━━ 🧨┊SC.┊ARES ARCHER & MINERVA STARBORNE┊@nightwhip
based on -- you have a timer that shows you for how long you have to live. this number changes and mostly estimates based on conscious or unconscious decisions a few minutes after making the decision: driving to visit your grandparents might make the number go to just hours but deciding on the road that no, you have enough fuel to not stop at the gas station you usually stop by makes it go to thirty years. you can’t see the number when you are within 10 metres of your soulmate, so your future is always unknown when you’re with them—and so is theirs.
Archer glances at the timer glaring just beneath the epidermis of his forearm, the glow of it causing barely there shadows on the steering wheel of his car. If nothing else, this soulmate shit did wonders for business. The time displayed made it easier for him to decide which jobs to take and which to pass on.
( Just discussing a triple slaying two months prior had made his timer drop from years to days. )
This job was different, for the first time since he first took up arms for the highest bidder, acceptance had made his timer increase. Just a nudge, but significant enough to notice. He’s already chalking it up to the adrenaline of the game.
( It’s easier to write things like soulmates off as child’s play when you lived as though you were soulless. )
The most difficult decision Archer had to make that evening was not will I, won’t I but rather how. Guns were convenient, silencer’s a gift from above. He’s been lax at the gym as of late, which made strangulation the should be choice. More physical than the others, it required a little more work. Then there was knives, and the extensive options he brought along.
Machetes were fun, but beheading was lazy and beneath him. A cleaver and bone were a sacred union, but it was dense and heavy and required more than one swing to be effective.
Then there was Apollo. His favorite buck knife that was always with him, named after his dearly departed younger brother that he had sent on to the next life prematurely by sticking that very knife into his carotid with a merciful twist.
( He still thinks about his twitching sibling’s cooling hands as they grabbed at his arms as he held him for the last few moments and how it felt like they were in direct opposition to the soothingly warm spurts of crimson that splotched his face while he kissed his forehead in the dying seconds of his time with him. )
Rarely did he ask questions about his targets beyond the necessary. What they did to deserve a reckoning brought forth by him was here nor there for him. Sympathy and empathy were two words he mixed up often -- he had yet to feel one well enough for their definitions to stick.
Moving through the apartment like a malevolent present, he’s halted by what looks like a personal photo. Dark haired with a smile that met her eyes, it has more life to it than the one he had been given with a file and instruction. Reaching out to inspect it closer before he renders that pretty face unrecognizable, he’s distracted by a presence -- or lack thereof.
Missing from just beneath his sleeve is that permanent timer glow, rerouting his attention completely as he changes course to tear his sleeve upward to inspect it.
“What the everloving fuck,” He says beneath his breath, for the first time in his life his timer was gone. In his haste to run his hand along his disturbingly bare forearm, his elbow caught the side of the display case and sent the very same picture he had been looking at hurtling towards the ground, the unmistakable crack of glass following.
