Spoilers: Everything
A/N: For ruxi. I woke up in the middle of the night and had to write this. I even wore a fedora to feel more gangsta. Spelling mistakes? Don't come to me with spelling mistakes. It's five am. Where are your children at?
Weepy Old Killer
1.
As a child, Mihai grows up under the care of the local orphanage. He's a scrawny young thing, and looks fragile, so fragile that you'd think his bones might break the moment you touch him. Although it's an orphanage, it isn't a poor one; the children there are well fed and cared for by the nuns, all of them with the pudginess that any happy child should have, even if the child is all alone in the world. Mihai is thin because he chooses to be.
Since a young age, he sets the pace to the course of his life alone, with no help from anyone else. His self-inflicted hunger strike comes from guilt. Survivor's guilt, one might call it. He survived. His parents did not.
He has been in the orphanage for three years now, and he is ten years old.
2.
On his eleventh birthday, the nuns bake him a cake, and hang up streamers in the cafeteria. All the other children are invited, and the cake is more for them than for Mihai, which suits him just fine; he does not want it.
There is a new kid in the orphanage, a recent addition. He calls himself Igor, and tells anyone who's willing to listen that it means 'sword of God'; he also tells them that he's going to be the best killer ever, and kill the bastards that took his parents away.
Mihai, who has been promising himself that for four years now, hears the declaration and laughs to himself. Unfortunately for him, Igor hears him. In the fight that ensues, cake is thrown and plates are broken, and shards are used as knives. The other children form a circle around them, hollering, cheering, taking sides and placing bets, like the blood-thirsty creatures that they really are.
To everyone's surprise, Mihai wins. It's not even about being the stronger one -- because Igor is, judged by body-mass, better built -- but about who is more clever. And Mihai is clever enough to spot the openings in Igor's strategy, and take advantage of him. When he has the boy straddled on the ground, both his hands slamming his rival's hands against the floorboards to get his hold on the shards to loosen, Igor only grins.
"You should train, Mihai," he tells him, after the nuns have dealt with them. "One day, you'll work for me, and I want the best killer out there."
Then, he goes back to scrubbing the statues clean, and Mihai doesn't think about it any longer.
3.
Orphans cease to be in the care of their orphanage on the day they become of age. In Mihai's case, it couldn't come at a shittier time, because it's winter. And although the nuns do not throw him out of the house immediately after the stroke of midnight, it is he who insists on freeing them of their presence.
He wakes up after hearing the church bells ring from the other side of the street, the event signaling his entrance into manhood. Although his movements are as quiet as possible, he's still heard by one person, who comes to help him shove his few possessions in a plastic bag.
"What're you gonna do?" Igor asks, his eyes full of sleep, but his mind alert either way. "Where're you gonna go?"
"I'll find a place," Mihai answers, and ties the bag to the end of a stick he found in the orchard. (He thought it would suit the purpose of this journey.)
"Makes you look like a hobo," the other boy mutters, and sits on Mihai's bed. "Anyway, I'm gonna ask the nuns to give me your bed tomorrow. 's bigger and comfier, I figure, since it hasn't broken those bones of yours in all the years you've been here."
Not for the first time, he wonders why it is that this boy still talks to him. Not only that, but why is he so intent on making him part of his life. Igor still insists that Mihai will work for him one day, and declares it as loudly as he declares his intentions to get revenge on his family's death.
"Will you try to find them?" his 'friend' asks, and Mihai gives him a silent nod. Of course he will.
"I'm off," he says, and that's as far as he'll go with goodbyes. Igor doesn't seem to mind; he just gets comfy in Mihai's old bed and waves him off dismissively.
And that is how he leaves the orphanage, without stirring up noise. The nuns wake up the next morning, and ask themselves what happened to the silent and nice boy whose bed is now occupied by someone else. Igor tells them he has no clue, and goes about his own business. Sometimes, Mihai is remembered, but most of the times, he is not; it's not that he is unmemorable, but how can you remember someone who has behaved like a ghost for eleven years?
4.
The first year is the hardest.
