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Summary:

There were many things about his Pandora job that dissatisfied Xerxes Break.

Prompt: Cleaning Crew

Notes:

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If Xerxes Break had ever filed taxes once in his life, his official job title would have been “Janitor”. But Break had, among many other things, his pride, and so when he’d first agreed to work with Shelly Rainsworth for Pandora, he had immediately begun rather large amounts of tax evasion to avoid ever referring to himself as a janitor.

This was not because Break looked down on janitors, or thought that it was a shameful thing to be. He was actually of the opinion that janitors, as useful members of society, should not have their title sullied by association with him, an actual serial killer, or any other part of Pandora. Xerxes Break looked down on Pandora as a whole—it was bright and shiny and useful on the outside, but he thought privately that any organization that made its members all legally register as either maids or janitors when what it really sold was a whole lot of murder was probably a kink thing, and Break didn’t particularly want to participate in the kinks of anyone whom he wasn’t actively fucking.

Also, he was kind of tired of having to wear a maid dress for any and all official work functions. That had been fun, back when he’d first joined Pandora, and he’d flattered himself he caught Shelly Rainsworth looking at his ass at least once per meeting, but Shelly had been dead for years now, which for the organization Pandora meant that she lived out her life solidly in time with no knowledge of Pandora or its members, and everyone who once knew her moved around her like water around a rock, because her head had been blown off by a Baskerville ten thousand years in the past and it had taken quite a large chunk of Rainsworth emergency resources to keep her existence from being destroyed utterly.

After Shelly’s death, Break had begun working alone—not out of any desire for loneliness, but simply because if he didn’t, then Shelly’s daughter, Sharon, would not be able to take her place in Pandora when she got old enough. He stopped leaving the currents of time that Pandora operated in, except for when he was on a mission, killing somebody or other for the sake of the time stream, because according to Pandora, it was not self-maintaining.

This was probably bullshit, as Break had killed nearly a hundred people and then altered the flow of time itself, and nothing at all had changed a hundred years down the line, but he hadn’t said anything earlier because he thought Shelly thought him hot in a maid dress, and he didn’t say anything now because he wanted to figure out what Pandora was hiding from him before he let on about what h e was hiding from them. 

Break knew that he’d find this out eventually, because outside of the stream of time that Pandora operated inside of, he had been hired as the Rainsworth family’s au pair, looking after Sharon and totally ignorant of any temporal meddling on anyone’s behalf, let alone his own. Break knew himself well enough to know that he would not die before fulfilling his goals—and so he would fulfill them. Someday. And for now, he would wear the maid dress and bitch about getting runs in his tights. Lucky him, he didn’t have to get the blood out of the white cloth—that would vanish as though it had never been once he left the physical, temporal world for Pandora’s hidden halls between the currents—but rips were a different story, and though he conceded cloth’s inferiority to knives and bullets, he thought it perfectly ridiculous how tights would rip spontaneously after only being worn once or twice or thrice. The Pandora uniform was a maid outfit with a frilly skirt so short it barely passed your thighs, and perfect white tights, and Mary Janes, and blood-red lipstick if you weren’t out on a mission, and if Break wasn’t so damn good at killing people he would have been legitimately considering throwing it out the window along with his taxes.

But he had been great at murder long before he was contractually obligated to do so in a maid dress and tights, and so he didn’t say anything about it. It was, after all, rather amusing to see all the other members of Pandora in the same uniform, even if Shelly was gone.

And though Break wasn’t quite of the belief that the timeline needed ‘cleaning up’ in quite the same way Pandora claimed it did, he couldn’t deny that it was a good job that paid well. Despite his refusal to call himself a janitor on any legal documents, he took to “cleaning up” temporal abnormalities like a duck took to water, or perhaps like Kevin Legnard took to killing people in his master’s name. Break killed alone, and he killed sexily, and he killed to make sure time proceeded the way Pandora wanted it, and if nobody ever saw how hot he looked doing it that was everyone’s problem but his.

After all, when you had all the time in the world to fulfill your goals, it was okay to kill people in a maid outfit sometimes. Break knew that he wouldn’t be alone for long, and he knew too that, being alone, this was the best time to get done what he needed to do without endangering those who were precious to him. But he could afford to take his time with it. After all, in Pandora, time was what you made of it—so really, he had all the time in the world.