It comes easy for her to admit that she has nothing left, except for her name. She's used to it; she's acknowledged that her life hasn't gotten any better by a long shot.
Pain is ubiquitous and has defined her reality for as long as she can remember. First, it was the physical abuse at home; she can still remember the screams and the broken glass and those late-night trips Gary used to make into her bedroom. She has him on the top of her 'people to visit' list.
She remembers how all kinds of drugs were introduced to her, how they dulled the memories of her messed up childhood (but not so much, she knows). Getting high didn't make her forget, it just pulled the curtain down for a moment so she could laugh at how fucked things were for her, then the curtain was pushed aside again.
Her arrest is a blur, but she can recall - down to the last syllable - the sentence passed on to her because a part of her already wanted to die anyway. If they refused to give her drugs, then death was her one ticket to freedom. No more pain, no more scraping the bottom of the barrel for hope. No more her.
Instead of clouds of white or the Garden of Eden, she wakes up in a tiny cell with harsh fluorescent lights and a death certificate by her cot. They tell her that she has to die to be reborn, like the phoenix tattoo on her hip that she got after running away from home. To her, it just looked cool. To them, it was how they were going to mold her.
And she is then trained, re-structured, given a second chance to redeem herself by serving nameless faces behind organizations all in the name of sacred duty to country.
She is reborn.
Then she is betrayed.
This abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere is just like that cell that she slept in after each mission. The cracked walls, the chipped paint, the grime and mold gathering in the corners - as empty as that cell. As empty as she is now.
She twists the solitaire diamond ring on her finger and bows her head in grief. Her photographic memory taunts her with events, places and people that have come and gone in her life. She could curse it for all the pain it has brought her. But another part of her knows that it's a gift. She will need her memory to guide her through this one last mission that she is staking her life on.
They say that it only takes a split-second to make a decision, even as millions of tiny cells and chemicals in the human body send jumbled codes to the brain before it rapidly translates the chemical jargon into the appropriate signal that is then broadcast into different parts of the body.
It takes just about that much for her to whip out a gun and fire three shots into the portrait plastered on the crumbling grey wall.
She walks away, knowing now that she truly has nothing.
After the grief, there comes rage. The deadliest emotion of all.
- END -