As a man accustomed to pre-emptively making his excuses, Maus was attempting to earnestly unravel the confluence of circumstances that had led him to tonight's bad decision so that he could sort out the most forgivable thread of explanation - or the one easiest to embroider, no pun intended - and had decided that there were too many competing factors at play.

Was it yesterday's expenditure of effort and adrenaline at the boxing gym making tonight's calm seem more like tedium than zen? Was it a thwarted attempt at enjoying himself that had seem him pre-gaming without a game in the end? Was it his increasingly feral desperation for anything that resembled a physical human interaction? The infuriatingly frustrating sensation of still having a lake of dammed-up tears that absolutely refused to give him the relief of falling for even a stupid reason?

Maybe it was something more positive. Maybe it was an inclination towards being an upstanding, reputable defender of the community despite everything currently working against him on that front. Maybe it was an awareness that if he cooped himself up at home with his phone he was going to make a series of increasingly poor decisions that could be avoided by getting healthy fresh air, instead. Maybe it was an earnest attempt to clear his head by taking a walk with his thoughts (although, said a wretched inward voice, if that were the case you'd be doing this as Kay, not Maus). Hell, maybe he just wanted to make it a couple blocks over and buy a taquito without being recognized by that guy that Elaine called Doodlebear, given how often she was making him humiliate himself in front of him.

Probably it was a little of all of the above, except maybe the tacquito. Still, he wasn't blitzed - quite firmly in control of himself, really, just a little untethered from reality in a way that he knew from experience was inadvisable in uniform and which, in the absence of warm human bodies to feel connected to, was unsettling and somewhat nauseating.

He was sober enough to realize that he was capable of making fully informed bad decisions, barely. It was a conscious, fully informed decision that propelled him towards an unpleasant signature - his own dimmed to that of a lowly page's - which he did not immediately recognize the shape of and could not readily place, although it had a familiarity to it. He'd run into it before - or rather, at least something like it - and it was not until he'd gotten close enough to probably be in earshot that he abruptly, and with a lurch in the gut, remembered where and when and how, and found himself beset by a crawling paranoia that he was about to be sucker-punched by something he couldn't even see, again.

It did not occur to him that it might be the actual same source, save as a sort of fleeting, disgusting hope. If he needed to be snapped back to reality that would certainly do the (wonderful, beautiful) trick. So when he lifted his voice into the dark street, casting his eyes around and trying to look casual, he did it without expecting to hear anything in return, let alone an answering voice that he'd heard before.

"If you're gonna try s**t," he said, his tone very pleasant, "I'd prefer you try it to my face."