Vigilante | ✔

Part V: Crisis

Eli couldn't believe what he was seeing.

He watched in rapt attention as the news station helicopter followed the chase. It wasn't the average chase, of course. Not the mad drive for freedom of a desperate criminal followed by the blaring sirens, dodging through traffic and speeding down highways. No, this pursuit was on foot, through the rooftops and all participants were masked. It occurred to Eli that it was very much the type of thing one would expect to read about in comic books, not to see in real life.

There were three men running, two with duffel bags, heavy with stolen goods, their faces covered by ski masks (a cliché choice, Eli noted but then his life had been filled with those as of late). They had just burst through a rooftop access door at the top of the apartment building they'd hope to lose their pursuer in. Behind them was another man, dressed in black and what Eli now knew was called a domino mask. He followed the men, who seemed to be ready to jump the small gap — maybe about four feet wide —  between the rooftop they were on and the one next to them, but their pursuer seemed determined not to lose them.

 The thieves jumped, but Eli noticed that one of them didn't land properly. One of them was injured and the masked vigilante would have no trouble catching up to them. For a moment, Eli expected the men to leave their fallen comrade and make a run for it. It was, after all, the logical thing to do if they didn't want to be caught. What they did instead wasn't something that Eli had seen coming.

The reporter speaking seemed just as surprised by the sound of the gunshot. There was a moment of shocked silence in which Eli watched as the man who had fired the gun turned and ran after his comrades while Matthew — because of course it was Matthew —  fell off the edge of the building he had tried to land on, disappearing into the pitch black alley below. Eli's heart seemed to stop, his eyes wide and breath catching in his throat as he stared at the spotlight shining on the place where he had just seen Matthew fall. Whatever the reporter was saying didn't register as Eli tried to process what it was that he had just seen.

Three hours had passed since the gunshot and the fall, and the cops had checked out the narrow alley where Matthew had fallen.

They found blood on the ground and nothing more. At least, nothing more had been reported, and Eli would have known otherwise. He had been looking at every channel playing the news, flicking back and forth between them in the hopes of hearing anything good. Last he'd heard, the bad guys got away and there was no sign of Matthew (he found some solace in knowing that the man hadn't actually died in some shitty alley), but that had been nearly half an hour before Eli had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the t.v.

 Eli hadn't been sleeping all too peacefully, so when he was awoken by a banging sound, he jumped up to a sitting position, startled. It took him a moment to recall what had happened that night and why it was that he had been asleep on his couch. Still a bit disoriented, he got to his feet, deciding to call it a night and go to sleep when there was a banging sound from somewhere in his apartment, yet again. Immediately, Eli figured that it was coming from his bedroom, and so he cautiously made his way towards it, stopping momentarily to grab the baseball bat Matthew had insisted Eli keep for self-defense after witnessing the redhead's attempts at defending himself with a water bottle. The young man peered around the doorway and froze, staring at what he found in disbelief.

 Leaning heavily on the glass doors leading to the small balcony, was none other than Matthew. Eli couldn't see him too well in the dark, but there was no mistaking the man, and an instant later, Eli was making his way over to him and opening the door.

 "No rush," Matthew said weakly as he stumbled forward. "I'm just bleeding to death on your doorstep."

 At any other time, Eli would have responded with a snarky comment of his own, but he couldn't manage to say anything at all as he let the other man lean on him. Once Matthew was sitting on Eli's bed, back resting against the headboard, Eli took a moment to really look at him. The man was filthy, but then he had fallen into a dirty alley, so Eli wasn't all that surprised. Matthew was panting heavily, his chest rising and falling in quick succession and a hand pressed to his arm. Blood had seeped out of the wound hidden beneath the man's fingers staining his clothes an even darker shade of black.