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You learn her name when you look too long at the file. Mom always told you when she tucked you in at night not to name the lobsters in the aquariums at restaurants, and not to learn the names of targets. When you were younger, you didn't understand, because Bro Strider made such a point of knowing everything about a target that, while you may not have a genuinely photographic memory, you can memorize in seconds. Striders know names, birthdays and favorite foods.
Mom would sigh, a hint of bitterness on her breath, and say that you shouldn't learn names because names have power. You're pretty sure you're the only assassin in the universe who was taught to kill from high fantasy stories. It's how Mom learned from her mom, though, so you can't be the only one, obviously, but—
Names have a power, but it's not immediately deadly to know a name. Bro's right. Names are crucial information that you need to know. If, for example, you're asked to whack one of a family of eight, it's a good idea to know which one you're whacking. You don't want to turn around one day and find out that you got the civvy street Captor and not his twin of shadows. You've always suspected Bro had a bit of a story behind that hit.
Bro isn't the kind of person to tell stories. He crafts them, from nothingness, a skill you desperately wish to possess, but he doesn't tell the story you know is there in your bones, is waiting on your lips to come out into the world. Stories have power like names.
One story says that you and Dirk should be married, by now. It should be all mafia dons and donnas, gathered around with families united. If you were part of a mafia, anyway. Stories are important because they shape your expectations. Bro and Mom tell you that it will be like that, one day, when they're teaching you how to scope out a vantage point. Sometimes they look at each other, like strangers who have met in the airport for the first time. The air crackles with “Do I know you?” and, because you're assassins, one and all, “Did I know you, or did I kill you?”
You've gotten to the age where insane tests are part of every job. It's just the way it is, Bro never explains. Soon kiddo, the training wheels will be off, and you'll be freewheeling into Shadow Town without handlebars. We've got to train you for those clients who are going to fuck you over, if they get half a chance. For those clients who aren't totally forthcoming. For those days when everything goes down the drain. He's giving you half information, and targets that are never where they're supposed to be, or clients who are never what they say they are. Figure it out, kiddo. Improvise.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde, and your specialty is improvising when the normal flow turns to rough waters. Your partner's name is Dirk Strider, and his specialty is making the rough water part of his complex plans. He follows the Strider maxim: “Know your enemy better than yourself, because if you stare too long into the abyss, it will start staring back.” You wonder if it's possible to make friends with the abyss. If it can stare back, it probably is aware of stuff. Dirk flicks bullet casings at you when you muse about the fake maxim out loud.
Getting extra case files for Dirk is old hat and totes routine. Bro has ground it into both of you, know everything. Be aware that we're not going to give you everything you need to know. Because the world doesn't work that way. So you steal the file, and see the name, and hand it over to Dirk, forgetting, perhaps, that names have power.
It's not that knowing a person's name will stop you from making a kill. Mom's lipstick is thick on your temple, and you are warm and happy because Calmasis's story is your favorite. But knowing a name can make you stop and look when you see it on the street. It can give you a taste of curiosity. Knowing a name is like a door into yourself, and any door can be opened with the right name. Leave the Striders to know that. They lock their doors. It is automatic for them.
The door between you and Dirk is open and never locked. Okay, so you might have had to kick it down. It might have taken years. There might be other further different doors inside himself that will always be locked off and closed. The robotic waitstaff guards their entrances sternly. That's okay, you grin as you saunter past, surveying what he is willing to give you access to (Dirk is laying still and dislocated in mud and leaves, half hidden in ferns after a training strife deep in the woods. You snap his shoulder back into place, and he comes to with a yelp. It's a cold wet evening, but you're side by side the whole way through it, talking to him about absolutely nothing, and you think he let slip more than he meant to. That's fine. Over the next few years he'll come to learn that you really never will use it against him).
You lie awake in your bunk, thinking. It's the crack of eight AM and sleepless Striders are too cool to venture out at such a cheerful normal hour. There is a new door inside you, and because, maybe, not only is your specialty going with the flow, but also making that flow turbulent, you open the door a crack and peek curiously through.
