Kill Bill
Title: Kill Bill (3/?)
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG - NC17
Warnings: AU, violence, blood, lots of unpleasantness. Character deaths very possible.
Summary: World peace is attained at a cost. The question is whose cost it was.
Note: Aliases/glossary.
A/N: Did I mention the violence?
03712datelog=logsecure
=29848bishop::login
=attn::27522wickerman::
::29848bishop:: A code x op has dropped from the grid.
::27522wickerman:: How long.
::29848bishop:: 1 month 11 days. Over 2 months since last NLGN dose.
::27522wickerman:: You’ve allowed a code x op to go off program for that long? Why was I not informed the moment the op dropped from sight?
::29848bishop:: I am merely your medical science head, sir, I claim no responsibility. Lear did not see fit to inform you at all, so I took it upon myself.
::29848bishop::connection terminated.
=attn::25539lear::
::27522wickerman:: Why have you not informed me we’ve had a code x breach?
::25539lear:: I initially believed the op would return as he was conditioned before it became an issue. Apparently Bishop’s contribution to our cause has a flaw.
::27522wickerman:: Activate tracers and have him brought in by force.
::25539lear:: We’ve verified he has removed his tracers. I have had code m ops posted at all his routine locations for some time in case he should return and scanning all surveillance grids available to us. I think we must assume he is now self-aware.
::27522wickerman:: Which op is this?
::25539lear:: 28868beesting.
=25539lear::connection terminated.
=attn::171244captain::
::27522wickerman:: We have a code x breach. All eyes and ops search and intercept 28868beesting, maximum priority 1.
::171244captain:: Sir, my team does not typically handle code x ops. That is Lear’s jurisdiction.
::27522wickerman:: Your security status has been upgraded. Search and intercept 28868beesting.
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
::171244captain::logout
*
17712datelog=logsecure
::171244captain::login
=attn::27522wickerman::
::171244captain:: 28868beesting located. 81276rockstar in place to intercept.
::27522wickerman:: Eliminate target.
::171244captain:: Clarify sir. Eliminate or intercept?
::27522wickerman:: Eliminate the target. Scrub the scene. Understood?
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
JULY 17. MANCHESTER.
The mop hit the linoleum with a definitive splat. Billy rubbed a knuckle into his eye and yawned, pushing the mop through the drips of beer on the floor.
“Come on, lads,” Angus’ gruff voice carried from the front of the pub, urging the last of the stragglers out, “Got to close her up now. We’ll all be here again tomorrow, like as naught.”
The mop squelched, pushing water, bleach, old beer and crumbs around the peeling floor of the kitchen. Billy fought the need to yawn again, but it tingled on his soft palette until he had to let it break. The sound of mugs being collected trickled back to him, the clink and thunk of them being put into the dish bins. His eyes were dry with fatigue. He wavered to one side, catching his weight as his hip thumped against the worktop, and drawing the mop handle back up to balance himself. What had it been now? Three nights without sleep? Four? But he couldn’t. Not with those cold eyes haunting him, following him.
“Off you go, son,” Angus’s voice floated back again, urging one last drunk out the door.
There was a gasped “Oi!”, and a short, sharp pew sound. The world stopped. Something clicked in Billy’s mind. He was instantly wide awake.
Seconds later, the sound came again, twice. Glass exploded both in front of and behind him, from the mirrored shelves full of spirits between the bar and the kitchen, and the window in the door to the alley. Billy dove, and the mop handle clattered to the ground, bouncing once on the floor by his ear among sparkles of glass shards, liquor and water. Before it hit the ground a second time, the door between the bar and the kitchen was thrust open, the world moving in slow motion, and before he could move Billy was staring down the long blue barrel of a gun. The face of the young man holding it was blank, expressionless, his eyes the same steely color, determined and deadly. His finger on the trigger squeezed-
The gun jammed.
By the time surprise registered in those eyes, Billy instinctively grabbed for the man’s wrist, jumping up to twist it round behind his back and slam him gut first into the metal sink. With the pop, the man’s shoulder dislocated, and the gun fell from his hand as he grunted in pain. Billy threw him downward by the torso, his nose connecting with the faucet as he folded over the pile of soaking dishes.
