Blood, hot, sticky and horribly metallic in its scent ran lines of oddly viscous scarlet down his face, staining the pale skin below a sorrowful red.
A smile stretched wide across the man's face, so wild, so wide that it would be no wonder if his head managed to split right in half from the sheer intensity of it, twitching and mad.
Tears, heavy and flowing freely, unchecked in their intensity, mixed into the blood, the two flowing so well together that it looked altogether correct together.
"And what the bloody hell d'you think you're looking at, then?" Edward Hyde barked, his voice sounding remarkably steady given that he was standing haphazardly on the precipice of panic, and as each second ticked by, he teetered closer and closer to tumbling right off the edge. "Get out of here before I have to make you!"
This had been intended as a threat, a warning that there would be more than one broken body lying lifeless on the cobblestones, the still leaking blood looking like an ever growing lake of regret, but under the gruff threats in his voice was something all the more frightening.
There was a layer of fear in his voice.
He didn't know if he could stop once he started, and that terrified him dreadfully.
He'd set out that night with the intention of having some fun, to get up to some well-meaning mischief, and, of course, drink enough to put a sailor or two to shame.
But there he stood, stained in another man's blood – some of it was his own, but not all that much comparatively – with his hands aching something fierce and tears pouring down his face in a steady river of regrets.
He didn't mean to do it.
Things just got out of control.
He just got out of control.
He got out of control and beat a man to death with his bare fists.
Time had seemed to slow to an agonising trickling treacle, the frantic fleeing footsteps that had left him still ringing in his ears long after they were out of earshot. Ordinarily, everything felt a little bit too much, but now nothing felt like anything, a heavy emptiness gnawing away at him as if determined to devour him whole, leaving nothing behind.
Finally, after all too long, a scrap of common sense kicked in, reminding him that not only was he covered in a dead man's blood, but was standing over the corpse itself, and that the longer he stood there dwelling on the foolishness of his actions, the more likely the chance of someone stumbling upon him and what he had done would be.
Taking a large, gulping breath of air he tried to regain at least as much composure that would not draw attention to him, attention being the last thing he wanted at a time like this. Fortunately for him, the good Doctor Jekyll was an expert in the matter and so there was at least a touch of body memory that he could go by so he could navigate himself out of the pit he had quite successfully buried himself in.
It was not until he retreated into the safety of Henry's office did he dare let the extent of the situation hit him. Oh, and hit him it did, washing over him like a relentless wave, catching him in a nasty ebb and flow of pain and mistakes. Disgusted, he flung of his cloak, his coat, anything that had even the slightest splattering of accursed crimson, his breath hitching nastily in his throat as he gasped and struggled to fill his lungs with the air that so suddenly was denied him.
His fingers, sharp clawed and slender, dug into his hair with an intensity that could only come from a half-baked hope that he might find a release from the reality of what he had done hidden somewhere in his unruly blond mess of hair. But, of course, there was nothing but further frustration to be found.
Sinking down to the floor, eyes screwed up tight against the world around him, hands still buried in his hair, he wept. Wept like a child in a nightmare. Wept like a criminal condemned to a fate that did not fit the crime. He wept there, huddled in a pitiful ball in an office that all of a sudden seemed too big and distorted, weeping as if his all the sins of the world were heavy upon his shoulders.
He wept not for the man he killed, but for himself. For the stains that would never leave his skin no matter how hard and how often he scrubbed them away.