[ WP ] You are a retired assassin . The only thing you want is to die . Keeping you from this is the fulfillment of your last contract : A celebrated performer paid you to kill him if he ever tried to make a `` comeback '' as an old man . After years in retirement , the performer announces a world tour .

The carpet was threadbare, red worn away into grays and stringy white. It muffled his footsteps well enough, just a hiss beneath his toes. His creaking knees sounded louder. His aching breaths felt louder. He followed the red path down an empty hall, and he followed the the sound of guitar chords to his last sin. 
 
 He found Marty on a love seat couch, paper on his lap. The stereo played his songs of forty years past. He knocked at the door frame, and Marty looked up. 
 
 `` Ah,'' Marty said. `` Come in, then.'' 
 
 He took a seat opposite Marty, smelled dust and old lemon-scented cleaner. 
 
 `` Do you drink whiskey, Codge?'' Marty asked. He held a tall glass, ice clinking. `` Do you even drink. Well, you should drink, now.'' Marty smiled, sipped. Codge took a glass-honey, oak, and bitter alcohol-swallowed, and coughed once. 
 
 In Marty's lap was the contract. His name was signed at the bottom, and two spots of crusted red-brown. In the old ways, they had sealed it with a drop of blood each, pricked from the wrist's blue vein. Flakes of their blood were drifting to Marty's pants. They had worn mourning suits when they made the contract. Marty had been laughing, then, at the traditions Codge demanded. 
 
 Now they wore mourning suits once more, and shared drink in Marty's home, and listened to the past. All of it old, dead, gone. Time sucked at Codge's bones and he was tired of it. 
 
 `` I was important,'' Marty said, staring at the contract's date. `` People knew me by name, by face. Even if they laughed, or hated me, they knew me.'' He drained his glass, filled it again. `` Some kid came by with a letter, did n't even blink at me. Luce went last week. I'm all that's left, now, and no one knows me.'' 
 
 Marty thumbed at the folds under his eyes, the hanging flesh beneath his chin. His hair had gone. Eyes the milky green of cataracts stared into his, and Codge knew the weight of those folds, the creases. 
 
 `` Do not go gentle, right?'' Marty asked, small, afraid, sinking into the couch. `` I could've died like Luce, in my bed, announced by letter. I could have.'' 
 
 Then it was time. The handle was familiar weight. The resistance of jugular was old company. Codge made it quick. 
 
 Codge burned the contract with Marty's lighter and sprinkled the ash over his corpse. He dabbed the blood from his blade. He finished his drink. He listened to Marty's fame play its last, until the stereo whispered into silence. 
 
 At home, he made his death in a handful of sleeping pills.
