Fragile Wings: Part One

by Timesprite and kaleko

"Good to have you back, Dom. Word was you'd off and retired."

"Retired?" I laugh wryly. "Me? Just getting better at choosing my battles."

"Yeah, well, I guess you can afford that," he rubs the back of his neck-- a nervous habit, and I already know what he's going to say next. "Look, I'm pulling a team together... they're good, but we could *use* someone of your caliber, if you're interested. I know you could probably make a hell of a lot more freelance than I can offer, so if you're not it's fine..."

Damnit. I sigh and put a hand on his shoulder. "Marc, I'm-- teamwork isn't really my thing anymore. It tends to go... badly."

He nods, but I can see the disappointment in his eyes. Damn, but it's a tempting offer. No matter how many times I tell myself 'This is it, I'm going solo now. No one to depend on but myself. No team, no... partner, just me,' I never can quite shake the loneliness. "Well, okay. I can understand that. But if you ever--" He shrugs. "We're trying to do some good, Dom. Not just mindless killing."

"There's no other kind of killing, Marc. And there's always a flip side of the coin. Don't let yourself ever get tricked into believing otherwise," I say, and a little voice in the back of my head is telling me I've gotten too cynical for my own good. I tell it to shut the hell up.

"Not the first time I've heard that, trust me," he replies. "And you're right. Hell, I don't have any illusions about what it is we do. I'm just trying to, well, chose my battles," He continues, throwing my words back in my face. "We've been doing counter-terrorism, mostly. Less information gathering. Might not be that much of a change but it helps me sleep at night."

----

"I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary out here," I hiss into my headset, weaving through the crowds of people milling around outside the auditorium. I glance over the guards watching the doors, into side halls, looking for anyone lurking where they shouldn't be. "This is not sitting well with me Marc. Either they're already inside, or they're back by you and McNally, 'cause they're not out here, and no one is going to be getting any weapons past those guards."

"I haven't found a damned thing so far, Dom. Shit, this better not be a bad lead..." I can hear the frustration in Marc's voice, even through the static on the com. We spent the better part of two weeks preparing for this job, if it's a bust, the team's not going to be pleased. "We had every indication that someone was going to try and disrupt this damned arms debate. I can't believe all those sources could have been wrong. You got anything, Atlas?"

"Nothing. Shit, Marc, I've been over this whole damned rig. I haven't found jack." I tune out as McNally and Marc continue their conversation. No one wants to say it, but this is stinking of a setup. I switch frequencies, still milling around with the rest of the patrons who're waiting to be let inside. I glance at my watch. Twenty minutes to go.

"Goode, you got anything? Please tell me you've got something."

"Sorry, Domino, no can do. It's quiet as the grave out here. Couple of people still drifting in from the parking lot, some guards around the perimeter but that's it. Baddies must be in with you lot."

"No one's got anything in here," I reply.

"Ma'am?" I nearly jump out of my skin as a finger taps me on the shoulder. "Can I see what's in your bag?"

I swallow hard. Crap, easy way to get killed. It's just one of the guards this time, though, so I show him my shoulder bag, then I'm on my way again. This whole thing has got me more unsettled than I'd realized. "Dom, you still there?"

"Yeah, sorry. I've got nothing. Neither does Marc or McNally."

"Not good."

"No shit, Randy."

"Has anyone got anything? I'm tired of getting groped by old foreign men here." The displeasure in Lemonade's voice is quite apparent. Not that I'd be pleased in her situation. Drew straws to see who got to play cocktail waitress on this gig, she should have known better than to go against my luck.

"Nothing. And you're supposed to wait for me to radio you, remember?"

"Yeah, easy for you to say, you're not getting your ass grabbed. There's nothing going on in here, or out on the floor. How long we got until show time?"

"Fifteen minutes. Let's hope someone finds something soon."

"Dom?"

"Yeah?"

"We're getting set up aren't we?"

"I sure as fuck hope not, but it's starting to look that way, yeah."

----

It's five minutes to the start of the debate, and the hallways are starting to clear. I've got to file into the auditorium soon, or I'm going to start raising suspicions. "We've got five minutes people," I murmur into the headset. "Everyone ready?"