Billy swiftly stooped, grabbing up the gun. With the groan, the man stumbled round, his nose spurting blood, his left arm coming up in a fist. Billy sidestepped the feeble punch and pistol-whipped him smartly on the head. He crumpled in a heap in the floor.
Suddenly the world was silent again, but for the heaving of Billy’s breath. He deliberately slowed it, closing his lips and taking in the smell of alcohol and blood through his nose. With the toe of his trainer, he tilted the unconscious gunman’s face up. He was dressed as your common pub-crawler, jeans and a leather jacket over a Manchester jersey, with tousled blondish hair and that typically British look, mouth open, his jaw crooked, as though it had been broken at some point. His eyes were half-closed, rolled back, his lashes black and damp, his nose bulbous, oozing blood down his cheek and flowering into the puddle of water and spirits below. He was younger. Early thirties, maybe. He ought to be out chatting up women or having a family, not looking to gun someone down.
Billy did not remember being thirty, or chatting up anyone.
He shook the fuzziness from his head and stepped over the sprawled man to the door leading to front of the pub, finding the body of Angus with a small round wound leaking blood from his temple, eyes staring at the back of the bar, unseeing.
He swallowed, edged around the body and used a pen to punch the keys to open the cash drawer, pocketing the day’s money. Ducking back through the kitchen, he leapt over the unconscious man and stumbled out into the alley. The adrenaline of the fight was leaving him now, and he slumped against the brick, more exhausted than ever.
Still clutched in his hand was the gun, its barrel elongated by a silencer, his finger on the trigger. He moved his thumb to the button to eject the magazine, catching it before it fell. The bullet that had jammed, the bullet meant for him was still there, caught up slightly crooked at the top of the casing. He didn’t know how he knew how to handle the gun, how to take it apart. A wave of vertigo slammed into him, the sounds of shouts and gunshots, visions like a melting film reel, faces surprised in their death, blood leaking from round holes between their eyes. He bent at the waist and retched on the wet paving stones.
Dropping the gun by his sick, he ran until the pub was blocks behind him, then fell to a brisk walk, turning up the collar of his shirt against the rain.
Pushing several of the notes from the register under the landlady’s door with her post, he climbed the creaking staircase up to the damp attic room where he’d stayed for the past month. He figured he had until morning to disappear.
He turned to the room. There was little of what might be called comforts. A mattress lay on the floor with a moth eaten blanket thrown over it, pushed into the corner by the small window. A few milk crates served as table, chair or shelf, whatever was necessary. A duffle bag held clothes, small wadded piles littered the floor, along with a steno pad and a pen stuck through the wire binding, a torch, a pocketknife, a roll of duct tape he’d bought to seal the drafty cracks in the window, an electric kettle and packets of instant coffee, a few books borrowed from the local library. But it was the tiny fridge he stumbled to as his stomach growled, remembering the carton of Chinese he’d stashed inside a few days ago along with a half empty bottle of cheap pilsner.
The food now tasted funny and the beer stale, but he didn’t care, scooping up the remaining forkfuls of rice, chicken and peas. He sat on the mattress as he chewed, knees feeling like jelly. He yawned, dropped the empty carton on the floor and drained the bottle.
He pulled his PID from his pocket, bringing up the ident files again, scanning them, looking for whatever could have a man chasing him for days now. Jamie Holmes had been left in London. He’d paid a wad of cash in a shady back room on the East End for a new memchip, a new name and a new past. What was more, he didn't even feel like that man anymore, someone so innocent, so simple. It wasn’t his name, but he’d trained himself to respond to it whenever necessary, and he'd done the same with the new one. The name he called himself now, Billy, had come off an old film poster, one that simply resonated somehow in his mind. He didn’t understand why.
