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She’d done unimaginable things to get to where she was today. Lied, begged, slept her way to the top, all in the name of proving her family wrong. Proving that she was worth something.
Is.
She’d lost a lot as a consequence though. Her sister, her girlfriend. Some would argue she’d lost her sanity too. Or her morals. There were a lot of things that could be debated whether she’d lost them, given them up or simply never had them at all.
And for what? What had she, little miss Ruth Bowers actually gotten for all the effort? For her grand plan of escaping the expectations her family had set for her?
She looked around the room from where she sat on the desk. It was early, dark enough that only the silhouette of Carmen, asleep on the sofa, was visible. Despite all the reasons she had listed in her journal, on the page entitled ‘For When It’s Time To Leave’, she liked it here.
Sure, the jobs were bizarre, her boss tried getting rid of her every time she was in the office longer than necessary and at the age of 22, when she’d planned to be attending parties with the more upper class members of her family, she was running around hiding in vents, skulking in sewers and getting stabbed by lizard men.
Objectively speaking, she should have hated her job. And yet, she didn’t. Quite the opposite in fact. She’d never felt more alive.
Oh, how Alice would have laughed if she could see her little sister now. Their job hadn’t been pretty either, not even the parties. You were never quite able to enjoy the dancing with the fear of being caught breathing down your neck, waiting for you to make that one fatal flaw. Even so, they’d always had standards.
Her standards had slipped, considerably.
She’d swallowed her dreams of grandeur a long time ago, washed it down with Dick’s stolen whisky the minute she’d decided to stay a while and torment him. Strangely, she hadn’t minded, not one bit.
It was nice to be part of a team again. She hadn’t realised until after deciding to stay that she’d been holding her breath for years, constantly ready to run in case trouble caught up with her. She’d even unpacked the bag she’d prepped for such a situation. That, she admitted, may have been unwise. Their jobs were still dangerous, even more so than when she’d been working alone, so an emergency bag could never be a bad idea.
But something about the bag being empty after years of being stuffed full of clothes and weapons helped her breathe a little easier. So it stayed empty.
Ruth sighed, breath too loud in the quiet of the office. Did she even deserve it? The others, they all had their lines drawn in the sand, what they would and wouldn’t allow themselves to do in a bad situation. Even if they’d crossed those lines once or twice, and she was sure they must have done, she was also sure those instances could be justified.
There were choices in her past she couldn’t be so sure about.
She wasn’t looking forward to the day they found out. Dick and Morgan had been startled enough about the convenience store owner, finding out she’d killed someone when she’d technically had the choice to walk away?
The thought of losing another family threatened to destroy her.
Maybe she didn’t deserve it. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to give it up.