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lb_leeTitle: Struck
Prompt: ‘Lightning’
Disclaimers: This was an experiment in writing all the things that skeeve me most. AU, and it’s Biff/M.D., so yeah, massive squick ahoy. Warnings for dubious consent, involvement with a minor, and general complete ignorance regarding safety and communication. Oh, and two people lying out their asses while beating the ever-loving crap out of each other. This is the first time I've ever felt like I need a disclaimer of, "THIS IS BAD. DO NOT DO," and I am only dismayed that this scrap isn’t dark and twisted enough.
The first time was during a fight, of course. It was the closest Biff ever got to anybody, these days, and he’d always been pretty fucked up.
And of course, it had to be M.D. Who else came even close to his level of busted? They were sparring, bruising, drawing blood like usual, nothing weird or anything. But maybe he was getting soft, or M.D. was just finally learning how to fight half-decent after all the beatings she’d taken from him, and she managed to kick his feet out from under him, and damned if he was going to let go when he had a good hold, so he took her down with him.
On the ground, M.D. was no less a lightweight, but a hell of a lot harder to pin down. She wriggled like a greased eel, and the kicking nearly neutered him a couple times. (More than once before, their fights had screeched to an inconvenient halt when she’d kneed him. It was unspoken rule that doing it on purpose wasn’t allowed, but with all the flailing she did, it happened anyway.) So he solved the problem by sitting on her.
She weighed about half what he did, so there wasn’t much she could do about it, which pissed her off. She shouted and bitched him out in fancy talk while he laughed at her and continued the long process of pinning her. She jerked and thrashed, trying to buck him off, and he was about to fix that by knocking the wind out of her when in the middle of all the insults, she complained, “A gun? Really? The heck is wrong with you, I don’t want to get blasted when I zap you and set it off by mistake…”
He continued trying to force her over so he could get her arm up her back. For a moment, he considered not responding, since it was stupid enough that it was probably a distraction tactic, but she kept at it.
“Seriously, Biff, time out, I really don’t want to get shot just because you’re full of Freudian machismo…”
“The fuck’re you talking about, I don’t carry fighting you.”
Whump. He’d gotten her over. She wheezed, but nothing shut her up for long. “Well, something is digging into my back, and it’s really uncomfortable, so either you’re carrying something, or you’re just inordinately happy to see me, now get rid of it.”
“Whaddaya mean, I ain’t—”
Then it hit him. He bolted off her so fast that he banged into the wall, and that was it, the fight was over, pitched into a whole new realm of fucked up.
Oblivious to his horror, M.D. got up, rubbing her shoulder. “Yeesh, I expected a little more professionalism from—”
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get the fuck out.”
She stared at him. Apparently something—maybe his face, maybe his lack of screaming—told her this wasn’t a time to give him shit, because she didn’t argue, didn’t sass, just said quietly, “All right. Okay. I’m getting,” all careful and pacifying, like you did with wife-beaters and psychos who might really hurt you, and she went out the window.
Good. He didn’t think he could actually throw her out; it meant he would’ve had to touch her.
Once he was sure she was gone, he took a shower and scrubbed himself raw, glad that he didn’t have hot water. Then he went out and was drunk until Thursday, because maybe if he slammed enough drinks down his throat, he’d be able to forget, or at least make it so he couldn’t get another hard-on for a month.
He would’ve stayed on the bender longer, except M.D. came back. Damn her for being smart enough to figure out what the hell had wrecked their last fight, smart enough to figure out his tangled mess of shit, but still too stupid to go away.
“The fuck do you want?” He snarled.
She looked at him with resigned disgust, plucked the bottle out of his hand, and said, “Still using the same maladaptive coping mechanisms, I see. Charming.”
“Fuck you. Get out of my apartment.”
She responded by tossing the bottle out the window. “For the last time, it’s not an apartment; it’s a sty. Now, we can do this the easy way, with you realizing I’m smarter than you are, or we can do it hard and you lose every ounce of ethanol you’ve got. Either way, it’s detox time. Make your choice.”
