He had never actually pistol-whipped anyone before. Fired bullets into soft, blubbery skin; that he had done. Then stood awkwardly, watching as the red liquid came rushing out like Mt. St. Helen's on the Discovery Channel. He had done that too. But despite the fact that his kill sheet was beginning to slowly build up, it had always been from a safe distance away. Actually using force against someone sitting only inches away; that was a new one. Not that she was dead, of course. Her unconscious body lay prone against the floor, blood seeping out of her forehead, but she was far from dead.

His wrist was unexpectedly throbbing now. Apparently there was a right and a wrong way to hold your weapon as you propelled it into someone's skull. He rubbed the aching muscles, silently, and considered the fact that his violence had taken on a new outlet.

Part of him was sickened, having to get close enough to submit his clothing to tiny drops of someone else's blood. The other part was fascinated. Actually feeling the crack rattle through the weapon in your hand as it makes contact with skin and bone. That was power. He found himself wishing Dave was there.

Grabbing her by one arm, he hauled her to a chair which sat in a corner of the room, her limp body moving easily across the slippery floor. Lifting her into the chair was a little harder, but mostly because her head kept bopping forward and he didn't want to get any added blood on his shirt. Affixing her to the chair with the rope left for him in Angelo's previous visit, his last step was to gag her with several handkerchiefs. He tied them tightly behind her head. If he had stopped to think about it, he might have found the phrase 'like father, like son' oddly appropriate.

Through the entire ordeal, Katie awakened only once, to the blurry vision of Chris' form as he was walking away. It was the last time she would see him as Chris.

.

.

When she came to again, the boy Katie knew as Chris was gone. In his place, he stood dressed in the clothes in which he felt more himself. The familiar red and black costume gave him the added confidence and self-assurance that he needed. If he was going to do this, he was going to do this as a fucking super-villain.

Unable to say anything, she only glared at him from behind a newly forming black eye.

"Don't take this too personally. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And by wrong place, I mean next to him." Chris considered his sentence, and decided to retract some of it. "Although you can take it a little personally. I'm finding it really hard to be unbiased to someone who, I'm pretty sure, has been fucking him for the last several months." Without warning, he suddenly kicked a wheeled chair into the brick wall in front of him. With a crash, it went flying and came to rest on its side several feet away. Katie remained silent, watching him without moving. He tried to regain his composure, but was finding it hard.

Prowling back and forth against the wall, he wrung his hands together in a way which looked both chillingly psychotic as well as slightly humorous in its stereotypical-ness. Well, humorous if you weren't the one tied to a chair, that is. "But that's ok. It's cool. It's still cool," Chris mumbled under his breath. His repetitive path suddenly took a new turn as he wandered closer to the pile of ominous objects heaped in the dark corner of the room and grabbed something from underneath a dusty blanket. Impossible, from Katie's vantage point, to tell what it was. Returning to the chair, one of the florescent lights hanging above caught a glint in the object he was holding and the obscured item shimmered in his hands. Caught by the light, the twisted, sadistic blade came into full view. He saw her eyes go wide and he smiled.

"Now, I think we're ready." He shifted the blade back and forth for a couple seconds, experimenting with how the weight felt in his hand, before bringing it close to her face. Right next to her left eye. If she was afraid, she didn't show it. Both eyes stared upward at her captor, still so nauseatingly bright. He thought of her with Dave again, and the jealous side of him wanted to cut them out, but pesky vestiges of fear kept holding him back.

Katie, starting to sense an opening in his hesitation, tried to say something. Her voice caught itself up in the fabric of the handkerchiefs. She tried again, stillborn words coming out in only mumbles. To Chris, the sound didn't resonate like someone pleading for their life or wailing pathetically in fear, but like someone trying to relay a message. His nerves still high, part of him welcomed this distraction to hold off on the whole torture thing for a couple minutes. He gave her his best 'I'm a bad-ass voice' to camouflage the fact that he was momentarily relieved. "Just remember," he began, his ever-present lisp getting in the way of any attempted bad-assedness, "I have this if you scream." Chris gestured to the knife and she nodded. He undid the bindings from her mouth, cautiously, as if expecting her to start crying out bloody murder.

Fabric removed, she wet her lips cautiously, preparing to talk but unsure if what she wanted to say was wise. "Spit it out!" he commanded.

The air of confidence he had been working so hard to present began to come unraveled as soon as the next three words spilled out of her mouth."You like him."

Shocked, Chris replied quickly. "What? No, I don't!" Which might have been more convincing had he not stumbled over his response. All these months of keeping this fucking crush, -this obsession, whatever the hell it was - with Dave a secret, and some random girl figures it out by their second encounter?

