v.

Not long after that, they're cruising through Salem, looking for trouble, when Martin says, quietly, "Smell that?"

Vogel grins wide, the way he does when he gets excited (which is often). "Somebody's scared," he crows.

All of the boys seem to grow a little tenser, taking their weapons up, and Amanda shifts to the front of the van, curious. She leans into the front, between Martin and Cross, and watches out the windshield, looking for the source of what's got the boys all worked up.

She doesn't see anything for a while, not until Martin slows the van and turns onto a street that isn't particularly well-lit. There, they all spot the source of the fear: a single girl, younger than eighteen, heading in their direction from the opposite side. A few yards behind her is a group of older men, loud, laughing, having trouble keeping to the confines of the sidewalk.

Amanda feels her considerable temper flicker, and she clenches her fist around her crowbar. She leans closer to Martin, and, keeping her voice quiet so it doesn't betray her anger (completely unnecessary, they can all feel it, but old habits and all that), and says, "We're not gonna go after her, right?"

Martin tilts his head towards her, looks sideways at her over the rims of his glasses, and she looks steadily back. "She's not the one who deserves to get eaten," she says, still quiet but emphatic.

Martin sucks his teeth, a quick little gesture, indicating his distaste—but not towards her, or the girl on the street. He faces front again, agrees "No, she is not," and revs the engine, powering them across the road, into the empty space on the sidewalk between the girl and the guys who were following her.

The guys are drunk, that much is obvious, and they reel back with a few blurted "Holy shits" and "what the fucks?", but they don't run, full of liquid courage and curiosity. Then the Rowdy Three burst from the growling vehicle and go to work.

Amanda wades in with a will, letting that tightly held anger loose, fueled on by Martin's feral howls and Vogel's cocky, gleeful taunts. One guy, blind with panic, tries to throw a punch at her; she swings the crowbar at him and feels something crack. The sound he makes is like music, and the joy she feels at breaking something that deserves to be broken overflows, spilling out of her in her laughter. It's noisy and chaotic and so much fun.

She remembers a time not so long ago, when she was the girl being followed down the street, trailed by a van full of unknowns—but that was different. She'd stopped being scared, funnily enough, when they'd thrown that note through the window, and by the time they'd cheered and shouted encouragement from behind their blacked out windows in response to her drumming, she knew that there was something else going on with that van, didn't mind it trailing her to the store.

She'd also been followed by guys she was scared of—in the years before the pararibulitis, being followed off the bus stop, home from a bar, always when she was alone, always by more than one man. Depending on how bad the vibes were, she'd had to duck into other bars, call her friends on the off-chance that someone was out too and could swing by to provide backup. It feels good to get revenge for all those times when she'd been outnumbered and helpless to fight, forced to run and hide instead.

So, when two guys break away from the group, turn tail and run down the street in a bid to escape the hell raining down on them, she follows without a second thought, racing after them with her crowbar clutched tight in her hand. Martin, using the end of his bat to knock a guy flat on his ass, spots her leaving, and after lighting a fresh cigarette, he lopes after her, keeping her within his sight.

Amanda is lighter and quicker, and way less drunk, so she catches up with the guys before they can reach the street corner, and turns her shoulder and uses her momentum to slam into the closest one's back, knocking him off his feet and into a nearby trashcan. His friend yelps and wheels around, and Amanda is ready—baring her teeth, she winds back and cracks him hard across the shoulder.

He doesn't react like she's expecting him to. Instead of clutching the injured spot, going down or trying to flee like most people would, he snarls and charges her, fast and unexpected enough that he's able to body-slam her into the brick wall. "Bitch," he spits, and winds back with the unhurt arm, backhanding her hard, but she's still got the crowbar in hand, and even as her head snaps to the side and her lip turns to fire, she jams the prongs into his ribs with as much force as she can muster. He hisses in pain, curling automatically towards the newly injured spot, and she takes advantage of the space to get her heavy-booted foot up, doing something she's seen Martin do sometimes when some guy just won't go down and kicking the guy's knee at an angle as hard as she can.

She hears something crunch, and he collapses to the ground. She laughs, a little breathless, blood hot and lip throbbing where it split, then, twirling her crowbar, she turns to his friend, who is a few feet away, struggling up from the pile of trash where he'd landed.

That's when she feels it—a tickle, deep in her chest, that swells and blocks her windpipe. No, she thinks but can't say, and in the next second, she drops her crowbar without meaning to, her hand going to her throat.

Something's coming.

She can feel something, creeping up from her chest, and the strength leaves her knees. She blinks and coughs, stumbles, then she's suddenly on all fours, gagging over the cracked concrete as something crawls up her throat.

As preoccupied as she is by what's going on inside her body, she's still relentlessly aware of the guy, looking carefully at her, then laughing as he steps closer. "Well, shit," he muses, brushing grit off his shoulder. "Look at you."

That's when Martin decides to intervene. Amanda gags, and through bleary eyes, she sees the guy look up, blurt "Shit" and try to step back, but there's no avoiding the baseball bat hurtling towards his solar plexus with vicious intent.

