You Want The Heart, Or To Be Saved

'Morning call for, Hex. Morning call for, Hex.' A robotic voice repeated over and over, the faint sound of an alarm ringing in the background, loud and annoying enough to wake the sleeping girl from what was once her deep and enjoyable slumber.

"I'm up robo nag," she groaned, pulling herself upright and shoving her long hair away from her face, "set alarm to off."

This morning was like every other, the typical, ordinary and rather irritating voice working as the girl's alarm clock, waking her at seven on the millisecond.

No real change to the predictable routine.

Hex pulled the hem of her singlet down as she stood up from her snowy sheeted bed and walked into her clean and heavily bleached bathroom, the few fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling making the polished, white tiles on the wall shine as she leant over the sink and brushed her teeth.

Because of the scheduled day-to-day repetition it didn't take long for Hex to fully dress herself, brush and flawlessly plait her hair then apply no more makeup than BLI regulation allowed their higher paid employees to wear.

As usual she made sure to take her pills, a slight variant of the ones the average joe would take since instead of giving her a feeling of euphoria they simply took away concerns that might affect analytical thought but otherwise left her fully capable of thinking and making rational decisions without any residual giddiness that the common plebeians would constantly have running through their systems.

One of Hex's strongest memories was being thirteen when she had stopped taking her pills for a week and in the thoughts of a thirteen year old 'everything went really funky and weird'. Sometimes there would be a fluttering in her belly and others would cause an ache where her heart belonged; it was horrible and she had never gone a day without them since.


They zap feeling, they give me nothing to worry about and I like it; I like not caring, Hex thought to herself as she checked her ray-gun and tucked it into its holster inside her white jacket.

Hex toyed with the thin and fine chain that hung around her neck, a circular pendant hung from it with a jeweled H embedded in silver; she didn't remember where she'd gotten it from but knew she'd had it for a long time. The best guess she was able to create was a parent but she couldn't remember having one, not a mother or father.

Her surrogate was the Battery City orphanage, not exactly what every kid dreams of but she had been brought up well with good meals and a warm place to sleep at night, she was schooled as all children should be and that was more than satisfying for her.

"What do I have today?" Hex asked as she approached the desk at the mission office on the third floor, it was a short trip from the staff quarters but she was already feeling the itch to get to work, she'd never liked staying still for long.

"Kurofuji said for me to give this to you." The man at the desk told her, placing a file in her hands before returning to his task of typing away at the computer in front of him, his eyes holding a shine Hex saw often in office workers.

She'd been with BLI for only a year and Hex doubted she would receive the special 'Kurofuji files' anytime soon. Harukichi Kurofuji was one of the leaders of the corporation and would strictly assign tasks to Exterminators since they were the only ranking who could complete such missions.

Her eyes scanned the paper, reading the orders she had been given and taking them in with a sense of pride lingering like an afterthought in her chest; the office remained quiet for a moment, aside from the clicking and clacking of many keyboards. It was a hectic sound but in truth Hex taught it to be rather relaxing, a simple sound that hung like a low hum in the air.

"What is this?" She asked, throwing the file onto the office workers desk with a hint of rage in her tone, it was clear that her pills had yet to kick in, she would have been much more placid if they had started working on her emotions, disconnecting her from them.

"It's a classified document from Harukichi Kurofuji, I received it when she came here earlier this morning," the man replied, looking uncomfortable and shifting in his seat, a reasonable reaction since most were afraid to enrage the killjoy hunter although it was a difficult thing to do.

"It's a damn job playing psych for some renegade they've captured. I kill the zone rats, I don't doctor them." It didn't take long for Hex to realize how out of line she was, the whole point of her job was to take orders and complete them, not question them and before the desk man could say anything further she had walked away, the file she had been given tucked beneath her arm.

Although she didn't particularly want to do it she had been tasked to meet with a killjoy that had been captured, he'd apparently been killed and brought back to life by the RRR project - Revive, Retrieve, Retire - and he's a bit wacky from it so she was meant to subtract as much information from him as possible.

