Prompted by the 'Masquerade' weekly challenge on the MC1T livejournal community.
Disclaimer: It morphed into something darker than I originally anticipated. Probably because the more you think about them, the darker Gosho's mangas seem to be.
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Máscara de la Calavera
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Death changes people. No, not the person who has, in fact, died. The ones who see death, beyond a TV show where in the back of your mind you know it's not real, or a documentary where it safe and not-here, cannot avoid being changed. To see Death is to be changed.
I first met Death when I was nine. I didn't recognize him, the first time, because he wore a mask. The explosion caused by an "accidental" switch of flashbang with gunpowder (no one found out exactly how it happened) obscured my father from view just long enough for his spirit to leave only a lightly mangled corpse behind. The assistants in my father's show, especially Jii-san, tried to keep me from seeing him afterwards, but my father had been teaching me escapology since I was four. Someone had covered everything except his face. When I saw it I knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that somewhere behind the smoky flare and my father's closed eyes, malevolent glee lurked.
The second time I saw Death, he hid behind the mask of myself, the demented robot that killed its equally crazy creator. I thought I caught a glimpse of something behind it before it left to usurp my life — a fleshless grin beneath empty eye sockets, mocking the façade of life even as he accepted the unintentional gift to his realm. By the time I tricked the construct into destroying itself, I hated all three of them: dead, destroyed, and Death.
Eventually we reached a situation where he didn't bother with masks. Maybe it was because I was already caught up in my own masquerade, or possibly because I wasn't the focus of his attentions at the time. He sat in the chair only just vacated by the victim of arsenic poisoning, watching Conan bustle about with an air of intense investigation. After a few minutes he inclined his head to the man-in-boy, and vanished. I can't decide whether the gesture was of one professional to another fellow tradesman, or an indulgent father to his eager son. Either way, I wondered what my opponent did, to attract such purposeful regard.
The Kid doesn't kill. Ever. Because I hate that damn skull, and I never want to see him, if I can, until he comes for me.
Unfortunately, my line of work means I nearly get killed on a semi-regular basis. He shows up whenever there's a decent chance that he can have me, like when my monocle deflected the bullet meant for my right eye. The concussive force nearly knocked me out, and luck played a large part in my safe landing. He was there the whole time, just at the edges of my peripheral vision until I reached the ground.
The baka mini-detective thinks I helped him keep his cover in return for healing one of my pigeons. I didn't want to chance one of the bullets that aim for me ever being deliberately turned on him. I don't want to see that specter ever leering at me from over his corpse, or his pseudo-girlfriend's, or especially the knot of little kids ready to follow him into hell and back. He plays a dangerous game, and the more people who know a secret, the faster it spreads. It's part of why Aoko will never, ever, hear of my night job from my own lips — I won't give that thing the opportunity to come within a mile of her, not while I'm still breathing.
Death changes you. It makes you confront your own mortality. I have no illusions about that; for whatever unfathomable reason, he stopped bothering to wear the masks that would hide him in my presence a long time ago. But until he comes for the last time, I will forever laugh, because for just one heist more, one moment more, I've cheated him. Which means that for now, I've won.
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