April 25th, 1989

"Hi, It's 'Kate' from Hotline Miami's dating service. We have set up a date for you this evening. She'll be waiting for you at Southwest 53rd place. As usual, make sure you wear something fancy."

The line clicks dead, and you hang up the phone. Odd, seems like you were called out earlier than usual; the sun was still setting.

The fridge is still well-stocked with food, and Rarity seemed to be perfectly fine occupying herself with more clothes-making, so you just tell her that you're going to be out for a bit. She nods in acknowledgement, still focused on her work.

You shut the door behind you, and immediately your whole demeanor changes. To any onlookers, you just looked like a guy going to his car. Nothing more, nothing less.

It doesn't take you long to reach the address. Unlike the other places you visited, this place was in a slightly better part of town.

The sun started to sink below the horizon, so that now the only illumination was the lights of buildings around you. Such is life in the city, anyway.

Pushing the idle thoughts aside, you open up your glove box, and grab your mask.

It was time.

Entering the building, you see a camera scanning the entryway ahead of you. You walk by, ignoring it; if anyone here could see you on it, then it was already too late for them.

As you walk through the next door, you surprise a mobster at the other end of the hall, holding a baseball bat. Apparently, you've already become infamous to them, because he immediately rushes at you, preparing to swing.

You get him first, though, dropping him with a well-placed punch. As he nurses his broken nose, you take the time to grab his dropped bat and finish the job.

After making sure his head was reduced to paste, you move on, bloody bat in hand. Further down the hall, you spot another mobster leaning against a metal door, taking a smoke break. He also had a rifle in his other hand.

Taking no chances, you hurl the bat at him, catching him right in the jaw and causing him to fall back against the wall in pain. You then make sure to cut off his cursing by running over and grabbing that same bat before it completely clattered to the floor, and swiftly mashing his gray matter into the wallpaper.

That's two down.

You hear talking from one of the doors in the hallway. Looks like someone heard your exploits.

Picking a door at random, you bash it open, finding two mobsters standing together, both of them with shotguns. You quickly smash the first one's head open, then run to get the second guy before he could react. He manages to get a shot off at you, but you deflect it to the ceiling at the last moment, before taking the gun from him and firing the second barrel into his ribcage, blowing a solid chunk out of him.

As he falls to the ground, you grab the first guy's shotgun, and whirl around just in time to see another two mobsters enter through the other door. You blow the first one's head clean off, and his lifeless body knocks the second guy over. He panics when he sees what you did to his comrade, and panics even more when you start to approach him.

You hear more movement coming from the other room, though, so you pull the guy up and turn around, one hand pointing your gun at the other door, the other keeping a vice grip on the guy's neck.

As you thought, three more guys come in the same way you did, and start shooting at you. Thankfully, your 'volunteer' takes the shots for you, and you return fire, managing to get two of them with one shot.

The last guy fires at you again, blowing your shield's head off and coating your mask in blood, but he then realizes that he's out of ammo.

Seeing your chance, you drop the now-thoroughly-dead body and throw your own empty gun at him, knocking him down. He starts backing up as you approach, begging for his life.

As you step closer towards him, you spy a pair of scissors on a nearby table.

Those will do nicely.

You grab them and start advancing on the mobster again, who has now backed himself into a corner. His pleading grows even more panicked, and you think you hear what sounds like a prayer in there, too. He really didn't want to die.

Not your problem.

Fun fact: The temples are the weakest part of the human skull, and as such are prime targets for stabbing.

Leaving the scissors lodged in his cranium, you go upstairs, eager for more.

You find a mobster waiting by a pool table, no doubt preparing for your inevitable arrival. Unfortunately for him, it appeared he wasn't ready enough, as it was almost too easy to punch him into a wall, and then stomp his head in.

You hear someone call out, and you turn to see another mobster leveling his gun at you, further down the hall. You know a losing battle when you see one, so you grab the nearest object you have, a pool stick, and duck into another room just as he shoots.

Inside, you find two guys, one with a knife and the other with a lead pipe. They charge at you the moment you enter, so you swing the pool stick at the first guy, braining him and breaking the stick in half. Wasting no time, you then take the broken end of the stick and shove it right into the second guy's eye, dropping him to the floor in a screaming, bleeding mess.

You help him out by way of introducing him to the underside of your sneakers.

Grabbing the knife, you barge into the next room- a bathroom, by the looks of it- and find another mobster, holding a gun. Not close enough to stab him, you instead throw the knife at him. It connects, blade first, and he drops to the ground, knife protruding from his face.

Grabbing his gun, you take the other door out of the bathroom and start shooting at the first mobster you see, then the next. They both drop after a few bullets are put into them, and you also gun down the guy from earlier who took a shot at you.

Inside the next room, two of them are patrolling, apparently watching both doors so they won't be caught by surprise. You shoot one at the same time he shoots, but thankfully his shots go wide. The second guy tries to get his gun on you, but you're faster on the trigger.

Two rounds rip through his lower body, then your rifle clicks dry. The mobster falls, but is clearly not dead. He even starts to futilely crawl away, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. You walk over and grab hold of his head. He screams in fear, and you twist, turning his head completely around with a sickening crack.

He gapes at you for a second, before his broken neck catches up with him, and he dies.

You do a quick sweep of the floor, just in case there were any stragglers waiting to ambush you. There aren't, so you head back downstairs.

There, through the doors that were left hanging wide open in the carnage, you spot the metal doors that you noticed right after getting here. They click, and slide open.

"Gotta do everything by myself, huh..."

Hearing that, you grabbed the nearest weapon you could find, a shotgun, and aim at the doorway, where a very large black man wearing a kevlar vest was rushing towards you.