He chose hard, and she had his apartment drier than a Mormon bake sale within the hour. Biff shouted some more and tried to clobber her, but after three days of drunk, he wasn’t much good for anything, even against her. All she had to do was get behind him, kick the chair forward, and the moment it hit his knees, he collapsed into it like a swooning maiden aunt.
“Sober up,” she told him. “I’ll be back.”
She didn’t tell him where she was going, just left, slamming the door behind her. Which proved she was pissed; she hadn’t used anything but the window in ages. Shit. Biff made a couple attempts to get out of the chair, realized that he was about as likely to make it to the liquor store as he was to solve world hunger, and gave up.
She returned a few hours later, apparently empty-handed. Wherever she’d been, she didn’t say, and anyway, Biff didn’t much care. He was just slumped in the chair, nursing his impending hangover with Gatorade and aspirin.
“You sober yet?” She asked.
“Mostly.” Enough to be able to talk and think in a straight line, but the edges of everything were still softened up enough that he could say, “I don’t fuck kids.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. Some shit, even I don’t do. I’ll break your window, I’ll break your arm, but I don’t fuck kids.”
“You don’t need to convince me,” she said. “With the amount of time we’ve spent in each other’s gray matter, I would have found out by now if you did. Last I heard, that part of your nervous system was autonomic.”
He realized that she wasn’t angry at him. No, she felt sorry for him. He would’ve rathered her pissed; at least that would’ve given him a little dignity.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, too tired to snap at her.
“So yeah. Proof that we’re doomed to know far too much about each other? Most definitely. Proof you’re a pedophile? Not remotely. And if you even try that tired old myth about gay men being child rapists, I swear to god, I will shove you full of metabo-speed and leave you there.”
“It ain’t about me being a faggot, okay? I know how this shit works. I was sixteen when it happened to me. It happens to guys, they keep it going, do it to someone else.”
For a moment, he thought she might try to strangle him. There, she was mad now, much better. “Christ on a Segway, Biff, when I said I didn’t want that myth, I didn’t mean I wanted an equally horrific one! That’s not how it works, just because you were raped—”
“Don’t call it that!” He shouted, slamming his fist onto the armrest. “It don’t count! It would count if it was you.”
She looked as though she were going to argue with him, but she didn’t. Some buttons, you just didn’t mash.
Instead, she said, “Want to spar?”
“I ain’t all the way sober yet.”
“That’s all right. Means I have decent odds against you.”
He thought it over, then shrugged and pushed himself up from the chair. “’Kay.”
They did, and for a while, things looked like they’d be okay. The leftover drunk in his system slowed him down, sure, but it also took the worries off his mind, left everything a bit softer and easier. (Maladaptive, his ass; it wasn’t the medicine that was the problem, just getting the right dosage.) He wasn’t feeling particularly violent, and M.D. didn’t seem interested in a real beat-down either, just the exercise, so they pulled their punches and grappled more than honestly fought. The residual alcohol in his system, plus the effects of three days on the bottle, almost put him on her level.
It turned out that it still wasn’t enough to sedate him below the belt.
Biff couldn’t even get up the energy to be angry. He just sighed, went, “fuck,” and walked away.
M.D. didn’t look confused this time, but she didn’t bolt. She just waited.
“We can’t do this no more,” Biff said. “It’s getting too fucked up, even for me. Dammit, I don’t even like you.”
“Well, duh,” she said. “You don’t like anybody. You like the fight. I’m the one who fights most with you, so…” she shrugged.
The way she said it, it sounded almost reasonable. He shuddered. “Great. Thazz just great. The hell am I supposed to do, fight some new jackass every week?”
He’d actually used to do that, back in the day. Gotten smashed, taken a swipe at someone, and then kept going until someone dropped or he got thrown out. It was the reason he still wasn’t welcome in a good half a dozen bars downtown. It had done the job of getting him the violence he wanted, but he hadn’t done it in a while, not since him and M.D. had started up their thing. After all, she was a lightweight, so he didn’t have to worry much about getting too badly hurt, and she could take pain, so he didn’t have to worry much about really hurting her either. Besides, though he’d never admit it, he preferred beating the crap out of someone who wanted to be there.
