The Killers- Tranquilize

He had always found a special appeal in tall buildings. Storming towards the sky like spear points, conquering the clouds, he had always felt that that was his proper place, at the top floor of his own glassy tower of Babel.

At night the effect was even more profound. It was like a thick black curtain had swallowed up the rest of the world, leaving behind only the faintest glimmers of distant golden lights. They shone like thousands of tiny spotlights, glowing just for him, because of him, buzzing and brimming like the thousands—perhaps millions—of souls that owed their lives or their livelihoods to his technology. Just the thought of it made him brim with pride, overflow with it like a volcano just after a climatic eruption with syrupy, vicious lava streaming down its sides.

The only downside to these tall buildings, he thought, was what it felt like to be at the top of one of them. Their overpowering silhouette was really best appreciated from a distance, where one could clearly see the full scale of the structure, especially in comparison to the rather humble surrounding buildings that comprised the remainder of the Domino City skyline. The other buildings were so low, so unassuming, that he often commented to his subordinates that, without the KaibaCorp tower rising elegantly like a redwood tree in a shrub garden, an observer would think that the Industrial Revolution had entirely bypassed their city. But embraced industrialization he had, and he had seventy stories of iron and glass to prove it.

Unfortunately, from the inside, the enormity of his achievement was invisible to him. Continually surrounded by loyal employees, buzzing computers, and piles of papers that needed his signature, he feared that he sometimes lost sight of the colossal scale of his accomplishments. Occasionally, on slow nights such as this one, he longed to see the KaibaCorp tower not as its owner, but as any other passerby who lived in its shadow, not its insides.

Deciding to rest his aching eyes from the unnatural glow of his computer screen, he stepped away from his desk and approached the vast bank of windows that comprised the far wall of his office. As he gazed out the window, figures raced through his mind as if someone was chasing them. Seventy stories equaled six months of intensive construction with hundreds of workers and three world-renown architects. It equaled tons of glass, iron, steel, thousands of feet of pipe, hundreds of yards of carpeting. It equaled millions of dollars, dozens of millionaire clients, seemingly endless shipments of weapons, and three regional conflicts that had resulted in the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. But that was a high estimate.

There had been protesters yesterday, waving sloppy posters and screaming obscenities. They had gathered around the perimeter of the building around nine in the morning, just as the majority of the employees were arriving. There had been perhaps one hundred of them, hardly a number to be frightened of, and a few brightly colored banners. The police had dispersed them quickly, but their chants remained stuck in his head, that primal, guttural music that, thanks to some lucky gust of wind, had managed to carry up to his open office window. Some of them had thrown eggs—a very immature response in his opinion; as if he were the teacher that everyone hated in middle school—but some of them had had good arms. After the crowds had cleared they brought in an emergency team of window-washers who had scrubbed the place spotless, he had made sure of that himself.

There was not to be a blemish on the masterpiece that he had created. It was more enduring than diamonds, stronger than steel, better than any tombstone or obituary at retelling his past achievements, and more majestic than any pharaoh's pyramid. And what did a pharaoh do when the rabble raised their voices? He crushed them before a little social discontent escalated into an unstoppable conflagration.

"These people don't understand, my job is to maintain order." He said to his reflection, strong and square in the pane of glass.

"And who's order would that be, exactly?" At the unexpected voice, he felt like he could have easily jumped out of his skin—if he had been the kind of person do such things. That voice—it was neither rough nor smooth, but thick and glossy, like oily layers of varnish on wood. Each syllable seemed to slide into the other, and yet there was grit in every word, as if the voice of the speaker had been scrubbed with gravel.

"Who's there?" He reached for the panic button conveniently hidden under the top surface of his desk, but as he spun around he saw that there was no need. He was faced with a completely—and now eerily—empty office. He shook his head furiously. It was late, he was alone, his mind was apt to wander. And he hadn't been afraid of the dark since he was a child.

Nevertheless, as he turned again to the window, he was overcome with the pestering thought that he was turning his back on something that had the potential to be very dangerous. Nagging chills swept down his skin like harsh winter winds, telling him softy but strongly, very strongly, not to close his eyes too abruptly on this matter.

Impossible. This was foolishness, superstition. Along with the billions of dollars devoted to everything from wall décor to window panes, the KaibaCorp building had the most state-of-the-art security systems that money could buy. There was simply no way that anyone could be there, he refused to accept even the glimmer of the possibility. Fiercely cracking his knuckles, he looked himself squarely in the reflective pane of glass.