Four nights without sleep. But he couldn’t. Someone was definitely after him, tonight had made that perfectly clear. It had been a mistake to stay here as long as he had. He could not sleep until he was in a new place. Could not sleep as long as those cold, bright eyes haunted him, glimpses in a crowd, across a street, fleeting, melting away as soon as he looked again. A month of paranoia. Months of dreams of dead faces, pulling spiders out of his flesh, running, always running. He couldn’t sleep until he got out of Manchester, out of England. He’d go north, or maybe west, far west, somewhere else.
He grabbed the duffle and began stuffing it with the nearest items, reaching for the notepad when he heard it. A creak, the loose fourth stair from the top that always squeaked, and his landlady was not meant to return from her holiday for a few days, at least. He’d led the bastard right to his door.
Grabbing for the heavy torch, Billy darted soundlessly to the side of the doorframe, into the toilet doorway beside it. The wait was agony as the creak paused, the door handle twisted, loose in its bolting, a door with a horribly ineffectual lock. The door swung forward silently on its hinges, and the steely blue silencer advanced into the room, the gun he had left. That was a mistake. Billy held his breath, sank into the shadows and waited.
Waited to see the hands, the grip trained military fashion, but the right one somewhat loose. Arms, shoulders, one awkwardly dropped, that rounded nose, hastily mopped of blood, one nostril stuffed with a wad of tissue, bruised and red.
As the gunman began to sweep the room, Billy struck viciously with the heavy torch to the back of the neck.
“Fuck!” the man cried, and Billy flattened him to the floor and wrested the gun from him a second time. This time he turned it on the man, who froze.
“Who are you?” Billy growled.
The man said nothing.
Billy thumped the barrel of the silencer hard against the man’s temple, just behind the eye. “I asked who th’ fuck you are. Why are you after me? Why are you trying to kill me?”
The man said nothing. His eye focused on the duffle by his nose, closed his mouth and slowly exhaled, blood bubbling a little at one nostril. Acceptance. This man would rather die than talk. Billy squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. Expecting to watch the life drain from the man, to see blood and mess and to remember this face, Billy gasped at its lack. The man didn’t even flinch.
Still straddling him, Billy slid the gun away across the floor and instead squeezed the man’s dislocated right shoulder, wanting pain, needing a reaction. The man whimpered, and Billy took satisfaction in the way his bones did not meet properly under his palm. “Don’t you move, or I’ll do the other one for you as well,” he growled.
He looked around for something to help hold the man, spotting the duct tape. He bound the man’s wrists behind his back, tightly, all the way down and over his curled fingers for good measure. He did his ankles too, and his knees, then rolled him over and sat him up, propped him against the large wooden post supporting the roof in the middle of the room and bound the man tightly to it. He used the last bit of tape on the roll to cover the man’s mouth. All the while, those eyes watched him, steely and cold. He found a dirty shirt on the floor and used it to cover them up, so they couldn’t haunt him anymore.
“Dunno who th’ fuck you are, but you’re damned lucky my landlady’s on holiday.” Billy muttered, and giggled stupidly as he staggered back, surveying his handy work. He stumbled on the mattress and sat back hard, finding the gun at his feet again.
He picked it up and ejected the magazine, finding the bullet again jammed in the casing. A tiny edge at the top of the clip was slightly bent. He tapped it against the floor, and using the handle of the fork to push the bent edge back, the next bullet popping up and into place, straight and ready. He reloaded the clip and pointed it at the bound man in the center of his room, wondering what variety of medical end Mrs. Donahue would come to when she found a bound corpse in her attic on her return from Brighton.
Billy yawned widely, set the gun on top of the nearest milk crate, and pushed the heels of his hands into his dry, exhausted eyes. “Fucker. Haven’t slept in days because of you,” he grumbled. “What do you want with me? I’m nobody.”
The man’s covered head turned in his direction, a gruesomely comic mask with a shirt bound pirate-like over his head and eyes, a square duct tape mouth, and a bruised, purple, swollen nose poking out between.
“I haven’t done anything.” Billy dropped down on his elbow, bunching the old blanket into a makeshift pillow. If he could just put his head down for a minute. Only a minute.