M.D. dug into her pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it to him. He caught it out of reflex; it was a tube of lube.
“Go take care of it,” she said, before he could speak. “You might be able to clobber some random stranger every happy hour for your jollies, but I try that, I’m going to end up in traction—or in a padded cell. You’re the only person I can punch for stress relief; I’m not losing that to something as asinine as this.”
Biff wasn’t sure whether to laugh or punch the wall. Finally, he just lobbed the lube back to her. She didn’t get sex; she wouldn’t care when he said, “I don’t do that shit.”
“Look, either you take care of it, or I take care of it for you.”
He turned away. “Then you better find yourself somebody else to fight with. I don’t fuck kids.”
She exploded. Ah, there was the kid he knew and hated. “You aren’t fucking me, you houseplant! You’re fighting me. Completely different. We’ve been punching each other for dubious psychological reasons for six months now, and you’ve never seemed to have any moral quandaries about that, so don’t start getting all gallant now; it’s not a good look on you.”
“I ain’t—”
She slugged him across the face, and that did it. There were plenty of things Biff couldn’t deal with, but he knew exactly what to do when someone punched him in the jaw. It was easy, reflexive, and automatic: he grabbed her arm, yanked, and sent her flying, but she knew his moves by now, bounced off the wall, and used the momentum to tackle him.
The tequila was still weighing him down, he could feel it, because M.D. didn’t weigh jack shit, he could dead-lift three of her easy, and he still went over like a stack of styrofoam. And once he was on the floor, she wouldn’t let him get up, just kept slugging away, because she was a fucking cheater who knew he could buck her off easy but no way he was going to try, not like this. At first he tried to shove her off him instead, so he could get away, but then she knocked the wind out of and bloodied his nose and fuck it, that hurt, he was treating this like a normal fight now and screw the ache in his groin, he was pinning her ass.
After that, it was just a downhill slide into hell, easy as falling off a roof. He grabbed her, rolled, got her under him, and it felt just as bad as he’d expected, but fuck it, there were more important things. Wrestling M.D. down was a bitch in the best of times, and now he was drunk and distracted, while she was giving it her all to be as big a pain in his ass as possible. All he had was weight, and in using it, one of her skinny thighs got caught between his legs and goddammit, it was almost like she was doing it on purpose—
Somehow, he got her on her face on the floor, which usually ended things, but she kept fighting, and he was far too close for it to be comfortable, and shoving his elbow between her shoulder blades wasn’t working. Damn her pain tolerance, she just wouldn’t stop.
“Stay down,” he panted, dripping blood on his collar. “Damn you, stay down…”
“You sure,” M.D. wheezed, and he could’ve sworn she was laughing, “you sure you mean me?”
Then she let out a whiplash burst of electricity, and that was it, it was all over, everything went neon and nuclear and he came with a strangled yelp.
Next thing he knew, he was pinned with his arm up his back.
“Boom,” M.D. said. She sounded pleased with herself. “I win.”
She let go of him and got up, dusting herself off. Biff didn’t move; he was still panting and shaking through the reaction. All he could be thankful for was that she was gloved up, so hadn’t gotten any of his mind during it.
“Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see any sex there; I saw a fight. You just happened to be a lot easier to take down than usual. Refreshing change of pace, really, getting to beat your hide for once.”
Biff was still gasping for air, but he managed to say in an unraveled voice, “You cheated.”
M.D. snorted. “Well, yeah. It’s me.”
“You did that on purpose.”
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I just fought you. How your body reacts is your business. How do you feel?”
“I’m a faggot who just did,” damn, what had they just done? “something very fucked up with an alien kid who is I-dunno-how-old, just that she sure as hell ain’t legal, after she bloodied my nose and electrocuted me. How do you think?”
