Gutter [Mattie]

[Cesan]

It’s six in the morning when the hunter finally gives up his halfhearted attempt to sleep. The bed is cold now that he’s in his apartment alone, and the silence that settles in the room is anything but peaceful. The city of Boston is just waking up—those with their daily jobs are bustling to work with their boring, broken-record lives. Somewhere, the Boston PD is working on their cases, somewhere there might even be a new one that Cesan may need to attend. But he can’t find himself to care, not even now. The thought of pools of blood and samples to test is far away in his mind when Cesan attempts to blink away the exhaustion from his eyes, yawning and getting out of bed with his sights set on the shower.

It is not the first time that Cesan has stayed up all night—however, most times it was for a much better reason than the anxiety that has managed to chew at his chest through the hours of the night. The shower is longer than it should have been and by the time that Cesan is able to get dressed and get ready to leave, it’s already 6:30 AM. Finding something to actually wear has never been so easy when Cesan pulls the first things that his hand can reach out of the closet. For the first time in years, it seems, Cesan will be going out in public wearing jeans and a blue BPD pullover sweatshirt.

Welcome back to college outfits.

Cesan has to make several trips back and forth between the front door and his room before he is able to leave the apartment for real. He forgets his phone the first time and nearly his glasses the second, and he even begins to make his way to drive away when he forgets his wallet.

7:00.

Cesan has decided, as if it would come to anyone’s surprise, that he does not like Silas. All other factors aside, there is something that is particularly annoying about being blocked off, regardless of whether it was in the man’s own apartment. Cesan cannot find himself to care that the wolf is a doctor beyond the fact that he had probably saved Mattie’s life—his pretty piece of paper meant little more to him than just that. Instead, his worries lie with Mattie and his wellbeing—the thought of Matthias being shot makes the Scotsman cringe. Guns may not be killers but the people behind them are, and Cesan has seen way too many dead bodies on the street and pools of blood surrounding them.

The story would have been so different if an analyst had been called in and Cesan would have had to see Mattie’s body there on the ground. It’s an irrational fear, maybe, but experience has told him that anything can happen, and that it really is far too easy for an accident to turn into a funeral.

Early morning traffic and distance makes a short ride turn into a very long one. He gives himself time to wake up with a coffee in hand before heading off back to Silas’s apartment building, leaning against the seat with glazed eyes staring off into the distance until he feels that the time is appropriate to annoy Matthias into leaving the building. He sets the coffee down, rummaging through all of his pockets until he finally finds his iPhone, texting Mattie a short and simple, ‘I’m here.’ It’s 8 in the morning now.

Sleeplessness and the long hours that have worn the man down are hardly of any importance by this time of the day, and with his coffee at his side, Cesan feels invincible.

Now all he needs is a kilt.

[Matthias Walker]

Waking to the vibration of his phone cupped in his palm is familiar.

Less familiar is the feel of the bed under him and the warm body tucked against his back—almost, but not quite, the things he has become accustomed to. For a moment Matthias frowns, still caught halfway asleep, the pieces not quite fitting together until he shifts and the numbness of his leg sharpens into a dull ache, the hand that goes instinctively down to pinpoint the throb clumsily tripping over the bandages. Oh, he closes his eyes again, of course it isn’t familiar. There is no reason for it to be: Wrong bed and wrong circumstances and, disentangling himself carefully from Silas, his thoughts trip over the werewolf, different, at least, person.

For a moment he hesitates, text message open on the phone in his palm and looking down at Silas. The doctor will want to look at the wound, and Mattie is reluctant to leave without saying good-bye, but—but there’s no reason for Silas to have to get up, either. Besides, there is no good response to a late-night I love you he isn’t sure he was even intended to hear, least of all when Cesan is waiting for him and Matthias knows that whatever says, it is not going to be I love you too, no matter how true or not it is.

So he pulls the covers back over Silas’s shoulders, gingerly applies himself to the task of standing and getting outside. Putting on actual pants fails to register as an option, walking is accomplished with a limp and furtive glances thrown over his shoulder to ensure that Silas remains asleep, and while Matthias usually breezes through Silas’s apartment in under a minute it takes him five to navigate the tricky proposition of steps and throw himself, at last, into the passenger’s seat, annoyed by the steadily increasing ache of his leg.

Blowing out his breath, disproportionately relieved, he blinks at Cesan, crooks a tired grin at him before the state of the other man registers and Mattie sits upright, incredulous, and says without a thought to rephrasing or censoring, “Did you even sleep? You look like shit.” In a voice still rough with sleep and coming from a man wearing a rumpled hoodie over boxers, the statement cannot be anything but utterly hypocritical, but Mattie is inclined to conveniently ignore that. What does register is that hello generally precedes proclamations of any kind, and even with a frown tugging his eyebrows together, “—morning. You did sleep, right, you didn’t—”

Matthias trips over the question, this time, self-preservation sweeping in an extraordinarily belated attempt at saving himself the embarrassment. There is no reason to believe that Cesan didn’t leave it alone, but hunting is not exactly something easily passed up, “—you didn’t go—out after?”