Bro tells you all about character assassination when you are thirteen, and getting the hang of reputations. It's something that Striders do. You looked across the table to Dirk, who shrugs, smirking. He's all relaxed and sexy—at least, that was what you thought then—the longer lines of a growth spurt calling to him in his legs and arms. He looks confident. His smile says he can do this. He always turns this smile right on Bro. Bro never believes him.
Within a month, you watch a man breakdown, his election campaign in ruins, and nothing left to lose. Dirk blinks. There's shock. In the stories this man would kill himself, it would be noble, tragic, and very very sad. Forgettable. Dirk told you once he was immune to stories, and you should cultivate it, too. Instead, you both watch your target, who just continues living, hollow, at a lost because everything that made him who he was managed to get obliterated.
You never tell Bro Dirk vomits for what seems an hour behind The Chess Master after Mr. Droog smirks at the pair of you and compliments Dirk on his smooth moves. You don't think Bro really trained you well enough for that part.
If Dirk was narrating this story, he'd omit the whole part entirely. He's like that. When Dirk narrates a story, Bro trains you perfectly, for a technical, given, value of perfect.
You steal into Dirk's room, and surprise, surprise, he's out. You pick up the file, play around with his computer, erasing your presence despite the protests of the AI. You read it all again. Why does the target have to die during a bondage scene gone wrong? You can't even envision it.
You and Dirk scout her out. She is just—innocent isn't the right word. You know it's the word Dirk would use, because he likes to think that anything that isn't him is nice and good, lambs and butterflies and innocence, a word you both don't know the meaning of. And you're pretty sure that because you don't know the meaning, it also applies to you, but part of being Dirk's best bud is knowing what not to tell him.
She's cakes, you think to yourself. She's silly faces when things get into a kerfuffle. She'd use the word kerfuffle, you know she would. She's not nice—she an heiress, and she makes some tough decisions that are not, you are sure, nice. Not for everyone. But she is nice and innocent and everything Dirk probably won't ever say, out loud, that she is.
You tap the file folder on your teeth, and understand why your mom always has a martini to hand. It's something useful to play with in times of trial. Plus, you've seen your mom kill a man with her olive laden tooth pick.
If this were your contract to dictated, you would stipulate the use of a bomb. No mess—for the assassins. No fuss—for Dirk's cunning mind, and your unparalleled chemistry skills. But it's not your contract. You scan the files again, and you realize you don't know who hired your family.
When Dirk finds you in the archive room, it's just quiet between the two of you. You don't need to ask him how he knew that you were there. He doesn't need to ask you what it is you're doing. You don't remind each other that Bro offered to take this one months ago. You're all grown up, but even Bro gets that some things are—
Some jobs are not jobs, your mother tells you after a debriefing, that you ever should have gotten involved in. She's telling this to you on the roof of a thirty story sky scraper that you have spent eight days an nights waiting upon with your rifle and your scope. You are a sniper, Roxy Lalonde. You will be doing a lot of waiting. Get used to it. But still, there are times when you can't pull out, and you're down the rabbit hole with the rest.
What do you do then?
This isn't a test. Bro stopped give you those years ago. Life is the test, he'll say with shaded irony. At least according to Dirk it's shaded irony. Whatever. Striders, loser to the last, but you'll believe them because there's nothing else to believe.
You drape yourself over his shoulders as he builds a circuit board, and ask if he remembers the first promise you ever made to one another. You whisper in his ear, all cuddly and friendly, like a cat sneeze. With his face turned away from you, and the far point of his shade threatening your eyebrows, you honestly don't know if it makes him smile, or he's already leaping further and further ahead toward the conclusion that you've come to.
You tell him, casually, that the contract you don't talk about was set up by the girl's own grandmother. That's your job. Your part of the team effort. You get him the information. He does the thinking about it so you don't have to. Your world is waiting, Roxy Lalonde. You are part of a well built machine. He's the one that built you.
He looks at you for a long moment, and then accuses you of thinking about it. You laugh and flip him the bird. But really you're just setting him up, giving him the information he needs to know.
When you were introduced to each other, there was a lot of weird ceremony, and long words, and the gist of it was that if either of you betrayed your clan, you'd kill the other. You both swore to this sacred trust.
