33. Earthly Aggression #3
And then it was quiet.
Not quiet quiet. The sounds underneath—groaning, wet breathing, wind through the girders.
The sounds the living made and the sounds the dying made and the difference between them.
He heard a car driving away as he wiggled out from beneath the car, his teeth grit and tears streaming down his face as he tried his best to not sob.
Cass’s left arm hung wrong as he braced the car. The shoulder was hot, swelling. He cradled it against his chest.
Riot was standing in the middle of the road.
The gloves dripped. His shirt was soaked red. His chest heaved. The gold behind the mesh was blazing—flat and bright and vast, the light of something that had burned through its containment and didn’t know how to turn off.
He was standing over the knife-wielder. What was left of the knife-wielder. Still looking down. His hands opening and closing at his sides in a rhythm that wasn’t conscious, like a machine that didn’t know the task was done.
Around him—the road. What had been men. Cass couldn’t look at most of it. His eyes skipped and skidded across the asphalt the way they would skip across text he wasn’t ready to read. His brain was doing him the enormous kindness of refusing to fully process what it was seeing.
The walkie crackled from near his knee where it must have fallen. Sage’s voice: “Clear. I’m coming down. Cass—stay away from him. Stay AWAY from him. Do you hear me?”
But Riot was bleeding. The wound across his ribs was pulsing with each breath and the blood was spreading and through whatever the thing that hummed between them was, Cass could feel something pouring off Riot that wasn’t rage.
It was absence. The place where Riot used to be was empty. Just the gold and the body and two impulses: destroy threat and take. No language. No thought. No Riot.
“CASS!” Sage’s voice echoed in the distance. “DO NOT GO NEAR HIM!”
Cass walked toward Riot on legs that shook with every step, bare feet on glass and blood and asphalt, stepping around things he would not look at, things he would not let his eyes describe to his brain.
“Riot, you’re hurt.”
The gold tracked to him. Tracked ON him. His hands flexed.
Riot stepped toward him. Not the way Riot walked—the way something wearing Riot’s body walked. The attention pressed against Cass’s skin like a physical weight.
“Riot, it’s me. It’s—”
Riot moved.
Around him. Through the space between them—suddenly THERE, above him. The claw-glove fisted in his hair and yanked— Cass’s head snapping back, throat bared, a cry tearing out of him.
Riot’s other hand found the waistband of his pants and pulled at them, the claws slicing into his skin at his hip.
The yank on his hair wrenched his injured shoulder.
The pain was so complete it became a kind of silence—everything else erased, just the pain and the hand in his hair and the hand at his waist.
“Riot, please stop,” Cass whimpered.
Riot froze but didn’t let go.
Sage was yelling in the distance, her boots slapping on the asphalt.
“I know you’re really mad right now…but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt,” he whispered. Cass’s right hand, shaking and bloody, reached up and pushed the mask up just enough to expose Riot’s mouth.
His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a snarl, blood dripping from his lips like he had bitten through something during the fight.
Cass kissed him.
On the snarl. His mouth against bared teeth and blood with the softest thing he could offer against the hardest thing Riot’s body could produce.
Cass didn’t care. He pressed closer, one-armed, his injured shoulder screaming where Riot’s grip had wrenched it, and kissed him like it was the only language left between them.
“Riot,” he whispered against the bared teeth. “Please come back.”
The hand in his hair loosened. Not all at once—in stages, like something thawing.
Fingers uncurling from a fist into something that was almost a cradle.
The pull on his scalp eased from a yank to a hold.
Cass’s eyes burned. His shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat but the hand in his hair was gentling and that mattered more than anything his body was trying to tell him about damage.
He pushed the mask up further, past the nose, past the cheekbones, until the only thing between them was skin and blood and the air. Riot’s face underneath was —
Beautiful, Cass thought, and then, wrecked.
“Brennan.” He kissed him again. Slower this time. His good hand came up to cup the side of Riot’s jaw, his thumb tracing the line where the mask had pressed red grooves into skin. “I’m here. You can stop now.”
Riot made a sound. Not a word. Not a growl. Something broken and human—the sound a structure makes right before it stops being a structure. It vibrated against Cass’s lips, against the palm cupping his jaw.
The gold drained.
