Even Machines Deserve Love

Author’s Note: Just a little bit of drabble I came up with when my friend gave me a starting sentence. I liked this drabble though.

Disclaimer: I went through hours of labor (more like thirty minutes) to come up with these characters.

Rating: T for minor gore and language.

qpqpqp

Her smile is cold, but my bloodshot eyes deserve it. Sitting at this early morning café, the sun striping our table with rich streaks of pink and gold, we’re staring at each other across two cups of coffee. She must have said something earlier to warrant a smile like that; but I can’t seem to make my ears work. Actually, I haven’t been able to make any of my senses function property, not after last Saturday’s job.

Every time I try to catch the smell of flowers, or anything else for that matter, my nostrils fill with the rusted copper scent of freshly spilled blood. I’ve taken to wearing sunglasses because everywhere I look there are walls splattered in atrociously bright red, the shades tend to dim the colors. If I’m touching cement I can feel flesh molding itself under my fingertips, not to mention the food that always tastes of metal and the screams that constantly fill my ears.

I’m not supposed to be like this. After all, I do kill for a living. She’s letting me know that with that smile pasted on her face, carving my failure into the pink marble of her lips. Telling me that I should be sleeping normally; that I should stop fretting over yet another job.

“For god’s sake, Nina, they were children, not one of them over twenty,” I tell her that, and even my voice is raspy. I must have smoked two cartons of cigarettes in the past five days; even now the ashtray between us is jammed with butts.

But she just stares, adding a little venom to her smile before she speaks, “You shouldn’t feel anything about these kinds of things, Jay. You’ve become a liability.”

Easy as pie. Now I’m a liability. These people never have any regrets; they don’t give a flying fuck that you’ve spent thirteen years doing their dirty work. One little glitch in the program they’ve created out of your mind and bang, bang, you’re dead. Easy as pie.

Their system is unbreakable, unbeatable – the only way to leave is a road trip to the gates of hell. That’s where all of us, their hired guns, go anyway.

Honestly, I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I have the money, a luxurious apartment, and all the toys I could ever want; but there is something missing. A something I thought I had found in one of those ‘children’ I had brutally slaughtered. I guess I was wrong. Truth is, we’re not supposed to have connections to the outside world, or even the inside world, because all of them change – you think you’re safe one day and the next you’re just some forgotten smear on the sidewalk without a fucking name. John Doe. Ha.

In my world, love, family, happiness – none of them can exist. That is what Nina has been trying to tell me this morning. I guess my software is going haywire; after all, we weren’t created to feel. Nevertheless, I want out. And that is only one of the many things I can never have, not safely at least – I just have to remind myself that I started this cycle. I signed the fuck up for this psycho fucking job.

She’s back to staring though, that cold smile still glued to her face. It screams danger, but I can’t make myself move. I can feel the gun pressed to my forehead and in my ears the screams are drowned in the white static buzz of fear and relief. I want out, I keep telling myself, and this is the only way to go – brains blasted all over some café where the staff are paid to keep things hush, hush and clean up the mess.

“We don’t fix broken machines, Jay,” she tells me.

“No, Nina, you don’t. You send them to the chop shop.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my words – when the insomnia gets too bad I wish they could fix me.

“Goodbye, Jay.” Those are the last words she says before she pulls the trigger. As the impact sends my body into the chair and the chair into the floor I tell myself I deserve this. I do, their machines do not break over things as insignificant as death, after all that’s what we’ve been built to serve.

But even a machine deserves a chance at love.