She shrugged again. “You make it sound like everything else we’ve done is somehow the paragon of normalcy and morals.” She put on a bright look. “Hey, think on the bright side; if you’re so dead set on seeing it as sex, this proves you aren’t entirely gay.”
He snorted even though it hurt. “Don’t give me that crap. You ain’t no girl neither. Don’t count.”
He waited for the shakes, the terror, the waking nightmare sensation of old touch and hands, but they didn’t seem to be coming. He didn’t feel the need to run or fight or scrub himself clean. There’d been no touching except the kind he could handle, no groping or kissing or any of the million things that made his flesh crawl. Just force and impact and adrenaline, with a good four layers of clothing for insulation. He felt… okay.
Which meant he was even more fucked up than he’d thought.
He tried to get up, didn’t even make it to his hands and knees. His muscles were purring, but they felt like half-melted peanut butter. However messed up his head might be, his body hadn’t been so happy in ages. The kid, damn her, had been right; he did like the fight.
She stuffed a wad of toilet paper in his hand, and he put it to his nose. Shit. Why did she have to be a kid? Because she was. No matter how she acted, no matter how she talked, no matter what she’d done or did.
But she’d hit him. She’d been the one to refuse when he walked away. She’d been in good fighting form too; he was the one who’d ended up on the floor. That didn’t make it any better, didn’t make it okay, didn’t make him any less of a sick fuck. It just made things more confusing.
“Why?” He asked.
She didn’t need explanation. “I told you. I’m not losing the only person I can go berserk with safely just because he’s having hang-ups. I mean, if you could find better outlets than getting massively smashed for don’t-tell-me-how-long-it’ll-make-me-depressed, I’m pretty sure you would’ve. It’s not like we’re doing it out of affection or anything; that’d be really messed up.”
True. It wasn’t like they liked each other. She was just better than fighting strangers in bars was all, and he was better than not fighting at all. There was no attraction, no love, no romance, none of that bullshit. And long as there were no illusions, he could handle it.
Biff sighed. “I’m going to Hell.”
“Oh, like you weren’t already, Catholic boy,” she said, punching him in the shoulder.
Prompt: ‘Lightning’
Disclaimers: This was an experiment in writing all the things that skeeve me most. AU, and it’s Biff/M.D., so yeah, massive squick ahoy. Warnings for dubious consent, involvement with a minor, and general complete ignorance regarding safety and communication. Oh, and two people lying out their asses while beating the ever-loving crap out of each other. This is the first time I've ever felt like I need a disclaimer of, "THIS IS BAD. DO NOT DO," and I am only dismayed that this scrap isn’t dark and twisted enough.
The first time was during a fight, of course. It was the closest Biff ever got to anybody, these days, and he’d always been pretty fucked up.
And of course, it had to be M.D. Who else came even close to his level of busted? They were sparring, bruising, drawing blood like usual, nothing weird or anything. But maybe he was getting soft, or M.D. was just finally learning how to fight half-decent after all the beatings she’d taken from him, and she managed to kick his feet out from under him, and damned if he was going to let go when he had a good hold, so he took her down with him.
On the ground, M.D. was no less a lightweight, but a hell of a lot harder to pin down. She wriggled like a greased eel, and the kicking nearly neutered him a couple times. (More than once before, their fights had screeched to an inconvenient halt when she’d kneed him. It was unspoken rule that doing it on purpose wasn’t allowed, but with all the flailing she did, it happened anyway.) So he solved the problem by sitting on her.
She weighed about half what he did, so there wasn’t much she could do about it, which pissed her off. She shouted and bitched him out in fancy talk while he laughed at her and continued the long process of pinning her. She jerked and thrashed, trying to buck him off, and he was about to fix that by knocking the wind out of her when in the middle of all the insults, she complained, “A gun? Really? The heck is wrong with you, I don’t want to get blasted when I zap you and set it off by mistake…”
He continued trying to force her over so he could get her arm up her back. For a moment, he considered not responding, since it was stupid enough that it was probably a distraction tactic, but she kept at it.
“Seriously, Biff, time out, I really don’t want to get shot just because you’re full of Freudian machismo…”
“The fuck’re you talking about, I don’t carry fighting you.”
