Another one-page excerpt put together for a writer's clinic, though this one is being ripped out of a fan-fic idea that I've had jostling about in my head for months now. With colder weather on the horizon perhaps I'll do more writing and less walking.

Feedback is welcome, but please keep in mind that this was done specificailly for the clinic; it's not really supposed to be a "finished" work.

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"That's your final answer then, Viktor?" Mordecai asked in his soft, portentous voice as he looked down at his much larger partner through his circular-lensed spectacles. His tone made the question seem casual, academic.

Viktor nodded resolutely as he sat in his overstuffed and hideously green chair, watching Mordecai warily, though his tone had an unexpectedly gentle note to it. "Ya. Am not going to leave Mitzi naow. You should not either. Come back to Lackadaisy, we talk...maybe make things like old times." Viktor's unrelenting Slavic accent and horrific grammar threatened to send a shudder through Mordecai's lanky frame; to distract himself he turned to look at a lamp, idly brushing fingers across the shade, frowning as a thin layer of dust cascaded to the floor.

Mordecai nodded once, precisely, as he began making his way to the door of Viktor's run-down apartment, his voice emotionless as ever as he replied, "If I return to that place, I fear it will not be on amicable terms. Mitzi and I have come to a parting of the ways. I hoped you could be reasoned with, but if you won't look after yourself...I'll do what I can for you." Mordecai turned his back upon Viktor, facing the door. He hoped for the curtain of red to descend upon him, for anger at Viktor's obstinacy to distance him from what had become an inevitability, but found that the only emotion fueling his actions was regret.

Moving more swiftly than he ever had before, Mordecai pulled his gun from the inner pocket of his suit jacket before turning to face his partner of the past years. Even with his speed he could already see Viktor rising to his feet, the massive feline's remaining eye widened in shock at the betrayal before it narrowed with anger, heavy tail lashing as he charged at Mordecai. Time slowed for some moments, giving Viktor's protégé an opportunity to appreciate being the intended target of Viktor's violence rather than an accomplice to it. If not for the burly cat's bad knee, an injury from The Great War, Mordecai might have come to a bad end.

As it was, the echo of his gunshot was deafening in the small apartment, and on some level Mordecai was astonished that Viktor's windows didn't shatter. The sickening crunch of bone followed immediately as his bullet sank deeply into his mentor's good knee, and Mordecai felt physically ill for a moment as he watched the man he had always looked up to crumple to the floor before him, a howl of pain and rage and...and anguish at Mordecai's betrayal?...leaving the large cat's muzzle, his burnt sienna fur standing on end as he writhed on the floor in agony. In some distant part of his brain, Mordecai realized that he had hoped to feel some degree of accomplishment at having bested his teacher, his friend, his partner, his...his Viktor. Pride in the realization that he had learned everything he could from the man who was the closest thing he had to a...to an older brother. Instead he felt his vision swim for the briefest of moments, and any fleeting sense of victory, of the sense of exhilaration he often felt when he dealt with an assignment, turned to ash. Only knowing that he had acted in his friend's best interests, that perhaps now Viktor could be safe, allowed him to regard the situation as anything other than an abject failure.

Even as his unwelcome feelings tore at him Mordecai looked down at his fallen mentor dispassionately, seemingly unruffled by the fact that he had just shot his partner of years, his voice calm, lethally quiet as he lowered himself to one knee before speaking to Viktor.

"Try not to let Lackadaisy destroy your body as it destroyed my soul," the ebony cat said to the partner he'd just crippled before rising deftly to his feet and leaving the apartment, the door closing with a dull finality behind him.