A/N: Different, but I like :3 See if you can guess who it is before I tell you.
PS, has nothing to do with my excursion to Italy. Was written before then. Swear.
Poison
Somewhere, underneath the concrete of Italy, there survived a man.
He was a tall man, emaciated and wiry with a disproportionate barrel ribcage and a thin, oft-grubby sleeveless white shirt stretched over that. As though under a layer of sour milk, the sharp black tattoo under his collarbone shone through. He had protuberant sewage-green eyes and small, hard teeth, and long, long fingers stacked with rings—unless he was working, in which he only had glossy burn marks raccoon-tailing his fingers as he picked and pinched and measured. His lesson.
Chemicals get caught underneath rings, much like people get caught underneath fingernails.
He used to live above ground. Once he had no need for vents for grey-green fumes--regarded grates as nothing more than grime-caked municipal scenery, not an escape hatch for evidence. He had been chased underground by—the name? Foreign in nature. Sumdac. Mechanical Revolution. They had no need for chemists, now, in his Italy. They had no need of maintenance workers in America; no need of farmers in Russia.
Isaac Sumdac helped all, and soon, the world would have no need of people.
His apartment was bare, his workshop full but meticulously arranged. He did not like people, did not like things or places, but this man, he liked fish.
He abided fish.
Fish were easy to take care of, yet he forgot to feed fish.
One by one they rose to the top of their little tanks like slimy marshmallows in the green bubbling water, rotting there, but his sculpted hawk nose was so ravaged from years distilling dangerous compounds that he smelled it as little more than a yellow-grey musk… nothing compared to the caustic sizzle of cocaine in his nostrils, though he had never touched a key or a card or a straw save to gather his own for customers too impatient—too rotting in their own itching grey skins--to wait.
He crafted, assembling designer poisons bond by bond, but never partook. He had the blessing of being an informed and untouched dealer, aware of every repercussion of the downy white powder he rattled off cooking sheets and scraped into identical clean baggies. He knew every concoction intimately: down to the stinging molecules, down to the area of the brain they would target. Still, even in his gas-mask, he could smell it. In his pores, he could smell it, cementing into his thin oily skin and questing for a blood-hot highway to into his barrel chest. He, too, was only human—a human that wearied of worrying over his slow, dragging death by the drug and sweat magma dripping down his chest and arms in the stifling lab.
It stung. Tingled. Burned. He survived.
He could not craft if he was in an altered state. He was popular. There was much demand. It was the passion of his work—and the vision of those that came to him, the ability to track their dirty lives like twenty-four-hour fruit flies as they convulsed in their own filth with a maddening, spiraling buzz--that kept him from the very crystals he created.
He thought of them as test subjects, really. Those who stumbled to him, paying him to experiment on them. Young ones, old ones; wide subject diversity. They never noticed any swap in consistency, nor the occasional placebo, and there was no board to review his progress.
In a way, Sumdac did help all.
The cheap lights buzzed above the two men, like the flies; like his customers, whining for just one more milligram for their euro. Fish rotted. The American fingered the surprisingly clean, glossy packets of powder, carrot-stub fingers flicking them down to the table when he was done. Oilslick knew the wandering look: guarded with a touch of contempt, as though there were better dealers down in 90210. The man, a distributor by the smell and silkworm sheen of his suit, was searching for a new fad, straight from his bottles.
His big American picked up a particular packet: one that looked like lethal cinnamon, speckled with larger granules of dead sugar. It seemed like something for a cake, if it didn't have such an ominous burning red-orange hue that spoke of the impending anorexic bloom in the brain. The rapture death, as though one's existence were rusting away. The American held it up for him—thinking, no doubt, that he would mutter something in Italian and scrounge up a price tag. Instead, Oilslick's flaccid lips split into an ugly grin and he leaned on the table.
"You wish to know what I call that one?" he asked slowly, accent thick but precise. The American gave the packet a side-glance, unknowing of the god powder he had in his hand—the one which Oilslick had drawn the chemical structure of long, long before he perfected it. In summer nights, smelling of stale sweat, he woke and scribbled under a bare yellow bulb; the floor of his yellowed room was covered in yellow notebook pages, spider-webbed and ciphered by a true artist.
The exiled chemist slicked his thick tongue over his teeth, lingering on the taste of the gold cap, and expelled the man's answer in a greedy hiss.
"Cosmic rust."