He sees the world in black and white.
Purity and depravity.
(He needs no shades of gray to determine his own category.)
Sometimes, they visit him. His latest kill (mission, they say, but it is no mission, for he is a tiger and they are a flea) holds haunting reminders that they always remain.
aLwAyS. The word pulls at his very core, shaking his grasp on reality and causing him to slip, one painstaking finger at a time. They will always be there. He will always be a monster.
(Oh, yes. He knows what they whisper about him, the child with torn, bloodstained clothes and matted silver hair and deranged eyes. After a while, he learns, there is only so much you can take until you snap, break, or have heard so much that nothing affects you anymore.)
Ja'far is on the verge of the latter. He wishes he were the latter, because to not care was so much easier, simpler, than caring. He still cares about them. They are the one thing he cannot stand, because they are the reason he keeps living and the reason he wishes so desperately to die.
His father had thrown himself onto his mother, and everything in his eyes, posture, demeanor had screamed Monster, fear, hatred. But something in his eyes still pleaded. Ja'far. My son. Please.
Ja'far slit along his trachea, inching down, bringing the knife upwards to dice his father's jaw in called him merciless, but even he gave painless deaths when he could. Such was the life of an assassin.
Child Ja'far appeared to have no emotion. No one felt the low, keening sound resonating deep within their hearts at the deaths of them more than he did, because they were good, pure, better than Ja'far could ever become.
Ja'far had killed his parents. He missed them every day. There was something psychotically deranged about those two sentences. They were contradictory. They were frightening.
All of this, everything he's done, is for Partevia's sake. If it hadn't been for the Partevian Empire, they (why? Why?) would still be alive. It is now, and only now that he realizes that he's sacrificed everything for an empire he cares naught for.
His prey stand no chance against his deadly blade. One slice, and his victim is dead. The ground lurches sickeningly beneath his feet as she flickers before his eyes, and suddenly it is his mother who slumps over in a pool of blood, life drained from her now glassy eyes.
Ja'far disposes of the body and leaves, reminding himself that he is not some child, he is an assassin, and assassins are not supposed to feel attachments to their victims. Or emotion in general. To serve the empire is the greatest honor.
He wonders what his parents would think if they could see him now.
(May Partevia prevail.)
A/N: This is actually a snippet of Chapter 3 of Wanderer, a multichapter story I've written. I figured it would make an interesting oneshot. If you enjoyed this, check it out! I think you'll like it.
