Dirty Work: Volume 2

Story One - Cravings - 7

And so I found myself sat in another burger place, not two streets down from the one I was sat at earlier that night, eating a burger just as crap as the first one, with Salis across from me and Markro in a small room in the back talking to the boss. Privacy is something which not many people know you can buy, and a Zale or two slipped across the counter as we placed our orders worked out a treat.

The more I think about my time with Dirty Work, the more I find myself reflecting on how much of it was spent at places like that, eating crap burgers in the shimmering lights of downtown Celestria. Eventually they all started to look exactly the same, and even now I find myself walking into one of them and ordering exactly the same thing, even if they don't serve it. Repetition, even if there is none. Every kill is the same aside from the first, and every bad burger ordered on the job is the same, except for the first one.

That one though, the one I sat eating with a girl who had tried to shoot me a few hours before that still shuddered slightly and had her makeup wrecked beyond all comprehension around her eyes, was different. In that burger was something that told me I was waking up again, like a machine that had gone into hibernation. My old instincts were coming back, and I began scanning every face that walked past the window of that joint as I had done before, watching for a Red Rose on the collar of a jacket or the flash of a gun by someone's waist. Not only was I becoming aware that I was rebooting, I felt the adrenaline begin to course through my veins like dystanium boosters firing up on a ship and I felt myself being revitalised by it. I was enjoying it. I loved it.

The feeling I'd had running down that street, wandering through Chorus' club on the track of Salis and her friends, was like nothing you could ever comprehend. Danger and the threat of death hanging over you like a sword, held only by the thread you walked, was like a drug, and I craved it. I admit it, I craved it. I wanted to be put in the firing line, and at that moment I hated the fact I had thrown up on the train going to rescue Flore, hated how weak I had been then. I hated all of my feelings of cowardice I had ever felt behind the trigger of a gun. I felt that it was a new me, a new Xayne, that was sitting in that small burger place in Region 22.

'Something wrong?' It was Salis. I looked up from my thoughts, and I saw a little fear in her eyes. Apparently my thoughts had been externalised somehow without me realising. I smiled weakly.

'Sorry. Just thinking to myself.'

'Thinking pretty strongly by the looks of things,' she said, trying to smile back. She sipped her drink and continued to wait patiently.

I finished my burger and got up to throw it in the bin. Outside it was beginning to rain, each drop cracking the lights of the street into a thousand rainbow bullets. The glass began to run like tears, washing everything away. I felt a new playing field being polished, the board being drawn up and the pieces being assembled.

The rain continued for five minutes before easing, the shower passing away. The billboard outside announced that another shower may be on the way in ten minutes time, but was expected to miss the majority of Region 22. I didn't care. I felt like I had just had a canister loaded into me, a new, freshly stocked firing squad's worth of potential ready to go. Locked and loaded.

The door opened behind us, and Markro stepped out.

'Right then, boys and girls. Orders are in.'

END OF CRAVINGS