To Kill A Killer

Chapter 9: Shadows and Stars

Nightmare was beginning to think that he should hire a secretary.

He had never given the concept serious consideration before. His system had been in place for decades, and he quite disliked it being disturbed by others – stars knew that he had been tempted to put a tentacle through Killer's ribcage when his idiot right hand had messed up his files as a prank.

However, glaring down at the paperwork piled up on his desk, he found himself absently composing a list of potential candidates.

Sci, perhaps. He would at least be practiced in record-keeping. Or I could simply use Cross...

He sighed, rubbing his single socket as he leant back in his chair, his tentacles swaying behind him with the movement. No, anybody that he hired would make a mess of things, he was sure of it.

Technically, he did not have to do paperwork. It was not as though he had any legal requirement to – the only laws that applied to him were the ones that he himself had created, and even those were flexible when it came to his own actions. However, he had found throughout his exceptionally long existence that it was useful to have a written account of things, lest he forget some important detail. The extensive system of filing cabinets that lined his office walls contained notes on his team's members, activities, duties, enemies, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, supplies, and the deals that they had agreed to when they had first entered his service, as well as any potential threats to his plans, battle tactics, every alternate universe he was aware of, how positive or negative they were, if they were under the protection of anyone significant, and the general levels of negativity in the multiverse.

Essentially, he attempted to keep a record of everything that he considered significant. While it had proved itself on multiple occasions to be worth the trouble, it was also, at times, rather tedious to maintain. Killer had once declared that it sounded like 'a pain in the ass' – a crude statement, but not entirely inaccurate.

Currently, he was sorting through the files that pertained to the multiverse's negativity, and, to put it bluntly, things were not looking good. Or, rather, they were too good. While he had managed to cause a few spikes of negativity here and there, it was nothing compared to the steady increase of positivity that had been happening for the past month or two. Since Killer's death, his team had been less than efficient. Cross and Horror, while being very valuable assets, lacked the raw power that came from their teammates' higher amounts of LOVE. He had found that it was best to allow new recruits to settle in before sending them on a mission, so the new Killer had been of little use so far. And Dust...

Well, Dust was in no state to fight.

Nightmare had always made it exceedingly clear that he had no patience for such behaviour, so he was not entirely sure why he was allowing it to continue. Perhaps it was merely because he knew not to push too far. While he was more than willing to test the limits of his team, he did not want any of them breaking, and Dust's current emotions were unstable enough to be a cause for caution. The murderer's feelings had always been rather volatile, but his recent emotions had been exceptionally so, to the point that Nightmare's tentacles had lashed out several times while he was alone in reaction to them.

At least, he told himself that it was a response to Dust's emotions. It was simply one of the hazards of being able to sense what others felt. For those first few weeks, his team's combined emotions had practically radiated from them, weighing down the very air around them. It was only natural that he would experience some of their feelings more strongly than usual.

He was the king of negativity. Emotions were his tool, his weapon, his to control. He was not influenced by them as others were.

In any case, Dust had been quite useless for some time now, and unfortunately, Cross and Horror were unable to pick up all of the slack, as their respective states after yesterday's mission had proven. There was a reason that he had recruited so many people for his team in the first place – mortals required such things as rest, and a single one was therefore insufficient for such a job.