FIC: It Comes With Practise, PG-13
It Comes With Practise
By Emerald Embers
Louise_cmi_vc@hotmail.com
Rated PG-13 for bad language, violence, and very mild slash.
Fandom: Lucky Number Slevin
Characters: Slevin, Mr Goodkat
Non-profit fanfiction, please don’t sue.
He wasn’t getting bored and he certainly wasn’t getting bad, but there were days every once in a while when Mr Goodkat suspected he was getting too old for this line of work, a feeling largely due to the boy he was berating now. Not that the boy cared. He’d heard children either aged you or kept you young; now in his mid teens, fifteen year old “Slevin” apparently had plans on making him die young.
“You do not practise killing people!”
“You can’t prove it was me.”
“I fucking can,” Mr Goodkat yelled, picking up the homeless man by the neck and pulling out his makeshift gag, seeing as it had never been and now would never be a necessity. “I knew it! These are your socks!”
“Could have been anybody’s. Three dollars for a pack at Walmart.”
“With your DNA on them.”
“Who’s going to waste their department budget on a dead hobo?” Slevin asked, lighting up a cigarette then having it knocked from his mouth with a right hook he really should have seen coming.
“Put that fucking thing out.” He resented the kid for not caring, resented him more for the fact that all he needed was a pair of sunglasses and a theme tune and he’d look like something out of a Hollywood movie. Fifteen years old and he’d lost enough puppy fat to let you use his cheekbones as a deadly weapon. “Why’d you do it?”
“People always throw up after their first kill. I had to make sure.” He looked at the corpse and frowned. “He tried to steal my wallet so I chose him, but I don’t know if that stops it counting. Either way, I didn’t vomit.” He rubbed his cheek, checked his jaw to make sure it hadn’t been knocked out of alignment, but everything felt fine. “Is that strange?”
“Kid, everything you do is strange.” He picked the dead man up in his arms, waited for Slevin to take up the feet so they could move him over to the boiler. He knew better than to ask if the kid had checked for any metals or plastics, had to give him credit for being a good student most of the time. “I looked up Ataraxia.”
“Damn, caught me out,” came the reply before Goodkat had a chance to question him. “Ataraxia sounds better than Autism Spectrum Disorder.”
“You’re autistic?” The voice was surprised but not as shocked as one might have expected.
“No. ASD just means you’ve got symptoms of it. Bottom of the scale are actual autistics, middle of the scale are savants and Asperger’s Syndrome, so on and so forth. I’m sort of mid to top. All the fun of free thought combined with clumsiness and an inability to empathise.” He shrugged. “Probably explains the lack of vomiting. They should get more people like me in the army.”
“Clumsy men wouldn’t be much use in a minefield,” Goodkat noted before flinging his end of the corpse into the furnace, waited for Slevin’s end to follow in before closing the door.
“Good point.”
“They always are.”
Slevin grinned and watched his mentor fire up the furnace, felt his stomach turn as the smell of cooking flesh filled the room. “I might have to second guess that not vomiting thing,” he decided, relieved he’d chosen a building that opened onto the canal. With a clubbing district only a few hundred meters up the canal, vomit in the water wouldn’t exactly be an unfamiliar sight. “You mind if I nip outside?”
“Fire away,” Goodkat replied, amused. So the kid was still human after all.
He was going to have to find some sort of halfway house for Slevin soon. Keeping a low profile was difficult enough for one man without the teenager accompanying him, and those cheekbones didn’t lend themselves to anonymity. It didn’t mean he wanted to leave him behind.
Still, they would keep in touch. He knew Slevin still had plans on finding the men who’d left him for dead, and to make quite certain they knew he’d been raised quite well, thank you very much. And if the men had an ounce of sense, which Goodkat hoped they would being clients of his, they’d realise who precisely had done the raising.
Any kid who faced death without caring deserved to have someone raise him right, and Mr Goodkat thought he’d done a good job. Slevin could read and add, and while he hadn’t had a high school education, he had spent enough time flicking through newspapers and browsing the web to know things that would prove far more useful in real life. Moreover, he knew enough about assassination that no bum with a drug habit and a knife would catch him out anytime soon. As soon as he had friends make up a birth certificate and passport for the kid, maybe a few diplomas, the world would be Slevin’s until the time was right.
Most importantly of all, it would give Goodkat time to concentrate on something other than ignoring how attractive the kid had become. An internationally recognised hitman could carry many burdens on his back, but he had no plans on letting adolescent crushes become one of them.
Especially not when said kid, given his expression when Goodkat had first walked in on this gruesome little murder scene, reciprocated.