CHAPTER FOUR
Pairing: Dom/Billy
Rating: PG - NC17
Warnings: AU, violence, blood, lots of unpleasantness. Character deaths very possible.
Summary: World peace is attained at a cost. The question is whose cost it was.
Note: Aliases/glossary.
A/N: Did I mention the violence?
03712datelog=logsecure
=29848bishop::login
=attn::27522wickerman::
::29848bishop:: A code x op has dropped from the grid.
::27522wickerman:: How long.
::29848bishop:: 1 month 11 days. Over 2 months since last NLGN dose.
::27522wickerman:: You’ve allowed a code x op to go off program for that long? Why was I not informed the moment the op dropped from sight?
::29848bishop:: I am merely your medical science head, sir, I claim no responsibility. Lear did not see fit to inform you at all, so I took it upon myself.
::29848bishop::connection terminated.
=attn::25539lear::
::27522wickerman:: Why have you not informed me we’ve had a code x breach?
::25539lear:: I initially believed the op would return as he was conditioned before it became an issue. Apparently Bishop’s contribution to our cause has a flaw.
::27522wickerman:: Activate tracers and have him brought in by force.
::25539lear:: We’ve verified he has removed his tracers. I have had code m ops posted at all his routine locations for some time in case he should return and scanning all surveillance grids available to us. I think we must assume he is now self-aware.
::27522wickerman:: Which op is this?
::25539lear:: 28868beesting.
=25539lear::connection terminated.
=attn::171244captain::
::27522wickerman:: We have a code x breach. All eyes and ops search and intercept 28868beesting, maximum priority 1.
::171244captain:: Sir, my team does not typically handle code x ops. That is Lear’s jurisdiction.
::27522wickerman:: Your security status has been upgraded. Search and intercept 28868beesting.
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
::171244captain::logout
*
17712datelog=logsecure
::171244captain::login
=attn::27522wickerman::
::171244captain:: 28868beesting located. 81276rockstar in place to intercept.
::27522wickerman:: Eliminate target.
::171244captain:: Clarify sir. Eliminate or intercept?
::27522wickerman:: Eliminate the target. Scrub the scene. Understood?
::171244captain:: Yes sir.
JULY 17. MANCHESTER.
The mop hit the linoleum with a definitive splat. Billy rubbed a knuckle into his eye and yawned, pushing the mop through the drips of beer on the floor.
“Come on, lads,” Angus’ gruff voice carried from the front of the pub, urging the last of the stragglers out, “Got to close her up now. We’ll all be here again tomorrow, like as naught.”
The mop squelched, pushing water, bleach, old beer and crumbs around the peeling floor of the kitchen. Billy fought the need to yawn again, but it tingled on his soft palette until he had to let it break. The sound of mugs being collected trickled back to him, the clink and thunk of them being put into the dish bins. His eyes were dry with fatigue. He wavered to one side, catching his weight as his hip thumped against the worktop, and drawing the mop handle back up to balance himself. What had it been now? Three nights without sleep? Four? But he couldn’t. Not with those cold eyes haunting him, following him.
“Off you go, son,” Angus’s voice floated back again, urging one last drunk out the door.
There was a gasped “Oi!”, and a short, sharp pew sound. The world stopped. Something clicked in Billy’s mind. He was instantly wide awake.
Seconds later, the sound came again, twice. Glass exploded both in front of and behind him, from the mirrored shelves full of spirits between the bar and the kitchen, and the window in the door to the alley. Billy dove, and the mop handle clattered to the ground, bouncing once on the floor by his ear among sparkles of glass shards, liquor and water. Before it hit the ground a second time, the door between the bar and the kitchen was thrust open, the world moving in slow motion, and before he could move Billy was staring down the long blue barrel of a gun. The face of the young man holding it was blank, expressionless, his eyes the same steely color, determined and deadly. His finger on the trigger squeezed-
The gun jammed.
By the time surprise registered in those eyes, Billy instinctively grabbed for the man’s wrist, jumping up to twist it round behind his back and slam him gut first into the metal sink. With the pop, the man’s shoulder dislocated, and the gun fell from his hand as he grunted in pain. Billy threw him downward by the torso, his nose connecting with the faucet as he folded over the pile of soaking dishes.
