Content warnings: Horror, murder, torture, villain POV
With the ruckus over and the gunsmoke clearing, Derringer takes a wander through the body count.
Not too many of the Spirit’s guys and gals got tagged, he notices as he dances his wingtips through the pools of blood and shit. “Margo’s down,” he calls out over one groaning, curly-haired body, then kicks over the not-Spirit goon next to her, who looks like she tried to turn him into pâté with her knives. Creditable job, too.
Well, he’s no use.
He hops over Pâté Pete, clutching the tail of his trench close to avoid new bloodstains, and lets it swing free again as he heads toward a silhouette he recognizes: the wiry little menace who put bullets in two of Derringer’s men before Derringer finally took the asshole out himself.
“Oh, well, you’re not dead,” he purrs, seeing as how he knows just what he did to the little bastard to put him down.
The fading gunpowder burns in his nostrils, sharp and clean; a counterpoint to the ripe rotting scents of blood and death rising from the carcasses around them. The smell those make when they twist together are the closest thing Derringer knows to what a burning life smells like. That scent-that’s-not-a-scent wafts up the back of his throat from the bright hollow core where he flambéed some chunks of his own soul to take out his eager little sharpshooter here.
Man’s gasping like he sucked a bottle of acid—close enough to what happened. He’s not long for this world, but he’s a little longer than he’d probably like at this point.
Derringer hooks a shoe beneath his shoulder and rolls him onto his back. And then stomps hard on the hand holding the pistol he was hiding beneath himself. Things crack beneath his sole and the menace screams horribly, a sound like cut glass slicing him from the inside.
“Tsk, tsk.” Derringer shakes his head sadly down at him, grinning at the dead-eyed futility that’s flooding out the banked rage in those eyes. He drops down onto his heels for a better look at that pretty sight. Leans back to avoid the spit. “Oh, now you’re a fighter,” he adds approvingly. “Very good sign.”
It’d be a shame to waste this. Derringer’s grin spreads a bit wider.
Mr. Menace glowers up at him. There’s a little fear starting in his face now, but mostly angry resignation. Not bad, considering what Derringer knows he’s seeing: sparks of red hellfire in Derringer’s baby blues atop a broad smile, and the air around him still shivering with unnatural heat every time he breathes out. His chest feels like the back end of a wildfire, where the firestorm has died down but the charcoal left behind is still hot enough to kill.
He feels gouged out. Clean and giddy-alive with the agony of his own soulfire. The gleeful pain of being. Stripped down to the bare realities: there’s life and there’s death, and he’s both.
Derringer slams his pretty little menace down against the ground by the throat and closes his mouth over the dead man’s. His eyes roll up at the sweet flavor of the burbling scream that fills his lungs. He inhales every bit of that potent fear, that determination to live, and then keeps right on going.
It feels like he’s inflating like a balloon. It’s not air he’s sucking in, mind, as the menace’s heels drum against the floor and his freshly-pulped hand comes up to claw wetly against Derringer’s side, doing nothing but leaving gory streaks on his coat. He sucks and sucks, a kiss in reverse, drinking every nectary drop of this glorious fighter of a man’s remaining life. Hot and sweet and spicy, it stings like a bitch in his throat, dizzies his head, soothes the raw burn in the cavity of his soul. It tastes like the moment of escaping a sure death. Tastes like Henry here kissing the love of his life.
Derringer will do him the favor of letting her know he won’t be coming back to her. At least she’ll know.
The man swings wildly, his pummeling going from angry and afraid to just terrified, rocking Derringer’s body with the force at first and then slowly fading into desperate but strengthless slaps.
Derringer keeps drinking. Till there’s nothing. Till all Henry is—was—tingles its way down into his chest, sweet and hot and bitter and quenching in its vibrance, and on those lips he can taste the cold that lies after.
He sits up then, and tips his head back to blow the last little puff of Henry the Menace out in a little memorial smoke ring. Fuck, his body’s buzzing with how good he feels.
“You’re a goddamn delight, Henry,” he murmurs down to the body, passing a hand over the face to close those eyes.
The room is dead silent. When he looks up, they’re all watching him. He grins, feeling high and giddy. “Great job, boys and girls. Carry on.”