Note: The last couple paragraphs or so of this fic were written about a month and a half after the rest of it, at 2 in the morning, while on a wild caffeine-fueled creative streak. So I apologize if the writing style changes abruptly or anything. I'll smooth it out later; I just wanted to get it up while it was still fresh.
Edit: Goddammit, site, stop eating my punctuation. :(
Son of Edit: Okay, last changes, I promise. Schermione had a bit of a suggestion regarding the ending paragraph, so I fixed it up a bit more.
Imina doesn't exactly like doing what she does, but she doesn't feel particularly bad about it either. She figures it's just a necessary evil like any other government job, really. The pay is good and the hours are okay and she gets an apartment and everything, and if she gets it by adding a little bit more to the total amount of shit in the world, then so what?
It's not like she can really afford to worry too much about the morality of her work, anyway. Certainly not while she's on the job, in the middle of everything, and it's all coming down around her. Not off the job either - it's a competitive, paranoid business, and there's always someone lower down willing to rat you out for a promotion if you seem too weak or too hesitant.
But sometimes, at the end of the day, when she returns home to the cramped little apartment in the falling-down building where everyone calls her by a dead woman's name, she remembers.
There's not very much to do on the long flights, once she's finished setting up her little devices. The movies are never any good, and she's usually too tense to read or sleep. So instead, she people-watches.
She can spend hours just staring at her fellow passengers, making up little dramas for them - the divorced businessman flying across the country for his daughter's birthday; the highschool student coming back from an exchange trip in France; the successful young executive returning to her company after a difficult merger. She never imagines them as anything particularly glamourous. No Russian spies sit at the end of her row, staring out the window; no movie stars occupy the first class seats and flirt with the attendants; no politicians or convicts or famous novelists fly with her. Just ordinary people, going about their business, leading lives that she can only experience vicariously.
Sometimes, in the late hours of the night, she'll strike up conversation with the flight attendants. She'll make small talk, commiserate with them about the time, ask them about their job, their kids, their family, their dog - anything, really. If one of them asks about her, she'll take one of the backstories she's made up - she's a med student from New York, she's a designer from Berlin, she's a lawyer from Seoul - and run with it. It gives her a little thrill, pretending to have someone else's life, and she lets herself get caught up in it, until she can barely remember who she really is and who she's supposed to be.
In the back of her mind, though, she always remembers, and she finds herself wondering which of them are going to be on the return flight, which of them will be on their breaks, which of them are going to be there when the little timer finally reaches zero, whether it's going to be Barbara or Mary or Louise that the gas gets to first, if Laura will run to the cockpit trying to warn the captain, if Betty will use her last breath to help a passenger get his mask on. She wonders if she should warn them. She never does.
By the time she gets back to her seat, she's usually stopped feeling guilty.
She looks at the others differently, though, once she's settled back in. Doesn't wonder about where they came from or who they are, anymore; doesn't make up any little stories. She just looks at their sleeping faces, trying to commit them to memory, trying to store away every last tiny detail. In the end, they really are just ordinary people. None of them have personally done anything to deserve this; they're just symbols, parts of a whole that needs to be controlled through whatever means are necessary. But she tries to make it up to them, a little bit, by letting some pieces of them live on even after the timer goes off, after the plane comes down, after the news reports and and the memorial services and the funerals are all over.
And later on, she'll go back home, back to the country that employs her, back to the city where she's never officially lived, back to the building where everyone thinks she's someone else, back to that tiny run-down cramped-ass little apartment - and she'll remember them.