It's hard to ignore when a man is falling to pieces in front of one's eyes, no matter how quietly, but Alfie does his damnedest to do so. Existential crises have never been of much interest to him and he is especially unsympathetic to the personal fucking crises of a man he's hired to do a job for him. It's inconceivable, really, that the silly cunt should have the audacity to offer him a fucking contact to do the job for him. "So what you're telling me is that you took the job blindly," Alfie states. "Because I know my men can be a bit slow at times but they're not stupid enough to lie about a fucking job like this one." Not when in a perfect world the man they were hiring would have been the epitome of cold-hearted immorality or some other fucking such thing along those lines.
Scoffing, Alfie shakes his head. "Nah, they didn't lie. So, the best I can come up with is that you assumed the camp would be made up of full-grown terrorists - a mistake I didn't think men of your sort made outside the fucking movies."
He doesn't hide his amusement that a man of Marc's reputation would take on a job so blindly as to be surprised at the last moment. "What camp doesn't hold children these days, eh? Enlighten me."
Women and children have been part of the struggle for so long that Alfie hadn't questioned the need for them to be eradicated with everyone else. They all carried the wrongs done to them from one generation to the other, leaving any of those children alive wasn't a fucking mercy, not out here. The hostilities between Israel and Palestine had only been exacerbated by the return of the unfortunate cunts from the great unknown - too many people crammed into a region where coexistence had always felt impossible - and try as the world at large might to put the Palestinian camps on the same scale as the other camps erected for the displaced that ignored the hundreds of years of conflict between them. When it came down to it there was inevitable violence written in the shifting sand and ravaged landscapes that didn't give a fuck about the treatises between one outside nation and the other.
"Your name wasn't picked out of a fucking hat," Alfie says after a moment, disgruntlement starting to set into the line of his shoulders. "Either you do the fucking job you were hired to do or -"
He grabs a fistful of Marc's collar as he talks, crowding in as if to will him into obedience when his knuckles brush against the man's chest and a vivid, breath-stealing sensation jolts through him and stops him mid-word. Alfie's hand tightens reflexively on Marc's collar, a faint shudder of feeling and the burn of the mark at his side pulling part of his attention from the man before him and to his own body. He knows what it is, of course, there isn't a fucking child who isn't brought up on stories of soulmates. He understands what's happening in the same fundamental way that he understands his faith but it takes him a moment to push aside his surprise. The idea of a soulmate felt like bullshit as he was growing up and it only became more unlikely when half the fucking population disappeared into nothingness. The blind trust people once had on finding their other half in their fucking mess of a world hasn't survived the decimation as easily as some faiths did and even they took a battering once they learned of the fucking oblivion those people disappeared into.
Going silent, Alfie forgets why he's gripping the collar of the man's shirt, still thrown off by the abrupt revelation that this curious man is more than just his latest fucking headache. He releases Marc's shirt, smoothing it absently as he studies him. "Right. Well, I wasn't expecting that," he says, grimacing but discarding the suspicion and accusations he might have hurled at someone else for absolutely anything fucking else.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-05-07 06:20 am (UTC)Scoffing, Alfie shakes his head. "Nah, they didn't lie. So, the best I can come up with is that you assumed the camp would be made up of full-grown terrorists - a mistake I didn't think men of your sort made outside the fucking movies."
He doesn't hide his amusement that a man of Marc's reputation would take on a job so blindly as to be surprised at the last moment. "What camp doesn't hold children these days, eh? Enlighten me."
Women and children have been part of the struggle for so long that Alfie hadn't questioned the need for them to be eradicated with everyone else. They all carried the wrongs done to them from one generation to the other, leaving any of those children alive wasn't a fucking mercy, not out here. The hostilities between Israel and Palestine had only been exacerbated by the return of the unfortunate cunts from the great unknown - too many people crammed into a region where coexistence had always felt impossible - and try as the world at large might to put the Palestinian camps on the same scale as the other camps erected for the displaced that ignored the hundreds of years of conflict between them. When it came down to it there was inevitable violence written in the shifting sand and ravaged landscapes that didn't give a fuck about the treatises between one outside nation and the other.
"Your name wasn't picked out of a fucking hat," Alfie says after a moment, disgruntlement starting to set into the line of his shoulders. "Either you do the fucking job you were hired to do or -"
He grabs a fistful of Marc's collar as he talks, crowding in as if to will him into obedience when his knuckles brush against the man's chest and a vivid, breath-stealing sensation jolts through him and stops him mid-word. Alfie's hand tightens reflexively on Marc's collar, a faint shudder of feeling and the burn of the mark at his side pulling part of his attention from the man before him and to his own body. He knows what it is, of course, there isn't a fucking child who isn't brought up on stories of soulmates. He understands what's happening in the same fundamental way that he understands his faith but it takes him a moment to push aside his surprise. The idea of a soulmate felt like bullshit as he was growing up and it only became more unlikely when half the fucking population disappeared into nothingness. The blind trust people once had on finding their other half in their fucking mess of a world hasn't survived the decimation as easily as some faiths did and even they took a battering once they learned of the fucking oblivion those people disappeared into.
Going silent, Alfie forgets why he's gripping the collar of the man's shirt, still thrown off by the abrupt revelation that this curious man is more than just his latest fucking headache. He releases Marc's shirt, smoothing it absently as he studies him. "Right. Well, I wasn't expecting that," he says, grimacing but discarding the suspicion and accusations he might have hurled at someone else for absolutely anything fucking else.