Chapter Text
Joseph Kavinsky stared out the driver's side window of his Mitsubishi and took a long, slow drag of his cigarette.
The summer rain streaked down the windows and poured steadily across the pavement. Clouds jostled for space in the cramped sky, choking the midday sun and crowding around the tops of buildings all crammed into the cityscape.
Kavinsky cracked his window and blew the stream of smoke into the greyish day. The sounds of Jersey in the middle of summer grew louder as they melted into the car and the smell of hot, damp asphalt rolled in, hanging thick in the humid air.
It reminded him of all the sleepless nights spent with his bedroom window open wide to let out the smoke or the scent of sex or sweat or blood, to let the night flood in. To make it easier to breathe, out and in. Out and in. Out and...
It reminded him of watching Ronan Lynch wake up in the middle of an alley and after a heartbeat of seeing nothing, seeing him become everything.
Kavinsky's lips tightened.
Ronan Lynch had been everything. He could have been. If he hadn't been such a soft, sniveling piece of shit they could have been-
Kavinsky punched the AC on and turned up his radio. Skov's favored Russian post-punk crap leaked through the speakers, steady snarl of the droning bass rattling the lighter in a cupholder. The window shut tight, he puffed cigarette smoke into the enclosed space, the acrid and familiar smell driving the memories out. He wrenched the car into gear and slammed the gas, roaring through the streets toward the boardwalk and the beach and the water and his tenth floor apartment.
Maybe he'd go to Philly with Prokopenko like he'd asked Kavinsky to (before he'd laughed in Proko's face-- "what, so I can come home to you makin' my meals, you fucking creep? Domestic goddamn bliss, ain't it?") Or crash with Skov and Jiang in New York. He sure as shit wasn't about to set foot in that hick-fucker dump Henrietta unless it was to burn every building in sight to the ground and him with it. Again.
He pulled into the lot of his complex, tires screeching on the flooring and the echo of the Mitsubishi's growls reverberating around the concrete cocoon. He snatched the key out of the car's ignition and swung out of the seat into the shadowed interior of the covered lot, wincing slightly as the stiffly healed burns on his chest and stomach protested the change in position. The ones on his legs hadn't been quite as bad and the palms of his hands carried only patches of irregular, waxy scars and hate and memories he wanted to hit and run and cut to pieces and god-fucking-dammit all he needed a drink and something to stick his cock into or break his fists on. Fury, deep and without direction and nebulous, froze him in place for a moment. So full of it that he couldn’t move. Thoughts stuck behind the wavering heat reflections streaming from the pavement under his feet.
He snarled silently and slammed the door of the Mitsubushi.
The crashing echo did little to drown the sound of the blood rushing in his head.
---
The inside of his terraced highrise was the picture of fast, careless, twentysomething debauchery fed by a perpetually hemorrhaging checking account. A couch sat starkly in the middle of the large living room, violet fabric and soft cushions contrasting ridiculously with the whitewash walls and the white tile floor with the scattered black rugs. LED lights flashed on the corners of the crown molding, half of them sputtering in their death throes or dim from overuse pf the strobe feature. When he’d decided to put them in the landlord had cautioned him the building was a historic feature or some such shit--Kavinsky just said "fuck it" and taken a hammer to the woodwork along with half a bottle of gin and a Sex Pistols tape for some "home improvement".
A huge window extended across most of the far wall, giving him a view of the beachfront. It was the one thing Kavinsky actually liked looking at (besides porn on movie theater size screens) in this place. What a place to call home, like home meant jack fucking shit to him anyways.
Kavinsky dropped his jacket onto his unmade bed in the next room, cigarette half spent and dripping fine ash on the bare mattress. The bed was huge but rarely slept in, his blankets and sheets ranging halfway across the room and pillows fetching up in corners. A full-length mirror occupied the space where a headboard might normally be, with a large crack splitting a corner into a fragmented continent intent on one day seceding and plummeting to the scuffed hardwood. Fucking hope it hits someone on the way down, Kavinsky thought absently. He considered his reflection for a moment as the last of his cigarette burned away in his fingers.
Bony hands, wiry chest and a flat, hard stomach were offset by a decent amount of muscle cording his arms and back, (courtesy of all the cars he'd beaten to death with various blunt weaponry). His white tank hung a little off his frame, his thin gold chain draping over angled collarbones. Patchy scars flowed across his exposed shoulders and the outside of his arms; his left marred to a greater degree than his right. His chest and sides he knew, were messes of tangled scars from the burns. Half his torso bore the results of injury equal parts self-inflicted and dream-made. Some were reminders of the scalpel he’d pilfered one night in the hospital and dragged across his sick starving ribs for every you’re-a-very-lucky-young-man until he passed out. Others had bloomed open, fast and sharp and numerous like a flowering vine growing itself furiously to death, flowing in red down one side from where he’d left off all the way down to his hips.
He’d been screaming before he woke up but it had been good to have the knife as an alibi for what his dreams had done by the time they got to him.
But Kavinsky liked how he looked. His knotted scars and outlined ribs and the look in his eyes and his slicked hair all conspired to create something haunting and hungry and furious and burning and fever-mad.
Fucking perfect was what he was.
He stuck his tongue out and flipped off his reflection before he left the room.