In the first year of freedom, he finds himself a job as an underground boxer. He's not the best there is at first, but once he gets the money to feed himself and trains better, he soon becomes the nightly champion. In his metamorphosis, Mihai goes from a scrawny kid to a muscled young man that makes the men on the streets want to cross on to the other sidewalk if it will keep them from bumping into him.
It's at the end of the first year that he finds them. It's been twelve years, but he can still see his parents' faces staring at him with dead expressions, their blood flowing freely and soaking the carpet, and the noise of the keys to the house hitting the floor when he drops them at the sight.
Killing them is not that hard. In fact, killing them is quite easy. All it takes is for Mihai to fight until he has enough money to buy himself a gun on the black market. After that, it's simple.
He's spent time thinking of how he wants to kill the men that made him an orphan. As a younger child, he always imagined an epic battle, with him barely surviving it, but in the end, it's not as honourable. He kills the first in his sleep, and the other while he's distracted fucking his two-cent whore. He doesn't kill the whore.
It doesn't make him feel any better about it.
5.
For a few years, he taunts with the freelance bodyguard business, trying to keep away from the unnecessary slaughter for a while (for forever, if he could). Bodyguarding is usually an easy job, and it gives him the chance to train his skills as a sniper and a shooter. It's his first boss who suggests that he do that if he wants to keep being hired, and he listens to that sort of advice, because surviving is the only thing he has left now.
Then one day, he doesn't remember it anymore, he finds himself in a bar, waiting for his newest employer to come.
"Told you it'd happen." Igor looks like an idiot in that white suit, but at least he's not wearing a fedora. Mihai thinks it's his duty as his oldest friend to inform him of that, and Igor laughs while Mihai signs the contract.
He does not question his sanity at accepting to work for the younger man. Maybe that's his mistake, one he will end up atoning for. Or, maybe, he simply has been aware that it would end like this, just like Igor had been so sure that Mihai would end up being his subordinate. Maybe, in the end, it was just their way of giving each other a sense of purpose beyond revenge.
6.
Years go by, and his boss' power grows as much as Mihai's own skills grow. Igor stops being Igor and starts being 'boss' the day he orders Mihai to take out an entire family in cold blood in order to eliminate witnesses. Mihai will never forgive him for it, but neither does he leave -- where would he go?
So now his skills are honed and he is the perfect killer. He is the weapon that his wielder wants him to be.
Sometimes, he wonders if this is all to life. If this is really everything he had set himself up for. He wants to answer, but it's his boss who answers for him. As long as there is breath in his body, Mihai's services and Mihai's life will be his. And that is how it had been from the start.
7.
He is almost thirty when he meets Milena.
He's not a virgin, hasn't been one in a long time, but under Milena's hands and under Milena's mouth, he feels like a teenager, discovering and being discovered. He tells her he wants to keep her, and she tells him that comes at a price he can't pay. So he pays, and pays, and pays; for three months, he monopolizes her every evening and her every night, and almost goes bankrupt in the process.
He washes his sins in Milena's lips, and whispers his weaknesses to Milena's skin, and pretends it's all normal, it's all family-like and functional in Milena's arms. He uses her until he loves her, or maybe he's loved her since he first had her, and she lets him, because --she says-- he makes her feel like a woman, and not like a possession.
Afterwards, he stops having to pay for her. He turns a blind eye to the other men, and other women, because he knows she'll turn a blind eye to the blood on his hands. They live blind to each other, and map each other out every night to make sure they've gone to bed with the right person.
8.
The worst thing about Ian is that he reminds Mihai of himself, in the way he is silent and scrawny, and in the way his eyes glint with a purpose behind them.
Milena thinks the kid is cute. She thinks that Mihai is even cuter for teaching him how to shoot, and acting like a surrogate father, and they both ask themselves how his boss even managed to get a son. But then again, knowing Igor, this was probably treated like a business agreement.
It's when he gives the kid his first gun that he realizes that he's never been shown affection before in his life. And somehow, something deep in Mihai's heart impulses him to start treating him like family, to start pretending that the three --because Milena's always there because she's Milena--are a family.
