"What kind of man are you?" Nothing much ever changes about that question. It’s always asked in the same tone – a sort of half strangled whisper. I’ve never understood why. Perhaps it comes from seeing too many early morning programmes as a kid. Only, I never watched them. Nope, on the streets by twelve and a fucking terror by fourteen. Never had any time for the kind of garbage that parents sit their kids in front.

Still, that question never seems to be asked right. If you think about it, it isn’t a question. No one asks what 'what kind of man are you?' if they’re looking to give a medal, for instance. It’s the kind of question people ask when they realize someone is going to die in a way bound to give most people involved nightmares. Except me, the person they ask. The person they’re too scared to scream at, or cry at, or say what they’re really thinking which isn’t to ask what kind of man I am. I mean, if we’re all being honest here, what they really want to say is 'what kind of monster are you?'

No medals, no awards, no gratitude in that kind of a question. It’s the real question, the one people think I can’t hear in their half-strangled voices. But the fear gives them away, always does. So when they ask, I’m not entirely honest. I don’t tell them that I’m not a man, that I left humanity behind one night in a church. I don’t tell them that I’m a God and there’s nothing nice or reassuring or helpful about gods. People don’t need to hear that. They all know the story, anyway. Hearing my name again isn’t answering the question. So perhaps I do the honest thing when I answer them.

"I’m a killer." All it takes is a flash of my razor, the pearl handle gleaming as the metal cuts through warm flesh and hard bone like melted butter. The Chosen, a woman who thought making messiahs would protect her, is butterflied on the steps of St. Jude’s, a place where all prayers on answered. I leave her body on the steps instead of hanging it on the doors.

I have some standards after all.

Razor Eddie
Simon R. Green Nightside
word count: 378

If your muse lived next door to you, would you be friends with them?

My first impulse when I read the question was to say something like 'if Eddie lived next door to me, I’d change my name and relocate to Bangladesh.' And it’s still a tempting response. Eddie isn’t the sort of guy (or god) any sane person would want as a neighbor. For one thing there’s the smell. He smells like "something that died and was dug up again" (Something from the Nightside). Then there’s the killing – it’s not so much a question of morality here as it is practicality. Eddie makes it his penance to kill the people who are ‘untouchable:’ men and women with power and influence who’ve committed unspeakably evil acts, etc. And while he may a God with a reputation, there are still the few, the stupid, the suicidal who are going to come after him for their masters’ death. Not of particular concern to someone who is virtually immortal, but as a next door neighbor you have to start thinking in terms of 'collateral damage.'

More telling than all of that though, I don’t think I’d be friends with Eddie if he were a neighbor simply because he doesn’t particularly want friends. He has two, John Taylor and the Dagon, and has a hard time with just them. Friendship is a very human need and while there is still humanity left, it isn’t a dominant motivator for Eddie’s actions. It would take a far more interesting, persistent person to be friends with the Punk God the Straight Razor. They would also, probably, have to be more than a little crazy.

Razor Eddie
Simon R. Green Nightside
word count: 263

I've been super slow in getting Eddie's responses where they need to be, but I should have that problem (mostly!) fixed by now. It's been a crazy few weeks but if you'll just bear with me a couple more days I can promise it'll get better. Again, sorry for the massive delays.

Razor Eddie stepped onto the New York street from an alley that hadn't been there a moment before and wasn't there a second later. Hands shoved deep into his battered overcoat, the Punk God of the Straight Razor paused a moment - like a bird settling it's feathers after a long flight. The transition from the Nightside to the real world was always difficult, even for a god. His powers were lessened by the uncertainties and restrictions in the air - most of his energy going towards maintaining his glamour. Even with it, people moved instinctively out of his way as he walked the short distance to Adam's building.

The God breezed through the first door and intervening spaces with his usual regard for locks and distance. It wasn't until Eddie got to the door to Adam's apartment that he remembered to pause, John's lecture on what was and was not acceptable in the real world still ringing in his ear. Apparently Eddie was to take a great deal of care not to irreparably scar Adam's psyche. It'd be irritating if it weren't so amusing. Shaking his head a little at John's presumptions, Razor Eddie raised his hand to knock at Adam's door and settling into his usual, unaffected slouch.

"It's being held on Sunday, March 16. Cathy's made a request for something French, chocolate and caloric." Eddie shrugged slightly, conveying the absolute mystery that he found the mind of a twenty something female. "John just wants to know where to send the cheque to and if any sort of homage is in order or if just the money will do. Alex didn't say anything that bears repeating."

1: J. Frank Sinatra – It Was a Very Good Year

When I was fourteen it all seemed so easy. My life was clear, it’s mission simple: be bigger, be badder, be nastier than thing at the other end of the bar. Not easy in the Nightside. No, but I managed. I killed and I killed and I killed until I was filled with other people’s blood and everyone else knew it. Never led the gang, but there wasn’t a gang leader that would cross me. Not with them too busy crossing themselves at my approach. It all seemed so easy then. Be a killer. Be hard. Be respected, no, not respected, be feared. That was what I wanted. It was a child’s wish.

Then I had to grow up. Hard is hard, and fear only as good as your last atrocity. I grew up in the Nightside. I grew up the day I realized that under other people’s blood and other people’s fear; I was as human as them. My victims; I was just as human as they had been. It isn’t easy being human in the Nightside. It’s even harder to be humane; I can name the so-called humanitarians. Of those that exist, only two really believe in the good they preach. One of them is already cold in the ground. So when I ran away from truth, and not so incidentally the coalition of the Nightside’s gangs come to kill their pet killer, I didn’t think of running to humane humans. They probably would have killed me then. For the greater good. Instead in my fourteenth year I hit the Street of the Gods. I learned humanity from a god who fell. The Dagon became a man, the last priest of his own forgotten religion. He tried to teach me how to be human. Then I became a god; and still a killer.

