Imagining I can let Albus get away with it and make him kill the Coronel during recovery arc.
Like, just imagining he goes to his house in the middle of the woods saying he wants to talk and that he will prepare them dinner and then while eating he says he finished his assignment while holding the ears of the guys he was sent to kill and a stash of money, so. He has no debt to pay anymore.
However, the Coronel’s debt to him…
The guy thinks he poisoned the food as he starts feeling dizzy, but Albus is calmly drinking on his wine as he explains that poisoning him is only the first payment.
When the man wakes up he has a plastic bag over his head and is tied up to a chair with legs spread. He notices quickly the chair is inclined, hanging by a neck holding him at the brink of suffocation. He doesn’t know where Albus is until he pushes the chair forward and the rope cut his air.
“It’s an awful feeling, isn’t it?” He tells him. “Could you handle hours of this? No? It’s ok, you learn how in a few hours.”
The man notices he’s also naked, and think is just for humiliation until Al begins to cut his chest with a kitchen knife. He doesn’t just slice but dips the knife and lifts before pulling the skin. It goes like that for an hour.
It is with a wet splat that Albus stops fraying him.
“Good job, only halfway there.”
The Coronel is spatting curses that fall in deaf ears when his body tenses at the sudden bolt of electricity over his bleeding chest, right on the open wounds. Only the sizzle of the taser giving him mere seconds to brace himself. The man’s screams become wetter and wetter as Albus alternates between choking and electrocuting him.
An hour later, the man’s neck is ragged raw when Albus cuts the rope and the man gasps for air with a bloody mouth.
“A-A-ar-e yo-u d-d-one?” The man asks him, heaving, watching the boy inspect the knife in his hands before cleaning it with the man’s clothes.
“I don’t have enough time for this. So I’ll make it short.” Albus goes to grab his hand then, “do you remember how many fingers you cut, Coronel?” He says as he slowly saws the man’s thumb. He screams, or tries to, but his throat is quite damaged now so only gurgling sounds come out. “Refresh my memory, would you? After the drip, I barely remember two,” he says, moving to the index finger. “Or was it three?
“Annie only had a few fingers in her hands when I found her…but I just don’t remember how many…” he said with a sad face that became a little smile as the forth finger fell with a thud. “Oh! I have a reminder of that day, tho! Let’s see,” he said lifting the hem of his pants and counting in a murmur before slamming the knife over the man’s last finger on his right hand. “Yeah, it won’t be enough with only one. You gotta pay the interests for a knee, too.”
The man sobs and his mind shatters just as much when Albus destroys his legs with a hammer.
He’s doesn’t stop until the man screams at him begging to be killed already.
Then, Albus slowly let’s the hammer down and goes to the kitchen. The man can hear the click of the stove before Albus walks back to him and grabs his face.
“Maybe it would’ve been a lot quicker if you had said it earlier,” she shrugged, letting go. “Guess you just wanted it the hard way, Coronel.” Albus takes off, not before taking the man’s cigarettes. Once at the door, he sees him muttering something under his breath. He feels a pang of disgust, but it dies quickly as he watches the cigarette in his hands light up. “Send my regards to my father when you see him in hell.”
Albus walks out and watches from the distance with one of the man’s reds on his mouth.
“They taste disgusting,” he thinks to himself as he ran out of minutes. He drops it and stomps on it before walking away.
The house burns down with the man in it and even if police finds a few digit prints, the system is blank on the profile. “The person doesn’t exist”, it says. He wasn’t old enough to have them on the system on the “people’s” files and nobody cares to check on the pet archives. So, after weeks, the case is dropped as something that happened because of a gang conflict.
Sann watches the news and looks at Albus, barely able to move because of the sudden flare of pain in his limbs and can’t help but remember Robert’s face when he shot. He knows there was anger in his heart when he did it, but he didn’t have a choice. Albus had planned it.
Albus doesn’t need to look at him to see the conflict crossing Sann’s face, but when he sees his own face in the mirror, when he sees the painting, the bursts between his legs and the scar on his cheek…when he thinks he sees Annie on the corner only to find nobody, doubt disappears.
