For QLFC, Puddlemere, BEATER 2: Use the title of a story written by your Beater 1 for inspiration (only human). Additional prompts: 9. (word) playful, 10. (emotion) apathetic, 14. (action) pacing nervously
All quotes are by actual serial killers. Thought this would be a fun little touch. (Also the spelling errors in the Ripper quote are intentional, because they are in the original.)
This also had me playing the "how far can I stretch the T rating" game. Warnings include murder, implied suicide, some blood, and likely psycho- and sociopaths (likely, because I'm not qualified to give a diagnosis).
Betaed by JBrocks917. (I keep forgetting to mention betas, but I appreciate them very much.)
Word Count: (with quotes) 1,617 (without quotes) 1,506
you'll never take us alive (they'll call our crimes a work of art)
When Regulus Black commits his first murder, he is a mere seven years old. A child. He has no personal quarrel — or even connection — with his victim. It is simply someone he picked off a random, busy street, because the man in question had looked like he would not be missed immediately. This way, Regulus now has a chance to get rid of the evidence with more time than he needs.
That in no way means he should not plan for complications.
It had been ridiculously easy, to lure that man away from the crowd, a benefit from being so young, he's sure.
He's well aware that — to most people — that sounds honestly terrifying, but that's just because they don't know better.
It makes you feel more powerful than anything else ever could. The victim could at the very most plead with you, before you end them. And what is more powerful than taking a choice that is as irreversible as this one?
Regulus is more than glad that he has had the luck to be born in a family like his, a family that understands this.
I don't even want to imagine how dull their lives must be, Regulus thinks to himself as he begins to mop up the blood.
"You're in my power now." - Alexander Pichushkin
This wasn't my intention. I did not mean to do this, Barty thinks to himself as he paces nervously through the living room.
But in the end, does it really matter whether or not he had planned to do this beforehand? What's done is done and cannot be reversed.
I am finally free, he realizes. Free, of his father who wanted nothing more than to press his son in a perfect little copy of himself with no regard for what the son actually wanted.
It is in this moment that Barty decides that he made a wonderful choice.
And so he stands there, laughing in his father's blood when his mother walks into the room and catches him in flagrante.
She comes around the corner from the study and freezes as soon as she sees him, dropping the book onto the ground in shock.
"Barty? What are you… what have you done?!"
Her frantic eyes move from her laughing and twitching son to the telephone that is placed near the wall on the side of the room she's standing on.
"What I should have done years ago," Barty replies calmly, almost apathetic about it all. "He deserved it about as much as you don't."
She does not have the time to scream.
"Either they have too much feeling and cannot control themselves, or they have no feelings. It is one of the two." - Charles Sobhraj
Regulus, of course, gets older, and that only makes his schemes more daring.
He takes great care to vary his target group, his method of action, location, weapons, and everything else he can think of. Especially so once his idiot brother leaves their family and tells his wonderful new boyfriend James — who of course just so happens to be a cop, because why wouldn't he be?
Snitches get stitches. His brother should have known this.
And if Regulus has some additional fun with his brother's boyfriend, their girlfriend, and offspring, well, who was to blame him?
A great many would. That's what made it fun.
That does not in any way mean that he can let the rest of the police station get away with this, no. With now eighteen his techniques are different, but Regulus would think he only improved with time.
The number of unsolved murders he privately claims are kind of a hint.
One by one, he attacks the officers in the police station who know.
He takes enough time and makes enough of them look like accidents that only a few suspect something is going on and they aren't taken seriously.
Regulus can afford the time; his family is good at what they do.
And he is the best of them all.
"I did a good job." - Tsutomu Miyazak
The murder of his mother is far from his only murder, and yet further from his only crime. Barty is keenly aware of that. Yet, it is the only one he feels something like regret for.
He does not actually regret it, because he delights in the continued destruction of men and women like his father.
Never during the act, no.
While he commits murder, he is cold and precise. He's rational and emotionless, because he needs to avoid doing a messy job. The one thing he can't afford at this point — after multiple robberies, one of which the people in charge took over a week to discover — is mistakes.
Criminals, murderers, who make mistakes are the ones who are caught.
That would just not do. Not when he still has so much work left before him.
The people he occasionally employs are on a strict need-to-know basis, he handles everything financial through at least twelve different accounts, and yet he is not arrogant enough to think that he hasn't made any.
Barty is a great many things — and he is sure the families of his victims have different opinions than theirs — but a fool is most certainly not one of them.
He makes sure to be better than that.
"I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing." - H. H. Holmes
When Regulus goes to attack the Longbottoms, the last one of the police officers — he had managed to drive the one to deal with it himself, wasn't that an achievement? — he did not expect to meet someone else there, hiding in the shadows with him.
As the two of them lock their eyes onto each other, they realize that they are here with the same intent.
To kill the Longbottoms.
Regulus is here for the father, Barty for the man's brother.
They decide to work together — once they have assured themselves of each other's competence — since they don't seem likely they get in another way. Additionally, neither of them are patient men at this point of the planning stage.
Now it is the time for action. To go back to planning with the chance — however small it may be — of this happening again simply is not worth it.
And they work together well, even though Regulus is playful where Barty is practically emotionless. They are still careful planners and make sure to rid themselves of any evidence.
Even if Regulus's result is… messier.
"Not the way I was taught," Regulus admits. "But I find this way a lot more delightful."
"You were taught," Barty asks, with pure want in his eyes.
Regulus grins.
"I like killing people, because it's just so much fun" - The Zodiac Killer
The two of them decide quickly that they should work together. After all, they are the first equally competent killers they have come across, and another set of eyes is always helpful when getting rid of the evidence.
It certainly doesn't hurt that they are basically the same age and their personalities work well together.
"You know," Barty says one night a few years into their partnership as they plan together in a hotel room that Barty rented with perfectly illegal money. "It's kind of a shame that the only way we can get the reputation we deserve outside of a few properly scared people is to get caught."
They lounge in the room as if they were teenagers talking about their vacation plans, with Reguls lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, and Barty relaxing in a nearby armchair.
"Not necessarily." Regulus rolls onto his stomach, grinning in the sadistic and oh-so-attractive way he always does when he is planning something.
"We could send letters to the press — maybe some of the crimes where they can't indict us for anymore at first, just in case the encryptions turn out to be weaker than we thought."
Barty grins. "I wanted to get rid of my father's name either way."
"I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer." - Jack the Ripper
They start sending letters to the police, at first only for small thefts done over a decade ago — has it really been that long already?
All the things that they can no longer get in trouble for.
Then, they start making the mistakes.
They begin including details unrelated to proving they are behind the crimes. Sure, they mix it with the equal amount of believable lives, but they do it.
Maybe love had made them cocky. Maybe it made them arrogant, careless, imperfect.
Probably had done at least one of those things, considering that the other thing they start including is 'worse' and more recent crimes. Things they can still get indicted for.
The fact that their deeds and letters both appear all over the country — the latter in places unrelated to the former — both helps and hinders them. It requires the cops to coordinate, but it also makes people pay attention. Which was, ironically enough, the thing they had wanted.
It is their downfall as their intended victim recognizes them and has the cops arrive before they can do more than get into the same room.
Neither of them wants to end up in prison, so they both make sure that at least their love never gets taken alive.
Not now and not ever.
"For me, life without murder is like life without food is for you." - Alexander Pichushkin