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((No problem!))

Darren knelt in the centre of the bedroom, shaking. The furniture in there was nearly as trashed as the living room, now, but the worst of the first rush of pain was subsiding. It would come again, and stronger, and he knew already that he would keep breaking things until there was nothing left but shards.

Even through his own agony and the crashing and cracking of furniture, he’d heard the door slam. Fawn was gone, and he could only hope she’d taken the cat with her. She would stay away from him now, she had to know the danger she was in now that she’d seen firsthand what he could be like—and she hadn’t even seen the worst of it—

His body seized again. On a moan of sheer misery, he grasped a broken chunk of what had once been a nightstand and cracked it in half; taking out the pain on the furniture dulled the fierce urge to get out and harm and watch them bleed and—

As his hands spasmed, he lost his grip on both reality and himself, spiraling down into a red-washed darkness.

He would not emerge from it, and would know nothing of what he did, until morning.

~

The tabby cat had lain huddled inside the pan while Fawn ran, but once she set it down in the hallway, it swished its tail and rubbed its furry head comfortingly against her side as she curled up on the floor. It meowed at her questioningly, as though asking What on earth just happened?

Turning its head to stare at her with its odd eyes, it seemed to wait for her to communicate an explanation for the events of the night, and why the nice human had suddenly smelled so different and gotten so scary.

It was really too bad that Fawn didn’t speak cat.

((Absolutely.))

The morning sun found Darren out in one of the alleyways, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He cringed instinctively at the light flooding the alley before realizing that it caused him no pain, at least not for now. Opening his eyes, he sat up and took an inventory of himself.

There were bruises on his arms that he vaguely thought he might have inflicted on himself somehow, and a much darker one on his ribs that he couldn’t remember receiving. Though he had some minor scratches and a few splinters that might have come from broken wood, he was otherwise mostly in one piece. He’d woken up in worse condition than this before.

But he’d never woken up outside his apartment. Slowly, half-afraid of what he might see, he looked down at his clothes and turned his hands over.

No blood. Whatever had happened, whatever he’d done, there was no blood on him.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that if something had gone a little differently, there might have been. Getting up slowly and suddenly feeling very old indeed, he leaned against the brick wall for a few minutes and began his slow, measured walk out of the alleyway. The bruises immediately woke and made themselves known, but it didn’t hurt as badly as it could have.

It was simply a stroke of luck that he’d been working from home the past couple of years; he could drop off the radar for days or weeks at a time and no one thought anything of it. These days, ever since he’d smashed his own (fragile or valuable things seemed to be the first to go when he lost himself at night), he worked from wherever he could get access to a computer. Until recently (until Fawn) that had been the library.

There were other places, but right now Darren couldn’t focus enough to do any work even if he could find a computer-friendly place to go. He’d deal with it another day, or this afternoon. Something. Maybe he’d go back to the café he’d worked from yesterday. It didn’t really matter.

It only took a minute after stumbling out of the alleyway for Darren to realize that he had no idea where he was; this was a part of town that he had never seen before. How in the hell had he gotten here from his apartment? Had he even been to his apartment last night, or had all of that been some kind of hallucination? He had been having any number of hallucinations lately; maybe none of what he remembered from last night was real after all.

Disoriented, he looked around. What exactly was he supposed to do from here, with no idea where he was going?

Well, he decided at last, he might as well just start walking. He couldn’t have gone that far from the places that he knew. Though he could have knocked on someone’s door and asked for help, and perhaps even received it, he felt oddly ill at ease about going to the door of anyone in this part of town. The houses—houses? Not apartments?—looked nice, neat and well-kept, but he felt like it was a bad idea to go up to anyone’s door right now.

As he walked, one hand reached up to rub his throat absent-mindedly. It felt raw and sore, like he’d been screaming, though he couldn’t imagine when that might have happened. The bruises weren’t so bad that he would have cried out on receiving them, especially if (as he suspected) he’d inflicted most of them on himself.

It took him nearly half an hour before he found himself in streets that he dimly recognized, and even then he wasn’t sure of where to go in order to reach his apartment. So he resigned himself to wandering the streets for a while longer, at least until he found an area that he knew well enough to orient himself.

Though he didn’t notice it himself, as the morning sun got stronger, he started moving closer to buildings and trees, slipping from shadow to shadow and keeping out of the sun as much as possible. Some passersby noticed, and a few of them gave him odd looks, but he passed out of their minds almost as quickly, intent as they were on their own lives.