There was some weird look in Katie's eye like she knew a way to get herself out of this mess safely. Something that suggested she was thinking 'Maybe, if I can reason with him' or 'Maybe, I can get him to relate to me' or some such escape plan a person might use in a Disney movie. Treading down a path that would lead to either salvation or complete destruction. In Katie's head, she had always played the heroin in those movies. It was worth a try.

"It's ok if you do. There's nothing wrong with that." She nodded her head encouragingly, hoping to get the boy currently standing stock-still to open up. He was looking at her with a completely unreadable expression, black-rimmed eyes under the mask he was wearing indecipherable. "I'm a really good listener if you want to talk!"

A mildly amused grin spread over Chris' mouth, his eyes still fixed in their blank state. "Nothing wrong with that..." he mumbled under his breath.

"You're obviously feeling really confused and scared about this but it's ok! I can help you! Just let me go!" she pleaded.

"Let you go?" Chris' words came slithering out; shaded with a certain hue of ill-omened callousness; the hatred in his voice seeming to change the very pressure in the air. "So you can, what? Go running back to your boyfriend" - (his voice choking on the word) - "and have him find me and murder me? I'm sure you'd love that."

"No," she squeaked. "I would never...he would never..."

"He'd never, what? Kill someone? Wanna bet?"

If Katie noticed the last line, she didn't have time to think about it. Her scream, piercing through the stale air, was her only response, and it had nothing to do with Chris' small talk. The serrated knife had found it's place into her leg, above her knee. For a split second, Chris had a what-have-I-done moment. Some reflexive thought-response instilled there from private school or television or any other information-distributor of right vs. wrong. Before he could ponder upon the ethics of stabbing someone, however, he once again remembered her being with Dave. And then practicality kicked in and he remembered that they were still in a public bowling alley.

"Shit!" Chris cried out, throwing his hands across her mouth. "Shut the fuck up! Someone's gonna hear us!" Her screaming stifled, she let out a surrendering cry and stopped.

The door slowly opened and folds of fat gripped the face of the man who peered inside. Grunt looked alarmed, or annoyed...it was impossible to tell. "Everything ok in here?" He didn't even wince at the sight of Katie's bleeding knee, or the knife protruding out of her body. Nothing out of the ordinary in the day of the life of a mobster.

"Yeah, it's fine." Chris didn't even turn his head to look at him. The costumed villain was breathing hard, anxiety and adrenaline fusing together.

"Are you sure? I heard a scream. Do you want me to put the gag back on her?" He looked at the handkerchiefs lying on the floor next to Katie's chair.

"No. I've got it."

"I think a couple of people heard her out here. They're wondering what's happening."

Chris still wasn't moving. He thought of right vs. wrong, and then thought about how it was all bullshit, anyway. Fuck, his entire upbringing completely contradicted the morality concept of right vs. wrong. His dad alone had killed enough people to desensitize him to the whole concept. His voice took on an unwavering, unemotional tone. "Then get rid of them."

"You want me to shoot all of them?"

"Whatever the fuck you want. I have more important things to do."

"Okie-dokie," Grunt replied, closing the door behind him. Katie started to cry, her overdue tears finally escaping.

Chris peered at her, almost confused. "Now you cry?" He pulled his hands away from her mouth, no longer worried about the general public in the bowling alley.

"All those people," she sobbed. "They're going to die because of me!"

Chris was taken aback for a second, wondering why she would care. Was it possible that all that kindness she had shown back at the needle exchange was genuine? For a split second, he suddenly felt bad.

Really bad.

Guilty, even.

He pushed those emotions aside as fast as he could. "Maybe you shouldn't have gotten involved with a superhero. That never ends well."

"He's just a normal guy to me," she wept.

Anger began to whisk back up, it's intensity growing even quicker than before. The guilt no longer anywhere to be seen, Chris grabbed the knife and yanked it out. Katie's resounding cry no longer had any meaning for him. "Normal! How could you call him that? He's...a lot of things, but normal isn't one of them. Fucking bitch. You don't deserve him."

"What? And you do?" Somewhere, Katie had suddenly pulled it together enough to throw this accusation back at her captor.

He stared at her a second before answering. "Maybe not, but at least I know how to handle him."

"What does that even mean?" she spat.

Her question went unanswered. Chris wasn't moving, his head turned toward the door, listening. "Why is it so quiet out there?"

Katie sniffled. "Are you planning on killing him?"

He turned back to face her, boots making a squeaking sound against the floor. In his hand, he was still gripping the knife. The stream of red blood dripping down the blade accented the crazed expression in his eyes. "It's complicated. But I will say this...I can't stop thinking about how much I want to ram my meat cleaver through his body, over and over again."

Katie gasped, and for a split second Chris assumed the action was in response to his words. That was, at least, until he realized her eyes were fixed on something behind him. Turning around, he gulped when he caught sight of the small intruder. Clad in her familiar purple wig and attire, the eleven year old was grinning.

"Meat cleaver? Wow, dude. That actually sounded really gay."