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All she can think of, as they handcuff her, as they slip her into the backseat of the police car, as they finally clip her wings, is a stupid quote. Only cooperate with those you can trust. She’s almost positive Lang said it, slapping Lang Zi’s name on the end like he did with every other damn thought that ran through his head.
Well, joke’s on him, she guesses, and she has to clap her hand over her mouth to stop from laughing at the absurdity of it. Her entire life is made around people she would never trust, whether out of disdain or for her own safety. It’s the name of the game. Years at a time, she’s spent building lives she discards like flash paper with the smallest provocation. Calisto Yew, Shih-na, what feels like a thousand other faces with walls built up around them made up of fake people, fake places, only to be abandoned, haunted houses in a row on a street that stretches forward over the horizon.
If she sounds bitter, she doesn’t mean to. It’s not like she’d have it any other way. A neighborhood of empty, moldering houses is better than the leveled field of rubble that’s more like her history before she joined the ring.
Some psychologist would probably tell her that she needs to learn to open up and trust people, to get over that history. That it’s not healthy to be constantly looking over her shoulder. That she only does this so she doesn’t get abandoned, herself. But that’s not even true – and even if it were, it wouldn’t matter.
Because the fact is that there have always been people like her, ever since the world began, people who lied and cheated and stole without feeling bad about it, without secretly self-flagellating. It takes a while to get there, sure, but it’s worth it. Someone needs to fill that ecological niche in society, to keep the underworld rolling on, and she was born to do it, as far as she can tell.
Just as there have always been people like her, though, there have always been people like Lang, a fact that she’s unpleasantly reminded of as he slides into the backseat next to her and whistles to the driver. (It’s more of a closed-mouth howl. He really is comically over-the-top.) They take off, and he turns towards her immediately, his teeth bared in that confrontational way of his; to her, he just looks like a puppy backed into the corner of his cage. “Shih-na,” he says.
Over the years, she’s heard him say her alias in plenty of different ways, and to his credit, he puts his money where his mouth is in terms of how he treats his subordinates – tonight is the first time there’s ever been any trace of anger to it. Even with that grudging respect, though, the events of the past few hours have truly illustrated how that stupid saying about trusting people divides them so perfectly, no matter how good an actor she was as Shih-na. He’d take a bullet to save her life; they both know she’d shoot him without a second thought.
She doesn’t give him the luxury of their usual conversational cadence, responding snappily instead of with the long pause she’d incorporated into the Shih-na persona. “That’s not my real name, Lang.” He, on the other hand, is completely predictable, responding by curling his lip at her, and she plows on, crossing her legs as the car flies through the streets. “I’m guessing you want to hear my confession?” If she knows Lang at all, if she knows herself at all, he would need to ask for that. He’s probably broken up, wracking his brain at how someone could possibly do what she just did. It’s an equation he’s never been prepared to solve.
“Not yet.” He responds smoothly, even though she’s clearly shaken him. “I’m more interested in your background. How you came to be with the ring. How you ended up being the one to tail me. Even how you picked me in the first place. I’m not the only Interpol agent on the smuggling ring’s scent-”
Honestly, it’s a little pathetic how transparent he is, and she can’t let him go on like this. “Lang, we’ve worked together for this long… You really think I don’t see right through you?” Her handcuffed hands fly to her mouth again to stifle that laughter threatening to break through, the only emotion she ever really feels enough to show. “That’s not why you’re here. You’re mad that I betrayed you.”
She tosses her head, the short bleached hair falling into her eyes. “You don’t care about the smuggling ring right now.” Her voice is vindictive, dripping derision, and it’s a relief to let it out for once. All those years she spent with Lang, the fake stories she’d told him to get him to believe, the life she’d invented wholesale from nothing, he’d fallen for every part of it because he assumed everyone else was like him; naive, ignorant, trusting. The idea of the truth is something she can mold into whatever she wants. A path to lead someone into what she wants them to see. A weapon to hurt them when they least expect it. A noose to leave them hanging. He’s felt every iteration of that now.
She’s a little disappointed, though, when he doesn’t raise his hackles again or even seem offended. Instead, Lang shrugs and settles back on the seat, even as he holds his injured leg stiff at a 90-degree angle. “I thought you knew me better than anyone, Shih-na, but you’ve got it all wrong here.”