"We're a go back stage," Marc answers. "Atlas thought he saw something up on the catwalks. That was three minutes ago and I haven't heard from him since. Gonna head that way myself."

"Okay," I reply. There's a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I just can't seem to shake. Shit. I need to calm down. We're supposed to be keeping radio silence anyway, so the fact that McNally hasn't checked in--

"I've got something!" Randy's voice cuts in over the headset. "Someone just slipped around towards the rear entrance. I'm going to see if I can--"

There's a loud crack, and a blast of static, then nothing. "Fuck. We got a problem people." I jump out of line and start sprinting back down the hall. "We just lost Goode. Lemonade, you still there?"

"Loud and clear, Dom."

"Good, get your ass out of there and meet me by the exit. Marc, find Atlas an-- Marc? Shit!" I change frequencies again and get nothing but static. I'm halfway to the rear of the auditorium when a bullet fractures the brickwork just inches above my head. Without slowing down, I grab the concealed gun from the bottom of my bag and take one quick glance back to see my pursuer racing behind me. One shot is all it takes, he drops to the floor, and I don't waste any time hovering over the body.

Lemonade is waiting for me at the back entrance, gun drawn. "What the fuck is going on? I heard gunfire."

"We were right, it was a setup. It wasn't the fucking delegates they wanted, it was us. Goddamnit, Marc, who the hell did you piss off? Come on, we've got to go."

"Go? We need to Get Marc and Atlas! We can't go."

"Fuck, Lemonade, someone just tried to kill me! Marc and Atlas are dead. Let's get out while we're still breathing."

"We have to go back for them!" She turns and starts running back the way I just came, but I grab her arm.

"I know you're not stupid. What the hell is your problem? We have to get the hell out no--" The sound of an explosion cuts me off, and already the air is filled with shouts and panicked screams. "Fuck. We've got to go."

----

She's going to get us both killed. I know it.

She's been acting funny all night. Not that I can blame her. She was sweet on Marc, I know. I sympathize with her loss, but that's what this kind of line of work is about. Loss. You always lose someone in work like this. You're taking lives, it's just fitting that the job would take someone from you, isn't it? I can't explain that to her now, of course.

Her face is streaked with tears, her golden blond hair a tangled, wet mess around her shoulders. She flops onto the bed, watching the wall of the cheap hotel room as if she's waiting for it to open up and swallow her. Perhaps that's what she wants. I flick the light off in the bathroom and sit down next to her. She turns to watch me, eyes wide like a lost puppy dog. She's looking at me for something I can't give her.

It takes a few moments for both of us to get comfortable and we exchange no words. It has only been maybe 20 seconds when Lemonade's eyes open and look at me trying to sleep beside her. She can't see my face, probably, only a mass of hair and a pale neck, the rest of my body disappearing under the covers.

Her lips move but nothing comes out. She sighs annoyedly, shaking a little as I move, my face now visible to her. She looks at me worriedly, then snuggles into her pillow and lays still again.

I can see her watching the clock on the nightstand behind me, watching the minutes tick by. She moves every now and then to scratch her leg or face or turn her head or yawn. She is doing it quite often. Is she trying to annoy me purposely? Or is she really just itchy and uncomfy and tired? I feel so bad, like I want to hug her, but I know that isn't the thing to do now.

No one ever hugged me when someone died. I just had to learn to cope. I can't coddle her. Comfort is something you can't afford to give in this line of work. You have to be hard, you have to shut it out. This won't be the last loss she'll ever see. She just has to learn to deal with it. Like I did.

I laugh inwardly at that. Yeah, I deal. Well, I can act like I do. That's all that matters.

I watch Lemonade's hand shake as it moves to touch the ends of my hair, curling the locks between her fingers. "Domino," she says, voice soft and cracking. "What should I-- I..." She puts her hand to my cheek, watching me with sad eyes. "Without Marc I can't..."

There are no more words from her, just heavy sobs and shaking as she moves forward, wrapping her arms around me and kissing me. I don't know what to do, or say, so I push her away. I push her away from me, back to her side of the bed, and roll onto the floor.

