The little, soft-voiced rat really made his blood boil.
He was scurrying around with his raw, pink tail between his legs, with one hand on whatever weapon he managed to pilfer from a rotting body and the other on the shoulder of his next "friend", cooing out lies like he was handing out candies filled with shards of glass to children. He would feel about the same amount of remorse from doing either of those actions, as long as he got to walk away with something new and shiny in his pocket at the end of the day.
Honest to god they used to be the best of friends. Partners at the very least, but an ugly vixen called greed can really turn a man into a swine.
Right from the start of their pillage through the sad land of Drangleic, Creighton had an enticing feeling that they were two different patches of dirty cloth sewed by the same rusted needle. Constant urges for watching red spill and drip and stain aren't exactly desires a man can paint up in pastel colors and laugh off as a passing phase. Creighton knew there were things about him that weren't right; that his hands shouldn't tremble so much at the mere thought of entering a bloody confrontation, that he shouldn't get the same kind of excitement that he gets from slamming his axe against a man's chest and feeling it cave in his rib cage as he gets from touching the soft body of a maiden. But he does, and what can be done about that.
He thought Pate was almost the same - almost, almost, so close - when, somewhere during their travels, before everything was torn to shreds of blood-thirst and revenge, he smashed his axe down on the spine of a traveling merchant who had turned away to bend over and show them all the useless trinkets he had collected over the course of his life. It was sudden and impulsive, and they both stood still while they listened to his bones snap and watched his body fluids seep from his almost bisected torso. Pate hadn't even flinched. He just glanced to Creighton's helmet-covered face and let out an annoyingly gentle hum with his annoyingly gentle voice, before he kicked the merchant over, so that his severed, protruding spine dug into the dirt, and started rifling through his wares. Creighton swore that if Pate had breasts he would have fallen in love on the spot.
As much as he despised the rodent now, he had to admit they made one hell of a pair of miscreants together. Pate lured them in like a provocative siren, singing sweet charms with his pretty voice, Creighton gleefully ripped their life away right when they made the miscalculation of being comfortably safe and secure, and they would both drown themselves in the aftermath until they were bloated and blue in the face. The murderer rode the tingling high of his kill in a satiated daze that worked its way all the way down to the pit of his stomach, while he watched the thief dig through pockets or pouches or satchels that were gradually absorbing blood and staining his gloves red. So pretty, pretty red, just like his pretty, smooth voice. Creighton could peer at his slender fingers nudging away spilled organs to part the zippers and buckles they were slopped over for hours.
Pretty red, just like the red that slid down his middle finger when he forcefully shoved the Ring of Thorns onto it. It bit its way all the way up his finger, but from the twisted way it looked, from the way it bit him even harder in the midst of battle, its thorns digging under his skin and tunneling down to his bone every time he was hit, he thought it was well worth the pain. Pate noticed his coveted treasure immediately, and Creighton could see his eyes start to get that delighted glaze they always got whenever that rat saw something he felt entitled to possess.
"Where did you get that ring from?" Pate had asked him, as light and casual as if they were two young friends sitting on a fence somewhere, kicking their legs back and forth under the sun.
On the contrary: they were both smeared with blood and stinking of sweat, trudging through a vile, poisonous copse, and one of them was picking at flakes of dried blood and bodily fluids on the jagged blade of his axe while the pain of betrayal drove its nails deep into his flesh.
Creighton shrugged, the heavy chainmail around his shoulders shifting with the movement, and made a noise of indifference. When Pate mirrored the noise like a parrot and smiled, his hand tightened to a fist, aching, needing, to snag Pate's throat and tear out his trachea so he could never make that noise ever again.
"Fair enough," his partner purred through his sickening smile. Pretending like he didn't try and off the murderer a while back by bumping into him on "accident" while he was peering off the edge of a cliff. Funny how slippery the dry stone was back there. Creighton felt his hands start to tremble and blood start to rush through every vein in his body.
The feelings faded as their conversation faded, but Pate parted his lips again and words oozed from his sharp tongue like black sludge.
"May I see it?"
Creighton paused mid-step.
His companion immediately melted into liquid sugar and attempted to squeeze his way into his pores, smiling and chuckling, clapping his hand against Creighton's shoulder and getting very close to his face. He was trying to charm him like he charmed their victims.
He held up his hand for Pate to examine the ring while his other hand groped and fondled the hilt of the axe at his side. Pate nodded at the equipment as if he were agreeing to something it whispered to him, before he looked up into Creighton's hard eyes and told him that he could trust him. The murderer almost believed him for more than a second.
"Don't you trust me?"
Poison secreted from the wings of butterflies drifted by on a passing breeze.
"Course I do, mate."
As his sugar-sweet smile fell, the thief told him he had the cold, hard-to-read eyes of a dead man, and it sent a thrilled shiver all the way down to the base of his spine. 'Oh, you have no idea, you dumb bastard.'
Unfortunately, Pate was always the more clever, the more naturally cunning of the two, and it reared its obvious head when he managed to slam the hilt of his spear repeatedly into the back of Creighton's unsuspecting skull and shove his fallen body into the trap that was planned to cage Pate all along. By the time Creighton stopped following black dots that danced in front of his eyes, his middle finger was coated with angry, red lines that seeped blood and Pate was smiling at him from the other side of iron bars.
