Unlike most mercenaries, Orson was not very good at working under pressure.

In fact, there were very few things in life he despised more than deadlines and strict schedules. They reminded him of his brief time in college - a joyful, carefree period of building skill and getting to know people (professionally and sexually) for most, a century long semester filled with exam dread and sleepless nights for Orson. He shuddered standing at the bus stop just remembering it.

Unfortunately, most jobs that were available to Orson contained a few things he viciously hated at the lowest, and some consisted entirely of things that the vast majority of people despised, and were commonly referred to as “minimum wage” or “low skill”. And if Orson had to pick one word to describe himself, it would be “low skill”, which was actually two words, though that hardly mattered.

“Not that I have a choice,” Orson thought, and listed all other things he hated in his mind while paying for his bus ticket. Generally, Orson wasn’t a very hateful person, but he definitely had his moments. He hated long lines at the grocery store, and itchy sweaters, and unskippable ads, and especially the greasy film that formed on milk when you heated it up to make a cup of cocoa. Also deadlines. Orson really, really couldn’t stand deadlines.

He knew that the work of a mercenary entailed some occasional dabbling in deadlines, but before the previous evening, he hadn’t quite had the chance to process what it would mean for him. Submitting a paper that he really rather wished he could work a bit longer on was one thing; getting murdered over a failed merc task was another.

Strangely, the possibility of death’s cold embrace didn’t scare him nearly as much as the disapproval of his college professors. Sure, this situation was already quite bad. In fact, it was catastrophically bad and with plenty of promise to get much worse if the opportunity presented itself, and it almost certainly would. And sure, he now had less than three days to sneak up on his target and use the device that he didn’t even know the purpose of by pressing it directly to their chest for twenty whole seconds. But Orson tried to see positives in everything, and he did see a positive in his current predicament:

At least Mr. Reynolds wouldn’t grade him on it.

Upon arriving on sight, Orson quickly navigated to the right building, entered it under the guise of delivering takeout, and made his way to the right floor. He lurked around the floor for a while, taking notice of every apartment. None of the doors made his spidey-sense tingle, so he found the least conspicuous spot around and made himself practically invisible.

He couldn’t actually make himself invisible, of course. What he could was assume the role of a deeply uninteresting man that you would automatically avoid if you were to run into them at a party, and that was close enough.

Eventually, after two hours of playing words with friends on his phone, the wait paid off. One of the doors opened, and, to Orson’s surprise, he saw his target, dressed in a suit and guarded by a woman that seemed anxious and unstoppable at the same time.

“Shit,” Orson muttered under his breath as they walked past him without even batting an eye.

Now, he had two options - either follow the target out of the building, or stay here and wait for them to come back. Either way, he would start to attract attention quite soon, as his spell of pretending to be a strikingly realistic mannequin would begin to wear off. Unless…

Orson’s mind was in the process of separating from his body, leaving him to fend off for himself without a guidebook or a farewell. He wanted to be anywhere; on a sunny beach in California, in a ballpit at Chuck-e-Cheese, in the empty warehouse of an abandoned Costco store… anywhere but here. But instead of bringing him to a safe place, his legs brought him to the entrance of That Apartment, and his hand knocked on it to boot.

And to his complete and utter horror, someone answered.

Orson stood on the threshold, panicking all over but in his liver and left occipital lobe of the brain in particular, trying to figure out whether he ever had a strategy to begin with. The door was about to open, and from that second he would have approximately four seconds more to come up with a reason for knocking. The lock clicked. Orson pinched his leg through the fabric of his trousers, and…

“Todd Brotzman from the Mexican Funeral?” Orson said.

Todd, who was not in the mood for dealing with his past, took a deep breath in.

“Yes?” he gave up.

“I…” Orson began. “No, no, I’m not going to lie, khm. I’m not a fan,” he admitted. “Sorry. I used to be, kind of, but I’m more into indie and progressive with just a dash of punk now. Uhm. Yes. I definitely know how you are though?”

“Oh, that’s totally fine.” Todd breathed a sigh of relief. “I love progressive too. Also power metal. So,” he said. “Anything you needed?”

