Author's Notes: This is my first fanfic ever. Still, I put some genuine effort into it, so don't run for your lives just yet! Feedback, especially detailed, would be really great. Flames too! And it burns, burns, burns... Ahem.
Anyway, without further ado, I present the first Max Payne slash story in existence! ...I think.
Prologue
It had been over a year since my life was sucked into yet another vortex of crime, betrayal and blood.
It seemed more like an eternity.
As if a black hole had consumed my past, leaving nothing but the faint, smoky trail of a bullet-ridden nightmare.
In psychiatric terms it'd most likely be called repression.
I call it survival.
The jury found me innocent. Again. Don't ask me how. Maybe they just couldn't believe that one man could be responsible for so much killing.
I turned in my badge a day later. I wanted nothing more to do with the Force. Wanted to start a new life. A life that Mona, in her death, had breathed into me.
Unfortunately, there's usually a pretty big gap between what you want, and what you get. I could turn my back on my profession, but not on who I was. A killer. A mass murderer, technically speaking. You can't leave hundreds of corpses in your wake and not have it leave a footprint on your soul. If I still had one. I wasn't sure anymore.
Getting a normal job was out of the question. Whatever normal was, I was about as far from it as one gets. It was easier to imagine myself as a Chippendale than working in some stuffed office, having to play along in order to fit in. Becoming a private eye was a predictable, practically inescapable choice, but it was the only one I could make while retaining some fragment of my old self.
I rented a miniature office in the shady area of town, and the respectably shady clientèle was soon to follow. Hookers, bums and lowlifes came in all shapes and sizes, becoming as close to colleagues as I would get. I couldn't complain. When you've lost so much already, concepts such as dignity and reputation stop playing a significant role in your life.
I steered off the big cases, hoping to avoid major bloodbaths. Fat chance of that working out, since 'major bloodbaths in your future' was the fortune cookie I've been forced to chew on my entire life.
Still, for the time being, things went smoothly enough. Nothing grittier than your usual murder here and there. Most of my cases were the kind my clients didn't want to be dug too deeply by the proper authorities. Or the kind proper authorities hadn't dug deeply enough into.
Proper authorities. Now that's rich. With corruption running so deep and so high, 'proper' wasn't a word you could implement anywhere but in a third grader's vocabulary. A word he too would toss away as soon as he came face to face with the harsh nature of reality. I'd strayed far from propriety, balancing on the thin thread of my remaining conscience, on the sidelines of the law.
It seemed to work for me.
Life, while not quite what any marginally sane man would call good, was bearable, which was much more than what I had reason to expect.
Insomnia was the most frequent of my guests. Actually, it was the only one, since I had no friends left, no close relatives, no one who gave the slightest bit of a damn. It was probably better this way. No friends meant no one to disappoint. No one to hurt. No one to lose. Less pain all around.
Insomnia visited me again tonight. Stuck on a middle ground between slumber and wakefulness, I was sprawled on the tattered couch in my new apartment – a bleak, colorless condo in a partially abandoned building. At least it was on the first floor this time, so I wouldn't have to shoot through a dozen floors if, or in my case when, it came down to it.
The radio was playing a worn, mellow country tune. Some redneck wailing and whining about how his wife left him, how he had no reason to live, how he drowned all his sorrows in a bottle. The usual crap.
I wanted to tell him to shut up. Try having your wife, child and then lover murdered, every bullet in New York City penetrate some part of your anatomy, everyone you trust stab you in the back one way or another and then try to drown your sorrows. I decided against it. Communicating with inanimate objects wouldn't do much good for my already questionable mental state.
A knock on the door woke me from my futile musing.
No matter what hole I tried to crawl into, how hard I try to stay under the radar, trouble has a knack for tracking me down. A knock on the door in the middle of the night was trouble's way of letting me know that – surprise, surprise- my short streak of luck had run out.
I made my way to the door as slowly as possible, perhaps in an desperate attempt to delay the hell about to break loose. I kept my gun in my jacket. Didn't want to scare a potential neighbor on a sugar hunt.
...Right.
With a sigh to welcome the inevitable, I opened the door.
A turmoil of unformed thoughts erupted in my brain, fighting for my attention like starved bloodhounds.
In the end, just one surfaced as the undeniable victor.
Have no fear, Vlad is here.