Dirk, you know, can do this job. His brother blocked out the steps for him, but character assassination, it's what Striders do. And he can do this job on his own. You wonder how he's going to get you. If he's the son and heir to the throne you know he is, he'll do the contract first, and come after you later.
You don't bother waiting.
There are others. Your mother does poisons, explosives, and goodness knows what else. You've inherited those talents. You've got a little sister though. The kind of girl who doesn't just dream in stories, but makes them come true. Her teacher, your grandmother, once rode a pair of corpses over a waterfall. You think she'll make a much better head of clan than you, when all's said and done. There's a certain dramatic flair needed when you're in this business.
Dirk grew out of the smile he had for Bro, but imperceptibly. His heroes, you think, still remain the same, pinstripe suits and careless personas that refuse to be nailed down by anything concrete. Alpha and Omega, and it never means a darn thing. Striders are total losers.
You didn't realize, until the moment he was on the back of your motorcycle and you were speeding across Seattle's snaking bridges into King County, that description of Dirk's heroes matches you, too. Except, you don't wear pinstripes. He doesn't say anything, and when his arms wrapped around you, you expected a sword in the stomach. But no, he is just hanging on for dear life, and you have broken a promise to your families. You break it together.
Bro's face has always been inscrutable. Unknowable. He's your teacher. Your sensei. King of the Gendo Ikaris and whatever else Dirk wants to call him. You'd think, at night, with Puget Sound spread out and sparkling as a gentle backdrop—and oh yeah, cars honking and screaming at you because you're on I-5 and guess where isn't an appropriate strife zone—both Striders would take their useless pointy sunglasses off.
The thing is, Bro has never worked on a team. You know that. He's trained hundreds of killers into teamwork before you, and you wish he could train others after you, but he himself has never worked with anyone but himself. He thinks he knows the two of you, slicing your first grenade in half, and leaping over the motorcycle into a katana clash with Dirk.
Striders are losers, but they know how to make real life seem surreal.
They zip up and down the freeway, suddenly leagues out over the sea, and close inland all at once in a fight that you're sure would be thrilling and deadly if you could track any of it. But you can't and you don't.
You are Roxy Lalonde, and you're going to keep your beloved best friend who's been a part of you since before time began from killing his Bro. All you have to do is wait.
Striders grandstand. They don't mean to. There's just something in those calculating whirring brains of theirs that devote two seconds toward holding a pose. You've seen Dirk Jr.—Dave, you get corrected testily over a juice box—try to fight the instinct with some success. Or he's just unlucky and clumsy. He wouldn't be the first black sheep of black sheep family.
Bro lands on top of a street light and Dirk lands bloody and broken on the concrete at a speed that probably contributed to the bloody bit. Bro holds the blade just so. Light from an unknown source zings off it. In a story, he'd monologue about betrayal, but you know it's just this two second pose before he kills the pair of you.
You pull the trigger. Lalondes don't do character assassination.
Dirk is quiet as you sit under an umbrella sipping your milkshake. You think he's trying to will the cast on his arm to fall off, and he'd be all healed. This isn't a story, and it doesn't work like that, though you have invested in a pair of fine shades because an undercover op without fine shades isn't worth it.
They're pink. You think he's rolling his eyes behind his own cracked triangles when he tells you yours are cute. He doesn't tell you that it should have been him who took Bro down. You don't tell him that your desire for everyone to get happy endings gets superseded by your desire to keep your friends alive.
A girl walks past, all curves and laughter, elbowing a brother, cousin, or perhaps just a friend who looks as though he should be a relative. You turn in your chair, and watch her, sipping your milkshake meaningfully.
“You know, she'd neverrrrrrr believe some assassins from a supes secret ninja clan are bound an' determined to be her bodyguards,” you tell Dirk.
“No, Roxy.”
“Yes, Roxy.”
“No,” he says firmly. “We approach her my way.”
His way is probably going to be boring, and will probably involve a lot of secret keeping that would, in any story, come crashing down around your ears at the most inopportune moment, but honestly life's not a story, and you, Roxy Lalonde, refuse to wait around any more.
You set down your glass and ask, just to keep him from feeling sorry for himself, if he'll accept a race. First one to the Crocker girl gets to do the operation their way. He's gone before you can get out of your chair. As it should be.