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“You make such a point of this place being so trendy, and yet I don’t see a lot of pianos around!” The door creaks open. A maniacal cackle fills the room instantly. The recipient of these words takes a deep breath and comfortably settles in his chair.
“It is what it is,” he says tersely, carefully watching the figure in black clothes and feeling its piercing, much too familiar, gaze on himself. “Why would you need it, though? To smear it with blood?”
“Oh, now you’re just wounding my heart, me,” the figure makes a strained loathsome smirk out of his blood-red lips, while he makes his way across the rather small room. “But, in all fairness, I’d do exactly that! I can't do you love and rhetoric without blood, now, can I? That’s the genre we’re in demanding, not me!”
“Take a seat. It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” hopelessly answers the one we’ll call the Manager, the Executive, the main force behind the existence of the Waylay bar, and other words of that effect. “I’ve been waiting you for quite a while.”
“Oh no, no, no! Do you even realise how many of you-s and me-s I’ve actually killed? Every single one was eager for a chat! And what do you think? I’ve listened to all of them.” A smiling face in pale face paint bursts into cackle, while a perfect blade spins with a whizz in his blood-covered hand.
The Manager takes a deep breath, clenching his wrist under the table. “And why do you think all of them like to talk so much, Kayne?”
“I know, I know, I know. Ancient history. But that’s exactly what I’m trying to fix!” Kayne walks behind his vis-à-vis back, puts an elbow on his head and swings the dagger in front of his eyes. Their hairstyles look almost identical. “The history is written by the winners, and that one’ll be a musical!”
“And who’ll look after the Waylay when I’m gone? You?” The Manager exposes his fangs in a sharp provocation, exposing with them his true nature. His face twitches in realisation after a cackling wave of laughter. Now both of Kayne’s elbow are on the Manager’ head, while his own head is resting on the interlocked palms, slightly swaying in an inaudible tune.
“I don’t think you realise what I want!” Kayne attacks back, his voice as angry as tight the grip on his dagger is. The handle of that weapon is more stained with blood than the blade. “I’ve explained it so many times now! Over and over and over again! I’ve explained this to the sweetest pretzel with a human name and my fucking face, I’ve even explained this to Nyarlathotep! That very one, who preferred to gain authority among these idiots and never changed his name! Do you know where they’re now? Do you?!”
Kayne, still not leaving his place behind the Manager, now holds him up by the hair to look into his face. Into his own face. Into this face with a carefully constructed customer service smile and a betraying twitch of fear. He breaks away from the grip, his mask breaking and showing active discomfort. Anger, even. His teeth clench to let in a breath.
“I can… guess.” He feels a loathsome smirk on his face, and makes sure to stop it with a snap of a rubber band on his wrist.
“Dead! They’re all dead.” The dagger goes into the table from behind the Manager’s shoulder with a loud bang. He doesn’t flinch. He feels more sorry for the table. The bloody hands make their way to the blade, holding on to the white suit jacket, its lapels and the chin of its wearer. Naturally, on purpose. It’d be much more efficient to walk to the other side of the table and take the blade without any trouble. But the Crawling Chaos was never known for its efficiency. He preferred the message over that. The Manager’s eye, fully reflecting the electric light, starts twitching a bit, when he sees the smiling figure, laid-back as he is, falling to the chair in front of him with a smirk and a dagger in his hands.
“I forgive you,” the Manager says, watching Kayne play with his dagger so leisurely, as if he’s going to throw it and end all of this. His leg dangles from the armrest. His tailcoat’s tail is hanging from the other side of the chair.
“You what?” Kayne bursts into cackle instantly. His cackle is pure, insincere like everything he ever was, mad, delirious.
“It’s alright. I forgive you.” There’s nothing alright about any of that. The Manager’s white suit is stained with blood, a mad god with a suicidal mission spreading in his veins sits in front of him, and the visitors will barely have a clue what happened. The Waylay never intended to have permanent employees.
“No, no, no, don’t you do that to me!” A panicky laughter erupts from Kayne’s throat. He jumps up from his chair, clutching his dagger as tight as he can.
“Do what?” The Manager might not know the desire to kill all versions of himself, but the desire to know how far he can go with pinches of emotional vulnerability overtakes him instantly. He allows himself an empty smile.
“Those games of yours!” Kayne snarls, throwing up his arms.
“Oh, you think I’m doing that for you?” A pause draws for a span of a few heavy breaths. “I forgive you.”
Stage two: the victim freezes in place, shifting from one foot to another. “…For what, exactly?”