And saw that he wasn't alone.

Floating like fog in the early morning, there was very clearly another figure behind him, tall, transparent, and infused with a certain kind of hard and icy fury that he had only ever seen in one other person. Himself.

"Who…who are you?!" He spun around again, clutching at his chest and with eyes steaming. But the instant his eyes met the opposite wall, the room was again completely empty. "Show yourself!" He balled his hands into tight fists and glared accusingly about the room, as if expecting the furniture to confess to trying to play tricks on him. Despite the illusion of his solitude, the air seemed to swim and simmer with whispers and darkness. Everything seemed heavy, to cling to him with a kind of dreary, sticky energy that he couldn't shake off. And everything seemed alive to him, to be watching and listening intently to see how everything was going to play out.

"Such fear, such…paranoia. Nothing has changed at all, has it, Akhenaden?" The question seemed to rise out of the walls, secrete from the furniture, completely engulf him. "No, forgive me—there is one difference." Icy whispers that cut and stung like salt surrounded him, infiltrating his ears with their poisonous and bitter inflections. "Now you have the blood of two ages on your hands."

He tried to speak, to yell, but his voice slipped through his fingers and fell lifelessly to the floor. All he could do was cough, gag, claw at his throat like a giant, wild cat sinking its claws into its prey.

"I….I d-don't know…w-what you're…t-talking about. You're not even r-real!"

The room seemed to chuckle at him, to contract and expand around him, to sink around his feet like quicksand. "Not real? I assure you, Mr. Kaiba, I am only more real than the last time you saw me. All you have to do is turn around."

Trembling, and silently repeating to himself that this was all only some awful dream that he was destined to wake up from, he slowly, deliberately, turned back to face the window. "I've just fallen asleep at the desk. Fell asleep at my desk. I will wake up from this. I will wake up." He clung to his words like a man lost at sea holding desperately onto a piece of driftwood, not knowing whether it would help, but that it was certainly better than being entirely alone and hopeless.

"Funny how easily your resolution crumbles when faced with something that you can't just…explain away," more laughter, gurgling like molten metal. "But then again, there is a very reasonable explanation, when you really think about it. Look into the mirror, Gozaburo. Look and see what you've done!"

"I don't follow orders. Not from you, not from people who are too cowardly to properly show their face!"

There was more chuckling, and a soft, gentle sigh. "You heard him, everyone. It's time we gave Mr. Kaiba something to believe in."

Like a wild frenzy of fireworks, fiery images exploded before him. Body after body materialized out of the murky darkness, burning the air. He could see row after row of eyes reflected in the window, glowing ferociously like hot coals. Their looks—proud, bitter, and tragically broken—tore him apart like acid rain. As a mob they were frightening, but as individuals they were horrifying. Each face grotesquely deformed, blood splattered, shattered. Some were missing limbs, the limbs of others were only barely or brokeningly attached to their owners and hanging limply at their sides.

Despite the social graces that benefited him so well in the board room, Gozaburo had always been lacking in a certain social sensibility that, even under the veneer he worked so well to construct, inelegantly exposed the flaws in its foundation when confronted with someone Gozaburo deemed to be 'sub-par.' Be it a client in a wheelchair, or the blank and unconventional stare of someone who couldn't truly see, the sight of some deformity, some imperfection, had always filled him with a sense of unease, as if the fabrics of his soul had grown dirty and wrinkled.

And now, now there were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of them packed tight. They were a multitude of broken toys, discarded rags, the wild, the uncivilized, the weak. And they each carried his death in their eyes. And at the fore was a man—scarcely more than a child—with a crooked smile and battered face crowned by disheveled wild white hair. He looked more animal than human, especially when barring that untamed, ecstatic grin of one who couldn't exact more precise vengeance if he had been using an exact-o knife.

Oddly dressed, he leered menacingly forward, barring his wicked, toothy grin like a lethal weapon. He sighed heavily and gestured elegantly to the assembled crowd behind him. "You see, Akhenaden, how no matter how much things change, the more they remain—sadly—the same. To think that me, in my ignorance, for a moment I believed that there might have been some hope for you, some hope for atonement." He shook his head, slowly, sadly. "But alas, I can see now there is no changing you, your soul possess a disease that surpasses the trials of time."