Darren wandered on alone.

((It’s all good. I’m doing about six things at once right now anyway! XD))

As Fawn waited for her order, the radio made a brief buzzing noise, the signal that music was going over to the local news.

“Residents on downtown 49th street are in shock today after a suspected break-in at Lord Duncan apartments left two residents dead and a third missing. A 911 caller who has remained anonymous reported sounds of a fight, including crashing and screaming. Upon arrival, the police found two residents dead in a destroyed apartment. The names of the deceased have not been released, but today a detective has confirmed that the tenant of the apartment, a Mr. Darren Blackwood, was not among them and has been tentatively declared missing. Police are asking that anyone with information about the break-in or the current whereabouts of Mr. Blackwood call the following number…”

~

In another small shop not far from the café, Darren stood with his back to the counter, listening intently to the radio. Pale and shaken, he stared down at his hands. There’d been no blood on them, he thought. There had been no blood. How could there have been anyone killed in his apartment? He lived alone, he’d been alone, he—Fawn. Fawn had been in his apartment, for bare minutes. He had thought she’d left, he remembered telling her to leave but what if she hadn’t? What if she’d stayed and he didn’t remember that part?

He couldn’t have. He couldn’t have…

“No blood,” he whispered, as though it were a charm against his own dark and diseased thoughts. “There was no blood.”

Stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans because right now he couldn’t bear to look at them, he turned hastily away and left the store. He couldn’t even remember why he’d gone in there in the first place.

But if what he suspected was true, it was the very least of the things he had forgotten.

There was no blood, he chanted silently in his head as he emerged onto the sidewalk and automatically moved towards the shadow of the buildings. There was no blood.

Darren stayed in the shadows as he walked. Though he was heading in the direction of the apartment, he didn’t think he was going to go in. What would he tell them when they asked where he had been while the…while the incident had been occurring in his apartment? That he didn’t know? Though he wasn’t a half-bad liar, could probably have made up some story about being dead drunk and passing out somewhere along the walk home, he didn’t have any proof—he hadn’t left the apartment except to find workplaces in weeks.

And who knew what they might find if they tested for blood on his hands.

As though struck by the idea, Darren pulled his hands out of his pockets and moved into a side street, staring at them as though fascinated. He still didn’t see any blood, not even traces of it under his nails, but then, he didn’t know how the two people found in his apartment had died. Maybe it had been another way.

No.

He knew it had been brutal and vicious and downright ugly. He knew that if he were to walk in to his apartment and look at the bodies—not that he could, as they were probably gone by now—but if he had been able to do so, he would have seen an image straight out of the nightmares that had been assailing him for weeks. It would have had his living room as a background instead of the forest or the street, but the picture would have been essentially the same.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew.

As clouds drifted over the sun and dulled the light, he shifted away from the protective shadow of the buildings. Once again, what he was doing escaped his notice; it just felt natural and right to stay in the darkest possible area that he could. In this busy part of town, no one looked at him twice—he was just another young man, hair a little too long and jacket a little too worn, wandering the street. Hidden by his ordinary clothes, he just kept walking, unsure of his final destination.

After a few very long minutes, the tabby came meandering back out, looking as ashamed of herself as a cat can look. There were brown flecks in her fur and, judging by the little rusty pawprints she was leaving as she padded out, there was enough blood inside the apartment that it hadn’t all dried yet. She stared up at Fawn and meowed once, loud and insistent.

Should she try to reach for the cat, the skinny animal would dodge away from her in much the same way she had dodged Darren the night before, though there was no fear in the way the creature held itself. Her oversized eyes stayed on Fawn, though, for another long minute, and once again it meowed before trotting away down the hall. As a tall blond man came through the doorway, the cat took the opportunity to sneak through the door and down the stairwell.

That man, however, did not look very impressed to see Fawn, and his uniform made it fairly clear as to why.

“Ma’am, civilians aren’t allowed up here. This is a crime scene. You’re going to have to leave.”

~

It took him a long, meandering while to make his way back to the apartment. Unless someone who knew him spotted him, he would just look like another gawker, staring at the building where a tragedy had taken place. He stayed across the street as he gazed up at it, his brows furrowed in concentration as he tried to remember what had happened the night before after Fawn left (if she had left).

But try as he might, he could remember nothing but fury and pain and despair, just like every other night. Except for the fact that every other night, he woke up safely in his own place, and no one was lying dead in his apartment.

