Her mind was in a dark place. The dreams would not stop, not even with help from the medication she had been given. She had spent the previous night tossing and turning, replaying the events that had happened in the church over and over.... and watching herself move through her nightmare garden. It had made her sick... and actively kept her away from her bedroom.

But today had only made it worse. Her temper had been getting steadily less easy to control, specifically when people decided to paint her as something she was not. The giant bugs words came floating back to her every time she heard the word monster.

It made her skin crawl. She had tried so hard, fought all her life, to escape such labels. Yet still they managed to follow her. She was almost entirely sure that she could donate all of her combined money to charity, volunteer her time at a hospital reading to sick children, and spend all of the rest of her time helping the unfortunate... and she would still be a monster in the eyes of normal looking people. She'd just be a nice one. A civilized, tamed creature for people to gossip about behind their hands. Too strange for them to even wait until she was out of earshot.

She was starting to understand why the mutants of the Sanctuary had chosen to live there. Where people of like minds and similar backgrounds could congregate and live together. Where people would not point, or judge you based on the color of your skin, or the nature of your curse. She was starting to realize why places like the Mansion where so hard to believe in, as she had upon first reading about it. A school where everyone got along? Where humans and the afflicted could live together, under one roof, in harmony?

Impossible. She couldn't even share a city block in this city, without one person insulting her based on her appearance. Frowning at her reflection in the water, she sniffled. Overwhelmed with emotion. Her hood had fallen off before she had stopped by the lakeside. The light rain falling over the city had doused her hair, and dotted her sunglasses... but she didn't care to pull her hood up and fix it. The water felt good against her skin.... and the few angry tears she had shed mixed right in.

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.

A raindrop managed to squeeze itself through the space between her glasses and herself, spattering against the side of her nose. She twitched, jerked from her inner world of anger and self pity, and glanced up toward the sky.

It was growing dark... darker than she liked. Given her past with darkness, she chose to abandon her watery twin, and turned to slink back down the path toward home. Sloth lifted himself slightly from around her shoulders, being more or less nocturnal. A long, slim pink tongue licked the air, beady orange eyes peering this way and that.

He smelled something... something appetizing. Andrea smelled nothing. Nothing but rain and wet grass. She lapsed into a little world of her own, trying to imagine more happy, carefree things for her walk home.... but got distracted. The path she had taken was abruptly altered, first by her serpent tugging her off balance, apparently intent on going in a different direction, and then by the appearance of a white van parked a ways off. It was not unusual, she thought, as she had seen people parked in similar fashions before. Usually preforming routine maintenance on the lake. But... something caught her attention, and she couldn't shake the urge to investigate...

Little did she know, it was Sloth who had given her the urge. After being joined for so long, she was starting to get inklings of what the snake was feeling. His sensitive tongue had picked up the scent of something enticing, and thus Andrea had picked up a very dulled version of it as well.

She approached, trying to keep her footsteps as quiet as possible...but the nearer she drew to the lakes edge, the louder her footfalls became against the quiet of the night. She heard a soft humming... and then her foot collided with a rather large pebble, which sent it skipping and crashing into the water before her.

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.

Everything moved too fast. One second she was watching a rock drop into the water. Then she had noticed a white sheet like thing gradually sinking not far off. Her mind went from confusion to bewilderment, wondering that it was doing there... and then before she knew it someone was behind her. The Greek jumped, her mind not working fast enough to deal with the situation.

And then he spoke. The words confused her for a moment, before everything slowed back down and she realized that the voice was familiar. Her thoughts turned from the mystery object in the water, to he last meeting with the man. She relaxed. Sloth did not. The large snake coiled tighter around her, muscles clenching hard enough that she squirmed. He could sense the danger that she had not. "...Martin? What are you--" And then she noticed the blade... How she had missed it in the first place was beyond her. A knife tucked neatly up against her throat, a razors edge away from cutting through flesh and bone.

Her eyes widened, dropping down to the red splotched uniform that clothed his arm. She felt the world tilt a little... and attempted to strong arm back unconsciousness. She still didn't quite grasp what was going on... but past experiences with knives and being out after dark came flooding back. Her scalp started to ache, and she trembled in his dangerous embrace.

"...M-martin...?"

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.

Once turned, she took to studying him as he studied her. He looked a little different, if not only because of what he was wearing. Green lips pulled down into a soft frown, and she set about fathoming an excuse, any excuse, for what was going on.

"...What happened to you?" She question, attempting to calm her snake with one hand, while she raised the other to touch one of the red spots on his white jumpsuit. "Are you hurt?" She completely ignored the implications in his statement, subconsciously deciding that whatever had happened must not as be terribly bad as it looked to be. She figured in a child like way, that Martin had run afoul of some trouble, being where he lived and all. Apperantly whatever it was, had ended in a bloody fight. She decided to be happy that he was alive, and looked to be more or less unharmed.

...But why were his eyes so cold?

He really did not look good with red all over him. It made her think of terrible things. The last of his words caused her to tilt her head in confusion. Problem? Had she stumbled across something she must should not have seen? "What is wrong? Are you in trouble?" It felt terribly silly to ask that of another, given her own situation. But she needed something to grasp onto. Martin was standing before her, knife in one hand, blood on the other. Everything pointed to danger... but she did not want to see it as such.

So... she simply wouldn't. It was Martin after all... the gardener who grew pretty roses, and helped her off of bookshelves. He was strong, and a little scary... but he wasn't a bad person.

...right? Why couldn't she stop trembling?

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.

