Fandom: Life on Mars
Rating: PG
Word Count: 360 words.
Notes: Gen for
jantalaimon, on her birthday. Which is today, in my timezone. ♥They don’t suspect him, never would, he wouldn’t even suspect himself and he knows. Eat a little, talk a little, throw up to throw them off the scent. Gotta keep it all contained. He’s used to it, years of covering; covering up for other people, covering up his personality, covering up the corpses.
He loves it. Revels in it. Is passionately devoted to it, all hours of the day and night.
His cellar is specially kitted out, but he doesn’t have a wine collection.
And they all think, ‘that lovely boy, he keeps model trains’, or, ‘that daft pillock, spending all that cash and concentration on little bits of metal and plastic.’
Oh, if only they knew.
The bruises to his ego never have the chance to go from green to purple, because he appeases his pain with his scalpel. He has the routine down pat, having written it in BIG LETTERS in his notebook. In code, of course, because it wouldn’t do to be foiled by stationery.
Step one: find the victim. And he calls them that, his ‘victims’, his unwitting, unhappy participants, though they are often far from innocent.
Step two: follow the victim. He gets to know them outside, before he’ll get to know them inside. Their trips to the post office, their meals for the night. Boring, tedious information that makes it all run smoothly.
Step three: flay the victim. See the sinew, flesh and fat, the physical aspect to creatures not worthy of the life they thrust in other people’s faces.
He does other things besides, of course. He’s been taught to multitask. He doubts his mentor realised what his new-age techniques would be assisting when he explicated the strategy. As well as the three simple steps, there are a dozen more complicated ones, camouflaging his trail, setting up unaware, uninformed idiots to take the fall for his dances with the devil.
And he’ll never be stopped, because the only person smart enough to figure out what he is, who he is, is fully complicit in his choice of existence.
“Chris, I want you to work with Annie on this one.”
“No problem, Boss. We work together well.”