To Hex it sounded like little more than child's play, she only needed to talk to him, find their hideout or who the new leader of a Zone was then write it in a report and hand it back in at the office; it was so simple it almost made her want to fall asleep but she didn't have any say in the assignments she was given and she knew it was best if she just got it done, no questions asked.

She took her sweet time going down to the ground floor where the captives were held, mainly because she wanted to stop for breakfast but also because she didn't like her job and would rather go out and kill some people instead, it was easier and less boring.

Better Living Industries didn't always keep captives but there was still a space for killjoys or people of the like who would conspire against the company but if you had to make a total the desert rebels would easily outweigh the norms; last she heard they had six killjoys, a droid and some dude that had stopped taking his pills and started ranting about the sky or something like that.

They only keep the people there for as long as they are needed, for the RRR project for example. Revive those that had been killed for their attempts to cause chaos, Retrieve any needed information from them, Retire or in other words kill them so they stay dead permanently. It was a pretty simple idea that all started from the industries newfound ability to bring the dead back to life as if the people had never died in the first place.

Hex looked up from her file to count the numbers on the doors and stopped when she reached number nine, she breathed out a sigh before stuffing the file inside her coat and pushing open the door, stepping in without a concern for what the person inside the room may be doing.
She'd not been sure what to expect when she entered, there had been no mention of the killjoy aside from a note of them being scatterbrained after their revival, for all she knew it could have been a chick or a guy, she was almost pleased with what she saw because deep down she had expected to get the worst.

It wouldn't be too shocking either since most killjoys were all over the place, they had unbrushed hair and they nearly never showered, they wore these insanely colored clothes that were ripped to shreds...
Everything about their appearances urged for them to not be taken seriously.

Like everywhere else in the building the room was based upon white and varying shades of grey, nothing that could be considered too special especially when compared to the dazzlingly crimson splash of color in the middle of an uncomfortable looking cot.

The guy or zone rat as Hex preferred sat cross-legged on the cot in what was more or less a white shirt and a grey prison jumpsuit with it half off and the sleeves tied around his waist. She thought what he wore looked stupid and if she had a moment in his head she would have been able to know he thought her clothes looked uncomfortable and boring.

His hands were handcuffed to a long chain attached to the wall, long enough for him to stand up and walk to the toilet and sink in the corner of the room but not long enough for him to be able to reach to door or escape, he really looked like a prisoner and he really was.'
Although she didn't care much for hearing about the killjoy's personal lives Hex still heard things and she knew that some of the zoners had a thing for signature colors, one of the ones she'd heard most often was how red belonged to what zone rats liked to call one of the Fabulous Killjoys.

"Party Poison, as I live and breathe. I'd heard you were killed a few months ago by Korse, never thought I'd see you anywhere but the morgue." Out of the many people to become a part of RRR she had never suspected one of them to be the killjoy leader but then again it did make sense since he would know more than most.

"And I never thought I'd come across the infamous Hex, the brave hunter of all things with a thought in their head." Hex's green eyes narrowed in response, she didn't feel pleased to be talked back to but didn't pull out her ray-gun and shoot him like she could have, and the file she received had said that he was supposed to be all over the place not a smartass.

"Watch your mouth zone rat." She spoke through her teeth as she sat in the chair opposite the killjoy, clenching her hands tightly; the pills did a lot for her but not as much for anger.

"No thank you. I'm not stupid, I know that it doesn't matter what I say or what I do I'll still end up being taken out again once this is all over and done with. It's a funny expression isn't it, all over and done with? It kinda makes it sound like the end of the world, the completion of life as we know it, it's a bit over the top if you ask me but you know, an expressions an expression..." Party Poison then proceeded to ramble on further about hardly anything at all, maybe she had been wrong when she thought he wasn't being scatterbrained.

"Can you just shut up for a minute?" She asked, not too politely as she ground her teeth, having a low tolerance for the redhead's senseless babbling.