Whump. He’d gotten her over. She wheezed, but nothing shut her up for long. “Well, something is digging into my back, and it’s really uncomfortable, so either you’re carrying something, or you’re just inordinately happy to see me, now get rid of it.”
“Whaddaya mean, I ain’t—”
Then it hit him. He bolted off her so fast that he banged into the wall, and that was it, the fight was over, pitched into a whole new realm of fucked up.
Oblivious to his horror, M.D. got up, rubbing her shoulder. “Yeesh, I expected a little more professionalism from—”
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get the fuck out.”
She stared at him. Apparently something—maybe his face, maybe his lack of screaming—told her this wasn’t a time to give him shit, because she didn’t argue, didn’t sass, just said quietly, “All right. Okay. I’m getting,” all careful and pacifying, like you did with wife-beaters and psychos who might really hurt you, and she went out the window.
Good. He didn’t think he could actually throw her out; it meant he would’ve had to touch her.
Once he was sure she was gone, he took a shower and scrubbed himself raw, glad that he didn’t have hot water. Then he went out and was drunk until Thursday, because maybe if he slammed enough drinks down his throat, he’d be able to forget, or at least make it so he couldn’t get another hard-on for a month.
He would’ve stayed on the bender longer, except M.D. came back. Damn her for being smart enough to figure out what the hell had wrecked their last fight, smart enough to figure out his tangled mess of shit, but still too stupid to go away.
“The fuck do you want?” He snarled.
She looked at him with resigned disgust, plucked the bottle out of his hand, and said, “Still using the same maladaptive coping mechanisms, I see. Charming.”
“Fuck you. Get out of my apartment.”
She responded by tossing the bottle out the window. “For the last time, it’s not an apartment; it’s a sty. Now, we can do this the easy way, with you realizing I’m smarter than you are, or we can do it hard and you lose every ounce of ethanol you’ve got. Either way, it’s detox time. Make your choice.”
He chose hard, and she had his apartment drier than a Mormon bake sale within the hour. Biff shouted some more and tried to clobber her, but after three days of drunk, he wasn’t much good for anything, even against her. All she had to do was get behind him, kick the chair forward, and the moment it hit his knees, he collapsed into it like a swooning maiden aunt.
“Sober up,” she told him. “I’ll be back.”
She didn’t tell him where she was going, just left, slamming the door behind her. Which proved she was pissed; she hadn’t used anything but the window in ages. Shit. Biff made a couple attempts to get out of the chair, realized that he was about as likely to make it to the liquor store as he was to solve world hunger, and gave up.
She returned a few hours later, apparently empty-handed. Wherever she’d been, she didn’t say, and anyway, Biff didn’t much care. He was just slumped in the chair, nursing his impending hangover with Gatorade and aspirin.
“You sober yet?” She asked.
“Mostly.” Enough to be able to talk and think in a straight line, but the edges of everything were still softened up enough that he could say, “I don’t fuck kids.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. Some shit, even I don’t do. I’ll break your window, I’ll break your arm, but I don’t fuck kids.”
“You don’t need to convince me,” she said. “With the amount of time we’ve spent in each other’s gray matter, I would have found out by now if you did. Last I heard, that part of your nervous system was autonomic.”
He realized that she wasn’t angry at him. No, she felt sorry for him. He would’ve rathered her pissed; at least that would’ve given him a little dignity.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, too tired to snap at her.
“So yeah. Proof that we’re doomed to know far too much about each other? Most definitely. Proof you’re a pedophile? Not remotely. And if you even try that tired old myth about gay men being child rapists, I swear to god, I will shove you full of metabo-speed and leave you there.”
“It ain’t about me being a faggot, okay? I know how this shit works. I was sixteen when it happened to me. It happens to guys, they keep it going, do it to someone else.”
For a moment, he thought she might try to strangle him. There, she was mad now, much better. “Christ on a Segway, Biff, when I said I didn’t want that myth, I didn’t mean I wanted an equally horrific one! That’s not how it works, just because you were raped—”
“Don’t call it that!” He shouted, slamming his fist onto the armrest. “It don’t count! It would count if it was you.”
