Death always got his due.

For years, ever since I'd accidentally frozen time for... well, a frankly depressingly long period in between bites of my cereal before I'd learned how to resume, I'd always thought that phrase applied to other people.

I'd avoided death more times than I can count. My line of work, you end up developing a pretty flirtatious relationship with that suave son of a gun. He beckons me into his embrace on a daily basis, and each time I coyly say nah, I've got other plans today. My ability to stop time let me keep him a good arm's length away.

You see, people often don't realize just how much thought, either conscious or subconscious, goes into your actions. Moving your arm is an entire lightshow of neurons firing in your brain, carrying signals down the nervous system to twitch and pull muscle fibers in dozens of simultaneous and differing directions. Even flipping someone off is a delightful exercise in body control.

When you have literal eternity to really study how these signals travel through your nervous system, how conscious and subconscious thought interact with every organ, tissue, cell in your body, you learn a few neat tricks.

For instance, visualization of action. You ever fantasize about getting into a fight? Pulling off all of the cool action movie moves in real life? It all goes perfectly in your mind, but ever get into an actual fight and you learn pretty quick that your body just doesn't work that way. One punch to the face, and your arms start flailing as pain flashes through each receptor in your poor little noggin.

Key phrase there, your body doesn't work that way. But with an eternity to learn, it can.

Whatever I envision my body doing, within its limitations, my body does perfectly. No fight ever went how I didn't imagine it going, no bullet missed its mark, no play in football I couldn't make work, hell sometimes I just used it to make sure none of my pee got on the toilet seat.

Again, I'd avoided death more times than I can count. My ability came in pretty handy with my work as a mercenary.

I just don't know how I'm going to avoid it this time.

There's a bullet just a good few inches away from the bridge of my nose, blurred by its proximity to my eyes. And the worst part is, I'm not even working today. This is just your regular, run of the mill bad luck.

I don't know why I'd frozen time. Maybe it was pure instinct, maybe I'd known something was wrong. Whatever it was, I was now forced to try to think clearly through the eternal burn on the roof of my mouth from my too-hot breakfast egg sandwich. I couldn't have just blown on it a bit before taking this bite? No, my impatient ass had to stuff my face without waiting for it to cool down.

Alright, whatever. Think clearly. I can't move my eyes, so I'm limited to what I can see being directly ahead of me and some slight peripheral. My mouth burns. I can't smell anything, no air to pull into my lungs. My mouth burns.... oh, you learn to get used to that, by the way, the whole no breathing thing and my mouth still. Fucking. Burns.

I see someone frozen in the middle of falling back, the window of a black car rolled down as people wearing masks shoot him. Assholes, not professional at all. There's like five other people on the sidewalk here, and you're shooting down it into the direction of pedestrians? No wonder I was in this predicament, they were fucking amateurs*.* And who guns people down in the morning, anyway? Some of us here are just trying to enjoy our egg sandwiches. Still burns by the way.

No matter how hard I think though, despite my annoyance with amateur mobsters, I don't see a way to dodge the crossfire. I'd grown intimately familiar with what my body could and couldn't do, and ducking or dodging a bullet just a few inches away from my precious brain meat isn't one of them.

Ah well. I guess death always got his due. Alright death, you suave son of a gun, come whisper your sweet nothings into my ear. There better be egg sandwhiches in the after life, because you owe me one.

I resume tim-