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“Son, let me introduce you to your new partner, Viktor Vasko.”
“Mordecai Heller. Pleasure to meet you,” the young man said, his eyes half-lidded in silent judgement, extending his hand in greeting.
The first time Viktor caught sight of Mordecai Heller, he was unimpressed, and understandably so.
The kid wore an expression that wanted to be menacing, but if you dared break eye contact enough to get a whole look of him, his ill-fitting clothes and rather mal-nourished body brought to mind only the word “ridiculous”. Viktor Vasko thought the boy looked ridiculous, and he believed Atlas May to be just as ridiculous, if not downright crazy, for suggesting that this should be Viktor’s new partner.
Of course, he refrained from pointing that out to his employer, but he couldn’t keep from making a face of disdain towards this disillusioned child pretending to be a man. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what Viktor personally thought about his partner. He could work with just about anyone, as long as they didn’t get in his way.
And Viktor had worked with his fair share of people. Like anyone, he had his preferences, of course. For instance, he preferred people who didn’t talk much (or at all), or people who didn’t intrude on his personal space much (or at all), or people who overall made ignoring their existence easier on him. His last partner, Georgie, was a good example of that. In fact, Georgie was the ideal archetype for a partner, mostly because the man was utterly too terrified of Viktor to even breathe in his direction, let alone actually speak to him. He avoided Viktor all-together, and the Slovak could only commend him for his efforts, so much so that he would even honor Georgie with the title of the best friend he’d ever had.
Too bad Georgie couldn’t avoid bullets as well as he avoided Viktor, though.
Now, because of Georgie’s frankly embarrassing short-comings, Viktor was stuck with this sorry excuse of an associate, who was either painfully oblivious of how much he got on Viktor’s nerves, or simply didn’t care. The latter, in Viktor’s mind, was considered synonymous to having an unfulfilled death-wish.
Mordecai was talkative, but not in the way most people were. No, not at all. Mordecai didn’t wish to speak to Viktor to get to know him, to prod him about his personal life or work ethics. Mordecai spoke to Viktor only to berate him, which. What?
“Your scruff is especially disgusting today, Viktor. Please consider shaving it with the nearest sharp object in your reach. Here, I’ll even lend you my pocket knife. You can keep it. Just… Do something about that abhorrent visage. It’s distracting me.”
Or—
“Fix it.”
“It is ransom note,” Viktor growled, “Who cares about grammar?”
“There is no excuse for bad grammar.”
Viktor couldn’t stand the young man’s condescending look, his patronizing words, the way he just refused to stay in the backseat and let him work in peace.
And yet.
And yet he also couldn’t help but be puzzled, even – dare he say it? Slightly impressed by Mordecai’s outspoken nature. None of his past partners had ever dared to entertain the thought of criticizing the surly Slovak before Mordecai came along.
So yes, Mordecai was talkative. But worse than that, Mordecai was skinny.
“You should eat more.”
“What?”
Mordecai looked up from where he had just been attempting to drag a pretty heavy-looking body out of the car.
“You should eat more,” Viktor repeated gruffly, hefting the corpse he himself had been carrying higher up on his shoulder. “You’re skinny.”
“Excuse me?”
It was endlessly amusing to see Mordecai break out of his usually calm demeanor into something more resembling of a normal human being. In this case, it was annoyance. His eyes were blown comically wide and his voice pitched higher in what Viktor could only guess to be an offended tone.
“Vhat you lack,” the man continued, ignoring his partner’s glare, “Is muscle.”
And to get his point across, Viktor patted the body on his shoulder, his mouth curving into a smug smile.
“You need protein. Little men like you not last long in this business.”
“I am not little! And I can handle myself, thank you very much. I don’t need advice from someone visually and olfactorily reminiscent of an ox,” Mordecai huffed, returning back to struggling with the body that was still, to his vexation, stubbornly laying in the car.
Viktor chuckled, and if, somehow, he had since then noticed Mordecai including more meat in his meals, he had refused to comment further upon it.
To his own surprise, the burly man found himself growing more… Indifferent to his new partner, as time passed. Not voluntarily, of course. But he couldn’t deny the fact that working with Mordecai, despite their very obvious differences, felt way more natural than with his past associates. Neither of them were particularly keen on getting to know one another, which was just fine with Viktor. When Mordecai wasn’t busying himself with trying to scold the older man for his boorish appearance or less than refined mannerisms, Viktor found their joined silence almost… Pleasant? At the very least companionable. And Viktor could recognize the warm feeling in his chest as uncharacteristically peaceful when in Mordecai’s presence, even veering dangerously close to proud, especially when he could notice the young man changing and growing more and more to fit the mold of someone made for this line of work. Yes, he had seemed ruthless and cold from the very moment they met, but now, Viktor was sure he could see a difference in him, a sort of confidence that wasn’t there before.
They had been partners for a year now, and Mordecai had transformed from a skinny boy into a lean, well-built man. His clothes were no longer hanging off him like baggy sacks off a hanger, his eyes no longer twitched in annoyance when blood stained the fabric on his body, he no longer chastised Viktor for his messy kills. Mordecai was a man worthy of being his partner, someone Viktor had come to… Trust.
That word hadn’t rolled out of his mouth in… A long time.
It stung the tip of his tongue.
