Piper Meets His Match

 Piper smokes his cigarette like its irritated him, long and thin face scrunched to villainous absurdity. In the bright neon illumination Jack thinks his partner looks almost like how a political cartoonist might draw a politician: all hard edged features, high cheekbones and eyes that register both as cunningly intelligent and brutally stupid at once. Jack has known Rex Piper nearly two decades now, and even after all this time those faces unnerve him. Piper has a cruel streak that Jack himself can't always avoid.

This is manifested when after another angry sounding exhalation, Piper leans over the man half crumpled in the shadowed doorway and promptly extinguishes his smoke into the skin of the mans face. Jack clamps a broad hand over their victims mouth as he writhes and lets out an awful, muffled moan. The sound is the terrible kind of pain that someone makes when they're experiencing an entirely new sensation of pain. Piper makes a face that looks almost like a smile, if were ever capable of such a thing. Jack knows as well as Piper does that they're on the Bad Side of Town, that something like this isn't nearly enough for even any passersby to look up in shock or revulsion, but Jack flicks his glance back and forth from their ensnared victim to the street. That's when he spots the woman.

Piper almost fucking growls when Jack touches him and the readied fist he has cocked very nearly feels like it could've become friendly fire. "Look", Jack urges him, pointing, and hates the almost childlike sound to it, hates the way Piper really does smile then. Rex hungers for weakness, for any and all places to be exploited, to be brutalized and broken until his victims are nothing but shambling wrecks. So when he sees the woman half illuminated by the streetlight his grin becomes so terrible that Jack feels the sickness brewing in the back of his throat. Rex prefers women, and not because he is any more merciful to them. Piper unleashes his half of his hold on their victim, striding out into the street and the dark, coat flapping behind him. Jack follows in his shadow, looking both ways, heart starting to race.

The streetlight is an island of amber illumination. Behind is the shadow of trees and a chainlink fence stretching into that blackness-- and the woman.

Jack knows something is wrong. Makes him stop, falter. Fear rises up in his soul like a terrible howling wind and it snatches away his words as he tries to talk Piper back into the island of light, but Rex is already sneering, hand reaching for the knife tucked away in his pants. When Piper is already close enough to touch her, the realization comes like a terrible revelation: Piper is bathed in light, like a figure from a Renaissance painting. The woman only feet from him is cloaked in shadow. A black bottomlessness in the shape of a person so pure and void that it is unnerving, a humanoid emptiness. Twinkling pale eyes are like cold stars in the emptiness that should be a face. And then Piper is touching it, smile smashed into a broken toothed gape as confusion illuminates in his violence oriented mind. Rex tries in vain to pull his hand away from a shoulder-shaped darkness. He can't. He can scream, and he does, and to Jack is the most upsetting sound he can imagine. An animal sound of fear, rage, discombobulation.

The twinkling star eyes stare back into agonized ones with an unflinching blaze. Darkness comes in a smile all its own, and in silence, the light above flickers, and dies.