thief crook cynic trickstervillain
Word Count: 2034
Occurs January 1st.
I remember the New Year's resolutions I made last year -- none of them involved killing someone. None of them involved starseeding people, draining energy, bending monsters to my will, becoming one myself. None of them begged me to ruin my family. None of them begged me to ruin someone else's.
Strange how we never find ourselves where we expect. How we look back with disappointment at all the resolutions sit unfulfilled. We meander through the year as our motivations leave us behind, retreating to meaningless tasks that we set for ourselves daily. Those resolutions wait and wait and wait. Within a month, we start losing steam. In three, those resolutions sit forgotten. Like half-finished daruma dolls, they stare back at us with impinging judgment.
I resolved to know myself. To define Elex Yorke out of sordid soirees, decadent parties, and overbearing parentage. I wanted to know who I could be, what I could do. Where I could go. What there was for me in a world dominated by algorithms, skyscrapers full of servers, and millisecond competitions to find the fastest stock results. How do you place a person in that? Where can you go when you don't speak the language of circuits and capacitors?
The Negaverse provided that answer. It gave me the path to success in a place so different from my own that I would have to twist myself for it. Contort all the ways I used to know the world. I didn't have a choice for accepting it. I carved my choices from the body of my old life.
Let me dot that last eye.
I learned who I was when I murdered someone else. Two someones, both loving parents to a hated child. They were victims uninvolved with the war. Collateral damage spread by an unsteady hand. He took my old life -- my failsafe, my safety net. The husk I sorely clung to when my new life made its ferocious demands. He took it as trophy, and in wrenching it away from me, he confiscated a second life. But an identity war is better waged not by getting even, but by burning all enemy assets to the ground. Their progeny made a mistake and the Negaverse offered me a chance to correct it.
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Schörl taught me better than to settle for less.
I saw Sinope's listlessness when I met him, soaked in his own body odor and shame, on the mall roof. He left his parents behind when they threatened a behavioral institution. Penalties for coming home beaten and bruised every week. He languished then, fat on his parents' succor. Too bloated with care to move on his own. I thought, isn't that a pretty fate? We should all be so fortunate to drain our parents to their marrow.
I gave him a place to live. Direction. Motivation. He perked like a wilting houseplant. So dependent he was on his parents that their loss would shut him up for good.
Schörl taught me reconnaissance. While the newly-turned Heliodor moped, I spent my time on watch. Learned the routine. Todd Burnett is ever home from Pan Consulting by five, and ever ready to cook for his wife. As a real estate agent for Halcyon Homes, Ffion Burnett keeps variable hours. She's never home before seven. Todd cooks and cleans and warms up the house for his beloved wife. She comes home with sore feet and bright eyes for her husband. It's picturesque. It's the heartrending tale of America that we're all trained to want, wrapped up in a pretty suburban home with a white picket fence for its bow.
They were the life I was supposed to have. The parents to love me, the relationship to last, the quaint but well-to-do economic status. I would've traded my time in Kolkata for that. I'd give up Tibet. The fleeting time I spent in France. I'd give away Azure Valley and all its pretty, untouchable candy. I'd give up having a boat. Living close to the ocean. I'd banish the thought of having a maid.
But they were everything I never wanted to be. They were vestiges to my old life, with all its petty fear for good impressions, for good grades, for staying quiet, for playing polite, for trading dress code after dress code to fit fashion's newest standards, for knowing when to make connections, for knowing when to sever them. I hated the way it called to me -- the way it sang in my bones.
The way Sinope stripped half my ties to that world. I would finish the job for him; he was never one to follow through.
Breaking in was simple. Large windows give enough perspective to teleport in unannounced. I smelled the bacon gristle sizzling in the pan, popping like oily blisters. Todd hummed a song I didn't recognize, but his earbuds hid my entry. He couldn't smell the smoke over his dinner. The opportunity lined up with a beckon -- the frying pan sat hot on the stove while his back turned to me. My heart raced, my hands started to sweat. I faced Hopeite again, the way her hair taunted me with every bounce of her head. My mind clouded with questions: what if he didn't go down with the first swing? What if he fought back? What if he became one of the Negaverse's adversaries in a flash?
The pan struck the back of his head before I came back to myself. There was no fanfare. No fight. He just collapsed, 200 pounds of flesh and bone slapping against a tile floor. The smell of cooked hair reached me when I started to drag him by the ankles.
