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They're assassins. Assassins, spies-for-hire, whatever they are, some part of Kate's brain is convinced they're supposed to be classy and suave as well as deadly. They aren't – classy or suave, that is, they've got the deadly part pretty much down.
At the moment, Kate's partner is sitting on the couch with a pizza crust jammed in his mouth and an Xbox controller in his hands, and he looks like a college kid on a three day pizza-beer-and-video-games binge. Judging from the stubble lining his jaw, he hasn't shaved in days. Does he even need to shave? Couldn't he, like, shapeshift the stubble away? Kate's not one hundred percent clear on the details.
Kate is about to tell him to research proper debonair-assassin-spy behavior when the door swings open. Kate doesn't really have to look, because there are really only three people who could even get into this room and two of them are already accounted for. "Cassie," she says. "Hey."
"Got a thing," Cassie replies, and Kate glances at her. Cassie is holding a manila envelope. She's usually holding manila envelopes. "Teddy, this one's for you."
The pizza crust falls out of Teddy's mouth. "Seriously? Hell yes." He grabs the envelope out of Cassie's hand. "Oh oh oh – I gotta –" He fumbles in his pocket for his phone, pulls it out and messes with it for a second before something starts playing. People are rapping. It takes Kate a second to figure out what it is.
"You get it? It's –"
Cash rules everything around me. "I get it, Teddy."
He grins. "Dolla dolla bill, y'all."
Kate grimaces. She's never been able to decide if Teddy is charming or embarrassing. They've usually got pretty full schedules, and he still manages to scrounge up the free time required to be a giant dweeb. Once he gave her this fake coin, all tarnished-looking with the words valar morghulis embossed on it. Kate didn't get it. Teddy just shook his head and muttered, "You gotta watch more TV," which was pretty much the dumbest thing Kate had ever heard, considering the circumstances.
But he's her partner, her friend, and he does damn good work, so she has to applaud him for holding onto that. He doesn't have to kill nearly as often as she does – people tend to hire him for more specialized jobs, infiltration and information retrieval, stuff like that – but he can kill, and sometimes he does. That can take its toll on a person's psyche, so. Whatever it takes and all that.
-
I should kill him, Kate thinks. She could. She doesn't have her bow, but she's got a gun, several knives, and a mental list of ways to punch this asshole's ticket quickly enough that even he couldn't get away. And he's fast, that's his whole shtick – well, at least half of it – so the fact that Kate is confident she could do that is evidence of her skill, her arrogance, or maybe both.
His name is Tommy Shepherd, code name Speed, and he has major destructive tendencies. She should kill him. He should kill her, really, but he won't; he says that's not his M.O. (which, to be fair, it isn't), but it's mostly because he wants to have sex with her. That's not Kate being arrogant – a chimpanzee could've figured that one out. The fact that Tommy's so obvious with his attraction just proves Kate's theory that he's a really shitty terrorist.
"Don't get me wrong," she says. "You get results, sure, but beyond that, you don't seem too committed to your cause. Sometimes I doubt you even believe in the whole 'mutant supremacy' thing."
Tommy blinks at her a few times before he smiles, teeth a dazzling white, and Kate finds herself absent-mindedly wondering if terrorists get good dental before Tommy actually speaks. "We're not that different," he says. "You believe in money. I believe in blowing shit up."
Kate scowls. She's not in the business of taking the moral high ground, but the comparison leaves a bad taste in her mouth. She should kill him, but when it comes to people like Tommy, there are always people who want them dead, and at least a few of those people are willing to pay money to make it happen. Kate's willing to be patient.
-
Wiccan, who is a surprise, appears on a warm, warm day, floating in the air and glowing blue, muttering under his breath. How he found them is a mystery – why he wanted to is less so, but Kate does wonder how stupid he has to be to take on two people with a body count as large as hers and Teddy's alone. Even Cassie can hold her own when she needs to, and Wiccan does seem to be a little caught off guard when Cassie pulls a gun on him.
I know, Kate thinks. She looks so sweet.
