mind to do - repay the favor. How far that would entail going, she had no idea.
Getting him to his feet was another challenge, but now she had that adrenaline flowing. They were only a few feet from their final destination in the building, anyway, one of those handy support beams. She dragged him toward it, snipping the ties on his hands. That was risky, she knew, but there was no other way to get him tied to the beam.
REYNARD: Ever the opportunist, Reynard saw that brief glimmer of freedom and broke for it -- the second his back was against the beam and the ties were cut, the man swung an arm free for a punch, loaded with brute masculine strength. It was simple and lacked class, and perhaps aiming for the face wasn't the cleverest thing ever, because the blow was short and sudden and inaccurate, only glancing off her jaw. Brawling had never been his specialty, and never would be -- but he tried lunging for liberty nonetheless.
DEVIN: And really, she should have seen that coming. Making a sound of surprise when she was hit, she held her hand to her face for a moment, watching him. And in the next moment, she was reaching for that taser, again, set aside on the concrete. That time, she took a far greater pleasure in shooting him with it, watching the barbs fly out and his body stop and jerk and fall. "Seriously?" was all she asked him, walking over to his body once the taser was off again and the electricity had stopped.
REYNARD: It felt worse this time. It wasn't the good old-fashioned connection of steel-toed boot to skin and bone, not force and impact, but a type of indescribable pain that flickered and danced its way through the nervous system. Reynard already knew, somewhere deep down, that he did not want to feel that taser again -- it was an animalistic fear that ran even stronger in his blood than the cocky piece of shit that was Mr. Fox.
Reynard bit down on his lip, hard enough to draw blood. He tried to say something back -- "yes, very seriously" -- but the worlds came out slurred, and now it was fairly easy for him to be lashed to the support beam, limbs slack and still shaking.
DEVIN: Smirking just a little bit, she got him back to his feet and tied to the beam, hands held with another zip tie and feet with a length of nylon rope. Didn't want any kicking or fussing, of course. "You think you're the first person who's ever tried to escape from me?" she asked him, checking to make sure he was securely tied, and then pulling the taser's barbs from his back, setting it aside. "Come on. We both know how it feels when your prey tries to escape." Amusing, was her best word for it. Like watching a mouse try to get away from a cobra inside a glass tank.
Devin opened her purse, pulled out her favorite knife - it was old-fashioned, shiny though the handle was starting to rust just a little bit. "Has Mr. Fox ever come back as a girl?" she asked him, genuinely curious.
REYNARD: "Not -- that I can recall," he answered haltingly, head back against the pillar, catching the smallest moment of rest. "The name rather forces it, I believe. Miss Fox, Lord Mary, and the tradesman's son? Doesn't sound right. The tale would be all wrong." Distaste for the possibility dripped off his tongue; it made it fairly obvious what his opinions would be regarding flipping the coin. Centuries of misogynism were hard to prevent.
And it was hard to suppress centuries of being a connoisseur of blades; Reynard caught a glimpse of Devin's knife out of the corner of his eye, and already found himself assessing its pros and cons, its merits and its flaws, and pondering which section of the edge would be best for parting skin. It took him another moment to fully realise that it wasn't his. It was for him.
DEVIN: Snorting a little bit, she shook her head, crossing back to stand in front of him. "About as wrong as 'Bluebeard' as a chick," she agreed. "Obviously I can't grow a fucking beard. Tale shit isn't going to save you. And trust me, it sucks." She ran her thumb along the edge of her knife, thoughtfully, watching a dot of blood appear. She'd sharpened the knife earlier, so it was perfect. "All I want to do is find some cute little blond and cut her fucking insides out," she confessed, and ran the blade down the center of his chest, tapping at the buttons on his shirt but not quite cutting anything yet. "And I've got all this chick bullshit going on inside of me, and it doesn't make sense and then some asshole," her voice was raising, now, in volume, again with that strange tone to it. "Comes along defending some bitch I didn't even know was his and fucking rubs it in."
Her hand wanted to stab, push the knife right into his belly. It lingered there for a moment, and she took a deep breath.
REYNARD: She took a deep breath, but he held his. Reynard's body unconsciously tried to shy away from the blade, trying not to give in to the deceptive rise and fall of his chest. Positive, negative. Up and down. Whenever you breathe in, I breathe out.
