Darkness, This Is My Old Friend, Darkness

C4: Darkness, This Is My Old Friend, Darkness

"Please, Please, you don't have to this" He pleaded. His face was dowsed in bruises. His left arm almost completely useless, after what looked like multiple pieces of glass had been jabbed into his wrinkled, aging skin. His nose dribbling blood. "I can give you whatever you want" He continued. "I'm the mayor" He chuckled lightly in fear. "Money? You want money? Name the price, it's yours" He said crawling backwards on the kitchen's cold tiles. Putting one hand on his sparsely haired head, as if he was trying to remember something, he continued. "A position? I'll give you whatever post you want. I'll even step down from the position of the mayor and appoint you. The people have no choice, they'll have to listen". He kept on trying back-peddle. Dragging himself on the floor, until inevitably, he came up against the chilling feel of the kitchens plastered and vaguely painted walls. "C'mon just, just tell me what you want", he said, trying to dowse the pain coming from the multiple stab wounds on his thighs, tears slowly dropping down his bruised cheeks. "Just tell me what you…"

"Shhhh", the murky voice echoed, gradually squatting down to the floor, while using the tip of the blood-stained knife to temporarily silence the impaled old man. "You know, it's better for you to keep mute and make people assume you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Everybody's gangster till they're seconds from death" The voice chuckled.

He pressed the knife even harder on the aged man's chapped lips. "How does it taste? The feel of your own blood, slowly running out, and you can't do anything to stop it. Tell me, how does it feel? To be powerless. Everything and everyone you ever loved, flashing through your memory, one, last, time" the deep voice unhurriedly said, almost counting words.

"Please, please, please", the old man muffled away, tears slowly dropping down his cheeks. "I have a wife. I have a family. An entire city to take care of. I don't want to die" he begged. "I don't want to… ahhhhhh" he screamed in agonizing pain as the masked man sunk his gloved hands into one of the deep cuts on his thigh.

"Don't interrupt me. This is the villain-intro speech. Allow them hear what I'm saying, would you? Now, how does it feel to know that with every breath you take, you walk even closer to the light. And for the first time in your life, you desperately desire to do the opposite of what you were taught as a child to do. You desperately long to embrace the darkness. Hold on to it for as long as you can. Get lost in it. The light finally becomes your end, and the darkness? A glimpse of the darkness looks like the possibility of a new beginning. Tell me brother", he pressed the knife even harder to his lips, making a slight cut on both upper and lower lips, "how does it feel?"

After a couple darkening seconds, staring deep into the tiring red iris of his victim, he slowly got up on his feet, cleaned the blood-stained knife on his dark, vague, jacket and looked through the window, into the murky, torturing night. Lost in the cool night breeze blowing in on his mask. He whispered quietly but loud enough for the injured old man to hear. "You can't tell me you didn't see this coming. It was kinda inevitable. After all, peace isn't the absence of war, it's just the procrastination of it" he smiled. "Got that one from a book I read yesterday, really put me in the mood for this. But you never fancied books, did you David? Nah, you didn't care one bit. You were just the lucky bastard who came out of mom's womb a little too quick ayy?"

"No way."

"Run, run away, run away from the darkness, they told as kids. Flee from it, they would say" he chuckled. "And so, we kept on running and running and running", he continued, while walking around the kitchen, stepping on the pieces of broken glass, littered all around, "never resting, never sleeping, never living for and in the moment because we were too busy imagining the cold fingers of the darkness drawing nearer to our oh so feeble light." He turned back halfway, his eyes locking with that of the dying man who laid on the floor behind him. "But all those years of running. Where we really running from the darkness? No", he smiled. "We were just running away from the image. The tiny reflection of what appeared as a lesser light. A blemish on our white suits. But never, ever the darkness." He now fully turned. Completely facing the helpless man on the floor. "The darkness was never really that far from our light brother", he said, gradually losing the mask. "In the truth, the darkness lied just behind our facade of light. So why were we running?", he continued, now completely losing the Mask and showcasing a tender set of lips, almost chiseled jawline, and a rather peculiar set of eyes".

"After all I've done for you" the bleeding man managed to whisper. "You ungrateful little—"

"Well I'm done running brother", he said, slowly walking towards the injured man on the floor. "I looked back, and I saw the darkness", he smiled slowly getting back on the floor, squatting just in front of the dying man. "I wasn't scared. In fact, I liked what I saw. And in truth…", he swiftly pulled the injured man's head closer, staining his soft, dark coat with even more blood. "I stopped running from it…", he said, stroking his almost bald head, "…and I became it. It's high time we all stop running from it brother", he placed his knife just under his head, grazing the neck of the impaled man. He tried struggling with him, but all his efforts were futile. He slowly bored the knife into his throat, the unmistakable sound of stainless steel on skin to familiar to ignore.

"Shhh Shhh shhhh", he said, trying the muffle the fading voice of the man who was seconds to the end. "Now you can embrace it too. Shhh Shhhh Shhh, the less you struggle, the more painless you discover it gets"

"It's neverrrrrr overrrrrr" he whispered, letting out his final breath, and with his head falling further down, signaled his death.

He slowly got back on his feet, leaving the knife in the neck of the breathless, lifeless body and walked over to the door, a couple steps away. "Now that" he cleaned his hands on his dark trouser, "is how to get a motherfucking party started.

Once again, he looked through the dark, murky, horizon outside and said

"It's time they all stop running. Embrace it willingly…" he looked at the body of the dead man behind him "…or embrace it permanently" he completed. Opening the door, he casually walked into the den of the night. Darkness meeting Darkness