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It’s an impossible fact that, sometimes, the mask fits a little too tightly.
It is impossible, yes. Owen knows this, has seen it for himself. Thanks to some (frankly, impressive) technology stamped with the Chimera logo, the thing couldn’t not fit, and damn near seamlessly too. It’s strikingly realistic, woven from a polymer flesh-like enough that it takes actually touching it to tell the differences, to see how it doesn’t measure up to the real thing. It takes getting closer than anyone has ever gotten to see the flaws. Hell, even Owen --- closer to it than anyone else, at least in recent years --- has gotten so used to the thing that it seems more real than not half the time.
It still chafes. Realistic it may be, and yet there’s a coldness to it. An impersonality that comes with viewing the world behind the barrier of someone else’s face. The mask fits too tightly against the glossy burn scars that now spiderweb across his own skin, pressing against the thick ropes of raised tissue with force enough to render them abundantly noticeable, impossible to forget. (He wouldn’t anyway, but the mask makes it worse.) Even taking it off isn’t enough --- not with the lines it leaves in his skin, the dermatological complications of prosthesis, the damage wearing the thing for so long is no doubt inflicting --- and he can still feel it during the rare occasions when he’s successfully able to shed it.
There’s no other choice, though.
For obvious reasons, there’s the fact that the world thinks him dead --- that the man who had once been his world thinks him dead --- and keeping his own face would jeopardise that, but there are other reasons lurking beneath the surface. The ability to move more-or-less unseen is a perk. The ability to hide his expressions even better than his training previously afforded is another. And, besides: sometimes the clinicism is useful. Revenge is, after all, a dish best served cold; often, it’s easier to choose apathy. To feel the abstraction his newest role lends him via the shroud of anonymity that comes with it.
Namelessness itself isn’t anything surprisingly new. He’s been operating under different names for years, passing through cover identity after cover identity, and it was rare enough to hear the name Owen Carvour even when the man himself was still alive. It did happen, from time to time, but only ever his surname: written out in mission dossiers or called up whenever he was to go out on yet another assignment. (His real first name was reserved for… other times. For twilight hours and stolen moments. For one man to use, one voice to say. For contexts that are no longer in the cards for either of them.)
He’s always been one for plans. For meticulously researching and making arrangements and understanding exactly what he’s got to do at any given time. Now, he has his own plans --- much darker plans than a younger version of himself would ever have dreamed, written in blood and tears and the ground pulp of everything he’d once valued, but plans nonetheless --- and he’ll sacrifice what he has to to get them done.
And so he dons the mask. The costume. The title. The role.
He works with the people he has to work with, no matter how much they make his skin crawl --- it’s doing that anyway, beneath the disguise --- because it’s necessary. He pulls strings and manipulates and lies and tortures and kills because it’s necessary. He doesn’t look in the mirror --- isn’t sure what he’d see if he did: the corpse of the man he’d once been or the face of the stranger he’s become --- because it’s not necessary, and he keeps himself from reminiscing as much as he can because that’s not necessary either.
(He doesn’t think about how he fails. About how his past is written into his skin with every scar and every badly healed break. How he hears it in his own damaged voice and shattered eloquence, sees it with the impaired vision of an eye that he only barely didn’t lose, feels it in the migraines and the panic attacks and the limp he can only sometimes hide. How it haunts him at night, when the shadows descend and he can’t fight back thoughts of C– of everything that’s happened. Of weapons silos and explosive timers gone off too soon and banana peels lying in wait.)
(He doesn’t think about how he can’t forget the bits before, either. The personal history of it all. Can’t ignore the quiet, cobbled-together times when all that had been them had been whispered promises soaked in blood and whiskey and gunpowder. Can’t forget Cur– the fantasies of where things could’ve gone if the flags draped over them ever lifted, if they could find a way out of having sold themselves to star-spangled patriotism, to queen and country, to people who wouldn’t care about seeing them torn apart or hunted down or dead. Can never avoid the unending, inevitable spiral towards the man he’ll never be able to forget, the man he’ll never be able to hate more than he still loves, towards… towards Curt.)
(He doesn’t think about those failures. That’s not necessary either.)
Eventually, though, the time comes for things to change. With the deflection of one-two-three-four-five-six-seven shots over one shoulder and a confession --- This ain’t over between you and me! --- the plan begins its final stages and he knows it’ll be worth it. (Doesn’t he?) He does. He knows it will be worth it.
Still. Sometimes, the mask fits a little too tightly.