Original Content

Unfortunately, while he was evaluating his strategic options, they walked all the way to the elevator. A cane - Alan's sword-cane, to be specific, was resting against the wall next to the control panel. Sawyer picked it up, and Alan's head was filled more with questions than with strategy.

The door opened.

"Is that...?" he asked, as best he could.

They walked in together.

"Yep," Sawyer said. "I wasn't going to just abandon it, y'know."

The elevator door closed, and she started to reach for the control panel, finding it an absolute chore with weapons in each hand. “Can you hold this for me?” she said, handing Alan the sword-cane.

Alan was too flabbergasted to know what the hell to do with it, and just as he was formulating an answer to how, logistically, he was supposed to both unsheathe and fight with a sword in the confines of an elevator, the door opened onto the top floor of the hotel. If he let her exit first, he'd be behind her, and he'd have a chance to-

“Come on, you take the lead.”

Well, fuck. While it wasn't running, being prodded in the ass-cheek with Sawyer's chainsaw urged him forward. She directed him down the hall, past a dozen or two hotel rooms, and into a side room full of vending machines and an icemaker, and more importantly, at one end, a heavy, locked door, labeled “Staff Only”. She pressed a key into his free hand. “Keep going.”

On the other side of the previously-locked door was the other side of the building. Not physically, mind you, but on the axis of presentation-versus-function. A stark, concrete stairwell with tubular iron handrails led down, and past a chain-link-fence-style door, up. She urged him towards it. “Same key.” Sure enough, it opened. With every step upwards, Alan tried to form a plan of attack, but nothing about any particular step seemed to make it more or less likely that resistance would succeed. There had to be a moment coming that would feel right, and since none stood out from the others, he just kept walking.

At the top of the stairs, there was one, final door. Sawyer bid him to open it, and he did, to cool, seaside air.

The whole convention, between the food court in the mall, the hotel, and the convention center, with their various interconnecting passages, could be experienced without a single breath of fresh air. The last time he'd had one, Alan realized, was on his way back from the dumpster on Friday morning. That reassuringly empty dumpster, he reminded himself.

It hit him like a truck. Being hit with a truck, at least in anime, often led to the main character being forcibly transferred into a new world, and in a way, that was exactly how he was feeling. The night sky, as much as it was dulled by the light pollution of the cityscape below, was overpowering, the miles of sky above him stretching into a discomforting yet fascinating infinity. And closer to the horizon, and on to hundreds of feet below, was the blazing lights of the city. Between how tired he felt and the extenuating circumstances of the past two days, he couldn't tell if it was 9PM or 2AM, and with Boston, like with any good city, the lights didn't help. Even in office buildings, the city was still alive, the term “after-hours” meaning little. From the great below, filtered through the dull hum of the HVAC units and ventilation stacks that populated the roof, he could hear the collected sounds of more conversations that he could count, the roaring humanity of bars, of afterparties and impromptu hangouts outside the convention premises. He'd chalk it up to the parodelia of the mind, taking the random noise of reality and parsing it into interpolated humanity, but it felt so… alive.

Sawyer placed the heel of her combat boot on the small of Alan's back, and kicked, sending him stumbling out onto the roof. He just barely kept on his feet, and he whipped around, staring at Sawyer. While his mind was barely functioning after being awake, paranoid, and terrified for so long, and it wasn't particularly sharp before all of that, he now found himself engaging in the complex calculus of how the fuck do I get out of this alive. Sawyer was standing in front of the door back down into the hotel, holding her chainsaw, though it wasn't running yet. All other exits were – he looked around, progressively less hopefully with every passing moment – well, the sky, followed by a fifty-plus floor drop.

Sawyer slung the chainsaw onto her shoulder, balancing the weight there. She took a wide, confident stance, and Alan was pretty sure that even given the weight and height difference, if he barreled into her, she wouldn't budge.

Alan had the terrifying realization that she might be the last person – the last thing, even, that he ever saw. That wasn't entirely awful – really, if he was in a better state, if he saw her walking by, he'd probably stare, at least as long as he was sure she couldn't see him doing it. Her costume, her character, had black combat boots over thigh-high stockings under a ruffled, white-lace-lined black skirt, and a cute purple wide-necked, loose t-shirt over a white and purple striped undershirt that reached down to her wrists. He still couldn't tell if her short, fluffy black hair, with two deliberate tendrils hanging in front of her ears, was a wig, or her natural hair. While he was curious, he supposed that however he made it out of this situation, he'd never know, so maybe it wasn't worth thinking about. Dark, skunked-out eyeliner and mascara and Alan-didn't-know-what blacked out the area around her eyes, and she wore a bit of red lipstick, the single furthest thing from black and purple on her. And she was shorter than him – only by an inch or two, but that was enough to count as yet another positive to him.

