For prompt 26: "Please don't do this"


The rope burned his skin as Alex shifted against the cold radiator. Yassen hadn't bothered to turn on the heat in the cellar.

"Please don't do this," Alex said, but his plea fell on deaf ears – just like it had for the last thirty minutes Yassen had used to prepare.

The set-up looked professional. An expensive video camera stood mounted on a tripod in the middle of the room, with two lamps with umbrella-shaped screens behind it, like what you would see in a photographer's studio.

Everything you needed to broadcast live.

Yassen stuck a cable into an outlet and the lights lit up, illuminating the small figure sitting in front of the camera. They were barely tall enough to sit properly upright in the chair with their hands bound to the armrest. Unlike Alex, their legs were free, and they were swinging them back and forth, too short to reach the ground.

Wide, grey eyes – just a shade lighter than the duct tape covering their mouth – darted from Yassen to the camera, before settling on Alex.

Alex had to look away.

"Yassen!" He twisted his wrists for what must have been the hundredth time, though he knew it was useless. The only thing he had managed was to get rope burns.

Yassen knew how to properly tie a knot, and Alex was bound to the radiator by several. Even if he somehow loosened the ones around his wrists, both his arms and legs were bound as well. Yassen had even looped the rope once around his chest. He was taking no chances.

Unlike the rich maniacs he worked for, Yassen was not prone to underestimate Alex.

"You said you didn't kill children!" Alex exclaimed. A tear slid silently down his cheek.

Yassen didn't answer. He stepped up to a table standing to one side filled with supplies and grabbed a gun and cast a glance in Alex's direction. Alex involuntarily froze. Then Yassen strapped the gun into a holster by his hip and grabbed the duct tape.

"You can't –." Alex's protests were cut off by Yassen taping his mouth shut, ignoring Alex's weak attempt to turn his head away, and Alex was left to watch as the assassin strode back to the camera and pushed a button.

A red light signalled the device had begun recording.

Yassen turned his head to meet Alex's gaze. His eyes showed neither triumph nor regret, just the familiar professional indifference he always wore around clients.

The assassin pulled out his gun and stepped away from the camera until he could aim without appearing in the feed, then unceremoniously pulled the trigger.

Alex sat frozen, stunned. Until that moment he hadn't actually believed Yassen would go through with it.

He thought the set-up was a threat, maybe for extortion, and Alex's presence in the room was just another one of Yassen's warnings about the cruelty of the darker parts of the world.

Yassen calmly sat down his gun back on the table, before ending the recording. His face didn't change from his stony expression, and Alex hadn't expected it to. Yassen was an assassin. A killer for hire. He cared nothing besides his next paycheck.

He hadn't batted an eye at Sayle's plans to murder thousands of children with Stormbreaker, because his morality consisted solely of whatever values his current employer paid him to have.

Alex realised now that Yassen hadn't spoken the truth when he told Cray he didn't kill children.

No, what Yassen had really meant was, 'I won't kill that child.'


Themes: non-graphic death (OC, child), betrayal