Because It Is Bitter Does it really matter that I feel bad about this? That there's an evil pinch to my heart when I slide the blade into defenseless flesh, slicing through it as easily as butter, leaving nothing but red devastation and bubbling, gasping death? This young woman will still be dead, no matter how much pain I endure over her demise. What's the point with an assassin with a heart? Yet I do feel something resembling guilt over the lives I've destroyed. I can live with it, though. I can. But I can feel it creeping closer and closer to the core of what I am, and one day, maybe not too far into the future, I will be the helpless one.
But for now, I have a job to do. To step out of the path of the blood - wouldn't want to mess up these fine new jeans, now would I? - wipe my knife on her once pristine white blouse. She won't have to pay the dry-cleaning bill, after all.
She is still gasping and twitching a little. She was unconscious in a matter of seconds after I severed her carotid artery, but her body refuses to believe it's dying, desperately forcing blood through emptying veins, sucking useless breaths into lungs that can't pass the oxygen on to the brain that craves it so. Her eyes are an empty, china blue. For a second, she looks so much like Dana Scully that I freeze in horror. Then my brain catches up with me, and she's just a plain, slightly dumpy blonde with pretty eyes. Pretty, dead eyes. Scully is still alive, and if someone would will it otherwise, they would know better than to ask me. My sometime employers, such as they are, know more about my weaknesses than I would like them to, but in that particular instant, I'm grateful. I don't want to know what I would do if I had to choose between her life and mine. Or even worse, between his life and mine. I don't want to know, but of course I know. It would be the end of me.
Disposing of bodies, cleaning up the site, covering my tracks. All this is just another day in my life. The horror that it should have become routine. When did I stop recoiling from the handling of dead flesh? When did I become this cold-faced monster? I was young once... wasn't I?
Young, perhaps, but never innocent. My first murder was committed before I had taken my first breath. My mother died in childbirth. I clawed my way down her too-narrow birth canal with savage force, and was delivered in a spray of her lifeblood. The original sin. My father, drunken, violent bastard that he was, still loved her and never forgave me for living in her stead. You're no son of mine. Evil changeling, dark elf. Your eyes, those pretty, green eyes, you stole them from her, ripped them right out of her skull. He went mad with grief in a romantic, Heathcliffian way. I killed him when I was fifteen. Yes, so my childhood was cold and violent? It doesn't explain the reality of Alex Krycek any more or less than the fact that I grew up hungry, that I was relentlessly ambitious, that I had many lovers but no one to love. Pick pocket to rent boy to aspiring hood, all the time working towards something greater, something better. Getting rid of that embarrassing accent, and thank god languages came easily to me. Constantly covering up the tracks of my past because no way, no fucking way was I gonna stay in the gutter. Creating myself from nothing like an artist adds layer upon layer of bright color to a dun canvas.
All that work, all that passion, and for what? A scarred mind, a missing limb, a thousand men who want me dead. An endless struggle to save this human race I hardly feel a part of. An unrequited, pathetic longing for someone who wouldn't trust me if I told him the sky was blue.
I don't know how they found me, what they saw in me that satisfied them. I was nineteen. Arrogant, rude, dangerous the way a rat is dangerous. The scratch of a rat is painful but not lethal, but its claws and teeth are pestilent. They honed my blunt force into a switchblade, my rough boy charm into malleable, deadly attraction. Deceit on two legs. Put me through college, the FBI Academy. Taught me to lie and believe the lie for the moment it was falling from my lips.
I was a good little murderer. I liked the rush of the hunt, the feeling of power the kill filled me with. I didn't particularly enjoy the moral implications, but they are so easily swept under the carpet when everything else is looking so promising. When there is no going back. I'm not killing my father every time I do a hit. He's long buried under a truckload of corpses that I have killed because someone else wanted me to. His is the only life I've taken for no one's reasons but my own.
My apartment is a hole in the wall, a drab, cockroach-infested dump with nothing in it but a bed and a telephone. My financial situation tends to swing madly between opulent wealth and near-starvation. Things are not going well right now. I am hunted, I am running scared, and somehow it's not as easy getting jobs on the freelance market when you're missing valuable parts of your person. I might be as deadly now, in decimated form, as I ever was, but people only see the handicap and turn it into who you are. Hitmen don't get disability benefits. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning and the rent's due today. Payment for today's job might be weeks in coming, and the dumpy blonde with Scully's eyes had only a couple of twenties in her purse. I feel exactly like the scavenger *he* thinks I am. It's true, and it's all going to hell. But I'm alive. I just have to wonder if any of this is worth the pain. I really don't think it is, but my sense of self-preservation has always been stronger than all the reasons there are to end it all. And there is no way I could leave this world of my own free will while he's still in it.
That is my undoing. Of course. It was supposed to be my big break, my chance to become a key player. The Mulder case. An Academy Award-worthy performance. No one ever told me it would be this painful to find what you are looking for. Mulder weaseled his way into my dreams and I never noticed I was falling apart at the seams. Kept going back for more, building castles in the air. The gentleman with the Morley-habit told me to get over myself and just fucking do my job, but of course I insisted on playing both sides. Disastrous consequences ensued. Mulder will never know that he has destroyed my life as fundamentally as I ever wreaked havoc on his. Fuck Mulder. Fuck him and his futile one-man crusade. Fuck his insistence on assuming the moral higher ground just because he's never been hungry and desperate and never had to choose between his life and someone else's.
The anger I direct at him never survives long. I don't know what's keeping the love alive, but it's like an alien thing inside me, so completely disassociated from the rest of what I am that I sometimes think I should be able to see it in my eyes, like the oil. Just like that fucking oil, it's invaded me and is controlling my actions. Love's a fierce and ruthless and cannibalistic thing, and it's feeding on something important inside me. My sense of purpose, perhaps. My self-esteem, certainly.
The bathroom mirror is greasy and the light is murky and somehow moldy, but I can see my face staring back at me. Who is this maimed and scarred man with his aging pretty-boy face, his hunted, wild-eyed stare? He resembles nothing so much as a deer caught in the headlights. When did I get this scared? I used to be a tiger. Starving and sick, perhaps, but no less dangerous for that. Now I'm prey.
Nothing to do now but go to bed and try not to dream. I don't want dreams. Not the bad ones, the obvious ones about enclosed spaces and pain and loss of control. And certainly not the good ones, which are worse. They are always about things I will never have, things I should know better than to even wish for.
Maybe I'm not such a rat after all. A rat wouldn't waste this much time on regrets. |
