Looking For You, But You’re Not Around
It turned out to be a good thing that Foggy had pulled an intervention. The sleep he’d gotten- the best he’d gotten in a long, long time- would need to both fuel him through the night, and through work and mass the next day.
He went out twice that night. Once as Daredevil, and once as a bat.
He pulled on his suit, absently fingering the horns that rested on his head as he tucked his billy clubs into their holsters. He climbed out to the top of his apartment, and breathed in the city around him.
His city was alive. It was so full of life, it was impossible to consider it merely an it. It pulsed with laughter and tears, mimicking the beats of a heart. The movements of all the people below, the cars, the other motions, seemed to form the city’s great breath. It certainly had its own unique smell. His city was alive.
And it was being strangled.
He smelled blood on the breeze and disappeared with the wind.
He slipped into a window that was cracked open, its curtains blowing lazily in the night breeze.
A sleeping child. Curled up on his little bed, holding onto one of those soft little things children all seemed to have now.
And he smelled like blood-death-rot-ruin-dust-sterile-ancient.
He could feel the heat, pooling slightly more at his neck, and smelled the sharp tang of the child’s blood, most traces vanished from his skin. His parents would never notice the tiny scabs, and neither would he. It would be gone before too long.
But the child would undoubtedly be sick the next day. He was young. No vampire should ever drain someone without their consent- but even if a child consents, they should never be touched. They were too easily damaged by the process, still forming, still growing into their bodies. It was harmful to take blood from them, if just because it was impossible to say what was ‘too much’ for their tiny bodies.
Daredevil had no mercy for child predators, no matter if they were sexual in nature or not.
With a barely audible growl, he took to the streets once more.
He visited Mr. Jameson next.
He could smell the slight traces of the vampire, like echoes hidden in the stone, whispers brushing against his skin as he got closer. They told him of the intruder.
Mr. Jameson was a very clean man, so the traces weren’t all that strong. It seemed he had stress-cleaned after their meeting earlier that day, and the air hung heavy with the cloying scent of the different cleaners.
Daredevil slipped inside, following the beating of the heart he recognized as Mr. Jameson’s to the top level, overlooking the perfectly manicured lawn. He could appreciate the upkeep, if just from the way the wind rustled the foliage. A very soothing sound, for a very soothing man.
Daredevil was not here to be soothed.
He carefully made his way up, so that he was peering down from the roof, rather than scaling the walls. He would have been far too visible had he done that.
Here, the scent of the vampire was stronger. Mr. Jameson must not have quite made it to his bedroom in his stress cleaning.
A rumble started in Daredevil’s chest, low and deep and primal.
This was his city, his people. That parasite was going to need quite a bit of luck. Daredevil hoped viciously the beast was prepared.
He checked on the sleeping man.
His scent was calm, radiating over the grief. He must have been crying over that cat again, before falling asleep in the process. He had been asleep for maybe two hours now, judging from the functions of his body. Daredevil wished him a peaceful night and left.
Listening to people sleep, on purpose, sometimes felt worse than watching them sleep. It was far too intimate. It made him uncomfortable.
Daredevil scouted around his city, stopping several petty thieves and one-time criminals. He didn’t need to be very violent with them. He hardly did more than spook them until they ran to the police ‘to escape him’.
(Brett was confused and very busy.)
On a normal night, he would have gone to bed, treasuring the gentle night.
He wasn’t this furious on a normal night. His possessive vampire instincts, coupled with his Devil, simmered in him, low and hot and angry and hungry for a release. He was going to boil over. It was only a matter of when, and who would be affected.
He stalked into a corridor, where he knew no cameras saw, and t u g g e d.
His joints popped and shifted, his bones shrinking and morphing under his skin, taking a new, miniature structure. He could feel as fur burst out of all of his pores, and as the wings tore out of his back, ripping his skin and reforming it just as quickly. It was agony.
He didn’t care.
He had learned early on that the faster he was able to shift, the better it was for him. He had shifted constantly in his youth, morphing from bat to human, bat to human, bat-to-human-bat-to-human-bat-to-human-bat-to-human-battohumanbattohumanbattohuman, ignoring how the faster he did it, the more violent the shift was, and the more pain it caused. It was his pain. He chose it. And it was good. It was safe. It kept his senses sharp, and gave him a shift faster than any vampire he had ever met- as well as dulled him to pain, so that he hardly reacted to the agony of anything anymore, improving his reaction time in comparison to other vampires.
He wasn’t sure he knew how to shift slowly, gently anymore. He knew most vampires barely experience discomfort when they shifted, and took great care to make it as painless as possible.
He had never had that option.
His shift took not even milliseconds, and he was infinitely grateful of the inherent magic of the shift for how it simply absorbed his clothes, bringing them back when he turned back to human. He didn’t understand why or how, but it was incredibly convenient. He paused to murmur a prayer of thanks every time, even if it was mid-battle.
Not even a second later, he launched himself into the air.
It had been too long since he had simply flown as a bat. He loved the way the wind brushed through his fur, the gentle strain of every wingbeat as it kept him from falling, constantly fighting against the intangible element. He loved the way sounds felt against ears that were made for his level of hearing, rather than simply having poorly adapted like his human form. He treasured the easy way all of his senses combined into images in his head, clearer than his human form. He loved the way his heart thumped in his tiny body. He loved how silent he was, even when using echolocation, how seamlessly he slid into the night, how no one looked at him twice if they even noticed him in the first place. He was simply… A night pidgeon to them.
Not exactly, obviously, but he was treated about the same. Some people despised him- feared him even- some people adored him. Most just didn’t care.
He wished he could show it to Karen and Foggy, if only so that they could describe his form to him. He could imagine how much they would love him as a bat, how excited they would be, how curious, just how many questions they would ask. He loved it so much, and he loved them so much. He wanted to share this with them.
He slammed the lid on those thoughts. He couldn’t think of this now. He probably would never tell them, and even if he did, it would not be now. He didn’t need any more distractions, any more commitments, any more confusion. He pushed the thought from his mind, like he had so many times before.
He had a job to do.
He darted above the streets, sticking to places he could feel puddled shadow, spilling over to cover him. It wasn’t likely people would gossip about a singular suspicious bat, but considering his luck, people would have traced the bat back to Daredevil before the night was over- or worse, Matt Murdock.
He haunted the city as it began settling down in the wee hours of the morning. He would catch a whiff of blood and trace it back to the source, only to get absolutely nothing for his efforts but more and more upset.
The creature didn’t seem to have a specific path- there was no correlation between victims, and it seemed to be carefully avoiding any sort of pattern, as if trying to confuse him. It probably was. It probably smelled him all over the city, as he smelled it. And yet, it chose to feed on his city.
He hung from the tallest spire of the city for a moment, trying to find not only exactly one specific smell from the city, but the freshest one. The needle-in-a-haystack metaphor had nothing on this. No, it was rather like trying to find specks of glass buried in the sand at the bottom of the ocean- but searching for one in particular, that was just a shade of a different color from the others.
While still being blind.
A painful, impractical, overwhelming, impossible task that would likely end in his death. Just like this one.
He swung himself from the spire, launching himself into the air, chasing after one whiff of blood-ancient-dust that seemed a little… darker than the others, more attention grabbing.
The wind shifted.
It was gone.