There isn't much of a fight, except he does manage to mumble Kate into these magic ropes, which she finds more than slightly annoying. Teddy knocks him out pretty quickly after that, and they get him all tied up and gagged and prop him up on the couch and wait for him to wake up.
Kate observes Wiccan, unconscious. His hair hasn't been washed in days. When he wakes up, he glares at her. His eyes are underlined for emphasis. He looks angry and desperate and sleep-deprived, but he can't do much with the cloth in his mouth. "Mmnnphh," he says, with a surprising amount of venom, all things considered.
"There are three guns pointed at your head right now," Kate replies. "I don't know how good you are at math, but if you think you can talk faster than all three of us can shoot, you are putting a hell of a lot of faith in your tongue."
He even blinks angrily.
They ungag him. Kate tries to interrogate him, but all she really gets is because you're murderers, because you're evil, because you need to be taken down. Kid says he knows the Avengers. Doesn't say he is one.
(Kid? He can't be any younger than Kate, really, when she thinks about it. She isn't sure when she started feeling so old.)
Also, he looks a lot like Tommy. Not in a vaguely similar they-could-be-related way, but copy-and-paste identical. There's gotta be a story there, but she doesn't bring it up, because she isn't really supposed to know Tommy well enough to recognize his face on someone else. The others would surely ask how, exactly, she ended up friends with a terrorist.
Her first response would be "friends" is maybe not the right word. A more fitting term would be "casual acquaintances who occasionally drink together and politely refrain from killing each other."
Her second response would be you don't want to know.
They knock Wiccan out again. Teddy takes him miles away, drops him somewhere in the woods. When he gets back, Cassie groans. "We're gonna have to move again."
Kate shrugs. It would have been more prudent to kill him, probably, but once you do something for a living, you try to avoid doing it for free. At least, that's how Kate sees it.
-
One day, Cassie hands Kate a manila envelope containing Tommy's picture. Kate blinks at it, contemplating, and Cassie helpfully starts to explain who he is, what he's done, how much someone is willing to pay to have him offed. Kate nods along, pretending to know him only by codename, by reputation. This is her chance, what she's been anticipating for a year at least, the inevitability that kept her from killing Tommy a hundred times over in the past.
She looks over the file. She contemplates how she could do it. She imagines a bullet to his brain, meditates on his body shot full of arrows.
She opens her mouth to say she'll take the job, but what comes out is, "I can't."
Cassie looks at her, eyebrows arched. Says, "You sure, Kate?" and Kate nods.
Teddy says, "Of all the contracts to turn down." Kate hadn't even realized he was in the room. When she looks at him, he shakes his head in disapproval.
"You take it," she says. She isn't sure what kind of explanation to give, because I just can't kill someone I know isn't an option. She could say he's too dangerous, that she isn't willing to take the risk, but they know her too well for that. She's banking on her partners trusting her judgment.
Teddy looks thoughtful for a second. He shrugs, mumbles, "Eh, whatever. You don't want it, I don't want it."
"Alright, alright," Cassie says. "I'll let the client know."
While Cassie exits the room, Teddy gives Kate a puzzled look. He just shrugs again. Silently, Kate thanks him for it.
-
If Kate's life is a movie, it's a disjointed series of images: friends, family, dreams from her youth, memories of people in brightly colored costumes, when good and bad seemed like words that meant something instead of nothing. The transitions are flashes from guns firing and pools of red spreading over the screen. The blood starts seeping past the edges. The audience screams. It was supposed to be another genre entirely and they want a refund.
Kate tosses and turns in bed, wondering who the client will go to next, who will pick up the contract on Tommy's life. He deserves it, probably, if anyone deserves it. The world will be better for it. Kate should be able to think of him lying in a pool of his own blood and feel a sense of security (although she never feels that way – even a dead dictator starts to look like a corpse-shaped pile of money). Instead she feels sick to her stomach, then she feels sicker for feeling that way.
Still.
It's comforting to know she's not dead inside.