midnight of a blade’s contradiction [shattered remix]

THE DEATH OF DAMIAN ROSWALD

The midnight bells tolled.

Damian sat on a rooftop, his legs dangling off the side of the building. He whistled tunelessly, his eyes scanning the dark streets below.

It hadn't gone as expected, but you see, that's the problem with difficult problems. There's always so many—variables—to account for, and you can't take them all into account. 

Too many options, too many futures, too many—possibilities.

So? How do you eliminate all the different possibilities? 

If there's a broken bridge, you have to fix it. With mud and clay and and stone and—your own two fucking hands.

Damian grinned gleefully. 

There was the answer right before his eyes, yes, down there, walking with his head held down as though the weight of world hung from his neck. That was the answer, to the problem, the answer to his problem.

Damian dropped through the darkness and landed with ease.

The man ahead—he was nothing, he was nothing but an annoyance, an irregularity in the carefully constructed plans. He couldn't be allowed to exist, and so, naturally, he had to die. Simple as that. Erase the problem. Build the bridge.

Kill the interloper in this timeline.

"Who's there?"

Something gave Damian's presence away, and the interloper turned, his eyes widening in sudden shock.

"Kid…? No… Who are you?"

Damian cocked his head to the side.

"Hello my sweet little problem. You've caused me quite a bit of trouble, you know, but I swear I don't hold that against you. I just—you see, I need you to die for me. Can you do that?"

The older man took a step backwards, one hand cocked, ready to invoke an Angel's Blessing.

"It's not hard, friend. Just die for me. It's that easy. Take a knife and slit your throat, and it's over. Just like that. Won't you help yourself out? Help me out?"

Damian advanced, his arms spread wide, as though he was about to embrace an old friend. He smiled the whole time. This was fun; so much fun. Sometimes that's just what you needed in life—a little excitement!

"Hey! I asked you a question. Who the hell are you?! What timeline did you come from?"

Damian thought about that for a moment, his head cocked sideways. 

The rain was starting to come down again; the rain—it only went away for a moment, but it always came back, the same way that insects always come back no matter how many times you kill them. 

That's what this interloper was; he was an insect. 

No, no no no no no, he was worse than an insect, he was a fucking maggot, he was a problem and he had to be eliminated.

The answer came to Damian suddenly, and he snapped his fingers.

"I'm just a you, that's all. I'm just a you that saw the truth. I went to the end, and I saw the truth, and I thought to myself—you know, I thought, that's fucking bullshit. So I came back, and I think you came back too, right? But no, see, no, I can't have you fucking up my little plans here, friend. You get that?"

The interloper took another step back, shaking his head the whole while. Didn't he understand? Damian thought he was making himself perfectly clear. This was so simple. Why wouldn't the other man just die?

"You're crazy. What the hell happened to make you like this?"

"Oh, I'm the crazy one? You call me crazy? Hah!"

Damian laughed—

—and laughed—

—and laughed—

—until he thought his sides might rupture. 

He pointed at the interloper and looked at the audience who were watching the whole exchange.

"Can you believe this guy? He thinks I'm crazy. Madness!"

The older man turned, confused.

"Who are you talking to? There's nobody here but us."

Damian furrowed his brows. Oh. Strange. The people had gone away.

"Well that's not very nice. You scared them off. Well. I guess the show's almost over anyway. We had better finish this."

He stepped forward, quicker than the other man could react. 

Quick enough to get inside his guard and slam a boot into the old man's leg. 

Crack.

Such a lovely sound bones make when they break. Like the gentle crackling of twigs in a campfire. Such a lovely sound no no no  such an irritating sound, yes an annoying sound that was like nails being driven into his skull.

The interloper screamed and fell back, clutching the bloodied, twisted ruin of his leg.

"You're so weak, so fragile. Are you really me?"

Damian crouched down beside the interloper. 

"This is why you never made it to the end. Do you know? Someone once told me—someone once told me that I'd end the world. And see, what I did, was I fucking killed him."

Damian drew a line across his throat. Rain dripped down the alleyway, falling on both men.

"And then, you see, I ended up—this is the funny part, hah! I ended up doing it. I ended up destroying the world. Funny, right? And then—and then! Some piece of fucking shit, some fucking Angel, comes and tells me that I can do it all over again. I mean, why not stop me before then, you know? That's just rude."

The older man, gasping for air, pulled himself upright, his eyes glazed over with pain. Damian thought that was rude, but he kept talking anyway, because finally, finally, he had the interloper's attention.

It's so annoying when people are talking to you and they don't fucking listen. 

Sometimes you have to cut their eyeballs out, just so they keep an eye on you. Get it? An eye on you. Hah!

"So then I thought, well, I may as well kill myself."

Damian stood again, and shrugged.

"Eh, I'm going to kill you now, yeah? But you aren't the me I'm supposed to kill. But then again, how do you get practice killing yourself? You only get to do it once, I suppose, but this is a unique opportunity. Hey—maybe you aren't really a problem after all; no, you're something like a—a gift! Yeah, I like gifts. Surprises are the best. Don't you like surprises?"

The interloper didn't answer. He just took off down the alley, ambling along with his broken leg trailing behind him. He limped as fast as he could, leaving a bloody smear on the brickwork, like a wounded animal giving a trail for the predator to follow.

Damian sighed. Maybe this really was just a problem after all, but it still presented an interesting opportunity. A chance to grow, that was important. A chance to practice killing himself, so he got it right, when it really counted.

The predator pursued the prey. 

Around the twisted alleyways, through a chain-link fence that led into the shipping yards of Tenebrae. It was there that the interloper found himself cornered, where the rain pelted down overhead, turning into steam against their Flame-blessed weapons.

Damian held his dagger at the ready, while the interloper went for a bigger sword. 

Damian wanted to tell him that a sword was too slow, too cumbersome a weapon. In a fight to the death, the only thing that mattered was getting in the killing blow. There was no time for showmanship.

The scary thing about killing, is that it's really easy.

The battle was over in a handful of blows. The interloper was tired, and old, and injured, and his faith in the Angel had been shaken.

Damian slammed his boot into the old man's chest, and pinned him against a shipping container. The two stared each other down, two pairs of identical eyes, separated by a mere few inches.

Damian hesitated.

He wanted the moment to continue for a little longer. This was fun and he liked fun, but he had so much to do.

"I'm sorry."

He really was sorry. 

He'd have liked to practice killing himself longer.

Oh well.

Bone gave way beneath the dagger, and the interloper's heart ruptured.

Life gone, just like that.

Killing is easy. That's what makes it fun.

Damian stopped the corpse from falling, and plucked the signet ring from the interloper's finger. Now Damian had two rings, one for each hand, and the Cinders glowed happily inside them, ignorant of the crisis their duplicate existence created.

Damian removed his foot and the corpse crashed into a heap, bleeding out into a rainy puddle. He extinguished his dagger and looked up to the sky, blinking water from his eyes.

If only all his problems could be solved so easily.

Damian sighed and walked away, whistling tunelessly beneath his breath.

Soon, he told himself. Soon, he'd kill himself. 

And then—

—then he'd finally, truly—

—die.