Behind the Masks [Martin]

Martin sighed. Again. People always had to make such a fuss about dying. No, it was not enough that People Who Mattered had hired one of the best in the business to take care of The Problem. It was not enough that said professional approached The Problem with utmost and polite sincerity. It was not enough that said Problem was taken care of with one of the oldest and most respected tools of The Trade. No, it was all not enough.

The Problem still had had to make a mess dying. He had screamed and pleaded and begged. He had soiled himself and cried. He had, quite literally, bled all over. People, Martin constated coldly, were such difficult things. Especially when he was about to be ending their lives. No respect for Assassins any more. Not that he really wanted respect. Not that he was truly bothered by the messy death. he was just...

slightly exasperated, because people kept doing senseless things that made everything more difficult for everybody involved. Next time, he swore silently to himself, next time, he would use a gun. He had arrived.

He had driven a car, one of those white transporters without much to identify them with. It was a rental of course and would soon vanish in the cities slums. The important part was already loaded in the back. And he was now extracting himself from his seatbelt, Martin started humming a merry tune. He had pulled one of the white People-Condoms that painters use over his be-suited body. The lake in the park was not where he would normally dispose of something this incriminating he mused, as he scanned the surroundings and then went to reclaim something wrapped in a tablecloth from the back of his car, but this Problem was supposed to be found quickly.

The tablecloth dropped nicely red splotches on the grass and mud as he removed it from the back of the car. He was still humming. And smiling a quite nice smile. If you did not know him that was. Red splotches falling on the ground. People really were so messy.

Martin was presently in the process of sinking the bloodied cloth (and with it The Problem) into the lake when a splashing noise broke the rainy and darkening tranquility of a task well accomplished. Martin spun around on his heels, facing the noise in a half-crouch. From somewhere his hands had produced a wickedly looking knife that was only a dull speck of darkness in the gloomy remant of a day. A speck of darkness that had been fed today already. And it seemed to be necessary again.

Martin advanced upon the source of the noise keeping quiet like... well the killer he was. The young from that watched him had not quite yet made the connections it seemed to him, but taking such risks as witnesses was unacceptable and therefore the young woman in her baggy clothes had just become a target in the rain. A target for elimination.

This decision was made without much ado, the deliberation cold and calculating like a computer and as Martin advanced, still silently, he peeled out of the rain like a ghost rising from the ground. A Ghost that had a knife quite readily at the womans throat and was already in motion to slit it. Only that in the last second the steel was stopped. He knew this one. Things were never easy, were they?

"Hello Andrea." His voice pronouncedly formal. Polite. His eyes though were ice. Cold like the rain. Cold like the night. cold like death.

Martins eyes (the third was securely tucked away behind the white *something* he had taken to wearing in these occasions) narrowed slightly as he took in Andreas devastated hairline. Apparently she had had another very bad hair day, for if he recalled correctly - a proposition not always as secure as one might think with timemancing immortals - she had had a lot more hissing and spitting going on on her scalp the last time they had met. Apparently she had fallen upon difficult times. Not something wholly unfamiliar to him.

His hand, the one not busy holding pointy, stabby implements, pushed her shoulder around so that he might get a better look at her face. (Only remember: No eye contact. that knocked you out once before.) It was indeed the green-skinned Gorgon of his past that had found him here in this park. And really, quite without much thought he spoke. "You do turn up at the most inopportune times, little one."

His eyes remained cold flecks of steel at odds with the amicable voice. The knife did not waver a bit, still visible. "And now we have a problem." He pointedly did not look at the bloodstains on him. And neither at the ones he had smeared upon her as he had gripped her. Such was death. And life.

Cold, terrifying Martin was, this frankly had to be admitted, slightly dumbfounded. Flummoxed. Bamboozled. Andrea, sweet little Andrea, whom ha had indeed rescued from a library shelf in the Romance Novel section of the Mansions library seemed so terribly, inconveniently... innocent. There had been a book about amutant with tentacles involved in that resuce somewhere if he recalled correctly. Really. And now this. Who would believe, upon stumbling across the disposal of a bloody corpse, (wrapped in a tablecloth nonetheless) that the Assassin handling the job had come to be hurt. Or that something else happened to him. The amount of naivete in the statements of the young girl struck Martin silent for more than a few seconds. If he were younger he might ahve asked 'Are you for realz!' (With exclamation mark, nonetheless.) Alas, he was not young. And proper grammar was something of a pet peeve of anyone having learned a foreign language. Argot was so terribly incovenient. It changed too quickly. The fact remained: The Girl who had read about someting like 'The Man of Thousand Tentacles' and 'Castle of screaming Delights' was just a bit... off.

He just stood there, looking at Andrea. He blinked once. This might have been important. Or not. The cold, ice, in his eyes was there. Open. The rain began falling more heavily now. Sheets of grayish blackness tumbling from the sky, which slowly began cleaning the mess off Martin. Bloodied drops quickly disappeared in the mass of others, hiding in plain sight. There was noise, too. The plattering and prattling of water hitting the ground. The plinking of it hitting leaves and branches. And it hitting the water of the lake behind.

Martins voice was clear though. Clear of any accent. Clear of any emotion. Superificially clear. Unaturally clear. (This crystal was artificial!) “Really, you are a tad slow, are you not?“ Not accusory. Not insulting. Just making a statement in that Martin way. You could almost hear the raised eyebrow. The slight smirk of one lip. Almost. Mostly it was a void though. Calling through the rain sucked clean of all humainty. And there still was the knife in his hand. Arguably it was held in a much more relaxed fashion now. Much more like a convenient tool. Something you could stick in a person, yes. But also in a table. Or wherever it was that handspan-long military knives were stuck if they were not stuck into people. (Martin would not know this.)