>>“The one in trouble, Andy, are you.“

Her hands flew to her ears, small balled fists tucked away within latex gloves. "Stop it!" She squeezed her eyes shut, stumbling back a step, and felt hot tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

He wasn't doing anything... nothing at all, to put her fears at ease. He was fueling the fire of panic in her heart. That feeling of overwhelming emptiness... A familiar ball of ice sprang to life deep within her chest, and she trembled violently. The blood... the thing in the water... the knife...

Everything pointed to something terrible, and he wasn't doing anything to tell her otherwise. "Don't you dare say another word!" Her knees were threatening to buckle under her. She could feel darkness clawing at her, dragging her closer to unconsciousness. She didn't want to think... to think about him that way. She didn't want dear sweet Martin to turn into something... something like the lion.

Vivid memories flashed across the back of her eyelids. Flashing knives, nightmarish growls. So much blood... "You aren't like them..." Axes shaded in light pink, neatly cutting a human down before her eyes. "...You aren't... please... say you aren't..."

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.

She was beginning to freak out, and rightly so. Her mind was a haze of 'let's pretend this isn't happening' with a splash or two of blind panic and flashbacks to very unpleasant times.

She didn't even notice his hand at her throat until he started squeezing.... and by that time, there was little she could do to stop him. A few fear filled moments were spent wrapping a gloved hand around his, intent to try and pry it off, while absently reminding herself how similar this felt to when her snakes had parted from her one by one. A slow, pressure in her head that grew and grew... until she felt numb, and her vision faded.

... She awoke later, jostled slightly from little bumps in the road, and from words being thrown her way, from a voice that was both oddly comforting and frightening. She blinked behind her glasses, her head lolling from one side to the other, before everything came back to her, sluggishly.

Where was she?... in a car? She could see rain in the windshield, ever wiped away as it fell by the wipers. She could feel a seat belt strapping her to the seat, and she could hear the sound of tires rolling happily through puddles and across wet pavement. And... she could also feel her neck, throbbing gently... a painful reminder of what had just happened. His words were suddenly no longer comforting... and she felt the overwhelming desire to run. Where was he taking her? Why was he acting like this? It felt to the frightened Greek as if her nightmares had pushed past the borders of their dream worlds, and were slowly invading her reality. She cast a quick, sidelong look at Martin... and her body acted on it's own accord. One hand flew to unbuckle her seat belt, while the other reached for the door.

She wasn't even really thinking anymore. Fear had overridden the little part of her that made sense now days... She felt the need to run, and run she would. A light up ahead shifted from green, to yellow, to red... and she had her door open. Intent on flinging herself out, and making a run for it.

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.

The Greek hit the pavement, stumbled, scraped her knees, and lurched into a full out sprint. She didn't know where she was in town, and with the rain splattering down on her, she was quite disoriented. That, combined with a more or less blind panic, left her running with blinders. Her feet slapped down the sidewalk as fast as she could manage. A light up ahead led her down a different side walk, away from the main road. The sounds of traffic quickly vanished, leaving only the painful sound of her own ragged gasps, and the thuds of rubber on concrete.

When she finally stopped, to collapse at the base of a street lamp, she didn't even know where she had run off to. She was facing a bridge, a small road that crossed a decent sized river. A small parking lot sat behind her, and a small grassy area sat just outside of the lights golden glow. She took it all in instantly, but retained none of it. Her chest hurt... her muscles ached, she she still didn't really know what was doing on. A few frightened tears escaped to roll down one cheek, and she dropped to her knee, resting her weight on all fours.

What was she going to do?... What had she just done? He... had apologized. Maybe... She was sure it had been, but her mind was so full of haze that she honestly could not make any sense of it all...

Had he really meant to hurt her... or had he simply acted in order to calm her down, as he had said? The Greek pressed a gloved hand to her forehead and sniffled. There was a tiredness behind her eyes, one she was familiar with. It signaled that she was running low on energy and the sheer will to remain awake. In the back of her mind, blissful darkness kept on calling for her to come back to it....

The sound of tired on pavement reached her ears far too late, and she jerked herself around. She couldn't see who was coming with the rain and her dark glasses... but she really didn't want to find out. Staggering to her feet, Andrea hurried toward the side of the bridge. To her delight, there was a trail that led down beneath it. She didn't hesitate a second to hurry on down.

Beneath the arch of cement, beside the slowly churning water, it smelled dank and musky. Random pieces of trash littered the area, and there were very obvious signs that someone had been living there not too long ago. The twenty four year old tucked herself into the darkness, back flat against the wall... and listened.

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?

After a tense moment of listening to night life chirp and croak, she grew tired of straining her ears. She couldn't hear much over the pounding of her own heart, nature, and distant traffic... but the sounds of approaching cars had long since passed. For a moment, she felt safe... like the storm has passed and she would have a few seconds to collect herself.

... there was a lot to collect.

A quiet sob escaped her, and she sank down to the ground. Shaking hands removed her glasses from her eyes, and she pressed her palms to them. Tears dripped out, an even flow as her nerves finally took over and left her a shaking, weeping mess. Sloth curled tighter around her shoulders, off put by her distress, and flicked his tongue out into the night air.

He could sense something... maybe a someone, but in the darkness, with so many critters skittering about to and fro, the great snake was unable to get his barrings completely. He curled around his sobbing mistress, the tension in his body making her shoulders ache ever so slightly, and waited...

Andrea ignored the serpent, mostly. The urge to cry had overrun her, and she was more than happy to just go with the tide of tears. Someone had once told her that when life became to great to bear, letting yourself weep would help to work out some of the kinks. She could feel it working, very slowly, as she sat in the dirt. The pain behind her eyes was lessening, and she could think a little bit more clearly.

... Enough so that she was starting to question a great many things. A hand dropped to her throat, which was still throbbing like a reminder, and she sniffled while wiping at one eye.