“Oh, well, you know,” The Manager smiles, bafflingly making it even look sincere. “For killing billions upon billions of yourself and casualties. For wanting to kill me. Things like that.”
“…Why are you doing this?”
The Manager has to slap himself on the wrist with a rubber band so as not to give in to the pleasure of seeing that weirded out face. Because the pleasure is flowing in his veins with ichor. You can’t run from your nature forever. Even if your hated nature is standing right in front of you with his hands shaking.
“It’s called a healthy dose of selfishness, ever heard of that? I don’t want to be stressed all the time for a change,” he shrugs. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. He talks only to keep talking.
And, finally, it works. The mask splits along the seam. A hateful gaze pierces the Manager right though, nailing him to his chair. Kayne’s voice twitches. “Maybe… you… You can just say… if you need.. me dead or… don’t know… gutted.. We’ll… we’ll figure something out…”
“I don’t need anything. My needs are perfectly met. Live a happy life. I forgive you.”
Kayne would feel better with a heel skewering his throat. With a pin at his neck nailing him to a cardboard behind the glass with his new name to match that weird butterfly. With his face broken in many places at once. He knows what to do at each and every one of these situations. His body is violently shaking against his will, making his dagger a useless trinket to tremble in his bloodstained hand. He can’t make a single witty remark. He’s a bit too busy with holding his head at a strategic angle, so that no tear falls down his face, and clenching his teeth in a rather sharp fence.
Finally, he spits out something with unnatural force and snarl, which are noticeably not tears, so that’s good. “Why did you do all that?”
If Kayne wasn’t so up in his own hell of a headspace, he wouldn’t know which of the two possible realities was more upsetting: the Manager being able to be better than him or the Manager not being able to be better than him. Both of those imply a certain doomed tragedy in being him. But right now his vision blurs, and his hand grips the dagger even harder.
“I didn’t do anything, as I’ve said. I’m just smoothing your edges. And I forgive you.” Even when the world is actively blurring in your eyes, you can’t help but see the Manager’s almost caring tired smile. He tries too hard to make his sharp face seem kind and empathetic.
“Stop saying that! I got it the first time!” His shoulders become so hunched his tailcoat’s dramatic lapels could meet his ears at an intersection, were they a bit longer. His lengthy dark-red (the only colour he wore besides black) earrings, each resembling a droplet of blood, were violently shaking with him.
“I am not saying this for you.” A blatant half-truth. That, and a single pair of gazes meeting is enough for a dishevelled head to grasp to a stupid, simple hope – please, I want that waste of breath to be just a laughter, even a pathetic one would do.
And in the next second a few tears fall down his face, frozen in a vague expression, while he curses under his breath, making it sound really quiet and desperate, almost like pleads. Humiliating. The only thing stopping him from sticking the dagger into his throat was his pride singing, screaming like a newborn phoenix. That’s why the chaos incarnate is standing still inside the office of the Manager of the Waylay. Well, not still. A wave of tremor still holds his body, making him acutely aware of the tears streaming down and, like acid, burning strokes in all of his face paint, blush and other mess on his face.
He needs surprisingly little time for his shoulders to start shaking. His sobs, more reminiscent of his favourite pathos, start to echo around the small room. The Manager doesn’t know where to look. Kayne always caught the gazes of people that didn’t want to do anything with him – that was one of his distinctive features. And yet, the Waylay was a place for so many things happening already for Manager to feel the guilt creeping up after every tear, dropped to the floor of this kind of decent establishment. So he sits at his place, cracking his knuckles for the fifth time in a row.
Finally, the Manager stands up, dusting off the blood from his pristine white suit with such ease and softly clears his throat. “I can… visit the bartender… ask him for a glass of Tabasco for you? If you want me to, of course.”
Kayne, still crying like a child, takes his hand away from his now blood-stained face and shoots a wild gaze at not-himself, as though it was a herald of doom before him. As though it was a car, driving directly at him with speeds beyond control only to stop right before the imminent crash, now blinding him with the headlights. He desperately sobs, still standing only because it would be even more shameful to fall. Not in his own eyes. His tears are mixing with mascara, with red eyeshadow, with blood, with face paint, falling down his face more in lumps than in drops. Thus, making his face covered with a vague grayish-brown hue of late autumnal leaves. The body doesn’t listen to him, it still shakes violently. The dagger is still held in his hand by some miraculous force for one reason only – it would be less stupid to keep holding it than to drop it. His thoughts are pierced by thousand panicky “what ifs”, all of which would shatter instantly, shall Kayne take one good look at the Manager’s suit almost glistening in the warm lighting.
