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The first blow hits like an avalanche.
Pain sparks through his face in a lightning bolt of agony. It’s not enough.
Race is no stranger to anger, to frustration, and no stranger to finding ways most others would consider extreme to work those feelings out of his system, either. He’s picked a hundred fights over the years—it’s almost too easy to let his mouth run, snap back at the strangers who like to comment on his voice or the way he walks or any other number of things people manage to find wrong with him. He savors the click of his jaw as he stumbles back, the blood that slicks his teeth and coats his tongue. The familiar taste of copper only fuels him.
He laughs and wipes at his mouth. “That the best you got?”
The three men in front of him stare at him incredulously, before the one in front—the leader, the one Race had made the mistake of talking back to—just cracks his knuckles, winds up, and punches him again.
His head whips back, but he’s braced for it, doesn’t stumble this time, just rocks back on his heels and swings back. The guy dodges his punch easily, but then, that’s what he wants.
Let them underestimate him. Let them get their fun in. It makes the other shoe dropping that much sweeter.
Admittedly, it hadn’t taken much for him to snap in the first place. Not tonight, with the setting sun blazing in his eyes, already pricking with tears. He’d been storming his way down the street, pace slowed from the angry run he’d broken into the second he’d left Spot’s sight to a fast-paced walk. One that betrayed the frustration and anger swirling through him.
Spot was a fucking idiot, if he thought his ill-timed, sacrificial lamb of a confession was enough to drive Race away. As if Race hadn’t already suspected. As if Race cared. As if Race wouldn’t wash Spot’s hands clean himself, if he had to. As if Race wouldn’t let Spot cover every inch of his body in bloody handprints, if that’s what he wanted. If he only fucking asked.
As if Race isn’t just as bad. As if Race isn’t worse, for not fucking caring, if he still got to love Spot, if he still got to experience Spot loving him.
The guys across the street that had whistled and jeered at him were just another part of his life—their mean, mocking faces were as much a piece of the city as the cobblestones beneath his feet. It’s nothing he hasn’t experienced every single day of living here, especially once he’d hit a certain age and his mannerisms became all the more noticeable. But for some reason, tonight, the names they’d called him, veering from insolent and rude into downright violent the second he’d deigned to acknowledge their presence, had struck a match on something ugly inside him.
It had been so childish, the decision to engage. But cleverness had never been his strong suit, and he was too pissed off to calculate the idiocy of making three grown men angry.
Well, no, that wasn’t quite true either, was it? His mind was always sharp as a knife in that way; it didn’t matter what he was feeling, how distracted he was, he always knew how far to push, when just enough became too much. He could tell when threats from older men who hated him for how he walked or talked were genuine. He could tell when the odds tilted away from him.
He’d known exactly what he was doing when he stopped in his tracks, turned back towards the group hollering at him, and told them exactly what he thought of them in return. And when they’d started towards him for real, he hadn’t turned tail and fled. He’d kept running his mouth, kept making them angrier, until they were close enough that he could smell the booze on their breath.
“What’s the matter?” he’d taunted, nearly shaking with anticipation. “Scared to fight a queer?”
And then one of them had thrown the first punch.
Violence is the closest Race has come to God in a long time. Dazed and dizzied from pain, blood loss, the inherent danger of putting his life in the hands of strangers tempted to end him just for the sake of it. It feels like worship. It feels like dancing—whether with the devil, or with something else entirely, he doesn’t know.
It certainly is a dance, the way he takes the blows like he’s trained for it, dodging one swing just to meet another, the three of them ganging up on him easily. He lets them, sure, something thrilling, like desire, like need coursing through him. He wants this too badly to ever say out loud. And the one person who’d ever understood that had decided even that was too much for him.
“What’s so funny?” one of them asks as he’s wrestled to the ground. “Bet you like this, don’t you? You’re sick.” A blow to his ribs, and he curses, curls in on himself, but there’s too many hands on him, and he can’t hide from the fate he’s carved out for himself here. Someone else kicks him in the stomach. “Degenerate fuckin’ fairy. You fuckin’ wish.”
Time blurs, but he’s pretty sure he manages to keep track by the methodical punches to his face. The blows aren’t as strong as they could be, not with the amount of alcohol they’ve clearly consumed, but that doesn’t mean any of it hurts any less.
And yet, somehow, it’s not enough.