What had happened last night?

His thoughts were interrupted as he watched a small, skinny tabby cat pad out of the building after a man left it. Frowning, he looked at it more closely. It wasn’t—it couldn’t be—?

Turning its head, the cat suddenly dashed across the street towards the crowd he was standing behind, weaving through them until it made its way to him.

And he certainly knew those mismatched eyes and that ugly scarred body. With a reluctant smile, he knelt. “You again, kitty,” he murmured. “You should know better by now.”

But wait.

Still kneeling and petting the cat, he looked up, dark eyes alert and searching. If the cat was here…

((What you did there, I see it.))

When he saw her come out of the building, he felt his breath catch. She was alive. Whoever was dead in there, whoever was dead inside his apartment, it wasn’t her. And if it wasn’t her…if he hadn’t killed her…maybe he hadn’t killed anyone. Maybe there was some other explanation.

Upon thinking that, he felt his breathing go back to normal for the first time since he’d heard the announcement on the radio. He stayed kneeling, kept stroking the cat’s bony back; the knobs of her spine were almost sharp against his fingertips.

Now that the first shock of relief had passed, he was back to wondering how to avoid her—but for a much more serious reason this time. She would recognise him; she knew who he was. Until he had decided what the hell he was going to say to the authorities, he did not want to be recognised. He had the strangest urge to grab the cat (who was apparently too stupid to stay away from him, so he might as well take her along) and head in the other direction as quickly as he could go, and he was actually in the process of picking her up when someone screamed.

The librarian, that stupid girl, was about to get run over and—

Darren didn’t know what happened next. He saw his own hand lift as though someone else were controlling it, heard a low, almost guttural no hiss from his lips, felt a sudden upward surge of heat that was almost unbearable, and then he watched as the car swerved wildly away from Fawn, spinning in circles across the road—as though it had been shoved by an invisible hand. A loud crunch as the vehicle wrapped itself around a lamppost made him shudder, but thankfully it was the passenger side that hit, and a few minutes and several overly-helpful passersby later, the driver was pulled out unharmed.

He stayed still, shaken. What in the hell had just happened? What had he just done?

The cat at his feet purred, and he had to be going mad, because for a moment he thought he heard words in the sound. Well done. She licked his ankle with her rough tongue.

Bewildered, he looked down at the cat. “Did you—?” No, that was beyond ridiculous, and when he hesitantly petted the animal again, her purr sounded like a normal cat’s purr should.

He pressed his free hand against his forehead for a second—he was going mad, there was no other way to explain this—and then looked up again, searching the crowd with watchful eyes for Fawn, or anyone who might have seen what he’d done right before the vehicle’s crash.

((I’m exhausted, so I’m heading to bed in a few. I’ll see you tomorrow after my exam!))

Darren waited patiently until Fawn had gotten out of the road before picking up the surprisingly quiet cat and following her, scooping up the bags she’d let fall as he went. He had no idea what he planned to do when he caught up to her—yell at her for being so foolish as to nearly get run over? Find out what the hell she was doing back around his apartment when he’d already given her every reason to avoid it like the plague? Give her back the damn cat?

The tabby, as though sensing his thoughts, squirmed around in his arms long enough to lick his chin with its sandpaper tongue. She seemed to have no compunctions about invading his personal space, and he actually found that carrying the warm, skinny weight wasn’t as taxing as he’d thought it should be; even the cat should have been enough to set off his temper and make him shove the animal away, but feeling her soundless purrs was actually rather soothing.

Maybe he should have kept her last night after all.

“You know,” he said casually as he caught up to her, “normally they tell car accident victims to stay near the site of the crash.” He dropped the handles of the two bags into her hand. “You forgot your stuff.”

But he didn’t give her back the cat, who had climbed up his arm to his shoulder and was now lying draped around his shoulders like a furry scarf. It didn’t look very comfortable for Darren, and indeed it wasn’t, but he let it slide—he was finding that he liked the ugly little creature.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he added, but it almost sounded like an afterthought. “And neither should I.” That said, he took a step back. “I’ll take the cat after all. She seems to like it with me.”

Having filled her in on his plan, at least the part of it that involved the only thing she should be concerned about—the cat—he turned around and walked into the nearest side street, leaving her be. If he were her, he wouldn’t want to be near himself after what she’d seen last night.

If that made any sense.