Destruction Causes Me To Love You

Meiji

A couple of months on the island and Meiji thought that he had already adapted quite well this place full of supernatural creatures and horrors just casually hanging about and actively inviting people to come and join. He had been a little concerned about his job prospects on the island at first, wondering if his chances were better turning back to legitimacy of all things. Happily, however, it seemed that just like the outside world, there were plenty of people on the island who would gladly pay for their enemies to die and would pay top price if the deaths were also mostly untraceable by magic.

At the moment, Meiji had two targets on his list, a fellow mercenary with either bad English or a faulty translator and relatively lowkey crooked business man who somebody would rather have in the ground. The business man was the small fry here. All Meiji really had to do was make it out in broad daylight, pass over a bouquet, and there you go. Dead man in approximately one to two hours. To be fair, this was hardly the first stage of his plan. It more like the last, honestly. After a week of metaphorically feeding his horribly far-below-his-league target daisies, Meiji had finally cooked up the last heart-attack inducing batch of poison.

He was already outlining his plans for finding the second target. There were little clues given as to where he would find the man and the fact that there were no known relatives or associates listed for him were all red flags that this guy could probably abandon town at the first sign of trouble. The issue with somebody liable to move so much was, of course, the fact that Meiji preferred slow, silent killings. If it would come down to a physical confrontation, however, he supposed there was just no helping it. At the very least, he knew very well how many ways a person could be efficiently murdered, even if he had never been in an actual fight before.

The reason for this was that fights were generally fair in their own slanted way. Meiji never wanted to enter a fair fight in his life if he could help it.

Meiji

The Manta Carlos downtown raised itself around him more like a home than it should have. If the place was a forest, then Meiji would be just another tree stuck in there with no particularly notable feature and this novel sort of anonymity continued to instill a sense of weirdness in him. Being forgettable made his job a good four times easier but that also opened up so many more doors for small mistakes. Prided on carefulness as he was, Meiji found himself making discreet checks in every direction, thankful for the fact that his perfect 360 degree vision made it unnecessary to actually turn his head.

His destination today was a tall building coated with reflective windows. Easily, he mixed into the stream of people flowing in, passing by the receptionists in the lobby with a guard of everyday businessman. With a black suit and a hat to hide some of his more unusual features, blending in was as simple as walking into an elevator and pushing a button. With a mutter of good morning lost in a sea of other greetings, he found a clear area in the corner to squeeze into, his height making it easy to keep the bouquet of flowers he held well out of harm's way. The tiger lilies were healthy-looking flowers he had bought just the previous night, chattering quietly to themselves in incomprehensible voices. The most he could feel from them was a mix of vague fear and joy. Shop flowers, mostly of them already cut and dying, wish for only two things -to be admired or to be meaningful. Meiji would give them both.

The fifth floor was where he got out, the other men rearranging themselves to let him pass. Even better, he had a witness coming out of the elevator with him. While most assassins absolutely hated crowds, Meiji loved having people around, at least until the point when the target actually died. At that point, he made sure to keep his head down until the drama blew over.

Meiji

He strode into the office confidently, nodding to the intern in the corner - an awkward looking student, who looked to be silently panicking over some deadline. Unpaid and unskilled, but from his visits to the office that week, Meiji knew that in terms of intellect, the boy was probably overqualified for his lowly position. Straight A's and accelerated classes, if he were graduating college now at the ripe age of nineteen, then Meiji might have actually disliked him. In any case, anxiety was what locked the boy at the bottom of the corporate food chain and that was very convenient.

"Jonathan," Meiji said, glancing about for just a moment, "I don't suppose your boss in today?" The twitch that the intern gave was enough to tell him that yes, the man in question was in fact still on his typical routine. It was always nice when targets remained completely oblivious.

"He's in a meeting a few floors up," Jonathan told him as expected, fingers already fidgeting back towards his work. "He'll probably be there for another half an hour or so. Er- unless you're actually here to see him for once?"

"I really would rather not." Meiji took a position to the boy's side, peering at his monitor. "How is your report going? Is there anything else I can assist with?"

Going out of his way to help somebody was something that Meiji never liked to do but Jonathan was a very good excuse to keep coming back to the office. It had been a happy coincidence that on his first trip, he found the student almost in tears over an economics project. From there, it was easy to keep dropping in, pretending that it was solely to check up on his work.

"Um, not at this moment, no. It's actually being reviewed now," Jonathan said sheepishly. "I forgot to tell you last time to not come today. I think that the professor will be returning the draft in two days, though." He jerked up for a moment. "Oh, are those for my mom?"

"Of course," Meiji said, offering the bouquet to him. "I hope you still have that vase I brought a few days ago. These tiger lilies are especially vibrant and it would be waste for them to wilt so quickly."

The short hunt for a vase ended with Jonathan bumping his head against the underside of his desk, glass container in hand. It had not been kept very well, with pollen crusted in the interior crevices. The intern filled it from a bottle of water and Meiji stood the flowers in it. Their muttering increased for a moment, relieved at the small respite.

"You really don't need to keep bringing those, you know," Jonathan said, with an uncomfortable frown. "I mean, Mom really likes them and all but I wouldn't want you to keep going out of your way like that."

Yes, and neither do I, Meiji thought privately. "It is only polite," he said instead, calm. "In any case, I can be back in two days if you would like but after that, my schedule is quite uncertain." He was already starting to move away, job completed for the time.

"Oh, well, maybe if you're just passing by?" The boy asked. "If the draft comes back and I need some kind of a major change-"

"I will be back, then," Meiji promised. He raised a hand in farewell and left to Jonathan's shouted goodbye.

Right, now what about that mercenary?

Meiji

The very first thing that Meiji had learned about killing people for a living was that it was profitable. The second was that No leads was both his favorite phrase as well as his most hated. He had absolutely No leads on wherever it was his second target might be. The most specific information was that the man was most likely on the island and probably in the city. His description consisted solely of "Short, is probably human, and has blue hair." This would have been a fantastic clue back on the other side of the Veil but on Manta Carlos, he could look out his window at any given time and pick out at least a dozen people with that description.

Surprisingly, the most annoying part was not that his target was supremely elusive. He could admire that, and enjoy the small element of challenge. No, it was the fact that his target was being elusive and damned if Meiji were not even more elusive than him. When it came to eliminating other people's assassins, Meiji vastly preferred to have them in the grave before they even knew he existed. That was a hard thing to accomplish if the other assassin were almost like a ghost himself.

This, in turn, left Meiji with two of his least favored avenues of information. One, casually chatting up complete strangers with knives in their back-pockets and a tendency to exude so much shadiness that it was a wonder they were not shrouded an opaque, black blanket -and two, people watching.

People watching was generally a waste of time but speaking with dirt-faced thugs was beneath him.

So, people watching it was.

Meiji

Over the course of a few hours, Meiji had observed ten affairs, three murders, five public breakups, and two smuggling operations. Granted, two of the three murder victims came back to life, but a murder was still a murder as far as he was concerned. This "consensual" label that Manta Carlos had to attach from time to time was simply unnatural. Although, as he really thought about it, one of the two might have been a real attempt. Immortal was another dirty word in his line of work. When people were very cleanly decapitated or disemboweled, it was very upsetting to see them stand right back up. Just what was the point of even trying?

He had chosen a small park in near city center to set up shop, so to speak. In truth, the area was more of a plaza with flower boxes and some young, hastily planted trees.The fountain there was something that may or may not have been real stone, with pipes still visible. At the very least, whoever working on it had successfully managed to make the grass look as if it wasn't part of some poorly funded community project. Obviously, it wasn't the best part of the city but there was far worse to be found.