BRING OUT THE MACHINE GUNS // open, visitor

[MYERS]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]Killing is something like riding a bike - it gets easier after the first few times you hit the ground. It gets scarier when there's something on top of you, digging at your throat, but that only makes you go through the motions faster and eases some of the guilt. I had no choice carries a weight to it that other words don't have. He knows there are people around him speaking, and yet the disjointed sound of voices doesn't feel real. Kill him. That's an order, pal.

Killkillkillkill-

Does it matter if he considers his options once, twice, or not at all?

Maybe - if this were a different time, a different place, and Ahab was not the person he now stood as today - the command would jolt some kind of indignant anger through him. Couldn't there be another way to sort this out? But it is neither that time nor that place, and the thick claws that curl out from paws that were once gentle are not for show. They wouldn't have given him his arm back if they wanted him to be a pacifist.

If he hits first, does that make him the bad guy? Is he a person or the product?

He takes the handles, shifts the gears, falls into that other part of himself that he didn't want seen. Slips into his head and dives deep, deeper still, digging into the things he lost and tearing at the last remnants of his past that he'd been made to forget. He finds the groove and fits himself in that niche easily. All of this - it's an old routine. Find the old anger and make it new again. Don't think, just do.

Somewhere in the back of his head, he's wondering what that sweet mother and child would think of him if her son saw how easily he lurched forward on command, how unflinchingly he faced the flames that flickered from his maw. He'd put out fires in the past; he could do it again. Ahab clears the space between himself and the Cipher in broad strides and recalls how he'd held his paw up to baby Roan, told him he could nearly fit in his palm. Morbid to think how Caesar's skull will break in one paw just as easily. (This, he also thinks, is exactly why he isn't allowed to have nice things. He dashed away his own hopes for a better future just as easily as the opportunities were laid out before him.)

The massive grizzly bear's expression is etched in stone as he raises a paw, swinging to drive long claws into the side of Caesar's face. He doesn't leave time for retaliation, using his left paw - the steel one, mind you - to bat at Caesar from the opposite direction. The old one-two, just to concuss him a little. Give him a taste before he got the whole spoonful. Those claws of his were meant to fillet fish, cut into the carcasses of deer; they'd go through some kitty-cat's face like warm butter if he made his moves right.

There's still a hint out doubt that coils like a hot iron in the pit of his stomach, the feeling that maybe he should let this thing - this target - live to see another day. He doesn't want this, doesn't want the blood on his paws once again. But he was told to kill; he never left a job unfinished.