Tenny filled the threshold, hesitating a moment, his expression, before he dragged his mask into place, one of quiet horror as his gaze went to Reese’s bloodied hands and arm.
Reese felt blood slide between his fingers; it was dripping down onto the carpet, now.
Tenny took a short, sharp breath, and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind him. “Here.” He crouched down in front of Reese and reached out with both hands.
Even though he’d just attached Reese a few minutes before, had been the one to cause this damage, wild-eyed and vicious, Reese immediately submitted his injuries to him; lad the backs of his hands in Tenny’s open palms.
They both seemed to realize it at once. He sucked in a breath, and heard Tenny do the same.
Reese stared down at his own hands, the red-soaked gauze, the pearls of blood sliding out from the edges, rolling off his palms – and down into Tenny’s palms. Tenny’s thumb stroked over the pads of his fingers, smearing the blood there, a slow, back-and-forth sweep. His breath shivered on the exhale, cool across Tenny’s wet skin.
Then Tenny reached for the kit and set to work. He taped wadded cotton batting over the lacerations to stop the bleeding, then used alcohol wipes to clean off the rest of Reese’s skin. By the time he peeled the tape back, the cuts were ready to be flushed; he did so with saline, catching the drip in the little dish Reese kept for just such a purpose.
Tenny worked in silence, and Reese glanced up once, searchingly, to find him intent on his task, brows drawn together, his frown deep.
When the wounds were clean, Tenny paused a moment. Traced the very edge of the one on Reese’s arm with a careful fingertip. He exhaled long and slow through his nostrils, shoulders slumping; but still, he didn’t speak.
Ointment was applied, and then bandages.
Reese flexed his hands afterward, the tape tight and binding against the movement. “Thank you.”
Tenny met his gaze, then, finally. His eyes were very wide, and very blue, and full of an emotion that Tenny couldn’t name, but whose enormity hit him like a shove in the chest, regardless. It stunned him – and by the time he’d scraped together a question, Tenny was standing, and tidying the kit.
Reese sat upright, bandaged hands resting on his thighs. He studied Tenny’s profile as he ordered everything with military efficiency, and snapped the lid shut. The mask was firmly in place again, an expressionless front that revealed nothing, and invited nothing.
“Tenny.”
He gathered up the dirty gauze, wipes, and batting and went to throw them in the bathroom wastebasket.
“Tenny,” Reese tried again.
Tenny paused on his way to the door, hands by his sides – curling into fists as he took a deep breath and released it, his jaw set.
“I’m not angry.”
Tenny didn’t respond, though Reese saw a muscle twitch in his cheek. Then he left, closing the door softly behind him.
Reese stared at the panel a long moment, willing it to open again. When it didn’t, he flopped backward onto the bed, folding his injured hands over his stomach. He stared up at the ceiling, and replayed Tenny’s face in the garage – and his face a few minutes ago, when he’d traced Reese’s wound, and then sought his gaze. He lingered over the contrast; shaping and recreating that emotion he’d seen, trying to place it – failing.
Then he thought about what Kris had said at dinner. About new friends, about dating. He felt hollow and lost when he contemplated those things, unable to envision them.
But he’d felt like that a lot lately, in the wake of Tenny’s hate. So. He supposed he had nothing to lose.
~*~
Walsh poured a splash of whiskey into three glasses of Coke and set them down in front of their three captives, all unrestrained and seated at one of the round tables in the common room. Mercy stood leaning against the bar, arms folded, and they kept darting glances toward him and shrinking down even deeper into their shirt collars. They weren’t going anywhere under his dark gaze, schooled now into something unimpressed and vaguely threatening.
Carter sat alone at a neighboring table, nursing his own drink, and Walsh joined him and shook out a cigarette as Ghost dragged out a chair and sat down across from Jimmy and his friends. Ghost could almost look friendly, when he wanted to, in a gruff, paternal sort of way, and he put on that front, now, folding his arms on the tabletop, leaning in toward the boys, his voice even and pleasant – but still authoritative.
“Alright, boys. You got banged up a little.” The one Tenny had knocked unconscious was holding a bag of frozen peas to the back of his head. “You had the shit scared out of you. Now, to me, that seems like turnabout’s fair play.” He inclined his head to a very dad-like angle. “You know what you were doing was wrong. This wasn’t about a joyride, or stupid teenage shit. You came here for a reason. The camera, and spray paint. The rumors flying around – throw in the fact that we caught you defacing our storefront, and that all adds up to you trying to make the Dogs look real bad in this city.” He pointed at Jimmy onyou, and Jimmy’s Adam’s apple jumped in his skinny throat.
“I don’t really care why you’re doing it. But I wanna know the truth. Once and for all. If it’s like Carter said, and someone’s pushing you into it, threatening you, then we can help. But if you’re just trying to make us look bad to cover your own ass…” He spread his hands, and let the sentence hang; let their imaginations run wild with the possible consequences.
Jimmy traded glances with both of his friends. The one with the peas dropped his gaze and sucked at his lip, miserable. The other one shrugged.
Jimmy took a deep breath. “They said I had to cooperate, do what they said, or they’d kill me and my family. All our families.” He tilted his head side to side to indicate his friends. “I had to make the Dogs look bad. They called it” – he frowned – “grass-roots. They wanted it to look organic. They said our parents all used to hate the Dogs, but things had started to shift. They said if the high school went anti-Dog, then our parents would jump all over the excuse.”
“Who isthey?” Ghost asked, just as Carter had asked before, in the shop.
