#BVO/Crash This Train verses

[tarnishedhalo]

♣ - Is your muse particularly merciless or do they leave their opponents relatively whole after a fight? Why?

The Fight in the Dog || Accepting {also, @ruginite for reasons}

When Riley was a teenager he gave as good as he got, more than once stepping up or stepping in to help someone a little less favoured than he was; mostly his sister, but sometimes a girl who just afraid, a kid getting picked on in the locker room for being different, and just sometimes himself for being a little too Haole for his own good. Maybe it was because of all the years he'd watched helplessly as Beth's mother suffered his father's wrath. For the years after she left that that unslaked rage turned on him and his sister. The reasons didn't really matter, maybe he'd always carried the seeds of anger and destruction in his veins. Later, the Air Force tempered that with discipline. He never really expected to be a doctor like his father or his sister. But he learned how to patch someone up well enough that they could get by, and he was perfectly content to be jumping out of plains and loaded for bear to do just that.

After the Accident though... It's hard to keep everything bottled up. Especially when the victims are kids, are helpless people who maybe deserve better, and it reminds him every time just how much like his father he can be. At the same time, there's something cathartic about beating someone into the ground, the rush of blood over his hands, the ache and the agony that have nothing to do with the pins in his spine or the nerve damage extending down toward the amputation. At over six feet and over two hundred pounds and all of that full of New York Irish spite, Riley tends not to have to worry about being anything less than the last one standing. And when all else fails...well, that's where Beth comes in, right?

Every once in a while though other things bleed through. Other things he can't exactly put his finger on. Guilt. Remorse. Slight sobriety. An emptiness that sits hollow in his chest. He hates those feelings most of all. Like now. Sitting on the floor, his real leg stretched out before him, the fake one bent at the knee and drawn up close. Back against the fridge, head hanging down. He doesn't look. He merely hands the other man a bag of frozen peas. Ignores the wreck the kitchen's in, things that'll get put right when he can find the motivation. A half chuckle rumbles low in his throat. "I'd say...you should see the other guy... but....you know." It isn't an apology. Least not in any shape or form that someone who wasn't Baz would recognise. ~*~

Riley's a beast, and he knows it. Delights in it in a lot of ways. It's only in the denouement that he can see just how bad things are, how fucked up he's been, and only when the 'other guy' is someone that's close enough to him that he can make himself care.