"I'm curious what made you want to go around murdering people because they had an opinion that your employers disagreed with? Do you enjoy the violence, taking people out with that space age gun? I know I don't, killing's such a waste. Why can't people be normal and talk things out like they did in the earlier days before this all turned to crap?" He asked too many questions that she neither wanted to answer nor had the time for, if she could finish up early there's a chance she could go out for a walk or something like that.

"I don't murder people because they have an opinion," Hex told him before taking a drink from the mug in hand, "I quell what would grow to be an outright anarchy. I keep the peace, the same as every other I work with does."

"But don't you feel horrible for it or do the pills you take deal with the remorse? Do you actually enjoy what you do like all the others? Please enlighten me, I'm genuinely curious to know how you could so easily look at someone who was living quite happily and blast a hole through their head without so much as a second thought." Party Poison adjusted himself until he was sitting more upright and leant his head against the wall, watching Hex who stared at him rather blankly from her cold and uncomfortable metal chair.

"Yes the pills do take remorse away and what I do is nothing more than a job. I'd like to know how you do as you do, you take none of the tablets and yet you kill others as easily as I." Hex was glad, as far as the thought she had backed him into a moral corner with no escape in sight; she knew she should have been interrogating the killjoy and not entering into a battle of wits with him but try as she might she could not help it.

"You work for BLI, I thought you above all others would know how draculoids work. They can't live without their masks and they live out a cruel existence. The only others I kill hunt the people I care for, your beloved Better Living Industries took a little girl from her family; what's your excuse for that?" The zone rat held a defiant tone in his voice, one that any Exterminator would expect to hear from a killjoy, especially one so famed as the leader of the rebels.

"I've taken no part in abducting children, it's not their fault they were born here and now," Hex protested and it was true, she had once been assigned with kidnapping a child but she'd refused to do it, she thought taking a child from its home was unnecessary and had instead volunteered to hunt some rebels in Zone Two.

"You kill those who protect them. The girl my friends, my brother and I came here to save thinks we're dead; I don't know where she is now. I don't know if she's alive or dead or who she is with, for all I know she could be in the same building as me and because she's a kid who can't help herself she'll have one of you bastards shoving pills down her throat before she's able to defend herself." Although she had a retort resting on her tongue, waiting to be used at any moment Hex quickly had her mind changed and fell silent once Party Poison had said his piece.

"I am on the winning side of the war; that's the only thing that matters to me." She'd been taught to say that ever since she was young and after a while she had come to believe it as well, she hadn't always wanted to agree with BLI.

"What about right and wrong; have you forgotten the importance of that? I have just as much right to go to sleep at night without a worry in my head as you do but no one cares for what's right anymore; that's why I'm in here now having those black and white pills put in everything I eat, everything I drink. I'm surprised I can still feel anything anymore." Party Poison sighed and smiled weakly before briefly closing his eyes and murmuring to himself, too quietly for Hex who was on the opposite side of the room to hear.

"You've been given the pills?" Hex asked him, wondering what kind they would be, the ones she took or the ones everyone else were given.

"Yeah, I've heard people saying that they take your memories if you've been on them long enough. It's strange being on them, I thought it would be much more pleasant but instead...it feels like I'm dying inside. I wouldn't suppose you would feel the same, you've probably been on them for so long you wouldn't be able to tell what it's like. You've been dead inside for too long that's why people like me seem so strange to you, to them, to all pill poppers. The killjoys are alive and the monochromatics are dead." His eyes dropped to the floor as he spoke, it was not the action of a man who was proud to be 'alive' as he liked to describe it, it was an action showing that he was afraid to be as dead as those working under BLI's thumb.

"You won't feel that way much longer, they'll kick soon." It was a cold way to put it but Hex was always known for her brutal honesty, even before she started taking the pills she was often labelled as a girl who called it as she saw it.

Party remained quiet for a moment, silence hanging heavily in the room before he lifted his head and his eyes; a strong and defiant look upon his face that showed just how resilient the killjoys were. "Then kill me now because I won't be dead inside like you and I won't be telling you a damn thing."

Notes