“The one in trouble, Andy, are you.“ Martin made this sound quite reasonable. Or so he thought. He took a step towards her. And then another. And then he stopped. To unpeel himself from the white thing he had been wearing for too long. Underneath was a perfectly gray business suit. The kind that hints at Money. With a capital. The white thing was brunched up and went into a pocket.

If he had to kill her, he had decided, he would pay the cleaning bill. The knife never wavered in his hand.

Martin's smile was the very picture of sympathy for her plight. The uncle you knew since your teenage years (the one who never was family and whom you nonetheless adopted) who now commiserated in that personally impersonal way. Not quite family. Not quite foreign. Half a distance. He stepped towards her. Closer in... closing. Up to you. (Feel the warmth radiating, living bodies) The white was a splash in the landscape behind him, now rapidly disappearing in a sea of muddied earth. Forgotten things. Forlorn standing in the rain. We are... together? One? Just gray eyes. Gray smile. Gray self.

Movement without warning. His fingers snaked around her neck, found those very special spots. Constricting the carotid. Life at my fingertips. Your pulse is... racing? They dug in painfully, constricting what was not supposed to be. One, two, three... Counting in your mind... dragging you to blackness. Were going down, down, down... No?
Later:
The humming of an Engine nearly disappeared in the clatter of raindrops and the squish-squish of windshield-wipers working overtime. Martin was quite at ease behind the wheel now. Also: He was quite sure he had fastened the seatbelt around Andrea correctly. (She was, and that was not something he planned on telling her, much more unwieldly than he had imagined.) “I'm somewhat sorry, but you were getting a bit Hysterical...” Cold notes falling. Honesty might or might not be contained therein. Down the drain. Rain was still bouncing on the frame of the car, making it a metal drum. Sounds and smells. Everywhere. “And I did want to get dryer.” Was she conscious? He was not quite sure, but politeness might be indicated.

Waiting at red lights. Normalcy that. A bit difficult after coming back from killing someone and kidnapping the other you believe? Wrongly I say. The principal act of ending lives, of altering them forever, may just be the expression of your own feelings of superiority. Then, indeed, waiting at red lights becomes nothing more than a chore, a charge, that is complicated, constipating your own ego. Then, I believe, people call you psychotic. Egomaniac. But there is another way. Killing as the ultimate test of self. Killing as a duel, battle, no matter your opponents innocence in strategy. Making it all about the other - and then making it less about the self. It is not you that is important. Nor is important the face you project into the other. Killing is just what people do...

just sports.
So now we stand, me and her, in a car at a red light. I feel more comfortable now. Drier indeed. Soaking rain, may it be useful or beautiful sometimes, is not my favorite form of weather to be about in. But then again... not most peoples. And therefore it is more than simply annoying or useful. It is... a practicality. So calmly I wait, await the changing, that I am, for a moment, quite surprised.

Andrea seems to have the sudden urge to take a stroll in the rain. Rather: To get away from me. Unbidden hunting instincts, those base things that you sometimes have to use in my line of job, start rising to the surface. Want out! They scream at me. Trying to get Adrenaline pumping through my veins, blood pressures want rising. But in the end... and the end is not far away... it is about denying those things for the present. I am not in danger, not a great one, and these things better stay controlled. So it is... I summon the ice and watch as Andreas feet splash through puddles. Watch calmly, coldly. And fire up the engine of the rental I am sitting in, door still halfway open, rain pouring in.

The red light I gladly forget.

Let her run... and wait at the other end of the block for her. Maybe she will have come to her senses by then i think. I think about giving her a healing illusion. That of freedom. I decide against it almost by reflex. Freedom... is not what I live for. Not my American Dream.

Simple driving. Diving into empty streets - the rain tells people to stay at home in this part of town it seems - with a now thankfully empty car. But then again: I am missing something. In need of things. Like the girl that left a few minutes ago, running down into the direction I am now driving in. I have crossed one bridge already going around the river, then followed accordingly into the opposite direction whence I came. Now I am driving again... over a bridge. This must be it. Point of no return, convenient bottleneck.

One of the things one learns in the military: Bridges are important things. If you do not have appropriate skills or equipment you are forced to use them. Even with equipment it is ofen easier to use them. And there are not many around. They are the nodes in the network of possibilities, the waypoints that connect. Whence springs they mythic troll, the crossroads into other realms. Ancient signs of importance, those. Ancient ways, the bridge. This one is is an old through tuss design. In the dark of night it is a net of shadows cast by overhead lights and drawn out into abstract patterns by the consistent fall of water from the sky. Elongnating and contracting those shadows as if they were living things, birthing. Roiling shadows they are called. Breaking waves in the sea of light.

The car is stopped upon the other side... come inside a dream with me... let me feel... with ye? Can I appreciate a moment this side of brutality? Apparently. I leave the car, lightly closing the door by reflex. No more noises. No more signs. And yet my eyes are drawn towards the bridge, the river, and not towards the street from where the woman I seek will come to me. It is drawn to the swinging shapes, the flowing water. Let me be...touching for a while... just by the fingertips - aside... see you in a different light. Casting.

And then the shadows are moving out of turn, a last image, but not too early, not too late. Crushing dreams and other images of affective illusion I begin cycling around the point. Trolls under the bridge? Could it be so easy?