Billy swiftly stooped, grabbing up the gun. With the groan, the man stumbled round, his nose spurting blood, his left arm coming up in a fist. Billy sidestepped the feeble punch and pistol-whipped him smartly on the head. He crumpled in a heap in the floor.
Suddenly the world was silent again, but for the heaving of Billy’s breath. He deliberately slowed it, closing his lips and taking in the smell of alcohol and blood through his nose. With the toe of his trainer, he tilted the unconscious gunman’s face up. He was dressed as your common pub-crawler, jeans and a leather jacket over a Manchester jersey, with tousled blondish hair and that typically British look, mouth open, his jaw crooked, as though it had been broken at some point. His eyes were half-closed, rolled back, his lashes black and damp, his nose bulbous, oozing blood down his cheek and flowering into the puddle of water and spirits below. He was younger. Early thirties, maybe. He ought to be out chatting up women or having a family, not looking to gun someone down.
Billy did not remember being thirty, or chatting up anyone.
He shook the fuzziness from his head and stepped over the sprawled man to the door leading to front of the pub, finding the body of Angus with a small round wound leaking blood from his temple, eyes staring at the back of the bar, unseeing.
He swallowed, edged around the body and used a pen to punch the keys to open the cash drawer, pocketing the day’s money. Ducking back through the kitchen, he leapt over the unconscious man and stumbled out into the alley. The adrenaline of the fight was leaving him now, and he slumped against the brick, more exhausted than ever.
Still clutched in his hand was the gun, its barrel elongated by a silencer, his finger on the trigger. He moved his thumb to the button to eject the magazine, catching it before it fell. The bullet that had jammed, the bullet meant for him was still there, caught up slightly crooked at the top of the casing. He didn’t know how he knew how to handle the gun, how to take it apart. A wave of vertigo slammed into him, the sounds of shouts and gunshots, visions like a melting film reel, faces surprised in their death, blood leaking from round holes between their eyes. He bent at the waist and retched on the wet paving stones.
Dropping the gun by his sick, he ran until the pub was blocks behind him, then fell to a brisk walk, turning up the collar of his shirt against the rain.
Pushing several of the notes from the register under the landlady’s door with her post, he climbed the creaking staircase up to the damp attic room where he’d stayed for the past month. He figured he had until morning to disappear.
He turned to the room. There was little of what might be called comforts. A mattress lay on the floor with a moth eaten blanket thrown over it, pushed into the corner by the small window. A few milk crates served as table, chair or shelf, whatever was necessary. A duffle bag held clothes, small wadded piles littered the floor, along with a steno pad and a pen stuck through the wire binding, a torch, a pocketknife, a roll of duct tape he’d bought to seal the drafty cracks in the window, an electric kettle and packets of instant coffee, a few books borrowed from the local library. But it was the tiny fridge he stumbled to as his stomach growled, remembering the carton of Chinese he’d stashed inside a few days ago along with a half empty bottle of cheap pilsner.
The food now tasted funny and the beer stale, but he didn’t care, scooping up the remaining forkfuls of rice, chicken and peas. He sat on the mattress as he chewed, knees feeling like jelly. He yawned, dropped the empty carton on the floor and drained the bottle.
He pulled his PID from his pocket, bringing up the ident files again, scanning them, looking for whatever could have a man chasing him for days now. Jamie Holmes had been left in London. He’d paid a wad of cash in a shady back room on the East End for a new memchip, a new name and a new past. What was more, he didn't even feel like that man anymore, someone so innocent, so simple. It wasn’t his name, but he’d trained himself to respond to it whenever necessary, and he'd done the same with the new one. The name he called himself now, Billy, had come off an old film poster, one that simply resonated somehow in his mind. He didn’t understand why.