“Vhen vas your first kill?”
“17,” Mordecai replied through rushed pants, pulling his knife out of a poor schmuck’s chest.
Viktor hummed thoughtfully, rubbing the blood off his palms on his shirt.
“Vas that first death in your life?” Viktor asked clumsily, almost timidly.
Mordecai turned his head slightly to throw his partner a quizzical look. He looked down when he answered.
“No. The first death in my life was my father’s.”
A slow silence seemed to stretch and twist the space between them, not the comfortable silence they were so used to. This one seemed to warp the very space they breathed in, making them seem further apart than they were. Viktor hated it. It made his insides churn in discomfort.
But he pressed on.
“Did you grieve?”
“What?”
Viktor sat down at the same table their victims sat at just a few moments ago, enjoying what appeared to be a game of poker.
“They say is natural to grieve your first kill. Helps you cope.”
“Grief is just as natural as death, and I want neither.”
Even with his back turned to the Slovak, Viktor could tell Mordecai became annoyed. As of late, he liked to consider himself an expert in picking up on the small cues in the younger man’s stoic personality. Viktor knew he had overstepped his bounds.
“Yah. Grief is a sack of shit,” he concluded, lighting himself a cigarette.
Despite their unspoken, mutual agreement to not dig too deeply into each other’s personal life, he couldn’t help but feel as if the years only brought them closer together. It was strange. They never really mentioned it, didn’t talk about it, but Viktor felt Mordecai’s presence like a seed extending its first tentative roots into his day-to-day.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock knock knock knock.
Viktor didn’t think there were enough swears in the English language to describe exactly how much he wanted to snuff the life out of the person knocking at his door at what was commonly considered to be the ass-crack of dawn, so he resorted to simply grumble as he dragged his heavy body out of bed. He opened the door, and instantly regretted his earlier decision.
“Good morning, Viktor.”
Mordecai was, of course, pristine in his appearance. His hair was neatly slicked back and framed his serious expression too annoyingly well to someone who had just been unceremoniously woken up, and his clean black suit put Viktor’s old pajamas to shame. So the older man made the obvious choice to shut the door in his associate’s face.
But when he felt something wedge in the door’s way he cursed the many years in which Mordecai got the chance to know Viktor and anticipate his actions.
“Go avay,” he growled in warning, but when Mordecai’s face sneaked into view through the open crack left by his foot in the door, the man knew he had just lost a fight.
“I brought you groceries.”
The door opened fully to reveal a disbelieving Slovak in his full glory. That was all the invitation Mordecai needed to finally let himself in and set a bag of what indeed looked like groceries on Viktor’s kitchen table.
“You brought me groceries?”
“Yes. I was bored.”
Viktor frowned, crossing his arms over his chest because damn it he was getting too old for this.
For his part, Mordecai seemed unimpressed by his partner’s show of morning grumpiness, choosing instead to make himself at home by brewing a pot of tea. Well, in all truth, this really wasn’t the first time he’s been in Viktor’s apartment, but it was the first time neither of them were covered in blood, or needing to escape the police.
“Vhy do you insist to make my life hell,” Viktor deadpanned, slumping on a chair in what he would be too proud to call resignation.
“It’s in my job description. Speaking of, I’ve spent some time looking into the informer we’re supposed to meet with this evening…”
Viktor couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment their relationship developed into this. He doubted it could be categorized as friendship, but he couldn’t deny there was a certain domesticity to it. It was natural. They worked together so well in the work-field that neither of them deigned it necessary to question when they started working so well off of it. They gravitated around one another as if that’s what they’ve done all their life. To Viktor, it was both new, yet also ancient. It was the familiarity of constantly being in Mordecai’s presence that also roused something else in his mind, something… Painful. It was like…
Like family.
Or, at the very least, the closest thing to family that he could get. He’d lost that once. But he could grow into it again.
That’s not to say that their relationship wasn’t without its bumps. It was to be expected, from two individuals that were so different. Viktor suspected Mordecai could see no inherent use in himself until he was doing something, then he had whatever use he could create in that moment under those circumstances. Quicksilver, able to flow along the landscape, responding to gravity. He could be anything ranging from bookish accountant to silent hitman in the snap of a finger. He was Schroedinger’s Heller. He didn’t know who he was going to be, or whether he was going to be alive or dead, until he opened the box of what was required of him. Of what Atlas required of him.
Viktor was not trained to be quicksilver, but a forged metal in a useful shape, inter-changeable with many other burly hatchet men, and differentiated only through experience and skill level. He was Mordecai’s foil, he compensated for him, and the young man acknowledged and respected him for that, the same way Viktor respected him.
They bounced off one another, breathing in the same rhythm, ever constant around each other, and that made Viktor strangely at peace.
So when he felt Mordecai’s bullet protrude his knee-cap, shattering the bone underneath to bits, the feeling preceding the physical pain somehow hurt a hundred times more.
Betrayal.
And when Viktor fell to the ground roaring in pain, he could still see Mordecai’s half-lidded eyes looking at him through hot flashes of white, the same pair of eyes that just days ago held Viktor’s universe in balance, and he wished his teeth would stop gritting against one another for just one second, one second to say the words breaking at the tip of his tongue like knives itching to cut through his partner’s skin.
I’ll never forgive you.