"What the hell was that, Lemonade?"

She just sobs into her pillow, shoulders hunched, hands tangled and wrapped around her long blond hair. "I feel like I could tear myself apart! Oh, God, I shouldn't have gone tonight! If I hadn't been there, maybe I wouldn't feel like such a failure!" She looks up at me again, lip quivering, nose running, eyes red and watery from crying. She controls her sobs long enough to blubber out, "He could still be alive and I left him! I don't want to live, I don't want to live with this guilt! Oh, fuck, this isn't what I wanted!"

"Shut up," I mumble, getting onto the bed and grabbing her by the shoulders. She is just as tall as me but much more petite, more fragile. 'Fuck', I think, 'How did someone as sweet and frail as this EVER get into this line of work?'

"What?" she howls.

"Shut up!" I shake her a little to let her know I'm serious. "When you get into work like this, you know the risks. You know your life is on the line, you know it can be taken from you at any moment. Marc knew that risk and so did you. The pain and the guilt will always be there, it doesn't fucking go away. You can't replace Marc, with anyone..." I laughed a bit, letting her see my feral grin. "Especially me. I'm as fucked up as they come."

She nodded, sniffling a few times and looking rather ashamed.

"Hey. I've been where you are," I tell her, combing through her hair with my hands. "I had to learn, too. Just gotta cope. Shut it out, keep it in, you'll be alive in the morning."

She smiles a bit. "Hopefully."

"How about I promise you that you will?"

She tilts her head and shrugs. "I'd say we'd have to be lucky. You are... I'm not... simple math, really."

I pat her on the shoulder. "I promise you you'll live to see the morning. After that, you're on your own."

I watch her lay back down, her back to me, and fall into something resembling sleep. During the night I listen to two lovers in the room across from ours. I listen to their moans, their ecstatic cries of ecstasy, then I listen to the silence.

Twenty minutes later I listen to their argument, and then a car pulling off outside. I listen to the woman's sobs, and turn to watch Lemonade. I feel sorry for the woman next door, the woman picking up on Lemonade's low-level empathic vibes, picking up on Lemonade's sorrow. I listen to her sobs until they die down, and at about six in the morning I hear her lover's horrified scream.

The cops aren't far behind, and I watch the EMT crews wheel the woman's body out on a stretcher from the window. Lemonade has not died, she is sleeping soundly in the cheap hotel room bed.

But someone has died today. Someone will be cried for tonight. Then I remember mourning is silly, and I feel the woman beside me shudder in her sleep.

----

"You hungry?"

Lemonade lifts her head and gives me a miserable look, then shakes her head. I go inside, pay for the gas, coffee, and a bottle of orange juice, trying to keep my eyes off the newspaper headlines. I sigh and add a pack of cigarettes to my shopping list. Another bad habit I thought I'd kicked. Well, not as if it's likely to kill me, I think ruefully.

We get back on the road and ride for fifteen minutes in silence before she reaches over and turns on the radio. I let the news report run for a minute before switching it off and receiving a glare in return. "We already knew they were dead."

"You don't even care, do you? Marc, Atlas, and Randy are all dead and you don't even give a fuck."

"Of course I care," I snap. "But this isn't the first time I've lost a team, Lemonade. And it sure as hell isn't the first time I've had friends die. But that's what happens in this line of work. People die. Right now, I just want to make sure we're not next on the list." She sinks back sullenly into her seat and glares out the windshield; I light up a cigarette and keep driving.
"You think they'll come after us?"

"Don't know. Maybe. I don't even know what the hell they wanted with us in the first place. We lie low for now, hope we're not worth the while, I guess." I turn my attention back to the road, but I can feel her still watching me. I light up another cigarette.

"It doesn't seem real-- that he's dead," she says finally. "Everyone was alive this time yesterday. I just feel like this is all some sort of fucked up dream. I'll opened my eyes and Marc will be here and this will all have been a nightmare..." I glance over at her. She's leaning against the window now, eyes still locked on the road ahead of us. I know that space in her eyes, some days I'm certain I still see it in myself. Great. Fucking wonderful. What the hell are we going to do now?

