The Great Grey

And just like that, it was over.

The very brief hesitation – surely he wouldn't – did not last longer than it took for Wilkes to take another step towards the door. "Wait," Tim hissed, scrambling for his trousers. While being seen naked wasn't his idea of a wonderful end to this nightmare, far more concerning was the long minutes they had spent in each other's company, and an explanation that would be expected from the observant eyes that would be watching.

"I'll not be walking through the house with the whores gossiping about– this." It was the closest he'd get to describing their interaction. Dressing in record time, ignoring the ache for now, and grabbing his shoes from where Wilkes had placed them, he drew himself up before the taller man, jaw set once more. "Hit me. You think I roughed up one of your girls, so at least give me a fat lip or black eye."

He didn't love the thought of it – one could only imagine a man like Wilkes knew how to throw a punch well – but better to nurse a black eye or split lip for a few days than limp his way past whores and johns who would have a field day speculating about what had happened in the room between himself and Wilkes.

Hand on the doorknob, Rosie paused. With the way Mouse would be walking, he supposed further damage might have been overkill, and whatever secrets the other man might have been harboring beneath his questions, the idea of roughing him up pulled Rosie's mouth back into a frown. High-strung, this mouse was, and Rosie sighed through his nose, attention yet fixed on the door before him.

Wordless, he released the knob and then threw a right-handed punch at the wall with a sharp crack of wooden panels. His knuckles were so thoroughly scarred it was a wonder they might still split so easily, and yet he felt the skin give way over bone without further effort. They bled like mad, knuckles; almost as much as the scalp, and droplets were already slipping over the back of his hand and onto the floor as he turned back to the jittery figure of his mouse.

Rosie grasped a hard hold of Mouse's jaw with his clean hand and then wiped his bloody knuckles in a rough swipe just below his nose and over his mouth. "There," he said as he drew his hands away, and then kicked over a chair for good measure as he turned back to the door.

"Hold your ribs," he cast back over his shoulder. "No one cares as much as you think."

He was expecting the blow — but when the insane gangster punched the wall, Tim flinched in spite of himself. "What–" he started, brows furrowing, only to freeze at the warmth of the hand that seized his jaw, and the warmth smeared across his face. It wasn't a terrible idea, really, except for that it also seemed unnecessary.

It was perverse, wasteful, and intimate.

There was nothing else to say; merely to shove his feet back in his shoes, and stumble his way out of the whorehouse, clutching his ribs, cupping his 'injured' face, and playing the wounded john to perfection. It was only when he was safely in his little East End apartment that he dropped the act – at least the parts of it that was an act – and paused, his back pressed against his front door, as he wondered what the unholy Hell he had just experienced.