[Cesan]

If there was anything that Cesan had expected, pants was on the list of those things. Mattie gimps and limps out towards the car, and once he makes it in, manners are forgotten and Cesan leans over to inspect the ugly coverings on Mattie’s leg. Had he gotten more than ten minutes of sleep, Cesan might have felt that angry stir in his chest again. Mattie is, by no means, truthfully his, but there is more that contributes to the heavy feeling in his gut than just a lover’s possessive responses to what he perceives as a threat. There’s a thought that continually traces back to his gun and another that leaves him planning his next break from work, and how it will be spent.

And with a bullet wound in Mattie’s leg, there’s a good chance that the younger hunter will not accompany.

He snaps back to attention with Mattie’s comments, and the only response that he has to offer at first is a lazy shrug. “Not wha’ I’d call a good night’s rest,” but he manages to smile still, tipping his coffee cup in Mattie’s direction as a small, silent salute. “Thanks though,” he adds with the tired grin still there. “yerr not too shabby yerself.” With messy hair, a messed up hoodie, boxers and a wounded leg, Matthias is ready to go up there and be an underwear model for Calvin Klein.

“Nah, I haven’ae gone out.” Not yet. “Don’ worry abou’ me, Matthias.” Sleeplessness, exhaustion, overworking himself until he’s about to pass out, none of them are things that Cesan is inexperienced in handling. The past night just happened to be a clusterfuck of all three. The most identifiable thing that Mattie had told him so far had involved a cat lady, and it’s not enough to go on—not yet. There are tons of crazy fucked up supernatural people in Boston.

The only challenge now is picking the desired one out of the crowd.

“Wha’ abou’ you, now? He sets the coffee down and gets moving, wanting to put as much space between himself and Silas’s apartment as possible. The traffic isn’t much better, but the journey back to his place will be sufficiently quick enough to settle his nerves. “Wha’ happened back there?” Cesan has to restrain himself from launching an interrogation—it’s too early, for both him and Mattie, and he’s sure on the side that Mattie would draw no pleasure from being questioned so soon after nearly being killed. But still, he knows just as well as Mattie does, that it couldn’t have all happened for no reason. The explanation that Mattie had given him had been brief, cut off and too short to make sense,
And despite the early hours, Cesan hopes now that he may be able to fit a few pieces of the puzzle together again.

“Gonna look a’ tha’ when we get back,” he adds as an afterthought, motioning with a flick of his hand to Mattie’s leg. Cesan is no doctor and he’s never had any intention to be, but he’s been educated enough to be able to handle wounds of all kinds—some of which, his own. A bullet hole, no problem. At least Silas had taken care of the bulk of the ordeal.

About as good a use as he’ll ever be to Cesan.

[Matthias Walker]

It isn’t funny, necessarily, but Mattie’s lips quirk into a smile anyway—genuine, if small and still shadowed with the anxiety. And yes, fine, anxiety is an entirely disproportionate reaction; he knows that Cesan can hunt just fine on his own, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. Especially not on his behalf. Not when it was his own fucking fault, not when it will heal, given time (he trusts that Silas wouldn’t lie to him about that, even if the painful ache of walking is far from encouraging). The relief, then, that comes with the assurance that regardless of whether or not Cesan slept, at least he wasn’t hunting, is caught in a carefully controlled exhale as he slouches in the seat, distracts himself with the seatbelt.

What about him indeed.

He chews over the question, watching the road. How much of what happened falls into the secrets he owes it to Silas to keep and how much of it is his to tell, Mattie has no idea. Regardless of how open-ended the question sounds, Matthias has been hunting too long to mistake it for anything but a very nice way of asking for the details he hadn’t provided before. Still, it’s complicated and Matthias is still tired enough to turn it over and over in his mind for much longer—

—except Cesan tacks on an addendum to the end of the questioning and Mattie’s expression cracks into a smirk a few shades too amused to be genuinely lecherous, and he shoots a sideways glance at Cesan, the drawl heavy with implication, “That all you wanna look at? ’cause, y’know, you’re welcome to the rest, too.” It is deliberately, goofily over the top, and out of place with the solemnity and exhaustion heavy in the car, but it serves to break the tension and uncertain possibilities of half-told truths. This doesn’t need to be different from any other hunt, and when he speaks again, it is with careful mechanic honesty.

Regardless of what Silas would or would not want him to tell, lying is going to get them nowhere. “I walked in on Silas talking to a girl in some alley. By a bar—don’t remember the name, but he’d know, can ask him later. He was wasted and he had a gun, so I tried to get him to come back to his apartment with me so he wouldn’t hurt anybody,” primarily himself, although Mattie still distinctly recalls the werewolf’s insistence that he never meant to hurt himself in the first place, and, God help him, he believes it. “Some kid showed up, started yelling, and when we were distracted—good hunting techniques, right? The girl shifted into a cat. Called herself a demon. There was lots of green, fire and smoke and shit, might’ve been an illusion, though.”

A shrug, “The kid freaked out, pulled a gun, and shot, and I—” Mouth twists into an ironic smile, and Matthias offers a grand gesture at his leg, “Got in the way. Kid ran off, cat sort of just vanished. Wasn’t really keeping track by then.” He slants a glance at Cesan, and, quieter, “It really was just a kid. That’s it. Be nice for him to, I don’t know, not have a goddamn gun, but it’s not a hunt.”