Strange how easy it is to dehumanize your victims. I dragged a body, not a person, down that hall. I forcibly reminded myself that he would get carpet burn as his shirt rolled up on the rugs. That every time his arms caught in a narrow doorway, I could be pulling his muscles. Stretching his tendons. That in a few minutes, he'd wake with a headache worse than any in his adult life. That all the fear in the world would fuel him with an unholy strength. That he'd fight with every last breath for this life he wanted to keep. That he'd fight ever harder when his wife came home in a meager hour. That when he died, when I killed him, his coworkers would notice his absence. That his family would mourn the loss. That Sinope would shrivel into his own self-pitying husk and starve himself away.
That I had goals. That I would I would spend lives to meet those goals. That I could spare no compassion. That I needed my compassion. I dragged until I found the bathroom. Then he started to wake.
He groaned at first. Spit bubbled out of his mouth like in a deep sleep, but I wasted no time on looking him over. Duct tape kept him still, draining kept him quiet. I would waste these bodies, but not their vivacity.
Strange how adrenaline dilates time to the unbearable. The minutes ticked by like spiders on my skin. The air felt stagnant; I felt too hot. I ran the bathroom fan and opened the window to air my presence out of the room. I heard screaming -- once, twice, thrice from the kitchen. I knew she couldn't be home soon; I still had an hour.
Todd saw my panic. He yelled for all he was worth, tired as he was. It didn't matter.
The screams were the tinny sounds of a smoke alarm. I laughed. I laughed while my body started to shake.
We're raised to think the worst we can do is kill someone. That the ultimate sin is murder. That by killing someone, we take away the sum total of the experiences they could've had in their natural life. We take away who they could've been, what they could've done, how they could've changed the world. We cut out possibilities. We tear down hopeful branches. We annihilate instead of create.
And I was going to annihilate this man that I've never met before. This drone from a consulting firm who only wanted to provide for his wife and child. Who still had half a life to live, who still had hope beyond hope, who still wanted to cook dinner for his spouse of 18 years. If providence took us down another path, I could've met him at dinner. Learned his stories. Heard his laugh. Tasted his cooking. Pity that instead I'd taste his blood in my mouth.
A key sawed into its lock and we stirred from our quiet reverie. Todd started his moaning on queue. I vanished for the kitchen. She was sprinting for the bathroom by the time I found the knife block. She dug at his bonds by the time I took the phone cord. She scrambled toward the kitchen by the time she saw me. She couldn't block the cord.
The older they are, the easier it is to break their hyoid bone. They don't come back from that. I let her go when her struggles started to fade and I swathed her in smoke. The knife block's missing resident found a new home in her bosom. I cut away that stubborn, matronly expectation. Left that part of myself to die with her.
Strange how loud a message is when it has no words at all. I lost myself for a while, floating in that fog. Thinking about my mother's imperfect picture. Thinking about the forever-disappeared Rowan Cameron. I thought of the way Sinope cheated me out of my own life. Pain lanced up my arm when something cracked; I realized where I was. What I was doing. I couldn't recognize his face anymore. The blood on my hands wasn't mine. The broken knuckles were. The house fell silent but for the screech screech screech of the unheard smoke alarm. Their distant wails never made any difference.
I traded two lives to break a man. I couldn't stand anymore. I felt weak in the way that moral zealots did when they lost sight of their insipid ideals. I knew I was one of those hypocrites. I don't know how long I laid in their shower, but I know how many times I retched.
The shower long went cold before I rose. Guilt still turned my stomach on a rack. Weariness commandeered my body. How much I wanted to be like my general in those moments -- lofty in my ivory tower, so far above the weight of my own sins -- but I don't regret the pain I felt. It was with weak legs and weaker hands that I addressed the mirrors next. I needed to smash each of them.
You never know how vain a family is until you count the mirrors in their home. Seven in total. Each one broken by a lamp base wrapped in my wet shirt.
I left behind everything I never wanted to be. But I was so much farther from knowing who I was -- I couldn't tell you the name of the boy who left the Burnett residence. He wrote a message indecipherable to me. Should I call him the Hyde to my Jekyll? If only I could be so trite. There were no answers in that home -- not in the hollow of Todd's skull or the heat of Ffion's heart. Not in Jack's drowning sorrows when he hears of their lot. I still don't know Elex Yorke.
Maybe I don't need to know. I spent the year searching for the answer, and I closed that year as a stranger to him. I'm just Faustite now. Mercurial, murderous, malicious Faustite.
Strange how life tells us how wrong we are. I was wrong to think I could make something out of my old identity. The Burnetts were wrong to send their son away. Their son was wrong to wrong me.
But how many wrongs will it take to write the end of this story?