- The End
By Emerald Embers
Louise_cmi_vc@hotmail.com
Rated PG-13 for bad language, violence, and very mild slash.
Fandom: Lucky Number Slevin
Characters: Slevin, Mr Goodkat
Non-profit fanfiction, please don’t sue.
He wasn’t getting bored and he certainly wasn’t getting bad, but there were days every once in a while when Mr Goodkat suspected he was getting too old for this line of work, a feeling largely due to the boy he was berating now. Not that the boy cared. He’d heard children either aged you or kept you young; now in his mid teens, fifteen year old “Slevin” apparently had plans on making him die young.
“You do not practise killing people!”
“You can’t prove it was me.”
“I fucking can,” Mr Goodkat yelled, picking up the homeless man by the neck and pulling out his makeshift gag, seeing as it had never been and now would never be a necessity. “I knew it! These are your socks!”
“Could have been anybody’s. Three dollars for a pack at Walmart.”
“With your DNA on them.”
“Who’s going to waste their department budget on a dead hobo?” Slevin asked, lighting up a cigarette then having it knocked from his mouth with a right hook he really should have seen coming.
“Put that fucking thing out.” He resented the kid for not caring, resented him more for the fact that all he needed was a pair of sunglasses and a theme tune and he’d look like something out of a Hollywood movie. Fifteen years old and he’d lost enough puppy fat to let you use his cheekbones as a deadly weapon. “Why’d you do it?”
“People always throw up after their first kill. I had to make sure.” He looked at the corpse and frowned. “He tried to steal my wallet so I chose him, but I don’t know if that stops it counting. Either way, I didn’t vomit.” He rubbed his cheek, checked his jaw to make sure it hadn’t been knocked out of alignment, but everything felt fine. “Is that strange?”
“Kid, everything you do is strange.” He picked the dead man up in his arms, waited for Slevin to take up the feet so they could move him over to the boiler. He knew better than to ask if the kid had checked for any metals or plastics, had to give him credit for being a good student most of the time. “I looked up Ataraxia.”
“Damn, caught me out,” came the reply before Goodkat had a chance to question him. “Ataraxia sounds better than Autism Spectrum Disorder.”
“You’re autistic?” The voice was surprised but not as shocked as one might have expected.
“No. ASD just means you’ve got symptoms of it. Bottom of the scale are actual autistics, middle of the scale are savants and Asperger’s Syndrome, so on and so forth. I’m sort of mid to top. All the fun of free thought combined with clumsiness and an inability to empathise.” He shrugged. “Probably explains the lack of vomiting. They should get more people like me in the army.”
“Clumsy men wouldn’t be much use in a minefield,” Goodkat noted before flinging his end of the corpse into the furnace, waited for Slevin’s end to follow in before closing the door.
“Good point.”
“They always are.”
Slevin grinned and watched his mentor fire up the furnace, felt his stomach turn as the smell of cooking flesh filled the room. “I might have to second guess that not vomiting thing,” he decided, relieved he’d chosen a building that opened onto the canal. With a clubbing district only a few hundred meters up the canal, vomit in the water wouldn’t exactly be an unfamiliar sight. “You mind if I nip outside?”
“Fire away,” Goodkat replied, amused. So the kid was still human after all.
He was going to have to find some sort of halfway house for Slevin soon. Keeping a low profile was difficult enough for one man without the teenager accompanying him, and those cheekbones didn’t lend themselves to anonymity. It didn’t mean he wanted to leave him behind.
Still, they would keep in touch. He knew Slevin still had plans on finding the men who’d left him for dead, and to make quite certain they knew he’d been raised quite well, thank you very much. And if the men had an ounce of sense, which Goodkat hoped they would being clients of his, they’d realise who precisely had done the raising.
Any kid who faced death without caring deserved to have someone raise him right, and Mr Goodkat thought he’d done a good job. Slevin could read and add, and while he hadn’t had a high school education, he had spent enough time flicking through newspapers and browsing the web to know things that would prove far more useful in real life. Moreover, he knew enough about assassination that no bum with a drug habit and a knife would catch him out anytime soon. As soon as he had friends make up a birth certificate and passport for the kid, maybe a few diplomas, the world would be Slevin’s until the time was right.
Most importantly of all, it would give Goodkat time to concentrate on something other than ignoring how attractive the kid had become. An internationally recognised hitman could carry many burdens on his back, but he had no plans on letting adolescent crushes become one of them.
Especially not when said kid, given his expression when Goodkat had first walked in on this gruesome little murder scene, reciprocated.
- The End