She looked as though she were going to argue with him, but she didn’t. Some buttons, you just didn’t mash.
Instead, she said, “Want to spar?”
“I ain’t all the way sober yet.”
“That’s all right. Means I have decent odds against you.”
He thought it over, then shrugged and pushed himself up from the chair. “’Kay.”
They did, and for a while, things looked like they’d be okay. The leftover drunk in his system slowed him down, sure, but it also took the worries off his mind, left everything a bit softer and easier. (Maladaptive, his ass; it wasn’t the medicine that was the problem, just getting the right dosage.) He wasn’t feeling particularly violent, and M.D. didn’t seem interested in a real beat-down either, just the exercise, so they pulled their punches and grappled more than honestly fought. The residual alcohol in his system, plus the effects of three days on the bottle, almost put him on her level.
It turned out that it still wasn’t enough to sedate him below the belt.
Biff couldn’t even get up the energy to be angry. He just sighed, went, “fuck,” and walked away.
M.D. didn’t look confused this time, but she didn’t bolt. She just waited.
“We can’t do this no more,” Biff said. “It’s getting too fucked up, even for me. Dammit, I don’t even like you.”
“Well, duh,” she said. “You don’t like anybody. You like the fight. I’m the one who fights most with you, so…” she shrugged.
The way she said it, it sounded almost reasonable. He shuddered. “Great. Thazz just great. The hell am I supposed to do, fight some new jackass every week?”
He’d actually used to do that, back in the day. Gotten smashed, taken a swipe at someone, and then kept going until someone dropped or he got thrown out. It was the reason he still wasn’t welcome in a good half a dozen bars downtown. It had done the job of getting him the violence he wanted, but he hadn’t done it in a while, not since him and M.D. had started up their thing. After all, she was a lightweight, so he didn’t have to worry much about getting too badly hurt, and she could take pain, so he didn’t have to worry much about really hurting her either. Besides, though he’d never admit it, he preferred beating the crap out of someone who wanted to be there.
M.D. dug into her pocket, pulled something out, and tossed it to him. He caught it out of reflex; it was a tube of lube.
“Go take care of it,” she said, before he could speak. “You might be able to clobber some random stranger every happy hour for your jollies, but I try that, I’m going to end up in traction—or in a padded cell. You’re the only person I can punch for stress relief; I’m not losing that to something as asinine as this.”
Biff wasn’t sure whether to laugh or punch the wall. Finally, he just lobbed the lube back to her. She didn’t get sex; she wouldn’t care when he said, “I don’t do that shit.”
“Look, either you take care of it, or I take care of it for you.”
He turned away. “Then you better find yourself somebody else to fight with. I don’t fuck kids.”
She exploded. Ah, there was the kid he knew and hated. “You aren’t fucking me, you houseplant! You’re fighting me. Completely different. We’ve been punching each other for dubious psychological reasons for six months now, and you’ve never seemed to have any moral quandaries about that, so don’t start getting all gallant now; it’s not a good look on you.”
“I ain’t—”
She slugged him across the face, and that did it. There were plenty of things Biff couldn’t deal with, but he knew exactly what to do when someone punched him in the jaw. It was easy, reflexive, and automatic: he grabbed her arm, yanked, and sent her flying, but she knew his moves by now, bounced off the wall, and used the momentum to tackle him.
The tequila was still weighing him down, he could feel it, because M.D. didn’t weigh jack shit, he could dead-lift three of her easy, and he still went over like a stack of styrofoam. And once he was on the floor, she wouldn’t let him get up, just kept slugging away, because she was a fucking cheater who knew he could buck her off easy but no way he was going to try, not like this. At first he tried to shove her off him instead, so he could get away, but then she knocked the wind out of and bloodied his nose and fuck it, that hurt, he was treating this like a normal fight now and screw the ache in his groin, he was pinning her ass.