Shit, Alan thought. She was gorgeous.

Shame she wanted to kill him.

“So, why'd you do it?” she asked. It wasn't 'dripping with menace' or anything like that – instead, it just felt like a casual question between acquaintances.

“What?”

“Christ, Alan, always making me work for it. Why did you kill that girl?”

By now, he couldn't even deny it to himself. There was no conceivable reality in which he didn't kill a probably underage girl that he'd been having sex with, drunk off his and her asses. The absurdity of throwing her body out the window seemed far less absurd now. He was being menaced, for fuck's sake, on the rooftop of a skyscraper by a cosplayer with a chainsaw, about to try and defend himself with a sword-cane, the cringe-est mall-ninja-ass weapon a nerd could possibly wield.

So, he thought about it.

“I didn't mean to.”

Sawyer laughed, and shook her head. “That's not good enough, Alan. Why did you kill her?”

Had he meant to? “It was an accident,” he said.

Sawyer rolled her eyes. “Okay, then why did the accident happen?”

Alan puzzled over this. “I mean… we were hammered, and she was into choking, and I tried my best, but I'd never tried it before, and-”

“Did you think to tell her that?”

“I didn't want to ruin the moment,” Alan told the floor.

“So you didn't want to disappoint her?” Sawyer asked.

“Yes!” Alan exclaimed.

“Is that your final answer?” Sawyer said. It felt like she was taunting him.

“Fuck, I just wanted to do something right for a change, okay?” Alan's jaw clenched, along with every muscle in his fists. “I wanted one goddamn win. Just one fucking W in the books. Fuck you. Fuck this. Fuck everything.”

Sawyer nodded. “Okay, I think I can take that one.”

Alan watched her shoulders relax just a little. “Does that mean-”

She chuckled. “No, no, no, I'm still killing you.”

“Then why,” Alan said, “Did you ask? You were gonna kill me before, and you're still gonna kill me now. Was there a single thing I could have said to change that?” Yet another case where he had no possible way of coming out the victor.

“Nope,” Sawyer said, smiling. “I just wanted to know what you'd say.”

She raised her chainsaw up, checking the motor, the linkages, picking a few pieces of cloth fibers out of the teeth. “I wanted to know how you people tick.”

Alan managed all of one half of the monosyllabic “What” before Sawyer continued. “I'm trying to figure out how and why all of this happens. It's basic self-awareness, right?”

Alan intended to, but did not, shrug.

“You see, Alan,” she said, “I only exist as I do because you exist. That's an obvious link,” she said, plucking out a bit of what, from Alan's distance, looked a lot like flesh. “The hunter only is a hunter so long as there is prey, that kind of thing. But what I don't get is why you exist.”

“Do I need a reason?” Alan offered.

“To be alive? No. To have a positive kill-death-ratio? Yes. And even if you hadn't found a victim at the right moment to make her one, there still has to be a reason that you were the person who could do that in the first place.”

She picked another piece of viscera out of the mechanism.

“Don't get me wrong. I have fun with my job. But ethically, it would be better if I didn't have to do this at all.”

“You don't,” Alan pleaded.

“If people like you-” She stopped, pondered, and rephrased. “People like who you were Thursday night – didn't exist, the world would be a better place. I wouldn't need to be this, sure, but you haven't seen the numbers. I only take the top cases. The most egregious, the things that can't be ignored. But I've seen how much happens here, all over this little fucking fandom we both call home. People like you are a fucking cancer dragging us all towards death.” She spat. “Have you even paid attention to your friends? They're all kind of shit.”

“Hey-” Alan protested.

“I've got 30/70 odds on Jeff molesting his sister, though back at the office there's a debate over whether I should get more or less points for if she was asleep at the time. Bill, well, I don't care about piracy, but there's been a couple family vacations ruined by credit card numbers he's skimmed. Clive's led a few hate brigades online – turns out he has very strong opinions about any male characters who he thinks he's similar to – I never expected to see someone bullied to a suicide attempt over saying Sephiroth was a drama queen, but here we are.”

Alan wanted to say “He wouldn't!”, but none of this really contradicted what he'd thought on his own.

“And Steve? Even you couldn't be that blind.”

Alan nodded. “Yeah, he's not great with women.”

Sawyer rolled her eyes. “That phrasing would be funny if I hadn't heard it so many times. If you know, why the fuck don't you do anything about it?”

