a costume shop crowded with masks. ⌖ @abseance
Hazy lights do little to obscure the heart of your mission, dead scent of moth balls provoked by the costume off-season; the heaviness to it comes not of reality, but what reality insinuates. You have a job to do, nestled between stacks and stacks of packaged raiment, traces of cheap feathers and tacky sparkles swept up in heaps across the linoleum. Disguise upheld by the peaks of your cheeks is not you ⸻ you are never you, near and afar, but especially not now as you bear jewel-encrusted embellishments with a placid pout ⸻ yet it retains its aesthetic appeal. You move, beauteously wry, with midnight blue filigree surrounding your black-eyed stare in elaborate motifs, twisting up and around your countenance, curling into floral insignias. Crystalline gemstones embed above your brows, between them, dotted with precision as another layer of complexity atop its design. You are drawn to it for reasons you cannot say, cannot meaningfully pry about in your labyrinthine decision making. It is blue. You go blue, if given the choice. Blue is stable and secure, impersonal and cold. You are blue, Leopard.
The snow leopard stalks its prey along steep mountain slopes, camouflaged among the rocks, creeping within striking distance in immaculate clarity. You have perfected the art of your gait, not so much as a single sound’s emittance from your feet against the floor, traversing every item of inventory the shop allures with, begs for patronage outside of October’s tendrils. You will not cause a ruckus, of which elderly cashier nestled away toward the front of the store will be forced to endure, because you are not that kind of girl. That is not how you conduct business and certainly not how you were trained. ⸻But where is she? So-called mark of yours, target of your crosshairs made to bridge the distance between you and here, never once burdened with insight as to the why. Why you are to do this damage, why you are to wield your rifle with hands that do not shake and sit in waiting until the time comes to embrace the trigger’s pull. Simple, then. A logical conclusion to come to: you do not need to know, you are the apparatus, the helm through which order and duty are contained. Sharp object of yourself follows directions and nothing more, never thinking, never stirring, going through the motions and making every ministration satisfied with your own automation.
From around another corner, you creep, light filtering in through cracked glass windowpane, dust particles pirouetting in their illuminated partitions. No one has been here. If anyone will be here, it will be her. You are prepared for this, flat of your knife concealed beneath pleats of fabric adorning you. Tumultuous excitement unfurls in the pit of you, some nightmarish delight in pursuing a target closer to your own age, respite from the countless greying suits you’ve taken out with well-aimed and intentioned shots. If only to delay the inevitable, you are enraptured in fantasy, caught up in the notion of gun barrel pressed into the side of her throat. Would she have it in her to retaliate? Would she ever see you coming? What would you do, then, tucked away in the back of a costume shop. You are not innately violent, Leopard. You were not brought up with any inclination of enjoyment to be found. You simply do, the same way anyone does any job: cut from a different cloth, you do what the average person cannot. You do it without fretting, without faltering, with that same passive look etched into the ice sculpture of your mien.
When there is flash of brunette, you move, finally, half-penumbra on your face where the dreamlike lighting casts depraved shadows beneath your mask. A certainty of who you are dealing with, even before you may gauge what she is clad in; shoot before you see the target, just as Professor used to say. Cast all doubt you have permitted to build up ⸻ coalescing as an ugly within you, not you, never you, you do not and cannot doubt yourself, and still there is a moment of hesitation before you’re halfway sheathed behind a velvet curtain. Embroidered with honor, you, the saint, the martyr, emerge. It must be her, this Akikō a case file has been built upon. (You blink once, twice, some back-and-forth metric of incredulity in what possibly fetters your blade-sharp cognizance.) One fluid motion into another, and your knife caresses the plane of her throat, featherlight. ❛❛ Shhh, ❜❜ you coo, patronizingly bringing an extended finger just shy of your lips.
