(SHATTERPOINT) DOING THE SENSIBLE THING

Skidmark had been patient, or at least as patient as a man like him could ever claim to be.

Ever since Anakin Skywalker had walked into Brockton Bay and torn apart everything he had built, reducing the Merchants from a citywide presence to a handful of nervous addicts stumbling through withdrawals, Skidmark had been nursing a slow-burning plan for revenge. He had told himself that all he needed was time, a chance to rebuild a little, to gather a few loyal bodies, and to wait for the right moment to take his pound of flesh from the man who had humiliated him in front of his own people. The thought of paying Skywalker back had been one of the few things keeping him going.

However, that admittedly happiness-inducing idea had been forced to take a backseat the moment he saw her.

Or at least the moment he saw what remained of her.

He had stopped looking for Squealer weeks ago. Between the loss of manpower, the disappearance of resources, and the simple fact that the gang was barely holding together as it was, he could hardly keep himself safe, much less conduct a citywide search for a woman who was evidently very good at disappearing when she wanted to. Part of him had assumed she would come crawling back eventually, probably with some half-baked story and a ridiculous new project she wanted funding for, so he had focused his attention on Skywalker instead.

And yes, in a bitter and twisted way, she had indeed come back.

Just not in any way he would have preferred.

Even now, hours after the fact, Skidmark still could not quite process what he had seen. The image sat in his head like something burned into the inside of his skull, impossible to shake loose no matter how hard he tried. He had seen plenty of ugly things in his life and had caused more than a few himself, but this had been different in a way he could not easily put into words.

Her head had been viciously torn from her neck.

The rest of her had not looked much better, and the less said about that the better.

Whoever had killed Squealer had not simply murdered her. They had desecrated her. There had been a kind of savage, pointless cruelty to it that made his heart lurch whenever he thought about it for too long.

He had buried her himself, with what few people he still trusted standing awkwardly at a distance. There had been no ceremony, no proper coffin, and no real plan, only a shallow grave in a place no one would bother to look, because he could not stomach the idea of leaving her the way she had been found.

Part of him had thought cremation would have been kinder.

Burial felt wrong, almost disrespectful in the face of what had been done to her, but it was the least he could manage with what little he had left, and in the end it was all he could offer. 

It was, ultimately, the least she deserved.

Standing over her grave with dirt still under his fingernails, he had found himself hoping for something he never imagined he would hope for. He hoped she had died quickly. He hoped she had not woken up in the midst of the abuse. He hoped she had not understood what was happening to her.

The sight of her had shaken him more deeply than he cared to admit.

For the first time in years, the drugs he peddled offered him no comfort at all. There was no high strong enough to drown out that image, and no chemical haze thick enough to smother the uncomfortable thoughts that had taken root in his mind. Most of his days since had been spent sitting in the same filthy room, surrounded by half-empty bottles and stale air, doing something most people assumed he was not particularly good at.

Thinking.

He had done a great deal of thinking.

He had thought about her. He had thought about the Merchants. He had thought about Skywalker. And more than anything else, he had thought about the only question that really mattered.

Who had done it?

Skidmark had made many enemies in his life, and that came with the territory. There were people he had ripped off, people he had threatened, and people he had hurt without a second thought. At the top of that list was Anakin Skywalker, of course, the man who had single-handedly done what the PRT and every rival gang in the city had failed to accomplish. In one night.

But none of them fit.

None of them seemed like the type to do something like this.

The Teeth might have come close, but they were not in the city and had never paid the Merchants enough attention to care about Squealer specifically. Even Oni Lee, known for his casual brutality and wanton displays of murder, would not have gone this far. Lee killed efficiently, with explosions and blades and sudden terror, but there was always a purpose to it, always a message attached to the violence.

This had not been a message.

This had seemed oddly personal.

Whoever had killed Squealer had enjoyed it. Skidmark could tell that much just from the state she had been left in. There was no other reason, bar one, for the violence to be so excessive and so unnecessary. 

Simple, ugly hatred. 

Hatred for her, or more likely, hatred for him.

And yet, at the same time, the killer had not cared enough to make it public. If this had been someone like Lee or even Hookwolf, the body would have been dumped somewhere visible, strung up or displayed for the city to see and retch. Instead, she had been left in an abandoned factory like trash, as if the person responsible had cared for nothing beyond the act itself.

Which meant it probably had not been planned at all.

It had been a crime of opportunity.

Someone had seen Squealer in a vulnerable state, recognized her, and decided at that moment to take advantage of it.

And the worst part, the part that made Skidmark’s skin crawl whenever he followed the line of thought, was the conclusion he kept circling back to.

The culprit was almost certainly a normal civilian.

He was not blind to what had been happening in the city. Even holed up in his own misery, Stubs kept him informed. Ever since Skywalker had taken down Battery, there had been a new kind of energy in the streets, as if his actions had done something dangerous to the balance everyone had taken for granted.

Civilians were looking at parahumans differently now.

They were less afraid and far more resentful.

Skidmark had noticed the change, but he had never imagined it would reach this point. He had assumed the first real victim of that growing hostility would be some minor hero caught alone, or maybe a low-level villain no one cared about.

He had not expected it to be someone close to him.

And now that it had happened once, he could not shake the feeling that it would happen again, that this was only the beginning.

Parahuman-civilian relationships had always been strained. Capes had power and regular people did not, and that imbalance had shaped everything about how the world worked for decades. Resentment had been there from the beginning, bubbling quietly under the surface, and now that resentment had been given an outlet.

Civilians outnumbered parahumans by an overwhelming margin. Skidmark had always known that in an abstract sense, but he had never really thought about what it meant until now. If they started believing they could fight back, if they decided together that capes were not as untouchable as everyone claimed, then the streets were going to get very ugly very fast.

And Skidmark, for all his bravado, was not eager to be around when that happened.

He sat in the dim light of his apartment, staring at nothing in particular, and slowly came to a conclusion he never would have entertained before.

Maybe it would be wise to pack up and leave Brockton Bay for a while.

Apart from his desire for revenge, he had nothing left tying him to this city anymore. His empire was gone, his people were scattered or dead, and the only person who had ever really mattered to him lay in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of the city.

Before he ended up like her, either at the hands of Anakin Skywalker or at the hands of another opportunistic civilian with nothing to lose, it was best that he made himself scarce.