That makes her scoff against her will. “No I don’t, Lang. There’s no way you’re not hurt by this.” Stabbing people in the back always, always hurts them – the closer they think they are to her, the worse it is. She knows this from experience, has come to expect the cold fire in their eyes as much as she expects another assignment arriving printed on a card before she can finish burning the last traces of her past life.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t hurt by it,” he says, a hint of a growl, and at least that seems to touch a nerve.
She can’t bring herself to be satisfied for too long, because he continues. “But I have time for that later. Tonight? I’m trying to bring down this ring once and for all. That’s what the questions are, not some revenge quest… The fact that you can’t see that tells me you’re not as observant as you think you are, Shih-na.”
“Will you stop calling me that already?” This time, it’s not sarcasm, but irritation that she can hear in her own words. How fucking dare he say that to her, after she tricked him for years. “You can’t claim to be Sherlock Holmes yourself, you know. You didn’t notice that everything about me was faked. You were blind.”
He shrugs. It’s bizarre and a little unsettling. The more she fires at him, the more relaxed he seems to get. “I had some time to think while they were bandaging me up, you know. About you. And our partnership. Or, heh, at least what I thought was our partnership.” When Lang grins, exposing his canines, it’s familiar. She hates that feeling. It would fade in time, normally, the residue of identities washing off like nuclear exposure scrubbed down in a shower, but this is still fresh enough that she hasn’t shed it yet.
“Oh?” is all she can make herself say, archly, turning her head to look out the window. Maybe the disinterest is the slightest bit feigned, but she rationalizes it by remembering what a long night it’s been. There’s still ash on her shoes from the fireplace, a random detail that jumps out at her now.
“Yeah.” Lang’s voice falls the smallest bit, but it’s not in sadness or pain. In fact, it’s a tone she’s not sure she’s ever heard from him before, so it takes her a moment to decipher it. Disappointment, she finally lands on just as he continues. “The way you work, it’s all based on taking advantage of other people.”
Obviously, she thinks, but doesn’t say it, just watching the lights of the city speed by outside the window.
“You think that makes you better than everyone because you ‘outsmarted’ them.” He actually uses air quotes, there, she can see out of the corner of her eye. “But hey, the truth is… it’s not quite that simple, Shih-na.”
That draws a huff of air unwillingly from her, and before she can stop herself, she’s turning around to look Lang in the eye. He’s a bit worse for wear, Badd’s gunshot saw to that, but he’s leveling his gaze at her more calmly than she’s seen him all night. “What do you mean by that? Of course I did. I was a mole in Interpol for years. Right under your doggy nose. I passed information and you had no idea, because you’re dumb enough to think everyone is honest.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Lang says in return, almost patiently. “I don’t think everyone is honest. I don’t think trusting people makes me dumb, either, because I have to trust my subordinates. Lang Zi says, ‘The pack that-’”
“Not Lang Zi again. Pwwh-” She starts to laugh because it’s what she has left, but it’s ripped right out of her lungs as Lang’s hand comes up and catches her arm, right under the glinting metal of the handcuffs. He’s still not angry, just serious, but now she’s spitting mad. Maybe that’s what he wanted. He can have it, then, because how – how could he possibly think –
“Stop laughing and listen for once in your life,” he cuts in. “Maybe if you spent a little less time thinking about how you’re such a criminal mastermind, you would know why I’m asking you these things. You’d know why I don’t have time to mourn a friendship tonight.”
“I know you,” she fires back, and wrenches her hands away. God, his hands are burning hot, it feels like, especially in contrast with the cuffs. “You’re just like everyone else. Stupid. Really, really stupid, to not be able to see me for what I am.”
“You know trusting the people you work with is pretty much how it works for everyone else.” Lang shrugs and gestures briefly towards her with his now-free hand. “It’s important to me.”
“That’s why it was so easy to betray you. Just like Faraday, just like Badd.” Something acrid is rising in her throat at how unbothered he seems at all of this. “And now I just know it’s tearing you up inside.”
“You were my assistant for three years.” Lang tilts his head to the side, shows his teeth the smallest bit. “Yeah, it’s not a good feeling. Part of it’s even my fault. You were my responsibility, after all...”