The only thing he can say is, “Don’t leave me.” Well, not say. Such a poor choice of a word. I prefer utter, squeeze out of himself even. Pinch it by claws, let it out, drowning in his tears, only to regret the words leaving his mouth in the first place. The dagger enticingly glistens in his hand. But stabbing himself for a social blunder still doesn’t sound that appealing for him. He can hear one of the voices in this city of millions under his mess of a hairstyle saying that one thing worse than admitting you need someone is admitting that you actually really do need someone. And a slit throat would be exactly that – a confession. A living being still can laugh it all off and put on some grandiose red eyeliner, like they don’t need anyone. They’ve got to live it through. They’ve just got to live it through. And let go of the Manager’s suit jacket, or else there’s going to be a hole in it with these claws, what even is that! That’s just unacceptable!
“I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
The Manager exits his office, flashing a kind-ish smile and generally looking like a person who has everything – even the bloodstained jacket’s sleeve – under control. A distinctive feature of Kayne and such alike is a sweet taste of control, smeared, like blood after vampire’s first dinner, all over their faces. And you can’t have control without power, certainly not in the Waylay, the decent establishment such as it is. The door creaks closed, leaving the stupid serial suicidal entity suffocating and wishing to burst someone’s head, all by his lonesome. If one of them couldn’t save his face, neither should the other one. The tall glass of Tabasco in not-bloodstained hands should burst too. It’s just unfair, isn’t it! Kayne had never relied on something so inconsequential as fairness or, science forbid, justice. Neither he had anyone put these pretty words in his mouth even once in his modest existence. And yet, everything his violently shaking in a full-blown breakdown body feels can only be compared to a child’s cry “That’s not fair! It’s not supposed to be like that!”
And how is it supposed to be?
A silent question is answered by a door, creaking open. It makes the crying creature instantly cover his face in the elbow of his raised hand, like he was protecting himself from a light too bright. We all know what he’s really protecting himself from, though.
“I’ve said it was for me,” the Manager allows himself a soft laugh, his fingers drumming on the tall glass, filled to the brim with thick hot sauce in its true reddish colour. “That’s… not the weirdest thing they think about me here anyway. Drink it. It’ll help you calm down.”
He offers the glass at a noticeable distance from Kayne, who’s clutching the dagger in trembling hand so tight as if the dammed thing would actually save him. He holds it for a while, listening to the ragged breathing and barely coherent mumbling, then finally sees the “drink” being taken. It was taken with such a suspecting gaze. You’d think there’s not only the purest Tabasco in the glass, but a ton of strychnine as well! It’s not like something so primitive as strychnine could knock down the Crawling Chaos, but still. It couldn’t even try to. If the strychnine could dream, and its only dream was to kill an ancient mad god… In short, Kayne is panicking for nothing.
He takes a sip or two and wipes his face with his tailcoat’s sleeve, feeling a piercing stare from afar. The Manager’s office doesn’t have a mirror. He knows all too well what he’ll see there. He knows he can thank Kayne only for one of his habits. That is, hiding behind his very own pallid mask. But all masks must be removed sooner or later – (we have all laid aside disguise but you) – and the messy face finally reveals itself.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“There’s hardly anything else to do. If you wanted to say that you wouldn’t do anything like that,” the Manager makes his best customer service smile, watching Kayne take another sip of Tabasco and think where to put the dagger, “I’d be rather flattered.”
“Why?” he finally asks, his voice no longer trembling, but not dramatic or exaggerated either, just… tired.
The Manager shrugs, sighing – without a doomed air to it, just to empathise his words. “Someone has to.”
Another sip of Tabasco leaves stains on the glass. “Ugh. You make me sick. You’re worse than Artie.”
“So, does that mean I’ll live a bit longer by your grace?” The Manager grabs his wrist tightly, just hearing the utter of a laughter in his voice.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Kayne uncharacteristically brushes that aside, listening himself do that in silent horror. “Oh, I can’t believe that. Even that sweet pretzel with my face wasn’t such a problem.”
“When you’ll go to wash your face, avoid the bartender. He knows a bit too much already,” the Manager smiles mysteriously, exhaling with relief and accepting an empty glass of Tabasco.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Kayne rolls his light-reflecting eyes on his way out of the office and hides the dagger in his tailcoat’s pocket in its entirety, leaving the question about its size unanswered. “…Thank you. I guess. Or you can go fuck yourself. Not that much of a difference.”
“I don’t particularly want that to happen again either.”
When Kayne sees his reflection without face paint or a pained grin, his first desire is to take out the dagger and to cut his throat. But you already knew that.