“Right!” Orson laughed. “Shoot. Sorry. Yeah, I was going to ask whether you have time to hear me ramble about a candidate to the local council for a bit, I’m gathering signatures and, uh, yes, you know, saw you and lost my train of thought. God I hate this job.” He laughed nervously again. “I am usually very good at talking to people! Today’s just really not my day.”

“Hey, man,” Todd wasn’t quite sure why he was saying it, but there was something in his brain telling him that this tall lanky creature needed a cup of tea and a few hours of rest, “if your work isn’t really urgent, you can come in, have some drinks with me. Tell me about that candidate of yours. Though I’d prefer if you talked about the progressive scene.”

“Uhm, yes. Yeah. Sure.” Orson smiled. “Tea sounds great.”

“Come in then.” Todd invited. “It’s not like I have anything to do.”

*

Todd experienced a series of increasingly confusing thoughts as he boiled the kettle and began to realize that he had just invited a complete stranger into his house for tea. This was perfectly normal behavior for Dirk, who was known for bringing in all kinds of people, pets, and supernatural entities over for tea. But Todd, on the other hand, was a distrustful, borderline paranoid introvert. And whatever had compelled him to do such a thing was a big, capital letter M Mystery.

“There you go,” Todd commented, placing a cup of green tea in front of Orson, and going back to the kitchen counter to brew himself some coffee. “So, uh,” he began, once again perplexed at his own words, “you seem kinda troubled. What’s that about?”

“Oh, pff.” Orson breathed in the smell of the steaming tea.

He closed his eyes for a second, tuning in to Todd’s mind and personality. Orson had always had a talent for mirroring people somehow - peering into their soul like a very observant and mildly magical owl.

“Well,” Orson began. “I am an adult man with no idea what I’m doing with my life at this point. I feel like I can never escape my past mistakes no matter how much I strive to be a better person. I worry all the time that I will alienate all my friends and have to be alone again. And I also think that all my romantic relationships inevitably fall apart exclusively because of me.”

“Mm,” Todd said.

He felt his eyebrows climb steadily up his forehead at constant velocity and had to force them physically to climb back down.

“You ever feel like that?” Orson asked.

And that’s when Todd decided that he needed some whiskey in his coffee.

An hour and a half later, and Todd had the impression that he had just crammed two years of psychotherapy into one long and exhausting but enlightening morning. He was there telling Orson about his first girlfriend and time in college as if they were best friends since kindergarten when the door clicked open and Kevin rushed inside with two heavy bags hanging on each of his shoulders.

“We’re having tsatsivi tonight!” he announced loudly from the threshold. “It’s a Georgian dish, you’ll love it!”

“We had to visit five different shops to find the right variety of walnut,” Farah added, walking in after Kevin. “Did you know that walnuts have varieties?”

Neither Todd nor Orson had an opportunity to answer the question, because Kevin took the scene by grasping at his chest dramatically and falling over onto the couch.

“Oh seriously?” Farah exclaimed, nevertheless rushing to help Kevin. “Are you okay?”

“Just a heart thing,” Kevin explained. “Pass me over my meds.”

Back at the kitchen, Orson was now visibly sweating.

“Don’t worry, it’s just my girlfriend and the guy she’s guarding,” Todd explained. “Wait here for a bit, I’ll go talk to her.”

By the time Todd got to the living room, Kevin was already breathing slower, and sipping water from a tall glass.

“I’m fine now,” Kevin assured them both. “I’m fine.”

“Hey, Todd,” Farah said, glancing at Kevin every now and then just in case he was about to pass out again. “Can I talk to you for a second? In the bedroom. In private. Cause Dirk called me and…”

“Sure.” Todd nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”

Orson listened to the exchange from the kitchen, his heart now pounding out of his chest even faster than Kevin’s. He reached into his bag and pulled out the device that bosses have provided him with. It was a solid block of black plastic, vaguely resembling a bloated walkie-talkie. He peered into the living room; his target was sprawled out on the couch like a napping walrus, defenseless, and the other two people in the apartment where on the other side of it. The conditions were perfect, and he only needed the twenty seconds.

He took a deep breath in, bit his lip and walked into the living room, the device hidden behind his back.

“Oh, hello.” Kevin waved from the couch. “Don’t mind me. I’m just laying down and waiting for my meds to kick in.”