Still, he claims her, like their friendship was real. It’s so frustrating that he won’t back off; most of the time when she leaves a life behind it goes up like a smoke bomb, and people run away, teary-eyed and coughing. They stopped her before she could detonate this time, and all that energy, all that anger, is coiled inside her when she’s so used to being empty by now.
“Then why are you still here, if it feels bad?” she finally asks him. “Either you care about me or you don’t, either I hurt you or I didn’t.” It has to be black and white like that, because that’s how it’s always been before; she likes to walk in the shadows, firmly claiming a side, the Yatagarasu in the depths of night, the dark ink of the smuggling ring’s commands. If she opens up the possibility of shades of gray, her life gets even more complicated.
At that, Lang has the audacity to actually laugh. “You think it’s that easy? You only care about yourself… It’s made you blind to other people, the same way you accuse them of being blind to you. I’m here because, like I said, you were under my authority. And because it’s gonna take a lot more than this to make me abandon my goal, Shih-na.” He chuckles again, cocks an eyebrow at her. “Do you even know what that is, or were you too busy planning your big moment?”
Something in his tone makes her cheeks go red. Shame is what her body is reacting with, unfamiliar because she thought she lost the ability to feel it long ago, and she wipes at her face as much as she can manage to will it away. Lang is the one who should feel ashamed. She tricked him. She tricked him.
Yet here he is: a little beaten, a mangy wolf, bleeding from the leg and staring her down, but not cowering, not backing away.
It occurs to her all at once that maybe the desolation she imagined she was leaving behind with each identity was following her instead, always a breath away. With this one misstep it’s caught up to her.
“I meant it when I said this was my case now. The difference between us, Shih-na,” and she doesn’t correct him this time, can’t seem to make her dry mouth move, “is that I have more than this. I have my men, who rely on me. I have my family’s honor and my country to protect. I have something to go back for. But you?” Across the backseat from her, Lang lets his head fall back on his seat, and for all his weariness, he still looks strong. “This is all you’ve got. And now it’s gone.”
With that, the car trundles to a stop. There’s nothing left for her to say, no way she can win. “I didn’t answer your questions,” she says, and lifts her chin. She’ll fake it to the very end, like she always does.
Lang lets out a breath of air through his nose. “That doesn’t matter. I put you in custody. I made sure that you’ll be put away… And I’ll be at your trial, too, to make sure that it’s fair. After that, I’d say that my responsibility to you as your superior will be completed, wouldn’t you? Until then, if there’s any poor treatment, you can come to me. But anyone can ask you those questions. Don’t tell him, but I think that Mr. Prosecutor might even be able to bring this whole thing down without your answers.”
He reaches over her and unlocks the door, pushing it open to reveal an officer already standing there. “We had some good times, Shih-na… No matter what you did, it doesn’t strike that out, in my book.”
The officer reaches out and takes her arm, helps her out of the backseat, and as the door closes again, she doesn’t meet Lang’s eye. That doesn’t matter, though, because she can feel his eyes on her, through the window, like he still cares after all this. She’s withstood gunshots, knives to her throat, she’s killed people, but for some reason this is what leaves her trembling against her will in the parking lot.
The car pulls off again, and she’s led inside. Questioning will be boring, surely, because she’s not going to give anything up; not because she feels any loyalty to Alba, who let her be captured, who was the reason she ended up in this position anyway, but because she’s not letting Lang get off that easy. He can keep his nose to the ground and follow the trail, his precious case, and maybe if he gets lucky he’ll find his way to the truth. After tonight, it’s more of a possibility, as much as she hates to admit it.
After she sits, stonily silent and chained to a desk, they’ll move her to a little five-by-ten cell with only visits from an incompetent public defender or the warden to entertain her. There’s nothing else to look forward to, no new life to start, no traveling or reinventing herself, no assignments or meetings or anything. Just plain walls, emptiness, and at night, the dark, too.
It’s fitting. Some part of her always suspected it’d end up this way. (The other part of her expected a quick death, and they were probably equally as likely.)
Acknowledging the near-inevitability of this doesn’t make it any easier, though, especially because Lang was right. She has nothing else to turn to, no one to miss. The only common thread linking her past haphazardly together was the smuggling ring, and even that’s gone now.
When she turns inside herself, the only place she has refuge anymore, it’s just as dark as the cell. And even though that darkness was a comfort before, now it’s as numb as everything else.