Euthymia

Kaleidoscope

Park Chanyeol never hesitated to kill a human in his life. No room for second guessing, not in this line of work. No guilt, no remorse, no overthinking or else the ethics might rot you from the inside out. He understood this better than most; that's why he lasted so long as a professional hitman.

Accept a target, find the target, kill the target. Forget gimmicks. No torture, no drawn out manhunts. Find them, shoot them, forget they ever existed for your own sake, not theirs. Under any and all circumstances, no hesitation. Chanyeol developed this skill almost immediately upon taking up the profession – good for business, bad for morals.

Shoot to kill, take the money, don't make it harder than it needs to be. Once he mastered the talent of flipping the switch of humanity on and off at will, he found this philosophy concerningly easy to live by. A few years into his residence at the top of the Itaewon pack's hitman payroll, he went numb to the kind of demanding work that never seemed to end. Business men, shop owners, petty criminals, police officers – they all looked the same to him. Sacks of meat with targets on their backs. He couldn't afford to look at them as anything else.

Taking odd jobs from his pack's gangsters and crossing off every name that appeared on his ever growing list became routine. Mornings consisted of breakfast, showers, and murder. It paid well. He'd gotten good at it. Young and halfway through his twenties, it seemed this was the closest he'd get to a promising future.

He gained popularity. The pack with an iron fist around Itaewon always kept him busy. They liked what he could do, no strings attached. All it took was a decent sized paycheck.

He never hesitated to kill a human. Not one living soul was exempt from his execution. All but one.

◐◐◐

"Have you ever killed an omega?"

Chanyeol rubs his earlobe between two fingers, particularly distracted by how soft his skin feels. How many bones are in a human ear? Three? And the rest is made of the plushy cartilage he liked to squeeze? He doesn't know much anatomy, but he cut a man's ear off once and learned a thing or two.

By accident. He often clarifies. The alpha who hired him for the job requested that he cut out the scent glands somewhere around the collarbone, or the nape, or maybe somewhere behind the ears. He wasn't sure, and neither was Chanyeol, so he hacked at the body until the pheromones went away. A safety precaution; even a dead alpha could release pheromones powerful enough to rile up the body collectors. No defensive, temperamental alphas on the job. Eliminate the scent glands, eliminate the problem.

Ears are quite easy to remove from a human body. Mostly skin and cartilage – that he is confident about. Perfect for chopping. They come off easily and they can be disposed of easily and, even after the process of mutilation, they maintain their softness and their plush. Chanyeol decides he likes ears and how they cause so little problems.

Except his own. His own ears cause many problems. Because they don't work. He doesn't listen. This is more of a conscious decision but a subconscious reason. Something about watching people die over and over and over and knowing you are responsible often scrambles some heads. Chanyeol isn't phased by his job, honestly. But the hard labor of it all morphed him into a bad listener. He just doesn't like hearing people speak to him, that's all. They never have anything pleasant to say.

"Did you ask a question?"

"An omega; have you killed one before?"

Short answer: no. Longer answer: Chanyeol is almost positive the answer was no, but to confirm this with the utmost confidence he has to rewind in the perpetual loop of senseless murders that plays in his head to pinpoint any moment that would refute his assumption. No, he couldn't have killed any omegas; he would've remembered such an uncommon target. Ninety nine percent of his targets fall into the alpha category, maybe three fourths of that remaining one percent being betas, and then the remaining being unknown because his employers can't always provide him every single detail.