Alan blunk. He'd been trying to think of strategies, something he could do, like maybe if he ran around the rooftop she'd run out of breath before he did but man he was out of shape, and-

“That's not fair,” he said. Steve was a good guy. Clive was a good guy. Jeff rocked. “Even if they're like that, they wouldn't do anything that bad. Even if they did, there had to be a good reason, like-”

“Good reason? Reason, yes, good, no-”

“Maybe his sister was the one coming on to him, I mean, it's kinda looked like that for a while so maybe-”

“Alan,” Sawyer said, flatly.

Alan's eyes snapped back to hers. “Yeah?”

“I'm really going to hate you if you keep talking.”

Sawyer gave the pull-starter of the chainsaw a good tug, and despite a few turns of the cylinders, it remained dormant.

In that moment, Alan could have, should have, rushed her and done something, but by the time he realized it, the moment had passed.

This was all so fucking stupid. This wasn't the way anything was supposed to work. Alan had lived his life the way he was told, at least, as best as he could, and he didn't deserve this. This wasn't in the possibility envelope for anyone, let alone Alan.

“You know what?”

Sawyer raised her eyebrows.

“I deserve to live.” This wasn't something he'd ever been entirely sure of. A lifetime of falling short of expectations and leeching off the goodwill of others, off the backs of family had made quite the strong counterargument. At the same time, Alan didn't ask to be born. And you know what? Even if he couldn't fend for himself, he still had rights.

“I have the right to a fair trial!” He thrust his cane into the ground for emphasis. “It's in the goddamn Constitution, I have rights as an American citizen-”

“Alan,” Sawyer said, softly.

His bluster started draining. “Uh, yeah?”

She sighed. “That protects you from the government. Not from me.”

“Oh,” he said, and a beat of awkward silence passed between them.

“And are you sure you deserve to live?” Sawyer said. “Consult your moral compass for me.”

Alan gritted his teeth. “I just want to, okay?”

She didn't react.

“I just want to fucking live,” he said, and charged, ripping the blade free of its cane-sheath. She still hadn't started her chainsaw. This had to be his chance – all he had to do was drive the blade in-between her ribs and then get the hell out of here.

She twisted to the side, and Alan's sword, with all his weight behind it, stabbed into the door back down into the hotel. Alan yanked at it, but it'd sunk in deep, and it wouldn't budge. He didn't have the time to-

Sawyer backhanded him across the face, sending him to the ground. Carefully, she planted a boot against the door, and used it to throw all her weight against the sword, dislodging it. She looked it over for a moment before throwing it back to Alan. The sword sailed over his head, and he scrambled for it.

“That isn't how we do things, Alan.” She tugged on the rip-cord again, and this time, the chainsaw rumbled to life. “Now we can start.”

She dashed towards him.

Fuck.

Words dropped out of Alan's mind entirely. She closed the gap faster than he could think, and swung that hungry blade at his neck. Alan brought the sword up in his right hand, bracing it with his left, hoping, and-

The teeth of the chainsaw caught on the edge of the sword, threatening to tear it out of his hands, and Alan grabbed tight, cutting his palm on his own blade. But the sheer mass of the chainsaw, the momentum behind Sawyer's swing, took Alan off his feet, and he rolled across the rooftop. Thankfully, he stopped right-side up, and rose to his feet with the tip of his sword tracking Sawyer, as she paced across the roof.

As she revved the chainsaw's engine, Alan reckoned with the fact that he would almost certainly have to kill her to get out alive. It was a good thing, he supposed, that he'd already popped his murder cherry. How did that get to be a normal-sounding supposition to him? He let his sword arm down.

“Okay, seriously though,” he said, “I don't get you.”

She lowered her chainsaw, letting it rip through the air a few inches above the rooftop. “Yeah?”

Every bone in Alan's body screamed to say something, anything that might change Sawyer's mind. “Why even give me a chance?”

She threw her arms wide in frustration. “Really? I told you already.”

Alan thought back to her previous statements, as best as he could remember them. She could have just been being cheeky, but there was a running theme to her taunts, both outside the ballroom on Friday and backstage today, as absurd as it seemed. “Is it seriously just more fun for you this way?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, waving her chainsaw at him, one-handed, for emphasis. “Do you think we were built for this kind of shit? Like, as humans.”

Alan had always thought of human beings as a pretty violent species. The entirety of human history was defined by wars, conflict, murder, and every kind of violation possible. Even our ancestors, deep in the simian lineage, were soaked in the blood of those killed not out of necessity, but out of anger.

