A collection of drabbles about our favourite assassin. Tell me what you think, because I'm not sure about them.

A Broken Tale

The Guild meant something. It meant efficient, expensive, elegant death, amongst other things. Which was why Teatime liked it. The whole place was proud of its role, of its business. It was glorious and unashamed. Untainted.

Teatime thought he must know every inch of the place. He thought he understood the ethos of the place. He understood the art of assassination, which was not the cleanliness of the kill, but the thrill of death, the anticipation as the inhumation was planned, the power you could wield on a knife-edge. Teatime lusted after it, for the moments when the shards of his mind caught the dark light of and shone.

***

A new and unique danger was introduced to Ankh-Morpork's streets when Teatime left the Guild for a few hours. Especially as he was angry.

He didn't like the other students. They weren't friendly. They didn't try. They were all aristocrats who hadn't learnt that avoiding Teatime meant avoiding pain. When Matthew Spiff had mocked Teatime's eye the other students had laughed. Until Spiff was found without a pulse. And quite a few other things usually deemed of considerable importance to the living.

A thief tried to accost him. Teatime's knife flashed in the moonlight.

'Hi. My name's Teatime. What's yours?'

The thief tried desperately to go back in time, and rob someone else. But it was too late now.

'Aren't you going to talk to me? That's so rude.' Teatime sighed and withdrew his knife. The thief crumpled.

Too late now...

***

Teatime had first encountered death when he was three. His parents had left. He still couldn't understand why. He'd just been playing games with them, and then, suddenly they had disappeared, and everyone was giving him strange looks and then, when he was older, he had been sent to the Assassin's Guild, in the hope that one way or another they would solve the problem. They had instead recognized someone they couldn't afford not to educate. In the hope he wouldn't inhume his comrades. In the hope that the wild, tempestuous death that was Jonathan Teatime could be tamed. It was a vain hope, but assassins are good at vanity.

Teatime didn't like vanity. It got in the way. But pride in your work was a trait he valued highly. Because work defined you, if you allowed it to. Teatime, however, intended to define his work.

If he couldn't rewrite the book of inhumations no one could.

***

Teatime had seen Cori Celesti once. The home of the gods. A huge ice spire, that had led Teatime to deplore the apathy of the human race. It was hardly a hidden location, and yes, climbing it would present some difficulties, but only if you were foolish enough to let physics get in the way. Teatime had long ago learnt to ignore that particular force. Then there were the gods themselves. Mere creatures of belief. Easily destroyed. All you had to do was inhume their followers...

***

Teatime observed the other students. They didn't make sense. No one did. Everyone seemed to feel an alien desire to have relationships with one another, that got in the way and consumed time voraciously. Time when they could be study. Or playing games with people, who quickly became victims. As far as Teatime was concerned a stranger was a just a contract you hadn't heard about. And every contract was viable. For a few dollars Teatime would have cheerfully inhumed one of the eight muses, or gravity. And he would succeed. Some people can't be stopped, because their self-belief burns their surroundings until everything else is just ether.

And Teatime believed in himself. Because he was the only sane person on the entire Disc. The only one sane enough to consider morticide, the only one sane enough not to be frightened by anything, the only one sane enough to be able to calculate the exact force needed to push a knife through armour without breaking the skin.

It amazed him that the rest of the Disc was so insane.

***

Teatime never regretted the loss of his parents. Because they were gone he was an assassin, and that was ample compensation. But, occasionally he thought he would like to talk to them. Just to say thank you. For the characteristics he must have inherited from somewhere, for the lack of bonds to them that left him free, for the introduction to the world that had left him the way he was. And for his name of course. Oh yes, he would love to have a friendly chat about Teh-Ah Tim-eh. And why they hadn't changed the spelling of Teatime into a phonetic version that would save time, tedium, trouble and lives. Including theirs.

Teatime saw a young woman pause in the street to give him an odd look. There were some good things about his name, he considered. Without it he would be unable to say the words he chose to vocalise now.

'Hi. My name's Teatime. What's yours?'

***

Even now Teatime could remember his first day at the Assassin's Guild, perfectly. He had seen the magnificent building and sensed that he belonged to it as much as the bricks that formed it. He knew that he had found his soul mate, and it was the spirit of inhumation that had found a temple in this building, the richest guild in the city. Teatime found that a large portion of his soul was reserved for death, which left so very little for other people. He wanted to make death his life. The only companion he wished for was his knife. He had been so happy to discover that he could be completely alone in the world and enjoy it far more without having to share.

Children are notoriously bad at sharing.

***

He wasn't dead. He knew it. That poker hadn't touched him. Because it couldn't have. Death only applied to others, he was an integral part of death. It couldn't claim him. And yet...

Everything was fading, like a nightmare in the sunlight, and he was losing his identity with his life. No. He wouldn't. He refused to be so stupid, so apathetic, so normal.Belief and concentration would save him, as they always had before.

The last of Jonathan Teatime's life trickled away, but he didn't. Not the part of him at the core. The soul. That fled to the Guild, to its home. And watched the other assassins, and saw their stupidity, and hated them for being so human.

And waited for another student like Jonathan Teatime to enrol. One who could be sculpted, with effort, into a second chance and a second assassin who would dream of inhuming the stars.