InsaneJournal

Who: Vlad and Max
What: An unexpected run-in
Where: Somewhere in the city
When: Late at night sometime between August 2 and August 5
Warnings: Violence, swearing, existential crisis, and general angst.


It was the same tonight as it had been the night before. It was the same the night before as it had been the night before that. Honestly, Max was starting to lose track of his dates and days, as they were starting to blur into one. Ever since the Full Moon, Brian had started to crumble. It started when he no longer went to work. Max had had to send an e-mail from his account citing a "family problem" to keep Brian from outright losing his job, though both knew that he was on the edge. A dentist couldn't just disappear. Though Max knew little about dentistry - of his own free will, as he refused to take on Brian's interests - he knew enough to worry about Brian's future. But there were more pressing issues than being unemployed.

The apartment was filling up with empty bottles. Brian's drink of choice was whiskey, and the smell had permeated everything he owned. Even as he stood out in the crisp night air, Max knew that he smelled like he had crawled out of a bottle of Wild Turkey. His eyes were bloodshot, skin sallow and somewhat sunken from a prolonged diet of booze and corn chips. An uneven coating of stubble had grown over his jaw, prickly and almost as dark as the sweatshirt that hung from his broad-shouldered frame.

Though his knuckles were scuffed and split open, he didn't feel the pain as he drove his fist into the young man's hard jaw. He was a strapping lad, barely old enough to have graduated college. His skin was a dark obsidian that would surely hide the bruises left by Max's fists and whatever implements he had picked up in this abandoned alley. It was too late for heavy foot traffic, and they were situated far enough back in the alley for a normal human to never hear the boy's grunts and groans of pain as Max beat him over and over.

He could feel spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth as he pressed on, a fury of tangled limbs that rained down on the boy's bald head. Sometimes he'd let out a series of guttural sounds that shouldn't have come from a human being, but mostly he was silent. He'd never remember this boy's face again. It would fade from memory, lost with all the others. But this boy would remember him. He had found a rusted soup can and used it to carve a deep circle in the boy's flesh on his side, near his spine. It was a deep wound, biting through several layers of skin. Even with medical attention, it would almost surely scar.

It was a reminder. He was here. Max's little flag. He was here. This boy could not forget him now.

He was here.