I look back on my life and it’s a lifetime spent covered in other people’s blood. I’m no closer or farther away from humanity now than I was at fourteen. I’m an un-worshipped god. But I am feared. In the autumn of my years, I’m killing the new me’s: the children coming up, not with straight razors, not anymore, but with guns and spells and combat magics. They all know who I was, and they fear what I am. In the autumn of my years, I cut down another me in the springtime of his. And he asked me ‘why?’ Why him, why didn’t he get a chance to repent? We’re all children of a fucked up city, a fucked up reality that’s only more honest in the Nightside. Kill or be killed, predator or prey, this world has always elevated the ruthless. Like me. And the truth is I don’t know why I got my second chance.

At the time it all seemed so clear, when I was fourteen. Run away from death. Hide on the Street. Learn about kindness. Kill a god. Become a god. Do penance. Now I’m a force for good, killing only those who deserve that death. The high, the powerful, the protected and occasionally, the very talented street kid; all judged guilty by the Punk God of the Straight Razor. But I’m still a killer, killing for good or killing for evil, it’s still killing. One of those things I figured out in my later years. Just like I figured out someday, someone else will be judging me and I’ll just be another killer, covered in his victims’ blood. Which, truth be told, suits me just fine.

Razor Eddie
Simon R. Green Nightside
word count: 588

It’s three o’clock in the morning. You are sound asleep, but something in your bedroom is alive, and moving. [ooc: some liberty taken with ‘bedroom’]

---

It was always three o’clock in the Nightside; the hour of the wolf, when most babies are born and most people die. Like all major cities, the Nightside never slept or slumbered but rather rushed by filled with silken danger even during those stolen moments when some of its denizens were tucked into beds. Men and demons, gods and monsters, even they needed rest but the city never stopped. The bright neon always gleamed, like the flash of gold at a whore’s throat and her beckoning smile after too many nights alone.

Uptown was where the ‘celebrities’ congregated, the fashionable district. And through Uptown you could reach Rat’s Alley, though no one ever went there willingly. It was the back alley for the desolate, the hopeless, the Nightside’s homeless and Eddie. A plastic sheet propped against the Alley’s end formed a lean-to, guarding the God’s privacy. He slept with his back propped against the wall and his oversized, grey trench coat spread underneath him. The noises of the city formed a familiar, almost soothing backdrop, the same variety of sounds always heard. So it took him a moment of blinking, half-awake, half-aware to realize why he’d woken so suddenly. It was a noise, but—a wrong noise. And that wrongness shook him in a way nothing else had since he’d become a god.

On his feet in a second, faster than human could hope to move it wasn’t fast enough. The plastic crashed down into the alley and Eddie had to throw himself out of the way of—of whatever it was. His foot slipped. Blood on the ground and without meaning too he glanced down and saw Jacqueline, poor Jacqueline with the clothes torn from her body. The flesh torn from half her face and going down, getting wider, her throat was a mass of blood and exposed muscles, her breasts and stomach just open, bleeding meat. Poor, poor Jacqueline, in love with Hyde and doomed to forever be apart. He spared barely a hope that they would be together now before pivoting in her blood to face where it had been. And Eddie was angry. Something had come for him. It had violated the only place he might call home. It had killed not a friend, which might have been forgiven, but someone uninvolved and that was so much worse.
The pearl handled straight razor appeared in Eddie’s hand as he smiled a nasty, unpleasant smile. And there, at the mouth of the alley, a figure stood in blood stained leathers bearing a familiar sword. “Hello, Mithras,” the Punk God of the Straight Razor said in his ghost-whisper voice, “I wondered if you’d reappear.”

“And so I have, and oh, I’ve changed, Eddie. I’m not the God you killed. I am new!” The reborn (or rather, recreated) God laughed, flinging open his arms to reveal bandoliers like Suzie’s across his chest with guns at hips and tucked into shoulder holsters. All he was missing were automatic rifles. Eddie sniffed disdainfully. Mithras dropped the sword and pulled the guns from their hip holsters and opened fire on the Punk God of the Straight Razor.

The sounds were deafening, as Eddie quickly amended his opinion. Mithras didn’t need the automatic rifles; his enhanced guns were more than enough. Debris filled the air between them as Eddie stepped back into Jacqueline Hyde’s blood. Bullets ricocheted off the old stone walls, tore through the make shift cardboard homes and punctured the few possessions of the homeless in Rat’s Alley.

And the wrath of the Punk God of the Straight Razor grew greater still.

Eddie did not move in a way that could be contained by three dimensions. He was there, suddenly, filled with his anger and the pearl handled razor flashed once. Both guns fell to the floor, still in Mithras’ hands. The warrior god screamed as Razor Eddie fell upon him. His bandoliers were cut away. His shoulder holsters fell to the ground. His leathers were stripped from his body and the warrior God of the Persians stood vulnerable in the lowest pit in the Nightside, the home of the desolate and hopeless. The razor flashed and Eddie turned the once-proud deity into a eunuch, divine blood pouring down his thighs onto the filthy pavement. Mithras screamed again and his screams echoed everywhere in the Nightside and down the Street of the Gods. The razor flashed for the last time and half of Mithras face disappeared and more, the skin pulled away like the tearing of a dress, widest at his stomach. He fell at Eddie’s feet, blood burbling out of his throat in a glub-glub sound until it was crushed under a black boot.

The Punk God of the Straight Razor looked down at his work and he knew it to be good.