Four nights without sleep. But he couldn’t. Someone was definitely after him, tonight had made that perfectly clear. It had been a mistake to stay here as long as he had. He could not sleep until he was in a new place. Could not sleep as long as those cold, bright eyes haunted him, glimpses in a crowd, across a street, fleeting, melting away as soon as he looked again. A month of paranoia. Months of dreams of dead faces, pulling spiders out of his flesh, running, always running. He couldn’t sleep until he got out of Manchester, out of England. He’d go north, or maybe west, far west, somewhere else.
He grabbed the duffle and began stuffing it with the nearest items, reaching for the notepad when he heard it. A creak, the loose fourth stair from the top that always squeaked, and his landlady was not meant to return from her holiday for a few days, at least. He’d led the bastard right to his door.
Grabbing for the heavy torch, Billy darted soundlessly to the side of the doorframe, into the toilet doorway beside it. The wait was agony as the creak paused, the door handle twisted, loose in its bolting, a door with a horribly ineffectual lock. The door swung forward silently on its hinges, and the steely blue silencer advanced into the room, the gun he had left. That was a mistake. Billy held his breath, sank into the shadows and waited.
Waited to see the hands, the grip trained military fashion, but the right one somewhat loose. Arms, shoulders, one awkwardly dropped, that rounded nose, hastily mopped of blood, one nostril stuffed with a wad of tissue, bruised and red.
As the gunman began to sweep the room, Billy struck viciously with the heavy torch to the back of the neck.
“Fuck!” the man cried, and Billy flattened him to the floor and wrested the gun from him a second time. This time he turned it on the man, who froze.
“Who are you?” Billy growled.
The man said nothing.
Billy thumped the barrel of the silencer hard against the man’s temple, just behind the eye. “I asked who th’ fuck you are. Why are you after me? Why are you trying to kill me?”
The man said nothing. His eye focused on the duffle by his nose, closed his mouth and slowly exhaled, blood bubbling a little at one nostril. Acceptance. This man would rather die than talk. Billy squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. Expecting to watch the life drain from the man, to see blood and mess and to remember this face, Billy gasped at its lack. The man didn’t even flinch.
Still straddling him, Billy slid the gun away across the floor and instead squeezed the man’s dislocated right shoulder, wanting pain, needing a reaction. The man whimpered, and Billy took satisfaction in the way his bones did not meet properly under his palm. “Don’t you move, or I’ll do the other one for you as well,” he growled.
He looked around for something to help hold the man, spotting the duct tape. He bound the man’s wrists behind his back, tightly, all the way down and over his curled fingers for good measure. He did his ankles too, and his knees, then rolled him over and sat him up, propped him against the large wooden post supporting the roof in the middle of the room and bound the man tightly to it. He used the last bit of tape on the roll to cover the man’s mouth. All the while, those eyes watched him, steely and cold. He found a dirty shirt on the floor and used it to cover them up, so they couldn’t haunt him anymore.
“Dunno who th’ fuck you are, but you’re damned lucky my landlady’s on holiday.” Billy muttered, and giggled stupidly as he staggered back, surveying his handy work. He stumbled on the mattress and sat back hard, finding the gun at his feet again.
He picked it up and ejected the magazine, finding the bullet again jammed in the casing. A tiny edge at the top of the clip was slightly bent. He tapped it against the floor, and using the handle of the fork to push the bent edge back, the next bullet popping up and into place, straight and ready. He reloaded the clip and pointed it at the bound man in the center of his room, wondering what variety of medical end Mrs. Donahue would come to when she found a bound corpse in her attic on her return from Brighton.
Billy yawned widely, set the gun on top of the nearest milk crate, and pushed the heels of his hands into his dry, exhausted eyes. “Fucker. Haven’t slept in days because of you,” he grumbled. “What do you want with me? I’m nobody.”
The man’s covered head turned in his direction, a gruesomely comic mask with a shirt bound pirate-like over his head and eyes, a square duct tape mouth, and a bruised, purple, swollen nose poking out between.
“I haven’t done anything.” Billy dropped down on his elbow, bunching the old blanket into a makeshift pillow. If he could just put his head down for a minute. Only a minute.
CHAPTER FOUR