"I could have asked more politely, but I believe in powerful messages," he said, his voice whisper-thin.
DEVIN: "Well, we have that in common," Devin had control over herself, after taking a couple of deep breaths. It was a slow path back up his chest, mostly because she stopped to cut off each of the buttons on his shirt, one by one. They clattered to the floor, and she paid them no mind. She didn't say a word, simply opened her canvas and made a cut along his collar bone and down his chest, a thin and shallow one to match the one he'd given her.
"There's payback for the scratch you gave me," she hummed, thoughtfully. "But there's still the matter of you making me feel like a woman. I can't let that go so easily," she was more talking to herself than to him, though she would certainly listen to any of his input.
REYNARD: Aw, matching scars. How sweet.
He repressed that comeback, and bit down on it with gritted teeth -- again, angering the woman with the knife might press this towards some injury he wasn't prepared to live with. So far, this was... surpassable. This was simply detention, albeit sadistic; this was house arrest and a slap on the wrist compared to the worse alternatives. And hearing her pondering the possibilities, Reynard did, of course, know the answer.
I know exactly what you could do, but that's the one thing you're not doing.
And knowing that, Reynard found himself saying, "I must kindly request that, whatever you do, you leave that--" A significant pause. "--to me. One of us emasculated is bad enough. And there are so very few in our league these days."
Reynard's eyes were lidded, his voice quiet. Perhaps making his worries heard had been stupid; she could use that. But there was such a thing as male pride, and knowing when one has gone too far, and knowing what would bring on an inevitable onslaught of never-ending revenge. And he trusted that Bluebeard knew those limits.
DEVIN: A second passed, during which what Mr. Fox was implying sunk in, and Devin repressed a shudder. She could disembowel chicks from here to Hell and cut wombs out of women (ah, the Ripper days had been incredible) but mention castration and her nose curled at the thought of it. She couldn't even bring herself to threaten, to use it against him. "Fuck you," she said after a second, reaching up to swipe her thumb along, collecting the blood from his chest. She liked to get her hands a little bloody when she worked.
"I don't do that." As though he'd blasphemed or something; then again, and Devin wasn't saying it aloud for obvious reasons, but this was the first man she'd put a knife to, ever. It took her a second to get her footing again. The implication alone had made her miss something that otherwise might've actually endeared Reynard to her - he put her in an us. It was a league that she'd missed because of a self-disgust driven isolation.
Her knife strayed, making a few lazy cuts in its wake, not quite accidental but not entirely purposeful either. Incidental, perhaps.
REYNARD: Familiar. So damn familiar, but this was all wrong, and it was coming from the other end; it was interesting to note the short battle of expressions that flickered across his face with every little slip of the knife. First a wince, brought on by the pain; then an ironing out into cold, hard and impassive; then the little twitch in his lips. The blood pooled into his dress shirt, violent crimson against the perfectly-clean white.
DEVIN: Once she was satisfied, for the moment, Devin set the knife down, moving to sit beside her purse. Silently, she went through, nonchalantly pulled out a plastic bag and put the knife in. She stuck the bag, and the knife, back into her purse. "You know, no hard feelings, man," she said, pawing through the bag for the thick, black cloth, a couple of feet long. "You and I have got a lot in common," she leaned up, carefully putting the cloth over his eyes, taking away his vision. She passed her hand in front of his eyes a couple of times, testing it out. "Who knows, we could even be friends." Her hand came to rest on his chest, rubbing some of that blood in and getting it all over her palm, which was sort of the point.
She leaned up a bit further, watching his face - less than an inch away and holding her breath so that he wouldn't feel it. It was an odd impulse that came over her, leaning closer until she could almost feel his lips on hers. And then she pulled herself away quickly, taking a few steps back, and then a few more.
REYNARD: The burning sensation of the knife on his skin had had his back arched, pressed hard into the beam behind him. With every little cut, fight-or-flight adrenaline had been slowly generating in his system with no actual way to dispose of that pent-up energy, straining against the ropes as he was -- it was a curious sort of frustration, and not one he had ever experienced. Futility. But it hit close enough to another type of frustration such that he recognized it, and his body and skin prickled, on-edge and wary and frigid and dissatisfied.
