sophie.

Chapter 23

DECEMBER 31ST, 4989

I never really liked bad guys in movies. And not just for the obvious reasons. For the longest time, I wasn't quite sure what it was about them that bothered me so much, but it finally came to me on my fifteenth birthday. My old high school friends and I snuck out in the middle of the night and went to see some really shitty adventure film. My friends thought it was fine, but I just had this really awful impression of it and I couldn't figure out why.

It was the writing.

I mean, don't get me wrong, they wrote the good guys really well. There was laughter and crying and love and bravery, all that mamby pamby bullshit. You saw them struggle with the motives and their weaknesses. But the bad guys... there was no change. There was no self-doubt or diversion or change in thought. All you saw was, go through with the plan. Kidnap the heroine or destroy the White House or what have you, and never anything else. And to me, that just didn't make sense. Do they crack jokes in their spare time? Do they ever feel self conscious about how they look? Do they have any hobbies they like to pursue? The movie always manages to chalk it up to evil, that to be so is the equivalent of a one-track mind toward demonic entropy. But they could've done something to change that; they're the writers after all.

I'm rambling. More to the point -- the evil just sucks. They're unrealistic; they're devoid of personality; most of them, for some reason, don't even have any emotion. Not even passion, which would make sense.

They just don't seem anything like a real person. And when I finally realized their flaw, I made the sort of half-wish that comes with wanting things to become, generally, just better.

I suppose my wish came true, and all in the wrong ways.

Daemon had become the epitomal bad guy, the one-track mind. And I'd forged myself into some wannabe assassin, staking out in the bushes across the street from his house. Or at least -- I thought it was a house. It sorta looked like one. It was generally box- shaped, and there were some windows cut out on its front face. The strangest thing about the house was that it, along with every other house in the neighborhood, looked identical. Entirely white in color (or lack thereof, really), cleans lines, and no patterns whatsoever. All of the lawns were the same unnaturally-bright shade of forest green, and every bush was cut into perfect little cubes in the same color. The only thing that showed even remote deviation from the norm were the clouds, and even those, as if following a code of dress, were notably uniform.

There wasn't a single noise. No birds chirping, no wind blowing. Like there was a vacuum that sucked it all out of the neighborhood. It was six in the morning, though, so I had to cut the creepy neighborhood a bit of slack.

One peculiar observation I'd made was the fact that, among it all, not a single noticeable advance in technology was present. I mean, the most I could chalk this up to be was a modern interior designer's wet dream, not an advanced society. It was actually quite disappointing. A thousand years stuck in suburbia, I could understand. But this seemed a bit overlong.

The house across from Daemon's was conveniently empty, a For Sale sign sticking up out front. So as the neighborhood came to life, my stomach curled and I hid, waiting.  Neighbors came out to water their  lawn, to retrieve their mail. Some spoke over fences and others made their business succinct. Among my distractions, I almost missed him. Daemon.

The front door opened and there I  saw him, exiting in a suit with his wife just behind him. She kissed him on the cheek, and as she shifted in the door frame, I saw a girl on her hip. She looked just above a toddler, and she smiled as her father kissed her on the forehead. And for whatever reason, as he shut the door behind him, I stood up from my hiding place and just... stared. I'm not sure what had come over me, but as he walked down the path and to the sidewalk, suitcase in hand, he looked up and saw me too.