The thought is infuriating. Here he is, practically whoring himself out for these men, giving his body up freely to be their punching bag, their plaything, and they don’t even have the decency to do it properly.
No one ever did, not until him, a tiny, evil voice whispers in the back of his mind.
One of them spits in his face, sneering at him as he manages to sit up, bringing a hand to his nose. He probes it gently, hissing at the spike of pain. It’s broken, no doubt about it.
He looks up at the group looming above him, vision swimming slightly. They’re laughing, and for some reason, that makes him angrier than anything else.
Do they think they did a good job? Do they think they hurt him enough?
What does it say about him that he knows the answer is no? What does it say about him that he’s this angry about it?
“Go ahead,” their leader laughs at him. “Fight back, come on.”
Race almost sighs. Of course he wasn’t going to find satisfaction from this.
He stands up, wiping the blood from his face. The taste of pennies builds on his tongue, and it aches, to know the last time he’d tasted this had been from Spot’s hand over his mouth. The reminder is all he needs to let loose.
This part is like a dance too, he thinks. It feels graceful, the audible crunch of bone snapping almost like the beat of a drum. He swings his leg high enough to kick the shortest one in the head and send him, crumpling like a paper doll, to the ground. That earns him a fist in his side, but it’s almost laughable, how easy it is to retaliate. A punch in the throat, a kick to the knee, and a foot driven down on his calf, and the second guy drops like a sack.
He grins at the sight, lets out something low in his throat that he doesn’t register as a laugh until he turns to look at the last man standing, and sees the fear present in his eyes.
Good.
“Come on,” Race breathes, readying himself for another fight. Let this do it, he begs silently. Let this satiate me.
When the man turns and runs, the sour disappointment that ripples through him almost bends him in half. He’s almost choking on it.
“Oh, fuck you!” Race yells, somehow angrier than he’d been before they’d begun. They hadn’t even had the nerve to finish what they’d started.
Somehow that keeps fucking happening to him.
He turns to look at the two men on the ground, stirring feebly, and that’s when he catches sight of Spot, rushing towards him, face stricken with panic.
“Racer, what the hell?” he asks, and the intimacy, the nickname, makes something like bile swell in his throat.
Race spits out a glob of blood and saliva on the ground. “Oh, fuck you, Spotty,” he snaps, putting extra emphasis on Spot’s nickname in return. He hopes Spot feels the dagger in each syllable. “I don’t need your help.”
Somehow, Race can tell that his anger doesn’t even register. Instead, he keeps advancing forward, demanding answers, taking up space like he always does, with no regard for how Race is backing away.
“Why were they-”
“Talk shit, get hit,” Race sighs, unwilling and unable to come up with a better explanation. And it really is the truth, isn’t it? It has been since day one. Spot finally reaches him, steps on the hand of one of the men Race had taken out as he does so, and the callous disregard for anyone and everything around them except for Race himself still sends a shiver up his spine. Race knows that will never change.
Spot brings a hand to Race’s shoulder, and Race flinches away, taking another step back. Finally, Spot seems to take the hint, his hand hanging limply in mid-air as he lets Race keep him at arm’s length.
He’s almost unrecognizable this way, letting Race call the shots. It feels wrong to see Spot so unsure, so hesitant. It feels like something’s irreparably broken.
“Race…”
Race speaks before he thinks, the way he always does, and says the one word he’d never thought he’d need to reach for. Not with Spot. Not like this.
Newspaper.
He can almost see the second it clicks for Spot, the way his eyes go wide, and then narrow, refusing to accept the pieces of what Race has severed.
“Ra-”
“Newspaper, Spot,” Race repeats. His eyes burn, and the tears that finally come are a relief. At least this coiling ache of shame and embarrassment is familiar. At least, in his perverse, fucked-up brain, he can feel better somehow because of this.
“Please,” Spot whispers, voice barely there. It makes Race sick, to have their roles reversed; Spot begging, Race unwilling to give in. What a twisted, inverted caricature of the two of them.
Race steels himself, forces the word to his lips one last time. “Newspaper,” he says, and his voice breaks only slightly. And then he turns, and walks away.
He can just about hear voices behind him—Hotshot, probably, telling Spot to stop trying to go after him. For a split second, he expects to feel a hand on his shoulder again. Any second, Spot will be standing in front of him again.
But he limps alone towards the bridge, and the tears are his only company.