And then there was a moment of silence, and the curious absence of anything happening. He could tell she was close. But without sight, the moment was lost on him.
DEVIN: Devin had thought about helplessness for a while. Sure, it made you feel helpless to not be able to control what happened to you. But not even knowing what could happen, not being able to see what was coming, that was another level altogether. She made sure to slam his car door shut when she got to it, and to rev the engine when she started the car up. This was the risky part, the leaving part. She didn't plan on going far, of course - far enough that he had no clue where she was or if she'd come back. That was her goal, of course. She squealed the tires on the way out of the parking lot, driving maybe a quarter of a mile before she stopped the car again.
REYNARD: He was good at waiting and biding his time when necessary, but he didn't know Devin. He could not predict her actions, nor guess her responses -- perhaps she really had departed. So he spent the intervening time squirming and writhing, tugging at his cords, testing the limits of his restraint. There was some slack on the ankles, but his hands were tied fast.
Reynard cursed aloud, smashing his weight back into the beam, then struggling to move again. Definitely carrying around a knife at all times from now on.
DEVIN: From where she was parked, she could see the warehouse - therefore see if he managed to get loose (which she doubted would happen) and, more importantly, if anyone else came across him. Devin poked through his glove box, idly, played with the radio for a while and send a couple of text messages. It would be bad to leave him for too long, but an hour wasn't horrible, in the grand scheme of things. And she was pretty sure that, after an hour of abandonment, she could be confident that her revenge was acceptable. She felt even with him, by her strange standards.
After an hour, she walked back down to the warehouse, bending to untie her boots and slip them off before she moved across the cement floor, socks falling silent.
REYNARD: An hour had left him time to ponder and reflect, letting himself go slack against his confinements, and letting the ropes take his weight, even if it dug painfully into the skin of his wrists. That'll bruise, too. He busied himself with making a mental tally of hurts as the blood slowly coagulated and dried, weighing injury against pride against his actual reasons for doing this in the first place. Self-fucking-sacrifice normally wasn't in Mr. Fox's vocabulary; but nowadays, it was hard to win trust without being a prince.
An hour was enough time to grow tired and weary, and for his anger to simmer away, leaving only a grim determination to wait for morning, at least, and to put all his affairs in order once he made it home. (If he -- no, once he made it home.) Someone would come along. Someone would drive by. Or she would return.
DEVIN: A swiss-army knife was produced from one of her pockets as Devin circled him, reaching out to cut the zip tie without warning. It put her behind him, nothing blocking his access to the door. As far as she was concerned, it was over; she'd left his keys in his car, left his four-ways flashing so he'd see the car once he was outside. She'd even put his radio back onto the channel she'd found it on. That was how Devin liked to carry out her revenge - completely washing her hands of it once she was finished. If the other party chose retaliation, that was their decision, but as far as she was concerned... it was over.
She'd just have to call a cab to go home.
REYNARD: After so much silence and inaction, Reynard was startled when the weight bracing his wrists suddenly... disappeared. He fell slightly forward, but caught his own balance and immediately ripped off the blindfold, the cloth winding through his tight-knit fingers. Not seeing Devin in the room ahead of him, he set to forcing his way out of the ropes at his feet, which was easy enough. Once he was free from the beam, the man instinctively stepped towards the exit ... before turning to see her behind him.
He stood there and surveyed Devin for a moment, as something almost like understanding passed between them. He could see she had a Swiss army knife. The score was about as even as it could ever be. After another few seconds of thought, Reynard stepped forward and lifted his hand to her face -- not a physical blow this time. It was softer, but had far more of assessment to it than sentiment; he brushed his fingers across her jaw, where the hit had connected, and then shook his head and left without another word.
Reynard's shirt was disheveled and open, his subtle cuts stinging in the chilly night air, his wrists slowly burning, and his ribs starting to kick up a cacophony of complaints. But oddly enough, he had stopped minding the pain. He was bruised and shaky, but incredibly prepared to go home, take a long shower, and call it a day. He would drive too fast and too recklessly on his way back to New York, and he would slam doors on his way into the apartment, and the water would hit painfully steaming-hot as he would scrub out the blood.
But it was a day, and they were even.