(Author's Note: I am aware that my story's format and subject is quite similar to the already present story "Love's Sorrow." However, given that I wrote over 40 pages of my own story before seeing said published one, I'd like readers to know that it was not indeed patterned off of, copied from, or otherwise ripped off the already published story, nor was it written with competitive motivations.)


The rain splashed against her face so hard that not even her shielding hand helped. The Patriot's barrel smoked against the cold water, the hiss of hot metal drowned out in the downpour. No wind, just rain, straight down onto her soaking hair, her heavy pack, her weary shoulders.

She shifted beneath the canvas straps. Even her light jungle fatigues weighed down on her now.

The heaviest weight was that in her chest.

"...Zorin."

His face had changed so much, yet not at all. It still had the shapely jaw, strong nose, pale eyes set deep into a light face. His cheeks, though, had sunken in since she last met him, his brow growing sharper as age took its toll. How old was he now...fifty-five? Sixty?

"I don't remember that name." His voice was warm, even in the freezing February rain.

She pressed her lips together and started to tell him that it was over, that the Cobra Unit had been gone for decades, but the words fell flat on her tongue and drained away.

"Sorrow." She sank back on her heels.

He smiled faintly, the same knowing, sad smile she remembered. He stepped forward and laid a gloved hand on her shoulder, pulled her close, too close for her to resist, and she had thrown her arms around him before she could say another word.

His chin rested on her shoulder, warm breath in her ear. "I know why you're here."

No. No, you don't. If you did, you wouldn't be standing here now. She let her eyes close and tried to pull away, but he pressed her against his chest until she bowed her head and agreed to stay.

-

"Remember, this is just like a snatch mission. Don't disturb anyone else. Get in, take the information, do what must be done, and get out."

"You never told me 'what must be done.'"

"...No. And that is the second half of your mission."

"Major, you're dancing around the topic. Tell me what it is. I can see in your face that you're dodging it, if not in your words.

-

"You're here to kill me."

She raised her eyes to meet his -- they were wet and red at the edges, but if that was from tears or from the rain, she couldn't tell. Then again...it always seemed to rain, when he was sad.

With gentle fingers, she took one of his hands away from her shoulders, then another, and this time he didn't stop her from stepping back.

A rumble of thunder echoed overhead. "I am one of the Soviet Union's most useful men in any of their intelligence divisions." Zorin -- The Sorrow -- raised a hand to push his glasses up the bridge of his nose. A familiar motion. To this day, why hadn't he ever gotten contact lenses?

"You are." She kept her voice flat, stiff. Doing her job. Nothing more.

-


"We'll name him after your grandfather, Adamska." She smiled and placed a hand where the baby rested. "You did say he always wanted one alive in the family at all times."

Smiling back at her, he placed an arm around her shoulders. "It isn't necessary, but--"

"I like it." Sinking into his soft sweater, she let herself close her eyes in a moment of calm. "Adamska William."

-

"And you were sent here to eliminate me before returning." He motioned to his chest, and then she realized -- he wasn't carrying a sidearm. Where his holster was, there was a less ragged patch of sweater, and the belts had left darker traces across the fabric.

She lowered her brows and slowly moved her gaze down to the forest floor. His boots were mostly clean; he had to have come here just for this reason. How did he know? Had his spirits told him? That also meant--

"Boss."

-

"This is an assassination mission."

-

"You have to shoot me."

Her head rose; she clenched her hands around the Patriot's handle. For a moment, she managed to raise its muzzle, but then it fell back against her hip.

-

"We're disbanding the unit. All of us have to go back to our respective countries. It's likely none of you will see me again."

-

"I can't." The words tore from her lips and took her heart with it. Her one, her only weakness, and one she never expected. The man she loved, she could never stop loving. Not even to defend her country...

"Shoot me!" He grabbed her arm, forced her to remember that she still held the Patriot in that hand. "You want to finish your mission, don't you?"

Finish the mission. Yes. She had come all this way to finish the mission. To stop the Russians from winning the Cold War and threatening America and the world. To make sure their intelligence was cut off.

She looked up at him.

"Then...you have to shoot me."

There was no way around it.

She tried to say something, anything, even I love you, but it came out a mangled, anguished sound as she hefted the Patriot up to the level of his head.

"The spirit of the warrior...will always be with you."

-
"We trust that you can do this. I know he was one of your old unit...but those days are over. Now, he is your enemy."

-

She narrowed her eyes to slits, and his face blurred into a pale mess behind her tears. As she blinked, a smile traced its way across his thin lips.

"Don't be sad." As she tightened her grip, she heard the pain in his voice. The fear. Even though he had looked others' deaths in the eye so many times, he was still afraid. "We'll meet...again someday."

Her finger tensed. The Patriot recoiled back against her palm, through her arm, into her shoulder. Its grooved muzzle spat a single flash.