----

I'm not dealing with this. Lemon was right to accuse me of not caring. I've been hiding behind the need to save our own skins, keeping myself busy by keeping us alive. Christ, these people were friends, and all I really feel is lost. Lemonade's grief is fresh and honest. It's one think to know you and your teammates may die, it's quite another when they actually do. And me? I think I stopped trying to think about it right around the time I had to be on the other end of that gun. At least she's been spared that. She's never had to kill one of her own.

I look at the clock, it's past midnight and Lemonade is passed out in the back seat. I've been driving all day because she's still trying to wrap her brain around this mess, alternately yelling at me and crying her eyes out, and I've been staring at the road, thinking of nothing but the safe house I'm eventually going to haul our asses to. I need sleep. At this rate, I'm likely to be the one that kills us both.

----

Bad lighting and worn carpets, people passed out in the hallway. I ignore it all, sifting through keys and letting myself into the small apartment I call home these days. It's not that we can't afford better-- even with my primary account wiped, I've got enough cash stashed here and there to more than make do, not to mention the cash Lemonade's probably got stashed up.

Thing is, I don't really care. What I want, more than anything, is anonymity. And here, no one will think twice about the thirty-something woman with the leaden complextion and the weird tattoo. Around here, I'm low profile. As long as the rent is in on time, I'm safely anonymous.

It's been two weeks, and as I enter the smell of normality hits me. This place has been fixed up a bit, enough for both of us to live. Lemonade always said she hated spiders but she really doesn't pay much attention to anything these days.

She's passed out on the couch again, the wide-eyed look still on her face, shocked and alert. The TV rambles on on some unknown channel, the remote is resting in her hand. I walk by and it slides down, onto the floor. "You gonna pick that up?" I ask, sitting onto the arm of the chair.

She doesn't answer. "Fuck. I hate this. I hate this catatonic bullshit, Lemonade! Snap the fuck out of it! He's dead, he's been dead for weeks and he's not coming back! You're alone, all fucking alone, get over it!"

"So are you!" she screams back, curling into a ball at the corner of the couch.

'Fuck', I think. I really hadn't meant to upset her like that. I know how fragile she is. It takes something like this to really shatter a person, you know? She's younger than I am, by at least six years, but she's always seemed like equals with me. She's one of those people you can read so easily it's almost sickening. And then she turns out to be ten times more complex than you ever thought.

But she's right. I'm just as alone as she is. I fire it back at her. "And I'm coping, aren't I?"

"Well, la-dee-fucking-dah for you," she hisses, cuddling a pillow against her chest.

I nod. "Okay," I say, going into the kitchen and bringing back one of our large kitchen bags. "You wanna give up? Crawl in the fucking bag, I'll lug you over my shoulder, and take you down to the street corner. You can rot there until Friday when the trash is picked up."

I let that sink in for a moment before continuing. "That's what you're doing. You're throwing your life away, for a stupid, stupid reason. People die, Lemonade. People leave. And it's sad it happens that way, but you're left picking up the pieces. Unless you wanna test your mutant abilities by jumping off the roof and seeing if your ability to fly manifests two seconds before you hit the ground."

She looks up at me over the top of the pillow, eyes tired and dead. They used to be a very vibrant pink, full of spirit. She hasn't slept in days, and she hasn't been eating. She's just about skin and bones now, the dark circles around her eyes making her drab expression even worse. "No," she says quietly. "I don't want to die."

I sit down next to her on the couch, just watching her. The TV blares, the only sound in the room, and I consider going for my gun. Pepsi has lost all my respect by hiring Britney Spears to do a commercial.

Lemonade senses my amusement, but not by her empathy as she can't read, only broadcast. She lays down on the couch, feet hanging off the edge, and rests her head in my lap. She goes to sleep like that.

----

"We have a job! We're back in the business!"

"What?" Lemonade's voice is a shrill shriek from the bathroom. She's standing in the tub, naked, with the shower curtain wide open. I back out of the doorway, trying to avoid being flashed.

