Kill or be Killed

Jade hissed in displeasure. She could already tell by the lack of other D.R.A.I.N. members that Talon was back, just as she had been each of the four times Jade had checked in the last two months. This fool really had the best protection the association could offer him, Jade mused, looking at the corporate fortress with a calculating stare, pacing from the roof of the building across the street.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

The sound of her heels echoed into the still of the night. They were one of her few trademarks; tall, spiked heels and a blade driven straight through the heart of her victims. But there, in the room where her target resided, was Jade’s single weakness. The one person that she would be loath to kill, for any price in the world. The one girl who would understand exactly how she felt, despite their age difference.

“We are sisters in all but kin,” Jade said softly to the night, a hard new edge to her voice. “I do not wish to harm you.”

She huffed and turned, getting a running start and leaping effortlessly to the next roof to examine Whitman’s fortress from a different angle. As she had suspected, there were no other D.R.A.I.N. personnel here, either. Nor at the rear of the federal fortress, as she discovered a few brief moments later. Her boss would be angry to hear that she shirked her duty because of the one woman - girl - who probably currently paced inside the disgusting man’s office.

The twenty-three year old hissed in frustration, running a hand through her midnight colored locks agitatedly. The girl she faced knew her well; the company must know already that the girl - who went by the name Talon - was her one fatal weakness. Jade would rather stab herself through the heart than harm a hair on the other woman’s head. The younger woman was like her younger sister. They had grown up together on that dreary little plot of land in the middle of nowhere, helping each other to survive. Surely their caretaker had realized they would work much better as a team, but instead he sent them away to opposing factions.

“That fool,” Jade quietly cursed the man for separating her from her sister. As a team, the two of them would have been completely unbeatable - an asset to whomever paid the higher price. But as Jade was older than Talon, she was sent away the day that she turned fifteen for her first days in the world of assassins.

She remembered then, staring out across the night sky, polluted by the lights of the city and the noises of cars, her thoughts when she went on her first mission. By no means did she like killing; not then, and not even now that she had done it for eight years. Jade remembered thinking, as she wiped the blood from her hands shakily the first time she’d ever used a blade to kill a man, that she didn’t want Talon to have to go through this.

“You lose yourself a little more each time,” she whispered softly, kneeling on the roof as unbidden tears managed to fall. “Talon, I don’t want you to become so numb that you can’t feel anymore. And by being who we are - what we are - I know that if you don’t get away you will become numb to everything. I’m almost there…I don’t want you to be here too.”

Tears fell then, quicker, and left warm, wet streaks down the normally unshakeable woman’s cheeks. Her hands were balled into fists, one on the ground to hold her center of balance and the other furiously wiping away the accursed droplets. When she finally looked up, the liquid clung to her lashes, glittering in the light of the nearest streetlamps. The effect on the woman made her seem like a heroine in a tragic novel or movie, whose lover died to protect her. It made her seem like a woman whose husband has been unfaithful. But also, the effect of the light glimmering from the tears on her eyelashes and the tear streaks down her cheeks made her seem like a long forgotten goddess whose only emotion is sadness.

If there were ever a more grievous moment than Jade felt in her heart at the prospect of killing the girl who was everything to her, like the little sister she had never had, it was lost in the sands of time and paled in comparison.

Yes, Talon of the D.R.A.I.N. group was the one and only weakness to the Raven Corps number one, Jade.