After that, it was just a downhill slide into hell, easy as falling off a roof. He grabbed her, rolled, got her under him, and it felt just as bad as he’d expected, but fuck it, there were more important things. Wrestling M.D. down was a bitch in the best of times, and now he was drunk and distracted, while she was giving it her all to be as big a pain in his ass as possible. All he had was weight, and in using it, one of her skinny thighs got caught between his legs and goddammit, it was almost like she was doing it on purpose—
Somehow, he got her on her face on the floor, which usually ended things, but she kept fighting, and he was far too close for it to be comfortable, and shoving his elbow between her shoulder blades wasn’t working. Damn her pain tolerance, she just wouldn’t stop.
“Stay down,” he panted, dripping blood on his collar. “Damn you, stay down…”
“You sure,” M.D. wheezed, and he could’ve sworn she was laughing, “you sure you mean me?”
Then she let out a whiplash burst of electricity, and that was it, it was all over, everything went neon and nuclear and he came with a strangled yelp.
Next thing he knew, he was pinned with his arm up his back.
“Boom,” M.D. said. She sounded pleased with herself. “I win.”
She let go of him and got up, dusting herself off. Biff didn’t move; he was still panting and shaking through the reaction. All he could be thankful for was that she was gloved up, so hadn’t gotten any of his mind during it.
“Now, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see any sex there; I saw a fight. You just happened to be a lot easier to take down than usual. Refreshing change of pace, really, getting to beat your hide for once.”
Biff was still gasping for air, but he managed to say in an unraveled voice, “You cheated.”
M.D. snorted. “Well, yeah. It’s me.”
“You did that on purpose.”
She shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I just fought you. How your body reacts is your business. How do you feel?”
“I’m a faggot who just did,” damn, what had they just done? “something very fucked up with an alien kid who is I-dunno-how-old, just that she sure as hell ain’t legal, after she bloodied my nose and electrocuted me. How do you think?”
She shrugged again. “You make it sound like everything else we’ve done is somehow the paragon of normalcy and morals.” She put on a bright look. “Hey, think on the bright side; if you’re so dead set on seeing it as sex, this proves you aren’t entirely gay.”
He snorted even though it hurt. “Don’t give me that crap. You ain’t no girl neither. Don’t count.”
He waited for the shakes, the terror, the waking nightmare sensation of old touch and hands, but they didn’t seem to be coming. He didn’t feel the need to run or fight or scrub himself clean. There’d been no touching except the kind he could handle, no groping or kissing or any of the million things that made his flesh crawl. Just force and impact and adrenaline, with a good four layers of clothing for insulation. He felt… okay.
Which meant he was even more fucked up than he’d thought.
He tried to get up, didn’t even make it to his hands and knees. His muscles were purring, but they felt like half-melted peanut butter. However messed up his head might be, his body hadn’t been so happy in ages. The kid, damn her, had been right; he did like the fight.
She stuffed a wad of toilet paper in his hand, and he put it to his nose. Shit. Why did she have to be a kid? Because she was. No matter how she acted, no matter how she talked, no matter what she’d done or did.
But she’d hit him. She’d been the one to refuse when he walked away. She’d been in good fighting form too; he was the one who’d ended up on the floor. That didn’t make it any better, didn’t make it okay, didn’t make him any less of a sick fuck. It just made things more confusing.
“Why?” He asked.
She didn’t need explanation. “I told you. I’m not losing the only person I can go berserk with safely just because he’s having hang-ups. I mean, if you could find better outlets than getting massively smashed for don’t-tell-me-how-long-it’ll-make-me-depressed, I’m pretty sure you would’ve. It’s not like we’re doing it out of affection or anything; that’d be really messed up.”
True. It wasn’t like they liked each other. She was just better than fighting strangers in bars was all, and he was better than not fighting at all. There was no attraction, no love, no romance, none of that bullshit. And long as there were no illusions, he could handle it.
Biff sighed. “I’m going to Hell.”
“Oh, like you weren’t already, Catholic boy,” she said, punching him in the shoulder.
