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But you're caught in my head like a thorn on a vine
To forever torment me, and I wonder why
Do I wish I'd never known you at all?
- The Bravery, The Ocean
On a warm summer evening in Dublin, a cold chill settles into Nina’s bones.
And then her heart resumes its rhythm; a survival instinct that settles in as naturally as a nervous tic. Beyond the silhouettes filling the crowded pub, her son seems alive and well, his head tipped back in a laugh.
She has never seen him smile; there’d never been an excuse for one during their few, brief meetings.
(Does it light up his face like the moon, the way her mother’s did? Or does it explode across his blue eyes, just like her father’s?)
Even with his back to her, she knows that Steve’s inherited her family’s bones. The rest of the gene pool seems to have followed suit: he has Da’s broad shoulders and perfect posture, just enough traces of her father that Nina doesn’t want to look away just yet.
(If he turns around and catches her, she’ll just pin it on an honest mistake.)
But his laughter rings golden, a sound unlike anything that had crossed the threshold of the home she’d once known and still dreamt of. Underneath the big coat she’s kept on, despite the warmth, her knives and guns are cold on her skin, and she considers these a sort of comfort only she can appreciate.
(After all, they are reminders that her heart is still made of metal.)
Nina considers it fair that seeing him has unsettled her; she had first laid eyes on him as a face in a dossier and the last time was when she’d glared him down from across a battlefield. The sun had beat down on both of them then, identical glints in their hair as they mirrored each other. She doesn’t believe in divine intervention the way her own folk do, but she wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that karma had a long-standing warrant on her.
All in all, this isn’t a good start to her night.
There had been nothing about her that he had got all wrong; she was nothing but a hired gun who viewed him as just another thorn in her side. She was, and would be, nothing like those swing-set mothers who never pushed their children too far from them and always stayed close enough to catch them as they fell back.
(She was supposed to be at a banquet hall in a hotel downtown to scope out her next target, she reminds herself, at least ten minutes ago.)
Steve isn’t alone. He sits at the edge of a small entourage whose English accents and boisterous tipsy jokes attract many a stare; some curious, others suspicious. Those casting the latter have no such reason to do so; from her vantage point, seated at a table near the window with nearly six feet separating her from him, she can tell that they’re just another pack of happy idiots, tongues loosened by premium Irish stout. But out of all the things - all the people - that could’ve landed here, on her old hunting grounds, it had to be the one she refuses to call hers.
(Someday - soon, she hopes - she won’t feel this strange pull around him.)
On the bright side - for him, at least - he certainly appears happier than the last time she’d seen him, which isn’t surprising. Right now, Steve Fox is just another English lad in Dublin, out with friends, comfortable and carefree without having to worry about his own mother taking him out with a bullet or kick to the head. There’s a shine about him that must be new to only her and maybe the giggly bartender who fills his glass, a girl who looks fresh out of sixth form and ready to fall into her idea of love.
(Nina can hear her own mother’s sigh in her head and she hates it, hates that she still can’t bear the thought of not living up to her expectations: the college degree, the nice young man Nina was sure to meet, the security deposit on a nice flat in a lovely neighborhood, the bloody babies that were sure to follow, all of Ma’s dreams for her and Anna having drifted away so long ago, as weightless as foam.
She’d once accused men of having it easier and said as much to Da, and to her dismay, he’d shrugged and admitted Ma had made some good points.)
The music streaming from an old jukebox in the corner picks up again, drowning out her thoughts but it’s still not loud enough for the flood of memories that seeps into her head. The house she remembers from her childhood - with the backyard she and Anna had scraped their knees in while playing - must be no more by now, and all she has is the present moment and yet another contract to fulfill.
(And him.)
(But no, no, no, she doesn’t. She can’t bear it.)
She’s still so young and yet, she isn’t. When she shifts her eyes to the line of wine-glasses hung up by their stems behind the bar, above her line of sight, she meets her own blue stare, except that it is his.
His eyes glint with life, a second chance hard-won. There were such great heights to fall from and he’d already lived through a few.
She is alive, too, painfully so, and seeing the sidelong glance laced with sympathy he sends her way, reflected in the glass, doesn’t help. It gives her the much-needed impetus to finally make a break for it.
Her heart pounds as soon as she steps out and she wills the roar of blood in her ears to float on somewhere, anywhere else that doesn’t take her back to the first memory she’d recovered after awakening from her twenty-year sleep.
Outside, the kiss of spring descends on her with the force of a clenched fist.