MergePunk: An Ooorah & WattpadPunkFiction Anthology

Thief - @SicSemperT-Rex - SnowPunk + Anti-Hero SF

Thief

A SnowPunk + Anti-Hero SF story by SicSemperT-Rex

When you first meet someone, the first thing they tell you is their name. What an absolute load of shit. Nobody cares. You want to know how I know? People spend their entire lives trying to make a name for themselves: they go off and be a soldier, or a priest, or any number of bullshit callings, thinking that they're going to make certain that they're going to be remembered for centuries to come. You know what actually end up happening? They turn into worm meal. Even if you are one of the miraculous few who manages to make a dent in this world of ours, you're not going to be remembered for it. You know who will be, though? The lord who sat there on his fat, lazy ass and watched you do all the work. Nobody remembers the men who laid siege, who watched their friends die around them, who wondered what would happen to their families if they died, or if they failed to hold the enemy back. Nobody gives a damn about them, but the lords and kings who valiantly lead them from their comfy tents? People will remember those assholes for eternity. 

No: I don't care much for names. Or the people they belong to. Symptom of seeing just how shitty people can be to one another, I guess.

Of course, I ain't much of a saint, myself. After all, I make damn good money from bastards wanting to get ahead of other bastards.

The bastard in question that night was Gaioz Tepesh. Definitely not my favorite client: he was always trying to get chummy with me, no matter how many times I tried to make it clear that we weren't friends. I didn't keep friends: they had a way of stabbing you in the back when you needed them the most. Gaioz was cheeky, obnoxious, far too laxed for my tastes. I didn't trust him to keep a secret any more than I could throw his fat ass.

"Jani, my boy!" Gaioz said in that jovial way of his as he approached me. As always, I was sitting at the bar in The Wolfhound, the sort of place where people saw nothing and heard nothing. The only place I liked meeting clients. "It's been far too long!"

I chugged down the rest of my ale. I was going to need it to deal with-

That was when he did the thing. The gesture he performed that I hated most of all.

He slapped me on the back.

I turned around, pulled out my pistol, and shoved it into his stomach while grabbing him by the back of his neck and pulling him closer faster than he could've eaten another sweet roll. "Do that again, and I'll make you squeal like the pig you are!"

Gaioz laughed, as if he thought that it was some swell joke. The look in his eyes that made me wonder if he'd actually wet himself, that time, said otherwise. "Come now, Jani: do you really have to be so sour?"

"Yes." I put my gun back in its holster and shoved him away from me, making him stumble backwards. "And stop using my name."

"Why? Do you really think anyone around here is going to turn you in?" He held his hands out, gesturing to all the people in the tavern, like a circus master showing off all the freaks under his employ to the crowds. "We're all criminals, here!"

"You wanna say that a little louder?" I growled, imagining what Gaioz's entrails might look like adorning the antler chandelier above my head. "I don't think the garrison heard you."

"Relax," Gaioz said. "The least you could do is be kind to the man trying to give you money."

I turned back to the bar and held my stein out to the barkeep. Bosko: the bear of a man who found mercenaries for people needing a job done in the cesspool known as Suurin like the village matchmaker. "More ale. Gaioz is paying."