It didn’t fade—it collapsed, like something giving way from the inside.
One second the eyes behind the pushed-up mask were flat and burning and empty, and the next they were green.
Riot’s green. The green that went soft when Cass said something that didn’t make sense.
The green that tracked him across rooms like he was the only moving thing in the world.
But the green was horrified.
Riot’s eyes widened, scanning—the road, the bodies, what was left of the bodies, the red shapes that didn’t look like people anymore. His gaze dropped to Cass’s face, then lower, to the shoulder hanging wrong, to the blood soaking into Cass’s pants from his hip.
Cass felt the strange blankness crack open and everything that had been behind it came flooding through.
Horror. A tidal, drowning wave of it. Self-loathing so sharp Cass flinched like he’d been slapped. And underneath that, buried so deep it was almost inaudible—the desperate terror of a man looking at the person he loved and trying to calculate how much damage he’d done.
Riot’s hands flew off Cass like he’d been burned. He stumbled backward—one step, two—tripped over something that had been an arm, and his knees hit the bloody pavement. The sound was terrible. Wet and hard at the same time.
“No—” Riot covered his face. His shoulders drew inward, hunching, folding, making himself smaller than Cass had ever seen him. “Tell me I didn’t—”
“You stopped.” Cass’s voice came out steady. He didn’t know how. Everything inside him was shaking, but his voice came out steady because Riot needed it to, and Cass’s body had always been better at knowing what people needed than his brain was.
He took a step toward him. Then another. His bare feet in the blood on the asphalt, still warm. “You always stop when it matters.”
The sound Riot made behind his hands was not agreement.
I’m here. I’m not afraid of you. You stopped.
There was a click behind him. The distinctive sound of a bolt being drawn back.
“Step away from him, Cass.” Sage’s voice. Hard and flat and breathing like she’d sprinted the last two hundred yards from the overpass, because she had. Cass turned his head—slowly, because fast movements seemed like a bad idea right now—and saw her.
She was on one knee at the edge of the carnage, rifle shouldered and aimed past Cass at Riot’s hunched form. But the rifle looked wrong. Different. There were things attached to it that hadn’t been there before, like she’d assembled this configuration during the fight, maybe.
“Cass.” Her voice brooked no argument. “Move.”
“He’s okay,” Cass said.
“He’s in post-episode. His cortisol is still—”
“He’s okay.” Cass turned his body—bad shoulder and all, grinding pain shooting white across his vision—and put himself between the rifle and Riot.
Squared his narrow shoulders against the muzzle he couldn’t see but could feel, the way he could feel someone watched him from across a room.
His bloody hair hung across his face and he didn’t push it back because both hands were busy—one useless, one reaching behind him to find Riot’s knee.
“Cass, I need you to move. Right now.”
“No.”
The word came out simple and clear and it surprised all three of them. Cass could feel Riot flinch behind him—the hand on Riot’s knee felt the jolt run through his entire body. Don’t protect me, the flinch said. I’m the thing you should be running from.
Cass didn’t move.
He shifted his weight backward instead, lowering himself to the pavement in front of Riot, and curled his body over Riot’s hunched form. His good arm came around Riot’s shoulders as his chest pressed against Riot’s back and his bloody hair fell around them both like a curtain.
It hurt. His shoulder screamed. The position was terrible, kneeling in blood on asphalt with his weight distributed all wrong and his left arm a dead thing hanging at an angle that made his vision swim. But Riot was shaking, and Riot’s hands were still over his face.
In the quiet space behind the curtain of bloody hair, Cass pressed his lips to the place below Riot’s ear where the pulse hammered.
“You’re okay,” he whispered. So quiet Sage couldn’t hear it. So quiet the dead men couldn’t hear it. Only for Riot, who was shaking apart under his hands. “You’re okay. And I love you.”
The shaking hitched.
Riot’s hands came down from his face. Slowly, like they weighed more than hands should weigh.
His eyes were red-rimmed and green and wet and wrecked and looking at Cass like Cass was the most terrifying thing on this road—more terrifying than the bodies, more terrifying than the gold, more terrifying than whatever he saw when he looked at his own hands.
“I love you too, princess,” Riot said. His voice was raw. Scraped out. But he said it.
Cass held on.