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"Don't go out alone" was one of the cardinal rules for powered life in Destiny City. It was one of the cardinal rules for anyone in Destiny City, but as nasty things seemed to be able to smell your existence - blood in the metaphorical water - it was worse, for someone like Maus.

It was also the rule that was most often disregarded, as far as he could tell. He ran into solitary patrols on nearly as many nights as he didn't. But he had not, this time, stumbled into temporary camaraderie to help deliver him from the jaws of something terrible.

Literally.

It was worse, that he was overconfident from too many wolfish run-ins during the holiday season, and unprepared for the youma that was not so easily dispatched. He might have avoided it, otherwise, or at least been a little less cavalier with his attacking. Still, if Maus could do anything besides lie, it was run: scramble, flee, high-tail it, if not at maximum speed than at maximum dizzying juke and feint.

He had shed the youma a half a mile ago and kept running for the sake of luring it further away from a populated area and losing it there, and was now propelling himself on sore knees towards - well, nothing; more away than towards, even if it was still far from pursuing him.

He was slowing to a wobbly jog now, his lungs screaming. He really, really, really needed to quit smoking (again). At least breathing too deep now only barely antagonized the mostly-healed bite in his side. Unfortunately running antagonized the new one, which was high enough on his arm that every swing of his shoulder had been a little reiteration of it.

He could stop, now, to assess the situation and whether he could afford to avoid risking Joy's ire by requesting the bailout of another stupid decision, although at least, if he needed to call her, he could point out that she'd be a hypocrite if she criticized him for going out alone. Not quite as deserted as he would have liked - he could see people passing by on the cross-street half a block down - but as far as he was willing to go, and better too many people than not enough.

He could - and did - lean on the corner of a nearby building, trying to pull aside too many layers of tooth-torn uniform to get a better look at what kind of damage he was dealing with, the appraisal made difficult by darkness, blood, and the lingering trembling of adrenaline, even as he fumbled to get himself into the dim circle of a street light too far away to be useful.

There was no one to hear him, if he made some unmanly noise of pain. But he'd never been given to that kind of whimpering - a fact that might have surprised Joy, if she could have known it - and it was thoughtless, not self-conscious, when he bit it back and opted instead to suck air through his teeth, and to pause and bang his hand a couple of times on the bricks before exhaling.

"Do not," he muttered to himself, in a tone of stern lecture as if he could shame his own body into heeding him, "need stitches. You cannot afford stitches. This is a bandaid situation or nothing."

There was a streak of natural obedience in him, but it was secondary to a streak of natural mistrust and paranoia when it came to things like this. So he hesitated, his eyes searching her face for a bit longer than was strictly necessary, his expression of wary hostility giving way, not to gratitude or defiance, but to a strange, soft bewilderment. His over-large eyebrows wrinkled together in an expression of confusion as he did, finally, turn to give her access to his arm, but he aside from a momentary flinch, he did not address it.

"Do you have a twin sister?" he asked. Of course, the name was the same, but this was still very strange. She had seemed so professional.

He had no answer to the question, and didn't seem to protest when she went on her quest to retrieve supplies.

She was correct, however, in assuming that he would still be waiting for her when she returned. He had even taken the liberty of dumping some of his uniform in a pile - convenient, that it would wisp away with the rest of him, and re-form when he was ready - to give her better access. Even more convenient that there was no such thing as magical laundry - imagine the profit margin on a Destiny City fuku dry cleaning business! - and that he could, therefore, use his hood as some sort of makeshift rag to soak up what was still bleeding and half-dried over his wrist. He had, when removing it, seen once again that persistent little flea of a light that had been dogging him for the last several days, but it had disappeared again before he could clap a hand around it - the quick movement of his arm only earning him a grimace of pain before resuming the tedious work of getting out of what bits of his uniform were in the way.

There were too many layers to the damn thing, was the problem. He had occasionally looked at Joy and wondered how she had the patience to strip down while powered to go swimming, as she had assured him she had done, when just for the sake of baring his upper arm he was standing among his shed gambeson and pauldron and bracer, his outermost layer hanging around his waist and innermost one shoved aside for her convenience. How were people getting down to dirty business in these things, as he knew they sometimes did? Maybe he'd been laced into these pants as some sort of karmic warning against trying it.

