FICLET: Deliberation

[sibilantly]

Fandom: SPECTRE
Pairing: gen (Franz Oberhauser-centric)
Word count: 300
Prompt: killing
Summary: How to get away with murder (and other sundry matters).


Franz's first impulse is to kill them both.

There'd be a certain poetry to it, really: Franz's father and James, as close to one another in death as they are now in life.

...then again, perpetuating that closeness is also something of an argument against killing them both.

That, and logistics.

Until he began thinking it through - truly thinking it through - Franz never thought plotting murder could be so tedious. He spends days - then weeks, then months - contemplating the details: how to get his father alone; how to deliver the killing blow (or will it be blows?) without arousing suspicion, should the body happen to be recovered (or should Franz destroy it somehow? Franz sighs, reminds himself to research corpse disposal methods); how to escape, shed all the trappings of his life, and begin anew. All of that is precarious enough without throwing a second murder into it.

And if Franz is honest with himself (he is capable of it, at times), he has to admit most of this isn't James' fault. At least, not initially. It isn't as if the little usurper wanted to become an orphan. It wasn't James' hand that signed the order of temporary guardianship. And it certainly wasn't James who suggested to Charmian Bond that said temporary guardianship become a little more permanent. Punishing him with the same severity seems... unfair. Unreasonable, even.

That being said—

James is still a usurper; a cuckoo, disrupting the natural order of things via the mere act of existing. Killing him might not be an option, but neither is leaving him be. It's a bit of a quandary, although the solution, when it comes to Franz, is wonderfully pleasing in its simplicity.

Franz's father needs to die, of that there is no doubt. But James—

James needs to suffer.