“I mean, yeah?” he said. “Monkeys wage war on each other, wiping out tribes, families, whatever, and that's just in our blood. It's natural to us.”

Alan could swear he felt the fury in her gaze heating up his cheeks. “Okay, Alan, but that's monkeys. Do you think that's good for them, just because they do it? Do you know how they feel? Do we have therapists who speak monkey?”

Alan considered this. “Maybe? Someone has to talk to that sign language monkey-”

“Dude, shut up,” she said. “You know what I mean. Even if monkeys were a direct parallel to humans, that's a shit argument and you know it.”

Maybe, in the middle of this, whatever this was, he could make a move. Subconsciously, preparing for a charge, he rose his sword.

Sawyer glared at him. “Put that the fuck down, and let me finish talking.”

Alan lowered his weapon, and he couldn't quite tell if it was out of fear or obedience.

“Do you know how many fucking bullets the Army wastes?” she asked.

“Uh,” Alan said, astutely.

“A fuckload, that's how many, Alan. Now, why is that?”

“Uh,” Alan answered.

“Because people subconsciously aim over the heads of other people. Even with their lives on the line, human beings, fundamentally, do not want to kill.” She puffed her cheeks out. “Well, on the average, at least,” she corrected.

“Uh, cool, but why-” he commentated.

“Here's another one for you,” she said. “Why was “executioner” a profession? Anyone with an axe can murder the hell out of a defenseless target, and executions weren't so common that someone needed to devote their time exclusively to doing it.”

He thought on this. “Purity stuff?” From what he knew of the past, people hated association with things related to death, disease, or anything they considered “icky”, which covered a lot. “Like, it was an “unclean” thing to do?”

The slightest smile crept on to her face. “Not where I was going with it, but yes. Not physically, but mentally unclean. Killing people takes either being completely desensitized, a proclivity for it, or a profound amount of emotional labor.”

It was a bit beyond the pale for Alan to feel sorry, in that moment, for the difficulties Sawyer might face as an executioner. “You could just… not,” he said, hopefully.

Her eyes hardened. “Ha ha, very funny, Alan. Sorry, but that's not an option for you. I know this is the right thing to do. But for my own mental well-being, I need to make this interesting.”

Alan, as he'd done at least thrice in the last 48 hours, blunk in confusion. He waited for Sawyer to clarify, but the clarification steadfastly refused to come. She revved the chainsaw at him, to no effect. “Oh, now you don't put up the sword? I know you know the only way out of this.” Her voice descended into a growl. “Fucking do it, nerd. I'm going to kill you whether you fight back or not.”

Oh for fucking EVERYTHING'S sake, Alan thought. She had no room to moralize at him, she'd murdered far more people than he'd even manslaughtered, and while he didn't think he deserved much, he definitely deserved a hell of a lot more than this. Who the fuck was she to tell him what to do with his life? Alan had done his goddamn best with the hand he'd been dealt, and if she thought she wouldn't make the same mistakes he did given the same situations, she was a fucking idiot, and-

His thoughts blurred together in a smog of rage, and he charged at her, holding the hilt of the sword in both hands, fully prepared to drive it into her chest and make her shut up.

When he was only a few feet away from her, she twisted out of his path. He'd committed too far, and couldn't change course. He saw the chainsaw arc through the air, level with his jaw, and prepared as best he could in that tenth-of-a-second space for the experience of being separated from everything south of his molars.

The flat of the chainsaw connected with his head. This carried 99.5% of his head through the air, and amazingly, almost 100% of his body, though the upper teeth of the chainsaw tore off a fistful of hair, and the lower teeth skimmed a few millimeters off his cheek. This time, he wasted no time on landing. She was fucking toying with him. Like he was some kind of goddamn joke. Everything, every feeling of frustration with the female race, with people who thought they didn't owe him anything, when he was just trying his goddamn best, people who thought they could just fucking disrespect him when after all this time, after all this failure and rejection and misery he at least deserved that, it was all right here. Right now.

He screamed, so hard he felt blood rip itself from his throat, tasting the iron in his mouth, and charged again.

“THAT'S THE SPIRIT, ALAN!” Sawyer shouted, cheeked raised in manic glee.

He would just stab at her. No matter what. She could bring that chainsaw down on his head, and he'd still get her, and that was what mattered. He'd keep running forward until that blade came out the back of her shirt covered in her own goddamn viscera, and-

The chainsaw came down earlier than he thought possible, driving the tip of his sword into the ground. His own momentum was ready to carry him into its whirring teeth, and he intentionally tripped, flinging himself forward, up, over Sawyer's strike. It took every pound of grip he had to hold onto the sword as he flipped through the air.

