| The Gemini Door By Amanda Finch [email protected] CATEGORY:
VA Thanks to Alicia and Holly for the drop-everything-and-Beta-this service they so selflessly provided. :) --------------------------------------------- Now I know what the veterans mean, the seasoned watchers. After awhile, you start to care. Of course, it wasn't the same set of circumstances for me. I knew who I was watching. But I didn't think I could still care, not after all that had happened to me. I didn't know I had the capacity. I damn them now for not doing a thorough job of taking it away from me. Because when you start to care, you get sloppy. Someone on your team reports you, and the next thing you know, you're sitting outside the regional admin's office on a hard wooden bench like a chastised second grader waiting for the paddle. The paddle would be easy, in comparison. At face value, the regional admin blackly threatens you to shape up, but genteely disguises it as a show of concern. Once you've been called in two or three times, though, you start to realize what it is they're doing. They're watching the watchers. They watch the way you sit, the way you move your hands when you talk, listening for cadences in your speech that would mark you as a potential washout. I understand they have to be careful. On that day when the order comes down and you have a clear shot, all it would take is one nanosecond of hesitation in your trigger-finger to unravel the entire masterplan, to hear them talk. It takes a certain mind to look at the distant people we're in charge of and -- well, to not see people so much as problems. Think of the cardboard targets, they'd told me, when I killed my first one. The cardboard targets though...they don't scream. They leave that little tidbit out of the handbook. I walked into that regional admin's office thinking, This is it. This is where you wash-out. What now? You take another seat in the conspiracy, that's what. But I had chosen the position I had very carefully. I was at a low-rank, but I was promising, they all said so. I could kill like I'd been born to do it. It could be the diplomat, the diplomat's wife, the diplomat's kid. It didn't matter to me. But for this project, for this position, I wanted to stay put. I hated myself for it. And just like my regional admin had learned to analyze the cadences of my voice, I had learned to tamper with them. You don't get into this segment of society stupidly, believe me. I learned that my body language could only say what I needed it to say, what I wanted to be analyzed. I must've been pretty convincing. They have me on the audio detail now. The snipers now, those baby assassins...they all talk about how hardass the listeners are. Now, you're listening and watching. Suddenly, those faces you'd been assigned to watch had a voice to go with them. You put those words together and you got stories. I'd known at the get-go that these two couldn't just be Redhead and Tall Guy. My first mistake was knowing their names. Shit. My *first* mistake was going out of my way to get this assignment. I wanted to test myself. It's not often when the stealth annihilation crews know secrets that the suits don't. But I had advantages. I had a certain invisibility, even with the audio detail. Even when I first heard Fox Mulder open his mouth to the sound coming out. It was like slicing a vein just to see the blood flow. Suddenly all the things unheard, the things that pulsed at me from a soundless perch beyond them, had a meaning and a function. It was my understanding of course that it wasn't him I had to kill, but the woman. That was the problem: I liked her too. I liked her for the reasons that Fox Mulder liked her. She crossed a room, and she bristled with life. For awhile there, it was just me, spilling back and forth from her apartment to his apartment. That's what got me reported in the first place...the fact that I didn't want anyone else assigned to him while I watched her. That was my first reprimand. It made my job easier when they just started staying in one place. I couldn't have planned it better. I failed my own test. Or maybe it was the men who raised me who failed to instill in me the innate ability to thoughtlessly kill, to have none of these hindering personal emotions to blind me to the facts. The facts being that this man, this Fox Mulder, had every intention of interfering with our way of life, with our step on the caste system. He'd kill *you*, they said. Hypothetically, they were right, of course. If he had the chance to bring it all crashing down on our heads, he wouldn't hesitate to do it. And I liked that about him. I saw in him that part of myself that only existed now in shadow, memory. I remember being a human being. But all I could do was sit back and watch their normal lives -- they'd laugh to hear someone call their lives normal -- through the haze of my own dim recollections. They taught us, early on, that we were born when the lights came and blinded us to everything else. Think of the time before the light as the afterbirth, they said, as the waste you shook off when your life was given to the Project. Think of the people who collected you as your family, they taught. Use the examples of real life you saw from your watch as a means to make up convincing normal aspects of yourself. It was easy to sound like a robot. It was easy to just sound like a gear that made the Cause run smoothly. The suits forgot we were humans. We were expendable. They talked about us going down like they talked about the weather. Both were inevitable. And that was my second mistake, letting the two of them convince me that I was still something resembling human, even after the tests and the conditioning. My superiors caught onto it somehow. I was reported, again. One time too many. How do you think I felt when I looked all around at the streets, at the apartments below, and there, in that window right above theirs, in his apartment now where they stayed, there was someone watching *me*? Watching the watcher. Of course I took the guy out. Scared the shit out of the two of them and however they were spending their quiet evening, but I shot the guy. That was the Syndicate's mistake, sending some half-assed marksman out to find me. What a fucking insult. Their underestimation was my gain. I guess it occurred to me then that there were some things science couldn't take from us. For all of my kills, for all of my loyalty to the Project and and for that adrenaline that rushed through my veins when I felt that gun recoil into my chest, I was still human. By definition my enemy, the time before the light had left upon me a scar that made revealed Fox Mulder as what he had always been. The person he had been before my birth in the light. I knew that the light might as well have taken him, too. It had taken them years to make me the person I am right now. It had taken me mere seconds to undo their work, to betray the Project. Don't you worry, Fox, I reassured him silently from the shadows. Little sister is watching you. ------------------------------------ |