:: Timeline warning! Takes place after the still active Mansion threads! ::
The gardener ordinaire of the Mansion was having a good day. Mr. Stein, Kabal spy, had taken a day off, or had at least decided on not showing his face today, so he was spending his time just doing work with the flowers. The shrubs and bushes. No people around, only the noises of children rolling over to him in the greens. Calling from the green grass, where at this hour the younger inmates of this educational prison were serving their free time doing preciously useless things. Wasting time away. So little time they had in their lives and they chose to spend it playing ball, rolling over in the sun or pursuing other trivial activities. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Mr Stein.” The voice was close. Much too close for comfort. Alarms rang in his head, as the dreaded pictures of sand appeared whence they should not come. Quickly turning around, digging his feet into the earth for stability, in hopes maybe of finding there the thing that he had not himself, he discovered the source of the call in a small boy who stood where nothing had been when he had come to work in this place. He had not heard, smelled, thought anything would come near him here. He had been mistaken. Small face, brown hair. Maybe ten years old. A small child indeed, looking up at him, knowing who he was. Knowing. Being sure. In a way that was wrong somehow. Mutant. Always mutants. Always the extraordinary. Here it was so common, natural, like the flowers growing in his garden. This garden. Inherently natural. Controlled, restricted. Natural selection. Discriminatory... in ways. Only the pretty survived to thrive in his gardens. After his will they were formed. After the will of the customer, of product development, researching in the darkness of ever-illuminated laboratories. Under skies of glass were hidden the truths of their origin. Their sapline.
He was walking out of the shrubs. Kid trailing him, tailing after him to see him off. The others would not be waiting. Maybe they would. A wave of his hand, a thankful smile released him from his duty, ordered him to go on the grass where the children played. Go where you want to. I wont hold you.
The entrance of the Mansion was where his visitor was waiting.
The metal gate greeted him with its usual cold metal, designed, hammered into shapes reminiscent of flowers. The empty spaces forming shapes that could be found behind it on the grounds he tended to. Bushes were standing to the left and right, a gravel walkway leading up to the grand brick building that housed all the students. Somewhere around here it was where his supposed visitor was awaiting him, wasn't it? At the gates. The entrance.
'I'm sorry we missed each other. I will be back here tonight.' The note was all he found at the gates. No one was there. And he was uneasy looking at the paper thing. It was unremarkable. Adherence to the normative always managed to elicit scrutiny from him, scrutiny and suspicion. It was after all not such a grand day. The note crumpled in his fist. Back to the flowers. To watching kids spend pointless hours, roaming where they should be learning. Teaching each other hated and malice. Among the many other things. This is what a child must learn lest the others that to yearn. And when others start to do, better find your way to do something to appease them fast. Otherwise there'll be a blast.
Say hello and say goodbye. Wash your hands before you eat. Keep your clothing clean and neat. Don't worry what the other say. Just watch their mouths give them away. Spend all their jealousy on you. What they say cannot be true. - And here is how the story goes, no what time us really shows. What you need, what you need is being gray, more than anything they say.
Evening. The sun was setting, turning the sky into a lovely shade of rose with little white sports in it. Martin was at the gates. Waiting. Someone was to come here an meet him. So the note said. There were a million possible people, reasons. A prank being his prime suspicion, but there was something in the air tonight. It made him uneasy. It made him think about how close the rose of the sky was to blood. Blood and bones in the skies.
It was a bad day indeed. The hollow pop of the bullets release reached his ears only after it had grazed over his face, leaving behind a scorch mark. Red hot the streak that as drawn over his cheek. There was no blood of course. The heat of the metal had cauterized the wound a it was cut into his flesh, but it hurt. And, as he was right now, he could feel it destroy his epithelium while his body was moving so slowly it seemed frozen in the thick, solid mass of air. Dancing. He had practiced dancing for this very reason. Dancing bullets. But the question remained: Why was he fired at?
There were again a million possible reasons, none of them a prank, but the mark on his cheek made other things more pressing than deliberations on the armsman's reason for his attack. Finding him, binding him even were the immediate targets of course. And the ice was there, that feeling of detachment that accompanied these objectives. The will do do anything that was necessary to achieve. Survival as an objective was out of the question. It was imperative. That man... the Africans face appeared again before his inner eye, would not know what had hit him. They never did. It was a blessing in a way.
His gloves fell on the ground. Slowly settling there, falling into folds of leather. They were polished at the fingertips, the leather shining in the dark. Polished from frequent use. The second pair, the one that was underneath, came off as well, plastic snapping. All in a blink, a heartbeat, while he was spinning, dancing through forms that were almost elegant. Flowing in one place, springing, rolling, changing into jerky movements. Minimizing exposure to the person hunting him. That one had expected his first two bullets to hit, quite obviously, but more followed soon after.
It was the dance of a lifetime. Easy, liberating it was to hold nothing back, to use everything he had to its utmost. Stemming the tides of time, just for him in a second, stemming them with his mind, mutation, violently reaching, unlike he had ever done before, to make more, get more. Time was of the essence.
It was a deadly grace he had been given. His death-dance flowing.
Had any of the children looked out of the window this hour, and maybe they did, as there was a loud commotion, loud snaps, shots, echoing through the grounds, which had, only hours before held children's' laughter, they would have seen their usual, absent-minded gardener, the one that sometimes liked the big words that sounded foreign, the very one who sometimes just stared emptily into the blossom of a flower, replaced. If they had known him then. Face cool and composed, he flowed through air that was stone to him, handling his granite body. Made mental commands to his flesh eternal long before it could ever follow. Blue eyes blazing in the light like a pair of sapphires, crystal fallen from the skies. Heavens revenge was calling.
It was as if a winterstorm had ripped the vlue from the sky and blown the gardener away. As if he had flown away on gusts of wind. Finally free. Freed of all responsibilities. He was fighting for his life against a person that had come to claim it here. At his workplace. At his home. Whatever else he called the Mansion, it had been his home after a fashion. Somehow it had touched his heart. It had to be the roses. Nothing else had. He was sure, as he would have assured himself, had he had the time.
It was a final dance he showed.
Had been his home. He would have to leave. After he got his hands on that killer.
Five bullets. Five he evaded. Or almost evaded. Another red-hot gash down his arm he had now. Six or seven was, in all probability best he could do, he knew that. There was a limit to almost everything; his powers only serving him so long before failure in battle was the most likely outcome. After all he was still human enough. His dance was a series of movements designed, intended to offer as little space as possible to the enemy, to allow for him to evade by being where finding his as target was difficult. It worked best against groups. People that stumbled over themselves. He had learned to dance, he knew this much to his bone, with groups of people. A single one was... a much greater challenge.
That morning the room that was kept so clinically clean was empty. There was no gardener in the Mansion any more. He was gone. With a bang. Seven of them. Through a silencer. And the gardeners rooms were left devoid of any trace, any hint of personality, just as they had been before. No dust was there. Just the faint smell of bleach that hung in the air as a reminder that he was gone. There was nothing here. Not even the bacteria on the walls survived his exit(us). The pair of leather gloves lay in the trash bin. Maybe it would be found there. Maybe. Such an ordinary word.
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