It's always after long, hard days at work, before he's even consciously aware of it, that he finds himself stepping out of his car and walking up to a door that isn't his. It's always unlocked, but he knows better than to take that as an invitation. Nonetheless, that's never meant that he's unwelcome precisely.

He walks through the still house, so quiet it feels abandoned, paying only cursory attention to his surroundings. He pauses in the basement doorway, as though on the precipice of a formidable decision.

The half-light falls through the open door, illuminating and shadowing in equal measure, like the glowing embers of a dying fire. The shadows, accented by the dim light, reveal things that can't be seen in the light of day. He finds it both comforting and distressing, compelling and repulsive.

It's only on days like this that the typically submerged wildness is freed from its cage. There's something fierce, almost brutal, and needy that surfaces in his damaged hero's eyes.

His silhouette moves from the doorway and the light shifts as he descends the stairs. He stops at the bottom, restrained in a way that's almost physical. The desire to escape this other place, this chthonic realm, wars with the desire to proceed, to know the aching satisfaction that comes with seeing this usually firmly controlled facet of a damaged hero.

He wishes that the seeing wasn't so compelling because the man who left was always a little less than the man who came. Sometimes it feels like the seeing is the only thing that's real. He isn't sure how much more of him can fade slowly away in these hypnotic moments before his mask is balanced precariously on the edge of an abyss with nothing to support it.

His damaged hero looks up with an inscrutable expression. He's never been able to read those features that seem set in stone. Granite or marble. Something that takes days, weeks, months to carve and years and endless endurance to wear away. He thinks the task is insurmountable, even for him, even when he can see just a little of the flaws and fractures that lie beneath the surface.

He's pushed up against the skeleton of a boat, and sometimes it reminds him of the ribs of a long dead animal and sometimes of the bars of a cell. He has no recollection of the intervening moments, but it's always like this. These splintered moments out of time. He's come to expect it from this other place where time doesn't mean as much as it should.

He's lost to sensations of fingertips and lips and teeth and more. His damaged hero growls things that might be endearments, if he didn't know any better. He does, and maybe that's the problem. Maybe it doesn't matter because he's always been tactile and it's easier to lie to himself when there aren't any words that he'd have to refute or deny.

It's in those brief moments after, between losing himself and sliding his mask smoothly back into place, that he realises how destructive this really is. He zips up his pants and buttons his shirt and promises himself that he'll stop coming, that things will be different.

It takes him days to bind himself back together, but it's never the same. The invisible scars from each transitory encounter, from each ephemeral touch, prickle and pull at the edges of his mind until some days it feels like his entire being is enveloped in pins and needles and he finds himself crossing the threshold to that other place again.