It would take significantly more coordination and strength than he thought he had to land upright, braced, and swing his arm around, tip of the sword arcing towards Sawyer's neck, but the human mind and body were miraculous things. When faced with impossible odds, they could pull out resources usually locked away. And so, he did it.

For a moment, he could see the next few tenths of a second, the blade embedding itself in Sawyer's neck, her going down like a bag of sand, and him taking the smart fucking decision and just getting the hell out of Boston, because he couldn't deny the existence of this world of his any more.

That moment passed as Sawyer pulled the edge of the chainsaw up to block. Alan's sword-cane slid down its edge, vibrating with each tooth that slipped past. Momentum was carrying his hand directly into its path.

It was only the specifics of mall-sword manufacturing that granted him a few extra moments. You see, there is this thing, the “tang” of a blade – how much the singular steel construction of an edged weapon continues into the hilt. The more “tang” there is, the sturdier the blade is, and the more resistant it is to bending and twisting forces. Ideally, the tang of a blade would extend all the way down into a pommel, or, lacking that, just to the end of the handle, but “sword-cane used in, admittedly, a high-budget Sailor Moon cosplay” was not the correct category of weapon to have a full tang. Even if whatever circumstances led to the existence of this costume were flushed with the fullest of cash, it was difficult to obtain a full-tang sword-cane, given the fact that in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight, it was pretty unlikely to be used for actual combat.

When a tooth caught firmly on the edge of Alan's sword-cane, chipped by ten or twenty of its predecessors, it wrenched the whole sword downward, and out of Alan's grip. But, since a sword is not a perfectly uniform shape, it rotated, and since a sword-cane has a hilt that is, well, a cane, that hilt spun, cracking Alan's wrist with a sound he could feel down to his toes. Pain blinded him, and he tumbled forward yet again. And when he, several strides away, put himself back together, the consequences of engineering became apparent. The blade had twisted almost entirely backwards, and the plastic grip had mangled itself into wrapping around his right forearm, the state of which he really, really wanted to not think about.

He did, anyway, and in that moment of wasted time, Sawyer was upon him. Her boot caught him in the throat, and she rode him down onto the floor. That was it, he thought. He was fucked. He wished he couldn't vividly imagine the consequences, the feeling, of that chainsaw hitting any and every part of his body.

The chainsaw hit the sword-cane, and what remained of the sword-cane shattered.

Alan scurried backwards with his one usable arm, and both ill-coordinated legs. He found himself backed against an HVAC unit, and picked himself up. Sawyer was cackling, her chainsaw held up like a knight's broadsword. He braced himself against the unit, and she pointed at his head with the chainsaw.

“See, isn't this fun?”

Alan thought like one of his favorite mecha anime, and ran a quick systems check. His right arm was fucked. He had no weapons. His legs worked. Forward was the way to Sawyer, and a quick and horrifically painful death. The only option was to put some distance between them. With his left hand and back, he felt out the space behind him, finding his way around the HVAC without taking his eyes off of Sawyer.

She, thankfully, didn't run at him. Instead, she came at him slowly, deliberately. With each step she took forward, he took another backwards.

“To be honest, Alan, you're doing better than most.”

He appreciated the compliment, but what he'd really appreciate was some distance between them. He took a few more steps.

“My targets usually freak out, scream, and forget how to defend themselves. Maybe it's the shock and awe,” she said, brandishing the chainsaw.

Alan held out his twisted hand, trying to put something, anything more between them as he backed away. He'd have to run, somehow, he just could not fight her and win.

“Admittedly, I had to put some work in to get you to get this far. I'd have had you backstage if I hadn't rigged things in your favor a little. You know, the cosplay and all.” She looked to the shredded remains of the sword-cane. “Shame that didn't last longer.”

He had to keep his eyes on her.

“So,” she said, smiling. “You still haven't answered.”

He kept backpedaling. “W-what?”

She sighed, this time more theatrically. “Which way did you want to be bisected?” Sawyer revved the engine again. “Horizontally?”

Alan took another step backwards, and felt his heel catch on something.

“Or vertically?”

The sudden stop of his foot caught him off-balance, and he fell backwards. This was not entirely out of the realm of possibility for him. When he stopped falling, he'd pick himself back up, scramble to make up for lost time, and keep retreating.

He did not, in fact, stop falling.

He saw Sawyer lunge, stopping at the edge of the rooftop. She stared at him, and she shrunk faster and further away with each moment. The edge of the building raced upwards.

And the last thing he remembered was her, yelling.

“Alan, you fucking idiot!”