"You'd think," he said, his breathing much more even now and his tone almost conversational, as if they were strangers exchanging contact information after witnessing a fender bender, "that with all that s**t between me and it, it would have had a harder time getting through everything."

He lifted his eyes to her then, curious and searching. "It was a dog," he said, in a tone of deliberate testing. How much did a Destiny City surgical resident know about things that were decidedly not dogs? Might be worth finding out, now that he had the opportunity.

Maus, who had no health insurance and knew what a round of rabies shots cost, had already anticipated heading this one off at the pass.

"I'm all up on tetanus," he said, "and it's not rabid. I know the owner." This was, broadly true. "Maybe I wouldn't have gotten bitten if I hadn't been poking around where I shouldn't have been," he added calmly, lest she proceed to suggest a police report.

He was reacting to her work with remarkable, almost nonchalant fortitude - certainly much stouter and with a much higher pain tolerance than one might have guessed by just looking at him. "Didnt I see you with a camera the other day? Talking to people in the street, I think. Thought you were with the news or something. Just a hobby?"

"No," he said.

He reacted to the jab with a little tension that could barely be called a flinch, lip caught in his teeth. "You looked like you were doing a job, and I've never met a doctor who had to hold down a side hustle. Or had the time to," he added. "Anyway. I remembered you," he said. It was a casual, unburdened statement. Maybe it was Kay that she'd been talking to when she said she didn't like small talk, but Maus remembered it, and where he might have parleyed the comment into a flirtatious compliment, he simply let it hang as the simple statement of fact that it was. Just as well, maybe, since it would have been real ******** hard to remember that he shouldn't call back to her asking if he'd ever done any modeling, a dizzying compliment that he had also taken care not to forget.

"You're easy to remember," he added. Well. He tried.

He let the questioning go, taking the broad hint as it was given and without offense. It would have been tempting to take the easy bait here and turn it, again, to easy flirtatiousness.

"No," he said instead. "Just ******** up my arm and my sleeve and decided it'd had enough." He reached up to experimentally touch the bandages - probably not very sanitary, but he wanted to know how badly it hurt and got the answer immediately - and then gave her a somewhat skeptical look, as if still trying to figure out what her ruse was.

"Thank you," he said. "Are you around here at this time a lot? I'll make sure to schedule my next dog bite, if you are. Kinda doubt you're in network, though."

He watched her, still, with that inquisitive and skeptical eye, and while her back was turned he tucked the card away into his subspace. He was wondering whether it was normal - and maybe it was - that a doctor in Destiny City might simply be used to tending to strange injuries without expecting too many answers to her questions. Probably you got used to that sort of thing and rolled with the punches, in the same way that everyone else in this city rolled with them in their own way. How often did people with inexplicable fatigue - or worse - get dumped anonymously at the emergency room doors?

He chased away a lingering suspicion that it might be more significant. There was no reason to think so, and if there had been, it would have been ungenerous to question it. Surely, if there had, he couldn't have suspected her of being aligned to the wrong side. No need to harbor irrational thoughts that made his skin crawl in revulsion.

"Maus," he said, and while it was not the same as having one of those convenient titles that could be mistaken for a name, it was conveniently possible to mistake it for a nickname. To be fair, he did not look entirely mousey - even at his height, a little too tall; a little too pale-eyed and too readily self-possessed. But who could ever say where nicknames came from?

It was not until after he said it that he clocked the strange phrasing of the question. Go by. Maybe a DC doctor also became accustomed to stubbornly anonymous patients.

He could not resist, at last, indulging himself a little. "You offer this service to everyone, or am I getting special treatment? I don't mind special treatment," he added, in a tone of easy mildness.

He was momentarily stunned into total silence - an unfamiliar place for him, and one he struggled to extract himself from. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't that.

“Oh,” he said at last, somewhat stupidly. This seemed to expedite the process of returning his words to him. “I didn't even consider that you could just - I see.” He paused.

“Thank you,” he said, with that sudden, earnest sincerity to which he was sometimes inclined, made youthful and even naive by those big watery eyes and that searching, eager expression. “Really. What a blessing,” he added, breaking out into the smile of someone made happy by considering another person's happiness, as if he could drink the relief of someone else's joy and no longer have any thirst of his own, “to go to sleep at night and know you're the only clean conscience in a stupid ******** warzone. Thank you,” he repeated.