9.
The day Milena is killed, Mihai wants blood. He wants Ian's blood with a blinding rage that stirs up inside him; and all those years of 'keep it cool' and 'keep it steady' cease to work. He points his gun at his boss's son. It doesn't matter that he doesn't pull the trigger -- he should, he should, he wants to so badly -- because it still gets him in trouble.
Ian is taken away, and Mihai is fired. He doesn't stay for long. He buries Milena with the last of his money, and burns all her pictures because they remind him of her, of her hair, her smell, her arms, her skin, and they remind him of Ian, and of his failure with the child.
Days later, he starts to ask himself what he should've answered Ian. What could he have told him to make him not end up killing the first thing that anchored him to reality? That he liked her? That he loved her? Whatever he could have answered, he hadn't; and now Milena was dead.
He leaves the city behind him, leaves behind the ashes of her pictures and the bones of her corpse to rot in the ground, and like he'd done in the orphanage, he disappears at midnight.
10.
Ten years later, Kiri makes him uncomfortable, because she forces him to remember everything.
Kiri has a bar now, her own place, and she's not a prostitute anymore. It makes him wonder if maybe Milena would've ended up co-owning the bar with Kiri, had she been alive.
Kiri's penmanship is not classy, nor refined, but the few words he writes to him in the letter are enough to stop him dead in his tracks and get him to return to the one place he'd thought he'd left behind for good.
Kiri has a picture of Milena still hung up on the wall, and it makes him remember her face and her smile, and it makes him hate Kiri a bit for keeping it.
Kiri lets him stay at her place for a while. Kiri's hair is short, and her skin looks clean and untouched. Kiri is Kiri.
Kiri is not Milena, and that will always be true.
11.
Ian calling him 'father' is something that scares him more than anything.
His eyes fall onto the tombstone of Milena, against which Ian lies bleeding, ironically, and wonders if he could've done anything to stop this. Maybe. Maybe he should've never laughed at that pudgy boy who once wanted to avenge his parents.
But he's always been soft-hearted, deep down; he had related to him, just like he'd related to Ian's not having received parental affection, just like he'd related to Milena's need to pretend it was all normal and nice and familiar behind closed doors. He had related to them both, and this was where it brought them.
He's almost glad Kiri is there, because he doesn't think he'd be able to hold Ian's hand, if they were alone. And if nothing else, the boy deserves at least that.
12.
Although he promises himself not to get involved with a youth deprived of parental love, or parental presence, ever again, he cannot stop it from happening.
Badou's an idiot. Badou is an idiot, but all idiots have reasons to be idiots, at least in their world. And Badou's an idiot for the right reasons. He screams like a girl, and shoots like a lunatic -- no precision, just a waste of ammunition, and bullets are usually expensive, you know? -- and his smoking habits are insane. But Badou almost makes Mihai want to laugh, because -- and call him an old man -- ah, youth.
Naoto's an idiot, too, because Naoto reminds him of himself. She's out to avenge people she doesn't even remembers, which makes her a bigger fool, and he can't help but want to tell her that there is no happy end at the end of that tunnel. There is no sense of completion once her goal is reached. There's just the question of where she goes next. And Naoto's a wanderer, like he'd been a wanderer. But at least Liza's got her sights set on the girl, so at least there won't be a chance of another Mihai case from happening.
And even if they both seem like idiots, just like the third one, the white haired one, at least they've formed a sort of a alliance that is not caustic or poisonous.
He wants to tell them, sometimes, that in their world, the only thing you can expect is to die a dignified death. He wants to tell them to live a little more, to love a little more, and to kill a little less. He wants to tell them that they're fools for trying to take the whole world on. He wants to tell them that he won't lay flowers on their graves, so they should shape up. He wants to tell them to pick their friends carefully, keep the goods one close, not wander too far off, be honest with each other, and never, ever, get involved with someone who has delusions of grandeur and is set of making them come true. Maybe then, maybe, they'll live a life that won't make them question the purpose of their existence when they've spent a few good years breathing in the air in the world.
But what would he know? He's just a weepy old man.