"This—this can't be right!" Gozaburo croaked through chattering teeth. "You've got the wrong man!" He made to turn his head away from the window, but was immediately halted by a violent gesture from the man.

"You stay where you are!" He demanded. And there was something in his voice—something so rough, so lethal—that Gozaburo felt compelled to obey him. He came closer, prowled around Gozabura with heavy deliberation, as if waiting for the moment to launch his most potent attack. "Now, do you honestly believe that, Akhenaden? You think this is all some silly cosmic accident? That poor, innocent, and undefended Gozaburo Kaiba has inexplicably been thrown into a situation that he has no control over—that he did not bring on himself? That the gods have pitted him against an adversary that he never asked for, that they have thrown a punishment onto him that he didn't deserve? Well, if that were really the case, Mr. Kaiba, the two of us could form a support group. But now, unfortunately the truth is always more painful, isn't it? To think yourself responsible for death, for destruction, for unimaginable horrors that you will never experience yourself, we would all like to think ourselves better than that. It's a painful idea—I grant you that one small concession.

"But at the same time I laugh, I laugh at you, Akhenaden. And why? For thinking that you could run, that you could forget, that you could hide yourself away and that no one would ever be able to find you. Your body, your name, the place you call your home, they have all changed, but your soul, your soul Akhenaden, is unchanged. Did you think we wouldn't be able to see through your façade? Did you honestly believe that—with a little scrutiny—these things wouldn't just fall away?"

Disgusted by the weakness in his voice, Gozaburo implored the nightmarish stranger with all the fortitude that he could muster, but it was like trying to construct a beautiful vase out of shards of broken glass. "I have no idea what you're talking about! I swear to God—"

He was interrupted by a fierce, stabbing laugh. "Hah! Do you hear that, everyone? He's going to swear it! Swear to his God that he's ignorant, that he's innocent! He's going to bare his soul to the tides time, and swear that he's not responsible for all the destruction—all the horror—that he has wrought!"

Laughter erupted in the crowd. Each voice, each ghostly inflection of noise, was so unbearably close, so tangible, that he could almost hear his own heartbeat pulsing through it, could almost feel their cruel laughter like a blade pressed against his throat.

"If you don't see it, Gozaburo," the stranger purred as he came closer and closer, breathing heavily into his ear and letting his hands wander dangerously close to Gozaburo's square shoulders, "I suggest you look closer!"

The glass, once so solid, seemed to turn to molten liquid before his eyes. His own image swam before him, his own face becoming distorted and ambiguous. And yet the figures in the background remained perfectly clear. They stood tall and proud like deadly statutes. Some were in strange dress, foreign and antiquated like that of the white-haired man, others looked more modern in appearance, but all glared down at him with the same eternal ferocity as his features blurred and took on the appearance of a Picasso painting.

One by one his features regained their clarity, but the more human his face became the less he was able to recognize it. His hair was long, dry, and clinging to the last remnants of color like a piece of dying straw. His face was gaunt, skin wrinkly and loose. His face was longer, narrow, and bent into foreign shapes. And his left eye throbbed uncontrollably. He gasped and grabbed at the socket, only to recoil in horror as he felt a lump of solid gold blossom there like a flower uncurling to the first rays of the morning light.

And the laughing grew louder, tearing at him and making every atom in his body vibrate to its unearthly frequency. He felt a groan come not from his throat, but out of every pore in his skin as he stumbled, fell to the ground as his face nearly exploded in agony.

"Please—Please leave! I beg you, make it stop!"

"Painful to realize your true identity, is in not, Akhenaden? Painful to realize that you are not safe, that there are people who can bring you to your knees, even after all these years. Yes, so little has changed…so little indeed. You still can't allow anyone to see you for how you really are..."

For a moment there was blissful silence and the pain lessened. Gozaburo delicately peeked up from where he had fallen on the floor, and looking around, saw nothing. For all the noise, all the pain, all the panic, he was completely alone. He rose carefully to his feet, tremulously looking over his shoulder several times before daring to meet his own reflection in the window pane.

He saw himself, cool, stable, well-constructed, confident. He saw neat right angles, straight lines, seventy stories of glass and iron and concrete. He saw a striking skyline and the best security system that money could buy.

And on the inside he could hear, like a bomb that ticks deceptively softly before resulting in a massive explosion, "and the more these things change, the more they remain exactly the same…"