Work Text:
The Hero
It was time. Time once again to lose one she loved. But that’s how she lived; she let herself love them, every single one of them. It was her penance. Her only solace in what she did. Some called her a hero- others a killer- but she did as she was told. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, just as you don’t question orders from the one who holds the gun.
She brushed his soft locks out of his face as she gazed lovingly through warm sepia eyes at the man below her. His sleeping face seeming so angelic, so innocent though he was from it. She remembered the time they met, the time they fought, the times she constantly berated him for his obscene smoking habits, She remembered it all. Every single moment with her lost loves were remembered, etched into her very soul so that they could still live on within her.
Moonlight seeps through gaps in the curtains, reflecting off into a spectrum of colour as she silently removes her signature weapon. It was a beautiful butterfly dagger encrusted with tiny jewels of every colour. Looking upon the jewels she feels reminiscent of the past, thinking of the past loves that this knife has tasted. The one at the very top, Red for the one with red hair- she remembered laughing at his abrasive attitude and his arrogant tribal tattoos. She remembered loving him. Then black for the rich one with the long raven- black hair, he was seemingly stoic, an aristocrat in appearance but she knew him truly. She loved him too. Then indigo for the her eyes, full of life and so much intelligence, another of her loves whose life now lies sealed in her dagger. Green for the one who never cried, pink for the scientist, orange for the ditsy one and finally peach for the bald one- his bald head, shaved as he kept reminding her- reflected the light much like the gem that held his life.
Snapping out of her daze, she tucked her golden strands out of her eyes and once again looked upon the next life that her dagger would absorb. The knife was held with a practiced precision, softly pressing against his jugular. Tear threatened to spill over as she pursed her lips together in anticipation. Then she stopped, a hand grabbing her wrist and the feel of his chest rising and falling at a quickened rate.
Startled her eyes flicked upwards and saw his cerulean orbs locked with hers. “Why?” he asks, surprisingly he doesn’t seem startled- as if he knew this was coming. She just stares, astonished. They never wake up. Never. The grip around her wrist tightens, “Why?” he asked again, his voice strained and raspy from the pressure of the cool metal kissing his skin.
“Its what I do,” she replied.
A small smile graced the lips of the man below the knife. “I'm the last one, are you happy that it’s nearly all over? All my friends, partners are gone. It was all you wasn’t it? One by one you picked us all off. Are you happy that your job is almost done, number 15?”
The tears start to spill as the one known as number 15 looks down at the one with the cerulean eyes. Knowing now that he had known her true purpose all along. “I love you, I love all of them,” she cries softly as he caresses her tear- stained cheek.
“I know, we all know. And that’s why we let you free us. You let yourself love us, knowing you have to kill us, to share our pain. Its your payment for our lives, the heartbreak is your penance and that’s why we let ourselves love you back.” He whispered through a true smile, the moonlight reflecting off his feral teeth giving the illusion that it is a wildcat, not a human, who lies under number 15 at the moment.
“You are then end. The final space on my dagger is for you.” Reaching into her pocket she pulls out an azure jewel, the same as the flecks that resided in her final target’s eyes. The free hand of the last one left he brings the jewel to his mouth and places a chaste kiss on it and together the fit the sapphire into its place at the very end of the hilt of the weapon filled with the lives of those that he had worked with.
“You're a hero, 15. You’ve set us all free, forgiven us for our unforgivable sins. Only you could find it in your heart to love after all we did. End this sweet torture, so I can meet the ones whose torture was not so sweet.” He tucked her golden locks behind her ear endearingly as she lent foreword and placed a final kiss on the cheek of her final beloved.
“My final target, your crimes have far exceeded the others I have sent on their way. You have maimed, mutilated, tortured and murdered; yet I have loved you. It is because I have loved you that I am able to free you from the world that holds the humans you most despise and had to rid yourself of. If there is a god,” her sepia eyes hardened and a look of serene acceptance came across her final target, “then I, number 15, deliver gods justice!”
With a practiced flick of her dagger it was over. Opening the curtains, then the sliding door, she stepped onto the balcony. Looking up, clouds covered the majority of the sky but the thin crescent of the moon was the only thing fully visible. That, she decided, was her love. Blocked and dulled by the clouds that bar the world of the living and the world but always there, one bit will always be shining down no matter how many clouds float in her way.
Days later her report was done. Handing in the write up to her boss in the ever-same gray office, in the repetitive gray city. “You have taken down the greatest terrorist group that this country has ever seen,” her boss says proudly, “you are a true hero.”
Is she not the same as them? The power to kill has taken over all of their lives, their own sense of justice driven them to different paths. They knew their sense of justice, to rid the world of those who are weak, the ones in the way of what they believed was progress. But what was hers? To protect? To love and set free? Only one thing was clear to her, as clear as the moon in the cloudy sky a few long nights ago.
She was no hero.