The bat makes contact, and the guy keels over, his head proving an irresistibly tempting target for Martin's boot. Then whatever's crawling out of Amanda's throat passes over her tongue and through her lips, and she can't breathe, gagging fruitlessly as she views, with horror, the snake landing on the sidewalk beneath her and then slipping away. Before she can even think to be relieved, though, she feels that same curling in her chest, another one ready to work its way up.

Then:

A warm hand, parting her hair so it can lie bare on the skin of her neck, that chilly tingle that means he's pulling the ugliness out. She could collapse, she's so relieved, but she still feels that snake, heavy in her throat.

It's a bad attack. It takes a long time before she realizes that her lungs and stomach are not, in fact, housing reptiles eager to escape, and somewhere in the process, she passes out for a few seconds—embarrassing, she hasn't done that since the very first time the Rowdy Three drained her symptoms. All she knows is suddenly, she's lying with her cheek pressed to the concrete, her breathing clear and with nothing stirring inside of her, and Martin is stooping beside her, brushing her hair out of her face and tilting his head so he can see her better.

"There you are," he murmurs around his cigarette.

Amanda pulls in a shuddering breath, then gets her arms under her despite the fact that they feel a lot like boiled noodles. Fortunately, Martin helps—he wraps ringed fingers around her upper arm and rises, carefully pulling her up with him.

Of course, the weakness doesn't dissipate once she's on her feet—the opposite, really; her knees buckle as soon as she tries to put weight on them, and she clutches at Martin's arm for balance. "Whoa," he says, catching her before she can fall, and she chuckles ruefully, shaking her head like that'll make her strength to return to her.

"This is so stupid," she groans, feeling just a bit embarrassed, the way she always seems to after they siphon off an attack, despite the fact that she knows that feeling drained like this is a hundred times better than the panic and pain, and that feeling weak isn't… well, a weakness.

Martin isn't having it. "Watch the cherry," he says briefly, warning her of the burning cigarette before he leans down, then his arm is pushing against the back of her knees, and she couldn't keep her footing even if she wanted to (she doesn't)—another second and she's in his arms, her arm sliding instinctively around the back of his neck even as mutters his name in startled protest.

"Relax," he says, firmly, but with a gentleness. "Not like you weigh any more'n a fly," and then he's carrying her back to where they'd left the others.

Amanda, briefly, tries to figure if it's worth arguing with him just because she doesn't enjoy feeling vulnerable (physically or otherwise) but ultimately decides against it—the Rowdy Three aren't exactly the best people to try that on, because when it comes to what she's feeling, they always know if she's lying. Instead, she rests her forehead against that tattoo on his neck (in control, it says, which is very Martin—Gripps did it for him, she'd discovered, and he offered to give her one as well; she'd told him as soon as she can decide what she wants, she'll take him up on it) and enjoys being this close to him. It seems like she rarely gets to touch and hug and roughhouse with Martin the way she does with the others.

That's stupid, she thinks, and, feeling sleepy and glad that he's here, the draining taking her usual (limited) walls down once again, she reaches out and plucks the cigarette from his mouth, bringing it to her own and taking a drag.

The light's reflecting off his glasses, making it difficult to see his eyes from her angle, but she thinks he's surprised. His voice doesn't sound any different than usual, though, as he says, "You better watch it—keep that up, you'll start to sound like Tom Waits."

"What, like that's supposed to be a deterrent? Tom Waits is the coolest guy ever," she says, taking another drag to affirm the view, and Martin chuckles. "Anyway," she says on the exhale, "you're one to talk. I literally never see you without a cigarette."

"Mm, well, that's different," he tells her. "Our bodies don't work the same as yours. We don't want you keeling over early, now, do we?"

"Oh, buzzkill," she grumbles, but she doesn't mean it, and puts the cigarette back in his mouth. She feels the brush of his rough lips against the back of her index and middle fingers as he tightens them around the butt again, and tries to play it off like she didn't just feel a cool, not-unpleasant shiver at the touch.

"Serious," is all he says. "I'm not about to tell you how to live your life, but I speak for the rest of the boys as well as myself when I say we'd like you to stick around for a while. So maybe, instead of peelin' out alone after a pair of dipshits, take some backup with you."

She lets her head loll against his shoulder and says, a bit sarcastically, "Okay, Papa Wolf."

He turns his head, and this time she's sure he's surprised. "What."

She doesn't bother to explain, because between his somewhat lupine appearance, his largely unspoken role as group leader and protector, and really, the howling, she thinks it should be obvious. Instead, she just says, "Thanks for getting my back," and, doing something she wouldn't dare to if she was at full power and not already this close to him, she tightens her arm around his neck, hugging instead of holding, and kisses his bristly cheek.

He doesn't really react other than to let a small cloud of smoke loose into the air to form a silvery halo around their heads. She doesn't his stoicism bother her, resting her head again on his shoulder, where the leather vest yields to the shirtsleeve made soft and a little ragged with age. A few more seconds, and then he says, "Anytime, Drummer."

A/N - Felt right to go out on a little bit of an Amanda/Martin vibe. I might write some stuff to follow this later on when I have some level of control over my life again but I think for now I covered everything I wanted to write about so this is a good place to leave it. Thanks so much to everyone who read and reviewed, I really appreciate it!