The Sorrow collapsed onto the river stones, a red stain welling up in his left eye. She threw aside the Patriot and caught him under the arms as he raised himself, blood dripping from the burst eye, glasses shot away and shattered on the ground. His chest heaved as he tried to move his arms, but she held him steady and pressed his head to her shoulder, holding him close as she counted his breaths.

One.

Two.

None.

He relaxed in her arms, falling against her, the pulsing from his eye reduced to a thin stream. Laying him on the riverbank, she brushed his bloody hair out of his face.

"Sorrow." She leaned over him and kissed him softly on the lips, then sat and bowed her head onto his chest. "There was no time, between then and now, that I ever stopped loving you."

She stayed there for what seemed like hours as the sky tore apart and poured rivers onto them both, washing away his blood and leaving only the stains in his hair and the dark spot on her jacket. It dribbled from her breast to her pants, as if she had been shot through the heart.

It took all the will she had left to stand and pick up the Patriot and its empty shell casing from the mud. With the dull ache still in her chest, she looked back at the body on the stones. It didn't seem...right, somehow, to leave him there. He had guided so many others to inner peace after death; it wasn't fitting that he should be cast aside in some forsaken forest to rot.

But she couldn't do anything about that. Either Soviet troops would find him and give his body the proper treatment for one of their fallen, or he would stay here, unknown, a disappearance. A smear in the military records, where his name was wiped away without reason.

As she turned to move past him and head for the retrieval point, her foot crunched on an odd shape. She crouched and picked up the object.

His glasses. She wiped them on her pants and then pushed them into the pocket that held the bullet's jacket. Thunder rumbled; she ducked her head and charged into the forest, realizing how little time she had left to reach the cliff where an American retrieval balloon package would parachute down for her.

"For a while, we lost contact with you." Major Evan Dale paced back and forth in the plane, his hands clenched tightly behind his back. He always did that, the nervous finger-lacing that he hid as a confident stance. He wasn't fooling anyone. "We thought you might have run into some trouble."

"No." She looked him in the eye and reached into her pocket. One of his thin brows rose, and from the pocket she pulled The Sorrow's glasses and laid them on the shelf beside Dale. In the crook of her finger was the metal jacket; she tightened her hand around it for a moment, then let that drop beside them with a soft clink.

Dale's other brow rose to match the first. His fingers knotted tighter, and he gave a curt nod. Even the propellors' growl faded away into cold silence.

Her gaze trailed off into the distance, the Major forgotten as she tensed her right hand, clenched, released. The recoil from the single shot was still there, rattling the bones, amplified as she rolled the scene over and over in her mind like a movie reel with no end.

"You're the strongest woman alive."

She glanced up at him, his face still blurry in her distracted view.

"But what had to be done, had to be done. He--"

"I don't need an excuse, Major." She turned to face him, bringing him into focus. "I don't need an explanation."

Dale jerked back, his fingers prying free of each other. "No. I suppose you don't." He held his breath for a moment, his chest freezing, his mouth open, before he managed to speak again. "You loved him. You had to."

"I did." She stood now, her face expressionless save for the constant, intent stare. "And I still do. His death changes nothing."

Far in the back of her mind, she cursed the Philosophers. They birthed her for their own devices, then cast her aside. Sent her to meet her new family, then tore them away. Given her a chance to love, then forced her to kill that love. Let her bear a son...then taken him, too.

Nothing belonged to her except the mission. That, and that alone, was hers.

No enemies. No friends. No loves or hates.

Not anymore.

"We'll be needing you again soon, but until then, you have leave."

She snapped back to his words. He was pitying her. The same men who had sent her to tear her heart out were trying to look sorry.

"Major Dale," she stood at attention and stared into his confused eyes, "I know that I'm a tool of the Philosophers."

"You're--" He cut himself off and sighed, motioning for her to continue.

"I understand that. And I understand that I must do anything necessary to preserve this world from global war, to keep the nations in harmony. If one, ten, a thousand men have to die by my hand, I will finish the mission."

"You're human. You're allowed to act like one."

"If being human means sacrificing the world for my own whims, then no, I'm not."

He sighed, stepping forward to clap a hand on her shoulder. "Take the leave. Get out of the base. Take some time to think, for once." He reached for the glasses and pulled as if to take them, but his hand stopped just as it reached the edge of the shelf. After a moment's pause, he pushed them toward her.

She glanced down at them, reached up, and lifted them into her hand. Rainwater still dripped from the lenses. Holding them carefully, she sat at the far end of the hangar and stared through the hatch door.

Hot tears welled in her eyes and rolled onto her cheeks.

Don't be sad.

The sense of eyes on her back forced her to turn.

Dale had already left the hangar.

We'll meet again someday.