It's been odd like that these past couple of weeks. In the middle of the night she'll climb into bed with me and just curl up beside me, naked. I try not to protest since nothing happens. She just lays next to me. I don't mind, really. It helps that aching feeling inside when I used to wake up alone. And she gives off warmth like a heater, so it's nice on those chilly nights.

She has no problem with walking about the apartment nude. Yesterday morning she was sitting on the couch in nothing but her underwear eating a bowl of cereal with milk dribbling down her chin as she laughed at the cartoons. It's funny how people recover so quickly from losses so great.

"We can't!" she howls, and I hear the razor drop into the tub. The water from the spicket goes off and she walks into the hallway still naked, one leg covered in shaving gel. "It's too soon!"

"It's been over two months, Lemonade. We've got to do *something*. The money is running out."

She looks indecisive for a moment. "Well. If we must." She shrugs, padding back into the bathroom. "I thought maybe we could do... something else."

"Oh? Like what? I hear McDonald's is hiring." I come into the bathroom, leaning against the doorway as she continues to shave her legs.

"Didn't mean like that. But whatever."

I inspect the floor tiles and sigh. "What were you thinking, Lemonade?"

"Real jobs, maybe?" she snaps, looking up at me. "Stopping the killing? It's too much. Too many people have died, Dom."

I roll my eyes, crossing my arms over my chest. "Don't go all fucking human-rights on me, now! What the hell would we put on a resume, anyway? 'Oh, I used to kill for massive amounts of money, now I just want to help my community!' Yeah, I bet Walmart might even hire us. They'll hire rednecks."

Lemonade grinned, shrugging a little. She has that look in her eyes that makes me wary about what she's going to say or do next. "We could become porn stars!"

"...Shut up. Just... shut up..."

The sound of her giggling reminds me of a cat in heat.

----

"This is in and out, Lemonade. Got that?"

"I got it," I hear her say, and hear the soft click of a glass pane being taken out of it's window frame.

I fidget uncomfortably from my place in the lobby. This is an easy job. It's why I accepted it. I need to know she's still up to it, she's still up to this. She's no good to me or herself if she breaks down.

I estimate it takes her about ten minutes to get into the main bedroom. I doubt hotel security will catch her, but we have to worry about that whore in his bathroom. I listen to the com link, and here the sound of an elevator. She's close. There's the sound of people passing her, talking drunkenly, slurring their words. He threw a huge party tonight. I idly wonder if he knew we were coming, if that's why he decided to let loose.

It doesn't matter, anyway. In twenty minutes it's done and Lemonade is coming out of the back stairs exit. She gets into the car and drops her hat onto the floor of the car. "It's done. Drive."

I watch her as she peels the latex gloves off. As we drive over the bridge 35 miles out of town, she throws them from the window. "Any problem from your point?"

"None at all," I say almost cheerily. "That was pretty cut and dry."

"It was," she says back, taking off her pack. "Who was he, anyway?"

"Dunno. My guess is he fucked over Riney's kid." I think for a moment about Riney before I light another cigarette. I feel bad for him. He's an old man, 80 years old or so, alone. His wife died three years back and his son was killed just a year ago by some self-righteous weirdo. Shot in the back of the head because he got said weirdo's stepdaughter knocked up. He said it was an accident, that he had threatened to do it but decided against it. Then he dropped the gun. Apparently. The jury believed it. Stupid fuckers.

Riney will no doubt thank us profusely, pay us our money, and send us on our way. I'm thinking about maybe paying him a visit afterwards, though. His wife is gone, his only son is gone, and he can't even hold on to his anger anymore, his vengeance, the one thing that I'm sure has kept him alive this past year.

People lose and take, it's what life is about. Someone loses and we take. We lose, and who takes? Us? That would be the logical way to do things but it never happens that way. We wait on fate, karma... wait for it to catch up to them and strike them down, maybe because we don't have the strength to.

I watch Lemonade as she stares out the car window to the scenery passing us by. I realize even if we ever catch who set us up, she would not have the guts to do what she wants so badly to do. So I turn the radio on, away from the silence, turning the dial away from the sad songs, and wonder if we'll be alive tomorrow.

[next part]

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