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Peter is not a violent person. If he was, he would have gone for a contact sport - football, maybe. Hockey, if he was a particular brand of masochist. Boxing, if only to make his father look at him, with that faraway look on his face. He would relish in the sound of bones crunching, blood sticking to his fists, would bare his teeth, would throw himself, full-bodied, into the thick of it.
He would.
But he didn’t. So he isn’t.
He’s a runner. He surfs.
The smell of blood makes him sick. The sound of bone snapping makes his teeth hurt. The thought of death, slack-jawed and rotting, makes him want to crawl into a hole and hide, nevermind the way the walls would close in on him. Nevermind the racing of his breath and the pounding of his heart, nevermind the cold sweat dripping down his back.
But Skinny Norris has a face that was made to be punched. That shitty little beard, that fucking smirk, those squinty eyes and that earring - always a different one, always begging to be pulled. Peter has thought, sometimes, with his feet in Bob’s lap, chewing on the cap of his pen, about the sound that nose would make if it ever broke. It’s too straight, really. It needs a bump, or a bend. A kink.
It would suit him better. It would fit right in with the ratty shirts and frayed hems, with the fucking ooze all over him, the stench of sweat and too much axe body spray that follows him long after he has tucked in his tail and ran.
Aboard the Explorer, in the swaying of the ocean, reeking of the fucker and locked in a dance with Juan’s suspicious mouth, Peter thinks, well, worse things.
Maybe a missing tooth or two wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen to Skinner Norris.
A punch can be enough to lose a tooth, right? If it’s angled right. If there’s enough force, Skinny might pull up his lip like a cat that has caught a smell it wants to follow, suck in a breath, and spit blood and bone. It would drip down his chin and over his throat only to gather in the fabric of whatever awful shirt he happens to be wearing that day.
He would scream and bitch and moan, and he would never forget it, rat bastard that he is.
But maybe he would be quiet, for a while, too stunned and too scared to do anything except bring up the blood and feel for the gaps in his shit eating fucking grin, staring back at him like Peter’s the unreasonable one. Like it wasn’t Skinny who set his needles right where it hurt and then dug his fingers in for good measure. Like it wasn’t Skinny who came up with a dogshit plan on a dogshit night, relying on his dogshit people skills. Like he didn’t pack a whole bag full of worn, unwashed clothes that feel strangely oily to the touch.
This shirt, he wore to his meeting with Hadden. Those trousers, at the junkyard. Peter can date them by their position, by the stains, by the stale scent of them. He could draw a map of Skinny’s moods in the week leading up to whatever the fuck happened on the pier, and it makes his knuckles ache.
—
The sound of Skinny’s nose breaking under his fist is better than he imagined. A low crunching sound, a grind, and then a snap, and-
And:
Skinny’s hands come up to his nose. The blood floods from it, between his fingers, over his shitty little beard, wets his lips, and drips, heavy and sticky, onto his chest. His eyes are wild things, darting from Peter’s face to his hand and back again, a rat trying to get out of a trap that has only one way in.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking psycho?”
However many steps back towards the locked gate Skinny manages, Peter matches him. He’s not a violent person. He’s a runner. He knows this scrapyard like the chambers of his heart.
But Skinny is looking at him, the rings on his fingers are stark against the blood on his face, and he still has all of his teeth, tinted pink. The blood gathers in the lines between one tooth and the next, almost brown where the enamel is thinnest.
His chest is heaving.
His eyes are bigger than Peter’s ever seen them. He’s not a violent person.
He pulls his fist back again.
Skinny flinches, and jerks back.
“You broke my fucking nose!”
Yes, thinks Peter, and I wish I had recorded it. He licks his lips. He doesn’t drop his fist.
“You almost got me killed”, he says instead. “Better me than you, huh?” You stole me from them, he doesn't say. You took my heart, and you took my mind, and then you tossed whatever was left into that cabin.
Skinny runs shoulder first into the gate. He doesn’t move his hands. Doesn’t say anything. He just stares back at Peter, and draws one shallow breath after another.
Peter drops his fist and his weight against Skinny. Let him flinch. Let him look. Let him think-
Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
“And you didn’t even wash your fucking clothes. What, did daddy never bother to explain detergent to you? Do you need a fucking demonstration?”
Skinny gapes at him. “What?“
Peter shakes his hand. Laughs. “You take this shit off, you stuff it in the drum, you put the powder in the drawer, you start the fucking cycle. It’s what normal people do when they want to smell like people.”
He wants- He wants:
He wants.
The blood on Skinny Norris’ face dries into an ugly shade of brown that Peter has never seen before. Like this, his eyes look huge.
Wet.
Pathetic.