“No problemo.” Orson smiled politely.

“Are you a friend of Todd’s?”

“Actually we’ve just met. But I used to like his music a lot.”

“He never told me he writes music!” Kevin exclaimed. “How humble of him.”

“I guess.” Orson shrugged.

His small intestine was currently playing tag with itself, wrapping around his organs and making him feel like he was about to cough up his own lung. He was hesitating. Why was he hesitating? The bosses had said that the device would temporarily neutralize everyone in sight, leaving him ample time to escape. What did the thing do though?! Would it kill this guy? Was he really about to commit murder?

“Please can someone just come in and ruin this for me?” Orson begged in his mind, but alas, no one did.

He gave himself five more seconds to decide, then suddenly became aware of his tongue and lips producing sounds that he was sure meant something in English, he wouldn’t know, since the ability to comprehend English had been temporarily taken away from him as if he forgot to pay for the subscription.

“I better go,” Orson’s mouth said. “Seems like Todd’s, uh, busy.”

“Was very nice to meet you!” Kevin grinned. “Come over again if you like, I’m always cooking something.”

“Sure. Sure,” Orson mumbled.

He then stumbled out of the apartment, almost crawled down the steps, collapsed into the nearby bush and produced one prolonged sob. His hand found his phone in the pocket of his jeans, extracted it from the pocket, and dialed a number through shaky fingers.

“Yes?” an irritated metallic voice asked at the other end.

“I quit,” Orson breathed out into the phone, then turned it off, threw it into the garbage, and laid down on the grass where he remained quietly and completely still for the next three hours.

*

Orson knew that he was certainly, definitively dead when he tried to come back home that night. After his three hour lie-down, he spent another five hours in a Starbucks, cramming various caffeinated liquids into himself and frantically making edits to his last will. He needed to make sure that his mother would be okay no matter what.

At the back of his mind, he was still managing to persuade himself that this was a precaution, and that he had a way out of this gigantic mess. At the front of his mind though, he was perfectly lucid and understanding of the simple facts of life. Being fired as a mercenary didn’t just mean another ugly point on his CV. He was done. Everything was over.

Nevertheless, he put his best foot forward in trying to escape. He got rid of all his things, including the device, through the means of pushing them forcefully through a pothole and into the sewers. He did his best to disguise himself and hopped from bus to tram to another bus, until he was ready to leave Seattle altogether. He paid for everything in cash and made himself invisible whenever possible, hoping beyond all reason that the bosses had better things to do than track him down.

That much was true: bosses were, indeed, incredibly busy, and not of a habit of carrying out menial tasks themselves. Unfortunately, the bosses were also considerably petty.

He was standing in a dark spot a few hundred meters from the bus station, away from people and street lamps. He could still see the road from there, and the neon lights of a nearby shop to his left. That is how he knew when they arrived. First, the cars stopped passing by. Then the neon lights went pop.

“I told you that I quit,” Orson said.

He knew they were standing right behind him even before they ever made a sound.

“You can’t just quit this, you pathetic moron,” someone replied, and with a shudder Orson realized that they were still speaking in that metallic, distorted voice. “You messed this up, Orson. Messed it up real good, and by that I mean it is very, very bad.”

“And I also know too much, bla bla,” Orson guessed with a constrained laugh. “I figured.”

“Actually you know jack shit,” the other voice replied. “But you are too inconvenient to leave alone without neutralizing.”

“Well.” Orson sighed. “I tried my best.”

And he turned around slowly on the spot. Opposite him, somehow both several miles away and at an arm’s length, stood a tall, disproportionate silhouette shrouded in a thick gleaming fabric. It was as black as the background except for the helmet, which was burning white and making Orson’s eyes water. The figure had its hand on a device - the same device Orson was supposed to use on his target - and it was pointed firmly at Orson.

“I’m sorry,” Orson muttered, as reality fell apart around him and consciousness slowly floated away from his brain.

His body thumbed heavily against the cold concrete.

“Like they say - if you want something done,” one of the bosses told the other, “do it yourselves.”

The other agreed, and they disappeared into darkness, unnoticed and ignored.

A few dozen meters away, Orson’s bus had just left without him.