A disciplined mind is a cherished possession. Years of training are required before one can go days without sleep, concentrate utterly despite unearthly distraction, or completely if temporarily ignore the pain of something as unpleasant as a gunshot wound.
Amon had these things. Literal years of sacrifice and self imposed deprivation had honed his mind and senses to razor keenness, his abilities unmatched in the art of hunting despite his lack of Craft. His mind – the only prideful thing he allowed himself, the only spark of warm feeling he could cultivate from his empty life.
She had taken it from him, and he didn't even know how. Like the child she was she had stormed into the ordered realm and laid waste as a child kicks over a sandcastle. His detachment, reserve, and composure had shredded in the face of her attack, and now he clutched the tattered remains around his naked psyche, forced to play the part of Amon the disinterested. He was no actor and he knew it. How long before everyone else did too? Before she knew it?
Even the memory of her warm presence brought the alarming softening in his chest, the melting. He scraped frantically, but the block of cold steel that had been his senses was oozing between his cupped fingers, the slippery softness escaping his ringing command to return at once to its previous unmovable state.
Suddenly, terrifyingly, every stoic trait he had relied on was powder scattered on the puff of her warm breath. The very fear he felt now was a symptom of this new mental illness. A sickness, yes, a wasting disease she was to his brittle and unbending mind, but he knew the cure. Yes, there was a cure, as a surgeon rips out a cancerous growth, just as brutal, just as bloody. Why then, did the hope of salvation from this affliction make him want to rake his nails down his face, move walls with the force of his rage?
It had been decided. Her fate was sealed, his salvation assured; at least this would be true if anything in his mind was firm or fixed anymore. No, it could be she was inoperable, as the end to his suffering would require the discipline she had tread upon with such innocent unknowledgeable abandon.
Deep, deep, beyond air, beyond thought, a small voice cried, echoing hollow with a reverberation he could feel in his clenched teeth. "How has it come to this? How is pleasure a torment and peace gained by murder? Must I molder slowly over the course of your wasted life, never to receive the sweet thrill of a caught breath, the electric chill of a single touch?"
The lone voice, wafting over the wasteland like a doomed general impervious to the odds called out of the depths, the smooth and deep grave Amon had spent his life digging every day and night since he'd held his murdered mother, had felt on his fingers the greasy, sticky blood that made up half his own running from her body. The voice, the very echo of his own that had crystallized and sunk that day, never to be used again, never heard again.
Until this moment. The only physical manifestation of the reawakening was a slow and deliberate blink, the involuntary clenching of a fist. Inside the dark field of the mind however a battle was brewing. This Amon, frozen in time had been thawed by the melting she had begun with a single look and smile. This Amon had risen from the grave and was summoning his army. Emotions, fantastical and looming forms like nightmare creatures began to gather themselves from the vacuum of his soul and close ranks facing the fortress of logic that had reigned uncontested for so many years. This Amon, pale and unblemished boy king, glowed in the gathering gloom that had become the inner world of his adult doppelganger.
The bright specter, growing more luminous every moment stood unflinchingly before Disdain and Denial, stared Anger down with Belief at his right hand. And then the bright young Amon took his first truth breath.
"I will not allow it," he intoned with the resonance of a great bell, sending a shiver up the adult Amon's spine. "I will not sleep, will not witness as you murder love and trust and beauty with a single bullet. Innocent blood will not stain our hands again." The emotional army surged toward the rough walls of the stoic fortress as Bright Amon cried out, "You shall not kill hope!"
He pointed a luminous finger and the walls, already weakened by Adult Amon's young obsession, cracked and crumbled, the army of revived emotions seeping like syrup through the fissures, coating and suffocating all resistance.
The mask of Amon never moved, never slipped. Only the light in the gunmetal eyes told of the victory as he pulled the orbo gun from its holster with a sure and practiced movement, checked the level, and stowed it away again. He turned and headed toward the door of the ruined apartment with new purpose. He had a new master and a new mission. He was off to save hope.