A/N Rated for bad language and references to violence.

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I stood at the end of the parking lot, thinking about lunch. I was on the job and I never ate on the job, but this little business was almost over and done with. The Boss and the Rabbi had paid well for this job- even though they were new to the business and thought they had the balls to bargain with me over the price.

I would have done it for half of what they settled on, the dumbasses.

At first he was just a fucked up job of a kind that I'd done before. Done too many times to count. I watched the father walk away, leaving the boy in the car. It was a matter of moments for me to drive away with the kid sitting in the back, my gun on the seat beside me. He didn't say a word. We got to where I needed to be and, looking at the back of his head, my gun pointed at him, I was more concerned about the drive through New York in the afternoon than the fact that his life would end or that I was ending it. But then he turned and something about that face as he stared up at me- stared at me, past my gun- stopped my trigger finger. He never blinked and I couldn't do it.

The first time in years that I'd botched a job.

The first time ever that I'd botched one because I couldn't bear to kill the target.

He sat in the back of my car, holding his mitt and his watch as if they would bring his life back to what it had been before. I'm sure it had been normal- a mother and father. The Boss had told me I was to take care of the last of the family, that the parents were taken care of.

"I want to go home." They were his first words to me.

"Neither of us is going home for a long time, kid." New York wasn't my home as long as those two gangsters wanted the kid dead. I flicked on the radio, trying to distract myself from what I had just done. What would I do with a kid?

The year that followed was the hardest. He talked too much when I didn't say a word, he walked too loud when I could ghost through a room, he was too messy when nothing of mine was ever out of place, he laughed too loud when my face hadn't known a smile in God knows how long.

I think I didn't do well by him. I know he saw things and heard things that he shouldn't have seen or heard so young. I know he met people he never should have met. Hell, I was one of those people. But he was living with a hired gun, sleeping on the floor of shity motel rooms and eating ravioli out of the tin in the back of the car. He was dead to the world, but he was life in my world. Stupid little kid.

After the first year he learned to watch and move and think like a killer. But he never became me- he never became the monster that I had become. He was a smart-ass with a shy smile. Could have had a girl in every town, but I never knew if he did after I warned him about it. We kept moving. I taught him to handle a gun, a knife and to fight dirty. I taught him how to track someone, how to plan a murder and get away with it clean. My life became a running commentary- a one-sided narrative that he soaked up. He was smart. Could have been a doctor, even, if his father hadn't made that fucking bet that started it all.

If the Boss and the Rabbi hadn't stolen Henry's world away.

I hadn't been able to bring back his folks and I couldn't have been them. I never tried and I never wanted to be. I was Goodkat, not some fucking surrogate parent. As a kid he would ramble on about baseball for hours. As he grew older it was girls or movies. And never once would mention of his parents leave his lips. He had seen that they were dead on the news- in a diner the day after we left New York. I expected a scene, but he watched the news program to its end and ate his pancakes. He started talking to me after that breakfast, when he hadn't said a word after the first sentence in the car.

I knew something was going to happen that day, the twentieth anniversary of that day. He looked across the room at me, that fucking look that he gave me that first day- the look that could stop my trigger finger. He looked at me and told me he was going to kill everyone involved in the deaths of his parents. Everyone. Henry was going to destroy the people that had destroyed his life.

Not Henry. Slevin. Slevin Kelevra. I smiled at the name.

Apparently he had been learning more from me than I had thought, what with his fucking attitude. But it was more than an assassination. It was a revenge plot with twenty years and all the hatred that came with those decades stored behind it. He looked at me, unblinking, and I knew he would try it by himself if I didn't go with him. I had never told him what I knew and he had never asked. I wasn't the talking type- and he more than made up for my silences with the way his mouth ran on. But he could read my silences better than anyone I had ever met, so I didn't have to find the words. I told him what had happened to his parents. He turned that watch on his wrist through the entire story.

"Will you help me?" He asked at the end, looking down at the watch's face.

I was the one people called to do the jobs that no one else would do. And no one else would go against both the Rabbi and the Boss, even though they were enemies now.

At first he was just a job I fucked up. Then he became my best job, my most important job, the only job I had ever cared about.

We polished the plan. It was fucking beautiful- a Kansas City Shuffle.

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