You pull the trigger, only to realize that the gun was empty.

The man takes a heavy swing at you, but you manage to duck it, and using his weight to your advantage, push him a bit off balance, giving you a chance to rush away from him, the same way he came at you.

You hear him let out a roar of anger before he starts to run after you. You might've underestimated him, because you can hear his footsteps slowly catching up with yours.

You sprint through the open metal door, and find a shotgun lying against the wall. Desperate, you grab hold of it and whirl around just in time to shoot a shell point blank into the guy.

The vest takes all of the impact, saving him from having his gut blown out, but it's thankfully enough to knock him to the ground. As you pump a new round home, he quickly gets back up, only for you to fire again.

You can tell that the vest was starting to give, because you saw a small amount of blood fly onto the floor. This doesn't stop him from getting back up again, though, just as it doesn't stop you from firing yet again into his vest.

The kevlar fails completely now, and he falls down once more, and starts coughing up blood.

Seeing that he's no longer a threat, you throw the shotgun aside and walk towards him.

Seeing you approaching, his eyes widen. "Oh God..." He coughs up more blood, and you can even see a few tears streaming down his face, though whether it's from pain or fear is unclear. "Please, don't!"

Not listening to him, you walk over and grab hold of his head. You then extend your thumbs, and place them right over his eyes.

And then you squeeze.

Predictably, he screams.

So you squeeze some more.

Blood splatters as you pop his eyes like grapes.

And you still squeeze.

Soon, his screaming dies down, and he falls back, limp.

After making sure he was dead, you remove your thumbs, and wipe the eye juices off of them.

That was it, seems like the place is cleared out now. Another job well done by the masked murderer that is you.

Before you go, curiosity gets the better of you, and you look around the room that this guy was hiding in. On one wall, was a series of monitors, which appeared to be where the cameras were controlled from. In front of them was a greasy, messy chair, covered in crumbs, which seemed to originate from a bag of flavored potato chips on the ground.

On the other side of the room, you see something that makes you pause. There, with a spotlight in place to show it even better, was a large bed, on which a woman in just her underwear was lying. You spied a very suspicious needle on the bed next to her, which seems to correlate with a few needle marks on her arms, amidst other bruising and marks.

She sluggishly looks at you, and you can see that her eyes are filled with tears.

"Yeah..." she speaks, her voice just as rough as she looks. "Just get it over with..."

You step closer to her, and she looks away, closing her eyes.

"I knew it would end like this..."

She coughs, and then seems to fall back into whatever comatose state she was in before.

A voice tells you not to, but you know what you have to do to her.

Acting quickly, since you didn't want to be around when the police arrived, you took hold of the woman and lifted her off the bed, which you found to be a bit easier than you expected.

Stepping through the blood and over the bodies, you carry her to your car, where you carefully put her into the passenger seat. Tossing your mask into the back, you start the car and pull away from the building, just as you start to hear police sirens approaching in the distance.

As you drive through the city, you can't help but look at the woman. You have a pretty good idea of what she went through, and even though it feels hypocritical, it sickens you.

As you pass by different stores, shops, and bars, you realize the implications of what you're doing. Obviously, you couldn't just leave this woman out on the street somewhere, and you were pretty sure the homeless shelter wouldn't help, either.

So that means you basically had to see to it that she recovered in your home.

The same home where you're already caring for a small child unicorn.

You had no idea how you'd explain this, or, in fact, if the woman wouldn't just call the cops on you the moment she was lucid.

This was a huge fucking gamble, and you knew it.

As you pulled up to your apartment, you figured that, whatever happens, you'd just wing it and hope for the best.

After getting the woman out of your car, you carry her sleeping form up the stairs and to your door, where you struggle to get your keys out and unlock the door. You eventually manage it, and almost run into the apartment to set the woman on the couch, and put a blanket over her.

As you go to close and lock the door behind you, you hear Rarity come out from where she was working. "Father, is everything-"

At that moment, she notices the passed out woman on the couch, and her eyes widen. "W- What- Who is that?"

Slumping against the wall, you say that you found her, passed out and sick, on the side of the road, and you couldn't bring yourself to leave her there. So you brought her here, so you could, at least, nurse her back to health.

Whether or not Rarity actually buys it, she doesn't push the issue, and walks up to the sleeping woman. You follow right behind her.

After a while of watching her slow breathing, Rarity speaks up. "Will she be okay?"

You think over it. You had found her after murdering an entire building of people, one of whom seemed to have taken full advantage of her. And then, when she had resigned to her own death, you had instead brought her home. Hell, now that you think about it, you could've probably left her there, and the cops would've seen to it that she was cared for. So why exactly did you have an urge to 'rescue' her?

Shaking your head, you tell Rarity that, while you certainly hope so, you'll just have to wait and see. She nods in understanding, then yawns. You almost laugh at that, and suggest that you both get some sleep for now. She agrees, and goes to bed.

You linger behind for a bit, looking over the sleeping woman. Whatever would become of this, you'd figure it out in the morning.

Writing out a quick note, in case she woke up before you did, you place it on a plate with some cookies that Rarity insisted you get for her, and set them on the coffee table in front of the couch. Hopefully, she wouldn't scream bloody murder when she woke up, and would at least hear you out.

And then there was the matter of explaining Rarity.

You sigh, and feel a longing to return to the murder. At least there, things weren't so complicated, and everything had absolute answers.

Turning out the lights and shedding your jacket, you crawl into your own bed, and quickly fall asleep.

Author's Note

Friendly reminder that Hydrogen is the best song and all other songs are objectively inferior to some degree.
Except for the one in Fun and Games that one is the absolute best