"It's nothing personal, my friend," he lilted, "I'd just gotten an eye for your ring is all. But you don't have to worry about that now. I'm sure you won't have to rot away in here for too long before you hollow and die." Always with the rose colored words, spun by slender fingers covered with blood he didn't even draw. No, Pate never drew any of the blood he had on his hands; Creighton was always the one who supplied it. How ironic, he noticed, that he literally did supply it today, from his own body, or at least the ring on Pate's finger did. Nevertheless, blood was passed between them, a piece of Creighton's skin was clinging to the ring on Pate's finger, and as Creighton watched him turn and scurry away with his tail between his legs - too soft to even finish the job, the spineless coward - he swore that, one day, he would scoop up the fluid from his former partner's pulped brain and drink it down like honey.
Consuming anger soon transformed to relief though, as soon as that curious, ignorant Undead man stuck a key into the door of his prison and wandered inside. The only thing that kept Creighton from carving his face off like wet paper was that he played the tool bringing him closer to that smarmy cow. He painted his face, not quite how nicely Pate painted his own, but close enough to lie his way into filling the seat of the victim, and that poor, stupid Undead ate it up like he was stuffing his gullet with fattened souls.
He was free now, free to corner the rat and flood him out of his hole, and god, did freedom feel good. Obsession was his heart's content: every moment he wasn't slaughtering demons or hollowed Undead, he was slaughtering Pate in his mind, picturing every sick thing he would do to that man. If he was feeling generous enough to let him walk away with his life, he would have the lesson pounded into his head to never cross Creighton again. People who did that didn't exactly lead a healthy life afterward, if they had any life left to live at all.
Chasing Pate became his reason for breathing, as he was sure running away became Pate's. He would kill and steal and lie and cheat from anyone in any situation, if only it got him closer - almost, so close! - to his sweet, charming, mild-mannered Pate. "It was nothing personal" he had said. Well, then surely cutting off his genitals and shoving his still-beating heart between his dirty teeth would be nothing personal as well.
Letting it slip during one of their limited conversations that he lived near Brightstone Cove Tseldora was his eventual downfall. It was a long trek through lands he didn't care about, but it was only a matter of time before he caught up. Creighton traced a crooked path of filth and deception all the way until he spied the tip of the spear that belonged to the man whose brains were about to be splattered along the wall of his home. Ambushing the rat in his own hole; Creighton couldn't have wished for anything better.
"You dirty, rotten, putrid waste of space..."
"Come now," Pate cooed, curling his fingers tight around his weapon, "I told you it was nothing personal, friend. It was all business, nothing more."
Even in that moment, when death was cuddling up close to him like a waiting lover, he was still trying to talk his way out of it with a voice dripping of candy filled with glass. Some people are just incapable of changing.
The wait had been so, so long, and he was so, so close, and he could already taste Pate's vile blood on his tongue. He'd never wanted anything more badly. "Business, ya say?" Creighton drawled, "Well, you know what line of business I'm in..."
The intensity at which Pate's face paled made Creighton force his teeth into the flesh inside his mouth so he could taste his own blood.
Their dance began with Pate, surprisingly, when he jabbed his spear into the junction of Creighton's armor at his shoulder and twisted the weapon like he was turning a key. From then on, nothing else existed to Creighton but the feeling of his axe carving through any part of Pate's body that it could catch and the pretty sounds that he made when it did.
He was vaguely aware of that idiotic Undead man rushing into the room and floundering at the entrance like a fish being eaten alive by a bird. Lies were mewled out by Pate, always trying to talk his way out of things, even to the end, and it hit Creighton harder than the spear at his chest did: if he didn't do something about the slimy rat, he would never stop.
Suddenly, some magic spell blasted against Pate's side, slamming his body against the wall with its force, and Creighton nearly started laughing in absolute euphoria. The dimwit was helping him out! Oh yes. Oh yes! He watched the magic burn into Pate's armor, scar his face, and knock him off balance, and it made his body ache all over, made him want to go sink his blade into the flesh of the unsuspecting and snap their bones while they still lived, just like he did back in Mirrah when he murdered man after man after woman after child and they tried to lock him up, just, just like Pate did, but oh no, terrified cowards and fools, there is no locking up the man that would take one's infant child from his crib and cut off his tiny feet just to hear him scream, just, just like how Pate is screaming right now as his body is dropping to the ground and his flesh and his soul are fading into mist, all because Creighton wanted them to, all because Creighton just couldn't stand the lying, backstabbing, soft-voiced bastard.
He laughs harder than he's laughed in years, maybe in his whole life. He laughs until his deep voice rises several octaves and breaks like he's a teenager again. It feels so good. The precious Ring of Thorns is pocketed by the moron sorcerer and he doesn't give a damn because no treasure is greater than the one that just faded into mist that he hopes he's inhaling right now. He rides the high of his victory hard as he spits out gratitude to the hopeless fool that helped him between gasping breaths of pure bliss and then directs him to a piece of treasure that he knows Pate rigged long ago just for the pleasure of scarring some mindless twit. What a fortunate day indeed.
When the explosion from the bolt-hole drifts up to his ears, he murmurs exactly what Pate would murmur as well, if he were standing beside him and looking down his nose at one of their many helpless victims. But he wasn't. He was dead as a dead man could get, cut up and burned and given a taste of his own sweetened medicine by the man he told could trust him with his life.
Creighton would have lowered down his chainmail leggings and done something absolutely despicable if Pate's corpse hadn't faded away and the Undead wasn't meandering about. What a damn shame.
Nevertheless, even without his desires fully sated, no tumble with the cutest maiden in Mirrah could ever make him feel this good. No one but Pate could ever make him feel this good. He knew their partnership was one-of-a-kind.